Thirteen Hours

Chapter 11

Griessel drove down Loop Street towards the harbour. He should have taken Bree Street as there was heavy traffic, slow vehicles, and pedestrians just wandering across the road, all the local chancers. And the Gauteng tourists. They were unmistakable. This was the second wave: the first were the December school holiday brigade, smug motherfuckers who thought they were God's gift to Cape Town. They were usually families with moody, cell-phone-obsessed teenagers, Moms fiercely shopping, Dads unfamiliar with the streets, getting in everyone's way. The second wave would arrive in January, the arrogant fat cats who had stayed behind to make their Christmas killing in Sandton and then come here for their annual spending frenzy.

He saw small groups of foreign tourists, Europeans, so painfully law-abiding, only crossing the road at the traffic lights, noses stuck in guidebooks, wanting to photograph everything. He stopped with the lights showing red as far ahead as he could see. Why couldn't the fucking Metro Police get off their backsides and synchronise them?

That reminded him he ought to call the Field Marshal. Oerson. Perhaps they had found something. No, better to remind Vusi. This was Vusi's case. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, realised it was the rhythm of 'Soetwater' and could no longer ignore his conscience. Alexa Barnard. He should have seen it coming.

She had told him she had a suicide fantasy. 'I wanted Adam to come home at half past six and climb the stairs and find me dead. Then he would kneel down beside me and say, "You're the only one I ever loved." But being dead, of course, I would never see Adam plead with me; those dreams could never be reconciled.'

He shook his head. How the hell could he have missed that? That's what happened when you got up too early, an hour earlier than usual. He still wasn't quite with it today. And he had given her alcohol as well. Benny the great mentor who 'had forgotten more than others had to learn.'

He sought some excuse in the way she had said it, the story she went on to tell. It had distracted him, created a false impression of a woman who was somehow still under control. She had manipulated him. When he whispered 'Soetwater', and she held her glass out for more, a fee for her story.

He had fixated on her thirst; that was the real problem. He had poured her two tots and she had pushed the hair back from her face and said, 'I was such a terribly insecure little thing.' And then her history had led his thoughts away from suicide; it had fascinated him. He had heard only her words, the heavy irony, the self-mockery, as though the story was some kind of parody, as if it didn't really belong to her.

She was an only child. Her father worked for a bank and her mother was a housewife. Every four or five years the family relocated as her father was transferred or promoted - Parys, Potchefstoom, Port Elizabeth, and eventually Bellville, which had finally broken the P-sequence. She left half-formed friendships behind with every move, had to start over as an outsider at every school, knowing that it would only be temporary. More and more she began to live in her own world, mostly behind the closed door of her bedroom. She kept a painfully personal diary, she read and fantasised - and in her final years at high school she dreamed of becoming a singer, of packed halls and standing ovations, of magazine covers and intimate sundowners with other celebrities, and being courted by princes.

The source of this dream, and the only constant throughout her youth was her paternal grandmother. She spent every Christmas holiday with her in the summer heat of Kirkwood and the Sunday's River Valley. Ouma Hettie was a music teacher all her life, an energetic, disciplined woman with a beautiful garden, a spotless house and a baby grand in the sitting room. It was a house of scent and sound: marmalade and apricot jam simmering on the stove, rusks or leg of mutton in the oven, her grandma's voice singing or talking, and at night the sweet notes of the piano issuing from the open windows of the small blue house, across the wide verandas, the dense garden and the neighbouring orange orchards, to the rugged ridges of Addo and the changing hue of the horizon.

At first Alexa would sit beside her grandmother and just listen. Later she learned the words and melodies by heart and often sang along.

Duma Hettie loved Schubert and the Beethoven sonatas, but her true joy was the brothers Gershwin. Between songs she would nostalgically relate the stories of Ira and George. 'Rialto Ripples' and 'Swanee' were magically coaxed from the keys, 'Lady Be Good' and 'Oh, Kay!' were sung. She told Alexa how that song was inspired by George Gershwin's great love, the composer Kay Swift, but that hadn't prevented him from also having an affair with the beautiful actress Paulette Goddard.

On a sweltering evening in her fifteenth year, Ouma Hettie suddenly stopped playing and told Alexa, 'Stand there.' Meekly, she took her place beside the piano.

'Now sing!'

She did, in full voice for the first time. 'Of Thee I Sing', and the old lady closed her eyes, only a little smile betraying her rapture. As the last note faded in the sultry evening air, Hettie Brink looked at her granddaughter and, after a long silence, she said, 'My dear, you have perfect pitch, and you have an extraordinary voice. You are going to be a star.' She fetched Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin Songbook from her stack of LPs.

