Читать книгу Sister-Sister - Rachel Zadok - Страница 9

Bad Things

Sindi lies curled on the grass, frost lapping her coat. I kiss her cracked lips, dead-man blue, and she opens her eyes. She stares at the tiny ice crystals clinging to the grass, focusing on nothing, focusing on nowhere.

Dawn bathes the streets in a clinical light that reminds me of the corridors in Bara Hospital, late at night.

“Don’t leave me,” I begged them, “take me home, don’t leave me alone.” But they left me there, with all the people skinny-limbed and dying.

Sindi sits up and rubs her face. She looks around, brow creased, as if she’s trying to remember if Loon Man was dream or reality.

“Everything’s a matter of which way you’re looking, and which day you’re looking from,” I tell her. It’s true. What was real yesterday is today’s dream, and it works backwards too. If you’re lucky, you dream good things.

We’re ready to walk when something catches her eye. I follow her gaze and there on the grass in a tangle is Loon Man’s necklace. She picks it up and holds it in front of her face. A black cross dangles from the frayed string. The cross is hand-carved, the rough wood darkened by the rub of oily fingers. It looks like a shadow suspended in the air, a cross-shaped hole in the day. Even the beaten copper eye, set into its centre, eats light.

The cross spins as the tangle unwinds, back and forth, trying to decide which way to settle. It finally stops with its back to Sindi, looking at me. Inside me, in my guts, I know. Bad things come.

Three days we walk, going nowhere. During the morning rush hour on the second day, a lady with bloodshot lips and eyes winds down her window and shakes a clear plastic bag containing a sandwich and an apple at us.

“Where you going?” She smiles, displaying lipstick-smeared too-white teeth. Sindi takes the bag and sticks her hand through the window, pointing at a bottle of water. The woman shrinks back, afraid.

“Please,” Sindi says, remembering her manners. The woman hands it over, winds up her window and stares straight ahead, as if she’s afraid we’re going to ask for more.

Sindi mutters her thanks to the glass, walks on. Later, when the cars are zooming again, she sits on the embankment and eats the sandwich. The apple she pockets for later.

On the third day, we come to the fence of the Reading Car Yard. It used to be a golf course until the government bought the grounds and turned it into a scrap yard for all the petrol cars they seized on D-Day. They fenced it in and posted guards in towers, but most of the cars still ended up back on the streets as b-diesel junks. Then some government clever wised up. Now the towers that punctuate the empty sky are rusting, and nobody watches over the pack of dogs they keep just hungry enough to bite.

We sit halfway up the embankment and wait for the rush hour, but it doesn’t come and we know it’s Saturday: Saturday and Sunday, the roads don’t clog. If we were any good at counting, we’d know they were coming. But the days stretch without end; dawn comes, night descends, nothing happens, we lose count. MondayTuesdayWednesdaySaturday who cares. It wasn’t always like that.

I stare at the highway winding round the city, at the trucks that work seven days, all hours. They slide onto the N3 and rush to the coast, leaving us behind. It’s far from here to the sea, but we were there one time: on New Year’s Eve, the beach jammed and crowded. I held Sindi’s hand as the waves rushed between my legs and tried to suck me under. I want to go there now, hitch a ride with a trucker back to when we were eleven and still happy, but my memories pull back like the waves and all I can remember is the salt on my lips and the feel of Sindi’s hand, slippery as a fresh-caught fish. And then it’s gone, and thinking of the sea makes my mind black.

I stand behind my sisi like her disobedient shadow, staring-staring at the billboards mounting the roadside, windows into lives we’ll never have; staring-staring at the ragged city sky and the cardboard-and-corrugated shacks where only children live because everyone else has died. And the clouds.

Sindi used to think that clouds were spookasem that had been blown off the stick by the wind. Next-Door-Auntie laughed when she told her that. “Ag child, that the dumbest thing you ever said. If clouds are made from candyfloss,” and she pointed at the white filaments scraped across the blue, “why don’t the rain taste sweet?”

Sindi stamped on Next-Door-Auntie’s foot. Mama saw and she caught a slap. We ran away to the veld and sulked for the rest of the day. Later, when the sun went underground and the clouds turned pink, she said see, but I could tell she no longer believed.

