Cabin Fever Read online

  And that was how it went on. On Sunday Manny borrowed the car and they came back. The Saint Bernard was in the same place. When the boys got back home Manny packed his kit into a canvas sausage, like the livercoloured punching bag in the school gym. He had to report back to base. He didn’t complain: he just went. Nicky sat in his brother’s room with the lights off and wondered how the dog was getting on without them. Eddie the Head was quiet.

  On Monday it was cooler. Nicky walked to the beach by himself.

  On Tuesday he hitchhiked. It was easy: people stopped.

  Brenda’s song was everywhere: on Radio Five in strangers’ cars, on the Walkman of a boy on silver rollerskates, blasting out from the speakers during Happy Hour at the Blue Peter. Nicky heard it without trying to.

  Day after day, the dog’s body blew up like a hot air balloon and then got on with the wormy business of decomposing, the ship of its skeleton listing in the sand until it was sharp and white and ratless. The Saint Bernard was doggy to the end, shaggy and blank and hopeful as a pair of slippers. He stayed and Nicky stayed with him, humming the only bits of the chorus he knew.

  On Wednesday his mother made him go down to the studio and ask if they had any positions for runners. It was that, she told Nicky crossly, or work at the Spur.

  Now he missed the dog. He sat backstage with his broom resting beside him on the floor. By winter the bones would have disappeared, sunk beneath the dunes, and he wouldn’t be able to find the place again. If he and Manny went back to sit on the sand and shiver in the wind that dropped at sundown, there would be no trace of the Saint Bernard, not even the faint smell of rot to mark the last place he’d lain.

  Nicky sighed and got up. He had about thirty seconds before the assistant director discovered his hiding place – that short bastard in his American baseball cap – and crapped all over him, even though Brenda wasn’t here yet. Nicky got busy, sweeping the spot he thought she was most likely to stand. The dust motes rose in the shaft of light that still got in past the blackout on the windows; the voice of the AD, nasal and persistent, drifted down on everyone. His back to the studio door, Nicky turned and turned, half-hypnotised, the way a dog settles itself for sleep. She would never arrive.

  ‘Haaa-YI!’

  The scream was a war cry, a shriek meant to thin the blood of all who heard it. Nicky tried to face the catastrophe – a grip hit by the lights? – but before he could do that, the hot weight fell on his spine like a stone. Fingers curled around his throat. Instinctively, Nicky dropped the broom brought his neck down to limit his exposure, the way Manny had taught him. He reached up and clawed at the hands, dragging them into his line of sight. They were small and brown and female, tipped with chipped purple polish, and they were very, very cold. Nicky staggered forwards under his load. The laughter began moving towards him in waves, uncertain at first and then building until they crashed around his ears. The AD was bent over so far that his baseball cap had fallen off.

  ‘Haaa, white boy!’ Brenda was screaming. The heels of her stilettos bit into his ribs. She flailed at him with her right hand like a jockey.

  ‘Run, whitey! Run!’

  Nicky, not knowing what else to do, obliged. Brenda was light – a tiny, veiny woman with the beak and talons of a bird of prey – and he had no trouble jogging her around the studio floor. As he ran she circled an imaginary lasso over her head, calling out ‘Yee-haaa!’ in her famous voice. Whenever she lifted her arms he could smell her flesh, a cloying, sweaty vanilla, spent adrenalin, and something else – the faint, dark excitement he recognised from the dog on the beach. It almost stopped him in his tracks, and he stumbled. She kicked at him impatiently.

  Someday Brenda would be really, truly late, for keeps.

  He would die, too.

  So would his mother, and everyone he knew.

  Manny might already be dead, though the news wouldn’t reach them until the army decided it was time. There was no coming back from The Border.

  But for now Nicky trotted, panting, around the studio, and sniffed at the live, pulsing woman on his back. I can’t believe it, he thought. I’m being ridden by Brenda Fassie.

  Like Eddie the Head, Nicky began to grin.

