Refuge (18 page)

The days following the fated dinner party had been interminable at home. Although unmentioned – his wife did not raise it and Richard did not offer any explanation – his behaviour had clearly irked Amanda. She spoke to him in clipped phrases pushed out through tightened lips. He found excuses to be away from home for most of Saturday, spending a lengthy period of time in the sauna at the gym, watching the sweat drip off him like poison. He had not joined her on a walk with the dogs along the green belt on Sunday, professing the need to work instead. But he was unable to concentrate on anything for longer than a few minutes, his thoughts hounded by imagined encounters.

He felt relieved when the weekend finally ground to a close. His return to the routine of the week brought some clarity. He stood in the shower on Monday morning and let the warm water flow across his body until the geyser started to refill and the temperature dropped. The eczema that normally dwelt in the crook of his arms had died down. The water snaked across his chest and tickled his stomach as he leant backwards and pushed his face into the cooling stream. Yes, he thought, you may have lost the bearing you were on, but you have found your masculinity again. He understood now, with a dart of anger, how powerless he had become. Impotence was not a state of flaccidity, it was a symptom of emasculation – of forgotten needs and unexpressed assertion. He had allowed himself to drift, or be steered, away from his manhood and into a place of timidity and fear. There he had lost his centre and, being unbalanced, had focused only on not tipping over. It did not matter if he ever saw Abayomi again – her continued existence was immaterial – as it had taken only one moment of her presence to reveal how far he had wavered. His anger at Amanda grew like a warm sac inside him.

Nadine met him wordlessly, handing him his telephone messages and a cup of coffee without smiling. The first day of the week was never good for her and Richard had learnt to ignore her moods. He would normally have accepted her grunted greeting, but this time he squared up to her.

‘Good morning, Nadine. Hope you had a lovely weekend. Mine was fine, thank you.’

Her eyebrows flickered in surprise and she nodded. ‘Interesting.’ Richard grinned involuntarily as she turned her back and headed for the rooftop for another cigarette.

The morning air outside was already humid, but the temperature in the air-conditioned office complex was crisp. Richard felt his mood ease as he sat down in his chair and surveyed the neat piles arranged on his desk. He was the master of his working world. The fastidiousness of his office was a buffer against uncertainties that might otherwise overwhelm him. Nophumla brought him a second cup of coffee and he applied himself to the waiting letters and emails with overeager resolution.

The letters were mostly mundane and the emails ranged from banter and weak smut to inter-office reminders and spam. Richard read them all, carefully dragging each email into an appropriate folder and deleting only a few altogether. There were a few documents to read, including a memorandum from Igshaan Solomons. He had called a special partners’ meeting for later in the week to discuss his recent investigations. Richard tossed the memorandum onto the corner of his desk without reading it.

‘Wanker,’ he muttered out loud, cracking open his morning newspaper.

The headlines were once again dominated by the xenophobic attacks that had gripped the country. Richard regretted that he had not remembered to ask Nophumla what had happened. He glanced at the photographs of burnt-out shacks and bandaged men, but refused to allow himself to be distracted and turned the page. Quantal Investments headed the front page of the business section, with the journalist speculating about a possible listing. Reference was made to jockeying among top legal firms for the Quantal contract; no names were mentioned. The cricket scores from the weekend featured prominently in the sports section, with India’s thrashing of England stirring up the old, mirthful comparisons. Richard chuckled at the reported comments of the English fans calling for the captain’s head to be impaled on a cricket stump. He felt an increasing sense of well-being, as if he had been relieved of some burden.

His morning warmed up to a rhythm of telephone calls and short consultations, settling him and distracting him from the emotional morass that had characterised the weekend. The Noon Day Gun boomed overhead from Signal Hill, as it had done since the days of the first colonial navy. It epitomised the quirky duality of the city, progressive and libertarian, yet nostalgically holding on to its cruel history. The grey-white smoke drifted down across the tops of the pine trees, filtering towards the houses and mosques of the Bo-Kaap.

