Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  The chair starts to tip and she jumps clear just in time, hooking her foot in a corner of the duvet and declining in a slow-motion pratfall to the mattress and then the floor. She giggles at herself for a while; there’s no one else here to do it.

  There’s a clear black handprint on the plaster of the ceiling. Hers? But she’s clean. She lies there for a long time, looking up at it.

  When at last she turns off the bedside lamp, the handprint vanishes, as does she, into the general dark of Nineveh.

  In the morning there is still no sign of the elusive infestation, although she has a crawling sensation, as though tiny mouthparts have been probing her. No marks on her skin, though. No new ones, at any rate.

  She rises from her bed with new determination, and hungry again. From the unlikely ingredients in her pantry, she manages to construct a processed-cheese sandwich, but when she bites down she finds it has somehow attracted sand grains: it grits startlingly between her teeth. She throws the cheese away, leaving the fridge empty except for the Sparletta bottles, one now holding chilled tap water.

  Decent groceries: it must be possible to obtain them. She is not a particularly discerning eater, but there are a few things she craves – tea with milk, wholegrain bread, proper cheese, tomatoes and avocado. To say nothing of a bottle of wine or two. She remembers, now, passing some shops with Toby on the way in: a cluster of mall and petrol station and McDonald’s. A pleasant stroll. Only about a kay or so, surely?

  It’s a perfect pale-blue morning. As she heads off down the driveway, a breeze rustles the fronds of the palms on either side, making white fire flicker in the green. But the day turns warm fast, and, in another clear manifestation of spatial distortion, the avenue grows longer and longer the further she goes. There’s sweat coming down her temples and dripping through her eyebrows by the time she gets to the end, where she pauses in the square shadow of the billboard advertising Nineveh’s charms. Welcome!

  The main road is bleaker and longer than she remembers: dunes and bush, and every now and then a stretch of blank concrete wall topped with razor wire. More of Mr Brand’s developments? Whipping past in a car, one gets the impression that the road is inhabited, busy even, with a press of traffic, people selling firewood at the side of the tar or walking along it. But time and space are different when you’re on foot. The spaces between the human events open up and elongate and the individual becomes smaller. The pavement appears and disappears. For stretches, there’s only a foot-worn track. Here and there she can see inlets and ochre paths that head into the bush. The cars are infrequent; it’s still quite early. She’s left all alone on the side of the road for long minutes between the vivid flashes of passing vehicles. When they come, they come fast. There’s no reason to stop here.

  A few faces turn to watch her from behind filmed windscreens. She doesn’t fit in here: a white woman, not even jogging. Does she need petrol? Has she burst a tyre? She gives a random guy in a van a reassuring thumbs-up. The uniform, that complicating factor, does give her a certain confidence that she wouldn’t normally have. Someone in overalls always has a job to do, a reason to be there. Again she mulls over the necessity of getting a more workmanlike bag. A toolbox: even if all she carries in it are cheese sandwiches and slug bait.

  She glances back over her shoulder in the direction of Nineveh. She’s come surprisingly far. The long wall is now visible only as an intermittent stitch of white through the bush, with the tips of palm trees poking up at regular intervals from its battlements. Seeing it from this angle, in daylight, the palms look completely artificial.

  She passes one, two, several people selling stacks of firewood. Wicker chairs and small herds of wire animals are also on display. They’re the same designs that you see everywhere, and not for the first time she wonders about the clandestine workshops where these styles are hatched and then released into the networks of roadside wire-benders.

  Now signs of life peek through the dusty greenery: corrugated iron, smoke, voices. Funny that she never noticed this settlement before, on the way in. People look up and nod to her cautiously as she passes. Shack-land. She doesn’t often find herself so close to this world, on foot. Maybe she should be more cautious, but she feels safe. The passing cars are just in touching distance, and up ahead, about two hundred metres away, she sees the familiar yellow and red of the McDonald’s. What could go wrong?

  She almost stumbles across the things laid out for sale in the next lay-by. The usual trinkets and piles of rooikrans, and something else: ice-white tiles laid out on a piece of plastic sheeting. Each has a figure at its centre. They look small and orphaned, lying there in rows.