  Astronomy Domine

  THE TWO OF THEM STUMBLED OUT INTO THE sandstone foyer after the show. All the way through it his arm had rested lightly across the back of her seat, touching, not touching, each hair a note in the chorus against her neck. Now their absence made her itch. She wanted to rub against him.

  It was impossible; all around them were ordinary people in shawls, drinking sherry under the bunting, hunting programmes and clothing and striped sweets. They were stunned by the stands and the sudden light.

  ‘I want a T-shirt,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the T-shirt, and then we can say we’ve done it.’

  They bustled and shoved with the others against the cloth-covered trestles; they held up garments to see if they liked their look; they added layers like embalmers in old Egypt when what they really wanted to do was remove them, strip by strip, until they were down to the very everything.

  They clung to those shirts. Somehow they provided safe passage through the landless bobbing in the foyer: they ferried the two outside and stranded them in the gardens. The girl and the boy dawdled. They had nothing to say while the insects hummed and bumbled dumbly against the glass of the theatre. The T-shirts they laid down on the paving beside them, and forgot.

  They could look everywhere but at each other; at the gas canisters for the restaurants that stood above ground, rough as rocket ships in moonlight; at the other people orbiting homeward; at the ushers dodging frantic as rabbits. All the busy heart of the Baxter lay cut open and exposed.

  He leaned close against the pillar, smoking. The building rose solid behind him, weird as a flying saucer in a forest. He puffed for an age on his cigarette, while stars threw themselves at the Earth. Its tip reddened and reduced, and inside him she knew that there must be clouds of smoke travelling his capillaries, whirling round liver and lights. She fingered his organs invisibly, the blood vessel lacework, the semen trees. She was in his orbit, silly with thin air.

  She blurted, ‘I haven’t been with anyone in three years.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s been three years since I’ve had a boyfriend,’ she said, as if reversing the word order clarified the idea. They were silent, stunned with her celibacy. Forever is measured in skin cells and oxygen, the deep space of deprivation. The shirts hadn’t stirred. They lay on the paving stones, woven, empty, mute. She poked one with her shoe. She cleared her throat to hear a human sound in the dark.

  ‘It’s a good idea, sometimes,’ she said. ‘Chastity. Afterwards, you realise what you’ve been missing.’

  He looked at her and shook his head ambiguously, and the spaceship lights outside the Baxter picked out every hair on his scalp, silver and defined. She pictured holding that curly head with its electric hum, its circuits popping between her thighs.

  It unbalanced her: she swung into him by accident and they knocked hips in zero gravity. She wanted to touch the zippered bulge at his crotch but they hadn’t even kissed yet.

  He looked down at himself, at this impossible distance, the light years between her fingers and the fork of his jeans. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. To cover his erection he said, ‘I can’t wait. I’m going to wear my shirt now.’

  He dropped the cigarette finally on the path, where it rolled away, blistered brief as an asteroid, and blinked out. Tomorrow morning women with brooms would sweep it into a pan, a bag, a bin, thinking it simple space junk instead of the live burning thing it had been made in his mouth.

  He crossed his arms over his body to strip off the old shirt, the Vitruvian Man, the cosmonaut in the locker room, ready to soar out of her reach. He grinned at her, his hair a smug helmet around his skull. His mouth was very red, and all the playground injustice of nipple and fang rose inside her, the old unfairness, the sureness of place in Heaven and on Ea
rth.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she told him. ‘I’m doing it too.’

  She peeled off the wool of her date shirt: she slipped out of her old skin. She stood dumb as an animal in front of him: she wanted him to see her with all her teeth and all her claws; in the moonlight her own breasts amazed her.

  Behind the glass walls of the theatre people were darting, dazzled by the lights after their broken hours in the dark. The actors walked among them in their day clothes, their faces plain with cold cream and delight. The girl and the boy stood semi-nude in the gardens and listened for other footsteps on the sandstone, for cracks to come between door frames, for walls to widen and spill light and noise in a flood.

  But nobody came back into the gardens where they stood, dizzy with the African lavender drifting up from the terrace below, its holiday feel and narcotic stink. She stretched the cotton down over her body and waited.

