Capture (5 page)

The song is ending and she brings herself back into the room, the little runt, Boogie, eyeballing her from the bar, miming smoking a joint. She looks away quickly, right at Vernon, who stands near the door, staring at her before he shifts his gaze across to Boogie, those little eyes of his missing nothing. She picks up her clothes and lets the yells and applause drive her from the ramp.

Chapter 6

Caroline lies on the bed, feeling dwarfed by the arctic expanse of duvet. They rented the house furnished and the bedroom is everything she hates—hidden soft lights and beiges and browns, the oatmeal shag carpet like a living organism beneath her bare feet. A room that could suffocate you with its malevolent blandness.

She tucks her feet under her, closes her eyes and leans back against the headboard. How does she feel? Numb, maybe. Anesthetized. Grief, she knows, will come later, riding in on the back of the black dog guilt.

She reaches for the pill container beside the bed and pops the cap, goes as far as dumping two pink and green bombs on the palm of her hand before she stops herself.

No, fuck it, she isn’t ready to find some pill-induced rationality and the anguish that will bring. But if she lets her mania kick in, with all of its attendant rage, she can dodge some of the pain and guilt. Cowardly, of course. And there’ll be no closure. But closure is such a TV word, anyway.

She drops the pills back into the container and snaps the lid shut.

How many times has she wished Sunny dead? Or rather, wished that Sunny had never existed? Had never come into being? Well, her wishes have been granted. Her child is gone.

Unbidden a memory clobbers her from the left field and her abdomen and thigh muscles contract at the echo of the eviscerating pain when the pink, bloody thing was torn from her, the twisted umbilical reaching deep into her and detonating something, like the pin of a grenade being pulled. It was as if the arrival of Sunny had triggered the birth of a part of Caroline that had lain slumbering, a manic Rip Van Winkle, who awoke enraged and out of control.

She can remember the exact moment when she emerged from the agony and saw the world as she had never seen it before, saw that florid-faced, furious infant, like a hideous old man, its mouth wide opening, howling. Announcing it was here.

Forever.

She looked into that face, eyes like slits, mouth wet and wide, bawling demands, little fists clenched, and saw no beauty, only rage.

And felt its reciprocal inside her, flowing out hot, thick, into her blood, feeling her body expanding with it, as if her cells were stretching their matrix to accommodate this other Caroline, her muscles sinewy and strong, her skin stretched vellum-tight across her skull. There was no post-natal glow. No bliss.

Her nipples were dry and retracted, denying the hungry infant, and when the thing screamed she pushed it away into the hands of the nurses, who looked at her with loathing. Her mouth tasted of metal and her sight and hearing were acute: she swore she could see the atoms around her shift and resolve as the doctors and nursing staff paraded through her room, and they seemed to form a shroud of confusion and self-pity around her husband, who tried smiles and hand pats, the feel of his fingertips repulsive to her.

Then came the psychiatrists, the pill-happy shamans, with their diagnosis of post-partum depression. Men with cold, calculating little mouths and eyes like scanners, the scratch of the pens on their prescription pads like blades tearing at her skin. They wrote up a list of medication as she sat staring at nothing, tits dry, her rejected child outside in the waiting room with a stranger wearing a wedding ring.

This was the start of her journey into some drugged netherworld, where color faded to monochrome and the soundtrack was mall muzak and her thoughts were blunted and fuzzy, and she knew she’d never write again.

Ever.

She remembers the exhaustion, the resentment that she felt when her career—Jesus, her life—was put on hold as she was enslaved to this tiny human, while her boy-genius husband tinkered with his clever gadget and sold it for millions. Her writing disappeared under a torrent of diapers and food allergies as she followed Nick Exley around the globe while he hawked his invention in Sydney, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Paris, Copenhagen, and now here on the godforsaken tip of bloody Africa.

Her agent, a bull dyke who still spoke in the clanging tones of her native Auckland, waited patiently for her next novel, and when it wasn’t forthcoming sent her an email containing only Cyril Connolly’s famous warning: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

Caroline feels a shortness of breath. She opens her eyes and jumps up, pacing the carpet, hugging herself as she’s done since she saw Sunny lying dead, the thuggish rent-a-cop crouched over her, forcing his breath into her in a way that was at once obscene and—his gammy leg spasming like a frog’s in a lab experiment—horribly comical.

