LITMIR.BIZ

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in the back of the head, right there in the car.”

      “Your chest doesn’t sound too good,” he says. “Why do you smoke?”

      “Horses for courses,” she says. “Never smoked yourself?”

      “Stopped,” he says.

      “Doctor’s orders?”

      “Yes. Kidney tumour.”

      “Ag,” she says. “Bad luck.” She stares straight at his face for a moment. In those few seconds, Aaron becomes intensely aware that she has noted something about him. She’s registered his faintheartedness.

      “Have you listened to the tapes yet?” she asks.

      “No,” he says. “Why’re you so keen for me to listen to them?”

      “No special reason,” she says. “Take it or leave it.”

      After she’s left, he considers listening to the tapes (self-help for souls in distress), but decides against it. For now, his heart feels like murder and his soul like a frog under a stone in a pool of mud; the only false voice he needs to identify is that of Eddie Knuvelder.

      *

      Against his better judgement, he accepts an invitation on Wednesday night to go out with Bubbles and Violet for a drink. Could they please drive with him one last time? Their car should be ready by the end of the week. Well, okay. Why not? Even if they are indeed bullshitting him to hell and back. But only on one condition, then, he says to Bubbles. Leave your gun behind. Shake me down, she says. Ask Violet, I’m not lying. No monkey business. Just a drink. And so off they go. The sky’s low and threatening.

      The Red Dolphin consists of a single large space, the bar counter at the left of the entrance, with small tables on the right and a TV set high up in one of the corners. It’s dusky inside. Tonight, the place is only half-full. They sit down at one of the tables. A mood of infinite desolation seizes Aaron. He should never have agreed to come along. Bubbles drinks a beer and Violet a beer shandy. Aaron has a non-alcoholic beverage. He thinks: May Eddie Knuvelder meet his Moses. May his bones be cursed. Bastard. Traitor. Bubbles plays a game of darts. Violet becomes jolly, starts giggling, and launches into conversation with other clients in the pub. Aaron makes no attempt to speak to anyone.

      Before too long, he realises he’s had enough. Violet’s visibly disappointed. Bubbles asks if they can quickly drive downtown, she knows a nice little place there. Spunky barmaids. Portuguese. Long dark hair, with big pink lips. Just what the doctor ordered, she says to Aaron, playfully pushing his shoulder. I’m sorry, says Aaron. I’m not in the mood tonight for girls with big pink lips. Oh, well, says Bubbles. She stares hard at him for a few moments with those two odd-sized eyes of hers. It’s that man from the gallery, isn’t it, she says. Aaron doesn’t answer. My offer still stands, she says. Teach him a lesson. Then all your problems will be solved. No, he says, they won’t. The situation is a hundred times more complex than she, with her mafia-methods, could ever imagine. Try me, says Bubbles, stomping her cigarette out with her shoe.

      Outside she sees a WANTED sign on the window. Rapist: last seen in the vicinity of Lower Umbilo. Fuzzy picture of a man with a moustache. She could put her head on a block she’s seen him somewhere before, says Bubbles. She thinks she knows where she can find him. Tomorrow, or maybe even tonight, still. Out of the question, says Aaron, he must get home. There are things he needs to attend to, urgently. (His life.) Then we’ll drag him out of his hole tomorrow, she says, the rotter. Does Aaron want to come along? No, Bubbles, he says, neither tonight, nor tomorrow, nor any other day. He’s never yet felt a calling to drag rapists out of their holes. If she wants to go searching for rapists, she must wait until her car’s been serviced and sally forth into the holes of the city or Lower Umbilo or wherever, on her own. He has work to do, he says. (Canvases to stretch. Paintings to make. Which he’ll sell off to whom, now that Eddie Knuvelder seems to have dropped him? Crook. Traitor. May he live to regret this bitterly.) Bubbles looks a little crestfallen. And even if he didn’t have work to do, says Aaron, he prefers to spend his time in other ways. (What does he have apart from his work, now that Naomi has left him behind?) And does she always take the law into her own hands like this, or does she by any chance work for the police, he asks. She flicks her stompie away. Bad luck, she says, we could’ve had some fun. He’d rather put his neck in a noose for fun, he says. In a hangman’s noose. You must be careful, Bubbles says, it’s not as easy as it looks. The rope must have the right kind of knot. The stool must be kicked away at exactly the right moment. She can always help him, if he needs help. He meets her gaze – squarely they stare into each other’s eyes. Hers without a trace of irony; she doesn’t bat an eyelid as she makes this comment. All the way home, Violet giggles in the back seat. Now the two of them must just sing “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth”. Then he’ll have heard everything.

      CHAPTER 3

      Six years ago, Aaron’s older brother, Stefaans, paid them a visit. It was his first visit since Aaron and Naomi moved to Durban twelve years earlier. Stefaans came by bus, accompanied by his youngest daughter. (If she hadn’t insisted, they would never have made the visit. If it depended on him, she knew, her father wouldn’t budge from the town where they lived.) When he got off the bus (so thin and worn-out, so wasted, Aaron was shocked), his first words were that he almost got engaged to the hostess on the bus – such a beautiful woman, how could he not fall for her! On the way down to Durban, he’d made drawings on a lined Croxley writing pad with a red ballpoint pen, and these he gave to her. For him, the trip was an overwhelming experience. The mountains! The hills and valleys! It’d been years since he’d crossed the Hex River Valley. The landscape such a revelation!

      It was not an easy visit. This was before Stefaans’s radical change of heart. He was still using all manner of substances. Stefaans had stopped talking for a few years, but now that he’d started again there was no stopping him – his visit testified to that. He talked from the moment he got off the bus until the moment he left again. Stefaans, his large frame bony, reminded Aaron of Oupa Harry, step-grandfather on their mother’s side of the family. That peasant raconteur, as Stefaans once called him.

      On this visit, his theme was family. Stefaans talked. Aaron listened.

      They put Stefaans in the cottage at the bottom of the garden. There, he could go to bed as early or as late as he liked. (Stefaans never kept conventional hours.) Before his arrival, Aaron gave Mrs Sekete careful instructions to clean the cottage thoroughly. Initially, she was afraid of going down there (she feared snakes), but later she reluctantly agreed, killing off the scorpion-spiders with great relish, sending the geckos scooting, and stomping the ground with a broom to chase all snakes in the area away. Aaron placed a table in front of the window, a place for Stefaans to write, if he liked. A good view of the lush environment. He hoped Stefaans would be pleased with the place.

      Stefaans was overwhelmed by the city; by the density and excessive growth in the lower garden; by the birdsong and intensity of colour. Everything was larger than life here, he said repeatedly.

      Every morning, Stefaans would come up from the lower reaches of the garden. And then he’d talk. He talked to Aaron about literature, films, art, family. Their mother’s life. Their father’s life. He talked about denial. Denial, he said, was the theme that occupied him most right then.

      Sometimes he’d take speed. Stefaans would come up from there, from the garden cottage below. He’d be all hunched over, perhaps after an afternoon nap during which he dreamt things, or thought about things, or after a mood had descended upon him – and then he’d take something. Aaron would watch as his tempo visibly accelerated, his mood lifting as he gathered his reduced powers and picked up momentum. He would sing lines from songs at the dinner table, making sly comments and laughing behind his hand. With that quick, sideways, crafty look of his. Who could hold him back? He dominated the company during mealtimes. He would sit leaning forward in his chair. He ate slowly, ate very little, sometimes almost nothing, in fact. Too busy with his little tricks, songs, phrases, his play on words, ongoing commentaries, his oblique remarks. And yet he always praised the food. (Left to his own devices, Stefaans would probably live on a diet of bananas

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