Capture (12 page)

“Vernon, God only knows how sorry I am—”

“Sorry? Sorry means fuck-all.”

His dark little eyes—spitting image of his father’s—burn with hatred and she is afraid that he’s going to reach across and hit her. She stands and hurries across to the sink, busies herself washing the pot and pan, the bacon fat floating on top of the muddy water.

She sneaks a glance at Vernon. He has pushed his plate away, his breakfast unfinished, and he sits with his elbows on the table, his huge shoulders slumped, his hair falling across his face, and she feels a sudden terrible pity for him, this wounded thing that is her son.

Yvonne dries her hands on a washcloth and edges past the table, wanting to slip away from the tiny kitchen. She was going to ask him about her insulin but she can’t bring herself to mention it now. Vernon grabs a handful of her pink chenille nightgown.

“That old fucker I seen you with at church last night, who’s he?”

“Nobody.”

He yanks at the nightgown and the fabric rips and the front falls open and half of a sagging breast is exposed. Shamed, she tries to close the nightgown but he tugs all the harder, and she has to fold her arms across her breasts.

“Tell me his name.”

“Mr. Tobias.”

“You not getting fucken ideas in your head, are you?”

“No, boy. Never.”

He pulls her down so her face is near his and shoves his fork at her, the tines denting her cheek. “I’m fucken watching you.”

He drops the fork and pushes his chair back and bumps past her, going into his bedroom and slamming the door.

Yvonne, feeling like she is going to faint, sags down into a chair, resting her head in her hands, fighting back tears. And she hears that crying again, sawing through her head, enough to drive her mental.

Chapter 17

The aubergine-colored preacher sounds like he’s commentating on a horse race with his mouth full of marbles, and it takes Caroline a while to realize he’s speaking English, or what passes for English out here. She catches a few words:
young life cut short, in the arms of Jesus, merciful God
, and then tunes out. Her eyes lift from the man’s sweaty face—rivulets of water running down his flat cheekbones, tracing the bulges of his many chins and pooling around his shirt collar—and she stares out over the channel of blue ocean at the bird shit on the rocks beyond, like icing on a stale cake.

She wears a sunhat and dark glasses, a simple white cotton dress and Indian sandals. Her feet sink into the molten beach sand and she has to keep shifting them to stop her exposed toes from burning.

Caroline looks back, as she has done every few minutes since this absurd charade began, looks over her right shoulder—even though this means passing her eyes over her husband, to whom she hasn’t said a word since their set-to last night. If she looked to her left she would avoid him, but then she’d see the little white coffin that lies on a flower-strewn bier under a striped shade-tent, the type of thing found at a tacky sidewalk flea market.

The upper panel of the coffin is open. Caroline allowed herself one glance, earlier, before hurriedly looking away. Just long enough to see that Sunny’s hair has been blow-dried almost straight and her face painted like that of a Mexican child whore.

Caroline knows that if she looks at the coffin again she will come undone. So her eyes skid across Exley—he stares down at the sand, his face pale beneath his tan, a small square of toilet paper, hard with dried blood, glued to his left mandible—and travel over the sad little group that has assembled: Gladys the maid, rock-like in the blazing sun, dressed in black from head to toe. A blonde woman, the mother of one of Sunny’s playgroup friends, trying vainly to find shade near the deck, sneaking a look at her watch. The sallow undertaker, his worn suit so shiny he could be in a glitter band, standing with his hands clasped before him in the manner of a professional mourner. The rent-a-cop brings up the rear, bullish shoulders barely contained by a fake leather jacket, sunlight dancing on the frames of his sunglasses, shifting his weight from the leg that is visibly skinnier than the other.

A movement catches Caroline’s eye and for a moment she feels a rush of hope but it is only Shane Porter slinking in, wearing a jacket over jeans and a T-shirt, like some aging rock star, his cowboy boots sinking low into the sand.

Nobody else from Saturday’s soirée has pitched up: funerals are obviously way less popular than boozy parties.

And no Vlad.

I’m not fun, now, Caroline thinks. I’m trouble. Too much trouble for him.

