by Roger Smith
The sun bleaches the matchbox houses and ghetto blocks that litter the sand of the Cape Flats. There is no wind today and the sky is hot and cloudless, bilious with the gauze of pollution that smothers the cramped hovels.
Louise is alone in the minibus taxi, the other passengers spat out earlier along the route. The co-driver sits on the jump seat facing her, raping her with his heavy-lidded eyes. He’s maybe eighteen, his skinny frame lost in his ’banger clothes.
“Where you from, girl?”
She ignores him, watching a naked child with a distended belly staring at her from the doorway of a shack.
The asshole reaches forward and grabs her leg, dirty fingers biting into her thigh.
“Girl, I’m fucken talking to you.”
He stands and leans over Louise as the driver throws the taxi into a corner, balancing like a sailor on a yawing deck, a trifecta of sweat, meth and lust radiating from him. He cups his package and thrusts it toward her face.
Louise doesn’t think, just makes a fist and punches upward into his groin, feeling the softness beneath her knuckles. He gasps out foul breath and sags, holding himself, hissing, “Fucken cunt.”
She shoves him aside and stands. “Let me out.”
The driver, thickset with a Braille of boils on his neck above his T-shirt, stares at her in the rearview, then he laughs and hits the brakes—sending Louise flying into the back of a seat, bruising her ribs—bringing the taxi to a dusty halt at the train station where a knot of passengers wait.
Louise battles the sliding door open and steps down into the dirt, searching for a landmark. She sees the dark bulk of the landfill, the scavengers on its humped back inky shadows against the bitter lemon sky.
A breeze—a foretaste of the gale that’ll attack the Flats later—throws dust over her shoes and swirls the stink of the dump beneath her nostrils, like the sommelier at the absurd French restaurant Michael Lane took her to a few years ago, when she’d scored six distinctions in her matric finals, just turned eighteen, old enough to drink the wine that Michael had made such a fuss off, Louise awkward and uncomfortable, hating the food, hating the knowledge that that this had nothing to do with her, that it was all about Michael showing off, showing her off, his little colored once-upon-a-time protégé.
Louise shakes off the stupid memory, diluting her anger by conjuring Michael last night, at his desk.
Weak.
Reduced.
Hers for the taking.
She waits for a funeral procession, a massive silver hearse dragging in its wake a rattling string of dented, rust-chewed old cars, and crosses the road to the maze of shacks, knowing that what she’s about to do is at best ill-advised, at worst just plain fucking suicidal.
Last night she’d tried repeatedly to call Achmat Bruinders, but was met each time with the same vaguely African-accented electronic voice saying his number wasn’t available on the network. In desperation she’d called his sister, Fazila, but when she said her name the woman killed the call, and hadn’t answered when Louise tried twice more.
So she’s come out here knowing that Achmat could be back in prison. Or dead.
Louise stops at the shacks, searching for a way into the maze of sheet iron and plastic and coils of wire. Trying, and failing, to remember the route she’d taken with Achmat when last she was here.
Trying to orient herself she scans the nasty little playground where a pair of boys, maybe ten or eleven, toss a rugby ball in high, looping arcs, yelling at one another, the names Marcellino and Terrill reaching her through a stream of glottal Cape Flats profanities.
One boy fumbles and the oval ball bounces wildly, squirts across the road and comes to rest in the dust at Louise’s feet. She picks up the ball, holding onto it, the sketch of a plan forming in her mind.
The taller of the boys—Terrill—stripped to the waist, with a sunken chest and arms too long, shouts at her in a tumble of words that she barely understands. He waves his arms like a rapper and pimprolls over to Louise, cursing her sex and her stupidity.
As he grabs the ball from her Louise says, “You want twenty rand?”
He looks up at her. “For what?”
“You know Doogie Bruinders?”
“Why?”
“Do you know him?”
“Fucken everybody knows him. So?”
“You know where he lives?”