He spent some time in the firm’s modest library, looking up case references. The racks of books were interspaced with blown-up black-and-white photographs of De Waterkant in the nineteenth century. Pictures of Coffee Lane and Loader Street showed Malay women sitting on the cobbles in the narrow streets, framed by the incongruous mix of Georgian and Malay architecture. Richard’s favourite was a photograph of the Ohlsson’s Brewery building and The Bricklayers Arms in Waterkant Street, taken in the early 1900s. The photographer had caught a small group of men lolling about near the entrance, possibly hoping for some benefactor to buy them a drink. It was an accidental capturing of a moment, a snapshot of individuals whose history was otherwise unknown and unrecorded. It amused Richard to imagine who they were and what they might have said to one another; had the photographer chosen a different moment, the small band of thirsty men would never have been seen or thought of again.

He left the office at lunchtime and ordered a ham and cheese sandwich from a corner café. Sitting back at his desk with the wax paper opened in front of him and the sandwich half-eaten, he even considered reaching over to read the memorandum from his partner. His hand hovered in hesitation until his cellphone started drumming on the desktop. He sat back in his chair and looked at the screen. The number recognition did not register the caller.

‘Richard Calloway,’ he answered, his tone low and dignified.

‘You sound very serious, Mr Calloway.’

He was at once aware of the sultry familiarity of the voice. The mischievous comment was incongruous in the formality of his office, although there was something strained in the speaker’s tone. Startled, he dropped his sandwich back onto the desk and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Abayomi?’ Agitation forced him out of his chair and onto his feet and he began pacing in front of the window, as if he expected to see her standing in the courtyard below. ‘Sorry, is that you?’ There was a welling inside him, like warm water being pushed up from his abdomen – a pressure that started in his groin and coursed up the sides of his waist. He touched his forehead to the cool glass.

‘Yes,’ the voice confirmed. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, Richard. I know you are a busy man. But you said that I should call you if I had any problems. And well … I do have something I need to talk to you about.’ Her voice was light, but he detected apprehension just below the surface.

The thought of seeing her again filled him with a giddy combination of anticipation and unease. The fact that she had simply called him on his cellphone, intruding from one separate world into another, both alarmed and thrilled him. Her voice in his ear shattered the calm of his office, breaking down the imagined protection that it afforded him. The conflict of responses confused him and instinctively he stuttered the beginnings of an excuse: ‘I … I can’t … It’s not—’

‘I am sorry, Richard,’ she cut him off. ‘If this is not a good time, it can wait for another time.’ Her manner was direct, without being terse. He felt the freshness of dealing with someone without pretence or mask, an interaction marked by simple honesty. For her there was no deception or devious construct, and no unforeseen emotion or hope. He was her client, a privileged man who had offered her his help. But for him, speaking to her seemed so entangled. He longed for simplicity. Separate rooms for separate lives. And yet, here she was on the other end of the phone.

‘No, no. Absolutely. I would very much like to help you if I can.’ He tried to steady his queasy excitement. ‘When should I meet you? I could make tomorrow morning. At the coffee shop in Waterkant Street … Milo’s. Will that suit you? At ten o’clock?’ The words seemed to gush out.

She laughed on the other side of the line, a soft purr that bubbled in his ear for an instant and then was gone. ‘Thank you, Richard. That sounds fine. I’ll see you there. Thank you, my dear.’ The endearment would have been empty in anyone else’s mouth, but his heart jolted as he heard it. The line went dead but he kept moving, smacking the cellphone into his open palm. How was his helplessness in the face of this request different from his disempowerment when facing Amanda’s cold domination at home, he wondered. The lack of control was invigorating rather than undermining, he decided. The exhilaration of the inevitable vanquishing made it palatable. But he remained skittish for the rest of the day.

