time. Either stop your GPS project, or bring the boy. Do NOT make us come and fetch him.”
Apatheto turns cold with fear, because he knows that stopping the project is no option; he has discovered a deviance and has corrected it. Why don’t they like this? But there is something he can do…yes, if he gives the first one to Jack – gutsy Jack G, his son, who took on the Kloof Nek Road…
Another father’s decision
The girl’s father knocks lightly before he enters her room. He looks at her with a powerless, cold incompetence; with a heartlessness that is born from helplessness and an inability to understand her pain.
“I have decided to send you to the Academy. The headmistress is a woman. She will understand better than I. She will know what to do for you. It’s the best really.”
The strange woman with the long nails and false eyelashes comes up behind her father. She puts her arms around his neck.
“Is this going to take long, my jelly bean?”
The girl’s fear makes room for anger and undisguised hatred, but it does not slow down the increasing emptiness in her heart; a vacuum that needs to be filled.
“I thought if I were happy, she would be happy too,” the father thinks, but he does not say anything. “I did not know that children could be so confusing to adults.”
Some weeks later
For all of my known, conscious life, Apatheto Gullible was my dad. I had absolutely no reason to doubt that. So now he wants to stick me into this joint with some rich kids; talks about some trouble that must be sorted out. Dad was always kind and patient with everyone. Perhaps that is the reason he hardly ever got paid for all the work he has done.
“You do understand that I have no choice,” Dad whispers to me.
The school mistress meets us in the hallway - a woman of strange beauty.
“Yersinia Pestis, pleased to meet you Mr. Gullible; and this must be Jack.”
She smiles at us, but there is something cold about her smile – like she’s some kind of dummy.
“Yes, this is my son, Jack. He will be no trouble at all, madam.”
“I am sure.” She is smiling again, but then Yersinia mutters inaudibly under her breath. “The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Jack Gullible under my battlements …” [Yersinia’s adaptation from Lady Macbeth’s words in Act 1, Scene 5, Line 37]
“I’ll be back as soon as I can, Mrs. Pestis,” Dad tries again.
She flashes an inviting smile.
“Yersinia, please. Welcome to A..hum Paragon A..hum Academy. ”
Yersinia emphasises the “please”, as if to focus her fake charm on us, but I am not fooled. She has this perfect smile, like it’s made out of plastic; this smooth skin – not a pimple in sight. She looks like a Barbie doll, but calls herself Yersinia Pestis. [Better known as the plague. An outbreak swept through Europe in the 1300s. Dubbed the Black Death, the disease killed more than 25 million people. Some worry about the plague's potential use as an agent of bioterrorism. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/03/0310_040310_blackdeath.html] It’s just the knee length skirt and the high leather boots that make her look like she’s an alien from another age.
“You need not have any worries. As you know, we have excellent discipline and all our teaching is done straight out of the book, Mr. Gullible.”
An ominous sound of struggling, something snapping, followed by shouting and wailing becomes audible from the back door. Yersinia Pestis calmly turns her back on the two of us.
“Doubt and Fear! You stop that immediately! Don’t make me come in there!”
She flashes her perfect smile at Dad again. Something does not seem right about that smile. It is just too perfect.
“Boys will be boys, won’t they? Always trying to eat each other alive!”
“So very true, Mrs. Pest…er...Yersinia”
But Dad is too sad to laugh his usual jovial laugh, and I know that in his heart, he does not agree with her. He is only trying to protect me by not making her angry.
“Oh but I am sure you are quite different. You certainly know how to act in an exemplary way.” She smiles at me, batting her eyelids much too fast. Don’t bet your life on it; I have a mind of my own.
I leave her alone in her office and follow Dad outside to say goodbye. He hugs me earnestly. His words to me are spoken softly, but in great earnest. They shock me, turn me cold with fear.
“Jack, my dearest son, I am not a good father for you. I love you very much, and as from today, I shall have to depend on you.”
He looks into my eyes; sees my surprise and his own brim with tears, just like that day when he spanked me real solid about that little skateboard trip.
