Water Music

by Margie Orford

  She didnt turn away from him. She made herself lie still. There was the texture of his hands on her skin to think of, the roughness of his fingertips, the smoothness of his wrist against her breast. She wanted to lose herself, to erase the kaleidoscope of images that swirled through her head. The child, the woman in the hole in the mountain, the phone dangling from the wall.

  But she couldnt, and her body did not go with his, but she knew his rhythm, knew him well enough to pretend. Riedwaans breath was warm on her face. Her own was catching in her chest.

  She couldnt.

  She pushed him away.

  I cant do it, she said.

  It helps sometimes to remember that youre alive, said Riedwaan. If you dont learn to shut the work out, it takes your life from you.

  I feel like it already has. Clare traced the scorpion on his shoulder; the ink long since become part of him.

  I thought that if I found out why people killed children, it would be like lancing a wound, she said. That Id be healing someone, something. Me.

  Riedwaan turned onto his back and looked up at the ceiling patterned by the street light outside.

  I look at these children, said Clare. And I feel like Ive gone mad. That little girl on Friday morning. She was one too many.

  She was silent a while. Riedwaan turned to face her.

  When I saw her, I felt nothing. Nothing. My heart didnt even beat faster. It was like I was looking at a rag or a piece of old newspaper, said Clare. Like she was just another piece of rubbish.

  He pulled her towards him.

  You feel far away, you know.

  Its these cases.

  It was too dark for him to read her eyes.

  You and Constance in the kitchen, were you talking deep stuff?

  Sister stuff, said Clare.

  She seemed upset, said Riedwaan. The way she was watching you.

  Shes used to running peoples lives.

  She loves you, Clare.

  Ja.

  So do I.

  Ja. There was a lump in Clares throat. Thanks.

  What were you going to tell me, earlier on, I mean? asked Riedwaan.

  Oh, it can wait.

  Its waited all day, said Riedwaan. Its been waiting since I left.

  A siren wailed in the distance, and another close by. The nights lament.

  Riedwaan, said Clare.

  He lay on his back.

  I need to gather myself, she said. I think I need to be alone.

  The long low sound of the foghorn penetrated the gloom.

  It was one oclock when Riedwaan let himself out. Clare didnt hear anger in the click of the front door closing. A moment later she heard his bike start. The sound filled the night, then faded into silence as he rode up towards the Bo-Kaap.

  Clare folded her hands over her belly, trying unsuccessfully to read what her body was telling her. Fritz arced up onto the bed, turning once and settling herself before falling into a triumphant slumber.

  Clare, though, was unable to sleep. The little girl occupied her mind: had someone hidden her, leaving her tied up where a Good Samaritan might find her? Or had she been tethered so that shed find neither help nor comfort and then die?

  Anwar Jacobss words ran through her head. Hed remarked on her lack of vitamin D, said that he didnt think her legs were able to hold her weight. Thats how brittle her bones were. He had said that the child may have been starving all her life.

  Or that shed never seen the sunlight.

  Clare watched the moving shadows on the ceiling.

  She put thoughts of the watery cave inside her own body firmly from her mind. The storm had returned with satanic vengeance, driving the waves against the sea wall. It sounded as if the ocean would burst through. There was an allure in the possibility that someday it would, and the ocean would wash away the city, and Clare with it.

  She turned over, and stared at the clock by her bedside.

  Sunday

  June 17

  35

  Riedwaan freewheeled down the cobbled streets of Bo-Kaap so as not to wake his neighbours. He unlocked his front door, the smell when he opened it reminding him that he had not been there for days. A heap of post lay on the floor bills, junk mail, a large envelope with an estate agents garish logo. He felt the weight of it in his hands. As heavy as money. He tossed it onto the low table in front of the dusty TV.

  He listened to his messages. One from the hospice, telling him his mother was fading. One from his ex-wife. The settlement had been finalised. She sounded pleased. That meant he was fucked, financially. He deleted them both.

