Sacrifices (19 page)

Louise stands in the rain and waits, the muffled bass vibrating up through her sneakers, silently talking away the panic that reaches up at her again from the mud.

The door opens and Achmat exits, walking on without a word, taking her deeper into the maze that grows darker and wetter.

They come to a shack that’s built hard against a cliff face of compacted trash, one of the towering walls of the
Paradise Park landfill, the stink of decay ripe in the air. Achmat unlocks the door and disappears inside. She hesitates.

“Come,” he says.

Louise steps onto a floor of muddy cardboard. The room is windowless and the darkness complete. A lighter flashes and finds the wick of a paraffin lamp, orange light washing a stained mattress, a wooden chair with a broken back and a shirt and a pair of jeans on a hanger, dangling like a lynched man from a hole in the tin.

He points toward the chair. “Sit.”

She obeys, the legs of the chair piercing the soggy cardboard and sinking into the mud beneath. Achmat folds down onto the mattress, laying a glass tube and a lightbulb stripped of its filament on the filthy ticking.

He ignores her now, his concentration absolute as he prepares the meth pipe, filling the unthreaded bulb with crystals and firing the underside with his lighter. Achmat sucks smoke, holding it in his lungs before he releases a toxic cloud. He inhales until the lightbulb is empty, a stunned expression on his face, his eyes closed.

Then he coughs and sighs and his body, wrapped tight as wire beneath his clothes, unspools as he slumps against the tin wall.

His fogged eyes open. “Talk.”

“I want to know what happened to my brother in Pollsmoor.”

“Why you think I know?”

“The undertakers said what was done to him was a message from the gangs. Was that message for you?”

He stares at her, unblinking. “What you know about them? The number gangs?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, me I’m a 28. Means I make war with the 26s. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe a year ago the boy come see me in Pollsmoor. How he find me, I dunno. Still calling himself Lyndall then, you understand?”

She nods.

“First time he come I don’t bother with him. Never had no visitors in twenny years. Then he come again, and again and again. So I go to the visitor’s room, just to tell him to fuck off and leave me alone. But I see his face and, man, it’s like I’m looking in a mirror at the little cunt that was me.”

Those glazed eyes, like melting glass, holding hers.

“Now, I can hear he’s been brought up good and I can see he’s soft. Too soft for prison. So I tell him, don’t fuck up your life like me. Don’t come in this place. And he ask me about Islam, and I tell him, ja, me I’m born a Muslim but now my religion is the 28s. I don’t see him for a while, then he’s back and he tells me he’s Mustapha now. That he’s found Allah. So, I think, okay, there’s worse things he can find. Then they give me parole and just like that I’m out and I never seen him again.”

Achmat lights a hand-rolled cigarette, worms of tobacco spilling from the paper. He smokes, eyes closed for a minute. He opens them and looks at her as if she’s nothing at all, before he focuses and clears his throat.

“Next thing I get sent word telling me the boy is killed in prison. Telling me how he’s dead and who done it. Done it to send me a message.”

“
What message?”

“There’s a rumor that I got parole because I spoke to the guards, told them about shit the 26s make in prison. Now they my blood enemy, the 26s, but no matter what they do you don’t go to the guards. You make your own law. You fix yourself what needs fixing, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“So, this rumor, this lie, now it becomes a truth: that Achmat Bruinders spoke. So when the boy is sent to Pollsmoor there’s men who know he’s my son, even though he’s nothing to me. And the 26s go into the awaiting trial cells and they kill him. Take his eyes and his tongue. You understand what this means?”

“Yes. But why did they take out his insides?”

“The innards they flush away, down the shithouse. It’s the heart they want.”

“What for?”

“To eat.”

“They ate my brother’s heart?”

“Ja. The three who done the killing ate the heart. For power.” He stubs the cigarette out on the wall and drops the butt on the floor. “Two of them are dead now. I sent word inside and it was done.”

“And the third?”

