(To keep you in the loop: if you missed the previous two excerpts from my latest novel, The Murder of Norman Ware, check out my previous two blog posts)

 

It took Jackson a long time to get up from the bed once Gugu had walked out with the battered Health & Racquet Club tog bag slung over her shoulder. Pretty had dressed and sat waiting for him on the step at the door of the one- roomed house, sipping a beer. The afternoon sun came in through the doorway and framed her, so that she looked like a movie character with burnished copper hair, but Jackson was now unmoved by her beauty. He wanted her gone, wanted her evil temptation as far from him as possible.

Perhaps Pretty was intuitive enough to sense Jackson’s mood because she picked up her handbag, the diamanté- studded silver one that she had bought from Mr Price that morning with money Jackson had given her, and walked out into the road. She was hoping that Jackson would call her back, but he didn’t. He didn’t even get up to watch her walk down the street, two hours earlier than she usually did on a Wednesday afternoon.

All of this – the debacle with Pretty and Gugu; the knowledge that his wife had walked out on him; the fact that he would not see his five-year-old son and two-year- old daughter again for an indeterminate length of time – resulted in Jackson drinking far too much that Wednesday night, which in turn meant that he was late for work on Thursday morning, the third of November.

Jackson was employed by a large landscaping company that maintained both the gardens and the golf course within the San La Mer estate. Usually, Jackson worked on the golf course and had to be at the estate early in order to mow the fairways and greens before the golfing day began. It would not be unreasonable to say that Jackson enjoyed his work. He liked driving the powerful, automated lawnmowers. He enjoyed donning earmuffs, protective glasses and a thick plastic apron and attacking the unruly edges of the course with a weed-eater. He took pleasure in the washing of the machines after a day’s work: hosing down the lawnmower after carefully removing the plastic grass-collection containers from the base; unwinding the cords from the weed-eater and wiping down the body; hanging the edge-trimmer on a thick steel hook in the wall of the maintenance shed beside all the other weed- eaters and branch-cutters and edge-trimmers; and then sharing a cigarette with a colleague. There was something about the power of the machines that excited him and raised him above the level of ordinary gardener. But on the morning of the third of November, he arrived at work late, and so he was delegated to the landscaping section as opposed to the golf-course side and issued with a pair of grass clippers from the maintenance shed (all the weed-eaters had long before been handed out). Along with the grass clippers, he was given his first written warning, which engendered renewed thoughts of anger towards both Pretty and Gugu. It might have been that anger, although it could equally have been the beer he had consumed the previous evening, that made his head feel as though it was going to burst and caused his eyes to burn in the sunlight. But he was not at all nauseous until he stumbled on the body.

Jackson’s job for the day was to trim manually the edges of the flowerbeds in the communal pool area. The communal pool area incorporated three pools (a large one in which exercise fanatics could swim lengths and kids could play water polo; a smaller, kidney-shaped one with submerged seating in which lovers could pet and women display themselves; and a round, shallow one in which toddlers could waddle); a small restaurant that sold light meals, sodas, cocktails and wine by the glass; ablution facilities with toilets and showers; and a sunning area complete with deck chairs and umbrellas. The pool area was one of the attributes of San La Mer that made it such an exclusive and sought-after estate. It was to this pool area that Jackson was banished after arriving late at work. It is important to note here that what was considered late in terms of Jackson’s arrival at work was relatively early in many other respects. In fact, the murder scene was discovered at eight forty-five, which was far too early for any of the San La Mer residents to have even thought about making the leisurely trip down to the pools.

Jackson had been clipping sky-blue plumbago bushes for half an hour before the heat, superimposed upon his hangover, became intolerable. Had he waited for fifteen more minutes, had he tolerated the heat for a quarter of an hour longer before deciding to find a drink, the restaurant staff would have arrived and he could have begged a glass of water from them instead of going to the men’s bathroom in search of a drink and inadvertently stumbling across a murder scene. But fate would have Jackson punished more severely for his infidelity than with a simple hangover, and so it was that he opened the swing door to the men’s ablution facility and discovered the body of Advocate Norman Ware.

The sight of Advocate Norman Ware’s body immediately made Jackson fiercely nauseous, so much so that he had to run out of the bathroom to avoid vomiting on a crime scene. He retched instead onto the very hedges he was supposed to be neatening that morning. Once he had finished hurling the remainders of the previous night’s beer onto the blue plumbago and yellow-and- orange Cape honeysuckle, he sprinted to the parking area of the pools, where he knew a security guard was sitting on a bench listening to music on his cellphone. He did not return to the bathroom to check whether he had been hallucinating, or if someone was playing a sick joke, or if a Halloween costume had been unthinkingly stashed away on the floor of the ablution facility. He did not want to risk having to see again what he had seen once. Even so, although he had been with the body of Advocate Norman Ware for no longer than thirty seconds, he would forever more be haunted by images of the corpse’s disfigured genitals whenever he thought of sex. Advocate Norman Ware would ultimately be the cause of Jackson’s erectile dysfunction, and although Jackson would visit doctors and sangomas, and even faith healers from Somalia, it would never be cured. It was as though Gugu had cursed him with a distinctly warped and very cruel punishment for his philandering.