‘I want you to help me with Gordon.’
‘What, Boss? Just tell me.’ It was not difficult for Hall to imagine himself in Kruger’s place in C-Max. He knew how much money flowed to Kruger and so far he could only dream about it flowing to him. He could feel the power he would exercise over stupid brown boers like Alfred Dongwana. He got the start of an erection when he thought of the young boys he would be able to fuck and nothing they could do about it. Tell me what do you want, he thought. Tell me what it is. Give me that kind of power. Give me something worth killing for.
‘You see the way Gordon is with that woman?’
‘Beloved?’
‘He’s all over this Beloved woman, making like he’s the man and he protec’s her. Like she’s a child and he’s her daddy. Isn’ that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He tapped a forefinger on the coir mattress with each yes. ‘He’s all over the bitch like a rash, guarding her. I seen him at work for a long time, too fucking long. I seen him with other women. He treats this one different.’
‘So?’
‘This is the time to take blood. I want her. Nothing will hit him that hard.’
‘You want me to do it?’
‘I want you to do it. I want her fucked. I want her face gone, her tits too. I want nothing left of her. I don’t want her left alive like the Dongwana woman. I want her finished in every way. I want her to pay for the way that Gordon has fucked up my life. She’s got to pay, but not so bad like he’s going to pay. He’s the one who’s going to live. They’ll show her remains to him. He’ll see pictures of what’s left of her and that will be the end of him. Every day he’s alive after that he’s going to be in hell. He’ll see those pictures in front of his eyes all the time.’ He drew away from Hall for the first time, as if bringing him into focus. ‘You understan’?’
Hall understood. During the night, he had thought about this very thing. He had imagined her dying while he was inside her, the final beats of her heart drawing him into the ultimate orgasm.
Kruger saw the excitement in him and smiled, an altogether humourless expression. ‘That’s my boy. Fuck her to bits, but after that I want nothing left of her.’
Kruger slept well that night, confident in the knowledge of what awaited Beloved – and Yudel Gordon. The three who had handled Penny Dongwana were boy scouts compared to Hall. If Hall moved on this Beloved bitch, she had no chance, specially not now that she had a thing for him. It was going to be too easy. And that bastard Gordon would never get over it.
Kruger would have been only slightly less satisfied with events had he known that his conversation with Hall, muted though it was, had been overheard by the block warder, and before the night was over, Elia Dlomo would know of his plan.
Hall was even more satisfied. To say that he was content would not be accurate. It was impossible for contentment to reside anywhere in the void where his soul should have existed. But a fever of conquest could. His satisfaction lay in the conversation he had had with Beloved when they had been left alone, with the way she would contact him, and with the slight unevenness that had entered her voice when his hand touched hers. He was going to have her, he told himself, as completely as it was possible for a man to have a woman. Not in the way that other men had women. He was going to have her so completely that no man would ever have her again. And her death was going to open the door for him to the top spot in C-Max, if he was returned there, or any other prison they sent him to. No one would stand in his way, least of all Elia Dlomo.
C-Max will be mine.
OF THE PRISONERS
in C-Max, Elia Dlomo was probably the one who had the worst night of all. He tried to sleep, but without success. Unconsciousness came for the first time after four in the morning.
Life in C-Max was tougher than it was in low-security prisons. And for him, C-Max had been harder than it needed to be. Enslin Kruger had wanted him in the Twenty-Eights from the time he arrived in C-Max, but he had been a Twenty-Six since the first time he was imprisoned. The other gang members had always stood by him and he was not going to rat on them now, not even for Kruger. He had never known a mother or father, and the Twenty-Sixes had become mother and father, brother and sister to him. He would die before he deserted them and he knew that, at some future time, he may well have to do that.
But it was not Kruger who was worrying him. Kruger was a dying man. Dlomo knew what they were planning and he knew that, if Hall came back, he would be taking over from Kruger. And the Twenty-Eights outnumbered them maybe four to one. In some blocks it could be as high as ten to one. Kruger was a bastard of the worst kind – Dlomo knew that – but Hall was mad.
