by John Hunt
Phen stood up; he had to go.
“Like me smashing your watch to stop time.”
There wasn’t a single answer written on his pad. The wide gaps he’d carefully left between each question were blank. He clipped the lead to Pal’s collar and put the pen in the pocket of his shorts. He wasn’t sure what to do with the pad, so he held it to his chest the way he imagined doctors did on their rounds. The birds were all gone and the first crickets greeted the night. Far away in the kiddies’ pool a frog burped. Phen imagined it sitting on the ceramic nose of the smiling dolphin. A woman with a peace sign on her bag pushed a pram towards the early glow of the street lamp. They were the only ones left in the park.
“You could’ve helped, but you didn’t. You’re pathetic. The only mystical thing you’ve done is produce a packet of Life Savers from the back of your head. You turned nothing to the light. Made no difference. An angel that deliberately clips its own wings.” He wasn’t sure if he’d made a metaphor or not. “You’re like all the others. You just talk. Or sing. Or dance. You dress differently, you have too much hair and you change the shape of your beard under your chin. Square, diamond, now it’s a circle, but the only difference it makes is to yourself. You’re not a guardian, you’re a waste of time. Show me—”
“Adventure,” Heb interrupted.
“What?”
“Adventure! See you back here after dinner.”
Phen was so stunned by the invitation he couldn’t speak.
“About nine o’clock should be fine.” He looked up to the sky, cleaned his teeth with his tongue and traced the circle under his chin with his finger.
The dining-room table was proof that two was an even number and three was not. Although his mother sat directly opposite him, this accentuated the empty seat at the head of the table. The space in front of it was vacant yet still taken. The bowl of peas or the gravy boat could not trespass there. Although that specific space had been unoccupied for over a year, it had always been reserved for the pending return of his father. The fact that this was no longer possible didn’t seem to change anything. A funeral and a container of grey dust was less final than the relinquishing of a dining position.
Most meals started noisily and ended in silence. His mother tried hard, adding bits of office gossip as the silences between the sentences grew longer and longer. The lengths of skirts and the width of ties were discussed. Believe it or not, Beverley in the typing pool was through to the ballroom-dancing Transvaal Champs. Mr Henderson, of all people, had got an Afro. They say to cover his bald spot. Phen nodded constantly in an attempt to look interested. He knew his mother was desperately searching for a dialogue; there just wasn’t much for him to say. Jimmy the Greek still hadn’t come around, although Phen knew he was back from holiday. All his conversations had been with a dog and an undercover angel.
After dinner they both read The Star. Phen started from the back, his mother from the front. They tried to go at equal speeds to ensure no one was left waiting when they reached the middle. This was a much more relaxed time. The dining-room table served a less melancholy purpose as they spread the newspaper sheets wide and pinned them down with their elbows. She didn’t like this prime minister B.J. Vorster. “Looks cruel. Balthazar,” she said, “reminds me of Beelzebub.” Phen wondered why Cassius Clay had changed his name to Muhammad Ali. The powerful boxer was pointing angrily to the camera as if getting ready to punch it. The article said he’d refused to go into the US army so that was the end of him.
After they’d finished the main body of the paper his mother always had a more than cursory glance at the classifieds. She never wanted to buy anything but was interested in what people were prepared to sell. From here they drifted towards the radiogram. He wasn’t a great fan of “The Epic Casebook”, and immediately demonstrated his boredom by stretching and yawning. As Inspector Carr started to investigate, he excused himself and went in search of the torch. He finally found the Ray-o-Vac next to the old hamster cage. The heavily ribbed silver metal felt comfortable in his hand although the batteries were old and the light the torch projected pretty dull. It would have to do. He hated lying to his mother when asked what the flashlight was for. All he could think of was the frog, its throat exploding downwards as it croaked.
“Krrrrug,” he said, making a joke of his deceit. “Looking f-for f-f-f-frogs on the walk. Heard them this afternoon.”
His mother’s eyebrows arched, returned and asked no more questions. Phen waved and let Pal out. Once he’d turned right down O’Reilly he pulled the pad from the back of his shorts and checked his pen was still in his pocket. He’d presumed the adventure was linked to the answers he had not received earlier in the afternoon. If his questions were about to receive replies he wanted to be ready. The overweight moon sat on the telephone wire and turned the spaniel a coppery ginger. It was much brighter than he’d anticipated. The torch might not even be necessary.
Heb was standing outside the park on the other side of the fence. “Adventure,” he confirmed, looking quizzically at the notepad. “We’re not going far, just high.”
They crossed Primrose and turned down Fife. He’d never seen Heb walk so fast or far before. His sunglasses, facing backwards and clinging to his fedora, bobbed with each step. He was wearing a holey cardigan to keep out the night’s chill. Red Christmas reindeer pranced with stiff legs, pointed hooves and straight necks across his back. The thick wool could not accommodate buttons. Instead, wooden toggles an inch long bounced off their leather straps as they cornered into Prospect Road. They were getting very close to Duchess Court again. Phen tried to hide his panic by watching a red nose crease into Heb’s neck, then fold back with the knitted collar.
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m not.”