It hardly rains any more. The cirrus clouds that wrinkle this faded sky are mean and meaningless. They leave the city to suffocate under the dust that creeps into everywhere, powdering our cheeks until we look like ghosts. With each passing season, circling this road, I feel how it sucks at our juice. We are being slow-baked, hardened like tar. In summer the heat plucks our flesh, stealing sweat and blood and tears; in winter the cold freeze-dries our bones. When we pee, if we pee at all, it splashes up onto our shoes. The soil doesn’t want our water. There is nothing this earth wants from us, and we have nothing left to give.

The sun climbs the sky. Noon and too hot. Less than a kilometre from where we sit, the shadow of the overpass spills onto the road like a purple pond.

“Shade, Sisi,” I whisper, but my voice is a breathless breeze. Sindi sits still as a lizard on a rock. Sweat beads on her top lip and her dusty lids sink over fever-yellow eyes.

In the distance, a motorbike breaks the flat line of the horizon. The rider hunches into his machine, going so fast the roar of the engine thunders over the concrete and warps the still air into a watery mirage after the bike has passed us by. Sindi hardly notices. A cloud blocks the sun and turns the air cold. Sindi drops her head onto her knees. I can almost taste the sweetness of her sweat on my tongue, a faint whiff like roadkilled dogs baking in the sun. Then the cloud moves on and for a time it’s hot again.

The shadows are long when she lifts her head, face puffy from the stuffiness between her legs. She holds out her dog-bitten hand, pulpy as a rotten plum. She prods it, pushing and squeezing her palm until the pain stretches lips over gums and her fingers spasm. Nothing she does, not bending or pushing, not pulling or pressing, can make the claw back into a hand. I stare at the claw-hand that’s too old and deformed to belong to my sisi but pokes from the sleeve of her coat, stare at the fingers that pulling can’t make straight, stare at the black dog-tooth pits oozing.

And inside me, in my guts, I know. Bad things come.

The dusky light that borders night flattens the city and reduces the squatter camp across the way to a single row of shacks. Smoke from cooking fires winds upwards; the spirals twist together until the smoke is too fat and heavy for the air to hold and it sinks back like a sigh onto the low roofs. Cold drops on us.

Sindi’s head rests again between her knees. I sit next to her, my palm pressed between her shoulder blades, concentrating on the whispering of her breath and the rising-sinking, rising-sinking of her back.

I watch the shadows move between the shacks: the shades of men drinking and women cooking, the shades of children playing and dogs sniffing. Everything’s humming along. The smoke drifts, opening up their lives for me to see; then it wraps them up and hides them away again. The smell of shack life – of burnt wood, of samp sticking to the bottoms of pots, of meat shrinking in a gravy of water and cabbage, of people’s shit and dogs’ shit and rot and rubbish – drifts across the lanes, ignoring the concrete barrier that separates cars going west from cars going east, and sticks its fingers up my nose. Noises float over the highway and take me home.

Mama squatting by the government tap at the end of our street, talking to Next-Door-Auntie while she scraped plates with her fingers. Behind them, the queue swapping chat while a ten-feathers-chicken tikked at the crumbs of pap Mama flicked from her fingers, running circles whenever she turned on the tap to rinse.

“Whose hen is it?” Someone pointed at ten-feathers with a dirty pan.

“Daai anorexic ding?” The whitey who stood at the junction by the mall every day begging change shook her head. “Looks like Gogo Nkosi’s chicken, they all scrawny like that one.”

“Looks like Gogo Nkosi,” came a shout from the back of the queue. Everyone laughed.

Across the highway, a woman screams. Someone shouts and bangs a pot against the corrugated wall of a shack, and the dogs in the camp pick up the commotion. A shot cracks, and two shadows break free from the haze and run down to the road. They bolt across the lanes, not pausing to look. Without slowing their pace, they vault the concrete barrier and make it almost all the way to our side before a man leaps clear of the line of shacks. In one hand, he holds a gun. He shuffles down the embankment, but he isn’t as easy on his feet as the boys. Arms windmilling, he slides the last couple of metres to the road.

“You fucking shits, I’m going to kill you!” he yells, thrusting his hand forward. Gunshot fractures the air.

