The JRB presents new short fiction by Eckard Smuts.
The Fog
‘Been gone, but now I’m way gone.’
—Kurt Vile
Fingers of mist curled around him, probing at the beach. What the hell, Beukes thought, bobbing in the icy water. Not ten minutes ago, when he’d paddled out, the fog had been a smudge on the horizon. Now the sun had grown dim, and he was beset on all sides by a murky, moving field of grey. He shivered. Within seconds, the cloud had swallowed him entirely.
He looked over his shoulder, trying to make out the other guy in the water: a ballie1 on a longboard, sitting on a peak some way to the left. Nothing to see there now but swirls of vapour. Beukes smacked the water with the back of his hand. Today, of all days, when he so desperately needed distraction from that morning’s shock. Still lying in bed, he had opened the investment app he’d downloaded a few weeks ago and watched the numbers all falling to hell. Lara, whose blankets lay ruffled beside him, had already left for work—she opened shop on Mondays and Tuesdays for her boss, Virginia, who taught yoga classes on the beach on those days. In a panic, he’d tried to call Lara, but at the last moment he had killed the line. Maybe it’s not necessary to tell her about this, he’d thought. Maybe I can fix it.
The fog milled around him. He took his cold-swollen hands from the water and held them in front of his face. What on earth had he actually done? The prospect was too terrible to contemplate. Just then, the sea began to move. A set was coming in. He heard the susurrus of its approach, but he couldn’t see a thing beyond the milky dome enclosing him. Swinging his board around, he paddled hard in what the surging water told him was the direction of the beach. But the lip of the wave smashed down a few feet behind him and, despite scrabbling to catch the whitewash, it pitched him under. For dreary seconds the ocean chewed on him like a warm-blooded snack. When he surfaced, sputtering, clutching at his leash, he knew it was time to get out. He caught the next wave’s foam and, bouncing like a rag doll, rode it into the shallows.
On the beach, the sun was trying to burn through the fog. The pale glare hurt his eyes. He crossed the path over the neck of the dune and came to the parking area, where a boxy old Land Rover stood at a tilt, its front wheels ramped up a low embankment of sand. The ballie’s, presumably. He must still be out there, Beukes thought. Some of these old guys weren’t right in the head, paddling into anything. Wiry, sun-baked men with strands of ropy hair sticking from beneath the caps of their hoodies, and wide grins plastered on their faces. He’s going to need X-ray vision to catch anything in that muck, Beukes thought.
The Duster he and Lara had been borrowing from her parents since getting back in the country stood parked a few metres behind the Land Rover. Beukes laid his board down in the sandy gravel beside it. Crouching, he reached behind the back wheel to retrieve the keys from a narrow ridge on the chassis, where he’d stashed them before paddling out. But the keys were no longer there. Frowning, he felt further along the chassis, probing the nooks and corners of the car’s undercarriage with his fingertips. He dropped to his stomach and scanned the ground beneath the car. Apart from a few loose stones, which he flung away, he found nothing.
He got to his feet and gazed into the fog now swiftly thickening around the parking lot. Had someone crept in from the dunes to steal his keys? But beyond the lot lay only sparse, low scrubland, clearly visible under blue skies when he’d arrived. There’d been no one for kilometres, he was sure of it—apart from the ballie, who’d already been in the water. And besides, his car was still here. He peered through the window. His flip-flops and crumpled T-shirt lay on the back seat. Beside them, partly covered by the board bag, lay his denim shorts, his wallet half-sticking from the back pocket. No one had been in the car, that much was clear.
He searched again for the keys, feeling carefully along the edge of the chassis on both sides of the car. He checked the wheel rims. Lying on his back in the sand, he gazed up awkwardly at the grimy undercarriage. There was no way around it: the keys had simply vanished. With a grimace, he considered the possibility that they’d snagged on his wetsuit and travelled with him to the beach. Leaving his board, he trudged back over the dune, scanning the sandy path and the bushes beside it for a glimpse of metal. On the beach, where the fog seemed thicker now, he poked at damp kelp heaps near where he’d strapped on his leash earlier. Clots of lice leapt from the foul-smelling piles. He found nothing.
He stood for a few seconds, arms akimbo, trying to think. The muffled sound of breakers lapping the shallows reached him through the fog. He mouthed a silent oath. I can’t deal with this now, he thought. Marching back over the dune, he decided to have one last look around the car. But when he reached the Duster, he stopped dead in his tracks.
