SHE IS BACK WITH ME but she is not back. She is elsewhere. She is imagining what Roxy is going through, and trying to blank out those thoughts. The physical injuries are healing well but there will be scarring. She moves listlessly around the apartment and refuses to go out. Her skin is always clammy to the touch. She lets me make her toast with baked beans or sardines or Marmite. These are the meals that comfort her. I assume this was her staple diet at the Sarrazin house. I cook delicacies to tempt her − roast chicken and crispy potatoes, pasta with butter and parmesan − and she turns away from her plate after a couple of forkfuls. A toxic mix of ferocity, rage and shame is curdling in her gut, and I don’t know what to do or say to help her.
She does not want to talk to me about anything. She refuses to allow me to fetch her in the afternoons.
‘I’m not a baby. I am fine.’
‘If I buy you a Vespa, will you use it?’
‘You said I had to get a licence.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. We’ll get you lessons. They won’t stop you. You look older.’
In the end, I plundered the trust account that held my inheritance and purchased a second-hand silver Vespa off Gumtree, not for her birthday, not for any special occasion other than she would no longer have to ask anyone for a lift or hitchhike. I had asked Klaus how Simone got to ‘Huis in Bos’, and his answer had terrified me: ‘She said she saw a white panel van following her and that she thought they had taken Roxy first because she was more vulnerable. So one day she just waited on the side of the road dressed in her cowboy boots, pretending to hitchhike. But I don’t know, she wasn’t saying everything …’
She did not use the Vespa, discarding it with a blank stare. It was too slow. It was too silver. Not today, she felt tired. It stood unused in the garage. Instead she borrowed a skateboard and came off on a dangerous downhill stretch with blind bends. A passing motorist with kids in her car scraped my daughter up off the tarmac, took her to the closest emergency clinic in the city and called me on my mobile.
When I got to the clinic, she refused to talk to me. I wanted to take her to Carrie, our GP, but she muttered that I must call Gina. Gina would know what to do. Later, when my mother arrived at the apartment, she did appear to know what to do, dispensing Dettol and attention, and soon Simone was patched up and calmer. She had a split lip and a bruise that was slowly forming on her cheek and a ‘very sore’ elbow, but there were no broken bones. Gina and Simone watched a dance show on RAI together. When I commented that Simone couldn’t understand Italian, my mother responded that music was a universal language.
‘Anyway, how is it going with the piano, do you still play?’ she demanded. ‘And Simona, is she still having lessons?’
‘No, Simona is not having lessons,’ I snapped, ‘she is sitting next to you on the couch after recklessly going down a hill that is used for Red Bull events, and she is lucky she didn’t crack her skull in half!’
‘Don’t fight,’ Simone said in a small voice. We both looked at her.
‘Did they check her for concussion?’ my mother asked.
‘I hope so,’ I replied. ‘They’d already checked her when I got there.’
‘You were late,’ my mother accused. ‘She was all alone. Concussion is very dangerous.’
‘I can’t do this,’ I said weakly. ‘Why don’t we eat something? We’ll all feel better.’
‘What do you eat in this house?’ my mother grumbled as she poked a finger at the various items in my fridge. In the end I went out to the corner 7/11. ‘Remember to get free-range chicken,’ Simone instructed from the couch, and I knew the terrible urge to self-destruct was passing. My mother made enough chicken broth for a small army and waved my objections aside, saying it was a soup that froze well. Broth with alphabet pasta was followed by boiled chicken and vegetables sprinkled with salt. I watched my daughter tuck in, and my own stomach unclenched from its now familiar knot.
‘It’s delicious,’ my daughter said, catching my look. ‘Why don’t you ever cook us boiled chicken?’
For a moment it was very quiet, and then my mother and I burst out laughing together. Simone looked from her grandmother to me, and then she smiled.
Later I walked my mother to her car. ‘She liked your soup. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile since it all happened. I don’t know how to help her.’ It was easier to say these things in the darkness, the stars just pinpricks of light in the firmament.
‘She has been through terrible things but we human beings are very resilient, and she has a very strong spirit. I was younger than her during the war. My generation also went through bad times and saw many terrible things but one goes on. Every day brings a new sunrise. I will come more often. It is important to keep her busy. Why don’t you look around for a piano teacher to come to the flat? It will soothe her. Do you remember how Daniel used to play? Your husband was a maestro on the piano. I would have liked to have heard his mother play. We must make music. It’s important that we make music.’ My mother patted my arm. ‘You are a good mother, Paola. Don’t hide your love from her.’ Like you did from Daniel.
My mother’s visit is a temporary respite. Simone sinks into a thick charcoal silence, and all she will eat is charred toast. But my mother’s chicken broth has given me an idea.
When the school holidays start, I take the Monday off and we drive into the harbour together. I tell Simone that I have accumulated too many overtime hours, and I convince her to come along with the excuse that I want to see a millionaire’s yacht that has berthed off one of the quays. I stop in front of the building that houses the Seafarer’s Institute and switch the car ignition off.
‘Let’s go.’
