Apocalypse Now Now (11 page)

The wagon stops with a jolt and I awake with a start, feeling like I haven’t slept at all. The boy in my dreams is intent on finding something, but he doesn’t see the huge dark creature bearing down on him, or the terrible man giggling like Tessie and Mari playing with their dolls. I’m scared for him.

I poke my head through the flap, and feel the cold dread slide down my back when I see the men talking, their hands busy loading rifles as their eyes look toward the horizon. I follow their gaze and see dust spiralling upward in the distance.

My father, a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, strides over to me. ‘They’ve found us,’ he says, causing the dread to dig its claws into my spine.

My father lays his rifle on the ground and holds my shoulders in his large hands. ‘You cannot be scared, little klipspringer,’ he says, putting his face close to mine. I look into his craggy face; the long grey beard falling downwards, the hard blue eyes locked on mine. ‘If you survive you must find the vehicle.’

It’s that ‘if’ that gets to me. If I survive. We have been running from the English forever, their threat constant. But I never thought they’d catch us. I look into my father’s eyes and feel him looking into me. He is angry, but not afraid. He squeezes my shoulders painfully. ‘You have to find it.’ He reaches down and grabs my hand, placing it on the Bible. It looks so small against the large cross worked into the leather.

‘Promise me, child.’

I want to cry, want to plead with him, want to tell him that I can’t, that I don’t know what he expects me to do. But I know that would disappoint him more than anything I’ve ever done. ‘I promise,’ I choke out.

He nods and pulls me into a rough hug. ‘Stay under the wagon,’ he says.

I clamber beneath the wagon and lean my back against the sturdy wooden wheel, pulling my knees to my chest and tucking my feet beneath my dress. I’m in a safe place where I’ve been a thousand times before, running here when my father or Uncle Niklaas has been angry with me. Nobody can reach me here.

I hear the men talking softly and the soft sobs of children, probably little Theuns and Mari. I close my eyes and after a while the sounds begin to blend into the sounds of the veld.

I’m lulled by the waiting so my heart leaps in my chest when the first gunshots crack. There are shouts, then screams, a horrific mess of noise so different to the usual camp sounds. From beneath the wagon I can see legs swarm through the laager, like the legs of huge ants.

I see my aunt on her knees, screaming as she is speared with a bayonet like an animal. I watch her, unable to believe it. Surely this is some game that is being played, like when she would mimic Uncle
Niklaas, her face severe and frowning, as she strode about pointing her finger at us. We would all collapse with laughter at her portrayal, so comical but strangely accurate. I see Dirk, the boy I’ve liked since I was little, braining a soldier with a hammer. He swings around to find another but is brought down by a gunshot that takes off half his face. I press my eyes closed again.

When I open them I see a black man sitting in the middle of the laager crooning over a body. The red soldiers move around him but none seem to see him. I look down to the head cradled in his arms and see the long grey beard. ‘Papa!’ I shout.

Before I know what’s happening I realise I’m running toward him. A hand tries to grab me but I dodge it, running frantically, the harsh smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, tears, saliva and snot streaming down my face. ‘Papa!’ I shout again. The black man looks up, one of his eyes completely white. I stop in front of him and his expression doesn’t waver as I let out a sharp scream.

‘He has been sung to the other side,’ he says softly in Afrikaans. I kneel down next to him and take my father’s face in my hands. ‘He was right,’ the man says. ‘You have to find it.’

Hands grab me and pull me to my feet. The man is undisturbed by the soldiers and begins to sing again. I focus on his low, crooning song as the soldiers drag me away.

I feel good the next morning despite the genocidal dreams and the intense throbbing in my forehead. It feels like a spider has lain eggs between my eyes and the babies are trying to burrow into my brain. I go through to the bathroom to take a piss and then wake Kyle up and together we look again at the card Yuri had grudgingly given us before we’d tasered him again and left him in his car next to the Liesbeeck River.

Dr Jackson Ronin – Herbalist and Supernatural Bounty Hunter
, the card reads, with
Dr Ronin will help you get rid of a goblin infestation, mix you a love potion or get rid of your bad juju
emblazoned on the back.

‘Excuse me for stating the bleeding obvious,’ Kyle says, ‘but this guy doesn’t exactly seem legit.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Yuri said he could help us.’

‘Yeah, to save his head from being lopped off,’ Kyle says, snapping his hands together like he’s using shears.

‘Got any better ideas?’

Kyle thinks for a moment and I can almost see the microprocessors doing their work. But the neural Google search comes up empty and he shakes his head.

‘I’m going,’ I say.

‘
We’re
going,’ he replies firmly. ‘Bax, I know you think you’ve got to be the leader in all this, that you’ve got to be tough and ruthless. But you’ve admitted to me that you love someone. That’s something I thought I’d never hear you say, you’ve always been way too cynical for that. So maybe you should let other people help for a change. Let me help you find Esmé.’

This is the first kind of emotional exchange I’ve ever had with Kyle. Our friendship is tight, but it’s built on late-night gaming sessions, shared business goals, weird philosophical debates, a mutual love of Mexican food and the ability to make each other laugh insanely. We don’t do feelings. Well, until now. I nod once. It’s a bit cold, I know, but I’ve only just discovered my ability to empathise with other human beings. Give me a break.

We sneak slowly down the stairs, but Rafe appears at the bottom and looks up at us with his head tilted to the side quizzically. He stares at me and taps his forehead once. Kyle turns to me. ‘He has a headache?’

