Absolution (3 page)

More seconds, a minute, silence, or perhaps she was too distracted to hear. There was a granite stone on the floor which she used as a doorstop, almost a small boulder, and she hoisted it from the floor and into the bed, thinking – what? That she would hurl it at her attackers? Could sticks and stones still repulse men, or did it take harder stuff? These were things she suddenly felt she ought to know.

As she adjusted the boulder in her arms, four hooded men appeared before her, their reflections in the glass of the framed photograph on the wall opposite her bed. They passed in single file down the corridor, carrying stunted guns in their gloved hands. The guns were in fact a sick relief, less intimate; death would be quick. She was no stranger to the power of guns.

The last of the four men turned, looked into the room, and sniffed the air. His nostrils were congested. She could hear
it as she shut her eyes tight, pretending to sleep, hoping that consciousness had no odour. She could smell him, pungent and sharp, and the metallic reek of the gun and its oils. Her heartbeats were so loud, how could he not hear them? He did hear them, turned, looked into the corridor for his fellows, but they had gone upstairs already – a shuffle, a scuffle, Marie subdued.

His weight came down on her, gloved hands, balaclava over the face, and the sound of his congested breathing. All of a sudden the stone in her hands was on the floor in a single movement, and he pressed down against her, felt for her, felt his way into her with one hand, the other, the waxed leather glove of it, over her mouth, the suffocation, her nostrils almost blocked, her heart roaring.

No, she had imagined that.

But she
could
smell him and the metallic reek of the gun. Her heartbeats were so loud, how could he not hear them, standing there at the threshold? But then he withdrew from the doorway, rejoined the others, and crept further down the corridor.

They would have been watching the house, known that only two women lived there, two women unlikely to have guns. They would have known there was no alarm, no razor wire or electric fence and, crucially, no dogs.

Clare felt the boulder, pale and heavy in her arms, resting alongside her. It was wet with perspiration and smelled of earth. She had dug it out of the garden’s old rockery to make way for a vegetable patch. If only the men would whisper to each other, just to let her know they were still there. She thought they were at the opposite end of the corridor, and then was certain of it when the board of the first stair leading to the top floor sighed under the pressure of an intruding foot. God! She must cry out and warn Marie! But she was choked, her throat swollen. Air would not come. The chords would not vibrate. Everything was thick and hard about her.

And then, deafeningly, four bright, explosive shots, low growls, and a fifth, deeper shot, a sixth, bright like the first, and then a
rush of feet past her door. The wall opposite her bed exploded in a shower of plaster, knocking the framed photo to the floor, shattering glass across the wood and rugs. There was a final quick shot, a groan and feet pummelling down the stairs, doors slamming, and then silence.

It was not a dream, but she woke from it to find Marie standing next to her.

‘They’ve gone. I chased them.’

‘I didn’t know you had a gun.’

‘You wouldn’t get an alarm,’ Marie said.

‘I will now.’

‘I’m going to the neighbours, to phone the police.’

‘Did you kill anyone?’

‘No.’

‘You missed?’

‘No. I aimed for their firing arms.’

‘You got them?’ Clare asked

‘Yes. One wouldn’t give up. I shot him again. And then the others came at me, and I shot another one of them again. That was all my ammunition.’

‘You were lucky.’

‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’ Marie hovered near the door, assessing the glass on the floor, the mounds of plaster, the exposed beams in the wall, the outer stucco. The extent of the damage would only be evident in daylight.

‘Are you sure they’ve gone?’

‘They drove away. They were really very stupid. I wrote down their car registration before they came upstairs. They were parked just outside the house.’

‘It was probably stolen.’

After she heard Marie leave, locking the door downstairs, Clare sat up in bed, her throat still dry and hot. How dare Marie keep a gun without telling her? How dare she fire shots in Clare’s house? How dare she assume so much?

