Cabin Fever Read online

  ALSO BY DIANE AWERBUCK

  Gardening at Night

  Cabin Fever

  Diane Awerbuck

  Published in 2011 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1966/003153/07

  80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa

  [email protected]

  www.randomstruik.co.za

  © 2011 Diane Awerbuck

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0111-4 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0219-7 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0220-3 (PDF)

  Cover design by Patrick Latimer

  Text design by Chérie Collins

  Set in 11 on 15 pt Adobe Garamond

  For wally whyton

  And we’ll go

  In and out the windows,

  In and out the windows,

  In and out the windows,

  As we have done before.

  Contents

  1. Mami Wata

  2. Weekend Special

  3. Astronomy Domine

  4. Cabin Fever

  5. Splodge Gets Married

  6. All the King’s Horses

  7. Relic

  8. There is a Light That Never Goes Out

  9. Shark-spotters

  10. School Photos

  11. The Boy Who Opened Doors

  12. The Way You Look Tonight

  13. Murder Ballads

  14. The Extra Lesson

  15. Loxion Kulca

  16. The Keeper

  17. Queen of the World

  18. Phosphorescence

  Mami Wata

  ‘LOOK,’ HE SAID, WHILE SHE WAS STILL panting behind him on the path. Their shoes had crushed the oils from the fynbos as they went, and the smell settled sharply in her skull so that she remembered being sick as a small child, with her mother propping her up like a doll and rubbing Vicks on her back with warm hands. Her head ached with the tension of holding the past and the present in place.

  ‘Here.’ He was touching the cliff face.

  Trillions of quartz shards were embedded in the rock, shaded from transparent to the deepest brown of the earth, all blinking out from behind his fingers. The girl was sun-struck, wanting to hold his hand. She sat down to free her gritty feet instead, alert to the flapping of his boardshorts. He stood with his back to her, looking at the water, and then he jumped in without waiting.

  He surfaced and called back, his voice echoing in the empty space. She shook her head. The water was only warm near the surface: she knew that as soon as her arms or legs sprawled out they would go numb. She thought, People have drowned here. She could see it as if it had already happened – the shout that was equal joy and fear, the boy’s boardshorts billowing out, the flat impact, his body bobbing face-down, the distressed air trapped in the material.

  How could he just jump in like that? On the floor of the dam there must be layers and layers of powdery quartz that no light ever reached. When the dam was made that great heart had been uncovered, but it only sank down again slowly in hundreds and thousands, glittering, and recast itself. The secret of the rocks was that they built themselves up again over the centuries. It was impossible to imagine men with machines excavating this place, making space where before there was matter, sinking pylons and pillars to feed the holidaymakers and retirees multiplying like algae over the town below. We have no idea where our water comes from, she thought. There could be anything in it. We just turn on the taps and put our mouths to them.

  The water was very dark. The boy looked like he was swimming in Coke: it swirled reddish around his shoulders while his limbs tapered whitely off into points. She watched him stroke out heavily to the other side of the dam, still splashing, taunting her. He hauled himself up and clambered over the old bones of the jetty that sagged into the water. The planks creaked and sighed under his weight. The river changed from red to brown in the dam, and then to green and blue as it ran towards the sea. One day it would take the jetty away with it. When the wind died in gusts at sunset she thought of the wood rotting softly, leaning into the water: in the morning she woke up and wondered if it was gone.

  The boy was heading for the jumping rocks, the successive platforms where you threw yourself, screaming, into space. He shrank as he ascended, inserting his fingers into impossible crevices, insinuating his toes. As he went he doubled over his own tracks, starting again from the straining jetty and jumping from higher and higher rocks, keeping his arms tucked close to his ribs so that he entered the water cleanly. He grew bolder, trying to recall the exact places he had jumped from when they were teenagers here in Hermanus, trying to leap back in time. Once he fell backwards and her heart plummeted with him until she understood that it was deliberate. Every time he came up again, whole and alive, replicated. His wet head reappeared, then his chest: he pinwheeled his arms and stretched his red grin at her.

  ‘The water levels must have changed!’ he called out. ‘See how they’ve dropped here!’ He flung out his arm again and she saw the line of green against the sheer white rock, the residue of childhood summer on this last day of their holiday. The new shallows were endlessly cold, impenetrable.

  He kept splashing at her, laughing, so that at last she slipped in and paddled near the edge for a few minutes, avoiding the skeleton of the old pylons that poked out, rusty and jagged. She ducked her aching head under the water and opened her eyes wide, as she always did, searching for whiskery weeds, for anything that might brush curiously against her thigh.

  The face that swam briefly up to hers had no lips, no nose or eyes. The small silvery scales that covered it were peeling back, like a second-hand snakeskin handbag, and the hair floating out from the skull was stained rusty red from the tannins in the water.

  The girl, without thinking, drew in a shocked mouthful of river water. She felt her throat close in protest: the thought of that water inside her body choked her. She flailed to the surface, trailing bubbles in the murk, and the thing whisked back past her, scales scraping against her hip. She stroked for the side of the dam and tried to push herself back onto the rock face, but it resisted, crumbling in her grip, and she had to force herself out by the power of her biceps, so that she grazed her torso in her panic. She sat on the rock, shivering and hugging her knees while the water streamed off her and flowed back over the rocks into the dam. The hairs on her body tried to stand up in their follicles.

