Kris Van der Bijl

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

He was a nurse for Mr W. Phahlele. He’ll know all about the orange tree attacks.

No.

Rule out the idea that I fully understood what occurred. 

It’s true that I was a nurse to the man, but my lack of biological training meant my job was to give him his daily sponge baths.

I first looked upon Mr W. Phahlele when he was stationed on what became his deathbed. I’m proud to say that he turned his mouth into a smile when he saw me. He had tubes stamped into his nose, mouth, cheeks and neck, so I never heard him speak, but I was told that his toothy smile was his way of communicating pleasure.

It’s said that Mr Phahlele’s public notoriety rose when he bought a string of properties in the Bishopscourt area of Cape Town. However, what really got him famous was his decision to cut a gulley across his estate.

Aimee, a daughter of his, introduced me to his estate. Outside, looking from the front entrance of the main house, one saw its endless green lawns swooping down towards the construction of the gulley.

“I’m against its construction”, Aimee stated.

“The grass looks nice, though.”

“It is nice,” Aimee replied. “But there’s a lot more I’d do with it.”

We strolled with our arms grasped behind our backs.

“I have to say,” I began, “that I’m really grateful for the job. Not many people would hire an untrained nurse.”

“It’s part of what we do here,” Aimee said.

Aimee explained that once the workers had finished digging and planting by hand, a canal would be made to direct a flow of water from Table Mountain. Though erosion was an issue, the reintroduction of water would make everything stable. To aid with the erosion, they’d begun planting orange trees.

“The gulley is absolutely necessary.” Aimee later said. “People don’t realise the potential of subterranean earth. Yes, digging it will spoil some soil. But it’ll also provide a renewable energy source that will change lives.”

Aimee explained that Mr Phahlele’s wealth stemmed from a technology that allowed nature to be re-grown in its habitat. This is also known as the impossible-to-overcome-wall faced by Prof. Windsor Van Wyngaard. Because of the routes taken through years of travel and the impossibility of returning to an Eden-like stasis, Prof. WVW declared the goal futile. But Mr Phahlele saw the necessity of Prof. WVW’s futility. The words that it would never be achieved gave Mr W Phahlele a fantasy to work towards. He had his pioneering technology grown into a host of experiments on his estate. They’d already reintroduced flocks of indigenous birds to cohabit with the well-settled songbirds and Ankole cattle. And they’d recently repurposed the old swimming pools into chlorine-scented watering holes.

I imagined that the orange trees would continue this effort. I was about to confirm this, but a distant wail emanating from the heart of the orange tree gulley ended our conversation. Aimee and I turned towards it. We saw three men in the estate issued overalls being carried out by a team of other workers. The three men’s hands and ankles had been joined together with egg-coloured cable ties so that each had their backs to the other. Their heads were pulled back in a way I first thought meant they were joined by their necks. But, as they were brought up towards us, I saw their cheeks pierced. A string had been threaded through each of their mouths and joined them together. Each of their tongues was fixed to the roofs of their respective mouths.

“Don’t get involved.” Aimee said as I stepped forward, “You’re Mr Phahlele’s nurse, not theirs.”

 I’m ashamed to say that I accepted this. I was first and foremost there for myself, and I was fine with my job as Mr Phahlele’s sponge-bath nurse. I reckoned that others could deal with such happenings while I stayed by the man’s bedside.

I never spoke to or met the other nurses who were employed (surely?). It was said that Mr Phahlele preferred female nurses. Still, they would leave once familiarity warranted references to different, more suitable clients. The other male nurses had a different relationship—one that formed a relationship assumed to be of a different kind of familiarity. I, of course, was the outsider of outsiders in this pre-existing order.

So, I let these days go by without overthinking. Looking back now, it was fear that led to the construction of solar-powered floodlights. Aimee explained that they were constructed from what was found in the gulley. Apparently, the prehistoric earth absorbed the sun more substantially than anything else. I received a pay raise.  