Milo’s was a small and inconspicuous coffee shop in De Waterkant. Richard hurried along the narrow roadway, past the closed doors of the gay clubs and the Italian delicatessen. Warm smells emanated from a patisserie where groomed men and women sipped hot espressos at tall tables. The gentrification of the old quarter was well under way. The Malmesbury-shale stoeps and cast-iron balustrades were disappearing, replaced by sandstone and pretentious ironmongery. The ornate plasterwork had proved too difficult to maintain and was traded in for Cretestone and imported marble. The shop was sandwiched between two renovated buildings, its rusted sign hanging from a strut in the wall. It was not a popular spot and he had hoped that they could meet without being noticed. He was worried that she would arrive scantily dressed and obvious, smeared with make-up and tottering on too-high heels. The anxiety made him feel guilty, as if he were being disloyal, but he could not shake the distressing vision of other men smirking to one another. Worse still, he might bump into a colleague and have to describe her as ‘a client’.

Richard need not have worried. She was already ensconced at a corner table when he arrived, reading a newspaper and sipping fresh orange juice. He felt a rush of adrenaline when he first saw her. She had tied her bead-tasselled hair up with a strip of cloth. The thick bunch stuck out at the back, assertive and confident. Her dress was simple, falling in a sweeping line from her smooth shoulders to her feet, and her skin gleamed like warmed chocolate. She got to her feet and waited for him as he made his way to her. There was a troubled look on her face, as if she had not expected to see him, or perhaps had been anticipating someone else. More likely, he feared, she was able to see him for who he was in the true light of day. Self-conscious, he ran his fingers across his hairline and smiled hopefully.

‘Good morning,’ he said, moving to kiss her on the cheek. He tried to hold her scent, an indefinable smell of something woody and musky, but she pulled away before he could identify it. He noticed that she was wearing some make-up, not gaudy smears of rouge, but gentle brushes of eyeliner that made her eyes stand out, and a blush of silvery-pink on her lips. She looked magnificent and Richard told her so as they sat down with the small table between them.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply, still formal. She looked down at the table and Richard realised that meeting with a client outside of the studio crossed as many boundaries for her as it did for him.

‘Thank you for coming to see me. I am grateful,’ she said after a while. Then she looked up at him and smiled. Richard felt an urge to reach across the table and hold on to her hand, to run his fingers down her cheek and promise to help her with anything she needed. She cocked her head slightly to one side and Richard saw the playful person who had jibed him on the phone starting to emerge. ‘What would you like? A juice?’

‘Coffee,’ he answered, which seemed to amuse her for some reason. ‘He’ll have a coffee,’ she repeated to the waiter meaningfully. The waiter remained rooted to the ground, staring at her until it became rude. She did not take offence, but brushed him off knowingly: ‘That’s all, dear, just a coffee. Thank you.’ The man blinked uncertainly and then scuttled off.

Richard joined in her mirth. ‘You see what you do to the men around you? You are a danger to us all. The poor man didn’t know what to do with himself.’

‘Oh, he’ll be all right. They always are,’ she said ruefully. Once the waiter had disappeared into the kitchen, her playfulness seemed to disappear. There was a duality in her that Richard found enigmatic, like shadows playing over the sea. Until now, he hadn’t been able to discern whether she was putting up a front or not. But, as she spoke, he felt perhaps that he was seeing her real self for the first time.

‘I have a problem …’ she started. ‘A close family friend has been arrested. He appeared in court yesterday but they don’t want to give him bail. They’ve postponed the case for a week to next Monday to investigate it further. I just need some advice from you on how to get him bail when the case comes up again.’ She paused and looked up at Richard keenly. ‘I wouldn’t ask you unless it was important to … my family. The whole thing is just a big mistake, but because of his … you know, his background and coming from Nigeria, well, no one wants to help him.’

Richard was quietly relieved that her problem was related to criminal law. He had expected her to ask him for advice on immigration, where he had no expertise at all. He was at ease dispensing advice on the processes in the district courts; the procedural steps and likely outcomes appeared effortlessly at his fingertips. Talking about it made him feel more centred, as if he had something substantive to contribute.

He asked her about the charge. Abayomi was uncertain, trying to explain the young constable’s cryptic reference to the handwritten notes in the register. Once Richard had learnt that the charge related to drugs, but that no drugs had in fact been found on the detained man, the matter seemed clear.