Thirteen Hours (6 page)

Daddy, you know I will never drink...

When he read those words they burned right through him. A
sharp reminder of the damage he had caused. Carla would never drink because her
father was an alcoholic who had fucked up his whole family. He might have been
sober for one hundred and fifty-six days, but he could never erase the past.

He hadn't known how to respond, his words dried up by his
insensitive blunder. It took two days before he answered her, told her about
his bicycle and his transfer to the Provincial Task Force. She encouraged him:

It's nice to know what you're doing, Daddy. Much more
interesting things than I am. I work and sleep and eat. At least I was at
Buckingham Palace on Monday...

Their correspondence found a level both were comfortable
with: a rhythm of two emails a week, four or five simple paragraphs. He looked
forward to them more and more - both the receiving and the sending. He mapped
out replies in his head during the day - he must tell Carla this or that. The
words gave his small life a certain weight.

But a week ago his Internet connection stopped working.
Mysteriously, suddenly, the computer geek on the phone, who made him do things
to the laptop that he hadn't known were possible, was also at a loss. 'You'll
have to take it to your dealer,' was the final diagnosis. But he didn't have a
fucking dealer: ultimately, it was stolen goods. On Friday afternoon after work
he bumped into Charmaine Watson-Smith on the way to his door. Charmaine was
deep in her seventies and lived at number 106. Everyone's grandma, with her
grey hair in a bun. Devious, generous, full of the joys of living, she knew
everyone in the block of flats, and their business.

'How's your daughter?' Charmaine asked.

He told her about his computer troubles.

'Oh, I might just know someone who can help.'

'Who?'

'Just give me a day or so.'

Yesterday, Monday evening at half past six he was ironing
clothes in his kitchen when Bella knocked on his door.

'Aunty Charmaine said I should take a look at your PC.'

He had seen her before, a young woman in an unattractive
chunky grey uniform who went home to her flat on the other side of the building
every evening. She had short blonde hair, glasses and always looked tired at
the end of the day, carrying a briefcase in her hand.

He had hardly recognised her at his door: she looked pretty.
Only the briefcase alerted him, because she had it at her side.

'Oh ... come in.' He put down the iron.

'Bella van Breda. I'm from number sixty-four.' Just as
uncomfortable as he was.

He shook her hand quickly. It was small and soft. 'Benny
Griessel.' She was wearing jeans and a red blouse and red lipstick. Her eyes
were shy behind the glasses, but from the first he was aware of her wide, full
mouth.

'Aunty Charmaine is ...' He searched for the right word. '...
busy.'

'I know. But she's great.' Bella had spotted the laptop that
he kept in the open-plan kitchen, his only worktop. 'Is this it?'

'Oh ... yes.' He switched it on. 'My Internet connection
won't
...
it just stopped working. Do you know computers?'

They stood close together watching the screen as it got
going.

'I'm a PC technician,' she answered and put her briefcase to
one side. 'Oh.'

'I know, most people think it's a man's job.' 'No, no,
I...
um, anyone who understands computers ...' 'That's about all I understand. Can I
.. . ?' She gestured at his machine.

'Please. He pulled up one of his bar stools for her. She sat
down in front of the tin brain.

He realised she was slimmer than he had previously thought.
Perhaps it was her two-piece uniform that had given him the wrong impression.
Or perhaps it was her face. It was round, like that of a plumper woman.

She was in her late twenties. He could be her father. 'Is
this your connection?' She had a menu open and the mouse pointer on an icon.
'Yes.'

'Can I put a shortcut on your desktop?' It took him a while
to work that one out. 'Yes, please.'

She clicked and looked and thought and said: 'It looks like you
accidentally changed the dial-up number. There's one figure short here.' 'Oh.'

'Do you have the number somewhere?'

'I think so ...' He took the pack of documents and manuals
out of the cupboard where he kept them all together in a plastic bag and began
to sort through them.

'Here ...' He indicated it with his finger. 'OK. See, the
eight is gone, you must have deleted it, it happens quite easily ...' She typed
the number in and clicked and suddenly the modem dialled up, making its
complaining noises.

'Well, fuck me,' he said in genuine amazement. She laughed.
With that mouth. So he asked her if she would like a cup of coffee. Or rooibos
tea, like Carla always drank. 'That's all I have.'

'Coffee would be nice, thank you.'

He put on the kettle and she said, 'You're a detective,' and
he said, 'What didn't Aunty Charmaine tell you?' and so they fell into
conversation. Maybe it was purely because they each had a lonely Monday evening
ahead. He had no intentions, God knows, he had taken the coffee to the sitting
room knowing that in theory he could be her father, despite the mouth, even
though by then he had become aware of her pale faultless skin and her breasts
that, like her face, belonged to a fuller woman.

It was polite, slightly stilted conversation, strangers with
a need to talk on a Monday night.

Two cups of coffee with sugar and Cremora later, he made his
big mistake. Without thinking he picked up the top CD from his stack of four
and pushed it into his laptop's CD player, because that was all he had apart
from the portable Sony that only worked with earphones.

She said in surprise: 'You like Lize Beekman?' and he said in
a moment of honesty: 'Very much.' Something changed in her eyes, as though it
made her see him differently.

He had bought the CD after he had heard a Lize Beekman song
on the car radio, '
My Suikerbos
'. There was
something about the singer's voice - compassion, no, vulnerability, or was it
the melancholy of the music? He didn't know, but he liked the arrangement, the
delicate instrumentation, and he sought out the CD. He listened to it on the
Sony, meaning to play through the bass notes in his mind. But the lyrics
captured him. Not only the words, the combination of words and music with that
voice made him happy, and made him sad. He couldn't remember when last music
had made him feel this way, such a yearning for unknown things. And when Bella
van Breda asked him if he liked Lize Beekman, it was the first time he could
express this to someone. That's why it came out: 'Very much.' With feeling.

