Daddy's Girl
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For Bella
THURSDAY
A grey heron waited in the reeds, beak poised above the pool. When the prison gates opened for the man, the bird flew off. The fish dived, a flash in the tea-brown water.
Five-thirty. Nearly weekend.
The guards impatient to get home at the end of a long shift.
The man’s parole papers filed under a name not his own.
His fingers curled around the hundred rand note from the
Prisoners’ Friend Society. He’d already discarded the address of the Christian halfway house expecting his arrival.
The man crossed the deserted road.
He wore borrowed trousers, a jacket that exposed his bony wrists, a white shirt. The smell of another man’s day in court, the sweat that came with the clock-stopping moment of sentence.
He waited, the last rays of the weak August sun
warm on his back.
The guards packed up, listening as the radio spat out Cape Town’s news.
In the distance, the rattle of a minibus taxi.
It crested the rise, and he flattened his blade-thin body into a ditch next to the road.
The driver stopped. The guards glanced up: the new shift arriving. Nothing much to mention. Thursday would be a quiet night. They handed over, boarded the
taxi, sped home.
Darkness descended.
The prisoner dusted off his clothes, eyes focused fifty metres ahead. The length of an exercise yard.
Ex-prisoner.
He cut through farmland, a shadow slipping down the serried vines.
The runty dogs lying between the workers’ cottages yapped.
A woman making her way home, stopped. She listened, but the dogs fell silent, and she walked on.
Uncertain.
The man watched her, at ease. Prison erases a man’s smell, teaches him the art of absence.
Above him, the stars wheeled, freed from the barred square that had contained his nights for so many years.
On the stoep of a gabled farmhouse, dogs lifted their heads. Then settled again. Inside by the fire, the owners sipped brandy as they glanced at the day’s headlines.
He did
not slow down as he scythed through the night.
At the crossroads, he orientated himself and headed for Cape Town.
No one would be waiting for him.
No one had, not since his mother’s funeral. His twenty-seven-year-old mother, shot five times by her pimp.
Twice in the face, twice in the heart, once in the cunt.
He had hoped, then, that someone would claim him. No one had, after
the funeral. Except the pimp who’d pinned him down for an old man to sample, both of them laughing at the blood, the tears.
Payment for the bullets used to kill his insolent mother.
He had melted into the cold Cape drizzle, sharpened a bicycle spoke, and gone to the shebeen where his mother’s killer sat. A beer in one hand and a girl in yellow hotpants in the other.
He had inserted
the spoke into the pimp’s back, pressing upwards until the tip pierced his heart. Then he’d disappeared into the night.
Sorry Mom.
He’d had that inked on the skin above his heart.
Vrou is gif
.
That above the other nipple, for the whore in the yellow shorts who’d pointed at him in the courtroom.
Woman is poison.
A taxi pulled over with its cargo of late-shift workers. He
settled next to a window and watched the new housing developments whip past. Villas hiding behind security booms; an empty soccer stadium where armed guards with leashed Alsatians patrolled the encircling razor wire; a shopping mall offering discounts.
He’d been gone for years.
Things had changed for the rich.
The roads became clogged arteries. Factory shift workers hurried home in
the dark. Young men swaggered on street corners.
He got out where the land was flat and the southeaster howled around huddled houses that stretched as far as the curve of False Bay. Government-built boxes for the people.
Nothing had changed for the poor.
He breathed in the smells of the place that had been his home. Car fumes, a dead dog, the tang of salt from the distant sea.
The outside.
A forgotten dream that he had buried when he’d first gone to prison and been absorbed by the Number, the brutal prison brotherhoods. A killer at ten, the 27s had embraced him, the gang giving him rank and purpose and a sense of family more powerful than anything a mother outside ever presided over.
On the corner was the Nice-Time Bar, a corrugated iron lean-to attached to a
brick house. White plastic chairs clustered around red Coke crates; five men sat drinking.
Inside the bar, a television flickered.
He ordered a beer from the barmaid, and stared at the woman on the screen who was unbuttoning her shirt.
The girl gave him his drink.
‘
Pop Idols
,’ she said, flicking through the channels. ‘It’s the final tonight.’
