by Nick Wood
Marlene pads into the hallway, demurely dressed in a yellow towelling robe, and she gives me a ‘thumbs up’. Renewed vigour flushes through me and I decide to just open my mouth and trust it. The start, after all, is often the hardest part.
“I’d like to come down for the weekend, Ma, to try and put things right with Pa. I miss you and – er, him too. I want to put things right again. If I can.”
There is silence on the other end. Dead silence. I realise the ‘secrecy’ button has been pushed on the other side. Marlene raises her eyebrows at me and I shrug.
Click. “Martin?”
“Ja, Ma?”
“Your father says okay, as long as there’s no political talk, alright?”
“Okay, Ma,” I smile, but tightly, with apprehension as well as relief.
“We’ve got some shopping to do, but we can see you after eleven on Saturday. You can stay in the spare room overnight if you want.”
“Thanks, Ma.” I won’t pack an overnight bag though. A weekend is too long after three years of silence. Baby steps.
“All right, good night, Martin.” She hangs up, sounding suddenly and strangely tired – but then, it is late, even if they are retired.
I stand up and slowly place the phone in the cradle. Marlene is standing behind me, arms around me, holding me close. Her damp hair smells slightly of tea tree oil shampoo and I feel her soft breasts against my shoulder blades, through my thin cotton shirt. I move her hands down to my bulging crotch.
We make the bed somehow and undress feverishly.
I’m still too desperate, too urgent, too excited, coming quickly and before her. She writhes and groans a split second after me, but the split second is a second too late.
I lie spent, holding her, wondering whether she is protecting my ego.
Then I see the photo of Suzette again. Shit, I’d still forgotten – to hide that, or to put it away. Marlene seems to be dozing in my arms, but I am suddenly wide-awake.
Marlene looks so like Suzette, just with shorter hair. So uncannily like her...
Her eyes open and she looks up at me: “What’s wrong, darling?”
I look at her and feel myself tensing even further. Somehow, I know. In fact, I think I’d always known, but didn’t want to think it.
She’d told me she’d been expelled from her family as a rebel – the ‘swart skaap’ – a black sheep story that – with hindsight – resonated too closely to my own. I would have realised earlier – if only it hadn’t been for the shape of her breasts beneath her blouse.
I roll away from her and sit up. “Who are you? Really?”
Her eyelids flutter and she rolls over the other way and feels under the bed. I panic and hold a pillow up in front of me, but all she sits up with is a cigarette and a lighter.
I put the pillow down as she lights up. I am too frightened to tell her not to. Marlene had always told me she was a fervent anti-smoker, just like me.
“So,” she says, blowing a smoke ring at me: “Some real pleasure at last! Have you tried rebuilding your Thought Machine again, Doctor?”
Chapter 9
Sibusiso’s Flight from Folly
Real silence is rare in a psychiatric institute, the lunatic asylum. I lie awake for the perfect moment, but none arrives. Always someone talks, grunts or wheezes, even in the deepest dark of night.
So the nights and days peel across the week and I have my therapy again on Thursday – we talk about the pain of fathers, even though neither of us is, as yet, a father. The doctor admits he struggles with his father too and I wonder how best to make things right with my own father. I test my doctor, and get him to bring out his Magic Thought Box. So it is that I guiltily note the details of where Dr. van Deventer hides it – and the key with which he accesses it.
I sent him my thoughts and the image of betrayal in five sharp seconds and he says at the end that he will organize a ‘family’ session soon – but, much though I want to, I don’t think that I can wait for such a session. I don’t know how long before the doctor moves his Box: or indeed someone else – like that dry and dangerous Dr. James – perhaps finds and confiscates it.
I lie in bed, my stomach is full from the evening curry I both chose and insisted upon. I smile contentedly, remembering the woman’s angry and resistant face, but she’d eventually given in, as the line of people waiting for food mounted behind me. I’d stood with firm panther feet, until she’d slapped the curry messily onto my plate.
