Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  “Okay,” says Toby, his voice a breath. “I think we’ll go now.” And then he’s scrabbling with the locks, and the girl’s flashing a look over his shoulder, and then they’re out of the house.

  She stands there for quite a long time, looking down at her raised hand. There’s blood on her knuckle. A single bead of it, perfectly round and red, and she watches as it inches down her finger and then over the back of her hand. There is no pain. She doesn’t understand how it could have got there. She can’t really remember what’s happened, but she feels calm, peaceful almost, like this has all happened a million times before.

  She wipes her knuckle, looks again. The blood is not hers.

  What?

  It must have spattered onto her. From one of the kids. A piece of flying glass, perhaps.

  She goes down on her haunches to pick up the broken glass and pottery. She picks up one, two, three pieces, and then she drops them again and lies down in the middle of the mess and she puts her head down on the floorboards and she groans.

  “Oh fuck,” she says, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.” There’s a piece of sharp pottery digging into her forehead, but she doesn’t move. She presses her face into the pain.

  The frog is still alive in its tin – that’s something, at least. She carries it upstairs, very careful not to trip on the steep climb.

  There’s a square outline of a trapdoor in the ceiling above the landing. The attic. It has, she dimly knows, always been there. She must’ve seen it a thousand times, but she can’t say that it’s ever occurred to her to go up there. But the kids saw the possibilities; saw that the house has other dimensions, that it might expand. That it might be larger than its known volume.

  She rinses her hand. She tells herself it’s not so bad. A bit of throwing of objects. Some people do it all the time.

  But not at Toby.

  Her throat clenches in shame. Somehow, hours have passed: it’s dark outside. Too late to call Toby now – she’d hate to wake Alma. Too late in every way.

  Fortunately, they didn’t clean out her upstairs cupboards, and she still has the necessary stashed away: an old fish tank, a dish for water. Little trick: how to calm a frog. You flip it on its back and tickle its tummy, and it’s putty in your hands. True. She eases it down into the cool dampness of the tank. In a bank bag in a special drawer, a supply of dead flies. She drops half a dozen into the tank. Some frogs are picky, insisting on live running insects only; but this one eyes the flies with interest.

  From her bedroom window, she has a melancholy view of the demolition site. It looks like World War One down there, with water standing in the trenches. Already, it’s hard to remember the shapes of what was there before. On the other side of the park, the residential streets give way to warehouses and workshops, which the trees in the park once concealed. Now, though, the shabby backsides of these buildings are exposed. The sodium streetlights show up flaws in the plaster, ragged rust-holes in the corrugated iron. Decayed, but monumental; living the cold, mysterious life of buildings after hours. Buildings that nobody loves or lives in, that were not built for that.

  She positions the frog tank carefully next to the bed. Strange what a little company can do, even if it is the humblest of creatures beside you in the night. She remembers that from childhood: falling asleep with a small, doomed pet in a box by her pillow. The darkness tamed, the loneliness held back.

  11. ALMA

  In the night, the cracks in the walls get worse.

  A giant crowbar reaches into Katya’s sleep to prise apart the world. So sudden, and so suddenly over, that on waking she’s sure the noise was in her dreams: one of those nightmare eruptions that leave one with the sense of a damped explosion, as if the skull were a padded box in which a tiny bomb has been detonated.

  She sits up, switches on the bedside light, listens. Nothing. Except that the water in the square tumbler at her bedside is moving, trembling slightly from some aftershock. She watches the nested squares of ripple in the water, their lines of interference. She turns to face the wall, and sees that a new black crack has snaked down behind the bed. A wide one, a proper chasm. It sunders the wall between two nails that once must have held a previous occupant’s pictures, which she’s never thought to replace with her own. The tiny fragments of plaster and paint that rim the crack seem to tremble – is it true? – in a breeze as soft and even as a sleeper’s breath.

  Is that a creaking? A seismic moan? A rolling grunt, rhythmic. Which stops dead; and then, after a moment’s silence, she hears quite clearly: “Jesus Christ.” A husky voice, dry with infinite irony.

  “Toby?”

