He and I walked back home, not talking.
But as I was about to disappear into my bedroom, he said, ‘Dom, whatever you do, don’t mess with The Debt.’
I said nothing.
‘Okay, Dom?’ he said, hands gripping my shoulders, his eyes searching mine.
‘Okay, Dad,’ I said.
YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE DEBT
At five-thirty the following morning, when the appalling Baha Men expressed their usual concern regarding the dogs and their escape, I felt relieved.
I’d been awake all night.
With the inside of my thigh aching, thoughts ricocheting around inside my head, there’d been no chance of sleep. But now, at last, I had the excuse I needed to get out of bed. I was lathered with sweat and my sheets were twisted into a knot as tight as the one Imogen used to put in her hair when her mother let her go to ballet lessons.
As I got ready for my morning run, as I went through the ritual of padding barefoot down the hall, of lacing up my shoes on the outside step, I started to feel better.
When I started running, however, the brand began to ache again.
But when I passed the Havilland house and saw that Imogen was there as usual, I couldn’t help but smile. My family, apparently, had a debt, The Debt; I had a brand burned onto my thigh; my life had changed – but this, Imogen standing at the window, was the same.
She scribbled on the windowpane with an imaginary pencil. Have you finished your Maths assignment?
I shook my head. No
She pointed at herself. Do you want me to help? I replied with a thumbs-up. I sure do.
Chirp Street was its usual chirpy self and Seb was outside Big Pete’s, running up and down on the spot, ponytail flicking from one shoulder to the other.
As we cruised down the Gut Buster a police car roared past, lights flashing, siren blaring.
Last night Dad and Gus had been so adamant, so obstinate: no police! Omertà, they’d called it. Code of silence. This matter has nothing to do with the police, they’d said. In that half-lit office, the atmosphere thick and fetid with conspiracy, I’d had no choice but to agree with them. But now, the breeze bringing the tang of the sea, sunlight splashing on my face, I realised how wrong that was. Nobody had the right to take the leg of any fifteen-year-old kid, especially not a runner! It was morally wrong. It was legally wrong. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’ll contact the police. I’ll put an end to this.
But as I made this resolution I had that feeling again: somebody was watching me.
‘It was your birthday yesterday, right?’ Seb said as we approached Big Pete’s.
‘How did you know that?’ I said, because I couldn’t remember ever telling him.
Seb hesitated for a second before he said, ‘Hey, it was on the net, right? Not possible to keep your birthday a secret any more.’
On the net? Okay, maybe it was on Facebook, but Seb wasn’t my Facebook friend.
‘So you’re fifteen now, right?’ said Seb.
I nodded.
‘Then you’re three days older than me.’
‘Your birthday’s on Tuesday?’
‘Sure is.’
‘But you’re still right for the race?’
‘Absolutely.’
Getting Seb involved with the school track team hadn’t exactly been easy to organise. If I’d have told the football coach that I knew this kid who was a whiz-bang footballer, he’d have been down to Seb’s place – wherever that was – in a second, a scholarship application in his hands. But middle distance running, unlike football, or cricket or even surfing, isn’t a sexy sport. Not in my school. Not in my state. Not in my country.
It was the video I’d taken with my iPhone of Seb running that had done the job, however. Coach Sheeds had taken one look at that, at Seb’s loose, easy style and had agreed: this kid deserved a shot.
‘It’s some sort of qualification race, isn’t it?’ said Seb.
‘Technically,’ I said. ‘But it’s also a big chance for you to show Coach Sheeds what you’ve got.’
Unfortunately, because Seb wasn’t a student at the school, he couldn’t compete for us. Not yet, not until he was on a scholarship.
‘Cool,’ said Seb. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘Great,’ I said.
He gave me a ‘Loose as a goose on the juice’ before he ran off.
Now, I told myself. Now is the time to do it. I ran back up the street, turning right at the new Coast Home Loans office. Past my old primary school and I was there. I hesitated before I went inside. Again there was that feeling that I was being watched, that I was being monitored.
