P
IPER SAT AT THE BACK OF THE MINIBUS TAXI, TRYING TO KEEP HIS face in shadow so the light didn’t catch the tattooed teardrops. But they were still visible, even though he’d pulled the cap low, and the other passengers avoided him like a disease.
Two dark women, squeezed into the seat ahead of his, were talking about this Barbie Doll killer who was all over the
Sun.
“He chop the head off. Only blondes, they say.”
“My daughter—the fair one—she work in Sea Point by the hair salon. She got the light streaks in her hair. Natural. I’m gonna tell her to dye it.”
“Better you do. It’s too terrible.”
Piper tuned them out. He wore the blue jeans and brown shirt he’d found in the bag under the trees, left there by the Air Force’s connections. It was as hot as a crematorium in the packed taxi, but he kept the sleeves of the shirt rolled down to hide his tattoos.
Under the trees he’d stripped off the orange jumpsuit. Then
he’d squatted with his briefs around his ankles and retrieved the condom containing a fifty-buck note he’d sent up his rectum for safekeeping before he left his cell that morning. It was slick with Vaseline and slid out easily. Over the years Piper had kept money, drugs, and even a cell phone in this God-given safety deposit box. A fifty-buck note was nothing.
He’d hidden the jumpsuit and the cop’s gun under a bush and changed his clothes. But he’d kept his Grasshoppers, the shoe of choice of old-school gangsters: leather lace-up moccasins with hand stitching around the blunt-toed uppers, and wedge-shaped crepe soles. Soles that let you creep up nicely on somebody. Over the years the original tan leather had disappeared under layers of oxblood polish.
At Retreat a colored woman was forced to squeeze in next to Piper, a toddler on her lap. From the way she sat—rigid, head turned away from him—the woman knew very well what the tattooed tears signified.
The child, a girl in a T-shirt with
tweet me wight
written across the chest in pink letters, stared up at Piper’s face, fascinated. Children unnerved Piper. They were bad luck, the way they could look in your eyes and see your soul like it was a flipping TV.
Another advantage of prison: no kids. Except on visiting day when the families arrived. But nobody ever came to visit Piper, and he’d spend the day in his cell, never having to clap eyes on the dwarves.
The child was still staring, unblinking, a bubble of drool forming in the corner of her mouth. Piper reached out a hand and turned the child’s face away. She opened her mouth and howled.
The mother risked a glance at Piper.
“It look at me again, I break its neck,” he said.
The woman didn’t doubt him, just scooped up the child and fought her way to the front of the minibus, calling for the driver to stop. As the taxi jerked back into the traffic, Piper saw them
standing on the sidewalk outside a loan agency. The child still crying, the mother smacking its ass like the whole thing was its fault.
A cop van cruised up beside the taxi, and Piper pulled his cap lower and stared down at his shoes. Out the corner of his eye he saw the cops turning into a side street.
As he flexed his toes, an image of Disco came to Piper. Sitting on a bunk, that beautiful face concentrating as he used a rag over his index finger—stained the color of blood—to dip into the shoe polish before he rubbed it into the leather of these Grasshoppers.
Not long now. Piper felt himself harden inside his jeans.
THE SPIDERS CRAWLED from Disco’s eyes, scuttled down his face, disappeared beneath his T-shirt, losing themselves in Piper’s brutal artwork. He lay on his stinking mattress and begged the spiders to stay away. Acrid sweat ran from him like he’d sprung a leak, and his joints joined in a chorus
,
singing along with his nerves and his cramping gut, pleading for the sweet relief that only tik could give him. He tore off the T-shirt and dabbed it at his body. It was soaked through within seconds. Then he put the sodden thing in his mouth and bit into it to stop himself from screaming.
Ice. Choef. Crystals. Tik-tik. Globes. Meth.
The names danced in front of his eyes like they were written in neon.
It was going on for a day since he’d caught a tiny hit of that straw he’d scored from Popeye. Barely got half a chesty into his lungs before that cop kicked it out of him. After the interrogation and the hellish night in the cell, he needed something to calm him. But he didn’t have no money. Not one fucken cent.
