Sacrifices

by Roger Smith

  “What if he does it again?”

  “He won’t. I’ll talk to him, I promise.”

  “Jesus, Beverley . . . ”

  “We’ll get through this, Mike.” Her eyes harden. “Like we did before.”

  Beverley turns and climbs the stairs to their bedroom, leaving Lane with a reminder.

  And a warning.

  6

  When the minibus taxi thumps to a halt the pimple-faced co-driver rolls open the sliding door and Louise steps out into early morning traffic on Newlands Avenue, sucking car fumes.

  She hurries home through the quiet streets, a Sniper car nosing up beside her, the two men inside checking her out before they speed away when they realize that she’s a girl beneath the cap and shapeless clothes.

  As she’s approaching the high walls and the closed gate of the Lane’s house a white Toyota draws up and a young blonde woman and a black man carrying a video camera get out.

  Christ, what has Lyndall done this time?

  Louise pulls her cap lower as she dodges the TV people and opens the gate, closing it after her, ignoring their shouts.

  Louise walks up the driveway toward the house, the top floor visible over the trees. Near the pool, a colored guy in some kind of protective outfit stands beside a small truck, THE CLEAN SQUAD 24/7 painted on its side. A black and yellow mask dangles from his neck, and he has removed the glove on his right hand so he can smoke.

  Another man, also in a protective suit, face and head covered, lugs a red plastic drum into the pool house where Chris Lane lives.

  Louise feels a knot of dread in her gut and has to fight the impulse to turn on her heel and bolt.

  The smoking man says, “Morning,” in Afrikaans, exhaling a cloud of fumes.

  Louise just nods in return, not in the mood for the look this working class man from the Cape Flats will lay on her when he hears her middle class accent—whitey accent—acquired in the suburban schools the Lanes sent her and Lyndall to. Not as posh as the private schools Chris bullied his way through, but light years from the barbed-wire festooned classrooms with their semi-literate teachers and broken windows out on the crime-ravaged Flats.

  She sees Michael Lane leaving the house, his BMW chirping as he uses the remote to unlock it, and jogs across to him, her pack thumping her spine.

  “Louise,” he says, moving like a zombie, leaning on the roof of the car. He looks like hell, his eyes torn and bloodshot. If she didn’t know him better she’d think he was hungover.

  “What’s going on, Michael? I got these hysterical messages from my mom.”

  “A girl was murdered last night, in the pool house.”

  “Jesus, Michael. What happened?”

  “Your mom let Lyndall in and he beat her up when she wouldn’t give him money. The Sniper guys threw him out, but he came back later and attacked Chris and killed the girl, a friend of Chris’s.”

  His eyes skid away from her, looking down the driveway as if he, too, wants to escape.

  “Where’s Lyndall now?” she asks in a voice she can barely recognize.

  “I’ve just heard from the police. They’ve arrested him in town.”

  “Oh my God, Mike.”

  He sags down into the car and starts the engine. “Go to your mother, Louise. She needs you.”

  The window of his car slides up and he drives away, edging past the cleaner’s truck.

  Louise walks around the side of the house, ducks under the washing line and opens the door to the cottage built in the shadow of the sprawling mansion. When she steps into the kitchenette, her mother, babbling incoherently, embraces her, weeping on her shoulder.

  Louise sees her mother’s black eye and swollen lip and all she can think, is good, I’m glad he’s in jail. He fucking deserves it.

  7

  As Michael Lane noses his BMW out the electric gates and into the street a woman with a microphone and a man with a video camera ambush him, the woman shouting questions through the closed glass of his window. He accelerates, the news people receding in his rearview mirror.

  Lane flees down the leafy streets of Newlands, ever-present Table Mountain looming over the large homes hidden behind high walls and electric fences. A suburb of old money, money that whispers rather than yells like on the nouveau riche Atlantic seaboard, where a fungus of stone and glass spreads ever higher up the slopes of the mountain.

