An hour after he’d already fallen asleep, he got a text from Cynthia, telling him she loved him and that she was sorry.
12. First Things Last
Jules watched her phone on the bedside table by her head. A colour swatch of old band posters, news clippings and shreds of wallpaper covered the walls and ceiling. Downstairs, an unswept silence bled through the walls, an eerie coda to the drama of the weekend. Her housemates were all out, which was good for them, because she’d been up all night crying. She wished she had someone to talk to.
She’d buried her face so far into the pillow she could feel the cotton against her brain. One eye traced a path to that godless, non-ringing, motionless son-of-a-bitch phone.
“Call me, so we can fix this, you fucking idiot.”
This had basically been her whole day since she’d gotten home from telling him off outside the museum the night before. The house had breathed around her while she occupied the bejesus out of her mattress as night shifted into morning. “Call me, Alex.”
That fucking idiot. Why wasn’t he calling? And what the hell had happened to his goddamned arm? God, if she weren’t so concerned for his safety, she’d have thrown that little shit under a bus already. She picked up her phone, checked her home screen, and put it back down, harder than she meant to.
That fucking idiot. She rolled over, collecting sheets and rays of sunlight in her nightshirt and tousled hair. Staring angrily up at the ceiling, she took stock.
Boyfriend’s an idiot.
Boyfriend was injured while cavorting with an unspecified hobag.
Boyfriend didn’t bother to chase her home after she blew him off on a street corner.
Roommates all left before she could wake and unload her misery on them at the breakfast table.
She rolled over. The cellphone didn’t move. “Call me, Alex.”
She picked it up, scrolling through to the home screen. Nothing.
Don’t call him.
She dialled his number. Then she hung up before it started ringing. “Call me, you asshole.”
She dialled, and hated herself for it. Just put the phone down and don’t click call.
It was ringing. She’d clicked call. She counted tones as the phone rang on the other end of the line. She was seconds away from headbutting the pillow when Alex picked up.
“Babe?”
“Hi, Jules. Oh god, I’m so glad you called.”
“Me too. I just... I didn’t want to leave things the way they were last night.”
“Me neither, I just, I just woke up.”
“Look, Alex. I... I don’t want to do anything rash, right now, because I love you, baby. But... I’m not comfortable with the way things have been lately. This other girl. I know I said I was cool with the whole thing, but it just feels like you’re lying to me...”
“No! Babe, you don’t understand. I would never lie to you, of all people. This whole thing’s just been one huge mix-up. I swear to god, I’m just having the worst week.”
Jules took a deep breath then said words that went against everything she was thinking and feeling. Everything she’d been planning to say all morning. Words that made her want to cry. She’d never wanted to say the opposite of the thing she was about to say more than she did right there. “Be that as it may... Oh this kills... I think I need to be alone. As in...not with you. I just need to know how I feel about myself. I want us to...to stop seeing each other.”
“What? No, Jules!”
“This is...look, it’s just where we are right now.”
“Seriously? We’re at...breaking up? Are you sure you have the right number here, love? We were going to go to Paris together.”
She smiled, but the sadness caught in her throat. “I guess so, Alex. It’s just, things have got so very different lately. Some of the ways I feel. I’ve been going through my own tough time, and there’s some stuff now that could change my whole life. And...you’ve been distracted, so maybe you didn’t notice, but...I just need time to take stock of things.”
The conversation petered out in the kind of awkward torture of niceties reserved for exchanges like this. Break-up exchanges. Both of them with their secrets, both with their other women. The confusion of youth in tumult, with the best of intentions. The December vacation of their lives. She watched it unfurl in front of her, like some scroll full of awful, awkward, unavoidable crap.
Alex played strong, selfless, understanding. She saw right through him, and she hated it. Any decision by Jules to take time off to think things over was something he would have to accept. He was putting her through a lot.
He said he’d be all right, like a grown-up, with the right tones and everything. She usually loved that, but not now. She knew he had no other options. Everything about this she hated, and her bones groaned against the decisions she was making.
But she couldn’t go back to waiting for him. “We just need some time. This is neither here nor there.”
They spent five more minutes saying goodbye, for now, just for the sad, teary now, before Jules said she had to go. She headed off to work at the paper soon after, a swirl of static gathering above her head.
As she rounded the corner outside the Oppi offices, Jules stopped at the top of the driveway and smiled, her palm on her chest. Lucille was waiting on the wooden-slat fence, all jasmine headbands and mirror skirts, a post-grad portrait glinting in the sun.
“Hi.”
“Hi back.”
The two of them hugged, there in front of the facebrick building, and took up close-but-separate spaces on the fence. Lucille was cordial, polite. Not too forward.
“You know, I was hoping you’d pitch up here.”
“Here...at the job where I work?”
Jules smiled, out in the dappled morning light. An unspoken world of quiet meaning stretched out between them.
“I’m heading home to Durban for a week to see my family, but...I really hope we’ll stay in touch while I’m away.”
They sat nodding together, all lazy make-up and cheap jewellery, darting shy glances at each other in the pale winter morning.
