Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  Samsara, ‘the wheel of rebirth’ and the curse of successive lives. The idea of reincarnation was completely foreign to Mark’s sense of the world and his understanding of life on the other side of death. As for the idea of soul mates—he could appreciate the poetry of the concept, but the idea that you could live your life by it was outside his frame of reference. And it was completely at odds with what he had learned of Adam’s character. Adam was not a sentimental man. He had an uncompromising way of looking at life. His situation as a fugitive had, understandably, instilled in him a wariness, a disinclination to get involved, but Mark wasn’t sure if Adam’s ability to distance himself mentally from what was going on around him was a product of circumstance or seeded in Adam’s very nature. How amazing, then, that this man believed fervently in finding his soul mate, an idea which wasn’t just romantic but extraordinarily hopeful.

  Mark glanced at his watch. He should stop daydreaming. Within the next hour, the waiting room outside was going to fill up with patients. And tomorrow he would get into his jeep and drive two hundred kilometres into the desert to administer polio vaccinations to the members of a small tribe of roaming nomads. Polio was unheard of further to the north, but here in the south it was becoming a problem. Namibia was one of the most sparsely populated places on Earth—a country with only one and a half million inhabitants—but distances were vast and reaching patients in the more remote parts of his catchment area was often a logistical nightmare. Pulling his desk calendar toward him, Mark Botha proceeded to put Adam Buchanan out of his mind.

  But that evening as he was sitting at the table in his kitchen, waiting for Rita to serve him his dinner, he found his thoughts going once more to the taciturn man he now called his friend.

  ‘Adam stopped by this morning,’ he said as his wife placed a bowl of chicken soup and dumplings in front of him.

  ‘I saw.’ She nodded and sat down in the chair opposite him. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine… I suppose.’

  She nodded again. He had never told her the real story, but Rita was not a stupid woman and he knew she was aware that something was off-kilter. She had asked him about it once, but had accepted without demur his explanation that he would be violating the confidences of a friend if he told her.

  The night insects thrummed against the steel mesh mosquito screens at the windows. The lamplight shone on his wife’s hair. She was his conscience, his anchor. When he had married her almost two decades ago, she had been slim and willowy and had fire in her eyes. Over the years her waist had thickened and the fire in her eyes had dimmed. It made him feel guilty, even though he knew she did not blame him for the life he had imposed on her. In the eighteen years they had been together, he had seen her break down only once; the day they had placed their thirteen-year-old son on the train to continue his education at a boarding school hundreds of miles to the south. But, apart from that one dark moment, she had given him her unconditional support.

  But he knew this was not the life she had imagined she would be living. Many years ago, as a young resident, Mark had been the star student in a class filled with other bright minds also intent on probing the mysteries of medicine. His professors had high hopes for him and his friends were convinced that he was destined for great things. ‘South Africa’s next Christiaan Barnard’ was a phrase used quite often.

  Instead he had chosen to exile himself and his pretty young wife in an isolated country in the south-western corner of Africa and to work among the people who lived in this tiny town wedged in between the desert and the cold Atlantic Ocean. He was a deeply religious man and he regarded his work as a calling, inseparable from his faith in a benevolent God.

  It was a hard life. Namibia had always been a country that tested the resolve of even resolute men. Its history told of hardship and deprivation; thirst, drought and death. Deep in the hinterland lived tribes like the Herero, Ovambo, Damara, Nama, Kavango and Caprivian. The inaccessible Kaokoveld was home to the beautiful Himba. But the coast of Namibia had always been a place so inhospitable, so barren, that even the nomadic Khoi San avoided it.

  But there was wealth buried underneath the sands of this barren country and even today Namibia was still dependent for its existence on diamond mining. Here in Kepler’s Bay, however, the prosperity of the diamond boom was long gone. Life was mostly a struggle for those who lived in the town’s modest houses. The diving community aside, Mark’s patients were poor and, for the most part, uneducated. Still, he found it a fulfilling life and he admired the hardy people who were his patients. He could see himself living here until the day of his death. But it wasn’t always easy for Rita.

  She looked up from her plate at him and smiled. Returning her smile, he placed his hand on hers, feeling the roughness of her skin, the wedding band he had placed on her finger almost two decades ago and which, over the years, had become enfolded by flesh. He looked into her patient eyes and he wondered, was this his soul mate? The one he had pursued and would pursue for all eternity? Was theirs the stuff of poetry and dreams and magic?

  No. There was no high drama here; no immortal passion. But deep affection, yes, and boundless trust. Above all, gratitude.

  And that, after all, had a poetry all its own.

  TEN

  JUSTINE HADN’T slept well. The discovery of the mattress and booze in the storage building had upset her more than she wanted to admit. The idea that people might be walking around the property at night without her knowledge was disturbing.

  First thing this morning she had asked the caretaker and his grandson to clean out the back room and throw out everything inside. They had also placed a massive padlock on the door, barring all possible entry, and every spotlight in the courtyard was now in working order. But she still felt unsettled.