These were the days of pride and unspoken tension. Back then, I had no one to reconcile my thoughts with, and I’m glad I can joke about it after the events. Part of it came from the extraordinary stories of people outside. People were so fascinated by this man who made the future not just present but ordinary. Everyone seemed to want a stake, and I was in the middle, utterly confused about why I was in the mix. And utterly afraid for no one but myself.

Soon, the other nurses must have been fired. I began working three seventy-two-hour shifts, straight, per week. You try to stay awake for the impossible amount of two hundred and sixty-seven hours every week for a month and tell me how you feel after. This wreckage removes everything but the task at hand. Added to this was the realisation that I could not foster a life outside my job. The only chance at conversation came when I would neglect my station to talk and smoke cigarettes on the lawns with the gardeners. They’d join me, and we’d talk about the progress of the orange trees. I did precisely this on the day of the attacks.

The attacks must have occurred in my second month of employment—on the afternoon of the third week—on the seventh day of the year. Yes, it was the morning of my fifth month of employment, a Saturday, when I walked to the gulley to smoke a cigarette and felt an eerie silence emanating from it. I glanced down at it, and a man named Regis called from behind him.

“Stop.” He said.

I cast my gaze at him.

He was dressed in orange overalls but wore a jacket of the same colour.

“I’m going to need a smoke.” He said.

I asked what happened as I handed him a smoke.

He placed a cigarette in his mouth and, aware of the tension, took his time to light it. “Oranges,” he began, “are attacking us.”

He cracked an unbelievable grin. We stepped towards the gulley and watched the events from afar.

We saw a leader forming himself from the gulley’s top to take charge. He sent three men charging into a patch of orange trees. They had yet to enter before two came running out. No less than nine oranges came flying out after them.

Now, the boss man had to prove his worth. I moved closer to see why he’d made himself their leader. He ran in, screaming, and was engulfed in the trees. We stood waiting for him to return. When he did run out, oranges were lobbing themselves towards him. Yes, oranges ‘lobbing themselves towards him’ by virtue of their own sentience. Each hit him squarely between the shoulder blades of his back.

Regis nudged me for a cigarette. I handed him another one and put another one in my mouth. But as I looked up from the flame of my lighter, the workers were gone. What remained was a pile of shoes, their hats, and their orange-shaded overalls.

Regis ran to the worker’s cottage for help. I kept my gaze on the piles of spades and machetes. They were being disrupted by sentient oranges rolling back to the trees.

“Aren’t you a nurse?” He asked.

“…”

Could I tell him?

Earlier that morning, I had been driving down a road in Lower Wynberg, speeding to report for work, when my car coughed and stopped moving. I had no petrol, so I needed to siphon some from a nearby Volvo.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

Why was he still relying on petrol at a time like this?

Honestly, I was too lazy to change my views. I still held onto the modernist power of the petrol-based motor vehicle.

My goal was to leave a note for the driver that explained my situation and my involvement with Mr Phahlele, the man up the road. The car’s owner could report to the property for petrol and ask for their money back, so I did a speedy transfer and got back into my car. It started, and it appeared I was to make a clean getaway until a hand came down on my bonnet. My foot slipped off the clutch pedal, and I stopped.

A man stood at the passenger door. I opened my car window and explained that I was late for work. He nodded and pointed at the pack of Stuyvesant cigarettes on my dashboard. I handed him two out of the pack. He used his lighter to light one and opened my car’s back door. I noted that he was wearing an orange jacket similar to Regis’s, so I figured that he must be someone who works at the estate. My logic was that I’d drive my usual route to the estate. If he wanted a lift nearby, then he’d make to get out. If he continued with me to the estate, then he was a worker like me. He did not get out before we reached the gates, and the security guards did not mention him. Despite facts suggesting otherwise, I say that he was a worker I failed to recognise.

My vision blurred, and my head throbbed as we approached the main house, like that internal terror one gets when one wakes in the night just seconds before something falls in another room. The man said nothing in the back seat and got out as soon as I parked without so much as saying thank you or goodbye. I knew then that this day needed me on extra alert, and it must have been because of this feeling that I found myself smoking in the garden at the exact moment when the events began.

