Daddy's Girl (16 page)

‘I get claustrophobic in that labyrinth.’

‘You know the place?’ asked Pearl.

‘Yes. I used to go to school over there,’ Clare said, pointing.

‘That fancy school?’ asked Pearl, cocking an eyebrow at the tiled roof visible above the trees.

‘That’s
the one. You can see it from the children’s playground.’

‘I know,’ said Pearl. ‘Let’s go sit there.’

‘You come here often?’

‘Lunch and tea break,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s peaceful there. I can keep an eye out.’

‘For what?’ asked Clare.

‘Things,’ said Pearl. ‘Kids playing. Little girls need someone to watch out for them. Used to be a gang initiation place, these gardens, after everyone
who lived around here got dumped on the Flats in the seventies. They’d come back here, make themselves into men by sharing some girl’s body.’

‘I know,’ said Clare. ‘Happened once when I was at school.’

‘Your twin that no one ever sees?’

Clare nodded.

‘I’m working now, thanks to you.’ Pearl tapped a cigarette from a packet. ‘I can spare you a smoke.’

‘I’ll manage without,’ said
Clare.

‘Of course you’ll manage.’ Pearl flashed her a rare smile. ‘But you’ll feel better if you have one.’

Clare took one, lit it, the smell masking the stench of decay that was turning her stomach.

‘Follow me,’ said Pearl. ‘I don’t like it here either. Too many ghosts.’

Just five metres, and Clare had left the reeds behind and the path was sunlit. Another five metres and there
was the fenced-off children’s park, with its newly built red slide, yellow swings, orange roundabout.

The two women sat on a bench nearby.

‘Pearl, I need you to help me find Yasmin Faizal.’

‘
Fok
, what is it with these gang cops and their daughters? There was another one. Her mother brought her for counselling. Calvaleen. I gave her my cell number. She phoned a few times.’

‘She
knows Yasmin,’ said Clare. ‘But I can’t get hold of her to talk to her.’

‘She’s not easy,’ said Pearl. ‘Self-medicates, as they say in the magazines. See that little girl on the swing? She looks about the same age as the one you’re looking for. Captain Faizal’s daughter.’ A dark-haired woman was pushing the child on the swing. As she plunged forward, she shut her eyes against the rush of air,
then dipped her head to her chin as she swung back again to her mother’s waiting hands.

Pearl pulled a copy of
Die Son
out of her bag. ‘Look at this case he has.’ Pictures of the two dead girls in the field in Maitland.

‘There’s a connection?’ Clare had worked with Pearl before, and again, it was like coaxing a wounded animal out of its hiding place.

‘Riedwaan Faizal’s the one who
caught my father, put him away for life. Life three times for that family he killed.’ Pearl chewed at a nail. ‘I’ve been hearing things, that Captain Faizal’s been opening up the space for new people.’

‘Which new people?’

‘People who know how to do business. These new people taking over. New drugs. Heroin, girls from Russia, taking over the old businesses, living soft. Claiming the Number
without earning their tattoos. The old Number gangsters, the ones who paid the hard way for their chappies in jail, aren’t happy with what’s happening.’

‘But who would’ve taken Yasmin Faizal? There’s been no ransom, nothing.’

Pearl yanked out a daisy that had fought its way through the grass.

‘I haven’t heard anything except rumours. Some say it’s freelance. Others say it’s Voëltjie
Ahrend because he wants to clear space for the 27s to make an alliance with the Afghans. I also heard it could be other
boere
.’

‘The police?’

‘Some cops’ll do anything for money. They’ll make a docket walk, so why not a child?’ asked Pearl. ‘Especially if it gets the Gang Unit out of Voëltjie Ahrend’s face while he does his deal with his overseas friends.’

‘Who are they?’

‘They
say Russians,’ said Pearl. ‘But people think if you’ve got black hair and a thick gold chain and you’re not a Portuguese running a corner café, you’re a Russian. Let me check it out a bit. If we’re not careful, it’ll get that kid killed. You too, Doc. You must take more care.’

‘Why are you telling me that?’

‘People smoke, then they talk shit,’ said Pearl. ‘What you’ve been doing isn’t
making you popular. You’ve disrupted some operations. Interfered with income. Drawn attention to things that were working smoothly. Working with Captain Faizal won’t help you.’

