ON THE WAY HOME one night, the deluge of rain pummelling against the windscreen so hard that the frenetic wipers can hardly keep up, a random conversation between Simone and Roxy on the back seat came back to me with vivid clarity. It was another wet and dark late afternoon, on our way back from seeing a matinee movie about zombies − not my first choice but I’d been overruled. Zombies were wayyyy cooler than vampires. Vampires were so overdone.
‘What is the scariest thing you can think of?’ Simone demands.
‘I saw this huge pet rain spider in a documentary,’ Roxy says. ‘It was seriously scary. It was like, falling off the ceiling on top of visitors, and they were like screaming, and the owner just like … laughed, as if it was funny. I don’t think I’d ever sleep again if somebody in my family had one of those.’
‘Yuck!’ Simone says.
‘What about you?’ Roxy asks.
Silence envelops us in the thickening gloom. The noise of pelting rain and whipping window wipers outside recedes, and around us car lights refract off metallic surfaces and slick wet roads, making it seem warmer and darker inside the car.
‘I dream that I’m in an igloo,’ Simone says in a faraway voice, ‘and there’s people crowding in from behind, and I shout and shout but nobody listens. They just keep pushing, and my body’s pressed so hard against the igloo wall that it’s starting to become the ice.’
‘Are you claustrophobic?’ Roxy asks this as if dreaming about igloos in Africa is perfectly normal.
‘No, I’m not scared when I go to the toilet, and that’s a small room. It’s just a certain kind of fear,’ Simone says loftily. ‘It only happens when I’m asleep.’
I listen in silence, wondering if there’s a connection to the sleepwalking episodes.
‘I guess,’ Roxy says.
‘Your mom’s the claustrophobic one,’ Simone says. ‘Remember how she didn’t want us to close the door that once and it was freezing? She’s weird.’
‘Georgie says it’s to let the wind blow through and clean away cobwebs,’ Roxy says. ‘She always does that. She’s not weird.’
‘Maybe she just wants to see what we’re doing! Maybe she thinks we’re going to smoke ciggies …!’ Simone shrieks. And they fall around giggling like two little kids. Then they’re quiet for a while. When I look in the rear-view mirror, I can see Roxy fiddling with her phone.
‘Georgie isn’t answering,’ Roxy says.
‘She knows you’re with us,’ Simone says. ‘She’s probably forgotten to buy airtime.’
‘She gets worried if I don’t call her to say where I am.’
‘Just phone Ben then,’ Simone says, sensing that the long-awaited sleepover might not happen.
Roxy says nothing for a moment, then she says, ‘Ben’s away. Anyway, he doesn’t want us to call him.’
Next moment Roxy’s head pops up between the seats and she asks me if I can drive her home tonight instead of tomorrow because she can’t get through to her mother.
Now, Roxy’s distant, suddenly grown-up voice is an echo from the past. Her parents must have had problems for a while. Ben was mostly a stranger to his kids. It didn’t make sense that Roxy would have run away to be with him. Something had to be done; I couldn’t pretend this was not happening. I called Georgie on the mobile number that was on the school parents’ contact list but it rang emptily and there was no message option. I’d have to drive out to the house in Muizenberg.
The following day, a Saturday, I told Simone I was going jogging on the False Bay promenade and she looked up, her head stuck in one of those offbeat books she picked up at garage sales. She plonked it down on the kitchen counter this morning as she went searching for something to eat. Diary of a Psychic: shattering the myths. By Sonia Choquette.
I was grateful to Choquette, who had given her something else to think about besides Roxy’s absence. It was the most energised I’d seen her in days.
‘What’s she got to say for herself?’ I asked, pointing to the cover of the book. I watched Simon put a slice of bread in the toaster and adopted as light a tone as I could. ‘Don’t put it higher than three or it’ll frazzle to a cinder.’
‘I like it burnt,’ my daughter said, before turning the toaster up as high as it would go.
There must be other people in the world who liked eating burnt offerings, or why would they make such a high setting?
‘Bam!’ she cried as she slammed the toaster handle down again. Not burnt enough …
‘She’s a precognitor,’ Simone announced as she cut her blackened buttered jammed toast into four equal squares. This was breakfast. Later I would find black crumbs everywhere. ‘Sonia knows things are going to happen before they do. But she says it all starts with visualising what you want. If you can visualise it strongly enough, then it will come to you.
