Capture (16 page)
Vernon dumped the Checkers bag in a drain and walked down to the store, bouncing the ball on the hard sand of the sidewalk. He made a bit of a production of buying a Double O orange drink. Pretended he couldn’t find his money, the old Muslim behind the barred counter getting all pissed off. Then he paid and left, knowing if anybody asked, the old man would remember him.
He went to the open lot near his house—car wrecks and rubble and weeds and gang tags—and drank his Double O and played keepy-uppy with the tennis ball the way he always did. Spending hours moving the ball from head to toe, to chest, to head, this loner of a boy.
Vernon saw his mother coming home through the dust, walking up from the taxis. She called to him but he ignored her. Head, to toe, to knee, to head. Watched her out the corner of his eye as she went into the house and when the screams came he didn’t even lose the tennis ball, controlled it nicely and let it drift to the ground, trapping it under his bare foot and slowly walking toward home, bouncing the ball, to where his mother came flying out the front door like something shot from a cannon, falling to her knees, dress riding up her fat thighs so he could see her pants, the neighbors running over and his mother gabbling, spit dangling from her mouth and one of the neighbors going in and then coming out again in a hurry and parking his lunch in a flower bed.
Eventually the cops arrived and Vernon’s mother told them she came home from church and found the thing in the bedroom. Vernon said he left his father sleeping and went and bought a drink and played with his ball. Didn’t see nothing or no one.
The cops took the body away and said it was “gang-related.” And that was that. Vernon’s mother was left to clean up the mess. Vernon sat watching TV as night fell and his mother was in and out of the bedroom, gray under her copper skin, carrying buckets of bloody water, her hands crammed with matted rags and newspaper. Vernon laughed, somewhere deep inside.
At 10 p.m. she was finished. By this time Vernon was in his room, reading his comics. His mother sat down on the bed and when he looked at her it was as if she’d seen some kind of hell she couldn’t describe.
“I’m sleeping in here with you tonight, okay, boy?”
She drooped toward Vernon, putting an arm around his shoulder, wanting some sympathy from him. He slapped her face. She jumped away, hand to her cheek, staring at him.
“You take your stinking fucken ass out of my room,” he said. “And from now on, you listen to me, and you do what I say, otherwise I do to you what I done to him.” The bitch backed away from him, another kind of hell in her eyes now. “Understand?”
She understood.
Sitting on the rock, more than twenty years later, Vernon can feel the satisfaction, the sense of power, like it was yesterday. The turning point in his life. Made him what he is today.
His phone purrs in his pocket and he slides it out. “Ja?”
It’s the darkie in the sentry box. Caroline Exley is on her way home.
Vernon, perfectly camouflaged in the shade, hears the high whine of the Land Rover, sees it bumping and rattling up to the house. The motorized gate rumbles open and the Land Rover rolls in. He hears the echo of the engine in the garage before it cuts. After a few minutes the door onto the deck of the house slides open and the woman stands there, staring out at the ocean, then she disappears inside.
Vernon sits. Waiting.
Chapter 22
The voices are back. A chorus of banshees, all screaming at once of murder and plague and death and hell and damnation. The energy that her rage at Nick gave Caroline—the protection that it afforded, the way it insulated her from her emotions—is gone.
All she feels now is the inevitable slide toward a major breakdown, and she is alone, without her medication and without her husband.
Driving down to the pharmacy in Hout Bay and refilling her prescription is a bridge too far and Nick’s return is in a future too distant to imagine.
She’s terrified.
Caroline has had two breakdowns. One after Sunny was born and another, three years later, while they were living in Paris. Her psychiatrist, a bland asexual man with rooms in an anonymous medical center in leafy Constantia, assures her repeatedly that by dutifully swallowing her pills each day and managing her stress—as if he were talking about balancing her checkbook—she will prevent another breakdown. Where, she wonders, as the voices scream and roil inside her head, did a dead child and a now ex-lover fit into the notion of stress management?