They stopped at two huge gates made from three layers of corrugated iron. Each gate had a square cut out of it through which a massive chain was threaded. This chain was then secured by the biggest padlock Phen had ever seen. The moon, now slightly above the telephone wires, cast their shadows twenty feet high against the door. The moment couldn’t have been any more exaggerated. As Pal lifted his head he turned into a wolf. Heb added a soft howl as Phen looked to see if anyone was watching. The silver torch in his hand clearly marked him as an accomplice. He began rehearsing his story to the police. His only alibi was his mother. She’d confirm he was really just looking for frogs. Would the lie-detector tests show this, too, was an untruth? Fear began to outpace his initial enthusiasm. When Heb had said they were going high he’d hoped for more of a religious experience, perhaps a quick visit to his shallow bowl that stretched across the universe.
“Ever been to a building site at night?”
“No. And there’s no chance we’ll ever open that.” Phen pointed to the lock and turned to go.
“Never judge a book …”
Heb pulled at the lock. The thick steel arch gave way immediately. Within seconds the chain was being yanked through the square. As soon as the doors could open they slipped through. Once inside they leaned against the crossbeams and closed the gates as gently as they could. Metal screeched against metal and then a walled silence. There was no going back now. Not only were they trespassing, they’d also chosen to imprison themselves.
“The foreman lost the key. Been like this for weeks. Deceive the eye and the mind follows.”
They sat on packets of cement and tried to focus. The moon was of less help here. The darkness had thickened, the moon’s light having been blocked by the high fence. Strange shapes teased their eyes. Phen probed rather pathetically with his torch. It was much tidier than he had imagined. Even the spades were gathered in neat bundles. In groups of twelve their handles leaned against each other, forming a long row of tents. Wooden brooms with wire bristles lined the wall in front of them like sentries quietly on guard. Feeling intimidated, Phen moved away and immediately fell over and into a wheelbarrow. Nothing stirred. Adding to the pantomime, his torch’s light went out.
“Careful. It’s twenty storeys high.” Heb pointed skywards. “The stairway is finished but it goes around an open lift shaft. There are no handrails. Hug the wall and you’ll be fine.”
Phen stood up and tried to digest what he’d just heard. If he’d understood it correctly, the purpose of the exercise was to climb the inside of a pitch-black building.
“You hold on to your dog and I’ll hold on to you.”
Suddenly Phen saw them like blind rats clinging to each other as they clawed their way around the inside of some vast chasm. Deprived of light and rope, only a potential fall of alpine proportions kept them bonded together. Instinctively, he made Pal’s lead shorter and pulled him towards his legs. This was not how he’d thought this evening would go. He’d left the flat with a sense of mission and a vague feeling of being in charge. Now his knees were starting to tremble, touching against each other involuntarily. He wanted to go home, back to his newspaper. There epic events had headlines and neat columns. Horror and inspiration, joy and sadness, arrived and left with the wide arc of a turn of the page. You could participate without leaving the comfort of your dining-room chair.
“You don’t have to come.” Heb sat back down on the packets of cement.
Phen needed to think. Who goes climbing with a dog, a torch, a pad and a pen? He wanted to suggest that tomorrow might be a better day. If he’d known what the night would entail he would’ve arrived early. More light. No dog. Certainly tennis shoes instead of slip-slops. He’d also have gone to the bathroom. He was under-prepared on all counts. His legs felt weak and the flu his mother had said was doing the rounds had definitely appeared. There was a slight buzzing in his ears. He felt his cheeks. It was also clear his sinus had returned. He sniffed uncomfortably to remove the blockage.
“I’m ready,” he said.
The first two flights were as dark as coal but hardly terrifying. He’d climbed trees this high before. A fall from here could end up in a broken leg or maybe a collarbone. Kobus Visser had survived similar injuries; he could too. He even felt embarrassed about holding Heb’s rough hand. Initially he was more concerned that he might come across as a sissy. Even on the ground floor he’d felt awkward and uncoordinated. He had too much stuff. The pad had to return to the back of his shorts and, to ensure a free hand, his torch had been forced into his right pocket. He tried to push it in as deep as possible, but the silver stalk still hung out by two inches. The point of his pen poked his thigh from the other side. Everything felt wrong.
By the third floor he was no longer worried about his torch or pen. Or the coarse hand he gripped more and more tightly. Academic fear had blossomed into physical terror. They were mindlessly moving up in a series of square circles. Mrs Smit had shown them an Escher drawing in art class and now he knew what it was like to be in one. To ensure they kept their backs to the wall, each step was climbed crab-like, their spines never leaving the rough, unplastered surface behind them. Terrified of the darkness in front, he rubbed himself hard against the blackness behind. The more he shuffled upwards, the more the sightless horror in front of him grew. Hell had come to visit.
He was no longer holding Heb’s hand. The grip had moved up his wrist to just under his elbow. Pal’s leash was six inches long. Half strangled, the dog had learned the art of moving sideways and one step at a time. By halfway Phen could no longer tell if he was climbing around the lift shaft or around some deep hole in his mind. Vertigo set in; he could feel a spinning height yet could see neither up nor down. His back was rubbed raw but the pain was the only thing that scraped a sense of dimension and direction out of him. Tied on either side by a leather strap and a muscular forearm, he inched his way around the unseen dread. His head had been turned inside out; he was stumbling on that outer edge too.
