Daddy's Girl (2 page)

No response yet.

She looked up at the council block’s windows. All of them closed. On the third floor, a curtain fell back into place. Ahead of her, movement. The boys on the corner slouched towards her.

The youth at
her window had both hands on the glass. He bent down, his eyes a startling shade of green. Clare wound down the window. Behind her, the hiss of a match was followed by the sharp tang of tobacco.

‘You don’t smoke?’

He had seen her nostrils flare.

‘No.’

‘You’re the doctor my mother called, then.’

Clare nodded. Not the time to explain the difference between a medical doctor and
a PhD in rape and serial femicide.

‘Put it out.’

His pitch of his voice changed slightly – all the authority that was needed. The smell disappeared.

‘She’s waiting for you.’

A taxi, the bass vibrating through the tar and up her spine, thudded its way up the street. Clare slung her camera bag over her shoulder and got out of the car.

‘You can relax. You’re with Lemmetjie.’ Thin
as the blade that had given him the scar on his neck and his nickname, Lemmetjie raised both arms in a circular motion, possessing her, the street. ‘No one will touch you.’

He fell into step beside her as she walked to the building. The graffiti-covered door opened before Clare could knock. The woman standing in front of her was tiny. She looked fifty, was probably thirty-five. She took Clare’s
hand.

‘Dr Hart?’

‘Clare.’

‘I’m Mrs Adams,’ she said. ‘Come inside.’

Clare followed her into the living room, where the kitchen had been curtained off from the sofas crowded around the television. Above the screen was a studio photograph of a little girl. Her white dress spotless, the halo of curls tamed for the photographer, green eyes fixed on Clare.

‘That’s her, Doctor.’
She lit a cigarette.

The ghost of that perfect face still hovered in the woman’s own hollow features, despite their being scripted with the story of the place where she lived. The scar on her lip was the signature of a husband’s fists. Her eyes were fierce, green. The same colour as Lemmetjie’s, as those of her missing daughter.

‘Where is she?’

‘I want you to film this,’ she said.
‘So you’ll have the truth down.’

Clare took out her camera and panned from the photograph of the little girl to the woman by her side. ‘Gone. Yesterday.’

‘You saw her yesterday?’ Clare probed. ‘She was here?’

The woman dropped her head into her hands. ‘I thought she was at my mother’s.’

‘She’s not?’

‘My mother sent her for cigarettes. She didn’t come home. They thought the
child had come back home, here. Lemmetjie and his
tjommies
went to look for her, but she was gone.’

The weight of it closed in on Clare. ‘You’ve looked everywhere?’ she asked Lemmetjie.

‘All her friends, my aunties,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘My other
ouma
.’

‘And no one has her?’

‘Nobody.’

‘You checked at the shop?’ asked Clare. ‘She arrived?’

‘Ja. The woman there gave her the cigarettes.’

‘No one saw her with anybody?’

Lemmetjie shook his head.

‘What else?’ asked Clare.

‘
Sê vir haar,
’ said Mrs Adams.

‘There was a car in the street. Tinted windows,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘Someone else says an uncle was talking to her.’

‘I saw you on the TV last night.
Missing
, your programme about that gangster’s daughter, Pearl. The
Cape Sun
had an article about you, too. They
said you’ve found some of the missing girls,’ said Mrs Adams. ‘She’s
mos
missing, a – what did you call them? – a Persephone, taken down into hell. You said that’s what you did with your project. Looking for missing girls, bringing them back to their mothers.’

‘I track what happens to them,’ said Clare, taking her eye from the camera. The girls I found’ – no way to say it gently – ‘they were
already dead.’

Mrs Adams folded her arms around her hollow belly. ‘If she’s dead, then I want her body. Find me something to bury at least.’

Mrs Adams shook another cigarette from the pack on the table, wormed her way to the window through the narrow space between the wall and the couch, and lifted the curtain. She sucked on her cigarette as if it were a lifeline.

‘Harry Oppenheimer
has gold mines. Voëltjie Ahrend and his gangsters have this.’ She waved her hand at the warren of matchbox houses and backyard shacks. ‘A gold mine too. They own the police. If I go to the police then my baby is dead, for sure. They’re not going to watch so much power get sold out from under them.’

‘Who’s buying?’ asked Clare.

