by Wole Soyinka
Then I don’t know what to do.
I think about tomorrow.
I think about how the seven o’clock sun will blaze across the sky as I drive eastward along Mombasa Road and onwards to the Organic Body Building warehouses at Mlolongo. Where Striped Shirt . . . ah! Fuck him. I don’t want to think about him or his organic body buildingness.
I think about how, like an uncaged something, I’ll move into my car after clocking out. The great remains of the weekend waiting for me. The leather of the steering wheel burning my palms. It’ll be a sky blue Saturday. And it’ll be a complete coincidence – a plane indeed landing. I’ll see it floating in from my left side where the national park expanse is. And this is it – as my car moves forwards, the plane moves in from the left. I’ll slow down and look up through my windscreen and I’ll get to see it from exactly underneath for a second or two. The hot silver metal of its undercarriage, the landing gear tyres, the smoke coming out from its turbines and the oil boil sound of its whoosh-thunder as it glides past. The zenith sun blindingly revealed.
I think about how the traffic will stretch from Bellevue to Nyayo Stadium. I’ll look into my side mirror and I will see that my fingers look like Daddy’s, my slim nose looks like his, my curly hair is his. I think I am Daddy.
I think about a yesterday.
Yesterday, I read a volume of Ladybird Educational in the Aga Khan Nursery School library. I came home and told Daddy I was very confused. Some guy had written, ‘the Earth rotates’. I told Daddy to look outside and tell me if he thought the earth was rotating because I couldn’t think it that way. Then at night Daddy took me to the kitchen.
from a novel in progress The Score
Hawa Jande Golakai
Dawn snuck up out of nowhere. Across the grass, patches of morning gold swelled and merged, creeping over stretch by stretch of dewy lawn. Blinking as rays striped across her face, Vee swallowed hard and picked up the pace. She squatted and examined the dead man’s feet. His shoes were relatively clean, bar disks of dried mud and grass jutting off the back of the soles. Flecks of mud spattered the bottom inch of his chinos. She leaned closer and took a picture with her phone. Gingerly, Nokia pinched between two fingers, she inched up the cuff and peered up his hairy leg.
A flurry of gasps made her jump.
‘Hai, wenza’ntoni!’ Zintle yelped.
‘You frickin’ crazy?’ Chlöe growled.
‘What I should do?’ Vee hissed over her shoulder. ‘Y’all got a better idea?’
Huddled and wild-eyed, Chlöe and Zintle stared her down in silence, ample bosoms undulating in unison. Zintle tightened her grip on Chlöe’s arm, chunky fingers digging trenches of red into Chlöe’s milky skin.
Dah helluva mark dah one will leave, Vee thought, wincing.
‘We’re not supposed to touch anything. And you’re touching things!’
‘I touched one thing!’ Vee wobbled as she got to her feet and reached out to steady herself. Her flailing hand grappled over dead leg, which sent her stomach contents into a slow roil. The man’s body, strung by the neck to the coat hook, took up a gentle pendulous swing, the fabric of his chinos and leather of his shoes making a low, eerie rasp against the grainy cement wall. Chlöe and Zintle shrieked and leapt away. Vee toppled onto her butt, scrabbled in the gravel till she found her footing and scurried over to them. Together, the circle heaved in harmony.
‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ Chlöe whispered. ‘No, I mean I’ve seen a normal dead person before. At a couple of funerals, when they’re clean and stuffed and make-upped. But not like this.’ One hand knuckled to a cheek, she moved it in frantic circles against her skin, a sure sign she was freaking out. ‘Not, like, a brutal murder.’
Vee sucked her teeth, a biting ‘mttssshw’, cut short considering the sombre atmosphere. ‘Dah wha’tin you call a brutal murder? It somethin’ like a very orange orange?’
‘Acch man.’ Chlöe rolled her eyes. ‘I mean . . . you know . . .’
‘I’ve been to hundreds of funerals,’ Zintle breathed, then stopped, mouth agape. From her expression, this was clearly a new one for her too.
‘Exactly. Who’s seen this kinda thing happen every day?’
