-
Frank Sullivan never made it back from the shed on December 1, 2011. He just never got there. There was no sign of a struggle along the three-metre garden path his wife had lined with stones. No scuffle outside, men in black masks or tinted windows on vans parked out in the street. It wasn’t like that. Frank was popular with everyone he knew, and his job wasn’t the sort that earned a man enemies. Dorine heard nothing—there had been nothing to hear. There had been no fight, and no leads were ever made in the case, because a case was never opened.
As far as South African disappearances went, that was not unheard of. People went missing every day—trafficked, ransomed, or kidnapped, bound for parts unknown. Even the sleepy electric-blanket nook of Grahamstown had its reports of this kind of thing.
What was unique about the night Frank Sullivan disappeared wasn’t the fact that he disappeared at all. It was the fact that, somewhere in the suburban silence that night, something changed, and Dorine van der Haar had never met a Frank Sullivan in her life. It just never happened. She was, in fact, widowed. This was the absolute truth. That was the way things were: she had been a widow for the better part of a decade, and had inherited her cosy little Grahamstown duplex in the wake of her husband, Joel Sullivan’s, passing. Things had never been different.
Joel had died at Ground Zero waiting to surprise his son, Otis, at work on the morning of September 11, 2001. In the blast following the first collision, Otis had fallen three storeys down an elevator shaft which exploded through the doors, thrown clear, miraculously, in the resulting explosion. He lay unconscious under the metal cage of a security desk inside the lobby for twenty-seven hours before the New York City Fire Department pulled him from the wreckage.
After fifteen minutes of CPR, they were able to revive Joel’s son before loading him in the back of an ambulance bound for a cross-town hospital. Joel’s body was never found. He was sixty-eight.
Frank Sullivan never got to die, like Joel did, because Frank had never existed. He’d never enrolled at Rhodes University, or discussed Plato with a group of neck-bearded first-years in his residence common room. His parents had never returned from a teacher’s meeting in Grade 5 with sad looks on their faces and took away his skateboard for the December holidays.
Dorine and Joel had bought a two-bedroom duplex in suburban Grahamstown. They had moved in together straight out of university and got nothing but disapproval from their family and friends. There was no sadness for Frank, because there was no Frank for whom to be sad.
Frank never got to lie about knowing who James Stewart was to the girl in the cinema lighting. Eleven months and six days after moving into their new home, Dorine fell pregnant with her and Joel’s only child. Little Otis. They were married two months later.
Frank’s toolshed was never Frank’s toolshed at all. It was Joel’s toolshed, and he used energy-saver bulbs.
Otis went on to raise three kids of his own with his wife, Virginia, after the Trade Center nightmare— Alex, Clark and little Cynthia. They moved into their own place in Port Elizabeth, a two-hour drive away.
Clark’s birthday was coming up. He was turning thirteen, and probably too big to play games with grandma Dorine anymore. He was really excited to get his presents this year, though. He wanted a guitar.
2. White Noise
“So, then what were you trying to say by it, man?”
The barflies adopted a rapid state of captivation with the scene over at the beer taps. The weekend scuffle of paper coasters and chip baskets had become centred around one angry-looking girl and a tall, thin man who seemed very much like he wanted to die. He was right to. No one blew smoke like Alex’s friend Ruth, at the Rat and Parrot Pub, fired up on beer and fuming at the procession of first-year chuckleheads out on the town and looking for trouble. This was especially true after pre-drinks and a Bill Maher interview on YouTube at her flat the Saturday evening before TriVarsity.
“Well?”
This poor idiot at the bar had called her "Babycakes" five minutes earlier, and inadvertently signed himself up as the main attraction in her festival of flared nostrils and abuse. “Fired up” didn’t do justice to the way she got over this, although fire was an appropriate metaphor for her response.
They, Ruth and her friends, were in the last term of their second year at Rhodes, and it was a status that had spurred her on to dizzying new heights of self-righteousness and aggression with the now-cocky first-years. It wasn’t the nicest colour on her, but everybody tried on personalities at some point during their degree, and she knew that. Alex did too, so Ruth was never embarrassed by it. From where they were sitting in their booth, Alex and the others watched quietly as the conflict unfolded, half pretending they weren’t there.