‘Do you think that’s true?’ The question was couched in casualness but her eyes were narrowed in preoccupation. She would mull over this for weeks and smugly share bits and pieces of Ms Choquette’s wisdom. I was used to the seriousness with which Simone approached these books, and parallel dimensions of existence were no longer a concept that I rejected outright. My guess was that Simone was planning on visualising Roxy back into her bed.
‘You’d have to ask Annie about that. She can tell you a lot more about precognition than I can. Okay, I’m going,’ I said, forcing myself not to give the speech on burnt offerings that would just start a raging argument that I wasn’t going to win.
She nodded, satisfied, and stuck her head back into the book, ignoring my final goodbye and the usual instructions I delivered. But it was an act; we had a departure routine. I would stand outside and lock the door with the key, and then wait for her to click the Yale lock into place and put the visitor’s latch in place. It was a Catch 22 situation that I’d gone over too many times in my head. This way she was free to come and go as she pleased − she had her own key − and I would have no way of knowing. There was a time, long ago, when I considered locking her in from the outside, but what if a fire broke out, and she couldn’t get out the flat? Besides which, she’d stop talking to me, or eating, and I’d just cave again.
I thought about my daughter’s latest peculiar notion all the way to Muizenberg. When I’d first seen Simone in her hospital bed, she’d had the plump cheeks and awkwardly soft body of a tall preadolescent twelve-year-old child. Over the last two years she’d lost all the puppy fat. The burnt food thing was just a stage. It must be teenage hormones that made the smell of burnt food appetising.
I couldn’t think about it, I would go crazy, so I pressed ‘disc’ and listened to Jack Johnson as I drove.
When I got to the house, an unshaven man in a vest, who was tending to a bonsai tree, told me Georgie had gone surfing. He gave me directions as his fingers held the scissors and went snip, snip, snip, without taking much notice of me. But he did suggest I wear a hat.
Georgie’s old striped towel was exactly where he said it would be. In a straight line with the showers. I sat and waited in my sunglasses and newly purchased cap. I was grateful for the bonsai master’s advice. The surfers were small, neat, catapulting rubber figures far out on the light-flooded horizon. It seemed to be hours later that Georgie walked towards me out of the haze of heat, holding a surfboard twice her size. The puzzled frown almost undid itself, although not quite, when I stood up unsteadily on the shifting beach sand and removed my sunglasses.
‘Hey Paola. Long time no see,’ she said, putting the surfboard down and removing the leash around her ankle.
I sat down again and waited for her to get herself out the wetsuit. She was wearing a bikini under the rubber suit that showed off a tanned boyish figure. It was only close up, as I was, that you’d see the stretch marks. She shook her long brown hair free and sat down next to me. After taking a long drink from a water bottle she dug around in a bag and found two green apples.
‘Here,’ she said, holding one out.
I took it from her. She polished hers with a corner of the towel and chewed slowly, her eyes squinting against the glazed horizon.
‘I’m so very, very sorry about Roxy,’ I blurted out, holding onto my uneaten apple.
‘We taught her to be independent. She’s just flexing her wings.’
‘The papers say she might have gone after Ben?’ It was none of my business and this woman was practically a stranger, but I had to know.
Georgie looked out to where the stick figures balanced on their boards, and she kept chewing as strands of long brown hair whipped around her ears. We were on the shoreline where it was damp so the sand was not bothering us much, but soon we would have to move with the tide coming in.
‘It’s nonsense,’ she said finally. ‘Roxy’s too sensible for that. Besides, we talked about it. Ben will come back.’
How to get through to this woman who appeared to be sleepwalking? I of all people could recognise the signs.
‘Are you managing? Financially I mean? You don’t work …’ My different tack ended off lamely.
She eyed me moodily; the chewing paused. ‘The schools are giving me time to make a plan. It will be hard on my kids if they have to change schools. If you mean how do we eat, we all share whatever comes out the orchard, and I sell organic fruit and veg baskets at the market. It brings some cash in.’ She wasn’t so upbeat this morning but she was still a problem solver. ‘And I do the cleaning at the house, the others pay me what they can.’ My sympathy must have showed because she shrugged. ‘It’s okay, washing dishes and cleaning toilets is no big deal.’
‘Roxy knew all this?’
