Cabin Fever

by Diane Awerbuck

  The blade pressed against my skin but didn’t draw blood. It was blunt, that knife, decorative but dull, an accessory in a game. Somewhere people were sobbing; the last strains of the school anthem came from the direction of the hall, a soundtrack to suffering. I wanted to tell them, the girls and the boys, that time isn’t linear. It can stretch like Chappies, like the little red elastics on braces.

  They say that you don’t feel the pain when your body is traumatised, but it’s not true. I felt every cut. The thin boy dragged down hard on the first stroke, and I saw my skin bunch and tear under the pressure of the blade. He sawed, humming as he went. I couldn’t help it. I screamed over the singing. I, said the red cuts on my wrist. He crossed the top and bottom in quick, ragged strokes, working his way towards my elbow. It was slippery work. And still I let him. You feel it all, but you send your mind away. You save it for later, so you can replay the scene again and again, looking for the trick of light that would have made a difference. It’s funny what your mind does, when it’s unbalancing.

  Kenny was bunched against the laminated poster on the library door, touching his wet glasses as if they reassured him. I could see the fat roll at his waist where his shirt had pulled free of his school trousers, and the snail trails of stretch marks, the signs of growing. Tuck in your shirt, I thought, but that wasn’t what was coming out of my mouth. Is that me? I wondered. Am I making this sound? The thin boy was silent, concentrating on carving the crossbar of the A. I saw Kenny uncurl his body; he moved slowly. By the time he did anything it would be too late: I would be speaking the new language of a lacerated alphabet.

  But he did move. He moved. Kenny pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose one last time and hauled himself upright. The carpet muffled the tread of his school shoes.

  Kenny didn’t bother with speaking – he simply stretched his hands out like a sleepwalker and pushed the thin boy sideways. He toppled over and sprawled, and I yanked my arm back from him. Before I could do anything else, the girl behind me grabbed me by the wrist. I was about to struggle when she pressed something soft down firmly over the cuts. She did it so that I couldn’t see them, and I was grateful. Sometimes not looking is the best thing you can do. Later, when they had to rip it from the crusted slashes in the emergency room at Vincent Pallotti, I saw what it was: a bandanna that she would never wear.

  The thin boy gaped up from the carpet at Kenny. ‘What are you doing?’

  Kenny had stopped crying, or maybe he’d just run out of tears.

  ‘I did this for you!’ the thin boy cried. ‘You said you wanted to come!’

  Kenny looked wordlessly at him. I waited for him to touch his glasses, but it seemed he was done even with that. Everything he knew was untrue, as if he had been bombed back into a past that precluded speech, as if the little dyslexic boy had found him out at last.

  ‘What’s WRONG with you!’ cried the thin boy. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Not in the library,’ said Kenny. His voice was soft and devoid of emotion. He was stating a rule. He picked up my teaching copy of Othello and held it to his sweaty shirtfront to underline his short speech.

  ‘You fat FREAK!’ screamed the thin boy. He scrambled to his feet and lunged, throwing himself at Kenny, who lifted the book. The thin boy bounced off him and stumbled backwards. He fell back again under his own disequilibrium. I think it was the first time that Kenny had realised that his tonnage could stand for something other than ridicule.

  But the thin boy was impervious to pain. He picked himself up again, gasping, and repeated his attack – and Kenny fended him off, a little more violently this time. The corner of the book had been crumpled in the assault, like the head of a turtle retreating into its shell. Kenny held it up.

  ‘Look what you did,’ he said to the thin boy. He spoke with a kind of wonder. ‘You damaged a book!’

  The thin boy looked at him in amazement. ‘What are you going to do, Kenny?’ he asked. ‘Fine me? Are you going to fine me?’

  The way of the world had come to visit Kenny. He understood, and drooped. The music from the Valentine’s Assembly had come to an end. Somewhere else the headmistress would be delivering a speech on kinds of love apart from the romantic. My pulse triangulated between head, heart and wrist, pumping blood to the cuts. I pressed the wad down harder in the pause between question and answer.

