Read Last Train to Retreat Online

Authors: Gustav Preller

Last Train to Retreat (10 page)

‘Good omen, we’re gonna win the pitch for sure.’

‘Was she nice, Zane?’

‘Some kiss, some passion!’

‘More like a girl vampire!’

It was Appleby who gave him a way out. ‘Must’ve been some fight at the dojo last night, Zane?’ Appleby knew about Zane’s karate. Zane nodded, cracking his lips in a feeble smile. With Sensei Simon he knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

Later Zane bumped into Magnus. ‘I sincerely hope you’ll have your normal face back for the pitch, Zane,’ Magnus said, eyes protruding like those of a freshly-caught fish. Magnus walked on, letting his words hang around like a spray of insecticide. There’d be no pitch for Zane with a face like that, and maybe no promotion. How bad would it be not to have to work on the goddamn liquor business, Zane thought. He shook his head – it was a loser’s thinking. He had to grab
all
opportunities and simply manage them – for the sake of his family.

In between meetings Zane rushed out and bought the afternoon paper. There it was, at the bottom of the front page: ‘Gruesome find on suburban train. Last night’s 8 pm train to Simonstown presented cleaners with more than the usual litter – a body lying in a pool of blood. The as yet unidentified man had died of a stab wound to the chest. According to a spokesperson the train from Cape Town’s main station probably carried no more than the usual 20 passengers spread out over 8 carriages, making it possible for an incident such as this to go undetected while the train was en route. He added that as trains reached their final destination the rear end guard would check that all doors were in good working order for the first ride the following morning. After that the cleaners would go to work. It was during this routine operation at Simonstown that the body was found. He declined to elaborate as an investigation was underway. Police are appealing to commuters who were on the 8 pm train from the city to Simonstown last night to contact …’

Zane tossed the newspaper into a bin in Spin Street, his mouth dry and hurting.
Ja,
unidentified because the girl had emptied Gatiep’s pockets. But there was still Curly – would he go to the police or lie low? Curly was probably wondering the same thing about Zane and the girl. Zane looked at his watch – it was 4 pm. He walked back into the agency to where Appleby was sitting.

‘I need to see a doctor, Appleby. I think the inside of my mouth needs checking.’

‘I thought you guys wore gum guards?’ Appleby stared at him with rheumy eyes – probably a rough session with his client Good Hope Distillers last night, Zane thought. Zane imagined himself looking and feeling like Appleby in the months to come – hangovers on the morning train, no longer riding his bike or surfing with Malaki on weekends. And Bernadette not wanting to kiss him anymore – hell, who’d want to kiss a mouth like his?

‘Forgot it at home … stupid of me.’

‘Well, go if you have to. Maybe just as well. The pitch is soon, kid, and
you
know and
I
know Magnus won’t let you near the client looking like that. In fact, I’m not too happy with you seeing clients right now. They’d think you’d been in a real fight … ‘

‘I’ll go now, Appleby, the sooner the better, right?’ Thank God Appleby couldn’t see what his arm looked like.

As he packed up, his phone rang. It was Bernadette.

‘Thanks for phoning last night.’ In most matters Bernadette didn’t beat about the bush.

‘Sorry, Bee, I was busy.’

‘I see, a busy bee, was that it? What with or who with?’ She was insanely jealous too.

‘It’s the pitch, things are getting hectic. I’m sorry.’

‘Okay, let’s get together on the weekend, it’s warming up, we can go to Sandy Bay, wine, snacks, a blanket, you know …’ She was already thinking about making love in the bushes lining Cape Town’s first and unofficial nudist beach. Getting there was a schlep – in Bee’s car to Llandudno then a long walk – but it was one place they were guaranteed not to bump into Bernadette’s parents.

‘Ha, ha, the water’s so freezing I won’t be able to do it. And then how’d you feel?’ It was a dumb thing to say, he thought, perhaps the dumbest since becoming a junior account executive. ‘Seriously, I think we’re going to have to work this weekend. Magnus is on everyone’s case. I’m not even taking a chicken to my parents on Saturday.’

She said nothing, an unhealthy sign with Bernadette.

‘Come on Bee, you’re in the business, you know how it goes. I’ll make it up to you next week, okay?’

