Ishmael Toffee

by Roger Smith

  Table of Contents

  Ishmael Toffee

  Falling: a short story

  Also by Roger Smith

  About the author

  Copyright

  Ishmael Toffee

  by Roger Smith

  1

  Ishmael Toffee wakes reaching for the knife, his fingers finding only a torn blanket and sand. He sits up, sweating, hearing the clamor from outside: a woman screaming like a siren and men laughing low in their throats.

  Not the noise that woke him. Used to that from years in prison. Sleep through anything, no problem. Not bothered neither by the car lights and the doof-doof music washing through the hole in the wall where the rusted sheet iron and the bits of wood don’t meet so nice. He’ll fix that hole later. Nail it shut. Don’t need to see outside, all you see is other people’s problems. And he has plenty of his own, God only knows.

  No, fear woke him, plain and simple. He’s scared shitless of being out here, being what they call a free man. Doesn’t feel like no free man, prowling this dark shack even a short-ass like him can’t stand up straight in. Scared of the day ahead. Scared they’ll come for him, take him back to prison, where the bastards will kill him for sure.

  He lies down on the blanket, trying to find some calm, but there is to be no more sleep tonight for Ishmael Toffee.

  When he leaves the shack in the morning the sea of rusted iron that is Tin Town sprawls out into so much space that it robs him of his breath and he almost runs back inside. But he shrugs on his backpack and locks up, hands shaking on the shiny new padlock he bought with the bit of money they gave him when they kicked him loose.

  A white cop car comes bumping up the road, sun burning the window glass, and Ishmael darts between shacks, eyes fixed on the dirt, shirtsleeves rolled down and collar up to cover his chops. Cops would be on him like a rash if they saw his gang tattoos. Ishmael is in such a rush he nearly gets pissed on by a one-legged old man, leaning on a wooden crutch in a doorway, dribbling a stream into the sand. Ishmael growls and the man reverses, dick flapping after him.

  Ishmael ducks under washing lines, passes a sheep with a matted coat standing up to its knees in a pile of trash, grazing. A small mongrel darts in behind the sheep and nips at its shins. The sheep moans and kicks back, but it don’t stop its breakfast. The dog smells Ishmael and bares its teeth. Ishmael aims a kick at its accordion ribs and jogs down to the road, taxi horns bleating into the windless air.

  Distant Table Mountain and its cloth of cloud rises up clear and sharp over the endless shanties and box houses of the Cape Flats, home to millions of coloreds—mixed-race people like Ishmael. One of the most violent places on the planet this, far from the beaches and wine farms of tourist Cape Town. Places Ishmael’s only ever seen on the TV.

  He pushes his way into the red minibus that’ll take him out of Tin Town to his first job ever in his forty-five years on God’s miserable earth.

  In the taxi he sits with his skinny ass wedged between two overdressed girls—all make-up and perfume—talking over him like he isn’t there. In another lifetime Ishmael would have followed these bitches from the taxi, held a knife to their throats and fucked them senseless, one at a time. Then cut their throats. But no more. He is rehabilitated, a changed man. Well, so the authorities tell him, and who the hell is he to disbelieve them?

  Why he lost the taste for blood, Ishmael Toffee couldn’t say. Killing for him always came easy. From when he was old enough to hold a knife, he’d stuck people dead. When the gangsters back in Paradise Park had wanted somebody gone they’d say “Get the jockey.” That’s what they’d called him, ’cause he was such a short-ass. Had a baby face back then. No more. Worn by the years now, lines deep as blade marks in his skin.

  Killing sent Ishmael to prison and kept him there. When you good at killing you don’t get no rest. The gangs fought for power in prison and an assassin never wanted for work. So the years passed and the bodies piled up and he became ever more feared, the tattoos of his seniority covering every inch of his brown skin.

  Came a day he just didn’t want to do it no more. Walked up to an enemy in the exercise yard, ready to stick him with a shank. Man seeing him, eyes like a rabbit’s, piss turning the crotch of his orange jumpsuit dark. But Ishmael just left the shank in his pocket, didn’t even touch the fucker and shrugged and walked away.

