The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  I think of hagbah, of lifting the Torah. Let them see what I have to raise up for them now. On a pillar of fire and a voice of thunder. Let them see.

  71

  Back outside to the rucksack. The overalls go in and a plastic bag comes out. The rucksack left well buried in the hole with rocks on top, just to make sure no one can possibly find it. To the swimming pool change­room next for a hot shower, scrubbing all the diesel dirt from my skin and hair. When I’m clean I dry myself with a stiff towel from the folded pile and get my fresh clothes from the plastic bag. One pair of black leather Bata toughies. One white dress shirt. One pair of new underwear. One pair of new grey socks. One pair of grey flannel trousers. One purple polyester blazer folded flat. All this stuff bought at the mall. From the lost-and-found box by the front comes a striped tie, the owner of which was caned eleven times, according to the black stripes on the back. The sharp tip of my screwdriver cuts the school crest off a tracksuit top and some pins from my new shirt fix it to the blazer pocket. At the mirror I comb my wet hair nicely flat. All is moving smoothly. Everything is fine. Everything is . . . but now I find my hands are down even though I don’t remember dropping them. My face looks too white. Then it doesn’t look like my face. My watch can’t be right. But the wall clock says it is. I’ve lost time. Be careful—maybe the Mandrax buttons are still affecting.

  I pat my pockets, making sure I have the transmitter, the screwdriver, the earplugs. I stuff my used clothes in the plastic bag and then head downhill. The sky is dark blue, the colour of my Habonim uniform from summer camp long ago. About an hour and a half and the first cars will be coming through the armoured gate. Then Oberholzer. Honoured Guest of the Week Oberholzer. Want to see his face when he sees me sitting there. I’ll be in the pews and he’ll be up on the bimah while I have my hand on the transmitter waiting for the right second. In the name of Isaac Helger and of Arlene Helger, in the name of Marcus Helger and of Annie Goldberg and of Patrick Cohen. In their names and in many others. When it goes it will be chaos. I will be as calm as a stone. Walk back to the mound and dig up the rucksack and put on the overalls and then unlock the grate and be on my way. Goodbye Solomon, goodbye forever. By five this afternoon I’ll be in Botswana. After that, New York. New world, new life, new everything. Thank you, Hugo.

  Black birds flap up from the dry grass of the rugby fields. I realise I’ve sort of gone away from myself again, I keep blanking. It’s nerves and it’s the Mandrax, maybe. I’ll be okay. Haven’t slept properly in a long while either, even with the pills. Some fuzzy shapes are crossing my eyeballs. Ignore them. I go down to the rubbish dump and toss the bag of underclothes in deep. As I step away I get hit with cramps, so bad I bend over. I start jog-walking to the shul. The cramps get worse—I’m dinkum worried I’ll kuk my pants. In the marble lobby I head straight for the toilets. I sit there groaning in the stall for a long time. When the diarrhea seems to finish, finally, I go to the sink to wash my hands and I notice I’m not walking a straight line exactly. I wash up, splashing cold water on my face. Still too white—like a bladdy vampire victim. Keep calm, bru. Do what you have to. I pat myself. Transmitter, screwdriver, earplugs. There’s no reason not to put the earplugs in, so I do—one less item to worry about. Must remember to take an aisle seat with the aisle to my right, so whoever is sitting next to me won’t notice my right hand busy working inside the hip pocket of my blazer. When the time comes. When Oberholzer has talked for a minute, feeling safe and confident up there.

  My legs are shaking. Must sit for a minute and get myself together. I should have eaten something, is there time to get something sugary from the tuck shop? No. Don’t be stupid. Just wait here. At the far end there are some plastic chairs stacked up and covered with a tarp. I lift the tarp off and get a seat. When I sit down I get the icy shivers and I’m worried I’ll have to run to the toilet again. I wrap myself in the tarp. My teeth are knocking. After a while the tarp warms me and I feel myself slowly unclenching.

  72

  I get up, it’s time. I go over to the mirror. Wet my fingers and wipe my face. I’m a young man in a blazer and tie. A sharp young man looking sharp. There is nothing in this world that can stop a sharp young—

  Zaydi puts his arm on my shoulders in the mirror and I scream. I start running to the teak doors. Zaydi is riding my back, trying to choke me and telling me to stop, stop. I bang through the big doors. This Zaydi is not frail, this Zaydi gives a screech and squeezes tighter. Can’t breathe. My hand is working in my pocket but the bladdy transmitter won’t activate. I rush up onto the bimah and walk on my knees to the bench and open the catch. I lift the bench lid and there is a flash of blue sparks and wires of electricity shoot through my arms. My body jerks. I am slammed back. Flames burn the side of my face. I start clawing, screaming. Fire is eating into my jaw, the heat—

  73

  “Are you oright?”

