Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  When the doors sigh open on floor fifteen, she steps out into a white corridor, onto a teal carpet with a diamond pattern. Every few feet, disk-shaped light fixtures of smoked glass like flying saucers are set into the ceiling. She pads down the corridor, the only sound the sub-audible buzz of some electrical system – air-con, lighting. There are no windows, and it’s impossible to say how far she is from real air and sunlight. This honeycomb bears little relation to the monolithic office block she circled earlier, looking for the parking entrance.

  She counts the numbers on the doors. There are offices to the left and right, but no apparent occupants. Can business really be that bad? Some of them show signs of recent activity, and a rapid exodus. Through doors ajar, she glimpses humorous postcards stuck to corkboards, a toppling pile of printouts on the floor, a chipped cup dumped in a sink in a tiny kitchenette. It’s like the Marie Céleste.

  At the end of the corridor, where it turns a corner, there is at last a window, looking down onto the roofs of other city buildings. The foreshore: land stolen from the sea. The rooftops have been put to various uses. She sees gardens and stacked plastic chairs and heaps of scrap metal and even, on one, a gazebo and what seems to be a water feature. She can make out the fat torpedoes of koi fish circulating down there, the size of grains of rice but the shape unmistakeable. She had no idea all this was going on above her commuter-level head. Most of the rooftops are grimy, though, not meant to be seen – like the top of the fridge in a short woman’s house.

  Down the other end of the corridor, just before it takes another corner, a cleaning lady leans on her silent hoover and stares down through a similar window. Katya wonders how the city’s streets are marked for this woman, with what humiliations, curiosities and pleasures. The two of them, sole survivors of whatever mysterious plague has wiped out everyone else on the fifteenth floor, gaze down upon the grubby topside of the town.

  The woman gives her a quick, flat glance and looks away, gunning the vacuum cleaner. It’s a reminder. She is not floating here; she is working. Katya is working too. She passes the woman in the corridor without troubling her with another glance.

  As she comes round the next corner, she sights life. Not Mr Brand, but another solidly potent figure, dark against the brightness of the corridor. It comes towards her with hand outstretched and a gleaming smile.

  The woman is glossy and round and fragrant as a sugar plum, with toffee-apple lipstick, a deep but elevated cleavage and apparently kneeless legs that taper smoothly from nyloned thigh to stilettoed heel. Her globular haircut shines like black silk and is, Katya assumes, a quality weave.

  She has no trouble recognising the woman immediately: this is the owner of the satiny telephone voice. Seldom does a voice and its physical person correspond so closely. She has extravagantly bow-shaped lips, perfectly filled in, that part to reveal moist white teeth. There is nothing dry or cold or rough about this lady. She is all arcs and curves, sketched with a calligraphy pen and filled in with rich colour. She proffers a hand and Katya feels the tips of enamelled nails touch her palm.

  “Miss Grubbs? I’m Zintle.”

  Katya is at once a kid with skinned knees and frogs in her pockets. Puppy-dog tails. She shouldn’t have worn the uniform; its powers are limited, in certain settings and with certain people. Zintle is tall, too. Being close to the ground has its advantages in Katya’s line of work (nippiness, ability to creep into small spaces), but now she feels cowed before this substantial woman. She misses Toby’s presence, pliant and wispy though it may be, by her side.

  “Miss Grubbs,” Zintle says, finding resonant depths in the name that Katya had not known existed. “We’re so glad you came. Mr Brand has been so enthusiastic about your work.”

  Her eyes, in finely wrought settings of copper eye shadow, dart around Katya’s face, seeking data. She clasps Katya’s upper arm and walks her towards an office door, a gentle but insistent escort.

  “I understand that you’ve worked for Mr Brand before?”

  “Yes.” She wants to say more – make something up, even. The woman seems so attentive.

  But Zintle hustles them on briskly. “Lovely,” she says, swivelling on one heel, batting open a door and easing them through. It’s choreography.

  Inside, it’s all light and sky. The far wall is glass. Beyond, Katya can see the steep side of Signal Hill, the mosques and the forehead of the mountain. The sky is flawless, but tinted that sad, gunmetal grey of double-glazing.

