Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Oh Kat, Alma would sigh, her breath filtering though the rosette of tiny holes in the receiver, ice crystals forming in her little sister’s ear. Each time Alma hung up, Katya was sure she had vanished entirely, like frost in the morning.

  The next time she saw Alma, it was three years later and Toby had just arrived, a pale infant of mysterious provenance. By this stage, Alma had started to peroxide her hair. Was it to match her child’s? With her white skin, it was indeed as if all that time Alma had been out in some blanchingly cold world.

  “Hey Al, it’s so strange,” Katya finds herself saying. “I’m crossing Dad’s path. He’s working again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Somebody’s hired me for a job. Apparently they used Dad before and thought I was the same company. He was there last year some time.”

  “God. So the old boy’s still alive. When did you last see him?”

  “Seven years ago. How about you?”

  “Less than that. Three, maybe. I went to see him in that group home – you know that awful place he was in for a while, with the drunks? He borrowed some money.”

  “Really?”

  “You sound surprised. I’ve done my bit for him over the years, you know.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “More than my bit.” Alma’s voice is starting to rise.

  Alma’s everyday voice is distant, always threatening to flicker out and disappear from tiredness or lack of interest. An unimpressed voice. She’s sounded that way since she was little. When she gets worked up, though, her voice slides up the register and she sounds like a child about to burst into tears: indignant, amazed to feel so much. Katya has never seen her sister weep – has only once seen her close to crying out from pain – and can’t bear to imagine it.

  “Anyway, it’s creepy,” Katya says. “Being in his footsteps, as it were.”

  “Huh. Serves you right, working in the same filthy business.”

  “It’s not the same business.”

  “Ja ja, relocation not extermination, I heard about it. Just do me a favour, okay? Think about what happened to Mom. What this business did to her.”

  Katya is silent. She cannot bring herself to ask the crude question: what did happen to Mom? Sylvie’s vanishing has always been too grotesque, too central to discuss as if it were just another episode in their lives. One day, when Katya was three, Sylvie went to the hospital and never came back. Katya knows this means she died, although that has never been spoken. It must have been an accident: something so maiming, so traumatising, that their mother was plucked instantly from the presence of her children and could never be returned. There is no shortage of possibilities. Any given day with Len, especially a younger Len at the height of his chaotic powers, could have brought a hideous demise.

  But it was always impossible to ask her father about Sylvie, and some kind of pride prevents her from asking Alma now. Anyway, she’s always understood that Sylvie’s loss belongs primarily to Alma. When it comes to their mother, Katya has no authority. Alma has three years on her, three years more of Mom; always has had and always will. Katya possesses only shadows: memories of a figure moving through a kitchen, in yellowing light; a taste in the mouth. These spectres are not proof of anything, nor are they weapons to be used in argument.

  And so Katya simply says, “I’ll tell Tobes to call.”

  Alma clicks her tongue and puts the phone down. Katya is not sure what that means. If Alma has cut her short, or if it’s the other way around.

  Above her, the tin squeals as Toby stomps across the roof, and she feels the noise in her teeth. She bites down on the scar tissue on her thumb, the place where she keeps slicing it open on the garage door. This is why she and Alma don’t talk much. Their conversations tend to twist back on themselves and bite, like snakes.

  In front of her on the kitchen table is Zintle’s “dossier”. She pulls it towards her, opens up the cardboard envelope. Inside is a sheaf of stapled paper – a brochure, phone numbers, maps, directions. Also a photocopy of a news clipping. Katya spreads the papers out on the kitchen table. The news article, dated June last year, is about a freak swarm of insects making their way through the southern peninsula. There’s not much information in the piece: some people’s gardens suffered, and a couple of motorists were disgusted by having to crunch their way through a tide of the things crossing a road. A small child suffered a bite on the cheek. It was over in less than a week. A zoologist from UCT was interviewed, and he stressed that this was a natural occurrence, no cause for alarm. This particular beetle, a “species of metallic longhorn”, swarms every few years, at unpredictable intervals – in recent times perhaps more flagrantly than before. There was no danger, but laypersons should not attempt to collect the creatures, “although they are attractive specimens”.

