by Roger Smith
Louise pulled up the torn bathing suit and fled to the cottage.
When she told her mother what had happened Denise responded with the caution bred into the serving classes. “You don’t want to make no trouble now, Lou.”
“Me? It was Chris. He wanted to rape me.”
Her mother slapped her through the face. The only time she had ever lifted a hand to her. “Don’t you say that! Don’t you ever use that word!”
Later in the afternoon Beverley Lane came out to their quarters, perching on the edge of a chair like it was contaminated, and spoke to Louise in her posh accent with her hard little smile. Saying that Chris hadn’t meant any harm, that he’d just got a bit carried away. Boys will be boys, and all that.
Money changed hands, of course, smoothing things over, and life went on as before, but Louise never swam in that pool again and steered well clear of Christopher Lane, although she felt his eyes on her as she hurried up and down the driveway to school and later to university.
Louise, blind to the passing Christmas shoppers and snarling traffic, can’t shake the feeling that somehow the Lanes—and she knows Beverley would have been the architect—have managed to make Lyndall the scapegoat for something their son did.
Louise gets Denise Solomons into a minibus taxi back to Newlands and then, carrying the card the woman cop gave her mother last night, goes in search of the Criminal Investigations Unit. She finds it in an office block in the city that looks like it belongs to a bank.
Louise meets a wall of security in the lobby and when she asks to see Detective Gwen Perils she is questioned so long and so listlessly by a uniformed black cop slumped behind a counter that she despairs of ever getting beyond him, until, at last, he picks up a phone and mutters into it and hands her a numbered plastic tag with a small alligator clip that she hangs from the collar of her boyish check shirt.
“Go up to fifth floor,” he says, pointing to the elevators.
She rides up and steps out into an open-plan maze of desks and low partitions and ringing phones, a babble of voices rising from within the cubicles: English, Afrikaans, Xhosa.
“Louise Solomons?”
A colored woman in her early thirties with flat-ironed hair appears beside her.
“Yes.”
“I’m Gwen Perils. I can give you five minutes.”
The cop turns and leads the way through the honeycomb of cubicles, until she arrives at a desk beside a window that offers a view out over the city. The woman folds her skirt under her and sits at the desk, a PC and a phone and a couple of files squared away at right angles. She points to a vacant swivel chair and Louise sits.
“You’ve come from the court?”
“Yes. Lyndall had already been taken to Pollsmoor.”
There is a slight narrowing of the hazel eyes when the cop hears Louise’s accent, a pursing of the lips before she speaks, working hard to banish the Cape Flats from her voice.
“I know you’re going to tell me your brother’s innocent. We get it all the time. Sob stories from mothers and sisters and grannies. Hell, I used to do it, too.”
Louise looks at her. The cop nods.
“Ja, me and my ma going to the cop shop, telling them to let go my dad, or my brother. Or my uncle. That they done nothing.” Her affected accent slipping as she goes back in time. Then she shakes her head as if to clear it, and when she speaks again that carefully learned voice is back. “Your brother is no different. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not here to tell you Lyndall’s innocent.”
“No?”
“No. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
The woman gives her a quizzical look, then shrugs. “Okay. Ask.”
“From what my mother tells me nobody saw Lyndall there last night? When that girl was killed?”
“Well, Christopher Lane saw him.”
“Aside from Chris?”
“No. But we found his skullcap. His kufi.” This stops Louise. “You didn’t know this?”
“No.”
“Ja. It was found on the bricks outside the pool house. We’ve sent it away for testing and we’re pretty sure it’ll match your brother’s DNA. There was blood on it. Testing should confirm that it’s Melanie Walker’s.”
“Lyndall tried to fight off the Sniper guys, earlier?”
“Yes.”
“So maybe he lost it then.”
“And the blood?”
It’s Louise’s turn to shrug. “Detective, you saw the size of my brother?”
“You’re going to say how can a shrimp like him overpower a bruiser like Chris Lane?”
“Yes.”
“Tik, my girl, that’s how. I’ve seen women smaller than you beat up guys built like Mike Tyson when they’re tikking.” She pauses. “He hit your mom, right?”
“Look, Detective, it’s true that my brother’s been nothing but trouble the past few years. I can’t tell you the times I’ve tried to get my mother to press assault charges against him.”
“There you go, then.”
“But murder? Smashing in the head of some girl he doesn’t even know? Makes no sense to me.”
Perils holds up a hand. “He beat up your mom, then he tried to fight the armed response guys, threatening that he was coming back to get the white people in the house. Looks like he did just that.”
Louise shakes her head.
“You telling me the Lanes are lying?” the cop asks.
“I’m asking you to consider that option.”
“What have you got against them, anyway?”
Louise says, “Nothing.”
“The way you speak, you went to good schools, right?”
“Yes.”
“They pay, the Lanes?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Listen, Louise, my mother was a domestic worker too. I know what it’s like. You’re out in the room in the back looking over at the nice white life, wanting it to be yours. And when they’re in the mood, the white people, they treat you well and you’re sure, one day, that that back door will open and you’ll step through and be just like them. Right?” When Louise only stares at her, Perils shakes her head. “It’s never like that. You’re in your world and they’re in theirs, and you’ve gotta make your own way.”
