by Unknown
I realize I’ve been looking for ghosts, ever since I saw the woman in the rain, but I didn’t see any in the lighthouse. I wouldn’t expect them here. The lighthouse has been taken over by owls and moss, dark spaces opened up to wind and light. It’s a place of life. Death doesn’t belong here.
I close my eyes and look up at the clouds, wisps of light and fleeting like ghosts on the wind. Is that where the lighthouse ghosts have gone? Into the sky, to become storms? I expected to find some still, dead memories in this metal coffin, but there’s only wind and light to sweep away the broken glass.
It’s better this way. New life laid over the old memories of the lighthouse. In a few more years, even Barbara’s childhood home will collapse, and there will be no more shelter for the ghosts. The warmth from the meadow will finally break through the cold wooden boards, and the eerie sentience of the house will dissolve, with nowhere to go. It, like I, will lay beneath the grass and rot, and when the last memory is gone, a new house will come, with new memories, and a shining modern house to fill the meadow.
I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to be the one to build that new house in the meadow. I want to be there to fill it with memories. I don’t want the world to go on without me, to keep spinning as though I was never here.
Somewhere out in the world is the life I left behind, the people I loved. They’re already building a new house. They’re beginning to forget me.
The sea crashes against the lighthouse rocks, and I stand up.
I won’t be the woman in the rain. I won’t cling to my life and my regrets until the last stone of my city is swept away. I won’t die, breath by breath, in a stagnant hospital bed. Not when I’ve only just remembered how much I want to live.
The metal of the gallery is cold beneath my feet. Glass crunches, leaving behind a few drops of blood. Over the cliff, the railing is torn away, jagged metal clearing a path for me. On the horizon, a rising storm beckons.
I’ve said my goodbyes.
I lift my arms
… and fly.
OF HEARTS AND MONKEYS
BY NICK WOOD
We are amongst the last of the last, the ‘do-not-dies’ as the dead now call us.
They follow us, the dead do, whispering and pulling at our ears and hair. The other two don’t notice, although they do see and comment on the occasional cock of my head, as I listen without comprehension to dry and meaningless whispers from shadowy lips, the occasional repetition of that one phrase, all I can make out - ‘do-not-dies…’
We make our way down the mountain slope to the dense bush and protea trees below, the draw-string bag bumping on my back. I laugh at their comments about me – my niece and her partner; for I’m old enough to have earned the right to be called mad.
But why do the dead follow me? I am not an amagqirha or traditional healer, nor have I drunk ubalawu to make contact with them either here, or in my dreams. I carry very little knowledge of the old ways within me anymore. Perhaps this is why they harry me so? None do I recognise; none seem tied to my birth. Their shapes change like the shifting smoke on the horizon, their features blunted and blurred.
The path branches through thick grass both left and right at the bottom of the slope; the fork to the right is more heavily trampled and leads between two large boulders. The bushes, laced with yellow-flowered sour fig creepers and the blackened cone protea trees, crowd the paths more than Bontebok high, scratching and pulling at our skins with a greater intensity than the dead can muster. The foliage releases a wet, oily smell that seems to suck the sweat from our bodies too. Bongani turns, with a relieved hunch to his shoulders, onto the well-flattened path to the right.
He stops at my whistle.
Four of the dead are dancing and waving in warning on top of the large boulders ahead.
I point left and immediately regret it.
Bongani stiffens and shouts, “I’m in charge, you silly old woman. You’d both be dead if it weren’t for me.”
I am still (just) the good side of sixty. His words hurt a little, even though there may be some truth there; he is quick on his feet and good at herding dam and river fish into the shallows, me, my bones are slow and stiff, but I have caught a few. Penny, she always just likes to sit and watch.
(Still the dead dance.)
I place my hands together in supplication and bow to him, showing ukuthoba. His face softens a bit, but he shakes his head. “I’ve had enough of fighting this bush, MamBhele,” he says, “We’ve earned ourselves an easier path for now.”
The dead obviously don’t think so, but can you really trust them - especially when you can’t hear what they have to say? I have asked them about Janet, but they just gape at me and whisper to each other.
I have nothing to give them in sacrifice, whoever they might be, apart from dragging a thorny branch across my right wrist to gouge a weal of blood. One of the dead prods at it with suspicion, but I feel nothing. The other four have left the boulders.
Perhaps it is enough. Perhaps we are indeed safe now.
Bongani and Penny are almost through the boulders as I follow them down the path.
Penny’s scream freezes me. Bongani is lying on the path, his body crumpled. An umlungu, a white man, stands over him with a broken branch in his hand. Penny’s scream rips shut as strong brown arms grab her mouth and body from behind one of the rocks and pull her back, out of view. Hairy, muscular arms … at least two men, two young and strong-looking men.
The man with the branch looks up at me and smiles, his hair wild and bushy. The blood on my wrist curdles and stings. I turn and run, back up the path, crashing through the thickened grass that slices my ankles beneath my shorts, before realising I’m still in sight to anyone chasing. I stop and duck under the branches of an acacia tree, cowering behind the rough, wide base of the trunk; seeking shelter behind thorns.
