Cabin Fever

by Diane Awerbuck

  Monica squinted at the towelette dispenser. It was already almost empty, and there were still six hours of MCQP to go. She could read the ad on it reversed in the mirror. Andrex! chirped the plundered dispenser. Put a smile on your cheeks! From behind the door of the cubicle came giggling, and the swishing of Barbie’s costume being pulled down over his thighs. ‘My tights!’ he complained. The cleaner paused mid-text and stared stolidly back at Monica. I should leave, she thought. I’ll just go home. The others won’t even know. I’ll just say I lost them or that I was sick. It’s the truth.

  But she concentrated on the dispenser, transfixed, and listened to the two men having sex. The cleaner listened with her, head cocked, lips pursed. With Andrex lightly moistened toilet tissue, feel cleaner, fresher and up for anything! Monica read the advert over and over. Then she marvelled at how her mascara had run: her whiskers were smeared around her mouth in a five o’clock shadow. She checked her own phone but there were no panicked messages from the denizens of Wonderland. Maybe it was hard to get a signal underground.

  It was the same feeling she had had in Standard Five at Nathan Sandler’s party, when she had hurled herself around the lounge to ‘What a Feeling.’ Her denim skirt had split with an almighty rip. Everybody had seen her panties. Monica felt the embarrassment low in her chest like heartburn. It had been fifteen years since then, and it still seared without cauterising. She washed her hands slowly, and carefully turned off the taps with her elbows. The last cubicle was silent now except for some sniffling. Monica wanted to put her ear to it but she backed away from the sink and made for the door.

  ‘Sorry, sisi,’ she said to the cleaner. The woman moved languidly out of the way. That’s the most I’ve spoken to anyone tonight, thought Monica. She squeezed past the woman, who gave off a startled scent of Sunlight soap, like a succulent trodden underfoot. Monica made off across the slippery dancefloor, kicking wet condoms with knots in them, skipping paper cups that bore the marks of teeth.

  The place was emptying. I’ll just have one more quick look for everyone and then I’m out of here, she told herself. She wandered through the rooms, blinded by strobes; the smoke unmitigated by bodies made her cough. The caverns stretched and multiplied before her. I’ll never get out of here, she thought. It’s the underworld. And my feet hurt. She wished she had someone whose belt she could grip while they strode ahead, pathfinder, outlier, sure of the way.

  At the next quietish, darkish room she came to, Monica stopped. There were unoccupied beanbags in a corner, and from there she had a fair view of anyone on their way out of the main entrance. I’ll just wait here for a bit, she thought. Work out how to get home without a car. The thought of emerging from the damp cavern of the Centre into the brisk, real world of the parking lot – where her breath would puff out of her in clouds and her wet bum would freeze even though it was December – made her want to cry. The trains at Cape Town Station weren’t running yet, and she had no money for taxis. Monica rested her head on her arms.

  ‘Hello.’

  The boy who had lolloped over to her was not in costume. Not unless he was James Dean after the accident, she thought, with his eyes rolling and his smashed head lolling to one side. The boy’s legs were bulky, as if he were wearing metal braces under his trousers. Callipers, thought Monica. That’s what they’re called. In Standard Five – the Year of the Upskirt Incident in front of Nathan Sandler and also Nathan Sandler’s mother and his three grown-up brothers – they had had a piano teacher whose legs were embraced the same way. The man creaked when he walked. The kids laughed a little, but they were terrified: he brought something with him to Kimberley Junior School that wasn’t there before.

  The boy didn’t go away. He stood in front of her, at least a head shorter than she was. Why was it always the crooked men who come over? The jacks-in-the-boxes, the snakes under splintering ladders? She peered at the white scars seaming him, like a stitchety voodoo doll, up one whole side of his torso and down again on the other. The tissue shone florescent under the blacklight, disappearing into the white sleeve of his T-shirt and then ducking underneath, as if his arms had been pulled off and reattached in the opposite sockets. Everything about him was wrong. Monica couldn’t help it: she stared. She stared and he stood there, waiting until she was done.