  His gang were nice and angry. “What’s up, Jockey? You gone fucken soft on us now?”

  Ishmael shrugged, lay on his bunk in the cell crammed with the stinking asses of thirty other men. Saw Dr. Phil on the TV, big bald fucker talking about career demotivation. That’s what I got me, Ishmael thought. I got me fucken career demotivation. Dr. Phil saying a man needs to find his passion. Ja, Doc, show me the passion in killing another pathetic brown motherfucker.

  Word got around about the jockey and he knew they were gonna come for him. An assassin don’t get no retirement. He got dead.

  Ishmael’s ass was saved by the warden of the prison who took a personal interest. Warden, brown man like him, was a reborn, tried to tell Ishmael he’d found God. Ishmael hadn’t found him no god. Hadn’t found him nothing. Lost something, is what. Lost his taste for blood, plain and simple.

  The warden knew Ishmael wouldn’t last in the general population and moved him into a single cell. Gave him a TV and a budgie in a cage. Ishmael would let the budgie out to walk on his shoulders and his head. Shat on him sometimes. He didn’t mind.

  Then the warden told him to go work in the vegetable garden that stretched down to the perimeter fence of Pollsmoor Prison. And there Ishmael found him Dr. Phil’s passion. Couldn’t wait to get out there every day, stick his hands in the ground. Plant things and watch them grow.

  Warden telling him, “Toffee, you’ve got green fingers.”

  Next few years Ishmael Toffee was a happy man. Him and his garden and his budgie. Then they told him that he had made such good progress, they gonna give him parole. Didn’t want no parole. Last fucken thing he wanted. But his budgie died and he was out on the street, first time in more than twenty years. Got him the shack in Tin Town and got him this job.

  What a bloody world.

  The taxi is in a road all trees and high walls and fancy cars that make no noise when they come down the road at you. Brown people like their cars to make a racket, pay good money for that. Whities want it nice and quiet when they drive. Just the way it is.

  Ishmael gets out the taxi in plush Constantia. Not far from Pollsmoor Prison, the barbed wire and guard towers a bad memory somewhere across the trees and the vineyards.

  Ishmael hears the ring of hooves and a young white girl in boots and tight pants with a black helmet on her head comes along on a brown horse, little titties waving hullo as she bounces in the saddle.

  “Missy, sorry,” Ishmael says, lifting a hand in greeting.

  “I don’t have any money,” she says in a voice that could cut glass, clopping on.

  He trots next to her. “No, missy, I don’t want no money. I’m looking for a address.”

  She digs her heels into the sides of the horse and it takes off like somebody stuck a lit cigarette up its asshole. Ishmael hears a car horn and turns as a little truck comes up beside him, so close if he didn’t sway his butt it would have clipped him. Two men inside, brown like him. Rent-a-cops in sunglasses and bullet proof vests.

  One of them, big fucker with a face like a pug dog, gun holstered at his hip, is out the passenger side coming at Ishmael. “You? What you want here?”

  “I’m looking for Price Drive, my brother.”

  “I’m not your fucken brother, you piece of shit.” Pushing Ishmael against the truck, kicking his feet apart. “Hands on the roof.”

  When Ishmael doesn’t move smartly e
nough he catches a smack on the ear, so he flattens his hands on the top of the truck. The driver is out now, lifting the backpack off Ishmael’s shoulder, looking inside.

  “What you want here?” the pug dog asks, frisking him, and none to gentle either.

  “I’m starting a job. For Mr. Goddard. Gardener. I got me a letter in the bag.”

  The driver finds the letter from the girly called herself a social worker, the one who has organized him this job because the warden at Pollsmoor recommended him. The driver grunts, shoves the letter back in the pack.

  “Where’s this Price Drive?” Ishmael asks.

  The pug dog points at a road sign. “Can’t you fucken read?”

  Ishmael can’t, but that is for him to know. “And number fifteen?”

  “Three houses down,” the driver says, tossing the backpack at Ishmael. He doesn’t dare lift his hands from the roof, so the backpack hits him in the ribs and falls to the ground.

