Capture (6 page)

Dawn finishes her set and walks her bare ass back out through the curtain, not even gracing the audience with a look. They’ll have to take their hard-ons out onto Voortrekker, now the bar is closing. The music ends and Vernon hits the overhead lights, industrial-strength fluorescents that hammer down hard and cold, revealing just how tacky and soulless the bar is. The punters blink, suddenly back in the real world, ashamed to look at one another. They grab their jackets and car keys and shuffle toward the door like condemned men.

A drunken john and a girl are still falling in love at the bar, oblivious to the light. She is so tikked out that if the john didn’t have his hand up her skirt, anchoring her, she’d fall from the barstool. Vernon grabs the john by the back of his shirt and shoves him in the direction of the door. The man stumbles, manages to stay upright, then just carries on straight out onto Voortrekker, not even looking back. The girl follows, falling off her high heels.

Costa is by the door, keys in his hand, ready to lock up. Vernon waits until Dawn comes out of the dressing room, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, hair pulled back into a ponytail, a bag slung over her shoulder like she’s going to the gym.

Boogie, still looking hopeful, tries to catch her eye but she ignores him and walks out. Vernon follows, stands on the sidewalk under the dead neon, watching her cross the deserted street, lighting up a smoke as she walks, disappearing into the dark lobby of her apartment block.

The barman, the cleaner—almost unrecognizable in jeans and a beret—and the last of the girls fade into the night. Boogie comes out last and Costa locks up from inside. The
tik
-head flaps up his hoodie and takes off down the sidewalk, toward his nasty little Ford Escort rusting under a streetlight.

“Boogie,” Vernon says.

The runt stops and turns. “Ja?”

“Slow down, my brother. You and me gotta have a talk.”

Vernon sees Boogie tense and knows he’d be no match for him in a footrace. Fixes a smile on his face and holds up a hand. “Relax, man. I wanna talk business.”

“Ja?”

“Ja, ja.” Vernon catches up with him, outside a construction site, an apartment block that has been gutted and is being transformed into low-rent offices and stores. “I hear you the man to talk to if I want some good shit?”

“For sure, Vernon. You know me.”

“Ja, ja, I know you.” Vernon puts an arm around the skinny man’s shoulders and eases him off the sidewalk, behind a wall of corrugated sheeting. He catches the burnt plastic stink of
tik
on Boogie’s body as he grabs him by the throat, lifting him onto tiptoe with his left hand. “I know you been selling weed to Dawn.”

The
tik
-head tries to speak, can’t find his voice, so he shakes his head. Vernon winds up a right hook, brings it from low down, all his weight behind it, and he feels face bones cracking under the blow.

Boogie sprawls on his back on the cement floor, like some rags thrown in the trash. Vernon goes straight in with a boot to the guts. Air comes out Boogie’s nostrils, and he holds himself, curling like a worm, too winded to cry out.

It had been Vernon’s plan to scare him, hurt him just enough to get him honest again, but then he sees his father when he looks down at Boogie, caught in a spill of streetlight: the glazed eyes, the filthy teeth, the prison artwork. Feels that old pain. And righteous fucken anger.

Channels that anger, as he grabs the hoodie and pulls it up, stretching it tight over Boogie’s head. He smashes the piece of shit’s skull against the graffiti-scarred wall. It makes a muffled thud and he hears the fucker groan. Feeble hands grab at his wrists. Next time he batters the head against the bricks he feels something give way under the cloth, like a rotten melon in a string bag, and the hands sag to the floor.

Vernon gets a groove going, battering away like he is trying to knock a hole through the wall, till the skull is all spongy beneath his fingers.

He releases the pulped head and lets it fall to the floor with a moist slap. Puts two fingers to the
tik
-head’s throat. Nothing.

Vernon sits a moment, slowing his breathing. Feels something wet and sticky on his hands and his face, realizes the hoodie slipped down while he was doing his percussion thing, and Boogie’s blood has sprayed like a power shower.

Vernon drags Boogie’s body farther into the construction site, leaves it behind a pile of builder’s sand. He wipes his hands on the dead man’s jeans and stands in the shadows, waiting until a taxi rattles by, then he limps to his car.

