by Roger Smith
“I’ve got to run.” Jangling loose change in his pocket. “So I’ll catch you at the funeral tomorrow?” He saw her face. “You didn’t know?”
She shook her head. “Nobody told me.”
Dick looked embarrassed. “Well, it’s at Claremont Catholic Church. Three bells.”
“Thanks.”
He looked like he was about to duck in and kiss her cheek, so she stepped back. Dick climbed up into the car and drove away. She waited until the gates finally rolled closed, after a few false starts, and went through the house, back out to the deck. She heard Billy behind her.
“Know anything about pools?” she asked, turning, trying a smile.
“Lady, I grew up out on the Flats. Our idea of a pool was a hole in the ground filled with ditchwater.”
It was “lady” again.
“Stop calling me ‘lady,’ for Chrissakes. Makes me feel like a dog. Call me Roxy.”
“Okay.” A pause. “But I like Roxanne better.”
“Whatever grinds your crankshaft.” Irritated as the wind blew her hair into her eyes, reaching up to smooth it away. “What’s wrong with Roxy, anyway?”
“It sounds … I dunno. Cheap.”
“Thanks.” Despite herself she was amused. “Well, since we’re getting all formal here, maybe I’ll call you William.”
“You can call me that. But it’s not my name.”
“Billy’s not short for William?”
He shook his head. “Not on my birth certificate, anyways. It says Billy Afrika. End of story.”
She shrugged, turning away. His voice stopped her.
“That suit, he say anything about the money?”
“Joe may have had some cash stashed away. I’ll know in a day or two.”
He was watching her carefully. “I wouldn’t like to think you’re bullshitting me, Roxanne.”
“I’m not. Okay?” Walking away from him, so those green eyes couldn’t X-ray her. “Dick told me that it’s Joe’s funeral tomorrow. I don’t know that I can go. Given the circumstances.”
“You’re going.” Following Roxy, staring her down. “When a man dies, his wife goes to the funeral. She doesn’t go, people start asking questions. We don’t need no questions. Understand?”
“Yes. I understand.”
Billy turned and walked back into the house.
The wind died suddenly, and in the lull Roxy heard the fading rumble of jet engines. She saw a vapor trail drawn on the darkening sky, slowly starting to smudge and blur as the plane disappeared north. Roxy wished she was on it.
DISCO WAS STRESSING big-time. He was so freaked out that feeding the meth into the pipe was turning into a major mission. His hands shook, not only from a craving for the drug, but from mind-fucking fear. He was in his zozo, in the dark, door locked, lights out. He crouched on the floor, under the empty spot where his mommy’s picture used to hang, and forced his fingers to obey him, trying to feed the powder into the pipe, working blind.
He’d been out on the streets, managed to scrounge thirty bucks to buy a straw from the tik dealer down on Sunflower Street. The dealer, Popeye, operated from a rusted trailer lying on its axles in the dust of a vacant lot. Peeling paintwork scarred by gang graffiti, like tattoos on an old man’s skin.
Popeye had a taste for his own product, and he was as scrawny as a Brazilian supermodel, his cheekbones sunken in on smacking gums, his teeth long ago lost to tik. A radio inside the trailer was tuned to a hip-hop station, and Popeye moved his skinny ass as he took Disco’s money and handed him the meth-filled drinking straw, plastic melted closed at both ends.
“I hear Manson looking for you, my brother.” Popeye, like so many people this side of Paradise Park, had sold his soul to the Americans.
“Ja? He know where to find me.” Disco trying for attitude and coming up short.
Popeye laughed. “My advice, you don’t wait for him to come to you. Otherwise he kiss you bye, bye like he kiss your buddy Godwynn.” Popeye made a wet smacking sound with his toothless mouth. He laughed again, then coughed up a greenie and spat it next to Disco’s Chuck Taylors. “Show respect. Go talk to the man.”
Disco had taken his straw and hurried home in the dusk, grateful that most of the streetlights in White City were dead, the innards of the lampposts gutted for copper wire. The lights of each passing car like gun sights on his back.