I think of Nombuso and her promises. I need to get the Box to her and we will have a weapon against the boere. I was not thinking straight then – but now I wonder how exactly they hope to wield this ‘weapon’.
Guilt too, I feel, looking for any excuse again tonight not to move – Dumisani there in the opposite bunk is talking to God; the night staff are restless and pace the dorm every hour.
For I find, despite myself, I do like the doctor – and I have no real wish to steal from him.
I lie quietly, unmoving, and start to tremble as the gas gathers around me. I know what is coming next and there is nothing I can do to stop it. There are loud shots and I fall forward to catch Mandla, but it is too late, his right eye weeps blood and his brains leak onto my trousers. I scream, but wake, mouth choked, my scream just part of a strangled and recurring nightmare. I open my mouth and gasp. Really, I have no voice.
I do not want to lose any more friends.
I cannot wait any longer. There is no perfect moment, no complete stillness.
I roll off my bunk and swing my rucksack from beneath my bed, while Dumisani continues to praise God. I hoist my bag onto my back and tie my takkies. I freeze as a staff nurse drifts by, but he is heading to the TV in the lounge, unconcerned by we who should be sleeping.
I pad warily past the nurses’ station and peer into the lounge. Both men are lost in a rerun of the Premiership game between Sundowns and Chiefs. One chews on a piece of dried sausage, it looks like Zandile. I wait for something to happen; their attention seems wavering, uncommitted.
A man falls in the penalty area. “Penalty!” shouts the nurse I do not recognise, standing up. Zandile barks his disagreement, enabling me to walk with quiet steps behind them and through into the wider hospital corridor beyond.
I turn right with no hesitation, walking with sureness in order to allay any suspicions.
Right, left, right again – ah, there is the doctor’s room. I am glad this is not a secure or forensic setting; the place is indeed quiet at this time, although the floor whispers beneath my feet.
I push against the door, relieved that it opens. The cleaners often forget to re-lock doors and security do not come here – for who would break into a madhouse?
Only madmen like me, surely. I hope this Box is worth any trouble it may bring.
I flick the light switch and close the door, but know I don’t have long as the light through the door-pane is a dead giveaway to anyone passing, the doctor’s work ethic not noted for midnight office appearances, I am sure.
I step across to his desk and pull at the left sided drawer. It does not give and I curse. No doubt he locked the drawer and took the key with him. He guards the Box with the utmost caution; I have seen this in the reverence with which he treats it.
I have no time for niceties. I wedge a chisel stolen from our occupational therapy workspace into the small gap between key-lock and desk. I have no hammer, so step back and kick the wedged chisel. It splinters the wood and lock with a brief but loud bang.
My hand shakes as I find the cupboard key under a pile of papers. I drop the key and it spins towards the test-cupboard. For one heart-stopping moment I think it will disappear under the small gap between floor and cupboard, but it spins slowly to a stop, just short.
I pick it up again, almost dropping it once more in my shaky haste. The door itself, once unlocked, opens easily, and I pull the Box out from under some test forms placed no doubt with intent to obscure it. I have only taken a few clothes in my bag and there i
s just room enough for the Box.
I close the cupboard door and switch out the light.
Footsteps thud down the corridor. I climb under the desk with difficulty, the bag on my back jammed against the wood above me. Only eight or so hours earlier I was talking about Father here, feeling guilty that I was betraying him – and to an umlungu of all people.
Now, all I feel is fear and the sweat trickling in a cold smelly trail down my neck. I try not to breathe as the door opens and the light flares on. I grip the chisel and a few shards of wood too tightly; blood starts to drip slowly from my right hand.
There is a tired sigh, the light dies and then the door closes. Keys rattle in the lock. I am to be locked in.
More keys rattle and then the man swears; withdrawing a last key, before moving off.
There is a dim light filtering in from the corridor. I release the chisel and wooden splinters, crawl out carefully and stand up. I pluck a tissue from the box on the doctor’s desk – the same box he passed to me only hours earlier for my face – and wrap it around my right hand.