Full of the madness of a man who’d gouged his own eyes out, Phen began to shake uncontrollably. No matter what he did he could not find the next step. He put his right leg out again and again, it was just not there. He was lifting his knee higher and higher into nothing. Even worse, the arm that had been so firm was slipping away. He tried to hold on to the hand and then the fingers. After a brief struggle, it was all gone. Now he understood: this is what falling felt like. It wasn’t so much the rush of air against your body, it was the disappearance of all other contact. He leaned back for confirmation and found the wall had gone too. He felt the pull of the lead. Pal must be falling with him.
“You can open your eyes now.”
Although Phen heard the voice it came to him as a distant echo. He could not immediately obey.
“And you can put your leg down.”
The absurd nature of the instruction, repeated twice, finally penetrated his brain. As his foot found the concrete floor his lids flicked up.
“Welcome to the presidential penthouse.”
It was the most beautiful thing Phen had ever seen. They had the entire twentieth floor to themselves. The concrete, smooth and uninterrupted, swept like a vast runway in front of him. The deck lay firm beneath his feet with no walls or ceiling to impede his view. He was suspended on a floating platform, walking in space. There were no edges, no boundaries, just a horizontal he could travel on. The stars wrapped around them tightly and added infinite distance at the same time. As far as his eyes could see, lights below answered the glow from above. Totally insignificant and central to everything, he looked over the park, above the neon cross of the Catholic cathedral and beyond the mine dumps.
“I wouldn’t go any further.” The rough hand had him by the shoulder.
He’d wanted to join the view. One slip-slop rocked backwards and forwards, testing the edge of the concrete. Heb wheeled him around and walked him in the opposite direction. As they moved across the dark plain, Phen wondered if he was hallucinating. He’d never been so aware of his mind and body being in two separate parts. One was buoyant and floating, the other more visible and fixed. They housed each other but were not the same. When they reached the other side of the building he waited for them to rejoin. They chose to stay apart.
“Counterpoint.”
Across and below, Crown Towers spread itself out. Two storeys shorter, it took up an entire block. Each apartment was framed by an identical blue aluminium square. This blue lived within a larger silver grid that sliced the building from top to bottom and from side to side. There were no balconies, and two windows per square opened at varying degrees. Although most of the curtains were drawn, higher up a number of them still stayed open. Phen watched four men play cards at a kitchen table. As the dealer flicked left to right a bored woman sat on the couch and stared at her shoes. Her feet rested on a pile of magazines which grew out of a black-and-white-chequered carpet. Everyone had a cigarette in their mouth. Smoke blurred their faces before lifting and circling in the light.
“That’s a big box of humanity. A cube on top of a cube next to a cube beneath a cube. Human honeycomb.”
Heb started singing. Although it wasn’t particularly loud, it wasn’t a whisper either. He stepped forward, bowed to Crown Towers and cleared his throat. He nodded to the invisible band behind him, clicked his fingers to give the beat and began.
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same.
Heb bowed deeply three times as he swivelled to acknowledge the full one hundred and eighty degrees of his audience. Then he turned to face Phen.
“Lose the fear, lose the fear, looooooose the fear!” He sang at the top of his voice as if it were the last line in a dramatic opera. Still with puffed-out chest, he
turned himself into a signboard, arms outstretched pointing north and south. One finger directed at Crown Towers, the other to the horizon studded with stars. “Which side are you going to turn to?”
Phen took a deep breath and followed Heb as they walked back towards the endless sky. Far below a whistle blew, a car wouldn’t start and a woman laughed more in derision than merriment. As if in reply to Heb’s song, someone turned their radio up. He’d forgotten entirely about Pal, who lay where he’d left him, a brick on the handle of his lead pretending to anchor him. He wished everyone could stay and allow themselves to be so politely pinned down.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you? Like my father, you have to go. Part of the code.”
“Sometimes the thing you feel you have to cling to is the very thing that’s holding you back.”
Phen sat down next to his dog and let him put his chin on his thigh. Heb remained standing.
“Any more of those questions?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He pulled the pad from out the back of his shorts. He had a torch that didn’t work, a pen that hadn’t written and a pad he couldn’t see. “I was also going to ask if you could stop me from stuttering.”
“You never stutter any more when you talk to me.”
“But with other people.”
“When I was growing up my head was full of sharp edges and loud noises. I began to imagine some crazy bird lived in there, all beak and claw. It kept scratching my skull from the inside, screeching, making me do bad things. Realised I had to tame him. So I built a perch for him from ear to ear. Over time I trained him to sit on it and relax … sometimes even sing. These days he does a lot of that.”
Phen looked up at Heb’s head, surprisingly silhouetted against a curve of the brightest white.
“Why don’t you go one better than me? Why don’t you put a bird in there you already like. Keep it calm from the very beginning. It’ll settle your mind from day one.”
“It’ll have to be a swan.”