Sacrifices (7 page)

Beverley grips Lane by the arm, hard enough to bruise his flesh. “Michael, you’re not going to do anything crazy, are you?”

He says nothing, shaking his arm free. 

“Jesus, Mike, look at this bloody country: more murders a day than a war zone,
politicians’ wives running coke, every damned cop with his hand out. Why should we play by some outmoded rules?”

“You’re trying to justify what we’re doing as some kind of political action?”

“I’m saying that the straight and narrow isn’t there anymore, so why try to walk it, for Christ’s sake?” Beverley stares into his eyes. “There’s no turning back now, Michael. Understand?”

He doesn’t reply and steps through the sliding doors, inhaling air thick with dust and pollen. Avoiding the pool, he wanders into the garden as a gaudy moon rises fat and yellow beyond the trees that grow dense near the perimeter wall.

He’s not sure how long he stands in the gloom, his hair and clothes whipped by the Southeaster as if he’s on the deck of a ship, before he’s drawn toward the rectangle of light from the garage, the roller door still raised. Lane’s tempted to get into his car and drive into the night, but he dismisses the thought and presses a button on the garage wall, the door shuddering and clanking as it closes. 

When Lane turns to walk into the kitchen his son stands in the doorway, blocking his path, bare feet spread, thick thighs stretching the fabric of his shorts.

“Move, Christopher,” Lane says.

His son’s reply is to shove Lane in the chest, sending him sprawling against the side of Bev’s car. Christopher steps into the garage, muscles swelling beneath his tank vest, and Lane feels the scale of him, the sheer power. Smells the sourness of his sweat.

When Lane pushes himself away from the car, his son lays a palm against his chest and shoves him again, hard, and Lane hits his head against the door of the high Pajero.

“We’re not going to have a problem are we?” Chris says, crowding him.

“Get the hell away from me,” Lane says, trying to dodge his son.

Christopher laughs and before Lane has a chance to lift a hand in defense the boy reaches down and grabs him by the testicles, squeezing hard. An agonizing pain robs Lane of his wind and he gasps and folds.

His son releases him and Lane slumps to the concrete in agony, the boy lifting a foot, ready to kick him in the ribs.

“That’s enough, Chris.”

Beverley stands in the doorway, looking down at Lane, her face expressionless.

“Come,” she says to her son, and he nods and obeys and the two of them disappear into the house.

When Lane can breathe again he manages to sit up, wiping snot from his nose, wiping tears of pain and humiliation from his face.

He stands and hobbles into the kitchen, the TV chattering from the living room. Grabbing the bottle of Lagavulin and a glass, Lane limps to the stairs. His wife and son sit side by side on the
couch, ignoring him, the tube flickering on their faces. Beverley’s right arm lies on the backrest, her fingers toying with the boy’s blond hair, so like her own.

Lane goes up to the guest room and closes the door. He sags down onto the bed and pours himself a second drink for the first time in twenty years.

Louise sits at the counter in the kitchenette, an untouched bowl of cereal before her, staring at her mother who is slumped on the
couch, lost in an Afrikaans soapie on TV. She searches for some trace of herself in the older woman’s dark face, with its high, wide cheekbones and broad nose, but—as always—can find none. Louise and Lyndall are thin and small-boned, with almost elfin features and light streaks in their wavy hair. Their mother is chunky, running to fat, her hair an unmanageable tangle of tight curls.

Denise Solomons looks up. “What is it, Lou? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Ma,” Louise says, emptying the food into the trash and rinsing the bowl at the sink.

Another lie. She’s been lying to her mother since she came home. Told her she saw the cop, Perils, and that she’d promised to keep the investigation open. Told her that she spoke to Lynnie on the phone and that he’s fine, locked up with guys his age.

Her mother knows enough about Pollsmoor to fear that her too-pretty son has been thrown in with a bunch of older predators, and Louise has said nothing about the terror in Lyndall’s voice, his garbled pleas to be buried Muslim.

Louise crosses the room and sits on the arm of the
couch, staring at the screen, but seeing the expression on Michael Lane’s face in the kitchen earlier, when she confronted him. The certainty that he lied to her, that he and his bitch wife are sacrificing Lyndall to protect their psycho son fills her with a rage so intense that she feels her fingers tearing at the worn fabric of the old couch, a hand-me-down from the Lanes.

Soaring strings play over the rolling credits of the soap opera and Denise mutes the TV.

“What time can you go and see Lynnie tomorrow?”

“After lunch, I think. I need to call Pollsmoor in the morning.” Battling to keep her voice level.

“How could he do this, Lou? Kill that girl and hurt Chris?”

Louise almost shares her suspicions with her mother, but she bites back her words. Denise Solomons idolizes the Lanes, sees them as the saviors of her
family. This is a burden Louise has to carry alone.

“I’ll talk to him tomorrow, Ma. Then we’ll know more.”

Denise nods, rubbing her eyes. Her skin has a gray tinge, like meat left too long in the sun, and she looks exhausted and unwell.

“Why don’t you go lie down?” Louise says. “I’ll bring you some tea.”

“No, let me stay up for a bit.” She smiles. “But a cup of tea would be nice.”

Louise crosses to the kitchen and boils the kettle, dropping a Rooibos teabag into a mug, adding hot water and the two heaped spoons of sugar that her mother demands, despite the advice of her doctor. She stirs the tea, the little vortex of liquid triggering an unwanted flashback of little Lou slipping through the looking
-glass into Michael Lane’s promised land and Louise—the past a more defined, distinct place than the present—feels such intense dislocation that she has to grab hold of the kitchen counter to anchor herself, fighting the panic that threatens to overwhelm her.

“Lou? Lou?”

She blinks and looks across at her mother, who is staring at her.

