The Raft: A Novel (22 page)

The communers leaned over. Their faces hung in the sky as they looked back down at you. They pulled your arms and legs outwards and strapped you down. Someone fastened another strap across your neck to prevent you from lifting your head. The strap was soft and clammy, like the fingers of a dead man, throttling you. All you could move were your fingers and toes. All you could control were the blinks of your eyes and movements of your mouth. You were utterly immobilised, as if your spine had been broken and you’d fallen into paralysis.

The sun shone warm and bright over your body, a gentle introduction that would prove to be a long and cruel relationship. The wind also said hello, rolling over your face and chest. The water lapped and nipped with sharp cold teeth. Two communers fastened a long rope to the front of the raft; the other end had been connected to the pier a short distance away from you.

And then they pushed you out.

The raft drifted further and further from the shore, burst through the first few waves, and jerked to a stop as the length of rope tightened. Your breathing was loud and ragged, misfiring in your lungs. Your heart pummelled the wall of your chest.

All you could think about at that moment was Jai-Li and her child, out on the sea in a flimsy vessel of their own. You felt you had done the right thing by helping her, but had she even left the misty cove? Perhaps she’d toppled over and drowned, crashed into the rocks. Anything could have happened. How far had she made it? Had she made it anywhere at all?

After all, convictions and good intentions mean nothing. The ocean makes no promises. The sun makes no deals. The wind never listens to your pleas, your screams, or your prayers. And the world does not care if you belong in it. There is no forgiveness in nature. Only a gauntlet. A hurricane. An explosion of particles and a fluke of order. Right and wrong will never be as hard as stone or as wet as water.

Not for Jai-Li, and not for you, Kayle. Not here. Forget it all. Forget your sense of
belonging.
Life has given you nothing but one, unpractised shot at it—nothing more and nothing less. So do what you must. Hold on to your mind and your body for as long as you can, let go of your silly hopes, your futile fears, and your inapt questions.

You have nothing.

Now you have nothing but your raft.

The burned man

I
am walking alongside my mother in the street in Tulbagh. I’m nine years old. We’ve just come back from the supermarket and she’s carrying a small bag of groceries. I’m hauling a larger bag with two hands and trying my best to keep up. It’s just a normal Saturday. The sun is bright and the sky is a pure and cloudless blue. Cars pass by, pedestrians go about their Saturday morning business—getting their hair cut in barbershops, window-shopping for clothing they can’t afford, compulsively checking the time as they stand in their queues at the bank.

I’m walking on the steaming pavement and I see an old man walking towards me. He’s wearing a large green trench coat with the collars thrown up. His thin strands of hair are combed to the side, drooping like dead tentacles, revealing pink scalp. He passes me, and the unpleasant secret that lies behind his upturned collar is exposed: his face is a mess of burned skin, a large patch of knots and cracks and swirls stretching from the neck to the forehead, a sludge of skin stirred with a spoon and allowed to set. He shifts his eyes down and looks at me as he goes by, dragging the long, mephitic tail feathers of a strong aftershave behind him—but he doesn’t move his head.

His eyes seem to say,
You see me, but I see you too.

The man’s face repulses me, but for some reason I also want to touch it—that canyon of scarred tissue—maybe even poke it to see if my finger will push through.

My mother says, “Don’t stare. It’s rude to stare,” and I snap out of my trance. I look back over my shoulder and see only the normal back of his coat, hunched over as he makes his way to wherever it is that burned people make their way. A cave, I think, or a lair. Some dank and lightless hole, no doubt. Not a regular house like ours, certainly.

Don’t stare. It’s rude to stare.

Stare at the stars. Stare at a sunset. Stare into the eyes of someone you love. Stare at your teacher droning on about the fall of apartheid. Stare at your grandfather’s pale face in his open casket.

But do not stare at the burned man.

I study my mother’s wide and ordinary face. She’s scanning the lot, looking for her car, one of the many ovular autovehicles glistening beside each other, but this time she looks different. I’ve seen her every day of my life and now she seems a stranger, her car-searching routine a mere impersonation of the woman who did the same thing last Saturday, and the Saturday before that.

