by Mark Winkler
“I’m not talking about Madge,” I say. She knows I killed Madge. She knows why I did it. I know she knows. I told her.
“Nor am I,” Doctor Petrakis says. You see now, I want to say to her. You weren’t talking at all. Not about anyone. You’ve done that thing again.
“I feel like K.,” I say.
“Who?”
“K.”
Perhaps she isn’t very well read. Or else she’s just doing the shrink thing.
“K. who is arrested and put on trial. And never knows what he’s accused of.”
She screws her eyes up and tilts her head to one side. Huh? her face says.
“Come on, Aphrodite,” I say. It’s nice to tell her to come on for a change. It’s nice to use her first name. “Kafka. The ultimate paranoiac. I hope you’ve read him.”
“‘Paranoiac’ isn’t a term we use any more,” she says. I’m not concerned about scientific or political correctness right now. It’s a label. A simple descriptor. Like the “tall” woman or the “fat” man. Everyone knows they would have other attributes too. You can’t go through life simply being tall or fat. You need other things to get by. Describing them like that is just shorthand. Otherwise we would spend our lives describing people who aren’t really worth it. Kafka was paranoiac. Paranoid. Or just plain scared. Or not, and just made up everything he wrote. What do I know? I’m not a shrink. Whatever Kafka was, he wrote K.’s story of the trial. I don’t say anything. Doctor Petrakis is also silent for a while. Sips her coffee. Pokes at her pad. Sometimes her coyness irritates. I know her well enough by now. She’s not writing anything. Just poking. Dabbing ink on the page. Making space to think.
“There’s a difference, Nathan,” she says. Finally. “K. didn’t know what he was on trial for. You do.”
“Does it count if I don’t remember anything?”
“Your photographs were on the scene. One with each woman.”
“You can’t know right from wrong if you don’t remember anything.”
I’m wheeled into the courtroom for further sessions. Each one takes up an entire day. Sometimes we just wait around and nothing happens. We go back. Home, I almost said. Court is supposed to start at 9 am. Sometimes it only starts at 10. If at all. Then it goes on for an hour or so. Then there’s recess. Sometimes recess runs into the lunch hour. When it does, court resumes at 2 pm. Sometimes 2:30 pm. At 3 pm the judge grants an adjournment.
We’re all outside the courtroom one day. The old man is sitting on a wooden bench. His hands are folded around the crook of his walking stick. Doctor Petrakis—Aphrodite to her friends—is next to him. Johnson is leaning against a wall. I’m in the wheelchair.
“Mr. McEwan,” I say to the younger man in the cape. He takes a step back. Almost jumps. “Why all the late starts and recesses?” I ask him anyway. Mr. McEwan says nothing.
The old guy laughs. He looks at me. If you took away the folds of skin that pressed on his eyelids he would look like a mischievous schoolboy. His eyes shine through shaggy brows. Through his spectacles. The skin around them makes them smaller than Sonia’s. Still, I can see that they’re blue. Or grey. Or green. Or a bit of all of that. It’s the first time I’ve looked into them. They’re clean and clear. They hide nothing. There’s no guile in them. No oblique strategies. No bullshit. They laugh easily. I like Mr. Carver. He puts his elbows on his knees and leans closer. “Because that is the judicial process these days.” He sighs. Grunts. Shakes his head. “The judicial process these days,” he says again.
So
“So,” Mr. Naicker says. My trial has been going on for ever. Sometimes it goes on without me. Spring flowers have erupted on verges. Trees have begun to bud. Mr. Carver tells me that yet another prosecutor has been appointed. It’s the third. The woman prosecutor got pregnant. There was morning sickness. I wonder if her baby will be born with a dot on its forehead. Her replacement was a man who came to court drunk. Mr. Carver says the drunk man told the judge to go and fuck her hand. After he was arrested they found six empty beer cans and a half-jack of vodka in his car. Mr. Carver laughs. The new prosecutor needs time to go through the material. He is clearly a slow reader. Mr. Carver says he’s had fifty-five years of this kind of thing. He says it’s nothing short of a miracle that he doesn’t have a bed next to mine and his own daily meds to swallow.
