Deon Meyer (9 page)

 

 

“I’m called Mat.”

 

 

“Because of your initials?”

 

 

“Yes,” he said, relieved.

 

 

“My name is Hanna. I’d be pleased if you called me that.”

 

 

“Are you a psychiatrist?” he asked nervously, impulsively.

 

 

She shook her head. Her hair was an almost colorless brown, tied back in a braid. The braid was visible with every movement of her head.

 

 

“An ordinary psychologist.”

 

 

“But you’re a doctor?”

 

 

She tilted her head, as if she was slightly uncomfortable. “I have a doctorate in psychology.”

 

 

He digested this information.

 

 

“May I smoke?”

 

 

“Of course.”

 

 

He lit the cigarette. It had bent when he’d clutched it in his hand earlier and it drooped sadly between his fingers. He sucked in the smoke and unnecessarily tapped the ash into the ashtray. He kept his eyes on the cigarette, on the ashtray.

 

 

“This is only the second week that I’ve been working with the police,” she said. “I’ve already seen a few people. Some were unhappy because they had to come. I do understand that. It’s not pleasant to be forced into something.”

 

 

She waited for a reaction, got nothing.

 

 

“Psychological consultation doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. Just that you need someone to talk to. Someone between work and home.”

 

 

Again she waited. Joubert kept his eyes away from her. Why did it sound like excuses to him? Why did it have to be a woman? It had caught him unaware.

 

 

“Your work creates a lot of stress. Every policeman should talk to a psychologist on a regular basis.”

 

 

“Was I referred because there’s nothing wrong with me?”

 

 

“No.”

 

 

“Who decided that I had to come?”

 

 

“I did.”

 

 

He looked at her. Her arms were relaxed, only her hands occasionally made small gestures to punctuate her words. And her voice. He glanced quickly at her face. He saw the line of her jaw, straight and delicate as if it was fragile. He looked away again. She didn’t look guilty. Only calm and patient.

 

 

“And my OC?”

 

 

“OC?”

 

 

“My commanding officer.”

 

 

“I get a whole pile of files every day from officers who think their men should talk to me. And only I recommend who should come.”

 

 

But it was still de Wit who had done the preliminary work. Filled in the forms. Written the motivation.

 

 

He became aware of the intensity of her gaze. He stubbed out the cigarette. He folded his arms and looked at her. Her face was serious.

 

 

Even more quietly than before she said: “It’s not unnatural to be unhappy about it.”

 

 

“Why did you choose me?”

 

 

“Why do you think?”

 

 

She’s clever, he thought. Too clever for me.

 

 

He knew he wasn’t mad. Or was that precisely what the crazies said? He was there because he was just a little crazy. The Great Predator was on his trail. And that sometimes made him . . .

 

 

“Because of my record,” he said resignedly.

 

 

She looked at him, a sympathetic half smile on her mouth. Her mouth was small. He saw that she wore no makeup. Her lower lip was a juicy morsel, a natural pale pink.

 

 

When she said nothing, he added: “It’s probably necessary.”

 

 

“Why do you think it’s necessary?” Almost whispering. Only the musicality of her voice made it audible.

 

 

Was this the way she worked? You came in, sat down and lanced your own abscess, releasing the pus in front of the good doctor, and she disinfected the wound and bandaged it. Where did he have to start? Did she want to know about his childhood? Did she think he’d never heard of Freud? Or should he start with Lara? Or end with Lara? Or with death? What about Yvonne Stoffberg? Do you want to hear the one about the detective and the neighbor’s daughter, Doctor? Screamingly funny story . . . Because the detective wants to but doesn’t know whether he can.

 

 

“Because my work is suffering.” A gutless reply. He knew it. And knew that she also knew it.

 

 

She was quiet for a long time. “Your accent. I’m from Gauteng. It still sounds strange. Did you grow up here?”

 

 

He looked down, at his brown shoes, which needed polish. He nodded. “Goodwood.”

