by Deon Meyer
Despite her anger, Anna had packed his clothes with care. She would be in the kitchen now, still in her work clothes, clattering pots and pans, radio playing on the table. Carla would be sitting at the dining-room table with her homework books, twisting the point of the pencil in her hair. Fritz would be in front of the television, remote in hand, skipping channels continuously, searching, impatient. Always on the go. He was like that too — things must happen.
Jesus, what had happened to his life?
Pissed away. With the help of Klipdrift and Coke and Jack Daniel’s.
Alcoholics Anonymous, Step Ten: Continue to take personal inventory and when you are wrong, promptly admit to it.
He sighed deeply. Desire pressed against his ribcage from inside. He did not want to be here. He wanted to go home. He wanted his family back, his wife and his children. He wanted his life back. He would have to start over. He wanted to be like he was before — the policeman from the Parow station who laughed at life. Could one begin again? Now. At forty-three?
Where would you begin, to start over?
You don’t have to be a genius to work that one out. He wasn’t sure whether he had said that out loud.
He must buy a newspaper and look for a place in the classified ads, because this fucking flat gave him the heebie-jeebies. But first he must phone. He found Mrs. McAllister’s phone directory in a drawer of the cupboard by the phone. He opened it near the front, and slid his finger down the list, turned a page, looked again until he found the number.
He would try one more time. One last fucking time.
He rang the number. It did not ring for long.
“Alcoholics Anonymous, good afternoon,” said a woman’s voice.
By chance Thobela bought the Argus. It was something to do while he ate fish and chips from a cardboard carton, the seagulls waiting like beggars on the railing for alms. He spread the paper open on the table before him. First he read the main article without much interest — more political undercurrents in the Western Cape, allegations of corruption and the usual denials. He dipped the chips in the seafood sauce. That was when he spotted the small column in the right bottom corner.
COPS CALLED ““INCOMPETENT” — BABY RAPIST CASE DISMISSED
He read. When he had finished, he pushed the remains to one side. He gazed out over the quiet water of the harbor. Pleasure boats with sunburned tourists on board cruised out in a line to serve cocktails off Llandudno and Clifton when the sun went down. But he was blind to the scene. He sat there staring and motionless for a long time with his big hands framing the article. Then he read it again.
There was a knock on the study door and the minister said, “Come in.”
The woman who put her head around the door was in her middle years, her black hair cut short against her head and her nose long and elegant. “Sorry to disturb you. I have made some snacks.”
The two women summed each other up with a glance. Christine saw false self-assurance, subservience, a slim body hidden by a sensible frock. A busy woman with able hands that only labored in the kitchen. The sort of woman who had sex in order to have children, not for pleasure. A woman who would turn away stiffly if her husband’s mouth and tongue slid lower than the small, worn breasts. Christine knew her type, but she didn’t want to let on and tried to seem inconspicuous.
The minister stood up and crossed to his wife to take the tray from her. “Thank you, Mamma,” he said.
“It’s a pleasure,” she said, smiling tight-lipped at Christine. Her eyes said, for the tiniest moment, “I know your kind,” before she softly closed the door.
In a detached way the minister placed the tray on the desk — sandwiches, chicken drumsticks, gherkins and serviettes.
“How did you meet?” she asked. He had gone back to his chair.
“Rita and I? At university. Her car broke down. She had an old Mini Minor. I was passing on my bicycle and stopped.”
“Was it love at first sight?”
He chuckled. “It was for me. She had a boyfriend in the army.”
Why, she would have liked to ask. What did you see in her? What made you choose her? Did she look like the ideal rectory wife? A virgin? Pure. She imagined the romance, the propriety, and she knew it would have bored her to death at that age.
“So you stole her away from him?” she asked, but wasn’t really interested anymore. She felt an old jealousy rising.
“Eventually.” He smiled in a self-satisfied way. “Please, have something to eat.”
She wasn’t hungry. She took a sandwich, noting the lettuce and tomato filling, the way the bread was cut in a perfect triangle. She placed it on a plate and put it on her lap. She wanted to ask how he had managed to wait, how he had suppressed his urges until after the wedding. Did student ministers masturbate, or was that a sin too in their world?
She waited until he began to eat a drumstick, holding the leg bone in his fingers. He leaned forward so that he ate above the plate. His lips glistened with fat.
“I had sex the first time when I was fifteen,” she said. “Proper sex.”
She wanted him to choke on his food, but his jaw only stalled a moment.
“I chose the boy. I picked him out. The cleverest one in the class. I could have had anyone, I knew that.”
He was helpless with the chicken half eaten in his hand and his mouth full of meat.
“The more my father prayed about the demons in me, the more I wanted to see them. Every night. Every night we had to sit in the lounge and he would read from the Bible and pray long prayers and ask God to cast the Devil out of Christine. The sins of the flesh. The temptations. While we held hands and he sweated and talked till the windows rattled and the hair on my neck stood up. I would wonder, what demons? What did they look like? What did they do? How would it feel if they came out? Why did he focus on me? Was it something I couldn’t help? At first I didn’t have a clue. But then boys at school began to look at me. At my body.”
