by Roger Smith
She stands, staring at him.
“Go.” Waving her away with a tattooed hand.
“Who are you?” she asks.
He looks down at Lyndall. “I’m his father.”
Then he fixes those torn eyes on her. “And yours, too.”
Part 2
Winter
1
Michael Lane wakes to a deluge—water drumming on the roof, sluicing the gutters and surging down the pipes, the house clanging and groaning like an old ship on its way to the breaker’s yard. Rainwater taps like a blind man’s cane directly above Lane; a brown stain in the shape of Africa has appeared on the pressed metal ceiling over the past weeks.
But it isn’t the rain that rouses him, nor the sick feeling in his gut that has haunted him these last seven months—relegating the guilt and horror of that night on the road twenty years ago to the vaults of his memory—it’s an erection, an insistent, throbbing hard-on, the tip driven painfully into the mattress. He rolls onto his back and the unruly thing slaps his belly, an unwanted reminder of a part of his life that died with the girl in the pool house.
A vague recollection of the dream that had prompted it—young Beverley cramming him into her mouth—floats across Lane’s mind and for a moment he is overcome by loneliness.
Three nights after Lane exiled himself to this room his naked wife slipped in, sitting on the bed beside where he lay, her light frame barely disturbing the mattress. He was awake but feigned sleep, lying with his back to her, ignoring the soft caress of her fingers down his spine, his body immune to her touch.
Repulsed by it, in fact.
He was certain she knew he wasn’t asleep but she withdrew her hand and left the room, gently closing the door after her. She never returned.
Lane leaves the bed and pulls on a robe, belting it tight, the absurd erection trying to eel its way between the folds as he crosses to the window and opens the curtains onto the sodden winter dawn.
Summer in Cape Town unspools like a reel of overexposed celluloid, the relentless sun bleaching the parched landscape, the heat a poultice drawing out the tourist hordes and the listless locals; the beaches, streets and sidewalk bars filled with bare flesh sweating booze and summer-lust.
But in winter the city lies muffled beneath weeks of unrelenting rain, the mountain shrouded in mist and soggy low cloud, the kelp-strewn beaches deserted, the bars and bistros heavy with off-season melancholy.
Lane has always liked the winter and welcomes it even more this year, the hard edges of that mad week in December softened a little by the cold and damp.
He pans his eyes over to the pool house where Christopher, seemingly untroubled by memory or guilt, continues to live, and before Lane can suppress it an image of his son crouched atop the dead girl hits him with the force of a blow and the remnants of desire leak away with the blood in his penis.
He pads past the open door to the marital bedroom—Beverley’s out doing circuits at the gym in Claremont—and locks himself in the bathroom where he empties his bladder and bowels. Afterward, as he lathers to shave, Lane inspects his face in the mirror. Aside from the haunted eyes he looks surprisingly good. He’s lost a few pounds in the last months, the skin stretched taut over the bones, making him appear strangely youthful.
As if to punish himself, Lane attacks his face with the razor, removing beard and shaving foam in brisk sweeps. Too brisk. He nicks his jaw and has to glue toilet paper to his mandible to staunch the blood.
He showers, dresses in corduroys and an argyle sweater and descends to the kitchen where Brenda Passens, her hands dripping with foam, rinses crockery and stacks it in the drying rack, spurning the dishwasher that stands silent beneath the sink. Brenda is a short, sturdy woman of around fifty, with a dark face that’s slow to smile. The Lanes inherited her from friends who fled to Australia.
“No husband, no children, no hassles,” their female friend had said when giving Brenda a glowing reference. The nature of the hassles unspecified.
“Morning, Brenda,” Lane says, clicking on the kettle.
“Morning, Michael.”
None of that “Mr. Mike” nonsense, which is a relief.
Lane drops a teabag into a mug and fills it with hot water. Holding the string he yo-yos the teabag, letting it steep, before dumping it into the trash.
