Читать книгу Sister-Sister - Rachel Zadok - Страница 8

Long-Dead Worm Dinner

There was a time I used to dream, curled up warm in Mama’s house that smelled of paraffin, Vicks VapoRub and Vaseline. A time I’d press my face into Sindi’s neck and breathe in the smells that clung to her hair, spicy as the air in the takeaway where Mustafa sold slap chips and bunny chows and Black Label quarts wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. A time I’d close my eyes and drift, like a paper boat floating in rainwater currents between the pavement and the road. Drift into the soft mouth of sleep, where sweet dreams waited.

Now, I close my eyes and disappear. I close my eyes and I am gone and being gone feels like forever, though I never left at all.

We walk all day, tramping down the emergency lane. Trucks thunder by. We march past vacant lots bristling with scrubby grass, rusting cans and broken beer bottles. Sindi only stops to watch the evening rush hour. Even then, she stays standing, halfway up the embankment, mumbling, “Emi, oru, abiku, O.” When the first cars shake loose she’s off again.

By the time the roads unclog, Mama Moon is on the rise, but she’s sucked her belly in and the night pours over us like fresh tar. Cat’s-eyes, lumed up by the headlights of passing cars, stretch into forever like rows of licked lime Sparkles. One for me, one for you.

“Sisi, stop,” I wail at the dark and the passing cars and Mama Moon. The soles of my baby-dolls feel like they’re sticking to the road. I struggle to put one foot in front of the other, step after step after step. “Stop, stop, stop,” I cry, frost-bitten, bone-tired. She keeps walking, but my legs are like lead, dead-dead.

Mist rises from the cooling concrete. Twisting white vapours swirl around my ankles until I can’t see my feet. Soon that milky sea reaches my knees, trailing ice along my skin. I think of the deep earth in winter and my head fills with cold and damp and I want to lie down and sleep forever. I close my eyes and, in the dark space inside myself, I see a bare bulb swing, flickering on, flickering off. I follow its shadowy arc back to before. Mama is crying and Sindi stands by the door, wide-eyes. And then they’re gone and I’m alone.

I open my eyes. “Sisi,” I call, but my voice is mouse-squeak small. Memories flash and fade. With every step Sindi takes, another piece of me disappears until she is so far away I hardly remember her.

Something buzzes in the soles of my feet. I frown at the dark curve of road. The ground rumbles as if a giant truck is hammering down the highway, but the road’s dark.

“It’s the King of the Road, little sister.” I hear Ben’s voice in my ear, but no one’s there. “He’s got a belly long as the highway and five lanes wide, and no matter how much he eats he’s always hungry. You better run.”

I look down and will my feet to move. I don’t want the King of the Road to eat me like roadkill, like an accident victim, but fear has made me lame. A hooter whines through the night. Passing headlights leave me blinded by white spots. I push my thumbs into my eye-sockets, then squint into the dark. A man stands in the middle of the highway, behind the barrier that separates the cars going west from the cars going east. He’s a shadow, but his eyes are like coals in an oil drum. He holds my stare and heat pours into me. My toes zing with pins and needles and the road lets go.

I dash up the embankment and I don’t stop running until I reach the top. The mournful warning of another car draws my eye back to the man. He drops over the barrier and stands on the same side as me. I scan the grey belly of the highway. Headlights float above the road like disconnected ghosts.

I can’t tear my eyes away as he darts across, long legs running lopsided, veering left, veering right. The car cuts close, speeding-speeding. He’s roadkill, I think, another soul sacrificed to the road’s hungry King. Even from up high I can hear the King’s stomach grumble. I close my eyes and plug my ears.

When I look again, the man is safe behind the yellow line. He gives me a narrow look and takes off up the road. I follow along the embankment.

The man has a strange way of walking: he takes long strides and careens from side to side, as if one of his legs is shorter than the other. And he keeps up a constant conversation with someone invisible, nodding like he’s listening and pausing like he’s considering the answers to questions. He’s loony and I mock him, “Loon Man, Loon Man, your legs are lopsiiided!” He pretends he can’t hear me, even though I know he can – he keeps glancing my way with his heat-projecting eyes.

