by H. J Golakai
‘None of what I, or any member of my family, have to say has any relevance whatsoever to what happened to Jacqui. If at all something has happened to her, which you or the police have no proof of.’
‘Relax, Serena. We’re having a normal conversation.’ Vee shook her head like she was appalled.
‘You have absolutely no right to harass us this way.’
‘This isn’t harassment. We simply need information, backstory, a quote or two. The family’s always the best source to approach. Why not help us out?’ Chlöe said.
Now for bad cop. ‘Just information,’ Vee reiterated, hardening her eyes. ‘How can we be fair and objective if we go to print without the family’s viewpoint, without allowing them to tell their side of the story? This is your chance to make sure that happens.’
‘I don’t give a damn what you write.’
‘Ah, then, I guess you don’t give a damn about what became of your sister.’
Serena’s eyes lit. Fuck off.
Vee waited for her to hurl the insult in her face and nothing came. Serena’s eyes screamed it and her mouth twisted furiously with a desperate need to do the same, but she couldn’t bring herself to surrender. Vee didn’t blame her. It would be a travesty hearing expletives come out of a mouth that pretty.
‘I do give a damn! I loved Jacqui. We all did!’ Chin trembling, Serena glared at the wall and absently swept her hair over one shoulder. It had likely taken ages to blow-dry to a silky fall of burnt umber, and the ends wisped into sweet curls. Vee felt sorry for poor, gauche Rosie. Next to her sister, she probably resembled her father in a bad weave.
‘Then?’ Vee shrugged like it was a no-brainer. ‘We’re here to respect whatever you can share with us, and it’ll go a long way.’
Serena’s throat worked, her eyelids flickering at the appeal a less stressful option held. It was easy to guess what the thoughts whizzing inside her brain were: the press were relentless and vicious, and once a stench got up their nose, they’d follow at a snarl until they dug up an entire cemetery looking for buried bodies. On the other hand, willingness to cooperate had its merits.
Serena mulled it over and shook her head. ‘No. Sorry. Have nothing to add to what you already know, and I doubt anyone else in my family can.’ Serena grabbed her tote and got up. The only time her cool slipped was when she turned and added: ‘If you have another story, follow that and let this go. Please.’
*
‘This was your secret errand?’ Vee gaped. The only word befitting the house in front of her was ‘mansion’. The Cape Dutch-style home was concealed from view by a tidy cluster of oak trees, their new spring leaves popping in. The skirts of the lawn were plush and verdant. A cobbled spine of a walkway snaked up to a veranda creeping with vine and rustic appeal. Vee resisted the urge to press her nose through the wrought-iron bars of the gate and beg the residents within for a crust of bread and a farthing.
‘This is your house?’ she spluttered. ‘Why the hell are you doing this job if you live like this? You’re out of your mind.’
‘How do you know I don’t need it?’
Vee jabbed a finger at the house. ‘Bish, please.’
Chlöe groaned long and loud. ‘I’m not trying to prove anything, all right? This is not my home any more. Trust me, it’s a really long story. Just picking up a few things and we’ll be out of here.’ Chlöe went back to pressing the intercom buzzer over and over.
‘And who’s that?’ Vee asked. A tall, light-haired man strolled down the drive towards them.
‘My older brother, Jasper.’
Vee snorted.
‘Yes, yes, I know, Jasper Cole … Chlöe Jasmine … we’re rich and white. Sue me.’ Chlöe put a hand on her hip and pulled a pout Vee would come to know with great affection. ‘This isn’t as simple as it looks. Please, please, can you wait in the car? I won’t be longer than ten minutes, promise.’
Vee put her hands up and kicked rocks. Drama download for the work week was over. Bring on the weekend.
17
The teenager’s skull smashed into the metal grate. The impact caused the foci of cracks in the bone to splay into hairline fractures. As sewer water emptied out of the underground pipe, dead weight stayed behind: garbage, driftwood, the carcasses of pigeons and one unfortunate cat. On a cement level close to the Black River and the N2 highway, the battered skeleton finally came to rest. Hours passed in a silence broken only by the chatter of vermin. Once again, the surface of the remains began to dry.