“You going to stand there, or tell me just what the fuck point you were out to make tonight, Chucks? You figure, what, ‘I’ll take a shot with my nineteen eighties’ misogynist rhetoric’? Girls at a bar, the smell of salted peanuts and drunk Smuts boys in the air—maybe get in on a little bit of that stone irony vibe, right? The fucking numbers game. Actually, I hope it’s that, or else you think educated, grown-ass women actually get off on being called 'Babycakes'!”
This guy must’ve been in his early twenties, as they often were, and tall as hell—a first-year, sure as the Lexus keychain hanging out of his pocket. Well groomed, clean looking. Probably a B.Comm and, despite the tongue-lashing he was currently receiving, pretty likely to be leaving with someone tonight. Who knew, whoever she was, she’d probably be a nice girl too.
Alex sipped his beer, wedged in between Julie and Crink, in a booth across the room, staring absently on as Ruth hopped down off her barstool and commanded the B.Comm’s attention from her meagre five-foot, one-inch eyeline. 'Babycakes'? Did your tractor-driving uncle teach you to talk like that, you neck-breathing, high-fiving misogynist dick?”
This was going to get worse before it got any better. Right at that moment, watching him from a safe distance, Alex figured that Lexus Keychain looked about ready to burst into flames.
Ruth continued, “Some of you creeps clean up real good too, hey. I mean, before you decide to shit all over someone’s birthday cake, that is.”
She took a step onto the mortified wretch, forcing him backwards into his highly amused mates. “I’ve seen you out there—like normal people with sick intentions. We don’t even get any proper warning.” The crowd at the bar moved alongside and behind the polarised pair, as Ruthie took another deliberate step towards her retreating jock. “When you bother to show up to class, sometimes you even look like people who are here to learn.”
She took another step.
“It’s always different packaging with you fucktards, but it comes down to the same bullshit at the end of the day.”
The upstairs bar had gone largely quiet by now, and Ruth put down her draught glass loudly enough to emphasise her next point. The B.Comm kid looked terrified. The air was thick with tension.
It was all too much, and from over in the booth Alex tried to stifle a laugh and failed. The look Ruthie shot him at that moment could’ve burned holes in the sun. He took a sip from his draught glass, smiled and motioned for her to carry on.
Ruth turned back to the flustered first-year as the bartender quietly put his drinks down beside him and went into the kitchen to clean glasses. She smiled, pulled her shoulders forward and not so subtly bulked up her already impressive cleavage. Alex put his face in his palms and tried not to look.
“Go ahead, bright eyes. Isn’t this why you came out? So you could put one of those filthy, hustler-flipping, inbred hands all over some nice Vaal girl’s rack, and—”
With one more tiny step, she was close enough for him to be able to smell her conditioner. What was about to take place at the bar was nothing short of a coconut-scented beatdown. She batted her eyes, smiled, and spoke under her breath, “Maybe take this party back to your place?” A crypt’s silence fell over the bar. It was like a western movie, five sec
onds after Clint Eastwood strolled through the saloon doors. The pub was transfixed as the showdown reached its lumbering, awkward climax.
“We might have a homicide on our hands, depending on what this cat says next,” Alex whispered to Julie, who nodded while putting her finger on his lips, not once taking her eyes off the tense scene. Julie loved this kind of shit—it was the number one reason she ever hung out with Ruth, who was more Alex’s friend than anyone else’s. He smiled and looked at his girlfriend’s shocked face, then got up and walked over to the awful situation at the bar. The other drinkers parted as he approached. He put his hand on Ruth’s shoulder from behind, her disapproval burning through his fingertips as he smiled at the young, confused man.
“Now class—what’ve we learned from this experience?”
The B.Comm stared at Alex uncomprehendingly. Ruthie groaned as Alex smiled reassuringly at him.
“That’s right: When we don’t play nice, we get our shit handed to us from unexpected quarters.”
