Blood Rose

twenty-six

It was three o’clock by the time Clare went to meet Tamar outside the bakery. From beneath the shade of a palm tree, a knot of boys untangled themselves, offering to guard Clare’s car, wash her window, sell her an old newspaper.

‘Where’s Lazarus?’ Clare asked one of them, exchanging fifty cents for yesterday’s news.

‘He went to the docks,’ said the child.

‘Tell him I want to talk to him,’ said Clare. The boy looked around furtively. ‘It’s nothing bad,’ she added. She slipped ten Namibian dollars into his hand. ‘Tell him to find Dr Hart.’ The boy nodded, sidling away before a bigger boy could twist the money out of his fingers. Clare went inside to buy the last cake, a sticky chocolate confection.

It was hot on the desert side of town, the morning’s mist a ragged memory suspended above the ocean. Clare drank some water and watched the street children hustle. Tourists looked furtive, then handed over handfuls of coins. Locals walked on, oblivious. Clare pulled her notebook from her bag and read her notes. The desert revealed its secrets, everyone kept telling her, but when it was ready and in its own way. Someone has been very determined that the three bodies were found. That part was easy. Why they were so determined was less easy. The seduction, the trust quickly established, quickly broken. The bullet, the knife flashing across a chest. The severing of the fingertips. That small, nail-tipped joint from the ring finger lying, oozing, in the palm of a killer’s hand. Everything about it said mission killer to her, cleansing the streets of rubbish, mending what had been broken by illegitimacy, poverty and delinquency, but the detail refused to crystallise into a coherent whole. The ghost, the killer, glided away from her when she reached for him.

‘Come with us.’ Tamar’s voice at her window made Clare jump. ‘It’s half an hour, the drive. We don’t need two cars.’

Clare got out and locked the car, balancing the cake box on the bonnet. ‘Dessert,’ she explained. ‘I think your niece will like it.’

Tamar stopped the vehicle near a copse of acacias huddled against the cliffs. The children exploded from the car, dashing across the hot sand to the shadow of the trees, shrieking as if they had driven five hundred kilometres instead of fifty. Only a dark line marked the flow of underground water. Clare turned her back on the sprawled plain with its encrypted alphabet. Everything left a trace on this vast Rosetta stone of a desert.

She and Tamar set down their laden basket on the cement picnic table. It was cool, shaded, where they were. Water welled to the surface at the crook of this elbow of river. The children shouted, splashing in delight because there was enough water to swim in. Another day, perhaps two, and it would be gone, as the river retreated underground, leaving nothing but cracked earth and insect and rodent corpses trapped in the mud. Clare flicked some eggshells and a curl of orange peel off the table, shook out the tablecloth and settled it over the rough round surface.

‘I’m glad we could come,’ said Tamar. She settled herself onto a cement bench, cradling her belly between crossed knees. ‘I’ve been promising to take them on a picnic for weeks, but this business has taken all my time.’

‘It’s nice to catch my breath before I catch my plane,’ Clare commented. The children splashed, slick as otters in the water, and Clare sipped her lemonade. ‘It doesn’t feel real out here.’

The breeze came up off the desert, hot and short-lived. When it dropped, the mantle of air settled again. Clare leant back against the tree. She was tired and the heat made her sleepy. Tamar unpacked the picnic basket, setting out mounds of white bread.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Butter these.’

Clare took the knife. It sliced through the margarine, separating into an ooze of bilious yellow oil. Tamar sliced cheese, waving away the clumsy flies flustering towards the exposed food. Slices of anaemic tomato wilted under plastic wrap.

‘How are you finding Walvis Bay the second time around?’ Tamar asked as Clare buttered the bread.

‘Quieter. Like half the town left in the middle of the night. Its soul seems to have gone.’

‘But it grows on one, despite itself and against one’s better judgement.’

Clare looked at the dunes, auburn tresses of sand rippling next to the black parting of the Kuiseb River. ‘I suppose it does,’ she said.

‘Your profile? How do you feel about it?’

‘I still feel like I’m missing something.’ Clare put the last buttered slices of bread on the plate. ‘Like a conversation I can hear through a door but that’s just too low to distinguish the words. I get the emotion, the tone, a sense of a dialogue, but the words elude me. Maybe being outside of all this will clear my head.’