  But the noise is coming through the wall. She bunches the sheets to her chin, sits up and leans over the headboard, pushing her eye to the wall. Looks inside. Dead black in the crack. Is this a load-bearing wall, whatever that is, exactly?

  A cough.

  Dad?

  Her bedroom lies over the garage, and she’s always been able to hear the shadow noises of the alleyway through the wall: the rattle of bins, the rubbish men’s whistles. But now she can hear new things, in exquisite detail: the rasp of breath, a low mutter.

  “Ohhh,” moans the male voice. “Oh Christ. Here we go, here we go a-bloody-gain.” World-weary, tragically amused.

  It’s Derek. The voice she knows, but the tone is unfamiliar: where is the wheedler, the beggar of coins and coffee, the collector of toothpicks and paper cups? Who is this other Derek? Her mouth is open against the crack, ready to call his name – but then she closes it again. She’s shy.

  Another creak and snap from inside the wall. On the other side of the wall, someone farts – she hears it distinctly – and someone else moans: a woman’s voice, she thinks. Plaster dust floats down on her head from the ceiling, like the most delicate confetti.

  Is the whole thing going to come down on top of them? If she steps out of bed, will the building crack open like an egg? Should she go downstairs, crouch under the solid kitchen table? She can’t remember what you’re supposed to do in an earthquake. Should she call out to Derek’s gang, bring them inside? Or would outside be safer? But the sky through the window is glittery and exposed, full of sharp things.

  No word comes from the other side of the wall, but after a while she discerns breathing: a clogged, open-mouthed snuffling. At length it modulates into a doggy snore. She puts out her bedside light. The crack in the wall persists, a seam of charcoal a shade paler than the wall. Dawn must be on the way. She lies there, separated from Derek and his companions by only the width and height of a fractured wall. How many are sleeping there? How many breaths? She tries to count the snores. Is her own breathing audible in the night?

  It’s an old house, solidly built, that has stood for nearly a century, despite the shifting foundations. She cannot imagine any real danger, the walls actually falling on top of her. She lies on her back, staring at the ceiling. Now she’s seeing the walls hingeing open smoothly, like a Tiffany egg or the housing of a giant telescope, leaving her high and dry beneath the stars. Like pictures of houses after airstrikes or earthquakes, beds suspended, undisturbed, with walls and ceilings gone. Her bed tips lightly this way and that, a boat rocked on a midnight sea. And in the corner, in accompaniment to her dreams, there starts up a rhythmic, full-throated clucking. Her little frog, singing out in the dark, a long way from its marshy home.

  In the morning, Katya comes downstairs and sweeps the floor and puts away the bruised fruit, and looks around at what Toby and Tasneem have achieved. She sees what has always been concealed under the grime and clutter, surfaces she’s never actually touched before. Someone has arranged fronds of fern in a glass bottle on the kitchen counter, as well as clear glass jars of foodstuffs: rice, some kind of yellowish flour, nuts. It looks good. Clean. Fresh. Even spacious.

  She can’t find anything. Objects have been packed away and organised by some alien intelligence, Tasneem’s no doubt, according to unfamiliar schemes and categories. She sees the scissors hanging
by a new piece of string from a hook on the side of the cupboard. Fridge magnets lined up in a row. Old newspapers folded up and slotted under the sink. It all makes perfect sense.

  Clearly, someone has barked a command to clean up and shape up, and every small object in the house has shaken off the dust and hopped to obey: the magazines lined up in a crisp-edged pile, the wine glasses standing to attention. Tasneem! So young, and already a powerful drill-sergeant of the material world.

  It’s strangely exhilarating, being in this transformed space; but Katya doesn’t really know who this house belongs to now. Like she’s house-sitting for a different version of herself, from some other universe.

  Breakfast, that’s what’s needed.

  The cereal bowls she eventually locates stacked in the bottom drawer of the dresser, but she can’t see the spoons. At last she locates filter paper, coffee, milk and the rest. She starts the day with a huge mug of really strong coffee, thank you very much, and contemplates how much of the slightly heightened strangeness of her last few days might be attributable to a lack of caffeine.

