Jack Hanger

By James Fouche

When a criminal mastermind called Joe Taxi kills his brother, Dave Matters is forced to revisit the gritty Cape Town drug scene. However, he is no longer the ruthless Dave who ran drugs for the Wallace brothers. After a botched drug deal Dave wrestles with bouts of memory-loss and an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Now, to avenge his brother and uncover a mystery, he must abandon the safety of his mundane life. As the anticipation of a mass city riot mounts, Dave inches closer to a climactic confrontation with an old nemesis, as well as the pains from his past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Fouche
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005145590

James Fouche

Crime author, silly daddy, serial-entrepreneur, autodidact, deep thinker, coffee snob, wine buff, passionate traveller. Those words somehow make up the total sum of James Fouche. If these words resonate with you, then you might like what he has to say.

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© 2014 James Fouché

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

The views, content and descriptions in this book is the sole fiction work of the author. Some of the content may be offensive to some readers and they are to be advise. All the characters portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Paul Yates-Round

JACK HANGER

James Fouche

www.jamesfouche.com

But each day brings its petty dust

Our soon-choked souls to fill,

And we forget because we must

And not because we will.

from Absence by Matthew Arnold

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in

the memory as the wish to forget it.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

INTRO

The traffic light was red. It was not going to turn green any time soon. He also had to race through it. No stopping now. No seatbelts. Bad brakes. Avoid a smash.

He was in pursuit, a rusted Mini chasing after a white minibus. His manoeuvrability was constricted inside the small car, and his nerves were taut. He was saddened by the situation. To top it all off, he didn’t even know why exactly he was doing this. The reason for a mindless, high-speed chase, zipping through oncoming cars and swerving for pedestrians was never an easy one. He was doing this for Joshua.

At the crossing stood a blue delivery truck, halted by the red traffic light. He shifted down a gear and stepped on the gas, overtaking the stationary truck by cutting into oncoming traffic. The Mini scraped against the side of the truck, emitting a loud, metallic screech. The steering wheel jarred in his hands, but he kept the vehicle under control and guided her past the truck. The Mini shot through the crossing, by sheer virtue missing all the cars.

He was racing down one of Cape Town’s busiest streets, chasing after a likeness of himself, preventing his shadow from escaping reality. It felt as though he was inside the minibus with Mtetho, sitting behind the big black drug dealer and whispering sweet nothings into his little ears, casting empty threats at an abandoned wall. Mtetho, with his dreadlocks tied in a bundle above his head, definitely didn’t look like him, but was the type of scum he could relate to. What made him any better? By measure, he was even worse than Mtetho.

There was also a mode of conflict here: something blatantly concocted from an exhausted non-existence. There was an inexplicable similarity present, a sense of confusion between prerogative and purgative. One was the right to be an individual, and the other was a method of purification or cleansing. Right now, in the middle of a perilous car chase, nerves and reflexes in full effect, his independent conscience was trying to orchestrate both forms of existences simultaneously. He tried to convince himself that he was doing something good, that he was becoming a better man. He had to redeem himself. So many things still stained him. So many stains.

Prison had left a big stain, and now Joe Taxi had left an even bigger stain. He had been so close. Who was Joe Taxi?

The minibus suddenly swerved for a child, rear tyre slamming into the curb, back end briefly jumping into the air, and then skidding across the pavement. The minibus shoved a young couple out of the way, and smashed through a coffee shop’s front window, leaving patrons scattering for shelter amid flying tables and cutlery. Slivers of glass flew in all directions. Pedestrians fell to the ground screaming, hands covering their heads in panic.

The Mini was set on a collision course with Mtetho and couldn’t stop in time. Hard as he might have tried, he could not force the car to a halt. It had bad brakes. Yes, he remembered that. The bad brakes. Not good at all. Very bad.

The Mini’s windshield shattered on impact, and he was thrown from the car, flung through the falling glass and into a brittle emptiness. There was a slight notion of pain, and he suddenly couldn’t comprehend its constant pulsating words, his vision beating showers of blurry white dots and blinking stars. He heard gunshots, screams, and a fine, muted whistling sound.