She looks around at the containers piled everywhere and the forklift trucks moving around. There’s no sign of a luxury yacht. ‘Where?’
Her hand is finally out of her mouth. Talking means she can’t tear her cuticles off at the same time.
‘Inside.’
‘Inside there?’ She looks around as if we are on planet Pluto. ‘You must be joking.’
‘No, I’m not joking,’ I say in the firmest, most natural voice I can muster. ‘They serve a good bowl of soup and fresh bread.’ An image from my childhood presents itself. ‘It comes out of this huge pot that looks like it belongs to the old woman in her shoe. Anybody that’s hungry can come in and get a decent meal for a few rand.’
She just sits there, arms now folded.
‘Come on, Simone, we both need some fresh air.’
‘Why?’ she says.
‘Why do we need some fresh air?’
‘You’re acting stupid,’ she says. ‘But actually you are stupid, you just act clever all the time.’ I don’t much care that I’m being insulted. This is the longest conversation we’ve had in a week. Part of me wants to whoop and cheer.
‘It’s where I picked him up, the time he disappeared off a ship.’
Her head swings round.
‘You never told me.’ The blue eyes glisten with accusation. Accusation is better than vitriol. It suggests we are in something together, however unnatural and forever puzzling.
‘Let’s go. I’ll tell you inside.’
She slams the door and flounces in ahead of me, pulling at her hair. Then she’s on the threshold, and the seamen in the room stop their eating and conversations, febrile curiosity alive in their eyes. And then something else enters the room. Something primal. Even the women serving stop what they are doing. Always this something else, a languid sexual energy that her pearly smooth, lightly freckled flesh transmits. I theorise that it comes from her previous life, from being exposed to things no child should ever experience. For a moment she pauses, expressionless, a strand of blonde hair in her mouth, eyeing them back, taunting them with her baby-girl cheeks and rosy open lips. Do you want me? Then she acts like any self-conscious teenager and dives for the nearest table. Well, you can’t have me. Weak with a mix of emotions, I sink onto the hard wooden bench opposite her.
‘Yuck,’ she says, nose crinkled to the rafters, shoving away dirty dishes left by the previous occupant and glaring at me.
I force myself to block out the other patrons and the lascivious thoughts directed towards my daughter in her strategically torn designer jeans and midriff T-shirt that together reveal plenty of youthful bare skin. A waitress wanders over and desultorily wipes away at the greasy tabletop with a grimy cloth. Simone ignores the menu put in front of her. I place an order for two servings of soup of the day.
When the sweet potato and pea soup comes, she keeps her elbows on the table.
‘I don’t want green soup, I want chips.’ Simone’s tone suggests this is all that could make this situation bearable.
The waitress perks up, looking from Simone to me. We’re about to make her day.
‘No chips today,’ I say brightly, avoiding my daughter’s glittering eyes. An odd calm has settled over me. ‘He ate soup. We will eat soup.’
Simone opens her mouth then closes it again.
We both manage to eat a little.
I tell her about getting a call from the harbour master after he’d seen a newspaper article. How I had found Daniel in this place, a little thinner and tired but safe, sipping at hot soup, acting as if he was in the best Parisian restaurant and hadn’t been missing for over a week. As if there was nothing untoward about having vanished off a ship out at sea and landing up here. For Simone’s sake, I relive the unexpected casual dread of that day. I leave out what Enid has told me − that Daniel has shed several skins in his lifetime, that he has learnt to blend into any surroundings when he wants to − and that I believe he spotted someone on the ship that he wanted to evade.
She won’t have it that the only rational explanation is that he slipped down the gangway without being seen and returned to shore before the ship set sail.
‘You’re just saying that. People do vanish off ships.’
‘Of course they do,’ I say, careful not to show how relieved I am that she’s talking again, even if it’s just to disagree with me. ‘The difference is they wind up dead. Either killed or drowned. How do you think it happened?’
‘I don’t know … Maybe they took him, maybe they kidnapped him off the ship.’
‘Daniel was found right here in Cape Town harbour, the same harbour the ship set sail from.’
Her eyes are narrowed in concentration.
‘Albert could have done it. He and Nada owned a boat. Sometimes they’d take clients on the yacht. I heard them talking about it.’ It’s the same old subterfuge; she wasn’t present on the boat with those ‘clients’, that’s not how she knows about it. ‘Daniel must have escaped.’ She sits back, pleased with herself.
‘You don’t just stop a ship out at sea and hop on,’ I say, staring out at the harbour through glass panes that are encrusted with layers of sea salt, wondering how many years worth of sediment has settled there. ‘It would be in the captain’s log. And anyway somebody would have told the police.’
‘I bet you I’m right,’ Simone says smugly. ‘You don’t understand how Albert and Nada operate. They probably did it at night, then they paid off the captain and the police and anyone that was awake.’
Albert. Nada.
The names are enough to put me in a panic. I haven’t brought her here to talk about the Sarrazins. It strikes me that her theory makes more sense than mine if one considered the eyewitness report that placed him at the captain’s table the night before he vanished. It was a mystery that had never been resolved. I’d thought I could control the conversation but the truth is I haven’t controlled a thing since Daniel, my soulmate and the only father she knows, began his disappearing tricks.
