Sacrifices

by Roger Smith

  Mrs. Coombs is demonstrating the cash register, impatient and hectoring. Tracy listens intently, asking hesitant questions and when she catches Lane watching them she blushes again and he looks away, scrolling through his emails.

  Restless, he leaves his office and walks through to the tiny kitchen, barely big enough to hold a bar fridge and a kettle. He gets the hot water going and squats, rooting for a teabag in the small closet that’s crammed with mugs, spoons, sugar and Mrs. Coombs’s disgusting sucking sweets.

  Hearing a light tread on the wooden staircase he looks up to see the girl slowly ascending, her pale thighs kissing beneath the hem of her dun-colored skirt. Lane feels a twist of desire until the white, unstockinged legs become those of Melanie Walker, spasming as his son smashes the life from her and Lane stands, dizzy, leaning on the fridge, bile burning his throat.

  The kettle bubbles and clicks itself off, steam condensing on the chipped enamel of the wall. Lane, catching his breath, stares at water running down in little rivulets.

  He leaves the teabag lying beside the mug and returns to his office, shifting his chair so that he can’t be seen through the hatch, and sits with his head in his hands, waiting for the nausea to pass.

  Lane’s phone, lying on the desk beside him, buzzes and dances, and when he sees Louise’s name again on caller ID the full weight of his culpability oppresses him and he lets the phone ring itself dead.

  4

  Louise, lying in the bathtub, her torn wrists pumping blood into the water, starts to shiver. She’d expected that once she’d opened her veins she’d slide into a welcoming oblivion, but the bath has cooled and the Northeaster howling in off the Atlantic forces cold air past the newspaper she wadded been the rotten wooden panels of the rattling sash window.

  She sits up, teeth chattering, and reaches out a hand to open the faucet, a fall of plasma beading the enamel of the tub. The old pipes clang and burp before allowing a hot and steamy trickle. Louise lies back and closes her eyes, letting the warmth and blood loss soothe her to sleep, oblivious to the water flowing over the lip of the tub, raining to the floor in red sheets, flooding the checkerboard tiles with her blood.

  5

  The moment Christopher touches the ball Lane knows he’s witnessing brilliance, and so does the crowd cheering from the rickety bleachers of the small rugby stadium an hour north of Cape Town. People are on their feet as Chris performs an outrageously balletic leap to intercept a poorly thrown pass, tucks the ball under his arm and sprints toward the opposition try line, zigzagging around defenders, ghosting his way through gaps that just seem to materialize, on his way to a certain score.

  Western Province is annihilating some up-country dirt trackers. The Cape Town-based pro outfit, instead of playing at its home ground, the immense Newlands stadium—so close to Lane’s house that the game day cheers made him (no fan of rugby) an early adopter of an iPod—has brought today’s fixture to fans in the Winelands, beefy white farmers and their colored workers united by blue and white striped rugby jerseys.

  When he drove Beverley up from the city to this valley of gabled houses with thatched roofs, he never spoke a word to her, even though this was the longest time they had spent alone in months, because if he’d spoken it would have been about that night in December and what their son did and what they did, and didn’t do, in response.

  As they took their seats in the stands a raw wind knifed in from the snowcapped mountains chilling Lane, who sat blowing on his hands, ignored by his wife and a group of her friends who were busy guzzling Scotch from flasks while he sipped at an icy can of Coke. He sank into a fugue state, unable to shake the profound gloom that had enveloped him at the bookstore.

  The tinny public address system drew Lane from his reverie with the announcement that Christopher was being called up as a replacement. Bev and her friends cheered and Lane faked a handclap, but his palms never touched.

  The boy sprinted onto the field that after weeks of rain looked like the Somme, high-fiving the mud-smeared man he was replacing. The ref’s whistle restarted the game and Christopher, blond and immaculate, untouched by an opponent, intercepted that pass and began his run.

  The roar of the crowd is deafening now as three defenders rush Chris who chips the ball over their heads and weaves, leaving them tackling air as he stretches out to retrieve the ball that bounces perfectly into his fingers.

