The Raft: A Novel

A tree in the clouds

Remember Jack Turning—

Ifell out of my dream.

It took me a while to figure out where I was, where I had fallen asleep. It was the familiar scratch of sand beneath my clothing that first became apparent.

The beach.

I sat up and looked towards the sun. It was sinking into the ocean, layering the sky in uneven smears of purple, yellow and red. The day was ending and I’d already spent most of it asleep, which meant I’d spend most of the night awake. Again.

Do you know about the alp?

The deep voice belonged to the large and swarthy man sitting beside me. Ropes of sun-bleached dreadlocks lay slung over his shoulders and down to the small of his back. His name was Gideon and he was as much of a friend as I could claim to have had in that peculiar place. Still, I knew so little about him—where he’d been born, where he had originally lived, or what it was that he loved in this world. I didn’t even know his last name. All I knew was that he had been taken to the beach as I had, all those years ago, and that, like all of us there, he was a far and unconquerable distance from where he truly wished to be.

Through his hair, one eye glistened back at me, the mossy green of pond water. He slid his feet into the sand in front of him and wrapped his arms around his knees.

No, I replied. I dusted the sand off my shoulder, trying to seem unaffected. I wondered how long he’d been sitting there, watching me sleep. I wondered if I’d said something I perhaps shouldn’t have.

It’s a creature, he said, that sits on the chest of someone who dreams. It squeezes all the breath out of the body. There was such a thing on your chest while you slept.

I wouldn’t know, I said.

Well, maybe you know this story, he went on. There was once a cabinetmaker who lived in a place called Bühl. Have you ever heard of this place?

I shook my head.

At night he’d sleep in a bed in his workshop. Around midnight, something would crawl onto his chest and sit on him until he could hardly breathe. After several nights of this, he discussed the matter with a friend. The friend advised him to stay awake in order to catch this märt. So he did. The following night he lay awake in bed, waiting, and as the clock struck twelve, saw a cat slip into his room through a hole in the wall. The cabinetmaker quickly blocked the hole. He caught the cat and nailed one of its paws to the floor. Then he went back to sleep. In the morning he found a beautiful woman sitting where the cat had been. She was naked and one of her hands was nailed to the floorboards. He was so taken by this woman that he decided to marry her. Many years later, after they’d already had three children, he returned with her to his workshop. He pointed to the blocked hole in the wall and said, ‘My darling, my love, mother of my children, it was from here that you came into my life.’ He bent down and opened the hole to show her. And as soon as that hole was opened, the woman changed back into a cat, ran out through the hole, and was never seen again.

I didn’t have a dream.

Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t, but there was a märt, my friend. Anyway, it is okay to talk about our dreams. I think it’s a good thing.

He spoke with such authority that, for a moment, I believed him. I believed it was fine, regardless of what we had so frequently been told.

No one can stop you from dreaming, Mr. Kayle. But go on. Let us dream and hide our dreams from each other as we’ve been told. It is ironic, yes?

What is?

Squatting on his haunches, he dusted his large dry hands together. His hair rolled over his shoulders as he swivelled in his spot towards me. The dreadlocks on the right of his head blazed; to the left his face was caged in twisted bars of shadow.

They wish us to keep our dreams a secret from each other, to keep them trapped inside us, when it really only makes us dream more. They are making sly, beautiful women of our cats, no?

Gideon stood and turned his gaze to the shifting ocean. I stared up at his broad and towering form. There were very few people on the beach as large as Gideon, even fewer with the capacity to command the respect that he could, in his own quiet way.

Strange days, he murmured under his breath, possibly only to himself. He used his foot to smooth out the print his body had left in the sand, as if in denial of ever having sat beside me, and began to walk away. Mr. Kayle, he added, looking back over his shoulder, the märt on your chest. I’ve seen it before. Stealing your breath in your sleep. For now, know that it is getting bigger, my friend.

At that, he set off along the white sand towards the group of communers at the end of the beach.

They were going about their usual business, dancing around their colossal fires, yelling their prayers, invoking their stars. Whether they were finding the answers to the questions in each of their steps and mantras, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t even sure that was the point. Perhaps I had missed something. Perhaps it didn’t matter whether they ever truly understood this broken world, only that they considered themselves privileged enough to be seekers within it. For some that may have been enough.