“I know what you’re going through,” Mr. Naicker continues. “I personally thought I might die before I saw some kind of resolution. It’s variable, you know.” He moves his knight. His finger is still on it. That lets me know he’s still contemplating the move. It allows him to move it back to where it was. And then to consider another move. That’s precisely what he does. I’m waiting to hear what exactly it is that is “variable.” Mr. Naicker is thinking about his move. I’m thinking about kicking him on the shin. Kicking those wormy veins to get him going. At last he leaves his knight alone. I contemplate a pawn.
“Take Ricky, for instance,” Mr. Naicker says. “When did you last see Ricky?”
I think about this. I don’t know. It seems like a long time ago. I shrug.
“Well, our friend Ricky got the judicial fast-track. They considered him completely compos mentis. Perfectly capable of standing trial. Perfectly capable of suffering the punishment. So.” He moves his bishop. Keeps his finger on the mitre. Looks at the piece from one angle. Then another. “So,” he says, “Ricky got seven life terms. Consecutive. One for each of his victims. To be served at a regular correctional institution. Which means getting regularly buggered, regularly beaten up and regularly stabbed. For the rest of his natural life.” Mr. Naicker takes his finger off his bishop. Sits back.
Now Ricky’s maths makes sense. Seven for him. Mrs. du Toit, the constable and Sonia make it two and a half for me. If he’d known about Madge, he’d have been a lot more impressed.
“It will be a miracle if Ricky survives even one of his life sentences. We are the lucky ones, Nathan,” he says. “We crazies get to play chess and drink coffee out of paper cups. We are warm and dry and we are fed and watered. Drugged when the authorities believe we need to be. We don’t have to concern ourselves with businesses or careers. They trim our beards and clip our toenails and make sure we see the dentist. We have no responsibilities or obligations. On the contrary, we get to compile our mental troubles as one might compose an email. We hit ‘send’ and they land in the inboxes of Doctors Humboldt, Petrakis et al.” He watches as I consider the release of my queen. “We have the channels of catharsis at our disposal. We can simply take the worst of ourselves and hand it over politely to willing recipients who have strings of clever letters behind their names. Then we sleep soundly while the good doctors dream our nightmares for us. And the next morning we get to do it all over again.”
I move my queen to threaten attack Mr. Naicker’s bishop. He nudges it out of danger. “Perhaps we’re not the crazy ones after all,” he says.
The shuffling of paper
The shuffling of paper is never-ending. Doctor Petrakis will testify that I am not fit for prison. Those are her words. What they mean is she’ll testify that I am crazy. That I should be held at a psychiatric facility for the foreseeable future. The phrase implies that somebody, somewhere, has the ability to foresee the future. I don’t press the point.
Before she gets her chance I have to listen to a string of other witnesses. It goes on for weeks. I’m fine with that. I’m not in a hurry. There are only two possible outcomes. It’s like playing chess with Mr. Naicker. I’ll either win or lose.
Inspector Morris is the first to make a move. He describes finding Madge and the other women. He does this in great detail. He is surprisingly detached. I try to put images to his words. Sounds, smells. Weather. Ambient temperatures. I can’t. It’s like listening to someone telling you about a movie you haven’t watched. The pictures you conjure up are nothing like what they’ve seen. I do remember one thing, though. I r
emember the days after Aunty Mike and the woodshed. When Mom answered the phone. When she told her friends that the week on the lake had been idyllic. When she gushed about a holiday that was nothing like she said it was. All sunshine and family fun. Inspector Morris was doing exactly that. Telling a story in which I didn’t appear. Where my truth had no place. A tight and considered lie. Like Mom’s.
I’d been right about Morris. He wasn’t stupid. Not that you had to be a genius to see the insanity defence coming. Or clairvoyant. Morris didn’t need to see my counsel’s files to know what they’d planned. So he didn’t dwell on Constable de Villiers or Mrs. du Toit or Sonia. He homed right in on Madge. Only a sane person, he said, and a very cunning one at that, would have the capacity to create an alibi out of an innocent customer, a young computer programmer whose girlfriend loved tortoises. Only a very cunning and totally sane person would be able to hoodwink an experienced investigative team for so long. That was not the mark of a deranged person. Inspector Morris went red when he told the next part of his story. How I’d appeared on the security cameras as I left the shop. How I’d gone around the back. How I’d waited for the customer to leave before throttling Madge. He went a deeper red when Mr. McEwan got him to admit that this was all pure speculation. That I’d appeared at the police station of my own accord. That I had offered to give them my fingerprints. That he had then let me go without pressing any charges.