  He spoke again, without invitation. Men thought they could just do that. As he talked, she heard the terrible lisping drag of his tongue. He breathed in the wrong places, like someone who has heard about the process but never had to do it themselves.

  ‘I come … every year,’ said the stitched boy.

  ‘Ah,’ said Monica. She thought, Leave me alone, you freak. I’m lonely but I’m not desperate.

  He read her answer as encouragement and began to lower himself to the beanbag beside her. The awkward weight of his body depressed the contents and she felt herself sliding sideways, her bare thighs sticking a little as they detached themselves from the plastic cover. She had to put out her hands to stop herself falling onto the angles of his lap.

  ‘Last … year … I missed it.’

  Monica scrabbled for purchase and righted herself.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘I was … in hospital. I broke … every bone in my body. I was in … an accident.’ He leaned in further, confiding. His mouth twisted. ‘I broke my … funny bone.’

  Oh God, thought Monica. He’s making a joke. He had to learn everything over. Everything. Like what was funny. She couldn’t reply, so she looked at him instead. His perseverance appalled her.

  ‘I thought … next year … I’ll be there. I don’t care. I’m … still alive.’

  She was morbidly interested. She didn’t want to be, but she was.

  ‘Here?’ She waved at the last few dancers and the detritus on the floor. ‘For this?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘For this.’ He reached out and touched her unbroken kneecap with one finger. Monica stared at the digit on her leg. She was thinking about Barbie dolls, how their ratchety knees bent, click-click-click. How their knees could bend both ways, because Barbies don’t have kneecaps.

  He was peering at her in the darkness. There were no scars on this side of his face – or maybe the kind light just erased them. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. Oh Jesus, thought Monica, he’s going to ask me to dance with him. She waited for the question, and it came as she had thought it would. In the dark he sounded like any other boy. When it counted, he barely lisped at all.

  ‘Will you dance with me?’

  Monica thought about it. She really did.

  ‘The music’s too soft,’ she said. The idea of having to hold him against her was exhausting; she felt as if she would never get up again.

  ‘But I can hear it from here,’ said the stitched boy, patiently. ‘I haven’t lost my … hearing.’ He poked her knee again, miserably insistent. ‘Listen.’ And Monica did listen, leaning her head to the same side as he did. He was right.

  It was an oldie, one that she would still remember when she had forgotten ‘What a Feeling,’ one that would be playing when all the music on all the dancefloors fell silent.’ Monica hummed the melody, the familiar words shimmering in the eye of her mind: Oh, but you’re lovely, with your smile so warm, and your cheek so soft, /There is nothing for me but to love you …

  She stood up. Her tail was almost dry. Monica leaned over and grabbed the stitched boy’s wrists and pulled him up with her, the same way Nathan Sandler had done when she had found herself on the floor of his lounge with her panties showing and the song from Flashdance racketing on and on while the other girls stood around her, laughing. Monica hauled the broken boy up next to her and hardly noticed his creaking.

  Once they were standing face to face he crooked his good arm around her waist and she suddenly knew it all, as if his touch had loosed some species memory in her. For once her brain was quiet and in its place was something worse: feeling. She knew the crunch and the night air and the lying on the tarmac – and the lonel
iness, that high whistling between the stars which is the sound of Death coming to get you, and you know that your legs won’t move.

  The music played, faint as a carousel, and the stitched boy limped, he flailed; she gathered his bones to her own like kindling ready for the fire. They lurched in circles until she couldn’t bear it; she felt her legs stiffening; she heard herself creak. At the last note, Monica stepped back from him.

  ‘I’m late,’ she said. I’m late, I’m late, I’m late. For a very important date. ‘I really have to go now. But thank you for a lovely time.’

  He gazed sadly at her. She turned and left him among the beanbags on the empty dance floor.

  She went out through the IN door, all the way out to the parking lot, where it wasn’t as cold as she had thought it would be. The fog was light and everywhere was the smell of fish, the way it was before they built the Castle, when Cape Town was under water.

