Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  “You’ll be okay,” she says.

  “Two days?”

  “Three, maybe. I’ll call you.”

  He nods in the dark. “No problemo,” he says.

  She should bend and kiss his cheek. The young are easy with their hugs, their kisses. But she doesn’t feel that young. Awkwardly, she grips his cold hand with her free one. “Don’t crash the van. That’s all I ask.”

  She watches him crank the car through a five-point turn and rumble off down the corridor of palms and lights. The red tail lights blink out at the end of the avenue.

  The bicycle guard trundles the tall gates closed behind her. He does not offer to take either of her bags.

  “Follow me,” he says, and wheels his bike around. His tail light is a small echo of the van’s, a strawberry firefly pulling away. She picks up her suitcase and follows.

  The sky is overcast, with no moon or stars, and no blue ghost of moonlight on the sea which she knows must be ahead. Instead of waves, she hears a hidden chorus, multitudinous, massed in the night: the creaks and sighs and bellings of the creatures out there in the vlei. The frogs and toads, the worms and the nightbirds. The ones she’s come to parley with.

  Ahead is a confused collage of shade, with black, vaguely geometric shapes rising out of the general dark. The ziggurats must be arrayed around her, but it’s too dark to make anything out. Close by is a much smaller building with a lit window. The guard has leaned his bike against the wall; now he comes towards her with an oversized torch. He hands her a clipboard, a black ballpoint attached with a piece of grubby string. The beam of the torch lances off at an unhelpful angle – she wonders if he’s any better at aiming that gun on his belt – and she has to shield her eyes to fill in what seems a tedious number of questions. Name, address, three phone numbers, fax number, email, place of work, age, occupation.

  “Age? Why do you need that?”

  He shrugs. Reuben, says his name tag. He has a delicate face: full lips and long eyelashes. His neck is wrapped in a grey woollen scarf, although it’s a warm night. He barely looks at her answers as he takes back the clipboard.

  “So ja,” he says, “they’ve put you in Unit Two.” He writes the number large next to her name.

  “Two? Is that good?”

  He pauses. “It’s okay,” he says. And with that he’s on his bike again, heading off towards the looming buildings, taking the torchlight. She can hear his tinny bell growing faint. Once more, she’s following through the dark.

  Beneath her feet, the path is hard and slightly unstable: wooden planks. The bicycle man pauses for her, turning to shine his torch onto a place where the planking is laid over a dark trench. She can hear the sound of running water.

  They come up against a two-storey building. The guard brushes a doorway with his torchlight, finding ONE in brushed aluminium letters. “Unit One,” he says.

  “Where’s the lights?” she asks.

  “They’ll be on tomorrow. For now, it’s just emergency power. We go up.”

  There’s an outside staircase leading up to the next floor. Katya ascends carefully: the banister is disconcertingly low. At the top, she has the sensation of stepping out into nothingness. They’re on a stone terrace, white in the torchlight but smeared with arabesques of mud: whorls and streaks left by muddy boots, as if an army of mud crawlers had emerged from the vlei and done a dance outside Unit Two.

  Reuben steps forward and his torchlight finds a doorway. Black matte surface. A silver TWO. He hovers a thumb – slender and shapely, she notes – over a small black square next to the door handle.

  “You do it,” he says. “I’m not authorised. You press it like this.”

  She puts her thumb to the pad. The door lock makes a soft cluck. “Wow.”

  “You see, you’re in the system.”

  This gives her a funny feeling. Like she was already built into the fabric of the building, long before she got here. Like her whorls and loops were there on the blueprints, inked in, microscopic. She remembers now the guy in the lobby of the Brand office block, scanning her thumbprint. She flexes her fingers uncomfortably.

  “Go in,” he says.

  Inside, it’s utterly dark, but she can feel the hollower darkness of the night pushing at the small of her back. She steps in, and then steps back out again immediately.

  “I can’t see a thing.”

  Reuben shrugs. “No lights tonight. Tomorrow you’ll have light.”

  “Well, can I have a torch?”

