The Mall (4 page)

‘Get up!’

‘Huh?’

‘Get up!’

‘Okay! Okay!’ His eyes shift again, and his fingers skitter towards the bunch of keys that have fallen under the car. I know exactly what he’s thinking.

‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘Think about what?’ he hedges as he stands slowly and leans back against the car.

‘What’s your name?’

‘What’s that got to do—’ I grip his collar and snarl in his face.

‘Daniel, Dan.’

‘Well, Dan. Nice to meet you. I’m Rhoda. So tell me something, you want me to tell your boss you fucking lied? Maybe have a word with that blonde you want to fuck?’ He
blushes and I press home my advantage. ‘You want to be known as the prick who let a child get lost and did nothing about it?’

‘I didn’t know. I fucking told you.’

‘You lied for a reason, Dan,’ I say, dropping the cigarette butt next to his hand and stomping it out. He flinches. ‘I know the security guards questioned you, and you
lied.’

‘They said the missing kid was black.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what they said, I swear.’

Fuck
. Morons.

‘What were you doing with the kid, anyway?’ he says. Shit. It could be that he’s not as stupid as I’d assumed.

‘I was babysitting. Kid ran off.’

He wipes his puke-snot with his sleeves, shakes his head and smooths his hair. ‘So it’s you who fucked up,’ he says. ‘Not me.’

‘I need to find the kid,’ I say. ‘And you’re going to help me.’

A sneaky expression flicks into his eyes. ‘You can’t make me,’ he says.

I really didn’t want to have to do this. I reach into the inside pocket of my hoodie and retrieve Zinzi’s knife. I actually have no clue how I’m supposed to use it, but Dan
doesn’t know that. Far as he knows I’m some high-strung junkie arsehole. I do my best, trying to recall scenes from Guy Ritchie movies. I press the button on the side and it clicks open
smoothly.

‘I’ll ask you again,’ I say, making my voice sound almost bored. ‘Will you help me?’

He doesn’t speak for a few seconds, eyes not leaving the knife. He grimaces and wipes his mouth again.

‘Well?’ I say, almost cheerfully.

He nods.

I’ve pulled up my hood as a precaution, but we don’t meet anyone as we head down towards the mall’s delivery entrance. We wander past an empty truck, a few
wooden crates, cardboard boxes and an abandoned forklift, a crumpled box of Rothmans on the seat. Dan walks slightly bow-legged in front of me, dawdling almost. I think about elbowing him in the
spine so that he’ll get a move on, but decide against it. I don’t want to push my luck.

He stops and points towards a pair of thick metal doors cut into the side of the windowless building.

‘Through there,’ he says.

‘After you.’

‘What? Why do I have to come?’

‘Just go.’

He pushes against the doors. ‘Locked,’ he says. ‘It’s after hours. See, we can’t get in.’

Fuck. There’s no way I want to go back through the mall again, but there’s a keypad next to the door, and Dan is avoiding looking at it.

‘Why do I think you know the combination?’ I say.

‘I don’t!’ he whinges.

‘Dan, Dan, Dan,’ I say, now almost enjoying myself. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ I pull out the knife again and click it open.

‘Okay, okay!’ His fingers tremble as he keys in the number. I file it away for future reference. 1-2-3-4. Always the same. ‘You need help,’ he says as we push through the
doors and into a narrow brick-lined corridor. ‘Psychiatric help.’

He trudges ahead, and I reach into my pocket for another pinch of blow.

‘Where now?’ I say. The corridor snakes off in opposite ways. I’ve lost all sense of direction, so I can only hope he isn’t going to do anything stupid, like lead us
straight to the security office.

‘This way.’

He takes the left-hand fork and we head deeper into the gloom. The corridor reeks of oil, concrete dust and a faint trace of rotten meat. Clearly this is the part of Highgate Mall that the
customers never get to see, and it’s as basic and stripped down as it gets. There’s not even a ceiling to mask the workings of the airconditioning system; massive silver pipes and
insulated wires loop from the ceiling like spilled metal innards. We push through another set of those heavy black doors, and he strides on confidently.

‘What happened to your face?’ he says without turning around.

‘Fuck you.’

He shrugs. ‘Just trying to be friendly. You’re not from here, are you?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘What’s with the accent?’

