by Roger Smith
She lets her fingers trace the filigree of scars on her upper legs. Some of the scars are old, almost invisible. Others more recent, still livid. And even though she has sworn that she would never do this to herself again, Louise removes the razor blade hidden in the folds of her pajamas and lays the cold metal against her skin for a second, closing her eyes, allowing the toxic rage that has haunted her since she was in the kitchen with Michael Lane to course through her. And, as she has learned to do, she directs that rage at herself.
Louise opens her eyes and slices at her leg, the blade biting through skin into her flesh, the blood flowing red and clean and clear, the pain sharp and purifying.
15
Lane wakes in darkness with a dry mouth. He reaches across for the familiar form of his wife, but his hand finds nothing but a rumpled comforter and he remembers that he has fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the bed in the spare room.
His swollen bladder has woken him and as he edges off the bed his pants cut into his groin and he feels the pain in his testicles. The violence of the last two nights returns to him in a montage worthy of one of his son’s bloodiest DVDs and by the time he gets to his feet his breath is coming in the short gulps of the asthmatic or the ancient.
He has to quell an urge to head into the marital bedroom, under the pretext of using the en-suite bathroom, knowing that, desperate for comfort, he’ll crawl into bed with Beverley.
You pathetic bastard, he says to himself as he limps down the passageway, his stockinged feet making no sound on the wooden floor. He has to pass Chris’s old room, the door standing ajar, his son snoring within. When he walks by the bedroom that was his for fifteen years Lane hears nothing behind the closed door. Bev has always been a quiet sleeper.
He clicks on the light of the guest bathroom. Chris has moved some of his toiletries in: a toothbrush with splayed bristles, a can of Axe deodorant and disposable razor. A wet towel and a soiled pair of boxers lie on the floor.
Lane unzips as he heads to the toilet, his stream of urine painfully arrested when he sees a huge turd coiled in the bowl. This is no floater, bobbing back from the maelstrom, this is a dump festooned with wads of toilet paper, his son exiting without bothering to flush.
Lane has to hit the handle three times to clear the bowl. Finally he gets to relieve himself, his penis and bladder throbbing in sympathy with his bruised balls. He inspects his urine for blood but finds none.
Lane washes his hands at the sink and drinks lukewarm water from the faucet. He only had three Scotches, so he’s not hungover, but this thirst—this very particular dehydration that comes from alcohol—returns him to his drinking days.
Leaving the bathroom he journeys back down the corridor, the same gargle of snores reaching him from Christopher’s room. For a second Lane entertains the fantasy of creeping inside and using a pillow to smother his son as he sleeps, but he walks on. Chris would wake and beat him senseless.
Back in the spare room he lifts the bottle of Lagavulin from the bedside table, pours a very small measure into his glass and drinks it slowly, then sinks down onto the bed.
Lying listening to the familiar creaks and stretches of his house at night, he understands the inevitability of his arrival at this place of utter desolation. How the last twenty years—his sobriety, meticulously paying his taxes, never getting so much as a parking ticket, throwing money and awkward affection at the Solomons kids—means nothing.
He and Beverley built a life on a cracked foundation, a life not without its trappings of success and glittery veneer. This big house had hosted its share of parties, blandly attractive white thirtysomethings eyeing one another’s spouses over their booze glasses, secure in the knowledge that if they strayed—and few did—it wouldn’t be far and it would be reassuringly familiar.
Lane had never strayed, bound to his wife by more than a social contract and the pooling of genes. She knew his secret, knew what made him different from the men around him, and no matter how light and bright and shiny it seemed, their life had at its center a darkness, and each night sleep took him to that dark place with its dreams of torn flesh and pleading eyes, and there was not a morning that he didn’t wake without the bitter tang of gasoline and blood in his nostrils.
When Lane closes his eyes he sees those three weather-beaten wooden crosses at the base of the oak tree, sees the road beyond that carves through bush and rock, sees the headlights of a pickup truck coming at speed and he’s at the wheel of that truck, twenty-four years old, his blood hot with weed and whiskey and many bumps of very pure cocaine.