Bella said, 'I wish I could sing like that,' and
surprisingly, he understood what she meant. He had felt the same yearning, to
sing of all the facets of life with the same depth of wisdom and insight and
... acceptance. To sing of the good and the bad, in such lovely melodies. He
had never felt that kind of acceptance. Disgust, yes, that had been with him
all his life. He could never explain why he felt this constant, low-grade
disgust for everything and, above all, for himself.

He said: 'Me too,' and after a long silence, the conversation
blossomed. They talked of many things. She told him the story of her life. He
talked about his work, the reliable old stories of peculiar arrests,
preposterous witnesses and eccentric colleagues. Bella said she would like to
open her own business one day and the light of passion, enthusiasm, shone in
her eyes. He listened with admiration. She had a dream. He had nothing. Just a
fantasy or two. The kind you kept to yourself, the kind he dreamed up while
strumming his guitar in the evenings. Like handcuffing Theuns Jordaan to a
microphone and telling him 'Now you sing "
Hex-vallei"
,
and not a part or a medley, sing the whole fucking song.' With Anton L'Amour on
lead guitar and Benny himself on bass, and they were gonna rock 'n' roll,
really kick butt. Or to be able to ask Schalk Joubert just once: 'How the fuck
do you play bass guitar like that, like it was plugged into your brain?'

Or maybe to have his own four-piece band again. Singing the
old blues, Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker, or the real old rock 'n' roll -
Berry, Domino, Ricky Nelson, early Elvis...

But he said none of this, just listened to her. Round about
ten o'clock she got up to go to the bathroom and when she came back he was on
his way back from the sink to the sofa and he said: 'More coffee?'

They were so close and her eyes looked away and her mouth had
a small, furtive smile that showed she had an idea what was going to happen
next, and she didn't mind.

So he kissed her.

And as Benny sat in the bright summer sun in the Tuesday
morning traffic, he remembered that it had been without lust at first, more an
extension of their conversation. It was full of consolation, longing, a gentle
coming together, just like Lize Beekman's music. Two people who needed to be
touched.

They kissed for a long time and then they stood and held each
other tight. He was again aware that her body was slimmer than he had expected.
She stepped back and sat down on the sofa. He thought she was saying it was
enough. But she took off her glasses and carefully put them on the floor to one
side. Her eyes looked suddenly deep brown, and defenceless. He sat down next to
her and kissed her again and the next thing he could remember she was sitting
up, taking off her bra and offering him her lovely breasts with shy pride. He
sat in the police car remembering how her body felt - soft, warm and welcoming.
He remembered the slow intensity. How he was in her, there on the sofa and
lifting himself up to look at her and seeing in her eyes the same immense
gratitude that he felt in his own heart. Gratitude that she was there, that
this had happened, and it was all lovely and gentle and slow.

Fuck it, he thought, how could that be wrong?

His cell phone rang and brought him back to the present: it
must be Dekker asking where he was. But the screen read ANNA and his heart
lurched.

It was the fall that saved her.

Instinctively, she had sprinted up the steep row of steps
that led up out of the street, up the slope of the mountain between two high
ivy-covered walls, and then up a narrow twisting footpath. Table Mountain was
suddenly a colossus looming over her, steep slopes of rock and
fynbos
and open stretches. She felt sure she had
made a mistake. They would spot her and catch her on the slope. They would grab
her and hold her to the ground and slit her throat, like Erin's.

She drove herself up the mountain. She did not look back. The
gradient sapped the strength from her thighs, her knees, a slow poison that
would paralyse her. Above, to the right, she saw the cable car station, sun
glinting off car windscreens, tiny, tiny figures of people, so close, yet so
terribly far. If only she could reach them. No, it was too steep, too far, she
would never make it.

She saw the fork in the footpath, chose the left one and ran.
Forty paces and then a sudden drop, the path unexpectedly falling to a rocky
gully that sliced down from high up the mountain. She wasn't prepared for it,
her foot landed badly on round pebbles and she fell to the left, downhill.
Trying to brake herself with her hands, she banged her shoulder hard and was
winded. She rolled over once and lay still, aware that her hands were grazed,
that something had struck her chin, but her greatest need was for air, she
needed to force it back into her lungs with great, ragged breaths. Her first
attempt was a bellowing croak like an animal and she needed to be quiet, they
must not hear her. Twice she inhaled hoarsely, then in smaller, quieter
breaths. The bank of the stream came into focus and she saw the crevice carved
out under the giant rock by centuries of water. Just big enough for her to
creep into.

She moved like a snake, over the round river rocks, her
bleeding hands held out in front of her, towards the opening. She heard the
urgent running steps of her pursuers. How close were they? She realised her
rucksack would not fit in. She was running out of time; they would see her. She
rose to her knees to tear the rucksack off, but had to stop to loosen the
buckle around her belly. She pulled the right then left shoulder straps off,
wriggled her body into the hollow and dragged the rucksack after her. Three of
them jumped over the dry stream bed three metres away from her, agile, athletic
and silent, and she held her burning breath, saw how the blood from her chin
dripped on the stones. She lay still, and shut her eyes, as if that would make
her invisible to them.

He sat in the traffic with his phone to his ear and said:
'Hello, Anna.' His heart beating in his throat as he thought of last night.

'Benny, we need to talk.'

It was fucking impossible. There was no way his wife could
have found out.

'About what?'