The Raft: A Novel (3 page)

I could just about make out the floating rafts bobbing over the small waves.

I counted three of them.

Each raft had been attached to the pier by a length of rope. The offenders had been tied down at the wrists and ankles, forced to stare only at the sky while they thought about their offences. Pumped full of hallucinogens and bared to the heavens, forced to wait until the universe dripped itself in, filling each with a sense of purpose, realigning them with The Renascence.

Although I knew nothing of the men on the rafts that day, a rumour had spread of their having vandalised the white house two mornings earlier. They’d scrawled defamatory comments on the walls in mud, but I hadn’t seen the words for myself. By the time I’d awoken, the evidence had been removed. Their sentence was delivered with no deliberation. No prolonged trial. No testimonies. A direct and unchallenged judgement by the one dictatorial panel of voices that oversaw us:
Guilty—Separation by the Raft.

Offenders could drift for as long as three days before being pulled back to shore. No food. No water. Pounded by the wind and the waves. Frozen in the cold or burned in the sun. Sometimes the icy rain fell so hard it must have felt like hot iron shot on their exposed faces. And while the rest of us could scarcely imagine such a battering, we sensed it was the stillness of a quiet night that affected them most. We’d heard about it. Watched them raptly. Wondered.

“Kayle.”

Surprised, I turned.

It was Moneta, standing a few feet behind me. She was an elderly woman with ash-grey hair tucked behind a green plastic peak. Her overalls were grass-stained, the tips of her fingers browned by soil.

“I wonder if you wouldn’t give me a hand,” she said.

Moneta needed me to move bags of fertiliser and fill pots, and I followed her to the botanical garden, a glass dome set back from the beach. The dome housed countless varieties of flowers, herbs, vegetables and small trees. I’d often seen children assist with the pruning, picking, planting and cleaning, but only Moneta knew how to make her autotrophic friends truly bloom into silent wonders.

As I entered the dome, I was hit by a flurry of scents: the perfumes of the brightly coloured flowers, the wetness of loamy soil. The air was thick with humidity, which probably kept Moneta’s skin as supple as a much younger woman’s. That, and her lifestyle: one of calm and commitment.

She explained where the bags of compost and the enormous clay pots needed to be moved to, and I hauled and dragged her heavy pots and filled a large empty wooden crate with soil and fertiliser. Once I was finished, I stepped outside to wash my hands in a bucket of water. I lifted my face to the sun. It slipped behind a single cloud—throwing grey on everything—and I continued to stare until it returned to blind me. I dried my hands on my pants and walked back inside.

“Oolong tea?” Moneta asked as I entered. She was sitting at a small wrought-iron table. She had prepared a pot of tea and two china cups, each overturned on a daintily patterned saucer.

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Well, have a seat then.”

She poured each of us a cup of tea. I lifted the cup to take my first sip, my thick finger squeezing through the narrow handle. We sat quietly for a while, and the silence didn’t seem to bother her. There was little deemed appropriate to talk about anyway.

“They gave me a hard time in the beginning,” she said. “You know, with my garden.”

I nodded. I was sure they had.

“It took me a while to explain that my garden would not be a possession of any sort. I have no interest in owning these plants as
things,
you see.”

“I see.”

She looked to the side as she spoke, and I felt as if I could have been anyone, really—any willing ear. Finally, she turned to me.

“Thank you for helping,” she said.

“It’s my pleasure,” I replied.

She smiled and sipped her tea. She surveyed her garden—the ferns, flowers, vines and vegetables—like a parent keeping an eye on her children in the park.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Would you indulge an old woman and her story?”

I shifted uncomfortably. Moneta and I had hardly said a word to each other before that moment. We’d greeted each other on occasion and I had assisted her once or twice before, but we were far from what one might consider close. “What kind of story?”

“A story I need to tell. To someone else and to myself, one last time.”

I looked through the glass wall and saw the others on the beach. They seemed far enough away and I was almost certain the two of us were alone.

“Okay,” I said.

