Sacrifices (13 page)

By the time she was a teenager
Louise was able to see Michael for what he was: a kindly man, but a weak one—in thrall to his hard little wife—and her ardor cooled, and she had to disguise her scorn when she answered his enquiries about school and university. He was her meal ticket, after all.

But, sitting now on the floor in puddle of her blood, he is the only person she can think of calling. The only person who can save her.

Louise leaves the bathroom, blind to the sordid apartment littered with unwashed dishes and junk food wrappers, passes the room in which her mother died—a faint medicinal smell and something eucalyptus still hanging in the air—entering her damp and cheerless bedroom where she digs her cell phone from a tangle of soiled sheets.

She sits down on the bed and keys in
Michael Lane’s number.

“Please, Michael,” she says as the phone vibrates against her ear. “Please.”

As Lane enters the bookstore his phone buzzes, the ringtone almost lost in the chime of the door. Nodding to Mrs. Coombs, he draws the Nokia from his pocket and is surprised to see Louise Solomons’s name on caller ID.

He’s about to answer when the girl—Mandy? Patsy?—emerges from the storeroom carrying a cardboard box overflowing with paperbacks. Books clatter to the floor and she sets the box down and crouches, knees pressed together, scrambling to retrieve them.

“For heaven’s sake,
Tracy,” Mrs. Coombs says, the girl wilting with embarrassment.

Lane sends Louise’s call to voice mail, pockets the phone, and kneels beside
Tracy helping her gather the books. She smiles up at him through a veil of dark hair, her pale face touched by a blush.

“Sorry,
Mr. Lane. I’m so clumsy.”

“Don’t be silly. And call me Michael, please.”

Their hands brush as he places an old Anthony Burgess—
Enderby Outside
—back in the box, and he is surprised that such pale skin (marmoreal, Burgess would have said) can be so warm.

Mrs. Coombs had arrived yesterday with her niece and with a shock announcement: she was taking a two month sabbatical—a cultural tour of
Italy, during the European summer. Her plane ticket was booked and she’d be leaving on Monday. Tracy—newly graduated with some useless degree in English—would deputize in her absence. Lane was given no chance to argue.

“I wasn’t expecting you in today, Michael,” Mrs. Coombs says around a phlegmy cough. “Aren’t you going to the game?”

“Yes,” he says, standing. “But it’s only at three.”

“Will it be on the television?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Tracy
, reaching for the last of the books, says, “I hear your son’s playing?”

“Well, he’s a reserve, but he’ll probably get a run.”

“You must be very proud,” the girl says, smiling shyly up at him.

“You have no idea,” Lane says and escapes to his office.

He boots up the computer, going through the motions of checking his email, blind to the invitations to meet Thai brides and enhance his virility with little blue pills, his mind on the game that afternoon, wishing that he could find a way to avoid being there to witness his son’s moment of glory.

Lane hears Mrs. Coombs’s gravelly voice and aunt and niece appear at the cash register, framed by the hatch. There is no familial likeness that Lane can see. Mrs. Coombs for as long as he can remember has resembled a tortoise but the girl—once you looked past the shyness and the
untidy hair—has fine features.

Mrs. Coombs is demonstrating the cash register, impatient and hectoring.
Tracy listens intently, asking hesitant questions and when she catches Lane watching them she blushes again and he looks away, scrolling through his emails.

Restless, he leaves his office and walks through to the tiny kitchen, barely big enough to hold a bar fridge and a kettle. He gets the hot water going and squats, rooting for a teabag in the small closet that’s crammed with mugs, spoons, sugar and Mrs. Coombs’s disgusting sucking sweets.

Hearing a light tread on the wooden staircase he looks up to see the girl slowly ascending, her pale thighs kissing beneath the hem of her dun-colored skirt. Lane feels a twist of desire until the white, unstockinged legs become those of Melanie Walker, spasming as his son smashes the life from her and Lane stands, dizzy, leaning on the fridge, bile burning his throat.

The kettle bubbles and clicks itself off, steam condensing on the chipped enamel of the wall. Lane
, catching his breath, stares at water running down in little rivulets.

He leaves the teabag lying beside the mug and returns to his office, shifting his chair so that he can’t be seen through the hatch, and sits with his head in his hands, waiting for the nausea to pass.

Lane’s phone, lying on the desk beside him, buzzes and dances, and when he sees Louise’s name again on caller ID the full weight of his culpability oppresses him and he lets the phone ring itself dead.

Louise, lying in the bathtub, her torn wrists pumping blood into the water, starts to shiver. She’d expected that once she’d opened her veins she’d slide into a welcoming oblivion, but the bath has cooled and the Northeaster howling in off the Atlantic forces cold air past the newspaper she wadded between the rotten wooden panels of the rattling sash window.

She sits up, teeth chattering, and reaches out a hand to open the faucet, a fall of plasma beading the enamel of the tub. The old pipes clang and burp before allowing a hot and steamy trickle. Louise lies back and closes her eyes, letting the warmth and blood loss soothe her to sleep, oblivious to the water flowing over the lip of the tub, raining to the floor in red sheets, flooding the checkerboard tiles with her blood.

The moment Christopher touches the ball Lane knows he’s witnessing brilliance, and so does the crowd cheering from the rickety bleachers of the small rugby stadium an hour north of Cape Town. People are on their feet as Chris performs an outrageously balletic leap to intercept a poorly thrown pass, tucks the ball under his arm and sprints toward the opposition try line, zigzagging around defenders, ghosting his way through gaps that just seem to materialize, on his way to a certain score.

