Unravelled (24 page)

Little obstacle? I frown at him. He’s preoccupied now, no doubt thinking about Emily.

“Ntatemogolo, are you OK?”

“Hmm? Of course.”

Suddenly I don’t want to be here anymore. I thank him and leave quickly. Something is definitely going on with that man, and when it comes to confiding in me he’s worse than Rakwena. It seems to me that the only way to find out what’s up is to come back when he’s not home and do a little breaking and entering myself.

He did say one thing that made sense, though. I have to talk to Rakwena.

***

The gate slides open to admit me, and Rakwena is standing barefoot on the front step in an old shirt and tracksuit pants, still rumpled from sleep.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” His smile flutters from hopeful to excited to nervous. He steps back to let me in. “I’m making breakfast. You want anything?”

I shake my head. My appetite has done a runner. “You go ahead.”

I wait in the dining room, my heart pounding. I’m still angry, confused and hurt, but I know we have to talk about this before…well, before we decide where to go from here. Rakwena returns with a tray laden with enough to feed a whole family, and in spite of myself I smile. He catches my eye and his face lights up with hope.

“I’m glad you called,” he says. He moves to sit beside me at the table, hesitates, and decides to take the chair opposite me instead. “I was worried.”

“About me or about you?”

He bites his lip. “Both. You’re still angry?”

“Of course.” I sigh. “But I guess I understand. Sort of. Well, I’m trying.” I watch him eat, and realise there’s still so much I don’t know about him. “Do all drifters eat like that?”

He pauses to swallow. “No. I’m different.”

“Because of the serum?”

He nods.

I take a deep breath, remembering the day I walked in on him in his room, injecting the serum like it was an insulin shot. Even then I knew he had a secret, and when I saw him sitting there with a syringe in his arm I thought the worst – he was a junkie or terminally ill. He could have told me then, instead of inventing a “chemical imbalance”. He had so many chances to come clean.

I swallow my anger. I didn’t come here to make either of us feel worse; I came to hear his explanation. It’s only fair, right? “So tell me about this serum. How does it work? I know it suppresses your urge to conquer, but how?”

It takes him a moment to respond. “It saps my physical strength. Drifters are very strong – it takes a lot to weaken them. Physically they can survive situations that would kill even a very healthy normal person. But their psychic energy is limited. It’s not like with other people – even in the gifted, psychic energy is naturally replenished, like physical energy, when you eat well, rest and take care of yourself. In the gifted, psychic energy is linked to gifts – the more you use your gift, the more psychic power you need. It’s the same with drifters, but their supply of psychic energy isn’t replenished automatically, no matter how healthy they are. It’s like a cell phone battery – you have to keep charging it. Conquests are how drifters recharge.”

I notice that he always refers to the drifters as a separate group, “they”, like he’s not one of them. I suppose that’s how he feels – or how he’d like to feel, anyway. My heart melts a little. But only a little.

“My supply of psychic energy is larger, because I’m only part…” He clears his throat. “Anyway, the serum affects the part of my brain that keeps my gift in check. So my powers go haywire, my body weakens, my psychic energy increases and my urge to conquer disappears. The longer I used the serum, the more effective it became. The urge is the brain’s way of telling a drifter his psychic energy’s running low, the same way a normal person feels hunger when their body is running low on fuel. Since my body was getting weak, I needed to eat more. Much more. And that’s also why I crave sugar. My body needs the carbohydrates.”

I exhale. “Wow. OK. So if you stop taking it, you go back to normal?”

“I guess. I’ve only ever missed one dose.”

The night at the Puppetmaster’s house. The memory hangs over us like a net, ready to drop.

“You’ve been taking it for so long,” I point out. “How can one missed dose be enough to undo everything?”

“It didn’t.” He lowers his head and pushes the last of his six-egg omelette around on his plate. “I don’t think I would have acted like that with someone else. I didn’t want to conquer. I couldn’t conquer you anyway, you’re gifted. My energy was building up, not waning, and I could feel myself losing control. I wanted to kiss you. I’d wanted to for a long time, and that night I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know why.”