  “Where did you get these?” she asks the young girl selling.

  The girl shrugs, laughs. She has a pleasant, square face, with a plump chin and small smiling eyes. Perhaps she’s just squinting into the sun.

  Katya goes down on her haunches for a closer look. Her overalls pull snug over her thighs, making her wonder if she’s put on weight in Nineveh. In two days? On bully beef and Sparletta? Quite possible.

  The bathroom tiles have been carefully removed: no broken corners, scuffs or smears. Tile adhesive chipped off the backs. Little blue flowers in their centres.

  “These are from Nineveh, right? Over there?”

  Shrug. “Do you like them?”

  “I like them very much. How much?”

  “Two rand a tile.”

  “That’s not bad.” She doesn’t bother to haggle. “I’ll take all of them – how many is that? Six, seven – nine.”

  The girl seems pleased. She stacks the tiles up and wraps them in a Shoprite bag, and Katya takes them carefully. She gives the girl a twenty-rand note and tells her to keep the change. The tiles are heavy, and all stacked together they make a pleasing brick, almost a cube, which only just fits into her bag.

  “Do you have anything else like this?”

  Again, that squinting-into-the-sun look, although this time the girl seems less amused and more assessing. She bites her lower lip with slightly skew incisors.

  “I could ask for you,” she says at length, carefully. “We have many things for sale.” The girl turns and meets the eyes of a man who’s been watching. When he comes over, Katya sees he has the same face as hers, but fleshier, with a strong, arrow-shaped nose.

  “John,” he introduces himself.

  “Hi,” Katya says, and puts out her hand. His grip is dry, silky and limp, as if he is unaccustomed to the form of shaking hands. It’s an uncertain moment; if handshakes are meant to be a show of trust, this one has failed.

  “You are interested in these tiles? I can get you more, many more. How many do you want?”

  He’s polite but pushy, and it adds to her wariness. She’s not sure why she started this.

  “If you want these things, you need to talk to me,” he presses. “Anything, anything – bathroom fittings, electrical – I can get it for you. But you must talk to me.”

  She nods and smiles, backing away. She understands.

  Her bag is considerably heavier now. Quality tiles weigh a ton.

  The mall is a small, new, rather homely one, with a temporary feel. It looks like it’s been made from a kit, slapped together rapidly out of plywood. It wouldn’t take much more than a good push to knock the stores over like a row of dominoes.

  She watches with professional interest as a rat scuttles out from behind a skip. Katya has a sentimental fondness for rats: they were her first humane conquest. For most of her twenties she led her own solo version of Len’s nomadic life, living in rented rooms and working in bars. It was a rat infestation in one of these establishments that got her started. The manager let her have a crack at the problem before he laid down poison. After much painful and unsanitary experimentation, she managed to trap every last rat, letting them loose one by one on Rondebosch Common in the dead of night to avoid suspicious passers-by. That was the beginning of her vocation, and it led in time to PPR, the van, the uniform and at last, wit
h great trepidation, to the house: a permanent base of operations. To everything.

  The rat dashes past a figure standing, hands on hips, in the corner of the parking lot. Katya does a double-take, but it’s just some poor guy trying to cadge a few coins. The real car guard, in his fluorescent bib, moves him along. It’s become a bit of a habit, to watch out for her father’s figure among the homeless and abandoned. She ducks her head and hurries on.

  Inside, the boxy space contains the usual array of clothes and electronics stores and fast-food joints; they all seem very exciting to her, as if she’s been away for months instead of days. The clothes so bright and clean, the tilted trays of perfect vegetables, the books and CDs with their covers as shiny as varnish. She picks up her basic groceries and gets some cash from the machine, then browses for a while in a bargain bookshop. It’s one of those odd places stocked with a random selection of publishers’ remainders, books rescued from being pulped.

  There’s a reference section, and she finds the Complete Guide to Southern African Insects. She riffles through it and glances at the pictures, the maps, the Latin names for grasshoppers and dragonflies. Len, otherwise unschooled, had all that knowledge at his fingertips. For any given indigenous bug, he could tell you names in half a dozen languages. Somehow, Katya never got it together to learn those things. Laziness, she supposes. For all her business cards and logos, this knowledge haunts her: Len was the true craftsman. She pushes the field guide back onto its shelf.

