Ritual

20

Tig wasn't in the mood to talk about what he'd said. I'm not gay. When he came to find Flea, sitting quietly in the unlit kitchen downstairs, waiting for Caffery to go, his face was red and patchy, his eyes were hard. She asked him what was the matter, what had been said, but he shook his head and was silent as they drove to the restaurant owner's house. It was only when they were standing on the doorstep, waiting for the door to be answered, that he spoke.

'They don't make them any different from the way they made them fifteen years ago. Something out of The Sweeney, that one.'

Flea didn't answer. She was staring at the little window in the restaurant owner's front door. Several times on the way over here she'd almost said to Tig, 'Look, let's forget it. Let's just turn round and pretend I never said anything.' She knew she was getting in too deep and now she was light-headed, as if an elastic band had been wrapped round her skull and was being tightened. If she was right, this innocuous-seeming house could hold the key to how Mallows got his hands cut off.

'Hey, you with us?' Tig said.

She blinked. 'What?'

'I just said — that cop. Jack Caffery. Gave me a little Fascist-police-state spiel. Aggressive. Only word for it.'

'He's not that bad.'

Tig looked her up and down in a way that made her uncomfortable. Then he gave her a tight grin. 'See? You gave the game away. You fancy him.'

She was about to answer when the sound of locks being opened from inside stopped her. She straightened her shoulders and ran her hands self-consciously down her jeans to iron out the creases. She wished she could see herself in a mirror — she knew she'd be pale in the face.

The man who opened the door had a faintly anxious, scholarly look about him. He was thin with close-cropped greying hair and skin so dark it seemed almost to have an ashy dust over it. He was dressed unassumingly in lightweight belted trousers and his pale green checked shirt had its sleeves rolled up. She noticed that the skin on his forearms was shiny — as if it had been greased.

'Mr Mabuza.' Tig extended his hand. 'Good of you to see me. Short notice, I know.'

Mabuza forced a smile. 'Don't worry, my old friend.' He took the hand carefully, almost delicately, and shook it. Then he inclined his head to Flea. 'Gift Mabuza. And you are?'

'This is Flea, my — my girlfriend. Hope you don't mind.'

Girlfriend? When the hell was that okayed? she thought, but Mabuza was looking at her so she removed her sunglasses and held out her hand. There was a slight beat — just a split second when she thought something crossed his face — then he took it and shook it lightly. When he let go she could feel a thin residue left on her hand — something faintly pungent, faintly unpleasant.

'Come in,' he said. He spoke in a stiff, clipped way — only a trace of an accent, a bit like Kaiser spoke sometimes. Sort of Eliza Doolittle-ish — a bit too English to be real. 'Come in, come in.'

She stepped inside and instantly felt a drag on her — as if the gloom was pulling energy from her. There was a smell in here, of meals cooked many months ago, of sadness. When Mabuza took them in and left them in the living room while he went to get coffee, it was a few moments before her eyes got used to the light, but when she did she saw the interior was decorated like an English guesthouse: horse brasses on the walls, purple carpets on the floor, overstuffed floral sofas with arm protectors, embroidered cushions plumped up and propped in a row. There were trimmed lampshades, a cheap carriage clock on the television, twin china spaniels on either side of the mantelpiece with a wooden crucifix on a small base between them. Without waiting to be asked she went to the mantelpiece and studied the cross, thinking there was something strange about it, something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

'Do you like it?'

She jumped. Mabuza stood next to her, holding a tray with cups and a coffee pot. His eyes were going from the cross to her face and back again. 'Very nice wood, do you think?'

'Yes,' she said, holding her face very still. 'Very nice.'

'I will leave the house in twenty minutes.' He set the tray down, then bent to pour coffee into thin rosebud-patterned china cups. Flea sat down on the sofa and Mabuza put a cup in front of her. Tig sat in a leather armchair, his head back, his hands on the chair's arms. 'My wife and I will go to a meeting at our church,' said Mabuza, 'so, my friends, I am sorry, we cannot talk all night.'

'We understand.' Tig pinched up the knees of his combats and sat forward, elbows on his knees. 'We'll try not to keep you.'

'And I should tell you now,' said Mabuza, 'I don't know why you are here, but I am very afraid you will be disappointed by our meeting, my friend. Today of all days I fear for my business.' He put his hands together, as if in prayer, and pointed the fingers at Tig. 'With the best will in the world my work for charities will become limited.'

