Memo From Turner

by Tim Willocks

  He stood bent over, his hands on his vast thighs, and growled as he tried to hold back burning tears. Those fuckers. That bastard. His rage redoubled, fuelled by self-disgust. Where was the rage when he needed it? He had grown up manhandling livestock, machinery, tools. He could eat pain. He was a fucking farmer. He could tear that clever-clever English cocksucker to pieces, he could crush his skull into cheese with his bare hands. The vain strutting gloating English turd.

  But he hadn’t. He hadn’t raised a finger. He hadn’t even raised his fucking voice. He’d lain on the ground and showed him his throat like a bullwhipped bitch. He’d let him take the piss because he was stupid, and OK he was stupid, he knew that, he’d been told so often enough by his teachers, his mother, his uncle, by anyone who thought they had the right to a fucking opinion, but what was he supposed to do about that? It didn’t mean he had to smile when they handed him a plate of shit, and a knife and fork to go with it. But he did smile, didn’t he? He let Hennie wank in his face. He let that old cunt take his gun and slap him down in front his friends and a bar full of blacks. He let him take the piss out of his family, his dead land, his fucking English. He never even tried to speak English until he met Dirk.

  ‘You haven’t got the balls,’ he said to himself.

  Another fantasy, not so fantastic. Take the gun from his belt and eat the fucking thing. Blow his brains out, here on the tarmac. Let them swallow that.

  Another bitch move. His head felt swollen, his face. He straightened up, panting. The land rolled away from him in every direction. It was hard and it had no pity, he knew that better than any of them, stupid or not. It wouldn’t keep you alive for a day unless you gave it your blood. He hated it, he loved it, it was the only land he knew. It was his. He’d given it all he had and he’d failed. The land had erased over twenty years of slog and left a hole in his chest where his pride should have been. It had given him nothing in return, not even hardness. He lived alone and had come to find comfort in his aloneness, a warmth, a defiance. Fuck ’em. He’d never felt so alone as he did now. Today it was no comfort at all.

  His rage was spent.

  His thirst was terrible. He couldn’t feel his tongue.

  The dying girl came back from the dark and choked him.

  Alone? He didn’t know the meaning of alone. She’d been alone. She’d looked at him with her insides bleeding and begged him to not to leave her alone in all that dark. And he hadn’t had the balls. He had more in common with that girl than he did with Hennie, more by far, but what had he chosen? If he’d opened that car door that Hennie had slammed in his face he could’ve broken the fucker’s shin bones without even trying. He wondered if the girl would have helped him if the tables had been turned, and as soon as he wondered he knew the answer and he felt sick again.

  He turned and looked north-west. He could head across the veld, away from all this shit, all this shame. From here you could reach the Kalahari without crossing another road. Of course, you’d never reach it. The state he was in he wouldn’t reach sundown. But it wouldn’t be a bitch move. Let the land take him back. Wipe the slate. Nasty way to go out, though. He’d have to throw away the gun he had in his belt or he’d end up using it.

  He heard a car engine and looked up the road towards Langkopf. It was still too early for heat haze but it seemed a long time before the vehicle came into view. He saw the shape of the light rack on the roof.

  He realised that for a while there, raving and weeping and vomiting on his own soul, he’d actually been doing all right for himself. He’d been getting somewhere, crawling towards something worth finding. He knew that because he felt it all shrivel away, leaving something much smaller, someone who wasn’t going anywhere at all.

  It was Rudy’s patrol car.

  Jason watched it roll by and slow into a U-turn. It pulled up beside him and Rudy leaned over and opened the passenger door. He flicked a cigarette out onto the tarmac.

  ‘Jump in.’

  The land had beaten Rudy, too, broken him and driven him into town long ago. But it had left him with a splinter of its hardness in his heart. Jason got in and shut the door.

  ‘Where’s your shirt?’ said Rudy.

  ‘I lost it,’ said Jason.

  Rudy drove off.

  ‘You lost your phone too.’

  Jason shrugged. The last he could remember of his phone it was lying on the table in the shebeen. He’d taken some selfies; and maybe been online, he wasn’t sure. Everything after that was confusion. Hennie slapping him, the smell of the bar-room floor, the escape to the cars. Everything but the girl and the look on her face. He’d never forget that. He stared through the windscreen.

