The Lazarus Effect (4 page)

Carina blinked against a hot welling of tears. All that self-sufficiency had driven her crazy. Throughout her medical career she’d seen her fair share of myths debunked. The one about the glowing angel that soldiered through chronic illness, uplifting others despite his or her own pain and hopelessness, was as rubbish as unicorns. Sick children were like sick adults: frightened, cranky, and downright impossible. The terminal ones were the worst.

Her Sean had been different. She’d waited desperately for the moment he’d become pathetic with need and fear, allowing her to be the pillar of maternal strength she needed to be. Until the bitter end, he was more a comfort to his family than they’d been to him, more so because every last one of them had failed him. It was almost as if Sean had been born to die nobly and show others how to do it. For heaven’s sake, even that bastard of Ian’s–

She shrieked as the knife sliced through the same finger again, deeper than before. Blood arced over the kitchen counter and the vegetables. Hissing and swearing under her breath, Carina wrapped the nearest piece of cloth, one of her favourite scarves, around the cut. On the tabletop, her Samsung cell phone began to buzz and vibrate like an irritating electronic animal, lifting
and clattering back against the marble in miniature convulsions. With one hand she grabbed it, pressed a button and balanced it against an ear with a shoulder.

In the front garden, Serena Fourie peered through the kitchen window at her mother on a call. Her cascade of blonde hair shrouded the phone, while she bustled around with things unseen. Serena didn’t need to be within earshot to know who was calling and what the call was about. It was almost midday and her mother, the workaholic, was at home. She watched her mother’s posture change sharply: her fine-boned, slender frame, which none of them had inherited, stiffened and her face reddened as her head snapped up, nearly causing her to drop the phone. She uttered what looked like sharp words into it and turned her back to the window.

‘Boo.’ Two fingers poked her in the ribs and Serena jumped.

‘Cut it out,’ she said to her sister, not turning around. Her voice came sharper than she meant but she couldn’t help it. Every word and every movement would be as barbed and poisonous today as it had been for weeks. By the look of it, the two likeliest contenders for a showdown were already squaring off. They’d held off for longer than last year, not bashing antlers until the actual day. Serena wondered if that was good or bad.

‘That means you’re jealous, if you jump when someone pokes you,’ Rosie giggled, unbothered. Her chest against Serena’s back, she draped her arms around Serena’s shoulders. ‘Or having
sex
.’

Rosie leaned into her neck, and Serena caught the waft of something sweet laced with peanuts on her illicit whisper. In
silence they watched their mother, breathing almost in tandem. In the kitchen, Carina cut the call and flung the phone away from her, then began pointlessly shunting items around on the counter.

‘What’s she doing?’

‘Making stew for supper.’ It was eleven thirty in the morning.

‘Was that Dad?’ Rosie whispered.

Serena nodded.

Another pause. Then: ‘What’s the date today?’

Sighing, Serena disentangled herself and spun around. The exasperated look she shot Rosie said, You
know
what day it is today. The day Sean had begun what would prove to be his final bout of chemotherapy. They all knew, had been
raised
to know and remember every landmark of their brother’s short life.

Rosie’s face remained woefully blank for a few seconds, before dawn broke through the clouds and she nodded robotically and hung her head. Serena shook her head. Trust Rosie.

‘I won’t be here for it, though. Supper, I mean.’ Serena hefted a gym bag of clean laundry. ‘Got cell group tonight. Going back to campus.’

‘Lemme come with you.’

A car crunched up the front driveway. It pulled to a stop outside the gate, and a young man slithered out of the driver’s seat and craned his neck over the gate. His hopeful eyes searched those of his sisters. Serena gave her head a sad, slow shake, and Lucas Fourie slumped back behind the wheel and drove off. She walked through the gate to her own car, fighting the urge to look back at Rosie standing alone on the lawn, biting her nails and looking lost.

Vee hung her legs out the driver’s side of her Toyota Corolla and polished off a Top Red apple. As lunches went, fatty steak rolls and unwashed fruit weren’t the best she could do, but it worked on the move.

