Apocalypse Now Now (2 page)

After that all I could see were ox-wagons burning in the night and people being massacred. These dreams always end with people being massacred. It’s like my sleeping brain is constantly set to the History Channel. If all the re-enactments were directed by Quentin Tarantino.

‘Hey.’ The familiar jazz-singer voice jars me from my dream recollection. Esmé saunters through the subway and slouches against the wall next to me. Her short dark hair is mussed up and a long strand hangs down across an angular cheekbone of her
pixie-like face. Her green eyes are framed with dark kohl which they’ll make her take off the minute she walks into school. She smells of smoke and jasmine perfume.

She pulls a cigarette from the pack in my hand and leans over for me to light it. Her hair falls into her face and I resist the urge to push it back. Something about the combination of the light in the subway, her smell and her closeness does something to me. Time compresses into this single point. My chest feels strange and I can’t think.

‘Jody Fuller was murdered,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘On the mountain.’

‘Fuck,’ I say. The coldness returns, sliding down my throat like a bad oyster. Jody Fuller was a year older than me but I had kissed her once. I remember she’d tasted faintly of milk and mint.

‘It’s funny,’ Esmé says. ‘I hated the bitch and now I kind of miss her.’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

We smoke in silence and then she flicks her butt into the gutter, pushes herself off the wall and leans across to smear a moist kiss across my lips.

‘Find me online later,’ she says, and then saunters away, her figure framed like a religious icon by the light pouring in through the entrance. I stay for a moment in the quiet subway. That kiss cleared the cache of an already bad day. I suck down the last of my cigarette and then push myself off the wall and head back into the rain. The rest of the walk is miserable. By the time I get to the old iron gates at the entrance of the school even my socks are wet.

Thankfully I had the foresight to wrap the contents of my backpack in a plastic bag. Along with my lunch and my school books is a four-page manifesto that could change everything. If all hell doesn’t break loose first. I face the gates of Westridge High and wipe the rain off my glasses.

Westridge is an imposing granite structure that has spat
generations of suburban Capetonians from its iron jaws. Like all prominent high schools in the leafy Southern Suburbs we have lush school grounds, sophisticated computer labs that were out of date as soon as they were installed, a debating team, a competitive rugby team, and gangs, drugs, bulimia, depression and bullying.

It’s an ecosystem; a microcosm of the political, economic and military forces that shape the world. Some high-school kids worry about being popular or about getting good marks. I worry about maintaining a fragile gang treaty that holds Westridge together. Horses for courses, as my dad says.

I walk fast through the gates but then slow down again when I see Mikey Markowitz up ahead; a small banana-coloured beacon of dorkiness in his bright yellow rain jacket.

Mikey was my best friend in junior school. He was thoughtful, kind and concerned for my well-being. By the time high school rolled around I was rethinking our friendship. It became apparent that high-school kids, or at least the ones who looked like their parents injected them with human growth hormone and then beat the joy out of them with a leather strap, could smell the weakness that Mikey secreted into the air. He’s a chubby, pink, blond-haired vortex of neediness that’s like shit to the big, violent flies with dyslexia that circle the school. So I made a business decision.

If you’re climbing a mountain and the guy below you falls and starts dragging you down into a gaping, icy abyss, what do you do? You cut him loose. Well, high school
is
a gaping, icy abyss and I had to cut the cord that connected Mikey to me. Still, I feel a guilty twinge whenever I see him sitting alone at lunch break staring morosely at his cheese sandwich. I slow down to let Mikey gain distance. There’s no sense in dredging up the past.

Mikey disappears into the rain and I quickly scan the groups of blue-blazered juveniles that skulk in the corners. Cold, beady eyes regard me from across the Sprawl – our name for the strip of tar
playground that runs from behind the red-brick school hall to the janitor’s hut at the edge of the lowest sports field.

The Sprawl is where everything important in the political life of Westridge happens. And important things are happening on this Monday morning. It’s a wonder the adults cannot feel it; the lines of power stretched tight across the playground crackling with energy. It’s almost pathetic to see the parentbots smile and drop their kids off into the seething ocean of chaos and fury, blissfully unaware and slightly high on expensive Italian espresso.

I stroll across to where the other members of the Spider are huddled in our usual corner and slip in with my clique, my protective bubble in the wilderness of high-school life.

