7 Days Read Online Free PDF

alcoholics … that’s double the risk.’
    He had protested and said they were only friends, he could support her, encourage her, they could attend AA gatherings together. And Doc had just shaken his head and said, ‘Careful.’
    How had he supported her tonight?
    He should have listened to Doc. Doc knew the ‘just friends’ explanation was a smokescreen. Doc could see he
liked
Alexa. More and more.
    And she liked him, he had thought.
    And now? Now he’d fucked it all up.
    Why did he always do that? Why was his life never simple? Never fucking ever. He was forty-five, the age at which you are supposed to reach inner calm and wisdom and resignation, the age at which you are supposed to have all your life shit sorted out. But not him. His lifewas constant chaos. An endless stream of trouble, a never-ending struggle to cope. But he just could not win, it was one thing on top of another. You could never get ahead.
    He had only just, this past month, started to get used to the whole divorce thing, tried to make peace with the fact that he and Anna were over. Totally, irretrievably over. He still struggled with the fact that she was ever more seriously involved with a lawyer. A fucking lawyer. But he was working on that, fuck knows, he was trying.
    He had cut back to pay the maintenance, and his contribution to Carla’s studies, and he could almost live with that, though he felt he was being ripped off, he paid far more than Anna, and they earned about the same.
    He’d worked hard the past weeks to fit in with the Hawks, the new relationship, the new structures, the new ranks. Everybody’s rank had changed, back to the military hierarchy of the old days. Everybody’s except his own, because a captain was still a captain. But he had accepted that too.
    He had got back into a routine with his children. Carla, who was studying drama at Stellenbosch. Drama, as though she hadn’t had enough drama in her life with an alcoholic policeman father and the whole divorce disaster. Drama. Where would the child find work? And his son, Fritz, who might or might not pass Matric, because he was playing guitar for Jack Parow’s band. Jack Parow. Hip hop or rap or whatever you called it, swore worse than a policeman. But what could he do? Fritz had talent – Jack had approached him personally, come and play for me. Griessel had made peace with the fact that the world had changed, that children had choices today, that their approach to careers was different.
    Peace with many things. On the brink of getting things straight.
    And now in one night he had made a complete arse of himself in front of three people for whom he had immense respect: Anton Goosen, Lize Beekman, and Alexa Barnard. And driven the last one to drink.
    He would just have to accept it. He was a fuck-up.
    The words hung for a moment in his thoughts and he realised: it was the swearing. That was the problem, the thing that had caused all the trouble tonight. Here, now, it had to end. He was through withswearing. Finished. For the rest of his life. The same way he had stopped drinking, he would stop fucking swearing too.
    And tomorrow, when she was sober, he would explain to Alexa about the Sloet case and ask her forgiveness, and get her to phone the other two, so she could tell them, it was all due to admiration and nerves, maybe it happened to other people too, maybe he wasn’t the first.
    And then he thought how beautiful Alexa had looked and his fleeting hope, at her house, that he would get lucky tonight, and he snorted in disgust at himself, at
this
world, in his Hawks BMW on the N1. And he thought, life is never fu—Damn. Life is never
flipping
simple.
    He found no pleasure in his new word.
    He stopped at the Artscape. His cellphone rang. It must be the centre manager again, about Alexa. He answered hastily, to say he had arrived.
    ‘Griessel.’
    ‘Captain, it’s Tommy Nxesi from Green Point.’ There was a wary note to his voice.
    It took a moment to register