Syndrome: A short story before an exhibition
Kathryn Smith
And so she’s stuck doing a cloak-and-dagger number without a cloak. Relying on her face alone, its guile. She’s had enough practice by now, in smoothness, coolness, blankness. A lifting of both eyebrows, the candid, transparent stare of a double agent. A face of pure water. It’s not the lying that counts, it’s evading the necessity for it. Rendering all questions foolish in advance.
-- Margaret Atwood, The Menaced Assassin
She remembers the smell of the natural history museum. It conditioned her seeing. She remembers the smell and the way she clutched her grandfather’s hand walking up the stairs. Her five-year-old legs having to take them one at a time. Step-step, pause. Step-step, pause. And grandfather nearly as tall as the giraffe standing in the stairwell. She was sure this was what made the smell. Or was it the mummy lying adjacent? Mummy. A funny word. Whose mummy is that? she asked. Don’t they miss her? I miss mine. Where is mummy? She could tell grandpa was sad as he said that it wasn’t that kind of mummy and really it was a man all wrapped up. The fine blond child was not convinced. She sniffed the case in which the mummy lay. Nothing really. More polish than perfume. What made the smell? She thought maybe it was the Bushmen. Or the insects. Or the balustrade. Or the carpet. Or the polished wood of the counter where the people waited to help you. It wasn’t one thing, but everything. She would never forget the emotional imprint of that musty colonial museum smell, and would seek it out whenever her adult life allowed. And the dead, still things that were hiding their secret lives from us, patiently posing so we could see them, understand them by staring so rudely. And just as you finished looking and turned away to the next curiosity, they would shift very slightly, adjusting their comfort for the long day of being gazed at. Or she thought so. We are compelled to kill things so we can look at them.
…
Sophie had already chosen her seat on the bus, one of the single ones at the middle doors so it was impossible for anyone to sit next to her. The hot smell of the vinyl seats, so hard under little bums in bright summer shorts. Some children were boisterous, most actually. Sophie could not stand the noise. Why could they not sit still? She did. Was it so hard? A fine-boned, white-blond child with bright skin and murky eyes, her attenuated legs with ankles crossed and hands folded in her lap, she sat there, plotting how to change the situation. But they were on the bus now, and there was nowhere to go as it rumbled across the landscape. She didn’t care to go on holiday, especially with a bunch of snot-nosed idiots she didn’t know. There were two she had noticed immediately, standing on opposite sides of the parking lot. She noticed them mainly because they could not have been more startlingly contrary. On the right, a stocky, muddy-blond kid who was not a day older than eleven but could have been pushing thirty. He stood alone in sturdy boots and work shorts, no parents in sight, as if he just appeared there. He seemed to be connected to nothing but himself. And his strange belongings. He had two torn shopping bags, one containing his clothing and the other various edible things, mainly cheap sweets and crisps. The handles were fortified with grimy bits of string this boy had fashioned into straps he could secure across his body in an X, leaving his hands free. A very smart attaché case sat beside him, with those silver locks with numbers and dials. It looked completely out of place for a beach holiday. When the bus driver tried to load it under the bus for him, he got a bloody ankle and a black eye for his trouble. Sophie couldn’t stop staring at him, and for the first time, was afraid another person, this boy, would catch her eye.
On the left was a kid you could barely see for his fussing parents. Only knobbly, marble-white twig legs were occasionally revealed from behind flapping hems and blazers. Had this child ever seen the sun? When his uncle had finished adjusting his backpack and cap, his mother simultaneously slicking down his hair and wiping his nose (would he have one left after all that?) and making sure his sunblock was evenly applied, they stepped back, Uncle embracing tearful Mother, and Sophie caught a glimpse of his face. Utterly bewildered, he stood perfectly still in a state of nervous surrender, arms dangling but fingers pinched all up together. He was transparent he was so pale, with watery eyes and a too-big nose and moist mouth. His skin was waxy-smooth, like those pictures you see of aliens with the crescent-shaped black eyes and long fingers. He looked like he’d never run, never fallen, never made mud pies. What a wimp. Sophie wanted to hug him and slap him simultaneously.
Looking around, she noticed what a motley bunch of kids these were. Rough neighbourhoods and hard living would mean she would have to hang onto her wits. No satin ribbon and vanilla-scented ballerina girls in her dorm room, but premature smokers and hair-pullers who wouldn’t think twice to immerse your sleeping hand in warm water so you’d wet the bed. Such a lame trick.
