by Roger Smith
He stared at the small monochrome monitor beside the phone. Then he burst out laughing. Maggott and a kid holding a giant furry toy were standing outside the gate.
Billy pressed the button that disengaged the gate lock and hung the phone back on its cradle. Roxy was looking at him, fear clouding her blue eyes.
He shook his head. “Don’t hassle. I’ll deal with this.”
He went to the front door and opened it. Saw Ernie Maggott walking across the pavement, trying to look all cool and authoritative, the kid clutching at his hand, wrestling a pink bear along with him.
“What’s this?” Billy said. “Starsky and Hutch?”
Maggott looked ready to explode, like the zits that bloomed like berries on his sallow skin. “I need to speak to the lady.” Maggott was looking over Billy’s shoulder at Roxy, who had come up behind him in the doorway.
“Mrs. Palmer isn’t answering any questions today.”
Maggott scratched at his neck. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Palmer. But this won’t take long.”
“Does your superintendent know you harassing Mrs. Palmer on the day of her husband’s funeral?” Billy saw he’d scored a hit. Same old Maggott, always trying to fly solo. And always crashing and burning. “Go back to Paradise Park, Maggott. You making a fool of yourself.”
Billy was about to close the door when Maggott looked embarrassed. “Um, my boy, he needs the toilet.”
The child said, “I got to po po.”
Billy laughed.
Roxy stepped forward, reached out a hand to the kid. “Come, I’ll take you to the bathroom.”
The kid looked up at his father, who nodded. “Ja. Go with the lady.”
Robbie, still clutching the bear, took hold of Roxy’s hand. “What’s your name?” Roxy asked as she led the kid down the corridor.
“Robbie,” the boy said. “And it’s my birfday.”
“Oh, well happy birthday, Robbie.”
Then they were out of earshot.
Billy leaned against the doorjamb, relaxed, eyeing the cop. “The fuck you want here, Maggott? This isn’t your turf.”
“And, what, it’s yours?”
“Just doing my job.” Billy gave him a bland smile.
“Ja? Bodyguard?”
“Asset protection.”
Maggott tugged a pack of Camels from his jeans, shook out a cigarette and lit it. “Hear you were looking for a 26 over White City side?”
“Who told you that?”
“Heard it in the wind. Found the American’s dead ass in the dump this morning.”
“Occupational hazard.” Billy shrugged. “Only American I care about is the lady inside.”
Maggott was nodding, exhaling. “Ja? Where were you, Barbie, night her husband was wasted?”
“On a plane from Dubai to Jo’burg. Emirates. Wanna see my ticket?”
Maggott shook his head. “It’s okay.” Scratched at a zit. Smirking. “So, seen Barbara and the kids yet?”
Billy kept it cool. “Why don’t you wait in your car? I’ll bring your brat out when he’s done stinking up the house. And don’t you come back here again without a warrant, okay?”
He closed the door in Maggott’s face.
THE BROWN CHILD’S grubby clothes looked slept in, and the hand she took to lead him to the bathroom was sticky. He was joined at the hip to the huge pink bear, like a fun fur Siamese twin, rattling off in that singsong accent about it being his birfday. She didn’t need to know too much about his circumstances to understand that it wasn’t going to be a joyous occasion.
She showed the boy into the downstairs toilet—left the door slightly ajar—and stood at the window in the corridor, looking up at Lion’s Head, watching a paraglider circling the summit like a giant moth. The toilet flushed, and the kid emerged, pulling up his jeans.
She took him into the adjacent bathroom, managed to separate him from the bear and washed his hands and face. He tried to wriggle from her grasp, as if he was afraid of water.
As they walked back to the front door the boy’s eyes snagged on a small porcelain figurine on a table at his eye level. A Malay slave girl in Victorian dress, carrying a bundle of washing, her bodice open to reveal dusky breasts. It was in the house when Roxy moved in; something Joe’s gay interior designer would have found amusing. Roxy hated the thing but had never got around to chucking it out.
“You like that, Robbie?” she asked, lifting the figure.
