Water Music (16 page)

A sugar-coated pill for the viewers: Mr Milan Savić is one of many concerned
citizens involved in community outreach programmes. Riedwaan sat up at the mention of his name Savić, king of the castle in Hout Bay, had recently moved to Cape Town, his reputation preceding him. And Chadley Wewers just this side of Milan Savićs fence? Riedwaan mulled over this as he picked up the estate agents envelope. Before he opened it he looked up, straight into his mothers eyes
boring down at him from a family portrait taken just before his father died. Now, when he paid his guilt-wracked Sunday visits, she only occasionally knew who he was.

Riedwaan slit open the envelope and looked at the offer. Someone had taken their time in typing all those zeros. He counted them. They could make quite a few problems disappear.

When Clare awoke, heart pounding like the waves, her nightmare was distilling into adrenalin. She had dreamed that she was Rosa. Rosa, her naked back sliding down against a white wall. Her fingers stiff and uncooperative, searching for numbers on a dial. The adrenalin cancelled the morning sickness. For the first time in weeks, Clare was up and out of bed, eager for a run. Darkness was leaching
from the sky. The swell was heavy against the rocks beyond the Promenade.

A lone runner on the Promenade, whom Clare used to pace herself. Five hundred metres, and she already felt better. Her heart beat rhythmically, and she imagined that other heartbeat inside her, claiming her, imagined its skull, rudimentary limbs, infinitely helpless. This accidental being would own her more completely than
Constance had ever done. She ran on, past the lighthouse, memories surfacing, she and her twin in the cool shade of a gum tree long, long ago, the tang of eucalyptus, dusty leaves rustling on a hot Namaqua afternoon. Her twin sisters face the mirror of her own, lying so close that the babies touched knees, bellies, noses. Clare had turned away, and in that moment, for the first time in her short
life, had the sense that she was herself. Just her, alone, her own separate self. The memory had spurred her on, comforted her, as much as the memory of her twin warm against her back.

Emerging from a dyad, did she now want to be lost again in the sentimental triad of mother, father, baby?

She touched the bollard at the end of the Promenade and turned back. She ran, her feet flying across the
wet concrete. The endorphins took over, and she sank into the oblivion of her easy, practised stride.

Clare showered and made herself an espresso. She took it through to her study and opened her laptop. She checked her email; nothing new on Rosa. No plausible responses to the Missing Person alerts that had gone out on the social networks. One thing was for sure, no one had seen Rosa for the last
three weeks, or if they had, they werent saying.

The results of the Dog Units search. Interviews of neighbours, walkers, riders. Mountain Men reports of alarm activations and vagrants, the phone numbers and locations.

Zero, zero, zero.

The innocence of everyday life made sinister because she was looking at it, reading it for something more than the jumble of human activity under whose surface
a lonely girl had slipped.

Her thoughts twinning the abandoned child with missing Rosa, her mind trying to stitch fragments from yesterday into some semblance of order. She was trained to recognise a pattern, a repeat. She sought something to anchor her thoughts as her mind worked along the well-worn grooves of parental cruelty and the depravity of strangers towards a child.

Clare opened the
little girls folder. It had had been forty-eight hours ago. It felt like a lifetime.

She picked up a photograph: the waxen face, the fold of the ears, crescent lashes on waxen cheeks, wild hair, the defined widows peak.

Clare stuck the girls picture onto the map of Hout Bay. A lepidopterist pinning a specimen, adding a wingless butterfly to her collection of damaged and dead children.

She was
wary of seeing pattern where there was nothing but coincidence. That the child was so malnourished was not unusual, she knew that all too well; that there had been no claim was not unusual either. Still, that haunted Clare. No keening mother, no angry father, no outraged uncles, brothers, promising to hunt and kill the monster who had done this. They were nowhere. There was no one.

The deathly
pallor of the skin, the bones too soft to keep the wasted little body upright. Who had done this, and how had it not been seen? Or had it? Was that why the little girl had been left to die? A cry for help, perhaps, rather than an act of cruelty?