‘What’s with the questions? Let’s just find the kid, get out of here. You’ll never have to see me again.’

‘Okay.’

The ceiling is even lower here, and I have to shrug off the beginnings of claustrophobia, which isn’t helped by the effects of the blow.

I open my mouth to speak ‘You sure you—’

He whirls around, and before I have a chance to block him, his elbow rams into the side of my face. Pain explodes in my cheekbone, and I reel back and slam into the brick wall.

Fuck!

He’s haring back the way we came, and the bastard’s quicker than I would have expected. Blocking out the bright bloom of agony and the taste of blood in my throat, I race after him.
I round the corner, then slow to a jog.

He’s slamming his body into the heavy black doors, punching and kicking at them like a toddler. He’s practically howling in frustration.

‘Hey!’ he shouts at the top of his lungs. ‘Hey! Help! Let me out!’

He pushes against the doors again, but it’s clear that they’re not going to give.

Slowly, eyes wide with panic, he turns to face me.

I am going to fucking kill him.

chapter 4

DANIEL

It’s near eleven and we’re in Woolworths. It closed at nine; the display windows are quarter-lit and only a few downlighters around the periphery of the shop are
kept on. The perfume counters are lit up from inside, and the spotlights under the mannequins shine up their skirts. The mirrors at the perfume counters reflect them jaggedly and the mannequins
look on, watching their own humiliation from a thousand angles.

I never liked mannequins. Their dead eyes, their peeling skin, their pert little nipples, hard as the rest of them to the touch.

Scarface is hurrying me on. ‘Come on, come on,’ she keeps saying.

‘You think I want to hang around here? In fact, this isn’t my idea of—’

‘I said come the fuck
on
!’ she screams and shoves me in the back. ‘Shut
up
!’

‘Okay,’ I say.

I’m going to show her that the child is gone and then I’m going home. This is how this evening is going to go. And you know what they say when you’re getting held up or
hijacked or whatever. Just co-operate and it will be over.

We navigate our way along a line of light-impaled mannequins into the food section. Scarface looks around nervously, as if she’s being followed. In an empty shop. Here was proof of what
I’d heard about drugs: delusions and paranoia. She hasn’t stopped sticking her powdery fingers in her mouth since she found me in the parking lot.

I knew the scary bitch was on drugs. Cocaine, heroin, tik, whatever it is. But while I’m bigger than her, she’s faster than me, and vicious. I can still taste puke in my mouth, and
my stomach fucking hurts. It’s the first time I’ve been beaten up since high school, and never so seriously. I thought she was going to kill me when I tried to run, but I think she
realises that she needs me to get her through the mall. I don’t know what she expects to see once we get there. That kid’s long gone.

She’s forced me to bring her through the Woolworths delivery entrance instead of back through the mall, so now I have to take her the long route through the store. But with any luck the
silent alarm was triggered as soon as we came in, and the cops are on their way right now.

You know, if she wasn’t so aggressive I might actually want to help her. All she wants, after all, is to find that boy she’s lost. I’m just glad she’s put away the
knife.

‘What the fuck are you waiting for? You’re not going to try—’

‘Give me a break, okay. I’m trying to figure out where the back exit is.’

‘Try there,’ she orders, pointing out a door with a small window and an electronic keypad.

‘Nah, cash office. We’re looking for the coldroom. That’s the door that opens out to our corridor.’

She pulls her hoodie further over her head so that I can barely see her face any more.

‘What are—’ I start, then notice the red-spotted security camera over the cash-office door.
Fuck
. Do I act like a criminal and rip a coat and a cap off the nearest
hanger or do I act innocent? Wait a minute. I
am
innocent. I’ve been kidnapped by this drugaddled crazy woman. When they see the tapes, they’ll know exactly what happened. I look
straight at the security camera and make a fearful face in Scarface’s direction. I wonder if anyone is monitoring the cameras now.

Again she smashes me in the back, right in my kidneys. ‘Good try, Danny. Your Oscar’s in the mail. Now let’s fucking
go
.’

‘Christ,’ I shout. ‘Stop hitting me, okay? I’m helping you out here. You could try and be nicer.’ She starts laughing, an empty cackle that sounds like a lifetime
of desperation. ‘I know you’re in trouble. I’m trying to help you.’

