Devil's Peak: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

Was it coincidence that he had recalled his first experience of sex with such clarity on his way here? At the same time he had been wondering how alcohol and memory interacted. He had a mental image of synapses submerged in brandy; while he stayed sober the level kept dropping and, like a dam drying up, exposed old, rusty objects.

  Not all the memories were pleasant, but he focused on those from long ago: the one of the girl with the gold chain around her neck and her name in gold letters against her throat. YVETTE. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with blue-and-white horizontal stripes and she had used too much perfume. But it smelt heavenly.

  There were odd details that he had remembered this afternoon. They had a gig in Welgemoed against the Tygerberg at the sixteenth birthday party of some or other rich man’s son. They set up beside the swimming pool on imported ceramic tiles. The rich wanker had kept hanging around and asking, “Have you got rubbers for the feet of the drums?” When he was a distance away, the drummer said, “I have rubbers for your daughter,” and they all laughed. The rich wanker, one of those men who dress as if they were still sixteen too, stopped and asked, “What did you say?” The drummer said: “I said I have rubbers,” but with a smirk. The rich man stood there knowing he was making a fool of himself, but there was not a lot he could do about it.

  When they played, the girl was there. She moved at the edge of the big group, half in the twilight. She wasn’t truly part of it. Or didn’t want to be. Sometimes she danced on her own. She looked at him and he noticed her eyes first, big brown eyes that looked sad. Long straight brown hair. Then he noticed her neat little breasts and pretty round bottom and he saw a potential opportunity and began to play to her.

  The prospect was nearly too much for him. He was afraid his hopes were unrealistic. He waited until late that night, until their very last break. He went over to her and said “Hi” and she said “Hi” and looked at him with that lost smile as if to say I know what you’re thinking. Then the strangest thing happened. She took his hand and led him past the house into the shadows. She opened a door low down at the side of the house. It was a storeroom of sorts. She closed the door and it was pitch-dark. He could see fuck-all. Then she was against him, hands around his neck and kissing him. He tasted alcohol on her tongue and Spearmint Beechies and smelt her perfume. Lust took hold of them in the dark, they kissed and undressed each other with searching hands and he felt her body — he ran his palms over her face and neck and breasts and hips and bottom. They bumped into invisible garden tools and somehow or other found a place to lie, a canvas tarpaulin over some sacks — not soft, but not as hard as the floor. He remembered the smell of turpentine and old paint, but above all, her perfume. The only sounds were their breathing and urgency. She took his dick and put it in her mouth. Lord, he would never forget that. For a moment she was nowhere to be found and then her hand was around his thing and then there was something warm and wet around it and it hit him like a sledgehammer, his dick was in her mouth. The realization of every masturbatory dream. He wanted to see it. He wanted terribly to capture it in his mind, so that he could know what it looked like and remember, but there was no light, absolutely none. He groaned partly from frustration and partly from ecstasy and he stretched out his hand until he found her bush, slid his finger in and felt her heat like glowing coals inside.

  Afterwards she opened the door for light so they could find their clothes and dress. He watched her silhouette faintly etched against the little light from outside. That was the last he saw of her. He went back, self-conscious and worried he hadn’t dressed properly in the storeroom. He hadn’t been missed. He looked around for her, but she was gone.

  Yvette. That was all he knew. That night he had lain in bed with a strange melancholy. Her smell was on his fingers and on his body. But the next morning it was gone. Just like her.

  While she was in the bathroom, he walked quickly out to his car and fetched the music and the CD player.

  When she came out her hair was clean and wet. She made up a bed on the couch for him. She put out a big blue towel for him and said he was welcome to use the bathroom. He said he would like to shower. He was aware of the awkwardness between them. Or was it just him?

  Tonight he was going to share a house with a whore. He couldn’t look at her and forced a polite smile.

  “Well, I’ll say goodnight, then.”

  “Sleep well,” he said.

