Memo From Turner

by Tim Willocks

  ‘Dirk? Give me the bloody keys.’ The dominant voice again. A foreign accent.

  ‘It’s my bloody car.’ This voice slurred, younger.

  ‘It’s your mother’s. Give me the keys, now.’

  Car doors slammed. An engine started up.

  ‘What do you buggers want?’ The foreigner. Then two new voices shouting together, the words indistinct. The foreign voice rode over them. ‘Shut up and calm down. Here, take this. Take it. Buy a new poster. Buy a new bar. Now fuck off before you get hurt.’

  More clunks. Lights flared right behind her.

  ‘I said: fuck off. Dirk!’

  ‘You didn’t have to bitch-slap him.’

  ‘Get behind that wheel and I’ll slap you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  She sensed the car to her left, the white one, drive away.

  She saw the burger.

  Her lighter went out. She relit it. She was in luck. The burger had landed on a plastic bag but it was out of reach. She crouched, grabbed the edge of the dumpster with both hands, and jumped, boosting herself up so that she lay doubled over the rim. The metal dug into her belly just beneath her ribs but it wasn’t something she hadn’t done before. The burger was invisible again. She clicked the lighter. Again. Again. A car door slammed; then another. The lighter caught. An engine started. She saw the burger.

  She reached out and grabbed it. Heard more shouts of contention. As she levered her body backwards a flood of white light threw her shadow at the raised lid. The engine revs rose to a whine. The girl jumped down and twisted to land sideways. She blinked as white lights hurtled towards her.

  Her bones collapsed.

  Her guts popped inside her.

  Her face bounced on glass.

  Her awareness was swamped. She was blind. Dazzled by bright colours. She was pinned above the earth. She was falling. Couldn’t breathe to scream. She saw the night sky.

  For a moment she felt nothing, heard nothing. She stared up at the stars. Her body warned her. It was gathering itself, preparing itself, to devote everything it was and everything it had to the experience of intolerable pain. The pain was as yet a ghost, shimmering just beyond the veil of reality, waiting for the energy to become material. She sensed that ghost. It was coming. And it was her own flesh. Terror saturated her mind. Terror so intense that for a moment it kept the ghost at bay. Red lights glared into her face.

  ‘Turn the engine off! DIRK! Turn the fucking engine OFF!’

  The engine cut out.

  The girl turned her head towards the voices. She looked down the shining red length of the car. A big white man opened the driver’s door and jutted his bearded chin towards the interior.

  ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘It’s my car.’

  ‘You’re weak. You’re stupid. And you’re pissed. Now move over and put your seat belt on.’

  The big man cocked his fist.

  ‘All right, all right! I’m sorry.’

  The girl wanted to speak but was afraid it would invite the ghost. She turned her head. Another man’s face stared down at her from the open rear window. Young, white, a huge muscular neck. He appeared to be horrified. She opened her mouth and a low moan came out and her insides started to scream and she choked the moan off. The young man called to the elder.

  ‘Hennie, I can’t find my phone. Give me yours.’

  ‘What do you need a phone for, dickhead?’

  The big man turned and looked straight down at her. He frowned but without horror; as if he’d spotted nothing worse than a flat tyre. ‘Bollocks,’ he said.

  The girl tried to speak to him with her eyes. The big man got the message. He scratched his beard with a thumb. Grimaced. He didn’t otherwise move.

  ‘Hennie, the phone, Jesus!’

  ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut.’

  The young man in the back opened the door and the big man, Hennie, took a step and slammed the door in his face. He looked down at the girl. Tiny points of light in dark sockets were all she could see of his eyes.

  The drunken voice from the front seat: ‘What’s wrong now?’

  Hennie looked at her a moment longer. She raised her arm towards him. She heard and felt the grinding of bones, the bursting of membranes somewhere deep inside her.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Hennie. He turned away from her. ‘Time to hit the road to Dreamland.’

  The girl watched him get in the car and close the door. The engine started. The young face appeared at the open rear window and peered down at her. He was crying.

