The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  “How do you feel at this point?” a voice shot out.

  “Disappointed. Desperate.”

  “Go on.”

  “For a while I sit on a branch. I sit there … by myself, at the highest point of the world. Above, the sun is beaming through the clouds, but as time passes, whatever it is that beams through feels less like the beam of a sun and more like the glare of a giant eye. The shape of it becomes clearer. It’s an orb. A planetary orb hanging in the sky. It speaks to me. It has a voice, and the voice it uses is my own and at the same time not my own. The voice is calming. It tells me I will not find my son there. And then it mentions a name.”

  “Whose name?”

  “Jack Turning. The voice repeats the name over and over again. It tells me to remember Jack Turning, but I don’t. I can’t.”

  “Do you know this name?”

  “No. I don’t. At least, I don’t think I do. The orb continues to tell me things. A feeling of hopelessness comes over me. I’ll never see my son again, I think. Perhaps it wasn’t his red shoe. I’m spent. I have nothing left. I give up. I lean backwards and fall through the clouds.”

  “Your feelings?”

  “I have no fear. I know it will all be over soon. I’ll hit the ground and it’ll be over. But then, suddenly, I see him. Andy. He’s there. He was on the tree trunk the entire time, climbing up after me. I’m slowing as I fall. I have time to turn to him and call his name … and he turns … and he looks me in the eye. But it’s too late. I pass him and my speed builds … the ground rushes towards me before … I wake up.”

  For a moment, I was no longer in the room. I could hear the voice of the orb. I could feel the fall and hear the wind. I could see Andy’s face, his bright green eyes in his young, unblemished face. I was filled with guilt and the anguish of falling from him as my hands clawed madly at rushing air, watching the distance grow as the tree shot up into the sky above.

  “And what do you feel when you wake up?”

  “Guilt,” I replied in my forced monotone, aware of how I’d failed to seem impartial. “Despair.”

  “Well,” the woman said. “For the moment, do not concern yourself. We’ll give you something to help you.”

  The man with the metal contraption rose from his seat and walked to me. He held out his hand and it fell into the single beam of yellow light. He was holding a small plastic bag filled with dark, dried and crushed red leaves.

  “It’s a temporary solution, until you’ve adjusted to your new state. Have a few leaves before bed. Wash it all down with water,” he said.

  I reached up slowly and took the bag from him.

  “They’ll prevent you having dreams.”

  I stared at the bag of leaves I’d been told would wipe away the orb, Jack Turning, the clouds, and my son’s face in a few daily gulps. Then I nodded up at him.

  I had to remind myself, The Renascence would see the transcendence of Man. The age of truth after the age of lies, and we’d been assured we’d never go back. Not to the way things were. Not to the way we had been for all those years, roaming like stray animals on some long dark night of fear and avarice. No, The Renascence would inaugurate the future of our existence, and the future was glowing bright.

  “Thank you,” I said, and wrapped the bag in my fist.

  Walking back from the white house, I felt the biting cold that signified the final few minutes before sunrise. I hurried down the path towards my tent. The large blue moon rippled on the surface of the flat ocean. The stars peered down from their posts, waiting to see what I’d do next.

  I grabbed the bag of red leaves from my pocket and looked at it. Then I opened the bag and tipped them all out. Each leaf was whisked upwards and carried away by a breeze, flecks in the blue light of the moon, like the ashes of all the dreams they had been prepared to extinguish. I watched until every ort disappeared into the night. Then I unzipped my tent and went inside to sleep.

  Moneta asks two favours

  T he heat of the day had already begun to fill the tent. I sat on the edge of my bed, curling my feet and cracking my toes. My body felt tighter and heavier than it had the night before, probably from the lack of sleep.