Amongst this tangled knot of scrappy youth that ranged from five to fifteen, Sophie noticed Stocky Kid giving the insipid Gecko Boy a really hard time. They were sitting across from each other, and diagonally across from Sophie. But Stocky Kid wasn’t doing anything other than staring in a hard, dark way at the boy, who was doing his best to ignore him, deliberately looking out the window with his bunched up fingers squarely in his lap. When their eyes eventually, momentarily locked, Stocky Kid made a V-shape with his fingers, gestured upwards to his eyes and then across to Gecko Boy’s blank face. I see you, you’re mine. He turned towards Sophie and with a look that could have stripped paint, put his hand on the front of his shorts, squeezed slowly and ran his tongue over his inflexible little mouth.
The triangular space between Sophie and those boys telescoped outwards. The noisy voices went underwater-mute. She pressed her fingernails into the palm of her hand so hard that she felt the smooth skin give, and warm moisture seep out. Although just seven, Sophie knew perfectly well what he was suggesting. Not know as in grasp intellectually, but her intuition was razor-edged. The little fucker. Gecko Boy gaped, unsure where to look. Sophie allowed the corners of her mouth to curl up just slightly, but made sure her eyes remained as dead and unforgiving as possible, presenting a studied image of coy interest that ended precisely at the falcate dimples bracketing her lips. Let’s see if he’s smart enough to figure this out.
When they finally disembarked at the incongruously named Happy Acres, she overheard the camp mother direct them to their dormitory just adjacent to hers. Stocky Kid was Ron and Gecko Boy was Robert. To them, she was still nameless.
…
Having found her bunk bed (a top bunk in the far corner so she has a panoramic view of the rest of the dorm and so she can always see someone approaching) and unpacked her small bag of belongings into her locker, Sophie sits quietly, a new notebook on her lap and a pack of coloured pens at her side. Since learning to write, she has been an obsessive diarist. Around and in front of her, the dorm is a seething mass of shrieks, wild hair and snatching fingers. Philistines. Since learning about the Bermuda Triangle, Sophie has taken pains to cultivate a attitudinal vacuum, assuming a countenance of deathly placidity, and keeping very still when everything around her whirrs and teems. I’ll suck you in, and there will be no trace of your self, she imagines.
A bell rings, a hammer frenetically hitting a metal dome mounted just outside the window alongside her bed. No chance of missing a meal or an opportunity to be brought to order now. She puts her writing things away, and hops down, her two narrow feet in their summer sandals landing neatly aligned, perfectly synchronously, on the crappy worn linoleum. Be the cat. You’ll live longer. She follows the throng to the camp’s canteen.
After a lunch of sweaty cheese sandwiches and bitingly cold milk served in scuffed plastic crockery, the camp mother announces the afternoon is to spend getting to know each other.
…
Sitting alone on her bunk, her finger absent-mindedly stroking the Band Aid on her knee while she draws a series of images that graphically suggest what she’d like to do that pig Ron, Sophie’s concentration is disturbed by a group of older girls huddled around, giggling. Despite them never talking directly to her, she is by no means paranoid they are talking about her either – she couldn’t give a fuck. But there’s always information to be had. And her presence seems makes them just a little uncomfortable. She could see it in their strained smiles and stupid blank eyes, the way their bodies shrank back just slightly when she approached, and their voices reciprocated an octave or two, too shrill in their greetings. She approached.
What’s that?
A simple question, delivered as a statement of fact but demanding a response.
Nothing. A ratty girl quickly secrets an object under a pillow.
Let me see. Again, not a request. Sophie ups the ante on her Bermuda Triangle disposition. After a few taut moments, the object is withdrawn and presented. A small plastic container, like the kind they use to take your pee when you’re sick. Like when she had her appendix out last year after it nearly burst. There’s milky white stuff inside. Sophie turns it slowly in her fingers. It’s jelly-like, doesn’t run up the sides. She flips it upside down. The stuff stays put. Just as she grips the lid to twist it open, the girls stifle a collective shriek.
Don’t! they breathe. It’s...!
What?
It’s gross! whispers one to her left, a tall, fat ginger girl.
I’m sure that’s not what you meant to say.
The fat girl looks away. The even fatter, crizzy-haired one next to her simpers, eyes wide with anticipation and ensuing scandal. It’s…it’s sperm!
Really? From where?
Those sitting adjusted their posture but all heads turned expectantly to the ginger girl.
Um…Ron gave it to me at lunch. Said there would be more if we wanted to help him. And.. and… and it’s good for your skin.
Really? Wanting to laugh out loud but not daring to break her composure, Sophie allowed her dimples to flash briefly. Many of these girls were twice her age, probably even already had their periods. Surely they would know what sperm actually looked like? She twists the lid, sticks her finger in, scoops a bit and wipes it across the ginger girls freckly chest.
Then why does it smell exactly like hair gel?
…
Robert, she asks, do you believe in ghosts?
Sometimes. Do you?
