Authors: Fanie Viljoen
Mindf**k (9 page)
Sunday felt like a dream. Kelly went to her boyfriend’s. She had a whole bag full of stuff with her when she left. I didn’t know if she would come back. My mom was probably still with her boyfriend, my dad probably at a friend’s place or in a hotel.
He still hasn’t come to fetch his car. Shit, I hoped he wasn’t hanging somewhere in a hotel or lying in a tub with slit wrists.
No, he’d rather go drinking. Feeling sorry for himself. Trying to forget.
I trudged around in the house feeling anxious. She’s alive, the thought rushed
around in my mind. I was certain of it. I just had that gut feeling. I saw her hand moving in the tent. I thought then it was a trick of the light, but it wasn’t. Her hand must’ve really moved.
I looked around for my cell phone. I had to phone Sky, to tell him. I found the phone on the carpet in the TV lounge. The TV was on. They showed re-runs of old animal programs. The presenter whispered excitedly as a cheetah chased down a springbuck, grabbing it by the throat, and pulling it to the ground. Dead.
Sky’s phone rang and rang. The voicemail didn’t even come on for me to leave a message.
I phoned again. The same story. Then I tried getting hold of Kerbs. After the second ring I hung up. No, I decided, leave Kerbs out of this. I shouldn’t speak to him. Not now. I was still pissed off with him. (And that’s putting it mildly.)
I stepped inside the kitchen to get
something to eat. Partygirl’s face haunted my thoughts.
Show me your happies. And she really did. I smiled.
I knew she would show them to me again. Once we’re alone. Like we were that Friday night. And this time Kerbs wouldn’t come and fuck everything up. This time it would be perfect. She would lie in my arms and she would be mine. Mine, all mine.
While I was eating the sandwich I’d made, I typed a SMS.
i think partygirl is alive.
I sent it to Kerbs and Sky.
I sat waiting for fifteen minutes. Not one of them replied.
I went outside to remove the camping
gear from my dad’s car. Whatever I could, I packed away. And whatever I couldn’t, I hid away.
Entering the house, there still wasn’t any reply to my SMS.
I went to my room and lay down on my bed whilst deciding what I should do.
‘What would you have done, Jack White?’ I asked the man with the pale face on the White Stripes poster. Jack White didn’t reply.
I decided to go and look for Partygirl.
I saw her at least three times, somewhere, walking the streets of Bloem, but I couldn’t stop in time to catch up with her. She also didn’t come when I sounded the car’s horn.
Kelly came back on Sunday morning. The bag of stuff that I thought she had packed to leave for good, hung over her shoulder. The boyfriend obviously had other plans.
My mom arrived shortly afterwards.
‘You probably heard,’ she said to me.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘And what, Mom? You can do as you please. What do I care?’
‘You know your father and I …’
‘I said I don’t care. Leave me alone.’
She seemed too tired to fight. With me anyway. My dad arrived home later that night. Then all hell broke loose. Things were being smashed to pieces against the wall. Doors slammed. My dad pleaded for another chance. The whole soap-drama.
On and on and on.
Then he got in his car and drove off.
The cheetah had seized its prey and ripped out its throat.
Eventually everything comes to an end.
Monday morning I woke up and decided to go back to Aldam. (Fuck school.) Partygirl came to me again the previous night. In my dreams.
Her hands moved across my body. I could feel her breasts against my back. Her legs folding around mine. Her fingers curling around my dick, starting to move slowly. ‘I’m not dead, Burns,’ she whispered. Like a freezing Free State winter night. When I woke up, my body was icy cold but dripping with sweat.
She was gone.
Only the cluttered room lay around me. And Jack and Meg White stared like ghosts from the red and black poster.
I had to go back to Aldam and take a look.
I had to find out what my dream meant. If it was true.
I tried phoning Sky again. He didn’t answer. Where was he?
A guy in a pickup truck gave me a lift on the N1. He probably thought that I was going to sit at the back, but I thought – forget it, I’m not sitting in the wind all the way to Aldam. It was also looking like rain again.
I got in next to him. I saw his lips parting as if he wanted to say something. Perhaps wanting to protest. I pretended not to see it.
