'Yeah?' She rested her hand on the hall radiator and cocked one knee a little in front of the other, pushing her hip out to the side. 'You forgot something?'
He looked at her neck, at the bangles on her tanned arms, then back at her face. 'In case you're wondering, I think you're very pretty.'
She blushed. He hadn't thought it was in her to blush. 'Yeah?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, lot of good it does me.' She pushed her hair behind an ear, lowered her eyes and waited for him to answer. When he didn't she smiled. 'Do you — uh — want to stay for coffee?' She twisted her knee round a little towards the radiator, opening her leg outwards from the hip. 'Or beer. I've got some in the fridge.'
He looked at her thigh in the jeans. Then he looked at her manicured hand on the radiator. Earlier she'd told him she was a manicurist and did lots of acrylics. She'd said she thought a good set of acrylics was the sexiest thing a woman could get to please a man.
'Thanks, but I'll have to pass.' He got out his keys. 'Don't think of it as a missed opportunity.'
'No?'
'Not at all. Think of it as a lucky escape.'
29
Flea had no idea how the ibogaine trip was going to be. What if she decided to go for a walk or, worse, tried to drive? She had to lock herself down, so they'd decided Kaiser would wait, not where she was sitting — on the sofa in his big, untidy living room — but within earshot: in the kitchen or the study. He'd rolled up the plastic sheeting in the doorway so he could hear her, assembled three electric fires round the sofa to keep the chill away, and now she could hear him shuffling around the other rooms in his tatty slippers.
Taking the ibogaine was like chewing bitter liquorice sticks — a chunk of fibrous root that made her jaw ache and also made her gag. She finished it then sat down on Kaiser's sofa to wait. For a long time she was sipping water and rubbing her tongue across the back of her teeth, trying to take away the fur that had stuck there.
Out of the dirty window the unkempt field where dandelion and bindweed grew was bathed in sunlight. Even in the daytime you couldn't see much from this vantage-point, just the tops of the trees in the Mendip land of neolithic ghosts, medieval cathedrals, legendary caves. Kaiser's rambling garden was so pocked with sinkholes and craters from the old mines that her mother wouldn't let them play out there as children. She'd said there were entrances to shafts that a child could fall down to their death and that she wouldn't put it past Kaiser to have left them open. It was funny, Flea thought, how Jill never realized it would be her, not her kids, who would end up dead at the bottom of a hole.
She sighed and pulled her feet up under her, arranging the dusty old duvet across her legs. She closed her eyes for a while and tried to fix in her mind the position of the bodies in Bushman's Hole. She pictured how Dad might have looked as he started the head-first descent to the bottom. She'd done a mathematical formula and decided that, fully kitted out as her parents had been, they'd have gone down at about twenty metres a minute. With almost a hundred and fifty metres to go, that slow glide to the bottom of the hole would have taken them eight long minutes. At what point they'd died was anyone's guess.
And then, as she thought of those eight minutes, she realized something she'd never thought of before: that she could see time. You'd never notice it usually, but now it was clear that time was divided up into visible portions if you knew how to look at it, and that things had always been like this, since the very beginning. Some time packages were big and some were small, and each had different colours according to its size: the smallest ones, the ones that represented just enough time to dodge a bullet or a punch, were small and cherry red — time splinters. The ones that were long enough to stop someone choking, or to run after and catch a ball, or to lose control and crash a car were a juicy orange, slightly puffy at the edges. Sleep used pale yellow cubes — eight-hour chunks that got fractured and split open unnaturally when she woke early, and that was why everything felt wrong during the day.
She kept her eyes closed and studied the time packages, and the way they made up her future, stretching out into the distance — lots of little shapes packed together in a long line. There was a noise coming from a distance behind the shapes. Wah wah wah. Soft at first, but getting louder. Wah wah wah. She twitched her head away because it was a noise she hated as a diver, the sort that could mark the onset of a toxicity overload, but this time it seemed to be outside her head, coming in across the fields through the closed window. Wah wah wah. Wah wah wah. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the sound drifting in, but instead she saw that the room had changed beyond recognition.
A crack had formed in the far wall. She stared at it, mesmerized, as it lengthened, shimmering silver as if the entire room was peeling itself. There was a noise as if the centre of the earth was splitting and, just in time, she understood what was happening. She threw her hands into the air as, all at once, the ceiling caved in and rolled sideways. Her ears filled with a racing noise. A heavy, unbearable light dropped hard on her, submerging her, making her cling desperately to the sofa, knowing that if she was washed away nothing could bring her back.
When at last the noise had stopped she lowered her arms cautiously and twisted her head. Nothing was as it had been. Everything had changed. Even the air was different: instead of being clear, it was silver and wavering. Beams of white light rippled through from overhead, silt swirling through them. She knew, just from the feeling of cold and dread, where she was. She was in Boesmansgat. A place for the foolish and the dead. Bushman's Hole.
She tried to wriggle away, but instead of moving backwards into the sofa the water seemed to lift her and roll her over, and before she knew what was happening she was swimming, shooting fast through the cold. She sculled a little with her left hand, turning herself in a small circle because she couldn't orient herself immediately and, to start with, wasn't even sure which way was up. The light rays were there again, but this time they were sharp, like submerged stalagmites, and she didn't dare swim near them, thinking they might cut her. She steadied herself and began to swim slowly, the sweetest, absolute clarity flashing against her face, no bubbles, just the currents streaming around the dry suit. Gin clear. Now she understood what those words meant. Gin. Clear.
She'd swum for some time, going nowhere, knowing now what it felt like to be a fish, when she noticed radiance coming from the right. She brought herself to a halt and turned to it. It was the entrance to a cave, brightly lit, and after a moment's hesitation she swam towards it. As she came within ten metres of it, she saw there were figures inside the cave, lit up like a nativity scene in a church. Three faces in the yellow light, Dad's, Thom's and Kaiser's. It was a room she was looking at: there were two beds, a chair with a suitcase on it, a print of an orchid on the wall above Dad's head and dusty curtains against the window. She recognized it: the Danielskuil hotel room they'd stayed in the night before the accident.
'Dad?' she said tentatively, her mouth moving slowly. 'Dad?'
The sound came back, louder this time, wah wah wah, and, like a film coming off pause and cranking up, the figures in the room began to move. They bent towards each other, talking in low voices, checking their dive gear, and she realized, from the way her feet began to hurt, that this wasn't an hallucination but a memory, that she had been in this room too — somewhere she fitted into this tableau, off to one side, out of the immediate picture, but there anyway, because that night she'd been sitting on a bed with her feet wrapped in bandages, watching the men check the gear.