I shrugged. I wanted to run but I was captured there, held for as long as he wanted to keep me in place.
‘Well.’ He turned. ‘I was just going to get myself some coffee.’
When I saw his back, I felt I could move. I went through the double glass doors that led to the front veranda, down the quick flight of three steps that was polished every day and then I was on the lawn with the cropped blades crunching under my bare feet. I could smell the grass as though it was cut yesterday. I flung myself into a cartwheel, relieved, jubilant at my escape. Then I looked upwards, back at the house. A figure stood in the window of my bedroom at the top of the house. I knew without counting which window it was, and who appeared like a ghost imprinted there. She was looking down at me, like a princess trapped in a tall tower. Her face was framed by the square shape of the glass, but when I lifted my hand to wave, she sunk back and moved away from the window, and the face that I might just as well have imagined was suddenly gone.
Fourteen
‘The difference between me and other guys is that I acted on it,’ a man called Vincent tells me. His charcoal eyes are impenetrable, direct. He leans back in his chair and I am incredulous that he can look so smug. For a moment I think I’m mistaken. I must have expected some remorse, for the time he’s already spent locked up.
‘You think that every man has those kinds of thoughts?’ I want to turn around and reference Zakes, but I resist the urge. Zakes is leaning over the camera with his eye on the lens.
‘Every one.’ Vincent puts his elbows on the table, his eyes are glinting, and they look into mine too long. He looks younger than Zakes, but not by much. ‘You never wanted to?’
I look away. I don’t want this. Not now. I want information, good footage, not some game. I check my phone. We have an hour. I look back at the criminal face across the table. ‘Do you mind if we stick to the formula? I ask the questions. You do the talking.’
He leans back. ‘Okay. Sorry. Too close to the bone?’
Zakes stops us suddenly and fiddles with the sound. The microphone is fed up through the bottom of Vincent’s shirt and attached to the collar. Zakes adjusts something on the camera, then moves inches away from Vincent’s face, and replaces the microphone at his chin. I notice his hands are trembling. When he’s satisfied he replaces his headphones and finds his vision behind the camera again and gives me the go-ahead with a thumbs up. He makes no contact with me, all this time.
‘Why are you in here?’ I resume.
‘I had sex with minors. Underage kids. Too many times. I got caught. They locked me up.’
‘How did you get caught?’
‘Some bitch ratted.’
‘Uh—’ I look again at Zakes, but he’s focused on his job. Keeps his eye to the lens, but I’m floundering, in need of support.
‘Can you tell me your story? Were you abused yourself, as a child …?’
His head goes back. ‘You sound like a shrink.’ He’s laughing and the mirth in his eyes emerges at the corner in the form of a tear. ‘I had a mother who loved me. Did she want more from me? I’ll never know. You want to fuck your kid? Is that what this is about?’
I clear my throat. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. ‘Would you leave the questions to me, please?’
‘What d’you want me to say? How bad I am? I started with my sister. She was nine, I was thirteen. Easy. Then my little cousin, only eight.’ He laughs. ‘Not hard.’
‘And how long … how long did it go on for?’
‘With my sister, she left home at sixteen, so plus minus a year before that. My cousin, we went on for five, maybe six years. She got into drugs, started messing with other guys. I didn’t want to touch her then. She’s a waste. Druggie. Meth and stuff. Last I heard she’s got a pimp, she’s on the streets again.’
‘How come they didn’t tell anyone? Did you bribe them? How did you get them to keep quiet? Did they keep quiet?’
He looks away for the first time. I see a moment of uncertainty, but it’s fleeting, and then it is gone. ‘There’s all sorts of ways. Threats. Sweets. Rewards. But you don’t really need all that. They don’t talk anyway. It becomes this thing, between you and her. She’s part of it, with you. So if she talks, it’s like she’s ratting on herself too. You make it like that. You make it so you’re in control.’
I nod, and look down at the paper in my hand. I take a moment, and we all are quiet. ‘Did anyone talk?’