  “Have a seat,” says Zintle, deftly installing Katya on a leather couch. She sits too, flinging one silky leg over the other. “Well then, you know the outline of the project?”

  “Well, no, actually. I don’t know much, is Mr Brand not—”

  “He’s in Singapore. Apparently.” Zintle leans back and rakes a hand through her hair, which rebounds perfectly into shape.

  The leather of the couch is taut and slippery, and Katya feels her overalled buttocks sliding off the edge. Crossing one’s legs at the knee, she discovers, is not only ladylike but helps to lock one in position.

  “You do … do extermination, right?” Zintle narrows her eyes and gives a teasing smile.

  Katya appreciates this lady’s style. She has a skittish, theatrical way of speaking, as if they’re performing a slightly suggestive play. Katya is fluffing her lines, but that seems to be part of the fun. Zintle hasn’t winked at her yet but there’s a bit of a flick of butterfly eyelid in every syllable.

  Still, Katya’s responses remain clipped. How else do you converse with such a person but play stone to their paper, rock to their silver scissor-blades?

  “Right,” she says. “Well, relocation, really.”

  “Precisely. So.” Zintle leans forward confidentially. “We have a residential project which has been experiencing some problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Various. Not very nice ones, to be honest.”

  “Cockroaches, rats, mites?”

  “Well … let’s just say it’s a comprehensive pest situation.” She’s up on her feet again – when she moves she’s fast – and holding out a hand. “Here we are.”

  There’s something laid out along one wall on a table, under spot lighting. It’s an architect’s model, showing several buildings and their surrounds. Everything is white, the only markings the patterns of edge and shadow.

  The scale is hard to make out at first. Katya sees a complex of four or five flat-topped, tiered buildings – ziggurat-like – arranged at angles around a central plaza. Elaborate walkways and arches and courtyards connect them, and tangles of what she supposes are ornamental plants drape over the edges of the stepped roofs. They look like tufts of white hair pulled off a hairbrush. A fountain, ringed by tiny benches, marks the centre point of the plaza. A long driveway, decorated with a double row of miniature palm trees, strikes off to the edge of the model, and the whole is contained by walls.

  “This is Nineveh.” Zintle’s dark fingers with their scarlet tips are vivid against the cardboard. A gorgeous giantess, reaching down from the clouds.

  “Nineveh?”

  Zintle shrugs. “It’s just a name,” she says. “Sort of a theme. One of the early investors was from the Middle East, I think.”

  Katya allows herself a moment to enjoy the calm of the miniature scene. There are model people down there, also colourless, frozen in attitudes of purposeful enjoyment: striding along a boardwalk, sitting at an outdoor table. A couple lean on a balcony railing. What they’re staring at, though, has not been included in the model. The ground breaks off just beyond the boundary wall, as if some other-dimensional cataclysm has swallowed up a chunk of reality. The architect’s manikins stare into the void – through the actual window, onto the vista of the real city beyond: full-colour, blurred, gigantic. They look on the abyss with no discernible expression.

  “It looks big,” says Katya. She’s never worked an entire estate before.

  Zintle taps a nail on the roof of one unit. A
smaller building on the border of the model, right up against the wall. “You’d have access to these, uh, servants’ quarters. Or shall we say, the caretaker’s lodge. It’s two units, for the maintenance staff. The other buildings are shut up.”

  “Never used?”

  “Not yet.” Zintle clicks her tongue, suddenly exasperated. “Such a shame. Beautiful accessories, all furnished and ready to go. Show flats! It was built over a year ago, you know? Was supposed to be filled with residents by now. Top residents. But there was a string of disasters. All the copper wire was stolen, for one. Half the reclaimed area collapsed into the bloody swamp. Excuse my language. This disaster, that disaster. The landscape gardening didn’t work out, everything got eaten by goggas. Plague of these … things. We thought they were gone, the previous guy assured us … well.” She splays her palms in a let’s-not-go-there gesture. “Now the security staff tell us that they’re back. We can’t move anyone in until it’s sorted. Losing pots of money. You understand?”

  “Goggas?”

