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  The darky had inhaled the food and was washing it down with the Coke, his pitiful belongings spread out around him. A torn blanket. A few shopping bags full of fuck-knew-what. A pile of old newspapers, pages waving in the breeze. A row of plastic Coke bottles filled with sea water. They drank it, these darkies, as a purgative.

  When Vernon had first seen the Rastaman sneaking down here a few weeks back, he’d been of a mind to kick the shit out of him and run him off. But something held him back. Some intuition. And Vernon was a man who trusted his intuition, knew all too well that not everything was plain and simple, that life didn’t run in nice straight lines: it zigzagged like a bastard, took off in unexpected directions. A successful man understood that. Stored up things that could be of use to him.

  So he let the darky be. Turned him into one of his projects. Brought him food now and then, made sure he didn’t stray from this desolate spot and stayed well hidden from the houses of the rich. The man had come to think of Vernon as his benefactor.

  Vernon stood, his leg bitching at him. “Okay, my friend, I’m going now. I see you soon, okay?” He flicked his unfinished smoke at the Rastaman, who caught it, juggling it in his outstretched palms, bobbing his wild head as he sucked on the end.

  Vernon hobbled back toward the truck and as he crested the rocks the house rose into view. Now there were only five people on the little beach: the skinny white guy standing with his wife, who looked like the sun had faded her to nothing, their girl kid, and two other men. One was the Australian dope smoker who lived in the cottage of a house a few streets away, a loudmouth with a red face and a big gut. Vernon heard his laugh, carried on the breeze. The other guy, older, tall with white hair—some kind of European—owned a massive place that backed up against the mountain.

  As Vernon saw the woman go off into the kitchen, the kid at her heels, his leg caved on him and he sat down on the rock. He kneaded his hamstring, watching as the white-haired guy said something to the other two, shook their hands, laughed and disappeared into the house, sniffing after the wife.

  Caroline Exley stood at the kitchen window watching Nick talk to Vladislav Stankovic, who had been fucking her for the last two months.

  Vlad threw his head back and laughed at something the hideous Australian ex-cricketer, Shane Porter, said. Then he turned and stared at Caroline and winked.

  Her husband and her lover couldn’t have been more different. Nick was small and slight, Peter Pannish, looking nowhere near thirty-six, dressed in the baggy clothes favored by people who spent their lives in communion with computers.

  Vlad was at least fifty (too vain to disclose his age) and tanned the color of old teak. With his beak of a nose and thick, iron-gray hair swept back from a high forehead, he looked like a Serbian ethnic cleanser. She called him Vlad the Impaler. Of course.

  So different between the sheets from her husband, too. Nick had used humor to seduce her. He’d been quite funny back when they met, ten years ago. They flirted, kidded and joshed one another into the sack.

  Sweet it may have been but Nick was never passionate.

  Sex with Vlad was a carnal brawl—he smothered her with his big body, damp flesh stinking of meat and Balkan cigars, his barrel chest covered in a carpet-like gray pelt, his coarse pubic hair abrasive on her clitoris. He fucked her until the voices were stilled and her rage softened and dispersed like smoke. The thought of his fat cock inside her made Caroline wet and she had to grip the kitchen counter to compose herself.

  She ran a hand through her hair, looking around the kitchen, overwhelmed by the evidence of the gross excess of her life. Plates of half-eaten food occupied every available surface: marbled gouts of birthday cake torn at by greedy little mouths, then discarded in favor of Belgian chocolates, syrupy Chinese confections and fluffy orange centipedes that stained fingers and tongues tartrazine-yellow.

  The toothy adults had eviscerated olive breads and croissants, leaving them to drown in a soggy smear of Chardonnay, balsamic vinegar, Brie, Roquefort and gaudy dips. Even the leaf salads looked stripped and violated.

  Sunny, who’d followed her inside, sat perched on a kitchen chair, keeping up an endless, inane patter that Caroline ignored. In some pretence of tidying up, she lifted a plate still coated with caviar, thick as sand on a lava beach, and nearly vomited at the gynecological reek.

  Dumping the plate, she closed her eyes and massaged her temples, trying to rub away the voices that were stirring within. A reminder to take her medication.

