by HJ Golakai
“You really can’t cut me a break, can you?” he muttered.
Chapter Twenty-two
“How’s it going?”
Vee looked up and faked a smile. “Not bad.” She typed a few edits and past Chlöe’s shoulder signalled to Darren Februarie with an open-palmed ‘give me five minutes’. “It’s looking good. It’s not complete, but at least we’ve got something more substantial than our first pitch. I’m splicing in your segment on the companies’ backgrounds – brief, nothing drawn out, we don’t want it to read like a suspect list – and the bid set-up.”
Craning over her shoulder, Chlöe scanned through the copy and impressive layout. Not as polished as she was sure the final product would be, but Vee had sure picked up a trick or several. “Me likey. A lot. I still can’t believe Nico’s giving us the run of page two for the Saturday print. That’s a lot of squeezing in we can do. Playing both angles; murder investigation and probe into the current empowerment craze.”
“Right. How empowering is it, how accessible and realistic, who benefits, is it just recycled drivel, devil with a different face, or are there actual rewards.” Vee tap-tapped and brought up another screen. “Online is gonna look a little different, with some success stories and flops, pros and cons kinda thing, and more finance commentary, Karl’s helping with that. People can get interactive with it, check out the company profiles, post comments on the investigation and whatnot. And of course with every new development they can –”
“Follow it on Facebook and Twitter,” Chlöe chorused along.
From her chair, Vee beamed up with the unadulterated pride she reserved for the juicy scoops. “I don’t want to jinx it by crowing too early, but we did good on this one.”
“We so have. The screw-ups strike again,” Chlöe beamed back. The moment held until Vee dimmed and cleared her throat. Her face became serious and guarded again.
“Let me dash this over to Darren dem, then we can go.”
“Awesome.” Chlöe nodded and clapped, fervently and one too many times. Vee rose with a Dell in hand, a loan from the IT crew until a permanent replacement for her laptop came through. Chlöe moved in to glide behind her desk and kill time flipping through the stack of lesser assignments while she waited. She checked herself just before her butt touched down, deftly sidestepped the chair and rammed her hands into the pockets of her linen slacks. Vee arched her brows and gave a nonchalant shrug, but all the same Chlöe perched on the edge of the desk and kept her hands to herself.
“Ready.” Several minutes later, Vee slid the powered-down laptop onto her desk. “I’m driving?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Good.”
“Yup.”
“Soooo … what’ve we got?” Chlöe drawled.
Vee leaned against the top floor railing of Parow Centre Mall and let her make a meal of fiddling with the pale yellow plastic binder until she extricated the stapled pages. “Xoliswa Gaba. Quite a riveting read for a slow afternoon. The dame’s had a few bats in her belfry, if you get my meaning,” Chlöe joked out the side of her mouth in the terrible Vaudeville accent she put on when she was doing her corny comedian bit.
“What’s it say?” Vee pressed quietly, ignoring the humour. She did truly want to know, despite having read half the background dossier already. But she’d stopped herself, knowing Chlöe would want to show her, tell her, make it known she was on the ball. Contritely so. She sighed inwardly against a swell of weariness. It was going to be an exhausting back-and-forth that lasted Lord knows how long – Chlöe grasping for banter and hamming it up, she having to pretend she was too affronted and pissed to be drawn in just yet. In truth she just felt desensitised, over it. It was done. Everyone could do whatever the hell they wanted, screw the consequences; that seemed to be the status quo anyway. She turned her head and raised her eyebrows at Chlöe, indicating the floor was hers to get on with the rundown.
“Oh right! Ahem. Date of birth, January 16, 1976. My mum always said early-year babies were never quite sound. No-one wants another gift they can’t exchange so soon after Christmas, heh heh. Okay, okay. Eldest of three, two younger brothers, born and raised in Gugs, father an electrician, mother a seamstress, blah blah blah, you don’t care about all that. Right, looks like a lot of Akhona’s gossip checks out. Mother had a patchy history of ‘mental problems’, no clear diagnosis or institutionalisation, just a hospital visit here and there, anecdotes. She buggered off when the kids were young, doesn’t say with whom or for what, or where she landed. No trail. Kids were raised by paternal uncle and his wife. Fast-forward a bit …” Chlöe flipped the page over. “Here’s where we perk up. In 1995 in her second year at var, she had to take time out. What did she do during that time-out? She had a ‘holiday’ at Valkenberg.”