A warm wind whispered in my ear then slipped away, gesturing me to follow it to some secret place. I got to my feet and trudged up the dune towards the road. Ahead, a rusted signboard read WELCOME WELKOM BETTYSBAAI. Over time, the wind and the rain had faded its colours and eaten into its metal surface. It creaked and teetered from a pole, each geometric letter glaring like the vacant eye of a dead god, a fallen Argus without sway over a nameless world.

The sun had already been swallowed whole and night was draped over the land. The large bonfires along the shore licked the darkness between the silhouettes of anonymous men, women and children—strangers to each other, strangers to themselves–dancing and chanting the last rites for their left-behind lives.

Andy, is that you?

Dad!

There was a soft rap on the tarp of my tent.

My eyes adjusted to the dimness. Each of the objects in my small space solidified into hard tokens of reality. The crooked silhouette of a person quivered on the side of the tent. I climbed out of bed, opened the entrance, and was hit by the cool night air. Standing before me was a young girl, clenching a shabby teddy bear in her right hand, chewing on the nails of her left.

At first I thought the girl was my daughter, but realised such a visit would be impossible. My daughter was not here. Not on the beach. Not even in the world. My daughter was long dead and this was someone else’s child.

Did they send you? I asked as I stepped out. It was still dark but I had no idea for how much longer it would last. I could see the last ribbons of smoke rising from the dying fires in the distance and hear the crackle of enormous embers beneath the babble and murmur of the ocean. The singing and dancing had ended. Most of the communers were asleep.

Do you have a name? I asked. She shook her head. Does your bear? He’s scruffy.

I wondered how long she had been on the beach, how long it had been since she had seen her family. Did she even remember them, and did they still remember her? Not that it mattered. The longer she stayed, the sooner their faces would become little more than worthless apophenia: Jesus in a slice of burned toast, Mother Mary in a frosted window. She was on the beach and on the beach she would remain. She’d grow up. She’d assimilate. She’d receive her reports and be conditioned to commune. You could bet your life on it, if it were still your life to bet: we were all there to stay.

The girl turned and ran, vanishing into the blackness. I threw on a sweater, grabbed my shoes and made my way up the rickety wooden steps, half-sunken in the dunes and their dull tufts of fynbos shrubberies. I stepped off the sand of the beach, slipped on my shoes, and hiked the winding clay path ahead of me, guided only by the light from the lone white house on the hill.

What fraction of God’s powers would satisfy you?

The light of an overhead lamp beamed down on me as I sat in a lone chair in the centre of a stark, featureless room. The rough stone walls were white and bare and a wooden fan thopped uselessly above the interrogators’ table, accomplishing nothing more than the shifting of stale air.

The skin beneath the plugs attached to the sides of my head was beginning to itch. A myriad of white wires extended outwards from each plug. Each wire ran into the port of box-shaped machines tucked away in the shadows; each machine did its part to facilitate my examination. An enormous grey box to my left generated printed reports based on my physiological responses to their questions.

Could you repeat the question? I asked, my voice flat.

The questions were always strange and elusive—difficult to answer directly. The most recent one had come from a man with an old, croaky voice. Six others, faceless, indistinguishable, sat behind their table, taking notes in small dockets. The faint glow of the moonlight through the window outlined the silhouettes of their heads and the curves of their shoulders. One of them was wearing baffling headgear, a rigid, geometric, cage-like device.

God, he said again. What fraction of God’s powers would satisfy you?

No fraction, I replied automatically. I’d studied The Age of Self Primary so thoroughly I could extract the correct answer with little conscious effort. None of it. That, and the power of God, cannot be measured in acts.

I watched as the grey box spat reams of paper into a tray.

Explain, said a woman sitting at the opposite end of the table.

The concept of a theistic God is based on omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. God is infinite. Infinity cannot be portioned. There is no percentage that can be subtracted from infinity and redistributed.

What about numbers? another woman asked. Numbers are infinite and yet they can be … portioned, as you put it.

"Yes. The permutations of numbers are infinite but the numbers themselves are finite. There are only nine of them, excluding, of course, the representation of zero. Asking me what I could do with a fraction of God’s power would be like asking what I could do with the numbers one, two and three—without having access to the other six. Such thinking is paradoxical. Nihilistic. It would lead to chaos. And historically, it has."

A few heads nodded and a figure in the middle of the row jotted something down.

And what is your understanding of the power paradox? one of them asked.

