Martin Hatchuel, Author

New Story: Water
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Kurt Vonnegut Rocks
Shit! He managed to distil writing into a few sublime seconds. Check out this YoutTube Vid .... [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyQ1wEBx1V0[/youtube]

The Vampire of Steynsburg Pass
The Vampire of Steynsburg Pass Martin Hatchuel - martin@barefootlients.co.za Who knows where this one came from? But I was glad we had garlic in the car... If you drive from Aliwal North to Burgersdorp and down to Henning, you’ll come to a T-junction with the Molteno - Steynsburg Road; and here if you turn right you’ll come, eventually, to the Steynsburg Pass. It’s a lovely road that winds down and into the little town at the foot of the Skuurberg, with sweeping views across the Eastern Cape to the south. And when you reach the town of Steynsburg itself you’ll find it a peaceful country place, and I hope that, like we were, you’ll be met with nothing but the greatest warmth and hospitality. But if, instead, you’re met with a frightened silence, you should know that the townspeople’s façade of rural friendliness hides a terrible but entirely understandable fear of strangers. This isn’t xenophobia. It’s much deeper than that. And so I must warn you that the Steynsburg Pass faces, at certain times of the year, directly into the setting sun: you must therefore take extra care to avoid driving there on cloudless late summer afternoons, when the blinding rays of the sunset will distract you and play tricks with you and create the illusion of a road that runs straight and true. And, my friend, if the worst should happen and you do lose control of your car - well, then I must ask you to please - please - do everything possible to avoid contact with the first paramedic who appears on the scene. Especially if he appears before the arrival of the ambulances... If you’re to understand these warnings completely, you must know that, although they may sound like the stuff of comic books and B-movies, there are certain things about Vampires which are entirely true. Things like their abhorrence of garlic and mirrors and the fact that they are entirely unable to face the sun - all of which they despise because they are affirmations of the living, mortal world. And you must also not take comfort from the belief that you are protected by your crucifix, or that you can kill a Vampire by driving a stake through his - or her - heart. For the undead are cursed to live forever, and even if they long for it, they can never find eternal rest - which is why the trappings of heaven and hell hold no sway over them. So hardened are they by the curse under which they live that almost nothing can touch the emotions of the undead. Almost nothing - because if a Vampire once knew great love (and this would have been before his conversion to the undead), that love will last forever, but in a form that is bitter and lingering. And if he was once possessed of great talent - an artist, a writer, a musician, or a dancer - he will practice his talent into eternity, trying powerlessly to recapture the passion which had once made him feel more alive than anything he had ever known. The Vampire of Steynsburg Pass is one of these especially tortured individuals; because, as a living person he was - and indeed, by reputation still is - hailed as the greatest of South Africa’s landscape painters (art dealers will tell you that, since the mysterious turn-of-the-century disappearance of Jan-Vincent Kemp, the value of his work has soared. They will add that the most sought-after of his paintings - and therefore the most valuable - are exquisitely coloured works characterised by an enigmatic sense of strength which captures the very spirit of the sun as it sets over the mountains of the Eastern Cape). It’s seminal to the incidents I am about to relate that Vampires are able to transform their appearance at will, and that they can, after sunset, assume the appearance of any human being of their choice (and herein lies another warning - beware those who seek to do good works in the hours of darkness: the kindly parish priest or the much-loved community leader may be other than he seems...). You must also know that the retina of the person who is about to die retains the image of the last beautiful thing that he or she sees. This is one way in which the body tries to protect itself from the horror of violent death. So it follows that a man who dies in a terrorist attack on a shopping mall will retain the image of the beautiful woman who was walking towards him in the instant before the explosion; and that the accident victim on Steynsburg Pass will retain the image of that same dramatic sunset which caused her mortal agony. And, finally, I’m sure that you know that Vampires feed irregularly, and that after feeding they will often - and especially if human blood is in irregular supply - enter into a kind of hibernation, which comfortable state is, for them, the closest