Sacrifices (2 page)

“What?” he said. “And get a knife in my ribs?”

“He hasn’t got no knife.”

Lane shook his head. “He
’s a
tik
-head, Denise. Let Sniper deal with him. In fact we should get the police and you should lay a charge.”

She shook her head. “He’s my boy. They gonna throw him in jail.”

Which he bloody deserves, Lane thought but refrained from saying. He looked across at Bev who was hanging up the kitchen phone. “A car’s on its way.”

The woman was sniveling. “I’m just glad Lou isn’t here. It would disturb her studies.”

Louise, Denise’s intimidatingly intelligent nineteen-year-old daughter (as different from her brother as anyone could be) was in her first year at the University of Cape Town studying English. Understandable, perhaps, that Lyndall—without a father since birth—had grown misshapen in the shadows of the two women.

Lane found a plastic packet of frozen vegetables in the freezer, wrapped it in a
kitchen towel and handed it to Denise. “Put this on your face.”

The buzzer sounded and he crossed to the intercom. When the Sniper patrolmen announced themselves Lane buzzed them into his fortress of high walls
, electric fences and alarms. They parked their car near the pool and he could hear their boots drumming on the brick driveway as he crossed the living room and greeted the two hulking brown men in their Kevlar vests at the front door.

“The son again?” Tweedledum said.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“The mother still letting him in?” Tweedledee said
.

“She’s promised, but . . .” Lane shrugged.

“They only learn when it’s too late, sir.”

Lane grunted and led them through to Denise in the kitchen and there was a machine-gun rattle of Cape Flats Afrikaans, a patois that Lane had lived with his whole life but still struggled to understand. He caught enough to know that the Sniper men were urging Denise to call the police and lay a charge, but she shook her head, tears rolling down her rapidly swelling face, the frozen vegetables discarded.

The rent-a-cops went out the back door and crossed to the cottage the Lanes had built years ago for Denise and her two kids. Lane stood in the kitchen doorway and watched as the big men dragged Lyndall out, the skinny boy fighting them, the knitted Muslim skull-cap he had taken to wearing lately falling to the bricks.

When Lyndall looked at him, his eyes naked and haunted, Lane glimpsed the shy little kid, always reticent to join in the games of cricket and soccer Lane and Chris had played on the vast front lawn, giggling through his missing front teeth when a ball was tossed his way.

Jesus, this is Lynnie, Lane said to himself, and almost intervened as the one Sniper man twisted the boy’s arm behind his back, ready to frog-march him down the driveway. But Lane merely followed in their wake, to where the patrol car was parked near the pool.

The lights were off in his son’s room, the carport empty of his sporty Honda. Lane was pleased Chris wasn’t here to see this, to stand and watch with a smug expression on his almost handsome face.

As the men dragged Lyndall toward their car, the boy shouted over his shoulder at Lane, “You white cunts better watch it, or you’ll be dead in your fucken beds.”

Pure
Cape Flats, the neutral accent that had come from good schools replaced in the last months with the harsh sounds of the ghetto. As the men fought the boy into the car, Lane could smell sweat and the burned stink of meth.

“We’ll take him to the taxis down in Mowbray,” one of the Sniper men said. “Still be better if the mother laid a charge.”

“No point in me getting the police is there?”

“No sir. She gave him access. He broke in, would be a different story. But . . .” A shrug.

Lane nodded and thanked them and watched the small car drive away. He used the remote on his keychain to close the gate after them. The patrolmen would beat the boy before they freed him, and somewhere Lane’s old liberal self squirmed.

But only for a second.

The two women watched Lane as he walked back into the kitchen. “Go to bed, Denise,” he said. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

“Sorry Mr. Mike, Miss Bev.”

Lane locked up and he and his wife went up to their bedroom, Bev talking around her toothbrush, threatening to fire Denise. Threats that would come to nothing Lane knew, as he slid his naked body between the fresh, starched, sheets. The work of Denise Solomons. She kept the house spotless and still managed to cook for them five nights a week. A treasure, all their friends said. More than one had tried to poach her, without success. Denise was loyal to a fault. Not always a good thing.

Bev slipped into bed and switched off the light and reached across for Lane, her hands on his body as familiar to him as his own.

And then came the scream.

Lane returns to the present, doing his best to hold the gaze of the woman cop. She says nothing, staring him down, and he’s terrified she’ll question him about the nightmare in the pool house. He knows he’ll stumble and Beverley’s revision, inspired by her diet of American courtroom dramas, will stand revealed for the fiction it is.

He feels fingers of cold sweat trace his ribs and his eyes skid away from the cop’s as he looks across at his wife who sits on the edge of her seat, hands clasped, eyes locked on his, willing him not to waver.

But when the cop speaks she addresses their son, who is still hypnotized by the pulsing pink, blue and yellow lights dangling from the spiky branches of the plastic tree.

“Chris?” He doesn’t look at her, his face blank. “Christopher?”

Th
e boy blinks and turns toward the woman, his eyes slow to focus. “Ja?”

“Tell me what happened earlier. Start when you were out drinking.”

Bev says, “He’s probably concussed—”

Perils makes a zip-it gesture across her lips and is rewarded with a glare that could lance a boil. “Tell me, Chris.”

And he repeats what his mother told the uniforms out by the pool. He was drinking beer at his usual jock hangout, Forresters Arms—Forries—ten minutes away on Newlands Avenue when he met the girl, Melanie Walker, and brought her home.

They had just entered his cottage when Lyndall appeared, looking wired. When Chris challenged him, Lyndall struck him with a weight, leaving him unconscious. Chris awoke with his parents in the room and the girl dead on the floor.

Perils turns to the elder Lanes. “Did either of you see Lyndall?”