Somehow Caroline finds herself in the kitchen and, though she knows better, she opens the fridge and grabs the half-empty bottle of Riesling lying beside the leftovers, her fingers chilled by the sweating glass. She frees the cork and tips the bottle, glugging like one of the bloated fetal-alcohol mutants who shamble along the Cape Town sidewalks. The wine is sour and she drops the bottle and it shatters on the ceramic floor tiles. Rushing to the sink, her sandals crunching over broken glass, she spits out the vinegary liquid.
She heads for the sitting room but the windows are too big and she’s left the door open onto the deck and the sunlight blares in at her and she has to turn and flee, kicking off her sandals and taking the carpeted stairs two at a time, until she comes to the cool dimness of the upper level. She passes Sunny’s room, the door standing ajar (left open by Nick making his morning pilgrimage of pain before leaving for the airport) and the voices channel her daughter, mimicking her laugh and her off-key rendering of a nursery rhyme: ‘Ring a ring of roses…’ Caroline slams the door and hurries into her bedroom.
She grabs her Nokia from beside the bed and dials her husband and gets his voicemail, delivered in that bizarre mid-Atlantic mélange he calls an accent, and the only message she can think of leaving is a scream of terror, so she ends the call and throws the phone onto the duvet.
Caroline walks through to the bathroom—a marble mausoleum with a terrifyingly large mirror—and stares at her reflection. Horrified by what stares back at her, she tears herself away, the light in the bathroom streaking and lagging like bad video, the molecules in the air thick and heavy, pressing down on her, resisting her as she goes back into the bedroom and sees her computer, a folded clam lying on the bed.
Her own voice, almost lost now in the psycho-billy chorus, tells her to leave it unopened. But she doesn’t hear or she doesn’t listen and she sits down on the bed, the comforter a living thing, slick and fleshy, ready to suck her down and suffocate her. She escapes its clutches and sits cross-legged on the carpet and lifts the computer onto her lap.
Her hands shake, palsied tremors that make opening the Mac almost impossible, her thumb finding the little slider that releases the lid—the serrations painful to her skin—but losing purchase and skidding off onto the cool plastic. She has to use both her thumbs, one on top of the other, to release the catch. She lifts the lid and her index finger taps wild Morse code on the power button before she stills it long enough to apply enough pressure to boot up the Mac.
The computer hums to life, the whine of its electrics at a pitch too high for Caroline to tolerate, and she dumps it onto the carpet and stands, hugging herself, as the machine grunts and moans its way to alertness.
When it trills its frantic little greeting she returns to it and opens the document file that contains her work-in-progress, the only thing that has sustained her, given her hope these last days.
Miraculously, the voices recede as her eyes fix on the familiar black Times New Roman script against the blue-whiteness of the monitor. She hears a backwash of churning and sucking, and then nothing. Quiet. Allowing her to concentrate fully, to weigh each word for meaning.
To face the truth.
Christ knows it is puerile crap. The most god-awful, adolescent shite she has ever written. The lowest form of chick lit. She is stunned almost to sanity and then the voices are back, delighted, whooping and laughing and jeering at her.
She grabs the indigo and crème computer and stands and swings it in a wide arc, repeatedly smashing it against the wall, gouging chunks of white plaster, brick red as flesh beneath, until at last the case of the iBook splinters and its innards are revealed: stippled little boards festooned with silver solder and M&M-sized doodads, colored wires like braided hair held in check by cable ties.
The battery flies loose and lands on the instep of her bare left foot and the pain only spurs her on to greater efforts as she swings and smashes, not even noticing when the torn plastic cuts into the palm of her left hand. At last Caroline stands with blood dripping from her, surrounded by computer body parts.
Leaving a trail of blood, she goes back into the bathroom and kills the light. Then she finds the basin in the gloom and opens the cold faucet, letting the water sluice the blood away. She is not sure how long she stands there but when she lifts her hand it stings as the lacerations make contact with the air.
But the bleeding has stopped and the voices tell her what she must do next. And who she must see.
The whole dog and pony show, billed as “a motion-capture master class with the creator of Life in a Box,” is the brainchild of Billy Chalmers, the tanned South African hustler who grins at Exley from the front row of the audience. Exley, placed before a display of artfully stacked brown boxes, the open laptop his only shield, stands at a podium facing two hundred people seated on folding chairs in the vast, windowless, climate-controlled space.
