Talion Read online

  She steps out of the light.

  Silence is on all sides of her, a silence that seems to be expecting something from her. She moves swiftly, until she comes face to face with his gate. Her fingers grip the bars. The house is surrounded by a plain garden, and has been freshly painted; ladders and paint tins are stacked against the front wall. To the right of the house, cracking the perimeter wall in two, breaking the boundary, there stands a huge tree – a sentinel, whispering in the wind. The Renault has been parked under this tree. But beyond the tree, mostly hidden from view, she can see a second carport.

  Somewhere behind her, she hears another door slam.

  Next to the gate, mounted in the wall at eye level is a mailbox. There are several letters stuck in the slot. She takes one.

  ‘Oi!’ a voice calls from the dark. ‘Can I help you?’ A stout woman is walking towards her. Next to the woman, leashed, is a large and growling black dog. Freya quickly pockets the letter.

  When the woman sees her face, she stops. ‘Oh.’ The woman seems startled. ‘I thought you were one of those . . . Can I help you?’ The woman has a whistle around her neck, a Taser gun at her side, and a bib that says Neighbourhood Watch.

  ‘No, no. I was just lost. Sorry.’ Freya begins walking backwards to her car.

  They stare at each other. The dog gives a low, loud bark. ‘Yes,’ the woman says, ‘you look lost.’

  ‘I’ll just be going then,’ Freya mumbles, hurrying away.

  The woman waits for her to get back into her car, before walking to one of the houses beyond the edge of the light.

  Freya jumps at the sound of her own car starting. But she edges it slowly around the cul-de-sac, peering into the little white house before accelerating back up the street, trying to map it, trying to make sure she would be able to find it again. At the top of the cul-de-sac, she looks up at the street sign: Themis Street.

  The Sunnyside streets are adorned, like most of the city, with big jacaranda trees that bend their canopies across the tar, reaching for each other. They are as bare as skeletons.

  She turns left, then right, taking herself deeper into the neighbourhood.

  Ahead of her, almost directly parallel to where his house is, there is a bridge that crosses a narrow stream. Walker’s Spruit. The stream runs through a strip of parkland, and is benched on both sides by narrow lawns, each with a stone pathway. Large willow trees edge the stream, bending inwards to touch the river with long, slender branches.

  She stops just before the bridge. The building immediately on her left is a doctor’s office, fronted by a parking lot. Freya pulls into one of the spaces, and switches off her lights.

  She is watching the night for signs of life.

  She hesitates for only a moment.

  Then.

  On foot, she turns down the stone path running along the parkland, past the houses that have their backs turned to the stream. She walks quietly; it is unusual for a park in this part of the city to be empty. To be safe.

  She walks only a few paces before she finds the back of the little white house with the blue roof. The house has a low wall at its rear edge, lower than its neighbours’, low enough to climb over. A smallish lawn runs from the wall to a back porch.

  The silhouette of the tree dominates the skyline above his house, and from this angle the carport behind it is clearly visible; it is covered in green netting. Inside the carport, she can see the shadow of a second car.

  She breathes deeply.

  That must be it. The red Mercedes.

  Slowly, she climbs over the back wall.

  Her feet crunch on the dry winter grass as she creeps towards the carport.

  And there it is. Gleaming in the bone-white moonlight. Gleaming even under the layer of dust. A beacon, a sign, a saviour. This, she thinks, is a reason to stay alive. Here it is – the way out of – the way through – the grief.

  Freya looks around her. Themis Street. A new place, a part of the city she has never given a second thought to. She can feel the streets reaching for her, whispering.

  She doesn’t fight it; she closes her eyes and allows the neighbourhood to envelop her. The herbaceous scent of the night, the small pastel-­coloured houses, the slight dereliction simmering beneath the surface.

  It would be easy to find out what his schedule is, to find out what he does when he thinks no one is looking. To find out what he does when he thinks he is alone.

  And no one would see her.

  No one would know.