Chlöe kept her eyebrows suspended for so long, awaiting pearl-clutching gasps of horror in response, Vee feared she’d wrinkle her forehead forever. “Wow, really?” she finally caved.
“Yes! The Valkenberg. The old and majorly creepy psychiatric hospital of lore that looms in Observatory.”
“I know it; everybody knows it. It’s not the Frankenstein’s dungeon people make it out to be,” said Vee. When she got the reaction Chlöe would’ve liked to receive, plus a healthy dash of awe, she shrugged it off. “For a piece I did some years ago, when I was freelancing. On healthcare facilities and the like in Western Cape. Very routine.”
“Better you than me,” Chlöe gulped. “Anyway. All I’ve been able to dig up is she went in for exhaustion, erratic behaviour, having uncommon delusions …”
They’re playing my song, Vee mused, feeling a distant ache and surprising lack of ire at the memory of her own meltdown. Clearly there were personalities at the edges of, or complete outliers to, the spectrum of ‘normal’ – her history was proof of that. The more permissive, the over-sensitised, the ones with membranes too permeable in certain spots. She shivered a little at the memory of her fingers clenched around Gavin Berman’s throat, and rubbed her hands along her arms. Of course her mind ran nowhere near parallel to the darkness of Gaba’s; what a ridiculous idea. But if Berman had been more threatening, if she’d had more to drink, would she have …
“… spent some four months inside and came out apparently patched up,” Chlöe rambled on. “Gaba sat out the rest of that year, came back and finished without incident. Her UCT records state that her uncle voluntarily removed her because she wasn’t coping well and petitioned that she be allowed back when she recovered. The extra info I got from admin files was he was concerned about ‘the lifestyle’ she picked up, guessing that means drugs and shitty friends. He raised her, he’d know what would tip her over. So time passes, our girl becomes a woman and graduates. New life, new job, new boyfriend – the bossman. Somewhere in between her breakup with Berman and getting terminated she lost it again a bit. Hence the short leave Akhona mentioned. Saw a private practitioner this time, a Dr Nhongo near N1 City, for ‘a tendency towards fixations and compulsive behaviours, with occasional bouts of paranoia’. Nowhere did I see a clear ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘bipolar’ or ‘hey, she’s psycho’ diagnosis. Maybe doctors record that somewhere else and lock it in a vault.”
“All this ‘psycho’ this and that – you’re messing with our mental image of her, and believe you me, we need a clear one so we know how to tackle her and throw her off guard. A psychopath is a real thing, not slang or some modern myth. They’re remorseless liars, and their ability to play-play at being real to sucker people into falling for their charm is legendary. They’re calculating; not just strategic, but that long con type of ruse that most people would get tired of. Most of all they’re cold – I don’t mean in the ballpark of ‘oh I had a sucky childhood so I’m shutting myself off so I can cope’ type thing – but no emotional dimension. It’s almost like they’re born jaded and distanced from humanity, like the inherent ability the rest of us have to love and rage and envy and be insecure is some kinda quaint disability. We’re like guinea pigs to
them, or maybe some regressive form of human, and they concoct very cruel, intelligent shit to do to us to see our reactions. None of that describes her. No, this woman does not have ice water in her veins. She’s temperamental, hugely.” Vee caught Chlöe’s expression and gave a mirthless chuckle. “Don’t mind me, that’s just my layman’s two cents. I think I’ve met a couple in my life, and I listened to my radar and stayed well clear.”
Chlöe flipped the first stapled pages back to the front. “Granted, an umbrella diagnosis mightn’t fit here. Maybe she wasn’t clinically classifiable, could be she has an unorthodox stress management mechanism. But these are only fragments of clinical files I’m reading here, it’s not easy to just yank this stuff. And believe it or not, Richie respects the privacy of the mentally misunderstood. How shocking is that, right?”
