The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories Read online

  Well, that is not the end of the story. I came out of OK Stores and pushed the trolley towards my hired Mercedes. Lo and behold! Amai was standing right in front of me. She had not left for home; instead she had waited outside to thank me. As soon as she saw me, she broke into song:

  Mwari wangu ngaarumbidzwe, My God be praised!

  My God is great! God bless you and give you a long life!

  I was so embarrassed. In my confusion at this grand display I left the trolley on the pavement, got into my car and drove away like a drug dealer. When I got to my hotel, I parked outside and stayed in my car for a very, very long time. Yes, that is what the experience of hunger did to me. To this day I wonder what happened to the trolleyful of food. Maybe some street kids got to it. There are so many of them in Zimbabwe these days.

  Nimbus

  Brett Petzer

  The morning was warmer than usual, with dust devils manifesting and dwindling between the stacked vehicles. Gweilo kept watch with the binoculars on the radiator of an old Ford, just above where his colleagues were huddled around a gaunt boy sitting on the roof of an ambulance.

  The boy had a smooth face – no philtrum, no chin, the gentlest bump of a nose – and although the boys knew well that this was foetal alcohol syndrome, they also meant it when they called the boy Wolkie, because he was as blithe and untetherable as a cloud. On this baking morning, however, they shouted at Wolkie all at once while he, eyes wet with panic, stumbled over a list of metal prices that was crawling across his retina.

  ‘C’mon, man, fuck! The al-yew-min-yum, don’t give us this other fucken prices!’

  ‘Wolkie, you must not make us worse off today. You know this is important, man. Just read the main number.’

  The boy looked up at the heads and shoulders that framed a blue and clear sky. A tear passed behind the crawl of US dollar amounts that were sliding too quickly out of sight.

  ‘It says … live warrants … three months ABR … 507.50?’

  ‘No man, fuck, it was four hundred last week. That’s not the price, man. Look for something like four hundred.’

  The crawl ended mid-figure; Wolkie’s i quota had been reached, a week’s worth gone in half a minute. It lasted a very long time if you only used it on outschool, which was why all children under fourteen got the quota; those who did all the lessons could earn tradable minutes but that kind of boy had never been part of the crew and Wolkie, weeks from fourteen, was beginning to bump against the upper limit of what his mind could be expected to achieve. Wolkie slumped back on the warm steel and breathed in deeply.

  The boys were in attitudes of dejection a little way off. Hannes sat head in hands, Gweilo was whistling in a way that promised violence and Mansoor, he now realised, was looking at him very intently without saying anything. They looked like this when they all tried to leave at night without waking him, when they went off for hours and came back dirty and sleepy and full of sea sand – they looked like this before Wolkie had learned to feign sleep and suppress the panic of being alone in the tunnel. Wolkie stood for a moment, while a loud creak came from beneath him. The six-storey pile of rusting sedan cars on which they all stood was getting properly warm in the Saldanha sun.

  Hannes spoke first.

  ‘Wolkie, if we don’t have the aluminium price, we do not know whether we can stay in the tunnel. Do you know that?’

  Wolkie nodded.

  ‘So what is it, Wolkie? Are we safe, or is the company coming for all this? Are we standing in the middle of a five-fucking-kilometre-long goldmine?’ With this, Hannes stamped on an upended car bonnet and pointed up and down the coast at the vast pyramids of silver and rust where thousands of appliances and objects and one Daphne-class submarine were starting to shine very brightly as the day gained on them.

  Hannes felt he was ratcheting up the quotient of menace in his voice in a very professional and steady way. He knew Wolkie tended to bolt when cornered, and they couldn’t have him fall off the hill of aluminium and hurt himself.

  ‘I think … I am going to say that the aluminium price was five hundred dollars. That is the price that I saw and that was the right price.’

  Without turning towards them, Gweilo said, ‘We could have shaved a seal and got better prices off of i.’