I glimpse behind me. The burned man is gone, and all I can think is that I want to meet him. I want to stare at his face for as long as it takes to satisfy me. Maybe even ask him how it happened. Instead, I climb into the back of my mother’s car as she locks the doors and starts the engine.

I’m going home but I don’t want to; I don’t want to go home with my mother. I want to see the other side of this pure and cloudless world. I want to see the dark places, hang in the shadows, mingle with the grotesque.

I gaze through the window as the car pulls out—at ordinary people, walking, talking, laughing—and suddenly feel that everything is
wrong.
I can’t help sensing, for the first time in my life, that something is being hidden from me. Some difficult, scarred truth. I can’t help feeling I’ve been told not to stare at the burned man all my life.

Jack Turning can’t get enough of it. He’s finding my thoughts hilarious; he’s laughing maniacally. Strapped to my raft, I feel like a patient in a hospital for the criminally insane. Jack’s some twisted orderly who revels in mocking me, knowing there’s nobody who’ll believe a word of my implausible rants. A part of me knows it’s not possible he’s actually there—out on the ocean at night—but the manipulated part of me wins out and accepts that he is. He’s been there a while now, but I can’t see him. My head’s facing upwards and all my eyes can see is the night sky, peppered in bright white stars. I’ve been here almost a full day, bobbing and rolling in a drugged daze. The water beneath is completely still, as if the novelty of my arrival has worn thin. Directly above, a big white ball hangs in the sky. On any other day I might mistake it for the common moon, this beating planetary
thing—
but tonight I know better; this is not the moon. It’s a masquerader. A fake moon, the throbbing, sickly orb that’s been hanging in our dreams. It knows our secrets and has promised a few more of its own.

“The burned man’s a good one,” Jack says. “You’ve held on to that little bauble of a memory for a while now, haven’t you? Kept it all bundled up in the back of your head somewhere. Ja. I like it. Really. I do.”

I hear him kicking his feet in the water like a bored child. He’s there, my mind tells me, sitting on the end of my raft, but I feel no extra weight there. I wonder what it must be like to exist in a state lighter than air. Surely it’s easier than carrying the extra luggage of heavy bones, organs and flesh? Maybe that’s life’s big problem—its obsession with matter, weighing everything down, making everything just a little harder for us all.

Jack says, “You, Mr. Kayle,
if you please.
Tell me something about yourself I don’t know.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Don’t I?”

My raft rolls over the water. I turn my wrists in their straps, trying to relieve my irritated skin. Overhead, the moon-like orb is a fat yellow blister against the black rind of the night, waiting to burst and spill its pus. When it does I’ll be here under it. I’ll be drenched in its infected discharge. Drenched and helpless. And Jack Turning will probably laugh his non-existent head off.

“I know that you think you’ve done some good thing, helping that woman,” Jack says. “And that’s why you’ve accepted this whole raft business. Like some kind of martyr. Ha! I’d go so far as to say you’re even proud of yourself. But here’s the kicker.” He pauses and cackles. “The kicker is you’re
not
a good man. And you know it. All the helping everyone, listening to everyone’s stories … you’re not doing it because you give a shit at all. You’re doing it because you know what
I
know.”

“And what’s that?” I say. My voice is hoarse, my throat dry with thirst.

“That you’re trying to make up for something. You’re trying so hard to be this shoulder to lean on, this sympathetic ear, but the truth is, good men never worry about doing good things. They just do them. You’re doing it because you
know
you’re not a good man. Not a good man at all. Only bad men have to work hard at being good. No. You did something terrible, didn’t you? You don’t remember what it is, I’ll give you that, but you know it deep inside of you. You know there is something dark and horrific lurking in the basement of your past, and all this being-a-good-listener, protecting these people’s silly little secrets, is not driven by love, or sympathy, or all that other nonsense, is it? You, Mr. Kayle, are driven by guilt. And the reality is, you’ve accepted your fate on the raft, not because you’re willing to nobly pay the price for helping that woman and her child, but because you know, you know, oh
you
know that
you deserve it.”

“What do you know?” I blurt, defensively. “You’re not even real.”