  “They bite. Like I say, we got someone in to sort them out, but between you and me, he was useless. Made things worse, actually. Creepy old guy.” She crinkles her nose in remembered disgust, as if at a bad smell. “We had to get rid of him.”

  “Yes, well. Some of these older companies, they’re very outdated. I have a different approach.”

  “I would hope so.”

  “You can’t be more specific about these … goggas? You’ve seen them?”

  Zintle holds her palm towards Katya and wiggles her fingernails, evoking scurrying arthropod legs. “Yugh.”

  “Well … are they caterpillars?”

  “No, no. Here, sort of …” Zintle grabs a pen and pad from the desk and scrawls a few assured lines. A cartoon bug. A button body with spindly legs sticking out in all directions – three on one side and four on the other, Katya notes – and a bundle of antennae like cat’s whiskers. She’s surprised Zintle hasn’t included a pair of goggly eyes.

  “A beetle? Does it fly? Does it swarm?”

  “Swarms. Eats the curtains, poos on the rugs. Nightmare.”

  “I see.”

  Zintle is suddenly brisk. “Well. Time runs short. I should just give you this dossier …” She hands over a glossy cardboard file. “Perhaps you’d like to peruse that, and get back to us with a quote? It’s a fairly urgent situation.”

  “Right then. I’ll have to go out there of course, check it out.”

  Zintle is standing now, smoothing her suit down, shaping her hair back into its slick curve with a palm of a hand, taking Katya’s arm and ushering her out. She’s good at this manoeuvre, very professional. Before she knows it, Katya’s back in the lift, doors closing behind her, on her way down to earth again.

  Toby is waiting opposite her house, his nose poked through the fence, the diamond wire pressing into his cheeks. He’s staring at the demolition site. It’s the first time he’s been here since the bulldozers finished up.

  “Fucking hell,” he says tightly. “How could they do that?”

  This place means something to him, too, Katya sees. She briefly feels their lives, hers and Toby’s, overlap, anchored to the same plot of land.

  “Here today, gone tomorrow,” she says. “Nothing lasts forever, kiddo. What are you doing here?”

  “Mom said. Your gutters.”

  “Gutters? Oh, okay, I suppose.”

  Alma is always doing this: worrying about Katya’s living arrangements. It was Alma who’d explained to her sister about vacuuming, for example, and about painting walls. Who persuaded her to put a damn door on the garage in the first place. When Toby was only ten or eleven, she started dropping him off at Katya’s place to sort out all the odd jobs that Katya had no idea needed doing. Now Toby comes alone, usually by taxi along the Main Road, with a screwdriver in his pocket and a dopey smile, eager to fiddle with a squeaky floorboard or mould on the bathroom ceiling. Katya suspects he’s not very good at this kind of DIY, but he’s always willing to give it a bash.

  A rocking motion catches her eye. A girl is lying along the top of the neighbour’s garden wall, on her back with one knee up and hands folded on her stomach. She’s wearing grey school trousers, one knee tossing to and fro. Eyes closed and dreaming, ears laced with the thin white cords of an iPod. Wire-fed, recharging. Fifteen, sixteen? So young, so weary. What could make such a new creature so tired?

  She feels Toby’s stare as a physical pressure, leaning on her right shoulder.

  The girl sits up abruptly from a deep sleep of music. She pulls out the earplugs and regards them down her nose, head lolled back on her shoulders. Then she swings to the pavement and stretches her arms behind her back, pushing out her chest like a dove sunning its wings. Pretty. She recognises her now. It’s the girl from down the road, the one who unpicked Derek’s spider web.

  She’s compact, with elastic-looking limbs: a body made for backflips and handstands. Coppery skin, short hair slicked back behind her ears, snub features and strong, clean cheekbones. Diamond nose-stud, to the left. Small mole on cheek, to the right. Dark eyes, more watchful than unfriendly. Maybe shy rather than sly; it’s hard to tell.

  “Howzit,” says the girl. Not shy, then.

  “Hi.” Katya turns her attention to the garage door. Let the young deal with the young.

  “See what they’ve done over the road?” says the schoolgirl.

  “Uh, yes. Kind of hard to miss.” Toby laughs and gives her his sweetest gape. Hopeless!