That was how the dream began. And Ouma Hettie's offical tuition.

Her parents were not impressed. A career in singing was not what they had had in mind for their only child. They wanted her to train as a teacher, get a qualification, something practical 'to fall back on'. 'What kind of man wants to marry a singer?' Her mother's words echoed ironically.

In her Matric year there was conflict, long and bitter arguments in the sitting room of the bank manager's house in Bellville. With the verbal ammunition provided by her grandma, Alexa fell back to her last line of defence: 'It's my life. Mine' A week before her finals she went for an audition with the Dave Burmeister Band.

Stage fright nearly got the better of her that day. It was nothing new. She had already experienced it at eisteddfods and the occasional performance at a wedding or with obscure bands in small clubs. It became a sort of ritual, a demon that began systematically to attack her four days before an appearance, so that, with a wildly beating heart, perspiring palms and an overwhelming conviction that she was about to make a total fool of herself, she could only complete the trip from dressing room to microphone with a supreme effort of will.

But as soon as she began to sing, with the first note uttered from her constricted throat, the demon melted away as though it had never existed.

At her first performance with Burmeister in a Johannesburg club, her grandma had been there to hold her hand and give her courage. 'This is what you were born for, my dear. Go out there and knock them dead.'

And she had. The reviews in The Star were still beside Ouma Hettie's bed when she passed away quietly in her sleep two months later. 'Alexandra Brink, in shimmering black, is so easy on the eye - young, blonde and beautiful. But once she starts to sing, her smoky, sensual voice, complete mastery of classical material, and innovative interpretations indicate a rare maturity and an acute musical intelligence. Her range encompasses Gershwin, Nat King Cole, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Bobby Darin, with Dave Burmeister's arrangements fitting her style and personality perfectly.'

Oliver Sands of Phoenix, Arizona, told Inspector Vusi Ndabeni he had fallen in love with Rachel Anderson on Day Eight of the African Overland Adventure. In Zanzibar. Over a plate of seafood that he had been eating with great concentration.

'You are obviously enjoying that,' said Rachel.

He looked up. She stood on the opposite side of the restaurant table with the emerald-green sea as a backdrop, long, dark-brown hair in a plait over her shoulder, a baseball cap on her head and lovely long legs in shorts. Ollie was a bit self-conscious, embarrassed by the way he had been devouring his meal. But when she smiled and pulled out the chair opposite him with a 'May I join you? I'll have to try some too,' he could scarcely believe his luck.

He told Vusi they had had to introduce themselves to each other on the first night of the tour - in a ring of camp stools beneath the African stars. He hadn't even tried to remember Erin and Rachel's names. Pretty, athletic, educated girls like that never noticed him. When she sat at his table in Zanzibar and ate her own plate of seafood with gusto, he struggled to remember her name, with a sense of panic. Because she had talked to him. She asked him where he was from and what his future plans were. She listened to his answers with interest, told him of her dream to become a medical doctor, and that one day she would like to make a difference, here, in Africa.

And so he lost his heart to a nameless woman.

Alexa Brink's stage fright grew worse. The loss of her grandma was a blow, as though a foundation had collapsed, so she learned to smoke to control the fear.

Despite the glowing reviews and the enthusiastic response of the small but loyal audiences in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, the demon of self-doubt clung to her shoulders every night. With a mean voice it whispered that one day she would be unmasked, someone in the audience would see her for what she really was and cry out that she was an impostor, an outsider and a fake. Alone in the dressing room she could not cope. One night she burst in on Dave Burmeister in tears and confessed her fear. That was the beginning of a vicious circle. With fatherly patience, Burmeister explained that all the great names struggled with stage fright. At first his gentle, quiet voice calmed her and got her behind the microphone. But every night it took a little longer, a little more convincing and more praise before she could make the terrifying walk across the stage.

One day, at his wits' end, Burmeister placed a glass of brandy and Coke in front of her and said: 'For God's sake, just drink it.'

Oliver Sands controlled his attraction to Rachel Anderson with an iron hand. Instinctively he knew he must not reveal his burning desire, he must keep his distance. He didn't look for a seat close to her on the truck, he didn't pitch his tent in her vicinity in the evening. He waited for those magical moments when - usually with Erin - she talked to him spontaneously, or asked him to film them with her video camera at some tourist spot. She sometimes saw him with a book in his hand and asked him what he was reading. They began a conversation about literature. In the evening she would come and sit beside him at the campfire and with her dazzling zest for life would say: 'So, Ollie, did we have a good day today or what?'

