Blood Rose

fifteen

Tamar Damases had arranged a vehicle for Clare’s interview with Shipanga. Clare signed for it, picked up the keys, and within five minutes was guiding the 4x4 along the wide avenue that led to Kuisebmond, the township where the caretaker lived. The quiet streets of the town gave way to a warren of lanes, and she slowed to avoid the darting children and mangy, slinking dogs. The cracked pavements were crowded with stalls selling single cigarettes and plastic bags holding an onion and two potatoes. Women squatted by low fires, tending fragrant vetkoek and frying pig trotters. Men with glazed eyes and the concentrated precision of the permanently drunk watched Clare drive past the dark shebeens, before turning back to the pool tables.

The address Tamar had given Clare didn’t mean much in the thicket of houses. She hazarded a guess and turned down a newly laid road that took her away from the larger houses and into a maze of narrow paths. Tin shacks and tarpaulins had been replaced with brick boxes. Green, red, pink, yellow, brown: brightly coloured, poorly built. The Smartie houses. A flock of chubby-legged urchins ran alongside the car. Clare parked. An entourage of children clustered around their minder, a girl of nine or ten, staring at Clare getting out of the enormous car.

‘Where does Herman Shipanga live?’ Clare asked the girl.

The fat baby on the girl’s hip gave a terrified wail and buried its face into her neck.

‘Come,’ the girl beamed. Clare followed her through backyards where washing snapped and forlorn patches of mielies somehow grew.

‘There.’ The girl pointed at a yellow house. The little boys backed up against her skinny legs. A few plugged their thumbs into their mouths and watched, solemn-eyed, as Clare knocked on the door. She could hear the radio blaring inside. It sounded like a church service, but the language was unfamiliar.

The door cracked open a few inches. A man, wiry and shorter than Clare, looked out from the gloom. His hair was sprinkled with grey; cheekbones high and wide; dark eyes, kind.

‘Herman Shipanga?’

The man nodded, wary. The air that escaped was stale, laden with the smell of too many bodies in too small a place.

Clare held out her temporary police ID. Shipanga opened the door wider and took it. ‘I’m Clare Hart. I’m investigating the death of Kaiser Apollis.’ The man’s eyes flickered with fear, anger, sadness; Clare couldn’t say which. ‘I wanted to ask you about him. About how you found him.’

Shipanga did not respond. Clare repeated the question in Afrikaans. Her train of urchins scuffled closer.

‘One minute.’ Shipanga answered in English. He closed the door, and the radio stopped. Then he opened the door again and set down two Coke crates in front of the house. ‘Sit, asseblief.’

Clare obeyed.

‘Voetsek!’ Shipanga raised his hand at the children and they scattered like gulls to settle at a safer distance.

‘English?’ Clare asked.

Shipanga looked down and spread out his hands.

She switched back to Afrikaans: ‘You found the boy?’

Shipanga nodded. He ran his hands over his eyes, as if trying to erase the image.

‘I read your statement,’ said Clare. ‘But I wanted to hear from you what you saw on Monday, from beginning to end.’

Shipanga did not take his eyes off her face. The beginning? His fingers sought the ridged scars on his cheekbones. Precise incisions that had been filled with ash so that he would be forever marked as someone who belonged. But that had been forty years ago. The close-knit structures of family and clan up north had fractured and then broken apart. The force of that implosion had landed him here on this tract of bleak sand. It had kept him in the heaving bowels of a factory ship until it had crushed him beneath falling crates of filleted fish. Then it had spat him out again to find woman’s work, sweeping and cleaning toilets, dragging his injured leg behind him until he had come face to face with the dead child in the swing. The end? Hard to say. Shipanga looked down at his shoes.

‘We used to find them like that,’ he said at last. ‘Outside the villages.’

Clare waited, watching as Shipanga gathered memories, sought words in a language that did not belong to either of them.

Shipanga looked at Clare, frustration clear in his eyes. The words were inadequate for what he wanted to tell her, the shock of a buried past colliding with the present. ‘I found him,’ he said. ‘The bullets to the head. Like the executions when the army was here, in the north…’ His voice trailed off.

The absence of war, thought Clare, did not result in the presence of peace. The elemental force of it, the trauma, shaped a man in unnatural ways, much as the wind along this Skeleton Coast bent the alien trees.

‘You found him,’ prompted Clare. ‘Tell me how you found him.’

Shipanga straightened the seam in his trousers. Someone had ironed them with care. ‘I ate early. I left after the first siren. Before six. I went straight to the school. Got my rake to clean.’

‘Which way did you go in?’

‘I went in the back. I take a short cut down the path between the houses.’

‘Don’t the dogs go crazy?’ asked Clare.

‘I always go there,’ said Shipanga. ‘They’re used to me.’

‘Did you see anybody?’

