Crink had stood up in his chair to survey his handiwork, leaning by the neck out of the window, his head tilted to the side. He hung it out into the hot driveway air, looking back and forth along the redbrick paving, squinting in the sun. It was quiet. Windless and dry.
Loretta’s voice had come from inside the house, startling him back into the world. He dropped heavily onto the windowpane. His left foot, still pink and sweaty from a day walking around a shopping centre with his mother, slipped and brought the full weight of his knee down on the window button. The rounded edge of the window had come up almost instantly. His foot became instantly wedged between the door handle and the side of the passenger seat, locking his knee in place and pushing the window painfully up and onto little Charlie’s throat. The gap his head had gone through closed too fast for him to react, and he became terrified.
Frantically struggling, he had scrabbled wildly at the door handle with his little hands, trying to catch the button and release himself from this whirring trap. His head still tilted, Crink had strained to keep his eyes open as the sun beat down relentlessly and he struggled to breathe.
As he shut his eyes, the boy knew, instinctively, that he was going to die. His foot jammed into place, he gave one push with everything he had and met an unyielding, unforgiving eventuality. He was trapped. He let out a panicked, gurgling rasp—a dry scream cut off by squeezing, mechanical terror, before a rushing and euphoric lightness.
Passing out wasn’t like going to sleep. Sweet little Crink got no build-up. There was no tiredness; it was just done. It was not at all like falling asleep. Losing consciousness was jarring—a jagged experience that was drawn out for the length of the dream that followed, with no rest. It was a protracted experience, extending endlessly into the ether, like dying.
Little Charlie Cranston never knew what to expect from dying. His mom had stopped him watching violent movies because they might warp his view of the world. Made him think death was something to be celebrated or cheered or tallied, instead of how it really was. He had watched those movies anyway—as kids were wont to do—but that’s beside the point. As it was, he was rapidly falling through dead air, clearly having exhausted himself, embraced by the celluloid theme from which his mother had tried so hard to protect him. Snatched from her hands by an electric window. He tried to scrutinise what was happening around him, but his screwed-up eyes wouldn’t let him see anything but blackness. He had listened, at first, to a great whistling rushing up and around him. Then, creeping into a vast and echoing nothingness, he knew, with the tiniest parts of his senses, that what he was listening to was the sound of the end.
–
“So his mom just found him hanging limp in the window?” Ruthie asked, her brow furrowing with concern for the childhood iteration of a boy she could barely stand as an adult. The music had stopped and a soft orange light was streaming in.
“Yeah, the doctors said it couldn’t have been more than four minutes or he’d’ve had permanent brain damage at his age. With the sun and panic and everything, he must’ve just passed out by the time Loretta got out to the car.”
“What’s my mom doing out by the car?” came Crink’s voice from the back entrance.
“She dropped off a bat for me to beat you with for keeping us waiting, you asshole.”
“Yeah, yeah, Professor Beynon kept me waiting for my consultation. Dude’s got a waiting line from the anthropology castle down to the Village Green.”
“Your gift for hyperbole astounds,” Alex droned in a fake British accent that made Ruth giggle.“You know that’s clear across town, right?”
Crink threw his jacket against the far wall and fished a baggie out of the Catch a Fire jar on his wall unit. It was red, green, yellow and black, a kitsch masterpiece Crink had proudly kept on display for many years. “Ah, Alex. You know you don’t have a crotch-punching force field, right?”
“Mature.”
“Your face is mature.”
“I hate to interrupt,” said Ruth, “but how is it you haven’t been caught by the authorities for stashing your pot in what has to be the most Rastafarian container this side of Peter Tosh’s grave?”
They all took a second to admire the engraved Jamaican flag made out of bones and marijuana leaves, etched into the wood of the container lid, while Crink mulled his dope on an old gig flyer. “A healthy combination of daylight paranoia and bold decision-making when it comes to my stash technique.”
“Charles Crink Cranston, when are you going to get your life in order?”
