Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  He leans forward, smelling of sweat and tobacco and … what? Mould? He tweaks the corner of her collar. “Snazzy.”

  She can’t help it: she pulls away. Len pauses, hand in mid-air, to note her reflex; then deliberately continues, taking a big handful of collar. She stays completely still. She allows it. He scrapes at the logo sewn onto the cloth with his thumbnail. “PPR. Stands for what?”

  “Painless Pest Relocations.”

  “Relocations? Very fancy.” He lets go of her collar at last. “And what’s all this about Painless?”

  “I remove animals, I don’t destroy them. It’s humane.”

  He whoops in amusement. The front legs of the bar stool rear back and slam down with a mirthful explosion.

  “Humane!” he snorts. “Fucking painless!”

  She straightens her collar and buttons it all the way up. “Dad, enough of the bullshit. Where have you been? All this time? Do you live around here?”

  He points his weather-beaten finger at the ceiling and traces a circle, points it at the ground and does the same. “In and out, around and about. Lying low.” He winks, reminding her queasily of Mr Brand. “So, you having any trouble with that job, then? Hit any snags? Need your old dad’s help?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. No.”

  He snaps his fingers for another round. The bar-girl is very young and seems suitably cautious of them, staying over on the far side of the bar.

  “So you know what to do with those bugs, do you? When they start to swarm?”

  “Which bugs?” she says without thinking.

  “Which bugs, she says! Which bugs!” The bar-girl smiles politely, and he jerks his chin at her. “Packet of chips, darling? Salt and vinegar.”

  Katya perches on her bar stool and watches him. She can smell him, see the mash of potato chips revolving behind his snaggle teeth. The more he eats, the more animated he becomes, shifting his bony rear on the slippery bar stool, raising his eyebrows at her comically.

  “Go on, get some of these down your neck,” he says, pushing the greasy foil packet towards her.

  She shakes her head.

  “What’s the matter? Pressure of work?”

  She rolls her eyes. But she is, in fact, thinking of the blank pages of her notebook. About Mr Brand, and the meeting she’s supposed to have with him, and the invisible goggas that she is unable to see. Beside her sits a man who knows more about vermin than anyone alive. She clamps her arms across her chest and grinds her molars together.

  “Dad. These goggas. You know what I mean.”

  “Pretty things, eh?” He lifts his eyebrows, waiting.

  “I haven’t seen them. Nothing, no infestation. If there ever was one, it’s gone now.”

  He chuckles into his glass.

  “What? What’s so funny?”

  He leans forward and tells her in a vinegar blast: “They’re there. They come and they go. Sometimes you see ’em, if you’ve got the eyes, sometimes you don’t. One day there’ll be one or two, and then the next day …” He widens his eyes, takes a sip.

  “Well, maybe you got rid of them all last time. Maybe they’re not going to swarm this year.”

  “Oh no. Oh no no, they’re coming alright. Soon, too.” He gives it a beat, but then can’t restrain himself: “Go on, ask me how I know. Ask me.”

  She thinks about it. “Oh.”

  “Oh, she says! Oh!”

  “Insurance.”

  He snaps his fingers at her: got it in one!

  “Dad. What have you done?”

  He waves her question away modestly. “Oh, not much, not much. Originally it was nothing, a pisswilly job.”

  “The goggas?”

  “Promeces palustris. Best to catch them when they’re still in larval form, of course, if you know where to look. Get in there with the poison. But a few of them had popped up and were doing their thing – eating the carpets, biting visitors and so on. So they called your old dad in to get rid of them.”

  “But you didn’t get rid of them. They swarmed – they destroyed the place.”

  “Think you could have done better? Sure, it was a bit late in the day by then, already July, but I did what I could. Plus there were other problems – cockroaches, guineafowl shitting on the roof, that type of thing. I was there two months, and it would’ve been a lot worse without Len Grubbs, let me tell you.” He sniffs. “Not that you could tell that cunt Brand anything. He was quibbling about payment from the get-go. Stiffed me in the end. So I thought, stuff him. When the job ended I made sure I left a calling card or two. Took certain precautions.”

