Blood Rose by Margie Orford Page A

fingers sought the ridged scars on his cheekbones. Precise incisions that had been filled with ash so that he would be forever marked as someone who belonged. But that had been forty years ago. The close-knit structures of family and clan up north had fractured and then broken apart. The force of that implosion had landed him here on this tract of bleak sand. It had kept him in the heaving bowels of a factory ship until it had crushed him beneath falling crates of filleted fish. Then it had spat him out again to find woman’s work, sweeping and cleaning toilets, dragging his injured leg behind him until he had come face to face with the dead child in the swing. The end? Hard to say. Shipanga looked down at his shoes.
    ‘We used to find them like that,’ he said at last. ‘Outside the villages.’
    Clare waited, watching as Shipanga gathered memories, sought words in a language that did not belong to either of them.
    Shipanga looked at Clare, frustration clear in his eyes. The words were inadequate for what he wanted to tell her, the shock of a buried past colliding with the present. ‘I found him,’ he said. ‘The bullets to the head. Like the executions when the army was here, in the north …’ His voice trailed off.
    The absence of war, thought Clare, did not result in the presence of peace. The elemental force of it, the trauma, shaped a man in unnatural ways, much as the wind along this Skeleton Coast bent the alien trees.
    ‘You found him,’ prompted Clare. ‘Tell me how you found him.’
    Shipanga straightened the seam in his trousers. Someone had ironed them with care. ‘I ate early. I left after the first siren. Before six. I went straight to the school. Got my rake to clean.’
    ‘Which way did you go in?’
    ‘I went in the back. I take a short cut down the path between the houses.’
    ‘Don’t the dogs go crazy?’ asked Clare.
    ‘I always go there,’ said Shipanga. ‘They’re used to me.’
    ‘Did you see anybody?’
    Shipanga shook his head. ‘My wife was here, my kids. At the school, on the way there, the fog was too thick. I saw nobody. Nobody saw me.’ He paused, thought about the implications.
    ‘No one was at school before you?’
    ‘Just Mrs Ruyters. Her car was there. I didn’t see her.’
    ‘Did you expect her to be there?’ Clare asked.
    ‘She’s always first.’
    ‘You always start with the kindergarten playground?’
    ‘Always. Some of the children come early. Mrs Ruyters likes it to be ready for them.’ Shipanga picked at his fraying cuff. ‘When I saw him there,’ he continued, ‘I thought it was one of the older children teasing. Then the wind turned him and I saw the flies on his face.’
    ‘Did you touch him?’
    ‘I told Sergeant van Wyk,’ said Shipanga, ‘I ran for help. The headmaster was there and he called the police. I didn’t see the boy again. My job was to stop anyone coming into the school.’
    ‘Who came?’
    ‘There were only a few,’ said Shipanga. ‘Mr Meyer, of course. He’s always early. The little boy, Oscar. He sometimes helps me or he goes to Mrs Ruyters.’
    ‘The other early people?’
    ‘They all went away when they saw the police vans and the ambulance. Only Calvin Goagab caused trouble.’ Shipanga’s mouth twisted, as if the name was bitter on his tongue. ‘He wanted to drop his sons at school.’
    ‘Is he often early?’ Clare asked.
    ‘He does what he wants. He’s a powerful man. He works for the mayor now. He has a smart house. He forgets that he came from here.’ Shipanga gestured to the grimy dilapidation around him. The silent, staring children shrank out of sight again.
    ‘Does anyone else use that back entrance?’ Clare changed tack. Tamar had told her about Goagab. She needed more.
    Shipanga shrugged. ‘Sometimes the children. The ones who come from the other side of town. Mara Thomson sometimes. She comes by bike.’
    Clare was about to get up, but Shipanga put his hand on her arm, restraining her.
    ‘It