by Roger Smith
Ford, seated in the coffee shop, nearly bolted when he saw her clamber out of the minibus taxi, battling across the road in jeans too tight and heels too high. Even at a distance he could see her face was badly painted. But he took pity on her and stayed.
She sat down in a cloud of cheap perfume.
“So what’s your idea?” he asked. She stared at him blankly. “For the movie?”
She forced a laugh. “Oh, ja, it’s a great concept.” She leaned in close, and he could smell meth smoke in her hair. They called it tik in Cape Town, because of the tick-tick sound it made in the pipe. “But I don’t wanna talk about it here. Can’t we go to your place?”
“I’m not looking for a date.”
She manufactured an outraged expression. “Excuuuuuuse me? What do you think I am?”
Hustling him, okay, and not very imaginatively.
He didn’t answer, just left coins on the table for the coffee and walked out, hearing the clatter of her heels as she followed him. He straddled the bike, pulling on his helmet. Before he could escape she slid on behind him.
He sighed, unclipping the spare helmet. “Wear this,” he said.
They rode back to Clifton and parked on the sidewalk in Victoria Road, the homes of the rich spread out beneath them. He gave her the tour, knowing he was being perverse. The sun sliced through the clouds for a moment, hitting the beach and the ocean below. A picture postcard that she drank in.
Now, standing in the ruined house, she was deflated, her smile gone, her eyes empty as she surveyed the mess. All Ford owned, right here: a sleeping bag, a paraffin stove and a bucket to shit in.
“What happened?” she asked.
“There was a fire.”
“Not to the house, man. To you.”
When he didn’t answer she shook her head and walked out into the rain.
●
Trinity shat herself the whole taxi ride back to Paradise Park, not seeing the ugly blur of poverty that was the Cape Flats—cramped houses, shacks, ghetto blocks—seeing only Angel’s face and his knife.
She left the taxi and walked home through the drizzle, and when her heels sank into the mud she took her shoes off and carried them.
Trinity went down the side of the brick house to the yard where she lived with Angel in a tin shack. The door gaped and she saw some of her things—a broken chair, a cracked plate—lying in the mud.
“What the fuck?” she said, rushing at the shanty.
A skinny man and a fat woman were sitting on her bed, eating from a can of minced pilchards. People she knew by sight, connections of the rubbish from the main house. The bitch had squeezed into one of Trinity’s dresses.
“What you doing in here?”
“We live here now,” the woman said.
“Where’s Angel?”
“Cops took him,” the man said.
“What for?”
“Stolen goods.”
Not murder, so Angel would make bail, sometime down the road.
“Get the fuck out,” Trinity said.
The woman stood and punched her. Bitch hit like a man and Trinity ended up on her ass in the mud. People from the brick house were in the yard now, laughing.
“Don’t fucken come back here,” the woman said, kicking her.
Trinity dragged herself to her feet, her shoes lost in the mud. Barefoot and bleeding from the mouth she ran back toward the road. She wouldn’t let the bastards see her cry.
●
“Why here?” Ford asked.
“I got nowhere else to go,” she said, sitting on the damp floor in her mud-smeared jeans, dirty feet bare, varnish on her toenails cracked. Dried blood on her swollen mouth.
“No family?” Shook her head. “No friends?” Shook her head again. “You’re not trying to hustle me, are you?”
Even in the state she was in she laughed. “Jesus, man, hustle you for what?”
So he said she could stay the night. Then she had to go. They shared the sleeping bag—both of them fully clothed—and she tried to come on to him, but he told her to relax, that he didn’t want that from her and she slept.
The one night became two and he let her stay on, his only rule that she didn’t smoke meth. But he could see she was getting wired, hanging for a pipe, would be climbing the walls if there were walls left to climb.
On the afternoon of the third day Ford went out and bought her some cheap jeans, a couple of T-shirts and some sneakers. He came home to find she’d disappeared and when she didn’t return that night he knew he’d never see her again.
But she was back in the morning with a black eye and a loaf of bread and carton of milk. He could smell tik on her, and guessed she must’ve turned a trick up in Sea Point.
He was ready to tell her to get lost when she said, “You were a user, weren’t you? That’s what happened to you?”
He nodded.
“I wanna be clean,” she said. “Will you help me?”
So he let her in, asking himself, since when were you Mother Theresa?
Then next days were a blur of her puking and screaming (he had to tie her down at night the shakes were so bad), then one morning she woke up and she was weak but clear.
She stank of sweat and vomit, so Ford wrapped her naked body in a cloth and led her out into the light rain. Walked her down the steps to the deserted beach, seagulls diving from the greasy skies, searching the dark ocean for food.
He stripped off his sweatpants and T-shirt and unwrapped her, carrying into the icy Atlantic. She screamed soundlessly, gasping, clawing at him, but he took her in deeper until they were both submerged in the freezing water. She ran out, dripping, swearing in Afrikaans, her teeth chattering, wrapping herself in the cloth.
Ford left the water and pulled on the sweatpants and led her across to the beach shower. Grabbed the cloth from her and pushed her under the water. Not as icy as the ocean, but still cold. He’d brought a bar of soap from the house and he scrubbed her, ignoring her protests.
A man in a raincoat walking a Labrador appeared from around the boulders, staring at her body.
“Fuck off,” Ford said and the man did.
Ford dried her and wrapped her in the cloth and got her back upstairs. Dressed her in clean clothes.
She ran his brush through her tangled hair and suddenly she was beautiful. She saw him looking at her.
“What?” she said.
He didn’t answer, just kissed her, and the clothes came off again and it started awkwardly but ended up good.
