The Death of Rex Nhongo (14 page)

A
Sunday evening in October: it was oppressively hot. With Bessie off-duty, Jerry and April spent the whole day together, more or less: a lazy breakfast followed by shifts watching back-to-back
Teletubbies;
lunch with the Americans Terri and Derek Sedelski and their two kids, then a trip to Greenwood Park; delight in Theo's delight at the train ride, laughter at his reluctance to get on the trampoline, photographs on Jerry's iPhone of the happy family—Dad holding Theo's hand on the climbing frame, Mum with Theo on her lap eating ice cream, the three of them smiling brightly into the sunshine at Derek's insistence. They got home at five and Jerry bathed Theo while April made scrambled eggs on toast. They ate in silence punctuated by their son's demands for more ice cream. They put Theo to bed together: Jerry sitting on the floor, carefully making sure the sleepy child could see every single page of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar,
April on the bed, eyes closed, her hand resting lightly on Theo's back. Only when he dozed off could they finally go their separate ways: Jerry to the office and his laptop to catch up on the latest releases on Tru Folk, April to the living room by way of the kitchen.

April poured herself half a glass of white wine and settled on the sofa, her legs tucked under her. She stared at her mobile phone, as she had been doing surreptitiously all day. She was behaving, she realized, like a teenager, and the thought gave her a light shiver of excitement. She sent a thank-you text to Terri to pass the time. She sipped her wine. She clicked the phone to light the screen, as if it were somehow possible that in sending a text message she could have missed an incoming call. She clicked the phone back to sleep. She told herself that she didn't need a call, that the anticipation was enough excitement. She laid the phone on the coffee table. It rang—or, rather, vibrated—almost immediately. It was an unfamiliar number. “Hello?”

“Yes, hello. Is that April? April Jones?” The voice came in staccato: a woman, clearly agitated. April experienced a sudden swell of terror.

“Yes. Who's this?”

“April Jones…” the woman said. “I'm sorry to disturb you at this time, April. It's Kuda. Shawn's wife. Shawn Appiah.”

“Hi! Kuda. Yes. You're not disturbing me at all. How are you?” She heard her voice as if from a great distance. It sounded ridiculous: too friendly, too
hearty
.

There was a great sob from the other end of the line. The effort it had taken to make the call, to get out the opening exchange, was clearly spent.

“What is it?” April said softly.

She found Jerry buying albums on iTunes. It was an extrava­gance of which she disapproved—the double expense of the album and the ludicrous price of a data plan in Zim. At the sound of her at the door, Jerry automatically minimized the window. April shook her head. “I had a call,” she said. “Kuda.”

“Who's Kuda?”

“Shawn's wife. The American. The guy I met at yoga. They came to our
braai
. The guy in the pool.”

Jerry turned around in his chair to look at her. “What did she want?”

“She wants you to go over. She remembered you're a nurse. She said Shawn's not there and she's had an accident. Her maid's away and it's just her and the little girl—Rosie. She says she can't drive to a hospital.”

Jerry blinked at her and shut his laptop. “Right.”

April looked on as Jerry packed his bag. He asked what the woman had said about the accident, what had happened. April shook her head. She hadn't said anything. She'd sounded distressed, feeble. Jerry thought aloud as he chose what to take—a burn? A cut? A shock? April watched with something like admiration. She had forgotten how calm her husband could be, how competent.

“You have the address?” Jerry asked.

“Yeah. Newlands.”

“Write it down for me.”

“I'm coming too,” April said quickly, and Jerry looked up at her.

“Theo…” he said.

“We don't know what's happened,” April said. Then, “The girl…”

“Right.”

“I'll call Bessie.”

“Is she here?”

“I don't know, do I? I'll call her.”

April called Bessie. The maid was in her room at the back of the property. April asked if she could babysit. By the time Bessie walked up to the house, her boss was already behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser, Madam waiting at the kitchen door. Bessie asked: “Is everything OK?”

