Sacrifices

by Roger Smith

  Beverley rushes Jade and kicks out at her and the blade disappears into a rain-patterned puddle. The girl folds, gasping, her fingers scrabbling at the mud.

  Bev is on top of her again, gloved fingers wrapped around Jade’s throat, and as Lane battles to his knees he sees his wife—a hunched, sodden shadow—strangle the life from the girl.

  21

  “Strip,” Beverley says.

  Lane, numbed by more than cold, obeys her, peeling off his wet sweater and shirt, unbuckling his muddy jeans.

  “Those too,” she says, pointing at his boxer shorts, and he steps out of them, his penis a shrunken twist of flesh.

  Lane sinks his naked backside down onto a wooden chair in his kitchen and watches blankly as Beverley sheds her sweats and her underwear, feeding them into the gaping mouth of the washing machine along with his clothes. She adds detergent, slams the door and the machine clicks and twitches, and then there is a long hiss as the washer fills with water.

  Lane fingers the Band-Aid on his cheek, staring at the washing machine but back on the mountain as Beverley frisked the dead girl, removing a plastic wallet and a cell phone, dumping them into her pack. Rescued the utility knife from the puddle, throwing it far into the night.

  “Come, Michael,” she said, grabbing Jade’s ankles as the rain started to belt down with a primeval savagery, as if the universe was mourning their actions.

  “Come!” she said again, and Lane shook himself free of his stupor and took the girl under her shoulders—Jade as light as a child—averting his gaze from the lolling head. They carried the girl to the low wall and pitched her over, hearing her body roll into the bush below.

  Beverley took Lane’s hand and led him to the car.

  As they drove down toward the city Bev dumped her pack in his lap. “Take the sim card out of her cell phone,” she said.

  His fingers, shaking now with cold and shock, battled to open the phone, and he couldn’t free the little yellow plastic card.

  Stopped at a traffic light, wipers mewling, Beverley took the phone from him, fingers steady and nimble beneath her gloves, removed the card and tossed it out into the rain. When they were on brightly lit De Waal Drive, speeding toward the suburbs, she waited until there were no cars behind her, lowered her window and threw the phone out.

  “Look in her purse,” she said.

  Lane took the Miss Kitty wallet from Bev’s bag and unzipped it. The orange sodium lights showed him a few notes and coins, two foil-wrapped condoms and a wrinkled photograph of Jade as a child, hugging a Labrador.

  “Anything?” Beverley said.

  “No.”

  “Then toss it.”

  As they passed Ou De Molen, the blades of the old mill rattling in the gale, he wound down his window and hurled the wallet into the shrubs that fringed the road.

  They drove home in silence.

  “Michael,” his naked wife says as she hands him a Scotch, her trimmed pubes level with his eyes.

  Lane slugs it and stands, staring out the kitchen window, trying to breathe away a band of anxiety that grips his chest like a vise.

  Beverley presses herself up against his back and reaches around, taking his penis in her hand. He feels her warm breath on his neck, feels his cock swelling, feels lust thick in his veins.

  He turns, Bev’s nipples hard against his chest, and he goes as far as lifting her onto the counter, forcing her legs apart—his penis rampant now—when he pulls back and says, “No. Not again.”

  “Mike?”

  But he’s gone. Running up the stairs to his bedroom, pulling on clothes.

  When he returns to the kitchen, heading toward the garage, his car keys in his hand, Beverley is wrapped in a towel

  “Where are you going, Michael?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” he says, stepping down onto the concrete, slamming the kitchen door behind him.

  But he’s lying. He knows exactly where he’s going, already thumbing a number on his cellphone.

  When Tracy Whitely opens the door to her apartment they don’t speak.

  She steps into his arms and they kiss as if the kiss of last night never ended. He walks her backward—too voluptuous to lift, this girl—and they tumble onto a couch in her cramped sitting room.

  They fight themselves free of their clothes and, as she sits astride him, he marvels at the heft her breasts: heavy and white, tributaries of veins pattering them, the nipples large and wine colored. Her belly is a soft curve leading into a thicket of dark hair.

