Talion Page 11

  ‘Well, he could be subtler.’

  They both burst out laughing. When Inspector Malope (a moniker Nol­wazi always reverts to, no matter how many times she hears, ‘It’s Pamela, for fuck’s sake’) laughs, her scar disappears into the natural laugh lines on her face, and the core of ice in her eyes melts away for a second, a wonderful second. But it is back, sharp and solid, when their laughs fall away, and Nolwazi’s eyes are automatically drawn to the scar across Inspector Malope’s throat, a flame in the dark.

  ‘I’ll get us some more cake,’ Inspector Malope says, standing.

  ‘No, let me,’ Nolwazi says, putting her hand on the other woman’s leg – the leg that no longer works.

  ‘I can do it,’ she says firmly, picking up her cane and hobbling to the kitchen slowly. ‘The doctor says I have to get used it, have to practise more.’

  Nolwazi is the one who found her – Pamela – the next morning, cut open like a goat for sacrifice. The last thing Nolwazi did was make sure she caught the men who did that; it was the easiest case she ever solved. The men were arrested.

  Guilty. All of them. Their sentencing hearing is tomorrow. Yet somehow, she doesn’t feel healed. She came here today to celebrate with Pamela, to put this chapter behind them. But there is still the leaden thing inside her, the thing that drove her away. The thing she shouldn’t have done. The bad thing. She, after all, is guilty too.

  Maybe everyone is right; she isn’t ready to be back.

  People have no idea what violence is. There is violence like a passion-­driven gunshot to the head. And then there is another kind of violence. A slow and vital violence. A brutality that twists inside the hearts of men, and is alive. Burning with anger. A violence that leaks from the hands – wet, rancid, scorching. Unspeakable, unrelenting.

  What kind of justice could answer that kind of evil?

  It couldn’t even be described as evil. It was something beyond evil, something that language hasn’t found a way to describe, because giving it a name is itself an act of evil. Just thinking about it is corrosive.

  And she is wearing thin, so thin.

  Seventeen thousand murders a year, this year. That is forty-six a day. Almost two an hour. A number that sounds incomprehensibly high, and also somehow not able to quantify all the murder she has seen. On that first night they met, Nolwazi had confronted Inspector Malope with these same statistics. And Inspector Malope had paused for a minute, then added, ‘Of course things are skewed a little differently in South Africa. Now drink up, we have an autopsy to go to.’

  Skew. Yes, things are fucking skew.

  The house is small and tidy. The kitchen is white and gleaming, the living room simply decorated and tasteful. Newspaper clippings from Pamela’s big cases, framed and mounted on the walls, speak to a varied and muscular career, now lost in the vengeful slash of a knife. When Inspector Malope sits back down, she lets out a big sigh, the pain hanging in the twist of her mouth, white and real. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘sorry that you had to leave here.’ She hands Nolwazi a plate.

  ‘I told you,’ Nolwazi says, ‘it isn’t your fault. I wanted to go. I wasn’t coping well, anyway.’

  ‘And how are you coping now?’

  ‘The cases are less . . .’

  ‘Less what?’

  ‘Less irrational, less brutal. These people have everything – it means little to them to lose their things. They have insurance and medical aid and psychologists. There’s more justice when you’re rich. But that isn’t really fair to say. Crime is crime, I know. But I . . .’

  ‘You can say it, child.’

  ‘I don’t care as much. It’s easier. It’s easier to see someone who has everything lose something, than it is to see someone who is starving to death get stabbed over a piece of bread. After what happened to you, I just . . .’ Nolwazi looks at her mentor, bent and broken, lonely and scared ‘. . . it’s easier not to care so much.’

  Inspector Malope touches her lightly on the knee. ‘You are not okay, my daughter.’

  Nolwazi picks up her discarded plate, tired. Her temper is so short lately. She used to be so sure, so firmly aware of her moral core. Now she is lost, a distracted detective, a disappointing daughter all over again.

  ‘Never mind me, Mama. How’s the new job?’