The hot feeling of shame comes back to me.
I’d sat in this place, the Seafarer’s Institute, watching the unshaven stranger opposite me put one spoonful at a time into his mouth, not spilling a drop. Beneath the sour smell of soiled clothes and unwashed skin, I’d fancied I detected something else – a faint underlying whiff of sex and genitalia and semen that disgusted me. What had my husband got himself into?
My memory flashes further back to an open doorway, my rich and spoilt boyfriend in the room behind, a man with mocking green eyes in front of me, informing me that he is Nicky’s housemate. For the first time in her life my young self is made breathless by an overwhelming urge to do something irrational − she desperately wants to take the stranger’s face in her two hands and kiss the arrogant mouth − and it is only by a supreme act of will that she steps past him to where her boyfriend awaits. It never changes; whenever she is near him, desire engulfs her.
On the day I fetch Daniel at the Seafarer’s Institute, together with the lurch of despair comes the sudden realisation that perhaps he and I have never had the same measures of normal.
‘Hey, mom-person … Are you okay?’
‘I think so,’ I say, as honestly as I can, meeting Simone’s anxious eyes. ‘I’m not sure how to help you. I can’t make Roxy come back any more than you can. We have to go on living in the present so that we don’t give these sick bastards the satisfaction of destroying our lives. We have to be stronger than them. Do you understand?’
She nods slowly.
‘It is not your fault that they took Roxy. Nothing was going to stop that. I don’t know who helped you but whoever it was, I’m grateful. And when you want to talk, I’ll listen. That’s all that I wanted to say.’
‘Why did you take me here?’ she asks again, looking around at the greasy tables with their land-based and seafaring occupants.
‘I don’t know. It was just an idea that came to me. It reminds me of him, how he likes good food and nice clothes but he also likes simple things. I see this place in my dreams, and I see him sitting here.’ I don’t tell her that in this dream I beg and plead for him to come with me, but he turns away from me and goes with a female shade that is formless and ever-changing. ‘I wanted to let you see that there wasn’t anything much you could do to stop him going, I suppose. I think that you think that you chased him away but you didn’t.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ she says, kicking at the wooden table with a child’s fury. ‘I know what he does.’
The thin ice beneath my feet has finally given way. I am sinking down, naked and without defence, into the freezing depths.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He said it in his stupid book. He gets paid for going with women. He’s like a gigolo. That is so disgusting. How can you stay married to him? If it was me I’d divorce him tomorrow.’
‘He’s your father, Simone.’ I say this automatically, because I am shocked at her scornful outburst. He is not her father but I have always gone along with her belief that he is. ‘What book?’ But of course I know what book. ‘It doesn’t matter, not where you’re concerned. He’s done what he can to protect you. He cares about you−’
‘I don’t want him for my father. I don’t want to see him ever again! He is a pig just like them−’ And with that she jumps up and hurtles out of the room, not waiting to pick up the chair that has fallen over.
The waitress comes over and picks up the chair, her eyes enormous and amazed. I give her a tip, pay our bill and go outside. Simone is nowhere to be seen. So I sit in the pale sunlight at one of the outside trestle tables and wait. It’s not long before I see her walking back along one of the quays, picking up pebbles and sending them whizzing across the water. She props herself up against the car and waits for me to walk over and get in before she gets in next to me.
‘The yacht is that way,’ she says pointing. ‘I asked somebody. Let’s go there.’
We sit in the car watching the comings and goings around the yacht. Those people are in their bubble and we are in ours. It is a strangely peaceful place here on the quay, with its hustle and bustle, and no inquisitive eyes or ears.
‘I was mad with him, so I sent that Lady Limbo book to Olmi,’ Simone says. ‘If it wasn’t for me they wouldn’t have arrested him.’
‘He’s okay for now,’ I tell her. ‘They can’t extradite him if they can’t find him. How did you find out that he’d been arrested?’
‘You were acting out of it. The CNN newsfeeds were on your laptop history.’
‘I see.’ I have promised myself not to judge anything she says so I don’t comment on the snooping that’s been going on for months.
‘I told the police it was me, but it wasn’t – It was Daniel,’ she says, biting her lip. ‘He came to help me and he killed Volkov.’
‘You saw him?’ I ask carefully.
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember what happened. Maybe I had one of those blackouts. I’d been bleeding from the day before, he’d hurt me and I couldn’t stop it. When I woke up I was on that raft and you were singing to me.’
You heard. You would never have told me this before.
‘But how did Daniel find you?’ I ask. ‘He would have had to know days before. Do you have any idea?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘He knows people, I suppose. Just like Nada and Albert, they know everything.’ And then, after a moment, ‘I heard the police talking about Volkov’s throat being cut, so I thought I’d better say it was me.’
‘You know that you will have to tell Klaus the truth?’
She nods.
I have managed to get back to shore and am back on solid ice. I have followed the general advice for falling through ice: turn around and face where you came from, because around the hole you fell through is the thick, safe ice that you already made your way over. This time the ice seems a little stronger.