She didn’t want the plate on her lap anymore. She plonked it down on the desk and folded her hands under her breasts. She must calm down; she needed him, perfect wife and all.
Her father would inspect her every morning like one of his men. He would not let her out of the door until he had approved the length of her skirt. Sometimes he would send her back to tie up her hair or to wash off some barely visible mascara, until she learned to leave a little earlier and apply her make-up in the mirror of the school toilets. She did not want to forgo the newly discovered attention of boys. It was a strange thing. At thirteen she had been just one of the crowd: flat-chested, pale and giggly. Then everything began to grow — breasts, hips, legs, lips — a metamorphosis that made her father rabid and had an odd effect on all the men around her. Matric boys began to greet her, teachers began to linger at her desk, Standard Sixes began to look at her sideways and whisper to each other behind cupped hands. Eventually she twigged. It was during this time that her mother began to work and Christine became part of a group who went to a parentless house after school to smoke and occasionally to drink. And Colin Engelbrecht had said to her from behind the blue cloud of a Chesterfield that she had the sexiest body in school, it was now officially accepted. And if she would be willing to show him her breasts, just once, he would do anything.
The other girls in the room had thrown cushions at him and screamed that he was a pig. She had stood up, unbuttoned her shirt, unhooked her bra and exposed her breasts to the three boys in the room. She had stood there with her big boobs and for the first time in her life felt the power, saw the enthrallment in their eyes, the jaw-dropping weakness of lust. How different from her father’s terrible disgust.
That is how she came to know the demons.
After that, nothing was the same again. Her display of her breasts was talked about, she realized later, because the level of interest increased and the style of their approach changed. This act had created the possibility of wildness, the chance of getting lucky. So she began to use it. It w
as a weapon, a shield and a game. The ones she favored were occasionally rewarded with admission to her room and a long sweaty petting session in the midday heat of Upington, the privilege of stroking and licking her breasts while she watched their faces with absolute concentration and cherished the incredibly deep pleasure — that she was responsible for this ecstasy, the panting, the thundering heartbeat.
But when their hands began to drift downwards, she returned them softly but firmly to above the waist, because she wanted to control when that would happen, and with whom.
The way she wanted it, exactly as she fantasized when she lay in her bed late at night and masturbated, slowly teasing the devil with her fingers until she drove him out with a shuddering orgasm. Only to find the next night that he was back inside, lurking, waiting for her hand.
It was at the school sports day of her Standard-Eight year that she seduced the handsome, good and clever, but shy Johan Erasmus with his gold-rimmed glasses and fine hands. It happened in the long grass behind the bus shed. He was the one who was too afraid to look at her, who blushed blood red if she said hello. He was soft — his eyes, his voice, his heart. She wanted to give her gift to him because he never asked for it.
And she had.
10.
My name is Benny Griessel and I am an alcoholic.”
“Hello, Benny,” said thirty-two voices in a happy chorus.
“Last night I drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s and I hit my wife. This morning she kicked me out the house. I have gone one day without drinking. I am here because I can’t control my drinking. I am here because I want my wife and children and my life back.” While he was listening to the desperation in his voice, someone began to clap, and then the dingy little church hall resounded with applause.
He lingered in the dark outside the long, unimaginative building, instinctively taking an inventory of exits, windows and the distance to his pickup. The Yellow Rose must have been a farmhouse once, a smallholder’s home in the 1950s before the high tide of Khayelitsha pushed past.
Below the roof ridge was a neon sign with the name and a bright yellow rose. Rap music thumped inside. There were no curtains in the windows. Light shone through and made long tracks across the parking lot, joyful lighthouses on a treacherous black reef.
Inside they sat densely bunched around cheap tables. He spotted a few European tourists with the forced bonhomie of nervous people, like missionaries in a village of cannibals. He threaded his way through and saw two or three seats vacant at the pinewood bar. Two young black barmen busied themselves filling orders behind it. Waitresses slipped expertly up to them, each wearing a yellow plastic rose flapping from the thin T-shirt fabric above their chests.
“What’s your pleasure, big dog?” the barman asked him in a vaguely American accent. Biehg dawg.
“Do you have Windhoek?” he asked in his mother tongue.
“Lager or Light, my friend?”
“Are you a Xhosa?”
“Yes.”
He would have liked to say, “Then speak Xhosa to me,” but he refrained, because he needed information.
“Lager, please.”
The beer and a glass appeared before him. “Eleven rand eighty.”
Eleven rand eighty? Alchemists Inc. He gave him fifteen. “Keep the change.”
He raised the glass and drank.
“I hope you will still feel like applauding when I have finished,” said Griessel when the ovation died down. “Because tonight I will say what I should have said in nineteen ninety-six. And you won’t necessarily like what you hear.” He glanced at Vera, the colored woman with the sympathetic smile who was chairing the meeting. A sea of heads was turned towards him, every face an echo of Vera’s unconditional support. He felt extremely uncomfortable.
“I have two problems with the AA.” His voice filled the hall as if he were there alone. “One is that I don’t feel I fit in here. I am a policeman. Murder is my specialty. Every day.” He gripped the back of the blue plastic chair in front of him. He saw his knuckles were white with tension and he looked up at Vera, not knowing where else to look. “And I drink to make the voices stop.”
