Last Train to Retreat Page 8

  ‘I’ll go now, Appleby, the sooner the better, right?’ Thank God Appleby couldn’t see what his arm looked like.

  As he packed up, his phone rang. It was Bernadette.

  ‘Thanks for phoning last night.’ In most matters Bernadette didn’t beat about the bush.

  ‘Sorry, Bee, I was busy.’

  ‘I see, a busy bee, was that it? What with or who with?’ She was insanely jealous too.

  ‘It’s the pitch, things are getting hectic. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay, let’s get together on the weekend, it’s warming up, we can go to Sandy Bay, wine, snacks, a blanket, you know …’ She was already thinking about making love in the bushes lining Cape Town’s first and unofficial nudist beach. Getting there was a schlep – in Bee’s car to Llandudno then a long walk – but it was one place they were guaranteed not to bump into Bernadette’s parents.

  ‘Ha, ha, the water’s so freezing I won’t be able to do it. And then how’d you feel?’ It was a dumb thing to say, he thought, perhaps the dumbest since becoming a junior account executive. ‘Seriously, I think we’re going to have to work this weekend. Magnus is on everyone’s case. I’m not even taking a chicken to my parents on Saturday.’

  She said nothing, an unhealthy sign with Bernadette.

  ‘Come on Bee, you’re in the business, you know how it goes. I’ll make it up to you next week, okay?’

  Her silence was now decidedly unhealthy. It inspired him, and he blurted out, ‘There’s something else, Bee …’

  ‘What?’ she snapped.

  ‘My mouth … you don’t want to see it let alone kiss it. Accident, bust my lips. It looks really ugly …’ His voice trailed off. For a short while her breathing told him she was still there then there was a depressing click.

  He ran to catch the train. He had to get to the girl to check on her injury and find out more about her. Was there anything stupider than sheltering a murderer about whom he knew nothing and who could die in his bed or disappear into thin air? The answer was yes – being an accomplice to the murder. Whichever way he looked at it, it was impossible to put a spin on it that would make him feel better. It occurred to him that his mouth injury didn’t warrant antibiotics and that the doctor could decide to give him something else which would be of no help to the girl.

  His worst fears were realised when he got home. The gash had not bled again since the previous night but he didn’t like the redness and swelling around it – it was how his own infection had started after the surfboard accident. And then she said, almost accusingly: ‘You know you helped me to kill that man?’ She was in bed wearing his surfing T-shirt with ‘LOCALS ONLY’ on it. Her mahogany fringe was neatly combed. She smelled of soap.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means if you go to the police we’d both be in trouble. I killed Gatiep, yes, but you helped me. We killed him.’ In the afternoon light streaming in from the mountain her eyes were a rich chocolaty brown except they had no sweetness in them. More like bitter chocolate, he thought.

  ‘Why are you so afraid to tell the police exactly what happened? You, we, had every right to defend ourselves! And what about thanking me for saving your life, huh?’

  ‘Curly won’t ever forget my face and now he’s on the loose,’ she said. ‘It was a bad thing to let him go. Maybe he even saw where we got off.’ It was as if she was thinking aloud rather than engaging in conversation, and what he heard was the hunter talking not the hunted. He felt a rush of admiration for her courage but her detached tone shocked him, bringing back images of her knifing Gatiep. The hunched-up figure in the train’s carriage, her silence, and vulnerable air – how the men had underestimated her! He told himself not to fall into the same trap.

  It galvanised him. He blurted out: ‘Who are you? Why in God’s name did you steal Gatiep’s things? What a dumb thing to do … what’ll the police think?’ He paced up and down the small room. ‘And where’s his stuff anyway … and your knife?’

  Her eyes were unfathomable like dark brown pools. Maybe her knife was under the blankets. She could kill him later while he was asleep in the lounge, stay in the flat for a few days then quietly disappear. They’d find his corpse and that would be it. Zane Hendricks would not have died in Lavender Hill after all.

  By the time Zane got to the doctor’s room it had closed. He had visions of her dying on him in the night. That was if she didn’t get him first.