  ‘It’s fine. I just sit in an office.’

  ‘A prison office. Must be interesting?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘There must be something you like.’

  Inspector Malope sighs and runs a finger across her scar again. ‘I miss it.’

  ‘Miss what?’

  ‘Being out there.’

  ‘I know you do, Mama.’

  12

  Fragments of conversation flit past him in the noisy hall, like moths. Some of them are indistinct, too muffled and light to hear; others perch on his ear for a moment, whispering. He takes in everything he hears. He doesn’t play poker to win – they don’t even play with real money because Mr October doesn’t approve of gambling. He’s here to listen, to find a reason for the whole community to be together. To put his finger on the pulse.

  From table eight, in the far left-hand corner, the one closest to the bar: ‘It’s been like this ever since they opened that bloody train station. No way to control who’s coming in and out, the neighbourhood filling up with the wrong sort.’

  ‘And who exactly is the wrong sort?’

  ‘These thugs that have been breaking into our houses!’

  ‘Wasn’t your Simon one of the ones arrested for those burglaries?’

  ‘Because he got mixed up with the wrong sort! Skollies!’

  From table seven, filled with the rivals of the people at table eight: ‘This isn’t about the robberies. This is about the drugs in our schools.’

  ‘It’s all connected. These hooligans hanging out on our street corners are the ones bringing the drugs in. Selling them to our kids!’

  ‘There is someone organising all this. Someone on the inside. These drugs aren’t coming from the trains only.’

  From table two, right next to his own: ‘We have to take our neighbourhood back. We have to fight.’

  ‘We’ve already started a neighbourhood watch. What more is there that we can do?’

  ‘We can apply to have the neighbourhood boomed off. Build a fence! Keep everybody out.’

  There’s a theme tonight, because of what happened to Ms Hendricks – the school’s English teacher and guidance counsellor, attacked in her drive­way. And because of the two hijackings that took place on the road just outside the station, and because of all the money going missing at the school. And because of another overdose, only this morning, this time a sixteen-year-old girl who, three days ago, had still been sitting in Mr October’s maths class, hiding behind big square glasses. The conversation has taken on a different shade. There is a sharpness, a texture that hasn’t been there before. People are drinking more than usual.

  ‘Like this car guard outside, where did he come from?’

  ‘What car guard?’

  ‘The one asking for money outside. Parked my car here for twenty years without needing a car guard.’

  ‘Kind of makes me feel better that he’s there’

  Mr October has lived on Themis Street for eighteen years. He believed in the community completely – community, family, and God. Sunnyside was a good neighbourhood, at first. A clean, friendly neighbourhood. Tight-knit. A place where his wife and children would be protected. But then crime rates spiked. Robberies. Hijackings. Suddenly drugs made their way onto the streets and into the schools. And into his wife. And with the crime, there came fear. People who could afford to move away moved away. Moved east.

  In Pretoria, wealth rises in the east with the sun.

  But no one at his table talks about any of this. They wave away the subject like a troublesome insect, not letting it settle, cheerfully talking about other things. Not drinking because they know he doesn’t drink, not
wanting to offend him.

  With his thumb he runs over the scar on his hand.

  He had the dream again last night. The dream in which he smothers his wife. The dream in which she has passed out cold, fallen to the ground where her energy abandoned her on the cement floor. She is slumped in a corner of the room, surrounded by the souvenirs of her day: her dolls. Her baby dolls. She’s been pulling off their heads and putting them aside in a pile (she discards the bodies in a black trash bag). A mountain of bright, artificial eyes that stare at him through the black dream-fog. The house is dark. The house is always dark. But still the eyes are clearly visible. So cheerful that they defy darkness.

  Stacked next to the plastic heap is a hoard of broken mirrors.

  Mr October does not know where she has been getting the dolls or the glass, or who has been supplying them; he does not know if they represent the drowsy depths of her drunkenness or the cold peak of her sobriety. Did she start her day with this project, or is it the final expression of her addled mind? She looks almost peaceful. But behind her quiet eyelids, there is a maelstrom.

