THE ROAD UP TO POLLSMOOR WAS JAMMED FULL of taxis and pedestrians for the Sunday visiting hour. Joanna manoeuvred around the people who ambled in the traffic, carrying bundles as if they were doing laundry. Joanna peered at their faces, but none of them looked frightened or seemed to be in a hurry. There were all sorts: whole families with Checkers packets of – yes – Jive and Niknaks and pies, as if they were going to lie on the sand at Kalk Bay beach. They plodded, resigned, all the way up the long drive to the door. Inside, Joanna was sure, there would be a reception cubicle just like the one at False Bay, with a gloomy guard eating something out of a bag transparent with grease.
She nipped in front of a white taxi with ONLY GOD KNOW’Z plastered on the windscreen, and parked the Golf carefully in one of the last spaces. VISITORS ONLY, it said, and that was fine. She was a VISITOR ONLY, and she wouldn’t be coming back.
Joanna joined the security queue, where a short woman with a paddle that buzzed was running it over their bodies. Joanna had been careful to remove the splint and sticking plaster from her face: she didn’t want to make herself any more conspicuous than she was. She looked almost normal again. The bruising was finally gone. Her nose was not her own, but she was getting used to it. Joanna was even getting her sense of smell back: it was never going to be as it was – thank God – and she could live with that. Now that she didn’t smell food as acutely, she was eating far less. Kevan had told her again that she was lucky. Some people permanently suffered Empty Nose Syndrome: one man had killed himself.
Her throat was healed over completely, although she stayed away from chilli.
Joanna fanned herself. Why didn’t they open a window, for God’s sake? It wasn’t like anyone could escape from Reception.
She could see through the glass in the doors beyond that the visitors’ room was full: boyfriends and grannies – and little kids coming to see their mommies. They looked worse than the women who were inside the cells. The prisoners wore denim, which she hadn’t expected. They had modified the basic uniform – why not? They had time, didn’t they? – and some of them wore ruffles and pleats. The light and shade of the thick blue cotton lay like feathers on their backs. They were proud of the way they looked, keen to prove that their time behind bars meant something.
Joanna was a little disappointed. She had expected to face her nemesis through glass, talk to her on the speakerphone like a goldfish.
But the cafeteria-style tables were probably better, she thought. It would be easier to do what she had come here for. She sat in one of the sticky plastic chairs near the door, and thought: Six months ago my bum wouldn’t have fitted.
She didn’t wait long. Viola appeared with no pretence at nonchalance. Manslaughter had rid her of her attitude. She looked passionless, literal, hunched and patchy as a vulture.
Something else is different, thought Joanna. I wonder if they’re medicating her? Not crazy enough for Valkenberg, but too crazy to roam the streets.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” said Viola stiffly, as if she was reading lines.
“I wanted to,” said Joanna, wanting to be kind. “I have something that belongs to you.” She tried a smile but her cheeks were twitching. Viola stared at her with those flat crocodile eyes. The bodies at the other tables were different shapes, scarred and dissected by the things that had led them here, but the eyes, they were the same. They had read the last page of the book and it is said: The End.
She reached into her handbag and brought out the jar. No one else in the visiting room even looked at the two of them, but Viola gasped and grabbed it. Like Golem with his Precious, thought Joanna. Viola was cupping it in her palms like a saint’s relic.
“Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Her eyes were glittery.
“You’re welcome.”
Viola ignored her. She was busy opening the screw-top of the jar. Oh, let her. It was just alcohol. The whiff of the preservative cut through the long afternoon smells of deodorant over sweat, the vanilla at the base of every grooming product on every head. Cuvier’s people had replaced the spirits every so often when the labia were decanted for study. Joanna had smelled worse witblits. What a gedoente, over this little scrap of flesh!
Viola lifted it close to her face.
I know what’s different, Joanna suddenly thought, and wanted to clap her hands. She’s ditched the turban. She looks so normal!
Before she could shout out or stop her, Viola tipped the last sliver of Saartjie Baartman’s labia into her mouth.