  He looks down at his own big torch with a frown. “Let me just show you quickly rather.”

  He goes ahead of her. In the flare of his torchlight, small details spring into life and are immediately doused: a picture frame, a door handle, the legs of a chair.

  “Ah,” he says. “Bedroom. You’ll be okay here.”

  “Okay, no, wait …” She feels her way forward, touches the edge of a bed. It feels inviting: cool, crisply made up. “Is this where he stayed? The other guy who was here. The exterminator.”

  She can’t make out his face behind the bright disk of the light. “No,” he says at length. “He was Unit One. Underneath.” The light dips briefly to the floor and back up. A sniff in the dark. “Okay, I say goodnight now. Electricity’s on again tomorrow.”

  And then he turns and herds his light back out of the door. She sees the illumination bounce once or twice off mirrors and pictures, and then the front door clucks shut again.

  She’s sunk in absolute darkness. She drops her bags at her feet and waits, feeling the disturbed space settle around her. Her knees are pressed against the bed. The best she can do is to stay very still, and not make any unnecessary motions. Carefully, she turns and sits. She works her cellphone out of her pocket. The small blue screen winks on reassuringly, but there’s no reception.

  She kicks off her shoes and fumbles her way between tight sheets. Small movements. The sheets smell clean. She coughs in the dark, just to hear the acoustics of the place, but there are none: sound sinks into the air like a footfall on thick carpet. Wrapped in black sheets in a light-less world, there’s nothing for Katya to do but vanish into sleep until the morning comes to show this place to her.

  5. BULLY BEEF

  In the blurred night that follows, Katya wakes frequently, rising with difficulty out of patches of dense, dreamless sleep. She can hear her own heartbeat in her ear against the pillow, a scraping sound, too loud. Each time she wakes there is the same disorientation: she can’t tell which way round the bed stands, in what room, in what house, what city. In the utter dark, she has no sense of the size of her body, or of the space in which she lies. There might be a high cathedral vault above her – or her nose might be two centimetres away from the roof of a cave.

  Morning comes with a tearing sound, like a knife through foil. She’s lifted out of the deepest trough of sleep, bobbing to the surface, head clearing the waves.

  She doesn’t drink now, not much, but there have been times in her life when she did. The worst part was always the waking, the panic of erasure. The laborious pulling-together of time, of the body. She has the same sense now, lying here in this strange bed, of having to reconstruct everything from nothing. How her limbs lie; whether she’s face-up or face-down. But unlike the drinker’s morning-after dread, she feels a dreamy, unfettered kind of elation.

  For a good few minutes, she lies there in the limbo of the dawn dark – mysteriously different in quality from evening dark, or midnight dark, or small-hours dark: with a luminous lining, the promise of something on the other side. Like pale-blue silk showing through black lace, or sand through shallow water as your night-boat comes to shore.

  Inevitably, her body settles into itself. Gravity seeps into the room along with a seam of light near her face, as if light creates mass. As her body returns to her, she finds that it’s a childlike pose she has adopted: hand shoved against her mouth and drool on her knuckle. She watches, a little fearfully, as the blue line of radiance gains intensity, and th
en becomes decipherable: the bottom edge of a curtain. Below her, a bed. These arms, these legs, this heavy head: all the same as they were before.

  It’s an old sensation, this: opening her eyes on an unfamiliar ceiling. When they were kids, in the old days with her dad, they moved around so much, flat to shabby flat. They slept in spare rooms and on the floors of Len’s dodgy acquaintances. For a while in a caravan. A couple of weeks here and there with distant cousins or long-lost aunties. Dumped with Laura on and off. Once they stayed in a converted garage, with a rolling door that opened their entire life for inspection every morning, like the lid of a sardine can. Once, a few nights in a small concrete room in the back of a mechanic buddy’s workshop, among the carcasses of engines and the smell of rancid motor oil.

