Cabin Fever

by Diane Awerbuck

  I thought about keeping the photographs, but the idea of preserving that hurt bothered me. I ripped the images up into tiny violent pieces, and then I burrowed them deep into the dustbin outside. I don’t want to remember her. I want to remember // Kabbo, the dead translator of his dead race, and I want to remember Lucy Lloyd, the white lady who survived to publish the transcriptions, who gave them flesh and sent them out into the world.

  But what I want to remember most is that it’s not the evidence that counts, after all. It’s the living with it.

  You teachers. You have such nice lives. All those school holidays.

  The Boy Who Opened Doors

  HE COULD TELL HOW LATE IT WAS BY THE SOUND OF THE TRAFFIC. The cars outside on the highway pressed on relentlessly, then vanished. There was no sleep.

  He could feel her watching him from the doorway; in a minute her eyelashes would crawl over his cheek as she kissed him goodnight. She had made the same movements on five thousand, eight hundred and thirty-nine days so far. And nights. She would never stop checking on him. He wanted to sleep naked; God, he just wanted to be able to sleep. He turned sixteen tomorrow, on the spring equinox, and had nothing to show for it but the precise kisses his mother gave him when she thought he was dreaming.

  She approached and bent down. He endured her dry lips on his skin. The molecules passed between them. She inhaled him, satisfied with his scent, keeping him with her. What would she do when he left home?

  The light halved, slivered, was pulled back under the door. She turned up the passage and he heard her lonely slippers – left, right, left, right – in retreat, like the sun.

  Christian turned over in his sheets and sighed; his armpits itched; a mosquito wheeled against the luminescent stars on the ceiling. How long had it taken him to arrange them in their exact constellations? The palms of his hands felt empty. He wanted to hold the cans of spray paint hidden in his cupboard, their cool, mechanical lengths, inhale their smell of outer space. He would make something big and clear this time, before he went, something unequivocal. He would sign it properly with his full name so that anyone who got up close would know him for the creator. Tagging was childish, the sort of thing for fence-sitters, not world-straddlers. And it should be somewhere his mother would see every day on her way to her shift at the hospital. She would see it and think that it was beautiful: his parting gift.

  The decision settled the boy. He pictured the stern concrete wall on the left hand of the freeway near his house. It banked the tarmac, winding smoothly into the city, but it had had to be joined in sections, like a puzzle, and now it was half-covered in weeds. The seams of the cement leaked darker than the surrounding walls, contour lines for the other path beside the highway.

  Christian waited for the familiar routines. He heard his mother’s sounds: the toilet flushing, the clicking of her tweezers, the sighing as she lay back at last in the empty bed that stubbornly retained its impression of two bodies. The solitary light in the house flicked off and he was left staring at the hooded dressing gown grown too small for him, abandoned on the back of the door, tented, ominous, as mouldy as if it belonged to an old man.

  He turned again and lay on his back, the pillow cool through the stubble at his nape. He was tired of it, the fear of next year, of everything that was coming towards him, unavoidable. He didn’t know what he liked doing except the painting, and no one would hire him to do that. He wondered if failure smelled like the dressing gown.

  That stink came off people too. In the last season even his own sweat had begun to bother him. The classroom itself was unbearable. Thinking that he might be trapped there for another year filled him with a thick, black panic. He felt the same way when he navigated night rooms when Eskom blew out the lights and the nippled switches flicked only to OFF and OFF in a bankrupt binary.

  It amazed him that so many people made it to adulthood – the hundred things they sidestepped blithely, every day, hurt his mind. All the crossed paths of all the people in the universe! He imagined their tracks glowing, the bright, invisible intersections that only dogs could see.

  Christian exhaled and sat all the way up, listening for the faint clinking of the cans in the cupboard. He rubbed his flat chest and picked his jeans off the floor. His mother had stopped trying to tidy up when he had said that he knew what she was doing. If she wanted to know if he was on drugs, why didn’t she just ask?

