I SUPPOSE IT WAS NATURAL that she didn’t want to be the only kid on the block who had absent father issues. But it was more than that.
I’d read up on kids with a history of sexual abuse and had come to expect anything. Delayed post-traumatic shock was real. It could happen any time. There was no exact way of knowing how it would manifest itself or when. It might happen years later when she had her own children, it might cause her to act inappropriately, it might cause her to self-harm – this jargon hid a world of terrifying possibilities that ranged from sexualised behaviour to cutting herself to jumping off a bridge.
When I raised it with Esmeralda, she gave me that raised eyebrows look that said ‘When are you going to toughen up, sister?’ and then suggested drily that instead of planning for Armageddon I took it one day at a time and handled each event as it occurred. Didn’t they teach us that kind of thing in Project Management? No wonder I was so stressed out. Things didn’t work like that. Didn’t I know that things hardly ever ended with a bang? They always ended with a whimper. Somebody famous said that. The trick was to work at life each day, to keep an eye on the small stuff. Because otherwise you only noticed stuff when it had already happened. Her brother was selling some T-shirts that said ‘Stay positive, regardless’; she got a commission for every one she sold. Did I want one?
Esmeralda and I had a tacit arrangement. Occasionally I invited her for lunch and a glass of wine, and in exchange Esmeralda listened and made suggestions. She was the only person who understood about Simone and me, but she left me speechless sometimes. I wasn’t sure which bit to respond to first. ‘Event? Why don’t I find that comforting? You make it sound like a Wild West Rodeo and I’m going to ride the biggest bad-ass bull of them all.’
She was silent for a moment as she chewed.
‘Is there anything concrete you can put your finger on?’
‘That’s just it. Nothing. I think she’s up to something … A lot of the time she’s unnaturally polite, if that makes any sense? Oh, and there’s a new poster on her door with a pretty vampire boy baring his fangs−’
‘That’s pretty standard,’ Esmeralda interrupted, shrugging it off. ‘It’s just a phase these young girls go through. They’re all reading Stephanie Meyer and they’re all looking to be Bella. Danger is cool and Safe is boring when you’re young … Even when you’re old sometimes …’ she mused, clearly thinking about something else.
‘It says STAY OUT – PRIVATE … But that’s not really it. She gave up climbing without telling me.’
Esmeralda’s fork stopped somewhere in the air halfway to her mouth. ‘She did? Why didn’t you say that straight away?’ She put the fork down and looked concerned. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I didn’t get a bill for the term, so I called to ask where it was. They said she’d produced a letter from me saying she wasn’t coming any more. I said there must be some mistake, I never wrote a letter and she loved climbing, it must be some other girl they were confusing her with, so they got her coach to call back. There was no mistake. He said when he saw the letter he made a point of calling her in and asking her about it – apparently she’s a natural and she’s fearless. She said it was taking too much time from her studies.’
‘That’s bad,’ Esmeralda said solemnly. ‘Climbing is her thing.’
Esmeralda’s reaction took me aback. Was I the only one who hadn’t realised that the climbing was more than just a passing fad? What the coach actually said was that it was rare for such a young climber to be able to distinguish between the feeling of fear and actual risk, and that he hoped I didn’t mind him saying it but Simone seemed to relax when she was on the wall. He seemed to think she had real ability. I’d grown used to Simone’s habit of climbing things without thinking about it much. At the beach it was the massive boulders, on the promenade it was the obstacle course, at the park it was a tree. I’d even seen her tackle a telephone pole but a splinter in her hand had stopped that attempt. I’d worry about her falling and she’d laugh. ‘I’m in my zone, mom-person. I’m Spiderwoman!’
I told Esmeralda that I’d done some follow-up investigation after my chat with the coach. It turned out Simone had given up all her afternoon activities and I didn’t even know.
‘What are her marks like these days? Did you talk to her?’
‘Of course I’ve talked to her. I’m not sure what’s going on. Her marks are carefully average – middle-of-the-road, not great enough to win any academic prizes, not bad enough to get unwanted attention. I totally lost it. Little Miss-Madam was cool as a cucumber; she said climbing brick walls every week was stupid and boring and I couldn’t make her do it if she didn’t want to and then she walked out the kitchen and banged her bedroom door shut … And locked it.’
‘Did you try again when you’d calmed down?’
‘Yes. It went just as I expected – that it was just a game. So what if she copied my signature? I was so old school. I always take everything so seriously, she didn’t know how to tell me. Blah, blah, blah. She was right about the game part.’