Skeletonisation, the decomposition of soft tissue that leaves behind only bone material, is a sure and steady process dependent on temperature, moisture and the action of micro-organisms. If a dead body is left undisturbed. The traveller in the drainpipe was up against much more than structural damage. Its early stages of putrefaction, the process in which the body disintegrates on a molecular and physical level, had begun in a very dry, aerated setting. Due to the constant blast of air rushing past it for several months, the usual destruction caused by bacteria had been impeded. Instead, mummification had begun. Skin and muscle that should have rotted away desiccated into a leathery parchment that hugged the bones. After being submerged for days, the remains were somewhat rehydrated, and the hitchhiking microbes on its surface resumed their busy task.
A rat wandered close for a nibble, flinched and pushed off, disgusted by the tough flesh and layer of dark slime covering the corpse. Some things even rats won’t do.
*
Years killed love.
No one ever imagined it happening to their relationship, yet it happened far too often. Maybe time annihilated objectivity, too, for surely not all or even half of married couples were always unhappy. Carina Fourie couldn’t care less. If the years had turned her into a graceless bitch, then so be it. She was willing to admit to her part in the saga. If she was a hag, then she had a fine accomplice in her spouse. Ian had a heavy hand when it came to bludgeoning their marriage, but again, she was also responsible. When had she stopped being a supple, fresh-faced young woman who took on life with zest, career with resolve and men with a wanton sparkle in her eye? At forty-seven she was no spring chicken, but by no definition was she washed-up. So when, exactly, had the apathy set in? When had the naked body of a man, her own man, in good shape and appealing to any red-blooded woman, become the pathetic shape of another human being, unalluring?
Since I lost my son. Since we lost our son and this man I call my husband refused to look me in my face and tell me anything but lies.
‘What’re you thinking, Carina?’ Ian moved around the bedroom with the easy prowl of a man in comforting, familiar surroundings. Comfort he had dedicated intellect and sweat to providing for them, but familiarity he was drifting farther away from on a daily basis.
‘You know how much I hate that question.’
A three-piece suit lay on the bed next to her jade silk gown. He leaned over and peeled away the white starched shirt, not bothering as the towel gradually loosened around his waist. Ian had hardly bothered to cover his nakedness in the fresher days of their union. It used to titillate her senseless the way he used to emerge from a shower, tall, brown and glistening. Spread himself along the mattress to air-dry, waiting with a knowing smile for his European temptress to lust him up. To moisten her lips and lashes and face with the droplets on his skin–
That woman was dead. Carina put her powder brush down, deciding to forgo any make-up tonight. Another thing she needn’t feel obliged to care about – being sexy, licking dew off horny husbands, or anything else that fell inside that wide circle. She wasn’t worried that there might be another pair of willing lips seeing to Ian’s dermis outside the confines of their bedroom. There could be one; there might be many; there may be none. There had been Adele, and that was all that would ever matter.
His hair was still wet from the shower, curling and releasing trickles of water down his neck. Kroes hare. Kinky hair. Enough black in it to point firmly at his bloodline. The blood her elder daughter
secretly wanted out of her as much as those kinks she spent hours blowing and flattening out. The same hair her son had inherited, that all her children had. No nods to her influence.
Her son. It used to be her sons; now it was singular. The dead must give way to the living. Her mind was betraying her more often over the years, as it was doing again now, scrambling for reason in fluff. Her eyes met her husband’s in the dresser mirror and held them until she broke the moment in cowardice.
‘I don’t know where to start with you any more, Carina. I don’t know what more to say.’
‘Then go with your instinct and say nothing,’ she snapped. She dropped the hairbrush with trembling fingers. ‘Isn’t that what we as a family have agreed to: silence?’
He flinched slightly, no more than that. The sting behind her oft-repeated accusation that Ian was the family, that they only functioned as a successful unit as long as all were in service to him, didn’t affect him any longer.