  The opposition scrumhalf, a terrier-like kid, throws himself at Christopher, who tucks the ball under his left arm and fends off the smaller man with a hand to the forehead, leaving him lying prone in the mud.

  Chris, grinning, speeds toward the open line.

  Lane can already see the headlines and hear the hyperbolic babble of the rugby commentators over the coming months, trumpeting the arrival of a new star in the rugby firmament.

  And his son, already insufferably arrogant, will take it as his due.

  As he took the sacrifice of Lyndall Solomons.

  Then Lane stops watching Christopher, his eyes drawn to the last opponent standing, a hulking prop forward covered in a pâté of mud and blood. The man has a shaven head and a massive torso with a hard gut swelling his jersey, enormous arms ending in blunt hands that seem to scrape the knees of his short, chunky legs. The monster trundles into a run, heading straight at Chris who hasn’t seen him, too busy looking over his shoulder at his teammates on the bench, gloating as he drifts toward the try line.

  For a second it seems the Neanderthal has left it too late and Lane, gripping his Coke can hard enough to dent it, wordlessly urges him on, willing a burst of speed into those plough horse hocks.

  Christopher, almost at the line, senses something and turns his head to look at this looming enemy, his mouth an oval of surprise.

  The big man hits him like a freight train, his shoulder taking Chris low, lifting him clean off his feet, the ball flying from his grasp as the giant drives the boy into the ground, right leg twisting beneath him.

  Lane is certain he can hear the twanging of torn ligaments and the stripping gears of Christopher’s knee assembly as the exploding patella is reduced to mush. But, of course, he hears nothing but the shrill yelps of the referee’s whistle and the boos of the crowd as the ref waves a red card at the thuggish Afrikaner for the illegal shoulder charge, the man unable to suppress a smile gap-toothed as a Halloween pumpkin.

  And when Lane, watching as his son is stretchered from the field, feels his wife’s eyes on him and turns to see Beverley shaking her head in disgust, he knows he’s been unable to suppress a smile of his own.

  6

  Louise goes home dressed in the clothes of a dead girl. The denim jacket and jeans are pretty clean, but a fist-sized patch of dried blood on the T-shirt chafes her ribs as she rides through the rain in the minibus taxi, and she can smell a stranger’s scent rising from the fabric: stale perfume, booze, cigarette smoke, sweat and something else—a smell she can’t quite fix.

  She knows the girl is dead because the colored nurse who brought Louise the clothes and boots—huge leather things with biker buckles—said, “Put these on. Owner’s not gonna need them no more.”

  The nurse, a sweet, chubby woman with a wall eye, also gave her ten rand for taxi fare. Louise promised to return the money but they both knew she won’t.

  Louise, discharged after two days in hospital, is full of a stranger’s blood too. She was admitted to Groote Schuur trauma unit bare-assed naked after her downstairs neighbor, an out-of-work actor, called 911 when he found himself sitting in a waterfall of her bloody bath water as he watched Idols on TV.

  She’d lost half her blood and her heart had stopped. The medics brought her back from the dead and restored to her a life she no longer had a use for. Sitting in the taxi, watching the cloud hanging low over the mountain like wet fleece, Louise wonders how this other girl got so lucky.

  Clenching her fists in her lap, she fights an urge to scratch open the wounds hidden beneath white bandages. She saw the railroad tracks of sut
ures on both arms when the nurse changed the dressings before she was discharged, and knows she’ll carry the evidence of this bungled attempt to her grave.

  An exhausted-looking social worker—a very pale woman in her fifties—wandered into the ward on the second day, asking Louise why she’d done it, and would she do it again?

  “I was depressed,” Louise said. “But I’m really sorry and I realize how lucky I was.” Knowing that this is what the woman wanted to hear.

  The social worker nodded and ticked off something on her clipboard. “What about the self-mutilation?” Louise said nothing. “Judging from the scars, you’ve been doing this for quite a few years?”

  “A couple, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Louise shrugged. “Stupid teen-torment stuff. It’s over now.”

  The woman consulted the clipboard. “I see you’ve had no visitors. Don’t you have any family?”