  “Ja, it’s him, hey. It’s Martin Helger!”

  “What you doing here, man, Helger, are you back at school?”

  “Give him space, hey okes. He doesn’t look too well, hey.”

  The voices all muffled. I lift my head, feeling the tarp slide off my shoulders. There’s a matric I recognise as Owen Roth, standing there, bending over me. Another one—Labner, Jamie Labner’s his name, I think. Roth is blond, Labner’s a ginger. I’m curled awkwardly on the plastic chair, my jaw hurts. I’m resting against a pipe and it’s hot. I hear myself asking what the time is. My voice echoes funnily inside me. My ears are stuffed. I remember plugging them. I remember I have a watch. I look at it as I pat my pocket. Fell asleep and the earplugs kept me from getting woken. Schmock. Idiot. Owen Roth’s muffled voice keeps asking me are you oright. “I thought you left school for good,” Labner says. It’s ten minutes to first bell. It’s all right. My hand is around the transmitter. It’s fine, I’m in the toilets and I’ll walk out the door and across the lobby and into the shul. I’ll take a seat. On the aisle. At the back. The transmitter is effective from any seat on the floor. Plenty of battery power. And a bus battery for the other. It’s Friday and Oberholzer is the honoured guest speaker. Keep calm and stay prepared, just like the Bomb Board says. Stay alert stay alive. I stand up. Another matric walks in. “It is him, hey. Martin Helger. You came back to school, hey!” His face is shiny with excitement. “He is on his way, Martin!”

  “Who is?” I stretch my back. Can’t start cramping again. I need water. “Volper,” I say. “Is that who you mean?”

  “Volper,” the oke says, and all three start laughing. Labner says, “What were you doing in here, man, asleep?” He turns. “Okes, he was schloffing right there when we found him!”

  “It’s your best friend who’s coming,” says the other matric. “Your number-one fan, hey.” More laughter.

  “Jesus, is there something wrong with you, Helger, hey? No jokes, hey, you check a bit messed. What’s that in your ear?”

  One of the others shushes this. Tells the oke doesn’t he know what happened to my parents? Meantime I’m drinking at the tap. When I go for the door, Jamie Labner makes a big show of backing away from me with his hands up. “You not chickening off?” he says. I stop, squinting—what’s he mean?

  Then the door bangs open and Sardines Polovitz steps in.

  He takes one look at me and starts pumping up like he’s about to pop with the news. He spins around and shouts, “It’s him! He’s here!”

  I walk at him, saying, “Get out the way, Polovitz.”

  But Polovitz goes on shouting, his back to me, blocking the door. He’s so excited his whole body’s shaking like a wet dog drying itself. “He is here, okes! It’s bladdy true! He’s in here, s’troos God! Come quick!”

  I hear running. I’m reaching to push Polovitz out the way but then he moves to the side and Johnny “Crackcrack” Lohrmann steps into the toilets. Right in my face. “Lookee, lookee here,” is what he says.

  74

  Polovitz and other okes have their backs to the shut door
to keep it from opening. They’re grinning. The others are by the urinal, their faces lank serious, some with their arms folded. Crackcrack rolls his shoulders and moves in towards me and I’m stepping back. One of the okes from the side says, “He lost his parents, hey. Maybe just leave him, hey.” Crackcrack stops and turns. “You think I care?” he says. “This little puss tried to kill me with a javelin! Tried to stab me dead! Maybe you forgot but I haven’t!”

  I say, “What do you want?” My voice croaks.

  Crackcrack didn’t even hear, he’s busy pulling up his shirt. “Check at this!” he shouts, his voice breaking all raw and echoing round the hard room. He has a scar down his chest and onto the abdomen like a fat pink snake. Where there should’ve been a nipple, on the right, there’s only a patch of scar tissue which he’s poking at now. “You tried a kill me,” he says. “You stabbed me. I lost my nipple! I lost my nipple!” His eyes in his skullish face are all bright and they don’t look normal. And it hits me how things never go away, everything leads to something else, like a row of dominoes. Cos years ago I went down to the Emmarentia Dam with Patrick Cohen and Ari Blumenthal and I saw a Solomon rugby jersey in the willows by the mud and it was Crackcrack and Russ Herman and Sardines smoking there. They would have put us all in that filthy water but Ari spoke my brother’s name and I saw the power of a Name. It should have ended there but it didn’t. One thing nudges another thing, one domino knocks over another one and it keeps going and now it’s coming up on eight in the morning the day before Rosh Hashanah in the foyer toilets of Wisdom of Solomon High School for Jewish Boys and Crackcrack is taking off his blazer and stripping away his tie. “And then I got fucking suspended!” he’s shouting. “Me! Fucking Volper stuck me away! You—you Helgers, I dunno how you do it, but you fucken Helgers are controlling everything. You behind the scenes. But now you got nowhere to run—now you ganna pay, boy—big time!”

