IF THE SHOES ARE STILL THERE, I’LL GO TO THE MALL, Tony said to himself. If they’re gone, it’s a sign. I’ll just turn around and go back home and wait for my results. There’ll be time to check the box before she gets back from her group. He wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve and craned his neck.
The empty sneakers were dangling over the power lines. They swung gently by their laces, as if their owner had been trying to get away so fast that he had run straight up into the sky, scorching the leaves vertical. The shoes had been black, with skulls drawn on them in Tipp-Ex, but they were bleaching rapidly: they were the same colour as the clouds. No one looked up, so the sneakers stayed, twisting in the southeaster that had gathered itself up and would blast Cape Town through the festive season and then all summer long. Next year some official would come with a ladder to cut them down, but Tony wouldn’t be around to miss them. For now, every time he saw the shoes, he just thought that there was a barefoot guy out there with some explaining to do. His mother’s prayer to Saint Anthony chittered at him: Holy Tony, look around. Something’s lost and must be found. ‘Merry Christmas, shoes,’ he muttered. ‘Hope you get back where you belong.’ The ownerless sneakers swayed on their invisible pendulum; the lines hummed.
He stepped into the road without thinking, and had to step back again in the same instant. The angry woman in the SUV unlocked a gym-hard arm from the steering wheel and jabbed her middle finger at him. When she pulled off again, he could see her mouthing curses through the glass, the children in the back stopped clocks, faces round and white with surprise. Tony wiped his face on the shoulder of his shirt, bending his neck to each side to do it. God, it was hot. You couldn’t concentrate. Better to wait till the lights changed. You think you have so much time, and then – bam! – the accident, the suicide bomb, the no going back. God works in mysterious ways, said his mother. How did people go about their lives without wondering when it was going to happen? And here he was, having to put his life on hold for a couple of symbols on an Education Department letterhead. Everything depended on it.
It’s just making me miserable, Tony told himself. It’ll be over soon – tomorrow; today, even. I’ll be out of here. And mostly, the bad things don’t happen. You cross the road, the cancer is treatable, the brakes don’t fail. You go on. Like the old guy. He looked up again.
The old man was out on his balcony. He lived near the top of the building: he could have stood on the wall and flapped his arms if he ever wanted to come down the easy way. But as far as Tony could tell, he didn’t. He sat in a saggy deckchair with his leggs crossed and dangling. He watched the mall, drinking beer and waiting, like Van Hunks. The balcony was decorated not with plants and garden furniture, but with sets of animal trophies, nailed to the wall like the heads of devils. He had attached a little balsawood aeroplane to the edge, and its propeller whirred. It was never still. All day and all night, as long as the wind was blowing – and no one there to see it.
Except Tony, who was interested in what happened upstairs. The old guy was his mascot. When it was very hot he wore a pair of flappy blue rugby shorts and went shirtless. He was paler than the animal skulls behind him, white even in the sun, impenetrable as the pith of an orange. In winter it was the same hunting jacket, day after freezing day. He is, thought Tony, the kind of guy who has all the gear, who likes to shoot deer and gut them. Tony had once seen him cleaning his gun, thoughtful, ostentatious. The old man was fascinating, the same way that saints’ relics were compulsive, repellent. Tony imagined him up close: his bristly grey stubble, the gristle and cartilage of his ears. How could he stand being in that body? How had he lived this long and not turned to dust in his seat?
The old guy leaned forward so that the hinges of his chair squeaked. At first Tony thought the sound was the hadedas that had moved in when the five-storey mall was built, like vultures at the Towers of Silence. Then the old man began hacking into one hand. He coughed and coughed, shaking the spindly deckchair. Afterwards he sat back and inspected his palm as if he expected to find lung fragments. Then he wiped his hands on his shorts and tried again. By degrees he winched his body out of the seat. He disappeared inside and came back out with two quarts of Black Label. He settled: the fabric of his chair resumed the shape of his bony backside. Tony thought, Be nice to be the one sitting in a deckchair, drinking that first cold beer fast, then sipping the next one slowly.
The old man was peering solemnly back at him, soundless, whole, annoyingly alive. He held the other bottle up to Tony, an invitation. God, Tony thought, startled and then disgusted. Hope I’m never that pathetic.
But he hesitated, there at the traffic lights, and he missed his turn to go. He felt the hot exhausted breath of the cars on his legs. The old man stared down at Tony. Then something switched in his face and his whole jaw seemed to dislocate and flip forward. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Tony said it out loud, then looked guiltily around for his mother and her Bible in its leather cover. The old guy was laughing. He had slipped his false teeth in again. He kept snorting. He was actually slapping his knee and coughing now, choking with merriment. ‘Very funny,’ muttered Tony.
The old man pulled a mock-serious face and saluted him with the beer: it made Tony swallow. His throat clicked. Tony gave up waiting for the lights to change in his favour. He crossed the road against the traffic, dodging the bumpers, trusting his feet to judge space. Man, he was going to drink a bucket of slushies at the mall.
As he walked, Tony’s throat hitched again, trying to reverse the digestion of the banana he had crammed in an hour ago. He shouldn’t have thought of slushies. He had watched the Columbine CCTV footage of the two killing boys, their guns lowered after the fact, ambling in the cafeteria while their classmates cowered. Under the tables, everybody was looking up. They were finally paying attention. The boys were nodding companionably at each other and saying, Eeny-meeny-miny-mo. Between couplets they paused, sucking at the straws of their super-sized slushies. Murder is thirsty work.
