by Roger Smith
“What’s up?” he asks.
“Barry Hurwitz has news and I just know it’s not going to be good. I don’t want to deal with this alone.” She stares at the shred of Kleenex still glued to Lane’s throat. “What happened to you?”
“I squeezed a pimple.”
Her eyes narrow in suspicion—an all too familiar look—but Lane is saved from further interrogation when a beefy man in a sweater and chinos steps out of an elevator.
“Bev,” Barry Hurwitz says, “so sorry to keep you waiting.”
Beverley makes the introductions and the surgeon pumps Lane’s hand before he steers them toward a small lounge—a couple of chairs hunkered around a table piled with magazines, artless abstract prints on the walls. They sit. Beverley perches on the edge of her chair, hands clasped in her lap. Hurwitz moves his gaze between the Lanes.
“Bev, Mike, there’s no easy way to say this. Christopher’s leg has turned gangrenous. His life will be endangered if we don’t amputate.”
Lane hears a sound so foreign to his ear that it takes him a few seconds to comprehend that his wife is crying. This woman, who stood stoic and dry-eyed at the graves of both her parents—taken a year apart by cancer—and her daredevil brother who shattered almost every bone in his body while base jumping, is weeping.
“When?” Beverley asks.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“And there really is no alternative?” she says, fighting for breath.
“None. I’m sorry.”
“How much of the leg will be lost?”
“We’ll take it above the knee. Of course, we’ll save as much of the limb as we can to facilitate the fitting of a prosthesis at a later stage.”
“What went wrong?” Lane asks.
“The leg became infected post-surgery. We tried to contain the infection but the tissue has become gangrenous and it’s spreading fast. If we don’t amputate septicemia will set in and he will most certainly die.”
Beverley blows her nose on a tissue that she conjures from her sleeve, her fighting spirit returning. “This is unacceptable, Barry. Surely this is gross incompetence, even malpractice?”
Hurwitz holds up a freckled hand. “Okay, let’s slow down, shall we?”
“No, I won’t bloody slow down! We’re talking about my son here.”
“Did you know Christopher was using anabolic steroids?” Hurwitz asks.
Beverley blinks and can’t stop her eyes skidding across to Lane before she swivels them back to the surgeon. “Of course not. What do you mean?”
“Once we discovered the infection I ordered intensive tests and the blood work indicates pretty heavy steroid abuse. We’re talking years here. Anabolic steroids impact on bone growth and strength, and in my opinion the severity of Christopher’s injury was as a result of his drug use. They also radically undermine the immune system, hence the present situation. I’m sorry, but that’s it.” He shakes his head. “Chris has had a tough time and I think we should focus on getting him through this before we start throwing accusations around, and I’m certain his steroid abuse isn’t something you want the media to get hold of.”
Hurwitz flashes a tight smile, but his pale eyes are hard and Lane knows he and his wife have been warned. When he sees Beverley is about to protest he cuts her off.
“Okay, Doctor, you’re right. We need to focus on Christopher. What’s next?”
“First I would suggest that you break the news. I’ll pop in on him later and give him any reassurance he needs.”
“Of course.”
“And we need Chris to sign a consent form.”
“Can’t we do it for him?”
The surgeon shakes his gingery head. “No, he’s eighteen, he has to do it.” He stands. “The duty nurse will give you the form. I’m contactable on my cell.”
He walks off, his loafers bleating on the tiles.
Beverley blows her nose and dabs at her red eyes. “I can’t do this, Michael. You’re going to have to tell Chris.”
“Bev, he’ll want to hear it from you.”
She shakes her head. “What he doesn’t need now is my weakness. Tell him I’m with Barry, being briefed. That’ll reassure him.”
Lane understands that her tears, as authentic as they may be, are also strategic. If she is the bearer of this news she will be implicated in Christopher’s confusion and anger. Better to use the unloved and unwanted father as her proxy. He can’t help but admire his wife.
Lane stands. “Okay. Where is he?”
She points down a corridor. “Ward seven. On your left.”