  A Sniper car with a yellow light bar on the roof approaches and the driver flashes his hazards at Lane in salute. Lane wags a hand in return.

  When he reaches the main road Lane doesn’t turn right toward the city and his dusty and comfortably seedy bookstore in Long Street, he heads left, following the spine of mountains southward to where the peninsula will eventually narrow and crumble into the Atlantic at Cape Point.

  When Lane left the house Chris was still asleep in his old room and Beverley was in the bathtub, hot water drumming in at regular intervals. She would lie in the steamy room for hours, her eyes closed, face turned to that of a primitive by a face pack. Gathering herself, persuading herself that what she had instigated was right. The only course of action.

  Like two decades ago.

  It’s only 8:00 a.m. but the day is already hot, no wind now, the Southeaster recharging itself over the Indian Ocean, ready to howl in later and batter the peninsula. Lane feels claustrophobic inside the climate-controlled cabin of the BMW and hits the button to lower his window, allowing thick, hot air into the car.

  He breathes deeply, trying to calm himself, but succeeds only in filling his lungs with dust and car fumes. Close to panic he clicks on the radio and “Jingle Bells” booms out, the inane warble conjuring a northern yuletide of snow and sleighs at odds with the burning landscape, the rocks of the mountains so sharply etched by the sun that they dance in an almost pointillist display, reminding Lane of the few times he dropped acid as a youth.

  He’d had none of the extravagant hallucinations others described, merely felt a slight sideways shift, a parallax view, leaving him with an intuition that reality was a fragile construct, threatened by some nameless dread lurking darkly in the peripheries.

  He kills the radio and raises his window, the A/C chilling the sweat on his body. He’s passing the sprawling Pollsmoor Prison, all barbed wire and bunker-like buildings, and wonders if Lyndall is being held there, or if he’s in a cell in the city, awaiting his bail hearing.

  Lane can’t block the memory of Lyndall as a boy of eight or nine on the lawn of the house, skinny legs and knobbly knees, robbed of a soccer ball by the already thickset Chris, who drilled it past his father into the makeshift goals, taking a victory lap, ripping off his shirt and pumping his fists and sliding on the grass like one of preening, overpaid professionals he so admired.

  Chris ended his celebration by diving into the pool and Lane walked with Lynnie toward the house, the kid ready to scurry off to the servant’s quarters in the rear, before Lane invited him to sit on the step with him and drink a Coke, the boy battling to open the can.

  “So, Lynnie,” Lane said, “what do you want to do when you grow up?” Expecting the usual kids’ list of fireman, or racing car driver or rapper.

  “I wanna work by a library.”

  “Really? A library?”

  The boy nodding, gulping at his Coke. “Ja, I like it in the library. Nice and quiet.”

  And now he’d be locked up in Pollsmoor, a place built for five thousand men and home to twice that. A place of gang rape and murder. A noisy, violent, bedlam. Put there by the Lanes and their lies.

  Lane entertains the idea of reaching for his cell phone and calling the woman cop and telling her the truth. But, of course, he doesn’t. His relationship with the truth these last twenty years has been tenuous at best.

  8

  They’ve missed Lyndall. He’s already on his way to Pollsmoor, bail denied.

  Louise hears this from her brother’s court-appointed lawyer, a Muslim guy who looks barely out of his teens, with gelled hair and a
cheap suit and ridiculously long, skinny shoes that slap and clatter on the stone floors of the courthouse corridor as he hurries away from where her mother sits on a bench, dabbing sweat from her brow with a crumpled Kleenex, dressed in a church suit that is too tight for her and far too warm for this day.

  Louise, jogging to keep up with the lawyer, is secretly pleased that she doesn’t have to face her brother, knowing she’d have a tough time containing her temper if she did.

  “But how can he already have appeared?” she asks.

  The lawyer shrugs, sliding between two tattooed men in T-shirts, who speak Cape Flats Afrikaans that is unintelligible to her ear. “They pushed him to the top of the roster. High profile case.”

  “How did he plead?”