“Soon. It’ll be sorted soon.”

She swallows back the bile in her throat. “Have you ever done that?”

“What?”

“Eaten a man’s heart?”

“Ja. I done it.” He shrugs. “It’s just what you do.” Achmat stands. “I can’t tell you nothing more.”

Louise gets to her feet, her nostrils thick with meth smoke and his acrid sweat. Achmat opens the door and leads her back out the way they came.

When they arrive at the street the rain has stopped and the clouds have cracked open onto a pale blue sky, hard sunlight hitting the mud and trash and the gang-tagged buildings. Ugly as it is, she feels as if she has been released from the underworld.

“Do something for me now,” Achmat says.

“What?”

“Come.”

He crosses the road to where a knot of kids are gathered in a sad little concrete playground with a broken swing and a rusted slide.

Achmat sits on a bench and Louise stands beside him.

“You see that boy?”

He points toward a child of maybe four, dressed in jeans and sneakers, dangling from the swing’s snapped chain.

“Yes.”

“Bring him here to me.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause he’ll come with you.”

“What do you want with him?”

“Just fetch him here.”

“Are you going to hurt that child?”

“No.”

She looks down at Achmat and sees something that she believes is tenderness on his face as he watches the boy. Maybe this is some lost grandchild, she thinks, and she walks over to the kid.

“Hi,” she says and the boy looks up at her. She holds out her hand and he blinks. “Come with me.”

The child is suddenly shy, hiding behind one of his friends, giggling, peering up at her.

“Come,” she says. “I’ll give you chocolate.”

“Swear?”

“Yes.”

He takes her hand and she walks him back toward Achmat, who sprawls on the bench, watching. The child tries to pull away when he sees the man, but she lifts him up and sits him on the splintered wood.

“Here,” Achmat says, taking a toffee from his pocket.

“Not chocolate,” the kid says.

“Next time, okay?” Achmat unwraps the toffee.

The boy grabs the sweet and stuffs it into his mouth, his jaws fighting the stickiness.

Louise hears a shout and sees a young woman running toward one of the houses, yelling what sounds like, “Cakes! Cakes!”

Louise
searches for the confections the woman is selling, but sees none.

A man comes out of the house wearing only a pair of shorts, despite the chill, looking as if he’s just woken. Even at a distance Louise can see the filigree of gang tattoos patterning his torso.

The woman points toward the bench and the tattooed man stares and then he breaks into a sprint, heading toward them.

“What’s going on?” Louise asks.

“Relax,” Achmat says.

The man calls out, “Dexter! Dexter!”

The kid looks up from his chewing and waves. When he makes to climb down from the bench, Achmat grabs him by the shirt and holds him back.

The half-naked man approaches, panting, his body shaking with more than cold.

“Let him go, you filth. Let him go.”

“Nice to see you, Cakes
,” Achmat says.

“Let him go.”

“You tell him to stay nice and quiet and nothing will happen to him.”

The child is squirming, starting to cry.

“Leave him. Leave my boy. He has no part of this.”

“Like you left my boy? Lying on the floor of the cell with no tongue and no eyes and no insides?”

And Louise understands who this man is and what’s happening.

“Let the child go,” she says.

Achmat shrugs and releases the boy who flies into the man’s arms, sobbing against his bare chest.

“You leave my boy, fucker,” Cakes says, backing away. “You leave him alone.”

The man hurries across the road and his wife tears the child from his grip and runs into the house, slamming the door.

Achmat sits with his arms on the back of the bench.

“That’s the last one,” he says. “Transferred to another prison before I could get him fixed in Pollsmoor. Got paroled last week.”

“And now?”

“And now I take it slow. I make him suffer.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

He shakes his head. “No. What good would that do? I’m going to let him live and kill what he loves the most.”

“The child?”

“Ja, but not today. I want him to worry and wake up each morning wondering if this will be the day I take his boy.” He looks up at her. “But I will take him.”

