Let?s see, he thought, and picked up the phone. The number he keyed was that of the SAPS Criminal Records Center in Pretoria.
As the applause after the last cut faded, he lay with closed eyes and a light heart. He wondered what he had lost in the past few years. He was the drinking equivalent of Rip van Winkle with this huge hole in his life, a black hole of unconsciousness. Everything had grown up. His children, the music of his culture . . . his fucking country. Everything except him. In his mind he was being exposed to the alternatives, how different things might have been. He didn?t want to see that now. He took the earphones off.
City sounds penetrated faintly from outside. His eyes were adjusted to the dark now. Streetlights illuminated the room sufficiently through the gauzy curtains. The outlines of the furniture, the dark shape of the painting against the wall. Small red and green lights shone from the fridge and the TV.
He wanted to tell Fritz. Reaching over the little table he found his cell phone and scrolled through the menu to text messages. He struggled a bit with the tiny pads of the keyboard. CD IS BASS HEAVEN. THANKS. DAD.
He sent the SMS and put the CD player and phone on his pile of clothes. He must sleep. He didn?t want to think, enough thinking for one day. He shifted around on the couch, struggling to be comfortable. It was best with his back against the backrest. Too hot for the blanket. Sleep.
He thought once of Christine lying in the bedroom, but he put her out of his mind and tried to think of Anna. That brought no peace so he thought about the music and he did what he used to do when he was seventeen: he visualized himself on stage. At the State Theater. With Anton & friends. He was playing bass guitar. Playing without effort, going with the flow of the music, letting his fingers run where they would and he heard the bedroom door open and soft footfalls on the carpet. She must be going to the bathroom. But here she was beside him. She lay down on the couch. Her back was against him. She shifted up close to him so they lay like two spoons. He hardly dared breathe. He must pretend to be asleep. Keep his breathing even and calm. He could smell her, her shoulder right by his nose.
She wanted comfort. She just needed a person. She didn?t want to be alone, she missed her child, she was raw and hurting. He knew all that.
He made a sound that he hoped would sound like a person asleep and put a hand on her hip. A comforting gesture. Half on thin material and half on bare flesh.
He felt the heat of her body. Now he was getting a fucking erection, it blossomed irreverently and there was no way to stop it. He had to think of something. He made another vague noise and shifted his hips back. Lord, she mustn?t know. He should have put his underpants on, that would have kept it reined in. Perhaps she wasn?t fully awake. He tried to listen to her breathing, but all his senses returned to him were her heat and her scent.
She shifted back against him. Right against him. Up here. Down there.
He wanted to apologize. He wanted to mumble ?I?m sorry? or something, but he was too scared. She was half asleep and that would make it all worse. He lay very still. Thought about the music. Played bass guitar along with
Give the harlequin more wine, scoobydoowaa, scoobydoowaa, red wine for his laughter and tears and pain . . .
She moved her arm, her hand, put it over his. She held it on her hip a moment and then drew it up under her nightie, oh fuck, up to her breast, her palm on the back of his hand and he felt her, felt the softness and she sighed deeply and pressed his hand tightly and roughly against her. Moved again, her hips away from his pelvis and her hand came down there, behind her back and undid the clip of his trousers, how he had no idea. Unzipped his trousers. Slipped in her hand and grasped him. Lust was one high perfect note in his head, a lead guitar that took flight to the rhythm of his heart?s bass and then she pushed him into her from behind.
Long after his orgasm they lay still like that, belly to back, still inside her, though spent and flaccid now. The first words she spoke, barely aloud, were: ?You are broken too.?
He thought for a long time before answering. He wondered how she knew. How she could see it. Or feel it. Why had she come to him? Her need? Or her gift to him? A comfort?
So he told her. About Anna. About his children. The drinking. Without plan or structure, he let it flow as it came into his head, his arm tight around her now, and his hand softly on the fullness of her breast. Her face against his, the fine hairs against his stubble.
He told her how he had been, in the days before the booze. He had been an optimist, an extrovert. A joker. He was the one who could make everyone laugh, at the funniest moments. In the parade room, when tensions ran high and tempers were stretched, he could spot the silly side of the matter and cut through all the crap with a phrase and leave them helpless with laughter. He was the one everyone phoned first when they wanted to throw some meat on the griddle for a
Two or three times a month he would join Murder and Robbery for an impromptu barbecue, a
Three o?clock on a Friday afternoon, just to relieve the never-ending pressure, at Blouberg or Silvermine or even at the office itself in Bellville South. Beer and meat and bread, laughter, chat and drink, he would be first on the list, because he was Sergeant Benny Griessel, instinctive investigator and unofficial, cynical chief clown who could ridicule the job and the bureaucracy and affirmative action but with compassion. So that they could all face up to it again.
Now, this side of the booze, they still had their
But no one called him. No one wanted him there, the sot who staggered and couldn?t string two coherent words together. The oaf who bumped into others, swore and fought and had to be taken home to a wife who opened the door reluctantly. Because she didn?t want that drunkard or the humiliation.
He told Christine he had been sober for eleven days now and he didn?t know the man this side of the booze.
Everything had changed around him. His children, his wife, his colleagues. Jissis, he was an old has-been amongst all the
of the young policemen in the Service.
But the main thing was, he believed he
changed. He wasn?t sure how. Or how much. A strange fellow in his forties with a gaping hole in his life.