With dread, I test the door.
I almost cry with relief when it creaks open. The security man had obviously cursed because he did not have the right keys.
God must be with me.
I scuttle down the corridor like a crab, back pressed against the wall so that I can glance both in front and behind me; but I see no sign of anyone.
The door to the outside opens easily. It feels good to be from an Open Ward, at least.
From there, it is but minutes to the front gate. It is dark enough to sneak past the guard post – the guard himself is occupied with what Father would call the evils of hard pornography. I find it hard not to sneak a look at his TV screen, where a naked man moves on top of a woman, as I crawl underneath the boom and into the bushes in front of the security shed.
Outside. Free.
I text Nombuso and move off quietly towards the main road.
There are sirens in the distance and an owl hoots in a tree ahead of me, freezing the trails of sweat that stripe my body. I wait for Nombuso in the shadows of a jacaranda tree. Pure silence does not exist here either. Inside me, someone growls in response to the hoot of the owl.
I say nothing, though; for only a madman talks to the air.
I doze briefly, but am woken by the throttle of a nearby motorbike and the dark leathered shape of a woman, silhouetted in unmistakable shape against an orange street lamp. She pulls up in front of me and I see a fluorescent shape circling her cheeks under the helmet – a black, green and gold mini-flag, lined in yellow; there is no way she bought that mobile tattoo on the open market.
Why does she flaunt her colours so openly now? Does she wish to take my place in hospital – or perhaps book her space in the grave, still so young?
I rise to greet Nombuso and she hands me a helmet. I climb aboard without question.
I know by now to hold her tight.
Thulani and Gill are waiting in the lounge.
Spread out on the table in front of them are the stripped bones of an automatic rifle, no doubt an AK-47. Thulani is busy clipping in a round of ammunition; another dangles heavily across his right shoulder, giving his body an oddly lopsided look.
Gill is smoking a joint and stands up as we come in.
“You got it, Sib?”
“Yebo,” I say, swinging the bag off my back, unsure where to put it and somewhat unnerved by the rifle parts strewn in front of me.
Thulani grins at me, “Mooigedoen, bra, as the boere would say.” He continues to clip the rifle together.
Nombuso looks at the top of the Box when I open the bag. “It’s not much to look at, hey.”
“How can it be a weapon for us?” I ask. “I know the SB could make good use of it if they ever got hold of this.”
“Think about it, Sibusiso,” she says, sitting down in front of me, pupils dilated with excitement: “It’s a direct route under the skin. If you can connect to anyone, regardless of race, and see how similar we are, how we share so many hopes and dreams, this will negate the skin, making so-called race and colour irrelevant.”
I remember her telling me she is studying Soc.Anthrop. too.
“One Box won’t go very far,” I say doubtfully.
I jump as I hear the rifle clack! Thulani has the weapon pieced together and loaded snugly under his arm. “We know people who can make more, given one original,” he smiles.
“Who?” I ask, getting out of my chair and moving away from the table. I don’t like guns.
Nombuso scoops up my bag with her left hand and silences us with a right index finger held vertically across her lips.
“What?” I ask and she scowls and presses her finger tighter against her lips. Thulani has quietly soft-toed to the back door, rifle cocked and cradled. Gill gets up slowly and I see her eyes are red, her pupils flared. She pulls a pistol from behind her back.
There is no sound; there is nothing to hear. And then it hits me how abnormal that is.
A dog howls nearby, perhaps one of the village strays who occasionally comes in for a beef or chicken bone. Nombuso swings my backpack over her shoulders, scoops up the helmet and grabs my arm, heading for the wide front door.
“Stay low,” she says.
She runs crouched, swivels hard right through the door and vaults over the stoep wall.
I suddenly hear the baying of bigger and fiercer dogs.
“Polisie! Hou stil!” the voice is loud, but distorted, crackling like a whip across my ears as I follow Nombuso over the wall. She has already kicked her bike into action.
