The Mall Page 9
‘Are we going up or down?’ Dan says, his voice sounding remarkably normal, although his eyes are glassy with shock.
‘I don’t know.’ I don’t. The motion is disorienting; one second I’m certain we’re travelling upwards, the next I’m convinced we’re headed downwards.
‘Fuck. That was close,’ I say.
Dan starts to shake violently, and it’s only when I run my hand over my face that I realise that I’m shaking too. I tell myself it’s just the cold water.
The lift’s gears screech again, and it judders and seems to slow down.
My phone beeps again and both of us jump. It’s another message. I click it open.
Oh fuck.
Dan’s staring straight at me. I look down. ‘What?’
‘Nothing. Can’t understand it. Just gibberish.’ I press delete, praying that it disappears off the screen.
Dan opens his mouth to insist, and then his phone vibrates and beeps.
‘Shit,’ he says, reading the message. He passes it to me.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I say.
Then the lights go out and the lift drops sickeningly two or three floors before slamming to a rocking halt.
‘Oh fuck,’ Dan says, in the dark. ‘What now?’
There’s the sound of gears screaming again, and then, bizarrely, piped music starts wafting out of the roof.
chapter 10
DANIEL
The only lights are the lift’s buttons, three rows of ten. 1 to 25, B for basement, G for ground, door open, door close and the emergency bell. I know it’s a waste of my time to try that one, even as I thumb it. Dead. Of course.
Nothing to show which level we’re on.
Rhoda is pacing around the lift, oddly keeping time with the muzak piping out from somewhere. ‘I’ve got to get out of here, Dan, I’m serious. I’m going to suffocate. Give me a foot up.’
‘Where?’
‘Do it!’ she hisses.
‘Fine.’ I offer her my cupped hands to who-knows-where she wants to climb. She scrabbles at the ceiling. She’s jerking around, almost falling off the platform I’m making for her, punching at the ceiling. For the second time today, I notice just how light she is. She shouldn’t be this light. It’s like if she relaxed all those tight sinews she’d break into pieces.
I don’t want to think too much about that now, so I try and break the ice. ‘Jesus, Rhoda, you’re quite hardcore for an academic’s daughter.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘I can’t believe you’re, like, wealthy and shit. I could have sworn you were—’
‘What? What? Some blacks have money, you know, Daniel.’
‘Jeez. You don’t have to tell me… I wasn’t—’ She’s got this fuck ing unsettling way of turning everything I say around.
She’s still squirming and wriggling in my grip. Her filthy gritty shoes are hurting my hands; sewer water is dripping off the hem of her trousers. I’m scared I’m about to drop her. ‘Hurry up, Rhoda. What are you trying to do?’
‘I’m just tryna…’ comes the muffled response.
‘It’s pointless. You’ll come out onto the top of a lift in a shaft that’s fuck knows how deep. Just as dark, just as airless.’
‘Shut up!’
‘If this lift shaft is anything like that bottomless pit we climbed down… And it has a bottom. A bottom we can smash on like melons from the fucking tower of Pisa.’ Now I’m just babbling, and I should just shut up, but I can’t. The fucking panpipes are driving me insane.
‘I said shut the fuck up,’ she bellows as she jumps out of my braced hands. I shake them out. Rhoda punches the wall again. She’s breathing too fast, and it dawns on me that her panic is for real.
‘Hey, Rhoda,’ I say, intent on calming her down. ‘Listen to the music. I know this tune.’
The panpipe muzak piping out of the roof was designed to be calming, and to my surprise it’s working. On me, if not Rhoda.
‘It reminds me of a holiday we took to Durban when we visited my cousin,’ I continue talking her down. ‘He was three months older than me, had much cooler toys, much cooler stuff. He put on this soppy CD and showed me a poem a girl at school had written for him. She’d copied the lyrics word for word.’
Rhoda’s breathing is starting to slow. ‘God, I’m going to puke,’ she says, but at least she’s starting to calm down to normal. If you can call her usual condition normal. It hasn’t escaped me that she’s probably about to start going into some sort of drug withdrawal now that her stash has been washed down the sewer. ‘Lionel motherfucking Richie. They’re cruel bastards. We know that much.’