“That child is innocent.”

“Maybe, but the law is the law, girly and the law is all we have.” He stands. “You forget about me now.”

Achmat Bruinders walks away from her, disappearing into the mess of shacks.

Louise waves down a taxi and climbs aboard, welcoming the press of humanity.

Lane sits at his desk in the gloom, staring through the hatch at the strip club neon, hypnotized by the naked leg kicking out, then falling, then kicking out again.

“Michael?” Tracy appears in the office doorway.

“Yes?” he says, switching on the Anglepoise lamp.

She hovers, holding a parcel in her hand. “I hope you don’t think this is very forward, but I got you something for your birthday.”

“Oh, God, how did you know?”

“Auntie Daphne has a reminder in the diary.”

Tracy
scuttles across and places the gift-wrapped package on his desk.

“Thank you,” he says.

She nods and hurries out, flustered and embarrassed, lifting a box of books and lugging it upstairs.

Lane carefully loosens the tape holding the striped paper, revealing a slim gray and black volume:
The North Ship
, a first edition of Philip Larkin poems dating from 1966. It is signed,
P.A. Larkin
scrawled in spidery handwriting on the title page.

Lane lays the book on his desk and mounts the stairs.
Tracy stands on a wooden ladder, stacking the South African history shelf. As she stretches to shelve a book her knees part and he can’t stop his gaze from traveling into the shadows of her thighs.

“
Tracy,” he says, “the Larkin is remarkable. Where did you get it?”

She walks backward down the ladder, talking over her shoulder. “It was my father’s. He loved Larkin. He did a kind of pilgrimage to
Hull and got him to sign it.”

“There’s no way I can accept it. It’s something you should keep.”

“No, I want you to have it.” She smiles, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “Please.”

“Well, thank you. I’ll cherish it.”

She giggles and Lane feels an almost uncontrollable surge of lust and wants nothing more than to crush those full lips, slightly parted on an overbite, beneath his own. It has been a day for surrendering to impulses, and he’s only saved from himself when the girl ducks past him and clatters down the staircase.

Lane stays upstairs, the musty smell of old books—a smell he has loved since he was a child—not soothing him for once.

“Michael?” Tracy calls up to him.

“Yes?”

“I’m going now.”

“Okay,” he says, walking down. “Thanks again.”

“Enjoy the rest of your birthday.” She opens the door and the noise of Long Street crowds in.

“
Tracy?” he says before he can stop himself.

“Yes?”

“Do you want to have a drink, maybe?”

She pauses, hand on the open door. He’s sure she’s going to refuse, but she nods and says, “I’d love to.”

Lane gets his jacket and they lock up and cross to a tapas bar in the building on the next corner, smokers—despite the cold and rain—huddled around plastic tables on the sidewalk that hug the Georgian columns. Lane opens the door onto hot air, fried food and a babble of conversation, and they squeeze their way through to a table by the misted window.

Over the next months, when Lane thinks back on that night, he remembers it as movie time-lapse sequence like the nature kitsch so beloved of the Discovery Channel—buds exploding into bloom, stubbled fields suddenly garish with sunflowers—but this is no floral transformation, this is the metamorphosis of Tracy Whitely from the awkward, plain, shop
girl (shoulders hunched like an adolescent, masking her breasts) to the woman who stares into his eyes with frank desire.

This transformation is alcohol lubricated, of course: two bottles of Cape cabernet are flattened in no time, and he’ll never forget Tracy licking a mustache of Irish coffee cream from her top lip—a lip that Lane wants to bite until it bleeds—and Philip Larkin, bless his crusty old soul, is an ice-breaker. 

But it is more than poetry and booze. The conversation becomes a call and response of commonality, bridging the twenty year age gap.

They are both only children. They are both orphans. His mother dying in childbirth, hers by her own hand when Tracy was fourteen. Her father dropping dead of a heart attack on a cruise ship three years ago, his winnowed by cancer.