Sacrifices (20 page)

The crowded room recedes; they are in capsule of two, leaning closer together, their hands touching on the tabletop. They share food from a platter of tapas. As
Tracy feeds him a ring of calamari, oil drips down his chin and she dabs at him with her napkin. When he takes the hand holding the crumpled linen in his and kisses it—smelling the youth on her skin—she laughs and holds his eyes and doesn’t look away.

Somehow the place has emptied and the waiters circle them, increasingly impatient. Lane pays and they walk out into the rain, an honor guard of sodden, stinking homeless emerging from the shadows, palms out. Lane, benevolent after the wine, with the glow of seduction in his veins, dispenses coins.

“Let me drive you home,” he says, a guiding hand on Tracy’s lower back.

“Oh, I’m just two blocks up. Next to the
Baths.”

“I’ll walk you then.”

“I’m fine, really.”

Lane insists and she takes his arm and they stroll to her building, a two storey Victorian, the usual inner-city fortress of gates and buzzers.

“Well,” she says. “Thank you, that was nice.” She unlocks the gate. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“
Tracy?” he says.

“Yes?”

She smiles up at him and he steps in and they kiss, and when he feels her tongue in his mouth Lane’s unable to quell an erection. His arms encircle her voluptuousness, so different from his wife’s spare body. Her smell is different too, fleshy and ripe.

Tracy
slides a hand down his belly and rests a finger on his zipper. Then, very slowly, she runs the nail of her index finger up the length of his penis, starting at his balls, and lingering for just a second at the tip which prods at his corduroy pants.

Then she slips from his arms and says, “Goodnight, Michael.”

The gate creaks open and slams and he’s left watching her legs disappear up the stairs.

Lane, still painfully hard, walks toward his car. For the first time in months he isn’t thinking about death and guilt.

The caterwauling of the
tik
whores drags Louise from a sleep so heavy that it leaves her paralyzed and she has a few seconds of panic when she can’t open her eyes or move her limbs. At last her motor nerves kick in, her eyelids flicker and she sits up on her bed and clicks on the lamp.

Jesus, the place is a dump.

Dirty laundry strewn across the room. The stench of something rotting in the kitchen.

Louise checks her watch and sees that she has been asleep for five hours, poleaxed after arriving back from
Paradise Park, falling face first onto the bed.

Now her body buzzes with manic energy, more energy than she’s felt in months and the next two hours are lost to a frenzy of cleaning: junk food wrappers and dirty clothes are removed, the bed is stripped and remade with clean linen, the moldy dishes are washed and stacked and the fridge cleared of rotting food.

Louise, bagging the trash, eyeballs the Sea Point Mr. Delivery menu dangling like a limpet from her fridge and realizes she’s ravenous. She has no idea when she last ate.

Ripping the menu free, she stares at the pictures: pizzas, peri-peri chicken, burgers and
shawarmas, all lushly photographed.

Food porn.

And it works on her.

She calls in an order—way more than she can eat. The chirpy girl on the other end with her singsong
Cape Flats accent tells Louise the food will be with her in an hour.

Suddenly out of distractions, Louise finds herself sitting at the kitchen counter scratching at her scars, flashing back to the tattooed man with eyes like broken glass talking about eating human hearts, so she powers up her laptop and goes on-line, skipping past the endless roll-call of South African crime statistics, losing herself in the comfortingly distant horrors of Guatemalan earthquakes and East African genocide and Korean death camps.

When the doorbell rings she buzzes in the driver from Mr. Delivery, a middle-aged white man with a depressed air, looking uncomfortable in his branded yellow T-shirt, a zip up bag hanging from his shoulder.

He dumps the bag on the counter beside the laptop and opens it, revealing a shame-making cornucopia of food. Louise pays and over tips, getting only a grunt in return.

Nibbling on a French fry, she drags her mouse to wake up the sleeping computer and gorges while she carries on mindlessly surfing, landing back at her home page, a South African news site.

Stuffed with food she sits staring blankly at the monitor, jazzy graphics trying to sell her a Playstation and car insurance and holidays in
Zanzibar. Then the display changes and she glimpses a photograph of Christopher Lane sprinting down a sports field, rugby ball tucked under his arm, blond her flying.

This jabs her out of her stupor and she is about to click the page dead when she reads the headline:
TRAGEDY FOR YOUNG RUGBY STAR.

She expands the link and reads about the leg injury and this morning’s amputation.
Beverley Lane is quoted as saying, “It’s been a terrible shock but Chris is being unbelievably brave and we are very proud of him.”

Louise laughs. She can’t stop herself—it’s as if the universe has reached down and whispered in her ear. The Lanes have been punished. She sees Achmat Bruinders sitting on the bench in that horrible little park, talking about the greatest punishment for a parent: to hurt what they love.

Beverley, the architect of the deception that killed Lyndall, has been forced to endure the maiming and mutilation of the son she adores.

It’s delicious.

But what about Michael, Louise wonders? He and Chris aren’t close, so how has this affected him? She allows herself to travel over to the house in Newlands, the house that is still part of her, imprinted in her memory, and she sees Michael living a diminished life, with an embittered wife and a crippled son. A life that will narrow and darken until he is an old man filled with regrets.

Yes,
Louise decides as she shuts down the computer, Michael Lane has been punished, too.

The shrill yelp of the cell phone wakes Lane to his first hangover in twenty years. As he sits up, reaching for the Nokia blinking at him in the dark, he feels a wave of dizziness and nausea and has to lie down again, listening to the phone trill itself dead, trying to piece together the mosaic of booze-tinted memories of the night before.

