The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  Faith thought about yesterday. The girl, Tomorrow. The kid was clearly in denial. And who could blame her; Faith, least of all. Denial was practically her middle name.

  If Faith had been smart, if she’d been anyone else, she’d have told the girl no way, no thank you, and good luck. But she hadn’t. She’d been an idiot yesterday. The kid had stood there, elbow-deep in dishwater, with her nose all red and fat from all the snot, and instead of being a grown-up and telling her the truth, Faith had just sat there, nodding her head and saying No worries, we can fix this We can fix this. A lie and a stupid thing for anyone to say, let alone a truthologist.

  The wind was doing a jig today. The Truth whipped and fought against Faith’s hands, desperate to join in, to have this dance. In the end she gave in, rolled the paper up, pushed it into her bag. Yes. Truth was, the kid was in denial. There was no two ways about it. But the truth was a sticky thing. A thing that could stretch and shift and blow up and pop at the prick of a pin. Like gum. Who was she to force it down other people’s throats?

  If she were to treat Tomorrow right, treat the case right, she had to at least entertain the possibility in her own mind, for the girl’s sake, that she was really looking for a missing ghost. She wouldn’t be a good truth finder if she didn’t. “Believe in everything until it’s disproved,” Lawyer would say. “Fairies, the myths, dragons, even ghosts . . .”

  But she wouldn’t be able to go it alone. What in heaven and on Earth and the great ethereal in-between did she, Faith September, driver for the Hanover Lazy Boys Corpse Collection Association, know about ghosts? It was dead bodies she ferried across the Liesbeek River, not souls.

  - 45 - SANS

  Dead. He couldn’t believe it. The kid was really dead. He was so sure the poor little bastard had jumped ship. So damn sure. And now he was lying here on this cold slab in this damn ugly son of a bitch of a morgue. Dead. Stone-cold dead. And all on his dead own, too. Not a mother or an aunt or a cherry to cry over his dearly departed soul.

  But what was worse, much worse (if he had the guts to be entirely honest with himself), was that the bloody backpack was gone. Had upped and vanished, poof. Most probably nicked by some random hungry sucker with a hope and a dream and a wandering eye who zipped it open hoping for a sandwich or a warm sweater and found R50,000 staring back. Lucky bastard had probably been grinning like a Cheshire cat while bathing himself in the orange notes like a certain cartoon duck all week. Or maybe he’d spent it already, who knew.

  After he had left the morgue, Sans walked around a while. Just walked. Every now and again he’d think he noticed a passerby staring.

  He was sweating. Could they see? His hands kept going up to his face to wipe away the wet with the back of his gloves. Again. And again. And again. Until his skin felt red and raw. What was worse, he had this crazy urge to giggle. He could feel the Laughter building inside his throat like a bomb.

  So he tried to keep his face taut. Pursed his lips so tight they hurt. Knotted his brows into a frown. And carried on. Carried on. Without a plan A or a plan B. No mission. No map. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to do. He needed help, but from where? From whom? Should he phone the fat guy again? Nah. That guy was as crazy as they came. And his bush-burning hadn’t gotten him anywhere, had it, now?

  Maybe he should look higher.

  Go right to the top.

  The inside of the brown cathedral with the fancy windows on the edge of the Company’s Garden was real pretty. With votive candles burning and the works. Right now it was empty, except for one solitary fart kneeling right at the front and a hot young thing with a crazy-long weave hovering around where the candles were.

  Sans slid into one of the pews and sat there, not quite knowing what to do or how this was supposed to go. He’d never gone to Sunday School. His parents hadn’t been religious much. Except if you counted their faith in science, logic, facts. Which was kind of the same thing, different jacket, according to some. Anyway, it felt quite peaceful, sitting there, staring at the stained-glass windows.

