Ritual

  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, ope
ning 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.

  'You didn't get all the way. That's why we couldn't find you.'

  'Now listen, Flea. They didn't find us last time, but this time they will. This time they're going to find us . . .'

  'This time?'

  Flea reached out again, into the silt. She couldn't see her mother any more and that made her panic.

  'It's important, Flea, so important. Don't let them bring us to the surface. Can you hear me?'

  'Mum? Mum?' Tears were backing up in her throat. 'Mum? Come back. Please.'

  'Don't let them bring us out of the Hole, whatever happens. Leave us. Just leave us.'

  'Don't go, Mum. Mummy . . .'

  But the silt blocked out everything, even the voice, and there was mud in her mouth and dirty water washing through her body and the nausea came back. It sent her spinning round – it was worse than any narcosis or CO2 overload she'd known, and she had to open her eyes and grip the sofa. Above her the ceiling was whirling out of control, the grubby yellow light-fitting twirling like a centrifuge, the daylight flashing in and out of her eyes, and she could hear a strange noise, a high-pitched whimpering coming from her mouth. She tried to sit up but as she did so she knew she was going to be sick.

  'Ohmigod,' she muttered. 'Ohmigod.'

  She just managed to get to the bowl Kaiser had put out and hung there, heaving and crying, until it was over and she was back in her body, crouched, a long line of saliva connecting her to the bowl, her mother's voice disappearing, as if into a long tunnel, behind her: Whatever happens . . . leave us . . .

  30

  'The one thing Jack Caffery still hasn't told me is why it's me he wants to see. I'm not a clairvoyant or a mind-reader. I have no magical powers – no eyes like a god's. But I don't think it's police business brought you here.'

  'It's not police business. It's my business.'

  'And what business is that?'

  Caffery rubbed his nose. The day had been weird. That some people would pay to have human blood in their house was beyond him. But with the earthenware bowl being tested at HQ and surveillance on Mabuza, he'd come to the end of what he could do at work. He'd tried going home to sleep, but he couldn't get rid of the feeling that something was watching him, that the shadows around the house were all wrong, so he'd got into the car and come looking for the Walking Man. He hadn't expected to find him so quickly. And he hadn't expected the Walking Man to start so quickly at pulling out the truth.

  'Jack Caffery?' The Walking Man was wearing his sheepskin slippers. He had stuffed each of his boots with a piece of cloth and now he tied them inside a plastic carrier-bag and wedged them into a small ditch that ran along the hedgerow. He wiped his hands. 'I'm asking you a question, Jack Caffery. What is your business?'

  Caffery looked at the fire, at the way some of the logs at the bottom had white and red crusts of heat like scabs. 'Someone went,' he said eventually. 'Someone was taken. Out of my life.'

  'Your daughter?'

  'No, no. Not my daughter. I've got no kids. Never will have.'

  'Your woman?'

  'No, I left her. Two months ago. Walked out on her.'

  'Then who?'

  'My brother. This was back in the . . .' He trailed off. 'It was a long time ago.'

  'When you were children?'

  'Yeah – it was. It was back in London. We . . . Well, you know how it is.' He held his fingers in the cavity behind his lower jawbone, pressing lightly because he'd learned it was one way to stop himself crying. 'We, uh, we never found him. Everyone knew who'd taken him, but the police, they couldn't get anything to stick.' He swallowed and took his hand from his throat, holding up his thumb to the firelight, turning it round and round. 'On the day he went missing I got a bruise on my thumbnail that wouldn't budge. It should have grown out but it didn't. No one could explain it, not the doctors, no one.' He gave a sad smile. 'I used to look at it, all those years, and think that the day I found my brother my nail would start growing again. But look at it.'

  He held it out. The Walking Man straightened and came back, on his slippered feet, to peer at the nail.

  'Nothing to see.'

  'Nearly four years ago. After all that time it suddenly started growing again. The bruise grew out. And with it the feeling went. The feeling for the place it had happened went – just like that. It vanished, as if I'd been told the answer wasn't where I was – in south-east London – but somewhere else.'

