Talion Page 8

  Underneath the drawings, the words: It comes with a price.

  And from the mouth of the lamb, the city speaks; it whispers stories into the ear of the homeless man as he falls into sleep. It tells him tales of violence, of revenge, of death. This is the kind of city I am, it says. Run, run away from here.

  But the man trying to sleep here hasn’t been taught how to read, and in the morning his urine will wash the letters from their dirty concrete canvas. He won’t remember the city’s murmurs.

  All he will remember is his hunger.

  Sunday

  2

  Pretoria is an odd capital city. A sleeping city, which spirals out from the stubby inner precincts in waves of suburbs – valleys and valleys of suburbs, where people dutifully raise children or happily retire or peacefully grow up. It’s a city designed around broad, tree-lined boulevards, great parks, shining malls, and quiet embassies. It is a green city, a soft city, a city for idyllic childhoods and lengthy afternoons. A city of diplomacy, responsibility, solidity. A city abundant in the fragrance of mulberry blossoms and freshly mown grass. It had been a happy place to be young in; Freya had liked being wrapped in the tranquil, unthreatening landscape.

  Freya is in a familiar street today; a street she knows too well. She’s stopped on the pavement in front of her childhood home. It’s a compulsion she developed after her parents died – touring the streets of her childhood, the streets of Before. Driving aimlessly, looking for something; not sure of what it is she wants to find.

  Before.

  Before is a province she’s trying desperately to get away from. Scrape off her past and discard it; shed the burden of being Freya Rust – sister, art student, friend. Become lighter, memoryless. But there are still moments hidden throughout the day – moments pregnant with memories and histories and facts; they hover above her, bubbles full of dirty, bloodied life.

  When she isn’t careful they burst, and she drowns under the weight of herself.

  Like right now, standing outside this house, massaging memories from her childhood that can’t be trusted; that are nothing but enchantments. Nothing but a glimmering veneer.

  The house.

  Hidden behind white, ivy-covered walls. With its sloping lawns, its groves of fruit trees, the large, tiled swimming pool. The broken courtyard covered by large canopies that throw thick, green shade.

  They loved it in that courtyard, she and Ben, the way it was slowly falling apart, disappearing into the wilderness of the back garden. It was a place they could escape to, a place of secrets and laughter. Laughter expressly forbidden inside the house. They could sneak sweets and eat them where no one could see. They could hide from the stifling, solid idea of parents and school. They could be free.

  And visible just behind the hallowed walls – its dark canopy leering down – is the mulberry tree. She aches for it now; aches to be back inside the branches of that tree with Ben. One of her earliest memories – perhaps her very earliest – is of the summer they moved into this house and she first climbed that tree and watched the mulberries grow. How when the berries emerged, they were green and hard and covered in a prickly white fuzz. How, as the long days rolled on, they began to change. Small red flecks appeared on the green nibs; then the fruits grew a little softer, a little plumper. A few weeks later, she drew first blood. When she pressed her too-long nails forcefully into the berry, red stuff spurted out; she watched, fascinated, as the sticky juice oozed out. As the summer lengthened, the fruit rapidly changed colour. From their initial candy-­red they began to deepen, intensify. They became purple, purple, purple. They became glossy and unappetising and made big splashes on the ground as they fell from the tree, too heavy to live. Freya could hardly touch them without the plump rubies disintegrating, without getting purple stains all over herself.

  They became too sweet to eat.

  Freya slowly gets out of her car, lighting a cigarette. The sky is just waking itself up, becoming blue. The morning star winks on the horizon. The world is absolutely still. The houses are lightless; there are no sounds of traffic, no signs of life. The street is enveloped in the brittle winter’s morning.

  A few years later, she had her first kiss under the mulberry tree. He came swaggering up to her, carrying a bag of fruit that rustled against his swimming costume. ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi.’ She was busy eating a mulberry, and her hands and lips were stained.

