The Mall (7 page)

‘Come on,’ Rhoda says.

I hesitate.

‘They’re not doing anything, Dan,’ she says. ‘They’re staying where they are.’

‘What if they try and grab us again?’

‘They got a fright, that’s all. You stood on one of them.’

I feel like a complete fucking moron. Middle-class white boy runs away from poor people. I follow her into the food court from where we’ll have a better lookout. The tables and chairs
bolted into the centre of the food court, never used by diners, are dusty and slashed in some places with dark stains, a sticky substance long-since dried. We sit down at a table facing the parking
lot. Twenty metres away, the three grey people stand at the kerb, discussing us in low tones.

‘Now what?’ I say, out of habit.

‘Jesus!’ Rhoda pokes her dirty finger at my face. ‘Can’t you make a decision for yourself? Just once?’

‘Fuck you,’ I say wearily. I didn’t really expect an answer. This is my dream. I have to decide what to do next. ‘You dragged me down here,’ I remind her.
‘I’ve got nothing to do with any of this.’

‘You’re supposed to know where we’re going.’

I get up and stalk back into the restaurant. I need to piss, and right now if I have a choice between sitting next to that putrid freak and a hand-to-hand battle with the fucking elephant thing
with my dick hanging out, I’ll choose the latter.

When I get back, the table’s empty. Rhoda’s at the edge of the parking garage, her dirty clothes blending in with the bums’. I suppose I don’t look any better.
She’s standing about two metres away from them and I can’t make out what’s going on. I hear raised voices but I don’t know whose. I almost follow the impulse to go and help
her out, but I think twice. She’s probably the sort of feminist who objects to chivalry, and I’m not going to risk being embarrassed or sworn at or smacked by her again. She’s
made her own fucking bed.

The middle figure of the three comes forward, raising herself taller than the men, who stand around staring at nothing. She’s just as grey and dusty as they are, but her clothes are not
quite as ragged; she’s fashioned herself some sort of robe and a headcloth.

She takes a step up onto the kerb and Rhoda shifts a couple of steps backwards. The grey woman swoops along to the table where I’m sitting. I try to stand up, catch my foot on the leg of
the table and sprawl backwards, knocking the back of my head on concrete. I lie there trying to get up but my foot is still caught as she comes to stand right over me.

‘What do you want here?’ she says in a ravaged croak.

‘I, I. Uh, she…’ I try to point out Rhoda, who is standing a little way back from us.

‘Why are you here?’ the woman insists, letting out a barking fit of lung-scouring coughing. A gob of phlegm spatters just past my head, and I crick my neck trying to avoid it.

Finally I pick myself up off the floor, rubbing my throbbing head. It’s so fucking sore I want to cry or scream or both.

‘We’re looking for a kid,’ says Rhoda. ‘A small boy who came down here. He—’

‘There are no children here. Get out. It will follow you.’ The woman raises her voice, and I can hear the fear around its edges, underneath the wetness.

‘Can you help us?’ Rhoda presses. ‘We can help you.’ She disgorges her pockets onto the table: a few coins, keys, tissues, two half-smoked cigarettes, her cellphone. She
doesn’t empty her jacket pockets, where I know she keeps the other cigarettes and her stash.

‘You must get away,’ the grey woman repeats, her eyes darting between the far side of the food court and the booty on the table.

‘We’ll leave you alone as soon as you tell us where the kid is,’ says Rhoda.

The grey woman looks at the pockets of my jeans. The outlines of my phone, my wallet and my keys bulge out blatantly.

‘Come on,’ hisses Rhoda.

‘Fuck, I need this stuff,’ I complain as I dump everything on the table.

‘For this, food.’ She picks up Rhoda’s phone. The woman rifles her grimy fingers through the wallet Mom gave me for my birthday. I’ve only got fifty bucks and a few
coins. She takes it all, leaving a dusty smear in its place.

‘We don’t want food,’ Rhoda says. ‘Just tell us about the kid and we’ll be on our way.’

The woman ignores her and walks back towards two braziers across the lot, trailed by the men. We just stand there, Rhoda cursing under her breath.

‘Hey,’ I say, too late to make any difference, ‘that’s my stuff.’

‘You want food?’ the woman calls back at us. ‘Something fresh today.’ She lets out a dry cackle that sounds as if it hasn’t been exercised for centuries. The men
chuckle to themselves, their laughter ricocheting hollowly through the silent space.

