The Shallows Page 4

  He went back into the house. ‘Nobody,’ he said. She said nothing. Looked down at her hands.

  ‘This man who’s stalking you,’ he said, ‘is he capable … do you have reason to be afraid of him?’

  She shrugged. She didn’t know. She thought his friends were a bad influence. And he was also thoroughly mixed-up in his head. But she didn’t know. It depended on who he was hanging out with.

  In what way was he mixed-up in his head? he asked.

  He’d had this thing about her ever since schooldays, but she’d never been interested in him. He’d come to Cape Town to look for a job. But she didn’t think he’d found one yet. She thought he was hanging out with tik-heads now.

  Had she talked to him yet?

  Not really since coming here. Just that once before she had the fit.

  What had he said then?

  He’d threatened her. (She looked down. Unwilling to talk.)

  With what?

  He’d said she wouldn’t get away. He’d come after her until she went with him. If she didn’t want to, he’d make her pay.

  ‘You can’t report him to the police?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘He’s done nothing yet,’ she said softly.

  ‘So do you have to wait until he does do something?!’ he asked.

  She shrugged again.

  The companionable atmosphere had been disrupted. Shortly afterwards she went to her room. He remained behind on his own at the kitchen table. Restless and disgruntled. That was how he’d sat at the table in their apartment in New York as well. Isabel had cried every morning. In the afternoon she hadn’t talked at all. Later he’d been afraid for her, she was so doggedly desperate in her blue dressing gown. They’d had moments of silent closeness on the subway, in streets on their way to museums, but the thrill of New York had largely passed them by. A sullenness had come over him. Nevertheless he’d still desired her at times. Desired her intensely. He’d wanted to blast open her blue dressing gown and stoke her like a furnace. Until she spontaneously burst into flame and they were consumed by it. In the museums only Oriental art had retained its appeal for him. The delicate hand of Jizō’s Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha from the twelfth or thirteenth century. The eleventh-century Bodhisattva from the Northern Song dynasty with its erect back and proud, enlightened-ecstatic facial expression. Western art, with very few exceptions, no longer did it for him. El Greco’s View of Toledo and the portrait of the cardinal; the work of Jeff Koons (Ilona’s trim little butt-hole).

  Latish the next afternoon he shopped – for the first time in weeks – extensively for ingredients. Tonight he was going to cook. He wanted to ask Charelle if she wanted to join him for dinner. He hadn’t cooked properly for a long time and he was a good cook. He made a green Thai curry. The kitchen was filled with enticing aromas. The windowpanes steamed over. The unusual heat had broken. It had started raining suddenly. A good day for curry. He didn’t want to invite her officially, he was afraid it might scare her off. He’d take the chance. Perhaps she wasn’t even coming home, or had other plans, although thus far she’d not often gone out during the week. Not that he’d really taken note all that carefully before.

  She came home in the early evening. Alert eyes, observant. How had she got home? Took a taxi, she said, then walked a few blocks. On her cheeks again the dark-red blush (from the brisk walk, with excitement?), and fine droplets of water in her dense hair. He invited her to have supper with him, he’d made food, he said, she might as well. At first she seemed a bit undecided. But she let herself be persuaded. Together they sat in the steamed-up kitchen. He and the child with the slender brown wrists like Tamar in the Bible. (Child?) Cut off from the world, and secure, while sitting here. She ate. She was evidently hungry. He hadn’t given much thought before to what she actually lived on, because in the fridge there was hardly anything: now and again a tub of yoghurt, a little block of cheese, a container with cheap margarine. He asked her about her family on the West Coast. When she’d started taking photos. They drank wine and she talked more freely than before. She’d started taking photos at high school, university students had handed out small cameras to the kids as part of a project. She’d been crazy about it from the start. She’d photographed everything in sight. Mainly the people of the town. The cemetery. The landscape. Gradually she’d become more daring. Before leaving the town she’d made a series of self-portraits in weird contexts. She had lots of new ideas – the ideas just came. She was enjoying her course at the art school – it was challenging, and the little job she was doing on the side wasn’t too bad. She helped out two afternoons a week in a friend’s hairdressing salon. Did the clients’ nails and so on. (To his shame he’d never even asked what she did.) She’d been in the city for two years now, but this was her first year at art school. She’d worked hard to save up for it. Her skin was remarkably soft, flawless like that of a prepubescent girl. They didn’t talk about the guy who was threatening her, but it was there, as a given between them. He was sure that she also sensed it.

