by Mark Winkler
“That’s just gross,” Sonia says.
“And guess what? The ones who made it to the top of the pyramid ended up just as dead as the ones at the bottom.” I stop. I’m losing track here.
“And your point is?”
I remember my point. “That however hard you work, however smart you are, however cut-throat or greedy or tough or whatever, you’re going to end up just as dead as the Somali baby or the Iraqi car-bomb victim or the Jew at the bottom of the gas-chamber pile. I’m happy to be one of the seven billion. The alive seven billion. The little ones. The ones whose names you can’t remember or will never know. The ones who go through life and then just kind of dissolve away at the end of it. I couldn’t be arsed to sweat blood so that I can sit on more cash than the Pope and bequeath hospitals and establish foundations or give every third-world kid an iPad.” I have a drink of beer. “I’m happy to sell ad space and grow old and sick and slip off the old mortal coil with no fanfare or monuments.” I’m thinking Madge here. I had pulled a curtain across our Saturday discussion. It’s slipping open again.
“Wow. That’s quite a sermon.”
“No it’s not. Sermons need God.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” I say.
Sonia is frowning. She scratches her head. Her hand disappears up to the wrist in her bush of hair.
“The ultimate point—the point of all points—is that I have satellite TV. I’m happy the way I am.”
“Are you? Really?” she says. “Just think. Money buys you things that do things for you. Money buys you idyllic holidays. Money buys you mansions with a view of the ocean. Money buys you designer labels and sports cars and enormous big flatscreen TVs. Money buys you freedom. Money buys you people who clean your house and do your washing.”
“I already have someone who does my washing,” I say.
It’s a quiet week
It’s a quiet week at work. I will it to be even quieter. I wish it wasn’t quite so quiet on the fourth floor of Pansyshell Park, Tamboerskloof. Mrs. du Toit has vanished. Or else she’s bunkered down and doesn’t want to see me. I’m avoiding Madge. The notebook I’ve stolen is for her. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Mrs. du Toit, it’s how to plan. When I speak to Madge again, it will be about planning. Wednesday is the worst. Nobody wants to go out for a drink after work. The inertia is not just mine. It’s like a thick wet blanket over everyone. I go to Eric’s on my own and watch him draw the same old alpine scene while we discuss the heat. It’s a silly conversation. Sometimes words are easier than silence. Eric has cranked up his air con to arctic levels. I go home.
I close my door and hear Mrs. du Toit through my family-tree wall. She hasn’t been in the lift or stalking my doorway for days. The woman with the jaw like a boxer’s is still irritating me. I am a little jealous of Mrs. du Toit’s self-jollification. I consider interrupting her. It’s hard not to once I’ve had my ear to the wall. The buzzing and the moaning. I wish she’d put in a load of washing. From this angle the woman at the airfield looks a lot like Mrs. du Toit.
I call her at seven in the morning.
“What’s for breakfast?” I ask. “I’m cooking.” In your flat, I don’t say.
She opens the door to me and she’s dressed for the day. I’m disappointed. I’m relieved that I have my working clothes on. She gives me a hug. It’s chaste. Like a Sonia hug.
“No cooking, just toast and coffee,” she says.
I put bread in the toaster. Load up her crap coffee machine. Ask her casually if she’s been busy. Add, coyly, that I’ve missed her. It isn’t an absolute lie.
She tells me she’d spent a few days with her sister in Stellenbosch. The sister married well. The wine farm is doing even better. We eat the toast. I’ve burnt it a little. The coffee is passable.
“Let’s do sushi tonight,” I say.
“Raw fish?” she shrieks. She throws her head back and her fillings glint. “Okay.”
So just when I thought things had gone south, Mrs. du Toit and I are sharing dishes at an Asian place in Church Street. I like it here because there won’t be anyone from the paper poncing about. The prices on the menu confirm that. Mrs. du Toit shovels dim sum and prawns and sashimi. She does a Thai curry and asks for crab. Once she’s hoovered everything in my budget I ask her if she’d like dessert.
“You,” she leans forward, “are my dessert.”
I’m not, actually. Something hasn’t agreed with her. I hold her hair out of her face while she vomits. I help her to her bed. I brush the splatters off the toilet bowl. I help her to the toilet. I hold her hair. I brush the splatters. I consider taking her from behind while she’s hunched over the toilet bowl. I don’t.