  8

  It’s his favourite place, this room. A place where he can be alone. Just him and his ladies. His beautiful ladies: aromatic, succulent, profitable. They gleam too, in their neat rows. Hundreds and hundreds of them, sitting beautifully on steel tables, just waiting to be harvested.

  The message comes through as he fastens the last of the bandages: they’ve found the body.

  Slick’s bones grow tense. He replies: do they suspect?

  - they have no idea

  - keep me posted

  He begins to undress, shedding his clothes. He stands in the quiet, cool room feeling the air-conditioning on his skin, watching the goosebumps ripple. In a photograph hanging on the wall – Mama Africa eternally sequestered behind glass – he can see and admire his reflection; he has a good body, strong and lithe. He doesn’t usually have a chance to see his reflection; there are no mirrors in his flat and he looks away from windows when he catches sight of himself. But tonight he forces himself to confront it.

  It’s a funny thing, seeing your own face after months of not seeing it. It is never the face you imagine. His own, so indistinct, so unmemorable. And lurking there, the shadow of his parents’ faces. His mother’s – wide and flat, eyes set far apart. His father’s – slim and caved in, a beauty spot on his chin.

  What had Mama Africa seen when she looked in the mirror?

  She taught him everything he knew. She gave him meaning. She gave him knowledge. She gave him a way to access the world. She gave him language. But all those things were also a lie. An experiment. Disguises she gave him for her own selfish reasons. And what happens when you look in the mirror and all you see is a reflection of a reflection of a thing that doesn’t exist?

  His reflection has no answers to his questions. There is only silence. And in the intestines of that silence, something dark.

  Something dark.

  He begins to wash the blood off his face, wiping the warm, wet rag carefully over the cold, sharp wounds. He leans into the pain.

  He suspects there are emotions he doesn’t have access to, has no experience with. Loneliness is one; he’s never experienced what people describe when they talk about loneliness. He has never craved another person.

  Joy, another.

  Euphoria.

  Pleasure. He doesn’t believe he’s ever truly experienced pleasure. Though he lost his virginity in an uncomfortable, sweaty encounter on a dirty mattress in Mama Africa’s house when he was sixteen, sex isn’t something he wants, so it can’t be something he misses. He masturbates very rarely; his orgasms are short, powerless things.

  He’s sober, too. He’s tried. Tried them all. There are times when you have no choice but to sample the product. But he doesn’t see drugs as an escape; he sees them as a prison. To be so dependent on a chemical feeling seems to him to be the worst kind of trap.

  As for love. Well, he’s never done that either. Did his mother love him? He doesn’t think so. He knows his father didn’t. Did Mama Africa love him?

  If she had loved him she would never have given him that knife.

  Drugs, alcohol, sex, love: those are all things that require you to relinquish something. Reality, control, hope. Power. Especially power.

  But violence . . . violence is power. Violence is how he keeps control. He was so weak, too weak, for such a long time. At the mercy of others.

  Never again, never again.

  Once his face is washed, the wounds cleaned and soothed, he take
s up a knife. He stares for a moment at the blade, silver and sharp, and then he cuts into his own flesh: a long, thin incision between his navel and his crotch. The cut flares beautifully. He can feel all his anger, all his panic, gather in his blood and flow towards the fresh wound, dripping out into the world, onto the stone floor, flowing down into the earth, and away.

  The pain is fresh, invigorating. Everything is under control.

  And he is calm.

  9

  After Mr October has washed the blood off his hands, his face – after he has put his soiled clothes in the wash – he sits on the floral couch his wife bought years ago and he waits.

  Satisfaction is running through his veins; the pure bliss of having let the violence loose. Not even the memory of his daughter’s face – horror, guilt, paralysis – can dampen it.

  When he hears the key in the lock, he speaks from the shadows: ‘I’m surprised you came home.’

  ‘Never,’ she says, ‘follow me again. Do you hear me?’

  ‘What are you doing, girl? What are you doing? Girl!’ He’s yelling, ferocious. ‘You’re betraying your mother!’