 

 

“Brothers and sisters?”

 

 

Wasn’t that in his file as well? “An older sister.”

 

 

“Is she still in the Cape?”

 

 

“No. Secunda.”

 

 

Now he looked at her when he spoke. He saw the broad forehead, the big brown eyes, set wide apart, the heavy eyebrows.

 

 

“Do you resemble each other?”

 

 

“No . . .” He knew he had to say something more. He knew his replies were too brief.

 

 

“She . . . looks like my father.”

 

 

“And you?”

 

 

“Like my mother.” He was shy, uncomfortable. What he wanted to say sounded so commonplace. But he said it: “Actually I take after my mother’s family. Her father, my grandfather, was evidently also big.”

 

 

He took a deep breath. “And clumsy.” He was annoyed because he’d added the last two words. Like a criminal deliberately leaving clues.

 

 

“Do you regard yourself as clumsy?” She said it automatically, a reflex, and in an odd way it made him feel better. At least she wasn’t in complete control.

 

 

“I am.”

 

 

“Why do you say that?” More slowly, thoughtful now.

 

 

“I always was.” His eyes wandered over the bookshelves but he saw nothing. “Since I can remember.” The memories dammed up against the dike. He took out a finger to let a few drops through. “In junior school . . . I always came last in track events . . .” He was unaware of his wry smile. “It worried me. Not in high school, though.”

 

 

“Why did it worry you?”

 

 

“My father . . . I wanted to be like him.” He pushed the finger back. The leak was sealed again.

 

 

She hesitated for a moment. “Are your parents still living?”

 

 

“No.”

 

 

She waited.

 

 

“My father died three years ago. Of a heart attack. My mother a year later. He was sixty-one. She was fifty-nine.” He didn’t want to remember.

 

 

“What did your father do?”

 

 

“Policeman. For seventeen years he was the commanding officer of the Goodwood station.” Joubert could hear the wheels spinning in her head. His father was a policeman. He was a policeman. That meant whatever it meant. But she would be making a mistake.

 

 

“I didn’t become a cop because my father was one.”

 

 

“Oh?”

 

 

She was so clever. She had caught him out. But not again. He said nothing. He dug his hand into his jacket pocket looking for his cigarettes. No, it was too soon. He took his hand out, folded his arms across his chest again.

 

 

“Was he a good policeman?”

 

 

Why this obsession with his father?

 

 

“I don’t know. Yes. He was of another era. His people— the uniforms, white and brown— were fond of him.”

 

 

He hadn’t even discussed his father with Lara.

 

 

“But I think they were scared of him.”

 

 

He had never spoken about his father to Blackie Swart. Or to his mother or his sister. Did he want to talk about him with anyone?

 

 

“He had a racial slur for every hue, for every racial classification in the crazy country. The Malay people were not coloreds to him. He called them hotnots. To their faces. His hotnots. ‘Come along, my hotnot.’ And Xhosas and Zulus were not blacks. They were kaffers. Never ‘my kaffers.’ Always ‘bloody kaffers.’ In his time there were no black constables, only black criminals. More and more as they moved in from the Eastern Cape looking for work. He hated them.”

 

 

He saw himself in the black armchair, the big man with the folded arms, bowed head, and somewhat untidy hair, the brown jacket and trousers, the unpolished brown shoes, the tie. He heard himself speaking. As if he stood outside his body. Talk, Mat Joubert, talk. That’s what she wants. Give her the skeletons. Let her dissect the remains of your life with her learning. Bleed out the filth.

 

 

“I also did at first, because he did. Before I started to read and had friends whose parents had different views. And then I simply . . . despised my father, his narrow, simplistic point of view, his useless hate. It was part of a . . . process.”

 

 

For a moment it was quiet in the dungeons of his mind.

 

 

The pain pressed down on his shoulders. He was at his father’s grave and he knew he’d hated the man. And no one knew it. But his father had suspected it.