His surfboard was no longer where he’d left it, beside the car. It was gone.
He spun around. Was someone pranking him? Was he under attack? The parking lot lay shrouded in mist, wholly silent. He stood for a long half-minute, listening to the sound of his own breathing. His wetsuit clung to him. Shivering, he realised he needed to get into the car, and to his phone—he needed to call for help, immediately.
He walked slowly around the Duster, to the edge of the parking area. With ears pricked for the sound of someone approaching, he searched among the bushes for a decent-sized stone. When he found one, he held it in both hands, feeling its heft. He’d been told once that front side windows were the cheapest to replace in a car. Circling back to the passenger door, he raised the stone, taking aim. But then he remembered: his phone wasn’t in the car. It lay smashed on the bedroom floor back home.
Stay cool, he had told himself that morning, when he’d watched his and Lara’s accumulated savings spinning down the drain in real time, the ticker on the investment app flashing ever more deeply into red. Breathing rapidly, thinking he might still salvage what was left, he’d pressed the ‘sell’ button. But then, as if the entire market had been waiting for him to give in, the selling stopped, and the ticker whizzed up into the green zone again. The price was going back up! He could still make amends—he bought back quickly, at a loss. Doing the math, he groaned. His impulsive sell had knocked almost ten per cent off the savings he and Lara were hoping to use as a down payment for a house.
Feeling nauseous, he’d put his phone down on the bedside table and gotten up to pee. It’s okay, he’d told himself, resting his palm on the bathroom tiles, we’ll recover the losses. The price was sure to make new highs: it was only a matter of time. The old school buddy who’d recommended the app had staked his reputation on it.
When Beukes came back into the bedroom he’d picked up the phone again, just to have a look. The price had whiplashed once more, diving even lower than the point at which he’d first sold. Stunned, standing in his boxer shorts in the family beach house he and Lara were inhabiting until they’d found their feet back in South Africa, he pressed ‘sell’ for a second time. Ten minutes later he bought back again, taking another massive loss. He doubled the stakes, adding leverage. He tripled them.
Before the hour was out, he’d traded their account down to zero. All the collective money he and Lara had put away during their two-year stint teaching English in rural China, gone. If he’d been able to borrow more money at that point, at whatever rate, he would have lost that, too. He stared at the screen. It felt like his teeth were bleeding. Manically, he pulled down the menu, trying to find an ‘undo’ button. But there was none to be found. With all his might, he hurled his phone against the wall.
Rushing to the garage, he’d chucked his surfboard and wetsuit in the Duster and fled the house. He’d gone a good distance up the coast before he came to his senses. The cobalt Atlantic lay beside him like a trusted friend. He’d set his course for one of the remote surf spots up north. Bash a few walls, he’d thought. Get the blood flowing, figure things out.
Now he was stuck out here without a phone, and some kind of devilry afoot. Was someone watching him from beyond the hem of fog? He trembled in his damp suit. The ballie, it occurred to him, was his last hope.
He ran back to the beach, fighting the urge to look over his shoulder. Wading into the shallows, he cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘Oi! Hello!’ he shouted into the murk. ‘I need some help here!’ But the thick mist muffled his voice—he may as well have been screaming into a pillow. He went in deeper. A breaker crashed around his waist; he felt the strong tug of the current. Another breaker came, and he dove under it. But then he looked back and realised he could no longer see land. Dread rose with the cold in his breast. No, no, he thought, this is madness without a board. Bodysurfing the next wave back to the shallows, he hurried from the water.
He made his way back to the parking lot, heart pounding. Cautiously, he approached the Duster, planning now to smash the window to get to his towel and clothes. He would get in and lock the doors against whoever was playing tricks on him out here. Wait things out. Surely the ballie couldn’t stay in the water forever? At that moment, with an awful lurch in his stomach, he realised that something else had changed. He took a few steps back, peering left and right into the curling mist to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. But no, he was right—the ballie’s Land Rover had disappeared.
With a curse, he sprinted up the dirt track leading to the coastal road. Reaching the tarmac, he hesitated, peering from side to side. Were those tail lights disappearing into the fog? ‘Wait!’ he shouted. But his cry vanished into the gloom. He ran his hands over his face. Panicking—and really, what choice did he have?—he decided to keep moving, to make his way on foot to the filling station that lay a few kilometres back in the direction of Yzerfontein.
