Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  Jonathan’s voice raw with anger and despair. ‘Why? Why do this to yourself? This is a cop-out, Justine. A cop-out!’ His face crumpled with alarm, his fingers clutching the edge of her hospital bed. His eyes shocked as he stared at her bandaged wrists. Her big brother who was always trying to save her from herself.

  She closed her eyes. Pushing her sleeve cuff up her arm, she placed her one hand over the other wrist, feeling the thick loathsome ridge of scar tissue underneath her fingers.

  Where was home?

  Home was where Jonathan was.

  But Jonathan was dead.

  And her head drooped and her throat muscles ached. But her eyes were dry and she could find within her no tears to spread their balm.

  TWO

  THE STRANDWOLF had spotted him. The animal stood motionless, its head hung low, its gleaming eyes staring at him unblinkingly. Then, with an indifferent toss of the head, it turned away from the human interloper and continued on its way once more, small puffs of desert dust blowing up from underneath its paws.

  The man breathed deeply and pulled his hat lower over his eyes. He had followed the animal for three hours, watching as it nosed its way along the water’s edge and among the sharp-fanged rocks, but without finding even a dead seagull to scavenge. It was clearly fatigued. By this time the wolf would have been foraging for hours, maybe even days. The animal’s territory was fully two hundred square kilometres wide: a vast area, but offering little.

  After its futile search for food on the beach, the strandwolf had finally turned inland again, and it had become increasingly difficult for the man to keep up. Not that the animal was moving swiftly; it was shuffling doggedly through the thick desert sand, its paws dragging slightly: tip-e-tap, tip-e-tap. But, weary as the animal was, it was still uniquely adapted to its environment, able to cover enormous distances in one day—mile upon empty mile—while he, in his thick shoes, his thigh muscles aching, strained to mount the steep curve of the dunes.

  It was so quiet. He couldn’t hear the sound of the ocean any longer. Sweat dripped into his eyes and blurred his vision. It was like looking through a sheet of boiling glass that had been warped and twisted by the terrific heat. Tip-e-tap. Tip-e-tap. The thick mane of hair at the strandwolf’s neck was matted. Its jaw hung slightly open. He couldn’t believe how thin the animal had become in the three weeks since he last saw it. The sides of its stomach seemed unbearably lean and attenuated.

  Tip-e-tap. Tip-e-tap. A soft, rhythmic noise. A poem made of sand and sound.

  At the top of the dune, the man stopped to catch his breath. He placed his hand above his eyes and looked ahead into the distance.

  An endless sea of wrinkled sand met his gaze. Ahead of him stretched an unbroken chain of S-shaped ripples, ranging in colour from palest peach to richest red. The Namib: oldest desert in the world—with the tallest dunes—tons of sand whipped into soaring crests up to three hundred metres in height. ‘The land God made in anger,’ the San people called this vast and desolate wilderness. But he had always thought that only a god in pain could have imagined a place like this.

  He started to walk again. The strandwolf had now lengthened the distance between them but he was not concerned. He had been this way before and he knew where the animal was heading. He was heading for home.

  And there it was, the cluster of sunburned rocks giving access to a warren of narrow passages and deep caves. It was while he was exploring these caves that he had first stumbled upon the home of this animal and its family. And he had been fascinated ever since. He had turned into a voyeur, constantly keeping on the animal’s spoor, staying close, taking note.

  Some of the natives called these animals windwalkers, while others referred to them as strandwolves. But in fact this was not a wolf but a brown hyena. The sloping back, the powerful shoulders and massive jaw were unmistakable, although it was true that its long thick hair gave the animal a distinctly wolf-like appearance and made it seem completely different from its cousins who lived in the bush thousands of miles to the north-east.

  As the man watched the animal approach the entrance to the cave, there was a movement close to the rocks and the next moment the strandwolf’s mate had stepped out of the shadows and into the sun. At her side were three furry cubs who barked at the sight of their father.

  The man smiled. After weeks of observation he had finally given in to temptation and had christened each member of the small family. It was an act of sentimentality of which he would not have thought himself capable. The male hyena he called Dante. The bitch was Beatrice. Two of the cubs he named Virgil and Antonia. The remaining cub was the runt of the litter. Much smaller than his brother and sister, his coordination poorer, and his one paw malformed, a name from the Divina Commedia would be too much of a burden. So he had christened it Pint-size.

  Normally brown hyenas live in communes consisting of several family members who form a well-structured support network, with every member contributing food to the communal den and sharing responsibility for the care of the young. But this family lived in a territory so harsh, so sterile, that the environment could not support a proper clan. And therefore this family was on its own and in peril. Eking out an existence in the purgatory of the desert, they had no fallback position and the slightest misfortune could upset the precarious balance between survival and sudden death. It surprised him how anxious he sometimes felt when he thought of the odds that were stacked up against the animals. He had become genuinely attached to them; in a way they had become his surrogate family.

