“You make a cogent, yet heart-breaking argument, Crink.” Jules winked at Alex as he tossed a Spongebob Squarepants plush toy up and caught it in his lap, again and again, only half registering what she’d said. Her wink lasted a second longer than it should have, rounding off into a soft frown.
“So, we break into the school grounds, and we take this walk around, and it’s, well...boring as hell, man,” Crink continued. “I got to tell you, if you’re ever in the reminiscence game, old primary school grounds are a dull battlefield to play on. Anyway, so we’re sitting there, eventually on the old cricket pitch, baking in the sun on this hot, steel grass roller.”
“The now-infamous steamroller wheel, used to flatten pitches and crush dreams.”
“Let me tell the story, Ruth.”
Ruth stuck out her tongue at her friend, broke off a piece of bread and repositioned herself on the blanket.
Crink continued, “We decide, after a while sitting there, to steal the wheel. Like, as a keepsake. It was part of the cricket pitch we both got bullied on for all those years. I saw Callum Murphy get the shit beaten out of him on the cricket pitch. Shit, this some’ bitch kissed Chrystle Josephs on that pitch in our last year. Seemed like we had to take it.”
Jules squeezed Alex’s calf, mouthing the words “You all right?” at him while Crink and Ruth continued to pretend they didn’t notice what the couple was doing.
Alex smiled warmly back at her.
“So?” Ruth pressed on. “How’d you get it home?”
“Well, we did it the only way we really could, I guess? We pushed it out the front gate, one of us at each side, and wheeled it home down the sidewalk. Hundreds of cars around... Man, this was the middle of the day. Park Drive traffic, so it’s all stay-at-home moms and their taekwondo kids coming back from practice, shaking their heads at us like they know us. No one was bothered enough to climb out of their ride and intervene, though, it seemed.”
“Jesus, Crink, just get to the punchline, so we can pretend you’re not a delinquent.”
Outside on the blankets, the girls’ expressions mirrored each others’ in mock consternation, as the shifting light under a moving cloud threw their features into stark relief. Alex and Crink sighed in unison.
Crink continued, “We get to this corner, right, and it’s the start of this massive fucking downhill slope that’s a block away from my place. So I tell this chode to wait at the top while I go down and spot for incoming cars. The idea is that we’ll roll it down the motherfucker of an incline, stop it once it’s lost some momentum near the bottom, and wheel it the rest of the way back home.”
Ruth clapped and tossed a bag of Simba chips at Crink. “Grade eight physics, everybody!”
“There were no cars around! It was a good idea!” Crink carried on, in mock pain at her comment, as Alex rubbed his girlfriend’s knee and swivelled around, leaning back and nuzzling into the crook of her arm. Shadows played around the old drive-in, clouds gathering in menacing fists in the sky above.
“So he waits, while I run down, leaning, as I can only imagine him doing, nonchalantly against the wheel.”
Alex tilted his head to kiss his girlfriend’s chin. “This is my favourite part,” he said.
“Until the bastard lets go of the roller.”
–
In Central, Port Elizabeth, the summer leaves mulched in the gutters before anyone got the chance to clean them up. Rot, a system tripping over its own glorious feet in the exuberance of the sun. That’s what that smell was—decay. An overabundance, produced to the point where the greenery became an olfactory graveyard, and the only cheap sympathy afforded anyone’s perception was the knowledge that what they were smelling was natural, and sweet, and joyful, and not at all wrong. And it smelled so wrong.
The smell hung like bricks in the air, as the leaves curled dead, awful-smelling tendrils up and around the tumbling steamroller wheel that day. Alex van der Haar, at the top of the hill, father of the imminent chaos, looked shocked, dismayed, and slightly intrigued, in his boyish foolishness. His best friend, his only compadre, stood terrified and dancing at the foot of this disaster, unable to stop the Apocalypse rolling towards him. A half-ton of chipped, worn, relentless concrete-and-iron roller tore chunks out of the road itself as it bounded down the steep incline.
