Читать книгу My Only Story - Deon Wiggett - Страница 11

It is 2018 and my aunt Esmé is sitting on my stoep in Johannesburg. She is a woman larger than life, and her questions ring out powerfully into the mild March afternoon.

‘So why have you summoned me here?’ says Esmé.

‘Summoned is a strong word,’ I say.

‘You made me drive two hours from Potchefstroom to talk to me on your stoep.’

‘It would have been an hour and a half if you weren’t freaked out by the highway.’

We jostle on, her boomily laughing, me choosing my words judiciously, because my aunt and godmother is an eminent academic who only really listens when you know what you want to say.

And then I tell Esmé all that happened to me, and she understands why she has been summoned.

‘So this Willem Breytenbach character,’ she says eventually, ‘you say he’s still alive?’

‘Very much alive, and very much active in Cape Town.’

Immediately: ‘But you must expose him!’

‘That is the plan,’ I say, and I tell her a very vague plan.

‘Your plan seems pretty vague,’ she says.

‘Don’t you have a long drive ahead of you?’ I say, but she pretends not to hear.

Then, as always, she leaves too early, and I cry about my dead father, and about being raped as a boy.

Esmé is right, though: my plan is pretty vague. Like everything, I talk about it to Craig, my therapist, who is a compact sage and a very poor Jew. In his office in a tranquil Sandton garden, he says I can expose Willem, if I want to, because he can teach me how.

The secret, he says, is profiling. He would say that, since his obsessive studies have made him both a criminologist and a psychodynamic psychologist.

In these pages, I will not be defending psychodynamics from other psychological schools’ shade. In 2018, I decide to trust Craig once more, because his methodology is available to me, and because he has never let me down. The rest of this story will prove or disprove my interpretation of Craig and the century of psychological thinking I so glibly make him represent.

‘So, if we assume I was not some kind of aberration, Willem has to be a psychopath?’ I say, and Craig nods gravely. In this book, he can only nod adverbially in response to things I state. That is our compromise, because using Craig’s direct words, and not my own, might jeopardise my budding sense of agency, or something, Craig says. If you think he is being a bit of a pain about it, you are quite correct.

‘If I can’t quote you when we talk, you will seem much quieter than you are in real life,’ I say, and Craig nods understandingly.

We talk through our basic assumption: if Willem is a paedophile and serial rapist, he has to be a psychopath, because only psychopaths can rape strings of people without being consumed by guilt – psychopaths are defined by their absence of empathy and conscience.

And so it is not Craig who says: ‘By understanding psychopaths, and their dark and empty pathologies, we could start to look for patterns in Breytenbach’s own life!’

If this were a real detective novel, the psychopath would be a serial killer. In his freezer, he would store grisly trophies and, in the cold kitchen of a loveless home, he would write cryptic letters to the cops, mocking their impotence and revelling in his power.

‘What can be more powerful than controlling life?’ his animal brain says.

‘Firing people!’ the corporate psychopath says.

‘Having sex with children!’ the serial paedophile says.

‘That’s messed up, man,’ the CEO and murderer say in strange unison.

All these psychopaths’ emotions are rooted in power. They feel rage and envy if they do not have the power they believe is rightfully theirs, and satisfaction when they do eventually attain it. That is how unsophisticated their personalities are.

Unlike in a proper detective tale, here our taunting villain is a paedophile. His trophies are not frozen; they are proudly displayed, because they are cryptic enough. The trophies are there for his friends’ benefit, because paedophiles often hunt in packs. Once some old man gets a teenage boy to blow him, a second old man will encounter less resistance, because the boy now thinks that that is what must be done.

And so a man like Willem may post pictures on social media in which he is seen to be enjoying the company of children. Kids who, now that you mention it, often look strikingly similar. Like a big-game hunter with a trophied wall, he may display his victims for anyone who can spot prey when they see it.

In 2018, Craig suggests I look for the trophies. Exactly where one may find them depends on the bullfrog one is trapping.

When I find Willem’s, it burdens me with a secret that is not mine to keep. He has been an insatiable hunter.

Somebody will have to stop him. Clearly it will have to be me.