by Roger Smith
It’s the kind of weather that encourages Capetonians to shed their clothes and come out to play: joggers, speed walkers, elderly white women clacking along on their Zimmer frames, bored colored nurses dawdling after them. Sunbathers lie like basted meat on the strip of sand at Rocklands Beach.
Loud yells draw Louise’s eyes to a mob of shirtless African exiles playing soccer, calling to one another in French, these waiters and car guards (engineers and teachers back home) executing deft passes, bicycle kicks and headers, young white skateboarders looking on enviously.
Harpo tugs at the leash and Louise frees him, allowing him to go truffling in clumps of grass, cocking a trembling hind leg and ejecting little squirts of piss. She stands on the paved walkway looking out over the ocean, a yacht with white sails silhouetted against the orange of the setting sun, the sea darkening on the horizon to the color of velvet.
A breath of wind washes in off the water, teasing at her clothes and she is lulled for a minute into a mindless stupor, her unfocused eyes on the gently rocking sail boat.
A throttled yelp has her turning and she sees that some kind of squat muscle dog has Harpo in its grip, pinning the old pug to the grass. Before she has time to think Louise grabs a paving brick from a pile being used for repairs to the walkway and rushes at the dog that’s shaking Harpo like a torn rag, cords of drool flying from its jaws.
Louise hits the dog on its furrowed cranium, but still it hangs on to Harpo. She hits it again and again and at last the dog lets out a high-pitched yelp and drops Harpo, staring up at Louise, panting, purple tongue lolling through nasty yellow teeth.
The dog growls at her and she swings the brick with all the force she can muster, collecting it in the snout and it sits down on its backside, shaking its head, whimpering.
“What the fuck!”
A heavy hand grabs her shoulder and spins her and she is confronted by a shirtless white man, tall and beefy, his face crimson with rage.
“How can you hit my fucken dog?”
“Fuck you,” she says. “Look what he’s done to mine! Keep him under control, or better still shoot the fucken thing.”
The man gives her a shove in the chest that sits her on her backside. The soccer game has been interrupted, the Africans standing watching.
Louise looks up at the man, sees his button eyes, his mean little blondish mustache, his beer gut hanging over the belt of his jeans. She can smell him: stale booze and cigarettes and general obnoxiousness.
She springs to her feet and only realizes she still grips the brick when she swings it and collects the man in the nose hearing gristle and cartilage cracking. A rash of bloody drops hit the paving.
The man puts his hands to his face, blood seeping through his fingers. “You fucken brown bitch,” he says, his voice muffled.
Louise hits him again, on the side of the head, felling him, and she’s astride him hefting the brick to deliver another blow when hands grab and lift her, the block ripped from her fingers.
“Okay, girl, okay,” one of the soccer players, a young guy with short dreads, says, “you teach him good, but now you stop.”
Louise hears her breath coming in rasps and she frees herself and rushes over to Harpo who is on his feet, a smear of blood on his hind leg, but otherwise uninjured. She grabs him and wraps him in her arms and runs.
She dodges traffic on Beach Road, horns screaming at her, and hurries back to her building. A wild girl stares at her when the doors to the elevator sigh open. Louise, cuddling Harpo, leans her forehead against the cool glass of the mirror and closes her eyes as she’s carried upward.
11
Lane stands in the elevator at Barnard Memorial watching as Tracy turns to the mirror, admiring her swollen belly, smiling as they descend. The second scan was fine. He’ll be a father again.
He sneaks a look at his wristwatch. The gynecologist kept them waiting and he needs to pick up his suit from the dry cleaners before taking the three-hour drive up to the literary festival. He’s going to have to scramble to make his scheduled 8:00 p.m. presentation.
Tracy smiles at Lane in the mirror and he steps up behind her, folding his arms under her belly, kissing her neck as the elevator shudders to a stop in the lobby and the doors slide open on Beverley and Christopher, his son balancing awkwardly on his arm crutches.
