But that wasn?t what was giving him an erection. It was something else. The body? The eyes?
Hell, he had never once been unfaithful to Anna. Except by boozing. Maybe Anna reasoned like that: he was unfaithful to her because he loved alcohol with an all-encompassing passion. So she was justified in looking elsewhere. His head said she had the right, but the green monster sprang to life, made him writhe in the bed. He would pulp the fucker. If he caught them. If he should walk into his house and bedroom and they were busy . . . He saw the scene too clearly. He turned over violently, pulled up the sheet, thrust his head under the pillow. He did not want to see. Some or other handsome young shit pumping his wife and he could see Anna?s face, her ecstasy, that small private sublime smile that told him she was in her own little world of pleasure and her voice, he remembered her voice, the whispering. Yes, Benny, yes, Benny, yes, Benny. But now she would be saying someone else?s name and he leapt up and stood beside the bed and he knew: he would shoot the fucker. He had to phone her.
He had to drink. He must get the bottle out of the kitchen cupboard. He took a step toward the wardrobe. He clenched his fist and stopped himself.
Get a hold of yourself, he said out loud.
He felt the absence below. His erection was gone.
No fucking wonder.
It was an old stone house with a corrugated iron roof. He climbed a sagging wire boundary fence and had to deviate around the carcass of a Ford single cab pickup on blocks before he could make out the number on one of the pillars of the verandah. The seven hung askew.
It was dark inside. Thobela retraced his steps to the back door. He turned the knob. It was open. He went in, closing the door quietly behind him, assegai in his left hand. He was in the kitchen. There was an odor in the house. Musty, like fish paste. He allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the deeper dark inside. Then he heard a sound from the next room.
Once the two from the police force?s Social Services had gone, she took a big flask of coffee and two mugs to the armed men on guard outside her door. Then she locked the door and went out onto the balcony.
The city lay before her, a creature with a thousand glittering eyes that breathed more slowly and deeply in the depths of night. She gripped the white railing, feeling the cold metal in her hands. She thought about her child. Sonia?s eyes pleading with her.
It was her fault. She was responsible for her child?s fear.
From the sitting room he heard a snore like the grunt of a boar: short, crude and powerful.
Thobela peered around the doorframe and saw the man on the couch under a blanket.
Where was the woman?
The Scholtzes. Their two-year-old son had died in hospital in Oudtshoorn two weeks ago from a brain hemorrhage.
The district surgeon had found lesions on the tiny organs and thin fragile ribs and ulna, cheekbones and skull. From them he had reconstructed a jigsaw of abuse. ?The worst I have seen in fifteen years as coroner,? the Sunday paper had quoted his testimony.
He walked closer to Scholtz over the bare floor. In the dark the silver half-moons of rings gleamed in the visible ear. Across the bulky arm was a spider web of black tattoo, the pattern unclear without light. The mouth was open and at the peak of every breath he made that animal noise.
Where was the woman? Thobela smoothed the cushion of his thumb over the wooden shaft of the assegai as he slipped past, deeper into the house. There were two bedrooms. The first one was empty; on the wall hung a child?s drawings, now without color.
He felt revulsion. How did these people?s minds work? How could they display the child?s art on his bedroom wall and moments later smash his head against it? Or batter him until the ribs splintered.
Animals.
He saw the woman in the double bed of the other room, her shape outlined under the sheet. She turned over. Muttered something inaudible.
He stood still. Here was a dilemma. No, two.
Christine let go of the railing and went back inside. She closed the sliding door behind her. In the top drawer in the kitchen she found the vegetable knife. It had a long narrow blade, slightly curved with a small, sharp point. It was what she wanted now.
He didn?t want to execute the woman. That was his first problem.
A war against women was not a war. Not
war, not a Struggle he wanted to be involved in. He knew that now, after Laurens. Let the courts, imperfect as they were, take responsibility for the women.
But if he spared her, how would he deal with the man? That was his second problem. He needed to wake him. He wanted to give him a weapon and say: ?Fight for your right to crack a two-year-old skull, and see where justice lies.? But the woman would wake up. She would see him. She would turn on lights. She would get in the way.
Christine sat on the edge of the bath after closing the bathroom door. She took the cap off the bottle of Dettol and dipped the blade of the little knife into the brown fluid. Then she lifted her left foot onto her right knee and chose the spot, between her heel and the ball of her foot. She pressed the sharp point of the blade gently against the soft white skin.
Sonia?s eyes.
He walked around the door of the bedroom where the woman lay, right up close. That?s when he saw the key in the lock and knew what he must do.
He pulled the key out of the lock. It made a scraping sound and he heard her breathing become shallow. Quickly he closed the door. It creaked. He pushed the key in from the outside. In haste he struggled to get it in.