‘Who are you talking about, Pearl?’

‘Watch your back, is all I know,’ she warned. ‘I’ll talk to you again when I’ve got something concrete. Something you can use. Something that won’t come back to me. Or,’ Pearl
looked towards the play park, ‘back to her.’

Clare followed the direction of Pearl’s gaze. The child on the swing.

‘Who is she?’

‘Look at her. Look at her face,’ ordered Pearl. ‘Now look at mine.’

The high, wide cheekbones, the slanted eyes, the dark hair. So like Pearl, and yet so different. There was an openness in the child’s expression – and the joy in the mother’s face contrasted
with the yearning in Pearl’s.

‘My daughter. The reason I help you. Her name is Hope. When I gave her away, I told them the only thing I wanted her to keep was the name I’d given her. That’s all she has of me.’

Pearl listened as her daughter’s laughter rang out.

‘Now her name is Hope Pennington. Her mother’s a lawyer who lives with another woman in a nice, smart flat. Two mommies. Completely
safe. Hope goes to that school there, the one you went to, the one that only has girls.’

Behind the razor wire and the electric fence, the high white walls of the school were visible. A modern-day cloister that kept the world at bay and provided a few lucky girls with a temporary shelter.

‘Is that why you took the job close by?’ Clare asked. ‘So you can watch your daughter play?’

Pearl nodded. ‘Sometimes it helps. Other days…’ her voice drifted off. ‘Other days I can’t bear that everything precious was taken from me. That’s when I used to go to my dealer – but that’s over now. The drugs gave me up, and these days when I want to die I get under my blankets and sleep for a day or two until I can get up again and start over.’

The woman helped her adopted daughter off the
swing, and hand-in-hand they set off towards a large white car. Pearl lit another cigarette. Inhaled, blew a smoke ring. Inhaled again.

‘Does she know you?’

‘I made her promise that she’d tell Hope I’m dead, that I had no family,’ said Pearl. Her knuckles were white on her knees as she watched the woman buckle the complaining child into her car seat.

‘I never want her to look for me,
to find out whose daughter she is.’

‘She’d be proud of you if she knew,’ said Clare.

‘It’s not me,’ said Pearl, pulling up her shirt, exposing the faint white marks on her soft belly. Clare put her hand out and touched the evidence of Pearls’ pregnancy.

‘Her father?’

The sun was beginning to dip behind the cloud tumbling over the mountain.

‘It’s a wise child who doesn’t ask
that question.’ Pearl tucked in her shirt. ‘Especially with a father like mine.’

Pearl and Clare walked back to the entrance. They skirted the lawns where the last of the Saturday brides clustered with their bridesmaids, awaiting their turn with the photographer.

A flower girl hurtled across the grass, colliding with Pearl.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, wanting to know what had catapulted
the child into her legs.

‘My mommy said I must look for my big sister.’ The child’s breath was ragged with fury and fear. ‘And I got a fright because she was hiding. I saw her and I called her but she ran away. She didn’t wait for me. Then I saw that man who was walking behind you.’ She looked at Clare.

‘Which man?’

‘How must I know?’ asked the child. ‘He was behind you when you went
in there.’ She pointed at the reeds. ‘And then he was sitting behind the trees when you talked to the aunty.’ Clare looked about. There was no one. ‘He was sitting behind you. I thought you knew him and then he looked at me and I ran away and I fell and now my ma is going to
klap
me.’ She put her hands over the mud stain on her skirt.

‘Let’s see if we can clean it off.’ Clare brushed at the
stiff pink tulle. The girl grinned at both of them, her teeth white against her pink gums. Six, she must be. Seven. The same age as Yasmin.

‘There’s my mommy.’ She darted off, weaving between the wedding parties on the lawn, where she flung her arms around her mother’s sturdy legs. Her panic kissed away, she pointed towards Clare and Pearl, and waved.

‘Should always go like that,
nè
?’
said Pearl, climbing into a minibus taxi on Main Road. ‘A kiss and everything’s fixed.’

Clare noticed the obscenity when she checked her rear-view mirror. The word POES, scrawled across the back window. Her windscreen wiper erased the word, but not her unease. Riedwaan not answering his phone compounded Clare’s anxiety.