I hear the burst of rifle fire from the back door and suddenly she is beside me, pulling me on to her bike. No time for helmets. There is a rapid crackle of gunfire from the darkness of the road, but I don’t feel anything, aware only of flashes of light and the snarl of dogs over the roar of Nombuso’s bike.
“Hold tight,” she snaps and then the bike surges and swings a sharp left unexpectedly, away from the road. There is the rattle of more gunfire and I duck against her, hearing a sharp whine in the air. I smell burning, but Nombuso has twisted the bouncing bike left again and suddenly we are whipping through tall swathes of thick vegetation, along a narrow path... The sugar cane fields at the back of Hope’s Folly, I suddenly realise.
I hear no more gunshots, but I see a red-glow in her rear view mirror.
The farmhouse burning.
The motor whines and the wheel spins as Nombuso kicks the ground occasionally, the bike struggling with the mud in the narrow tracks between the fields. A blue light flashes behind us but recedes into the distance; the track is too narrow for a car or van.
The track forks and we swing right. It is hard to see anything at all with a dim half-moon low in the sky. Nombuso is cursing and coaxing her bike and although I am pressed against her, I feel the whip of passing vegetation against my body and the sides of my face. My neck aches, my head forced into an awkward angle by the bulky bag on her back.
She gears down and I see we are in open space by the side of a tarred road.
I feel her body tense, her breath hold, as car lights flash towards... and past us.
She guns the engine again and swings onto the road, then presses the throttle with such force that the bike screams. I lean against her, holding her tightly, burying my head painfully against the bouncing bag, all to stop my lips being pulled open by the savage wind buffeting us.
I lean as she leans and forget all else, my body and mind numb against the roar of the wind.
Finally, the wind and roar lessen and I peer over her shoulder. We are racing along a dark street, shacks on the left, more solid shaped houses on our right. Even in the dull moonlight, the place looks tantalizingly familiar.
Nombuso grinds the bike to a halt and kicks the bike stand down. She sags forward and sighs, exhausted. My body feels locked in shape, frozen, but I eventually manage to let go and stumble off.
By which time a man is coming down the
path of the house behind us.
From his shape, a very big man!
He stalks past me and helps Nombuso off her bike. I catch a glimpse of his face – tight and serious Numbers. Then they are walking past me and I see Numbers has pulled her arm over his shoulder and is half lifting her. She sags against him as if she is unwell.
I follow. The door opens in front and I see a young child standing there, hanging on the door handle from the inside.
Inside, I recognize Mamma’s house, but Numbers and Nombuso have already gone through into one of the side rooms, so I sit and wait in the entrance room. The young boy, as I now see him, comes to sit with me. He must be around eight or nine.
His eyes are wide, his face serious: “Have you been running from the police, Uncle?”
I nod; too tired to do anything else, wondering what Nombuso is doing.
The door opens on the right and Mamma steps though, large and somehow reassuring in her size and presence. I catch a glimpse of Nombuso lying on a bed, bandaged and unmoving.
I moan, but Mamma just holds up a hand: “Nombuso will be fine. She’s bleeding from her side, but the bullet grazed her. It has been and gone. As for you, my boy, wipe your face and hand with this.”
She passes me a damp cloth which stings my face and right palm. The palm bleeds again, but just a bit.
Numbers comes through: “She sleeps.” (‘Words’ is obviously not his middle name.)
Mamma nods, slips into a room on the left, to return and give me some soup and bread to eat. I wolf it down, hungry and starting to shiver after the night’s exertions.
“Thulani and Gill have been killed,” Numbers says.
Shocked, I choke down a gulp of hot soup, burning my throat.
“From police radio?” Mamma asks, turning to him. Numbers nods, watching me.
I put the soup bowl down. I have no more wish to eat. My stomach feels hollow, despite the hot soup and soft bread lining it. The news makes me both sad and shaky. I see Mandla’s dead face again. His eye has stopped bleeding, but his body is stiffening, despite all I can do.
Inside me, the Beast bites deep, draining my spirit.