  He picks her up – she is light because she hardly eats any more – and moves her to her mattress in the corner. She has torn up her blankets. But no matter: in his dreams the nights always seem to be warm. He looks at her face. How thin, how worn, how torn with abuse. The drugs have hollowed out her bones, swallowed her flesh. Pockmarks are scattered across her forehead, scabs and sores all over her arms. She smells of dried, dirty sweat.

  The pillow appears in his hands, magical, miraculous. He holds it tightly above her face, before forcing it down on her. He smothers her until she wakes up from the impact; then he pushes harder, with more force, silencing her moans and her defences. Her arms flicker feebly at her sides, too weak to protest. The fabric of the pillowcase strains against his hand, is being held on to so tightly that it cuts into his skin. It makes a sound – the straining fabric – a sound that overpowers the dream completely. A creaking, dry sound. The sounds of a thousand tiny things tearing.

  Then it is over.

  His wife is still. The pillow disappears. He sits in the dark room and listens to the silence, drawing shadows into his lungs.

  He says to the man on his left, the headmaster of the school, ‘Do you think reporting the stolen money to the police was a good idea?’

  His question melts the mood, and the people around him relax a little. ‘What else were we supposed to do?’ replies the headmaster, and the conversation is off. Although no one, at least, goes so far as to mention drugs, or the overdose.

  Until the headmaster says, ‘It really has been astonishing, how fast these drugs have come into the school,’ and Mr October can tell that as soon as he says it, he regrets it, and the conversation freezes.

  Mr October lets his words fall as gently as snow: ‘Well, hopefully at the community meeting next week the police will shed some light on things. Time for me to go. I fold.’

  13

  ‘Build a fence! Keep everybody out.’

  Those are the last words Slick hears as he steps out of the room.

  He has heard all he has come to hear. No one noticed him slip into the back of the hall, and hopefully no one has seen him slip back out again.

  He hurries away into the quiet of the night.

  Wednesday

  14

  A list of things he would never be able to teach his son: how to shave, how to tell a girl you loved her, how to be a good man, how to tie a tie, how to talk to God, how to change a tyre, how to make his famous lamb curry, how to have mercy, how to keep the woman you love safe.

  15

  Freya has been following Abraham October for four days, and here’s what she’s learnt so far: he sticks to the speed limit; he only sleeps four hours a night; his daughter leaves the house before he does and comes home after; and Freya has never seen them interact. He is yet to use the red Mercedes he drove the night Ben was killed. He has his gun with him at all times. Twice now, before he’s gone to bed, he’s left the house, walked across the back lawn, and let himself into the shed.

  She hasn’t heard him speak, but she imagines his voice is cold and rough, like a hammer striking dead iron. Like a deep, deadly fissure.

  And following someone is easier than it seems, because people don’t pay attention.

  Before Abraham October, Freya spent her days doing nothing much but trying to inoculate herself against everything she was feeling. She slept, she drank. She had sex. She did these things deliberately. She didn’t care that she was being self-destructive or isolating herself. It was easier than the alternative. It was easier than getting on with life.

  But now there is something even easier, more compelling. Now there is Abraham October. Now Freya welcomes the rush of grief as she wakes up in the morning; it has become her reason. A reason to dress. A reason to shower. A reason to stay sober. Her grief has become her power – if you were to cut her open, it would spill from her in great black waves and drown everyone in her path.

  Last night she followed Abraham October as he drove out to the local community centre, a forlorn barn-like building surrounded by a forest of tall, bare blue-gum trees. It was only after a shot of vodka from the flask in her purse, and a couple of puffs of a joint, that she had the courage to sneak out of her car and over to the back of the building – avoiding the car guard – and peek through the window.

  Poker. They were playing poker.

  This morning she followed him to his school and watched him drive through the large iron gates. Then she rushed back to his house. His empty house.