Ahead of us, a girl walks into the train of Mama Moon’s glowing indigo dress. She walks like she’s asleep and dreaming. Loon Man calls out to her and she swings around.

“Sindi!” I yell, relieved to have found her, though for a moment my head is a fog of confusion as to how I lost her, if she was lost at all. I want to ask her where she’s been, but she’s focused on Loon Man. The air between them is tense. Sindi’s shoved her hands into her pockets and pushed them wide, so she looks bigger than she is. Looking at Loon Man, bent double, wheezing, hands flapping like dying fish, I wonder why she bothers.

Loon Man’s old. His face has collapsed in the middle like he has no teeth. A thin grey straggle spills from under his sooty trilby and sits unevenly on the shoulders of his trench coat. The coat gives him bulk, but his hands tell me that under it he’s skinny-skinny. Still, he’s tall, and his brogues are polished to a mean shine. What’s a man with nice threads doing walking the highway at night?

As his breath slows, Loon Man straightens up and the years fall off him. I frown, trying to focus on his face. It’s like watching a TV being fine-tuned, the screen warping back and forth. His face shifts through a lifetime – young, old and every age in between – but always his eyes remain the same. Hot cosmic eyes, deep as the moonless sky. His face fixes around sixty, but the shifting has left me dizzy. Loon Man slides a hand into his coat and Sindi cocks her pockets.

He smiles. “My child, I know you’ve got trigger fingers, but you don’t have a trigger. Still, I understand where you’re coming from.” His voice reminds me of Next-Door-Auntie’s boyfriend, too smooth for his mouth. Mama said Next-Door-Auntie’s boyfriend spoke like an American televangelist, and that all preachers were tsotsis, you could tell by the designer suit. I cut narrow eyes at Loon Man, to let him know I’ve got his number.

“I’m not going to hurt you, my child. See?” He pulls out a hip flask that glows in the lunar light like the embers of a dying fire. “Just something to keep warm,” he says, raising the copper flask to his lips. He knocks back a slug, shuts his eyes and shakes his head. His cheeks sound loose. “Church brew. Good stuff, blood of the Lord.” He winks and with a flick of his wrist offers the flask to Sindi. She draws her right hand from her pocket and holds it out.

“That’s fair,” he says, dropping the flask into her palm.

As her fingers close round it, she steps out of his reach. Sindi doesn’t trust men, not even Joe Saviour, whom we’ve known since we were four days old. She sniffs at the neck of the flask. Her nose wrinkles but she takes a sip. It makes her cough. She hacks until she doubles over. The flask tilts in her hand. A drop of Loon Man’s golden brew splashes onto the road. One for the King.

“Watch it, that’s the blood of Jesus.” He snatches the flask as Sindi spits. The snail slides off the toe of his brogue, leaving a glimmering trail.

Sindi holds up her hands. “Sss_asorry, mm_man, sorry.”

She backs away and I watch, wide-eyes, expecting his fist, but he just throws back his head and laughs. He laughs and laughs like it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened, gesturing at his toe with the open flask. He doesn’t spill a drop. At first, Sindi frowns at the sight of Loon Man playing the fool, but after a while his laughing catches and she smiles. I haven’t seen my sisi smile since . . . I can’t remember the last time. I hug my shoulders, wishing he’d stop. His laughing shakes me. It twists the world. It makes me fade and blur.

“Go away!” I scream.

The sudden silence throbs.

“We shouldn’t hang around, my child,” he says, pocketing the flask. “It’s not safe.” As he adjusts the lapels of his coat, the headlights of a passing car catch a copper gleam in his seams. Loon Man is a Believer, a tuned-in follower of the Black Preacher. “Joshua Piepper.” He holds out his hand and fires his name into the night. “First Disciple of the One True Church. Pure of blood, pure of spirit.”

“Loopy loopy Loon Man,” I jeer, motioning circles at the side of my head.

“Sss_aSindisiwe.” My sisi’s fingertips graze his.