“I hope you will entertain my story. It may be a bit long. I imagine it will be. But I must tell it the way I want or I will not want to tell it at all.”

“All right.”

She lifted her cup and watched me carefully as she sipped. Then she smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m not sure you know how much this will mean to me, but it does, it will, and I thank you. I’ll make us another pot.”

The man in the woods

I
was born in the middle of the last century, and I suppose that makes me—oh, I don’t know—a hundred-and-some-odd years old. I’m not really sure anymore. I never thought I’d get to this age, or that I’d get here feeling the way I do. But life, I’ve learned, is like a cat that comes and goes as it pleases, making you think you own it when it is only in
its
best interest that you believe so.

When I was twenty years old, I thought I was an adult. At thirty, I thought I was somewhere in the middle of my life. Forty, I knew it all. At fifty, I cared less, but only because I assumed the majority of my life was behind me.

Ha! Well, you can understand where this is going.

At fifty, I wasn’t even halfway through it, and yet I’d anchored myself with my preconceptions. Given each little moment and event its weight, only to find that most of my experiences were not anchors. They were balloons, floating up to the sky as the years breezed by, out of my reach.

I rarely understood where I was in my life. When I married at the age of twenty-two, I believed married life was my destiny, for then I believed there was such a thing. When I had my first child, I thought he would be my entire reason for being. And for a time, both he and my husband were, and would have continued to be, had death not robbed me of them both. My husband was killed in a road accident seventy or so years ago and my child was taken by cancer twenty years later. I never had grandchildren. I never remarried. I have no family. My younger sister passed away about forty years ago in her sleep, of old age, I’ve been told.

And yet, I am here. Alive.

What has it all been about, the whole silly business of my life? I can honestly not tell you.

Funny, isn’t it?

But none of this concerns me. And neither, I suspect, does it concern a young man like you.

No, what I want is to tell you one story.

Only one.

Of all my balloons, this is the only one I hold on to. The rest are floating, up in the sky. It is the only story I can recall with absolute clarity. I cannot tell you what it means, but that doesn’t concern me. All that matters is that it’s the clearest memory in my head, and for that reason alone, I wish to tell it.

I was raised in a small town; at the time it was called Tsitsikamma. In the language of the Khoi-San people this meant “place of water.” It sat near the coast, an incredibly woodsy place. That’s what I remember most: rolling hills blanketed in dense forest. The ground was covered in moss and chips of bark. The air smelled of damp and tree sap. One large highway weaved through it, but you’d never know until you were standing right on it; the woods swallowed that highway right up. Even the sound of passing trucks and cars couldn’t make it too far beyond the edge of the woods, certainly not as far as our cabin.

Before Tsitsikamma, we lived in a town called Kroonstad. My father was the manager of a factory that made cardboard boxes and my mother stayed at home to take care of me. I don’t recall much of Kroonstad, but I do remember the many boxes my father brought home. There wasn’t much money to spare, so boxes were often the best my father could provide as gifts, and I rarely complained. I kept myself occupied building fortresses, robots and motor vehicles. Other times I played marbles with myself at the bottom of an enormous and empty bowl-shaped swimming pool in the middle of the housing commune.

I kept out of trouble with my parents most of the time, except for when I brought some injured animal into the house without permission. Once I even managed to hide a few bats in a box, until my mother tipped it over while cleaning. Needless to say, bats were not her favourite of my friends, and she ended up running around the house with a broomstick, trying to shoo a pair of disorientated fruit bats from the corner of our ceiling, cursing and scolding me as she did.

I look upon my time in Kroonstad with reasonable fondness. But when the box factory went under, my father lost his job and we were forced to move. As a child, I questioned little: I simply packed my things, hopped in the back of our old car, and was driven out of Kroonstad to my new home in the thick, dark and marvellous woods of Tsitsikamma.

Our new house turned out to be nothing like our old one. Instead of the flat, concrete commune in Kroonstad, where most of our neighbours were large women with rollers in their hair who leaned over the fences chain-smoking, our house in Tsitsikamma was a log cabin in a deep forest clearing, where the neighbours were large birds and bugs who chirped and clicked from the trees and the bushes.

