The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  The water grew cold and the tips of her fingers turned into prunes. What would, what would? Then the answer hit. Obvious. So obvious.

  She reeled her body upwards, one arm fishing for the towel.

  The Bunny. The damn Bunny would know. Time to suck it up and go say hello.

  - 32 - SANS

  Sans was chucking cards onto the boot of a car with his regular bunch of dead collector chums. The only female dead collector, Faith, didn’t seem interested in playing today. She was leaning against a street pole, thumbing through that rag of hers again. He’d lost three games in a row already, more fuel to fire his already foul mood, and the chick thumbing through the rag was sommer annoying him.

  Her guardjie, the mullet-head with the lame name, saw him looking irritably her way and gave a shrug.

  “I don’t know why you read that rubbish,” Sans called out. “The Daily Lies, more like it. And that Lawyer guy?” He made screwy signs with his fingers to his head. “I heard he was locked up in Lentegeur—you know, the mental hospital?”

  The guardjie slapped down a card, then dug his greasy glove into a bag of crisps.

  “Yes, yes,” said Faith, nose still in the folds of the rag. “I’ve heard it all before and I don’t care.”

  “Crocodiles in the sewers. Mutant rats. Shady men who control the world,” Sans tried again. “It’s always the same bullshit, isn’t it? You do know that it’s all bullshit, right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You shouldn’t be so quick to discount everything that blows you out of your comfort zone. John Lennon said he believes in everything until it’s disproved. He’s even been quoted as saying: ‘I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?’ ”

  “John Lennon! Really? So, we’re quoting a wife beater now, who threw his own firstborn son away like he was trash and cheated on his wife? Or are you going to be telling me now that that’s also fake news? One of your alternative facts?”

  “Wife beater? What are you talking about?”

  “Ah, see. You don’t know everything.”

  The dead collector shrugged, and her blue locks gave a quick bounce. “Whatever. All I’m saying is that there are more things in heaven and earth and all that. So it’s best not to jump to conclusions before you’re sure you have the whole picture.”

  Shakespeare. The chick had just quoted Shakespeare, although he doubted the little conspiracy nut knew it herself. What was it with all the cherries in his life quoting Shakespeare suddenly? His mother, God rest her soul, had loved Hamlet. Read it to him as a bedtime story. Maybe that was why the line did the trick, or maybe he was just feeling desperate. “Say, talking about more things in heaven and earth . . . Does that rag of yours have a classifieds section?”

  “Yes, so?”

  “I’ve got this friend, right?”

  “Yes. So what? Is he an unimaginative bastard like you?”

  “Ouch!”

  “I just tell it like it is.”

  “So, about my friend,” he continued, brushing off the sting. “He needs an expert of some sort. Only he doesn’t quite know what kind of expert yet. He’s going a bit haywire. Thinks he might be hallucinating and such.”

  “Sounds like he needs to see a psychologist.”

  “Yes. That’s what I told him. But he’s got a hang-up with head doctors. So I was wondering, what would your rag recommend for someone like that?”

  “My rag?”

  “Your highly respected, quality newspaper, I mean.”

  She shifted her weight against the pole, closed the rag, and folded her arms. “Fine. There are stories doing the rounds. Stories about spirits.”

  “Spirits? Barmen mixing alcohol with methanol, you mean, and causing brain damage? That’s old news.” Sans scratched his head. “I suppose it could be brain damage, mind you, I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, that would suck for him, but it’s better than being crazy, right?”

  “No. Not those kinds of spirits. Dead people. Ghosts.”

  His eyeballs did a loop. He looked at the mullet-head, but the guy was focused on getting the last bits out of his crisps packet. He couldn’t tell whether he was paying any attention to this conversation. “No thank you. No way. No such thing as ghosts. Don’t believe in ’em. Never have, never will.”

  “Me, neither, to tell you the truth,” she said, stroking a nasty purple bruise above her left eyebrow. “My guess is guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  “It can do strange things to a person. And the way I figure it, you’re not—I mean your friend’s not—exactly choirboy material, is he?”