She spread out the photographs of the girl, curled and stiff, her fingernails ripped and filthy. Alongside, photographs of the muddy path, the crude
shelter in the trees. The place the perpetrator had chosen was so public. She flipped through the photographs until she found the one with the leather restraint. The child had been tethered. Gently. With so many other injuries, the thong securing her had caused no hurt.

Clare ferreted in that cusp between thought and feeling, trying to identify what it was that felt familiar even as it unsettled
her so. She watched the waves. They were coming into focus, the grey ocean barred with a swell that rippled almost as far as the container ships on the horizon.

She turned back to the notes Anwar Jacobs had sent her; examined again her own from the bridle path. The child. Bruises everywhere. Her face gaunt, her body frail. On her hands and feet, the nails ripped as if she had tried to dig herself
out from somewhere.

Yet she had been left, tethered, where someone would find her. Whoever left the child in the forest really did seem to want her to be found. Or had the person hidden her, planning to return?

Clare scrutinised the photographs of the little girls wounds. Her little naked body on display, its details recorded subjected to a final assault, that of officialdom.

She set out the
photographs of the abrasion on the nape of the childs neck.

Clare angled the light, peering at it closely.

Letters of the alphabet.

A tattoo.

The rain had stopped, but the rush of cold air took Clares breath away when she got out of the car. The tanzanite pendant was like an icicle on her skin.

The security guard looked up from his Sunday newspaper. There was a picture of the place on Judas Peak where the little girl had been found. Clare in the background. His eyes flicked up at Clares face. He waved her through, and Clare took
the lift to the Intensive Care ward.

Anwar Jacobs looked up when she walked in.

How long have you been on call, Anwar? You look exhausted.

Ever since you found that little girl on Friday, he said. Yours was my first phone call today. Looks like youre bringing me a chink of light. Come and see her.

Clare watched her for a moment, but the child did not stir in the darkened room. Her breathing
was regular, her pulse steadier, the metronymic rhythm of the drip bringing her back from the brink.

I wanted to check something, said Clare to Anwar. Something I noticed in the photographs. May I?

The doctor nodded and left the room.

Sitting on the bed beside the girl, Clare settled herself. Felt the warmth of the little body, the swell of the breathing, the calm that descends as a child hovers
on the brink of sleep.

Untangling the tresses spread across the pillow, Clare worked her fingers along the girls scalp. Feeling a twig stuck in the hair behind her ears, her fingertips eased it out, brushing against a ridged patch of skin at the nape of her neck. The child didnt wince. If it was a wound, it had healed.

The small curled-up body inched closer to her. Clare found her flashlight.
Lifting the girls hair, she ran her finger across the skin. The child buried her face in the pillow when Clare angled the light onto her neck.

An E and an S. She could not make out the rest.

The childs hand reached upwards. Clare rested her hand on it, their fingers entwining as she did so. With the index finger of her other hand, Clare read the scar.

Esther. Clare said the word.

The corners
of the girls mouth lifted, a ghost smile. Clare pulled the cover up to the childs chin and tucked her in securely.

She closed the door and went to look for Anwar. She found him in a ragged armchair in the storeroom that passed as a nap room for the doctors on duty. He was asleep, the tea beside him ice cold.

Anwar. Clare touched his shoulder.

His chin snapped up.

What?

The child, said Clare.
The wound on her neck. It looks like a prison tattoo.

Show me. He was on his feet.

Done with a pin and a Bic, said Clare, as they walked back to the ward.

She must have screamed blue murder, said Anwar. He opened the door. So many nerve endings at the nape of the neck.

Some children learn not to cry. Judging by the state of her, she is one of them, said Clare. She mustnt be left alone. I need
to know if she says anything more. She is the only key to her own puzzle.

They were standing by the little girls bed.

A nurse aid will stay with her. She wont be alone, said Anwar. The childs eyes opened as he spoke.

Anwar, look, said Clare. Shes responding.

He bent over the child, but she recoiled, thrashing her arms, oozing rehydration fluid and blood where the needle had pulled out of her
arm. The look on her face was one of terror. She cowered, an animal cornered, her mouth open in an endless, silent scream.