  The girl watched the blood-red car drive away between the shanties.

  Brake lights flared. The lights disappeared.

  And the ghost took possession of her body.

  2

  Hennie had been driving for seven hours. They were six hundred clicks from Cape Town and thirty minutes from home. He’d been glad to see the dawn, and its eerie splendour had not been lost on him, but in broad daylight the Northern Cape was something to be crossed not appreciated. The province was larger than Germany. Flat scrub desert stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sky was a hard, bright blue. It was always blue. There were days when Hennie would have danced with joy to see a single cloud.

  He’d never been much of a sightseer, or a tourist, though he’d seen his share of the world and more. Maybe it was because he was a Londoner. In his view grand landscapes were best enjoyed on a cinema screen – deserts, jungles, canyons, waves pounding the rocks, forests in the snow, and so forth. But then you were only looking at them for a few seconds at a time, and you knew that shortly someone would appear on a horse or driving a fast car, and that they’d shoot someone or meet a long-legged woman or find a suitcase full of cash. He’d hiked through all such terrains in his time, carrying a sixty-pound pack and a rifle. They were impressive for about five minutes, then they were just something to be crossed. He’d shot a good number of people, too, but he’d never met the woman or found the suitcase, or at least not in a landscape. The woman he had met at her husband’s funeral. The cash was a sequence of digits in Switzerland.

  His mind had roamed from one random thought to another since they’d left Cape Town and some had seemed profound and even important, yet now he couldn’t remember a single one. He wondered how many thoughts he had had in his life. Probably millions, if you included things like deciding to cut his toenails or how many sugars to put in his tea. Most of them – in retrospect, almost all of them – had been a complete waste of time. Gone forever; and no more significant than the thoughts of a dog. The toenail stuff was the probably best of it. At least that had been useful. He’d seen men killed by neglected toenails.

  He rubbed his face with one hand to improve the blood supply to his brain.

  Time was catching up with him. He felt that he was in the best shape of his life but objectively that wasn’t possible. Fifty-five-year-olds didn’t win gold medals. But he believed he could take his twenty-three-year-old self on the grounds of stubbornness, meanness and experience. He’d been harder on the outside but softer on the inside. The softness of youth was built into the machine. No matter how brutal your own life had been, you could always put that down to sheer bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong parents. You still had hope. It took another couple of decades to realise that there was no better world somewhere. A better life, maybe, but not a better world. Man was a vicious bastard, pure and simple, and mad into the bargain.

  He turned from the tarmac unspooling across the veld and looked at Dirk.

  Dirk lay slumped against the passenger door. Drool seeped from the corner of his mouth to soak his Versace T-shirt. A handsome lad. Hennie felt a pang of love stab him in the chest.

  Dirk would be twenty-four next month. Since the age of nine he had been Hennie’s stepson. If he’d been Hennie’s real son, Hennie would have made his life a misery and most likely have driven him away. As his stepfather Hennie didn’t feel a genetic responsibility for who Dirk was. Didn’t feel o
bliged to mould him or feel embarrassed by him. All that was Margot’s business. Hennie’s was to keep Margot happy. Keeping Margot happy was the purpose of his life. No easy chore but he felt glad to have found any purpose at all. When necessary, it meant protecting Dirk. He had protected Dirk from the law. Question was, did he need to protect him from Margot?

  ‘What a fucking cock-up.’

  He realised he’d muttered out loud. A grunt came from the back seat. He glanced up into the mirror. He saw Simon’s white Toyota 4Runner, some hundred metres behind them. Simon was their head of security. He was Zulu, as solid as Table Mountain, and as close to a true friend as Hennie had. Hennie adjusted his angle on the mirror and saw Jason blinking and clutching his throat in the rear.

  ‘Jesus.’ Jason’s voice sounded like a cheese grater on a rusty pipe.