He knew he was stupid to come home to the
zozo
, that Manson could have been waiting, but he wanted a dark hole to crawl into and hide. But what he really needed was to score. He lay
shivering, staring at the wall where the picture of his mother used to hang. Even though it was gone, inside with the fat woman, he could still see his mother’s face. That beautiful face, so much like his.
Then he was hearing disco music, his mother’s favorite song …
First I was afraid …
No. He couldn’t handle that. Not Gloria Gaynor. Not now.
But the words were coming. He couldn’t stop them, even though he wrapped the rancid pillow around his head. He couldn’t stop the music and the memory that rode in on the back of it like the devil on a dark horse.
I was petrified …
Three-year-old Disco dancing to “I Will Survive,” dancing the dance that gave him the nickname that stuck to him like glue. A hot sweaty night in that apartment on Hippo Street, Dark City side, airless now the wind had died. Disco swirling around in the cramped sitting room, between the torn sofa and the old black-and-white TV, a ghetto blaster banging out the music on a tape stretched from overplaying. The music loud in the Cape Flats night.
But not loud enough to drown the words of Disco’s mother, Evangeline De Lilly—Vangie—and her boyfriend, Pedro. They were at the kitchen table, and Pedro was making another white pipe, the apartment already hanging with smoke like smog on a still day. Disco spun, dizzy, head swirling, a feeling he would seek to reproduce the rest of his life. Snatches of conversation reached him, but he forced himself not to hear.
“He go, or I go,” Pedro said.
“But it’s my son.”
“I’m telling you, Vangie. I fucken mean it. Do it, or I go.”
Then his mommy, beautiful and forever young, came toward Disco, drying tears on her face, reaching her arms out to him. Disco smiled up at her, swaying his tiny hips, ready to dance
with her the way he always did. His mommy was on her knees in front of him, and she wrapped her arms around him, trapping him, stopping his scrawny body from moving to the beat. She released him, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.
Then his mommy’s hands were at his throat, squeezing, until he was choking and gasping. Little fists trying to fight her off.
His mommy’s face like he had never seen it before. Made mad by drugs and lust.
Disco went into a place darker even than his mommy’s eyes.
Blackness. No air. A heat like none he had ever known. And a noise, a mechanical bellowing, crashing. He reached out his hands in the dark and felt something. Something slick. His fingers scrambled for purchase and he grabbed and tore, and a chink of light burned through the blackness. Tore deeper, and he saw a mound of trash and beyond it the landfill stretching to infinity.
Disco fought his way out of the black bag, a tiny figure on the wasteland of junk, seagulls screaming as they dived out of the hot white sky. The noise he heard was a bulldozer, balanced high above him on a mountain of garbage, its front end lifting, about to send a heap tumbling down on him. Disco ran, pumping his little legs, sliding, falling, making no progress in the quicksand of slop.
The bulldozer tipped its load.
Disco was smashed, rolled, flattened by the flood of trash. It clogged his eyes and his nose and his ears. The weight of the world’s waste burying him. His breath smashed from his lungs. Once again all was black. Silence.
Then an arm, a thin reed waving in the ocean of offal. And a head, like a newborn fighting itself way out of a womb of shit. He pulled his way to the surface, stinking, exhausted. Dragged himself upward, lay for a minute, coughing sludge and slime.
Disco walked forever through the filth. Saw people in the distance, black scribbles on the horizon, scavengers looking for
food and empty bottles, same as him and his mommy did sometimes. Saw the ghetto apartments built right up to the edge of the dump, like rusted trawlers becalmed on a sea of trash.
Home.
Reeking, body covered in slime and rotting food, he dragged himself up to the third floor and banged on his door. No reply. He banged again, crying. Sobbing. Loud enough for the old woman in the next apartment to peer down at him and cluck before she slammed her front door.
