The Shining Girls

EASY TOUCH A short story by Lauren Beukes

Dearly beloved

is a good way to start.

So is:

Hello my friend

Or:

Greetings to you and your family

Or even an exotic:

Salut

In the end, it doesn’t matter how you address them. You don’t even need a name. They will give you everything. Roll over to show you their bellies like dogs, their tails still wagging. Money talks, you see. It roars like a stadium of soccer fans, drowning out that little voice of doubt.

Laryea has never had any doubt: people are greedy and stupid; they get what’s coming to them. People like Hilda Varone, whose name is printed in big block capitals on his cardboard sign, so she can’t miss him in the clog of people waiting in the arrivals hall of OR Tambo International. Not that she could miss him anyway. He is a big man, more fat than muscle these days, if he is honest, but still good-looking, in a button-up shirt and chinos and a flattop you could stand a glass on. He likes to look professional for his clients.

He knows from experience that Hilda will be feeling anxious, that all those hours and hours on a plane from Mexico City via New York will have given her too much time to think. And it’s her first time without Oscar. In these kinds of circumstances, it’s important to stick to routine. People like routine. It makes the world seem safe and predictable.

The glass doors to baggage claim glide open and spit out a flurry of people armed with suitcases and backpacks and wheelie carryons. Hilda looks rumpled and tired, dragging her big grey suitcase with the dodgy wheel that veers out capriciously. He has chosen a spot right in front of the doors, but her eyes skid over him and his neatly lettered sign, searching the crowd as if she is expecting someone else.

He’s always thought of her as chubby, but she’s lost weight since he last saw her. Now, she’s just chub, a short compact package of a woman with over-plucked brows and a frizz of dark hair that doesn’t like being told what to do. Much like Hilda herself.

Laryea has always found Oscar easier to deal with. For an ambulance driver, Oscar is a meek man, as if all the shout has been drained out of him by the yawl of the sirens as he navigates the sprawl of Mexico City with his arthritic hands clamped on the wheel, wishing for power steering. He should retire, but how can he, considering the circumstances?

The couple has been to Johannesburg three times since they first made contact eighteen months ago. But Oscar opted to stay home in sunny Me-hi-co this time round. It gets expensive, all these flights, all these meetings, all the administration. Supposedly, this is the last trip. A mere formality and it will all be done.

Laryea knows better.

‘Ms Varone!’ he calls out to Hilda. ‘Over here.’

‘Laryea,’ she says, noticing him at last, but she sounds less than thrilled. Jetlag is a bitch. He moves forward to welcome her with a kiss on both cheeks.

‘You still dragging this old thing around?’ he says, taking the suitcase from her. ‘Don’t worry, soon you’ll be able to afford Louis Vuitton. A matching set for you and Oscar!’

‘I think we have mas importante things to spend the money on, no?’ she says, sharply.

‘Of course. Forgive me, señora. How is Gael?’

‘The same,’ she says, bleakly.

Life can change in an instant. One moment your six-year-old son is stepping out of a bodega, the next he is on his back under a car, with the axle pressing down on his stomach, crushing his spine, his spleen, his pelvis, so the doctors say he will probably never walk again. A burst tyre. A freak accident.

It’s not that Laryrea doesn’t feel sorry for Hilda and Oscar. But the world is full of tragedy.

Hilda is quiet on the drive to the restaurant. But the question still lurks in the tension of her shoulders, the clench of her jaw. When?

‘You have to be patient,’ Laryea soothes her. ‘These things take time.’ ‘These things take time. These things take time,’ she parrots angrily. ‘This is what you always say, Laryea.’

He imagines her telling off her water-cooler clients in the same tone, more fluently perhaps in her native Spanish, but no less bolshy. He imagines entire office complexes living in fear of Hilda Varone, employees willing to risk drinking Mexico City tap water rather than face her wrath.

‘This is the way third-world governments work,’ he says, ‘This is what makes it all possible. You know that. Your mother—’

‘Leave my mamá alone.’ She glares out the windscreen at the hawkers selling superglue at the traffic lights.

‘You know what I’m saying, Hilda, if Pinochet hadn’t—’

‘I said to leave it. It was different in Chile. There was none of this… lawyers.’ She spits the word out.

‘Of course not. She didn’t have time to set anything up when she fled the country.’

‘She leaves everything. Just pack up and go.’