  Maybe the day would improve once she started to develop the film she had taken of the house. She was curious to see the outcome of her exploratory shots.

  She walked down the narrow passageway leading off the kitchen and opened the door to the darkroom. When she pulled the heavy folds of the blackout curtain across the door, it was so dark she could not see her hand as she brought it up to her face.

  She moved carefully toward the countertop where she had placed her film. As she started the familiar routine of processing film and developing prints, she could feel the world outside the door receding. By the time she switched on the safelight to start the development process, her concentration was absolute.

  It was about to happen: a piece of blank paper transforming itself into an image. She gently slid the print into the open tray of developing solution, making sure that it was emulsion-side up to avoid trapping bubbles against the paper’s surface. Placing her hands firmly on the edges, she started to rock the tray.

  And there it was, slowly swimming up through the liquid, an image as ethereal as a fragment from a dream—fragile, insubstantial—as though, if she were to reach for it, it would be sure to disappear. But then the outlines hardened into the shape of a door, a window, a long empty corridor.

  She smiled. Magic.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER she wasn’t smiling any more. She was frustrated and puzzled. Leaning forward, she examined once more the sheets of contact prints. There was no getting away from the truth. A large number of the black-and-white prints were flawed.

  The pictures she had taken had been of empty rooms, but the prints in front of her showed something different. There was something else in those pictures—something alive. She stared at the contacts, her eyes aching. Surely it couldn’t be. But, yes, just about every third print showed the dark shape of an animal positioned somewhere in the picture. An animal with a narrow head, strong shoulders, a sloping back. A dog?

  In most of the pictures, the dog was massively underexposed and reduced to a mere silhouette, a stark black shape. In one of the prints the dog seemed to be running directly across the lens’s field of view. The outline of the animal was blurred, indicating movement. If this had bee
n a real photo shoot, she would have used a much faster shutter speed to arrest the motion, but this seemed for all the world as though she had accidentally captured the animal in full flight as it had burst out of nowhere.

  In only two of the pictures was the image sharper, less two-dimensional. But, unfortunately, in these pictures the dog was also at the farthest point from the camera. In one, the animal was standing sideways at the very end of the long passage. In the other, it had turned its back to the camera. But in both cases the animal had an appearance of roundness and solidity that was missing from the other prints, which gave no impression of depth.

  But was this a dog? She narrowed her eyes. She couldn’t put her finger on it—maybe it was just the way it held its head, or the furtiveness of its posture—but there was something about the animal that seemed wild somehow.

  She stepped back, baffled. She knew that photographers will sometimes come across ‘wild images’ during the course of their career, images appearing in their pictures for which there seemed to be no logical explanation. It had never happened to her, but she had read about it. She had always thought that these images were probably the result of careless printing. Stale paper, staining splashes from one tray into another, contamination from tongs or fingers. There could be any number of reasons. But how on earth to explain what had happened here?

  Maybe the negatives would provide a clue as to what went wrong.

  She placed the negatives on the light box and carefully looked at each frame through the magnifying loop. The enlarged, perfectly focused images were easy to check. What she needed to do now was to cross-reference the negatives with the frame numbers on the contacts in which the animal appeared.

  This was bizarre. The negatives were clear. Not one of the negatives showed anything else than empty rooms devoid of life. No dark shape. No blurred movement.

  For a moment she stood thinking. Maybe she should simply do another run? Feeling irritated and, for some reason, apprehensive, she selected a slice of paper and placed the strips of cut film on its surface. After covering the negatives with glass, she flashed them with the darkroom white light. Removing the glass, she placed the contact sheet into the ‘soup’.

  Whatever was going to show up on these prints would not be the result of sloppy printing. She had used fresh developer and she had checked the fixer and the paper. She was keeping a close eye on the thermometer. As she worked, she tried hard to keep her mind calm and to merely accept—not evaluate—the images that were rushing up through the developing liquid.

  But it was difficult to stay unaffected. By the time she had finished producing the new sheet of contacts, she felt almost a chill.

  The animal was still there. Except, the pictures were different now. It was as though—in the time it had taken her to print the new batch—the animal had moved from one side of the room to the other side. From behind the chair to in front of the chair. From the end of the corridor to right inside the doorway.

  The print that had showed the animal running now showed an empty room. But as she brought the loop to her eye, there it was. Captured in the large oval mirror against the wall was the reflection of a retreating form, as though the animal had sprinted from the room and was now slinking away into the shadowy passage beyond.

  And then there was the picture she had taken of the staircase in the hallway. The detail was clear, the contrast pin-sharp. Light was streaming through the tall windows and the filigree patterning of the wrought-iron balusters threw shadows onto the marble floor. The wall behind the staircase was splashed with graffiti, the outline of the words clearly defined against the white backdrop. It was an interesting shot: the grace and beauty of the staircase, so reminiscent of a more gracious age, juxtaposed with this angry expression of modern angst. But she had no time to admire the composition. As she peered through the loop, her eye was fixed on the dark shape that dominated the frame. In the first sheet of contact prints the staircase had been empty.

