Talion

by Beyers de Vos

  Wiping her fingerprints from the things she’s touched, she moves on.

  The last room is decorated in simple monochrome. White linen, grey rug, grey chair. The bedroom is tiled; it is colder than the rest of the house. When Freya steps across the threshold, she shudders. A pair of slippers is tucked under the bed, a dressing gown folded over a chair. The corner of a carpet flipped over, the ghost of the foot that disturbed it still hanging in the air above it.

  This is his room.

  It is devoid of smell. No cologne. No smoke. None of the musky sweetness she’s come to associate with masculine spaces, the scents that remind her of her father, of Ben. Aside from the bed and the chair, there is a small desk with a laptop set on it. Nothing in the drawers but pens and empty notebooks. A tall wooden cupboard in the corner contains his clothes. Collared shirts in neutral colours. Black pants, boring ties, simple jackets. Underwear, socks, pyjamas. Four pairs of shoes.

  On his bedside table, underneath the photo of a woman wearing a headscarf and holding a paintbrush, lies a ring, a single gold band.

  It’s a frugal room, and it unnerves her. Where are the signs of life? It’s too clinical to be natural, too bare to amount to anything. She sniffs one of his shirts. It smells of laundry detergent, but nothing else. It is neutral, sterile. There isn’t any breath in this place, any energy. It is dead. Whatever is left here is no longer breathing.

  The only part of the house with any pulse, any personality, is his daughter’s room; like a hibernating animal in a dead tree: asleep for the winter, but still flush with red-hot life. Once his daughter moves out (because who would want to continue living here?), Abraham October will have nothing but spiders for company.

  This house will crumble into ash.

  16

  Nolwazi eyes the little blue hat dejectedly.

  Her uniform is laid out on her bed, newly ironed and ready to be worn. She always starts with the shirt. She likes the way it feels against her skin: crisp. She likes the way she has to button it all the way to the top of her neck; she likes the way it fits her. The last time she wore it was the night Benjamin Rust died; some of his blood got on her cuffs, and she had to replace the shirt.

  Her stockings are next. She’s had to buy them herself, because the ones she’s been issued by the police department have been lost to the thorns on the untended rose bush flanking the entrance to the police station.

  Then the skirt. A deeper blue than the shirt, and not pretty. A blue like a polluted sky. It fastens around her waist with a harsh click of the clip, and forces her to tighten her stomach, to constrain herself.

  Now she slips into the shoes, polished and black, which always, always remind her of school (of feeling inadequate, of being a stranger), especially when she is standing in a crime scene.

  And the hat.

  Nolwazi doesn’t like the hat. The little blue hat. The same colour as the skirt, like a big splash of bird shit. It lends the uniform less authority. And Nolwazi needs all the authority she can get, short as she is. She slips it over her cropped hair, anyway.

  The gun, the most important part of the uniform. The thing which, more than any of the others, separates her from everyone else. Empowers her. Marks her as different, as dangerous.

  She picks up her badge and her bag.

  Her apartment is on the seventh storey, and her front door opens up on panoramic views of Sunnyside. A neighbourhood of contradictions. A neighbourhood between things. A fluctuating border between Hatfield – the student district and gateway to suburbia – and the Pretoria city centre, derelict, crime-ridden and impoverished, abandoned for the most part by anyone who has a choice. Sunnyside, beset by traffic, noisy, bustling, overcrowded. Nolwazi loves Sunnyside. It is the only part of Pretoria that feels truly urban to her, that feels like you live in what a city is meant to be, and not the warped inside-out cities that South Africa produces – where people live on the fringes, and the centres are characterised by danger and fear and neglect. Sunnyside has some of this air of abandonment and danger – sex workers and drug dealers line the streets; disused buildings are common; litter and debris have claimed the pavements that separate tall, disrespected buildings (it isn’t uncommon to wake up to the sound of gunshots).

