The Raft: A Novel (29 page)

What we saw next is something I’ll never forget.

Friend attacked friend, parent leaped on child. Jumping on each other, wrenching the hair from scalps. Biting. Scratching out eyes. The captain, looking even crazier than normal, had one of his knives out, but he wasn’t peeling apples or gutting fish; he was peeling and gutting people. One or two managed to get hold of the guns and fired blindly into anyone who came close, murdering the people they’d once trusted.

Right about then my father grabbed me by the arm and shouted for my brother and me to run … to keep running and not look back. So we did. The three of us ran deeper into jungle, cutting ourselves on the branches and leaves and bushes. But even though I knew I shouldn’t, I did look back one last time, and all I could see was the shuffle of blood-soaked bushes and gut-smeared trunks. Eventually we had run so far we couldn’t see any of it.

But the screaming …

Boy, oh boy. Tuh-tuh-tuh
-trust
me when I say the screaming didn’t stop for ages.

Burt

O
ver the course of the story we’d moved back inside and now Anubis was sitting on a tattered sofa in the centre of a living room. “We ran until we got all the way to the top of the hill,” he said. “And we found this house. This house, and the laboratory, and the small farm out back. But there was no one here. It had been abandoned. So we tuh-
tuh
-took it—my father, my brother and I—and we’ve been living here ever since.”

I walked around the living room, inspecting books in the shelves. There was a metronome sitting on a wooden table beside an unusual assortment of collectibles: a doll, a broken watch, a knife and a pair of glasses with cracked lenses. The rest of the room was surprisingly homely: a furry rug under an oval wooden table, a brown paper globe of the earth acting as a shade on the light hanging from the ceiling.

“We realised this was once some kind of lab and the plants and fruits had been made to protect it. Turn people crazy before they could get up here. Pretty effective. You wanna stop people from busting in your home? Make something that makes them forget why they bothered in the first place. Have them turn on themselves.”

“With fruit that makes you psychotic.”

“Ha! The fruit doesn’t
make
you do anything. It’s more of a catalyst for who you already are. Some enlightened monk makes his way into that jungle, all he’ll do is forget why he bothered coming up. And that’s enough of a defence. The rest of it, the
levels
of crazy, that’s all you, man.Your worst fears, right out there, ugly and awful. All the stuff we’ve pushed down deep. We think we’re happy, Raft Man, in control, but there are mean things in the basement of our s-suh-
suh
-souls. Like sewage floating under a super city. The fruit just buh
-buh
-brings it all out. Smart, huh?”

“Hm,” I said noncommittally, examining the old, dusty books on the shelves and reading the unfamiliar titles:
Thirty-Minute Meals with Jamie Oliver. Peter Pan. Where’s Waldo? Conquistadors of the Useless. The Decameron. The Silver Brumby.

“We kinda like it here now. My father built this cabin for my brother, down in the woods—a little cabin with one window and hardly any light—and I think he prefers it down there, you know? I mean, he comes up here for dinner sometimes, but mostly I take something down to him. My father … well, he was okay for a while, but I think he really missed my mother. We fought, you know. A lot. I reckon he began to lose it, lose his muh-m
-muh …
his muh
-mind.
And now he’s sick, stuck in bed in the other room. Can barely walk these days, but I’ve got him on some good drugs. Turns out this place had some decent medical supplies and equipment too.”

I sat down on the couch beside him. “So everyone died out there that day?”

“Almost everyone.”

“I don’t understand. Why did they attack each other?”

“Because the best thing you can do to keep this world going is not be born at all. To not exist. Consume nothing. Waste nothing. Use nothing and leave nothing behind. Sounds kinda extreme, right? But that’s the reality, whether we like it or not.”

Despite his logic, I wasn’t sure that had been the reason. It didn’t satisfy my need for answers, the idea that they’d torn each other apart as an act of environmental conviction.

“And the bodies—they’re still down there?” I went on.

He watched me carefully as he answered. “All part of the design. That jungle down there—it just
loves
flesh! Takes those bodies right up, and after a couple weeks—nothing.”