Words left my mouth although I could barely remember what they meant. Those lines from the scripts flew out like a language merely recited phonetically—shards of jagged and transparent glass. Philosophies memorised, dead on arrival. I paused, my tongue swollen, my mouth dry. I longed for a glass of water, but there wouldn’t be a drop until I was done. They knew all too well: it was more difficult to deceive them under physical strain. Eventually I managed to speak again:

Man has always been unable to differentiate between true power and the trivial struggle to reposition himself within a predetermined framework. We have never known true power. We have never come close. True power cannot be based on hierarchy because the simple act of positioning oneself above another will always rely on the positioning of those below. True power doesn’t rely on such a symbiosis. It doesn’t need it. True power is absolute.

I paused and licked my lips. But Man was obsessed with finding the answers to his questions without considering the possibility that it was the questions he posed, in fact, that were incorrect. This presented a problem.

How?

Plotinus was correct when he stated God could not be reached intellectually.

And in that regard, what is it we’re attempting to accomplish today, with The Renascence? the old man asked.

To deconstruct the questions, find the flaws in them and then disown them—to exist within the answer itself, free from the inanity of our primitive curiosities and hierarchies.

A third woman: And what of natural selection? Isn’t life itself based on the survival of the fittest? On hierarchy?

Yes, but natural selection is only the first stage. Evolution demands more. In the end, we will not need to be the fittest, for competition itself will cease to exist for us. Subsequently, we will neither disown nor denounce the remaining organisms with which we share the planet. We will simply exist in a state of being of which they will have no concept and to which they will have no access, on an alternate stream of time, within the one true reality.

There was a moment’s silence before they all nodded in agreement.

Straight out of the scripts. Almost word for word. You’re very impressive, the man with the headgear said. He scrawled on his paper. You are academically gifted but you are still … questioning. That is your weakness. Added to which, we’re not entirely convinced that you have surrendered yourself to the truth. We’re not sure you believe in it. A pause. Even if you can recite it.

The machine whirred again and printed out the latest results on me.

Tell us something. Another man spoke for the first time. His voice was the most calculating of them all, and the driest, as if he’d never once in his life expressed any sentiment of joy. Have you been dreaming?

Yes.

Of what?

I paused to consider my response, even though the machine was already churning out my true response in numbers and graphs.

My son, I replied. Andy …

Tell us about your dream.

This was always the most difficult part of the test. No scripts to call upon. No quick answers. My dreams were all I had, all that was left of me, and soon they’d be handed over to The Body, just like everything else.

One of them tapped a pen on the table, impatient for my response.

I’m walking in a beautiful forest, I said, squinting from one shadowy face to the next, doing my best to sound neutral. That’s how it starts. How it always starts. There are many tall trees, but I see one in particular in the centre of the forest, enormous in width and height. It’s taller than the rest. This tree extends far beyond the canopy of the forest. Its trunk disappears into the thick white clouds above. At my feet, a red shoe is lying in the dirt. It’s a child’s shoe. I recognise it as my son’s, then look up and realise he may have dropped it while climbing that tree.

How do you feel at this point in your dream?

My emotions?

Yes.

Excited. Hopeful.

Go on.

The grey box rumbled and spat. The moon had moved beyond the glass doors behind the seated examiners, leaving the room in a disquieting dimness.

I decide to climb the tree, thinking he is at the very top of it, perhaps sitting on a branch up in the clouds. To my surprise the tree is easy to climb even though there are no branches at the base of it and the trunk is perfectly cylindrical, too wide for me to wrap my arms around. My hands and feet clasp firmly on to the bark as I ascend. I continue climbing. As I enter the foliage of the surrounding trees, I notice children sitting in the higher branches—children of differing ages. I do not recognise any of them. They ask me if I am their father and I tell them I’m sorry, no, I’m not. And then I continue. Eventually, I exit through the top of the trees and am able to see the landscape in all directions. The trees go on forever, a boundless plateau. There is no curve on the horizon. It is flat and it is infinite, and I continue climbing.

How do you feel at this point?

Nervous. The height begins to worry me. My hands and feet aren’t gripping as firmly as they once did. My confidence begins to … lessen.

Do you give up?

No, I continue.

Go on.

