The Shallows

by Ingrid Winterbach

  There is blood everywhere. It’s already formed a puddle on the table in front of him. Customers are ushered out of the shop. I leave the man with his head on the table, and quickly slip away to the bathroom at the back of the shop, before it can be cordoned off. Just as well the bullets didn’t go through the body, else I would have been drenched in blood. As it is, there is blood only on my hands, my wrists and on the sleeves of my light summer jersey. I take off the jersey carefully. Fortunately I’m wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, otherwise that would have been blood-spattered as well. I wash my hands thoroughly, with hot water, up to the elbows. I rinse the sleeves of my jersey quickly in cold water – I’ll wash it properly later at home.

  When I’m done, the police have turned up already. Because I’m coming from the back of the coffee shop and nobody else has remained behind in the shop (I’m the only eyewitness who hasn’t run away or fainted), I do double duty as the first suspect as well. A well-rounded female sergeant asks me to sit down at one of the tables. (Her name tag says Nkosikati Ndlovu.)

  I watch a little scrum struggling to lift Buks’s large body onto a stretcher. My legs are lame. My hands are trembling. The magazines that had been lying in front of Buks and the newspaper he’d been reading are drenched in blood. The blood is already starting to form a puddle under his chair as well. The emergency team at last manages to load Buks’s body onto the stretcher and to carry him out by the door. My hands are trembling uncontrollably. Did I know the deceased? Not personally, but I know who he is. Did I notice any suspicious-looking person? Yes, a man in glasses and a jacket. This the sergeant finds suspicious. How could I have noticed this? (Sergeant, madam, I happen to be very perceptive.) I noticed it because it’s unusual for somebody to wear a jacket like that on a hot day. What colour was it? Grey-brown, I think, with a herringbone pattern. An ugly jacket, I add, ‘not very fashionable; very badly cut’. The sergeant regards me with sharpened interest. The more detail I provide, the more suspicious she finds me, that’s clear. If on top of everything I find space in my statement to comment on the cut of the person’s jacket, I must undoubtedly have criminal tendencies. Add to this my conspicuous and unprepossessing lip defect, and I am the prime suspect hands down. How else – the physical scar as mark of a damaged psyche. What was I doing here? I was having coffee before conducting an interview with somebody in town. I was sitting here minding my own business (even though I detest the place. Even though I’m already scheming another escape from the town. I just first have to get at the old father again). I was working on my laptop, I say. There it still is on the table where I was sitting. Thank God not stolen in the general chaos! The sergeant wants to check it. Exhibit number one in court: the laptop belonging to the harelip with the blood-smeared clothes. (When I look down, I notice for the first time dark blood spatterings on my T-shirt.) Sergeant, I say, believe me, I have nothing to do with this. By all means check my laptop, but then please let me go, I have an appointment in half an hour’s time that I can’t put off and I still have to freshen up, make myself decent. (Or should I turn up at the old father’s with bloodstains on my clothes? Would that make his memory kick in?) Now may I please use the bathroom again? I may, but a member of the Service must accompany me. She must wait for me outside the door.

  Once again I rinse my face and hands. Have a drink of water, I suddenly have a raging thirst. My hands are still trembling. I take off my T-shirt, do my best, but it’s virtually impossible to remove the spots of blood without wetting the whole T-shirt. Fortunately it’s not a white shirt.

  The sergeant seems not at all persuaded of my innocence. She checks my ID document, takes down the number. Gets my address and other details. I must see to it that I don’t leave town in the next forty-eight hours. I have to report to the police station tomorrow morning. If I should attempt to get away, they would be on my trail immediately.