  She takes his penis and rams it home, riding Lane to a climax that empties him off all his guilt and dread.

  Part 3

  Spring

  1

  Lane lies with his hand on his unborn child, feeling Tracy’s belly expand as she breathes. That night three months ago, after he and Beverley killed Jade, his sperm hunted down and fertilized one of Tracy’s eggs, and the result—they have named her Emma—floats in amniotic fluid beneath his fingers.

  A shaft of sunlight pierces a gap in the curtains and trickles over the bed, over the rumpled sheets—still fragrant from last night’s love making—over Tracy’s hair strewn like kelp across the pillow, and up the wall to the cork board cluttered with photographs, newspaper cuttings and Mrs. Coombs’s postcards of Venice and Florence; the last finger of warm light finding the monochrome ultrasound image of Lane’s daughter.

  When Lane slides from the bed Tracy moans but doesn’t wake. He grabs a bright African print cloth from a chair and wraps it around his middle as he walks through to the living room. Tracy’s cramped apartment is a jumble of color, crammed with junk store furniture—she’s young enough to have an affection for bulky seventies pieces covered in brushed nylon the color of bile. Posters and framed prints mask the flaking paint on the walls.

  Lane loves the nights he spends here. Loves the contrast with the sterile Newlands mansion. Feels young again. He approaches the laptop lying on the couch, the quadrisected Windows icon floating like a spinnaker across the sleeping screen, and swipes a finger over the touch pad to waken it, hearing the low trill as its grunts itself alert.

  He observes his morning ritual: typing the name Sally Stringer into Google search. The computer, aging and underpowered, grinds and churns before 1 680 000 results appear. Only a few of these are relevant, and when none of them are recent he feels the tension in his gut release and he clears the search history with a couple of clicks.

  Lane opens the doors onto the balcony and steps out into the sunshine. Looking out across the city, the smell of spring in the air, he feels a sense of joy, fear quarantined in a vault deep within himself.

  The traffic on Long Street snarls beneath him, taxis spilling workers onto the sidewalks. His gaze travels over the Lutheran church, palm trees and purple jacarandas flanking its gray spire, and up at the mountain that dwarfs the city, its rock washed yellow by the light, a froth of cloud lying on its flat top.

  He catches a distant starburst, the windshields of parked cars glinting on the road where he and Beverley killed Sally Stringer. That was Jade’s real name, according to the news reports that appeared in the days after her death. Sally Stringer, seventeen, who grew up in respectable Milnerton, a stolidly middle-class feeder suburb fifteen minutes from the city center.

  Daughter of Gerald and Paula.

  Sister of Dylan.

  Her body was discovered by a hiker—a French tourist from Lyon—the day after Lane and Beverley threw it down the slope. The media paid attention only because she was young and white and had died on a world heritage site.

  When the police established her identity, and her history of drug abuse and prostitution surfaced, the reports dwindled and—Lane suspected—so did the enthusiasm of the cops. In a city as murderous as Cape Town, who was going to bother with a junkie hooker?

  So he and his wife got away with murder.

  What remorse he’d felt had been trumped by the fear of discovery. And that fear was tempered by the hormonal avalanche o
f bedding and falling in love with Tracy Whitely—and the discovery that she was pregnant with his child.

  For it was his, she assured him. Swearing she’d been celibate for months before that night, and Lane had no reason to doubt her.

  The balcony door creaks and Tracy, languid, sleepy, wrapped in another of the colorful cloths that litter the apartment, emerges and holds him from behind, resting her head on his shoulder.

  “I don’t like to wake up and find you’re gone.”

  Her breath is hot and just slightly rank.

  Lane turns and kisses her and they end up sprawled on the couch, her cloth falling open, his mouth on her flesh.

  “Mike, no, I have to get to the bookstore,” she says.

  His reply is to burrow his tongue deep between her legs, feeling her swell, tasting the salty sweetness of her, hearing her moan as she grinds herself against him.

  When they’re done, Lane pads naked into the little kitchen and brews coffee. He returns, pushing aside magazines and paperbacks to make space for the mugs on the table. Tracy is still becalmed on the couch—always paralyzed after sex—her hair a black hedgerow.

