Читать книгу Nineveh - Henrietta Rose-Innes - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe call comes a few mornings later, as she’s rubbing her hair dry after another bath and observing Derek through the upstairs window. He’s on the opposite pavement, his back to her, weaving something – a piece of tape or ribbon – through the holes in the fence. It’s absorbing, and the phone startles her.
The voice on the line is lush; she can almost smell the musk on the woman’s breath, hear the smack of her lipstick. Sales call, Katya thinks, or someone following up on an unpaid bill.
“Miss Grubbs?”
“Who is this?”
“Painless Pest Relocations?”
Katya adjusts her tone. “That’s us – how can we help?”
“Hold the line for Mr. Brand, please.”
Silence, filled with furtive clicking. Derek’s still busy down there. He must have been cold last night, she thinks. She could’ve gathered blankets, made food, offered coffee...but she’s never done that, in all her years here. Never taken anything to Derek and his friends, never given them more than an empty Coke bottle to return for deposit.
“Grubbs!”
She remembers his voice, although now it’s clear of the burr of drink. She looks down at herself – she’s in a towel – and takes a moment to mentally slip into her overalls and button them up.
“That’s what they call me.”
“Then that is what I shall call you too. I believe we met at our garden party – perhaps you recall? You were wearing a rather fetching green.” His voice is like marble, heavy but polished, evoking those giant stone spheres you see rotating in streams of water outside corporate headquarters. It would be reassuring, if not for its slightly mocking tone.
“White shirt,” she says. “Too much to drink.”
“And more before the day was out, I’m very much afraid.”
Derek has moved on. The ribbon he’s left behind makes a zigzag pattern in the wire, like those webs made by spiders on acid.
“So now,” Mr. Brand’s voice continues. “I have a problem, a persistent problem, and I would like to engage your services. If you’re available.”
“Depends,” she says. “What sort of job are we talking?”
“What sort of job? Caterpillar wrangling, of course – what else?”
After the call, she sits quietly for a few minutes, considering. Down below, a schoolgirl – white shirt, gray trousers, Mary Janes–strolls past Derek’s handiwork without a glance. She might be from the family that moved in recently down the road. Passing by, the girl casually pinches the end of the ribbon between her fingers, and as she walks on the zigzag unravels, lashing up and down through the wire, until the fence is empty again and the ribbon trails behind her like a tail.
A feather drops onto Katya’s shoulder as wings clap across the space above her, and she looks up to see duct pipes, a blackened walkway. She takes it as a good omen: the beasts are here. City pigeons, in their proper place.
She’s always liked parking garages, their in-between feel. No matter how glossy the shopping precincts that lie above or below, the parking garage is always a brute dungeon of raw concrete. Not a wild space, but not civilized, either. The dark corners and crevices make her urban-pest sensors prick up. Here you get your rats, sometimes your pigeons. Not a terribly varied fauna, but a resilient one, dark-adapted.
This parking garage is nothing special, the usual stained concrete and unfinished pillars. The old PPR-mobile looks dusty and out of place between the Beemers and Mercs. She lets her fingertips glide over the sleek flanks of the cars – metallic shells so like the carapaces of giant beetles – as she moves between them to the stairwell.
A short flight of stairs, and then a swing door and an abrupt change of atmosphere. There’s a well-lit, carpeted lobby and a lobby-man in a cinnamon uniform; he takes her name and her picture with a webcam like a tiny Death Star. Then she has to press her thumb to a glass screen that glows with a bluish light. They say not a word to each other. He points silently to a space behind her right shoulder, in a banishing-from-Eden gesture, and she turns to see a large notice board of names and floor numbers.
Brand Properties, it says on the board: fifteenth floor.
“Thank you,” she murmurs.