‘What’s up, Bax?’ Zikhona growls, shoving me affectionately with her shoulder and almost knocking me over.

‘The demand for our product hopefully,’ I say with a grin.

‘Amen, brother,’ the Inhalant Kid wheezes.

‘Anything new?’ I ask.

‘The gangs are still at each other’s throats,’ Kyle says.

‘They haven’t seen my plan yet,’ I say with a smug smile. That’s what it’s all about. My plan. An intricate blueprint for the future of Westridge.

The Spider is different to most schoolyard organisations. In school, like in prison, if you don’t affiliate yourself you’re easy prey. Although you run a low risk of getting ass-raped (unless you go on rugby camp), it’s inadvisable to go without a crew to watch your back. The Spider evolved out of the primordial pit of the Sprawl. We’re a new form of life that survives not through strength but through agility.

We’re a small operation but a successful one. We found each other by the kind of freak radar that draws together kids that don’t really fit in. There’s me with my congenital eye condition and weird glasses. There’s Kyle the freakishly clever kid. Ty the Inhalant Kid, who has found his life’s purpose at the bottom of a
paint tin, and Zikhona, who is big in a sumo wrestler kinda way. When we found each other it was like pieces of a puzzle fitting neatly together.

‘Do you think it’ll work?’ the Inhalant Kid asks nervously.

‘It better,’ Kyle says. ‘Or we’re seriously screwed.’

‘We could always kill Anwar,’ Zikhona says with a scowl. ‘And blame it on the Mountain Killer.’ I resist telling her the dreams I have where Anwar is just one of the many unfortunate souls that die screaming.

‘You cut the head off the chimera and another one will grow to take its place,’ Kyle says.

‘We’re not a gang,’ I say. ‘We’re a corporation.’

The truth is that our success hinges on the fact that we remain neutral among the axes of power – the two gangs that control Westridge High. The juggernaut that runs the school is the Nice Time Kids, led by self-styled warlord Anwar Davids. They’re dangerous, organised and the prime suppliers of drugs. Their management style is kind of like the Third Reich – big, cruel and requiring absolute loyalty of their members.

The other dog in the pit is the Form, led by Denton de Jaager. They run a business of fake doctors’ certificates, parental permission slips and leaked exam papers. They’re more like al-Qaeda – a networked, guerrilla-style militia that blends into the general school populace.

The problem is that the Sprawl isn’t big enough for both of them. Over the past year the tension has escalated and now they are snapping at each other’s throats, with nothing but the Spider standing between them. Because knives are so cheap and easily available, both gangs carry them. I know Anwar has access to guns too and I wonder how long it will be before Westridge has its debut drive-by shooting. Kyle calls high school a zero-sum game. It’s like
Highlander
, there can be only one (in this case gangs, rather than sword-wielding immortals with mullets).

It’s not the gutting of students that worries me though. We have a unique selling proposition, a great democratic product that, along with soccer, is the world’s favourite spectator sport. Yes, I’m talking about porn.

You’d think that in the digital age a pornography vendor would be as out of date as a crusty old guy in tie-dye selling LPs at a flea market. But like that old hippy there is a method to our madness. We don’t sell a product. We sell an experience.

You’re looking for Ron ‘The Hedgehog’ Jeremy’s first skin flick? The original
Debbie Does Dallas
? You’ve come to the right place, we can get them to you by the end of the day. We’re the Cinema Nouveau of the porn world. We deal in the Altman of anal and the Coen Brothers of the cumshot. In a better world we’d be part of Westridge’s cultural committee.

One student getting stabbed would be inconvenient. A gang war could be the death knell for our business. Lockers would be searched, pupils would be questioned, parents would be summoned, and there are just too many trails leading to us. So I have no choice but to intervene.

The school bell rings and we shuffle into the school hall for our first assembly of the term.

‘Did you tell anyone?’ I whisper to Kyle as we troop into the hall, kids around us jostling and yapping like dogs reacquainting themselves with the pack.

‘About your necrophilia?’ he replies. ‘Never, the secret will go with me to the grave. After which you can do with me what you will.’

‘My dreams, you tool. Did you tell anyone about my dreams?’

‘Oh captain, my captain. Do you question my loyalty?’

‘Cut the crap. Did you tell anyone or not?’

