Sacrifices (24 page)

Lane opens the door to the doctor’s rooms and ushers
Tracy inside. Two couples and a few women on their own look up as they enter. Tracy crosses to the desk and speaks to the nurse, who takes her to give a urine sample.

Lane sits beside a very young couple who are huddled together, whispering, the man’s hand on his wife’s belly. They laugh and the boy kisses the girl on her forehead.

Tracy returns, depositing her urine sample in a tray. She beckons Lane as a nurse opens the door to the consulting room. The doctor, a young woman with a thatch of blonde hair, smiles at them and points Tracy toward the high examination bed. Lane sits on the stool at the head of the bed.

“So you’re having pains?” the gynecologist says, as
Tracy lies on her back.

“Yes and there’s some blood.”
Tracy, fighting tears, is even paler than usual.

“Okay, let’s take a look.”

The doctor lifts Tracy’s blouse away from her stomach and applies a coating of gel to her abdomen. She places a handheld probe, connected by an umbilical to an ultrasound machine, onto Tracy’s belly, moving it across her skin.

Lane squints at the monitor, the bell-shaped image reminding him of the interior of a snow globe rendered in high contrast monochrome, a pointillist swirl that coalesces into the shape of something vaguely organic as the doctor stills the probe.

Before he can properly decode the image the gynecologist drives the probe toward Tracy’s pubes and Lane is left staring at a flurry of dead channel static until a foot, shocking in its clarity—the toes perfectly formed—swims out of the boiling pixels.

The doctor nudges a switch on the machine and a waveform appears on the monitor and Lane hears a rapid, muffled pulsing, like a sonar reading from the depths of the ocean.

“Well, the heartbeat is normal,” the gynecologist says. “I think you can relax.”

Tracy
allows tears to come and Lane strokes her head.

The doctor smiles at him. “Why don’t you wait outside while I examine
Tracy?”

Lane leaves, hurrying out into the corridor in search of a bathroom. He shuts himself in a cubicle and kneels, shooting a hot jet of bile into the toilet. He gags again but produces nothing more than a tendril of slime.

When Lane flushes and heads for the sinks the young husband is there, drying his hands on a paper towel.

“Hey, man, I thought it’s only the chicks who get the nausea thing?”

Lane manages a smile as he washes his face and rinses his mouth.

“You okay?”

“Yes, thank you. Some dodgy seafood for lunch.”

“What you guys having?” the man asks.

“A girl.”

“Cool. Ours is a guy. A little Province supporter.”

The man taps his blue and white rugby jersey and Lane relives the moment that Christopher was tackled, hears the sudden hush of the crowd, hears his own silent cheers.

When the flashback fades he’s alone, staring at himself in the mirror. He wipes his face,
smoothes down his hair and exits the washroom. Tracy waits for him in the corridor.

“Everything okay?” Lane asks.

“Yes, fine.” Tracy takes his arm. “She says the bleeding was external, a little tear or something. She wants me to come back tomorrow afternoon for another scan, but she’s just being super careful. It was a false alarm.” She kisses him on the cheek. “Sorry if I freaked you out.”

“No. I’m just pleased you’re okay.”

They ride down in an elevator and emerge into the yellow light of late afternoon.

As he unlocks the
BMW Lane asks, “Are you hungry?”

“God, I’m starving.”

“Me too,” he says, even though he’s not.

But he knows this good news demands a celebration of some sort and he drives to the bistro across from the bookstore, the staff recognizing them, ushering them to their favorite table by the widow, where they watch a blanket of mauve light fall upon the city.

There is no wine tonight but there are plates of tapas and they feed each other over the candle. When Tracy talks excitedly about plans for their wedding and where they are to live with their child, Lane has to look away, out into the night.

When he turns back to
Tracy and sees her surrounded by ghosts (Errol, Petunia, Little Brandon, Melanie Walker, Lyndall Solomons, Sally Stringer) Lane knows he has to tell her everything, even if it means losing her. 

“Trace,” he says, falling into the abbreviation used by her young friends, the ones she seldom sees these days.

“Yes?” she says, lifting a loop of squid to her mouth.

The words are lining up like an invading army, ready to spill from Lane’s mouth, when the ghosts disperse and all he sees is this dark-haired Botticelli beauty with a smear of olive oil on her chin, and he says, “I love you.”

“And I adore you, Michael.” She takes his hand and brushes his knuckles with her lips. “Thank you for being in my life.”

The stalled taxi rocks, dark faces pressed up against the windows, shouting, the sodium light towers raining hard light down on the mob. Louise sees a man, close enough to touch, hurl a brick. She ducks and the glass beside her shatters, shards like diamonds landing in her lap.

A woman screams and there are a series of flat slaps as cops fire tear gas into the crowd of striking transport workers. A gap opens up and the taxi jolts forward.

As the minibus passes a furniture store a skinny man wearing only a pair of shorts emerges though the smashed glass doors, struggling with a TV set the size of a pool table.

Young guys sitting behind Louise cheer the man on as two hefty women, one of them with her hair in rollers, chase him down and fight the TV from his grip, pummeling him to the ground, leaving him cursing as they hurry the big screen into a nearby shanty.

The taxi, free of the mob, picks up speed, the Flats rising in broken flashes from the darkness.

Louise’s day has been fragmented, chaotic, her mood the worst it has been since she tried to kill herself.

After fleeing Michael Lane’s bookstore she returned home to find Harpo had pissed all over the kitchen. Not his fault, the poor old guy, confused and neglected. She clipped on his leash and took him for a walk on the Sea Point promenade, the ocean and the sunblasted apartment buildings a blur to her, Harpo dragging at the leash until she released him and let him find clumps of grass to sniff at and piss on.