Dlomo never thought of himself as being other than sane. As far as he was concerned, all his life he had only done what he had to do to protect himself. From the time he was a child, he had tried to survive. When he had killed, it had been for that reason.
The family where he had grown up had never been his. As far back as he could remember, he had slept alone in a small lean-to, made of a single sheet of corrugated iron, resting against one wall of the cottage. He sealed the ends himself with a few layers of cardboard sheeting taken from grocery boxes discarded at a neighbourhood spaza shop. The floor too was made of the same cardboard, which had to be replaced every few weeks.
The members of the family that occupied the cottage – a man, woman and four children, all older than him – had always shown him that he was there on sufferance. What had happened to his own mother and how he had come to be living under these conditions had never been explained to him. All he knew was that he had duties to perform that took most of each day and that he received two bowls of mealie pap and his accommodation, such as it was, in payment. Clothing consisted of the well-worn rags discarded by the family’s children. If he did not do the cleaning and washing that was expected of him, he was beaten by the woman or one of the bigger boys. They used a one-by-two plank for the purpose.
By the age of ten, he was beginning to resist successfully and the man took over his punishment. Now failure to do his housework resulted in beatings with the fists of the man or one of the bigger boys. The beatings often ended with him vulnerable to the man’s boots as he lay on the floor of the kitchen, their chosen place of punishment. Elia knew that if he had been more pliable, only approaching family members with downcast eyes, never disagreeing and always being careful to do as he was told, things may have been easier. But that degree of subservience had never been possible. His challenging eyes and hard-lipped mouth only increased the severity of his punishments. School had never been a feature in his upbringing. No one in officialdom was interested in, or even knew about, a black boy living alone in a township lean-to.
Long before his tenth birthday, the young Elia learnt that, if he wanted to eat more than the small helpings of the tasteless porridge the woman gave him, he would have to steal. He also learnt that he had to steal further afield than neighbourhood hawkers and spazas. No matter how skilful the theft, after the third or fourth visit without his buying anything, the proprietor would be on the lookout. So his afternoon sorties ranged wider and wider across Soweto. He found himself always on the lookout for virgin territory.
It was at the age of thirteen on one of his trips, a successful one during which he had profited by an apple and a small packet of cheap marshmal-lows, that the incident occurred that accelerated the direction his life was taking. The oldest boy of the family he lived with saw him leave the shop, at that time the township’s only supermarket. On a few earlier occasions, he had noticed that Elia had something good to eat. He caught up with Elia a block from the supermarket. ‘I saw what you did,’ he said. ‘You steal from the businesses. When we get home I’m going to tell my father. And he’s going to fuck you up good.’
It had been a rash thing to say and the boy was soon to pay for it. On the way home, they had to cross a stretch of open ground that bordered a small, reed-fringed wetland. Elia had allowed the other boy to walk ahead. It was there that he made his move. The other boy was nineteen to Elia’s thirteen, but the dual advantages of a body made strong by years of physical labour and a surprise attack from behind were enough. A rock he found at the side of the path cracked the older boy’s skull with the first blow. After that, Elia used the rock to destroy his tormentor’s larynx and suffocate him. He dragged the body into the reeds and left it there. At no time in his life had he ever done anything as satisfying.
Going back to the house where he had lived was out of the question. He fled north-east towards the city on foot, through mine properties that were already falling into disuse. On one of them he found a shed that was no worse than his usual accommodation. There was even a tap that worked. He used the shed as a base from which to venture out to steal food. This time, he also stole clothing and for a few days he was better dressed than he had ever been.
The distance he had travelled seemed a long way to him, but not to the police, who tracked him down to the shed two days after the body was found. The dead boy’s parents had immediately known who the culprit was and told the police what they believed.
