The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “My name?”

  It was as if nobody had ever asked him.

  “Anubis. M-mm-muh-my name’s Anubis. Now, Kayle,” he said. “Finish up my culinary delights and come with me.”

  Anubis led me through the house and out onto a wooden deck. There was no moon and it was too dark to see much of my environment. We were at the top of a thick black patch of the oval island. He leaned on the rail.

  “You want to know where you are, I can tell you,” he said. “Why not? You’re here now and you have a right to know, I suppose.” He stared out towards the ocean. “There are only the three of us here. My father, my brother and me. But I deal with the running of this island by myself. I have no choice. My brother and my father have certain conditions that don’t allow them to be out here, managing the ins-and-outs. You’ll never see my brother rigging up pulleys, repairing the house, raising stock, cooking and doing meet-’n’-greets with people like you. He does help me, in ways I probably need to explain, ways even I don’t fully understand … but nevertheless trust and depend upon. I guess you could say we’re kind of a tuh-tuh-team.” He turned around and put his back to the rail, resting his elbows behind him. He turned his head up to a sky splashed with countless stars and continued to speak …

  The mirror man

  My brother and I were born twenty-three years ago, five minutes apart. We’re identical twins—and when I say we’re identical, I mean identical. With most twins, there are always small differences upon close inspection. Slightly larger eyes. Smaller hands. Wider nostrils. Something! But not us. Nope. We’re identical in every way you can imagine, as if the same p-puh-person came into this world twice.

  My parents were what you’d call extreme environmentalists. Protesters. Anti-establishment people. Always going on about the corporate overseers, you know, those evil bigwigs who twirl their moustaches over some new profitable way to poison our bodies, our minds and our homes. I’m sure you know the sort. One thing was for certain, however: whether bound by their political passion or perhaps even something more, my parents were truly in love with each other. My father wuh-wuh-worshipped my mother, my mother put all of her faith and trust in my father, and together, the two of them became Bonnie-’n’-Clyde-Gone-Green.

  He was an English teacher and she was a secretary, but after only a few years of living together, they left their jobs to join an aggressive, growing movement of outraged people called The Borrowed Gun.

  It was the accidental dropping of the “Gas Giant” Bio-bomb in Maputo in ‘55 that really sparked The Borrowed Gun, I reckon. I mean, everyone saw it on the news. A city of corpses. Dead fish floating on the surfaces of the lakes. Acidic rain riddling crops and p-p-people’s hair falling out. All of those suits in court, shrugging and oopsing and cutting deals to dodge the blame bullet …

  And it was right about then that my parents came off the leashes of society like two wild dogs. It wasn’t charity work on their minds, though, it was vengeance.

  My brother and I were sheltered from most of their undertakings in the early years. People would come to our house in the evenings and my mother would bring out trays of tea and coffee for these strangers. They would talk about things I couldn’t understand and the same few words would g-g-go back and forth: “government,” “tactics,” “infiltrate,” “liberate.” Words like that.

  Sometimes discussions would get heated, at which point my mother would enter our room to tell us a story. She made them up as she went along, which meant they’d only ever be as good as her mood. Her stories were full of make-believe creatures and farfetched adventures, which often bored me, but my b-b-b-brother seemed to appreciate them.

  No. I wanted to know what the adults were talking about. I didn’t want to lie in my room and listen to fables about monsters and dragons. I wanted to hear about the monsters that scared my parents. The dragons they were trying to defeat. And I wanted in.

  It was around this time, on an ordinary trip to the seaside with my parents, that we found out about my brother’s unusual skin problem. That was a particularly strange day. One day you think you know how the world works and the next you don’t, as if over the course of a night somebody went and changed a rule somewhere.

  My brother and I were eight years old. My father was lying on a towel, wearing big sunglasses and drying off from a swim. My mother was reading a book. The rest of the beach was full of the regular Sunday crowd. I was sitting next to my parents, trying to make a sandcastle, and my brother was playing d-d-down by the water.