  •

  Ominously, by morning, the red around the girl’s wound had spread and a pus-like liquid was oozing out. ‘I’m going to take you to Wynberg Hospital, you hear me?’ Zane said rushing around doing breakfast and getting dressed at the same time. ‘It’s close. We’ll take a taxi.’

  ‘Nooitie, you can’t force me!’

  ‘Then I’ll call an ambulance.’ His stomach felt knotted like the laces of his shoes he’d tied furiously seconds earlier.

  ‘No you won’t. They’ll see it’s a knife wound, they would’ve seen the papers, they’ll tell the police. The police will search the flat, ask why we kept silent. Is that what you want? It’s too late now.’

  They spoke fast like lovers on the Flats having a spat. All this time she was having Marmite toast washed down with Rooibos tea. He marvelled at how much she could eat while having a tense conversation. Bernadette would have called it an example of female multi-tasking that men were incapable of.

  Zane ended up calling Appleby to say he’d be late for work. He then cycled to the doctor who had treated him for his surfing injury, and requested antibiotic tablets and cream for a ten-day biking trip he was planning in the mountains – ‘Just in case, Doctor, you understand.’ When the doctor asked him about his mouth Zane said with a shrug, ‘I’m a brown belt going for black, it comes with the territory.’ It was Appleby who had said that drinking with his GHD client at least once a week was something that came with the territory.

  Fifteen minutes later he exited the chemist shop and cycled home, a plastic bag with medicine swinging from the handlebar – a warrior triumphantly returning with the spoils of war. High on adrenaline he ramped up and down pavements expertly negotiating gaps to avoid pedestrians and lampposts. He took the Court Road incline effortlessly. But when he entered the lift of his building and the doors closed on him he felt trapped again. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror – a crack ran through his face like a fault-line cutting it in two. He was staring into the eyes of his old enemy – the enemy within – and he saw the hard truth: You got the medicine to save the girl so that you didn’t have to take her to hospital – not because of her fears, whatever they are, but because of your own.

  His image in the mirror morphed into a boy with a gun facing a rival gang, in a street where the lights had been shot out earlier and residents were cowering behind doors – an order by Hannibal that included no calls to the police, for their own sake, he had said, for who else but the Evangelicals, God’s fighters, would protect them from the invaders? And to his men: ‘Defend the neighbourhood even if it means death!’ The boy and the other new recruits formed the frontline as part of Hannibal’s ‘man test’, the boy struggling to make out the enemy in the new moon, wanting to throw himself on the ground and make himself small but staying upright to prove he was at last a man. No drugs to bolster him, to give him the courage and the heart to kill because the Evangelicals weren’t into drugs then, only God. The gun shaking in the boy’s virgin hands, his entire body flinching in anticipation of being pierced by bullets, the sudden flashes, thudding and whining around him, his trigger finger pulling and pulling – unfired cartridges would make him fail the test – not in anger or hatred but to be accepted and respected, to feel part of something, to feel that for the first time in his eighteen years he was somebody. The boy on his right suddenly screaming, ‘Jissis, Jissis, help my!’ tottering then going down hard like a tree felled. Screams everywhere – death was never interested in taking sides – sirens wailing, blue lights flashing, Hannibal’s thunde
ring voice, ‘vamoose!’, figures scattering, zigzagging with hooded heads like guinea fowl racing low through long grass, leaving behind bodies and the acrid smell of fired guns.

  To this day Zane did not know if he had actually killed someone. He had fired his gun, yes – at an enemy out there rather than at a target he could see – and he had aimed high so that he wouldn’t hit anyone. But the barrel jerked up and down so violently that it was impossible to tell. In the end five people lay dead – two of Hannibal’s men and three from the other side. Zane was questioned for days as were other youths, but gangs never talked, preferring revenge to laying charges against rivals. Then suddenly all went quiet. Hannibal shrugged off rumours of a police payoff, smiled in his devastating way, embraced Zane on a job well done, and carried on his love affair with Zane’s sister, Chantal. Zane was free – but not from Hannibal or the knowledge that, captured in police files, were his name and personal details, open-ended, hanging over him. His had been a freedom bought, not earned.

