Ishmael Toffee

by Roger Smith

  Florence stops for a moment, trying to get her breath, before she lifts the lid of the trunk and heaves the suitcase inside. Close to breaking down she looks across at the big house, all the lights on, tinkly jazz music coming from inside. She hasn’t seen Mr. Goddard since he came to her room an hour ago, after the media people finally left, and told her he wanted her gone. Tonight.

  She stared at him. “Where am I going to go?”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “If you’re not out by midnight I’m calling the police.”

  He threw a couple of hundred in notes on the floor at her feet.

  “That’s more than I owe you.”

  Florence picked up the money and sat on the bed, still a mess from what the cops did, her clothes strewn across the floor like trash. Then she started shoving things in an old suitcase. Didn’t have much. All the furniture and appliances belong to Mr. Goddard. Lucy Goddard gave her the TV for Christmas a few years ago, but how was she to take it, that big heavy thing they’d gotten rid of when they got one of those new flat screens?

  So Florence packed and called a taxi, all the time asking herself the question she’d asked Mr. Goddard: where was she to go?

  Still pondering this when the taxi sounded its horn in the driveway.

  Florence gets in the rear of the car and watches the house fall away behind her as they drive toward the road. Ten years she’s lived here. Working first for old Mr. and Mrs. Partridge who moved away to a retirement village. Put in a good word for her with the Goddards, nice couple with their new baby.

  Gone now. All gone.

  The gates swing open and the car is through and out into the road.

  Looking back, Florence sees that the gates haven’t shut automatically and out of habit she’s looking for the remote control on her keychain to click them closed when she remembers that the keys are back in the room that is no longer hers.

  Finally the tears come, leaving her sobbing into a tissue and when the driver asks her where she’s going she has no answer.

  31

  Cindy stares at her toes sticking up pink through the water in the same bathtub where she saw her mommy dead. She watches her toes so she won’t think of Mommy in that red water, her face so very white. And so she won’t feel Daddy’s hands on her, washing her with soap, his hands horrible like the crabs she saw with Mommy on the beach, hands that run all over her body and especially between her legs.

  She tries to keep her legs closed tight but Daddy pushes them open and it hurts and she can hear his breath coming from his nose and even feel it like hot wind on her wet shoulders.

  Daddy takes his hands away and stands and lifts his glass from where it sits on the side of the bath, and he drinks the dark stuff inside. His hair hangs down over his eyes and he smiles at her but she’s not looking at him. She’s looking at her toes.

  “Come, Cindy, get out,” he says, and she just sits there.

  So he grabs her under the arms and lifts her from the tub, and she stands and drips water onto the bathmat. He pulls the pink towel from the rail and he dries her, his hands going everywhere again and his breath smelly and loud like a train.

  She closes her eyes and says quietly, so only she can hear: “Help me, Ishmael. Help me, please.”

  32

  Ishmael hasn’t touched drugs in years, not like the other fuckers back in Pollsmoor who’d smoked anything to take them out of the world of rape and pain and violence, trying to speed up the days moving slow as a river of mud.

  Not him. Needed to keep his mind sharp in his line of work.

  But in the minibus taxi, driving into the night, he feels like he did when he was a teenager and used to fry his brain on chemicals. Feels as if he’s not inside his body no more, that he’s floating above it like a kite, and all that connects him is a thin string and if that string snaps it’s all over.

  Finished.

  He feels the string stretching and fraying, feels himself going away and he hears the voices of the dead, all the people he put in their graves, whispering to him. Telling him to come. Telling him it’s time. He forces open his eyes, forces himself to see the alive people on the sidewalks and the cars and the orange streetlights.

  “Don’t die, Ishmael, don’t die,” he says, but it’s not his voice he hears, it’s the girly’s.

  His throat is dry and he’s sweating and blood is leaking out of him and pooling on the seat, dripping. When the taxi stops at a light he hears the tap of the blood on the floor, and a woman behind him is saying something in his ear, something about her shoes getting dirty.

