Capture (10 page)

Exley can read no more and kills Facebook. But his BlackBerry, loaded with Facebook and Twitter and all the other social networking apps, blinks endlessly beside the keyboard, taking the toll of the outpouring of meaningless expressions of sympathy.

For Caroline it is as if being off her medication for two days has freed a constriction. She sits cross-legged on the bed, chain-smoking, computer on her lap, a torrent of words spewing from her fingers onto the keyboard. A surge, an expiation, and even if she’s not sure precisely what she’s writing, she knows that it’s better than anything she has written in years.

It is not exactly autobiographical (there are no dead daughters) but there’s a frustrated woman writer and a bloodless husband who smells of motherboards and solder and there’s a European lover with a past. And it’s good and caustic and sexy and funny and bloody clever, actually. Zadie Smith meets Martin Amis, she dares to venture.

When Caroline surfaces from her interior world she has lost all sense of time and realizes that the room is dark, the only light coming from her laptop monitor. She sets fire to another fag and lifts the computer from her lap, her groin warm from its overheated battery. She still works on an ancient Mac, sluggish and probably festering with viruses. Nick keeps offering her the latest thing with all the bells and whistles but she refuses, some silly superstition forcing her to keep the laptop on which she wrote her only notable work. Stupid, she knows, to invest magical properties in a piece of machinery, that kind of hocus-pocus is best left to her geeky husband.

She stretches and walks across to the window, watching the last light fade over the Atlantic down near Sandy Bay, the nudist beach where Vlad likes to take her, striding along with his beak thrust forward and his uncircumcised dick slapping his thighs like a fat kielbasa while she follows in his wake, self-conscious in her naked, freckled skin.

Caroline clicks on the bedside lamp, digs her phone out of the folds of the duvet, sees the flickering message light. The phone has binged all afternoon, like an arcade game. She checks her missed-call list. All from acquaintances, no doubt with clumsy attempts at solace. Nothing from Vlad. She speed-dials his number. Voicemail again.

This time she leaves a message: “Sunny drowned just after you left yesterday. We are having a service for her on the beach here at home at ten tomorrow morning and I would very much like you to be there.” Sounding like a prissy Home Counties housewife inviting the vicar to tea.

Caroline dumps the phone, clicks off the lamp and lies back on the bed, dropping the cigarette into the cup on the bedside table. She finds that she has pulled down her tights and knickers and her fingers are at play on her inner thighs. She tries, with little success, to pretend they are Vlad’s chunky but skilful digits.

She runs the fingertips of her right hand over her thin pubic fuzz, no bikini waxes for her. Her fingers travel south, over her bony mons, and find the lips of her vagina. Ungenerous, was how a very ex lover described her twat. But it is wet and she slides in a finger, trying to take herself toward some kind of pleasure. She has never been a good masturbator, usually becomes distracted and loses interest before she can come. Tonight is no different.

Unbidden, her fingers slide out and creep up her belly until they reach the fault-line of her Cesarean scar, the tissue still a thicker texture than the surrounding skin, and all at once she is overwhelmed again by the reality of Sunny’s death, feeling as fragile as when she briefly allowed Nick to embrace her in the kitchen earlier.

This will not do, Caroline. This will not fucking do.

She sits up, switches on the lamp, the walls of the room starting to recede from her, and she knows she’s about to tip into a void from which there will be no return. She grabs her computer and massages the touchpad, opening Skype, and almost sobs with relief when she sees that her oldest, dearest friend Julia is online.

Caroline clicks on the green phone—
doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee—
and there is Jules, blinking at her, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she gets herself seated.

“Jesus, Caro! How are you, darling?”

It is a relief to hear somebody who speaks as she does, in a slightly downplayed version of Received Pronunciation, with well-rounded vowels. Out here in South Africa, English is wielded like a blunt weapon.

Jules gushes on. “Can’t talk for long,” she says, “I’ve got some Bangladeshis or Afghanistanis downstairs for dinner. Associates of Ollie’s. Bloody horrible, misogynistic little jihadists. I just sneaked up here for a fag.” Caroline can see the bookshelves in the background of the room on the top floor of the Georgian mansion in Fitzroy Square. Oliver is something in the City and has made many fortunes. Julia squints at her monitor, frown lines furrowing her brow. “What’s going on, Caro? You look absolutely knackered.”