Day and night he was completely aware of her, he knew where she was every moment, what she was doing, whom she spoke to. He saw that she was friendly with everyone in the group, he kept count of the time she spent with others and realised he was especially privileged - he received more of her attention and conversation than anyone else. The two lean and self-assured chief guides were very popular with the other girls, but she treated them just the same as the men in the tour group, friendly and courteous, while choosing to take her meals with Ollie, talk to him and share many more personal secrets.

It was like that until Lake Kariba. On their second day there, when they boarded the houseboats, she was different, sombre and quiet, the joy and spontaneity gone.

Alexa Barnard learned to have three drinks before a performance. The dose required to keep the demon sufficiently quiet. It was her limit. Four made her slur, the lyrics swimming in her memory, Burmeister's proud paternal smile wiped from his face by a worried frown. But two was not enough.

She understood the risks. That was why she never had a drink during the day or after the show. Just those three glasses - the first one tossed back an hour and a half before the curtain, the other two taken more slowly. The cellist suggested gin since it didn't leave the odour on the breath that brandy did. She tried gin and tonic, but didn't like it. Dry lemon was her ultimate choice of mixer.

In this way, she kept the demon under control for four years, hundreds of appearances and two CD recordings with Burmeister and his band.

Then she met Adam Barnard.

She noticed him one evening in the little Cape theatre - the tall, virile, attractive man with a thick head of black hair who had listened to her spellbound. The following evening he was back again. After the show he came knocking on her dressing-room door with a bunch of flowers in his hand. He was fluent and charming, and his compliments were measured, and therefore seemed more genuine. He invited her out: a business lunch, he made it clear.

She was ready for what he suggested, aware of the limits of her chosen genre. She was known and popular in a small circle, she had a few glowing interviews in the entertainment sections of a few dailies and modest CD sales. She was aware of the limited scope of her career, audience and income. She had reached the highest rung of a short ladder and her prospects were predictable and uninspiring.

Three days later she signed a contract with Adam Barnard. It bound her to his record company and to him, as manager.

He made good on his professional promises. He sought out Afrikaans compositions from Anton Goosen, Koos du Plessis, and Clarabelle van Niekerk, songs to suit her voice and what would become her new style. He hired the best musicians, developed a specific and unique sound for her and introduced her to the media. He courted her with the same quiet professionalism, and married her. He even weaned her off the three pre-appearance gins with his total support, belief in her talent and his silver, silver tongue. For two years her life and career were everything she had dreamed of. One day an open-air photo shoot for Sarie magazine was cancelled due to bad weather and she came home unexpectedly. There, in the same sitting room where she and Griessel had sat, she found Adam with his trousers around his ankles and Paula Phillips on her knees in front of him, performing skilful fellatio with her long fingers and her red-painted mouth. Yes, that Paula Phillips, the dark-haired singer with long legs and big boobs, who was still dishing up pointless commercial junk to middle-class ears. That was the day Alexa Barnard began to drink in earnest.

Even though Rachel Anderson had changed in her behaviour towards everyone, Oliver Sands knew it must have been something he had said or done. He replayed every interaction, every word he had said to her, but he could not pinpoint the source of her aversion. Had he said something to someone else, or done something to someone else that had upset her so much? He lay awake at nights, on the trips to Victoria Falls, the Chobe Game Reserve, the Okavango, Etosha, and finally, to the Cape, he would stare out of the window in the faint hope of gaining some insight, some idea of how he could make things right.

The previous night in Van Hunks in Cape Town he had cracked under the strain. What he ought to have said was: 'I can see something is bothering you, Rachel. Do you want to talk about it?' But he had already downed too many beers for Dutch courage. He sat down beside her and like a complete idiot said: 'I don't know why you suddenly hate me, but I love you, Rachel.' He had gazed at her with big hungry puppy eyes in the crazy hope that she would say, 'I love you too, Ollie. I've loved you since that magical day in Zanzibar.'

But she hadn't.

He thought she hadn't heard him over the loud music, because she just sat there staring into the middle distance. Then she stood up, turned to him and kissed him on the forehead.

'Dear Ollie,' she said and walked away between the crush of people.

'That's why I came back here,' Sands said to Vusi.

'I'm not following you.'

'Because I knew the dorm would be empty. Because I didn't want anybody to see me cry.' He did not remove his glasses. The tears trickled under the edge of the frame and down his round, red cheeks.