No, it had to be done, I told myself.
Up the steps, through the door and I was in the police station.
An older cop with a pot belly glanced up at me when I entered, but immediately looked back down again.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, a note of annoyance in his voice. ‘How can I help you today?’
Now I wished I hadn’t been so impetuous and had spent some time rehearsing what I was going to say.
My own father had mutilated me with a branding iron? Yeah, right.
They’d threatened to amputate my leg. As if.
‘Can I help you, son?’ said Pot Belly. ‘It might not look like it, but I’ve got a lot of work to get through today.’
‘Actually, not right now,’ I said, and I turned around and walked out.
I had to figure out what to say. I’d come back later in the day when I had it right.
I ran back down the street, back past Coast Home Loans.
After I’d crossed the bridge again, Elliott joined me. He was his usual noisy tail-wagging self and that morning I was especially glad to see him. I even told him this.
‘Elliott, it’s so good to see you!’
When you run all the time on the streets like me, like Seb, like Elliott, you develop what Gus calls a ‘runner’s sixth sense’ about traffic.
We came to a crossroad. My eyes hadn’t seen a car, my ears hadn’t heard any traffic, my nose hadn’t smelt any traffic and my body hadn’t felt the vibration of traffic. There was no traffic, so there was no need to break stride as I moved from the footpath onto the road.
I was halfway across the road, Elliott just behind me, and there was still no sound, no smell, no vibration. But then there was a black motorbike, with a rider clad all in black, headed straight for us. I jumped out of the way. The motorbike missed me, its back wheel brushing my leg. But it collected Elliott, catapulting him skyward.
In slowmo I watched him fall, dog-paddling in the air, his black-and-tan fur twisting against the blue of the golf-friendly sky. Watched him hit the road with a thud.
He didn’t move.
I hurried towards him.
‘Elliott! You okay? Elliott!’
He looked at me, his eyes brown and liquid. He whimpered. And then he died.
‘Is everything okay?’ came a voice from behind.
I turned to see a man, dressed for jogging, a concerned look on his face.
‘Is it your dog?’ he said. ‘Do you want me to do something? Ring the police?’
‘Not my dog,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘I just found him like this. No need to ring the police.’
Before he could say anything else, I sprinted off, and the brand on the inside of my thigh started burning anew.
I knew then that I wouldn’t be going back to the police station. Not today. Not ever.
SNAP! CRACKLE! POP! UGALI!
Two days later after my morning run I was at my grandfather’s house.
‘You okay, tiger?’ Gus asked, his eyes full of concern as they searched my face.
The words popped into my head: I’m not a tiger and I’m not okay.
But that’s where they stayed.
‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ I said instead.
But I couldn’t stop thinking of poor little Elliott. His furry body dead on the bitumen becam
e another not-so-furry body: it became me.
As I ate the breakfast Gus had prepared, he downloaded that morning’s data from my heart monitor onto his iMac. Gus is pretty techno savvy. I wouldn’t exactly call him a nerd or a geek, but he’s definitely not one of those old guys who peck about on a keyboard like a myopic chook. And if he doesn’t know something, he isn’t afraid to ask. Though, usually it’s my sister Miranda he directs his questions to.
I dipped my spoon into the bowl of steaming ugali.
‘Of what?’ you say, and I don’t blame you.
As far as breakfast cereals go, ugali isn’t really up there. Snap. Crackle. Pop. Ugali! Doesn’t happen. Just like a chocolate milkshake, only crunchy. Not quite.
Actually ugali is pretty bland. I reckon that’s what ugali means: lumpy stuff with very little flavour. But ugali is what Kenyans eat and, as everybody knows, the Kenyans are incredible middle distance runners. Therefore, if I eat ugali, and lots of it, I’ll run fast too.
That’s Gus’s theory anyway, and I never question Gus’s theories because if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have become a competitive runner in the first place.