“I don't know,” April said. “An emergency, it seems.” She attempted a weak smile. “Theo's down. I'm sure he won't wake up. Have you got your phone? Good. I'll call you if we're going to be very late.”

Jerry swung the car onto Alexander towards Arcturus and Enterprise Roads. April said, “Don't you want to go via Glenara?”

Jerry said, “I know where I'm going.”

They drove in silence for a while. Jerry was putting his foot down, too fast. April gripped the strap above her head and bit her tongue.

Jerry said, “She didn't say anything?”

“She didn't say anything.”

“For future reference, you need to get as many details as you can. Even if the person's distressed.”

“I wasn't expecting this,” April said. “Fuck!”

“For future reference,” Jerry said. “That's why I said ‘for future reference.'” Then, “Call her.”

“What?”

“Call her. Talk to her. We don't know what's happened. Keep her on the phone.”

April searched through her phone for the last call received. She pressed dial. There was no answer. Jerry hissed, “Shit!” April began to feel very frightened. Less than an hour ago, everything had seemed like a game. She looked out of the window at the oncoming headlights.

Jerry turned off Enterprise Road and onto Princess Drive. He hunted house numbers in the headlights. He found what he was looking for. He pulled into a driveway and buzzed down the window to press the intercom. Nothing. He waited. He was about to press the buzzer again when the automatic gate opened. He drove inside.

In spite of herself, April found herself drinking in every detail, curious about how the American and his Zimbabwean wife lived. She noted the empty, cracked swimming pool, the slightly unkempt lawn, the swing frame with no swing. The house was nice, but smaller than she'd imagined. She wondered how it would look in daylight. She knew that Shawn liked to drink his coffee on the veranda. She couldn't see any veranda. It must be on the other side.

“No guard,” Jerry said. Then, peering through the windscreen, “I think the front door's open.”

He cut the engine and reached into the footwell behind April's passenger seat for his bag. He touched his hand to her elbow. He said, “I want you to wait here. I want you to lock all the doors and wait here.”

“For fuck's sake, Jerry.”

He said, “We don't know what's happened. You can't get her on the phone. The front door's open. Wait here.”

“OK, sure,” she said.

Jerry got out of the car and disappeared inside the house. April tutted to herself, even as she was swamped by an unexpected wave of fear. She hit the central locking.

A
pril waited until five minutes turned to ten. She called Jerry's mobile. It rang on the shelf beneath the steering wheel. She composed herself for a moment before getting out of the car. She stood on the gravel driveway, listening intently. The cicadas were deafening. She approached the front door, acutely aware of the crunch of every footfall. She pushed open the door into the small dark hallway. A light was on in the room to the left. She entered a living room dominated by a large flat-screen TV and, on the opposite wall, an even larger framed seventies poster for
When the Revolution Comes,
an album by the Last Poets (whoever they might be). She stared at the poster, fascinated. It had to be Shawn's. He must have brought it all the way from America to hang it on this African wall. She wondered what it said about him. She backed out of the room. She hissed, “Jerry!” No response. She headed deeper into the house. The hallway opened into a corridor that led left and right. To the left was pitch darkness. To the right, a lit doorway. She padded towards it. She said, “Jerry!” again, this time at conversational volume. Her voice seemed to die in the still, enclosed space. There was no immediate reply, but she heard a noise behind the door and then, as she got closer, her husband say, somewhat breathlessly, “In here.”

April pushed the door. It swung into a brightly lit open-plan kitchen. The first thing she saw was a small red spatter up the right-hand wall by the intercom. Her eyes widened. To her left was a breakfast bar. On top of it sat a mobile phone, presumably Kuda's, which was next to a small stainless-steel cleaver in a thick, congealing pool of blood.

April had never considered herself the squeamish type. Then again, such an assumption had never been tested and she felt a brief surge of light-headedness so that she had to support herself on the counter. Her fingers came away bloody and she said, “Oh, Christ.”

