Nowhere

by Roger Smith

  What a dumb name that was.

  How fuckin low can you go, Joe? he’d often taunted his old man while fried on shit, his father looking angry and hurt and confused all at once.

  So, over the next couple of years, there’d been threats from his father and promises that he’d reform from Leon (all broken) and finally Joe had run out of patience and the boy had been sent to a boarding school, a fuckin prison of a place an hour out of Cape Town.

  He’d run away after a few months and gone back home. His mother, always a softie, had pleaded with his father to give him another chance, and for a while he’d pulled things straight, then he’d just got bored and started using again and when he’d done the tattoo—flashing it at his freaked-out parents over breakfast—his father had thrown him (literally picked him up and flung him like he was tossing a fuckin dwarf) into the car and driven him ten hours up here.

  Jesus, what a shitty trip, Leon hanging for a drink or something stronger, his father, that Superman jaw of his set firm as cement, saying fuck all, driving like a demon—only stopping for a piss and coffee, escorting Leon to the toilet like he was a fuckin prisoner—flying through countryside so flat and empty that it had left Leon shaking with agoraphobia by the time they’d arrived at the farm outside the hick town of Nêrens (whoever had named it was either a humorist or an idiot), the farm belonging to some cousin of his dad’s who owed him a favor, fuckin family of inbred fucktards.

  It hadn’t taken Leon long to duck out of the house at night and steal a pickup and drive into the pathetic little town with its one hotel where he’d tried to get a drink in the bar, a bar—even all those years after Apartheid had ended—full of white guys, not a black or colored face in sight.

  When Leon, looking even younger than his seventeen years but cocky as all hell had walked up to the counter and ordered a beer the bartender had told him to fuck off, but some big old Boer in khaki who Leon’d vaguely recognized from the TV had grabbed Leon’s hand and he’d thought he was going to get seriously smacked, but the old guy had squinted at the swastika and said, “You know what that is?” in a voice marinated in booze.

  “Fuck, of course I know,” Leon had said, still stupid and cocky. “I did it.”

  “And do you believe in what it stands for?”

  Hell no, Leon had wanted to say, but sanity had prevailed and he’d said, “Sure.”

  “What then, my friend? What does it stand for?”

  And Leon, even though he was certain that he was going to get his ass kicked, couldn’t resist doing a little click of the heels and raising his right arm out straight like he’d seen in the old war movies and saying, “White power,” the words just flowing from his mouth.

  Magnus Kruger had laughed and ordered the bartender to give Leon a “real drink”, a Klipdrift and Coke, and hey fuckin presto, that was that, he was a right-winger, clasped to the moldy bosom of the volkstaat, and a whole new life had unfolded for him because of that stupid tattoo.

  And here he was, five years later, living a lie.

  He was no rabid right-wing asshole.

  He was an Afrikaner, sure, but an urban one. Spoke English as well as he spoke his mother tongue. Had grown up watching American TV shows and movies and vegging out on PlayStation and he knew more about The Avengers than the Voortrekkers.

  But back in the city he’d been a nothing.

  A nobody.

  Girls had laughed at him and guys would use his drugs and his money and then tell him to piss off. But up here in Nêrens—in Witsand—he’d met these pathetic losers and spotted a gap.

  The little Boer stronghold of around three hundred fuckheads was populated by people under fifteen and over fifty, mostly. With the exception of the massive gatekeeper Hansie Britz (a brain the size of a pea rattling around in his thick skull) teenagers split for the big cities as soon as they could, escaping the Calvinist claustrophobia and the middle-aged and old people hiding from the realities of Africa.

  But Leon had played the game perfectly, going as the big city kid who’d adopted their ways, and they loved him for it.

  He was smart, a fuck side smarter than them which, Jesus, let’s face it, wasn’t saying much. Most of these guys were really fuckin dumb. Magnus Kruger was shrewd, knew how to hang together a speech, but try and have a conversation with him and you got nothing but a drunken, paranoid babble.