  She’s climbed over the back wall, and now she’s standing outside his kitchen. She has a brick with her, rummaged from an abandoned pile she found at a building site near her flat.

  The back door is locked. Freya wraps the brick in her scarf and smashes through the window set into the door. Shards of glass prick her skin, forming a pattern of red dots, a constellation of bloodspots. She reaches for the lock and unlatches the door from the inside. Treading quietly, her body instinctively cautious, she is prepared to flee at the slightest sound.

  The kitchen is white and very clean; it smells like mint-scented bleach, like stale air, like the oily-salty build-up of thousands of cooked meals. There are no forgotten items on the counters, no dirty dishes in the sink.

  The living room is bare. One couch and an unstained carpet. No tables, no bookcases, no television. No magazines or artworks or photos. No adornments. Like a cheap hotel. Blinds hide the front garden from view; no sunlight can break through.

  The dining room has clearly not been used in a long time; the old wooden table at its centre is covered in a layer of dust. There is nothing else in the room but a single bulb that hangs from the roof by a thin wire, and two portraits. Mounted against the opposite wall, they are framed in redwood. They are rough, pedestrian portraits done in charcoal: a man and a woman, both smiling. They look at each other from their frames. They could be anyone. They could be everyone. A spider has made its web between the two drawings. The strings of dirty silk shine red in the dimly lit room; the spider is nowhere to be seen.

  She leaves the room undisturbed.

  She walks deeper into the interior.

  The bathroom is as white as the kitchen. There are few toiletries. A bottle of shampoo, a bar of orange soap. Two toothbrushes, one white and one red. A tube of toothpaste. One bottle of no-brand headache tablets. No other medications. No cough syrup or vitamins or mouthwash. No disinfectant or plasters or shaving cream or razors.

  Of the three rooms she finds beyond the kitchen, the first is a burst of colour in a desolate landscape. The walls are red, the bedding pink. A row of stuffed lion toys sits on the bed. Lingerie is draped over the full-length mirror. The room is messy and musty: it smells of nail polish, perfume, and cigarettes. Like bubblegum and vanilla. This must be the daughter’s room. The curtains are drawn and Freya doubts that either natural light or fresh air has been allowed into the room in some time. A
plate smothered in old tomato sauce lies next to the bed. And an ashtray.

  A small tendril of smoke slowly coils out of the ashtray.

  How . . .?

  Freya leans over, picking up the butt of the cigarette from the dirty ashtray, pushing her finger into its edges – still warm. Suddenly, the room changes. Suddenly, it is full of shadows, full of potential danger. Freya is sure she saw Abraham’s daughter leave. She can’t be home; she can’t be here.

  Freya listens.

  She can’t hear anything. No sounds of muffled breathing, no rustle of someone trying to keep still. But her eyes are drawn immediately to the shadows coming from underneath the bed. She can’t help but think that right beyond the edge of that darkness, someone could be hiding; her imagination is already warning her that at any moment a hand, a fist, a knife, could come out and grab her – stab her, end her.

  Breathe.

  She gets down on her knees.

  Her hands are vibrating with something like fear.

  She reaches out to the edge of the bed and takes hold. Then she swings her head down, prepared to meet the eyes of danger.

  But there is no one, nothing.

  She is alone. She is alone.

  She doesn’t invade any further. This room is too filled with life; it threatens to disrupt her mission.

  She’s not here to spy on teenagers.

  The second room is stripped, naked. A single bed, a bedside table, a desk. No decoration, no linen on the bed. Freya opens the desk drawers. They yield nothing but a Bible. She takes out the Bible and flips through it. It looks new. On the first page it says, ‘This Bible belongs to Peter.’ The name is scribbled in a clumsy hand, the letters oddly spaced. In the back of the Bible is a small square snapshot. It’s the printed image of a sonogram: white lines and bubbles loop around in a black void. On the left, there is the vague impression of a figure. A ghostly speck. It gives Freya the sensation of falling, falling. She shuts the Bible.