  After a while, he tried to talk to God. But he had no clue what to say to the guy. So he tried to think back to what they did in the movies. Crossed himself. Went on his knees. Stayed like that a while. Lit a candle. Maybe if he tried praying . . . So he clasped his palms in front of his chest and told God about the fever and the money and his unicorn. Said he knew he wasn’t exactly the choirboy type, but hey, it wasn’t all his fault. Some of the dice were cast way before he had a say in the whole shebang. He didn’t choose how they rolled. It wasn’t first prize for him, either, to grow up under the glare of a staunch atheist with mental problems and a nihilist drunk. Maybe his real mother had been religious? Although he doubted it. If she had been, she would probably not have gotten her panties into such a fix in the first place.

  He left the church when he ran out of things to say. It was drizzling now. At least the rain helped to mask the fever. He cut through the garden with its fat pigeons and the odd squirrel who hadn’t made it onto a sosatie stick yet. Past the shit-stained statue of the serious-looking cherry with the beastly water spouts sprouting from underneath her toes. Into the street.

  - 46 - FAITH

  There she was, slurping noodles for breakfast, waiting for the ghostbuster, cursing this new freelance gig. She got into this to help people. Probably, if she had to be honest, it was, like Lawyer kept telling her, because she couldn’t manage to help herself. At first anyway. Back Then. When they locked up her someone and her little someone else in that place on the Flats and threw away the key and it felt like she’d killed them herself, that it was all her fault, because she hadn’t done enough. Hadn’t protected them hard enough.

  She wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye. She could still hear the puffed-up zombie marshmallow woman, her voice robotic inside the suit. “You want to what? No. Of course not. Hands at your sides. Keep your hands at your sides. Mouth, too. Cover it up. There’s the door, ma’am. Please. Get out.”

  She had. Gotten out. Got out forever and then some.With a few extra miles for good luck. She’d never look back, she promised herself, as she stood lost and disorientated in that bloody mortality factory’s parking lot that day, pressing the car’s immobilizer on repeat. Trying to find the source of the beep.

  Yes. She’d forget. And keep forgetting. Till she damn well croaked. From tomorrow on, she’d decided, standing there in that parking lot with the wind whipping at her clothes, spraying that fine white Flats sand into her eyes, today would be Today. Every day. And Yesterday? She’d keep that somewhere else.

  But she was remembering now and it was hard to describe the feeling. A quiet was simmering in her guts, a vexing, numbing quiet. Like a pre-storm calm. It had visited her before, this squall-signifying quiet. Back Then. When it brewed and brewed and boiled and blew into a big damned rumbling bang that went off like a universe-sized cymbal at the center of her very being before her walls started caving in. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. Falling apart.

  In the end, after everything, this freelance gig, the Society of the Down, along with Lawyer, was what had helped to patch up the wall between Then and Now. It had helped her to make sense. Of nothing. And everything. But was there a line? And how was she supposed to know when not to cross it?

  Ghosts. Ghosts? Really, Faith? She hated the idea of ghosts. Hated, hated, hated it. As a rule, Faith’s mind was open. Way open. More open than most. You had to be open to different angles if you wanted to see how the light reflected off them. But she’d rather believe in anything—be it the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Adamastor, aliens, giant unicorns, the hai-uru, the aigamuxa, the tokoloshe, or any other kind of mythical creature, tall tale, myth, or conspiracy theory—before she believed in ghosts. She was a patternologist, a puzzle solver. She needed one and one to make two, not the unholy trinity.

  The real ugly thought, however, was that if ghosts were real, her own baby’s soul could be out there drifting around somewhere, all a
lone, scared out of his wits, screaming for his mom. The thought was too awful to linger on, so she shoved it away as best she could.

  She was sucking spilt soy sauce off the neckline of her white T-shirt, real classy, when a bell pinged, the door of the noodle bar swung open, and there he was. She watched as he stooped down to wash his gloved hands in the bowl of chlorine that waited on a pedestal by the door. Saw him hang up his windbreaker and look around for her. She waved. A smile clicked into place, and he walked her way.

  “Mr. Mostert. Nice to see you again,” she said as he squeezed his bulk into the booth. “Thanks for agreeing to see me on such short notice, and so early at that. How is the spirit trade treating you?”