‘Buying, selling. Gangsters, police, politicians.’ Mrs Adams
turned her green eyes on Clare. ‘For us that lives here, it’s all the same. We’re the ones who pay in the beginning and in the end.’

‘Your son’s in the Neighbourhood Watch,’ said Clare. ‘He told me on the phone. You have to call the police,’ said Clare. ‘They’ll mobilise the Neighbourhood Watch, get everyone looking. I can’t do that.’

‘Neighbourhood Watch
se moer
. Lemmetjie knows nothing
about nothing. Twenty years old and never even been to jail. I told him that. What does it help to hold a vigil outside a gangster’s drug house?’

‘The Number’s taking over here, Ma,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘Voëltjie Ahrend and his 27s.’

‘Voëltjie Ahrend knows
fokkol
about the Number, in jail for a year. Out again because his lawyer bought a judge. Now he’s claiming territory he never fought for.
The cops are owned by those gangsters – and it’s us,’ she stabbed her finger into her chest, ‘the women, our little girls, who pay the men’s price. That’s why I called you, Doctor. If you make your film then they will look for her. Otherwise they just say, wait twenty-four hours and then report her missing.’

‘I told you, Ma, you’re wrong.’ Lemmetjie didn’t look her in the eye. ‘What I do is
for Chanel. To make it safe for my baby sister to play outside.’

‘Who you
are
hurts your sister,’ spat his mother.

A retort in the distance: a gunshot, a car backfiring? Mrs Adams didn’t move from the window.

‘Chanel,’ said Mrs Adams. ‘It’s a warning. To me. To him. To stay out of the way.’

‘Ma,’ said Lemmetjie. ‘We’ve got to fight back. I’m going to call the cops.’

‘Tell me,
Doctor.’ Mrs Adams faced Clare’s camera. ‘What does one more little girl mean, in a war?’

Clare turned the question over in her mind as she drove back. As she got closer to town, the pavements became less cracked, then they sprouted trees, and the houses were set further and further back from the road. There were walls instead of wire fences, and soon she was back in the oak-lined avenues
of the suburbs that sheltered in the grey skirts of Table Mountain. She stopped at the dry cleaners and picked up her evening dress, buying a pair of high-heeled sandals on her way back to her car. She put them in the boot, then went to the studio to approve the final sound mix for that night’s broadcast of
Missing
. She requested two minor changes, and sent the programme off to her producer.

Taking her copies of
Missing
with her, she drove home. She unlocked her front door and went upstairs to her quiet white sanctuary. Clare opened the sliding doors that led onto the balcony overlooking the Sea Point Promenade, her cat twisting between her ankles, purring its welcome. She picked Fritz up. The sea beyond sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. On the lawn near Clare’s house, a young
woman was pushing her daughter in a yellow swing.

‘Higher, Mummy, higher!’ the child was calling, her hair flying in the wind. ‘I’m flying! Look at me, like a bird.’

The afternoon sun broke though the cloud, splashing small hands on the barre and pooling on the floor; the girls’ serious faces looked straight ahead. From the piano, a simple minuet. One, two, three. One, two, three. Slow enough for everyone in the class to keep up, their tummies tight drums in new pink leotards.

‘First position. Heels together. Feet out. Hands held correctly, chins
up,
plié
. And smile and turn. And smile. And turn. And hold. Hands in front and second. Curtsey.’

The ballet teacher marched down the line of little girls, adjusting a hand, a foot, tapping at protruding bottoms, bellies. She paused next to the dark-haired girl at the front of the line, touching her long nails to the girl’s cheek.

‘Smile, Yasmin. This isn’t a funeral.’

The child smiled
obediently. Her slender limbs were correctly positioned; she knew this from her ballet teacher’s approving frown. Madame Merle moved on.

‘Hands graceful, girls. First position and music, Mister Henry. And smile. And smile. And curtsey.’

Clapping her hands, she dismissed the class and accepted a cigarette from the pianist. Mister Henry lit it for her.

‘What, Yasmin?’ Madame Merle became
aware of the lingering child.

‘Isn’t it too early, Madame?’ Madame Merle blew a smoke ring, round and perfect, over the child’s head.

‘Darling, it’s the gala tonight.’

‘
Persephone
. The ballet about the girl who disappears,’ Mister Henry explained. ‘At Artscape.’