Flea sat in silence while the men talked about business, the charity. She fiddled with the spoon in the saucer, letting her eyes flit round, first to the crucifix, then to the cupboards, the walls, trying to decide what it was about this room that bothered her. There was a painting of a cat washing its face under a picture light in the alcove. It was on nailed-together boards and seemed out of place. She studied it for a while, wondering if that was what worried her. Or maybe it was the bay window, with its heavy curtains that would stop any light getting in or out. Or the wallpaper — striped up to the waist-height dado rail, with a plain dark ochre base that might have been washable. She thought there was a faint sheen to it and tried to pick out areas that had been cleaned, where the colour was paler. And then it struck her. It wasn't the walls or the curtains that were setting off alarms. It was the carpet.

She stared at it, her pulse thudding. Slightly dusty-looking, its pile was too deep to be fashionable, but otherwise it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Except for one thing. The colour. It was a dark, slightly pinkish purple. The same colour as the fibres on the hands.

'Flea,' Tig said sharply, next to her, making her jolt upright. She looked up to find Mabuza in front of her, offering her a plate of biscuits.

'I'm sorry,' she said, her mouth dry. 'I'm…'

'Miles away,' Mabuza said. 'That's the expression, isn't it?'

She looked at the biscuits, then back at his face.

Was this the face of a man who had cut another human being to pieces — here in this room? 'I don't know much about charity work, the voluntary sector. It's not my thing.'

'Don't apologize. Did you want a biscuit?' He smiled and pointed at the plate. 'My wife made these ones. The others, I'm afraid, are from the shop.'

'Thank you.' She leaned forward, her cup and saucer balanced in one hand. Hesitating — thinking of the carpet, the heavy curtains — she put her finger on the edge of the plate and applied just enough pressure to pull the rim down. Mabuza tried to catch it but it fell out of his hands, landing face down on the carpet, scattering the biscuits.

She put her cup down with a clatter. 'Damn, I'm- Here, let me.' Before Mabuza could do anything she had pushed back the coffee-table and was on her hands and knees, collecting up the biscuits, piling them back on the plate, raking through the carpet for crumbs. 'Clumsy.' She lifted her face to the two men, giving them the blankest of smiles. 'Clumsy and stupid.'

When the floor was almost clear she took a deep breath. With her left hand she picked up the last couple of biscuits, the right she closed round a chunk of the carpet. She pulled. There was a faint, ripping sound, but she kept her eyes pinned on the men, still smiling. In one movement she tipped back on her heels, putting the biscuit on the plate, picking up her cup and sitting back on the sofa, her right hand folded round the clump of carpet and tucked under her left arm.

The two men didn't say anything but looked at her silently. She found herself speaking, saying anything to cover the silence. 'Where are you from, Mr Mabuza?' It was out of her mouth before she'd even thought what to say. She forced herself to hold his eyes and keep the smile there. 'Tig'll tell you,' she said, trying to make her voice calm. 'I'm about as nosy as they get. Sorry.'

'Don't be sorry.' Mabuza inclined his head with a polite smile. 'No apologies necessary in this house. I'm from South Africa — thank you for asking.'

'South Africa?'

'Do you know it?'

A picture came into her head. A picture of dark, freezing water, a picture of human screams echoing into the desert air. 'No,' she said quietly. 'Not really.'

'I know what you're thinking.' His eyes were slightly yellow round the pupils as if he was jaundiced.

'Do you? What am I thinking, then?'

Mabuza laughed. 'You're thinking I'm black.

You're thinking the only South Africans you meet are white, and here I am sitting in front of you, large as life, and I'm black.'

'That's right,' she said, not moving her eyes from his. 'That's exactly what I was thinking.'

'I'm one lucky South African black, believe me.'

