The Apartment (23 page)

But now the girl's smile is becoming too wide, her lips stretching unnaturally over teeth I can see are blackened and broken. The smell comes at me like a solid object and I shuffle backward on the couch, but Carla's weight is keeping me there.

“It's okay, sweetie,” Carla says, her breath fast. “It's all gone. Nothing can hurt you again. It will all be okay.”

The girl twists, twists, twists her hair around her finger until a thick drape of it comes free from her scalp. She steps forward and her whole face comes into the light. The gray skin is mottled with bruises, one eye swollen shut, the other burst red. She licks her cracked lips, and her tongue grows longer, stretching away from her mouth, a smear of bloody spittle following it around her face.

Pulls another hunk of hair, drops it to the floor. Rips at her scalp and at her face, still smiling, ingratiating. Pleading.

“Papa? Pourquoi tu ne m'aime pas?”

The skin melts off her face, revealing blackened flesh.

“Papa. Pourquoi?”

I try to force my eyes shut, but she wants me to see. She's dissolving into a pile of darkened carrion on the floor, re-forming now into something with too many thin, bristly legs, something with red eyes, shimmering like a wraith along the baseboard.

“Mark? Mark?” Carla comes in close, her warm, living hands to the sides of my face, her hot, sweet breath in my mouth, and finally I can stop seeing. She's kissing my tears and I'm grasping at her like she'll keep me alive.

Carla is living. She blocks my view of everything I don't want to see. She protects my eyes from myself. I give in. Decades fall from me, and for a moment I feel liberated, as if none of it ever happened. I'm back in college, back when life was light, making out with my girlfriend as if joy was never tinged with sin or guilt.

We spend the night like that, curled together, and everything is forgiven. But when dawn rises in the room, I smell it first, then feel the sticky gore all over my skin. Then, against every screaming instinct, I open my eyes.

I sit in the car, hunkered down in the driver's seat like a private detective, a cup of shitty McDonald's coffee cooling on the dash. I have a clear view of the house from here, but so far there's been no sign of life.

I haven't been back here for two months, not since the night Hayden and I fled to Montagu. I haven't dared return, convinced that being in the vicinity of the scene of the crime will unblock the toxic buildup of emotion kept in check by the tranquilizers my folks' prescription-happy doctor has been feeding me. Tranquilizers I won't have to hide from Mark. But now, as I stare at the new front door—an incongruously modern hardwood thing my dad picked out when he came down here to clean up—I'm not feeling much of anything at all. No sadness, regret, pity, or the old standby, anger.

Without pulling my eyes away from the door, I take a sip of coffee, ignoring the jitter of the cup in my trembling fingers—a side effect of the drugs. Karim's cousin and his wife have been in there for a week now.
Is that long enough?
I don't know much about them (I don't want to know), just that they decided to move to the Cape and needed a place to stay. I mailed the keys to Karim and asked him to take care of the details. They're his family, after all. My dad offered to collect our personal belongings, and I rented the house partially furnished to save on moving costs, although most of the living room furniture was beyond saving. The first month's rent and the deposit have been eaten by the mortgage, minus the percentage the real estate agency is skimming off the top.

Karim's relatives jumped at the chance, and why not? They're getting a good deal. It's at least two grand cheaper than anything else in the neighborhood. Zainab, the leasing agent, was aghast when I told her the price I was willing to let it go for. I could hardly tell her that I needed a particular kind of tenant, and Karim's family fitted the bill.

I double-check the time. I have three hours until I have to fetch Hayden from playgroup. The drive back to Montagu takes two and a half, so I'm pushing it. I open my door and splatter the cold coffee onto the sidewalk. I toy with the ignition key.

I shouldn't be here.

I jump as the door opens and a man steps out. He's short, dumpy, his Lions T-shirt pulled out from his shorts—nothing like Karim. He shivers and screws a cigarette into his mouth. He stares straight ahead and smokes. I'm right in his line of sight, but his eyes skate over me.

How much has Karim told him about what happened here? It made the national papers and news sites, after all, IOL.com leading with the headline
CAPE TOWN'S NEW HOUSE OF HORRORS
. Carla got a small obit in the
Mail & Guardian.
She would have appreciated that.

I don't know what possessed me, but I went to her memorial service, deciding to drive down on a whim. It took place two weeks after her murder in the cavernous chapel at the exclusive Bishops Diocesan College (one of her brothers was on the board there), although I'd heard her railing against the Bishops old boys' network many times. Arriving late, I found a pew at the back. The chapel was only a quarter full, the empty seats adding a tawdriness to the whole affair. One by one, her colleagues and members of the South African literati tried to outdo one another with their overblown eulogies and readings. I tuned them out and stared at the backs of the mourners' heads, hoping no one would recognize me and imagining what they would say if they did.

Don't look now, but that's the wife. You know,
his
wife.

Do you think she knew he was crazy all along?

She wasn't there when he did it, so who knows?

Where is he now?

You haven't heard? Valkenberg. Locked up in the secure wing. Electroshock treatment, the works. When they found him he was a gibbering wreck.