  ‘For a second I thought you’d been kidnapped, or worse,’ said Rudy.

  ‘Why would you think that?’ said Jason.

  ‘Because when I called you a black fella answered.’

  ‘I lost it in Cape Town. Because I’m stupid.’

  ‘Well, you’re in luck. He picked it up in the street when it rang. I told him I was a police and he promised to drop it in the post.’

  ‘You think he will?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Said he was on his way to church. A respectful type, the way it used to be.’ Rudy smiled. ‘They’re not all criminals, you know.’

  The girl’s face came into Jason’s head again. He rubbed his eyes until she went away.

  ‘So you had a spot of bother with Hennie.’

  ‘Hennie’s a turd.’

  ‘Anybody who knows him can tell you that,’ said Rudy.

  The gun in his belt was digging into Jason’s ribs. He pulled it out and made sure the safety was on and laid it in his lap. He saw Rudy’s glance.

  ‘What did Hennie say?’ said Jason.

  Rudy nodded at the gun. ‘He said you’d fired that off in some dive and upset the local riff-raff.’

  Jason nodded. He wanted to tell Rudy about the girl. But he couldn’t. At that moment he would gladly have sent Hennie Hendricks to the floor of the pit. If the girl was dead, it was Hennie that had killed her. But he couldn’t drop Dirk in there with him. He couldn’t betray a friend. Dirk was the only true friend he’d ever had.

  ‘I did worse at your age,’ said Rudy. ‘Forget about it.’

  ‘You’re not going to come down on me?’

  Rudy lit another cigarette. He inhaled and blew out the smoke with exasperation.

  ‘Jason, when it comes to the rest of the world and every bastard in it, I’m with you. I’m always with you. Come hell or high water.’

  Jason felt his eyes sting with tears. He turned away and wound down the window and stuck his face in the warm wind to dry them off before Rudy could see them.

  ‘That’s what I promised your mother when Oscar died. That’s what I promised her again in her own last hours. I may not have made a good fist of it, but I’m with you. Never forget that.’

  Jason took a deep breath and held it until he knew that his voice would be steady.

  ‘Thanks, Uncle Rudy.’

  ‘And remember, I’m the only one.’

  ‘There’s Dirk, too.’

  ‘Listen. I understand why you’ve held Dirk’s hand all these years – because have no doubt, he needed it more than you did. You’re a thousand times the man he is. You could crush him like a dung beetle. But he will drop you like a used rubber johnny the minute it suits him. That’s what the rich do with the likes of us.’

  Jason didn’t want to believe that. But he probably did.

  ‘I’m sick of feeling smaller than I am.’

  Rudy took another deep drag. He nodded.

  ‘Welcome to the club.’

  5

  Margot’s dream mansion was a gorgeous pile of wood – or as the architect had put it, ‘natural timber’ – glass and stone in what Hennie understood to be the African Zen style. More impressive, to Hennie’s mind, were the four hectares of flourishing greenery in which it sat. More plants grew here – more sheer chlorophyll – than in the surrounding
thousand square kilometres combined. Swimming pool, koi ponds, water features, gardens galore, with solar power, geo-power, and all the eco-friendly bells and whistles that the owner of an environmentally disastrous mining operation could wish for.

  Hennie was particularly proud of the security features, which he had supervised. The estate was enclosed by three-metre-high walls, clad in Travertine stone and topped with an electric fence that was lethal to humans. The concrete was embedded with seismic sensors. Reinforced steel bars extended three metres underground to prevent tunnelling. Four armed guards. Cameras covered every angle and were monitored twenty-four hours a day in the gatehouse security module. The American Embassy in Mogadishu wasn’t better protected, if the Yanks hadn’t been run out of town, Hennie couldn’t remember. Some might think these measures overcautious but in this country they weren’t unusual and Margot had more reason than most.

  Outside the compound were two clay tennis courts with a small pavilion for spectators, a stable for Margot’s three horses, and a hangar for the Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Hennie, Dirk and Simon were all licensed to fly it. The small plane wasn’t a toy. No one apart from engineers wanted to come to Langkopf for meetings, so it was used often enough; and it put them in range of a decent rugby match or even a night at the theatre in Kimberley. To Hennie it was priceless, it made him feel less trapped in the middle of Hell’s creation.