  “No,” Louise said. Even though that wasn’t strictly true. There was a father out there on the Cape Flats. With a hangman’s noose tattooed between his eyes.

  “No friends?”

  “We’ve kinda drifted apart,” Louise said.

  “Ja, it happens, I know. But there are support groups that can help you.”

  “Okay.”

  “And here’s the number of a twenty-four hour help line,” she said, handing over a card.

  “Sure. I appreciate this.”

  “Anything else you want to share?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  The social worker, gnawing on her cheap ballpoint, stared at Louise. “You should know that I was legally obliged to report your suicide attempt to the police.”

  “Do they even care?”

  “Probably not, but they may send somebody over to take a statement.”

  “Okay.”

  The woman nodded and wandered off. The police never showed up and nobody bothered Louise after that.

  The taxi stops and she steps out into the drizzle, her feet sliding inside the outsize boots as she walks the half block to her apartment. Only when she confronts the locked gates at the entrance to her building does Louise realize that she has no keys. She hits a couple of buttons and somebody buzzes her into the lobby without asking who she is.

  She hurries up the stairs, expecting the actor to block her, but his door is closed. When she gets to the corridor outside her apartment she lifts the bathroom sash window a couple of inches and retrieves a key taped to the rotting wooden frame—a precaution dating back to when her mother was still alive.

  Louise unlocks the apartment, a wet dog smell filling her nostrils. The parquet floor in the living room has lifted, the dark wooden rectangles bleached white in patches by water damage. Crossing it is like walking over the keyboard of a giant piano. The stained legs of the chairs show how high the water rose before it drained downward. The carpets in the bedroom are soggy and stinking, curling away from the floor.

  None of this is hers. They rented the place furnished from a miserable bastard of a landlord, so she doesn’t give a shit.

  She needs to pee but can’t face that bathroom so she heads into the kitchen, pulls down the jeans and squats over the sink, drilling a noisy stream onto the metal. She knows its gross, but what does she care?

  Back in the bedroom she sheds the dead girl’s clothes and dresses in her own, feeling weirdly like she’s impersonating herself.

  Whatever that means.

  She fills a wheely suitcase with clothes and rescues her ID documents, bankcards and her copy of Through the Looking-Glass from the drawer beside the bed.

  Louise stands a moment in the doorway of her dead mother’s room, the closets still filled with her belongings. All she takes is an old photograph album, then she grips the suitcase and gets out of there.

  The actor, a short white guy with a silly bottle-black bob, is unlocking his apartment door as she comes down the stairs. He stares at her, shaking his head, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

  “Better luck next time,” he says.

  Louise doesn’t reply, bumps past him and exits the building, dragging the suitcase after her, the wheels clickety-clacking as she walks into the rain with no idea of where she’s going.

  7

  Lane, sitting at his desk with the electric heater warming his feet, reads Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” from a first edition he picked up for a song at a charity stall in Greenpoint, the poet’s jaundiced view of family (of man handing misery on to man) resonating as never before.

  Lane hasn’t seen his son in the week since the rugby game, even though the Barnard Memorial Hospital where Christopher lies recovering is mere blocks from the bookstore. Beverley is hardly ever home, sitting vigil at the boy’s bedside, consulting obsessively with the orthopedic surgeon—a gingery teddy bear of a man often found on the pages of glossy magazines in the company of fashion models—who spent hours reassembling Chris’s shattered knee and fractured tibia.

  Lane, with his empty house and the bookstore free of Mrs. Coombs’s glowering presence, finds himself almost happy for the first time since that terrifying night in December.

  He lays the Larkin down and shuts his eyes. Over the muffled murmur of late afternoon traffic on Long Street he hears Tracy Whitely washing up tea things in the kitchen. This quiet, efficient girl has fitted in seamlessly. She’s learned the inventory with impressive speed and renders assistance to customers that her aunt was never able, or willing, to give.

  He’s made up his mind to pension off Mrs. Coombs when she returns from her travels and offer Tracy a permanent position at a salary that, he hopes, will be difficult for her to refuse.

