Last Train to Retreat Page 4

  The depressing feeling that she was a murderer among saints lifted somewhat when she saw an old poster in reception saying, “16 Days of Activism for no violence against women and children. Don’t look away, act against abuse.” It wasn’t the 16 days of no violence – she no longer believed politicians mouthing platitudes year after year or the statistics that under-reported abuse yet still ranked as one of the worst in the world – it was that she hadn’t looked away, that she had acted against abuse.

  •

  Two nights later the sound of gunshots awoke Lena. Instantly alert, she thought how it was that life on the Flats conditioned the subconscious never to mistake gunshots for fireworks or car exhausts.

  She turned only her head so that both ears were off the pillow, and listened for more sound. People on the Flats lived with guns the way buck on the plains lived with big cats – they were part of life that was often short and brutal. Tonight there was no telling if the guns were meant for her.

  Car engines revving, more shots, squealing tyres – Lena wanted to pull the pillow over her head but the instinct to survive stopped her – she needed to hear if the front door was being kicked in or the window shattered, hear if footsteps were coming her way. She’d grab Sarai, exit through the kitchen door at the back of the house, scale a few fences and run once more.

  Hardly breathing Lena listened for the slightest sound.

  A floorboard creaked. God, were they already inside the house? Her dilapidated fence had long since ceased to be a first line of defence but she had locked the doors and closed the windows. To have eyes like a cat on this inky night! With her arms stiffly by her side the impulse to throw off the duvet and run became almost unbearable. Memories of being called a little giraffe by her mother – all legs, slender neck, large brown eyes – and her father, like a male giraffe aroused by his female offspring coming in season, suddenly becoming interested in her, memories of another room, other footsteps in the dark, of waiting, tense and still.

  From the darkness came Sarai’s plaintive voice, ‘Lena, that big noise … what is it? I am scared, Lena.’

  Lena breathed again. ‘It’s guns, Sarai. Don’t worry, probably just a gang fight. It happens all the time.’ But Lena couldn’t be sure, Cupido fresh in her mind.

  Like a ghost Sarai appeared by the side of her bed. Then she felt Sarai sliding in under the duvet against her – shivering in her T-shirt, fragrant, firm. Lena put her arms around her. How strange the sensation of giving comfort by touch only? Lena had felt it on the first night when she stroked Sarai while she was asleep. Now they were awake, their bodies melded against each other. Sarai stopped shivering and her breathing became even – like a pet frightened by fireworks now safely in the arms of her mistress.

  Lena thought Sarai was dozing off when suddenly she felt the girl’s fingers tracing her spine. She stiffened. Was it a caress? They shifted to Lena’s stomach, found her navel, gently massaging it. Lena lay like a plank – flashes of nightly visits, furtive touching, awkward penetration accompanied by searing pain and tears, dire warnings if she said a word, bile rising in her thick and bitter threatening to choke her. And afterwards, her father’s face in her pillow, his mumbled apologies, words tumbling like a waterfall – nothing like his carefully scripted Sunday sermons – until she clamped her hands over her ears to stop him from drawing her into his pain and his self-deception.

  ‘Sarai, stop it! Please don’t do that.’ Lena rolled away.

  ‘But I like you, Lena … very much,’ Sarai blurted out, sounding hurt.

  ‘It’s … it’s not right!’

  ‘But loving or liking someone means it is okay.’

  ‘I like you as well but I’m sorry, I can’t do it. Maybe one day … one day we can talk about it.’ Lena faced the girl again. ‘I think you should go back to your own bed.’ God, she was talking about ‘one day’ as if the girl was going to stay. New, disturbing feelings were running through Lena.

  But every night the girl would start off alone and end up in Lena’s bed until morning. Sarai made sure something of hers was always touching Lena – a foot, a leg, a hand, an arm. Mostly they slept soundly but sometimes the girl would call out something in Thai and rub lasciviously against Lena in her sleep. It would wake Lena up and her heart would start pounding. And she wouldn’t move away.

  Five

  Zane locked eyes with his opponent while keeping sight of the whole man. Slow the breathing, relax the muscles, empty the mind of everything except the target – it was a mantra he worked hard on in his training. It could mean the difference between life and death one day. His opponent was ahead on points – he had a waza-ari, or half a point and Zane had none.

