by Roger Smith
To cover his panic Lane reaches for the telephone. “I’m calling the police.”
“Hey, go ahead.”
She stares him down, exhaling through the side of her mouth, sneering when he drops the phone in its cradle.
“Who are you?” Lane asks.
“You can call me Jade.”
“What do you want?”
“Take it easy, we’ll get to that.”
She lifts herself from the floor and walks to the desk, curling into the chair facing him.
“I know what you’re thinking, Mike, why didn’t I come forward seven months ago?” He nods. “Okay, this is what went down that night: Lynnie—I couldn’t ever get my head around the Mustapha thing, he was always Lynnie to me—came over to my place in Gardens all freaked out. Said he’d had a fight with his mom, that he smacked the old bitch when she wouldn’t give him money. Said you called the armed response guys and watched when they dragged him to their car. That hurt him, Mike. He liked you, said you’d been kind of a dad to him.”
She sees his expression and shrugs, “That’s life, hey? Anyway, we smoked a lot of shit and you know how horny you get, so we fucked ourselves straight again. Then we walked over to an ATM and I drew the last of my money and Lyndall said he’d go down to some merchant on Roeland Street to score. Hour later he wasn’t back and I thought he’d dropped me, so I went over to some Nigerian guys near the Gardens Center and said they could gangbang me if they fixed me up. They had some heroin and they fixed me up a little too good ’cause next thing I wake up in the hospital two days later, my fucken parents standing over me, crying and carrying on. They did the whole mommy and daddy thing and sent me into rehab. That’s where I heard what had happened to Lynnie and it freaked me out, so I thought what the fuck, maybe I’ll go straight. Never said a word about what happened that night to anybody. I stayed in rehab for three months and got clean and my folks sent me up to Jo’burg to get me away from bad influences, as they put it.” She laughs. “Thing is, bad influences are like shadows man, they follow you everywhere.”
“If what you’re saying is true, why didn’t Lyndall use you as an alibi?”
“Hey, I’m sure he tried. But he only knew me by my street name, and if he took the cops to the place I was living they wouldn’t have found me, and nobody there knew who the fuck I was ’cause it belonged to the friend of a friend of a friend. You know how it goes? But those ATMs have all got cameras, so there’ll be a nice picture on a computer somewhere of me and Lynnie, taken round that time he was supposed to be killing that girl.”
She has him and she knows it.
“Now, Mike, when my folks heard I was using again they cut me off, permanently this time, and I owe big bucks to some guys you don’t wanna get on the bad side of, so here I am.”
“That’s what you want? Money?”
Jade makes a gun of her thumb and index finger and points it at him, cocks the thumb and clicks her tongue against her palate. “Correct, Mikey. I want one hundred thousand in cash.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Nah, it’s not. You’re stinking rich. Lynnie told me and I Googled you and your wifey. This,” waving her cigarette around the office, “is just a hobby isn’t it, Mike? Real money’s in that property development business Beverley runs.”
“It’ll take me a few days to get that kind of cash together.”
She shakes her head, tangles dancing. “It’ll take a day, even if you’re discreet and draw money out of different accounts and credit cards.” The street slang slips for a moment. Whoever this girl is, she’s well educated. Jade takes a cell phone from her pocket. “Gimme your mobile number.”
Lane gives it to her and she keys it into the phone. “Okay, I’ll call you this time tomorrow.”
She stands. “Mike, don’t even think of fucking with me, okay? If you don’t have the money for me tomorrow night I’m going to the media with this. It’s the kind of story they’ll love.”
“I’ll have the money for you.”
Jade slings her bag over her shoulder, drops her cigarette to the wooden floor and grinds it dead with her sneaker. Pointing through the hatch at the cash register she says, “How much is in there?”
“I have no idea.”
She heads out of the office toward the register. “Well, open it, Mike. Let’s see.”
