Strong Medicine (14 page)
Authors: Angela Meadon
-Testimony of survivor, Limpopo province, South Africa
#
The clock on the wall showed that it was 8:45am.
A cold wind howled through the brown-leaved trees outside, tugging their branches back and forth. The weather man on the radio said there was snow on the Drakensburg Mountains. I’d still never seen proper snow. I’d promised Lindsey that I’d take her to the ‘berg this year if there was proper snowfall. I would get her back and I would take her to the mountains. I would take her this year regardless of how much snow fell.
I stood against the wall, making sure I wasn’t part of the queue, watching the front door for Brits and Nyala. They arrived at the same time. Nyala neatly dressed in blue jeans and a black blazer, Brits in loose jeans and tracksuit top with holes in the seams.
“Ms. du Toit.” Brits pressed his lips together and narrowed his eyes at me. “How good to see you first thing on a Monday morning. I trust you have something important to share with us.”
I showed him my teeth in what I hoped was a suitably angry smile. The man rubbed me the wrong way. I would have told him to fuck himself again, if he wasn’t on Lindsey’s case. I might still do it before the day was over.
“Why don’t we go into the interview room?” Nyala stepped between us, put his hand on my shoulder, and guided me towards the office. I was getting a little too familiar with that room.
Nyala and I sat on opposite sides of the table while Brits took up his customary position against the wall.
“What is this about, Ms. du Toit?” Detective Nyala steepled his long, elegant fingers and tried to smile at me. I could see the sharp edge of frustration beneath his tight lips and hard eyes. This was not going to be easy.
The fiery resolve that had burned in my chest all morning faded in the presence of these two cold men. Could I really accuse these two cops of being in on a kidnapping ring, in their own station? It was one thing to call-out lazy cops, another thing entirely to say they were covering up muti murder.
I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. I’d get locked up.
My hands shook and a cold nail of fear hammered into the base of my skull.
“
Coo-eee!
” Detective Brits snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “Great, she’s gone vegetable on us.”
In that moment, Detective Brits was everything I hated about my situation. He held the power. I was trapped in his station. Like I’d been trapped by Patrick. Years of resentment and frustration exploded in me like a supernova.
I lashed out, grabbed his hand and flattened the knuckles into the tabletop. The plastic table bent under the pressure as I leaned all of my weight on his hand. I felt his knuckles grinding together under my palm.
“Ahhh! Get off me!” Brits twisted his arm to try wriggle free and I increased the pressure.
“Ms. du Toit, please…” Nyala hovered next to me, his chair thumped against the wall as he stood next to us, arms held out, hands just above mine. “This isn’t necessary.”
No, it wasn’t strictly necessary, but it felt good anyway. I released Brits’s hand and watched him as he clasped it to his chest and backed away to his place by the wall.
“I want answers,” I said while the balance of power was still in my favor. “What happened to my daughter? What are you doing to find her? No more bullshit.”
“Erin.” Nyala stepped closer to me, his expression softening. “I wish I had good news for you. I wish I could tell you that we found your daughter and everything was fine and she’d be coming home.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “But I can’t.”
“What about all the info I’ve brought you?”
“We’re glad you’re so committed to helping,” Nyala said.
Brits snorted and glared at me.
“Really? It seems like you’d rather I disappeared.”
“Well,” Nyala said. “It would be easier for us to concentrate on doing our job if you would… step back. But I understand where you’re coming from.”
“I spoke to Luke Armitage’s parents today,” I said.
“Oh, for fuck sakes.” Brits threw his arms in the air. “They are crazy. They won’t let go of the idea that we were involved in their son’s disappearance.”
“Were you?” My skin flushed hot and cold at the same time, and my armpits grew damp against my shirt.
“Of course not,” Nyala said. “It’s difficult sometimes, to believe that something like that could happen to your child. Mr. and Mrs. Armitage are still coming to terms with their loss.”
His mouth was moving and he was making all the right sounds, but something in Detective Nyala’s dark brown eyes made me wary. A spark burned there, deep down. I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What exactly have you done so far?”
“We’ve interviewed eyewitnesses,” Nyala said.
“We’ve canvassed the neighborhood,” Brits said.
“We’ve spoken to our informants in the gangs that we know specialize in this kind of thing,” Nyala said. “But, unfortunately, we haven’t been able to make any arrests yet.”
“Do you even have a suspect?” Their answers were like something out of a bad cop show on TV. They had barely done anything.
“Please,” Nyala said. “Try to understand Ms. du Toit. We don’t have anything to go on. And we have many other missing children cases.”
“More than a hundred,” Brits said.
“We’re doing everything we can, Ms. du Toit.”
Be that as it may, they were not doing enough.
