Refuge (6 page)

‘No, no Nigel,’ Jeneker interrupted him, saliva building up in the corners of his mouth. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know me; I’ve been here before, haven’t I, my friend? And as for not calling the police, well your wife is all banged up, isn’t she? So she couldn’t call even if she wanted. So you can think of this as a sort of preemptive strike. Ja, that’s right, a pre-emptive strike.’ He paused, pleased with his turn of phrase. ‘So here I am, in your face, to check out whether you’ve had any more spiritual callings recently. And guess what, Nigel, just as I am about to knock on your door, what do I hear? Guess what I hear?’

Ifasen shook his head slowly.

‘I hear you calling your wife all kinds of names. A whore. Now, I mean, is that a nice thing to say? I don’t think so, Nigel. All right, so maybe there’s some truth in it.’ Jeneker paused, sneering. ‘But, I mean, the rest – well, it just isn’t nice, Nigel.’

‘Enough!’ Abayomi’s voice came from the kitchen doorway. Her face was firm and undaunted. ‘Enough, Jeneker. I will not have you come into my home and speak like that. I am fine. I did not call you. I did not ask for you to be here. My husband and I were having a discussion. He did not say anything rude to me. My husband is a respectful and loving man, and he would not hurt me. He is an honourable man and you are wrong to speak to him so.’

Jeneker’s shoulders stiffened and he leant towards her with his fists balled. But he said nothing for a few moments, sizing her up. Then he cracked a smile, moving closer to her and putting his moist hand on the bare skin of her elbow. Abayomi turned her head away from him.

‘Your boss sends his regards,’ he said, leaning up so that his half-shaven cheek nearly touched hers. ‘He says he hopes that you are being a good girl.’

He pulled away from her, still grinning and chewing stale gum. Abayomi stared back at him. ‘So that is why you are here? Did Mandla send you? Does he not have the courage to come here himself? So he sends you, the messenger of the messenger.’ Jeneker’s face darkened at the description. ‘Tell him he is not my boss. He does not own me.’

‘That is where you’re wrong. Whore,’ Jeneker replied, carefully formulating the word in his mouth. He was suddenly serious, speaking with an unnerving earnestness. ‘That is where you are so wrong. I’m afraid that you
are
owned.’ There was almost a hint of sadness in his voice as he spoke. ‘You know it and I know it. The only question is whether your man here really knows it.’ He concluded by spitting out his gum in Ifasen’s direction.

The unlocked front door cracked open again and a skinny figure flounced in, initially beaming and then jumping when he caught sight of Jeneker in the living room.

‘Shit!’ The word escaped in a high shriek. ‘Old age does not come in just one day, but you the scary man do make me old today.’ The man’s dark skin seemed sucked into the hollows of his body. Despite his ill appearance, he moved with amazing pace. He dived across the room and darted into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. The key turned in the lock before Jeneker could reach him.

‘You can’t escape me, Sunday boy,’ Jeneker shouted after him. ‘Don’t be running away from me now. I be the man you waiting for,’ he said in a mock-Jamaican accent, rubbing his hand up and down the wooden panel.

‘I be sleeping off my old age for the fright you giving me, ma cop man.’ Sunday’s muffled response squeaked from the other side of the door. ‘You be letting me go now, ye’right?’

Jeneker sighed and walked back towards the front door. He stopped on the threshold and cocked his head back at Ifasen. ‘Nigel.
You
… I will be watching. Okay? I know you are a wifebeater, just like all the other Nigels. Or you will be slaughtering a goat on your living-room floor, like number 408. Or like number 213, hey, start a little braai in the kitchen using the window frames. How about one of those? I know you, Nigel, I know what you are. All of you. So mess up just once, only one time, that is all it takes, and I will be all over you. You understand,
boytjie
?’

Ifasen made no movement, worried that the slightest gesture would spur the policeman on. But Jeneker did not wait to see his response. He pushed the door wide as he strode away, letting the stench from the passageway drift into their living room.

