Apocalypse Now Now Read online

  First there’s the logical, clinical, businessman me. This is the me that creates plans, devises schemes and shifts pawns around like Kasparov. This me would drink neat vodka while stealing candy from babies and life savings from old people. This Donald Trump of the cerebellum I immediately dub BizBax.

  The other is a personality I didn’t even know I had. This is the me that feels. Gross, I know. This me probably attends crystal healing sessions in my cerebral cortex, believes people are important and almost certainly likes piña colada and getting caught in the rain. He is a flaming metrosexual. I call him MetroBax.

  Perhaps these two parts of me have always been there, their chatter a subtle murmur beneath my conscious mind, but since hearing about Esmé’s disappearance, they’ve become seriously talkative:

  BizBax: It sucks, but the truth is that Esmé is just a pawn like anyone else. A valuable pawn, one that comes with unique intimacies and affections; a pawn with benefits. But a pawn nonetheless.

  MetroBax: This is Esmé we’re talking about. Esmé. She introduced us to Nerdcore rap and banana, peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

  BizBax: And that information was gratefully assimilated but we can’t get nostalgic about it. Besides, what can we do?

  MetroBax: We need to help find her. I believe that working together we can achieve anything. After all, it’s not our darkness we’re afraid of. It’s our light …

  BizBax: You know what’s dark? Geriatric amputee bestiality.

  MetroBax: That’s disgusting. Why would you even say that?

  BizBax: Because I’m who I am. I’m the real Baxter, you’re just an afterbirth of the psyche.

  Insanity; it always seemed like so much more fun on TV. I clutch my head and try to make the voices stop. The businessman part of me is right. I can’t let this distract me. A calm comes over me as I ruthlessly shove the emotions back down.

  Love? You’re an idiot, Zevcenko. Think of all the pathetic love songs ever sung. Think about all that wasted time and effort for something that is now evolutionarily irrelevant. You’re programmed to love so that you can secure the perpetuation of your genes. You know what else will secure the perpetuation of your genes? A sperm bank.

  The real legacy that I should be thinking about is the Spider. We have the opportunity to create something great and your brain splattering oxytocin around is just getting in the way. Forget your adolescent dreams. Forget Esmé.

  The next morning, it’s Whitney Houston that does it. Not content with ruining her life with crack she’s taken to ruining mine with the emotional knuckleduster that is ‘I Will Always Love You’. The radio switches on at 7.13 a.m. and sends Whitney’s high-pitched wailing to kick my ass.

  There’s a sharp pain in my chest and I feel short of breath. The walls of the room lurch and spin like I’m on an out-of-control fairground ride. I gasp for air. ‘Mom,’ I shout. ‘MOM!’ There’s a thud of footsteps coming up the steps and then my mother sticks her curl-framed face into my room.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she says with a worried look.

  ‘I think I’m having a heart attack,’ I gasp, clutching my chest. She sits on my bed and puts her hand on my chest, checks my pulse, feels my head and then smiles at me.

  ‘Baxter,’ she says, ‘you never were a very emotional boy. You’re like your father that way.’

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I say, clutching my chest again. ‘It hurts so much.’

  My mom smiles her infuriating smile again. ‘I think you’re worried about Esmé,’ she says. ‘You’re having a panic attack.’ The idea is so ludicrous, so transparently, pop-psychologically vapid that, well, it might just be true. My mind becomes unhinged again, split down the centre with logical, clinical businessman Baxter on one side and feely-emotional, metrosexual Baxter on the other:

  BizBax: We’ve obviously been ingesting too much oestrogen from the plastic in our food. It’s affecting our judgement.

  MetroBax: It’s our girlfriend. If we’re cut, do we not bleed?

  BizBax: Cry me a river. Let me tell you a little story. When Thomas Farnsworth tried to scale the north face of Everest in 1976, his expedition got stuck in an avalanche. His entire climbing crew was lost and he had to cut up their corpses with a shard of glass and eat them to survive. He lost all his fingers and toes from frostbite. While gnawing on the gall bladder of a friend do you think he stopped and cried like a little bitch?

  MetroBax: You made that up, didn’t you?

