Payback - A Cape Town thriller

by Mike Nicol

  Mikey said, ‘Hout Bay’s buggered. They’ve got wild crime from the squatters. Story I heard about a black family come down from Jo’burg to cycle in the Argus, they book into this expensive guesthouse, full-on security, armed response, electric fences, anyhow the black daddy gets up to take a pee in the middle of the night there’s another black daddy on the landing who’s got a shopping list from the shacklands, this dude does him right there, pow, nine mil smack in the chest.’

  ‘Gives the city a bad image.’

  ‘No kidding, bru.’

  Val picked up the signs for the kennels over the bridge, turned into side roads heading back up the valley along the river away from the sea, the plots getting bigger, the road going from tar to gravel. The sign on a gate said Domestic Animal Welfare Group. He parked the car on the verge. They walked up a path to a ranch-style house set under bluegums. Everything in shadow. The house in need of paint, a glass pane in the front door cracked. A note above the buzzer said ring for attendance.

  They did. And again. Twice more before a woman appeared with a parakeet on her shoulder, small dogs yapping at her feet. Mikey noticed she wore sheepskin slippers that might’ve been chewed by a dog.

  They both said ‘Hi ma’am’ - gave her full smiles.

  What she saw was two clean and tidy young men, dressed in chinos and v-neck polo shirts with their sunglasses stuck in the v. She smelt a hint of aftershave.

  Val said, ‘We’re from the Mitchell’s Plain Baptist Congregation, ma’am, I’m Val and this is Mikey and we’re arranging a party for orphaned children from a home that is run by our church.’

  Mikey held out a letter with a printed masthead. ‘This is our address and charity number, ma’am, and if you’ll phone our pastor he’ll confirm our mission.’

  She barely glanced at it. ‘Alright. So what’s it you want?’

  ‘Bless you,’ said Mikey.

  Val said, ‘We were hoping, ma’am, that you’d have twelve kittens seeking good homes because it is our intention to give our orphan charges a pet to care for. Under our supervision at all times.’

  ‘In the name of the Lord,’ Mikey said, ‘our intention is to give our young charges something to love and to provide a home for neglected animals.’

  ‘Really?’ said the woman. The parakeet on her shoulder pecked at her hair and she flicked her head to stop the bird.

  ‘All we ask, ma’am, is that the kittens be donated as all our funds are for the running of the orphanage.’

  ‘That so?’ said the woman, looking from one to the other, stopping on Val’s face. ‘Alright. I’ve got kittens I can give you. On your word you’re going to care for them?’

  ‘So help me God,’ said Mikey.

  ‘We’re Christians,’ said Val.

  They followed the woman through the dim house that smelt of cat pee out to the kennels at the back: rows of sad dogs, cats curled asleep in patches of sun, the kittens in a wooden Zozo hut with a high reek.

  ‘It’s two litters,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve got to feed them because their mothers won’t.’ She stared at the men. ‘You know how to feed kittens?’ They said no, and she showed them, telling them how much each kitten needed.

  ‘No problem,’ said Val. ‘The kids will love doing it.’

  The woman fetched two cardboard boxes and divided the kittens between them.

  ‘In God’s name we thank you,’ said Mikey, taking one of the boxes.

  The woman glanced at him like she couldn’t believe he’d said that. She indicated a path round the house they could take to get back to their car.

  They put the kittens in the boot and Val took the coast road to town under the Twelve Apostles. Cranked up some R&B on the sound system. Even so, they could hear the kittens screeching.

  ‘I hate cats,’ said Mikey. ‘Dogs too.’

  ‘How about her bird,’ said Val. ‘It’d shat all down her jersey. Jesus Christ, some people.’

  ‘Weird. Fully.’ Mikey’s cellphone rang: Abdul Abdul.

  ‘I’ve got Sheemina on the other line,’ Abdul said. ‘I want to tell her a nice story.’

  ‘We’re passing through Camps Bay,’ said Mikey. ‘Lotsa babes on the beach. Moms with their kiddies under the palms.’

  ‘Don’t give me shit,’ said Abdul. ‘You wanna be a tour guide, I can arrange it. Give you a special interest in paraplegics.’

