Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  The buzzing sound was emanating from an electric hair clipper, wielded by a young man in a neon-green jumpsuit. He was dangling from abseil gear, his feet wedged on either side of the unfortunate corpse he was shearing. It was a young mother, judging by the burp cloth still draped over her shoulder. No doubt the victim of social shame inflicted by one of the cruel mom cliques that ruled the city’s playgrounds. As the dead woman’s long black hair parted company from her scalp, it came to life. It writhed and twisted, so that green jumpsuit guy had to wrap it round his wrist to keep it from slithering away into the sky.

  “Hey, you skabenga! What are you doing?” Unathi yelled, which was perhaps not the most prudent of plans. The young man startled so badly that he lost his grip on his anchor line. The rope screamed through the carabiner. He grabbed for it, but it burnt through his palm and came free, dropping him out of the air. He landed on his neck with a grisly crunch. The spasming hair wriggled free of his wrist and slithered away into the mossy hollows between the tree roots.

  “Is he?” the writer asked.

  “Dead,” Unathi confirmed, kicking the corpse. The hair clipper was still buzzing in his hand. “Now what?”

  “You could always follow the extension cable,” the cat said.

  “We could always follow the extension cable,” Unathi said, ignoring the cat. She yanked at the electric cord attached to the vibrating hair clipper and started reeling it in.

  The cable wound between trees, over glens and at some point, with little heed for electrical safety, right through a babbling brook.

  “I wonder why they didn’t use batteries,” Haruki said, jumping over the brook. The cat was back to riding his shoulder.

  “We ran out,” a voice replied from the shadowy glade up ahead. Unathi and the writer stepped into a ring of trees to find a slight man with glasses and a rumpled suit sitting atop an oozing mound with Mickey Mouse ears, pointy fangs and gargantuan cartoon eyes swiveling in opposite directions. Bright paint leaked down the sides of the mound and saturated the grass beneath it in camouflage whorls of color. It grinned at them and rolled its eyes.

  Beside the mound an oversized generator hummed happily, a tangle of extension cords like Medusa dreadlocks running away from it to feed power to other hair clippers in other parts of the forest, shearing other suicides of their bewitched locks.

  Gathered around the mound were young men and women in various shades of neon and states of industry. They’d formed an assembly line of sorts. On the far side, apprentice artists in grey jumpsuits sat at workbenches besides boxes and boxes of bowling balls. They stripped the paint off the balls, sanded down the surfaces and delivered them to the next workbench where a girl with bright-pink hair and huge goggles airbrushed the iconic smiley flower designs onto them.

  The flower balls piled up next to her, blinking happily, while they waited their turn at the next station, which aptly resembled a sumo ring. Several huge men and women wrestled with tangles of writhing suicide hair, wrapping it onto the flower-faced bowling balls. The hair resisted. As they watched, a tentacle of hair squirmed out of one man’s grasp. “Look out!” he yelped. The hair slapped him aside. He flew out of the ring and landed with a fleshy thud at Unathi and Haruki’s feet. “Urrrgh,” he said.

  Back in the ring, an artist in a red jumpsuit grabbed the end of the hair and cracked it like a whip. The hair collapsed to the ground, stunned. Two other artists leapt on it and wrapped it round the flower face before it could recover and stapled it down. It quivered and howled as the hair and the flower ball became one.

  The final stage was a wooden platform raised like a dock. Cute artist boys and girls in school uniforms released the finished artworks into the sky. “Byeee! Sayonara! Get big and strong, you hear! Have a nice life!” They waved their hankies in salutation as the hairballs drifted off like balloons, already sprouting gnashing mouths and spined tentacles.

  It was horrible.

  It was brilliant.

  The man atop the mound gave the mecha pilot and the writer (and the cat) a chance to take it all in. Then he stood up and threw his arms wide. “Welcome. I am Mr. Murakami. And this is my heap. I am king of it and all artistic endeavor.”

  “So you’re the guy?” Unathi snarled.

  “Ob-vious-ly.” The cat rolled its eyes.