He does as she says and when the drawer pings open he sees a couple of hundred in bills among the credit card receipts. She holds out a grubby hand and takes the money, shoving it into her hip pocket.
“Be good now.”
And she’s out the door, not looking back as she disappears into the throng of pedestrians.
8
When Louise wipes at the misted window of the taxi with her sleeve and sees the light towers casting a sulfurous glare over Paradise Park, she realizes she is no longer afraid of this place. One of the perks of surviving a suicide attempt is that the very real terrors within dwarf the imaginary terrors without
The arm of her sweater comes away damp and as she tugs at it she reveals the sutured wound on her right pulse—the twin of the one on her left—visible now that the dressing has been removed. Her skin is puckered and a black scab traces a line from beneath her palm to halfway down her forearm, the catgut stitches spiking from the wound like stray hairs, as if some creature has been buried in her flesh.
Louise catches the fat, putty-colored woman crammed in next to her peering at the wound and covers it with her jacket, staring out the rain-patterned window at the box houses and ghetto blocks mired in mud.
Yesterday, feeling curiously numb, she sat at the kitchen counter of her new apartment—a furnished studio in Sea Point with a view of a Nigerian brothel—drinking hot chocolate, paging through her mother’s photograph album, looking at pics of herself and Lyndall snapped by Michael Lane on a succession of birthdays, posing in clothes bought with his money.
The photographs ended when the Solomons kids hit puberty: forced smiles and knowing eyes already hinting at the future rejection of Lane and his patronage.
When Louise glimpsed the name Fazila Bruinders and a phone number written on the inside cover of the album in her mother’s cramped, childlike scrawl, she closed the book and shoved it into the back of her closet, as if hiding it would erase what she’d seen from her mind.
But that night, when the raging of the meth whores in the street kept her awake, a question repeated itself in an endless loop: who was the woman with her father’s last name?
This morning, spaced out from lack of sleep, Louise sat with her cell phone in one hand and the photo album in the other, knowing that she should scratch at the cover with a knife, destroying that name and telephone number forever.
But she didn’t. She keyed the digits into her cellphone and held her breath as the Samsung vibrated against her ear.
The woman who answered thought she was white, of course, with the usual colored reticence when questioned by a whitey. Finally Louise convinced her that she was the daughter of Denise Solomons.
“And what you want with me?” Fazila Bruinders asked.
“You’re related to Achmat Bruinders aren’t you?”
“I don’t want no trouble.”
“Please, I’m just trying to find my father.”
The woman sighed. “I’m his sister. But that don’t mean I’m like him, hear?”
It took a lot to convince the woman to see her, but finally she agreed to meet Louise, who tried to set up a rendezvous in the city. Fazila refused. Louise would have to come to the Flats.
The woman told her which taxi to catch from Cape Town. Told her to wait outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken near the Paradise Park train station at seven-thirty, where she would be met. By whom she didn’t say.
As Louise sees a train sliding by in the rain, the taxi comes to a sudden halt and a skinny boy flings open the sliding door, shouting something incomprehensible. Louise stands and is swept out by the other passengers, left on the sidewalk in the dr
izzle, lost until she spots a red and white striped pyramid rising up against the dark sky.
Cap pulled low, dodging taxis and pedestrians, she hurries up the stairs of the KFC, taking shelter under the roof, the stink of chicken and old oil reaching her as people emerge carrying bags of food.
“You Louise?”
She turns and looks at a mirror image of herself.
No, not quite a mirror image, she realizes as the girl comes up the stairs into the light: Louise doesn’t have a minefield of acne scars on her cheeks, and she hasn’t pulled her front teeth to give better blowjobs. But the resemblance is unmistakable.
And the girl sees it too. “Fuck.” Shaking her head.
Then she says, “Come,” and waddles off into the rain, so pregnant she looks as if she could squat right now and drop a baby into the overflowing gutter.