  That’s when we heard the scream. Blood-chilling, unearthly. I remember people on the beach turning their heads at the same time. I remember thinking someone had been eaten by a shark, the way that scream rippled across the beach. It was only when I stood that I realised it was my brother making that sound. He was running back up the beach towards us.

  I’ll never forget that first time I saw him standing there, veins of ocean water running over his, his b-b-b-body. He was covered from head to toe in the biggest, reddest blisters you can imagine. His face was twisted and pulpy, his eyelids almost completely closed. His arms looked like a string of onions in a tight red sack. There wasn’t a part of him that wasn’t bulging and burning—and he just kept screaming and screaming. A sound I’d never heard before, but recognised anyway.

  It was like it was me screaming.

  EPP, they call it. My brother’s an extreme case. It means he suffers from a photosensitivity to light, and any prolonged exposure makes the poor guy look like he’s been tossed in a lobster pot. In an instant, my Mirror Man—as I still like to call him—was more my shadow than a brother, a familiar figure trapped in constant darkness.

  He was given medication, but his body reacted badly, and it didn’t seem to help much anyway. So my mother decided it was best he stayed inside while I got to play outside with friends. Curious kids often asked about him and I’d just shrug and say he was sick. He’d get better, I told them, but he was sick. I can only imagine the b-b-b-bullshit stories they spread about the boy who lived in the darkness—the boy who could do nothing but stand at his upstairs bedroom window and watch us kick a soccer ball about in the street.

  Some days my brother did come out of the room, but he looked like a ghost wrapped in those black sheets. The look did him no favours. It only mmm-muh-made him even stranger to the other kids. I’d spend time with him in the dark room, of course, and we’d chat and joke and talk nonsense. That lasted for a while, but eventually he lost interest in what I had d-d-done with my light-filled day. He lost interest in our favourite TV shows. TV and video games and comics. He stopped laughing at my jokes too. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like he was sad or depressed, it was more that, while he lost interest in some things, others interested him more. He began to talk about strange dreams he was having—things he was seeing in the darkness. People’s faces, places he’d never been to. His words became more and more puh-puh-puzzling, and after a few months he was barely stringing together a sentence that made any sense, kinda the way people talk to you in dreams. I’d listen to him, patiently, you know, maybe I could figure something out, but sometimes I felt like running away and never seeing him again.

  Adults think their problems are so bloody big, but they’re equipped to deal with them, and that makes all the difference. For a kid, everything’s the most incredible thing ever, or it’s the end of the world. Nothing’s just fine. And that’s how it felt, dealing with him. I couldn’t handle it, and couldn’t handle that I couldn’t handle it, you know?

  One morning, I woke up in my bed and he was standing over me, his skin white as cream cheese, his eyes … We were both born with dark guh-guh-green eyes, but now his were like new leaves on a tree. He had no expression on his face. He was sleepwalking. I asked him what he wanted—why he was out of bed so early—but he only leaned and said, Bang! Crash! Bang! Don’t look right. Look left.

  That was it. That’s what he said.
/>   And then he went to bed.

  I thought nothing much of it, went about my day as normal, met up with Joey Sinclair and Ben Beatty, two friends from school. We went skateboarding through the city. We were about to cross a road, but as we came off the pavement, we heard a loud crashing sound on our right. We turned to see some poor guy drop a television he’d been carrying from his car. Joey and Ben laughed and pointed, and I would have probably joined those losers, but something in me clicked without thinking. For some reason, I looked the other way. That’s when I saw the big red van spuh-sp-speeding down the road. No time to shout. The van ended up hitting Joey and Ben both. They rolled over the bonnet, landed in the road like boneless chickens. Joey pulled through but lost a leg, Ben Beatty dud-duh-d-d-died right then and there, and I went on to skate another day.