  Ishmael grabs hold of the seat in front and pulls himself to his feet, spinning on the woman and God only knows what she sees staring at her from inside the hoodie but it scares the bitch enough to have her shrink back, eyes wide.

  Ishmael draws every last bit of his strength and shouts for the driver to stop. As the taxi bumps to a halt the co-driver pulls open the side door and Ishmael stumbles out, smelling the flowers from the gardens of the rich white people.

  Over the tree tops he can see the lights of Pollsmoor and he has to laugh, ’cause he’s not scared of that prison no more. Wherever he’s going, it’s not there.

  He crosses the road—nearly gets hit by a big car, a white man shouting at him from behind the wheel. Ishmael walks on, hands gripping his gut, holding himself in.

  Not far now.

  He sees a light coming toward him and almost too late he realizes it’s one of those little trucks with the rent-a-cops inside, the sign on the roof like a yellow eye, and he drops down, hiding behind a tree on the sidewalk. The truck speeds past and somehow they don’t see him.

  Ishmael gets to his feet and stumbles on. It’s only when he nears the house that he asks himself the question: How you gonna get inside, Ishmael? How you gonna do that?

  When he sees the gates standing open like welcoming arms he has to blink, making sure he’s not dreaming this. Then he tells his feet to take him up the driveway, shoes crunching on the stones as he rounds a curve and approaches the house.

  Ishmael stands a moment, watching, listening. He hears the scratch of a cricket and the muffled call of a night bird. To his right the floodlight swimming pool lies flat and blue, the cleaner chugging beneath the surface, sending lazy ripples across a wooden deck. The sliding doors of the deck are open, warm light spilling out from the living room beyond.

  Bare feet and legs appear on the staircase as a man in short pants and a blue shirt comes down, carrying an empty glass. The white man. The father. And from his too-careful walk, Ishmael knows the man is drunk. Watches as he goes to a wooden cabinet and pours himself a drink.

  Ishmael crosses the deck and steps into the living room, his shoes sinking to the laces into a green carpet thick as grass. The man has his back to Ishmael, whistling a tune, using little silver tongs to lift a cube from an ice bucket. The ice clinks against the side of the glass, almost an echo of the sound the Okapi knife makes when Ishmael clicks it open.

  The white man’s shoulders tense and he stops whistling and turns, holding his glass. He stares. When he recognizes Ishmael his fingers open and the glass falls soundlessly to the carpet, the booze spreading in a puddle near his bare toes.

  He jumps for the wall and hits a little button. Ishmael doesn’t hear no alarm, but he knows it’ll bring that truck and the rent-a-cops. The phone starts to ring, cutting into Ishmael’s head.

  The white man has backed against the wall. “What do you want?” he asks, his voice rough like he’s being throttled.

  Ishmael says nothing as he walks forward, just lifts the knife and stabs the white man in the heart. The whitey stares at him, surprised, then steadies himself against the drinks cupboard. Ishmael pulls out the blade and stabs the white bastard again, and he slumps to his knees.

  Ishmael crumples down with him, and it’s like the two of them are praying, blood leaking out of them both. With the last of his strength Ishmael finishes the job, cutting the white man’s throat down to bone,
watching as he folds to the carpet.

  The knife falls from Ishmael’s hand and room is spinning slowly now, and he knows he’s done. But that’s okay.

  He hears a noise and looks up straight into the eyes of the girly who stands halfway down the stairs, wrapped in a pink bath towel.

  “You came Ishmael,” she says.

  When he tries to speak warm blood fills his mouth.

  The girly looks once at her dead father then she comes to Ishmael and kneels down beside him, putting her arms around him. Her hair is wet and she smells so nice of soap.

  ●

  Cindy sits cradling the little man’s head in her lap.

  “Thank you, Ishmael,” she says and she’s a big girl and she doesn’t cry.

  She feels his body shake, and a sound like a long sigh comes from his lips and right then the window glass lights up like magic, all glowing and shiny. Grown-ups would say that it’s just the headlights from the little truck that comes fast up the driveway.

