Apocalypse Now Now (6 page)

‘I love that you appreciate my theatrical talents,’ she says with a bow.

I push my bike in next to Olaf’s silver Audi. Esmé stays here during the week with her mom and her stepdad Olaf but is forced to spend the weekends with her father in Parow. We
sneak through the large chrome kitchen and out the back door to Esmé’s garden apartment.

Despite the chic fittings, Esmé’s pad is a little different from your average teenage girl’s. Mostly because she’s a raging klepto and her room is like a giant shrine to thievery. She steals from everywhere she goes; coffee cups, clocks, jewellery, an ‘Esmé Ave’ road sign, a bowling pin and a dressage championship trophy. I know all of her talismans and take great pride in my ability to notice when she has stolen something new.

‘Thief and thievee have a special bond,’ she said the first time I came here. ‘I have a connection with the owners of all these objects. It makes me feel less lonely in life.’

‘Seriously?’ I asked.

‘No, stupid,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I just like to take stuff without paying for it.’

She doesn’t turn on any lights except the kitsch purple-and-green lava lamp that she stole from a crusty old weed dealer who had a crush on her. The resultant murky green ambience is like an underwater Chernobyl and she grins and pulls the psycho face again. ‘Better,’ I say, sliding closer to her. ‘I really felt the bloodlust that time.’

Something scuttles across the floor as I wrap my arm around her waist. ‘What the hell is that?’ I say, jumping backwards.

‘Oh, it’s probably Hammy. He’s gone missing. Gotten out of his cage.’

‘No ways, that looked bigger than a hamster.’

‘Oh please, Baxter, stop being paranoid. It’s Hammy, I’m telling you.’

‘OK, sorry,’ I say, rubbing my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘I’ve been a little stressed out lately.’

She grabs a colourful Mexican throw that was artfully stolen from the wall of a Mexican restaurant, takes my hand and we climb up onto the flat roof of her bedroom. The moon is playing
kiss-catch with the clouds and bathing the roof in alternating periods of light and darkness.

Esmé spreads the throw on the roof and lies back on it. The moon dodges a cloud and we’re bathed in light. I sprawl on the throw next to her and we look up at the stars.

‘Twinkly,’ Esmé says, stretching out her hands and wiggling her fingers at the stars.

‘Hippy,’ I say.

‘Don’t, like, bring any of your bad energy here, brah,’ she says with a thick stoner twang.

‘Fully sorry, bro,’ I reply.

She rolls onto her stomach and looks at me. ‘TILF or Die?’ she says.

TILF or Die is one of our finest contributions to the world. It’s a game with very simple rules: you give the name of a teacher to the other person and they have to decide if, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, they would sleep with that teacher to repopulate the world or if they’d rather let yourself and humanity die first. We’d seen enough of each other’s teachers at inter-school events to get a good idea of their relative repulsiveness.

‘Mr Bailey,’ I say.

‘Die,’ she says as a cloud catches the moon and we’re plunged into darkness. There’s a flash of light in my brain and I see a vision of Esmé with her throat cut. There is an eye carved onto her forehead. I grit my teeth and blink my eyes frantically to make it go away.

‘OK, that was easy,’ I say quickly to cover my panic. Sweat prickles on my forehead. ‘I get to ask another one. How about Mr Roddick?’

‘Ew. Die. Actually, I’d gouge out my eyes first so that his face wouldn’t be the last thing I saw. My turn. Ms Hunter.’

I breathe in deeply and force myself to be calm and logical. Stress can cause your mind to do weird things. My subconscious
is dwelling on the Mountain Killer. That’s a normal reaction. I knew Jody Fuller and she’s dead. I’m just projecting that onto Esmé.

‘TILF obviously,’ I say.

‘Really?’ she asks.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Ew,’ she says again as the moon frees itself from the cloud’s sweaty embrace and showers us with silvery light. ‘You OK?’ She nudging me with her shoulder.

‘Totally. Let’s play again.’ We play another couple of rounds and then settle into silence. I roll onto my stomach and look at her.

‘Stop it,’ she says, pushing a dark strand of hair out of her face.

‘What?’