But he was safe now, in his zozo. Once he’d had a smoke, his mind would be nice and sharp and he’d know how to deal with this Manson situation. And figure out how to get back his mommy’s photo. At last he fed the meth into the pipe. Had to risk a quick match, guiding the flame toward the powder, already feeling the rush that was to come.
When the door smashed open, Disco dropped the pipe and the match died. He saw a shape coming in at him, and a heavy shoe caught him in the abdomen. He was down flat, face squeezed against the rough wooden floor, bile in his mouth. The naked bulb hanging from the ceiling flared into life, and he saw the shoe that had kicked him: a scuffed black wingtip. Not what Manson or his crew would be sporting.
Disco lifted his head, a tendril of drool connecting his mouth to the floor. The cop, the ugly one with the zits, swam into view. He was holding up the pipe.
“The fuck’s this?” Out on the Flats this was definitely a rhetorical question.
Disco felt his hands being pulled roughly behind his back and then the cold steel on his wrists as the cuffs were locked.
chapter 21
MAGGOTT TOOK ROBBIE TO MCD’S FOR A BURGER, LATE FOR A kid to be awake. They sat at a window table, and Maggott watched the tik whores out on Voortrekker, stumbling like the undead through the night. Robbie had his face deep in his double cheese.
Maggott was hanging for a smoke, but you couldn’t take kids into the smoking section these days. Fucken laws against everything in this so-called new South Africa. Petty laws that punished a guy who wanted a smoke while the murderers and pedophiles walked free.
“Where’s my mommy?” Robbie asked, face smeared with barbecue sauce the color of congealed blood.
Maggott leaned across and wiped the boy’s cheek with a paper napkin. “She’s sick. So you gonna stay with me a few more days, okay?”
The kid looked uncertain, but he nodded and crammed a handful of fries into his already bulging mouth.
Maggott’s wife had called him earlier. She was up in Atlantis with her new fuck. Maggott had to laugh: the Man from Atlantis. If the Flats were bad, then Atlantis was hell. A cluster of shacks and nasty houses, rotting up on the West Coast. The bitch knew how to pick them. When he’d asked her when she was coming home, she’d said she was getting engaged. She’d hung up before he could tell her you needed to get divorced before you could get fucken engaged.
When he called her back, he’d got her voice mail. If there was anything worse than his wife’s voice live, it was the recorded version. She affected an Americanized drawl that was about as sophisticated as two dogs fucking in the dirt.
Shit thing was, he still loved the bitch.
Robbie was tugging at his sleeve. “Daddy, I wanna choc shake.”
“Fuck that. You just gonna puke it up again. Come; we gotta go.” He stood and walked out, Robbie scrambling to catch up with him.
As they crossed Voortrekker toward the blockhouse shape of Bellwood South, Robbie forced his sticky hand into Maggott’s. A tik whore clinging to a lamppost gave them a leer.
“Father’s Day special.”
Maggott strangled a laugh.
He left Robbie with the grumbling woman constable at the front desk and hauled Disco De Lilly into an interview room. Time to see if he was ready to talk.
THE SHAKES WERE bad enough to rattle the cuffs that the pimply cop left on him. Disco sat at the table in the interview room, trying to force himself to stay calm and keep his fucken trap shut. He told himself the cop couldn’t hold him for more than a night on the pathetic bit of tik he’d busted him with. He just had to stay nice and cool.
&nbs
p; The cop sat smoking a Camel, looking at him like he was dogshit. “Disco, my buddy, talk to me.”
“’Bout what?”
“Tell me what really happened up there on the mountain the night you jacked that Benz.”
“What Benz?”
The slap rocked him back in his chair. But he hardly felt it. His whole body was itching, feverish, his joints aching for a pipe.
“And tell me why your bushman buddy ended up with a bullet in his head.”
Disco licked his dry lips. “I dunno. I swear.”
The cop dug in his pocket and came out with Disco’s pipe. Set it down on the table. Then he fished around in his jacket and came up with—honest to God—a straw of tik.
“Okay, Disco, listen. You talk to me, and you can have this.” The cop held the straw so close Disco swore he could taste the bitter powder on his tongue. “Serious. You can make it right here and get nice and zooked. I won’t say a fucken word. What you reckon?”
