by Roger Smith
A pause. “Yes, okay, of course. Um, Michael isn’t here.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m in a bit of trouble. I was mugged, now in the street—”
“My God! Are you okay?”
“Yes, but they took my money.”
“Please, come up.”
The buzzers grinds and the lock clicks. Louise pulls the sleeve of her hoodie over her fingers as she opens the gate and enters a lobby lit by a buzzing fluorescent. It’s clean but some kind of carbolic can’t quite mask the stench of piss.
She walks up the stairs, a mosaic of old black and white tiles. Art Deco, she thinks. Or is it Nouveau? Michael would know, of course.
Reaching the landing she hears a muted laugh, the distant mewl of a baby and the one-sided mutter of a TV set. The door to apartment four opens and the woman, Tracy, stands in the doorway.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
She steps back and waves Louise inside, laying a hand on her shoulder for a moment.
“No, really, I’m fine,” Louise says, swiping the cowl of the hoodie from her head, looking around the apartment with its all-too-familiar student clutter.
“What happened?” Tracy asks.
“I was next door at the Baths having a swim and as I left some guys grabbed me and pulled me into a doorway and took my purse and my phone. Thing is, I live in Sea Point and I haven’t got fare now, for the taxi.”
“Jesus, the bastards,” Tracy says. “Please, Louise, sit.”
Louise sits on the old couch, its torn upholstery camouflaged by a brightly colored cloth.
Tracy perches next to her and up-close Louise sees that she’s just a slightly overweight white girl, with a rash of pimples on her forehead and teeth that could have done with the attention of an orthodontist. Her eyes are big and brown and without guile. Puffy, too, as if she’s been crying.
A wad of crumpled Kleenex lies on the coffee table beside the muted TV that’s tuned to a chick flick—Cameron Diaz looking kooky, her run mascara making her raccoon-eyed.
Misery loves company, Louise thinks, and almost feels sorry for this woman all alone with her tears. And seeing her like this, sad and chubby (one of those big girls who’ll be fat by the time she’s thirty) drains Louise of the rage that has been seething in her blood like a predator.
“How did you know I lived here?” Tracy asks.
“I saw you and Michael the other day, coming out. I just pressed all the buttons and got lucky. Sorry to hassle you.”
“No, no, please. Louise, sorry, I’m being rude,” Tracy says. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? A Coke?”
“No, really. I’m fine. I wonder, though, if I could bum ten rand off you so that I can get home?”
“God, of course. Hang on a moment.”
Tracy gets up and waddles through to the bedroom and Louise hears her opening a drawer and scratching inside. Louise feels deflated. Ashamed. She’ll take the money and leave.
She stands and wanders over to a cluttered table by the window. A laptop with a kitschy sunset screensaver lies amongst empty coffee mugs and piles of books: Philip Larkin poems, a couple of political biographies, and—peeping out from beneath a volume on African art—a very familiar cover. Louise grips the spine and pulls out a collector’s edition of Through the Looking-Glass.
Tracy is back in the room, holding out a fifty rand note. “Please, take this.” She sees the book in Louise’s hands. “Oh, have you read that?”
Louise knows if she opens her mouth it’ll be to scream, so she just nods.
“Michael loves it. He’s going to read it to Emma. Already planning that, even though it’ll be years before she’ll be big enough. Isn’t that sweet?”
Something twitches deep inside Louise’s gut. Something old, something dark, something very, very angry, and the rage that filled her yesterday, when she hit the man with the brick, rises like a red tide.
She nods again, laying the book down. Taking the banknote from the podgy girl she shoves it into the pocket of her sweats, crosses to her pack and opens it, keeping her back to Tracy as she rolls on the kitchen gloves.
Tracy has the book in her hands, paging through it, and Louise knows that this girl has forgiven Michael Lane whatever he did to make her cry.
Louise has one rubber finger on the towel, ready to unwrap the knife, when a voice inside her says, no. No knife.
