Boy on the Wire (14 page)

She scrabbles around the edges of the door, hoping it will give, as if she is the one inside wanting to get out. A coffin underground. She stops and breathes and looks around the room. She goes back downstairs and gets the axe she has seen. She comes back to the door and hesitates. Just for a second. She does not want to see what she knows is in there.

The smell of the house, the stink of it. The feeling of not being alone.

She raises the axe over her shoulder. It takes several blows before she makes a hole in the door. She looks through it but can see nothing. She puts her hand through the hole and feels for the key, half expecting another hand to reach out for hers. She can see it clearly, feel it even – a child’s hand. Again, she does not know why she expects a child.

She finds a bolt. There is no lock on it. She pulls it back and the door opens inwards. The smell hits her. The smell of the house comes from this room.

It is black inside. She notices pinpricks of light. Gaps in the roof tiles. She notices these first and they are like stars and then the room grows lighter. But one area does not grow lighter. A shape begins to form. The room lightens around it.

She does not step into the room. She cannot do that. She thinks she sees it move. It is moving, crawling slowly towards her.

‘John.’

15

Rachel Hyde watches as they load her husband into the back of an ambulance. He seems smaller – like a child. The police cars have their lights on still. They flash blue against the house. She wonders why they do this, what the point is.

The ambulance driver told her where they would take John. She did not ask to go with him. She is not sure she wants that and is ashamed to feel that way.

She thinks of him, huddled in the corner of the room, and remembers the fear on seeing him, fear of this man and everything he might have done, everything he might be. But what exactly has he done? Can she be sure he has done something? Did he lie? He was eight. Everyone lies. Did he push his brothers off a cliff, sending one to his death? If he did that, then did he mean to? There is no way for her to know.

She came here to find her husband. She has found him. But he is not who she set out to find. He is a mass of bones and flesh and hidden somewhere inside, something she has never known, never been allowed to see.

The letter opened the wound and here – there – when she opened the door, she saw the insides of it, the rotting, stinking flesh of it.

When the ambulance drives off, she walks upstairs to the room where she found him. Already the smell has started to go. Now there is a smell of something else instead: the bodies of the police and forensics team. The room seems smaller as well, much smaller with all these people inside, and with the lights they have set up.

A mirror is propped against the wall. He was slouched opposite it when she found him. She can imagine him watching himself in it. If you examine a mystery closely enough, for long enough, certainty will follow. Certainty, but not necessarily truth. This is what she finds herself thinking.

Later, a man comes to talk to her.

‘I am Major Mbuli.’

She says nothing.

‘The man, John Hyde, is your husband?’

‘Yes.’

‘He has been here for all this time?’

She shakes her head, confused.

‘In Port Elizabeth, I mean.’

‘We are, were, separated.’

The man nods. ‘Have you spoken to him in the last few months?’

She shakes her head.

‘I have met him before.’

She looks up at this.

‘He found the body. Of his brother, I mean.’

‘I did not know that.’ She pauses. ‘How did he die?’

‘He hanged himself. In the same room where you found your husband.’

She holds her voice steady. ‘There was a letter. He would have known, would have guessed what his brother was going to do.’

‘Yes.’ The policeman’s tone changes. ‘He phoned. I am afraid to say the message did not get through.’

‘Did not get through?’

‘The message was not relayed. Later we sent a car, but it was too late. Mr Hyde had beaten us to it.’

Rachel wonders which Hyde he means.

‘I am sorry. There have been cuts.’ He goes on. ‘You have the letter? Mr Hyde was not able to produce it.’

‘Do you suspect him of something?’

‘We did at first, but he was on a plane, somewhere over Africa at the time it happened. Nothing to answer for.’

‘Nothing to answer for? Are you sure?’

‘What do you mean?’

She shakes her head. ‘Nothing. I do not have it. The letter, I mean.’

Mbuli nods. He does not press it. ‘Your husband will live. That’s what they tell me. He is severely dehydrated, but you found him in time. Another day, and …’ He pauses. ‘We will need you to come and give a statement. But there is no rush.’