Remove all of that, and this was simply a day in which the whole world smelled like death. This was a mistake, an error in judgement. This artefact had somehow escaped its regular post on the cricket pitch of a local primary school. No longer idle and dominating, still as old as time itself. And here it was now, let loose on the city, set upon a path that would bring it cascading down into anarchy and destruction.
It was beautiful, and fucked up beyond anything the two young boys had ever experienced. The wheel, meant to hit the corner at the bottom of the quiet hill, turn ninety degrees, and continue down the quiet road until it rolled to a complete stop, did anything but.
-
“It bounced. Over the ledge at the corner of the road, man. This fucking wheel, it was heavy as shit, and on that day it was just like, ‘Fuck both of you, I’m going to bounce over this ledge and into some poor old man’s driveway!’ In which was parked, directly in this thing’s way...”
Alex, Ruth, and Julie all smiled, as this was the crux of the story. Even though they’d heard it at every keg party, wine gathering, international evening and tequila Tuesday they’d ever been to, it was still the only part any of them really cared about. They were putty in the palm of his hand. And he knew it.
“—a One Series BMW. Which we had just enough time to see the roller connect with. It started off this...crunching, screeching sound I can still hear in my quiet moments, before we bolted for greener pastures.”
Ruth leaned over and poured Crink a refill on his wine. “I just love a man who can blast a crater in the face of reasonable courtesy, and turn it into a great bar story.”
“It is what I do,” he said, raising his glass to the group, and to his friend.
Alex chimed in, “Crink bailed first. He was just the sound of rapidly retreating slip-slops by the time I turned around to go. I didn’t see him for shit.”
The group laughed together, a pattering of happy chuckles and sublimated cooing that settled into more general conversation as the steadily advancing cloud line gathered above their heads.
“So, Alex,” Jules interrupted, clearly trying to keep the focus on her boyfriend for his special day. Crink and Ruth got the hint and turned towards him, as she continued, “How’s your first semester with that dragon Walker been?”
Alex responded carefully, but not so much so that it seemed suspicious. He’d decided that, until he could work out what the situation was with this Walker character, and why it seemed his presence in the history faculty was a mystery only to Alex, he’d keep his mouth shut about his real concerns. “I’ve been less than enjoying Walker’s class this year, but it’s manageable.”
Jules responded, dunking a finger’s worth of her Salticrax into the hummus container and examining it closely. “To be honest with you, honey, and I hope you don’t hate me for this, but it doesn’t surprise me, given your mark on his last paper.”
A cloud began to form between the friends, just heavy enough to be classified as rain or, in Eastern Cape terms, the run-of-the-mill Grahamstown fog machine. Alex snorted, more aware that his slightest move might give away his complete confusion. He knew what it was, what he was meant to understand, but could not pull it from his mentality, for it was not a part of him. He was fundamentally absent from the history all around him.
He blurted to Ruth, out of nowhere, “Hey, have you seen Sheila around lately?”
Before she could speak, it started to rain heavily, creating instant rivulets and miniature creeks in the dry cracked landscape. Nobody said anything for a moment or two as the rain doubled its intensity and became a heavy downpour.
The group abandoned camp in urgent, frantic silence, collecting the
ir things as they fled. Moments later, the drive-in resumed its quiet life as a ghost in the shadow of a small town.
–
Much later that night, Jules crossed slowly over from the computer table to where Alex was sleeping. She’d spent an hour, maybe an hour twenty, editing photographs from his picnic after Alex had gone to bed that night, trying to find the right shots to put in their scrapbook. She loved her boyfriend like he was family (except for when that love manifested in bedroom naughties), but Alex van der Haar was a hard man to photograph. It was why she’d made sure his friends each had their own mik-en-druk digital cameras for the afternoon. If there was any way to subvert his natural, if subconscious, tendency to ruin shots of himself, it was through the quantity, not the quality, of the photographers.
With all of this footage—even the stuff running back to the car in the torrential autumn—she’d got what she needed. She looked down at the bizarrely positioned form of her boyfriend in bed. He was asleep, coloured ghostly by the blue glow of the laptop screen bouncing off the floor tiles and the Velvaglo paintwork. The bed was working its usual, slow-burning wrinkle-magic on his handsome features. His hair was already inexplicable, and a thin wet spot spread out from his mouth onto the pillowcase.
