The Shallows

by Ingrid Winterbach

  She saw him and made straight for him.

  Could she, and she nodded at the bar stool next to him.

  Could he buy her a drink?

  With pleasure.

  She was an attractive woman. Karlien had got her slender build from her mother. Extremely lush eyelashes, emphasising her eyes. Pretty eyes, green. Her skin must have been exposed to a lot of sun (must be the horses), but she had laughter wrinkles and she smiled readily, although slightly warily. (One of those women whose ready smile constituted a defence against the world, he thought.) Darker blonde than her daughter. A more expressive face, even if only because of the light sun-wrinkles, and in spite of the slightly forced smile. For a moment Karlien’s uninscribed, almost expressionless face flashed clearly before his mind’s eye. He shuddered lightly. Focused on the woman in front of him. The mother.

  She just had to get away from the town, she said. She couldn’t process what had happened to her child. She blamed herself. She should have known. She’d not taken to Karlien’s friends, especially not the girl with whom she’d shared the flat. And now they were all being charged, and with possession of drugs on top of it, and probably dealing in drugs as well. They were probably all guilty. (Not a word about Karlien’s possible complicity.)

  Her perfume was expensive. Her nails were manicured. There was not an inch of this woman that was not meticulously groomed. The sports car belonged to her without a doubt. She accepted the offer of another drink. She held her liquor surprisingly well. (Clearly better than her husband.) Nick took careful note of how much he was drinking.

  She couldn’t forgive herself. She should have known. Karlien was their only child. Her husband had been crazy about her when she was small, but communication was not his strong suit. Since her adolescence he and the child hadn’t really spoken. They’d gradually drifted apart. She blamed her husband for it. He’d not been there for Karlien when she needed him. Had he been a stronger father figure, she might never have gone astray and gone overboard with the whole satanism thing. This whole terrible affair hadn’t done their marriage any good either. Not that it had been that wonderful in any case (with a slightly wry smile). She didn’t know why she was telling Nick all these things. He was a stranger. And yet, he was somebody who shared this tragedy (tragedy? would he call it that?) with them, because he’d been Karlien’s lecturer. (She had unusual eyes, attractively framed by the lush lashes.)

  She just had to get away from home for a while. She could no longer watch the child lying around so washed-out and listless. Physically Karlien had recovered well enough, but emotionally she was – she could almost say – crippled. (Of course the child would rather slump around with her friends in the satanic den among the black candles than in that shell-pink bedroom among the teddy bears and other soft toys, he thought.)

  There was something frail, something childishly trusting about the woman, he thought, but still, and he didn’t think he was imagining things, a strong sexual vibe. He had to keep a level head. Otherwise he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself.

  By midnight she was leaning her tear-stained face on his shoulder. He buried his face in her fragrant neck, his thoughts whirling in tempestuous turmoil. At a quarter past twelve they went upstairs to her room. She definitely had the bridal suite. Marginally more attractive than his room. They’d held back on the cavorting fish and the floral duvet and the dark, depressing wardrobes, but went flat out with satin – satin curtains, satin scatter cushions, satin bedspread – and a variety of large, cheap Mr Price-type vases containing tinted feathers and dried plumes. At least there was a large window facing the sea, with the reassuring sound of breaking waves.

  Her body was youthful. She was tanned, the line of her bathing costume still visible, although it was winter already. Her breasts were lovely – nicely firm and rounded. She surrendered herself with ardent abandon. It was the first woman he’d slept with since Isabel. His own enthusiastic response confused him.

  What the fuck now, he thought, as he went back to his own room in the small hours.

  *

  Early morning he was awake and pondering. He hadn’t reckoned on a lightning fling with the mother of his ex-student in the local hotel at Oesterklip. Instead of simplifying his life, he’d now complicated it.

  What was he going to tell her? What was he going to do if her husband got to know about it and hired somebody to fuck him up? (He didn’t look like the kind who could do it himself.) In his mind’s eye he saw Karlien’s pale, reproachful gaze bobbing buoyantly towards him.

