Red Tape

By Vanessa Wright

Anne Hurter is a broken woman; trying to resist the undercurrents flowing from a past of sexual abuse and emotional deprivation. Freedom does not lie in the death of her parents, but in the form of a caring and attentive saviour, Louis. Anne is incapable of love and Louis seeks it in the arms of another woman. A fragile Anne is pushed over the brink and finds self-preservation in the form of hoarding at the cost of her three children. Her home becomes her sanctuary. Soon it is filled with destruction, death and decay. The discovery of Rachel’s body sets the cat among the pigeons. Detectives van der Merwe and Cele can’t shake the feeling that there is more to this accidental death than meets the eye. As more bodies are discovered in Anne’s back yard, their gut instincts are proved correct. What they do find will leave Anne clinging desperately to sanity as they confront the true evil of the killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanessa Wright
• Release date: Oct 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370255948

Vanessa Wright

I am a 50 year old visual artist, author, mom and pug breeder. Two of my Afrikaans short stories have been published in My kort vir jou sop available on www.amazon.com as an e-book and soon to be released in soft cover. I have taken part in Nanowromo 2012 and reached the target on day 26. I have my own blog at http://iread1966.wordpress.com, appropriately named Humouring the dark, where I have a few followers. I am also active on Facebook and Twitter and am a member of a writing group. I lead my own book club as well- I am a true bookaholic. Writing has always been my passion, however the timing always seemed incorrect as daily life interrupted more frequently than not. Now, I have decided to go big or go home.

Book preview

To my husband who has to put up with my author mind more than anybody else ever needs to

If I were a bird I would fly over the chaos

I have created and it would be

a tiny, insignificant thing in comparison

to the rest of the universe.

VW (2013)

Preface: a short history of trauma

Chapter 1

Anne’s life had not been an easy one. If a photographer was asked to make a print thereof it would be black, white and grey; the color had been leeched out of her; her emotions had been sucked dry; she was an empty husk waiting to be filled by the people that surrounded her. What she did not yet know and could not predict, was that the trauma she had suffered in her life would cause far reaching ripples in a pond fraught with unseen dangers lurking in the dark, mossy depths.

She was born to elderly parents who lived in a government housing project in The Grange, Pietermaritzburg. Even as a child, she found it ironic that the poorer suburbs were always named with The as a prefix. The unstressed participle was used effectively to relegate the poor to a unique community where the upper and middle classes could avoid seeing the broader, filthier aspect of life. They lived in abject poverty, in a tumble down dwelling and overgrown back yard. The yellow paint on the front door had faded into indistinct patches; two fan light squares of glass were carefully replaced by black plastic and duct tape; the fatalities of fraying cricket balls. The color of the house was neither off-white nor beige; an unidentifiable cream; a muddy light brown.

In the streets, barefoot children with runny noses played soccer with a patched leather ball, or cricket with cracked bats and dog-chewed tennis balls. Invariably hunger stamped its mark on them, claiming the undernourished bodies as part of the global impact of its hold. At five o’ clock sharp, the bitter housewives called their children loudly in to dinner, promising a smart smack to the bottom to those who dared tarry. This was her neighborhood; this was what she knew to be true. It was no wonder therefore that Anne was forced to grow up quicker than her more affluent peers. It didn’t take much to have more in life than the inhabitants of Anne’s suburb.

Her mother, needing the color and effervescence plants embodied, cultivated a bed of dahlias against the wire fence that faced the street. Technically speaking, what remained of the wire fence. Bits and pieces had eroded and dropped to the ground, leaving holes the size of a child’s fist. The bulbs were gifts from various neighborhood women. Everything in The Grange was either hand me downs or what could be spared. Lovingly they were placed into the ground, covered with a gentle blanket of ground, sparingly watered with the exhilarating expectation of chromatic blooms. Her father refused to weed the garden as this would lead to his having to mow the lawn and keep the yard in at least a semblance of tidiness. Nobody knew how it even made sense, but his word being law and his logic supposedly superior, nobody was allowed to even touch the gossamer leaves of a dandelion. Eventually, the carefully laid flower beds and the promising blooms were choked by duwweltjies and kakiebos which grew knee high on the little plot her family called home. Symbolically this was also true of her mother’s soul being choked to death in the stranglehold her father exerted. Her aura became faded, washed out and brittle, turning to seed, blown before an uncaring wind. Perhaps, if she had landed in more fertile ground than that which her husband and circumstances provided she would have bloomed spectacularly.

