his face.
The eye looked bad, red and puffy. Later it would be purplish blue. Most of the scab on his lip had been washed off. Only a thin line of dried blood remained.
He pulled the razor from the left ear downward, all the way across the skin, over the jawline into the neck, then started at the top again, without looking at himself. Pulled the skin of his jaw to tighten it around the mouth, then did the right side, rinsed the razor, cleaned the basin with hot water, dried off again. Brushed his hair. Had to clean the brush: it was clogged with black hair.
Had to buy new underpants. Had to buy new shirts. Had to buy new socks. Trousers and jacket still reasonable. Fuck the tie. The room was dark and cold. Rain against the windows at ten past eleven in the morning.
He walked out. Kemp opened the door of the 4?4.
¦
There was a long silence that lasted as far as Milnerton.
“Where to?”
“City.”
“You want something.”
“One of our assistants has started her own practice. She needs help.”
“You owe her.”
Kemp merely snorted. “What happened last night?”
“I was drunk.”
“What happened last night that was different?”
There were pelicans on the lagoon opposite the golf course. They were feeding, undisturbed by the rain.
“They were so full of their fucking four-by-fours.”
“So you assaulted them?”
“The fat one hit me first.”
“Why?”
He turned his head away.
“I don’t understand you.”
He made a noise in his throat.
“You can make a living. But you have such a shitty opinion of yourself…”
Paarden Island’s industries moved past.
“What happened?”
Van Heerden looked at the rain, fine drops scurrying across the windshield. He took a deep breath, a sigh for the uselessness of it all. “You can tell a man his four-by-four isn’t going to make his prick any larger and he pretends to be deaf. But drag in his wife…”
“Jesus.”
For a brief moment he felt the hate again, the relief, the moment of release of the previous evening: the five middle-aged men, their faces contorted with rage, the blows, the kicks that rained down on him until the three bartenders managed to separate them.
They didn’t speak again until Kemp stopped in front of a building on the Foreshore.
“Third floor. Beneke, Olivier, and Partners. Tell Beneke I sent you.”
He nodded and opened the door, got out. Kemp looked thoughtfully at him.
Then he closed the door and walked into the building.
¦
He slumped in the chair, lack of respect evident in his posture. She had asked him to sit down. “Kemp sent me,” was all he had said. She had nodded, glanced at the injured eye and lip, and ignored them.
“I believe that you and I can help each other, Mr. van Heerden.” She tucked her skirt under her as she sat down.
She had folded her hands on the desk, the fingers neatly interlaced. “Mr. Kemp told me you have experience of investigative work but are not in permanent employ at the moment. I need the help of a good investigator.” Norman Vincent Peale. She spoke smoothly and easily. He suspected that she was clever. He suspected she would take longer to unnerve than the average female.
She opened a drawer, took out a file.
“Did Kemp tell you I was trash?”
Her hands hesitated briefly. She gave him a stiff smile. “Mr. van Heerden, your personality doesn’t interest me. Your personal life doesn’t interest me. This is a business proposition. I’m offering you a temporary job opportunity for a professional fee.”
So fucking controlled. As if she knew everything. As if her cell phone and her degree were the only defense she needed.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty,” she said without hesitation.
He looked at her third finger, left hand. It was bare.
“Are you available, Mr. van Heerden?”
“It depends on what you want.”
? Dead at Daybreak ?
2
My mother was an artist. My father was a miner.
She saw him for the first time on a cold winter’s day on Olien Park’s frost-covered rugby field, his striped Vaal Reef’s jersey almost torn off his body. He was walking slowly to the touchline to fetch a new shirt, his sweaty litheness, the definition of shoulders and stomach and ribs, gleaming dully in the weak late-afternoon sun.
She had told the story accurately, every time: the pale blue of the sky, the bleached gray white of the stadium’s grass, the smallish group of students loudly supporting their team against the miners, the purple of their scarves bright splashes of color against the dull gray of the wooden benches. Every time I heard the story I added more detail: her slender figure taken from a black-and-white photograph of that time, cigarette in her hand, dark hair, dark eyes, a certain brooding beauty. How she saw him, how all the lines of his face and his body were so irresistibly right, as if, through all that, she could see everything.
“Into his heart,” she said.
She knew two things with absolute certainty at that moment. One was that she wanted to paint him.
After the game she waited for him outside, among the officials and second-team players, until he came out wearing a jacket and tie, his hair wet from the showers. And he saw her in the dusk, felt her intensity, and blushed and walked to her as if he knew that she wanted him.
She had the piece of paper in her hand.
“Call me,” she said when he stood in front of her.
His mates surrounded him, so she simply gave him the folded paper with her name and telephone number and left, back to the house on Thom Street where she was boarding.
He phoned late at night.
“My name is Emile.”
“I’m an artist,” she said. “I want to paint you.”
“Oh.” Disappointment in his voice. “What kind of painting?”
“One of you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a handsome man.”
He laughed, disbelieving and uncomfortable. (Later he had told her that it was news to him, that he’d always
