by Roger Smith
No, she told herself. You promised him. You promised.
So Louise dialed the third number and this time a woman answered, a woman who called her “lovey” and calmed her enough to get the details from her.
“Okay, here by Abu-Bakr’s we can organize the collection of the deceased by the morgue. We also get a man to wash the deceased—since you got no men in the family to do it—at the graveyard. And we see the grave is dug and book the Imam to do the funeral service.”
She had named a sum of money that would clean out the account Louise shared with her mother. Louise told the woman she would meet the undertakers at the Salt River morgue, would hand them the money in cash, and would travel with them to the cemetery in Paradise Park, wherever that was.
“Lovey, all the Muslim graveyards near town is full like sardines,” the woman said. “But this one is nice and open.”
Before she rang off the woman told her to bring a white bed sheet, two bars of Sunlight soap and some rope.
“What’s the rope for?” Louise asked.
“To tie him in the sheet. Your brother,” the woman said. Telling her that the rope used for makeshift washing lines would be fine.
Louise found a clean white sheet in the linen closet and two bars of the Sunlight soap her mother used to wash kitchen towels under the sink. No rope. So she stowed the sheet and soap in her backpack—remembering at the last moment that she would need to cover her head at the funeral—and raided her mother’s closet for a headscarf, then hurried up to the main road, emptied their bank account at the ATM and bought rope at a hardware store before jumping onto a taxi to the city. A second taxi had dropped her near the morgue, where the Muslim undertakers were waiting to lead her to identify Lyndall.
Almost lulled to sleep by the vibration of the truck, Louise opens her eyes to see that they’re on Voortrekker Road, an endless unscrolling of used car lots, strip malls, take-out franchises and titty bars, the sun throwing hard black shadows over the silent neon, peeling paintwork and boarded-up windows. This is as far as she’s ever been from affluent, forested Cape Town, with its oceanfront bistros and palm-lined beaches.
The driver turns right and crosses a bridge, a gang-tagged train clattering beneath them. As they pass through a clot of heavily fortified stores and factories the wind ambushes them with sudden ferocity, rocking the truck on its springs, and the two men roll up their windows against the grit that pellets them.
The factories give way to an infinity of mean houses and ghetto blocks and Louise—kept insulated by the Lanes and their money—is on the Cape Flats for the first time, in the vast mixed-race ghetto that rises like a mirage from the dust.
21
A tall blonde wearing Indian sandals and a white peasant dress—the breeze wrapping the diaphanous fabric around her very good legs—steps down from a brawny SUV and Lane thinks there must be some mistake, for surely this is the dead girl’s sister, not her mother?
But, as she approaches him in the driveway, a floral cloth bag hanging from her shoulder, he can see the faint latticework of lines on her suntanned face and when she lifts her sunglasses onto her head like she’s raising a visor, revealing a pair of green eyes swollen with grief, he realizes the woman is easily his age.
Conjuring a smile, the muscles of her face setting off a chain reaction of wrinkles like ripples on a pond, she says, “I’m Liz Walker.”
“Michael Lane.”
He isn’t sure whether a handshake is appropriate but when he extends his hand the woman takes it in both of hers like a politician or a preacher, staring into his eyes.
“How’s your son doing, Mike?”
“Oh, he’s okay. He’s tough. A rugby player, you know?”
She nods. “Our youngest, Dillon, also plays. A mother’s nightmare.”
Finally she releases his hand and looks around the garden, toward the pool house.
“That’s where it happened?”
“Yes.” She’s staring at Lane again, expectantly, and he says, “Follow me.”
They set off around the pool toward the scene of the bloodletting.
When she called thirty minutes earlier Lane had been alone in the house, too unnerved by the events of the morning to drive to the bookstore. Chris hadn’t returned and shortly after Lane’s desertion of the marital bedroom his wife, dressed in tennis whites, had roared off in her Pajero. Lane pitied her doubles partner.