  But Cindy knows better.

  THE END

  Falling: a short story

  By the last day of the shoot Ford reckoned he knew the girl’s plumbing better than her gynecologist. Or any of her clients. Because that’s what she was, this makeshift porn star lying splayed and naked on the dining room table, attended by two bare-assed dwarves—one white, one black—with Viagra-powered hard-ons: a brown skinned hooker from the Cape Town ghettoes.

  The director, Didier, a skinny French guy with stubble you could strike a match on, beckoned Ford, showing him where to put the camera for the next setup. This shoot was as low budget as you could get and Ford had to hump the video camera and tripod himself, no assistants like he’d been used to back when he was earning the big bucks shooting TV commercials.

  He pushed the thought away, eye to the viewfinder, bringing the girl’s shaved snatch into focus in time for one of the priapic dwarves to climb on board, his child-sized butt pumping.

  Didier shouted “cut” and the dwarf clambered off the table. The girl opened her meth-glazed eyes, lifting herself up on one elbow. Her blonde wig had slipped, showing her frizzy dark hair, and the woman doing make-up and wardrobe (an alcoholic lesbian with the shakes) stepped in and fixed it.

  “Okay, Trinity,” Didier said to the girl, “you are now dead. Okay?”

  She nodded and slumped down, her eyes closed.

  “Azzedine? Where is Azzedine?” Didier asked and a flunky left the room to search for the star of this mess.

  Ford took the opportunity to duck out too, away from the heat of the lights and the stink of dirty underparts and jism. They were shooting in a house in one of Cape Town’s anonymous northern suburbs, rented for the three days of filming. Ford went through to the kitchen to grab a Coke from the refrigerator. It was midwinter, the wind driving the cold rain against the kitchen window. Ford, feeling like he was in a car wash, stood staring out at the storm, the famous flat topped mountain obscured by clouds soggy as cotton wool.

  Didier bellowed: “Cameraman! Where is my fucking cameraman?”

  Ford took a last glance at his sorry-assed reflection in the rain washed window and went back into the dining room.

  Shooting over the prone body of the naked girl, Ford framed up a shot of the Algerian male lead standing beside the table, dressed in an overcoat, a fedora and a pair of sunglasses.

  Plucking the sunglasses from his face, revealing a pair of terrifying vacant eyes, the stud stared down at the girl. Then he tossed aside his hat and opened the overcoat, revealing the asset that had made him legendary in pornoland.

  The naked dwarves cowered against the walls as the Algerian mounted the girl and went at her, wet flesh slapping, until she groaned and her eyes flickered open.

  “Cut!” Didier shouted, applauding.

  And so it dragged on for another two hours, the room getting hotter and the bodies ranker as they overheated, the star carving his way through multiple couplings with the girl, the dwarves, and a couple of blank faced women whose breasts didn’t move when they were being pounded.

  About as arousing as open heart surgery.

  Then it was done with the magic words, “It’s a wrap” and suddenly Ford was alone in the room.

  He killed the lights and cracked a couple of windows, drops of rain blowing in on the north wind. Ford ejected the digital tape from the camera and marked the label. He stowed the camera in an aluminum box, folded the tripod and slid it into its black rubber tube. When the lights were cool enough he freed them from their stands and stacked them in a corner of the room with the rest of the gear, ready for collection by the rental company.

  He found the producer, a sallow man in his fifties, sitting in the room he used as an office. The room was bare except for a folding table and chair and an empty fish tank. Ford handed over the tape and the producer gave him a thin pile of banknotes. The only smart thing Ford had done: insisting he be paid by the day. In cash.

  Neither of them said a word and Ford headed through the kitchen where the dwarves, the Algerian stud and the two women were drinking tequila with Didier and what passed for the crew.

  Ford walked out the backdoor into the drizzle. The hooker, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket—minus her blonde wig—stood under a carport beside Ford’s old bike hitting a meth pipe, the wind tugging a speech bubble of smoke from her mouth. She didn’t seem to know or care that he saw her.