Chapter 8

Sunny tugs at Exley’s boardshorts, saying something about her boat in the water. Her milky child-smell comes to him before he opens his eyes to the darkness, before his brain allows him to recall what happened the evening before. Instinctively he reaches for her, the feel of her skin already on his fingertips before reality sucker-punches him and he sits up, fighting through panic to find air.

The room filled with Sunny’s toys and clothes, her scent rising from the pillow, is too much for him to bear and he flees out into the corridor.

The door to the main bedroom is still closed and he knows that facing his wife now is impossible.

Exley goes down the stairs and walks toward his studio, the insulated box shrouded in welcoming gloom, sliding open the door, the chill of the A/C on his face. He closes the door and without switching on the lights sits down in his Aeron ergonomic chair, feeling it mold its shape to him like a lover. Reaching beneath his workstation, his hand red in the muted glow of a pilot lamp, Exley boots up his computer.

He closes his eyes, listening to the whine of the hard drive rising to a low scream, like a distant jet taking off, hears the static crackle and low burp as the monitors come to life, followed by the cluck as the motherboard engages the CPU, catches that familiar hot-wire smell of the innards of his computer waking from their slumber, information coursing through the suddenly alert banks of memory.

As he sits in the dark, his eyes closed, a flashback hits Exley that almost overwhelms him with its intensity. He’s lying with Caroline on the bed in their tiny London flat, his hand on her swollen belly, staring into her eyes as he feels their child kicking in her womb. Caroline, orphaned at twelve, raised by her much older sister—an aloof, distant woman—reaches up and touches his face and says, “This is all I ever wanted, Nick. A family.”

Exley’s eyes open, and he grips the arms of the chair, staring into a cold and barren future. Even when Caroline’s madness exiled her, he’d had Sunny and the simple, undiluted love that flowed between them.

Gone now.

The computer grunts and Sunny, or rather the digital familiar of his daughter, appears on the monitors. He stares at the loop of dancing pixels and hears her singing just the day before, “
Sun
-ny
Ex
-ley is having her
birth
-day”, and he finds himself mouthing the words endlessly, giving them her childlike cadence, until they make as little sense to him as her death.

Chapter 9

The car engine wakes Yvonne Saul, the glass in her bedroom window buzzing as it vibrates from the low rumble. She looks at the clock next to her bed—just gone 4 a.m. The engine cuts, and the car door smacks shut, then the front door of the house opens and slams. She lies still, listening to his footsteps getting closer to the door that she can’t lock since he kicked it in.

The door hits the wardrobe as he pushes it open. “Hey!”

Yvonne keeps her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. As if that will stop him. Suddenly cold as he pulls the blankets from the bed, leaving her lying in her nightdress, her knees lifted to her chin. “Move your fat fucken ass. I’m hungry.”

She opens her eyes. He stands over her, switching on the bedside lamp. As the light floods the room, she sees the blood on his shirt and jeans. Dried dark red on his arms and hands. So much blood.

Yvonne can’t stop her mother’s reflex. “Boy, you hurt?” Sitting up, reaching a hand to her son.

He slaps it away. “You gonna be fucken hurt if you don’t get up. I’m not talking again.” He slams out of the room.

She lifts herself from the bed, a tall, thickset woman in her mid-fifties. The wild young beauty she once was lost in the flab and the wrinkles that have left her looking ten years older than her age. She draws a robe around herself, slides her feet into slippers and goes to the cramped kitchen.

He is by the table, stripping off his bloody shirt, dropping his jeans and kicking them across to her. Standing there in his underpants. Yvonne can smell sweat on his body and the metal stink of the blood.

“Wash these clothes,” he says.

She bends to pick up the bloody jeans. “What you done now, Vernon?”

His bare foot catches her in the abdomen and sends her flying against the stove. The back of her head smacks the oven door. “Who the fuck are you to question me?” Staring up at him as he looms over her, making a fist, waiting for him to beat her, as he’s done too many times before. But he holds back, leaning in until his face is close to hers. “Now you cook me eggs and steak and you wash my clothes. And there was never no blood. Nothing. You hear me?”

“Ja. I hear you.”

