PROLOGUE

Eddie had always fantasised about being shot. Growing up on the Flats, it comes with the territory: being shot, being knifed, taking a screwdriver in the ribs. He’d envisaged that it would be exquisitely intense; that the nanosecond between life and death would play itself out in technicolour splendour.

As a twelve-year-old, Eddie had been transfixed by the newspaper pictures of Rashaad Staggie being lynched by hundreds of rabid Pagad members outside his house in Salt River. What a way to go: shot and beaten and burnt to death in the street, while people spat on you and swore at you and the press took photographs. Eddie must have kept that issue of the next day’s Cape Times for two or three years after that, getting it out regularly to look again in awe at those pictures. Staggie, the feared Hard Livings gang leader, all bok and full of bravado when he arrived in his fancy white bakkie to confront the mob, staggering about with bullet wounds in his head and all over his body, flames leaping off him like in a movie. That was 1996.

Then, five years later, he’d watched as people jumped off the Twin Towers on September 11. He’d been mesmerised by their rhythmic, slow-mo dances of death. Sitting in front of the box at Cruise’s mother’s place in Delft, he’d wondered what they were thinking. Were they bidding farewell to their loved ones, saying hello-howzit to their Maker? Or were they just thinking that it had been a really bad idea to get out of bed that morning?

With multiple bullets lodged in his arse, that last thought is the one playing in Eddie Beukes’s head right now: “Should have stayed in bed today.” Instead, he’s lying on his stomach, awash in the pain and stench of his own exploding bowels. All around him are the sounds of sirens, gunshots, shrieks and shattering glass.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. The theory sounded grand, but Eddie always figured it would never live up to the hype. He’d seen people take bullets before; he’d pulled the trigger himself a few times. Once, he’d even shot himself, accidentally in the foot. It was more of a graze really, but at the time, in the Galaxy Club in Athlone, it had hurt like a bitch, popping open his shoe and spraying a line of blood onto the floor. To make matters worse, he’d done it while chatting up a chick; he’d been fondling his gun at the time and next thing he was hopping about on one foot. When the boys saw what had happened, they howled. Now you’ve gone and put your foot in it! Never forget the safety, my bru! They’d threatened later that if he even attempted to clean the bloodstain off the carpet, they’d attach his balls to his ears. So it remained, a spidery, rusty-red testament to macho moves gone wrong.

But today hasn’t just gone wrong: it’s gone befok. Today, Eddie knows what it’s like to be shot properly. He’s taken two in the arse and one in the lower back. The blood he’s lying in is not just a splash; it’s a sticky pool sinking into the tarmac. Around him, there is mayhem. Wadeville, east of

Johannesburg, is in chaos. When the news reports start airing, they’ll describe the scene with that tired, old phrase, “a warzone”. But that’s what it is. The security van looks as though it’s been melted in the sun; its contours warped and flattened by the impact of the collision. A couple of hundred metres up the road, one of the BMWs is overturned and flattened almost in half. The unmarked police vehicle is not in much better shape, its bonnet torn from its body and the front windscreen an untidy spiderweb of cracks and chip marks. All around, the buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes.

Eddie raises himself painfully, turning his face. Earlier it had been a sunny day, but the highveld sky has clouded over and is now a brooding gunmetal grey. A body, one of the security guards, lies flopped out of the side of the van; even in his wounded state, Eddie knows the man is dead, having taken several rounds from the AK-47s a few minutes earlier. Someone else seems to be suspended from the roof of a shed adjoining a warehouse over the road. Squinting, Eddie can see that it’s the bulky frame of Cruise hanging there, a misshapen crucifix, one arm hooked by the sleeve to a jutting piece of metal sheeting, the other arm swaying limply at his side.

The shooting has stopped now, and the rising babble of voices alternates between English and Afrikaans. Eddie can’t decipher the words, just the intonation: short, sharp vocal bursts. They are getting closer, competing with the high-pitched sirens.

“En nou, hierdie een?”

Eddie’s head starts to submit to the engulfing agony of his body. The war is over. Help is at hand. He can rest now.
“Hierdie een? Fok hom. Fok hulle almal.”

