Sacrifices (3 page)

The kids were in their swimsuits, splashing in the pool. Lyndall, always timid, sat at the side, dangling his little brown pipe-cleaner legs in the water.
Chris Lane, already a thug, grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him into the water, dunking him in the deep end. Lyndall surfaced spluttering, gagging and flailing, screaming like an animal, before he sank again.

Michael Lane
, in his Banana Republic shorts and shirt, had to dive in and haul Lyndall out and lay him on the coping, pumping water from his lungs—which became a stream of brightly colored puke as he spewed up the sweets and cake he’d guzzled. The kids looked on in horrified fascination and their parents’ mouths formed little moues of distaste behind their wine glasses.

It was left to Louise to take the hand of her
tearful, snotty little brother and lead him away to the servant’s quarters behind the big house, her cheeks burning with shame.

Reaching into her backpack for her toiletry bag, trying to shake herself free of this unwanted memory, Louise is startled by a knock on the door of the cubicle.

“Yes?” she says.

The supervising professor, a very white woman in her thirties with prematurely gray hair and a permanently harried expression, sticks her head in.

“Louise, we’ve had a call from your mother. It seems there’s some situation at home.” The woman hands over the cell phone Louise had to surrender the night before. “You’d better call her.”

Lyndall, she thinks. The little bastard is causing shit again.

Louise mutters her thanks and takes the phone, powering it up, regretting giving her mother the landline number to the research center. A number Denise had sworn she’d only use in an emergency.

The red light on her
Samsung starts to strobe and she sees that she has sixteen missed calls and ten messages from her mother.

She hits speed-dial, calling Denise’s cell phone. She gets voice mail.

Louise listens to the first few of the messages, an audio montage of incoherent hysteria. What she can glean is that it’s about Lyndall, okay, but the depth of her mother’s distress is disturbing.

She tries Denise’s cell again, but still gets voice mail. Knowing her mother, she’s forgotten to charge her phone. Louise considers calling the Lanes, but shame stays her finger on the keypad. With her luck she’
ll get Beverley and have to listen to the tweezer-lipped bitch talk down to her.

Louise sits for a moment, eyes shut. She’s tempted to kill her phone, return it to the research supervisors and tell them not to disturb her further with calls from home. But a snatch of one of her mother’s garbled messages, something about a dead girl, loops in her mind and she sighs and stows her belongings in her pack and leaves the cubicle, cursing Lyndall for ruining this for her, just as he’s ruined so many things before.

Lane sits slumped on the
couch staring out at the sky over Table Mountain lightening to the color of a bruise. The cops and their entourage have gone. Beverley stands by the window, and when she turns to watch Chris coming in from the kitchen carrying a bowl of muesli, her face looks old and drawn, vitality leached from her eyes.

Chris sits and reaches for the TV remote, the adenoidal twang of a Kiwi rugby commentator blaring out.

“Turn that off,” Lane says.

The boy ignores him, shoveling food into his mouth, wiping milk from his chin with his hand.

Beverley crosses the room, grabs the remote and clicks off the tube.

Chris looks up at her, speaking around a mouthful of food. “Hey, I’m watching that.”

“Shut up, Christopher,” she says. He shrugs and carries on eating.

Bev sits on the
couch beside Lane, forming an isosceles triangle with their son at its apex.

“There are things that need to be done,” she says, her voice t
ight with strain. “We need to call these people, the Walkers, and offer our condolences.”

Lane stares at her. “Jesus, Beverley, it hardly seems appropriate.” She shrugs. “So, are we just going to wish away what Christopher did?”

She looks at him, blinks, then says, “We’ll never speak of it again, Michael, do you hear me?”

Lane shakes his head and turns to Chris.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you do it?” His son slurps muesli. “Are you taking steroids again?”

Christopher clatters the bowl down onto a glass-topped table and stands, towering over his parents. “I’m going to sleep in my old room.”

He humps his way up the stairs toward the room he had as a child, untouched since he moved to the pool house,
Tintin
books and action figures still on the shelves, where he’ll lay his over-muscled man’s body in the boy’s narrow bed.

Beverley closes her eyes, her mask of composure slipping at last. She has been the engine that has driven her husband and son these last hours, her certainty washing away Lane’s protests and his doubts. Like it had twenty years ago.

She sighs and her eyes open and come to rest on Lane. “What are we going to do about cleaning the pool house?”

Typical Bev: treat the symptoms.

“There must be people who handle that kind of thing. I’ll Google it.”

The kitchen door creaks open and Lane hears the shuffle of Denise Solomons’s carpet slippers. She would have spent a night without sleep, as they did, with the police questioning her out in her cottage in the backyard.

Denise stands in the doorway. “Morning.”

“Morning,” Lane says.

“Can I make youse some tea?”

“We’re okay, Denise,” Lane says.

She hovers a moment then shuffles into the living room and stands before them. She wears a blue housecoat, the fringe of her petticoat visible beneath the hem. Her hair, usually drawn back into a tight bun, is loose, hanging in graying corkscrews to her shoulders. Her one eye is swollen shut and her lip bears a scab the size of a tick.

“I feel so terrible, Mr. Mike, Miss Bev.”

Lane says, “Sit, D. Please.”

She lowers herself into a chair, perched on the edge of the cushion, her fingers grabbing at the soft leather. “I know Lynnie has been causing trouble, but to do what they say he done, the cops . . .” She breaks off and pulls a tissue from her sleeve and dabs at her good eye.

Lane looks at his wife. This is the moment where their humanity can triumph, where they can face what their son has done and face what they’re doing to this woman’s boy.

