The Lazarus Effect. HJ Golakai
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were it not for those who loved her. Society extolled the virtues of strength, but nobody ever gave any solid advice on how to break down properly. How long could a mother bustle about playing hostess, all the while mentally pushing aside the thought that her only child might be somewhere no mother would ever want her baby to see?
“I completely forgot the time,” Mrs Paulsen called from the kitchen. “I hope you didn’t have to wait too long.”
“Not at all,” Vee lied.
Idly, she examined a large ornate cabinet filled with china plates, dusty mugs and tiny figurines. If there was one thing that crossed all cultural boundaries, it was the off-limits cabinet with the delicate glassware and precious silver.
“Ian gave most of those to me,” Mrs Paulsen said, following her eyes as she set down the tea tray. “From his travels during his university and post-grad days. Me, I haven’t really travelled much. To Namibia once, before I got pregnant with Jacqueline, and once the two of us went to Zimbabwe in the good old days when it was such a nice country.”
Over the rim of the teacup, Vee studied her. This woman devoted a daily portion of her energy to remaining on the move so that no one could see how miserable she was. And how angry. The canned rage was hard to get at over the pain, but it was unmistakably there. It must be a struggle for her to carry on as a preschool teacher, seeing those eager eyes and sweet smiles every day.
“And where are you from?” Adele asked, pushing short brown hair behind both ears. “Your accent’s very different.” She leaned over, deftly spooned three measures of white sugar into her tea and then reclined in her armchair. Moving Adele. Still Adele. Vee cast a swift vote for Moving Adele. Still Adele looked ready to rise at any moment and slap the taste out her mouth for holding the cup the wrong way.
“I’m Liberian. From Liberia,” Vee added stupidly.
Adele “ahhed” and looked ceiling-ward, snapping her fingers in recollection. In the measured tones of an educator, she rattled off the capital city and two neighbouring countries and pressed on the current state of the politics since the end of the civil war. Vee felt pleasantly surprised and impressed. Most locals had little knowledge of other cultures “further north”, as they called it.
“To tell you the truth, I really didn’t know what to expect after I spoke to you yesterday,” Adele went on, returning to small talk. “With a surname like Johnson . . . but you’re obviously not coloured. What does your first name mean?”
Vee’s internal alarm gave a warning beep at the urging for more chitchat. They were officially in avoidance-tactic territory, and time was something she didn’t have much of.
“I’m named after a trading city in the north. There was a mix-up on my birth certificate between my place of birth and my chosen name, so . . . Voinjama stuck.”
Vee about-faced, turning serious. “Mrs Paulsen, I have to be honest as to why I called. I mentioned I’m investigating old missing persons cases, but . . . it’s really for a magazine article. I’m an investigative journalist for Urban magazine; maybe you know it.”
When the other woman gave no response except to settle deeper into the sofa, Vee plunged on.
“I’m not connected with the police in any way, nor am I a private detective. But I do care about what happened to your daughter, and other children like her, and that’s why I’m here.”
Truth kept light. Honesty was wonderful, but too much of it, especially here, was bound to come across as highly questionable, even absurd. How on earth to tell a mother that during a panic attack she was hounded by what looked like the ghost of her missing daughter? The photograph that she’d “borrowed” from the bulletin board at the Wellness Institute would remain under wraps for now.
Vee squirmed under Adele’s gaze. The discomfort reminded her of waiting outside the principal’s office to be punished.
“So Ian, Dr Fourie, he didn’t hire you to find Jacqueline? How’d you find me?”
“Um, no, he didn’t,” replied Vee, taken aback. Had she gone that far in her misrepresentation? She was certain she hadn’t. Ignore the second question.
Armed with the photograph and buckets of innocent charm, she’d managed to wangle an identification out of the more talkative members of the paediatric nursing staff. People were helpful if they thought there was a chance of seeing their names in print. It was easy enough to link Jacqueline to her mother, but suspicion sealed off communication beyond that. Otherwise, all she got was a very tenuous connection to a Dr Fourie, of which both an Ian and a Carina falling under that surname had refused to take her calls.
“I’m sorry if I led you to think otherwise,” she continued. “I hope you don’t change your mind about speaking to me.”
She cringed internally. It was never advisable to give a source the option of shutting you down. Plus her own health and sanity depended more than her livelihood on finding the truth behind Jacqueline Paulsen’s disappearance. Envisioning the hovering dead wasn’t fun any more. As they regarded each other, she saw with relief her plaintive look was matched by Adele’s own desire to talk.
“How much do you want to know?” the woman said wearily. When Vee produced her Nokia and switched it to voice recording, Adele nodded mutely, giving the go-ahead.
“Please,” said Vee, propping it on the table, “everything.”
Chapter Four
At the age of sixteen she’d met Ian Fourie, Adele Paulsen began. They were two middle-class coloured teenagers growing up in Athlone, her family being further down the ladder of the class system than the Fouries. It was the early eighties and the winds of change weren’t blowing through apartheid South Africa yet, or at least not hard enough to keep up with the tide of ambition swirling inside Ian. His aura of “more-ness” had him destined for far greater things than what the restrictive government had mapped out for “non-whites” of his kind. Bright herself, Adele was nevertheless content with her lot in life and vacillated between nursing and teaching. Highest on her list of priorities was to adore her secret boyfriend. Ian was immensely intelligent, but like many talented men was controlled by an insufferable matriarch.
“It’s amazing how powerful men can be such shrivelled assholes in their mothers’ presence.”
Vee gave an involuntary start at the sound of an expletive coming out of the mouth of such a collected, well-spoken woman.
“Ian’s family didn’t have much more than mine, but to see his mother carry on you’d think they were rolling in it. Every time I came by, that crabby old bat had her face scrunched up like I came to steal something. In a way, I guess . . . I guess I did. We were both so young and didn’t think for one second we wouldn’t end up together. It was that naive first love.”
“What made you stop seeing each other?”
“We didn’t. We never actually broke up, not formally. He left in December 1981. One day he was here in Cape Town, and the next he wasn’t. He had family abroad, in Europe. His mother didn’t want him leaving the country to study medicine, but after he started up with me it became the best idea she’d ever heard. I knew Ian wouldn’t pass up the chance in a million years. Not that our relationship didn’t matter. Ian’s just like that, always has been. He has this fire to accomplish things, and nothing should ever stand in his way. Emotions . . . love and things like that just have to work their way around what he plans to accomplish.”
The bitterness left her voice, and she turned on a softer look. “He isn’t all cold, ambitious bastard. Ian’s a good man; he truly is. He protects and provides for all the people he loves. I think so much is expected of him by so many people, it gets hard for him to balance being successful and keeping everybody happy.”
She still loves him. Tightness closed around Vee’s heart. Did she still look like this to others, deflated and blindly defending a man who had, to all intents and purposes, moved on with his life and excluded her from