Eddie can make out the footsteps approaching but he is unconscious by the time the two police officers reach him. He doesn’t feel the heavy-duty boot connecting with his shattered thigh.

                        CHAPTER ONE

16 May 2002

Eddie’s mind was wandering. He was staking out a hit in Obs, but his thoughts were miles away – on Melanie, his own private enigma. A post-graduate sociology student from UCT, Melanie had started visiting the family a few years ago, after one of Eddie’s father’s “episodes”. John Beukes had begun using his revolver to change television channels – one of the symptoms of his PMP, or post-mandrax psychosis, a condition not alleviated by bouts of heavy drinking. The old man’s habits had eventually managed to attract the attention of Cape Town’s thinly spread social services.

Melanie would arrive at their house in Tafelsig, looking good, clean and left-of-centre – a sexy, beret-headed struggle-brat. Eddie would call her a limo-liberal and ghetto-whore, but never to her face, of course. And she would hold his mother’s trembling hand, pat his cheek and preach the gospel of community goodwill and domestic peace. Eddie would nod and smile with teary-eyed sincerity. But the only piece he was thinking about was the one between his legs. She was twenty-five at the time; he was fifteen and small for his age. But at fifteen he was already a master craftsman in the art of the mindfuck. In the presence of his mother, Miriam, he would assume the whiny, infantile tones of a petulant child. “Ag mammie, they made me do it and
you don’t understand me.” It always worked. Miriam was his protector, his champion – and his unwitting accomplice.

Thing is, with Melanie he wasn’t sure if he wanted to fuck with her mind, fuck her, kill her, or all of the above. He hated the bitch. And he was intrigued by her. Around her voice and scent he could feel himself reacting like a diabetic to a sugar rush. But he would lower his eyes deferentially. He’d call her “milady” and hold back on the ghetto-rap and skollie invectives he usually used on white ears. He had already integrated the psychological discourse of post-apartheid South Africa into his street dialect. He spoke of the need for closure, counselling, empowerment, anger management. He had the jargon down to a finely honed, articulated craft.

Around other “sturwies, serfs of the system and flak catchers” – the terms he used to describe emissaries from social services and NGOs – he was exactly the opposite. Once, after he helped relieve a neighbour’s car of three of its wheels, he was visited by a social worker called Colin. The burly man balanced on his haunches and eyeballed him sternly while pushing his fists together. It was a pre-planned ritual enacted in order to approach the deviant teenager on his own level. But it was also to flex his pecs, to show Eddie that he was once one of the manne, that he was wise to his tricks, that he mustn’t even think of messing with another bro from the ghetto. And Eddie sneered at him and spewed every skollie expletive he’d ever been taught, plus some that hadn’t yet been even introduced into street-gang-speak. He acted out the stereotype, the double-speak and the self-parody. By the end of it he wasn’t sure whether he was the humiliator or the humiliated. Not for Melanie, though, that filth from his mouth. She was another story altogether. But why was she on his mind now? Must be the woman he’d been watching.

It was not his first hit, not by a long shot, but it was certainly – in terms of his junior ranking – the most significant. He’d been staking out Lower Main Road in Observatory for several days and had noticed that around 9am every morning a woman would park her car outside the community centre and leave at 6pm each night. Some days she would drive alone; other days she would be accompanied by a man, who would take the wheel. The car was a Toyota Tazz – “The Starter Pack”, in gangster speak: a traditional entry vehicle for wannabe jackers. No problematic security, easy disposal: hit it and get it to the chop-shop as quick as you can.

The woman’s companion looked big but out of shape – not built for battle, that much was evident. And she, with the trademark trendy lefty corduroy jeans and tweed jacket – that must be what reminded him of Melanie. They were perfect targets.