“You okay?”

Louise manufactures a smile. “I’m fine, Ma. Just a bit tired is all.”

She carries the mug of tea and places it on an embroidered doily on the table next to the
couch.

“Ma,” she says, “tell me about the farms.”

Asking this, even though she knows she’s being selfish and cruel, that she’s forcing her mother to recycle old, stale lies. But she needs some soothing reassurance now, even if it comes from a threadbare fiction.

Her mother clucks. “I tole you about them, Lou. A thousand blessed times.”

“Please,” she says.

Her mother sighs and shakes her head, but she smiles as
she tells Louise about growing up on a vineyard a hundred miles up-country, generations of her family laborers on the wine farm. Denise gives the fairy tale version: the clean air, the beautiful mountains and the sharp scent of the grapes being pressed. Louise, as she has since she was old enough to read, can’t stop herself from filling in the blanks: the laborers paid a pittance in cash, the rest in liquor; the so-called tot system, keeping these people drunk and enslaved, producing babies misshapen by fetal alcohol syndrome.

But she lets the truth go, for a moment, her mother’s sentimental evocation of another world a balm, soothing away the anxiety that gnaws at her.

She closes her eyes, holding her mother’s hand, letting this simple woman’s guttural voice—a voice that so shamed her the very few times she brought a school friend home—carry her into a bucolic fantasy. She sees a horse and cart crossing a shallow stream, heading toward a thatched roof cottage that stands in the shade of big, green trees.

The
Hay Wain
, of course. The painting of an English landscape by John Constable had so entranced her when, as a nine-year-old, she’d found it in a school library book that she’d done the unthinkable: torn the page out and smuggled it home in her satchel. She stuck it in the photo album she still keeps hidden in her closet. Stuck it on the page beside a picture taken on Christmas day when she was six, Louise sitting on Michael Lane’s lap out on the front lawn, smiling a gap-toothed smile, gripping a giant pink bear that almost dwarfed her.

“And Daddy?” Louise says, her eyes still closed. “Tell me about Daddy.”

Denise sniffs and produces a tissue from the sleeve of her dress, dabbing her nose and eyes, lost now in the story she has told many, many times.

A story Louise believes not one word of.

“He was a wonderful man, your father.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was handsome, like Lynnie. But taller.” She blows her nose. “I tole you all this, Lou. Why you asking me again?”

“Please, Ma. Please. Just tell me. It makes me happy. Tell me again how you met.”

And her mother tells of a dance in a rural hall, in the colored part of the small town, a charming young teacher sweeping a farm girl off her feet as he whirled her around the floor to strident banjo and accordion music. Tells her of their romance and their marriage and the two small children that came in quick succession.

Denise stops and Louise opens her eyes and sees her mother’s face, a mask of pain before she fakes a smile.

“Make me another cup of tea, Lou. Please.”

Louise nods and heads through into the kitchenette, clicking on the kettle. She doesn’t press her mother to continue. To tell her how happy they had been until one night a fire had raged through the valley, consuming a vineyard, jumping fire breaks until it reached the few small houses, whitewashed with thatched roofs and Dutch gables, that stood by the stream.

How her father had saved his wife and children and run back into the house to rescue their belongings, never to emerge.

A story lifted, of course, from one of her
mother’s soap operas.

Louise adds sugar to the tea and takes the cup across to
Denise, who smiles her thanks.

Louise says goodnight and walks into her bedroom, fetches her nightgown and PJs, then goes into the cramped bathroom and closes the door. She runs water into the tub and strips off her jeans, sitting down on the closed lid of the toilet.

She lets her fingers trace the filigree of scars on her upper legs. Some of the scars are old, almost invisible. Others more recent, still livid. And even though she has sworn that she would never do this to herself again, Louise removes the razor blade hidden in the folds of her pajamas and lays the cold metal against her skin for a second, closing her eyes, allowing the toxic rage that has haunted her since she was in the kitchen with Michael Lane to course through her. And, as she has learned to do, she directs that rage at herself.

Louise opens her eyes and slices
at her leg, the blade biting through skin into her flesh, the blood flowing red and clean and clear, the pain sharp and purifying.

Lane wakes in darkness with a dry mouth. He reaches across for the familiar form of his wife, but his hand finds nothing but a rumpled comforter and he remembers that he has fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the bed in the spare room.

His swollen bladder has woken him and as he edges off the bed his
pants cut into his groin and he feels the pain in his testicles. The violence of the last two nights returns to him in a montage worthy of one of his son’s bloodiest DVDs and by the time he gets to his feet his breath is coming in the short gulps of the asthmatic or the ancient.

He has to quell an urge to head into the marital bedroom, under the pretext of using the en-suite bathroom, knowing that, desperate for comfort, he’ll crawl into bed with Beverley.

You pathetic bastard, he says to himself as he limps down the passageway, his stockinged feet making no sound on the wooden floor. He has to pass Chris’s old room, the door standing ajar, his son snoring within. When he walks by the bedroom that was his for fifteen years Lane hears nothing behind the closed door. Bev has always been a quiet sleeper.

He clicks on the light of the guest bathroom. Chris has moved some of his toiletries in: a toothbrush with splayed bristles, a can of Axe deodorant and disposable razor. A wet towel and a soiled pair of boxers lie on the floor.

Lane unzips as he heads to the toilet, his stream of urine painfully arrested when he sees a huge turd coiled in the bowl. This is no floater, bobbing back from the maelstrom, this is a dump festooned with wads of toilet paper, his son exiting without bothering to flush.

Lane has to hit the handle three times to clear the bowl. Finally he gets to relieve himself, his penis and bladder throbbing in sympathy with his bruised balls. He inspects his urine for blood but finds none.