The Lazarus Effect (14 page)

‘Lawd’ha mercy,’ Vee whispered.

The fir-lined gravel driveway snaking up to the house in front of her was so long you could starve to death trying to walk it. An elegant foyer with marble arches overlooked an immaculate garden, tastefully lit for the evening’s festivities. If Chlöe’s house was a mansion, the grandeur of this one had no name. A stately sprawl, that was it. The owners were clearly members of the club where champagne flowed with little restraint.

‘Hhmm, mah pipo, dey even sef got wata fountain,’ she marvelled. ‘Lookah dah fat li’l boy playin’ harp insah it.’

‘Stop acting country and stick to boardroom English,’ Joshua said sternly. ‘That’s a boy
made of stone
with a harp. Although, they are rich enough to pay for a real child to stand in a freezing fountain all night.’

‘Now I feel underdressed for all these champagne wishes and caviar dreams.’ She fussed with her hair, and caught him watching her with disturbing intensity out of the corner of her eye. ‘What? Don’t start. I’ve had a shitty day.’

She’d spent most of it waiting for news on the data on Jacqui’s computer. At last ‘The Guy’, dexterous hacker into private
records and acquirer of internet gems, had emailed his findings, and it had crushed her: forty gigabytes of uninspiring junk that any sprite in tune with the times would have on her PC. The one folder Vee had hoped would be pay dirt turned out to be nothing of the sort, just pages of initials, dates and what looked like rand value amounts. It made no sense. What had Jacqui been up to? Running some kind of extortion scam?

‘I wasn’t. Christ. I was just thinking you clean up pretty good.’

‘I clean up exceedingly well. Boardroom English.’ Vee snapped her vanity mirror closed. ‘And that wasn’t what you were thinking.’

‘Well, since you’re forcing my hand …’ Joshua’s mouth turned up a little, ‘I was imagining you with just the shoes on, nothing else …’

Vee slammed the car door. ‘Dammit, Allen, you promised me good behaviour, so if you’re gonna be carryin’ on like this all night–’

‘Aww, don’t be like that. That’s the last one, I swear. Hey, wait up, will you slow down … Haha, you can’t run in heels, can you? Now you better put on your best smile and don’t forget I brought you here, ungrateful wench. Ow, shit Vee, you hit like a guy!’

Inside, Vee did her best to keep her lips tightly pressed so her open mouth didn’t catch flies. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen wealth before, but no two displays were alike, and some display this was. Joshua steered her away from the sparkling decorations towards a waiter with a tray of bubbly flutes. ‘I know you have a
problem with focus, but that’s what you need to be doing right now. That’s the host over there: Philemon Jabulani Mtetwa.’

She snorted effervescence. Joshua’s Yankee pronunciations never failed to make her feel better about her own awkward attempts. ‘You’re pathetic. This country’s your second home – learn the lingua franca. Any one of the eleven.’

‘Bite me, I’m half Indian not Zulu. He’s a major player in the investment game. I’m talking millions upon millions.’

‘How many did he put into the WI?’

He held up far too many fingers. ‘Not him alone, through his satellite companies and co-investors. But let’s just say somebody’s getting fired if a wing isn’t named after him.’

‘How does he know the Fouries?’

‘They’re right over there. Go ask them.’

The couple was certainly not what Vee had imagined. The man was no short, overbearing dictator, but tall and not at all hard on the eye. He was doing a fine job of working the room and making nice, laughing in all the right places and pumping hands with ease and pride. His axis of rotation centred round the squat, speckle-haired Mtetwa, casually dressed himself, and a few other men in expensive, semi-formal attire. Tied to Ian by an invisible string was a fair woman, on the thin side, clad in an unsuitable shade of green that worked up her pallor. Carina was trying far too hard to look flat and uninterested; she resembled her daughter Serena as she did it. Vee narrowed her eyes. Anytime someone went that long without blinking, gremlins were hatching evil inside their skull.