Cruise had said the hit must be spontaneous. No pre-planning. But if Cruise had to grow another brain cell it would be lonely. As lieutenant, he may have had the senior rank, but Cruise was a fool and easily led. Eddie was only a fieldworker, a runner – the lowest rank in the gang hierarchy – but he’d mapped out the mission in his mind like a military manoeuvre. From the approach to the target site, every twist and turn of the getaway, the time and place of the cooling-off phase. Even their clothes were planned to the finest detail: none of those labels they like to flash at the Waterfront or the Mitchell’s Plain Mall. Dress code for this hit was strictly combat gear.

“Excuse me, milady…”

Eddie approached the woman getting into the passenger side of the Tazz. As she turned towards him, Cruise, the bulkier of the two attackers, was already behind the driver, gun thrust into his back. The gang generals had issued them both with 9mm pistols, the hijacker’s weapon of choice. The distinctive sound it made when cocked was unmistakable, piercing – full of intent. Eddie flashed his pistol in the woman’s face. Her eyeballs seemed to freeze into their sockets.

“Get in, milady. No noise or your boy gets it.”

The Tazz had central locking, so everyone got in at once: Cruise in the passenger seat with the driver, Eddie in the back with the Melanie lookalike. Fifty metres along Lower Main Road, two others from the gang were waiting in a second car, to monitor the action and to execute plan B, the rescue operation, should the mission fail.

“Like one happy family,” Eddie said, smiling, trying to keep things calm. “Nice and easy, my friends, nice and easy.”
But the driver was shaking so badly that he dropped the keys. Or maybe it was a stalling ploy. Either way, he needed an incentive to get the car on the road. The crack of Cruise’s pistol against his cheekbone did the trick, and with Miss Trendy-Lefty sobbing in the back, they pulled off.

They quickly got out of Obs, onto Eastern Boulevard, then along the N2, heading for the R300 and the turn-off to Mitchell’s Plain. The plan was to get the vehicle as far away from the jack scene and to the designated panel-beater-cum-knock-shop as soon as possible. They had taken along the hijacked couple as collateral because Eddie had spotted the “Tracker” sticker on the car. “Who puts Tracker on a Tazz?” he’d thought when he noticed it. But it was an important observation: had they driven off without their cargo, the tracking company could have been alerted and the operation foiled.

The plan was to dump the pair in the middle of nowhere. No-one must get hurt this time. It was a test from the generals: to leave as little collateral damage as possible. But Mr and Ms Trendy-Lefty didn’t know this, and Eddie wasn’t in the mood to assuage their fears just yet. He was way too pumped up on adrenaline.

By now, the driver had regained some composure. Slivers of skin and blood were hanging from his damaged cheekbone, but he remained silent and kept both hands on the wheel. The beret-head was stammering in one of those private-school-elocution accents that infuriatingly reminded Eddie of Melanie again.

“Please keep the car, our cellphones – everything. We have children. They need us. You understand that, don’t you? I mean, you’ve got parents, right?
“Yeah,” chirped Cruise, “but my own mother would sell me for a rock.”

Before the mandrax and booze finally fried his brain, Eddie’s dad, John, would impart life-skills lectures, often in the form of a riddle.

Example: “What’s the difference between America and the Cape Flats?”

Answer: “America has Bob Hope and Johnny Cash. The Flats don’t have hope or cash! And they’ll never have either.”

Then the bitter laughter.

Another of his home-spun aphorisms was that “irritation can produce a pearl in the oyster”.

Also from the book of John, some more expedient advice: “On the Cape Flats there are only two survival strategies: get rich and get out.” Which is exactly what Eddie’s game plan was – by hook and definitely by crook.

He’d become a smash-’n’-grab specialist way back; he’d first added it to his collection of petty-thievery skills as a sixteen-year-old. Hanging out on the corners of Lansdowne, a more affluent coloured suburb, he’d suss out suitable targets, normally cars driven by manicured matrons with handbags and cellphones placed carelessly on the passenger seat. No-one in Cape Town really knew what smash-’n’-grab was back then. He’d take a spark plug to the car window and in the blink of an eye would make off down the road with the bounty. Depending on the contents, he’d either sell them to his street connections or spend them.

The fact that he was robbing his own community didn’t faze him. A venerated gang leader had once described this class of coloured to him: “They’re a community of perfume shitters. They are worse than whites because they want to be like them.”