  “Mike, you’re going to tell her? Tonight?”

  “Yes,” he says, the image of Beverley’s mean little mouth dimming the shine on the day just a little.

  “Promise?” Tracy says, and he can see her as a six-year-old, wide-eyed and gullible.

  “I promise.”

  “Why are you so scared of her?” she asks, sitting up, knotting her cloth.

  Because she knows where the bodies are buried, he thinks, but he says, “I’m not scared of her, but Beverley’s old fashioned. She’ll tolerate an affair as long as it’s discreet but telling her about the baby and asking her for a divorce is another story.”

  “What can she do? She can’t stop you.”

  “It’s a money thing,” he says. “Stupidly, I let her control the finances and she can make things difficult for me.”

  “Oh fuck the money, Mike. We’ll make do.”

  “I just have to handle it delicately,” he says. “Get her on board.”

  “But you will talk to her?”

  “Yes, don’t worry.”

  A poor liar, Lane looks out the window, a pink mosque up in Bo Kaap drawing his eye.

  “Where do you go, Mike?” Tracy asks.

  Blinking, he turns to her. “What do you mean?”

  “When you shut down on me and slip away? What aren’t you telling me?”

  An answer eludes him and she’s up off the couch, tears on her face, disappearing into the bedroom, closing the door more than firmly. Lane follows her and gets as far as putting a hand to the doorknob before he sighs and heads for the tiny bathroom.

  Standing in the bathtub under the unenthusiastic spray of water that dribbles from the shower head, he feels the weight of all he has done and joy drains from him, sucked into the vortex of soapy water gurgling down the drain.

  2

  When the door to the bookstore opens and Michael Lane steps out, Louise jerks back from the window of the bus, out of the afternoon sunlight that has lulled her almost to sleep.

  She puts up a hand up to mask her face, but Michael is oblivious to all around him, staring at the sidewalk as he walks, nearly bumped off his feet by a chunky black man in overalls. The doors to the bus wheeze closed and it rolls slowly forward into the clotted traffic on Long Street, tracking along with Michael as he heads toward the alley where he parks his car.

  He looks worried. No, depressed, Louise decides, relieved that the Michael Lane she has been carrying inside her head these last months jibes perfectly with the Michael Lane walking slowly toward his BMW.

  The traffic surges and Michael is lost to her, but seeing him for the first time in nearly a year has left her confused and preoccupied and she almost misses her stop at the Gardens Center.

  Louise leaves the bus and enters the mall, passing the German deli where florid men drink beer and eat sausage, the DVD store with its bright posters of American action movies, the sporting goods store—when she sees a black dumbbell in the window she has to stop her mind from spinning away—and ducks into the pharmacy near the escalators.

  She’s running an errand for her neighbor, Mrs. Rosen. Louise has become friendly with the old woman over the past months, walking her arthritic little pug, Harpo, and doing her shopping as she becomes increasingly frail. Mrs. Rosen has a son, David, a plumber who rushes around Sea Point in a little white truck—THE DRAIN SURGEON stenciled on the doors—who is cheerfully disinterested in his ailing mother.

  So, Louise, still living off Michael Lane’s guilt money, has stepped in to help. It keeps her busy and lends the illusion of connection to her shapeless, amorphous life.

  The pharmacist, a distant relative of Mrs. Rosen’s, is the only person in Cape Town willing to import an obscure Chinese herbal remedy the old woman swears helps her heart condition, and once a month Louise makes the journey from Sea Point to collect the medication.

  She enjoys the trip but is pleased when the bus from the city returns her to the scruffy heterogeneous seaside suburb—so different from Waspy Newlands—where the Jewish old guard surrenders apartment by apartment to the influx of Nigerians and Zairians; mezuzahs unscrewed from front doors, flats that once held refugees from Hitler’s war now home to members of a more recent African diaspora.

  The bus drops Louise outside what was once a delicatessen—a Sea Point institution where many of the older patrons had still spoken Yiddish—and is now an African hair-frying salon, the bright illustrations out on the sidewalk enticing customers with the Boeing Cut, the Ford Zip, the Tyson or the R. Kelly.