 

 

“I hated him . . . Doctor.” He deliberately added her title, creating a distance. She wanted to know. She wanted to hear what specters were wandering about in his head. He would tell her. He would fucking tell her. Before her techniques and her voice and her greater knowledge winkled it out of him . . . “I hated him because he was what I could never be. And because he resented it and threw it back in my face. He was so strong and . . . fleet-footed. On a Friday evening he would make the brown constables line up in the street behind the station. ‘Come, my hotnots, the one who reaches the lamppost before I do can go fuck this weekend.’ He was in his fifties and he always beat them. And I was slow. He said I was merely lazy. He said I must play rugby because that would make a man of me. I started swimming. I swam as if my life depended on it. In the water I wasn’t big and clumsy and ugly. He said swimming was for girls. ‘Girls swim. Men play rugby. It gives you balls.’ He didn’t smoke. He said it affected your wind. I started smoking. He didn’t read because life was the only book one needed. Reading was for girls. I started reading. He was abusive. To my mother, my sister. I spoke softly to them. He said ‘hotnot’ and ‘kaffer’ and ‘coolie.’ I addressed them all as ‘mister.’ And then he went and died on me.”

 

 

Emotions expanded from the inside, in his chest. His body shook, independently, so that his elbows landed on his knees, his head between his hands. He wondered how she, when he . . .

 

 

Suddenly he wanted to tell her about death. The longing to do so spread through him like a fever. He could taste it, the relief. Speak about it, Mat Joubert, and you’ll be free . . .

 

 

He straightened and put his hand in his pocket. He took out the cigarettes. His hands were shaking. He lit one. He knew she would say something to break the silence. It was her job.

 

 

“Why did you choose the same career?”

 

 

“The detectives were separate from the uniforms at Goodwood. There was a Lieutenant Coombes. He wore a hat, a black hat. And he spoke softly. To everyone. And smoked Mills out of a tin. And always wore a vest and drove a Ford Fairlane. Everyone knew about Coombes. He was mentioned in the newspapers several times, murders he’d solved. We lived next to the station. I was on the stoop, reading, when he came past from the detectives’ office on Voortrekker Road, probably on his way to see my father. He stopped at our gate and looked at me. Out of the blue he said, ‘You must become a detective.’ I asked him why. ‘We need clever people in the force.’ Then he left. He never spoke to me again. I don’t even know what became of him.”

 

 

Joubert killed the cigarette. It was half-smoked.

 

 

“My father said no child of his would ever work for the force. Coombes told me to become a detective. He was everything I wanted my father to be.”

 

 

Tell her she’s looking in the wrong place. This track leads nowhere. It wasn’t his father who’d fucked him up. It was death. The death of Lara Joubert.

 

 

“Do you enjoy your work?”

 

 

Now you’re getting warm, Doctor.

 

 

“It’s a job. Sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not.”

 

 

“When is it pleasant?”

 

 

When death is clothed in dignity, Doctor. Or when it’s completely absent.

 

 

“Success is pleasant.”

 

 

“When is it unpleasant?”

 

 

Ding! You’ve just hit the jackpot, Doctor. But she wouldn’t get the prize today.

 

 

“When they get away.”

 

 

Did she realize that he was hedging? That he was concealing, that he was too frightened now to open the sluice gates because he’d forgotten how much water had been dammed up behind them?

 

 

“How do you relax?”

 

 

“I read.” She waited. “Science fiction, mostly.”

 

 

“Is that all?”

 

 

“Yes.”

 

 

“You live alone?”

 

 

“Yes.”

 

 

“I haven’t been here long,” she said and he noticed her nose— long and slightly pointed. It seemed as if the elements of her face didn’t belong together, but they formed a beautiful whole that began to fascinate him. Was it her fragility as well? He liked looking at her. And it gave him satisfaction that he found her attractive. Because she didn’t know it. That was his advantage. “And there are many things I still want to arrange. But one thing that is taking shape already is a social group— if one can call it that. Some of the people who consult me . . .”