  The young ones were sniffing at their father but today, as was so often the case, he had no food to offer them. The bitch lay down and the cubs fell to her side with short greedy barks as they tugged at her teats and started to suckle. Pint-size was slow on the uptake. As he tried to muscle his way in between the bodies of his brother and sister, there was a scuffle, a flash of teeth, a sharp squeal like a child in pain. Virgil had butted his sibling hard with the head, nipping him ferociously in the ear. The man grimaced at this display of aggression. Love, animosity, competitiveness—a complex brother-to-brother rivalry as old as time—instinctive and inevitable.

  He sank to his knees and used both hands to burrow through the hot top layer of sand until he found the deeper, cooler sand below. Lowering himself onto his stomach, he brought his binoculars to his eyes and settled down to watch.

  THREE

  THE DAYS WERE slipping by without Justine really being aware of their passage. She went to bed early and her sleep was dreamless, and in the mornings she would wake up late, the sun high in the sky. Out there, beyond the avenue of trees, the expansive gardens and the sandstone wall, was a world busy and bustling, but she had no thought of it. The house held her and its quiet spaces made her lose track of time. She did not explore. Most of the rooms still stood silent, their doors closed, exactly the way she had found them on the evening of her arrival. She had not even wandered through the gardens yet. She was content to sit on the steps, hour after hour, her mind calm. Her cameras stood untouched, the books she had brought with her remained unread. Sometimes, with a start, she would look at her watch, become aware of the mug of coffee at her elbow that had long since cooled, and she’d vow that tomorrow would be the day she would shake off her indolence and start afresh. But the next day would find her on the steps once again.

  Until today.

  To begin with, for the first time since her arrival, her sleep was troubled. Her dreams gripped her and she could not break free. She was smothering. There was no air for her to breathe. The smoke was black, attacking the lining of her lungs, and she gasped with the pain. She was pushing herself along on her stomach, moving in the direction of the door. The door seemed oversized, the knob much too high for her to reach. Her eyeballs burned inside her head and she was coughing. The doorknob was hot when she touched it and she drew back in alarm. Outside was the whooshing sound of flames. And the next moment she could hear Jonathan scream, scream, scream from deep within the ho
use; a scream of such terrible despair that it numbed her heart and she knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

  She jerked awake. She was lying on her back, her arms rigid. The bedclothes were twisted tight around her legs. Sun was pouring in through the window and she could see a blue sky. It was a beautiful morning.

  Her body was starting to relax, her breathing beginning to even out, but the next moment her body jerked again as the phone suddenly rang shrilly from beside her bed.

  The noise seemed completely alien in that quiet house. For a moment she simply stared at the phone on her bedside table as though she did not know how to cope with its sudden intrusion into her life. But then she lifted the receiver and brought it slowly to her ear.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Justine? Is that you?’

  Her mother. And as was usually the case when her mother addressed her screwed-up daughter, her voice was simultaneously sharp, accusing and anxious.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘Well.’ She could hear her mother breathing deeply. ‘You might have called. I saw Mrs Cavendish this morning and when she asked me if everything was all right at the house, I had to admit that you haven’t even been in touch with me yet. I felt like a fool.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I called your mobile number but it seems to be out of service.’

  ‘I gave up my phone.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  Justine shrugged, forgetting for the moment her mother couldn’t see the gesture.

  ‘And you left so quickly, you forgot your mail. I told you to take it with you. Now you’re back from Greece, you can’t expect me to serve as your postbox, you know.’

  ‘Just bin it. It’s probably junk.’

  Her mother sounded shocked. ‘I can’t do that. You haven’t looked at your post for the entire three months you were away. There could be something important in there.’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘And I understand you don’t have an email address any longer.’

  ‘I don’t need one.’ She disliked email, anyway. Some of her photo assignments took her to places where email was hardly an option. People did not understand and became irritable when you did not respond immediately. But she’d better placate her mother otherwise she would never hear the end of this.

  ‘Just put the mail aside, OK. I’ll pick it up next time I see you.’

  ‘So is it what you expected? What’s the house like?’

  ‘Big.’

  There was an awful quiet at the end of the line. When her mother spoke again, her voice was carefully controlled. ‘What about food? Are there good shops nearby?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Are you sure this is the right thing for you? I’m not at all convinced that you should be alone right now. Since Jonathan’s—’

  She tensed. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I merely want to say—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  Her mother’s voice was suddenly bitter, the words edged with pain. ‘What makes you think you’re the only one who is suffering, Justine? Has it ever occurred to you that I need to talk about my son? That I miss him? That I need to share my grief with someone?’

  Justine lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ Sorry. Sorry. So sorry for everything she’d done. And her mother didn’t even know the half of it.

  ‘Barry was here again last night. He knows you’re back. What should I tell him?’

  ‘I’ll call him.’

  ‘You should. He’s a good man, Justine.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her mother’s voice sounded suddenly old. ‘I’m sure you do.’

  • • •

  IT WAS TIME to face the house. Still dressed in her pyjamas, she walked down the long passageway, flinging open the closed doors one by one.