“Jules,” Caroline says, “Sunny’s dead.”

This catches Julia in mid-inhale and she chokes and coughs. “Bloody hell, Caroline, what are you saying?”

Caroline tells her, outlining the events of the last day, while Julia stares, the ash on her forgotten cigarette lengthening and dropping into her lap, a moment of frantic swiping, and muttered “fucks” and “sorrys.”

“My God, oh my God.” Julia stubs out the cigarette and shakes her head. “Caro, I’m so sorry…”

“I know.”

“Come home, darling. Promise me that you’ll come home.”

Before Caroline can reply, Jules, Julie, Jule-
yah
(dead these last two years of ovarian cancer) disappears from the screen. Biting back a scream, Caroline flings the computer onto the bed and jumps to her feet, wrapping herself in her arms, as if she’s trying to contain her racing heart.

This is a bad one, the thing that has her in its grip. Worse than its predecessors.

Frantic, Caroline roots through the mess on the beside table, finds her pills, and is busy popping one of them out of the blister pack when she is gifted with a flashback of her husband last evening on the beach, standing with that Australian fool, pot smoke seeping from his head and, just like that, her terror morphs into a rage that rises in her and cauterizes the pain. Burns away her grief. Burns away any residue of guilt.

Targets the man holed up in his cave below.

Exley, beyond exhausted, slumps at the workstation, unable to shake the fear that what he has built is as crude as a blow-up doll. His face is itchy with stubble and sourness comes in waves from his dirty T-shirt. Some primitive notion has him in its grip, telling him that if he showers and changes he will erase all that remains of his daughter, as if he holds the last of her on his unwashed skin and soiled clothes.

He shrinks the modeling interface and takes himself back to the source: brings the motion-capture data onto the monitor, looking for a sequence to extract and loop.

His device caught every tiny movement of Sunny’s body as she danced, and Exley sits entranced, watching the pure, unmediated essence of his child. The way she moves from a clumsy pirouette to stamping her feet like a squaw—copied from a
Pocahontas
DVD—her pigeon-toed, slightly knock-kneed stance, the Bollywoodesque arm and hand movements, how her chin thrusts forward and her backside juts out to balance her.

He is so transported that he doesn’t hear the door slide open, only realizes that his wife is in the room when her fist strikes him behind his right ear. She says nothing, her breath coming in rasps, her eyes wild and unfocused.

“Jesus, Caroline, stop!” he says, lifting his arms to protect himself from her flailing limbs.

But his words are useless in the face of her violence. She grabs the computer monitor, trying to hurl it at him, sending a glass flying to the ground where it smashes. Exley stands and gets his arms around her waist, pulling her away from his workstation, dragging her from the room.

Caroline shakes loose from his grip, raking his jaw and neck with her fingernails. She slaps him. He takes her by the shoulders and pushes her backward. Their limbs tangle and they fall to the tiles outside the studio, Caroline thrashing beneath him.

Her knee catches him in the balls and his arms fall open and she is on him, swinging her fists, a blow to his nose bringing tears to his eyes.

He grabs her wrists and feels her manic strength as she rips an arm free and punches him in the chest. He gets to his knees and envelops her again, falling on her, somehow pinning her to the tiles.

It is a silent brawl, she’s biting and kicking and scratching, but neither of them says a word, the only sound their broken breath. An eavesdropper would swear they were fucking.

Caroline arches her spine and drives her legs upward and it is all Exley can do to stop himself being thrown off her. Then suddenly it is as if a plug has been pulled and all the manic energy drains from her and she lies still, her breath coming in rasps.

“Let go of me,” she says, her voice flat with exhaustion.

He waits a moment to check that this isn’t a ruse, but Caroline is spent and he rolls off her, sitting with his hands wrapped around his legs, staring at her as she lifts herself to her knees, brushing her hair away from her face.

“Are you taking your medication?” he asks, breathless, his heart hammering.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re not,” he says. “And you know you should. Especially now. You’re under a lot of strain.”

She stands. “Oh, drop the euphemisms, Nicholas. Go ahead and say it. Say the word you’ve so carefully avoided all these bloody years.”

He gets to his feet, still wary. “Caroline…”

“Fine, then I’ll say it: mad. I’m totally out of my fucking mind, aren’t I, Nick?”