  “Good. Things are good. Death and taxes, you know what they say, there’s always work in death and taxes.”

  “Just the thing I want to see you about,” said Faith, laying down her chopsticks.

  “Well, I’m not a tax collector, so I’m guessing it’s the other kind of problem you need sorting out?”

  “You guessed right.”

  The waitress arrived with a bowl of noodles. She slid it onto the table in front of Fred and teetered away on her green stilt-like heels. The sin-eater pulled the bowl closer, tucked a serviette into his collar, and chuckled at his own joke.

  “I’ve never tried noodles, you know. For sin-eating. Snakes in a bowl. Don’t you think they look like snakes coiled together in a bowl? Thin and slippery and easy to digest, come to think of it. Maybe the sins would slip down easier with noodles? Although I’d have to get a hang of these bleddie chopstick thingies first, wouldn’t I?” He signaled the waitress for a fork and she brought it to him with a scowl. Click-clack-clickety-clack went her green heels on the tiled floor.

  “So,” said Fred, sticking the fork into the bowl. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

  Hair. The answer to everything was hair. Sitting in the Happy Happy Joy Noodle Bar, with her legs pulled sideways against the soft red padding of the booth, Faith had quizzed the sin-eater on how this whole ghost-hunting thing had to go. “A favorite toy, like a teddy, will do,” he’d said, “to conjure up a spirit. It will give you a fifty-fifty chance. But the real meat is in the flesh-and-bone stuff. DNA. That is the ticket for cooking up some class-A ghost bait.” But Elliot’s DNA, Tomorrow had said, had been burnt to black, black smoke.

  She left the sin-eater to slurp the last of his noodles in peace, and headed back to the Bo-Kaap, to see if there was a way to make a cold trail heat up.

  * * *

  So there she was again, knocking on the door of the candy-pink house, revisiting an image she had never wanted to have a cup of tea with in the first place. Black, black smoke, burning everything.

  Actually, Tomorrow had said, no, not quite. There was this place she and Elliot had gone to, a few months before he got sick. She’d been worried. Had had a premonition of sorts. Couldn’t sleep. So she slung Elliot across her hip and carted him off to this big old house in Sea Point. Not a sangoma, no, she wasn’t into that. This was Sunday School stuff with a bit of a twist. Just a bit. Which meant it was way more legit. She’d heard about it from a friend of a friend of a friend’s mother, who was real religious—knew her Bible front-to-back and to the front again. This woman had gone there, to this Holy House, and taken her kids with. And as a result, they were healthy as horses, and you could bless the holy sisters for that. That was what the woman had said anyway, and Tomorrow had seen her kids, running around and playing and kicking each other. Healthy as horses for sure. “Right?”

  “Hmm,” said Faith. The kitchen was spotless. No dishes in sight. Tomorrow must have done some serious industrial-type cleaning last night.

  “So,” continued the girl, off she and her baby brother had gone. To the Sisters of Godiva House of Holy Hair. There the sisters in their bruise-blue turbans sat on the ground in rows, wielding their clippers with pious absorption like electric rosary beads. She’d waited in line with the rest until their turn came and a pear-shaped sister, who had big round eyes and a hint of a Namakwa twang when she opened her throat, had shaved Elliot’s wispy toddler locks and offered them heavenward. Most of his baby locks were for burial in the house’s holy garden, with one lone lock to be kept apart and bottled and displayed with the rest of the many in the holy hall—“A what-do-you-call-it, a shrine, Faith, the size of a rugby field, true story, cross my heart, I swear—lined with candles. Can you imagine?”

  “Hmm.” Faith saw the rows of bottles in her mind, glinting in the darkness.

  That was it, the sisters had told Tomorrow as she wiped the hair from Elliot’s nose, pulled his beanie down over his shorn head, picked him up, and swayed him in the breeze to make him stop crying. Their duties to God were done. A whole head of hair like Elliot’s could keep the Laughter at bay for months, years, if you were prepared to put some serious prayer power into it. So Tomorrow had gone home. And slept. For the first time in months.

