Folly (3 page)

I realised as I walked towards the green palisade that I hadn't actually been to the folly since Mark had rented it out. With another person occupying it, the building had no longer felt like it was ours and I had stopped thinking about it. I hadn't even had cause to go round to the front gate.

Hayley was a Goth-type with dyed black hair and pale skin, who always dressed as if she was going to a funeral and, I remembered Mark saying, had a nightclub-related job that kept her busy from late afternoon until the small hours of the morning.

Her black Opel Corsa was parked under the steel carport. The parking area had originally been paved, but now I noticed that thick, toughlooking weeds had invaded the brickwork. The grass in the garden must have been a foot high, and the overgrown flowerbeds provided further tangled proof of Hayley's lack of interest in her outdoor environment.

I scowled in frustration. The rental agreement had stated that Hayley was to take care of the garden. At one stage, she'd paid Goodness to cut the grass and tidy the beds for her. Obviously that arrangement had fallen by the wayside.

I pressed the yellow button on my buzzer and her gate rattled open. Then I walked up the short stretch of lawn, grass grabbing at my ankles, and knocked on the front door.

I had to knock four times before I got a reaction, and then it was clear that I'd woken Hayley up. She unlatched the door and peered out, shielding her blue eyes against the cruel blaze of the morning sun. Her hair hung in dishevelled locks around her shoulders and, under the oversized charcoal
T
-shirt she wore, her legs looked pale as bones.

‘Sorry to wake you,' I said. ‘I just wanted to remind you that you're overdue with the rent.'

Vaguely, I registered that the folly looked pitch black inside. Hayley must have hung blinds over the windows in order to block out the daylight so she could get some sleep between her crazy shifts.

‘Yes, I know. I tried to call you on Monday but your phone wasn't working,' Hayley said. ‘I wanted to tell you I'm giving notice. I'll be leaving at the end of the month. I paid a deposit when I came here, so you can just keep that in lieu of this month's rent, if that's ok.'

‘What?' I gaped at the girl in disbelief.

Her rent was the income I'd been relying to get me through the rest of the month. The horses' hay. Goodness's wages. Money for food and water and electricity.

And something …
something
for the bond.

‘You should have told me at the beginning of the month,' I managed to sputter.

‘Well, I tried. I left a message, and then I tried to phone you last week. Twice.' Hayley's pale chin jutted defensively. ‘There's only so much I can do. I actually didn't want to give notice but, you know, having the power go off for days on end is really inconvenient.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘It was … er, because of an invoice dispute with the supplier. Their mistake, of course.'

She said nothing in reply; I could see she didn't believe me.

I was about to turn away, defeated, when I heard a snuffling from inside the house and Hayley opened the door wider to allow her dog, a black spaniel, out into the garden.

And that was when I saw it.

Blinds over the windows as I'd expected, yes. But the walls – those lovely eggshell-white walls … Hayley had painted them pitch black.

Without asking anyone's permission, she'd redecorated the entire interior of the cottage, Gothic morgue-style. It was so dark it looked like negative space. Dear God, she'd even painted the ceiling, and the wooden bookcases that had been built into two of the octagon's sides were now a matte black in colour. The only trace of illumination in that unholy place came from a single ray of light that shone down onto the grey tiled floor from the gap in a badly fitting blind.

I stared, horrified.

This cottage was unlettable in its present state to anyone except a member of the Addams family. My brain recoiled from the costs this represented. The hours and hours of stripping and sanding, then the painting – to take it from dark to light again would take at least a fortnight, not to mention multiple coats of paint, and would probably cost the equivalent of six months' rental.

And that, for me, was the final straw.

I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and glared at Hayley. The fury I felt must have been written in bold on my face, because I saw her actually wince.

‘Who gave you permission to repaint?' I shouted.

Hayley blinked rapidly. ‘Well, nobody, I … I've been here so long, you know, I thought …'

‘You thought? You honestly thought you were going to be able to get back your deposit after leaving the premises in this ruined state?'