‘Imagine if she had managed to hide her money away before she left; how hard it would be to get it out of the country? This is par for the course. You shouldn’t expect it to be easy. Have patience, señora. This is the last time, I promise.’

He suspects it will have to be. They have taken her for $47 453 so far and he can’t see how they will squeeze any more juice from her.

The secret is in not using round numbers. Round numbers are too much like a bribe, a ransom. All those gaping zeros like holes in a story. To short-circuit suspicion you need the kind of numbers beloved by bureaucrats and auditors. Numbers that suggest 14% tax or built-in administration charges or adjustments for the exchange rate. Official numbers. Numbers that can keep clicking up, because there is always another cost, another agency fee, another unforeseen surcharge.

‘I can’t do this again,’ she says, staring out the window as if the sweep of trees lining Jan Smuts Avenue requires her fullest concentration. ‘No puedo más.’ Laryea pretends not to notice her dabbing angrily at her eyes.

‘The last time. I promise. Mr Shaik is waiting for us at the restaurant. In half an hour, less, the last of the paperwork will be signed and sealed. If you want, we don’t even have to check in to the hotel. You can get straight back on the plane and go home to Oscar and Gael. Si?’

‘Yes, okay,’ she sniffles. ‘But this Mr Shaik is corrupt. I read the newspapers.’

‘Do you know a lawyer who isn’t? And his corruption, señora, is what we are counting on.’

It is a fact that names in the news have more credibility.

Laryea is not a monster. He is a student of human behaviour. He admires Oscar and Hilda’s fortitude. They are not without their resources. They borrowed that money from family and friends. They could have used it to fly Gael to a private hospital in America. It would have paid for the specialist spinal surgery at least. Instead they’ve given it to Laryea’s syndicate. Is it the syndicate’s fault that the couple is so naive and greedy as to believe a fairytale about $12.5 million?

It helps that the fairytales are set in countries too far away to be able to check up on the details. It helps more that Laryea’s format, his bait, is grammatical with none of the gross spelling mistakes or lazy typos endemic to the genre.

No, Laryea’s English is excellent. He has a talent for languages, a way with words. It’s why he was bumped up from catcher to guyman. Now, instead of fielding emails, he does fieldwork. He deals with actual clients, in person, face to face. This is not why his mother worked sixteen hours a day as a post-office administrator to pay for his university education. Still, he has been able to put his political science degree to some practical use. Current affairs make for topical lures. So do Hollywood movies.

Better that he had become a journalist. Like the photographer he had assisted in Ghana in 2005. Since then, he has seen his name around a lot, that photographer. He keeps an eye out for it, in the newspapers, sometimes on the cover of fancy art magazines. While he was waiting for a client in the lobby of the Sandton Sun once, Laryea picked up a flyer for the photographer’s new exhibition. His photographs were selling for R20 000 each. Easy money. Fame. And for what? Pointing and clicking? Now that’s a scam.

The Zoo Lake Restaurant is a tourist destination, which means, Laryea supposes, that tourists don’t have to destine any further north. It’s just enough, a taste of the real Africa, diluted, exaggerated. A glamorous movie-land of ornate masks and hanging lamps of dyed leather and food tamed for feeble western palates.

‘Did I ever tell you about the bees?’ he asks, as he pulls out Hilda’s chair for her. It’s a signature story in his repertoire. He uses patter to set clients at ease, to make them feel like they’re bonding. You aren’t supposed to use real stories, in case you reveal yourself in the details. But Laryea would take a bet, any amount you like, that the famous photographer doesn’t remember his name, let alone know how to find him.

‘The bees? No. I do not think so. Is Mr Shaik coming pronto?’ Hilda looks anxiously around the restaurant.

‘He’ll be here any minute, just relax. Have a glass of wine. The food here is excellent. Really authentic.’

‘You know I have trusted you all this while, Laryea.’

‘I know, Hilda.’

He has arranged a happy ending for her. Or the semblance of one. In return for the last outstanding $6 572, which is the absolute limit of her gullibility he reckons, she will receive 108 pages of paperwork from Mr Shaik, filed in triplicate and stamped by the Reserve Bank as evidence of the transfer to her account in Mexico City.

