The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  I rush at him, and he spits at me, racing back to the kitchen and out the window, into the balmy Cape Town night. It’s the first time I’ve seen the little bastard in weeks. I wonder where he’s sleeping now. In an open sewer somewhere, by the smell of him. I don’t smell much better, so who’s to judge. I pull the window closed but I can’t fasten it because the lock’s broken. Another thing on the list of boring domestic chores that never got done.

  I pick the shard out my foot and go back into the living room just as my alarm goes off, marking the end of the first twelve minutes. Harry McVeigh is starting to sing about the safety of the clouds out his window for the third time tonight.

  Christ. I’m really starting to hate this song.

  I restart the alarm, and turn the page.

  Step 2: Light their way home

  Dim the lights. Draw a circle on the ground in chalk or paint. As you draw the circle, whisper the words, “vinces diligunt mortem” three times. Place a candle in the centre, to guide your lover back to you.

  I don’t have a dimmer. So I grab the heavy throw from the couch, still rumpled up, and drape it over the floor lamp in the corner of the lounge. I turn off the overhead lights. The lamp is a glowing spectre in the darkness, watching me from the corner of the room. I should be used to this by now.

  I reach into the box of candles I’ve set aside. It’s empty. Fuck.

  All I want to do is lie down on the floor and sleep. Sleep until it’s all over. Because I can’t do this. Shanaaz needs me, and I can’t even get my shit together enough to make sure there are (bandages) candles. Here’s Kara fucking things up as usual. I can practically hear my father’s voice in my head, telling me how useless I am.

  Pull yourself together, girl. You can wallow in self-pity later.

  Trusty phone to the rescue, I guess. I open YouTube and search ‘one hour candle flickering’ and open the first of the apparently six thousand hour-long videos of flickering candles. Thank god for the Internet. Let’s hope that demons aren’t sticklers for tradition.

  I take a stick of red chalk from the bowl, assume the position kneeling on the carpet, and make my best attempt at drawing a circle around myself. It’s hard to make out the shape of it on the scuffed parquet floor.

  “Vinces diligunt mortem. Vinces diligunt mortem. Vinces diligunt mortem.”

  This is another thing lawyers have in common with demons. We’re both way too into Latin.

  (She always sits in the front of the classroom. I can’t actually remember her name. I’ve been drinking too much to avoid thinking about the fact that I’m broke and two years late with my PhD and my funding is about to run out and I’m still just a temp lecturer and they could fire me whenever they want and my fiancé left me last year for a fucking boy named Johannes and all my friends who got real jobs at law firms are buying houses and having babies… and to be honest, all the first years have blurred into each other by now. She’s a mid-blur smear. There’s nothing remotely special about her. If I thought about her for a second, which I haven’t, I’d describe her as idealistic, a people-pleaser, always moving in a pack, probably one of those girls who’ll join a legal aid clinic in the townships and get too emotionally invested in her clients until she retreats into the soft comforts of suburbia and motherhood.

  She comes to my office one afternoon to discuss one of her essays. “I just want to understand where I went wrong,” she says, taking a notepad and a pen shaped like a banana out her bag. I worry that she’s going to cry. They always cry. But she’s got a smile on her face, ready to take notes, eager to learn.

  “I felt like I was reading a sociology essay,” I begin, my words clipped, hoping to hurt her enough that she’ll just leave. “You missed the most basic difference between crime and delict. Criminal law doesn’t give a shit about justice for the victim. The law sees crime as a harm against society as a whole.”

  She smiles at me. I note that she’s got a chipped tooth, product of the public healthcare system. “A crime offends the natural order of things.”

  “Less esoteric than that, but yes, basically. The criminal must be punished even if the victim forgives them. Nullum crimen sine poena. There can be no crime without punishment.”

  “But what about restorative justice?”

  I pause, caught off-guard. “Someone’s been reading ahead.”

  She shrugs. “I’m the third sibling to do this degree. My parents only know about two university professions and I faint when I see blood, so medicine wasn’t an option.”