He banged and banged until at last the door opened and his mommy stood there, wrapped in a towel. She screamed and jumped back, hands to her face, the towel falling away from her bare body. Disco walked in and saw Pedro filling the doorway to the bedroom, naked, scratching at the fat, wet thing that jutted from the wiry hair at the base of his tattooed belly.
“Fucken useless cunt,” Pedro said as he walked back into the bedroom and slammed the door.
Pedro beat his mother, beat Disco, and drove away in a ’73 Beetle, never to be seen again. And two days later Disco found his mommy lying in her own blood in the bathtub, Gloria Gaynor on a loop in the background.
I will survive.
Not this time.
Disco screamed, screamed himself all the way back to the here and now.
Him lying on his bed, sweating, hanging for tik more than he had ever hung for anything in his whole fucken life. Disco lifted himself off the bed and dragged his branded ass across to where his clothes were still shoved in the plastic bag. He found a pair of Diesels, the ones that sat nice and low-slung on his hips. Sexy like. Bought after one of him and Goddy’s more successful scores.
Godwynn.
Disco’s fevered imagination—on a roll now—served him up
an image of Goddy lying in that same dump, his brains oozing out of his mouth, a living carpet of flies buzzing like dentists’ drills as they clung to him, making him even blacker. Disco spewed. He couldn’t stop it. Yellow bile onto the Diesels. Fuck it. He wanted to trade them for a straw. Knew that Popeye had a hard-on for these jeans.
He edged to the window and peeped out, terrified he’d see Manson and his crew. The cramped yard was empty. He needed to get to the faucet next to the fat woman’s kitchen. The only place he could rinse these jeans before he went down to Popeye to beg him to trade for tik. Got to his feet and opened the door an inch. Put a weeping eye to the crack. Saw a slice of blue sky and white sand. Empty.
Disco left the
zozo
and scuttled across to the faucet, bent double as the cramps took him again. He was washing his kotch off the jeans when a shadow fell across him. His nerves were so befuck he swore he felt the weight of it.
He waited for the cold mouth of a gun to kiss the back of his neck. Resigned himself.
What the fuck … ?
The smell clued him in even before the voice. “What’s up with you?”
The fat woman stood over him, in the fluffy nightdress that seemed to grow on her like the mold on rotting meat.
“I’m sick, Auntie,” he said.
She laughed. “Sick for a pipe, ja. You not careful, you’ll be dead, too.”
He squinted up at her, the massive breasts sheltering him from the sun that burned his skin like flames.
“Ja, they was here. Last night and this morning,” the fat bitch said.
“Who?”
“Manson’s people. They wake me and Zuma up.”
The little black mongrel hid behind her and yapped at Disco,
dancing on three paws in the dust, fourth leg jiggling in the air like it was on a spring.
“What they say?”
“What you think they say? They gonna kill your fucken ass dead.”
She bent down and picked up the dog, clutched it to her, almost losing it in her breasts, kissing its head. “Come, come, little Zuma boy. Let Mommy give you some nice fish cakes.” She waddled off into the house.
Disco scrubbed like crazy.
T
HEY LEFT THE SUN BEHIND AS THEY ROUNDED HOSPITAL BEND, driving into a low cloud draped like damp cotton wool over the mountain and the heavily treed suburbs. Leaving behind what remained of Roxy’s good mood, too.
A perfect day for a funeral.
Roxy sat beside Billy in the Hyundai, traveling deeper into the cloud. Billy drove fast but well, seemed to sense gaps in the traffic before they opened, avoiding the minibus taxis that hurtled like scuds toward the Flats. He wore a pair of dark jeans and a white shirt under a black leather jacket. No tie. Wearing shoes, too, a pair of black lace-ups that looked freshly polished.
Light rain splattered the windshield of the car, and Billy flicked the wipers into a slow moan. The rhythm of a funeral dirge. After five years the mysteries of Cape Town weather were no clearer to Roxy. The locals said, being on a peninsula, you got four seasons in a day. Not only the weather changed on this side of the mountain, away from the ocean. Her part of town,
still marinating in rich sunlight, had something Mediterranean about it, the feel of the Riviera. But this looked more like England. Houses that wouldn’t be out of place in a prosperous London suburb, sheltering behind oaks.