#
I opened the door of my car, almost fell into the chair, and pulled the squeaky door shut. The tears finally broke from my eyelids and took the last shreds of my control with them. I slammed my fists into the steering wheel. Hammered at it over and over and over again until my angry yell subsided into hopeless sobs.
How could this have happened to my baby? I’d done everything I could to raise her to be safe. I’d told her about stranger danger and how to be alert and not trust people she didn’t know. Where had I gone wrong?
I started my car, the steering wheel shook with the beat of the engine, like a mechanical heart. I drove home on autopilot, my mind too clouded to focus on the road in front of me. The morning rush hour traffic had died down to a steady stream.
The house was quiet. Thomas’s curtain was open and I caught a glimpse of the disaster zone that was his room. It was like something you’d see on those hoarder programs on TV. I closed the front door and slipped into the kitchen. The table was covered with beer cans and flyers of Lindsey, as usual. A thin streamer of steam rose from the kettle, and a wet tea bag lay on the counter. Besta had made tea recently. She was probably in her bed with a You magazine.
I found my bottle of vodka in the back of the fridge. A tiny voice in my mind said something about drinking in the morning, but this was a special occasion.
I locked myself into my bedroom, climbed under the duvet and took a long swig of bitter, cold vodka. I never let Lindsey eat or drink in the bed; she always spilled. She would give me such shit if she could see me now.
I put the bottle down on my night stand and reached under the bed. My fingers brushed up against Lindsey’s school bag and I pulled it out. I propped it up against my legs and opened the zip.
I didn’t want to go into her bag. It was her space. Private. But it was also the only link I had to her, to the little girl she had been when everything was normal, and before she’d been stolen from me. Maybe I could find something, some piece of her that would make her real again. Make her present.
The first thing I found was a sandwich bag with half a peanut butter sandwich in it. Green and blue mold was starting to frost the bread.
“Ugh.” I dropped it into the dustbin next to the bed.
I took out a few of her books and paged through them. They were filled with her neat, cursive handwriting, and lots of doodles. Blue ball-point pictures of trees and sunsets rimmed the edges of almost every page. Happy bunny faces peeked out every now and again.
Seeing the bunny faces reminded me of the toy bunny Lindsey kept on the zip of the bag. I checked all the zippers, and felt around inside the bag, but the bunny was gone. A fresh wave of despair crashed over me, bringing more tears to my eyes.
My cell phone rang, jolting me out of my misery. I didn’t recognize the number, but the voice was all too familiar.
“Erin? It’s me, Patrick.”
“Have you found her yet?”
Patrick cut straight to the chase. The way he said it, as if it was my responsibility to find her. I felt the hair on my neck stand up, my stomach turned over and a sour taste flooded my mouth. It was the one thing I could rely on him to do, to piss me off.
I took a deep breath, tried to unclench my fists. “We haven’t found her yet,” I said through clenched teeth. “But the cops are following up some good leads. There’s an eyewitness. I found him.” I felt it necessary to add that, to lay claim to the one lead we actually had in Lindsey’s disappearance. It was more than he’d done.
“Ah, crap,” he said. I could hear him tapping a pencil on something plastic on the other side of the phone. It was his tell. He always tapped something when he got nervous or angry. Right before he’d start tapping things with his fists. “Can we meet?”
“Ah, I don’t think—”
“Please, Erin? I need to see you. I’m worried.”
It was not a good idea. Seeing Patrick again would undo me, set me back into the same angry, helpless, hopeless place I’d been when he left ten years ago. “No, Patrick, I can’t. I shouldn’t have come to see you last week.”
“She’s my daughter too, you know. I can’t sit here knowing she’s missing and not do anything about it. Please?”
I scratched at my thigh, he tapped the pencil faster.
“No Patrick. Don’t come here. I don’t want to see you. I’ll let you know if she comes home.”
We’d been sharing this bed for a decade. Lindsey and I were always close, physically and emotionally. She was starting to get defensive about her space, a normal change for a girl becoming a teenager, but she still loved curling up in bed with me at night. We would lie facing each other, the moonlight filtering in from outside, and she would tell me all about her day. Her blue eyes would sparkle as she recounted a funny story from math class, or an exciting moment from netball.
I should get up, have a shower, and get ready for work. I’d already missed a week in the office. How long was too long? They couldn’t fire me, surely. Fuck it. If they did I’d be free of Steve’s grabby hands.
I pulled my duvet over my head and tried not to think about how quiet and empty the room was.
When the first birds started singing, I heard Besta get out of bed and shuffle down the hall into the bathroom. I imagined the photos on the walls looking down on her as she went past. There were a couple of her and my father on their wedding day. One of me and Thomas when we were kids, building a sand castle on the beach in Durban. There were a collection of black-and-white photos of men and women with stern faces, the men with long beards. They were our proper Afrikaans family, the du Toits from back in the day. They all looked terminally depressed.