He frowns as people do when they notice her stutter for the first time. “Sindisiwe,” he says, looking thoughtful. “Sindisiwe.” He repeats her name as if she and it are two pieces of a puzzle. Before he can fit them together, she turns her back on him and walks away.

“Where are you going, Sindisiwe? Wait. You don’t have to tell me. Looking at you, no offence, you look lost. You’re looking for a family. I’d say you’ve got no one – but seek and ye shall find, the Lord says.

“Tell you a secret,” he says when he catches up to her. “I can read people. It’s a gift. Praise the Lord for it. I look at you and I know, you’re heading for The Ascension. The Ascension of the Mothers for the New Mankind? Am I right? You know what I’m talking about.”

Silence.

“Okay, I understand, you’re nervous. And who could blame you, a young woman can’t know what to expect. You worry that you won’t be good enough. But I’m here to tell you, all God’s creatures are perfect, the Lord made you perfect and you are. Am I right, my child, you want to be saved?” He pauses and pats his heart. It takes me a second to figure out he’s checking for his flask. “Your name means saved. Sindisiwe, it means saved. Did you know that?”

They walk under an overpass. I hurry across the top, reaching the other side just as they emerge.

Loon Man is still jabbering. “I know I met you for a reason. The Lord sent you to me, so I could lead you to salvation. That makes me happy, for that is my purpose. Saving good girls and keeping them pure so they can be the Mothers for the New Mankind. So few untainted souls left in the world, so few.”

He looks up at me and frowns, as if remembering something. “You are pure? I mean, your blood, it’s clean?’ He clears his throat and answers for her: “Of course it is. I can see into people and in you I see a pure heart, pure blood, a pure soul.”

Sindi stops walking. She looks at Loon Man as if she’s only just seen him. “What did you ss_asay?” Her voice crackles like a badly tuned radio.

Joshua Piepper looks at the road. “I’m sorry,” he says, hunching his shoulders to ninety years old. “An old man can put his foot in it. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Sindi narrows her eyes.

“My child, if you’ve got the sickness, don’t worry. The Lord has a plan for us all, have faith . . .” He trails off, sounding disappointed. “The Lord has a plan.”

She kicks the ground. “Before, what did you ss_asay?”

“Before?” He shrugs. “I said you should join our church.”

She shakes her head, her hands balling into fists at her sides.

“Calm down, child. All I said was that you have a pure heart and soul, nothing meant to offend.”

She blinks and the darkness, lifted earlier by his lunatic laughter, comes crashing down. In the faint moonlight I can just make out her eyes. Dead eyes. Colder than broken glass. “Soul.” She exhales the word, so quiet only my twin ears catch the sound.

“My child, where are you going?”

Sindi clutches a clump of grass to steady her balance and turns to face him. We’re already halfway up the embankment, but the old man hasn’t lifted his soles off the road. Ahead, the dark wheel of the off-ramp winds around the hill and disappears into the night, reappearing high above us as Voortrekker Road, bright with streetlights and straight as a runway.

“Let’s keep going, we can be at the church tomorrow morning. It’s not far, just past Nasrec in the old refinery. My people are on the move, I know we’ll get lucky and catch a ride. I foresee it. We’ll be there tonight.” Joshua Piepper pulls up the sleeve of his coat and brings his wrist close to his face. The eerie green glow of his watch light sinks deep crags into the flesh around his eyes. Loon Man the ghost.

The old man’s fresh, but we’ve been walking since dawn and it’s so late now I have to bend my neck all the way back to see Mama Moon. Soon, the sun’s going to creep over the horizon and people will begin to leak onto the streets. While the night still wraps us in her blanket, we can shut our eyes for few hours in peace.

Sindi raises her hand to wave goodbye. Loon Man twitches. He looks at Sindi, looks at me, checks his watch again, face glowing green. “There’s evil up there, my child.”

I glance over my shoulder, wondering where the crazy from this morning went. Nothing moves. The wind whispers against my skin. “Leave him, it’s cold,” I murmur.

“Sss_asomething bad on the road,” she tells him. “I s_asaw him this mm_morning.”

She turns and continues the steep climb. After a moment, he follows. No one wants to walk the road alone. There are people who do, but they’re sad and mad and talk to invisibles, warding off loneliness in the company of ghosts.