they can ever come to the experience of bliss. But the Vampire’s sleep is a shallow one, and each has his own trigger to wakefulness. For the Vampire of Steynsburg Pass, that trigger is the motor accident. And if an accident should happen at sunset, the Vampire will rise from his coffin deep in his secret cave under the Skuurberg Mountains just as the screams of tortured tyres mingle with the screams of tortured passengers. And transforming his dress into that of an experienced ambulance man, he will transport himself to the scene of the accident and, at the very moment when the last rays of the sun have disappeared from the sky, begin ministering to the victims. Like every trained first-aider, he is adept at stabilising bleeding - although his reasons are far from altruistic. Because, like every Vampire, he cannot drink blood that has been spilled on the ground, nor can he take it from the dead: his blood must be alive when he drinks it, his victims entirely aware of what he is doing to them. And for the Vampire of Steynsburg Pass there is another, almost equally compelling reason to keep the victims alive: his need to draw is almost as great as his need for blood. His need, particularly, to draw the sunsets which he cannot bring himself to witness in person. So, having made sure that the survivors of the crash will live for as long as he desires, he can now - with the aid of one of those innocent looking torches with which your doctor will peer into your eyes and throat at almost every physical examination - quickly sketch the impression that remains preserved in the eyes of his victims. And then, in the hope that this time he may have the material he needs for completing just one more painting at least equal in power to that of the works he produced when he was alive, he will lean forward and gently, and with infinite tenderness, sink his incisors into the neck of his prey; and thus will he inject his venomous saliva into the bloodstream and so paralyse the body before he feasts on its warm, sweet-smelling blood. And if time allows, he may sketch a portrait of his victim’s face before making one final gesture to ensure that his presence remains unknown to the living whose lives - and, more importantly, whose deaths - he so completely despises: he will take a shard of broken glass from the ground and slash across the neck to remove his teeth marks from the soft and yielding flesh. And with the wail of approaching ambulances, he will withdraw into the darkness of his cave to work - trying and trying to capture that essence, that spirit, that sense of place which is cruelly and forever denied him. * * * And now we come to the events of the night of Sunday, April -. It was a typical late summer accident on Steynsburg Pass. Four friends had visited in Molteno for the afternoon and, on their return and unaware that most accidents on this Pass take place in the dying minutes of the day, but nevertheless keen to get home before dark, the driver had been going too fast; and worse - he’d sped up when he thought the road was straight, so that it was only in the very final moment that he saw that, in fact, the road took a sharp turn to the right. The tyres screamed against the tar and then against the gravel on the edge of the road, and the passengers, flung forward by the action of the breaks, cried briefly, too, until they were silenced by the force of the car hitting the little stone wall which runs alongside the road and defines the cliff-top. Without safety belts, everyone was flung around the interior of the vehicle as it plunged and tumbled down. And when it came to a halt in a little crease in the mountain, all but one of its occupants were very close to dead. The girl had been flung from the car as it cartwheeled, and had landed on her back in a bed of soft mud formed by recent summer rains. When the ambulance man found her, she thought he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She had been bleeding from wounds to her leg and arms, and he bandaged her and spoke softly to her, and as he worked she told him that she loved him. “Shh, shh. You’ve been hurt. Let’s concentrate on getting you better,” he said. And then he told her that, because she had fallen so far down the cliff, they must wait for climbing teams to arrive to lift her to the ambulances. “But I haven’t heard any ambulances yet,” she said. “I know. You’re lucky. I happened to be driving behind you when you crashed. I’ve called for help. The others will be here soon.” He was looking into her eyes with his little torch when she pleaded with him not to leave her. “I’m scared, I don’t want to be alone.” “Shh, shh. I won’t leave you here.” And he took a sketch pad from his pocket and a pencil and started to draw. “Look, he said. Here’s the sunset.” He flipped the page and began to draw a portrait; and when he showed it to her she laughed and teased. Soon she began to relax, but she suddenly gripped his arm, and cried “what about the others? You must go and look