I caught Esmeralda’s look of surprise. ‘I don’t believe her any more, that’s all. It’s an act; there’s something else going on. Now that I know, she’s gone all secretive. I tried her door the other day when she wasn’t there. It was locked. Why would she lock it when she’s not there? When she is there, her clothes are spread all over the floor and her bed’s a tangle of cables, between the mobile phone charger and the iPod charger and her laptop cables. She’s always doing something on a screen. What am I supposed to do, become her friend on Facebook so I know what my own daughter is doing?’
‘Sometimes all these vulnerable kids need is some of your time,’ Esmeralda said, before dipping a French fry into some tomato sauce and popping it into her mouth.
Walking away from her towards my car, I acknowledged that Esmeralda might have a point. Two years had passed quickly. I’d allowed myself to think Simone was settling in nicely because it suited me. But something hadn’t felt quite right from the beginning. I’d struggled to find a way to open the conversation with Simone about wanting to legally adopt her and have her come to live with me. I’d thought it would make it easier for both of us if I made it clear that I believed it was what Daniel − the absent father figure she clearly adored − also wanted, even if he appeared to have abandoned us after his disappearance a year before. The morning after I’d explained this, as best I could, she’d come into the kitchen with a cocksure expression on her face and thrown open the fridge door as if now it was her fridge too. From that day on she’d acted so normal that it struck me as unnatural, as if she was trying out the role of utterly normal wanted teenager in her own life story.
Admittedly, in the last few months, much of my energy had gone into looking at different avenues for earning a living. It was a matter of risk mitigation. My Picador & Plexus manager, Piet van den Berg, had made it clear that allowances made for my personal circumstances (a newly acquired teenage daughter) could not continue indefinitely. I didn’t hold it against Piet. It was just the nature of the beast. We were in a cutthroat business driven by ambitious revenue targets. There weren’t enough home-based projects that needed my level of consulting skill or could afford my rates. Over the long months of recovery from the accident and then the legal struggle to adopt Simone, I’d gone from star performer in terms of earned revenue to potential liability. It was a question of time before they put the screws on me and I’d have to make a choice: Travel to the big projects or take a retrenchment package.
A chance aeroplane discussion with a Nigerian Programme Manager employed by a major mobile phone operator in her home country had resulted in me passing on the name of a technical contractor I’d used a couple of times on our projects. We’d swapped business cards, and she’d sent me an email a few months later asking if I could source a project manager contractor and suggesting we do it on the basis of an introduction fee if the contact worked out. I didn’t need to worry about confidentiality. I’d be dealing directly with her and she’d be paying me out of her programme budget. It had gone on from there. After that, she’d contact me when one of her projects needed a skilled contract resource, and I’d do some homework and make a few calls and play it like I was doing everyone a favour. I didn’t ask too many questions and she didn’t volunteer more information than the specific resource requirement. An opportunity presented itself and I took it.
But it was a risky game and I knew it. My employer, P&P, had big-time corporate lawyers on their payroll, and I’d signed an exclusive employment contract that included an ‘Other Work’ clause prohibiting any private business enterprise, as well as a ‘Non-solicitation’ clause that precluded soliciting resources other than on behalf of P&P. The idea was to keep us honest.
In theory I could run the whole business using nothing but a personal computer and a phone; in practice I couldn’t use my company laptop or my company mobile because of the security protocols that ran in the background on a 24/7 basis. So I rented my own office ‘pod’ in a renovated Victorian semi situated in Loop Street that had been set up as a community business hub. The rotating office concept offered affordable and flexible workspace to start-up business and entrepreneurs on an as-needed basis. Perspex bubble chairs hung from the ceiling with their own laptops and headphones all tied in to the Wi-Fi network. Or you could opt for a closed door ‘pod’. I kept it low key, no company registration required, just a new bank account in my married name at another bank. It was all very modern and liberating.
Ironically, the headquarters for my fledgling enterprise was not far from W&W&W, the world-famed esoteric bookshop where intruders had broken in after closing time and killed its manager, Elijah Bloom. After hours, Elijah was a ‘Specialist in extra-terrestrial phenomena, alien abductions and unexplained disappearances’, according to the blurb on his private business card. Often I would be in the traffic driving over the very spot of bloody tarmac where his body had landed after he’d been thrown out the window still tied to his office chair, and my gut would burn with the injustice of it. Time would shift and I’d be back in his roof office the day I implored him to look for my missing husband, wondering what I was getting myself into but going along with it because I didn’t know where else to turn. At some point Elijah went from hired PI to ally and good friend. I’d come to appreciate his thoughtful, low-tech, HB-pencil-on-paper approach and the ability he had to look at things differently. I missed his offbeat humour and common sense. I thought he would have liked my new ‘pod’ office.