  He was gracious. He paused only briefly, so that his long brown hands were caught in the fabric, surprised. The Saturday feeling rose up in her again and she saw all of him in that instant – the hairs on his chest, defiant; the solid astronomical meat of his sides.

  I’m looking at a half-naked man, she thought, and I think I’m going to touch him.

  He lifted his arms slowly over his head again and pulled his new T-shirt over his chest. It wasn’t the plants she could smell with their reversed evening circuits, the blades of pubic grass, the exposed roots and the wandering oaks. It was him and all his satellites. There was night-flowering jasmine in his armpits; his crotch was cinnamon; jungle love was all around. She smelled flowers trying to sprout in the cracks of her own body, felt the green zing in the fingers that was the planets knuckling down, the charge travelling from the middle of the Earth all the way to where they stood, lightning its way to the surface, tuning the forks of their feet.

  Then he caught her around the waist and pulled her to his body, and his arms were hard, the safety bars clamped down for lift-off. Part of her panicked. She wanted to struggle but his eyelashes fluttered against the back of her neck. He drew back to check and then angled his feathered head down again. She pressed her lips to his mouth – and then the smooth planes of his cheeks, and then his glassy forehead.

  After phrenology there is no going back: the kissing gate swung open. They breathed. Oxygen rushed in, renewing her fingerprints. While she stood up straight he had jimmied her ribcage windows: he had turned the dials of her insides. With his tastebud codes, with his skeleton key, she had been diddled with coat-hanger love.

  This is what a man feels like, she thought. I had forgotten. She spread her palms and felt him with every ridged finger; on him she laid her head in the old family way. The skin at his throat was sweet and cool, as if he’d been swimming in some lunar lake, black and sweet, dislodging the stones on the bottom.

  In the gardens the sprinklers came on, jetting drops over squirrels and bergies and cars in the parking lot while the girl and the boy stood on the next level, high and dry-mouthed, metal in every pore, wishing for rain.

  ‘I have a third nipple,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded. Her head was full of pollen, of feathers and of flight.

  ‘Will you show it to me?’

  He held her hand and led her to the cement stairs at the back entrance, where the lights burned everything orange as orchards. The gas canisters leaked and growled in their cages; their lazy fog drifted above the theatre, smelling of sulphur and control rooms.

  He laid her down sideways. He bent her over and lifted up her shirt. On her skin his hands were warm.

  He drummed his fingers on her jerky xylophone spine.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, lame and unmusical. ‘It fell off. It wasn’t really a nipple. It was more a sort of a mole. Like a Rice Crispie. People kept trying to pull it off because they thought I had something stuck to me.’

  ‘It fell off?’ He drew back and sat down sadly on the stairs beside her.

  She shrugged. ‘One day I woke up and it had come off during the night. Just disappeared.’

  ‘Just like that?’ he said, to make sure.

  ‘Just like that.’ She pulled her shirt down.

  He sighed with disappointment and lay down like a dog. His lips were swollen hot and pink with kissing, as if the sun had risen inside his mouth. His speech was slow with the burning.

  ‘You’re trying to show me something that isn’t there anymore.’

  She shrugged again; there was nothing to say. Their wings were packed flat, ready for retraction. She expected the husks to flutter down to the path and lie next to their old clothes like the flying ants that invade summer houses, desperate for electricity, dashing themselves dry against the tiles.

  He said casually to the sprinklers, ‘I have an extra toe.’

  ‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

  He sat up on the stairs and began to pull off what was left of his spacesuit – first his boot and then its thin black sock. She waited for the hothouse buds of his ankle, the faint fur on the bridge of his left foot.

  And then, and then – the digits themselves, all six, bunched pinkly as blooms from a magician’s sleeve. They steamed gently with the exposure. He wiggled them in the aquarium light, and she saw that it was true.

  ‘It’s real,’ she said. There was no trick or sleight-of-hand, no now-you-seeit-now-you-don’t. There they were, and there he was, her hybrid polydactylist. Her eyes knew the truth but her brain kept dialling other numbers.

  ‘How do you know which toe is extra?’

  ‘I think it’s this one,’ he said, and gripped the second from the end. ‘But it’s not vestigial. It has a bone and everything.’