  BizBax: The factual inaccuracy does not affect the sentiment which, in case you missed it, is stop being such a goddamn pussy.

  MetroBax: That night when you were first with Esmé. You remember that? If you can honestly and truly tell me what you felt I’ll leave you alone, you emotionless cyborg. Just tell me.

  ‘Love,’ I say.

  My mother leans forward from her perch on the end of my bed and looks at me quizzically. ‘Baxter?’

  ‘Love,’ I say again. ‘That’s what I felt when I first met Esmé.’ My mother beams with all the benevolence of a medieval Christian mystic. ‘I knew you were in there somewhere,’ she says, softly tapping my chest.

  It’s time to undergo a fundamental recalibration. A shifting of paradigms brought about by the introduction of new data into what I had previously thought was a closed feedback loop. I thought love was a ridiculous kids’ story that only stupid adults believed in. Like politicians’ promises and Scientology. But it’s real. The shifting of paradigms is finished. The information is assimilated. Old directive: Prevent gang war at Westridge. New directive: Save Esmé from whoever has taken her and rip out their heart. Just try to stop me.

  The Van der Westhuizen house is a riot of activity. I weave my bike through the cops and reporters that have congealed at the front door. ‘Nobody but family and friends,’ a large cop says, putting a restraining hand on my handlebars.

  ‘I’m Esmé’s boyfriend,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to see the family.’

  ‘I’ve got a kid here who says he’s the kidnapped girl’s boyfriend,’ he barks into his radio.

  ‘Let him in,’ a voice squelches from the radio. The cop jerks a thumb toward the door. I lean my bike up against the wall and turn the ornate brass handle of the front door to step inside.

  Inside, relatives are standing around and patting each other consolingly like great apes. Several policemen are wandering aimlessly around the living room as if expecting Esmé to pop out from behind one of the giant pastel-pink couches. Esmé’s mother is perfectly made up and is playing host, as if this were a party she’d thrown. ‘Oh, we’re trying to be strong, but Esmé is our babbbbieee,’ she says, steadying herself against the large ceramic sculpture of a Dalmatian that squats at the entrance to the lounge.

  From what I can glean the disappearance of Esmé went down like this: her mother and Olaf, her stepdad, had gone out to a function and left her watching TV. They’d come back to find an Esmé-less garden apartment. They had phoned her friends, phoned me too apparently but my phone had been off. No Esmé.

  Sandra van der Westhuizen is a chiselled Aryan specimen who looks like she could headbutt a rhino into submission. Which, in a sense, is what she’d done. Olaf was said rhinoceros, an Incredible Hulk of a man, which only made his matrimonial humiliation all the more poignant. There was no question of who wore the beige chinos in the Van der Westhuizen house.

  ‘Baxter,’ Sandra says with pretend enthusiasm, batting her false eyelashes and touching her freckly, gold-cross-adorned chest. She hates me, of course. She told Esmé that it’s because she thinks I’m a bad influence but I suspect that my eye condition strikes a deep chord of distrust in her ovaries. I’m just a bad genetic choice for her daughter. Sorry, darling, evolutionary psychology is just not that into you.

  ‘I know you must feel awful, just awful, but there was really no reason to come,’ Sandra says. She fake-kisses me on both cheeks and leads me away from her relatives. ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything, but in the meantime perh
aps you can speak to Sergeant Schoeman about Esmé’s disappearance. Maybe you know something that might help.’ She ushers me into the kitchen.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Sandra says to the man sitting at the kitchen table, ‘this is Baxter. Esmé’s … friend. Perhaps he can help.’ She pats me once on the shoulder and then returns to the grieving event of the season.

  Sergeant Schoeman is big man. No, let’s not euphemise. He is fat. Hugely fat. Obese, in fact. To clarify, Sergeant Schoeman is the Michelin man of the South African police force, a giant cream doughnut of a man stuffed into a worn leather jacket. A dark goatee wraps around his lips like he’s been huffing on an exhaust pipe. He nods to me and points to the chair across the table from his.

  ‘So you’re the boyfriend, sugar?’ he drawls as I sit down.

