No darling, you did nothing wrong. It’s me, me!
She would let him rant and rave before approaching him and touching him tentatively with her fingertips, put up with his resistance and slowly reach for his hands. And then finally, finally David would say with that touching honesty of his that there was no cure for his feelings for her, so she really mustn’t hurt him again. This was the moment she would whisper her pledge of faith into his ear, followed by her decision to join him on his big Verne trip. If necessary, she would quit her job for it. Anything to make it up to him. Anything to keep things as they were.
David loved her in a unique way, because he saw something in her that she’d never wanted, or rather, never dared to see in herself. She was only familiar with her fighting spirit. As the child of foster parents in this flat, rainy country where everything was so well organized, she soon discovered that no other girl or boy had a father who was shot by a firing squad, or a mother who perished in the perpetual snow of a mountain pass. Everything about her was different. The way she looked, the way she felt, her past. She never felt truly connected to anyone. Every day, both in and out of school, was one long battle against the jeering, bullying and gossiping of her peers, their parents and even her teachers. She hoped that one day she could accept the unfamiliar, softer side of herself. David would help her.
When, shortly afterwards, she reached the house, she saw to her amazement that he was not waiting for her in the doorway.
33
It was chaos at the gates of St Helen Joseph Hospital. The nursing staff had blocked the access roads to and from the hospital to demonstrate for higher wages, which had been promised by the government but had so far failed to materialize.
‘Amandla,’ chanted the woman Paul recognized as the night nurse who had lovingly cared for him. ‘Awethu,’ shouted the protesters. ‘Power! To the people!’
The police tried breaking open the locks of the chains some of the demonstrators had used to shackle themselves to the gate, but they were immediately stormed by packs of shrieking nurses. A water cannon was deployed in reaction to this.
Paul climbed over a fence and from beside the road tried several times to hail a passing minibus. For a moment he wondered whether he was using the correct signal. When he caught the eyes of some passengers, he realized that no driver with a minibus full of blacks was prepared to pick him up: a white man with a swollen, purple face, a black eye, a bandaged nose and twenty-four stitches starting at his left eyebrow that made him look like a thug.
A little further down he saw a woman step out of a taxi and he began to wave. He saw the driver sizing him up as he approached the car. He forced a smile in an attempt to break the ice and remarked that he was not nearly as scary as he looked and that he lived downtown at Fifteen Park Street. A very good fare. The driver gestured for him to get in and moments later they were zipping along the gated communities protected by 9,000 volts of electrified barbed wire.
Paul looked at the driver’s ID card dangling in front of the windscreen and saw that the man behind the wheel was named Mosi Siluthu. Meanwhile, he also noticed that the garbage alongside the road was piled sky-high. Mosi saw Paul watching and took a good guess that he wasn’t aware of the latest developments.
‘It’s happening all over the place. Everyone is demanding a wage increase. The garbage men have asked for fifteen per cent. So long as they don’t get it, they’re not going back to work.’
The result of this strike was that the streets of Johannesburg were now filled with splintered glass, old newspapers, huge amounts of plastic, towers of cans, rotting food, and elated rats running among the heaps of garbage and digging tunnels. At this rate they would surpass the number of illegals within a few days’ time. Thanks to its sanitation department, Jo’burg was now a rat’s paradise.
‘The ANC, sir,’ Mosi said as he looked at Paul in his mirror, ‘governs in the name of big business. And look what happens: repression of labourers. Yesterday garbage men, today hospital staff, tomorrow construction workers, the day after municipal employees, then factory workers. Before you know it, the whole country will be on strike. Amandla!’
‘Awethu,’ Paul replied.
‘The protests continue to increase,’ Mosi said. ‘Especially now that Jacob Nkoane has announced his candidacy for the presidency.’
‘What?!’ exclaimed Paul, shocked.
‘Were you cooped up in solitary confinement in that hospital?’ Mosi asked and, without waiting for an answer, rambled on. ‘The ANC has made reducing poverty a central campaign theme for the upcoming election! But take a good look around you! It’s a disgrace that this is what it’s come to!’
‘How long ago did Nkoane announce?’ Paul asked, short of breath.
‘Only today,’ Mosi replied seriously, and Paul caught his eyes staring at him in the mirror again. The news about Nkoane felt like someone had punched him in the gut. He now realized how much the ANC must have pressured The Citizen to make him put aside his corruption investigation and now that same pressure would be exerted tenfold on the Scorpions.
But Paul surmised that Dingane was not a man who succumbed to that kind of pressure.
They silently continued on to Park Street. When they reached his house, Paul was extra generous with his tip and then the man disappeared from sight, mumbling to himself.
It had started raining. The drops clattered in a different key and different rhythm on to the plastic bags, the crumpled boxes and other heaps of rubbish.
With a head full of confused thoughts and haunting images of the condor – his hands gripping him hard and the badly beaten face – Paul opened the creaking door to his flat. For going on six months, it gave off the dismal atmosphere of a ‘desperate man alone’. Paul had hoped to leave the jumble of emotions behind him once he’d shut the door, but hopelessness and depression taunted him like demons who’d apparently decided to spend the rest of his life tormenting him.