  And Kruger’s cronies were all Neanderthals.

  Fat, pathetic jokes.

  The Internet was banned in Witsand but Kruger wasn’t that dumb that he didn’t understand the propaganda value of social media, just didn’t know how to use it. So Leon had stepped in. Convinced Kruger that putting out his shit in Afrikaans was a waste of time, preaching to the fuckin choir.

  Told him to put it out in English, too. Get more coverage, get noticed by right-wing assholes all over the globe. So Leon became a kind of campus newsman. It was a laugh at first, cooking up these wild, reactionary rants. He’d find a few facts and distort the shit out of them and people applauded.

  As long as you were downing blacks and Jews you could say what the fuck you liked.

  And now, at barely twenty-two, he was a commandant in Kruger’s little cartoon army. Got to wear some stupid insignia on his khakis on special occasions. Got to order the old guys around.

  They’d bitched at first until Kruger had kicked their asses, and they’d learned to take Leon’s orders and shut their stupid mouths.

  Like today.

  It had been his idea to get a commando together to rescue Kruger. The old fucks had shaken their heads, but a few younger guys (guys in their forties and early fifties who still had some blood in their veins, not just brandy) had weaponed up and they’d gone after the darkie who’d taken Kruger.

  Okay, it had turned into a fuckin mess, what with that ambush, but still, he’d done something. Hadn’t just fuckin sat back and taken it.

  A sound from the bed drew Leon from the window.

  A cough. A young woman’s cough.

  It wasn’t quite true that there were no young people in Witsand. There were always a couple of females in their late teens or early twenties, single mothers with snotty kids, rescued by the Witsand Women’s League (a posse of hatchet-faced old bitches who saw the devil’s work everywhere) from vice and sin in the nearby towns.

  Most of the women were hooking on an informal basis, getting ripped off by pimps and small town cops, and the promise of shelter at Witsand seemed like a godsend.

  Until they got here and had to go to church every day and pray for their sins and have the jealous, dried up old tannies tell them what to wear and how to speak and think and raise their brats and on and on and fuckin on.

  They got pissed off and bored and were so fuckin easy.

  It was like having a harem, Leon the skinny little sultan screwing himself stupid.

  The young women stuck it out for a month or two and then they grabbed their brats (or didn’t, some of them just dumped them on the old bitches) and put on lipstick and tight jeans and T-shirts and hit the road with their thumbs in the air ready for anybody to take them anywhere.

  Anywhere but here.

  Anywhere but nowhere.

  When the numbers dwindled, the tannies went out in their minivans and came back with a new batch of snatch.

  Jesus, who could complain?

  The slut in his bed coughed again, a disgusting wet cough and Leon clicked on the lamp and she blinked up at him through a greasy tangle of mousy hair and moaned and told him to put out the light.

  She had pimples around her mouth and her tits were sad and slack from breastfeeding and she just disgusted him.

  “Get the fuck out,” he said, grabbing her and dragging her from the bed.

  “Leon,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

  “Commandant Louw to you, you fuckin whore.”

  He threw her clothes at her, ugly hand-me-downs from the tannies, and she started sniveling and this infuriated him even more and he grabbed her and the cl
othes and marched her through the filthy kitchen and shoved her out the back door into the hot night, locking the door after her.

  Jesus.

  He scratched his balls—had she given him something? Too soon to tell, he supposed—and opened the fridge and helped himself to a Black Label beer and chugged the longneck dry in a couple of gulps.

  He burped and felt better.

  Leon wandered through to his sitting room—one of the perks of his rank was that even though he was single, he had his own small house—and rescued his sweatpants from the floor and pulled them on. The room was mess of computer gear, gaming consoles, TV sets. Much of it confiscated from the teenagers who smuggled the shit in and were busted by their parents.

  He pushed away a clutter of junk food wrappers and beer bottles and slumped on the sofa and stared at the ceiling feeling edgy and disturbed.

  So he made a quick meth pipe, got it going over the flame of his lighter, and sucked at the smoke.