  The man frisking him steps back. “Go on then, move your stinking ass.”

  Ishmael takes his pack and walks on, comes to a pair of gates in a wall high as a prison. Presses a buzzer. Nothing. Presses again and hears a woman’s voice—colored—squawk out at him. “Yes?”

  “Ishmael Toffee. I come for the job.”

  “I know who you are. You late.”

  The gates click and open out at him and Ishmael starts down a driveway that leads through a beautiful garden to a house bigger than any he has ever seen, and the air smells fresh and clean and the sun shines through the trees like it is made special for this little patch of heaven.

  2

  Florence April watches the scrawny figure in the badly fitting clothes come walking up to the kitchen door. She shakes her head and sighs, muttering under her breath, “Ay, Mr. Goddard, Mr. Goddard . . .”

  She has never met this man, but she knows him. Grow up on the Cape Flats and you know this type only too well. Brothers. Uncles. Next door neighbors. White men went to college and brown men went to prison, proud of it too with their tattoos and their own slang language, like they were something special. Her bastard husband died there, may his soul rot in hell. Last thing she wants is one of them here, in her sanctuary.

  Mr. Goddard and his schemes. Wouldn’t last long, this ugly little man. These types can’t stay out of prison, it was all they knew.

  She draws herself up to her full height, imposing in her crisply pressed housecoat and stands in the doorway.

  The man stops, takes off his cap and holds it, fingers moving nervously on the brim. Dirty, broken fingernails.

  “I’m Ishmael Toffee, my sister.”

  “You call me Mrs. April, you hear?”

  “Ja. I hear.”

  “You wait out here for Mr. Goddard.”

  She goes inside, closing the door in his face. Passes through the kitchen that is bigger than her quarters out in the yard, into the dining room where Mr. Goddard sits eating his breakfast, reading the paper. He looks up at her and smiles. Beautiful teeth, Johnny Goddard, all clean and white in his tanned face. He is a nice looking man, with his straight blond hair that falls across his forehead so he has to push it back. Tall, dressed in tennis clothes, golden hair on his legs and arms. Smells like she imagines a pine forest would smell.

  “There’s a man here to see you, Mr. Goddard.” He frowns, forgetting about the creature he’s invited into their lives, and she says, “The gardener.”

  He smiles again. “Okay, of course. The man from the rehabilitation program. I’ll talk to him on my way out, Flo.” He stands and calls into the corridor. “Cindy! Cindy, come, we’re going now.”

  He reaches down for his tennis racquet, just as the girl comes in. Six years old, blonde like her daddy. Beautiful like her mommy had been. He holds out his hand to the child. “Come.” She hesitates, then takes his hand and they walk out, this golden father and daughter.

  Florence clears away the breakfast dishes and takes them into the kitchen. Sees Mr. Goddard talking to the ex-convict, waving one of his long arms around the garden, smiling. Cindy plays a skipping game on the lawn, staring out from under her blonde fringe, looking at the ugly little man.

  Florence dumps the dishes into the sink and walks through to the main bedroom. A massive bed, comforter pulled aside. An expanse of white carpet, leading to the en-suite bathroom. Florence can never enter that bathroom without seeing Mrs. Goddard—Lucy—lying dead in the bathtub, the water red from the slits in her wrists. Florence finding her one afternoon when Mr. Goddard was at work.

  Florence grabs one end of the sheet and pulls it loose, stripping the bed. As the sheet floats from the mattress a tiny pair of pale-pink panties fall to the carpet. The child’s. Florence bends down and picks them up, seeing the blood smeared on the front of the cotton panties, seeing dried spots of something else. Men’s stuff.

  Florence knows what she is looking at. Has known for a long time. Known before Lucy Goddard found out and cut her wrists. Florence shuts her mind to it. This is no business of hers.

  She bundles the panties up with the bedding, ready to take it all to the laundry room, then she stops and stares out the window up at the dark rock of Table Mountain, not seeing it, back in the dining room that morning bringing breakfast in to Mr. Goddard who stood by the open patio doors, busy on his cell phone.

