Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  She is lying in a field of flowers. She turns her head and her gaze alights on a beetle nuzzling its way into the heart of a yellow daisy. It’s a wacky-looking creature: jointed feelers and legs sticking up at acute angles, a narrow, armoured head equipped with pincers, and a pair of long, precisely tooled wing-sheaths – all coated in the most fantastic blue-green iridescence from feeler-tip to the end of each of six legs. Sipping peaceably at his satiny bloom.

  “You’re pretty funky, aren’t you?”

  She picks herself up and knocks the worst of the mud off her boots.

  The wetlands are extravagantly beautiful and full of life, brimming with pools of amber water that flash where the sun hits them. In some places the water runs clear, elsewhere it stands still over a precipitate of slime. Spider webs gleam with dew in the shadows. Wafts of meady scent alternate with the sulphur of vegetable decay. At times Katya finds herself fording a shoulder-high field of flexible, pinkish swords, or wading through waterlogged grass. She can see that the place has suffered a fire not too long before: the alien vegetation has been burnt down to the sod, making way for new growth. The gaps between the stumps are lush with banks of tiny flowers in lavender and pink and white, the stubby raised fingers of succulents, daisies with egg-yellow centres and bees in their mouths.

  And the beasts, the beasts! They are everywhere, scuttling in the grass. Here and there are patches of pale-grey sand, tracked with the symmetrical indentations of tiny paws and tails. Every now and then a hidden bird will give an outraged but pure cry as she passes. There are bees and muggies, and a fat jointed centipede struggling to get away from her curious fingers, and two small geometric tortoises clambering over the sand. One tree holds a mud sculpture in its boughs; it proves to be filled with scurrying ants when she taps its sides. She wants to touch everything – the knobs on the tortoise’s back, the soft explosions of the fat bulrushes. Katya is not wearing gloves today.

  As she walks, she feels her heart lifting. This is a child’s landscape of mud and splashing pools, nothing too big or tall, no dramatic cliffs or giant trees. The beauty is in modest treasures. A watery patchwork place, shifting and uncertain. There are no markers here, no distinctive great trees or boulders – or any stones at all. She’s lost sight of Nineveh now, but she can’t yet hear the sea. Great bunches of dakriet stand up in her path, but each one looks the same from every angle; there are strands of water which lead in no clear direction, seeming to sneak left and right behind her back as she blunders on through thigh-high grass. Sun and shade dapple her eyes. At times she runs up against a larger patch of water that seems to be part of the vlei she saw from the bedroom, but its outline is amorphous, cluttered by reeds and green-scummed, only revealing itself when she’s already one bog-soaked ankle deep in what had been solid land the moment before.

  At length she gives up on finding a path to the beach. Some odd curvature of space occurs here, leading her in circles like Alice in the flower-garden. She suspects it is not physically possible to wade straight through to the other side, to get back to the map.

  A white golf ball nests in the undergrowth like a rare egg to gather up. Once she’s seen one, her eye picks out another and another: a dozen. An atavistic impulse compels her to gather them all and make a careful pile of them in the grass. It’s odd, that pyramid of white spheres: the only human marker in this watery landscape.

  Then she comes out of a stand of reeds onto an emerald plain, and stumbles into a strange midget village. Municipal workers, she presumes, have been cutting down alien vegetation and have left the dead branches in evenly spaced heaps that look like small collapsed huts. On the other side, the ground starts to hump itself into dunes, the dank succulence of the vegetation toughening into beach scrub. Low barricades of milkwood appear, although still the sea remains elusive.

  She climbs in under the umbrella of one of the milkwoods. It must be close to midday now, and getting hot. She zips down her overalls. The air is a relief, and she succumbs and pulls her arms out of the sleeves and lets the top half hang around her waist. She’s got only a bra on, and soon her torso starts to sting pleasurably where the sun dapples through the leaves.

  This is the most peaceful she’s felt in forever. She lies there in the sleepy warmth and feels that this might be where she really belongs. Tree roof, soil floor, and the beasties buzzing around: a sweet spell.

  Through her eyelashes, she makes out an odd shape in the leaves. Directly above her, a rust-holed cooking pot has been hung on a branch. She sits up quickly and puts the top half of her overalls back on. A small chill has entered the air.

