Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

‘Hymie, we’ve been through that! You promised you wouldn’t bring it up again.’

‘Cripes, Peekay, what are you going to do?’

I told him about the three scholarships I’d been offered and the paragraph in the letter which encouraged me to apply again when I had obtained my first degree.

Hymie was silent for a moment. ‘Got it! We’ll go together to whatever university you choose and then we’ll take the last two years at Oxford. You’re only just seventeen and I’m just eighteen, we’ve got lots of time!’

It was my turn to be silent. ‘You’ve forgotten one thing,’ I said finally.

Hymie was quick as a flash. ‘Of course I haven’t, we’ll go to Witwatersrand and Solly can continue to train you and the old combo will stay together.’

‘It sounds great, Hymie, but you’ve already been accepted for Oxford. This doesn’t fit in at all with your plans.’

‘Plans! Plans are meant to be broken. This is a much better idea.’

But I knew it wasn’t.

‘Let me think, Hymie. I just need a few days to think things out.’ I knew quite suddenly that I would have to visit the crystal cave of Africa, that I had to ‘speak’ with Doc. Doc was still a very real part of my life and I had come to think of the crystal cave of Africa as the place I would be closest to him.

‘Call me, reverse charge, in a week, you promise now. So long, Peekay.’

The next morning I packed a rucksack and left before dawn for the cave. By mid-morning I had climbed to the shelf next to the cave. I had no desire to enter; Doc’s spirit was everywhere, I was as close as I needed to be.

The shelf faced west and caught the late afternoon sun so that now I sat in shadow, the smooth dolomite surface still cold from the night. I closed my eyes as Inkosi-Inkosikazi had shown me how to do so many years ago.

Now there came the sudden roar of water in my head and then I saw the three waterfalls. I was standing again in the moonlight on an outcrop of rock directly above the falling water. Far below me the river rushed, tumbling into a narrow gorge. Just before the river entered the gorge an apron of green water spread from the base of the last of the falls and across its centre, a small boy’s jump separating them, were the ten black stepping stones, their smooth wet surfaces only inches above the swirling current.

I took a deep breath and launched myself from the rock; the cool air mixed with spray rushed past my face. I hit the pool at the bottom of the first waterfall, the sound of the splash drowned in the roar of the water. I surfaced to be swept over the second of the falls and then again over the third, landing in the deep pool of swirling green water. I fought my way to the surface and struck out towards the first of the black stones. Pulling myself up onto it, I hurriedly jumped from one stone to another, finally leaping for the pebbly beach beyond. I felt my toes and the ball of my foot touch the smooth round river pebbles, and as I landed I found myself inside the crystal cave of Africa.

The cave was illuminated as though by soft sunlight and I had no trouble seeing around me. It was more magnificent than I had ever imagined, the stalactites suspended in every imaginable colour, some hanging thirty feet from the ceiling. I walked towards Doc’s platform skirting the mirror-still pools of water reflecting the grotesque and beautiful stone icicles. A ray of sunlight, as sharply defined as if it were painted in a Raphael skyscape, fell onto the platform. I looked up to see a perfectly round hole in the ceiling through which the sun shone as though predestined for this precise hour of this precise day. The beam of light shone through the crystalline structures above the platform and spilt down the steps leading up to it. Slowly I climbed the rough, natural steps until finally, standing on the top step, I looked down onto the platform where Doc lay at my feet.

Doc lay as I had imagined he would, fingers extended, arms bent at the elbows and crossed at the wrists across his breast, his legs straight, like the effigy of a medieval knight at rest on a gothic tomb in a quiet corner of a great cathedral. He was made of pure crystal, the soft sunlight reflected from the effigy dancing at the edges. Doc’s sculptured face was surrounded by burnished light.

I told him of my fear of losing control of my destiny, how, because I had camouflaged myself so well, I seemed now to be shaped and directed too much by the needs of others. How the power of one within me was being dissipated even though their purposes for me were not corrupt or ill-intentioned. On the contrary, their deeds came swaddled in the innocence of love. I was becoming powerless as those around me plundered my spirit with the gift of themselves.

It was as though there was a voice inside me explaining me to myself: I had become an expert at camouflage. My precocity allowed me, chameleon-like, to be to each what they required me to be. To Doc a companion, to Mrs Boxall an enchantment, to the people a champion, to Captain Smit a fulfilment, to Miss Bornstein a bright lint in a dull warp, to Hymie a foil, to Singe ’n Burn a product and to my peers an idealised school boy, a winner and a great guy.

I was a poor boy among rich ones and in my mind the status they gained by the simple expedient of being wealthy was only leavened by my superior performance in every other expectation. I had come to identify with my camouflage to the point where the masquerade became more important than the truth. While this posturing was so finely tuned it was no longer deliberate, it had nevertheless been born out of a compulsion to hide. As a small child I had discovered that only two places are available to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a non-entity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.

My camouflage, begun so many years before under the persecution of the Judge, was now threatening to become the complete man. It was time to slough the mottled and cunningly contrived outer skin to emerge as myself, to face the risk of exposure, to regain the power of one. I had reached the point where to find myself was essential.

I was not conscious of how long I had been sitting cross-legged on the shelf but slowly my eyes focused and the soft blur of blue in front of them sharpened into the mountains to the west. In the rainforest below me I heard the cry of a red loerie. My legs were stiff and my ankles sore where they had been crossed. I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom… the same sense of being free that I had felt when the big, black, hissing train had pulled out of the platform, away from the hostel, Mevrou and the Judge. When Hoppie had sat opposite me and we had first shared an adventure and a green sucker between us.

I had come back from the dreamtime in the crystal cave of Africa with a certainty that I would be tested once more before the power of one would become mine alone. When my destiny would be in my own hands.

I continued to sit completely still as Doc had taught me to do when observing any living thing. ‘Still like rock, Peekay, past the itch and the scratch and the pain, where the concentration sees with a diamond-sharp light.’ And so I sat perfectly still, emerging slowly from the cocoon of the trance I had been in. In my mind I asked Doc for a sign.

At that moment, sitting still as a rock on the shelf directly outside the crystal cave of Africa, I had no doubts, nor was I troubled by the intellectual absurdity of the request for a sign, a confirmation in a physical sense of the message I felt so clearly within me.

At first it was hardly a movement at all, less even than the flicker of an eyelid, a slight blurring of light. Then the head of the black mamba rose above the edge of the shelf two feet from where I sat. Its flat anthracite head froze inches above the shelf. Its forked tongue, as though possessing a life of its own, flicked and trembled the air for vibrations. The huge snake rose, periscoping above the shelf, moving forward until its head was no more than six inches from my face. I could see its eyes, black tektites without movement set above jaws of injected death. Its head moved in slow motion from side to side, sweeping across my sightline. If it struck I would have fifteen minutes to live… enough time to enter the cave and lie beside Doc before my nervous system collapsed. The mamba’s head moved below my line of sight and then came to rest on the toe of my boot. I could feel the pressure of its body as it slid over the boot and along the shelf to disappear over the cliff’s far edge. The snake could only have come out of the cave. Doc had sent me a sign. I knew what I was required to do.