for the others.” The beautiful ambulance man, with his pale eyes, his shining black hair and skin as white as milk, had looked at her with the greatest sympathy. “You must be strong. I’m afraid there’s not much hope for them,” he said. “But you must go and look!” “All right, I will. But first I’m going to give you a shot to calm you.” And she felt herself drifting off. And as the haze descended she imagined that her wounds must be much more serious than she had thought - else why would he should chose to inject the sedative into her neck? * * * Rosemary woke in the little Provincial Hospital to find herself surrounded by her family. And as she opened her eyes her mother began to cry, falling on her bed and hugging her fiercely and stroking her hair. “Ma, Ma. Are the others OK?” “My poor darling!” cried her mother and her deep sobs told the younger woman all she needed to know. “Pa? Is it true? Pete? Mickey? Reynard?” Unable to speak, her father simply shook his head. She lay back against her pillows, stroking her mother’s back with her free hand. “You’ve been holding that picture ever since the ambulance men found you,” said her sister. “You wouldn’t even let them take it away from you in the operating theatre. They say that it was as if you had a death grip on the thing. “What is it? Please, let me see it?” “No!” cried Rosemary, hiding the paper tighter against her chest. And her sister, sensitive soul that she was, thought it best to let the subject go. She and ‘Mary had always been close and she knew that she would show her eventually. * * * At the inquest, the girl was asked to describe the accident, and at the end of her tale, and quite unbidden, she had said “he injected the sedative into my neck, your honour.” There was a moment’s pause before the coroner asked one of the ambulance men if this was normal procedure. “We might inject into the neck if the arteries of the arms or legs are unavailable to us - like if they’re hidden from us by the patient’s position - or if there are extremely severe injuries to the limbs.” “And were they, in this case?” “No, your honour. When we found her, the patient was unconscious. She had one jagged cut on the left side of her neck and minor abrasions to her legs and arms, but they had already stopped bleeding. “She was really lucky to be alive, but she had landed in a mud pool and we think this is what saved her.” The coroner turned again to Rosemary, and said, not unkindly, “you must be mistaken, miss. Perhaps the shock of the accident has played tricks on your mind?” But the girl was reluctant to let it go. “No, I am not mistaken! You are!” “Rosemary,” said the coroner, again with much kindness in his voice, “we’re here to determine the cause of your friends’ deaths, and the conduct of the ambulance men would only be important if we believed that they were implicated in them.” The coroner could see the tears that had come to Rosemary’s eyes. “But I want to see him again,” she said. “Who, Rosemary? Who do you want to see again?” “The beautiful ambulance man who helped me before the others arrived.” “I don’t think I understand.” “This ambulance man helped me. He said that he had called for help. I want to see him again. Why isn’t he here?” The coroner consulted his notes before asking who had reported the accident. “It was Jan Bergen who farms at which Mooiplaas, your honour,” said the ambulance chief. “No, it was him!” cried the girl. And now the coroner became stern. “I think that is enough. Rosemary, you were unconscious when you were found, and the concussion must have played tricks with your memory. Thank you for your time. “Now. I need to know if the ambulance crew noticed anything unusual about the bodies of the deceased.” “We did, your honour,” said the chief. “Two things. They all seemed to have lost almost all of their blood, and they all had jagged cuts on the left sides of their necks.” “In what way is this unusual?” “Just that the injuries were all so similar, your honour. But the loss of blood probably had to do with the cuts on their necks.” “Is this inconsistent with this kind of accident?” “No, sir.” At this point, the coroner had been tempted to return a verdict of death by accident, but two things worried him: the first was simple - there was something about the way the girl was behaving that was unusual. But the second - well, he couldn’t put his finger on the second problem, but he knew that he was uneasy. And so he decided that further investigation was necessary. He asked for a second reading of the medical reports, and there it was - the excessive loss of blood. “Was there evidence of massive bleeding?” he asked. “Yes sir,” said the medical examiner who had conducted the post-mortems. “The bodies contained very little blood.” “I am aware of that, Doctor. But what I mean is, was there an excessive amount of blood on the ground surrounding the bodies when first they were discovered?” It was the ambulance chief who realised what the coroner was alluding to, and who