Jerry said, “Are you OK? It's a bit of a mess.” And she saw him for the first time, knelt over Kuda's partially visible body, which was lying on the floor at the far end of the counter. He hadn't looked up at her—presumably he'd just heard the distress in her voice. “A bit of a mess,” he repeated.

April now saw that the pool of blood smeared into a thick, careless streak that stretched the full length of the counter before disappearing over its end. She took a couple of steps forward and found that Jerry was kneeling in an even more impressive bloody puddle, a needle in his mouth, and a length of rubber tube in his hands.

“Is she dead?”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

Jerry didn't have time for explanations. He said, “I saw the girl. In bed. Other end of the house. I thought she was sleeping, but that was before…I didn't check. Can you check?”

“Right.”

April returned to the corridor. She ran her hand along the wall until it hit a light switch. She flicked on the light and hurried towards the far end, less from any sense of urgency than to preclude the opportunity to reflect upon what she might be about to find. She tried the penultimate door on the right, but it was a small guest toilet. She opened the last door quietly and she was in Rosie's bedroom. She stood looking down at the little girl in the half-light from the corridor. Rosie was lying on her front, her head to one side, her thumb lightly touching her lips. April watched for a moment that stretched unbearably. She thought she might scream until, at last, she saw Rosie's spine rise and fall with a deep and heavy breath.

Back in the kitchen, Jerry was pulling off a pair of latex gloves and washing his hands. April said, “She's just asleep.”

Jerry nodded. “Thank God,” he said. Then, of Kuda, “She must have been waiting for us. She opened the gate and then passed out. I've stabilized her blood pressure, but we need to get her to hospital.”

“Suicide?” April breathed.

Jerry looked at her. His expression was serious but unflustered. He shook his head, not an answer so much as a negation of the question in favor of pressing practicalities. He said, “Can you wait with her a minute? I have to check something.”

Jerry moved quickly around the kitchen. He tried the back door. It was locked and bolted from the inside. He returned to the main part of the house. April heard doors opening and closing. She stood over Kuda's body. She looked down at it. The woman was wearing a white T-shirt with “Jesus Saves” across the front in red letters. The midriff of the T-shirt was a wide bloody stain. Kuda's arms were swathed in bandages, gauze and tape. April guessed six or seven cuts in total. Jerry had raised her right wrist to rest on an upturned saucepan and he'd taped a drip to the counter that ran into her upper arm.

April
was standing over the body
. She felt peculiar. She wondered if this was how it would feel or, rather, how it would look if you had just killed a person. If somebody had walked in at that moment, would they assume her a murderer? She dropped to her haunches and rested her hand on Kuda's shoulder, if only for the sake of appearances.

Jerry came back into the kitchen. He said, “There's definitely no one else here.”

April looked up at him sharply. She hadn't even considered this a possibility. She said again, “Suicide?”

“I don't know. She's cut her radial, but the angle…But I don't know. I'm no expert. And she called us and waited for us to arrive. It's just weird. And the other cuts? I don't know. Self-harm. Maybe.”

“Shawn. The husband. He said something about mental illness.”

“He told you that?”

“No. At the
braai
. He said she hadn't been well. That's why they'd come back to Zim. It was the way he said it. That's what I thought: mental illness. And on the phone, when she called, she said she'd had an accident and that Shawn was out of town. She didn't say anything about anyone else.”

“Right,” Jerry said. Then, “I need to get her to a hospital. You're going to have to stay here—for the girl. I'm going to carry her to the car. Can you carry the drip?”

April looked at her husband. She didn't much like his plan, but she knew it was the only one that made sense. She said, “You're sure there's no one else here?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.” He took April's hand and squeezed it. He said, “I'll be back as soon as I can. Maybe you could call someone.”

“Like who?”

“I don't know. Terri? Tom Givens?”

“No,” she said. “Let's just do this.”

A
pril watched Jerry pull the Land Cruiser through a tight three-point turn and swing away up the drive. It stopped at the gate and she watched the idling car for a second or two before realizing she'd have to open it from inside. She hurried back to the kitchen and found the intercom by the door. She lifted the receiver and saw the button smudged with a bloody fingerprint. She found a tea towel to cover her own finger and pressed it. She heard the grind of the gate and the grunt of the powerful engine.