  Louise goes into Checkers on Main Road and picks up a frozen vegetable pie and a ready-made salad for her dinner. She wanders down the aisle to the bakery, fragrant with a rich, yeasty smell and bags a lumpy kitka loaf for Mrs. Rosen. The bakery is kosher, as is the meat counter where she buys a roast chicken for the old woman.

  Louise has learned about keeping kosher from Mrs. Rosen. Learned, too, that as a child Irma Rosen was in Auschwitz.

  A few weeks after moving to Sea Point, Louise encountered Mrs. Rosen in the elevator, struggling with grocery bags, and helped her to take her shopping into her overstuffed old lady apartment.

  Louise was stowing tinned food in a high closet in the kitchen when the sleeve of her sweater rode up, revealing the jagged scar on her wrist. Mrs. Rosen, withered by age, with a dowager’s hump, stood at just the right height to spot the scar and Louise became flustered and pulled down her sweater.

  The old woman had responded by lifting the sleeve on her left arm, showing a skinny limb with wrinkled, sagging flesh. A number was tattooed on the underside of her forearm, the edges blurred with age.

  “Don’t be ashamed, my girl,” she said. “We are both survivors.”

  And that’s when they became friends.

  When Louise arrives at the old woman’s apartment, she sees the front door standing open, Harpo trapped behind the security gate, wagging his tail, snorting.

  “Mrs. Rosen?” she says.

  The son, David—a dead ringer for Danny deVito—appears from inside.

  “Hi . . .” he says, lips moving like a goldfish as he searches for her name.

  “Louise.”

  “Ja, Louise, listen, my mom collapsed and she’s been taken to the hospital. The ambulance has just left. I need to get some of her things together.”

  When the man looks at her with dazed helplessness, Louise goes through to the bedroom that smells of lavender and medication and packs underwear, pajamas and toiletries into a small suitcase, handing it to David.

  “Ah, thanks. Hell, times like this I wish I had a sister.”

  “What are you going to do with Harpo?”

  “Shit,” he says, scratching his bald head.

  “He can stay with me tonight.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

&nbs
p; Louise collects the dog’s food and water bowls, clips on his leash and walks him across to her door as David locks up his mother’s apartment.

  “Send her my love,” Louise says.

  “Thanks, sure,” he says, his short legs hurrying him toward the elevator.

  Louise heats her pie and feeds Harpo some chicken and they settle down together in front of the TV, Louise surfing away from the news with its endless litany of murder, rape and pillage.

  Louise finds a period drama—Victorian women wringing their hands and succumbing to the vapors—and as she falls asleep beside the dog, she’s thinking not of Mrs. Rosen, lying in a hospital bed, but of Michael Lane.

  3

  Lane, waiting for his wife to come home, sits in the kitchen drinking a mug of coffee, staring blankly at a newscast on the muted TV: police firing automatic weapons into a crowd of striking mine workers, black men falling to the dusty ground.

  He hears a scuff and a thud and his son is in the room, dragging himself along on rubber-tipped forearm crutches. Christopher, dressed in a bulky sweater and board shorts—fabric flapping on his missing limb—ignores Lane, leaning a crutch against the counter while he opens the fridge and roots inside for milk, drinking it straight from the plastic bottle, white liquid hanging from the fuzz of a beard that sprouts from his face like a fungus. The boy has gained weight, a paunch straining at the elastic of his shorts, jowls eroding his jaw line.

  Chris burps, grabs a loaf of bread, a Tupperware container of leftovers and a six-pack of beer, dumping them into the cloth bag that hangs from his shoulder, re-engages the right crutch and thumps out. Over the last months he’s become a hermit—lying in his room, eating, drinking beer and watching horror DVDs—his prosthetic limb shoved into a closet.

  Beverley’s problem.

  Lane’s coffee has grown cold, a winkled film floating on its surface. He stands and tosses the liquid into the sink, contemplating a Scotch when he hears the familiar grind of the garage door and the rumble of Bev’s Pajero.