The recollection of the kiss outside Tracy’s apartment fills him equally with shame and desire and when the phone starts to ring again he reaches over and answers it, expecting to hear her voice.

“Michael?”

“Tracy?”

“Who the fuck’s
Tracy? It’s me, man, Jade.”

This gets him sitting upright. “What do you want?” He clicks on the lamp, turning the digital clock to face him.
5:40 a.m.

“Hang on,” Jade says, shouting over a sudden surge of loud music that cranks up the volume of
Lane’s headache. He holds the phone away from his ear. A door slams, muffling the music, then she’s back. “Okay, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Michael, listen, there’s a situation. I need another fifty grand.”

“What?”

“Tonight. I need it tonight, otherwise there’s gonna be big shit.”

“Jesus, Jade, we agreed—”

“Fuck, Michael, are you hearing me? I need the bucks. I don’t get it from you I’ll go to the media, sell my story.”

“They’ll never pay you that kind of money.”

“Michael, don’t fuck with me. Just get me the fifty.” He hears desperation in her voice. And fear. “Get it to me, or I’ll make your life a living fucken hell, I swear.”

“Okay, Jade, calm down. I’ll do it.”

“You’d better.”

“Relax. I will.”

“Then I’ll call you around five this afternoon. Ja?”

“Fine. Please don’t do anything crazy now.”

“Just get the money.”

She’s gone. Lane lays the phone beside the bed, his head throbbing, his stomach awash with acid.

As he stands he’s seized by dizziness. Bile rises in his throat and he almost spews. He breathes the vomit down, a cold sweat dappling his forehead.

Lane pulls on his robe and lurches through to the bathroom, hearing Beverley
dressing for gym behind the closed bedroom door.

He drinks from the faucet until his stomach is distended, then he brushes his teeth and tongue. He’s combing his hair when the bedroom door opens. Lane steps out into the corridor to see his wife in her sweats, bag slung over her shoulder.

“Bev?” he says.

“Yes?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“I’m late for gym, Michael, and then I’m off to the hospital. We’ll catch up tonight.”

“No,” he says. “Now.”

She sees the look on his face and retreats into the bedroom. He follows her and closes the door; the first time he has been in this room in months. Lane sits down on the unmade bed and Beverley perches on the stool at her make-up mirror.

“What’s wrong?” his wife asks, shooting a glance at her silver Tag Heuer wristwatch—an anniversary gift from Lane.

The words come in a spurt as he tells her about Jade extorting one hundred thousand from him and tells her about this morning’s call.

Beverley shakes her head as he stumbles to a close.

“You fucking idiot, don’t you realize that by paying that little bitch you’ve admitted our guilt?”

“What else could I have done?”

“You could’ve told me, for a start.”

“You were so caught up with the whole Chris thing.”

“I would’ve handled it, Michael. Believe me.”

“How?”

She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Okay, I want you to stay home today. Call that girl at the bookstore and tell her you’re sick.” She stares at him. “You hear me?”

“Why?”

“Because when we meet up with this
blackmailing little bitch it’ll be on my terms. I don’t want her anywhere near you today.”

“We?”

“There’s no way I’m going to let you deal with this alone.”

“What about the money?”

“I’ll organize it, you just stay here. I’ll be back by five. If she calls before then let me know, alright?”

“Yes.”

She stands. “Can I rely on you, Michael?”

“Yes,” he says again.

She nods and leaves the room and Lane sinks back onto the bed and closes his eyes. He draws his legs into the fetal position and, clutching a pillow still warm from Beverley’s body—still redolent of her skin—he falls asleep.

Lane, shaved and dressed, sits in his chilly living room, gazing out at the black Northeaster driving in a storm off the Atlantic. Watching the water blur the windows Lane remembers an ocean voyage he took with his father when he was a boy, a trip on a mail ship from Cape Town to Durban. On the first day out the weather was foul, the boat tossed by squalls, the sky and the ocean merging in a yellow-gray smear.

The ship held only a handful of passengers and sea sickness drove them all to their cabins.
Bernard Lane lay heaving on his bunk, the air thick with the stink of his vomit. When his father fell asleep eight-year-old Lane, entirely unaffected by the tempest, left the cabin and made his way onto the deck, marveling at the black waves breaking over the bow, feeling the spray on his face.

A man in a slicker appeared and took Lane up to the wheelhouse, the uniformed officers teasing him and complimenting him on his sea legs. The captain,
a bearded Italian, let him take the wheel, Lane staring out at the massive swell, completely unafraid.

It is one of the happier memories of his childhood and Lane wonders what happened to that brave boy.
The years have peeled him of his courage and he finds himself almost envying his ruthless little wife her resolve and fortitude.

The grandfather clock in the hallway—another ugly piece inherited from Beverley’s mother—chimes twelve times and Lane reaches for his phone, unable to delay any longer the call to the bookstore, feeling an adolescent nervousness as
Tracy answers.

“Lane’s Books.”

“Tracy, it’s Michael.”

He hears a slight inhalation. She’s nervous, too. “Michael, how are you?”

“I’m fine. I won’t be coming in today.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Well, it’s this business with Chris. I need to be at the hospital.”

“Of course, I understand.”

“Tracy?”

“Yes?”

“I want to apologize, about last night, if I got carried away.”

She giggles and this reassures him. “Oh, no, please.”

“I really enjoyed myself.”