Now I See You

by Holmes, Priscilla; Holmes, Priscilla;

‘Like Donald Duck? You inhale helium to do that. Your voice goes squeaky and high for a short time.’

  ‘How many people know a thing like that?’

  ‘Anyone who’s ever blown up balloons, just one of those things you pick up.’

  Matatu rubbed his temples with his fingers before he spoke. ‘DI Tswane, there’s one more thing. There was a witness to this murder. The only person to come forward who has actually seen the perpetrators.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your grandfather, Chief Solenkosi Tswane. He refuses to cooperate with the police. He won’t talk to anyone but you.’

  Life’s like a chessboard. Just when you think you have a game plan, one piece moves and everything changes. My palms prickled. It was always like this. The valley had left thorns in my hands.

  ‘Keep me informed,’ Matatu said. ‘I want to know what’s going on. If you need more people or resources, talk to me. I want regular progress reports, whenever you can establish contact.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I closed the door quietly behind me. No point in exposing myself further to the boss’s scrutiny. He’d given me my orders and I’d follow them, even if going back there, leaving Jozi, was the hardest thing I’d been asked to do in a long time. I stood there for a few minutes trying to come to terms with what was going to happen next.

  If there was one thing I knew all about, it was leaving. Usually when someone left the valley their leaving was accompanied by cries of grief. Clothing was torn, heads shaved. But not for me. After the ritual punishment ordered by my grandfather, I had left forever.

  I fled alone and in the dark. And I swore never to return.

  Now the outcast had to go back. The valley people usually displayed their hands to the sky in happiness when a loved one returned. This would not happen for me. There would be no stamping feet, no killing of an ox. As the chief’s granddaughter I had been a sort of princess in the valley, a loved one. But now it would be different. News of my arrival would be announced in the valley. But who would care?

  After my briefing with Commissioner Matatu, I needed to clear my thoughts. I walked outside for a moment. It would soon be dark. Johannesburg nights came quickly. I heard the last birdsong of the day and watched long, mauve shadows creeping across the walls of the building. The snow was melting, leaving soggy patches on the road. The winter sun slipped below the rim of the world, leaving the sky blood red and ominous.

  I walked back to my building and took the lift to the underground shooting range: a bright well-lit place with sand walls surrounding six individual practice stands.

  I selected a .38 Special, narrowed my eyes behind the safety goggles, and shot ten rounds into the heart of a life-size target hanging on a wire ten metres away.

  As I stood back, judging my aim, Zak Khumalo appeared in the next stand.

  ‘Glad you’re on our side, Thabisa; you’re almost as good as me.’

  I ignored him. Zak Khumalo might secrete some hypnotic scent that drove women crazy, but I simply found him irritating.

  ‘Yes, and to think my grandfather wanted me to stay home and do beadwork,’ I said as I turned to leave.

  He laughed softly. ‘That’s a great idea. Beautiful black women with grey eyes should stay put. Trust me; you’d be safer at home.’

  ‘Unless I had you to protect me, I suppose?’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘I’ll always protect you, DI Tswane, you know that.’

  ‘Oh ja? Like you did last week with Botha?’

  ‘Listen Thabisa, if you’d entered the building with me like you were supposed to –’

  I looked at him in outrage. We’d been on a job together the week before, chasing Mike Botha, a suspected murderer and known drug dealer, who had jumped bail. It had meant storming his girlfriend’s apartment in Hillbrow.

  The lobby of the building was small, full of rubbish. It stank. You could reach up and grab a handful of grease from the air. An old washing machine, a filthy armchair, black bin bags containing God knows what. The door looked as if it had been kicked in a few times and I’d sighed when I looked at it. I had spent quite a few years knocking on doors like this.

  I’d been about to follow Zak inside the building when a figure lurched out of the shadows, smashing into me from the side. We both crashed to the ground. The impact knocked me breathless; my weapon skidded off into the dark, beyond my grasp. Then Botha’s hands had curled round my throat, squeezing.

  ‘Don’t move, bitch,’ he hissed.