Among the weeds, car wrecks sprouted occasionally; towed to this final resting place by her father, allowed to rust and fall back to the earth in reddish heaps. He refused to have them taken away by the scrap metal dealers as he was going to work on them soon and generate an income for the family. Whenever there was any money, for which he could not take credit, it went straight down his gullet in the form of a cheap bottle of liquor. He was never a connoisseur; anything that would get him to the appropriate high would suffice.

As if the alcoholism wasn’t enough her father was a chain smoker; his fingers stained orange and his teeth yellow in the sallow face. Smoker’s wrinkles mapped his features into dry river beds and dusty farm roads. Overflowing ashtrays, a dense cloud of smoke and the jangle of empty bottles followed him around like a tethered shadow.

Her mother was denigrated to something less than a human being. After a bout with the alcohol devil her father would lift his huge fists and the marks would remain on her mother’s body for weeks afterwards, turning deep purple, green and finally a sickly yellow. She wore them like a badge of honor around the home, after all a good woman deserved to be kept subservient. The bottle led the head of the household to courageously burst into Anne’s room, demanding sexual gratification since Anne turned the ripe old age of eight. If she refused he would bellow that she owed him. The man of the household was entitled to gratification and preferential treatment by the women in his domain. Her mother once tried to intervene, but was brutally assaulted and spent a week in the local hospital where they treated her dislocated shoulder and broken cheek bone. She told everyone that she had walked into a door, nobody believed her.

The only income the family could count on was her father’s state pension and disability grant. He had lost a leg above the knee due to a shunting accident in the train yard. Anne knew that he had been drunk and had inadvertently walked over the rails, behind a shunting train. The driver had not seen him and had subsequently driven over his leg. Her father’s hysterical screams eventually alerted him to the fact that something was awfully wrong. He dragged him from under the train and phoned for medical assistance. Unfortunately the leg could not be saved and had to be amputated above the knee. An artificial limb was attached which eroded his fragile ego and worsened the pre-existing control issues. As his control over his body and mind slipped, his iron fist closed tighter around the women in the household. Anne has vivid memories of him unstrapping the leg and climbing on top of her. The stump was a mottled purple, grey affair that inhabited her nightmares. Her trust in men became a historical fact, an ancient artifact of a lost civilization; never to be unearthed by the careful brush strokes of an archeologist, held up to the light or examined by his knowing eye.

The disability pension her father received barely covered the requisite alcohol and nicotine dependency. Many were the nights that Anne and her mother had to go to bed with the gnawing ache of hunger in the pit of their stomachs. In order to keep food on the table Anne worked from the age of twelve at the local Spar. At least she could walk there and back, not needing to depend on the drunken, automotive ramblings of a father that wandered across the road in search of equilibrium. He brought nothing home save empty hands, shaking heads and embarrassed whispers. She knew what they were saying about him, she pretended that it didn’t matter, but of course it did. They saw her father as a good for nothing drunk that couldn’t hold onto a job; a man who believed that women needed a good old punch in the face to keep them toeing the line. Anne was deemed a good for nothing too for, as they said, familial genes will out. She came from bad stock and bad she would remain.

