The Raft: A Novel (27 page)

“This is my home, Kayle. You’re in my home,” he said, “and there are rules. Disrespect my island and m-muh
-my
rules and I’ll feed you to the trees. You understand?”

Despite the knife, I was hardly intimidated. His threats seemed hollow; his attempts at some kind of menace were puerile. Contrary to what he thought, his stuttering words and actions made him seem anything but tough. He reminded me of a character in a comic book. He was emulating someone he’d seen somewhere—someone he’d told himself was intimidating—and doing a poor job of it.

“I understand,” I said, a line in a script I was expected to say next.

“Fantastic. Come,” he said. “Get some food.” He whipped the blade from my neck and left the room. Cautiously, I climbed out of bed and rubbed my wrists. The blood rushed from my head and I grabbed the post of the bed. I took a moment to find the strength in my legs, and was finally able to stand and walk slowly across the room. I made my way through the door leading to the kitchen.

It looked more like a wizard’s laboratory than a kitchen. Shelves of spices and dried roots and leaves were crammed into various, mismatched jars and tins like mystic potions. The walls were wallpapered yellow and a big grandfather clock with a shattered glass face stood in the corner. The hands of the clock were still moving, but the time was wrong. Unless the stars were still bright in the sky at five thirty-six in the morning. The smells from the bubbling pot were overwhelming, delicious and impossible to distinguish.

“Have a seat there, Kayle. Take a load off.”

I sat down slowly at a small steel table covered in a ragged plastic tablecloth. The cloth was patterned in cartoon elephants marching behind each other, each trunk curled around the tail of the one in front.

“I hope you like Giant Squid with Kraken sauce. Just like Mother used to make it.”

He grabbed two bowls, dished up the meat and broth with a wooden ladle and brought them steaming to the steel table. I lifted my bronze spoon and dipped it into the bowl of food. It was chicken and potatoes. He smiled at me and wasted no time, slurping and chewing his meal. At least it was edible then. Safe. Good to know. I ate slowly anyway, my stomach still turning slightly after my last disagreeable meal.

“I see you admiring my grandfather clock over there. It’s a beautiful piece. The k-k-kitchen’s the only place on the island where time matters, Kayle. If you want that chicken done just right, that is. You’ve got a splash on your chin there.”

I wiped my chin and licked the sauce off the back of my hand. The young man turned back to his bowl. My eyes scanned the room again, and then the door through which I’d entered.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“This is my house. Well, our house. On
our
island.”

“Our?”

“My father’s in the next room. My brother’s downstairs.”

“There are only the three of you?”

The man grabbed a chicken leg with both hands and bit into it.

“I was impressed, Kayle. I really was,” he said, putting the stripped bone back in his bowl and licking his fingers one by one. “You know, the only reason you made it is because I was down in the jungle. You do know that, right? But also, the reason you m-
muh
-managed to get all the way to me was because you resisted. You walked almost a kilometre inland before taking a bite of that pear, and that’s the furthest I’ve seen anyone get in a while. Most can barely make a few feet before they’re c
-cuh
-climbing up trees and stuffing their faces.

“It’s not easy resisting those fruits, is it? All that time at sea and suddenly you’ve got this incredible buffet, this orgy of fruity goodness there just for you. The smells are hard enough. And I should know. They were designed that way. Designed to be irresistible. So congratulations, Kayle. It was impressive. That, and the f-f-fact your stomach was so shrivelled you hardly had any fruit at all. That probably saved your life too.”

“Those fruits were put there on purpose?”

“That’s right.”

“And they’re all …?”

“Yes,” he said, understanding. “The ones in the jungle, yes. We’ve got our own fruit up here at the house. And not just fruit. Some livestock, vegetables, grain. The really guh
-good
stuff. But out there … well, it’s a jungle out there.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not on a real island, Kayle. It’s more of a ship, really. And if you’ve ever read a book or seen a movie, you’ll know, where there are ships there are pirates.”

The young man finished off the broth with his spoon. After he was done he took his bowl to a blue plastic tub filled with water and soap.