It is long moments before I can hear anything other than pounding blood. Then there is just stillness and the distant bark of a baboon.
My ears stay good and I would hear a chase. Of course, I am old and they have caught enough now for a good few days of sex, whatever their fancy.
But why did the dead stay behind with them?
I cry.
I had promised my brother I would take care of his pale daughter for him, even as he lay and haemorrhaged his life quickly away on his bed. I was the only one there to speak to him, his white wife already two days dead. All over town, all over the land, all over the world, people lay dying to the final deadly twist of Umbulalasizwe, this Nation-Killer virus, which takes to the winds like an Invisible Angel of Death. At the end of a week of global carnage, very few were still there to watch and share the dying. There is just a sprinkling of us left now, spared by God for an unknown reason. Bongani says it is as if we were born of the tough survivors, those who developed a resistance to HIV during the days the government refused to roll out anti-retroviral treatment to its people, when it was an older and kinder virus. He always was a clever one, that Bongani, but now he may be a dead man too - with his words, like his body, dust.
Why spare me, God? I am just an old woman.
So many have died and yet I still live. Why me?
Yes, I am a do-not-die, but I fall asleep with my wet face crusted against a hard tree-bark, endlessly saying sorry to my brother.
The cold wakes me, cramping the bones in my hips. I see the sun is down, the night and an early autumnal mist stealing in. Light enough still to see, but I know I must move if I am to stay alive.
I stand with aching difficulty and stretch stiffly, raw hunger and thirst pulling me back into a hunch. I strip a few tough leathery brown figs from the succulent sour fig creepers, bite the barky stem and sip the sour, sticky moisture from within. The wound on my wrist itches but has scabbed. I haul the bag off my bag and unpack the last of the dassie meat, cooked and still smelling fine. It was killed by my lucky stone as it lay sun-bathing on a rock amongst its faster brothers and sisters.
&nb
sp; But why should I eat? Why should I go on? Alone, I am nothing.
Even Janet’s shade avoids me and she is now more than six lunar cycles dead. It must be rising seven months since I was last held in a loving rather than a dying embrace by her. The dead don’t hug and even they have left me, chased away by this damp and creeping fog … or perhaps something else? No, I will not think more on this and yes, why should I raise this food to my lips, even though my stomach begs me to?
Because … at least for now, I still can.
It tastes good, seasoned by my prayer for Janet’s shade. I leave the scraps for morning … none can I spare for my ancestors, I only hope they understand.
So I follow the path less travelled, winding its way along the flank of a mountain peak, somewhere south of Silvermine I think, a ways from old habitations where a few of the do-not-dies, Cape leopards and caracals, vultures and baboons still look for easy pickings. The stench of death and rotting flesh used to be a good guide to when you were getting close enough, but it’s all disappeared since the Big Burn tore through Cape Town and across the Flats, reducing so much to blackness and charcoal. The fynbos is used to fire though, growing rapidly again to strangle everything on the slopes. There is even some dryer and thornier vegetation like the acacias, marching in from the Karoo, now that the people are almost all gone.
All I want is cover for the night - somewhere high, in a tree perhaps. I could strap myself against the trunk with the elastic exercise bands from Penny’s aerobics classes, which I’ve been keeping for her in my bag. To tie myself onto a tree trunk on high would be the safest thing to do now that I am alone – above and beyond ground scavengers.
My wrist burns so I wipe it with the last of the sour, soothing juice from a plucked fig.
Cries hang on the air. A child’s cries. I’d recognise them anywhere, despite never having had any of my own.
I follow the shrill sound of a young and miserable voice.
I’ve played mother to quite a few, even though my preference for women’s company meant my family wanted little to do with me. But I was faithful to Janet for twenty years. Thankfully, people’s need for work usurped the stiffest of their principles and I was good with stories and playing with their children, spinning a good few rand from child-care. Janet, though, was the real businesswoman behind it all, sharp as hell. (Paper money is only good for wiping your bum with now. At least coins can still be used to open rusted food cans.)
Dead babies still hurt the most to look at.
This child is very much alive, deep in the underbrush and trees, in the flats away from the mountain slope. I creep in through the bush, slowly and carefully – a live child is bound to have adult carers and I age this one by its cries as between five and ten.
The sobbing stops and there is a low murmur of adult voices so I slow my creep to a careful hands-and-feet crawl, testing the ground gingerly ahead of me before placing my weight, praying there are no sleeping snakes.
Ahead, a small clearing opens up and I hear and smell the crackling bite of a smoky fire – have they a golden stock of matches too? A middle-aged woman sits and cuddles a listless looking child awkwardly in her arms; a second, older child of preteen years – a girl in a tattered green dress - stands and looks on helplessly. A small man circles the clearing suspiciously, thankfully on the opposite side of the clearing, so I pull back slowly into the deeper shadows of the trees. They have a small tent. It is an organised family; I can smell insect repellent.
I can also smell the younger child’s sickness.
The man comes near and I play musical statues to the thump in my chest and head.
He returns to poke the fire.
The child retches and vomits, the woman holds her wrong, some of the vomit may stick in her throat.
I have had enough of death…
“Molweni, hello my friends.” I enter the clearing, hands raised.
