Ritual

32

On Kaiser's sofa — eighteen hours since the ibogaine trip had begun, Flea came to life again and began to remember who she was and why she was there. She felt as if she'd been to a different planet, as if half of her was still out there somewhere, struggling to find its way back into her body. She sat up gingerly, blinking in the first grey light of morning filtering through the window. After a while she pulled her feet up on to the sofa and slowly, slowly, pulled off her socks.

The problem with her feet had started a few days after the accident, and now it had got to the point that she was so ashamed she wouldn't take her shoes off if anyone was watching. Her feet seemed veined and misshapen, awkwardly crabbed like a monkey's or a lemur's — they made her think of the hand she'd brought to the surface from under the harbour, the brutal way it had been removed from the body. She squeezed the webbed skin experimentally between her thumb and forefinger and, briefly, it seemed to liquefy, to run away leaving her toes free and independent. She stopped moving, trying to keep still, waiting for the drug to stop working. After a while her vision cleared and the skin was back, tethering her toes together. Life was so unpredictable. The things that stayed longest in your mind were always the things you hadn't foreseen.

She pulled on her socks and was about to roll back on the sofa, when something made her stop. Someone was watching her. In the doorway, under the rolled-up plastic sheeting, a figure stood perfectly still.

For a moment it was as if nothing in her body moved, not her heart or her lungs, because she was looking at a creature, a dead creature that should have been lying on the ground, but instead was standing up in the doorway. Its clothing was billowing round it, just like Mum's in Boesmansgat. Its face was a bony mass.

'Mum?' she whispered. 'Mum?'

'There now,' the dead animal said, and its voice was not Mum's but Kaiser's. 'Flea?'

There was a pause when she didn't know what to say. Then, in a hoarse voice, she whispered, 'Kaiser?'

The creature moved, turning its face, and as it did, Kaiser materialized from inside it, smiling out from the corpse. Her vision cleared and it was just Kaiser again, dressed in an unfamiliar white shirt, looking very tired. 'Phoebe?' he said, coming into the room. 'How are we feeling?'

She shook her head, not taking her eyes off him.

'Are you all right?'

'Yes. I mean… it's still there. The drug — it's still there.' She licked her lips, trying not to think about the death mask. 'I mean you — just now. I thought…'

'Yes?' he said slowly, taking a step into the room. She'd forgotten how tall he was. How tall, and how heavy his head was.

'Nothing.' She rubbed her eyes and tucked her feet under her on the sofa. 'It was just the drug.'

He was holding a glass of water and he handed it to her now. He sat down on the sofa next to her, making it bow with his weight. She tried not to look at him. She wanted to say: 'They're not at the bottom.' But she didn't. Instead she sipped the water and kept track of him out of the corner of her eye, thinking of the animal skull.

'I was sick,' she said, after a while. 'You told me I'd be sick.'

'It gets most people like that.'

She looked at the bowl on the floor. 'You cleaned it up for me. I didn't even hear you come in.' She blinked. Everything was familiar, yet strange: the edges on all the objects were hazy and brown, crawling a little as if they were outlined with a column of ants.

'Would you like some more water?'

'I've got a headache,' she said numbly. There was something about his shirt that she thought she should mention, but her head hurt too much. 'A headache.' She wiped her face with her palms. She took some deep breaths. 'Kaiser. Do you — do you remember my feet?'

'No.'

'At Bushman's Hole, I didn't dive because…'

'Because you'd cut your feet on some glass. Yes. I remember that.'

'Except,' she murmured, 'except… I didn't. I didn't cut them.'

He laughed gently. 'Well, I saw blood. I helped you dress them. I pulled a piece of glass out from between your toes. I don't think that was your imagination.'

'No. It happened, but it wasn't an accident. Not an accident at all.' She pressed her fingers hard into her temples, wanting her head to stop seesawing. 'I went and found the glass. I got a bottle from the hotel bar and smashed it in the car park. Then I trod on it.'

Kaiser was silent. Not an animal skull. Just Kaiser. 'You know there's something — something different about Thom?'

'Different?'

'Yes. We never actually said it but we always knew something was slightly wrong. Poor little sod. But he's OK, you know. As long as he's got instructions, he knows how to follow them. The only thing wrong with him is he's not flexible — he can't think in an emergency.' She pressed her fingers harder into her temples, speaking slowly and clearly: 'He should never — never have been with them. Not on his own that deep. I let him go because…' She shook her head, trying to shake away the guilt, wishing it would lift off her like a skin. 'I was scared, Kaiser. So scared. You don't know what Dad was like. He was… We couldn't be weak around him. If we showed fear or weakness it just — just finished him. I didn't want to go into that hole so I trod on the glass.'

It was the first time she'd ever put it into words — the mistake she'd made, the corner she'd turned that meant she would forever be paying the price, forever pulling other people's bodies out of deep water because she couldn't pull up the bodies of the two people she'd allowed to drown. It felt odd to have the words out in the air now. It was as if she was waiting for judgement.

She bent over at the middle, resting her chin on her knees, her hands on her stomach. There was a long silence. It was Kaiser who broke it, speaking in a low voice: 'You know, you are so very much like your father.'

She looked sideways at him. 'Am I?'

'Yes.' He gave a sad smile. 'Oh, yes. So very much like him.'

'Why?'

He laughed and put his arm round her shoulders. 'Oh, I can't answer that. The answer to that question is a long, long road.' His big goat's face creased in a regretful smile. 'That's a road only you can travel.'