Lane approaches the woman at the desk who gives him a consent form and explains to him where Christopher must sign.
He finds the private ward, the half-open door allowing him a view of his son’s leg sheathed in plaster, suspended from a pulley system. Lane knocks and enters. Christopher is watching rugby on the widescreen TV mounted opposite the bed, a pair of headphones hooked into his ears. He looks pale and somehow reduced.
He stares at Lane and removes the headphones. “What are you doing here?” His voice slurring from painkillers.
“I’ve come to see you.”
“Bullshit. Where’s Mom?”
“Talking to the doctor.”
The room is festooned with flowers, cards and garish foil balloons urging Chris to “get well.” Lane removes a striped Western Province rugby flag and a pile of men’s magazines from a chair and sits.
“Chris, Doctor Hurwitz tells us he needs to operate in the morning.”
“Ja, I know. To reset my leg.”
“No. I have some bad news.”
“Fuck, man, spit it out. What’s going on?”
“There’s gangrene in your leg. They have to amputate.”
The boy stares at him. “You serious?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Chris . . .”
“Get the fuck out. I want to see mom.”
Lane stands and flaps the sheet of paper. “You need to sign this. It’s a consent form.”
“I’m not signing a fucken thing. Call my mother. Now.”
Lane shrugs, sets the paper down on the cabinet beside the bed and heads for the door.
“Dad?”
When had the boy last called him that?
Lane turns and sees the fear on his son’s face and he feels an echo of a very old emotion that he thought was long dead.
“Do they have to do this?” Chris asks, his voice thin.
“Yes. If they don’t you’ll die.”
“Jesus.” He closes his eyes, then opens them and looks up at Lane. “Don’t go. Please.”
Lane sits. “The doctor will be in later to explain everything to you.”
“What will I do? Afterwards?”
“Hurwitz is already talking of a prosthesis. They’re very sophisticated these days. You’ll be able to lead a normal life.”
“Normal for a cripple?”
Lane shrugs. “There will have to be a period of adjustment.”
The boy makes a sound that resembles a laugh. “I suppose you think I deserve this?”
Lane shakes his head, but can find no words of denial.
Chris says, “You’re not going to believe me, but since I’ve been here I can’t stop thinking of that night. What I did.”
“I believe you.”
“I was popping ’roids. And you know what happens when you mix them with booze? Fucken does your head in.”
“Chris, we don’t need to talk about this now.”
“No, we do. She was a bitch, that Melanie. A real ball-breaker. Thought the sun shined out of her twat, liked to bring guys down. She hit on me at the bar, in front of my buddies. Asked me if I was man enough to handle her.” The boy shakes his head. “Turns out I wasn’t. After the booze and the ’roids I couldn’t get it up and the little bitch laughed at me and I knew it’d be all over Facebook and Twitter that Chris Lane’s got a floppy cock. I just lost it,
man, kinda blacked out until you and Mom came into my room.” He looks at Lane. “You ever done anything where you fucked up big-time?”
Lane nods. “Yes. Yes, I have.” Back on that road, kneeling over the legless, dying child.
“Then you know how I feel.”
“Perhaps.” He stands. “Good luck tomorrow.”
“You gonna come see me again?”
“Sure.” They both know he’s lying. “Sign that form and give it to your mother, okay?”
Lane walks out and finds Beverley pacing the corridor, hugging herself. “How is he?”
“As you’d expect. He wants you.”
“What took you so long?”
“Nothing. We spoke.”
“About what?”
“Go in, Bev. He needs you.”
Lane walks down the corridor and presses for an elevator, avoiding the eyes of the man in the mirror when the doors slide open.
14
As he lifts his son’s amputated leg from the trunk of the BMW Lane hears the rattle of the garage door. It’s still dark when he surfaces, sweating and gasping, from the dream and he upsets the glass of water at his bedside in his haste to click on the lamp.
Lane, calming himself, lies listening to Beverley’s Pajero reversing out of the garage and receding into the soft wash of drizzle. She’s driving to the hospital, to be there for the surgery.
