Sacrifices (10 page)

Grabbing clothes, socks and underwear from the closet, he dumps them into a suitcase. He’s in the bathroom collecting his toiletries when he sees Beverley’s reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are dry and her poise restored.

“What are you doing, Mike?” she asks.

He
pushes past her. “Moving into the spare room.”

“Come on, don’t be silly.”

She puts a hand on his chest and runs her fingers down toward his belly. A familiar signal this, that she wants him. And be damned if he doesn’t feel a momentary twitch in his penis which has lain flaccid and tightly coiled in his underwear these last two days. An answering throb in his scrotum—pain, rather than arousal—erases all desire and he lifts the suitcase and walks away from her hand and the compact warmth of her body.

“I’d appreciate you making sure that Christopher moves back into the pool house today, okay?”

She nods and Lane leaves the room they have shared for fifteen years, knowing he’ll never return.

When the morgue attendant draws back a sheet patterned with rust-colored stains Louise thinks she’s witnessing some mysterious Muslim ritual, that Lyndall’s eyes have been covered by coins. Realizing that she’s looking into the bony cavities of his empty eye sockets, she has to grab hold of the gurney to steady herself.

“What have you done with his eyes?” she asks, imagining some illegal harvesting of organs.

The attendant, a mud-colored man with a head cold who can’t stop sniffing and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his filthy smock, stares at her and shrugs.

One of the undertakers, the older one with the skullcap and long graying beard, touches her arm and says—so quietly that she has to strain to hear him over the clatter of gurneys and the caterwauling of the bereaved in the overcrowded police morgue—“It’s the prison gangs, Missy. They take the eyes of them what spies on them.” He leans in so close she can smell sour curried meat on his breath. “They take his tongue, too.”

Lyndall’s lips are pulled back in a grimace, the hard strip
lighting revealing the stub of something black and torn behind his blood-stained teeth.

What kind of hell had visited her brother in his last hours?

Louise closes her eyes, her stomach heaving, bile burning her throat. Something jabs her in the ribs and she blinks. The attendant thrusts a clipboard at her.

“Sign here.”

She grabs the clipboard and scrawls her signature so forcefully that the nib of the pen tears the paper.

“You go wait outside now, Missy,” the older undertaker says.

Louise, dodging the litter of corpses and the keening and sniveling bereaved, escapes into the parking lot, breathing dust and fumes and the sickly-sweet stink of death, is lost for a moment, panic seizing her—the raw brick building, the palisade fencing topped by spirals of barbed wire, and the looming gray bulk of Table Mountain blurring past her sun-lazered eyes.

Then she sees the battered
pickup truck, a collage of mismatched body parts, ABU-BAKER MUSLIM BURIAL SERVICES crudely painted on the doors, along with a scribble of spidery Arabic and a crescent moon

She crosses to the truck and leans against it. Her legs fail her and she slumps, squatting in a small pool of shade. The wind that raged all night has died and a thick heat lies trapped in the bowl of the mountain, suffocating the city. Louise finds herself chewing her fingernails, the taste of salt and grit and
god-knows what else on her tongue, and jams her hands into her pockets.

She closes her eyes, barely registering a phlegmy gurgle and a spurt of liquid, but there’s no ignoring the stench of corruption so intense that it startles her from her stupor. She’s squatting beside an open drain, the toes of her Chuck Taylors dangling over the lip of the furrow in danger of being caught in the dark red tide surging toward her, the bloody water overflowing, snaking across the asphalt and finding its way beneath the cars that are parked in the narrow Salt River street.

Louise, on her feet, stretching the neck of her T-shirt to cover her nose, sees the two Muslim men carrying her brother out of the morgue. He’s wrapped in a torn blanket that gapes as they approach the truck, the pink sole of his bare left foot catching the sun.

The younger of the two undertakers, a big, silent brown man in a sweat-stained yellow shirt, grips Lyndall’s feet under one arm and opens the
pickup’s camper shell. The men slide Lyndall inside and the big man secures the flap before taking the wheel of the truck.