  “Hey, lady, what are you implying?”

  “You asked for my opinion. There you have it. By the way, if your friend wants a hand with his conscience, I know a guy.”

  A snort. “I think my conscience is good, thanks.”

  “And your friend’s?”

  “Just dandy.”

  “Oh, well, that’s great, then.”

  “Maybe my friend’s just hitting the bottle too much. It’s more likely that.”

  “Maybe, but . . .”

  “What? Spit it out.”

  “Personally, your ‘friend’ sounds like he could do with the services of a sin-eater.”

  “A what?”

  All the card players looked up. Even the guardjie.

  “Fred Mostert. Big guy. Sin-eater.”

  The guardjie nodded knowingly, scrunched up the empty packet into a ball, and stuck it into his jacket pocket.

  “So you don’t know everything, then?” Faith said, tapping her copy of the Daily Truth as if that were some kind of oracle. “There’s this guy. Hangs out at the Green Point Sanatorium. Bills himself as a kind of all-around Happy Meal of a white-sangoma-ghostbuster-priest-karma-doctor. But his main deal is sin-eating. It’s a family trade.”

  “What the hell is sin-eating, though?”

  “He absolves sick people’s sins by eating them. Far as I know, some of the European colonists brought the ritual with them when they first set up camp here to plant their veggie garden. Funny to think that planting one pretty little garden ended up causing so much hell, and generations of it at that, don’t you think?”

  “Like the Garden of Eden.”

  “Touché. That makes two gardens, then. Best we all lay down our trowels and stop planting gardens right away. Weapons of mass destruction, I tell you.”

  Sans couldn’t be sure, but he thought he detected a small crease around her eyes, a smile brewing underneath the dead collector’s mask. Was she just laughing at her own joke, or thawing to him?

  “Anyway. I see Fred around now and again—our paths tend to cross. We both spend a lot of time hanging around the dead and the dying. He’s a sweetie. You’ll find him most days in Green Point, at the sanatorium, although sometimes they chase him away. He’s also got fingers in other pies, not always steak and kidney.” The crinkle at the eyes again. “Word is that he’s legit, the real deal. Either that or he’s a hell of a good scam artist.”

  Sans’s guess leaned towards the latter, but something was dawning on him. He did know this guy. Or he’d seen his name somewhere, and recently. “Does he also find lost things? Love? Money?”

  “Multiskilled, as they say. But then you have to be, in this city.”

  Sans didn’t like the way she was looking at him.

  “Probably penis enlargement, too. Tell your friend.”

  “Ouch. Funny. But seriously, ghost-eating? I mean, you’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “Sin-eating. And fair enough. It sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it? But that’s all I have. Barring a trip to the psychiatrist. We’re living in interesting times, my friend.” She poked him in the ribs with the rolled-up rag. “As I said before: Who are we to be the judge of what’s ridiculous or not?”

  Sans found himself counting her dreads, wor
king out how much they were worth. Pity she’d gone and dyed them blue. She might have been a real cash cow.

  The buzz in his pocket made his whole body rock.

  “You okay?” asked the dead collector.

  “Golden.” He swallowed back the bile, his throat burning with sick. “Out of interest’s sake. About finding lost money. Do you think—?”

  From inside the dead collector’s van, a radio crackled. “Sorry. Gotta go. There are grinners waiting. Come on, Ash.”

  Sans watched them go. Screwed. He was still screwed. Sin-eater his ass. It was his cash he needed—no time to waste on fairy tales. So he went back home. To pour himself a drink. Have a sandwich. Think about his sins. Ponder the merits of the concept of karma.