13. A Stone’s Throw Away From Wherever
“Am I dying?” Crink was in the middle of the most shocking hangover of his life. “I think...I think I’m dying.” The reason he was asking was that, given the evidence, he couldn’t be sure he was not, in fact, dead, or on his way to dead. He felt like he needed clarification.
His head, for instance, felt remarkably close to what he imagined an axe death to be like. Pulses of pain, and a crack of burning aching that made its way across his face and settled behind his eye. His eyes, draped in fiery heat, swam back in his head with every blink. These could, he supposed, be twitching their last spasmodic twitches as his body rolled over into its final moments. He might, in a very real way, actually be dying right now. It was possible.
He didn’t even know where he was right now. This could be hell. That would have been strange, of course, owing to the quaint furniture and thatch roofing, but, ultimately, who was he to disagree with the décor choices of Satan?
“You’re not dying,” his best friend told him from across the breakfast table, spreading butter onto a slice of toast as Crink pulled his blanket up to his chin. He surveyed him with bleary-eyed doubt. “Really...” Really, though, what did he know, that marmalade-eating son of a bitch? What did he know about pain?
He took a bite of his own toast and chewed, looking into Alex’s downcast face. His friend, even apart from the grey haze that hung over everything Crink looked at this morning, looked like he’d aged five years overnight. He’d barely said anything all morning—what Crink knew about last night, he’d had to pry out of him like NORAD codes.
Looking at Alex’s hangdog face now, Crink thought maybe he knew a thing or two about hurting.
“So...Koosh...roofied me?”
Alex nodded his head and looked up from his plate at him. “Um, sorry about that, again...”
There was no need for a
pologising. Why he would keep doing it the way he was confused him. “Alex, why do you keep apologising for this? Didn’t you...didn’t you two kinda kick his ass? I mean...don’t I owe you?”
Alex sighed, dropped his toast and folded his arms, then propped himself up on the table so he could look into Crink’s eyes. “You don’t have the full picture, buddy.”
Crink fought down the taste of his toast working its way slowly back up his throat. “What the hell does that mean, Alex? What aren’t you telling me?”
Sheila sat down opposite both of them, and set a steaming French press down on the table in between them, along with more toast. He eyed the toast with a slight tinge of fear.
“Some shit went down yesterday, dude,” Alex said, grimly. His voice emanated coldly from him, seeming to hang in the air like old washing. “That guy...he attacked you, and I’m pretty sure it was to get at me.”
“What do you mean, ‘get’ at you? Alex, you’re a third-year anthro student. What would anybody want with you?”
Sheila chimed in at this, though Alex seemed like he wanted to say something: “We don’t know. That’s why we’re hanging low here, Crink, until we know what’s happening—where it’s safe to be, right now.”
Crink took a bite of toast as Alex let his head droop onto his folded arms. He chewed thoughtfully a few seconds, boldly swallowing the dry toast and ignoring his gag reflex. His next words issued a shower of crumbs from his mouth and onto the kitchen table. “Why not call the cops?”
Alex looked up. “Nothing they can do. We have no proof you were attacked and not just high on some god awful party drug. We don’t know who these guys are, or why they’re here. I mean, Jesus, one of them is allegedly named ‘Koosh’.”
Crink dropped his toast and let another wave of nausea wash over him. Alex was right, of course, even if they’d had more to go on, there probably wasn’t much the cops would do for them right now. Still, he felt annoyed at his friend’s unwillingness to open up. Through the fog of his own sick stomach and swimming vision, he just didn’t feel like he had the time for this cagey bullshit.
“Alex, what aren’t you telling me?”
“Crink...”
Crink belched loudly, silencing his friend and issuing a grimace from Sheila. He took another swig of water, before saying, “Where’s Julie?”
Alex looked instantly sad. “She left me this morning, buddy.”
He immediately regretted asking, but Alex pressed on, “Everything’s okay, it was all...quite polite, and she’s not in any trouble. She’s wrapping up at the paper and is leaving town for a while for some family stuff.”
“Alex...”
“Crink, dude, I’m fine. Or I will be. I just...I need to figure out a way out of this mess.”
Sheila reached over and grabbed a mug, filling it up from the French press. She seemed to be addressing the glass jug in front of her more than either Crink or Alex at that moment.. “Should get you the fuck out of this town, Alex, maybe follow Jules’s lead.”
Crink leaned back in his chair to observe the awkward stare between Alex and this woman. He yawned, his mouth unhinged and wide, and asked, “Weren’t you wearing a nun outfit when we met you?”
“Yeah, and?” she asked, stone-faced.
“And why are we following your advice? I mean, sorry, no disrespect, and seriously, thank you for putting me up in that house from The Hobbit this morning—”
Sheila attempted to interrupt with, “And saving your drugged-up ass last night, but whatever—”
But Crink powered through, with, “—but what has gone right since you fucking arrived on the scene? Seriously, literally everything that could go wrong, save time-travelling murder ninjas, has happened to Alex since you appeared?”
“Look, Crink, there’s no time for this, all right?” Alex sounded angry.
Crink didn’t care. “Look, bro, you’re not thinking straight. You’re not some kind of hero. This is bigger than you. You’ve got no idea what you’re getting yourself into and you can’t—”
“Crink, I can fucking fly.”