The kid jabs a finger at the shacks. “In there.”
“I mean, can you go in there and find him? Tell him I’m here?”
He shakes his head. “You fucken mad, bitch?”
“Okay, Terrill, you just got yourself into serious shit, hear me?” Putting as much of the Flats into her voice as she can.
“How you know my name?”
His friend has sloped up and Louise points a finger at each of them in turn. “Marcellino and Terrill. I’ll tell my father about you guys.”
“Who’s then your father?” Marcellino asks, not as cocky as his friend. Small and skinny. A runt.
“Doogie Bruinders,” she says and his eyes cloud with fear.
“Fucken bullshit,” Terrill says.
“Look at my fucken face, boy. Who do I look like?”
Marcellino stares at her, then says to his friend, “Looks like him. She does.”
Louise fixes her eyes on Terrill. “Want to save your ass?”
“How?”
“I’m gonna wait here with your little friend and you gonna go call Doogie. Tell him his daughter’s here. You bring him back and I tell him you guys are cool, that you helped me. And maybe, if I’m feeling nice, I give you that twenty. Otherwise I tell him you a little pair of shits who are dissing him. You choose.”
“Go, Terrill,” Marcellino says and his friend jogs off swallowed by the maze.
Louise throws the ball at the boy and he fields it, tossing it in the air a couple of times before he loses interest and lets it fall to the dirt, trapping it beneath a torn sneaker.
“I don’t want no trouble, sister.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“School’s closed.”
“Why?”
“The gangsters come yesterday and they rape a girl in the classroom and cut her dead. So no school today.” He shrugs, staring out over the Flats.
Louise has nothing to say to this.
“Why you speak so nice?” he asks and she blushes at how unsuccessful her attempt to camouflage her accent has been.
“I’m not from here.”
“Where you from?”
“I grew up in Newlands.”
“By the rugby stadium?”
“Yes, close to it.”
“Me, I’m gonna play for Province. Then the Bokke.”
The Springboks. The national rugby team.
Even Louise, who knows nothing about the game, understands that this runt will never make it in the bullyboy world of hulking Christopher Lanes and she feels a stab of pity.
Digging in the pocket of her jeans she pulls out a hundred rand note. A fortune to this kid.
“Buy yourself some boots or something,” she says.
He stares at the money, mouth agape. “For real?”
“Take it. Go.”
“What about Terrill?”
“I’ll tell him you had to go home. Move, quick, quick, before I change my mind.”
“And Doogie Bruinders?”
“Don’t worry you won’t have any trouble with him.”
The money disappears into his pocket and he grabs his ball and he’s gone without looking back, scuttling off into the dust.
Louise waits a few more minutes, wondering if Terrill has done the smart thing and got his ass out of there, when she hears footsteps and turns. Achmat Bruinders comes toward her, the kid—face bleached by terror—following a few steps behind.
“This little cunt giving you trouble?” Achmat says, grabbing Terrill by his shirt.
“No. He helped me.”
She holds a twenty out to Terrill who reache
s for it. Before his fingers can snag the banknote Achmat grabs it.
“Fuck off,” he says and the boy is gone like a rabbit.
“So,” Achmat says, those dead eyes on her, “what you need from me?”
“You want to make ten thousand rand?”
He coughs up a dusty laugh. “You joking, girly?”
“No, I’m not.”
“So you changed your mind, hey?” he says.
“About what?”
“You want me to kill somebody don’t you?”
And for a moment there’s still enough of the old Louise alive in her for her to know that she should turn on her heel and take a taxi out of there and forget about this man and forget about Michael Lane too, but she nods and says, “Yes, I want you to kill somebody.”
13
As Lane watches his crippled son battle his way out of Beverley’s Pajero, sliding down from the high car onto his good leg, hopping in place on the sidewalk and reaching inside the SUV for his crutches, he experiences a cocktail of equal parts pity and revulsion.
