by Mark Winkler
“Charlie,” the barman says, “give it a break.”
I feel a lightness next to me. As if Charlie has been replaced by a fresh breeze. The new beer is cold. It has a crisp white head. It tastes as bad as the first. There’s a jug of water on the counter. The ice melted long ago. The lemon has moulted into the water. I ask the barman for a glass. The water has a sour tinge. It tastes better than the beer. I feel a hand flip the hood off my head. I’m ready to embed the glass I’m holding in Charlie’s face. The face belongs to a woman.
“I knew it was you,” she sings. She’s way ahead of me. I have no idea who she is. All I know is that she’s at the three-drink stage. At least. I’ve managed a sip of my first and a sip of my second. She has shiny skin. Her forehead is dotted with pink nodules. She hasn’t been a teenager for decades. She’s wearing a black leather jacket. The leather is scuffed and greyed at the elbows and shoulders. She pulls up a stool and sits close by. She grabs her hair in two fists and knots it at her neck. She puts a hand on my knee. She leans forward. “I took your fingerprints,” she says. “It was me, remember?” I’m not in the mood for this. I try to picture the woman at the police station. A little blue hat pulled low over the brow. An undershot jaw with a Habsburg lip. Slim above the waist. Thick legs made thicker by combat trousers and boots. I look down. Her feet are kicking rhythmically at the air.
“Constable, um,” I say.
“Constable whatever,” she says. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“First name?”
“Not even that.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” I ask. It wouldn’t be smart to piss her off. She looks at her glass. It contains the last of a dark brown liquid.
I find my smiley face somewhere. “Brandy and Coke?”
She sniffs at the suggestion. “Bacardi,” she says. “Bacardi and Coke.”
I buy the drink. I shouldn’t have. She stays. She talks about her son. He didn’t get enough oxygen at birth and isn’t quite right in the head. Her upcoming divorce. The arsehole of a husband who didn’t know he was on to a good thing. The impossibility of police employees paying their way. The fact she’s been a constable for eight years. And will be for the next eight too. The race issue, you see. It’s not a career any longer, she says. I need to concentrate to keep up with her. I’m not sure my act is holding up. When the jug of water is finished I wave at the barman for a refill. The head on my draught has gone flat. There are no more bubbles floating through the gold.
There is some kind of aggro-switch floating among the ice cubes in Constable Whatever’s fourth Bacardi and Coke. Halfway through, it trips. She removes her hand from my leg. She thrusts her lower lip out. The action pulls at the ends of her mouth and makes it small and mean. She’s no detective, she says. Not yet. She doesn’t need the rank to be able to tell. I can see her thinking it was me that did it. Whatever the CCTV tape shows. She can see it in my face, she says. I’m probably a psychopath. I’m too pretty for my own good. I needed Madge’s money for drugs. I dress like a criminal. Who sits in a bar with his hoodie pulled over his head? Who drinks water all night? I’m probably one of those homosexual communists.
I don’t look her in the eye. Instead, I put my hand on her thigh. I would really prefer not to. I put on my smiley face again. “Constable,” I say. “You’re overwrought.”
She blinks at the word. I can see she doesn’t know what it means. For a moment she’s unsure whether to be offended or not. Apparently animals respond to tone of voice. She puts a hand over mine. The lip wobbles. The eyes glass over.
“I’m going to the gents, and then we’re going to organise you a ride home.”
On Sunday I wake up with the sun in my face. It’s March, and still warm in the mornings. Sunrise is an hour or so later than in December. I move my head slowly to one side and then to the other. I expect pain. There isn’t any. I remember that I drank water at the bikers’ bar. I remember being nice to a policewoman. I don’t remember if I finished my beer or not. I suppose I walked home. Either watched TV or went to bed.
