The Mall (28 page)

chapter 24

DANIEL

I’m standing in the corridor, propping myself against the smokers’ wall with my foot. I pull another cigarette out of the pack and light it with the butt of the
last. A few metres away, just past the alcove, Josie’s whispering something to Katrien. But fuck them. For once I don’t care what they’re saying.

That… place… broke something in me. I don’t know who I am any more.

Or maybe it fixed me. Maybe I know exactly who I am now. I finger Rhoda’s knife where it sits in my jeans pocket. I found it when I was digging through her bag for some cigarettes and I
pocketed it, almost without thinking. I like having something of hers with me.

Katrien nudges Josie and stubs her cigarette out on the wall behind her. She looks at me as if she’s seeing me for the first time, pauses as if she’s going to say something, but
changes her mind and carts herself back inside.

Josie lingers a little.

‘When did you start smoking?’ she asks.

Before, I would have sold my soul just to have her speak to me. Now I just feel a spark of irritation. Unbidden, I get a flash of blonde bodies swinging redly in infinite mirrors. I shake it
off.

I shrug. ‘I dunno. A while.’

‘You’ve been out here ages. Bradley’s going to… You can’t chain smoke instead of work.’ She says it like it’s a joke she’s sharing with me.

‘I give a fuck what Bradley says.’

I know my surliness will offend her, but I like the feel of the scowl on my face, the burn of tar in my lungs. I’m done trying to be nice. I’m done taking their shit. She starts to
turn away, but then hesitates. ‘Jeez. You’re off sick for a couple of days and you come back… all…’

I wait, looking into her eyes without flinching. She is pretty, there’s no denying it. She holds my gaze then walks away again. I watch her arse and her legs in her jeans. ‘It suits
you,’ she says without turning around. I’m waiting for that voice inside me to start squealing,
She likes me! Should I ask her out? What will I say?
But that voice is silenced by
a thick layer of filth and memory and rage. I light another cigarette with Rhoda’s Zippo and stroll back the long way, through the service corridor and to the front of the shop. I take a few
puffs in the doorway and grind the butt out against the display window.

Bradley skitters up to me. ‘Come on, Daniel,’ he whinges. ‘That’s just not acceptable. You’re late for your counter shift.’

I just look at him. It’s only in these last few days that I’ve realised I’m taller than him.

‘In fact, take your dinner break now and put a new shirt on. You stink of smoke. And I’m going to dock you an hour.’

Did he sound so high-pitched before? He’s like a mosquito.

‘Ja. I’m here now.’ Katrien and Josie are staring at me, caught in mid-transaction. The bejewelled customer they’re dealing with also watches with interest.

Bradley’s face drops. ‘I – I. Listen here. You can’t… In fact, I’m giving you a written warning. It’s really unacceptable.’

Did I seriously put up with this before? I’d rather have a whiskey and a cigarette than stand here, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned lately it’s that life’s
too short to waste your time on shit you don’t want to be doing. Especially when you know what you’d rather be doing.

‘Ag, stick it up your arse, Bradley.’ I walk out of the shop, imagining their faces. Josie, Katrien, the customers, Bradley.

So, ten thirty on a Tuesday morning, I’m sitting in the bar at JB’s, drinking my second double and smoking another fag. I stick my finger into the hole under my ear
and dig around a bit. It’s become a habit since we came back. I want to see what I saw when I did it first; I want to feel what I felt. But there’s no magical light show; all it does is
throb. I wipe the film of bloody mucus on my jeans and take another slow drag.

I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to deal with Mom’s neediness, her constant nagging and watch Rhoda put on her middle-class private-schoolgirl act. The strung-out druggie
freak who beat the shit out of me and held me at knifepoint just six days ago seems to be some distant dream. But rather that dream than this nightmare.

Do I mean that? Would I rather be caked in shit, running for my life, or here, at home, doing the same old crap I’ve always done?

These fucking Johannesburg suburbs: they suck you in. They want you to get comfortable and complacent and enslaved just like the rest of the rats in this city. Working to pay for shit we
don’t need so that we can feel happy we’ve got a job. Putting up with prats like Bradley. Or even worse, ending up like my mom, selling herself for a big, ugly house and a car.

I down my whiskey and call for another. I stare at the face reflected in the mirror behind the bar. I’m not the same person. None of this bothered me last week. Nothing bothered me last
week except whether Josie liked me.