  As Ford mounted his bike the lesbian came out of the garage, where she’d stored the clothes and props.

  “Hey, Tommy,” she said. “Not staying for the wrap party?”

  He didn’t reply, trying to kick the Kawasaki into life. It wasn’t cooperating.

  “What you got lined up next?”

  “Nothing,” he said, kicking. “Downtime.”

  “So where you staying now?”

  “Clifton.”

  “Clifton as in Clifton?” she asked, picturing Cape Town’s playground of the rich and famous.

  “Clifton as in Clifton,” he said as the bike rattled to life.

  “Shit, you must be doing well.”

  Ford gave the bike juice and took off into the rain, letting the water wash away the sleaze of the last few days.

  ●

  “Clifton,” Trinity said, the bloody blade of the Okapi knife denting the skin of her neck, “I know a guy who lives Clifton side.”

  Angel had just cut the white john’s throat, the dead man’s head hitting the wooden floor like a bowling ball, and he was right up at her with the knife, his beautiful face twisted with rage and meth-driven madness.

  “Why you get me this loser?”

  So it just popped into her head—Clifton—and she spoke before she had time to think.

  “You fucken bullshitting me?” Angel said.

  “No, Angel, I swear. The cameraman from that movie, he lives by Clifton.”

  Angel, his breath hot and stinking on her face, stared into her eyes, deciding whether to believe her or hurt her.

  The last hours had been brutal. Trinity standing in the rain on Voortrekker Road for God-knew how long, freezing her tits off, until this white guy had finally stopped in his crap old Toyota. She told him a cheap price so he wouldn’t argue, desperate to get out of the rain, knowing that Angel would follow and they’d loot the man’s house.

  But he had fuck all. Looked like he’d been cleaned out in a divorce, maybe. One chair. TV standing on a Coke crate. A mattress lying on the bedroom floor. Angel so furious that he tortured the poor bastard, trying to get him to admit that he had a safe or credit cards. Anything. Burned out his eyes with cigarettes. Cut him, the naked man’s underpants stuffed in his mouth to stop him screaming. But he had nothing to give. No cards. No safe. Just a few banknotes in his wallet. So Angel had finished him.

  Angel so crazy with anger now that he was ready to kill Trinity, too.

  “Tell me ’bout this guy from Clifton.”

  “Heard him yesterday at the end of the shoot, talking to the make-up
woman, says he lives there.”

  “So, what’s your plan?”

  “I phone him tomorrow. Get him to take me to his house. I check it out good for alarms and shit, then you come with me the next time.” She shrugged.

  “Why would he wanna see trash like you?”

  Trinity was stringing lies together, desperately. “I know he’s got the hots for me, way he was always giving me the eye.”

  “Ja?”

  “Trues God.”

  “Okay. We’ll do it. You better not be bullshitting.”

  “I’m not.”

  He took the knife away from her throat, folding the blade closed with a click and Trinity tried to find some god to pray to that the cameraman hadn’t been lying to that old dyke.

  ●

  Ford watched the girl’s eyes as he unlocked the door, like he was shooting a close-up. Those eyes that had been filled with a desperate greed as he’d walked her down between the beach houses clinging to the slopes above Clifton Beach, houses that sold for millions of dollars to people like David Beckham and Madonna.

  Shock, now, in those eyes as she took in what had once been the living room, all that was left of the house, the rest a charred pulp of wood and drywall. The open ceiling of the room was covered in plastic and tarpaulins that didn’t keep out the rain that had started falling again.

  She’d called him earlier—got his cell number off the movie call-sheet, he guessed—saying she wanted to meet, that she had an idea for a movie.

  “I’m done with porno,” he’d said.

  “No, this is something else.”

  He’d almost killed the call, sure she wanted to hustle him, but the weather, boredom, and a creeping depression had him agreeing to meet her for coffee in Sea Point.

  So he rode the Kawasaki five minutes down the road that snaked along the coast and lost itself in the apartment blocks that were all Saint-Tropez by the ocean and Lagos a few blocks up.