SHE LAY WITH HER BACK AGAINST THE HARD ground of the mountain – You mean the Cape Granite and Peninsula Sandstone fynbos, said Doctor Renfield. You lucky girl! It doesn’t occur anywhere else in the world! – and swam in and out of consciousness.
It’s a dream, Joanna thought. Except that I can’t make it end.
She felt the blood struggling along in the bottom of her limbs. Pins-and-needles, Joanna told herself. Needles-and-pins. This is how James feels in the bath.
She was freezing. The rain wouldn’t stop beating against her face.
Why won’t this end? If I try hard enough I could just melt into the sand like a Bushman burial.
But not like the ones in the cave, said Doctor Renfield. You don’t want to go the way they did, Jo-Jo, not with your head bashed in and your bones in splinters. Your teeth fall in and your eyes pop out. Your brains come trickling down your SNOUT!
“Oh, fuck off! Please!” Joanna tried to say. “I am so tired of you!” No sound was coming out of her throat. She wanted to wipe the wetness out of her eyes, but she couldn’t raise her arm properly.
But the voice was nagging, insistent, and then it was joined by another one, and then another. They nagged her into consciousness, and they wouldn’t go away.
Wake up, Mommy!
What goes croak-dot-dot-croak-croak-dot-croak?
Joanna opened her eyes properly. The toad moon had set. The rain was still falling, but more softly. She moved her head so that she didn’t get the drops in her mouth when she breathed. Her nose had moved all the way over to the right side of her face.
“Morse toad,” she whispered. The air whistled as it left her lungs and exited through the cut in her neck. It didn’t hurt – not like her crotch and her head hurt – but she was too scared to touch it. She was afraid that her fingers would go straight through and she would feel cartilage. Why wasn’t she dead?
Joanna listened for the two men but heard only the storm. She was making an island in the run-off that streamed past her on all sides, gushing down the mountainside. God, it was steep! She was only clinging on because her body was at an angle to the slope. The thousand branches caught and pricked at her, drawing scratches on her arms and legs like a road map – or like tattoos.
I’m Gulliver, Joanna told herself. This is not a metaphor. I’m Gulliver and I need to get back home.
The car keys were long gone, discarded by the men and hurried along somewhere subterranean in the grey water of the storm drains and the sewers. Joanna squinted down the hillside, but the rain and the darkness were too thick, and she couldn’t tell if they had left her Golf in Recreation Road. She had parked by the kerb, but people left their cars in the street all the time. It wouldn’t look suspicious, and no one would come looking for her in the safe suburb of Fish Hoek.
How long until morning? She couldn’t wait. If she fell asleep she would go rolling to the bottom of the Valley, catching every branch on the way down.
Aren’t you tired of waiting, Joanna? If you wait long enough, you’ll bleed to death right here, and that’s going to be awkward to explain to James.
She tried to sit up, punch-drunk, vertiginous. She lifted her arms in inches and took off the filthy T-shirt. She stretched it lengthways and then wound it in small movements around her neck, the way a woman trussed her head in a turban. Joanna didn’t want to know what was underneath it. She could guess, and it filled her with a panic that made her shake. Her teeth were actually chattering.
The road. If I can make it there—
You can make it ANY-WHERE! Here’s to you, Noo Yawk! Noo YAWK! said Doctor Renfield.
“Oh, why won’t you stop!” begged Joanna, but she hoisted herself onto her scraped knees. As long as she kept her chin to her chest she wouldn’t pass out.
She pulled herself along in a kind of leopard-crawl, grabbing at the fynbos, ripping handfuls of the bushes out of the ground that had been dunes not very long ago. But she was doing it. Every few paces down the mountain was a few metres further away from the two men.
Wasn’t it?
Oh, Christ! Was there anything in her car to identify her?
Joanna tried to think, but her mind wasn’t clear. She brought her forehead down sharply against a branch and the red pain at both ends of her head cut through the haze.
Nothing in the car. Not even shoes.
But it was such a long way down the mountain! Even if she made it, she would still have to walk all the way to False Bay Hospital.
She sank back on her stomach. She couldn’t get enough air, and the sand was so nice and firm, so finely grained.
I don’t care. I don’t care what happens now.
She was so tired. She couldn’t do it.
Joanna slept.
Wake up, Mommy! Wake up! Wake up! Wake UP!
James was in his white bed six blocks away, but he was here too, in his fluffy blue nightgown. Joanna turned her head.
“Hello, my poppet,” she said. She still couldn’t talk properly, but he understood what she was saying. God, she was so glad to see him! She stretched out her hand. “You’re getting wet.”
“Come on, Mommy,” said James. He grabbed hold of her fingers and started pulling at her in the way that she hated. His curls were straightening as the rain flattened them against his forehead. “Want rice cakes. Want juice. Want to watch TV.” His mouth was turning down. If she didn’t co-operate the tears would come next.
“Don’t do that, James,” Joanna told him. “It’s still sleepy time. Go back to bed.”
“No! No! No! NO!”
“Please just leave Mommy alone for a bit, baby. I’ll get up now-now.”
“GET UP, MOMMY! WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP!”
“Alright! Jesus!”
James yanked at her arm and there was a sudden slippery give in the sand beneath her. Joanna felt the dune come away in a sheet, like the lagoon banks on the beach. She slid with it, and then rolled.
She screamed, but no sound came out of her mouth.