On floor two she’s joined in the lift by a good-looking young man with satiny skin and a sharp black suit; on floor four, a bony woman carrying a tray of samosas. Nobody speaks, and none of them meet each other’s eyes, although she attempts a brief flirtational skirmish in the polished metal of the lift wall with the young man. She tries to snag his eyes, but he’s too good: she can’t get an angle on him. He’s staring off into a corner, not looking at anyone – not even himself. It seems unnatural, but also a skill: who could look at nothing, surrounded by mirrors? He gets out on the eighth floor, samosa lady on the tenth. Katya ascends alone. She imagines herself a cosmonaut in her green flight suit, trapped in a space-capsule. If it goes any higher, it might hit zero gravity.
When the doors sigh open on floor fifteen, she steps out into another white corridor, teal carpet with a diamond pattern underfoot. Disk-shaped light fixtures of smoked glass like flying saucers are set into the ceiling. She pads down the corridor, the only sound the sub-audible buzz of some electrical system – air-con, lighting. There are no windows, and it’s impossible to say how far she is from real air and sunlight. This honeycomb bears little relation to the monolithic office block she circled earlier, looking for the parking entrance.
She counts the numbers on the doors. There are offices to the left and right, but no apparent occupants. Some show signs of recent activity, and a rapid exodus. Through doors ajar, she glimpses humorous postcards stuck to corkboards, a toppling pile of printouts on the floor, a chipped cup dumped in a sink in a tiny kitchenette. It’s like the Marie Celeste. Can business really be that bad?
At the end of the corridor, where it turns a corner, there is at last a window, looking down onto the roofs of other city buildings. The foreshore: land stolen from the sea. The rooftops have been put to various uses. She sees gardens and stacked plastic chairs and heaps of scrap metal and even, on one, a gazebo and what seems to be a water feature. She can make out the fat torpedoes of koi fish circulating down there, the size of grains of rice but the shape unmistakeable. She has no idea all this had been going on above her commuter-level head. Most of the rooftops are grimy, though, not meant to be seen – like the top of the fridge in a short woman’s house.
Down the other end of the corridor, just before it takes another corner, a cleaning lady leans on her silent hoover and stares down through a similar window. Katya wonders how the city’s streets are marked for this woman, with what humiliations, curiosities and pleasures. The two of them, sole survivors of whatever mysterious plague has wiped out everyone else on the fifteenth floor, gaze down upon the grubby topside of the town.
The woman gives her a quick, flat glance and looks away, gunning the vacuum cleaner. It’s a reminder. She is not floating here; she is working. Katya is working too. She passes the woman in the corridor without troubling her with another glance.
As she comes round the next corner, she sights life: not Mr. Brand, but another solidly potent figure, dark against the brightness of the corridor. It comes towards her with hand outstretched and a gleaming smile.
The woman is glossy and round and fragrant as a sugar plum, with toffee-apple lipstick, a deep but elevated cleavage and apparently knee-less legs that taper smoothly from nyloned thigh to stilettoed heel. Her globular haircut shines like black silk and is, Katya assumes, a quality weave.
She has no trouble recognizing the woman immediately: this is the owner of the satiny telephone voice. Seldom does a voice and its physical person correspond so closely. She has extravagantly bow-shaped lips, perfectly filled in, that part to reveal moist white teeth. There is nothing dry or cold or rough about this lady. She is all arcs and curves, sketched with a calligraphy pen and filled in with rich color. She proffers a hand and Katya feels the tips of enamelled nails touch her palm.
“Miss Grubbs? I’m Zintle.”
Katya is at once a kid with skinned knees and frogs in her pockets. Puppy-dog tails. She shouldn’t have worn the uniform; its powers are limited, in certain settings and with certain people. Zintle is tall, too. Being close to the ground has its advantages in Katya’s line of work (nippiness, ability to creep into small spaces), but now she feels cowed before this substantial woman. She misses Toby’s presence, pliant and wispy though it may be, by her side.
“Miss Grubbs,” Zintle says, finding resonant depths in the name that Katya had not known existed. “We’re so glad you came. Mr. Brand has been so enthusiastic about your work.”