I had a small collection of photos of Lindsey on the wall, among the dour family. One photo from each year at school, from nursery school to now. I’d walked past those photos every day for years. They were so familiar that they’d almost faded into the background. Taken for granted.
Would I get to add more photos to the collection?
I lay in bed as the house came to life around me. Petey’s laughter echoed through the sullen gloom, accompanied by the sound of Thomas blowing raspberries on his stomach.
Johan coughed and stomped his way down the hall, hammered on the bathroom door and demanded Besta vacate.
It wasn’t fair. Life should not carry on. Not without Lindsey. Anger flooded my chest and I balled my hands into fists, wadding the duvet up between my fingers. How dare they? How could they just go on as if nothing had changed? As if my baby girl wasn’t missing.
By the time I made it out of bed, everyone except Besta had left the house. She sat at the kitchen table, as usual, a chipped tea cup held in her fleshy hands.
“You not going to work today?” Besta asked. Her face was pale, her skin drawn into tight creases around her down-turned mouth. I could see myself in her features, or maybe I saw her in my features. Give or take twenty years of heartache and alcoholism.
“
Nee
.” I shook my head. The thought of going to work made me want to cry and vomit at the same time. “Steve can manage without me for a while longer. My kid’s been kidnapped. I’m sure he will understand.”
“Wil jy ontbyt he?”
“Nee.” The idea of eating was worse than the idea of going to work and I had to swallow hard to stop my stomach from heaving. I sat down next to Besta. Only a week ago I had served Lindsey breakfast at this table. That was the last time I’d seen her. My eyes tingled and tears ran down my face. I could feel the sobs building in my chest, massive, hard gulps of anguish that needed to escape. I held them in until my ribs ached and my throat burned.
I surrendered to the pain, collapsing in a shuddering heap on the kitchen table. Besta put her hands on my shoulders and I could vaguely hear her humming a lullaby in the gaps between sobs.
“Can I have a cup of tea?” I asked when I’d cried enough of the pain out that I could talk again.
“Ja, of course,
liefie
!” Besta stood and started putting together two cups of tea. The steel lid of the old jam jar unscrewed, making a familiar pop as it came open. She took out two wrinkled teabags and dropped one into each cup. A large spoonful of brown sugar followed the bags.
The kettle was just starting to boil when my phone vibrated against my thigh. I scooped it out of my pocket and glanced at the screen. Unknown number.
“Hello, Erin speaking.”
“Erin du Toit? I think I know where your daughter is.”
If I hadn’t been sitting down at the kitchen table I would have fallen over.
“Who…who is this?” I asked.
“My name is Precious,” the caller said. “I think I know where your daughter is. I can’t talk on the phone, will you meet me?”
She sounded sincere, I had taken plenty of prank calls in the week since Lindsey had disappeared and they all had a hint of mockery in their voices. Precious sounded more frightened than foolish. Still, I wasn’t about to invite every stranger into my house because they claimed to have information.
“Okay, we can meet. Where are you?”
“I live in Boksburg,” Precious said. “Can you meet me at Carnival City?”
“I can be there in an hour.”
I gulped my tea down. The hot liquid scalded my throat and washed the taste of vodka from between my teeth. I dragged my fingers through my hair.
Besta’s eyes lit up.
“Good news?” she asked.
“I hope so.” I told her what Precious had said, and then kissed her forehead before I ran out of the house.
#
I’d been to Carnival City a few times with Patrick while we were still dating and never again since. When I drove into the parking lot at 11am on Tuesday, I expected to find it empty. Instead, there were a good two hundred cars crowding the double-storey escalators that led from the parking area up to the casino entrance.
The wide promenade in front of the casino was flanked by murky ponds. White rings on blue concrete marked the water’s slow evaporation. Wide columns stood at random in the ponds, with streaks of lumpy white bird shit trailed across every surface. Two bedraggled ducks stood at the edge of the water on my right. The whole walkway was separated from the ponds by Perspex walls. I couldn’t decide if it was to stop people from drowning or refilling the ponds with puke. Probably the latter.
Three high school kids wandered towards the casino a few paces ahead of me, giggling and trailing a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. They were still in uniform. I’d like to believe that Lindsey would never cut school to hang out at the casino. She liked to push the boundaries, but she was a good kid. She made good choices.
A little train with four carriages no bigger than golf carts rumbled up to the giant revolving glass door at the front of the casino and an elderly couple disembarked. They held onto each other as they doddered up to the door.