  The slight, bespectacled man smirked. He stood up and skidded down the side of his mud creature, leaving behind a swathe of blues and greens. It groaned and swiveled its eyes to watch him. “It depends,” the man said. “By ‘the guy’ do you mean one of the most challenging and thought-provoking artists of the twenty-first century? Who innovated the superflat style combining the best of otaku culture and Japanese pop aesthetics? Whose factory puts Andy Warhol’s little art manufacturing industry to shame? Whose art has the capacity to shock, to titillate, to overturn the world as we know it?”

  “I meant, are you the fucker responsible for ruining my boots?”

  “Your boots?” Takashi shifted his gaze from Unathi’s tits to her boots, which were no longer remotely white. They were splattered with blood and mud and spinal fluid and bits of writhing, haunted hair. “Is that whale penis leather?” the artist asked admiringly.

  “Killed it myself,” Unathi beamed.

  “Divine.”

  Unathi turned grim. “And one of your hairball creatures has destroyed them. Along with half of Tokyo. And the whole of Saiko Squadron. Although, technically, they’re replaceable. I mean, we have new academy graduates practically begging to be recruited.”

  “What can I say?” The artist shrugged. “Good art should exact a toll.”

  “Hamba’ofa! Exact this!” Unathi said, as she pulled her diamante-studded .357 Magnum from the holster on the side of her boot and pressed it to his temple.

  “Wait!” yelled the cat and the writer at the same time.

  “You got a better idea?” she said, her finger itchy on the trigger.

  “Don’t you know anything about art?” Haruki said. “Look at him.”

  Unathi looked at Takashi, beaming lunatically like one of his flower balls.

  “He wants to die.”

  It sunk in. “Shit. And then his art will live forever.” Unathi eased her finger off the trigger.

  “And grow bigger and more infamous and ravage the whole world!” Takashi crowed.

  “Shut up,” Unathi said, lowering the gun and jamming it up against his crotch. “Unless you want to bleed to death slowly from a bullet hole in your hairy balls.”

  “Even more sensational! I’ll take it!” Takashi grinned.

  Unathi ignored him. “This writing you do, Haruki . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Ever do art critiques?”

  “I haven’t . . . but I see where you’re going.”

  “What?” Takashi said, panicky. “No, no, no, no. This is a time for action, not words.”

  “I’m thinking this suicide hair thing is interesting, but, you know, in my opinion . . .”—Unathi paused for effect and rolled her eyes—“sooooo derivative.”

  “No!” Takashi yelped.

  “Shock for shock’s sake,” Unathi continued. “So tired. So very . . .”

  “Don’t say it. Don’t you dare.”

  “So very Damien Hirst,” she finished.

  “Aaaaaagh!” Takashi tore at his hair. “I am nothing like that hack. You can’t do this to me!”

  “Already doing it,” Haruki said, tapping away at his phone. “I’m uploading a scathing review to all the arts sites right now.”

  “Have mercy,” Takashi moaned.

  “Sorry, friend,” Haruki shrugged, not looking up from his screen. “I guess the text message is mightier than the mass-produced pop-art gimmick.”

  Takashi grabbed Unathi’s hand, wrenched the gun up to his temple and, before she had time to react, pulled the trigger. A bright twist of blood arced away from his temple in slow motion. The artist’s lips twitched in the faintest of smiles and then he keeled over sideways, reve
aling the bloody mash where the back of his head had once been. His blood started to mingle with the swirl of colors on the grass, muddying the bright hues.

  Unathi looked down at the body. “Eish,” she said. “That’s done it.”

  “Watch out,” said the cat. Unathi and Haruki stepped back just in time to avoid being flattened by the scramble of neon jumpsuits fighting each other to get to the top of the globulous, seeping heap of color.

  The battle was ugly. The hungry young artists climbed over each other, dragged each other down, punched each other in the face and the throat. And then they broke out the knives. After a while it got too messy to tell who was actually wounded and who was just slathered in paint.

  “We should leave,” the cat said. “The succession fight is only going to get nastier.”

  “But the whole world is screwed. Takashi’s dead.” Unathi gave the body a kick to emphasize her point, adding some of the artist’s blood to the congealed stains on her boot. “His reputation is going to grow; the haunted hairballs will only become more powerful . . .”

  “No,” said the writer. “Ignominious suicide after a bad review? That’s not a scandalous death that will lead to centuries-long infamy; that’s a pathetic publicity stunt. His former students and factory colleagues will be the first to defame him. It’s over. The hairballs will eventually shrivel up and die or get bought up by advertising agency execs to display in their foyers.” He added, “But only ironically.”

