[2013] Sacrifices

by Roger Smith

  Lane, lifting his own phone from the dresser beside the bed, tries to find remnants of last nights’ alcohol-fueled resolve but the Scotch has left him dry mouthed and liverish and he feels a paralyzing depression enfold him like a cloak.

  But, as he conjures up Louise Solomons’s eyes staring at him across the kitchen table last evening, the bitter bile of guilt rises in his throat and he pockets his Nokia and slips out into the corridor.

  The clock radio in Chris’s old room is tuned to a newscast and he hears his son’s heavy tread over the latest crime reports. Lane, feeling a twinge of pain in his swollen testicles, shames himself by hurrying toward the stairs, eager to be gone before his son emerges.

  He scuttles past the main bedroom—door closed, shower in the en-suite bathroom whispering—descends the stairs and crosses the living room, his socks skating on the tiles.

  Lane opens the door onto the deck, inhaling the crisp air (too early to be tainted by carbon emissions) and walks around the side of the house, his socks soaked by the dewy grass. Invisible now to the bedrooms upstairs, he takes Gwen Perils’s card from his pocket and punches her cell number into his Nokia.

  Before he can hit dial a movement draws his eye and Christopher appears beside the pool, dressed in shorts, vest and running shoes, jogging on the spot. Retreating behind an assegai tree Lane pockets his phone, watching his son through the glossy leaves as he stretches, touching his toes with ease.

  Chris shakes his arms to loosen the muscles before taking off down the driveway. The ornate metal gates fling themselves open like swan’s wings, furling when he disappears from view. He’ll be gone for at least an hour, powering his way along one of the trails that lead up the mountain from Newlands forest.

  Lane retrieves his Nokia, his hands slick with sweat. He composes himself, then jabs at the little green phone. When he hears the cop speak he feels a momentary lurch of terror, and he’s speechless for second before he realizes that he’s listening to the woman’s voice mail, telling him to leave a message.

  “Detective, this is Michael Lane. Please call me back as a matter of urgency.” Sounding like his pompous father again.

  As Lane slips the phone back into his pocket a scream—a prolonged, howling descant—rises from Denise Solomons’s room, visible through a thicket of shrubs.

  Lane knows he should retreat into the house and pretend he is deaf to the woman’s distress, but he finds himself hurrying over to the cottage, where he hears a series of hiccupping sobs. He bangs on the door and after a few seconds it flies open, revealing Louise dressed in a T-shirt and floral pajama bottoms, blinking at him, her short, spiky hair standing in quills.

  “What’s happened, Lou?” he asks.

  “It’s Lynnie. They’ve just called from Pollsmoor. He was murdered last night, in the cells.”

  Lane lays a tentative hand on the girl’s bony shoulder. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Louise.”

  “Fuck you, Michael! Fuck you,” she says, throwing off his hand and slamming the door in his face.

  Lane staggers under the weight of his guilt. But, as he walks toward his wife who stands in the kitchen doorway—looking cool and composed in a white cotton top and ivory-colored slacks, her plucked eyebrows arched in enquiry—he feels the guilt washed away by a surge of pure, unalloyed relief.

  18

  Louise leans her sharp shoulder blades against the door, the wood still trembling from the violence with which she slammed it, and closes her eyes to the cottage and its hand-me-down furniture, colonized—like her life—by Michael Lane’s charity.

  Her mother, reduced to a wailing, drooling mess has been unable to provide any detail about the way Lyndall died, so the dream that woke Louise in the early hours becomes the visual accompaniment to Denise’s garbled account of the call from the prison.

  Louise sees the hands tearing at Lyndall’s flesh, hears him screaming in terror, and knows that she has failed him. She should have fought harder, called a press conference yesterday: yelled at the top her lungs about the Lane’s machinations and Lyndall’s innocence.

  But who would have believed her, a brown kid who looks younger than her years? Beverley Lane, cool and groomed and composed, with the innate superiority of her race and class, would have milked the media and left her looking like a silly, hysterical girl.

  Silence has Louise opening her eyes.

