Kill Baxter (11 page)

I sigh.

‘Enjoy,’ he says with a smile. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve spoken to your potential mentor.’

I TRUDGE BACK
through the courtyard from an extra remedial class with King. He’s right: I have absolutely no aptitude for magic. He says he’s spoken to this ‘specialised teacher’ but she has yet to give him an answer. It probably won’t make a difference. No matter how hard I practise the exercises I’m given, I just can’t make it work, and I’m starting to have massive performance anxiety. Failure to produce a flame on your palm in front of the whole class is embarrassing, and there’s no Viagra for magic.

I look up and see the Red Witch standing silhouetted against the setting sun on top of the Hexpoort ramparts. A bird, a huge grey and white falcon, watches me from its perch on her thick leather glove. It launches off and swoops across the barren canyon. The Witch turns her eyes on me with the same penetrating gaze as the bird. I hurry away.

My new life has not been going so great. If Westridge was an exercise in attempting to control the raging sea of hormones, chemicals and body parts of delinquent teenagers, then Hexpoort is that plus kids with the ability to bend the fundamental laws of physics. Within my first week I’ve witnessed a fight using knives of corrosive green fire, an overdose on Stevo’s product, and the aftermath of an orgy where a kid from Pondscum broke his penis attempting a reverse cowboy with a girl from Broken Teeth. While they were magically hovering in the air.

I’m just trying to keep my head down and stay the hell out of school politics. Which isn’t easy. Hekka struts around with this faux inner conflict showing on his face: the tortured hero trying to come to terms with his fate. It’s fucking ridiculous. He engineers all these little situations where he comes across as the noble underdog in class. I saw him fucking plotting them out on an Excel document.

Thankfully Nom lent me an old cell phone and I managed to get hold of Esmé to apologise. She was cool and distant, which made me push harder, which made her angry, which made me angry, which made her angrier which … It didn’t exactly go well.

I feel my old life slipping further and further away from me and I can’t seem to stop it. So I’ve developed coping strategies. I play insane amounts of chess on Nom’s crappy phone. It’s a bit like manipulator methadone, but I admit it’s a cheap substitute. My project to send Kyle emails about magical things has also become a ritual. The sheer amount of information on the Hexpoort hard drive is astounding, and I dive into it nightly. I’ve gone through scans of diary entries, newspaper clippings, old documents and napkins with whisky stains and formulas written on them. I find obscure people of esoterica and tell him about them, trying to unravel the insanely bizarre shit that the magical community has done over the years. I find a couple of articles about magic and dreamwalking scanned from an old magazine called
The Journal of Occult Practices
that are helpful. Kyle’s loving it.

I reach the Malpit stairs and make the long climb up to the dorm. I’m starving, and when Nom brings in a huge pot of stew, I’m pathetically grateful, even though it’s cold so we’re forced to wait in a line and heat it up in the microwave.

I sit on the couch next to Stevo to eat. The stew is not bad: thick and spicy and filled with vegetables and chunks of stringy meat.

‘What is this?’ I ask through a mouthful.

‘Dassie,’ Stevo says as he chews. ‘The Witch has had a good hawking day.’ He reaches up to give Timothy and Hunter a chunk each. They sit on his head and eat contentedly. Then he produces a bottle of home-made whisky from a brown paper packet at his feet and passes it around.

‘Not hallucinogenic, I promise,’ Nom says as he hands me the bottle.

‘Not unless you drink too much,’ Stevo adds with a grin.

I take a grateful swig and feel the liquor burn my throat. My first week at the Poort has been rough and I’m glad to take the edge off. I’m having another swig when Faith and Chastity appear. Chastity grabs the bottle from my hand and takes a long gulp. ‘Right, Sanity time, you little bitches,’ she says, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

‘All right!’ Stevo claps his hands together. ‘I’ve got some new material.’

Chastity laughs. ‘Your shit is going to be Disneyland compared to what I’ve concocted,’ she says.

‘It’s true.’ Faith shakes her head. ‘She tried it on me.’

