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  For Bella

  August the eighth

  THURSDAY

  1

  A grey heron waited in the reeds, beak poised above the pool. When the prison gates opened for the man, the bird flew off. The fish dived, a flash in the tea-brown water.

  Five-thirty. Nearly weekend.

  The guards impatient to get home at the end of a long shift.

  The man’s parole papers filed under a name not his own.

  His fingers curled around the hundred rand note from the Prisoners’ Friend Society. He’d already discarded the address of the Christian halfway house expecting his arrival.

  The man crossed the deserted road.

  He wore borrowed trousers, a jacket that exposed his bony wrists, a white shirt. The smell of another man’s day in court, the sweat that came with the clock-stopping moment of sentence.

  He waited, the last rays of the weak August sun warm on his back.

  The guards packed up, listening as the radio spat out Cape Town’s news.

  In the distance, the rattle of a minibus taxi.

  It crested the rise, and he flattened his blade-thin body into a ditch next to the road.

  The driver stopped. The guards glanced up: the new shift arriving. Nothing much to mention. Thursday would be a quiet night. They handed over, boarded the taxi, sped home.

  Darkness descended.

  The prisoner dusted off his clothes, eyes focused fifty metres ahead. The length of an exercise yard.

  Ex-prisoner.

  He cut through farmland, a shadow slipping down the serried vines.

  The runty dogs lying between the workers’ cottages yapped.

  A woman making her way home, stopped. She listened, but the dogs fell silent, and she walked on. Uncertain.

  The man watched her, at ease. Prison erases a man’s smell, teaches him the art of absence.

  Above him, the stars wheeled, freed from the barred square that had contained his nights for so many years.

  On the stoep of a gabled farmhouse, dogs lifted their heads. Then settled again. Inside by the fire, the owners sipped brandy as they glanced at the day’s headlines.

  He did not slow down as he scythed through the night.

  At the crossroads, he orientated himself and headed for Cape Town.

  No one would be waiting for him.

  No one had, not since his mother’s funeral. His twenty-seven-year-old mother, shot five times by her pimp.

  Twice in the face, twice in the heart, once in the cunt.

  He had hoped, then, that someone would claim him. No one had, after the funeral. Except the pimp who’d pinned him down for an old man to sample, both of them laughing at the blood, the tears.

  Payment for the bullets used to kill his insolent mother.

  He had melted into the cold Cape drizzle, sharpened a bicycle spoke, and gone to the shebeen where his mother’s killer sat. A beer in one hand and a girl in yellow hotpants in the other.

  He had inserted the spoke into the pimp’s back, pressing upwards until the tip pierced his heart. Then he’d disappeared into the night.

  Sorry Mom.

  He’d had that inked on the skin above his heart.

  Vrou is gif.

  That above the other nipple, for the whore in the yellow shorts who’d pointed at him in the courtroom.

  Woman is poison.

  A taxi pulled over with its cargo of late-shift workers. He settled next to a window and watched the new housing developments whip past. Villas hiding behind security booms; an empty soccer stadium where armed guards with leashed Alsatians patrolled the encircling razor wire; a shopping mall offering discounts.

  He’d been gone for years.

  Things had changed for the rich.

  The roads became clogged arteries. Factory shift workers hurried home in the dark. Young men swaggered on street corners.

  He got out where the land was flat and the southeaster howled around huddled houses that stretched as far as the curve of False Bay. Government-built boxes for the people.

  Nothing had changed for the poor.

  He breathed in the smells of the place that had been his home. Car fumes, a dead dog, the tang of salt from the distant sea.

  The outside.

  A forgotten dream that he had buried when he’d first gone to prison and been absorbed by the Number, the brutal prison brotherhoods. A killer at ten, the 27s had embraced him, the gang giving him rank and purpose and a sense of family more powerful than anything a mother outside ever presided over.