  Nolwazi’s flat is on the top floor of the building named Mulberry Heights on the final corner of Arcadia Street, a long and crooked artery that connects Hatfield to Sunnyside. Her building is the colour of a fleshy nail bed. She and her uniform clash beautifully with the building.

  The neighbourhood is dominated by buildings from the 1970s, the decade in which Pretoria had its architectural revolution. Browns. Oranges. Pinks. Angular, kitsch designs.

  Nothing like American cities, which are tall and metallic, edgy and beautiful. Or British cities, historic and marbled, built from ancient stone.

  Still, Sunnyside has a certain charm. A broken, dusty charm.

  Today, turning right where she would have normally turned left, Nolwazi heads towards the city. Hailing a taxi, she feels the slow dark magnetism of the Pretoria High Court pull at her.

  Past the Union Building Park, all sandstone and symmetry and Chinese tourists, the taxi goes. Whenever Nolwazi looks up at the building, she experiences an odd melancholy; she imagines all those politicians in their offices, all the presidents who have walked those halls, and she wonders if they feel melancholy too. They surely must, the weight and retribution of history so solidly around them. And she thinks of Mandela, and she says a small thank you, almost a prayer.

  Past the buildings, and now she is in Pretoria Central proper, the traffic suddenly fiercer, the streets suddenly louder, the cluster of skyscrapers seen from afar now all around her.

  Across the river – but not a river at all, just a trickle, just a drain.

  Then right into Nelson Mandela Boulevard and ‘Driver stop!’ and the taxi screeches to a halt.

  The courthouse is modern and rectangular. Ugly, really. She hesitates on the pavement outside. Breathes deeply. Dr Phillippidis had given her one final prescription for anti-anxiety medication and she popped them this morning, but they don’t seem to be working. She’s on the edge of hyperventilating.

  Just get it over with. Just breathe.

  17

  Freya stands in the centre of the shed – in the single, perfectly square room. From the outside, it is a simple structure with a flat roof. The inside is just as basic: it hasn’t been tiled or painted. Everything is grey cement, covered in an even greyer layer of dust. A small kitchenette is fitted with a basin. There is bathroom cubicle in one corner, without a door. Freya now understands why the door isn’t locked; there is nothing to take but a single mattress abandoned in a corner, a large paint tin that looks like it was used to hold fire, and a broken chair.

  But these are not the only signs of occupation, not the only tokens of whatever half-life was lived here.

  There are the drawings.

  All over the walls, and the floors, dozens of crude geometric drawings have been carved. Furious lines across the cement form odd, angular faces. Some, made with charcoal, have been smudged by feet, or have long fingermarks pulled across them. Some of them have been etched into the cement with something sharper. A knife. Or a piece of glass. The faces are not all the same. Some are stark and undetailed. Some are very intricate and specific, like portraits of real people. Some are shapeless and adrift. Some are arranged around other objects, other faces, forming patterns, repeating themselves.

  None are smiling.

  And there is a name. Repeated everywhere. In between all the other drawings, written in the same hand, again and again and again: Peter, Peter, Peter.

  The carvings and the drawings are overlaid and overlaid again so that they form a tapestry of faces. So many of them that they paint the whole room black; they spill over from the floor onto the walls, climbing towards the ceiling. And right in the middle of the ceiling a cross bears down on the room like the voice of God.

  Freya gets lost in the
all drawings, all the eyes. She falls away into a black space, where the drawings are alight, burning with a sickly luminescence. From the roof, in big bouquets, in clusters, objects hang from thin strings. Pieces of glass. And other things – plastic things. Blinded, Freya can’t quite process what they are, but then they burst into focus.

  They are heads. Dozens and dozens of heads.

  Heads that have been torn from the bodies of dolls, swaying like wind chimes, side to side, side to side. Their faces stare out, reflected in the broken pieces of mirror – not glass, but mirror – which have been hung beside them. From these mirrors, the doll heads stare back at themselves, creating reflections and reflections of reflections: hundreds of lifeless blue eyes staring down at her. At her, and beyond her; beyond the walls of this shed to the streets. To the streets of the city; as if to challenge how banal it is, how pedestrian.