  All I need is five more minutes and the bell will ring and we’ll all have to go into shul. I step sideways to my left. I’m thinking hard. “Let me go or I swear—”

  “Swear what?”

  “I swear I’ll tell all these okes what happened at the Dam. I’ll tell em, Crackcrack.”

  Crackcrack doesn’t answer but he stops and the blood leaves his face.

  “I’ll tell everyone here,” I say. “And everyone I can. I swear I will, Crackcrack. Everyone will know.”

  There’s a second or so there where I reckon maybe it’s working, he’s fading off, turning away. But then as he spins back, I realise all he was doing was hauling his arm back—he’s zooming at me with a monster swing. I put my elbows up, fists over eyebrows like Marcus taught me so long ago, and Crackcrack’s bony fist smashes down and my forearm goes numb. Don’t turn away. But smashing fists keep swarming in, battering me. Some get through and my eye is thumped, my lip crushed, my ear mashed. I feel the sinks hitting me in the small of the back and I lunge forward blindly, grabbing. Our arms tangle up and we struggle together. Crackcrack is much stronger but his feet on those handmade leather soles are slipping while my cheap Bata toughies catch a better grip on the tiles. Suddenly he gets hold of my polyester lapels.

  Polyester boy is what he called me at the side of the Emmarentia Dam, after he looked at the label of my dress shirt. Never knew how much a pair of words could hurt. And that water was foul and we hadn’t done a thing to them, just asked a question and by then Patrick’s forehead was all swollen and don’t forget how he flattied the side of my face. Just mean. Called Ari a shoch and painted his face black with mud. We had the water at our backs and they would have put us in there and God knows what all else. You have to remember all that. You have to remember he asked for it.

  Crackcrack slings me by the lapels into the ceramic sinks again and then dives low in a tackle. I punch him in the back but it does nothing and he is scooping my legs up, twisting, trying to put me down. I hold on to the sinks and stay up, somehow, trying to kick him off me.

  His eyes were bad. Never saw such eyes after I told him to strip. Take it all off. He did it because he thought that’d be the end. But these things have their own momentum. He stripped off the handmade shoes and the Instinct pants and the Lacoste shirt and the Calvin Klein underpants. All the armour of the brand names and he was big enough and mean enough to beat us all up but every time he hesitated all I had to do was say Marcus Helger. That’s all. And then I said you made my friend go fetch his yarmie like a dog, well now you are the dog you know that. Get down, dog. Down and bark. And after he did and we were all laughing, Crackcrack started to cry with a beam of sunlight on his face from a gap in the willows. It was Ari who found the old rope, a coil of half-sunk hemp rope curled up in the mud and reeds with the top of it dry and crackly with dried duck shit. I lifted it with a stick with slime hanging from it and made him tie one end around his neck like a collar.

  Crackcrack drops my legs and straightens up and hammers me with a knee in the belly. I let go of the sink that I’ve been clutching like a drowning man at the edge of a swimming pool and I hit the ground on all fours. Crackcrack drops on my back, flattening me. I feel his hands scrabbling for something. Suddenly I realise.

  I told him, Say I am a dog. Tell us what you are. He has to learn, said Ari, but Patrick Cohen was shaking his head. I had the rope and clicked my tongue and walked Crackcrack into the filthy water and told him drink it. Please God stop, he said. I diden mean it. And Ari said, Ja, you did you were ganna chuck us in like rubbish and now you deserve.

  I grab for my tie, snatch at the knot of it. So does Crackcrack. We both get it. Crackcrack starts to rip on it, to yank it back. I hold on with everything I have. Crackcrack gets one knee to my forearm and digs his weight down into it and my hand goes weak. Gradually the fabric is being prised out of my fingers, Crackcrack twisting up whatever comes loose. We are both breathing hard, both totally concentrated on this battle of the hands, the tie. But centimetre by centimetre it creeps away from me. Then Crackcrack yanks hard and it’s gone—I snatch for it but already that knot is at the back of my neck, twisting.

