Free Mindf**k by Fanie Viljoen

at Allemanskraal Dam?’ he asked with a heavy Afrikaans accent.
    ‘Ah, you know.’
    He frowned. I could see he wanted to know more, but bugger him, he wasn’t my father.
    When he saw I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat, he switched on the radio. Radio Sonder Grense. Can you believe it? I thought all their listeners had bloody well diedalready. Well, that was how the presenters talked to them. As if they were scared to wake the dead, leaving that for the Second Coming.
    ‘It’s now ten o’clock and time for the news,’ the presenter said in Afrikaans.
    His words struck my mind like an echo in an empty room.
    What if they carried a story about Partygirl on the news? About her disappearance from her mother’s house. That she went missing. Perhaps something about a body that was found at the Allemanskraal Dam … Maybe that the police were on the lookout for three boys in their late teens that could help with the investigation. (Translated meaning: the guilty fuckers.)
    The news reader drawled from one story to the next. Robert Mugabe who was still refusing to get off his throne like a full of shit teenager, giving the world the finger. The ANC protecting their wickets. Theenormous Aids pandemic wiping out people all over Africa. (And the South African minister of health who wanted to stop it with garlic and beetroot.)
    When a story about another farm attack came on the air, the old guy just said ‘fuck’ and switched off the radio.
    Nothing about Partygirl.
    We drove on in total silence. At the Aldam exit he dropped me off. I started walking to the gate. A game warden picked me up halfway and dropped me off at the resort’s swimming pool. (I told him that my friends were waiting for me there. I couldn’t really tell him that I came to see if we actually buried Partygirl.)
    When he drove off I started making my way to the dam. Down the stone stairs, past the trampoline and put-put course, the new swimming pool and the super tube, to the camping area, where the main stage was.
    Cleaners were already busy picking upthe rubbish. It looked like a dumping site: beer cans, papers, used condoms. The fine grass was in bad shape after the weekend. In places you could see the rectangles where the tents had been.
    I tried working out where our tent stood. It was close to the water. I walked alongside the dam. Everything looked different. I stopped at a flat patch of ground. Was it here? It didn’t look as if the ground had been tampered with. I looked at the area again. The trees in the distance. The distance from the main stage. (They were busy taking it down.) No, it wasn’t there.
    I strode further.
    My heart missed a beat when I saw it.
    Unmistakable for someone who knew, but if you didn’t know, you would walk over it without noticing anything.
    The ground made a slight bump even though we took a lot of it out and dumped it in other places. The Beetle’s hubcap wasstill lying there. I picked it up, turned my back on the workers and wiped it clean with my T-shirt. Just in case there were some fingerprints on it. Then I dropped it again.
    I stared at the ground. As if I wanted to say that I was sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sorry, Partygirl.
    But I didn’t say it. I chased away all the thoughts that tried to surface in my mind, attempting to feel nothing.
    It happened.
    Live with it.
    ‘Lost anything?’ one of the cleaners suddenly asked behind me.
    He would never know just how much.

TRACK 26
Something has changed
    My mind was a mess as I lumbered back to the main building at the swimming pool. I saw nothing around me. Heard nothing. I only thought about her. About Partygirl.
    I soon found myself sitting in a car and driving back to the gate along the resort’s road. I must’ve stolen the car, I thought vaguely. But I couldn’t remember doing it. In the rear-view mirror I noticed the small window at the back was broken. The loose wires from the hotwire job hung at my knees below the dashboard.
    The car’s entry