“What do you mean
ship?
”

“This all
looks
like an island, but you aren’t on some exotic getaway. This island is made of the real shit of the human world, Kayle. Refuse. Bottles. Machinery. Plastic. Ground down, tied up. Squashed and compacted into bricks. Whatever can be used. And it turns out, most of it can be used.”

The young man rinsed his hands in another bowl of water and dried them on a tea towel hanging from the dark mahogany clock.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“My name?”

It was as if nobody had ever asked him.

“Anubis. M-mm
-muh-my
name’s Anubis. Now, Kayle,” he said. “Finish up my culinary delights and come with me.”

Anubis led me through the house and out onto a wooden deck. There was no moon and it was too dark to see much of my environment. We were at the top of a thick black patch of the oval island. He leaned on the rail.

“You want to know where you are, I can tell you,” he said. “Why not? You’re here now and you have a right to know, I suppose.” He stared out towards the ocean. “There are only the three of us here. My father, my brother and me. But I deal with the running of this island by myself. I have no choice. My brother and my father have certain conditions that don’t allow them to be out here, managing the ins-and-outs. You’ll never see my brother rigging up pulleys, repairing the house, raising stock, cooking and doing meet-’n’-greets with people like you. He
does
help me, in ways I probably need to explain, ways even I don’t fully understand … but nevertheless trust and depend upon. I guess you could say we’re kind of a
tuh-tuh
-team.” He turned around and put his back to the rail, resting his elbows behind him. He turned his head up to a sky splashed with countless stars and continued to speak …

The mirror man

M
y brother and I were born twenty-three years ago, five minutes apart. We’re identical twins—and when I say we’re identical, I mean
identical.
With most twins, there are always small differences upon close inspection. Slightly larger eyes. Smaller hands. Wider nostrils. Something! But not us. Nope. We’re identical in every way you can imagine, as if the same p-puh-
person
came into this world twice.

My parents were what you’d call extreme environmentalists. Protesters. Anti-establishment people. Always going on about the corporate overseers, you know, those evil bigwigs who twirl their moustaches over some new profitable way to poison our bodies, our minds and our homes. I’m sure you know the sort. One thing was for certain, however: whether bound by their political passion or perhaps even something more, my parents were truly in
love
with each other. My father wuh-wuh-worshipped my mother, my mother put all of her faith and trust in my father, and together, the two of them became Bonnie-’n’-Clyde-Gone-Green.

He was an English teacher and she was a secretary, but after only a few years of living together, they left their jobs to join an aggressive, growing movement of outraged people called The Borrowed Gun.

It was the accidental dropping of the “Gas Giant” Bio-bomb in Maputo in ‘55 that really sparked The Borrowed Gun, I reckon. I mean, everyone saw it on the news. A city of corpses. Dead fish floating on the surfaces of the lakes. Acidic rain riddling crops and p-p-people’s hair falling out. All of those suits in court, shrugging and
oopsing
and cutting deals to dodge the blame bullet …

And it was right about then that my parents came off the leashes of society like two wild dogs. It wasn’t charity work on their minds, though, it was vengeance.

My brother and I were sheltered from most of their undertakings in the early years. People would come to our house in the evenings and my mother would bring out trays of tea and coffee for these strangers. They would talk about things I couldn’t understand and the same few words would g-g-go back and forth: “government,” “tactics,” “infiltrate,” “liberate.” Words like that.

Sometimes discussions would get heated, at which point my mother would enter our room to tell us a story. She made them up as she went along, which meant they’d only ever be as good as her mood. Her stories were full of make-believe creatures and farfetched adventures, which often bored me, but my b-b-b-brother seemed to appreciate them.

No. I wanted to know what the adults were talking about. I didn’t want to lie in my room and listen to fables about monsters and dragons. I wanted to hear about the monsters that scared my parents. The dragons they were trying to defeat. And I wanted in.

It was around this time, on an ordinary trip to the seaside with my parents, that we found out about my brother’s unusual skin problem. That was a particularly strange day. One day you think you know how the world works and the next you don’t, as if over the course of a night somebody went and changed a rule somewhere.