  He opened the windows, letting air into the old house. He took out the rubbish and looked at the dishes in the sink. He made himself a cup of coffee Nescafé was as barista as it got in Signal Street. He smoked a cigarette, abandoned the coffee. He was wired enough as it was.

  He stripped off his clothes, dropping them to the floor. Leather jacket, shoes, shirt, jeans, underwear. The shower water was freezing hed forgotten to switch the geyser on but it felt good. The icy water needled the fog out of his head. He dried off and pulled on a tracksuit.

  It was already Sunday. A day off. But it stretched as empty as a Karoo road in front of him. He had to sleep, but he stopped at his daughters empty bedroom. It had the same look as all the childrens bedrooms hed seen in the homes of many divorced fathers. The pink bunk bed hed finally managed to assemble. The few drawings shed brought home to him curling off the walls. Nothing else left behind.

  Riedwaan lay down on the top bunk where Yasmin had always slept. The blank day would come, Sunday the worst now that he had no one to take to the aquarium. He had no one to take, with a ball, to the beach. He had no one to lie on the floor with to read Beauty and the Beast. No one, ever since his enraged ex-wife had taken Yasmin with her to Canada. So many promises to Yasmin, to both of them. But his phone would ring and hed be off on his bike to work. Leaving his wife to explain. Again. Until she got sick of it and packed up and left.

  First hed had a woman whod left him because he was never around. Now he had a woman he suspected might leave him because she preferred to be alone.

  The curtains hung askew and a sliver of moon was visible in a rent in the clouds. Riedwaan watched it slowly slide; he must have slept, because the next thing he was aware of was the muezzin calling. Fajr, the dawn prayer signalling the fading of the night. The wolf hour passing. Riedwaan listened to the chant threading through the silence blanketing the city. He got up, but not to pray.

  He flicked on the TV. He stared at the morning news while he drank his coffee black because the milk was sour, unsweetened because the sugar was finished. The tension on the mines in the north-west had exploded into warfare overnight thirty casualties or more. He watched a looped clip of cellphone footage showing men wearing the same uniform as he did. Firing at fleeing men. When the dust cleared, Riedwaan saw bodies and some sticks and a knobkierie littering a dry piece of veld.

  The massacre had knocked the story of a child abandoned in a Cape forest from the lead. He watched the cameras pan across a wasteland filled with smoke, dust and teargas. Government lackeys and union officials talked nervously from behind a police cordon.

  Where the fuck are you? he shouted at fat, absent ministers asleep in their king-size beds.

  The anchor didnt answer, but she did cut to a government spokesman who sweated and threatened but could not, would not provide answers or assurances.

  Riedwaan fingered the last cigarette in his pack there was nothing for breakfast. But for the grace of Edgar Phiri, North West province is where hed be right now. Using a government-issue rifle against men who wanted enough money to feed their families.

  The Cape child was up next, but there was nothing new. Just yesterdays news being rehashed. Eager e.tv journalists calling the little girl Angel. Shallow, saccharine sentimentality. Like using air freshener to mask the stench of a corpse. Then the news teams helicopter flew in close, the aerial view shifting the perspective. The clear
ing was close to where Rosa Wagner had made her last phone call. And Hout Bay was threaded with paths for walkers and horse riders that no car could traverse. The camera panned across the valley, from Izamo Yethu and its squalor to the lush paddocks along the river, across the estates and then to the castle and Hangberg beyond. The presenters patter was a potted tale of the rich and the poor and the fault lines of violence produced by proximity.

  A sugar-coated pill for the viewers: Mr Milan Savić is one of many concerned citizens involved in community outreach programmes. Riedwaan sat up at the mention of his name Savić, king of the castle in Hout Bay, had recently moved to Cape Town, his reputation preceding him. And Chadley Wewers just this side of Milan Savićs fence? Riedwaan mulled over this as he picked up the estate agents envelope. Before he opened it he looked up, straight into his mothers eyes boring down at him from a family portrait taken just before his father died. Now, when he paid his guilt-wracked Sunday visits, she only occasionally knew who he was.