  “Ouch.” Unathi shuddered.

  “Should we get back? I don’t know about you, but I could murder some spaghetti.”

  “Early lunch?” Unathi checked her watch. It was only twelve. But then, hey, Tokyo was a fast place.

  They started walking into the forest, back towards the bunker, the cat riding Haruki’s shoulder. Behind them, the artists were still engaged in violent infighting. One of them had extricated herself from the melee and was filming the carnage. It would make a great video piece.

  “So why did you leave Johannesburg, if I may ask?” Haruki said, heaving open the bunker door.

  “That city? Hayibo. That city is too fucking crazy.” She shook her head, ducking under the dangling foot of a suicide. “Hey, you have any idea when whaling season starts?”

  Dear Mariana,

  I have FAllen in love with your typwriter, typ½os and all. The tactility, the stacatto click of THe keys is so much mpore fuFILLing than the dulled ergonomics of my keyboard.

  I always thought to be a writer yiu should have a magnificent old typewrter, polished black and roosting among the white sheaves of paper and crumpled mistakes like some prehistoric insect of curves and clivcks. I KNow this is cliche. But that it should be muse anddrug, hungry for you rather than the other way round. As all GOod drugs are.

  So, while your typeweiter (ticking out these words, astonishing me with the immediacy of creation; ink on paper so much more tngible than pixels of 10-pt Times New Roman. It lends the wrods a sense of permanence that my computer lacks entirely. And look, I am getting better! My fingers are adjusting (finally!) to the rhythms of teh spaces. Anyway, I digress. It’s this hopeless infatuaTion with this machine.)

  So. Again. While your typwriter, being electric and that blond beige of deskbound electronics pre-candy-coated imacs, is not quite the slick black BEast of my imaginings, the novelty of the thing is delightful, and thus, inspiring.

  I think, perhaps, it extends beyond the typewriter though, to your feng shui-ed house that bears my invasion a little uneasily I’m afraid. But ah, Mariana, what stories your things tell of you. Oh, don’t worry, I haven’t been prying. I’m not the type to snoOp, or at least only a litlte.

  You’ve no idea how much you are embodied in this space. I can breathe you in these rooms. There is so much more I know from trning over the secret places of you, like the soft underbelly of some thorny beetle. For you can be thorny, honeybee. You can be a hellcat. Like Dante, who I am afraid still doesn’t like me verfy much. He skulks around the house, tail puffed out like a toilet brush, quivering. It’s that ridiculous name. I told you it would give any cat a complex.

  Anyway. Sitting at your desk, my hands dancing over the typewriter like pale spiders, looking out at your view of the mountain, I feel at once diSplaced and at home. I have to confess to wanting to pull a MR. Ripley and neatly acquiring your life.

  It’s all spelled out so clearly in even just the surface of your possessions. No need to open drawers or read old letters when evrything I need to know of you lies out here, so naively exposed. A stranger could construct you from your things. Your books and CDs and photographs tell me more than billsor diary entries. It’s all so naked.

  You should be more careful

  A list then to illustrate the pieces of the puzzle:

  1) The pictures of your fucked-up slick-clique hipster friends and the total absence of photos of your fucked-up highbrow parents (or of me, I’ve noted, but it’s been a while and I’ve already forgiven you this slight).

  2) Your old fashioned rollerskates to take to Mouille Point, gliding along the promenade like rollergirl.

  3) The sixties-style furniture of which you’ve collected quite a mismatched assortment.

  4) Eccentric artwork done by those fu

  000cked-up boho friends and glossy coffee-table books.

  5) Obscure “cutting edge” electronica you know I have no tolerance for, beats and whines like the sonic nightmares of kitchen appliances.

  6) Sartre and Tolstoy cosied next to Eve Ensler’s twat and David Egger’s monstrous ego – and all that other contemporary literary wanking you seem to go in for.

  7) two-ply T.P., Clinique, Dove and a loot of Mac cosmetics in every shade.

  8) A wardrobe full ofDiesel and EVisu, trading in your parent’s high-priced fashion fetishes for your own.