‘Looking at me. With that all-knowing look, like you’re looking right into me,’ she says with a shudder. ‘It’s creepy.’

‘Sorry.’ I give a small shrug. ‘It’s a genetic thing.’

‘Freak,’ she says as another cloud hugs the moon. The darkness feels like it’s gripping me by the throat.

‘Hey.’ She pushes herself up onto her elbows. ‘I’m kidding.’

‘I know,’ I say hoarsely. ‘I’m just –’

‘It’s OK,’ she says, sliding forward to kiss me softly on the lips.

My heart cracks like a honeycomb splitting and drips thick gooey love into my chest. You know when you’re a little kid and you think clouds are soft and smooth and you dream of rolling around in the sky on them? That’s what making out with Esmé is like.

The next day doesn’t exactly compete with the previous night in terms of excitement. My dad has fetched me from school at lunch break to take me to visit my grandfather, who lives in a depressing
retirement home which is a fifteen-minute drive from Westridge. The tyres of my dad’s car crunch on the stones of the Shady Pines driveway and I look up at the old vine-covered building in despair. I have a thousand things to do and visiting old people is not on the agenda. I’m here because my grandfather is dying and I have been forced to come and pay my respects to the eldest of the Zevcenko lineage.

‘Come on, Bax,’ my dad says. ‘It won’t be that bad.’

‘Sure,’ I say sullenly.

It
will
be that bad, not least because Grandpa Zevcenko is ‘different’. Which is a nice way of saying ‘totally insane’. I haven’t seen him since the Great Family Brawl of 2008 and that I’d really rather forget.

To understand the Great Brawl you need to understand my uncle Roger. My father’s brother is a man who wears a wide-brimmed hat and speaks of the Devil as easily as other men speak about sport. Yes, Uncle Roger is a religious fanatic with burning eyes and a homoerotic love for the biggest Bearded One who patrols the clouds and your thoughts.

When Grandpa Zevcenko brought up the giant crows, Roger would stir like a great monitor lizard poked with a sharp stick, and Christmas 2008 was one such time. Grandpa Zev had been enjoying the Johnnie Walker a little too much that day but nobody had minded at first. Food had been gluttoned, crackers had been cracked, family nostalgia had been indulged in, and everybody was sitting around in the soporific afterglow. An old, drunk grandfather was tolerable. That is until he started talking about the Crows.

Grandpa Zev, a green plastic Christmas hat perched rakishly on his shaggy white hair, stood up unsteadily and addressed the room. Even at twelve I was the only one who guessed what was about to happen and I began to barricade myself into a corner with Christmas presents.

‘The thing about the Crows is that they’ll tear out your throat and then delicately drink your blood like they’re sipping goddamn Martinis,’ he said. As a mood-killer it was a winner on all counts. There was a long silence before everybody tried to divert attention to something different at the same time. In all the noise, only Grandpa Zevcenko’s voice could be clearly heard ringing out, ‘The Crows will gouge out your eyeballs, if you give them half a chance!’

Uncle Roger stood up and faced my grandfather. ‘Dad, there are no such things as giant crows,’ he said, his voice tense and forced. Grandpa grinned the wild, ravenous grin of a madman. ‘The crows are more real than your imaginary friend in the sky, son.’

At that my uncle had taken an angry step forward. This was a mistake. Roger is a tall and broad-shouldered man but Grandpa Zevcenko had been a champion boxer in the army and still had a solid right hook for an old guy. He dropped Uncle Roger easily. That’s when all hell broke loose. Roger’s wife Mariekie tried to intervene but she caught the eldest Zevcenko in the midst of the fog of war. He grabbed her by the perm and shoved her head into the granadilla trifle and possibly would have held it there until she’d stopped thrashing had he not been restrained by my father and Darryl, the disabled neighbour, who vaulted off his wheelchair, grabbed him around the waist and pulled him to the floor.

As a twelve-year-old I learnt a lot from this experience. 1) If you’re gonna drown someone in trifle, it’s best to do it with no one else around. 2) My family are a bunch of circus freaks.

‘He’s not going to be around much longer,’ my dad says as I get out of the car. ‘Use this as a chance to say goodbye.’

