Devil's Valley (4 page)

We followed the dry riverbed, Prickhead waddling on his weird bow-legs, the catapult now draped across a sloping shoulder. It still seemed improbable for him to move with so much ease.

And then, just as I was beginning to think I’d run right out of steam, we came through a last thicket of trees and saw the valley opening up ahead, with signs of fields, and vineyards, orchards, all bleached by drought, but still bearing the unmistakable imprint of civilisation. There were houses too, few and far between, some of them in a parlous state but all of them apparently inhabited. Four, five, six, followed by a hulking whitewashed church, much larger than one would expect in such a wild place, with a square, squat tower. For a moment I couldn’t make out anything more, as the valley swerved to the left.

When I turned back, Prickhead had disappeared. In a sudden panic I looked round: would I ever, if I had to, find my way out again?

Rucksack

Right now the fucking rucksack required more urgent attention. I lowered it on a large flat rock in the middle of the dry riverbed and removed the tape recorder from its womb of odds and ends of clothing. It was one of those nifty little jobs that can fit into a shirt pocket. The red light went on when I pressed the button, but the tape was stuck. So much for technology. A journalist’s fate worse than death. I pressed it to my ear but there was no sign of the familiar reassuring hiss. Even a few vigorous shakes made no difference. I’d shaken other things with more success in my life. Furious with frustration I gave it a slap, my stock solution for hitches in anything from a PC to a parking meter; and for once it actually worked. The little wheel was turning again, its whisper music to my ears. I pressed Record, went through my alphabetised repertoire of synonyms for the female pudenda (more satisfactory than the standard one-two-three-four-five), rewound, then pressed Play, and listened approvingly to the recitation, in my own voice, of what years ago had still been within my range of the accessible; just after the letter ‘p’ I switched off.

Kitsch

Now follows an event that gets my knickers in a knot. It doesn’t reflect well on me, but what the hell. I’ve hit rock-bottom anyway, as Sylvia or the kids or any of my colleagues would be only too happy to testify. A hairy turd is worse than any second-hand car dealer. So here goes, and devil take the hindmost.

Just as I’m bending over to do up the clasp of the rucksack again there is a splash. I straighten my back to look. On the far side of a small thicket of withered underbrush and reeds I discover a long deep pool that somehow escaped my notice earlier. A movement in the pool catches my eye. Now for the kitsch part. I know it sounds like overdoing it, but I swear by my mother’s corns that this was how it happened. Crime reporter signing on. A naked girl comes scrambling from the pool, her back to me. She bends over to wring the water from her hair, then sweeps it back over her shoulders. A long black mane that ripples in shiny wet waves all the way down to the bulge of her buttocks. In the interests of truth I must specify that her body is a bit on the thin side to my taste. If this had been my fantasy I’d have filled her out a bit, more curves, more moulded kind of thing. But this is the point: it’s not a dream, she is real. So I have to take her as she comes.

Then, like an obliging model, she turns to face me. She throws her head back, both arms raised, her feet wide apart to steady her on the slippery surface of the wet rock. Long legs, if kind of sinewy. The thing about legs is this: no matter how thick or thin they are, how short or long, they meet somewhere. And there’s nothing wrong with the bush that marks this meeting point. Black tufts sprout abundantly from the armpits too, something I’ve always had a weakness for. Altogether, it’s the total wet-dream image. Except, as I said, the girl’s not exactly the Birth of Venus. I did my stint of Art History at varsity, don’t underestimate me, and Botticelli clearly had no hand in this one. Even so, beggars can’t be choosers.

Gentlemanly Thing

I just stand there, kind of dumbstruck, like Lot’s wife. After a while she lowers her head again, but remains standing with her hands stuck in her thick dark hair, the points of her elbows raised to the late light, looking straight at me.

Jesus, now I’m really flexing the old purple-veined stylistic muscles. I’ll soon be the man I used to be. Watch this spot. But I can’t keep the girl waiting: she’s still standing there at the edge of the pool, looking straight at me. Yet there isn’t the slightest hint of embarrassment or shock in her gaze; nothing exhibitionist either, I should add. She simply stands there, looking at me, right into my face as far as I can make out through the threadbare screen of brittle twigs and reeds and stuff between us. I can see the late sun glistening in the droplets on her skin, touching like brush-strokes the elevations of her nose and cheekbones, her collarbones and shoulders, et cetera.

The one who feels caught out and embarrassed is me. As if I have no fucking right to be there. And that’s saying something, because there isn’t much I haven’t seen in my line of work, the whole range from the shit-smelling awful to the bloody beautiful. Take my word. Feeling trapped like a schoolboy in a girls’ locker room, I bend over to start fiddling with the straps of the rucksack again. Then it occurs to me that I might do the gentlemanly thing and offer an apology. I straighten up. But it’s too late. The lady has vanished.