“Don’t let this out of your sight. Please study it every day. Your very survival will depend on it! It shows the way to your real Father, the one who owns all authority. You were given to him when you were still small – with water. Find Him! Find out who you truly are!”
He puts this smallish parcel in my hands.
“Hide it in your jacket,” he says. “Jack, you can do this. I know you can. There’s more depending on this than you realise. So go ahead!”
“Do what?” I ask.
“You will find out when you come to that part of the journey – whether I am a bad father, or not.”
He hugs me again.
“Go now, I’ll pray my King to be with you.”
“Your WHAT? Dad, we live in this democratic setup, remember?”
But he turns and quickly walks to the waiting car, and does not give me a chance to ask another question, or to try and stop him. He looks pale and tired when he waves. I hide the parcel in my pocket. Yersinia calls me back to her office.
She opens her mouth to speak to me, but before a sound can come from her yellow teeth, the door from which these strange sounds have earlier come, bursts open. Two fighting crocodiles scramble into the room, rolling, wrestling and biting at each other. I make a beeline for the door, but before I can close the door, I can see Yersinia jumping on the table. She grabs an umbrella from its stand and starts hitting at the two monsters.
“Fear! How dare you bite off Doubt’s tail!”
I can hear the blows from the umbrella falling on some hardened, scaly skin.
“Ouch, Mom! That was my eye! I’ll get you for this, "you horrible wench!”
Then I can hear Yersinia’s voice again.
“Molluscum! Molluscuuuuuum! Come here at once! Why are you never here when I call you?”
I only hear this faint mumbling male voice.
“Well! Go get him!” It is Yersinia Pestis’ voice again. “Do you want him to escape?”
The door opens. An overweight, sweaty little man appears. He has these festering sores all over his body.
“My name is Molluscum Contagiosum, ” [Molluscum contagiosum (MC) is a viral infection of the skin. It is caused by a DNA poxvirus (MCV)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molluscum_contagiosum]he tells me in a gruff voice, and then continues as if reciting something that he has trouble memorising: “Welcome to A..hum Paragon Academy for the captives… I mean.. for the children of spies and saboteurs to be reha..liberated…I mean…re..ha.. bi..li.. tated. No…reading of books. No… studying in dun…dorms. Only smoking and taking the . dru…and fighting will be allowed. I shall now take you to your d… dunge… d.. dormitory.”
What’s going on here? My real father? Given? With water? I don’t know what this is all about, but there is little time now for thinking about all that.
As I pass the long corridor of the first floor dorms, I see a girl standing at the very far end. For a moment she looks at me with her big, strange eyes and then quickly disappears into one of the doorways. It all happens so quickly, like I’m just dreaming or something. But at the same time, it feels as if she is still looking at me with those indescribable eyes.
Jack enters his new dorm
Mollusc
um does not seem to have learnt too many societal niceties from Yersinia. They reach the second floor which must be where the boys’ dorms are; no security doors for barricading entrances – only obscenities written on the walls.
“No swopping places with other boys!” are Molluscum’s parting words before the door is banged shut behind him.
The room is a little bigger than the four steel beds that it contains. Two depression grey steel cupboards are sighing a shared grief against the opposite wall.
Two boys are sitting on the furthest bed, playing chess, using a very old, run-down plastic set. A third is leaning through the window, trying to whisper something to someone in the neighbouring dormitory.
“A prison, exactly like a prison,” are the thoughts that Jack simply cannot ban from his mind. “What is WRONG with my father?”
The boy at the window slowly turns around. He has a thin, pale face. His hair is a dirty white and seems pasted to his head with some low-quality office glue.
“So you must be the final captive - the one that inspires some repressed… childhood fear with the old girl? Wonder why she should be so afraid of YOU. ”
He musters Jack. “We’ll see… soon.”
There is an unmistakable look of enmity in his glance when Wesley Southbound looks Jack over.
He deliberately and slowly walks up to Jack.
“I do not know whose side you are on, but you’d better choose quickly. If you choose blood, you will be better off, of course. I cannot do much for you if you choose water, and there is no place for turncoats.”
He pushes his face right up to Jack’s.
The other two boys have