Chris slams the car door and Beverley noses the Pajero into the Long Street traffic, a flare of hard light striking her hands as they grip the wheel, triggering the image of Tracy’s bruised white neck and Lane feels his cappuccino returned to his mouth in a wash of bile.
He gags into a napkin, ready to leave the table in the coffee shop, duck out past the toilets and make his escape through the back alley, when two uniformed schoolboys—blond and thickset—step off a bus and laugh at Christopher as he hops and flounders, almost losing his balance as he struggles to seat his arms in the crutches.
Chris sees them and a look of such naked anguish crosses his son’s bloated, unshaven face, that Lane is left skewered to his seat, watching as the boy heaves himself through the doorway into the coffee shop, the pink nub of his amputated leg peeping out beneath the hem of his shorts.
Lane lifts a hand in greeting, and Chris nods and hops and poles his way between the tables.
When Lane charged his cell phone that morning, for the first time in days—anticipating a call from Louise—the phone binged and flashed with countless missed calls and messages, the last four from his son. He realized that it was Chris’s nineteenth birthday and when the phone rang in Lane’s hand and his son’s name appeared on caller ID, some reflex made him answer.
“Chris?”
“Hi.”
“Happy Birthday.”
“Ja, thanks.”
“So, what’s up?”
“Listen, Mom’s bringing me into town to see the doc this morning, so can we maybe meet? Afterwards?”
“Today’s not great for me, Chris.”
“Just for a minute or two. Please?”
There was a stammer of uncertainty in the boy’s voice, a vulnerability that Lane had never heard before and he found himself agreeing to meet Christopher at noon.
Red faced, panting, T-shirt riding up on the folds of his flabby gut, Chris falls into the seat opposite Lane, almost upsetting the table, foam from the cappuccino flung to the wooden surface.
“Hey,” Chris says.
“What’s the doctor say?”
“Usual crap.” Christopher leans his crutches against the wall, a yeasty smell of sweat rising from him. “Pissed off that I’m not using the prosthesis. Blah, blah.”
“And why aren’t you using it?”
“Fucken hurts is why. Burns like a bastard. Makes the stump bleed. Fuck that.”
A waiter appears and Lane says, “Want something, Chris?”
“You got beer?” Christopher asks and the waiter nods. “Okay, gimme a Castle.”
The waiter leaves and they sit a moment in silence.
“What’s on your mind?” Lane asks.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about what happened with, with . . .”
“Tracy?”
“Ja. Bummer, man.”
“Major bummer,” Lane says, his sarcasm lost on his son.
The waiter sets down a bottle of beer and a glass. Christopher drinks straight from the bottle, hissing out gas after he swallows.
Lane says, “Chris, I have a meeting in a couple of minutes.”
“Sure, okay. Listen, I know Mom spoke to you about coming home.”
“Yes, she did.”
“Right. I just wanted to say it would be cool with me too if you did.”
“Would it?”
“Fully.”
Lane has no idea what to say, so he sips his cappuccino.
“No, for real.” Chris wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Hey, I know we haven’t really seen eye to eye for a while, but it could be different now.”
“How?”
“Life’s dealt us both shit hands. Maybe we’ve learned something.”
“Learned what?”
Chris leans in close. “Listen, I know it must have been rough for you, lying about what happened when I did what I did and then dealing with the whole Lyndall thing. Then this business with your girl friend. That’s brutal.”
“Yes. As you say, brutal.”
“So, maybe we can be a family again? Get through all of this shit together?”
And when he sees that Chris means it, that he’s not here merely as his mother’s proxy, some yearning for redemption in his muddied blue eyes, Lane feels a sadness so profound that he is left strangled.
The trilling of his cell phone jars him out of his funk and he frees it from his pocket. Louise.
“Where are you?” he says.
“The bookstore. You?”
“I’m a minute away.”
Lane ends the call, stows the phone and stands, pinning a banknote under his saucer.