  He added a dark hoodie and his faded trainers with the skulls Tipp-Exed on them. They were the exact shape of his feet; they made him feel like he wore wings. He ended up taking only two cans from the cupboard and his wedge-nibbed koki pen. His backpack clanked but his mother slept on in her far-away room.

  Outside the night was unwinding. When he looked down across the city the lights were off at the astronomers’ dome; the Taiwanese ships in the harbour waited for a berth in the dry dock; the full moon was a blood orange. Christian sucked in the night air and felt his lungs expanding, their inverted tree reaching down towards his ankles, up towards his skull.

  He made his way above the highways and train tracks, the cans in their bag a cool comfort against his back. Pinelands, Observatory, Mowbray. Things were easier on foot, without traffic lights and other drivers: Christian saw his path laid out before him as if it was a dotted white line. There was the sangoma in his hessian, digging for roots. There was the obese homeless man, lying dismal and still at the robots. The dew soaked the boy’s feet, turning his grey trainers black again. Where he walked there were footprints in the grass, but he had no reason to look back.

  Christian stopped to catch his breath. He held onto the railings above the highway, light-headed, looking for the spot he had imagined. He felt like a man about to throw himself off a bridge.

  It was obvious. Down below on the concrete siding there was a clearing among the weeds that trailed down on either side. The boy bent closer under the streetlights. What he had thought were weeds was ivy. Songololos twisted away from his hands as he disturbed them.

  Christian walked a few metres to the thin, oil-slick bridge over the motorway itself. He crawled over the side and hung his weight from the railings, panting. He swung across, hand over hand, until he could jump down onto the narrow strip of tarmac. The cans clattered, Gothic in the stillness. To shush them, he settled his bag on the pavement.

  He looked around but there was only the silence of office blocks. Somewhere up at Rhodes Mem. the animals were gathered; qagga nuzzled each others’ flanks.

  Christian felt inside the bag for a can. In the light they were achromatic. He shook them to make sure they worked: the widgets inside rattled like pebbles. He began.

  The boy painted four doors on the cement, taller than his head. He had to stretch; the next morning he would think he’d gone numb along his right-hand side. But the doors. The doors led nowhere and the doors led everywhere. Tennis courts could not be simpler: they were only outlines.

  He had meant to make three doors and render them differently, so that people could choose the one that seemed the most inviting. But in the end he found that he had painted three outlines – and an open door.

  The last one had a handle painted on it, a white knob. And this door was ajar. The boy had painted the darkness visible in the angle between the front of the door and what lay behind it until the cans were hissing, empty. With the koki pen, he wrote his name in tiny letters along the bottom. His full, unwieldy name.

  Christian wiped his prints off the cans. He would dump them in the bins at Hartleyvale Stadium on the way back. He could go home to sleep in his own bed: he found himself unafraid of the dressing gown behind his bedroom door.

  He didn’t hear the police van until it was almost upon him, its ghostly riders twinned under the windshield. Christian shrank back against the wall. There was only time to grab the backpack. He leaped; his feet seemed to propel him from the tarmac into the air. He grabbed at the ivy and pulled himself up the concrete, his trainers scuffing at the artwork.

  On the b
ridge, Christian ran. Here was the sangoma; here was the bergie. They ignored the running boy.

  Back in his old room, Christian regarded his hands. The fingernails were rimmed with black. His trainers were worse: they would never be the same. His mother would cluck over having to replace them – as if he had had a choice. Christian undressed, leaving his jeans in a warm puddle on the floor. He fell backwards onto the bed, bouncing on the mattress.

  He slept. The paint dried on the side of the highway. The doors were clear, three shut, one swinging open so that it seemed to move a little on its false hinges.

  The next morning some of the drivers on their way to work – not all of them, only the ones who looked – saw those doors. They thought of the doors they had been through, or not been through, and also the doors that they still had to open. Some of them thought about scrubbing off the paint with bleach and Handy Andy. Some of them thought about their children.

  The boy’s mother also drove down that highway to get to the hospital. She drove as she always drove in her second-hand BMW carefully. Her hands moved on the wheel, steering her automatically into the lane changes, moving her away from the cars that were too fast or too slow. She twiddled the tuner on the radio to find the weather report on FMR.