After two hours of being beaten by two black constables under the supervision of a white one, Elia confessed. He tried to complain to the court the way his confession had been coerced, but the judge either did not believe him or decided that he was obviously guilty, and how he was made to confess made no difference. What surprised Elia and everyone in the court was that some of the evidence alerted the judge to the circumstances of Elia’s life. The judge’s own line of questioning eventually resulted in his finding that there were mitigating circumstances. Instead of being sent to the gallows, which were in their last years of operation, he had been sentenced to only ten years, the first five to be spent in a reformatory for boys.
During his first week in Tokai reformatory, he was abused by a clique of older boys who were always on the lookout for a new victim. Instead of reporting the matter to the warders and earning the reputation of being a piemp, he dealt with it himself. One of his tormentors had an arm broken. Another was bitten so badly in the genital area that for a while there was a real possibility he might lose part of it. A third suffered a spinal injury he would carry with him for five years before he died in a shower of police gunfire. Abiding by the same code, his prison victims never told anyone who their assailant was. After that a gang of boys, both younger and older than Dlomo, gathered round him for protection and no one in Tokai, not even the warders, ever bothered any of them again.
In the mythology of the prisons, Tokai was harder to survive in and a more productive breeding ground for criminals than any prison in the country. It deserved its reputation. Before he was moved to an adult facility, the anger that had been growing in him all his life had hardened into a rage that would never leave him.
It was in Pollsmoor a few years later that he met Samson Khumalo, some five years his elder and in for armed robbery. Samson became the boy’s protector and this time he was not expected to pay. He, in turn, did his best to protect Samson. On Elia’s discharge, Samson put him in contact with Reverend Khumalo, his father. To Elia’s great surprise, he was accepted into the Khumalo family as if he had been a son. The reverend farmed a smallholding of vegetables, pigs and goats in the KwaZulu homeland, high in the foothills of the Drakensberg. For half a year, Elia worked on the farm, along with one of Samson’s brothers, but this time he slept inside the house in a bed with sheets and ate with the family. For Elia, this would probably have been enough, but at the end of every month there was also a modest pay packet. For a while, the rage within him subsided. It would never leave him entirely, but now it was controllable. ‘You’re a good man,’ the reverend told him more than once. ‘A man shouldn’t have to pay all his life for a mistake he made when he was a boy. In any case, the one you hurt deserved it.’ He rarely referred to Elia’s crime, but when he did he always spoke about Elia having hurt his victim. He seemed not to acknowledge that anyone had died.
Later events were to change the reverend’s opinion. Some six months after Elia had been welcomed into the family, Ruth Khumalo, nineteen years old and in her second year in teacher’s training college, came home for the Christmas holidays. Elia’s only experience of women before that time was the beatings he had received in childhood. He had never felt the touch of a woman except in punishment. His own hands had never known the softness of a woman’s skin. The physical love of a woman had been beyond all possibility of contemplation.
On seeing Ruth, he knew immediately that he loved her and had no doubt that she must also love him. Every night in bed he masturbated while he held her image in his mind.
Ruth was a sturdy Zulu girl, broad in the hips and big-bosomed. She wanted to become a teacher to help spread education and the gospel among her people. In Elia she saw a lost soul. It was her duty to help him towards the light. During her holidays, she taught him the rudiments of arithmetic and speaking and reading English, activities that her father found praiseworthy.
When Dlomo asked her to accompany him on a walk through the hills, she agreed readily. She was the perfect woman in every way, virtuous, hardworking and with a body that could drive a man crazy. Out of sight of the village, while they rested on a grassy hillside, Elia had reached for her, trying to take her breasts in his hands. She had pushed him away. ‘No,’ she had shouted. ‘What are you doing? You can’t do that. Stop that.’
But stopping had been impossible. This was the woman he had never had, these were the breasts he had never touched, this was the skin he had never stroked. He tore the dress away easily, but the screaming, the screaming was too loud, the screaming was keeping him from all that he wanted so badly, and the screaming made him realise, through the waves of his rage, that he would never again be returning to the Khumalo home. Despite the screaming, Ruth Khumalo may have survived, but her attempt to flee destroyed her. He caught her in a few strides. The rock that came to hand was comfortingly familiar, very much like the one he had used next to the wetland eleven years before.