‘She looks so … plain.’ Vee felt superficial for saying it, but the Carina of her imagination was grander than her husband.

‘So plain and … small.’ She turned to her date for thoughts and Joshua was gone.

Hours later, her nerves were tissue-thin. The buffet was excellent, but there was only so much that mustard-encrusted beef, artisanal bread and spicy prawns could do. Inserting herself into random conversations was easy enough, but extracting useful information was like pulling teeth. Whispers about Mtetwa barely graduated beyond the good ol’ Zulu boy made golden on a British education and a passion for business solutions for rural communities. Vee couldn’t keep her eyes off Carina, how deadpan she looked, yet her eyes kept flitting around and narrowing, especially in Ian’s direction. Any minute now she’d rip an arm off the ice sculpture and take it to her husband’s head.

Liquor oiled up the crowd. Vee flitted from one faux-intellectual conversation to the next, soaking up garbled nonsense.

‘–problem is that Malema reflects the rotten core of the government! If the crown prince can prance around accusing Anglo American of
raping
the country–’

‘–then she of all people shouldn’t be living in a dreamland. That’s what marriage is, not romance and excitement or even happiness for God’s sake, but years and years of–’

‘–gay pride. I’m sorry, but not getting on a soapbox for sexual freedom doesn’t make me
any
less of a liberal than not having black friends makes me a racist–’

‘–tiger! Then this little Japanese guy pops outta the boot, and there’s this part with the Mike Tyson punch … Can’t explain it, man, you need to just watch
The Hangover
. Best movie
ever
!’

Who
are
these people?
Vee sucked in fresh air on the gilded balcony onto which she had escaped. Why couldn’t she have been a gossip columnist? They adored these awful parties steeped in chocolate gateaux and the toxic lives of others. And where the hell was Joshua? Ah, yes, of course, her beady eye observed, laughing it up with some hottie in a backless dress. Useless punk.

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’

She turned, and nodded at the man who had appeared at her shoulder. She took her dessert plate from the chair.

‘Sorry to disturb. I’m not a smoker, but I can’t take the drivel in there any longer.’ His smile was the first genuine one of the evening. He held out his hand, pulled it back and looked at it with a crinkle of his nose, then wiped it on the front of his shirt. He offered it again. ‘Sorry, barbecue sauce there. Marcus Neethling. You work with the hospital?’

Vee shook her head. ‘Just a lowly layperson. Who diagnoses all her medical problems using Google, like everyone else.’

‘Ha. Really. I find that hard to believe. A lovely woman like yourself looks far too intelligent to trust the internet for reliable medical information.’

Vee smiled. Okay, so the good doctor was angling for more than innocent conversation and fresh air. ‘What kind of doctor are you?’

‘Psychiatrist. The psych ward staffers are the underdogs at WI. Probably why most of us didn’t show up. We weren’t even
allocated our own wing, yet we’re coping with a huge influx of referrals …’

A bell rang in the back of her mind. Psychotherapy plus Neethling. Shit. This was the guy she should’ve been paying regular visits to, the doctor to whom her old GP had referred her to get to the bottom of her … stuff. The very same she’d been on her way to see on the fateful morning that Jacqui Paulsen’s photograph dragged her into a vortex.

‘Are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

Vee threw her head back and laughed. ‘You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,’ she muttered. Then again … As her mother often said, there were lessons in chance encounters. ‘Actually, there is something that’s been knocking around my brain for a while. A friend of mine is in a psychological quagmire, if you can call it that. I know you’re off the clock, but …’

He was open and engrossed as she talked of this fictitious young woman her age, in great health and full of promise. His eyes flicked to high beam when she got to the interesting part: say this woman began,
spontaneously
, to suffer from brief, unexpected and crippling attacks for no apparent reason.

Neethling cocked his head. ‘Muscle spasms? Nausea? Dizziness? A paralysing fear that this is the final gong, the world’s about to end?’

‘Exactly! I mean, yes, come to think of it my friend mentioned those very symptoms.’

