Sacrifices

by Roger Smith

  “No point in me getting the police is there?”

  “No sir. She gave him access. He broke in, would be a different story. But . . .” A shrug.

  Lane nodded and thanked them and watched the small car drive away. He used the remote on his keychain to close the gate after them. The patrolmen would beat the boy before they freed him, and somewhere Lane’s old liberal self squirmed.

  But only for a second.

  The two women watched Lane as he walked back into the kitchen. “Go to bed, Denise,” he said. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  “Sorry Mr. Mike, Miss Bev.”

  Lane locked up and he and his wife went up to their bedroom, Bev talking around her toothbrush, threatening to fire Denise. Threats that would come to nothing Lane knew, as he slid his naked body between the fresh, starched, sheets. The work of Denise Solomons. She kept the house spotless and still managed to cook for them five nights a week. A treasure, all their friends said. More than one had tried to poach her, without success. Denise was loyal to a fault. Not always a good thing.

  Bev slipped into bed and switched off the light and reached across for Lane, her hands on his body as familiar to him as his own.

  And then came the scream.

  3

  Lane returns to the present, doing his best to hold the gaze of the woman cop. She says nothing, staring him down, and he’s terrified she’ll question him about the nightmare in the pool house. He knows he’ll stumble and Beverley’s revision, inspired by her diet of American courtroom dramas, will stand revealed for the fiction it is.

  He feels fingers of cold sweat trace his ribs and his eyes skid away from the cop’s as he looks across at his wife who sits on the edge of her seat, hands clasped, eyes locked on his, willing him not to waver.

  But when the cop speaks she addresses their son, who is still hypnotized by the pulsing pink, blue and yellow lights dangling from the spiky branches of the plastic tree.

  “Chris?” He doesn’t look at her, his face blank. “Christopher?”

  The boy blinks and turns toward the woman, his eyes slow to focus. “Ja?”

  “Tell me what happened earlier. Start when you were out drinking.”

  Bev says, “He’s probably concussed—”

  Perils makes a zip-it gesture across her lips and is rewarded with a glare that could lance a boil. “Tell me, Chris.”

  And he repeats what his mother told the uniforms out by the pool. He was drinking beer at his usual jock hangout, Forresters Arms—Forries—ten minutes away on Newlands Avenue when he met the girl, Melanie Walker, and brought her home.

  They had just entered his cottage when Lyndall appeared, looking wired. When Chris challenged him, Lyndall struck him with a weight, leaving him unconscious. Chris awoke with his parents in the room and the girl dead on the floor.

  Perils turns to the elder Lanes. “Did either of you see Lyndall?”

  Bev shakes her neatly cropped head. “No. He was gone by the time we got down there.”

  “Chris,” the cop says, “you’re sure it was Lyndall who attacked you?”

  The boy can’t suppress a sneer. “Jesus, of course I am.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  Chris blinks and his eyes skid over to Beverley, who tenses. A detail of the story they did not rehearse. But Christopher is his mother’s son. “Uh, the ’banger stuff those guys like. A hoodie. Baggy pants. That little knitted cap thing on his head.”

  “A kufi?”

  “Ja, that Muslim thing.”

  The skullcap that Beverley had rescued from the bricks outside their kitchen door and planted it near the pool house. Lane’s unsqueamish wife first dipping it in a puddle of the girl’s blood.

  “Were you drunk, Chris?”

  “No.”

  “How many beers did you drink?”

  “Three or four. That’s nothing for me.”

  “And did he say anything to you, Lyndall, before he hit you?”

  “Called me a fucken white cunt.”

  Beverley can’t hide a small smile of satisfaction at their son’s performance.

  “How did Lyndall get in?” Perils asks. “He no longer had a key, did he?”

  “No,” Beverley says. “We changed the locks and reprogrammed the gate remote controls. He must’ve slipped in when Chris drove his car into the driveway. There’s a delay before the gate closes.”

  “And how did he get out?”

  “My keys are gone,” Chris says. “There’s a remote on the keychain.”