‘I was fucking jealous of my cousin,’ I continue, trying to keep it boring. ‘Girlfriends writing him poems. He became a rabbi. Never married. Wonder how much his Lionel-Richie-toting primary-school sweetheart had to do with that.’
She manages a smile. ‘Yeah. Probably had a lot to do with it. “Hello”,’ she croons half-heartedly, strangling the words as if she hates them. ‘“Is it me you’re looking for? Cos I wonder what you are and I wonder blah blah blah”.’ She peters out.
Okay. She’s back. Thank God. ‘Just carry on thinking of open spaces, okay. Listen to the music. Imagine you’re in the desert, on the open sea, in a meadow. Anything fresh and clean. Okay?’ She doesn’t ask how I know so much about claustrophobia.
‘Yeah, okay. Thanks, Dr Phil. I got it now. Breathe and think about fairies and unicorns,’ she says. ‘It would be easier if we weren’t stuck in a fucking falling lift! What the fuck do we do, Dan?’
‘Well, we know the name of the song… What do we do with it?’ I ask, more to myself than her. ‘The message said “name that tune”. Who do we tell? How?’ If there’s one thing I know a lot about, it’s games. And I know this is too easy. This is Level One. And I know Rhoda isn’t ready to hear that just yet.
‘I guess we just text the name back.’ Rhoda pulls out her phone.
‘No, wait. I don’t think so. Nobody’s going to design a game based on cellphones. The coverage and the relay time are just too unreliable. Maybe in the future. The control has to be something internal.’
She looks at me like I’m talking in Vulcan. ‘What are you on about? That sounds fucking complicated. We need to keep things simple, all right?’
‘Rhoda, listen. This is a game. It runs on its own internal logic. I doubt these fucks are sitting around waiting for us to SMS anyway. They just set the game in motion and they’re probably sitting at home listening to Britney Spears and jerking off.’
‘You don’t know—’
‘You may have lived twenty lives on the streets and know all sorts of shit about all sorts of shit. But I’ve lived twenty thousand lives in front of consoles. I know games. This is just a game.’
‘In games players don’t really die, though.’
‘To play a game well you have to feel like you’re going to die. You get into the zone and nothing outside matters. This is just a game without a manual. I’ve played hundreds of pirated games before. We have to figure it out, that’s all.’
‘We’ve got no time, for fuck’s sake, Dan. What the hell do you—’
‘Let me think.’ And I block out her noise, just like I’ve blocked out my mother’s nagging so often in the past.
The only control panel here is the lift’s buttons. That must be the input device. If we have to input a word, we need an alphabet. So it’s either one to nine like a cellphone, or… the buttons – it has to be the buttons. Thirty buttons, twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Which four do we leave out? Door open, door close, alarm – gone. One left. Space bar? Which one?
The song’s nearly finished, arsehole! my mind screams at me. But the dominant part of me stays calm. I’m in the zone. I’m bre
athing deeply. You stay calm, you breathe deeply, your time remaining stretches out. You panic, it’s over. You go blank. Not today. Breathe.
Probably B, but I wouldn’t know. Is it a simple substitution cipher? Ground=A, 1=B, 2=C. Or 1=A, 2=B, 3=C. That’s very easy. Too easy. But maybe that’s part of the trick. Maybe the input is not supposed to be the hard part; the guessing game is.
How many chances do you think we have, dumbfuck? We can’t start again in this game. Shut the fuck up. Make a choice. Trust your intuition. You know how you get that feeling when you’re really in the sweet spot, you can almost foresee the future, you’re so in synch with the machine. Listen to the best voice. Trust yourself. I know her soft and sexy voice; she sounds like an angel.
Okay. 1=A. Here we go.
8 – 5 – 12 – 12 – 15.
A lurch and my stomach’s in my throat. Instinctively I push myself into the corner of the lift, my knees bent like I’m sitting on an invisible chair, my arms pushing against the two walls as hard as they can. I’ve seen it on TV somewhere. They showed what happens when you’re in a falling lift. First your legs shatter, then you bounce up and smash your skull against the ceiling. So what you want to do is become a shock absorber, keep your legs flexible to buffer the force, then hold on so you don’t bounce.