  As the gates opened and Hennie drove through he wondered what kind of mood he would find her in. Margot’s moods could never be predicted and bore no necessary relationship to whatever was going on at the time, or at least to what appeared to Hennie to be going on. If there was an opportunity to get worked up she seized it with both hands and her teeth. If things were rosy, as they usually were, this did not rule out the chance that she would find something somewhere with which to torment herself and anyone else in range.

  Hennie felt no shame in admitting to himself, even if to no one else, that he was a little scared of her. His machismo, if that was the right word, was so extreme, and so often validated by life-threatening experience, that he was able to concede that emotionally, intellectually – in all realms other than the sexual and physical – she was the dominant partner. After some early clashes had neared Armageddon, on which occasions he had backed down because it was clear that she never would, he had realised that this was why he was madly in love with her. And so he still was. The previous women in his life, his memories of whom were as lost to him as those of his toenail clippings, had never scared him for a second. Maybe it was one of those Freudian things. His mother had been a battleaxe in her day.

  He had no doubts he’d done the right thing in abandoning the girl. But he wasn’t sure it was right to keep Margot in the dark. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d kept something significant from her. It was possible he never had. But this cock-up involved Dirk. If he told her about it she would worry and the worry would grow as she imagined the worst. It would go on for weeks, months. It would be like infecting her with a tapeworm. He was scared to tell her he had failed. But not too scared to do it if it was right. He knew how to hold his hand up. He had to protect her from that worm. He had to keep the worm inside his own gut.

  He slowed down and poked a finger into Dirk’s ribs. Dirk shifted but didn’t surface. Hennie felt along the upper rim of Dirk’s eye socket with his thumb and found the notch in the bone and compressed the supraorbital nerve. A trick for rousing the almost dead he’d learned from a medic in 1 Para. After a few seconds, Dirk opened his eyes and reached towards the pain drilling into his skull. Hennie withdrew his thumb.

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Wake up, Dirk, we’re home.’

  ‘I feel like I’ve got a brain tumour.’

  ‘Tell me, what do you remember about last night?’

  ‘Oh Jesus, I’ve got tunnel vision.’

  ‘Last night, Dirk. Think. Think hard.’

  ‘I remember the first shot of sixty per cent mampoer. If I remember the second I’ll throw up. Shit, I need a piss, too. Pull over.’

  ‘You can wait, we’re nearly there. Is that all you remember?’

  ‘Why, what did I do?’

  ‘You didn’t do anything. Can you remember that?’

  Dirk nodded dismissively and grabbed the water bottle and drained it.

  As they approached the house, Margot emerged onto the decking. She was wearing her blue silk dressing gown and holding a coffee cup. Ash-blonde hair dishevelled. Head and shoulders held up and back as always. Magnificent as ever. She wasn’t smiling.

  Hennie parked up and got out and walked round the car to open the door for Dirk. He mustered a grin for Margot.

  Margot said, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘We’re fine, love, nothing’s wrong.’ The tapeworm felt like a large poisonous snake. ‘Nothing that a hot shower and a few hours’ kip won’t cure.’

  ‘Dirk?’ Margot turned her pale blue eyes on her son.

  ‘Mum, please, I’ve got raised intracranial pressure.’

  ‘You weren’t due back until tonight.’

  ‘We got rat-arsed in a shebeen,’ said Dirk. ‘Christ, I’m still rat-arsed.’

  ‘A shebeen where?’ said Margot.

  ‘I don’t know, what does it matter? Some township.’

  Margot looked at Hennie. With that look he was on the rack.

  ‘After the game and dinner and a strip club the lads were feeling bullish. Dirk wanted to take a walk on the wild side. You know how they are.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Young lions. They want to see the world, get a whiff of danger. With me and Simon on board a whiff is all it was ever going to be.’

  ‘What was wrong with sleeping it off in the hotel?’

  Hennie almost stumbled. Then the answer was on his tongue before it had passed through his brain. ‘Jason fired a gun at a poster of Nelson Mandela.’