  They stood in the fighting stance, one leg in front, knees flexed, upper body at a forty-five degree angle, hands up and elbows in. They wore mitts, gum shields, groin protectors, and pristine white gis, no weapons, only empty hands, even finger and toe nails cut short. The dojo’s bright lights bore down on their sweating bodies. Refereeing the fight was Sensei Simon Rees, 4thdan, late-thirties, calm blue eyes, black belt frayed white and all fat chiselled from him from years of training.

  Zane’s back foot tapped his opponent’s front ankle, distracting him, then bounced up with a snap-kick to the man’s stomach followed by a roundhouse to the side of the head. It stopped just before contact – sun-dome in training. What did penetrate was Zane’s shout or kiai that accompanied the attack.

  ‘Ippon!’ said Sensei Simon, arm up, awarding Zane a full point and the bout. In real life there would be no holding back – kicks and strikes were designed to incapacitate or kill.

  Zane and his opponent bowed to each other and made way for the next two contestants. ‘Oss, Loslit!’ Maurice acknowledged, giving Zane a little smile. ‘Loslit’ was what his fellow karateka called Zane, ‘loose-joint’ in Afrikaans because of his remarkable suppleness. Zane and Maurice both held the rank of 1stkyu brown belt and both were training for their 1stdan black belt grading in a few months’ time.

  The class of brown and black belts did twenty more minutes of rigorous kihon and kata – high rep individual techniques as well as prescribed, ballet-like sequences that told of imaginary opponents coming from all directions and how the karateka might defend and counter the attacks. It required flow, grace and explosiveness all at once, and Zane felt good because he’d been told by Sensei Simon that he was good at it.

  •

  Zane’s high over his ippon win was short-lived. As he exited the dojo in Plumstead and made his way to his flat in Wynberg he thought of Chantal’s call two days earlier. ‘The house where the explosion took place is Hannibal’s, Zane, and everyone is saying they’re making tik,’ she had said, voice trembling on the phone.

  Zane chose a route with little traffic because at 8.15 pm it was dark and all he had were flashing lights on the front and back of his bike to alert motorists. To see where he was going he relied on street lamps. He crossed over busy Gabriel then Constantia Road heading for the quiet capillaries of Wellington and Mortimer. He could feel the cold sweeping away his good spirits – it caused his eyes to water and his face to sting, an unwelcome reality check. Since his sister first shared her suspicion about the house and Hannibal, the intensity of Zane’s training had increased through sheer nervous energy.

  Halfway through his 2.3 kilometre ride he got to the first of seven speed humps. He accelerated, ramping and whooping along the straight, flat road but not as gleefully as usual. He did it six more times and felt no better. Damn Hannibal! It was he who had introduced Zane to martial arts at the community hall in Lavender Hill in his last year at school. That the older Hannibal had bothered flattered Zane no end, even after Zane found out that he’d become besotted with Chantal and she was not returning his advances. That was until she fell under his spell – a black event if ever there was one. Twice a week a sensei from Newlands would cross the railway line to the Flats to instruct them. The highly formalised style of Okinawan Goju Ryu didn’t go with
the shabby shorts and T-shirts they trained in but the sensei said what mattered was the discipline. Straightaway Hannibal stood out – for his love of fighting, his killer instinct, and his disdain of rules and etiquette. After smashing the nose of an opponent with a head butt the sensei banned him from the hall. Soon thereafter the project died a quiet death. Gutter fighting, down and dirty, was the reality of the Flats – not kihon, kata, and kumite, and Zen philosophy.

  At school Hannibal was Zane’s hero. No one could beat him in fights; those who tried were left senseless and bloodied. He taunted and intimidated teachers. And he was a magnet for the girls: his swagger was both relaxed and coiled, he cultivated a passive face and hard eyes – things he had acquired from Chinese triad movies – and even though he was chunky he moved with surprising speed and grace. The final touch to his looks came after he had founded the Evangelicals gang – knife scars on his right upper cheek and left chin sustained in turf wars, thick welts as a result of refusing stitches, boosting his appeal and reputation. And instead of four natural front teeth – which he’d had taken out – Hannibal used removable dental bridges overprinted with letters making words. One read HA-NN-IB-AL, another K-I-L-L, and there was N-A-A-I. In the company of strangers he would suddenly smile and enjoy their reaction.