  The day had sapped her energy and she was glad it was nearly over; the obscenely cheerful thirty-somethings and their unruly brats had left her feeling frayed around the edges. God knows, she’d done her best to keep her disdain—and her incessant, nagging rage—in check.

  Vlad exchanged handshakes with Nick and Porter, trotted up onto the deck and breezed into the kitchen, dressed in his ridiculous Eurotrash outfit: a pink Lacoste shirt and blue drawstring trousers, tanned legs sockless in white espadrilles.

  “Darlink,” he said in that joke accent.

  “Careful. Little ears,” she said, nodding at Sunny, who watched them, squinting, as if she sensed something.

  “It was lovely day,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Next time you must bring your wife.” A running gag this, between them. The unnamed, eternally absent wife—away at health farms and spiritual retreats.

  “Of course.” Coming closer, laying his broad-fingered hand near hers.

  She could smell him, his fleshy odor welling up beneath the noxious designer aftershave. Every time she saw him she told herself that he was absurd, a buffoon. And then she let him fuck her, anyway. He didn’t know or care that she had been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her first, and only, novel. Or that after three years her publishers were demanding back their piddly little advance for the book on the Brontë sisters she had never quite been able to write. All he wanted to do was shag her stupid.

  Caroline looked out the window and saw Nick and the Australian hunched over a joint, laughing smoke. Idiots. Then she saw the toy ship bobbing in the shallows, the retreating tide lapping at it, rocking the sails, the backwash threatening to suck it into the waves. This gave her a moment’s inspiration.

  Pushing her hair out of her face, Caroline turned to Sunny and smiled her most maternal smile. “You had better go and rescue your boat, darling,” she said, sending her daughter to her death so the Serbian philistine could shove his thick fingers inside her sticky knickers.

  Exley could relax at last, now the guests had left. He’d had to be vigilant all afternoon, waiting for one of Caroline’s episodes. But she’d been on best behavior. Aloof and distant, sure, but that was Caroline. There had been no insults, no tantrums, no broken glass. A pretty good day, then, after all.

  Shane Porter handed him a joint, saying, “Come on, mate, let’s get baked.”

  Exley seldom smoked weed but he had a little buzz going from drinking wine and maybe a hit or two would keep his good mood afloat. And he sensed that Porter could be persuaded to tell him about that incident in Islamabad three years before when a world of shit had landed on the spin-bowler-turned-commentator’s blond head, leaving him living like a remittance man here in Cape Town.

  Exley had googled Porter and it seemed that he’d called a Pakistani opening batsman (a bearded character who knelt, faced Mecca and kissed the cricket pitch every time he scored a hundred runs) “Osama bloody Bin Laden” during a commercial break, not realizing his mike was still live and that he could be heard all across the subcontinent. But the details were vague and contradictory, the Wikipedia entry warning that the allegation was unsubstantiated, and the garrulous Aussie had spoken of everything except his fall from grace in the two months Exley’d known him.

  Emboldened by the weed, Exley said, “Tell me about it, Port.”

  “And what would that be, Ex?”

  “What really happened in Pakistan?” Floating the question out on a cloud of smoke.

  Exley
was aware of Sunny at his side, saying something as she tugged at his boardshorts. He absent-mindedly stroked her hair, his attention on the Australian, and she slid away from his hand.

  Exley took another hit and passed the joint back to Port, who sucked it down to nothing, exhaled a fragrant cloud and flicked away the butt toward a sky streaked with reds and mauves. He spluttered, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shaking his head.

  “Nah, you don’t want to ruin a beaut of a day.” But Exley knew he had him, the mix of Cape wine and Durban weed acting like truth serum, and Porter asked, “Sure you want to hear my tale of woe?”

  “Yeah, I’m curious.”

  “Ah, it was bloody awful mate, I can tell you,” Port said, conjuring another joint from his shirt pocket and firing it up. “One day I was on top of the world, calling a Pakistan–Australia game in Islamabad, next day I had to jump on the silver budgie and bugger off home, to disgrace and universal condemnation.”