finally put the pieces together. “Your honour, you’re right. There was almost no blood on the ground and there was very little on the interior of the car.” The late summer heat made the silence in the court room all the more intense. “This isn’t the first time that this has happened, is it?” The ambulance man looked at his colleagues, the question silent on his lips. “No, your honour,” said one of the juniors. “It was like that at that accident last March.” “And remember the one where we found that little girl...?” said another. The records were called for, and examined, and every one of them showed that the victims had died with almost no blood in their veins; and that there was very little blood on the scene. And, it was noted, that every single one of the victims displayed jagged lacerations to the left side of the neck. The long silence was heightened by the monotonous and far away calling of a turtle dove. The windows had been thrown wide in search of even the slightest of cooling breezes, but the court had been sitting for hours, and the air in the room had remained still and now it was stale and sour. And yet the heat turned immediately to ice when the coroner delivered his verdict “I have no alternative but to find that death was caused, in all three cases, by Vampirism.” When the clamour in the court room had finally been brought under his control, he turned to the girl once more. “Miss,” he said, “I have to conclude that you have been inordinately lucky. I have no doubt that the man you saw - and the man who draw those pictures - was a Vampire, one of the undead, and that, for some reason known only to himself, he spared you a fate worse than death. “Perhaps it would be best if you tried to forget what happened altogether. “For the rest, we can only pray that the good Lord will remove this terrible apparition from our midst.” * * * Mariek laughed when I finished this story. “Prove it,” she said. And so I took her along to the little village museum, and I asked to see the curator, who turned out to be a woman of no more than about twenty eight. And we spent a fascinating hour looking at the collections with her; and I saw that she liked Mariekie’s company, so that I became bold enough to ask if she would show us the portrait that was supposed to have been drawn by the Steynsburg Vampire. She was shy and reluctant at first, but our obvious interest must have won her over. “Why would you want to see that?” asked the curator I made up a story about having had a near accident on the Steynsburg Pass as the sun was setting last evening, and this must have been reason enough for her. “It’s in my quarters,” she had said, and she slipped through a door behind the museum. I noticed that Mariek was becoming uncomfortable, but I said nothing, for I was petrified and knew that my voice would shake if I spoke. When the curator returned at last, she was holding an old leather document wallet in both hands - a beautifully tooled piece with all the patina of many year’s use and care. It contained just one sheet of the most extraordinary paper I have ever seen: it looked quite new, and I could see that it was tough and very strong - but it felt light and almost as if it wasn’t there when I held it between my fingers. Mariek refused to touch it. I put it back in its wallet and we fled as quickly as we could, forgetting our manners and leaving without thanking or even greeting the sweet young curator of the Steynsburg Museum. We drove for some minutes before she said “Martin, what did you see when you looked at the picture?” She knew that I was angry. Hadn’t she seen it, too? “It was a portrait of me,” I said, sulkily. “The little fraud went into the back and drew a picture of me. With a stupid grin on my face with long teeth like a Vampire.” “No, Martin,” she said, very quietly. “It was a portrait of me.”

SURFING ON MID-WINTER’S DAY
SURFING ON MID-WINTER’S DAY Martin Hatchuel P O Box 2690 Knysna 6570 martin@barefootclients.co.za 084 951 0574 044 384 1810

“But if you make it wacky”, said Judy, “it’ll be more fun.” She was chewing and talking and climbing onto my lap all at once, and, like a long-legged (very thin) stick insect settled herself there. I was babysitting. “I can’t make it wacky. It has to be serious. These peopl’re paying me to write this, and they want real facts and figures and stuff. And besides, you’re six. You can’t read.” “Why?” “Don’t know.” “But you have to know.” “Why?” “You’re big.” “Yes, but not grown up” “But your hair’s grey” “Gee thanks, Judy. You make me feel really old” “What do they want?” “The doctors? They want to know about how I was sick.” “Why?” “Coz they’re doctors. They want a record.” “What’s a record?” “Story of what happened.” “Were you sick with monks?” She meant mumps. “No. Sick in my head.” “Like crazy? Isn’t that wacky?” “Guess it is.” “Then you have to make it wacky, coz that’s what it is. You gonna read it to me?” “Maybe when it’s finished.” “Is that going to be before I go home?” “Perhaps....”