I groaned as I passed through the carousel and into the twilight world of the casino. It was exactly as I remembered it. Luminous green, yellow and orange covered every surface; the carpet, the walls, the giant pillars with fools-hat fingers that hung over the heads of people walking beneath them. God, I hated the place. The fake cheer made me want to vomit.
The noise of the place was as much of an assault as the décor. A constant blaring of bells and beeps and tinny music piped in through crackly speakers. I went through the metal detectors at the door and turned right. The gambling floor took up the center of the building, on my right as I walked down the passage away from the door. It was surrounded with glass, like a giant fish tank full of gamblers. On my left was a succession of shops - a candy store, a biltong store, the entrance to a cinema.
I kept my head down and tried not to make eye contact with anyone as I made my way toward the arcade. Precious would be waiting at the old Wimpy in the family area.
A handful of teenagers were clustered around a zombie-shooting game in the arcade. The hall rang with their cheers, the sounds of gunshots, and a thousand other game noises as each of the machines ran through their intros. I shuffled through the maelstrom and pushed through the double doors and into the wan sunlight again.
The family entertainment area had all the charm of a freak show with none of the freaks. There was a variety of amusement park style rides and a patina of neglect. A large carousel turned slowly, two small children sitting on the horses, holding on to the grips with white-knuckle determination as the beasts wobbled and squealed around and around.
A row of roller-shutters hid the kind of skill games at which Lindsey was great — ball-tossing, ring-flinging; anything that required careful aim was right up her alley. She’d cleaned out a stall at Gold Reef City two years before. The bored teenager behind the table hadn’t thought a little girl clutching fifty bucks could win every stuffed toy he had. Lindsey had scooped the plastic balls out of the bucket he handed her, and shot each one into the first prize hoop. Every time she won a toy she had given it to a child walking past. She only kept one, a little bunny with grey fur and deep brown eyes.
I found Precious sitting by herself at a table in the empty seating area of an abandoned Wimpy. She was the only adult there. She raised a Coke can to her lips and sipped quickly. There were five other concrete tables, their plastic benches filled with teenagers laughing and making eyes at one another.
“Precious?” I asked as I drew close to the table.
She nodded and her eyes grew wide, with shock or fear, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m Erin. You called about my daughter?”
“I’m so sorry it took me so long to contact you.” Precious looked down at the table when she spoke, not willing to meet my eyes. “I am scared of what my brother will do to me, but I heard you on the radio. I’m ready to speak to you.”
She was a large woman with a round face and fingers like short, fat sausages. Her floral blouse and blue jeans had been washed until almost all the colour had faded from them. Her long, purple braids rustled together when she moved her head.
“But you’ve come to me now,” I said. “Hopefully it isn’t too late. Tell me what you know.”
“It’s my brother, Thabo.” Her voice quavered when she said his name and she took a quick sip of her Coke, like a bird pecking at a feeder. “He told me that he knows what happened to your daughter.”
She spoke slowly, glancing around at the teenagers around us. None of them was interested in us though. They all had their own teenage politics and romances to deal with.
“Please, carry on.”
“I went to visit him last week. He had money. Normally he doesn’t have anything, but he made me coffee — real coffee — and a sandwich with butter on it. He had a bunch of papers, all the same, all with a little girl on them.” Precious took another quick sip of Coke, and I gestured impatiently for her to finish the story.
“He said he’d helped a man find a girl for a
sangoma
. That girl. Lindsey.”
I hated hearing my daughter’s name come out of her mouth almost as much as I hated the woman herself at that moment. I bit back the angry words that crowded at the edge of my tongue. In the week since my baby had disappeared, Precious was the best lead I’d got. I couldn’t fuck this up and scare her away. She was frightened enough already.
“He said a man asked him to find a blond girl. He said the man has given him money before. I think he’s a witch doctor. He said the man makes
muti
from children.”
I grabbed the edge of the table as my world melted and slipped away from me.
Muti
. The word echoed and amplified in my head until I wanted to scream to get it out.
“You must take me to him.” I glared at Precious, focusing on her eyes, anchoring myself to the world through her.
“I can’t.” Precious shook her head, wiped at a mark on the table. “He’s dangerous.”
“Why did you call me then?” I slammed my fists into the table and Precious jumped, her fleshy face wobbling, and let out a small cry. “If your brother knows where Lindsey is, he could help me get her back. You must take me to him.”
Precious fiddled with her skirt and shook her head. I was losing her. She’d come this far, but her brother scared the shit out of her. There must be something I could do to make her go through with it.
“Look at this.” I took the phone out of my pocket and opened the image gallery. The camera was shitty and the photos were grainy, but they showed Lindsey alive and happy. Her huge grin wrinkled her eyes and lit her face up with joy in each image. Whether she had ice cream dripping down her fingers, or was sitting under a tree with Petey. “This is my daughter.”