  “Not guilty, of course.”

  The sneer in his voice gets her angry and she tugs at the little asshole’s sleeve, the synthetic material of his jacket rough beneath her fingers.

  “And you argued for bail?”

  The lawyer stops and stares at her. “Look, Ms. Solomons, I know what you’re thinking.”

  “What?”

  “You think I’m some little punk fresh out of law school—”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “—and that I rolled over when the big dog barked.”

  “What big dog?”

  He shakes his head. “Where you living, girl?”

  “Who’s your fucking girl?” Right up in his face.

  “So anger management’s an issue in the family, right?”

  He sees he’s scored a point and smiles and walks on.

  She chases after him. “Okay, listen, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  “This is Cape Town at the start of the tourist season and these victims are rich white people. There’s mega media attention and the city doesn’t like it. They want it all to go away as soon as possible. For them your brother is already guilty. So they brought in the city’s senior prosecutor, a guy who usually only handles the really big cases, to nail this down tight.”

  “And your bail application was denied?”

  “Correct. And they’ve pushed for a trial date in three days. They’re looking to have your brother sentenced by Christmas.”

  “Jesus. Can they do that?”

  “Yes.” He’s walking again.

  A little of Louise’s anger at Lyndall leaks from her. Whatever he’s done he at least deserves a fair trial.

  “And there’s nothing we can do to slow this down?”

  “Sure, you hire one of those guys.” He points toward a pair of middle-aged white advocates in black cloaks, looking like self-important crows as they hurry past with their bulging brief cases.

  “I can’t afford one of them.”

  He shrugs and the shoulder of his cheap suit stays jammed up near his ear. “Then your brother is in for a bad time.” He’s walking again.

  “Look, please, I need help here.”

  He pushes open the door of the men’s toilet. “And I need a pee before my next appearance. So, good luck.”

  And the door, after releasing a sharp smell of urine barely masked by pine air-freshener, closes in her face.

  9

  Lane turns right onto Ou Kaapse Weg, a road that hairpins up the mountain—the smoggy sprawl of the Cape Flats spreading out to his left—then starts to wind down to the west side of the peninsula.

  As the endless expanse of Long Beach and the cold blue of the Atlantic comes into view far below, Lane feels a sudden bout of nausea, bile scalding his throat. He pulls off the road into the scrub and gets out and retches, producing nothing more than a few thick strands of spittle. He wipes his mouth and leans against the car, closing his eyes for a second.

  “Boss?”

  The voice has him spinning. A gaunt black man with a face so lined and fissured he looks as if he’s hewn from the rock of the mountain, stands behind him. He wears only a pair of torn shorts, his skin stretched tight over the corrugations of his ribs, his calloused feet shoeless. The man carries a bundle of firewood bound with baling wire. He offers the wood to Lane, who has no use for it, but he digs money from his pocket and hands it to the man, who nods his thanks and disappears down to some squatter settlement hidden deep in the bush.

  Lane pops the trunk and stows the wood, wipes his hands on his corduroys and gets back behind the wheel. He sits for a moment, looking down at the distant tumble of houses at the far end of Long Beach, the oceanside development that made him a wealthy man.

  His late father’s only sibling, John, had lived down there in ramshackle seclusion, in a world of indigenous vegetation and sea birds, the Atlantic tossing driftwood and dead seals onto the beach, the high tide almost lapping at the porch of his wooden house. Then, in the early nineties, the world had started reaching its tentacles round the mountain and houses and condos and strip malls mushroomed on the perimeter of his land. Developers in luxury German cars came calling and were greeted by the barrels of a shotgun. Uncle John fired into the air the first time. Slower, or more stubborn property vultures, took the second blast of buckshot in their asses.

  He died alone of a heart attack in his house in nineteen ninety-four. Estranged from the rest of his family it fell to Lane—recently married, with a small child, studying for a useless master’s degree in English and working night jobs—to pay for the cremation. Bev had tried to dissuade him, making the very good point that it would leave them without food for the next month. But Lane had admired the old man and treasured memories from childhood of running wild on that beach, and he forked out the cash for a cheap pine coffin and a by-the-hour preacher.