  The Australian stopped, the joint halfway to his lips, when Caroline’s scream tore the air. At first Exley thought it was just another of her episodes when she came hurtling from the house, yelling, relieved that only the Aussie reprobate was here to witness this.

  Then Porter grabbed Exley by the shoulder and spun him to face the ocean. “Jesus, Ex!”

  It took a moment for Exley to understand that the driftwood he saw tossed on the water—the Atlantic rough now that the tide had retreated and the wind was up—was his daughter’s arm breaking the waves in the shadow of the gray rock. Sunny’s pale head rose for a moment and then disappeared beneath the tumbling swell.

  Exley took off, plunging into the freezing breakers, feeling the shelf fall away from under his feet. No sign of Sunny. He dived, made heavy by his clothes, and saw her sinking toward the wagging fingers of kelp, her hair floating away from her head in Medusa coils, a few bubbles escaping her mouth.

  Panic had him swallowing water and Exley surfaced, gasped for air and dived again, flailing his way down to Sunny. He grabbed her and towed her upward, fighting his way out of the surf, dragging his daughter onto the sand, crouching over her, his hair dripping onto her face that was a pale death mask.

  Exley opened Sunny’s mouth and breathed into her, feeling how cold her lips were. Jesus, he’d never learned CPR. Is this how you did it?

  Through his terror he was aware of Caroline kneeling on Sunny’s fan of wet hair, pale hands fluttering uselessly. Shane Porter stood frozen, staring.

  Then powerful arms shoved Exley aside and a big brown man in a rent-a-cop uniform appeared from nowhere, straddled Sunny and pumped her chest, water spilling from her. The stranger used both hands to open Sunny’s jaws and covered her mouth with his own, forcing air into her lungs, getting into a rasping rhythm, as Exley heard the mad wail of sirens.

  Chapter 3

  Majestic. The word comes to Vernon as he pilots his pimped Honda Civic through the curves, headlight beams skewering the coast road into the city. You were fucken majestic, my brother.

  Vernon has a monster sound system in the car—tweeters perched above him, six-by-nine speakers bulging beneath the rear window, sub-woofers occupying half the trunk—but tonight he prefers the quiet, just the soothing thrum of rubber on the twisting road and the little crackle of his Lucky as he inhales. He lounges in the bucket seat, face glowing green from the instrument panel, comfortable now in his jeans and T-shirt, the Glock holstered at his hip, and replays the last few hours.

  Vernon knew the child was dead the moment he got to her. But he also knew this was a moment he must seize, and he put his mouth over hers and breathed into her like he was blowing up one of the party balloons that still caught the breeze on the table near the house. He felt her little ribcage rising beneath him as her dead lungs swelled with air.

  Vernon got a groove going, breathing, sitting up to pump at her chest—seeing the hope and desperation on the three white faces hovering over him—then down again, his mouth over hers. Pointless, but he kept at it. Exhausted by the time the emergency crew came jogging up with their EMT kits.

  Vernon stood, his bad leg almost buckling, fighting for breath, looking down at the father. “I’m sorry, sir. She’s gone.”

  The medics tried to work their magic, but it was no good. In the midst of all this the Australian faded with the last of the sun and the two parents were left on the beach with the medics and the cops who came up from Hout Bay. The mother sat on a rock, hugging herself so tight she looked like she was in a straitjacket, and the father paced up and down in his teenager’s shorts and T-shirt muttering “Jesus Christ” over and over again, like somebody, somewhere was going to make this all okay.

  Vernon stage-managed everything. Getting the ambulance crew out of there, interfacing with the police—led by a darky captain, more politician than cop—who asked polite and sympathetic questions of these rich white people.

  The highlight, the masterstroke, was not letting the cops take the body. When he saw the vultures from the police morgue bumping a gurney over the sand, throwing long shadows as they triggered the motion detectors that drove the house’s spotlights and surveillance cameras, Vernon cornered the father, whose eyes swam with tears, magnified by his thick glasses.

  “Sir, I have to advise you not to let them take your daughter,” Vernon said, speaking soft, right up in the whitey’s ear.

  “What?”

  “These technicians from the police morgue. I wouldn’t let them take her.”

