Lonnie Apteker was sitting in Doctor Allyson Dodd's chair when Lucy Amis walked into her new analyst's office, not far from the national gallery, which was showing, incidentally, a series of video installations of young men being ritually circumcised in the Lesotho mountains. Lonnie had seen the show, wincing as he ran a mop across the floor. Meanwhile Doctor Dodd lay bleeding a few streets away. She'd been thrown from her car in a head-on collision, more than a little her fault, and the broken windshield raked a passing pitchfork pattern right to the bones in her face. She looked up at the sky and gurgled. Lucy was 'bi-polar' (or whatever) and this was a low, a downturn, her functions barely functioning. But the upturn could happen just like that. "I thought you'd be a woman," she said. "Allyson is a woman's name."

Lonnie was there to do the windows. He'd sat down to rest given the night he'd had. A pipe or two then on with his cousins, Booisens and Taliep, to a bash thrown by a girl still at school. Her parents were away, returning a caravan, overnight. The party grew and grew and spilled onto the street. They'd opened the doors and windows, and friends and neighbors all joined in, until the thing inside of Lonnie that kept him walking around, jolling and talking, wound down. He sunk to the ground around three or four that morning, behind a house where dogs were chained. He woke to dog licks and walked home, his head thundering, the sun like a knife, and showered, ignoring his mother and sisters, and came to work, trying not to vomit in the taxi.

"Where do I sit?"

Lonnie, tall and lean at thirty one, forgot his uniform, a beige coverall stained at the heart, and must have seemed presentable in a T-Shirt and slacks. He shrugged and stared at the young white female. She pulled a chair out before the desk and sat down. Enabling events, Santé Van Heerden, Doctor Dodd's secretary, had called in sick. Her voice message now lay blinking on the doctor's desk. Santé had contracted a bug on the long weekend, visiting Knysna with her Kenyan boyfriend. She remembered looking over at a sneezing child at a roadside restaurant. Unseen were the germs, airborne and alive. Dodo, her man, was also feeling it, home, too, and they were both now seeing each kiss, the weekend long, as an exchange of sickness.

Lucy was fourteen. She had a trio of beauty marks running left from her nose to her ear. They made her face wonky, she believed. Like a smeared photocopy of the face she ought to have. Those beauty marks were one of the many, many flaws she mentally ran through several times an hour. Her eating disorder was an afterthought, really. She barely took responsibility for it. Food was optional, and she declined. Her body was boyish and unhappy to look at. So spindly and pale she might have tumbled from a closet in a Tim Burton movie. A waif with long blonde hair left to clump and frizz, to snarl and die. Cutting had no appeal, but she did bend her fingers back, trying hard to reverse them far enough to touch the top of her hand, loving the white fury of the skin there where the joints strained through, needing the throb afterwards, the sore pulse and sensation. Her sudden green eyes were lonely looking. Her shoulders seemed to want to bury her, to enfold her in a cloak or bat wings. They slung forward and gave her a precociously defeated, exhausted quality - like an airlifted soldier, or a girl terribly pre-occupied with her own thoughts. Her own vivid, endless thoughts. They were bad thoughts, mostly, so she declared. She certainly hated herself for having them. Her school dictionary was page-marked to the one with 'empathy' on it. She'd circled the definition. "The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object, so that the object appears to be infused with it." The underlined lines meant better ways to castigate herself - it was ammunition. Empathy-lack. The opposite of empathy, is what she had maybe. Something else even worse. Active evil. A real churning darkness inside. "The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another." The capacity for this. Lucy had none. She believed. It meant she didn't deserve to live according to her forbiddingly strict ethical code. The code was a response to inevitably absent professional parents, mom, Dusty, a lawyer, and her father, Cliff, a brand manager for a national condiment chain. She had made their lives hell for as long as she could. It was a point of pride with Lucy. She burnt things down and ripped them up. She turned walls at home into galleries scrawled with disturbance: ME YOU FUCK UP - blunt truths like that. She hurt other girls. Any number of pencils inserted just above their elbows after being lovingly sharpened. She lured pets into pools. Broke bird wings. She aimed for the eyes of kitty cats with her BB gun. Lucy stripped off in class. She urinated in front of everyone at birthday parties. Rule #4 of the Code: do whatever you want, whenever you want. Rule #1: nobody cares. Dusty and Cliff were bewildered, long-suffering and happy to throw money at therapy.

"Is this it? We just sit here?"