  So this is the place he comes to before he goes to bed.

  Who created these sculptures? Was it him? Driven by something deep and dark, some terrible urge to create? Is this how he expresses himself? Or is that something that killing fulfils? Does he kill to understand himself?

  Freya sits down on the mattress and looks outwards. There is one window in the shed, through which she can see the back of Abraham’s house, the red Mercedes, the porch, his bedroom window.

  Freya recognises the world she has stumbled into. It’s grief.

  Grief.

  Grief is the thing covering these walls; she is surrounded by the artefacts of someone else’s tragedy. And she understands the person who made all these things, who carved their mind onto this concrete. She understands that grief isn’t a thing that can be spoken about; it can’t be translated into something that exists outside of you. Language isn’t enough. Talking isn’t enough. Even this – this angry, ragged art – isn’t enough. Grief infects your blood: blue grief washes through red veins, and changes you, changes your fibre, your core, your heart.

  Your altered heart.

  She can’t bear it any more; she can’t stand it.

  Before she knows it, she has fled.

  She runs, runs out the shed and over his back wall, retreating all the way to the jungle gym, and is sick. Crouching down, she watches her vomit splash onto the dirt.

  Freya becomes aware of how dead everything in the park is – the dead leaves piled underneath the rusty jungle gym; the thirsty grass, brown and fading; the corpse of a lizard, tipped sideways, drying in the sun. The bloodless, still sky.

  The silence, the murdered sound.

  She looks behind her at his sad, lonely house.

  And she runs.

  18

  Slick leans against the jungle gym, pressing his thumb into the wound on his thigh, looking at the young woman in front of him – the girl – and the envelope she is holding out to him. ‘So this is where you live,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know why we couldn’t do this the usual way.’

  ‘Because I said so.’ He smiles at her. ‘How does it feel to know you’re almost off the hook?’

  She regards him with her flecked, frozen eyes. ‘Just meet Lucky in the park next week like usual. Don’t come back here,’ she says, turning away from him and walking back through the yellow grass.

  19

  ‘How did court go?’ The question comes suddenly, after a short and comfortable silence, in which Nolwazi had been doubting her choice of ice-cream flavour and tentatively considering buying a second one.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Did they get the full sentence?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  He becomes silent; she is annoyed that he’s forced her to be rude.

  She shouldn’t be here.

  He’s her subordinate, after all, and this is inappropriate. Sure, she couldn’t help but flutter at the idea of a date with Frik, at the idea of some semblance of a normal social life. He makes her laugh; he makes her feel sexy. He hears her. But she isn’t sure that he’s good. He might be charming, but he isn’t good. He’s a bully: he enjoys arresting people; he enjoys being intimidating. And he’s friends with Hans – what does it say about someone that they can be friends with racists? ‘There’s no changing him now, man. Just ignore him when he says things like that.’ Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.

  The little ice-cream parlour is quiet; she likes the casual intimacy, the brightly lit red-and-white interior, the colourful displays, the comfortable couches. Cosy, childlike. Frik is staring into the distance, thoughts crawling across his face like restless shadows. ‘Why don’t you want to tell me about the court case?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But you won’t talk about what happened, either.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, don’t you want to set the record straight?’

  ‘What record?’

  ‘Do you think there aren’t rumours about why you were transferred?’

  ‘I asked to be transferred.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She sighs. Things flash across her memory. Dark things, bloodied things, angry things. The image of the butt of her gun against the dark ebony of someone’s skull. The deep, deep cuts it made. Her own strength. ‘I just don’t like talking about it. It’s behind me. I lost control. I made a mistake.’

  Frik is quiet for a second, before he asks, ‘Do you think there is anything worth going to prison for?’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  He throws up his hands (he has very vocal hands). ‘Just something I’ve been thinking about lately.’