  “And this weight?” Perils asks. “Where is it?”

  Beverley shakes her head. “He must’ve taken it with him.”

  “A ten pound weight?”

  Bev shrugs.

  Lane feels the dumbbell dragging at his arm as he carried it, wrapped in a plastic bag, and buried it deep in a pile of builder’s sand—left over from a recent renovation of the laundry room—at the bottom of the garden.

  He conjures a dog, a salivating German Shepherd straining at its leash, leading its master, a hulking uniformed cop, toward the pile of sand, the policeman rooting in the rubble and finding the weight.

  When Lane shakes himself free of this image he is alone in the living room.

  He hears voices from the kitchen: the cop and Chris. Where’s Beverley? The sound of a toilet flushing upstairs answers him. He rises and crosses the tiles.

  Perils stands watching Chris who opens the fridge and takes out a carton of milk and drinks from it while he clicks on the small TV that sits on the granite counter. Sports highlights. A rugby game played earlier in Australia.

  Perils says, “Mind if I get a glass of water?”

  The boy wags a hand toward the sink, his eyes fixed on the screen and the cop finds an upturned glass in the drying rack, fills it from the faucet and stands beside Chris.

  “What position do you play? Center?”

  Chris nods. “That’s right.” A smile that manages to be a smirk. “How do you know?”

  Perils laughs. “I’ve got brothers.”

  The boy’s eyes are back on the screen, watching the celebration of a try.

  “You enjoy the physical side of the game?” Perils asks.

  “Sure. That’s why I play it.”

  “Were you friends, you and Lyndall? Growing up together?”

  “No. He did his thing, I did mine. Different worlds, you know?”

  “He wasn’t much of a sportsman I’m thinking?”

  Chris shakes his bandaged head. “Nah, he was always a bit of a weed.”

  “But he got into your room and knocked you unconscious?”

  Christopher looks at her now, smile gone, something hard in his eyes. “He caught me off guard. Hit me with the bloody weight.” His hand touches the bandage.

  “You okay, Chris?” Lane asks from the kitchen doorway.

  “Ja, I’m okay.”

  Bev comes in, standing between the cop and their son. “Detective, maybe it would be better if you questioned Chris when my husband and I are present?”

  “We were just talking rugby. I’m a bit of a fan.”

  Chris clicks off the TV and walks out of the kitchen, still carrying the carton of milk.

  Beverley says, “Are you done, Detective? We’re exhausted.”

  “For now, yes.”

  Lane walks past his son who sits drinking from the carton, a mustache of milk left on his upper lip, an echo of the innocent, smiling child of long ago.

  Standing at the window, Lane sees a black body bag, oily in the arc lights that turn night to day, carried from the pool house and slid into the rear of a gray van.

  4

  Louise Solomons is shaken awake at dawn and, still groggy, has to extend her skinny right arm for a blood sample. The guy doing it, a second year medical student, is clumsy and she says, “Fuck,” when the needle jabs her.

  “Sorry,” he mutters, still half asleep himself.

  He fills a vial with her blood and tapes a cotton ball to
her arm, then checks her pulse and takes her blood pressure before shuffling out of the cubicle.

  Louise has completed the first night of a sleep limitation study being run by the medical and psychology faculties of the University of Cape Town during the summer vacation. She and the other ten volunteers were kept awake until 2:00 a.m., then allowed only four hours sleep.

  For the next week she’ll be cocooned in this research lab with the other volunteers, all strangers to her, under constant surveillance to make sure they don’t nap. The money is good and the study will give Louise a sense of purpose during this season of false cheer and keep her insulated from the strident Christmas carols and frenzied consumerism she loathes.

  And it’ll keep her away from Lyndall, who is even more out of control this time of the year.

  As she sits up on the bed, dressed in the T-shirt and sweatpants she slept in, rubbing her eyes, she remembers that she dreamed about her brother and feels a hot rush of irritation that he is dogging her, even here.

