The teenager’s skull smashed into the metal grate. The impact caused the foci of cracks in the bone to splay into hairline fractures. As sewer water emptied out of the underground pipe, dead weight stayed behind: garbage, driftwood, the carcasses of pigeons and one unfortunate cat. On a cement level close to the Black River and the N2 highway, the battered skeleton finally came to rest. Hours passed in a silence broken only by the chatter of vermin. Once again, the surface of the remains began to dry.
Skeletonisation, the decomposition of soft tissue that leaves behind only bone material, is a sure and steady process dependent on temperature, moisture and the action of micro-organisms. If a dead body is left undisturbed. The traveller in the drainpipe was up against much more than structural damage. Its early stages of putrefaction, the process in which the body disintegrates on a molecular and physical level, had begun in a very dry, aerated setting. Due to the constant blast of air rushing past it for several months, the usual destruction caused by bacteria had been impeded. Instead, mummification had begun. Skin and muscle that should have rotted away desiccated into a leathery parchment that hugged the bones. After being submerged for days, the remains were somewhat rehydrated, and the hitchhiking microbes on its surface resumed their busy task.
A rat wandered close for a nibble, flinched and pushed off, disgusted by the tough flesh and layer of dark slime covering the corpse. Some things even rats won’t do.
*
Years killed love.
No one ever imagined it happening to their relationship, yet it happened far too often. Maybe time annihilated objectivity, too, for surely not all or even half of married couples were always unhappy. Carina Fourie couldn’t care less. If the years had turned her into a graceless bitch, then so be it. She was willing to admit to her part in the saga. If she was a hag, then she had a fine accomplice in her spouse. Ian had a heavy hand when it came to bludgeoning their marriage, but again, she was also responsible. When had she stopped being a supple, fresh-faced young woman who took on life with zest, career with resolve and men with a wanton sparkle in her eye? At forty-seven she was no spring chicken, but by no definition was she washed-up. So when, exactly, had the apathy set in? When had the naked body of a man, her own man, in good shape and appealing to any red-blooded woman, become the pathetic shape of another human being, unalluring?
Since I lost my son. Since we lost our son and this man I call my husband refused to look me in my face and tell me anything but lies.
‘What’re you thinking, Carina?’ Ian moved around the bedroom with the easy prowl of a man in comforting, familiar surroundings. Comfort he had dedicated intellect and sweat to providing for them, but familiarity he was drifting farther away from on a daily basis.
‘You know how much I hate that question.’
A three-piece suit lay on the bed next to her jade silk gown. He leaned over and peeled away the white starched shirt, not bothering as the towel gradually loosened around his waist. Ian had hardly bothered to cover his nakedness in the fresher days of their union. It used to titillate her senseless the way he used to emerge from a shower, tall, brown and glistening. Spread himself along the mattress to air-dry, waiting with a knowing smile for his European temptress to lust him up. To moisten her lips and lashes and face with the droplets on his skin–
That woman was dead. Carina put her powder brush down, deciding to forgo any make-up tonight. Another thing she needn’t feel obliged to care about – being sexy, licking dew off horny husbands, or anything else that fell inside that wide circle. She wasn’t worried that there might be another pair of willing lips seeing to Ian’s dermis outside the confines of their bedroom. There could be one; there might be many; there may be none. There had been Adele, and that was all that would ever matter.
His hair was still wet from the shower, curling and releasing trickles of water down his neck. Kroes hare. Kinky hair. Enough black in it to point firmly at his bloodline. The blood her elder daughter secretly wanted out of her as much as those kinks she spent hours blowing and flattening out. The same hair her son had inherited, that all her children had. No nods to her influence.
Her son. It used to be her sons; now it was singular. The dead must give way to the living. Her mind was betraying her more often over the years, as it was doing again now, scrambling for reason in fluff. Her eyes met her husband’s in the dresser mirror and held them until she broke the moment in cowardice.
‘I don’t know where to start with you any more, Carina. I don’t know what more to say.’
‘Then go with your instinct and say nothing,’ she snapped. She dropped the hairbrush with trembling fingers. ‘Isn’t that what we as a family have agreed to: silence?’
He flinched slightly, no more than that. The sting behind her oft-repeated accusation that Ian was the family, that they only functioned as a successful unit as long as all were in service to him, didn’t affect him any longer.
Ian rubbed the bone close to his eyebrows, a sign he was struggling to control his irritation. ‘We can’t talk to that journalist. We can’t live through this again. You know that.’
Who’s we?! Carina wanted to scream. Instead, she swept into their en suite bathroom and slammed the door.
Bitterness. Bitterness killed love, and she’d embraced it. Flushed with shame and a giddy sense of triumph, Carina said to herself, I am bitterness, and rage and regret, and I’ve killed the love in more ways than one. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the reflection in the mirror as the thought warped through her mind again and again.
I killed the love and happiness in my home. She forced a tiny smile. Well, then, there was nothing like vengeance to light a flame under a rotting carcass.