  She opens her mouth to speak, and then closes it again. Her lips are white.

  ‘I’ll do whatever I have to, girl. I’ll go to the police,’ he says.

  She smooths the front of her dress and raises an eyebrow at him, and says sneeringly, ‘And tell them what, exactly?’

  Before

  1

  Ben cringed at the noise their shoes were making on the cast-iron staircase, which wrapped around the back of the Old Chemistry building. The metallic thuds rang out onto the empty campus.

  He looked down into the alley between this building and the next, filled with the whirr of generators and extractor fans – other machinery he knew nothing about. This was the sciences corner of the campus and he hardly ever set foot here. It was late; everything was quiet. They were not supposed to be here. ‘Stop worrying,’ Freya had said earlier. ‘Everyone does it all the time. It’ll be fine.’

  He could hear Alex and Adam ahead of him on the staircase, giggling – high. Freya’s shoe, hardly worn and bright green, was above him, dangerously close to his eye. ‘It’s locked,’ came the whisper from above. But then, a moment later: ‘Oh, wait. It’s not. There’s just a latch.’

  The climb was over and moments later Ben stepped onto the roof.

  Housing a giant lecture hall that seated hundreds and sloped down towards a lectern, the Old Chemistry building was not the tallest building on campus, nor the most august. Ben had attended only a few classes there, none of which he remembered. But the roof of the building was a different story: easy to access and never locked, it was flat and sunken, with a low perimeter wall that protected it from the wind, and ensured that anyone who was illegally partying there remained unseen. A wall on which he could rest his elbows as he looked out over the campus, and the city.

  A panorama of lights around them, bright and sharp and full of power.

  The city was carpeted in jacaranda blossoms that even in a post-sunset world cast a soft purple light across the campus. There had been a storm that afternoon, but the sky had cleared, leaving only a cool, refreshing openness. It was a time of year that always buoyed Ben’s spirits. The world was warm and light and colourful, and he felt full of potential.

  ‘Pretoria,’ he whispered, watching the word glide into the silver air.

  It pained him, the immense feeling that he was seeing something beautiful that would go unnoticed by others; that it would disappear as soon as he looked away. Worse, that he wouldn’t remember it: this moment, when the world smelt exactly like this, and looked exactly like this, and felt exactly like this – this expansive, sublime moment. The anxiety of beauty. ‘You feel things too much, and you think too much,’ Freya had told him once when he’d tried to explain it to her.

  Alex and Adam were on the other side of the roof, looking down onto the campus. ‘There are totally two people having sex down there,’ Alex shout-whispered to them.

  ‘I’ve never seen someone lift their leg that high,’ Adam said, trying to demonstrate.

  They laughed.

  Freya had put down a blanket, and was pouring everyone wine. Ben could smell it from where he was standing: acidic and sweet and cheap, the way they liked it. She brought a paper cup, filled to the brim, over to where he was standing. Placed it in front of him like a question. He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, wavering. She sounded serious. He hated it when she was serious.

  ‘You’ve been distracted lately.’

  ‘Just assignments and stuff, no big deal.’

  ‘Not love trouble?’

  ‘No. Not recently. Why so curious, Sizzle?’

  ‘No reason. You just seem on edge. We haven’t spoken in a while.’ She wore that little frown she had cultivated so meticulously. Three short creases just above her nose.

  Ben sighed. He knew he had been distant lately, aloof. Because he had wanted to protect her, because there was a part of his life he didn’t want her to know about. And if he was honest, he enjoyed the secrecy. He enjoyed the fact that there was something that belonged only to him; that he didn’t have to share with her. That separated them. Because he and his sister had no secrets, nothing they didn’t reveal, no emotion, no opinion that wasn’t co-owned. And for a very long time, that had been comforting – that had been a salvation.

  But then something inside him had changed. He’d begun to feel angry. He’d begun to wake up at night feeling something stirring inside him. Some terrible thing. Some terrible thing that wanted to cause pain.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ he said, taking a sip of his wine and retrieving a joint from his pocket.

