Last Train to Retreat (29 page)

O
n their fourth day in Wilderness Zane was sitting on the beach with Lena feeling as if his world was teetering. He had the awful realisation that all along he had been building his new life on flimsy foundations on the mountain side of the track, and that it was now threatening to fall apart. And nobody was to blame except himself – he had kept that which could not be seen away from others and, worse, himself. The Zane Hendricks people could see – the flat in Wynberg, the job, the clothes, the bit of money he could now flash – he had been more than happy to present to the world, to his parents, Chantal, Bernadette, the people at BAT, even Malaki and Lena.

He thought of how spin had entered his life. How different was the new Zane from an ad campaign that relied on airy fairy promises? Had he become what he disliked so much? Maybe his father was right. He should have learnt a trade – something real, honest, and lasting. Zane stared at the sand castle a boy and a girl were building, their zeal and commitment such that they were convinced it would stand against the tides. Just like him.

Zane sat stiffly on the sand. The deep peace that the mountains, forests, lakes and lagoons had gathered over millions of years he had lost in four days. It was unable to lull him into thinking that things weren’t as bad as they seemed to be. He stopped taking in his surroundings. It was as though they’d been painted on shiny canvas and were bouncing off his eyes. He was aware only of the waiting, knowing he would have to confront his shadow rider once and for all. He and Lena were both waiting, he thought – so young, so new to the world to be facing their separate destinies so soon. It made every day they were together a precious day of reprieve.

•

It came the following afternoon, when the sun was three-quarters through the day heading in the direction of George and bathing the beach in a rich apricot hue. His mobile was ringing from his rucksack, muffled, barely audible. He hadn’t received any calls since stepping off the bus in George. He’d bought his parents a mobile and airtime – it could be them, he thought. It could be Appleby with a crisis at work, or Malaki with news, maybe Bernadette – they had not spoken for weeks. He thought how few people there were who had reason to call him, and smiled ruefully – that would be about it for his funeral too. But then he’d never been a Facebook man on a mission to collect friends. Crossing the line had been everything.

He stared at his rucksack as if it contained a reptile.

‘It’s yours, Zane,’ Lena said and took it out for him.

Its shrill ringing was now cutting through the roar of the sea – swells rising in long lines, pounding the shallows and throwing up plumes of white water. The small screen showed no name, only a number he didn’t recognise. He felt relieved, probably a wrong number. His impulse was to throw his mobile into the sea, cut off the world and hold Lena against him so that all he could hear was the beating of her heart and her breathing.

He pressed the green. A man’s voice said, ‘Zane?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Someone wants to talk to you.’

He was still trying to work out who it was using his name so familiarly when a new voice came on the line. As he listened he reached out for Lena’s hand and pressed it to his cheek, but it couldn’t stop the tears running silently down his face and into the sand.

•

Zane and Lena got to Malaki by 11 am the following morning. The first bus would only have
left
George at 11 am arriving in Cape Town in the evening. Zane would never have forgiven himself had he waited, and he had done the only thing he could think of – hitch-hiking the 450km from Wilderness to Cape Town. They had left Wilderness in the late afternoon reaching Swellendam three-and-a-half hours later after a long wait on the N2 outside Mossel Bay. Lena’s presence helped but Zane remarked that little did motorists know
she
was the dangerous one – she was still carrying her knife. They stayed at a B&B close to the main road running through Swellendam, Zane knowing he would not sleep. They talked until she dozed off in his arms he having told her about Hannibal who wanted them both dead because they had each crossed him twice. She stirred and said, ‘I’m sure he’s the one who killed Sarai. Your enemy is mine too. At least we got something straight.’ She kissed him goodnight and he wondered for the umpteenth time what it would be like to make love to her. Even with his mind in turmoil he wanted her, she’d been driving him crazy for days. In the morning they walked to the outskirts of Swellendam at 5.30 am, got a lift half-an-hour later and arrived in Cape Town by 9.00 am. From there they took the train to Muizenberg and a taxi to Strandfontein. Zane had thought it best not to go near his flat or Lena’s house. What he had heard on the phone had been bad enough.

They found Malaki on the beach teaching three awe-struck kids how to surf. Zane wasn’t sure if it was Malaki’s dreads and physique or the scary surf.