I look down. I feel dizzy. I tilt my head and can see I’m about to enter the clouds. The branches and foliage above me are barely visible now, but at least I know how far I have to go. I press on. Soon, I’m in it, surrounded by cloud. I call my son’s name but there’s no response. I climb some more. Call some more. Nothing.

How do you feel at this point? a voice shot out.

Disappointed. Desperate.

Go on.

For a while I sit on a branch. I sit there … by myself, at the highest point of the world. Above, the sun is beaming through the clouds, but as time passes, whatever it is that beams through feels less like the beam of a sun and more like the glare of a giant eye. The shape of it becomes clearer. It’s an orb. A planetary orb hanging in the sky. It speaks to me. It has a voice, and the voice it uses is my own and at the same time not my own. The voice is calming. It tells me I will not find my son there. And then it mentions a name.

Whose name?

Jack Turning. The voice repeats the name over and over again. It tells me to remember Jack Turning, but I don’t. I can’t.

Do you know this name?

"No. I don’t. At least, I don’t think I do. The orb continues to tell me things. A feeling of hopelessness comes over me. I’ll never see my son again, I think. Perhaps it wasn’t his red shoe. I’m spent. I have nothing left. I give up. I lean backwards and fall through the clouds."

Your feelings?

I have no fear. I know it will all be over soon. I’ll hit the ground and it’ll be over. But then, suddenly, I see him. Andy. He’s there. He was on the tree trunk the entire time, climbing up after me. I’m slowing as I fall. I have time to turn to him and call his name … and he turns … and he looks me in the eye. But it’s too late. I pass him and my speed builds … the ground rushes towards me before … I wake up.

For a moment, I was no longer in the room. I could hear the voice of the orb. I could feel the fall and hear the wind. I could see Andy’s face, his bright green eyes in his young, unblemished face. I was filled with guilt and the anguish of falling from him as my hands clawed madly at rushing air, watching the distance grow as the tree shot up into the sky above.

And what do you feel when you wake up?

Guilt, I replied in my forced monotone, aware of how I’d failed to seem impartial. Despair.

Well, the woman said. For the moment, do not concern yourself. We’ll give you something to help you.

The man with the metal contraption rose from his seat and walked to me. He held out his hand and it fell into the single beam of yellow light. He was holding a small plastic bag filled with dark, dried and crushed red leaves.

It’s a temporary solution, until you’ve adjusted to your new state. Have a few leaves before bed. Wash it all down with water, he said.

I reached up slowly and took the bag from him.

They’ll prevent you having dreams.

I stared at the bag of leaves I’d been told would wipe away the orb, Jack Turning, the clouds, and my son’s face in a few daily gulps. Then I nodded up at him.

I had to remind myself, The Renascence would see the transcendence of Man. The age of truth after the age of lies, and we’d been assured we’d never go back. Not to the way things were. Not to the way we had been for all those years, roaming like stray animals on some long dark night of fear and avarice. No, The Renascence would inaugurate the future of our existence, and the future was glowing bright.

Thank you, I said, and wrapped the bag in my fist.

Walking back from the white house, I felt the biting cold that signified the final few minutes before sunrise. I hurried down the path towards my tent. The large blue moon rippled on the surface of the flat ocean. The stars peered down from their posts, waiting to see what I’d do next.

I grabbed the bag of red leaves from my pocket and looked at it. Then I opened the bag and tipped them all out. Each leaf was whisked upwards and carried away by a breeze, flecks in the blue light of the moon, like the ashes of all the dreams they had been prepared to extinguish. I watched until every ort disappeared into the night. Then I unzipped my tent and went inside to sleep.

Moneta asks two favours

The heat of the day had already begun to fill the tent. I sat on the edge of my bed, curling my feet and cracking my toes. My body felt tighter and heavier than it had the night before, probably from the lack of sleep.