Heat floods my face, and I have to tear my gaze from his. “Oh. Um. But wait, that doesn’t make sense. At the time you said it was because you missed your medicine.”

“I didn’t know what else to say,” he confesses. “Maybe the Puppetmaster poisoned me. Maybe that’s what happens when you miss a dose. I was too scared to ask your grandfather – I knew he’d kill me if he found out. He was already furious with me for letting you go after the Puppetmaster.”

Damn it! I want to smile, but I force myself to keep a straight face. This boy keeps finding sneaky ways to get under my skin. He lied to me! I can’t forget that. “Rakwena, why didn’t you just tell me? After the Puppetmaster, did you really think I couldn’t handle more weirdness?”

He finishes the last of his food and pushes the plate away. “You don’t understand.” His hands ball into fists on the table. “This thing is a curse. It’s ruined my life! Every bad thing that has ever happened to me was caused by it. Every bad thing!”

“You mean because of your father?”

He snorts. “You’ve seen for yourself what he’s like. But you know what, even normal people have fathers like that. Useless, self-serving scum. I could have handled that. I could have found a way to be OK with a dad who screws around and hits my mother. But it’s not that simple. They were happy, at first. My mother kept telling me about how wonderful it was in the early days, before the pull got too strong.”

“What pull?” I interrupt, frowning.

“The bond. It was fine at first, before they were married. He lived with his cell, he was always travelling but when he saw my mother he was good to her. I don’t know why he married her. He had to know it could never work, not with the bond always pulling him back to his brothers. When I was born, my mother knew something was wrong. At this point my father was away for five, six months at a time. When he came back I was about seven months old, and she confronted him. She wanted to know why my eyes were blue, why my toys were always getting knocked over even when I was nowhere near them, and why my hands were so hot all the time. He came clean. She loved him, so she accepted it. What could she do? She was young, in love, with a baby to look after. She needed him.

“But once she knew the truth, everything changed. He was always gone, and she knew there were other women. She said he couldn’t help it – it was part of being a drifter. He would come home in a foul mood and start a fight, and soon he went from shouting at her to beating her. So when I was five she left him. You know what happened next.”

I nod. How could I forget? Senzo followed Mmabatho, split Rakwena’s face open with his telekinesis, leaving him scarred for life, and then “died”. “After that?”

Rakwena sighs. “We moved here. Mama wanted to get away from the memories. For a while things were good. Rre Sechaba came to work for us, and he was the father figure I always wanted. But the fear was still there. Mama knew I’d soon come into my powers, and life would become impossible for me. It’s hard enough to get through life as a normal person, but a half-drifter… Well, she hunted down a traditional doctor, hoping he could find a way to undo it. We tried a complicated ritual – asking Mama’s ancestors to claim me from my father’s side. That didn’t work. There was a lot of drinking of funny liquids and making offerings. Next she tried getting pastors to pray over me. That didn’t work, because they didn’t even know what a drifter was. They kept going on about evil spirits. They didn’t understand that the problem was not a spirit, it was my blood.

“Finally Mama heard about your grandfather. I was about ten – my telekinesis was developing fast and my urges were quite intense. I was always getting into fights and I couldn’t explain why. All I knew was that physical contact made me feel better. It was hard for Mama, though. My father had already made her weak and she got sick a lot. Every time she touched me I hurt her. Every hug brought on a dizzy spell. I started avoiding contact with her. I hated myself. No matter what I did I couldn’t get away from the curse in my blood.

“Your grandfather had never met someone like me. He didn’t know how to help us. It was another year before we heard from him again. He had found something that could possibly cure me – or at least manage my urges. Mama and I got on a plane right away. We stayed in a small village in Peru with him for over a month, testing the serum, learning to handle the side effects. He saved my life, Connie. I was a mess before I met him. He taught me how to be strong, how to control my gift. When we got home, it was like a brand new start for us. I could touch my mother without hurting her, I could have a normal life. Then her dreams started.”

He stops here. I already know this part of the story. His mother’s disturbing dreams escalated into hallucinations and paranoia, ending in psychosis. They moved to Rustenburg to be with her family, but after some time she was sent to a facility and Rakwena was shipped back to Botswana, all by himself. Thank God Rre Sechaba was there to look after him.

