Sacrifices (14 page)

“And here’s the number of a twenty-four hour help line,” she said, handing over a card.

“Sure. I appreciate this.”

“Anything else you want to share?”

“No, I’m good.”

The social worker, gnawing on her cheap ballpoint, stared at Louise. “You should know that I was legally obliged to report your suicide attempt to the police.”

“Do they even care?”

“Probably not, but they may send somebody over to take a statement.”

“Okay.”

The woman nodded and wandered off. The police never showed up and nobody bothered Louise after that.

The taxi stops and she steps out into the drizzle, her feet sliding inside the outsize boots as she walks the half block to her apartment. Only when she confronts the locked gates at the entrance to her building does Louise realize that she has no keys. She hits a couple of buttons and somebody buzzes her into the lobby without asking who she is.

She hurries up the stairs, expecting the actor to block her, but his door is closed. When she gets to the corridor outside her apartment she lifts the bathroom sash window a couple of inches and retrieves a key taped to the rotting wooden frame—a precaution dating back to when her mother was still alive.

Louise unlocks the apartment, a wet dog smell filling her nostrils. The parquet floor in the living room has lifted, the dark wooden rectangles bleached white in patches by water damage. Crossing it is like walking over the keyboard of a giant piano. The stained legs of the chairs show how high the water rose before it drained downward. The carpets in the bedroom are soggy and stinking, curling away from the floor.

None of this is hers. They rented the place furnished from a miserable bastard of a landlord, so she doesn’t give a shit.

She needs to pee but can’t face that bathroom so she heads into the kitchen, pulls down the jeans and squats over the sink, drilling a noisy stream onto the metal. She knows its gross, but what does she care?

Back in the bedroom she sheds the dead girl’s clothes and dresses in her own, feeling weirdly like she’s impersonating herself.

Whatever that means.

She fills a wheely suitcase with clothes and rescues her ID documents, bankcards and her copy of
Through the Looking-Glass
from the drawer beside the bed.

Louise stands a moment in the doorway of her dead mother’s room, the closets still filled with her belongings. All she takes is an old photograph album, then she grips the suitcase and gets out of there.

The actor, a short white guy with a silly bottle-black bob, is unlocking his apartment door as she comes down the stairs. He stares at her, shaking his head, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

“Better luck next time,” he says.

Louise doesn’t reply, bumps past him and exits the building, dragging the suitcase after her, the wheels clickety-clacking as she walks into the rain with no idea of where she’s going.

Lane, sitting at his desk with the electric heater warming his feet, reads Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” from a first edition he picked up for a song at a charity stall in Greenpoint, the poet’s jaundiced view of family (of man handing misery on to man) resonating as never before.

Lane hasn’t seen his son in the week since the rugby game, even though the
Barnard Memorial Hospital where Christopher lies recovering is mere blocks from the bookstore. Beverley is hardly ever home, sitting vigil at the boy’s bedside, consulting obsessively with the orthopedic surgeon—a gingery teddy bear of a man often found on the pages of glossy magazines in the company of fashion models—who spent hours reassembling Chris’s shattered knee and fractured tibia.

Lane, with his empty house and the bookstore free of Mrs. Coombs’s glowering presence, finds himself almost happy for the first time since that
terrifying night in December.

He lays the
Larkin down and shuts his eyes. Over the muffled murmur of late afternoon traffic on Long Street he hears Tracy Whitely washing up tea things in the kitchen. This quiet, efficient girl has fitted in seamlessly. She’s learned the inventory with impressive speed and renders assistance to customers that her aunt was never able, or willing, to give.

He’s made up his mind to pension off Mrs. Coombs when she returns from her travels and offer
Tracy a permanent position at a salary that, he hopes, will be difficult for her to refuse.

When he hears her soft footsteps he opens his eyes.

“Sorry to disturb you, Michael,” she says, standing in the doorway. “I’ll be going now.”

“Okay, I’ll lock up.”

She moves a strand of hair from her cheek and when she smiles her pale face, free of make-up, is very nearly pretty.

“You like Larkin?” she asks, eyeing the book.

“Yes. Now more than ever.”

“He’s the subject of my masters
’ thesis.”

“Really? I didn’t know you were doing a masters.”

She nods. “Correspondence. Through UNISA.”

“Do you write?”

She shakes her head. “Oh no. All I could ever do is teach.”

Lane sees a flaw appearing in his plan. “Is that what you want to do? Teach?”

“Not really. As Auntie Daphne keeps on telling me, I seem to have studied for a completely useless degree.”

“I did the same. And here I am, happily underachieving.”

“Well, I like selling books.”

“And I like having you here.”

This gets her blushing. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Yes, have a good night.”

Lane watches Tracy through the hatch as she shrugs on a raincoat, her body surprisingly wide-hipped and full-breasted beneath her plain dress. She flips the sign on the door to CLOSED and hurries across the road, hoisting her umbrella.

Lane realizes that he is becoming quietly attracted to this girl. Absurd, of course, she must be twenty years his junior, but when she brings him his tea with just the right amount of milk and sugar—something neither his wife nor Mrs. Coombs has ever bothered to master—and their fingers touch, she is not quick to withdraw her hand.

These thoughts are interrupted by the doorbell and he sees a woman on the sidewalk. He shifts his chair from her view and ignores the bell. She’ll spot the sign and go. But she doesn’t, and rings again, keeping a finger on the button.

Lane leaves his office, standing at the cash register, mouthing, “We’re closed.”

This doesn’t deter her, and the buzzer fills the shop like a swarm of wasps.