Crink smiled at Ruth from behind clenched teeth and a protruding joint. “The second you admit to your burning hot desire for me.”
Outside, the last summer-school afternoon of Alex van der Haar’s second year yawned tiredly as it settled into night time. The houses on the valley rim turned on their lights, and were responded to, in kind, by the gas lamps and trashcan fires of Joza township, across from them. Down in the bottom of the valley, three friends gave each other a hard time in a poster-covered bedroom. Crink smoked his joint. Ruthie talked about art-house films and why Crink was an idiot. Alex, for the most part, just sat and listened. Not one of them felt any need to leave, ever.
–
The 8.35 PM Greyhound chugged softly down the Bathurst Street incline as Albion de Villiers scrolled through his phone’s inbox at the stop. It had been five hours since he’d checked his messages over a tofu and leafy green salad at Café Blanca. He screwed up his eyes at the screen. Five new messages. He never usually let things sit for this long, but between last-minute packing and running into his research fellow on the way down to High Street, he’d lost track of time. The packing was largely to blame. Colour-coded socks, vacuum-sealed and folded in the back of his old packing case, two weeks’ change of pants, double that for the shirts.
He’d have to thank Lucille, his fellow, for that Hawaiian number she’d left on his desk as a Christmas present. Right after he dropped the shirt itself off at the Salvation Army. He set about organising his messages as the bus pulled off. Albion enjoyed having a sense of order to his everyday activities, no matter how small or frivolous. It made him feel more connected. It was a kind of discipline or agency, glazed over the chaos of his daily life. Getting through a work day exactly to schedule and coming out without any nagging loose ends gave him a sense of having won, somehow, at the great cosmic swingball game of life.
Two messages from Mom. One from the dean—Albion couldn’t be arsed with the man’s Thatcherian administrative bullshit this night, though. He deleted all three.
Of course, there was one from Lucille, wishing him a happy Christmas. Shame, he thought as his thumb hovered over the delete key. She was a sweet girl. Way too excited though, always fluttering around his office. Helping out with stuff that had nothing to do with her work. The second she had any spare time between coursework, she was in there cleaning things that hadn’t been cleaned, or needed cleaning, in years, She was a more-than-capable post-doc fellow, with a promising academic future. A lot of potential.
Deleted. The last message lingered there, an Arial-lettered notification set squarely upon his dated green cellphone screen. Albion de Villiers smiled softly to himself as the bus rounded the corner of Grey Street, right and onto the N2 in the frog-filled evening. He touched the screen with his thumb in the pale lamplight from above his seat. He settled back in, and texted Friederich.
–
“We’ve been seeing each other since my second year at Wits.”
“Oh she sounds lovely.”
“I’ve definitely found my soul mate, yes.” It was thirty minutes into Albion’s trip and, in classic form, he was chatting up the old lady with the window seat next to him. She was Celia, head buyer at Foschini, Grahamstown, on her way through to East London for a training conference. She was fifty, and happily married to her second husband, Moe.
“Will you be taking her to see any shows over the Christmas period?”
Albion had omitted the part about
“her” (his fake girlfriend) being a “him” (his real, glorious boyfriend) out of kindness to the nice, but no-doubt conservative old lady. He loved Friederich with all his heart but, despite having come a long way, South African varsities weren’t all sunshine and roses for gay men, and he’d become skittish about his personal information. He’d had his fair share of confrontations by the time he had eventually graduated cum laude. They had spent Christmas Eve 2008 in the ICU of Milpark Hospital after some tool at a residence mixer hit Fry in the forehead with a half-full bottle of Cobra. Twelve stitches—one for every stinking day of Christmas.
He smiled warmly at Celia. “We’ll probably just stay in.” He’d spent all the time he needed to defending himself from a full spectrum of ignorants and conservatives. That would include everyone from well-meaning but narrow-minded relatives, to the mixer jock he decked for bottling his boyfriend on Christmas Eve. Now he understood when and where an explanation would do the most good, and where it would just ruin some nice old lady’s evening. There were times when he just didn’t have the energy.