  He asked, ‘What are you eating?’ and she replied, ‘Mulberries,’ and he laughed a little like that wasn’t something he would ever do. Then he offered her one of the fruits in his bag. They were round and wrinkled, purple, but not purple like her mulberries. Purple like bruises. They smelt sour.

  ‘What are they?’ she asked.

  ‘Passion fruits,’ he said. ‘Granadillas.’

  ‘Passionfruitgranadillas? That’s a silly name.’

  ‘No, stupid. Passion fruits. Or granadillas. They have two names.’

  ‘I don’t think things should have two names.’

  ‘Well, these things do.’

  He opened one up. It had white flesh. Viscous, velvety flesh. And in the middle of this flesh was a pocket of orange goo with black speckles suspended in it. To Freya, it looked like something from the inside of an animal. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Taste it,’ he commanded. She didn’t want to. She wanted more mulberries. But he said, ‘If you taste it, I’ll give you a kiss,’ and she had been wanting to kiss a boy ever since Grietjie from next door had kissed a boy. So she tasted it. It had a sticky taste. Too sweet and too sour. It gave her a headache.

  And then he kissed her, and the passion fruit shells fell from her hands – discarded, leaking yellow blood into the earth.

  Freya turns in a slow circle, closing her eyes, pulling the city through her. The city is soaked in memories like that – memories that sit like para­sites on street corners all over Pretoria and latch on to her, keeping her from being free.

  She thought about it, after Ben died. Thought about packing up every­thing and leaving. Thought about moving away, starting over. That’s what Ben would have done. What Ben would have done anyway; she’s always known he wouldn’t stay here, that he hated the city because it is where their parents died.

  But what is the point of starting over, of trying to get to know some other city, when she knows that in her core it is the grit and dust of this city that fuels her? This is the place she knows. She knows it as intimately as she knows her own body. She has explored its pathways, its pleasures and pains, just as deftly, just as thoroughly. This city is in her guts. And it knows her like she knows it. The city has formed her. Has made, unmade, and remade her. She thinks like this city, moves like this city.

  Everywhere else would treat her like a stranger; she wouldn’t know who she was, somewhere else.

  Pretoria is inside her and rejecting it would be an act of great betrayal.

  She might as well cut out her own heart and leave it fidgeting on the ground.

  3

  A list of things Mr October does every morning: makes coffee, prays, eats a slice of toast (marmalade, no butter), walks into his dead son’s room, takes a shower, cries quietly in the shower, listens to his daughter breathing through her bedroom door, leaves the house before he has to see her.

  4

  The large face-brick building stands baking in the morning sun. The sign at the bottom of the yellow lawn reads: Methodist Church of South Africa, Sunday Service: 08:00. Cars are spilling out of the tiny parking lot onto the surrounding pavements; religion is still doing big business amid the middle class of Pretoria.

  Freya considers driving right through the ugly stained-glass windows that frame the heavy wooden doors. Instead, she squeezes her car onto a stretch of pavement that gives her a view of the doors, and the people who would come dripping out of them any second now. Dazed and guiltless.

  While she waits, she lights a joint. The smoke fills her lungs, dry and sweet. She sits low in her seat and lets the breeze w
aft through her window.

  Yesterday, she returned to the park behind his house, and she waited.

  In daylight she had a much better view of his garden; the grass is yellow and short, beset with weeds. His porch is rotting. And in the corner, right against the back wall, stands a garden shed. Small and derelict, it looks unused, and makes an odd contrast to the newly painted house.

  The parkland around the stream isn’t being looked after. The grass is barely alive and there is litter everywhere; empty chocolate wrappers and vodka bottles adorn the stream, caked in mud. An abandoned jungle gym stands in the centre of the park – one swing missing, rusted and forlorn. It smells like rotting garbage. The stream is lined with untended grass, dense shrubs, and large willow trees. She stood in the shadow of these plants, hidden from view. It was quiet; she saw no one come through: not one jogger, not one person walking their dog.