9
Panic hits Lane when he’s marooned in rush hour traffic, cars inching toward the southern suburbs, the BMW’s wiper blades whimpering as they sweep rainwater from the windshield, blurred red taillights snaking around the lower slopes of the mountain and disappearing into the downpour.
After the terrifying girl left the bookstore Lane retreated into the gathering dark of his office, losing an hour to one of his fugue states before he decided that he had no choice but to tell Beverley about the blackmail attempt. She’d know how to deal with this.
He felt calmer by the time he locked the bookstore, set the alarm and walked out into that uniquely Long Street winter smell of rain, car fumes and damp clothing overlaid with the tang of curry from a nearby halal take-out.
But now, on Hospital Bend—the Victorian turrets of Groote Schuur dissolving into the watery gloom—the traffic comes to a halt and Lane’s fingers tremble on the steering wheel, sweat pooling in his armpits. Struggling to breathe he turns down the heat, letting a blast of cold air through the vents. The demister is losing the battle and the world disappears as condensation fogs the glass.
Lane nudges the button that lowers his side window, heart hammering in time to the drops that pellet the car roof. Hard, cold, rain stings his face, his eyes shutting in reflex, leaving him blind with panic. He closes the window and dabs at his cheeks with a handkerchief, gasping for air.
A horn sounds behind him and he sees that the traffic is moving again. With a shaking hand he engages first gear and the BMW is sucked into the wake of the slowly moving stream of cars, past Newlands forest to the Kirstenbosch intersection, where he is able to turn left and escape the gridlock, the tree-lined streets of this prosperous suburb leading him home.
Lane parks in the garage—only an oil stain in Beverley’s bay—and hurries through to the kitchen where he splashes a double tot of Lagavulin into a crystal tumbler and throws it back, feeling the burn. He recharges his glass and takes ice from the freezer, the cubes cracking as he flexes the plastic tray. Dumping a block into his Scotch, Lane sits down at the kitchen table, his favorite place in this sprawling, unwelcoming house. Sipping the drink he feels steadier, the whiskey a balm to his nerves.
Containment. That’s what is needed.
This girl needs to be contained. Jade. Her street name, she said. Did that mean she was a prostitute? There was a knowingness in her eyes that made him believe she was. Not that he’d had any experience with whores. As a young man he’d been attractive enough, and the world free enough, for sex to be in easy supply. And the first two decades of his marriage to Beverley had been sufficiently carnal to keep him well satisfied.
In these last months, desire still surfacing occasionally through the anxiety and depression, he’d considered using a prostitute. But the thought of a cold-blooded transaction (a grope in a sordid room or a blowjob in his car) had sickened him. Lane understood intuitively, that—drained of his jism and his lust—he would be left staring into eyes filled with scorn, like those of the girl earlier, sizing him up, calculating his weakness and his worth and dismissing him.
The Pajero rumbles into the garage, its wet brakes squealing. For the first time in many months Lane looks forward to seeing his wife.
Beverley enters the kitchen and dumps her car keys and purse on the counter.
“Jesus,” she says, “the traffic was brutal.”
“I know. I was caught in it too.”
She sits at the table, her face hollowed by exhaustion. “Pour me a Scotch, Michael, please.”
This is an unusual request. Beverley is a wine drinker: Riesling and Chablis in the summer, Cabernet and Merlot in the winter. Anything stronger is purely medicinal.
Lane makes her a drink, adding a splash of spring water to the whiskey. Beverley takes a slug and winces, but gulps another mouthful.
“There’s been a setback,” she says.
“What’s happened?”
“The wound has become infected. Barry Hurwitz is going to have to operate again.”
Lane doesn’t speak, just sips his drink and lets her continue.
“God knows Chris’s rugby days are over, but there’s doubt, now, about how well he’ll be able to walk. Barry tells me that after this second procedure the left leg may end up significantly shorter than the right.”
Still Lane can find nothing to say. Beverley drinks, watching him over the rim of her glass, which she deposits on the table with a flat smack.