  I smelt him coming before he touched me; his breath sour, his body odour like ripe cheese. That’s one of the things that gets to me about my job, the baddies often smell really bad. I wanted to vomit, but his hands constricted my throat and I couldn’t breathe, let alone throw up. I lay still for a moment. Then with all my strength I brought my knee up hard into his soft gut. He gasped, relaxed his grip for a moment. I turned, grabbed the pepper spray from the back of my belt, and shot into his face. Howling, he reeled into the street, hands tearing at his eyes. His howling turned into choking and gasping, and he fell on all fours. As he crumpled forward, Zak appeared from the building. In a few seconds Botha was handcuffed and shoved into the car.

  Before he dragged Botha away, Zak had glanced at me.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked. ‘You should have gone in with me, you know that.’

  I’d almost smiled. Under all the swagger and macho exterior, perhaps Zak was a grown-up professional after all.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I didn’t need your help. It was under control.’

  He looked at me with a small half-smile.

  ‘You having fun?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, ja. A real blast.’

  Now, a week later, I could see his eyes gleaming in the darkening light. Everything about him – T-shirt, bulletproof vest, shaved head and the 9mm Glock – was black as night. He blended into the dark like a shadow. Invisible. But I could feel his eyes on me.

  I stuck my .38 into my webbed hip holster. My cuffs and spray were stuck into the back of the belt. I was in full uniform, but I knew Zak saw straight to the black lacy underwear I was wearing underneath.

  ‘Zak,’ I said, ‘enough, okay? Stop looking at me like that. I could use a bit of real encouragement. About police matters, that is.’

  He stepped forward, stood close, put his finger under my chin and locked eyes with me.

  ‘Anything you like, Thabisa,’ he said, moving his finger down my neck.

  ‘Cut it out, or I’ll report you for sexual harassment.’

  He stepped back, dropped his hand.

  ‘I understand, Thabisa, you just can’t trust yourself around me.’ His laugh was soft and low in his throat as he walked away. ‘Still got your bank-teller boyfriend?’

  ‘He’s a trader, not a bank-teller.’

  ‘Same shit.’

  Adrenaline tripped into my bloodstream and I had to breathe slowly. I didn’t want to risk grabbing my gun and shooting him by mistake.

  In the cloakroom, I washed my hands quickly, not wanting to look in the mirror. I knew what I’d see there. A wary young woman scared of the past. The conversation with Matatu had brought back memories of my childhood, memories of the remote valley where I had grown up. Thoughts floated to the surface of my mind and burst like bubbles.

  In the Eastern Cape, beyond the Xuka River, over the Qabe Mountain pass, deep down where the river runs straight off the mountains and into the valley, is my home. Nguni Intile. Nestled in a time-worn crevice, surrounded by rugged red cliffs. If I close my eyes I can see northwards, where the great Drakensberg Mountains rise and thicken into a blue, jagged wall. This is the place where I was born. It’s hard to find the way in... but even harder to find a way out.

  For as long as anyone could remember, the valley had been a remote cut- off place. Even when the trappings of civilisation trickled into neighbouring villages and the young men returned from the mines with radios and crazy city stories, the people of the valley clung to their traditions
. They would have been lost without them. Or that’s the way I used to see things. Back then when I thought the valley was stifling me. It felt like there was no way out. Even the landscape held me trapped. The long-promised new road from Engcobe came to a complete halt once it met the copper-coloured earth of the valley. You still had to scramble down a dangerous mountain path to get to the village.

  We never saw a car in the valley. The only traffic jam was caused by cattle being taken to graze by the young boys trusted with this important task. The valley was a place where time had stood still for decades. History and time had passed it by.

  Valley people cherished their isolation. Just as they tended their cattle, made their complicated bead-work, and married whom they were told. These things could be counted on. You knew the water from the mountain streams was as pure as the first snow. You knew that Chief Tswane would punish wrongdoers in the traditional way. That you rubbed your body and clothing with red clay until you glistened to show you were amaQaba, that you worshipped your ancestors, their spirits were always there in the valley. That was all you needed to know.