And not only the lady. The bloody pool too.

I broke through the underbrush and tangled weeds to where it had been a minute ago, but there was no sign of water. The hole was there, a rough rectangle among the rocks, but it was empty and quite dried up. So obviously there was no sign of wet footprints either.

Quite Normal

Now don’t tell me it was a mirage, a hallucination prompted by a too rampant urge and too little occasion.
She was there
. I can recall every damn detail. Not only the mane of tumbling hair, the straight black eyebrows, the cheekbones, the wide mouth, but something else I’d like to add for future reference, as it is of some importance. The girl had four tits. One pair quite normal, of the size and shape one would expect, the nipples perched like two bees (who said it first?) exactly where one would look for them. And then, a narrow hand’s breadth below them, like small smudges on an artist’s paper, something first drawn, then erased, but not quite, not altogether, another pair. Not proper-sized boobs, these, only a suggestion of two mild swellings, stings of the aforementioned bees; but no doubt about the nipples. You think this is the kind of thing I could have imagined?

I can remember telling myself: Now this is something I wouldn’t mind having a closer look at. Investigative journalism. But the thought also brought a tinge of guilt, as if with that candid gaze she could read my mind (the lingering stain of fucking Calvinism, like a dirty rim in the bath); and that may well have been the reason why I bent down over, the rucksack again. The truth, almost the whole truth, and nothing but.

While I was still scouting among the sparse dry reeds fringing the edge of the dried-up rock pool, in search of some trace of her, a voice behind me said:

“So there you are.”

M
Y FIRST THOUGHT, when I returned home after Little-Lukas’s death, was that the bloody accident had once again put paid to all hope of doing something on the Devil’s Valley. Story of my life. But the boy kept haunting me. A few days after the accident I phoned his landlady to find out whether she’d heard anything from his relatives; and about funeral arrangements, that kind of thing. (From our crime reporter.) No, to both questions. There had been no news from family and friends, and unless someone turned up to claim the body the municipality would probably have him buried. The rent, she reminded me, was still outstanding too.

I usually put on a tough-guy act, but in the end I’m a soft touch. I mean, I shout at the fucking bergies who squat on the stoep, then slip them the odd rand, even though I know bloody well it will go straight into a bottle of blue-train. As a result, every month I’d screw up my budget, and Sylvia would have her field day. At least that is now over and done with. Anyway, in an unguarded moment I undertook to pay the landlady her blasted rent, as well as the funeral costs if no relatives pitched up during the next week. Three thousand two hundred and thirty-one rand for a simple cremation, no service, no coffin, no nothing; only a nondescript little brown cardboard box with Little-Lukas’s ashes, delivered on my doorstep by a tall man who looked like Groucho Marx.

Abandoned Notes

What was to be done with the box? I considered arranging a burial, but the picture of Groucho, the landlady and myself in the cemetery on a wet winter’s day in Cape Town was too much for me; besides, I couldn’t afford any further expense. That was how I started thinking about taking the ashes to the Devil’s Valley. Kind of pilgrimage. Also, it was as good an excuse as any.

I dug up my notes abandoned thirty years ago, on the Seer’s trek into the Swartberg, stowed in a dilapidated old box in the dust and cobwebs and mouse shit and silver moths and cockroaches in my garage. I added to it the cigarette box from my night of cheerless carousing with Little-Lukas, and then began to sort out the confused memories of our meandering conversation.

There wasn’t much sense to be made of it; and most of what returned to me through the remembered fearful swell of OB was hedged in by question marks. Any report slapped up out of that whore’s crotch of notes and recollections would have seen me fired on the spot. But frustrating as they were the memories kept haunting me. In the messy business of my life it became a single constant spot of reference. The reassurance of a few small hard facts: this and this and that I knew, this and this and that was certain, unshakeable by wind or weather, adversity or time.

I went to see my editor on the question of accumulated leave; he seemed singularly happy to let me go. From an adventurous colleague I borrowed a rucksack, purchased what was necessary in the line of provisions, added my tape recorder and my camera, plus flash and tapes and film, and set off for the Little Karoo to feed the long-starved rat. In Oudtshoorn I spent a day on enquiries until I found a helpful garage man who agreed to take me into the mountains in his four-by-four, as far as the beacon from which I would have to strike out on foot. That was the Wednesday, a tranquil day in late April, in the afterglow of summer.

Or For Worse

I’d counted on a week, but the garage man persuaded me to stretch it to ten days.