“That is lovely. She sounds like a lucky lady.”
“I try my best.”
Rumbling softly through the night, this dimly lit carriage of plastic air-conditioning nozzles and felt carpeting inched, like a lion, towards Jerusalem.
–
“Not yet!” Albion shot forward in his chair and collided with the deployed food tray in front of him, briefly winding himself. With the bus immediately occupying his field of focus, his first reaction was to check to see if he’d woken Celia. Her head lolled on the neck pillow she’d shown off earlier. Celia was sound asleep and snoring. Albion pulled the curtain back a crack, to see the lights of Port Elizabeth looming in over the unseen horizon. He must’ve slept all of twenty minutes.
Leaning back in his chair, he let out a slow sigh, as if those city light cobwebs were all he’d ever need in his life. He’d give it another five minutes before texting Friederich to drive out to fetch him. It was only a five-minute drive from his Russell Road flat, but it was late and Albion preferred to let him sleep until he needed to come out. He eyed his phone in the darkness of the bus, but decided to let him sleep a little longer.
He shut his eyes as the road signs and lights from the Coega development zone flashed past, Albion thought about his students and Christmas trees and Lucille and her stupid shirts.
–
Albion de Villiers never arrived in Port Elizabeth that night. The bus pulled in twenty-five minutes after he went to sleep, and the passengers were greeted in front of the offices with smiles and blanket-clad family members. Celia Hammersmith met her husband, Moe, sitting on the roof of his parked Fiat, his eyes full of the same adoration they’d had as kids.
Friederich was there too. He’d been waiting for ages. He had received a call half an hour ago from his cousin at varsity that she was just outside PE and needed a lift home as her parents were out of town. “Get your lazy ass out of bed, you lazy ass.”
Standing there, the heavy coastal mist making his forehead slick, he pulled his old Universal Studios jacket tightly around himself and smiled broadly as she made her way down the short stair-set and onto the pavement.
“Well, I do declare, if it isn’t Lucille Gordon, my favourite academian in all the world.”
“Academic, genius.”
“Smart-ass, more like it. Did you shrink during the semester? You’re shorter than I recall.”
Albion was nowhere on that bus. He never had been. He’d never left his office that afternoon to race home with his ugly shirt, because he had no office to leave. More importantly, the room where his office had been had never seen a man named De Villiers. He’d never packed his vacuum-sealed socks. He’d never held Fry’s hand in the ER as the doctor counted off stitches quietly. Never told his boyfriend, how much he loved Boris Karloff and how he looked so much like Frankenstein after the patch-up.
Never kissed on the hood of a car, overlooking that shithole of a town he loved so much. Never loved.
Albion de Villiers didn’t so much come to an end as the story of his entire life was pulled from the shelf, wholesale, and replaced with other stories entirely. Of course, it was the absence of his ending that allowed Alex van der Haar to finally find his beginning.
B.
4. As Good as a Holiday
“He’s not going to do it,” Ruth called over her shoulder to Julie, as she leaned with her elbows hung low over the ZazuZazu deck railing. They had been in Cape Town for the final week of their vacation while Julie took care of research for the newspaper. Ruth had tagged along because, as she put it, “There’s really no choice between watching Dr Phil at home, and hitting the streets out in the cradle of South Africa’s nasal-yuppie-self-starter mankind.”
“Then why are you watching?”
Ruthie stopped staring down at the man on the street corner for a second and glanced left along the length of the giant Black Label banner against the balcony’s edge. There must have been twenty other faces, decked out in sunglasses and neck chains, peering out at the scene below. She clinked glasses with the surprised emo kid opposite her and turned back to Julie. “Um, because all the other kids are doing it, ma? This guy is hilarious, are you kidding? When did you become such a wet jam rag?”
“Firstly, GI Jane, that’s severely nasty.”