They sit in silence for a moment, the cop gazing out the window over the city toward the endless sprawl of the Cape Flats smothered by a tobacco-colored layer of pollution. Louise wonders if Perils is measuring her progress, from there to here.
The woman’s eyes move from the window to the expensive little watch that encircles her wrist.
Louise says, “I think Chris Lane is on steroids.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“No. But he’s big and aggressive.”
The cop laughs. “You could be describing most of the guys at Bishops.” The fancy school Chris has just matriculated from.
Louise says, “Last year Chris and a crew of his buddies were out drinking one night. They stopped at a gas station store to get some food. They got into an altercation with a pump attendant—a black guy—and they beat him into a coma.”
Perils looks at her, startled for a moment, then her face is impassive again as Louise continues.
“He survived, but he lost an eye and has some sort of brain damage. The parents of these boys—including the Lanes—paid off the victim and no charges were laid. I’ve heard that Chris was the instigator. Called the man a kaffir, and when he reacted, started beating him.”
“Louise, how is this relevant? I know you’re trying to help your brother, but the case against Lyndall is pretty damn airtight.”
“So you’re not even going to investigate further?”
“It’s an ongoing investigation, of course.” Perils stands and lifts a file from her desk. “I’m late for a meeting.”
Perils is walking and Louise follows her through the partitions. “What would you do, Detective, if you were me?”
“I’
d do everything I could to help my brother.”
“Then all I want is for you to do your job. I want fairness.”
“Listen, Louise, this isn’t some beach book where the hero cop ties up all the loose ends and everybody goes home happy. This is real life, and most of the time real life isn’t fair, okay?”
Perils steps into an open elevator and leaves Louise marooned as the doors slide shut.
11
Walking along Long Street Lane passes a locksmith and a liquor store and catches the dirty feet whiff of a Chinese medicine importer before he arrives at the Regency building (three storeys with an ornate façade painted gray and white) that houses the bookstore founded by his father, bearded, bohemian Bernard Lane—hosting boozy soirees and introducing authors in his plummy accent, letting the world believe that he was independently wealthy—who’d gone to his deathbed with creditors snapping at his heels.
Lane unlocks the door and sets the bell chiming. Usually this small, cluttered store soothes Lane, an antidote to a world that is increasingly alien to him. Dressed in his tweed jacket with elbow patches, shapeless corduroys and unpolished shoes, he can fool himself with his impersonation of a bookish fellow subsiding happily into middle-age.
Now he feels like an imposter and Lane’s Books—flagrantly anachronistic in a country where people battle to buy bread—nothing but a costly conceit.
Daphne Coombs, sixty-something with a helmet of mauve hair, guards the cash register like a gargoyle. She dates back to his father’s time, Lane remembering her from his visits here as a small boy. If there had been a Mr. Coombs nobody had ever seen him.
“Morning, Mrs. Coombs.”
“I’m surprised you’ve come in, Michael”
He shrugs. “I just needed to get away.”
Lane flashes back to the carnage in the pool house: the blood, the bone splinters and the gray sponge of brain matter.
Mrs. Coombs is speaking: “I’m more than capable of holding the fort.”
“Of course you are,” he says, shaking off the nauseating memory, heading toward his office.
“By the way, there’s some policewoman waiting for you.”
Lane takes a deep breath and walks through to his invaded sanctuary. Detective Perils stands silhouetted against the hatch that offers a view of the bookstore and busy Long Street.
“Is there something I can help you with, Detective?” Lane asks, working hard to keep his voice cool and level as he closes the door, muting the grumble of traffic.
When she doesn’t reply he seats himself behind his desk, his father’s old swivel chair creaking its usual welcome. “Would you like to sit?”
“No, I’m okay,” she says.
“Some tea?”
She shakes her head, that straightened and gelled hair an unmoving curtain framing her face. “I hear your son and some of his friends got themselves into a bit of trouble last year?”
“And where did you hear that?” Lane keeps his face expressionless, but his scrotum tightens like a fist.
“Seems they beat some black pump attendant half to death and it all went away just like that.” She makes a sharp click with thumb and middle finger. Then she smiles down at him and rubs her fingers together as if she’s counting money. “Or should I say, just like that?”
“Is there a point lurking around here, Detective?”
She sits opposite him and crosses her legs, the fabric of her pantsuit whispering. “How long have you known Lyndall Solomons?”
Lane shrugs. “He must’ve been two or three when his mother started working for us.”
“So you saw him grow up?”
“Yes, I suppose I did.”
“Were you close to him?”
“Well, he was a quiet child. A little distant. I had more of a relationship with his sister, Louise. She was a very bright kid.”
Perils gives him a cold smile. “My boss sees this case as closed. He’s already calling it a win in the media. It’s being fast-tracked: Lyndall Solomons will be back in court within three days and he’ll be found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years without the option of parole. You understand this?”
“Yes,” Lane says, “of course.”
“So, if there’s anything, Mr. Lane, that you want to say, say it. Otherwise that kid’s life is pretty much over.