  Mikey made a gesture of throwing the phone out the window. Said, ‘Give us half an hour we’ll be done. Mikey’s Decorators at your service.’

  He heard Abdul sigh, say, ‘You stuff-up, I phone the SPCA.’

  Mikey disconnected. ‘What’s his case?’.

  Val shrugged, wondering how nice it would be in a Clifton apartment, view of the sea, view of the mountains. A place like Sheemina February had. Among the rich larneys.

  4

  Oumou took one look at the house and said, ‘Non.’ Continued in French, What was he thinking? Had he taken complete leave of his senses? Went into English so there could be no possibility of Mace misunderstanding the message. ‘This is a ruin. We cannot live in a broken house. We have a daughter.’ She gestured at the wild overgrown garden. ‘There will be horrible insects. A little girl cannot play in a place with horrible insects. Non, non, non. The house is not in the question. We have to build a new house.’

  ‘Whokai. Whoa, whoa, whoa, love. Don’t chew his head off.’

  Oumou shifted her glare from her husband to Dave Cruikshank, the estate agent.

  ‘Love,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, ‘this is wonderland. Beatrix Potter, hey?’ He blew a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth. ‘Call in a garden service, they’ll sort it out no time at all. The kiddy’ll think it’s magic.’

  ‘It is a ruin,’ said Oumou.

  ‘So knock it down, love.’ Dave flicked ash into the riotous vegetation. ‘What I’m showing you and Mace here is a bargain. This sort of property doesn’t come on the market every day. This sort of property’s scarcer than hens’ teeth.’ He gave a display of his teeth. ‘You want to build a new house, love, then that’s what you do. Get your Mace to speak to his pals in the building trade. Six months’ time you open the door onto shiny travertine marble.’ He grinned again: his upper dentures not quite straight, and put a hand on Oumou’s arm. She drew back. ‘Don’t look at what you see, love. Look at the potential.’ Dave put the key in the front door. ‘Stand back a bit, is not a pleasant smell.’

  Before he sold property, Dave sold cars. He sold Mace the Spider, a good deal and a sound buy. After an engine overhaul, a wonderful car. As he put it, ‘The 1970 Alfa’s class, Mace. The least you can do is give it an overhaul.’

  Mace now believed it was time to give their lifestyle an overhaul. Get out of the security complex in the suburbs and into the city. If you were going to live in Cape Town, you lived in the City Bowl. The peninsula suburbs were too House and Garden, the seaboard out of his price bracket, both sides, the Atlantic and False Bay. He wanted some of the city’s life: the sirens, the lights, the wail of the muezzin’s call to prayer, the cotton days of fog. And to be below the mountain, to feel its heat. What he liked about the city was the whacking great mountain in its middle. Anywhere you looked, the mountain loomed. He’d heard Dave was in property. He called him. Dave said, ‘Funny you should ring now, there’s this place just come on our books, Mace, come’n take a look see.’

  Oumou said, ‘Non. Dave is a crook. What he sells there is always a story.’

  Mace said, ‘Let’s see what he’s got.’

  Oumou came back, ‘I know what you are going to do. You are going to buy this house. Because it is a bargain.’

  Her mind was set on concrete, glass and chrome. This desert woman, who’d lived in a mud house most of her life, wanted concrete, glass and chrome. Mace couldn’t understand it.

  Before he opened the door, Dave said, ‘Like I say, love, you could knock it down. But why would you do that when you got walls and a floor here already. You get me?’


  ‘We are coming to the city for the view,’ said Oumou.

  They turned to look at the view hidden behind a hedge so thick and wild not even a bird could nest in it.

  ‘Trim the forestry, love,’ said Dave. ‘You’ll get all the view you want.’

  He opened the door. The house exhaled must, dust, rot, and death.

  ‘It’s not good,’ said Dave, ‘like I said.’ He took two torches out of his jacket pocket, handed one to Oumou. ‘Like I say, what we’ve got here, love, is about dreams. Forget the present. This is the future.’

  Oumou gave the torch to Mace so she could tighten the bandanna tied over her hair. Mace watched her, saw a faint smudge of clay beside her right ear where she’d hooked back a stray strand. Her dungarees, too, were stained with clay. Her canvas shoes smudged and clotted like she’d been treading in mud.