Her eyes, in finely wrought settings of copper eye shadow, dart around Katya’s face, seeking data. She clasps Katya’s upper arm and walks her towards an office door, a gentle but insistent escort.
“I understand that you’ve worked for Mr. Brand before?”
“Yes.” She wants to say more – make something up, even. The woman seems so attentive.
But Zintle hustles them on briskly. “Lovely,” she says, swiveling on one heel, batting open the door and easing them through. It’s choreography.
Inside, it’s all light and sky. The far wall is glass. Beyond, Katya can see the steep side of Signal Hill, the mosques and the forehead of the mountain. The sky is flawless, but tinted that sad, gunmetal gray of double-glazing.
“Have a seat,” says Zintle, deftly installing Katya at one end of a leather couch. She sits too, flinging one silky leg over the other. “Well then, you know the outline of the project?”
“Well, no, actually. I don’t know much, is Mr. Brand not—”
“He’s in Singapore. Apparently.” Zintle leans back and rakes a hand through her hair, which rebounds perfectly into shape.
The leather of the couch is taut and slippery, and Katya feels her overalled buttocks sliding off the edge. Crossing one’s legs at the knee, she discovers, is not only ladylike but helps to lock one in position.
“You do...do extermination, right?” Zintle narrows her eyes and gives a teasing smile.
Katya appreciates this lady’s style. She has a skittish, theatrical way of speaking, as if they’re performing a slightly suggestive play. Katya is fluffing her lines, but that seems to be part of the fun. Zintle hasn’t winked at her yet but there’s a bit of a flick of butterfly eyelid in every syllable.
Still, Katya’s responses remain clipped. How else do you converse with such a person, but play stone to their paper, rock to their silver scissor-blades?
“Right,” she says. “Well, relocation, really.”
“Precisely. So.” Zintle leans forward confidentially. “We have a residential project which has been experiencing some problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Various. Not very nice ones, to be honest.”
“Cockroaches, rats, mites?”
“Well...let’s just say it’s a comprehensive pest situation.” She’s up on her feet again – when she moves she’s fast – and holding out a hand. “Here we are.”
There’s something laid out along one wall on a table, under spot lighting. It’s an architect’s model, showing several buildings and their surroundings. Everything is white, the only markings the patterns of edge and shadow.
The scale is hard to make out at first. Katya sees a complex of four or five flat-topped, tiered buildings – ziggurat-like – arranged at angles around a central plaza. Elaborate walkways and arches and courtyards connect them, and tangles of what she supposes are ornamental plants drape over the edges of the stepped roofs. They look like tufts of white hair pulled off a hairbrush. A fountain, ringed by tiny benches, marks the center point of the plaza. A long driveway, decorated with a double row of miniature palm trees, strikes off to the edge of the model, and the whole is contained by walls.
“This is Nineveh.” Zintle’s dark fingers with their scarlet tips are vivid against the cardboard. A gorgeous giantess, reaching down from the clouds.
“Nineveh?”
Zintle shrugs. “It’s just a name,” she says. “Sort of a theme. One of the early investors was from the Middle East, I think.”
Katya allows herself a moment to enjoy the calm of the miniature scene. There are model people down there, also colorless, frozen in attitudes of purposeful enjoyment: striding along a boardwalk, sitting at an outdoor table. A couple lean on a balcony railing. What they’re staring at, though, has not been included in the model. The ground breaks off just beyond the boundary wall, as if some other-dimensional cataclysm has swallowed up a chunk of reality. The architect’s manikins stare into the void – through the actual window, onto the vista of the real city beyond: full-color, blurred, gigantic. They look on the abyss with no discernible expression.
“It looks big,” says Katya. She’s never worked an entire estate before.
Zintle taps a nail on the roof of one unit. A smaller building on the border of the model, right up against the wall. “You’d have access to these, uh, servants’ quarters. Or shall we say, the caretaker’s lodge. It’s two units, for the maintenance staff. The other buildings are shut up.”