“Agreed. I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”
Julie frowned from behind her newspaper as Ruth turned back to the man swaying and pirouetting in the street. “And secondly, it’s morbid to watch somebody kill themselves, no matter how much entertainment it provides.”
“He is entertaining though,” Ruthie half-whispered to herself before taking another sip of her drink and turning back to the action. Out in the street below, fixated upon by the eyes of the pub collective, as well as the various store owners, passing motorists, restaurateurs, busboys and hipsters that frequent the corners of Kloof Nek Road and New Church Street, was a naked, screaming man running back and forth across the busy intersection. He’d been doing it for the past twenty minutes, just waiting for new cars to arrive before he appeared from some arbitrary bush on the side of the road and ran, hollering and flailing his arms, in front of their bumpers.
Sunburned and stumbling, he’d invariably wind up with his hands on the bonnet of an approaching car as it screeched to an abrupt halt, both relieving and disappointing the helplessly entertained onlookers, while he stared, defiant, panting and bleary-eyed into the windshield.
Each time a storeowner would come out to stop him, he’d solemnly agree to leave the area and return to whatever embarrassing nudist colony or group of circus untouchables had spawned him. Managers would throw a dishtowel over their shoulders, satisfied with their contribution to the peace and gentle nature of the Cape Town suburbs. Busboys would grumble their way back inside, pondering the salaries at their parents’ printer ink businesses. But the balcony watchers knew to keep their eyes on the intersection. Sun-baked and bustling with midday traffic, it was only a matter of minutes before—
“Shit, here he comes again!”
Ruth held her breath as the naked man, stringy and bold with the heat, sprinted over the hot tarmac on the balls of his feet for the sixth time, cutting across and in the same direction as a Ford Bantam. He rolled across the front left side of the bonnet and onto the ground with a thud as the inevitable collision took place, before springing back to his feet to launch, screaming and laughing into a wordless dance with the moustached driver, who was trying to inspect the damage to his car and ascertain the severity of the injuries on a man quite clearly insane.
“How can you just watch that shit?” Julie asked, folding up her paper and pulling Ruth’s attention back from the scene like a claw might pull and move a Kermit The Frog doll inside a café machine.
“Fine, then what do you want to talk about, Julieee?” The two girls were friends, with no hidden animosity, which was, Ruth had always thought, strange. She did
n’t even like girls, but via Alex, she and Julie had become friends. Like Alex, it seemed to her that she had little in common with Alex’s girlfriend, and, like Alex, she found herself irritatingly desperate for Julie’s approval.
The worst part was, the woman was such a saint to everyone and everything, Ruth didn’t mind at all. Julie—that delightful, gorgeous, ice cream-flavoured bitch,
After a few years of friendship with her at this point, Ruth knew exactly what Julie wanted to talk about.
“The lives and private matters of our friends and family, dummy.” She smiled, soft as a bed of cotton bud rabbit orgasms, as she said this. Ruth knew Jules was just down to gossip.
–
Clark was bouncing the heel of his shoe against the cracked, bleached gutter piping of the outside of their apartment building. “So, he’s been insane the entire time.”
“Yeah. Obviously it’s ‘they’ in the series, but you get the idea. The whole thing’s a breakdown.” Alex picked at the hole in the ceiling tiles, squinting in the sunlight, squatting, like some urban Buddha as he sat with his legs dangled over the side of the rooftop. They were only maybe six storeys up. “Basically, Stephen-PH Spielberg—the character—he takes over a cheap Hollywood studio and converts it into his own production house.”
“Like, what, an office invasion?” Clark sat next to his brother, listlessly tossing stones over the roof of their house to clatter on the corrugated iron overhang below.
“He buys it out, I don’t fucking know, do I? He’s Spielberg, he’s got options, man.”
From inside the flats, they could hear a clattering, the distinct sound of pots and pans being moved around, hastily thrown into the boxes. Their mom, Virginia, had set them all out earlier in the day.
Clark shifted in his spot on the old shingles. “Okay, you’ve got me. Then what?”
Nails in the Sky Page 5