Her entire salary trickled into the greedy maw of the monthly budget. She warned her mother not to give any of her hard earned cash to her father, but after a hail of fists rained down on her cringing body, her mother always relented and there would go the rest of the week’s meals. She would have to ask the manager for any goods that were past their sell-by date and take this home. The ensuing embarrassment became an unbearable burden and she would walk home with blazing cheeks, hunched shoulders and smoldering anger. Some nights she would have to study by the bleary light of a fat, tallow candle, the wax dripping silently into a liquid, reflective pool at the bottom of the tin candle holder. The electricity would be cut, because the money that had been put away specifically for the bill and hidden in the deepest, darkest corner she could find, was somehow sniffed out by ‘the alcoholic’, as her father became known in her mind. She hated the way his nostrils flared ever so slightly and an almost imperceptible line of spittle forged its way across his lip and down his stubbly chin at the sight of money. They ate cold, canned goods until Anne was able to pay something towards the bill. Miraculously there would be light and warmth in the echoing rooms of Havelock road 124.

Every third weekend, without fail, she had to bail her father out of the nearest police station as he had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. She had to accompany his unwashed, stinking body home and hand him over to her mother who would gently wash the sweat from him, dress him in his pajamas and lie him down to sleep like a helpless child. Alcohol fumes wafted and eddied in the breeze from the open window. She never heard her mother utter a word of recrimination.

Their furniture was non- existent, as anything of worth had been sold or pawned to pay the alcoholic’s dues. He went to loan sharks when the money ran out, putting up their ratty lounge suite, ancient television set or curtains as collateral. It went the way of all the previously lost items; bobbing on the sea of 100 Pipers Scotch Whisky or Romanoff vodka. They now sat on white, cracked plastic chairs when her father’s cronies came over. Her mother had to be at their beck and call, as her father’s croaking voice demanded another bottle of whisky or extra cold beers. He wanted to know why dinner wasn’t ready yet and what the hell was she doing sitting on her behind all day anyway? The emotional abuse and the bruising was the ultimate reason why her mother never left the house anymore. She couldn’t stand the pitying looks of the neighborhood wives; she became abject with terror and would cringe when her husband lifted his hand to wave at a passing friend. She could not visit a hair salon; buy a new dress, shoes or beauty products, as any extra money disappeared into the alcoholic’s wallet. What was left of her mother was a frail waif in hand me down clothes that hung on her thin frame; a ragdoll in threadbare dresses and scuffed shoes. Her skin hung in loose folds around her emaciated frame while her hair clung in oily wisps around a face in which the eyes where somehow too huge and the cheeks too hollow. Her lips were permanently pressed into a thin line; she rarely smiled. The world had taken her joy and executed it in the blink of an eye.

Anne’s school uniforms were never new; some came from the charity shop at church while others were given to her by tannie Dorothy whose daughter was two years her senior and obese to boot. Anne never knew what it was to have clothes that fitted perfectly; they were always either too small or too big which made her the brunt of many a school joke. Her stationary came from the welfare or the church; she had to be satisfied with the oldest school books available and if any of the pages had been torn out and she brought it to the attention of the teacher, snickers and giggles would follow her everywhere she went. They reverberated in every one of her dreams. Her nickname was the welfare girl. She screamed silently and pleaded without words for them to stop. Their torment followed her, closer than her own shadow, down the school hallways, an evil thing attached to her heels. She never had friends, was never invited to a sleep over or birthday party, not that she would have had anything to wear, but still it would have meant a lot to her at the time to have been part of a group. She became a solitary figure on the playground, always sat at the back of the class and never raised her hand to answer any questions voluntarily. She never had sandwiches to share, juicy tales to tell or news of a forthcoming vacation in Europe. Each vacation she spent in their silently violent house, praying for the clock hands to move faster so that she would be able to go back to school the following day. God ignored her pleas and laughed uproariously at her dilemma.

Her class mates never understood her relief at the end of the vacation. She would start the school day with an idiotic grin on her face and attack each lesson with fervor. They shook their heads, thinking she was either irrational or totally insane.