  The boy had tired of diving. He swam back and sat next to her for a few minutes while they crouched like rock rabbits and her heart slowed its hammering. I should warn him, she thought, but the walls of her throat felt bruised. She swallowed and began.

  ‘There was something—’

  ‘I think—’ he said.

  She stopped and deferred to him.

  ‘You go.’

  He fingered a pebble.

  ‘We’re thinking the same thing.’

  She waited, the iron taste of the water coming back up.

  ‘We should see other people.’

  The pebble clinked, given back to the rock.

  ‘What did you want to say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She got up and walked back along the path, alone. The quartz glinted wherever she looked, blinding.

  That night she went to bed early, itching in the raw places on her skin, watching the moon with the windows closed so that the baboons wouldn’t get in. She waited to fall into sleep the way the
boy had fallen into the dam, happily, trusting that it would be dreamless and ordinary asnd complete, but she couldn’t unclench her fingers from the wakeful cliff. Somewhere outside the house, beyond the mountain scrub, the jetty was leaning out further, slowly splitting its sides.

  The bed squeaked as she swung her legs off its edge. She felt her way to the other room with her bare toes, her feet slipping a little in the puddles on the parquet floor.

  The watery track soaked reddish into the wood. It led all the way out to the cement patio where they had baked during the day like lizards, lazy and jewelled with sweat, and in the evenings they had watched their meat blistering over the coals.

  In the darkness where he had made a humped outline the night before, the boy’s sleeping bag lay empty. She lifted it, ducking down into the sweet smell of his old sleep. She inhaled and held her breath, and she heard the faint effortful dragging sounds outside.

  As the creature went it slipped and sighed, its burden sometimes catching fast on the buchu. The scales on its tail twinkled like quartz in the moonlight. The boy’s eyes were blank. When it reached the jetty the last planks disintegrated under its monstrous skittering weight and the creature plopped back into its element, replete. The splinters floated away on the current.

  Weekend Special

  BRENDA WAS LATE. SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Her producers lied to her about the time the recording sessions started so that by the time she turned up, growling and red-eyed, the session musicians had only just arrived and were nodding their heads agreeably at each other, fingers fiddling their instruments: behind them the snare-like windscreen wipers, in front guitar chords soft rain. Brenda would be charmed out of herself, and step neatly into the music. Everyone was happy, including Nicky.

  Today was the same, except that they had exactly six hours to film the video. Her song was number one, permeating Nicky’s last summer at home, weaving itself into the weather until it was the sound of the season, of December, of school holidays and lying in the hollows that his body made in the squeaking-hot sand on the beach. Even the white stations were playing it.

  Instead of sweeping the stage, Nicky sat where he was hidden by the wings, smoking. Someone on set was playing a beatbox and the chorus floated over to him, squeezing between the dusty black screens. The song played itself over and over, but only in bits: the phantom bootlegger who’d taped it off the radio had tried to wait until the DJ’s intro was finished, but by then Brenda was into the first notes, and they’d given up. Nicky inhaled and jogged his skinny knees as he heard Alex Jay growling, over and over, Here it is, folks, the tune that’s taking over the townnnnn. He pictured the man in his cramped studio at night, with his hair peroxided yellow at the tips so that he looked like he’d been shocked. He would be hunched forward, spinning the record until Brenda’s face in the centre merged in on itself, her short ’fro the boundary of her bones.

  Nicky popped his jaw and exhaled blue smoke as her voice spooled out over the air, a bright ribbon binding them to the here and now. He wondered what she actually looked like. On the album covers and in the magazines she was changeable, half-princess, half-pug, her hair braided, then shaven, then bleached white like the froth on beer. Brenda was everywhere and nowhere. She cruised the streets with her retinue of bodyguards in black suits, the boyfriends, driving a little way behind her in her lowslung red Nissan so they wouldn’t cramp her style. He wondered if she would even say hello to him when she arrived at the studio. Most of all, he wondered what it was like to have a voice like that, to know what it was that you did well. His throat burned.

  Nicky stubbed out his cigarette. He was still learning how to hold it properly; his fingers weren’t yellow yet, like Manny’s. He was teaching himself the tricks: how to flip a smoke out of the pack so that it landed between your lips; how to blow rings over people’s heads. Nicky had time on his hands. His friends were in Plett for Matric Rage. They seemed to know exactly what they were going to do in 1984, and all he could think about was that book they’d had to study, the one by Orwell, and that everyone’s future had arrived except his. He expected to find his call-up papers each day that he mooched home from the studio where they had said he could start as a runner. Manny had already been to basic training. He was somewhere up north: everyone just called it The Border.

