Daddy's Girl (29 page)

He was in the room now, bringing the cold with him. The door was open onto
the sandy patch of yard, where the washing hung forlornly on a line.

Outside.

The illusion of safety. All outside was a place from which you’d be dragged inside.

Inside.

Where she was now. Alone with him. How it’d always been. She resisted the pull of acquiescence. A habit, she’d learnt that.

‘You got an
entjie
for your pa, Pearlie-girlie?’

Pearl’s hand slid her phone back
into her pocket. She felt the buttons, pressed send. The message for Dr Hart. Maybe she’d come. But Pearl remembered that Clare didn’t know her address. So, she wouldn’t come. Pearl on her own. Like always.

His proximity made it hard to think. She reached for the two singles she’d bought from the café. She passed him one, and the matches too.

She forced herself to breathe.

In, out.

In, out.

‘You’re not happy to see me?’

Graveyard de Wet ran his finger down his daughter’s cheek, the cigarette in his hand curling smoke into her eyes. He scanned her body. The short hair, the new shirt, clean jeans, the boots.

‘You not your daddy’s girl any more, Pearlie? You too good for me, now?’

He pulled out a chair and settled himself at the table, elbows resting on the
green Formica.

‘Make me something to eat.’

She might as well, she thought. Could be her last. Pearl turned to the stove. An egg, bread, some fruit.

As she put the food in front of him, she saw the cutting on the table. His front-page moment. A yellowing photograph from
Die Son
. ‘Monsters se Moer’, the headline.

‘I brought this for you, Pearlie-girlie.’ He smiled. ‘To remind you
what you did.’

‘I did nothing, Pa,’ she said. She picked it up and put it in her pocket, her heart knocking. Her father in the dock, with her in a corner, listening to the sentence.

‘You told the
boere
where I was. It’s why that Faizal could find me.’

Pearl held the knife above the papaya. As she sliced the mottled skin, juice ran along the wooden board. The black pips glistened as
the two halves fell away from each other.

‘Here, Pa.’ Placating him, another habit. ‘Eat this.’

He pushed the fruit aside.

‘You spoke to that doctor on TV. Said things about me. About the 27s.’

His hand hard on hers, the knife clattering onto the draining board.

‘Why are you here?’ she whispered.

‘To teach you a lesson,’ he said.

‘Where’s the child?’

‘Faizal’s child?’
he asked. ‘Fuck knows. Dead.’

Pearl’s knees buckled and she slid to the cold floor. The feral tang of him, obliterating her other senses. Reduced to smell, that most primal of the senses. The oldest, animal part of her brain had failed her – unable to flee, she crouched, immobile. Her head bent to her knees, exposing the nape of her neck, Pearl tried to imagine the blow that would fall.

It didn’t come. It never had come, release.

‘And then to teach the same lesson to Voëltjie Ahrend.’

He squatted next to her, his breath moist on her bare arm.

She pushed her fists into her eyes.

Why had she imagined she’d be allowed to go free? How could she have believed again? Like the time she was a little girl and she’d hidden in the ceiling. Only to come down the next morning
and to find him there, waiting for her. The stupidity of her own cleverness. She bit down into her own tongue, refusing him. The blood was salty in her mouth.

‘Are you ready to learn again, Pearl?’

‘I don’t know, Pa.’ He pushed a knee into the hollow below her breastbone. ‘I don’t know.’

Her senses returning.

The wind up, now, howling.

His left hand a vice on her arm, the knife
in his right. She raised her head and looked at him, the blackness beginning to clear. She bared her teeth, plunging them into the ropey hand. He did not flinch. He had time to work on her. With a knife in his hand, he always got what he wanted.

Pearl knew what was coming. She’d fight, of course. She would fight till the end, a sacrifice that would protect her Hope, forever oblivious in her
white bed.

Yasmin thinks about her party clothes – a yellow skirt stiffened with tulle and a Little Miss Sunshine T-shirt – waiting for her at the top of her mother’s cupboard. She squeezes her eyes shut against the darkness, but her picture of the clothes is faint, like the reflection on a night-time window. Like the window she used to sit next to in the dark, watching for her daddy to come home.
He would kiss her goodnight, holding her closely before she sank into a deeper, safer sleep.