‘My sister. She testified against me in my trial. That’s why I’m here. She left long ago. She wasn’t even part of our family any more. That’s how she did it so easily. Fucking bitch.’
‘Where is your sister now?’
He looks down at the floor. I can’t tell if it is malice or regret in his tone. ‘I don’t know,’ he mutters softly.
Once Vincent has left the room, we pack up in silence. The room is bare, just raw face brick and that wooden table. Zakes stands at the door and looks back. ‘Wouldn’t like to spend my life in here,’ he says.
I drop him outside his flat in town and he hesitates before he closes the passenger door of the car. ‘Come up and have some tea with me? Unless you’ve got something better to do.’
I check my watch. It’s only just gone six, and I know that Auster’s expecting me home late anyway. ‘Okay. Okay.’ I say it twice, the second time more a confirmation than the first. ‘Just one cup.’
In the lift we’re both quiet, just watching the numbers. Then he looks at me and laughs. ‘I’m only in here because you’re a guest,’ he says. ‘Normally I take the stairs.’ The lift continues to climb.
‘Really? What floor are you on?’
‘The very top.’
‘That’s why you’re so fit.’
‘Partly. I’m also a bit chickenshit.’ He shrugs, sheepish. ‘I just don’t trust lifts.’
The doors open and we step out. Outside the third door on the corridor, he fumbles with his keys. The usual easiness between us has slipped away and in its place is a warm discomfort. It’s the change in venue, I tell myself. I’m so used to being on set or on site or in transit with Zakes, I have no idea who he is in his private space.
Inside the apartment is clean, with a few sparse items of re-upholstered Art Deco furniture pieces and a shelf at eye level that runs the entire circumference of the room, packed tight with CDs and DVDs. I move straight to the window. Below me the city is a field of fairy lights.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I breathe.
‘Not bad, considering where I come from. My parents never dreamed of living in the city.’ He’s beside me now, his sleeve brushes my arm.
‘Did you make your life happen this way? Or was it all just accidental?’ I ask.
‘I have no idea,’ he laughs as he turns. ‘Don’t start with your complicated questions. How many sugars?’
I sit on the couch and he brings me a mug of tea then sits down right next to me. I breathe in.
‘This is weird, Zakes, being in your home. It feels like a date or something.’ As soon as it’s out I regret it.
He laughs. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘I don’t mean it like that—’ I feel embarrassed, but he sips his tea as though he’s thinking about something else.
‘I’ve just been a bit concerned about you,’ he says. ‘This filming, hearing and seeing all these hectic things. I’m wondering if you have any place to off-load.’
‘That’s really sweet of you, but—’ He smells good, still soapy despite the workday. Bizarrely, I’m thinking of kissing him and I find myself looking into his eyes too long. I’ve never thought of Zakes like that. Now suddenly I know that there are no real boundaries beyond the ones we construct for ourselves. Our relationship has been professional, until now. Now I know that it’s possible to move in or out of any emotional obligation, simply with the flash of a thought.
I don’t know what’s come over me, so I excuse myself and go to the bathroom.
There’s a book lying open,
spine bent and pages down, on the cistern. It’s Camus’ The Outsider, and he’s already about halfway through it. I wash my hands at the basin and splash my face, but regret it when I look in the mirror and see the mascara on my upper cheeks. The towels are white, so I avoid them and take a few sheets of toilet paper instead, and carefully wipe the black from beneath my eyes.
‘You okay? Have you been crying?’ he asks when I enter the lounge.
‘I just smudged my mascara. I’m fine.’
He’s standing over at the sound system against the far wall, an open CD cover in his hands. ‘John Coltrane okay?’
‘That sounds great.’
The jazz begins, much like a simple conversation, and Zakes sits, quiet. Then he says, ‘This music, Coltrane is pain and power, both.’
‘I don’t know much about it. About him.’
