slapping against your arse? The ground was far away, didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I wanted to yell – not scream, I wasn’t scared. I wanted to shout. I was angry, but when I opened my mouth my cheeks filled up like plastic bags flapping in the wind. God silenced me.”
Loon Man sinks into his past, droning on about Sonny and twenty-eight floors and a life of sin, the words sliding round his mouth and coming out slurred and broken. He’s mumbling-shouting, raving-moaning, crying for poor Sonny who never stood a chance. Then, sudden as a finger click, he snaps out of it. “Listen, my child, God has plans for all of us. I fell twenty-eight floors and when I opened my eyes again I was nobody. The next twenty-eight years I spent on the street. I didn’t have the stomach to rob or kill any more. I wandered like Christ in the desert, looking for salvation. Almost thirty years. But I can offer it to you now, I can save you a lifetime of pain. Come with me, become one of my children and birth a Pure Child for God.”
He reaches over, puts his hand on Sindi’s shoulder and starts praying. “Jesus, save this child, bring her into our fold. Let her be a mother of your children, bless her clean blood and fertile womb. Keep her safe from unclean men, from infidels and Satan-worshippers. Save this child from the devil, don’t let her wander the streets for thirty years. Save her from my pain. I wasn’t strong, no Lord, I wasn’t strong like Jesus. I deserved my suffering. I gave in to temptation, I gave in to the devil. Don’t let this child escape You like I escaped You.”
I dance to Loon Man’s gospel raving. I sway and stamp and clap my hands, just like Sunday. “No Lord,” I shout when he shouts. “Save me,” I shout when he shouts. “Blessed be,” I shout when he shouts.
Then, rapid as it came, the raving stops and he shoots me a look. “They say there’s no place in heaven for babies with no name,” he says. “My boy died before I gave him a name. Tell me, demon, do you know my Sonny?”
I shake my head and give him a wide grin, stretching my lips so far back my teeth gleam against the night. I jive, still full of gospel. “Sonny’s dead, Sonny’s long-dead worm dinner, Sonny’s dead, long dead.”
Loon Man narrows his eyes. “You,” he says, pointing at me, his hand wrapped in string with the pendant tucked into his palm, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” He begins to pray, so soft at first I can’t hear the words; then, ever so slow, the volume rises. His words stroke me, wind around me, tie me up. I’m caught in the singing, swaying-swaying, and I don’t suss his game until the ropes are halfway up my legs.
“You tricked me!” I shriek, but he keeps praying. I wriggle. I squirm, but his prayers are binding. The hole made of silence opens wide, like a hungry mouth coming to swallow me. “Please, I’ll be a good girl.”
He holds out his pendant. It spins on tattered string.
“That’s just broken string,” I say.
He glances at the string, taking his eyes off me for a second. I begin to laugh. I laugh and laugh until my laughing fills me up and I balloon, big as a house, big as the world and when I pop, the dawn breaks, icy and grey.
Bad Things
Sindi lies curled on the grass, frost lapping her coat. I kiss her cracked lips, dead-man blue, and she opens her eyes. She stares at the tiny ice crystals clinging to the grass, focusing on nothing, focusing on nowhere.
Dawn bathes the streets in a clinical light that reminds me of the corridors in Bara Hospital, late at night.
“Don’t leave me,” I begged them, “take me home, don’t leave me alone.” But they left me there, with all the people skinny-limbed and dying.
Sindi sits up and rubs her face. She looks around, brow creased, as if she’s trying to remember if Loon Man was dream or reality.
“Everything’s a matter of which way you’re looking, and which day you’re looking from,” I tell her. It’s true. What was real yesterday is today’s dream, and it works backwards too. If you’re lucky, you dream good things.
We’re ready to walk when something catches her eye. I follow her gaze and there on the grass in a tangle is Loon Man’s necklace. She picks it up and holds it in front of her face. A black cross dangles from the frayed string. The cross is hand-carved, the rough wood darkened by the rub of oily fingers. It looks like a shadow suspended in the air, a cross-shaped hole in the day. Even the beaten copper eye, set into its centre, eats light.
The cross spins as the tangle unwinds, back and forth, trying to decide which way to settle. It finally stops with its back to Sindi, looking at me. Inside me, in my guts, I know. Bad things come.
Three days we walk, going nowhere. During the morning rush hour on the second day, a lady with bloodshot lips and eyes winds down her window and shakes a clear plastic bag containing a sandwich and an apple at us.
“Where you going?” She smiles, displaying lipstick-smeared too-white teeth. Sindi takes the bag and sticks her hand through the window, pointing at a bottle of water. The woman shrinks back, afraid.
“Please,” Sindi says, remembering her manners. The woman hands it over, winds up her window and stares straight ahead, as if she’s afraid we’re going to ask for more.
Sindi mutters her thanks to the glass, walks on. Later, when the cars are zooming again, she sits on the embankment and eats the sandwich. The apple she pockets for later.
On the third day, we come to the fence of the Reading Car Yard. It used to be a golf course until the government bought the grounds and turned it into a scrap yard for all the petrol cars they seized on D-Day. They fenced it in and posted guards in towers, but most of the cars still ended up back on the streets as b-diesel junks. Then some government clever wised up. Now the towers that punctuate the empty sky are rusting, and nobody watches over the pack of dogs they keep just hungry enough to bite.
We sit halfway up the embankment and wait for the rush hour, but it doesn’t come and we know it’s Saturday: Saturday and Sunday, the roads don’t clog. If we were any good at counting, we’d know they were coming. But the days stretch without end; dawn comes, night descends, nothing happens, we lose count. MondayTuesdayWednesdaySaturday who cares. It wasn’t always like that.
I stare at the highway winding round the city, at the trucks that work seven days, all hours. They slide onto the N3 and rush to the coast, leaving us behind. It’s far from here to the sea, but we were there one time: on New Year’s Eve, the beach jammed and crowded. I held Sindi’s hand as the waves rushed between my legs and tried to suck me under. I want to go there now, hitch a ride with a trucker back to when we were eleven and still happy, but my memories pull back like the waves and all I can remember is the salt on my lips and the feel of Sindi’s hand, slippery as a fresh-caught fish. And then it’s gone, and thinking of the sea makes my mind black.
I stand behind my sisi like her disobedient shadow, staring-staring at the billboards mounting the roadside, windows into lives we’ll never have; staring-staring at the ragged city sky and the cardboard-and-corrugated shacks where only children live because everyone else has died. And the clouds.
Sindi used to think that clouds were spookasem that had been blown off the stick by the wind. Next-Door-Auntie laughed when she told her that. “Ag child, that the dumbest thing you ever said. If clouds are made from candyfloss,” and she pointed at the white filaments scraped across the blue, “why don’t the rain taste sweet?”
Sindi stamped on Next-Door-Auntie’s foot. Mama saw and she caught a slap. We ran away