“Your grandfather and Rre Sechaba are the only people we ever told,” he says softly. “Your grandfather warned us from the start that it was dangerous to take the serum. He said nothing I could do would change my blood. He grilled us for a week before he let me try the serum. All these years, he kept asking whether I had changed my mind, whether I wanted to go back. He said if I asked him to, he would destroy the serum and never make it again. But that’s the last thing I want. I keep thinking if I take it long enough, it’ll cure me for good. Maybe it will.” He looks up hopefully.

I blink back tears. “I don’t think so.”

“But you don’t know! It could happen. If I take it for long enough. It could happen!”

And then it hits me. He
is
a junkie. He’s got a drug that makes his symptoms go away, that gives him the illusion of control, and as long as it’s in his blood he’s happy. But it’s not a cure; it can’t wipe out his DNA. Nothing can. Ntatemogolo told him the truth all those years ago – he can’t change his blood any more than I can change mine. And maybe he shouldn’t want to.

I reach across the table and take his hand. We sit there for a long time, trying to find a way back to the world we lived in before, but deep down we both know that world is lost to us forever.

“What now?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll understand if it’ll take a while for you to forgive me.”

I look at him. “You’re missing the point. It’s not about that. It’s not about whether or not I still want to be with you. It’s bigger than us, don’t you see that?”

He pulls his hand away and lapses into sullen silence. He knows I’m talking about the Cresta Crew.

“You know better than anyone how the bond works,” I tell him. “Look what happened when your father tried to go against it. He made your mother miserable! You have a family of brothers now, decent guys. Nothing like your dad. All they want is to be part of your life. Is that too much to ask?”

“Yes!” He gets up suddenly, knocking the tray with his arm. “Don’t you get it? They’re cursed, too, and I want nothing to do with them! All I care about is you. Just tell me that we’re OK and I’ll be fine.”

“This isn’t fine!” I take a breath – I didn’t want to raise my voice. “You’re not fine. It hurts, doesn’t it? The bond? You feel physical pain.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I fall silent. Rakwena can’t be rational about this – the scars run too deep. Nothing I say will convince him that the Cresta Crew are any different from his father. Nothing I do will persuade him to talk to them. But it’s clear to me now, finally, what a struggle his life has been. It’s his father’s fault, I know, and yet I can’t help feeling sorry for Senzo, too. He must have cared about Mmabatho at first, but he was trying to live a life that was completely unnatural to him. It’s like the Cresta Crew said – they don’t build relationships outside their cell. The cell is their family, and Rakwena has spent his whole life away from his.

There’s so much to think about. I know I still want to be with him, but now I’m not sure I should. His parents’ story stands as a glaring testament to the perils of following the wrong path. How can I stand in the way of Rakwena’s cell reuniting? How can I put my needs – no, wants – above the needs of seven people?

“Connie, please say something.”

I swallow. My throat is dry and my head is reeling. “I don’t know what to say. I think…I think we need time. Time apart, to think. To figure this out.”

He nods slowly. “How much time?”

“I don’t know. There’s just so much going on – my grandfather, your father, your cell. You have school and I have exams…” I exhale, suddenly exhausted.

“OK. I’ll wait.” His voice has grown hoarse.

I give him a tentative smile. Maybe time is all we need. But the way this year is going…maybe not.

***

I wake up suddenly, feeling weak and anxious. I turn onto my side, seeking a logical reason for my discomfort, and then it comes back to me. I had that dream again. The game, my mother’s urgent warning and the threat of the Puppetmaster.

It’s been so long since the first time I dreamt it that I almost forgot about it. I wonder why I dreamt it again. It can’t mean anything, can it? I’ve never put much stock in dreams. They’re just meaningless images that have drifted down to the subconscious. But why would I dream the same thing twice, especially after such a long interval?

Out of the corner of my eye I see something flicker on my table. I turn my head. It’s the crystal, glowing brightly. I turn my back on it, suddenly anxious to put the dream out of my mind. Every time I look for trouble I find it in spades, and right now I have more than I can handle. I close my eyes and let sleep draw me back in.