Gallows Hill (16 page)

‘What happened?’ asked Clare.

‘The files said she never spoke about it. She said she couldn’t remember anything.’ The social worker’s hands lay in her lap. ‘No charges were laid after the enquiry. The dead girl was an addict, so no one was too bothered. Then Lilith ran away for the last time. She turned 18 and the whole system could relax again. She was off
our hands.’

‘But not out your mind?’

‘No,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘There was something about her that got under my skin. Maybe because I’d seen her so early on. Saw the state she was in. She was a textbook case. She had all the classic symptoms of trauma, but there was no physical evidence. It was only later that she started cutting herself.’

‘It’s a way to make pain real, cutting.’

‘You know about it, do you?’ Wilma Smit looked at Clare, making a rapid professional assessment. Clare resisted the impulse to reply.

‘Few people recover from being abandoned by their mothers. For Lilith, it was her art that helped. It’s funny that you came now. She’s been in my mind again. I went to see her show. Have you been?’

‘Her show? No, I don’t know anything about it,’ said Clare.

‘It’s on now,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘In Woodstock, at one of those fancy new galleries. You can see the posters all over town. She doesn’t use her surname. Just Lilith.’

‘I think I know what you’re referring to,’ said Clare. ‘I’ve seen a face, a haunting face, it’s up everywhere.’

‘Go and see the show,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘I went. Maybe I was looking for evidence, just something, you know?’

‘Did you find anything?’ asked Clare.

‘Not much. Shadows,’ said the social worker. ‘My own imaginings. I suppose I wanted to find something in the work. Make some sense out of her suffering. But it’s all modern art. And I don’t really get it.’

‘May I see her files? I need to see them.’

‘They’re sealed.’

A gust of wind rattled the windows. Clare laid some photographs out on the
desk.

‘It’s Lilith,’ said the social worker.

‘Her mother,’ said Clare. ‘Suzanne le Roux. A reconstruction of a skull found at the Gallows Hill burial site.’

‘Where?’

‘Gallows Hill,’ said Clare.

‘But the paper said they’re old skeletons. Slaves and prisoners.’

‘They are,’ said Clare. ‘Except for this one. Suzanne didn’t die of malaria in the Northern Transvaal. She never
left Cape Town.’

Wilma Smit’s eyes were wary.

‘You’ve been waiting for this day, haven’t you, Mrs Smit?’

‘Maybe I have,’ she said. ‘But it won’t change anything.’

Clare parked at the top of the Company Gardens. The tunnel of oak trees she walked through was a relief from the heat. At the other end, she made her way past a stodgy cluster of tourists and signed in at the archives.

‘Same papers, Doc?’ asked the archivist, putting the documents she had requested on her desk. ‘You went through all of this last time.’

‘I skipped the arts pages,’ said Clare. ‘I was looking at the news stories.’

‘Okay. Here’s the lot, then,’ said the archivist. ‘
Dirty Dancing
and
Fatal Attraction
were big at the time. That boiling bunny, d’you remember it?’

‘Impossible to forget,’
said Clare, threading the microfiche through the viewing machine.

‘I’ve got some old art magazines too,’ said the archivist. ‘
Vula
magazine.
ADA
, there’s all that stuff too. Would you like to see them too?’

‘Please,’ said Clare. She had her eye to the viewfinder, February 1988 was flicking past again. This time she stopped at the arts pages. There it was: the boiling bunny, Glenn Close looking
like a psychotic librarian.

She caught her breath and scrolled back again, past the Glenn Close photo.

She stopped. The photograph took up half the page.

The green dress, the cascade of hair, the generous mouth, the cheekbones. The woman was laughing. A necklace of rough-hewn silver bracts rested on her collarbones. It was the necklace she had been buried with.

It was her.

Suzanne le Roux was standing in front of a semi-circle of men –black suits, T-shirts. Almost like backing singers in an early Madonna music video. There was a series of black and white woodcuts on the wall behind them. Each one a township Guernica. Casspirs, soldiers, boys bleeding in the dust. Clare magnified the image on the film strip. A painting of a naked woman, sun-bronzed and laughing on a
houseboat. Her head flung back; her hands on the drum-tight belly holding her unborn child. Next to her, crimson geraniums in a pot. Suzanne le Roux’s vermilion signature bold in a corner. On the wall alongside, a portrait of a little girl. Blonde hair haloed her face, a hand was clamped around a teddy bear, white lilies in a vase next to her.