Vee held her tongue. In her time, more recently than she cared to recall, she’d seen far too many abnormally dead people. Shot, hacked, diseased, starved . . . And once, bloated flesh piled high enough to darken the horizon of her young mind for months, years even. In comparison, this hapless soul had gone with reasonable dignity.
She averted her eyes, the violence of her heartbeat reaching up her chest like a clenching hand, closing her throat. Now was not the time to let an acute phobia of dead bodies run riot. The dangling man had her property. Every time she looked at him, her eyes were drawn to his neck, a thickened, bruised pipe wrapped in purple fabric. Her flesh tingled and shrank, drawing her face tight. She had to think clearly and quickly. Neither was happening.
‘Why isn’t anyone coming? Why the hell’s it taking so long?’ Chlöe whined.
Zintle turned her back to the scene. ‘They’re coming. We called them, so they should be here soon. But you’re right, it’s taking forever.’ Eyes fixed to the gravel, she smoothed down the front of her maids’ uniform and shuffled her feet. ‘I want to leave this place.’
Chlöe clucked sympathetically. ‘It’s OK if you want go back to reception. We can all wait there.’ Vee whipped her a withering look. ‘Or maybe hang around with us a bit longer. Please. It’ll look weird to the police if we’re left alone with him, when we’re the ones . . .’
Vee fired another eye, sharper still, watched Chlöe taper off to a biting of her lips.
Situation was bad enough already. Why help it escalate from strange to outright damning, which it sure as hell would when the police inevitably found out exactly which guest had been present when the body was found. The less incriminated she looked, the better.
‘I can’t keep working here any more,’ Zintle repeated. ‘Too much bad luck.’
Vee softened. The last forty-eight hours had been rough on all of them, but Zintle had borne the brunt. If she heard the phrase ‘excelling outside of one’s job description’ ever again, she would think of hospitality’s unluckiest ambassador.
Zintle’s face contorted. ‘Ugghhnn, I feel sick.’ She doubled over, clutching at her stomach.
Chlöe’s horror magnified. ‘Sies man, don’t throw up.’ She rubbed a soothing hand over the maid’s back. ‘If I see or even hear someone throw up, it makes me sick too.’
‘I . . . uuggghhnn . . . won’t vomit . . .’ Zintle compelled herself, gulping air like a landed fish.
‘Oi. Can you not say “vomit” either? It’s not helping.’
Vee edged closer. The man’s eyes were shut, tiny slats of the whites just visible when she crouched. She’d always thought the popular strangled expression was one of bulging, terrified eyes, shot through with harried blood vessels. Tongue drooping over toothy grimace for effect. Nothing like that here. Facial muscles slack, expression . . . not peaceful, or particularly anything for that matter. Just gone.
She inhaled and clamped her airways before creeping even nearer. Once upon a time in a faraway lab somewhere, super-nerds had taken time to ascertain that the soul allegedly weighed twenty-one grams. They probably hadn’t bothered identifying its odour, but some process made the human body smell torturously different after death. Not decay exactly; this man had been gone a mere matter of hours. But there was that subtle yet unmistakable turn after the flesh and spirit parted ways, the thing she could stand least of all. She stared at the noose around the man’s neck, throbbing alternately with regret and then shame for feeling such regret.
‘Don’t even think about it.’ Vee whipped around. Eyes narrowed, Chlöe stared her down over the head of a wilting Zintle, now snuggled in her bosom.
‘I wasn’t,’ Vee snapped. Maybe a tiny, foolish part of her was. But if she removed the scarf . . . hide it where? And explain
the absence of a murder weapon how? Massive shitstorm potential.
The silk had been knotted twice then twisted completely along the length stretched around the neck. The noose closed in a third knot at the back of the head, where the loose material had been fashioned into a loop of sorts, easily slung over a worthy hook. Under the substantial weight, the workmanship of the coat rack was literally holding up. The tips of the man’s shoes barely touched the ground. Breath held again, Vee zoomed her phone’s camera and snapped a close-up of the garrotte. She stared at it for a long time, nonplussed.