The insides of Crink’s eyes were on fire. “Did I just hear you right or am I actually dead and this is purgatory or some shit?”
Alex got up from the table and brushed the hair out of his eyes like he had every ten seconds since he was twelve. “Yesterday I got caught out in the street in front of a speeding car and I closed my eyes and I flew. It was only for a few seconds and then I broke my arm—thanks for asking, by the way. Please, don’t argue with me, I’m only telling you this so that you understand why we—”
And then it fell into place. Crink understood. His best friend, for all these years, always so special. Had always been the centre of these strange energies. Always carried around so much unexplained baggage—so off-kilter, this man with a world of daydreams, strangeness and the unexplained behind his eyes. Alex van der Haar, the space cadet’s space cadet, never yet to fit into his own skin properly, in that moment, finally made complete sense.
“You can fly?” Crink said, simply and with complete wonder in his voice.
Alex stopped, catching his words as he locked heavy-lidded eyes with Crink from across the kitchen. He didn’t say anything, only nodding.
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t...” Alex was incredulous. Crink was looking him directly in the eyes, unblinking. “There’s nothing to believe, son. How do you think I got this cast?”
“Weird masturbation? I don’t know your life.”
“It’s true, Crink - he really did fly.”Crink rolled his eyes at Sheila. “What reason do I have to believe either of you? You were a nun the first time we met, and you don’t seem to have gotten much realer since then.”
“Says the man who told Barb Christiansen he was a women’s rights rally coordinator at the Pool Soc AGM.”
“I...she told you about that?”
“She told everybody about that, Crink. Sadly, though, your useless attempts to woo gay women at university mixers is just not that important to us right now.”
He stopped, his eyes pointed upwards in thought, for a second, before turning to Alex and saying: “Fine. Prove it. Fly for me here in the kitchen.”
His best friend slumped back in his chair and looked at him with sad eyes. “I can’t.”
“I know you can’t, that’s what I’ve been saying.”
“No, asshole, I mean, I can’t right now. I haven’t been able to since it happened. I don’t know why.”
“These things take time to perfect, Alex,” Sheila said, still looking at Crink, through the weak and watery eyes with which she’d been silently judging him all morning.
“How can you encourage this kind of thing?” Crink asked her, but a new thought overcame him, sitting there in that kitchen. She was, this woman, for all of the craziness of her story, and whatever nonsense Alex was spouting about flying, well and truly disappearing.
There was no getting around it. The woman seemed herself to be fading into the wallpaper of the house. Her skin looked waxy, and her eyes seemed like they were fighting a losing battle to stay open. And, the longer Crink looked directly at her, the more he got the feeling he was just looking at the wallpaper behind her.
It was impossible. And yet, here he was, watching it happen. And if that was possible, and Alex really believed what he was saying about flying, then...
He looked back to Alex and judged him through a mole-eyed glare, trying to find a hint of a lie in him. There was nothing. He believed what he was saying, and with the incredible disappearing woman over here as their new road pal, well, who was Crink to say what was possible anymore?
He sat back in his chair, blew air out from his puffed out cheeks, and threw up his hands. “There is no way we can go to the cops with this.”
-
An hour later, Crink had showered up and was sitting on the living room couch, across from Sheila, who was silently flipping through news channels. Alex was in the shower, and, in hi
s absence, Crink realised he had never had a conversation with this woman in his life.
He took a deep breath, adjusted himself on the couch, and decided to make small talk. “You look like ass.”
She sighed. “I’ve been ill.”
“It shows. What’s wrong with your skin? You’re all...see-through”
Another silence hung heavy in the room, and Crink refocused his attention on the TV, as the shower stopped somewhere in the background. A minute later, Alex walked back into the room, damp and towelling his hair dry.
Crink heard his friend squeak on the hardwood floor behind him as he halted, mid stride, and mumbled the words, “Shit, stop!” through a mouthful of toothpaste.
Sheila snapped around, the remote still in her hands, reacting much faster than Crink could ever hope to in his current state of misery. “Stop? Stop what?”
Alex swallowed, tossed his toothbrush aside and grabbed the remote. “The channel, you passed it already.” He flicked the TV back two stations, ending on a news station where police were describing an escaped prisoner. A black-and-white sketch of a thin man with a Van Dyke beard took up the bottom right of the screen.
From his spot on the couch, Crink asked, “What’s going on?”
“Fuck!”
“Alex!” Sheila snipped, “clue us in!”
“Fuck! It’s the same guy. Oh my God, shit, what?” They all watched the screen, Crink’s stomach pulling slowly at itself as St Smythe’s guards described a vicious prison break the week before to excited news casters next to a chain link fence.
“I told you about that guy, Chuck Daedalus, from the bar?”
Sheila nodded, but Crink just let out an, “Um...”
“Some asshole I met at a bar, man. He was asking all these questions about Julie, talking all this weird smack. It was like he knew me. This is him! I met him!”
“Wait, you actually know this guy?”
“No, but he knows me. And Julie. Jesus, Sheila. This can’t be a coincidence.”
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