And what about Rhoda? Is she still playing the game, or is it over for her?

I don’t want to go home; I’m scared to find out.

I down another double, wait for the alcohol to hit. It doesn’t. I can’t even get fucking drunk. But I keep trying till the end of my shift, till my money’s run out.

When I get home, Rhoda is lying on a sun lounger by the pool. She’s wearing a pair of my board shorts and a vest and has my music in her ears; the dogs are lying in the
sun next to her. At least she’s not wearing my mom’s bikini. The dogs jump up and sniff my legs as I cross the lawn, then look up at me, bemused. They can’t seem to find a trace
of me either under this smoke and booze sweat. I lean down to fluff Clarrie’s head but she flinches away.

Rhoda looks over at me and takes out the earphones. She shifts to semi-sitting and crosses one foot over the other. Her legs are glistening with sun cream. I try not to look at her small breasts
inside my top, but fail.

‘Dan. I’ve got to tell you someth—’ She stops as my smell reaches her before the rest of me. I sit down heavily on the side of the lounger, almost tipping her over.
‘Christ, you don’t look too good. You smell like a fucking ashtray a wino pissed in.’

‘I just quit.’

‘Smoking?’

‘My job.’

‘What? Why? What happened?’ There’s something about her tone. It’s almost as if she’s going to launch into a Rose-like nag.
You give up too easily, darling.
Daniel, you really should apply yourself more. You have such promise, but you waste it idling and staring at the ceiling. Opportunity won’t knock on the ceiling, my boy.

‘Oh, never mind. What did you want to say?’

Rhoda puts her hand on my arm. ‘I’m worried about you. You haven’t been… yourself for days now.’

Myself?
Myself? What the fuck do you know about who I am? This is me. Right here. You taught me that. Until you changed. You changed. Not me. You, sitting like a fucking suburban princess on
my mother’s fucking sun lounger.

‘I’m just tired,’ I say.

‘Listen, Dan. I say I need to go, I know your mother doesn’t want me here, and you tell me to stay. What are we doing? Where do we go from here? What do you want to do?’

I want you to tell me what to do. The only time I ever did anything interesting with my life, I was following you. I need you to tell me what to do.

‘I don’t know. I need to… I don’t know,’ I say.

Rhoda starts winding the iPod’s cord, looks away from me. ‘I’m going to go. It was fun. But I’ve got stuff to sort out, and the sooner I start the better.’ She gets
up.

‘Wait, Rhoda. I don’t want…’

She stands, arms folded, waiting, challenging me to say what I mean. Then when she sees I’m not going to say any more she shakes her head, and I see a flush of anger settling in her face,
and I recognise the knife-fighter I met those lifetimes ago. ‘What happened to you?’ she says.

‘You know what happened to me,’ I tell her. ‘It happened to you too.’

‘No, I mean since we got back. At least you could string a fucking sentence together in that place.’

‘Rhoda, it’s not the same any more.’ I slump over and lean my chin on my hand.

But I feel her arm around my shoulder. She’s sitting next to me. ‘I know…’ And now she’s smelling the skin around my neck, breathing in the smoke and the whiskey
sweat like a memory, and her face is pushing against my skin and it feels warm, and then we’re kissing and her mouth tastes different from anything I’ve tasted before. So much realler
than I ever would have believed. Her hands are moving over my clothes and under my shirt and my fingers are on her face, feeling the scars, pressing them into my palms, and I want to fuck her right
here, on my mother’s sun lounger, and my hands are pulling up the vest, nudging over more scar tissue, and the dogs are milling about, squealing, not knowing who to protect, and then they
bolt away, yapping with glee and the garage door is shearing open.

My mother is home from bridge.

‘You need to move out,’ Rhoda licks into my ear.

By the time Mom’s rattled out of the car and through the house onto the patio, Rhoda and I are straightened up and sitting half a metre apart, looking innocent. I make a show of lighting
up a fag for Rhoda and then myself as Mom picks off her heels and tiptoes across to us, the dogs trotting at her feet, tattling tales in Pomeranian. I know how much the smoking bothers her and
sometimes I ask myself why I want to hurt her, but no answer comes. I just like smoking. It distinguishes me.

‘Daniel, I wish you wouldn’t. It’s so… unhealthy.’