A long time ago she had stopped being her parent’s daughter; she was the daughter of no one and anyone. She became a shadow figure which had, in a far, forgotten place once been known as Anne. In her mind she was building walls and bridges and turrets with which to enhance the distance between her and the real world, as well as keep her safe from the onslaughts on the castle doors. She invented a castle keeper; a fiery, fearsome dragon to defend her honor and keep her heart in an icy vault. At times she wished that somebody would take her out of the circumstances she was drowning in; that somebody would throw her a sturdy rope by which she could pull herself out of the quagmire and into the light.

Chapter 2

In the evenings, when her parents were finally asleep and her father’s drunken snoring could be heard throughout the threadbare house, Anne would tiptoe silently down the corridor that connected her room to the bathroom and subsequently to her parent’s bedroom. She would stand outside their door and listen intently, waiting for him to stop snoring; yet each time he inhaled sharply or mumbled in his sleep, her heart would plummet as she realized that, despite her fervent wishes, he was still alive. She wished she was brave enough to walk in boldly and hold a pillow over his bloated, red-veined face; hold it down until the voice, the body and the person of her father stopped struggling and slipped away. Every morning she would pray for his death before leaving for school and each afternoon the disappointment would rush through her and crush her soul as she saw him seated on the porch gazing blearily at her as she opened the squeaky gate. Anne gave up on religion; on the idea of a loving father figure. God could not help her anymore.

She hated her father more than anything on earth. The fire would consume her and the bitter hatred would boil over whenever he spoke to her. She would answer in monosyllabic grunts or one word sentences, for if she did not at least attempt an answer, a primeval scream would rent her throat as her father’s fury ignited in a lightning flash.

She never offered him her emotions on a plate anymore, not after the first hundred or so times he had taunted her with something that she had shared in confidence. Her inner turmoil became a joke to be bandied about when the rest of the gang came over and her father played the role of the indulgent, strong male who put the females in his household in their place. When the color had risen to her cheeks he seemed to enjoy the subtle torment even more. The cronies would eye her developing body with smug appreciation. They would nod sagely whenever her father had words of wisdom to share and agreed that the best place for a woman would be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Of course they agreed with him, he was supplying the liquor that, for brief moments at a time lifted them out of the poverty pit. The next topic under discussion would invariably be her mother. She was identified as a cold, barren bitch that never bore him the expected son. After Anne’s birth she would never be able to bear another child again. Anne’s body had torn an intrinsic, secret part of her mother’s reproductive system and subsequently crushed her father’s dreams. Her would always be bitter at his lack of male prodigy and would take it out on Anne when and wherever the opportunity arose. She, with her budding breasts, clear complexion and long hair would never be the sought after or adored son, but always the unwelcome mouth to feed, the daughter which he wished would hurry up and get married even though she had been only fourteen at the time. In her father’s mind a son in law would take care of his every whim and shoulder the financial burden of the home. In reality this secret wish translated to enough liquor to keep him and his posse happy to eternity.

Anne, a diligent student, received good marks. She knew that this would be the only possibility of escaping The Grange and thus the hollow lives of her parents. She had promised herself a long time ago that she would never be anything like her alcoholic father or her mousy, dependent mother. She had grown up with less than nothing, yet held tightly onto the belief that she could have everything. She vowed never to let anything she owned disappear into oblivion.

In 1982 she matriculated and got a well paying job as a receptionist at Labuschagne and Joubert, attorneys at law. The firm, a family business, specialized in conveyance and family law. Her life clung to a certain routine, for in routine lay safety and peace. She worked an eight hour day, sustained her father’s habits and skulked home with the disgusting bottle in the brown paper bag and the packets of Peter Stuyvesant wrapped in a highly visible, yellow Checker’s shopping bag. Yes, she knew that she had become his enabler, but in her mind it made divine sense to hasten his death. Each delivery brought the skeletal reaper closer.