‘I’m on my way to Aldam, and you?’
‘Kroonstad.’ His voice was uncertain. He probably didn’t know what he’d let himself in for right now.
‘All right then.’
He pulled away. I saw him glaring at me from the corner of his eye.
‘You don’t have any luggage,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘What are you going to do at Allemanskraal Dam?’ he asked with a heavy Afrikaans accent.
‘Ah, you know.’
He frowned. I could see he wanted to know more, but bugger him, he wasn’t my father.
When he saw I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat, he switched on the radio. Radio Sonder Grense. Can you believe it? I thought all their listeners had bloody well died
already. Well, that was how the presenters talked to them. As if they were scared to wake the dead, leaving that for the Second Coming.
‘It’s now ten o’clock and time for the news,’ the presenter said in Afrikaans.
His words struck my mind like an echo in an empty room.
What if they carried a story about Partygirl on the news? About her disappearance from her mother’s house. That she went missing. Perhaps something about a body that was found at the Allemanskraal Dam … Maybe that the police were on the lookout for three boys in their late teens that could help with the investigation. (Translated meaning: the guilty fuckers.)
The news reader drawled from one story to the next. Robert Mugabe who was still refusing to get off his throne like a full of shit teenager, giving the world the finger. The ANC protecting their wickets. The
enormous Aids pandemic wiping out people all over Africa. (And the South African minister of health who wanted to stop it with garlic and beetroot.)
When a story about another farm attack came on the air, the old guy just said ‘fuck’ and switched off the radio.
Nothing about Partygirl.
We drove on in total silence. At the Aldam exit he dropped me off. I started walking to the gate. A game warden picked me up halfway and dropped me off at the resort’s swimming pool. (I told him that my friends were waiting for me there. I couldn’t really tell him that I came to see if we actually buried Partygirl.)
When he drove off I started making my way to the dam. Down the stone stairs, past the trampoline and put-put course, the new swimming pool and the super tube, to the camping area, where the main stage was.
Cleaners were already busy picking up
the rubbish. It looked like a dumping site: beer cans, papers, used condoms. The fine grass was in bad shape after the weekend. In places you could see the rectangles where the tents had been.
I tried working out where our tent stood. It was close to the water. I walked alongside the dam. Everything looked different. I stopped at a flat patch of ground. Was it here? It didn’t look as if the ground had been tampered with. I looked at the area again. The trees in the distance. The distance from the main stage. (They were busy taking it down.) No, it wasn’t there.
I strode further.
My heart missed a beat when I saw it.
Unmistakable for someone who knew, but if you didn’t know, you would walk over it without noticing anything.
The ground made a slight bump even though we took a lot of it out and dumped it in other places. The Beetle’s hubcap was
still lying there. I picked it up, turned my back on the workers and wiped it clean with my T-shirt. Just in case there were some fingerprints on it. Then I dropped it again.
I stared at the ground. As if I wanted to say that I was sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sorry, Partygirl.
But I didn’t say it. I chased away all the thoughts that tried to surface in my mind, attempting to feel nothing.
It happened.
Live with it.
‘Lost anything?’ one of the cleaners suddenly asked behind me.
He would never know just how much.
My mind was a mess as I lumbered back to the main building at the swimming pool. I saw nothing around me. Heard nothing. I only thought about her. About Partygirl.
I soon found myself sitting in a car and driving back to the gate along the resort’s road. I must’ve stolen the car, I thought vaguely. But I couldn’t remember doing it. In the rear-view mirror I noticed the small window at the back was broken. The loose wires from the hotwire job hung at my knees below the dashboard.
The car’s entry ticket was sticking out of the ashtray. I handed it to the guard at the
gate and quickly paid. ‘Keep the change.’
I didn’t want him getting too close to the car and having a better look. He might notice that there wasn’t a key in the ignition. When he lifted the barrier, I drove out, relieved. I stepped on the gas pedal and the car roared forward.
The road back home was like a bad trip in which Partygirl didn’t feature anymore.
A car turned off with me at the Nelson Mandela exit at Bloem. And right again to Langenhoven Park. It followed me through the streets. Past the Pick ’n Pay, down Dirk Opperman Street.