‘Go back to it,’ he ordered.
‘It’s
mos
a rerun of
Missing
, that Doctor Hart’s gang-cherrie programme.’ The barmaid rolled her eyes. ‘Just some Number gangster’s daughter showing off her scars. An excuse to show off her tits on TV. Hoping the
Voice of the Cape
will pay her for her story.’
‘Go back. Turn up the sound.’
She knew enough to do what she was told.
‘All the same when they come out,’ she muttered, lighting
a cigarette. ‘An inch of skin, and the brain’s dead.’
He ignored her, listening to the rasp of the woman’s voice.
Pearl, she called herself.
Stupid name.
The barmaid finished her cigarette, going off to serve another customer.
The programme ended, the man drained his beer, and left.
He stood in the alley behind the shebeen, running through the plans he’d made with the other
27s, the generals who’d crouched in a circle.
The custodians of the unwritten law of the Number gangs had decided who should die, and when.
Any slight, any unearned claim to rank, any secret revealed, was a betrayal that had to be paid for in blood.
That was the law of the 27s.
He did not have much time.
He did not have enough information.
But he knew where to start.
He took the hand-fashioned knife from the sole of his shoe, slipped it into his pocket.
An expert at prising open secrets.
FRIDAY
Green.
Clare Hart nosed across the Friday morning traffic, the taxis and bakkies surging towards the city.
Red.
Three Indian crows feeding on a dog’s carcass hopped back and forth at the lights, black eyes fixed on the traffic, their timing impeccable. A huddle of boys rolling dice, betting with bottle tops, stared at Clare. Chained dogs barked in the litter-strewn yards. She
was looking for a street with no name – its sign long since torn down and sold for scrap metal.
Clare looked up at the pockmarked buildings; three-storeyed walk-ups that baked in summer and froze in winter. The Flats. The buildings were named after battles fought long ago by people who’d lived far away. Waterloo, Hastings, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Tobruk.
The people who lived in this place
called it Baghdad.
Coke adds life.
A hand-painted slogan in red and white on the wall of a corner café, its small dispensing window covered with hand grenade mesh. On the opposite corner the primary school, rubbish swagged against rusting barbed wire. The playground was filled with children in white shirts. The girls wearing bottle-green skirts; the boys in grey pants. In a corner, a little
girl stood alone under a bullet-riddled sign.
Your Neighbourhood Watch watches out for you.
The child was clutching a lunch box. Her eyes, large and dark, were on Clare as she drove past. A group of older boys appeared out of nowhere, swarming around the little girl, knocking her sandwiches from her hands, jerking her between them. The child did nothing to protect herself. One boy pushed
a rough, probing hand up her skirt. The child’s tears tumbled down her drawn cheeks. Clare pressed her hooter and the boys – ten, eleven years old – turned to stare. She was on one side of the fence; they were on the other. They gave the girl a final shove and were off in a pack, joining a game of soccer on the dusty field.
The girl picked herself up and left, straightening her skirt as she
ran, tucking in her white shirt, absorbing the casual violation, abandoning her trampled lunch.
The lights changed and Clare drove on. The
hoekstanders
eyed her, the smallest of them disappearing down an alley as she passed. News of her presence was travelling ahead of her. She checked the car’s central locking.
Orange.
Clare slowed. The shabby buildings were pitted. In a fortnight,
five children had been killed in a surge of gang warfare. Small white coffins were brandished at funerals by grim-faced uncles and brothers promising revenge; in tow were the resigned mothers, who sobbed when they went home to wait for the next convulsion of violence, the next lot of casualties. It had not come. Not yet.
El Alamein.
Bleached to a trace, the letters indicated the block
Clare was looking for. A freshly painted hammer and sickle claimed the territory for the Afghans.
She stopped.
A boy detached himself from a wall, sauntered over, jeans slung low. Clare was in his territory and he knew it; knew that she knew it. Smiled. Her pulse quickened as she keyed in the text she’d been instructed to send. Another youth, mongrel-thin, materialised at the corner. Two
more peeled themselves off the wall, joining the others. Grouped together, their bodies coalesced into a multi-limbed creature.
She checked the screen of her phone.