April turned to look around the kitchen. She was impressed by her own sangfroid. She considered cleaning up the blood. She believed herself equal to the task, but decided against it, because what if there was some kind of criminal involvement, after all? Surely it was best to leave it for now. She wanted to make herself a cup of tea. She opened every cupboard, but couldn't find tea. She did find a bottle of Scotch and poured herself a large one, not because she wanted it but because she had no experience of situations like this and it was the kind of thing they did in films or on TV.

She went to the lounge, shutting the door to the kitchen's horrors on her way out. She sat on the sofa opposite the TV and beneath the large poster. She took out her mobile and tried to call Shawn. That was her impulse: to call her lover. Only after she'd hit “dial” did she appreciate that, if he answered, she'd have to talk to him as a husband and father. She felt a surge of panic until she heard the familiar automated response: “The subscriber you are calling is not available at the moment.”

April sipped Scotch. It gave her heartburn. She stood up again. She went to check on Rosie. The girl was still sleeping soundly.

Without allowing herself to consider what she was doing, April opened the second door down from the child's bedroom. If she had considered it, she'd have told herself that she was looking for clues as to what had happened, or rechecking for intruders, or simply that she was bored. But she found that she was quite able not to consider what she was doing at all.

She turned on the overhead light. The room appeared to be a study or home office. There was a cluttered desk with a space where a laptop habitually sat. There was a daybed made up with a baggy single sheet, a crumpled quilt and pillow. Shawn hadn't lied to her about his sleeping arrangements and this knowledge gave her grim satisfaction so powerful that she sat on the bed and lifted the quilt to her face and positively reveled in the grotesquerie of her own behavior. The quilt smelt faintly of cigarettes and armpits and arse. April wondered if this, cigarettes apart, was how all men smelt—of armpits and arse. It was certainly true of Jerry, just different armpits and a different arse.

She remembered St. John Vaughan, the Cambridge academic. She remembered his curious, odorless hold over her; the bliss she'd experienced against his bare chest and gripping his hairless buttocks. She remembered blowing him in the Queens College car park and the watery, tasteless gush of his semen. She found this memory exciting, not of itself, but in the power it now seemed to give her over other, smellier, men. The idea was absurd and weightless; and, in this bizarre situation, it allowed her to float right out of motherhood and marriage in a way that she found intoxicating. When life takes a bizarre turn, she wondered, doesn't it endorse our most bizarre behaviors?

April stood up and swilled Scotch like a veteran. She left the study and made for the room at the corridor's end. It had to be the master bedroom. It was. She was no longer even positively not considering her actions: she was at the whim of her whims.

She took in the king-size bed, with the extraordinary and ornate faux-leather headboard. She wondered who'd chosen this bed; assumed it was Shawn. This thought led her to imagine the plans she knew he'd have laid out for its topography, then the all too obvious reasons these plans had been foiled. She smiled to herself. Shawn was a kind of sexual hobbyist—his desire to fuck a certain woman in a certain position in a certain venue little different from Jerry's urge to own the latest releases on Q-Topia, Partisan and Storyville. And just as there was an endless back catalogue of unoriginal ways to sing the blues that excited only the most dedicated fan, so there was an endless back catalogue of unoriginal ways to fuck.

April sat on the bed. On the bedside table, there was a Bible. She opened it at the bookmark. There was a passage marked with biro, Ephesians 6. She read, “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.” April didn't believe in God, certainly not the devil, but the words still had the power of an incantation and gave her short-lived pause. She looked up to find Rosie standing in the doorway.

“Who are you?” Rosie said.

“April. I'm a friend of your mum and dad. You came to my house once. Remember?”

The little girl nodded. She said, “I need the bathroom.”

“OK.”

“It's dark.”

