I CYCLE ALONE OUT of town on the north road, the road to Johannesburg. I am determined to find a skeleton or something for Marika, but all I see are Simba packets hooked on the barbed wire and rusting tins of Coca-Cola and beer, and a red shotgun cartridge faded pink by the sun. It has not rained in two years and the earth is bone dry.
I see a lizard scurry into a Coca-Cola can.
A jacky hangman on the telegraph wires watches me watching it.
Although I am on the other side of the yellow line, riding on the jagged edge of the tar, a bus hoots at me and I feel the tug of wind in the wake of it. A stamp-sized square of paper butterflies up in the wind and settles again. I drop my bicycle to pick it up. Just paper. I flick it over in my fingers and see that it is not just paper, but part of a faded photograph of a black man. An ear, an eye, a cheekbone, a jagged edge where the nose should be. I stare at the photograph while something tickles my mind, a memory of some kind. Then it dawns on me that this could be Moses, younger and faded.
The Kodak photographs from the spool I saved from the baboons lie scattered on the kitchen table. My mother has not shot off another spool since we came to the Karoo. Why she has had them developed now, after so long, is a mystery to me.
The first photograph that catches my eye is of my father braaiing on a vine-stump fire, his lips snarled back to reveal his teeth. He stabs at the lens with the fire tongs as if he is a Zulu warrior with an assegai. There is fire in his eyes. Behind him, on the grid, slit crayfish cook in their shells.
I flick through photographs of the coral tree in bloom.
Then there is one of Marsden, standing beside his surfboard. He has unzipped his Zero wetsuit and the arms dangle like fins from his hips. I feel a pang of regret, for all the times I felt it unfair he should be so damn good at surfing and drawing.
There is a shot of Byron in the yard, his foot resting on the lug of a spade while he rolls a cigarette out of newspaper and Boxer tobacco. In the background Chaka burrows under the hibiscus.
There is a photograph of my mother in black bra and panties. She reaches out to the camera, as if to block the lens, but all she does is obscure her face. I know it is my mother because of the pink delta lines on her stomach from Marsden and me. The flash makes her skin look waxy.
There is one of me on the stoep, rubbing linseed into the Gunn & Moore bat. Though he is not in the photograph, I know that my father is just out of frame, reading the Cape Times, calling out the cricket scores, wondering if he ever told us that he once bowled out Barry Richards.
There is a shot of my father caught unawares at his typewriter. The postcard of the Venus de Milo, tacked to the wall, curls up at the edges. In his eyes there is a guilty, fugitive look. The look I see in Chaka’s eyes when I catch him shitting in the yard.
Then there is an out-of-focus shot of all four of us on the terrace of The Brass Bell, on the edge of the sea. My father has his arm around my mother, but he is not looking at her, or at the camera. He casts his gaze somewhere out to sea. Towards a yacht on the horizon, or Seal Island, or begging seagulls. For the first time, I wonder if my father was still in love with my mother when Marsden died. I imagined that the cricket ball splintered their love, as it did the tomato-box wicket. But what if their love was already falling apart and he longed to sail away from all of us to write his novel? To sail out to sea alone, like old man Santiago, to land the big fish he senses is out there.
Marika dances barefoot on the N1 in her cotton dress and tastes the falling rain with a lolling tongue. Skyfire flickers across a dark sky. For me the rain is not something magic, but Marika is over the moon, dancing, slapping her feet down on the tar.
After the rain the desert floats in a green, fishtank light. A river of frogs hazards the N1. Some make it across. Others pop under the singing wheels of motorcars, pink insides squirting out their mouths. Marika fills buckets of frogs and I cart them across the road and spill them out on the other side. She catches them with her bare hands and laughs at my fear of touching the cold, pulsing things.
As I weave through the flat frogs on the tar, swinging a squirming witchbrew of frogskin, I pray that they will not jump and brush against my hand, or land on my sandaled feet. When I spill them out I stand back, as a frog’s compass may spin haywire and send the frog hopping back towards me, instead of following the eastward drift of the others. They stay in a dazed, blinking-eyed clutch, until Chaka’s sniffing nose spurs them on again. They all head east.