Bev’s eyes move from Lane’s face down Tracy’s body, coming to rest on the shape of their unborn child.
“Oh come on, Michael? Seriously?” his wife says, her throat tight with rage. “You’ve gone and got her bloody pregnant!”
Lane maneuvers Tracy out of the elevator, trying to rush her past Beverley and Chris.
Tracy pushes his hands away.
“You never told her?”
“Tracy . . .”
She shakes her head and flees the lobby.
“Tracy, wait,” Lane says, moving after her, but Beverley has him by the bicep and with the strength of fury spins him to her.
“You think I’m going to let you just edit us out of your life and move on? A new bimbo and a new baby? Fuck you, Michael Lane, you don’t know what I’m capable of.”
Beverley frees his arm and strides into the elevator, Chris scuffing in after her, smirking into his fuzzy beard.
Lane jogs out into the dazzle of the late afternoon sunshine, looking for Tracy.
She’s gone.
12
Louise sits at a table in the window of a delicatessen opposite the hospital, sipping an unwanted latte. It’s her second in an hour and she feels the caffeine jangling her nerves. She should have ordered water.
Earlier, she staked out the bookstore from the coffee shop in Long Street, and saw Michael Lane and the young woman as they emerged, smiling and laughing, Michael’s hands all over his chubby white bitch.
Louise followed them as they strolled hand-in-hand up to Barnard Memorial, her head filled with nauseating images of the two besotted parents-to-be cooing over an ultrasound of a cockroach-sized fetus.
When Tracy leaves the hospital lobby alone, looking agitated, Louise drops coins on the table and follows her.
Tracy is crying, Louise is pleased to notice.
A problem with the baby?
The thought of this cheers her. She shadows Tracy to an apartment block near Long Street Baths, ducking into a curio shop, pretending to browse through postcards in a rack by the window, but watching as a balcony door on the second floor opens and the girl comes out and stands staring up at the mountain, a breeze tugging at her long black hair.
Got you.
13
Standing on the sidewalk outside the hospital, rush hour pedestrians jostling him, the street thick with the throb and snarl of traffic, Lane searches in vain for Tracy.
He sets off toward her apartment on Long Street, thumbing the speed-dial on his cell phone. The phone purrs in his ear and then goes to voice mail. He doesn’t leave a message. As he kills the call he sees the time on the face of his Nokia: 4:56 p.m.
His small suitcase is in the trunk of his BMW, packed for tonight’s junket, holding his shined shoes, fresh socks and underwear, his favorite tie, a white shirt laundered and crisply pressed by Tracy—Lane kissing her on the neck this morning as she stood ironing it in the cluttered living room of her apartment, Tracy trying to fend him off, but the two of them falling onto the couch and fucking as the steam iron clicked and fumed and the sleeves of his shirt dangled from the ironing board like dead limbs—his razor and tooth brush and cologne zipped into a toiletry bag along with a note (that he will only discover much later and realize how much more his heart can break) saying “I adore you, Michael.”
But his suit, his armor for his hour in the public eye tonight, is at the dry cleaner up near the Gardens Center. The dry cleaner that closes at five p.m. Lane does an about-turn and hurries to his car.
As he noses the BMW through the traffic, the digital clock counting down the minutes to the top of the hour, he tries Tracy again. Voice mail. He finds nothing
to say.
He arrives as the dry cleaner is closing up, parks illegally on a yellow line, hazards flashing, and gets to the door before the last of the bolts are thrown. The Muslim manager, already in her jacket and headscarf, shopping bag dangling from her arm, reluctantly lets him into the store, leaving him breathing cleaning solvents as she fetches his suit, plastic garment bag squealing when she hands it to him and takes his money.
Back in the car Lane knows that unless he drives directly to the Karoo he will be late. The traffic is brutal and he’ll be lucky to get there by eight, to make the opening speech at the book festival in which his friends have invested so much time and money. So he hangs the suit from the hook in the rear of the car and nudges the BMW into the gridlocked traffic inching toward the airport.