April led her to the bathroom. She switched on the light. The girl eased herself onto the toilet seat and her face took on an earnest expression of concentration. Then she smiled, said, “Finished!” and reached for tissue paper. She said, “Where's my momma?”

“She had an accident,” April said. “She had to go to the hospital. So she rang me to come and look after you.”

Rosie looked up at her. She seemed to take in this information without any kind of shock or difficulty. She said, “What kinda accident?”

“I don't know,” April said. “She cut herself. But she's going to be OK. We should get you back to bed.”

The little girl slid off the toilet and slipped past April in the doorway. “I don wanna go to bed. I'm not tired any more. I wanna watch TV.”

“It's late, Rosie. You need to be sleeping.”

“No! I wanna watch TV. I got DVDs. You like
Henry Huggle-monster
?”

April followed the child down the corridor to the lounge. She watched helplessly as Rosie turned on the TV and DVD player with expert ease and settled herself on the sofa. She knew she should probably put her foot down, but it wasn't her kid and it was an unusual situation, to say the least, so, instead, she sat down next to her. The girl said, “You lemme watch TV?”

“Why not?”

For a moment, the girl looked at her in disbelief. Then, she instinctively snuggled into her and April lifted her arm to allow Rosie to settle her head on her lap. Maybe she'd fall asleep again there. The anti-piracy warning flashed up on the screen. April said, “What's the program?”

“I told you.
Henry Hugglemonster
.”

“Right.”

Rosie sat back for a moment and regarded her with a furrowed child's brow. She said, “Momma had an accident?”

“That's right. But she's going to be fine. You don't have to worry.”

“I's not worried. Jus maybe it Sasabonsam what did the accident. Because he real naughty an dun all kinda accident even if I gets the blame. Like, when we at your house by the deep end an I push your baby in the water an Daddy dive in? Thas me an I know I dun sumthin bad, but it Sasa what said it, you know?”

April looked down at the girl and her heart stopped, then restarted and quickened and her breaths came short and her head filled with blood. She recalled the day of the
braai,
Theo being dragged out of the pool and lying limply on the burnished tiles. She felt something: a curious, cold, uncomfortable emptiness that swelled behind her navel and rose in her chest until she thought she might gag. She said, “Who's Sasa?”

“He like my friend. Only I tell him he not my friend any more cos he get so angry an always gettin me in trouble.”

April felt her fingers tighten around the soft flesh of the child's belly. She said, “Is he in your imagination?” Rosie looked at her blankly. “I mean, Sasa, is he pretend or is he real?”

“I dunno. Pretend, I guess. I mean, thas what Daddy say an no one see him but me. He come when we move to Zimbabwe.”

“Where's Sasa now?”

“Dunno. Sleepin, probly.”

April gave her a reassuring squeeze. “Don't worry,” she said. “I'm sure Sasa had nothing to do with it.”

April relaxed and allowed her breathing to even out; her thinking too. She understood her physical reaction to Rosie's story reflected the sudden recollection of her greatest fear. She believed she also understood the little girl who'd moved to a foreign country at the heart of a breaking marriage and invented a friend to support her and, no doubt, justify her anger. It all made sense, as everything made sense if thought about in the right way—the urge to love, love's passing, the desire for something more.

In that instant, April experienced some kind of epiphany, believing that she fully and dialectically understood herself—educated career woman struggling with maternal instincts, child and wife of alcoholics, vulnerable loner and sexual predator, powerful and powerless, utterly controlled and at the mercy of her temperament. In that instant, she believed that she was seeing herself as she was, and the clarity of the harsh light rather suited her—even her flaws looked to her sympathetic and almost beautiful. Everything was comprehensible and, when understood, could be excused.

She was stroking Rosie fondly and, when she looked down, she found the girl was fast asleep. April considered lifting her to bed, but didn't want to risk waking her, so instead rested her head on her hand and watched back-to-back episodes of
Henry Hugglemonster,
in which small, lovable cartoon fiends taught children the value of sharing and listening and eating a varied and nutritious diet.