Sindi’s head snaps up. She sees the two boys running up the embankment, she sees the man with the gun. She stands, too quick, and sways as the man fires again. The boys bolt past her. They’re fourteen, maybe fifteen, about the same height as us; the one in the front wears a dark, oversized coat that flaps behind him. In the low light, Sindi might look the same to the gunman.

“Run, Sisi!” I yell, and she runs.

The boys are fast. They disappear over the top and we scramble after, not looking back to check if the man with the gun is following. As we crest the ridge, we see the boys pull back the KEEP OUT – GOVT. PROPERTY sign and slip through an open seam in the rusted car-yard fence. The fence rattles as the sign swings back, closing the gap behind them.

The fence stretches for a kilometre. We’ve walked it before, dragging a stick along the links until the guard dogs came, barking-barking, snapping and snarling. The man with the gun could pick off someone running along it, easy.

Sindi heaves back the sign and slips through the gap, but she doesn’t duck low enough and a wire snags in her hair. I bounce on my toes. The man is coming. Clambering over the barrier in the middle of the road, gun tight in his grip. Sindi twists and turns, trying to pull free, but the wire works deeper into the mat of her hair and won’t let go.

The gunman is coming.

She grabs her hair and rips it free, leaving a tuft for the wire as a toll. Grunting, she lurches into the scrap yard.

The ground swells around us in uneven mounds and slopes. The earth remembers the shape of the course, though the lawns are long dead and no one plays golf here any more. Ahead, a dark mountain of dumped petrol-cars rises into the deepening night, rusting and rotting, the biggest pile-up I’ve ever seen.

Sindi stumbles, already struggling for breath. Her skin, slick with sweat, looks plastic. The boys throw her a look and I wonder if they think she’s the man with the gun. Behind us, the fence rattles.

“I’m going to get you, hear? I’m going to fucking get you.”

I can feel the man’s fingers twisting around the gritty wire like they’re around my neck. Then, somewhere in the hollow space between the petrol-cars and the fence, the pack begins to bark.

The dogs are coming.

The boys run towards the car-mountain and veer left when they reach the tangle of slumped bumpers and gutted chassis. Sindi leans forward, trying to push herself, faster-faster, but her legs aren’t listening and her feet smack the dust slow-mo. We both scan over our shoulders, checking for dogs, checking for the man, and in that second the boys vanish, like they’re witchdoctors, spirit people, ghosts.

The pile-up stretches as far as I can see into the dusk. There’s no way over, and the way around, left or right, would leave us open to the gun or the dogs. But the boys went left, and they’re gone.

Sindi ducks left, hunching as she runs to look for the crawl-space, that magic door the boys have vanished through. The cars are jammed tight, some crushed flat as 2D by the tons of metal above. Each car is like a brick in a wall, the spaces between only big enough to stash a baby.

And the gunman is coming.

Frantic, Sindi starts pushing – pushing the bumpers, the squashed hoods, the doors of the side-on cars; running-running, pushing-pushing, looking for spaces, gaps, big or small, any place wide enough to crawl into and deep enough to hide in.

Because the dogs are coming.

I can hear them, snapping-snarling, and the man, swearing and rattling the fence. Sindi stops. Her breath heaves in, out. She stands, arms at her sides, fists clenched, and faces the wall of cars.

A third shot cracks. A dog yelps. Its life snaps away: in a finger-click it’s gone. I hear the brother-dogs, the sister-dogs, crying-crying. Then they’re on the move again, away from the fence and the man and the gun. And he’s climbing; his weight sends a reverb down the wire.

The gunman is coming.

Sindi looks around, wild; looks left, looks right, looks left, looks up. A shadow shifts. I narrow my eyes. There’s a dark gap, four or five metres above us, between a trailer and an old tanker, the round kind for transporting fuel or milk. The circular back-end of the tanker is facing us and juts out a little over the cars. The trailer is jammed into the pile just above, and the container it was carrying tilts at an angle, creating a triangular space: a narrow tunnel too small to stand in but big enough to crawl through on hands and knees. The boys must have gone in there. Maybe it leads all the way through to the other side.