Her silence was now decidedly unhealthy. It inspired him, and he blurted out, ‘There’s something else, Bee …’

‘What?’ she snapped.

‘My mouth … you don’t want to see it let alone kiss it. Accident, bust my lips. It looks really ugly …’ His voice trailed off. For a short while her breathing told him she was still there then there was a depressing click.

He ran to catch the train. He had to get to the girl to check on her injury and find out more about her. Was there anything stupider than sheltering a murderer about whom he knew nothing and who could die in his bed or disappear into thin air? The answer was yes – being an accomplice to the murder. Whichever way he looked at it, it was impossible to put a spin on it that would make him feel better. It occurred to him that his mouth injury didn’t warrant antibiotics and that the doctor could decide to give him something else which would be of no help to the girl.

His worst fears were realised when he got home. The gash had not bled again since the previous night but he didn’t like the redness and swelling around it – it was how his own infection had started after the surfboard accident. And then she said, almost accusingly: ‘You know you helped me to kill that man?’ She was in bed wearing his surfing T-shirt with ‘LOCALS ONLY’ on it. Her mahogany fringe was neatly combed. She smelled of soap.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means if you go to the police we’d
both
be in trouble. I killed Gatiep, yes, but you helped me.
We
killed him.’ In the afternoon light streaming in from the mountain her eyes were a rich chocolaty brown except they had no sweetness in them. More like bitter chocolate, he thought.

‘Why are you so afraid to tell the police exactly what happened? You, we, had every right to defend ourselves! And what about thanking me for saving your life, huh?’

‘Curly won’t ever forget my face and now he’s on the loose,’ she said. ‘It was a bad thing to let him go. Maybe he even saw where we got off.’ It was as if she was thinking aloud rather than engaging in conversation, and what he heard was the hunter talking not the hunted. He felt a rush of admiration for her courage but her detached tone shocked him, bringing back images of her knifing Gatiep. The hunched-up figure in the train’s carriage, her silence, and vulnerable air – how the men had underestimated her! He told himself not to fall into the same trap.

It galvanised him. He blurted out: ‘Who are you? Why in God’s name did you steal Gatiep’s things? What a dumb thing to do … what’ll the police think?’ He paced up and down the small room. ‘And where’s his stuff anyway … and your knife?’

Her eyes were unfathomable like dark brown pools. Maybe her knife was under the blankets. She could kill him later while he was asleep in the lounge, stay in the flat for a few days then quietly disappear. They’d find his corpse and that would be it. Zane Hendricks would not have died in Lavender Hill after all.

By the time Zane got to the doctor’s room it had closed. He had visions of her dying on him in the night. That was if she didn’t get him first.


 

Ominously, by morning, the red around the girl’s wound had spread and a pus-like liquid was oozing out. ‘I’m going to take you to Wynberg Hospital, you hear me?’ Zane said rushing around doing breakfast and getting dressed at the same time. ‘It’s close. We’ll take a taxi.’


Nooitie,
you can’t force me!’

‘Then I’ll call an ambulance.’ His stomach felt knotted like the laces of his shoes he’d tied furiously seconds earlier.

‘No you won’t. They’ll see it’s a knife wound, they would’ve seen the papers, they’ll tell the police. The police will search the flat, ask why we kept silent. Is that what you want? It’s too late now.’

They spoke fast like lovers on the Flats having a spat. All this time she was having Marmite toast washed down with Rooibos tea. He marvelled at how much she could eat while having a tense conversation. Bernadette would have called it an example of female multi-tasking that men were incapable of.

Zane ended up calling Appleby to say he’d be late for work. He then cycled to the doctor who had treated him for his surfing injury, and requested antibiotic tablets and cream for a ten-day biking trip he was planning in the mountains – ‘Just in case, Doctor, you understand.’ When the doctor asked him about his mouth Zane said with a shrug, ‘I’m a brown belt going for black, it comes with the territory.’ It was Appleby who had said that drinking with his GHD client at least once a week was something that came with the territory.