  Next, she finds one of those photographic books where vintage blackand-white photos of Cape Town are compared with the same views taken in modern times. Long Street, Camps Bay now and then. District Six, alive and then in ruins. The antique harbour with its elegant pier, and the bleakly triumphal foreshore that was built on top of it – pushing back the sea by force of will, shadowless in the seventies sun. What is striking is how everything is different – the point of the book – but also how neither the old nor the new seems obviously preferable. The monochrome pictures of Victorian Cape Town seem dreary, stricken with a kind of lassitude, the streets strangely empty. The fifties snaps are stultifying in their own way: those over-bright Kodachrome skies, the street scenes populated entirely by white people – except for the picturesque flower-sellers, of course. In none of the pictures does the city seem to be sitting easy with itself. Only the mountain and sea seem serene, altering at a far more dignified pace. A disorientating experience, looking at this book. Each person snapping the shutter had been trying to fix the city as it was, but there is no fixing such a shifting, restless thing as a discontented city. If you strung these pictures together in a giant flip-book, or put them together to make a jerky film reel, year on year, the city would be hopping and jiggling, twitching and convulsing in a frenzy of urban ants-in-the-pants. Colonial cities are itchier than most, no doubt, fidgeting in the sub-Saharan light; harsh, even in a sepia world.

  So little of the original Cape Town remains. Just the heavy star of the Castle pinning down its surroundings like a brooch – or a five-pointed policeman’s badge. How silly to imagine that anything built now will stand for years to come. She shelves the book again, butting it carefully against the flimsy partition of the shop wall. This place, certainly, will not last long enough to feature in photos of the future.

  She leaves the mall through the automatic doors and stands at the edge of the parking lot to make some calls. First, Mr Brand’s office.

  Today, Zintle disappoints. Her voice is as mellifluous as ever, but lacks its previous rise and fall. She seems subdued, as if she has a slight cold or a case of the sulks or even a slight hangover. “Oh, Miss Grubbs,” she says absently.

  Katya misses the sense of being playfully manipulated – does Zintle no longer care? “Just checking in, reporting in, you know,” she says. “To my employer.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Zintle has no faith in her after all, no faith whatsoever.

  “I have an appointment with Mr Brand on Sunday. I thought I should just confirm the time and so on.”

  “Sunday?” She sniffs. “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t work Sundays.”

  “Well what should—”

  “Try him at his home. He’ll be there. Maybe.”

  “Oh, okay. Also, I need some money for expenses?”

  That gets a laugh out of Zintle, at least. “You’re not the only one, my dear,” she says. “Good luck.” And puts the phone down.

  After that, Katya feels shy to ring the Brands’ house. Instead she tries her own. On the other end of the line, she imagines the old house ringing like a bell, cracks widening with every vibration. Pick up, Toby, before it all comes tumbling down. She gives up after ten rings and phones him on his cell.

  He answers at once. “Yo PPR, what can we do you for?”

  “God, that’s terrible. Why are you answering the phone like that? This could be a work call. Shit, this is a work call!”

  “Jees, sorry. Howzit, Katya.”

  She’s immediately penitent. She didn’t mean to be sharp. His voice seems wispy and insubstantial on the end of the line. She has a moment of vertigo, of panic: where is he? How would she ever find him again, or he find her, if one of them hung up now?

  “Where are you, Toby?”

  She knows it’s an irritating habit, to ask a young person on a cellphone this question: the reflex of an older generation. And she accepts the rebuke:

  “I’m just … out.”

  So wavering, so faint. A boy in a bubble in the sky. It’s his mother’s voice: a million years ago, Alma’s whisper reaching her from another world, unmoored, drifting, ever more distant.

  Suddenly there’s a yell on the other end, and the line goes dead.

  She rings again. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m busy,” he says ungraciously. Judging from the agonised howls, Toby is now contending with a pack of wolves.

  “Toby, what the hell? Are you okay?”

  He grunts. “Yes yes – it’s just … Can’t talk now!”

