didn’t care. He had to find Matt. If it wasn’t already too late.
As he came around Hospital Bend, the sprawl of city and harbor below him, his phone rang. When he saw Susan on caller ID, his impulse was to ignore the call. How could he face his wife now? But he answered.
“Susan. How are you?”
“Jack, I’m fine. We’re fine.”
“So it’s done?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s okay? The baby?”
“She’s perfect.”
“I’m glad, Susan.”
She interrupted him. “Jack, Matt’s here.”
He thought he was hallucinating. “What did you say?”
“I said Matt’s here. A policeman found him out on the Cape Flats.”
“My God, Susan, I’m so sorry…”
“Shhhhhh, Jack. Don’t say any more. Just come here. Come here now.”
“Okay.” He felt a heady rush of relief. His son was safe. His infant daughter was alive. His wife wanted him to come to their side.
“Jack, you’re coming here? To us?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
CHAPTER 33
Carmen Fortune sat for a long while at the taxi stand, watching the minibuses hurtling in and out, the distinctive cries of “Caaaaape Teeeeeuuuuunnn” as the sliding-door operators urged her to board. She ignored them.
It was still light, only just gone seven, and the sun hammered the Cape Flats.
On impulse she stood and walked a block, until she came to the street where she had grown up. Protea Street. She hesitated, almost turned on her heel, before she gathered the courage to approach the house of her nightmarish childhood. A small, scruffy place surrounded by a sagging wire fence, no different from hundreds around it.
Carmen hadn’t been inside, or spoken to her parents, since her mother had thrown her out six years ago. Before she could stop herself, Carmen opened the front gate and walked up the short pathway and banged on the door.
The door opened a crack and she saw her mother’s face. She fought the urge to run.
Her mother glared at her, shocked. “What do you want here?”
“I want to see him.”
“You’re not welcome here. Go back to the street where you belong.”
Her mother was closing the door. Carmen pushed the door open, forcing her mother backward. Then she was walking down the corridor toward the main bedroom, her mother’s hands clutching at her back.
Carmen swung and faced her. “Is it true that he gonna die?”
Her mother wilted. “Ja. He don’t have long.”
“Then I have the right to say good-bye.”
Her mother said nothing, but she slumped in defeat. Carmen went into the bedroom without knocking.
A skeleton with gray skin and sunken eyes lay under a sheet on the bed. It took her a moment to connect this emaciated thing with the sweating, grunting weight that had pressed down onto her small body night after night.
It was the voice that did it.
“Carmen. You’ve come.” The voice was weaker, but it was still the one that had poured filth into her ears as he raped her. This was her father, okay.
She walked up to hionntood over him, staring down.
He tried to smile, revealing gums set into a mouth like a sinkhole. “Carmie, the good Lord has answered my prayers.”
“Ja? Has he?”
“I prayed that you would come to say good-bye to me before I go.”
Her father’s eyes were filled with self-pity and fear. He was not going easily to his final destination.
A clawlike hand was groping for hers. She slapped the hand away and pressed her face close to his. “Drop this God bullshit, you bastard. You think raping your own child for years, making her pregnant twice, and throwing her out of your house is something God is going to forgive?”
She saw the terror well up in his eyes as his sunken, toothless mouth searched for words. Her mother was hovering in the gloom at the bedroom door. Carmen heard a sharp intake of breath.
“We both know you’re going to rot in fucken hell for what you did to me.” Carmen laughed in his face and pushed past her mother. “And you’ll get yours, you bitch.”
Carmen fled the atmosphere of oppression and terror. She stood in the street sucking air, calming herself.
When she walked away, the sky seemed bluer.
Disaster Zondi drove along the freeway toward the airport. The shacks and mean houses of the Cape Flats sprawled on either side of him in the gathering darkness.
So, how did he feel, now that it was over?
He tried out that daytime TV word: closure. Was this how it felt? He felt lighter, he had to admit, but at the same time there was an inescapable sense of anticlimax. Was he still yearning for something more acute?
More transcendent?
What he did hear was the creak of the karmic wheel as it turned. For every action, you had better believe there would be a reaction. Like the American, Jack Burn, choosing Cape Town, of all cities, to run to. How different would it have been if he had parachuted his family into the safe, middle-class certainties of a Sydney or Auckland?
The wheel would have turned, no doubt, but probably in a more mundane way.
And as for Rudolphus Arnoldus Barnard getting sent off to the big barbecue in the sky, the punch line of that particular cosmic joke was irresistible.
Zondi laughed.
He found himself whistling as he drove to Domestic Departures. He was experiencing an unexpected feeling, a sensation that he was unfamiliar with. It took Zondi a minute of intense reflection before he decided that, quite possibly, it was happiness.
At dawn Benny Mongrel followed a footpath up the lower slopes of Table Mountain, etched into the scrub like a scar in coarse hair.
When he had walked away from the blackened horror that had once been the fat cop, Benny Mongrel had no desire to return to his cramped shack in Laender Hill. He’d spent too many years in confined spaces, with the stench and moans and sickness of other men mixed into the foul air he breathed.
So he had come to the mountain.
He had found an overhang of rock that gave him shelter, not far from a stream that hadn’t dried up despite the heat. He’d been down a little way now to where large houses clung to the slopes, their back gardens stolen from the mountain. Despite high fences and razor wire, he had come away with a shirt and a pair of jeans off a washing line. He needed no more than that.
As he walked up the path, he saw a movement in the scrub and slowed. He picked up a stone and crept forward, sure that he would find a rock rabbit for his breakfast.
The bush parted, and a puppy with a thick golden coat scampered out. It was too young to fear men, and it