  That was when the sprinklers came on, soaking everything in their cool, rational mist. It’s standard practice for emergencies now, but back then it was a miracle. The drops didn’t sink in as soon as they landed: they quivered, whole, like water under a microscope. I imagined the people who would come later with their tools, sifting our damp remains, matching femur with kneecap, counting out toes.

  The rain fell and the covers of the books darkened by degrees, the stains spreading down their spines. The pages would swell to triple their size and the covers would warp. Nothing would fit back between them.

  The first cellphone rang.

  The girl beside me squeaked. It was surprise more than anything else. She hadn’t made a sound the whole time I was being cut, or when the boys were fighting.

  The thin boy was back on his feet. He swivelled towards her.

  ‘What did I say?’ he roared. ‘Didn’t I tell you to be as quiet as a mouse?’ He shoved the knife towards his own face and for a moment I thought he would plunge it into his eye, but he only clenched it between his teeth. He marched over and began to drag her out from under the table. She was so light that he only had to pull once to unbalance her. A boy’s centre of gravity is in his shoulders; a girl’s is in her pelvis. She fell forward. The strap on her top broke under his hands. The thin boy simply hauled her over onto her back and sat on her chest. There were carpet burns on her knees.

  He stared into her face, then he reached down and forced his fingers inside her mouth. He twanged the little red elastics on her braces. Then he tried to yank the girl’s head up by the hair, but the little hooks on her headgear had caught in the carpet and trapped her. The thin boy gave up and then raised both hands above his own head, clasping the hilt of the knife like an Olympic athlete on the podium.

  It happened so fast, survivors always say, as if slowing it down means they could have done something about it. Before we knew what was happening.

  The paper heart on his sleeve seemed to pump on the downstroke. At first I thought he had aimed for the heart and missed, but he stabbed her in the throat on purpose. In movies you see blood everywhere, saturating the floor and spraying the walls, but this girl produced only one feeble jet, like the water pistols her classmates would use to terrorise the school for Matric Madness. I didn’t expect the hot slaughterhouse smell of her insides, there among the books. Pig, I thought. Pig, pig. We were seeing the end of fiction.

  The other girls had their heads in their hands. They hid behind one another. Some of them were sobbing, but they were trying to do it silently: they had seen what had happened to girls who weren’t as quiet as mice. More cellphones rang. The tinny voices rose in an approximation of music, an automaton’s idea of an orchestra.

  The cellphone symphony rose and seemed to rouse the thin boy. He looked down at what he had done. He touched her mouth again. His voice was flat, as if shock could absorb sound. ‘I used to wear braces. But they hurt. Especially at night. This ache, you know?’ He wanted us to understand. ‘So one night I got up and I took them off with pliers.’ He laughed at himself.

  Still the cellphones rang. The girls were crying, louder now. Kenny had sunk back down to the floor again, his stand for the old order overturned. He had let go of Othello, and it had fallen spread-eagled on the carpet, where the inferior ink began to run. Kenny saw the death of punctuation; he watched the lines lose their curly brackets. The words went last, smearing the pages. The paper itself would eventually dissolve back into its constituent fibres, like a time-lapse film, something running in reverse and sending all of us back to the forest. And they say there’s no undoing; they say there’s
no going back!

  The thin boy rolled off the girl’s body. He was still holding the knife. And he came to me, came to do what he had always planned to do, but had been frustrated by interruption and insubordination. The thin boy also had rules. I tried to move off my knees. For a moment there was the sick dream-fear that I was paralysed, that the thin boy had cut some vital wire in the current of my body. But they moved, my joints grinding, old and out of time. I shifted from under the table. The cellphones chorused, the prelude to a performance: bleeps and riffs and phrases from another world, like the recordings NASA sends into space. And I stood up to meet him.

  He slashed at me, wanting to divide me in two like the poster on the door. But he counted on my being still, the way the girl was, and all I did was wait until he had completed his arc. I reached out with my good arm and dug my thumb into his wrist, there, burrowing deep between the bracketing tendons. He shrieked and buckled.

  ‘Kenny!’ I said. ‘Get over now and help!’ And Kenny did. He pushed the thin boy down and clambered on him: he had seen how it was done. But it was me the thin boy bawled at.

