Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

On the other hand, I didn’t date on a permanent basis again while at school, just some heavy petting here and there. Because Aunt Baby Marnewick would cross the path of my sexual – and later professional – education.

She and her husband lived in the house behind ours. He was a big, strong miner, like 90 percent of Stilfontein’s male inhabitants a shift worker, a rough diamond who dedicated his Saturdays and Sundays to the installation of a three-liter V6 engine into a Ford Anglia. He had to move the whole instrument panel and gearbox back and lengthen the driveshaft and the transmission, which made the basic reason for this task – to give other Anglia drivers a very unpleasant surprise at stoplights – useless. Simply by looking through the window, any idiot would immediately have noticed that Boet Marnewick’s car wasn’t standard.

Suburban legend had it that he had to win Baby with his fists, way back in Bez Valley, that stewing pot of a suburb in Johannesburg, when he wanted to take her away from a sturdy Scotsman. She stood on the front veranda of the house and watched the two men snorting and bleeding like two bulls proving their genetic superiority to win her hand.

Because Baby Marnewick was a good-looking woman. Tall and slender with thick, red hair, a full, broad mouth – and formidable breasts. It was her eyes, small and sly, that gave her a touch of sluttishness that, I suspected, men couldn’t resist – possibly because it created the impression that she was easy, and was also a clue to her real nature.

For years I was barely aware of the neighbors behind us. (Why are neighbors “behind” us so much more mysterious, lesser neighbors?) The high wooden fence between the two houses probably contributed to it. But for a sexually awakening teenage boy, the sight of Baby Marnewick in her Saturday outfit at the shopping center was unforgettable. And my awareness of her grew, my interest pricked by vague rumors and the blatancy with which she flaunted her sexuality.

In the early spring of my last year at school, on a perfect warm afternoon, bored, Marna-less, and curious, I peered through a thin crack in the steadily decaying fence, not for the first time, but still a coincidence, an opportunistic moment of wishful thought.

And there in the backyard of the Marnewicks’, Aunt Baby lay on an inflatable mattress, naked and glistening with suntan oil, dark glasses covering her sly eyes, and a playful hand and calm fingers with painted nails fondling the paradise between her legs.

Oh, the sweet shock.

I stood there, too frightened to move, too frightened to breathe, light-headed, mindless, utterly randy, discoverer of the pleasures of voyeurism, the chosen of the gods, placed there at just the right moment.

I don’t know how long it took Aunt Baby Marnewick to achieve orgasm. Twenty minutes? More? For me the time flashed by – I couldn’t get enough – until she eventually, with a low, deep groan through her open mouth and heavenly little movements of stomach and legs, gratified herself.

Then she got up slowly and disappeared into the house.

I stood staring at the mattress for a long time, hoping she would return. Later I realized it was not to be my destiny and went to my room to give expression to my own overriding desire. Again and again and again.

And the next afternoon I was at my spy hole in the fence again, ready to resume the wonderful one-sided relationship with Baby Marnewick.

She didn’t masturbate in her backyard every afternoon. She didn’t lie in the sun, slick and nude, every day. To my great disappointment there was no routine of time or day. It was a game of dice and of yearning, visual theft. I sometimes wondered whether she did it in the morning when I was in school: I even considered being “ill” for a few days to test the theory. But occasionally, one day a week, sometimes once in two weeks, my avidity was rewarded with some enchanting scene.

I fantasized about her. Obviously. I would walk round (climbing over the fence was too undignified), stand next to her, and say: You need never use your hand again, Baby . Then I would undress and she would welcome me into her with a Yes, yes, yes, yes , and after I had taken her to unknown sensual heights on the inflatable, we would lie next to each other and discuss how we would run away and be happy for ever and ever.

Fantasy number one.

With variations on the theme.

How different and more interesting than the fantasies would be the reality, the small, life-changing reality.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

13

Rush-hour traffic from Mitchell’s Plain. He took the N7, in a hurry to get home, still had to phone Wilna van As.

He was amazed at the world in which he lived. He and Kemp and he and Orlando and who owed whom, the mechanisms of social and professional interaction, the eleventh commandment: be the one who is owed. Kemp: You’re trash, Van Heerden . O’Grady: Jesus, Van Heerden, that’s not a fucking living. Why don’t you come back? Orlando: A bottom-feeder going down…It’s lower than shark shit, Van Heerden. Why don’t you go back to the Force? General consensus about his life, but they didn’t know, they didn’t understand, they had no insight. They had no understanding of his sentence: he had to serve it, a life sentence, and then, in a moment of investigative euphoria, he had wondered whether he would be released, would receive amnesty. How absurd, fuck, like a man in a cell, dreaming he was outside, only to wake in the morning.

He pulled off at a petrol station for fuel, saw the telephone booth, phoned Wilna van As.

“The bank says they never held mortgages on the properties. I found the deeds of conveyance and the letters of the attorneys, but I don’t understand all of it.”

“Who were the conveyancers?”

“Please hold on.”

He waited, saw in his mind’s eye the woman walking to the melamine cupboard in her office for the documents.

“Merwe de Villiers and Partners.”

He didn’t know the firm. “Could you fax the documents to Hope?”

“Yes,” said Wilna van As.

“Thank you.”

“The identity book. Did you discover anything?”

“I’m not sure.” Because it was Hope Beneke’s job to bring the bad news. He was merely the hired help.

“Oh.” Thoughtful, worried.

“Good-bye,” he said, because he didn’t want to hear it.

He paged through his notebook, found Hope Beneke’s number, put in another coin, and dialed.

“She’s in consultation,” said the receptionist.

Like a fucking doctor , he thought.

“Please give her a message. Wilna van As is going to fax her the deeds of conveyance for Jan Smit’s two houses. I want to know if there were mortgages on the houses. She can phone me at home.”

When he got out of the car and looked up, he saw the sun going down behind the next cold front coming in from the sea, the mass of clouds heavy and black and overwhelming.

♦

He sautéed the garlic and parsley lightly and slowly in the big frying pan, the aroma escaping and rising with the steam, filling the room, and he inhaled it with pleasure and a vague, passing surprise that he could still do it. Verdi on the small speakers. La Traviata . Music to cook by.

Jan Smit wasn’t Jan Smit.

Well, well, well.

Sometime during or before the year of our Lord 1983 the man formerly known as X acquired American dollars. Illegally. So illegally that he needed a new identity. For a new life. As Johannes Jacobus Smit. A life of classic furniture, life within the law, a private, hidden existence.

Conjecture.

He opened the tin of tuna, poured the brine carefully down the drain of the sink.