Читать книгу The Fall - Jen Thorpe - Страница 6

Thuli

‘In a week Hector will be dead. I saw it in a glitch.’

‘A glitch?’

I look around the alleyway we’re standing in to make sure nobody else can hear us. Although the Jammie Plaza is busy, it’s quieter over here away from the crowds. This journalist and I should be safe from prying ears. Her mousy hair is tied up with an actual elastic band in an old-school ponytail. Her black jeans are faded, and definitely haven’t been washed recently, because I can see the smear of something yellow on her right thigh. There’s a pair of cigarettes in a soft packet sticking out of her pocket. Her shoes are nineties hiker-style, high at the sides to protect the ankles, and as for her faded blue T-shirt … well. This is someone who my mother might say ‘is not taking care of herself’.

She’s here and she’s listening to me, though. I can’t waste this opportunity.

‘I just call it a glitch. I don’t know what its real name is, but it’s like a quick look at the future.’

‘And you do this how?’

‘The trick is to hold your breath until what once was breath turns into something else. ’Til the point where you feel if something fresh doesn’t enter your body you will explode. Your lungs should ache, burn even. Scream for you to breathe. Eventually, at the point when you feel like you’re about to die, your vision should start to feel hypersensitive, like you can see the movements before they’re happening. It’s because you can.

‘Now, if you’re there, and if you concentrate, and you hold that breath a bit more, then as you exhale, the particles of you that were once here go elsewhere.’

I see her subtly trying to hold her breath, wondering if she’ll get there. For a moment I kind of hope she will, that someone else will know what this is like.

‘You see?’

She shakes her head, eyebrow raised, mouth sceptical.

Just because she can’t get there doesn’t mean what I know isn’t real. It just means she’s not different like me. I should have known that from looking at her.

‘Well, it’s probably because you haven’t … because something bad enough hasn’t happened to you. Anyway—’

She interrupts, her face turning quickly from bemused to angry: ‘Look, I’ve had plenty of things happen to me, trust me, and the last time someone told me they could time travel, they were off their face on LSD, so I think that’s about all I need from you right now.’

She starts packing her things away.

‘Wait. I mean, I’ve only been able to glitch since … Well, I mean … The point is, I’m not on drugs. I’m not shitting you. This thing that I can do, I can move out of my body and into somewhere else. Another time. Sometimes I just escape from here.’

I don’t tell her that it feels like my body blames itself for getting me into trouble and tries to escape. I’ve tried to unlearn that type of mental bullshit, but it’s hard to shake the voices that say that women are to blame for everything. Especially when those voices are repeated all around me so damn often.

The world would have you believe that women invite things on them – the bad things at least. The good things count as ‘luck’ or ‘exceptions’. Fuck it. She’s losing interest while I’m replaying lessons from childhood church in my mind.

‘What I’m about to tell you is important. Just listen for a little longer.’

‘Look, this all sounds a bit …’

She shakes her head and shoulders side to side, making a circle around her ear with her finger.

‘Crazy? I know it sounds crazy, but if you’d just fucking listen …’

‘If that’s your attitude, I’m sure there are thousands of other students here who would like their version of #FeesMustFall told, so …’ She continues packing her things, but I can’t let her go. I have to get this off my chest before someone dies.

‘Don’t go. I didn’t mean it. I know you do your job right. I’ve seen you doing it. Asking the questions that need to be asked. I know I can trust you because I’ve been watching you for a while – in real time and in my glitches. Going back and forth, checking where you’d been and what you’d been up to.

‘I’ve seen you before today, walking around on campus, watching the scuffles, crouching down with that hot piece of DSLR you have, snapping away like our pain is going to make you famous. Don’t get defensive. At least someone’s here trying to tell our side of the story. They wouldn’t believe it if we fucking told it. The realer the real is, the harder it is to make people trust it these days. They’re more comfortable with the glossed-up version. Am I right?’

She just shrugs, but she’s still here, so I guess that means I can keep talking. I know something that will convince her I’m telling the truth.

‘Do you remember that feeling last Friday like you were about to land on that rock the police had just thrown back at the students?’ Her eyes widen as if I’ve told her that I know all her secrets. I continue before her brain has space to doubt me. ‘I moved it. Before you landed. The glitching allows me to do that type of thing, but only if it’s in the future. You see, I saw all of that last Monday. I thought there wouldn’t be any benefit to letting our only committed storyteller break her arm, and so I took a bit of covert action.’

I’m not surprised that she looks both confused and dubious. I would too if someone started telling me something like this. I wouldn’t have believed any of it if it weren’t happening to me. I’m not crazy.

She narrows her eyes at me before she speaks and I notice dark circles line them. Girl is not getting enough sleep.

‘So what you’re asking me to believe is that you’ve been to the future and you moved a rock that I was about to fall on?’

‘Yup.’

‘Right. And so, if that were true, and you could move through time, how far might you be able to go, do you think?’

‘I know. It’s seven days at most – I can’t get any further than that. That’s why what I have to tell you is so urgent, why you’ve got to move quickly.’

‘And how long have you been doing this “glitching”?’

‘That’s not important.’

‘It is to me. So how long?’

‘About six months.’

I don’t want her to ask what started it. I said about six months, but my body knows down to the second what started all of this. That’s not for her, though. That’s not for now.

‘What’s important is what I saw today. It’s going to change everything. Are you ready?’

She nods, looks at the stone buildings around us laced with ivy. I bet she’s thinking that this place looks too nice for bad things to happen. I thought the same thing. I was wrong, and so is she. Ivy can’t protect you from anything, especially not from other people.

I take a deep breath and tell her what I saw.