  When she looked up the bus ground into the door on the driver’s side. She sped up instinctively, trying to avoid the thing that had already happened. The bus driver hadn’t noticed that she was there, as if an invisible door had suddenly opened into another world, and taken her.

  The BMW spun and leaped in front of the bus, where it was caught and pushed forwards by the bumper. Her hooting and screaming meant nothing. She lifted her hands from the wheel and banged furiously on the windscreen. She knew that the driver was so much higher than she was that she would only be saved if he looked down. Some of the passengers were swivelling their heads like birds, attracted by the far-away shrieking of tyres and the smell of burning as the bus driver slowly changed lanes. He looked blankly ahead of him. Later the forensics team would measure the skid marks her tyres had made: two hundred and eighty six metres. More than ten times the distance of the corridor between the boy’s room and hers.

  The bus pushed her car closer to the concrete siding. The boy’s mother knew that if it travelled another few centimetres she would be smashed into the wall. A ribbon of pleas wound through her head, a tape unwinding from a cassette and spilling out on the ground, twinkling uselessly in the sun. Don’t let me die this way. I’m not ready. I’m not ready. She counted the goodnight kisses she was still owed.

  The glass of her window shattered slowly over her right arm, tinkling like bells and falling like stars, and it didn’t hurt at all, spiralling outward with a dreadful crunching. Calm fell on her; she stopped straining away from the driver’s door. She concentrated instead on the women inside the bus. They were staring at her, mesmerised; some held their hands over their mouths. Each woman wore a silver star on a piece of green felt pinned to her massive chest, like a sheriff’s badge. The stars winked out at her, strange in the daylight. She turned her head away from the bus and the shocked faces of its occupants. Why would no one help her? She thought, All this time I thought I was safe. And I have never been safe at all. She looked instead at the concrete, and what she saw was the four doors that had been painted there.

  The first three doors were only white outlines, skeletal and unhelpful. But the fourth door was open. She could see her own name written at its foot. And she could see inside the crack.

  She tried to peer round the door painted on the concrete. She wanted very much to go inside, because there would be the old table of her own childhood, the lantern with its hot light, and in her room would be her small dressing gown in her childshape, and it would still fit her. Her mother would beckon to her; her father would come in to say goodnight. Everyone she had ever loved would be behind that door.

  Except one. Her boy would be left out.

  The woman shook herself against the seat, the shiver gathering at the back of her neck and travelling under each breast to the heart. Her mother was dead and gone and her father the same before that, and that was as it should be, each according to their time. She heard a snicking sound and understood that the door had closed.

  The boy’s mother looked back up at the bus driver and saw, oh sweet Jesus, a crowd of women passengers closed in around him, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting at him as if he’d been asleep.

  The bus had finally slowed. The grinding along the sides of her car began to ease. The woman tried to lie back in her seat but it was bent out of shape and she was thrown oddly to the side, like a crash-test dummy.

  They both came to a halt in the middle of the highway. Cars swirled around the diversion in the morning current towards the city.

  The bus’s doors sighed open and the women pushed each other aside in their eagerness to hurry down the steps and onto the tarmac. They poured over her like ants, touching her with their feelers to make sure that she was alive.

  ‘Not a scratch!’ they marvelled, over and over, shaking their heads, patting her down. ‘Yhu! Not a scratch!’

  The bus driver was still in the bus, afraid to come down, insisting that he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t seen her at all. He was shaking, the alcohol seeping out through the pores in his frightened skin.

  The police and the rescue workers eventually had to cut her out of her car. The BMW had been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste between the bus and the concrete; it left scrapes of green paint among the ivy.

  The women waited and watched, exclaiming among themselves. The stars on their chests shone in the daylight, shone like they belonged there in rigid constellations. One woman moved back, shifting her bulk from foot to foot. She adjusted her beret and began to sing a chorus.

  The others straightened up and responded: she sang the lines and the rows of ranked women bellowed them back at her.