The next few days the sun shone and the weather was warm, the beach filled with bathers. It was like that sometimes in Cape Town in winter, when the cold and the rain retreated and you could almost believe it was summer.
They hung out on the beach and swam and told each other their life stories. Hers was all about abandonment and abuse and a pimp called Angel. His about a career and a family destroyed by drugs, leaving him minding this shell of a house for its owner while the insurance claim was processed.
On the last day of fake summer his phone rang and it was a producer he’d last worked for years ago, before he’d fucked everything up. The guy needed a camera assistant. In a hurry. Knew it was a step down for Ford, but could he do it?
Hell, yes, he could do it.
●
It was pissing with rain again after those beautiful days but that did nothing to dampen Trinity’s good mood as she left the house, climbing the stairs up to the road. Clean for the first time in maybe ten years and enjoying living with this guy Tommy, kinda old—at least forty—but way nicer than Angel.
Tommy getting work now and talking about maybe helping her get a job in the movies too, come summer. Behind the camera this time, for sure.
She walked up to the 7-Eleven on Victoria Road, nice and warm in her raincoat (so new it still had a strong chemical stink) carrying an umbrella. Brown chickie behind the cash register knew her by now and they said a few words as Trinity shook the rain from the umbrella, folded it and l
eft it by the door.
She went down one of the aisles, looking for detergent. Got distracted by the gossip magazines and was flipping through PEOPLE when she felt a hand grip her arm and turned, staring up into Angel’s eyes.
“Baby,” he said. “I been looking and looking.”
●
It was late afternoon when Ford got home, tired after working since before dawn. He’d assisted the second unit cameraman on an American B movie—Cape Town going as Seattle—shooting cars speeding through the rain slick streets.
The cameraman had an injured shoulder, so he asked Ford to step in for a couple of tricky handheld shots. Ford got the shots and the production people had promised him more work down the road.
So he was feeling pretty mellow as he stepped into the ruined house, the rain drumming down on the plastic and the tarps, drips plopping into the buckets that Trinity had placed to catch them.
Ford saw her sitting on the floor and he knew she was high. Before he could speak something hit him on the back of the head and he fell, dazed.
He looked up at the intruder, brown guy with gang tattoos coiling from under his clothes and a knife in his hand. Didn’t need any introductions to know who this was.
Angel brought the knife down, aiming for Ford’s belly. He rolled just far enough to take a deep cut to his left arm. There was only one way this was going to go. Ford got to his knees and punched up at Angel, catching him a glancing blow beneath the ribs, enough to send him backward.
Ford made it to his feet, the room tipping and whirling, and before he had time to think he tugged open the plastic that hung where the door used to be, revealing the deck that jutted out high above the boulders and the raging ocean. The wood of the deck was mostly intact, but singed by the fire and rotted to papier-mâché.
Ford had to guess where the steel support beams where, gambling that they would hold his weight. Edging backward toward the rail, expecting at any second to fall.
Angel tore open the plastic, coming after him into the rain, laughing.
“Where the fuck you think you going, white meat?”
As he lifted the knife and rushed Ford the timbers gave way and Angel disappeared like a hanged man falling through a trapdoor.
Ford looked down and saw Angel lying face down on one of the boulders far below. He was still alive, moving, trying to get up, one arm dangling, a leg dragging. His foot found a patch of black moss and as he slipped he danced a little dance that was almost comical, then he tumbled into the wild ocean, an arm coming up like a periscope. Before a wave hit, Ford thought he glimpsed a shouting face through the swell, then Angel was gone.
Trinity stood at the gap in the plastic, staring down at the water. She ducked back inside and Ford followed her, clutching his bleeding arm. He’d need to get to an emergency room.
Trinity lifted a meth pipe from the floor and got it going with a lighter, sucking till the glass glowed. She exhaled a billow of smoke and held the pipe out to Ford.
When he hesitated she said, “Fuck, just this one time. What’s it gonna hurt?”
Ford, his blood dripping to the floor in time with the rain, took the pipe, the familiar warmth of the glass on his fingers. He hit it hard and let the immediate rush take him someplace warm and safe.
She was right. What was it going to hurt?
THE END
Also by Roger Smith
Dust Devils
"Smith’s take-no-prisoners tours through the underworld just keep getting stronger - like Dutch Leonard on the far end of a crank binge." Barnes & Noble Favorite Novels 2011
"A master class in how to create a novel that speaks to the reader on multiple levels. Truly powerful writing." Florida Times-Union
Wake Up Dead
“Both horrific to read and impossible to put down." NPR
"The Cape Town setting recaptures all the blood and menace that time and nostalgia have effaced from Raymond Chandler’s mean streets and redoubles them.” Philadelphia Inquirer
Mixed Blood
“A bleak but magnificent portrait of a still-divided city.” The Guardian
“Smith plays out that chilling sense of inevitability that is at the heart of the best noir. Like George Pelecanos, he captures lives trapped by poverty and prejudice without sentimentalizing those lives or downplaying the havoc they can produce.” Booklist
About the author
Roger Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and now lives in Cape Town. His thrillers Mixed Blood, Wake Up Dead and Dust Devils are published in seven languages and two are in development as movies in the U.S. His books have won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award) and been nominated for Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel awards. His fourth novel, Capture, will be out in mid-2012. Visit his website
Copyright
© 2012 by Roger Smith
All rights reserved
Cover photograph © Sumaya de Wet
Ishmael Toffee & Falling are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without the express written permission of the author or publisher except where permitted by law.
Table of Contents
Ishmael Toffee
Falling: a short story
Also by Roger Smith
About the author
Copyright