He was in the spare room, sitting on an upright wooden Biedermeier chair—inherited from Beverley’s austere mother—staring out the window, a light breeze unraveling the cloud on the mountain, when the phone rang: a jangling cacophony that began downstairs in the living room, then rolled through into the kitchen and finally pursued him upstairs when the extension in the main bedroom startled to yelp.
He sighed and dragged himself from the chair, moving slowly, hoping that the answering machine would kick in and relieve him of responsibility. But when he reached the little white phone disguised as a clam shell sitting atop a novel on Bev’s beside table, it was still purring, so he lifted it and found himself talking to this woman, her breathy whisper branding her as one of those Capetonians he had always loathed: prosperous neo-hippies who ranted about living at one with nature, ate raw food, got Reikied and Rolfed and sent their kids to the Waldorf School.
So her request to visit the scene of her daughter’s death didn’t surprise him. Some New Age nonsense, he guessed. But how could he refuse her?
“The boy who killed Mel, he was like a son to you, wasn’t he?” Liz Walker says as they skirt the pool.
“Well, no. We weren’t close, really.”
Distancing himself from poor dead Lyndall, heading off any accusations this woman may be ready to level.
“But you’d known him all his life. It must be terribly painful?”
She’s staring at him with those soulful eyes and he sees she’s looking for a grief buddy, wants to conscript him into her little woundology club. He gives her his back, sliding open the door to the pool house.
“Here we are,” he says.
Lane hasn’t been in here since the night of the carnage and is astonished at how normal the room looks. All the gore is gone. The blood-splattered posters of rugby players and big-breasted girls have been removed and the walls scrubbed clean. The carpet, only recently soggy with the fluids and brain matter of this woman’s child, has been shampooed and dried back to its original ivory color. The only hint that anything happened is the industrial-strength carbolic that still hangs in the air.
Liz Walker takes in the room. “Please don’t think I’m being ghoulish, Mike, but where was Mel lying, exactly?”
Jesus Christ.
He points to an area at the foot of the bed, near the open door. “Uh, pretty much right there.”
When he looks up at the woman he sees that her veneer of Aquarian composure has been peeled back to reveal the enormity of her pain. Tears well in her eyes and she delves in her bag and finds a Kleenex, dabbing at her face and blowing her nose.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, please.”
“We loved her so much. We were so proud of her. She was studying to be an oral hygienist, you know?” Liz Walker says, suddenly very middle-class in her grief.
“Ah, I see,” Lane says, wanting to bolt.
“Yes, she had the most beautiful teeth.”
And, of course, Lane is served a flashback of those teeth, scattered on this very carpet, winking at him from within a blancmange of brain and blood. A rush of dizziness has him shoving out a hand, supporting himself on the doorframe.
The woman lays soft fingers on his shoulder. “Are you okay, Mike?”
“Yes, of course.”
She tilts her head to the side, regarding him, shifting a strand of blond hair from her face. “We don’t always understand what the universe sends our way, Michael, but there is a plan. I truly believe that.”
He nods, thinking, no, my dear, there’s no plan. There’s just a malevolent
chaos that stalks us all, and your New Age platitudes are about as effective as garlic and silver bullets.
She sets the cloth bag down on the neatly made bed and digs inside, producing a thick white candle, a stick of incense in a wooden holder and a box of matches.
“I’d like to meditate here for a few minutes, Mike. Are you okay with that?” He nods. “And would it hassle you if I lit this candle and burned some incense?”
“No, no. Please go ahead.”
He steps toward the doorway and Liz Walker kicks off her sandals, tucks her dress and folds herself to the carpet right where his son murdered her daughter. She effortlessly pretzels her legs into the lotus position, positioning the candle and incense holder before her.
“I’ll be in the house,” Lane says. “Just ring the doorbell when you’re done.”
“Thank you, Mike.”
He nods and leaves. As he crosses the lawn he hears a wail and thinks the woman is weeping before he realizes she’s chanting in a high, clear, voice. Some Eastern tongue. Sanskrit?