She will have about a week to enjoy the idea of her wealth before she realises that it is all fake, that the money has not been deposited, that it never will be. But by that time she will be 10 000 kilometres away and Laryea will have switched to a new cellphone number, a new email address. It could be worse. Ask the Swiss guy who was kidnapped last year. Or the German who was murdered…

Laryea has always thought of the syndicate like a swarm on the move. If the queen dies, you make a new queen; if a worker bee dies, you replace it with another drone. Their business is decentralised. Untouchable. The hive will always survive. And honey is one of the best ways to catch mugus of course.

Romance scams always seemed too cruel to Laryea – and too much trouble. Like catching a shark; they’re easy to hook but a struggle to reel in. Besides, there is too much typing involved with all the instant messages and emails that stand in for passion these days.

Laryea takes a sip of wine – Warwick Trilogy 2006, because he likes to indulge his clients in these final meetings. He likes to think it is an act of grace, although he notes with irritation that Hilda has barely touched hers. She is fiddling with her fork, tapping it nervously on the edge of the table. Rat-tat. Rat-tat. The restaurant is filling up; conversation and the clatter of cutlery relegating the Senegalese gospel album that has been on repeat since they sat down to ambient noise.

‘Now, this story,’ he says, trying to recapture her attention. ‘It’s more about honey collectors than bees, really. I was working with a photographer, a famous one, you might have heard of him—’

‘Was this before or after you work in Burger King?’

He had forgotten he’d told her about that. Why had he told her about that? About exactly where a political science degree will get a young man with big dreams and no work permit; not to The Economist, but the Burger King at Paddington Station, lost like the storybook bear with his red Wellington boots.

‘Before,’ he says, trying to recover himself. ‘The photographer, he did these hyena photographs. You might have seen them?’

‘No.’ She fishes a battered soft pack of smokes from the bowels of her bag and distractedly taps out a cigarette. Laryea pinches it from her lips before she can light it.

‘We’re in the non-smoking section,’ he says, laying the cigarette on the table perfectly parallel to the woven placemat. Her mouth twists into a stony pout in its absence.

‘Anyway, I was translating for him.’ This part is a lie. He was carrying the photographer’s equipment, all the lights and battery packs and loops of cable. It was only when the real translator, an environmental journalist for the UN, fell ill with gastroenteritis that Laryea had stepped in to untangle the local dialect.

‘It was about an hour and a half from Techiman, where the jungle runs right up to the highway, like it’s trying to swallow up the road. The whole town was three houses. Mashambas, you know, like mud huts? Maybe forty or fifty people living there, women pounding cassava or sitting with blankets spread out on the ground selling softdrinks, fruit, loose cigarettes, warm beer and gin. They call it gin, but it’s actually liquor they make themselves in Coca-Cola bottles.’

‘We have towns like this in Mexico.’

‘Maybe not quite like this, but close enough I’m sure. So the women sell basic stuff and pound cassava and the men collect honey.’

‘Mmf,’ Hilda says.

‘No, but it’s terrible, just listen. The way they do it. These are African bees. And African bees are crazy. Loco.’

‘I know what crazy is.’

‘They’re incredibly aggressive. They’ll attack at the slightest provocation. So what these guys do is they smoke them out. They spend hours going through the jungle, sometimes days, trying to find the hives and when they do, they tie cassava leaves and plastic bags around their heads and hands, because insects don’t like the smell and then they set fire to the bush around the tree.’

‘And then the bees fly away and they get the honey.’ Hilda is less than impressed.

‘The point is that it’s a disaster. They burn down half the forest in the process – and they ruin the honey. The smoke gets into everything.’

‘You can see this in the honey, acaso?’

‘That golden glow? Poof!’ He kisses off his fingertips. ‘Gone. It still tastes sweet, but it’s dusty with soot. So, they can only sell it on the local markets. It’s an economic tragedy. If they had hives, if they learnt how to cultivate the honey, they could sell it internationally. Organic, fair trade, all that stuff, they could make real money. But instead they’re trapped in this subsistence life, burning down the forest, destroying the trees where the bees make their hives, so everytime they have to travel deeper into the jungle.’

‘This is very sad. But it is like this everywhere, no? All over the world there is tragedia. Refugees. Economics. Earthquakes. Genocides.’ Hilda fiddles with the cigarette, puts it down, exchanges it for the fork. Rat-tat. Rat-tat.

‘I’m not comparing it,’ Laryea says. ‘Not with what happened to our friend.’ But he doesn’t like the echoing of his own thoughts so recently. How does he explain that he was moved by the poignancy of the story, this self-defeating cycle, like a microcosm of the futility of humanity?

