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 to the veld and sulked for the rest of the day. Later, when the sun went underground and the clouds turned pink, she said see, but I could tell she no longer believed.
It hardly rains any more. The cirrus clouds that wrinkle this faded sky are mean and meaningless. They leave the city to suffocate under the dust that creeps into everywhere, powdering our cheeks until we look like ghosts. With each passing season, circling this road, I feel how it sucks at our juice. We are being slow-baked, hardened like tar. In summer the heat plucks our flesh, stealing sweat and blood and tears; in winter the cold freeze-dries our bones. When we pee, if we pee at all, it splashes up onto our shoes. The soil doesn’t want our water. There is nothing this earth wants from us, and we have nothing left to give.
The sun climbs the sky. Noon and too hot. Less than a kilometre from where we sit, the shadow of the overpass spills onto the road like a purple pond.
“Shade, Sisi,” I whisper, but my voice is a breathless breeze. Sindi sits still as a lizard on a rock. Sweat beads on her top lip and her dusty lids sink over fever-yellow eyes.
In the distance, a motorbike breaks the flat line of the horizon. The rider hunches into his machine, going so fast the roar of the engine thunders over the concrete and warps the still air into a watery mirage after the bike has passed us by. Sindi hardly notices. A cloud blocks the sun and turns the air cold. Sindi drops her head onto her knees. I can almost taste the sweetness of her sweat on my tongue, a faint whiff like roadkilled dogs baking in the sun. Then the cloud moves on and for a time it’s hot again.
The shadows are long when she lifts her head, face puffy from the stuffiness between her legs. She holds out her dog-bitten hand, pulpy as a rotten plum. She prods it, pushing and squeezing her palm until the pain stretches lips over gums and her fingers spasm. Nothing she does, not bending or pushing, not pulling or pressing, can make the claw back into a hand. I stare at the claw-hand that’s too old and deformed to belong to my sisi but pokes from the sleeve of her coat, stare at the fingers that pulling can’t make straight, stare at the black dog-tooth pits oozing.
And inside me, in my guts, I know. Bad things come.
The dusky light that borders night flattens the city and reduces the squatter camp across the way to a single row of shacks. Smoke from cooking fires winds upwards; the spirals twist together until the smoke is too fat and heavy for the air to hold and it sinks back like a sigh onto the low roofs. Cold drops on us.
Sindi’s head rests again between her knees. I sit next to her, my palm pressed between her shoulder blades, concentrating on the whispering of her breath and the rising-sinking, rising-sinking of her back.
I watch the shadows move between the shacks: the shades of men drinking and women cooking, the shades of children playing and dogs sniffing. Everything’s humming along. The smoke drifts, opening up their lives for me to see; then it wraps them up and hides them away again. The smell of shack life – of burnt wood, of samp sticking to the bottoms of pots, of meat shrinking in a gravy of water and cabbage, of people’s shit and dogs’ shit and rot and rubbish – drifts across the lanes, ignoring the concrete barrier that separates cars going west from cars going east, and sticks its fingers up my nose. Noises float over the highway and take me home.
Mama squatting by the government tap at the end of our street, talking to Next-Door-Auntie while she scraped plates with her fingers. Behind them, the queue swapping chat while a ten-feathers-chicken tikked at the crumbs of pap Mama flicked from her fingers, running circles whenever she turned on the tap to rinse.
“Whose hen is it?” Someone pointed at ten-feathers with a dirty pan.
“Daai anorexic ding?” The whitey who stood at the junction by the mall every day begging change shook her head. “Looks like Gogo Nkosi’s chicken, they all scrawny like that one.”
“Looks like Gogo Nkosi,” came a shout from the back of the queue. Everyone laughed.
Across the highway, a woman screams. Someone shouts and bangs a pot against the corrugated wall of a shack, and the dogs in the camp pick up the commotion. A shot cracks, and two shadows break free from the haze and run down to the road. They bolt across the lanes, not pausing to look. Without slowing their pace, they vault the concrete