Last Train to Retreat (19 page)

After six years Rowena died as quietly as Elton had disappeared, slipping into a greater silence almost with relief, leaving Lena with a matric certificate and no money and no work. Rowena had always been thin and nervy but death had made her look emaciated. With the help of Adi Apollis, Lena applied for the SASSA position advertised at The Centre. It was one of the great ironies in Lena’s life that her mother’s high standing had been instrumental in her getting the job. There were other bitter ironies – Elton, man of God and moral compass to the community, sexually abusing his daughter; Rowena, teacher of life skills like cooking, sewing, nutrition, managing money and family relationships, choosing silence and denial in order to survive. Two people looked up to by the community, betraying themselves and their daughter – the ultimate betrayal to Lena.

The Mowbray station sign brought Lena back to Sarai. Since the train incident and her suspicion that Gatiep and Curly were somehow connected to Cupido and others who had held Sarai captive, Lena had renewed her search for the Thai girl. She revisited Green Point where she first saw Sarai, the V&A Waterfront, Mouille Point, and Three Anchor Bay. She went back to the city skirting the Long Street massage parlour where Sarai had once worked – they had thrown Lena out on her first visit. Tonight she was doing the Bo-Kaap, including the Malay Quarter between Buitengracht and Signal Hill. The busy Sea Point area she’d leave until last. Lena was convinced that Sarai’s illegal immigrant status as well as her debt to her captors would make escape to Thailand all but impossible. But would it stop her from going to the police and telling them about Cupido’s death and where Lena lived? The girl had to be around and Lena had to find her.

Lena thought of how she had tried to understand Rowena, allowing that perhaps it was the woman in her, not the mother, who had been humiliated – a woman sexually rejected for her daughter, age against youth. But in Lena’s presence, Elton and Rowena never touched each other or cast intimate glances. What happened in their bedroom was anybody’s guess but Lena doubted that anything ever did. Why else would her father have come to her? Such thoughts distressed Lena so much that she banished them from her mind and maintained her own inner silence on top of those imposed by her father and her mother – layers of silence built over many years. Then came Zane, thrust into her life by sudden death on a train to nowhere.

•

Lena had taken the 4.30 pm train to the city with the kind of hope diamond diggers felt at the start of every search. Now she was on the last train back to Retreat with nothing to show for it and despairing what the next day would bring. The stations flashed by like on the night Zane rescued her – a reluctant hero, she thought, but a hero nevertheless. In the flat she had seen his white karate suit and brown belt, and wondered why a man with his training acted as he had on the train – in fact, not acted until it was almost too late. It had puzzled her ever since. And not carrying out his threat to take her to hospital when the poison spread, and waiting before getting the antibiotics. It was as though he had been weighed down by other things.

She got off at Wynberg, six stops short of Retreat, and walked to Zane’s flat hoping his girl wouldn’t be there. Lena nearly turned back when his block came into view but her train had been the last one. Taking a taxi home now seemed silly, she told herself as she rang the bell to his flat. And wasn’t there still the risk that he could go to the police?

•

Like two dogs vaguely acquainted, Lena thought – no growling but tails not wagging either, getting to know each other all over again, sniffing for any scent of threat. They were in Zane’s lounge. He had arrived minutes earlier from a training session and seemed surprised to see her, a little dismayed, she thought. She looked at him as he wheeled his bike to the bedroom – his lean body moving effortlessly, his head with its short, dense pelt like some creature of the water. He seemed to radiate energy. Was it nerves or the exercise?

‘You’re stressing, aren’t you?’ she said, ‘is it me?’

‘Like you don’t know it, of course it’s you … it’s us,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s also other stuff from the past involving my sister. We’re close and I worry about her.’ He re-appeared, changing the subject, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘No.’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘I’m looking for Sarai.’

‘Christ, still! Does it really matter now, Lena? You took her away from the streets the night of the World Cup. You gave her a chance and she messed up, didn’t she? You couldn’t have done more.’

‘She might be in trouble, in fact, I’m sure she is.’

He came back into the lounge and looked at her quizzically.

She blurted out, ‘Six of the places I went to in the last two months said that others had been looking for her too …
six
, Zane, imagine how many I
don’t
know about?’ She bit nervously on her lower lip. She wished she could tell him about Cupido.

