by Roger Smith
And Lane, soaked in alcohol to keep at bay the memories of his murdered lover and their dead baby and to prevent himself from confronting the maddening certainty that his wife was the agent of their deaths, stared at the man and heard himself saying, “Why not Dennis? Why the fuck not?”
He rode the elevator up to his room and self-medicated from the mini-bar until he heard the soft tap on his door, holding onto the thought that this kind of animal distraction may be exactly what he needed.
But now, watching this scrawny girl unbutton her jeans and step out of them, he’s not so sure. She gives him a smile that never reaches her eyes.
“Hey, lovey, you gonna get undressed or what?”
Lane unbuttons his shirt and shrugs it off and almost falls as he steps out of his jeans. He lies back on the bed, still sipping from the Scotch bottle. The girl tugs down a pair of lace panties and he sees her black pubic hair is shaved to a little patch, like the bristles of a toothbrush.
She hops onto the bed and straddles Lane, yanking his filthy boxers down over his feet, dropping them on the carpet. She takes hold of his penis, working her wrist like she’s shaking poker dice. Nothing stirs down there.
“Hey, what’s wrong? Don’t you like me?”
She flashes him another smile, her lipstick pink as a flesh wound. She sighs, shoves her frizzy hair away from her face, and ducks down, swallowing him, working at him energetically, faking happy, slurping sounds, but he knows it’s no good.
Lane puts a hand on her hair—tacky from some kind of gel—and gently pushes her head away. “It’s okay,” he says. “Forget it.”
She still has hold of him, false yellow fingernails denting his soft flesh. “You gotta pay, though.”
“You can keep the money. No problem.”
She releases him and he gets to his feet, using the wall for support.
“If I leave now, Dennis he gonna think I don’t do my job,” the girl says as she rolls her T-shirt down over her breasts.
She looks scared, and Lane conjures the barkeep’s yellow eyes.
Lane, edging along the wall to bathroom, wants her out of there, but he says, “Why don’t you watch TV?”
She nods, buttons her jeans and sits on the bed—barefoot, legs crossed—using the remote to bring the TV to life, surfing till she finds MTV, moving her shoulders as Latino gangbangers curse at the camera.
Lane closes the bathroom door, puts his head under the faucet in the sink, then sits on the closed lid of the toilet, eyes closed, for what feels like hours. Realizing he’s an idiot to leave the girl alone—she’s probably stolen from him—he grips the towel rail and hauls himself to his feet.
But when he goes through to the bedroom the girl is still there, chewing gum, watching TV, bouncing up and down on the bed, his wallet safe on the dresser. Lane grabs for a bottle in the mini-bar. The Scotch is finished, so he slugs back a vodka, which brings him close to puking.
The girl blows a pink bubble and pops it with a wet smack. “Gimme a drink, man,” she says.
Lane shakes his head. “You should go now.”
She shrugs and climbs onto a pair of white peep-toe shoes with heels like stilts, grabs her purse and takes careful little steps toward the door.
“Okay, I see you then,” she says, and she’s gone, closing the door after her.
Lane kills the TV and sits on the bed, staring at himself in the wall mirror. He sees water running down his face and thinks it’s from his wet hair. Then a trickle finds its way into his mouth.
Salty.
Jesus. He’s crying.
And the floodgates open and he falls onto the bed, crawling up the comforter, grabbing at the pillow, howling and weeping for all he has done and all that has been done to him.
4
In the morning when Lane reaches for his first drink of the day—the only remaining bottle in the mini-bar the vile Malibu—his body rebels and he spends a long time on his knees in the bathroom, puking and sweating. By the time he stands, rinses his mouth and splashes his face, he’s as sober as he’s been in the last fortnight.
His toilet kit, untouched since the literary festival in the Karoo, lies beside the sink. As he unzips it and removes his toothbrush and toothpaste a folded piece of paper falls into the sink.