  “Ma?” Nothing. “Ma?”

  Louise hurries through to the bedroom and finds her mother lying on the carpet beside the bed, her face gray and her breathing shallow.

  Kneeling beside her, Louise lifts her head. “Ma? Talk to me.”

  The older woman groans, but her eyes remain closed, and a brownish froth of spittle appears at the side of her mouth.

  Louise stands, stupidly patting herself for her cell phone, then hurries into her bedroom and finds it next to her bed. Reception is always poor in this room, so she sprints through the kitchenette, rips open the door and runs out into the courtyard, the signal building on the scratched face of her old Samsung.

  Louise dials 911 and gets a recorded message. She hits redial. The message again, and a wave of panic and desperation rises in her.

  “Please,” she shouts at the digital voice, “please answer!” And she feels tears and snot on her face.

  Hands on her shoulders spin her and she’s looking up at Michael Lane.

  “Louise, calm down.”

  She has to fight the urge to sink into his arms.

  “My mother’s unconscious, Michael. I need an ambulance.”

  When he releases her she almost falls, then recovers and follows him into the cottage. He scans the kitchen and living room then heads for the bedroom, kneeling beside her mother, putting a finger to her neck.

  Digging into his pocket he frees his Nokia and thumbs the speed-dial, handing Louise the phone which is purring in his hand, its superior antennae locking onto a signal bounced back at them from the mountain.

  “That’s Sniper’s emergency response number. Just give them the address and they’ll send a private ambulance.”

  “And where will they take her?”

  “To Constantia Clinic.”

  “And how will we pay for that?”

  “Don’t worry about that now, Louise. Just do it.”

  A human voice answers and Louise hears herself giving the address as Michael Lane opens her mother’s mouth and starts CPR.

  Beverley hovers in the cottage doorway, looking like she got lost on the way to book club. “Michael? What’s going on?”

  Michael lifts his face from Denise’s long enough to say, “She’s collapsed. Go and open the gates for the medics.”

  Within minutes a shiny new ambulance manned by a pair of male-modelly EMTs in tight jumpsuits is in the driveway. Louise shows them through to the bedroom, where they relieve Michael Lane, covering her mother’s face with a transparent oxygen mask that looks like a beached jelly-fish. They set up a drip before loading Denise onto a gurney and wheeling her out.

  Louise follows, watching as her mother is slid into the ambulance.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Michael Lane asks, appearing at her elbow.

  She wants to say yes, but she shakes head. “No, Michael, you’ve done enough.”

  Louise climbs in after her mother and the doors are slammed and the ambulance takes off, siren weeping.

  19

  Lane sits alone in the kitchen, staring at the layer of wrinkled scum on the surface of a cup of cold coffee. The giddy flash of relief is long gone; all he feels now is the dark taint of guilt.

  The lowing of his Nokia brings him out of his funk. Answering it, expecting to hear a bureaucrat from the clinic demanding his credit card details, Lane’s caught off-guard by the remodeled vowels of Detective Gwen Perils.

  “You left a message, Mr. Lane?”

  “I did,” he says, scrambling for a lie.

  She helps him out. “I suppose you have heard already about Lyndall Solomons?”


  “Yes, via his mother who was pretty hysterical as you can imagine. I just wanted to confirm it with you, Detective.”

  “The Solomons boy died during the night in the awaiting trial cells at Pollsmoor. There are no further details and the investigation won’t be handled by this office.”

  “I see.”

  “Was there anything else, Mr. Lane?”

  “No, Detective. Thank you.”

  Lane ends the call, any opportunity for atonement lost as the phone fades to black.

  Beverley walks in from the living room. “Your cop friend again?” When Lane doesn’t reply she takes a bottle of Evian from the fridge and pours it into a glass. “What did she say?”

  “She confirmed what we heard. About Lyndall.”

  “So,” Beverley says, “it’s all over.”

  “No,” Lane says, “it’s not all over. And I think you know that.”

  The thundering approach of their son bounding down the staircase has them turning to the kitchen doorway as Christopher appears in a shorts and a T-shirt, his hair still damp from the shower.