  On the corner was the Nice-Time Bar, a corrugated iron lean-to attached to a brick house. White plastic chairs clustered around red Coke crates; five men sat drinking.

  Inside the bar, a television flickered.

  He ordered a beer from the barmaid, and stared at the woman on the screen who was unbuttoning her shirt.

  The girl gave him his drink.

  ‘Pop Idols,’ she said, flicking through the channels. ‘It’s the final tonight.’

  ‘Go back to it,’ he ordered.

  ‘It’s mos a rerun of Missing, that Doctor Hart’s gang-cherrie programme.’ The barmaid rolled her eyes. ‘Just some Number gangster’s daughter showing off her scars. An excuse to show off her tits on TV. Hoping the Voice of the Cape will pay her for her story.’

  ‘Go back. Turn up the sound.’

  She knew enough to do what she was told.

  ‘All the same when they come out,’ she muttered, lighting a cigarette. ‘An inch of skin, and the brain’s dead.’

  He ignored her, listening to the rasp of the woman’s voice.

  Pearl, she called herself.

  Stupid name.

  The barmaid finished her cigarette, going off to serve another customer.

  The programme ended, the man drained his beer, and left.

  He stood in the alley behind the shebeen, running through the plans he’d made with the other 27s, the generals who’d crouched in a circle.

  The custodians of the unwritten law of the Number gangs had decided who should die, and when.

  Any slight, any unearned claim to rank, any secret revealed, was a betrayal that had to be paid for in blood.

  That was the law of the 27s.

  He did not have much time.

  He did not have enough information.

  But he knew where to start.

  He took the hand-fashioned knife from the sole of his shoe, slipped it into his pocket.

  An expert at prising open secrets.

  August the ninth

  FRIDAY

  2

  Green.

  Clare Hart nosed across the Friday morning traffic, the taxis and bakkies surging towards the city.

  Red.

  Three Indian crows feeding on a dog’s carcass hopped back and forth at the lights, black eyes fixed on the traffic, their timing impeccable. A huddle of boys rolling dice, betting with bottle tops, stared at Clare. Chained dogs barked in the litter-strewn yards. She was looking for a street with no name – its sign long since torn down and sold for scrap metal.

  Clare looked up at the pockmarked buildings; three-storeyed walk-ups that baked in summer and froze in winter. The Flats. The buildings were named after battles fought long ago by people who’d lived far away. Waterloo, Hastings, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Tobruk.

  The people who lived in this place called it Baghdad.

  Coke adds life.

/>   A hand-painted slogan in red and white on the wall of a corner café, its small dispensing window covered with hand grenade mesh. On the opposite corner the primary school, rubbish swagged against rusting barbed wire. The playground was filled with children in white shirts. The girls wearing bottle-green skirts; the boys in grey pants. In a corner, a little girl stood alone under a bullet-riddled sign.

  Your Neighbourhood Watch watches out for you.

  The child was clutching a lunch box. Her eyes, large and dark, were on Clare as she drove past. A group of older boys appeared out of nowhere, swarming around the little girl, knocking her sandwiches from her hands, jerking her between them. The child did nothing to protect herself. One boy pushed a rough, probing hand up her skirt. The child’s tears tumbled down her drawn cheeks. Clare pressed her hooter and the boys – ten, eleven years old – turned to stare. She was on one side of the fence; they were on the other. They gave the girl a final shove and were off in a pack, joining a game of soccer on the dusty field.

  The girl picked herself up and left, straightening her skirt as she ran, tucking in her white shirt, absorbing the casual violation, abandoning her trampled lunch.

  The lights changed and Clare drove on. The hoekstanders eyed her, the smallest of them disappearing down an alley as she passed. News of her presence was travelling ahead of her. She checked the car’s central locking.

  Orange.

  Clare slowed. The shabby buildings were pitted. In a fortnight, five children had been killed in a surge of gang warfare. Small white coffins were brandished at funerals by grim-faced uncles and brothers promising revenge; in tow were the resigned mothers, who sobbed when they went home to wait for the next convulsion of violence, the next lot of casualties. It had not come. Not yet.