The laughter dries up. ‘Yeah. A prat like you would willingly help someone like me. I know what you think of me.’

‘Ja? What do I think of you?’ I challenge, rubbing the small of my back.

‘Ugly unladylike darkie freak with a drug and anger problem. Typical of these black bitches who think they’re above their station.’

Well, at least she isn’t deluded. Aggressive. Paranoid. Fucked up on drugs. But, to her credit, she is not deluded. ‘You’re wrong. You don’t know me.’ I stop short
before I say, ‘Nobody knows me.’ That would be pathetic, and at least we’re talking, and for now she’s stopped hitting me.

She seems unconcerned that this whole show is going on right on Woolworths’ television screens. I gesture to the camera.

‘You think I care? That’s the least of my worries.’

‘Anyway, it’s probably a false camera,’ I say, hoping to sound streetwise. ‘You wouldn’t know where they hid the real cameras.’ At Only Books they put
hidden cameras right over the tillpoints. Bastards are far more interested in catching their staff red-handed than busting a customer stealing a book.

‘I guess the coldroom door will be behind there,’ she says, pointing out the fish and butchery counters. The slabs of meat lie in dark rows, wrapped in plastic, and the fish seem
almost fluorescent in the gloom, their shocked and sunken eyes reflecting a glow from somewhere.

‘You’re probably right,’ I say and lead the way behind the counter. We navigate by the light of a few low-wattage strip lights and their reflection off the stainless steel
industrial fridges. The floor and the walls are tiled with the same plain white tiles and I try not to think of the knife in the junkie’s pocket and the slicing and hacking that goes on back
here. My heart is beating too fast and too high. I have to concentrate to push back the wooziness that’s threatening to cloud me. The air stinks; an intense concentration of that frozen blood
smell that I know from down the corridor, mixed with ammonia and fish. The massive fridges, no doubt full of hanging carcasses, wheeze and crack as we pass.

I hear a crumpling thump behind me and Scarface curses under her breath. I turn around and see her picking herself up from the floor, swearing in that joke accent of hers. She wipes at the knees
of her jeans and her hands come away dark.

‘Jesus H. Christ. It’s fucking fish blood or something. I need to wash my fucking hands.’

She finds a sink and some stainless steel counters ahead of us. I look down at the pool of blood, unconvincing in this light, and then up, half-expecting to see a massive fish hanging from a
hook in the ceiling, but there’s nothing. The darkness and the smell are getting to me. This has to be the goods receiving area and the delivery door has to be somewhere near. It has to be. I
want to show this freak where I saw the boy and I want to go home.

Now Scarface has finished washing her hands – surprisingly fussily – and is shaking them dry. I walk past her around a bend to the right and, thank God, see the delivery door that
leads into my corridor. I recognise the web of cracks where the bulletproof glass in the little window was shot. I type the access code into the keypad and the door hisses open.

The air in the familiar corridor rushes into my lungs like the breeze from a Highveld storm. I have never felt so happy to see full-strength neon lighting, cheap face brick and slick concrete in
my life. I’m on home ground again. Fifty metres away is the scuff mark where Josie and countless other smokers lean against the wall. Just past that is my alcove, my safe place. It’s
been two hours; it seems like weeks.

The door behind me slams with a clank. I whirl around to see Scarface behind me, pushing at it.

‘Shit. It slipped. I was trying to wedge it open.’

‘Don’t stress. We can unlock it with the keypad if we come back. But it’s really easier to go back through the mall.’

‘We’re not going back through the mall.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told you to stop asking questions. Show me where you saw… him.’ The way she says this makes me think she doesn’t even know his name.

‘It was right here. I was… standing… there.’ I indicate the far end of the corridor. ‘And he ran past me down here. There’s nowhere he could have gone but
back out to the mall. All the doors stay locked.’

‘Okay, show me.’

‘The way out? But it was hours ago. You’ll never fi—’

She grabs my T-shirt and tries to push me against the wall. I smell her dangerous chemical sweat. I wince; she’s grabbing my chest hair along with the shirt.

‘Do I look like I’m asking you, Dan?’

She looks exhausted. She hasn’t had a nostrilful of coke for at least five minutes. I’m thinking about that knife, but she doesn’t seem so threatening any more; she just seems
desperate.