  “Insurance.”

  “Insurance. I kept an eye on things. Made sure there was always something going on, you know? Greenfly. Wood-borers. Our furry friend the rat.” He wheezes a laugh, flashing his missing tooth. “Plus a little general chaos. It was beautiful.”

  “What about the other stuff? The missing copper wire, all of that – was that you?”

  He shrugs, modest. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Despite herself, Katya is impressed at the scale of the operation. Over the course of, what was it, nine months? – he’d single-handedly made Nineveh unlivable. “And you’ve been hanging around here all this time?”

  “I’ve been in the vicinity, you could say.”

  “But why? What’s in it for you now?”

  “See, I was waiting for beetle season to roll around again. I made sure enough of those buggers survived last time to lay eggs, and I’ve been keeping a paternal eye on the little ones, as it were, as they go through their growing pains.”

  Metamorphosis. Katya wonders whether her father has not, finally, gone completely insane. “Come on, Dad, you expect me to believe that? You’ve been, what, herding larvae?”

  “I know the places where they lay their eggs, the hidey-holes. I’ve made sure they’re protected. It’s a good crop. A bumper crop. The swarm’s gonna be a knockout. My plan was, I’d let them hatch, and then Brand would come knocking on my door in desperation. Easy money. I’d make him kneel down in the mud and beg for help. But instead, what happens?” He leans towards her, poking her shoulder with his finger. Katya leans away.

  “You pitch up, just as the beasties are starting to pop up again. You get the benefit of it. Hardly fair, eh?” He pulls back and slugs his drink, then shows her his missing tooth again. “But never mind, we’ll make a plan.”

  “What do you mean, we?” she asks. Oh no.

  “You’ll be needing some expert assistance, my girl. I know these creatures, I’ve dealt with them.”

  “Dad. I can do it. This is my job. They hired me.”

  He scoffs. “You think this is going to be easy? You think you can play P. palustris a tune on your painless pipes” – spittle lands on her cheek – “and they’ll follow you out the front door?”

  “Yes,” she says, stupidly, stubbornly, wiping her face with her sleeve.

  “Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe not so much. Here’s an idea, though, listen to this. How about I’m your ‘assistant’? You’re going to need one. Can’t rely on those buggers, Pascal and whatsit. No, no, my darling, I think your old dad better come along. We’ll get it done. It’ll be just like the old days, eh?” He stretches, lacing his fingers together and turning them inside out and pushing them up above his head. His whole body pops and he grins in relish. “See, I’m in good nick, I’m ready to work.”

  “I don’t do your kind of work. I don’t use poison, I don’t kill things. I told you.”

  “What do you do with the beasties then? Put them up in a nice hotel?” He chuckles at his own joke, slaps a knee.

  “Boxes. I use boxes.”

  “Oh, boxes. Oh well that’s alright then. How many boxes have you got? You got twenty boxes? Fifty? Five hundred? You have no idea! These buggers will stick you in the boxes if you don’t watch out! They’re tough. You’ll see. You try on your own, it’ll be a fuck-up. Then what will you tell your Mr Brand, eh?”

  She looks down into her
glass, rotating the last mouthful of amber.

  “Here, I’ll drink that if you’re not going to.”

  She lets him take it; he gulps it down in one.

  “Tell you what,” he gasps. “I’ll tell you what you do. You go to your precious Mr Brand and you say, here’s how it is, you tightwad bastard, you’ve got a serious invasion on your property of noxious animals, noxious endangered animals, and it’s going to cost you top dollar to keep them away, and it’s going to take months to sort, and I’m going to need a special assistant. And then,” – he’s miming it now, flinging something down on the bar like a lightning bolt – “then you slap down a toxic frog, or a nice little scorpion, right there in the lap of his Italian bloody suit! That’ll get him!”