  The next day he experienced a strange excitement. He was going to cook again that evening. Perhaps they could now have supper together more often. At least she’d be having a decent, nutritious meal every day.

  He planned the menu in detail. He was stepping with a lighter tread; the students were less irksome than usual. Even the girl who wanted to work on satanism seemed less ridiculous. He was patient with her, even though she didn’t seem to be making much headway. Perhaps she could do something with the installation project after all. He was supportive. To such an extent that in an unguarded moment he found her staring at him fixedly, something she hadn’t done before. Perhaps she thought he was trying to seduce her – how could he know what was happening in that head. Perhaps she thought he was planning to tumble her on the leopard-skin rug that she wanted to use in her installation (based on a You photo of a ‘satanic pit’ that had been discovered in an abandoned mineshaft), commit indecent acts with her. Kids nowadays were probably warned at length against paedophiles.

  That evening he made an aromatic chicken dish. Top drawer, he thought. Charelle joined him more readily. They drank wine and she talked even more freely than the previous evening. Was Charelle a family name? he enquired cautiously. No, she said, coloured people were fond of fancy names. It was a bit of a fashion, names like Lisché and Shinique and Izona. What kind of people were her parents? he asked. She shrugged. Simple small-town people. Conservative. Religious. And she? She just shrugged again. But she did believe in the devil? She just laughed, shook her head in denial. They talked about the art they liked. She was clearly eager to get to know as much as possible about contemporary art. (Unlike his blasé, torpid students at the art school.) She had a habit of lifting her eyebrows when talking animatedly about something. (Towards the end Isabel’s eyebrows were like two crossed swords – pale, like her hair.) He told her about Ilya Kabakov, whose work he was studying with renewed interest of late. (To his regret there had been none of it to be seen in New York.) She listened with interest; lively eyes. He asked her about her youth. Her father had at first worked at a crayfish factory in Klippiesbaai, she was born there, but later they moved to Veldenburg, where he was now working for a timber firm. She’d gone to school there, in the town. But she’d known from an early age that she wanted more from life. She wanted to be an art photographer. That was her purpose with her training. Had she made many friends in the city? No, she was a bit of a loner. And the man, the guy who was pestering her? He’d only arrived in Cape Town at the beginning of the year.

  He cautioned himself not to get too familiar with her, to keep an appropriate distance. The next two evenings they ate together again. She showed him her portfolio. He was impressed. Surprising, that this girl, who’d grown up in a small West Coast village, with probably no proper high school education and very limited exposure to international art, could produce work that was so fresh. Like Cindy Sherman, she posed and photographed herself in all kinds of artificial si
tuations. One of these self-portraits had been taken in a butchery, with metres of sausage wound round her naked body. (It shocked him, he had to admit.) He shouldn’t underestimate her – delicate wrists or not, she was daring, focused and ambitious. If she could persevere, she could, with her natural talent and ingenuity, go far.

  Seven

  Late summer turned to autumn. It rained. It gradually got cooler. Two days a week he was at the art school. The rest of the time he spent in his studio. It was not a space that he much liked, he was renting it temporarily, he’d have to start looking out for something else. He was working on figures that he carved from wood – simple, stylised figures, with strange heads: sometimes of animals, sometimes of humans. Sometimes standing, sometimes kneeling, with exaggerated genitals. Sometimes even with tails, grinning, with grimaces. It had been quite a few years since he’d last painted, only carving, and drawing. He was booked at his gallery for an exhibition the following year.

