metal above. Each car is like a brick in a wall, the spaces between only big enough to stash a baby.
And the gunman is coming.
Frantic, Sindi starts pushing – pushing the bumpers, the squashed hoods, the doors of the side-on cars; running-running, pushing-pushing, looking for spaces, gaps, big or small, any place wide enough to crawl into and deep enough to hide in.
Because the dogs are coming.
I can hear them, snapping-snarling, and the man, swearing and rattling the fence. Sindi stops. Her breath heaves in, out. She stands, arms at her sides, fists clenched, and faces the wall of cars.
A third shot cracks. A dog yelps. Its life snaps away: in a finger-click it’s gone. I hear the brother-dogs, the sister-dogs, crying-crying. Then they’re on the move again, away from the fence and the man and the gun. And he’s climbing; his weight sends a reverb down the wire.
The gunman is coming.
Sindi looks around, wild; looks left, looks right, looks left, looks up. A shadow shifts. I narrow my eyes. There’s a dark gap, four or five metres above us, between a trailer and an old tanker, the round kind for transporting fuel or milk. The circular back-end of the tanker is facing us and juts out a little over the cars. The trailer is jammed into the pile just above, and the container it was carrying tilts at an angle, creating a triangular space: a narrow tunnel too small to stand in but big enough to crawl through on hands and knees. The boys must have gone in there. Maybe it leads all the way through to the other side.
Using bumpers and empty headlight sockets as steps and handholds, Sindi reaches the tanker quick-quick, coming up on its left-hand side. Up close I see it was once painted green, but the paint’s faded and the company logo’s covered in scabs of rust. On the right, the rungs of a ladder climb the flat back of the tanker. Sindi stretches for it, but it’s at least twice as far as she can reach. I scan the grounds. I can’t see the man but I feel his madness.
Sindi presses her body against the flat back of the tanker and edges along the bumper, arms stiff, fingers spread, desperate for something to grasp. Don’t look down, I think, but halfway across, she does. The world turns.
Sisi’s going to fall and the dogs are going to eat her.
A bead of sweat rolls down her face and plummets to the ground.
Sisi’s going to fall and the man is going to shoot her.
Sindi lunges for the ladder. For a split second the top half of her body seems to disconnect from her hips. Her fingers graze one rung, then another, and she lifts one foot to give herself the extra reach she needs. As her hand closes over the third rung, her other foot slides off the bumper. She pivots on her wrist and slams into the ladder, yelping like that dog she almost killed. The sound of impact echoes through the hollow length of the trailer. For a moment she hangs, frozen midair; then she twists to face the tanker, settles her feet on the ladder and begins to climb.
I taste my heart as I inch across the bumper, praying the gunman didn’t hear her cry out. We’re easy targets: Sindi stands out against the pale-green paint like a bird against the sun. I’m sure he’s going to pick her off, but she moves with surprising speed, wriggling into the tight space under the container before I reach the ladder. The hole swallows her.
By the time I stick my head into the space behind her, her feet have disappeared. The dark closes in, heavier than night-dark, than normal dark. It has a fatness, as if all the cars pressing down from above have squeezed it into something solid. We crawl into the car mountain like two blind mice. I can’t even see the soles of Sindi’s boots, though if I move too fast I bump against them. This is a place that has never known light.
The air is soupy with smells. Engine oil and the grit of rust are sharp in my throat. The stink of damp carpets, sun-perished seat leather and rotting foam rubber clots my nostrils like fungus spores. I can even taste the cigarette butts in the ashtrays. The space becomes tighter the further in we go. There are dents in the tanker and the unevenness makes the blackness shrink and swell. As we inch along, the tunnel pushes down, getting tighter and tighter until it scrapes against the top of my head. Soon, I’m forced to lie flat on my belly and pull myself along the porous metal, the skin of my palms hot with friction. I can’t hear the dogs barking or the man shouting any more. Nothing penetrates the dense air. Even Sindi’s breathing is thick, as if someone’s stuffed a wet cloth into her mouth.
My head bumps against the soles of her boots. I lie there, waiting for her to move, ears straining against the ink. For a long time, there is only silence. Then I hear scratching, small at first, but rapidly increasing into a frantic scrabbling, fingernails on rust, and the stink of Sindi’s panic closes around me and I know: the boys didn’t come this way.
In the dark there’s no way to tell how much time has passed, or if the hours move fast or slow. How do we know the clock is still ticking, or if the cogs are stuck and the hands, twitching-twitching, count the same second over and over?
In the dark it is cold. The icy night air seeps into the scrap mountain, between bumpers that jut at odd angles, through sagging windscreens, over bonnets and roofs where rust has eaten away hope and shine and Mama Moon’s light glints off broken glass. The cold presses in, layering chill over chill until the metal shrinks and groans. It sinks towards us. When it reaches the tanker beneath us and the trailer above us, it swaps frost for body heat.
In the dark sounds are big and small, there and not there. The metal creaks and moans and complains. Our tomb speaks, saying things we don’t want to understand, but do. It tells us it’s easy to crawl into its belly. It says there is no way out. Around us things scratch, fall silent, scratch. Tiny nails scrape, tiny teeth nibble, small creatures burrow into the rotten seat stuffing. The mountain is alive. The mountain is dead.
I forget Sindi.
She’s so silent, drifting in, drifting out, asleep, awake, afraid, afraid, dreaming-dreaming. The dark’s a swamp. It drowns my mind and steals my memories. I try to hold on, but it’s more than I am.
After a while, the dark pressing down on me begins to feel good, like when Mama squashed my face between her breasts and held me there until I couldn’t breathe. The dark feels safe. I close my eyes.
I forget me.
Follow You to Your Drowning
“Fphst.”
I sit on the bumper of a yellow electric, blinking. From my perch I can see an ocean of dirt rolling out beneath me, shadowed by the skeletal trees that push skywards like cracks. To my left, pines hunch in a sombre clump. I blink again. The light’s so sharp I can see the crisscross mesh of pine needles carpeting the ground. To the right, the highway arcs against the horizon like a grey rainbow. The sight of it makes me feel empty inside. I look away, not wanting to feel like that when I’m on top of the world, light and free, floating-floating. I wonder how I got to be sitting on a sun-faded plastic bumper, leaning against the dented bonnet of a car. I turn my mind round and round, but all I find is a space, a big black hole, and it makes me feel bad.
“Fphst.”
The noise sounds like someone with no teeth trying to whistle. I look down. Below me, two boys stand on the edge of an old tanker. One boy has his head shoved into the space between a trailer and some cars. The other boy wears a long coat. I stare at them, the funny feeling in my gut getting bigger.
“Hey bra, let’s waai, maybe she not in there,” says the boy with the coat.
“She