  But hardly had he eaten a hasty breakfast than Mignon came into the dining room. She was highly upset. Her car had been vandalised. She’d had to summon her husband immediately to come and see what he could do about it.

  He had to be on his way in any case … said Nick.

  Yes, it was better that way, she said, and gave him a perfunctory hug.

  The car – the expensive sports car indeed – had had its tyres slashed and on the bonnet and doors was painted with spray-paint: white cunt.

  (The lettering had been executed quite skilfully, with a certain stylish flair.)

  *

  He did not see her again before his departure. Against one of the hotel’s outer walls the guy with the scar and the bag of crayfish was standing grinning in the morning sun. Fatey. Little destiny. A short distance from there, on a low wall, sat Penelope the snake catcher and signwriter. Before Nick got into his car, he checked carefully that a snake hadn’t perhaps slipped into his car. When he drove off, both of them waved at him exuberantly.

  *

  Suddenly it’s freezing cold. It’s the beginning of July. There is low mist over the mountaintops. Snow is forecast. I slip out to have coffee in town. I’m starting to feel more at my ease. It’s been a while since the stalker waylaid me in the coffee shop where Buks Verhoef was shot. That place I’ve in any case been avoiding of late. As I round the corner, on my way to a small, inconspicuous coffee bar in an alley behind Church Street, somebody grabs me by the arm. It’s him, the hollow-cheeked stalker. Before I can resist, he’s adroitly steered me into the coffee shop to which I’d been headed. (How did he know to find me here?)

  ‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘I want to talk to you. In god’s name don’t scream again. I won’t do anything to you. You should know that by now.’

  We sit down. At this time of day there aren’t many customers. A man is sitting in the corner reading his newspaper. Another man is working on his laptop in the opposite corner.

  ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ I ask.

  ‘Why would I?’ he asks.

  ‘Because there’s nothing in it for you, following me around all the time. You persist in believing I know something I don’t know.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I don’t have to spell it out. It relates to Buks Verhoef.’

  He laughs brusquely. He looks tired.

  ‘You interest me,’ he says. ‘I still think you should accept my offer and accompany me on a trip to the interior.’

  ‘Don’t you have a cousin to visit in the psychiatric institution, and a visit to a family farm in Mpumalanga waiting for you? Is that where you’re planning to take me?’

  ‘That can wait,’ he says. ‘My cousin is not going to come to his senses any time soon. In fact, I fear he may never do so. No,’ he says, ‘if you come with me, I don’t envisage visiting my disturbed cousin.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I say emphatically, ‘I’m not going travelling with you. I happened to be there the day Buks Verhoef was shot. More than that I don’t know. I did not know him. I know nothing about the motives behind his murder. I’m starting to suspect you have something to do with it. The way you suspect me of some kind of involvement.’

  He laughs again. A mirthless chuckle.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he says. ‘I want to come back. I’m tired of wandering about in foreign countries. I’ve done it for long enough. I’ve come to consider my options here. A kind of
reconnaissance, you might say. Perhaps a couple of people I want to get even with, but that’s not a priority. Old friends I want to look up. Probably not all of them are going to be equally delighted to see me. As far as your allegation is concerned: No, I have nothing to do with Buks Verhoef’s murder. Murder interests me only indirectly. You could say I have a highly personal interest in it. You could say I have my own selfish uses for crime. For the rest I find it banal. Buks Verhoef’s death is banal. He was a banal artist and his death was banal. As I’ve implied before, his death may not even have been totally undeserved. Most artists nowadays hardly deserve to live. There are only a few exceptions – Blinky Booysen was such an exception, and he’s dead. Beautiful irony. What became of him, heaven only knows. Blinky and I, by the way, were never friends, even though I had the greatest respect for his work. I still have it. I can’t get worked up about Buks Verhoef’s death. Come with me, let’s leave it all behind us. Let’s take a trip together. I repeat – you won’t be sorry.’

  The man looks tired. He’s unshaven. Dark rings under his eyes. His irises are flat, a flat milky-grey disc. His bony nose and hollow cheeks are even more prominent than before. With stubble beard and close-cropped head, he looks even more like a convict today. I remain silent. Let him have his say.