“Ja. It look like my mommy.” He peered up at Roxy with huge dark eyes, beautiful and without guile.
“Then your mommy is very pretty.” She handed the figure to the boy, who took it in his free hand.
Robbie stared down at the slave girl, then looked up at Roxy. “My mommy gone. With another uncle. What hit me.”
Roxy had read some poetry in her time, even tried to write some years ago, but she couldn’t recall anything as gut-wrenching as these three brief lines.
She found a smile for the child. “You keep it then, Robbie. As a birthday present.”
He stared at her. “S’trues God?”
“Yes.”
The boy took the figurine and hurried off as if Roxy might change her mind, went to find his father, who had been banished to his car by Billy Afrika.
Billy walked the kid out. When he came back he saw the look on Roxy’s face.
“Don’t stress about that guy. He’s an asshole.”
“What was he doing here?”
“Think about it: he’s stuck out on the Flats investigating gangs and domestic assaults. Highlight of his month is arresting some tik head who raped and strangled his own toddler girl. Hid her body in the roof till it stank too much for the mother to pretend no more.”
“Jesus, Billy …”
He shrugged. “Sorry. But that’s the life out there. Then he comes across you”—he waved a hand around—“and all this. He has a dream of cracking a big case that’ll get him posted to this side of town. Problem is, half his brain is missing, and the other half’s gone looking for it. Get what I’m saying?”
“I get it. He’s dumb as dirt. But dumb people are dangerous.”
“Relax. I know his commanding officer. Any more crap from Maggott, and I’ll go over his stupid head. Okay?”
She nodded. Then she went to dress for the funeral.
chapter 25
PIPER SAT AT THE BACK OF THE MINIBUS TAXI, TRYING TO KEEP HIS face in shadow so the light didn’t catch the tattooed teardrops. But they were still visible, even though he’d pulled the cap low, and the other passengers avoided him like a disease.
Two dark women, squeezed into the seat ahead of his, were talking about this Barbie Doll killer who was all over the Sun.
“He chop the head off. Only blondes, they say.”
“My daughter—the fair one—she work in Sea Point by the hair salon. She got the light streaks in her hair. Natural. I’m gonna tell her to dye it.”
“Better you do. It’s too terrible.”
Piper tuned them out. He wore the blue jeans and brown shirt he’d found in the bag under the trees, left there by the Air Force’s connections. It was as hot as a crematorium in the packed taxi, but he kept the sleeves of the shirt rolled down to hide his tattoos.
Under the trees he’d stripped off the orange jumpsuit. Then he’d squatted with his briefs around his ankles and retrieved the condom containing a fifty-buck note he’d sent up his rectum for safekeeping before he left his cell that morning. It was slick with Vaseline and slid out easily. Over the years Piper had kept money, drugs, and even a cell phone in this God-given safety deposit box. A fifty-buck note was nothing.
He’d hidden the jumpsuit and the cop’s gun under a bush and changed his clothes. But he’d kept his Grasshoppers, the shoe of choice of old-school gangsters: leather lace-up moccasins with hand stitching around the blunt-toed uppers, and wedge-shaped crepe soles. Soles that let you creep up nicely on somebody. Over the years the original tan leather had disappeared under layers of oxblood polish.<
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At Retreat a colored woman was forced to squeeze in next to Piper, a toddler on her lap. From the way she sat—rigid, head turned away from him—the woman knew very well what the tattooed tears signified.
The child, a girl in a T-shirt with tweet me wight written across the chest in pink letters, stared up at Piper’s face, fascinated. Children unnerved Piper. They were bad luck, the way they could look in your eyes and see your soul like it was a flipping TV.
Another advantage of prison: no kids. Except on visiting day when the families arrived. But nobody ever came to visit Piper, and he’d spend the day in his cell, never having to clap eyes on the dwarves.
The child was still staring, unblinking, a bubble of drool forming in the corner of her mouth. Piper reached out a hand and turned the child’s face away. She opened her mouth and howled.
The mother risked a glance at Piper.
“It look at me again, I break its neck,” he said.