A triangular tip of white poking out of his pants caught the corner of her eye. She exhaled shakily. A furtive peep over her shoulder ran smack into Chlöe’s glare, drilling a hole through the back of her head. Answering with silent plea, Vee deftly slid the object from the man’s pocket and stuck it in hers. She turned her back on Chlöe’s widening eyes and frantic head-shaking.
‘They’re coming,’ she said.
Three older men, flanked by two strapping groundsmen in blue work jumpsuits, trudged across the expanse of grass. The groundsmen were no less wild-eyed than they had been when, short of two hours ago, they’d come across the florid-faced white man strung up outside their workroom door. They hung back with a couple of the older men, wildly gesticulating over what Vee felt sure was a colourful extrapolation of a story they’d told several times already. The last of the group, hard-faced and decked in a trench coat that was absurd considering the building heat, made a beeline for them. Is it a coincidence that the police look the same everywhere, Vee wondered, or do they follow an international manual? A surge of weariness cut through the shock, overcame, left her feeling like a jaded witness in a cheap private-eye novel until the policeman tripped on the downhill verge of the lawn and nearly fell. She turned away to hide a giggle.
A crowd of gawkers, guests and staff from the lodge, was in full fluster by the time the officers had questioned them. The single crime-scene technician, whom Vee had anticipated would be an entire team working with scientific flourish, simply clicked away at different angles on a basic Kodak and cut the body down. Another stab twisted under her ribs as the massive pair of scissors worked through her silk scarf.
Chlöe sighed. ‘I feel cheated after all these years of watching CSI. We could’ve done that. Well, not take the body down ourselves but . . .’
Vee tuned out. The best bit was kicking off. The cops formed a scrum of whispers for what felt like forever. They pulled Zintle, sobbing by then, aside. Head down with hands clamped under her armpits, she seemed to be speaking in fits and bursts. She shook her head and shrugged a lot. As the probing wore on, she stole guilty glances over her shoulder at Vee and Chlöe. One of the cops snuck a comforting arm around her shoulder and leered down the front of her uniform. Finally, Hardface Trench, who was clearly in charge, broke the huddle and set about creating another expert beeline. He had thrown off the coat, revealing a crisp blue shirt and pants of a brown so similar to his complexion that from afar he looked naked from the waist down.
‘Ohhh, Gooood . . .’ Chlöe groaned. Vee steeled her spine and set her expression to ‘concerned but oblivious’. In the pockets of her jeans, her fingers began to tremble as they stroked the rectangle of paper.
‘What’s your name, ma’am?’ Hardface looked directly at Vee.
‘Voinjama Johnson.’ She let him blink, purse his lips, mouth the name soundlessly many times as he scribbled in a battered notebook, and offered no help. She wondered what highly revised version he’d put down. Probably just Johnson; most people went with Johnson.
‘It’s my understanding you know this man.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Hhhmmph. He’s one . . .’ He squinted, flipping at leisure through the notebook.
‘Gavin Berman,’ Vee blurted.
Hardface stopped and raised his head very slowly. ‘You just said you didn’t know him.’
‘You asked if I know him, not if I know his name.’
The policeman’s head reared a barely perceptible inch as his eyes hardened. His body language computed a rapid adjustment from ‘the easy way’ to ‘the hard way’, now clearly the only option on offer. ‘Would you mind coming with me so long? So we can work out how everyone here knows everyone else, which you seem to know a lot about.’ His arm executed an upswing as if to shepherd her along the path. Neither Vee nor Chlöe, crowded to her back like a fledgling to its mother, fell in line. The arm dropped. He flicked his head in the direction of the front entrance and abruptly strode off, a contemptuous click of his tongue slapping the morning air.
‘Find Lovett now. Start with that blonde’s room, then his,’ Vee whispered to Chlöe. ‘I doubt they’ve left yet. And call Nico.’
‘I thought we weren’t calling Nico!’
‘Change of plan,’ Vee muttered.
Vee rotated kinks out of her neck and shoulders as she trudged down the hall to the managing editor’s office, apprehension stirring up her breakfast. She really wasn’t up for it this morning. Investigating for Urban magazine had been one thing, but wading through the innards of the City Chronicle beast had so far proved a different adventure altogether. Yeah, definitely Jonah in the belly of the whale level of wading. Nico Van Wyk captained his ship using strangely different coordinates, ones she had yet to decipher.