‘Phiri called before we left. Captain Faizal should be here early next week. It’s all sorted.’

Riedwaan’s name lay between them. A challenge or an offering of sympathy, Clare wasn’t sure. She wondered what Tamar knew, if anything. Not that there was much left to know.

‘Aunty, Aunty, come and look!’ The children burst from the undergrowth, a flutter of shrieks and pigtails and wide-eyed horror. Tamar’s hand went straight for the pistol tucked inside her trousers, nestled next to the foetus, free-floating in its watery cave. A breeze curled off the dunes and around Clare’s neck, lifting the downy hairs.

‘What is it, Angela?’ said Tamar.

‘Come see, come see.’ The child was hysterical, hopping from one pink-sandalled foot to the other. Further up the river bed, the children had discovered a tunnel in the scrub that had grown up over three seasons of good rain. Clare had to bend as Angela and Tupac wove through the bush. The pathway twisted and turned, as disorientating as a maze. Some of the branches had been cut back to clear a path. The cloying stench of death filled the air. Clare’s blood ran cold as she thought of who might have been there before them.

The little girl stepped into a sun-dappled clearing. A semi-circle of stones faced a small cave in the sheer, black cliff face. In front of it was a makeshift altar; the stumps of a few candles leant drunkenly, melted by the heat. A small body hung limp, a shrivelled fruit among the profusion of white blossoms at the entrance to the clearing. Clare stepped forward to touch the corpse’s ginger fur. The skin was starting to slough off, leaving grotesque strips of exposed flesh. Flies clustered where its life had bubbled away.

‘Tupac, take your sister back to the picnic place,’ said Tamar.

Angela clung to her aunt, tears glistening on her plump cheeks. ‘Who do it? Who do it to the kitty, Aunty Tamar?’

Tamar squatted down beside her distraught niece and drew her into the circle of her arms. The child buried her head in Tamar’s shoulder.

Clare walked around the semi-circle. Faded Coke tins and discarded cigarette butts littered the place, the milder brands bearing telltale lipstick stains. She picked one up. A menthol ultra-thin. A teenager’s nicotine starter pack.

‘I’m going to take her back to the car,’ said Tamar, gripping Angela firmly by the hand. ‘Will you check here, Clare? Come on, Tupac, you too.’

The undergrowth closed on Tamar and the children, leaving Clare alone. On the other side of the makeshift altar lay a brandy bottle and a red G-string. Clare took a tissue out of her pocket and picked up the wisp of stained underwear. It was dim inside the cave. Once her eyes had adjusted, though, Clare could make out the graffiti: Chesney and Minki. The girl’s name had been scored through when LaToyah had replaced Minki in Chesney’s affections. There wasn’t much else – a couple more empty bottles, a bottleneck with the remnants of a filter in it, a filthy old mattress. Unimaginative, small-town Satanism. A lizard bobbed on tensed elbows, liquid black on the sun-ravaged rocks, watching Clare duck into the tunnel of undergrowth.

‘You get a lot of this Satanic stuff?’ she asked Tamar when she got back to the picnic site.

Tamar had her niece on her lap. Tupac was sitting close to her too. He sidled away when Clare reappeared, an eleven-year-old sensitive about his image. Clare sat down opposite them.

‘There’ve been a few incidents: bored teenagers wearing black nail polish and experimenting with group sex. Nothing too serious.’

‘Crucifying cats is something else. The men I go for often start their careers torturing small animals.’

‘I want to go home, Aunty.’ Tamar stroked the hair out of Angela’s eyes and popped a piece of bread into her mouth.

Clare packed up the picnic. ‘Do you know anyone called Minki?’ she asked.

Tamar shook her head.

‘LaToyah?’

‘Dime a dozen in Narraville, LaToyahs,’ said Tamar. ‘Three in my street.’

‘And Chesney?’

‘I know him,’ said Tupac. It was the first time he had said a word. ‘Chesney used to go to my school, but then he left to go to the school in town, the one where you found that dead boy in the swing.’

The two women looked at each other over the children’s heads.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Tamar quietly, strapping Angela into her seat. They were all silent as they drove back to town through the gathering dusk.