Once upon a time.... On your blackest night, throw a dark cloth veil over everything. Take some sleeping tablets and become drowsy, compliant, unmoving and very, very heavy. If you can feel worse than that, you’re depressed. It’s where I come from. Before it there is nothing, no reality, no dreaming. I wasn’t born, wasn’t brought up, didn’t graduate. The I that I am today, at thirty entered the night, not, as the poet required, raging against the dying of my light, but quietly accepting its coming, welcoming it in to eat away at my mind, to clear my memory of the past.  The I began then. By thirty-one I was a slave to the sadness. Moving through the world, but avoiding it and accepting the madness as myself. And at thirty-two, I was the madness. My reality shrank. Silence and darkness were my greatest friends, I wanted only them. I lay unmoving on my bed, undressed, my ears plugged against the sounds of the world, against the traffic of the day, against the music of the evening, even against the silence of the night. My own breathing was sound enough for me; its rhythm all I could bear. The light of the day was the greatest insult. I darkened my room to keep it away, as though it was the force that would drive me beyond myself, into that final abyss that the truly mad must explore until they die. Drawing the curtains, keeping the light at bay, was the last act of self-preservation that I had. There was no future, no tonight, no tomorrow. The acid dripping through me left only a shell of sorrow. Nor could I mourn myself: I had no reason to die, just as I had no reason to live. The madness was limbo, and limbo became what I deserved. I knew that I was living at my level and was the result of my worth. Madness proved it so. I was the bottom, the stinking arse of humanity, and I was gathering the reward for that. This removed my will. I did what I was told by those few people who were left me, those few that stayed behind though they had no idea that I had gone. Bathed when I was told, ate when I was given, did all the things of life, slowly like an unresponsive child. I came to see that death was my only reason for life, and like I craved the darkness and silence of my entombed room, I began to crave the silence of death. But even this one thing that I wanted, this only thing, refused me. My leaden, slowed-down limbs would not move to bring it closer, to help it in. At times I would rage, cry and weep uncaring of the tears and snot on my face. To sob from my gut the boundless emptiness that was in me. With each sob, the emptiness grew. Expanded like the universe expands where it cannot expand, becoming greater and filling more and more of me till my hands flayed at my face, their soft, unsharp fingers unable to tear it open to let this nothing out. When you’re the weakest, you do as you’re told. The stronger know better. I knew that - the madness showed it to me. And so, when the woman said I must go to the hospital, I went. She was stronger, I could tell. She had a home, she knew how to make supper, she took her child to school every day, she respected her mother-in-law and obeyed her husband. She was normal, so she was stronger, so I went. It was Christmas, and the occupational therapy people had made strings of paper puppets and chains of coloured cardboard. They hung unmoving on the walls of the out-patients’ waiting rooms, mute to the massive heat of the Highveld December. They told me to be happy, but I could not. I told that to the doctor. I told him how I was worth nothing, how I was here because I had been told I had to, that I wanted to die, but that death wouldn’t have me. I told him I would do what I was told. And he told me to take the pills. The mental hospital was a Legoland of long, narrow, red brick bungalows. The windows, doors, gutters and echoing corridors were all painted in the same yellow-cream institutional eggshell. I spent my hours waiting on the hard, wooden benches that marched along the walls. Doing as I was told: Wait for the doctor, Wait for his receptionist, Wait for your medication, Wait for your blood tests, Wait for the admissions clerk. Wait for the madness to pass. And the other people who came to sit with me. Wait for them to go, to stop intruding on any peace I found in the hallways where silence whispered of necessary work, broken sometimes by the loud tattoo of someone walking briskly. Only the staff walked briskly. We were the shufflers, and our mission to get better (if any of us was to get better) was of much less immediate importance. Wait, it will take time, said the doctor. We were the slow, the sadness made us slow, and the pills made us slower.

“You keep staring out the window. Mommy says it means I’m dreaming, and I gotto concertrate when I eat otherwise it gets cold.” “Hey?” “When I stare out by the window.” “You’ve lost me.” “You know. Stop staring. You gotto write quickly so you can read to me.”