He walked to the window, behind which a downpour magically transformed the lights of the city into thin vertical beams, and his mobile rang. He thought about Mosi, what he had mumbled to him before he rode away in the taxi amidst the drenched piles of the city’s accumulated rubbish: ‘This is no longer my world,’ and he answered his phone.
34
Edward looked out over the vegetable garden with its aubergines, courgettes and nearly ripe pumpkins. Among the fruit trees further down, startled sheep stared at him in the twilight. He walked over to the herb section, where he picked some mint and let the fresh leaves soften on his tongue before slowly chewing them with his eyes closed. Anything to put off the moment. Anything not to have to key in the Johannesburg number.
Delaying the inevitable, he strolled further into the garden. Past the petunias, the lady’s mantel and the yarrow, towards the two centuries-old oak trees that demarcated the land around the farmhouse like gnarled watchmen. He thought back to the years when he met here weekly with the man he was about to phone. The man who’d been no more than a boy back then.
At the time, Edward had recognized the teenager’s unbridled curiosity and advised him to keep track of everything he came across in a journal. Thoughts, opinions, random sentences from newspapers or snippets from conversations on television and radio as well as pictures from papers and magazines. He encouraged Paul to identify links between the different elements of his collection and to come up with explanations, hoping to instil in his nephew the desire to develop his own opinion. An opinion he would then have to put to the test. On Paul’s seventeenth birthday, Edward agreed with him that they’d meet for weekly debates in which they would differ as sharply as possible on whatever topic Paul chose.
Every Saturday afternoon, Edward would turn up at the farmhouse. In winter they sat in front of the fireplace and wrangled while his sister Isobel prepared a casserole: Dutch-style slow-braised beef served with mashed potato and red cabbage. ‘Comfort food’ in her words. In summer the two antagonists usually sat facing each other in the
front garden, with Isobel serving them iced tea and homemade lemon cupcakes. Edward assumed the role of the steadfast conservative whose take on world politics was informed by self-interest, while Paul argued in favour of his youthful and naive conviction that man was here on earth to rectify everything shattered by previous generations. In the process his nephew branded Edward everything reprehensible under the sun. He was a ‘populist idiot’, an ‘unscrupulous capitalist’ or a ‘speechifying reactionary’. But with each noxious label Edward felt a growing intimacy between them and saw Paul gradually transform from an introverted kid who had difficulties keeping his aggression in check into a strong-minded young man who had got better at expressing himself. Both Edward and Isobel realized that these weekly sessions were an ideal outlet for a boy who yearned to express his anger about a world that had deprived him of his biggest hero: his father.
During those formative years, Edward taught Paul not only how to navigate the impulses of his personal intuition, but also to trust the accuracy of detached analysis. ‘Combine the two and you’ll be a great journalist,’ he repeatedly told Paul.
Now he stood between the two ancient oak trees, waiting patiently to hear the voice of a once-promising journalist who’d long since lost the ability to combine those two elements.
In the silence that followed after Paul answered, Edward heard it was raining.
‘Are you outside?’
‘I’m in front of an open window.’
An alarmed Edward pictured Paul jumping and ending up on the street, in the rain. Injured, bleeding and unconscious. Seven or eight storeys below the open window. ‘Don’t worry,’ Paul said, apparently sensing Edward’s concerns thousands of kilometres away.
‘Should I be worried, Paul?’
‘Maybe. If you could see me now.’ Paul laughed mirthlessly.
‘What happened?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Everything that happens to you matters to me,’ Edward said irritably, like a father reprimanding a wilful son.
‘Let’s pretend I’m doing well,’ Paul said. ‘Then at least we can stop talking about that.’
Paul was silent. Edward heard the South African rain tapping in the background and couldn’t help but look up.
‘I’ve got a job for you. One you can really sink your teeth into.’
‘Sounds good. Tell me more.’
‘A young Afghan boy was found in the woods, dressed Bacha Bazi-style. The case appears to have links with Armin Lazonder and a Russian associate of his, Valentin Lavrov.’
All was quiet on the other end of the line. Edward waited for a reaction, but none came.
‘You’ve got my attention,’ Paul said eventually.
‘I want you to work with Farah Hafez.’
‘She’s new at investigative journalism?’
‘That’s why I want you on the job. I’ve just spoken to her and she’s come up with a third name, for what it’s worth.’
‘All good things come in threes, Ed, so out with it.’
‘Grigori Michailov.’
‘Since when does the AND cover cold cases?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Michailov has been dead for quite some time.’
‘I know, but he’s still claiming victims as one of the walking dead, judging by the latest information we have. Someone tortured by the Khad thought he spotted him.’
‘Sounds like the Bermuda Triangle. Lazonder, Lavrov and an undead Michailov.’
‘I told you this was a case you’d be able to sink your teeth into.’
‘So if I take you up on your offer, I’ll be working closely with this woman?’
‘Trust me, Paul, she’s sharp.’