‘Brace!’ I scream at Rhoda. ‘Brace like me!’ She squeezes into her corner as we plummet. We’re going so fast, I’m feeling light; any faster we’ll be in zero-G.
The lift slows, then jerks to a halt.
‘Fuck! Nice going, gameboy. Let’s do it my way now, okay?’ She thumbs at her phone.
‘No!’ But it’s too late. She’s hit
‘Is that good or bad?’ I ask, but my gut tells me down is bad. I see the endless tunnel again. If we are anywhere in the middle of a shaft that deep, we have plenty of space still to fall.
Now Rhoda’s working on prising the doors open. Even if she manages to open the door, I’m sure we’d see nothing but blank concrete. I just watch her. I’m so tired.
The closing bars of the music snap us out of our fugues. ‘Christ, Dan. It’s ending. I don’t think we’ll get another chance.’
My angel whispers in my ear.
It’s a fucking QWERTY keyboard.
Which end does it start? Do we exclude caps lock or colons on the middle row? No time. The last words are sung; the final notes are kicking in. And what the hell was the order of the letters?
Breathe, my angel tells me. You know how to touch-type. You’ve IMed for years. Write me a message. Say hello. Don’t think. Trust yourself.
I’m in the sweet spot. I can’t hear the music any more. It’s just me, the perfume of my angel, her feathers drifting in the white air.
12 – 2 – 21 – 21 – 20
‘You cut that a bit fine,’ Rhoda’s saying when I open my eyes. But she’s smiling thinly. We’re going up. Slowly.
The Lionel Richie song dies; the lift stops. Another panpipe rendition comes on.
‘Here it goes again,’ I say. ‘I knew that wasn’t all.’ I don’t recognise the tune. Jazzy easy listening, but without any particular harmony standing out.
Rhoda’s checking her phone. Nothing. Nothing on mine either. ‘Bastards, what the fu—’ She pauses. ‘I know this,’ she says. But instead of looking pleased, her face pales and glistens with a fresh sheen of sweat.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘There’s no way they could…’ she’s muttering to herself.
‘Come on, Rhoda. You need to talk to me. If you know the song give me the fucking title.’
‘“Nonhlanhla”,’ she says.
‘Huh? I didn’t—’
‘“Non-hlan-hla”,’ she reiterates like I’m a moron. ‘It’s a common name, jerkoff, not some weird alien shit. There’s probably more Nonhlanhlas in South Africa than there are Dans.’
‘Okay. Whatever. Just give me the spelling. We can do the PC bullshit later, okay. Have you forgotten where we are?’
‘Christ, you’re a dick—’
‘How. The fuck. Do you spell it. Rhoda.’
‘N–O–N–H—’
13–20–13. ‘Hang on, hang on. I can’t think where the keys are. You need to go slower. I can’t…’
‘H. H, man! Write it down or something.’
12–12–
And we’re falling so fast I’m thrown against the side of the lift. I try to get into my brace position and Rhoda’s screaming at me: ‘Try again!’
‘There’s no way to clear this thing. I don’t know. How am I…’ This is too much for me. My fucking angel has left the building and all the knowledge I have left is how this game has worked up to now. That’s all I can trust. I have to believe that we’re going to stop and get another chance. I’ve been acting so macho and like I know what I’m doing. But I’m going to kill us both. I don’t want that as my last action. I don’t want that as my last thought. I want to go home. I want to wake up. I think about screaming, but then the lift judders to a stop.
‘Okay, let’s try that again,’ Rhoda says, her voice softer. ‘I’ll go slowly.’
I nod. ‘Any idea how long this song is?’
All she says is ‘N’. I press 13.
‘O’ 20
‘N’ 13
‘H’ 12
‘L’ 21
‘A’ Door open? Fuck, I’ve got it wrong. This can’t be right. But we’re halfway and I can’t reset. There’s no fucking undo in this game. I press the button, Rhoda’s eyes widen, doubting me as much as I doubt myself. The doors don’t open. I can’t tell if that was good or bad. We just have to finish this entry.