  The rooms on the top floor were empty, or as near to empty as made no difference. It was as though the owner of the house had found himself with only a limited number of decorative objects and pieces of furniture at his disposal and had been forced to portion them out among the numerous rooms. So he left a rug in this one. Curtains in the next. A tufted slipper chair here, a vase with a pattern of Oriental blossoms there. But despite the emptiness, the atmosphere in the rooms felt oddly charged. It was as though the bones of the house—the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the very joists and beams—had become saturated with the emotions that had existed in these previously inhabited spaces. As though the house had trapped within it forever the laughter and the tears, the whispered words and silent dreams of its past occupants.

  And there was one common denominator that linked all of these rooms. Every single room she entered had a mirror against one of the walls. Oval mirrors. Painted mirrors. Mirrors flanked by angels. Mirrors with their faces silvered by time. Large, overmantel-sized mirrors. Mirrors so small you could hardly see your face in them. Someone had liked mirrors. The mirrors doubled and redoubled the space they reflected, making the empty rooms seem even larger and barer. The effect was strange, deeply disconcerting. But it also had the effect of making her feel excited.

  She almost ran downstairs. Opening the box she had brought with her, she took out a Leica. She returned to the top floor and walked through the sunlit rooms once more, keeping the camera to her eye, relishing the light and the formal precision of these near-empty spaces. She clicked the shutter indiscriminately. These would only be test shots—at this stage she was merely exploring the territory. When the time came to get down to serious work, she would switch to her Hasselblad or Linhoff with their bellows and lens movements compensating for converging parallels. But right now, the Leica would do her fine. She was shooting without intellectualising and, for the first time in almost a year, she was actually enjoying the feel of a camera in her hands again. Maybe her creative dry spell was finally coming to an end.

  Her work had always straddled two categories: photojournalism and architectural photography. She was drawn to extreme situations—war, death, social upheaval—and in Africa, the Middle East and Chechnya had captured moments of despair. But after such a tour of duty, she’d consciously embark on a decompression period, immersing herself in the cool clarity of architectural spaces. She sometimes used digital but she was known for her work with film, preferring black and white and the ability it gave her to play with texture and grain.

  But for the past year she had felt as though her inner eye had shut down. She had lost the ability to draw from within her. And she couldn’t even blame it on Jonathan’s death. The rot had started much earlier than that. She had lost her vision a long time ago: her sense of wonder.

  Not many people had noticed. Barry had, of course. As her editor and part-time lover, he knew her so well. But her technical expertise was such that she was able to fool her other editors and her colleagues. But she knew she was substituting style for substance. Her pictures had lost their heart.

  Even more worrying, she seemed to have lost her nerve. Whereas before she would actively seek out assignments that took her to the world’s trouble spots, she now avoided them. This was one of the reasons she had come to Paradine Park. She needed to pull back, dig deep within herself. Find her lost courage in a place where no one would pressure her.

  And now, as she walked in the morning sunlight from empty room to empty room, she was suddenly filled with purpose. She didn’t know where it came from, this fizzing excitement, and frankly she didn’t care. She was simply grateful. She brought the camera to her eye, saying a silent prayer. And hallelujah. With an almost audible click in her mind, the camera’s eye melded with her own.

  She took wide-angle shots, pulling back to allow the lens to embrace the spare formality of the rooms. She moved in close, training her lens on the curl of a strip of peeling wallpaper, on the star-shaped symmetry of a cracked pane of glass. She tracked the precision of the egg-and-dart cornicing, caught the sober sparkle of an antique mirror. And as she peered t
hrough the lens into the gleaming looking-glass in front of her, there she was—back to front but still the right way up. A reflection so real, it was easy to forget it was not quite perfect.

  She was focusing on the tarnished brass knob of a bedroom door when she noticed the initials carved in the doorpost. She lowered the camera and walked closer. A capital A, followed by what looked like a B. But the A was crossed out by two deep lines scored into the soft wood. Above and slightly to the right of the maimed A was the outline of the letter R.

  She ran her fingers over it. The letters had been carved with such force, the grain of the wood showed through the paint. The person who did this had been angry.

  She looked around her. The room she had entered was very much like all the other rooms except for the wide, free-standing wardrobe with delicate art nouveau patterning around the centre panel. No doubt it was locked. She turned the handle and indeed the door stayed put, but as she ran her fingers over the top of the wardrobe, she felt the outline of a key.

  The door swung silently open on its hinges. A musty smell assailed her nostrils. This closet had not been opened in a long, long time. She had half-expected it to be empty, but instead it was filled with clothes: neatly folded vests and boxer shorts, a pile of laundered handkerchiefs, several pairs of socks. On the very top shelf were a number of labelled boxes stacked on top of each other. In the hanging compartment were shirts, a suit, a dark green corduroy jacket, and a pair of grey flannel trousers. A long row of shoes was arranged in a straight line.

  The sight of the clothes was disturbing, somehow, as though the owner of the clothes might enter the room at any minute, select a scarf or handkerchief from among the contents of the closet, slide his fingers into the driving gloves that rested like two limp hands next to a pair of silver-plated cufflinks. And he would look at her and wonder who this woman was and what she was doing here, snooping through his things.