  *

  Outside the light is blindingly bright all of a sudden. The entrance to the coffee shop has been cordoned off with yellow tape, but a large crowd of rubbernecks has already congregated on the pavement. A woman is crying uncontrollably. I am inspected with great interest when I emerge. I am probably regarded as a suspect. A camera flashes. Fortunately I was keeping my head averted. Tomorrow my photo will appear in the press. I’m not easily put off my stride, but in the car I realise that my teeth are chattering, as if I’m cold. Even though I washed my hands and face and tried to rinse the blood from my T-shirt as thoroughly as possible (just as well I’m wearing dark-coloured jeans today), I’m still not entirely clean. (Who could ever have guessed that I’d have the blood of Buks Verhoef on my hands?) I sniff at my hands, at my arms, at my shirt, and fancy that I can smell an undertone of blood. (Perhaps the old father will pick it up as well.)

  The gates of the retirement village swing open once more. Miss De Jongh is awaiting me. I inform her briefly of what happened. She must thus please excuse a blood spot or two, should she notice any. If she’s shocked, she doesn’t let on, but I do imagine that I catch a flicker of sharpened interest in her eye – even something a trifle arch, perhaps? A girl who’s game for adventure? She is once again wearing a low-cut top that displays her impressive bosom to advantage. Is this magnificent sight wasted on the old father, or does he take delight in it? Delight and more. Way back there was nothing wrong with his appetite. Although.

  This time he’s sitting on a cane chair on the stoep. It’s still warm enough to sit outside. He has a light travelling rug over his knees. Once again he hardly glances at me. He is sitting so that he can gaze over the garden, in the direction of the dam, where last we stood looking at the koi. What will I drink? asks Miss De Jongh – a soft drink perhaps, sugar for the shock? (Sarcastic?) Make that something stronger, please, I say. She nods. An understanding. (It would be advantageous to have her on my side.) Whisky? A double, please. A conspiratorial glint in her eye, unless I’m imagining things. (I need the strong liquor. I now have the shakes, lightly. The screams of the customers still echo in my ears. Of Buks’s last, beseeching glance I can’t rid myself.)

  The double tot calms me, but dulls my focus. The woman seems in fact not disinclined to pour me another shot on the spot. I suddenly get the impression that she fancies a drink or two herself, and she is probably the keeper of the key of the well-stocked liquor cabinet. Old father was no teetotaller, if my memory serves. Will Miss De Jongh and I become friends? Confidantes? Will she tell me how stingy he is, how badly he pays her, how she hates working for him, how she sometimes considers putting something in his drink? She’s not my type. Her expression is too businesslike, too stony. A chilly glance, and not ironic – not unlike that of her employer.

  Nowadays whole days pass without my seeing anybody, talking to anybody. The town I find alienating. The town centre I avoid, buy my milk and vegetables at the smaller shops, the KwikSpar, the Engen on the Somerset West road. After the excesses and indulgences of my youth I hardly drink anything any more, the whisky goes to my head in an instant. It does, though, dull the sharpest edge of the screams and the ringing in my ears. It lifts my inhibitions. I draw my chair closer to that of the professor.

  ‘As you know by now,’ I say, ‘I’m writing a monograph on your sons. I would like more information from you regarding their childhood and youth.’

  For the first time he faces me directly. If fleetingly. If he recognises me, he doesn’t let on. If he didn’t recognise me, it would not be odd. I couldn’t very well hold it against him. But has he sensed something, has his interest been piqued by the trace of the smell of blood on my person, my clothes?

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asks.

  (Now we’re talking.)

  ‘I understand that you were the single parent to the boys for the greater part of their childhood and youth. When did their mother leave, and under what circumstances? Isn’t it customary for the court to grant custody to the mother rather than to the father?’

  The whisky has emboldened me too much. Wrong question
. I see, or imagine I see, a momentary contraction of his pupils at the mention of his former wife. I shouldn’t have put it like that. I shouldn’t have given him a gap.

  ‘The court grants custody to the father when it is found that the mother has neglected her duty or been negligent, or in the case of adultery or malicious desertion,’ he says. ‘When my former wife deserted us maliciously, she left the children in my care without scruple, second thought or any subsequent regrets. She ran off with her lover. Her lover at the time.’ (For the time being I ignore the insinuation that there had been a multitude of lovers afterwards.)