  ‘Wolkie, can you think how the price of aluminium could go up by a hundred dollars in one week? Do you understand what must happen for that? My brother, you must imagine that Ghana sells nothing, and then Jamaica sells nothing, and then Russia sells nothing, and everyone runs out, in one week! You …’ But Hannes saw Gweilo turn to him and point in the direction of the office; then they heard the helicopters. It was the Queen Maud Land and Cape Metal Company’s monthly check over their vast aluminium holdings, which had slumbered against the end of the decade-long metals slump.

  But, as Hannes counted backwards, he was sure that it was a week early, and at the wrong time of day. If the price they lived by week to week had hit five hundred, a figure from childhood, a war must have started somewhere in the world, and the QMCMC’s decade of hardship was over. But Kewmsimsie’s hardship had been at the same time ten years of plenty for the four professional thieves.

  After a minute, the aircraft veered towards them, and the boys, moving hand over foot, swung fluidly down to ground level in minutes. Wolkie was grateful when they were on land and set off at a sprint through the stumble kloof, a ravine strewn with exhaust pipes; when one nicked his leg quite badly, a distraction had been granted; he knew that today’s failure would not get brought up again soon.

  The crew flowed like gazelle between obstacles, their muscular and closely-scarred bodies leap-running among and over the exhausts, Wolkie breathing hard and feeling the cool of the air where he was bleeding. The chop of the aircraft rotors came close sometimes, but only because of how the hills of metal scooped sound. Twice Wolkie wheeled around, convinced against all experience that the chopper was metres away from him, hovering at shoulder height in a clearing off the canyon. He wheeled again and fell, and the rough white sand of that part of Kewmsimsie was bracing against his cut. The boys did not look back, and when Wolkie shook himself and set off again, the few seconds’ delay had carried them almost out of sight. He pounded down the long, narrowing ravine of lorries and vans, with just ahead a gap where the metal stacks touched. Wolfie reached ahead with his arm. Four strides ahead was the bright sunlight of the clearing on the other side. As he shot through, strong sets of arms yanked him sharply to the left. Wolkie doubled up to catch his breath, but, motioning for silence, the boys pulled him upright, and he flattened himself against a van. Slow again, he had nearly run into full sight of the low turns the chopper was now making; he was looking like a liability again. As always, with no one to cap the implications of such a thought, Wolkie relaxed into the fact that the group would always need someone young enough to get the outschool quota of i, free and encrypted. With a very rapid crescendo in sound the helicopter now passed directly over them, hissing and blowing hotly against the cliff of cars. The boys holding their breaths and Wolkie coughing, they edged along the frame of a minibus taxi overhung by a ledge of other taxis laid crossways.

  Wolkie looked up at the Kewmsimsie chopper, which had slowed, perhaps because of the glint of the exhausts as the crew traversed them. It had climbed a bit and now hung in the sky. The sky was, for the long moments to come, no more a free somewhere away but the vast retina of the metal-yard company, a door creaking ajar, looking right onto their little tunnel entrance. Ropes tumbled from the chopper, and people came down them, and the people became distinct as Kewmsimsie recycling scientists with clumsy yellow glasses. They were talking very fast, but facing away from each other, pointing at a hill of fire engines and City of Cape Town buses under which the boys had lived since they were eight and nine and had first crawled under the fence into the yards.

  Hannes, who was crouched right next to Wolkie, began thrumming his fingers in the air, probably scrolling photos of all the tracker app caches the
y had hidden around the hill of Volvos. This had become very serious very quickly, and the day was still hot. The scientists were taking their time about it, and the boys allowed themselves to sit down and so expose their legs as the minibus got too hot to lean against.

  Wolkie’s throat was papery with thirst, and as he concentrated on trying to make saliva enough to swallow down some of the dust in his mouth, a flickering, long-ago logo for Dope Ice flashed across his field of vision. The familiar tin expanded in size, then the swaying palm trees on the logo took on a third dimension, rustling and throwing shade with those early-Forties effects where the sun looks like it’s shining through palm leaves right into your eyes and you have to squint. An old tracker app was picking him up, probably from inside an ice cream van. For the others, staying invisible to trapps by suppressing their own signal took a moment’s thought.