  “Well then, I’d have even more reason to expect a better essay from you.” That was unkind. I feel my face flushing. I stand to cover my awkwardness. “If you’ll excuse me. Office hours ended ten minutes ago and I didn’t eat lunch.”

  “Can I keep asking questions if I buy you dinner?” She stands too. Shorter than me, still smiling, not at all fussed by my prickliness.

  I’m completely bewildered now. “What?”

  “Well, a cheap dinner.” She laughs, loose and easy, like water. “My cousin’s having a braai. They’re making kebabs.”

  I’m so surprised that I agree before I know why. I steal glances at her as I drive us through to the Bo-Kaap. There are some signs. Short nails. Button shirt. Lip-ring. But I’m thrown off by her head-scarf, the little diamante S around her neck. Is this a date?

  We’re mobbed by family the moment we walk in the house. Everyone seems to be a cousin, or an in-law of a cousin. Someone puts a cider in my hand the moment I walk through the door and fifteen friendly strangers start asking me about my life. Weirdly, they even seem to care about my answers. Before I know it, I’m telling stories about growing up in Cradock, my verkrampte parents and their failing goose farm. They laugh at my bitter complaints like they are hilarious jokes.

  People hover around Shanaaz like she’s a brazier. She embraces everyone, holds their hands while she talks to them, cackles at their jokes. Already I feel a pang of jealousy. I have never seen anyone more loved by so many people. My eyes follow her everywhere, this girl I had dismissed as a blur, and I catch my breath and think: ‘oh’.)

  The alarm goes off. Another twelve minutes gone. I’ve just been kneeling here, trapped in my memories, running out of time. I can make it up to her. I swear I will. I can tell her how remarkable this warmth of hers is. How she banished my loneliness. How much I love her. But I’ve got to do this first.

  I silence the alarm. There are 52 unread messages on my phone. But who would I talk to, now? What could they possibly have to say? More wine. That’s what I need. I swallow several mouthfuls, relishing the sourness. Drink, you useless bitch. Drink until you can focus.

  I turn the page.

  Step 3: Invoke their memory

  Your lover has swallowed the waters of Lethe, they have already forgotten you. You’re going to have to remember them back into flesh. Re-member them. Embody them. Put on their favourite clothes. Look into the mirror. Tell it the best memories you have.

  Shanaaz loved this Pikachu onesie. Her brother bought it for her when he went to Japan. It was cleaner then. Sorry, baby. I’ll get you a new one. Let’s get you back, and then I’ll buy you five.

  She’d find any excuse to wear it.

  (Dress-up parties that Shanaaz wore the fucking Pikachu onesie to, and her explanation for each:

  Movie Stars: “There are six Pokemon movies, not even counting the TV specials.”

  Teenage You: “Pikachu fan since 1997, yo!”

  PJ party: “You know better than anyone that this is literally the only thing I ever wear in bed.”

  Swingin’ 60s: “No but listen—Satoshi Tajiri was born in the 60s.”)

  I bury my nose in the fur on my arm. It smelled like her for the first day or two, but now it smells like everything else in this flat. It smells like grief and feces.

  There’s a hand mirror propped up against the couch. I stare into it. I look like a vampire, all clammy skin and hollow eyes. But vampires don’t have reflections, I guess. At
least some people are spared the sight of the monster they’ve become.

  Tell it the best memories you have.

  I stare at her, this demon in the mirror. Memories. The good ones. Okay.

  My voice is hoarse. “I took you to the Bollywood festival at the Labia theatre. You never stopped finding the name funny, even though I explained I don’t know how many times that it was named for the Venetian countess.”

  (“But I mean come on, did they mos have to paint the building pink also? You’re telling me that’s not on purpose?”)

  “We bought vodka slushies and you got drunk and kept talking about how you loved every single movie. Each film was four hours long, but you made us watch three in one day.”

  (I tease you about this for weeks. Every time you come in for a kiss, I make a big show of touching the tips of our fingers together and then faking an orgasm. “Bollywood sex!” I laugh.)