She nodded. ‘But that’s not why she left. She’s grown up with the other families. That’s how it is with us at the house, what goes around comes around. It’s not just the sex.’ She gave me a crooked grin. ‘That’s just one part of the giving.’
She refused to imagine that her daughter might come to harm.
‘Did you tell the police she wasn’t with Ben, Georgie?’
‘No, what difference would it make?’
‘Maybe they’d use their energy to find her here in South Africa, not in some mythical jungle.’ I wanted to shake her awake.
‘Maybe it’ll help him to be there. Maybe the jungle is where Ben needs to be right now,’ she snapped. Back off Paola, back off.
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ I said in a more neutral voice. ‘They’re treating the case as if Roxy’s a runaway.’
‘I did something similar when I was her age. I left home,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I joined a commune and I worked for my mattress and food. It was better than being at home.’
‘Georgie, what if you’re wrong, what if she’s been abducted? There are girls all over the world that have never been found.’
‘She’s too old,’ Georgie said serenely. ‘They abduct kids that are ten or eleven, that haven’t even reached puberty.’
That isn’t true, I wanted to shout.
‘Roxy just needs some space. She has to process Ben going away − we all do.’ It hit me then that Georgie was all cut up over Ben, and that was all she could cope with, and the loveless husbandless part of her was almost glad Roxy had taken herself out of the equation. After all, Roxy was a big girl, so now Georgie could just look after her two younger boys and worry about Ben.
Words tumbled off the tip of my tongue, things I couldn’t stop myself saying.
‘The Missing Persons Bureau says its mainly kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen that disappear. Did you know Roxy went out on her own late at night to amusement arcades and bars? Weren’t you worried about her?’
A surfer called out hello and she hollered back with a report on the wave conditions. She stayed like that, turned sideways, watching him rush the ocean, and rubbed at one eye with a hand. I wondered if she was wiping away a tear. ‘Losing his eyesight did something to Ben. He went into a panic. We had insanely bad fights. That was when Roxy started staying out.’
‘There are some sadistic perverts out there, Georgie−’
‘It’s not true what they’re saying about her, that she went with lots of boys. She never even had a boyfriend. She just wanted to surf.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s just jealousy because of all her achievements. But you have to tell the police who Roxy really is.’
She turned slowly to look at me. ‘Why are you here, Paola? Simone and Roxy aren’t really friends any more, are they?’
I swallowed. ‘Something happened with Simone a long time ago and I think it might be the same people.’ And my husband has some seriously messed-up friends who might in some way be involved.
She nodded slowly. ‘So that’s why. You’re here because you’re worried about Simone. And you should be.’
‘Georgie, listen to me please, we don’t have much time. Did anything happen before Roxy disappeared? That might explain where she is?’
‘At least I was there for Roxy every day of her life,’ Georgie barrelled on, and there was tearful rage in her voice now. ‘Do you even care how many times we gave Simone a lift home from school? I knew there was no one at the flat waiting for her, I’d want to invite her to come over to us because I could see she didn’t want to get out the car … but we lived too far away, I couldn’t afford the petrol for a double trip. That’s not right, you know,’ she scolded, ‘kids need people around them that they can depend on. Roxy still climbs into my bed when she can’t sleep and one of the other kids is usually already there, so we’ll have Milo and talk in the dark. At least I knew who her friends were, the good ones and the weird ones.’
The undertone couldn’t be missed. ‘Weird ones?’
‘It was like a dream, not real … And anyway, you and I hardly know each other, so why would I have said anything? All we’ve ever talked about is the kids’ school. And Josh, I suppose.’
‘What are you saying, Georgie?’
‘It was the day Simone went after Josh and she found him listening to the wasps on the old netball field. Do you remember I told you about it?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘I know I told you that I let Simone go and I stayed behind, but it didn’t happen exactly like that. They were away so long that I went looking for them. When I turned the corner, I could see Simone at the far end of the old netball field. For a moment it almost looked as if she’d grabbed Josh’s hand away from this … person in a long black coat. Simone’s back was to me so she didn’t see me. I’ve gone over it so many times. It was a hot afternoon and I was irritated because I’d had to leave my other boy’s soccer match and I’d promised him I’d watch, and Josh always did this. When I looked again, I was closer by then, Josh was standing against Simone with his hand in hers, and I saw that the person Simone was talking to was a woman. Anyway, whoever it was saw me coming and got into a car that was waiting on the road next to the field.’