When he enters the hallway and closes the front door, he can still hear the chant and it follows him upstairs to the bedroom where he sits again in the ascetic northern European chair, staring out at the boiling cloud, almost envying the Walker woman her ludicrous faith.
22
Louise is driven deep onto the Cape Flats, her brother’s body sliding and thudding in the rear of the truck as it bucks over roads so broken and scarred they belong in a war zone.
Smug Newlands, its upper avenues dwindling into the lush green carpet of forest that drapes the slopes of Table Mountain, is another world, far from this parched dustbowl where upscale Cape Town hides its poor.
The wind, roaring in unchecked from distant False Bay, blankets the box houses and squat apartment blocks in yellow grit. Pedestrians stagger like drunkards, clothes flapping as they fight their way to buses and taxis whose headlights glare through the dust.
The houses and ghetto blocks give way to a patchwork of shacks, cramped hovels thrown together from sheet metal, plastic and cardboard. A stench comes in on the wind, strong enough to make the driver seem fragrant. Before she can stop herself Louise puts her hand over her nose.
The older undertaker laughs. “Welcome to Paradise Park, Missy.”
A landfill looms through the dust, standing higher than the ghetto blocks, the wind scouring its face and raining down filth on the streets like some ticker-tape parade for the poor and the powerless.
A soiled disposable diaper suctions up against the windshield, obscuring the driver’s view. He curses softly in Cape Flats Afrikaans and triggers the wiper blades, which judder and scuff across the glass, frisbeeing the diaper onto the sidewalk.
Jesus, no wonder you were tikking, Lynnie, Louise thinks. You’d have to be out of your bloody head to keep coming back to this hellhole.
The truck bumps onto a sand track, flinging Louise against the driver, his fleshy arm slick with sweat. Closing her eyes, she imagines that this brutal day is over, that she’s back home, standing under the shower, washing away the foulness and the death.
Then she sees her mother lying unconscious in the clinic and the furtive, guilty look on Michael Lane’s face that morning, and she knows that the cottage will never be a sanctuary again.
When she opens her eyes the pickup is rattling through a graveyard, shacks built among the headstones, the crosses and concrete angels used to anchor sheets of plastic that billow and shriek in the gale.
The truck noses through a gate that has been flung open by the wind, and they’re in the Muslim burial ground, most of the graves just mounds of earth, a few marked by low, unadorned headstones.
Through the dust Louise sees two men wrapped up like Bedouins against the sandstorm, sheltering with their shovels inside a partly dug grave.
The pickup grinds to a halt and the older undertaker points toward a sheet iron lean-to, the roof banging in the wind.
“You go wait in there, Missy that’s where the body gonna get cleaned.” He slides out of the truck, covering his eyes with his arm, wincing as he’s stung by grit, his long beard blown back over his shoulder like a stole.
Louise grabs her backpack and runs into the three-sided tin structure, her eyes tearing. She finds the most protected corner, where a spigot juts through a gap in the sheet metal, a coiled garden hose tied to its mouth with baling wire. Setting down her backpack Louise kneels, removing the Sunlight soap and the length of rope.
Fighting the wind, the two men carry Lyndall’s body from the truck, the blanket flapping open on his small feet—the same size as hers. When they were kids, Louise was forever bitching at her brother for filching her shoes when he lost his at school or playing solitary games in the forest.
They lie Lyndall down near the spigot. The driver leaves and Louise hears the truck door slam. The older man hovers, not meeting her eyes.
“Where’s the guy who is going to wash my brother?” Louise asks.
The undertaker crouches beside her, his beard ochre with dust. “Missy, he just phoned me. He can’t come.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a bus accident over by Mitchells Plane. Nine men from a Muslim choir killed and they need him for that.”
“So who will clean Lyndall?”