  “We’re talking a full partnership, right? Okay. Okay. Well you know I’ve always loved Sydney, and this bloody country is getting more screwed up by the day.”

  Mr. Goddard saw her and stepped out onto the patio, his voice trailing away, but she heard him saying something about a new start for him and Cindy.

  Florence knows only too well what’ll happen. They’ll pack up and go to Australia. And what of her? She’s not getting any younger. Got no family. Got no pension. All that stands between her ending up back on the Cape Flats is this job, and she knows he’ll toss her out like trash, Mr. Goddard. That’s how they are, these white people. Had it happen to her often enough before. But now she’s too old to start again.

  So, with no real plan in mind—not yet—Florence takes the child’s panties into the kitchen and puts them in a plastic bag. She locks the kitchen door and walks across to her room, hidden away behind the washing lines and the trash cans.

  She unlocks her room—neatly made single bed, big old TV, hotplate by the sink—looking out the little window at the man working in the garden as she hides the panties in the closet beneath her small stack of folded sweaters.

  Not sure how she’ll use them, but there’s no way she’s going to be thrown back into the world of that thing out there, shirt off as he chops down a shrub, crude prison tattoos crawling like eels over his wasted body

  3

  Ishmael sweats as he pulls out weeds. The garden of this house spreads across what must be two acres of land. But it hasn’t been looked after lately. Ugly things coming up between the flowers. It’s okay, he knows what to do.

  “Hey! Hey you! Lunch.”

  He looks up and sees the battle axe waving at him from the kitchen door. He washes his hands under a faucet—water warm from the sun—and pulls on his shirt, walking up to the house. The woman has left him lunch on a chipped plate lying on the gravel next to a dog’s water bowl. Hasn’t seen no dog. Doesn’t like dogs.

  As he takes the food Ishmael spots the blonde kid peeping at him from one of the upstairs windows. She ducks away when he catches her eye. They went out in the fancy car, the girly and her daddy, then came back maybe an hour ago, the white man watching as the kid walked into the house before driving away again.

  Ishmael sits under a tree and eats with the spoon the woman left for him. Bent old spoon—discolored. Like him. Doesn’t matter. Lunch is chicken and brown bread and butter. The gravy is nice and he finishes all his food. Catches the kid checking him out from the house, ducking away again when he looks up.

  He rinses the plate and spoon and leaves them by the back door. Strips off his shirt and goes back to work.

  “
What are those drawings on you?”

  Ishmael turns and sees the girl standing watching him, way kids do. Not scared to stare.

  “They like comics, missy.”

  “My names not missy. My names Cindy.”

  He says nothing to that, pulling out a handful of weeds. Looks back and she is gone. Suits him. Little blonde girlies and men look like him aren’t part of the same world.

  But she comes back later, with a small pile of picture books, him taking a break, drinking some water. She sits next to him like a little madam. Opens one of the picture books. Drawings of people and animals and cars. Nice white people and little blonde kids like her.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ishmael, missy.”

  “I told you my name is Cindy.” She points to the words coming out the people’s mouths. “Read this to me.”

  “Can’t you read?”

  “Of course I can, but this word,”—tapping at the page—“I don’t know it.” Looking up at him. “Read it to me.”

  “Ask the lady by the house.”

  “She’s too busy. She chased me away.”

  Staring at him with those eyes the color of the water in the big shiny swimming pool.

  What the hell, he wasn’t going to bullshit. “I can’t read, missy.”

  “You lie. Everybody can read.”

  He shakes his head. “Not me, I can’t.”

  Her eyes unblinking on him. “Didn’t your mommy and daddy teach you?”

  “I never had no mommy and daddy.”

  She stares at him. “Have they gone to heaven?”

  He has to laugh. “Ja, someplace like that.”

  Something crosses her face like a shadow and she nods. “My mommy has gone to heaven, too.” He can find no words to offer, then she looks bossy again. “And why didn’t you learn at school?”

  “I never gone to no school.”

  “Hey! Hey!” The battle axe again, standing like a teapot in the kitchen doorway. “You don’t get paid to sit on your backside. And Cindy, you come in now, hear? Come!”