  ‘What did you call me?’ I say.

  ‘Um, nothing,’ he says, his large face drawing inward into a deep scowl. ‘I’m asking the questions around here. Name?’

  ‘Baxter Zevcenko,’ I say.

  ‘Zevcenko, Zevcenko,’ he says, tapping his pen against his chin. ‘Not one of the Zevcenkos that used to live in Bergvliet?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, wait, that wasn’t Zevcenko, that was Zarkowitz. First question. Did you make the double-backed beast with your disappeared lover?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Coitus, sexual intercourse, the horizontal mambo on the dance floor of love, the –’

  ‘OK cop, pig, orificer, I get the idea. How’s that relevant?’ I say.

  He curls his mouth into a smile. ‘Just trying to ascertain whether it’s a crime of passion,’ he says, scribbling something in his notebook. His hand is huge but he writes delicately, as if he were writing in a fluffy pink diary instead of a police notebook.

  ‘You think I had something to do with this?’ I say.

  ‘Just answer the question,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I had sex with her.’

  ‘Nice!’ he says, holding his hand up for a high five.

  I stare at him. He chuckles. ‘The thing that interests me is that you also knew Jody Fuller.’

  ‘I barely knew Jody,’ I stutter. ‘And why do you think Esmé was taken by the Mountain Killer? From what I’ve read in the papers this isn’t exactly his MO.’

  ‘I’d agree with you,’ he says. ‘If it wasn’t for the large eye carved into her wall.’

  He opens an envelope and slides a photograph across the table. It’s a picture of Esmé’s room and, indeed, a large jagged eye has been carved into the wallpaper.

  ‘What do you know about the Eye of the Sieners?’ Schoeman asks, tapping the photograph with a thick, sausage-like finger. The word ‘Sieners’ reverberates through my mind. ‘That’s what it’s called,’ he continues. ‘The eye. It’s some Afrikaans mystical bullshit.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I say, averting my eyes from the photograph.

  ‘Like you say, this is something that the Killer has never done before. So maybe this is a special case. Maybe he has a special relationship with Esmé.’

  ‘Stop beating around the bush,’ I say, sliding the photograph back across the table. ‘Just spit it out.’

  Schoeman smiles, baring his canines and causing his jowls to wobble. ‘Full of yourself, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘But OK, I’ll say it. I think you have something to do with Esmé’s disappearance.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I say, standing up. He leans across the table, surprisingly quickly for a fat guy, and grabs my hand. With a jerk he twists it back so that pain shoots up my arm, forcing me to sit back down.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I hiss through the pain. ‘That fucking hurts.’

  ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re dealing with your average dull-witted cop, Baxter,’ he says, leaning in close to my face. ‘I’m going to catch the Killer and I’m not messing around.’ He lets go of my hand and leans back in his seat. ‘So I’m only going to ask you this once: anything you feel like getting off your chest?’

  ‘No,’ I say, rubbing my hand. ‘I didn’t kidnap Esmé. So why don’t you do your job and find out who did?’

  ‘Baxter?’ he says as I get up to leave.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you’re the Mountain Killer I’m going to find out.’

  I slip out of a side door and walk around the back to Esmé’s apartment. Judging by the grey powder on the door frame the place has already been fingerprinted. I look around for cops but the media circus out front is keeping them busy. I nudge the door open with my elbow and step inside. There’s a pang in my heart as I look through her collection of curios. Everything is pretty much the way it was when I’d last been here.

  I look carefully through her stuff but nothing is out of place. I’m about to leave when I see something sticking out from underneath her dresser. I get down on my knees to look at it. It’s a small skeleton. Hammy. He looks like he’s been gnawed on by some kind of animal. Jesus. I push the skeleton away with my foot and notice something else as I stand up. A strangely shaped grey tooth is poking out from beneath the rug next to the dresser. I pick it up. The one side is serrated and it’s warm to the touch. There’s something really odd about it. Out of the corner of my eye it looks like it’s glowing.

  It’s not something Esmé’s stolen. I know that because she would have told me the story of the thievery, deftly weaving the tale of the sleight of hand and misdirection that had allowed her to make off with her prize. I slip it into my pocket and then climb over the back wall of her garden and into the alleyway behind her house. I slink round the front, grab my bike and push it slowly along the canal.