But I have to stare. To return to that time that was my real infancy, when I began this life again, to return to that hospital that was my womb. Nobody remembers their early infancy easily. I have to stare because that is what I did best, then. Stare and hear my breathing. And when the therapist needed it, I had to talk. About my mother, my father, my family. Did they wound me, did they reject me, did they love me, talk to me, ignore me, want me, hate me? Did I? How was my schooling, was I angry, frightened, did I fit in, was I a sportsman, was I a scholar, a misfit? Did I, was I, could I, how many, how often, where, when? The answers came slowly. The memories were gone, the feelings were gone and it took time to find them again. There was silence in the therapist’s room as well. A limited, fifty-minute silence (“our time is up, we’ll have to continue this tomorrow.” “OK, if you want me to”). She asked her questions quietly, and I had to find the answers. Often they wouldn’t come. She waited patiently. She reminded me of the questions, and I tried, because I was told that I had to, sometimes I really tried to answer. But through the madness the memories and the answers would not come, and I began to realise that I was mad. She told me that they knew I was mad, but that the worthless person she saw sitting there wasn’t me: it was a possession of the illness. She was lying. I knew that. Knew that I was the madness, that the madness was the reason for me and that I was the reason for the madness. I was doing what I was told, and I had been told to go to the therapist on those days at those times, and to tell the therapist everything, and that it would be confidential. But I caught them out. Sometimes the doctor asked me about things I said to the therapist - so I knew they were talking about me behind my back. I understood because I was weak. The strong told me what to do. I would not fight the strong. Like a fire cracker going off, one day I got better with a bang, and you could smell the gunpowder of my wellness in the air. The sky was blue and its colours were bright, I danced, I sang, I played. The world was fine, and I was finest. I could spend money because I could earn it. I knew how. Power was mine, too, but I knew that I could toss that off, that I had no need of it. I was me, and everybody recognised that. I giggled, I shouted, I punched the air. I could do what I wanted because I was ME! I made plans. I would buy a house, a new car, a yacht. I would work and sail. I would read. There was so much to read, and I went to the library. I needed to know more about mechanics because I could not fix the gear box or motor on the yacht, so I took out the book. And more about economics so that I could manage my money better. It was easy, I could learn it quickly, so I took out the book on that. And a novel. I needed a novel, because I needed to be entertained, so I took out a novel. And I could still take another two more books, yes, I was allowed to borrow five books, I had five cards, I could take two more. Jokes, jokes, yes that was it, I should learn some jokes. Been far to heavy-handed recently, I needed to learn some jokes, so I took out the book on that. But perhaps I would consider not buying the yacht. Maybe I’d build one. Yes, yes, I had the tools. There was space in the garden for a yacht. Yes, I’d build a yacht. I took them home to read, but I stopped on the way to buy a dishwasher. A house always needs a dish washer, and it was ridiculous that somebody of my station in life didn’t have one. The price was right, too, and you got free crockery with the purchase. So it was a good buy. I wasn’t wasting my money, and would the store accept a cheque? Of course the bank returned the cheque and of course the books and the dishwasher were soon forgotten. The darkness took me again, and become a cycle of blackness and blinding light, of despair and elation. They said I was bipolar, they said I was manic-depressed. I was mad. And now that the mood swings had come, madder than ever. I needed my tomb-like room to comfort and cradle me. I was no longer of the world. I was the pills, was the things that I was told to do, was the madman, playing my part as I should. My eyes sunk, my skin was white and my hands shook. I hadn’t the confidence to walk to the door, to walk to the bathroom, to walk the dog. I knew when the mania came that I should take advantage of its creative energy, to write, to draw, but I could not. And I knew when the sadness came that I should use its energy to die, but I could not. The act of killing myself was too much trouble. Death would come. If I waited. On and on the cycles continued, the up-down round and around, and I hated myself with a loathing that was unspeakable, with all the hate that the sick have for the healthy, the healthy for the sick. Hated more than that, so that I wanted to leave myself, to run away like the child from its parent, the refugee from his oppressor. I was my own oppressor and my madness was the dictator whom I reviled, loathed, hated and scorned. There was no body so bad as mine, none so putrid, so fat, so loathsome, so pasty white and stooped. It was a body so revolting that I seldom washed it. Its hair deserved no shampoo, its mouth no toothpaste. The itching and the foul taste were my own and fitting punishment for being. And with the coming of the loathing, time lost its meaning. Without the need to mark its passing there was only night and day, and even they blurred into one in the semi-darkness of my room. The daylight hours might slip me by in furious oblivion, or hang with sweaty slowness. But the darkness never passed: longer than just endless, the night was the torturing time when the madness mocked me, taunted me, held me up to myself as a beacon of vile humanity. The man unwanted by men, the outcast, the biblical leper receiving his punishment in the dark. Still the descent into night continued. No matter how often I reached the bottom, I was able to sink lower. And so, on that cold, mid-winter’s night when my mother died, no extra sadness came. The sadness that I had was complete, it was in me and of me, and no external cause could now make it greater. Nor could it make it shrink. When the ghosts left and the mania returned, when the soaring, sweeping, sky-reaching ebullience came, the arc-lights of energy, when they came, I remained sad beneath it all. For no matter how the madness tried to convince me that I was better, I began to know that it was a liar. It was the first sign that I would, after many more years, finally return. But then, in that frozen winter, my laughter had gone. Slunk away like a beaten dog. No matter how high or how low, I found no laughter. The madness was serious, now, and the doctor stepped up the medication. Lithium for the mood swings.  