I park my car on a yellow line and push open the worn, heavy entrance door. I interrupt a man stamping documents to introduce myself, and he looks confused. He yells to the other man behind the counter, who looks at me and also shakes his head. Typical, I think, only in South Africa do you practically hand yourself over to the cops only to be rebuffed by inefficient bureaucracy. It reminds me of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Next I’ll be carrying a towel over my shoulder and be tortured by being forced to listen to someone’s disgracefully bad poetry. So long and thanks for all the fish.
I am busy dictating a message to the man behind the counter when I see Sello through the window. I tell the man to forget the message and head outside.
“Glad you could make it,” says Sello, breathing hard. He has a light sheen on his forehead and looks a bit ruffled. Maybe he has just come from a crime scene. Despite my morbid curiosity I resist asking him about it.
“Didn’t feel I had much of a choice,” I say, but he has already turned and begun walking away. I catch up and he leads me around the building to a back door. It seems to be disconnected, somewhere they use only on special occasions. Rapists, serial killers, writers. I am not worried till Sello double-bolts the door from the inside. The walls are thick and the air holds a slight chill. The cold clamminess reminds me of The Old Fort on Constitutional Hill. There is no one else around and it unnerves me. We walk down a passage and turn into the first open door on the left. It is an interrogation room, empty except for two plastic chairs and a table made from an old door. There is a two-way mirror on the far wall, which tricks you into thinking the room is bigger than it really is. Sello motions for me to sit down and excuses himself. I take a chair and sit in a way that I hope makes me look relaxed, so that the people behind the mirror will say: “He looks innocent.” There are no windows.
Sello comes back with a grubby folder in his hands. It is the same one he and Madinga brought to my house before they searched it, but it’s now considerably thicker and a great deal more foxed.
“Where is Madinga?” I ask.
Sello purses his lips and his eyes move up towards the corner of the room: a classic indication of lying.
“He’s busy with another case today.”
He shouldn’t have bothered; I am not that interested.
“Cash-in-transit heist,” he adds, seemingly enjoying the small deception.
“So he is trying to catch actual criminals,” I say.
Detective Inspector Sello ignores this and opens his folder. I start to feel the first gnawing of nerves. My underarms are wet, despite the frosty surroundings, and my stomach is tight. I hope he can’t see the patches of sweat blooming from my pits. I keep my arms close to my body.
“Mister Harris,” he says, “we found some disturbing things in the last few days.” His face gives nothing away. I try to follow suit.
“In your house. Powder residue… an illegal drug.”
God, I thought I had used all the coke in my house.
“GHB,” he says, tasting all the letters.
Now I don’t know whether to tell the truth or not. You shouldn’t lie to cops. But wouldn’t not lying be stupid?
“What is that?” I ask.
“You don’t know?” he asks, knowing the answer.
“No,” I say.
He is quiet for a moment. Scratches his scalp in a measured, practised way.
“Mister Harris,” he says, speaking slowly. “I thought you came in to co-operate.”
It’s my turn to be quiet.
“Look,” he says, “it doesn’t matter if you admit to knowing what it is or not, or whether you have ever used it. The point is that we found some in your house.”
“I’m finding it hard to see the relevance,” I say. Now I can feel perspiration on my face, and I wipe my upper lip.
“The relevance is that GHB can be used as a date rape drug, like Rohypnol. Miss Shaw had it in her labs.”
I laugh out loud. This has become ridiculous. It’s as if someone had seen the mind map and followed it step by step. I wonder if I am dreaming. If one night after working on Eve’s Graceful Demise I went to sleep and this has just been one big, ugly dream. I pinch myself. It hurts.
So much for GHB being untraceable. I guess that’s what you get from doing your research on Google instead of asking your drug dealer. Sello is watching me. I close my eyes and try not to sweat. He turns a few pages until he finds what he is looking for.
“We also found blood,” he says.
“Bullshit.” The word is out of my mouth before I’ve even thought it. “You’re making this shit up.”
Sello just looks at me.
“Okay,” I say. “I may have had some illegal drugs in my house, but there was no blood. There was no blood because there was no fucking murder. You’re trying to break me, get a confession out of me to make your job easier. Well, it won’t fucking work. I was in special training in the army. I laid landmines in Angola. I was in a hellhole in Bangkok where they interviewed me with a piece of hosepipe every day for two weeks. I will not confess to something I didn’t do. You can’t change my mind. I am not breakable.”
With his mouth closed, Sello runs his tongue over his teeth. He knows I’m lying.
27
NOT WAVING
I am sitting in my lounge, drinking merlot and looking at the blue-skinned man. The wine is a vintage Meerlust I have been saving for a special occasion. I picked up a case on some or other Cape wine route holiday. I sigh. Those were the days. I figure that if I wait till I get out of prison to drink it I would kick myself for every day of my sentence. After this bottle I have another lined up. And another.
There is something unnerving about the painting. Not only do his eyes follow me around the room, but they seem to have some knowledge of who I am and what I’ve done, and it makes me feel on edge. After regarding him for a while I raise my glass to him and, in a way, to Eve. I see Eve in Denise’s eyes, and in the way she purses her lips to smile, but apart from that they are polar opposites. Eve was so cool and reserved and pure and Denise is mysterious, provocative, dark. Impossible to pin down. Almost as if she is Eve’s shady reflection. That’s why we connect: in this over-lit world, we are both shadows.
She is healing me, in a way. I catch myself thinking of her often. Wondering what my life would be like if we hadn’t met. I’m under no illusions: I know that I don’t know anything about her, and that she will leave me in a beat. But when everyone else is banging down the doors she asks nothing of me. She seems to know when I need her and when I need space. As if she has had some kind of special training. I have never been in a relationship with a girl who knows how close I want her. I usually feel overwhelmed, then abandoned. Denise makes companionship an art form. An intuitive foxtrot. I wonder why she is being so good to me, a stranger. Maybe she is doing it for Eve: a final gift.
I have broken all my rules for her. I make her breakfast every morning (rye melba toast with cheddar and marmalade, black coffee, neither of which she finishes). I hold her as we fall asleep. I emptied out a bedroom drawer of mine so that she doesn’t have to live out of a suitcase. She hardly takes up any space. I seem to have lost interest in other women. Sometimes, at night, when we are exhausted but too giddy to sleep, I read to her. Faulks, Gordimer, Rushdie, Niffenegger, Murakami. She purrs when I open Atwood or Mantel. She transcribes Plath and leaves the scribbled notes around the house for me to find. I discover Contusion hiding in the crevice of the couch, Kindness in the shower, Cut inside the fridge, Edge on my pillow. I whisper Ondaatjie’s The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife into her ear. I have so little to offer, but at least I can give her that. We get lost in it, together. I keep Stevie Smith’s poignant and perfect poem, Not Waving But Drowning, to myself. It is too true to share with anyone else. I am, have always been, the one not waving.