  'Here?'

  'I don't know. The countryside – maybe here, maybe somewhere else.' He dropped his hand and stared at the lights of Bristol, thinking about the east, about Norfolk.

  'Something else happened,' the Walking Man said. 'Four years ago something else happened.'

  'Maybe.' Caffery shrugged. 'I think I came close to finding him – that's all.'

  'Someone died. I think that happened too.' The Walking Man took two or three breaths. 'At the time you lost the connection, I think someone died.'

  Caffery nodded. 'Yes,' he said quietly. 'Someone died too.'

  'Yes?'

  'The one who did it. Penderecki. Ivan Penderecki. He died. Suicide. If you're wondering.'

  'I wasn't.' The Walking Man prodded at the fire.

  Several minutes went by while Caffery tried to shift this new idea round his head, that maybe Penderecki's death had severed his connection. He'd never asked himself that before. Then the Walking Man spoke again, his voice completely different. 'What,' he said quietly, 'was his name?'

  Caffery was caught off balance. No one had asked him that in years. They just referred to him as 'your brother', or 'he', as if they thought his name would be too awful to say. 'It was . . . Ewan.'

  'Ewan,' said the Walking Man. 'Ewan.'

  The way he said the name, gently, as if he was speaking it to a child made Caffery's throat close. He had to press his finger under his jaw again until the feeling passed and he could breathe. He opened a jar of cider, drank a little and pulled his coat collar up round his ears. He gazed at the stars and let himself think, not about Ewan but about Flea at the dockside, cupping someone else's hand in hers and looking up at him, as if she was saying: 'Don't worry, I can take care of this. You go and sit – go and be with yourself for a bit.' For a reason he couldn't explain he wanted to rest on that look in her eyes.

  He reached into his pocket for the small brown bag. The crocus bulbs inside were little grainy balls with papery brown skin that slipped off as he touched it. As the Walking Man pulled on his socks, Caffery held out his hand, the bag sitting on his flat palm, the firelight making the dark shapes inside the brown paper glow like coals.

  The Walking Man stopped. He stared at the bag for a while. Then, without a word he stood and took it. He pulled out a bulb and held it up to the light, turning it in his blackened fingers.

  'The Remembrance.'
He examined it reverently, as if it had a message written across its sides. 'When it comes out, the Remembrance, it's a perfect Delft blue. Just a little orange down in the centre, like an egg yolk. Or a star.'

  He put the bulb back into the bag and poked his finger around a bit, like a kid counting sweets on a Saturday-morning street corner. Then he folded the top carefully and tucked the bag into the breast pocket of the filthy coat he wore and, as if nothing had happened, went on stoking the fire.

  They didn't speak for a few minutes. Caffery drank cider and watched the Walking Man begin his nightly ritual, taking off his clothes and wrapping them, putting them under the sleeping-bag where they wouldn't attract any moisture. At night he wore specially designed sleepwear. It was filthy, but you could tell it was expensive, hi-tech, from one of those extreme-sports suppliers. There was an O3 logo that Caffery recognized from Flea's dry suit. When he'd finished, the Walking Man pulled on his coat and began to potter around again, feeding the fire for the night.

  Caffery knew his time there was almost over. 'Look,' he said, clearing his throat, 'I've given you what you wanted. Now you – it's your turn. You have to tell me what it was like, what you did to Craig Evans.'

  'In my time. In my time.'

  'You said you'd tell me.'

  The Walking Man snorted. 'I said, in my time. I need to think about you first.' He threw another log on to the fire, then brushed off his hands. 'Tell me, what do you see when you look into the faces of those girls? Those prostitutes you don't sleep with enough.'

  Caffery frowned. He had to pick up his tobacco pouch and roll a cigarette before he answered. 'I don't look,' he said, lighting it. 'I try not to see. I mean, whatever happens, I don't want to see my own reflection.'

  'Yes – because if you see it do you know what you're really seeing?'

  'No.'