He turns to go, but then stops. ‘You did not know Mr Hyde? Peter Hyde, I mean.’

She shakes her head. ‘I only met him once.’

He nods. ‘I am sorry.’

He leaves. She does not know what he is sorry for.

She does not go to the hospital the next day and does not call. Instead, she goes to the house next door. She watches the DVDs almost without stopping. She does not watch everything on them – that is impossible. Instead, she watches most of them using fast-forward.

She watches him paint the house, and then, later, much later, remove the furniture and carpets. She watches a speck disappear in the garden and the smoke that follows.

She sees him leave the larger house and walk in the direction of the fence. The camera loses sight of him, but she knows he was coming here to the bungalow. He does this many times.

She sees him sitting in the chair in the larger house, hand resting over the side. He jerks. She thinks at first he has fallen asleep and the movement was him waking. But she can see his eyes and they remain open. She watches his hand, held rigid over the arm of the chair.

She sees John sleeping, moonlight washing over him. He gets out of bed while it is still dark and leaves the room. She can see only shadows. He does this several times. It may be sleepwalking. She is not sure.

He is in the corridor, sitting with his back to the wall. She can see his head move, back and forth. He seems to be hitting it against the wall. She turns up the volume, but the only sound is the buzzing from the television itself. She looks closer. His face, from what she can see, is in a grimace. She thinks he is crying.

He stands at a window looking out at the garden and does not move. She checks the player to be sure, but there is nothing wrong with it. She checks the time. He stands in the same position for eight hours, the only movement the tapping of his fingers on his leg. The window faces the front garden and the road. She wonders what was out there, though she suspects she knows the answer.

He runs through the house, from room to room. There is no reason to it.

She watches the last disc again. Watches the black space where she knows her husband chose to die.

Then she stops. She begins arranging the discs in date order. As she does this, she notices another disc under the chair. This has different handwriting on it and is dated earlier than any of the others. On this one she sees Peter. The face from the park. She sees him in the room under the eaves and she sees him place a rope over the beam and she watches him hanging from the beam until he stops swinging and the camera stops. The next image is of her husband bursting into the room. On the disc this happens a second after Peter hangs himself, but she knows it could have been days. She sees him launch himself at the body, sees him hold it up and try to grab the rope. He has to let go and he runs down the stairs and gets a knife and comes back and cuts the rope and she sees his brother fall at his feet. John loosens the rope and he takes his brother’s face in his hands and he kneels there with him, rocking back and forth, and she can see that he is shouting at the body, shouting so much his neck muscles strain, she can see them even in the grainy picture. She watches him do this until there is no more space on the DVD and it goes back to the beginning and she sees Peter’s face fill the screen as if nothing had happened.

She drives to the library and looks at newspapers from 1983. She starts with the twelfth of December, but there is nothing. In a copy dated the thirteenth, though, she finds a short article, a matter of a few lines: ‘Paul Hyde, aged ten, a resident of Kragga Kamma, died in an accident in the mountains near Barrydale. He leaves his father, mother and two brothers, aged eight and twelve.’ That is all.

She also goes to the police station. She finds Mbuli there and she leaves the discs. She explains where she found them. The policeman does not look surprised. Perhaps it is his training.

‘Will there be charges?’

‘He has done nothing wrong.’

She nods.

When she returns to Peter’s house – she finds it hard now to think of it as John’s house – she looks again at the photograph of his parents. She is struck by how alike they look. John and his father. His father wears a broad grin. She finds herself smiling, but stops when she realises what she is doing.

She finds the letter from his father. It is back in the envelope in the drawer. Now she knows more. She would not say she understands it. It is not for her to understand.

Also in the drawer is a man’s watch. She turns it over and reads the date inscribed there. She holds it for a long time. Night has fallen before she can bear to put it down. It is something to hold on to.

