Ivan Vladislavic - Double Negative

In the beginning, he always bamboozled me. All it took was one unexpected turn down a street we normally drove past and he could throw me off the trail. Then with every subsequent stop or bend in the road, the map I was making in my mind grew less and less reliable. If I was lucky, some landmark like the turnip-top of a water tower or the pylon lights at a sports stadium would let me pick up the thread, but often it was lost for good. Finally, my father would pull over and ask me the all-important question. After I had given my answer, I would sit up, and then we laughed to see how wrong I was. Once, after we had dropped some letters in the box at the post office, he drove us in a circle, so that when I thought we were close to home, it turned out we were back where we started. And once or twice, with the car rocking like a river barge on its soft suspension, I did in fact fall asleep.

As time went by and I discovered more subtle clues than those unreeling like a strip of film through the frames of the windows, I got better at the game and started to win sometimes. I learned to read the bumps in the road, the rumble of tar under the wheels, the way the car jolted across railway lines or yawed through subways. At night, colours fell through the windows from neon lights and robots, the sky was dark and smoky over Alex, and near the garages along Louis Botha Avenue the air smelt of rubber. My father had to work harder to mislead me. He varied his speed so that I lost a sense of distance, and circled around blocks so that I lost direction. He became as involved in the game as I was and liked to lose as little. A few times we dallied so long my mother thought something had happened to us, and when we got home, in high spirits from the fun, she ticked me off for making my father play silly games, when he was the one who had started it all.

A day came when I could not go wrong. It was a Friday evening. We had dropped Paulina at her bus stop, as she was going home for the weekend, and on the way back we stopped at a new fish-and-chip shop for takeaways. Usually my father would have been in a hurry to get home before the smell of the food got into the upholstery, but the unfamiliar territory drew us both into a game. I scrambled over the seat and stretched out in the back. We went down Louis Botha. Certainty settled over me like a blanket. I knew exactly where we were going. I had X-ray vision, I could see through the leather seats, where springs were coiled in fibre, I could see through the metal ribs of the door. Factory yards, shopfronts, garden fences and houses drifted by. My father turned off the main road earlier than he should have and wound through the crooked streets of Savoy. I saw the yellow-brick chimneys of the houses, the cars parked in driveways, the lights burning in windows. I had become a compass needle. Rather than trying to figure out where he was going, I was giving him directions, telling him when to slow down, where to turn, when to double back.

At last we stopped. The air was thick with the homely smell of food, which the vinegar had not entirely soured. I could see a streetlight on a tall pole, the jigsaw undersides of oak leaves, pieces of sky between branches. My dad’s voice reached me through the wall of the seat: ‘Where are we now, my boy?’

For the moment, I could not answer. I lay in the dark with the bitter knowledge that I had unlearned the art of getting lost.

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