She turns and walks across to Tracy, hands at her side, and as the woman looks up from book, smiling, Louise punches her in her pregnant gut. Hard. Tracy wheezes and folds and Louise grabs her by the hair and smashes her face into the wall, hearing something break.
Tracy slides down to her knees, blood on her nose and mouth, gasping and sobbing.
Louise wraps her fingers around Tracy’s throat and starts to squeeze. The woman tries to fight back, but she’s weak and soft and useless, and Louise’s fingers bite deep into her flesh.
It takes a long time before Tracy is still.
Louise squats with her back to the wall, drinking air, exhausted now that the adrenaline is starting to ebb. She wants to lie down and close her eyes and sleep. But she forces herself away from the body, grabs her backpack, slips her hoodie over her head, covering her hand with her sleeve again as she clicks the door locked and hurries down the stairs.
The lobby is empty as she buzzes herself out. She closes the gate and walks away down Long Street, her small figure swallowed by the party people.
Part 4
Summer
1
When Michael Lane opens his eyes and sees three bullet-shaped light bulbs pointing down at him like little missiles, he has no idea where he is. Lying supine on a roiled bed, dressed only in piss-stained boxer shorts, he turns his throbbing head and blinks at the hot sun bleeding in around the edges of a pair of drawn curtains.
The ring of a telephone woke Lane. Not the polite trill of his cell, but the harsh analog ring from the phone beside the bed. The ringing dies with a little jangly echo. As it starts up again he remembers he’s in a hotel room.
Remembers something else, something too painful to confront.
He sits, fighting nausea, fumbling for the phone that hasn’t rung in the weeks since he checked in. Lane lifts the receiver from the cradle, catching a whiff of pine disinfectant.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Lane your wife is in reception.” A young woman’s voice. Cape Flats with an Americanized veneer.
His mouth opens but no words emerge. He clears his throat of bile.
“Mr. Lane?”
“What did you say?”
“Your wife is here. Should I send her up?”
“No, no. Tell her to wait. I’m coming down.”
Jesus, Beverley has found him.
He drops the phone and stands, momentarily dizzy, sending a hand out to the papered wall.
He hasn’t left this hotel room since Tracy’s funeral—ten days ago? eleven?—and he can’t remember showering or brushing his teeth. What little food he’s eaten was delivered by room service along with endless replenishments of the mini-bar.
The first two mornings the housekeeper knocked, wanting to clean the room. He refused and on the third day he gave the woman two hundred rand and told her not to return.
She hasn’t.
The room is sordid, every surface littered with little bottles of booze: Scotch, vodka, brandy, gin and some puke-making concoction called Malibu, that smells and tastes like tanning oil.
When Lane enters the bathroom and clicks on the merciless fluorescent he sees a scrawny stranger in the mirror above the sink. His face is covered in black stubble shot with white. As he bends to gulp water from the faucet in the sink he smells the stench of his body and knowing that he’ll face Beverley in this state is like a badge of pride.
He leaves the bathroom and opens the closet, finding a shirt and a pair of jeans. When he pulls on the jeans he has to cinch the belt tight to keep them up, leaving the shirt hanging loose to cover the poorly fitting
denims.
He exits the room, walking down a dark, windowless corridor, runner lights recessed into walls the color of pond scum. The elevator clangs open and he avoids the mirrors, watching the floors count down from ten.
The elevator opens onto the lobby, late afternoon sunlight blasting in from Long Street. Lane blinks, momentarily blinded, as a voice speaks at his shoulder.
“Michael.”
He turns to see Beverley, looking crisp in a white shirt over khaki pants. Her face has the serenity of the embalmed. She’s definitely using Botox.
“Bev,” he says, “this is a surprise.” She says nothing, her eyes scanning Lane. He points to the cocktail lounge. “Let’s get a drink.”
She nods and follows him into the mercifully dim interior, the place empty save for an elderly brown bartender polishing glasses while he watches the muted TV: a wildlife documentary of lion at a waterhole.
Lane selects a booth far from a plastic Christmas tree blinking sadly in the gloom and they sit.