As she climbed into bed, shut the laptop and went to bed, all the while right next to her, steadily, and with great paralytic panic, Alex van der Haar was having a nightmare.
–
He was in the back left corner of the Eden Grove Red lecture hall, a dark human mound, hands folded at his desk, a brow and eyes glinting out from his hoodie. It was deserted, a room as simple as its dimensions, with none of its regular commotion. The lights were impossibly bright—stadium lighting, flat and pervasive. Like noon on Mercury.
He could hear papers rustling, that distinct, apple-crisp sound that set his pulse racing. Rows of empty chairs stretched out and away from his position. Wood veneer flats clung to metal shingles, a Serengeti of brown, polished tabletops and plastic chair thickets. To his left lay the empty entrance aisle, steps, whitewalls—sensible, minimalist university décor.
Alex shifted in his seat. Something was wrong. As he looked down into his own lap, the chair veneer visible between his legs, he realised he couldn’t move. Not a muscle from the waist down worked, a sudden disconnect between his thoughts and his legs.
The lighting didn’t look any brighter, but, with his panic mounting, it seemed more obvious in a strange way. He pushed on the desktop, trying to lift himself, but he was rooted to the chair. Alex van der Haar thrust his head around, struggling against his invisible manacles. He could see figures in his peripheral vision. Not solid. Not shapes. The suggestion of people, like some hint of movement just beyond his focus. Why couldn’t he move his legs?
Then a light bar above his head burst. It swung past him, a trail of white light and glass flowing through the air in its arc. It was slower than it ought to be. A strange, sluggish, glow shifted over everything, in shards, glowing tiger stripes across his perception.
A howling filtered through his senses, the bell-tower calm of the class offsetting his mounting panic as he wrestled the compulsion to stay where he was and not move a fucking muscle. Alex turned in his chair to find the back wall of the class rushing away from him, as more shapes moved in the periphery of his vision.
Why couldn’t he look at them? With this tunnel vision and hundreds of figures now on the edges of his awareness, he found a way. He slid down into his chair to emerge in the row in front of him.
As he stood up straight in the swaying light, the shapes stopped moving and everything went calm.
Light bars in front and at the back of the now-massive hall exploded out and over him, slashing through the air with a strangled jingle. The air, filled with a slow-tumbling curtain of glass shards, thudded a foreboding into his brain, as chittering, human sounds from the darkness crept up around him. The exit door at the end of his row burst into magnificent view, a new and all-consuming goal. Now the lecture hall unleashed a torrent of terror in his veins. Panic gripped him as he took off across the desktops.
No sound. Pure, and animistic.
He ran, terrified, as lights gave way to darkness, eating up the distance between him and the exit. The only light left to him was the neon strip lining the walkway of varnished wood under his feet, an airport runway to salvation, in this thicket of Armageddon. Dozens of hands, bleeding in and out from around him, grabbed at his feet with each desperate step.
He arrived at his neon-lit door, swinging it open as the last light burst behind him and a black hand brushed his shoulder, to find before him a dark abyss, yawning at his feet. There stood Albion de Villiers, metres away, talking to his imaginary friend, Frank, whose face Alex recognised without having ever seen it before—an older man, with grey hair, who seemed, even from this reasonable distance, not to want to look at Alex.
They were talking calmly to each other as he took a step back into a doorway that wasn’t there anymore. Now he was perched on the hood of a rusted red Alfa Romeo. In the midst of a screeching, wailing sea of emptiness, Albion turned his head to Alex.
He grabbed Alex’s jacket, instantly inches away from his face, though Alex hadn’t seen him move. He was snarling, like an animal, slamming him against an unseen wall. Right against his chest, and screaming at him. The words filtered through to him, with each successive shake of his lecturer’s arms, fuzzy like speech underwater. Static, creeping in, louder as their eyes locked.
He was scared.