He dials Tracy and this time when he hears her message he says, “I’m sorry. I love you.”
14
Louise sits in the dark by the window of her apartment. A green neon hand, index finger gesturing endlessly toward a chicken take-out down on Main Road, draws her eye and when she drags herself away from the window the afterimage of the prodding digit is burned into her retinas.
Her mind is empty of thought and she feels so calm, so detached, that she sends her own index finger to her throat, feeling for her pulse. It is a slow, steady drumming beneath her fingertip. Unusual for Louise, whose heart-rate has always been fast, birdlike, excited.
She doesn’t turn on a light, settling herself in front of her laptop at the kitchen counter, stroking the touchpad to waken it. Clicking on a link, she opens the website for a literary festival in the Little Karoo, the address gleaned from the ugly poster on door of Lane’s Books.
Louise scrolls down to information on the first event, the opening address later tonight by Michael Lane who is described as “the doyen of Cape Town’s independent book dealers.” There is a photograph of him smiling, looking handsome and poised and clever.
The clock on the lower bar on her screen ticks over to seven-thirty, and she pictures Michael sipping a Scotch, shaking hands, mingling with the crowd drinking the “welcoming cocktails” advertised on the website.
She knows he’ll be nervous—he once told her, when she’d been terrified to make a speech at school, that he loathed public speaking—but he won’t show it. He’ll hide his emotions the way he always does, beneath that affable, Nice Guy exterior, and he’ll take to the podium and make his points in that measured, reasonable, winning way of his.
Louise stands and crosses to the closet beside her bed. She clicks on the lamp and strips off her T-shirt, jeans and panties, standing naked before the mirror. She feels a slight electric tingle at her pubes and sees that her small nipples are erect.
When Louise realizes that she’s aroused she almost laughs. She’s a virgin. The closest she’s come to sex was when the oafish Chris threw her onto his bed all those years ago, and she can’t remember when last she masturbated. Back in the bathroom of the backyard cottage in Newlands, she thinks, when her mother and Lyndall were still alive.
Louise finds a finger brushing her pubic hair and stops it. No. Save this. Bottle it. Uncork it later.
She steps into a clean pair of white panties and a pair of black sweatpants, pulling on a gray T-shirt. Unhooking her hoodie from a hanger, she slips it on over the T-shirt, zipping it to the breastbone. Digging her one-piece Speedo swimsuit—unused since school—from the closet, she takes it through to the bathroom where she soaks it in the sink.
In the kitchen she opens a drawer and removes a pair of yellow rubber gloves, still wrapped in plastic. Louise frees the gloves and lays them on the counter, slides open another drawer and stands a while, not thinking, just listening to the distant hiss of the surf blending with traffic noise; to the whine of the elevator motor; to a muttering TV set, experiencing a strange sense of dislocation, as if she can see herself from above as her hand dips into the drawer and removes a small steak knife with a serrated blade.
She places the knife beside the yellow gloves on the counter.
Returning to the bathroom, Louise lifts the Speedo from the sink and wrings water from it. She’s going to unnecessary trouble, but these props are important to her, fleshing out the narrative that is assembling itself in her mind. She lifts a candy-striped towel from the rail above the bath and wraps the damp Speedo inside, carrying the towel to the kitchen where she sets it down next to the gloves and the knife.
Louise finds her small backpack lying on the couch, empties it of a novel and a half-empty bottle of spring water, and stows the knife and the rubber gloves inside, covering them with the towel. She zips the pack and slings it over her shoulder, leaving the apartment, moving quietly so she doesn’t rouse Harpo who is curled up in his basket.
As she walks through the mild evening toward the jabbing green finger up on Main Road, she looks at her watch. Nearly 8:00 p.m. Michael Lane will be excusing himself at the gathering of drinkers, finishing his Scotch, maybe shaking a hand as he enters the conference room, walking toward the podium. Louise can see it: the starched white cloth, the pitcher of water, the microphone.