The bearded man holds open the passenger door and Louise is sandwiched between the undertakers as the driver starts the engine and they rattle out of the morgue and turn toward
Voortrekker Road. There is no A/C in the pickup and the driver’s sweat is thick and acrid. It’s almost a relief when he fires up a cigarette.

“Where you from, Missy?” the older man asks.

“Cape Town,” she says.

“Than how come you speak so nice?”

Louise doesn’t reply, shuts her eyes and rests her head against the back of the seat, the vibrations of the truck jarring her skull. When the driver brakes suddenly she hears Lyndall slide and thump in the rear.

She still has no idea how or why he was murdered.

Perhaps her mother knows, but she lies sedated in a private ward with Biggy Best furnishings and a view of a vineyard, a machine monitoring her broken heart.

Louise, once Denise was stabilized, took her phone out into the garden of the Constantia clinic that looked like a country club and called Pollsmoor Prison, but had been unable to track down the official who’d broken the news to Denise and all she’d been able to establish was that Lyndall died after “an incident in the cells” and that, since he’d been an awaiting-trial prisoner, his body was the property of the police not the prison services, and had to be identified and collected by his next of kin at the police morgue in Salt River.

After the cardio specialist—a tall, suntanned man who looked like a tennis pro—told her that Denise had suffered a minor heart attack but was out of danger, Louise took a taxi home. When she walked down the driveway and saw Michael’s BMW parked alone in the open garage she’d had to fight the urge to knock on the door of the big house and beg for his help.

She hurried to the cottage and booted up her laptop—a gift from Michael when she’d started at the
University of Cape Town earlier in the year. He’d appeared at the cottage one evening with a sealed box, the computer still encased in molded polystyrene. There’d been no sign of Beverley, and it hadn’t taken much to imagine her saying, “You’re spoiling her. Why can’t she make do with Chris’s old laptop?”

Sitting at the counter in the kitchenette, her WiFi piggy-backing the broadband connection from the Lane’s house, Louise Googled Muslim burial rites. Lyndall had to be buried by sunset today, that much she knew. But how and where she had no idea.

Wikipedia told her that the body would have to be washed and wrapped in cloth. She couldn’t bring herself to read more and printed out the article. While the printer chugged and spat, she googled Muslim undertakers and scribbled down a few Cape Town telephone numbers.

Her first call had gone straight to voice mail. A man answered the second number, rattling away in express-speed Afrikaans. When he heard her voice he put down the phone.

Louise, helpless, tearing up, was tempted to call Doves funeral services—she passed their chapel in Claremont daily in the taxi—and let them organize some no-name-brand Christian burial.

No, she told herself. You promised him. You promised.

So Louise dialed the third number and this time a woman answered, a woman who called her “lovey” and calmed her enough to get the details from her.

“Okay, here by Abu-Bakr’s we can organize the collection of the deceased by the morgue. We also get a man to wash the deceased—since you got no men in the family to do it—at the graveyard. And we see the grave is dug and book the Imam to do the funeral service.”

She had named a sum of money that would clean out the account Louise shared with her mother. Louise told the woman she would meet the undertakers at the Salt River morgue, would hand them the money in cash, and would travel with them to the cemetery in Paradise Park, wherever that was.

“Lovey, all the Muslim graveyards near town is full like sardines,” the woman said. “But this one is nice and open.”

Before she rang off the woman told her to bring a white bed sheet, two bars of Sunlight soap and some rope.

“What’s the rope for?” Louise asked.

“To tie him in the sheet. Your brother,” the woman said. Telling her that the rope used for makeshift washing lines would be fine.

Louise found a clean white sheet in the linen closet and two bars of the Sunlight soap her mother used to wash kitchen towels under the sink. No rope. So she stowed the sheet and soap in her backpack—remembering at the last moment that she would need to cover her head at the funeral—and raided her mother’s
closet for a headscarf, then hurried up to the main road, emptied their bank account at the ATM and bought rope at a hardware store before jumping onto a taxi to the city. A second taxi had dropped her near the morgue, where the Muslim undertakers were waiting to lead her to identify Lyndall.