  Later, once I was able to think back on it (Bang! Crash! Bang! Don’t look right. Look left), I knew my brother had given me a warning of some kind. I asked how he knew. He said he didn’t know what I meant. He didn’t remember saying anything, and we never brought up that weird, shitty day ever again. It took me a while to work my way through the events of that day—reach any kind of firm resolution—but I found myself listening to my brother all the time. The more I listened, the more sense he started to make. He’d still babble and digress, but I never thought of wuh-wanting to run away. I’d play all day in the sun, and later, after meeting with my brother, would talk about my day a little differently, fill him in, make him part of it. I was no longer smug about it. We became a team. I became his eyes and ears in the world, giving him reports on the working world—what I had seen and heard and figured out about life in the light—and he’d report back on what he’d seen and heard and figured out about life in the dark. In that way, as was always meant to be, we got the whole gig covered.

  The world was a funny place around that time. There were the riots. The bank bombings. Six hundred angry people crashed through the front doors of the Gausen Telecommunication Tower and trashed the offices one floor at a time until they reached the top floor, burst through the CEO’s office door and threw that old Carl Gausen guy off the rooftop of his own empire.

  My father was brought home late that night by one of his friends. His head was bleeding and he was hobbling like he’d been in a fight. I tried to find out what had huh-huh-happened but my mother told me to go to my room while she grabbed the med-kit and cleaned his cuts in the bathroom.

  Later, when the footage came out, I thought I saw my father between those tower-stormers, but I told myself it wasn’t, that it was just someone who looked like him. To this day I’m not really sure. My brother, on the other hand, had nothing to say about it. He didn’t even watch. All he said when I came back to my bed that night were two words: Bad fruit.

  Then he turned over and went to sleep.

  After that, more people came to our house, and I watched them from the door of my room. My mother sat on my father’s lap in his armchair, listening to what these strangers had to say, but something was different about these later meetings. My father was less vocal, let others do the talking. One night he and my mother came into our bedroom to talk to us about something important. My brother and I just sat in our beds and listened. My father said that we’d be leaving. It was buh-buh-buh-best for us all if we didn’t live in our house anymore. My mother was rubbing his back, nodding and smiling at us.

  There are people who want to own us, he said. They’re everywhere. Sometimes they’re even people we think we like. But we have to be careful, because they’re really trying to control us, and the best way to control someone is to first get them to like you. We see these people on TV and in magazines. Sometimes we meet them in the street. But we need to leave because we believe in something better, don’t we, boys? We believe in freedom.

  He said we’d be on a ship for a few weeks. We’d be there with our closest friends and family. I asked where we’d be going and he said, An island. There’s a beautiful island owned by one of these bad people. It’s a floating island. One of our dearest friends saw it, and he knows where it’s going. So we’re going to find it and we’re going to take it from him. That’s where we’ll live.

  I could barely contain my excitement. An island! Juh-juh-just like in the movies! But when I turned to share the moment with my brother, I saw he was looking back at my parents with these scared, scared eyes. At the time, I didn’t get it. I mean, we’d live with our friends and float around the world, going wherever we wanted and doing whatever we wanted. No stupid school. No pollution. No problems.

  My father saw his alarmed look. Don’t worry kiddo, he said. There’s plenty of shade on the island.

  Then my parents left the bedroom arm-in-arm and closed the door behind them.

  Two weeks later we were on the ship. It was an old ship, but enormous. My parents were excited that day. I ran on board to find our cabin, and as always, bagged the top bunk. The lights of the cabin were kept dim, the curtains of our little window remained drawn and the door stood only slightly open. The first night, everyone ate dinner in the Mess Hall. (Except my brother—he ate his meals in the cabin. He could tolerate electric light, but he’d become kinda solitary.) I recognised a few people from our neighbourhood. Kids from our street, a coupla teachers. A local security guard, my father’s mechanic, the Indian from the corner shop. And a few others I only knew by face. Anyway, everyone seemed optimistic. Friendly. Helpful.