Disco stared at the meth. The cuffs rattled on the tabletop, and the spiders crawled out of his ears and ran into his eyes. Every nerve end in his body was being blowtorched. He was ready to spill, the magic word yes already forming on his coated tongue when the cop was no longer sitting in front of him.
Piper was.
Rotten teeth smiling at him, the tattooed teardrops dripping down his cheeks.
Disco squeezed his eyes shut so tight he thought his eyeballs would pop like zits. When he opened his eyes the cop was back, checking him out. Waiting for him to speak.
“Your mother’s cunt” was what Disco said.
A HEAVY DOOR slammed shut behind Disco. The lock fell, and he heard the cop walking away. He was alone in a cell at Bellwood South, kept away from the men in the other holding pens. Heard their catcalls and whistles as the uniformed cop walked him down the corridor. He lay on the filthy mattress, shaking so badly from tik craving that he didn’t even feel the bedbugs and the lice as they swarmed his body. He was in the system again. Knew where he was going to end up if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.
Same place he’d ended up two years ago.
Another heavy door had slammed behind him as he’d stood in a crowded communal cell in Pollsmoor Prison. Sentenced to three years for housebreaking and meth dealing. He was in D section, the 28s’ turf.
Disco was greeted by sibilant sucking sounds. Through a haze of tik smoke he saw men crouched on the floor. Men lying on bunks. Staring at him. Making the smooching noises. Knew what that meant. The sucking got louder. And the mocking laughter followed. He was surrounded, and the men ripped off his clothes, rough hands on his naked body.
A body as yet unmarked by a tattoo.
A man thrust a dirty towel at him. “Wear it.”
He wrapped it around his middle like a miniskirt. It didn’t cover his balls.
“Pretty bitch.”
A skinny man, small as a monkey, hopped up onto a bunk and grabbed Disco’s face. The monkey man had a chunk of cooked beetroot in his hand, the juice staining his palm like blood. He pressed the beetroot against Disco’s lips, painting him to look like a whore.
“Pretty, pretty bitch.” The monkey man cackled and skipped away.
Hands forced Disco down. When he screamed, a rag was shoved in his mouth. He writhed, fought, but the prisoners held him. Seventeen men had their turn with him on the floor, against one of the double bunks. The pain was beyond anything he could have imagined. A nylon rope, an improvised washing line, reached from the barred window to the upright of the bunks, and the dangling orange jumpsuits danced like empty men in time to the thrusts.
The next day Disco limped along the corridor, coming back from the showers, where he had tried to wash away what was done to him, knowing it would all be repeated after 4:00 p.m. lockdown.
Disco saw a man watching him, standing dead still, the others prisoners flowing past him like muddy ditch water around a rock. Tattoos circled his arms and climbed from the neck of his jumpsuit. Most unsettling of all were the black teardrops falling from each eye as the man stared, transfixed by the curse that was Disco’s beauty.
Piper followed Disco to his bunk. The 28s nodded obediently when Piper told them to pack Disco’s belongings and bring them to his cell, where he evicted the man in the bed beside his own. Piper lay with his tattooed face close to Disco’s and raped him that night and every night for the next year and a half until Disco got paroled.
When he wasn’t raping him, Piper spent endless hours of agonizing, obsessive worship—tearing into Disco’s flesh with the blade and the needle, mopping the blood with a cloth, concentrating fiercely as he branded him. An excruciatingly painful, intricate filigree of black tattoos. Culminating in the name Piper curling down Disco’s back, disappearing into the curve of his buttocks.
At the end of each session Piper had smiled, revealing the two false front teeth with a 2 inlaid in gold on one and an 8 on the other.
“Beautiful,” he had said as he surveyed his handiwork.
chapter 22
ROXY WENT TO THE FREEZER AND POURED HERSELF A STOLI. NEAT. Felt the burn of the chilled alcohol as it slid down to her gut. She took the bottle and the glass and walked through to the sitting room where an early Chet Baker vocal was playing. After the gangbangers’ visit, all she had for music was a portable CD player—shitty speakers—but she needed something to fill the silence in the house.