  One end of a log was underwater close to his head. I saw it and I looped the rope under it. I put my foot on the log and leaned back and pulled. Crackcrack thrashed around but the log was heavy and jammed and I had leverage. Ari got a stick and pushed on his head too and it went under. I held it under with the rope for a while and then I let him up just a little, to catch some air, but then I pulled again and he was gone under. I kept doing it. I don’t know, it was addictive, this revenge. And his struggles got weaker.

  The tie is pulled tight across my Adam’s apple, so tight that no knife blade could get between it and my skin. I feel my head swelling up with blood. It makes my lips fat and I can feel the pulses ticking in them. Everything is going black at the edges. I’m aware of shouts from the side, so far away. Someone is trying to stop it but Polovitz is moving across. It’s not going to stop. Crackcrack is strangling even harder.

  That stick of Ari’s was slick with mud and okay it was me who told Ari I don’t think he’s a dog, I think he’s a bitch. I still had him by the rope but Ari wouldn’t move. He called you a shoch, I said. He nelly drowned us. I was crazed with anger. We both looked at Patrick Cohen, but Patrick said not a word, he only fingered those lumps on his forehead and looked away. He asked for it, I said. He’s the one who bladdy asked for it. And Ari’s face changed but he couldn’t. So I said give it here. You take this. So Ari took the rope and held it and I took the stick. In a little while Crackcrack started to scream.

  My hands give up on scratching at the tie. I can hardly feel my fingers as I start slapping and clawing all around me. All I can see now is a little smear, pumpkin-coloured, as big as a coin, and I’m feeling warm, tipping over sideways and falling, falling . . . Far away, my hand goes into the pocket of my blazer where I feel the transmitter and next to it the little screwdriver which I’ve forgotten all about. I reach up and feel the twisted grip at the back of my head, his hands are like a winch
made of blood and bone. I bring the screwdriver up and over and stab it down and feel it go in. When it’s sunk as deep as it can go I pull, gripping my own wrist, wrenching as hard as I can. The pressure disappears and the blood falls out of my head and face and I can breathe. I hear Crackcrack screaming. Just like he screamed at the Dam. I’m trying to get up. I see the white sink and the polished curve of steel pipe under. It makes a U shape and there’s a valve on it shaped like a small star and when I reach to pull myself up, I turn back the other way and there’s a blur. A dark thing. Growing wide so fast. Growing huge. As big as the world and all-a-sudd

  Nothing

  Genesis

  1

  In the beginning was darkness and then he created himself and he saw light and it was strange. There was light without but darkness within and he moved himself over the face of the darkness and saw nothing in it. Now he is being turned over and washed again. Powder and snap of latex. The pungent growing stench of his waste in the room. He is aware of the plastic parts that are not him because him ends where wires and tubes start. The brown hands slither over the white poles and the white poles are his parts. A sweet harsh smell, chemical—they are rubbing on the skin. Dark hands whispering with pale palms, cracked palms of calluses.

  He is lying on his side. The awful ice pick of that tiny digging light, jabbing down at him, angling. He catches sight of a pink and hairy wrist under it. The controller.

  It’s not the first time. But he’d forgotten that.

  2

  Time is one solid clump that starts to break up into pieces and the pieces are all mixed up. There’s the lady who puts things in his hands—a fluffy green ball, a carved wooden something from a board of black and white squares, a stick with a soft end which she dips in colours and, guiding his hand, uses to make lines on perfect whiteness. She plays music and moves his arms and legs to the rhythm. In another fragment a man buckles a helmet on his head and puts paste in a plastic semicircle that goes over his top teeth with a taste like the metal tube he places into one hand, taping the fingers around it. Then a green wide thing comes down over his mouth and nose and the man turns a tap on the tank and there’s a soft hiss as the air turns cool and thin. He breathes it in and feels as if the bed is tilting. The man plugs wires into a box, twists a dial. Now there’s a humming and he feels things moving inside himself, in his bones, his taped hand tingling around the tube and his muscles quivering and bunching everywhere. Another fragment: they are wheeling him upright down a wide corridor. There’s a red hose coiled behind glass by the door. His rubber wheels squeak. Outside in the glaring light there is grass and there are big trees and flowers with colours that burn the air like coals. He sees people in white robes and looks down and finds he is wearing the same. And the talking man with the round face under the bald pate. Controller. He’s always there in the fragments, always talking.