  A few days later a lawyer called to tell Lane that his uncle had left him the land. The developers beat a path to his door and Lane knew he should sell, take the many millions and put financial care behind him. But the knowledge of what would be built, how this stretch of the peninsula would be ruined forever, kept him from signing any of the documents they thrust at him.

  It was Beverley who came up with a plan. She would develop the land herself, in partnership with the least scabrous of the developers. A third of the area would be protected as a sanctuary and the rest would be developed with houses that conformed to a strict code: whitewashed walls and thatched roofs. No double storeys. No satellite dishes.

  Of course this made the property even more exclusive and Lane marveled as Bev oversaw the project, keeping the developers in line and enforcing the aesthetic code. Within a year all the sites had been sold and they were rich enough to buy the house in Newlands and for Lane to take over the running of the bookstore his father had started. A bookstore that leaked money. No matter, he could spend his days searching for rare volumes while Beverley moved onto more developments and made them even richer.

  Lane starts the car and drives down into the valley, past the reborn Christian tabernacles and shopping malls and the wood and tin jumble that is the makeshift Kayamandi township.

  He comes to a T-junction and pulls the BMW off the road, into the shade of a giant oak. Three wooden crosses are driven into the soil at the base of the tree. The wood of the crosses has rotted and one of them lists almost to the ground. Twenty years ago they were clean and white, each bearing a name. Names that have long disappeared, but are etched into Lane’s memory: Errol, Petunia and Little Brandon.

  Because of that family, once residents of the nearby mixed race area of Ocean View, Lane insisted that they keep Denise and her two small children when they bought the house in Newlands, overriding Beverley’s plan to get rid of the live-in help that was the legacy of the previous owners. Not only insisted on keeping them, but built them a cottage. And put the children through school, even sitting in the evenings at the kitchen table, helping with their homework, while his wife and son watched TV. Because of those crosses Lane had done this, some band-aid for the guilt that he carried.

  And because of those crosses he’d joined his wife and son in the lie that would damn Lyndall Solomons.

  10
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  Louise sits with her mother at a sidewalk café near the courthouse, drinking a cup of espresso to scare away the tiredness that’s creeping up on her. The older woman, dabbing at tears, sips at a cup of milky tea.

  “What we gonna do, Lou? I think we must ask Mr. Mike for help.”

  There’s a sharp chime as Louise drops her cup into the saucer. “Hell, Ma, think for a moment: Lyndall attacked Chris and killed this girl. You think Michael’s going to pay for some fancy defense lawyer?”

  “As God is my witness, Lou, I don’t know why Lynnie done what he done.”

  Denise is sobbing again and Louise closes her eyes, massaging the bridge of her narrow nose—the nose that so resembles her almost girlishly-pretty brother’s—and she sees the pool house, with the crime scene cleaners at work, and she’s battling to put her skinny little brother in that room, using a weight to smash in that girl’s head.

  Instead she sees Christopher Lane with his big chest and his blacksmith’s arms and she’s fourteen again, her boyish body modestly covered in a one-piece bathing suit, lifting herself out of the pool, standing dripping on the tiles as she reaches for her towel. Aware of Chris coming out of his room, already man-big at thirteen, wearing only a pair of shorts, carrying a beer can in his hand.

  He grabbed her, and at first she thought this was some stupid game, that he was going to push her into the pool, but he covered her mouth with his hand and dragged her inside, throwing her onto the bed, ripping her bathing suit so that her tiny breasts were exposed.

  She screamed and he slapped her and when she screamed again he punched her in the gut and left her gagging, his hand at her groin, grabbing under her wet swimsuit.

  “Chris!” Michael Lane was in the doorway, red faced from tending the barbecue in the sun, a pair of tongs still gripped in his hand. “What the hell’s going on?”