‘A woman in a long black coat?’ My voice was hoarse with disbelief.
‘Yes, I know. Weird, huh?’
‘What kind of car was it?’
‘I don’t know. It was too far. It was black, that’s all I saw.’
‘What did Simone say? Did you ask?’
She gave me a look. ‘Simone said it was just someone looking for directions, that they’d seen the school sign and driven in. But something wasn’t right, she was so tense, I could feel it. You know what crossed my mind? This is crazy, I know, but it was like aliens tried to kidnap Josh and Simone saved him.’
I smiled weakly. ‘Maybe you should consider scriptwriting.’
‘You think so? Anyway, Roxy would have told me if something like that happened to her. She doesn’t keep secrets like Simone does.’
I had to find the right words to reach her.
‘Listen to me, Georgie: there are people after Simone, and maybe after her friends as well. I think Simone stayed away from Roxy because she didn’t want to draw attention to her, but it was too late. That story you just told me, that’s why you should be worried, even if you don’t want to be. Our brains do funny things, they turn away from the truth sometimes, but then it resurfaces. What you saw that day had some meaning that you couldn’t grasp and your brain has been trying to make sense of it ever since.’
I didn’t want to frighten Georgie more than necessary but the story explained why Simone suddenly insisted on visiting Igor. She’d thought Roxy was in danger.
Georgie nodded slowly.
‘You couldn’t know, but for months I had a female bodyguard in the flat with Simone any time I wasn’t there. But eventually I had to try and give her a more normal life. I thought she was busy every afternoon of the week and there’d only be a couple of hours when I wasn’t home, but she stopped going to all her after-school activities and I didn’t know.’
I could sense I finally had her attention. Desperate to keep her with me I carried on talking. ‘Roxy’s only fifteen. You’re right that it’s not the worst thing that can happen to a young girl to make her own way, however hard it is – but what if you’re sucked into a rabbit hole of evil and nobody knows? There are people that hunt down kids that are unprotected, for whatever reason. You have to believe me.’
She watched me, the light shifting in her gaze, and deep in her brown eyes I thought I could see Roxy, a tiny faraway figure surrounded by a blue halo.
‘It’s been two weeks now and you haven’t heard a word from her. You said Roxy was a sensible girl and that she wouldn’t keep secrets from you. Then wouldn’t she call you if she was okay? She knows you’re on your own with the other kids and that you’d be desperately worried … She once cancelled a sleepover with Simone because she knew you’d be worried. The Roxy I know would call you.’
Her eyes widened and she stared at me. She knew I was right.
‘She’s my best friend, I don’t know what I’ll do without her,’ Georgie said, her chin on her knees, hugging them to herself as she rocked back and forth on the beach. ‘He wasn’t a bad father before he got sick. He taught all our kids to surf. And we were always on time with the school bills, not like some of the other families … Roxy couldn’t understand − I thought it was that, that she needed time … What do we do now?’
‘We go and see a friend of mine, Detective Knappman and you tell him what you’ve just told me.’
Knappman agreed to meet us in his office although we’d ruined a rugby game he was watching on TV. When I said he could record it, he grunted that he wanted to watch it live. The inexperienced detective who’d once driven me home from Valkenberg and played classical music in his car to soothe my shattered nerves had reminded me of a young carthorse visiting the city. This more experienced Klaus had lost that innate farm-boy belief that the rain would come soon; his eyebrows remained in place yet his mouth betrayed a certain cynicism. But he took Georgie’s story seriously. A policewoman came and took Georgie away to another office so she could make a signed, written statement.
Klaus said we were laying one baksteen at a time, and baksteen by baksteen we would furrow these people out.
‘It’s ferret, not furrow,’ I pointed out. ‘We’ll ferret these people out brick by brick. That’s what you mean.’ I just couldn’t help myself. ‘You have to let Detective Olmi know.’
He glared at me, but then he shook his head and laughed.
‘Ja, that. Exactly that. We’ll ferret them out. Olmi’s team will be notified.’
Georgie’s statement was something, and yet it was nothing. There was no proof of anything. My daughter’s life was sand running through this man’s fingers. For him, she was one of many; for me she was a small girl with her hand in an unknown woman’s bigger hand, a schoolgirl in a photograph whose gaze wrenched my heart apart, a girl who a few hours ago had made herself burnt toast for breakfast in the apartment she shared with me. Her child’s feet were bigger than mine; only I cared about this small irrelevant detail.