‘Another reason why you think there’s a gang trading in girls?’ He walked to the kitchen. ‘I need food. Did you know if you don’t eat protein within an hour of training, your body starts eating in on itself?’

‘Nice,’ she said, ‘it can’t taste too good.’

‘Ah, so you
do
see the lighter side of things!’

‘I’m also hungry.’ She opened a cupboard and the fridge to see what there was.

‘I never guessed you had an appetite,’ he grinned.

At the small round table in the lounge covered with a black-and-white cloth they devoured what they had gathered – sardines from two tins spread on thick slices of seed bread, peanut butter and syrup on more bread, nearly a litre of milk, and grapes. ‘I had to stock up after you left,’ he said, wiping his mouth with a piece of paper towel. ‘Lena, what is it you want from me? Can’t we just get on with our lives and hope what happened on the train goes away? The Thai girl is your business.’

‘It should be the world’s business, Zane. Men drove the slave trade long ago, they’re doing it again, and the money this time is
big,
so big they can’t stop. And the reason it’s big is because there’re so many people in the world trapped in poverty, all of them potential victims …’

‘I feel for them, I really do, Lena, but governments, NGOs and the police are the ones that should fight this battle, they have the resources. You can’t take on the world and its suffering. I mean, what
can
we do? We’re
muggies
on an elephant’s back.’

She gave him a desperate look. ‘Have you thought about it, Zane – when you use a bullet, or
tik,
cocaine or heroin, it’s used up straightaway, then you have to get more, right?’ He nodded. ‘Well,’ Lena said, ‘traffickers use
the
same girls over and over again
because they’re flesh and blood, they’re living things
.
Jesus, how fucking crazy is it that what makes a woman a woman should also make her a slave to men. And more are born each minute, each second! I mean, it makes women more valuable than all the stuff we dig up from the earth that’ll run out at some point – minerals and oil and gold!’ The hostility in her dark chocolaty eyes had come back. That he had been caught in it by chance was of no consequence to her.

‘
Minute
, Lena! I say again, what
can
I do?’

‘You can go to that massage parlour where she worked and pretend you’re a customer and ask for her.’

He stared at her. ‘You’re crazy.’ But as he said it he thought of the plaque in Spin Street that marked the site of the tree where slaves used to be auctioned, of their pitiful earnings called ‘coolie money’ – Zane had visited the Slave Lodge museum across the road from where he worked – and he realised that what Lena had told him was no different from the old slave trade, there were just more of them today. Zane’s office was metres away from where slaves used to be sold like cattle. Today he was free – from slavery and apartheid – he could move around without a pass book, he voted, earned a good wage yet he did nothing to help modern-day slaves. Like Sarai.

‘Why? You’re a man, I’m a woman. When I went to the parlour they must’ve thought I was a dyke or a
gatta
, bad news for them either way.’ She wasn’t a cop. Maybe she was a dyke without realising it, Lena thought? She remembered how Sarai’s touch had excited her – an unexpected sensation flooding her body. Or had she simply responded to a show of affection that she knew posed no physical threat?

‘And if Sarai’s there and they take me to her?’

She looked him squarely in the eyes. ‘Then don’t make love to her, just talk to her. Pretend you’re the kind type who’s interested in people’s souls, not their bodies. Ask how she is,
see
if she looks well.’

Zane got up and paced the lounge, his hands in his jeans pockets.

‘If it’s the money, I’ll pay for it, okay?’ she said. She watched him. When they first met she thought he was from her world. After her second visit she realised he did not belong to it entirely, that a part of him had already moved on. Not for him some dead-end job in a factory in Epping or Atlantis. ‘What do you do, anyway?’

‘I’m in advertising. I’m the guy who has to keep the clients happy. For that the agency’s given me a fancy title. And you?’

‘I work for a government agency. I’m the girl who keeps the community happy with grants – women with children, disabled people, old people, all kinds of people who need financial assistance, millions of them. Where are you from?’

‘Lavender Hill, my parents and sister are still there.’

‘I’m also from there. I’m still there. My mother died, and my father … well, he left us years ago.’

They looked at each other. They were like two stick insects, long feelers aquiver with the realisation that they were on the same little branch holding on for dear life.