Lonnie had loved school. It was a place to be. Out of the house all day. The house was mad. Mad with his father's weakness. He drank, his father, he gambled. He got fired. He tried, and failed. He was clever enough, this man, to know it was something outside of himself holding him back. Something to do with the city and its buildings, its restaurants, and the people during lunch, in suits, something they had that he didn't. Call it what you like: chances, high friends, natural gifts, ideas, good families, money, white skin. Call it what you like. There was a divide. A high invisible fence. His father bumped against it all the time. His head hit the wall harder and harder each time until the sense was knocked out. He was left with drink and a family to terrorize, to re-do to them what had been to him out there. So things flew and smashed into the wall. Needful everyday things. Glasses and plates, heirlooms and remembrances. As the lone boy, Lonnie took a lot of it, protecting his sisters from the dark bouts his father vented, taking blows and hearing words you shouldn't say to a tender son. His mother just religious and weeping in the kitchen.

Those were the wild years of his school days. He naturally made a refuge of the streets. It had its own terrors but nothing to match a poisonous father, the sting of that intimate betrayal. He wasn't surprised by gang tactics. It was geography and territory, it was commerce and industry. It was stuff he learned at school played out on the Flats for real. You just become one of them. You go places together. There are superstars you look up to and rewards for a task done well. Girls and money and connections. A feeling of forward momentum. Excitements in stolen cars. Drawing blood under street light. Seeing victims struggle to fit events into place. Walking away from what you've done, the claim of it lessening each time in your mind, until you are ready to murder. Lonnie did nine for assault and battery. A couple wouldn't say where the car keys were. A nice new Jetta. Him and his boys were inside their home. Someone made the dog still. The place was lit strangely. They were artists. Blue lights and tiled walls. It was a nightclub in there. Someone said they must have swallowed the keys. Lonnie knew it was a dare, a cue, a problem if he didn't follow the idea down its own path: he cut the woman open. Her stomach was yellow in the blue light. Her blood dark black. He was high enough to take in the colors. They swam and cushioned him from his own actions. She passed out. She came to. The man struggled and Oros klapped him. Someone found the keys in a jar in the kitchen. They drove away and were picked up three days later. Someone had seen them. They were all on file. The cops took it serious.

He made the most of jail. Advanced through contracts and killings but withdrew, too, looked out for opportunities to pass agency on to younger fools with less to loose. They thanked him. Lonnie valued his quiet in the cell. He valued the overhead vista in the yard, the majesty of a busy Cape sky. The regimen agreed with him. It stilled him inside. He noted his own moods, his own needs for the first time. What were his interests, what had led him to this enclosure? Prison became a father. Strict and dependable. Parted clouds were inked on the small of his back. They were the symbol of renewal to him. A path forward. Away from the onus and bloodletting, away from punishments and reckonings. When he got home again, his father was gone.

"This is shit," Lucy said, standing up. "Who are you?"
"The doctor," Lonnie said. "Who are you?"

Lucy looked at him. Her bunchy jeans were belted with a pink Barbie belt. The pink Barbie belt was a giant joke to her. The utmost in satire. That she, Lucy Amis, would wear a pink Barbie belt. It killed her that people didn't stop her in the street, applauding her genius. It confirmed Rule #9: all people are Idiots, you can tell if they don't get the belt. Nobody ever got the belt. The test of the pink Barbie belt was the closest Lucy ever came to spirituality. It transcended the doings of the ants of the earth. It proved her own troubled ascendancy. She was a complicated girl.

"Who called you Allyson? It's so gay. You should sue them."
"What's wrong with being a moffie?"
Lucy scoffed.
"It can surprise you what you do when things change."
"What things?"
"Your life, the place you stay, everything."
"That's never happened to me."
"So you don't know. You might be gay."
"I'm not!"
"You don't like girls?"
"No."
"Is it because of the bible, you don't like girls? Or what people might think?"
"This isn't working by the way. I know you think you're making 'progress' but you're not. This is just stupid."
"Answer the question."
"I eat everyone's pussy at school. Yum yum. All day long. I'm a lesbo. Okay?"
"I know you are."
"Fuck you, Allyson."
"Why else would you be wearing a little pink belt?"
Lucy's eyes shot to his. Her face flushed. She seemed to straighten in the chair.
"What's your name?"
"It's Bernie. Bernie Sausage Dog."
Lonnie clicked his tongue. The sound sat between them.
"Lucy," the girl said. "Like you don't know from the file."
"I haven't read the file."
"You're not supposed to lie so soon."
"I haven't. There are files about me too, somewhere. I don't care what's in them. Do you care what's in yours?"
"I know what's in mine."
"What?"
"The same stuff there always is. Big words. Dumb theories. I don't care."
"Well it was nice talking to you, Lucy."
"It's an hour, dude. We got like forty minutes still. But I'll leave. I could go to the park or something."
"Don't you have somewhere to go?"
"The park. I just said."
"That's sad. You're just going to sit in the park. Like an old lady."
"Old ladies feed the birds. I kill the birds. Massive difference."
"You like killing things, hey Lucy?"
"Sometimes. You should write that down."
"Why?"
"All the others do, when I say things like that."
"I have a good memory."
"So do I - who doesn't? That's what we do."
"Do what? Who?"
"Remember. God, you're dumb."
"I let people say bad things to me three times."
"Ooh, I'm so scared, Allyson."
"You've had your three."
"Fuck you."