‘What is going on, Klaus? What do those people have to do with Simone? Can’t you pick them up for loitering and bring them in for questioning?’
‘Ek weet nie, Paola. I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t take anyone into custody based on her story, you know that. Maybe it was an actor, or a singer in a rock band, or someone on their way to a fancy dress party. Mrs Vermaak must have seen those people on the corner like you did. It probably worked on her imagination, with her husband gone and now her daughter missing.’
His words hit me with the force of a rock thrown at my chest. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ I said. ‘I mean, that she would have seen them too.’ I was furious with myself. What happened to logic?
‘She says not, that she drives another way, but I’m not convinced. We are meaning-makers, and the mind reaches its own conclusions.’ He sounded absent-minded, as if his own mind was somewhere else.
‘Klaus, can I ask you something?’
He swung round to look at me. ‘Wat?’
‘When you brought Elijah’s boxes to the apartment, did you bring Simone’s music box from the house? Shouldn’t something like that be with the other stuff, as evidence?’
‘Van wat praat jy?’ Klaus sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘What music box?’
‘It was in Simone’s bedroom at the Sarrazin house but she didn’t take it with her.’
‘Ja? En …?’
‘The other day when you brought them upstairs, it was there in a parcel next to the metal detector.’
‘That wasn’t us,’ Klaus said, shaking his head. ‘I know the evidence picked up from Simone’s room. No music box that I know about. What’s so important about it?’
‘The music turns her into a zombie. She falls apart.’
‘Hell, Paola, this is tough for you,’ Klaus said, shaking his head. ‘Maybe somebody was trying to do a good deed, give Simone a gift from her old life to help her settle in, something like that.’
‘Yes, that must be it.’
The mystery of the music box was a tiny matter in the bigger picture, and Klaus wanted me out of his office so he could attend to whatever was brewing in his head. I recognised that distracted frown. It meant that Klaus had caught the scent of a wrongdoing. Georgie’s story about Josh’s near abduction had got his attention.
‘Do you believe me about those people now? Are you going to step up the search for Roxy?’
‘I can’t take anybody into custody but there are other things we can do, yes, there are other things we can do,’ Klaus said thoughtfully, his chair facing the parking lot, as if he hadn’t heard me.
Georgie accepts a ride home. She sits next to me in a dazed, semi-catatonic state. When I ask what she has in her fridge she stares at me blankly and eventually says, ‘Spinach, I think.’ I call Simone and explain that I’ll be late, she should make herself something for supper and make sure she doesn’t open to anybody. On the way we stop at a 7/11 store so that I can buy some supplies. Georgie lets me take control without arguing, but when I suggest a farmhouse omelette for supper at her place, she reminds me in a low voice that the family is vegetarian. ‘We’re not vegans,’ she says, ‘and we eat fish, because that’s got omega oils and I think that’s important for the kids. We’re just trying to reduce our footprint on the planet.’ ‘Is cheese okay?’ ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Roxy loves cheese.’ And then she begins to cry.
She’s calmed down by the time we get to the house, and luckily it’s late enough so that the communal kitchen is clear of other people. My farmhouse omelette is nowhere near as good as Nathan the Bear’s, but Josh and Wally tuck in, munching thick buttered slices of bread with the stringy cheesy omelette, as if they haven’t had a proper meal in days. Georgie picks at her food but she makes an effort for the kids’ sake. When we’re finished, Wally says goodnight and she asks me to watch television while she puts Josh to bed, and then we can have a hot mug of Horlicks together before I go.
Josh shuffles off silently to do his teeth and then I hear some scuffling and soft voices through the open door as he climbs into bed. The low tones of Georgie’s voice singing a hymn to her troubled lastborn reach me:
I would be true, for there are
those who trust me;
I would be pure, for there
are those who care;
I would be strong, for there
is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there
is much to dare.
When she comes back, she says that it’s thanks to Simone that she’s started singing to Josh. They’re old songs from her childhood. What would Ben say if he heard her singing Pentecostal hymns to their children? But it’s a hymn her mother sang to her to calm her whenever anything bad happened, and now it seems to calm Josh. She just keeps singing it like a lullaby again and again until he falls asleep, and he even lets her hold his hand while she’s singing.