Hell's Music Read online

  Rae followed her to the guest room, crinkling her nose when they passed through the lounge. “You still don’t have a TV.”

  “Nope. I’m a Luddite, remember. No landline and, for that matter, I don’t have a computer either, so no chatting or wasting bandwidth on social networking sites. In this house we read books. You know those rectangular objects with pages inside? Little words printed on them?”

  “You must spend a fortune on internet cafés then.”

  “Unlike you, I don’t live in front of a computer screen. Once every two or three days is fine for a healthy adult human. Now go take a bath and please wash your hair.”

  “You sound like Ma.”

  Emily bit back a retort. She would have to do a lot of smooth-talking between the parents to sort out this mess. If her kid sister thought she’d lucked out with a convenient place to crash, she’d better think twice.

  Chapter 2

  Walk-ins

  It wasn’t too much of a slog to their father’s house, since Rae was pretty much used to walking just about everywhere she needed to go, but the incline up Kloof Nek was killing her calf muscles. Car after car roared past her on the windy road, the southeaster ripping through the tall umbrella pines that marched up the slope to her left. The mist boiled down Table Mountain’s ravines, never quite reaching the city limits.

  Rae hated the wind. No matter how hard she tried, her hair always came loose from whichever attempt she’d made to restrain it, obscuring her vision, with tendrils getting stuck in her mouth and making her gag when they went down her throat. A motorcycle license probably wasn’t such a bad idea. Then she could borrow Emily’s Vespa, or even save up for one of her own, if she got a job. The problem was, she didn’t want to end up as a waitress but it sure beat working in some retail hell like Davy.

  So, off to Daddy Dearest it was. She was pretty sure he’d open his wallet, especially once she’d spilled the story about how horrible her mother was, but that meant she had to shake it to get to her father’s house before Ma called him to bitch and moan about their delinquent daughter.

  One of their delinquent daughters. Rae smiled at the thought. Ma was most likely berating herself for being a failure, yet she couldn’t find it in her heart to feel pity for the woman who’d made such a hash job at parenting.

  It wasn’t their fault. After all, she’d had Emily to look up to, so certainly she couldn’t be blamed for turning out like her sister, not when their mother pretty much drove them to it at every angle every time she tried to prevent them from exploring their interests.

  Rae turned away from those thoughts, content to concentrate on the burning in her muscles, putting each foot before the other. When she reached the top of Kloof Nek, she turned to look upon the city sprawling below. The leafy-green suburbs of Oranjezicht flowed into Gardens with its cluster of Victorian-era homes to the heart of the CBD and Foreshore where skyscrapers fought for dominance. Glass-sheathed buildings flashed with the bursts of sunlight that lanced through the cloud cover. It was good to be based in the city. She far preferred its bustle to half-asleep suburbia.

  The rest of her journey would be easy now. She could have taken the bus but she hadn’t wanted to bug Emily for the change. Penance for her sins from the other night. It was too late to dwell on the foolishness of blowing the last of her cash on that beer before the guys had started buying her drinks. God, and her head still pounded. One tequila too many. Rae turned away from the city and continued walking, glad her route took her downhill.

  Of course in the light of day her escapade didn’t seem like such a good idea. Her sister had been right about her needing to finish her education, though she hadn’t wanted to agree at the time. It all seemed so senseless. Most of her friends were already talking about what they wanted to become: physiotherapists, beauty technicians, accountants, graphic designers or brand managers, none of which appealed to her. She couldn’t see herself spending so many hours reading and reading then reading some more.

  In that regard, she was not like her sister, whose love of books consumed almost every waking minute of her life to the point where she’d even dated one of her professors. That pale, pasty creature had turned her sister into such a wallflower. No way was she going to let some guy dictate to her what she could or couldn’t do with her life.

  She still had plenty of time to decide. The holidays lay ahead of her, six weeks of sorting out the conflicting options in her head and figuring out the way ahead. First off, she had to speak with her father. Even though it was tempting to try to hitch a lift down to Bantry Bay, Rae kept walking and lost herself in an easy rhythm.