The newspaper caption read: ‘Suzanne le Roux’s
triumph at her sell-out opening at the Osman Galleries, Green Point. Photograph: Ian Wilde.’ Clare leaned back in her chair, thinking. She had the feeling that it was going to cost her, but still, she sent a text to Pedro:
A favour. U worked with Ian Wilde in the 80s. R U still in touch?

Pedro:
Why?

Clare:
I need 2 ask him about some pics he took back then.

Pedro:
Will try. Dinner in return?

Clare:
Sure.
Pls text details. x

Feeling a wave of irritation, Clare went off and photocopied what she needed.

She returned everything to the archivist, packed up her things, and walked back to her stiflingly hot car.

A homeless woman at the traffic lights was fanning herself with a copy of
The Big Issue
. The baby at her back looked limp as a rag. Clare opened her window and gave the
woman R20. She tossed the magazine onto the back seat of the car. The face on the cover was the same as the face on the posters. The artist Lilith le Roux, a latter-day Grace Kelly.

Clare phoned Magda de Wet. An arts journalist, Magda knew everybody and everything. She and Clare had been at school together. Two clever, skinny girls at Leliefontein Primary. The only two girls from the district
who didn’t have babies and a mechanic for a husband by the time they were twenty. They had both come a long way from that dusty, thorny playground, and they knew it.

Clare got hold of her friend as she was heading out for a sandwich.

‘Come join me,’ said Magda. ‘I’ve got a gap. Then it’s deadline hell for a few days. Now’s good. I haven’t seen you for so long – you must be wanting something
from me.’

‘That’s exactly what my niece told me,’ said Clare.

‘Was she right?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Clare.

‘Meet me at that new place in Woodstock,’ said Magda.

The Kitchen, a block or two into Woodstock, was an oasis in an urban slum. Clare looked at the menu. Best Sandwiches In Cape Town.

Magda de Wet arrived, a six-foot whirl of legs, earrings, scarves and necklaces, kissing everyone she knew.

‘I’m not hungry,’ said Clare once Magda had settled.

‘Come, Clare, stop being anorexic, for Christ’s sake. Order a Love Sandwich,’ said Magda.
‘They’re the best in town, and I can’t eat alone.’

‘You choose for me,’ said Clare. ‘Chicken and avo and lettuce.’

‘Control freak, or what?’ She smiled at Clare. ‘So, skat, you were asking about Lilith le Roux.’

‘About Suzanne le Roux, actually. Lilith’s mother,’ said Clare.

‘She’s been dead for years,’ said Magda. ‘Lilith’s the one who’s interesting. Have you seen her latest show?’

‘Not yet,’ said Clare. ‘I thought I’d talk to you first. Find out a bit about her. Her mother, too.’

‘Suzanne le Roux.’ Magda fixed her hooded eyes on Clare. ‘She did sell well at one stage, but she’s slipped into obscurity. She’d had a couple of shows in Europe. Also played politics a bit. Then she ran off, back when there was all that fighting in the 80s.’ With a wave of an elegant hand,
Magda dismissed the political convulsion that had brought South Africa to its knees.

‘And Lilith?’ asked Clare.

‘Ah, Lilith. Her work’s about mother and daughter stuff – abandonment, sex, desire. You’ll have seen her show on posters, it’s called Forensic. Appropriate, I think.’

‘Sounds a bit like that British artist,’ said Clare. ‘Tracey Enim.’

‘Imagine Anaïs Nin let loose in a
mortuary, and you’d have Lilith. Very clever, transgressive, very –’ Magda took a sip of her coffee. Her lips left a perfect crimson imprint on the edge of her cup.

‘Masochistic? Erotic?’ Clare prompted.

‘Exactly,’ said Magda. ‘It sells her work. And she’s beautiful. You almost have to be these days, to be successful. She seems so vulnerable, so everybody – men, women, the lot – think
they’ll get a chance to fuck her. A dealer’s dream.’

‘Who are her dealers?’ asked Clare.

‘The Osmans took her not that long ago,’ said Magda. ‘I was a bit surprised. She’s beyond their comfort zone, I’d have said.’

‘Osman. I know the name,’ said Clare. ‘Tell me about them.’

‘Upmarket now, discreet, well-connected,’ said Magda. ‘Been going since forever. Made their name in the late
80s with good representational art.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Clare.

‘The kind of work rich housewives and corporates buy to hang on their walls,’ said Magda. ‘Beautiful stuff that makes the buyer look good. In the early days the Osmans did a lot of trading in Laubser, Irma Stern, Pierneef, Frans Oerder. Some sculptures too, Edoardo Villa among them. They also sold minor Renoirs and Picassos
– the kind of stuff that found its way here mainly through state collections. They knew how to source, and Gilles Osman, for all his troubles, has an eye.’