  Manny came home for the occasional weekend every couple of months, but seemed dazed. His girlfriend had dumped him in a letter while he was away, and he didn’t want to see anyone else. He didn’t even want to drink anymore. What Manny most liked to do now was walk. Sometimes Nicky went with him, but he couldn’t keep up. Manny seemed to speed up as he got into his stride, his thighs and calves popping with foreign muscle, until he was so tired that he could fall sleep at night in his old room, where the Iron Maiden posters watched him from the walls. He slept under THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST and looked out at THE TROOPER. If Nicky slept there while Manny was away, he would have nightmares where a lobotomised Eddie the Head loomed over him, holding a cutlass and a flag, smelling of blood. But Manny slept and slept, constantly, heavily, under a graphic spell.

  Nicky hadn’t ever thought that he – himself – could kill people. When he tried to imagine holding a rifle, it just seemed ridiculous, as if his hands were paws. But it wasn’t just that. When he listened to the song now he didn’t think especially that he could kill people like Brenda. The whole idea was beyond him. This December had made him certain.

  His new squeamishness extended beyond human beings, looping out like waves of sound to everything he saw and touched. He was still grossed out by the dead Saint Bernard that Manny had shown him, all the way out at Sunset Beach, past even the cooling towers. But the lurching nausea he felt at the memory couldn’t make him sorry that he had gone to see it. Not seeing was worse.

  The boys had had to walk to the beach; their mother was out.

  ‘How far is it, Manny?’

  ‘Not far. A couple of kays. It’s rad, I promise you. You’re going to love it.’

  But it was more than a couple of kays, and Nicky wasn’t loving it. They hadn’t brought anything to drink and his face was burning; his sinuses felt like cellophane. The sun was curing the boys like biltong. He tried not to complain – he didn’t want boerrins, the way Manny liked to curl up his right forefinger and knuckle Nicky so hard in the sternum that he felt like his ribcage was about to shatter – but after another half an hour of walking next to the road and breathing the cars’ exhaust fumes, he gave in and said, ‘Manny – how much further?’

  His brother turned. His scalp gleamed blue through his stubble and Nicky half-expected a lummy at least, but Manny said, ‘Come. I’ll piggyback you.’

  Manny’s sweatshirt was damp with sweat; it protected his arms. SLAVERY WORLD TOUR said the bleeding letters down one sleeve. His friend had sent it to him from the UK – a dud printed and discarded ahead of the concert the boys would never see. Nicky focused on Anubis, whose doggy snout was pointing to all the places out of bounds for South Africans. Manny crouched; the jackal’s face moved. Nicky placed his hands on his shoulders and then he jumped, curling his legs around his brother’s waist in the same move. Manny carried him the rest of the way – it couldn’t have been much longer, but Eerste, Tweede and Derde Steen all looked the same when you were on foot – and then at last they stumbled into the grass and the talcum dunes. Manny unlocked his arms as he fell forward, and Nicky slid down, weak-kneed. He left an imprint of himself in sweat on his brother’s shirt.

  ‘It’s here somewhere. Close,’ said Manny, sitting up and stretching his arms so that the sweatshirt lifted and Nicky could see his new six-pack, the belly-button and the trail of hair that led away from it, a black arrow pointing to his dick. ‘You can smell it.’

  Since Manny had come back from The Border there were some places he couldn’t go. Movie houses made him choke: women’s perfume made him sneeze. Every person who passed him by seemed to leave a contrail like an aeroplane, a line of ghostly prints that could lead Manny, i
f he wanted, to where they lay in their soft beds without hearing his approach.

  There was something awful about your senses tuning in to people that way, that they could be marshalled for uncertain uses. The beach was safe: the same horizon, the old smells.

  The boys separated and began the search for the dead dog. There was no one else on the beach. Nicky could never understand that. The mountain was rendered in silhouette over on the left, a tourist postcard. In the sea a windsurfer battled against the sudden stillness. His sail sagged, the tension missing at its two points: Nicky heard it flap over the water. He had hardly had a chance to look when Manny called him over and gestured.

  The dog lay on his side, half-buried, his fur matted with sand. Nicky made sure he was upwind, and sat down carefully. At first it seemed that the dog only lay there, dreaming, and Nicky waited for his back legs to twitch. He would have come up to Nicky’s thighs if they had stood together somewhere, leashed and expectant, everything turning rightly on its axis. But the Saint Bernard didn’t move. Shiny green flies buzzed over his head like a cartoon in Mad Magazine. Nicky tasted his stink. He really was dead.

  ‘The eyes go first,’ said Manny, pointing. ‘The eyes go first and the fur goes last. Soon it’ll just be a pile of bones.’

  Nicky thought, He belongs to someone, doesn’t he? Why don’t they come and look for him? He’s still wearing a collar. We’ll have to go home and leave him in the sun. He’ll be here in the dark, and then in the sun again tomorrow.

  Nicky tried to speak, but his voice broke – knack-jumps, Manny used to call them. He cleared his throat and fiddled with a long white spiralling shell. He tried again.

  ‘Nobody knows where he is.’

  Manny shrugged. He watched the dog, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, his sweatshirt drying stiff in the wind. Nicky blew the sand out of the shell and stowed it in his pocket. He wanted to remember where they had been.