  He cackles, and Katya laughs too, a blurt of tension. She quickly disowns the laughter with a frown. “Thanks, but I can handle it. On my own.” She struggles off the bar stool – not made for shorties, these things – and gathers up her bags.

  “Can I have a lift then?” he asks. “I believe I’m going your way.”

  “No car.”

  “Oh.” At first she thinks he’s going to offer to walk with her, but he seems to lose interest. “Oh well.” His gaze drifts across the bottles lining the back of the bar.

  “Dad,” she says.

  “Hm?”

  The roll of money she withdrew is still in her pocket. She peels off a fifty-rand note and puts it on the bar. “If you need anything …” She hesitates. “Call Alma, okay?”

  “Likewise, sweetheart,” he says as he pockets the cash. “Likewise.”

  9. UNDERWORLD

  Afterwards, she goes back to the bookshop and buys, bloody-mindedly, the Complete Guide to Southern African Insects and – what the hell – a field guide to frogs and one for snakes and reptiles too. Fuckit, she can also learn to throw Latin around.

  The books add considerably to the weight of her load. Struggling back along the road with her two bags of groceries and the tiles and the field guides, Katya is flushed with whisky and bile. How dare her father follow her here, with his dirty shoes and fingernails, making claims, making demands? Will she ever find a home, a life, that he can’t worm his way into?

  When she spots the tile-seller standing by the side of the road, sucking on an orange and standing on one foot, Katya feels a sudden flare of righteous anger at her, too. Another shyster!

  The girl sees her coming from a distance and squints in her friendly way. Before she can say anything, Katya takes a fifty-rand note from her pocket and pushes it at her.

  “I don’t have any more tiles …”

  Katya takes out another pink note and thrusts that into the girl’s palm too. She’s never done this before, giving money away: it feels powerful. The girl looks at her, uncertain, fingers half-curling around the notes.

  “I want to know where the tiles come from. Tell me.” Katya takes out a blue hundred. Her food money for the week.

  The girl rolls all three notes together into a thin tube, looks briefly over her shoulder, then nods. “Okay, rather let me show you.” Another backwards glance. “Five minutes. I’ll meet you down there.” She gestures with her chin at a bus stop down the road.

  Katya waits in the piss-smelling shelter with its broken bench, watching the intermittent traffic pass. Soon the girl joins her, taking her sleeve in her fingers and pulling her round the back of the shelter and down a narrow lane running along the edge of the shacks. Wood-smoke and eucalyptus are strong in the heated air, as well as a faint sweetish stench of sewage coming from the bushes. People watch them curiously, and her guide nods and greets one or two. A small battered-looking dog follows them for a while, yipping suspiciously, but then they move beyond its turf and it leaves them alone.

  The homes here are built of tin and wood and scavenged scrap. Some of it, Katya realises now, quite possibly liberated from Nineveh. She squeezes her wallet, and feels for the cellphone in her pocket. And then realises how silly that is, considering that she’s just given away all her money, and the fact that, no doubt, most of the people living here have better cellphones than her beaten-up old clunker. Phones are important here, she imagines: if home is flimsy or uncertain, a contact number can be a permanent address.

  They’re moving out of the shacks now, following a narrowing track into the bush. Around her, the swamp is still and hot. It’s an unseasonable, humid heat – almost thunderstorm weather, strange for Cape Town. Another thing that’s changing about this town: the weather patterns. Autumn used to be a slow cooling, a prelude to the gently persistent rains of winter. But this steamy pressure promises a deluge.

  Katya’s disorientated, but the girl walks confidently, striding more easily now that she’s out of sight of the shacks. Katya’s confidence wavers. This feels wrong, against her instincts. This is not pristine wetland, birdwatchers’ paradise. This is the urban bush: utilised, compromised. There are paths here, but they were not made for people like Katya to use. She has the overpowering sense of walking into a complex trap.