She looks forward again, in time to see the buffoonish cleric—just where the fuck did Nick find him?—close his eyes and lift his arms heavenward, beseeching “Jay-
sus
” in an ever more incomprehensible gabble. Maybe he’s speaking in tongues? Then she catches the name Jane, repeated over and over, bobbing to the surface of the sea of clogged vowels, and this very nearly shatters her composure.

Their child’s name was Jane Exley. But Nick, from the day the infant came home from the hospital, started calling her Sunshine, and then Sunny, cooing at her in the crib, wiggling his fingers at her. Making her smile and giggle.

Caroline feels her throat tighten and fixes her gaze again on the rocks, watching the birds hovering and lifting off and jostling one another, trying to dodge the tendrils of emotion that reach their suckers out toward her.

Caroline’s sense of smell, acute as always when she is off her medication, catches something foul drifting in from under the shade-tent to her left. Just the flowers in the hideous wreath, she tells herself, but she is unable to stop imagining that it is Sunny’s body rotting.

But of course they must have done something to her, some barbaric embalming. All at once her mind is alive with images of her child lying naked on a steel table, being eviscerated, her innards lifted from her and thrown into a bucket, her blood sluiced away by a savage in gumboots.

Caroline must have reacted to the horror of this image, allowed a groan to escape her lips, because Nicholas tries to take her hand, his fingers cold and clammy on her skin. She pulls her hand free and folds her arms and goes so very, very far away that she barely registers when her husband stands beside the dark charlatan and fumbles and stumbles his way through what he imagines is a eulogy.

“Sunny, I love you with all my heart and I always will. The thought of you gone is more than I can comprehend. I keep wanting to say, come back. Come back to me.”

Nicholas sheds the only tears and then it is over. The undertaker is joined by two flunkies and they screw the faceplate of the coffin in place and wheel Sunny away and collapse the shade-tent into lengths of pipe and rolls of cloth. Caroline watches the little white coffin disappear around the corner of the house, on its way to being burned. Sunny will turn to smoke and float up into the sky in some mean, industrial part of the city.

Nick shakes hands with the preacher (she glimpses the palming of banknotes) and the fat man labors off after the undertakers. A shadow falls onto Caroline and she smells last night’s booze as Shane Porter mumbles some Antipodean platitude in her ear.

“Shane?” she says.

“Yes, love?”

“Eat shit and die.”

He stares at her, mouth gaping open on capped white teeth, and she turns and heads toward the house.

As she gets closer she hears the twang of an acoustic guitar and a frayed American voice whines out at her about his daughter in the water. The old Loudon Wainwright song that Exley used to sing—wildly off-key—to Sunny, splashing with her in the sea, while Caroline watched from the cool sanctuary of the house.

She crosses the deck and sees that her husband is having his moment. That he has unveiled to the uncomfortable group of would-be mourners what he has been slaving away on since Sunny died, locked away in his studio.

A giant plasma TV is suspended above the table of drinks and crisps and nuts, and Sunny dances on the screen, radiant against an infinity curve graded from white to blue. A more alive Sunny than the thing she glimpsed in the coffin, Caroline has to concede.

Then she gets closer and understands just what grotesqueness her husband has wrought. It is realistic, of course. He is skilled, her boy-man. But it is not real. She sees in the face of this computer-generated effigy something unhealthy and unappealing that disturbs her on a primal level. A knowingness in the eyes of this faux-Sunny, something wanton, almost lascivious in the curl of the lips. Caroline’s instinct is to recoil.

If she feels a rush of revulsion she is not alone. The soccer mom mutters some blandishment and bolts for the door, her absurd heels drumming her off the Good Ship Exley. Gladys quickly busies herself ferrying in cups of tea from the kitchen. Shane Porter takes refuge in a glass of wine. Only the rent-a-cop stares at the screen, transfixed.

“Sir?” he says to Exley.

“Nick,” Exley says.

“Nick. This,” pointing a blunt brown finger at the screen, “this isn’t no video, right?”

“No. It’s computer animation.”

“Like
Avatar
, kinda?”

“Something like that.”

“And you done it?”

“Yes, Vernon, I did.”

“It’s beautiful. Beautiful.” Coming out as
bewdie-fool
in his strangled accent.