  She stumbles out of the shade and up a slope of white sand. From the crest, she can at last see the breadth of the sea, and between her and it a tough pitching landscape of dunes. Small flies plague her. She slaps them away. Slaps her head also because sly music has entered it, a thread of a tune. Whistling. Coming from where? Down there, on the beach.

  There is a horse and rider cantering along the shore. In their path, an ambiguous shape stands or leans, dark against the beach. If she had Toby here with her, she could send him coursing down to the beach to investigate for her. Check it out, Tobes, double-quick. The horse floats like a mirage, its hooves beating silently. As it approaches the still figure, the horse appears tinier and tinier, until she realises that the tilted black shape is a piece of boat wreckage, much larger than a man.

  The horse and rider move on out of the scene, but the whistling remains, displaced by distance, like the soundtrack of a film slightly out of synch with the image. It makes her shiver. She lowers herself, putting the body of the sand dune between herself and that distant figure. The whistling ebbs.

  A chilly breeze has sprung up. Time to go back. This time, the swamp relents and lets her find her way home. She doesn’t see the pyramid of golf balls, though. It’s as if they’ve sunk straight into the ground, which might actually be possible in this boggy earth.

  Back at the gate, the fingerprint magic doesn’t work. She realises that she is too coated in mud, and even when she spits on her thumb and wipes it off on the clean underside of her collar, the door refuses to know her. At last she raises her fist to the gate. The thick wood gives a muffled thump. She tries harder, with knuckles. Before she knows it, she’s doing rats-in-a-rat-trap, squashed-flat. Everybody responds to that one. It works a charm: soon she can hear the spin of bicycle wheels on the other side, and the door clucks its acceptance. She pushes it open cautiously, but there is no meaty dog body pressed against the other side.

  Reuben straddles a bicycle on the other side of the door. When he sees her, he laughs, rings his bell and pedals off again, smiling. Reuben and Pascal: she’s pleased that these two will be her companions here, crossing paths with her at clockwork intervals. Pascal appears to be the dog man, Reuben the biker.

  “Are you going into town?” she calls to his back.

  “Tomorrow,” he shouts, and spins between the buildings. She’s got him to smile, at least.

  Her knuckles sting as she heads back across the mud. Rats-in-a-rat-trap! Len coming home at odd hours, rapping it out on the roof of the car or the side of the caravan. Squashed-flat! Alma and Katya would jump out of their skins, every time. Instantly awake, crouching to receive whatever their father might be bringing home. It might be a treat, sweets or a comic book. Sometimes he’d be in a mean mood, and they’d have to duck. If he’d been fired again, or lost money, or had a fight, he would be on fire with indignation, waking them to tell them about this new injustice. Sometimes he’d be in a high good humour, whistling, rubbing his hands, ready to pack their bags. Or he’d bring home something for them to play with: a grass snake or a frog.

  It’s possible to get addicted to that kind of lottery. But Alma shrank away from it, grew silent and thin and secretly hard, laying her plans for escape. Katya tried to play the game. She slept with one eye open, ever alert to her father’s moods, ever ready to engage.

  Once, years ago, one of Katya’s fleetin
g boyfriends used Len’s knock on her door when he came to visit.

  “You scared the shit out of me!” she shouted. “Why did you knock like that?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” the poor boy said, bewildered.

  And she couldn’t explain.

  How to explain her father? He was a frightening man, a physically dangerous man. It wasn’t that he abused them or hated them. But he was rough company, always dropping hammers on their feet or keeping them out all night in the rain. He didn’t lift a hand without bringing it down hard, didn’t touch if he could shove. He never could respect the fragility of bodies. Len made his living from perilous things, from animals with teeth and stings and claws, and various poisons, and a range of implements fitted with blades and weights and protruding nails. All this compounded by his nature, so impatient, so given to rapid and unconsidered movements, to extravagant gestures of rage and enjoyment. Her father was proud: he would rather collide with the world than bend to it. And some of life’s shrapnel inevitably ricocheted off him and struck his close relations.