‘On the move’ had a nice ring, active with a predatory edge, which made a pretty good ripple on the stagnant pool she called her career these days. The shocking part was that she’d let it happen and hadn’t cared much. Her recent blackouts told of a subconscious dissatisfaction, but her subconscious wasn’t really her problem if it didn’t speak up. True, making its presence felt by flipping all her switches with no provocation at the oddest times was not ideal, but that simply meant there’d have to be some new ground rules.

Reminded of one, Vee popped a foil tab of Cipralex and grimaced the pill down her throat. The previous plan, finding a specialist in her brand of issues (‘psychiatrist’ sounded so wrong and ‘therapist’ far worse), was canned. Popping pills for a so-called anxiety disorder was the size of it; a professional and meds combined she couldn’t handle.

Vee flipped through a paperback, eyes skimming, mind wandering. Solo missions had their perks. Most of the staff at
Urban
magazine couldn’t handle twiddling with their own thoughts to keep the hours from crushing their skulls in. Juggling the drudgery of being both investigator and part-time features editor meant she was well aware that she was looked upon with both awe and pity.

She gnawed on the apple core, relishing the mingling of the pips’ bitterness with the film of medication on her tongue. Hard as it was to admit, ‘investigator’ was nothing but a title at this point. One more lame fashion feature, one more piece of junky prose slapped under a ‘human interest’ header, and she’d start collecting scalps. Now was the moment to poke the bear, or perish.

‘This isn’t how we operate.’

‘Yeeessss, it kind of is. This,’ Vee nodded at the manila envelope, every angle of her pitch outlined and cross-checked to the hilt, ‘is what you expect of me. When last have I asked you to expect things of me?’

‘A while, I’ll admit,’ Portia Kruger said. ‘And I’ve not minded too much. You’re stretched across two publications. If anything, I’ve been expecting you to announce that you were scraping together what’s left of your leave and buggering off for a bit, not asking for more work. You’re ill, anyone can see …’

Vee dropped her arms and leaned her head, ever so slowly, to one side.

‘That was …’ Kruger raised exquisitely manicured hands in apology. ‘You have asked that I not pry, and so far I’ve obliged.
So far
. But this is clear out of the blue sky, not to mention rather obscure an angle, even for you. Surely you don’t think I’m so out of touch or poor at assessing human character that I’d miss the subtle traces of a personal agenda in here,’ she tapped the edge of the folder.

‘It’s a good story,’ Vee replied, flagging.

‘Come now, there’s more. Show your working as well as your sums. We’re not doing the movie scene where I’m the bastard boss forcing the ingenious maverick to toe the line and throw away a great hunch. I don’t know which journalism tactics the Americans taught you at the oh-so-prestigious Columbia University, but it’s not how the cookie crumbles on the dark continent.’

Okay, so we
are
doing this
. Vee steeled herself. Her CU credentials only popped up when Portia felt intimidated – which she had no reason to be, as an Oxford graduate running one of her father’s newspapers at thirty-two – and when she wanted to sharpen her claws on a minion’s bones. The editor-in-chief looked intrigued, and also piqued that she hadn’t sent a writer to sniff out a story like this already.

‘This breaks us out of our comfort zone, which we need. Badly.’

‘Too hard core for a major feature. An article on the rising incidence of missing children sounds riveting, but where’s the appeal? Our readership isn’t chuffed when we go too dark.’ Portia eyed her as she ran her palm over the back of her chignon, from which a few curls had tumbled loose.

Taking a different tack, Vee rallied. ‘I haven’t done investigative work in months. We’re both wasting resources. That can’t be what you want.’
Too whiny; turn it around
. ‘Our readership needs pushing. Otherwise we’re just adding to the growing pile of garbage that sets us back to last century.’
Johnson, come on! Predictably combative. Steer straight, for God’s sake
. ‘Look. This could be as big as the xenophobic violence piece …’ Vee levelled a challenge, but Portia refused to meet her gaze, looking away with a genteel cough. ‘And
that
made waves, if memory serves.’

‘Voinjama, there’s no debating you’ve done some great features here, okay? Kudos for the violence thing.’ Portia waved a hand. ‘It’s still on everyone’s lips.’

‘On lips, maybe, but not under our credits. My name was on it but it didn’t even appear in
Urban
.’