“Never used?”
“Not yet.” Zintle clicks her tongue, suddenly exasperated. “Such a shame. Beautiful accessories, all furnished and ready to go. Show flats! It was built over a year ago, you know? Was supposed to be filled with residents by now. Top residents. But there was a string of disasters. All the copper wire was stolen, for one. Half the reclaimed area collapsed into the bloody swamp. Excuse my language. This disaster, that disaster. The landscape gardening didn’t work out, everything got eaten by goggas. Had to redo all the interiors. It was a plague! We thought they were gone, the previous guy assured us... well.” She splays her palms in a let’s-not-go-there gesture. “Now the security staff tell us that they’re back. We can’t move anyone in until it’s sorted. Losing pots of money. You understand?”
“Goggas?”
“They bite. Like I say, we got a guy in to sort them out, but between you and me, he was useless. Made things worse, actually. Creepy old guy.” She crinkles her nose in remembered disgust, as if at a bad smell. “We had to get rid of him.”
“Yes, well. Some of these older companies, they’re very outdated. I have a different approach.”
“I would hope so.”
“You can’t be more specific about these...goggas? You’ve seen them?”
She holds her palm towards Katya and wiggles her fingernails, evoking scurrying legs. “Yugh.”
“Centipedes?”
“No, no. Here, sort of...” Zintle grabs a pen and pad from the desk and scrawls a few assured lines. A cartoon bug. A button body with spindly legs sticking out in all directions – three on one side and four on the other, Katya notes – and a bundle of antennae like cat’s whiskers. She’s surprised Zintle hasn’t included a pair of googly eyes.
“A beetle? Does it fly? Does it swarm?”
“Swarms. Eats the curtains, poos on the rugs. Nightmare.”
“I see.”
Zintle is suddenly brisk. “Well. Time runs short. I should just give you this dossier ...” She hands over a glossy cardboard file. “Perhaps you’d like to peruse that, and get back to us with a quote? It’s a fairly urgent situation.”
“Right then. I’ll have to go out there of course, check it out.”
Zintle is standing now, smoothing her suit down, shaping her hair back into its slick curve with a palm of a hand, taking Katya’s arm and ushering her out. She’s good at this maneuver, very professional. Before she knows it, Katya’s back in the lift, doors closing behind her, on her way down to earth again.
Toby is waiting opposite her house, nose poked through the fence, the diamond wire pressing into his cheeks. He’s staring at the demolition site. It’s the first time he’s been here since the bulldozers came through.
“Fucking hell,” he says tightly. “How could they do that?” This place means something to him, too, Katya sees. She briefly feels their lives, hers and Toby’s, overlap, anchored to the same plot of land.
“Here today, gone tomorrow,” she says. “Nothing lasts forever, kiddo. What are you doing here?”
“Mom said. Your gutters.”
“Gutters? Oh, okay, I suppose.”
Alma is always doing this: worrying about Katya’s living arrangements. It was Alma who’d explained to her sister about vacuuming, for example, and about painting walls. Who persuaded her to put a damn door on the garage in the first place. When Toby was only ten or eleven, she started dropping him off at Katya’s place to sort out all the odd jobs that Katya had no idea needed doing. Now Toby comes alone, usually by minibus taxi along Main Road, with a screwdriver in his pocket and a dopey smile, eager to fiddle with a squeaky floorboard or mold on the bathroom ceiling. Katya suspects he’s not very good at this kind of DIY, or any more interested in it that she is herself; but he’s always willing to give it a shot.
It’s Len’s fault, that Katya doesn’t know about houses. After the loss of their mother, when the sisters were little, they never really had a house, or not for long. Len kept them moving, job to job and place to place. They’d pass through with a nomad’s contempt for the townsfolk. A dozen different schools. Many nights next to the spare tire in the back of the old bakkie, the pickup always stank of bird shit and pesticide and sometimes blood. They never did stand steady on the ground beneath their feet. But Katya always imagined that once you got to settle down, once you had that stack of bricks and mortar, it was solid. She hadn’t realized how restless bricks and mortar are: how much effort it takes to keep them from falling down, from wandering off or spilling out in the wrong direction. It’s disheartening to see that respectful inattention is not enough. That to keep things exactly as they are requires arduous maintenance, like a lawn needs cutting or a body needs feeding. Such ceaseless labor to shore up the world.