Do something, said Clare, turning towards Anwar but he had already retreated to the door.

I cant go near her. She is terrified of me, he said to Clare as a nurse brushed past him. Its because I am a man. Ive had children react like this before. The worst cases. The voice,
the smell, it triggers panic. I think shell be fine with you. She tolerates the nurses. You stay with her.

The blinds were closed and the room dark, apart from the faint green glow of machines emitting electronic chirps. The girls eyes were on Clare. The absence of expression spoke of a terror too deep for a childs simple body language of fear and reproach. She kept utterly still. Her knees were
drawn up under her chin, her spine each vertebra a misshapen pearl showed under the scarred skin.

Clare approached the child as one might an injured bird, knowing that her size, her proximity, might again trigger panic. That the child might injure herself, rip out the drip that had taken so long to re-insert into a barely visible vein.

The child did not move; she followed Clare with her eyes
until she sat down.

Despite the childs stillness, Clare felt her shrink further, as if she had retreated even deeper into some locked chamber at the core of herself.

Anwar Jacobs closed the door, pitching the room into darkness once again. Clares eyes adjusted to the dark. The little girls eyes were gleaming.

I wont hurt you, said Clare. Her voice was low, the voice of a mother speaking into
darkness so that a child might anchor herself to the sound. After a long silence, Clare slowly got up to open the blind. She pulled the cord and barred light fell onto the floor. The child shut her eyes instantly, her fingertips pressed tightly to the lids. She whimpered. Pain and terror in equal measure.

The light hurts you, doesnt it? Clare closed the blinds. She sat beside her on the bed.
The child seemed lost in the cold wastes of white sheets, pillows, blanket; alone, small, bereft.

She looked up at Clare with a mute appeal.

Clare put her hand on the childs cheek, her touch slow, soft. The girl did not flinch.

Tell me please, who are you?

Nothing. An impossible question, she knew. But she tried again in Afrikaans. Again, silence.

My names Clare, she tried.

No response.

The sound of the rain was louder, drumming da da da da da da da.

The little girl lay still. A tentative hand, reaching for Clares. She took it in her palm, sensing the childs yearning, her loneliness. Clare lay down on the bed beside her. Face to face. She rested a hand on the girls stiff little back. She moved closer, so that the child was curled against her chest. Thus contained, the child burrowed
closer. This she was familiar with, Clare realised. A familiarity with bodily proximity. Clares body was a sanctuary, though she herself was a stranger.

She felt the childs warm exhalation on her skin.

Who are you, little one? Clare whispered.

The childs breath faint on her face.

She was trying to speak, Clare realised. She had tilted her head so that she might breathe words into Clares ear.
Sounds so faint that Clare was not at first sure she had spoken. Then she placed a hand against Clares throat, and Clare covered it in hers.

The childs breath was soft as a moth-wing as she tried, and failed, to utter a word. Tears pooled in her dark eyes, spilling over. Her narrow chest shook with silent sobs.

Wheres your mother gone? Clare whispered, but there was no answer, just her hands
moving under Clares top, finding comfort as they settled on Clares breasts. After some time the childs breath evened, her heartbeat regular at last.

Clare lay beside her until she sank into sleep. A real sleep, this time. She pulled the blanket over Esthers shoulder. Then she moved the nurses gift of a teddy bear into her arms. It would do for the moment.

You look like you could do with some
breakfast, said Anwar as she closed the door behind her.

Love to, but not right now.

Behind the bonhomie, desolation in his eyes. Clare knew why Anwar Jacobs avoided going home. One reckless taxi driver, one red light, his son dead.

You still with Faizal? he asked. Between them the memory of the night when he had sought solace in Clare, who had given so willingly.

I am.

Hes a lucky man.

Im not sure hed agree with you this morning, said Clare.

She zipped up her jacket.

I need to know when shes recovered enough for me to question her.

Thats going to be a while, he said. But shell be OK.

Physically, said Clare.