  Dirk squinted as if affronted by this information. ‘When?’

  ‘I told you not to take that cretin.’

  ‘Don’t start on Jason, Mum.’

  ‘Pissed-up tomfoolery,’ said Hennie. ‘He didn’t hit Nelson or anyone else. But with Dirk just passing the bar exam –’

  ‘On his third attempt.’

  ‘– I didn’t want to chance any bother with the cops, so I brought them straight home.’

  A fair point. Margot managed to swallow it. ‘What was Jason doing with a gun?’

  ‘I carry a gun, you carry a gun,’ said Hennie. ‘I could hardly frisk them all every time we stepped outside.’

  ‘You know why I failed those bloody exams?’ said Dirk.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Margot. ‘You’re still rat-arsed.’

  ‘Because I don’t want a career as a lying bastard.’

  ‘I’ve given you the best education money can buy.’

  ‘I hate the law.’

  ‘Then you should have chosen something else. You’re a grown man.’

  ‘I did it to please you.’

  ‘It does please me. I’m proud of you. What you do with it now is up to you.’

  ‘I’d rather shovel shit with Jason.’

  Hennie saw it coming. The set of her mouth. Her nostrils. Cold rage at white heat. He felt sorry for her. She couldn’t help herself.

  ‘I didn’t know Jason was that talented,’ she said.

  ‘You never liked him,’ said Dirk, ‘even when we were kids. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Jason’s gay,’ said Margot. ‘A homo. Maybe you didn’t know that.’

  Dirk looked at her as if she’d stabbed him. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  Margot shrugged. ‘Maybe he doesn’t know it either. Maybe he doesn’t dare see it that way, they say these things are possible. But he’s in love with you.’

  Hennie wondered if she was right. She usually was. It hadn’t occurred to him but he had no sense for such things. His prejudices in that respect, being strong and impervious to persuasion, blinded him to all but the obvious. It didn’t matt
er. He had to stop this incipient catfight.

  ‘Come on, love,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all perfectly fine with me,’ said Margot to Dirk. ‘I don’t care what he is. Is it fine with you?’

  ‘Jason’s my best friend.’

  Margot said, ‘Is he shovelling your shit or are you shovelling his?’

  Dirk stared at Margot, trying not to blink. Margot didn’t have to try. Dirk trembled and his fists clenched. One day he would go for her. Maybe he needed to. Maybe that’s what she wanted him to do. But not today. Not while Hennie was around. He clapped a hand on Dirk’s back.

  ‘Let’s go, sport.’

  Dirk dropped his eyes and nodded. Hennie gave his shoulder a squeeze. Dirk shrugged him off and walked past his mother without looking at her. Margot clenched her eyes shut. She still held the coffee cup. It was steady. Dirk disappeared into the house. Tears formed beads along Margot’s eyelashes. She wiped them away on the edge of her wrist. Hennie walked over and put his arm around her waist.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll get over it.’

  Hennie took the cup from her fingers and tossed it in a long arc. Coffee sprayed the grass. The cup splashed into the nearest koi pond, scattering the dozing Jap carp.

  Margot said, ‘Why did you do that?’

  Hennie stooped and swept her up in his arms like an old-time film star.

  ‘For what I’ve got in mind, you’ll need both hands.’

  6

  Turner swung his Land Cruiser off the M18 and headed for Woodstock. The dashboard clock read 07:34. If they were as drunk as Khwezi said they were, there was a chance he could catch them in their hotel beds.

  A search of the national database had validated his instinct not to tell Sergeant Rudy Britz that his nephew’s phone had been found on a fresh corpse. Jason Britz had been arrested three times, twice for possession of marijuana and once for an affray that had left two men in hospital requiring reconstructive surgery. Despite the severity of the latter offence, Jason had never been required to stand before a judge. All charges had been dropped. It wasn’t likely that Sergeant Rudy would have helped to put his nephew in a Cape Town interrogation room. Turner had offered to deliver the phone to Jason’s hotel. That had made Rudy cagey, but he’d given him Jason’s name and address and that was enough. Jason lived in Langkopf, a small town on the other side of nowhere in the Northern Cape. The smartphone would tell him more about Jason than his uncle Rudy knew.