The Quarry (2 page)

When he awoke this time night was falling and it was under that same but imperceptibly shifted pattern of stars that might mean everything and perhaps nothing at all that he continued on his
way, walking now with a motion stiff-legged and strange as though he were partly constructed from straw. Tiny flashes of fire of alien bodies burning as they fell occasionally passed by overhead.
He remembered that he was supposed to make a wish but no wish came to him. He walked. Night passed above and he continued to go north at his pace that grew slower and slower. The moon rose at some
time before dawn and hung lopsidedly ahead of him like something to which he aspired but then the sun came up and the moon faded till it was merely an outline. He walked as yesterday in the
gathering light and heat but felt nothing today of the grace that had infused him. There was a sense inside him of events winding down of springs uncoiled and of wheels slowing and he knew that in
his blue and spectral fugue of movement and sleep he was quickly drawing near to the uttermost edge of things.

Then once again he heard the sound of a car behind him. He went as yesterday into the grass at the side of the road but there was a fence here marking the edge of someone’s property. He
tangled himself on a piece of barbed wire and by the time he got free there was a cut on one finger that made blood run brightly into his palm. Shit, he said. Shit. He crouched on the ground and
stared down at his hand that was marked in this way. By now the car was almost on him and he listened to the noise of the engine and waited for it to pass. But it did not pass. It swelled and drew
opposite the place where he lay concealed and then stopped. He lay in silence, listening. He heard a car door open and feet crunching in the road. There was a pause and then a man’s voice
uttered some word and he heard the door being opened. Something metal was lifted out and there were other sounds then.

He couldn’t see the road today and he didn’t know who might be there or how many of them there were. But he also knew that the next time he lay down would be the last. There was no
reason to hide any more. He stood up slowly and emerged from the grass into the road. He stood there, looking down.

The car was a white Toyota. A thick-set man with a balding skull was crouched down at the rear wheel, which was flat. He wore circular golden spectacles that enlarged his eyes. He was perhaps
forty years old.

He stood up, this man, on bowed legs. He seemed about to run. But the moment passed and neither of them moved.

Then the driver spoke.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

The traveller tried to reply but his tongue felt limp and charred and he couldn’t make it work. He wanted to eat and drink and he enacted an expressive mime.

The driver shook his head. Then he looked around and back at the man and sighed.

‘Just wait,’ he said. ‘All right?’

The traveller stood in that same place and waited while the driver got down wheezing again into the road and went about changing the tyre. He waited while the other loaded the flat tyre into the
boot. Then the side door was opened for him. On the way around the car to the passenger seat the traveller looked into the back and saw boxes and packages piled up and, draped carefully over them,
a garment of distinctive colour and cut from which he inferred that the second man was a minister. He got in and the minister shut the door and went back around to his side. He got in too and shut
his door. He started the engine.

Now they drove on at speed with the road unspooling through that landscape of grass in which nothing moves except what you dream up in it.

A short distance afterwards they came to a garage and tearoom that were near a cluster of houses. They parked the car at the edge of the concrete and got out.

As they walked over the minister tried to support the man’s arm but he shook him off.

‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘I can do it.’

‘All right,’ said the minister. ‘All right.’

They went into the tea-room. There was nobody in it except an elderly woman sitting behind the counter. She had blue veins like cryptic runes in her arms and under her stare that was filled with
a nameless rage they crossed to a plastic table at the window. There was a lot of plastic in the room.

A black woman in a stained yellow dress came out from the kitchen. She carried a notebook and pen. She was ponderous. The man knew what he wanted but he couldn’t speak. He pointed to
something on the menu and she wrote in her notebook. She took the minister’s order too. Then she went back into the kitchen.

They sat in silence, waiting for their food. The man was looking down at the table. The minister sat back and his eyes, which were molten and dark, flickered all the time on the face of the man.
What he thought was never spoken.

‘Here’s the food,’ he said at last.

The same ponderous woman brought it in. She carried it on a tray and put their plates down in front of them and went out. The minister had ordered a cup of coffee. The man was having a full
breakfast.

He ate with a voraciousness and speed that were frightening. Still nothing was said. There was the clash of the knife and fork and the sound of his chewing and the old woman behind the counter
sat glaring, venting on their strangeness all the insidious fury that she’d gathered up to herself in her life.

When he had finished he pushed back from the table.

‘Can I have some more?’

The minister half smiled. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, waving one hand listlessly.

The man signalled to the old woman, who spoke peremptorily sideways into the kitchen. In due course the other woman came out, carrying on a plate the same breakfast, identically arranged. She
put it down in front of him and went out.

This time when he’d finished he again sat back and watched the minister sipping at his coffee. The light that came in through the window had moved on a little and dust motes were visible
around them.

‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Much better.’

‘Do you want to…?’

‘I don’t want anything,’ he said.

They sat there for a bit.

‘You wouldn’t have a razor and some soap I could borrow?’

The minister took the car key from his pocket. He gave it to the man. ‘In the cubby-hole,’ he said.

He got up and went out. The garage was deserted except for the pump attendant who was reclining on a cement island with the blue cap of his uniform pulled down over his eyes. The man opened the
car and took a small black toiletries bag out of the cubby-hole. He looked again at the minister’s frock that was so carefully draped across the back. He shut the door and on his way around
the car surreptitiously looked down at the registration. It was a number from a town the man didn’t know.

The toilets were behind the tea-room. On his way past the window he glanced in at the minister, who was still sitting at the table. They looked at each other through the glass as though
they’d never seen each other before.