  The dream is fading, her memory serving up fragmented images like a sequence of Instagram shots: she and Lyndall as kids, maybe ten and eleven years old, invited to Chris Lane’s birthday party, the token dusky faces in a sea of privileged white ones.

  The party was on the front lawn of the house on a shiny summer’s day: tables creaking under heaps of gaudy cakes and snacks and sweets, Beverley and Michael plying over-cosseting parents (unable to be away from their brats for even an hour) with Cape wine and crudités.

  The kids were in their swimsuits, splashing in the pool. Lyndall, always timid, sat at the side, dangling his little brown pipe-cleaner legs in the water. Chris Lane, already a thug, grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him into the water, dunking him in the deep end. Lyndall surfaced spluttering, gagging and flailing, screaming like an animal, before he sank again.

  Michael Lane, in his Banana Republic shorts and shirt, had to dive in and haul Lyndall out and lay him on the coping, pumping water from his lungs—which became a stream of brightly colored puke as he spewed up the sweets and cake he’d guzzled. The kids looked on in horrified fascination and their parents’ mouths formed little moues of distaste behind their wine glasses.

  It was left to Louise to take the hand of her tearful, snotty little brother and lead him away to the servant’s quarters behind the big house, her cheeks burning with shame.

  Reaching into her backpack for her toiletry bag, trying to shake herself free of this unwanted memory, Louise is startled by a knock on the door of the cubicle.

  “Yes?” she says.

  The supervising professor, a very white woman in her thirties with prematurely gray hair cut in a severe bob and a permanently harried expression, sticks her head in.

  “Louise, we’ve had a call from your mother. It seems there’s some situation at home.” The woman hands over the cell phone Louise had to surrender the night before. “You’d better call her.”

  Lyndall, she thinks. The little bastard is causing shit again.

  Louise mutters her thanks and takes the phone, powering it up, regretting giving her mother the landline number to the research center. A number Denise had sworn she’d only use in an emergency.

  The red light on her Samsung starts to strobe and she sees that she has sixteen missed calls and ten messages from her mother.

  She hits speed-dial, calling Denise’s cell phone. She gets voice mail.

  Louise listens to the first few of the messages, an audio montage of incoherent hysteria. What she can glean is that it’s about Lyndall, okay, but the depth of her mother’s distress is disturbing.

  She tries Denise’s cell again, but still gets voice mail. Knowing her mother, she’s forgotten to charge her phone. Louise considers calling the Lanes, but shame stays her finger on the keypad. With her luck she’ll get Beverley and have to listen to the tweezer-lipped bitch talk down to her.

  Louise sits for a moment, eyes shut. She’s tempted to kill her phone, return it to the research supervisors and tell them not to disturb her further with calls from home. But a snatch of one of her mother’s garbled messages, something about a dead girl, loops in her mind and she sighs and stows her belongings in her pack and leaves the cubicle, cursing Lyndall for ruining this for her, just as he’s ruined so many things before.

  5

  Lane sits slumped on the couch staring out at the sky over Table Mountain lightening to the color of a bruise. The cops and their entourage have gone. Beverley stands by the window, and when she turns to watch Chris coming in from the kitchen carrying a bowl of muesli, her face looks old and drawn, vitality leached from her eyes.

  Chris sits and reaches for the TV remote, the adenoidal twang of a Kiwi rugby commentator blaring out.

  “Turn that off,” Lane says.

  The boy ignores him, shoveling food into his mouth, wiping milk from his chin with his hand.

  Beverley crosses the room, grabs the remote and clicks off the tube.

  Chris looks up at her, speaking around a mouthful of food. “Hey, I’m watching that.”

  “Shut up, Christopher,” she says. He shrugs and carries on eating.

  Bev sits on the couch beside Lane, forming an isosceles triangle with their son at its apex.

  “There are things that need to be done,” she says, her voice tight with strain. “We need to call these people, the Walkers, and offer our condolences.”

  Lane stares at her. “Jesus, Beverley, it hardly seems appropriate.” She shrugs. “So, are we just going to wish away what Christopher did?”

