Ishmael Toffee (11 page)

Neither of them said a word and Ford headed through the kitchen where the dwarves, the Algerian stud and the two women were drinking tequila with Didier and what passed for the crew.

Ford walked out the backdoor into the drizzle. The hooker, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket—minus her blonde wig—stood under a carport beside Ford’s old bike hitting a meth pipe, the wind tugging a speech bubble of smoke from her mouth. She didn’t seem to know or care that he saw her.

As Ford mounted his bike the lesbian came out of the garage, where she’d stored the clothes and props.

“Hey, Tommy,” she said. “Not staying for the wrap party?”

He didn’t reply, trying to kick the Kawasaki into life. It wasn’t cooperating.

“What you got lined up next?”

“Nothing,” he said, kicking. “Downtime.”

“So where you staying now?”

“Clifton.”

“Clifton as in Clifton?” she asked, picturing Cape Town’s playground of the rich and famous.

“Clifton as in Clifton,” he said as the bike rattled to life.

“Shit, you must be doing well.”

Ford gave the bike juice and took off into the rain, letting the water wash away the sleaze of the last few days.

●

 “Clifton,” Trinity said, the bloody blade of the Okapi knife denting the skin of her neck, “I know a guy who lives Clifton side.”

Angel had just cut the white john’s throat, the dead man’s head hitting the wooden floor like
a bowling ball,
and he was right up at her with the knife, his beautiful face twisted with rage and
meth-driven
madness.

“Why you get me this loser?”

So it just popped into her head—Clifton—and she spoke before she had time to think.

“You fucken bullshitting me?” Angel said.

“No, Angel, I swear. The cameraman from that movie, he lives by Clifton.”

Angel, his breath hot and stinking on her face, stared into her eyes, deciding whether to believe her or hurt her.

The last hours had been brutal. Trinity standing in the rain on Voortrekker Road for God-knew how long, freezing her tits off, until this white guy had finally stopped in his crap old Toyota. She told him a cheap price so he wouldn’t argue, desperate to get out of the rain, knowing that Angel would follow and they’d loot the man’s house.

But he had fuck all. Looked like he’d been cleaned out in a divorce, maybe. One chair. TV standing on a Coke crate. A mattress lying on the bedroom floor. Angel so furious that he tortured the poor bastard, trying to get him to admit that he had a safe or credit cards. Anything. Burned out his eyes with cigarettes. Cut him, the naked man’s underpants stuffed in his mouth to stop him screaming. But he had nothing to give. No cards. No safe. Just a few banknotes in his wallet. So Angel had finished him.

 Angel so crazy with anger now that he was ready to kill Trinity, too.

“Tell me ’bout this guy from Clifton.”

“Heard him yesterday at the end of the shoot, talking to the make-up woman, says he lives there.”

 “So, what’s your plan?”

“I phone him tomorrow. Get him to take me to his house. I check it out good for alarms and shit, then you come with me the next time.” She shrugged.

“Why would he wanna see trash like you?”

Trinity was stringing lies together, desperately. “I know he’s got the hots for me, way he was always giving me the eye.”

“Ja?”

“Trues God.”

“Okay. We’ll do it. You better not be bullshitting.”

“I’m not.”

He took the knife away from her throat, folding the blade closed with a click and Trinity tried to find some god to pray to that the cameraman hadn’t been lying to that old dyke.

●

Ford watched the girl’s eyes as he unlocked the door, like he was shooting a close-up. Those eyes that had been filled with a desperate greed as he’d walked her down between the beach houses clinging to the slopes above Clifton Beach, houses that sold for millions of dollars to people like David Beckham and Madonna.

Shock, now, in those eyes as she took in what had once been the living room, all that was left of the house, the rest a charred pulp of wood and drywall. The open ceiling of the room was covered in plastic and tarpaulins that didn’t keep out the rain that had started falling again.

She’d called him earlier—got his cell number off the movie call-sheet, he guessed—saying she wanted to meet, that she had an idea for a movie.

 “I’m done with porno,” he’d said.

“No, this is something else.”