  “You too.” She went down the passage and shut her door. He went to the bathroom. It was still steamy from her shower and filled with her fragrances, soap and shampoo and lotion. It smelt different from Anna’s bathroom. Fuller. Richer.

  He undressed and neatly folded his clothes and put them on the toilet lid, on top of his service pistol. He looked down at his body. Naked in a whore’s bathroom. He looked at the chest hairs already turning gray and the middle age slackening of his belly. His penis was in that no-man’s land between indifference and desire, a half-smoked cigar. Not exactly your Greek god. Not exactly seductive in Christine van Rooyen’s eyes. He smiled wryly at himself in the steamy mirror.

  He showered using her semi-transparent soap that was the color of red wine, and shampoo from a white bottle. He rinsed off and toweled. Put only his trousers on and carried the rest of his clothes and his firearm to the sitting room. He stacked them in a neat pile beside the couch and sat. He examined his bed. It was a big, wide couch. Long enough. He took out the Anton Goosen jewel case and had another look at it. He took out the second disc of the double set and put it in the player. Earphones on. He switched off the standard lamp beside the couch, swung his feet up and placed the player on his stomach. Pressed Play.

  Only once the nine members of the Task Force had grown tired of laughing and jesting and gone on their way did the detective in Midrand get a chance to take the fingerprints of the two suspects. Then he had them locked up in the cells again.

  He sat down at his desk and began to go through the evidence systematically. In one of the transparent plastic evidence bags he saw the identity documents that the Task Force men had found in the BMW. He took them out and looked at the names.

  Let’s see, he thought, and picked up the phone. The number he keyed was that of the SAPS Criminal Records Center in Pretoria.

  As the applause after the last cut faded, he lay with closed eyes and a light heart. He wondered what he had lost in the past few years. He was the drinking equivalent of Rip van Winkle with this huge hole in his life, a black hole of unconsciousness. Everything had grown up. His children, the music of his culture . . . his fucking country. Everything except him. In his mind he was being exposed to the alternatives, how different things might have been. He didn’t want to see that now. He took the earphones off.

  City sounds penetrated faintly from outside. His eyes were adjusted to the dark now. Streetlights illuminated the room sufficiently through the gauzy curtains. The outlines of the furniture, the dark shape of the painting against the wall. Small red and green lights shone from the fridge and the TV.

  He wanted to tell Fritz. Reaching over the little table he found his cell phone and scrolled through the menu to text messages. He struggled a bit with the tiny pads of the keyboard. CD IS BASS HEAVEN. THANKS. DAD.

  He sent the SMS and put the CD player and phone on his pile of clothes. He must sleep. He didn’t want to think, enough thinking for one day. He shifted around on the couch, struggling to be comfortable. It was best with his back against the backrest. Too hot for the blanket. Sleep.

  He thought once of Christine lying in the bedroom, but he put her out of his mind and tried to think of Anna. That brought no peace so he thought about the music and he did what he used to do when he was seventeen: he visualized himself on stage. At the State Theater. With Anton & friends. He was playing bass guitar. Playing without effort, going with the flow of the music, letting his fingers run where they would and he heard the bedroom door open and soft footfalls on the carpet. She must be going to the bathroom. But here she was beside him. She lay down
on the couch. Her back was against him. She shifted up close to him so they lay like two spoons. He hardly dared breathe. He must pretend to be asleep. Keep his breathing even and calm. He could smell her, her shoulder right by his nose.

  She wanted comfort. She just needed a person. She didn’t want to be alone, she missed her child, she was raw and hurting. He knew all that.

  He made a sound that he hoped would sound like a person asleep and put a hand on her hip. A comforting gesture. Half on thin material and half on bare flesh.

  He felt the heat of her body. Now he was getting a fucking erection, it blossomed irreverently and there was no way to stop it. He had to think of something. He made another vague noise and shifted his hips back. Lord, she mustn’t know. He should have put his underpants on, that would have kept it reined in. Perhaps she wasn’t fully awake. He tried to listen to her breathing, but all his senses returned to him were her heat and her scent.