  A few hits allowed him to chill enough to understand that it was a woman causing him to feel this way.

  Not the skanky bitch he’d just thrown out.

  No, it was another woman he was obsessing over.

  Susanna Kruger.

  He hadn’t been able to stop thinking of her since he’d seen her at the courthouse that morning.

  He grabbed an iPad and powered it up, searching YouTube until he found Sue Kruger’s (that’s what she called herself, writing in English, Sue Kruger, performance artist) channel and there it was, the video she’d shot from her selfie stick, catching herself wading through the retards as she sang “Nkosi Sikeleli” climaxing in that awesome money shot when she touched Kruger on the shoulder and he fell like a hanged man through a gallows trapdoor.

  Leon caught a serious cackle at it and played it twice more, laughing louder each time.

  He clicked on another YouTube video, posted the night before, of Sue doing a performance in Cape Town, and watched the bumpy, badly shot thing (recorded on somebody's phone) of her Racheltjie de Beer routine, ending up standing bare-assed naked—tits and cunt on full display—in front of the crowd.

  Jesus, she was a stunner, he had to admit.

  Didn’t look anything like her fat, ugly father.

  She looked like the girls back in Cape Town that he’d always chased after—blonde, model types—who’d laughed at him and scorned him.

  And he realized that he and Sue Kruger weren’t that different, both Afrikaner rebels. She was probably ten years older than him, but still.

  They were two of a kind.

  And now she was up here. Doing what exactly?

  He didn’t know.

  He froze the image of the naked woman, staring at her body, feeling his cock stiffen in his sweatpants.

  “I think we need to meet, Sue,” he said, rubbing himself through the stained cotton, “I really think we need to meet.”

  TWO

  Sue Kruger sat on the edge of the bathtub, staring down at her feet submerged in the tepid brown water that dribbled from the hot faucet. The tub was old and filthy, rings of grime marking the inside like strata of rock. There was no stopper, just a rusted copper chain dangling from the overflow drain, leaking rust and verdigris onto the chipped enamel.

  She longed for a bath, longed to lie down in the warm water and let it soothe her, but there was no way she was going to submit herself to the filthy tub (that squat in Amsterdam was a very long way away), so she lathered soap and washed under her arms and between her legs and rinsed herself with water from the cold faucet.

  The towels were mildewed and grimy so she walked naked and dripping into the hotel room and dried herself on one of her T-shirts. The room was sordid, a urine-colored light drizzling down from the light fitting in the ceiling, and bakingly hot. An ancient air conditioner was jammed into the wall but it had done nothing when she’d prodded at it and she guessed it hadn’t worked since before Nelson Mandela had walked free.

  The door to the balcony was open, but the night breeze that wheezed in was hot and tired.

  Still naked Sue sat on the bed—a narrow, sunken thing with a lumpy mattress covered by an orange comforter patterned with cigarette burns—and pulled open the bureau drawer, releasing the smell of bug repellent and mold. A Bible lay inside, just like she’d known it would.

  She closed her eyes and riffled through the onion-skin pages, stopped at random and opened her eyes and read the first words that jumped out at her.

  Woe to the wicked! Disaster is upon them! They will be paid back for what their hands have done. Isaiah 3:11.

  She laughed and, as she opened a little baggie of weed and dumped a clump onto the top of the bureau, her fingers expertly separating the pips and the stalks, she thought of the investigator she'd met earlier. She’d known her fair share of cops in her time—you’d didn’t live the life she’d lived without brushes with the law—but none of them had been like Disaster Zondi.

  He looked like a lawyer. Well dressed, but not flashy. He was staying here, too. She’d glimpsed him leaving the empty lobby earlier when she’d gone in a vain search for room service, and she wondered what he made of the accommodations.

  She remembered their conversation at the Wimpy, her assertion that her father was innocent and that the truth should be revealed. Was she fucking crazy? Disaster Zondi was right. Magnus Kruger should go down.