I spend the night with her. In the morning she looks at me and says, “Christ.” She runs to bathroom. I make her black tea. I go to work.
I have to speak
I have to speak to Madge. I’m sure Dino’s blank notebook holds the secret. If Mrs. du Toit can plan things for me, Madge and I can plan things for ourselves too. A notebook would help. It’s Friday so everyone wants to sneak out early and go to Eric’s after work. I tell them I’ll see them there. I have some work to finish before the end of the day. It’s a lie. I expect Sonia to raise an eyebrow. She doesn’t. I go to Madge’s shop. Today’s dress is pale green and shiny. The scarf is a deep pink silk. Crimson, she would probably call it. Pink and green sound like they shouldn’t go together. They do.
“Conditions,” I say to Madge. “I won’t get arrested. Ever.” I think for a moment. “That’s the only one.”
“The perfect murder,” Madge says.
“And no mess. I can’t do mess. That’s another.”
Madge nods. “Two conditions, then,” she says.
I pull Dino’s notebook from the pocket of my hoodie. “We need to plan this,” I say. “Meticulously.”
“Meticulously,” says Madge. “Surely our planning will go better with a cup of tea.” There’s no milk. I go around the corner up Church Street to the kiosk on Burg. I make sure the Somali hasn’t slipped me expired milk. Like he did last time.
I make tea. Decline a biscuit. We begin. Guns are not an option. We wouldn’t know where to get one. Or how to use the thing. We could make it look like an accident. An overdose of the medication she’s refused to take. Electrocution. A short circuit in the shop. The kettle, perhaps. Or an electrical fire. She doesn’t want to burn. Doesn’t want to endanger anyone else. I tell her she could have a penicillin reaction to the mouldy biscuits in her cupboard. We laugh. What if someone broke into her flat, I venture. “Then they’d have to rape me,” she says, “so that’s not going to happen.” A car accident, I say. We could disconnect her brakes. Messy, she says. Complicated. Unreliable. I make another pot of tea. It still doesn’t leak from the cracks in my cup. We come up with ever more ludicrous ideas. We laugh. There are a few doodles on Dino’s pad.
“We’re not very good at this, are we now?” says Madge. She stares at the stuff in her shop. Her smile fades. The fading reminds me that this isn’t a parlour game. We’ve wasted the last hour.
A man in a suit wanders up to the shop. He hesitates in the doorway and looks at his watch. It’s well past five. Madge has forgotten to lock up. The man has a thick black moustache. The eyebrows look like its offspring. He has a thick nose and glasses with frames that are black and heavy. For a moment I wonder if he’s wearing one of those off-the-shelf Groucho Marx disguises.
“Are you still open?” he asks.
“Seem to be,” Madge says.
Groucho pokes around. Fingers a whole lot of stuff. Picks things up and puts them down. He brings a small bronze Beethoven bust to the counter. He raises his eyebrows. “How much is this?”
Why would you want to buy a crappy bust of Beethoven at five-thirty on a Friday evening, I wonder. Someone else comes in. Madge sees him and rolls
her eyes. The new guy is young. He’s wearing a hoodie. He is amazingly skinny. Meth, I think. He looks nervous. Something clicks into place in my brain.
“That’s two thousand five hundred and forty,” I say to Groucho. The little bust is mass-produced. One among a million souvenirs from Bonn or Vienna or wherever.
He turns it over. Under its base is a price tag. “It says seventy-five,” he says.
“Three thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,” I say. “Or get the fuck out of my shop.”
He puts it down. Scurries out. Madge looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. I have. I’m watching myself from four, five, ten storeys up. I have X-ray vision. I can see through the bricks and the mortar. The kid in the hoodie has a soapstone sculpture of a tortoise in his hand.
“Two fifty-five,” Madge sings. The kid looks at the thing he’s holding.
“Too much,” he says. “Thanks, anyway.”
“You can have it for a hundred,” I say. “Seventy-five if you buy something else as well.”
Madge glares at me.
Christ, I want to say, you’re dying. Let the man buy the tortoise. I’ve never tended customers in Madge’s shop before. There’s a first time for everything..
“Really?” the kid says.
“It’s Friday,” I say. As if that explains everything.
“Okay, then maybe I’ll look around,” he says.