  Everyone but the captain.

  The captain was a raggedy old man, built like a German Panzer, and he never smiled at anyone. I’d pass him in the c-c-cuh-corridors and he’d look at me as if he was planning on putting me between two slices of bread. I asked my mother about him and she said he was one of the most respected men in the group; I should always do what he said. Not that he told me to do anything—didn’t speak to me at all, actually—but still, he knew I was there. I reckoned he didn’t like me too much, which didn’t bother me. He was just this beat-up old bastard with knives in his belt (he always had knives on him), and when I asked my father about those knives, my father only said, When you’re out in the wild, knives have all kinds of purposes. Cutting ropes and gutting a fish or peeling an apple. A knife’s like an explorer’s palm-plate, son.

  Well, that ship sailed the ocean for three weeks, and by then, you can imagine, people were getting impatient. Where’s this island? everyone was asking. The excitement was gone, the thrill—and then there was this one night when my friend’s father’s tiles slipped off his ol’ roof—if you know what I mean—and he began flinging tables and saying we’d run out of food, which scared the shit outta everyone. A bunch of guys had to take him into another room, calm him down.

  It rained a lot, so we were stuck in our cabins, with nothing to do. Sometimes we’d get into a storm and everything would fall this way and that, and we’d have to pinball ourselves against walls just to get to the bathroom.

  But then, one morning, we heard someone shouting from the deck. I was on my bed, peeling an apple with a knife I’d nicked from the kitchen. I saw this group of people rushing past our cabin doorway. I hopped off my bed, told my brother to come see. He was on his bunk below, saying it was too b-b-bright out there. I said that was fine, I’d tell him everything when I got back.

  By the time I got to the deck there was this crowd of people leaning over the rails, whistling and shouting and cheering. I pushed my way through them and grabbed the rail.

  The island.

  My first thought was that it was unusual-looking, protruding from the ocean like a gigantic green nose. Someone yelled they could see the wake in the water, and that the island was moving, definitely moving, and everyone cheered.

  It wasn’t just any island. It was our island.

  We’d made it.

  It was just in time too, because that table-flinging father hadn’t been far off course; we’d almost completely run out of provisions. That night everyone got a small portion of the last remaining food and we simply trailed behin
d the island at a fixed distance.

  Father said he and my mother had to have a meeting with the others. The island was owned by a member of the most powerful company in the world. We’d have to approach carefully. These big shots wouldn’t give up their toys without a fight, father said, but luckily we were in the business of fighting too.

  The next day the ship pulled up behind the island. The men brought out the secret stash of guns and weapons we’d had on board all along. They lined up along the rail as the ship came in. The rest of us watched through the murky windows of our cabins. The closer we got, though, the stranger the place appeared. The trees were perfectly straight and evenly lined up like an oversized fence. Behind the trees we could mmm-muh-make out a mess of dark and thick jungle, and on top of the hill, there were a couple of house-like structures.

  I gotta say, even then it didn’t look as formidable as we had been expecting, but nobody said a thing. Nobody cared. Nobody gave a shit what it looked like. We were all silent now, just the s-s-s-sound of the waves crashing against the sides and the steady drone of the engine, like a big sleeping thing. Then the engine was shut down, and we drifted closer, guns pointed and aimed. We honestly believed we were ready for anything.

  We pulled right up to beach without a hitch. That was the easy part. The ship touched the back of the island and the anchors were thrown on shore. A bridge was unscrewed, lowered onto the sand, and the men with the guns went down first, though they were hardly trained soldiers. Most of them could barely hold a gun. There was my English teacher, Mr. Harris. He couldn’t seem to decide whether to keep pushing up his glasses or keep his finger on the trigger. Another was my neighbour, Mr. Caldwell, clutching a big black handgun like it was a kid’s water pistol. In front of them all was Captain Knife-Pants, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, walking ashore with the anxious toddle of a man looking for the nearest bar.