  As a family, they were remarkably accident-prone. Len broke Alma’s collarbone when she was ten, swinging a gas tank off the back of the bakkie. It wasn’t deliberate. Katya remembers feeling pleased that it wasn’t her, and hoping her father had noticed the nimble way she jumped aside. And once he took Katya with him to clean birds’ nests from a roof. She was eight. He didn’t hold the wobbly ladder for her, and as she was coming down it twisted away from the roof on one leg and toppled, and she landed heavily on her arm with a rung across her neck. She was brave; she didn’t cry and she carried the toolbox back to the bakkie with her left hand, and clutched her fork awkwardly that night at supper. Alma noticed, but Dad didn’t. Katya refused to meet her sister’s eye across the table. It was only the next day, when she couldn’t dress herself with her strengthless and swelling right arm, that her father grudgingly took her to the public hospital. He paced up and down the waiting room while a trainee doctor pressed and manipulated her arm, trying to persuade her to confess to pain. She didn’t, she wouldn’t. At last the young medic, frustrated, gripped her upper arms and lifted her bodily into the air. She bit her lip. She didn’t yelp.

  Her father did magic tricks. He could make coins come out of their ears, he could hypnotise a frog. He could do accents and jokes and funny songs. He could make Katya weep with laughter, the only kind of crying allowed. He called her “Katyapillar”. Sometimes he slapped his daughters in annoyance, and that stung but it wasn’t the worst of it. The frightening part was the sense that they, the Grubbs, lived in a merciless world, full of hostile objects that could at any time rear up and hurt them. And the best you could do was be prepared to hit back.

  These days, Katya often wakes with a jolt, ready for anything, her father’s knock still echoing from the door of her dreams.

  7. GOLF

  Something’s changed: there’s a new sound in the air. Irregular, emphatic. Thwuck, it goes. And then, after a long pause: Thwotch. It seems to come from above. Katya walks quietly up the stairs to the terrace outside Unit Two.

  At first, she fails to recognise the figure with the golf club. A man’s body looks different in moments of muscular tension. There’s a line of golf balls on the edge of the low wall around the terrace, and Mr Brand is perched up there too, screwing himself into a chunky pretzel to swing at them one by one. Thwop. It’s an odd sight, the ball flying sweetly from such an earthbound figure as Mr Brand, sweating in his shirtsleeves.

  But when he turns around she sees his face alight and boyish, and the exuberant flight of the ball makes sense. His joy changes to something else when he catches sight of her. He stares and then roars out a laugh, doubling over his club. The mud cracks on her forehead and cheeks, and she realises how dirty she is. So that’s what Reuben was grinning at. At least Mr Brand won’t see her flushing under the mud.

  “Grubbs!” he yells. “You filthy child!”

  He hops down – surprisingly lightly – from the wall and comes towards her, club in hand, the silver wand vibrating in amusement. Despite the sweat, he’s as clean as ever. Cream suit trousers, white shirt; cream suede shoes, even. How on earth has he moonwalked, spotless, over the mud?

  “I didn’t realise we had a meeting,” she says.

  “Just popping in. I used to drop in on your father, Grubbs Senior. Check in on the old crook every now and then.” He says this with relish, whisking circles in the air with the head of the club. “He and I, before things turned sour, we used to line up the balls, just so, and whip them out into the bushes. Good fun.”

  “You’re kidding me. My father played golf?” It’s not to be imagined.

  “Not very well, no. Had to watch my head. A bit on the wild side.” He acts out ducking under a low-flying ball. “You play?”

  “Please. Can you picture it?”

  He pauses and considers her. “Some other sport, perhaps. Mud-wrestling.”

  “I’m very dirty,” she remembers.

  “Grubby Grubbs,” he says, rather childishly she feels. “Go on, get yourself cleaned up, and then let’s have a drink and you can tell me what’s been going on with this gogga invasion.” He widens his eyes on the last words, teasing.

  Katya lets herself into the flat. A drink – does he mean she should invite him in? It’s too late now, he’s turned back to his balls. She’s not sure what she is here, exactly: employee? Hostess? In the spirit of compromise, she leaves the door unlocked, but only slightly ajar.