  But I was different. My grandfather, Chief Solenkosi Tswane, had chosen me to be the one who went to school. That’s when everything had changed.

  Everyone thought he would choose a boy. After all, they were the ones who fought, made a noise and told the girls what to do. But I was his only descendant, everyone else was gone and blood meant everything. So he chose me.

  Me, the little tomboy who climbed trees and came home wet from the river, her belly full of star apples and bush fruit. The one who played ndize, finding the best places to hide from the boys, finding them easily when it was her turn. I hunted scorpions, dressed the family goat in a bead headdress and rode her like a horse. I was the chosen one. The one who had to climb the mountain every day to go to the farm school. Ten kilometres there and back. In all weather, even when it snowed or when the spring rains flooded the river and I had to wade across, my school dress on my head, to keep it dry. The other kids felt sorry for me, especially the girls. It made me different. They were happy doing their beadwork and helping their mothers. But I loved to learn. To see letters forming words, numbers that always made sense when you added them up. I loved that; making sense out of patterns and squares, just as I loved to hear my teacher tell us about the world outside. For most of my childhood I believed that the world didn’t go beyond the mountains that framed our village life. But once I went to school I knew there were other places out there and they were calling me. When I won the scholarship and went to live in Grahamstown, I saw that world and I liked it.

  At eighteen I matriculated. And then my grandfather tried to marry me off to a neighbouring chief. I couldn’t believe it. After all the education, all the dreams I had dared to dream, I was to be sold to an ancient friend of my grandfather’s. A man almost three times my age. Just as my eyes were opened to the real world, I had to follow tradition and do what was expected. When all you know is nothing, all your expectations are nothing. But I had escaped the bondage of valley women, only to find it had me in its time-honoured trap.

  ‘I have good lobola for you,’ Chief Tswane said. ‘Fifty cattle when you marry Bundo.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t marry an old man.’ I shuddered to think of ancient hands roaming over my body. A toothless old man sharing my bed.

  ‘You will marry who I say,’ my grandfather insisted.

  ‘No, I won’t. I’m going to college. I’m not marrying anybody.’

  Besides smelling like a goat, Bundo was almost as old as my grandfather and already had three wives. It wasn’t going to happen.

  But nobody ever refused my grandfather. It was unheard of in the valley.

  I could understand that I was my grandfather’s only hope of strengthening the family bloodline. No other members of the family remained, apart from my great-aunt, a lady in her seventies. But that didn’t mean I had to kneel down and accept this fate. I just wouldn’t do it.

  ‘I will return one day and help the village, I promise,’ I said. ‘But for now tat’omkhulu – grandfather, I have to qualify and get a job. Then I can think about marrying.’

  ‘You will marry who I say,’ my grandfather repeated, louder this time.

  I pressed my lips together until they hurt.

  ‘I will not marry this man. I am leaving.’

  ‘I command you!’ Solenkosi Tswane was almost incoherent with rage, but I persisted.

  ‘You have educated me to think for myself and now I am refusing.’

  My grandfather drew himself up to his full height, pulling the red blanket around his skinny shoulders.

  ‘How can you leave our valley?’ he hissed. ‘This is where our ancestors live. If you leave your village you will forget who you are.’

  I stared down at the ground, saying nothing.

  ‘Go then,’ said my grandfather, turning away from me. ‘You are no longer a child of the valley.’

  I rose from the floor where I had been kneeling. All valley women knelt to their chief.

  ‘There is nothing more to say. Goodbye.’

  As I was leaving the homestead, Grandfather called out: ‘You will be punished for this. This is our way.’

  That night the village women came for me.

  Women I thought friends, women who had taught me the ways of the valley, the ways of the beads, led by my grandfather’s chief wife, Ngosi. They inflicted a ritual punishment I would remember all my life. I still bear the scars.