“Don’t wake up!”
As Alex shook awake, panting in the 4 AM coldness, an image of a blue ring was briefly visible in the cool darkness of the room, and then gone.
He blinked, the roof retreating from his vision then snapping back into place in the darkness, before he turned to the other side of the bed.
Jules wasn’t there.
–
He hard-stepped it outside, huffing and frightened, breathing hard still (probably) from his dream, out and past the vacant bathroom. Down the passage, then back towards the door and out to the security gate. She wasn’t in the flat. She wasn’t in the fucking flat.
His whipping, tense body felt fuelled by horror, disorientated and focused entirely on her face. Where was she? He spun back, at the door, peered down the passage, then back again, and tried to think. Think, dammit, think!
The gate lock was still done from the inside. Maybe she was still inside...maybe this was all his groggy mind throwing him. He probably just wasn’t thinking. She hadn’t left, but...why wasn’t she there?
He bounced back into the bedroom, frantic. His head blasted with the sound of his blood in his ears. She had to be here, but why wasn’t she here? Oh god, where was Julie? He snapped his head back and forth, swooping his eyeline over the room. Pillows. Throws. Cold black light on rugs and photo albums. Nothing.
He stood there, useless and unmoving. His dream...whatever that was, echoed in his mind. How could she be gone now? The curtains hung limp and illuminated and terrifying. The inked-blue-stain of the room made everything seem alien. He took one step towards the bathroom, remembered he’d just gone there then walked over anyway out of desperate frustration. Nothing.
He stomped back over to the bed to check his phone, and walked past the balcony door, from the guest room. The window was open, and a sudden wind billowed Jules’s lace curtains into the room.
As Alex stepped out into the early morning, stretching his feet from the toes back over the cold, painted floors outside. A washout blue horizon lay over their Grahamstown from behind dormant pubs and the stone edifice of Pepper Grove mall. Everything slowed down instantly, and the sound of the world dragged out from around him. Alex drew his breath for an instant, looking down the fire escape into the alley below, before Julie greeted him from behind.
“Hey cock knocker! Up here!”
He spun around, again, now out there on the balcony, unsure what was going on, and looked up.
On the roof, on a
checkerboard blanket with a pizza and the last of a two-litre Mountain Dew from the fridge, sat his grinning, shivering girlfriend. Plastic Doraemon cups struggled against the weight of gravity as she glimmered down at him, as wide with her smile as with a torso full of outstretched arms.
“What is this?” He laughed.
She giggled back. “A make-up picnic for the one that got rained out, you assclown. Come up here.”
Alex shinnied the ladder, his curiosity slowly abating as he hand-to-tekkied his way up to the landing. “You’re incredible. I’m not sure I believe you exist.”
“Crink and Ruth helped me set it up, but they left.”
“Now I definitely don’t believe you.”
“No, it’s true. Crink wanted to wait behind the fire escape and jump out at you as you came out, but I told him you’d probably push him to his death.”
He slid down next to her on the blanket, shaking his head. “No, I mean you. I can’t believe you did this for me. How are you real?”
“Well, I am amazing. It’s been said.”
“Well documented, it’s true.”
Jules handed Alex a pizza slice from the box then pushed herself against his side as the grey light of morning unveiled the city before them. “Where’ve you been lately, boyfriend?”
Alex took a bite and put his cheek on her head as the day began. “Around.”
–
The Elizabeth Donkin School for Young Arts class had dismissed early for the afternoon after Mrs Berrington received word the municipality was going to be conducting a fire safety drill in the lobby and basement, and would be, as she said, “banging all of that ghastly equipment around like some kind of circus”. Some of the kids said they swore she left out the back entrance with her boyfriend twenty minutes later, but that’s neither here nor wherever they were spotted driving to in his Daewoo Matiz along Marine Drive around sunset.
Sitting alone on a bench just slightly down the road from the old building where she had her lessons, little Cynthia didn’t care about Mrs Berrington. She didn’t care about her classmates, the rainclouds gathering overhead or her homework for later that night. What she was thinking about was resting across her knees.
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