Capture (33 page)

Dawn’s wearing a T-shirt with something written on the front over her tits. She twists the fabric and reads
Burning Man 2001
. Big enough to be Nick’s. If she knew it was the dead wife’s she’d have to tear it off, way her nerves feel this morning, sticking up through her skin like little feelers.

She lifts the hem of the T-shirt and sees she’s bare naked underneath. Flashes back to the Ugly Sisters rolling her jeans onto her, pulling them up tight into her gash, no panties in the way. Remembers the ugly little room at Lips, when she was all over Nick like a
tik
monster from the gutter.

How is she going to face him?

But the thought of Brittany gets her standing and wobbling out the door and into the bathroom. She pees, humming something, eyes closed, trying to chill herself. Hold it together for the kid, Dawn. Hold it together, bitch.

She washes her face with the soap in the basin and squeezes some toothpaste onto her finger and cleans her teeth. Not up to using one of the pair of toothbrushes that dangle from little hooks under the mirror.

Dawn finds a huge towel, fluffy and white as a polar bear, hanging behind the bathroom door and wraps it around her waist, under the T-shirt. Checks herself out in the mirror. Pure street whore. But what can she do? What’s done is done.

She peeps into the child’s room and sees that the bed is empty. Hears voices from below and walks down the stairs, taking it nice and slow, making no noise on the carpet.

The sound of Britt’s laughter leads Dawn toward the kitchen and she stands in the doorway, watching Nick and her daughter, their backs to her, making breakfast. Brittany is up on a chair by the table, stirring egg yolks in a glass bowl and Nick dips in a finger and then paints the tip of the kid’s nose with the yolk. Brittany laughs, furiously wiping her nose on a kitchen towel.

Nick walks over to the stove where something splutters in a pan. As he flips burgers he sees Dawn. “Hey,” he says. “You sleep okay?” Smiling at her like fuck-all went down last night.

Dawn nods. Doesn’t trust her voice yet.

Brittany jumps from the chair and comes over and hugs Dawn tight around the knees even though she doesn’t deserve it. Dawn strokes her daughter’s hair, hating herself. Then Britt’s off again, back up on the chair, clanging a spoon against the bowl.

“Is this okay, Uncle Nick?”

“Perfect,” Exley says, and he pours the yolks into a pan. “Burgers and scrambled eggs okay?” he asks Dawn.

“Thought you’re a vegetarian?” Finding her voice.

“Soya patties,” he says with a shrug.

Dawn has to laugh at this rich guy cooking the meat substitute her family ate when she was a kid because they were too poor to afford the real thing.

Nick plates up and the three of them take their places at the table, Brittany at the head, Dawn and Nick facing one another. Britt takes each of their hands and closes her eyes. There’s an awkward moment, then Nick reaches over with his free hand and takes Dawn’s and looks at her and she can’t meet his eyes, so she closes hers and listens to her daughter saying a little prayer in a voice so sweet and pure it’s enough to break her heart.

Tears come. Tears of shame and self-loathing and she has to leave the table, hurrying out into the living room.

She hears Nick say, “Eat up, Britt, your mommy isn’t feeling good.”

He comes after Dawn and finds her standing by the door open out onto the deck, watching Cape Town putting on one of its shows: all shiny sea and creamy sunlight and a sky so blue it looks like a movie effect.

He lays his hand on her back. “Hey,” he says.

“Jesus, Nick, I fucked up big time.”

He turns her to him and holds her. At first she resists then she softens against him. “Dawn, it’s done. Let it go.”

She wipes her eyes, fetching a smile from somewhere. “So what is this, Nick, some
Pretty Woman
fantasy you got going here? Like you’re Richard Gere and I’m Julia Roberts and you’re gonna save me?”

“Believe me, Dawn, if anybody is being saved, it’s me.”

“Ja?”

“Yes.” He’s staring at her, and then through her, going somewhere deep inside himself. “Dawn, I’ve done some things in the last week—”

She doesn’t want to hear this. Not now. So she puts a finger to his lips. “Ssshhh. Leave it go, Nick. This is too nice to spoil.”

She takes his hand and they walk back into the kitchen and they eat their breakfast, Brittany bubbling away and Nick joking with her as if his dark moment never happened and Dawn wonders if anything could ever be this bloody good again.