“So am I insane or not?” I ask Mr. McEwan afterwards. I’m not comfortable with what Inspector Morris had to say. We’re walking down the corridor. They’re walking, at least. I’m being pushed in a wheelchair by Johnson. Every now and then we stop so that Mr. Carver can catch up.
“Don’t you worry about a thing,” Mr. McEwan says. He doesn’t look at me. I look up at Doctor Petrakis. She’s staring straight ahead. Down the corridor, past the wasted beings that populate the place. Bags of skin filled with bad decisions and uncertain futures.
The next time they call a few witnesses from the biker bar. Two customers and the barman appear. They each have a few minutes to point me out. To confirm that I had been drinking with Annette de Villiers. The barman contradicts the customers. He insists that I’d ordered only two beers, and that the first had hardly been touched when it spilled. He remembers that I barely touched the second one. That he was irritated by my drinking free tap-water all night. The prosecutor asks him why he should remember such an arbitrary thing. “In my line of work, it’s pretty memorable when people don’t drink the drinks they’ve bought,” he says. The gallery titters.
The drunk guy with the fake German accent doesn’t appear. I’m disappointed. I’d told Mr. Carver about him. I was looking forward to watching him being put in his place by Mr. McEwan.
The day it’s Sonia’s turn she’s full of tears. Her little eyes are swollen almost shut. She turns her face from me. She struggles to talk. Eventually the prosecution gets the story out of her. I’d walked with her for a bit, she says. I asked her if she was intending to drive. She’d said yes. Then I told her she wasn’t. She thought I was going to offer to drive her home. Then I jumped her. Wound the scarf around her neck. Just before she passed out she realised what I’d meant. When I told her she wasn’t going to drive. No, she had no idea why I’d tried to kill her. Other than having just fired me, which she’d done in the nicest possible way.
She is asked some more questions, mostly about work. I stop listening. I know all that. It’s boring. I try to scratch my nose with my shoulder. It’s itchy at the tip and driving me crazy.
When they call pathologists and other specialists, I stop listening. It’s the movie thing again. A story told by other people, with someone else in the starring role. I don’t remember killing Mrs. du Toit. Can’t remember getting her to her car. Or dumping her in a ravine on Table Mountain. Driving her car to Woodstock. Cleaning her flat so thoroughly that you could eat off the floor. The state doesn’t know how I got home after dumping the car. They’re still trying to track down taxis who might have given me a lift. The prosecutor points out that I could simply have walked. The damp running clothes that I didn’t understand now make sense. I didn’t walk. I ran. I could tell them. Tell them that I ran all the way to town and up the hill to Tamboerskloof that night. Tell them that I washed my kit in Mrs. du Toit’s washing machine.
The trouble is that nobody asks me.
The worst
The worst is when Doctor Petrakis takes the stand. She puts on a face I’ve never seen before. When she looks at me she may as well be looking at a street pole or a hubcap. Her consonants click and hiss like precision-engineered metal. She uses medical phrases. I only know some of them. I stop listening once I lose track. She’s talking about parts of me I don’t understand. It’s like a physician going on about your patella or your epiglottis. When all you want to know is how your kneecap or your throat is doing.
Then she begins about the lake house. I can’t stop listening any longer. I’m hearing. I don’t want to. I want to cover my ears with my hands. My wrists are in cuffs. The cuffs are cuffed to the arms of the wheelchair. The arms are bolted to the wheelchair. The wheelchair is stuck to the earth by gravity. The earth spins in space. It flies around the sun. It’s too big for me to stop. Someone begins moaning. It’s not so much a moaning as a high flat keening. It sounds like a counter-tenor who has had a stroke and woken up tone-deaf. Doctor Petrakis stops talking. She looks down at her hands. The judge bangs her gavel. Words come out of her mouth. I can’t hear them over the noise. She has her angry face on. I suppose her words are angry too. Johnson wheels me out. The shrieking person follows us into the corridor. Past people carrying signs about serial killers and death penalties. Into the ambulance. All the way home.