  In the weeks after Charelle’s epileptic seizure Nick got into the habit of cooking supper for the two of them at least twice a week and often also over weekends. He quizzed her about the guy who’d threatened her. No, she said, he wasn’t stalking her any more. She hadn’t seen him for a long time. She didn’t know where he was hanging out nowadays. But with him she could never be sure – he had a weak character. What did she mean? he asked. No, it wouldn’t surprise her if he had criminal tendencies as well. She’d seen it coming from far away. Ever since school. Nick didn’t notice any more suspect motor cars in front of or in the vicinity of the house, and there was no repetition of the swearing incident.

  It was quite a bit cooler by now, and he found the evenings with Charelle cosy in the warm, steamed-up kitchen. He started to look forward to these occasions. He took trouble over the food. He thought she was gradually getting to feel more at ease with him. He found her sharp, witty; the more comfortable she got with him, the more she dared – he teased her about the devil, and she teased back. He found her pretty. Uncommon, with the slender wrists and the dense, warm hair. Although she wasn’t his type, he found her sexy. She started cautiously questioning him about his life, about his work. He didn’t reveal much. A bit about Isabel. About the trip to New York. He told her what he was working on, but didn’t take her to his studio. Perhaps later. He was cautious. When she needed a book, he sometimes brought it from the art school for her. She told him about her childhood and about her schooldays. When she was ten, they’d moved to Veldenburg, her father had found a better job there. When she started taking photos at the age of fifteen, she wanted to document everything around her. She photographed the young people in the township, outside the town. She photographed things at random, like people’s back yards, and the food on their tables, everything that caught her eye. She liked taking photos in the cemetery of all the new graves being added every day. And of the pregnant girls standing with their arms around their friends (never a father in sight). And of the young mothers with their babies – the girls that she felt sorry for, because once they had a child on the hip, that was the end of their lives. She was twenty-three. (Older than she looked.) She’d worked in the town for a few years to earn money before coming to Cape Town. They often talked about art. It was going well for her at the art school. She was glad she was doing the course. It had been a good decision. She also liked her room very much. She’d never had so much space to herself, she said again. Sometimes she felt guilty about that, but she wasn’t complaining. She’d thought she’d outgrown her epilepsy – she’d stopped taking medication for it a long time ago. She’d been so ashamed, she said, after he’d come across her that day. No, he said, no, that she should never feel. He hesitated to ask her whether she’d ever been in a serious relationship. He was scared she’d take it the wrong way. But she did once volunteer the information that when she’d had a relationship with someone after school the guy who was stalking her now had been bitterly jealous.

  She told him how miserable she’d been the first few weeks in Cape Town. How she’d missed her parents and the familiar surroundings of the village. Obs had felt dangerous, the little streets were so narrow. She’d never known from which direction she could expect danger. In Main Road and everywhere the non-stop hooting of taxis had rattled her. The mountain she’d only later started to find beautiful. But she still preferred the West Coast and surroundings.

  Isabel was always present, when he and Charelle were having supper in the kitchen. Naggingly, under the surface – always just outside his field of vision, just beyond his sphere of consciousness. He considered making a statue, a kind of harpy-like figure, with the body of a bird and the head of a woman, balancing on the edge of a bowl, or a dish, in which his head, the size of a hen’s egg, was displayed.

  Apart from his sketchbooks, in which he drew every day, he started working again on large sheets of paper of 150 x 110 cm each. In his drawing books he drew little elongated figures, figures on fire, figures with chopped-off limbs, with pig’s snouts, skull-like heads, comic-eyed heads and bulging cheeks, sideburns – all distorted in some way or other. He drew skulls and crosses, coffins, glowing coals, flames and demons – all the props and paraphernalia of hell – inspired by their medieval depictions. But on the large sheets of paper he did not distort the figures. On a large, barren plane he drew a multitude of male figures doing violence to one another in various ways: shooting, beating with sticks, burying, suffocating, torturing, hanging and sometimes even executing. Not a tree, shrub, plant or blade of grass on this vast plane, only the men violently harming one another, in every conceivable manner.