Beverley was at his side. Oh-so-fuckable Bev with the tight little body and the well-bred voice, getting him hard as she leaned over and whispered filth in his ear. Way after midnight they’d quit a party in Simonstown—surfers and sailors and students—and were driving to Uncle John’s place, the old man gone walkabout in the Kalahari for two weeks. He’d left them the run of his house, a stock of beer and the keys to his Toyota pickup, all bull-bars and fat tires. The Panzer, Bev called it.
Lane driving with his foot flat to the floor, one hand on the wheel, the other around Bev’s shoulders, pulling her to him, thinking only of getting her into Uncle John’s bed, his hard-on throbbing painfully against the buttons of his Levis.
Bev shouted “Michael!” as he jumped the stop sign, her voice lost in the sound of tearing metal and exploding glass.
Too late Lane hit the brakes and the truck spun three-sixty degrees in a scream of rubber before it halted, shaking on it springs, headlights spearing the crumpled wreck of a small car that had been flung with massive violence at the oak tree, wrapped like crumpled foil around it’s trunk, smoke and steam hanging low in the beams of the Toyota.
Sudden quiet, just the ragged idling of the truck’s engine and the smack of a wheel ripped free from the car, lurching like a gimp on its bent rim down the road toward them, before it collapsed on its side and lay still.
“Jesus,” Lane said, “are you okay?”
“Yes,” Beverley said. “Drive, Michael. Get us out of here.”
But he didn’t. He opened his door and stepped down onto the asphalt, shocked sober, his senses suddenly hyper-alert. He could hear his shoes on the gravel, the call of a bird, the distant fizz of the surf, invisible through the dark bush.
As Lane walked toward the mangled car, his feet crunching on a confetti of broken glass, the smell of gasoline was overwhelming and when he approached the driver’s window he smelled something else, something earthy and metallic.
He leaned down and looked and gagged. A man was impaled on the steering wheel, his neck twisted at an impossible angle, blood flowing from his mouth. Lane walked around the mashed hood to the passenger side, and saw that a woman had been decapitated, her head lying on the road—hair still wrapped in some kind of striped headscarf—eyes staring up at him, crimson lips framing a question they would never ask.
Then he heard soft whimpers coming from behind the crumpled rear of the car. Bev beckoned him from the truck and every cell in his body urged him to walk away from the wreck, leave whatever lay keening and disappear into the night.
But when he moved it was toward the rear of the car. He took two steps, froze. Listened. Heard weeping.
The shock finally hit Lane, his legs shaking, a cold and greasy sweat dripping from his hair. He had to hold onto the wrecked car to stay upright, fighting for breath, puking booze and chemicals.
When he had composed himself the cries were stilled, and he knew that it was over, that whoever was back there was dead now.
Then he heard the whispered word, “Mama.”
Lane pushed himself away from the wreck and took the last few paces around the back of the car, the road turned daylight-bright by the glare of the Toyota’s headlights.
A child lay prone on the asphalt. A very small brown child. His legs had been severed above the knees, and he dragged himself along the road toward the car, leaving a slug-trail of blood, whimpering, “Mama, Mama.”
> Lane knelt and reached out a hand to the child, but couldn’t bring himself to touch him, the boy turning his head and looking up at Lane, his dark eyes wide with agony and terror.
“Michael,” Beverley was beside Lane, shaking his shoulder. “We have to go.”
“Christ, Bev, he’s still alive.”
“But he won’t be for long, Mike. Come.”
He stared up at her, her short hair haloed by the truck’s lights. “I can’t just leave him here like this.”
“You have to. If another car comes along you’re fucked. The cops’ll test your blood and you’ll be way over the limit. You’re looking at jail time, Michael.”
She shook his shoulder again and hurried off toward the truck.
Lane stood, the child still staring up at him, still crying for his mother, thick gouts of dark blood oozing from his lips.
