Free The Raft: A Novel by Fred Strydom Page B

drivers were standing in front of their wreckages, staring indifferently at the crumpled steel boxes. The third driver, still in the car suspended diagonally against the pole, was still in his front seat, unconscious or dead. The man spared a glance for them all but did not stop walking.
    He climbed over a low wall and into a public park. His sweaty skin cooled in the shade of dense green canopies. Dead leaves wheeled across the ground in a warm wind. The sun cut through the leaves above, spindles of light spearing in and out of the gaps.
    In the centre of the park, between the trees, an old woman was bent over a refuse drum, rummaging through trash. She pulled out a black wrapper dripping with yellow liquid, and put it in her mouth. She sucked on the plastic and turned to look as the man in the red shirt went by.
    The man walked through the park and out onto the narrow winding roads of a small residential area. Large houses, tucked behind bushy front yards, beige outside walls crawling with pink and purple bougainvillea, gimmicky postboxes, an unmanned length of hosepipe lying like a snake on an outside lawn, water looping into the grass. The man swung his head from side to side as he walked, but still he saw nothing familiar.
    The man walked. Suburb after suburb, a stretch of road lined with restaurants and cafeterias, a pool hall, an art supplies shop. He crossed the perfectly green grass of a school rugby field, walked beside a concrete canal. The more he saw of the world, the less he grasped. His head was filled with more and more unrelated details and none of them added up to a helpful sum of this strange world’s parts. The complexity of it all exhausted him. When his feet began to hurt, he stopped to sit. When he grew bored, he walked on. He did this for most of the day.
    Once the sun had moved almost all the way across the sky, burning at its worst, he came across a bridge. A group of people were lying in the shade beneath: men and women in suits, children, teenagers, office workers, schoolteachers, policemen—a random assortment of people. He ducked under the bridge to join them and sat, finally out of the scalding sun. The people under the bridge looked at him silently. He remained there until the sun went down and the world was swathed in darkness. The group curled up close to each other, holding on like hopeless refugees from a faraway place they could no longer recognise as their home, and went to sleep.
    In the morning the sun returned and one by one they awoke and left the underside of the bridge. The man woke and watched with tired eyes as each person ambled away. He lifted his head from the concrete and wiped away the bits of sand and stone embedded in the skin of his cheek. He cricked his neck and his back, and then made his way out into the vivid world. He was no closer to remembering where he was or how he had come to be there, but now he felt something other than confusion: a mist of despair swirling up and around him.
    As he walked, he encountered a few more of the world’s mundanities: an unattended fruit stall, a black dog chained to a post, barking frantically from behind a wire fence, an abandoned merry-go-round creaking softly in the wind.
    A few hours later the man in the dank red shirt came across something that finally brought him to a stop: the sight of a woman walking towards him. He paused and stared at her. She stared back at him. She was wearing a black shirt and a ruffled orange skirt. She had long bleach-blonde hair. The roots were beginning to show and two curls framed her face.
    She was beautiful, he could register that much, but he was interested in more than her beauty. Something deeper had caught his attention, something he could not understand, like the details of a dream that had been forgotten but that left the waking soul with a lingering sense of incomprehension. He couldn’t shake it: this woman seemed different from everything and everyone else in the world. This was