  It was at that time that Zane became aware of the fear of violence within him – of being sucked into the violence of others, and harmed or killed. He had seen a man die with a bullet in the chest. He had cowered as his father hit his mother in drunken fits. At school he had watched boys fight until they were blinded from all the blood. He stood up for no one, did not speak up at home, gave a wide berth to trouble in the streets. He wondered if he would ever become a real man. On the dojo floor Hannibal got the measure of him – a nervy boy who flinched when bone hit bone as his kicks and punches were being blocked – and said, ‘I’ll make a man of you yet, Zane, dis uitgesort.’ If only Zane had known what it meant! But he asked no questions – not when a lifeline was being thrown by someone like Hannibal. Joining the Evangelicals had offered hope to Zane for the first time, made him feel important, given purpose to his meaningless existence. And by then Chantal had fallen in love with Hannibal because in the early days of the Evangelicals Hannibal was seen as doing God’s will – meting out divine justice where the police couldn’t or wouldn’t. The Evangelicals were God’s own warriors and at eighteen Zane had become one of them.

  Screeching tyres broke up Zane’s thoughts. A car jumped the red light at the intersection of Aliwal and Church causing another motorist to slam on brakes. ‘Fucking asshole!’ the one shouted. ‘Up yours!’ the other shouted back. Even on the privileged side of the track violence lurked, Zane thought. It merely had a civilised veneer. Was that what he was acquiring at the dojo – the capability to kill cloaked in nice-sounding maxims in an alien language? Could he ever punch or kick through the point where his training had conditioned him to stop, with one thing in mind – to kill? Was scoring an ippon refereed by Sensei Simon and bound by the rules of Shotokan – his style – true courage? Or was it fending off a murderous attack in an alley on the Flats when your dry mouth and shaking hands told you to run?

  As he entered his building he knew that the boy who had held his tongue during Hannibal’s brutal initiation rites had crossed the line with him to Wynberg.

  •

  Bernadette’s intoxicating fragrance was wafting from the bedroom as he walked into the flat. She was waiting in his bed, not the lounge, as she often did. There were signs in the kitchen that they would eat later – it was first things first with Bernadette – the pot on the stove, the chopped garlic, onions, and tomato on a plate, the spaghetti on the counter. She was from a wealthy family in Upper Constantia, her father, Derek Booysen, having made his money in property during the boom of 2003-2007. He had bought her a car to run around in while she was ‘finding her feet’ in advertising. ‘Why choose me, Bee?’ Zane asked many times, ‘I can’t take you to my home and you can’t take me to yours. We have to hang out in places your parents will never go to. And I got nothing.’ They avoided Constantia, where her parents lived, the southern suburbs from Rosebank to Kenilworth, and the Atlantic seaboard, and frequented instead hip, arty spots like Woodstock which her father still thought of as a sleaze hole from the 1990s. Bernadette would toss her plaits around – finely knotted like rope but not as dull, more a lively red – and say, with her thumb up, ‘But you got so much, baby. Bernadette likes this!’ She’d stroke his sleek head – hair cropped with no parting, snugly fitting his skull like a dark-brown swimming cap – and she’d run her hands playfully down his hard chest and arms, down his legs and groin as if checking for concealed weapons.

  They had met at the AAA School of Advertising in Cape Town where their agencies had enrolled them, he by Barnard, Ainslie, Theron, or BAT as it was known, and she by her agency on the other side of town. His mother, Gloria, wanted him to join the Arthur Murray School of Dancing in Plumstead. ‘Now there you’d meet the right kind of girl – a nice Coloured girl,’ she said. Bee thought it hilarious, ‘Look what you got instead – something wild, and white! Live for today, Zane, tomorrow might never come.’ But like clockwork after love-making his mind would switch to the future and he’d talk about it while she lay in the after-glow of her orgasm.

  ‘Baby, come here,’ she called out.