  She looks at him, blinks, then says, “We’ll never speak of it again, Michael, do you hear me?”

  Lane shakes his head and turns to Chris.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you do it?” His son slurps muesli. “Are you taking steroids again?”

  Christopher clatters the bowl down onto a glass-topped table and stands, towering over his parents. “I’m going to sleep in my old room.”

  He humps his way up the stairs toward the room he had as a child, untouched since he moved to the pool house, Tintin books and action figures still on the shelves, where he’ll lay his over-muscled man’s body in the boy’s narrow bed.

  Beverley closes her eyes, her mask of composure slipping at last. She has been the engine that has driven her husband and son these last hours, her certainty washing away Lane’s protests and his doubts. Like it had twenty years ago.

  She sighs and her eyes open and come to rest on Lane. “What are we going to do about cleaning the pool house?”

  Typical Bev: treat the symptoms.

  “There must be people who handle that kind of thing. I’ll Google it.”

  The kitchen door creaks open and Lane hears the shuffle of Denise Solomons’s carpet slippers. She would have spent a night without sleep, as they did, with the police questioning her out in her cottage in the backyard.

  Denise stands in the doorway. “Morning.”

  “Morning,” Lane says.

  “Can I make youse some tea?”

  “We’re okay, Denise,” Lane says.

  She hovers a moment then shuffles into the living room and stands before them. She wears a blue housecoat, the fringe of her petticoat visible beneath the hem. Her hair, usually drawn back into a tight bun, is loose, hanging in graying corkscrews to her shoulders. Her one eye is swollen shut and her lip bears a scab the size of a tick.

  “I feel so terrible, Mr. Mike, Miss Bev.”

  Lane says, “Sit, D. Please.”

  She lowers herself into a chair, perched on the edge of the cushion, her fingers grabbing at the soft leather. “I know Lynnie has been causing trouble, but to do what they say he done, the cops . . .” She breaks off and pulls a tissue from her sleeve and dabs at her good eye.

  Lane looks at his wife. This is the moment where their humanity can triumph, where they can face what their son has done and face what they’re doing to this woman’s boy.

  But when Beverley sp
eaks her voice is sharp, “He did it, Denise. Attacked Chris and murdered that poor girl. If you had only bloody listened to us earlier and called the police she would still be alive now.”

  Lane is unsure what amazes him more: how convincing Beverley is in her lie, or that he remains mute in the face of it.

  Denise Solomons breaks down, sobbing, sucking air and keening. Beverley shakes her head and gets up and stands by the window with her arms folded. It is left to Lane to console the woman, placing an awkward hand on her heaving shoulder.

  “Where’s Louise, Denise?”

  “She’s by the ’varsity. I phone there and leave a message for her.”

  “Why don’t you go and lie down until she gets here? Okay?”

  Denise nods and pushes up out of the chair. She stares at Bev, then shakes her head and scuffs out. Lane waits until he hears the back door close before he crosses to stand beside his wife.

  “This is madness, Beverley.”

  She shrugs one shoulder. “What’s done is done.”

  “It’s going to unravel. The cops’ll pick up Lyndall and he’ll give them an alibi.”

  She spits out a laugh. “That little tik-head? Please. Michael, remember where we live, for Christ’s sake. You know how thrilled the cops’ll be to have an open and shut case.”

  “That’s blue sky thinking, Beverley.”

  “Is it? How many people murdered each year in this bloody country?” When he doesn’t reply she says, “And how many of those murders are solved?”

  “Beverley . . .”

  “So do you really think the cops are going to fuck this one up? They have a suspect. They’ll get applause from their bosses and look great in the media.”

  “So we just sacrifice Lyndall?”

  “Where do you think his life is going, Michael? He’s a mess. We’re only hastening the inevitable.” She softens and touches his face. “We have to do this, Mike. For Christopher. He’d go to prison for years, with those savages.” Her eyes close and she shakes her head. “No, no. It’s unthinkable.”