‘It’s a typical panic or anxiety attack, or chronic anxiety disorder if it’s been going on for a while.’ Neethling was a little hesitant in the beginning about embarking on what was clearly a
consultation, but was leaning into it. ‘In my opinion, and I deal with more serious mental disorders, but others would agree–’

‘Mental disorder?’

He laughed and held up his hands. ‘Hold on. That sounds too scary. Let’s call it a psychosomatic event. It stems from our normal fight or flight response, but because the trigger is sudden and unprovoked, there’re a lot of theories as to what causes it. But in a healthy person with no history of drug abuse, other mental conditions or a genetic predisposition … then a good place to start would be here.’ He tapped a finger on the side of his head.

Vee hugged her arms to her body. ‘What … How would that matter?’

‘The body and the psyche express trauma in different ways. All our systems communicate, even when we set up mind-blocks. I guess you could say the body reacts against a conscious effort to suppress the anxiety. Unfortunately, the experience is like having a meltdown.’

‘What if …’ Vee dropped her arms. They felt naked and useless by her sides, so she grabbed her glass with both hands to hide the tremor in her hands. ‘What about hallucinations?’

‘Like what, lucid dreaming? Sleep paralysis?’

‘No.’ God, how she wished. ‘A real manifestation of … shapes. Things you could touch if you weren’t completely paralysed.’

‘Visions of what, exactly?’ Neethling looked uneasy.

Vee waved a hand. ‘Ahhh. I can’t believe I’m about to ask this. What the hell. Can one of these attacks … can they open
doors to the other side? Like, make things that aren’t real come out of nowhere and … menace you?’

Neethling rubbed the bridge of his nose. Yep, Vee thought. He’s going to call the guys in white to drag me away. ‘I won’t give you a neurology lecture, but anxiety attacks stimulate many areas of the brain. They’re intense and can imitate a highly spiritual experience. Joan of Arc? Paul on the road to Damascus?’

‘Oh-h-o-o! I thought the reigning scientific theory debunking all that was schizophrenia. Or bipolar disorder. Or boring, Christian nuttery.’

Neethling laughed and put his hands up. ‘No comment, on any of that. All I’m saying is brain chemistry is complex. Don’t let it fool you – your friend, I mean – into thinking the supernatural is a possibility here. Consider the obvious. Has she ever gone through a huge trauma, physical or emotional? Something she never fully processed or let go of?’

‘It depends. I’d have to ask her what she considers traumatic,’ Vee said. ‘She’s seen a lot. Her definition’s pretty wide.’

‘There you go, then. Examine the past. Panic attacks and PTSD go hand in hand. Death, major life changes, horrific experiences like war–’

The flute stem snapped and slashed her thumb, and the glass tinkled to delicate bits on the balcony floor. A waiter materialised to clean up the mess. Mark Neethling rose to help, but Vee squeezed past him and scuttled off the balcony, leaving him staring after her with a frown.

‘I saw this medical series once,’ Vee mused aloud, taking her thumb out of her mouth, ‘about horrifying ways to die. This woman cut herself. A small knife cut, and flesh-eating bacteria got in her system and started eating her up and they had to chop her arm off to stop it.’

Joshua examined the cut. ‘Nothing’s going to dissolve your arm off,’ he said. ‘While we’re on the subject of honesty …’

‘We very much weren’t.’

‘Lately you’ve been very shady. You’re hiding something. Don’t forget you already have the talent for theft. Throw that in and you’re well on your way to turning into a full-blown criminal.’

Vee put her finger back in her mouth and looked away. She was in no mood to be psychoanalysed twice in one night. She felt stupid enough for giving a virtual stranger access to poke around her life, her guarded hurts. What had she been expecting – that Neethling could magic up a cure in one sitting? ‘You should get better friends. The open-book kind, who don’t lie or keep secrets.’