  El Alamein.

  Bleached to a trace, the letters indicated the block Clare was looking for. A freshly painted hammer and sickle claimed the territory for the Afghans.

  She stopped.

  A boy detached himself from a wall, sauntered over, jeans slung low. Clare was in his territory and he knew it; knew that she knew it. Smiled. Her pulse quickened as she keyed in the text she’d been instructed to send. Another youth, mongrel-thin, materialised at the corner. Two more peeled themselves off the wall, joining the others. Grouped together, their bodies coalesced into a multi-limbed creature.

  She checked the screen of her phone.

  No response yet.

  She looked up at the council block’s windows. All of them closed. On the third floor, a curtain fell back into place. Ahead of her, movement. The boys on the corner slouched towards her.

  The youth at her window had both hands on the glass. He bent down, his eyes a startling shade of green. Clare wound down the window. Behind her, the hiss of a match was followed by the sharp tang of tobacco.

  ‘You don’t smoke?’

  He had seen her nostrils flare.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re the doctor my mother called, then.’

  Clare nodded. Not the time to explain the difference between a medical doctor and a PhD in rape and serial femicide.

  ‘Put it out.’

  His pitch of his voice changed slightly – all the authority that was needed. The smell disappeared.

  ‘She’s waiting for you.’

  A taxi, the bass vibrating through the tar and up her spine, thudded its way up the street. Clare slung her camera bag over her shoulder and got out of the car.

  ‘You can relax. You’re with Lemmetjie.’ Thin as the blade that had given him the scar on his neck and his nickname, Lemmetjie raised both arms in a circular motion, possessing her, the street. ‘No one will touch you.’

  He fell into step beside her as she walked to the building. The graffiti-covered door opened before Clare could knock. The woman standing in front of her was tiny. She looked fifty, was probably thirty-five. She took Clare’s hand.

  ‘Dr Hart?’

  ‘Clare.’

  ‘I’m Mrs Adams,’ she said. ‘Come inside.’

  Clare followed her into the living room, where the kitchen had been curtained off from the sofas crowded around the television. Above the screen was a studio photograph of a little girl. Her white dress spotless, the halo of curls tamed for the photographer, green eyes fixed on Clare.

  ‘That’s her, Doctor.’ She lit a cigarette.

  The ghost of that perfect face still hovered in the woman’s own hollow features, despite their being scripted with the story of the place where she lived. The scar on her lip was the signature of a husband’s fists. Her eyes were fierce, green. The same colour as Lemmetjie’s, as those of her missing daughter.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I want you to film this,’ she said. ‘So you’ll have the truth down.’

  Clare took out her camera and panned from the photograph of the little girl to the woman by her side. ‘Gone. Yesterday.’

  ‘You saw her yesterday?’ Clare probed. ‘She was here?’

  The woman dropped her head into her hands. ‘I thought she was at my mother’s.’

  ‘She’s not?’

  ‘My mother sent her for cigarettes. She didn’t come home. They thought the child had come back home, here. Lemmetjie and his tjommies went to look for her, but she was gone.’

  The weight of it closed in on Clare. ‘You’ve looked everywhere?’ she asked Lemmetjie.

  ‘All her friends, my aunties,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘My other ouma.’

  ‘And no one has her?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘You checked at the shop?’ asked Clare. ‘She arrived?’

  ‘Ja. The woman there gave her the cigarettes.’

  ‘No one saw her with anybody?’

  Lemmetjie shook his head.

  ‘What else?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Sê vir haar,’ said Mrs Adams.

  ‘There was a car in the street. Tinted windows,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘Someone else says an uncle was talking to her.’

