The following morning, at the supermarket, and on a Friday in which nothing much happened, except maybe for my being early for my shift, a woman with dark hair and a red face approached my till, slammed a serrated knife on my counter and began to shout. She showed me how the wooden handle was missing screws and some of her saliva sprayed on my face as she asked me what type of place I was running there. I’d never run anything in my life, I thought, but I took the knife anyway.
Please ma’am, I said, let me go fetch you another utensil. I’ll take this up with the manager, I offered, which only made her look away in disgust.
I took the knife, closed my eyes, opened them and started walking. I walked past her and into the full light of the fluorescents. I walked towards the aisle where the knives were. I walked past it, and then I walked past the manager’s office, too. The knife’s packaging, which was hard plastic, was sticking to my palm. When I placed my free hand on the door handle of the rest room, Jill, a fellow employee, called out to me. She asked me what I was up to, so I told her I was pleasing a customer. Then I smiled.
I swear, Jill said, the way these people are so inconsiderate, they could drive someone to suicide. Jill had green eyes and a long fringe she liked to blow off her face. She always stood with one hand on her waist — either at the parcel check or the kiosk— her paunch pushed forward at an angle from her small frame.
I nodded. Then I stepped into the rest room, but, before I closed the door I turned to face her, and when the frame broke the fluorescent light into dark drawn-out shadows on my face, like I’d seen it do with any number of us when we stood there, my smile widened and I said to her, tell me about it. Then I sat there for a long time before I took the knife back to the storeroom.
We arrive at a small house on the corner of Milner and Lawley Streets. The door’s blue, and it hangs in front of us, under a dimpled pane. Its peeling panels look close to ruin, and it stands just a meter behind a white fence. When I knock, there’s no answer, and Cissie asks me if we’ve arrived at the right place. She edges up towards me and I knock again, but still no one replies.
Eventually, I turn around and look up the road. On the opposite side, I see two teenage girls lounging on the back seat of a gold Cressida, their legs hanging out of the windows. In the sunlight, their thighs look as thin as arms, and I can hear the murmur of their voices hissing under the silence. A man with short dreadlocks, wearing a navy soccer shirt, pushes a trolley down the road towards us. He has his boots hanging around his neck by thick red laces, and he stumbles as he steers the trolley over the pavement. Occasionally, he shakes his head and shouts into the cage. When at last he pushes past the three of us, I turn to Cissie and Ruan and tell them I have a feeling we’ve arrived at the right place.
You sure?
I’m not.
I guess none of us are, Cissie says, and puts out her cigarette.
I turn back to the door and push it as hard as I can, and it clicks open when I give it a third shove. Ruan, Cissie and I file in, making our way into a small foyer.
Inside, the building feels cramped, despite its emptiness, and smells coated with an old layer of dust. We take measured steps, our feet falling in a soft pattern over the carpet. The client isn’t anywhere in sight, but his voice seems to carry from every room in the house. Maybe it’s in my head, but I can feel it shaking the walls. Then the front door slams closed behind us and we stop moving. His voice beckons us closer. Then he starts laughing. Ruan, Cissie and I walk towards him, one after the other.
We don’t find him waiting in the living room, and we don’t find him waiting in the kitchen, either, or even in the bathroom. Instead, we find his voice speaking to us without the presence of his body. There’s a laptop, with a camera fitted over the screen, balanced against a green vase on a coffee table. The three of us take our seats on a sofa in front of it. The man’s silhouette is spread out on the display. The audio jack’s connected to a stereo system set up on the tiled floor in the corner, and it pushes his voice into the house. Ruan, Cissie and I sit in silence.
We wait for the man to start. I look through the curtain lace and notice the glimmer of the gold Cressida again. It makes its way down Lawley Street, the legs of the girls still hanging out of its back-seat windows.
Then the man shuffles to life inside the screen’s frame. His silhouette moves, and he tells us that he’s prepared a game for us to play.
We listen.
It will be my very last game, he says.
We watch him light a cigarette. He takes a slow drag through the tube in his neck, then lets the smoke funnel back out in a thin plume. It curls at the top of his screen, crowning him with a small firmament. Then he starts to whistle, and in the middle of the frame, his face takes on the form of a dark landscape, rolling unevenly below a blue mist.
Once, he says to us — and Ruan, Cissie, and I draw in, pitching our heads forward to listen — there was a small and hidden village. It wasn’t very far from this city where the four of us now take our seats, holding our palaver across this wire. It was small, and known only to its inhabitants. They had no ruler, and had seen it fit to name their village after the harvest bounty, a word in a dialect now disappeared from this world. One year, the rains held off, and in the following seasons, the land was struck by a heat wave — the beginning of blight and famine. Then one day, the elders instructed the children in the village to go searching for quarry and crops, and when they returned, sorrowful and without reward, they all fell into a deep sleep. The following morning, the children began to grow roots on their scalps, and within a fortnight they had banana saplings growing out of their heads. The elders, famished, took only a day to deliberate. Then they decided to dig early graves for the children so the saplings might grow into trees. There would be more children, they reasoned. Then they buried them. They watered the graves with their tears and the saplings grew into trees and they feasted. However, soon after the elders had taken their fill, they fell into a deep slumber and awoke to find roots growing out of their own heads. The bark from the saplings thickened and pushed down on their weak joints, and within a day they were buried below the earth. Later that same evening, the sky opened itself with a thunderclap, and now a grove of banana trees stands where those villagers once lived. Do you understand me?
I do.
This comes from Cecelia. She says it without hesitation and lifts herself up from the couch. Surprised, Ruan and I turn to face her.
Good, the man replies. He lights another cigarette and draws the smoke slowly through the tube. Then he motions his hand towards a door on the left side of the hallway. The three of us follow his gesture with our eyes. You’ll find more inside, he says, and Cissie nods.
In silence, she walks across the hallway and enters the room to the left. The door closes behind her and the ugly man continues.
Once, he says again, there was a man who was a carpenter and a spirit man.
The man exhales the smoke through his nose and continues.
Since the carpenter was blessed with both craftiness and piety, he says, with firm fingers that carried the land’s wisdoms as well as a porous spirit, he was valued widely across the region. However, he had been born with a nose that was moved too far to the left of his face, and a cleft palate, disfigurements which delivered him daily into the clutches of shame. He was unable to bear the company of his neighbors, and, as a result, lived the life of a fugitive. In each village he passed, he was seen only as a faint figure on the hills, where he would set up his hut far from the eyes of the villagers below. One night, alone in such a hut, his ears growing heavy with the cheers of a harvest festival below, a notion came to him. He would fashion a wooden sculpture in his own image, only amending it where the disfigurements had struck his face. He labored for two days without rest, and was done as the third day dawned, upon which he beheld his work. The following day, he smuggled the sculpture to the village below, where it was received with praise and admiration. However, when he descended from his mountain to meet the villagers and reveal himself as its creator, no one recognized him. Instead, he was captured and then banished for vagrancy. Do you understand me?