  She stood on the dry ground by the security booth. Inside it was a guard in his Hyena Security uniform. He ignored her. He was talking to the cleaning lady, who had migrated even further. The two were pressed together – comfortable, close – inside the wooden hut. The woman’s head was back as she brayed laughter. Her phone was gone. Monica stood and watched their pantomime as she calculated the distance to her bed.

  Behind her a car hooted. She moved out of the road absent-mindedly, but it drew up beside her, warm and idling in the early morning.

  ‘Hey there!’ shouted its occupant. It was Ken. Most of his bodypaint had been rubbed off. He sat naked and unconcerned in his seat. He leaned over Barbie, who was slumped over the open window of the passenger’s door, vomiting quietly into his wig.

  ‘Need a lift, sweetheart?’

  His chest was still sweaty. The drops glinted orange under the streetlight. Steam seemed to rise off him. Monica smiled and shook her head. She was feeling fine. The muscles in her legs were warming up slowly, and her feet weren’t that tired after all. It would take her about an hour to walk the six kilometres back to Observatory, if she just followed the train tracks. And if she felt like it, she could stop at the BP for a waffle along the way.

  The car pulled out of the parking lot with a screech and nosed into the road. Its tail-lights faded into the grey dawn over the harbour. Seagulls were circling overhead. There was a song in her skull, skimming over the bones. As she began the long walk back, Monica started to hum it.

  Murder Ballads

  WHEN THE THREE MEN FILED INTO THE ROOM they could have been anywhere: a dining room, a waiting room, a courtroom rank with sweat. This was business. Two sat; between them one stood at the microphone and waited.

  His hips gave him away, his black hat, the sharp heel of his boot that tapped out the time. The audience knew from the first twang, the ribbed sigh of the metal, that he was the frontman – but more than that: they knew from his possession of the bare human voice that superseded any tool or instrument, the hard-pressed innard and gizzard.

  Graham Weir began his ballad, and ballads are stories, are desperate letters, are messages from the grave. It took us in the audience back to the veld, to the open spaces, to the place where you could still choose the ending.

  I sat in the third row, at the end, and listened for stories. I wanted to know how things happened. I didn’t want to analyse them, or find a newsworthy angle, or add a paragraph about retribution and reconciliation. I didn’t want to take notes or check that the sound guy was recording. I wanted to sit somewhere alone, in the dark, and have my dreams interpreted without having to say a word except ‘Yes’.

  But beside me was a woman who smelled peculiar. She exuded a sharp, acidic stink like cat’s piss; there were burned edges to her aura. It reminded me of being at the hairdresser’s with my mother, who used to get a poodle perm and think herself lucky to have it: there was the same sense of things being forced into new shapes. She took up more than her fair share of the seat, this woman; her meat moved, it touched me at arm and thigh.

  And she was laughing wetly to herself, all the way through the performance, her choking coughs half-muffled by the songs. Sometimes there was no music, and the sounds she made were audible. One musician occasionally held an accordion on his black knee but didn’t play at all. He moved its lungs so that it only sighed, the warm air of the ages moving through the whole man to the tips of his fingers. Its bone buttons flashed in the spotlight like funeral jewels. She spoiled it.

  She huffed and puffed as Weir sang the old ballads and fingered the familiar keys, the bars and rope, the hopelessness, the silver reckoning moment. He picked on even the known chords of ‘Amazing Grace’ and cracked those, his throat shrinking down to its tendons. Sometimes he held his head skywards, and the notes went over our skulls. They went over hers.

  In the ballads no one comes for you – not your father or your mother, or your own true love – except to watch you hang, and that was in the morning. The woman next to me heard the notes and knew that there was something in the room that she could not name; she was a false medium, a table-rapper at a supper séance, and so she laughed.

  I tried to ignore her, to focus on the gift of this single night to myself in the midst of the De Jager hearings, a night I couldn’t afford but knew that I needed, one night of space between me and the thing that had happened in Darktown. I concentrated instead on the backdrop, the sepia photographs of the old diggers next to their coffins, the searching men with their rifles and their spades. It was a joke, or it wasn’t. There they were, preserved for us to ponder.