  Ignoring Lane he plants a kiss on Beverley’s cheek. “I’m off, Mom. Catch you later.”

  He rushes out, slamming the front door and Lane hears the roar of his car engine and the spit of gravel as he takes off down the driveway.

  Carrying her glass Beverley crosses to the kitchen table and Lane marvels at how poised and composed she looks. Her absurd mother sent her to deportment classes as a teenager and Lane has no doubt, as his wife seats herself with her back straight and her pampered hands folded in her lap, that a book would remain perfectly balanced on her head. Her short blonde hair, encroaching gray hidden by her artful and extortionate stylist, is neatly combed and her understated make-up hides any of the stress so visible on Lane’s own face.

  “Let’s just move on now, Michael,” she says. “Put this all behind us.” As if she’s talking about some minor unpleasantness at the tennis club.

  “Beverley, we killed Lyndall. Whatever he was, he didn’t deserve that.”

  “You’re overstating things just a little don’t you think?”

  “Am I? Well here’s an understatement for you: our son is a sociopath. Face it.”

  He expects Beverley to argue but she doesn’t. Instead she crumples, as if invisible guy ropes anchoring her have been cut, and holds her head in her hands.

  For a moment a reflex almost has Lane reaching out a hand to comfort his wife, but the image of Beverley and Christopher on the couch together the night before, while he nursed his bruised balls, drives him from the kitchen and up the stairs into the marital bedroom.

  Grabbing clothes, socks and underwear from the closet, he dumps them into a suitcase. He’s in the bathroom collecting his toiletries when he sees Beverley’s reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are dry and her poise restored.

  “What are you doing, Mike?” she asks.

  He pushes past her. “Moving into the spare room.”

  “Come on, don’t be silly.”

  She puts a hand on his chest and runs her fingers down toward his belly. A familiar signal this, that she wants him. And be damned if he doesn’t feel a momentary twitch in his penis which has lain flaccid and tightly coiled in his underwear these last two days. An answering throb in his scrotum—pain, rather than arousal—erases all desire and he lifts the suitcase and walks away from her hand and the compact warmth of her body.

  “I’d appreciate you making sure that Christopher moves back into the pool house today, okay?”

  She nods and Lane leaves the room they have shared for fifteen years, knowing he’ll never return.

  20

  When the morgue attendant draws back a sheet patterned with rust-colored stains Louise thinks she’s witnessing some mysterious Muslim ritual, that Lyndall’s eyes have been covered by coins. Realizing that she’s looking into the bony cavities of his empty eye sockets, she has to grab hold of the gurney to steady herself.

  “What have you done with his eyes?” she asks, imagining some illegal harvesting of organs.

  The attendant, a mud-colored man with a head cold who can’t stop sniffing and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his filthy smock, stares at her and shrugs.

  One of the undertakers, the older one with the skullcap and long graying beard, touches her arm and says—so quietly that she has to strain to hear him over the clatter of gurneys and the caterwauling of the bereaved in the overcrowded police morgue—“It’s the prison gangs, Missy. They take the eyes of them what spies on them.” He leans in so close she can smell sour curried meat on his breath. “They take his tongue, too.”

  Lyndall’s lips are pulled back in a grimace, the hard strip lighting revealing the stub of something black and torn behind his blood-stained teeth.

  What kind of hell had visited her brother in his last hours?

  Louise closes her eyes, her stomach heaving, bile burning her throat. Something jabs her in the ribs and she blinks. The attendant thrusts a clipboard at her.

  “Sign here.”

  She grabs the clipboard and scrawls her signature so forcefully that the nib of the pen tears the paper.

  “You go wait outside now, Missy,” the older undertaker says.

  Louise, dodging the litter of corpses and the keening and sniveling bereaved, escapes into the parking lot, breathing dust and fumes and the sickly-sweet stink of death, is lost for a moment, panic seizing her—the raw brick building, the palisade fencing topped by spirals of barbed wire, and the looming gray bulk of Table Mountain blurring past her sun-lazered eyes.