In the little alley-way next to the tea-room there was a large red motorbike parked. There wasn’t any sign of the rider, but when he got into the bathroom he saw that one of the cubicles
was occupied. He filled a basin with water and removed from the black bag the intimate tools required for shaving. He felt weak and as he looked at himself in the foggy mirror it struck him that
this activity was ludicrous. He laughed shortly, then stopped.

While he shaved and looked at himself in the glass he thought about everything that had happened. He dried his face and was about to brush his teeth with his finger when he thought what the hell
and used the minister’s toothbrush instead. He combed his hair with the minister’s comb, which had strands of the other man’s hair woven into the teeth. He took off his shirt and
washed himself and used some deodorant that made him smell like the other man. Then he put all the things he had used back into the bag.

He was about to go out when he caught sight of his hand and saw traces of blood on it. He didn’t know where the blood had come from. Then he remembered the barbed wire and turned the tap
on and washed off the blood.

The toilet in the cubicle behind him flushed and a man came out. He was about thirty-five years old with black hair cut very short and a manicured moustache. A plump mouth with pink lips,
prominent front teeth. In the centre of his forehead there was a round perfect mole. He carried a motorbike helmet. They nodded at each other in the mirror.

‘
Warm
,’ the newcomer said. He had a high, thin voice.

The man grunted. It was only now that his mind went back to the tea-room and he remembered a pay-phone hanging on the wall. It occurred to him that the minister might be using this phone at the
present moment. But when he was back in the car-park he could tell at a glance that the minister hadn’t moved from his place at the table.

He put the bag away and looked again at that frock, that garment, on the seat. He touched it with one finger, then shut the door and walked back into the tea-room.

The minister’s name was Frans Niemand. He was forty-three. He’d come to the church only later in his life, seven and a half years before. Prior to that he’d
worked as a clerk in government offices in Paarl. It wasn’t, he said, ‘the sort of work to make you happy’.

The man watched him. ‘Being in the church makes you happy?’

‘Do you find that hard to believe?’

‘I’m not very… religious.’

They were sitting in their places as they had been before, opposite each other at the low plastic table. Against the glass beside them fat black flies were bashing at the pane. The minister was
smoking a cigarette.

The man was thin but not slight. He did not make unnecessary movements though he was clearly capable of speed.

The minister offered him a cigarette. He shook his head.

‘So where are you going to now?’

The minister said the name of a town.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Further up the coast. The middle of nowhere. I’m replacing the minister at the mission station there.’

‘I didn’t know they still had mission stations.’

‘Oh,
ja
. Everywhere.’

The woman in the stained yellow dress was back now, standing over them and breathing audibly. A name tag pinned skewly across her bosom said that her name was Beauty. Beauty put down their bill
on the table-top and spoke the amount out loud. The minister took the money from his pocket and gave it to her and she counted it and went back into the kitchen.

‘Thanks.’

‘That’s okay.’ The minister looked around. ‘Shall we go?’

The man nodded but for some reason neither of them moved. The only sound in the room came from a television in the corner. He glanced around and at one of the other tables he saw the man who had
come out of the cubicle in the toilets. The motorbike helmet was on top of the table next to him. He was staring intently into space.

He became aware that the man was looking at him and he turned his eyes.

The man looked at the minister. He watched him. He felt the minister wanted something from him.

‘Where are
you
going to?’

He thought for a second. He said, ‘north,’ and started playing with a plastic spoon on the table.

‘On foot?’

‘Yes, on foot.’

‘Where did you start from?’

‘You want to know a lot.’

‘I answered
your
questions.’

‘Shall we go?’

The minister gave a high, girlish laugh. He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

They got up from the table and walked across the room while the old woman at the counter who had yet to do anything to justify her presence glared at them with that viciousness that bordered on
ebullition. They went out. The petrol attendant was still sleeping outside and a dog was nosing at a bin and they went back to the car and got in. They drove out and back on to the dust road and
carried on driving north.

They came to a town half an hour later. They drove down the main street with its leaning lamp-posts and newspapers blowing and its quality of granular light. At a traffic light they stopped and
both looked to the right and there was a policeman on the corner. His uniform was blue with noticeable buttons and his face made from some clotted clay. He looked at them and they at him and then
both of them looked at each other. The light changed and they drove on and presently left the town behind. The road was close to the sea still and the water stretched immensely away. There was
fynbos
on either side of the car and a light, sour breeze made the branches tremble.

Later they came to a fork in the road. The right fork went inland and up to the border. The left went to the minister’s destination. They went left. Now the road was
colourless and thin as it had been when the man was walking on it. It travelled on within sight of the sea on the left. There were no more houses now and no more people and the sky pressed vacantly
down.

It was early afternoon and the sun was hot as they drove. They passed the carcass of an animal next to the road on which three black crows were feeding and one of them flapped up ahead of the
car and lumbered off over the veld. The road went through a salt pan that was cracked like a mirror and in which there was nothing alive. There were river beds that were dry. Boulders glistened
occasionally from side to side with that fulsome pinkness of flesh.

They came to a quarry on the right that had been mined for chalk but was now abandoned and disused. Ahead of them the road mounted a rise. The minister pulled over. There was an acre of gravel
at the edge of the quarry with bunches of scrub growing nearby. The minister parked here, facing away from the road, and switched off the engine. There was silence again, broken only by the faint
buzzing of some insect. Then even that fell silent.

The minister took a map out of the cubby-hole. He spread it out across his lap. ‘I think we’re almost there,’ he said. He rolled the map up again and put it away.