  The old women came first, Ngosi, followed by Mkolo, Lulama, Odwa and Dumile, the gossipy gogos – the old ladies of the valley. They had taken the small blades from the Great Kraal, the blades used to inflict severe punishment. The last one to be cut was a man who had killed his neighbour. And now I was the criminal.

  The younger women, my friends from childhood; Azile, Dinda, Popi and Pinda, held back, to start with. They were crying. Their mothers made the first cuts while Ngosi held me down. They were all waiting for me to scream, but I didn’t cry out although I had to bite my lips until they bled. Ngosi shouted, ‘This is your punishment, this is our way.’ Lulama made the first cut. The women were ululating and shouting like a pack of dogs. I saw Pinda weeping, trying to run away from the hut, but her mother held her back. In the end they all cut me.

  Afterwards, as I lay bleeding on the floor of the hut, Ngosi said ‘I told him this schooling would bring trouble. I warned him.’

  I left the valley with dozens of small bleeding wounds crisscrossing my back and grief in my heart. I left everything behind me that night; the bones of my ancestors, my childhood, all the familiar things of my life. I knew I could never be the same, that once I had left the valley I would have to become a different person. So I did.

  I had not been back to the valley since.

  Once I started working, I sent regular cheques to my grandfather, the way anyone who leaves always does, but they were never cashed. My throat ached with unshed tears when I thought about it. And now I had to go back and face it all over again.

  I remembered the elaborate ceremonies, which involved the messy sacrifice of animals. I shuddered at the thought. I’d hated those ceremonies; I didn’t like the blood and the screaming of the animal about to be slaughtered. There was a great deal of ululating, dancing and foot-stamping. This was not my thing, even when I’d been little, with my black curls jumping off my head like tightly coiled springs.

  I forced my thoughts to the present day. I had to stop thinking about the past, get on with my life and do my job. I returned to my office, and settled down to read the files on the Eastern Cape criminals. I sat at my desk engrossed in them, until I checked my watch and realised how late it was.

  Paul would be waiting; I’d better get home. It was his birthday and we had planned to meet friends for dinner. I snapped the files shut and left the building.

  As I walked into the car park the snow started falling again. Fat snowflakes spotted the tarmac, covered my braids and landed
on my lashes. It was bitterly cold. I shivered as I got to my car and saw the slush on my windscreen. I knew my heater wasn’t going to cope and I would be freezing all the way home.

  3

  15 June 2006

  I drove away from the office through sheets of snow, and as I’d expected, my car heater put up a fight, but it couldn’t cope. I pulled over in front of my flat and finished my make-up in the car, frowning at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. I hoped the snow wouldn’t ruin it all again – a girl’s whole life changes when her mascara runs.

  The city roared with life: traffic, snatches of rap music, shouts, laughter, squealing tyres. I felt the rush of it. Suddenly the streetlights blinked off. As the snow kept falling, the lights in my block vanished. The whole of Randburg disappeared. Another common occurrence – a Johannesburg power outage.

  There was a bad vibe coming off the city tonight, buzzing off the grey concrete and the wet tarmac. I glanced at the bruised sky. Paul would be angry that I was so late.

  My throat was dry, my heart jumping anxiously. I was determined to sparkle tonight. I imagined him opening the door to greet me, seeing my glossy lips and braids caught up in a twisty ponytail. How could he resist me? I wanted him to say: ‘Hi babe, you look beautiful. I know you’re late, but it doesn’t matter, just as long as you’re home safely.’

  If only he would look at me the way he used to at the beginning of our relationship. And then... I’d look up at his slightly skew nose and full lips, and I’d kiss him, slip my hands under his shirt, feel his back, run my fingers up to his shoulder blades, then down, beneath the waistband of his trousers... We hadn’t enjoyed that sort of evening for a long time. Too long.

  As I crossed the road, the snow turned to rain, fierce drops burst on my warm skin. I was soaked before I reached the stairs. The lift was out, of course. Just what I needed at the end of a shitty day. I swung open the door to the steps. Flashing my police torch, I pounded up four flights, two steps at a time. I wrenched the door open. Paul had lit all the candles; the apartment was full of weird shadows.