‘Dom, stop running!’
If my parents said that to me once when I was a little kid, they said it a million times.
‘Dom, please walk!’
But I couldn’t help myself. Why walk when you can run? Why go slow when you can go fast?
When I got to school the teachers took over.
‘Dom, stop running!’
‘Dom, please walk!’
But I couldn’t help myself.
In the end my parents took me to a doctor and she gave me these pills, these anti-running pills. They worked, too. I stopped running around and I just sat in the classroom and watched the goldfish being goldfish in the goldfish bowl.
Then Gus came to live next door, with his running books, and his running magazines, and John Landy and Roger Bannister and Hicham El Guerrouj and all those other great runners all over his walls.
‘I’m actually a pretty fast runner,’ I told him one day, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.
So for three days I didn’t take the anti-running pills, flushing them down the toilet instead, and I went over to Gus’s house and told him to come outside and watch me. He watched as I ran around, faster and faster and faster. Then he believed me. I stopped taking the pills for good, Gus became my coach and I became a middle distance runner.
And with all the regular running I did, I no longer felt the need to run around the classroom any more.
As I ate the ugali, I read last month’s edition of Running World, an article about the rivalry between Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, the great English runners of the eighties. In a ten-day period they traded the mile world record three times!
‘How big was Sebastian Coe?’ I asked Gus, my mouth full of ugali.
‘A hundred and seventy-five centimetres, fifty-four kilos,’ he replied, demonstrating his customary encyclopaedic knowledge of all things to do with middle distance running.
Great, another runt.
‘And Steve Ovett?’
‘He was a bigger man. A hundred and eighty-three centimetres, seventy kilos.’
Immediately, I preferred Steve Ovett. Felt angry because Coe beat him in the 1500 metres final at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
‘Let’s see what the weather’s doing,’ said Gus, switching on the TV.
Again they were talking about Otto Zolton-Bander.
Even though everybody knew the Zolt’s story, everybody around my age anyway, they were going through it yet again. During the last two years the two-metre-tall juvenile delinquent had broken into many of the luxurious holiday houses on an exclusive part of Reverie Island and stolen goods worth thousands of dollars.
Otto Zolton-Bander had also stolen people’s cars, their boats, and, despite never having taken a flying lesson in his life, four different light planes. He’d landed them, too. Well, crash-landed them. But each time he’d walked away unscathed.
As for the Robin Hood bit, somebody who worked at an animal refuge on the island had let on that they regulary received cash donations from somebody who called themselves ‘the Zolt.’
Apparently a private investigator by the unlikely name of Hound de Villiers had tracked the Zolt down and made a citizen’s arrest. The newsreader explained that Schedule 1 to the Criminal Code Act 1899 stated that ‘it is lawful for any person who believes on reasonable ground that another person has committed the offence to arrest that person without warrant’. They showed a photo taken on Hound de Villiers’s phone of the Zolt handcuffed to a tree, his knees up around his ears. He was giving the camera a cheesy smile. I couldn’t help admiring the Zolt. Imagine smiling like that when you were as handcuffed as that. The story ended with the reporter saying that Hound de Villiers would be bringing the Zolt in to the authorities tomorrow afternoon.
Then it was the weather – the long-range forecast for the next two weeks was fine and hot.
‘Promising,’ said Gus, turning off the TV.
Promising, because I ran well when it was hot. My PB – my personal best – for the 1500 was set when it was thirty-four degrees.
Gus reckoned it was all the ugali I was eating, that although I was white on the outside, inside I was a heat-loving Kenyan.
‘How did they do it?’ I asked.
I could tell from the look on Gus’s face that he immediately knew what I was talking about.
‘We really need to keep our minds on this race, Dom. That’s the ticket.’
‘How did they do it?’ I said, pushing away the bowl of ugali.
Gus looked at me, then propped himself on a stool. When he did this, Stumpy poked his head upwards, sort of like one of those meerkats at the zoo, popping out of its burrow.