The image of the severed limb lying in the trunk of his car—the skin pale and bloodless, the bisected femur jutting from the torn meat of the thigh—returns and he realizes that, in the dream, he was about to offer up his son’s leg in an act of atonement.
A payment in flesh.
Lane understands that some irrational primitive impulses—dating back to a time before mankind lifted itself from its knuckles—are still hardwired into him, but the notion of prayer, of abasing himself before some fuzzy higher power, is ludicrous.
Yet it persists.
He leaves the bed, shrugs on a robe and walks to the window, opening the curtains onto a wet, gray dawn. As he steps into a pair of house shoes Lane sees his father’s feet—corded with veins, toenails yellow and unclipped—scuffing along in hospital slippers, a drip stand dragging behind, wheels squealing.
Bernard Lane, as bluff a pragmatist as any Lane has known, had undergone some kind of religious conversion in the weeks before his death. One day Lane arrived at the hospital to find the curtains drawn around his father’s bed. The old man was either dead or using the bed pan, but as Lane approached he heard a muttered incantation and cracked the drapes to see a Catholic priest praying at the bedside, Bernard mumbling along gamely.
Lane, unseen, retreated to the waiting room. A few minutes later the priest, a furtive man who carried with him an aura of shame, scuttled past clutching his Bible.
Lane never spoke of this with his father, but a thought had nagged at him: when his time came, when he was faced with the inevitability of his own death, would he, too, reach for some mumbo-jumbo?
Lane banishes this nonsense and heads for the bathroom. It’s only when he confronts his face in mirror that he remembers that today’s his birthday. He’s forty-five.
“Happy bloody Birthday,” he says sourly.
Spreading shaving foam across his cheeks and jaw he sees the small wound from Jade’s knife is all but invisible, a tiny blemish on the skin of his neck.
He shaves and steps into the shower. A moment’s dizziness has him closing his eyes, gripping the faucets, and he’s back in that dream, lifting Christopher’s leg from the trunk, turning . . .
Turning toward whom or what?
He has no idea.
Lane showers and wraps himself in his robe again and, without remembering how he got there, finds himself in Christopher’s childhood bedroom. The curtains are open and wintry light washes the action figures and the posters of forgotten rugby heroes.
Lane sits on the bed, his eye drawn to a small framed photograph half-hidden on a shelf of sporting trophies and kid’s books. He lifts the photo and wipes a fine layer of dust from the glass. Chris, maybe six or seven-years-old, grinning, stands on Camps Bay Beach, dressed in baggies, holding a body board.
Lane remembers taking the photograph, the recollection almost painful. This is when he’d still loved his son, or—more to the point—when his son had still loved him, before the boy had grown mean-spirited and cruel.
A telephone call, maybe two years after this photograph was taken, had signaled the change in the boy: the father of one of Chris’s school friends—a man Lane had never met—demanding that he come at once and remove Christopher from his son’s birthday party.
Driving over, Lane guessed that Chris had punched a child—at eight he was already showing early signs of the bully he would become. But when he arrived at the house, a sprawling Constantia mansion, the father led Lane to the rear, to the cramped room of the domestic worker, a black woman who watched mutely from within.
The man pointed at the door to the room and Lane saw the word “kaffir” scrawled on the wood in marking pen. Incendiary hate speech, a relic of South Africa’s apartheid past. An affront to Lane’s liberal sensibilities.
He looked at the man and shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Your son did that.”
“Surely not?”
“My wife came out to call Thembi and caught him in the act.”
“My God. I’ll have this out with him.”
“You had better. And he is not welcome in this house again.”
Lane nodded and found Christopher standing alone, gazing down into the swimming pool, a small smile on his face—the other children keeping their distance, whispering.
In the car Lane said, “Why did you do it?”
“Because that’s what she is. A kaffir.”
“Don’t use that word!”
The boy shrugged and stared out of the window and Lane knew he had lost his son.