16

He does not belong in this country. He is free to leave and he will. The past that belongs to him, that he has made his own, has seen to that. The stories told have seeped into the country around him. They clutch at his feet and drag him down, pin him here. He wants to leave. But he cannot. Not yet.

If he could somehow take the story he told, or the story he did not tell, and bury it under a rock in the middle of the Karoo, walk away and forget where it was hidden, then maybe, just maybe, he could stay. He could stay here, unfettered, in a virgin country, a new life, Rachel at his side.

He has put the house up for sale for almost nothing. The bungalow next door too. He cannot go back to the house. He knows that. And perhaps someone else can make something of it. Someone, wanting to live out there, will choose it out of the six or seven nearby also for sale. It won’t be the same for them. It is just a house after all: brick, cement.

It is his final betrayal: selling the house his father would not sell. But he knows, too, this is what his father would have wanted. For his son to be free of it all. It is why he did not call him back until the end.

He still sees them. He has not told anyone this. He still sees them, but not like before – his father, his mother, Paul and Peter. The shape of a head in a crowd, a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of one of them looking at him. He went for a walk in the park a few days ago with Rachel and, in the distance, walking hand in hand with an adult, he recognised Paul, the child’s head half-turned. It was far away but he knew it was him.

He kept it to himself. His hold on Rachel’s hand did not tighten. He is certain of that. He is certain, though he also knows he blacked out for a second, was somewhere else entirely. These periods have been getting shorter. They are almost gone. It is only a matter of time.

He looked at Rachel then, walking alongside him. He noticed the lines on her face. He pulled her towards him and she gave him half a smile. It is important she does not notice. It is important, for a reason beyond himself, a reason he is beginning to understand, that he does not let go of her again, that his past does not weigh on her.

That she knows is a comfort to him, one he did not expect. He knows she wants children. He thinks he may be ready, and ready to offer more too. Peter. Or Neil. Or Paul. Sarah if it is a girl. If indeed she will want those names now that she knows. In some ways he thinks it may be better not to have those names – but only in some ways.

She has agreed to a trip before they fly home, before they restart their lives in England. She wondered if it was a good idea. He knows it may be the worst idea he could have had, but at the same time he knows that his story is not complete. He needs to go to where it started, stand there, and let it seep through him, to see what remains behind. That is his hope. It is the only way he knows how to bury those words, ‘I saw’. It is the only way he knows to get back to the moment, the moment they went off the edge.

That moment is still lost. Though John knows he was responsible, he does not know why and cannot remember the seconds before. The doctors told Peter he might never remember, but they did not say the same to him. The doctors did not tell him, did not warn him, that in changing the story for someone else he would change it for himself too, and the true story would be replaced by this other, this doppelgänger.

He has not seen the other boy. This gives him little comfort.

At George, it begins to rain. He slows down. The rain stops three hours later as they turn off the N2 towards Barrydale. There is still mist in the air.

The first stretch of this road is flat, but then they begin to climb and the mist grows thicker. He struggles to see more than a few metres ahead and is driving at the speed he would drive in a city. The mist collects in drops on the windscreen. He looks out of the window on his left, looking for the place. He remembers it clearly. Or he thinks he does. It was almost twenty-nine years ago now. He remembers they parked alongside the road at a viewpoint. Opposite, the mountain was covered in yellow flowers. The flowers are out again, though the weather is different. They climbed over the wall and there was a path leading down to the pools. He remembers that it could not be seen from the road. Not a path as such. He remembers branches scratching his skin.

He passes one stop. It does not look familiar. Then another. He drives another two kilometres further into the mountains. Each stopping place is no more familiar than the last. He tries to remember which side of the pass it was, but nothing. He stops, not because he thinks it is the place but because he has to choose one.

He looks across at the mountains. They are swathed in mist so thick it is like rain. It billows across the valley. The flowers he remembers, the smell too. There is one smell: rain, tar, gravel. There is another as well: the mountain itself, the mineral, metallic taste of it. He remembers the dirt in his mouth when he fell as a boy.

‘Is it here?’