  I finally forced myself to stand and the bed creaked, the mattress popping back into shape. I looked around my confined space. Each small object and ornament sat in its rightful place: a shelf of tattered books and a stack of unfinished drawings beside a broken mug of pencils. There was a small chest of drawers containing a few items of clothing. A red umbrella with missing spokes leaned like an ageing charmer. Beside it, a shoebox of clippings from National Geographic magazines recovered from the cabin of a boat wreck. There was also a glass jar filled with coins, a set of broken headphones, and a rusty old army knife that wouldn’t close anymore …

  (The Renascence is not a law, Kayle. It’s a choice. A collective choice, isn’t it? A choice we make together. Material hoarding was resigned to the Age of Self, whether or not the people of different periods were able to see it for themselves. The secular people of the technological period prided themselves in having little in common with the henotheistic people of Ancient Egypt—with their ideas of an afterlife and their pantheon of gods—and yet both seemed intent to die in mounds of their possessions. Don’t you see the hypocrisy in that kind of behaviour? Rest assured though, Kayle: in The Renascence, when we die, we’ll leave nothing behind)

  I ducked my head and stepped outside. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright light as I sauntered through the narrow spaces between the tents, passing familiar faces as they went about their morning chores. A large woman dunked her clothing in an old bucket. She churned the dirt out of a soapy shirt, her bronze arms pumping like the rhythmic shafts of an engine. There was the smell of jasmine, sawdust and spices in the air, and steam rose from tinny pots warbling over gas burners.

  As I left the commune of tents and stepped out onto the beach, the sea breeze nibbled at my legs and arms like inquisitive, invisible creatures. I shaded my eyes with my hand; the sun was high enough for it to be midday. The sand beneath me was already hot between my toes and, at the far end, the faint shimmer of a heat mirage weaved like a chorus of ghosts.

  I walked along the water’s edge with my pants rolled to my knees. I crouched and cupped the water in my hands to dab the back of my neck. Seagulls hovered and cried above me, chasing each other between the rays of the sun. At the end of the beach a group of people stood huddled like the Moai statues left by the inhabitants of an expired empire, gazing forever out over the ocean. It would have been an odd sight had I not already known the object of their fascination: they were watching the rafts.

  I could just about make out the floating rafts bobbing over the small waves.

  I counted three of them.

  Each raft had been attached to the pier by a length of rope. The offenders had been tied down at the wrists and ankles, forced to stare only at the sky while they thought about their offences. Pumped full of hallucinogens and bared to the heavens, forced to wait until the universe dripped itself in, filling each with a sense of purpose, realigning them with The Renascence.

  Although I knew nothing of the men on the rafts that day, a rumour had spread of their having vandalised the white house two mornings earlier. They’d scrawled defamatory comments on the walls in mud, but I hadn’t seen the words for myself. By the time I’d awoken, the evidence had been removed. Their sentence was delivered with no deliberation. No prolonged trial. No testimonies. A direct and unchallenged judgement by the one dictatorial panel of voices that oversaw us: Guilty—Separation by the Raft.

  Offenders could drift for as long as three days before being pulled back to shore. No food. No water. Pounded by the wind and the waves. Frozen in the cold or burned in the sun. Sometimes the icy rain fell so hard it must have felt like hot iron shot on their exposed faces. And while the rest of us could scarcely imagine such a battering, we sensed it was the stillness of a quiet night that affected them most. We’d heard about it.
Watched them raptly. Wondered.

  “Kayle.”

  Surprised, I turned.

  It was Moneta, standing a few feet behind me. She was an elderly woman with ash-grey hair tucked behind a green plastic peak. Her overalls were grass-stained, the tips of her fingers browned by soil.

  “I wonder if you wouldn’t give me a hand,” she said.

  Moneta needed me to move bags of fertiliser and fill pots, and I followed her to the botanical garden, a glass dome set back from the beach. The dome housed countless varieties of flowers, herbs, vegetables and small trees. I’d often seen children assist with the pruning, picking, planting and cleaning, but only Moneta knew how to make her autotrophic friends truly bloom into silent wonders.