  ‘You got your blood on me!’

  Outside, sirens were joining the cellphone chorus. Grown-ups were coming. The thin boy cocked his head as he listened, and he looked up at Kenny, calmer.

  ‘You know we can’t go back,’ he said. The thin boy turned his face to the library wall, away from the poster, with its BAD RULES FOR BOOKS. STUDENTS who DAMAGED BOOKS were going to be FINED.

  I think if he had had a chance he would have tried to kill himself. It was a clean decision, the kind made by dictators in bunkers, by boys with mail-order guns. He ignored the body of the dead girl as if she had never existed. The spaghetti strap of her top hung off her shoulder. It bothered me, that broken strap. The flesh itself was unmarked under the blood: once she was washed at the mortuary there would be no way to tell what had happened except if you looked at the ragged hinge of her throat.

  I reached out and slipped the strap back into place, where it belonged.

  I think of her, now, whenever I undress. In the mirror I take off my bra and there is a groove in the grown-up flesh of each shoulder. She will never have these indentations.

  It took two paramedics to lift Kenny off the thin boy.

  I still see them, the pig and the wolf. I see the thin boy on his knees with his sleeves up, as he was at the beginning, not sitting on the dead girl’s chest at the end. It’s not the stabbing that horrifies me: that was a quick thing. It’s the inked scabs on his arm that stay, that merging of text and flesh.

  And it’s Kenny I wonder about, the one who could have gone either way. I wonder what he’s going to do in the post-February world.

  And me, of course. I wonder about me. I let her die. I am not what I am.

  But at least I’m here to remember how the story about the wolves and the pigs turns out. I have the scars to prove it. I wear long-sleeved shirts as a rule, but sometimes they ride up before I can pull them down again, and students gawk. They should stare: it’s an odd tattoo.

  I AM.

  Loxion Kulca

  HIS SEAT WAS WET. The chill moved slowly along his thighs and then knuckled up his backbone, cracking each vertebra. The train smelled hotly of holiday and vomit. It was impossible to doze. Should he move? Jurie shifted from one buttock to the other and inspected the other passengers, calculating the numbness of each stranger’s backside. Someone famous had once told him that when they were nervous about speaking in public, they imagined the audience members reduced to their underwear.

  Jurie was anxious. When the security guards were on strike, everything else went out the window. Today none of these passengers held tickets, but Metro Plus was full. Nobody was keeping the rules about where to sit. There was the suspicious, contained hysteria before a race, to be run backwards to Metro if the man with the clicking ticket machine appeared. The world belonged to chancers, thought Jurie. People who weren’t afraid. It started with not paying for tickets. How far would it go before somebody stopped them?

  Jurie’s ticket was safely in his wallet: one trip, there and back, to the loans manager at the Standard Bank in Adderley Street. He hoped that the manager would see him for what he was – an honest man, trying to start over. Small business was the wrong term: farmers like Jurie kept everyone else alive. They didn’t even know it.

  They were saying on the train that there were gangs doing the rounds because of the strike. Some of the men carried machetes, the kind you see in photos of the massacres up north, where the killers stand defiant before the cameras, their heads dripping with sweat and the bodies deflated in the streets behind them. You saw those photos and you felt the men’s breath on the back of your neck, thought Jurie. He flattened his creaky spine against the backrest and stared back out of the window to calm the panic he felt struggling to rise. The train had stopped beside an HIV billboard with its two blue faces. The features looked runny, like raw eggs. ‘Theta Junction’, said the billboard. Theta? There was no connecting geometry. What did it mean? He peered at the billboard, feeling like the old man he was, as if the train was moving forward but he was staying in one place. A frog, he thought. A frog in a pot.