  A murky black-and-white photo shows a single nondescript beetle in the bottom of a laboratory beaker.

  The brochure is much more appealing. The cover shows an artist’s depiction of a gleaming ivory building, tiered, lapped at its base by an impressionistic greensward. The sky in the picture is rapturous, the clouds artistic dabs. There’s a line of darker blue in the distance: the sea? Nineveh welcomes you, it says in embellished cursive. The address is not one she recognises, a suburb name she doesn’t know. She’ll have to look it up.

  She props the picture up against the kettle: a fragment of colour in the corner of her stuffy kitchen. It breathes of some foreign place, not quite of the here or the now. She wants to shrink herself to that size, lodge on one of those miniature balconies, bask in the beams of a small but potent sun; or, better still, duck down into one of those tiny, immaculate rooms and close the door behind her.

  Time for a new notebook. She selects a fresh one from the pile in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It’s a fine, old-school piece of stationery, A5, hard black covers with a red fabric spine. The top and middle drawers of the cabinet are where she keeps the old ones, filled with her working notes. They get used up surprisingly quickly: she starts a new one every three or four months. She’s not really sure what she’s keeping them for. Perhaps one day she’ll write her memoirs: Life Among the Vermin.

  Len never made a note in his life; his stories were all in his head. But Katya likes to do it. Making records is one way to keep things squared away.

  She slides out the small pencil she uses for such things – so much more practical than pens for working in the field – and makes a neat heading:

  NINEVEH

  Katya negotiates a fee with Zintle for a reconnaissance trip to Nineveh. Mr Brand, it seems, expects her to stay on the property in the “caretaker’s lodge”. Normally she wouldn’t agree to this, but given the scale of the project – and the generous fee promised – she decides to make an exception. A few days should be enough to assess what needs to be done.

  The day before she’s due to go, she packs her bags. She has to stand on a chair to pull the suitcase off the top of the bedroom cupboard – it’s been ages since she’s gone anywhere, and the bulky old thing is buried under a mound of spare blankets and the pieces of a broken chair. The suitcase is one of the few things Len ever gave her – or rather, that he left behind.

  Katya was twenty then. She’d been helping him out with the work full-time for three or four years, after she quit school. They were staying in a truly appalling hotel in Durban (cracked and leaking toilet bowl, dried matter – perhaps blood – on the walls). One morning he was gone, leaving her with the bill and a curious sense of gratitude: she would not have escaped in any other way. Later, their current employer came knocking, and she understood why he’d needed to disappear. Some expensive power tools had gone missing. Len had a habit – or perhaps a principle – of walking away from a job with more than he brought in.

  But perhaps he’d just decided it was time to go. Katya suspected that Len was getting bored with her, now that she was grown. She was no longer so eager to please, but she didn’t make much effort to quarrel with
him, either. She was starting to apprehend her own boredom, too, and the fatigue of the years ahead, grinding along with Len in the driver’s seat. Len ever more whisky-soaked, their travels more haphazard and accident-plagued. At some point she’d started to be repelled by the stink of killing that clung to them both. She wanted to be clean. And she wanted to be still: to have one place she belonged to, that belonged to her.

  Along with the suitcase, Katya inherited a couple of nets and traps and the like, which she kept. And two pairs of Len’s underpants, which she did not. She wrinkles her nose at the pungent memory.

  Zintle had made the same face when recalling Len Grubbs, the exterminator, and Katya sympathises. It is the family smell, Eau de Grubbs. It comes from living on the road, from working with animals and chemicals. Not a bad smell, necessarily. Does Katya smell the same? (And could Zintle sniff her out?) Probably. Although, of course, this is famously the thing that one cannot tell about oneself.