  ‘Today is my pottery class,’ she’d said to protest the time Mace set.

  Dave had said, ‘Move fast, my son, I’m fighting off the pack.’

  ‘Forty-five minutes,’ Mace had said to Oumou. ‘I’ll fetch you.’

  ‘What we’ve got here,’ Dave had said, ‘is your deceased estate. Owner went into a home twenty years ago. Died last week. One son in Canada. Who wants shot of the hassle. What I’m telling you is any price is good.’

  ‘And your commission?’

  ‘Fixed as of the asking price, my son. You get below the marker, you owe me.’

  Mace could hear him sucking at his dentures. ‘Deal?’

  He looked over Oumou’s shoulder into the stench and darkness of the house. Ripped wallpaper, old newspapers, shit everywhere, much of it human.

  ‘Mind the planks, love,’ said Dave, ‘bit dicey some of them.’

  They followed him in, Mace in front, Oumou behind, her hand latched onto his belt. Dave opened a door off the passage into a sitting room, streaks and spots of light filtering through holes in the corrugated-iron sheeting at the windows.

  ‘Think sun,’ he said. ‘Think big couches, thick carpets, sun, sun, sun. Sun all over this room. Your kiddy lying there in front of the winter fire doing her homework.’ Dave rubbed his hand over the fireplace tiles. A dull green showed through the grime. ‘Genuine, my son. Old Victorian. That’s what you’re buying here. History. Vintage Cape Town. Gracious living. What you say, love? You getting the picture here? Seeing how things could be in the not too distant?’

  Mace moved the torch beam over the walls, smoke blackened, the skirtings charred. In all the rooms the same smoke markings, filth everywhere. Bottles, broken glass, tins, faeces, lumps of food dried to a powder, spider webs snagging against their faces. Behind him Oumou sneezed, cursed in French.

  Dave said, ‘I was into property, I’d snatch this myself.’

  ‘Where is the problem?’ said Oumou.

  Dave patted his trouser pocket. ‘None of the ready, love. Dave Cruikshank’s right extended.’

  He shuffled them back into the entrance hall. A staircase disappeared into the dimness of the upper storey.

  ‘Bit rickety,’ he said, kicking at the lower stairs. ‘Take my word for it, great views.’ He bent to open a door to a cupboard beneath the staircase. ‘But take a decko here. Down there’s your original mud-floor cellar. History bloke we contacted at the uni said probably belonged to an earlier house. He reckoned might’ve been a farmhouse up this part of the mountain once. How’s that? You get that racked up, you can lay your Cape reds down there ‘n become a connoisseur.’

  ‘You going to show us?’

  Oumou’s cellphone rang, and she headed for the warmth of the sunlight to answer it.

  ‘Right now, it’s best you take my word for it.’ Dave closed the cupboard door. ‘Spiders mostly. The history bloke said he wasn’t going in there till there’d been fumigators. Not the sort of chap to excavate the pyramids. But then me neither. You convinced?’

  Mace nodded, half-listening out for Oumou.

  Dave dusted off his hands. ‘Your wife a born Frenchie, my son? Looks like that model. The shaven-headed bird. Iman.’

  ‘Malian. Place called Malitia. One of those mud towns.’

  ‘Always wondered what happens when it rains. Those towns must just wash away.’

  ‘Mostly it doesn’t. Rain.’

  ‘That right? Not a drop?

  Oumou came towards them holding out her phone. ‘This woman says she is calling for you.’

  Mace took the phone and answered but the connection was gone. The call register gave no number.

  Behind him Dave said to Oumou. ‘What you think, love? You see yourself and the kiddy living here? Your old man mowing the lawn?’

  Before she could answer, Mace, riding on an instinct this might be Sheemina February, said, ‘Did the caller give you her name?’

  Oumou shook her head.

  ‘She knew your name?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘She say anything else?’

  ‘Non. She says Mrs Bishop can I speak to your husband.’

  Dave locked the front door, came to stand up close. ‘Children, I’m not putting pressure, far from it, thing is, you’re running ahead of the pack but the dogs are closing. Quick decision is of the essence. Next twenty-four hours this place is going to be in new hands. If those were your hands I’d be happy.’