Portia flinched and Vee stopped. Mentioning how often serious material got shifted to
City Chronicle
, how final decisions on content were beyond Portia’s control, was suicidal.

Portia blinked thrice, slowly. ‘Would you like to go over to
Chronicle
?’ she asked, voice soft. ‘We’re family, after all, and you’ve collaborated with them before. It wouldn’t even be like moving.’

Vee shook her head quickly. ‘No.’ Yes. Did she? They
were
all part of one media company; moving one building down the street wouldn’t be like moving at all. Everyone looked so happy over there. She bet only corporate demons of the recognised variety hounded their heels – stress, deadlines, brutal competition – not dead teenagers.

Portia displayed her top row of pearliness in a rictus Vee could only assume was a smile. ‘You know what they say about grass being greener. Now, I suggest you take the piece about the singer-slash-socialite from Joburg. Rehab, steamy French boyfriend, new album … there’s a lot of meat on those bones.’ She slid another dossier over from the stack on her desk. ‘Look, she gushes, you go through the motions. This isn’t the worst idea.’

Vee kept her arms at her sides.

Portia sighed. ‘Voinjama. As combative as our … relationship has sometimes been …’

‘We have a relationship?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.’ Portia mulled a second more, measuring her words. ‘I do, despite assumptions, take interest in my best people. I’d actually prefer that you coast the median, for now, instead of … being you. So what’s it to be? Missing urchins, or pop star?’

Vee reached over slowly, picked up her file and stowed it under her arm.

‘Your own funeral.’ Portia settled behind her desk. ‘Oblige me and don’t interpret that literally, which you have in the past. I have no intention …’

Vee sighed. ‘Portia, if we’re not doing the movie scene, I’ll just take the rest as implied. Deliver and don’t screw up, or you’ll take me off it and make me regret it for the rest of my time here.’

Portia cocked a brow. ‘Same chapter, same page,’ she said, and flicked her finger in a ‘get out’ gesture.

Vee put the magazine aside and checked her watch: well past 5 p.m. Where was Paulsen?

Portia was testing, or merely pitied, her. Whatever the cause, the effect landed her here, parked in Little Mowbray opposite the home of one Adele Paulsen, itching for the first face-to-face interview of what would hopefully become … what? Vee was after more than a soapbox article. ‘Forces’ had led her here – God, how precious and moronic that sounded! – and she knew, much as she cringed at the admission, that the force was strong within her indeed. Her maternal grandmother, a woman possessed of mystical powers of the ‘African science’ variety, had often warned Vee in whispers about her ‘specialness’. Years later and Vee’s take was that she was just especially sticky for weird shit.

Vee snickered, back of her hand over mouth, until she lost her breath a little. She was losing it. This was how the slip down the slope began.

That was neither here nor there now. She had to turn this around fast or have it taken away – no, snatched and burned and never spoken of again. Precisely why she hadn’t been entirely transparent with Portia, who had no clue how flimsy a lead she truly had, or with Adele Paulsen, who’d chosen to believe she was in some way connected with the official investigation of her daughter’s disappearance. The former she would deal with later. Portia was fond of giving her sufficient rope with which to hang herself. As for the interview, experience had taught her that lying would get you through the door and no further. If
Adele Paulsen smelled a rat early on, everything was dead in the water. Vee popped gum into her mouth and chewed. Coming clean was invariably harder than lying.

A boisterous group of bare-chested young men in shorts and sneakers jogged past. One caught her eye and whistled, calling out something in Afrikaans that made the rest burst into laughter. Vee hissed and turned away, dismayed as a familiar, unwelcome warmth spread below her navel. Lately, her mind was a cesspool of smut and, being somewhat single-minded, she knew it would affect her work. It was hard to give anything full focus when sex – the loss of it from her life, reacquiring it again with any decent regularity, how much of it other happy bastards were having – occupied a startling portion of her thoughts.

The unsettling part was that men were everywhere – statistically, miserably, half of the population. Ever since she’d been dropped ass-backwards into singlehood, she noticed that they were more everywhere than she’d ever known them to be. Their obliviousness to their sexual draw bordered on spiteful. Striding around displaying V-shaped torsos misted with sweat and bare, muscled legs … it had to stop. Her last major assignment had propelled her into riots and neighbourhoods shredded by prejudice, and also into the arms of an Angolan photojournalist. No more mistakes of that kind.

