Margie Orford knows bullets. She knows inmates, and she knows gangs. I know because I’ve been there, at Orford’s launches and talks – one of them inside the Groot Drakenstein prison – where she’s explained how she’s fired the arms, spoken with the murderers and rapists, chased after the hijackers, travelled shotgun in the police van.
Orford’s knowledge is of the dangerous sort – it’s possibly what got her manuscript for her latest crime novel, Daddy’s Girl, stolen recently. Word has it that she employed all her insight into the mind of the criminal to get it back.
Daddy’s Girl, a prequel in Orford’s Clare Hart series of thrillers, is being launched at the Book Lounge tonight, so if you’re in the mood for a good krimi yarn, don’t miss it.
Meanwhile, BOOK SA is proud to present the book’s first chapter:
* * * * * * * *
August the eighth
THURSDAY
One
A grey heron waited in the reeds, beak poised above the pool.
When the prison gates opened for the man, the bird flew off. The fish dived, a flash in the tea-brown water.
Five-thirty. Nearly weekend.
The guards impatient to get home at the end of a long shift.
The man’s parole papers filed under a name not his own.
His fingers curled around the hundred rand note from the Prisoners’ Friend Society. He’d already discarded the address of the Christian halfway house expecting his arrival.
The man crossed the deserted road.
He wore borrowed trousers, a jacket that exposed his bony wrists, a white shirt. The smell of another man’s day in court, the sweat that came with the clock-stopping moment of sentence.
He waited, the last rays of the weak August sun warm on his back.
The guards packed up, listening as the radio spat out Cape Town’s news.
In the distance, the rattle of a minibus taxi.
It crested the rise, and he flattened his blade-thin body into a ditch next to the road.
The driver stopped. The guards glanced up: the new shift arriving. Nothing much to mention. Thursday would be a quiet night. They handed over, boarded the taxi, sped home.
Darkness descended.
The prisoner dusted off his clothes, eyes focused fifty metres ahead. The length of an exercise yard.
Ex-prisoner.
He cut through farmland, a shadow slipping down the serried vines.
The runty dogs lying between the workers’ cottages yapped.
A woman making her way home, stopped. She listened, but the dogs fell silent, and she walked on. Uncertain.
The man watched her, at ease. Prison erases a man’s smell, teaches him the art of absence.
Above him, the stars wheeled, freed from the barred square that had contained his nights for so many years.
On the stoep of a gabled farmhouse, dogs lifted their heads. Then settled again. Inside by the fire, the owners sipped brandy as they glanced at the day’s headlines.
He did not slow down as he scythed through the night.
At the crossroads, he orientated himself and headed for Cape Town.
~
No one would be waiting for him.
No one had, not since his mother’s funeral. His twenty-seven year-old mother, shot five times by her pimp.
Twice in the face, twice in the heart, once in the cunt.
He had hoped, then, that someone would claim him. No one had, after the funeral. Except the pimp who’d pinned him down for an old man to sample, both of them laughing at the blood, the tears.
Payment for the bullets used to kill his insolent mother.
He had melted into the cold Cape drizzle, sharpened a bicycle spoke, and gone to the shebeen where his mother’s killer sat. A beer in one hand and a girl in yellow hotpants in the other.
He had inserted the spoke into the pimp’s back, pressing upwards until the tip pierced his heart. Then he’d disappeared into the night.
Sorry Mom.
He’d had that inked on the skin above his heart.
Vrou is gif.
That above the other nipple, for the whore in the yellow shorts who’d pointed at him in the courtroom.
Woman is poison.
~
A taxi pulled over with its cargo of late-shift workers. He settled next to a window and watched the new housing developments whip past. Villas hiding behind security booms; an empty soccer stadium where armed guards with leashed Alsatians patrolled the encircling razor wire; a shopping mall offering discounts.
He’d been gone for years.
Things had changed for the rich.
The roads became clogged arteries. Factory shift workers hurried home in the dark. Young men swaggered on street corners.
He got out where the land was flat and the southeaster howled around huddled houses that stretched as far as the curve of False Bay. Government-built boxes for the people.
Nothing had changed for the poor.
He breathed in the smells of the place that had been his home.
Car fumes, a dead dog, the tang of salt from the distant sea.
The outside.
A forgotten dream that he had buried when he’d first gone to prison and been absorbed by the Number, the brutal prison brotherhoods. A killer at ten, the 27s had embraced him, the gang giving him rank and purpose and a sense of family more powerful than anything a mother outside ever presided over.
On the corner was the Nice-Time Bar, a corrugated iron lean-to attached to a brick house. White plastic chairs clustered around red Coke crates; five men sat drinking.
Inside the bar, a television flickered.
He ordered a beer from the barmaid, and stared at the woman on the screen who was unbuttoning her shirt.
The girl gave him his drink.
“Pop Idols,” she said, flicking through the channels. “It’s the final tonight.”
“Go back to it,” he ordered.
“It’s mos a rerun of Missing, that Doctor Hart’s gang-cherrie programme.” The barmaid rolled her eyes. “Just some Number gangster’s daughter showing off her scars. An excuse to show off her tits on TV. Hoping the Voice of the Cape will pay her for her story.
“Go back. Turn up the sound.”
She knew enough to do what she was told.
“All the same when they come out,” she muttered, lighting a cigarette. “An inch of skin, and the brain’s dead.”
He ignored her, listening to the rasp of the woman’s voice.
Pearl, she called herself.
Stupid name.
The barmaid finished her cigarette, going off to serve another customer.
The programme ended, the man drained his beer, and left.
~
He stood in the alley behind the shebeen, running through the plans he’d made with the other 27s, the generals who’d crouched in a circle.
The custodians of the unwritten law of the Number gangs had decided who should die, and when.
Any slight, any unearned claim to rank, any secret revealed, was a betrayal that had to be paid for in blood.
That was the law of the 27s.
He did not have much time.
He did not have enough information.
But he knew where to start.
He took the hand-fashioned knife from the sole of his shoe, slipped it into his pocket.
An expert at prising open secrets.
* * * * * * * *
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October 8th, 2009 @06:26 #
Couldn't get in the door! That'll teach me to arrive at quarter past six. Hope the launch was amazing as it looked from the outside. In the cold.
October 8th, 2009 @08:48 #
Launch went very well I think. Amused looking people, maybe bemused, delicious Dish food. I hope you got a book:) Mervyn was very funny and asked smart questions so I enjoyed being treated like a REal Writer...and many copies of Daddy's Girl sold and signed.
October 8th, 2009 @08:57 #
I would have got a book. I would have bought Andrew's new one too. And the graphic novel of the Unknown Soldier they've been keeping for me. Only I COULDN'T GET IN THE DOOR.
October 8th, 2009 @09:07 #
That's why we opened the side gate, so tardies like yourself could still find their way in. Margie, you were great, an absolute pleasure to converse with. I really enjoyed it and we sold extremely well and will of course continue to do so.
October 8th, 2009 @10:14 #
Lauren - that is why one always goes armed to book launches - the crowds just part like the Red Sea did for Moses if you have a little pistol in your hand...
@ Mervyn - always happy to talk...
October 8th, 2009 @12:47 #
It was a marvellous bash. Good food, good questions, good crowd. And wait till you see the dress the Dame wore. Plus I have my own little intertextual moment to report. But am waiting for the launch photos/blog :)