Shipanga shook his head. ‘My wife was here, my kids. At the school, on the way there, the fog was too thick. I saw nobody. Nobody saw me.’ He paused, thought about the implications.

‘No one was at school before you?’

‘Just Mrs Ruyters. Her car was there. I didn’t see her.’

‘Did you expect her to be there?’ Clare asked.

‘She’s always first.’

‘You always start with the kindergarten playground?’

‘Always. Some of the children come early. Mrs Ruyters likes it to be ready for them.’ Shipanga picked at his fraying cuff. ‘When I saw him there,’ he continued, ‘I thought it was one of the older children teasing. Then the wind turned him and I saw the flies on his face.’

‘Did you touch him?’

‘I told Sergeant van Wyk,’ said Shipanga, ‘I ran for help. The headmaster was there and he called the police. I didn’t see the boy again. My job was to stop anyone coming into the school.’

‘Who came?’

‘There were only a few,’ said Shipanga. ‘Mr Meyer, of course. He’s always early. The little boy, Oscar. He sometimes helps me or he goes to Mrs Ruyters.’

‘The other early people?’

‘They all went away when they saw the police vans and the ambulance. Only Calvin Goagab caused trouble.’ Shipanga’s mouth twisted, as if the name was bitter on his tongue. ‘He wanted to drop his sons at school.’

‘Is he often early?’ Clare asked.

‘He does what he wants. He’s a powerful man. He works for the mayor now. He has a smart house. He forgets that he came from here.’ Shipanga gestured to the grimy dilapidation around him. The silent, staring children shrank out of sight again.

‘Does anyone else use that back entrance?’ Clare changed tack. Tamar had told her about Goagab. She needed more.

Shipanga shrugged. ‘Sometimes the children. The ones who come from the other side of town. Mara Thomson sometimes. She comes by bike.’

Clare was about to get up, but Shipanga put his hand on her arm, restraining her.

‘It was a warning, the boy. Like a warning from the spirits. This is a bad place. I told you we used to see them left dead to warn us, telling us to keep our heads down, not see things, to leave. That boy was a warning. Like the old ones we had during the war.’

‘Who was the warning for?’ Clare asked.

Shipanga shook his head. ‘There are many ghosts in this desert. The desert sees everything. All our secrets.’ He paused, waiting for a distant siren wail to cease. ‘It keeps secrets only as long as it feels like it. Then the sand moves and there are all the skeletons. It is a message.’

‘And what was the message?’

‘That I must go home to my village,’ said Shipanga. ‘I mustn’t die here.’ He traced a curved line in the sand: the river on whose verdant banks he had spent his boyhood.

Clare stood up to go. Shipanga looked up at her. ‘Did you speak to Miss Mara?’

‘Not yet,’ said Clare.

‘Miss Mara knew that boy well. He was in her team. The other boys, too, the dead ones.’

To the left of the house, a woman turned the corner, laden with old plastic shopping bags. She stopped when she saw Clare, her brow furrowed with concern. ‘Herman?’ she said as she approached.

Shipanga stood up. ‘This is my wife. Magdalena, this is the police doctor.’ Clare took the woman’s plump hand. It was as soft and worn as an old glove. Magdalena looked at her husband.

‘He can’t sleep,’ she said to Clare. ‘Since he found the dead boy, he keeps us all awake with his nightmares or with walking about. He says the boy was there to call him home.’

‘What do you think?’ asked Clare.

Magdalena shook her head. ‘I was born in the city. I see no ghosts. There are sailors here, truck drivers, and foreigners from everywhere. It’s one of them. Whoever did it is gone.’ She sat down beside her husband. ‘Gone, Herman.’

Shipanga leant against the sturdy body of his wife, the strength drained from him. ‘You’ll excuse us.’ Magdalena pulled him to his feet, limp as a rag doll. Clare watched the little house swallow them. The radio crackled back to life.

The children drifted away when she returned to her car. She sat for a minute, wishing she still smoked. The caretaker had given her nothing new, nothing concrete.

The hand tapping on her window snapped her into the present. It was Shipanga again. ‘I found this,’ he said, reaching for Clare’s hand and placing a tangle of gossamer threads in her palm. It was a cast, a compact ball of insect remains; wings, shimmering and transparent, some still attached to fragments of insect bodies.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s from insects, after they’ve been eaten. You only find these ones in the desert.’ Shipanga pointed to a red-streaked pair of wings, longer than the others. ‘They come out if it rains.’

‘Termites?’

Shipanga nodded.

‘Why are you giving me this?’ The tangled limbs moved in the breeze, their husky weightlessness horrible in Clare’s hand.

Shipanga stepped back from the car window as Clare tipped the little corpses into the cubbyhole. ‘After they took the boy away,’ he said, ‘I went back to the swing. I found it stuck in the tyre where his head had been.’