My brother and I were eight years old. My father was lying on a towel, wearing big sunglasses and drying off from a swim. My mother was reading a book. The rest of the beach was full of the regular Sunday crowd. I was sitting next to my parents, trying to make a sandcastle, and my brother was playing d-d-down by the water.

That’s when we heard the scream. Blood-chilling, unearthly. I remember people on the beach turning their heads at the same time. I remember thinking someone had been eaten by a shark, the way that scream rippled across the beach. It was only when I stood that I realised it was my brother making that sound. He was running back up the beach towards us.

I’ll never forget that first time I saw him standing there, veins of ocean water running over his, his b-b-b-body. He was covered from head to toe in the biggest, reddest blisters you can imagine. His face was twisted and pulpy, his eyelids almost completely closed. His arms looked like a string of onions in a tight red sack. There wasn’t a part of him that wasn’t bulging and burning—and he just kept screaming and screaming. A sound I’d never heard before, but recognised anyway.

It was like it was me screaming.

EPP,
they call it. My brother’s an extreme case. It means he suffers from a photosensitivity to light, and any prolonged exposure makes the poor guy look like he’s been tossed in a lobster pot. In an instant, my Mirror Man—as I still like to call him—was more my shadow than a brother, a familiar figure trapped in constant darkness.

He was given medication, but his body reacted badly, and it didn’t seem to help much anyway. So my mother decided it was best he stayed inside while I got to play outside with friends. Curious kids often asked about him and I’d just shrug and say he was sick. He’d get better, I told them, but he was sick. I can only imagine the b-b-b-bullshit stories they spread about the boy who lived in the darkness—the boy who could do nothing but stand at his upstairs bedroom window and watch us kick a soccer ball about in the street.

Some days my brother did come out of the room, but he looked like a ghost wrapped in those black sheets. The look did him no favours. It only mmm-muh-made him even stranger to the other kids. I’d spend time with him in the dark room, of course, and we’d chat and joke and talk nonsense. That lasted for a while, but eventually he lost interest in what I had d-d-done with my light-filled day. He lost interest in our favourite TV shows. TV and video games and comics. He stopped laughing at my jokes too. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like he was sad or depressed, it was more that, while he lost interest in some things, others interested him more. He began to talk about strange dreams he was having—things he was seeing in the darkness. People’s faces, places he’d never been to. His words became more and more puh-puh-puzzling, and after a few months he was barely stringing together a sentence that made any sense, kinda the way people talk to you in dreams. I’d listen to him, patiently, you know, maybe I could figure something out, but sometimes I felt like running away and never seeing him again.

Adults think their problems are so bloody big, but they’re equipped to deal with them, and that makes all the difference. For a kid, everything’s the most incredible thing ever, or it’s the end of the world. Nothing’s just fine. And that’s how it felt, dealing with him. I couldn’t handle it, and couldn’t handle that I couldn’t handle it, you know?

One morning, I woke up in my bed and he was standing over me, his skin white as cream cheese, his eyes … We were both born with dark guh-guh
-green
eyes, but now his were like new leaves on a tree. He had no expression on his face. He was sleepwalking. I asked him what he wanted—why he was out of bed so early—but he only leaned and said,
Bang! Crash! Bang! Don’t look right. Look left.

That was it. That’s what he said.

And then he went to bed.

I thought nothing much of it, went about my day as normal, met up with Joey Sinclair and Ben Beatty, two friends from school. We went skateboarding through the city. We were about to cross a road, but as we came off the pavement, we heard a loud crashing sound on our right. We turned to see some poor guy drop a television he’d been carrying from his car. Joey and Ben laughed and pointed, and I would have probably joined those losers, but something in me clicked without thinking. For some reason, I looked the other way. That’s when I saw the big red van spuh-sp
-speeding
down the road. No time to shout. The van ended up hitting Joey and Ben both. They rolled over the bonnet, landed in the road like boneless chickens. Joey pulled through but lost a leg, Ben Beatty dud-duh-d-d-died right then and there, and I went on to skate another day.