Vee felt a sharp nudge to her ribs, which snapped her out of her reverie. “What?!” she barked. She flinched a little at the bite in her voice.
Chlöe blushed and murmured an apology. “I was saying, she’s in my hands, I’m reading her through, but,” she hiked her shoulders, “I’m still lost. Like, yeah, she’s not all there. But the rest of it, scarf-strangling and body-dragging? How’d she even manage to start and keep a relationship with a savvy guy like Gavin for so long?”
Vee sighed. “Because crazy fucks best. It’s a universal and undeniable attractant. Compare Moloi and Gaba – alright, take looks out the equation, ’cause that always skews the data. All things considered – do you think Akhona ever stood a real chance? People never want what they can get. And quite often they don’t want to keep what they have once they’ve had it. As to this high drama, Gaba feels justified. You don’t mess with a woman who’s had your dick in her mouth. She’ll bide her time and then bite, and bite like she’s got lockjaw. I reiterate, this isn’t all professional grief. B&M became her everything, her home. You got any idea what that’s like, disgraced and forced to start from scratch?”
Chlöe looked like she could tell the conversation had veered into choppy waters and wisely decided not to navigate it. Instead, she bobbed her head in agreement, then jibed, “Geez, and you take that mouth with you to church.” Then she said: “Answer this then. Assuming it’s her, why’s she lounging about? Bumping off two people, attacking a third and then whistling off to work … sounds like a lot of admin for one person. What, she’s that arrogant, to be waiting around to get caught?”
Or waiting around for something else. Vee stroked her nose. “On that, I have no idea why, not yet. My guess, hiding in plain sight. If she wasn’t confident there wasn’t a solid charge to lay on her, she’d be long gone.”
Chlöe let their theories fill up the air between them, before chirping: “This is nice. Us, doing the thing.” She bit her lip and swung one leg side to side a little; for a moment it was plain to see the kid she’d been, the chipper elf always acting out for attention because she was so unsure of herself. The kid she hadn’t really grown out of being yet. “Look, can I just … ?” Her voice, already barely audible, trailed into a sigh.
Vee closed her eyes for a long moment, drawing in a deep breath and then releasing it. After their fight – rather, after she’d lost it and Chlöe had just stood there, intermittently cowering in silence and trying to explain her actions in a high mouse-voice – the atmosphere between them had crystallised into something sharp and uncomfortable.
“I know you asked me why I did it, why I went so far as getting Richie to hack those emails between Joshua and Lovett. And I just wanted to say …” She gulped, not taking her eyes off the ground. “It wasn’t like some malicious thing I set out to do. It just got out of hand.”
Vee clenched her jaw and kept staring straight ahead. Big surprise. Wasn’t that the Bishop calling card – push one domino and stand around wild-eyed as it set off a chain of events she had no idea how to stop?
“I only wanted to know about Lovett, who he really was and what you guys were whispering and acting shady about at the lodge. And yeah I know, I know okay, I should’ve taken your explanation at face-value and backed off. But once I asked Richie to dig up some info, and he came back with all that other stuff, the correspondence with Joshua … I couldn’t un-know it once I’d found out. I couldn’t pretend like that wasn’t something I had to tell you. Because I know you didn’t know about it, no part of those emails felt like a conversation you’d been part of at any point. I felt terrible that you’d been lied to. I only told you because –”
“What? You were looking out for me?” Vee parried, keeping her voice soft. “So I can thank you?” She gave a cool, lazy shrug. “Well, thank you.”
“No! I was trying to …” Chlöe flailed her hands like she was trying to pick the right words out of thin air, ones that would work as a salve and not a bunch of platitudes. Her shoulders sagged as she gave up. “Look, I know anything I say right now …”
Vee turned and treated her to a solid eyeballing. “Bishop. Seriously. I’m cool, okay. We’re cool.” When the furrow between Chlöe’s eyes deepened instead of evened out, Vee flicked her eyes heavenward and cracked a smile. “I mean it. It’s done; let’s just move past it. So we can focus on this.”
