Chapter 23
The weekend before Christmas was slow to begin. It was as if the population had burned itself out during the mad rush to the stores. There was an atmosphere of anti-climax: people had been gearing themselves for the celebration, but somewhere along the line the brakes had been released prematurely and the race was over before it had begun.
Parties raged the Friday night. When a blessed relief of silence replaced the booze, there remained mangled bodies to be carted away. Twisted wreckage of vehicles remained like some gruesome exhibition of human frailty.
Lamont heard his father answer the phone. Juno and his mother were in bed. The sun was a few inches above the horizon and seagulls called their song on the beach. He visited the fridge and took a bite out of the cheese and gazed at the furrow his teeth had just made. There was a sway to his body as he stood there in his shorts. His hair was ruffled. His eyes were out of focus and he couldn’t think. He placed the ravaged cheese back into the fridge and closed the door.
Hot water came out of the shower and gave him his life back again. He peered at his reflection as he cleaned his teeth. Then he pulled on a red singlet and with his shorts an untidy heap in the corner he fastened his skin-tight jeans.
His father was still yakking on the phone when he left the flat. He heard the name Mil repeated often.
The reserve was empty as he drifted near the spot where she was killed. The tranquillity of the lake through the trees drew him to its edge. He kept looking toward the bamboo grove and thinking of her. He watched a flight of gulls and suddenly wondered how cleanly they could have picked the carcass beneath the maggots. Then he burst into tears. ‘Shit! I’m cracking up!’ He groaned into his hands as his torso heaved with his torment. He spent the rest of the morning huddled into himself in the park, waiting for the spectre to leave him in peace.
*
Juno awakened roughly with a smack of sourness in her mouth. Her head drummed constantly and she thought for a minute she was still in last night. The megawatt thump from the hotel down the street had driven her berserk. She moved slowly out of bed and stood at her window. She wondered if her hearing had been impaired because the street was in view but it sounded smothered, like under a pillow.
Fear met her and smiled briefly, then she remembered the plugs and dug the chewing gum-like clods of wax from her ears. The noise from the lounge sounded like visitors. She opened her door but it was her father on the phone.
‘God!’ she looked at her watch. ‘Who phones at this hour?’
Coffee and corn flakes and an appointment to keep. She washed the sleep from her eyes and put on her briefest bikini and brushed her hair. It fell back the way it wanted to be. She poked her tongue out at her hair and suddenly she felt better.
The surf was still-day flat. The sun glared and the sand glared back at it. A small platoon of disenchanted surfers blew disgust from their mouths, as their boards lay waxen in their racks. It was early, it was still, and it was getting hotter by the minute.
Juno spread her towel upon the sand and stretched her body on top of it. The sun beat down upon her covered eyes and she saw a swirl of white and pink in her mind. She was tired and careless, as if the night before had ended her dreams.
‘Glad you’re on time.’
Rane dropped beside her and gave her some cheer.
‘How are you?’
‘Much the same.’
‘And Max?’
‘Don’t really know, Juno. He’s off to see Mac today.’
‘Are you going too?’
‘I’m with you, Juno.’
They lay in the sun for hours, talking of their lives. The beach filled with visitors and the calm of the sea wrinkled as children ran in and out with their squeals.
‘Let’s piss off?’
‘Ok!’ Juno folded her towel and scrubbed hastily at the sand on her skin. ‘But I feel like some fruit first.’
They stood in the reserve where his sister had died. The apples they ate had a taste of sadness, a melancholic misery that stays behind after someone is killed.
‘There’s Monty!’
‘Leave him to himself, Juno.’
‘Why?’ Juno was surprised and sought an explanation from his eyes.
‘I saw him earlier on my way to the beach. Believe me, Juno! Your brother wants to be by himself for a while. You understand, don’t you?’
*
Their morning had changed with the sighting of Lamont, sitting there in his gloom. They left the reserve and dawdled the dusty track toward the wooden house. The heat and a strange unease flowed between them. Juno had an urge to look back, as if the spectre of madness were a few paces behind.
‘Shit!’ she shivered slightly as she turned to Rane. ‘What’s happening? There’s this weird feeling of ... I don’t know what it is, but ... shit! Rane! What’s happening?’
Rane had geared himself for the story that must unfold. How can he tell her of a night he didn’t exist? Would she understand dream phantoms? He had wanted to leave till the last drop, that last-wrung drop, the picture he must now draw of his actions and his state of mind when he knelt before the victim of his rage.
And what of the visitations on those strange nights? It is with a curious reluctance that a boy must pull the sheets over his body at night, knowing that when sleep finally comes so also will the wind to carry him off to worlds and dimensions beyond the Limit itself.
‘Juno,’ he began with sudden clarity, ‘supposing you don’t remain with yourself when you think or dream, that you, and I mean the actual you behind the facade of body and mind, behind the brain that bleeds or breaks in a fall; well, suppose you travel with your thoughts, hand in hand, at the same speed, in the same directionless spread, like, I suppose, ripples you see when you drop a stone into a pond or just any smooth surface of water, well, and that you leave behind in good working order with no parts missing, for say, a split second maybe, and nothing wrong with it at all, you leave behind your body and your brain and everything else.