‘So. You want food?’ Rhoda says to me, doing a pretty good impression of the old hag.

My stomach grumbles. I’m fucking starving. I wonder if she’s got any chips. I’m really hungry for chips.

‘I’d think there’s more important things to worry about tonight, but come on,’ she shrugs.

We follow.

The woman leads us into a stinking alcove, walls scuffed with person-filth up to waist height, flattened cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting layered into a nest. The men feel their way to the
fire, shuffling with tiny steps as if it’s pitch dark. The grey woman digs behind a wall of cardboard for a plastic bag, barks a phlegmy series of coughs into her hand then rummages in the
bag.

I hope to God that the seeping wax-wrapped package she pulls out isn’t the meal we’ve just bought. But no gods are listening: it is. In addition, she finds a bottle of water and an
unwrapped half-loaf of white bread, which she wipes on her top before handing it to us.

‘Eat there,’ she says, indicating the tables at the food court where we spoke. ‘Then you go.’

‘There’s no way I’m eating—’ I start, but Rhoda nudges me.

‘Thanks,’ says Rhoda. I thought at least she’d argue.

We walk back across the parking lot to our table.

‘This shit is not a meal. Come on. You’re prepared to fight about everything else. Why couldn’t you…’ But I know I’m wasting my breath.

‘I didn’t hear you complaining.’

‘Well, you’re the one with the street experience, aren’t you? You should know what’s normal in this sort of situation.’

Rhoda spits out a laugh. I can’t tell if it’s sarcastic or genuinely amused. ‘Normal? Okay, tell me. We’re lost underneath a mall that keeps on changing direction, buying
food from a grey woman in a ghost parking lot, being chased by a screaming monster and getting texted by the marketers from hell. What “sort of situation” do you call that? Sounds more
like a normal day in your neck of the woods, shop boy. What’s normal in my life is having a hit and chilling the fuck out.’

‘Well, I’m not eating that crap. Look, this bread is covered with mould,’ I say as we sit down.

‘Bit of penicillin never hurt anyone. Fact, it’s good for you,’ she says as she unwraps the greasy brown whatever-it-is, folds the sides of the wrapper up so that it
doesn’t ooze all over the table, and dunks the bread in it. ‘Yum yum,’ she says.

I’d better follow suit or lose all credibility and I smear a hunk of bread into the sauce. I raise it to my lips.

‘I can’t believe you were going to fucking eat that!’ Rhoda peals as she flips her bread onto the floor.

She leans back and lights up one of her prize cigarettes, then another, and passes it to me. I take it without saying anything. I don’t smoke, but, Christ, if ever there’s a
moment… The first drag makes me gag, and Rhoda smirks at me. The nicotine coats my tongue, the taste acrid and unfamiliar. I take another tentative pull, cough, and try again. This time I
hold it in, dragging it deep into my lungs far more easily than I thought it would be.

‘Glad to see the asthma’s cured, Dan,’ she says.

‘Whatever,’ I mumble.

‘You’re quite a sick puppy,’ she chortles to herself.

‘Fuck you,’ I say.

Rhoda sits quietly, puffing, watching the three hobos lurking by their fire as if she hasn’t a care in the world. I want the illusion that I’m on some seaside holiday to last, but
the silence, broken only by the occasional snap of the fire, is freaking me out.

‘I can’t believe she took your phone instead of mine,’ I say. ‘It’s a piece of shit.’

She smirks, but doesn’t say anything. She takes another long drag and the smoke seeps out of her nose. I try that myself.

‘So, Rhoda Hlophe, huh?’ I venture, remembering the surname on her last phone message.

‘What’s it to you,
Dan
?’ Her tone is light.

‘That’s not a British name.’

‘No.’

I wait. She offers nothing more. ‘Where are you from?’ This is officially the longest conversation I’ve ever had with a strange woman. I try not to concentrate on my smoking
style.

‘Jesus. Quizzy boy, aren’t you?’

I look at her arms, the array of scars ranged along them. I don’t know what to say, but I want to carry on talking. ‘I’m confused, that’s all.’

‘How a black woman with a South African name gets such a whack accent?’

‘Ja.’

‘Ever heard of exile in your lily-white suburbs?’