  Was it two, three, maybe four drinks later that he climbed the stairs again to the top of the Absa building to make the call? No one was counting, especially not him, so he couldn’t be sure, but his legs felt heavy and the climb to the top felt like a bad case of earworm, as if he were climbing the same stair after stair after stair, over and over on repeat. He was starting to think that he’d succumbed and purgatory was one never-ending Escher painting when he finally reached the roof to phone the bloody guilt-eating, ghost-swallowing, money-whispering whatever-he-was. He punched in the number. The phone rang and rang for what felt like forever. Until it didn’t.

  “Hello,” said the man on the other side.

  Wrong number, he wanted to say, then chuck the blinking-message-flashing-piece-of-shit-harbinger-of-doom down the side of the building to scatter into a million plastic pieces down below. But he didn’t. Idiot. He said hi.

  Later, looking back on all of this and replaying the order of events in his head, he would figure out that this was the moment. The moment when it all went from tits up to tits overboard. If meeting the unicorn was what plunged him into the rabbit hole in the first place, this was the moment his ass hit the other side.

  - 33 - FAITH

  Faith hadn’t yet gotten to page three, what with Pony Boy interrupting her, but if she had, there was something else she might have told him. There was this article in today’s Truth claiming the injections distributed via the city’s postboxes were making some unlucky souls hallucinate.

  She read and reread the article with interest. Maybe that was what was wrong with Pony Boy’s “friend”? Hadn’t Ash told her he’d seen Sans talking to himself the other day? She should probably tell him when she saw him again. Tomorrow. She wouldn’t forget. Tomorrow. Tomorrow Focus, Faith, focus.

  The therapy bar was packed. Faith pushed through the crowd, squeezing her limbs through the gaps, careful not to touch any arms or hips or hands or ears or shoulders. It made her think of that game they used to play as children at school fairs. There was this curved piece of wire attached to a plank and you had to navigate the bends with a metal loop without the loop touching the wire—otherwise a buzzer would go off. She used to love that game, would always make it right through to the end of the wire to win something, a plastic toy or a piece of candy. Steady hands. She’d had steady hands back then.

  She made her way to the edge of the ring where a waitress in a short skirt was waiting around looking bored while balancing a serving tray on her head with a lone beer on top of it. On the other side of the ropes, a good-looking guy in his twenties wearing red overalls adorned with shiny reflectors (a paramedic, perhaps) was beating up his patsy for the night, a giant furry teddy bear, who was taking the hits like a champ.

  When the teddy took a tumble, Pretty Boy paused for a second, wiped the sweat from his brow with one gloved hand, and motioned to the waitress, who unbalanced the tray from the top of her head and handed him his beer. Pretty Boy took one swig and broke the bottle against Teddy’s head. A buzzer went off and the referee waved a red card. Pretty Boy just shrugged, took out an R200 note from his pants pocket, and waved it at the referee, who conferred with the floored bear in a whisper, then took the money and nodded at Pretty Boy to continue.

  “Excuse me,” said Faith to the waitress, who was inspecting her red come-to-bed nails for any imperfections through her transparent gloves. The waitress looked up at Faith. Her mask had a see-through slit, to show off her red lips (the same shade as her nails), which she now puckered into a disapproving pout. “If you need a drink, you’ll have to get it at the bar. I only wait on the patients.”

  “No. I know. I don’t want a drink. I’m looking for someone. One of your therapists.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Easter Bunny. Is he in tonight?”

  “You mean Lawyer? He’s not just a bunny, you know. That’s just one of his suits.”

  “Yes. Sure. Is he working tonight?”

  “Why should I tell you?” asked the waitress. Behind her back Pretty Boy had proceeded to take a running leap from atop the ropes and was now straddling the bear on all fours while pummeling its furry head with murder in his pretty blue eyes. The sight made Faith’s stomach spin.

  She focused her attention back on the waitress. “Why shouldn’t you?” she asked.

  The waitress sighed, rolled her eyes like a queen. “Fine. Whatever. Out back, in the alley by the changing rooms. He’s on his break.”