“Aren’t you a nurse?” Regis repeated.

“Go get help,” I said. I need to make sure that the man is okay.”

Did I plan everything that was occurring?

No.

I am its sole survivor, but that doesn’t mean I am a mass murderer. I wouldn’t be able to plan such events.

I’m being honest when I say that after Regis and I witnessed the beginning, I spoke nothing of the events to Aimee or the man. I walked into the main bedroom and began giving him a sponge bath. Aimee was, as usual, in the room with us.

I was scrubbing him with that orange-shaded sponge he liked, pulling out dirt from his cracked and calloused skin, and watching the foamy bubbles ascend and descend the contours of his body.

He and Aimee were arguing.

So, even if I wanted to, I could not interject with the impending terrors.

Regis once told me that most of their arguments stemmed from their different fantasies about the estate. He thought Aimee would change everything he’d achieved after his death. I countered that this couldn’t have been true, given that she hired me to keep him alive.

I cannot accept the narrative formed after these events that Aimee played a vital part in the attacks. She’s more guilty than me – trust me. But, if I were to see her as acting against him, then I’d have to see my role of employment as one there to increase the speed with which he died. In this scenario, I was given a job above my experience not because of the opportunity it afforded me but because no one else was better suited to be inept.

Regis and I never finished this argument, but it was rushing through my head when a scream was heard outside, and I recognised Regis’s voice.

Aimee and the man stopped their arguing. She ran to gaze out of the window. She looked down, and I imagine that she saw what was coming. The fear made her stand nearly lifeless in a spot by the window.

All was still and silent in this room.

I stopped the man’s bath. I began to gather my things.

Aimee regained movement when a man wielding a machete broke into the room.

Mr Phahlele was still naked from the bath, save for a tea towel covering his bottom half. I ducked beneath the bed, bringing the small basin of dirty and soapy water with me. I then peeked my eyes out from underneath the white-cotton bed covers to follow what was occurring.

Aimee stepped forward to address the man. A swift move by the man brought the wooden handle of the machete to the side of her head, knocking her to my left. She rose, swaying from the pooling blood, and swiped her fist against him. He staggered back, gripping his face, before switching the machete blade to face forward. He raised it above her head.

But before he struck down, a perfectly lobbed orange came through an open window and hit the intruder. He fell into Aimee’s blood pool and moved about in an attempt to raise himself. Aimee saw her chance. She stomped on the hand that held the machete. It left the man’s grip. She grabbed it and raised it to hack at him. But, like him, she was hit by an orange flung through the window. 

Now, both of them were on the floor.

I took my chance and acted in defiance towards the expectations of my job. I began climbing out of the bedroom window from which the oranges emanated. My whole body was out, and my hands were perched on the windowsill when I saw that Mr Phahlele needed to prove his worth again. He began to writhe in his straps. He ripped out the plugs and drains, and even his catheter came out with a pop. He seemed so close, and he must have done something, but, alas, I did not see what. Something smacked my shoulder blades, and I fell three storeys out of the window.

I never screamed.

Lying on the ground, I saw the green lawns of the estate as they swooped down towards the gully. They were quiet, but the lights above shone with a lightbulb buzz. They did nothing to aid my broken body and did not illuminate the events now occurring in the room above me.

Mr Phahlele’s ending in that room depends on who is asked. Some say Aimee was involved since she benefited from an inheritance after his death. Those who believe this theory find karma in these attacks. But I prefer those theories that utilise myths to the day in question. In this mind, Mr Phahlele is still tucked in bed and breathing life into the future he imagined. The intruder was never identified due to the extent of destruction that occurred to his person. Some blame me as the only survivor, but you wouldn’t. And as the ruins of his estate have been flooded from the water’s inevitable rise, the truth of the gulley orange trees remains alive in the myths that came after its day.