‘Man is spirit, that’s what Coltrane essentially believed. You can’t reduce him to anything. The African Continuum, it’s this idea that the cosmos is a completely integrated spiritual complexity. His music becomes a life-force, it’s like a road to freedom.’
‘Do you believe that? That we’re spirit, that we can’t be reduced to anything?’
‘Sometimes. I’d like to. In times of doubt I put that on as a cloak around myself. Self-protective thoughts, really, I suppose.’
I pick up my tea. It’s cooled, and I drink it more quickly now. ‘It’s pretty,’ I say. And then: ‘You can never tell who someone really is, just from their art.’
‘It’s simpler than that,’ he says. He puts down his own empty cup, looks me square on. ‘You can never really tell who someone is.’
‘I see you’re reading Camus.’ I hold my own discomfort in this moment that has gone beyond the daylight and the clarity of our professional relationship.
He laughs at my observant nature. I can’t switch it off, even when I’m using the bathroom. ‘The absurdity of morality.’ A single finger taps his knee.
‘Is that how you read it?’
He shrugs. ‘It’s what an individual chooses, between any two opposing values in any situation.’
‘We’re always choosing, in every moment.’ I think of choices I’ve made and others made for me.
‘What is your mission, Cat?’ he asks suddenly. ‘What are you so afraid of, or obsessed with, that you just can’t stop?’
The light-spattered picture beyond the curtainless window makes me think of a Van Gogh painting. I scratch the back of my head, and seat myself beside him again on the couch. This time I make sure that our arms don’t touch. ‘Can I tell you something very personal, Zakes?’
‘I feel like I’ve known you a thousand years,’ he says. ‘Your secrets are safe with me.’
‘It’s the whole reason for trying to get these stories … and for this movie.’
‘It’s what I want to know,’ he replies.
I feel my lungs lift and contract in a small sigh. Sometimes those outside our lives make the best priests, if we are looking for an avenue towards redemption, or just the chance to confess. ‘I think I killed my sister,’ I say.
At home the lights are already on. Auster is in the kitchen, an apron tied around his waist. He’s still in his blue work shirt and suit trousers and he’s got the beginnings of a stew bubbling away on the stove. Hayley’s sitting at the kitchen table, sweating over some maths homework. In parts the pages have been rubbed right through as she rethinks her errors again and again with the help of an eraser.
‘You’re late tonight,’ Auster says. He takes a bag of rice and pours a cupful into a sieve, then rinses it beneath a stream of running water from the tap.
‘Hi, Mom,’ Hayley says, and pulls herself forward on her elbows over her book again.
‘Sorry. I had to drop Zakes at home, we got out of there so late. Thanks for picking up the slack for me.’ I go to Auster and put a kiss on his cheek, but I can’t tell if he’s pissed off with me or just distracted by the task of coordinating a meal.
‘How did it go?’
Suddenly I love the sound of the rice falling from the sieve into the pot. Suddenly such simplicity is the only thing that makes sense to me.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Hayley asks.
‘Filming.’ I sit at the table and Auster places a glass of red wine in front of me. I take a sip and put it down again, unsure if I really want any more.
‘Filming what?’
‘I’m making a movie. Trying to put a story together.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Men.’
‘Men? Like Dad?’
Auster picks up a ladle and stirs the stew, peering into the pot.
‘No. Other men. Men who are nothing like Dad.’
‘It can’t only be about men.’
‘Hayley,’ I say, leaning forward, holding her forearm in my hand. ‘Can we talk about something else? How was school?’
She tells me, but I’m aware that I’m not really listening. All the while she talks and all through dinner and the whole time afterwards when the three of us are clearing the dishes and wiping up the extraordinary mess that Auster always seems to make, I am distracted, and thinking of something else.