  His body shook with anticipation. He was glad he’d showered at the dojo. He ripped off his tracksuit and shoes, left the bike at a crazy angle against the wall, and went into the candle-lit bedroom. She lay naked in the flickering light twirling her kinky plaits. For a while his future would be suspended, as would all thoughts of Hannibal on the other side of the tracks.

  Six

  A few nights later Sarai tried again to make love to Lena. Lena, having showered first, was in bed dozing off after a hard day at The Centre. It was the girl’s turn in the shower. The sounds of cascading water interspersed with vigorous soaping were comforting to Lena – it felt as if the exotic girl-woman had been in Lena’s house for months.

  Sarai came from the bathroom under cover of darkness and slipped into bed naked, pressing her fragrant body against Lena’s. Lena gave a startled little cry. This time the girl went further. She cupped one of Lena’s breasts, ran her tongue over the hardening nipple then took it in her mouth. A strange sensation swept through Lena. With broken breath she let Sarai suck and bite her. Caught in the dark, Lena had no time to think, only to feel, and what she was feeling was surprisingly good. It seemed all too brief – a matter of seconds to Lena – before it changed into something disturbing once more.

  Lena pushed Sarai away, ‘I’m a woman … surely it’s a man that you want?’

  ‘I only do men for money, Lena, nothing else. So I can pay men like Cupido and go home. Hah, men in Cape Town not for loving! When I think of loving I think of women, beautiful women.’

  ‘You can’t mean I’m beautiful?’

  ‘More than you think, Lena, you just don’ look after yourself – no make-up, no perfume, no hip swing, no sweet look in eyes. And you good person, like some farangs I know back home. You kill for me … ah, you prefer men, is that why you don’ want me?’

  ‘God, no, Sarai, I hate them, how can I want them!’

  ‘But … but … I don’ understand, we both don’ want men. So why not …’

  ‘It’s a long story I’ve told no one …’

  ‘You don’ want me here anymore, Lena, I am too much trouble!’

  ‘No, you’re not. Listen to me, with no papers you’ll be arrested and sent to a terrible, terrible place, Sarai, and you may never see your home again. You have to stay here.’ Lena had visions of the girl out there on her own and cracking up, telling all out of fear and desperation. She kissed Sarai, and whispered, ‘I want you to stay, okay?’

  But Sarai seemed inconsolable. She cried herself to sleep in Lena’s arms leaving Lena with an unsettling feeling that the girl was going to be more difficult to manage in the w
eeks ahead. On her own, cooped up in the house during the day, and not getting the kind of love she expected from Lena, Sarai could become dangerously discontented. Lena’s survival depended on retaining control of her and at this moment she had no idea how she was going to do it other than entering into a steamy relationship. But the brief, delicious sensation was nowhere near compelling enough for Lena to forget what had happened in her father’s house. No amount of scrubbing in the shower could remove the slime Elton Valentine had left on her. Whoever touched her thereafter would feel it, sooner or later, because she could feel it.

  Could she ever let go and lose herself – with anyone? Lena doubted it – her rage was hotter than any passion.

  •

  Lena encouraged Sarai to go to the shops during the day if she felt like it – to get out, to buy groceries, milk, bread, and fruit – but not to engage in any conversation. ‘You never know who you could be talking to,’ she warned. ‘We don’t want the police coming here asking questions. Don’t forget, although I killed Cupido, we were both there and you did hate him, Sarai. What if the cops say you helped me? You’ll never get back to your island.’

  The girl would nod gravely and take the money Lena gave her. She would be at home when Lena returned from work but Lena could see she was getting edgy. One day Lena found her on hands and knees cleaning the linoleum kitchen floor with a wet cloth. Although Lena had never seen her do it she thought nothing of it. It was only when Lena prepared dinner and saw Sarai cleaning the floor for the third time that Lena asked her to stop. Sarai became argumentative, insisting that the floors were ‘very, very dirty’ and that germs and cooking didn’t go together. She was bright and alert but aggressive, not letting Lena finish a sentence. Her final act of defiance was to remove her T-shirt and bra and start on the floor again, breasts swinging as she cleaned. They mesmerised Lena – they were like low-hanging, swaying mangoes. Lena and Sarai ended up having their first argument, with Sarai refusing to eat, and staying in her own bed the entire night.