The woman didn’t doubt him, just scooped up the child and fought her way to the front of the minibus, calling for the driver to stop. As the taxi jerked back into the traffic, Piper saw them standing on the sidewalk outside a loan agency. The child still crying, the mother smacking its ass like the whole thing was its fault.
A cop van cruised up beside the taxi, and Piper pulled his cap lower and stared down at his shoes. Out the corner of his eye he saw the cops turning into a side street.
As he flexed his toes, an image of Disco came to Piper. Sitting on a bunk, that beautiful face concentrating as he used a rag over his index finger—stained the color of blood—to dip into the shoe polish before he rubbed it into the leather of these Grasshoppers.
Not long now. Piper felt himself harden inside his jeans.
THE SPIDERS CRAWLED from Disco’s eyes, scuttled down his face, disappeared beneath his T-shirt, losing themselves in Piper’s brutal artwork. He lay on his stinking mattress and begged the spiders to stay away. Acrid sweat ran from him like he’d sprung a leak, and his joints joined in a chorus, singing along with his nerves and his cramping gut, pleading for the sweet relief that only tik could give him. He tore off the T-shirt and dabbed it at his body. It was soaked through within seconds. Then he put the sodden thing in his mouth and bit into it to stop himself from screaming.
Ice. Choef. Crystals. Tik-tik. Globes. Meth.
The names danced in front of his eyes like they were written in neon.
It was going on for a day since he’d caught a tiny hit of that straw he’d scored from Popeye. Barely got half a chesty into his lungs before that cop kicked it out of him. After the interrogation and the hellish night in the cell, he needed something to calm him. But he didn’t have no money. Not one fucken cent.
He knew he was stupid to come home to the zozo, that Manson could have been waiting, but he wanted a dark hole to crawl into and hide. But what he really needed was to score. He lay shivering, staring at the wall where the picture of his mother used to hang. Even though it was gone, inside with the fat woman, he could still see his mother’s face. That beautiful face, so much like his.
Then he was hearing disco music, his mother’s favorite song …
First I was afraid …
No. He couldn’t handle that. Not Gloria Gaynor. Not now.
But the words were coming. He couldn’t stop them, even though he wrapped the rancid pillow around his head. He couldn’t stop the music and the memory that rode in on the back of it like the devil on a dark horse.
I was petrified …
Three-year-old Disco dancing to “I Will Survive,” dancing the dance that gave him the nickname that stuck to him like glue. A hot sweaty night in that apartment on Hippo Street, Dark City side, airless now the wind had died. Disco swirling around in the cramped sitting room, between the torn sofa and the old black-and-white TV, a ghetto blaster banging out the music on a tape stretched from overplaying. The music loud in the Cape Flats night.
But not loud enough to drown the words of Disco’s mother, Evangeline De Lilly—Vangie—and her boyfriend, Pedro. They were at the kitchen table, and Pedro was making another white pipe, the apartment already hanging with smoke like smog on a still day. Disco spun, dizzy, head swirling, a feeling he would seek to reproduce the rest of his life. Snatches of conversation reached him, but he forced himself not to hear.
“He go, or I go,” Pedro said.
“But it’s my son.”
“I’m telling you, Vangie. I fucken mean it. Do it, or I go.”
Then his mommy, beautiful and forever young, came toward Disco, drying tears on her face, reaching her arms out to him. Disco smiled up at her, swaying his tiny hips, ready to dance with her the way he always did. His mommy was on her knees in front of him, and she wrapped her arms around him, trapping him, stopping his scrawny body from moving to the beat. She released him, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.
Then his mommy’s hands were at his throat, squeezing, until he was choking and gasping. Little fists trying to fight her off.
His mommy’s face like he had never seen it before. Made mad by drugs and lust.
Disco went into a place darker even than his mommy’s eyes.
Blackness. No air. A heat like none he had ever known. And a noise, a mechanical bellowing, crashing. He reached out his hands in the dark and felt something. Something slick. His fingers scrambled for purchase and he grabbed and tore, and a chink of light burned through the blackness. Tore deeper, and he saw a mound of trash and beyond it the landfill stretching to infinity.