  She waited until she heard the front door open, and then she crouched down, peering through the foliage. A young woman was getting into a car; even from that distance Freya recognised her as the teenage girl in the bar from the night before – his daughter.

  There was still no sign of him.

  All the curtains were drawn; strong, thick burglar bars in front of all the windows. What darkness lurks behind those dull walls? And how could she invite it into the open? How could she force it to reveal itself?

  While she waited, she stared at the spot where she knew the red Mercedes was parked, and she stared at the great, leafless tree that grew above it. A gnarled tree that she recognised even in winter, even as grey and barren as it was. A mulberry tree. A mulberry identical to the one that stands like a great mythical ruin at the centre of her childhood.

  Eventually, he came out of the house and hurried to his car.

  She followed.

  She followed him all day.

  She followed as he drove to a nearby school. She parked outside the school and waited. She followed him back home, again taking up position in the park. She watched as he washed his car (the Renault, not the Mercedes). She watched as he let himself into the shed in the back garden; he stayed in there for at least an hour. She watched as his daughter came home and left again a few hours later. And she followed him when, five minutes after his daughter left the house, he came out in a hurry.

  She followed him as he drove towards the campus, the cold night leaking into her car.

  She followed him as he stopped and bought himself dinner – a pie and a Coke.

  She followed him all the way to Hatfield.

  She followed him back to the exact spot where he shot Ben in cold blood.

  Back to where she had watched her brother die.

  At first she thought he was on some dark errand; that he might be ready to kill again. She became sure he was waiting for his next victim; that he couldn’t be here a second night in a row for no reason. Every time another car drove past, she tensed, waiting for a gunshot. But he just sat in his car, staring at the bar, his face blighted by slants of shadow. He stayed there until four in the morning; eventually, responding to some silent unfathomable sign, he left.

  Freya went home, cold and heartbroken and determined to be outside his house again in the morning.

  Which is when she followed him here, to this church. This ugly, silly church.

  She watches the door of the church; there, in the shadow of the interior, he stands. He is collecting hymn books with a stern look on his face, the folds of skin around his mouth turned down. Sour, unfriendly. Murderous.

  She holds the letter she stole from his mailbox in her hand. Nothing of substance, just a magazine subscription renewal form. But there, printed in simple black type, is his name. This morning when she woke up, as she tried to throw the shadows off herself, she had a vision; a vision of herself walking up to him and stabbing him in the heart. And she said his name out loud for the first time; she announced it to the empty, Ben-soaked flat.

  ‘Abraham October.’

  ‘Abraham October.’

  ‘Abraham October.’

  Monday

  5

  Slick eyes the block of flats impatiently. If he makes the wrong move now, it will all fall apart. All because the fools weren’t discreet enough. Because they wouldn’t listen. Because of those stupid blue shoes hanging there for the whole world to see.

  He calls a number and lets it ring three times. Above him someone flicks a curtain aside and a moment later he is buzzed up through the pedestrian gate. He moves inside quickly. A young man stands in the shadow of the building, framed by the front door; his eyes widen as soon as he sees Slick. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asks.

  Slick smiles, but shakes his head in warning. All he says is, ‘Get inside, Steve.’

  Steve shrinks back, then turns and hurries upstairs.

  The flat is small and messy. An open-plan bedroom and kitchen. A bathroom, off to the right. An unmade bed in the far corner. The curtains drawn, darkened sunlight giving the room a red taint. The smell of marijuana spoiling the air. There is another young man asleep in the bed.

  ‘Get rid of your friend, Steve.’

  Steve nods, makes his way through the maze of dirty laundry and empty pizza boxes on the floor, and wakes his friend up, whispering in his ear. The young man nods, jumps out of the bed. He pulls on some clothes wordlessly and leaves, not looking at Slick once.