He jogged along the shoulder of the road, grateful for his booties. After a while his breathing came in rasps, and he grew stuffy in his wetsuit. At one point—how long into his trek, he couldn’t say—an ear-splitting noise erupted behind him. He flung himself from the road just in time to avoid being hit by a freight truck that came hurtling past, the drawn-out sound of its horn trailing behind it like the trumpeting of an enraged elephant. Moments later, the fog had swallowed it again. Beukes picked himself up from the gravelly slope beside the road. Brushing dirt from his wetsuit, he resumed his trot.
No other cars came by. By the time the dim glow of signage appeared up ahead, hovering in the clouds, it felt like he’d been running for ages. He emerged into the well-lit forecourt of the filling station feeling like some kind of aqueous monster from a bad sci-fi movie, salt-encrusted and gasping for breath. An olive-green SUV that had been filling up at the pumps pulled away as he approached, slipping into the veil of fog. The petrol attendant, who stood holding the card machine, eyed Beukes quizzically.
‘Hello,’ Beukes croaked, ‘is there a phone I could use, please?’
The attendant gestured towards the shop. ‘In there,’ he said. Beukes nodded and walked over. The glass door slid open noiselessly.
A bored-looking woman in an oversized service-station jacket sat behind the counter. She’d been touching up her lipstick, but stopped when Beukes came in. ‘Hi,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘I, uh … do you possibly have a phone I could use? It’s kind of an emergency.’
A minute later he was standing in a cramped back office, trying not to touch anything. Martha (he’d spotted the cashier’s name tag on her jacket) looked at him expectantly. In her left hand she held the office phone’s receiver, and the index finger of her right hand hovered over the dial pad. ‘Number?’ she asked.
It had occurred to him, while he was running through the fog, that there was only one person he could call. Not only because he needed spare keys for the Duster, but also because it was the only phone number he knew by heart. But the thought of speaking to Lara now struck him mute. She was probably at work, he considered. She was the one who’d found a job shortly after they’d come back from the East, helping Virginia in the art supply shop, while he went surfing, or sat around the house, making schemes for the future. When he’d told her about the investment app, she’d looked worried at first, but she had come round to it eventually. ‘I guess you know best,’ she’d smiled.
He breathed deeply and recited her digits. One by one Martha punched them in, and handed him the receiver.
The phone rang once, twice. It had been Leon who’d recommended the app. His old school friend. They’d been catching up, over beers. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ Leon had said, ‘I’m telling you. If you can hold your nerve, you’ll double your money by next year, guaranteed.’ They’d laughed, and Beukes had told him about the only holiday he and Lara had allowed themselves during their time abroad, a scooter trip around Vietnam. They’d chosen Vietnam because it was cheap. He’d felt like a king, cruising the narrow roads, Lara’s arms clasped tightly around his waist. If he saw Leon again, he was going to kill him.
‘Hello?’ said Lara. Her voice sounded distant, slightly muffled, as if the line weren’t a hundred percent.
‘Hey,’ he said, trying to sound neutral.
A pause. ‘Beukes?’
‘Hey, yes, it’s me. Listen, I’m in a bit of a … situation.’ A few weeks after meeting Leon, he’d been sitting on the couch at the beach house, idly browsing, when an ad for the app had come up in his feed. Usually he never clicked on these things—they were for suckers, he maintained—but this time he thought he’d have a look. House prices in Cape Town were even more preposterous than he’d reckoned with, and he and Lara didn’t want to squat in the family cottage forever. He’d go in with a small amount, he decided. Minimum risk, just to see what happened.
‘Beukes!’ Lara said. Only now did he hear the anxiety in her voice. ‘Oh, thank goodness! I came home for lunch and found your broken phone in the bedroom and didn’t know … I thought …’ she trailed off. What had she thought? What would he, Beukes, think if he came home and found Lara’s smashed phone lying on the floor, the car gone?
‘It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m okay,’ he said. What sounded like a sob came from the other end of the line.
‘Oh, thank goodness, Beukes! Where are you?’
‘I’m … it’s complicated. I’m at the beach, way up the coast. Surfing. But I’ve lost the car keys. The car … It’s a bit of an emergency,’ he pressed on. ‘There’s a crazy fog out here. My surfboard’s gone too.’
‘Your surfboard’s gone? What do you mean? Are you okay?’
