I climbed the stairs to our third-floor offices, arriving hot and speechless. Tumi at her front desk looked at me, brightened up and smiled. I usually enjoyed that smile but this time I just nodded and walked past her without a word of encouragement or appreciation.
It was rude of me but boundaries had to be re-established, I said to myself, and anyway she could see that I was hot and stressed. She could also see that I had come from the direction of the stairway rather than the lifts. So I had a practical excuse. All the same, boundaries had to be . . .
Who was I fooling? I had got used to her being there. She had not told me anything about leaving and I had thought we were friends at the least.
I got stuck into it at my desk. I had to put all my records and notes as straight as possible. They had to be immediately understandable if they were to be passed on to someone else. I did not want someone phoning me every few minutes asking for explanations. We have these four enthusiastic freelancers, our modest tilt at unemployment – three young men and one young woman who do most of the preliminary research, surveillance and legwork and who are the source of endless headaches, mercifully tempered by their contagious optimism and easy laughter. Ask, don’t assume – Thekiso had dinned that mantra into their recalcitrant young heads until they knew it by heart and often mimicked him. He pretended that it was beneath him to notice.
We also have this prim but embittered old hatchet we all call Mama Mary, who runs everything and everyone out of a shoebox-sized closet next to Thekiso’s office. I suspect we are all secretly a bit afraid of her silent disapproval and the unwavering eye that sees through closed doors. At least I am, although I call it respect. Fortunately, I seldom see her as she always has her door shut and inviolable. I understand that she was once a well-regarded manager of a gospel-music group until a plagiarism stink enveloped one of her rising stars. She hitched her waning star to Thekiso’s uncertain phoenix after he helped clear her name. But she had been finished in the gospel-music business by the time that reprieve came.
I left at five-thirty with a half-formed idea of going around to one of the building sites, but then rejected it. I would only end up countermanding Thekiso and creating confusion and doubt amongst the workers. And anyway there was that construction supervisor Thekiso had found after Lesego’s accident – an experienced man who had lost his job at a major company after getting hopelessly entangled in a fraud involving missing materials. People at both ends of the supply chain claimed the materials were never delivered, some said they were scrapped in the normal way, others that they had gone over the fence. He had been in charge and got scrapped too. Thekiso and Ditoro had been unable to prove or disprove the lingering suspicions about him to anyone’s complete satisfaction. All the same, Thekiso had planted a spy amongst the workers in the form of an additional security guard and night watchman to keep an eye on him. Oh sure, Thekiso gave people second chances but that did not mean he was a saint.
I drove home to Spruitview in the east of Johannesburg. We were always thinking of moving to another suburb, particularly with the babies coming, but somehow something always got in the way.
Lesego had plans for a much bigger yard with rolling green lawns where small children could gambol safely and uninhibited. But she also resented the idea of leaving our present house, where she was beginning to feel at home. After all, this is where we started our life together. And it was a pleasant, quiet neighbourhood with people like us, with comparable backgrounds and similar tastes and so on. People you shared memories with. People you could like or dislike without prejudice and malice.
This evening the home fires were burning low. Malesiba, our cleaning woman from Lesotho, lived in the back-yard room and kept the house immaculate. But it no longer felt like the hopeful home we had been trying to create. It felt cold, even though the lingering summer heat still hovered in it.
I watched the early evening news, which was full of highly articulate men and women urging me to support them. Eloquent and emphatic as they all were, they still said nothing that talked to me. Somewhere along the line I had lost my place in the political and social dance of the country. True to say, I had not tried very hard to reclaim it – and what was really left to reclaim? As I listened to these good people my own position seemed totally irretrievable – a thousand years from now their clones would be saying the same things, and I was already weary of it.
I switched the television set off and went into our makeshift study. The other spare bedroom had been set aside for the children and the door was seldom opened; I usually hurried past like I was passing a haunted forest. I hesitated and nearly opened the door, but didn’t.
Lesego made use of the study much more frequently than I did, so it had quickly come to be referred to as Lesego’s study, even by our friends and casual visitors. It would be the perfect place for my reading tonight. More businesslike, you know, sitting on a businesslike chair with the file on a businesslike desk. The comfortable lounge sofas seemed almost self-indulgent.
I began to read the orange file. The files in our office are colour-coded. It is a simple, outdated system but it works for us. Orange means that someone had at some point thought that this case might have some promise. Green means you go for it full throttle, it is a winner. Red means treat this with caution, as it is not likely to go anywhere. There are other variations and colours that we use, but those are the basic codes. We use these files also because most of our clients still prefer the solidity of a file full of papers, rather than being told that something is on the computer. And what about these stories about anyone gaining access to any computer? some ask belligerently, to show off what they know.
So, what was Sandile Nkosi doing in this file? Who was he when he was not misrepresenting facts in the city streets?
It was an interesting story but depressingly familiar . . . of things begun with high hopes and ending in bitter disappointment. Of the few who get away with the fat and the gravy, and the many left with empty plates and dry bones at the end of the grand feast.
The money, as could be expected, was gone and there were some who wanted to know where. The legal route was, of course, out of the question to people like these. It was too long, too expensive, they wailed. But really they were the kind of shy people who feared all sorts of legal embarrassments; people who wanted to keep things quiet and dark, but did not know how to go about getting information for themselves, wanting to keep their hands clean for as long as possible. This was the current thuggish thinking in the country, of course.
I wondered if I wanted to go on with this. I was getting tired of tales of woe from people who had got ripped off by smarter crooks while plotting to rip off people less smart than themselves. They posed as injured innocents when they would not have given a solitary sigh about the people who had lost out through their own questionable activities.
I got up, wandered to the kitchen and got myself a cold beer from the fridge, creepily conscious of the emptiness of the house. I knew I had to get through that damn file, if only to make Lesego’s and my loss mean something.
That had been the advice old MaMolefe back in Marakong-a-Badimo had given me over the phone that terrible weekend – when I had told her the reason we could not have her great-granddaughter Pono to visit us as she was supposed to. Lesego had been battling her way out of the city to fetch her that Friday when the accident happened.
“Make it mean something! Bokao – Meaning. That’s the only thing!” she had commanded. I could have told her that as far as the police were concerned the case was closed and that Lesego and I were still too shocked to even talk about it. But I remembered her low opinion of the police and let it go. Now the old woman’s words seemed to have been pointed and far-sighted.
I sat down again at the desk and began reading Thekiso’s notes. Having become used to his terse style, I could put a lot of it together without