A woman laden with bags of shopping began fiddling with a front gate two houses up from the car. Vee leapt out of her head and the driver’s seat, clicking the alarm after her.

‘Ms Paulsen? I’m Voinjama Johnson. We spoke yesterday morning.’

The older woman looked confused, then her eyes cleared. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Miss Johnson …’

She trailed off and went back to fiddling with the clasp on the gate. Vee stepped in, unburdened her of two Shoprite grocery bags and followed her into the front yard when the gate finally swung open. It was a small, pale-blue house with a tiny but manicured front garden. The walkway leading up to the front stoop was a lattice of crumbling stone, swept free of dirt.

Vee watched in amused wonder as a black puppy under a tree produced its body weight in excrement. She thought of her own dog as the puppy bounded up, barking and weaving around their feet. Adele Paulsen gave it an affectionate rub with one foot and brushed it aside, climbing the stairs as she rummaged for her house keys in her handbag. She launched into a ramble about how being a teacher was very trying work, especially without the use of a car, which was in the garage. It meant she was always late for the appointments she hadn’t forgotten. And she was really forgetful, especially now that there was no one around to hold things under her nose.

The woman was obviously house-proud. The entrance corridor was neat, and the wooden floors looked like they’d enjoyed a recent wax and buff. In the sitting room, rays of fading sunlight poured through windows trimmed with heavy floral curtains.

The bright tidiness kicked an unexpected swell of pity up Vee’s throat, and she checked herself quickly. If she’d lost a child – which she had, but not in the pure sense – keeping a home spotless and welcoming would be a priority of the lowest order. Her own period of misfortune wasn’t long buried in
the basement of memory at all: unwashed body, swollen eyes, perfectly happy to marinate in her own stink and self-pity were it not for those who loved her. Society extolled the virtues of strength, but nobody ever gave any solid advice about how to break down properly. How long could a mother bustle about playing hostess, all the while wrestling the thought that her only child might be somewhere no mother would ever want her baby to see?

‘I completely forgot the time,’ Paulsen called from the kitchen. ‘I hope you didn’t have to wait too long.’

‘Not at all,’ Vee lied. Idly, she examined a large ornate cabinet filled with china plates, dusty mugs and tiny figurines. If there was one thing that crossed all cultural boundaries, it was the cabinet with the delicate glassware and precious silver. Jacqui, like all children, would likely never have touched its contents if she had valued her l–

‘Ian gave most of those to me. Precious, they are.’ Paulsen spoke up behind her, setting down the tea tray. ‘From his travels during his university and postgrad days. Me, I haven’t really travelled much. To Namibia once, before I got pregnant with Jacqueline, and once the two of us went to Zimbabwe in the good old days when it was such a nice country.’

Over the rim of the teacup, Vee dissected Adele. This woman devoted a daily portion of her energy to staying on the go. No one ever need see how miserable she was. Or how angry. The canned rage was hard to get at over the pain and armour of niceness, but it was unmistakably there. It had to be a struggle
carrying on as a preschool teacher, seeing those eager eyes and candied smiles every day.

‘And where are you from?’ Paulsen probed, pushing short brown hair behind both ears. ‘Your accent’s very different.’ She leaned over, deftly spooned three measures of white sugar into her tea, and leaned back in her armchair. Moving Adele. Still Adele. Vee swiftly cast a vote for Moving Adele. Still Adele looked ready to rise at any moment and slap the taste out her mouth for holding the cup the wrong way.

‘I’m Liberian. From Liberia,’ Vee added stupidly.

Adele ‘ahhed’ and raised her eyes ceiling-ward, snapping her fingers. In the measured cadence of an educator, she rattled off the capital city and two neighbouring countries before leaning into current politics since the end of the civil war. Vee jarred, pleasantly surprised and impressed. Most locals had little knowledge of other cultures ‘further north’, as they called it. The darker Africa, a realm devoid of ice cream or shopping malls.