Lane, his shaking fingers palsied and slow, rescues the paper from the damp porcelain and unfolds it. He reads, “I love you, Michael, and I always will,” written in Tracy’s unformed hand, the “o” of love a crudely drawn heart.
He holds the paper to his nose, closing his eyes, and convinces himself that he can catch a whiff of Tracy’s perfume, even though he knows it’s the cheap hotel soap he’s smelling.
Lane opens his eyes, folds the note and places it inside his toilet bag, and spends a long time cleaning slime and bile from his teeth. He stares at himself in the mirror, running a hand over his beard. He looks like his father. This realization has him digging into the little bag for his razor.
When he’s shaved, revealing a face hollowed by booze, he takes a long shower, his mind empty of thought.
Wrapped in a towel he goes back into the room that’s thick with the stink of him. Craving fresh air he cracks a curtain and tries to slide the window open, but it is fastened. All he can do is set the A/C to maximum.
His cell phone lies dead in the mess beside the bed. Locating his charger in a drawer beside the Gideon Bible he resuscitates the phone sufficiently to look at his missed calls. Ten from Mrs. Coombs. Seven from Beverley. The rest from numbers he doesn’t know.
Guilt makes him listen to Mrs. Coombs’s latest message, from an hour ago.
“Michael, I have been going to the bookstore each day to hold the fort, but there are urgent matters that need your attention, accounts to settle and so on. I’ve been invited to Plettenberg Bay by my sister and I’ll be leaving this afternoon. I’ll be away indefinitely. I’m sorry, Michael, but this business has depleted me, too. Please telephone if you need anything.”
He deletes the message, too much of a coward to call Mrs. Coombs back. The woman has been a Trojan since she cut short her Italian adventure and flew home, organizing the cremation service, liaising with the police and the insistent media while Lane drank and surrendered himself to grief and self-pity.
He stands and searches the closet and manages to find almost fresh underwear and socks. His cleanest clothes are the suit and shirt he wore to the book festival and Tracy’s cremation service. He dresses, clicks on his wristwatch—11:40 a.m.—and leaves, hanging the MAKE UP THE ROOM sign on the door.
Lane hesitates in the lobby, blinking at the cauterizing glare of the summer sun.
Patting the top pocket of his jacket he finds his sunglasses, slips them on and walks out into the world.
5
Louise almost misses him.
Exiting the bathroom at the coffee shop opposite Lane’s Books—such a regular now the gay waitron uses her as an agony aunt—she feels downcast and depressed. The little rush of expectant excitement that buoyed her last night has evaporated.
Earlier, from her usual vantage point in the coffee shop window, she watched Mrs. Coombs lock the bookstore and disappear down Long Street. Still believing that she’d see Michael Lane today Louise sipped her coffee, drank the refill the waitron brought her—his chatter about his “man” and their endless breaking up and making up the price she had to pay for the freebie—storing up her pee, worried that she’d miss Michael if she went to the toilet.
But when the waitron started to describe a torrid bout of make-up sex in a hissy whisper, she excused herself and locked herself in the bathroom, staying in there forever, too listless to wipe herself and return to another empty day.
But she washes her hands and slouches out, eyes on the floor. As she gets to her table she catches a movement, a man walking toward the bookstore. Just a glimpse before a bus wipes him from view.
But she’s sure it’s him.
Michael.
Louise throws coins onto th
e table, grabs her backpack and rushes across Long Street.
Lane unlocks the door, hearing the bleats of the alarm. He punches the security code into the keypad and walks into the store, inhaling the musty smell of old books and stale air. He leaves the CLOSED sign in the door as he shuts it.
Crossing to the cash register he sees Tracy’s idiotic Smurf mug standing on the counter, crammed with pens and colored markers and—heartbreakingly—a yellow pencil, the top bearing a cross-hatching of tooth marks from when she gnawed at it while on the telephone.
Lane opens a drawer beneath the counter and stows the mug and its contents. He unhooks the Gustav Klimt calendar from the wall—obstetric appointments marked in Tracy’s clumsy hand—and hides it along with the mug.
