‘So there’s no burial necessary.’
‘Anything left over is incinerated. Sometimes the predators take everything. What we call a “clean sweep”. No work for us to do but put the next one in.’
‘But there are some, presumably, who do break?’
‘Like that fellow over there, the one who screamed a few minutes ago. You see, my men have gone out into the water, they’re getting what they need to get from him, and if he doesn’t give them everything they want, then back he goes. Sometimes it takes a dozen trips out before they realize we’re serious; they scream every time, but don’t tell us everything we want to hear, and back they go. Ones like that always break down eventually, though. It’s the most efficient system we’ve found, and it serves an ecological function, too. Fish stocks in the area have increased ten-fold over the last three years.’
‘This is the court of last resort, so to speak, for the hardest cases.’
‘These are the ones who’ve been through everything else and still not cracked. I can’t explain what it is about the ocean, some kind of natural rhythm that just scares the hell out of them. We figured out how to do it best, too. You leave them out for a day, in a secure position, and let them roast. Then the next morning, after they’ve been shivering all night from the burns, we drag the cages down to the water line and let the tide start to work its magic. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. There’s something redemptive about it.’
Your fingers and toes were throbbing and burning as the salt worked on the exposed tissue where the nails had been torn away, and the sores that covered your back were alive with sand kicked up by the breeze and the persistent sting of fleas. You were aware that you were beginning to burn when you chafed your bare thighs together or shifted your wrists in their shackles. The inside of your mouth was cottony and you closed your eyes to preserve the little moisture that remained. Sleep was impossible because of the strength required to hold yourself in place; if you relaxed, the shackles at your wrists and ankles would cut into your flesh, and it would be a short time before they began to cut into bone. I have resisted this long, I can go longer. It is not like illness or fever, not even like shame. Nakedness no longer matters. They can do what they want to me, they can watch me pissing and shitting myself, if I had anything left inside me to piss or shit. No food in my stomach to vomit, not even bile. This is not the worst they have done. This is almost a reprieve.
Suspension over sand might not have the hot flush of shame, or the chills of sickness, but was nonetheless both hot and cold. Shame had been rife indoors. You did not want to remember what they had done to shame you; it was impossible to return to that and still remain yourself.
You could hear the voices of the guards and the officials who accompanied them, but couldn’t catch individual words; they were spending more time watching than you would have expected, as if they were attending a test match, with lunch and tea breaks. Turning your head to one side or another, you could see cages just like yours, stretching out on either side, nine to the left, fifteen to the right, the furthest at the limits of your vision; some were in line with your cage, others were closer to the water. In the cage to your left was a young woman. Like you she was steeling her body, holding it in place so that the shackles would not cut into her extremities. You thought you recognized her from inside, but without any hair, and several metres distant, it was difficult to be sure. You clicked at her, as you had taught yourselves to do, but she did not respond; perhaps she had gone elsewhere, travelling. The guards were too far away to take any notice of what you were doing. Turning your head to the right, you found the cage on that side was closer, and you recognized a friend from inside. Together you had learned the ancient alphabet, taught by one of the first prisoners, the knowledge passed down over the years. To the guards, it was only noise, mumbo jumbo.
‘Hello, friend. They’re not watching us.’
‘Did they bring you this morning?’
‘I don’t know. You should hold yourself up. Your wrists.’
‘It’s all over tomorrow, either way.’
You tried to remember how long you had been friends. You had met at least five years before being captured. Your bodies had not changed markedly; you were thinner now, your faces drawn, but you were still recognizable as yourselves.
‘I won’t scream. Will you?’
‘No.’
There was no point in screaming. You thought you knew what it would be like to drown, you had almost done it at the age of three in the deep end of a pool. At first you had panicked, forced to swim out from the ladder into the depths, and then, finding yourself dropping to the bottom of the pool, you had relaxed, come to the end of your air, and suddenly found yourself on the concrete poolside, the mouth of the swimming instructor clamped on your own, the wrinkles in her face dripping with water, and a crescent of other children standing near you, looking curiously as the great fat woman breathed the world back into you. It was not so bad almost drowning; I would have preferred it to resuscitation. Why did I panic? I knew how to swim; I swam before I walked. I was talking to someone, a boy with brown hair, and I was trying to tread water, and then I was under the surface, falling past those other small bodies, and the round abdomen of the swimming instructor.
The light was beginning to shift, and a hot breeze blew down from the interior, throwing sand against your burned body, and you began to feel chilled, wracked by the nausea of sunburn that comes when the light fails. The woman on your left and the friend on your right were also beginning to shiver and shake.
Is this where you end? Is this how you end?
It is my nightmare. I dream it every night, every hour, have dreamed it for two decades now.
It is all I can see.
II
Sam
Before I leave for Johannesburg tomorrow, Greg suggests a visit to my old neighbourhood. We stop first at the weekend market in the Old Biscuit Mill, jammed with hipster locals shopping for overpriced baked goods, handicrafts, African masks spray-painted matte white to make them look more chic. Alongside all that there are still the run-down shops on Albert Road, the car guards with manic arm motions insisting that it’s fine to park on a solid line because everyone does it and the traffic police don’t give a damn and anyway it’s a Saturday so what could happen?
At the market we sit on hay bales and eat while Dylan plays with some other children. Greg seems to know everyone and after two hours of eating and playing and squeezing through the crowds to buy vegetarian wraps and pastries and iced coffees I tell him I’m going to look for my old house and will meet them later.
I dodge through the cars on Albert Road and with the map in my head walk back towards the City Bowl; after a few blocks I turn up Dublin Street, cross Victoria, and turn off onto Kitchener.
Devil’s Peak looms above, though it doesn’t seem as massive as I remember it. And while the street hasn’t changed much in two decades, it feels narrower, cramped and enclosed. Some of the houses are more dilapidated than they once were, others look like they’ve been recently refurbished, repainted and encased in burglar bars that enclose the front verandas. Kwaito pulses from one of the shabbier houses. Further up the hill, from a house with a new extension built above the original one-storey structure, there’s the sound of a string quartet coming from a stereo, the windows all thrown open and the curtains limp with heat fluttering out through the bars.