He was up and over the desk with his hands on her throat in an instant, prison quick. The child wore a terrible smile. A kind of foxily triumphant grimace of a smile. It made him release her almost immediately. She seemed impressed.

"That's never happened," she eventually said, her eyes bright and excited. "I didn't think you were allowed to do that."
"I warned you, Lucy."
"It's okay. I'm sorry."
"Really?"
"Yes. If you have a rule, you have to stick with it."
"That's not true."
"It is. If it's a good rule."
"Mine's more a law. From the streets. You don't let anyone cross the limit you told them was the limit. You know?"
She nodded.
"I'm like that, too. I give people like space enough to prove themselves to me, to like live up to my picture of them, and then, when they don't, and they never do, I drop them in my mind."
"How do you mean?"
"I drop them. I picture them falling. Like the Roadrunner when he sees he's missed the edge of the cliff and he's just running on air, then he looks down."
"And that's when he falls, I know."

They both sat in silence that was not that bad. Not awkward or anxious. Just a natural intake of breath. Metabolizing the sum of incidents. She was calmer seeming and her eyes had brightened. She was really talking to him. He was good this one. Lonnie saw something like poise, the woman waiting behind her youth. She'd be thoughtful and trustworthy. You'd make worse mistakes than marrying her. An ambulance sounded loudly in the street below, snapping the quiet. Lucy stirred in her chair and stretched, cat-like. Her shoulders splayed and Lonnie saw her soft white neck with its pale veins, clouded red areas where she'd scratched hard in some temper, then they slumped forward again, and she looked at him.

"Why can't people understand me? It's like when we went away to the Berg. We packed the car. I helped. I was being nice. I can be nice. But I could see everything that would happen. It would be...just okay. Driving and talking. The mountains. Walking around. Then food and a bath. It made me sad for us. So I started crying. But they got angry at me. I didn't want to ruin the Berg. They thought I did, but I didn't. I just felt sad for us."

"I've never been to the Berg. We would go the beach. All my sisters. I'd have to watch them."
"How many do you have?"
"A lot."
"There's this girl in my class whose like you."
Lonnie smiled.
"She's gifted," Lucy said. "Everybody keeps telling us how 'gifted' she is. Suzanne James is gifted. She can sing and dance and she's fast on the field and she talks to everyone and she 's pretty. Once she handed cards. Invitations to the Wimpy. She'd drawn this picture of everyone at the Wimpy. Everyone laughing and having a great time. So I drew myself in, Like a vulture thing hovering above the table and gave it back to her. She put it on the teacher's desk. Another big black mark against Lucy."

"You can talk hey?"
"I don't know why. I just feel like it."
"Well I've got things to do."
Lucy nodded and stood up. Then she undid her belt and put it on the desk.
"Give this to one of your sisters, okay?"
She grinned shyly at him.
"See you next week."
Lonnie picked up the belt and slapped it loudly on the desk. Lucy laughed and left.

In coming years, Lucy graduated from UCT. She studied psychology and now, much later, runs a modestly successful practice in Noordhoek. She rides on weekends. She sleeps with broad shouldered women with accents. She likes the Latinos. Her doctoral thesis was on affective disorders. She found that feelings are like Mondays. Inevitable and not as bad as you anticipate. They pass. They return. You go on. Lonnie was fired as a window cleaner. He went to Namibia and worked on cars at a friend's garage. He married twice and used his fists on both of them as his father had done. He liked the beaches out there and raised dogs which he sold as far afield as Colorado, rare breeds, snub-nosed dogs with black eyes and powerful jaws. He died last year in an accident and in one of his stapled little notebooks, blue with fountain pen, the droppings of Lonnie's inner life, was something about the meek inheriting the earth. In a parallel universe, Lonnie and Lucy run a bed & breakfast together. They make love in the firelight. They hold each other and help each other, and guests smile at their happiness.