‘No way you’re an exile. All the real exiles are old. Dead or dying.’

‘True. But shit has a way of filtering down through generations. Anyway, I need to take a piss.’

She walks off to the shell I pissed in earlier. I watch her go, then I start fretting again. Of all the things to obsess about, the thing that’s bothering me most of all is how I managed
to take a wrong turn outside Only Books. I’ve walked that way a thousand times. If I had just got us out of there then, none of this would be happening.

Jesus. My mom will be really worried by now. Maybe she’ll call the police. Maybe they’ll come looking for me. Rhoda comes back, wiping her hands on her jeans.

‘What now?’ I ask.

‘I need to get my phone back.’

‘How?’ But she’s off already, striding across the parking lot. I trail behind her.

The three hobos are standing around the brazier, holding sticks into it, mumbling in low tones. The woman looks up from the fire as we approach, and the men shift their heads with their
shoulders, following their ears. Up close, their eyes are scarred pits, and by the way they murmur, I realise they’re probably half-mute too. Jesus, what would a blind mute do upstairs in
Joburg? Stand by a traffic light, get pulled around to car windows by some con artist who’ll take all their money at the end of the day? They’re probably better off down here.

‘I need my phone,’ says Rhoda, mincing no words. The woman watches her cautiously, keeping one eye on the skewer hidden in the brazier.

‘I’ll give you, uh,’ Rhoda says, casting around for something of value to exchange for her phone, ‘his watch.’

‘
What?
’ I say.

‘Dan,’ Rhoda hisses. ‘We
need
our phones in here. We don’t
need
your watch. I’m asking nicely now. But I’m not fucking around.’

‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ I give up the watch. Truth is, it’s a piece of shit and doesn’t keep time, but the woman takes the deal. She obviously knows that a
phone with a disabled SIM card and a flat battery is of no use to anybody.

She rests her skewer on the makeshift crate-table next to the fire and digs through her plastic tote bag while Rhoda and I try not to look at the two skinned and charred rats steaming in the
dank air.

As Rhoda takes her phone she spots something red at the neck of the woman’s shopping bag.

‘What the fuck?’ She lunges at it. A little red toy robot. ‘Where did you get this?’ But the woman is scurrying back into their shelter. Rhoda runs to catch up and grabs
the woman by the throat. ‘Where did you get this? Tell me!’

Rhoda’s about to hit the woman, but she hesitates. The woman musters enough strength to stop gibbering and talk. The quicker she speaks, the quicker we’ll be gone, and right now
that’s all that is important to her.

‘People leave things. Here. Or there. I gather things. That people leave.’

‘Where?’ shouts Rhoda. ‘Where did you find it?’ The grey woman points to the far end of the food court, the same area she was eyeing when she first spoke to us. ‘It
will follow you.’

Rhoda and I look at each other. She pockets her phone and the toy and goes off in the direction the woman pointed.

‘She says she found the toy here, so the kid must have come through here. If he didn’t come back the way he came – which is highly fucking unlikely – he must have gone
through here. There’s got to be a door here somewhere. Where would the fire stairs have been built?’

We trace our way past all the empty shop-shells and find a narrow opening partially covered by a stack of scaffolding planks. The door leads to a pitch-dark stairwell.

Rhoda feels her way into the darkness. I wait for a worrying moment then hear a crumple and a meaty, cursing thump. ‘Jesus motherfucking Christ! Who puts a fucking brick wall at the top of
the fucking stairs?’ Rhoda comes limping out, rubbing her forehead. I bite my tongue not to laugh, and she goes hobbling around the food court, searching for another exit.

My phone beeps. What now?

I put my phone back in my pocket as Rhoda comes back, ‘Nada,’ she reports. ‘There’s definitely no way through here. The kid couldn’t have come this way.’

Just then, her phone beeps. She shows her message to me.

chapter 7

RHODA

Fuck.

Only four cigarettes left.

I know I should really ration them, but I sit at a food court table, light up and take a deep drag. My lungs ache from breathing in this foul smoky air, and my throat’s itchy and sore. I
nip the fag and slide it back into the box. Checking that Dan isn’t about to emerge from the rancid hole of the ‘men’s’, I pull out the envelope and snort a pinch of blow,
which should help sort out the headache that’s been festering. Nothing like a healthy diet to keep the system in check.