  Wolkie tried to shut down the swaying trees and the easy-going beach scene and it grew greyer and quieter, but didn’t go away. The trapp might be in the ice cream truck behind them, but what if it were further away – as far away as the helicopter? Was one of the scientists looking right at them? Was Wolkie already a warm, living red pulse on the helicopter’s ground display? Still the hazy tropical partygoers were pouring Dope Ice into themselves and each other among the great mesas and canyons of remaindered metal. The other boys sat alert, tensed for immediate flight, whispering routes to each other. They expected no more of Wolkie than that he keep up.

  Gweilo had once tried to explain to him how it feels at midnight on your fourteenth birthday: Outschool plays a short piece summarising the courses you’ve taken, then, without waiting, networks crawl down your eye as your name is uploaded to tax and labour and police records in countries known and unknown, your name flashing in Chinese and Hindi, and job offers close to you start sliding up the other side of the screen, and nothing to do but opt in to everything – or trouble sets itself in motion.

  Now the helicopters were here, and probably more tomorrow. Maybe, in coming days, Kewmsimsie smelters that shook the tunnel when they passed over it would trundle into Al-1 from the steel section. Company workers could clear the Volvo hill in a morning; the crew would watch from a dune as their neighbourhood was fed into vats of molten metal and pressed and stacked ready for the Pearl Delta.

  Hannes had a blocker; to any trapp in the world, he wasn’t there. Gweilo had been fitted with one by a man in the dunes when he was small. But Mansoor, who usually spoke five words a week, had had to save for five years before he went into the tunnel, into the lowest part where it was permanently wet, and wait there for the dune woman. Mansoor, speaking more words that one night than he would say in a normal year, had told how you lie there, the light hardly ever working, and old Sella would make you eat plants from the dunes mixed with sugar until you began to sweat.

  She would whisper that you had to get a fever – a fever that close to kills you – for the corporeal app to shut down. When she couldn’t pick up the capp anymore, you felt her make a cut on the side of your head, and she put the blocker in, but you were kicking and carrying on, and then she sewed you up very fast and she was gone.

  You had to put aloe on your head so that you wouldn’t have a scar; if you had a big scar that showed, you couldn’t go into a town or even take a government bus. When Mansoor came out again, he said, things were not as loud; you didn’t get chatter from broken car trapps. Kewmsimsie got nice and quiet, you could hear the birds and the sea and the helicopters better. And if you were hungry for a bit of bird, and you caught something that was maybe one of the rare ones and you were getting it ready for the fire, you didn’t get that long fucken video with the panda character that starts shouting and making you nauseous. No, you can walk without all the chatter; instead of a seagull you can be an eagle, he said. Mansoor had stopped, then run his fingers through his matted black hair, apparently caught unaware by his own somewhat poetic statement, and then he had shut up again for ten days.

  When the helicopter couldn’t be heard anymore, the boys stole back to the tunnel and spent the night breaking open batteries for trapps.

  Wolkie undid the bolt on the last of the twenty bicycle trailers that led one into the next from the Volvo hill to the dune beyond Kewmsimsie under the perimeter fence. Hannes had said to wait for ten minutes before going out into the full sun, and that Sella would be on time and would know to come in. He saw one figure approaching from the light but, a moment later, there was another. Wolkie shivered and cleared his throat to speak. His hands curled into fists.

  ‘Who is with you?’ he croaked.

  ‘Calm yourself, little man,’ said a husky old woman’s voice. ‘I have my Gideon here to keep you company is all. Hannes said you were a bit soft in the understanding. Now take us in quick, man. I only have tonight for this and I need Gideon back in two days – you remember mos, you all used to play on the dunes when you and those bliksemse kinders were small – so you must pull yourself together sommer quickly, and no long stories.’ She brushed past him, followed by a half-remembered boy as tall as himself, dressed in very fussy old-style button clothing, who didn’t speak.

  He had been aware of himself lying there for some hours before he remembered about the operation. He was intermittently interested in the idea of himself lying in the dark, encrusted with blood down one side, but he kept preferring to think of the time they rolled a Joule city car down a hill of sedan bonnets and it smashed a server core to pieces. Gradually, patience exhausted, he turned his attention to the fever that was still in him, and the increasingly assertive pain in his temple. Then the feeling very suddenly entrenched itself as reality and he opened an eye into the dark. He knew immediately that Gideon was kissing him.

