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time I experienced a feeling of triumph, feeling the sun and the throng of people as they came rushing out, congratulating me, and for once I felt confident. Even during initiation by the previous year’s prefects (when we were dumped in a truck with pig shit and covered with a canvas, punched, beaten and dropped off to walk home in the middle of the night, covered in shit) I didn’t care, because I was one of the chosen. Chosen despite the fact that I didn’t play rugby, just chosen for who I was, or for the part I had allowed them to see. Chosen, for who they thought I was.
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    My father becomes agitated. Bronwyn is standing next to him, unnoticed. The atmosphere on the platform gives no indication that I’m about to start a journey to hell.
    The whistle is like a chain of sound running up and down the carriages. Sound with length. Everybody starts talking faster and louder. The whistle has issued a declaration. It cuts like an ice-cold chainsaw through my spine. My mother catches my expression and says, ‘Nicky, you’ll be fine.’ She looks at me intently, and nothing else exists. I can feel my face drain of colour, and the African sun slicing through the dirty roofing has no effect on the shiver running through my body.
    The large hooks join like iron hands between the cars, lock and take up the slack to carry us away, griping with loud metal clunks between the links of this shackle. The screeching of re-leasing brakes and dragging metal on metal—discordant, jarring sounds—gives the impression that the machine is aware of the long trek and bemoans it . . . or the unwilling ones it is carrying.
    I hear the nearest wheels go over the first joint in the tracks: Dik . . . dik. I hold my mother’s stare. The invisible cord of tenderness starts stretching.
    We juggle for position, filling every window. I fight only to see my mother’s face, and she stands there knowing my need. I focus so intently that all else smudges into pixels, with her face in the centre.
    Dik-dik . . . dik-dik, the sounds shorten in step. Eventually I only see the spot that is her face. Then a pylon sweeps past as we enter a long bend. As the train obediently follows the tracks, the pylons arrive faster. Where is she? I search until I can no longer see the platform.
    The sound changes as I pull my head back in.
    â€˜We’re fucked,’ someone says.
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    T he journey is in no way as I imagined it to be.
    For the first part of the day, with tension unravelling, massaged by increased familiarity and the rhythm of the steel wheels, there seems to be a jostling for position. By the time we snake through the Hottentots Holland Mountains all restraint has evaporated.
    Bizarrely my life has now swung even further around, fixing a course directly opposed to what I yearn for, dragging me over uncharted territory.
    We travel through the semi-desert of the Karoo that I learnt to love as a child. For hours on end I block out my reality, escaping to the wild outdoors. The contrast tortures me—I see where I want to be, but I’m so far removed from it, like a caged bird hanging at a window to a forest.
    There are three realities: the outside, the trepidation inside me, and then the chaos behind me bristling against my neck like the cold breath of the devil, who knows what awaits me.
    I take a wire-bound notebook from my top pocket—the first of many such books I will use to diarise what happens to me over the two years. I write:
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    The light of the train runs like a scanner over a strip of ribbon, lighting the Karoo desert. From where I cup out the light, with my face close to the glass, I see a transient betrayal of the nocturnal mystery. Untouched-ness is richest in feeling. Our lack of exposure to it has numbed us to the subtle gifts that nature gives, like the emotion locked into a soft desert wind and the scent in its wash when you stumble upon its mystery while opening a gate