  ‘May I ask how old the boys were when this happened?’ I ask.

  ‘The boys were six years old,’ he says.

  ‘And did they retain contact with their mother afterwards?’ I ask.

  ‘From her side she never again made any attempt to take up contact with them,’ he says.

  ‘So from their seventh year the boys never again had contact with their mother?’

  ‘That is correct,’ he says.

  ‘Is she still alive?’ I ask.

  ‘That I would not know,’ he says.

  ‘And as boys did they not miss her? Or even try later to get in touch with her?’

  Wrong questions. Too soon to delve for vital information. I’ve botched the interview. Lost my focus. I still feel the dead weight of Buks in my arms. The smell of blood lingers on in my nostrils. The whisky has clouded my judgement. Olivier – quite rightly – ignores my question, turns to Miss De Jongh, who, with legs crossed, is sitting diagonally across from him on a garden bench, smoking, and gestures with the broad yellow-pale hand. (I have remembered the shape of his hand very precisely.) A sign that the interview has been terminated. She steps on the cigarette with her heel, gets up, and shortly afterwards accompanies me to the front door. It’s cool when I walk to my car. I sniff at my arm, at my T-shirt. Unmistakable still the warm, meaty iron smell.

  Janetta and I had gone to have a drink at the hotel on the outskirts of the town. Like wolves we ran together everywhere, in cahoots. She was pretty, with a broad forehead and cool, grey-blue eyes. Two men sat across from us in the pub. There was a cosy fire in the fireplace. I recognised one of them straightaway, he was a professor of history at the university, high profile. After a while they asked if they could join us, buy us a drink. Certainly, why not? After quite a few drinks the friend made a proposition to Janetta. I went with Olivier to his room. (Why the two were booked into the hotel for the night I don’t know.) Why did I go with him? I would have done anything at the time for the sake of the adventure, just for the hell of it. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what followed. We’d hardly got to his room, when without preliminary he sat me down roughly on the edge of the bed, came to stand in front of me, opened his fly, grabbed my head firmly and pushed it down, tried to force his penis into my mouth. I bit him. He slapped me, on the side of my head, hard, so that my ears rang. I kicked at him. He grabbed me by the arm, jerked me upright, pressed me against one wall, banged my head against the wall, slapped me in the face, so that my nose started bleeding. (I wondered whether it was strictly necessary for him to be quite so murderous.) I brought my knee up hard between his legs. In the few moments that he was off balance, I grabbed my handbag on the bed and cleared out. With bleeding nose and without shoes I ran back to town. It was raining. Did I report him to the university council, or whatever? No, what for. At the time I believed that if you got into trouble you had to get out of it as well as you could. The next day Janetta and I laughed about my narrow escape. Even though I was far gone at the time and mainly on a suicide mission, I was damned if I was going to let myself be raped by such a cold fish, such a stupid cunt. I never saw him again. Shortly afterwards, in any case, I left town. I left when Janetta left. Without her the place was even less to my taste.

  *

  I go home. I rinse out the jersey. The water turns a pale red. I scrub myself vigorously under a hot shower. I’m fed-up with myself for having botched the interview. Perhaps the old father won’t even want to talk to me again. So now I’ll patiently have to regain his confidence. Think up some alternative strategy. First talk to him about his own work. I’ll flatter him. He’s probably the kind of man who thrives on soft soap.

  The next day I buy a newspaper. There is a blurred photo of me, head averted, taken as I was coming out of the coffee shop. At this stage no clear motive for the murder has been established, maintain the police, but they’re doing their best. Yes, for sure. The town is shocked, to a man. A beloved inhabitant dies, says the newspaper headline. Everywhere on trees the posters: Shock death of well-known artist.

