Blood Rose

twenty

Mara Thomson picked up the photographs propped against her clock. Her team of homeless boys in their brand-new football kit, holding up a silver cup in triumph. The other picture was worn at the edges: Mara and her mum in the park next to the London council estate that she had survived by learning to be invisible. She pressed the photographs between her hands, bookending her journey to the point where she sat now – with Kaiser Apollis’s dead body bobbing on the periphery of her thoughts. It drove her to the kitchen in search of tea and company.

Oscar was at the kitchen table alone, uneaten cornflakes congealing in his plastic bowl.

‘You’re up early.’ Mara smiled at him.

A door slammed upstairs and the boy’s delicate throat constricted around the food. Oscar looked up. Mara did too, imagining George Meyer stepping from his other lodger’s bedroom into the chill passageway upstairs, closing the door on the woman inside: Gretchen, who always paid what she owed, exuding contempt for her landlord, for his lonely dribble of pleasure.

‘Go on,’ said Mara, breaking the spell, ‘eat your breakfast.’

Oscar, conditioned to obedience, picked up the spoon. The mournful wail of a ship’s siren came from the harbour.

‘The Alhantra,’ said Mara, putting on the kettle.

Mara had taken Oscar on board once and he had seen Juan Carlos kiss her when they thought he wasn’t watching. But the boy was always watching, so he had seen Juan Carlos, Mara’s boyfriend, slip into her room in the middle of the night, and away again just before dawn.

George Meyer came into the kitchen, buttoning up his jacket. He greeted Mara and poured coffee, drinking in silence.

‘Come, Oscar,’ he said, putting down his mug and looking at his watch. Oscar reached out a tentative hand, but George thought he was reaching for his lunch and handed the boy two slices of cling-filmed white bread. The two of them stepped into the trails of fog hanging low over the desolate yard, the washing limp on the line, just as Clare Hart opened the gate.

‘Good morning, Dr Hart,’ said Meyer. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m here to see Mara Thomson,’ said Clare. ‘Is she in?’

‘In the kitchen,’ said Meyer, opening the door to his truck. ‘Get in, Oscar. You’re coming with me today. You can draw some more plant specimens for me. Your mother would’ve liked that.’

Oscar climbed in and placed his bag at his feet. He let his forehead rest against the cold glass. It could have been a nod.

The doorbell chimed, interrupting the tangled drift of Mara Thomson’s thoughts. She had been half-expecting Dr Hart, but seeing her on the doorstep gave her heart a little jolt.

‘Please, come in.’ She opened the door for Clare and led her down a dingy passage off the kitchen to her bedroom.

‘Sit here,’ said Mara, offering Clare the only chair and sitting on the unmade bed. A splash of sunlight framed her face, setting her apart from her anonymous bedroom. The only place that revealed any personality was the crowded table next to her bed.

‘Lazarus told me you were at the dump,’ said Mara.

Clare nodded, picking up a photograph. ‘You?’ she asked.

Mara nodded. ‘That was taken just before I came to Namibia. Me and my mum.’

You had to have a charitable eye to see the blood that linked them. Where Mara was all tawny shades and wild hair, her mother was pale, her lips as prim and pressed as her blue suit. But it was there, in both their narrow faces, the wide-set eyes.

‘My father was Jamaican,’ Mara explained. ‘But I never knew him. He was killed in a fight before I was born. So it was just me and my mum. It was hard for her when I left.’

‘And for you?’ Clare asked.

Mara sighed. ‘I expected a village of light and heat and throbbing cicadas. Instead, I got Walvis Bay. Somebody had to,’ she said, with a wry smile.

‘That bad?’ asked Clare.

‘Oh, it’s been okay. Till all this. I threw myself into my work, answered the kids’ questions, read to them and organised a soccer team. My mum clipped out the sports pages from the Sunday papers and taped soccer games and films. Bend It like Beckham was a real hit. It all worked,’ said Mara. ‘I worked and that was a first.’

There was a framed photograph of Mara with her arms entwined around a dark-haired man. ‘Your boyfriend?’ asked Clare.

‘Juan Carlos.’ Mara leant back against the wall. ‘You want me to tell you about Kaiser?’ she asked. ‘The others?’

‘Let’s start with Kaiser,’ Clare suggested.

‘What don’t you know?’ asked Mara.

Clare thought of his body on the mortuary table. No secrets there. She knew how much he weighed; that he still had a couple of milk teeth; that he had been violently sodomised, but that he had healed; that his back was covered in scars; that someone had stood so close to him that their breath had mingled. Someone had looked the bound child in the eye, cocked his gun, pulled a trigger and shot him in the face.