  Typical of her father to rent a place that suited the playboy image he’d invented for himself since he’d left their mother. Not that she blamed him. Their mother was a bit much to handle most of the time, but it still stung that he’d left, even after a decade of getting used to the idea. His home was a sea-facing apartment above the main drag, and though she took a chance, assuming he’d be there, she was gratified to see his Mercedes SLK parked outside the garage. That meant he’d already been out and had returned. Ben Clark was an architect by trade, worked from home and could afford all the trappings accompanying the lifestyle he’d chosen.

  Rae smiled. And he could definitely afford to open his wallet to his younger daughter, especially if she found a way to turn on the charm to result in a little fatherly remorse.

  She allowed herself a smoke before she rang the buzzer, and watched the cars pass. Did her pa bumble about in his apartment? The sliding door leading onto the balcony was open but she detected no movement. Ben wouldn’t be pleased about her latest stunt–that much was for sure. If she played the little girl who was hard done it might work. A phone call beforehand might have been a good idea but she wanted to catch him off guard. She ground out the butt of her beedie, rubbed her face to smudge her makeup and redden her eyes, then took a deep breath and crossed the road.

  She had to press the buzzer three times before someone answered with a sleepy “Hello.” A woman’s voice.

  Rae’s hackles rose. “Tell my dad his daughter, Rae, is outside.”

  The woman paused and Rae heard faint strains of classical music playing over the speaker. “Okay.”

  She counted to twenty-seven before the gate unlocked. The stairs leading up the side of the house she took two at a time to reach the front door, which didn’t budge when she rattled the handle. Locked, damn it.

  The waifish woman who came to the entrance looked about Emily’s age and wore the navy blue dressing gown Rae had bought her father for his birthday last year. Her blond hair looked mussed, as though she’d just risen. Rae groaned inwardly. Talk about catching her father with his pants down, almost literally.

  She shoved past the young woman with barely a greeting but plastered a smile she didn’t feel like sharing to her features as she entered the kitchen where Ben busied himself making coffee. “Morning, Dad! What’s for breakfast?”

  * * * *

  Glad to escape the mid-morning glare of Long Street, as well as the chaos of cars, minibus taxis, buses and trucks, Emily slumped into the comfortable leather-upholstered recliner at the back of her shop. Hell, she could do without the usual goggle-eyed throngs of tourists, or locals on a mission.

  Here she was surrounded by the things she held dear: her shelves that contained rare and vintage second-hand books, as well as the random objet d’art she chose to stock. Not quite a bookshop or antique store, or even a café, Interzone was her little world, her sanctuary from Cape Town’s general madness. Here she could draw the deep maroon drapes to create mystery, or turn the dimmer switch a bit higher to brighten the shimmering scarlet crystal chandelier that took pride of place in the center of the ceiling.

  “Quaint” or “eccentric,” she’d heard her shop called. “Weird” or “strange,” even, but it definitely fit right in with the bohemian atmosphere of the small off-street arcade where her neighbors sold vinyl records, braided hair, stocked African cur
ios and maintained a tattoo parlor.

  The point was, it was hers, even more so since she’d moved on from Adrian. It had become her little cocoon, wrapping her against the assaults of banality that all too often stalked outside the beaded curtain that fringed the door.

  But Emily did not relish the phone call she had to make now. It troubled her that Rae had dropped in unannounced. Her sister brought with her a particular brand of craziness Emily had absolutely no desire to welcome back into her life. It reminded her of the silly things she’d gotten up to when she’d been that age.

  When she’d been that age–therein lay the rub. At twenty-six, Emily remembered all too well the hell she’d put her parents through when she’d just turned twenty. Hell, with her it had started far, far earlier. She’d certainly picked her time, during the most acrimonious stage of her parents’ divorce. Rae’s antics were mild by comparison.