  - 47 - PIPER

  Piper unlocked the gate, shoved the key back in her pocket, and folded her arms. The wind was biting at her ears. She hugged herself to beat the breeze, and made her way through the overgrown garden. Along the winding path. Over the wet grass. Past the mossy vision of the Virgin growing on the wall. And the stone statue with its eyes downturned. Across the empty courtyard. To the wooden door.

  She knocked and banged. Knocked some more. No one came. The caretaker was probably sleeping off a hangover somewhere. She’d seen him drinking on the sly before. Knew his type. Hell, she was his type.

  Decision time. What to do? Wait for him to wake up or go off script?

  She knew the rules: always go through Major first, never walk on the property unaccompanied, never knock on the old woman’s door. You’re a no one, a nothing, remember that. But she’d already broken all the rules, hadn’t she, the rules that were supposed to count? Turned her back on the Hippocratic Oath. Why stop now? And the boy. The boy. She was seeing his face. He was haunting her. And it had to stop.

  Had to stop.

  Even a junkie knew that.

  She scratched her cheek. When she withdrew her fingers they were red with blood, her blood. But never mind that.

  She’d been to the office once or twice before. She was sure she would be able to find it again. Through the archway into the open hallway stacked with identical wooden doors. Right to the end, then turn right. Third door on the left. There. It was this one. She was sure of it. She came to a stop and knocked.

  “Come in,” called the voice on the other side.

  The old woman was sitting at her desk, massaging her bare feet, her blue turban wrapped tightly around her head, her white kaftan slightly too long at the sleeves. She’d been a real nun once, Major had told her, pure old-school Catholic, no hippie bullshit. Then the Down Days happened and things got rough. So she branched out. Got a makeover. Glammed things up a bit. To attract more souls.

  “You?” said the nun, looking up from her feet. “What are you doing here? I thought you were Sister Alice bringing the tea. Where is Sister Alice? Where’s Major?”

  “I’m here about the boy.”

  “The boy?”

  “The one from yesterday. About twelve. Maybe thirteen. Manga tattoo on his shoulder. Had a real strong glow.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember,” said the nun, lowering her naked feet to the floor. “Quite the soul. Lots of life in him.”

  “I want him back.”

  “You know it doesn’t work like that. That’s not the deal.”

  “Then I want to negotiate a new deal. I want the boy and I’m not leaving until I get him.”

  “More money,” sighed the nun. “That’s what this is about? You want more money?”

  “No, it’s not. I mean . . .” Piper paused for a moment, thinking of the possibilities. “No. All I want is the boy.” Piper folded her arms and lifted her shoulders to her ears as the nun took her time to study her, the old woman’s eyes trailing her up and down with a frown.

&nbs
p; “I don’t know what’s gone into you this morning, young lady,” said the nun finally. “This isn’t you. You are polite. Well-mannered. A respectable young woman who has fallen on hard times, working her way up again. That’s why I hired you. To help you to help yourself.”

  Polite. Well-mannered. Perfect little pushover. “You don’t know me.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But you don’t know me, either. And you can’t just barge into my office like this and trade the boy back like a baseball card. What’s done is done. It’s too late. His soul is in a better place now.”

  The door opened. It was Major. The old cow must have pressed some kind of panic button.

  “Miss Jones was just leaving,” said the nun.

  “I was?”

  “You can come back by appointment. As I said, I don’t like people barging into my mornings like this. Where is Sister Alice with the tea? Major?”

  “Mother,” said Major, “I’ll deal with the girl and I’m sure Sister Alice is on her way, but—”

  “But what?”

  “There is a woman at the gate. Wants to see you. Says it’s about a missing boy.”

  “What missing boy?”

  “She didn’t say. She says she needs to get a sample of his hair.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” The old woman stared through the caretaker and the open door into the empty hallway. “Doesn’t sound good at all.”

  “She says the kid’s almost two years old. Went missing Monday. At the museum market.”

  “Tell the woman at the gate I’ll see her, but she’ll have to wait. My feet are hurting and I’m not doing anything until I’ve had my darn tea.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”