  Riedwaan slit open the envelope and looked at the offer. Someone had taken their time in typing all those zeros. He counted them. They could make quite a few problems disappear.

  36

  When Clare awoke, heart pounding like the waves, her nightmare was distilling into adrenalin. She had dreamed that she was Rosa. Rosa, her naked back sliding down against a white wall. Her fingers stiff and uncooperative, searching for numbers on a dial. The adrenalin cancelled the morning sickness. For the first time in weeks, Clare was up and out of bed, eager for a run. Darkness was leaching from the sky. The swell was heavy against the rocks beyond the Promenade.

  A lone runner on the Promenade, whom Clare used to pace herself. Five hundred metres, and she already felt better. Her heart beat rhythmically, and she imagined that other heartbeat inside her, claiming her, imagined its skull, rudimentary limbs, infinitely helpless. This accidental being would own her more completely than Constance had ever done. She ran on, past the lighthouse, memories surfacing, she and her twin in the cool shade of a gum tree long, long ago, the tang of eucalyptus, dusty leaves rustling on a hot Namaqua afternoon. Her twin sisters face the mirror of her own, lying so close that the babies touched knees, bellies, noses. Clare had turned away, and in that moment, for the first time in her short life, had the sense that she was herself. Just her, alone, her own separate self. The memory had spurred her on, comforted her, as much as the memory of her twin warm against her back.

  Emerging from a dyad, did she now want to be lost again in the sentimental triad of mother, father, baby?

  She touched the bollard at the end of the Promenade and turned back. She ran, her feet flying across the wet concrete. The endorphins took over, and she sank into the oblivion of her easy, practised stride.

  Clare showered and made herself an espresso. She took it through to her study and opened her laptop. She checked her email; nothing new on Rosa. No plausible responses to the Missing Person alerts that had gone out on the social networks. One thing was for sure, no one had seen Rosa for the last three weeks, or if they had, they werent saying.

  The results of the Dog Units search. Interviews of neighbours, walkers, riders. Mountain Men reports of alarm activations and vagrants, the phone numbers and locations.

  Zero, zero, zero.

  The innocence of everyday life made sinister because she was looking at it, reading it for something more than the jumble of human activity under whose surface a lonely girl had slipped.

  Her thoughts twinning the abandoned child with missing Rosa, her mind trying to stitch fragments from yesterday into some semblance of order. She was trained to recognise a pattern, a repeat. She sought something to anchor her thoughts as her mind worked along the well-worn grooves of parental cruelty and the depravity of strangers towards a child.

  Clare opened the little girls folder. It had had been forty-eight hours ago. It felt like a lifetime.

  She picked up a photograph: the waxen face, the fold of the ears, crescent lashes on waxen cheeks, wild hair, the defined widows peak.

  Clare stuck the girls picture onto the map of Hout Bay. A lepidopterist pinning a specimen, adding a wingless butterfly to her collection of damaged and dead children.

  She was wary of seeing pattern where there was nothing but coincidence. That the child was so malnourished was not unusual, she knew that all too well; that there had been no claim was not unusual either. Still, that haunted Clare. No keening mother, no angry father, no outraged uncles, brothers, promising to hunt and kill the monster who had done this. They were nowhere. There was no one.

  The deathly pallor of the skin, the bones too soft to keep the wasted little body upright. Who had done this, and how had it not been seen? Or had it? Was that why the little girl had been left to die? A cry for help, perhaps, rather than an act of cruelty?

  She spread out the photographs of the girl, curled and stiff, her fingernails ripped and filthy. Alongside, photographs of the muddy path, the crude shelter in the trees. The place the perpetrator had chosen was so public. She flipped through the photographs until she found the one with the leather restraint. The child had been tethered. Gently. With so many other injuries, the thong securing her had caused no hurt.

  Clare ferreted in that cusp between thought and feeling, trying to identify what it was that felt familiar even as it unsettled her so. She watched the waves. They were coming into focus, the grey ocean barred with a swell that rippled almost as far as the container ships on the horizon.