  As the tyres of Zane’s bike squealed softly on the shiny passage floor to his apartment, he felt as if the Flats had followed him across the line in the shape of a willowy girl with fire in her eyes. He had left Kapie-taal behind him with its funny-sad overtones of failure and desperation, speaking English in shops, on the trains, at BAT, and to Bernadette. Now it was with him again, in his apartment, in his bedroom, its sounds carrying his dismal past.

  Much later, his mind a maelstrom, Zane suddenly sat up from where he was lying on the lounge couch. How dumb to carry on using the train to get to work! What if Curly had seen them get off at Wynberg? All Curly had to do was hang around the station at peak time and wham! Sooner or later they’d stare into each other’s eyes again. Zane decided that for the next ten days he’d use a bus or go by bike. At least it was summer and he wouldn’t have the rain and the cold and the dark.

  •

  Three days later she was gone, nothing left of her in the flat but rumpled sheets and pillows and some dirty dishes in the sink. No note, nothing. He had returned from work carrying food and groceries and called her name expecting her to be there. Although her wound had responded well to the antibiotics she had still limped badly. What did he expect, he now asked himself – for her to stay longer, and when she was ready to go, hug him and say thank you? She wasn’t the kind. But he had no idea what kind she was. All he knew was that he felt a strange and surprising emptiness when he realised she had gone. The feeling got worse when he started wondering if she had tricked him into believing her leg was worse than it really was, and was just biding her time before slipping away.

  She’d been an intrusion, an imposition, a liability, and a total mystery. Now she was a threat to his freedom and his future.

  Thirteen

  Bella Ontong, seated behind a computer in the charge office of the Lavender Hill police station, looked up as Sergeant Vincent Bruins walked in, boots thudding like a marching troopie’s on the hard floor. ‘Vince, I hear somebody got killed, is that right?’ Her fingers shot up from the keyboard in elegant suspense. The bright overhead light gave a shine to her short black hair, caught the pips on her shoulders – three on each side – and the narrow band of gold on her left hand.

  Sergeant Bruins nodded. ‘Ja, Captain. I was on call-out number six when the station sent me to this house … a neighbour heard the screams. I walked through the gate and there this guy was, throat ripped out, looking arag. Most of the stoep was red – a gemors if ever I saw one! And you won’t believe who did it!’

  Everyone stopped what they were doing – the charge office went quiet. Sergeant Bruins was an imposing man. His head was always scraping against the cabin roof of the patrol car and his leg got in the way of the gear lever. If the sergeant happened to be in the passenger seat, whoever was driving would say, ‘Legs together, please, Sarge – like a good girl now.’ The sergeant’s blue-clad body was now looming over the counter – the wood dark and shiny like an old pub’s except the rubbing had come not from elbows holding glasses but from members of the public under stress 24/7.

  ‘His neighbour did him in, Sarge!’

  ‘Nooitie, it was his vrou!’

  ‘Okay, a gang then? It had to be a gang.’

  ‘Nwata, it was his kid who got violent … needed tik money.’

  ‘Minute, Vince, we haven’t got all day! Some of us work, you know,’ Bella Ontong said. As officer commanding on this Sunday shift she was happy that both policemen had returned from their rounds unscathed. On this early evening with no members of the public in the charge office her staff deserved to unwind a little.

  ‘It was his two pit bulls that did it,’ the sergeant said solemnly. ‘Turned on him, net so, just like that!’ He clicked two fingers. ‘Why, we don’t know. We called the SPCA.’