‘What kind of troubles?’

‘Nothing specific,’ said Magda. ‘He’s supposedly been on some long sabbaticals. Truth is, though, he had a breakdown and spent some time at a clinic. Useful, though.’

‘How so?’ asked Clare.

‘Tax man
was onto him,’ said Magda. ‘Lifestyle audit. He’s got expensive taste. They wanted to see if his income matched his expenditure.’

‘Does it?’ asked Clare.

‘Hard to say,’ said Magda. ‘Nothing came of it in the end, nothing that I heard, but since then he’s left the day-to-day running of the gallery, handling the artists, etcetera, to Merle.’

‘She also has an eye?’

‘Gilles used to
pick the artists at the graduate shows – probably where they got Lilith,’ said Magda. ‘He was the face of the business. But Merle’s the one who’s kept her head through tough times.’

‘Are they a couple?’

‘No, brother and sister,’ said Magda. ‘Came from the wrong side of the tracks in some one-wagon town in the Karoo. Carnarvon or some arid hellhole like that. They survived it and have stuck
together ever since they moved to Cape Town and re-invented themselves. A bit like me and you, really.’

‘It’s amazing how far a fear of farms will get you,’ said Clare.

‘Brains, I’d call it,’ said Magda. ‘Being hardegat is what my father calls it. I don’t think Gilles Osman had the easiest time, though,’ said Magda. ‘I felt sorry for him. He did his national service, like all the white
boys then. But he’d been to art school – in Pretoria, I think – so they all thought he was a moffie. He had a friend, someone with rank, the story goes, who helped protect him. But it was like
Lord of the Flies
in those army camps. Then he came down here and was cold-shouldered because he wasn’t English-speaking and wasn’t from Cape Town. So he was pretty much fucked both ways.’

‘It can be very
smug, Cape Town,’ said Clare. ‘Thinking of itself as the centre of the universe. Damn hard to break into if you’re not Constantia blue blood.’

‘Yes. I’ve seen people’s eyes glaze over if you mention the peopleon the other side of Main Road.’

Magda finished her coffee.

‘The Osmans eventually cracked it,’ she said. ‘Gilles went to spend time in Amsterdam, then New York and London, Tokyo,
even. When he came back he slipped into the world he’d set his sights on and has made a lot of money since then.’

‘You seem to know him well,’ said Clare.

‘Too well.’

‘An affair?’

‘Didn’t last very long.’

‘Come on, tell me,’ said Clare.

‘I interviewed him a couple of years ago,’ said Magda. ‘He asked me to dinner, courted me a while. I was flattered.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Ag, usual art thing,’ said Magda. ‘He’s a narcissist. Charming and handsome, but cold. There was nobody in the relationship but him. I was just the mirror. But I think I wasn’t quite polished enough to reflect back what he wanted to see.’

‘Just as well, I suppose. I’m better at being alone,’ said Magda, with a wry laugh. ‘Are you’re still with that good-looking skollie I met? Rafiek something.’

‘Riedwaan,’ said Clare.

‘It’s been a long time – for you.’

Clare shrugged.

‘He’s got you hooked.’ Magda’s black eyes glinted.

‘Not really,’ said Clare.

‘You’re blushing!’ laughed Magda. ‘I never thought Clare Hart would meet a man who would make her blush. By the way, what happened to his child, that little girl who was abducted?’

‘Yasmin,’ said Clare. ‘Such a daddy’s
girl. She’s okay. A child’s body heals so fast.’

‘And the mind?’ asked Magda, signalling to a waiter for the bill.

‘She’s gone with her mother to Canada,’ said Clare. ‘She left a couple of weeks after she came out of hospital.’

‘They divorced?’

‘Not yet,’ said Clare.

‘Is it better that way?’

‘Simpler,’ said Clare. ‘But not better. It broke Riedwaan’s heart, losing her.’

‘She’s safe there, at least,’ said Magda, putting her hand on Clare’s arm.

‘I suppose so,’ said Clare, taking out her purse. ‘But Yasmin is only seven. Too young not to have her father close by. It’s bad for both of them.’

The waiter stood at the table with the bill.

‘I’ll get this,’ said Magda. ‘Why don’t you go and see Lilith’s work? You may as well. I’ve got to run, but the gallery’s
just a couple of blocks away.’

The gallery, a converted factory, was a sanctuary from the wind hurling itself off Devil’s Peak. The lift cranked itself up to the top floor. White walls, grey floor, a window framing Table Mountain and the tumult of clouds that swirled down its arid flanks.