…
Since that fateful summer of ‘87 at Happy Acres, Sophie, Ron and Robert have minimal physical contact as adults, but often wrote to each other. As Starfish kids – underprivileged or orphaned children who get sent on a seaside holiday at the mercy of the welfare department – they tend towards an us-against-the-world persona that is often exercised on each other, with rather unfortunate results. Their extra-mural activities at the camp, strictly not part of the camp mother’s itinerary, established a life-long bond between them. Exploratory in sexual, emotional and physical control, the experience has left the kinds of physical scars so common from childhood playground exploits, but also those less visible ones for which adult Robert has subsequently sought professional help.
Sophie’s mother disappeared in the early 1980s when she was five. Her family convinced her that she, also an artist, was forced into exile due to her political connections with the underground liberation movement and the risqué content of her watercolour paintings. Explicit, mixed-race male nudity did not go down well in a Christian Nationalist Apartheid context. But why, thirteen years after democratic freedom in South Africa, has her mother still not returned? With no knowledge of her father, Sophie was raised by her grandparents, but loss paid another visit when Sophie’s grandfather died shortly after taking her in.
Nearly ten years older than Robert, and four years older than Sophie, Ron’s chief interests are in specialist military strategies, and portraits of the self and risky states of existence produced as video clips. A textbook narcissist with exceedingly well-developed sociopathic tendencies, Ron has found an ideal career path, specialising in 'global dirty work'. He has developed a powerful online presence, and uses the descriptor of ‘artist’ for lack of a better one for his unique way of interacting with the world around him. He still has the irritating habit, which he was rehearsing from those days at Happy Acres, of reciting Roy Batty's death speech from the final moments of Blade Runner: I've seen things... (elaborate pause) seen things you little people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate (pause) All those moments... they'll be gone. Wanker.
Preoccupied with conspiracy theories, particularly those concerning South Africa’s engagement with international dirty politics in the twilight years of Apartheid, Robert’s online identities variously claim that he was born in Berlin and lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall; that he was a boy when JFK was assassinated, and in his twenties in 1979 and in 1923. His real birthday, Sophie knew, was December 19, 1982, as the last bolt tinkled to the floor after the enormous Umkhonto weSizwe sabotage of the Koeberg nuclear power station on the Cape west coast. He grew up without a father but with six brothers in a two roomed flat on the grey side of Milnerton, the bit where you can't see the palm trees from your window. Mrs Sloon was a librarian, which figures.
Years of letter-writing as pen pals (and many pranks presented as naïve letter bombs) preceded Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, where their communication has evolved into an accidental art form, ensuring anonymity where necessary and itinerant subjecthood always. As adults, all three are pursuing careers are visual artists in some form or another.
…
The cellophane wrapping was coming away messily. She had tried to pick at the little clear tongue so carefully, but she should have listened to her grandmother’s admonitions about not biting her fingernails. The tongue was resistant, so she was forced to pick at the edges where the brittle plastic was sealed like a wrapped gift. Suddenly it tore diagonally across the top. To prevent the box from dropping to the floor, her small hand gripped tight and crushed the corner. Damn! She was trying to work by touch, under the covers of her bunk with a dim torch, while the other girls lay sleeping. Someone was snoring, probably that fat ginger one. She couldn’t stop bawling after the hair gel incident, her gauche coolness forever compromised. Wan light was pushing against the sea-grimed window panes. The rip of the cellophane startled Sophie, the damaged corner made her angry. Why couldn’t she just get it perfect? She’d spotted the purple box sticking out of Ron’s weird shopping bag get-up earlier, when she’d managed to escape from the cupboard they’d put her in, at the back of the boys’ dormitory. The smell in that room confirmed it. Boys reeked. And the corners of her mouth still smarted from the underpants they’d tied around her head. The chocolates were probably a gift from a doting relative who had no clue how mean (not to mention overweight) her blond, blue-eyed boy was. Or more likely he’d stolen it from another kid. Probably Robert. So Sophie had stolen it back. But it wasn’t enough just to know she’d avenged Robert in a tiny way, or just to have them for herself. Like that poor man who’d stolen the Mona Lisa and kept her in his cupboard just because he thought she was the most beautiful person he’d seen. No, Sophie wanted to eat one chocolate for each day she had to be at this retarded camp. She imagined encountering Ron, a Whisper in her mouth, staring at him indifferently, waiting as the chocolate coating melted and her saliva eroding the malted centre until it gave in, dematerializing the hard round form into warm sweetness. Her secret, hiding in plain sight. The thought made her stomach bunch up and a tingly feeling inch downwards. For each one she consumed, she would make a replacement from unspeakable materials. She would present Ron with the full box for the long bus ride home, as a peace offering as she really wanted to be his Best Friend Forever. Sophie nearly choked trying to stifle a giggle, anticipating his reaction when there was no place to escape and where his ability to construct a decent revenge was severely limited. The box and its contents would be one of her many secret projects.