Western
Province is annihilating some up-country dirt trackers. The Cape Town-based pro outfit, instead of playing at its home ground, the immense Newlands stadium—so close to Lane’s house that the game day cheers made him (no fan of rugby) an early adopter of an iPod—has brought today’s fixture to fans in the Winelands, beefy white farmers and their colored workers united by blue and white striped rugby jerseys.

When he drove Beverley up from the city to this valley of gabled houses with thatched roofs, he never spoke a word to her, even though this was the longest time they had spent alone in months, because if he’d spoken it would have been about that night in December and what their son did and what they did, and didn’t do, in response.

As they took their seats in the stands a raw wind knifed in from the snowcapped mountains chilling Lane, who sat blowing on his hands, ignored by his wife and a group of her friends who were busy guzzling Scotch from flasks while he sipped at an icy can of Coke. He sank into a fugue state, unable to shake the profound gloom that had enveloped him at the bookstore.

The tinny public address system drew Lane from his reverie with the announcement that Christopher was being called up as a replacement. Bev and her friends cheered and Lane faked a handclap, but his palms never touched.

The boy sprinted onto the field that after weeks of rain looked like the Somme, high-fiving the mud-smeared man he was replacing. The ref’s whistle restarted the game and Christopher, blond and immaculate, untouched by an opponent, intercepted that pass and began his run.

The roar of the crowd is deafening now as three defenders rush Chris who chips the ball over their heads and weaves, leaving them tackling air as he stretches out to retrieve the ball that bounces perfectly into his fingers.

The opposition scrumhalf, a terrier-like kid, throws himself at Christopher, who tucks the ball under his left arm and fends off the smaller man with a hand to the forehead, leaving him lying prone in the mud.

Chris, grinning, speeds toward the open line.

Lane can already see the headlines and hear the hyperbolic babble of the rugby commentators over the coming months, trumpeting the arrival of a new star in the rugby firmament.

And his son, already insufferably arrogant, will take it as his due.

As he took the sacrifice of Lyndall Solomons.

Then Lane stops watching Christopher, his eyes drawn to the last opponent standing, a hulking prop forward covered in a pâté of mud and blood. The man has a shaven head
and a massive torso with a hard gut swelling his jersey, enormous arms ending in blunt hands that seem to scrape the knees of his short, chunky legs. The monster trundles into a run, heading straight at Chris who hasn’t seen him, too busy looking over his shoulder at his teammates on the bench, gloating as he drifts toward the try line.

For a second it seems the Neanderthal has left it too late and Lane, gripping his Coke can hard enough to dent it, wordlessly urges him on, willing a burst of speed into those plough horse hocks.

Christopher, almost at the line, senses something and turns his head to look at this looming enemy, his mouth an oval of surprise.

The big man hits him like a freight train, his shoulder taking Chris low, lifting him clean off his feet, the ball flying from his grasp as the giant drives the boy into the ground, right leg twisting beneath him.

Lane is certain he can hear the twanging of torn ligaments and the stripping gears of Christopher’s knee assembly as the exploding patella is reduced to mush. But, of course, he hears nothing but the shrill yelps of the referee’s whistle and the boos of the crowd as the ref waves a red card at the thuggish Afrikaner for the illegal shoulder charge, the man unable to suppress a smile gap-toothed as a Halloween pumpkin.

And when Lane, watching as his son is stretchered from the field, feels his wife’s eyes on him
and turns to see Beverley shaking her head in disgust, he knows he’s been unable to suppress a smile of his own.

Louise goes home dressed in the clothes of a dead girl. The denim jacket and jeans are pretty clean, but a fist-sized patch of dried blood on the T-shirt chafes her ribs as she rides through the rain in the minibus taxi, and she can smell a stranger’s scent rising from the fabric: stale perfume, booze, cigarette smoke, sweat and something else—a smell she can’t quite fix.

She knows the girl is dead because the colored nurse who brought Louise the clothes and boots—huge leather things with biker buckles—said, “Put these on. Owner’s not gonna need them no more.”

The nurse, a sweet, chubby woman with a wall eye, also gave her ten rand for taxi fare. Louise promised to return the money but they both knew she won’t.

Louise, discharged after two days in hospital, is full of a stranger’s blood too. She was admitted to Groote Schuur trauma unit bare-assed naked after her downstairs neighbor, an out-of-work actor, called 911 when he found himself sitting in a waterfall of her bloody bath water as he watched
Idols
on TV.

She’d lost half her blood and her heart had stopped. The medics brought her back from the dead and restored to her a life she no longer had a use for. Sitting in the taxi, watching the cloud hanging low over the mountain like wet fleece, Louise wonders how this other girl got so lucky.

Clenching her fists in her lap, she fights an urge to scratch open the wounds hidden beneath white bandages. She saw the railroad tracks of sutures on both arms when the nurse changed the dressings before she was discharged, and knows she’ll carry the evidence of this bungled attempt to her grave.

An exhausted-looking social worker—a very pale woman in her fifties—wandered into the ward on the second day, asking Louise why she’d done it, and would she do it again?

“I was depressed,” Louise said. “But I’m really sorry and I realize how lucky I was.” Knowing that this is what the woman wanted to hear.

The social worker nodded and ticked off something on her clipboard. “What about the self-mutilation?” Louise said nothing. “Judging from the scars, you’ve been doing this for quite a few years?”

“A couple, yes.”

“Why?”

Louise shrugged. “Stupid teen-torment stuff. It’s over now.”

The woman consulted the clipboard. “I see you’ve had no visitors. Don’t you have any family?”

“No,” Louise said. Even though that wasn’t strictly true. There was a father out there on the Cape Flats. With a hangman’s noose tattooed between his eyes.

“No friends?”

“We’ve kinda drifted apart,” Louise said.

“Ja, it happens
, I know. But there are support groups that can help you.”

“Okay.”