Strong Medicine (12 page)
Authors: Angela Meadon
Lerato ‘Betty’ Mnandi
23 October 2005
Mbabane Police Station
Please Note: This confession was taken when Lerato Mnandi was brought in for questioning about the disappearance of her daughter, Busiwe. The aunty had notified us that the child had gone missing. We questioned Mrs. Mnandi first.
My husband woke me early in the morning and said we must go for a walk, and I must bring the baby. We went into the hills. We walked for a long time, further than I’ve ever walked before. We were very far away from the village. There were no people around. I hadn’t seen anybody in a long time.
He found a river and we stopped there for some water and I fed the baby.
Then my husband told me that he’d had a dream the night before.
He said the ancestors told him that they would give him a cure for AIDS if he killed one of us and drank our blood.
He said he dreamed that he was holding two insects, a big one and a little one. The big one was me and the little one was the baby. He decided to open his hand, and the one that flew away would be spared. The big one flew away so that is why we have to kill the baby.
He told me I must hold the baby, but I couldn’t. I shouted at him. I told him I wouldn’t do it. I told him there must be another way.
He picked up a rock and hit me here, on the head.
I fell on the floor and I went unconscious.
When I woke up, the baby was dead. He had cut her. And he was wrapping the pieces in plastic bags.
When he was finished he made me carry the bags back to the village. He told me the ancestors were happy about what we had done. He said that I must be proud. But I can’t be proud. I hate him. He killed my baby.
- Villager, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.
#
“It’s very bad news.” Busi blew her nose in a tissue.
I tried to keep the car on the road through a veil of tears which blurred everything in front of me into a grey mess.
“We must go to the cops immediately,” I said.
“These guys use
muti
to protect themselves from the cops,” Busi said.
“Ag, that stuff doesn’t really work. It’s superstition.”
I could feel Busi’s gaze on me.
“After what you’ve just been through, do you really believe that?”
I wasn’t sure what I had just gone through. “It was weird, and there are some things I can’t explain, but that doesn’t mean magic is real.”
“But you believe her about Lindsey being taken by an
inyanga
?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. It felt so real. I’m going to tell the cops anyway. Maybe they will do something about it.”
I parked on the street outside the police station and had to walk around a drunken teenager throwing up in the street. A woman hovered over him, trying to elicit his mother’s phone number and getting nothing but retching in response.
I sighed in relief when I saw that there wasn’t a huge queue in the reception area. I walked up to the counter and hailed an officer with his feet up on the desk, who was eating a sandwich. He rolled his eyes as he stood up.
“Yes?” He brushed crumbs off the front of his uniform and let them fall to the floor. There was a smudge of tomato sauce next to his badge.
“I’m looking for Detective Nyala or Brits.” I had to fight the urge to wipe the tomato sauce off his chest. Lindsey always spilled sauce on her clothes. No matter how often I told her to eat over her plate. Every dinner. Without fail.
“They’re on lunch.” The officer sucked at a piece of food stuck between his back teeth. “Should be back soon.”
“Is it okay if I wait?”
The cop shrugged and returned to his lunch.
I took a seat and pressed my head into my hands. My eyes hurt from all the crying. My sleeves were damp with tears. Busi put her hand on my shoulder and brushed my hair behind my ear.
We waited almost an hour in the wood-paneled reception room. It was so old-fashioned I expected to see a “
Blankes aleen
” sign on the wall.
Detective Nyala arrived just before two in the afternoon. Brits followed him into the police station, brushing crumbs from his faded corduroy jacket.
Nyala offered a tight smile when he saw me. He ushered Busi and me into the interview room we’d used before.
“What can we do for you today, Ms. du Toit?” Nyala asked as he sat behind the desk and took out a notepad. I’d never met anybody as obsessed with taking notes as these two guys were.
“You could tell me you’d found my daughter.” An hour of waiting on the hard wooden bench had eroded my patience, what little I had to begin with.
“We’re doing everything we can,” Brits said, a touch of his own impatience coloring his voice.
“Except finding her.” I narrowed my eyes at him, hoping the furious heat in my chest would burn a hole in his smug face.
“I’m sure you didn’t come here to antagonize us, Ms. du Toit.” Nyala stepped in to defuse the tension between Brits and me.
“I’d like to talk to you about…something that happened this morning,” I said.
“Is it related to the case?” Brits asked.