‘What makes you say so?’
‘I recognize talent when I see it, remember?’
‘I think I get it,’ Paul said. ‘By hooking her up with me you’re turning me into the comeback kid and you give her a leg-up, am I right?’
This time it was Edward who remained silent.
‘How’s Mum, by the way?’
‘I’ve taken her up to bed. She’s sleeping.’
It had stopped raining in Jo’burg.
‘Paul?’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Edward listened absentmindedly to the dial tone after Paul had hung up. The sheep moved languidly against the purple-red evening sky. In the distance, above the city, he saw an area of low pressure building and heard the distant rumble of thunder.
35
It was dark in the bathroom when Danielle opened her eyes with a start. The water was lukewarm. Had she fallen asleep? It couldn’t have been for very long. But she knew one thing for certain. The lights had been on when she got into her bath.
She sat up, feeling slightly dizzy, and while she supported herself on the edge of the tub she searched for a towel in the darkness but couldn’t find one. She got out of the bath and reached for the light switch. At that moment she felt a gloved hand cover her mouth before she could scream. She was firmly pressed against the body of a large man, who smelled of leather, mint and a musky aftershave. A man who spoke English with a Russian accent whispered sinisterly in her right ear.
‘It’s dangerous to fall asleep in a bath. A lot of people drown that way. But it’s a peaceful death. You drown without even knowing it. Is that what you’d want?’
He released the pressure on her mouth so she could answer. She shook her head back and forth: no.
‘A wise decision. Now you need to tell me what you know,’ the man said hoarsely. ‘You need to tell me all about the boy. What you didn’t get a chance to say on television, you can tell me.’
Again she felt the leather on her mouth loosen its grip. She briefly caught her breath and tried to speak.
‘He was used for Bacha Bazi.’ She could barely get out the words.
‘I know that. But how did he get here?’
Danielle felt a blind panic set in.
‘That … I don’t know.’
She felt herself being lifted up and flung into the bath, her head hitting the edge of the tub. She was immediately pushed under water and felt his other hand grabbing on to her flailing legs. In an attempt to breathe she swallowed water. When the hand unexpectedly pulled her head out of the water she gagged.
He continued to whisper in her ear. ‘I don’t have to do this, you understand. As long as you tell me what you know. So I’m asking you again. How did the boy get here?’
‘I … I don’t know …’ she sobbed.
Immediately, the hand pushed her under water again. This time the other gloved hand grabbed her between the legs, causing her mouth to open in a scream and fill with water once more. She felt herself losing consciousness.
That was the moment the hands pulled her up, lifted her out of the bath and pressed her up against a hard male body. As the hands went through her wet hair, down her back and squeezed her buttocks, she tried to stammer a few words through her sobbing.
‘He hasn’t said anything. He’s sedated.’
The hands returned to her head and gripped it tightly. She smelled the mint again as his face appeared close to hers like a dark cloud.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘What I just did to you is nothing. Nothing compared to what the others will do to you. They will go much further. Silence you for good. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ she managed to blurt out.
‘No, you’re the one who saved his life. That’s why I’m saving yours.’
He turned her around.
‘Put your hands against the wall.’
She obeyed him.
‘Close your eyes.’
She closed her eyes.
‘Start counting to sixty, slowly.’
She began to count. When she got to five, he interrupted her.
‘Slower … If you count slowly, you’ll live.’
She started counting again. From one. Slowly. As if she was a dying star light years away
. She didn’t stop when she reached sixty. Perhaps dying was a little bit like counting for ever.
36
Just before she got to it, the front door swung open and David strode angrily towards her.
‘Lies! You can only ignore them for so long!’ he shouted agitatedly and grabbed her by the shoulders as though he wanted to give her a good shaking. ‘I’m sure you’ll work it out. We’ll work it out! I want you to tell me everything! Everything, you hear me?’
‘In a minute, David,’ she said, stunned. ‘In a minute.’
He wrapped an arm around her and ushered her inside, where the Verne books were scattered about, the malt whisky bottle was three-quarters empty and the air was still thick with the spicy aroma of the meal he’d originally prepared for the two of them.
‘You should have warned that doctor about taking her story to Marant,’ he said, sounding tense.
The penny dropped. So that’s what he was all worked up about. David had watched The Headlines Show too.
‘I did, darling.’
‘So she didn’t listen to you. Stupid!’
Farah never thought she’d loathe herself this much. Here she was, with a secret she was dying to confess so her life could go back to normal. A life in which she felt more at home than she’d realized until now.
‘Would you please sit down, David?’
‘What about you? Don’t you want something to eat? And what can I get you to drink?’
‘Sit down and listen to me, will you?’ she begged.
It did the trick. He grabbed his whisky glass and sat down on the firm designer sofa.
During the long silence, as she searched for the right words, David shifted uneasily in his seat and frowned impatiently.
‘You know what kind of life I lived before I met you. You know, right?’ she said shakily.
‘I’ve got an idea, yes. That’s all I need to know. End of story.’
Butterfly on the Storm Page 28