They passed the next several minutes in a dense but far less prickly silence, taking turns to help themselves from the punnet of plums they’d bought from Checkers supermarket. Eventually, Vee peeped out of the corner of her eye. A downcast Chlöe opened her mouth, squiggled her tongue in thin air as if probing it for more idle chatter, then stuffed a plum over it. Vee looked away, her chest heavy. She clacked a rough plum pip against her teeth to loosen the last of the fruit’s mushy, stringy flesh and spat it into the plastic bag they were using for trash.
“Plums always remind me of apples.”
Chlöe looked up from scanning the bustle of shoppers teeming below their feet, eyes lit with such desperate hope that Vee felt like a sadist for ever contemplating silence as punishment. Chatter was Chlöe’s lifeblood. “Plums remind you of apples?”
Vee nodded, tonguing out fluffy strands from between her incisors. “Plums and strawberries remind me of apples. And apples remind me of home.” She took another fruit from the punnet and wiped it on her jeans. “When I was small, for a while I lived with my granma. Paternal. Outside the capital, in Bong county. But she used to come to town every now and then to buy and sell …”
“She was a trader.”
Vee nodded, warmed and guilted by Chlöe’s look of pride at recalling the small detail. “Yes. She was. Well, is; she runs her own store now. But back then she was more mobile, and sometimes she brought me with her to Monrovia. You know how children can act, they come to fine-fine place and lose their country-ass minds. I was fascinated by the stores and everybody going inside; I used to think only certain people were allowed and if we dared try it, we would get stopped.” She chuckled. “My granma laughed when I told her. One day we spent forever doing her market, I got so hungry I couldn’t stop whining. Afterwards she took me to a supermarket on Randall Street, that’s one of our major streets, and bought me apples. I can never forget that day, how inside it looked so bright and shiny and huge to me, and how that apple tasted.” She bit into her third plum. “I mean, I’d eaten apples before, it wasn’t a ‘jungle bunny comes to town’ thing. We just don’t grow such fruits, strawberries and whatnot. To find it, that’s special shops you going to, and not small money you will pay. It’s still like an exotic experience. Even now, when apples dem wastin’ in wheelbarrows all round town.”
She held up the bitten orb, its taut mauve skin torn away to reveal a glistening orangey centre. “It’s like, this fruit don’t exist to us. We use the word ‘plum’ to describe a mango. It used to frustrate me when I first asked for plum and people kept pointing to this mess.”
“For real?” Chlöe laughed, the first one Vee had heard her utter in two days. “My thing was sardines. My mum had this prim Constantia housewife façade going, ridiculous. She was like, ‘sardines and anchovies are anti-soci
al and unladylike’. But Jasper and my dad could eat whatever they liked! I used to chow tins of it behind her back and go around breathing in everyone’s faces, it was hilarious. Well, she was the only one who didn’t think so.”
Vee smiled. “When I –” She broke off, tapped Chlöe’s arm and pointed. “That’s her, that’s her.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Chlöe squinted along the trajectory of the finger. Across the gleaming expanse of store windows and metal railing, a woman ambled with typical post-lunch lethargy, clutching a brown paper bag adorned with the iconic emblem of Nando’s chicken. Slightly taller than average height, strong and hippy of build, a bun of dreadlocks coiled atop her head. “You sure?”
“Yes,” Vee breathed, feeling a crackling under her skin. At Chlöe’s eyebrow-raise, she added, “The photos. She’s going into African Bank, we know she works there. And she was in my space, in my face for a good and violently long five minutes, at least. Believe you me, I know that that’s her.”
They wove through the rapidly thinning crowd to the other side, pausing outside the entrance of the bank. They looked up at the bank’s blue-and-white insignia, then at each other. Chlöe shrugged, shouldered past Vee and pushed the door open.
“Good afternoon. Can I help you?” The fair-skinned woman zeroed in instantly, hands clasped with schoolgirl poise over her uniform, smile of nearly rabid eagerness at full beam. Her name badge read ‘Cynthia Banda’ below ‘Branch Manager’. Vee looked around the premises. Tucked in the corner round the bend from Woolworths, it was relatively small compared to the confident sprawl of First National Bank across the way, and therefore not wisely situated in terms of crowd catchment. Currently there wasn’t much for Cynthia to manage. She decided to wing it.