  ‘What, what man. Ge roff, go out.’

  There was a shuffle backwards.

  Then a clear voice said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were still gone.’

  Wolkie said, ‘Fuck, man. Fuck,’ and then, ‘Switch on a light, fuck.’ Wolkie was suddenly aware of his body in a way that he hadn’t been before. It felt like a house where everything had been stolen. His eye was clear of indicators, newsfeeds, crawls and ads.

  While he scanned the tunnel for a shape that was Gideon, he put his left hand to his temple. Pressing down into fresh bandages, he heard an in-head message: Trappblocker is: Operational. Sinhung Company DPRK, and he let out a stray laugh which hurt instantly.

  ‘What were you doing? I was awake. Where is Sella? Sella, waar’s jy?’ he asked the tunnel.

  ‘She’s long gone. It’s me keeping you safe now, and you could be grateful at least.’

  ‘Well, I’m grateful for the part where you kept me alive after my op.’

  ‘Not as grateful as you’ll be when I tell you this,’ Gideon continued quickly, eager to move on from the kiss. ‘You clowns spend all your waking hours digging for trapps and selling them to us and whoever else when you don’t even have to. Sella can’t stop laughing about it.’

  Wolkie, engrossed in the project of sitting up without passing out from the pain and dizziness of it, humoured him. ‘Oh, really? And must we go ask the Kewmsimsie for food and minutes?’

  ‘You earn your food one day a week. The rest of it goes on minutes. I’ve seen you all climb up on that old submarine, and the boys spend a whole day stitched up to Hive and that space mmog. Ten years living in a scrapheap, and most of it gone on minutes, and now aluminium is worth more than nothing, suddenly it’s all over for you. Didn’t you ever ask whether there’s another way to get minutes? What’s your five-year plan?’ Gideon laughed at the catchphrase from a retro comedy and Wolkie settled down onto his back, entirely too bored and sore to respond.

  Enthusiasm for the turn of the century was a city affectation that Wolkie recognised from the adverts that scrolled across the bottom of outschool – Gideon’s clothes were probably from there. Whatever tent old Sella had on a dune somewhere, a corner of it was Gideon’s, and probably full of quaint devices and dumbpaper posters and vintage-
shop buttons and zips. Wolkie had to pause there; it was hard to be very angry with someone who wore historical dress while living with anti-capp scrap merchants who moved up and down the fucking dunes.

  ‘Gideon, you can tell me about it when I wake up. Just give me water, please.’

  Wolkie lay in half-consciousness. He was determined not to fall asleep again properly until Gideon was gone and the bolt drawn to. He decided to make a show of having recovered and gingerly sat up. Gideon was reading, his eyes closed but dully glowing. ‘Yes, Gideon, now that you say so, the minutes … I did think of that every time a battery exploded while we were trying to cut a stupid little cheap trapp out of it, and every time I cut my foot or shins or arms on a chassis or a door. Those times I thought to myself, Why don’t we just stop trying? Let’s try hunger! Let’s just totally lose it from looking at a ten-kilometre-long scrapyard all day. I thought that and then I climbed down into the old sub on the beach and just killed myself.’

  Gideon’s glow dimmed and he opened his eyes and he turned to Wolkie. There was a crunch of gravel and a slight rush of damp salt air as Gideon came and sat close to Wolkie and then leaned in very close. Wolkie quietly moved his hands up to under his chin. Gideon whispered, ‘Do you know about the gap in the cloud?’

  Wolkie looked up at the tunnel roof, where the glint of the guide light from a bioreadout clipped to his finger was reflected on the shiny surface of the bike trailer. ‘No, I don’t know what you mean, Gideon.’

  ‘Well, before you start, listen. You know the cloud is around everything, right? Birds, fish, balloons. You even see insects flying slow and low to the ground because they have trapps now. And you know when we have that many trapps, and all of them listening – not just to what’s around them, like these old trailer trapps are listening to us, but—’