A rocking motion catches her eye. A girl has come to lie along the top of the neighbor’s garden wall, on her back with hands folded on her stomach. She’s wearing gray school trousers, one knee up and tossing to and fro. Eyes closed and dreaming, ears laced with the thin white cords of an iPod. Wire-fed, recharging. Fifteen, sixteen? So young, so weary. What could make such a new creature so tired?
She feels Toby’s stare as a physical pressure, leaning on her right shoulder.
The girl sits up abruptly from a deep sleep of music. She pulls out the earplugs and regards them down her nose, head lolled back on her shoulders. Then she swings to the pavement and stretches her arms behind her back, pushing out her chest like a dove sunning its wings. Pretty. Katya recognizes her now: it’s the girl from down the road, the one who unpicked Derek’s spider web.
She’s compact, with elastic-looking legs and calves: a body made for backflips and handstands. Coppery skin, short hair slicked back behind her ears, snub features and strong, clean cheekbones. Diamond nose-stud, to the left. Small mole on cheek, to the right. Dark eyes, more watchful than unfriendly. Maybe shy rather than sly; it’s hard to tell.
“Howzit,” says the girl. Not shy, then.
“Hi.” Katya turns her attention to the garage door. Let the young deal with the young.
“See what they’ve done over the road?” says the schoolgirl.
“Uh, yes. Kind of hard to miss.” Toby laughs and gives her his sweetest gape. Hopeless!
But the girl’s observing him in a not unfriendly way. “So, have you guys got cracks?”
“Crack?” says Toby.
“Cracks, cracks in your walls. From the vibrations. From the machines.”
Toby looks at her, worried. The girl quirks a shapely eyebrow. “Look.” She points at the wall she’s just been sitting on. Sure enough, there’s a diagonal crack down to the tar. Has it always been there?
“And look, look there, it goes all across the road. I’m telling you.” Now the girl is skipping out into the road – really skipping, like a small child – and pointing at the tar, which does indeed look ominously split open between her feet. She points out the length of the crack with a toe, hands in the air to balance. Her gray trousers ride up to show her ankles, thin relative to taut parabolic calves, in short white socks.
Is she younger than Katya had thought? Older? She has one of those strong faces where the bones set early and stay good for decades.
“You living around here?” asks Toby.
The girl ducks her head in a sideways nod. “Around. You?”
Oh, please.
Katya fiddles with the garage door a little longer before giving it up. It’s now genuinely impossible to open without the handle. The girl is watching with arms folded across her chest. Toby has turned to stand by her side, similarly cross-armed. Copycatting.
“Toby, do you need a ladder, or what?”
“No, it’s cool, I can get up by the garage roof. It’s easy.”
She notices the girl is spreading her legs wider across the crack in the tar, showing further, unanticipated lengths of calf. Toby’s smile is stretched to breaking across his face.
“Now?” she says, snappier than she intends.
“Just now.”
“You be careful.”
Inside, Katya tracks onto the carpet some kind of khaki sludge from the road. She fetches the broom and pan from the kitchen corner – where a new black crack snakes up the wall.
The old house is built on sandy foundations that have been subsiding for decades, and she’s used to the odd warp and split, the plaster running like a laddered stocking. Like the lines on her own face, she can’t quite remember when each crack in the house appeared or lengthened; but she knows their shapes, their long italic slants, their seismograms. This one, though, she’s never read before. Inky, sharp-edged, viciously jinking. It seems mischievous. Her first irrational thought is that the girl is somehow behind it, playing a joke.