A memory snapped back to me.
The trees, it seems, will take the body of a dead thing as quickly as they
want
it, or want to get
rid
of it.

“Nothing left?” I probed.

“Even if you don’t eat the fruit, other parts of the jungle have other kinds of biological defence systems. Wild stuff. Fringe genetic programming. It took everyone in the juh-juh-
jungle
that day. Apart from us.”

“You said
almost
everyone.”

The young man smiled.

“That’s right,” he began, sitting forward. “You got me. Not quite everyone.” He paused for a moment, and I wondered if he was going to continue. “I went back out there, into the jungle, many months later, and I ran into this man, standing there, near a river. I knew him once … but not well. He came around to our house a couple of times. Buh-buh-
Burt
. I think that was his name, he used to live on our street. Tall guy, in a black coat. Anyway, I saw him out there and … I don’t know, I reckon he must have got away from the group like we did. Not sure how he survived so long down there in the jungle by himself, but there he was. I tried to ask him about it, but he wouldn’t answer. He didn’t smile, didn’t even move. He just stood there. I don’t know if he remembered who he was, or even
how
to speak—”

“He chased you,” I cut in.

“Yes.”

“And the trees, they stopped him. Attacked him.”

Anubis frowned and leaned back, the scar on his face creasing.

“How did you know that?”

I shook my head. I had to tell Anubis about Moneta, as much as I had promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone. The decision didn’t seem to come from me, though. I felt as if I was being directed to speak—a whisper from a faraway place, as if from the orb in my dream.

“There was an old woman,” I said slowly. I sat forward on my chair and rubbed my hands together. “Part of my commune on the beach. She told me a story, about a man in the woods, like the one you’ve just told me. The only thing is, she said it happened to
her.
Her story happened a long time ago and in a different place. But it was the same story. Same man. I’m sure of it. Burt.”

Anubis said nothing, but the look on his face had changed—back to that conceited, plotting look from before. I wasn’t certain whether he believed me. He said nothing, waiting for me to continue. “A few days later she took her life,” I continued. “She left a letter explaining everything: that she knew the story didn’t belong to her. It wasn’t her memory.”

“Me,” Anubis said, possessively. “It belonged to
mm
-me.”

He seemed agitated by my remark, peeved that for the first time he’d been put on the back foot of our exchange. He got to his feet and walked to the bookshelf. “Here,” he said, grabbing a book from the shelf. He handed the small notebook to me. “I drew a picture of him. A picture of Burt and me. I was young and liked drawing. Crappy drawings now, if you ask me.”

I paged through the notebook. There was a crude drawing of Burt and of the young man. Burt was tall, lanky, with a narrow, pale face. He was wearing a big black coat.

I handed the book back. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t explain this. I wish I could but I can’t. She couldn’t understand it either. But the coincidence … her telling me all of this, me somehow ending up here, meeting you, the real owner of that memory …”

Anubis took the book from me and put it back in his shelf. He seemed relieved that I had decided it was
his
true memory and not hers and this seemed to allow him to probe the matter further. “What was her name?” he asked.

“Moneta.”

“Moneta.”

“Hm.”

“You know, my brother,” he continued. He paced the room in circles, tapping his finger to his lips as he stared at the ceiling.
Another cliched charade,
I couldn’t help thinking. Gone was the comic-book villain.
And now, ladies and gentleman, I’ll be playing the part of the contemplative man.
Was anything about his behaviour genuine, or was it all some kind of act?

“He used to talk about these dreams he had. He’d dream he was a very old woman living in a glass house. A g-g-glass house overlooking a beach. He could never explain it, but he’d dream of her often.”

I rubbed the back of my neck and closed my eyes. “That’s her. I don’t know how, but that’s her.” I shook my head and took a breath. “It doesn’t make sense. It makes no sense. No
sense …
”

“Are you okay?”

“My head hurts.”

“I don’t usually invite strangers to meet my brother,” Anubis said, “but I get the feeling you need to speak to him. He understands this sort of thing. I don’t know how else to put it. He may even be able to help you find your son—what’s his name again?”

“Andy.”