Aurorix for the depression. Ritalin for the depression. The pills made me fat, they made me shake. They were, they said, making me better. But something had killed my laughter. And on and on the cycles continued, up and down, up and down, until the doctor said we can do no more for you. You must enter the hospital’s full-time programme. You must be medicated under our supervision. You must have shock therapy. That which was left of me bargained with the devil; I said I’d rather go away to the coast and try to recover on my own, take my medication with me, ring up the hospital and speak to him regularly. Please let me try. If I fail I promise I’ll come back. I promise, please let me try. Very well, you may go. We hold little hope for you. I collected three-month’s worth of medicine from the hospital, packed my things and drove the agonising, slow road away from my home. Free of myself, I felt that I could re-build myself. Perhaps I could be a new person. But there was no laughter at the coast, just as there had been none before. We take ourselves with us wherever we go. The pointless emptiness remained, the pointless and undirected longing, the pointless cycles of useless energy and listless submission. The pointlessness of living. A thousand miles away, the madness was still with me. The small town that once had embraced me now wanted little to do with me. The mentally ill are unclean in most places they go, and though society has left the leper’s bell behind, its warning still rings clear. In a church-going little town, it rings loudest. Still, it was here, without the support of my hospital, and with only one friend, that I wanted to start again. It had something for me. At last I began to ache for health again. Almost three years after night had set in and my ghosts had come to claim me, I realised that I was not compelled to be their host forever.  I borrowed money to begin a boating business, and its responsibilities forced me to rise each morning. The medication kept me from myself, and somehow I attained an even keel, though the sadness remained. The pointlessness, the compliance with what I was told, the mechanical plodding, the emptiness, they all continued. So that when, just three weeks after his eightieth birthday, my father finally followed my mother into his own death, my mourning was no greater than the processes of life. A dull ache, a dull realisation that, of those few who still cared for me (though they may never have understood), there was now one less. My business grew, but still the sadness and pointlessness remained. I was resigned to life, still doing what I was told, accepting what I was handed. I made the mechanical motions better, now, than I had for years, but they were motions nevertheless. I had learned to act so well that those who thought they knew me thought they saw me improved. I alone knew that the shell was fragile, that under it was emptiness, and that emptiness was the weakest foundation. On a November evening in 1996, floods drowned the Southern Cape. They ruined houses, killed people and animals, ruined crops. Silted up the river, ruined my business and cast me adrift. The shell broke and the madness returned. I soared. I sank. I did crazy things. I sat and did nothing. And the emptiness within me continued to grow. The madness had beaten me. I remembered my promise, and began to make plans to return to the hospital, to take their medicines, their nursing, their shock treatments. I packed my bags, stored my boat and looked for a friend to mind my dogs. Through all of this, through the building of the business, its success and failure, a woman had been watching me and aware of me, without my awareness of her. A healer who heals through her simple belief that our bodies are chemistry, and that it is the chemicals that we put into them that affect them. Positive or negative. She begged me to give her a chance, to try her diet and make one last stand before I submitted totally. She had the healthy person’s horror of the mental hospital, and I still had the sick person’s longing for its un-threatening closeness, other-worldness, comfort, ordered and neat warmth. The mental hospital remains my womb. I agreed because I was submissive, still doing what I was told. Her immediate begging held more sway than a promise made two and a half years ago. Breakfast, lunch and supper I ate only potatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, fish, and herbs. Plateful after plateful, four and five times a day, I ate only these things. She told me to expected headaches and lethargy. The diet became my focus, my passion, my fanaticism. I emptied my kitchen. All the fruits and sweets and breads and starches, pastas and chillies that I loved, I threw away. I was still the useless piece of human trash that was being punished for my condition, and I accepted my new regime as that punishment. Self-inflicted, but punishment nevertheless, and I went along with it as only the fanatic can. The headaches were debilitating. I had been told to take no medication at all, and without the painkillers to smooth my mind, if not my pain itself, I could concentrate on nothing but the pain. For a week I remained possessed completely. The cartoon picture of the wild-eyed, unwashed madman, a lunatic swinging from black sadness to blinding energy and down again with crashing speed, down lower each time, up higher each time. Holding the only thing that I had left: the order to follow a diet. And I followed it because I had come to the two final doorways. Chose one into eternal madness and certain, sudden suicide. Or one into a new I, a life on my own without the ghosts and demons that had been with me these past long years. With the last desperation of the defenceless, the last defiant shout of the condemned, I went after this new healing and its promise of life. And at the end of that week, the madness had gone. Without a bang or a fanfare, or even a whimper, it left and closed its doors behind it. No headaches, no lethargy. No emptiness. In the middle of the second week of the diet, I noticed that a creeping calm was entering me, that my moods were not swinging at all, that I was sleeping through my nights and waking refreshed in my mornings, that I was losing the weight that was the legacy of the drugs I had last taken two years ago. I knew that this time the madness had gone because of the calmness that had entered me. There was no mania or soaring energy, and in the calm I felt I was standing on a dock after years of tossing in a stormy sea. I was still rocked by feelings, but they were now just feelings, and their reality was now just memory. For ten more weeks I followed the diet, building up a new foundation for myself, a new strength, layer by fragile, shallow layer, until fragility became strong by the depth of its many laminates. I was finally learning to crawl, to walk, to run as a healthy person. If I had a bad day, I got the blues like everybody else, and like everybody else, a swim or a walk or a talk with a friend could wash them away. My emotions were mine, and I was learning that they were mine.