Before she can stop herself, Caroline has her mobile phone in her hand, speed-dialing the only person who can ground her right now. The phone goes straight to voicemail, Vlad urging her to “leave message.”   She doesn’t. What is she meant to say? While you were fingering me, my daughter drowned?

And she is back in the kitchen, her jeans and knickers bunched at her knees, Vlad walking away, kissing those very fingers in salute, whistling his way out the front door. Caroline turning, fixing her clothes, looking out the window, past the two stoned men, as Sunny goes under for the last time.

The bedroom seems to close in around her, suffocating her, and Caroline knows she needs to talk to somebody. Not her parents—they are long dead in a car accident in Provence. Not her brother, the aging roué who lives in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, and definitely not her shovel-faced, menopausal sister, as bovine as the cows she farms in Herefordshire.

Desperate to connect to somebody, even her husband, Caroline rushes out into the corridor. She finds Nick in Sunny’s room, asleep on her bed, curled up in a fetal position, the nightlight burning, his thick glasses lying in the jumble of toys on the bedside table.

In a rare moment of tenderness Caroline decides not to wake him, and clicks off the lamp and goes back to their bedroom, where exhaustion hits her like a freight train. She pulls off her jeans, too tired to brush her teeth and wash her face. But not too tired, suddenly, to kneel down, in her knickers and T-shirt, feeling like a primitive with her praying hands held in front of her, as she surrenders to some absurd impulse, trying to find some long-forgotten Church of England platitudes from her childhood.

She mutters a few words, a pathetic plea for Sunny and for herself and the boy-man asleep in their dead daughter’s bed. But kneeling there, her bare knees itching from the carpet, Caroline feels a sudden, cold certainty that there is nobody out there listening. Nobody at all.

Chapter 7

Dawn has no idea how long she’s been sitting in the only cubicle in the women’s toilet, door shut, lid down, just chilling, wrapped in a towel, her clothes bundled in her lap. The music and the shouts and the lust-yells still penetrate the plywood walls, but at least she is alone for a while.

Then the girl who works the door, a thickset misery with cross-eyes and a mustache, bangs on the wall and Dawn drags herself back from wherever and leaves the bathroom, walks past the fuck-rooms, hears grunts and moans like pigs feeding. Sylvia the cleaner, skinny, black, invisible in her housecoat, comes out of one of the rooms with a mop and a bundle of soiled towels. Unglues a used condom from one of the towels and drops it into a garbage bag.

Dawn goes down a narrow corridor toward the dressing room, the music muted now, the voices of a couple of dancers coming to her loud and raucous from inside, the smell of
tik
thick in the air, and all at once she sees herself heating a glass pipe over a lighter flame until the contents bubble like fat. Gripping the pipe in her fist and taking it to her mouth, her cheeks falling hollow as she sucks, eyes closed. Feeling that complete release as the smoke fills her and blows the top of her head off, and every care in the world flies away and leaves her blissed out, like God himself has anointed her.

Fuck, Dawn, get yourself together. She stands, calming herself, letting the drug-lagged talk wash over her.

“And she say—” A cough.

“What she say?”

“She say no!”

“No?”

“Ja. No.”

“So what you say?”

“I look at her and I say, I kick you back deep in your mother’s cunt.”

“Of course, yes.”

“Of course.”

Dawn sees Brittany, sleeping with the soft toys, and that gives her the strength to go into the room. Two long-time veterans of the skin trade are lazing naked in their chairs in front of the mirrors, bouncing a styrofoam cup of tequila and a
tik
pipe, their dark brown bodies patterned with varicose veins, bruises, burn marks and Cesarean scars, breasts heavy from suckling unwanted and unloved babies, coarse pubic hair waxed away to narrow landing strips to allow fast access to their plumbing.

Dawn looks at them and sees herself in ten years, if she doesn’t do something—any fucken thing—to get herself away from this.

They check Dawn out and the fat one says, “Excuse us, Lady Di.”

Lady Diana, a name that came from God knew where and has stuck. The way it works on the Flats with these bitches who want to pull you down. Dawn calls them the Ugly Sisters, because she is the fairest skinned of them all. One of those stupid private jokes that gets her through the night.

