Dead at Daybreak

“One of the best. An animal but an artist. But he got sloppy, too much work, too much money, too much weed, too many women. Tried to make a fortune, so he made six millions’ worth of twenty-rand notes without the watermark and dumped the printer in the Liesbeek River with a hole in the head to get his hands on his part of the profit as well. So they got him for the murder and the money.”

Soldiers started moving papers around again.

“And this is his work?”

“Looks like it. He was the king of the blue books. The blues were easier to fake. The seventies and early eighties were good years…”

“One more question, Orlando.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s 1983. I have dollars. American. Many dollars. I want to buy a house and start a legal business. I need rand. What do I do?”

“Who’re you working for, Van Heerden?”

“An attorney.”

“Kemp?”

He shook his head.

“So now you’re a PI for an attorney?”

“Freelance, Orlando.”

“It’s lower than shark shit, Van Heerden. Why don’t you go back to the Force? We need all the opposition we can get.”

He ignored it. “Dollars in ’eighty-three.”

“It’s a long time ago.”

“I know.”

“I was small-time in ’eighty-three. You had to take thirty or fifty cents to the dollar. But if you’re looking for names, I can’t help you.”

Van Heerden got up. “Thank you, Orlando.”

“Are there still dollars in this thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe, though.”

“Maybe.”

“Dollars are big money now.”

He only nodded.

“You owe me one, Van Heerden.”

? Dead at Daybreak ?

12

Aunt Baby Marnewick.

Every time I hear about a new movie in which fearless American heroes save us all from a virus, meteorites, or enemy aliens threatening humankind, I wonder why they are so completely unaware of the far more interesting, small, yet life-altering suburban intrigues.

The Marna Espag love affair didn’t survive our first clumsy and incomplete sexual effort. There was no sudden dramatic ending, simply a systematic cooling off, aided by my disappointment in my performance and her shame because she hadn’t been able to hide her own frustration.

But at sixteen, seventeen, the soul and the body heal amazingly fast, and we remained friends, even when she started dating the head boy, Lourens Campher, during the July of our senior year. I’ll wonder forever whether she and Lourens managed it successfully and if he gained the trophy of her virginity and restored her faith in men.

On the other hand, I didn’t date on a permanent basis again while at school, just some heavy petting here and there. Because Aunt Baby Marnewick would cross the path of my sexual – and later professional – education.

She and her husband lived in the house behind ours. He was a big, strong miner, like 90 percent of Stilfontein’s male inhabitants a shift worker, a rough diamond who dedicated his Saturdays and Sundays to the installation of a three-liter V6 engine into a Ford Anglia. He had to move the whole instrument panel and gearbox back and lengthen the driveshaft and the transmission, which made the basic reason for this task – to give other Anglia drivers a very unpleasant surprise at stoplights – useless. Simply by looking through the window, any idiot would immediately have noticed that Boet Marnewick’s car wasn’t standard.

Suburban legend had it that he had to win Baby with his fists, way back in Bez Valley, that stewing pot of a suburb in Johannesburg, when he wanted to take her away from a sturdy Scotsman. She stood on the front veranda of the house and watched the two men snorting and bleeding like two bulls proving their genetic superiority to win her hand.

Because Baby Marnewick was a good-looking woman. Tall and slender with thick, red hair, a full, broad mouth – and formidable breasts. It was her eyes, small and sly, that gave her a touch of sluttishness that, I suspected, men couldn’t resist – possibly because it created the impression that she was easy, and was also a clue to her real nature.

For years I was barely aware of the neighbors behind us. (Why are neighbors “behind” us so much more mysterious, lesser neighbors?) The high wooden fence between the two houses probably contributed to it. But for a sexually awakening teenage boy, the sight of Baby Marnewick in her Saturday outfit at the shopping center was unforgettable. And my awareness of her grew, my interest pricked by vague rumors and the blatancy with which she flaunted her sexuality.

In the early spring of my last year at school, on a perfect warm afternoon, bored, Marna-less, and curious, I peered through a thin crack in the steadily decaying fence, not for the first time, but still a coincidence, an opportunistic moment of wishful thought.

And there in the backyard of the Marnewicks’, Aunt Baby lay on an inflatable mattress, naked and glistening with suntan oil, dark glasses covering her sly eyes, and a playful hand and calm fingers with painted nails fondling the paradise between her legs.

Oh, the sweet shock.

I stood there, too frightened to move, too frightened to breathe, light-headed, mindless, utterly randy, discoverer of the pleasures of voyeurism, the chosen of the gods, placed there at just the right moment.

I don’t know how long it took Aunt Baby Marnewick to achieve orgasm. Twenty minutes? More? For me the time flashed by – I couldn’t get enough – until she eventually, with a low, deep groan through her open mouth and heavenly little movements of stomach and legs, gratified herself.

Then she got up slowly and disappeared into the house.

I stood staring at the mattress for a long time, hoping she would return. Later I realized it was not to be my destiny and went to my room to give expression to my own overriding desire. Again and again and again.

And the next afternoon I was at my spy hole in the fence again, ready to resume the wonderful one-sided relationship with Baby Marnewick.

She didn’t masturbate in her backyard every afternoon. She didn’t lie in the sun, slick and nude, every day. To my great disappointment there was no routine of time or day. It was a game of dice and of yearning, visual theft. I sometimes wondered whether she did it in the morning when I was in school: I even considered being “ill” for a few days to test the theory. But occasionally, one day a week, sometimes once in two weeks, my avidity was rewarded with some enchanting scene.

I fantasized about her. Obviously. I would walk round (climbing over the fence was too undignified), stand next to her, and say: You need never use your hand again, Baby. Then I would undress and she would welcome me into her with a Yes, yes, yes, yes, and after I had taken her to unknown sensual heights on the inflatable, we would lie next to each other and discuss how we would run away and be happy for ever and ever.

Fantasy number one.