So, here’s his chance to confess. To save Lyndall and maybe, just maybe, to save something of himself.
But when he speaks Lane hears himself saying, “I’m afraid I have nothing to add to what I told you last night, Detective.” He shrugs. “Nothing at all.”
12
Louise walks up from the city taxi, the leafy streets of Newlands growing darker as the sun sinks behind the mountain. She inhales bougainvillea from a bush winding through the barbed wire and electric fence that surrounds a large house, an anonymous fortress like the Lane’s, and her feet crush the flesh-like blooms.
She’s dreading getting home and having to deal with her mother’s desperation. When her phone vibrates in her pocket she almost ignores it, sure it’s Denise Solomons pestering her for news. But she sees PRIVATE NUMBER on the face of her phone and takes the call.
“Yes?”
“Lou? Lou?” Lyndall shouting through a bedlam of yelling voices.
“Lynnie?”
“Lou, you gotta get me out here, Lou. You gotta get me out.”
“Lyndall, just calm down, okay?”
“I didn’t do it, Lou. I wasn’t even there, in Chris’s room. I was in town.”
“Swear to me, Lynnie.”
“I swear, Lou. I swear.”
And, even though she knows she shouldn’t, Louise believes him.
“Lyndall, I’ve found out I can come and visit you in Pollsmoor tomorrow, okay? Then we can talk.”
“Lou, there’s shit going down in here.” An eruption of shouting, the sound of the phone being dropped and bumped. Then Lyndall is back. “Promise me if I die here tonight you bury me Muslim. Promise me.”
“Lyndall, for fuck’s sake calm down. You’re not going to die.”
“Promise me, Lou!”
“Okay, I promise,” she says and the connection is broken.
This new incarnation of her brother, the skull-cap wearing Mustafa, was about a year old. Finding Allah had done nothing to temper his tik habit, and Louise dismissed this conversion as just another way for Lyndall to piss off the world.
She arrives at the Lane’s house, scans the road for media and when she spots none she uses the control on her keychain to open the gate. Walking down the driveway she sees that the crime scene cleaners have gone, the doors to the pool house are closed and the curtains drawn.
Avoiding the Lane’s house, she cuts past the garage toward the backyard. The roller door is lifted, the garage empty of Michael’s BMW and Beverley’s Pajero.
Louise ducks under the washing lines, free of laundry today, and heads toward the cottage, but when she sees the back door of the big house standing open, she surrenders to an impulse and walks into the kitchen.
It has been years since she’s stepped into this room, but nothing has changed. She can’t stop herself from sitting down at the table, the surface—lovingly waxed by her mother with lavender-scented polish—familiar beneath her finger tips.
At this table, in the winter of Louise’s seventh birthday, Michael Lane had read her Through the Looking-Glass. Every night for a month, after eating dinner with her mother and Lynnie in the cottage, she’d bathed, put on her PJs and dressing gown and presented herself at the kitchen door of the big house at 7:00 p.m. exactly, clutching the hardcover book with the old black and white illustrations that was her birthday gift from Michael.
Each night he’d opened the door for her and seated her at the kitchen table, making the offer of hot chocolate which she’d politely accepted. He got the kettle boiling and, as he closed the door to the living room, muffling the babble of the TV, she’d glimpsed Beverley and Chris sitting glued to the box, wa
tching American sitcoms with fakey laugh tracks, the tube washing their pale, blank faces.
Her mother and Lynnie were doing the same thing in the cottage, but their small TV was tuned to the dramas on the Afrikaans channel: overheated tales of love and loss and betrayal.
Michael spooned chocolate into two mugs and added hot water, the earthenware chiming as he stirred the powder. Placing the two steaming mugs on the table, bits of dark chocolate orbiting on the foamy surface, he asked Louise about her day at school.
Then Michael had opened the book and continued from where he’d left off the previous night, his beautiful voice transporting Louise into the strange and wonderful world Alice discovered when she traveled through the looking-glass. The closing of the book each night, another chapter closer to the story’s end, had filled her with a creeping sense of desolation.
Twelve years later, sitting in the gathering darkness of this vast kitchen, Louise appreciates the irony of Michael reading her Lewis Carroll’s book, and wonders if he’d done it knowingly, if the parallels with the brown servant’s child stepping each day through the mirror into the wonderland of white privilege were too rich for him to resist.
13
Lane parks his car in the garage—no sign of Beverley’s Pajero—and enters the house through the door that leads to the kitchen. It’s almost night and the lights are off. He stands in the gloom, listening for signals of his son’s presence. All he hears is the Southeaster nagging at a loose roof tile. As his eyes become accustomed to the murk, Lane realizes that he’s not alone—Louise Solomons sits at the kitchen table, watching him.
“Hell, Lou, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he says, reaching for the wall switch, igniting the LEDs that fill the room with hard blue light.
Louise fixes him with a level stare. She’s always managed to disconcert him, this reserved, hidden girl and when he’s with her he senses an unspoken disappointment: that he’d been the keeper of the door to a new life; a door he’d opened a crack, then closed in her face.
“Michael, I need you to be honest with me,” she says.