B.Comm didn’t move, his eyes still wide.
“‘No one’, that’s right. Now, I’m going to take your stunned silence as an apology. How about you make like the Red Sea while you’re only kind of embarrassed?”
A quizzical look came from the B.Comm, matched by a beat’s worth of disgust from Ruthie who, by this point, wasn’t even watching any longer.
“Just go, dude.”
The B.Comm left the bar area like a Le Coq Sportif-wearing bat out of hell, leaving behind his brandy and Coke, and what Alex assumed were two drinks for the girls back at his table.
“Thanks for that, hero,” Ruth said as Alex pushed a pre-packaged Bertrams and ginger ale towards her across the bar. They clinked glasses, and returned to their table, where Alex handed the other factory-packaged drink to Julie.
–
Grahamstown at night is a bright place. Not Vegas-bright. Not obnoxious like that, all leather skirts, convertibles and cowboys in sunglasses. It’s the kind of ambient lighting seen in horror movies—pervasive, emanating from unseen corners. Eerie, especially given the early-morning mist that rolls through town in the winter months. Gas station lighting.
It’s a city, officially. Evidently having a cathedral qualifies a place for that. But the atmosphere is small town from left to right. The street lamps blink on and off at random in the shadier side alleys. The pavements, building fixtures and stop signs, the churches and traffic lights jut out slightly, off centre, giving it the look of a city drawn by a talented seven-year-old with a squint. Everything in place, but not quite right.
It’s the kind of setting that breeds people with a proclivity towards entertaining themselves, and weeds out the kind who need options to get by. A “city” then—a city populated by the adult versions of a thousand bored kids, wandering the streets at 2 AM, looking for something to pass the time. Big-city kids hate it here. The first-year journalism class is filled to the rafters for maybe four months, before the Sandton Barbies and their Jersey Shore boyfriend counterparts sniff out the truth to life in a small town: it’s not like the Gilmore Girls—snappy banter, quaint diners and good-looking people everywhere. These are ideas injected into the small-town aesthetic by scriptwriters and Faith Hill, and while they aren’t necessarily a lie, they’re only part of the truth. The bigger truth is that there’s not much going on there.
Realising this, a good fifth of the first-year class never see out their first semester.
Evening walks through and around the Rhodes University campus aren’t dazzling, but they are impressive—brown- and cream-coloured buildings, squat and imperialist, on manicured lawns, fountains as landscaper centrepieces. Wrought-iron gates slam shut after the library closes each night. Brick walkways and potted plants are offset by light pouring from the all-night lab windows. Tiny Eastern Cape frogs whistle across to the campus from the nearby botanical gardens, and behind the varsity wall, the Christmas-light net of Joza location glows back from across the valley.
–
The ceiling fan in Clark’s bedroom had been squeaking for days. From where he sat on his bed, reams of geometry notes splashed out on the mattress all around him, he took a second to refocus his eyes, survey the room, and stare up at the groaning metal contraption.
This room was a fortress of responsible study measures. He had his window open a crack, enough to let in fresh air without rustling his notes. A rubber stopper was positioned just behind the edge of the door, in exactly the right arc to stop it if it were to open suddenly. Computer in the corner, sans power cable (he’d dropped it off at a friend’s a few days earlier, for safe keeping). This was his bastion on the border of all distractions during this insane study season—the November exam period.
But that fucking ceiling fan was relentless. He uncrossed his legs, bounced up from the mattress and grabbed a screwdriver from under his desk then a chair from the other side of the room.
“Not today, squeakers.”
Positioned under the spinning fan, Clark reached into the groove between the light fixture and the rotating wooden paddles and tightened a protruding screw. The result was a deafening shriek issuing from an inch in front of his face, like nails on a chalkboard feeding back through a PA attached to a wailing cat.
“Shit-shit-shit-shit!” Clark yelled above the noise, frantically turning the Phillips left instead of right, and sighing his relief at the dissipating screech. This new silence was underscored by the noise of his phone, vibrating on his bedside table. He jumped down from his swivel-chair perch and ran over. Once he read the name, Clark hit the green phone immediately. “Alex.”
