Devil's Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

feels caught out and embarrassed is me. As if I have no fucking right to be there. And that’s saying something, because there isn’t much I haven’t seen in my line of work, the whole range from the shit-smelling awful to the bloody beautiful. Take my word. Feeling trapped like a schoolboy in a girls’ locker room, I bend over to start fiddling with the straps of the rucksack again. Then it occurs to me that I might do the gentlemanly thing and offer an apology. I straighten up. But it’s too late. The lady has vanished.
    And not only the lady. The bloody pool too.
    I broke through the underbrush and tangled weeds to where it had been a minute ago, but there was no sign of water. The hole was there, a rough rectangle among the rocks, but it was empty and quite dried up. So obviously there was no sign of wet footprints either.
    Quite Normal
    Now don’t tell me it was a mirage, a hallucination prompted by a too rampant urge and too little occasion. She was there . I can recall every damn detail. Not only the mane of tumbling hair, the straight black eyebrows, the cheekbones, the wide mouth, but something else I’d like to add for future reference, as it is of some importance. The girl had four tits. One pair quite normal, of the size and shape one would expect, the nipples perched like two bees (who said it first?) exactly where one would look for them. And then, a narrow hand’s breadth below them, like small smudges on an artist’s paper, something first drawn, then erased, but not quite, not altogether, another pair. Not proper-sized boobs, these, only a suggestion of two mild swellings, stings of the aforementioned bees; but no doubt about the nipples. You think this is the kind of thing I could have imagined?
    I can remember telling myself: Now this is something I wouldn’t mind having a closer look at. Investigative journalism. But the thought also brought a tinge of guilt, as if with that candid gaze she could read my mind (the lingering stain of fucking Calvinism, like a dirty rim in the bath); and that may well have been the reason why I bent down over, the rucksack again. The truth, almost the whole truth, and nothing but.
    While I was still scouting among the sparse dry reeds fringing the edge of the dried-up rock pool, in search of some trace of her, a voice behind me said:
    “So there you are.”

Story of My Life
    M Y FIRST THOUGHT, when I returned home after Little-Lukas’s death, was that the bloody accident had once again put paid to all hope of doing something on the Devil’s Valley. Story of my life. But the boy kept haunting me. A few days after the accident I phoned his landlady to find out whether she’d heard anything from his relatives; and about funeral arrangements, that kind of thing. (From our crime reporter.) No, to both questions. There had been no news from family and friends, and unless someone turned up to claim the body the municipality would probably have him buried. The rent, she reminded me, was still outstanding too.
    I usually put on a tough-guy act, but in the end I’m a soft touch. I mean, I shout at the fucking bergies who squat on the stoep, then slip them the odd rand, even though I know bloody well it will go straight into a bottle of blue-train. As a result, every month I’d screw up my budget, and Sylvia would have her field day. At least that is now over and done with. Anyway, in an unguarded moment I undertook to pay the landlady her blasted rent, as well as the funeral costs if no relatives pitched up during the next week. Three thousand two hundred and thirty-one rand for a simple cremation, no service, no coffin, no nothing; only a nondescript little brown cardboard box with Little-Lukas’s ashes, delivered on my doorstep by a tall man who looked like Groucho Marx.
    Abandoned Notes
    What was to be done with the box? I considered arranging a burial, but the picture of Groucho, the landlady and myself in the cemetery on a wet winter’s day in Cape Town was too