Strong Medicine (16 page)
Authors: Angela Meadon
My office was always cold. It was the high, corrugated iron roof and lack of any insulation that did it. I kept a small fan-heater under my desk, aimed resolutely at my ankles, but there was nothing to keep the heat in. The little fan would squeak and rattle its way through the day, pumping out scorchingly hot air, and I would still spend most of the time shivering. Unless it was summer, in which case it was like roasting yourself in your very own solar oven.
At least I didn’t suffer alone. Imperial Plastics’ two other employees shivered it out with me in our ceiling-less cubicle office. Eliot and Gideon were our internal salesmen. They wrangled phones, served customers and spent their days digging through boxes in the dusty warehouse that took up most of the building. It had taken me almost a year to get to know the staggering number of different pipe fittings and all their infinite variations. Eliot and Gideon could pick even the most obscure fittings in a matter of seconds.
Our little office was built out of dry wall and separated the warehouse itself from the walk-in customer service desk. Really, it was nothing more than a big, empty window and a long shelf that the guys used to give the customers their pipe fittings. Steven had grabbed my ass once while I served a customer, using the counter as cover. It’s a pity there were no security cameras on our side of the counter.
Our lecherous manager had his own office on the other side of the service area. It had lace curtains over the windows and an air conditioner. He didn’t spend much time in it. But when he did, like now, I could hear the tinny sounds of heavy metal belting out of his PC speakers.
I sneered at the closed door to his office, something I could never do to his face. Shitty as the job was, answering phones and printing invoices all day while being eye-fucked by every man who walked in, it was the only job I had.
“How’s the search going?” Eliot stood next to my desk. Towered over it would be a more accurate description. I’d never met a taller man in my life. Looking up at him gave me vertigo.
“It’s slow,” I said, pulling my gaze away from Steven’s closed door to offer Eliot a small smile.
“We were so worried when we heard,” he said. His eyes, always slightly bloodshot from his preference for Black Label, brimmed with tears. I had to blink back tears of my own. I’d never realized that this man might care so much for a child he’d only met twice during the three years we’d worked together.
“Thank you for your concern.” My voice broke and I cleared my throat, trying to keep steady. Trying to keep my emotions under control.
“We didn’t think you’d come back to work so soon. Only a week. When something like this happens in our community, the mother will mourn until the child is found.”
“I wish I had that option.” I really did. The last place I wanted to be right now was in this dust-laden shit hole, shivering my ass off over weak coffee, while my daughter’s kidnapper got further and further away. If he was even running at all.
The phone on Eliot’s desk droned from among its bed of papers. “If you need anything…”
I turned my attention back to the yellowed PC monitor in front of me and set about capturing the sixteenth invoice for the day. I had a huge backlog to work through, at least three hundred of them. My mother would say it was proof that I was indispensable to the company, the fact that nobody else had captured the invoices. Truth is everyone else here was too ass-lazy to spend their time on someone else’s job.
As I bent to my task, my cell phone rang.
“Ms. du Toit? It’s detective Nyala. Can you talk?”
My mind ran through every possible reason he’d be calling in the heartbeat before I answered. They had found Lindsey and she was unharmed. They’d found her but she’d been raped. She’d been mutilated. She was dead. The possibilities stretched out before me, dark and bloody.
“Just a minute.” My voice came out a strangled squeak. I stood and walked out into the parking lot in front of the building. The anemic warmth of the sun was a welcome relief from the frigid office.
“Okay,” I said. “We can talk now. What is it?” I was ready for whatever news Nyala had for me. My hands shook so hard that my earring clattered against the side of my cell phone.
“We need to discuss Lindsey’s disappearance,” Nyala said.
“Do you want me to come to the station?”
“No, no. This is not something we can talk about there. It’s…complicated.”
“What do you mean?” This conversation was not going the way I’d expected it to. I couldn’t yet decide if that was a relief or more cause to worry.
“All the stuff you’ve been doing. You’re not helping. We need you to stop.”
“What?” The word tore out of my mouth, the first crack in the dam of emotions I was trying to hold back.
“You keep…interfering. We need you to back off.”
“Back off! You must be kidding!” I shouldn’t shout at him. He was a cop, after all, and they didn’t see the world the same way the rest of us did. They had a badge and a gun and a government too stuck up its own ass to deal with accidental officer-involved shootings. “I’m the only one doing any goddamn thing to find my daughter, unless you count vague assurances and excuses. You and your partner haven’t done a thing to find her! My daughter could be dead already!”