“Not even real?” he roars out hysterically. “Not. Even. Real. That’s great. Just great. Not even
real.”
The water babbles and slaps against the sides of the raft. “Let me tell you what else I know, Mr. Kayle. After helping Jai-Li, you’ve already decided the beach just isn’t good enough anymore, is it? All this waiting, dreaming, moping. You won’t let yourself waste away on the sand with the rest of them. Nope. So what are you to do? You’re going to get out of here. You’re going to look for your son. Your love will guide you, won’t it?” He chortles again. “A father’s love will guide like the stars in the sky. But here’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Kayle. You will find Andy. I can feel it. I have a kind of sixth sense about these things. But you will not be guided by love. It’ll be by guilt.”

“Guilt?”

“Guilt is strong, Mr. Kayle. Powerful stuff. Love nests. It’s an undisturbed ecosystem, like all the little bugs and slugs that live happily together in an everglade. You can sit in one place and wallow with all the love in your heart, but it won’t get you anywhere. You’ll never evolve. You’ll never crash through walls. Love doesn’t change the world. The real driving forces in this world are guilt and fear. Guilt and fear. And you, my friend, have oodles of both. So you’ll find him. Oh, trust me, you’ll find him. Eventually.”

I scrutinise the surface of the moon orb and it’s moving, swirling like sour custard, bubbling, beginning to ferment. The warm wind rushes across my body and there’s a terrible smell in the air. It’s the smell of cooked meat. It doesn’t belong out here on the ocean. I know this even as the drugs do their work and as Jack Turning rattles on.

Suddenly, Jack Turning is right there, leaning over me, but I do not recognise him. His face is burned. He has no hair. His lips are taut and shiny, his teeth bared in a wide and unnatural grin. His left eyelid is folded over crookedly. His ears are tucked into his head like folded pairs of socks, and he smells like seared meat.

“But,” he says, “but, but, but … will Andy want to see you? That’s the real question. Will Andy really want to reunite with a
murderer
like you?”

Murderer.

The word swipes at me like the swift talons of a dangerous animal. I don’t know what he means. No, he’s lying this time. He
must
be, I tell myself. I have never murdered anyone. I don’t know everything but I know what I’m capable of doing and not doing. Some things we don’t have to remember because once they’ve happened they form a part of our constitution forever, like a deep scar that will never fade completely. If anything, I need to believe that, at
least.
I would know if I’d done such a thing,
surely.

Jack says: “Oh yes, Mr. Kayle. You
murderer.”

My head is strapped down and I can do nothing but look directly back into his face. He squats, perched above me. He will not go away. I want the drug to wear off, to turn to my side, to run and hide, but I can’t, and the saccharine smell of his cooked face sickens me. I cannot turn in the other direction. Because of the raft, I have no choice but to keep staring at the burned man.

Extracts

(Excerpt from the
The Age of Self Primary
)

There were attempts to restore society, of course. Humankind had lost its memories but little of its instincts. Over time, individuals stepped forward proclaiming they recalled how various systems had once worked—currencies, industries, hierarchies—but their recollections were limited. It was as if each of them recalled the purpose of an arm, or a foot, or an ear, but had no concept of the body as a whole. More importantly, a greater number of people were less than convinced by these declared systems, or interested. Most could barely remember who they were, let alone comprehend the part they were expected to play in the dead trends that had governed modern industries. The factory conveyor belts that had once produced thousands of identical must-have curios produced nothing but dust and webs. The latest fashion trends hung on mannequins in shop windows, enticing nobody. Who could tell the difference between the older model electronic palm-plates and the newer ones? Who had once had authority and who had followed? Who could be trusted to perform a surgery or educate a child? Who were the rightful heirs and what good were class structures without an understanding of status?

It was soon evident that trying to put together the complex labyrinth of civilisation would be impossible. Nobody knew where to start. The class structure collapsed at the same time as the economy. There were a few sporadic acts of violence and destructive behaviour from a small group of frustrated individuals, but on the whole, the amnesiac populace knew too little of their predicament to build up sufficient rage, let alone sustain it for long enough to act. In the months succeeding Day Zero, most people behaved like harmless, curious babies enamoured by the simple forms of the world.