  The two officers on traffic duty walked over to the elongated car, shaking their heads. The woman strapped onto the paramedics’ gurney watched their blue silhouettes approach. She overheard the one cursing when he tripped over something metallic. It clattered against his boot and came to rest against the wall. She turned her head to see it more closely, and the paramedic grabbed her face between his gloved hands and moved it firmly back into place. But before he did, she saw what was lying there: two tins that had held spraypaint. MIDNIGHT BLACK read the label on one tin, and on the other RADIANT WHITE.

  The Way You Look Tonight

  MONICA GRIPPED THE COLD PORCELAIN. She stared at herself in the mirror and thought, I want to go home. She had come to the bathroom for sanctuary, but things were no better. The toilets had backed up and the floor ran with piss; there was no toilet paper, no soap; people were queuing to get into the stalls: inside and outside were the same. The squat woman whose job it was to clean the place leaned against the door frame, thumbing double-jointed texts on her phone. She looked up every once in a while, scanning for predators and bosses. Monica saw how tightly her hair was braided, how it pulled her features to the sides of her skull. Unaffected by the chaos, she shifted her weight to the other foot every few minutes and reached up idly to scratch her scalp with a pointed fingernail.

  People kept pushing through the swing door into the bathroom. They were all in groups, in pairs. They jostled happily against Monica, jamming her hipbones sharply against the sink.

  ‘Soz!’ called one man with a gleaming, shaven head. He was dressed as Ken, his naked pectorals outlined in body paint. He bobbed like a boxer past Monica: his cheerfulness narrowed her eyes. She kept watching him in the mirror. His partner was Barbie, in a cascading blonde wig and pink sequins that were reflected by the white tiles. Monica wanted to warm her hands on him. Barbie didn’t acknowledge her. He was hobbling on his stilettos, trailing Ken. Barbie was four hours past gratitude: he stumbled and sniffed, wailing for Ken to wait, that his feet hurt, that he always went too fast. They made a chain only because Barbie had one hand clen
ched on his partner’s belt – the only point of purchase. They fell into the final cubicle. His complaint was cut off abruptly.

  At least they were polite. Sometimes people shut the doors of the stalls but mostly they didn’t care who saw them. And why should they? The Mother City Queer Project was the one bright night in the whole year that the lunatics ran the asylum: costumed, ostentatious, anonymous.

  Monica twisted round to look at her bunny tail in the mirror. The white fluff drooped, sodden. It had seemed so perky at five in the afternoon when they were at Karen’s flat, downing Savannas and dressing up as characters from Alice in Wonderland, giggling and shrieking, ‘Drink me!’ ‘Eat me!’ before collapsing on the carpet. They were supposed to stick together, but Monica had no idea where the Red Queen was. She shouldn’t have been hard to find: her dress was made of playing cards strung together with paperclips. Alice herself, in blue eyes, painted freckles and a transparent dress, had disappeared almost immediately, gone through the looking glass with some grinning, groping man.

  Monica’s costume had not been appreciated by the few mean boys at MCQP. She had spent an hour dodging frantically through the warren of the Good Hope Centre, zigging and zagging from room to beating room as two bullies with water pistols took turns to aim at her fluffy tail. She had realised too late that it was glowing, irresistible, florescent in the dark, and there was nowhere quiet to rest except the toilets.

  I’m late, thought Monica the Rabbit. I’m late, I’m late, I’m late – for a very important date. She dabbed at her sagging eyeliner and sallow cheeks. I’m so tired I look dead, she thought. I’m too old for MCQP. It’s three in the morning and I just want to skip this whole thing and go straight to the waffles at the BP at sunrise.

  It wasn’t meant to be like this. This night was supposed to be the end of good behaviour, when you could discard everything you knew and lose yourself in the craziness with your friends, maybe find someone serendipitous who felt the way you did about everything. And you’d be together, high as kites, the ribbons on your tails fluttering gaily down to Earth so little children who had to sit down to bored breakfasts would look up at the sky and go, Ah, I want to be just like that.