  But the girl’s observing him in a not unfriendly way. “So, have you guys got cracks?”

  “Crack?” says Toby.

  “Cracks, cracks in your walls. From the vibrations. From the machines.”

  Toby looks at her, worried.

  The girl quirks a shapely eyebrow. “Look.” She points at the wall on which she’s just been lounging. Sure enough, there’s a diagonal crack down to the tar. Has it always been there?

  “And look, look there, it goes all across the road. I’m telling you.” Now the girl is skipping out into the road – really skipping, like a small child – and pointing at the tar, which indeed does look ominously split open between her feet. She points out the length of the crack with a toe, hands in the air to balance. Her grey trousers ride up to show her ankles, thin relative to taut parabolic calves, in short white socks.

  Is she younger than Katya had thought? Older? She has one of those strong faces where the bones set early and stay good for decades.

  “You living around here?” asks Toby.

  The girl ducks her head in a sideways nod. “Around. You?”

  Oh, please.

  Katya fiddles with the garage door a little longer before giving it up. It’s now genuinely impossible to open without the handle. The girl is watching with arms folded across her chest. Toby has turned to stand by her side, similarly cross-armed. Copycatting.

  “Toby, do you need a ladder, or what?” Katya asks.

  “No, it’s cool, I can get up by the garage roof. It’s easy.”

  She notices the girl is spreading her legs wider across the crack in the tar, showing further, unanticipated lengths of calf. Toby’s smile is stretched to breaking across his face.

  “Now?” she says, snappier than she intends.

  “Just now.”

  “You be careful.”

  Inside, Katya tracks onto the carpet some kind of khaki sludge from over the road. She fetches the broom and pan from the kitchen corner – where a new black crack snakes up the wall.

  The old house is built on sandy foundations that have been subsiding for decades, and she’s used to the odd warp and split, the plaster running like a laddered stocking. Like the faint lines on her own face, she can’t quite remember when each crack in the house appeared or lengthened; but she knows their shapes, their long italic slants, their seismograms. This one, though, she’s never read before. Inky, sharp-edged, viciously jinking. It seems mischievous. Her first irrational thought is that the girl
is somehow behind it, playing a joke.

  Can it really have jagged all the way through the earth from the demolition site across the road? How deep does it go? Does it run through the whole house, bottom to top? She imagines it slicing through her walls, her foundations, through the earth deep beneath the road, straight and thin as a laser beam, cross-sectioning the cakey layers of earth, gravel, sand, tar. She shoves the broom back in the corner, although it can’t conceal the flaw.

  When the phone rings, it’s so loud it seems it might split the cracks open wider still. She snatches it up before it can do more damage. “PPR.”

  The pause on the other end is ironic. “It’s only me, Kat.”

  She makes her hand relax, lowers her voice. “Sorry. Hi. Your son’s on my roof, if you’re looking for him.” This is usually the reason for Alma’s calls.

  Katya strongly associates her sister with telephones. Certainly, these days, phone calls – or more usually, voicemail messages – are their main mode of communication. But it goes back further.

  When Alma was thirteen and Katya ten, Alma started to run away. Sometimes she was gone for days, sometimes weeks. And then forever: at seventeen, Alma left and didn’t come back. But Katya continued to hear from her. Alma would phone at odd hours, from call boxes, from unknown destinations, across immense distances. Sometimes there would be long gaps in their communication. This was before cellphones, and with Dad on the move, it wasn’t always easy for Alma and Katya to find each other. But they made a plan with Aunt Laura, a distant cousin of Len’s, who resided immovably in Pinelands. Every time she had a valid phone number, Katya would inform Laura, and receive Alma’s current number in exchange – all while resisting being pumped by her aunt for further tragic family gossip.

  One way or another, every few months Katya would hear her sister’s dry whisper on the other end of a phone line, or sometimes just a few moments of the kind of silence that was unmistakeably Alma’s: a silver crackling static. Katya started to lose the memory of what her sister looked like. She saw only a tiny, delicate figure, floating in cloud, somewhere very high and very cold. An ice princess, barely real, weightlessly revolving around the still point of the phone receiver which connected them. Where are you, Katya would ask, where have you gone?