The man looks away, out over the cemetery. As if a switch has been flicked, the wind dies with a last ragged gasp and the two grave diggers emerge from the hole like they’ve been resurrected. They dust themselves off and start to dig, the blades of their shovels ringing against the tightly packed yellow soil.
The undertaker sighs and shrugs. “You gonna have to do it yourself.”
“No,” she says, her voice breaking. “I paid you.”
When the horn of the truck sounds he stands, shrugging again. “I’m sorry, Missy, I gotta go.”
Louise rises and grabs him by the arm. “Please, you can’t leave me alone like this.”
“The Imam gonna be here in one hour’s time. You gotta get the body ready, or he won’t bury your brother.”
The horn bleats again and the man is gone.
Louise sinks down beside Lyndall, wrapping her knees with her arms, tears tracing patterns in the dust on her face. How long she sits there she doesn’t know. At last she wipes her eyes, blinking away grit like shards of broken glass.
“Fuck you, Lynnie,” she says, shoving the corpse with her hand, feeling the solid, lifeless mass. “Fuck you for doing this to me.”
She turns and stares out, the bleached landscape blurred by her tears. The gravediggers, done with their task, shoulder their shovels like rifles and stroll toward the tumble of shacks.
Louise blows her nose, dries her tears and digs the computer printout from her backpack. She scans the page, reading that the eyes of the deceased must be closed.
“Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about that, Lynnie, do I?”
The jaw has to be bound shut with cloth and the body must be washed an odd number of times, at least once.
“Once is all you’re getting. You hear me?”
There are more instructions about the winding of the body in the sheet, but this is more than enough for her to absorb right now.
Louise battles to open the rusty spigot. It burps and splutters before brown water trickles from the hose onto the concrete. She unwraps a bar of Sunlight soap—the familiar blue-gray cake with the little sun stamped into it—and places it beside Lyndall’s body.
Reaching for the blanket, she steels herself as she exposes his face, sickened all over again by the horror of his empty eye sockets. There is no way she can clean this. She covers him. Maybe if she starts with the rest of his body, she’ll find the courage to do his mutilated face.
She parts the blanket at Lyndall’s midriff, revealing his torso.
What she sees get her screaming and crawling away from him, breath coming in gulps, eyes squeezed shut.
You’re imagining it, girl. You’re tripping out.
&
nbsp; But when she opens her eyes the horror is fresh and real. Lyndall has been eviscerated—sliced open from neck to pubes, his internal organs plundered, his empty ribcage and the vertebra of his spine exposed.
She can’t stop a hot jet of puke from shooting from her mouth, hitting the concrete floor, splattering her Chuck Taylors.
Louise knows that she is looking at the ultimate in gang justice: a message her brother will take with him into whatever afterlife he is destined for. A Muslim must be buried with anything which is separated from the body—even hair, nails or teeth should be interred along with it. By robbing him of his organs they have left Lyndall incomplete.
She sneaks another look at the raw, gaping wound that splits his torso and shakes her head.
“I can’t do this, Lynnie,” she says, sobbing. “I just can’t do this.”
Then she hears footsteps on the gravel outside the lean-to. The man who will wash the body has come, thank God.
Louise stands, ready to see a bearded figure in a white robe, a skull-cap on his head.
But the man who enters in isn’t bearded, and his gaunt face is covered with a crude filigree of blue-black tattoos. He wears jeans and a T-shirt, his sinewy arms alive with prison ink. He stares at her, then down at Lyndall.
Louise backs away, trying to work up a scream, but her voice dies in her throat as she trips over her backpack and falls, banging her head against the sheet metal wall.
The man advances, his eyes fixed on hers.
Dead eyes.
He reaches down for her and every warning her mother gave her and every terrifying newspaper report she has ever read about the Cape Flats spins through Louise’s mind, and she knows that she is to share her brother’s fate, and that like his, the last minutes of her life will be a living hell.
The man pulls her to her feet and she can smell stale sweat on him and something burnt and toxic.