  He kept up his slow scrutiny, his neck straining. Lately all his parts complained, even the bits he left unused. Jurie hated the train, its cramped carriages, the seats stitched surgically by someone’s rough hand. He clung to the cool imagined space of the bank, his entrance in the echoing hall with its marble floors and pillars, the smell of the old ink pads that lodged in the mortar, pigeons shifting restless in the rafters. How tiny the tellers looked behind the desks, with their papery faces. They cast no shadows in the expensive gloom: only the tendons in their arms twisted. Such effort to stamp forms when there was so much else to do! Jurie flexed his stumpy fingers; he looked critically at his clothes and wondered again if he’d made the right choice. He wore what he always wore – hardy, faded camouflage from Cape Union Mart, the four-square shirt in khaki, brown, blue, green: a pixellated map of the world. In it he had stood in front of his dark-spotted mirror and found himself merged with the bedroom walls, seen and unseen.

  Why didn’t everyone dress properly for the weather? It was mid-December. The rubber on the train doors was sticky; the metal benches on the platform burned. Jurie listed the cheap Korean jerseys, the second-hand German coats. Inside them the passengers were nervy, rigid, clutching at their handbags. At every station they darted looks at newcomers, stabbing, suspicious, expectant.

  Like this one, the woman sitting close by, holding a child tightly by the hand. Their faces were the ones he saw on TV. Hutu? Tutsi? It didn’t matter. Here she was just foreign. They were both wearing jerseys. The little girl’s was white wool: a cloud, a shroud, a rabbit. She must be very proud of that jersey. There were tiny, shiny beads in the stitching. They had shimmered when Jurie got on at Plumstead; they shimmered now as she moved up, making space between them. An emergency jersey, because you just didn’t know. Jurie tucked his shirt tails in so they didn’t touch her, wondering why it was that you couldn’t tell other people’s suffering from the outside. The woman narrowed her eyes at him and then shifted further away, deliberately crossing her legs. She turned to the little girl, presenting Jurie with her adult woollen back. She began singing snatches of a song into the girl’s face. When she came to the chorus she clawed her hands in the air and growled. The little girl screamed and wriggled and laughed, and wouldn’t let her stop.

  And another one, the absent twitchy lady over there, with her top buttoned the wrong way. There was something skew about her altogether. She felt Jurie’s regard and patted her hair down, uselessly. The southeaster had stiffened the points into quills. A severe parting ran through the middle of her scalp, as if, long ago, someone had split her in half with an axe and the hair would never grow there again. Jurie dragged his eyes away and focused on the backs of the fences from the window. So many people with their hidden histories, their burns and scars and sh
ortfalls, and all of them detained here together. Maybe this was how the loans manager felt. Jurie wanted badly to get off, but the train was moving forward only in fevered increments, resting heavily between stations on the tracks. There was no reason that he could see.

  Someone urgently tapped his thigh. He jerked away. The woman with the cross-buttoned shirt was leaning forward confidentially. Her brows were inverted commas, standing up off her face and making everything she said seem like quotes.

  ‘I’m going to town.’

  Jurie didn’t have anything to say to those brows. I’m not getting involved, he thought. She’ll just keep on. He nodded, then looked down quickly, but it was already too late. She caught him by his pressed khaki sleeve and began pulling gently. Silence, thought Jurie. Silence is consent.

  ‘I usually take the bus,’ she pronounced. ‘But today – I’m taking the train.’

  He concentrated on the variegated flooring.

  ‘Can you theta?’ asked the woman, persistent. Her lower jaw moved even when she wasn’t speaking, a rubbery chewing motion, a toy set in motion. Jurie shook his head, staring resolutely at the floor. Oh. Theta. Little shining bits in the composite twinkled back at him, as if something was trying to get through.

  The woman sat back, waiting, her eyebrows raised even further, her duty done. I don’t care if she’s offended, he thought. She’s not rational. I just want to be left alone. He patted the resentful sleeve back into place along the crease, feeling the burden of his normality. The engine kicked into life again and the train trundled on, past a burned house. It had been newly graffitied. The black walls said NEW CLEAR POWER and FAITHFAITHFAITH. There were spray-painted skulls in casual ranks, like an ossuary.

  On cue, a blind man and his whole cousin began making their way through the carriage. Jurie thought that they were impressive when you first saw them, but it wore thin. They smelled of bushfire – as if they had been in the burned house – and they were unashamed, slowly parading the blind man’s deformity as he panted and sang his verse over and over, like the sonbesies that drove the first colonists crazy. By now Jurie knew the words by heart.