The car’s windows were tinted but I recognized the car.
It was Kerbs.
Fuck knows, I didn’t have the strength to deal with him.
My heart started racing, I didn’t know why. We were friends. But something had changed. I felt it in my gut.
What did he want?
I stopped at the Caltex garage and left the car there.
Kerbs drove by. I saw him turning his head in my direction when he drove past me, his arm hanging out the open window.
I raised my hand to greet him but he had already turned his head away, his eyes fixed on the road.
I quickly started for home, on foot. I wished I could have just driven back to my house but I couldn’t show up at home with a stolen car. It would have been plain stupid.
It was a long way home. I glanced back occasionally while still keeping my pace. Kerbs could have appeared behind me again at any moment. There were too many cars around. I tripped over a rock when the
umpteenth car drove past and I glanced fearfully over my shoulder.
When I finally reached our road I quickened my pace. And then I saw it: Kerbs’ car was parked on the sidewalk.
He was waiting for me.
Smaller steps. Smaller and smaller steps.
Something has changed.
Rapidly increasing heartbeat, sweat running down my back.
My eyes slipped out of focus, then back in focus.
What did he want?
I approached, saw the painted flames on the doors, the bumper sticker:
Just visiting this planet
. The word
Kerberos
was painted on the car’s boot. Kerbs found it in a book. In the Greek mythology Kerberos was a hell
hound with multiple heads that welcomed people to the realm of the dead. He had to see to it that they couldn’t get back out again.
Kerbs got out of the car. He stood there in the open door, smiling in very much the same manner as Friday night, that devilish smirk.
‘Where were you?’ he asked. His voice sounded weird. Friendly and firm at the same time.
‘Don’t worry, I know,’ he said before I could answer. ‘You should stay away from there. You’re gonna drop us all in the shit.’
‘I had to go and look.’
‘At what?’
‘If she is really dead.’
‘But you know that she’s dead.’
‘I saw her.’
‘We all did.’
‘Afterwards. When we came back.’
‘You’re talking shit and you know it.’
‘No.’
Kerbs slammed the car door closed. He approached. ‘And? Is she really dead?’
‘The grave is still there.’
‘But is she in the grave?’ Again that unearthly laugh. Mocking, as if he knew the answer.
‘I don’t know. Probably. I couldn’t dig it up, there were people.’
‘Oh, you’re fucked in the head, Burns. So let me help you.’ He now stood right in front of me, forcing a whisper through his clenched teeth: ‘She’s fucking dead. We killed her and –’
‘You killed her! We only helped to bury
her.’
‘No, Burns, we did it. Remember? You took her first. Got your rocks off and everything. And then I took her, and then Sky –’
‘Sky was outside the tent the entire time. He only saw her when she was dead already.’
‘No, Burns. You’ve got it wrong. First you, then me, then Sky. And then you again. And you bashed her head against the gas cylinder. You were fucking wild, Burns. I couldn’t believe it. Not from you, buddy.’
His words slashed through my mind. That wasn’t how it happened. Fuck knows, it wasn’t.
‘No, Kerbs. It was you … it was you!’ I yelled at him. ‘Ask Sky. He’ll tell you.’
‘I’m afraid Sky can’t say anything anymore.’
Ice cold words. Kerbs’ eyes bore through mine. I suddenly realized what he was actually saying.
‘Sky wanted to go to the pigs, Burns. He wanted to tell them what you’ve done. Squeal. I decided: to hell with it, you don’t do that to your friends. I took care of him, Burns, for you …’
I had to swallow hard at the puke pushing up my throat. Shit, everything around me was falling apart. Kerbs slipped into focus, out of focus. His voice seemed far away.
‘Don’t worry, nobody will find him. And he won’t be able to talk anymore. And neither should we. We should go on as if nothing happened. We don’t know anything.’ He grabbed my shirt and forcibly pulled me closer. ‘We didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. Okay, Burnsie? Okay?’
I probably nodded, perhaps even said yes. I can’t remember.
But Kerbs was satisfied. And that was all that mattered.