Lane turned and stumbled toward the Toyota. Beverley was behind the wheel, and he fell into the passenger seat and hadn’t yet closed his door when she took off, swerving onto a side road. She zigzagged though back roads until she found her way to the sand track that led to his uncle’s house and parked the Toyota and killed the headlamps. They sat for a while, listening to the engine cluck as it cooled, listening to the pounding surf.
“What if somebody saw us?” Lane said.
“Nobody saw us, Mike. There were no other cars. We were lucky.”
“Lucky? Jesus.”
She left the truck and unlocked the house. He followed her into the kitchen as she grabbed a bottle of Southern Comfort from the table, took a hit and passed it to him. He drank until he coughed and retched.
Bev seized him by the hand and led him to the bedroom and stripped off her clothes, stripped off his too, threw him onto his back and fucked him. He tried to push her away when he heard the faraway wails of emergency vehicles, but she carried on riding him, her first climax weaving into the cat’s choir of sirens, and they fucked for hours. Fucked until they were both insensible, the bottle lying empty beside the bed.
Lane, hungover and sick, woke in the morning to the sound of running water and the hiss of a hose. He went out and saw Bev in a pair of cut off jeans and a T-shirt, washing the truck. Already battle-scarred from years of his uncle’s adventures, the Toyota bore no visible signs of the collision. The headlamps were caged in mesh, and were undamaged. The bull bars showed a few scratches but they weren’t fresh.
When he looked at Bev she shook her head and put her fingers to her lips, and they never spoke of the accident again.
Ever.
Six weeks later Bev pissed on a stick and the next month they were married. Lane was in the delivery room when Christopher fought his way out of Beverley, and looking at the bloody, bawling infant Lane had felt no happiness, seeing and hearing only that small, mutilated boy left to die alone in the night.
And now, lying on the spare room bed drinking Scotch, he knows it is irrational, primitive even, but he believes that some deal had been struck the night he fled the accident scene. Lane had been given his freedom in exchange for his son. The smiling blond child, cherubic in his early years—“dada” the first words from his pink lips—had grown into the sneering bully, the steroid-fuelled predator who lies asleep next door in the room of his childhood, his thuggish body sprawled across the bed, lying head-to-head with Lane, separated only by the wall. The Siamese twin image gets Lane sitting, reaching for the bottle again.
Beverley had used the hit-and-run, used his guilt, to get him to lie for his son a year ago when Chris led his friends in the near-fatal attack on the black gas station attendant.
She’d convened a meeting between the Lanes and the fathers of the other boys on the Saturday morning after the assault. They had hunched darkly at the rear of a bland coffee shop in Cavendish Square while privileged Cape Town went about its consumerist business and plotted how to pay off the injured man, knowing his wife—an illiterate woman with three children, living in a shack out in the badlands near the airport—wouldn’t be able to resist the blood money. Chris and his friends had walked free.
Lane throws back his fifth Scotch, but the alcohol can’t wash away the memory of Chris kneeling over the girl, Melanie Walker, pulping her head into the carpet of the pool house, his blacksmith’s arm beating down in a relentless rhythm.
His son the killer, sleeping peacefully, who’ll wake in the morning to his life of plenty—university in the new year and trials for the Western Province professional rugby team—while Lyndall Solomons is jammed into a cell at Pollsmoor Prison, not ten minutes drive from here.
Lane searches the pocket of his pants and finds Detective Gwen Perils’s card. He reaches for his phone, ready to call her and tell her everything, when he reads the time displayed on the face of his Nokia: 3:22 a.m.
No hour to call anyone, not even a cop.
So he drops the phone on the bedside table and lies back and sips the Scotch, knowing he won’t be able to sleep. That he’ll be lying here at sunrise, waiting.
16
The door to the minibus taxi, rattling open like marbles shaken in a tin can, releases Louise into sunlight so harsh that it seems to weigh upon her, pressing her down into the bubbling blacktop, making each step an act of will.
She squints against the sun, battling to see the dun-colored brick walls, the high fences and barbed wire and the skinny-legged guard towers where shadowy men, thick with body armor, sweep the courtyard with long barreled rifles.