  “You loved to sing,” my voice cracks. “You love to sing. You sing everywhere, you don’t care who can hear you. You dragged me to karaoke on Long Street on your birthday and I was a grumpy bitch about it, and I stood up on the stage and said the lyrics to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in a deadpan monotone in protest, but then you got up and sang ‘Love on Top’, smiling at me while you did your best Beyoncé impression, and every single person in that club fell in love with you, and I was so proud that you were mine.”

  (“Shan, I’m sorry I’m such a grumpy bitch sometimes.”

  You smile and you take my hand. “You are. But you’re my grumpy bitch.”)

  “And I said I would sing with you but only if we were alone, and it became our thing to sing in the car together, and you called it Kara-oke.”

  The face in the mirror stares back at me. She still looks monstrous. But maybe there’s some softness there, somewhere. Maybe there’s something in that creature that can still feel. Maybe it’s Shan, looking through my eyes.

  “White Lies” is reaching the chorus again. Christ, I really, really fucking hate this song by now. Trembling stars and tears dragged from cold eyes.

  I glance at my phone. Okay. More. The demons want more. Bare your soul. Sell them your memories. Whatever you’ve given them so far isn’t enough.

  Memories, Kara. The good memories, but all I can see is…

  (she’s lying there, still propped up against the bathtub where I left her. The book is in my hand, and I’m not sure where it came from, and I didn’t find any bandages but I found this book instead, and there’s something not right about her eyes, and I realise that they’re open but not blinking any more, they’re not blinking because…)

  …Shanaaz’s body on the floor of the bathroom…

  (she’s cold, and she’s so still, and it’s like at that moment a video clip starts playing, and it’s not real, because it can’t be, but I can’t stop it, or skip or rewind…)

  …things happening one after the other, increasingly impossible things. I remember teaching my students about the automatism defence, S v Stellmacher, the times when the natural logic of consequence is so powerful that the very concept of choice looks like madness. Extreme drunkenness, extreme emotions, moments when the interruption of consciousness vanishes and your limbs act on their own, like you are a machine.

  I shake my head. Grab the mirror. Get a grip, girl. You don’t have much time. Happier memories.

  “We’d sneak off to corners of the law building and make out in classrooms. Prof Higgins walked in on us and we tried to convince him you’d slipped and I was helping you up.”

  (The smell of you. The all-encompassing smell of you.)

  “You were out in Manenberg in the heart of the gangland, running those community workshops about the constitution. You went missing and they called your sister, and she phoned me in a panic asking if I knew where you were. I was in my car driving out to the township, ready to bring the army to come look for you, and they called to say you’d just wandered back to the town hall, you were having tea with some auntie you met and your phone died and you didn’t get why anyone was worried.”

  The phone alarm goes off. I silence it. This is going to take as long as it’s going to take.

  “And when you met my parents. I thought it was the worst day of my life.”

  (It’s 42 degrees in Cradock, and my parents haven’t stopped bickering since we arrived. They make little digs about you being a Muslim, and less subtle digs about their only daughter having turned into a rug-muncher and they should have known this would happen when they let me go off to an English university. My mom drops the potato bake and my dad shouts at her and my brother keeps turning the conversation to those awful terror attacks in Europe, nê, and this is the problem with letting refugees in who have different morals to decent folk. I make some excuse to leave early. The geese chase us on the way back to the car, flapping their wings, and I’m shaking as I pull off. I can’t bear to look at you, I’m so ashamed. And then there’s a noise from the passenger seat like you’re crying, but I look around and…)

  “You laughed and launched into an impression of the geese and my parents quacking with all their racist bullshit. ‘Flap attack!’ you said. ‘Although, hang on, that’s what they think we do to each other. Lesbian come-ons. Flap attack!’ I had to pull over, I was laughing so hard and it was like that for the rest of the drive down. All you had to do was link your thumbs and flap your hands and we’d be helpless with laughter. But you also held my knee as I drove and told me that you loved me more because I came from a place of so much anger and defied all that to be me.”