  When he hears her soft footsteps he opens his eyes.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Michael,” she says, standing in the doorway. “I’ll be going now.”

  “Okay, I’ll lock up.”

  She moves a strand of hair from her cheek and when she smiles her pale face, free of make-up, is very nearly pretty.

  “You like Larkin?” she asks, eyeing the book.

  “Yes. Now more than ever.”

  “He’s the subject of my masters’ thesis.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you were doing a masters.”

  She nods. “Correspondence. Through UNISA.”

  “Do you write?”

  She shakes her head. “Oh no. All I could ever do is teach.”

  Lane sees a flaw appearing in his plan. “Is that what you want to do? Teach?”

  “Not really. As Auntie Daphne keeps on telling me, I seem to have studied for a completely useless degree.”

  “I did the same. And here I am, happily underachieving.”

  “Well, I like selling books.”

  “And I like having you here.”

  This gets her blushing. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Yes, have a good night.”

  Lane watches Tracy through the hatch as she shrugs on a raincoat, her body surprisingly wide-hipped and full-breasted beneath her plain dress. She flips the sign on the door to CLOSED and hurries across the road, hoisting her umbrella.

  Lane realizes that he is becoming quietly attracted to this girl. Absurd, of course, she must be twenty years his junior, but when she brings him his tea with just the right amount of milk and sugar—something neither his wife nor Mrs. Coombs has ever bothered to master—and their fingers touch, she is not quick to withdraw her hand.

  These thoughts are interrupted by the doorbell and he sees a woman on the sidewalk. He shifts his chair from her view and ignores the bell. She’ll spot the sign and go. But she doesn’t, and rings again, keeping a finger on the button.

  Lane leaves his office, standing at the cash register, mouthing, “We’re closed.”

  This doesn’t deter her, and the buzzer fills the shop like a swarm of wasps.

  He strides to the door and unlocks it, confronting a skinny girl of maybe eighteen, her dissolute beauty freezing the words of rebuke in his throat. Her face is elfin with high chee
kbones, blue eyes made dark by smudged mascara, and a wide mouth, almost obscenely full-lipped, one side dragged down in a sneer. That her blonde hair is dirty and matted, hanging in Medusa coils to her shoulders, just adds to her gutter appeal.

  Despite the chill she wears only a black T-shirt over dark jeans so tight they could be airbrushed onto her. The T-shirt is damp from the rain and her erect nipples spike the sheer fabric. Lane is shamed by a stab of rogue desire.

  “We’re closed,” he says, pointing at the sign.

  “Let me in, Mike. I need to talk to you.”

  Her voice is gravelly and low, like a thirty-year-old ingénue channeled through the mouth of a teenager.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Fuck, man, just let me in. I’m freezing my tits off,” she says, hugging herself.

  Lane steps back, allowing her into the bookstore. Delving into the grimy cloth bag that dangles from her shoulder she finds cigarettes and a lighter.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” he says.

  “Fuck that.” She fires up and after a few deep drags says, “You got an office?”

  “Look, what do you want?”

  “It’s about Lyndall Solomons.”

  “What about Lyndall?”

  “Why don’t we go sit where nobody can see us?” Pointing the cigarette out at the crowded sidewalk.

  Lane, his sanguine mood darkening, leads her into his office. When she crouches beside the heater the neck of her T-shirt gapes and he catches a glimpse of an erect pink nipple. She stares up at him though smoke and matted hair.

  “I’m listening,” he says.

  “I was with Lyndall the night he was meant to’ve killed that girl.”

  Dread takes Lane’s legs and he slides down into his chair. “Nonsense.”

  She shakes her head. “Uh, uh, Mike. It’s the truth. He arrived at my place before midnight and I was with him till round five the next morning. So whoever killed her, it wasn’t Lynnie.” She sucks so hard on the cigarette that her cheeks almost kiss. “I’m guessing your rugger-bugger son did it, and you and Bev covered things up.” Laughing at the shock on his face. “Ja, Lynnie told me some stories about Chris. Sounds like ’roid rage to me.”