  ‘Wait,’ Slick says. The man pauses at the door, turning around slowly, but keeping his gaze to the floor. He is tall and slim and gaunt, with messy black hair. Slick takes a step towards him. He pauses. Then he laughs. ‘Nice tattoo,’ he says.

  The man’s fingers automatically begin to linger over his lower stomach. ‘Thanks,’ he mutters and closes the door behind him.

  Slick turns to Steve. ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Does he know anything?’

  ‘No,’ Steve says, ‘nothing.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Good. Where is the stuff?’

  ‘In the closet.’

  ‘Get it. We have to move it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The police. They know it’s here. They’re going to be raiding this place. Tomorrow. So get moving.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  ‘Anonymous tip-off.’

  ‘Do you know who it was?’

  ‘I have my suspicions.’

  ‘Who—’

  ‘Just pack it up and let’s go.’

  ‘I’m coming with you?’

  ‘Yes, you’re going to lay low somewhere for a while. I don’t want the police asking questions.’

  ‘They know about me? Specifically?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I’m not taking chances. So get moving.’

  Steve doesn’t move for a few seconds, then jumps into action, moving quickly to the closet and lifting the floorboards. He begins packing large green packets into a bag.

  ‘Which car is yours? I’ll start moving the stuff.’

  ‘The Atos.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which fucking one?’

  ‘The white one.’

  Slick nods, moves to the window and peers out. ‘Fuck,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is there a back way out of this place?’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The police are outside. Stay here, don’t let anyone in. I’ll call you when you can come down.’

  6

  Winter in Pretoria has a particular smell. An arid smell. A cold smell – but with a suggestion of fire, robust and earthy. And a hint of concrete. In the centre of the smell, there is dust; dust covers everything in winter. It is a smell that fills your bones when you walk out the door in the morning; when you go outside for a mid-afternoon smoke break and the sun has crisped the air; and when, at dusk, it comes rushing from the shadows like desiccated ice and the perfume of cooling bark snaps
off the trees and you rush inside the house to curl into the warmth of yourself.

  But at noon the smell is at its most potent. It washes over Nolwazi as she steps from the car and wraps her jersey around her waist.

  The flat she’s looking for – number E6 Jacaranda Court, Mill Street – is in a squat block adjacent to an empty lot haunted by graffiti. Telephone wires span the front of the building, and flung over these, hanging from shoelaces that have been tied together, is a pair of shoes. Not old, but slightly scuffed, the shoes are bright blue with red laces. Nolwazi stretches her own feet; they’re hot and trapped. Her shoes are blocky and black – practical shoes for practical ladies is what it said on the side of the brown box they came in.

  The blue shoes are an advertisement, an invitation. Somewhere on this street, someone is selling drugs. Nolwazi looks the street up and down. It is quiet, mid-morning. Apartment blocks are stacked tightly along its length. A solitary restaurant is squashed in between them, but isn’t open for business yet. There is no one in the street except a beleaguered car guard with a limp, who wouldn’t be able to stop anyone from stealing the clothes off your back, let alone a car. But he would know something; he would know where on this street you could find those drugs. His function as intermediary, and his discretion, would have been bought by the dealer. He definitely won’t talk to her. She makes a note of the shoes, anyway. And of the way the car guard is stealing glances at her when he thinks she isn’t looking.

  ‘Come on up,’ the voice says when he buzzes her in. The elevator rattles ominously on the way, her stomach clenching.

  Eric Evans is dressed in a tank top and shorts, a uniform Nolwazi associates with joggers, a group of people she tends to dislike. He is sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter in the small flat (kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom) eating cereal. The tip of his fringe (long, blond) is wet with milk where it has fallen into the cereal, but he hasn’t noticed. The kitchen is dank, and Eric has left the front door open to let in some light. Behind the kitchen, two doors that lead to bedrooms are closed. To her right, she glimpses a dirty bathroom, floor strewn with towels and underwear. Students. Which, if she hasn’t already made it clear, are the natural enemy of the police officer.