Roxy dropped the visor on the passenger side and looked at herself in the mirror. No makeup, except for a smear of lipstick. She decided that should go and dabbed at her lips with a Kleenex until they were bare.
She wore a simple black dress. No jewelry except for the crucifix and her wedding band. She’d nearly left the house without the ring, having removed it the day after Joe died. An unconscious act of self-liberation.
She’d felt strangely upbeat over breakfast. After her clumsy attempt at seduction the night before, she’d expected Billy to retreat into silence. But he’d seemed eager to talk, even if it was that macabre conversation about the Sea Point killer. Conversations with Billy Afrika were the weirdest she’d ever heard. Fascinating, though. Sometimes the best stories were the back stories.
Then that cop with the skin like last week’s pizza had arrived with his kid. The interlude with the boy had left her feeling off course and depressed.
Roxy saw a row of cars and a black hearse, parked outside a small Catholic chapel in a quiet, tree-lined street. Had Joe ever been a practicing Catholic? She’d never known. They’d married at a registry office before flying off to Mauritius for their honeymoon. She knew, though, that Joe had wanted to be cremated, so at least she wouldn’t have to endure the graveside rituals.
Billy parked, came around to her side, and opened the door.
“I’ll catch you afterward, okay?” Closing the door after her.
“You’re not coming in?”
“I am. But I’ll hang near the back.”
She nodded and walked toward the chapel. The Hyundai chirped behind her as Billy used the clicker to lock it.
People were drifting into the church. Men in suits, women
wrestling down the waistlines of dark dresses they hadn’t worn in a while. They sized Roxy up and held tighter to their men. She scanned the faces, mostly white, mostly middle-aged. Nobody she knew.
An undertaker, a gaunt man in a shiny black suit, materialized from around the side of the chapel, cigarette smoke seeping from his nostrils like his head was on fire. She felt his eyes on her butt as she walked up the stairs. “Abide With Me” warbled out of speakers inside the church, the high notes distorted. She paused at the top of the stairs and looked back. Billy was standing on the sidewalk, watching. He nodded at her. She turned and went inside.
Joe’s coffin, covered in wreaths, rested on a silver bier.
The reality of what she had done hit Roxy and nailed her to the aisle, like the nails in the hands and feet of the wooden Christ that hung over the pulpit, staring down at her in anguish. She felt as if the crucifix dangling from her neck was burning into her flesh.
She forced herself forward.
Jane and her mother sat in the prime mourner’s seats, in the front-row pew. Roxy had never met Joe’s first wife, but she’d glimpsed the woman once at the Waterfront, battling heels too high and too young for her, face fixed in the permanently startled smile that comes with cosmetic surgery. Or maybe she was still shocked that all the nipping and tucking hadn’t stopped Joe from trading up.
Roxy found a seat on the aisle, halfway down. She slid a hymnbook out of the rack in front of her. Flipped though it to distract herself. People around her were standing, and a man wearing vestments and a dog collar took to the pulpit. He had a comb-over, and layers of flesh sagged from his chin, like the bellows of a church organ.
He’d worked hard to achieve what he reckoned was an informal manner, as if that would make the words he spoke
about a man he’d never met seem more sincere. It didn’t. He waffled on fulsomely about a man Roxy never knew either: a dutiful husband and father. A businessman.
Off-key hymns were sung. Roxy went into a quiet place within herself, like she was in a floatation tank. Not awake exactly, but not asleep. Blank.
Until she heard the unmistakable moan of Bob Dylan singing “Death Is Not the End.” Jane’s idea of a send-off for her father. It sounded like a threat to Roxy, and she remembered the dream of the undead Joe that had left her screaming. Jane came to stand next to the coffin, mulish jaw raised as if to defy the tears that streamed down her face, pink knees showing under a badly hemmed dress.