R
ICHARD WAITED IN
the congested traffic, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel of the luxury car. The engine was overreactive and impatient, shuddering as it crawled along the highway, the rev counter jerking and dropping with every slight touch of the accelerator. He had been thrilled, like a young boy again, when he first took delivery of the sleek Mercedes SLK 280. The unlimited power and racing-level acceleration promised an end to the tedium of traffic, and the low-cut form and sporty two-door look suggested both youth and success. Before it had arrived, he had daydreamed about driving the German car, silver and gleaming, soaring like a bird past other commuters slumped in their threadbare sedans. The gauche salesman had spoken about kilowattage and torque and deceleration curves: V6 engine, 2996 cc, torque 221 at 2 500, zero to a hundred in 6.3 seconds. Richard had taken care to remember the statistics, so that he could rattle them off nonchalantly while suggesting to admirers that the car was just a ‘plaything’, simply a lowly means of transport in his already bedazzled world. And for the first few weeks his parking bay had garnered longing looks and low whistles. For a blessed while, he had felt satisfied. He had bought an expensive pair of Police sunglasses, some racier music CDs and, as a playful touch, a small green gecko that clung rakishly to the back window. The tyres had squealed pleasingly as he pulled into the parking garage. He had revved the engine a little more than necessary, announcing his morning arrival.

But a few weeks later his partner and friend David Keefer had bought the new Porsche Cayenne 4
×
4, with sparkling metallic paint and towering wheel hubs. Despite its massive solidity, it retained a sleek look, like a stalking predator. Everyone had wanted to sit on its smooth yellow-brown seats and listen to the surround-sound speakers that enveloped you in pitch-perfect notes. David chose some pretentious classical remix, with high-strung violins and a thudding bass beat, to show off the full range of the system. Richard had to confess that the effect was awe-inspiring. The seats were wide and embracing, with generous legroom.

‘Now this is the way to travel in Africa,’ David announced, as if the tall ginger-haired man planned to drive anywhere but from his sea-view home to the office and back. Richard’s SLK seemed a little tame next to the grand lines and chunky off-road tyres of the Cayenne. ‘Three-point-six-litre engine, you know,’ David added, and then nodded unintentionally towards Richard’s sports car parked alongside. ‘Quite good ground clearance, too,’ he mused. Richard had glared at him, but his friend’s bumbling personality nullified any hint of malice.

David had expressed his concern that if he put his wave-ski on the colossal car, it would scrape against the neon lighting rods of the parking garage. The worry was genuine, but it also exposed Richard’s low-slung vehicle, whose only problem was clearing the sunken kerbstone in his driveway without tearing the car’s belly open. David might just as easily have been querying whether a new brand of condom was not perhaps too small for his substantial girth. Richard was dismissive and suggested, unkindly, that a few broken lights seemed a small price to pay for the enjoyment of such a manly vehicle.

His irritation was further compounded when the firm’s new ‘partner of colour’ – as the senior partner Selwyn Mullins was inclined to refer to Igshaan Solomons – had arrived in a new two-door dark-blue sports Bentley. Richard had never seen anything quite like it: the paintwork was so rich it looked wet, as if you could sink your arm in up to your elbow. It was a long, sturdy vehicle with doors that stretched nearly all the way to the rear wheels and began way in front of the seats. The back window was tiny, the wheel hubs rising up to make way for the implausibly large wheels. The light leather was hand-stitched and the interior was finished off with real oak inlay. A large crest on the bonnet announced the car’s pedigree.

Richard asked him about the specs: ‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ Igshaan had responded blithely. ‘Us darkies don’t really go for data; we’re more into the styling. Doesn’t that colonial dashboard look hilarious?’ The man’s droll attitude towards the car infuriated Richard.

Carmen, the receptionist with big, silky eyes, was the first to slide into the passenger seat. Igshaan grinned as he held open the door for her, putting on a Cape Flats accent as if he were the doorman of a Bonteheuwel minibus taxi. ‘
Net vir jou, my lekker
lady.’

‘Oh, feel these seats,’ she crooned as she stretched out her legs in front of her. ‘And so much space. This is a car that you just
must
have sex in.’ She giggled, her tanned breasts wobbling beneath her stretched top, and rubbed her hands over the leatherwork. The car smacked of pretension, but Richard still found himself peeking at it out of the corner of his eye, even months later.

He sat now in his own cramped vehicle, feeling caged like a domestic pet. As he waited for the cheap Korean runabout in front of him to move, he felt none of the vigour that he had hoped for. Instead, sitting so low on the ground with his buttocks only inches from the tar now seemed ridiculous. He was trapped with this discharge of humanity that escaped the city like pus oozing from a wound. He was surrounded by their jam-packed cars, five, six people to a vehicle, all trying to make their way home. The functionality of their commuting choices jarred with the gaudiness of his, and he thought he saw some passengers smirk as they looked down at him from their elevated taxis and buses. They saw his ageing visage, he imagined, his hair thinning and eyes sagging, driving a young buck’s sports car.