  Alma has it too, despite her pot-pourri, her talcs and creams. On Alma the scent seems to translate into a kind of sexual signal. From the age of about eleven, boys took one sniff and started to follow her around. While never once losing her composure, Alma used this power to pull herself away from her family and out into the world. Hand over hand. Grasping at the bodies of boys and men, hanging on like a drowning girl, desperate to be dragged clear of the swamp. And it worked. Whoever the faceless boy was who fathered Toby, he made Alma’s return impossible. After that, she lost her enthusiasm for sleeping around: there was no need. And now that she’s married to solid Kevin, Alma can devote herself full-time to eradicating the troubling odours of her former life.

  It’s something too intimate and shameful for them to talk about, but Katya knows her sister is still terribly self-conscious about the smell. As a child, Alma would scrub and scrub, any time they got close to a bathroom. These days, Alma has three bathrooms in the neat home where she lives with her husband, their young children – twins, a boy and a girl – and Toby. It’s a place where every object has been carefully chosen and positioned. In the bathrooms and the bedroom are dozens of bottles of expensive scent, body spray, deodorant. But they say the body has a signature, molecular; that it doesn’t change. Under her perfume, Alma still has the family aroma.

  Sylvie’s smell was different. It is one of the few definite pieces of information Katya has about her mother: her musky, talcy smell has persisted more strongly than any visual memory. Going through her father’s abandoned things that day when she was twenty, Katya found a loose photograph of an impossibly young, grinning Len with shoulder-length hair, arm slung around a voluptuous brunette. She recognised nothing about the woman – except, perhaps, a version of her own full bust, and something of Alma’s distance in the eyes – but she accepted on the evidence that this was Sylvie, her mother, fresh out from England and newly married. Immediately, Katya felt the need to turn the picture upside down and not look at it again.

  During her twenties, Katya held on to very little. Her possessions were so few that they fitted inside Len’s: his suitcase and one of his old wooden box traps – despringed, defanged – which she’d stuff with clothes and haul from house to house. Each time she moved, she threw out more of the heavy past. But the photo she has kept, all these years. Now it’s hidden right at the back of the filing cabinet. Every couple of years she fortifies herself with a whisky and sneaks another peek. Over time, the woman’s face speaks to her less and less. Young Len, on the other hand, seems to grow more vital with every year spent in the cabinet dark. She’s never shown Alma the picture. It is her own guilty piece of Sylvie, kept for herself alone.

  The suitcase tumbles down from the top of the cupboard onto her head, bringing with it a chair leg, the body of a fish moth and the smell of her father’s things. He’s here now, coming towards her out of the dust; his body is darkness crawling with the floaters of her sun-dazzled eyes. He smells strongly of campfires, of mothballs, of bleach and tobacco. He catches something from behind her ear, holds it tight in his hand: a conjurer’s trick. He smiles and holds out his palm, and she sees it is crossed with gold, with something rich and glinting and alive. A dragonfly.

  “Aitsa!” he’d say.

  The trick was meant to make them laugh, or flinch. She never knew which. Sometimes he let the little creature go, and sometimes not. And sometimes there was nothing in his fist at all. Sometimes it was just a fist.

  4. AT THE GATES

  Nineveh is so very new that it doesn’t yet exist – not in the Cape Town street directory, and not on the maps in Katya’s head. She stares at Zintle’s map, but it’s like a jigsaw piece for a picture she’s never seen. She can’t work out how these loops and forks correspond to any place real. When she tries to follow the route in her mind, she drifts into limbo: somewhere out past Noordhoek, between the new houses and the beach. Wetlands. Or so she thought.

  She hasn’t got used to Toby at the wheel, and has to stop herself from clutching at the handbrake. But he drives prudently, she’ll give him that. Very upright in the seat, with his long legs cramped under the dash and his head poked forward off his shoulders, scowling into the headlights. Some young men gain grace with proximity to machines. Toby, clearly, is not one of these.

  “Christ, relax,” she says. “Take your nose off the windscreen.”