–
From her side of the bed, Julie listened in on the most pointless conversation she had ever heard. “No. No, Lou Ferrigno wasn’t ever a TV cop. You’re thinking of TJ Hooker, and he was the character, not the actor. Yeah. What? No, that was PJ Powers, dude, what the hell?”
According to the neon digits on the clock across from her, it was 4:35 AM and she was busy listening to her boyfriend, a grown man, and his little brother discuss TV’s The Incredible Hulk on the phone.
“Wasn’t Ferrigno the one who played Zordon on Power Rangers?” she said, shutting her eyes against the cool side of the pillow.
“What? No, Clark, hold on, Julie’s being a smart-ass. Baby, I thought you were asleep—are we keeping you up?”
Julie smiled in the dark and patted Alex’s belly under their duvet. “Say hey to Clark for me, idiot.”
She shivered as she slid out from under the warm blanket and padded across the cold tiles to the kitchen, where she turned on the kettle. She lifted herself onto the countertop and pulled one of the two mugs they owned out of the cupboard by her head.
She’d started dating Alex around November of first year, and, in spite of their friends’ doubts, they’d made it through the first holiday season in one piece. This was the kind of achievement that really turned heads in a student town like this. Holidays were when every relationship, good, bad, new, ancient or otherwise, went all to shit, for no reason at all. Nobody started dating around Christmas vac in Grahamstown. She’d seen it happen in a hundred percent of the couples during their first year, whether they’d been flings or heavily devoted from day one. Not one survivor. That they’d even got past the three-week mark in that deathtrap of a season was testament to just how naturally this relationship had come to them.
She yawned as she got the instant coffee ready for the rapidly boiling water. Alex was talking about Galactus, somewhere in the background.
This one couple they’d known, Derek and Sonya, they’d been together for a year before they even got to Rhodes. They were from Durban, like her. High school sweethearts. Indestructible, and that was an adjective they’d regularly put to the test during their first semester. And it had all gone to shit the night before the end of year.
The story went something like...
-
Derek goes out to the Pool Comm AGM and becomes hammer-wasted on a bottle of cheap Mozamb
ican wine. All is well. Around 3 AM, he shambles back up the hill to his place. He stops halfway, spotting Sonya’s res room across the dew-wet lawns. He mulls it over a second, but only that long. Love’s a stupid thing. After sprinting across the lawns, followed by a daring break-in, Derek falls into Sonya’s single bed with her, safe and sound, and immediately passes out. All is well.
Two hours later, though, Sonya hears a noise in the bed next to her. Her man is retching. Reacting immediately, she shoves him out of the bed with a blanket-muffled thump. “Use the sink in the corner, you ass!”
He stumbles over and makes a mess in the nick of time. After cleaning the sink and himself, Derek falls back into bed.
Poor Derek, he isn’t there for long before he’s back over at the sink. Sonya can hear solid bits hitting the basin from her bed, as her boyfriend of three years heaves in the twilight.
Outside, birds are beginning to chirp.
He finishes, brushes his teeth, and returns to bed—dead, to the world.
Derek Kaplan is not done outdoing himself, though. An hour later, Sonya feels something new she can’t pinpoint at first. Derek’s been breathing softly next to her for ages. Not a peep. She smiles, breathes deeply, and decides it’s nothing. Then she scrunches her eyes and shifts under him.
She shifts again, though. Something isn’t right. She starts to squirm, and the squirming becomes a tossing, then a panicked pushing of her arms against the mattress to get herself away from the bed as fast as possible as she realises what it is she’s feeling. It’s in her clothes, collected in the sheets underneath her. Everything is wet. “Derek! Derek, get off of me!”
The sleeping man next to her shocks awake. They jump out of bed, and the room floods with instant, manic confusion. Denial and regret are on his face, as she glowers in the dark. He’s piecing together the past hour of his life, and it is not a happy picture. Their clothes cling to them, warm and wet and ruined. Derek Kaplan has thoroughly pissed the bed.
Nails in the Sky Page 2