I navigate the lilac-coloured hallways, past care workers carrying bedpans and mumbling, shuffling old people, until I find his room at the end of a corridor lit by a single, bare bulb. I take a deep breath, knock once, and then enter.

Grandpa’s room is sickly custard colour and it smells of urine smothered with fake lavender air-freshener. It’s furnished with a single bed, dumpy beige armchairs draped with standard-issue old-person mohair blankets, a circular table and a small wooden cabinet in the corner of the room. A familiar white-haired figure sits on a rattan bench on the balcony and stares out over the lawn. I walk slowly over and clear my throat. ‘I’m Baxter,’ I say in the voice I usually use for babies and small dogs.

The figure swings around and fixes me with the knowing-eye. I stand still as it scans me, prodding and probing deeply with its intrusive gaze. ‘I know who you are,’ the old man says. Grandpa Zev has aged a lot. His skin is pale, almost translucent, and he is much frailer than I remember, but his blue eyes still glint with pure, unadulterated craziness.

‘How are you, Grandpa?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not your grandfather,’ he says. ‘I need to tell you the hard truth about your birth before I die.’ He beckons me over with a withered hand and I sit on the bench next to him.

My grandfather is clearly insane, but why would he make up something like this? He clears his throat with a wet, hacking cough. ‘Your father was the baby of a hooker I used to frequent. When she died of syphilis, your grandmother and I took him in and cared for him as our own.’ The words hit me like tiny hammers. ‘What …’ I choke. ‘But …’

He looks at me seriously for a second and then breaks into a bout of coughing laughter.

‘I’m just fucking with you, Baxter,’ he says, wheezing with delight. ‘That’ll teach you to talk to me like I’m an invalid.’ Well, it turns out he would say something like that because he’s an asshole. Strangely that makes me like him more.

I was worried that there’d be nothing to say, but Grandpa Zev and I talk for ages. Something in my chest stirs as I talk to him,
a warm sensation that feels a little like indigestion. I ignore it. He tells me about his parents, his dad a Pole, and his mother an Afrikaner with strange religious tendencies. He tells me about growing up in Poland and being a lackey for organised crime as a teen. In a wave of spontaneity I tell him about the Spider and the porn business.

He nods thoughtfully. ‘Good business to be in. If we’d have had something like that when I was your age the war would have been a lot more fun.’ He laughs. ‘Growing up in Poland before the war we had our own Sprawl. Gangs, small-time thugs, political youth groups; everybody was trying to control the neighbourhood. And you know the most important thing I learnt?’

I lean in closer, eager to hear pearls of wisdom from the eldest, weirdest Zevcenko.

‘None of it means shit,’ he says with a phlegmy laugh. ‘The Nazis came in and took it all. And then they got their ass kicked and then it was the Russians. No matter how powerful you think you are there’s always a bigger fish in the sea.’ He bursts into a riot of coughing and waves a trembling hand at the small wooden cabinet in the corner of the room. ‘Black bottle,’ he splutters.

I walk over to the cabinet, open it and survey the vast quantities of medical supplies therein. I locate the large black medicinal bottle and carry it over to Grandpa Zev. He takes it with a shaky hand, unstops it, and takes a swig. ‘Gin,’ he says. ‘These fascists won’t let me have a drop of alcohol so I have to secrete it away.’ He hands me the bottle and I take a swig. The liquid burns brightly in my throat like a welding iron.

‘What about women?’ he says. ‘Are you going steady with anyone?’

‘There is a girl,’ I say.

‘Do you love her?’ I want to say no. I want to tell him that a large part of me thinks that love is an unnecessary complication. That no matter what combination of dopamine and serotonin
floods my brain when I see Esmé, she’s just a piece of the board like everybody else. But I can’t.

‘Maybe,’ I whisper.

He nods. ‘We Zevcenkos are strange creatures. We don’t find love easily. But when we do we imprint for life and nothing can keep us away from the object of our affections.’ He grimaces and takes another swig of the gin. ‘Well, almost nothing.’

‘You and Grandma?’ I say.

He chuckles. ‘I’m afraid not, my boy. Oh, your grandmother and I had our moments but I had already found and lost the love of my life by the time she came around. Nothing she could have done would have changed that.’