This new income stream had two consequences. The first was that Johan and Sara le Roux grew rich. Not overnight and not without merit, for the state is an unsympathetic client and it took long hours of blood and sweat. But over a period of nearly thirty years, Le Roux Engineering grew to an industry with three giant workshops and a separate building in Johannesburg for research, management and administration.
The second consequence was that they had to wait until 1972 before they could think of another child. That was the year Emma Le Roux was born. On 6 April, a birthday she shared with the entire Republic in those days.
‘Then they moved to Johannesburg so my father didn’t have to travel so much.’
My own intuition was that Big Bucks no longer felt entirely at home in the middle-class greyness of Vanderbijl Park. Linden was the neighbourhood of the up-and-coming wealthy Afrikaner in those days.
‘And that was where I grew up,’ with an apologetic wave of her hand that said ‘that was my fate’. I could see the earlier heaviness had lifted, as if the telling of her story had somehow freed her. She smiled a little self- consciously, and checked her watch. ‘We must be up early tomorrow.’
We went outside. The night was an incubator of heat and humidity. Far off to the west there was lightning. While we followed the brightly lit pathways back to the Bateleur suite, I considered her story. I wondered whether she ever thought about the source of her wealth, built on the foundation of apartheid and international sanctions and now so wholly politically incorrect. Was it a guilty conscience which made her place so much emphasis on her parents’ poor background?
Was the origin of her wealth the reason she had a career, the reason she did not simply live off her interest?
At our suite I asked her to lock her bedroom door from the inside – which, we were soon to find out, was bad advice.
My cell phone beeped in my pocket. I knew it was Jeanette Louw’s daily ‘EVERYTHING OK?’ text. I took it out and sent back the usual ‘EVERYTHING OK’. Then I walked around the building one more time before going to bed. My own bedroom door remained open. I lay in darkness and waited for sleep. Not for the first time, I chewed over the advantages of a respectable family history.
8
Emma’s cry penetrated the thick sand of sleep: ‘Lemmer!’
I was on my feet and in the sitting room before I was wholly awake, not even sure her cry had been real.
‘Lemmer!’ Pure terror.
I rushed at her door, slammed into it. Locked. ‘I’m here,’ I said, hoarse with sleep and frustration.
‘There’s something in the room,’ she shrieked.
‘Open the door.’
‘No!’
I hit the door with my shoulder, a dull thud, but it stayed shut. I heard a strange, vague sound inside.
‘I think it’s a … Lemmer!’ My name was a frightened scream.
I took a step back and kicked the door. It splintered open. Her room was pitch black. She shrieked again. I banged my palm where the light switch should be and it was suddenly bright and the snake lunged at me, a huge, grey, hissing, wide-mawed monster, the inside of the mouth as black as death. I recoiled into the sitting room. Emma screamed for me again, and for a fleeting moment I saw her in the double bed, pillow and duvet, everything piled up in front of her for protection. The snake lunged at me, striking again and again, the hollow hiss of pure rage. I tripped over a chair, and the snake’s fangs bit into the material millimetres from my leg. As it pulled loose, venom sprayed in a bright mist. I rolled off the chair, across the floor. I had to get a weapon, a club. I grabbed the lamp off the corner table, swung it, and missed.
The snake was incredibly long, three metres, maybe more, streamlined and lethal like a spear. I leapt behind the other armchair, trying to keep it between us; the snake came over the top, it front end lifted high. The lamp was too heavy, too clumsy, I smashed it against the wall to get rid of the shade, hit a painting, glass and wood shattered, Emma screamed. The snake struck and I hit, grazing its neck. I leapt to the right to get away. Swiftly, it came again, unmanageable, terrifyingly determined, as though my blow had released a deeper rage, a long, thick, elastic projectile, the black eyes relentless, the maw aggressively gaping.
I shook with adrenalin. It struck, pain stabbed my foot, I hit back with the lamp, the metal where the bulb had been struck the reptile’s neck, knocking the head against the wall. For a moment, it was off balance. I struck again. The lamp-stand was long and heavy. It hit the snake’s body where it slid across the tiled floor, and seemed to break something under the gunmetal scales. The snake recoiled, twisted around itself. I hit again and again and again, the head evading me. I saw a line of blood on the floor. It was my foot. The venom would dull me; I must finish it now.
I lifted the lamp high over my shoulders, smashed it down violently. Missed. Gripped it like a baseball bat, swung, hit, swung, grazed the head. Missed. It was retreating now. I held the lamp-stand like a sword, trying to trap the head against the floor. Once, twice unsuccessful, the third thrust of the point was behind the head, I bored it into the tiles. Its long body wound up the lamp and around my arm. With my bleeding foot I tramped the neck down, lifted the lamp again and stabbed the head with all my fear and loathing and revulsion. The snake was coiled around my leg now, the long supple muscle convulsing one last time. As it relaxed, I jerked my foot away and smashed down one last time to totally pulverise the coffin head.
She sat on top of the toilet in my bathroom. I sat on the floor, still in my sleeping shorts. My foot rested on her lap. She carefully extracted the splinter of glass.
‘I’m bleeding on you.’
‘Just keep still.’ Strict, the same schoolmarm who had ordered me to ‘Sit down, Lemmer’ a few minutes ago. I noticed her hand still had an obvious tremor. She pulled the shard out with her fingers and put it carefully on the windowsill. It hadn’t been the snake’s venomous fangs after all. She rolled paper off the toilet roll and pressed the bundle hard against the cut. The blood soaked through it.
‘Hold this tight,’ she said, and pushed my foot towards me. She got up and went out. I couldn’t help noticing the imprint of her nipples against the big T-shirt she wore for pyjamas which hung to above her knees and exposed her shapely calves. I kept the toilet paper pressed to the cut. My hands were steady. She was away for a while and then I heard her bare feet moving through the disarrayed sitting room with its overturned chair, broken painting and the pieces of the lamp. The snake lay outside on the veranda. Its long scaly body was still supple and smooth when I’d dragged it out. I felt guilty, despite the circumstances, about the indignity, the sharp contrast between that deadly coil and this lifeless ribbon.
Emma was carrying a small leather bag. She sat down again, unzipped it and took out a pair of scissors. Picking up one of the white facecloths, she began to cut.
‘Someone put that snake in my room, Lemmer,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
I just looked at the scissors and facecloth.
‘That’s what woke me. The window … when it slammed shut. Or something. I just went to have a look. The window is shut, but not latched.’
Deftly she cut a long spiral out of the cloth. ‘Give me your foot.’ I put it on her lap again. She took off the bloodstained paper and inspected the cut, which had stopped bleeding. She took the facecloth bandage and began to wind it around the ball of my foot. ‘Someone must have unlatched the window from inside last night. While we were at dinner. It’s the only way, you can’t open the window from outside.’
I said nothing. She wouldn’t want to know how improbable her theory was. How would you handle a reptile like that? How do you slip it through the slot of a half-open window?
How would ‘they’ know we were staying here? How would they have got here from the main road in the night with a three-metre venomous snake and known exactly which window was Emma’s?
Emma took a tiny silver safety pin from the leather bag and pinned the bandage securely. She tapped her palm on my toes. ‘There you go,’ she said, satisfied with her handiwork. I took my foot off her lap. We both got up.