‘It's not ruined …' she tried, in a very small voice.

‘Oh, yes, it is. You will not be getting your deposit back unless, before you leave, the walls and ceiling and bookcases are all restored to their previous colour. And in the meantime, you owe me the full rent for this month. I want that money transferred into my account by the end of today, or I will charge you interest.'

‘Yes,' Hayley whispered, cowering back into the doorway. ‘Please, I will do. Please stop shouting, Mrs Caine. I'm sorry.'

My heart was pounding with adrenaline from the outburst and, surprisingly, I found the sensation exhilarating. Gathering my rage around me like a cloak, I turned and strode away.

Chapter 4

H
ayley deposited her rent within an hour. Five minutes after that I'd emailed the supplier with the feed order for the horses and paid Goodness his wages for the next fortnight, paid the electricity and paid the water bill.

After doing all that I looked at the pittance that was left in my account and I felt the same sick clench of fear in my stomach that I'd felt earlier.

And, as of next month, I had an unlettable cottage.

What if I took the advice that both my brother and his lawyer were all but ramming down my throat? What if I sold the house for whatever I could get? Made other hard decisions? Retrenched Goodness, who was like family to me, and which would mean him and his wife and children would have to move out and go … Go where? To the nearby informal settlement of Diepsloot and look for work, I supposed. For them, as outsiders, life in that ghetto would be extremely difficult, and jobs were certainly not easy to come by.

I'd have to ask my vet to humanely destroy my horses. What else could I do with them? At seventeen and twenty-two years old, they weren't exactly in their prime. And I would probably have to re-home, or euthanise, my cats, given the standard no-animals policy in most modern flats and cluster developments these days.

And what then? What if, another six months down the line, I still had no job?

The unthinkable prospect of moving to Cape Town and throwing myself at my brother's mercy got me up from my chair and marching out of the house.

‘There must be something else I can do,' I said aloud, as I walked through the back garden and down towards the wire-fenced vegetable patch, causing Admiral to raise his head and regard me curiously. The vegetable patch had been badly neglected this past year, and only Goodness's tireless work and some natural reseeding had ensured there was anything growing there at all. The sweet basil and garlic chives, spinach and land cress were doing well, and a cherry tomato bush was thriving in the far corner.

‘There must be some way of making enough money to keep this place. Even if it means selling my body.'

I gave a short, bitter laugh at that joke.

Bob the Cat, the oldest and friendliest of my four felines, sauntered over to greet me with a chirrupy meow. Bending down, I rubbed his head and listened to the comforting rumble of his purring.

‘Poor choices, Bob,' I said aloud to him. ‘That's what has landed me here.'

He glanced up at me with a look devoid of sympathy. In Bob's world, the cat food was still arriving in the bowl and the pillow next to mine was his reserved night-time sleeping spot. ‘What could possibly be so bad?' he seemed to be asking.

Now, though, I couldn't help thinking of the idiotic things I'd done when I was younger that were partly responsible for my current all-time low point. Bad decision after bad decision, and now I was firmly stuck in the mess I'd created for myself.

I'd dreamed of becoming an actress or a radio dj when I'd finished school, but my parents had made it clear that such frivolous career choices would not be supported. Instead, I was told I should follow in Roger's footsteps and complete a university degree in something ‘worthwhile' – preferably business.

I had ‘compromised' by leaving home straight after I'd done my final exams and moving into a tiny flat with three of my friends. I got a job at a local steakhouse and within the short space of just eleven months had succeeded in achieving a promotion from junior waitress to ordinary waitress. Attaining the dizzying heights of management, it seemed, was not meant for me, nor had I been offered a lateral promotion to assistant chef. But I was happy enough. I was acting in local productions and doing occasional work as an extra in movie shoots. I was half-leasing an ex-racehorse. I was dating a succession of interesting young men whom my parents considered as unsuitable as my job: musicians, arts students and university dropouts with ponytails and pierced ears, dope habits and heads full of dreams.