He’d almost killed the call, sure she wanted to hustle him, but the weather, boredom, and a creeping depression had him agreeing to meet her for coffee in Sea Point.

So he rode the Kawasaki five minutes down the road that snaked along the coast and lost itself in the apartment blocks that were all Saint-Tropez by the ocean and Lagos a few blocks up.

Ford, seated in the coffee shop, nearly bolted when he saw her clamber out of the minibus taxi, battling across the road in jeans too tight and heels too high. Even at a distance he could see her face was badly painted. But he took pity on her and stayed.

She sat down in a cloud of cheap perfume.

“So what’s your idea?” he asked. She stared at him blankly. “For the movie?”

She forced a laugh. “Oh, ja, it’s a great concept.” She leaned in close, and he could smell meth smoke in her hair. They called it
tik
in Cape Town, because of the
tick-tick
sound it made in the pipe. “But I don’t wanna talk about it
here
. Can’t we go to your place?”

“I’m not looking for a date.”

She manufactured an outraged expression. “
Excuuuuuuse
me? What do you think I am?”

Hustling him, okay, and not very imaginatively.

He didn’t answer, just left coins on the table for the coffee and walked out, hearing the clatter of her heels as she followed him. He straddled the bike, pulling on his helmet. Before he could escape she slid on behind him.

He sighed, unclipping the spare helmet. “Wear this,” he said.

They rode back to Clifton and parked on the sidewalk in Victoria Road, the homes of the rich spread out beneath them. He gave her the tour, knowing he was being perverse. The sun sliced through the clouds for a moment, hitting the beach and the ocean below. A picture postcard that she drank in.

Now, standing in the ruined house, she was deflated, her smile gone, her eyes empty as she surveyed the mess.
All
Ford owned, right here: a sleeping bag, a paraffin stove and a bucket to shit in.

“What happened?” she asked.

“There was a fire.”

“Not to the house, man. To you.”

When he didn’t answer she shook her head and walked out into the rain.

●

Trinity shat herself the whole taxi ride back to Paradise Park, not seeing the ugly blur of poverty that was the Cape Flats—cramped houses, shacks, ghetto blocks—seeing only Angel’s face and his knife.

She left the taxi and walked home through the drizzle, and when her heels sank into the mud she took her shoes off and carried them.

Trinity went down the side of the brick house to the yard where she lived with Angel in a tin shack. The door gaped and she saw some of her things—a broken chair, a cracked plate—lying in the mud.

“What the fuck?” she said, rushing at the shanty.

A skinny man and a fat woman were sitting on her bed, eating from a can of minced pilchards. People she knew by sight, connections of the rubbish from the main house. The bitch had squeezed into one of Trinity’s dresses.

“What you doing in here?”

“We live here now,” the woman said.

“Where’s Angel?”

“Cops took him,” the man said.

“What for?”

“Stolen goods.”

Not murder, so Angel would make bail, sometime down the road.

“Get the fuck out,” Trinity said.

The woman stood and punched her. Bitch hit like a man and Trinity ended up on her ass in the mud. People from the brick house were in the yard now, laughing.

“Don’t fucken come back here,” the woman said, kicking her.

 Trinity dragged herself to her feet, her shoes lost in the mud. Barefoot and bleeding from the mouth she ran back toward the road. She wouldn’t let the bastards see her cry.

●

“Why here?” Ford asked.

“I got nowhere else to go,” she said, sitting on the damp floor in her mud-smeared jeans, dirty feet bare, varnish on her toenails cracked. Dried blood on her swollen mouth.

“No family?” Shook her head. “No friends?” Shook her head again. “You’re not trying to hustle me, are you?”

Even in the state she was in she laughed. “Jesus, man, hustle you for what?”

So he said she could stay the night. Then she had to go. They shared the sleeping bag—both of them fully clothed—and she tried to come on to him, but he told her to relax, that he didn’t want that from her and she slept.

The one night became two and he let her stay on, his only rule that she didn’t smoke meth. But he could see she was getting wired, hanging for a pipe, would be climbing the walls if there were walls left to climb.