I
t was the following week that Hannibal saw Zane Hendricks emerging from the Wynberg station building. The evenings were tricky for Hannibal because vendors in Station Street packed up at five and only a few minibus taxis hung around, giving him little place to hide. But it was Zane – dormant in Hannibal’s brain for years, occasionally rising up to rile him, lately very much on his mind – suddenly emerging as flesh and blood. From where he stood at the entrance to a fast food joint, Hannibal studied him: same easy stride but with more muscle propelling him, brown hair compact with no parting, angular face full of purpose, clothes that spoke of an office job – long-sleeved blue shirt, black chinos, black leather shoes, and a briefcase – but to Hannibal still Zane, the insider who had taken Chantal away from him.

Hannibal turned his bitter face away, waited for Zane’s figure to recede down the road and followed him. Up Church Street all the way to the law courts, right into Court and almost to the end before disappearing into a block of flats. Just as he thought – Zane didn’t have a car. Hannibal had been spending hours at the station every morning and afternoon, his conviction and resentment growing that Zane’s was not an hourly wage job; he seemed to have no fixed starting and finishing time. Sasman’s deadline had become secondary to Hannibal. Having his hopes destroyed in minutes in a dusty street by Chantal had shocked him more than any knockout could have done. The threat posed by the killers of Cupido and Gatiep and the sudden involvement of Philander had been overtaken by the old triangle of Hannibal, Zane, and Chantal.

Hannibal stood in the quiet twilight of the street, his mind in turmoil. He should have shot Zane before he disappeared. Now he had to wait again at the station. The cool snout of his gun’s silencer pressed against him. Just a plop and Zane would be history. No deafening roar, more like the thudding of a club on a young seal – the image recurred in Hannibal. But what satisfaction would it bring? The day of judgement surely was not about a single merciful shot out of the blue with no thunder? There had to be
knowledge, realisation, awareness
first of the sins of the past and the coming retribution for it to have any meaning.

•

Cage fighting to Hannibal was the next best thing to actually killing someone. The anticipation of it made him restless days before a bout. He’d replay bad moves that cost him in the past – he remembered them because his defeats had been so few. In his mind and in his yard he’d practise knock-out moves conjuring up the faces of his opponents from memory or, if they were new, from billboards. Like gunslingers of the American West they would all come to challenge Hannibal.

Now, standing in the cage and listening with half an ear to the ring announcer, Hannibal stared at his opponent – a man with black hair matting his white chest, dark eyes looking at him from under wild eyebrows, pointy ears like Sasman’s Dobermans – a new challenger from Gauteng, Peter Holt, aka Pete the Bolt. The announcer’s voice boomed to the far reaches of the Velodrome: ‘Introducing first, fighting out of the red corner, this man is a freestyle fighter. He stands 1.8 metres tall, weighing in at 86 kilos. He holds a professional mixed martial arts record of thirty-nine wins and four losses, with twenty-eight wins by knockout. He is the current, reigning, and defending light heavyweight national champion … ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Hannibal “The General” Fortuin!’

The capacity crowd cheered. The announcer proceeded to introduce Peter Holt then he stated the basic rules, and that five rounds of five minutes each had been scheduled because it was a title fight. The referee said to Hannibal and Holt, ‘Touch gloves and come out fighting!’ The murmur of the crowd rose. Hannibal disliked touching gloves. To him it was false etiquette, like bowing to an opponent in karate, insincere and wasteful, when all he wanted to do was tear into the face and body of the man in front of him. And there was always the risk of an opponent faking the glove touch and executing a sudden punch or takedown. One of Hannibal’s losses early in his career had been through a sucker punch.

Hannibal’s fingers, sticking out from his cowhide leather grappling gloves, opened and closed. He drew in air behind his gum guard where his teeth used to be. It made a hissing sound as he waved off Holt’s offer to touch gloves. Holt had made his name in Gauteng as a grapple artist who excelled at the takedown. Once he had an opponent on his back, Holt always went on to win through his knowledge of jiu-jitsu – his chokes and joint locks would deplete lungs of air and tie bodies up in ways nature never intended. Submission on the canvas was his game. Hannibal, with his knowledge of karate and Thai kick-boxing, preferred to fight standing, picking his opponents apart with strikes and going for the knockout – a style known as sprawling and brawling. Not for him the sweaty, smelly close-up groundwork of MMA. Hannibal reserved the missionary and 69 positions for bodies smelling of perfume and shampoo, like Chantal’s.