by Unknown
She halts my panic with a kiss and we taste the salt of each other’s tears.
Wrapped in one another’s arms, we lower ourselves back onto the bed, her on top.
We stop a moment, taking one last look. The sight of her terrifies me, saddens me, but she still moves like Sarah, still smells like her, still sounds like her.
She tilts her head, her dead eyes wandering across me. “I see it all, you know; what might have been. When you’re dead you remember everything, even the future that didn’t happen.”
It takes me a moment to understand what she’s offering, another to overcome my trepidation.
When I speak, my voice is hoarse. “Tell me.”
The light overhead flickers off, and in the dark she smiles, kisses me. She rises again, tasting me on her lips, and begins to talk.
“We were going to have our first child in two years time. He had your hair and my eyes.” She begins to remove my clothes, her hands exploring every inch of flesh revealed. The t-shirt goes first.
“We named him Josh, after your grandfather. He likes to laugh, likes it when you carry him on your shoulders.” My trousers unzipped, she feels inside. I’m stiff and ready, gasp as she grasps it, works it. My hands caress her breasts, hold her soft hips, as we slowly, fumblingly, position ourselves. We sigh in unison.
“Our little girl comes a year later. Samantha. She has dark hair that falls out after the first week and when it grows back it’s the same colour as mine. She loves the dog we get her for her birthday. She never lets him from her sight, him or her big brother.”
Our breath becomes short as we push against one another. I’m kissing her hard, touching every inch of skin I can reach with my lips. The story still comes, slower now, as we make love.
“We make new friends and we move out into the country. You still like to draw, I still like to paint and we never grow tired of doing them together. We still make love and you still look at me with that shy glint in your eye. I still make you run out on the bill in restaurants. I’m more woman than you can handle, you say.” She strokes a sweaty strand of hair from my face, arches her back as her orgasm takes her.
I groan, releasing myself inside her and we both collapse in a heap, holding each other close.
“The kids grow up and leave home. We have a party for each of them and we move somewhere smaller. Your hair thins and my tits sag but you still tell me how much you love my laugh and I still love you for making me laugh.” She kisses the tip of my nose, looks deep into my eyes.
“I go first,” she whispers, “and you follow closely after.”
The tears have started again. My heart is still fast in my chest, expecting her to leave at any moment.
“But that’ll never happen,” I say. “That future’s been stolen from us.”
She frowns. “No, sweetie. It’s been stolen from me, not from you. You can still do all those things.”
“I can’t do it without you.”
“You can. You will. It’s what the living do.”
She gives me one last kiss.
“You’ll do all these things,” she whispers, and before my eyes she begins to fade, as if someone is dimming the light around her and her alone.
“I promise.”
TAAL
BY ABI GODSELL
“Dear South African Public” The words skittered across the screen, chasing each other in a stream of pixels. The next line jumped and flickered, almost unreadable. The government blimps needed servicing.
“Please do not alarm yourselves”
Below, the populace - decidedly unalarmed - continued their homeward migration out of the city proper, trading the grimy skyscrapers and leafless Northern suburbs for the quiet civilisation of the South.
Surresh breathed smoke rings out of the window of the jeep, watching them.
There was a nervous crush of people on the payment, avoiding the puddles and the eyes of beggars. The air thrummed with talking. Someone tripped over the local street artist, kneeling on the pavement, and swore. A group of young men in suits ran after a fat rooster. (Town Chicken was the in-thing with all the trendy restaurants just now.)
A girl waited for a bus, clutching a brown paper bag and trying to hide behind her scarf.
Someone was haggling over the price of tomatoes.
The old CBD was beginning to live again.
A door to one of the shops swung shut with a bang and everyone stopped for a moment.
It was a cautious, hesitant revival.
Surresh supposed that that was understandable. It was too soon for people to feel safe here. In a few hours, the city centre would be dead, save for the prostitutes and the night-watchmen and the occasional adventurous Taxi-Lord.