“Andy, Andy. Right.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. “Okay. Here’s what you have to do. Go down to the cabin tomorrow, after the sun comes up. Have a ch
-chuh
-chat. Like I said, he might be able to help you. Sorry, but that’s all I can say. It’s difficult to tell you what to expect. But you’ll see what I mean.”

I stood slowly. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone, least of all the man’s reclusive brother. I wanted to get off the island. That was it.

Anubis went on: “My advice, grab some biltong in the kitchen. He
loves
dried meat. There’s not much biltong up here but every now and again I make some out of one of the older goats. It holds for longer than cooking it. Not as good as ku-ku-kudu or ostrich, of course, but he likes it. That’ll soften him up.”

“Look,” I said, standing. “Thank you. For … taking care of me. Bringing me in. I’m grateful. But—”

As I got to my feet, the room began to spin. The sound of a choppy ocean crashed into my head. I felt myself losing my balance, felt the chicken dinner rising in my gut. I grabbed the arm of the couch and hunched over. For a moment it felt as if I was back on the raft, a violent body memory. Anubis grabbed me and held me up.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded because I knew I’d throw up if I said a word. I took a deep breath.

“I’m fine. I need to rest,” I managed. “Lie down somewhere.”

“Okay. Come on, Raft Man,” he said, making his way to the door. “Let’s get you out before you’re s-s-sick on my floor.”

We waited until my seasickness lessened, then walked down the corridor to my room. I noticed the door of another room was standing slightly ajar. I could hear a faint and rhythmic breathing coming from within.

“That’s my father’s room,” he said. “You shouldn’t go in there, he needs his rest.”

I could just make out the ghostly shape of an old man lying in a bed in the darkened room. He was covered in a white sheet and attached to an IV drip on a long steel pole. I felt my stomach lurch and steadied myself on the door frame, Anubis right behind me. I could see the man better now. He looked older than I’d imagined from the story, by at least fifteen or twenty years, but then I knew nothing about the father or how sick he really was.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“An acute case of shitty luck,” Anubis said.

I turned from the door, following the young man back along the corridor. He took me to a new bedroom, not the one in which I had been bound. It was neat, clean and basic, with a window overlooking the ocean.

“Sleep tight, Raft Man,” he said. “I’ll wake you in the morning. You’ve got a baa
-baa-bathroom
through that door there.” Then he closed the door. I stood and listened to the discomfiting sound of a key turning as he locked me in.

Before I finally got to sleep, I thought about Anubis’s story (that was Moneta’s story) and wondered how such “sharing” could occur at all. His brother knew about Moneta; she’d had Anubis’s memory. There was the incredible unlikelihood of having actually
met
both owners of that one memory. Was that in itself a coincidence, or had I been told the one precisely
because
I’d soon hear the other? Had Moneta known, either consciously or subconsciously, that I’d find myself on Anubis’s island?

Nothing added up.

In the morning, I was awakened by Anubis shaking my shoulders. When I opened my eyes, he was already at the door, encouraging me to get up and join him outside.

I climbed out of bed and bent over to put on my shoes. A warm beam of early morning light filtered in through the windows. I pulled the blanket back over the bed and headed back along the corridor.

The door to the father’s room was open and I glanced inside. This time he was awake, staring back at me with glassy eyes. I closed his door and continued to the end of the corridor.

As I stepped out onto the wooden deck, the fresh morning air hit me like an icy wave. The house was higher above sea level than I’d imagined, truly at the summit of the island, looking down on the thick green jungle stretched out like a tattered rug, the thin outlying lip of white beach, and, all around, the infinite blue ocean.

I slid my hand over the wooden rail and walked along the deck towards a narrow footbridge. The roughly constructed bridge hung over a twenty-foot drop into dark undergrowth before connecting with a second wooden deck surrounding another wooden house. On the roof of the second house there was an archaic satellite dish strangled by thick vines. I couldn’t tell if it was working. The entire house was draped in vines embellished with bright pink flowers, each like a pair of pouting lips poised for a deadly kiss. The sight of these plants unsettled me. They crawled along the gutter, under the window frames and through the gaps in the wood, ensuring a firm stranglehold before consuming all.