“You don’t care, do you, Michael?” Still Lane stays silent. “You think he deserves this? Some eye for an eye bullshit?”
“Hardly and eye for an eye.”
His words propel her from her chair and she stands over him with folded arms.
“Christ, you’re a sanctimonious little prick. How dare you take this attitude after what you did twenty years ago?”
Lane forces himself to meet his wife’s eyes. “I jumped a stop sign. I killed a family. It was an accident. Christopher straddled a girl and beat her to death with a ten pound weight. Surely even you can see the difference?” She stares down at him, a pulse twitching in her jaw. “And every day I’ve been tormented by the memory of that dead family.”
“Spare me the soap opera, Michael.”
“But has Christopher ever shown any remorse, for what he did to that girl, or what we all did to Lyndall?” He shakes his head. “No. But I’ll bet he’s filled with self-pity now.”
“So you see what’s happened to him as some kind of karmic balancing of the books?”
He lifts his palms toward the ceiling. “It’s a start.”
“Then what about you and me? How are we to be punished?” she asks, her voice throttled by fury.
This is the perfect moment to bring up the girl and her demands. But he can’t, certain that Beverley, in her rage, will turn it against him. That the appearance of Jade will be his fault, as if he’s somehow conjured her.
So Lane says, “Look at us, Bev. Look at how we’re living. When last were you happy, even for a moment?”
Beverley grabs her things from the counter. “I don’t have time for this crap. I’m going to take a shower and get back to the hospital.”
She hurries out and Lane is left at the table with his empty glass.
That, at least, he knows how to remedy.
10
Louise is sure the woman isn’t going to show. Fazila Bruinders has left her stranded for over an hour in this piss-stinky apartment with the pregnant retard who sits staring slack-jawed at hip hop videos, chain smoking and stuffing her face from a packet of chips.
When the girl lights another cigarette, Louise says, “Should you be doing that, Layla?”
“Huh?” Exhaling fumes
“Smoking? While you’re pregnant?”
“Fuck, I gave up tikking, didn’t I?” she says, moving her head like a camel in time to the music, making beatbox grunts and hisses.
Louise stands up from the couch, a dirty blanket smeared with food stains covering the torn fabric, and walks to the window, cracking the curtain.
Four guys hang out on the fire escape, bouncing a meth pipe. One of them, smoke billo
wing from his mouth, turns and looks at Louise, eyes flat and dead in the flare of a lighter that ignites another pipe. She pulls the curtain closed.
“Won’t you call your granny again?” Louise asks.
“You try,” the girl says, tossing her a new iPhone, the shiny gadget like an artifact from a distant civilization in this sordid apartment.
When Louise thumbs the keyboard a screensaver appears: a middle-aged blonde woman waving happily at the camera with Table Mountain in the background. She wonders what else this pale tourist has left in Cape Town.
Louise hits redial and gets voice mail.
She drops the phone on the cushion beside Layla who says, “Tole you, they doing stocktaking by Checkers. She gonna be late.”
Louise needs to pee but she’s feeling very prissy and middle-class about using the bathroom that’s visible behind a half-closed door. This is as grim a place as she has ever been in: one room, washed by the dirty light of a naked bulb dangling from the stained ceiling; a double bed, unmade, with greasy sheets; a closet with a broken mirror; heaps of women’s clothes strewn across the frayed carpet; a food-smeared hot-plate standing atop a bar fridge beside a loaf of sliced white bread that fans out of its plastic wrapper, hairy with green mold.
Louise’s bladder aches, so she heads for the cramped bathroom and finds a sink full of dirty dishes, alive with ants. She pushes the door closed and the ammonia reek of urine brings tears to her eyes. The toilet bowl is cracked, liquid leaking out onto the linoleum, and the lid is brown with dirt.
Louise squats, trying not to touch the seat. As she releases a stream of pee she hears the front door open and slam and the voices of Layla and another woman.