I finally forced myself to stand and the bed creaked, the mattress popping back into shape. I looked around my confined space. Each small object and ornament sat in its rightful place: a shelf of tattered books and a stack of unfinished drawings beside a broken mug of pencils. There was a small chest of drawers containing a few items of clothing. A red umbrella with missing spokes leaned like an ageing charmer. Beside it, a shoebox of clippings from National Geographic magazines recovered from the cabin of a boat wreck. There was also a glass jar filled with coins, a set of broken headphones, and a rusty old army knife that wouldn’t close anymore …

(The Renascence is not a law, Kayle. It’s a choice. A collective choice, isn’t it? A choice we make together. Material hoarding was resigned to the Age of Self, whether or not the people of different periods were able to see it for themselves. The secular people of the technological period prided themselves in having little in common with the henotheistic people of Ancient Egypt—with their ideas of an afterlife and their pantheon of gods—and yet both seemed intent to die in mounds of their possessions. Don’t you see the hypocrisy in that kind of behaviour? Rest assured though, Kayle: in The Renascence, when we die, we’ll leave nothing behind)

I ducked my head and stepped outside. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright light as I sauntered through the narrow spaces between the tents, passing familiar faces as they went about their morning chores. A large woman dunked her clothing in an old bucket. She churned the dirt out of a soapy shirt, her bronze arms pumping like the rhythmic shafts of an engine. There was the smell of jasmine, sawdust and spices in the air, and steam rose from tinny pots warbling over gas burners.

As I left the commune of tents and stepped out onto the beach, the sea breeze nibbled at my legs and arms like inquisitive, invisible creatures. I shaded my eyes with my hand; the sun was high enough for it to be midday. The sand beneath me was already hot between my toes and, at the far end, the faint shimmer of a heat mirage weaved like a chorus of ghosts.

I walked along the water’s edge with my pants rolled to my knees. I crouched and cupped the water in my hands to dab the back of my neck. Seagulls hovered and cried above me, chasing each other between the rays of the sun. At the end of the beach a group of people stood huddled like the Moai statues left by the inhabitants of an expired empire, gazing forever out over the ocean. It would have been an odd sight had I not already known the object of their fascination: they were watching the rafts.

I could just about make out the floating rafts bobbing over the small waves.

I counted three of them.

Each raft had been attached to the pier by a length of rope. The offenders had been tied down at the wrists and ankles, forced to stare only at the sky while they thought about their offences. Pumped full of hallucinogens and bared to the heavens, forced to wait until the universe dripped itself in, filling each with a sense of purpose, realigning them with The Renascence.

Although I knew nothing of the men on the rafts that day, a rumour had spread of their having vandalised the white house two mornings earlier. They’d scrawled defamatory comments on the walls in mud, but I hadn’t seen the words for myself. By the time I’d awoken, the evidence had been removed. Their sentence was delivered with no deliberation. No prolonged trial. No testimonies. A direct and unchallenged judgement by the one dictatorial panel of voices that oversaw us: Guilty—Separation by the Raft.

Offenders could drift for as long as three days before being pulled back to shore. No food. No water. Pounded by the wind and the waves. Frozen in the cold or burned in the sun. Sometimes the icy rain fell so hard it must have felt like hot iron shot on their exposed faces. And while the rest of us could scarcely imagine such a battering, we sensed it was the stillness of a quiet night that affected them most. We’d heard about it. Watched them raptly. Wondered.

Kayle.

Surprised, I turned.

It was Moneta, standing a few feet behind me. She was an elderly woman with ash-grey hair tucked behind a green plastic peak. Her overalls were grass-stained, the tips of her fingers browned by soil.

I wonder if you wouldn’t give me a hand, she said.

Moneta needed me to move bags of fertiliser and fill pots, and I followed her to the botanical garden, a glass dome set back from the beach. The dome housed countless varieties of flowers, herbs, vegetables and small trees. I’d often seen children assist with the pruning, picking, planting and cleaning, but only Moneta knew how to make her autotrophic friends truly bloom into silent wonders.

As I entered the dome, I was hit by a flurry of scents: the perfumes of the brightly coloured flowers, the wetness of loamy soil. The air was thick with humidity, which probably kept Moneta’s skin as supple as a much younger woman’s. That, and her lifestyle: one of calm and commitment.

She explained where the bags of compost and the enormous clay pots needed to be moved to, and I hauled and dragged her heavy pots and filled a large empty wooden crate with soil and fertiliser. Once I was finished, I stepped outside to wash my hands in a bucket of water. I lifted my face to the sun. It slipped behind a single cloud—throwing grey on everything—and I continued to stare until it returned to blind me. I dried my hands on my pants and walked back inside.

Oolong tea? Moneta asked as I entered. She was sitting at a small wrought-iron table. She had prepared a pot of tea and two china cups, each overturned on a daintily patterned saucer.

Yes, please, I said.

Well, have a seat then.