  Mace’s cellphone rang: Matthew Hartnell. ‘You-you-you’ve got to c-come here,’ he said. ‘To the club. N-now.’

  5

  In the car Mace said, pointing down Molteno Road, ‘Look at that. Don’t you want to live with this every day?’

  Cape Town city spread below them, clear now with the brown haze lifted and the sun hard on the buildings. Across the bay a white sickle of beach gleamed up the west coast for such a distance you could almost make out the bulk of the nuclear power station.

  Mace revelled, ‘Oh man.’

  Oumou reached out to put her hand on his arm. ‘Oui, this is beautiful. But not the house. In the house there is a bad feeling.’

  ‘Ah, come on.’ Mace slowed for the traffic lights at the reservoir. ‘It’s an old house. Get the renovators and the painters in, like Dave says, it’s what the house can be, not what it is.’

  Oumou smiled, took her hand off his arm.

  * * *

  Mace, she knew, could be stubborn and demanding. And sometimes she resisted and sometimes she didn’t. This time she would wait. In the waiting much would change. Maybe they would move to this house, but maybe they wouldn’t. She kept the smile, thinking of how for a time at the beginning she had resisted him, even when she didn’t want to.

  ‘You come here for your business, to my town Malitia to sell guns, you go away again,’ she had told him. ‘For months you are away. You come back with that woman, Isabella, I think she is your wife.’

  ‘Isabella is a contact. American. She can get us guns. It’s business.’

  ‘You sleep with her. This is business?’

  Mace had said, ‘That’s over’ - and reached out for her hand, drawn her towards him.

  She laughed at his brazenness, pushed him away.

  In Paris men had been like that. She met them, she talked to them, they thought they could lay her. She told them no. Three years she’d spent fighting them off, one way or the other. Four or five she’d pulled a knife on to make her point. The ceramicist she worked for said, ‘Why make pots when rich men want to screw you?’

  ‘Because I do not want to screw them or you,’ she said.

  He leered at her. Always trying to feel her bum, her breasts until she threatened his groin with a knife and said she’d set free his testicles, if he didn’t stop it. The gesture got them to an understanding.

  When her time was up she went back to the desert, to Malitia, to shape pots from her native clay.

  The potter said, ‘Stay in France, you will make more money. We can organise an exhibition.’

  Oumou said, maybe one day.

  The man she met on her return to Malitia was Mace Bishop. He was sitting with her broth
er at a café where men gathered in the afternoon, smoking hookahs, drinking coffee. Playing dominoes. He looked at her as the French men had done, but said nothing. That night he ate at their house. He and the other man, Pylon, joking with her brother.

  He admired her pots. He spoke to her in poor French and she told him to speak in English.

  ‘You know English?’ he said, surprised.

  ‘Like French, it is the language of guns,’ she said. ‘When I was a girl there was a man here the same as you. An Englishman. If he had nothing to do he would teach me English.’

  ‘He couldn’t have been very busy.’

  She laughed. As he stood grinning at her said, ‘Why must you sell guns here?’

  The grin didn’t leave his face. ‘For the money.’

  Oumou set a lump of clay on the wheel the French ceramicist had given her. ‘So that people can kill each other. Kill women and children. Little babies even.’

  ‘They do that,’ he said. ‘Anyhow.’

  ‘You are a heartless man.’

  He told her then about his country and the war there and the need to finance what he called ‘the struggle’. He didn’t tell her about Cayman. About his nest egg.

  ‘And this makes it right, to sell guns?’ she said.

  ‘I sell guns to those who need to fight. Like we are.’

  ‘To children.’

  ‘In my country they took the lead. They have a future.’

  ‘Empty words,’ she said, turned to her clay, smoothed it, rounded it, began to shape a form that was long and elegant like her neck. She started the wheel and let this man who sold guns watch her make something beautiful.

  For a time she resisted him, his kind attention that would tease her, never touch her, make her laugh. And then one sunset they walked through the mud streets, across the casbah where men packed away their wares and went up the steps onto the wall that had once enclosed the town, gazing into the wadi at boys playing soccer with a ball on the sand between the palm trees. Behind them the imams in their mosques called the faithful to prayer and Mace said, ‘I want to sleep with you.’