  Freya folded herself onto the blanket, hugging her knees. Her thick, mud-coloured hair spilled over her face into her lap.

  ‘Where’d you get that, then?’

  ‘From the guy outside The Dank Den.’ He inhaled and offered her the joint. She took it delicately.

  ‘Let’s go out on Friday, even if these two won’t be there. Please? I miss you,’ she said. Her soft, soulful voice was sharpened by the smoke.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Rusty?’ She never called him Rusty; not unless she was sad.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Sizzle.’

  She said, ‘Put on some music, Rusty.’

  Ben was always put in charge of the music. He was a believer in the power of music, the power of a soundtracked life. He didn’t like silence; it made him anxious. Freya was the opposite: she preferred silence, unless she was completely relaxed. She smiled at him now as he took out his phone and plugged it into his tiny portable speaker, as he took a quick photo of the four of them in which Freya stuck her tongue out at him. Then he pressed play. ‘Not too loud,’ he warned, ‘or security will definitely hear us.’

  ‘Bastards,’ Alex said, taking some wine and sitting down on a wooden crate.

  The melancholy guitar strums of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ began to soak into the night. Alex, her hair cropped short, and Adam, long black hair like waves over his face, had been together for ever – constantly smiling at each other, holding hands, turning inwards to develop and nurture their private jokes, their secrets. Ben supposed he and Freya were the same – although not the same at all, of course.

  The crates were scattered all over the roof, together with a few tins used for making fires and dozens of wine bottles stacked against the roof’s edge. Alex said, ‘I hope no one else comes up here tonight,’ and downed her wine. ‘More please, babe,’ she said to Adam.

  He should tell them. He should tell them his secret. His secrets. But he resisted the temptation, taut like an arrow on his tongue, and pushed it back inside: not yet, not yet.

  ‘Mr Jones’ began playing as a soft silence fell. ‘I love this song,’ Freya said, getting up suddenly. In union, they decided to
dance.

  Alex reached over and flicked the volume right up. ‘Let the bastards come,’ she said. The deep bass rhythm pumping from the tiny speaker floated out over the city in a cloud.

  Ben looked around at his friends and their clothes – ripped denim and leather jackets, wife beaters and skinny jeans, All Stars and oversized cardigans. Their flowing, manicured hair, trapped and sparkling in the light, their lithe, glistening bodies moving through the warm night air. He had never felt more relevant, more alive.

  ‘I love you guys,’ he yelled at them, and they smiled back at him from their golden halo of pumping, smoke-laced joy.

  The Lamb and the Knife

  June

  1

  The massive concrete bridge twists across the highway.

  Underneath the bridge, a homeless man has taken shelter. Even in the coldest hours of the night there is an endless stream of traffic flashing past; the lights are frantic, the sound unbearable. His brain is struggling to come to rest. Above him, against the broad grey foot of the bridge, a series of four drawings is illuminated by the light of his withering trash-tin fire. These are new drawings; he did not see them when he left that morning on his foray into the city to look for food, for anything.

  In the first drawing, the figure of a lion and the figure of a lamb – drawn in sharp, broad lines – stand facing each other. The lion is grotesque; the lamb is full of fear. And on the ground between them, there lies a heart. The heart has been torn from the lamb, and in her chest there is a gaping cavity, a black hole.

  In the second, the lamb has in her hands a large knife, which glows red – the only hint of colour in an otherwise monochrome world. The lion’s expression has changed: from proud to wary. The lamb’s too: from horror to anger.

  In the third, the lamb has struck at the lion. The lamb has cut out the lion’s heart; she holds it triumphantly. Holds it in her human hands. The lion has fallen to his knees.

  In the fourth, the lamb has placed the lion’s heart inside her own chest. She is smiling a dark smile. The lion is dead. The lamb’s mouth is open and reveals rows of small, sharp teeth.