  ‘I know enough about crime,’ he says, ‘to be able to guess what happened to Verhoef. He was involved in illicit art trading. But somewhere he made a mistake – the poor guy wasn’t canny enough for the types that he’d got mixed up with – and then somebody was hired to get rid of him. As simple as that. Everything very predictable. Everything very banal. But what about it, what business is it of mine?’

  ‘The suspect was admitted for psychological observation,’ I say. ‘Who’s going to hire a mentally disturbed person to commit a murder?’

  ‘Perfect,’ says the man, ‘the perfect person to use for such a thing! Somebody who can’t distinguish all that well between voices from out there and voices from in here.’

  ‘It sounds like your Moorreesburg cousin,’ I say.

  ‘For sure,’ says the man, and laughs. (It’s a long time since I’ve seen anybody laugh so joylessly. If perhaps in a moment of insanity, my judgement severely impaired, I’d considered travelling with him, this little laugh alone would have been enough to change my mind.)

  ‘I seem to remember that you wondered whether the suspect wasn’t perhaps completely normal – like you and me’ (and here I shoot him a meaningful glance) – ‘simply with an urge to rid the world of mediocre artists. Of the tyranny of mediocrity, I seem to remember your words.’

  Again he laughs his unpleasant little chuckle. ‘You have a good memory,’ he says. ‘But no, I don’t doubt that the fellow is disturbed in some way or other. Probably severely disturbed.’

  ‘So now you’ve gone and changed your story completely,’ I say. ‘Now all of a sudden you don’t care a fig for Verhoef’s death, whereas before you wanted to know all about the day and the circumstances of his death from me. One of the reasons, I think, why you don’t want to leave me alone.’

  ‘And the other reason?’ he asks.

  But I know what he’s getting at and I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of a reply. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I don’t even know your name. You don’t know mine. Thank you very much, but there’s no way I’m going to avail myself of your offer. No way. You’re wasting my time. You’re wasting your own time. Do yourself a favour and stop bothering me.’

  ‘If you’ll go with me, I’ll tell you my name,’ he says as I get up. ‘It may well interest you.’

  ‘I prefer that we both remain anonymous,’ I say, turn around, and walk out of the coffee bar. But not without feeling the hairs bristling on my neck. Not a good feeling and the day is cold and dismal.

  Before going home, I enquire at the guest house where the woman with whom I had the surprising encounter was staying. I’m told that she left the previous day, back overseas.

  *

  Just before driving out of Oesterklip, he received an SMS from Marthinus saying: Buy today’s paper, check the interesting item on the Verhoef suspect.

  Nick stopped at the only café in town. No newspaper. If he wanted a paper, advised the man behind the counter, he should go to Veldenburg. About fifteen kilometres from here. In the café there was not a huge choice, except naartjies, cling-wrapped bananas (overripe), tinned food and firelighters. Two gates with sensors to ambush prospective thieves. On a wire shelf, apart from the Oesterklip Express, three books. Two of them were Mills & Boon-type romances, the third was Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Of all things. This place was definitely not without its surprises, thought Nick.

  He bought the book for Marthinus, without knowing exactly what it was about. It looked like something that might interest him. Perhaps something that Marthinus could discuss with Anselmo Balla, who was so interested in St Augustine’s City of God.

  *

  Veldenburg vicinity was where Charelle came from. If he’d known her parents’ address he could have seen where she grew up. She’d told him that at school already she’d taken photographs in the cemetery of all the different letters of the alphabet. She’d shown him in her portfolio the tombstones starting with the letter K that she’d photographed. In one of the town’s butcheries she’d taken the photographs of herself, naked, draped in metres of boerewors. And now she wanted to do a nursing diploma. Perhaps he and Marthinus should after all visit Tarquin and company once more to find out whether they knew who was responsible for the atrocity. It was unforgivable, it was scandalous that people should go unpunished after what they’d done to her. When Nick thought of her, he still registered it in the vicinity of his heart, it still felt as if his heart were being compressed between two heavy objects.