That’s what my daughter was to these men, a case. A name and a number. Just another missing child.
“Yes,” I said. “In a way it is. I went to a
sangoma
.”
Brits snorted and rolled his eyes. “Oh great, now we’re using magic to search for missing people. Where is she then?”
“Ag,
fok jou, man
. At least I’m doing something! What have you done to find Lindsey?”
Brits’s jaw tightened and his fists clenched. “We have a lot of missing people we are looking for.” He spoke slowly and deliberately. “We can’t go screaming off on every harebrained idea you bring us.”
“Harebrained?” My voice almost broke it rose so high. “I found Lindsey’s school bag. I found the eyewitness. What have you done?”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job.”
“Okay, Adriaan, why don’t you take a break?” Nyala stood up, stepping between us. “I’ll take care of this.”
Brits glared at me over detective Nyala’s shoulder for a moment before he left the room, slamming the door shut on his way out.
“Well,” Busi said. “That was unpleasant.”
“Detective Brits is old fashioned,” Nyala said. “He’s not willing to consider other options.” He sat down again and picked up his pen, the point hovering over the paper. “Now, tell me about the
sangoma.
”
I told him everything about our visit to the dingy little shack in the middle of Alex. I told him about the chanting, how she threw the bones, and about the herbs she’d burnt.
“She knew details about Lindsey’s disappearance that I hadn’t mentioned to her. I was careful not to tell her anything, but she knew. I can’t explain it. She says Lindsey’s been taken by an
inyanga.”
Nyala took careful notes as I spoke. I was finally being taken seriously, even if I didn’t quite believe it myself.
“I’m glad that you brought this information to me,” Nyala said when I was finished. “I haven’t heard of any
inyangas
here, but I will ask around, see if any of my contacts have heard of someone like that.”
“Thank you.” I said.
“I just want you to understand that this kind of thing…
inyangas
and all that, it doesn’t really happen here. In the city. You might get these kinds of people in the villages in the rural areas, but not here.”
“Are you telling me you’re not going to do anything with this information either? Like the eyewitness and the bag?” My chest clamped tight around my heart, I fought to draw breath. These fucking cops really weren’t going to do anything to help me find Lindsey.
“No, not at all. I’m going to do everything I can to help your daughter.” Nyala glanced at the door through which Brits had left. I could almost hear the ‘but I can’t speak for my partner,’ at the end of his sentence.
My face burned and I ground my teeth. I was in the police station, surrounded by cops. This was not the place to lose my temper.
Busi stood and thanked detective Nyala before scooting me out the door and into the parking lot.
“I see what you mean,” she said as we got into my car. “They don’t care, do they?”
#
The game ground to a halt as I got out of my car, carrying two heavy shopping bags. The kids stared at me, wide-eyed, as I made my way across the parking lot. I wanted to smile and ask them if they were having fun, but I couldn’t force my face into the correct shape. So I hunched my shoulders and took the stairs two at a time.
Besta and Johan were sitting around the kitchen table, and a half-dozen empty cans of Black Label stood between them.
Could these two stand each other without booze?
I tried not to pay any attention to the cans.
Surely my mom deserved better than an unemployable drunk?
“Any news?” my mom asked when I hefted the shopping bags onto the counter and started unpacking the groceries.
“Nah,” I said. “Spoke to the cops today. Still the same.”
I couldn’t tell her about my visit to the
sangoma
. She’d lose her mind. In her world, “those people” got their powers by speaking to the devil. If she thought I was getting mixed up with them she’d lose her shit.
Rhea’s pronouncement that Lindsey had been taken by an
inyanga
was even worse. I couldn’t tell her that without actual evidence. It would destroy her.
“I’m sure they will find her soon,” Besta said, blindly optimistic as always.
“I don’t think they really care,
Ma
.” I took the last item out of the shopping bag, a big bottle of vodka. I grabbed a clean glass from the dish rack and sat at the table.
The bitter tang of cheap liquor stung my nose when I cracked the lid on the bottle. It was like swallowing nails, but I forced a glassful down and refilled for a second pass. I needed the brain-numbing oblivion of cheap vodka more than anything right now.
We sat together, the three of us with our own demons, united in our desire to obliterate them with alcohol. It didn’t take long.