  She shifted back against him. Right against him. Up here. Down there.

  He wanted to apologize. He wanted to mumble “I’m sorry” or something, but he was too scared. She was half asleep and that would make it all worse. He lay very still. Thought about the music. Played bass guitar along with “gee die harlekyn nog wyn, skoebiedoewaa, skoebiedoewaa, rooiwyn vir sy lag en traan en pyn, skoebiedoewaa, skoebiedoewaa . . .” Give the harlequin more wine, scoobydoowaa, scoobydoowaa, red wine for his laughter and tears and pain . . .

  She moved her arm, her hand, put it over his. She held it on her hip a moment and then drew it up under her nightie, oh fuck, up to her breast, her palm on the back of his hand and he felt her, felt the softness and she sighed deeply and pressed his hand tightly and roughly against her. Moved again, her hips away from his pelvis and her hand came down there, behind her back and undid the clip of his trousers, how he had no idea. Unzipped his trousers. Slipped in her hand and grasped him. Lust was one high perfect note in his head, a lead guitar that took flight to the rhythm of his heart’s bass and then she pushed him into her from behind.

  Long after his orgasm they lay still like that, belly to back, still inside her, though spent and flaccid now. The first words she spoke, barely aloud, were: “You are broken too.”

  He thought for a long time before answering. He wondered how she knew. How she could see it. Or feel it. Why had she come to him? Her need? Or her gift to him? A comfort?

  So he told her. About Anna. About his children. The drinking. Without plan or structure, he let it flow as it came into his head, his arm tight around her now, and his hand softly on the fullness of her breast. Her face against his, the fine hairs against his stubble.

  He told her how he had been, in the days before the booze. He had been an optimist, an extrovert. A joker. He was the one who could make everyone laugh, at the funniest moments. In the parade room, when tensions ran high and tempers were stretched, he could spot the silly side of the matter and cut through all the crap with a phrase and leave them helpless with laughter. He was the one everyone phoned first when they wanted to throw some meat on the griddle for a braai. Two or three times a month he would join Murder and Robbery for an impromptu barbecue, a braai. Three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, just to relieve the never-ending pressure, at Blouberg or Silvermine or even at the office itself in Bellville South. Beer and meat and bread, laughter, chat and drink, he would be first on the list, because he was Sergeant Benny Griessel, instinctive investigator and unofficial, cynical chief clown who could ridicule the job and the bureaucracy and affirmative action but with compassion. So that they could all face up to it again.

  Now, this side of the booze, they still had their braais. But no one called him. No one wanted him there, the sot who staggered and couldn’t string two coherent words together. The oaf who bumped into others, swore and fought and had to be taken home to a wife who opened the door reluctantly. Because she didn’t want that drunkard or the humiliation.

  He told Christine he had been sober for eleven days now and he didn’t know the man this side of the booze.

  Everything had changed around him. His children, his wife, his colleagues. Jissis, he was an old has-been amongst all the Sturm und Drang of the young policemen in the Service.

  But the main thing was, he believed he had changed. He wasn’t sure how. Or how much. A strange fellow in his forties with a gaping hole in his life.

  He told her all this and somewhere in the telling she asked: “Why do you want your wife back?” He wondered about that before he answered. He said the thing was, he had been happy then. They had. She was the woman he had begun his life with. They had nothing, just each other. Set up house together, suffered together. Laughed together. Shared the same wonder at the magic of Carla and Fritz’s births. Celebrated together when he was promoted. They had history, the sort of history that mattered. They were friends and lovers and he wanted that back. He wanted the bond and the camaraderie and the trust. Because that was a great part of who he had been, what made him what he had been.

  And he wanted to be that again.

  If he couldn’t get Anna back, he had fuck-all. That was it.

  She said: “A person can never be like that again,” and before he could react, she asked, “Do you still love her?” It made no difference how long he thought about that one, he could not answer her. He wanted to talk shit about “what is love,” but he kept quiet and suddenly felt weary of himself, so he asked, “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Why was it necessary . . . to become a prostitute?”