I don’t feel like talking any more. I’ve talked and talked and look where that’s got me. I should have just shut the fuck up in the first place. I consider telling this to Doctor Petrakis. That would be talking. I keep quiet. I’m sitting on the chair in her office. I’m sitting so still that there’s not the slightest squeak. I don’t need to look at the window to know that the southeaster is howling. The window rattles in its frame. Every so often a gust of wind is so strong I can feel the pressure change in my ears. I’m looking at the carpet. It whirls and curls and the red zings against the blue. Doctor Petrakis pulls a chair close to mine. She sits down.
“Nate,” she says.
She just called me Nate. I wish I could find my smiling face. It’s too much hard work to look for it.
“How are you handling the stress?” She waits for me to answer. I don’t.
“We’ve had a chat to the judge,” she says. “By ‘we’ I mean Mr. Carver and Mr. McEwan. They’ve got her to agree to exclude you from the rest of the proceedings. It’s not as though you were going to take the stand anyway. They convinced her that having you there would disrupt the court too much. She didn’t need much convincing after the last session. Are you okay with that?”
I shrug.
“I really need you to say yes or no. I can’t have you excluded unless you allow it.”
Twirls and swirls and furls.
“We have to call your mother as a witness. And possibly your sister too. Do you want to be there for that?”
Uncurl, untwirl, unfurl. Eventually I drag my eyes away. I shake my head. It loosens my tongue.
“No, I don’t,” I say.
Before and After
It’s all
It’s all over.
Or perhaps it’s just begun.
The court has decided that I am guilty. Guilty in that I did it. In that I murdered Madge, Mrs. Du Toit and Annette de Villiers. Not culpable, because I’m insane. So I’m not joining Ricky. I’m not being sent to a place where I’ll be fucked up the bum again. I’m staying here. Probably for ever. Home. They’ll be scared to let me out again. Look what happened the last time.
“Your move,” I remind Mr. Naicker. He’s used t
o me talking now. So are September and Johnson and all the rest. That first time I held my fists out and said, “You choose,” Mr. Naicker almost jumped out of his chair.
“Oh my word, Nathan,” he’d said. “You just scared the living bejesus out of me.”
“Left or right?” I’d repeated.
Mr. Naicker got it. He got that he shouldn’t make a big deal of it. He put a shaky hand on my left fist. He’d chosen white. Then he said, “It’s a little blustery out. Still, maybe we can persuade Johnson to give us a whirl around the garden. What do you say?”
These days, it’s much easier to find my smiling face.
We spoke to each other every day, Mr. Naicker and I. Until the day we ran out of things to say. The chess pieces stood idle between us. It was awkward. Things were probably easier when I wasn’t speaking. When Mr. Naicker just babbled on and on. With neither of us under the pressure of holding an actual conversation.
So I asked him how he’d landed up here. Mr. Naicker went rigid. He stared at me. Stared and stared. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Then he relaxed a little. “What have you heard?” he said.
I told him what Ricky Chin had said to me.
Mr. Naicker nodded as he listened. The nodding seemed to relax him. By the end of it he was more or less back to normal. He had one correction. His daughter hadn’t been discussing her day at the consulting firm. She had been describing a Prada handbag in great and loving detail. To Mr. Naicker this seemed an important distinction. I wondered whether she’d still be alive if she’d chatted about work instead.
“And you, Nathan? What is your story?” Mr. Naicker said.
I’d opened the door, I realised. He already knew it all, or pretty much, at least. There are no secrets in this place. I had no corrections for him. Their version seemed accurate enough. I have to go by what other people have to say on the matter. I don’t have much to go on myself. Afterwards, Mr. Naicker and I agreed not to revisit our pasts. This means we can chat about anything. So our discussions frequently revolve around Ricky’s talent for digging up information. We conclude our talks by inventing careers in which Ricky might have shone. Careers that don’t involve seven gratuitous and wildly violent murders. A brilliant investigative journalist, perhaps. An archaeologist. A forensic auditor. A lawyer. A researcher of the obscure and arcane. A spy. Sometimes we share analyses about new inmates. It’s not important if we’re accurate or not. The stories we make up are entertaining enough. When we have nothing to talk about we simply shut up. That’s fine as well.