  My reflection looks the same as always. Except for the glassiness in my eyes.

  (“Shan,” I say, and I touch your cheek, but it’s cold, and I realise that you’re sitting in a puddle of your own shit, and I remember how some injuries mean people shit themselves when they die, but it never occurred to me before that it would smell.)

  It’s no good. I scrub my palms over my eyes. Turn the page.

  Step 4: Say their name

  Blood is passion, it connects you to others. Love is empathy. When you empathise, we say that your heart bleeds for them.

  So bleed for them. Bleed and write their name in your blood, in the centre of the circle.

  I’m out of wine. I stumble back to the kitchen and grab a fresh bottle from the cupboard, unlabelled plonk, tucked behind the dregs of the sherry. It’s the last one. I’d better nail it this time. Squirtle’s eyes glow at me through the window. I hiss at him and he slinks back into the night. Persistent fucker. We have that in common.

  I come back into the living room and hear the scuffles of tiny claws from the shoe box in the corner by the lamp. The mice are awake. But it’s not time for them yet. I remember the man at the pet store when I bought them, the strange smile when I asked for pinkies. “A girl who plays with snakes is a girl with a taste for danger,” he’d leered. I took the box without making eye contact with him and hurried out of the store.

  Over the past week, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the whole body is a map of blood vessels. There are the obvious places one could cut. Arms, hands. But arms and hands have so many nerves. Tendons. Bone. So easy to slip and slice too deep. My arms are already a mess of scars and scabs. Never thought I’d be a cutter. Who says people can’t change.

  I once read a case where some teenager talked his girlfriend into committing suicide over the phone. She’d cut into her femoral artery. The expert witness said it was the fastest way to die, but only if you could get to it. It takes a lot of determination to keep going, he said, to hack through all that flesh, pulling the strands of muscle apart, peeling back the skin…

  (her eyes are empty, they stare at nothing through a mask of blood, no baby, no baby don’t be dead, don’t be dead baby I’ll fix it…)

  I’m not going to accidentally kill myself slicing my leg. Probably the safest place. I stand up and pop open the buttons on Pikachu, peeling it off.

  There’s already blood on my thigh. I touch it with my fin
gers, confused, wondering whether somehow just thinking about it made it happen already.

  Oh. Stupid girl. It’s your period. I hadn’t even noticed.

  Well, I guess that’s convenient.

  I slide my fingers into my panties and coat them with blood. They come out slick, warm.

  (“You’re my honeypot,” I whisper, face in her cunt.)

  I squat over the circle and start to write her name.

  (She’s curled up on our bed, groaning. I place a mug of tea on the side table and sit down on the bed. She snuggles into me. I tuck her hair behind her ear and kiss her forehead.

  “Aren’t our magical womxnly wombs supposed to synchronise or something?” she says, muffled into my boob.

  “Poor little love.”

  “I want you to be suffering with me.”

  “I’ve queued up Vampire Diaries for us. That’s plenty suffering.”

  She sighs happily. “I love being in pain. It brings out the best in you.”)

  Her name, a thick red and brown smear on the floor. It looks like I’ve written over it a hundred times, like I’m trying to etch it into the floor. Shanaaz. Shanaaz. Shanaaz. Shanaaz.

  Someone knocks on the door.

  I bolt to my feet, heart galloping. It’s too soon. Wait for the knock on the door. You’ll know if you failed, because something will come to find you, but it won’t be your lover.

  There’s another knock. Then three quick raps. Someone is at the door. Someone who is not my lover.

  I reach down silently and pull the onesie back up around my hips, clutching it closed in the front. Something is moving out there. The floorboards creak slightly under the weight of something heavy. Heavier than Shanaaz.

  I take another sip of wine. Dutch courage. Walk slowly to the door, trying to be as quiet as I can. I peep through the doorhole, but all I can see is a dark shape in the hallway.

  “Kara?” a quavering man’s voice, heavy on the Italian accent. “Kara, you there?” My downstairs neighbour.