We clear the floor and sit down on pillows in a small circle.

‘So,’ Chastity says. ‘Rules for the newbie. Sanity is the official game of Hexpoort and it’s simple. We use illusion magic to create the sickest, grossest, most disturbing images we can imagine to freak people out. Call “Sanity!” and the images stop but you lose the round. The one who can last the longest wins.’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘But my magic is not that, you know, great.’

‘Oooh.’ Chastity puts on a baby voice. ‘I forgot the poor little man can’t get it up.’

‘Ignore her.’ Faith turns her head so she’s glaring at the side of her twin’s face. ‘It happens to a lot of people. It’s fine. You can just be the victim this time around.’

‘Fine,’ Chastity says with a cruel smile. ‘And I’m the conjuror.’

‘No problem,’ I say. ‘I’m good at games.’

Chastity and Faith sit directly across from me and Chastity begins chanting in Xhosa and making gestures with her hand. My vision starts to shift and images appear in the air in front of me. They become more vivid, like I’m watching something in high definition. It’s not pretty. The porno stuff I can manage. I’ve seen enough creature porn in my young life to be able to run with the big dogs. Then comes the wave of snuff. Some of it is your rudimentary serial-killer schtick. Clowns with butcher knives, dolls coming alive. It’s like watching an eighties horror marathon on TV.

I smile and yawn. Chastity looks at me with raised eyebrows and I know I’ve made a mistake. Truly bizarre stuff starts happening. Monsters and ghouls seem to latch on to my face and shriek with schizophrenic voices, screaming so close to me that I think my eardrums are going to burst.

‘Sanity!’ I shout, before I know what’s happening. ‘SANITY, SANITY, SANITY!’

The images and sounds disappear abruptly to reveal Chastity blowing the end of her index finger like it’s a smoking six-gun. ‘Works every time,’ she says.

‘Don’t worry, man.’ Nom puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not many people can beat her at Sanity. She’s the queen.’

That night I lie awake on my mattress listening to the stone around me. I experience a deep, tingling sensation that takes loneliness and puts it through a wah-wah pedal so that it peaks and dips unpredictably in my chest. I’ve never been suicidal, but for the first time in my life I consider it. I want out. I want out of this goddamn place.

My dreams are thankfully nondescript. Teeth falling out, being late for buses and the occasional feeling of falling – the stuff that counts as banal for me these days. The next day reality is far, far worse than any dream. We’re digging pits under the fiery eye of the sun. Sweat drips into my eyes and I blink furiously to stop the stinging. Today’s lesson at Hexpoort is hard manual labour. The Shadow Boer walks up and down next to the pit like a drill sergeant.

‘This is some insane Mr Miyagi shit,’ the kid next to me says, sweat dripping down his dirt-smeared face. ‘Why the hell do we have to do this?’

‘I’d rather be waxing a car or painting a fence,’ I agree as my spade bites into the dry earth.

‘I’m going to ask him.’

‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Really, don’t.’

He ignores me. ‘When do we learn magic?’

The Shadow Boer looks at him. ‘Magic? Oh, so you are
fokken
wanting to be learning magic then, mah sunshine?’ He claps the kid on the shoulder. ‘
Jussus
, man, you should have just asked.’

The kid smiles, the Boer smiles back. And then knees him in the groin.

‘You are like the clay and I’m going to be moulding you,’ he says, making it sound almost sexual. A bearded man in khaki shorts and socks lasciviously showing how he will mould your soul is an awkward moment of note. Everyone looks down. ‘You want to learn magic, mah sunshines?’ he says. ‘Then you must be strong.’

The days in Hexpoort blend into a blur of hard labour, magic lessons, and drinking and drugs at Malpit. I don’t seem to be making progress with the magic, but my alcohol and drug tolerance has improved, and my body aches from hard physical exercise.

The carpal tunnel syndrome in my mouse hand has been replaced by calluses. Wiry muscle is beginning to build. My hunched keyboard shoulders are straightening out. My screen eyes are refocusing. It feels like I’m starting to live more in the physical world and less in my mind. I’m hating every second of it.