Standing staring out over the ocean, her mind wheeling like the seagulls that screamed overhead, she felt a
n anxiety that left her starved for breath.

Somehow she clipped Harpo back on his leash and hurried him home, pacing the apartment, her mind full of
Michael Lane and his pregnant bitch. Louise crossed to the window, stared down at a newspaper seller standing on the corner waving a paper, wailing, “Aaaaaaar-gus.”

She found herself tracing a scribble in the dust on the window.
Drawing the noose tattooed on Achmat Bruinders’s forehead, and she was back in that grim little Paradise Park playground months ago, her father looking at her with those pale eyes, saying, “But the law is the law, girlie. And the law is all we have.”

Louise wiped the pane clean with her sleeve and crossed to her phone and scrolled for Fazila Bruinders’s number and pressed dial.

“Ja?”

“
Fazila?”

“Yes?”

“This is Louise Solomons.”

“Yes, Louise?” Hurried, unfriendly.

“I want to reach Achmat.”

“I’m not in touch with him no more.”

“Then give me his number, please.”

A long hesitation. “I don’t want no more of this, hear?”

“Yes, I hear.”

There was a rustle and a grunt and the woman read out a cell phone number that Louise scrawled on the cover of a magazine. Before Louise could thank Fazila she was gone.

Louise sat staring at the number as if it would tell her something. Then she punched it into her cell phone. An electronic voice told her the subscriber was not available.

She prowled the apartment, spoke gibberish to Harpo and when he closed his sad eyes and fell asleep she spoke to herself, saying she was crazy to be reaching out to Achmat. What did she want with him, anyway?

Even though she couldn’t answer the question, she hit redial on her phone, listened to it buzz, and heard that rough, unfinished voice say, “Ja?”

She hesitated, almost lost her nerve, th
en said, “This is Louise.”

“Ja.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

Good question. “Can I see you?”

“Going to cost you.”

“Five hundred?”

“Seven. For inflation.”  Did she hear him laugh?

“Okay. But can we meet in town?”

“
I don’t go to town. Phone me when you by the graveyard.”

Hours late
r the taxi finally reaches Paradise Park and she knows the cemetery is near when the stench of garbage, far more intense on this warm night then when she was last here in winter, fills the minibus.

Louise thumbs Achmat’s number, as she has done every few minutes since the taxi was swallowed by the stalled traffic. And she gets the same electronic message.

The minibus stops, the door rattles open and Louise steps out, the stench so thick that she covers her nose with her hand. Smoke reaches her nostrils and the smell of fat blends with the garbage and she sees a woman cooking sausages on the sidewalk, loading them into buns and selling them to commuters.

Louise disappears into the shadow of the graveyard wall and thumbs her father’s number again. Nothing.

“You stupid in your head or what?” Achmat’s face swims out of the shadows. “That phone, it’s like a light to call the animals to come and get you.”

He grabs the phone from her hand, the face a glowing rectangle, and shoves it into the pocket of her hoodie.

“There was some trouble. That’s why I’m late.”

“I know. I hear. You got the money?”

“Yes.”

“Gimme it.”

He takes the money and she follows him into the maze of shacks. Out of the range of the sodium towers the darkness is complete and she stumbles into holes, scrapes herself against tin and wire, following Achmat’s footsteps, his hacking cough a beacon.

He grabs her arm and yanks her into a narrow passage and her feet find something wet and stinking but she follows on, her hand held in front of her, the darkness broken momentarily as chains clank and a door opens and closes, an emaciated man leaning against a shack, vomiting, the sourness of his stomach thick in her nose.

Louise gasps as something brushes against her legs. She lashes out with her foot, and an animal—a cat?—yelps and hisses and flies up onto a tin roof, rushing away with a ticking of claws.

Then they’re in Achmat’s shack, the stench of the landfill a living presence in the room, and he’s setting fire to the wick of a paraffin lamp. Nothing has changed in the last few months. He takes the mattress and points to the broken chair. She sits and this time there is no mud for the legs to sink into.

He speaks as he prepares a meth pipe. “So, what you wanna know?”

She stares at him. “What’s it like to kill somebody?”

He looks up for moment, then carries on chopping crystals with a knife. “For me it’s nothing.”

“And the first time?”

“Don’t remember. I was drunk and we smoked drugs.”

“Then the first time you can remember?”

He shrugs. “Just something I done.”

He ignites the globe and sucks and he’s no longer there with her
. In silent communion with something deep in himself he releases smoke from nose and mouth. A smile touches his face and he sinks back against the iron wall like he’s been deboned.

Achmat holds out the globe to her. She shakes her head. He lifts the pipe again, clicks the lighter and inhales.

When he’s done he lays the globe down and looks at Louise through the eyes of a mystic.

“Why you ask me this?”

“Lyndall didn’t kill that girl. He shouldn’t have been arrested.”

He stares at her and she starts to tell him the story about the Lanes and what she knows they did but can’t prove, about Christopher Lane losing his leg, about Michael Lane moving on, untouched by grief or guilt. It’s an expiation, a confession to some dark priest.

As she speaks Achmat’s eyes close and she thinks he’s asleep and that she’s talking to herself, but when she’s done his eyes open and he says, “So, you come to ask me to kill this white man?”

Louise
looks at him and wonders if that’s why she’s here. Then she shakes her head.

“No.”

“You gonna do it yourself?”

She shrugs. She doesn’t know. Not yet.

He coughs, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “You talk like a whitey but you still brown like me. Remember, there’s one law for them, the whites, and another law for us. You come on here telling me you wanna kill some brown man I say fine, do it. But a white man?” He stares at her. “You ready to go to prison? For what these people done to your brother?”