Sprawled out on the pavement, one spent eye focussed on Mtetho, he heard the sirens echoing in his mind. They were late. They were always late. Purpose-driven tardiness or sheer coincidence? He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He had done what they had asked of him. His conscience could rest. It was a clean slate from here.

Then it started, just as the whistling sound faded. He could feel his mind changing, morphing rapidly. He had hurt himself somewhere, somehow. He should have known this would happen, should have realised when the liquid had formed. The pool – an unpleasant oddity. It had always been the bringer of bad tidings, a foretelling of things.

He awoke in a daze of white. It looked like Heaven, for but the briefest moment, before everything filtered into actuality. Then he saw the faces around the bed. They were vacant stares, stern features, all fixated on him. Gaunt, blank expressions peered down at him forebodingly. Had he done something bad? Was there any point to it?

There was one face that carried hope in the form of a flimsy smile. A chubby, friendly face, with warm brown eyes. Who did that face belong to? He knew that one.

Why was he suddenly scared of himself?

Why has his boundless anger subsided?

What’s with all the questions?

Who was he now?

Where was Dave?

SUNDAY

Daddy beating Mommy. Breaking Lance Brewer’s already crooked nose with a cricket bat in fourth grade. Waltzing around in a drunken stupor and, subsequently, throwing up on a stranger’s lawn, seconds before passing out. Seeing the body of his five-month-old baby brother floating face down in a bathtub. In an icy warm fit of rage, as well as in self-defence, driving the splintered backend of a pool cue into a notorious drug runner’s chest. A prison cell’s metal door sliding back in its track and loudly slamming shut, with him on the inside. An instant rush of blood to the head. Racing a rusted Mini into a taxi minibus to prevent some low-life question mark from evading police capture.

These were some of the more profound memories Dave relived and endured daily. Regrettably, the appropriate emotions did not accompany these sporadic bursts of recorded events. Not anymore. Dave experienced the moving pictures in his mind, knew they wrought obvious conflict in the feelings of a sane man, but could feel virtually nothing about it. There was a metaphorical crack in his mind, hiding the emptiness and bleeding sense.

This did not mean that Dave was entirely void of feelings. In fact, his existence depended on love and hate. It fascinated him how delicious a lover’s glance could be, and, simultaneously, it vexed him how oddly captivating the raw look of contempt could be among enemies. As a fascinated observer, he lived and breathed every uninhibited emotion through others.

His sensibility deviated somewhat from conventionality, though. His heart thumped according to another satisfactory reasoning, where emotions were rarely intensified. From the deepest core of his soul beat a heavy, dark drum in a pitiable monotone.

So, Dave was not really a hollow man. His hard, disturbing past had simply bleached the colour away, and had burnt the beauty of everyday life. He had become violently saturated by the world. It was in his unfortunate abundance that he lacked the worth of living. His needs and desires had been excessively numbed by the length of life he had been dealt. He was, essentially, a victim of circumstance; he was lonely and uncomprehending.

Duly, his strange, cold manner had estranged him from most people. He was a socially impaired freak. He was the crazy one. He was the only one sane enough to see his insanity. He was twenty-seven-years old and working in a video shop. He was not married, and never would be, even though he longed for the touch of a wife and the parental concern for children. He was constantly intimidated by the shadow of the old Dave – and suffered from a mild obsessive compulsive disorder.

He was Dave Matters, and his fingers were tingling from the repeated impact.

He looked down at his bloodied hands.

In the darkness, the red blood looked like black ink. He held it up to the light of a lonely streetlamp and smelt the blood. As far as he could recall, it wasn’t his. Or was it? His arm was warm and itchy.

One was running away from him, feet tearing grooves into the open field. He was fleeing from an unmasked Dave Matters – a lucid decision not fairly granted to him at the time. As soon as the soles of his footwear struck tar, he disappeared into the night, a shadow among shadows. The second one, his friend, The Jackal, was still lying on the ground, breathing defeat and snorting blood, eyelids wavering at the tip of consciousness, but still looking at his assumed prey.

Dave wondered what he was doing there. He even wondered where he was, and how he had ended up there. It was not as if he had forgotten his surroundings; he just deemed it unworthy for his distracted memory. To him, it was merely life. Why couldn’t he instantly recall the good things anymore? Were they so few?