  “Wait wait wait! I need you to come and get me. Tomorrow.”

  A tense and panting silence on the other end.

  “Tobes? Tomorrow?”

  “No! You bugger!”

  An unearthly yowling in the background. And he’s hung up. She tries again: no answer.

  She thinks, and then dials her sister. “Is Toby okay? I just had a weird phone call.”

  “Well, he’s on a job. For you. Mongeese, I think he said to me.”

  “Mongooses?”

  “Whatever. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “No, nothing, never mind.” Alma freaks out enough as it is. “Just tell him … tell him two o’clock, tomorrow. I need to get back for a meeting on Sunday.”

  Katya hangs up, wondering whether she’s got her lift or if her driver has been ripped limb from limb by raging mongeese. The flimsy partitions of the mall building seem to clatter and shake behind her. Across the parking lot, the wind is smacking at the rather sad banners on poles, rolling an unattended centipede of trolleys across the space of the parking lot and – bang! – into the side of someone’s car. Everything is in motion, distressed by the wind; steel and concrete shivering like the waters of a lake. She hovers at the edge of the lot, weighed down by her grocery bags, unwilling to start the long trudge home.

  Something strikes her like a bird from the sky, gripping the back of her neck with fleshy claws. She yelps and ducks and twists around, dropping her parcels to beat away the attack.

  The figure behind her jumps back and yells too, and for a moment they’re like cats in a fight, all arched backs and snarling. Then she sees who it is and stops cold. Her hand goes to her neck.

  He’s got his fists on his hips, grinning, pleased with himself. “Katyapillar! Fancy meeting you here!”

  She digs in her fingers until she can feel the nails.

  The first thing she does is buy them both a drink, and a stiff one too. She’s not sure she can do this sober. Remembering Mr B
rand, she chooses whisky. They sit in the dim rear section of a franchised steakhouse, one that has a bar with polished wood and fake brass and very few customers.

  “What are you doing here, Dad?”

  He smirks. “Heard you were about.”

  “Heard from who?”

  “Heard you got my job.”

  “My job, Dad,” she says. “Mine.”

  He laughs and cracks his knuckles, making her flinch at the sound. He’s got a distinctive way of doing it: pushing his palms together prayerfully, forcing the wrists back at ninety degrees until they click, then deliberately moving the pressure onto the fingers to get at the knuckles, producing a riff of meaty pops. Katya clenches her teeth to stop the sound getting into her head.

  She can see them both in the mirror, up on bar stools with their ankles hooked around the legs, identical poses, each swivelled a half-turn away from the other. It could be late at night in this boozy amber light, the two of them strangers drowning their sorrows, and in fact she can feel that late-night drowsiness coming over her, a kind of inertia. When he turns his face to the side, she catches the gleam of an eye, the angle of the brow. Each glimpse delivers a soft blow of recognition. Dad.

  She’s not sure if he looks bad or good. Older, certainly. He looks like someone who’s spent seven years in a forest, chopping wood and eating squirrels: lean, battered, dirty, but tough and full of wily energy. He’s wearing cheap jeans and an old yellow T-shirt that says Tropicana and shows his arms, still knotty with muscle. Looks like he’s lost a front tooth. His skin is lightly wrinkled, like paper that’s been dropped in the bath and left to dry, and he’s darkly tanned and sun-spotted, except for the right forearm. That one is flayed. It’s the snakebite, the old healed one. Puff adders have an evil bite: the venom necrotises the flesh. She vividly recalls the shape of the scar, which reminded her of the smooth skin of a gum tree where the bark’s stripped off. He used to flinch away from a touch to that arm. Now the discolouration is worse: the damaged skin is red and looks even thinner than before. On the backs of his hands and around the edges of his brow the skin is freckled with age, which, along with the missing tooth, gives a paradoxical impression of boyish mischief. Even the wisp of tarnished hair that remains at the back of his head, floating above his balding scalp, has a youthful exuberance. The only really dispirited thing about him is his footwear: the running shoes are worn down almost to the uppers, with holes at their seams through which she glimpses horny nails. Shoes: always the biggest giveaway of hard living.