  As I entered the dome, I was hit by a flurry of scents: the perfumes of the brightly coloured flowers, the wetness of loamy soil. The air was thick with humidity, which probably kept Moneta’s skin as supple as a much younger woman’s. That, and her lifestyle: one of calm and commitment.

  She explained where the bags of compost and the enormous clay pots needed to be moved to, and I hauled and dragged her heavy pots and filled a large empty wooden crate with soil and fertiliser. Once I was finished, I stepped outside to wash my hands in a bucket of water. I lifted my face to the sun. It slipped behind a single cloud—throwing grey on everything—and I continued to stare until it returned to blind me. I dried my hands on my pants and walked back inside.

  “Oolong tea?” Moneta asked as I entered. She was sitting at a small wrought-iron table. She had prepared a pot of tea and two china cups, each overturned on a daintily patterned saucer.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  “Well, have a seat then.”

  She poured each of us a cup of tea. I lifted the cup to take my first sip, my thick finger squeezing through the narrow handle. We sat quietly for a while, and the silence didn’t seem to bother her. There was little deemed appropriate to talk about anyway.

  “They gave me a hard time in the beginning,” she said. “You know, with my garden.”

  I nodded. I was sure they had.

  “It took me a while to explain that my garden would not be a possession of any sort. I have no interest in owning these plants as things, you see.”

  “I see.”

  She looked to the side as she spoke, and I felt as if I could have been anyone, really—any willing ear. Finally, she turned to me.

  “Thank you for helping,” she said.

  “It’s my pleasure,” I replied.

  She smiled and sipped her tea. She surveyed her garden—the ferns, flowers, vines and vegetables—like a parent keeping an eye on her children in the park.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Would you indulge an old woman and her story?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. Moneta and I had hardly said a word to each other before that moment. We’d greeted each other on occasion and I had assisted her once or twice before, but we were far from what one might consider close. “What kind of story?”

  “A story I need to tell. To someone else and to myself, one last time.”

  I looked through the glass wall and saw the others on the beach. They seemed far enough away and I was almost certain the two of us were alone.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I hope you will entertain my story. It may be a bit long. I imagine it will be. But I must tell it the way I want or I will not want to tell it at all.”

  “All right.”

  She lifted her cup and watched me carefully as she sipped. Then she smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not sure you know how much this will mean to me, but it does, it will, and I thank you. I’ll make us another pot.”

  The man in the woods

  I was born in the middle of the last century, and I suppose that makes me—oh, I don’t know—a hundred-and-some-odd years old. I’m not really sure anymore. I never thought I’d get to this age, or that I’d get here feeling the way I do. But life, I’ve learned, is like a cat that comes and goes as it pleases, making you think you own it when it is only in its best interest that you believe so.

  When I was twenty years old, I thought I was an adult. At thirty, I thought I was somewhere in the middle of my life. Forty, I knew it all. At fifty, I cared less, but only because I assumed the majority of my life was behind me.

  Ha! Well, you can understand where this is going.

  At fifty, I wasn’t even halfway through it, and yet I’d anchored myself with my preconceptions. Given each little moment and event its weight, only to find that most of my experiences were not anchors. They were balloons, floating up to the sky as the years breezed by, out of my reach.

  I rarely understood where I was in my life. When I married at the age of twenty-two, I believed married life was my destiny, for then I believed there was such a thing. When I had my first child, I thought he would be my entire reason for being. And for a time, both he and my husband were, and would have continued to be, had death not robbed me of them both. My husband was killed in a road accident seventy or so years ago and my child was taken by cancer twenty years later. I never had grandchildren. I never remarried. I have no family. My younger sister passed away about forty years ago in her sleep, of old age, I’ve been told.

  And yet, I am here. Alive.

  What has it all been about, the whole silly business of my life? I can honestly not tell you.

  Funny, isn’t it?

  But none of this concerns me. And neither, I suspect, does it concern a young man like you.

  No, what I want is to tell you one story.

  Only one.