The man turns and points a gun at my head.
I struggle to hold my water in, despite there being so little left in my bladder.
The woman recoils. The child in her arm coughs and keeps coughing. She is choking, face up in the women’s clutch of fright.
The man cocks the gun, a noise that cracks through my head and wets my legs.
But I cannot stand still if a child might die.
“Let me help you with her,” I say, holding my arms out.
The man lowers his gun-hand and I can breathe again. The woman stands up, but does not hold her child out.
“Turn her over,” I say gently, “and pat her back.”
She does so, watching me warily, and her child coughs the last of her sick from her mouth onto the ground and begins breathing a little easier, though still panting a bit.
I breathe a bit easier too as the man sticks his gun into a belt around his waist after carefully un-cocking it. He has a sallow, flat face, as if he has distant San or Khoi ancestry.
The woman is brown but not as dark as me – her girls are paler still. The older one smiles at me, but says nothing.
Her mother speaks in Afrikaans: “Wat is jou naam?”
“Noluthando,” I tell her, relieved and more relaxed, “Noluthando Ngobo Bhele.” Only the worst of the skollies and tsotsis ever ask for names from those they intend to kill, as if it gives them further power over their quaking victims – and they certainly don’t look after children. Still, the virus has been no discriminator of moral character; I have seen that.
The man holds his hand out to me: “Are you on your own, gogo – do you want to join us?”
I smile and nod gratefully, blinking tears away, even though I am no grandmother.
The older girl shows me a space by the fireside. They have some meat on a spit of wood over the fire and it looks (thankfully) like chicken.
I wipe my legs discreetly with a scented wild mint leaf from my bag before sitting down.
They give the little one some moistened, crushed buchu leaves for her stomach.
One by one they introduce themselves - Habib and Marlene, Shannon and Tracy. Marlene talks for Shannon. The older girl herself still says nothing. They’d had to move, and move fast, when the Big Burn swept through everything, lit by God or someone who was hoping to purge the world of death’s stink. The Mountain had been wet with late winter rains; so like us … like me, they’d found refuge in the woods alongside rivers and the larger dams.
Tired of just surviving, Habib has finally decided to head west and north, where he says some of his family may still live – way up the West coast, deep into dry Nama country. He says the names of his family with a spattering of clicks.
“Cousin,” I nod, for us amaXhosa learned our linguistic clicks from much shared history deep in back-time with the Khoi-San people.
He looks at me with narrowed eyes. Is it that my comment was over-familiar? Or perhaps he is one of those who think we have taken everything from them since the white man finally gave power over to us; one of those who claim they are the sole indigenous people of this area and country? If so, it’s a silly squabble to hold onto, with such a large and empty space now left for so few.
And it would indeed be a long, long walk, but I have nowhere else to go. Although I have not seen the shades of any of my family, deep down I know they are all dead. Yet my ancestors have not told me this – I have nothing to give them, apart from my own life, is this why they do not come and why they show me nothing?
I voice this belief of mine and our words dry up.
Behind me, I hear the whispers of voices and turn quickly. There is a cloud of children, hanging in the bushes, talking much, saying little. I do not know them. Why are they here? What do they want?
Habib stands next to me, peering into the bushes, holding his swaying gun in front of him. “What is it, gogo? What do you see?”
“Nothing,” I sigh, turning back to the last flickering coals of our fire.
Shannon watches me. In her eyes, I can see she has seen them too.
We settle
for the night, them in their tent, me on a rolled mat from my bag.
The dead children quieten their whispering when I wave an angry arm at them. I have not yet died and so I fall asleep with some little hope.
I wake to find something sniffing at my face.
In my vanishing mist of dream, I imagine it is Janet at first - until it grunts and flashes teeth from its grey, hairy face, backing off with my bag in its deft, dark hands.
I sit up, knobkierie straight and stiff with shock, biting back a scream.
The baboon has found the last of the dassie and is cramming the meat into its mouth, grimacing at me. I look around, but it is alone – it must be a single male, probably roaming the bush in search of a new mate, in the hope of starting a new troop.
I avoid eye contact, careful not to raise a challenge and slowly stand up, backing even further away. Despite myself, I let out the slightest, fearful whimper.
The baboon throws my bag down and turns to lope off into the bush. Behind me, I hear a little chuckle. It is Marlene, stretching her arms wide from the flap of the tent-door, as if embracing the new day.
“You’ve already had a visitor,” she says. “Did he take everything you had left to eat?”
I retrieve my bag and feel inside, nodding shamefully.
“Families share,” she says simply, turning to pop her head back into the tent. “Get up you lazy lot, it’s getting late.”
She has a working watch, I notice; to me the sun is only just creeping over the bushes. The child shades have gone, as if driven away by the sun.
We eat the last of the chicken, sip and splash sparsely from a water jug, pack our goods.
“Forty-three minutes,” she says. “It’s now seven twenty-five.” She hitches up her Y-frame back-pack. Habib smiles mildly. The girls move easily and quickly, as if in a well-rehearsed routine. Shannon takes my hand. Tracy looks a lot brighter herself in the day’s gathering heat.