‘I glitched forwards this morning in a moment of boredom. Since I’ve been glitching, I’ve noticed that there is always a buzz and crackle when I first arrive somewhere else. Like my mind is trying to pick up the radio signal and tune in to the frequency. It lasts a few minutes. It’s tinny and screechy, but I can hear the voices on the other side and I know that I just need to stand a minute and recalibrate.

‘I was shaking my head, trying to clear my ears of the crackle, and watching the crowd. We were standing near the parking lot, right by where the statue used to be. Now there’s just that cement block that used to be the base. Do you know it?’

She looks down campus in the right direction, so I go on.

‘As usual, Hector was in the thick of things, marching towards Sindiwe and me. She was holding the microphone, must have been waiting for him to get to the block. He looked like he was ready to burst.

As he jumped up on the stone, he raised his right hand in a fist into the air. He looked like he was born to do it. Like this moment was his destiny.

‘You know who I mean, right? You’ve seen him. The skinny one with the good looks and the arrogant smile?’

My voice tremors, but I push on. I can’t believe I used to find friendship in that smile. But that’s not for now either.

‘Twenty-one years old and the man thinks he is a god – to the ladies and to the movement. Like we need another man telling us what to do. Still, once you get taken seriously in movements like these, you better hope your dick is as big as you’re pretending it is. The hopes and expectations of thousands of students depend on you getting what they want for them, protecting them and their interests.’ I try to avoid thinking about how Hector didn’t protect me. ‘If you don’t, you’re gone just as fast as you got here.

‘I could see as he turned towards us that his shirt read: Too rich for NSFAS, too poor for fees, too black for a bank loan. Too honest for democracy is what it should have read.’

She takes out a notebook and pen, starts writing, and looks at me, gesturing with her hand for me to go on, like a horizontal royal wave. I look around again to make sure nobody’s listening, but there are just a bunch of students resting on the lawn, jamming to their Bluetooth speakers. We’re still safe.

‘So anyway, Hector was standing there, looking out at all of us, his eyes wide and alert, his forehead gleaming with sweat. As he opened his mouth to shout, he flinched sharply, and his face was a kaleidoscope of expressions in a split second. He turned away from the crowd to look back at Sindiwe and me, and then his eyes went so calm and peaceful. He collapsed. He didn’t even put his hands out to stop himself. People began to run, Sindiwe grabbed my hand and we started to run too. Nobody wanted to be the next to get shot.’

She stops writing, her eyes wrinkled in concern. ‘Who shot him?’

‘The thing is, there was nobody there—’

‘Nobody where?’ she interrupts me again, and I’m not sure if that’s what journalists usually do or if she just has a short attention span. Still, I can’t stop telling her now that I’ve started. I might be furious with Hector, but I don’t want him to die.

‘From the sky. That way.’ I point in the direction of the SRC building. ‘That’s where the shot seemed to come from, but there was nobody there.’

‘Nobody there to shoot him? But how could you see that if you were running the other way?’

Fair question. I guess it’s truth time.

‘I suppose I’d better be honest.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘That’d be a good start.’

‘I haven’t only seen this scene once. I’ve seen it a few times today; I keep going back to check and it’s always the same. The shot comes from the direction of the SRC building. I think I see two people there, but sometimes it looks like only one. When I look closely I just see … something. It’s not clear.’ In my mind it’s shimmering metal, like mercury. But I don’t want her to think I’m completely mad.

‘So you look on the roof, and you see either one or two people and one of them shoots Hector?’

‘But then they’re gone.’

‘Gone how?’

‘It’s like as soon as they take the shot, they just … They just dissolve.’

Her eyebrows are raised and she’s biting her lip like she doesn’t know what to make of my story. I carry on.

‘Every time I go back, Sindiwe pulls me away before I can get a proper look. The crowd is going insane and it’s impossible to stand still. It happens too fast. I can’t do anything to help him. None of us can. Each time I go back, I hear someone scream: “He’s not breathing. Someone call an ambulance. Someone!” Then I’m back in real time, the glitch is over, and I’m not that someone to help him.’

In telling her what I saw, a euphoria has started to spread through my body. She watches me, unembarrassed. Now that I’m done talking, she’s taking her time to ask a question.

I use the pause to reapply my lipstick, straighten my skirt down over my thighs, and attempt to tame my wild hair. Just because the world is falling apart doesn’t mean my looks should suffer. She watches me making myself up, and I can see she’s straining to avoid rolling her eyes. Whatever.

‘And you believe this “glitch” you keep seeing is real?’

‘Trust me, the things that I’ve seen before have turned out like I saw them in a glitch. Every single time.’

‘And you think this happens sometime this week?’

‘I know it. Like I said, seven days is the furthest forward I have been. Today’s Monday, so that means sometime between now and Sunday, Hector is going to be shot. I can’t help him on the day, but maybe you can.’

‘How do you work that one out?’

‘If you start trying to solve this now you can work out who’d want to kill him. Or what can shoot and then dissolve. Or find a way to get him out of there or something.’

‘To be honest, this all sounds a little far-fetched for a paper like ours. Maybe you want to talk to someone from The New Age?’

‘No, you’re the right person. I know you care about your stories.’

‘Do you have any proof at all that any of this is true?’

‘You still remember that feeling like you were about to hit the rock, don’t you?’

She nods, a faraway look in her eyes. I know she can do this. Truth is, I know more about her than I’m letting on. I know she helped that journalist break the story about Sindiwe’s dad. I know she knows more about how very weird this world can be, that there are things you can’t just explain with logic. I know she knows that sometimes there are bigger forces at play. What I don’t know is if she’ll help me.

‘Will you at least try? See if you can save him?’

She folds up her notebook and packs it away. She hesitates a moment before walking away. ‘I’ll try.’

I stick out my hand to shake hers. ‘I’m Thuli, by the way.’

‘Helen Miller.’