  Nolwazi looks over at the other couple sitting in the ice-cream parlour, in love, not caring about the winter wind outside, talking about nice things, probably. Good, kind, funny things. ‘No, prison is a death sentence,’ she says, finally. ‘Nothing is worth that.’

  ‘You can’t see yourself breaking the law for any reason? Nothing that is worth breaking the law for?’

  ‘No.’ She is lying.

  ‘You are so sure.’

  ‘I am.’ Lying again. ‘You aren’t?’

  ‘I’m never sure, but justice is worth going to jail for.’

  ‘Justice?’

  ‘Yes. Justice. Revenge.’

  ‘Those are not the same things.’

  ‘They come pretty close. Some things the system can’t take care of . . . I can see how someone would want to take the law into their own hands.’

  ‘But you’re a police officer?’

  ‘Yes, and I would arrest anyone who broke the law. But if they did it for good reasons, I would also understand them.’

  ‘So you would take justice upon yourself, make that decision alone, and go to jail just to fulfil your own idea of vengeance?’

  But isn’t that what you did? says the voice inside her head.

  ‘If someone killed someone I loved, if they got away with it, I would kill them. And I would be willing to go to jail for it, yes.’

  ‘You sound like you’ve thought a lot about this.’

  He doesn’t respond, but asks, ‘You wouldn’t?’

  ‘If someone killed someone I loved, I would prove they did it. I would arrest them. But I wouldn’t kill them. Retribution isn’t my business.’

  More lies.

  ‘Sometimes people have to do what they have to do. Else how do they sleep at night?’

  Nolwazi finishes her cone, the last remnants of the ice cream sending a sharp, cold blast across her teeth. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘that sounds like a brave thing to say, but I’m not so sure it is.’ The coldness spreads from her teeth down the rest of her body, and the delicate passion fruit, so intense a moment ago, leaves a thin, sickly aftertaste that might not have anything to do with the ice cream. She waits for Frik to finish, and then stands.

  He stands too, and says, ‘I’ll just go give the car guard his tip and then I’ll take you home,’ handing her the keys to the car. She watches as he gives the scraggly guard – his back turned against t
he cold, his neon-­yellow bib the same colour as her ice cream – some money. There seems to be some debate about whether it is enough.

  When he climbs back into the car, he puts his hand on her thigh.

  20

  Mr October stands at the kitchen sink. She walks past the kitchen, on her way out.

  ‘Going to Frennie’s?’

  She rolls her eyes, and nods curtly. She’s wearing a new jacket: denim, expensive.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘What happened to the window?’ he asks. And the money in my closet, he wants to add. But doesn’t.

  ‘I broke it earlier. Sorry.’

  ‘Has anyone else been in the house today?’

  ‘No, Pa.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Bye.’

  He walks towards the dining room, stopping in front of the framed portraits of his parents. He carefully touches the dust mark where someone ran their thumb along the drawing of his mother.

  He doesn’t think about his parents very often; hasn’t thought about them in years. His parents had been plain people. Quiet. His mother did what mothers did and his father did what fathers did, as far as he could tell. They lived in Eersterust, out to the west of the city. A small, conservative community. He still owns the house they lived in, although he hardly ever goes there now. And why would he? He hated the place, the poverty of it, the oppression.

  He takes his phone from his pocket and dials. The woman on the other end of the line doesn’t even let him say hello before she says, ‘She’s here, Abraham. She’s safe. I’ll drop her again later. Don’t worry.’ He hangs up. The same phone call he makes every night. Every night that he isn’t in his car following her around. Making sure she can live her life on her terms.

  The portraits of his parents stare at him impassively. He should have thrown them out ages ago. Is this what his daughter would think one day, thirty years from now, standing in a dining room of her own? Would she look up suddenly as she was setting the table and think about a father she had long forgotten? Would he be nothing but a rough slash in her memory, too?