  As an adult, though, she’s found a home and tried her best to stick in it. She doesn’t like to spend nights away. As far as lovers’ beds go … well, she doesn’t stay for breakfast. Katya is one of those creeping girls who pick their shoes from the floor and vanish at midnight. She prefers to deposit the scents of the night back in the fug of her own bed.

  In the night, Nineveh’s sheets have lost their cool neutrality and taken on her own smell, but they are still tight and smooth around her, as if she’s been held in a motionless swoon all night. She wonders how long this bed has been waiting for an occupant. Is she the first?

  The night before comes back to her in pieces, like stepping stones through the gloomy swamp. The firefly light of the bicycle. The damp air and the darkness. The Halloween face of the security guard above his torch. The dense conversations of the frogs and insects all around.

  The morning light is casting a grain of texture onto something next to her head. Her arm dangles towards the light and touches fabric. The curtains are not cheap, thin things like she has at home, but heavy stuff that resists the light. She lets them slip back between her fingers. While the curtains are still closed, there might be anything out there. Any landscape at all, any place in the world.

  A bicycle bell rings somewhere, tingling in her chest. That silver sound fills her with a flood of nostalgic delight. It is the sound of childhood, of clear days, of cycling with no hands down hills … where does it come from, this memory? Did she have such a childhood? Did anyone?

  Another sound: the ripping again. She pushes the curtain aside. And lies there, propped on an elbow, staring out at the dreamy scene that fills the large window. The light is quenching in its early-dawn blueness. There is a vlei, very still, with a complex, broken frame of tufts and fronds. She can make out the heads of bulrushes, etched against the milky water. She sees now what makes the tearing noise: an Egyptian goose, raking its wingtips on the water, then climbing away with a clap. It leaves behind it a serrated wake.

  It is not a completely lonely scene. There’s some kind of construction site on the far side of the vlei. Another housing estate going up. Stationary bulldozers and tractors, dim in the early dawn, a tiny tin-drum brazier burning like a thimble of heat. A nightwatchman, still on duty.

  She sees the building from that lonely watchman’s perspective: hers must be the only window showing any movement, the only one in which the curtain has been pulled aside. She closes it and in the dimness pats her hands along the wall, looking for a light switch. Her fingers find a square of smooth plastic, which doesn’t even require a click. Her touch alone triggers it, and the lights fade in, dim and yellow. The electricity is back.

  She gets out of bed, assuming once more her body’s weight. She’s still in jeans and T-shirt from the night before.

  The light switches are in obscure places, not easy to find. A girl in a maze, Katya makes her way out of the bedroom and into a dark passageway by trailing a hand on the wall and not losing contact. In this way, she was once told, any maze is solvable. It is one of those pieces of information she’s stored up, in case of need. She has many imaginary stratagems of this kind; plans for escape.

  By means of this cunning technique, she locates a small kitchen. The fridge buzzes to itself, cycling. She opens it, letting a rectangle of white light into the dark. The shelves are empty. Something she hasn’t given much thought to: how she will sustain herself while she is here.

  Opposite the kitchen, a door opens onto an empty living room. She wades through white linen curtains and finds the handle of a patio door. It slides back smoothly on its runners, letting her out onto the terrace and into morning light. She surveys the field of operations.

  For a moment, she feels a vertigo of scale. She is inside the architect’s model that she saw in Mr Brand’s office. As advertised, a high wall rings the property, topped by the parallel lines of electric fencing. She can make out the main entrance, with the lions on the gateposts looking small as cats, and the corridor of palms beyond. Just inside the gates is a small wooden hut: the guardhouse. It seems much closer than it did last night on her torchlit march. Her own block, the modest “caretaker’s lodge”, is built into a corner. The guardhouse and the lodge face an arc of larger, grander buildings, all pale plaster and stone and designed in a vaguely Babylonian style: stepped terraces, ziggurats, archways.

  A central plaza separates the staff quarters from the residential buildings. But this is not the landscaped garden that’s meant to be there: it’s a raw field of mud, criss-crossed by temporary plank paths and tracked by bicycle tyres. A small stream bisects the area.