When a minibus taxi bumps to a halt beside her, the co-driver throwing open the sliding door, Louise climbs aboard and says, “Long Street.”
15
Lane is late. Still dripping from the shower—really just a frantic dance under the spray to wash off the sweat—he rushes into the African-kitsch hotel room and lifts his wristwatch from the dresser, clipping it on. It’s after eight.
There was an accident near Swellendam, a brewery truck jackknifed and caused a pileup, Lane cursing and inching past emergency crews hosing the road free of broken glass, beer and blood, his cell phone calls to the festival organizers going unanswered.
Lane snatches his shirt and underwear from the suitcase. As he pulls on the shirt he sees four bruises on his right bicep, already turning a mottled mauve against his white skin—where Beverley grabbed him at the hospital, her grip like a vise.
A wave of anxiety has Lane lifting his cell phone from the bed and jabbing at Tracy’s number on speed dial, cradling the Nokia between chin and shoulder as he finds his pants. Tracy’s message again.
Before he can speak the phone slips from under his chin and falls to the quilted and beaded rug. He leaves it there. It’s only when he pulls up his suit pants that he realizes that he hasn’t brought a belt. The trousers hang low on his hips, evidence of the weight he’s lost in the year since he last wore this suit.
Lane wraps his necktie into something that resembles a Windsor knot and pulls on his jacket, buttoning it to cover the sagging pants. No time to shave. He finger combs his hair and is almost at the door when he realizes that he is shoeless, and sinks down onto the bed, fingers thick and clumsy on the laces of his brogues, cursing himself for not bringing loafers. Done with the laces he runs for the door.
Dashing across the lawn toward the conference center he startles a peacock, the bird flapping and scampering, letting out an almost human scream. When Lane arrives in the lobby of the hotel young men and women in aprons are busy clearing away empty bottles and glasses.
He stops to get his breath and makes his way toward the closed doors of the conference room, pushing through into an auditorium filled with people seated on folding chairs, their backs to him.
The mayor of the town, an Afrikaans matron with the helmet-like hairstyle of Margaret Thatcher in her prime, is at the podium, stumbling along in her thick English, clearly improvising as she talks about the cultural history of the area.
The woman pauses, seeing Lane as he tries to sneak up the aisle.
“Oh and here he is, the late Michael Lane.”
There is laughter and Lane takes the podium to loud applause. He glugs a glass of water to soothe his parched throat and when he looks out at the audience he doesn’t see them, he sees his wife earlier in the lobby of the hospital, her face twisted with hatred.
16
Walking down the busy sidewalk, her hoodie maski
ng her face, Louise catches the ripe perfume of Jacaranda blossoms rising above the blocked drains, the car fumes and the chlorine leaking from the Long Street Baths. A streetlight on the sidewalk outside the Lutheran church shows the trees in full purple bloom. Summer, late to arrive in Cape Town and late to leave, is finally on its way.
That smell—triggering childhood memories of a sunnier, simpler time—leaves Louise unexpectedly happy, so happy that she almost walks past Tracy’s apartment block, down festive Long Street, letting the laughter and the warm light spilling from the bars, bistros and backpacker hostels lead her away from the darkness inside her.
But she stops outside the gated lobby, her finger already moving toward the button of apartment four. There is no name above the button but she knows if she presses it a buzzer will sound in the apartment where she saw Michael Lane’s fuck standing on the balcony.
Louise touches a fingertip to the button, feeling the tackiness of the plastic.
Sees Lyndall lying on the sand out on The Flats, with his empty eye sockets and his torn abdomen. Sees a smug, smiling Michael Lane with his arm around the pregnant woman with the black hair.
Louise jabs at the button and after a moment the speaker recessed in the wall beside the gate whines and a tinny voice says, “Yes?”
Louise holds her breath. It’s not too late to turn and walk away.
But she exhales and leans toward the intercom.
“Oh, hi, I dunno if you remember me? Michael’s friend, Louise? We met at the bookstore?”