When he turns Brenda has gone, moving so silently he didn’t notice her departure, the whisk of a broom from the living room the only clue that she is still in the house. A change from big, clumsy Denise Solomons, dead of a heart attack these past three months, Lane only hearing about her death when she was already long buried.
Arriving home from the bookstore the day after Denise collapsed, Lane had gone to the cottage to find Louise and enquire about her mother’s condition. When he knocked the door swung open and he saw the cottage keys lying on the kitchen counter. All the hand-me-down furniture was still there, but the faded wallpaper wore dark rectangles where Denise’s hideous prints had hung, and in the bedrooms the mattresses were stripped of their bedding, the gaping closets empty but for a clatter of wire hangers.
When Lane dialed Louise’s cell he got her voice mail. He called the clinic and was told that Denise was out of danger, but would need to be hospitalized for at least another week. He agreed to cover all expenses.
He tried to call Louise a few more times but she never responded to his messages. He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t relieved. At the end of each month he deposited a hefty sum of money into the bank account Denise and Louise shared.
In May the bursar from the University of Cape Town called to inform Lane that Louise had dropped out and, though there wouldn’t be a refund for the remainder of the year, no further payments for her education would be required of him.
Lane heard no more about the Solomons women until a few weeks ago when the domestic worker of a friend passed on the news that Denise had died of a heart attack in April.
Out of duty Lane had tried to call Louise but he’d got her voicemail again, and she’d never returned the call. Unbeknown to Beverley he’d continued making the deposits.
Guilt money.
Blood money.
What the hell . . .
Lane takes his tea and sits down at the table, watching the wind drive the rain against the window, dreading the day ahead. Christopher is to make his professional rugby debut for the Western Province team that afternoon and Lane, despite his misgivings, will be in the crowd.
Why is he still here, living this lie? Why hasn’t he bolted, like Louise Solomons?
The death of Lyndall ended the investigation into the murder of Melanie Walker, the police, her parents and the media satisfied that justice had been done. In a television interview the girl’s mother had praised the wisdom of the Universe, and who was Lane to argue? Whatever suspicions Louise may have had seemed to have been swept away by the tragedies of the last months.
So the Lanes were safe.
But fear and guilt gnawed at Lane. He visualized his life as a fragile assembly of carefully balanced lies, and carried a superstitious dread that if he were to withdraw from his family (revealing the fiction of the happy marriage and the doting parents) the construction would tumble.
So Lane plays his role as paterfamilias with his bookstore, his nice home in Newlands, his attractive blonde wife and athletic son. And the world seems to think well of his performance.
He hears the rattle of the roller door as Beverley’s car pulls into the garage. She enters the kitchen, wearing her gym outfit beneath a short hooded top.
“You have toilet paper on your face,” she says, dumping her bag on the counter.
Lane peels the bloody scrap from his jaw, rolls it into a ball and drops it into his empty mug.
“Have you seen Chris?” Bev asks, taking a bottle of Evian from the fridge.
“No.”
“I suppose he’s with the team.” She sits opposite him, sipping from the bottle. “What time should we leave?”
Wh
en he doesn’t reply she looks out the window at the rain, her expression unnaturally serene. Lane stares at her face—a frozen, blank mask—and wonders if she’s having Botox injections. A movement draws his eyes to her hand lying on the tabletop, and when he sees that it’s shaking he understands the toll the last months have taken on her. Aware of his gaze she makes a fist, stilling the tremor.
He rises. “I’m going to the bookstore for a few hours. I’ll pick you up at one.”
Lane leaves her at the table staring out at the rain again, her fist still clenched.
2
The blade bites deeper than it ever has, but the pain means nothing now. Louise, wearing only a T-shirt, sits cross-legged on the cold bathroom floor watching the blood well up on her thigh, flow over her goosebump-pimpled skin and drop onto the checkerboard tiles. She has cut so deep into her leg that she can see flesh and fat, but that old double-act, anxiety and depression, has her tight in its grip and the burn of the blade and the sting of the wound as it opens to the frigid air barely register.