  Emily steeled herself and dialed her mother’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times. She considered putting the receiver down, rather trying again after she’d fortified herself with an espresso when her mother answered.

  “Keating residence.” Her mother had reverted to her maiden name before the ink had dried on the divorce papers.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  “Emily, your sis–”

  “I know. She’s here with me. She’s safe. Don’t worry.”

  “Do you know–”

  “Yes, I don’t really want to hear all the gory details.”

  “She’s turned out worse than you, you know that? We should have been stricter, we should have...”

  Her mother began another one of her tirades and Emily pinched the bridge of her nose and pulled the receiver away from her ear, so her mother’s words mutated into strangled squawking.

  It was at that moment the beaded curtain of her shop tinkled and she looked up to see a man enter. He wasn’t what she’d consider her average customer. Tall with long black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, he wore camouflage pants and some black metal t-shirt, his arms completely covered in a frenzied kaleidoscope of tattoos. Great. Some metal head.

  A hand placed over the phone’s mouthpiece while she suppressed a frown, Emily asked him, “Can I help you?”

  The metal head cast a glance over his shoulder, as though he looked for someone before he turned to her. “Can I use your bathroom?”

  Of all the things to ask. Her mother’s voice over the phone was winding down, and she’d probably be waiting for Emily to offer some sort of appropriate answer. Mothers first. She’d deal with metal heads later. Besides, he did look rather desperate. If she caught him shooting up brown in the bathroom, or schnarffing a line, she’d give him a once-over with the can of pepper spray she stowed in her desk’s top drawer. It wouldn’t be the first time some junkie had tried this stunt at her shop. The last thing she needed to do was scrub a thin spray of blood off her walls and porcelain because the damn addict couldn’t find a vein the first time. It also struck her as faintly ridiculous that these preconceptions were the first to spring to mind when she dealt with someone who belonged to one of the subcultures she’d immersed herself only a few years ago.

  She shrugged and gestured with her head, over her left shoulder. “Sure, in the back.”

  “Thanks.” He rushed past her, all but slamming the door off its hinges.

  Her mother’s bleating drew her attention again and she lifted the phone to her ear. “Emily! Emily? Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes. Can I ask that you just calm the hell down, please? Carrying on like some fishwife with PMS isn’t going to solve the matter. I have customers in the shop.”

  “I’ve talked and talked until I’m blue in the face. I’ve begged, I’ve pleaded. I’ve been nice, I’ve threatened. Nothing works with you girls. It’s as if I’m talking to a brick wall. You’re both just like your fa–”

  “Leave Dad out of it, Ma. We’ve had this conversation before.” The old anger welled up and Emily’s eyes prickled. Trust her mother to know exactly which buttons to push.

  The beaded curtain at her front door tinkled again. Another man entered. Some trendy-looking guy, his dark-blond hair gelled into spikes, expensive-looking SLR camera dangling from his neck, designer jeans and pop-up collar on his pastel-blue golf shirt. He peered around her shop, but Emily ignored him as she allowed another wave of her mother’s tirade to wash over her. He stopped in front of her desk and cleared his throat.

  This guy would wait, so she could concentrate and maybe find a gap to stop her mother’s bitching. Her mother possessed some innate sixth sense when her daughters didn’t pay attention. She’d handle the customer as soon as she could politely extricate herself from the drama that played itself out on the other side of the line.

  “Ma, Ma. Please. I have a customer in my shop.”

  “You never listen to me!”

  “I’m listening to you now. Please just calm the fuck down. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t get the cops involved. Rae’s with me. Just let things chill a bit. Give it a week or so. I’ll make sure she doesn’t catch any more mischief.”

  “You girls are such a disappointment. Look at the way you talk to your mother. You could have made something out of your life. And what did you do with your university degree? You pulled it through your backside, you did. Two years of money wasted and you didn’t even finish the thing.”