“You found me,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Coombs?”
“Yes. It wasn’t easy to get her to give you up. I told her there were financial issues to discuss.”
The barkeep has appeared beside them, unctuous as an undertaker. “Madam? Sir?”
“A Scotch for me,” Lane says. “Double.”
“A Perrier with a slice of lemon. No ice,” Bev says.
The man inclines his head and leaves. Lane toys with a beer mat, eyes drawn to the TV, watching a lioness run down a gazelle.
“Michael, I’m so sorry for what happened to your friend,” Beverley says, and he feels her hand resting on his.
He looks down and sees that she still wears her wedding ring on her manicured finger. Sees the bruises on his bicep after she grabbed him at the hospital, the last time he saw her. Sees her snapping on a pair of gloves that rainy night she killed Sally Stringer.
And Lane can’t stop it now, the memory he’s been firewalling with booze: he’s unlocking the door to Tracy’s apartment after driving back from the Karoo—leaving straight after his speech, wanting to hold her in his arms and repair the damage he’s done—calling her name as he steps into the living room, seeing the overturned table, the laptop and books on the floor, stepping around the couch to where she lies on the threadbare kilim her swollen tongue bulging between her teeth, a froth of blood around her mouth, her eyes wide and staring.
Lane knowing that she’s dead and he shouldn’t touch her, but kneeling and holding her, feeling the waxy coldness of her skin, smelling her voided waste and seeing the bruises on her throat left by the fingers that throttled her.
“Mike?” Beverley says and he looks up from her hands into her eyes and the accusations of murder are about the spill from his mouth when the bartender wafts up, placing their drinks before them.
Lane grabs at his glass and washes the words down his throat with the burning liquid, feeling the alcohol hit his empty belly and seep into his blood.
Beverley ignores her glass of water, eyes never leaving his. “Come home, Michael,” she says.
Lane empties his drink and sets the glass down, the ice cubes kissing softly. He already has a hand up, gesturing for another Scotch and receives a nod from the barkeep.
“Did you hear what I said?” Beverley asks, sitting forward, her fingers on his arm.
Lane shrugs her off by reaching across and lifting a heavy soapstone bowl filled with stale peanuts. He feels the heft of the bowl, feels it smashing into that unlined face, pulping the nose, breaking the jaw.
But all he does is offer her the nuts which she dismisses with a twitch of her head. He sets the bowl down and settles back as the bartender arrives with his drink. The man deposits the empty glass on a tray, swishes a cloth across the table to remove the little ring of liquid left by its base, and glides off into the murk.
Lane drinks, forcing himself to take it slowly.
“Michael,” Beverley says, “what happened is tragic, but your life has to go on. You still have a family. Come back to us.”
“That’s very generous of you, Bev,” he says, mouthing the words as if they are scripted.
“Let’s pack up your things and we’ll go back to Newlands. If you like you can stay in the spare room, until you’re . . . adjusted.”
“I need time, Beverley,” he says.
“By time you mean being marooned here in the godforsaken place drinking yourself senseless?”
“Yes.”
“You look like hell, do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re being self-destructive, not to mention self-indulgent.”
“Perhaps.”
She shakes her perfectly pruned head. “Okay, I can see that I’m not going to get anywhere with you today.”
He shrugs and she rises. “The offer stands, Michael. When you’re ready, come home.”
Beverley, penny loafers muffled by the carpet, is sucked into the glare of the lobby.
Lane downs his drink and holds up the glass for another.
2
Louise rides the bus toward the Waterfront, mauve dusk settling like a shroud over the office towers on the Foreshore. She’s spent another frustrating day keeping vigil in Long Street, searching for Michael Lane.
The two weeks since she killed Tracy Whitely have dragged. The highlight was the afternoon when she hid herself in Cash Crusaders opposite the Doves Funeral Chapel in Plumstead (she’d seen the notice for Tracy’s cremation service online) pretending to be fascinated by a sticky collection of old vinyl—Vicky Leandros, Rodriguez, Demis Roussos—and watched Michael park his BMW and cross the road with Mrs. Coombs.