She poured each of us a cup of tea. I lifted the cup to take my first sip, my thick finger squeezing through the narrow handle. We sat quietly for a while, and the silence didn’t seem to bother her. There was little deemed appropriate to talk about anyway.

They gave me a hard time in the beginning, she said. You know, with my garden.

I nodded. I was sure they had.

"It took me a while to explain that my garden would not be a possession of any sort. I have no interest in owning these plants as things, you see."

I see.

She looked to the side as she spoke, and I felt as if I could have been anyone, really—any willing ear. Finally, she turned to me.

Thank you for helping, she said.

It’s my pleasure, I replied.

She smiled and sipped her tea. She surveyed her garden—the ferns, flowers, vines and vegetables—like a parent keeping an eye on her children in the park.

Let me tell you a story, she said. Would you indulge an old woman and her story?

I shifted uncomfortably. Moneta and I had hardly said a word to each other before that moment. We’d greeted each other on occasion and I had assisted her once or twice before, but we were far from what one might consider close. What kind of story?

A story I need to tell. To someone else and to myself, one last time.

I looked through the glass wall and saw the others on the beach. They seemed far enough away and I was almost certain the two of us were alone.

Okay, I said.

I hope you will entertain my story. It may be a bit long. I imagine it will be. But I must tell it the way I want or I will not want to tell it at all.

All right.

She lifted her cup and watched me carefully as she sipped. Then she smiled.

Thank you, she said. I’m not sure you know how much this will mean to me, but it does, it will, and I thank you. I’ll make us another pot.

The man in the woods

Iwas born in the middle of the last century, and I suppose that makes me—oh, I don’t know—a hundred-and-some-odd years old. I’m not really sure anymore. I never thought I’d get to this age, or that I’d get here feeling the way I do. But life, I’ve learned, is like a cat that comes and goes as it pleases, making you think you own it when it is only in its best interest that you believe so.

When I was twenty years old, I thought I was an adult. At thirty, I thought I was somewhere in the middle of my life. Forty, I knew it all. At fifty, I cared less, but only because I assumed the majority of my life was behind me.

Ha! Well, you can understand where this is going.

At fifty, I wasn’t even halfway through it, and yet I’d anchored myself with my preconceptions. Given each little moment and event its weight, only to find that most of my experiences were not anchors. They were balloons, floating up to the sky as the years breezed by, out of my reach.

I rarely understood where I was in my life. When I married at the age of twenty-two, I believed married life was my destiny, for then I believed there was such a thing. When I had my first child, I thought he would be my entire reason for being. And for a time, both he and my husband were, and would have continued to be, had death not robbed me of them both. My husband was killed in a road accident seventy or so years ago and my child was taken by cancer twenty years later. I never had grandchildren. I never remarried. I have no family. My younger sister passed away about forty years ago in her sleep, of old age, I’ve been told.

And yet, I am here. Alive.

What has it all been about, the whole silly business of my life? I can honestly not tell you.

Funny, isn’t it?

But none of this concerns me. And neither, I suspect, does it concern a young man like you.

No, what I want is to tell you one story.

Only one.

Of all my balloons, this is the only one I hold on to. The rest are floating, up in the sky. It is the only story I can recall with absolute clarity. I cannot tell you what it means, but that doesn’t concern me. All that matters is that it’s the clearest memory in my head, and for that reason alone, I wish to tell it.

I was raised in a small town; at the time it was called Tsitsikamma. In the language of the Khoi-San people this meant place of water. It sat near the coast, an incredibly woodsy place. That’s what I remember most: rolling hills blanketed in dense forest. The ground was covered in moss and chips of bark. The air smelled of damp and tree sap. One large highway weaved through it, but you’d never know until you were standing right on it; the woods swallowed that highway right up. Even the sound of passing trucks and cars couldn’t make it too far beyond the edge of the woods, certainly not as far as our cabin.

Before Tsitsikamma, we lived in a town called Kroonstad. My father was the manager of a factory that made cardboard boxes and my mother stayed at home to take care of me. I don’t recall much of Kroonstad, but I do remember the many boxes my father brought home. There wasn’t much money to spare, so boxes were often the best my father could provide as gifts, and I rarely complained. I kept myself occupied building fortresses, robots and motor vehicles. Other times I played marbles with myself at the bottom of an enormous and empty bowl-shaped swimming pool in the middle of the housing commune.