He smiles but she can’t see no softness in that face. Handsome like his dead father, and just as sick in the head. He disappears into the bathroom and she hears him splashing water, then he goes to his room, slamming the door after him.

Yvonne closes her eyes, praying for God knows what. When she’s done she stands and carries the clothes to the bathroom and soaks them in the tub, the water stained red by the blood.

Vernon feels it coming as he lies on the bed in the gloom, chilling, listening to Motown. The panic rising in him, making him restless, afraid.

Before he was shot everything he did was about power, about imposing his will on people weaker than him. But since he came back from that terrifying blackness things have changed. There is a fear in him now. A fear that he could just evaporate, that the darkness could claim him.

He sits up and clicks on the lamp. His room is neat, the way he likes it, nothing out of place. Just a bed and a table and a wardrobe. No pictures on the wall. Nothing. Doesn’t need that shit. Fucks with his head, which is already crammed too full of pictures. Takes a deep breath. He sits for a bit, just breathing, telling his nerves to stop shouting at him.

After a few minutes he is feeling a little better. Loose. His hands not shaking no more. So he stretches out on the bed and then makes the mistake of allowing his eyes to close.

And there they come, the images of his father, right here in this bedroom, with his tattoos and his missing teeth and his rancid smell, like a backed-up drain. Coming at him with the broken bottles and the lit cigarettes.

Vernon’s little-boy skin smoking black as his father holds the cigarette to his stomach, hand over his mouth and nose, shutting out any screams. Not that his mother hears. Deaf she is, to all this. Blind, also, to the marks on his body and the blood between his legs when his father is done getting his jollies.

Vernon has to fight hard not to scream. He sits up, telling himself it is all in the past, man. His rancid fuck-up of a father long dead. But his heart is like a boot trying to kick open his breastbone and the sweat is heavy and rank on his body.

He hears his breath coming in gasps as terror drives him from the room. He opens the front door of the house and stands battling to breathe. Catching dust and diesel fumes from the buses and taxis, the roads busy even this early on a Sunday morning.

The streetlamps—the few that work here in Paradise Park—still burn, dropping green light down on the weekend workers hurrying to the buses and taxis. He ducks back inside and flops down on the sofa and channel-surfs the TV, not seeing the succession of darky politicians and those frosty bitches on CNN.

He can’t sit still and he’s up again and goes back outside, where it’s lighter now, the streetlamps dead, and grabs the garden hose and starts washing his car. Wipes a smear of Boogie’s blood from the driver’s seat and hoses the exterior, trying to calm himself with work. But his throat is still tight, like his father’s hand is on it, throttling him.

Chapter 10

Exley wakes at his workstation, keyboard denting his cheek, the strobing monitor agitating his eyes through their closed lids.

As he sits up and squints at the wireframe that still dances, he can’t stop himself from sliding back along the timeline to the moment when Sunny came to him on the beach, desperate for his attention.

But now, in his fantasy, he hands the joint to Shane Porter and he turns to Sunny and sees her pointing to the little sailboat, bobbing in the waves like some cheesy Hollywood model shot from pre-digital days, and he hauls the boat to safety and gives it to his daughter who, as a result, is safely asleep upstairs, her golden hair covering her pillow like fleece.

Exley’s bulging bladder brings him back to reality and he hits the pause bar on the keyboard and stands, his legs uncertain as he leaves the studio and crosses the living room, opens the sliding door onto the deck and walks down to the sand, cool and powdery beneath his bare feet, a Turner landscape of soft blues, reds and yellows lying before him.

The ocean is flat and motionless, with barely a lick of a wave.

Avoiding the spot where Sunny’s body lay, he crosses to the hump-backed boulders, fissured and veined, indigenous bush growing like scraggly beard in the folds of the granite, digging his penis—uncomfortably stiff from the weight of his bladder—free of the boardshorts. Exley pisses away his hard-on and stows himself, wondering what to do next.

The enormity of his grief takes his legs from under him and he sinks down onto the sand and dry-heaves, producing nothing but the taste of bitter bile in his mouth. He sits again, his back to the small wooden rowboat that lies against the rocks, oars neatly shipped, watching the gulls squabble on the huge, flat rock near the mouth of the inlet, its slopes alpine with bird shit.