  Jason Britz was of no more than average height but his shoulders half filled the rear of the car. His primary occupation was lifting weights and injecting steroids. In theory, he was a farmer. For two centuries his forefathers had sweated, coaxed and bullied a living from this godforsaken terrain, a land shunned by all flora and fauna edible to Europeans and even to the vast majority of Africans. No soil, no grass, no trees, no fruit, no mammals. In the four years since Jason had inherited his family’s farm, the desert had reclaimed itself almost entirely. In practice he made a living supplying weed and meth to local dealers whose main clientele worked in Margot’s mine. He wasn’t in prison, or buried under the sand, because his uncle, Rudy Britz, was a police sergeant.

  Hennie pulled a bottle of water from the holder and drank and put it back.

  ‘Can I have some of that?’ asked Jason.

  ‘Get your own.’

  ‘The other bottles are in the boot.’

  Hennie managed not to respond.

  Jason said, ‘You think it’s all my fault.’

  ‘I was enjoying the silence. Why don’t you try it?’

  Jason didn’t speak again for all of thirty seconds.

  ‘I wonder if she’s still alive. I mean, well, you know who I mean.’

  ‘Shut up. You’ll wake Dirk.’

  ‘I’ll never forget that look on her face. It’s bad juju, Hennie.’

  ‘Did you know that farmers are the root of all man’s woes?’

  ‘Man’s?’ said Jason.

  ‘Mankind. The human race. Us.’

  ‘Ag no, man, we’d all starve without farmers.’

  ‘You’ve hit the nail right on the head.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Crime, war, slavery, tyranny. Greed and murder for greed. Capitalism. Sexually transmitted disease. It’s all down to the farmers.’

  Jason laughed. Hennie laughed too.

  ‘You’re trying to wind me up.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Hennie. ‘Before farmers came along we had none of those things. Everyone was too busy, hunting antelope, buffalo, reindeer, seals. Fishing. They were always on the move and the men were all tooled up and fit with it, so there was a limit to how much bullshit any one man could get away with. But a farmer has to stay put, he has a shovel not a spear, and the good farmer – such as your father was – who breaks his back pulling weeds and digging irrigation, grows more produce than he and his family can eat. So the family gets bigger and your population booms and you grow even more food, and the surplus just keeps getting bigger too. So what do you do with that surplus?’

  ‘You sell it,’ said Jason. ‘Or barter it. Or save it for a drought.’

  ‘Very good. But to do all that you have to store it, right? And if you store it, sooner or later some evil bastard is going to come along and steal it. So some local gangster gets a bunch of his own villains together and says to the farmers thereabouts, Look, we’ll store it for you and keep it safe for when you need it. For a reasonable commission, of course. Are you following me?’

  ‘Sounds a bit like the drug trade.’

  ‘Very much so. Before you know it that gangster is calling himself the king, and the surplus isn’t yours any more, it’s his, all of it, every grain, every goat, every egg. And if your farmer complains, the king sends his boys to kneecap your oxen, or peel the bark from your olive trees and rape your daughters. Now all the farmers are working full-time for the king for no pay, not a red cent, and the king is in his castle, which the farmers built and paid for, and his boys have become an army, but it’s not enough because money’s tight and you farmers can’t be squeezed any harder without dropping dead even sooner than you already do, and somewhere over far yonder hills some other king is working the same scam. So what does our king do, if he’s got the balls?’

  ‘He muscles in on the new king’s territory.’

  ‘Right,’ said Hennie. ‘War. War means slaves to work the new fields and give the king his footbaths and build temples for his gods and mine the gold for his crown. Prostitutes for the troops. More people. More surplus. More war. And basically there you have it. Civilisation as we know it. Thanks to the bloody farmers. And as Oscar Wilde said, the downtrodden masses have sold themselves for a very bad pottage indeed.’

  ‘What’s a pottage?’ asked Jason.

  ‘A kind of thick soup.’

  ‘Yeah, but now we’ve got the Internet.’

  Hennie snorted. ‘If it was up to me I’d shut it down today.’

  ‘Are you a communist, Hennie?’

  ‘My dad was a socialist, much good it did him. I’m more in the way of a king, but to be a king you have to understand how the game is rigged.’

  ‘Well, you can’t blame me for the wars or the Internet. I’m not a farmer any more.’