  Of all my balloons, this is the only one I hold on to. The rest are floating, up in the sky. It is the only story I can recall with absolute clarity. I cannot tell you what it means, but that doesn’t concern me. All that matters is that it’s the clearest memory in my head, and for that reason alone, I wish to tell it.

  I was raised in a small town; at the time it was called Tsitsikamma. In the language of the Khoi-San people this meant “place of water.” It sat near the coast, an incredibly woodsy place. That’s what I remember most: rolling hills blanketed in dense forest. The ground was covered in moss and chips of bark. The air smelled of damp and tree sap. One large highway weaved through it, but you’d never know until you were standing right on it; the woods swallowed that highway right up. Even the sound of passing trucks and cars couldn’t make it too far beyond the edge of the woods, certainly not as far as our cabin.

  Before Tsitsikamma, we lived in a town called Kroonstad. My father was the manager of a factory that made cardboard boxes and my mother stayed at home to take care of me. I don’t recall much of Kroonstad, but I do remember the many boxes my father brought home. There wasn’t much money to spare, so boxes were often the best my father could provide as gifts, and I rarely complained. I kept myself occupied building fortresses, robots and motor vehicles. Other times I played marbles with myself at the bottom of an enormous and empty bowl-shaped swimming pool in the middle of the housing commune.

  I kept out of trouble with my parents most of the time, except for when I brought some injured animal into the house without permission. Once I even managed to hide a few bats in a box, until my mother tipped it over while cleaning. Needless to say, bats were not her favourite of my friends, and she ended up running around the house with a broomstick, trying to shoo a pair of disorientated fruit bats from the corner of our ceiling, cursing and scolding me as she did.

  I look upon my time in Kroonstad with reasonable fondness. But when the box factory went under, my father lost his job and we were forced to move. As a child, I questioned little: I simply packed my things, hopped in the back of our old car, and was driven out of Kroonstad to my new home in the thick, dark and marvellous woods of Tsitsikamma.

  Our new house turned out to be nothing like our old one. Instead of the flat, concrete commune in Kroonstad, where most of our neighbours were large women with rollers in their hair who leane
d over the fences chain-smoking, our house in Tsitsikamma was a log cabin in a deep forest clearing, where the neighbours were large birds and bugs who chirped and clicked from the trees and the bushes.

  The house itself was not really a house but a lodge for tourists and travellers. My father hadn’t bought the business; it belonged to his older brother. He’d offered my father a position as manager of the lodge, as well as a couple of rooms for us to use while my father worked there. I was a small child at the time, so it is difficult to say in all honesty that it was an enormous house, but at the time it certainly seemed so. There were six rooms, each with four or five bunk beds. Three small rooms with double beds. There was a communal room with a bar and a pool table below a big poster of a man sitting in a red Cadillac. The communal kitchen was full of tinny old pots on the walls and a ceramic rooster that perched on top of the fridge. Behind the lodge there was a large outside area where guests could sit on hollowed-out logs and braai meat on open fires, talking and singing into the early hours of the morning. The place was rarely ever full, but the backpackers and vacationers trickled in and out steadily over the course of the first spring we were there.

  Most of them were young men and women who needed an easy and affordable place to rest en route to somewhere else. Sometimes they’d arrive wishing to spend a night and would only leave after three days. Sometimes they’d book a room for three nights but leave on their first morning. All sorts arrived but we had no real trouble. My mother and father argued a few times in the first couple of weeks, mostly about money, I suppose, but that didn’t last long.

  After a time everything settled down as each of us explored some fresh and exciting aspect of this new life. My father had found a guitar stashed in a storage shed and was suddenly strumming old tunes around the fire at night, entertaining guests when the vibe was right. My mother took up painting, but spent most of her time taking care of my new sister, Carly. And I soon learned there was far more to do than play with cardboard boxes, marbles, and even bats. The woods, stretching on in all directions, were a treasure trove of curiosities. And I, a reckless and uninhibited explorer, planned on discovering each and every last one of them.