After I’ve kissed my daughter good night and made much of the ritual of switching on the passage lights and leaving her bedroom door ajar, and after she’s called me back to kiss her again three times in a way that she hardly ever does any more, and after we’ve laughed and after she falls asleep and after I’ve showered and soaped myself and stood in the streaming water too long, I put on my pyjamas and climb into the big double bed beside the man who loves me most. He’s wearing his reading glasses halfway down his nose, so that when I’m close to him he looks over them and can still see me in focus.
‘Long day, huh,’ he says gently.
The book I’m reading is contemporary crime fiction, a popular genre, but tonight I leave it untouched on the bedside table. Instead I switch off my bedside light and worm my way down under the covers, pushing my body against Auster’s for warmth.
‘Too long,’ I say.
‘How was the shoot today?’
‘Paedophiles in prison,’ I say. ‘I don’t know which was worse, that or the kids’ shelter. Talking to both sides, it’s—’ I shake my head. I’m too tired to find the words to describe my time with Vincent.
He’s still looking at me down his nose as though he’s about to launch into a lecture. ‘And where’s this going to lead you?’ he asks instead.
I know what he’s getting at, but I ignore it. ‘Auster,’ I say instead, ‘this one guy I interviewed today. He said something about … something along the lines that the only difference between him and other men is that he acts on his impulses to have sex with minors. Have … I mean … do you?’
Auster whips the glasses off his face with one hand. ‘What, have impulses to have sex with minors? Not recently that I can remember.’ There’s sarcasm in his voice. I can tell that he’s pretty close to having had enough. But I don’t know when to quit. I never do.
‘No, I mean have you … do you think about it? Have you thought about it? Is it something that crosses your mind? Is it really in all men’s minds?’
He flicks the switch of his beside light, sinking the room into darkness. Slowly my eyes adjust, and soon I can make out the shape of the curtained window, the outline of my husband’s head. I put my arm across his body as he turns his back to me.
I wait, but still there is no answer for me and I don’t ask him again. I have no idea if he doesn’t answer because he’s so insulted or because he’s already fallen asleep.
Fifteen
I do not remember that my mother’s eyes ever lit up when either one of us entered the room. She cared for us in the way that she knew how, but now I believe that there were times she must have hated my father and her children for taking away the life she might have had, for not being what she’d once imagined a family to be.
Most nights we sat in the lounge with my mother and Samuel
. When Marshall returned from work he invaded the room, filling the space with his height and bulk and his wide mouth. He’d pour himself a whiskey from the cabinet on the side of the room and sit down in the easy chair beside the window.
There was a night a fire blazed in the grate, eliminating the need for electric light. The room was too warm. My mother opened a window to let in some air and the curtain moved softly, some invisible hand lifting the veil for the breeze to enter. Marshall settled back in his chair, rolled his shoulders and took a long swallow of his drink. I moved to my father and found his lap. The light from the fire warmed his face and it glowed soft colours in reflection. I sat down and his hands found my shoulders and he pulled me against his chest. I lifted my hand to his cheek where it met with the rough stubble of his skin.
‘You have two beautiful girls,’ Marshall said. ‘You’re a lucky man, Sam.’
‘I have three,’ my father said, looking towards my mother. She did not smile.
She took a sip of her drink and looked at the clock on the wall. ‘I need to finish supper,’ she said.
‘You need help?’ Marshall asked.
‘Samuel is doing his roast chicken. I must just get the potatoes done and set the table.’
‘I can do that,’ Devin said.
My father moved me aside, back down onto the floor. ‘You girls sit,’ he said as he got up from the chair. ‘We’ll get the grub and I’ll call you through when it’s done.’
They left us alone. From the kitchen I could hear the vague and filtered tones of them talking, my mother relenting, inviting him back into her space with her voice. I sunk into the chair that Samuel had left behind. It was warm and it smelled of old leather.
Marshall swallowed his drink and I saw the lump in his throat move up and down. He placed the glass on the table beside his chair and the smile stayed around his mouth, but he looked at my sister. ‘Come here,’ he said to her. ‘The spider monkey always seems to have a lap to sit on. You’re left out in the cold.’