  ‘I saw you on the TV last night. Missing, your programme about that gangster’s daughter, Pearl. The Cape Sun had an article about you, too. They said you’ve found some of the missing girls,’ said Mrs Adams. ‘She’s mos missing, a – what did you call them? – a Persephone, taken down into hell. You said that’s what you did with your project. Looking for missing girls, bringing them back to their mothers.’

  ‘I track what happens to them,’ said Clare, taking her eye from the camera. The girls I found’ – no way to say it gently – ‘they were already dead.’

  Mrs Adams folded her arms around her hollow belly. ‘If she’s dead, then I want her body. Find me something to bury at least.’

  Mrs Adams shook another cigarette from the pack on the table, wormed her way to the window through the narrow space between the wall and the couch, and lifted the curtain. She sucked on her cigarette as if it were a lifeline.

  ‘Harry Oppenheimer has gold mines. Voëltjie Ahrend and his gangsters have this.’ She waved her hand at the warren of matchbox houses and backyard shacks. ‘A gold mine too. They own the police. If I go to the police then my baby is dead, for sure. They’re not going to watch so much power get sold out from under them.’

  ‘Who’s buying?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Buying, selling. Gangsters, police, politicians.’ Mrs Adams turned her green eyes on Clare. ‘For us that lives here, it’s all the same. We’re the ones who pay in the beginning and in the end.’

  ‘Your son’s in the Neighbourhood Watch,’ said Clare. ‘He told me on the phone. You have to call the police,’ said Clare. ‘They’ll mobilise the Neighbourhood Watch, get everyone looking. I can’t do that.’

  ‘Neighbourhood Watch se moer. Lemmetjie knows nothing about nothing. Twenty years old and never even been to jail. I told him that. What does it help to hold a vigil outside a gangster’s drug house?’

  ‘The Number’s taking over here, Ma,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘Voëltjie Ahrend and his 27s.’

  ‘Voëltjie Ahrend knows fokkol
about the Number, in jail for a year. Out again because his lawyer bought a judge. Now he’s claiming territory he never fought for. The cops are owned by those gangsters – and it’s us,’ she stabbed her finger into her chest, ‘the women, our little girls, who pay the men’s price. That’s why I called you, Doctor. If you make your film then they will look for her. Otherwise they just say, wait twenty-four hours and then report her missing.’

  ‘I told you, Ma, you’re wrong.’ Lemmetjie didn’t look her in the eye. ‘What I do is for Chanel. To make it safe for my baby sister to play outside.’

  ‘Who you are hurts your sister,’ spat his mother.

  A retort in the distance: a gunshot, a car backfiring? Mrs Adams didn’t move from the window.

  ‘Chanel,’ said Mrs Adams. ‘It’s a warning. To me. To him. To stay out of the way.’

  ‘Ma,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘We’ve got to fight back. I’m going to call the cops.’

  ‘Tell me, Doctor.’ Mrs Adams faced Clare’s camera. ‘What does one more little girl mean, in a war?’

  Clare turned the question over in her mind as she drove back. As she got closer to town, the pavements became less cracked, then they sprouted trees, and the houses were set further and further back from the road. There were walls instead of wire fences, and soon she was back in the oak-lined avenues of the suburbs that sheltered in the grey skirts of Table Mountain. She stopped at the dry cleaners and picked up her evening dress, buying a pair of high-heeled sandals on her way back to her car. She put them in the boot, then went to the studio to approve the final sound mix for that night’s broadcast of Missing. She requested two minor changes, and sent the programme off to her producer.

  Taking her copies of Missing with her, she drove home. She unlocked her front door and went upstairs to her quiet white sanctuary. Clare opened the sliding doors that led onto the balcony overlooking the Sea Point Promenade, her cat twisting between her ankles, purring its welcome. She picked Fritz up. The sea beyond sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. On the lawn near Clare’s house, a young woman was pushing her daughter in a yellow swing.

  ‘Higher, Mummy, higher!’ the child was calling, her hair flying in the wind. ‘I’m flying! Look at me, like a bird.’