The worst part was that the film had been doctored for visibility. Everything around the boys had been dulled, and only their two figures were haloed. The killers moved around, sipping slowly and considering, and they were floating in light.
Tony leaped the final metre of the street, gaining the pavement. If he could make it out of the sun, he’d be all right – somewhere cool and quiet, where he could sit down. He ducked under the striped boom into the parking lot and jogged across the tarmac to the lift. He rode up, glaring at a woman whose trolley rammed him in the kidneys at every floor. When the glass doors yawned, he pushed back at her. Then Tony crossed the threshold into the dome.
It was no better than the street: the noise and light made his head feel full of sand. Christmas bells were shaking madly; there was a choir of wriggling school kids in the atrium; everything was wrong. He needed to leave. Tony reversed and navigated a route through the streaming shoppers, stepping onto the escalator. Down a level was better. He made his way back slowly to the dim parking lot. He would find a bench that no one used in the day. He could hang there, check out Skeleton Gorge, decide what to do next.
But there were no benches. Tony wandered over to the bollards and hooked his feet between the railings. He looked out over the forest below, picking at the paint with his index finger. It flaked obligingly. God, everything was already falling apart, though it was only ten years since The Barracks had been built. He could remember when it was a construction site. The mall had been designed by people who had never been to Cape Town. They didn’t know that everything here turned towards the mountain. Righting that parking lot would mean lifting up the whole complex and rotating it – like those guys did at school, spinning footballs on the tips of their fingers – and setting it down again facing the other way.
He looked out at the alpine view, the transplanted Christmas trees that crawled up the slopes of Nursery Ravine and the depression that was the Old Zoo. You used to be able to walk around up there, on Devil’s Peak. There were fallow deer. They would come up to you when they smelled Marie Biscuits and nudge the packet, trapped by the craving. You could touch their foreheads, feel the shape of their skulls, stroke the short fur between their eyes. Tony had found a single antler where the stags had been roaming, restless with rutting. The antler was bone-heavy in the forest, fossil-cold when he took it back to his bedroom. It was not at all like the old guy and his trophies, he told himself.
The deer that were left were on the move, spirited away from Table Mountain because they were exotic. Hessian nets had already been set up, and they would be unfurled any day now. The deer would be chased down the mountain and caught in the rough fibres, tranquilised and taken to game farms where people would pay to hunt them. Eventually, the only trace of them would be on money: Property of the South African Reserve Bank. The deer that avoided the nets would be shot where they lived. They would be ghost deer, looking for their lost mates on the slopes opposite Hospital Bend. We can’t look at anything without wanting to rip the guts out of it, thought Tony bitterly.
He really should leave now. He checked his watch and then leaned out one last time to look for the constant man on the balcony, trusting his weight to the balls of his feet, bouncing a little in his trainers.
Tony’s left shoe missed the railing and he stumbled back, landing on the cement. His ankle buckled inward, the second time his body had betrayed him.
He righted himself, placed his feet carefully side by side, and looked again. The old guy wasn’t there. His empty deckchair didn’t make sense. It was wrong: a pulled tooth, a missed train, an eclipse. The propeller on the plane spun. The rotation made Tony feel dizzy.
The gunshot was very loud in the underground parking lot, startling him away from the sound and towards the trees and the retreating deer. For a few seconds – one, two, three – he knew that his fingers would slip and he would topple over the side without the consent of his tendons. He saw his unlucky spirit self plummeting into the blue of the firs, smelling of resin and crushed out of true by the time he hit the slopes, rolling.
But it was only the echo that shunted along the barrier: it ricocheted off the bodies of the cars and made his teeth ache in his head.
If I don’t turn around, Tony thought, I won’t have to look. He gripped the icy railing, sieving the air for sounds. In the distance people were walking, heads determinedly down.
Tony forced himself to face the scene.
What was left of the old guy was lying in an open parking space between a Range Rover and a BMW, both sprayed with the red end of him, the rain and thunder of dying. From here he was smaller, the bones of his body light and flightless as a bird in a diorama, light and porous as a balsawood plane.
Tony made his way towards the old man’s body, angling his head carefully away. He could not look directly at what lay before him, but then he thought: I’m the only one who looked up. I should do something.
He moved his eyes slowly over the corpse. He was expecting the face to be collapsed and shrunken like the Bushman heads in the museum, but instead the bullet had exploded the old guy’s false teeth, springing the bridge from his mouth in protest. Tony felt the sympathetic set of his own teeth in his gums.
The old man had dressed carefully for his final display, a formal shirt that Tony hadn’t seen before. His collar was buttoned all the way up to his grizzled chin, as if it was only his head that had fragmented, a bunch of flowers in a fist. There was a note pinned to his chest, folded over once like a florist’s card, with its familiar message and foreign script.
Tony saw his own hand reach out. He was hardly even shaking. The paper was crumpled, as if it had been torn from something the old guy had been reading. The writing was a smudged, blocky print. NO ONE WOULD FIND ME.
Behind him, the footsteps and the shouts were beginning. Tony screwed the note into his palm, reducing it to half its size. He looked around. The dentures lay discarded next to the body, bridged with pink and slick with spit. He half-expected the teeth to chatter towards him over the cement, but they lay still. No one would miss them. He closed his hand quickly over the hinged plates and slid them into his pocket. They still smelled of beer. Tony wiped his hands on his jeans. He got up, feeling his joints stretching like perished rubber bands – how long had he been crouching there? – and backed away. One last time his eyes traversed the old man’s body, all the way down to his feet.
They were bare, white and ribbed with tendons, the feet of a plaster Christ on a wooden cross, flung to kingdom come.