Vera nodded as if she understood. He looked for another focal point. There were posters on the wall.
“We scream when we die,” he said, soft and slow, because he had to express it right. “We all cling onto life. We hang on very tight, and when someone pries our fingers loose, we fall.” He saw his hands were demonstrating this in front of him; two fierce claws opening up. “That is when we scream. When we realize it won’t help to grab anymore because we are falling too fast.”
The foghorn at Mouille Point mourned far and deep. It was deathly quiet in the church hall. He took a deep breath and looked at them. There was discomfort; the cheerfulness had frozen.
“I hear it. I can’t help it. I hear it when I walk in on a scene while they are lying there. The scream hangs there — waiting for someone to hear it. And when you hear it, it gets in your head and it stays there.”
Someone coughed nervously to his left.
“It is the most dreadful sound,” he said, and looked at them, because now he did want their support. They avoided his eyes.
“I never talked about it,” he said. Vera shifted as if she wanted to say something. But she mustn’t speak now. “People will think I’m not right in the head. That’s what you think. Right now. But I’m not crazy. If I were, alcohol would not help. It would make it worse. Alcohol helps. It helps when I walk in on a murder scene. It helps me get through the day. It helps when I go home and see my wife and children and I hear them laughing, but I know that scream lies waiting inside them as well. I know it is waiting there and one day it will come out and I am scared that I am the one who will hear it.”
He shook his head. “That would be too much to bear.”
He looked down at the floor and whispered: “And the thing that frightens me most is that I know that scream is inside me.”
He looked up into Vera’s eyes. “I drink because it takes away that fear too.”
“When last was John Khoza here?” Thobela asked the barman.
“Who?”
“John Khoza.”
“Yo, man, there are so many dawgs coming in here.”
He sighed and took out a fifty-rand note, pushing it with his palm over the bar counter.
“Try to remember.”
The note disappeared. “Sort of a thin dude with bad skin?”
“That’s him.”
“He mostly talks to the Boss Man — you’ll have to ask him.”
“When last did he come to talk to the Boss Man?”
“I work shifts, man, I’m not here all the time. Haven’t seen John-dawg for ages.” He moved off to serve someone else.
Thobela swallowed more beer. The bitter taste was familiar, the music was too loud and the bass notes vibrated in his chest. Across the room near the window was a table of seven. Raucous laughter. A muscular colored man with complex tattoos on his arms balanced on a stool. He downed a big jug of beer, shouted something, although the words were lost, and held the empty jug aloft.
It was all too hollow, too contrived for Thobela, this joviality. It always had been, since Kazakhstan, although that was a long time ago. A hundred and twenty black brothers in a Soviet training camp who drank and sang and laughed at night. And longed for home, bone-tired. Comrades and warriors.
The barman came past again.
“Where can I find the Boss Man?”
“It can be arranged.” He stood there expectant, without batting an eyelid.
He took out another fifty. The barman did not move. Another one. A palm swept the money away.
“Give me one minute.”
“The second problem is with the Twelve Steps. I know them off by heart and I can understand them working for other people. Step One is easy, because I fu . . . , I know my life is out of control, alcohol has taken over. Step Two says a Power greater than ourselves can heal us. Step Thr
ee says just turn over our will and our lives to Him.”
“Amen,” said a couple of them.
“The problem is,” he said with as much apology as he could put into his voice, “I don’t believe there is such a Power. Not in this city.”
Even Vera avoided his gaze. For a moment longer he stood in the silence. Then he sighed. “That is all I can say.” He sat down.
By the end of his second beer he saw the Boss Man approaching him from across the room, a fat black man with a shaven head and a gold ring on every finger. He would stop at a table here and there, almost shouting as he spoke to the guests — from the bar his words were drowned in the racket — until he reached Thobela. There were tiny drops of perspiration on his face as if he had exerted himself. Jewelry glittered as he offered his right hand.
“Do I know you?”
His voice was remarkably high and feminine and his eyes small and alert. “Madison Madikiza; they call me the Boss Man.”
“Tiny.” He used a nickname from the past.
“Tiny? Then my name is Skinny,” said the Boss Man. He had an infectious giggle that screwed up his eyes and shook his entire body as he hoisted it onto a bar stool. A tall glass materialized in front of him, the contents clear as water.
“Cheers.” He drank deeply and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, waving an index finger up and down in Thobela’s direction. “I know you.”
“Ah . . .” His pulse accelerated as he focused more sharply on the man’s features. He did not want to be caught unawares. Recognition meant trouble. There would be connotations, a track with a start and an end.
“No, don’t tell me, it will come to me. Give me a minute.” The little eyes danced over him, a frown creased the bald head. “Tiny . . . Tiny . . . Weren’t you . . . ? No, that was another fellow.”
“I don’t think —”
“No, wait, I must place you. Hell, I never forget a face . . . Just tell me, what is your line?”
“This and that,” he said cautiously.
The fingers snapped. “Orlando Arendse,” said the Boss Man. “You rode shotgun for Orlando.”