Eddie was determined to defeat these cologne crappers. The injustices of his life could not be washed away like shit through a sewer. He would never live on, or below, the crapper line.

Which is why the gangs winked and beckoned so seductively. It wasn’t just the money they flashed in wads, or the cars they drove, or the chicks they scored. Sure, those were all incentives. But the real lure was the confidence of belonging to a powerful organisation – not to a desperate underclass, scurrying and scavenging on the periphery of a white-owned, black-ruled economy. To Eddie, the gangs offered more than just quick cash and a glamorous lifestyle; they were crusaders, avenging angels.

Cruise reached over and popped a CD single into the player. He’d bought it along especially: How Do You Want It by Tupac Shakur, the American gangsta rapper who had literally embodied the mantra and mythology of live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse, and whose songs were anthems for the Firm and the 28s.

“Check it,” said Cruise to the driver, brandishing a hefty bicep etched with a fresh tattoo. “I even got the ‘Thug Life’ tattooed in honour of the good man himself.”

Then he skipped to his favourite track and began hitting it up:

Call the cops when you see Tupac,

Grab your Glocks when you see Tupac...

Eddie was irritated by Cruise’s mix of bragging and bravado. This mission needed to be low-key and photo-finish perfect, otherwise he might be doomed to exile from the gang empire. Hell, if Cruise fucked things up properly, he could end up tortured in some shithole tenement block on the Plains. You never know when you piss off the bosses; he might even be killed. And things can go wrong so easily. It had happened during his previous hit, after his return from the Eastern Cape. He was lucky to get out of that one.

On the recommendation of Melanie, his mother had decided to remove him from the influence of his father and the gang milieu of the Flats. Her solution was to send him to her family in the rural hinterland. But Miriam’s family lived on the outskirts of Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape. Miriam was once a beautiful Xhosa girl. At the age of 18 she had migrated to Paarl to find work as a grape picker on one of the Western Cape’s many wine estates. There she had fallen into an illicit relationship with a handsome, idealistic, young Afrikaans farmer, whose conservative cultural heritage concealed a dubious genetic history. That was in 1983. Eddie was born a year later in July.

“We were so in love,” Miriam would recall dreamily to Eddie. “Mal for each other. He was the most romantic man in the world.”
Perhaps memory had blunted the more jagged-edged realities of their relationship. The only recollections Eddie had of this romantic union were drunken ramblings, raging tempers and flying fists.

The young couple had escaped the wrath of the well-heeled white community and headed for sanctuary among the dispossessed communities of the Cape Flats. But the social geography and history of the area merely echoed its natural geography. Although the Beukeses encountered precious pockets of support for their mixed – and illegal – union, many members of the coloured community were as harsh and unforgiving as the desolate, windswept plains themselves. The ostracism and dehydration of once-romantic dreams had taken its toll on the couple and their son. Hard living had dissipated Miriam’s radiance, aided by alcohol, buttons and domestic abuse. John had turned into the perfect cliché of a disadvantaged community: unemployed, angry, inebriated – and alienated from whites, blacks and coloureds alike. Eddie’s own physiognomy became their neon sign of non-belonging: he bore the fairer skin of his father, the coarse, curly hair of his mother and a pair of blue-green eyes that seemed to belong to neither.

He certainly didn’t fit into a rural Xhosa community, and a month after being sent to the Eastern Cape, he was back in Cape Town. By then he had to try doubly hard to prove he belonged to the gang. They called him a vuil mbala – a frans – a dirty nothing – the most hateful insult reserved for gang outsiders. He had to provide irascible proof of his allegiance. So he attempted to hijack a car. On his own. He had been given the treasured 9mm, which he’d stroked nervously as he waited at a busy intersection close to the Athlone Mall, along Lansdowne Road. He couldn’t remember the colour of the car, just the make: a Toyota Corolla. The driver was an elderly, bespectacled white man, who had pulled over to speak on his cellphone. When Eddie had accosted him, he’d laughed in his face, perhaps because he was so small and young-looking, or maybe because he looked white and therefore incapable of committing a crime. He’d even tried to continue his phone conversation.