He shrugs. ‘I’ll take a look.’ She makes no movement to get out of the car and instead just nods. He is grateful for that.

He walks along the wall, looking for the path he remembers. He sees tins, a crisp packet, cigarette ends. There is no obvious path. He looks back at the car and at her in it. It is covered in drops of water. Dust too. The raindrops make paths through the dust. He can barely see her, though he knows she is looking at him. The rain and mud run through her face.

He turns away and looks back down the valley slope. He knows he would not be able to see the pools from here. He pauses. He knows what he should do: climb over, find the path and if it is not there, then drive on.

He sits on the wall. The mist collects on his arms and he watches the drops cling to his hairs. He wipes one finger across his forearm and the water runs off. He can feel it seeping into his clothes now. He looks down the side of the valley again, gets up and steps over the wall.

He walks along the edge of the fynbos on the other side of the wall. There is no gap, no obvious way down. He retraces his steps and goes in the opposite direction. At one point there is a space between two branches. He can see the space continue a little way down the mountainside before it disappears behind a boulder. Not a path as such, but perhaps it once was. Used just enough now to keep the route visible. He wonders if there was ever a proper path. To the boys it might have seemed so as they were small, but not to the parents. They just pushed a way through.

The bush scratches his hands and tears at his trousers. A thorn leaves a line of blood. It mingles with the water. He likes this. Something about being this close to the bush, feeling it inside him, feeling the water trickle into his shoes. He is soaked through by now with the mist and the water on the bush, but he makes no move to lift his arms free.

He feels nothing familiar, as if moving further into the mountains has drowned the memories, drowned the smell.

From behind the rock, he can see the way downhill. He looks back and to the right. The road, the car, the wall have all disappeared already. He hears a car, but it does not stop and the noise seems far away. At that moment, standing behind the rock, hearing the car go by, something hits him. He wants to call it a memory. It is more a vision than a memory. He sees it, but as if it happens to someone else, happened to someone else.

He sees them, more clearly now than at any time since he left the house. It frightens him. He thinks of turning back, but he cannot lie to Rachel. Not again. He should not have brought her.

His father is in the lead, striding ahead through the bush, carrying a basket. He pushes his way through the bush, not caring about the scratches, breaking branches, clearing a way for the others to follow. After him, the two older boys: Peter in front, then Paul. There are towels over their shoulders.

He, the boy he knows is himself, carries a camera. Hyde watches him. His heart is beating a little faster at the sight of him but he breathes in deeply. He picks his way more carefully through the bushes and is a little way behind his brothers and behind his mother too. He watches as his mother holds a branch to one side for him. ‘Come on.’ He hears the words now, as clearly as twenty-nine years ago. The gesture is gentle, the words are not. He can see the sweat on her face. They push their way through the bush, now as tall as them, and they are gone. The noise of their feet, their voices, vanish. He hears the call of a bird.

He starts after them, parting the bushes with his arms. After a few minutes he emerges into a clearing. There are rocks and through them runs the river. His parents are there too. They are setting up the picnic, putting out blankets on rocks. Now they stand, looking downstream to the pools. They stand with their backs to him, unmoving. He cannot see the children.

He moves out of the last of the bushes and approaches them. He realises there is no sound. The water flows by, but he can hear nothing. He looks up. The mist is even lower. There is a grey cloth further up the mountainside that will be covering the road. He has descended through it. He thinks of Rachel and he calls out, but nothing comes from his chest and he knows anyway she wouldn’t be able to hear him. Not here. Not now.

It is as if he is under water. The air is thick around him, thick and wet. He heads towards his mother and father. Still they don’t move. He sees their faces in profile. His father, the same age he is now, looks down the river. There is a breeze, just one breath. It picks up his hair. His mother’s too. She stands on his father’s right, slightly behind him. He sees the wrinkles in the corner of her eye. She squints. There is no sun today. Neither of them are smiling. His father’s mouth is half open. Is he calling out? Is he talking to his wife? Perhaps he has just sworn, just realised, half-realised, what is happening further downstream.