I had grown up listening to the synthesized bell sounding every Sunday morning at eight sharp. This morning I was walking through the church’s heavy doors when the bell rang. Besta had ironed our clothes and polished our shoes the night before, while I dozed in a vodka-induced stupor.
The interior of the church was another throwback from the good old days, all wood paneling and carpet the colour of spilled blood that had been worn thin down the aisle. The people around us smiled and greeted us as we found open spaces on the pews. The woman next to Johan frowned at him and tossed her dark brown curls over her shoulder.
“He smells like he’s still drunk from last night,” she loud-whispered to the man sitting beside her.
“Bitch.” I glared at her, but she didn’t look at me again.
When all the congregants had shuffled in and taken their seats, the organ warbled to life in an airy attempt at a hymn I didn’t recognize. The organist was an old woman. Her glasses perched on her nose as her arthritic fingers made slow progress through the hymn.
Once the song stuttered to a close, an equally grey-haired minister stood at the front of the hall and started preaching. I quickly grew tired of his mumbled words; the sermon was about charity and giving to the less fortunate. Nothing inspirational. My mind wandered in the stuffy air and I found myself falling into an old habit I’d developed as a child, imagining life stories for the people in the pews around me. Perhaps the man with the bald spot and sweat stains on his shirt was a lawyer, his wife found out he was cheating on her and he was here to find forgiveness. The woman next to Besta, with two fidgeting children pressed in beside her, might be here hoping that Jesus would help her children learn to behave.
So I passed the hour inventing stories for everyone around me. Everyone except the snarky bitch who’d complained about Johan. Her story was probably worse than anything I could come up with.
When the sermon was over, we filed out of the hall and were on our way to our car when a nervous-looking couple stepped in front of us. The woman was short and thick in the waist and thighs. She wore a dark blue dress and sensible shoes. Her long straight hair formed a waterfall on either side of her face. She had a friendly face despite the worry lines on her forehead and dark rings under her eyes. She looked to be more or less my age. Her husband was older, also neatly dressed, but with a baseball cap pulled down to his ears. Rowdy tufts of brown hair stuck out from under the cap.
“You’re the family with the little girl who’s gone missing?” the lady asked.
I stopped dead, my left leg hovering above the path. My skin prickled as I tried to find the right words to answer her. I hadn’t expected people to recognize us. None of my friends were the church-going type. My mom came here often, but her preference for alcohol and Johan meant she didn’t have many friends in the church. We hadn’t been on TV or anything.
“Uh, yes,” I said. “How do you know?”
“We have - had - a son in Lindsey’s class last year. His name was Luke? Armitage?”
I hadn’t met many of Lindsey’s friends. She’d brought a few girls home with her after school during the earlier years, but our house was not exactly an environment conducive for little girls.
The name seemed familiar, and I could see the pain and fear in the man’s face. Luke’s mother looked so hopeful, like she was desperate for me to remember her son, so I forced a smile and lied. “Of course, Luke. I remember him.”
“We’ll be in the car.” Besta grabbed Johan’s arm and steered him down the grass-bordered path to the parking lot.
“It’s been almost a year now,” the woman said.
I was about to ask her what had happened a year ago, but the anguish pouring out of them made it all too clear.
Her husband glared at me from over her shoulder. “The cops say they’ll keep his case open, but they won’t do a damn thing about it.”
“The cops?” Details prickled at the back of my mind. A vague memory. Had Lindsey said something to me at the time? Was Lindsey in the same place Luke had been taken?
“We shouldn’t speak about this here.” The woman glanced nervously at the congregants filing past us. Nobody took any notice. “Will you meet us later, to discuss Lindsey’s disappearance?”
“What do you know about Lindsey?” I stepped in close to the woman, she winced and pulled back. “She’s been gone almost a week! I’m running out of time, please, you must tell me.”
I wanted to grab her clothes, pull her hair, anything to get the information out of her. But we were standing outside a church. I would have to be patient. I took a deep breath and released it slowly.
“Where would you like to meet?” I asked.
“We could go for coffee at the mall?” she suggested.
“Yeah, okay.” I would have to contain my nerves until we were in more anonymous surroundings. “I’ll go there right away.”
They nodded and smiled. The old man took his hat off and scrunched it between his thick fingers. They walked down the path toward the parking lot, shoulders hunched, their bodies pressed up against each other for support.
Would I end up like them in a year? I shook my head. It couldn’t happen. I didn’t have anyone to lean on.