‘You like to drop in, eh!’ Malaki grinned at Zane.

‘Especially on your waves,’ Zane said. They hugged then Malaki put an arm around a stiff Lena. ‘What brings you two back so soon?’

‘You don’t want to know,
my bra
. I’ll catch you later, at the camp.’

That afternoon Zane told Malaki everything. It was the only time Zane had seen Malaki twirl his dreads around his fingers like worry beads. ‘And you say you dare not go to the police?’

Zane nodded. ‘And I’ve got to phone my mother and father, otherwise
they
might. I pray they don’t panic … it’ll be the end.’

‘He’s forced you to come back and face him, Zane. And what if he doesn’t stick to his side of the agreement?’ Malaki placed a hand on Zane’s shoulder. ‘I and I aren’t happy at all.’ The sing-song rhythm of his voice did nothing to sooth them.

‘I’ve got no choice. It’s been a long time coming, my friend.’ Zane stared at the dune bush. How different nature was here compared with Wilderness. Here it was filled with menace. He could feel the presence of the Flats just beyond the dunes.

Zane chose to speak to his mother first. The news would play havoc with his father’s high blood pressure. She broke down halfway through his third sentence. He thought of Appleby who had advised him early on at BAT, ‘Give ‘em the headlines, Zane, then the bottom line, fast, especially with Magnus.’

‘Ma,
listen!
I know what I gotta do. She’ll be okay but if you go off to the police she won’t, you understand?
You have to understand, Ma.’

Gloria cried some more. ‘But what about you?’ she sobbed. It was Malaki’s fear too.

‘There’s no other way, Ma. Now promise me you’ll stop Pa from doing anything silly?’

He spoke to his father anyway. Up to that point Zane’s parents had not worried because of a message from Chantal saying she was okay and staying with a friend. Now Eddie listened with a calm that Zane knew from experience he couldn’t trust. There were too many balls in the air and Zane was no juggler. To make matters worse Lena said in the middle of the night as they lay next to each other, ‘Who said you’d be on your own?’

‘I can’t and won’t bring my friend into this!’

‘I don’t mean Malaki, Zane, I mean me.’

He turned on his side to face her. ‘
No
, Lena,
no,
don’t even think about it.’ A dying log shot some last sparks into the night.

She almost hissed at him, ‘He’s the leader, he’s worse than Cupido and Gatiep, he’s made slaves of women, he’s killed, and he murdered the one person I cared about.’

‘Let it be, Lena. Sarai’s dead. You did your best.’ But he thought about her words, ‘the one person I cared about’ – Sarai, not him. And he knew again that he loved Lena regardless of how she felt about him or what she had done. There was nothing phoney about Lena Valentine. She was genuine, the real thing. She was nothing like the Zane Hendricks who had made it to the
larney
side of the tracks pretending he was someone else. It was just that her life had been fucked up by her father. But had it
not
been for her father she might have turned out differently – maybe a scatty, shallow, sex-driven girl like Bernadette. He knew he was going round in circles because he was exhausted but it made him love Lena even more.

What he found difficult to tell her – apart from the fact that he loved her – was what Hannibal wanted him to do.

A
s Zane and Lena made their way down the dusty street it was like going back into his past. It was a street from his childhood that he and Chantal had walked for so many years. Now there was a sense of high noon about it – men with hard eyes watching them come into town, the street ominously clear of ordinary people. Down the road to the house imprinted on his mind since the day Chantal had told him about the
tik
explosion, aware with each step he took that he was staking his sister’s life, Lena’s, and his own on the next few hours.

It was 12 o’clock, the time Hannibal had called for. Zane stuck his hand through the smaller of two gates and knocked on a wooden door. A man waved them in and proceeded to frisk them. Lena squirmed, ‘Hey, don’t you dare touch me there!’ He found the knife, grinned as he held it up.

Zane said tensely, ‘Okay, where do we go?’ The man pointed to a side door and then at his open mouth. ‘God, Zane, he’s got no tongue,’ Lena said. The man went into the street, locking the door behind him.

Zane and Lena entered a kitchen. Leaning against the counter were three men smoking crystal meth. Smells of long ago came to Zane – plastic shower curtains his drunken father Eddie had set on fire, stale piss from feral cats around Darwin Court. He’d heard the more impurities there were in the crystals the more the smoke smelled.

