The Desk Sergeant – who looked as if he would be happy to lock up Vida under any pretext for simply being Vida, for coming into the station on New Year’s Day, for coming into the station on New Year’s Day to report a murder, or for all of the above – only seemed to pay attention to what Vida was saying when he said, ‘At first I thought it was Emil Coetzee.’ All of a sudden, the sergeant had a lot of questions and wanted to know every detail, until Vida even gave him what seemed to him to be the most useless detail of all: ‘She smelled of a woman’s cheap perfume … or a cheap woman’s perfume.’ Although he meticulously took down every piece of information, the Desk Sergeant did not commend Vida for reporting the crime. Instead, he charged him with loitering and locked him up in one of the holding cells, which only served to cement Vida’s resolve to not intervene in the lives of others.

Tom

TOM

Tom woke up to find himself naked and alone in a very cold room. What on God’s green earth was going on? How drunk was he? What day was it? Was he in hospital? Had he made it home? He really hoped he had not gambled or drank away whatever money he had to his name. He had promised Doreen that he would be good this time, but, while he remembered the promise, he did not remember the keeping of it.

His brain felt like cotton wool, his limbs were stiff and immobile and he seemed to have lost his voice. His tongue was thick and swollen and refused to move. This was all too familiar. He was trapped in one of his early morning stupors in which he was filled with a deep sense of foreboding, but could do nothing to escape it. But why was he naked?

Before he could find an answer, Tom heard voices, and as he listened to them, he relaxed. The voices spoke with authority: the people coming knew exactly what was going on and would explain it to him. The door opened and two men – one white, the other black – looked down at him. They looked at him for quite some time, and both smiled as though they had found a long-lost friend. They did not seem to make anything of his nudity. They did not seem to mind his silence. They seemed happy to take him as he was.

‘It is almost uncanny,’ the white one said as he slowly leaned closer.

Tom wished he had the voice to tell the man that something was either uncanny or not – nothing could be almost uncanny. Unfortunately, he still did not have enough saliva to lubricate his heavy tongue and set it in motion.