  No longer. At the top of the stairs was the animal. It was looking straight at the camera. The light from the windows reached even the back of the staircase and she could see the animal clearly. Watchful eyes, the ears pricked at full alert, even the hint of a fang.

  Not a dog—she could see that now.

  A wolf.

  ELEVEN

  THE WATCHER was excited. It would be his first foray into the house, although certainly not the last. Not that he was greedy. He always restricted himself to only one incursion every seven days. It was one of the rules of the game. If he didn’t stick to it, he became obsessive and when he was obsessive, he became careless. That was the way he was caught the first time around. Even the most oblivious of subjects will sense it if someone walks through their house every night.

  He had prepared carefully. By this time he knew her routine. When she was at home the gates were open. But if she were going to be absent from Paradine Park she always shut the gates. He couldn’t quite understand why she even bothered. There was no lock to keep out intruders, just a bolt. But it certainly made things easier for him. It was as if she were posting a sign. Hello. I’m not here. But come on in.

  This morning the gates were closed.

  He walked quickly up the avenue of trees, keeping to the shadows. But he took care not to seem furtive. When he reached the top of the driveway, he stopped. Her car was nowhere to be seen, so she was definitely gone. And every window was shut tight.

  Cautiously, he walked around the house. He had discovered an outside coal cellar with a chute on one of his previous visits when he was scouting the lie of the land. And there might just be an internal door in that cellar. And that door would open into the house.

  For a moment he hesitated, grimacing. The chute was black with grime. Well, it couldn’t be helped. He eased himself gingerly over the edge and slid down the chute on his stomach.

  The cellar was very dark and the ceiling low. He shuffled forward inch by inch. Something brushed against his face and he slapped the air wildly with his hand. And now he had reached the door—a wooden door, nothing out of the ordinary. He turned the black knob, which rattled loosely underneath his hand. And what do you know, the door wasn’t locked. He smiled.

  The door opened into a passageway. On one side was the kitchen; he could see the stove and the edge of a kitchen table. On the other side was a closed door. He opened it, peeked inside. A darkroom. Cameras, measuring jugs and trays. There was a strange smell in the air. Chemicals.

  The cameras were expensive. Nikon. Leica. Haselblad. He picked one up, squinted through the lens.

  What thrilled him more than anything was that he had discovered a kindred spirit. She was a watcher, just like him. That compulsion to look, to record, to catalogue—oh, he knew it well. He and Justine shared a magnificent obsession. And they both dealt in minute observations.

  Life passes people by in giant strides. When they look back at their lives, they notice the landmarks but lose track of the details. But he is the keeper of details. He hoards them. His office at home was filled with folders holding notes on his fellow players: all those easily forgotten details, or details that weren’t even consciously noted.

  The worn-out bra strap peeping out from underneath the party dress. The shadow at the corner of the mouth. The yeasty smell of unwashed armpits. The huskiness of a voice in the aftermath of making love. The anemone flaring of the pupil in a startled eye.

  Justine, too, dealt in details. Fleeting, fugitive images which would disappear forever if she did not capture them in a flash of light.

  He replaced the camera on the shelf, his fingers lingering on the shutter. As he left the room and pulled the door shut, he noticed he had left five black fingerprints on the wood. Not good. He’d better wash his hands.

  He stepped into the kitchen and, after rinsing his hands, dried them on paper towels. Then he rubbed off the fingerprints. He squashed the towels into a tight wad and pulled out the rubbish bin from underneath the kitchen sink.

  Th
e bin was free of household waste, which was disappointing. Rubbish revealed a great deal about people. He dropped the paper towel inside and shoved the bin back into place. Next time, when he came back, he would check again and this time he might be luckier.

  As he pushed past the swinging door leading into the entrance hall, he had a bad moment. On the opposite wall was a full-length mirror and for a second he thought there was someone else in the house. By the time he realised the figure with the black-stained face and white eyes was himself, his heart was racing.

  But even as his heartbeat evened out, he felt as though there were eyes watching him. The Watcher being watched.

  And then he realised what it was. The mirrors. He couldn’t get away from himself. Everywhere he turned, there he was, looking ridiculous with his black face. It was almost painful to watch himself in these big mirrors, which reflected not just his face but his whole body—the whole pathetic mess from head to toe. All these mirrors. Why the fuck would anyone have so many mirrors?

  The profanity popped into his mind without warning and shocked him. Calm down. He placed the palms of both hands against his heart. Calm down. Keep playing the game. Observe the observable. That was the rule. The thing to do now was to turn his focus back to where it belonged. Focus on Justine. Her bedroom—that was what he should be looking for. Her most intimate place.

  He climbed the tall, wide staircase, his heart hammering. Down the long passage, past the empty rooms with their big, shiny windows. This part of the house was unfamiliar to him. Years ago, when he had visited the house as Louisa Buchanan’s guest, his visits had been confined to the ground floor. This was all new.

  The house so quiet. His footsteps so loud.