I get up. Go for a run. I come home, check on Mrs. du Toit. She has wet the bed. I fight to pull her out of it. A malty smell releases from the sheets. She has nothing on. I deposit her on the couch and cover her with a towel. She wrestles with the towel until it’s bunched under her chin along with her knees. What’s between her legs is sexless. Like wood shavings or a handful of parsley. I put the soiled sheets in her washing machine. Before I turn it on I fetch the laundry from my flat. Throw it in with the sheets. I sit on the bathroom floor and watch it spin until it stops. I stuff it into the dryer. I rinse the facecloth and give Mrs. du Toit a bed-bath on the couch. This time I do her face first. I turn over her pissy mattress. On a shelf in a closet I find clean linen. I make her bed. I fetch her from the couch. I collect my laundry from her dryer. I go to my flat. The History channel is starting a new season of Alien Day. No repeats. I like aliens. Mostly because there aren’t any.
On Monday I struggle
On Monday I struggle to find my working face. It’s March and it’s pouring. I wish weather were predictable. We’re in Sonia’s meeting when the lights go out. The boardroom has no windows. It’s like a coalmine at midnight. My heart rate goes ballistic. Sarel flicks a lighter. It doesn’t take. He flicks again, and again. The flicking makes snapshots of the faces. I can feel sweat. It pushes through my skin like little drops of molten wax. Sarel’s lighter takes. He holds it above his head and uses it to find the door handle. As he reaches for it the lights come on again. It’s been a minute or less and still the brightness surprises. Everyone blinks. They clap and say, “Yay.” They don’t mean it. I’m sure every one of them was hoping that the lights would stay out. That we’d all be sent home.
Sarel sits down opposite Sonia. “Jeez, Nathan,” he says. “Scared of the dark much?”
I can see Sonia kick him under the table. What does she know, I wonder. What does she know that I don’t? Sarel looks at her and opens his mouth. I suppose he wants to say, “What the fuck, Sonia?” He says nothing. She uses her glare to segue into her usual bollocking. Except she’s angrier than normal. We’ve missed every target ever since the bank thing. The vertical lines at the top of her nose seem to have deepened. When she’s finished with us, she starts on the web dev team. They’re getting hardly anyone to the site. In spite of the search marketing and SEO work and all the other propeller head stuff the geeks are pretending to do.
After the meeting I’m still shaking. Yumna looks at me as if I’d grown horns or had a haircut. Sarel avoids my eyes. Sonia calls me to her cubicle. I’m going to struggle if she says anything about the lights going out. She doesn’t. The nipples declare her mood. She hands me a sheet of paper torn from a pad. The tear went wrong and a long thin triangle is missing at the top edge. On it is a list of names, companies and phone numbers.
“Three things,” Sonia says. “One, call these people. Two, remind them that we’re still a newspaper that sells half a million copies every day. Three, tell them they’ll get 33% off rate card for anything booked and confirmed by the end of the month.”
I look at the piece of paper in my hand. The names and numbers are angry. I can’t read probably half of them. Sonia hasn’t done this since I first joined.
“Want me to give Yumna’s and Sarel’s lists to them?” I ask.
“They don’t have lists,” she says. “I want to know how you’ve done before you go home please.”
When Sonia says “please” it doesn’t mean please.
I turn to go and walk into Dino. His frame takes up the entire entrance to the cubicle. Just as it fills the cubicle when he’s in it.
“‘Excuse me?’” Dino prompts as I push past him.
“You’re excused,” I say over my shoulder.
“Cock,” Dino says. Sonia doesn’t contradict him. I wonder how much she’d like him if he had one of his mafia cross
bow bolts through his temples.
I pick up the phone and start dialling. Dino starts talking. I put the phone down. Blah blah blah, goes Dino. Something about a woman found strangled in the bushes. She must be white otherwise he wouldn’t be so excited. Even then it’s not such a biggie for him. This is Cape Town after all. All pretty and touristy on the surface, lethal beneath. The locals know that. They know what to stay away from. They know you can lose your life for twenty rand or a cellphone if you’re in the wrong place. She must have been a visitor. After almost twenty years, the murder of a white woman still makes the front page. Especially if she’s foreign. Black women, coloured women are still page four fodder. Dino’s still bitching. The cops aren’t giving him anything. Even his closest connections are zipped up tight. They won’t let on the who, what, where, when, why or how. “What am I supposed to do?” Dino is saying. “Let the sub write a big headline and then give him one line of copy to go under it?” Grow up, Dino, I want to say. Stop being such an arsehole. Pad it with a paragraph on the weather and some old murder statistics. Interview some people in the area and write that they didn’t see anything. It doesn’t matter what area it is. It’s more likely that they wouldn’t have seen anything if it’s the wrong area. Nobody will remember the bullshit once you get the real meat in a week’s time. I’m listening for Sonia’s sympathy noises. She’s not making any. She must really have it bad this month. Dino’s rant trickles to a stop. I can almost hear Sonia shrug her shoulders. Dino leaves. I pick up the phone again. Call marketing managers and media agencies. Write a blanket email to everyone as I go. Tell Sonia at the end of the day that her list was shit. “It’s not the fucking list that’s shit,” she shouts. She shouts some more as I walk out. Shout shout shout, goes Sonia. I don’t know what she’s shouting.