‘Bugger off,’ he barked in answer to her knock. ‘Unless it’s Johnson.’
The office was cool and furnished with austere, practical taste, a man’s space. Chronicle was close to the top floor of the office building, the room swept through from a perfect angle by breeze. Envious as always, Vee thought of her cubicle next to a sealed-off window.
‘Overtaking specific projects without permission.’
She blinked. ‘Beg your pardon?’
Rifling through the filing cabinet behind his desk, Nico didn’t turn or look up. ‘Seat,’ he pointed. Vee considered declining, thought better of it and sat.
He pulled a sheet from a folder and sank into his chair. He vigorously massaged his face with both hands before dragging them over his head, buzzed short of honey-brown hair to downplay the balding dome on top, and down the back of his neck. Deep-set, grey-green eyes that saved his face from being plain were rimmed faintly with red. He stared for ages. Vee squirmed. Finally, he smacked a palm on the desk in a ‘let’s get down to it’ manner.
‘Saskia can’t stand you. You’re not madly in love with her either. She says you’re messing about with the online team, making it hard for her to do her job. Why can’t you learn to stay out of her way? You’ve been here over a year. You should have the hang of it by now.’ He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Meddling.’ He looked up. ‘Why do you do that?’
Vee sighed. He was quoting from one of the reference letters in her file, and she would bet her right arm this one was from none other than her old boss, Portia Kruger. ‘I’m not meddling. Not exactly. It’s just . . . Saskia’s the office manager but she barely manages. She’s fulla wahala, everything got to be palaver with her. She’s more concerned with running people than she is about quality output. Who cares if I help the web guys? They’re understaffed.’
‘They’re doing fine, all things considered.’
‘They’re not. What things considered?’
‘Backchat and authority issues.’ He tapped a line on the piece of paper, nodding emphatically at her sceptical expression. ‘Seriously, that’s really on here. Kruger’s thorough.’
‘Can I get a copy of that?’
‘What do you think?’ He leaned back again. ‘What’s your deal with Anton?’
Vee threw up her hands. ‘You mean Saskia’s toilet paper. He’s more comfortable with Afrikaans, why can’t he be on the Afrikaans editorial?’
‘He should get comfortable with communicating well in both languages. Chlöe Bishop does.’
‘Chlöe is half Afrikaans. And she studied languages at UCT. Anton can catch up if y’all give him chance to breathe.’
‘Propensity to preach and pick up strays,’ Nico intoned, making an invisible tick against the paper. Vee muttered a curse and sat back. If he was all systems go for a verbal flogging, she wasn’t going to help him at it.
‘Oudtshoorn.’
‘Hehn?’
‘Oudtshoorn. You know where that is?’
Vee flicked through her mental archive. ‘Mossel Bay?’
‘Further. Out in the south-western Cape, Klein Karoo country. The Grotto Lodge is a two-star establishment out there, and they’re gunning for their third this year. They put on their best face during last year’s World Cup and still didn’t get it. They’re not letting it go this year, and that means they need all the stellar reviews they can get.’
He slid a thin manila file, open to a brightly coloured pamphlet, over to her. ‘Looks nice enough. Apparently it was a hot-spot during the soccer, though God knows why anyone would want to be somewhere as beautiful as the Garden Route when it was pissing down at kick-off last June. Anyway, bloody tourists never seem to give a damn about realities like the weather.’ Sighing, he rubbed his eyes hard enough to wrinkle his forehead. ‘It’s gone up in the revolving door ratings with the number of tourists and ministers wives that have been passing through. If they need more positive spin, it can’t hurt. They get publicity, we get advertising.’
Vee gave the leaflet a polite perusal throughout his speech. Adorning the front was a hulking, rustic building of indeterminate architectural style squatting amongst some dusty red boulders. ‘Quaint’ was the first word that leapt off the blurb inside. She closed it. The look she shot was an admixture of ‘I’m not following you’ and ‘I think I am, but you can’t be serious’.