  “A sex worker,” she said, but in quiet self-mockery.

  She moved slowly and he slipped out of her. A small moment of loss. She turned over so her face was towards him and his hand was off her breast.

  “Would you have asked me that if I was selling flowers?” There was no confrontation in her voice. Her words were flat and without emotion. She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s just a job.”

  He drew a breath to answer, but she went on: “People think it’s this dreadful thing. Bad. Damaging. Your work brings you damage too. That’s what you just said. But it’s okay to be a policeman. Just don’t be a whore.”

  He thought if she hadn’t been a sex worker, Sonia would have been safe at home, but he knew he could never say it.

  “When I began, I also wondered what was different about me. All my clients ask the same thing. ‘Why did you become an escort?’ It makes you think there’s something wrong with you. Then you think, but why should it be something wrong? Why can’t it be something right? Why can’t it just be that I think further than most people? What is sex? Is it so bad? What makes it such a bad thing?”

  She got up and walked away from him and he was sorry he had asked her. He didn’t mean to upset her. He should have thought. He wanted to say he was sorry, but she had disappeared down the passage. He became aware of his trousers still unfastened so he zipped them up.

  She came back. He saw her shadowy figure moving and here she was, but this time she sat at his feet.

  “Do you want a cigarette?”

  “Please.”

  She put two cigarettes in her mouth and clicked the lighter. In the light of the flame he could see her breasts and face and bare shoulders.

  She passed one to him. He drew deeply.

  “I was always different,” she said and blew a plume of smoke that cast a ghostly shadow on the opposite wall. “It’s hard to explain. When you are small, you understand nothing. You think there’s something wrong with you. My parents . . . I come from a good home. My father was in the army and my mother was mostly at home and they were okay with that. With their little world. With that kind of life. The older I got the harder it was for me to understand. How could that be all? How could that be enough? You go to school, you find a husband or a wife, you raise kids, you retire by the sea and then you die. You never upset anyone, you do the right thing. Those are my father’s words. ‘My child, you do the right thing.’ Whose right thing? The people’s? Who are t
hey to decide what the right thing is? You pay your parking money and you never drive too fast and don’t make a noise after ten at night. And you do your duty. That’s another of my father’s classics. ‘People must do their duty, my child.’ To your family, to your town, to your country. What for? What did they get for doing their duty? My father did his duty to the army and he was dead before he took his pension. My mother did her duty to us and she has never been to Cape Town or Europe or anywhere. After all the duty, there was never money for anything. Not for clothes or cars or furniture or holidays. But it was okay for them, because people mustn’t be flashy, that’s not the right thing to do.

  “Everyone wants you to be ordinary. Everything everyone teaches you, is just so you won’t be different. But I was different. I couldn’t help it. It’s the way I am. If my parents or the school or whoever said that is what you should do, then I wondered what it felt like to do the opposite. I wanted to see what it looked like from the other side. So I did. I smoked a bit and I drank a bit. But when you are fifteen or sixteen, almost all the rules are about sex. You mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that, because you must be a decent girl. I wanted to know why you had to be a decent girl. What for? So you could get a decent man? And a decent life, with decent children? And a decent funeral with lots of people? So I did things. And the more things I did, the more I realized the other side is the interesting one. Most people don’t want to be decent, they’ve all got this stuff inside that wants to be different, but they don’t have the guts. They are all too scared someone will say something. They are afraid they will lose all the boring things in their lives. There was this teacher, he was so dutiful. I worked on him. And I slept with him on the Students Christian Association camp at The Island. He said, God, Christine, I’ve wanted you so long. So I asked him why he hadn’t done something about it. He couldn’t answer me. And this friend of my father. When he came to our house he would look at me sideways but then go and sit next to his wife and hold her hand. I knew what he wanted. I worked on him and he said he liked young girls but that it was his first time.”