‘I am your faithful confidant. I would never reveal your sweaty, intimate secrets. They could use thumbscrews, they could use hair shirts, they could –’

‘OK, asshole, I get the point,’ I snap.

‘Are they still … you know?’ He taps his temple.

I nod. ‘They’re getting worse I think. Pretty much every night now.’

‘What does the head-shrinker say?’

Dr Basson is the psychiatrist my parents send me to to help me ‘work out issues’. He’s a weird old guy who’s done all kinds of tests on me; intelligence tests, empathy tests, are-you-a-psycho? tests, even crackpot tests that seem like he’s checking for ESP. As far as I can tell my parents are wasting a fortune on the society-sanctioned witchcraft that is the psychology profession.

‘He says that they’re my psyche’s way of dealing with stress.’

‘Maybe you should take it easy,’ Kyle says.

‘Sure, I’ll take it easy. How does being expelled, with no source of income except the money your parents give you, sound?’

‘Fucking terrible,’ he says with a grimace.

‘Then don’t tell me to take it easy,’ I reply.

We slump into our seats in the hall and watch as the Form walk in and take their places at the back left. The Form is like the personification of inherited privilege. They carry themselves like wealthy Bond villains and think along the same lines. They’re not interested in money in the way the Nice Time Kids are. They’re interested in keeping themselves entertained by beating up everything and everyone that has the audacity to challenge them.

The Nice Time Kids, or the NTK as they’re more commonly known, take their places at the back right. If you distilled all the cruelty, all the hormonal surges, all the bad ideas and warrantless arrogance of adolescence into a single obscene organism, it’d be the NTK. They’re messy to a point way past the simple apathetic neglect of the rest of us. They wear their messiness like a badge; missing buttons, torn collars and cuffs, shoes scuffed and filled with holes, all ham-handedly proclaiming their affiliation. The rest of us are in between trying to figure out what the situation
between the gangs is. Has there been a truce? Will sanity prevail? Will peace, goodwill and huge porn profit margins smile upon the Spider?

Anwar Davids, his uneven crew cut showing patches of his scalp in the artificial light, turns his head and smiles. The school holds its breath. Slowly he brings his hand up, widens his smile and draws his thumb across his throat, and then points straight at the solid figure of Denton de Jaager.

Denton extends his large, chubby hand to look uninterestedly at his nails and then leans back and yawns. A shiver of acknowledgement runs through the masses. At least everybody knows what’s happening.

The tension is broken as our headmaster, the Bearded One, ascends to the lectern. He raises his hand for silence even though nobody is talking. He rubs his mousy brown beard and begins to speak.

‘Welcome back from ahhh what I umm hope was a stimulating weekend.’ There are titters. Judging from some of the glassy eyes staring blankly forward it’s more likely that it was a stimulant weekend courtesy of the NTK.

‘Ahh, it’s unfortunate to start like this but, umm, the police inform me that another body has been found on the mountain.’ There’s a collective intake of breath. ‘We have, ermmm, asked a representative of the police force to, umm, speak to you this morning.’

A small, balding man sporting both an impressive handlebar moustache and an ugly burgundy suit strides onto the stage and pushes his John Lennon sunglasses onto his forehead.

‘Good morning, I’m Mr Beeld, a criminologist working on the Mountain Killer case. I know this is rather traumatic for everybody, but it’s important to remember that, worldwide, more people are killed by falling coconuts and defective toasters than by knife-wielding serial killers.’ He gives us a smile that’s meant to
be reassuring. ‘Of course, we must take the necessary precautions and awareness is the number-one weapon in the fight against crime.

‘What we know is that either the victim knew the killer or the killer is very good at what he does. He used some kind of serrated blade to cut her throat and then carve the bloody likeness of an eye into her forehead. As you may already know, the eye is the calling card of the so-called “Mountain Killer”, a serial killer already responsible for the deaths of twelve people in the Cape Town area.

‘The all-seeing eye is of particular occult significance,’ Beeld continues. ‘It represents spiritual sight and transcendental vision. The fact that it is used as a calling card means that this could be the work of a cult, or of an individual with an interest in occult lore. Serial killers generally show a lack of empathy and a superiority complex, often with delusions of grandeur. There is a pathological need for control. And murder, of course, is the ultimate form of control.