Fifteen minutes later he exited the chemist shop and cycled home, a plastic bag with medicine swinging from the handlebar – a warrior triumphantly returning with the spoils of war. High on adrenaline he ramped up and down pavements expertly negotiating gaps to avoid pedestrians and lampposts. He took the Court Road incline effortlessly. But when he entered the lift of his building and the doors closed on him he felt trapped again. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror – a crack ran through his face like a fault-line cutting it in two. He was staring into the eyes of his old enemy – the enemy within – and he saw the hard truth:
You got the medicine to save the girl so that you didn’t have to take her to hospital – not because of her fears, whatever they are, but because of your own
.

His image in the mirror morphed into a boy with a gun facing a rival gang, in a street where the lights had been shot out earlier and residents were cowering behind doors – an order by Hannibal that included no calls to the police, for their own sake, he had said, for who else but the Evangelicals, God’s fighters, would protect them from the invaders? And to his men: ‘Defend the neighbourhood even if it means death!’ The boy and the other new recruits formed the frontline as part of Hannibal’s ‘man test’, the boy struggling to make out the enemy in the new moon, wanting to throw himself on the ground and make himself small but staying upright to prove he was at last a
man.
No drugs to bolster him, to give him the courage and the heart to kill because the Evangelicals weren’t into drugs then, only God. The gun shaking in the boy’s virgin hands, his entire body flinching in anticipation of being pierced by bullets, the sudden flashes, thudding and whining around him, his trigger finger pulling and pulling – unfired cartridges would make him fail the test – not in anger or hatred but to be accepted and respected, to feel part of
something
, to feel that for the first time in his eighteen years he was
somebody
. The boy on his right suddenly screaming, ‘
Jissis, Jissis
,
help my!
’ tottering then going down hard like a tree felled. Screams everywhere – death was never interested in taking sides – sirens wailing, blue lights flashing, Hannibal’s thundering voice, ‘vamoose!’, figures scattering, zigzagging with hooded heads like guinea fowl racing low through long grass, leaving behind bodies and the acrid smell of fired guns.

To this day Zane did not know if he had actually killed someone. He had fired his gun, yes – at an enemy
out there
rather than at a target he could see – and he had aimed high so that he wouldn’t hit anyone. But the barrel jerked up and down so violently that it was impossible to tell. In the end five people lay dead – two of Hannibal’s men and three from the other side. Zane was questioned for days as were other youths, but gangs never talked, preferring revenge to laying charges against rivals. Then suddenly all went quiet. Hannibal shrugged off rumours of a police payoff, smiled in his devastating way, embraced Zane on a job well done, and carried on his love affair with Zane’s sister, Chantal. Zane was free – but not from Hannibal or the knowledge that, captured in police files, were his name and personal details, open-ended, hanging over him. His had been a freedom bought, not earned.

As the tyres of Zane’s bike squealed softly on the shiny passage floor to his apartment, he felt as if the Flats had followed him across the line in the shape of a willowy girl with fire in her eyes. He had left
Kapie-taal
behind him with its funny-sad overtones of failure and desperation, speaking English in shops, on the trains, at BAT, and to Bernadette. Now it was with him again, in his apartment, in his bedroom, its sounds carrying his dismal past.

Much later, his mind a maelstrom, Zane suddenly sat up from where he was lying on the lounge couch. How dumb to carry on using the train to get to work! What if Curly had seen them get off at Wynberg? All Curly had to do was hang around the station at peak time and wham! Sooner or later they’d stare into each other’s eyes again. Zane decided that for the next ten days he’d use a bus or go by bike. At least it was summer and he wouldn’t have the rain and the cold and the dark.


 

Three days later she was gone, nothing left of her in the flat but rumpled sheets and pillows and some dirty dishes in the sink. No note, nothing. He had returned from work carrying food and groceries and called her name expecting her to be there. Although her wound had responded well to the antibiotics she had still limped badly. What did he expect, he now asked himself – for her to stay longer, and when she was ready to go, hug him and say thank you? She wasn’t the kind. But he had no idea what kind she was. All he knew was that he felt a strange and surprising emptiness when he realised she had gone. The feeling got worse when he started wondering if she had tricked him into believing her leg was worse than it really was, and was just biding her time before slipping away.

She’d been an intrusion, an imposition, a liability, and a total mystery. Now she was a threat to his freedom and his future.

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