Clare had not been so close to firing guns for years, not since she had spent the holidays at her cousin Dorothy’s farm in the Eastern Cape, and the foreman had been killed in an attack, Dorothy wounded. The two Great Danes had been killed, too, and it was only the next morning when they were certain the danger had passed that they went out and dug ditches for the dogs and buried those huge, sleek bodies inside the compound. Danes do not have long lives. They wrapped the body of the foreman in potato sacks and put it in the back of the truck. Dorothy sat next to the man’s body, her leg stretched out and still bleeding. Clare had driven half an hour on dirt roads, then over the pass to the hospital in Grahamstown. Surely there had been others with them, perhaps her daughter? Her memory was only of the bleeding cousin, the dead foreman, the dead dogs, and the invisible attackers. Her daughter could not have been there. By then, Laura had already disappeared.

Clare did not have the stomach to see if there was blood in the corridor, though she knew there would have to be, blood like battery acid, burning into the rugs and floorboards, impossible ever to remove.

The police confirmed that the deadbolts and doors had not been forced, and Marie insisted that she had remembered, as she always did, to check the locks before going to bed; it was as much a part of her nightly habit as flossing her teeth. Besides, she had a mania about security, so she would not have had a lapse, even on a bad day. The telephone line had been cut at its point of entry to the house. Clare stood in the kitchen, her pyjamas covered with a white robe, hair pulled back into a severe knot. She was trying to listen to the policeman questioning Marie, but no one came to question her. It felt as though they were ashamed of Clare’s presence. Women were not meant to be giants. Police flashes flared in the upstairs corridor, accompanied by the high electronic
whine of cameras. Forensics experts were dusting and collecting samples. She felt a coward.

If the crime had been so professional in its execution, then perhaps petty criminality was not the explanation; petty criminals, even violent criminals, would not have the kind of equipment that would open a lock without any detectable signs of force. Apart from blood on the floor and gunshot wounds to the plaster of her bedroom wall, her house was untouched. The damage had been done in the ‘gunfight’, as she felt she must call it, in a half-ironic tone that would drive Marie mad in the following weeks.
During the gunfight
, she would begin a sentence, or
I feared that gunfight might be my last experience of the world and it seemed such a waste, such an aesthetic failure
.

Only one thing appeared to have been taken.

‘There is something missing,’ she told the uniformed officer who was leading the investigation.

‘Missing?’

‘My father’s wig.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The tin box containing my father’s wig. He was a lawyer. I kept it on the hearth. It has been taken.’

‘Why should someone wish to take your father’s wig?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Can you describe it?’

‘It was a painted black tin box with my father’s wig inside. The wig he wore when he argued cases in London. Made from horsehair. I don’t know its value. There were more obviously valuable things they might have taken.’

‘What colour was the wig?’

‘White. Grey. It was completely ordinary, as barristers’ wigs go. Like you see on television. Old movies. Costume dramas.’

‘It is a part of a costume?’

‘No. Yes. That isn’t the point,’ Clare said, trying to check her exasperation.

‘Would you like it back?’

‘Of course I want it back. It belongs to me. It can have no meaning for anyone but me.’

‘Except maybe a bald person. You are not bald. Perhaps the person who took it is a bald man. A bald man would need a wig more than you.’

‘That is a ridiculous thing to say. Should I not give a statement?’

The officer stared at her through pale jelly eyes.

‘A statement? I was told you saw nothing.’

‘Don’t you think you should ask me whether I saw anything? I saw things. I saw the intruders, their reflections.’

Clare was told to go back to bed, to one of the guest rooms. Walking upstairs, she passed little plastic shrines, police evidence tents marking drops of blood, snaking all the way to her bedroom door. She could not remember coming downstairs, nor could she remember having seen blood, but the tents suggested this was impossible; there was blood everywhere, and the smell of the invaders came back to her: synthetic, chemical, a kind of orange disinfectant, a bathroom cleaning fluid or deodorizer. Those men had cleaned themselves before they attacked; they knew what they were about. When they left, she was certain, they did not disappear into the waves of numberless shacks that stretched out beneath the mountain to the airport and beyond; they went to private hospitals where questions would not be asked, and then home to wives or girlfriends who would tend their dressings with quiet discretion.