‘Who the hell knows?’ I say quickly. I jump the last few steps
and push past Rafe. ‘You’re not coming,’ I say to him. We walk quickly to the door but Rafe follows us like a stray dog that has been given food.

‘Rafe, not now!’ I say.

‘Baxter,’ my mother’s voice calls from upstairs. ‘What’s going on down there?’

‘Keep him here,’ I hiss to Kyle. I open the door and Rafe tries to follow but Kyle steps in front of him. ‘I want to come with,’ he hisses back.

‘You said you want to help,’ I say, giving him an imploring look. ‘Please, just keep him here.’

‘Will you be OK?’ he says.

‘I’ll be fine. Just keep him here. The last thing I need is him hanging around.’

‘What should I say to your folks?’ he asks, turning quickly and grabbing Rafe in a headlock. Rafe fixes me with the
knowing-eye
from under Kyle’s armpit.

‘Play the sympathy card,’ I whisper. ‘Say I’ve gone for a walk, say I’m at church praying. Say anything, just keep him here.’

I walk quickly down to Claremont station. I wait briefly for the clattering yellow-and-grey train to appear, and then climb on and find a seat next to a large woman who smells of incense, her grey dreadlocks held back by huge headphones which emit thumping trance music.

I close my eyes and only open them again when I hear the blind buskers shuffle down the aisle singing gospel, the same song they always sing about flowers and bright mornings and Jesus. I pull a coin from my pocket and drop it self-consciously into the cup. The train rattles through stations in quick succession until it
rattles into Cape Town station. I look out to my left and see the dark walls of Good Hope Castle, which splay open like the points of a giant granite starfish.

I’ve always hated that place but now it causes an undefined paranoia in my gut, a feeling that runs up to my forehead causing it to itch and throb even more. I have to force myself not to scratch flesh from my face.

The decrepit old office block is a short walk from the station. It’s called the the Flamingo, except that the ‘a’ and the ‘m’ in the sign have long since fallen off and thus renamed it the Flingo.

A group of guys in tracksuits huddle at the door, whispering offers of weed, coke, acid and mushrooms out the sides of their mouths, their eyes never ceasing their relentless roaming up and down the street.

I mumble vague apologies and push the dirty revolving door, forced to shove it hard to move it the few inches required to gain entry into the dull grey, ammonia-scented lobby. I find the elevator and press the button several times. Nothing. Nothing. I give up and take the stairs, stepping over a black cat that’s either dead or incredibly lazy.

The fifth floor is deserted except for a shifty-eyed cleaning lady playing solitaire in the stairwell. She scowls as I step over her cards. I walk past several doors until I get to number 56. ‘Jackie Ronin – Herbalist and Supernatural Bounty Hunter’ is stencilled on the wooden door. Beneath the stencilling, graffiti kids have scrawled ‘Who you gonna call?’ and a bad reproduction of the
Ghostbusters
logo in permanent marker. I knock twice.

‘I said I’d have your rent next Tuesday, you Lebanese bloodsucker,’ a gravelly voice calls from inside.

‘I’m looking for Jackie Ronin,’ I shout.

‘Do you work for the Revenue Service?’ the voice says.

‘No.’

‘Did I sleep with your wife or sister?’

‘No.’

There’s a long pause. ‘Then it’s open.’

Inside, a guy, forty-something and rough-looking, is seated on a grubby mould-coloured couch in the middle of the room with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He’s leaning over a Monopoly board and placing a little red hotel carefully on one of the blocks.

‘Are you Dr Jackson Ronin?’ I say.

‘Last time I checked,’ he replies, not looking up. He gestures irritably for me to sit down on a dirty beige recliner opposite him. I gingerly remove a sandwich and the broken-off head of a ceramic Buddha from the recliner before lowering myself into it.

The guy throws the dice and gets two ones.

‘Snake eyes,’ he hisses and then moves the little silver dog two blocks forward. This looks like it might take a while.

I look around. The office is really more like an apartment. The kitchen to my left is lit by a single bare light bulb which illuminates the fact that it’s really small and dirty. There’s a bedroom to the right and what looks like an office straight ahead.

The living room itself is a dump; old papers and magazines are stacked in teetering piles in the corners. There’s an old wooden TV set with a smashed screen, above which a badly preserved moose head rots. It stares menacingly at me.

I’m pretty sure there are crack dens with better interior design than this place. Ronin looks like he has grown organically from within this apartment like fungus, a human-sized version of something you’d find growing under the sink.

His face has the texture of an old loofah. His large Roman nose looks like it has been broken several times and never reset, a crag-like protrusion that gives his face a wizardly cast. His long reddish hair is streaked with grey and held out of his face by a white tennis sweatband with the words ‘Sport Activ’ printed on
it in neon green. A long brown-and-black feather hangs from his left earlobe and his impressive red beard has a single long braid extending from it.

He throws the dice again and gets a five and a three. He picks up the little silver top hat and moves it eight spaces forward. The top hat lands on a space that is infested with hotels. Ronin curses and upends the board, sending dice, counters and cards scattering everywhere. He suddenly seems to notice me and looks at me, his red caterpillar eyebrows meeting in the centre of his forehead in a frown.

‘Trying to sell me something?’ he says warily.

‘No, I need –’

‘What I need is some fresh air,’ he growls, and he gets up and strides to the window. He yanks it open and climbs out onto the rusty fire escape that clings precariously to the side of the building.