‘Tell me what he was like,’ said Clare. ‘What he did, where he went, who he hung out with, where he slept, what he ate.’

‘What he ate?’ repeated Mara, fiddling with the frayed hem of her hoodie. ‘He ate what he could scavenge. Meat, if he could find it.’

Clare thought of Lazarus throwing away the roll Mara had bought him, her hurt and disappointment clear in the set of her narrow shoulders. ‘Who were his friends?’ she prompted.

‘Lazarus, I suppose,’ said Mara. ‘Fritz Woestyn, too. They played soccer together, slept in a heap at the dump like stray dogs.’

‘What did he talk about?’

‘To me?’ asked Mara, looking Clare straight in the eye. ‘Not much. I know he loved his sister Sylvia and that he liked to draw.’ She was quiet. Around them, the silence of the house was overwhelming.

‘Tell me, Mara,’ said Clare softly, ‘what he dreamed.’

Mara slitted her eyes. ‘How will his dreams get you to the truth of who did this to him, to the others?’

‘Dreams take us to places we don’t anticipate sometimes,’ said Clare.

‘He wanted to live. That can be quite an ambitious dream in a place like this.’ The silence was taut, a tightrope between them.

‘He wanted to go to school.’ One tentative foot on the rope of her story. ‘He wanted to draw.’ Another. Mara looked at Clare as if she were searching for something. ‘He wanted a mother. That’s about it, as far as Kaiser’s dreams went,’ she said. ‘Since I’ve been here so many kids I know have been sick, have died. It’s Aids. That’s why most of them are on the street in the first place. And if they didn’t get the virus from their parents, then they soon catch it from their clients.’ Mara’s shoulders slumped.

‘When did you see him last?’

‘Friday afternoon,’ Mara said with certainty. ‘We always have practice and he never missed. I didn’t see him at the Sunday practice. Weekends are different. The boys are less’ – she pulled the cord of her sweatshirt – ‘steady. Let me put it like that.’

‘Did you ask where he was?’

‘I was going to,’ Mara replied, ‘and then they found him, so I didn’t need to.’

‘The others?’ asked Clare. ‘Fritz Woestyn and Nicanor Jones?’

‘I knew them,’ said Mara. ‘They played in my team.’

‘What happened with Sergeant van Wyk and Kaiser?’ asked Clare.

‘I was stupid,’ said Mara. ‘Stupid and naïve. It was before Fritz Woestyn was found, so I wasn’t worried. Just irritated that he didn’t come to a weekend game. I asked and one of the boys told me he was in the cells, so I went to look for him.’

‘Where was he?’

‘By the time I found him he’d been dropped back at the dump,’ said Mara. ‘He’d been beaten. Badly. I tried to lay a child abuse charge.’

‘What happened?’

‘Sod all,’ said Mara. ‘Kaiser wouldn’t say anything. I knew he’d been picked up near the harbour. Whoring maybe. I know that Van Wyk took him back to the cells and beat the shit out of him, but Kaiser wouldn’t say nothing. I had to leave it…’ Mara hesitated. ‘You know Van Wyk used to be with the vice squad?’

Clare nodded.

‘There’ve been rumours that he offers protection to the girls working the docks. You know, like… they have no choice but to accept it in return for a cut of their fee.’

‘You think Van Wyk’s running boys, too?’ asked Clare.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mara. ‘I don’t know if it’s even true about the girls. I only know that Kaiser was with him and that afterwards he could barely walk. Van Wyk said he found Kaiser like that and picked him up to protect him.’

‘That was the end of it?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Mara. ‘Kaiser wouldn’t say anything. Nothing more I could do.’ Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. ‘That’s all I can tell you. Pathetic, right? To see someone every day and to know nothing about them.’

Clare stood up and opened the door. It was the end of the interview. They walked back to the kitchen where a woman in a blue dressing gown was stirring sugar into her coffee. A blonde plait snaked over one shoulder.

‘Gretchen,’ said Mara, disconcerted. ‘You’re up early. This is Dr Hart.’

‘Hello,’ said Clare.

Gretchen lit a cigarette. ‘You’re making progress, Doctor?’ she asked. ‘With these little boys?’

‘I hope so,’ said Clare.

‘Good,’ said Gretchen. ‘So sad, what happened.’ She sipped her coffee, her blue eyes fixed on Clare without a glimmer of recognition. She wouldn’t have seen Clare at the bar of Der Blaue Engel the previous night. All she would have seen was a blur beyond the stage lights.