My finely tuned skills are atrophying. I’ve worked for years for the stamina and multitasking ability to watch two seasons of a series in one night while following the public destruction of a celebrity on social media and crowd-solving a terrorist attack on Reddit. I was a perfect interface between man and machine. Now I’m just becoming buff.

The nights are filled with deep feelings of emptiness. I grit my teeth and bear it, presumably out of the same insanely masochistic impulse that has me stopping myself from interfering in the politics of the school.

It’s five weeks after I first stepped through the Hexpoort gates when the Shadow Boer takes us to a field within the school boundaries. In it is a paintball-splotched fake town complete with junked cars with what look like real bullet holes in them. A metal frame on the side of the field holds dozens of black punching bags swaying in the breeze.

The Boer stops us in front of the bags. ‘You are here to be learning Combatives, your real
fokken
education here at Hexpoort,’ he says, scratching his beard. ‘Listen here, mah sunshines. Mamma Nature, in her favouritest quest to fuck wif the human race, has given us this limp wet rag for a body and
skopped
us out into the world with beasts and monsters whose DNA has
fokken
being pumping iron at the evolution gym.’

He walks up and down in front of us, looking each one of us in the eye as he passes. ‘If a bookie looked at us, no claws, fangs, no scaly armour, the
oke
would have placed odds on us being knocked out in the opening rounds of our evolution. But we didn’t just survive, we
fokken
rocked the party
, ek sê
. We climbed to the top of the food chain wif a goddamn stone knife between our teeth.’ He waggles his thumbs. ‘Everyone say “thanks, thumbs”. The point,
julle klein naaiers
, is give up all sense of romance. Your stupid little spaghetti bodies are not well designed for kicking ass. Too many soft spots.’ He jabs a kid in the neck with his finger and the kid collapses in a heap on the ground. The Boer grabs him by the shirt, hauls him to his feet and pats him on the back.

‘The only trick to fighting is to find the soft spots in your enemy and then stab, gouge, crush and bite them until the
fokken
thing stops moving. And then stamp on his head just to be sure. Any questions?’

One kid raises a trembling hand.

‘
Ja
, you,’ the Boer says.

‘Why do we have to learn fighting?’ the kid says. ‘Why can’t we just use magic?’

I grit my teeth and wait for him to get hit in the throat, but the Boer nods.

‘The first rule, mah sunshines, is to keep the energy you have like you’re on the last bar of your cell-phone battery. Magic takes energy to use. If it’s easier to club something to the ground with a spade and then stomp on its head, then you do that rather. But the best is a combination of the two.’

He grabs the kid who asked the question. ‘Boom, flash spell to the eyes, grab him by the throat, headbutt. Nighty-night.’ He doesn’t hit the kid hard but he drops too. The Boer sighs, then leans down and pulls him back up to his feet.

‘Ja, mah sunshines. Demons, elementals, Treskulls, Obayifo, Nahuda and a thousand other
fokken
nasties are out there, and these
okes
are really not nice. I’m going to teach you how to fight them with whatever you have. No offence, but those namby-pamby magic theorist bookworms might be teaching you all that “oooh, let’s get in touch wif our feelings” magic shit, but you meet a demon, they gonna fuck you up six–love if you try to get all philomasophical with them. We’ll do Musangwe boxing, Zulu stick fighting, Cape Flats knife fighting, and street-fighting magic. We’ll
fokken
do muay thai and you thai and everyone thai. We’ll do ju-jitsu, karate, kung-fok-you and every other
fokken
chop suey thing you can imagine. By the time I’m done with you, you’ll have a fighting chance against the terrible things that stalk the night, do you unnerstand me?’

‘Yes, Boer,’ the class mumbles.

‘No you don’t. Do you
fokken
unnerstand me?’

‘Yes, Boer,’ we shout.

‘
Ja
, well you better. Now start punching those
fokken
bags.’

I put on a pair of dirty gloves and start hitting the bag half-heartedly. I’m really not in the mood for this.