I blow out a stream of smoke in her direction and she flinches, then shoots a disapproving look at Rhoda. To my surprise, Rhoda grinds out her cigarette on the edge of the pool. ‘Sorry,
Rose. I am trying to cut down.’

‘It’s okay, Rhoda. It’s not you I worry about. It’s Daniel. I told you about Alvin… and I just wouldn’t… want—’

I stop listening. She
what
? She told Rhoda about Dad? No fucking way. I glare at Rhoda. Her eyes shift, her gaze landing anywhere but my face. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I get up
and stalk inside and grab my keys from the kitchen counter, but now Mom’s parked behind me. I can’t very well go outside and ask her to move her fucking car before I make my grand exit,
can I? I go upstairs and slam my door, making sure they can hear it down in the garden.

I slump on the bed, which Florence has made neatly. She’s picked up Rhoda’s clothes and shaped them into sharp little passive-aggressive squares stacked on the chest of drawers.

There’s a perfunctory knock on the door, and Rhoda barges in, ready to argue, Clarissa at her heels as backup. ‘Dan, don’t blame your mother fo—’ But she stops when
she sees I’m laughing.

‘I’m too old for this shit, Rhoda.’

‘Yes, you are.’ She sits down on the bed next to me. Some of the electricity from earlier is still coursing and I touch her hand. She laces her fingers through mine.

‘I would have told you about Dad, you know. It’s not some big secret.’

Rhoda doesn’t say anything, but there’s an expression of pity on her face. I don’t want to be pitied.

‘Did she tell you about Frank?’ I ask.

‘Uh, a bit. Just that she was seeing a married man.’ She takes the cigarette from my mouth, taps the ash worm into the saucer by the bed, takes a long drag.

‘Ja. The slimy fucking bastard.’ I pause, wondering how much I want to tell Rhoda. All of that was before. This is now. ‘Do you know how she’s able to shop and play
bridge all day, and live in this house and drive a Merc?’

Rhoda takes a last suck and grinds the butt out. ‘I can guess,’ she breathes out with her smoke. Clarissa curls onto the rug in the sun and starts licking herself.

‘Ja. And meantime Rank Frank is sitting at the head of his company, appearing in public with his happy family, probably fucking another five women until they get too old for him. Then he
pays them all off for their silence, a fraction of the income from his dodgy business deals.’

‘I’m sorry, Dan.’

‘Thanks.’ I miss my father. He smoked till he died of lung cancer. I light up another one, then scratch at my neck-hole.

Rhoda slaps my hand away, just this side of friendly. ‘Stop it. Please.’

I hear my mother chatting to Florence downstairs in the kitchen as she chops up something for lunch. I can’t remember what it was like before. Was Mom always this long-suffering? I
basically tell her to fuck off, and fuck your dead husband too, and she goes into the kitchen to make me some lunch. Have I always been such a bastard to her? She should have thrown me out a long
time ago.

‘What happened at work?’

‘Ag, just that prat, Bradley. He’s such a fucking toady. He shat on me in front of everyone for smoking. I was just making up for all the smoke breaks I didn’t take.’

Rhoda doesn’t smile. ‘You weren’t smoking in the corridor again, were you? I thought you’d promised.’

‘Jesus, what’s the big deal? Everyone smokes there all the time. None of them get eaten by fucking monsters. It’s never going to happen again. It never happened. Down the end
of that corridor is the fucking Woolworths receiving bay, not some monster-infested never-neverland. It never happened. We’re in the real world, forever and ever and ever. This is it.
It’s over.’

Rhoda stands up, angry. She jabs at the hole behind my ear. ‘This happened, fuckwit. This happened!’

‘Ouch!’

‘Sorry.’ She sits down again and stares out of the window for a while. ‘It doesn’t feel over.’

‘What, you want a text message to tell us what to do next? Check your phone.’ I say. We both pause. I know she’s wishing, just like me, that something will happen. But there
are no message beeps; there’s just the sound of a dog barking next door, traffic on the road, someone mowing a lawn a few houses away. ‘This is it, Rhoda. Game over.’ You
don’t even get three options here.

Rhoda swings her legs up on the bed and lies flat on her back. I shift down from my slump to lie next to her.

‘I don’t know what to do next,’ she says. ‘If I was trying to score some coke or weed, I’d know exactly what was next.’

‘You tempted?’

‘Not at all. Fuck, whatever happened down there – whatever didn’t happen – was the world’s greatest rehab programme.’