Louise listens to the whisper of car tires on the wet road three floors down and can’t remember when she was last out in the world. She hasn’t bathed in days and she can smell herself, her armpits sour and her groin yeasty. She runs her tongue over her furry teeth, then bites down on her tongue-tip, swallowing the metallic tasting blood, the throb of pain vague and muted.
When Louise glimpses her face in the cracked mirror propped against the wall—shreds of dirty yellow double-sided tape above the washstand evidence of a previous tenant’s failed attempt to mount it—she shuts her eyes, unable to look at her reflection without seeing the man with the noose branded between his eyebrows.
Too late: she’s back at the graveside of her brother, she and the tattooed man the only mourners as the Imam, the reawakened Southeaster tugging at his long beard, hurries through the prayers, a gabble of Arabic as foreign to her as the windswept hell of the Cape Flats.
When the Imam was done, the stranger who claimed to be her father reached down and poured three handfuls of soil onto the body that lay on its left side, shrouded in the white sheet. Then he walked away, disappearing into dust without a word or a backward glance.
As the gravediggers started shoveling sand into the hole, Louise begged the Imam to give her a ride to Cape Town. He clucked and shook his head, muttering about being alone in his car with a woman, but he relented and let her sit in the rear of his gold Mercedes as he sped through the Flats, dropping her at a taxi that would take her into the city.
The next few days, sitting at her mother’s bedside in the fancy clinic in Constantia, Louise had struggled not give voice to her rage. She’d long suspected, of course, that Denise’s account of their father was fiction, imagining the all-too-common refrain of some useless brown asshole abandoning her mother and their bastard children.
But nothing had prepared her for this nameless man with the tattoos that marked him as a killer.
Or worse.
Finally, after she moved with Denise to this depressing apartment in Kenilworth (a suburb that seemed gloomy even when the sun shone) and the older woman recovered some of her strength, Louise demanded the truth.
Her mother, sitting in a chair by the living room window, shook her head. “As God is my witness, Lou, I can’t talk of it. It’s too terrible.”
“Then give me his name, Ma,” Louise said. “I want his name.”
When Denise shook her head again, sniffling into a Kleenex, Louise grabbed her by the shoulders with a fury that had her mother staring up at her in shock. “I deserve to know.”
The older woman sighed and nodded. “His name is Bruinders. Achmat Bruinders.” She looked out the window as a train, a yellow and gray caterpillar, rattled by. “I won’t say no more, Lou.”
Louise waited until Denise was asleep that night, closed her bedroom door, booted up the laptop and Googled Achmat Bruinders, her mouse-clicks triggering a slew of newspaper reports from the mid-nineties.
She traveled back twenty years, and read how Bruinders and three of his gang, wasted on a cocktail of speed and downers, had invaded a farm house in the remote Karoo. Raped and murdered two white women, eviscerated them and wrote gang slogans on the wall in their blood. Slit the throat of one of the women’s four-year-old daughter. Looted the house of clothes, a microwave oven and a TV set and drove back to Cape Town where they were caught when they tried to sell the spoils.
They were all sentenced to death and would have gone to the gallows if Nelson Mandela’s new government hadn’t repealed the death penalty.
Eighteen years later Achmat Bruinders was out, a free man.
His photograph, taken during the trial, stared at her from the monitor. A dead ringer for Lyndall.
Louise, sickened, slammed the laptop closed.
She never spoke to her mother about what she read (knowing how tormented Denise must have been when Lyndall changed, how his behavior must have echoed his father’s) and let her mother take her shame to the grave.
Louise lays the cool razor blade vertically against her left wrist, already imagining it biting into her flesh, when a memory, more painful than any of the self-inflicted wounds, blindsides her.
She’s nine years old, sitting at the kitchen table in the big house with Michael Lane, her school books spread before them, Michael reading an essay she’s written, correcting her spelling.
Done reading, he looks up at her, smiles and says, “This is excellent, Lou. I’m proud of you. Very, very proud.”