  The man stared at him. “Why not?”

  “Things happen at the morgue. Sexual interference. Theft of body parts.” The guy gaped, confused. “I have a personal connection with an undertaker, sir. A man who will treat your daughter with respect. Respect and dignity.”

  Dignity. Now, where the fuck had he found that word? Like a bloody infomercial on the TV.

  Vernon laughs, tapping his horn as he passes a slower vehicle, bringing the spiral coil of the car lighter up to the tip of another Lucky, getting the cigarette paper burning—that nice, toasty smell in his nostrils. Of course the white guy lapped it up and Vernon phoned a mortician connection of his from the Flats who arrived in his best shiny black suit, a furtive assistant dogging his heels.

  After the cops filed out and the undertakers drove away with the dead child laid out in the back of their truck, the father took Vernon’s hand in both of his, like he was holding on for dear life.

  “Thank you, Mr.…?” Staring at him blankly.

  “Please, call me Vernon, sir. Just Vernon.” Digging into his uniform pocket and finding a card—had them printed at his own expense—with his name and cell number on. “You or your wife need anything, anytime, you just call me, hear?”

  The whitey nodded and Vernon limped off toward the front door, ready to drive down to Hout Bay and punch out and change into his civvies. The cherry came as he walked through the living room, passing a table full of rich-kid birthday gifts. He boosted a Barbie Doll, staring out at the world through a plastic box, eyes as blue and dead as the drowned girl’s.

  Vernon also took a piece of colorful paper that was barely torn and wrapped the Barbie up nice down at Sniper HQ, and now it lies on the back seat, rustling as he speeds through the curves at Oudekraal, the lights of Camps Bay glittering ahead like a rich lady’s necklace. What the fuck, the kid wouldn’t be playing with that dolly, not where she is now.

  Dawn Cupido lives in fear that the same sick shit that made her childhood a nightmare will be visited upon her daughter. Which is why she pays more than she can afford for this dump in blue-collar Goodwood, a predominantly white-Afrikaner neighborhood of small houses and blank-faced apartment blocks, wrapped in razor wire to keep out those grasping dark fingers from across the railroad track.

  Dawn, dressed in a faded toweling robe, stands in the dingy kitchenette of the studio apartment, making a cup of instant coffee, the locked balcony doors behind her barely muting the night traffic rising up from Voortrekker Road—one of the longest in Africa
—that chains this sad suburb to wealthy Cape Town.

  Through the bars of the cracked kitchen window she can see the sodium light towers hovering like UFOs over the mean houses and shacks of the sprawling Cape Flats. She grew up out there, in apartheid’s dumping ground, with its millions of mixed-race inhabitants, where kids are raped and murdered at a rate that defies belief.

  Dawn takes the coffee and a packet of crinkle-cut chips and flops down on an old sofa that hemorrhages stuffing, gazing blankly at a ballroom-dancing competition on the mute TV. Her four-year-old daughter, Brittany, lies on the double bed, sleeping in the embrace of one of her many soft toys. Dawn reaches over and strokes Brittany’s copper-colored curls, careful not to wake her. Marveling, as she does each and every day, that this beautiful blonde creature resulted from a desperate ten minutes in the back of a car with some long-forgotten white john.

  Dawn blows on the steaming mug, staring at the dancers—all glamorous and graceful—as they twirl and prance across the screen.

  She crams her mouth with chips and washes them down with coffee, having one of those moments when she sees—really fucken sees—the squalor of her life. And to underscore it, the room throbs with the opening bars of a bad cover version of “Eye of the Tiger,” signaling that the titty bar across the road is open for business. Means that Dawn has less than half an hour to get Brittany to the babysitter and get her ass over to the bar where she’ll spend another night flashing her stuff at fat, sweating whities.

  Jesus.

  Dawn knows she is going to need a little help getting through the night, so she digs under the cushion and finds a zip-lock baggie bulging with weed. She lifts a copy of People magazine from the carpet patterned with burn marks and dumps some of the weed onto Angelina Jolie’s goldfish lips. The green mound smells like all the rooms from Dawn’s childhood and she has to shut her eyes for a moment, as if that will stop the memories.