He wiped his brow and stretched out a long-fingered hand to try the monitoring receiver. Still nothing. He blamed the heat. That, and that he’d forgotten to charge it this morning, but mostly the weather. It was scorching today. Far too hot for this time of year.
Almost four in the afternoon, middle of July and he was still sweating. This would be remembered as a hot decade.
Suddenly he was bathed in shadow as a propaganda blimp passed overhead. Surresh glanced up briefly.
On the screen was a greyscale photograph - archive footage by now familiar to anyone who spent much time in Central Joburg these days. Below the image, a “To Hell with Afrikaans” poster resting on a pair of school shoes, ran the usual red text: “Understanding that, in your country,”
The image changed now, something else dredged from the archive files.
“you have a hatred of violence”
The toes of a police boot and the shadow of a gun faded in. The text crawled on: “and thick-handed policing,”
Surresh snorted, sending the smoke in crazy spirals. He wondered how this ‘Government’ could hope to understand anything at all.
The blimp and its flashing screen passed and sunlight returned. Baking sunlight. Surresh groaned and boosted the aircon.
The retreating airship now flashed the message: “But please do remember that THINGS HAVE CHANGED.”
Well, at least they’d got that right. Since they’d pushed the Americans into nuclear war, showered Europe with fallout in a bigger fuckup than Chernobyl and chosen South Africa as a home away from home, things had changed. Now that the Chinese ‘Government’ had arrived and taken over, everything was different.
He looked out at the abandoned high-rises across the way, and down at his watch. He ground the remains of his cigarette between his teeth in annoyance. The girl was late again. He hated pick-up duty.
The glass shattered, catching the sunset in a spectacular show of light. Callie flung an arm over her eyes, stumbling for a moment. Then the soldier was through the window and she was running.
The soldier hit the ground heavily, landing on his knees, allowing his armour to absorb the impact. After a moment he rose, glass falling from him like rain. He paused, banging his mask until the filter stopped rasping and then, with deliberate slowness, continued the hunt.
In the shadows, half-under an abandoned bathtub, Callie crouched. There was blood in her mouth and her ankle throbbed. She cursed her luck.
Towering over the pitted floor, her pursuer began stalking the room’s perimeter. Glass crunched under each heavy stride. Callie willed her spent muscles still; she couldn’t afford to shake now. The footfalls of the searching soldier echoed harshly from the concrete walls, closing in.
She froze, holding her breath and listening.
He stepped nearer, so close that she could hear the hum from his kit.
Steady.
Her fingers brushed the signal pack at her hip. The twin buttons were cool and smooth under her fingers. Waiting.
The soldier tramped closer, his gaze intent on the tub in front of him. For the first time in the mission, Callie hesitated. This timing had to be perfect.
Another piece of glass snapped under his boot.
Closing her eyes and risking one tiny breath,
she hit the first button.
It was the soldier’s turn to hesitate. He’d definitely heard something up ahead, a small gasp perhaps, but the sudden beeping from the doorway demanded his attention too. He was just turning to investigate the door when the final warning sounded. Callie braced her body and slammed down on the second button, detonating the contact bomb she’d slapped on the frame as she’d run in.
Suddenly it was like there were two suns blazing at the soldier, one sinking beyond the dirt-caked windows and the other an explosion of fire and chemical brightness in front of him. For a heartbeat, flame consumed everything. Then the shockwave shattered the door and ripped chunks from the ceiling. Shards of rubble rained down on Callie, cracking the tub with savage force. For a time, there was only sound and blackness. Then just blackness.
After a while, she let the tension flow from her muscles. Slowly, she pulled herself from the remains of the bath tub, bleeding from a dozen places but somehow, improbably, alive.
Gingerly, she found her feet, deciding that today’s strategy had definitely worked better on paper.
She shook the dust from her ears and listened. The room was still. She smiled bleakly, lucky this time.