He went on holding her gaze in a way that made her uncomfortable. It was just as if he'd seen her grab the carpet and was trying to spook her into saying something. Slowly he began to talk, his eyes not leaving hers as if he wanted every word to sink in. At first the words meant nothing to her, drowned by her pulse pounding, but slowly she realized he was telling her his story — how he'd been born in Johannesburg, how when the white-owned drilling company he worked for had wanted to look good and fill their quotas, as if they belonged to the new South Africa, they'd gone hunting down the company's ranks and taken a long-standing black forklift driver, moving him quickly and artificially up the ranks until he was appointed CEO and taken to Cape Town. Gift Mabuza had never made a decision in his three years as CEO. He'd spent the days in his oak-panelled office in the shadow of Table Mountain, playing Internet poker and signing cheques until the whole scam was cracked apart by the press. Then he had taken the pay-off, come to the UK and, with what he'd learned, had opened the Moat.

'And so,' he said, 'my new friend, Flea. Tell me, what do you know about my country?'

'Very little.'

'You see, what's on my mind is what on earth the police in England think of my country.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'There has been a terrible business at my restaurant — I'm sure you've followed it on the news. The police, you see, interviewing my staff, keeping my business closed. Even I'm not allowed inside, they tell me. Now, I don't know, my friend, what beast or inhuman brought this terrible ungodly thing to my door, but I have lived long enough to know that it is a slur — an attempt to sabotage me.' He opened his hands and held them out. 'You see the colour of my skin. You hear my voice. I'm an African, Flea, and the African will always be the leper of the world.'

Flea sniffed. She patted her jeans, pretending to feel for a tissue. She pushed her left hand into the front pocket and, with a surreptitious flick of the finger, released the chunk of carpet. Then she rested her hand on her thigh. Mabuza's eyes followed the movement.

'You see,' he said, after a while, letting his eyes linger on her hand. 'I am not wanted in this society — so someone…' He slowed down and repeated the word, '… someone has taken the most appalling risk to discredit me. But…' He gave her an unexpected smile. His teeth were white. One was missing, next to his right canine. 'My enemies have taken a wrong turn here. That is the joke. No one can point a finger at me — I am not a savage.'

'Mr Mabuza,' she said levelly, 'you're talking in riddles.'

'Riddles? Hardly. What I'm trying to explain is that I have never had any dealing with the police.' He said the word very deliberately, enunciating every syllable. 'The police. I don't know what they must be thinking about this black South African.' He raised his eyes and locked them on hers again. 'And you? Do you know what they're thinking?'

He knows, Flea thought. Damn and fuck, he knows who I am. 'No,' she said steadily. 'I have no idea what they might be thinking.'

There was a long silence. Next to her on the sofa Tig was fidgeting, clearing his throat. She was about to say something to him when the carriage clock chimed. Immediately he was on his feet. 'We should be going,' he said, holding out his hand to Flea. 'Come on. Let's go. Now.'

She got to her feet a little shakily, setting the cup down so hard the spoon fell off the saucer. 'I need to use the toilet, Mr Mabuza. I just want a bit of tissue to blow my nose.'

There was a moment's hesitation. She didn't imagine it — she knew she didn't. Mabuza's eyes flickered to Tig's, came back to hers, then returned to Tig's. And then he smiled, graciously, holding up his hand to show her out of the room. 'Of course,' he said calmly. 'Of course you must.'

The toilet was on the first floor directly above the hallway. She climbed slowly, the stairs curling round above the hallway where the two men waited for her. On the staircase she passed four or five niches in the wall. In each stood a crucifix, some small, some big, all clean and new in spite of the dust that lay everywhere else. The walls were panelled below waist height and she couldn't say what it was, but something about the panels made her uncomfortable — she held her hands across her chest so she didn't have to touch them. They made her think of things being shut away — of shadows snapping at her heels.

She got to the landing, with its low lighting and faintly clinical smell. The feeling was still there — that someone or something was watching her. At the top of the staircase a door faced her, just where Mabuza had said it would be. She pushed it open, pulled the cord and the little room lit up — primrose-yellow porcelain, a box of Kleenex tissues on the cistern, and her reflection staring back at her from the mirror above the sink. She held the door handle tightly, studied her face, the hair that hung in hard coils round her forehead, the circles under her eyes. After a moment or two she stretched up on tiptoe so that she could look at the reflection behind her, down at the panels behind her calves. There was nothing. Why had she thought there would be?

Just as she was debating what to do a noise to her right made her turn. A few feet across the landing a door was half open. She hadn't noticed the room because the light was off, but now she couldn't take her eyes off it. The sound was coming from inside, of someone sniffling, as if they'd been crying.