  Suddenly there was no more breezy banter – a pit bullterrier getting you by the throat had to rank near the top of horrible deaths, and they’d witnessed plenty of sticky ends on the Flats. Weekends were always the worst. The gangs partied at shebeens, pool joints, and clubs and maimed and killed one another. The trouble was that most joints had steel gates to keep the police out. Sunday was the day of domestic violence. It wasn’t too bad in the morning when people were in church, dressed in their Sunday best – hat, tie, suit – but once home they drank and did drugs, whole families sometimes. Gang and family killings were horrific but sometimes Bella wondered if the dead weren’t better off than the mentally-wounded living. Last week a father high on booze, Mandrax and meth ended up fucking his equally zonked-out daughter. Ja, that’s tik for you – made you as jags as a rabbit (the hysterical wife had laid a charge of rape – rape? To make sure, Bella had added incest and the fact that at 17 the daughter was under-age). Then a frightened father called from a street corner because his tik-crazed son was on the rampage in their house; as the police van pulled up the mother emerged swearing at the father for being a terrible parent (the embarrassment of having police outside her house outweighing the plight of her family, Sergeant Bruins had concluded sagely). Then there was the drunk, jealous lover who beat his girlfriend to a pulp, called the police then broke down in the sergeant’s bear-like arms. And the sobbing single mother whose son stayed out all night, missed church, and finally arrived with a wound in his neck still ‘meth befok’, as the sergeant explained later. He had spoken to the boy sternly, like a good father might have, ‘Next time I’m taking you to the station for a drug test, you hear me?’ Bella was always worrying about her staff and about the community. The sergeant and his colleagues had to be not just enforcers of the law but also counsellors, psychiatrists, and surrogate fathers and mothers. The needs of the people of the Flats went way beyond where the next meal was coming from.

  ‘Sergeant, your vest … you’re not wearing it! You think it’s a drive through the wine lands that you’ve been on, or what?’

  ‘Sorry, Captain, my locker was broken into yesterday … nothing missing except the vest. I’ve done a report but you know how long it takes to replace stuff.’

  Bella sighed. Bullet-proof vests were like gold to gangs. Vests made them feel invincible and they paid top dollar for them. The theft of Vince’s vest pointed to the possibility of crooked cops at the station. Just days earlier Detective Warrant Officer Quentin Philander had said, ‘Bella, I’ve got my suspicions but I can’t prove a thing, not yet … how terrible to look at colleagues and wonder if they’re in the pockets of the gangs.’ He’d shaken his head – thoughtful, a little desperate. ‘That’s the thing about corruption – no smashed window, no body, no knife or gun, no blood, no fingerprints – it leaves nothing behind. Corruption talks softly, it’s educated, earns a salary, wears a suit or a uniform …’ Philander had been consumed by it to the detriment of his cases piling up like Table Mountain in his cramped detective’s office at the back of the station. Just as well the likes of Bella worried about the safety and well-being of the operational staff.

  Bella looked at the clock on the wall. It was nearly 6
pm, the end of her day shift. Around her on the walls were reminders of what her life was about, had been for so many years – photos of police top brass, a poster on the rights of children, pictures and descriptions of missing persons, a help-line poster for those with drink and drug problems, a notice offering a reward for the recovery of a quad bike, an ad for a debt counsellor, a HIV-Aids educational poster, a prominent board with the words, We are committed to quality service. Are we delivering? We welcome your suggestions, and below it a poster advising citizens on how they should go about lodging complaints and compliments.

  Captain Bella Ontong loved her job even though she knew she would never win the big war out there. She took it battle by battle in the knowledge that where she could, she made a difference to the lives of those who reported to her and those who lived in despair all around her.

  •

  Bella was packing up in the OC office when Detective Warrant Officer Philander walked in wearing his metal-grey suit that picked up the grey spreading around his temples. Of his three suits she liked it best. What she liked least was his uniform which he was required to wear on Wednesdays – it made him look like just another cop and reminded her of the difference in rank between them even though they were almost the same age – she 37, he 40 – and had both been in the force for 18 years. She knew the reason all too well. When he was 12, Philander’s blue eyes and wavy hair had prompted a concerned, zealous apartheid official to apply the comb test and thereafter to declare him White. The comb test worked like this: if a fine-toothed comb (which many officials carried in their long socks) ran through a person’s hair easily he or she was classified as White; if it got stuck the person was non-White. This was in spite of the fact that Philander’s father, brother and sister looked Coloured (there had been some doubt about his mother). In that year, 1984, Philander was one of 518 people who’d been re-classified from Coloured to White. He ended up in a school for Whites while his brother and sister remained in the co-ed school for Coloureds. He escaped the fate of Vic Wilkinson who was reclassified four times: from mixed race to White to Coloured, back to White, and finally to Coloured again. But since 1994 the new South Africa had dealt Philander the ultimate ironic blow: as a White, promotion in the force passed him by in favour of his Black, Indian, and Coloured colleagues, aggravated by the fact that he was male.