  * * *

  The Easter Bunny was leaning against the wall between a scrawny guy in a Stormtrooper suit, who was sitting on his helmet, nursing a black eye with an ice pack, and another waitress wearing an even shorter skirt than her colleague inside. He must have been saying something very funny to the Stormtrooper because he was laughing so much he almost dropped his ice pack. (Despite herself, Faith was impressed. These days not a lot of people had the balls to laugh like that.) The waitress just puffed on her cigarette, the milky smoke curling up towards the tar-black sky in lazy question marks. Faith wondered how much tip money she had to make to be able to afford one of those. Or maybe the Stormtrooper had given her one? Word around town was that being a live punching bag paid a mint. Although you could only do it for so long before all those kicks to the head started messing with your brain.

  “Lawyer?”

  The Easter Bunny dropped his sentence midway and looked up. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.” His mask was wrapped around his chin while he smoked and his bare lips turned up into a smile but his eyes didn’t follow suit.

  “Well, I certainly never expected to see you again,” he said later while they stood squeezed together in his dressing room, which was just about bigger than a toilet cubicle. A row of suits hung on hooks against the yellow plasterboard wall—different skins at the ready for him to slip into. Next to the door was an intercom panel that buzzed out your name if a customer selected you from the menu.

  “A nice surprise, then?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, hanging his big bunny head on a hook on the wall.

  “Come on. You didn’t miss me?”

  The Bunny sat down on the cubicle’s only chair. It must be hot inside all that fur, she thought, as sweat pooled at his eyebrows and along the sides of his ears. “Really? You just up and vanish in the middle of the night, taking my two best T-shirts with you, and then you pop in here weeks—months!—later and ask me if I’ve missed you? You can’t be serious.”

  “Come on. It’s not like we were that serious or anything.” Faith ran her fingers though her hair. “You knew I wasn’t into that.”

  The Bunny propped one paw onto the cubicle’s tiny dressing table and glared at her. “Into what?”

  “Relationships.”

  “You say it like it’s a swear word.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, hell, Faith, it’s not like I thought we were going to grow old together or anything, but three years. Three years! Was it really necessary to vanish without saying a damn word, stealing two perfectly good shirts on top of it?”

  “I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “I mean, what kind of person breaks up with someone else via Post-it Note?”
>
  “I . . . I don’t know.” Faith sighed. “What do you want me to say, Lawyer? That I’m an idiot? That I’m sorry?”

  “Hmph,” the Bunny snorted. “And then some.” He folded his arms, leaned back into his chair until its front legs lifted and the back of his head kissed the wall.

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  There was a patch of dried blood on his fur, just below the knee. Faith watched him pick at it for a bit. She needed to choose her moment.

  “So. Go on. What is it? What do you need?” Lawyer looked up, stared straight at her.

  “What makes you think I need something?”

  “Do you take me for an idiot? Just because I get beat up for a living doesn’t mean I’ve got shit for brains. Well, at least not yet.”

  Faith stared up at the costumes on the wall: a doctor’s coat, a black cloak (a judge’s robe, maybe, or the Grim Reaper’s), a yellow health-worker’s suit, a policeman’s uniform, a proper suit and tie, a bright purple dinosaur. “So what’s new at the Truth? Anything juicy?”

  His frown softened, petered out. “Fine. I’ll bite. But just because I miss talking to you about this stuff. I’ve got some interesting intel on the Laughter. A source who’s saying it’s a prion disease.”

  “A what?”

  “A prion disease. Don’t know much about it. Hell, I almost failed biology. But the way I understand, it’s like a neuro-thingymajig thing. A brain disease. Affects the nervous system. In the fifties, these cannibals in Papua New Guinea—”

  “Whoa. Hold on. Cannibals?”

  “Yup. Funerary cannibalism. They ate their dead. A way of returning their life force to the community. Sounds kind of romantic, doesn’t it? Becoming one with your loved ones and such.”

  “Ugh. No way, Lawyer.”

  “To each their own. Point is, you only get it when you eat people. The disease. And get this, Faithie—one of the symptoms is uncontrollable laughter.”