He cussed the air blue. ‘Why don’t you just talk to me? What could be so terrible? And before you answer that, weigh in everything else I already know about you. And you about me.’

This is different. This time I’m being haunted, or I’m possessed, or I’m certifiable. I’m terrified and I don’t want you laughing at me. No … I couldn’t bear it if you gave up on me
. Quilting together the patches of Jacqui’s story was her problem, and the process was much more convoluted than it looked in the movies. Movie ghosts introduced themselves, and then went about sprinkling helpful clues for the intrepid heroine to find. Jacqui was a lazy, taciturn diva.

‘I ever told you the story about my Grammah?’

‘You’ve told me a hundred stories about your grandmother. She practically raised you.’

‘The other one. The one I never talk about.’

Joshua’s eyebrows jumped to his hairline. ‘The one that throws bones and shit?’

‘She’s a
zo
, like a spirit medium … cleanser, not a witch doctor.’ She folded her hands on her lap. ‘When I was born, she told my mother I was her ‘gift’. That I had a wonder about me, and she would teach me all the
zo
intricacies. There was going to be a ceremony and everything when I got to a certain age.’ Vee looked up at Joshua and saw she had his full, horrified attention. ‘That’s why my mother fell out with her mother and they barely speak to this day. That’s why even when I go home I rarely visit her, though she’s reformed and not in the spirit business any more.’

Joshua’s irises were two onyx planets swimming in an ever-widening ocean of white. ‘Are you saying she made you into a witch?’

Vee put her hands over her face and laughed. ‘No, dummy. My parents are Anglican snobs, they’d never let shit like that happen. I’m saying …’ What
was
she saying? ‘I don’t always know what I’m about, what all the things in me are reaching for. I don’t want you getting swept up in my mess again. I can handle it.’

‘Everything isn’t always about you and what you want.’

Vee put her head on his shoulder. ‘Of course it is. That doesn’t even make sense.’ She plucked the tissue that had been wrapped around her thumb out of his hand and tucked it back around. ‘I’m ravishing and intense and highly complex. But I’m not myself right now. So don’t get all up in your feelings.’ She gave him a peck at the corner of his mouth.

‘You’re right.’ He kissed her, briefly, on the lips.

‘This is inappropriate.’ Vee kissed him back.

It would never go any further.

The mood threw a curve ball, shooting tingles up the back and between her legs. He nipped her bottom lip and she gave a little shudder. She linked both hands around his neck; he dragged her onto his lap; she ran her fingers over his buzz of curls; he moved a hand up her thigh, smoothing her dress aside–

‘Whoa!’ Vee pulled away.

‘What?’

‘Sshhhh!’ Her mouth dropped open.
‘Oh my God, how did I miss that?’

Joshua sagged. ‘Jesus wept.’

Vee barely heard. She called up a blank page in her mind’s eye, a table much like the ones she’d used in secondary-school bookkeeping. A clear, nondescript sheet with a line down the middle to separate a credit and debit side. Basic accounting, no mess, no fuss. But suppose that was exactly what Jacqui
hadn’t
wanted? What if the files had looked disappointing because they were meant to? If anyone snooped around in Jacqui’s room hunting for proof of mischief, for something that looked out of place, all they’d uncover was–

‘Absolutely nothing,’ she said to herself. She snatched her clutch handbag on the edge of the bench and took out her cell, gave Joshua an apologetic grimace, and dialled. In seconds, the other end picked up. ‘Chlöe, finegeh, listen. Remember the mystery folder The Guy sent us today? Yeah, I know, useless. But what if it wasn’t?’

She rattled off her theory: the files were a track record of a little informal business. One side was an inventory of all Jacqui’s merchandise, and the initial typed next to it was simply the name of the person who’d made the order. A crossed out name meant money and goods had changed hands – transaction sorted.