  I put my hand in my pocket and feel the tooth as I walk home. It’s possible that she intentionally left it there to tell me something. But what? Alternatively it’s some kind of new calling card for the Mountain Killer, but I can’t even begin to process that. This emotionally vulnerable thing is completely new to me and, to be honest, I can’t really see the point of it. What’s the point of an internal state that makes it impossible for you to think about things rationally? Surely the opposite should apply. Surely I should be rational, clinical and lucid enough to evaluate all of the evidence objectively. But the dull ache in my chest, and the spiralling cacophony of worry that wraps itself around my head, just won’t listen to reason.

  I squeeze my hand tightly around the tooth and wheel my bike back through the mud, grass and litter next to the canal.

  It’s one o’clock in the morning before I admit that the insomnia has won. I wait until I can hear the familiar hiss of my parents’ white-noise machine and then take my bike out of the garage and pedal slowly through the suburbs. A thin dog slides through the shadows in front of me like an eel. I aim my bike at it and it disappears into the night.

  I freewheel down a hill toward the canal and the smell of kids smoking joints in the corners curls around me like a cloak, reaching the old oak tree that looms over the canal. I lean against the gnarled oak and run my fingers over the scarred bark. This is where I kissed Jody Fuller.

  Jody Fuller is dead. I try to imagine her empty body and can’t. All I can think of is the milky taste of her mouth and the aloof look in her eyes. I wonder how many other people kissed her. Am I alone or part of an exclusive club that know what her lips tasted like? ‘Please don’t let Esmé be dead,’ I whisper to the tree.

  ‘Jy,’ a whisper comes from inside the canal like the sound of a bicycle tyre deflating. I stare down into the dark concrete channel and see a man slumped against the wall of the canal. ‘Give me an entjie,’ he says, putting his fingers to his mouth in the universal gesture for ‘cigarette’.

  I move a little closer and see that he is sitting on an old paint tin, grinning up at me toothlessly. His face is covered in the grey-green ink of prison tattoos, an esoteric infographic of rank, affiliation and brutal misdeed that I’m glad I can’t decipher.

  One of his eyes is milky white. He hoists a battered three-
stringed guitar onto his lap and widens his gummy grin. I pull my cigarettes from my pocket and toss one down to him, keeping one foot on the pedal and ready just in case he is meaning to continue this conversation with a knife.

  He takes the cigarette and I throw him down the lighter. He cups over the cigarette and his face glows orange as he lights it. ‘Who don’t you want to be dead, laaitie?’ he murmurs around the cig.

  ‘Nobody,’ I say. ‘Can I have my lighter back?’

  ‘You remind me of a girl I once met. On a battlefield long ago. Who are you praying to?’

  ‘I wasn’t praying,’ I say.

  He takes a drag of the cigarette and plucks one of the strings on the guitar. It sends a discordant note jangling into the night. ‘You see down there?’ He waves the cigarette in a circle to indicate an area further downriver. The light from the coal burns a chaotic pattern on my retina. ‘That’s where two young men were stripped naked and executed by gangsters as part of an initiation.’ He takes another drag. ‘And further down a Congolese refugee hanged himself from a tree because he couldn’t get a passport. Strange fruit for motorists to gawk at on their morning commute. And the world forgets but this black river remembers and carries the memories. This is where the lost spirits of the dead come to cross. I am the singer of souls. I lay to rest the spirits of the dead and make sure their memories remain alive,’ he says softly, his milky eye rolling back in his head as if examining a part of his brain.

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Does that pay well?’

  He ignores me and begins to sing a wordless song, his voice low and guttural like the gurgling of one of the sewage pipes that empties into the dark water of the canal. The tone rises and falls and then he begins to chant:

  ‘At the beginning of time two brothers, the Mantis and the Octopus, travelled the depths of space searching for a place to call their own. They came upon a planet, untouched and virgin and they each claimed it for themselves. In order to settle the dispute they had a contest. Whoever could give birth to the best creations would claim the world for their own.’