“No, my child, not here on this patch of God’s ground, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m asking a bigger thing. Why are you here?”
The silence makes a hole in the night and it sucks me in.
“I was on the street too, long time ago now, but years, many years, so many I can’t give you a number, but it was long enough for me to grow old. Truth be told, I lived between the streets and prison.” He lifts his sleeve. The number 28 is tattooed on the inside of his wrist.
Sindi shifts, her eyes flicking behind their lids. She’s too tired to be interested in bedtime stories. And me? I don’t usually listen to other people’s stories – everyone has a story, I have stories of my own – but his voice pulls me away from the silent hole.
“Everyone comes from somewhere. There’s a beginning to every legend, some place we call home. Don’t matter if it’s a palace or a shack.”
I’ve heard this sermon before, at Saviour’s Pit Stop.
“There’s very few that’s born to the street. Even the street kids, they’ve got family out there. Whether they care or not, that’s a different story. Point is, you’ve got to start somewhere to end up here. The in-between, from there to here, that’s what I’m asking. Why are you here?”
A snore rolls in Sindi’s throat. Loon Man doesn’t seem to notice. He sips from his flask, his voice dipping until I can no longer follow – his lips seem to swallow the words just out of his mouth. Keeping mouse quiet, I slip closer and sit down on the bench.
He stops talking and frowns at me. “Why are you here? Why? Why? What do you want?” He reaches into his coat. His hand rests on his heart a minute, then draws out a piece of string tied around his neck. There’s something on the end of it, something black, and he rubs it between his thumb and finger, muttering like a crazy.
“Now flee from youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness!” he shouts, making me jump. He lifts the flask to his ear and shakes it, testing the level. “Look at me now, I’m one of God’s generals, but once I was a general of another kind. I was nineteen when I went to prison for the first time. I was a boy, but I thought I was a big man. Prison makes you realise you’re nothing, and if you want to survive, you better find your balls.” Loon Man slumps under the weight of his memories. He’s getting like Mama on payday after a few quarts of Black Label. “I spent twelve years in prison. I went in a burglar with a two-year sentence, came out a killer. To survive, you follow orders. They tell you to kill, you kill. God was with me. Even as I shed the blood of another man.” He stabs the air with an invisible knife. “I came out and I was going straight. Wife took me back and I did okay for a while.”
He trails off and just sits there, staring at the past and sipping from his flask. He’s beginning to bore me. I look at Sindi and wonder what she’s dreaming. I long to sleep, to dream the same dreams as my sisi, but I’m afraid of the dark, of the empty place I go to whenever I close my eyes.
“In his pride the wicked does not seek Him, in all his thoughts there is no room for God!” Loon Man’s roar knocks me off the bench.
“Janine got pregnant. Me, a father. I was happy, I was, but the pressure – didn’t think I could do a kid. In prison I ran from nobody; out in the world, I was scared of a baby. The night Sonny was born, I started to run. But you can’t run from the life God gives you, you can’t run from your legend. If you try, He will find a way to turn you, to make you pay.”
“Scaredy-cat man, scaredy-cat man, prison don’t bite but your baby can,” I sing, getting back on the bench.
“All I took was my gun, my phone and a bottle of whisky. I checked myself into the Carlton Hotel. A room on the twenty-eighth floor – twenty-eight, to remind me. I took a shower to wash the soot from my skin. My phone started ringing. I didn’t answer, but Janine kept calling and I thought, I owe her a goodbye. She told me about my boy. She said he had ten fingers, ten toes, she said they were so small but they were perfect. Tiny and perfect and blue.”
Loon Man stops talking. The silence buzzes, tense, waiting. I cling to the bench.
“Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt, for the tree is known by his fruit.” He slaps his thigh and I snap up straight, but I don’t fall. “I don’t remember anything else, just the sound of the air rushing in my ears as I fell. You know what it’s like falling buck naked through the air, my child, balls slapping against your arse? The ground was far away, didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I wanted to yell – not scream, I wasn’t scared. I wanted to shout. I was angry, but when I opened my mouth my cheeks filled up like plastic bags flapping in the wind. God silenced me.”
Loon Man sinks into his past, droning on about Sonny and twenty-eight floors and a life of sin, the words sliding round his mouth and coming out slurred and broken. He’s mumbling-shouting, raving-moaning, crying for poor Sonny who never stood a chance. Then, sudden as a finger click, he snaps out of it. “Listen, my child, God has plans for all of us. I fell twenty-eight floors and when I opened my eyes again I was nobody. The next twenty-eight years I spent on the street. I didn’t have the stomach to rob or kill any more. I wandered like Christ in the desert, looking for salvation. Almost thirty years. But I can offer it to you now, I can save you a lifetime of pain. Come with me, become one of my children and birth a Pure Child for God.”
He reaches over, puts his hand on Sindi’s shoulder and starts praying. “Jesus, save this child, bring her into our fold. Let her be a mother of your children, bless her clean blood and fertile womb. Keep her safe from unclean men, from infidels and Satan-worshippers. Save this child from the devil, don’t let her wander the streets for thirty years. Save her from my pain. I wasn’t strong, no Lord, I wasn’t strong like Jesus. I deserved my suffering. I gave in to temptation, I gave in to the devil. Don’t let this child escape You like I escaped You.”
I dance to Loon Man’s gospel raving. I sway and stamp and clap my hands, just like Sunday. “No Lord,” I shout when he shouts. “Save me,” I shout when he shouts. “Blessed be,” I shout when he shouts.
Then, rapid as it came, the raving stops and he shoots me a look. “They say there’s no place in heaven for babies with no name,” he says. “My boy died before I gave him a name. Tell me, demon, do you know my Sonny?”
I shake my head and give him a wide grin, stretching my lips so far back my teeth gleam against the night. I jive, still full of gospel. “Sonny’s dead, Sonny’s long-dead worm dinner, Sonny’s dead, long dead.”
Loon Man narrows his eyes. “You,” he says, pointing at me, his hand wrapped in string with the pendant tucked into his palm, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” He begins to pray, so soft at first I can’t hear the words; then, ever so slow, the volume rises. His words stroke me, wind around me, tie me up. I’m caught in the singing, swaying-swaying, and I don’t suss his game until the ropes are halfway up my legs.
“You tricked me!” I shriek, but he keeps praying. I wriggle. I squirm, but his prayers are binding. The hole made of silence opens wide, like a hungry mouth coming to swallow me. “Please, I’ll be a good girl.”
He holds out his pendant. It spins on tattered string.
“That’s just broken string,” I say.
He glances at the string, taking his eyes off me for a second. I begin to laugh. I laugh and laugh until my laughing fills me up and I balloon, big as a house, big as the world and when I pop, the dawn breaks, icy and grey.
Bad Things
Sindi lies curled on the grass, frost lapping her coat. I kiss her cracked lips, dead-man blue, and she opens her eyes. She stares at the tiny ice crystals clinging to the grass, focusing on nothing, focusing on nowhere.
Dawn bathes the streets in a clinical light that reminds me of the corridors in Bara Hospital, late at night.
“Don’t leave