In his side mirror he noticed the bright light of a motorcycle moving towards him in the gap between the lanes. A middle-aged man on a Vespa chugged past him, a stained beard protruding from beneath his helmet. His jersey and lunch box were strapped down on the back of the small seat with elasticised snakeys. He looked like an overgrown adolescent on a child’s toy, his legs splayed like bat’s wings. Some days Richard might have been amused, but his mood was peevish and he felt a wave of loathing as he watched the small machine whine its way through the traffic, wobbling through the heated air between the stacked-up cars. The man’s silly demeanour only highlighted Richard’s sense of his own rectitude, the suffocating self-consciousness that was his mantle and his prison. How free might you be, he thought, once you stopped noticing the eyes of the audience about you? Or stopped caring.

But when Richard saw the yellow-orange light of another motorbike approaching, he instinctively turned the wheel, just slightly, letting the nose of the car drift a few inches to the right, closing down the middle path by a critical fraction. It was almost an unconscious act, unwilled, he would have argued prissily. The driver braked sharply as he realised that the gap was too narrow. The bike drew level with Richard’s closed window. It was huge in comparison to the flimsy scooter that had gone before; its engine block was massive and the surrounding fairings shone fiercely orange. The expression of the driver was obscured by a full-face helmet and dark glasses, his riding jacket zipped tightly around his neck. He twisted the throttle, revving the bike into a guttural roar until Richard’s door hummed in protest. The rider’s thigh was close to the glass and his body towered over Richard in his bucket seat. The unspoken aggression was intimidating; Richard’s hands felt damp despite the air conditioning. Reluctantly, he turned the steering wheel back the other way, and the gap slowly opened as the traffic stumbled forward. With another low growl of the engine, the biker let out his clutch and the bike sprinted past, nimble despite its size. Richard thought he noticed the man shake his helmeted head, but he couldn’t be sure. The bike’s tail light was soon lost beyond the line of metal shapes baking in the afternoon heat.

The traffic crawled around the side of Devil’s Peak. The old English blockhouse stood on its promontory, watching over the bay. The lower slopes of the mountain were marked with pockets of dense pine trees, originally introduced for firewood and now clustered around the white stone blocks of Rhodes Memorial. Richard scanned the grass slope near the road for signs of wildlife. He could make out a small herd of wildebeest lying in the shade, and two Burchell’s zebras standing nose to nose, unmoving. The Parks Board had shot all the fallow deer brought by Cecil John Rhodes, but the grey squirrels and starlings that had accompanied the colonial powers were still abundant throughout the city.

It would still take him over half an hour to get home, he realised, suddenly fatigued by the day and unenthused by the prospect of another evening at home. He had spent much of the day with Svritsky, trawling through documents looking for inconsistencies that could be used to their advantage. His client had been uninterested in the process, refusing to switch off his cellphone and repeatedly standing up and walking around Richard’s office while shouting in Russian into the receiver. Twice he had used Richard’s landline, barely asking before dialling, and had conducted lengthy and boisterous conversations on both occasions. Richard was sure that the calls were international and made a mental note to adjust the sundries entry in his bill.

Richard’s secretary, Nadine, nurtured a vicious dislike for Svritsky and refused to have anything to do with him. She was a wiry, hard-faced divorcee who smoked incessantly. Yet, despite being constantly away from her desk to feed her addiction, she managed to run Richard’s life with clinical efficiency. She expected others – Richard included – to conduct themselves with a similar degree of competence and was often curt. Lapses in memory, vagueness, confusion – these were all regarded by her as tantamount to full-scale dementia, and her withering ire was unforgiving. She was feared by all the other staff in the office, sometimes even by the partners themselves. Having worked for Richard for over a decade, she and he had reached a working arrangement that kept friction to a minimum. But Svritsky stretched this relationship, sometimes to breaking point. On one occasion, many years earlier, he had stood swaggering at the open door of Richard’s office and told him in a loud voice that he needed to get rid of the ‘bag’ and employ someone with ‘good tits and a wide mouth’. Nadine had hissed at him and promptly disappeared for the afternoon, leaving Richard scrabbling to find a free typist. At the next consultation, Svritsky’s silver-plated lighter went missing after he had left it on Richard’s desk. Richard had no doubt that Nadine had disposed of it in some energetic and terminal fashion.