“Help yourself,” I say. “Take your time.” The kid browses. He picks stuff up and puts it down.
“Seventy-five?” Madge hisses. “Seventy fucking five?” She’s furious.
“It’s a tortoise from Zimbabwe,” I say. “It’s not Degas’s Little Dancer. The world does not rest on a tortoise.” She has no idea what I’m talking about. I watch the kid. He fishes around. “I’ll be back in a sec,” I whisper to Madge. I go past the kid. Out of the shop. I can feel Madge’s eyes on my back. I look up at the sky above St. George’s Mall. I avoid looking directly at any of the security cameras. In Church Street I’m out of their view. I run. Unlock the gate to the alleyway. Madge’s back door too. A plan is happening in my head. I feel like I’m having my out-of-body experience again. Like I’m floating fifteen metres in the air and watching me. My heart rate has gone ballistic. My mind is whirring like the cogs of the world’s most complicated clock.
“Goodness,” Madge says when I appear through the back door. I stay in the little corridor that is Madge’s kitchen. I put a finger to my lips. She frowns. She’s not getting it. Not at all. I’m relieved that the kid is still there. I need him for my plan. He picks things up and puts them down. He picks up other things and puts them down. I want him to take his time. I want him to hurry up. I slip Dino’s pad into my pocket. It was useless for coming up with plans.
The kid takes the tortoise to the counter. “I’ll just take this. A hundred is fine,” he says.
Madge flicks a look at me. I worry that the kid will see me. He doesn’t. He pays and goes.
“Where the hell did you go?” Madge asks. She’s left the cash register open to cash up the few rand she’s made for the day. I see a few dirty notes in the compartments.
“To the ends of the earth,” I say.
She stands staring at me.
I go up to her and take the tails of her scarf in each hand. “Bye, Madge,” I say. I begin to strangle her with the scarf. Her eyes bulge. She tries to shake her head. No, no, no, the shaking says. No no no! Too late now, Madge. It’s harder than I’d thought. It takes a long time for her body to go limp. I let it slide to the floor. Her eyes are still open. I take the scarf and stuff it into my pocket with Dino’s notebook. I have a hard-on. It’s the craziest hard-on I’ve ever had. I’ve never come in my pants. I’m not far off. It’s all I can do not to whip it out and do myself right there.
I run a quick inventory in my head. One, two, three things. I take all the notes from the register. Leave the change. I make sure again that I have the notepad and Madge’s scarf. I take two squares of paper towel from the roll in the kitchen. Madge is still staring. She is lying behind the counter. Her head has flopped sideways. Her tongue protrudes from her mouth, blunt as a sausage. Thick and white and already dry. She would hate to see herself like this. Looking like a gargoyle. I can’t help her.
“I love you, Madge,” I say. I kiss her cheek. Everything I’m about to leave behind has a right to be there. My DNA on her face from a kiss. On a cracked china teacup. My fingerprints all over the place.
I go out through the back. I wipe the handle and the lock of the door with a square of paper towel. At the gateway to the alley I pretend to struggle with the lock and the bolt. It gives me a moment to wipe both of them with the other square. I still have a hard-on. Meth Boy is going to get it. I imagine him trying to convince the cops that he paid a hundred rand for a piece of soapstone. It’s not going to work. My hard-on lasts all the way to Eric’s. It hurts to walk. I wave at Sonia. She turns to order me a beer. I go straight to the gents. I sort out my hard-on. I flush the bits of paper towel away with everything else.
I feel terrible
I feel terrible in the morning. I go for a run anyway. I throw up in someone’s driveway before I get to the top of Kloof Nek. I turn back. A newspaper poster on a street pole. City Antique Dealer Murdered. I bet Dino’s name is all over the thing. I don’t know if I puked because of the hangover. Or because of what I did to Madge.
I find a note in my bed. It’s from Mrs. du Toit. It has an unsticky piece of Sellotape attached to it. Came by, you not here, it says. Come to me when you get in—A. It could have been stuck on my door last night. I don’t remember. I shower. There’s a pile of dirty clothing in my bath. I transfer Madge’s scarf from the pocket of my jeans to my shorts. I pour a glass of Coke and stir it with a fork to get the bubbles out. I eat some dry toast. I feel a little better. There’s a precipitous decline from the Edwardians to the Woman in Red. It should irritate me. It doesn’t. I try not to look at the smiling woman with the big jaw. I collect the clothing from my bed.
