Ritual (20 page)

Flea had no idea how the ibogaine trip was going to be. What if she decided to go for a walk or, worse, tried to drive? She had to lock herself down, so they'd decided Kaiser would wait, not where she was sitting – on the sofa in his big, untidy living room – but within earshot: in the kitchen or the study. He'd rolled up the plastic sheeting in the doorway so he could hear her, assembled three electric fires round the sofa to keep the chill away, and now she could hear him shuffling around the other rooms in his tatty slippers.

Taking the ibogaine was like chewing bitter liquorice sticks – a chunk of fibrous root that made her jaw ache and also made her gag. She finished it then sat down on Kaiser's sofa to wait. For a long time she was sipping water and rubbing her tongue across the back of her teeth, trying to take away the fur that had stuck there.

Out of the dirty window the unkempt field where dandelion and bindweed grew was bathed in sunlight. Even in the daytime you couldn't see much from this vantage-point, just the tops of the trees in the Mendip land of neolithic ghosts, medieval cathedrals, legendary caves. Kaiser's rambling garden was so pocked with sinkholes and craters from the old mines that her mother wouldn't let them play out there as children. She'd said there were entrances to shafts that a child could fall down to their death and that she wouldn't put it past Kaiser to have left them open. It was funny, Flea thought, how Jill never realized it would be her, not her kids, who would end up dead at the bottom of a hole.

She sighed and pulled her feet up under her, arranging the dusty old duvet across her legs. She closed her eyes for a while and tried to fix in her mind the position of the bodies in Bushman's Hole. She pictured how Dad might have looked as he started the head-first descent to the bottom. She'd done a mathematical formula and decided that, fully kitted out as her parents had been, they'd have gone down at about twenty metres a minute. With almost a hundred and fifty metres to go, that slow glide to the bottom of the hole would have taken them eight long minutes. At what point they'd died was anyone's guess.

And then, as she thought of those eight minutes, she realized something she'd never thought of before: that she could
see
time. You'd never notice it usually, but now it was clear that time was divided up into visible portions if you knew how to look at it, and that things had always been like this, since the very beginning. Some time packages were big and some were small, and each had different colours according to its size: the smallest ones, the ones that represented just enough time to dodge a bullet or a punch, were small and cherry red – time splinters. The ones that were long enough to stop someone choking, or to run after and catch a ball, or to lose control and crash a car were a juicy orange, slightly puffy at the edges. Sleep used pale yellow cubes – eight-hour chunks that got fractured and split open unnaturally when she woke early, and that was why everything felt wrong during the day.

She kept her eyes closed and studied the time packages, and the way they made up her future, stretching out into the distance – lots of little shapes packed together in a long line. There was a noise coming from a distance behind the shapes.
Wah wah wah.
Soft at first, but getting louder.
Wah wah wah
. She twitched her head away because it was a noise she hated as a diver, the sort that could mark the onset of a toxicity overload, but this time it seemed to be outside her head, coming in across the fields through the closed window. W
ah wah wah. Wah wah wah
. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the sound drifting in, but instead she saw that the room had changed beyond recognition.

A crack had formed in the far wall. She stared at it, mesmerized, as it lengthened, shimmering silver as if the entire room was peeling itself. There was a noise as if the centre of the earth was splitting and, just in time, she understood what was happening. She threw her hands into the air as, all at once, the ceiling caved in and rolled sideways. Her ears filled with a racing noise. A heavy, unbearable light dropped hard on her, submerging her, making her cling desperately to the sofa, knowing that if she was washed away nothing could bring her back.

When at last the noise had stopped she lowered her arms cautiously and twisted her head. Nothing was as it had been. Everything had changed. Even the air was different: instead of being clear, it was silver and wavering. Beams of white light rippled through from overhead, silt swirling through them. She knew, just from the feeling of cold and dread, where she was. She was in Boesmansgat. A place for the foolish and the dead. Bushman's Hole.

She tried to wriggle away, but instead of moving backwards into the sofa the water seemed to lift her and roll her over, and before she knew what was happening she was swimming, shooting fast through the cold. She sculled a little with her left hand, turning herself in a small circle because she couldn't orient herself immediately and, to start with, wasn't even sure which way was up. The light rays were there again, but this time they were sharp, like submerged stalagmites, and she didn't dare swim near them, thinking they might cut her. She steadied herself and began to swim slowly, the sweetest, absolute clarity flashing against her face, no bubbles, just the currents streaming around the dry suit. Gin clear. Now she understood what those words meant. Gin. Clear.

She'd swum for some time, going nowhere, knowing now what it felt like to be a fish, when she noticed radiance coming from the right. She brought herself to a halt and turned to it. It was the entrance to a cave, brightly lit, and after a moment's hesitation she swam towards it. As she came within ten metres of it, she saw there were figures inside the cave, lit up like a nativity scene in a church. Three faces in the yellow light, Dad's, Thom's and Kaiser's. It was a room she was looking at: there were two beds, a chair with a suitcase on it, a print of an orchid on the wall above Dad's head and dusty curtains against the window. She recognized it: the Danielskuil hotel room they'd stayed in the night before the accident.

'Dad?' she said tentatively, her mouth moving slowly. 'Dad?'

The sound came back, louder this time,
wah
wah wah
, and, like a film coming off pause and cranking up, the figures in the room began to move. They bent towards each other, talking in low voices, checking their dive gear, and she realized, from the way her feet began to hurt, that this wasn't an hallucination but a memory, that she had been in this room too – somewhere she fitted into this tableau, off to one side, out of the immediate picture, but there anyway, because that night she'd been sitting on a bed with her feet wrapped in bandages, watching the men check the gear.