  Sometimes when Weir held still he flattened himself into the paper so that he stood with the dead men at the vanished saloon, stood beside his own coffin, stood by the pale woman who was holding her ghost baby loosely to her bodice, as if it was already gone and she held only its shadow.

  Or else it was that the men in the photographs ventured out onto the stage. There they bloomed, rosy and whole, a regretful garden grown up through the boards of The Little Theatre, dazzled, a little awkward, their tongues thick in their mouths, the spades and rifles replaced by cemetery bouquets crumbling dusty in their hands.

  Whichever way it was, the dead men had been called up, and so they leaned there, the evidence ranged before the bland audience, the snickering housewife, her husband, me. Weir stood beside them, alive and sizzling, struck over and over by the lightning of trauma and memory. When he showed his teeth the women in the audience tittered. We wanted him, or what he had, and knew that we wanted him, or what he had, and it made us excited and afraid. The men were quiet.

  In the end the melody just came to an abrupt halt, because there was no way to end it but cleanly. Weir stood still and the men in black paused, cautious as animals now that they were done with the music, or the music was done with them. Weir took off his black hat. Beneath it the hair had bristled bravely, but now under the stage lights his scalp showed pinkly through. With a sweep of his hand he divested himself of the West, and made himself as ordinary as the audience – though what had fallen from his mouth was not. The musicians looked up at the audience, dazzled, awkward, thrown back from the rosy gardens, the wet regret, the past.

  Then they took their instruments and they retreated behind the backdrop. We were left to ourselves, blinking and murmuring, bending to collect appendages.

  The stinking woman beside me stood up with a sigh. She gathered her evening outfit to herself, the soles of her shoes hard on the floorboards of the makeshift auditorium.

  ‘Ag, skies,’ she murmured, and I drew my knees up to allow her and her husband passage to the exit. Her smell dragged behind her: it followed me to my car. I showered again when I got home.

  The next morning I was sorry I had gone out. I should have slept longer in preparation for covering the De Jager trial. My eyes were sandbagged; my nose streamed at every scent. We were crammed together in the gallery, sweating and contained. There was the usual fidgeting, the shuffling of papers, the scarred faces of the relatives like Scrabble letters. Court is the combinati
on of tension and boredom. So many words generated; so many versions recorded, pored over, proven false. When I was first given the court beat I thought it would make a difference to have the sorry transactions laid out in plain view, that sides would be easy to choose. Now I know that everyone thinks they tell the truth. At the beginning of a trial we are spectators, but by the end of it we are witnesses: we listen and are merged with the events. By this afternoon, everything would be different.

  The gallery wasn’t noisy, the way it gets when gangsters go on trial. It was expectant: people wanted to know why. They already knew what, although the repetition of fact makes it no easier to live with. They were an audience; they wanted a story. And it had to be a story with a happy ending.

  The TV station wanted a couple of soundbites for the evening segment: me, windswept in front of the magistrate’s court, summing up the session, ending with the usual rhetorical questions that defy conclusion.

  I wanted something else. We sat away from the rest of the gallery, near the doors, so I could grab the killer’s parents before they were overwhelmed by the other microphones and senseless, shouted questions as soon as they set foot in the corridor. I wanted first go at them. I wanted to know how they felt.

  In the defendant’s seat young De Jager leaned forward, elbows on the knees of his new suit pants. He had shaved his head during his month of psychiatric assessment. Beneath that scalp, said Doctor Oosthuizen in her testimony, lay the two expected hemispheres of a normal brain.

  De Jager had a skew smile that showed off his chipped teeth. He began to testify. I was grateful the SABC had applied for access to the transcripts. I meant to keep notes, but after I heard him speak, my right hand tingled and then went numb. I tried to flap the blood into it as the cameraman watched me curiously, raising a sandy eyebrow. I shook my head at him.