Loon Man’s nervous twitching stops when we step into the milky glow of the streetlights, as if he thinks light can protect him. We follow the road as it crosses above the dark highway towards the racecourse. In the distance, the neon sign of the Casbah Roadhouse sparks and goes out. There’s always something fresh in the bins at Casbah at closing time. Usually, we’d head straight there, but Sindi keeps going until she gets to the patch of grass by the racecourse gates. We once sat for hours on the concrete bench here, waiting for Mama and Next-Door-Auntie to win big so we could go home. They lost so much they couldn’t pay the taxi fare. That was the first time we walked the highway.

Sindi leans against that same bench and yawns. I wonder if she’s ashamed to go through the bins in front of Loon Man, or if she just isn’t hungry. For the first time since we left the townhouses this morning, she examines her hand. Already, the flesh around the wound is red and swollen. She prods the area, sucks her teeth.

“You okay, child?”

Sindi nods and puts her hands in her pockets. Joshua Piepper takes out his flask. He offers it to Sindi but her eyes are closed. For a while he sits sipping at it, staring at nothing. Sindi’s breathing slows, deepening the stillness. It’s so quiet that when he speaks, I jump.

“Why are you here?” His voice like boots on wet gravel.

Long time after, when it begins to seem like the question never was, she pats the green blades. “The grass.”

“No, my child, not here on this patch of God’s ground, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m asking a bigger thing. Why are you here?”

The silence makes a hole in the night and it sucks me in.

“I was on the street too, long time ago now, but years, many years, so many I can’t give you a number, but it was long enough for me to grow old. Truth be told, I lived between the streets and prison.” He lifts his sleeve. The number 28 is tattooed on the inside of his wrist.

Sindi shifts, her eyes flicking behind their lids. She’s too tired to be interested in bedtime stories. And me? I don’t usually listen to other people’s stories – everyone has a story, I have stories of my own – but his voice pulls me away from the silent hole.

“Everyone comes from somewhere. There’s a beginning to every legend, some place we call home. Don’t matter if it’s a palace or a shack.”

I’ve heard this sermon before, at Saviour’s Pit Stop.

“There’s very few that’s born to the street. Even the street kids, they’ve got family out there. Whether they care or not, that’s a different story. Point is, you’ve got to start somewhere to end up here. The in-between, from there to here, that’s what I’m asking. Why are you here?”

A snore rolls in Sindi’s throat. Loon Man doesn’t seem to notice. He sips from his flask, his voice dipping until I can no longer follow – his lips seem to swallow the words just out of his mouth. Keeping mouse quiet, I slip closer and sit down on the bench.

He stops talking and frowns at me. “Why are you here? Why? Why? What do you want?” He reaches into his coat. His hand rests on his heart a minute, then draws out a piece of string tied around his neck. There’s something on the end of it, something black, and he rubs it between his thumb and finger, muttering like a crazy.

“Now flee from youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness!” he shouts, making me jump. He lifts the flask to his ear and shakes it, testing the level. “Look at me now, I’m one of God’s generals, but once I was a general of another kind. I was nineteen when I went to prison for the first time. I was a boy, but I thought I was a big man. Prison makes you realise you’re nothing, and if you want to survive, you better find your balls.” Loon Man slumps under the weight of his memories. He’s getting like Mama on payday after a few quarts of Black Label. “I spent twelve years in prison. I went in a burglar with a two-year sentence, came out a killer. To survive, you follow orders. They tell you to kill, you kill. God was with me. Even as I shed the blood of another man.” He stabs the air with an invisible knife. “I came out and I was going straight. Wife took me back and I did okay for a while.”

He trails off and just sits there, staring at the past and sipping from his flask. He’s beginning to bore me. I look at Sindi and wonder what she’s dreaming. I long to sleep, to dream the same dreams as my sisi, but I’m afraid of the dark, of the empty place I go to whenever I close my eyes.

“In his pride the wicked does not seek Him, in all his thoughts there is no room for God!” Loon Man’s roar knocks me off the bench.