“Big night?” Mrs. du Toit asks as she opens the door. She’s trying to tease. I can see she’s put out. I shrug. She flicks the tiniest frown at my bundle of washing.
“Work thing,” I say. “We were celebrating a big sale.”
“Okay,” she says. Mrs. du Toit is wearing a summer dress. It’s yellow. So are her shoes. Her face is made up. I can’t see the pores in her skin.
“Were you on your way out?”
“It can wait,” she says. She takes the clothing from me. In the bathroom she sees to the load with brisk movements. Maybe the laundry service is by invitation only. The yellow dress stays on. There are little crescents of sweat at her armpits.
“Come with me,” she says. I follow her to the living room. I stop. She continues to the front door. “No, come with me to town. I’ve got a few things to do. Then we can go for coffee or something.” She narrows her eyes. “Or are you embarrassed to be seen in public with an old woman like me?”
I am. I can’t admit it to her. “Of course not,” I say. It’s not just that. I don’t want to go. Or maybe I do. I don’t actually give a shit either way. I’m trying not to think about Madge. I tell myself that she’s in a better place now. I don’t know what that place is. Maybe it’s a worse place. There probably isn’t either of those places anyway. My head hurts. I don’t know.
We go in Mrs. du Toit’s Golf. It’s new. It smells of leather and chemicals. The fumes are probably giving us both cancer as we sit there. I expect her to drive with her seat pushed forward. With her nose almost on the wheel. She doesn’t. From somewhere she takes a pair of sunglasses. Wraparounds. Retro-chic and probably expensive. “Seatbelt,” she says. She sits back. She kicks off her yellow shoes and dumps them at my feet. She drives as if the car was an extension of herself. It’s a fast car.
We go to Gardens Centre. It’s a great ugly grey tower block of apartmen
ts built above a shopping mall. We go to the supermarket. We go to the German deli. She browses briefly through a clothing store and buys nothing. I’m pushing her trolley. I’m three steps behind her. She goes into the pharmacy. She takes a piece of paper from her handbag. She hands it to the woman behind the counter. The woman makes a fuss of getting a few boxes of pills together. It’s not very exciting. She puts three boxes on the counter. Mrs. du Toit scoops them into her handbag before I can read the labels. We go to her car and pack her shopping into the boot of her Golf. There’s a smell of pine needles from the bags. I push the empty trolley away. I turn back to the car. She’s walking off.
“Come,” she says. She hardly looks around.
I tag along. Like a little boy forced to go to the shops with his mother. We walk under the highway bridge. I can smell urine and old sweat. I’m trying to walk next to Mrs. du Toit. The pavement is too narrow. I follow behind. I’m looking at my little-boy feet. Then there’s a policeman in front of me. Standing still and scowling. I want to fling my arms around him. Yes yes yes, it was me, I want to say, me who strangled Madge with her own pink scarf. No no no, I want to say, you’ve got the wrong guy. The policeman is carrying a KFC bag stuffed to bursting. He’s pissed off because I almost walked into him.
A block down the road Mrs. du Toit turns into a side street. She walks into a place that was once a warehouse or a workshop. It smells of coffee. I look around at the coffee drinkers. I don’t know anyone. We sit down. Mrs. du Toit takes off her sunglasses. She orders a mocha something and a glass of water. I order a flat white. I don’t know what that is. I’m sure other people have ordered one before me. I’m sure it will be fine. Behind Mrs. du Toit sits a man with a laptop open on his table. He is sitting away from it. He has a newspaper in his hands. City Antique Dealer Murdered, the headline says. I’m sure Dino got a by-line. I can’t see from here. Mrs. du Toit is talking. I don’t know what she’s saying. I nod and make noises now and then. I’m trying not to watch the man with the newspaper too hard. I wish he’d put the thing down and go back to his laptop. The waiter brings the coffee. Mrs. du Toit opens a box of pills without taking it from her handbag. She pops a couple out of a card. She swallows them with her water. Then she repeats the action with another box. She starts nattering again. The man puts down the newspaper and pulls his laptop closer. It’s taken so long that I’ve almost finished my flat white. It’s a lot better than the stuff from Mrs. du Toit’s coffee machine.