  How and why he went down didn’t matter.

  When the weed was cleaned, Sue tore the page from the Bible—an old ritual of hers—and rolled a joint, licking the paper and sealing it. She fired the doob and took a long hit, holding it in her lungs, her eyes closed, feeling like she was sinking away from herself, thinking of that Russian free diver she’d read about who’d gone far down into the ocean off the Spanish coast and had never surfaced again.

  The ringing of Sue’s phone interrupted her reverie and she exhaled a fragrant cloud as she checked the face of her Samsung. She’d been bombarded by the media since that little bit of theater on the courthouse steps—it had taken them no time at all to track down her number—and had stopped answering her phone, but when she saw Tjaart De Wet’s name come up she swiped at the Samsung’s face.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “So,” he said, “quite the fucking show, sweetie.”

  “You saw it?” she said, deadpan.

  He laughed.

  “Ja, me and,” she heard him tapping a keyboard, “one hundred and fifty-five thousand other YouTubers. And counting. And it was all over TV.”

  “It was a moment.”

  “Oh ja, it was.” He paused to light a cigarette, the scratch of a match and kissy puffs. “Come home, sweetie, you’re hot as hell right now. We’ll put together a solo show here at the gallery. It’ll be massive. The media are all over you like creepy-crawlies.”

  “I dunno, Tjaart.”

  “Oh please, Sue, what the fuck are you gonna to do up there? This is an opportunity for you. This is your time. Seize it or it’ll be gone girl.”

  “Maybe. But I want to see him.”

  “Pappie?”

  “Ja, Pappie.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. I want some resolution, maybe.”

  “He won’t see you. He’ll just lock you out of his little Boer ghetto and you’ll feel useless and stupid and people’ll lose interest and then you’ll come home and feel like shit again.”

  “Probably,” she said and sucked at the last of the blunt.

  “You getting stoned?”

  “Just a bit.”

  “You taking your meds?”

  “Jesus, Mommy, gimme a break.” But she laughed. “Yes, I’m taking my fuckin meds.”

  “Good. Now listen to Mommy and pack up now and get in your car and come back to Cape Town and we’ll make it all happen. I’m on it already.”

  She stubbed out the joint on the scarred dresser. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Ja. I’ll pack up and come home.”

  “Promise?
”

  “Promise.”

  “Like all those times before when you made me promises and then you split for Jo’burg or Durban or fuckin Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe? I mean people leave Zimbabwe, they don’t fuckin go there!”

  “I was curious.”

  “Jesus. We had a show and you just disappeared.”

  “Tjaart that was a long time ago.”

  “What? Six months is a long time?”

  “And I was just one of a string of artists. Nobody noticed I wasn’t there.”

  “I fuckin noticed, okay?”

  Sue sighed, nodding at her reflection in the window. “Okay, you got me. I’ve been really unreliable and impetuous and a really crap friend. But not now. I swear I’m coming back.”

  “You not gonna let this media shitstorm scare you away?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m going to work it like a bitch.”

  “Call me when you get here, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “Love you.”

  “Ja, ja,” Sue said, but she was smiling when she ended the call.

  What the fuck, he was right. Hanging around here was pointless.

  Suddenly energized, she dressed and threw her few belongings into her backpack and quit the room.

  She left the key with the man who dozed behind the reception desk and went out into the street. It was only just after ten, but the town was dead.

  No cars. Stores closed. The only sign of life the single traffic light that was permanently stuck on red, glaring down at the main drag like a cyclops.

  Her car was parked down a side road and to reach it she had to pass the door to the bar and heard a burst of male laughter and the hysterical commentary of a game of rugby taking place in some distant time zone.

  As she approached her car, parked in the glare of a street light, she slowed her step and felt her chest tighten. In the couple of hours since she’d last seen her old Nissan it had been grievously wronged. All four tires were slashed and it rested on its rims. The faded paint work had been revitalized with some customizing: kaffir hoer, cunt, slut, had been sprayed on the doors and hood.