On a strip of parched grass by the prison wall a woman and a child sit on a tartan blanket with their backs to her, picnicking on gobs of viscous meat and chicken with yellow, pimpled skin. When the child, a chunky blond boy, turns to Louise she sees he is the young Christopher Lane, his mouth smeared with gore as he tears into a strip of bloody flesh.
Beverley Lane shouts something at Louise but all she hears is a scream so painful to her ears that she covers them and flees down an endless corridor, the floor burnished to an oxblood sheen.
Arms encircle Louise and metal gates slam behind her as she’s dragged to a cell seething with men, their limbs opening like anemones as she is thrown amongst them, and she sees they surround the naked body of Lyndall, and then they’re reaching for her, their fingers tearing at her clothes, tearing at her flesh.
Louise wakes, sweating, her heart pounding, and clicks on the bedside lamp. It’s after three in the morning. She wonders if she yelled and woke her mother, but the cottage is silent. The wind has died and in the distance she can hear the mosquito drone of a motorbike and the usual night music of sirens.
When she draws back the covers to cool her body she sees spots of dried blood on the leg of her PJs from where she cut herself earlier, and feels a reprise of the panic and rage that had her reaching for the blade.
Louise stands, breathing deeply, trying to calm herself, and crosses to the window. She opens the curtain a chink, looking up at the big house, standing square and dark against a sky washed gray by light pollution from the city. No, not quite dark. A lamp burns upstairs in the spare room.
Christopher, she guesses. Staying there until the cleaning solvents in the pool house have dispersed. Then a shadow falls on the blind covering the window, and she sees a silhouette that is too delicate to be Chris’s: Michael Lane is sleeping there, away from his wife. The room goes dark and Louise steps back from the window.
She remembers the expression on Michael’s face, in the kitchen earlier. Guilt. Michael, unlike his wife who effortlessly massages the truth to suit her purposes, is not a good liar. It isn’t difficult to imagine the argument between the Lanes that caused Michael to sleep alone. An argument prompted by Louise confronting him, she’s certain.
She’ll catch him in the morning before he leaves for the bookstore and work on that guilt. This is Michael, after all, and even though her once overwhelming love for him has been tempered by teenage cynicism, she still believes that he is essentially a good man. Weak and too easily bullied by his nasty little wife, but good.
In need of comfort, Louise opens the closet and finds her copy of Through the Looking-Glass hidden beneath a pile of T-shirts, resting on top of her photo album. The book, for years her most treasured possession, is in perfect condition. She pages through it, Tenniel’s illustrations as magical as the day she first saw them.
She flips to the frontispiece and reads the inscription: Birthday wishes to Louise, a girl who knows there are no impossible things. Michael.
Taking the book back with her to the bed, laying it beside her pillow like a talisman, Louise clicks off the lamp and slides under the covers.
Closing her eyes she works at consciously calming herself, drawing deep breaths through her nose, and exhaling slowly. Banishing the horror-movie images of the nightmare and visualizing the panic that threatens her as a toxic yellow-brown smoke, smoke that she can disperse with each exhalation.
Visualizing a waterfall through the smoke: a waterfall on Table Mountain that came with the winter rain. She only saw it once, when she was eleven, she and Lynnie hiking with Michael Lane, Lyndall moaning about the small pack he had to carry, Louise entranced by this wilderness just minutes from the house in Newlands.
Standing amongst the rocks and the fynbos on the flat plateau at the top of the mountain, the invisible city far below, smiling up at Michael who looked like a monk with the rain dripping off the hood of his parka.
Michael crossed to the small pond at the waterfall, knelt and drank, calling her over. Folding down beside him, she cupped her hands and brought them to her mouth, and tasting the purity of that cold, clear water, Louise sleeps.
17
When he wakes from a restless slumber, Lane is astonished to see that it’s nearly 8:00 a.m. He raises the blind and looks over the garden at Table Mountain looming like a cutout against the empty blue sky, the rock washed golden by the sun. There is no wind and the famous cloth of cloud hovers undisturbed above the mountain’s flat top, ready for the hordes of tourists and their camera phones.