‘N’ 13
‘H’ 12
‘L’ 21
‘A’ Door open. A shudder and I think oh God this is it, we’re dead, but then the lift is hoisting us up gently.
‘How did you know that?’ I ask as we ascend.
‘My dad used to play it when we were first in… in the UK. It was his favourite song. “Nonhlanhla” by Chubby Khoabane. It’s goddamn sacrilege to change Chubby’s trumpet into fucking panpipes. Dad would be…’ She stops.
‘Well done,’ I say when I realise she’s not going to tell me any more. ‘Good for your dad.’
‘He named me after this song.’
‘What? Rhoda?’
‘Nonhlanhla’s my real name. Rhoda’s my slave name, if you like.’
‘Better than Lastchance or Nomore, I suppose.’
She gives me a fuck-off look. ‘What I don’t know is how these fuckers knew. Nobody knows my name. Nobody.’
If that’s her name, I have an idea what’s coming next. Sure enough, soon as the lift stops again, another perfect muzak tune follows. Barely into the first bar I start pressing the buttons: 3 – door open – 13 – 17 – 2 – 21, and we’re on our way up again.
‘Clever,’ says Rhoda. ‘We’ve got HELLO NONHLANHLA DANIEL. I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to say next.’
But I’m thinking of home again. How my mother would put on that Elton John song to soothe me after Dad died. I think it soothed her too, to sing along to it softly, combing her fingers through my hair. We had the same hair, Dad and me, thin and straight, got knotted a bit, could respond to the gentle tug of Mom’s fingers. This has to be some fucked-up dream. My dad’s ghost coming back to me in the middle of a long and terrifying night to shit on me for not mourning him properly. What the fuck was I supposed to do? I was thirteen. You don’t know how to grieve at thirteen. When are you supposed to learn how to grieve?
I wipe at my eyes. It’s sore as if it was yesterday. I wonder if Rhoda’s noticed I’m crying, but she’s standing at the other side of our box, just staring into nothing, a blank look on her face.
‘Hey, Rhoda. You okay?’ She looks at me dully, as if she’s just woken up.
She slurs, ‘No. I don’t think so.’
&n
bsp; I rifle through her jacket pockets, still damp and stinking from the sewer. They have to be ruined, surely. But in the lower inside pocket I find a crumpled box of Stuyvesant, the plastic wrapping protecting the lone cigarette from too much damage. It’s bent and damp, but it will do. I rummage for the lighter, and have to click it several times before it catches. I take a deep drag and put it between her lips.
‘Here.’
She pulls the smoke deep into her lungs, coughs, and shakes herself straight.
‘Thanks. That’s better.’ Resuscitating someone with cigarettes. Ironic. My life has changed a bit.
She takes another drag, hands me the cigarette and then there’s screaming and grinding machines and the lift is imploding and people are chainsawing things and smashing cars and I realise we’ve stopped and music has come on again but these are no panpipes this is war and a guy or an army is screaming from the pit of their stomachs and then holy shit I recognise the noise somewhere in the noise a pattern not of music nothing so regular but I see a scene of blood and carnage headslayer five level eight with all weapons unlocked that is the racket that accompanied the full-on slaughter and now I remember Karl has the game soundtrack video and my head is so tuned into the noise that I can read the caption on his screen as we play I am blowing his monsters to blood clots band is called Sons of Tombspawn and the track number seventeen level eight unlocked was called
READY TO DIE
5 – 2 – door open – 3 – 11
Shit. Space? I look to Rhoda, but she’s just standing there, covering her mouth, eyes wide and this noise is killing me, I can’t think straight. Which one did I say was the fucking space?
I try 25 and we start to plummet again, the familiar buffeting and I don’t even bother to brace because honestly having my brains knocked out would be better than this noise, this trying, this up and down and this TINY FUCKING BOX MY BRAIN’S GOING TO EXPLODE I’m going to stop breathing. Then it will be quiet. Then I can go and walk out on my meadow, wash in the cool stream, lie in the sun. Die in peace.