  When she finishes eating, she finds herself washing the cup and bowl and putting them back where she found them. She shifts the skew chairs so they stand straight at the table. She takes her bag, some clothes, the frog in a box. Locking the house behind her, it is as if she’s leaving a hotel room, some place she might never see again.

  It’s a measure of their relationship that the route does not come automatically to her: she doesn’t often go to her sister’s home in Claremont. The houses in Alma’s road are modern, single-storey with generous front and back gardens, all beautifully maintained. There is not one shameful facade in the row. Alma’s is particularly trim, the wall newly painted.

  It seems strange, sometimes, that a child as generally slapdash as Toby could have emerged from this orderly nursery. She knows this troubles Alma too. Alma keeps an eye on their slippery lineage as expressed in her son: always remarking on the shape of an ear, a hand, trying to trace the bits and pieces of Dad, of Katya, of Mom that may have slithered into the mix. She has never revealed who Toby’s father is – part, Katya thinks, of her desire to quarantine Toby, to keep parts of him for herself alone. Her new babies, the twins she’s had with her plump husband Kevin, have broad, vividly coloured faces and chestnut hair and, like Toby, look nothing like Grubbses.

  It’s quite hard to get into Alma’s house, and not because of broken garage doors. The barriers here are rather more deliberate: high wall, electric fence, no bell – it’s been removed so that beggars don’t disturb the family. She rattles her keys against the security gate. No result. “Alma!” She hooks her fingers over the top of the wall and hauls herself up, toes scrabbling at the joins between the Vibracrete panels.

  “I’m here,” Alma says, rising suddenly, garden trowel in hand. Their faces are a foot apart. “That wall’s just been painted, you know. You’re scuffing it.”

  “Well then let me in, why don’t you?”

  But Alma makes her climb. Childish, on both their accounts. She holds her hand up, as if to help Katya, but doesn’t touch her as she scrambles over the wall. It’s high, but Katya’s strong in her upper body. She jumps down and her feet land in dug-up flowerbed soil.

  It’s always like this, her and Alma. Both of them, alert to a battle undeclared. Alma lowers her weapon and digs it into the soil.

  Behind her, the garden lies defeated. Every plant knows its place. It is not so much a growing garden as a mosaic, a pattern of concrete inlaid with panels of lawn, outlined with narrow borders of small-petalled, undemonstrative flowers where required. Alma is very proud of it, but Katya has never seen such a collection of dispirited, beaten-down plants. And lawn, lawn, lawn: not big and ostentatious like the Brands’, but squared off into diamonds and parallelograms. At the centre of four converging paths, there’s a concrete birdbath. No algae in it, and certainly no birds.

  It’s been a while since Katya’s been here. With sidelong glances, she inspects her sister. Alma dislikes being looked at, and always knows when someone’s doing it.

  Still so thin. Katya’s not a large person but her sister always makes her feel puffy, inflated, pressing at her clothes. Alma’s wearing white, all white, and her pale hair hangs in a tight plait down her back.

  Who gardens in white? Katya recognises it, though, as a uniform of a kind.

  “You’ve come to apologise,” Alma says.

  Katya looks away. “Is he here?”

  “He was very upset yesterday.” Alma quirks an eyebrow in the direction of the half-open front door. “They’re through in the back.”

  Katya follows her sister’s neat rear through into the house and down the passageway. Somehow, Alma managed to find a house as symmetrical as herself. A long corridor into the back, doors to left and right. At the end is a kitchen set at right angles, with the back door centrally placed between two big windows.

  Everything gleams. The window glass is perfectly clean, the blinds pulled down exactly one-fifth of the way over the glass. Outside, more lawn, and another Vibracrete wall, its rectangular slats as regular as the empty cells of a spreadsheet.

  “Hi, Annabel,” Katya says to the nanny, who is doing the washing up.

  “Hello my darling,” she smiles. Annabel is a woman about her own age. Katya’s not often in this house, but when she is she always chats to Annabel. They smirk at each other about Alma’s little ways, behind her back of course. Sometimes Katya fantasises about stealing her from Alma and setting her up as her secretary, but the sad truth is that she could not afford to pay the woman as much as she’s getting right now for changing nappies.