Bev shakes her neatly cropped head. “No. He was gone by the time we got down there.”

“Chris,” the cop says, “you’re sure it was Lyndall who attacked you?”

The boy can’t suppress a sneer. “Jesus, of course I am.”

“What was he wearing?”

Chris blinks and his eyes skid over to Beverley, who tenses. A detail of the story they did not rehearse. But Christopher is his mother’s son. “Uh, the ’banger stuff those guys like. A hoodie. Baggy pants. That little knitted cap thing on his head.”

“A
kufi
?”

“Ja, that Muslim thing.”

The skullcap that Beverley had rescued from the bricks outside their kitchen door and planted it near the pool house. Lane’s unsqueamish wife first dipping it in a puddle of the girl’s blood.

“Were you drunk, Chris?”

“No.”

“How many beers did you drink?”

“Three or four. That’s nothing for me.”

“And did he say anything to you, Lyndall, before he hit you?”

“Called me a fucken white cunt.”

Beverley can’t hide a small smile of satisfaction at their son’s performance.

“How did Lyndall get in?” Perils asks. “He no longer had a key, did he?”

“No,” Beverley says. “We changed the locks and reprogrammed the gate remote controls. He must’ve slipped in when Chris drove his car into the driveway. There’s a delay before the gate closes.”

“And how did he get out?”

“My keys are gone,” Chris says. “There’s a remote on the keychain.”

“And this weight?” Perils asks. “Where is it?”

Beverley shakes her head. “He must’ve taken it with him.”

“A ten pound weight?”

Bev shrugs.

Lane feels the dumbbell dragging at his arm as he carried it, wrapped in a plastic bag, and buried it deep in a pile of builder’s sand—left over from a recent renovation of the laundry room—at the bottom of the garden.

He conjures a dog, a salivating German
Shepherd straining at its leash, leading its master, a hulking uniformed cop, toward the pile of sand, the policeman rooting in the rubble and finding the weight.

When Lane shakes himself free of this image he is alone in the living room.

He hears voices from the kitchen: the cop and Chris. Where’s Beverley? The sound of a toilet flushing upstairs answers him. He rises and crosses the tiles.

Perils stands watching Chris who opens the fridge and takes out a carton of milk and drinks from it while he clicks on the small TV that sits on the granite counter. Sports highlights. A rugby game played earlier in
Australia.

Perils says, “Mind if I get a glass of water?”

The boy wags a hand toward the sink, his eyes fixed on the screen and the cop finds an upturned glass in the drying rack, fills it from the faucet and stands beside Chris.

“What position do you play? Center?”

Chris nods. “That’s right.” A smile that manages to be a smirk. “How do you know?”

Perils laughs. “I’ve got brothers.”

The boy’s eyes are back on the screen, watching the celebration of a try.

“You enjoy the physical side of the game?”
Perils asks.

“Sure. That’s why I play it.”

“Were you friends, you and Lyndall? Growing up together?”

“No. He did his thing, I did mine. Different worlds, you know?”

“He wasn’t much of a sportsman I’m thinking?”

Chris shakes
his bandaged head. “Nah, he was always a bit of a weed.”

“But he got into your room and knocked you unconscious?”

Christopher looks at her now, smile gone, something hard in his eyes. “He caught me off guard. Hit me with the bloody weight.” His hand touches the bandage.

“You okay, Chris?” Lane asks from the kitchen doorway.

“Ja, I’m okay.”

Bev comes in, standing between the cop and their son. “Detective, maybe it would be better if you questioned Chris when my husband and I are present?”

“We were just talking rugby. I’m a bit of a fan.”

Chris clicks off the TV and walks out of the kitchen, still carrying the carton of milk.

Beverley says, “Are you done, Detective? We’re exhausted.”

“For now, yes.”

Lane walks past his son who sits drinking from the carton, a mustache of milk left on his upper lip, an echo of the innocent, smiling child of long ago.

Standing at the window, Lane sees a black body bag, oily in the arc lights that turn night to day, carried from the pool
house and slid into the rear of a gray van.

Louise Solomons is shaken awake at dawn and, still groggy, has to extend her skinny right arm for a blood sample. The guy doing it, a second year medical student, is clumsy and she says, “Fuck,” when the needle jabs her.

“Sorry,” he mutters, still half asleep himself.

He fills a vial with her blood and tapes a cotton ball to her arm, then checks her pulse and takes her blood pressure before shuffling out of the cubicle.

Louise has completed the first night of a sleep limitation study being run by the medical and psychology faculties of the
University of Cape Town during the summer vacation. She and the other ten volunteers were kept awake until 2:00 a.m., then allowed only four hours sleep.

For the next week she’ll be cocooned in this research lab with the other volunteers, all strangers to her, under constant surveillance to make sure they don’t nap. The money is good and the study will give Louise a sense of purpose during this season of false cheer and keep her insulated from the strident Christmas carols and frenzied consumerism she loathes.

And it’ll keep her away from Lyndall, who is even more out of control this time of the year.

As she sits up on the bed, dressed in the T-shirt and sweatpants she slept in, rubbing her eyes, she remembers that she dreamed about her brother and feels a hot rush of irritation that he is dogging her, even here.

The dream is fading, her memory serving up fragmented images like a sequence of Instagram shots: she and Lyndall as kids, maybe ten and eleven years old, invited to Chris Lane’s birthday party, the token dusky faces in a sea of privileged white ones.

The party was on the front lawn of the house on
a shiny summer’s day: tables creaking under heaps of gaudy cakes and snacks and sweets, Beverley and Michael plying over-cosseting parents (unable to be away from their brats for even an hour) with Cape wine and crudités.