Exley, on autopilot, pedals his digital snake oil, convinced that if he stops talking and allows reality in, he’ll fall apart.
In the morning a car driven by a silent black man met him at O.R. Tambo airport. As the Beemer carved a path through the rush hour on the freeway, Exley, brain fogged by anguish, watched without seeing the rash of condo developments en route to Sandton, Johannesburg’s money belt, far from the post-apocalyptic inner city and the endless sprawl of ghetto townships he’d glimpsed from the air.
When the ugliness softened and blurred through tears, he was sure he’d have to be poured from the car, a messy puddle of snot. The driver’s eyes, skewering him in the rearview before sliding back to the road, shamed him into pulling himself together.
Once inside the movie studio that hosted the presentation, Exley could have been anywhere from Sydney to Stockholm. The usual mix of accents and ethnicities, members of the digital diaspora, united like Freemasons by geek-speak unintelligible to a civilian.
Exley fell back on the safety of his rituals: fussing with the laptop, trotting out his mantras. Digging into his usual bag of tricks, sending mo-cap sequences through to the big-brother bank of flat screens that floated in the gloom.
Now there is a break for a late lunch and Exley dodges Chalmers and the money men who want him to eat with them, and finds a room to hide in. He sets his phone alarm for an hour hence and crawls under a plastic table, ignoring the foot-rot stink of the curling carpet tiles.
Drawing his knees into a fetal position, he falls asleep and tumbles down some rabbit hole and emerges on the beach, getting baked with Shane Porter, feeling Sunny tugging at his boardshorts, ignoring her, fobbing her off, seeing her floating underwater, a chain of bubbles escaping her open mouth.
Exley battles his way out of the nightmare, banging his head on the underside of the table, awake now. Reality is worse. His daughter is dead.
His phone’s red eye winks and he sees he has a missed call and a voicemail message from Caroline. But when he plays it he hears only the hiss of her breath and a muttered curse. He considers calling her but he’s feeling too fragile for the inevitable confrontation.
Exley gathers his belongings and finds a bathroom and washes his face and straightens his clothes. Then he stands in the darkness at the side of the studio, like a performer waiting in the wings, as the audience of strangers drifts back to its seats.
Driving is almost beyond Caroline. The Landy’s absurd gearstick, rearing up out of the floor between the front seats, is a difficult beast at the best of times but with Caroline’s tremors hitting the upper limits of the Richter scale controlling this wobbling, spindly-thing is impossible and metal grates and tears as Caroline forces the car into gear. She is still barefoot, the soles of her feet protesting at the painful contact with the rubber-sheathed pedals.
The heat is suffocating and the smell of gasoline fills the car, burning her eyes and nose. The side windows are open but there is no breeze to stir the air. Her brain feels swollen, pressing up against the backs of her eyes, and even though she drives slowly the passing houses are a pointillist blur of swirling color.
The voices continue, one minute screaming obscenities at her, the next falling to hissy sibilance. These whispers are the most dangerous, inviting her to stop fighting, to surrender to her madness. But she fights on. Holds onto some last shred of herself as she battles the Land Rover up the hill to Vlad’s house.
If she sees him, she tells herself, then she’ll be okay. He’ll fix her. He’ll still the voices. All he has to do is hold her, envelop her, and the madness will recede.
She bangs the Land Rover into the curb outside his house and falls from the high car, leaving the door hanging open as she rushes toward the front gate. Like all the other houses in this suburb of riches, Vlad’s is a castle keep surrounded by looming brick walls, strands of electric fencing singing at the top. The barred gate towers above her, topped by a cross-hatching of ornate spikes. A burnished metal plate is recessed into the masonry beside the gate, with a white button and a compound-eye oval of speaker holes.
She presses the button, the plastic sticky to the touch, knowing that somewhere in the house she has triggered a buzzer. Peering through the bars, she sees slices of the nouveau riche monstrosity: blank windows firing the sun at her, patio furniture, palm trees, the huge oak door like a closed mouth at the top of a flight of wide stairs. No movement.