But now all she feels is an ache. It’s been there for nearly a year. Ever since the terrible birthday when her daddy didn’t come home and she’d fallen asleep next to her cake with its unlit candles, the terrible day when Uncle Clinton had been shot, and her daddy too. But her daddy just needed a bandage.
And he could walk properly still. She was glad that the wind was blowing, moaning like a mad woman outside her window, because she couldn’t hear the sound of her parents arguing later and later into the night until she heard the front door slam.

She’d lain awake until it was light enough to get up, and when she went into the kitchen for breakfast her mother’s eyes were puffy and her mouth
was hard and there were only two places laid at the breakfast table. Yasmin sat as still as a rabbit in the headlights. It wasn’t hard, because that was how she felt. There had been nowhere to run to, so she just watched as her mother took down daddy’s picture from the wall.

It didn’t help to remember all that, but what she did remember was that when Tuesday came, she’d be seven. She would
remember all her birthday cakes. She couldn’t remember her first birthday. Nor her second, but she had seen the pictures.

A teddy bear.

A yellow duck.

Three had been a fat green pony; a Pegasus that looked like a frog.

Four was a train with wheels made out of Liquorice Allsorts.

Five, a bee with yellow gauze wings that caught alight when mommy lit the candles.

Six had been
a fairy castle.

And seven was going to be a ballerina: a Barbie stuck into a cone of pink, flounced icing.

There. She’d remembered them. All her cakes.

She needed to hoard them, the memories with a whole story. She would go back to them later, when the fear pressed against her lungs
again. For now, she would listen to the quiet. That, she knew how to do –
trying to measure the distance
of things. Where she was. How far things were from the pit she was in.

The dark can last a long, long time.

Sometimes not long enough, though.

His voice again. The man, lowering the ladder, climbing down, putting his hands on her body. She scrambles away, gashing her knee, but he is there before she can do anything, grabbing her hard.

He places her precisely; tells her what to
do.

She obeys. She does not want to make them angry again. The pain of their anger is fingerprinted on her arms, her back.

The masked man switches on the camera.

Yasmin holds out her hands towards him, her nails bloody from trying to scrabble out of the pit, and she dances.

MONDAY

The cereal was finished, so was the milk. Clare put a ready-made meal into the microwave. She watched as a kayaker cut a silver line across the ocean, and when the microwave pinged she pulled herself away from the window. Lasagne for breakfast. She’d had worse.

Leaning against the counter, she ate without tasting, letting her thoughts drift. Casting about for a missing thread.

Calvaleen.

Who she still had not spoken to because she didn’t answer her phone.

She put the half-finished food back into the fridge, pushed aside her maps and notes, and pulled out Madame Merle’s file of green notification slips. Calvaleen’s was there, with the family address below the signature.

Clare took the elevated freeway out of town, then the slip road to the new suburbs spreading
east of Table Mountain. The streets were raw gashes in land that had once buffered the serried rows of neat, post-war houses from the expanding townships on the Cape Flats. Estate agents’ boards adorned the few remaining trees and the new lamp posts.

The complex was on the edge of a suburb stuck between the freeway and a bleak industrial area. Clare stopped at the security gate. A guard approached,
clipboard in hand, his gun a lump under his jacket.

‘What number, please?’ Thick French accent. Yet another refugee from an imploding Congo, ensuring Cape Town’s security.

‘Number eight. Van Rensburg.’

The guard lifted the boom and waved her through.

She rang the doorbell. A ‘For Sale’ sign hung askew on the house next door. Clare was about to ring a second time when she noticed
a slim shadow behind the amber glass.

‘Dr Hart.’ Anxiety filled Latisha van Rensburg’s voice. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m looking for Calvaleen.’

‘You too?’

‘Who else is looking for her?’

‘A girl.’ Latisha’s grip tightened on the door handle. ‘A bit older than Calvaleen. She came here last night. Very late.’

‘Short hair, scar on her face?’ asked Clare.

Latisha nodded.

‘Pearl?’

‘She didn’t say. Took off again when I told her Calvaleen wasn’t home.’

‘She back now?’