Impulsively, Lane frees the photograph from its frame and takes it to his bedroom. He props it up against the base of the lamp on the bedside table and dresses.
Even though it’s still very early—Brenda Passens not yet in the kitchen—Lane locks the house and drives his BMW out into the deserted streets, wet leaves slapping the underside of the car.
An impulse that has its root in that disturbing dream has him turning south, rather than heading toward the city. When Lane’s hand is drawn to his shirt pocket and he feels the outline of the photograph of Christopher he can’t recall putting it there.
This is absurd.
He nudges the BMW’s turn signal before the Trovato Link exit, ready to leave the southbound freeway and loop back, joining the traffic streaming into Cape Town. But he clicks off the flasher and the exit blurs by.
What’s going on?
Stress, he decides. He is having some minor nervous episode. Quite literally not himself.
So he surrenders and lets this other Michael Lane pilot the BMW over Ou Kaapse Weg and down to the three crosses planted beneath the oak tree.
Lane pulls off the road and sits watching the morning traffic washed by the wintry sunshine seeping through the clouds. Two black women hurry past the BMW and sardine themselves into a waiting taxi, its exhaust rattling and fuming as it stutters off.
Lane, obeying some nameless whim, exits the car and opens the trunk. There is no leg inside, of course, just the spotless gray carpet. He unscrews the tray recessed into the lid of the trunk and lets it fall open onto a selection of tools. Slipping a screwdriver into the pocket of his jacket, Lane approaches the crosses.
They are in even worse repair than when he was here seven months ago, the wood rotting, the white paint faded to gray. Little Brandon’s cross lists to the side, the patibulum touching the earth. Lane rights it and straightens the crosses that flank it.
In the grip of an urge he can’t resist, Lane finds the screwdriver in his hand, using it to loosen the earth at the base of Little Brandon’s cross, scratching out a hole a
few inches deep. He removes the photograph of Christopher from his pocket, folds it twice and buries it in the mud, covering it with soil. The muddy mound looks like a tiny grave, the weather-beaten cross standing vigil over it.
Overcome with shame, Lane rises and wipes his fingers on a handkerchief, looking around to see if this bizarre act has been witnessed. Cars fly by, the wind of their passing buffeting him, but nobody looks his way.
He hurries back to the BMW, dumping the muddy screwdriver in the glove box. As he jabs the key into the ignition his cell phone rings and he lifts it from his pocket.
“Bev,” he says.
“It’s done.”
“How is he?”
“Still unconscious, but he’s out of danger.”
“Good. You must be relieved?”
“Yes.” A pause. “Happy Birthday, Michael.”
“Thank you,” he says.
There’s a longer pause that neither of them can fill, then she ends the call and Lane waits for a gap in the traffic, does a U-turn and speeds toward the city.
15
The minibus taxi rattles to a halt at the Paradise Park graveyard and Louise steps down into yellow mud that sucks at her sneakers. The rain has paused and thin sunlight dribbles through the black clouds, casting a dirty light over the mess of shacks growing out of the bog land. The taxi drives away and Louise looks around for Achmat Bruinders. There is no sign of him.
A dog wanders out of a shanty and takes a shit in the mud. Two small boys, barefoot, in torn sweaters and shorts, curse in Cape Flats Afrikaans as they kick a punctured soccer ball, using a rusted car wreck as their goal posts. A woman with red and yellow curlers in her hair stands in the doorway of a shack, smoking, staring at Louise.
Across the road four guys in their early twenties, uniformed in hoodies, baggy jeans and running shoes, lean against a gold car that blares Tupac, their eyes like leeches. One of them pushes himself upright and pimprolls toward her. The others follow and Louise, so sure that she was numb to fear, feels a surge of panic.
The leader comes to a sudden halt in the middle of the road, as if his ankles have been clamped. His friends are already slinking back toward the car. Louise turns and sees Achmat Bruinders standing behind her, hands at his side, face expressionless as he watches the men get into the car and drive away, tires spinning in the mud, hip-hop lost in a roll of thunder.