‘Sure. I know.’ Tears welled. I stood to return my mug to the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry,’ I called back over my shoulder. ‘I know how freaky this is. I know exactly how freaky.’ I placed my mug overly carefully into the sink and turned on the red tap. The pipes groaned, then screamed. I turned it off, then hung my head over the sink.
Babalwa’s feet flopped down the ancient wooden floors to the kitchen doorway.
‘Look, it doesn’t mean—’ she offered eventually.
‘Leave it,’ I said to the sink. ‘Trust me, I know what you mean. I’m as scared as you are.’
‘I just need—’
‘Trust me, Babalwa, I understand. I really do understand.’
‘I’ll help you move?’
‘Sure. Let’s do that.’
CHAPTER 14
I hopped around on my other leg
I kicked down the door to the adjacent semi, carving up the skin on my right ankle as it caught on the edge of the broken Yale lock. ‘Fuck! Fuck fuck fucking mother of God! You got first aid?’ I bellowed at Babalwa, who was standing in the street behind me, arms folded, amused.
‘Actually I do, Chuck. Stay there. I don’t want you bleeding in my house.’
She came back carrying a full see-through medical box with a red cross on the top. She dropped it next to me and retreated.
‘The cross glows in the dark. Found it in a 7-Eleven just after—’ She broke off mid-sentence.
I opened the box and used some of the contents to bandage the wound, which wasn’t as impressive as I had first thought. A scratch with some blood really. ‘Where do the larnies live?’ I asked. ‘Clearly nowhere around here. I need supplies.’
‘Walmer. Big walls. Swimming pools. Golf.’
‘Perfect. How do I get there?’
‘Seriously? You’re not even going to clean that out with salt water or anything? You’re just gonna wrap a bandage on like that? Damn, who raised you, boy?’ Babalwa knelt down next to me, unwrapped the bandage and said, ‘Wait – I’ll be back.’
She returned with a bowl of salt water and proceeded to clean and bandage my foot as I hopped around on my other leg, painfully aware of the sparse nature of my boxer shorts.
‘Roy, you stink. I mean, you really, really smell. You should have bathed last night. When last did you actually wash? Like, with soap?’
‘A while back, but chill. Chill.’ I felt defensive. ‘Soon as I’m done here and I’ve got some supplies I’ll clean up – proper.’
‘Bullshit. I’m getting you a bar of soap right now and when you find one of those larny swimming pools, you use it, right?’ She was laughing as she looked up at me. ‘And see if you can find some actual underpants. I’ve seen too much of you already.’ She patted my freshly dressed ankle wound and packed up the first aid kit. ‘I’ll draw you a map to Walmer. It’s easy. You won’t get lost.’
Babalwa’s map included these directions:
Up parliament
into cape road
left into roseberry
which becomes Target Kloof… follow the loop
right into main
township on your left
larnies on your right
‘Target Kloof?’ I asked as I stepped up into the van.
‘It’ll make sense,’ Babalwa replied. ‘Big S bend. People always wrapping their cars around the poles.’
‘Sounds exciting. See you now now.’
I drove away, up Parliament Street. At the top of the road I looked in the rear-view mirror to see Babalwa waving goodbye.
I waved back.
Target Kloof was as she had described it, a sweeping downward S bend ending in a little bridge over a valley, the road dividing two lush halves of suburban jungle. I drove at a crawl. A troop of monkeys watched me from the tops of the trees, a large male scratching his balls as the van passed. I waved at them.
Once through Target Kloof I took the right where Babalwa suggested, although at this stage I was already where I needed to be: fences, signature gates, walls, swimming pools, satellite dishes. I cruised, looking for easy targets.
Eventually I settled on River Road, a strip of double- and triple-storey houses facing onto a golf course, a few of them gabled, a few done out in mock-modest homey style and a few completely walled off. I smashed the van through a relatively humble black-and-white gated entrance, and then straight through the wall of a family entertainment area. A flat-screen TV – a relic or family keepsake of some sort – fell forward from its cabinet and shattered on the van’s bonnet.
I kicked through the thin, locked inter-leading door with my good ankle and headed into the main house. This, the bills on the entrance hall table said, was the residence of the Cotton family. Mr Ken Cotton. His wife, Barbara.
Hallway family photos. Their two girls, bright teenagers, arms around parents, themselves content in plastic pool furniture. The girls playing tennis in all-white, alluring outfits. The wider Cotton family on Christmas Day, lined up in two rows, arms linking, each combination telling its own story.
I pissed over the photo collection and the bills, soaking the Cottons as thoroughly as possible. Then I walked, dick out, as far as I could into the lounge proper, hosing the off-white lounge suite and the expensive wooden coffee table. It was a relief to be able to slip back into my habit. I zipped and thought of Babalwa’s request that I secure clothing, and then of her wrinkled nose at my stench. Too lazy to go back to the van, I searched the Cotton house looking for soap, finding a spicy underwear collection in one of the girl’s bedrooms instead. Pink G-strings. A studded bra with fake gems on the rim. Suspenders. I stopped awhile on her bed, running my hands through the teenage fabric, my erection throbbing half-heartedly at the loss.
The wall above the bed was covered in photos stuck onto the wall with Prestik, the montage carefully constructed to portray the life of a young PE debutante and her beau, who looked, in almost every respect, like a fool. He posed in each shot – sometimes pulling muscles overtly, or simply beaming far too intensely into the camera. Throwing a rugby ball to his mates. Running. Jumping. Pointing. He was on the ugly side and wouldn’t have aged well at all; but in the pictures the ugliness was light, a hint beneath the dominant, metallic veneer of youth.
I spat at him first, then at her, both lugs finding their mark on the wall and slowly dribbling down over their young faces.
In her cupboard I found a bar of Reece-Marie herbal soap (coarse rosemary, sage, lemon grass, teatree oil, aqueous cream and glycerine). The packaging promised it would lather exceptionally well.
I turned into Ken and Barbara’s bedroom, a typically dull set-up attempting to mimic magazine style. Creams and off-whites, wooden-framed pictures of Cotton life through the ages. Young Ken making his way in the world with a fishing rod and a smile – about twenty years old. Young Barbara gazing with measured effort to the horizon from what looked very much like the same beach Babalwa and I had visited. Ken and Barbara must have been, I guessed, around my age: the grain on the photos matched the scant remains of my own past.
I found a fluffy off-white bathroom towel in the en-suite bathroom and, even better, a key to the door leading out to the pool.
The back garden was ominous. Vast lawns tracked away from the pool, down a series of mini rolling hills, but they were out of control, the grass wild and angry. Shrubs and bushes created a barrier between the kitchen and the pool which, back in the day, would surely have been cut back weekly. But as I stood there the Cotton family entertainment zone hummed with decay, reinforced by the green skin on the pool and a layer of aqua-bugs and insects dancing on the corpses of drowned colleagues.