Kill Baxter (12 page)

‘You!’ The Boer strides over to me. ‘You’re not giving it a
fokken
detoxifying face mask.’ He takes the bag between his thick hands and strokes. ‘Would you like a nice massage now, bag?’ he says in a falsetto voice. ‘How about some
lekker
chamomile tea?’ Then he steps back and hits it so hard that everyone flinches. ‘
Ag, ja
, sorry, bag. That’s not going to happen.’ He leans across so that his face is right next to mine. ‘Hit it!’ he shouts, so loud that my ears ring.

So I punch and continue punching. I hit the bag until my arms hurt. I picture everyone I hate: Anwar, Hekka, even Basson. My face is streaming with sweat, my T-shirt is soaked and I feel like my arms have been jolted from their sockets. The Boer looks at me with his dark eyes. ‘Better,’ he says with a nod. ‘Now kick.’

By the time I head back to the showers in Malpit, my body feels like melted plasticine. I step gingerly into the stream of water and it knocks the breath out of me. I look at the taps miserably. No hot water. The cold digs deep into my cells like cancer. I hate it here. I hate it with so much force that it scares me.

It’s right then that I decide I’m going to escape. If I stay here any longer, my resolve to be good is going to crumble. I look through the stream of cold water at my arm. This ugly tattoo may be magical, but it’ll probably hurt less than staying here. I’ll find somewhere to lie low in Cape Town and make a little money. I’ll start another business, legit this time. At least I’ll be able to see Esmé and Kyle and the rest of my crew.

King intercepts me as I’m heading back to my mattress. ‘Your specialised teacher has agreed to meet with you.’

‘Now?’ I say. ‘Please, I need to sleep. I’m exhausted.’

He shakes his head. ‘She’s not someone you keep waiting.’

I sigh, throw my stuff down on to my mattress and follow him down the Malpit stairs.

He takes me into a part of Hexpoort I’ve never been: the point of the pentacle called Bokveld. This is where the teacher’s apartments are. It’s not somewhere you want to be called at the best of times. The apartments are minimalist, with a central common room and a huge communal kitchen. The Boer is sprawled on a leather couch in the common room watching reality TV as we pass. He doesn’t look up.

King leads me to a large set of wooden doors right at the back. ‘Here you go,’ he says. ‘She’s waiting for you.’

‘You’re not coming in?’ I ask nervously.

‘Oh no,’ he says with a small purring smile. ‘You’re on your own.’

I push open the wooden doors and find myself in a large apartment. The granite walls have been decorated with large canvases of bright abstract art, and there are dozens of pot plants of various sizes scattered around. A huge window has been set into the heavy granite wall, giving a panoramic view of the surrounding canyon. The sun is setting, and the tan and brown of the rocks contrasts brilliantly with the intense oranges and velvety purples of the clouds.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’

I turn to see the Red Witch striding across the living room towelling her wet hair. She’s wearing a torn black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt ornamented by two strings of multicoloured beads, and a pair of ripped jeans. It’s strange seeing her face without its usual covering of red clay. If anything, it’s more intimidating.

She walks across to the huge window and knocks on it. ‘Bulletproof,’ she says. ‘But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.’ She steps between two cacti and pulls out a wooden chair, flips it around and straddles it, her arms hanging over the back. ‘King has apprised me of your situation, Zevcenko,’ she says. ‘Take a seat.’

I quickly head to the colourful couch and sit with my hands on my lap like I’m waiting for punishment. ‘King said I was meeting my new teacher here,’ I say.

The Witch smiles. ‘You are: me.’

‘You?’ I croak. ‘No disrespect, Red Witch …’

‘You can call me
ma
,’ she says. ‘It’s traditional for a
twasa.
But the answer to your question is yes, me. You have a problem and I intend to help you solve it.’

‘The thing is, I really have no background in magic,’ I say. ‘I’ve been looking at the books, but I—’

‘You seem to be mistaken about the nature of this conversation, Zevcenko,’ she says. ‘Let me correct your obvious confusion. This is me telling you what’s happening. There is no discussion involved. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

She shoots me a hard look. ‘Yes,
ma.
’

‘Sorry. Yes,
ma.
’

‘You have the potential to become a Dreamwalker. That’s a skill that hasn’t been seen in a long, long time. It’s also what is probably stopping your general magical progress.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘One question: what is Dreamwalking? I’ve looked at the hard drive that King gave me, but it’s all pretty vague.’