‘Oh.’ Still, Yasmin lingered.

‘Run along.’ Madame Merle turned away. The class was over. The beam of her attention
switched off.

Yasmin felt Mister Henry’s eyes on her as she negotiated the stream of six-year-olds rushing to the cars idling outside. Ever since her older friend Calvaleen had stopped dancing, hers was the only dark bun among the blondes.

The change-room door burst open and the older girls billowed out, all tulle and chatter. Yasmin pressed herself against the wall, and then went to her
locker. She had a proper ballet dancer’s crossover cardigan, which Amma had knitted for her as an early birthday present. She tied the bow. Thinking about her birthday gave her a knot in her stomach. It was her birthday that had started all the trouble. Last year, when she turned six. In three sleeps she would be seven. She hoped it would be better this year.

Yasmin reached into her bag for
her takkies. Her mother always threw a fit if she went outside in her satin pumps. She pulled out her old shoes, dislodging a piece of green paper as she did so. She unfolded it, her heart beating faster. Zero-to-panic. That was Amma’s nickname for Daddy. That’s how she felt now. Zero-to-panic. She realised that it was another thing she’d forgotten. Madame Merle had handed out the notices with strict
instructions that they get them signed and return them to her.

‘So I can be absolutely sure that your mummies and daddies know to fetch you early, darlings,’ is what Madame Merle had said in her posh voice.

Another thing that would make her mother strip her
moer
. Two things! She’d forgotten to give her mom the paper. And the picking-up time had changed. Yasmin felt shame wash over her.
She tried so hard to do everything right, to make her mother happy, to make her smile like she used to. But everything she did just seemed to make her mother angrier. Ever since her daddy had kept her for the weekend and that Aunty Ndlovu had come with the police papers that said her father was bad like the gangsters he was meant to catch, things had been even worse.

Yasmin smoothed open the
notice that Madame Merle had handed out. The notices were only mailed if you missed a class. ‘Saving money, darlings!’ said Madame Merle. ‘Do you think a person can eat from teaching ballet?’

Her mother wouldn’t know that the school was closing early today because of the performance of
Persephone
. Calvaleen was meant to be the star, Persephone. But she’d have got the notice in the post because
she had stopped going to the older girls’ class a long time ago. Yasmin missed her. She crumpled the paper. She didn’t like to think about girls who disappeared. She didn’t like to think that her mother was on shift and that she would shout at Yasmin if she phoned her. No one would come to fetch her for a long time.

She was going to be in trouble again. She knew it.

She could hear Madame
Merle’s voice.

‘One, two, three.’ Madame Merle’s voice cut across the music. It was the end of the dance: swan-like in their white skirts, the girls would be skimming across the room, their necks elongated, trailing their arms behind them.

‘Like air, girls. You’re ballerinas, not bricklayers. Jeté, jeté, jeté.’

The tight burn in Yasmin’s throat told her tears were coming. She took
a deep breath and made herself think. She was a big girl. She could make a plan. She unzipped her emergency money pouch and looked at the coins in her palm. Two fifty cent pieces. She repeated the cellphone number she needed to dial and stood on tiptoe in front of the call box in the passage. She slotted in the first coin, then the second.

‘Oh Eight Two,’ she whispered. ‘Five Four Two Two
Oh Oh Seven.’

The coins clicked down the gullet of the call box. Yasmin’s tummy unclenched when the phone began to purr.

‘Faizal.’

‘Daddy.’ A lilt in her voice.

‘Leave a message.’

Her father’s voice for other people.

The call box swallowed the last coin, cutting the connection before she could leave a message. She replaced the receiver. The piano had stopped. Mister Henry
would be closing the lid, gathering his score. His eyes were always watery behind his glasses. He smelt funny. Calvaleen had told her. Yasmin didn’t want to have to wait with him. She hoisted her pink rucksack, then slipped past the security guard and through the gate to wait until her mom came.

The afternoon sunlight slanted between the Roman pines lining the steep street. Yasmin did not
like to look at them. They were like the trees in the dark Russian fairytale forests in her book. Forests where cannibal crones like Baby Yaga Bony Legs lurked, waiting for young girls. The street was empty; only one car near the park. Dog walkers. Yasmin could hear barking. She told herself that an hour was not so long, not while it was still light.