Dylan came to an abrupt halt, left standing at the crossroads he could not comprehend.
Jane was sniffing, talking through the tears, about Joe. Was Roxy imagining it, or were the girl’s eyes fixed on her?
Roxy needed air. She left the pew and walked toward the door. Told herself not to run.
It was still drizzling outside, but Roxy was out in the open, breathing gratefully, smelling the ozone. As she walked toward the road, a thin wire of lightning strobed on the horizon.
PIPER LEFT THE taxi at the Mowbray stop, near the station. He was on his way to catch a train through to Paradise Park—it would be emptier and more anonymous than another taxi at this time of day. But first he needed to do a bit of shopping.
As Piper approached Ebrahim’s Superette, a dingy corner store in a sagging Edwardian building, two Muslim men in knitted kufi caps stepped out. One was young, in jeans and Nikes, a patchy beard like a fungus straggling across his face. The other was much older, in a pantsuit and sandals, his full white beard touching his chest.
The young man took off down the sidewalk. The old one was busy closing the door, hanging the hand-lettered sign that said the store was shut for Friday lunchtime prayers.
He barely looked at Piper when he approached. “We closed.”
Piper held out the fifty-buck note. “I just need me some soap.”
The Muslim was about to lock the security gate; then he squinted at the money.
“Okay, but you have to make quick.”
He opened the door and went inside. Piper followed and closed the door, heard the click of the lock as it engaged. The store was typical of those found in the low-rent neighborhoods of the inner city and out on the Flats. Everything from bicycles to clothes, candles, primus stoves and grocery items. Incense and the rich smell of curried meat hung in the air. The small windows were jammed with faded shirts and bolts of fabric, the glass dirty enough to keep out prying eyes.
Piper saw what he was looking for, in a finger-smeared display cabinet beneath the cash register: a range of Okapi knives. This ring-lock folding pocket knife, with a four-inch carbon steel blade, curved wooden handle inlaid with metal crescents and stars, had sent generations of brown men to their graves. Or the emergency room if they were lucky and the knifeman was shoddy in his work.
Piper had first held one of these knives in his hand when he was ten years old. And had killed his first man with one a year later. That was one thing he missed in prison: the curve of that wooden handle in his palm. He’d killed men with sharpened spoons or slivers of plastic torn from buckets, but there was nothing like flicking the Okapi open on the seam of his trousers, seeing the gleam on the blade, and putting it to work.
“Gimme one of those.” He pointed into the cabinet, to his preferred model.
The man looked hard at Piper and didn’t seem to like what he saw. “That going to set you back more than a soap.”
“Don’t worry, old man. I got it.”
The Muslim wheezed and coughed as he unlocked the cabinet. He lifted out the knife and handed it to Piper, who weighed it in his palm and smiled his 28 smile.
Perfect.
He opened the blade and tested a finger against it. It needed to be honed, but it would do. The next part was pure instinct. He reached across the counter with his left hand and grabbed a handful of the Muslim’s shirt, pulling the man toward him. At the same time he raised the blade so that it hung for a moment at ninety degrees to his body; then he brought his arm down and felt the knife pierce the old man’s chest. Pulled the knife out and plunged it down three more times.
He let go of the Muslim, who slumped across the cabinet, then slid back and fell behind the counter, a smear of blood on the glass top.
Piper wiped the blade clean on a dishtowel that hung on display and slid the Okapi into the pocket of his jeans. He reached over and took the twin of the knife he’d just used and pocketed it, too.
He opened the cash register and grabbed the notes inside. Probably not more than five hundred rand, but enough for his needs. He didn’t intend to be out for long.
Piper helped himself to a pair of dusty sunglasses from the rack on the counter. Cheap plastic knockoffs, chunky black things from the
Super Fly
days of the seventies. They would cover at least part of his tattooed face. Then he pocketed a bar of Caress bath soap. A gift.
Piper left the store. Now he was going to do what any man getting out of prison does: he was going to see his wife.