Ian rubbed the bone close to his eyebrows, a sign he was struggling to control his irritation. ‘We can’t talk to that journalist. We can’t live through this again. You know that.’
Who’s we?! Carina wanted to scream. Instead, she swept into their en suite bathroom and slammed the door.
Bitterness. Bitterness killed love, and she’d embraced it. Flushed with shame and a giddy sense of triumph, Carina said to herself, I am bitterness, and rage and regret, and I’ve killed the love in more ways than one. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the reflection in the mirror as the thought warped through her mind again and again.
I killed the love and happiness in my home. She forced a tiny smile. Well, then, there was nothing like vengeance to light a flame under a rotting carcass.
18
‘Lawd’ha mercy,’ Vee whispered.
The fir-lined gravel driveway snaking up to the house in front of her was so long you could starve to death trying to walk it. An elegant foyer with marble arches overlooked an immaculate garden, tastefully lit for the evening’s festivities. If Chlöe’s house was a mansion, the grandeur of this one had no name. A stately sprawl, that was it. The owners were clearly members of the club where champagne flowed with little restraint.
‘Hhmm, mah pipo, dey even sef got wata fountain,’ she marvelled. ‘Lookah dah fat li’l boy playin’ harp insah it.’
‘Stop acting country and stick to boardroom English,’ Joshua said sternly. ‘That’s a boy made of stone with a harp. Although, they are rich enough to pay for a real child to stand in a freezing fountain all night.’
‘Now I feel underdressed for all these champagne wishes and caviar dreams.’ She fussed with her hair, and caught him watching her with disturbing intensity out of the corner of her eye. ‘What? Don’t start. I’ve had a shitty day.’
She’d spent most of it waiting for news on the data on Jacqui’s computer. At last ‘The Guy’, dexterous hacker into private records and acquirer of internet gems, had emailed his findings, and it had crushed her: forty gigabytes of uninspiring junk that any sprite in tune with the times would have on her PC. The one folder Vee had hoped would be pay dirt turned out to be nothing of the sort, just pages of initials, dates and what looked like rand value amounts. It made no sense. What had Jacqui been up to? Running some kind of extortion scam?
‘I wasn’t. Christ. I was just thinking you clean up pretty good.’
‘I clean up exceedingly well. Boardroom English.’ Vee snapped her vanity mirror closed. ‘And that wasn’t what you were thinking.’
‘Well, since you’re forcing my hand …’ Joshua’s mouth turned up a little, ‘I was imagining you with just the shoes on, nothing else …’
Vee slammed the car door. ‘Dammit, Allen, you promised me good behaviour, so if you’re gonna be carryin’ on like this all night–’
‘Aww, don’t be like that. That’s the last one, I swear. Hey, wait up, will you slow down … Haha, you can’t run in heels, can you? Now you better put on your best smile and don’t forget I brought you here, ungrateful wench. Ow, shit Vee, you hit like a guy!’
Inside, Vee did her best to keep her lips tightly pressed so her open mouth didn’t catch flies. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen wealth before, but no two displays were alike, and some display this was. Joshua steered her away from the sparkling decorations towards a waiter with a tray of bubbly flutes. ‘I know you have a problem with focus, but that’s what you need to be doing right now. That’s the host over there: Philemon Jabulani Mtetwa.’
She snorted effervescence. Joshua’s Yankee pronunciations never failed to make her feel better about her own awkward attempts. ‘You’re pathetic. This country’s your second home – learn the lingua franca. Any one of the eleven.’
‘Bite me, I’m half Indian not Zulu. He’s a major player in the investment game. I’m talking millions upon millions.’
‘How many did he put into the WI?’
He held up far too many fingers. ‘Not him alone, through his satellite companies and co-investors. But let’s just say somebody’s getting fired if a wing isn’t named after him.’
‘How does he know the Fouries?’
‘They’re right over there. Go ask them.’