‘If I tell you, will you get your mind back on the race?’
I nodded.
Gus sighed deeply and started the story.
‘I’ve just finished my morning run. The same as you do, but I always used to end with a dip in the ocean. Salt water is isotonic, you know.’
I glared at Gus; I wasn’t in the mood for one of his customary digressions.
‘What happened?’ I demanded.
‘It’s winter, and I’m the only one in the sea. The water’s calm, no surf at all. I’m not even swimming, just walking along the bottom. That sort of resistance work is –’
Again, I gave Gus the ‘no digressions’ glare.
‘I’m waist deep in the water, it’s a beautiful day, and then next thing I know I’m waking up in hospital.’
I interrupted, ‘But what happened at the beach?’
‘I don’t know what happened at the beach. Like I said, one second I’m walking in the water, the next second I’m waking up in hospital. And there’s all these people looking at me. It takes me a while to realise that they’re doctors. I start to panic, of course. “Am I okay?” I ask. But the head doctor, a man with a lovely smile, says, “You’re a very lucky young man. You’ll be out of here in no time at all.” Later I find out he’s Professor Eisinger, at that time one of the top surgeons in the country. Anyway, I relax. I’m a lucky young man. I’ll be out of here in no time at all. And I feel fine, I’m not hurting anywhere. The doctors leave and I wonder why my parents aren’t here. Hasn’t anybody told them I’m here? This nurse comes in then and says that she has to change my dressings. What dressings? I ask myself. She pulls back the sheet. And my leg is gone. At first I don’t believe what I’m seeing, because I can still feel it. It feels like it’s there.’
Fifty years later and I could still hear the outrage, the shock, the pain in Gus’s voice as he looked down to where his leg had been. He seemed lost for a while before he picked up the story again.
‘I started crying, carrying on, but the nurse grabbed me by the shoulders, and shook me hard. “You’re lucky to be alive,” she said. “Now act like a man while I change your dressing.”’
‘Maybe you were
attacked by a white pointer,’ I said, thinking of the spate of shark attacks along the coast last year.
It was Gus’s turn to fix me with a look. ‘It was The Debt, Dom.’
‘But what did they ask you to do? What was the repayment?’
Gus shook his head. ‘You know I can’t tell you that,’ he said, a pained look on his face.
‘But you have to tell me,’ I said. ‘I need to know what’s going to happen to me.’
Gus got up from his stool and stomped around on crutches for a while. Then he turned the radio on, really loud. Music was playing: Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sahn’. Gus moved in close to me, so close that I could smell his deodorant.
‘The repayments are never the same,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Sometimes it’s obvious what they, The Debt, stand to gain. Other times it’s not so obvious. The repayment might seem more like a test of your mettle, to see what sort of man you are. But whatever you do, don’t get too confident, don’t get too cocky, not until you’ve finished the very last one.’
Immediately I realised what had happened.
‘That’s the one you didn’t do, isn’t it? That’s why they took your leg. But what was it, what did you have to do?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that,’ he said, as he took my empty bowl away.
I turned my attention back to Running World, but it was no good because Sebastian Coe’s and Steve Ovett’s achievements just didn’t seem so awesome any more.
Inside my head, thoughts were breeding thoughts, like microbes reproducing. What in the hell had Gus’s last instalment been? And if Gus hadn’t been able to repay it, then what chance did I have?
But there again, Dad had repaid his.
Had they been given the same instalment? Was this why their relationship was so strained, why they always seemed to push each other’s buttons?
Thoughts were breeding thoughts and it was getting too much, my head was ready to burst.
I had to get out of there.
I pushed my chair back. Got to my feet.
I threw a ‘see you later’ in Gus’s direction before I hurried outside.
As I walked next door to my house, I passed Roberto the head gardener. As usual, he wasn’t doing much gardening, just sitting on the ride-on mower, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, talking on his mobile in Italian.
Catch the Zolt Page 3