She removes the two intertwined strings of beads from around her neck and hands them to me.

‘These were passed down to me by my teacher. He had some skill in Dreamwalking, but I never could get the hang of it.’

‘So what am I supposed to do with them? Look pretty?’

She smacks me across the back of the head.

‘Stop being a smartass.’

‘Sorry,
ma
,’ I say.

‘Dreamwalking allows you free access into your own psyche. It allows you access to other people’s dreams, and in certain cases into the depths of someone else’s mind. It may not sound like much, but properly utilised, it can be an incredibly powerful tool. Or weapon. There are tales of great dream battles between sangomas, like psychic games of chess, with the winner capturing the loser’s True Will and being able to control him completely. Those beads are the key to the White Ways, the world of the dream. The White Ways are the strands of the web of being, and each bead represents an axis within your own psyche.

‘I can’t tell you any more than that; like I say, I had no talent for Dreamwalking. All I can tell you is what my teacher told me: seek an inner guide, a part or even several parts of yourself that can teach you how to traverse the world of the dream.’

‘You mean like travel inside my own mind?’ I say.

‘Well yes, bright spark. I’m not talking about going to Umhlanga Rocks for a holiday.’

‘How?’ I say.

‘That’s up to you,’ she says. ‘My teacher said that weaving the beads was the key to Dreamwalking.’

She gets up and points to the door. ‘I expect you to have made progress by the next time I see you, Zevcenko.’

Everyone is asleep when I get back to Malpit except for a couple of kids smoking a bong. I sit on my mattress with the two strands of beads in my hands. What the fuck am I supposed to do with a bunch of touristy jewellery? I weave them between my hands like I’m playing that game that girls play when they’re kids. Nothing.

‘Useless,’ I say and put them in a pile next to my bed. I lay my head on the pillow and skydive gratefully into unconsciousness.

I’m in a featureless city, grey, gloomy and massive. The street sign up ahead of me says ‘Glowstick’, which is suitably obtuse for a dream.

‘Hey,’ a voice says. ‘Welcome back, daddio.’

I turn to see the guy with the massive afro and his group of rhinestone-studded dream weirdos behind me.

‘You again? Jesus, I have the strangest dreams.’

‘No, man,’ he says. ‘Not Jesus. Tyrone, your genital phase.’

One of his friends, with garish red lips and blonde hair piled high in a beehive, quickly powders her face in an antique hand mirror and strolls over to me. ‘Light me up, won’t you, honey?’ she drawls. She holds out a lighter and places her long cigarette delicately between her lips.

I sigh and light the cigarette. She scratches me under the chin with a nail. ‘Ain’t you just the cutest thing?’

‘Stop seducing the Conscious Self,’ Tyrone says.

‘Oh shush.’ She flaps a hand at him.

‘OK,’ Tyrone says slowly. ‘I can tell that you’re not really grasping what’s going on.’ He touches his chest. ‘I’m your genital stage.’ He points to the woman with the cigarette. ‘This is your oral phase.’

‘Please, honey,’ she says. ‘Call me Junebug.’

‘That’s your phallic stage,’ Tyrone continues, jerking his head to indicate a guy in a baby-blue jumpsuit wearing a giant white Stetson. He has a straw in his mouth and a massive Smith & Wesson revolver holstered at his hip.

‘Hey, motherfucker,’ he drawls.

‘Oh shush,’ Junebug says again, slapping his shoulder. ‘It’s his standard Freudian joke. He doesn’t mean anything by it. You can call him Richard.’

‘This over here …’ Tyrone nods at a South American-looking guy with a bone through his nose who scratches at his lime-green jumpsuit like it doesn’t fit, ‘is your anal stage, Cabales.’ Cabales raises a hand in greeting. ‘And last but not least is your latency stage. Now where the hell did Chester get to?’

There’s a yapping noise and a little chihuahua with a silver rhinestone-studded bow tie trots out from behind Junebug and starts sniffing my leg.

‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘Lovely to meet you all. But why are you here?’

‘Well, together we are Psychosexual Development,’ Tyrone says. ‘The basic phases your libidinal drive goes through on its dance-floor shuffle towards maturity, as proposed by Sigmund Freud. We also moonlight as your psyche’s first and only funk band.’