  “I told you it wasn’t working, and now’s not the time to bring up my obvious lack of tertiary education. You’re trying to distract our discussion from what’s really important.” Her earlier conversation with Rae sprang to mind and Emily gritted her teeth. Like mother, like daughter.

  “Well, you can all go and make a mess of your lives. I’m done with the both of you.”

  Emily was vaguely aware that Mr. Pop-up Collar departed from her shop and she sighed a small breath of relief, which was short-lived when her mother killed the call.

  She sat in shocked silence for a few moments and fought back the urge to give in to tears. Arguments with her mother always went this way, with Irene Keating digging old cows out of ditches and leaving Emily feeling as though she were a complete and utter failure.

  Any attempt at pointing out that she owned her own store in the prestigious Long Street drag did little to mollify a mother who’d expected her daughter to become something fancy, perhaps a university professor or a researcher, or some such occupation fit for the daughter of one of the intelligentsia. With her mother, it was always what title went before your name and how many letters followed.

  When she was sufficiently sure she wasn’t about to wail like a two-year-old who’d been smacked in public, Emily took a deep breath and rose from her chair. Now to deal with Mr. Metal Head who got up to goodness knew what in her bathroom.

  Her shop wasn’t large and shared a tiny courtyard out back with the other outlets on this side of the building. The bathroom was situated in a nook beneath the staircase, but her visitor had not taken the key when he’d gone there. The chap had seated himself on the stairs leading to the roof and rested his head on his knees, fingers loosely clasped over the holey Doc Martens that had quite evidently seen better days.

  “Erm, you’ve been out here a bit,” Emily said. “Everything okay?”

  He looked up with a startled gasp, and she found herself transfixed by the palest green eyes she’d ever seen, dark rings around the irises only accentuating their peculiar shade. “I’m okay.” The man rose abruptly, as if embarrassed he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He brushed his hands on his pants then stretched, his vertebrae clicking audibly.

  Emily pegged him standing at least six-feet-four, tall but not bulked like a rugby player. God, and how she hated rugby players… Then she kicked herself mentally. Metal heads equaled beer, obnoxious music and juvenile behavior. Where had she seen him before? Probably way back when hanging out at The Event Horizon, getting hopelessly schmangled.

  “Um, you coming into the shop? We don’t really enc
ourage customers to hang out in the back here.”

  He regarded her for a short while. “Sure. Might as well check out a few titles. Really should be going.” His voice was a rich baritone with an accent she couldn’t quite place–South African but with a twinge of American. An ex-pat South African returned home? Couldn’t cut it over the pond after deserting the Rainbow Nation?

  Emily turned, gratified to hear him following her back into her shop. When he brushed past her as she locked the backdoor, she caught a whiff of his cologne, something musky with a hint of patchouli. Damn, it had been a while since she’d gotten this close to a guy, as in “close enough to perve without seeming to” and it bugged the living hell out of her that she even thought along those lines. Why the hell it should bug her was something she wasn’t able to place a finger on at this point.

  Settled back in her armchair, Emily gave the appearance of going through her index system while Mr. Metal Head browsed the bookshelves. What surprised her was that he took his time, some of the earlier tension draining from his posture as he selected books, read the back cover blurb or the first few pages.

  “See anything you like?” she asked after about five minutes.

  “You got quite a collection here. Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs…”

  “What, were you expecting Marian Keyes, Picoult and the like?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “There are dozens of shops already stocking that shit. I prefer edgier stuff here, things you wouldn’t necessarily find at the bigger chain stores.”

  He laughed. “You’re obviously not in it for the money.”

  Emily couldn’t help but bristle slightly. “What you getting at? I have my customers.”

  “Sorry. I haven’t been back in Cape Town for a while. A lot of the old places simply aren’t there anymore.”

  “Changing times. Saw a gap in the market when the old stores couldn’t adapt to the climate. Started attending deceased estate auctions and car boot sales. Only took me about two years to build up enough stock. I get by.”