“Chris, I’m sorry, I have to go. But like I told your mother, I need time to straighten my head out.”
“Sure, I get it.”
“We’ll talk.”
Chris leans across the table, extending a thick hand. Lane takes it and they shake, the first time he’s touched his son in years.
Christopher says, “See you, Dad.”
Lane nods and makes his way though the tables without looking back.
14
“It can be done,” Louise says.
“By whom?” Lane asks.
Louise shakes her head. “I told you, that doesn’t matter.”
They are in Lane’s office, with the door closed even though the bookstore is deserted. He perches on the edge of his desk, his arms folded, watching Louise who stands at the hatch staring out at Long Street.
“Lou,” he says. “I need to know.”
She turns and looks at him, her expression unreadable. Then she nods. “My father.”
“You have a father?”
“The stork didn’t bring me, Mike.”
“Who is he?”
“He was in prison until last year. For murder. He’s killed more people than he can remember. Seriously, he’s perfect for this.”
“When did you connect with him?”
“At Lyndall’s funeral. First time I knew he existed.”
Lane says, “Why would he do this?”
“For the money, of course. He has a major tik habit to feed.”
“What if he’s caught and this leads back to you?”
“He wouldn’t care if he went back to prison, for him it would be a relief. And he doesn’t squeal. Ever.”
“How? How would it be done?”
“He’d go to the house at night. Kill her. Make it look like a home invasion.” Louise is as impassive as if she’s reciting a laundry list. She shrugs. “It’s your call, Michael.”
“Jesus,” he says and wanders across to the barred window and gazes out at the alley.
He’d killed a family. He’d sent this girl’s brother to his death. He’d looked on while his wife killed a teenager. Inexcusable acts. But none had been premeditated. This is something different, this requires crossing a line that he hadn’t even known was there until yesterday.
Lane feels very much as
he did a few years ago, building up the courage to jump from the Storm’s River bridge, standing on the edge, harnessed, the bungee umbilical trailing behind him, the impatient young supervisor saying, “Okay, man, go, there’s a bunch of people waiting.”
Lane, frozen, looked over his shoulder at Beverley who turned away in embarrassment.
Fifteen-year-old Chris, who had already jumped twice, executing dives and swoops that had delighted the crowd, said, “Ah, he’s too chickenshit to jump. Untie him.”
This had goaded Lane into action and he shuffled forward and plunged into endless space, an eternity of freefalling before the bungee tugged him back from the fast-approaching rocks, and he bounced and tumbled and fell again and then swung at the end of the bouncing cord until he was hauled up, feet first.
By the time he was unharnessed Bev and Chris were already back in the car, his son slouching in the rear seat with his cap pulled low. As Lane, his guts still watery and his legs not quite obeying him, slid behind the wheel, the boy clapped slowly and sarcastically and Beverley, checking her lipstick in the visor mirror said, “My hero.”
Lane sees her hands, earlier, on the wheel of the car in Long Street. Sees those hands on the neck of Sally Skinner. Remembers how cold Tracy had felt when he touched her body.
He turns to Louise. “Okay,” he says. “Tell him to do it.”
15
As Louise rises from the little make-up table squeezed between the bed and the closet her foot brushes the sleeping Harpo and when he opens his eyes and gazes up at her he looks startled.
“It’s me, Harps, relax,” she says and his little stub of a tail thumps the carpet.
But the woman looking back at her from the mirror is a stranger: short hair gelled and spiked in a kind of Halle Berry thing, tight fitting black blouse—buttoned at the wrists to cover her scars—worn loose over a knee-length black skirt bought this afternoon at the Waterfront. And honest-to-god lipstick—“Serenity Brown” the colored cosmetics attendant at Edgars told Louise in her fake American accent. Even a few dabs of scent behind her ears, from the little bottle of Tommy Girl she’d bought with the lipstick.
No wonder poor old Harpo is confused.
Louise’s phone chirps. Michael.