  In a weird way I want to return to the coffee shop where Buks Verhoef was shot. (For the time being that’s not possible – clearing-up operations will probably take a while.) I feel the need to anchor the – still unreal – event. I replay it again and again in my memory. It happened so suddenly that it’s as if it never happened. And poor Verhoef’s last gaze, at first despairing and then resigned – like an animal before it’s executed.

  I meet you in town for coffee. I tell you what happened, how Buks Verhoef died in my arms. How I still find it difficult to believe what happened. You are shocked. You can imagine that it’s difficult to believe – such a violent event – so unexpectedly and without any warning. (We must both be thinking of the death of Jacobus.)

  I’m well, you say, when I ask you how you are. I don’t believe you. Your lovely eyes still seem sorrowful. I believe, like you, that you’ll never be entirely well again. His death tore a hole out of your heart, you said once. Irreparable, something like that. From now on you’ll be limping along, you said. Crippled. Of everyone and everything you loved him best.

  *

  Marthinus phoned in the early morning.

  ‘Have you seen the newspaper?’ he asked.

  Nick had been dreaming of a bed of black lava ash in which his father said they should plant peas. He was still groggy with sleep.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Buks Verhoef was shot and killed in a coffee shop in Stellenbosch.’

  Nick was shocked. His first (guilty) thought was that he now no longer had a buyer for his house.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The police don’t know yet. But a suspect has been apprehended.’

  Now Nick was sorry that he hadn’t sold his house on the spot to Buks Verhoef. Although that probably would not have been of much use. He’d have gotten the money only once the estate had been settled. But now that the sale had fallen through, he was less than ever inclined to stay in the house. Perhaps he should let it immediately and go and live in his studio.

  Marthinus said: ‘I told you, didn’t I, that you shouldn’t sell your house to Buks Verhoef. He’s mixed up with all kinds of crooks and swindlers.’

  ‘He wasn’t necessarily shot by a crook or swindler,’ said Nick. ‘Was the coffee shop robbed?’

  ‘Nobody else was injured,’ said Marthinus. ‘Nothing or nobody was robbed. Apparently the man came into the shop, shot Verhoef and then ran out.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good,’ said Nick.

  ‘No,’ said Marthinus. ‘Verhoef’s death is in all probability connected with his shady dealings – illegal art trade and all that, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. And those are exactly the kind of shenanigans Victor would be involved in. That’s exactly the kind of criminal activity that would appeal to him.’

  Nick groaned. ‘Oh, come on, Marthinus,’ he said. ‘Now you’re going too far. Victor can’t have a finger in every pie!’

  ‘Why not? Oh Lord. I have a very strong intuition that that man is back in the country with a definite agenda and is cooking up some scheme somewhere behind the scenes. Guerrilla tactics – the robber gangs and protagonists and all sorts of bit players striking all the time in unexpected places. Just as they do in his novels.’

  ‘But, Marthinus,’ said Nick, ‘surely you can’t jump to that kind of conclusion just because things happen
like that in his novels!’

  ‘I can’t?!’ said Marthinus. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ said Nick.

  ‘So how does it work?’

  ‘Marthinus, I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but it doesn’t sound right to me.’

  ‘Think about it again,’ said Marthinus. ‘Remember – Victor Schoeman isn’t your man in the street. With him anything is possible. He’s not a guy who can distinguish between reality and fiction. I have a sense that all these things are related to one another.’

  ‘But, Marthinus,’ said Nick, ‘at first you thought that Victor was involved in the Moorreesburg affair – the inmates who escaped from the high-security facility; then you thought that the mental case who sat here in my kitchen was one of the inmates. A calling card from Victor. In both cases you were wrong. Now you want to allege that Victor had something to do with the murder of Buks Verhoef. All on the basis of events in The Shallows.’

  ‘Look,’ said Marthinus, ‘I know it doesn’t sound very convincing, but I have a strong intuition that all these events are linked, and I can usually trust my intuition.’