A man was saying, ‘So this is
pasela
, Delron … on the house, all we want?’

‘On this house, ha, ha, I like it!’ another man said, inhaling fumes through a straw from a light bulb which had had its metal threading removed. The heated crystals made a clicking sound as he smoked.

‘Yeh, Goppies, from the Boss.
Lekka
,
nuh?
’ Delron was in black jeans and a bright yellow T-shirt and smoking from a
larney
designer lolly.

‘I already had three, man,’ Goppies said. ‘
Jissis
, the hits are
jits
…’ Goppies was thick-set, with acne-marked cheeks, and his front teeth were missing.

‘This is just the horse-dove,’ Delron said, ‘there’s mains and pudding coming.’

They looked up, stared at Zane and Lena.

‘We heard you were coming,’ Delron said.

‘
Kyk net die bruin ogies
,’ Goppies said.

‘
En die mooi lyfie, oulike kind
,’ the third man said, his pupils dilated.

They ignored Zane and devoured Lena with their eyes. She held onto him. It was like being back in the train, he thought, why did it have to come to this again? This time there were more of them, and he knew what
tik
did to men.

He looked at Delron coldly, ‘Take us to Hannibal. I want to see my sister.’

They walked into a large room, empty except for a chair on which Chantal was sitting, arms and legs bound, cloth in mouth, eyes dull and sunken, long auburn hair surprisingly clean and shiny and brushed down one side of her face. It was her hair that troubled Zane most – had Hannibal been preparing her for himself, at last? She had a ghostly beauty that made him hate himself for having let her down. Tears welled up when she saw him and she tried to speak.

Were it not for Hannibal’s hard eyes his little smile might have been welcoming. Zane had never forgotten the look – lulling and dangerous all at once. They stared at each other, the elapsed years feeling not like old scars but fresh wounds.

‘What can I say except it gives me great pleasure to see you – together,’ Hannibal said. He gazed at Lena a little longer. ‘
Nuh
, you look like a lady but you’re nothing but trouble
.
To think you killed Cupido and Gatiep.’ He shook his head in grudging admiration.

‘I’m ready, Hannibal, let’s get it over with.’ Zane held his gaze.

‘Not so quick. Delron, Pattat, Goppies,
kom, kom!
’

They came like a pack of dogs – tails up, mouths open, eyes moist with anticipation.

‘Sit, and wait.’ Hannibal said. They sat on the floor.

‘I said I’m ready, Hannibal.’ Zane disengaged from Lena.

‘Oh, you are?’

‘
Ja
, what you said – we fight, no weapons, and whoever wins walks away, remember? If you win, you get Chantal. If I win I walk away with Chantal and Lena. That was what we …’

‘
Minute!
’ Hannibal said, ‘boys, is it right that if I lose, which I won’t, I get nothing?’

‘Nah, Boss!’ they chorused.

Zane said, ‘You’d lose only what you didn’t have in the first place, Hannibal. If I lose I lose my sister.’

‘I had Chantie …’

‘For a short while, Hannibal, long ago, then you fucked up.’

‘I had Chantie!’ Hannibal’s voice rose. He looked desperately at Chantal. ‘Say that if I beat him and let him go I’ll have you again?’

‘She can’t talk, Hannibal … maybe you don’t want to know.’

Hannibal’s face twitched but he said nothing, stood motionless. Then he jerked the cloth from Chantal’s mouth. ‘Remember, Chantie, it’s his life we’re talking about.’

Chantal put her face in her hands and sobbed, ‘I love you, Zane.’

‘Does it mean yes, but that you won’t or can’t love me?’ Hannibal’s dark eyes glittered. Chantal’s look gave him the answer. He took out his gun and waved it at Zane and Lena, ‘Down,
sit down
– hands on your head!’ He gestured to his men, ‘It’s time for the mains, boys.’

They advanced on Chantal.

‘Now this is what I call a dish,’ Goppies’ grin was a gummy hole where his teeth used to be.

‘Compliments to the chef,’ Delron said.

‘She’s
stirvy
this one, stuck-up, I can see it in her eyes, makes me
kak
jags, who’s first anyway?’ Pattat jabbered like a DJ on a roll.