She remembered the woman from her visits to the bookstore as a kid, Daphne Coombs bringing Louise Cokes and complimenting her on her diction—a polite way of remarking that she spoke without her mother’s guttural bray. Louise, consuming news reports after the murder, had discovered that Mrs. Coombs was the orphaned Tracy’s only living relative.
But it was Michael she was there to see and even from across the busy road his distress was visible: his shoulders slumped, his step uncertain. The old woman seemed to be supporting him as they entered the chapel.
After twenty minutes Louise was attracting unwanted glances from the fat guy behind the counter of the store, so she left and browsed at sidewalk clothing stalls until a few people filed out of the chapel and shook hands with Michael and Mrs. Coombs before the couple walked back to the car.
Louise was dangerously close to the BMW and she thought she’d been spotted when Michael stared straight at her. But he looked away, resting his hands on the roof of the car, slumping down, and Mrs. Coombs ushered him into the passenger seat before she took the wheel and drove away down Main Road.
Louise had a good view of Michael’s face. He hadn’t been crying—she would have enjoyed that—but he looked haggard and unhinged. Not the composed, slightly aloof man she had known for all those years.
That was the last time she saw him.
She haunted Long Street every day, drinking decaf at the coffee shop opposite Lane’s Books and patrolling the sidewalk near Tracy’s apartment, but Michael had disappeared. Mrs. Coombs manned the bookstore, arriving at nine and closing up at five. After the police finished their investigation the apartment was locked, the curtains drawn.
The police, of course, had no clue about what had happened to Tracy Whitely. Her death, widely reported in the media, was an embarrassment to the city. Long Street, filled with hostels and tourist bars—minutes from the glitzy Waterfront—crawled with blue uniforms, and the Nigerian drug dealers had to lie low and the kids sitting on the backpacker balconies had to douse their weed-filled cigarettes.
Louise, on her daily Long Street watches, couldn’t suppress a little feeling of satisfaction as the useless cops patrolled while she walked free. But Michael Lane’s absence has left her feeling empty.
She needs to see him, needs to see evidence of
the pain she’s caused him.
A week ago she’d wondered if Michael had moved back to the house in Newlands, but a phone call had settled that. She’d spoken to the woman who’d replaced her mother, saying she needed to contact Mr. Lane urgently about his car insurance. The woman had told her that Michael hadn’t lived there in months and that she had no idea where he was, that she should call back later when Mrs. Lane was home.
So where is Michael Lane?
Louise has no answer, but as the bus judders away from the Waterfront, heading toward Sea Point and home—her apartment will be heavy with the ammonia of poor, neglected Harpo’s piss—she feels a curious excitement low in her belly, as if some remnant of an ancient reptilian intelligence has bypassed her brain and read something in the Southeaster that screams between the buildings and buffets the rush hour traffic, and she knows, without understanding how she knows it, that this period of stasis, this feeling of her life being on pause, is about to end.
3
The skinny brown girl is very young and as she lifts her T-shirt over her head Lane is presented with a searing flashback of Louise Solomons sprawled on Chris’s bed, one tiny breast exposed as his son groped beneath her wet swimsuit.
Lane, snagging a Scotch from the mini-bar, closes his eyes and when the room spins he has to grab onto the wall-mounted TV for support.
After Beverley quit the cocktail lounge Lane moved to a stool at the counter, the bartender—the nameplate DENNIS winking from his waistcoat—observing Lane through eyes old as sin as he dispensed alcohol with the ceremony of a shaman.
As he poured the last round at closing time Dennis leaned toward Lane, a sucking mint unable to mask his fetid breath and said, “Perhaps sir would like company? In his room?”
Lane, many sheets to the wind, as he late father would have said, took this as a proposition and manufactured a laugh. “Sorry, Dennis, but I don’t swing that way.”
The barman twitched his turtle mouth and said, “No, sir. I meant a young lady.”
