Blood Rose

twenty-seven

Music blasted through the girl’s iPod as the bike hurtled through the desert. She snaked her arms under the driver’s leathers, and he accelerated, pluming dust behind the bike. It shimmered across the sinking sun as they passed the rusted no-entry sign. ‘Danger/Gevaar’ said the next one. The girl hopped off the bike and opened the gate. In among the trees were the remnants of three huts and a car wreck.

‘Who lives here?’ she asked, climbing back on the bike.

‘Nobody now,’ said her companion. ‘Some Topnaars used to, but the South African army kicked them out twenty years ago.’

The man hadn’t been this way in what… ten years, twelve? He hadn’t even thought of the place since his unit had given up, rolling south in their Bedfords when Walvis Bay was handed back to the Namibians. For their sins, he thought. What anyone wanted in this godforsaken dump was beyond him.

‘When’re you going to stop?’ the girl whined. It would be dark soon and she wanted a fire and a joint. The man was enjoying the feeling of a girl’s tits pressing into his back. It made him feel young again, like the soldier he had once been and not the overweight husband he had become.

‘Where’s the fucking road gone? It should be here.’ Instead of a track leading to a hut under a gum tree, there was a bank of sand, pocked with branches and other long-stranded flood debris.

‘That flood, a few years ago, it shifted the course of the river. It must’ve blocked Memory Lane,’ said the girl matter-of-factly. ‘Let’s stay here. The desert’s all the same, anyway.’

The man parked the bike under a canopy of gnarled acacia, thinking of the girls he and some of the others in his unit used to pick up and bring out here. Army mattresses, they had called them. A couple of days in the desert made them docile, amenable. Not like this wild thing with the same name as his wife’s fancy perfume.

The girl had logs and kindling assembled before he had the panniers unpacked. She put a match to the grass and blew, showering red sparks across the satin sky. She leant back and offered the man a drag of her deftly rolled joint – another thing girls seemed to have learned to do in the last twenty years. He traded his hip flask for the joint.

The girl tilted her head back and he traced down her throat as she drank, stopping at the hollow between her collarbones where her breath fluttered below his thumb. She put his hand to her mouth, flicking her tongue along his fingers, clicking the piercing in the centre of her tongue against his wedding ring. Then his knee was between her thighs and he was spreading her legs and mounting her. He was finished before he’d really begun. The girl sighed, turning away to light a cigarette. He tried to kiss her, but she brushed him aside.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said, rummaging for food in the bag next to her, propped up on one elbow. She considered brushing her teeth, but the man had fallen asleep beside her, his arms around her stomach. She covered them both instead and lay, watching the stars wink, bright as lanterns in the branches of their tree canopy.

When the girl woke, it was dark. No moon. No wind either. She guessed it was two o’clock. Maybe three. The silence filled her ears, her lungs, making it difficult to breathe. She snuggled back into the man’s arms, but the pressure of her bladder would not relent, so she wormed her way out from under the covers and felt around for the torch and her shoes. She picked her way towards a denser patch of darkness on the edge of their campsite.

When she flicked on her torch, nosing the light ahead of her into the trees, he was waiting for her. Grinning.

The girl’s scream ricocheted into the night.