I don’t feel like Mrs. du Toit. Not today. Not ever again, actually.
On Tuesday I plug through Sonia’s list again. Every lead basically tells me to fuck off. Either in those exact words or a bit more politely. I wonder if Sonia is setting me up for something. I don’t think so. You never know. At the end of the day I’ve sold some tiny black-and-white ads that will be buried together somewhere behind the editorial pages. I should tell the clients that they’d be better off keeping the money. That would be the honest thing.
At the end of the day I report my progress to Sonia. “Wow,” she says. As if I were a cat bringing her a dead bird. I head for Eric’s. Decide at the last minute that I don’t feel like it. Don’t feel like Eric or the people drinking there. Don’t feel like the biker bar. I mooch around town. Pass Madge’s old shop. The Chinese woman is standing outside, ordering passersby to go inside. They don’t. Then, I don’t know what I do.
I wake before dawn. The front of my brain feels like it’s been replaced with concrete. It’s as if I haven’t slept for days. Pine needles, something else in my nose. Some animal smell. For a moment I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I put my feet on the floor next to my bed. They land in a pile of damp clothing. Running vest. Shorts. Trainers. Moist socks stuffed inside. A pink scarf. Did I get shitfaced somewhere and then go for a mad drunken run? I don’t think I drank. I sniff my armpits. They’re rank. There’s no tang of alcohol. No sour aftertaste of it in my mouth. No fumes of it on my breath. Whatever this is, it can’t be a hangover. I should go for a run. I can’t think of anything worse. I gather up the kit. It’s wetter than it looks. Bundle it with my week’s washing under my arm. Find the key to Mrs. du Toit’s flat. She won’t care if I do a wash. Won’t notice in her funk.
I hold my breath as I open her door. I expect the zoo smell I can’t get used to. It’s gone. The air is still and clean, like a hotel room. There’s no odour of shit or sweat or urine. The flat smells like soap and furniture polish. The place is spotless. Even the taps at the sink gleam.
I go to the bedroom. Mrs. du Toit isn’t there. The room is immaculate. The bed has been stripped. I open her closet. Clean sheets and the duvet cover lie folded next to her clothes. All crisp and colour coded. I don’t see the sneakers and jeans she wore on our walk. I don’t know what else she’s packed. The rope and the newspaper clippings are gone. I look for them everywhere. In the bedside pedestals and the closet. In the bathroom vanity. In the kitchen cupboards. In every drawer I can find. What I see is perfect order. Mrs. du Toit is hardly a housekeeping Nazi. There is no wine in the kitchen.
I put my laundry into her washing machine. Shower at my place while it’s being done. Go back and transfer the load to the dryer. Wait for it to finish. I leave my keys to her flat on a counter. Latch the door so that it locks behind me. Look out at the parking area below. Mrs. du Toit’s bay is empty. In my flat I shake out some dryer-warmed clothes. Put them on. Spend twenty precious minutes looking for a tuk-tuk.
I’m late. Sonia says nothing. I can see she’s freaking. Her mouth is thin and pulled. She can’t look at me. She sticks out a hand.
“List,” she demands.
I give it to her. Six of the fifteen items have been ticked off. She looks up at me. “And now?” she says.
“And now I want a new list.”
“Why?” she says. “You’ve been at this one since Monday and nothing. Fifteen prospects, six tiny sales.”
“Dog food,” I say.
“Huh?”