To remember the present, he had to embrace the past.

Where was he now?

To go back to his beginning would be humanly impossible. It was a murky, muddled mess too emotionally disturbing for the everyday individual to consume and digest in one psychological meal or sitting. Even a couple of hours into the past would be pushing it.

He started the day, began at morning, sun sneaking up yonder high treetops.

The bathroom was small, white, and square. Though its limitations were evident, the unmistakable presence of Dave lingered in the uncertainty of the room. There was no mildew between the tiles, no bundles of hair on the floor, and no toothpaste stains in the basin. Dave was neater than most people, not too compulsively so, but clean and methodical, nonetheless.

The empty intimidation of his blank stare fell into the pool of a little mirror over the basin, reflecting back onto nothing. There was little use in reassuring himself that he was still good looking. It meant nothing to him. If he could not value his own beauty, then no one else could.

Dave was a well-built man. Not a muscle-bound grotesque, but more muscular than most. He climbed into the bath, convinced himself that being dirty was not a necessity, then rid the cloth of its excess water whilst holding it above his head. There was something wickedly spiritual in allowing water to stream over his near-bald head and through his stubbly hair. Eyes closed, mouth open, hoping to find an answer within. It would never come.

Spirituality, religion, and mayhem. Dave was lost in confusion so intense that there was no clarity in religion. He wanted answers about existence and his living worth, longed to dispose of doubt. Though he was eager to peruse the more philosophical verses in the Bible, his understanding of it would purposely stay shrouded by choices. He was not meant to understand. His reasoning was that there was something missing in his life.

His hands rhythmically moved over his broad chest, no longer sensing the bizarre collection of scars he had attained in numerous knife fights. A few of them had been near-fatal cuts. In fact, it had been in hospital where he had met Marsh-The-Cop for the first time. He had been admitted with a serious chest wound, given to him by that other guy, the one with the stuff on his face. What was his name again? Was it What’s-His-Name? And that song?

Dave lived in a small granny flat behind the Gordon residence. Shenko Gordon and his mother, Helena, stayed in the house. Dave paid them a very modest rent for the flat, helped with whatever a man as strong as he could, and kept to himself most of the time. In return, the Gordon’s opened their kitchen to him and did his washing for him on a weekly basis. He was never in need of anything, yet he felt far away from completion there.

The granny flat consisted of two spacious rooms. One was a living room and entertainment area, where Dave exercised. The second was an average-sized bedroom with an old-fashioned en-suite bathroom. There were some everyday pieces of furniture that filled the flat, most of them not even Dave’s. Bed; cabinet; television stand; cupboards; three-seater, comfy couch. On the whole, the entire dwelling seemed eerily abstract and rid of life. Both rooms looked, felt and smelt beige.

Dave’s residence was excessively reserved. He had ample money available to him, yet he seldom saw fit to spend it, especially not on senseless, homely things to improve or simplify his way of life. He owned no television, no radio, no cellular phone, no hairdryer, no oven, and no fridge or freezer. Prior to his accident, Dave had owned all these types of things. Now, he had no use for them.

The Gordon house was still. It was early, just before eight. Dave quietly slipped into the kitchen.

Tea was fun. Dave felt compelled to keep both hands busy. A certain purpose or use had to be bestowed onto each hand simultaneously. This allowed his mind to focus on at least two things at the same time, which eliminated thinking from the equation. If Dave’s mind could not think of concurrently performing two or three completely different tasks, then he resorted to contemplation. This was an avoidable result, something Dave battled to refrain from doing. Thinking about the past was bad for him.

The psychiatric evaluation he had undergone in prison, though only a two-week hypothesis following the Mini smash, had deemed him a sufferer of a rather obscure form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Granted, it was hardly a severe psychosis, but it was still an unexpected awkwardness he had become accustomed to. He was slightly neurotic, not psychotic. In other words, he was aware of his semi-ritualistic compulsions and the regularity with which he repeated himself or touched objects.