‘I was waaay overthinking it. We know Jacqui liked being up in things. Things cost money; she had to be getting the mah from somewhere. Now I thought about all the ways a clever girl could go about getting spare cash and none of them added up. Adele, forget it. Her pa spoilt her all right, but from what we saw in her room, her acquisition dysfunction was worse than yours, something Ian wouldn’t enable. She couldn’t have
been twisting her oliver for some sugardaddy so he’d pimp her lifestyle. Her best friend would’ve told us, and Jacqui doesn’t strike me as the type. Why be with a cretin like Ashwin if you weren’t a romantic deep down?’

‘Then what was she up to?’ Chlöe replied.

‘The obvious. Rosie
handed me
the answer and I didn’t get it. Every kid tries their hand at enterprise at some point, right. Rosie said they shoplifted for a while and lost interest. But Jacqui didn’t, she just went wholesale on her own. Those bales of clothes in her room, that was it! She was hawking what she was stealing. What better way to make money off other fashion-crazy gossip girls.’ Vee chortled. ‘Jacqui fuckin’ Paulsen. This li’l girl was a mafia market woman.’

Now it all computed, what the brand new clothes in those three plastic bundles were for. Jacqueline had contrived her own ingenious shortcut to the pocket money dilemma.

‘Okay, hmmm … I see your reasoning …’ Chlöe mulled. Vee pictured her pinching her bottom lip. ‘If that
is
the case, she must’ve been at it for months, pssh, maybe even a year. That was quite a printout we got. Where the hell was the money going?’

‘I’ve got a few ideas. I’m sending you pictures of the things she had lying around in her room; our answer’s bound to be in there. I know it’s late, but go online if you can, check if any of it was pricey. I’m in the middle of something.’ Vee hung up.

Joshua said, ‘You’re a fantastic date, by the way. In case you were wondering.’

‘Sorry.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘Tell me, what kind of kid were you? I mean, at seventeen? You’ve told me plenty about
your childhood but you do get cagey with the details around high school.’

‘Because my teens were weird and stupid. Everyone’s are, they’re supposed to be. I have little trust or respect for anyone who peaked early. What was
I
like?’ He slouched, stretching his arms along the backrest of the bench. ‘Horny.’ He shrugged. ‘Impatient, brooding, obnoxious. Excited that high school, the most confining place ever, was almost behind me. Scared shitless about the concept of ‘the rest of my life’.’ He paused. ‘
Super
horny, and obsessed with obsessing over all the action I missed out on.’

‘You were still unblemished at seventeen? How did I not know this?’ Vee gasped in mock horror. He looked like he’d been fiddling with people’s daughters since the first grade. ‘But you look like such a ho.’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. Learnt on the job. I had a lot to work through … awkward, gangly, a smile to frighten small children.’ He flashed a sharky grimace and ran a finger over his teeth. She understood the gesture: braces. So the shit-eating grin was, in part, the flourish of a talented dentist. ‘Every girl I wanted was taken, half the time by one of my friends. Wasted a shitload of time on stupid crushes.’ He pressed an index finger to his temple. ‘Huh. Breakthrough moment. I may have a thing for unavailable women.’

Her Nokia interrupted. ‘No need to go online,’ Chlöe said. ‘These products are all dead expensive. I recognise the brand names: REN, Dr Hauschka, Sisley. La Mer facial moisturiser
– that’s liquid gold in a jar, bosslady. If our girl was buying herself status, she fucking knew how to shop for it.’

‘How could her own mother have missed all this?’

‘No offence, but did
you
recognise REN’s mayblossom and blue cypress cleansing gel?’

‘Point taken. We’ll go through that file again on Monday. I now pronounce you free to enjoy the rest of your weekend. Where are you, by the way?’ The clamour in the background was outrageous.

‘Joburg,’ Chlöe said.

‘You
flew
to Johannesburg for the weekend?’

‘No, Grandma. Joburg the club. Long Street.’ Chlöe ruptured into giggles and whispered, ‘Gotta go, someone’s writing their number on my boobs.’

Vee hung up and gave Joshua a pained look. ‘Can we please leave, before I lose it again?’