Dawn burned visibly through a crack in the exterior wall, wood and plaster riven by the shotgun blast. Clare was allowed to retrieve the photograph from the floor; although its frame had been broken and the glass shattered, she found that by some miracle the antique print itself was intact, almost unharmed, except for a small scratch in one corner. In black and white her sister Nora stared, stern-mouthed, not at the camera, but into the
distance, looking out, imperious, through horn-rimmed glasses, her forehead shaded by a ridiculous white hat, the fashion of many decades earlier. Though she was not middle-aged when the picture was taken, Nora wore a dress of white polka dots against a pale background – probably pink, Clare thought – with satin rosette buttons. It was not a young woman’s cut, dowdy rather than demure. The polka dots of the dress matched her pearl earrings. Nora’s shoulders rubbed against another woman in a light herringbone coat and black straw hat decorated with ostrich feathers. Both looked smug, chins jutting forward, jowls already forming. Clare did not recognize the other woman; they were all interchangeable, sitting in their reviewing booths at identical party rallies. That was how she liked to remember her sister, buttressed against history, in denial of the currents of history, firm-mouthed and frowning, a year or two before her assassination. It was comforting to think of her that way, to imagine her static and immobile.

Marie was beside her again, panting, smelling of wet grass. ‘Of course now you will have to move. They know they can get at you here. It’s too easy.’

‘I will have an alarm. Better burglar bars,’ Clare protested.

‘You need walls. You cannot stay in this country without walls to protect you. Walls and razor wire, electrified. Guard dogs, too.’

There was no doubt that Marie was going to win this battle. Marie, after all, had risked everything. Marie, the assistant, the employed, the indispensable, must be allowed to determine their future domestic arrangements.

‘Marie, what was the car?’

‘I gave the police the registration number.’

‘But what make? What model? Was it old or new?’

‘New,’ Marie hesitated. ‘A Mercedes.’

‘Yes. I thought it would be something like that. You will make appointments with estate agents, tomorrow, won’t you?’

Clare

You come out, across the plateau, running close to the ground, find the hole in the fence you cut on entry, scamper down to the road, peel out of the black jacket, the black slacks, shorts and T-shirt underneath; you are a backpacker, a student, a young woman hitchhiking, a tourist, perhaps with a fake accent. Soon it will be dawn. But no, I fear this isn’t right. Perhaps it wasn’t there, not that town – not the one on the plateau, but the one further along the coast at the base of the mountains, and you have gone overland to hide your tracks, not through the centre of town, not where anyone will see you at night, men coming out of bars, remembering in days to come the young woman, taut and determined, hurrying alone in the night. You went overland, up the mountain, circling round the north side of town, up through the old indigenous forest. How many hours’ walk? – twelve kilometres or more, and that’s if you kept near the road. Run, roll, slide over and down the mountain through the forestry land, the plantation, the even rows of tall pines, a grid of growth, into farmland, wide fields, the mountains behind you, the sea in front, and come down to the crossroads, where others linger in the streetlights, women and men, children, people waiting for a taxi or a relative. An old woman with a child tied to her back scrambles up over the rear fender of a vehicle, helped inside by the other passengers as it drives away, ghosting along the coast road on its innocent journey.

And yours – the flight that becomes flight as soon as the bombs detonate – what kind of journey is that? I understand that you were responsible, but how can I know with certainty? How can I know whether it was that particular explosion or another,
whether the strangers who came to me later were protecting you from something or someone else, or protecting me?

I have tried to make sense of you in the past, Laura, but each time I try it comes out wrong. I write it but fail to see it. Call it a mother’s blindness. I try again, imagining it another way, but still it seems incomplete.

This new attempt to reconstruct the last days before your disappearance is only for my own sake, because there was never an official account. I begin this diary again, a new final beginning, at the same hour as I have put the pieces in motion that will result in the writing of my own life. The biographer now comes, invading my home and my mind; unlike others, no less malign in their way, I cannot deny him entry.