I kept out of trouble with my parents most of the time, except for when I brought some injured animal into the house without permission. Once I even managed to hide a few bats in a box, until my mother tipped it over while cleaning. Needless to say, bats were not her favourite of my friends, and she ended up running around the house with a broomstick, trying to shoo a pair of disorientated fruit bats from the corner of our ceiling, cursing and scolding me as she did.

I look upon my time in Kroonstad with reasonable fondness. But when the box factory went under, my father lost his job and we were forced to move. As a child, I questioned little: I simply packed my things, hopped in the back of our old car, and was driven out of Kroonstad to my new home in the thick, dark and marvellous woods of Tsitsikamma.

Our new house turned out to be nothing like our old one. Instead of the flat, concrete commune in Kroonstad, where most of our neighbours were large women with rollers in their hair who leaned over the fences chain-smoking, our house in Tsitsikamma was a log cabin in a deep forest clearing, where the neighbours were large birds and bugs who chirped and clicked from the trees and the bushes.

The house itself was not really a house but a lodge for tourists and travellers. My father hadn’t bought the business; it belonged to his older brother. He’d offered my father a position as manager of the lodge, as well as a couple of rooms for us to use while my father worked there. I was a small child at the time, so it is difficult to say in all honesty that it was an enormous house, but at the time it certainly seemed so. There were six rooms, each with four or five bunk beds. Three small rooms with double beds. There was a communal room with a bar and a pool table below a big poster of a man sitting in a red Cadillac. The communal kitchen was full of tinny old pots on the walls and a ceramic rooster that perched on top of the fridge. Behind the lodge there was a large outside area where guests could sit on hollowed-out logs and braai meat on open fires, talking and singing into the early hours of the morning. The place was rarely ever full, but the backpackers and vacationers trickled in and out steadily over the course of the first spring we were there.

Most of them were young men and women who needed an easy and affordable place to rest en route to somewhere else. Sometimes they’d arrive wishing to spend a night and would only leave after three days. Sometimes they’d book a room for three nights but leave on their first morning. All sorts arrived but we had no real trouble. My mother and father argued a few times in the first couple of weeks, mostly about money, I suppose, but that didn’t last long.

After a time everything settled down as each of us explored some fresh and exciting aspect of this new life. My father had found a guitar stashed in a storage shed and was suddenly strumming old tunes around the fire at night, entertaining guests when the vibe was right. My mother took up painting, but spent most of her time taking care of my new sister, Carly. And I soon learned there was far more to do than play with cardboard boxes, marbles, and even bats. The woods, stretching on in all directions, were a treasure trove of curiosities. And I, a reckless and uninhibited explorer, planned on discovering each and every last one of them.

Over time, I grew used to the endless trees, the untidy forest floor, and the inquisitive looks and nods from the local wildlife. It had been my father’s idea for me to keep a notebook to write down whatever I saw and heard in the woods, and I adopted his advice with great zeal. Armed with my pencil and my notebook, I would wake up early and take a stroll, exploring and documenting all the woods had to offer. Every morning I went deeper in, sought out some new route, and found a perfect spot to lie in the shade and chew on the end of a pine needle.

Beyond the woods were more woods. I never came across anyone else on my rambles. I was told that the woods ended in a cliff-face drop into the raging ocean, but I had never seen it for myself. After the first few weeks of going out as far as I could, I assumed the edge of the cliff was a great deal further than I could ever walk and so there was no need to worry about it.

When I left the lodge I would always start at the same point—a path that led from our tiny car lot—but as soon as I was beyond the range of my mother’s kitchen window, I would divert left or right. Most of the time, it felt as if the woods led me, they set my path, and in that way I came to trust them, since the woods rarely led me to trouble.

Rarely, but … No, I cannot say never.

On one especially hot summer morning, I left the lodging with nothing but my notebook, a pencil and a banana, and began one of my regular walks. I turned off the path and headed down a leaf-laden slope. I grabbed a rough tree trunk and slung myself to the next trunk, and then the next one, and the next. I continued, light on the balls of my feet, all the way down. I looked up. Birds. Their silhouettes could have been mistaken for leaves were it not for their nimble darting from branch to branch.

In the woods there were all sorts of birds.

A book from the library had a picture of each of them, and I always made sure to keep an eye out. I had seen Knysna loeries, emerald cuckoos, olive woodpeckers and even a couple