  9) And let’s not forget the health-conscious single (!) girl’s refrigerator, adorned with erotic fridge magnET poetry and more photos, stocked with coke light and heineken and single-serving portions of various easy-cook ingredients. One aubergine, 1 red pepper, one yellow, one onion, one plain greekstyle yoghurt, one pack of tofu, one butternut, one slab of butter, one litre of soy milk, omne thai-style green curry paste, one clasisc mnt sauce, one jar odf lemomn grass oeneoneoneone oeneoNEONEONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE EOINEJNEHEHE OEN df’;hjlgkjlkjl ts rghjrggjh eark,jfdz

  Anyway.

  While you are supposedly away, like Little Red Riding Hood off into the dark woods to visit your sick grandma, I will simply slide into your life as you would a pair of shoes.

  I will change my star sign. You’re Aries Tiger? I’ll start doing Pilates, drink green tea and eat at swish restaurants where they serve sorbet between each course. I will go to auditions and acting clases and feverishly type scenes for countless unfinished plays that will never be performed on this very typewriter, and chainsmoke Lucky Strikes in the cxrisp office of your therapist and bitch about my mother.

  The bitch has been calling, you know. Your mother, not your therapist. And perhaps that’s one thing I would not wish to assimilate as your doting dopplegang, not even to have something to talk about with my/your therapist. I can see where you get your razor tongue from. Jesus. She leaves shrill messages on your voicemail (for obvious reasons I don’t pick up) in that FUCKING posh tone of voice that sometimes creeps into your own like when we fgight, like a switCH. Snotty on-off-on-off, hotcold, hot-clolf. Like that fcuking cat.

  Look, kust loojkj how upset I am just thinking about that fuCKIGN bitch makes me lapse into typois again. I HAve to go out

  I’m back. I went to Spar. I got flour and potatoes and eggs to make gnocchi. For two. Although you won’t be here. After all, you’ve been gone weeks now. Who knows when you might come back? I’ll toast you though, all the same. I bought wine–Thelema red, candles, baby tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic and home-made cannelloni from Carlucci’s. More paraffin, too.

  Sorry I lost it, your mother. . . No wonder you never told her. Her message
s have become increasingly, I don’t know, like there’s a sense of nervousness to her soliloquys after the beep. I think she’s worried. Suspicious. Maybe I’m imagining it.

  I know I’m not imagining the other messages you’ve been getting. I know, I know. I promised I wouldn’t snoop, but what if there was an urgent call? What if there was an emergency? You’d need to know wouldn’t you?

  Steve has been calling a LOT, M. And I mean a LOT. He seems terribly ------- familiar on the phone. On the answring machine, I mean. I’m not jealous. Really, I’m not. I mean, we’re over, right? It’s got nothing to do with me anymore. I’m just curious, that’s all. I guess I ujst wish you’d told me. Thatsall. Were you seeing him before? You said you weren’t that way inclined. You said you weren;t interested. I know, I’m sorry, I’m not jealous, I’m just sad. I still care aboiut you. I just don’t like to thoijnk of anyone else toufching you

  sorry. I;m sorry. I’m back again.

  I’m afraid I’m going to have to do something about Dante. He’s sort of a typo, too. Like we were. See, I’m not afraid to admit it now. You were right, we’re not good for each other, we can’t compromise. I know it was only a couple of months. I know I have issues with trust. And that was all part of it.

  This whole thing has given me a lot of time to think and I’ve finally accepted it wasn’t ever going to work. You’re right. I can’t own you, I don’t want to. I’m sorry if all this Mr. Ripley stuff has been a little out there.

  I think I’ve finally come to terms with it, Mariana. Wouldn’t your therapist have been pleased? And after this I will be out of your life forever, I promise. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always love you. You meant a lot to me and while I know things fucked up, that I fucked up, that doesn’t change the way I feel. Part of me feels like you played me for a fool, all those lies, all those games. Oh it was fun for a while, the furtiveness of this delicious secret, like an affair, our own private reality that excluded the rest of the world.

  It got too much though, you know? It all became really difficult, sore. And I still don’t really understand. I mean I can understqad your mother, but I don’t get why you were so scared, why you pretneded in front of your friends. Were you ashamed of me, M? Or only of us? It’s really sad that you denied yourself like that. It’s not healthy M. You can’tg live a lie like that. I’m saving you.