  Then she sees the battered pickup truck, a collage of mismatched body parts, ABU-BAKER MUSLIM BURIAL SERVICES crudely painted on the doors, along with a scribble of spidery Arabic and a crescent moon

  She crosses to the truck and leans against it. Her legs fail her and she slumps, squatting in a small pool of shade. The wind that raged all night has died and a thick heat lies trapped in the bowl of the mountain, suffocating the city. Louise finds herself chewing her fingernails, the taste of salt and grit and god-knows what else on her tongue, and jams her hands into her pockets.

  She closes her eyes, barely registering a phlegmy gurgle and a spurt of liquid, but there’s no ignoring the stench of corruption so intense that it startles her from her stupor. She’s squatting beside an open drain, the toes of her Chuck Taylors dangling over the lip of the furrow in danger of being caught in the dark red tide surging toward her, the bloody water overflowing, snaking across the asphalt and finding its way beneath the cars that are parked in the narrow Salt River street.

  Louise, on her feet, stretching the neck of her T-shirt to cover her nose, sees the two Muslim men carrying her brother out of the morgue. He’s wrapped in a torn blanket that gapes as they approach the truck, the pink sole of his bare left foot catching the sun.

  The younger of the two undertakers, a big, silent brown man in a sweat-stained yellow shirt, grips Lyndall’s feet under one arm and opens the pickup’s camper shell. The men slide Lyndall inside and the big man secures the flap before taking the wheel of the truck.

  The bearded man holds open the passenger door and Louise is sandwiched between the undertakers as the driver starts the engine and they rattle out of the morgue and turn toward Voortrekker Road. There is no A/C in the pickup and the driver’s sweat is thick and acrid. It’s almost a relief when he fires up a cigarette.

  “Where you from, Missy?” the older man asks.

  “Cape Town,” she says.

  “Than how come you speak so nice?”

  Louise doesn’t reply, shuts her eyes and rests her head against the back of the seat, the vibrations of the truck jarring her skull. When the driver brakes suddenly she hears Lyndall slide and thump in the rear.

  She still has no idea how or why he was murdered.

  Perhaps her mother knows, but she lies sedated in a private ward with Biggy Best furnishings and a view of a vineyard, a machine monitoring her broken heart.

  Louise
, once Denise was stabilized, took her phone out into the garden of the Constantia clinic that looked like a country club and called Pollsmoor Prison, but had been unable to track down the official who’d broken the news to Denise and all she’d been able to establish was that Lyndall died after “an incident in the cells” and that, since he’d been an awaiting-trial prisoner, his body was the property of the police not the prison services, and had to be identified and collected by his next of kin at the police morgue in Salt River.

  After the cardio specialist—a tall, suntanned man who looked like a tennis pro—told her that Denise had suffered a minor heart attack but was out of danger, Louise took a taxi home. When she walked down the driveway and saw Michael’s BMW parked alone in the open garage she’d had to fight the urge to knock on the door of the big house and beg for his help.

  She hurried to the cottage and booted up her laptop—a gift from Michael when she’d started at the University of Cape Town earlier in the year. He’d appeared at the cottage one evening with a sealed box, the computer still encased in molded polystyrene. There’d been no sign of Beverley, and it hadn’t taken much to imagine her saying, “You’re spoiling her. Why can’t she make do with Chris’s old laptop?”

  Sitting at the counter in the kitchenette, her WiFi piggy-backing the broadband connection from the Lane’s house, Louise Googled Muslim burial rites. Lyndall had to be buried by sunset today, that much she knew. But how and where she had no idea.

  Wikipedia told her that the body would have to be washed and wrapped in cloth. She couldn’t bring herself to read more and printed out the article. While the printer chugged and spat, she googled Muslim undertakers and scribbled down a few Cape Town telephone numbers.

  Her first call had gone straight to voice mail. A man answered the second number, rattling away in express-speed Afrikaans. When he heard her voice he put down the phone.

  Louise, helpless, tearing up, was tempted to call Doves funeral services—she passed their chapel in Claremont daily in the taxi—and let them organize some no-name-brand Christian burial.