I frown at him. ‘So what you’re saying is that you’re all parts of me.’

‘Yes!’ Tyrone says, like I’m finally understanding a particularly complex maths problem. ‘Well, except your anal stage. Your natural anal stage didn’t develop. Cabales over there is a novice Peruvian shaman who accidentally blundered into your psyche while high on ayahuasca, so we trapped him and made him perform the functions of your anal stage.’ He snaps his fingers. ‘Improvisation. That’s what I like about being part of your psyche.’

I hold up my hand. ‘So, just so we’re clear, you replaced a stage of my internal development with a Peruvian shaman? Of all the things I’ve heard in my life, that’s possibly the most fucking demented.’

Cabales gives me a hurt look. ‘Hey, you surely remember all the unfortunate toilet-related accidents you had when you were younger?’

My face goes red just thinking about it. My mother said it was because I was a very anxious child. ‘Yeah,’ I mumble.

‘Well, those stopped, didn’t they?’

‘Eventually.’

He snaps his fingers. ‘Well, that’s when we recruited Cabales.’

‘This is all really fascinating, in an incredibly, ridiculously fucked up sort of way,’ I say. ‘But why are you here, in my dreams?’

‘We’re here to teach you to Dreamwalk, honey,’ Junebug says. ‘Some people get totem animals, some get holy guardian angels, some get daemons. You get your libidinal phases as a seventies funk band. Everyone is different, just remember that.’

‘It’s a lot to take in,’ Tyrone adds. ‘We get that. But we’re here to help you.’

‘Yeah, it’s a lot to take in,’ I say sarcastically.

Richard strides across to me, lifts his Stetson and looks me in the eye. ‘So how about you quit your bellyaching and we teach you something?’ he drawls. Chester the chihuahua yaps his approval.

‘OK, fine,’ I say with a sigh. ‘What are you going to teach me?’

‘Let’s start with travelling into other people’s dreams.’ Tyrone gestures to the dark, empty city around us. ‘This is what we like to call a dreamsaver. It’s just a kind of empty stock image that your brain conjures up to house things. Once you start to manipulate the dream, you can use whatever dreamsaver you find yourself in to access whatever state of mind you want.’

‘What about the beads?’ I ask. ‘How do those fit in?’

‘Those are just an interface, honey,’ Junebug says, dabbing at her lipstick. ‘Different cultures use different things: sticks with symbols carved into them, statuettes, pendants. It’s a short cut into the dreamworld. If you get good enough with those pretty beads, you won’t have to go through the motions of going to sleep.’

‘But let’s start slow,’ Tyrone says. ‘I want you to try and change this dreamsaver to something else. Think you can do that?’

I look around. The city is menacing and claustrophobic and I start to feel the paranoia taking over. ‘Sure,’ I say nervously. ‘This place sucks anyway.’

‘Focus,’ Tyrone tells me. ‘And make the dream respond to your will.’

I focus on the street, the buildings, the dark sky. I feel like I’m slowly being crushed by them. Birds, black pigeons with red eyes, begin to appear, fluttering down and landing on the buildings around me. More arrive, hundreds of them, cooing and scratching with their evil little feet. This is not good at all. I need desperately to get away from this place.

‘Easy,’ Tyrone says, looking at the birds nervously. ‘You want to just let your mind become calm. Those birds won’t be dangerous unless you make them dangerous. Think of a good memory.’

It’s not exactly the most calming thing he could have said. I search my mind for something reassuring and hit an image of Kyle and me playing video games in his room. OK, so it’s not the most epic memory, but it’s comforting because it was a simpler time, before I knew about all the things in the world that want to kill me.

I focus so hard on that memory that I think my head is going to split open. I feel the world shift around me, and when I open my eyes I’m in a giant cage. Kyle is riding a unicorn with the face of Nettie Harrison, the girl that died of leukaemia when we were in grade two. He’s squealing with terror as a man smoking a cigar orders him to serve an eternity of detention.

‘Good,’ Tyrone says with a satisfied smile. ‘We’re in Kyle’s dreams now.’

‘We’re in Kyle’s dreams?’ I say. ‘So can he see and hear me?’

Junebug nods. ‘Uh-uh. It’s better than Skype, honey.’

‘Kyle!’ I shout. ‘Kyle!’

Kyle’s bizarre unicorn ride disappears and he drops to the ground. He sits on the floor staring at me.