Can it really have jagged all the way through the earth from the demolition site across the road? How deep does it go? Does it run through the whole house, bottom to top? She imagines it slicing through her walls, her foundations, through the earth deep beneath the road, straight and thin as a laser beam, cross-sectioning the cakey layers of earth, gravel, sand, tar. She shoves the broom back in the corner, although it can’t conceal the flaw.
When the phone rings, it’s so loud it seems it might split the cracks open wider still. She snatches it up before it can do more damage. “PPR.”
The pause on the other end is ironic. “It’s only me, Kat.”
She makes her hand relax, lowers her voice. “Sorry. Hi. Your son’s on my roof, if you’re looking for him.” This is usually the reason for Alma’s calls.
Katya associates her sister strongly with telephones. Certainly, these days, phone calls – or more usually, text messages – are their main mode of communication. But it goes back further.
When Alma was thirteen and Katya ten, Alma started to run away. Sometimes she was gone for days, sometimes weeks. And then forever: at seventeen, Alma left and didn’t come back. But Katya continued to hear from her. Alma would phone at odd hours, from call boxes, from unknown destinations, across immense distances. Sometimes there would be long gaps in their communication. This was before cellphones, and with Dad on the move, it wasn’t always easy for Alma and Katya to find each other. But they made a plan with Aunt Laura, a distant cousin of Len’s, who resided immovably in Pinelands. Every time she had a valid phone number, Katya would inform Laura, and receive Alma’s current number in exchange – all while resisting being pumped by her aunt for further tragic family gossip.
One way or another, every few months Katya would hear her sister’s dry whisper on the other end of a phone line, or sometimes a few moments of the kind of silence that was unmistakeably Alma’s: a silver crackling static. Katya started to lose the memory of what her sister looked like. She saw only a delicate figure, floating in a cloud, somewhere very high and very cold. An ice princess, barely real, weightlessly revolving around the still point of the phone receiver which connected them. Where are you, Katya would ask, where have you gone?
Oh Kat, Alma would sigh, her breath filtering though the rosette of holes in the receiver, ice crystals forming in her little sister’s ear. Each time Alma hung up, Katya was sure she had vanished entirely, like frost in the morning.
The next time she saw Alma, it was three years later and Toby had just arrived, a pale infant of mysterious provenance. By this stage, Alma had started to peroxide her hair. Was it to match her child’s? With her pale skin, it was indeed as if all that time Alma had indeed been out in some blanchingly cold world.
“Hey Al, it’s so strange,” Katya now finds herself saying. “I’m crossing Dad’s path. He’s working again.”
“How do you know?”
“Somebody’s hired me for a job. Apparently they used Dad before and thought I was the same company. He was there last year some time.”
“God. So the old boy’s still alive. When did you last see him?”
“Seven years ago. How about you?”
“Less than that. Three, maybe. I went to see him in that group home – you know that awful place he was in for a while, with the drunks? He borrowed some money.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised. I’ve done my bit for him over the years, you know.”
“Oh, I know.”
“More than my bit.” Alma’s voice is starting to rise.
Alma’s everyday voice is distant, always threatening to flicker out and disappear from tiredness or lack of interest. An unimpressed voice. She’s sounded that way since she was little. When she gets worked up, though, her voice slides up the register and she sounds like a child about to burst into tears: indignant, amazed to feel so much. Katya has never seen her sister weep – has only once seen her close to crying out from pain – and can’t bear to imagine it.
“Anyway, it’s creepy,” Katya says. “Being in his footsteps, as it were.”
“Huh. Serves you right, working in the same filthy business.”
“It’s not the same business.”
“Ja, ja, relocation not extermination, I heard about it. Just do me a favor, okay? Think about what happened to Mom. What this business did to her.”