He strides to the door and unlocks it, confronting a skinny girl of maybe eighteen, her dissolute beauty freezing the words of rebuke in his throat. Her face is elfin with high cheekbones, blue eyes made dark by smudged mascara, and a wide mouth, almost obscenely full-lipped, one side dragged down in a sneer. That her blonde hair is dirty and matted, hanging in Medusa coils to her shoulders,
just adds to her gutter appeal.

Despite the chill she wears
only a black T-shirt over dark jeans so tight they could be airbrushed onto her. The T-shirt is damp from the rain and her erect nipples spike the sheer fabric. Lane is shamed by a stab of rogue desire.

“We’re closed,” he says, pointing at the sign.

“Let me in, Mike. I need to talk to you.”

Her voice is gravelly and low, like a thirty-year-old ingénue channeled through the mouth of a teenager.

“How do you know my name?”

“Fuck, man, just let me in. I’m freezing my tits off,” she says, hugging herself.

Lane steps back, allowing her into the bookstore. Delving into the grimy cloth bag that dangles from her shoulder she finds cigarettes and a lighter.

“You can’t smoke in here,” he says.

“Fuck that.” She fires up and after a few deep drags says, “You got an office?”

“Look, what do you want?”

“It’s about Lyndall Solomons.”

“What about Lyndall?”

“Why don’t we go sit where nobody can see us?” Pointing the cigarette out at the crowded sidewalk.

Lane, his sanguine mood darkening, leads her into his office. When she crouches beside the heater the neck of her T-shirt gapes and he catches a glimpse of an erect pink nipple. She stares up at him though smoke and matted hair.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“I was with Lyndall the night he was meant to’ve killed that girl.”

Dread takes Lane’s legs and he slides down into his chair. “Nonsense.”

She shakes her head. “Uh, uh, Mike. It’s the truth. He arrived at my place before midnight and I was with him till round five the next morning. So whoever killed her, it wasn’t Lynnie.” She sucks so hard on the cigarette that her cheeks almost kiss. “I’m guessing your rugger-bugger son did it, and you and Bev covered things up.” Laughing at the shock on his face. “Ja, Lynnie told me some stories about Chris. Sounds like ’roid rage to me.”

To cover his panic Lane reaches for the telephone. “I’m calling the police.”

“Hey, go ahead.”

She stares him down, exhaling through the side of her mouth, sneering when he drops the phone in its cradle.

“Who are you?”
Lane asks.

“You can call me Jade.”

“What do you want?”

“Take it easy, we’ll get to that.”

She lifts herself from the floor and walks to the desk, curling into the chair facing him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Mike, why didn’t I come forward seven months ago?” He nods. “Okay, this is what went down that night: Lynnie—I couldn’t ever get my head around the Mustapha thing, he was always Lynnie to me—came over to my place in Gardens all freaked out. Said he’d had a fight with his mom, that he smacked the old bitch when she wouldn’t give him money. Said you called the armed response guys and watched when they dragged him to their car. That hurt him, Mike. He liked you, said you’d been kind of a dad to him.”

She sees his expression and shrugs, “That’s life, hey? Anyway, we smoked a lot of shit and you know how horny you get, so we fucked ourselves straight again. Then we walked over to an ATM and I drew the last of my money and Lyndall said he’d go down to some merchant on Roeland Street to score. Hour later he wasn’t back and I thought he’d dropped me, so I went over to some Nigerian guys near the Gardens Center and said they could gangbang me if they fixed me up. They had some heroin and they fixed me up a little too good ’cause next thing I wake up in the hospital two days later, my fucken parents standing over me, crying and carrying on. They did the whole mommy and daddy thing and sent me into rehab. That’s where I heard what had happened to Lynnie and it freaked me out, so I thought what the fuck, maybe I’ll go straight. Never said a word about what happened that night to anybody. I stayed in rehab for three months and got clean and my folks sent me up to Jo’burg to get me away from bad influences, as they put it.” She laughs. “Thing is, bad influences are like shadows man, they follow you everywhere.”

“If what you’re saying is true, why didn’t Lyndall use you as an alibi?”

“Hey, I’m sure he tried. But he only knew me by my street name, and if he took the cops to the place I was living they wouldn’t have found me, and nobody there knew who the fuck I was ’cause it belonged to the friend of a friend of a friend. You know how it goes? But those ATMs have all got cameras, so there’ll be a nice picture on a computer somewhere of me and Lynnie, taken round that time he was supposed to be killing that girl.”

She has him and she knows it.

“Now, Mike, when my folks heard I was using again they cut me off, permanently this time, and I owe big bucks to some guys you don’t wanna get on the bad side of, so here I am.”

“That’s what you want? Money?”

Jade makes a gun of her thumb and index finger and points it at him, cocks the thumb and clicks her tongue against her palate. “Correct, Mikey. I want one hundred thousand in cash.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Nah, it’s not. You’re stinking rich. Lynnie told me and I Googled you and your wifey. This,” waving her cigarette around the office, “is just a hobby isn’t it, Mike? Real money’s in that property development business Beverley runs.”

“It’ll take me a few days to get that kind of cash together.”

She shakes her head, tangles dancing. “It’ll take a day, even if you’re discreet and draw money out of different accounts and credit cards.” The street slang slips for a moment. Whoever this girl is, she’s well educated. Jade takes a cell phone from her pocket. “Gimme your mobile number.”

Lane
gives it to her and she keys it into the phone. “Okay, I’ll call you this time tomorrow.”

She stands. “Mike, don’t even think of fucking with me, okay? If you don’t have the money for me tomorrow night I’m going to the media with this. It’s the kind of story they’ll love.”

“I’ll have the money for you.”

Jade slings her bag over her shoulder, drops her cigarette to the wooden floor and grinds it dead with her sneaker. Pointing through the hatch at the cash register she says, “How much is in there?”