The buzzer sounds and Lane is already waving the intruder away when he sees Louise Solomons staring in at him from the sidewalk.
Resisting an impulse to flee to his office and hide, he opens the door.
“Louise,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard about what happened and I wanted to say how sorry I am.”
“Thank you.”
“I just saw you from across the street. If this is a bad time?”
“No,” he says, “of course not. Please, come in.”
He closes the door after her and they stand for an awkward moment in the deserted bookstore.
“Come though,” he says and leads the way to his office, taking his seat behind the desk. He points to the chair opposite him. “Sit.”
She sits.
“How have you been, Louise?”
“Oh, okay, Michael. Thanks. And you?”
He shrugs. “Louise, you know how it is? It’s hell.”
“Yes,” she says, “it is.”
Michael Lane slumps in his seat, staring at Louise. He looks years older. The skin on his face is gray and blotchy. He has dark rings under his eyes. His breath is sour. A snowfall of dandruff lies on the shoulders of his suit jacket. He looks reduced, his clothes hanging from his skinny frame.
So, this is it, she tells herself. This is what revenge feels like.
“Louise?”
“Yes, Michael?”
He looks away, through the hatch, out at Long Street. “I have to tell you something.” His eyes are back on her. Heavy-lidded, haunted eyes.
“What?” she says.
But she knows. Knows what he’s about to say, and part of her doesn’t want to allow it, doesn’t want to have his penance leave her with the burden of her own guilt.
But she stays quiet and keeps her eyes on his as he tells her everything about that night nearly a year ago. About what Christopher did and what he and Beverley did in response. There are no surprises. It’s like watching a movie after reading a review filled with spoilers, and just as anti-climactic.
She says nothing and Michael sighs. “I’ve told you nothing you didn’t already know.” She nods. “What we did was unforgivable.”
“Yes,” she says. “It was.”
“So, if you want to call the police I’ll make a full confession.”
Louise shakes her head. “No, Michael. What good would that do?”
“It’ll give you closure.”
She laughs. “Don’t you go all Oprah on me now, Mike.”
A smile twitches his lips then dies and he sits staring at her, as if he had a ration of words that are now spent.
“Michael, do you know I still get that money from you every month?”
He waves a hand. His nails are long and unclean. “God, that’s nothing.”
“No,” she says. “No, it’s not nothing and if I keep accepting it, now that you’ve told me what you’ve told me, it’ll seem like a bribe. And I couldn’t live with that.”
“No, of course not.”
“So, I want to earn it.”
“How?”
She is as surprised as he is when she hears herself saying, “I want a job, Michael. I want to come and work here. With you.”
6
Lane sits in his office listening to the wheeze of the ancient A/C—the air that it releases dry, dusty and tepid, heavy with the briny stink of stale cooling agent—hypnotized by the endless procession of murder statistics that flit across his computer monitor like migrating birds.
The heavily barred sash window that offers a view of the alley rattles, the wind whimpering through the gaps in the wood, but Lane resists the impulse to open it. Summer heat, hurled into the city by the rampaging Southeaster, suffocates downtown Cape Town—the mountain and the high-rises kettling the dank air—sending Capetonians to the ocean where the beach sand peppers their skin like buckshot.
Six mornings a week Lane leaves the comfortable anonymity of his newly-rented, fully-furnished studio apartment near the Gardens Center—the revving engines of the delivery trucks and glottal oaths of their colored crews reaching him before dawn each day as he lies in bed, sleepless—and drives the few miles to the bookstore, where he sits at his desk and does nothing at all except stare blankly at his monitor.
On Sundays he wanders the Waterfront, sometimes losing himself in the darkness of a cinema, leaving with no recollection of what he has seen. He hasn’t had a drink since he quit the sordid hotel. He wears clean clothes, showers and shaves each morning and prods at microwave-warmed meals from Woolworths each evening. His lungs take in air, his heart carries on beating, his bladder and bowels empty themselves with no instruction from him.