She lay down on the sofa and looked out at the night, the vodka and Chet Baker’s “Old Devil Moon” going some way toward relaxing her. The young Chet, when his voice was still high and girlish, long before the smack had turned him gruff and wrinkled as a hobo.
She saw Billy Afrika reflected in the glass of the sliding doors as he came down the stairs, dressed in one of his crisp shirts and a pair of Levi’s. His scars invisible. He’d been quiet all night, his door closed.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” He walked past her to the kitchen. She heard the fridge door open and slap shut. He came back out carrying a plastic bottle of water.
She sat up, lifted the liter of Stoli, glass cold on her fingers. “Want a drink?”
He tapped the water bottle. “I’m sorted.”
“Want to sit down?”
Billy hesitated, then surprised her by shrugging and sitting opposite her, still holding the water. He nodded toward the CD player. “Who’s she?”
Roxy laughed. “Not a she. That’s Chet Baker.” He shook his head, and she said, “Before your time.”
“You like this old-school crooner stuff?”
“I did a shoot years ago with a photographer who knew Chet from way back. He was playing it in the studio. Saw I liked it, so he gave me the CD.”
“You miss it?”
“The modeling? No. It was good to me, I guess, but it was time to move on. All that air-kissing and ass-kissing. Not exactly a deep and meaningful existence.”
Giving him a smile, getting nothing back.
Roxy poured herself another vodka. “Okay, I’ve had a couple of these”—she held up her glass—“and I’ve had a seriously weird couple of days, so that’s going to be my excuse.”
“For what?”
“For crossing some line and asking what happened to you. Where you got those scars.”
His face closed, and Roxy regretted speaking. She held up a hand. “I’m sorry. I’m being a bonehead. Forget it.”
Billy looked at her as if he was weighing something up. Then he surprised her for the second time. “No, I can talk about it. But it isn’t no bedtime story. Sure you wanna hear it?”
“I’m sure.”
He took a drink from the water bottle, screwed the cap back on, staring out into the dark. “Okay. Happened when I was a kid. Sixteen. I’m in a gang out on the Flats. Little punks really, stealing stuff. Mugging people. Causing shit. Then the gang leader has some issue with a girl; she disses him or whatever. So he wants us to punish her. Gang-rape her, then kill her.”
He looked at Roxy now. She
tried to stay cool, sipped her drink.
“But I don’t want no part of it.” Almost a smile when he saw her relieved expression. “Relax, not ’cause I’m some good guy. I’m just chicken. Her father owns a liquor store, middle-class. Kinda people who piss perfume. His money will make the cops take notice. I don’t wanna go to jail. So I fade. Try to disappear.” Shaking his head. “You can’t.”
“And what happened to the girl?”
“They rape her. Cut her throat. Piper does. That’s the leader. Piper. Dump her outside her daddy’s store. The cops are after them, and Piper decides that it’s me that talked. I didn’t, but that don’t make no difference. They get hold of me and beat me up, stab me, set me on fire, and put me in a hole and bury me. Leave me for dead.”
She was staring at him, her drink forgotten halfway to her lips. “Jesus.” She took a swallow, set it down on the table.
He shrugged. “I got lucky. Some little kid saw what happened and called a cop who lived nearby. Young guy. He dug me out, did some CPR, took me to hospital. I was in the burn unit for a few months.”
“And the gang?”
“They got caught. Went to juvie. Juvenile prison. They all turned on the leader, Piper.”
“Where is he now?”
“He pulled a whole lot more shit later, so he’s in Pollsmoor. For life. No option of parole.”
“Piper. Sounds so sweet.”
“Not his real name. Gang name. Means ‘to stab’ in gang talk.”
“Not so sweet,” Roxy said.
“No.” Looking at her before he spoke. “Wanna hear something weird?”
“Sure.” Not so sure.
“Those two guys who came at you, the pretty one, they call him Disco …”
“Yeah?”
“He was Piper’s what-you-call … wife in prison.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“No. S’trues God.”
“That’s seriously spooky.”