But when Beverley speaks her voice is sharp, “He did it, Denise. Attacked Chris and murdered that poor girl. If you had only bloody listened to us earlier and called the police she would still be alive now.”

Lane is unsure what amazes him more: how convincing Beverley is in her lie, or that he remains mute in the face of it.

Denise Solomons breaks down, sobbing, sucking air and keening. Beverley shakes her head and gets up and stands by the window with her arms folded. It is left to Lane to console the woman, placing an awkward hand on her heaving shoulder.

“Where’s Louise, Denise?”

“She’s by the ’varsity. I phone there and leave a message for her.”

“Why don’t you go and lie down until she gets here? Okay?”

Denise nods and pushes up out of the chair. She stares at Bev, then shakes her head and
scuffs out. Lane waits until he hears the back door close before he crosses to stand beside his wife.

“This is madness, Beverley.”

She shrugs one shoulder. “What’s done is done.”

“It’s going to unravel. The cops’ll pick up Lyndall and he’ll give them an alibi.”

She spits out a laugh. “That little
tik
-head? Please. Michael, remember where we live, for Christ’s sake. You know how thrilled the cops’ll be to have an open and shut case.”

“That’s blue sky thinking, Beverley.”

“Is it? How many people murdered each year in this bloody country?” When he doesn’t reply she says, “And how many of those murders are solved?”

“Beverley . . .”

“So do you really think the cops are going to fuck this one up? They have a suspect. They’ll get applause from their bosses and look great in the media.”

“So we just sacrifice Lyndall?”

“Where do you think his life is going, Michael? He’s a mess. We’re only hastening the inevitable.” She softens and touches his face. “We have to do this, Mike. For Christopher. He’d go to prison for years, with those savages.” Her eyes close and she shakes her head. “No, no. It’s unthinkable.”

“What if he does it again?”

“He won’t. I’ll talk to him, I promise.”

“Jesus, Beverley . . . ”

“We’ll get through this, Mike.” Her eyes harden. “Like we did before.”

Beverley turns and climbs the stairs to their bedroom, leaving Lane with a reminder.

And a warning.

When the minibus taxi thumps to a halt the pimple-faced co-driver rolls open the sliding door and Louise steps out into early morning traffic on
Newlands Avenue, sucking car fumes.

She hurries home through the quiet streets, a Sniper car nosing up beside her, the two men inside checking her out before they speed away when they realize that she’s a girl beneath the cap and shapeless clothes.

As she’s approaching the high walls and the closed gate of the Lane’s house a white Toyota draws up and a young blonde woman and a black man carrying a video camera get out.

Christ, what has Lyndall done this time?

Louise pulls her cap lower as she dodges the TV people and opens the gate, closing it after her, ignoring their shouts.

Louise walks up the driveway toward the house, the top floor visible over the trees. Near the pool, a colored guy in some kind of protective outfit stands beside a small truck,
THE CLEAN SQUAD 24/7 painted on its side. A black and yellow mask dangles from his neck, and he has removed the glove on his right hand so he can smoke.

Another man, also in a protective suit, face and head covered, lugs a red plastic drum into the pool house where
Chris Lane lives.

Louise feels a knot of dread in her gut and has to fight the impulse to turn on her heel and
bolt.

The smoking man says, “Morning,” in Afrikaans, exhaling a cloud of fumes.

Louise just nods in return, not in the mood for the look this working class man from the Cape Flats will lay on her when he hears her middle class accent—whitey accent—acquired in the suburban schools the Lanes sent her and Lyndall to. Not as posh as the private schools Chris bullied his way through, but light years from the barbed-wire festooned classrooms with their semi-literate teachers and broken windows out on the crime-ravaged Flats.

She sees
Michael Lane leaving the house, his BMW chirping as he uses the remote to unlock it, and jogs across to him, her pack thumping her spine.

“Louise,” he says, moving like a zombie, leaning on the roof of the car. He looks like hell, his eyes torn and bloodshot. If she didn’t know him better she’d think he was hungover.

“What’s going on, Michael? I got these hysterical messages from my mom.”

“A girl was murdered last night, in the pool house.”

“Jesus, Michael. What happened?”

“Your mom let Lyndall in and he beat her up when she wouldn’t give him money. The Sniper guys threw him out, but he came back later and attacked Chris and killed the girl, a friend of Chris’s.”

His eyes skid away from her, looking down the driveway as if he, too, wants to escape.

“Where’s Lyndall now?” she asks in a voice she can barely recognize.

“I’ve just heard from the police. They’ve arrested him in town.”

“Oh my God, Mike.”

He sags down into the car and starts the engine. “Go to your mother, Louise. She needs you.”

The window of his car slides up and he drives away, edging past the cleaner’s truck.

Louise walks around the side of the house, ducks under the washing line and opens the door to the cottage built in the shadow of the sprawling mansion. When she steps into the kitchenette, her mother, babbling incoherently, embraces her, weeping on her shoulder.

Louise sees her mother’s black eye and swollen lip and all she can think, is good, I’m glad he’s in jail. He fucking deserves it.

As
Michael Lane noses his BMW out the electric gates and into the street a woman with a microphone and a man with a video camera ambush him, the woman shouting questions through the closed glass of his window. He accelerates, the news people receding in his rearview mirror.

Lane flees down the leafy streets of Newlands, ever-present
Table Mountain looming over the large homes hidden behind high walls and electric fences. A suburb of old money, money that whispers rather than yells like on the nouveau riche Atlantic seaboard, where a fungus of stone and glass spreads ever higher up the slopes of the mountain.