After breakfast Exley and Dawn sit on the deck, Brittany and Mr. Brown down on the beach. Dawn wears a pair of Exley’s shorts, belted at the waist, her bare feet on the chair, wrapping her legs with her arms, chin on her knees. She looks calmer; the ashen layer under her copper skin has faded.

“So what happens now?” Dawn says, turning her head to look at him. 

“Do you have a passport?” he asks.

“Ja, I do, actually. That guy from Lips, Costa, took some of us to dance at club up in Mozambique a few months back. A total fucken disaster. But why you asking?”

Exley tries to keep the tension from his voice. Knows he’s gambling now. “I went online, found out I can book the three of us on a flight to Bali, leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

“Bali?”

“Yeah.”

“Why Bali?”

“Because we don’t need visas and it’s the other side of the fucking earth.”

“You serious, Nick?”

“Yes. I want to get away from this,” sweeping his hand from the beach to the house. “From everything that’s happened. And I want you and Brittany to come with me.”

“And after Bali?” Dawn asks, unfolding her legs, sitting upright.

He shrugs. “We’ll see. There are plenty of options.”

She shakes her head. “So this isn’t just, like, some holiday thing?”

“No.”

“Talk to me, Nick. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Exley stares out over the ocean. “I guess I’d like to make a life with you and Brittany. In the States, maybe, or Australia.” He finds the courage to look at her. “What do you say?”

She’s staring at him. “We can’t replace them, Nick. Your wife and kid.”

“Jesus, don’t you think I know that?” His voice is harsher than he intended and she jerks like she’s been slapped. “Sorry,” he says. Too late.

“No, I’m sorry,” she says, standing and walking over to the railing, turning her back on him, and he knows he’s lost her.

But after a while she faces Exley and says, “Fuck, Nick, this is big stuff. Too big.”

“Okay, I understand,” he says, standing, talking fast, selling this. “But what about taking it a step at a time? Bali for two weeks? We chill out, have some fun. Then we talk about the future?”

She walks into the living room. “What about your stuff?”

Exley follows her. “All of this came with the house,” he says gesturing at the furniture. “I have a buyer for my computer gear. Sunny and Caroline’s things I want to pack up and give to charity, or whatever.”

“And your wife? Her funeral?”

He shakes his head. “Her body is going to be flown to England. To her sister. She’ll be buried in some graveyard alongside her parents. It was her wish.” A flash of guilt makes him turn away for a moment, until he’s ready to continue. “There’s nothing for me here, Dawn.”

She’s nodding. “Britt don’t have a passport.”

He hesitates. “She can use Sunny’s. Nobody will ever know.”

Her eyes skid away and he can’t read her expression. “It’s just paper, Dawn.”

She nods. “I know.” Watching him. “You got it all figured out, haven’t you?”

“No,” he says. “No way.”

“Okay, Mister Nick,” she says. “Let’s do the Bali thing. Reckon I’ll look cute in a sarong.” Smiling at him. “Then we see, okay?”

And that’s good enough for Exley. For now.

Dawn’s head is spinning from more than the meth hangover. Feels like she’s on one of those Japanese bullet trains she’s seen on the TV, and it’s speeding off, taking her farther and farther away from her life.

Trying to ground herself, gather her thoughts, she steps back out onto the deck, staring into space, but something catches her eye, something in the water where the low waves lick at the beach. At first she thinks its just a piece of driftwood, then she sees it’s the little bear, Mr. Brown, and it’s kinda creepy because he lies on his back with his legs and arms spread, floating in the surf, the water washing him onto the beach, then pulling him back, just like he’s a dead body. Dawn flashes on Nick’s little blonde girl lying dead in that selfsame water. The image freaks her out and she looks around for Brittany.

No sign of her.

“Britt?” she calls, walking down onto the sand. Does a three-sixty—a pirouette—the rocks and the sea and the sky blurring. “Brittany!”

Exley, coming down a little from the tension of laying out his proposition to Dawn, feeling looser now that she’s agreed to some of it, wanders into the kitchen and gets himself a bottle of Evian from the fridge. Walks into a Caroline flashback, catching her last violent shudders on the tiled floor. Wills her away.

Jesus, it’ll be good to leave this house.

As he drinks from the bottle he crosses to the window and sees Dawn on the beach, agitated, calling her daughter’s name. Then she’s shouting for him, her voice thick with fear. Exley drops the water and bolts out of the kitchen and across the deck.