  In the bathroom mirror, she sees she is coated, pretty much from toe to crown, with a silky dark mud, like the finest of spa treatments, drying now and starting to pull at her skin in a not unpleasant way. A blackface flash of white teeth, pink tongue, white eyelids. So much for the dignity of the professional pest-relocation expert. Her spattered trouser-legs are also speckled with small travellers: ticks, dozens of them. She sticks her foot up on the edge of the bath and tweezes them off, one by one. Other leg. It’s hard to do, with her short fingernails. Into the toilet bowl, and flush – it’s not exactly killing. She gives her trousers a last smack with her palms.

  Now she’ll have to check every fold of her skin for their nasty, flat bodies. She strips down warily, on the lookout. Her body looks freakishly pale, cuffed with deep brown ankles, hands, neck and face: an interesting effect. It all stinks worse indoors – as if the muck is starting to spoil. Mud tracked in onto the carpet, too, she sees with some dismay.

  Perhaps this is why she so dislikes ticks, more than any other insect: searching for them is the one time she has to look at her body unflinchingly, examine every inch of skin.

  Alma and she are both cursed with skin that scars. It keeps the marks of her father’s inattentions forever, like paper keeps ink. Her wounds are not as deep as some children’s, she knows that; but fathers have different ways of marking their children. Katya’s scars are evenly distributed across her body. Cuts and scrapes and scars and badly set bones. And cigarette burns, lots of those. She treasured those scars when she was a child. They were the family brands, they showed they belonged to each other. She had a child’s scorn for Alma, who mourned the loss each time her skin was split.

  The mildest of Katya’s marks are a sprinkling of tiny flecks all over her body, which only she would notice. Her father used to hold a match-head to the skin to get a tick to pull out its mouthparts. The girls would be left with tiny blisters, which they’d scratch away after a day or two, leaving a freckle. There’s a better way of doing it, of course, as Katya now knows: you dab a little Vaseline on the tick to smother it, and it backs out. Painless all round. But Len had no patience for such niceties.

  The worst of her scars is from the dog-bite, humiliatingly on her buttock, received on a job with her dad when she was eleven. She still bears two narrow arcs of puncture wounds, now shiny and slightly indented. A small triangle on her foot is from when Len dropped a box of engine parts on her when they were setting rat-traps in a warehouse. Many of her scars have
interesting shapes, suggesting the imprints of man-made objects. If you transcribed them, copied them all down neatly on a page, they’d make an expressive alphabet.

  It has been a problem, with lovers. Lying alongside another naked body, is it not traditional to count off the other’s scars, to touch them and hear their stories, to read the skin? Like being granted a peek into a diary. But so many entries! And it’s embarrassing to confess how many were written by her father.

  In the shower, she rinses her body, and under the mud her flesh is slick and thin, almost translucent – as if the troublesome outer layer has been burnt away, leaving infant skin beneath. Through the falling water, she can hear Mr Brand moving around inside the flat. What’s he up to? Of course he has a right to enter his own building. It was probably rude of her not to invite him in. But still, it feels odd, showering with a strange, fully clothed man only inches away through the thin wall. She turns the water off and listens. Footsteps, chinks and rustles. Objects picked up and set down? Drawers opening?

  She towels herself dry, and the scars show up again, white against rosy skin. She has only one not-quite-large-enough towel, which she cinches firmly across her bosom before opening the bathroom door. Mr Brand’s nowhere to be seen, but the front door’s ajar. She scuttles for the bedroom. What things has he touched? She looks for displaced objects, but nothing is obvious.

  Clean clothes – and not the uniform, this time. There isn’t a lot to choose from, but it takes her longer than it should to consider the permutations of two pairs of jeans, three shirts. In the end she goes for a dark ensemble: black jeans, navy long-sleeved shirt. She leaves her shoes off; they just make her legs look shorter. She brushes her hair back behind her ears in the usual way. In the mirror, she looks like a teenage boy on a date, a fifties boy, Brylcreemed and eager and angular. She should have a cigarette behind her ear. She bends savagely at the waist, throwing her head between her legs and shaking out her hair. It makes her dizzy, crazed-looking, like one of Derek’s more agitated colleagues from the park. She runs her fingers one more time through the wet hair and leaves the room to avoid changing her outfit all over again like an anxious fifteen-year-old.