‘Imagine for a second, Juno, imagine that for that infinitesimal moment, when the essence, I suppose you could call it, well, that essence of you becomes sort of blended in with the energy which makes up thought. Well, according to physics, you’re gunna reach the speed of light. Imagine, Juno, just imagine, that when that essence reaches the speed of light it ceases to exist! How’s that? Hey?
Instead you break through to the other world, to the worlds parallel to ours, to parallel universes that co-exist within different logic frames. But what makes it all fantastic is that the other universes are invisible to us because they exist at different frequencies. We’re out of sync, as Dad would say.’
Juno pulled a face that said, ‘Oh yeah?’
‘I can see you’re with me.’ Rane said hopefully and laughed. They ignored the sun’s censure and moved slowly up the track, lost to that space that sets around a couple.
‘Alright, it’s just a bit further, and ... ’ Rane halted as Juno stopped to clear a stone from her sandals. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘I’m with you.’
‘Well, suppose you alternate between here and there at such a frequency that you’re almost here and there at the one time, simultaneously, if you like big words, and ... ’
Juno scowled at him. ‘I understand words of a polysyllabic structure, Rane. Don’t be so patronising. You males! I tell you ... ’
‘Okay!’ Rane put his hands in the form of surrender and laughed with a weak laugh. ‘Sorry. Suppose, okay, suppose you’re vibrating at such a speed that you’re nearly duplicating yourself, that you’re experiencing things almost simultaneously in both places, here and there, if you like, and that you go with your thoughts and also remain with your physical self.’
‘I get what you’re saying.’ Juno turned to him. ‘You’d receive images of two places virtually at the same time.’
‘Well,’ Rane paused for breath and looked at her for a long moment. Then, ‘it happens to me.’
They reached the stone steps and delighted in the coolness of their territory. Juno often wondered why they didn’t have a dog; it would have thrived in these conditions.
The garden was a rainforest that shaded and insulated the house from the track. Amid the ferns, palms and bush tucker trees lay old bicycles and toys that had had their day. Ropes hung from high sturdy branches and foot holes notched their way up into the canopy. A burglar would love this place yet surprisingly the wooden house remained untouched by felonious hands.
The verandah was in shade as they went up through the floor. Rane found the key where it was always hidden and opened the sliding doors to the lounge. A stale and solemn odour hung inside. While Juno flopped onto the bench and with legs astride lay back with her head hard against the wood. Rane appeared with drinks and she was slow to notice that he had returned to his ambitious account.
‘Like, on the way out I can, well, one aspect of me, at least, can be a host to immeasurable and indefinable numbers of experiences, which are way beyond the understanding of us in our present existence.’
‘You said aspect of you. What do you mean?’
‘Aspect is phase which in vibration theory is one side of the coin. Think of a pendulum. It goes from one side to the other, and back again. Like a return trip on a ferry. Well, the phase is like a one-way ticket. You don’t return. What I was talking about is the phase where I am on the way out, or, if you like, on the way back. During either of these two phases I pick up a picture or a feeling or something, an impression or whatever.
‘Your dad was saying something to mine the other day about thoughts getting stored in a vault and whoever’s got the key can get whatever thought they wanted. It wasn’t a bad way of putting it. Most of the books I’ve read talk about the way you move backward in time once you go faster than light; in other words, back into our past. You end up with negative mass, like a negative world in exactly opposite proportions to our own. That way it’s been theorised that we could read the past by travelling faster than light.’
‘Wag a bitjie!’ Juno shifted from the bench and adopted a near-Lotus position next to the railing. ‘Didn’t Einstein prove that the speed of light couldn’t be exceeded?’
‘That’s what Dad says!’ Rane replied agreeably. Then he continued. ‘But just for the moment imagine the possibility of thought being able to accelerate, or, if you like, to travel at irregular speeds; then it must be able to travel faster than light.
‘Imagine a whole bunch of universes in some form of relationship to one another. They might be parallel or existing within the same theoretical space or whatever; now, if thought, or energy, they are both the same anyway, breaks through from one universe to another, it ceases to be in the universe it’s just vacated. You see what I mean?’
Juno didn’t. She shook her head.
‘Once you trip over the speed of light you get sucked into another realm. Jesus! With that sort of infiniteness there would be an explanation for my ability to experience the past, and, the future.’
Juno accepted the logic of his argument but relegated the possibility and the actuality to the bottom of her priorities. So far the discussion had been interesting if not entirely relevant. But Rane’s sister and brother had been removed from his life and she understood his need for conversation and companionship.
‘I suppose you reckon that all this had something to do with your roulette performance?’
‘You know,’ Rane said with a hint of mockery, ‘for a girl, you’re not all that bad!’
‘Cut the crap!’ Juno retorted with false irritation. ‘I not only cannot see into the past, but I can’t even remember what happened yesterday!’ Then she realised what she had said, and was full of remorse.