  He bought the paper, drank something in a coffee shop. On page three there was a report that the suspect in the Buks Verhoef murder case, who’d recently been admitted for psychological observation, alleged that he’d acted on instructions from voices. Sometimes he got instructions to kill someone, he alleged, and sometimes he heard voices warning him not to go to sleep, because he’d never wake up. From the report it wasn’t clear whether the man had been instructed by the voices to shoot Buks Verhoef, specifically, or whether Buks had by pure chance been the victim of his hallucinations. What did seem clear to Nick was that everything suggested that Victor Schoeman at least had not been implicated in the Verhoef murder. Which didn’t mean that Nick did not still suspect him of all sorts of chicaneries.

  Nick reflected that he should probably be grateful that the man hadn’t been instructed by voices to shoot him there and then in the coffee shop or afterwards in the bar. He’d thought the guy, the Chris Kestell double, looked pretty bewildered that day, with his floating eyes. He should count his blessings, and negotiate the world with fewer misgivings.

  *

  From Veldenburg Nick drove to Frederiksbaai. Back to Oesterklip was not an option, and back home would feel too much like a lack of perseverance.

  The hotel at Frederiksbaai seemed considerably more acceptable than the one at Oesterklip. He was sitting on the hotel stoep that afternoon watching the sea when somebody behind him said his name.

  ‘Nick.’

  He looked round. An attractive, middle-aged woman was standing behind him with a drink in her hand. It took him a few moments to recognise her: Marlena Mendelsohn.

  She’d lost her lanky angularity, and her radiant blondeness, but she’d remained well preserved. Her face and figure were considerably fuller, she was groomed and made up to her eyebrows, she was smartly dressed. Absolutely not as he remembered her in her skimpy dresses and threadbare jerseys, her bare knees sometimes blue with cold.

  (He could have died for the beauty of her slender feet and her bony, boyish knees.)

  What was she doing here?

  She was visiting people in South Africa. She’d lived in England for years. She’d been running a gallery there for a long time. Her husband had
died recently. (Rich inheritance, he thought, that explained the gold jewellery. The manicured appearance. Had she ever worn jewellery before?)

  And he?

  He was living in Cape Town again. Teaching part-time at an art school.

  Was he still painting?

  (Was he still painting – what kind of a question was that? She was the one who’d sat with him for hours in his studio, encouraged him; evinced, for whatever reason, an intense interest in his work.)

  No, he wasn’t painting any more. He drew nowadays and worked mainly in three dimensions.

  Her nails were polished. She wore boots and jeans. (Expensive; designer clothes.)

  Was she here with Victor?

  Victor? No, why would she be?

  She’d left here with him.

  Victor had just been a means of getting out of the country, she said. They lost touch years ago.

  And Blinky? he asked, with trepidation.

  She shrugged. Dead, as far as she’d heard.

  Did she know where he died?

  No. As far as she knew, he died in Cape Town. She wasn’t quite sure when. She’d left the country by then.

  ‘You used to be very good friends,’ he said. (Accusingly?)

  She looked pensively over his shoulder at the sea. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we used to be. He made wonderful stuff.’

  Nick had no desire to carry on discussing Blinky with her.

  This was the woman who thirty years ago had charmed him out of his mind. Whatever he knew about art, he’d learnt from her (not at art school). She’d stood behind him (literally) and encouraged him. She’d sat behind him on a plastic chair in his studio talking to him while he painted. She told him about the death of Rothko, who’d been found by his assistant in a pool of blood, having slashed himself with a razor and taken an overdose of antidepressants. About Guston’s father who’d committed suicide when Guston was twelve years old, about Kitaj’s visits to whores in Havana, about Jasper Johns’s obsession with flags. About Seurat, dead at thirty-one of diphtheria. About Goya, about Dostoevsky, about Roy Lichtenstein. She explicated the values and qualities of colours for him: black with its mystical connotations, white with its connotations of purity; grey, perceptually inert (as he’d experienced the Oesterklip beach during his first visit.) Red, yellow. Green.