Eddie had shot him and ran. A gang lieutenant who had been dispatched to observe the botched operation later commended him on his bravery. Eddie was back in the fold, by the deceptively white skin of his teeth. The hit made the headlines. The driver survived. Eddie’s homeboys would never know that he had wet himself in fear and couldn’t eat for days afterwards.

After taking a left off the R300 onto a sand road leading towards the dunes, Cruise instructed the driver to pull over. Eddie hopped out of the rear, opened the driver’s door, unclipped his seat belt and yanked him out. His eyes were on the driver’s hands. He didn’t think the trembling man would attempt to pull any heroics at this stage, but it was imperative to ensure that he didn’t make any sudden moves. Even a sudden unclipping of a seatbelt would warrant an armed response.

Cruise had pulled out the woman, grabbing her by the upper arm.

“So you say you’re actors and married and do all sorts of community shit,” he was saying. The word “shit” came out in a fine haze of vindictive spittle.

“Well, we want you to act out a marriage scene for a disadvantaged community. We’ll direct you.”

By now the southeaster had picked up and the woman was almost gyrating in the wind. She was clutching her elbows to her body, trying to ward off the cold and fear, glancing helplessly at her husband

“Take off your clothes,” said Cruise.

“Please no… I…”

Cruise punched her once in the face, a short, solid jab with ring-encrusted fingers that landed her arse-first in the sand, legs indecently splayed. She was stunned, her long hair swirling in the wind and quickly matting onto the blood running from her mouth. The husband lunged to her side, and received another, harder punch for his efforts, connecting with his already-damaged face.

“We can’t mess them up unless they give us grief, bru,” whispered Eddie. “Those are the rules.”

“They gave us grief.”


Cruise stood over the couple. “Now,” he said, gesturing with his gun for effect, “you are going to show us what it’s like when a husband and wife make nice love. Then we are going to show you both how it’s done.”

Fuck. Eddie should have expected this from Cruise. Ever since they had been in school together, Cruise – otherwise known as Tyrone William McBride – had been obsessed with his dick and what he could do with it. It was freakishly large, and he’d moulded his identity around it, whipping it out and showing it off whenever he could. And he wasn’t afraid to get rough with girls if they weren’t too keen to check it out. Eddie often wondered why he ever hung out with Cruise in the first place: it was good to have some muscle around, but he’d been one depraved, fucked-up kid ever since junior-school days. And here he was again, obsessing about sex, swinging his dick around.

But today’s objective was to score the vehicle, not let Cruise act out the constant porn movies in his head. By now he’d managed to get the couple semi-undressed and manoeuvre them into the missionary position. They were moving almost imperceptibly in the evening mist, speaking softly – but not inaudibly – to one another. Eddie found this particularly disconcerting. They were saying beautiful things to each other, as though they were making love on a duvet in front of a fireplace, instead of being forced to fuck in the veld in front of a couple of skollies who needed to make their mark.

“Come on, it’s fucking freezing. Let’s duck,” said Eddie. Cruise shrugged, but didn’t resist.

“Ya, whiteys, you getting boring anyway. You don’t like to pomp, hey?”

They left the naked couple just off the R300, still entwined among the sand dunes and the scrub. Then they made their way through the labyrinth of Mitchell’s Plain’s crescent-shaped neighbourhoods to the designated knock shop, where the car would be stripped, given a new chassis, resprayed, re-registered and got ready to roll. When they made the handover, they were paid a grand each for their toil, and invested in the biggest stash of rocks two grand could buy.

Despite Cruise’s antics, it had gone smoother than the first hit of white pipe.

The following day, Eddie read about the couple that had been hijacked, stripped naked, forced to simulate sex and abandoned in the dunes. They had stumbled into an informal settlement on the outskirts of Khayelitsha where a kindly member of the community had summoned the police. It was all over the newspapers and on the radio. That was the material proof Eddie required to graduate from fieldworker to ndota, gang warrior. He had passed a crucial initiation test cum laude. The next one would be tougher.