Rane laughed nevertheless. He casually reached across to her and gently touched her on the shoulder. But in that touch there was a message, and it transmitted itself clearly. Juno’s features suddenly softened and she became a little more alive, more feminine.
‘I’m explaining all this because I know who killed Dali.’
Juno froze. There was a stillness between them and it was a few moments before she spoke again.
‘How?’
‘I saw his hands!’
At first Juno watched her hands while her mind concentrated on the images he was creating in her mind. Then she looked up at him and saw his distress. She waited. Then he spoke again.
‘Abnormal things, Juno. Huge crushing stinking rotten ape’s hands! They also saw them before she died.’
‘They? Who’s they?’
‘Dali and your brother.’
‘Oh!’
Another calm descended upon the verandah and they did not talk for a while. Juno wasn’t certain if the conversation existed in a dream or not. The beginning and end were not connected by a middle, as if the guts of a sausage were to be removed with only the hollow skin remaining to prove a relationship between start and finish.
‘We executed him in his house.’
Juno’s draw dropped suddenly. She stared at Rane with angry and pleading eyes. She wanted to avoid the avalanche of disclosure that threatened to bury her. Then she uttered, ‘We?’ and knew immediately the answer. Then she asked with a statement, ‘You killed someone!’
‘He murdered Dali!’
They were standing because it was impossible to sit. They were uncertain of the moment, burdened with the horror around them. Then Juno’s expression softened again, as if the meaning had become clear. She looked at him with the eyes of a priest in confession and her hand touched his mouth to silence. ‘I’m glad.’ she purred and sought to ease his trauma.
‘I’m not.’
‘God!’ she twisted her body away from Rane, as if she were to leave, and then twisted back again like a discus thrower. ‘Why not? Do you have doubts? About the guy ... ’
‘Because I enjoyed it!’
Juno saw purity in his awful honesty and a clumsy pleasure invaded her. She remained quiet while he fought for the right words. The day and the heat were passing slowly. Magpie music had begun as a distant and tingling effect.
‘I got a kick out of it. I would do it again. If I had to. Because I wouldn’t be afraid. I have been there now.’
‘Don’t feel like that, Rane.’ Juno went close to him and wrapped her arms about herself in a surrogate expression of a desperate desire for him. She wanted to say something. She knew the consequences of taking a life. She had grown in the land of the warrior where the act of killing satisfied a legitimate need, where the killer was worshipped as an icon of society’s strength. Then she said, ‘Sometimes we don’t belong where we are, Rane.’
‘That’s a curious thing to say.’
‘Yeah! Wasn’t it?’
For fifteen minutes or so they forgot their conversation. Rane sometimes looked at her and sometimes she at him. A profound and unfamiliar trust was forming between them, like an ethereal stranger come to stay. The verandah was cool as enormous ferns stretched their fronds across the roof of the pergola, shading Rane and Juno in their nest of poinsettias. Magnolias were almost sinful in their fecundity and scented beauty. Juno removed the bikini and bathed in the filtered sun as Rane went inside to fix fresh fruit juice and lots of ice cream. When he returned, she was lying there with the flowers, awaiting pollination.
‘I’ve taken the phone off the hook.’ he said gruffly and began to unzip.
*
Lamont returned home in time to catch his father hurrying out of the building. Frank Donleavy had the look of the search on his face, just as he had looked before a safari, or one of those other adventures where the quarry was man. His eyes were intent on discovery. They passed each other with a sparse greeting and Lamont went into the foyer as Frank broke into a trot across the peninsular.
It had been a difficult conversation with Milan Krulis. The fate of Hans Dorfman had been relayed in veiled phrases, a sort of lexicon of The Cross twenty years before. Milan had hung up, and because of the pressure of his other business concerns had phoned again hours later. Meanwhile, Frank had waited, steadfast, in a climate of suspense before the final arrangement could be confirmed. When Milan finally came on the line again Frank said he would contact Max. It was hoped that the big bearded giant would be able to cope with this new development. The line was still busy. ‘I’ll walk over there, Marit.’ he said and went out without hearing her reply.
As Frank took to the stone steps beneath the verandah he heard the smothered laughter of his daughter and Rane. He pushed his head up into the floor and, seeing the young couple, coughed ‘ahem!’
‘No! Don’t get up! I won’t be long. I was looking for your dad, Rane.’ It was obvious that Max was absent. ‘Any idea where he is?’
‘Er, he’s with Mac.’ Rane said with spluttered words. Juno just stared at her father.
‘Sorry to disturb you two.’ Frank said quickly as he began his retreat. ‘I’ll see you later. If I miss him at the hospital, will you ask him to contact me at home? It’s very important!’ He descended and they could hear his way through the jungle. Then his voice came back at them, ‘Better replace the phone. Things are up.’
Frank’s head was blurred with the impact of seeing his best friend’s son and his own daughter like that. Rane had his erector muscle wedged between Juno’s thighs and their bodies were shining with sweat.