“Look.” I could hear the strain in Nyala’s voice, but I couldn’t tell if it was anger or fear. “This is a dangerous situation. For you, not just for your daughter. You don’t understand what’s going on here. The people involved. They kill people who interfere with their operations. It doesn’t matter who you are. They have powers we can’t fight. They have friends we can’t get to. It’s safer for everyone if you accept what has happened and move on.”
“Move on?” I yelled into the phone, spit flying from my lips. My hands bunched so tight I thought the phone would crack. “Fuck. YOU!”
I threw the phone against the wall, screaming a wordless wail. It clattered to the pavement, the case split open and the battery tumbled out. Had he really just said that I must accept my daughter’s abduction? That I should move on? Nyala and his insufferable partner might be able to turn a blind eye, but there was no way I would.
I collected my phone and fit the pieces back together as I returned to my desk. My whole body went numb, my arms turned to lead and my insides knotted into a tangle of dread and anger. I stared at the invoice in front of me until the words blurred and tears dripped onto the paper. I couldn’t do this. Not yet. I couldn’t sit here and pretend everything was going well when my daughter might be gone forever.
“Tell the boss I’ve gone home,” I said as I walked past Eliot with my head down, hoping he wouldn’t see my tears.
I awoke with the last light of the evening seeping through the curtains. The house was thick with the smell of beef and vegetable
stew. Petey’s happy giggles drifted up to me and danced through me like butterflies on a summer breeze. Besta and Johan provided a tense counterpoint to the toddler’s happiness. Their words carried frustration and anger through the house.
I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting around the dinner table with my family. Lindsey’s absence would be too stark. What if Petey asked about her? He was the only member of the family who didn’t understand what had happened to Lindsey. What would I tell him if he asked?
I pressed my palms against my eyes. This was my life now, apparently. Detective Nyala thought I should just get used to it. How could I possibly do that? Tears slid down my temples and pattered onto the duvet beneath me. I never realized how much water was in my body until it all decided to leak from my eyes. I had a never-ending supply of tears, and a bottomless well of grief to pour them into.
“
Kos
!” Besta’s voice echoed through the house as she called the family to dinner. My body was too heavy to lift and I lay on my mattress, conscious of every ache from my throat to my feet. There must be something serious enough in the inventory to keep me away from the dinner table. In the end, unable to come up with a good reason to stay away, I relented and made my way down to the kitchen.
Everyone was seated by the time I arrived. Their faces froze and the laughter left the room when I walked in. Sue pulled Petey against her body, eliciting a squeal of protest. Her brown eyes danced away from me, the smile died on her lips.
“Ah, good, you’re here.” Besta walked around the table, squeezing between the counter and Thomas’s chair. She enfolded me in a warm, slightly moist hug, and placed a fleshy kiss on my cheek. “How was work?”
“The same as usual.” I unfolded myself from her embrace and filled a bowl with the fragrant stew.
Sue kept flicking nervous glances at me while I ate. Nobody spoke. Lindsey’s absence at the table weighed upon all of us, like a fallen tree pinning us to the bottom of a river.
The room rang with the sounds of cutlery and Petey’s incessant chatter. The most he elicited was a mumbled response from Thomas or Sue.
Then it happened. The moment I’d been dreading.
“Where’s Lindsey?”
“Shh!” Sue and Mom shushed him at the same time.
I placed my spoon carefully back in the bowl. A lump of
wors
floated in the broth like a turd in the bath. I watched it for a moment, the silence in the room broken only by my deep, deliberate breaths.
“I don’t know.” The honest answer. The one I didn’t want to utter. The only one I had.
“What do the cops say?” Sue asked. Her reluctance to talk about Lindsey vanished and curiosity took its place.
I balled my hands into fists on the table top. “Not much. Less than nothing.”
“They haven’t found any leads yet?” Thomas asked.
“The opposite,” I said. “They won’t act on any of the leads I’ve given them. We found her bag.”
Johan nodded sagely, like he’d personally found it in the
veld
.
“We found an eyewitness who says he saw Lindsey talking to a man on the afternoon she disappeared. I even found a man who bragged to his sister about abducting Lindsey. The cops haven’t done anything with any of it. They won’t.”