The house itself was not really a
house
but a lodge for tourists and travellers. My father hadn’t bought the business; it belonged to his older brother. He’d offered my father a position as manager of the lodge, as well as a couple of rooms for us to use while my father worked there. I was a small child at the time, so it is difficult to say in all honesty that it was an
enormous
house, but at the time it certainly seemed so. There were six rooms, each with four or five bunk beds. Three small rooms with double beds. There was a communal room with a bar and a pool table below a big poster of a man sitting in a red Cadillac. The communal kitchen was full of tinny old pots on the walls and a ceramic rooster that perched on top of the fridge. Behind the lodge there was a large outside area where guests could sit on hollowed-out logs and braai meat on open fires, talking and singing into the early hours of the morning. The place was rarely ever full, but the backpackers and vacationers trickled in and out steadily over the course of the first spring we were there.

Most of them were young men and women who needed an easy and affordable place to rest en route to somewhere else. Sometimes they’d arrive wishing to spend a night and would only leave after three days. Sometimes they’d book a room for three nights but leave on their first morning. All sorts arrived but we had no real trouble. My mother and father argued a few times in the first couple of weeks, mostly about money, I suppose, but that didn’t last long.

After a time everything settled down as each of us explored some fresh and exciting aspect of this new life. My father had found a guitar stashed in a storage shed and was suddenly strumming old tunes around the fire at night, entertaining guests when the vibe was right. My mother took up painting, but spent most of her time taking care of my new sister, Carly. And I soon learned there was far more to do than play with cardboard boxes, marbles, and even bats. The woods, stretching on in all directions, were a treasure trove of curiosities. And I, a reckless and uninhibited explorer, planned on discovering each and every last one of them.

Over time, I grew used to the endless trees, the untidy forest floor, and the inquisitive looks and nods from the local wildlife. It had been my father’s idea for me to keep a notebook to write down whatever I saw and heard in the woods, and I adopted his advice with great zeal. Armed with my pencil and my notebook, I would wake up early and take a stroll, exploring and documenting all the woods had to offer. Every morning I went deeper in, sought out some new route, and found a perfect spot to lie in the shade and chew on the end of a pine needle.

Beyond the woods were more woods. I never came across anyone else on my rambles. I was told that the woods ended in a cliff-face drop into the raging ocean, but I had never seen it for myself. After the first few weeks of going out as far as I could, I assumed the edge of the cliff was a great deal further than I could ever walk and so there was no need to worry about it.

When I left the lodge I would always start at the same point—a path that led from our tiny car lot—but as soon as I was beyond the range of my mother’s kitchen window, I would divert left or right. Most of the time, it felt as if the woods led me, they set my path, and in that way I came to trust them, since the woods rarely led me to trouble.

Rarely, but … No, I cannot say
never.

On one especially hot summer morning, I left the lodging with nothing but my notebook, a pencil and a banana, and began one of my regular walks. I turned off the path and headed down a leaf-laden slope. I grabbed a rough tree trunk and slung myself to the next trunk, and then the next one, and the next. I continued, light on the balls of my feet, all the way down. I looked up. Birds. Their silhouettes could have been mistaken for leaves were it not for their nimble darting from branch to branch.

In the woods there were all sorts of birds.

A book from the library had a picture of each of them, and I always made sure to keep an eye out. I had seen Knysna loeries, emerald cuckoos, olive woodpeckers and even a couple of barn owls. Funny how I still remember those names. Whenever I saw one, I wrote it down in my notebook and drew a picture of it. One day I even came back to the lodge with a baby robin that had fallen out of the tree and broken its wing. My father helped, but warned:
Be careful out there, Moneta. The forest is not a playground. It’s a place full of living things, all fighting to survive in this world. Do not expect the loyalty of anything fighting only to survive.
He warned that even plants, harmless as they appeared to be, would attack an intruder if necessary.