Kaiser and her father moved aside a little, turning slightly away from Thom, who might have been close enough to overhear their conversation but was so busy repacking the scrubbers on the rebreather units that he didn't pay them any attention. They made it seem casual as they murmured to each other under their breath. It was a private conversation – they were sharing a secret, but Flea could lip-read. She could understand every word they were saying.

Is it strange?
Dad said, looking up into Kaiser's face.

Is what strange?

You know. To be back. In Africa.

This is South Africa. Not Nigeria. This isn't the
place it happened.

Flea could read every word – it was like having her memory scrubbed clean and bright and replayed at high definition. Every pixel was brilliant in its clarity and the picture stayed quite still, undisturbed by water eddies and silt.

Even so – it must be odd after all these years.
Do you think you could come back and live here?

No
, Kaiser said, and his face was momentarily sad, old.
You know the answer to that. You know
how they tried to show me up – make an example
of me.

The two men continued what they were doing, cleaning masks, checking cylinders, and for a while there was a companionable silence. Dad checked the straps on his buoyancy compensator and, satisfied, put it to one side. Then, empty-handed and finished with his tasks, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Thom wasn't listening, then leaned forward to Kaiser.
Listen
, he whispered.
This is important.

Kaiser seemed surprised by the tone.
What?
David? What is it?

Dad leaned closer, and spoke. But this time half of his mouth was obscured and all Flea could make out were the words
down there
. . .
promise
. . .
be sure
. . .
experience
. . .

She stared at him, her heart thumping, but just as she was about to swim nearer, to ask him to repeat what he was saying, something in her peripheral vision made her stop. Moving cautiously because she felt that if her head rocked she'd be sick, she turned towards it.

A long spit of sand lay in the gloom to her right. Slowly, slowly, as her eyes adjusted, shapes began to appear out of the dark. First a skeletal hand, raised up and splayed in the frigid water, the neoprene suit ending at the bony wrist. Then another hand, light lasering eerily between the fingers. Her heart thumped. Another shape was dissolving out of the gloom near the first: the hunched and awful figure of a diver, stiffly jackknifed, its head buried face down in the silt, the word 'INSPIRATION' stencilled on the cylinders. Two bodies – only ten metres away – she could almost touch them. Her throat tightened as she swam towards them, looking at the terrible positions, knowing she was seeing Mum and Dad.

'No,' she tried to say, but no sound came. She moved her arms back, panicked, trying to cry out. Mum and Dad, in their graves. But before she could cry, another sound started. It was like a wind rushing through a crack in mountains, deafening, and then came a swirl of water and a flash of light, like a door opening, and then, in no time, the bodies were gone and there was silence in her head.

She opened her eyes and lay motionless, registering what she could see. In front of her there was a curtain lit from behind, dirty windows, a flask of coffee on the table, the cupboards on the walls that were always locked. Kaiser's masks, his family's masks, the ones he'd let her play with as a child, looked down at her from what seemed a great distance. There was the noise of a single-engined plane droning overhead and light in her eyes, and she saw how stupid she'd been and that she wasn't in Bushman's Hole, but lying on a sofa in Kaiser's house.

Somewhere she could hear a fly buzzing and Kaiser tapping on the computer keyboard. But when she turned in that direction her head spun and she thought she'd be sick, in spite of the Kwells. So she carefully shifted position and, when she was comfortable, kept very still, trying to focus on the flask. When she was sure her head had stopped spinning she closed her eyes again. Instantly colours bubbled from the corners, like oil on water spreading under her eyelids, pulsing bigger and bigger until they filled her head and ballooned into her nasal passages, suffocating her as if the pressure would make her skull explode, it was so enormous.

She half raised a hand, moving it weakly towards her face, trying to wipe away the colours, making a little noise in her throat, a begging sound, wanting it to stop. Then, just when she thought she couldn't take any more, they popped, like a bubble, leaving nothing. Just cold, clear darkness. It took her a moment or two to realize she was back in the freezing water of Boesmansgat.

'Mum?' She tried to speak but her tongue was heavy. 'Mum?'

She moved her arms in the water, wanting to see her mother's face through the mask, wanting to see her eyes.

'Mum?'

Without warning a face appeared inches from hers. It was partly skeleton, wearing a diver's mask, and round it floated blonde hair and something white and diaphanous – a white shirt billowing like a cloud in the water. Startled, Flea pulled back.

'
Oh, Flea
. . .' said the voice. '
Is that you, Flea?
My baby . . . where are you?
'

'
Mum?
' She reached out her hands despairingly, opening and closing them in the darkness in case she might feel another human hand in hers. '
Mum
, I'm here. Over here. Mum,
please
, I've been trying for so long. Oh,
Mummy
, I miss you, Mummy, so much.'

In spite of herself, in spite of the fact that she was in the water, trying not to tumble backwards, Flea knew her corporeal self was crying. It wasn't happening down in the cave, but up where her body was lying on Kaiser's sofa. There was wetness on her cheeks.

Silt billowed round the awful ruined face. A wave of nausea overcame her, and Flea tilted her head to compensate. Then the picture stopped seesawing and Mum spoke again: 'Flea. Don't cry.' Her voice was odd – not the same as before. It was soft, low and a little flat. 'Don't cry, Flea.'

'Mum, what were you trying to tell me? What did you mean, "We went the other way"?'

'Look down, Flea.' She pointed downwards with her skeletal hand. 'Can you see?'

Heart thumping, Flea, sculling her position to keep stable, peered in the direction Mum was pointing. Now she could see that they weren't at the bottom of the hole at all: they were on its gently sloping sides. And there, lit eerily in the gloom, she could see it – the bottom. It must be more than twenty metres further down.