“Tell me what’s it say?” “I told you already.” “But you promised you’d read it to me.” “I know” “But it’s almost home-time. My mommy’s gonna be here an’ you won’t have read it to me!” “OK. Wanna make a bargain?” “What’s a dargin?” “A bargain. You let me off - I don’t have to read it to you today - and in return I’ll take you to the beach and tell you the whole story tomorrow.” “Why’d you wanna go to the beach?” “‘Coz that’s my favourite place.” “I like the beach, too. It makes my mommy happy .”

After the first three months, when my healer and I felt that I was perhaps strong enough, I started breaking the rules. First I ate some fruit. Then I added some rice to my cupboard, some peas, some wheat. But never the poisons, never the sweets, the sugars, the empty or unnecessary. Each new food was more than just a re-discovery - it was a new discovery. Now I took nothing for granted, and without my noticing it, a long-dead child was being born. I was opening my eyes wide to wonder at the world. And like every child, I had the uncontrollable need for the sea. I had always admired surfers. They were closest to the ocean and they were the ones I wanted to be. They were the chosen, and I had once known that I could never presume to be among them. Now at thirty eight I had been to the other side of my own very darkest hell, and people couldn’t frighten me. Only I could do that. So I joined them in the water. In our town there is a man who teaches surfing. All through the autumn of last year, that first year of my life, this patient, quiet man spent hours in the water with me. On the coldest days he woke up at six in the morning to surf with me, five days of the week, six, seven days if he could. In the shortening afternoons as winter approached he sat with me to watch the waves. He explained them to me over and over again, taught me about left breaks and rights, rips, currents, swells, close-outs. We watched and I practised, drilling, drilling, drilling. He began to show me wave-sense, that unteachable feeling for the ocean, that wordless understanding of what is going on beneath you, that knowledge that makes a surfer a surfer. He honed my paddling, my position on the board, my feeling for it all. I began to understand that here was my childhood. The morning rush to the beach, the eagerness, the jumping to warm up as I pulled on my cold wetsuit, the enjoyment of even that hardship, the teenage anticipation that maybe today I would at last get up and ride my first wave: this was my childhood. On mid-winter’s day last year, more than three months after I had begun my lessons, more than three years after I left that hospital, and more than eight years after I went to hell, I stood up and rode my first wave. And in that space inside me where there had been such terrible emptiness before, I suddenly found love. I was the wave. I was me, I was the universe and the universe was me. I had become a surfer. I rode it for just a second, but I laughed. A loud roaring of happiness, a natural rising thing, an explosion of all that was good about me, good about the ocean, good about life. I had laughter! At last, at last, at last, I was a child!

“Mommy’s here!” “Will you ask her if we can go tomorrow so I can tell you the story?” “We can, we can, I know she’ll say yes!”

Oh, and Judy, even if she says no, I’ll be there tomorrow and tomorrow and every day. Fighting to surf better, fighting because I have come to it so late and want to catch up all those lost years, fighting because now I have life and I will fight to keep it as long as I can. Fighting because surfing has made me whole and more complete than ever I dreamed. And fighting because my childhood was given back to me there, on a wave on a cold mid-winter’s day.