  She turned back to the notes Anwar Jacobs had sent her; examined again her own from the bridle path. The child. Bruises everywhere. Her face gaunt, her body frail. On her hands and feet, the nails ripped as if she had tried to dig herself out from somewhere.

  Yet she had been left, tethered, where someone would find her. Whoever left the child in the forest really did seem to want her to be found. Or had the person hidden her, planning to return?

  Clare scrutinised the photographs of the little girls wounds. Her little naked body on display, its details recorded subjected to a final assault, that of officialdom.

  She set out the photographs of the abrasion on the nape of the childs neck.

  Clare angled the light, peering at it closely.

  Letters of the alphabet.

  A tattoo.

  37

  The rain had stopped, but the rush of cold air took Clares breath away when she got out of the car. The tanzanite pendant was like an icicle on her skin.

  The security guard looked up from his Sunday newspaper. There was a picture of the place on Judas Peak where the little girl had been found. Clare in the background. His eyes flicked up at Clares face. He waved her through, and Clare took the lift to the Intensive Care ward.

  Anwar Jacobs looked up when she walked in.

  How long have you been on call, Anwar? You look exhausted.

  Ever since you found that little girl on Friday, he said. Yours was my first phone call today. Looks like youre bringing me a chink of light. Come and see her.

  Clare watched her for a moment, but the child did not stir in the darkened room. Her breathing was regular, her pulse steadier, the metronymic rhythm of the drip bringing her back from the brink.

  I wanted to check something, said Clare to Anwar. Something I noticed in the photographs. May I?

  The doctor nodded and left the room.

  Sitting on the bed beside the girl, Clare settled herself. Felt the warmth of the little body, the swell of the breathing, the calm that descends as a child hovers on the brink of sleep.

  Untangling the tresses spread across the pillow, Clare worked her fingers along the girls scalp. Feeling a twig stuck in the hair behind her ears, her fingertips eased it out, brushing against a ridged patch of skin at the nape of her neck. The child didnt wince. If it was a wound, it had healed.

  The small curled-up body inched closer to her. Clare found her flashlight. Lifting the girls hair, she ran her finger across the skin. The child buried her face in the pillow when Clare angled th
e light onto her neck.

  An E and an S. She could not make out the rest.

  The childs hand reached upwards. Clare rested her hand on it, their fingers entwining as she did so. With the index finger of her other hand, Clare read the scar.

  Esther. Clare said the word.

  The corners of the girls mouth lifted, a ghost smile. Clare pulled the cover up to the childs chin and tucked her in securely.

  She closed the door and went to look for Anwar. She found him in a ragged armchair in the storeroom that passed as a nap room for the doctors on duty. He was asleep, the tea beside him ice cold.

  Anwar. Clare touched his shoulder.

  His chin snapped up.

  What?

  The child, said Clare. The wound on her neck. It looks like a prison tattoo.

  Show me. He was on his feet.

  Done with a pin and a Bic, said Clare, as they walked back to the ward.

  She must have screamed blue murder, said Anwar. He opened the door. So many nerve endings at the nape of the neck.

  Some children learn not to cry. Judging by the state of her, she is one of them, said Clare. She mustnt be left alone. I need to know if she says anything more. She is the only key to her own puzzle.

  They were standing by the little girls bed.

  A nurse aid will stay with her. She wont be alone, said Anwar. The childs eyes opened as he spoke.

  Anwar, look, said Clare. Shes responding.

  He bent over the child, but she recoiled, thrashing her arms, oozing rehydration fluid and blood where the needle had pulled out of her arm. The look on her face was one of terror. She cowered, an animal cornered, her mouth open in an endless, silent scream.

  Do something, said Clare, turning towards Anwar but he had already retreated to the door.

  I cant go near her. She is terrified of me, he said to Clare as a nurse brushed past him. Its because I am a man. Ive had children react like this before. The worst cases. The voice, the smell, it triggers panic. I think shell be fine with you. She tolerates the nurses. You stay with her.