It wasn’t enough though, not in the long run. The rebellion wouldn’t survive on poor strategies and luck. She‘d have to crap out her Tactics department when she got back to base. Sighing suddenly, she rubbed her aching shoulders. Her Tactics department was two people and a dartboard. The two best monopoly players on the team, and a dartboard for when they got stuck. This country hadn’t been ready for a war. Not even close.
The bloody helmet slid off easily, revealing the remains of an Asian face. He was so still and so mangled that it was only when Callie bent close, checking his breast pockets for ammo, that she realised he was alive.
Beneath the heavy uniform, she felt his chest shudder, rising and falling spasmodically. Startled, she jerked away, looking properly at his face. One eye was a mess, blood and tissue tumbling from a sunken lid. The other was a deep brown.
It blinked at her. Thin lips began to move slowly in soundless speech.
Callie stood, transfixed by something in his tired gaze. The sudden horror of the thing she had done swelled within her. Her eyes prickled involuntarily. She shook her head, dropping his gaze and answering her shame with anger.
It wasn’t like he was an innocent. You lost that when you signed up for the Government army. The Chinese Government Army. Since South Africa had signed that damn treaty, the Chinese was the only government that mattered here anymore. They didn’t let you hold onto anything. Especially not innocence.
She could almost understand it, the treaty and everything. They’d all been so scared when war had broken out. Oil war between America and China, two of the world’s leaders shooting each other to shit over the last dregs of fuel. They’d been scared badly in the beginning, and worse with the first nuclear strike. The President had been scared enough to sign away his power for the promise of security.
Now only the rebels and the Army weren’t afraid.
The soldier coughed, racking and wet.
She balled up her fists. She hadn’t invited the fucking Chinese.
There was more blood on his face now, leaking from between his gently moving lips.
No tears for invaders. No shame in defence. The blood was thick and dark.
No one was forced to join. There were always choices, some were just harder. There were always choices, no matter how young you were. He coughed up again. Something inside his body must be very broken.
Her stomach churned and she quelled it with rage. Narrowing her eyes, she glared down at him. “Don’t talk to me … jou fokken jakkals.” She spat the last words at him in the language she’d been clumsily trying to learn since the Chinese government had begun operating in flowery English.
His good eye swivelled back to her. He rasped a hollow breath and:
”Ek praat nie met u nie.”
Callie stopped, stunned.
The words had flowed smoothly, even from his mangled mouth, pronunciation perfect. No one in her crew, not even Mercy, spoke Afrikaans that well.
The brown eye turned away. I’m not talking to you. But he continued to whisper. On his lips, the blood had begun to dry, splitting into sharp black flakes. Gradually, his words slowed. She could hear how his lungs bubbled now. After a while, he stopped speaking entirely.
Numbly, she sank to her knees, staring at the body. It was a long time before she could move again.
Eventually, the last of the sun slipped out of the little room, sinking below the empty Parktown high-rises and leaving the smog cloud glowing.
The chip-reader’s screen winked once, bright as a fallen star, as Callie slid the soldier’s identity implant in. He’d earned a name now. And maybe more than that. She thought for a while. Her grasp of the language wasn’t nearly good enough. They were supposed to have learned the poetry and the songs of mourning, but she’d chosen to study French. Still, some things needed to be done, even if you could only do them badly. There was at least one song she did know. She drew a slow, shaky breath and got out her paint.
She’d nearly finished her spray can when her ’com buzzed. Slipping it into her ear and slapping on the throat patch, she winced at Surresh’s hysterical yelling.
“Callie! Where the hell are you?! You’re forty-five overdue!”
“I’m coming Surresh. Just finishing up the usual.”
“Are you alive?”
She almost managed a smile. “No shit.”
In the jeep outside, Surresh exhaled. She was fine. He could hear from her voice that she was rattled, but you could survive being rattled. He put his hand on his own pounding heart, and lit another smoke.