Using bumpers and empty headlight sockets as steps and handholds, Sindi reaches the tanker quick-quick, coming up on its left-hand side. Up close I see it was once painted green, but the paint’s faded and the company logo’s covered in scabs of rust. On the right, the rungs of a ladder climb the flat back of the tanker. Sindi stretches for it, but it’s at least twice as far as she can reach. I scan the grounds. I can’t see the man but I feel his madness.

Sindi presses her body against the flat back of the tanker and edges along the bumper, arms stiff, fingers spread, desperate for something to grasp. Don’t look down, I think, but halfway across, she does. The world turns.

Sisi’s going to fall and the dogs are going to eat her.

A bead of sweat rolls down her face and plummets to the ground.

Sisi’s going to fall and the man is going to shoot her.

Sindi lunges for the ladder. For a split second the top half of her body seems to disconnect from her hips. Her fingers graze one rung, then another, and she lifts one foot to give herself the extra reach she needs. As her hand closes over the third rung, her other foot slides off the bumper. She pivots on her wrist and slams into the ladder, yelping like that dog she almost killed. The sound of impact echoes through the hollow length of the trailer. For a moment she hangs, frozen midair; then she twists to face the tanker, settles her feet on the ladder and begins to climb.

I taste my heart as I inch across the bumper, praying the gunman didn’t hear her cry out. We’re easy targets: Sindi stands out against the pale-green paint like a bird against the sun. I’m sure he’s going to pick her off, but she moves with surprising speed, wriggling into the tight space under the container before I reach the ladder. The hole swallows her.

By the time I stick my head into the space behind her, her feet have disappeared. The dark closes in, heavier than night-dark, than normal dark. It has a fatness, as if all the cars pressing down from above have squeezed it into something solid. We crawl into the car mountain like two blind mice. I can’t even see the soles of Sindi’s boots, though if I move too fast I bump against them. This is a place that has never known light.

The air is soupy with smells. Engine oil and the grit of rust are sharp in my throat. The stink of damp carpets, sun-perished seat leather and rotting foam rubber clots my nostrils like fungus spores. I can even taste the cigarette butts in the ashtrays. The space becomes tighter the further in we go. There are dents in the tanker and the unevenness makes the blackness shrink and swell. As we inch along, the tunnel pushes down, getting tighter and tighter until it scrapes against the top of my head. Soon, I’m forced to lie flat on my belly and pull myself along the porous metal, the skin of my palms hot with friction. I can’t hear the dogs barking or the man shouting any more. Nothing penetrates the dense air. Even Sindi’s breathing is thick, as if someone’s stuffed a wet cloth into her mouth.

My head bumps against the soles of her boots. I lie there, waiting for her to move, ears straining against the ink. For a long time, there is only silence. Then I hear scratching, small at first, but rapidly increasing into a frantic scrabbling, fingernails on rust, and the stink of Sindi’s panic closes around me and I know: the boys didn’t come this way.

In the dark there’s no way to tell how much time has passed, or if the hours move fast or slow. How do we know the clock is still ticking, or if the cogs are stuck and the hands, twitching-twitching, count the same second over and over?

In the dark it is cold. The icy night air seeps into the scrap mountain, between bumpers that jut at odd angles, through sagging windscreens, over bonnets and roofs where rust has eaten away hope and shine and Mama Moon’s light glints off broken glass. The cold presses in, layering chill over chill until the metal shrinks and groans. It sinks towards us. When it reaches the tanker beneath us and the trailer above us, it swaps frost for body heat.

In the dark sounds are big and small, there and not there. The metal creaks and moans and complains. Our tomb speaks, saying things we don’t want to understand, but do. It tells us it’s easy to crawl into its belly. It says there is no way out. Around us things scratch, fall silent, scratch. Tiny nails scrape, tiny teeth nibble, small creatures burrow into the rotten seat stuffing. The mountain is alive. The mountain is dead.

I forget Sindi.

She’s so silent, drifting in, drifting out, asleep, awake, afraid, afraid, dreaming-dreaming. The dark’s a swamp. It drowns my mind and steals my memories. I try to hold on, but it’s more than I am.

After a while, the dark pressing down on me begins to feel good, like when Mama squashed my face between her breasts and held me there until I couldn’t breathe. The dark feels safe. I close my eyes.

I forget me.