Was he okay? ‘I’m not sure. I think so,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve lost the keys and I need the spares. Do you think you can bring them here?’
Lara’s voice was all concern now. ‘I can come, I just need to tell Virginia she needs to mind the shop this afternoon and then I can borrow her car and come straight away … Where are the spares? They’re in the drawer by the front door, right? And where did you say you were? I’ll be there right away. You sure you’re okay? Should I bring some food or something? Do you need clothes?’
‘Just bring the keys, it’s all right,’ he said.
‘Where are you, precisely?’
‘I’m at that spot we came to a few Saturdays ago. Do you remember? Up near Langebaan. Where you swam and complained about the currents.’
‘Yes, sure,’ Lara said. She sounded calmer now. There was a pause. ‘But Beukes … what on earth happened to your phone?’
Now it was his turn to stay silent. Martha watched him from the other side of the desk. He turned his back on her. The thought of what he’d soon have to tell Lara sat like a spider in his throat.
‘I can’t explain right now,’ he said finally. ‘Please just come and get me. It’s freezing out here. There’s a crazy fog.’ The line crackled. It sounded like some kind of static interference.
‘Okay, okay, just hold …’ he heard her say, but the disturbance grew worse, distorting her voice.
‘Lara? Lara?’
‘… and then … if Virginia … I’m sure I can …’
‘Lara, I’m not hearing you.’
‘… if you want? Okay bye!’ And then she hung up.
He stared at the receiver in his hand. Martha yawned.
‘I think the phone’s gone dead,’ he said.
‘It does happen,’ Martha replied.
‘Okay well, I … thank you,’ he said. At least he knew that Lara was on her way. Possibly in Virginia’s car. And when she got here, he’d have to explain about his cell phone. And why he had thrown it at the wall. He left the office, retreating through the sliding door. The petrol attendant—the only one on duty, it seemed—was leaning against the fuel pumps, chewing a toothpick. ‘You okay, brother?’ he asked. Beukes ignored him. He wasn’t feeling well. He needed to think, just for a minute. He took a few steps out into the mist lapping the brightly lit fuel court. The cool fog enfolded him. Would Lara know to come and get him at the filling station? No, she wouldn’t—he’d told her to meet him at the surf spot. He could go back inside and try to call her again, but the thought of facing Martha and the dead phone once more felt like too much. Besides, he thought, shuffling along the shoulder of the road, I should go and check on the car. We can’t lose the Duster, too.
For how long did he walk before it came to him that this might not be the best course of action? It was hard to say. He was moving slowly. All he saw, in the ring of visibility surrounding him, was tarmac, and gravel, and ghostly patches of scrub floating along at the edges. The air had cooled a great deal. He hugged himself as he walked. He’d been going, he felt, for hours—much longer than when he’d been making his way towards the station. Have I missed the turn-off? he wondered. Eventually, gradually, finding nothing, he stumbled to a halt. It may be, he considered, that he’d struck out in the wrong direction after the phone call. I should double back to the station, he thought, and call Lara again. If Martha didn’t want him to use the phone he could bargain with the petrol attendant to use his cell phone—surely he’d have one.
And then, he thought, once this mess is sorted out, I need to find a way to explain to Lara what I’ve done with the money. Our money. All of it. Haltingly, he turned around and began making his way back to the filling station. The silence of the fog lay thickly about him. He walked for a long, long time. A darkening in the surrounding opacity told him dusk was coming on. Still he kept walking.
The filling station did not come. Soon it grew quite dark. Where on earth am I? he thought. Only then did he understand that the filling station would never come, because it, too, had disappeared. He plodded on for another while still, booties squelching on the asphalt. Then, leaving the road, he struck out across the dunes in what he hoped was the direction of the sea. In the star-empty darkness, he could hardly see his hands in front of his face. Somewhere beyond the fog he heard, or thought he heard, the boom and the shush of waves as they rose from the deep, pummelling the shore.
~~~
1. ‘BALLIE (Bul-lee, with u as in up), Parents, old people. ‘A weird old ballie lives in that cave.’ ‘My ballies won’t let me go to the jorl.’ (Steve Pike, Surfing South Africa, 2007)
- Eckard Smuts lectures in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University. His writing has appeared in The Johannesburg Review of Books, Daily Maverick, Business Day and Go! Magazine, among other places. Follow him on Instagram or Bluesky, or find him here.