She slipped into the car minutes later, badly roughed up. Calmly, he checked her over for major damage.
“I’m all right, Surresh.” But her eyes disagreed.
Understanding, he pulled off - first thing you learned on pick-up duty was when not to ask.
Callie watched the city through the window, lifeless and shut up for the night, night that should have been buzzing with Jozi vibe. But she didn’t want to think about how things used to be.
In the distance, she could see a propaganda blimp, running news footage of the march. People died in the street, gunned down by soldiers, every time they ran this video. It was part of the Government’s desensitisation plan: hit us with those images enough so we get used to them, until they’re not real. Until we don’t care.
All of a sudden, Callie missed her dad.
It had been simple after the march, the lines drawn clean and absolute. Us and Them, Justice and Tyranny.
Now she was wary of capital letters. If the Government was recruiting South Africans … tricking us into fighting our own…
She shook her head. There’d been no betrayal in the soldier’s brown gaze, no surprise. Just sadness. She sighed. How did she justify that? She’d been shocked when she’d realised she was fighting a South African. He’d known from the start. She didn’t believe that anyone could be forced to join the army.
He’d joined.
Maybe he’d just picked the wrong side. Maybe she couldn’t make it that simple anymore.
He hadn’t looked like he even realised he’d chosen badly, but Callie was bad at reading Chinese faces. She wondered if she could use that excuse here, with him.
What does a South African face look like, anyway?
Maybe she’d lost his intentions in the blood and the missing eye.
“Stupid fucking thing,” she muttered to herself. Surresh looked up but she shook her head at him, pointing at the blimp.
“Yes, that one’s the worst. ‘We can build a stronger, loving nation.’ Makes me sick, that line.”
She looked at him curiously.
“You don’t ‘build’ a nation. It’s not an office park. You grow it, with little forward steps and fuckups and compromises and small acts of grace.”
T
hey drove home through the gathering dusk, past the street artist carrying her Autopainter and wondering how to clean her sneakers. Both were silent as they overtook a precariously-loaded bakkie. The young men in pointy shoes had taken off their expensive jackets and were laughing and petting their cage of chickens.
A bus overtook them, speeding away from the lampless CBD streets. In its back window was a girl with a scarf, looking down at her empty hands.
Around the rebel jeep, the city went on.
Callie thought a bit. Small acts of grace.
She wished it could have been better, but she’d always hated Afrikaans before the revolution.
When the government cleanup crew finally arrived at the building, they sighed and shrugged. It was a standard scene: light damage, walls covered in the usual terrorist propaganda, Nkosi Sikele and such. It was only one worker who found the other message, sprayed small and neat beside the body:
Mag die Here jou seen, en nog baie jare spaar*, Kuan Lee Gouws.
* * *
* “May God bless you and spare you for many more years.”
DEAD MAN’S HANDLE
BY JAMES BENNETT
Tony Ward was down among the dead.
These days he worked the graveyard shift. The dogwatch. The small hours. The p.m to a.m. What with Jane’s baby on the way and the recession having swallowed his job at the gas board, he’d had to find work where he could, despite the unsociable hours. Jane might complain when he left their small Leicester terrace at six p.m, and complain when he returned at dawn, cold from his long walk home, slipping into bed beside her half an hour before she rose, but the job was money, the only thing that kept them afloat. Such complaints were an ever-brewing cloud, threatening to burst into rows, and Tony and Jane lived under that cloud, both of them knowing the truth. If Panther had not taken him on, Jane would be delivering their baby on the dole. This fact seemed to keep the storm from breaking.
Lips tight, she kissed Tony goodbye on the doorstep. It was only his second week on the shift and already she was bored of watching TV, the dreary mill of soap operas and talent shows with no one there to hear her opinions, listen to her scorn. If Tony saw the despair in her eyes, the dull reflection of radio waves, he found it hard to sympathise. The January wind nipped at his coat. His was now a world of screens.