Dawn stands near the surf, one hand raking her hair. “I can’t find her, Nick. And she didn’t go into the house.”

Exley sees the bear in the water and he sees Sunny floating, those last bubbles of breath leaving her and rising to the surface where they vanish.

He sprints across the sand and up onto the rocks to get a vantage point, to see if Brittany is in the ocean, being pulled away from land by the current, his breath louder then the surf, and just for a moment—in a near-subliminal flash-cut—he glimpses Vernon Saul squatting on those rocks and fears for Dawn’s girl.

Exley blinks and there’s nothing there but the play of sunlight and shadow, and he scans the empty water and the beach until his eyes find a pale flare inside the wooden rowboat.

The child peeps up at him, the sun torching her hair, laughing as he hurtles from the rocks, swoops down on her and lifts her from boat, the girl saying, “I were hiding, Uncle Nick, I were hiding away.”

He has to fend off Dawn’s flailing hands as she sprints across the sand, wanting to hug the child and hit her, shouting, “Don’t you ever do that again!”

Brittany starts to sob and Exley hands the wailing girl to her mother, who grabs her and envelops her and rushes her up the steps into the house.

Exley rescues the drenched bear from the waves, its body dripping water, and carries it across the beach and into the living room, where Dawn hugs Brittany, soothing her, saying, “Oh, my baby, my baby, you made me so scared.”

Chapter 52

Following them is piss easy. The Audi’s got muscle under the hood but Exley drives slow, with the top down, Mr. Richie Rich giving his new girls a treat. Vernon, his Civic tucked in three cars back, sees Dawn’s hair blowing in the wind as the Audi takes a wide curve on the ocean side of the coast road, sees her laughing when she turns to the kid strapped in the back.

When they get to Camps Bay, making like the French Riviera with its beach and sidewalk cafés and blonde cunts in tea-bag bikinis, Vernon has to sharpen up. Here the Audi is just another car in the stream of Ferraris and Porsches and SUVs with jukebox grilles.

But when the Audi snakes up toward Table Mountain and then down to the city and the foreshore, a cloud of pollution hanging like mustard gas over the office towers, Vernon knows where they are headed, and once they’re on the freeway he puts foot and leaves them behind, takes the Monte Vista exit, shoots down to Voortrekker and finds himself a parking spot across from Dawn’s place.

Vernon lights a smoke and waits, Tony Orlando warbling “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” over and over in his brain, till he punches in a Temptations CD—“Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”—to shut the fucker up.

When Dawn unlocks the scuffed and pitted door and leads Exley into the tiny apartment it’s difficult for him to hide his distaste. The place is squalid. Not dirty but about as ugly a room as he has ever been in.

Dawn takes Brittany’s hand, saying, “Nick, hang in here, I’m just gonna drop Madam over with Mrs. de Pontes.”

“Are you sure you want to leave Britt there?”

“Ja, I’m just gonna stress about her and the sea. Better this way.”

He nods and their voices echo away down the corridor, Brittany complaining, Dawn telling her it’s just for tonight, she has to help Uncle Nick pack up some stuff, and there’ll be a treat tomorrow. A big one, she promises.

Exley crosses the stained and mangy carpet—it may have been beige, long ago—and stands looking out through the padlocked balcony doors. The doors are barred and rusted razor wire spirals around the railing of the small balcony, even though the apartment’s on the second floor. The traffic on Voortrekker rumbles and throbs, the bleats of the minibus taxis and their yelling drivers rising up to him.

He turns and scans the place, feeling somehow disloyal as he does it. A molting sofa. A small TV set, one side of the plastic casing held together by duct tape. A double bed, neatly made, covered by an off-white comforter that’s frayed at the edges. A troop of soft toys arranged across the pillows.

Unframed postcard-sized photographs of Brittany—as an infant, a toddler, dressed as an angel in a nativity play—are stuck to the brown walls, edges curling away from the damp plaster. A closet is squeezed in beside the bed, one door dangling from a broken hinge. Next to the bathroom is a kitchen sink under a frosted-glass window, a microwave oven and a hotplate on the counter.

The lack of beauty, the lack of grace, scares Exley. No matter how poor he and his mother were (or he and Caroline in the early days) the places they lived in were always cluttered with books, fresh flowers and framed prints rescued from junk shops, old furniture hidden beneath bright cloths and cushions.