She’d loved him in that moment with an intensity that almost overwhelmed her, and she just knew that he would ask her to move into the big house, and when she brought friends home from school it wouldn’t be to the cottage with her shy, tongue-tied brown mother, it would be to her new room, with handsome, nicely-spoken Michael Lane there to greet them.
Louise laughs away the childish idiocy, but the memory has done what the blade couldn’t: pierced the fog of deadness around her, and she feels tears on her face, more tears than she cried for either Lyndall or her mother. She tastes the salty drops as they dribble into her mouth, watches them spill onto the floor, puddling pink with the blood from her thigh.
She’d loved Michael Lane. Loved him silently but obsessively. She’d loved her mother and her brother, too, but her love for them had been unconditional. They’d had no power to transform her life. Her love for Michael Lane had been all about expectations. Expectations that were never met.
By the time she was a teenager Louise was able to see Michael for what he was: a kindly man, but a weak one—in thrall to his hard little wife—and her ardor cooled, and she had to disguise her scorn when she answered his enquiries about school and university. He was her meal ticket, after all.
But, sitting now on the floor in puddle of her blood, he is the only person she can think of calling. The only person who can save her.
Louise leaves the bathroom, blind to the sordid apartment littered with unwashed dishes and junk food wrappers, passes the room in which her mother died—a faint medicinal smell and something eucalyptus still hanging in the air—entering her damp and cheerless bedroom where she digs her cell phone from a tangle of soiled sheets.
She sits down on the bed and keys in Michael Lane’s number.
“Please, Michael,” she says as the phone vibrates against her ear. “Please.”
3
As Lane enters the bookstore his phone buzzes, the ringtone almost lost in the chime of the door. Nodding to Mrs. Coombs, he draws the Nokia from his pocket and is surprised to see Louise Solomons’s name on caller ID.
He’s about to answer when the girl—Mandy? Patsy?—emerges from the storeroom carrying a cardboard box overflowing with paperbacks. Books clatter to the floor and she sets the box down and crouches, knees pressed together, scrambling to retrieve them.
“For heaven’s sake, Tracy,” Mrs. Coombs says, the girl wilting with embarrassment.
Lane sends Louise’s call to voice mail, pockets th
e phone, and kneels beside Tracy helping her gather the books. She smiles up at him through a veil of dark hair, her pale face touched by a blush.
“Sorry, Mr. Lane. I’m so clumsy.”
“Don’t be silly. And call me Michael, please.”
Their hands brush as he places an old Anthony Burgess—Enderby Outside—back in the box, and he is surprised that such pale skin (marmoreal, Burgess would have said) can be so warm.
Mrs. Coombs had arrived yesterday with her niece and with a shock announcement: she was taking a two month sabbatical—a cultural tour of Italy, during the European summer. Her plane ticket was booked and she’d be leaving on Monday. Tracy—newly graduated with some useless degree in English—would deputize in her absence. Lane was given no chance to argue.
“I wasn’t expecting you in today, Michael,” Mrs. Coombs says around a phlegmy cough. “Aren’t you going to the game?”
“Yes,” he says, standing. “But it’s only at three.”
“Will it be on the television?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
Tracy, reaching for the last of the books, says, “I hear your son’s playing?”
“Well, he’s a reserve, but he’ll probably get a run.”
“You must be very proud,” the girl says, smiling shyly up at him.
“You have no idea,” Lane says and escapes to his office.
He boots up the computer, going through the motions of checking his email, blind to the invitations to meet Thai brides and enhance his virility with little blue pills, his mind on the game that afternoon, wishing that he could find a way to avoid being there to witness his son’s moment of glory.
Lane hears Mrs. Coombs’s gravelly voice and aunt and niece appear at the cash register, framed by the hatch. There is no familial likeness that Lane can see. Mrs. Coombs for as long as he can remember has resembled a tortoise but the girl—once you looked past the shyness and the untidy hair—has fine features.