The reality is that Laryea is as much a mugu to false promises as Hilda, carried on his worthless degree and a British Airways flight to London, only to end up washing dishes in a Lebanese restaurant in King’s Cross, flipping patties at Burger King, cleaning the public toilets at a outdoor rock festival. He knows disappointment. It is the reek of shit and teenage vomit in a plastic portaloo on an August afternoon with distorted guitars buzzing like sick bees in the background.

He was made an offer to move to Johannesburg. He took it. And dealing in dreams seemed easier than drugs.

The waitress comes over to the table to let them know that their friend has arrived. ‘He’s just on the phone. He said he’ll be with you in a minute.’ She indicates to a tall man in a crisp dark suit with a cellphone clamped to the side of his head, pacing up and down in the foyer and talking loudly in Algerian French. Another deal on the go. Another mugu biting.

‘He doesn’t look like his foto in the newspapers,’ Hilda says, staring at the man across the restaurant. ‘And I heard he was sick.’

‘You must have him confused with someone else,’ Laryea reassures her.

Hilda abruptly stops fidgeting with the fork. She drapes her arm over the back of the chair, and takes a deep swig of her wine, which is no way to appreciate a good vintage. But it’s as if the question mark knotting up the muscles in her neck and shoulders has dissolved away like Disprin.

‘You know, Laryea, I like your story very much. Now, I want to tell you a story.’

‘Don’t you want to wait for Mr Shaik?’

‘This is personal. Just for you.’

‘All right,’ he says, intrigued.

‘I know you think I am stupid.’

‘Hilda! I’ve never thought that for a moment.’

‘Because my English is not so good, you think that means I cannot think so well. But this is not true.’

‘Of course not. I’m hurt that you would even say—’

‘Will you listen? You know why I have ask you here? To this restaurant?’

‘Because of the ostrich. You said you wanted to try the ostrich.’

‘I had a phone call. From the police.’

Laryea pushes his chair away from the table.

‘Sit down. It is too late.’

In the foyer, two men approach Mr Shaik, who is really Mr Dansua, and politely but firmly remove his phone from his hand and wrest his hands behind his back.

There are three more men in plain clothes crossing the restaurant towards their table. Laryea saw one of them in the gift shop on the way in, even noted the slovenliness of his clothes, ill-fitting, creased, like the man had more important things to do than ironing.

‘The police?’ Laryea laughs uncertainly.

‘I thought you were trying to help us.’

‘I was. I am.’

‘Come on, señora. I don’t know what kind of lies they have been telling you, but we can sort this out.’

‘You are the one with the lies, Laryea. But this is not the story I want to tell you.’

‘Then what?’

‘I lied also.’

‘You?’ He is trying to understand, but it is like struggling through thick and scratchy jungle to find the road he was walking only a minute ago.

‘There is no Gael. No cripple son. No accident.’ Hilda grins, revealing the skew incisor that Laryea has always found somehow endearing. It is the first time she’s smiled since she stepped off the plane.

‘Then you knew? From the beginning? This has been a set-up for…’ – his head reels, like a hit of nicotine – ‘… for eighteen months?’

‘No. The police, they only contact me now, while we are still in Mexico. It is terrible shock. We are very angry with you. And that’s why I fly out. To make sure you get what you deserve, cabrón.’

‘But I’ve seen photographs.’ Of a boy strapped to a plastic board, his little face swollen up like a meaty red and purple flower with a stamen of plastic tubes sprouting from his nose.

‘And I have seen papers that show you are going to pay us. Tax certificates. Letters from the bank. My husband has access to the children’s wards. We have a camera.’ She shrugs.

‘You’re saying you invented Gael? The surgery in America? But what about Dr Edwards? Dr Friedman?’

‘I say you are not the only one, Laryea. We make up Gael so you will feel sorry for us. So you will give us el dinero – the money – instead of someone else. But I will not tell this to your police or the judge. They will think Gael is real. That you defraud us, the poor parents of a broken little boy. They will not check. Mexico is so far away. And you will suffer for this. You will suffer mucho.’

Laryea has never felt any doubt. Never felt any guilt. But now, as the police cross the restaurant towards their table, guns held low at their sides, an SAPS badge held before them, opening a pathway between the tables like a magic key, he can see that he has lost his golden glow. His honey is tainted, has turned, in fact, to shit.

And the forest is burning down around him.