His mother’s hands are halfway up to her face. Cupping her hands around her mouth to call out. Or just finished. The skin of her neck stretched out by the grimace of her lips.

He walks between them now, inches away. He stands in front of them, his back to the waterfall. He wants to reach out to them, wants to hold their hands, to be held by them. Most of all he wants to push them back, back away from here, back up the slope and back into the Chevrolet baking in the sun.

He reaches out to them.

They move.

Their heads swivel. Their gaze shifts from the middle distance to his face. Their lips close, their faces blank. He sees something in their gazes, though. He sees that they know, that they are filled with the knowledge of what he has done, of what he will do.

They stare at him and he turns and begins to run. He crashes into the bush, not following a path, and runs through it. Lines of blood appear on his skin.

After some time he stops and tries to gather his breath. There are steep drops around here. The parents told the children that. They told them. He needs to be careful where he puts his feet.

He looks out over the bush. The flowers on the bush are at neck height – a carpet of yellow. The bush. The mountain. It is raining now and it falls in swathes but he cannot feel the breeze. He crouches. Down here there are no leaves. He can see through the branches, across the ground. He looks to his left, off the path, up the mountain, and to his right. He sees something that makes him stand upright again. Just two metres away, he sees legs from the knee down. The branches and leaves cut off the rest of them. The legs of a child. He stands up and calls out ‘Hello?’ He does not expect an answer. He crouches again, but they are gone. He scans the bush to the left and right, looks ahead and behind. Nothing. He gets up. Off the path, a few metres away, further down the hill, the bushes sway. First one bush moves, then another, as if something slithers between them. He plunges into the bush again, following the child he can see, the child he thinks he sees, running through the bush, flitting between leaves and branches.

His feet slip. Once he finds himself falling and stays upright by grabbing the branches. He stops then and scans the bush. It is still again. A drop of rain gathers on his eyelash. He blinks to get rid of it, feels the salt from his skin in his eye. It makes his eye water and a tear rolls down his cheek.

There, to his right, another movement. He bends down below the leaf cover, but can see nothing. He runs again, following the swaying branches.

He stops, focuses on his breathing. Tells himself what he is seeing is not real. He trusts in the logic of it. He tells himself to hold back from this, not to fall again.

When he stops, the swaying stops. He waits, crouched in silence. The only noise now the river. It is closer, but still some distance off. He grabs a branch and shakes it. It soaks him. There is a ripple further off as he shakes the branch. He takes a step closer, stops. The swaying stops too. He shakes a branch, it starts again. He waits for it to die down. He feels his heart in his chest. There, ahead and to the right, a ripple, this time not of his making. It seems to be coming towards him. He stands rooted. The branches press against his chest, his arms hang by his side. He watches the movement. It comes right up to him, right up to the leaves in front of him. He waits and he can sense hands reaching out to him, reaching out to grab his own hands, his legs. His flesh tingles. He wants to duck down into the branches and put his face right up against the face of the child beneath, and cry out to him, shout as loud as he can in the face of one so close, yet who is too far away to hear, scream at him to stop, to stop what he is about to do. He stands. His head goes back, his face tilts to the rain, his eyes close. He waits for the child to take him.

Then he senses the child turn around and move off. He feels the absence, the withdrawing. He opens his eyes and sees movement straight ahead and Hyde is running again, running, though the branches stick in his flesh and hold him back. They stick and tear, and as he moves he feels as if he leaves bits of him behind. Stripped to the bone, his flesh hung out on branches to dry. Votives to the gods.

And now he is a boy again. As he runs, leaving his flesh behind, he grows smaller and the bush swallows him. He bursts onto a path, a narrow line of stones running through the bush and he is running, running and slipping and falling, and the only way he knows how to stop falling again is to run faster and faster, but he cannot stop himself falling and his legs are moving but not touching the ground and then the stones disappear and the bush on either side falls away and he is out, free of the bush, the ledge a little way down the path, free, light as air.