“What do you mean they won’t?” Thomas asked.
“One of them phoned me. Told me to back off. Told me the person who did it was connected and they couldn’t do anything to help.”
“
Nee, fok dit,
” Sue said. She ran her fingers through Petey’s hair, brushing the unruly blond strands neatly across his forehead. “I couldn’t sit back and do nothing.”
“Maybe they are right.” The room echoed with the last words, all sounds of eating stopped. I bit my tongue, drew a deep breath and turned to face Thomas.
“What did you say?” My voice was a whisper, like the scales of a snake rustling
veld
grass.
Thomas coughed, looked around the table for support. Everyone else avoided his gaze. “It’s just that they know what’s best, Erin. They deal with this all the time.”
Johan nodded in agreement and drank from a half-empty bottle of beer.
“I can’t believe you would say that, she’s my daughter.”
“I know, I know. It’s just…”
“Maybe if you gave them more time?” Sue said.
I wanted to punch them both in their smug faces, to claw out their eyes and spit in their hair.
“How dare you? I’d expect Sue to say something like that, but not you, Tommy.”
“Excuse me?” Sue’s voice rose in indignation and Johan chuckled.
“You heard me, bitch. You know what? Fuck you if you think I’m going to give up on my daughter, you’re wrong. Go fuck yourselves.”
I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t be surrounded by people who would give up on their own family. I stood up from the table, too angry to eat anymore, despite the fact that I’d only had a few bites of my dinner.
“Erin, please?” Besta clutched at my sleeve and I shook her hands away.
My fingers itched for a cigarette and my mouth watered at the thought. I grabbed a pack of Camels from the counter and went to stand on the balcony outside. The door slammed behind me and frigid air nipped at my cheeks.
Mr. Botha’s overworked broom stood next to his door. He’d be out again when the sun rose, sweeping the coal dust into clouds.
I looked up at the crescent moon; a bright star burned next to it. My father had taught me that it was a planet, Venus. Or was it Jupiter? I could never remember. He also said that if we drove an hour out of the city we’d see more stars than we could believe. Whole galaxies even. All I could see from here was the constellation of Brixton Tower, the galaxy of Sandton City, and the myriad other lights that marked the pulse of Johannesburg.
We used to have a telescope when my father was still alive, and books filled with beautiful photos of gas clouds and things in outer space. Besta had given them all away after he died. She’d said it was too painful for her to be surrounded by his things. Should I give Lindsey’s things away? Maybe to an orphanage or something?
I lit a cigarette, sucked the smoke deep into my lungs and held it until my chest burned. My phone rang as I coughed the smoke out. I checked the caller ID, it was Busi.
“What’s up?” I tried to sound calm and positive when I answered.
“Not much,” Busi said. “I just wanted to check up on you. Any progress?”
I sighed. “Nothing yet, if you believe the cops, but I’ve found the guy who abducted Lindsey.”
“No shit! What did the cops do?”
Another lungful of smoke burned its way down my throat. “Nothing. Apparently they know who it is. They’re protecting him.”
“No way,” Busi said. “They told you that?”
“Yeah, I got a call today. Told me to back off.”
“You going to?”
“I don’t know.” I flicked the
stompie
over the railing and watched the ash splatter on the bricks below. “I don’t know what is left to do.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
I looked at my watch. It was just past eight o’clock. Busi would struggle to find a taxi this late. “It’s too late now. Can you come tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up. I looked out over the city once more and headed up to bed. I had no more ideas. Nowhere to turn.
I changed into my pajamas and got into bed. Darkness swallowed me.
#
I danced until every muscle in my body screamed for relief. I danced until the sound of the beads and the heat of the fire pushed all thoughts from me. Then I collapsed, the sand pressing into my breasts and scraping skin from my knees and my cheek.
“It is too late,” a voice spoke from the darkness. “There is nothing you can do now.”
An old man walked into the circle of light around the fire. He wore a dappled gold leopard skin over his shoulders and leopard tails hung from a belt around his waist. He held a staff with long grey feathers hanging from one end. He sat in the sand next to me.
“Your daughter has been taken by a
n inyanga
,” he said. “He will take from her what can never be given back. You must fight for her.”
He touched the feathers to my forehead and I awoke, soaked with sweat, my blankets twisted around my legs.