  Jason fell into what seemed to be a thoughtful trance.

  Hennie was peeved that his historical analysis had not provoked greater admiration.

  Jason said, ‘We shouldn’t have left that girl.’

  ‘Forget about the girl.’

  ‘We should’ve at least called an ambulance.’

  Hennie felt a familiar rage simmer in his chest.

  ‘Jason, do you know what “tolerate” means?’

  ‘Tolerate? It means we should try not to hate the blacks.’

  ‘That’s a narrow definition,’ said Hennie, ‘but it’s a start.’

  ‘Uncle Rudy says we shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘More generally it means that when a situation – or a person – is a pain in our bollocks but either we can’t do anything about it or the cost of doing so would be more than its worth, we grit our teeth and put up with it. For instance, we tolerate the sun, the dust, the mosquitoes. We tolerate the whims of women and the tantrums of children. And yes, we tolerate the blacks, and Rudy’s wrong, you should bother, because you’re not going to get rid of them any more than you’re going to get rid of the sun.’

  ‘I see your point, Hennie.’

  ‘No you don’t because I haven’t made it yet. My point is, I tolerate you.’

  ‘I always thought you were a good bloke, too.’

  Hennie looked in the mirror to see if Jason was taking the piss. He wasn’t.

  ‘You might also say that I suffer you. For Dirk’s sake. But if you don’t shut your mouth, that can change.’

  ‘I don’t want Dirk to suffer.’

  ‘Jesus. Are you still pissed?’

  ‘She couldn’t have seen Dirk. Pity he didn’t see her.’

  Hennie glanced over his shoulder.

  Jason was wringing his hands and staring down into the space between his knees.

  ‘She saw me,’ he said. ‘Did she get a good look at you?’

  Hennie braked slowly and opened the electric window.

  ‘They say we all look the same to them,’ said Jason. ‘You could always shave the beard off.’

  Hennie stuck his arm out and waved at Simon to overtake them.

  Jason said, ‘I wonder what Margot will say.’ He noticed Hennie’s manoeuvre, the white Toyota swooping past. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Hennie pulled over and stoppe
d. He left the engine running. He got out and opened the rear door on Jason. Jason cringed, like a dog who knows he’s done something wrong but not exactly what. Hennie pitied him, but not enough to shirk what had to be done.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why?’

  ‘I’m tired. You drive.’

  Jason’s lips quivered with gratitude. He stuck one foot on the tarmac and ducked his head and one shoulder out of the door. Hennie stepped behind him and slid his right forearm across Jason’s throat. He grabbed his own right elbow with his left hand and levered his left forearm into the back of Jason’s neck. He dragged him, choking, from the car and dumped him in the scrub at the side of the road. Jason rolled onto his back and stared up at him, panting with fear.

  ‘Listen to me, you stupid, drug-addled juice monkey. Margot isn’t going to say anything because Margot’s never going to know. Neither are your mates, your uncle Rudy, and most of all Dirk. Only you and I know. And if I ever hear that anyone else does, I will recycle you into the shit of carnivorous beasts. It takes about two days and the smell is peculiar depending on whether or not you get eaten alive. Have I made myself clear?’

  Jason nodded. He started to get up until Hennie stabbed a finger at him.

  ‘Stay down.’

  Hennie took a gun from his jacket pocket. Jason’s Vektor Z-88, a Beretta 92 produced on licence for the cops. He ejected the magazine and the cartridge in the chamber and dropped the gun at his feet.

  ‘The next man who takes that off you might not be so friendly.’

  Hennie took the chance to examine the back of the Range Rover in daylight. The bumper, the boot, the window. He rechecked the surfaces from various angles. After a moment he was satisfied. Not a mark on it. There’d be traces of something, but he’d get one of the men to give it a scrub, wax and polish. He tapped the gleaming metal twice.

  ‘British engineering, mate.’

  Jason had not dared move. Hennie slammed the rear door without looking at him and got back behind the wheel. Dirk moaned and shifted but didn’t waken.