She pulled the toilet door closed, shutting it tightly so it would be heard downstairs. The two men were at the foot of the stairs, talking, in low, confidential voices, and their tone didn't change so she took an experimental step across the landing towards the open door. The floorboards were solid — no creaking or sagging — and in a few short steps she was standing just to the side of the door. The men went on talking below. From here she could crane her neck and see most of the room beyond.

It was an odd bedroom, lit only by two standard lamps in the corners. It made her think of a pioneer home with bare floorboards, gingham check and a lollipop flower-stitched quilt. There was a suitcase on the floor and a few feet away from it a white woman on her knees in the middle of the room, facing the bed. She was a little younger than Mabuza, blonde and enormously fat — her body seemed to flow out of the plain white dress she wore. Her chest heaved and shuddered with the crying: a strange sound that Flea somehow knew wasn't connected with sadness.

The woman put both hands on the floor and bent, her enormous arms dimpling, dipping her head so that she could see under the bed. Even from the doorway Flea could see the tears shivering in her eyes as she squinted into the dark, and at that moment it struck her what was odd about the crying. It was the sound of fear. The woman was crying because she was afraid of what she thought she would see under the bed.

She craned her neck to peep into the far corners, and when she seemed to have found nothing she tilted back on her heels and turned, very slowly, to look directly at Flea. The tears were standing on her cheeks, but she didn't speak, or seem surprised to find someone watching her. She just gazed at her steadily as if she'd known she was there all along.

Without a word Flea went back to the stairs, expecting any second to be shouted after. Ignoring the charade about the toilet — she'd meant to open and close the door, run a tap or something — she headed down the stairs as quickly as her legs would carry her. At the bottom the two men stopped talking.

'It was nice to meet you,' she said to Mabuza. She didn't stop walking or offer her hand to him, just went straight to the door, ignoring Tig coming up behind her. 'Very nice. I'll see myself out.'

Outside she went fast, going in a straight line, her arms folded. The air was warm, but she couldn't help shivering, glad to have the feel of the house off her. What she'd seen was enough. In the morning she would go straight to Jack Caffery.

'Hey.' She'd got halfway down the street by the time Tig caught up with her. He grabbed her arm and swung her round to face him. 'What the fuck do you think you're doing?'

'He knows who I am, Tig.' She swept her hair off her face and held his eyes angrily. 'Couldn't you tell? Didn't you see the way he was looking at me? It was weird.'

'The only thing that was weird was you forcing him to talk about the case. That was weird.'

'I didn't force him. He wanted to talk about it.

And anyway — there's something wrong in that house.'

'Flea. Flea.' He pulled her a little further down the road so they were completely hidden from Mabuza's front gates. It was nearly seven o'clock in the evening, but the sky was still blue, and the businessmen who owned the houses in this community were returning home in their Audis and Mercedes. Some eyed Tig and Flea. One parked his car, then stood in the driveway, his sunglasses in his hand, watching them. 'Listen,' Tig said. 'Don't you think you're being paranoid? You went in there worried — you didn't say anything but I could tell you weren't comfortable. You're making things up.'

'I'm not making up the way he was staring at me. When he asked what the police would be thinking.'

'Flea, look, I'm not saying I know him well, that'd be a lie, but I know enough to tell you he doesn't do things in weird ways. He's not underhand.'

'Oh, yeah?' She wasn't convinced. 'You sure?'

'Yes,' he said, and walked towards the car. 'I'm sure.'

She waited a while, watching him leave, her heart still thumping. The man in the driveway lost interest and aimed the remote control at the garage door. Eventually, when there was nothing else to do, she followed Tig to the car, getting out her keys. She opened the door for him, then got into the driver's seat, sinking down with a sigh.

'I'll tell you something else,' she said, pulling on the seatbelt. She could still feel the thin layer of grease on her hand from Mabuza's handshake. 'They're not going to church this evening — at least, not to any church you or I would go to.'

'Oh, come on. What're you talking about?'

She stared back in the direction of the house — an ordinary enough house on the face of it. She thought about the idea she'd had that shadows were running round the panelling at knee height. She thought about the woman searching under the bed, the fear on her face. She thought about the crucifixes. And then, in a second, she realized what was wrong with the house.

She turned back to Tig, her eyes stinging. 'I'm just telling you, Tig, those people aren't Christian.'