After depositing the dreaded parcels on the kitchen table, she would need to wash her hands repeatedly; feeling as if the filth of his habits clung to her like the sluggish bodies of bloated leeches. She used bleach and a nail brush, scrubbing the skin around her nails and knuckles to an angry, swollen red. An extra nail brush and astringent soap found its way into the large tote bag she took to work. Whenever the thought of the bottle and cigarettes she had to buy before going home, crossed her mind she had to rush to the ladies’ room and start the dirt elimination process all over again. When her work colleagues noticed the state of her flayed, red hands she applied intense moisturizing creams and ensconced them in a pair of gloves at night. She still scrubbed violently at times, but hid the results well. Anne wore a mask that showed her as a capable, efficient young female while inherently the cracks were growing ever wider. Step on a crack and break your back….wasn’t that the age old saying?

A particularly wide crack that appeared abruptly and without warning were the severe panic attacks she suffered at the mere thought of leaving the house in the morning, stepping onto the local bus and arriving at work. Furthermore every stranger she encountered seemed to be staring at her with disgust, as if they knew Anne scrubbed her fingers raw, knew she was hiding a terrible, dark secret about her home life, saw clearly the abuse she was subjected to and knew that her mask was slipping to reveal the horror beneath. Each time an attack occurred, Anne saw Death hurrying towards her from the corner of her eye; she never knew whether she should stand and fight or take to the hills. When Death’s fetid breath clung warmly to her body and refused to be budged no matter what plans or methods she implemented, Anne made an appointment at the State Hospital with their family doctor.

Dr. Grieve correctly diagnosed the severe panic attacks and prescribed benzodiazepines, explaining that they were effective, fast acting and brought relief within thirty minutes to an hour, but shouldn’t be thought of as a cure all. Once she stopped taking the medication the symptoms would return. He advised her to seek therapy in the form of a psychologist or counselor. Anne nodded sagely, indicating that she understood, while rationally negating the need of a head doctor delving into her dark recesses and uncovering secrets which should remain hidden. She wouldn’t allow spelunking or cave diving where her mind was concerned. She dreaded anyone finding out that she wanted, no needed her father dead; deader than dead, dead as a doornail, firmly ensconced in a coffin, six feet under the ground. She seemed unable to stop the litany of thoughts that scurried through her head. It was strange to know all the euphemisms, metaphors and sayings regarding death. Clearly her thoughts were not normal and nobody needed to know how deep the desire for her father’s death encapsulated her entire being.

She stuffed the prescription for Xanax and a list in the doctor’s spidery handwriting, containing all the known side-effects and numbers for two psychologists into her tote bag. The list was, to say the least, impressive ranging from confusion, slurred speech, and dizziness to nausea, blurry vision and depression. Trust the pharmaceutical companies to come up with a tablet for depression that would inevitably lead to more depression. She was caught in a vicious cycle; unable to escape.

She filled the prescription at the hospital’s pharmacy and immediately dry swallowed one of the small, oval tablets, mentally admonishing them to work immediately. The following month, as the medication spread its calm throughout her bloodstream, was pure bliss and Anne, having decided that she had indeed been cured, blithely dropped the plastic container in the dust bin. Within two days a vague uneasiness settled and folded its wings. On the third day it redoubled its efforts and brought new playmates along which crowded Anne’s mind.

The obsessive behavior, paranoia and fear raged like a wildfire, totally out of control, blown onward by strong winds to wreak ever more havoc. Anne rose up to six times a night to check if all the doors were locked and the stove and iron were turned off. She counted spoons and floor tiles ceaselessly; worked out routines which should be followed to the letter to avert the feelings of nausea and vertigo that bound her. A break in any routine became a symbol of certain catastrophe as she waited for the sword to drop and impale her.

T-shirts would have to be folded a certain way and stacked according to color; light to dark. Her shoes needed to face the same way and the library books would have to be aligned with mathematical precision to keep the monsters at bay. The anger she felt at having her routines changed or attenuated bubbled like white hot lava. She struggled to keep these feelings sublimated and not allow them to consume the people around her. As with so many things in life, a natural outlet for Anne’s anger in the form of exercise or team sport was never found, not that she would have been able to afford it anyhow