Disco fought his way out of the black bag, a tiny figure on the wasteland of junk, seagulls screaming as they dived out of the hot white sky. The noise he heard was a bulldozer, balanced high above him on a mountain of garbage, its front end lifting, about to send a heap tumbling down on him. Disco ran, pumping his little legs, sliding, falling, making no progress in the quicksand of slop.
The bulldozer tipped its load.
Disco was smashed, rolled, flattened by the flood of trash. It clogged his eyes and his nose and his ears. The weight of the world’s waste burying him. His breath smashed from his lungs. Once again all was black. Silence.
Then an arm, a thin reed waving in the ocean of offal. And a head, like a newborn fighting itself way out of a womb of shit. He pulled his way to the surface, stinking, exhausted. Dragged himself upward, lay for a minute, coughing sludge and slime.
Disco walked forever through the filth. Saw people in the distance, black scribbles on the horizon, scavengers looking for food and empty bottles, same as him and his mommy did sometimes. Saw the ghetto apartments built right up to the edge of the dump, like rusted trawlers becalmed on a sea of trash.
Home.
Reeking, body covered in slime and rotting food, he dragged himself up to the third floor and banged on his door. No reply. He banged again, crying. Sobbing. Loud enough for the old woman in the next apartment to peer down at him and cluck before she slammed her front door.
He banged and banged until at last the door opened and his mommy stood there, wrapped in a towel. She screamed and jumped back, hands to her face, the towel falling away from her bare body. Disco walked in and saw Pedro filling the doorway to the bedroom, naked, scratching at the fat, wet thing that jutted from the wiry hair at the base of his tattooed belly.
“Fucken useless cunt,” Pedro said as he walked back into the bedroom and slammed the door.
Pedro beat his mother, beat Disco, and drove away in a ’73 Beetle, never to be seen again. And two days later Disco found his mommy lying in her own blood in the bathtub, Gloria Gaynor on a loop in the background.
I will survive.
Not this time.
Disco screamed, screamed himself all the way back to the here and now.
Him lying on his bed, sweating, hanging for tik more than he had ever hung for anything in his whole fucken life. Disco lifted himself off the bed and dragged his branded ass across to where his clothes were still shoved in the plastic bag. He found a pair of
Diesels, the ones that sat nice and low-slung on his hips. Sexy like. Bought after one of him and Goddy’s more successful scores.
Godwynn.
Disco’s fevered imagination—on a roll now—served him up an image of Goddy lying in that same dump, his brains oozing out of his mouth, a living carpet of flies buzzing like dentists’ drills as they clung to him, making him even blacker. Disco spewed. He couldn’t stop it. Yellow bile onto the Diesels. Fuck it. He wanted to trade them for a straw. Knew that Popeye had a hard-on for these jeans.
He edged to the window and peeped out, terrified he’d see Manson and his crew. The cramped yard was empty. He needed to get to the faucet next to the fat woman’s kitchen. The only place he could rinse these jeans before he went down to Popeye to beg him to trade for tik. Got to his feet and opened the door an inch. Put a weeping eye to the crack. Saw a slice of blue sky and white sand. Empty.
Disco left the zozo and scuttled across to the faucet, bent double as the cramps took him again. He was washing his kotch off the jeans when a shadow fell across him. His nerves were so befuck he swore he felt the weight of it.
He waited for the cold mouth of a gun to kiss the back of his neck. Resigned himself.
What the fuck … ?
The smell clued him in even before the voice. “What’s up with you?”
The fat woman stood over him, in the fluffy nightdress that seemed to grow on her like the mold on rotting meat.
“I’m sick, Auntie,” he said.
She laughed. “Sick for a pipe, ja. You not careful, you’ll be dead, too.”
He squinted up at her, the massive breasts sheltering him from the sun that burned his skin like flames.
“Ja, they was here. Last night and this morning,” the fat bitch said.
“Who?”
“Manson’s people. They wake me and Zuma up.”
The little black mongrel hid behind her and yapped at Disco, dancing on three paws in the dust, fourth leg jiggling in the air like it was on a spring.