  She wanted to touch that toe but she couldn’t ask. The unfractured architecture of his face – the bones and jaws, the Samson pillars – stopped her.

  And not just that. All the rest of him, too, that he would let her handle – the dip at his throat, the flesh of his lobes, the loose change of his nipples, and lower.

  And lower. His belly with its love and intestines curled against her; his cotton pockets she turned inside out; the head of his penis, silky as an eyelid in sleep.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

  He didn’t shrug and say, It’s mine. I hated it before but I’ve learned to live with it. It is a part of me.

  What he said was, ‘Of course. It helps on the trapeze.’

  Cabin Fever

  THERE WERE SO MANY BAGS. Karina tried to measure them in kilos, but her mind resisted the mathematics. She had stopped trying to make sense of everything days ago, when she had first driven Saul to rehab. Now they only stood and looked, she and the gardener. Every so often Maxwell giggled with nerves – a high-pitched snuffling – while he waited for further instructions. Karina must know what to do.

  He was a small, shy man in overalls the precise electric blue of the Eighties. He hadn’t wanted to go through every drawer, toolbox, suitcase, golf bag in the filthy garage, but Karina had stood stiffly by with her arms over her stomach and made him rummage through his employer’s secrets. She hadn’t been able to force herself to do the same. I would, but I can’t stand on chairs to reach the highest cupboards, she told herself. What if I fall and lose the baby?

  She was terrified that the clinic (the Funny Farm, sang her brain, but she pushed the interruption back) would contact the police and they would turn up to search the house, that it would be her fault, as it always was. Karina had already spent days – as fast as her back and her belly allowed her – going from room to room, sorting through likely hiding places, imagining Saul’s choices. She had left trails through the dust like a snail where the vacuum cleaner hadn’t erased the evidence of their past lives. The lost things left a residue, nestled snugly in balls of aggregating cat hair and the grime from ceiling boards imperfectly aligned. Even the roof was precarious. Karina had laid the items beside her on the rug: one pearl earri
ng, the diary from her breathless first year, stubs of plane tickets to places she wouldn’t see again.

  Now she weighed those tokens against the sheer amount of the marijuana in the garage. It astounded her. And how neatly and consciously it was packed: first into plastic bags, and then into anything that had come to Saul’s hand – used envelopes, Checkers packets, missing socks. There were mounds of weed, whole landscapes shredded. She thought of earthquakes and floods, of the people who live in dangerous places and wait for the plates to shift.

  ‘Put it back,’ she told the awkward Maxwell. ‘Just stack it there, against the wall, for now.’ He ducked his head and began, scurrying like an ant, relieved to have something to do. Karina bent with difficulty – God, her back was killing her; she was sure the ligaments were pulling away from her spine – and picked up a polythene bag that said BANANAS: R9.27. Best by 01.04. She left Maxwell to his task.

  She ducked inside the house. In the movies people were always flushing their drugs away. She made her way unsteadily to the bathroom, where there were still sticky yellow drops on the black and white vinyl flooring. Up close you could see where someone had forced a join in two of the sections: dirt gathered in the crack.

  Karina undid the knot with her fingernails. Even at arm’s length the stink rushed up to meet her, a green genie from a bottle. Coughing, she emptied it into the toilet bowl, blowing the last powdery crumbs from the corners of the plastic bag. She brushed the strands from her fingertips, each one a smelly filament that tarred, that feathered. The dagga bobbed in the water.

  Karina flushed the toilet. The mass swirled, a matchstick landslide, a sodden Amazon forest. It clung to the porcelain; it crept up the sides. Armitage Shanks, leered the toilet bowl, the letters peeping through the weed as the water level righted itself. Karina flushed the toilet again, hoping that that this time the result would be different. The dagga floated, an impassable geography. And there were fifty bags, a hundred and fifty! She squatted, resting her back against the cool impersonal wall. How many bathrooms had she waited in over the years, wondering what to do? Now she occupied the one in her own home and counted off on her married, swollen fingers ways to retrieve drugs. It wasn’t funny.