Yes. That I knew.

Still, the wife was lucky she wasn't in the house when he did it. It could have been her.

Oh yes. And they have a young daughter, don't they? What could make someone do something like that?

Well, I heard he says he didn't do it. Said a gang broke in.

Didn't the DNA evidence prove it was him?

You're joking. DNA evidence? In this country? You think they'd bother? The backlog in the labs is a joke.

You know, it's so tragic. He had another daughter once. She died.

Did he kill her too?

No. They say it was an accident.

Shame. It's a terrible thing.

And what he did to Carla…

Pieces. She was in pieces.

Toward the end of the service, a middle-aged white woman sitting a few pews in front of me whipped her head around and stared at me intensely. She was dressed conservatively in black, but on her wrist she wore a bracelet made of goatskin: the sangoma. I stared right back at her without blinking, then mouthed, “Fuck you.” Shaking, I got up and left. I half expected her to follow me out—I half wanted her to. I still don't know why I focused my rage at her. Perhaps because like me, she hadn't been able to save Mark.

After what Mark did hit the headlines, old friends tried to reach out to me, but I ignored most of them, choosing to cut myself off and cocoon myself and Hayden in Montagu. I couldn't tell who gave a shit about us or who simply wanted to hear the gory details, eager for a chance to trot out the old South African “you're so lucky you weren't there” line. Then Karim messaged me a month ago to see how I was doing. I wrote back. Perhaps some part of me knew he'd be useful. We chatted every day, and then he mentioned that his cousin was moving down from Joburg and needed a place to stay. I recalled him telling me the family had endured their own brutal home invasion, and I offered to rent the house to them. Of course I did.

Mireille's voice ghosts in:
I thought it had left with the last people. They had pain, but not enough.

Now it is with you.

I reach for my coffee and take a sip and get a dismaying ghost-mouthful of nothing before remembering I've poured it on the sidewalk. Karim's cousin sucks at the cigarette furiously, eyes squinting, like a gangster in a movie. He chucks the butt at the skeletal sticks of Odette's long-dead wisteria, then lights another. He looks like he can handle himself. A strong character. Stronger than Mark, or is this just fanciful thinking? Again, he seems to look straight through me. To him, I'm just a dumpy white girl in a secondhand Mini, which I'll pay off after the advance for the book comes through. Five thousand dollars: not enough to set Hayden and me free, but the plummeting rand is on my side, and it'll keep us going until I find a full-time job.

It will keep us going until we can return home.

Most of Carla was found crammed into the pantry.

I didn't see the aftermath firsthand, but my imagination filled in the blanks. The superintendent who came to Montagu to question me after the incident was kind. She advised me not to return to the house “until it was cleaned up.” Mark didn't ask to see me when he was arrested, and he still hasn't. The cut-price attorney my parents hired is adamant that due to Mark's actions and state of mind I don't have a duty of care to pay for his legal representation. I am going to fight to keep the house, and refuse to give into the bank's demands to sell. It's Hayden's. It's not the bank's. It's not Odette's. It's not Zoë's. It's Hayden's. It's all she will ever have of her father.

But I can't risk bringing her back here until…

How long will it take? We were in the apartment for only—what was it, five, six days? I haven't been back in touch with Monsieur le Croix, but I don't need to get in touch with him. I've been online. After we left Paris, all the apartments in that building, including the one we stayed in, were rented out in less than two weeks and the building itself is back on the market. Whatever was poisoning the bricks and mortar—bad juju, infrasound, dead children, fucking mold, whatever—left with us. Or with Mireille when she threw herself out of the window.

Or maybe the Paris real estate market just picked up.

The man on the stoop scratches his belly. A small hand clutching a Barbie appears through the bars of the security gate. I grip the steering wheel and lean forward in my seat. A little girl. Not much older than Hayden. I suck breath through my teeth. Did Karim tell me that his cousin had children?

Yes. You know he did.

I lean across and roll down the passenger-side window. The little girl is saying something to the man—I can't make out her words from here—and he ignores her. He's blank-faced, focused in on himself.

Like Mark was just before he…

We went to the apartment. We brought something back. Now I have to get someone else to take it away.

Now it is with you.

You don't really believe that, do you?

I could cancel the lease and throw them out of the house before it's too late. I could shout a warning right now, right this second, tell them who I am, try to convince them the house isn't safe.

Maybe the damage has already been done.

Maybe it hasn't.

I roll up the window. The man still shows no interest in me. The small hand disappears back through the bars and into the gloom beyond the door.
Merci,
I think as I turn the key in the ignition and drive away.
I'm sorry it had to be you.

S. L. Grey thanks:

Lauren Beukes, Rob Bloom, Wayne Brooks, Louise Buckley, Eileen Chetti, Jennifer Custer, Hélène Ferey, Claire Gatzen, Adam Greenberg, Sam Greenberg, Bronwyn Harris, Savannah Lotz, Charlie Martins, Oli Munson, Alex Saunders, and Carol Walters.