Almost lulled to sleep by the vibration of the truck, Louise opens her eyes to see that they’re on Voortrekker Road, an endless unscrolling of used car lots, strip malls, take-out franchises and titty bars, the sun throwing hard black shadows over the silent neon, peeling paintwork and boarded-up windows. This is as far as she’s ever been from affluent, forested
Cape Town, with its oceanfront bistros and palm-lined beaches. 

The driver turns right and crosses a bridge, a gang-tagged train clattering beneath them. As they pass through a clot of heavily fortified stores and factories the wind ambushes them with sudden ferocity, rocking the truck on its springs, and the two men roll up their windows against the grit that pellets them.

The factories give way to an infinity of mean houses and ghetto blocks and Louise—kept insulated by the Lanes and their money—is on the Cape Flats for the first time, in the vast mixed-race ghetto that rises like a mirage from the dust.

A tall blonde wearing Indian sandals and a white peasant dress—the breeze wrapping the diaphanous fabric around her very good legs—steps down from a brawny SUV and Lane thinks there must be some mistake, for surely this is the dead girl’s sister, not her mother?

But, as she approaches him in the driveway, a floral cloth bag hanging from her shoulder, he can see the faint latticework of lines on her suntanned face and when she lifts her sunglasses onto her head like she’s raising a visor, revealing a pair of green eyes swollen with grief, he realizes the woman is easily his age.

Conjuring
a smile, the muscles of her face setting off a chain reaction of wrinkles like ripples on a pond, she says, “I’m Liz Walker.”

“
Michael Lane.”

He isn’t sure whether a handshake is appropriate but when he extends his hand the woman takes it in both of hers like a politician or a preacher, staring into his eyes.

“How’s your son doing, Mike?”

“Oh, he’s okay.
He’s tough. A rugby player, you know?”

She nods. “Our youngest, Dillon, also plays. A mother’s nightmare.”

Finally she releases his hand and looks around the garden, toward the pool house.

“That’s where it happened?”

“Yes.” She’s staring at Lane again, expectantly, and he says, “Follow me.”

They set off around the pool toward the scene of the bloodletting.

When she called thirty minutes earlier Lane had been alone in the house, too unnerved by the events of the morning to drive to the bookstore. Chris hadn’t returned and shortly after Lane’s desertion of the marital bedroom his wife, dressed in tennis whites, had roared off in her Pajero. Lane pitied her doubles partner.

He was in the spare room, sitting
on an upright wooden Biedermeier chair—inherited from Beverley’s austere mother—staring out the window, a light breeze unraveling the cloud on the mountain, when the phone rang: a jangling cacophony that began downstairs in the living room, then rolled through into the kitchen and finally pursued him upstairs when the extension in the main bedroom startled to yelp.  

He sighed and dragged himself from the chair, moving slowly, hoping that the answering machine would kick in and relieve him of responsibility. But when he reached the little white phone disguised as a clam shell sitting atop a novel on Bev’s beside table, it was still purring, so he lifted it and found himself talking to this woman, her breathy whisper branding her as one of those Capetonians he had always loathed: pr
osperous neo-hippies who ranted about living at one with nature, ate raw food, got Reikied and Rolfed and sent their kids to the Waldorf School.

So her request to visit the scene of her daughter’s death didn’t surprise him. Some New Age nonsense, he guessed. But how could he refuse her?

“The boy who killed Mel, he was like a son to you, wasn’t he?” Liz Walker says as they skirt the pool.

“Well, no. We weren’t close, really.”

Distancing himself from poor dead Lyndall, heading off any accusations this woman may be ready to level.

“But you’d known him all his life. It must be terribly painful?”

She’s staring at him with those soulful eyes and he sees she’s looking for a grief buddy, wants to conscript him into her little woundology club. He gives her his back, sliding open the door to the pool house.

“Here we are,” he says.

Lane hasn’t been in here since the night of the carnage and is astonished at how normal the room looks. All the gore is gone. The blood-splattered posters of rugby players and big-breasted girls have been removed and the walls scrubbed clean. The carpet, only recently soggy with the fluids and brain matter of this woman’s child, has been shampooed and dried back to its original ivory color. The only hint that anything happened is the industrial-strength carbolic that still hangs in the air.

Liz Walker takes in the room. “Please don’t think I’m being ghoulish, Mike, but where was Mel lying, exactly?”