  Close to the base of her building, down to her right, a couple of milkwood trees grow up against the perimeter wall, their trunks bending low to the ground, their leaves dark and glossy – the only sign of organic life within the walls. White garden furniture is arranged in their shade.

  There is no other greenery: no trace of the hanging gardens suggested by the model. The built-in planters on the terrace are filled with nothing but flakes of grey stone. Clearly, the planned vegetation was never planted, or has been devoured by the mysterious goggas. Also, there are no small human figures, other than herself.

  Zintle had mentioned that the land was reclaimed. Katya wonders how much of the wetlands they had to drain, how many thousands of vertebrate and invertebrate souls were displaced or destroyed to make this place. In her experience, a poorly drained property is a magnet for all kinds of damp-loving pests: water-snakes, slugs and especially mosquitoes. The rising water and its travellers always find a way back in.

  Indeed, beyond Nineveh’s perimeter, everything is insistently alive and pushing to enter. Heaped against the outside of the wall is a mass of green and silver: low bushes and stretches of pale grass, threaded and patched with water. It is a beautiful scene, the colours pure Cape fynbos. She can smell the sweet pungency from here. Beyond the green, further gradated bands of colour – a line of white beach and then the sea, an opaque blue today like a turquoise inlay. And above all that, a chalky morning sky, the subtlest blue of the spectrum. The sudden rush of light and sea air is the visual equivalent of that shining bicycle-bell sound – all sparkle and fizz.

  Katya is a princess in a white tower … another childhood fantasy, but not a childhood she recognises as her own. Some other little girl, one she never was. Where do they come from, these confusing visions? But never mind – she claims them. She stretches her arms out into the sunlight, and she is small again, a child cradled in a big, bright world, alight with possibility. She hasn’t felt this particular pleasure, this animal wellbeing, for a long time.

  The unfinished feel of the estate does not depress her. She can see the potential here: this is a place still forming. Unlike Katya’s usual environs, Nineveh is a brand-new world, made from scratch. She’d been uncertain about this job, but now she’s eager to get on with it, to open negotiations with her fellow residents, small or large. She sees the days set out before her – three? Perhaps she could even stretch it to more? – as empty and capacious as these pristine quarters, this golden prospect. She sends a message, an invitation, to every crawling, scuttling creature out there: Come in, come in, infest, invade, give me reason to stay! />
  Some movement down there. A man has appeared, is sitting at one of the tables smoking a cigarette. She’s disconcerted to have company in her new world, but then she sees the dark-blue uniform. He’s a security guard. At once she feels glad: they both belong here, they’re part of the crew. He sees her and gives her a languid salute, leaving his hand raised for a couple of seconds. It is from the expansive panache of his greeting, more than anything else at this distance, that she deduces it is not the small, slightly morose Reuben who guided her last night.

  She sends a regal wave in his direction and retreats through the white curtain layers, a royal bride in seclusion.

  The bathroom walls are plain, tiled in frostbitten white, with a border of stylised blue flowers. Her every touch leaves a fingerprint, matte against the gloss. If this place was immaculate to start with, it won’t be for long. Briefly, a vision of her father intrudes. Pissing in the basin, stubbing his foul cigarettes out on the windowsills. She runs water loudly. Mind on the job, she tells herself.

  She showers in the brand-new bathroom – the taps snapping briskly on and off, the water gushing hard and hot from a sunflower-size shower head. Quality plumbing, this. She takes pleasure in buffing herself with brand-new soap, a brand-new towel. From habit, she avoids looking at herself in the long bathroom mirror. She combs her hair cleanly back from her forehead and behind her ears, the way that feels clean and sharp, the way she likes it.

  First things first: the uniform. She has brought three sets of greens with her, each crisply pressed by the lady at the laundromat down the road from her house, a luxury Katya allows herself. She puts one on, straight over her underwear.

  Now, the notebook. She opens it to where she’s put the heading: NINEVEH. She underlines NINEVEH, then writes beneath it in a confident hand: Day One: Thurs 11 May