Summer, 1972
The path that wound behind the archery was always littered with new things to take down to the river. Every once in a while, there'd be an old arrow stuck in a tree or, better still, a new one just slid under a bush. Then, of course, it was Finders Keepers.
Sure, there'd be the odd wrestle and tug: Once, Pip had got his nose popped trying to take his arrow back from Davey, while Davey said his arrow's going no place 'less the groundkeeper upped along and claimed it (which he often did) but if not... Finders Keepers.
The day Davey bopped Pip on the hoot was only the second day of summer holidays and already the boys were as bored as bark. Last month's floods at Lookout Beach on the Wild Coast had taken care of any travelling the families might have planned, and as a result, the parents were even more grumpy and demanding than usual. So instead of spending the summer holidays at Lookout with the guys who built the rope bridge across the lagoon last summer, the kids of Walmer started looking around their own backyard for things to do.
The archery was one of them.
They were going to meet the Ryan boys at the river down the hill from the archery where Butch Ryan said the black bass bit, though they'd never seen a black bass or, for that matter, any other shade of fish.
"Bout the only thing that bites around here are the mozzies," what mister Ryan always said.
Scatter, eleven-and-a-half (the half made him just that much older than Pip), was the oldest of the boys except Pete Ryan, who'd stopped playing with them now and had just started playing in a band with some older boys from Walmer High.
Funny, thought Scatter, it was Pete Ryan who'd first discovered the cave down in the valley. Even Pete's old dog Rivet was buried there, but Pete Ryan didn't go there any more. Maybe, when you're older, caves lose their pull. But Scatter doubted that somehow.
Scatter scuffed his way down the steep shale-slide to the river. He stopped at the edge of the still, black water and looked across at the cave on the opposite bank. The voices of Pip and Davey blurred from the path behind him. He moved away from the place where the lake licked the path. The shuffling shouts of Pip and Davey slurred and slipped away altogether, and all he could hear was the suck of the sludge and the slip of his feet and the chirrupy strains of the valIey's chordant ambience.
Mirrors seemed to creep in on his vision, slowly surrounding him from the one-eighty and lengthening to a shimmering point somewhere so far ahead he couldn’t see them meet for their crashing flashes of light. He felt the bones in his legs melting through the skin of his feet as his body lengthened, his neck jacking its way notch by notch through the top of his skull. His skin lumped and puckered and his hair tingled like ice on a fern as his vision shimmered and the earth around him hammered. The dull earth sucked him down, the blue sky extracted him.
He felt squeezed, dredged, shucked and shelled.
"Hey Pip, take a look at this." Pip was standing on the deck of an old abandoned donkey cart. "What is it?" Pip shouted back.
"Scatter’s shaking like a sheepdog!" called Davey.
Pip turned to the place where Davey was pointing. "Probably got the bilharzia, like mister Ryan said," he yelled.
Davey jumped up and down as he pointed "No, Scatty's got the wobblies, that's whatl"
"What‘s he looking at?" Pip asked, hopping down from the cart. "Beats me," said Davey, as Pip came up beside him. "What's he saying?"
The two boys stood like statues, beaming in on the place where Scatter was standing. They listened to the strange sounds that were coming from his direction. They listened for just a moment longer, then looked at each other and ran like bushbuck, with the hounds come scampering down.
Light so bright it ran. It dribbled like Winter melt and chrystalised in his hair. Stretching. Shrinking. Bones creaking. Consciousness yawning. So tired...the edge...the every edge, and beyond. Now a spiralling, twisting, thundering jolt.
"Harg!"
The boy turned. The tribe was watching him. Somehow, he'd caused their smart. He felt their stinging glare at the same time he felt his burning flesh. The red tongues had licked him again. This would be the last time. Harg saw the face of his Father turn toward the sky from where the ice walls rolled, and then slowly look down at the black earth the fire had torched.
"Garrugh aya Karra Harg," the old man pleaded. "Oshogh Karra aya garrugh !"
He turned and shuffled away from the Ring. To leave the Ring before the Elders called the Closing was a disgrace. But the Elders had spoken. Harg, his only son, must be banished to the Karra Cave.
The Tribe did not watch the old man go. Their eyes were heavy, their feet the only focus they would know for hours. He took his son’s hand, and without looking back (though Harg did), he crossed the paths the glaciers had just dragged.
The ground kicked him awake with a cold, hard boot. His vision was a black sheet, tossed and puckered, stuck with a million pricks of careless night. His head was a lump of thump. His ears rung with a white-hot hum. He peeled his head from the loud grass and tried to set focus.
Pain.
All that was left was pain. A deep-seated wound (a loneliness) so penetrating it turned his bones to stone. He looked out over the lake and saw, in the darkness of the cliffside on the other bank, a hole so black, so dark and secret, it seemed to hang there as if all the nights since the dawn of time had been left forever in this one place.
Scatter pushed up, and started to run.
The moon mashed a yellow stream of running light between the trees. The boy's shadow flickered in pools of puddled night, the leafy streets of Walmer Downs waving in tunnels of tossing trees as his panic raced him home.
He passed the sprawling hedges that tangled around Pip's place. He caught the blue flicker of the television through the branches as he ran, wondering whether Pip and Davey were crashing through the same nightmare, not knowing what the nightmare was or how it had begun.
He reached the corner of Water Road where it cut across Archer's Drive, and only slowed his pace when he was well around the bend. Under the foggy cones of light that fell from the streetlights his fear seemed to fade, and he tried to find the sense in what had happened as he reached the gate and the warm welcome glow of home.
As he opened the front door and saw his mother at the end of the passage, he knew right then that something was very wrong. He sensed an air of panic here too, in the warm comfortable home. His mother stared at him, the phone hanging loose in her hand. Slowly, she raised the mouthpiece and said in a flat whisper, "It's alright. He's here now."
Scatter closed the door softly behind him. He pulled his fingers through his hair, not knowing what to do or say. His mother set the receiver down on its cradle and wrung her hands in her floral-print apron. They stood at opposite ends of the passage, the mother staring fixedly at the boy, the boy looking straight down at the floor.
Scatter sensed the walls closing in on him. It was coming at him again. The floor whirled in a dizzying orbit around his feet. The light from the ceiling grew brighter, hotter. He dreamed rather than saw his mother approaching, yet felt the pressing weight of her breast as she threw her arms around his neck and drew him in.
"Oh Frankie, I was so worried. Pip's mother said the boys had told her you'd had a fit or something, and they were so scared they couldn‘t tell her where you were. Are you all right Frankie? I called the police. What on earth happened?"
She squeezed him to her and dropped her head down on to his. As her first tears began to spill, she felt the boy's body shudder in uncontrolled tremors.
"It's all over now. Easy now. There."
She felt his weight sag in her arms, as his knees shook his balance from under him. She let him gently down on to his haunches, crouching there with him shivering against her. She became aware of a distant rumble. Must be a storm approaching, she thought. The rumble grew very quickly, and as she looked to the window for the first signs of lightning, she realised with a sickening jolt that it was here in the room; here, in her arms.
"Frankie? What's..."
A gushing as dark and deep as the black lake rose from the boy's chest.
"Harg moogh Karra osh."
In the blur of her gasping shock, she noticed too a terrible smell of rotted leaves and an ancient damp rising in the fast-approaching mist closing in around her. She sank away from the boy, her hands rising to her throat as she struggled for breath. The last thing she saw before her thumping heart froze in her chest were his terrified eyes as he sniffed at the air, like a hungry Baboon in the wind.
Cave Photo by James Kemp on Unsplash. Moon photo by John Silliman on Unsplash.
Comments