I even became the proud owner of an ancient Golf that belched alarming quantities of blue smoke from the exhaust but managed to ferry me between all these activities without breaking down too often.

My career as a waitron abruptly hit my own personal glass ceiling a year later when I managed to spill a full gravy boat of the restaurant's lethal, oily, dark orange peri-peri sauce over a customer's expensive white outfit.

I decided that the time had come to implement some life changes. I was going to leave South Africa, fly to England and make my fortune by earning British pounds.

I sold my Golf and bought a ticket to London. From there, I spent four years on the move, working at all sorts of odd jobs along the way. I was briefly employed to give sales presentations for a vegan dating club, but was fired after laughing at the owner when he invited me to dinner and made a drunken pass at me over his plate of seared duck breast. I then worked as the personal assistant to an elderly upper-class gentleman who talked non-stop about hunting, wore a toupée that looked like a dead squirrel, and drove his dented Bentley as badly if he was blind.

For a while, I became a doorgirl at a rather dodgy Soho strip club. My job was to sit at the club's entrance wearing a low-cut black dress and stiletto shoes, and describe to potential customers, in salacious and exaggerated detail, what attractions they could enjoy inside once they had paid their entrance fee.

When I wasn't working I was travelling, to Scotland and Ireland, Israel and Paris, New York and Los Angeles. I spent the British pounds just as fast as I earned them, and achieved the notable distinction of arriving back in the country with less money than I'd had when I had left.

Broke, jobless and desperate to earn some quick cash, I saw the advertisement in the paper a week later.

‘Broadminded ladies with good speaking voices needed for telephone work.'

It sounded intriguing. I enquired, got the position, and a week later found myself sitting in a small, soundproofed cubicle and listening, wide-eyed, while my first-ever caller described his cock to me.

‘It's long and very hard at the moment … throbbing slightly … and the tip of it … is purple in colour,' he'd offered rather breathlessly, while I gawped in astonishment at what I was hearing. I'd had some experience of cocks, of course, but hadn't known that they were available in purple-when-hard and had never imagined their owners were wont to describe them in such proud and boastful detail. Still less had I thought about the fact that the men who phoned in to sex lines were doing so for one purpose only – to masturbate to a climax while I, in my breathiest voice, described my fictional lacy underwear and imaginary ddd-sized breasts while talking dirty to them to enhance their pleasure.

The first week of my new job was eye-opening. By the second, I started to find it entertaining. What made it fun was knowing that while my callers were aroused, I held a certain power over them, even while I was pandering to their most explicit desires.

I soon realised that there were some men who required the concept of power to go even further. These callers wanted a more extreme service, and not every woman talking on the phone lines could satisfy their needs. They wanted to be dominated, punished, controlled. Not for them the whispered confessions of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, lingerie-wearing nymphomaniac. No, they wanted the voice, image and stern commands of an invisible strict mistress, leather-clad, standing tall in stiletto-heeled boots and wielding a whip.

Telephonic domination soon became my specialty. Over four years I worked at various phone companies, sometimes taking sex calls, but more usually speaking to the men with fetishes, the adult babies, the naughty schoolboys, the slaves who called in craving humiliation and harsh control.

I'd interspersed my phone work with overseas travel, and it was after returning from two months in Thailand that I had finally come to the conclusion that my family had despaired of me ever reaching – that I needed to do something more constructive with my life.

Talking thousands of men into explosive orgasm was no small accomplishment, and yet it was not something that was going to make prospective employers sit up and say ‘Wow!' So, after proving my ability as a creative type by fudging my cv to conceal the fact that I'd spent the last few years speaking filth on the phone, I had managed to get a job with an advertising agency as a junior copywriter. Times were good back then, and people were hiring.

Soon after that, myself and Gaby, a girlfriend I'd done some travelling with, had been invited to a party held by an acquaintance she hadn't seen for ages.