“Please, go upstairs and take you medication.”

She ignores him. “Okay, maybe I am mad. But, by God, who is sitting in a darkened room trying to breathe life into our dead daughter?”

Chapter 14

Dawn sees a cop van and an unmarked white Toyota reflecting the titty bar neon in their windshields as she crosses Voortrekker, the wind like a hot hand pushing against her. She stands on the center line waiting for a gap in the traffic, hair blowing into her eyes, still half upstairs with Brittany in the old Portuguese lady’s apartment (ugly wooden furniture and stained doilies and dusty crucifixes and the stink of soup brewed from offal), Mrs. de Pontes bitching that she wants more money to babysit and Dawn peeling notes she can’t afford from the skinny roll in her purse.

But Brittany, God alone knows why, likes the Porra woman and the old bitch keeps her place locked up tight against the tide of brown and black people who’ve muddied up this once white area. She and the other whities scuttling like roaches once a day for supplies, muttering their way along in little groups, clutching their purses, lost in a sea of dark faces shouting and bartering and arguing in Cape Flats Afrikaans and African tongues from here and up north.

A taxi rattles by, the driver half out his window to see Dawn’s ass, and she gives him the finger and takes a gap and makes it to the other side serenaded by car horns. Passes the police vehicles and heads for the doorway of Lips, reckons they’re here to shake Costa down again, these cops. But a uniform—pimply thing with a smear of mustache—blocks her at the door and asks her if she knows Glenville Faro.

“Who the fuck’s Glenville Faro?” Dawn says, dodging him and getting inside the near-empty club, out of the wind.

“Boogie. He means Boogie.” This from one of the Ugly Sisters, the fat one, leaning against the bar, her tits making a break for freedom from the top of her dress, the young cop all eyes and yo-yoing Adam’s apple.

Dawn sees Costa and a plainclothes—chunky brown guy—near the ramp and knows this is some other shit going down.

“What’s Boogie done now?” Dawn asks, putting her bag on the bar top, nodding to Cliffie the barman.

“Gone and got his stupid brains beat out,” Cliffie says, sliding a can of Coke across to her, like he does every night.

“Dead?”

“Ja.”

Dawn cracks the tab and hears a mutter of fizz, catches a few cool little bubbles on her fingers. Drinks from the can, that metal taste on her tongue, the syrup only making her more thirsty as it goes down her throat, but the caffeine giving her a little kick.

“Where this happen?” Hiding a burp behind her hand, all ladylike.

Cliffie jerks his head toward the street. “Construction site.”

The plainclothes cop comes over, an ugly fucker with nostrils like shotgun barrels. He adjusts the hang of his balls while he window-shops her rack. “You work here?”

“Ja.”

“What’s your name?”

“Angel.”

“And I’m Winnie fucken Mandela.” He gives her a smirk. “When last you seen Glenville Faro?”

“You mean Boogie?”

“Ja, whatever. When you seen him?”

“Last night. Early hours.”

“Where?”

“The street.”

“Who’s he with?”

“He come out with us, me and Cliffie and Sylvia and them.” Flicks a finger in the direction of the Ugly Sisters; the skinny one’s come in the door now, standing with her friend, voices shrill as parakeets as they talk up the drama.

“And then?” the cop says, weighing his nuts again.

“Then nothing. I walk across the road to where I live.”

“Anybody else there?”

“Ja, him,” she says, nodding toward Vernon, who appears in the doorway, checking out the scene. Vernon’s looking at her now and suddenly Dawn knows just what went down with Boogie and why, and she feels sick as she asks, “Can I go get ready?”

“Ja, go,” the cop says. “Maybe I get me a front-row seat for the show, so make sure your thing don’t stink.”

“Like your mother’s, you mean?” Dawn says, and he looks like he’s going to smack her, but he just flushes and clenches his fists and she empties the can down her neck and takes her bag and heads for the dressing room, feeling Vernon’s eyes on her, an icy little chill in her gut that’s got nothing to do with the cold Coke.

The cop, name of Dino Erasmus—Vernon remembers him from Bellwood South headquarters—goes red under his muddy skin, Dawn giving him lip. Good at that, the little bitch, walking away now, swinging her ass.