  It’s dim in the kitchen, but the world outside the kitchen window is aflame with frank and innocent light. There they are, her nephews and niece: Toby sitting on the grass with his legs in a sandpit and the twins playing around his feet. A sandpit! Katya can’t remember the last time she saw one of those. It seems strangely outdated, like caravans and Porta-Pools. She remembers one from her distant past, in a nursery school somewhere. Nobody played in it because it had dog turds in it. But there are no dogs or cats to spoil the silky consistency of this sand.

  “You upset him,” says Alma again. She talks very freely in front of Annabel, as if the woman is not really there.

  “He upset me.”

  “Oh for god’s sake, Katya. The kids did what they thought was a nice thing for you. Toby’s fixed three million things in your house and you’ve never complained. But now he tidies up for you and you, you freak out.” Alma folds her arms across her narrow chest. “And don’t raise your eyebrows at me like that.”

  “Let’s not fight, Alma. I can’t stand fighting with you and Toby, all at the same time. And I did actually come here to apologise, by the way.”

  “That’d be a first. How about apologising to him for everything else, while you’re at it? All this work you make him do—”

  “Hey, you’re the one sending him round all the time.”

  “Not that work. Your work. He’s covered in bites, my god!” Her dry voice cracks, is for a moment a girl’s voice, high, almost singing with distress. “And I think about Mom …”

  “Alma.”

  “This life. It did her in.”

  Katya’s heart lurches into the cold pause that follows. She repeats, miserably, “Alma.”

  “No, no … I’m not getting upset, I won’t get upset. No.” She breathes, a deliberate in and out, and when she speaks again her voice is colourless. “Do this for me, Katya. Look at your hands.”

  Despite herself, she looks down. Her hands are nicked and scuffed. Scabbed and bitten.

  “That’s what you’ve given yourself with this life. Think about that.”

  And she knows what Alma means. They’re Dad’s hands that she’s looking at. And she is silenced: it is another unanswerable thing.

  “Let’s go out,” Alma says. “They’ve made salad.”

  Katya dawdles a second in the back doorway, watchi
ng the twins play. They’re lavishly provisioned with educational toys, and the sandpit is filled with plastic earthmovers and trucks in red, yellow and blue. The toddlers are mashing them eagerly into the ground, but the sand is not ideal for excavation: try though they might, the diggers make no impression. The dry sand keeps running back and filling in the pits, covering the plastic vehicles and the plump hands holding them. There must be all sorts of things lost in that sandpit, lost forever. Katya wonders how deep it goes. Toby’s bare feet are completely buried in it, up to the ankles. Every now and then he reaches out a long arm and hooks back an errant crawler. Tasneem drifts behind the group, holding a glass bowl in her hands.

  Alma scoops up the boy twin and cradles him. Katya cannot help but be filled with pride and admiration for her sister, despite everything. She is so neat. So clean, so precise. Her clear features, her tightly bound hair, her symmetry. Is this illusion? Are some people’s features genuinely more balanced than others? But there is no other way to describe it. Alma is notably bilaterally symmetrical, like a pale but exquisitely patterned moth.

  Which is curious, of course, because she is not. Symmetrical, that is.

  Her sister always wears the same kind of clothes. It’s one of the things they have in common: they don’t wear dresses much. Alma doesn’t like them because they often lack pockets, and she wants to be able to hide her hand. There are many people, casual acquaintances or even friends, who do not know this thing about Alma: the two fingers on her right hand that are bent into a claw. She broke them badly, a long time ago, and the bones never set right. She waited too long before seeing a doctor. Or perhaps she never did see one – Katya’s never heard the whole story. It is a testament to Alma’s grace and self-control that she’s able to conceal her injury so well. You might know her for years and never see it. She used to be right-handed, but now she holds her pens in the left.

  Katya looks at Alma walking through her garden, child on hip, and she sees her sister’s subtle loss of balance: invisible, surely, to anyone but her.