of grass to steady her balance and turns to face him. We’re already halfway up the embankment, but the old man hasn’t lifted his soles off the road. Ahead, the dark wheel of the off-ramp winds around the hill and disappears into the night, reappearing high above us as Voortrekker Road, bright with streetlights and straight as a runway.
“Let’s keep going, we can be at the church tomorrow morning. It’s not far, just past Nasrec in the old refinery. My people are on the move, I know we’ll get lucky and catch a ride. I foresee it. We’ll be there tonight.” Joshua Piepper pulls up the sleeve of his coat and brings his wrist close to his face. The eerie green glow of his watch light sinks deep crags into the flesh around his eyes. Loon Man the ghost.
The old man’s fresh, but we’ve been walking since dawn and it’s so late now I have to bend my neck all the way back to see Mama Moon. Soon, the sun’s going to creep over the horizon and people will begin to leak onto the streets. While the night still wraps us in her blanket, we can shut our eyes for few hours in peace.
Sindi raises her hand to wave goodbye. Loon Man twitches. He looks at Sindi, looks at me, checks his watch again, face glowing green. “There’s evil up there, my child.”
I glance over my shoulder, wondering where the crazy from this morning went. Nothing moves. The wind whispers against my skin. “Leave him, it’s cold,” I murmur.
“Sss_asomething bad on the road,” she tells him. “I s_asaw him this mm_morning.”
She turns and continues the steep climb. After a moment, he follows. No one wants to walk the road alone. There are people who do, but they’re sad and mad and talk to invisibles, warding off loneliness in the company of ghosts.
Loon Man’s nervous twitching stops when we step into the milky glow of the streetlights, as if he thinks light can protect him. We follow the road as it crosses above the dark highway towards the racecourse. In the distance, the neon sign of the Casbah Roadhouse sparks and goes out. There’s always something fresh in the bins at Casbah at closing time. Usually, we’d head straight there, but Sindi keeps going until she gets to the patch of grass by the racecourse gates. We once sat for hours on the concrete bench here, waiting for Mama and Next-Door-Auntie to win big so we could go home. They lost so much they couldn’t pay the taxi fare. That was the first time we walked the highway.
Sindi leans against that same bench and yawns. I wonder if she’s ashamed to go through the bins in front of Loon Man, or if she just isn’t hungry. For the first time since we left the townhouses this morning, she examines her hand. Already, the flesh around the wound is red and swollen. She prods the area, sucks her teeth.
“You okay, child?”
Sindi nods and puts her hands in her pockets. Joshua Piepper takes out his flask. He offers it to Sindi but her eyes are closed. For a while he sits sipping at it, staring at nothing. Sindi’s breathing slows, deepening the stillness. It’s so quiet that when he speaks, I jump.
“Why are you here?” His voice like boots on wet gravel.
Long time after, when it begins to seem like the question never was, she pats the green blades. “The grass.”
“No, my child, not here on this patch of God’s ground, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m asking a bigger thing. Why are you here?”
The silence makes a hole in the night and it sucks me in.
“I was on the street too, long time ago now, but years, many years, so many I can’t give you a number, but it was long enough for me to grow old. Truth be told, I lived between the streets and prison.” He lifts his sleeve. The number 28 is tattooed on the inside of his wrist.
Sindi shifts, her eyes flicking behind their lids. She’s too tired to be interested in bedtime stories. And me? I don’t usually listen to other people’s stories – everyone has a story, I have stories of my own – but his voice pulls me away from the silent hole.
“Everyone comes from somewhere. There’s a beginning to every legend, some place we call home. Don’t matter if it’s a palace or a shack.”
I’ve heard this sermon before, at Saviour’s Pit Stop.
“There’s very few that’s born to the street. Even the street kids, they’ve got family out there. Whether they care or not, that’s a different story. Point is, you’ve got to start somewhere to end up here. The in-between, from there to here, that’s what I’m asking. Why are you here?”
A snore rolls in Sindi’s throat. Loon Man doesn’t seem to notice. He sips from his flask, his voice dipping until I can no longer follow – his lips seem to swallow the words just out of his mouth. Keeping mouse quiet, I slip closer and sit down on the bench.
He stops talking and frowns at me. “Why are you here? Why? Why? What do you want?” He reaches into his coat. His hand rests on his heart a minute, then draws out a piece of string tied around his neck. There’s something on the end of it, something black, and he rubs it between his thumb and finger, muttering like a crazy.
“Now flee from youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness!” he shouts, making me jump. He lifts the flask to his ear and shakes it, testing the level. “Look at me now, I’m one of God’s generals, but once I was a general of another kind. I was nineteen when I went to prison for the first time. I was a boy, but I thought I was a big man. Prison makes you realise you’re nothing, and if you want to survive, you better find your balls.” Loon Man slumps under the weight of his memories. He’s getting like Mama on payday after a few quarts of Black Label. “I spent twelve years in prison. I went in a burglar with a two-year sentence, came out a killer. To survive, you follow orders. They tell you to kill, you kill. God was with me. Even as I shed the blood of another man.” He stabs the air with an invisible knife. “I came out and I was going straight. Wife took me back and I did okay for a while.”
He trails off and just sits there, staring at the past and sipping from his flask. He’s beginning to bore me. I look at Sindi and wonder what she’s dreaming. I long to sleep, to dream the same dreams as my sisi, but I’m afraid of the dark, of the empty place I go to whenever I close my eyes.
“In his pride the wicked does not seek Him, in all his thoughts there is no room for God!” Loon Man’s roar knocks me off the bench.
“Janine got pregnant. Me, a father. I was happy, I was, but the pressure – didn’t think I could do a kid. In prison I ran from nobody; out in the world, I was scared of a baby. The night Sonny was born, I started to run. But you can’t run from the life God gives you, you can’t run from your legend. If you try, He will find a way to turn you, to make you pay.”
“Scaredy-cat man, scaredy-cat man, prison don’t bite but your baby can,” I sing, getting back on the bench.
“All I took was my gun, my phone and a bottle of whisky. I checked myself into the Carlton Hotel. A room on the twenty-eighth floor – twenty-eight, to remind me. I took a shower to wash the soot from my skin. My phone started ringing. I didn’t answer, but Janine kept calling and I thought, I owe her a goodbye. She told me about my boy. She said he had ten fingers, ten toes, she said they were so small but they were perfect. Tiny and perfect and blue.”
Loon Man stops talking. The silence buzzes, tense, waiting. I cling to the bench.
“Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt, for the tree is known by his fruit.” He slaps his thigh and I snap up straight, but I don’t