“Janine got pregnant. Me, a father. I was happy, I was, but the pressure – didn’t think I could do a kid. In prison I ran from nobody; out in the world, I was scared of a baby. The night Sonny was born, I started to run. But you can’t run from the life God gives you, you can’t run from your legend. If you try, He will find a way to turn you, to make you pay.”

“Scaredy-cat man, scaredy-cat man, prison don’t bite but your baby can,” I sing, getting back on the bench.

“All I took was my gun, my phone and a bottle of whisky. I checked myself into the Carlton Hotel. A room on the twenty-eighth floor – twenty-eight, to remind me. I took a shower to wash the soot from my skin. My phone started ringing. I didn’t answer, but Janine kept calling and I thought, I owe her a goodbye. She told me about my boy. She said he had ten fingers, ten toes, she said they were so small but they were perfect. Tiny and perfect and blue.”

Loon Man stops talking. The silence buzzes, tense, waiting. I cling to the bench.

“Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt, for the tree is known by his fruit.” He slaps his thigh and I snap up straight, but I don’t fall. “I don’t remember anything else, just the sound of the air rushing in my ears as I fell. You know what it’s like falling buck naked through the air, my child, balls slapping against your arse? The ground was far away, didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I wanted to yell – not scream, I wasn’t scared. I wanted to shout. I was angry, but when I opened my mouth my cheeks filled up like plastic bags flapping in the wind. God silenced me.”

Loon Man sinks into his past, droning on about Sonny and twenty-eight floors and a life of sin, the words sliding round his mouth and coming out slurred and broken. He’s mumbling-shouting, raving-moaning, crying for poor Sonny who never stood a chance. Then, sudden as a finger click, he snaps out of it. “Listen, my child, God has plans for all of us. I fell twenty-eight floors and when I opened my eyes again I was nobody. The next twenty-eight years I spent on the street. I didn’t have the stomach to rob or kill any more. I wandered like Christ in the desert, looking for salvation. Almost thirty years. But I can offer it to you now, I can save you a lifetime of pain. Come with me, become one of my children and birth a Pure Child for God.”

He reaches over, puts his hand on Sindi’s shoulder and starts praying. “Jesus, save this child, bring her into our fold. Let her be a mother of your children, bless her clean blood and fertile womb. Keep her safe from unclean men, from infidels and Satan-worshippers. Save this child from the devil, don’t let her wander the streets for thirty years. Save her from my pain. I wasn’t strong, no Lord, I wasn’t strong like Jesus. I deserved my suffering. I gave in to temptation, I gave in to the devil. Don’t let this child escape You like I escaped You.”

I dance to Loon Man’s gospel raving. I sway and stamp and clap my hands, just like Sunday. “No Lord,” I shout when he shouts. “Save me,” I shout when he shouts. “Blessed be,” I shout when he shouts.

Then, rapid as it came, the raving stops and he shoots me a look. “They say there’s no place in heaven for babies with no name,” he says. “My boy died before I gave him a name. Tell me, demon, do you know my Sonny?”

I shake my head and give him a wide grin, stretching my lips so far back my teeth gleam against the night. I jive, still full of gospel. “Sonny’s dead, Sonny’s long-dead worm dinner, Sonny’s dead, long dead.”

Loon Man narrows his eyes. “You,” he says, pointing at me, his hand wrapped in string with the pendant tucked into his palm, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” He begins to pray, so soft at first I can’t hear the words; then, ever so slow, the volume rises. His words stroke me, wind around me, tie me up. I’m caught in the singing, swaying-swaying, and I don’t suss his game until the ropes are halfway up my legs.

“You tricked me!” I shriek, but he keeps praying. I wriggle. I squirm, but his prayers are binding. The hole made of silence opens wide, like a hungry mouth coming to swallow me. “Please, I’ll be a good girl.”

He holds out his pendant. It spins on tattered string.

“That’s just broken string,” I say.

He glances at the string, taking his eyes off me for a second. I begin to laugh. I laugh and laugh until my laughing fills me up and I balloon, big as a house, big as the world and when I pop, the dawn breaks, icy and grey.