LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Abduct him. Take him for a little ride. Make him get out. Smash his knees with a steel pipe. Leave him there. Let him find his own way home.”

      “Jesus H Christ,” he says.

      “This coffee’s A1,” she says. “A-fucking-1.”

      Prankster, Aaron thinks, after she’s left. Sounds more like a description of Bubbles Bothma than of Eddie Knuvelder. In which case he’d better keep his guard well up.

      *

      His heart brims with thoughts of murder. His damaged kidney hurts. That would be his body sending out emergency signals. (A good time to listen to those tapes, maybe?) He whets his teeth, his brushes, like knives. Knuvelder will pay for this. But what can he do? Nothing. Maybe Knuvelder will change his mind. A capricious man. Obstinate. Maybe he’ll come to his senses. There’s still time. In previous years, Aaron would work right through the night. Stumble up the stairs the next morning in a daze. Stare at what he’d done the previous night. If it was no good, he’d destroy it. Start again from scratch. Now he works regular hours. Now that Naomi’s dead. Following the situation with his illness. Maybe this is what Knuvelder thinks he picked up in Aaron’s work – a whiff of disease, of downfall. God help Aaron if that’s the case, because then everything’s lost. But that’s not really the way things are. If Knuvelder would only look, if he would just open his eyes! If his head wasn’t so full of shit and his healthy judgement not eaten away by an insidious worm and obsequious lackey, he’d see that after all these months, things are starting to happen again in Aaron Adendorff’s work. A reminder of the old battle, the recalcitrance, the conflict and the crazy humour; traces of all this have returned, but in a new form, fiercer now. More forceful, more unerring than ever before. More uncompromising. His imagery by turns humorous, banal, apocalyptic. Brick walls and tumbling, hacked-off limbs. A head rolling like a rock down a slope. But Knuvelder, Knuvelder chooses not to see any of this.

      Tell me, Eddie Knuvelder, he thinks, tell me, with your hand on the Bible – or on whatever it is you regard as holy – tell me this new work of mine isn’t gripping. Tell me it’s not good. Really good. Tell me something isn’t happening here, something as new as anything you could ever hope for.

      *

      Aaron’s first thought the next day is that he should never have allowed the woman into his house. Now that she’s been inside once, he must make sure she never again gets any further than the kitchen.

      His second thought concerns Knuvelder. Knuvelder’s clearly sold out. No longer uses his own judgement. Instead, he lets those two assistant curators talk all kinds of shit into his head. (The one thin, white and pale – a case of bulimia, without a doubt – and the other dark, sluggish, overweight, with dreadlocks. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.) Knuvelder’s head’s going soft. His better judgement gnawed away by the worm of political correctness. But maybe all is not lost yet. Maybe Knuvelder’s busy positioning himself favourably in relation to international trends. (The man has a strong self-serving instinct.) An unpredictable bastard. He’s come up with unexpected moves before. Maybe there’s still hope. Maybe he’s deliberately pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, making an apparent choice, only to come up with something quite different, and quite surprising, in the end.

      It’s still early in the morning when Mrs Sekete phones to say the taxis are on strike; she won’t be able to make it to work today. Better, he thinks, better that she’s not here on this day. Better not to have her around: steaming, singing, muttering, slamming doors, dragging furniture across the floor as she sweeps. The milk is sour. His heart beats uneasily.

      Against his better judgement, he takes a second look at the list of names Knuvelder mentions in the interview. Only two of them established figures. The rest are all young artists – one of them, he notices to his dismay, is Jimmy Harris, the artist at whose solo exhibition the picture of Knuvelder was taken. He’s familiar with the work of another, Moeketsi Mosekedi. Aaron knows the woman mentioned, as an insolent tart: a smug, pseudo-intellectual poseur who produces horrifically pretentious work. He can’t bear even to think about it. Maybe Knuvelder’s got something going with her? Something sexual? But he’s always thought of Knuvelder as asexual – if Eddie had to choose between sex and financial gain, Aaron thinks, he wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

      At eleven o’clock, someone knocks on the door. With a sinking feeling, he realises it’s the neighbour again. For a moment, he considers not opening the door for her.

      “Ag, man,” she says, cigarette in one hand, a small plate in the other, “I thought I’d quickly bring you a pancake. You looked so down in the mouth yesterday.”

      No further than the kitchen. So he has resolved.

      She proceeds to sit at the kitchen table. Removes the little cloth from the pancake. It doesn’t look promising. A greenish sheen rises from its surface.

      “How about another nice cup of coffee,” she says.

      He doesn’t answer.

      “Why do you still look so hangdog,” she says, “as if the shadow of death has just passed over you.”

      “It has,” he says.

      “You check out the Lotto on Saturday night?” she asks.

      “No,” he says.

      “What if you won?” she asks.

      “I didn’t,” he replies.

      “How do you know for sure?”

      “I just know.”

      “We had three digits right,” she says.

      “How exciting,” he says.

      “My offer still stands,” she reassures him. “Just say the word. We can arrange for someone to take that prankster out. Or maybe teach him a lesson.”

      “I won’t be making use of your services, thank you,” he says.

      “Oh, well,” she quips. “You know where to find me.”

      On the other side of the valley, a dog barks in a high-pitched, hysterical voice. Apart from that, all is quiet. It couldn’t possibly have been Knuvelder’s own choice; he must have allowed himself to be swayed by those two arrogant heirs. Insinuating fucking jackals. Otherwise, the man must be suffering from some unidentified affliction, something slowly eating away at his good judgement.

      “Where’s the newspaper?” the woman asks.

      “Which newspaper?”

      “The one you showed me yesterday.”

      He hesitates a moment before fetching it.

      She looks long and hard at the photo of Knuvelder. “I know this man,” she says. “I’ve met him somewhere before.”

      “Where the hell would you have met him?” he asks.

      “Man,” she says. “I’ve been around.”

      She folds the newspaper up firmly. “I don’t read newspapers any more,” she says. “All I read is human interest. Like the night they eventually cornered the old paedophile Gert van Rooyen. He still managed to shoot their tyres to smithereens. The policeman ran all the way to Gert’s car in the driveway. Gert opened his window. Pulled out his revolver. The policeman thought Gert was going to shoot him, but the next moment Gert pushed Joey Haarhoff’s face down onto his lap and shot her in the back of the head. Then he took one last look at the policeman’s eyes before turning away and shooting himself, also in the back of the head. In front of the policeman. All over before you could say Doris Day. Old Joey still breathing, but she died on the way to hospital. The end of Gert and Joey. The secret of the girls went into the grave with them. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.”

      She lights up.

      “Old Joey still wrote, in her last letter to her sister, that she must forgive Gert. He was a good man. They didn’t know anything about abducted children. In the letter she even made a list of all

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