Yasmin lifts her face from her knees. A shaft of sunlight has found its way through the murky air, a splash of yellow against the wall. She tries to count the motes of dust, then takes the seed out of her pocket and holds it to her nose.

Cardamom.

The smell of her father.

She pulls the blanket closer around her shoulders and stares at the dust sparkling in the air. Tears begin
to well as the ray of light dims.

She thinks of her daddy, the times he took her walking up Lion’s Head, when she’d pretend it was just the two of them in the whole world. She wished he didn’t go away for days and days and then come back with ghosts in his eyes.

Yasmin sees the ghosts even when he smiles. She can feel them, cold feathery things, when he hugs her carefully so that she doesn’t
bump her face on the gun under his shirt.

Her sunbeam fades and disappears. Hunger claws out of her belly and into her throat. The wind whines as it whips through the broken panes. The steel rafters are skeletal fingers against the sky. A bird flies in, and disappears into a ragged nest.

On the edge of the nest is a movement, a chick seeking its mother.

Yasmin holds up her hands as
the tiny body tumbles through the air, then lowers them again to cushion its fall. When she cups her hands over the fledgling, she can feel the fast flutter of its heart against her fingers. It pecks at the fan of skin between her thumb and forefinger.

Footsteps echo in the empty space, and Yasmin slides down the wall onto her haunches. She closes her hands around the bird, shutting her mind
against what is coming.

The District Surgeon turned in at the prison gates, startling the heron hovering over a pool of water in the vineyards next door. Kobus Hoffman would rather have been in bed watching the Saturday cartoons with his daughters, but he needed the overtime pay. His Land Rover was a familiar sight, so the guards waved him through and he parked in his usual bay outside the admin block. He lingered
for a moment in the cocoon of the heated car, listening to the news. The bulletin warned of an approaching storm, but natural disasters were so much more tolerable than gang slayings like the recent one in Maitland. It turned his stomach to think of it. And yet here he was, about to hand out painkillers to the very men who committed such acts – usually with as much thought as one would give
to swatting a fly.

Hoffman clutched a satchel containing folders from the morgue, X-rays, reference letters and a stethoscope.

‘You can’t get enough of us, Doc,’ quipped the warden on duty.

‘Governor wants every man, sick or dead, accounted for before the ceremony tomorrow,’ said Hoffman. ‘A group of ex-politicalprisoners-turned-Jo’burg-empowerment-billionaires will be unveiling the
statue of some struggle hero who was careless enough to die before he got rich. So, no sick people allowed.’

The warden laughed, unlocking the gate that led to the separate hospital wing. ‘Paradise, that’s what they’ll find here tomorrow.’

The benches lining the corridor were filled with men, their legs sprawled across the narrow passage. Hoffman felt their eyes on him as he opened the
consultation room. The doctor arranged his folders, checked his stethoscope, and poured himself a glass of water. He took out his wallet, passing his thumb over the faces of his wife, his daughters, and then slipped the photograph into his breast pocket. His talisman, close to his heart. A nurse handed him the patients’ cards and Hoffman flicked through them.

He was ready when the first knock
came.

‘
Binne
.’

The first one. Behind him stretched an orange ribbon of tough, hard men. Throughout that day, Hoffman looked into throats and ears. He listened to chests that rattled with TB, examined the skin lesions that come with AIDS. There were no ARVs to dispense and the local hospital wouldn’t accept prisoners from maximum, so he gave them cheap painkillers and sent them back to
the cells.

The nurse brought Hoffman a cup of lukewarm tea. A brown film floated on the top but he gulped it down anyway. As he completed the notes for his previous patient, he sensed a man standing in front of his desk.

‘
Naam
?’

‘Khan.’

The voice was quiet, authoritative. Kobus Hoffman looked up at the patient standing nonchalantly in front of him. The tall man with the bulky torso
looked strangely familiar.

Dr Hoffman found his card. Rafiek Khan – the last in the queue.

Complaint: Chest pains. Cough.

‘
Hoes
?’ Hoffman asked.

‘Ja, coughing,’ the prisoner confirmed as he unbuttoned his shirt, revealing the 27 tattooed on his neck.

Hoffman put the stethoscope to his ears.

‘You married, Doc?’

Hoffman was listening to the chest rattle typical of TB,
and the question caught him unawares.

‘Ja,’ he said.