“Saturday suits me better, you see,” he said. His name was Koot Joubert, a solid block of a man, as heavy as a Bedford truck, if one can imagine such a vehicle with sideburns. “I’ll be coming back from Prince Albert next Saturday. Round about noon, I think.”

High up in the mountains where he dropped me we confirmed the time.

“I’ll be right here at the beacon,” I said. “If I’m not here, don’t wait for me. That’ll mean that I decided to stay longer.”

“Don’t think you will.” With a rumbling laugh like an old engine starting up. “The people down there is a strange lot. Judging from the ones who sometimes turn up in town for shopping, that kind of thing. They’re a wild bunch, man.”

“See you next Saturday, Koot.”

“No, right, okay.” He offered me a hand the size of a gearbox. “Hope you come back alive.”

I could think of several questions I’d still have liked to ask, but decided to wait and see for myself. I refused to be discouraged in any way. I’d bloody well waited long enough to get to the brink of this tract of history that had tantalised me for so long. For better or for worse, so help me God.

At the side of the gravel road I remained standing until Koot Joubert’s dust had settled among the rocks. Then I turned towards the Devil’s Valley, with a huge curving slope straight ahead; I felt like a mole on a woman’s tit.

One last time I checked the contents of my rucksack. The provisions. The tape recorder and notebooks and ball-point pens. The two cartons of Camel, four hundred, plus a few loose packets stowed in my pockets. Enough for ten days, if I rationed myself carefully. The White Horse safely ensconced in the box containing Little-Lukas’s pinkish-grey ashes.

Now here I was at last, and behind me a voice was saying, “So there you are.”

I
T’S DAMN HOT here in the dry riverbed where I’m crouched waiting. There is still time, but not much. If she doesn’t come soon, I’ve had it. And there’s such a lot still to untangle in my mind.

The others are about their business among the ruins. In my mind I fit them into their usual places, the way things were before the bloody catastrophes began. Grandpa Lukas, as they call him here, among his mottled goats on the mountainside, chewing or sniffing his strong tobacco. Brother Holy pacing up and down his rows of vegetables, hands behind his back, preparing his sermon of fire and brimstone for next Sunday, while Smith-the-Smith furiously hammers a white-hot horseshoe of pure gold into shape on his anvil for a horse he’ll never see. The sprinkling of old people in the cemetery, sweeping the aisles and dusting the headstones and cleaning the little beds of succulents on the graves as they chat to the dead and pass on all the news from the living in exchange for tidings from the other side. Tant Poppie Fullmoon with her bag of herbs, waddling on her small round feet to bring a new baby into the world or strangle another. Jos Joseph planing boards for coffin or bed or doorpost, his mouth bristling with wild-olive nails, one of which he occasionally swallows when he becomes excited. Jurg Water loping behind the forked stick he uses as a divining rod, up and down the dried-up slopes where no drop of subterranean water remains to set the stick twirling in his huge paws. Henta Peach and her gaggle of barely nubile furies twittering among bright shafts of light in some dark shed, ample warning that at moonrise tonight they will be cavorting naked among the bluegum trees again. Hans Magic accompanied by his perennial cloud of flies like a fucking halo around his filthy head. The randy old shoemaker Petrus Tatters pretending to be hard at work while everybody knows his thoughts are with Criel Eyes’s widow who he’s planning to screw tonight. Gert Brush among the paintings never finished because he keeps on adding new faces to the ones hovering in the layers of paint below. Isak Smous counting the money he’ll never spend. Job Raisin at his stands of drying tobacco and raisins, branch in one hand to chase away the birds that disappeared from the Devil’s Valley a century ago. Tall-Fransina bent over the tip of the coil from her still, surrounded by her innumerable cats as she awaits the blessed moment when the heart of the run can be cut from the heads. Peet Flatfoot, the dwarf I’d christened Prickhead on my arrival, hiding in the thickets beside the dried-up water-holes to spy on the naked girls who have long stopped swimming there. Ouma Liesbet Prune huddled with her small tin trunk on the roof of her little house, waiting for the skies to open so that the Lord can sweep her up to heaven, while her distant nephew Ben Owl lies snoring down below until nightfall when he will get up to prowl in the dark on his club-foot. Bettie Teat and her brood in the sun on the doorstep of the church, a child at each bare breast, waiting for Brother Holy to descend from the cabbage patch to castigate her for the sins of her voluptuous flesh. Also Lukas Death, somehow appointed as my guide and mentor during this stay which is now over and not yet over: he occupies the biblical position of Judge in the Devil’s Valley, a combination of justice of the peace, and mayor, and field cornet, besides doing his job as teacher and undertaker.