‘She’s not here,’ Latisha murmured. ‘She wasn’t here last night either.’

‘I need to ask you some questions then,’ said Clare. ‘About Yasmin’s disappearance.’

‘Why?’ asked Latisha. ‘What’s Calvaleen got to do with Yasmin?’

‘She knew Yasmin well, ever since she was born, in
fact,’ Clare said softly. ‘You might be able to help me understand a few things.’

‘I’ve been with Shazia Faizal most of the time. She’s convinced that Riedwaan has Yasmin.’

‘And what do you think?’ asked Clare.

‘If only it was that simple,’ said Latisha. ‘You know, my husband bought us this place after he was shot.’ She pointed to the eight-foot wall with its wreaths of razor wire.
It opened onto a field beyond, where no child dared venture. ‘But nothing keeps you safe.’

Latisha opened the door just wide enough for Clare to enter.

The walls of the entrance hall were covered with framed photographs of Calvaleen dancing, spectral in white tulle.

‘This is her rehearsing for the role of Persephone?’ asked Clare.

Latisha nodded.

‘Why didn’t she dance it?’
asked Clare.

‘Things got in the way.’ Latisha was walking down the passage.

Clare followed her, past the formal sitting room with its couches covered in protective plastic. More photographs lined the passage walls. SAPS rugby teams. Massive men with hairy arms draped over each other’s necks. A single photograph of men in green-and-gold tracksuits. Clinton van Rensburg one of them, so different
to the diminished man she’d seen hobbling down the corridor in Caledon Square.

‘My husband,’ said Latisha, noticing Clare’s interest in the photos. ‘But these days he just works all the time. Strategic human resource deployment. Some rubbish like that. Not good for a man who likes to do things rather than think about them.’

Latisha pushed open the kitchen door. On a small table were three
unused place settings. The smell of last night’s uneaten supper still hung in the air.

‘Can I give you some coffee?’

‘Thank you.’ Clare knew that making coffee, putting out cups, are small rituals that calm the fearful; they’d be likely to make her presence more palatable in this still, cold house.

‘You were saying… things got in the way of Latisha’s dance performance?’

‘School,
being busy. Being a teenager. She got sick of dancing every evening, every weekend. Wanted to do other things too.’

Latisha busied herself with the kettle and a plunger, spooning out coffee. ‘Would you get the milk out?’ she asked.

Clare opened the fridge, knocking off a photo stuck to the door as she did so.

‘Sorry.’ She picked it up. Clinton van Rensburg and Riedwaan with their daughters.
Yasmin grinning on her father’s lap. Calvaleen staring ahead, her face sullen. ‘Children’s Day at Caledon Square’ read the caption. Clare put the photo back among the clutter of notices from the ballet school. She noticed a reminder about changes in schedule, with Friday’s early closing highlighted in orange, and a green permission slip with the bit that needed signing torn off. There was
also a letter from the Royal School of Ballet in London offering a second audition.

‘What happened about this London audition?’ she asked.

‘She missed it.’ Latisha was pushing down the coffee plunger. Some of the hot liquid spilled onto her hand. ‘What do you want, Dr Hart?’ she asked. ‘Why are you here asking me questions about Calvaleen? It’s Yasmin who’s missing, so why are you wasting
your time here?’

‘Children know things about each other that adults don’t,’ Clare tried to explain.

‘She’s not a child. She’s seventeen.’

‘But you still send in her forms, even though she’s no longer at the ballet school?’

‘Habit,’ said Latisha. ‘Hard to break. Her father likes things to be orderly. Drove her crazy.’

‘Can I keep this?’ asked Clare, fingering the permission
slip.

Latisha shrugged. ‘If you want to, I suppose.’

‘You said she was dancing. At the Winter Palace?’

‘Yes,’ said Latisha, brightly. ‘Loving it.’

‘I went there. I didn’t find her there.’ Clare saw the tension snap across Latisha’s face. ‘So where is she?’

‘I wish I knew,’ Latisha’s whisper was fierce. ‘If I knew I’d have fetched her myself. The last time I spoke to her…’

‘When was that?’

‘Thursday. She phoned me. Said she needed a thousand rand.’