  Sometimes in the late afternoon, after working in his studio all day, he had a beer with Marthinus. Marthinus often invited him to watch DVDs at his place in the evening, but Nick accepted only on those evenings he wasn’t cooking for himself and Charelle. He and Marthinus watched, among others, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (with crazy Klaus Kinski – evidently one of Marthinus’ heroes). They watched a few classic masterpieces of Japanese cinema. Woman in the Dunes and Ran made a great impression on him. The first of these he had seen before, but for some reason he found it painful to watch it now. It was something to do with the texture of the woman’s skin. For days he was still under the spell of the atmosphere of the two films. Afterwards Marthinus usually had a fair amount to say about the DVDs. An intense man, who reacted enthusiastically to everything that interested him.

  The parents of Karlien, the student doing the satanism project, came to see him one morning. The mother was small, blonde, sexy, tanned, dressed in riding gear. Luxuriant eyelashes, lavish mascara. A trophy wife? The father looked familiar to Nick, some big-shot businessman. He was wearing a sports jacket and smelled of liquor, at eleven o’clock in the morning. The mother did the talking. The father looked bored, checked his watch every so often. They were concerned about Karlien. They did not like the idea that she was meddling with satanism for her project. They didn’t think it was a healthy interest. They thought it might lead her astray. Art was her life, it was her dream, the great interest in her life, apart from horse riding. And her little dogs. She was determined to make it in the world of art. (This was news to Nick.) They were concerned about her, because at home they could still keep an eye on her, but she’d moved into a flat in town with a friend a while ago. Nick didn’t know how to respond. The mother looked pleasant enough, but the father looked like a real bastard. The sort who thought art was a waste of time.

  *

  Charelle told him one evening about the first day she arrived in Cape Town two years ago. She’d got a lift from Veldenburg with somebody, it was cold in the early morning when he dropped her in Cape Town. She’d had bad period pain (Nick was wrong-footed by this intimate disclosure), and she was scared of the mountain. She didn’t want to look at it. The mountain was everywhere. She’d be staying temporarily in a friend’s room in a house, until she found her own place, while the friend was overseas. The domestic had let her in. She’d told her to wait in the kitchen. Late
r she’d heard someone come in. The person went into one of the front rooms, closed the door, and started crying bitterly. She’d remained sitting aghast at the kitchen table. Later the girl had come out and joined her in the kitchen. Her parents’ dog was dying, she said, and made them both tea.

  Nick was cautious at all times. Not a word, not a gesture that could possibly give her the wrong impression. He was careful never to say too much about himself. He kept his distance. It was only in the kitchen that they were ever together – never in any other place in the house. The single exception was the day she had the epileptic seizure, when he’d gone into her room. Sometimes the woman with the turban came to pick her up for the weekend, and once or twice she visited her parents in Veldenburg. She always informed him when she was going away for the weekend.

  *

  One Saturday morning in mid-April Marthinus knocked at his door at the crack of dawn. He was wearing a woollen cap and an army overcoat. He blew on his hands and stamped his feet. It was a cold morning. Nick glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see a pig at Marthinus’ heels. Nick invited him in. They sat at the kitchen table. Nick made them some tea.

  ‘Did you see?’ asked Marthinus.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The news.’

  ‘No, what?’ He hadn’t watched television for a long time. (Of late too busy preparing food in the evenings.)

  ‘A failed assassination attempt on a businessman in the Moorreesburg vicinity. An unknown man and three other people are under suspicion. The police are searching for them.’

  ‘So? Nothing out of the ordinary there.’

  Could he smoke?

  Sure.

  ‘No, not at first sight!’ said Marthinus and blew out the match. (What an animated guy this was. He reminded Nick of a cousin of his, the son of his father’s eldest brother. Always full of bright ideas.) ‘No, but wait for it – the other three people are psychiatric patients on the run!’