  But the girl turns and smiles at her. “It’s okay,” she says, and her pretty grin is reassuring. Katya wonders how old she is. Fifteen, maybe. A little younger than Toby. Increasingly, Katya seems to be shown a path through the world by children.

  “There,” the girl says, pointing.

  Katya blinks in the sunlight and sees that they have come quite far – far enough, in fact, to see the boardwalk extending into the swamp. Behind it, Nineveh looms like an ice fortress. Approach is everything, she thinks: how different this landscape seems if you come to it from the outside, through a village of shacks. How things change, according to the routes one takes to them. She can hardly believe she belongs behind those battlements.

  “Okay,” she says. The girl has taken no further step towards the building. “You get all this stuff here? From who, from the guards? The builders?”

  The girl’s shaking her head emphatically. It’s clear she plans to come not a step closer.

  “Who?” Katya’s question is too loud, bullying.

  The girl’s finger is not pointing at the back gate. It’s pointing to Katya’s feet – between her legs. Into the shadows under the boardwalk, where the ground dips down.

  Katya peers into the dim and clammy space. There’s nothing down there. And yet: that is where the imperious finger of youth is directing her. Katya steps forward onto the mud. She’s learning how to walk on this slipping, uncertain foundation. It takes a light touch, a hesitant tread, nothing too demanding or insistent. The walkway is chest-high here. Katya puts her bags to one side and ducks under the edge. When she looks back, the girl has gone.

  The darkness continues in. Some sort of tunnel seems to go right under the perimeter wall, under the caretaker’s building. The foundations, she sees now, are supported on cement uprights, creating a long, low cavern floored in mud.

  The girl had pointed: insistent, jabbing.

  Katya shuffles forward, head bent. Soon it’s easier to crawl. This is, so often in her line of work, the proper approach: to get down on all fours, to emulate the beasts. Pest’s eye view. The air is dense with moisture and the dank perfume of the underlayers of the earth. There is mud under her hands and knees – a surprisingly pleasant sensation. It takes a moment of suction to pull the heel of her hand out of the muck. Daylight has narrowed to a long, low slit behind her back. The cool encloses her.

  Worms and crawling things. Snakes. She puts on her small headlamp, the elastic band tight around the back of her skull. The beam flares and points. She switches it off again. She turns her back to the slit of light at the entrance and lets her eyes absorb the darkness. She waits.

  There. Up ahead and above her in the dark, she sees a slim trapezium of light floating somehow against the ceiling. At first she thinks it’s a reflection from water, thrown up against the concrete. But no: it is steady. She crawls towards it. The ground slopes gently upwards, the space becoming more cramped the further in she goes.

  It i
s a kind of trapdoor above her. A plank half conceals the gap, but a bar of weak light shows through. She puts her hand up tentatively and pushes at the damp wood. And the weight of the building pushes back. She has the distinct feeling of being pressed back down into the mud, of the space squeezing smaller, the dark cave pinching shut …

  Panicked, she twists around in the dark on her belly and struggles back the way she came – crawling, slithering – until she’s passed under the boardwalk and climbed out of the trench and there’s sky above her again.

  She rolls over and lies on her back. High, high up in the bluest of skies, a bird paddles past. Flying, it is bathed in sunlight under and over. No downside to that world.

  Back in Unit Two, the floor seems less firm beneath her feet. Everything sways. She has seen the cavity beneath the structure, now. Nineveh contains another, lower storey, an underneath that did not exist before. She feels the same disorientation she felt looking down into the maw of the demolition site back home.

  She lays out the tiles on the floor of the living room, placing each like a piece in a game. The nine tiles seem an unimpressive haul, but she senses they are merely a sample, a calling card. They have travelled mysteriously to get here: passing through the walls of Nineveh and back again. This place is not as impermeable as she had thought. There are channels, trade routes out and in. And now she has made herself part, in a small way, of these illicit transactions. As if she’s stolen these things herself.