Tracy and their unborn child have been dead for thirty-two days, their killer still unapprehended. Tracy’s apartment remains untouched since the police and forensic technicians abandoned it. Lane has not been back since the night he found her body. Returning to dismantle what had been their lives is unthinkable, so he continues to pay the rent and utilities, trying not to imagine the creeping dust and the meat flies feeding on the stain on the kilim.
Tracy’s face is starting to fade in his memory, her features losing definition like a Polaroid left too long in the sun. A self-protective mechanism, he supposes, to mute his grief. And time and sobriety are eroding his alcohol-fueled certainty that Beverley killed Tracy and Emma. Or is that just another defense mechanism? A way of protecting himself from the knowledge that he is too weak to set in motion the engines of revenge?
Perhaps.
His office door is closed but through the hatch he can hear the rattle of Louise’s laptop keyboard and the murmur of her voice when she answers the phone. No calls are patched through to him. At lunchtime and at the end of each working day she taps on the door and comes in to give him his messages, written on lined paper in her neat handwriting.
He thanks her, but ignores them, adding the pages to the pile in his desk drawer.
The first few days she was here Louise asked him questions, in her quiet way. He showed how the books were stacked and cataloged and instructed her on the use of the cash register and credit card terminal. Then he retreated to his office and left her to do whatever she wanted, sure that she would become discouraged and disappear.
But she hasn’t disappeared. She’s out there every day—Monday to Saturday—keeping Lane’s Books alive, while he communes with the dead.
During his obsessive Googling of Sally Skinner, Lane stumbled across a website called Bearing Witness, and it is this site that he opens each day when he arrives at the office.
The website, maintained by families of South African murder victims, is simple: a monochrome background with a banner of type crawling across the bottom of the screen—reminiscent of a TV news broadcast—displaying the names of the dead, updated hourly.
The ticker mesmerizes Lane, drawing him into the relentless tide of statistics that baldly sketch the suffering out in the world, beyond the walls of his office. The sheer volume numbing him, leaving him with the understanding that Tracy was just one more name that skidded across a screen somewhere and was gone.
Or was she gone? Wasn’t death just a failure of storage media? Perhaps nobody dies as long as enou
gh information about them is preserved? Then that insight, too, is washed away by the ever-renewing roll call of the dead in South Africa’s undeclared war.
7
Louise sits at the counter beside the cash register, ceiling fans stirring the thick air—Michael’s office the only part of the store with A/C—creating a database of books on the laptop she brings in with her each day. The cataloging of the stock is as primitive and haphazard as it must have been when Michael’s father started Lane’s Books. If a customer—one of the few who dribble in off Long Street—requests a book, it’s a painstaking process to try and track it down.
So it is Louise’s mission to enter all the books into the database, to have the inventory information at her fingertips.
She leaves the counter and, pretending to tidy the new arrivals shelf, sneaks a glance through the hatch into Michael’s office. He has moved his desk, making himself almost invisible from the store, but she glimpses his hand resting beside his mouse and knows he’s staring at that website again.
She’d waited until he’d left one evening and booted up his computer, checking his browser history, which had led her to Bearing Witness. Sitting in his chair, staring at the names flitting across the bottom of the monitor, she had understood its hypnotic power, and wondered if her brother’s name was in there somewhere. Or didn’t a death in prison count as murder?
Still, confronted by the scale of the statistics, she found it reassuring to know that her crime was lost, swept away in the face of this deluge.
The phone rings and she crosses to the counter. “Lane’s Books.”
There’s a pause, then the unmistakable voice of Beverley Lane says, “Who is this?”
Louise, who hasn’t spoken to the bitch in a year, almost laughs. “This is Louise. May I help you?”
“Louise? It’s Beverley. What are you doing there?”
“Oh, hi, Bev. I work here now.”