On the afternoon of the third day Ford went out and bought her some cheap jeans, a couple of T-shirts and some sneakers. He came home to find she’d disappeared and when she didn’t return that night he knew he’d never see her again.

But she was
back
in the morning with a black eye and a loaf of bread and carton of milk. He could smell
tik
on her, and guessed she must’ve turned a trick up in Sea Point.

He was ready to tell her to get lost when she said, “You were a user, weren’t you? That’s what happened to you?”

He nodded.

“I wanna be clean,” she said. “Will you help me?”

So he let her in, asking himself,
since when were you Mother Theresa?

Then next days were a blur of her puking and screaming (he had to tie her down
at
night the shakes were so bad), then
one
morning she woke up and she was weak but clear.

She stank of sweat and vomit, so Ford wrapped her naked body in a cloth and led her out into the light rain. Walked her down the steps to the deserted beach, seagulls diving from the greasy skies, searching the dark ocean for food.

He stripped off his sweatpants and T-shirt and unwrapped her, carrying into the icy Atlantic. She screamed soundlessly, gasping, clawing at him, but he took her in deeper until they were both submerged in the freezing water. She ran out, dripping, swearing in Afrikaans, her teeth chattering, wrapping herself in the cloth.

Ford left the water and pulled on the sweatpants and led her across to the beach shower. Grabbed the cloth from her and pushed her under the water. Not as icy as the ocean, but still cold. He’d brought a bar of soap from the house and he scrubbed her, ignoring her protests.

A man in a raincoat walking a Labrador appeared from around the boulders, staring at her body.

“Fuck off,” Ford said and the man did.

Ford dried her and wrapped her in the cloth and got her back upstairs. Dressed her in clean clothes.

She ran his brush through her tangled hair and suddenly she was beautiful. She saw him looking at her.

“What?” she said.

He didn’t answer, just kissed her, and the clothes came off again and it started awkwardly but ended up good.

The next few days the sun shone and the weather was warm, the beach filled with bathers. It was like that sometimes in Cape Town in winter, when the cold and the rain retreated and you could almost believe it was summer.

 They hung out on the beach and swam and told each other their life stories. Hers was all about abandonment and abuse and a pimp called Angel. His about a career and a family destroyed by drugs, leaving him minding this shell of a house for its owner while the insurance claim was processed.

On the last day of fake summer his phone rang and it was a producer he’d last worked for years ago, before he’d fucked everything up. The guy needed a camera assistant. In a hurry. Knew it was a step down for Ford, but could he do it?

Hell, yes, he could do it
.

●

It was pissing with rain again after those beautiful days but that did nothing to dampen Trinity’s good mood as she left the house, climbing the stairs up to the road. Clean for the first time in maybe ten years and enjoying living with this guy Tommy, kinda old—at least forty—but way nicer than Angel.

Tommy getting work now and talking about maybe helping her get a job in the movies too, come summer. Behind the camera this time, for sure.

She walked up to the 7-Eleven on Victoria Road, nice and warm in her raincoat (so new it still had a strong chemical stink) carrying an umbrella. Brown chickie behind the cash register knew her by now and they said a few words as Trinity shook the rain from the umbrella, folded it and left it by the door.

She went down one of the aisles, looking for detergent. Got distracted by the gossip magazines and was flipping through
PEOPLE
when she felt a hand grip her arm and turned, staring up into Angel’s eyes.

“Baby,” he said. “I been looking and looking.”

●

It was late afternoon when Ford got home, tired after working since before dawn. He’d assisted the second unit cameraman on an American B movie—Cape Town going as Seattle—shooting cars speeding through the rain slick streets.

The cameraman had an injured shoulder, so he asked Ford to step in for a couple of tricky handheld shots. Ford got the shots and the production people had promised him more work down the road.

So he was feeling pretty mellow as he stepped into the ruined house, the rain drumming down on the plastic and the tarps, drips plopping into the buckets that Trinity had placed to catch them.

Ford saw her sitting on the floor and he knew she was high. Before he could speak something hit him on the back of the head and he fell, dazed.