He now filled the kettle while removing a spoon from the cupboard, hearing a Bryan Adams song in his head, flipped the tea can and lightly clapped his hands as he set it beside his cup, thinking that Bryan Adams had done the soundtrack to Spirit, flicked the spoon and caught it, removed the milk from the fridge while placing the teabag in the cup, thought of the movie Cocktail, where Tom Cruise tossed the bottles, fetched sugar while twirling the spoon, turned the milk holder around his index finger as if he was a gunslinger, maybe Clint Eastwood, his mind lingering, the boiling water distracting him. Switch; click; pour; spoon clang; milk again; flip the lid. Queen did the soundtrack to Highlander. Open the fridge in search of the ingredients for a toasted sandwich. AIDS is a killer; malaria a close second. All the time thinking, sadly, that there was some form of insanity involved here, thinking American Psycho, thinking too much.

He somehow managed to live his life like this.

Out the house, Dave started down a steep hill. Langeberg Ridge, a neat little spot caught between the normality of Brackenfell and the riches of Durbanville, had a number of hills and vacant plots about, with numerous construction sites on the outskirts of the suburb. The houses there, in contrast to the Gordon house, were mostly colourful double storeys, or the more modest single-levelled flag of wealth, with, at least, three cars displayed in the paved driveways.

Shenko had inherited the house from his father – whom he had never met. Due to his disability – Shenko had endured a rare nerve trauma at school, which had left him limping and paining – he merely survived on his scant disability funds, his mother’s mini pension, and Dave’s monthly rent. The poor condition of the house explained precisely this in more than words; cracks, weeds, and a much-needed paint job. A sense of deprivation cast a shadow over the house, like a dark, looming cloud blocking out the richness of the sun. Normal folks passed the house warily, while Dave embraced its cold solace lovingly.

In an area predominantly occupied by factory managers, small business entrepreneurs, husband and wife teachers, and accountants, the Gordon house was a bit of an oddity, an eyesore. At the end of the day, everyone knew that Shenko would not be able to sell the place. He would be a permanent stain in the flawless fabric of suburban life. Endurance and sacrifice were hard lessons to learn, even for the average man.

Dave heard little birds twittering in an unimaginable distance, the sound penetrating his absence. It sounded like yellow finches. He glared up at the skies in wonder, not really adoring the perfect South African skyline. His mind was travelling beyond the borders of Cape Town, beyond Table Mountain and the stretching seas, beyond the African plains, beyond the stars and the endless galaxies, and beyond logic. It was happening more frequently now. He was constantly seeing things. Unexplainable apparitions bearing truths, or premonitions?

His sight shrunk back to reality. Day had broken.

The sun dwelt in the pit of mediocrity. Though its presence was unrelenting and almost self-explanatory, there was a pained slowness about the way it peaked and later sank into the vast emptiness of the eye. The world, as seen from the confused bowl of Dave’s unremitting view, seemed lethargic. It was a slow life.

It was 2010; it was June. The Soccer World Cup was mere days away from kick off. South Africa had finally made it onto the map. Unfortunately, the forethought of the World Cup had left a terrible aftertaste in the mouths of many South Africans. They felt conned and exploited by their own government and despised the worldly ravings of imminent concern fuelled by the international media. They wanted to return to their normal way of doing things and living life, but that would never happen. The country had been raped by a world monopoly, and she had been bled dry of significance. There was still the slow-burning fuse of potential havoc. The threat of mass rioting had been a silent monster since the beginning, and it had brought the nation to a pivotal point, balanced on a sharp point, and poised.

Because it was his Sunday, Dave had to open and lock up shop. During the week, he worked cyclical half day shifts, intermittently relieving or relieved by Leanne, his thirty-one-year-old co-worker. Weekends rotated fortnightly, this weekend belonging to him.

His life and work was a conformed routine. Quite understandably, it was a routine that his nature likened to. Also, a video shop required very little input from an employee, if any. He only had to check the morning float, return some movies, and help customers. He tried smiling all the time, but it made him look like a mummy, fresh out of the grave, robbed of concealing bandages, and sticky with decaying life. His vacant glance scared the crap out of some of the kids. So he just resorted to being reserved old Dave, the quiet time bomb.

It was the holy day and, being such, was a terrible day to work. Sundays