  She lets him do the navigating. This place obviously exists in a parallel universe, where nothing is quite what it seems. Some slightly future Cape Town, perhaps, one that Toby, being young, instinctively inhabits. Because he hasn’t been alive long enough to have the roadmap stamped into his brain, he drives without directional prejudice, following Zintle’s instructions to the letter, with no second-guessing. Thus they end up in the right place – which feels, to Katya, profoundly wrong.

  On a dark stretch of road with bush on either side, Toby lurches the car off into a narrow avenue lined with palms. High white walls on either side, topped with electrified wire and set with evenly spaced floodlights, turn the road into a corridor of light and dark. The palm fronds glow emerald, backlit, and they drive for ages through criss-crossing shadows. The avenue seems implausibly long.

  How could she have missed this place, if it’s been here more than a year? Katya thought she knew this city – she’s fished creatures out of its cracks and crevices for years – and yet right now she can scarcely tell which way she’s facing. Strange scenery has been cranked into place. The mountain is still there behind them, and somewhere up ahead is the ocean, where it should be, but everything else is turned around. This is somewhere else now. This is new.

  Eventually they crunch to a halt in front of a set of tall iron gates where the avenue terminates. It’s dark. Two giant lanterns are supported on bulky gateposts, but their light does not extend far into the gloom. Beyond the gate, the walls and the road and the trail of lights disappear. It’s impossible to tell what lies on the other side.

  Toby switches off the engine. Katya gets out and stands in the sudden country dark, and listens. The road is freshly tarred all the way up to the gate, but the ground beyond is raw, still to be landscaped. She draws her eyes away from the blackness between the bars and examines the gateposts. She sees now that they are ornate, elaborately shaped and tiled. A grinning lion paces either side, done in hard-wearing ceramic. Some kind of Mesopotamian fantasy, it seems.

  Although the lions are hokum, the padlock on this gate is real enough: bright bronze and as big as a pack of cigarettes. There is no obvious keypad. No buzzer or handle. She has no phone number to try, and anyway, there’s no cellphone reception.

  Toby pops his head out of the car. “Let’s go,” he moans. “It’s dark, there’s no one here.”

  Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps this is all a huge practical joke, a trick. Peering through the bars, she has a powerful sense that there really is nothing there, that the street-map did not lie when it showed a blank. That they’ve reached the edge of the map and are about to drop off.

  It’s odd, an
d touching, too, to see Toby so discomfited. Katya herself feels eager to push open the gate, dip her toe in the blackness.

  She’s just about to turn away and get back into the car when a silvery sound tickles the air: an irregular ting ting. A small light wavers towards them out of the dark on the other side of the gate. It casts a modest halo on the ground as it approaches, slows and stops. Of course: a bicycle bell. She sees the glinting wheel-spokes before she sees the uniformed rider. He straddles the bike, looking at them through the bars and breathing hard.

  “You’re the lady?” he asks. “The worm lady?”

  “That’s me,” she says, and suddenly she’s on familiar ground. He gets off the bike and fumbles with the big padlock.

  “Step back, please,” he says, and when she does the gates come creaking open after her.

  “No car, please,” he says. “It’s still very muddy in here. You can get stuck.”

  Toby passes her bags out of the car. She doesn’t have much with her: a small rucksack, the old suitcase. “Okay,” she says to him. “This is it, compadre.”

  He’s watching her with anxious bushbaby eyes. “Are you sure? Is this the place?”

  “Seems to be. Go on, Toby, it’s fine. This guy’s expecting me.”

  She’s taking a bit of a risk, leaving him the van. But they have several small jobs scheduled over the next few days, easy money that she doesn’t want to give up. Some humane mousetraps to lay. Some mongooses that need transporting from the SPCA. Easy stuff. Toby can handle it, she reckons, while she’s living the life of ease and luxury in Nineveh. She’s made sure the first-aid kit is filled and ready to go, that he has enough gloves, enough of everything. He’ll be sleeping in her house, keeping an eye on things.