Caroline can take no more of this and she heads for the stairs, rushes into the bedroom and slams the door, suddenly needing to pee so badly that she can feel drops escaping into her knickers. She grabs her phone on her way into the lavatory, lifts her dress and squats, speed-dialing as she drills a noisy stream into the toilet bowl.

Vlad’s voicemail again. The vitality drains from her body and it is all she can do to wipe herself dry and drag herself to the bed where she falls face down and allows sleep to take her.

Chapter 18

Exley feels barely tethered, like a helium balloon that the slightest gust could lift and set on a course for the sun that pummels the house. He stands with Vernon Saul and Shane Porter. The dark man sips noisily from a teacup, his eyes on the monitor.

Port inhales a glass of white wine. “Jesus, Ex, I can’t imagine how you feel, mate. I’ve hardly got any shut-eye since the night when… Since that night.”

“It’s been hell, Port. The reality still hasn’t hit home yet,” Exley says, longing for a Scotch but reaching for a safer option, a beer.

“I wish there was something I could’ve done, you know, to help. But I’m an Outback boy, always been a crap swimmer.”

“There was nothing anybody could have done. Not even Vernon.”

Exley points his beer bottle at Vernon Saul, who can’t drag his eyes from the dancing Sunny.

“Yeah, he was a Trojan.” Porter empties the wineglass and Exley takes it from him.

“Can I fill you up?”

“Against my religion to refuse a drink, mate, but I’ve got to get moving. Some business in the city.” He shakes Exley’s hand. “If there’s anything I can do, Ex, all you have to do is shout.”

“Thanks, Port. I appreciate it.”

Porter slaps him on the shoulder, nods to Vernon, and heads off into the brightness of the day. Gladys is in the kitchen, washing up. Caroline is in hiding upstairs and Exley is alone with Vernon. This big man in his cheap jacket, check shirt and tie looks like a plainclothes cop but Exley is pleased that he’s there. Something about Vernon Saul reassures him.

The brown man speaks without taking his eyes from the screen.

“Could you do me, like this? In the computer?”

“I guess. It’s a lot of work, of course.”

“I understand. I understand.”

Exley lifts another Grolsch from the table and pops the cap. “Would you like a drink, Vernon?”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re not on duty?”

“No, I’m pulling the nightshift.”

“Then have a drink with me. Keep me company.”

“Okay. A beer.”

Exley hands him the bottle and leads the way out onto the deck, sitting down at the table in the shade. Vernon takes the chair opposite him and lifts the beer in salute. “Better days.” He chugs from the bottle, then inspects the label. “This is imported, right?”

“Yes.”

“Nice.”

Exley drinks and feels the alcohol go straight to his head. He has to concentrate not to spin off into some interior monologue and focuses on Vernon’s broad face, watching him drink.

They sit in awkward silence for a moment. Then Exley’s cell phone rings inside and he stands. “Excuse me.” He walks into the house.

Vernon swigs from the bottle. Too sweet for him. He’s not much of a beer man and he’s used to South African brew with its bitter, chemical taste. Still, it’s good to park here on this deck, watching the ocean, drinking expensive booze.

Not a life he desires. No, not for him this fancy shit, but he’d like to develop his relationship with Nick Exley—finesse it—so that he can drop in like a friend, have a drink and a chat. That would be nice.

He’s used to controlling people out on the Flats. People made vulnerable by poverty. Or people desperate to avoid punishment for their crimes. Too easy. But this is something he’s always dreamed of: exerting power over a rich man. A man who wears his wealth like a suit of armor. And Vernon has broken through that armor.

Exley returns, looking pale, his eyes red behind his glasses. As the sun catches the whitey’s face, Vernon sees livid tracks down one side of his neck. Scratch marks. Wonders what hell this pathetic bastard has been living through these last days. Almost feels sorry for him.

“You okay, Nick?”

“Yes, sure. People from overseas. Condolences, you know?”

“Of course. A trying time.” Vernon nods, sips. “So, what are your plans?”

“I expect we’ll pack up and leave, as soon as possible.”

“But you don’t want to?”

Exley looks at him in surprise. “No, I don’t suppose I do. I’m not really sure why.”

Vernon uses the neck of his beer bottle to describe an arc, taking in the house and the beach. “This place, of course, is full of bad memories. But it’s also the last place you saw your little girl alive. Maybe you want to hang on to that?”