“You can only sell dog food to people who have dogs. These people have no dogs.”
Sonia looks at me blankly. Sometimes she can be really thick.
“Sonia, they don’t want to advertise. They don’t have the money, or they’re doing fine without it, or else they just don’t care.”
“Remind me what you do with dog food?” she says.
“Sell it?”
She hands the list back to me. “Exactly,” she says.
There’s something wrong with my desk. There’s something wrong with everything on it. I don’t want to touch anything. None of it is mine. People like Sarel and Yumna pin things up around their cubicles. Photographs. Silly quotes and cartoons. Kitschy sayings set in Papyrus or Comic Sans. Pictures of random things. Their desks have stuff on them. Their own coffee mugs. Wire bicycles. Rubik’s cubes. Flash drives in the shape of little rubber men or bracelets or credit cards. All sorts of shit. Not mine. There’s nothing of mine here. Never has been. I’m sure their drawers are full of rubbish as well. Gimmicky erasers. Bottle openers. Containers filled with useless brown coins. Sachets of McDonald’s tomato sauce. More flash drives. I wonder if there’s a camera somewhere that’s hooked up to my laptop. The thought makes me want to take my clothes off. It’s hard enough to sit on the chair. My head is hammering harder than ever. I cross my arms, grab my shoulders. It’s like a hug. It makes me feel better. I don’t want to let myself go. I sit like that for most of the day. I’m trying to remember Madge and Mrs. du Toit. I’m trying to forget both of them. No, I’m actually working very hard at forgetting them. They deserve to be forgotten. They went away. The harder I work at the forgetting the more I remember them. It’s driving me crazy. They’re each like a shitty tune you can’t get out of your head. Hugging myself stops me from picking up the newspaper’s laptop and the newspaper’s pens and pencils and hurling them against the wall.
Sonia sticks her head into my cubicle. I don’t look at her. At the edge of my vision I can see she has her bag over her shoulder. She puts a hand to her mouth. She drops it.
“Christ, Nathan,” she says. She doesn’t sound angry any longer. Just tired. “Go home.”
I unfold my arms. They hurt from the hugging. I see it’s past five. I’m surprised. I wonder what I’ve been doing the whole time. I don’t know. I need to pee.
Sonia calls me in
Sonia calls me in for a chat on Thursday. I’m late again. I’d been looking for the picture of the woman at the airfield. It’s fallen off the wall. You’d think it would have been on the floor. It wasn’t.
> I expect Sonia to be furious. Nipples at the ready. She’s not. Nor are they. She is slumped in her chair. She tells me to sit down. My hands find my shoulders. Sonia looks sad. I don’t know what face to put on. I try my smiley face.
“Nathan.” She says this and then says nothing for a while. Then she says it again. “Nathan.”
I can hear that she doesn’t want to see my smiley face. I can hear that she wants me to look at her. I look at her wastepaper basket. It’s made of fine black mesh. Somebody must have kicked it at some point. There’s a dent in it and the top edge is skew. Inside are a few balls of paper and a clamshell and a can of Coke Zero. The can has leaked brown onto the paper. It’s not like the leak is going to attract ants. Ants don’t understand Coke Zero.
“Nathan,” Sonia finally says. “This isn’t working.”
You mean I’m not working. I don’t say it.
“I don’t need to remind you that you were, um, a bit of a special case when we took you on.”
Perhaps she does need to remind me. I don’t remember. Special implies some kind of incapacitation. Retards are called “special.” Maybe that’s not what she means.
“You were fine. You did okay. You were almost, almost normal for so long.”
I can see where this is going. Or rather, I can see where Sonia is going. She’s going away. She’s going to go away by making me go away. That’s the strategy. I’d bet on it. I turn from the wastepaper basket so that I can’t see her at all. I start the process of trying to forget her. There are steps. They’re hard enough as it is. They’re even harder when the person you’re trying to forget won’t shut the fuck up.
“I’ve done everything I can. Now I’ve lost the fight. At least they’ve allowed me to give you a choice. One, resign. Two, take a package. Of course, you can fight it if you want to. That’ll mean disciplinary hearings, corrective directions, revised performance indicators—and a month or so to come right.”