Having my own contracting agency required creative time management − most of the extra work, like going through CVs, I could do late at night at home, but sometimes I’d have to juggle calls and appointments in the city, so I suggested we join a lift club. Instead, Simone ended up making her own arrangements, sometimes with the school microbus and sometimes with other kids who lived in the vicinity. I was proud of her for being self-sufficient.
I’d congratulated myself that Simone and I had settled into a routine. Most nights I’d arrive home to find some kind of supper in the warmer drawer – our freezer was packed with ready-to-bake meals and she’d learnt to cook some simple dishes from Sarie, the housekeeper who had been responsible for her in the Sarrazin household – and then we’d sit and have supper together and talk about our day. Simone’s Cape Malay chicken curry was pretty good. Sometimes she’d ask if I wanted a glass of wine, and I’d agree because I liked watching the seriousness with which she poured it; somehow it reminded me of Daniel.
Now I couldn’t believe it – the months of pretence, lying to me night after night with a different story about what she’d done that afternoon. For one whole term she’d entertained me with amazing imaginary climbing-wall exploits, incredible tennis tournament playoffs and radically cool photography club assignments, and I’d lapped it up like some disingenuous moron. I told myself that I’d been a fool. What I’d taken for the innocent shine of youth in her startling blue eyes was in fact a hard amused adult glint, waiting for me to realise what was going on and wake up to the real world.
Later, Simone told me they’d followed her often. That in the beginning she’d caught minibus taxis because they were convenient, until she’d seen a white panel van following one day, and then the next day again. After that she’d spent most afternoons evading them, until eventually she’d decided the safest thing to do was catch a lift home every day, usually with Amber and sometimes with a girl in a lower grade who lived nearby. They’d drop her off right in front of the flats and then she’d run up the stairs if the lift was busy and lock herself in. It had happened a couple of times that someone knocked and then she’d call herself on the mobile phone and pretend she was talking to me.
She really really needed her own transport, Simone said. Sophie was getting a scooter for her birthday because her mother was tired of driving her around.
What happened to walking? It wasn’t that far … She’d get some good clean fresh air into her lungs instead of sitting at her computer most of the day−
‘You’re just saying that because you don’t want to come and fetch me … It’s kilometres to walk, don’t you get anything?’
‘There’s a bus, Simone. The bus stop isn’t far. Other kids catch the bus. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You used to be pretty good at catching buses.’
That was how she’d attracted Daniel’s attention in the early days: riding out to Camps Bay on a bus and then sitting at the bus stop opposite Sonkasteel, waiting for him to see her from the second-floor passageway when he left the apartment. She’d also stalked me from the bus stop in the weeks after Daniel’s disappearance, when I still had no idea who she was.
No surprise what happened next in these situations. She’d leave me sitting alone and slam her bedroom door behind her. Sometimes I worried for the door.
When Valeria’s birthday party came up, I agreed only on condition that she was back by 11 pm, which I thought was a reasonable time for a girl of fourteen. I bought a pizza for supper and fell asleep on the sofa after watching a DVD. I woke up to hear a key being turned in the front door. I looked at my watch; it was ten minutes after one.
‘What happened? Why is it so late …’
‘The party wasn’t over. Brett gave me a lift on his bike.’
‘Who’s Brett?’
‘Amber’s brother.’
‘What happened to the lift you were getting with Sophie?’
‘Sophie got a lift with someone else.’
‘You know you can call me. You don’t have to get lifts with strangers.’
‘If I had my own scooter I could leave early when the security guards were still around. Then you wouldn’t have to worry.’ And with that she scooped Trushka up and sauntered off to her room.
Esmeralda had her own take on the whole scooter thing. First, she pointed out that you had to be 16 years old to get a licence to drive a road scooter that had any real power. Then she eyed me quizzically. ‘You need to take back control. She’s doing what she wants, running rings around you. That’s not parenting. That’s a cop-out. It’s also called TROUBLE, in capital letters, when you’re dealing with a teenager.’