The couple was certainly not what Vee had imagined. The man was no short, overbearing dictator, but tall and not at all hard on the eye. He was doing a fine job of working the room and making nice, laughing in all the right places and pumping hands with ease and pride. His axis of rotation centred round the squat, speckle-haired Mtetwa, casually dressed himself, and a few other men in expensive, semi-formal attire. Tied to Ian by an invisible string was a fair woman, on the thin side, clad in an unsuitable shade of green that worked up her pallor. Carina was trying far too hard to look flat and uninterested; she resembled her daughter Serena as she did it. Vee narrowed her eyes. Anytime someone went that long without blinking, gremlins were hatching evil inside their skull.
‘She looks so … plain.’ Vee felt superficial for saying it, but the Carina of her imagination was grander than her husband.
‘So plain and … small.’ She turned to her date for thoughts and Joshua was gone.
*
Hours later, her nerves were tissue-thin. The buffet was excellent, but there was only so much that mustard-encrusted beef, artisanal bread and spicy prawns could do. Inserting herself into random conversations was easy enough, but extracting useful information was like pulling teeth. Whispers about Mtetwa barely graduated beyond the good ol’ Zulu boy made golden on a British education and a passion for business solutions for rural communities. Vee couldn’t keep her eyes off Carina, how deadpan she looked, yet her eyes kept flitting around and narrowing, especially in Ian’s direction. Any minute now she’d rip an arm off the ice sculpture and take it to her husband’s head.
Liquor oiled up the crowd. Vee flitted from one faux-intellectual conversation to the next, soaking up garbled nonsense.
‘–problem is that Malema reflects the rotten core of the government! If the crown prince can prance around accusing Anglo American of raping the country–’
‘–then she of all people shouldn’t be living in a dreamland. That’s what marriage is, not romance and excitement or even happiness for God’s sake, but years and years of–’
‘–gay pride. I’m sorry, but not getting on a soapbox for sexual freedom doesn’t make me any less of a liberal than not having black friends makes me a racist–’
‘–tiger! Then this little Japanese guy pops outta the boot, and there’s this part with the Mike Tyson punch … Can’t explain it, man, you need to just watch The Hangover. Best movie ever!’
Who are these people? Vee sucked in fresh air on the gilded balcony onto which she had escaped. Why couldn’t she have been a gossip columnist? They adored these awful parties steeped in chocolate gateaux and the toxic lives of others. And where the hell was Joshua? Ah, yes, of course, her beady eye observed, laughing it up with some hottie in a backless dress. Useless punk.
‘Do yo
u mind if I sit here?’
She turned, and nodded at the man who had appeared at her shoulder. She took her dessert plate from the chair.
‘Sorry to disturb. I’m not a smoker, but I can’t take the drivel in there any longer.’ His smile was the first genuine one of the evening. He held out his hand, pulled it back and looked at it with a crinkle of his nose, then wiped it on the front of his shirt. He offered it again. ‘Sorry, barbecue sauce there. Marcus Neethling. You work with the hospital?’
Vee shook her head. ‘Just a lowly layperson. Who diagnoses all her medical problems using Google, like everyone else.’
‘Ha. Really. I find that hard to believe. A lovely woman like yourself looks far too intelligent to trust the internet for reliable medical information.’
Vee smiled. Okay, so the good doctor was angling for more than innocent conversation and fresh air. ‘What kind of doctor are you?’
‘Psychiatrist. The psych ward staffers are the underdogs at WI. Probably why most of us didn’t show up. We weren’t even allocated our own wing, yet we’re coping with a huge influx of referrals …’
A bell rang in the back of her mind. Psychotherapy plus Neethling. Shit. This was the guy she should’ve been paying regular visits to, the doctor to whom her old GP had referred her to get to the bottom of her … stuff. The very same she’d been on her way to see on the fateful morning that Jacqui Paulsen’s photograph dragged her into a vortex.
‘Are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’
Vee threw her head back and laughed. ‘You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,’ she muttered. Then again … As her mother often said, there were lessons in chance encounters. ‘Actually, there is something that’s been knocking around my brain for a while. A friend of mine is in a psychological quagmire, if you can call it that. I know you’re off the clock, but …’