Free Sacrifices by Roger Smith Page A

on the bedside lamp. It’s after three in the morning. She wonders if she yelled and woke her mother, but the cottage is silent. The wind has died and in the distance she can hear the mosquito drone of a motorbike and the usual night music of sirens.
    When she draws back the covers to cool her body she sees spots of dried blood on the leg of her PJs from where she cut herself earlier, and feels a reprise of the panic and rage that had her reaching for the blade.
    Louise stands, breathing deeply, trying to calm herself, and crosses to the window. She opens the curtain a chink, looking up at the big house, standing square and dark against a sky washed gray by light pollution from the city. No, not quite dark. A lamp burns upstairs in the spare room.
    Christopher, she guesses. Staying there until the cleaning solvents in the pool house have dispersed. Then a shadow falls on the blind covering the window, and she sees a silhouette that is too delicate to be Chris’s: Michael Lane is sleeping there, away from his wife. The room goes dark and Louise steps back from the window.
    She remembers the expression on Michael’s face, in the kitchen earlier. Guilt. Michael, unlike his wife who effortlessly massages the truth to suit her purposes, is not a good liar. It isn’t difficult to imagine the argument between the Lanes that caused Michael to sleep alone. An argument prompted by Louise confronting him, she’s certain.
    She’ll catch him in the morning before he leaves for the bookstore and work on that guilt. This is Michael, after all, and even though her once overwhelming love for him has been tempered by teenage cynicism, she still believes that he is essentially a good man. Weak and too easily bullied by his nasty little wife, but good.
    In need of comfort, Louise opens the closet and finds her copy of Through the Looking-Glass hidden beneath a pile of T-shirts, resting on top of her photo album. The book, for years her most treasured possession, is in perfect condition. She pages through it, Tenniel’s illustrations as magical as the day she first saw them. 
    She flips to the frontispiece and reads the inscription: Birthday wishes to Louise, a girl who knows there are no impossible things. Michael.
    Taking the book back with her to the bed, laying it beside her pillow like a talisman, Louise clicks off the lamp and slides under the covers. 
    Closing her eyes she works at consciously calming herself, drawing deep breaths through her nose, and exhaling slowly. Banishing the horror-movie images of the nightmare and visualizing the panic that threatens her as a toxic yellow-brown smoke, smoke that she can disperse with each exhalation.
    Visualizing a waterfall through the smoke: a waterfall on Table Mountain that came with the winter rain. She only saw it once, when she was eleven, she and Lynnie hiking with Michael Lane, Lyndall moaning about the small pack he had to carry, Louise entranced by this wilderness just minutes from the house in Newlands.
    Standing amongst the rocks and the fynbos on the flat plateau at the top of the mountain, the invisible city far below, smiling up at Michael who looked like a monk with the rain dripping off the hood of his parka.
    Michael crossed to the small pond at the waterfall, knelt and drank, calling her over. Folding down beside him, she cupped her hands and brought them to her mouth, and tasting the purity of that cold, clear water, Louise sleeps.

17
     
     
    When he wakes from a restless slumber, Lane is astonished to see that it’s nearly 8:00 a.m. He raises the blind and looks over the garden at Table Mountain looming like a cutout against the empty blue sky, the rock washed golden by the sun. There is no wind and the famous cloth of cloud hovers undisturbed above the mountain’s flat top, ready for the hordes of tourists and their camera phones.
    Lane, lifting his own phone from the dresser beside the bed, tries to find remnants of last nights’ alcohol-fueled resolve but the