Dawn ignores them and drops her towel, knowing her beauty hurts them more than her words could. She sits in front of the chipped mirror, wipes her sweaty face, repairing her make-up.

The club owner, Costa, comes into the dressing room, as immune as a butcher to the spread of naked flesh. He’s a sallow-skinned man in his fifties, with hair the color of cigarette ash and a soft paunch that swells above the stone-washed jeans that his colored trophy wife insists he wears.

“I tell you not to smoke that shit in here,” he says. The pair laugh like hyenas, blowing their
tik
smoke in Costa’s face.

“The cops give you hassles, send them to us and we suck their cocks like always,” the fat one says, making kissy sounds, pink gums visible through her missing front teeth.

Costa sits down beside Dawn and says, “Out,” to the other two, waving his unlit cigarette toward the door.

“It’s our fucken break time.”

He waves at the door again. “Take it in the shithouse, then.”

They don’t argue, wrap dirty, make-up-smeared towels around their bodies and exit, mumbling. Dawn hears “little cunt” as they go.

Costa offers her a cigarette and when she shakes her head he inserts a smoke beneath his sad mustache and fires up. “You think about what I tell you?”

“Ja. And the answer is still no.”

“Dawn, you nice girl, but I can’t keep carrying you like this.”

“The customers like me, Costa.”

“Sure, they like you. Sure. And they want to fuck you. For good money. And you? You say, no. No, no, no.”

“Costa, I hooked. I done it. Then I pulled myself straight.”

He waves a tired hand at her nakedness. “You calling this straight?”

“They can eyeball me all they like, but no man’s touched me in a year.”

“And that makes you, what? Better?”

“No. Fuck knows I’m not proud of what I do, but I can still look my daughter in the eye.”

“Thing is, Dawn, you taking up the space of a girl who will go with the customer into the rooms. You costing me big money.”

“You firing me?”

“No, not yet. I want you to think. Think nicely.”

“I thought.”

“You can earn maybe a thousand a night. Do it for a year, you can take your daughter and go somewhere.”

“And what, Costa, start on the
tik
again, like those two, so I can fuck my brain up enough to allow those fat Boers to shove their filthy things into me?”

He stands, sighing, drops his cigarette on the floor and grinds it dead with a thick-soled Nike. “You think, Dawn.” Tapping his temple. “You think nice.”

He leaves and Dawn dresses herself again as one of the girls finishes her set, ending, like always, with a pedophile double whammy: R. Kelly’s “I Believe I can Fly” and Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean,” to fractured applause. Dawn waits by the curtain, in the gloom, as the girl, naked and sweating chemicals, slinks her skinny ass out, dragging her costume, sequins winking in the red light.

Dawn cracks the curtain and goes back out there, into the haze of smoke and booze and overheated men’s bodies, finding that place inside herself that keeps her safe and distant.

Vernon leans against the bar, drinking a Coke. He doesn’t touch alcohol when he is on duty. Isn’t much of a drinker anyway, the stuff has a way of screwing with his nerves.

It is close to 3 a.m. and the crowd has thinned, but a scrum of horny white men clog the ramp, staring up into Dawn’s thing like it’s the answer to their prayers. And the little
tik
-head, Boogie, still wanders around like a mongrel dog from the squatter camps. The kind that nips at your heels and when you kick out at it you see it’s rabid, froth like shaving foam hanging from its jaws.

Boogie is dark and skinny, in the universal banger uniform: outsize T-shirt, his cargo pants hanging low and loose enough to reveal the elastic of his boxers when he lifts his arms above his head and does a little dance step. Even with the racket of the music Vernon can hear the fuckhead’s cartoon-sized sneakers squealing like baby mice on the tiles as he does his MTV thing.

Boogie finishes his dance like he expects applause then he leans down to talk to one of the whores, his voice high pitched, spitting words from his bucktoothed mouth as he shouts over the music.

Costa figures that since a place like Lips is going to attract the meth merchants, better to know who the supplier is, keep tabs on him, regulate things. So Costa tolerates Boogie, with his gang-talk and prison ink staining his pipecleaner arms, and a permanent brand on his lower lip from the hot
tik
pipes. Vernon lets him be, long as he don’t sell his shit to Dawn. But the little fuckhead is taking a liberty.