Katya is silent. She cannot bring herself to ask the crude question: What did happen to Mom? Sylvie’s vanishing has always been too grotesque, too central to discuss as if it were just another episode in their lives. One day, when Katya was three, Sylvie went to the hospital and never came back. Katya knows this means she died, although that has never been spoken. It must have been an accident: something so maiming, so traumatizing, that their mother was plucked instantly from the presence of her children and could never be returned. There is no shortage of possibilities. Any given day with Len, especially a younger Len at the height of his chaotic powers, could have brought a hideous demise.
But it was impossible to ask her father about Sylvie, and some kind of pride prevents her from asking Alma now. Anyway, she’s always understood that Sylvie’s loss belongs primarily to Alma. When it comes to their mother, Katya has no authority. Alma has three years on her, three years more of Mom; always has had and always will. Katya possesses only shadows: memories of a figure moving through a kitchen, in yellowing light; a taste in the mouth. These spectres are not proof of anything, nor are they weapons to be used in argument.
And so Katya simply says, “I’ll tell Tobes to call.”
Alma clicks her tongue and puts the phone down. Katya is not sure what that means: if Alma has cut her short, or if it’s the other way around.
Above her, the tin squeals as Toby stomps across the roof, and she feels the noise in her teeth. She bites down on the scar tissue on her thumb, the place where she keeps slicing it open on the garage door. This is why she and Alma don’t talk much. Their conversations tend to twist back on themselves and bite, like snakes.
Her messed-up hands. Len’s. When they used to eat together in the old days, Katya would stare at his short fingers, attached to square, functional palms. When she looked down at the table, there they were again: those same hands, if smaller, less shopworn versions, clenched around her own knife and fork. She was always scared of developing Len’s bulbous knuckles, which he’d crack in their ears of his children to wake them in the mornings. Alma had the same hands – although Alma ate neatly, manipulating cutlery with neurotic precision. The tips of her index fingers pressed white against the steel as she dissected the food into smaller and smaller morsels. Katya ate loudly in response, chewing with her mouth open like her dad, showing Alma her teeth and her scorn.
In front of her on the kitchen table is Zintle’s “dossier”. She pulls it towards her, opens up the cardboard envelope. Inside is a sheaf of stapled paper – a brochure, phone numbers, maps, directions. Also a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. Katya spreads the papers out on the kitchen table. The newspaper article, dated June last year, is about a freak swarm of insects making their way through the southern peninsula. There’s not much information in the piece: some people’s gardens suffered, and a couple of motorists were disgusted by having to crunch their way through a tide of the things crossing a road. A small child suffered a bite on the cheek. A zoologist from UCT was interviewed, and he stressed that this was a natural occurrence, no cause for alarm: this particular beetle, “a species of metallic longhorn,” swarms every few years, at unpredictable intervals – in recent times perhaps more flagrantly than before. There was no danger, but laypersons should not attempt to collect the creatures, “although they are attractive specimens”.
A murky black-and-white photo shows a single nondescript beetle in the bottom of a laboratory beaker.
The brochure is much more appealing. The cover is an artist’s depiction of a gleaming ivory building, tiered, lapped at its base by an impressionistic greensward. The sky in the picture is rapturous blue, the clouds artistic dabs. Nineveh welcomes you, it says in embellished cursive. The address is not one she recognizes, a suburb name she doesn’t know. She’ll have to look it up.
She props the picture up against the kettle: a fragment of color in the corner of her stuffy kitchen. It breathes of some foreign place, not quite of the here or the now. She wants to shrink herself down to that size, lodge on one of those miniature balconies, bask in the beams of that small but potent sun; or, better still, duck down into one of those tiny, immaculate rooms and close the door behind her.
Time for a new notebook. She selects a fresh one from the pile in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It’s a fine, old-school piece of stationery, A5, hard black covers with a red fabric spine. The top and middle drawers of the cabinet are where she keeps the old ones, filled with her working notes. They get used up surprisingly quickly: she starts a new one every three or four months. She’s not really sure what she’s keeping them for. Perhaps one day she’ll write her memoirs: Life Among the Vermin.
Len never made a note in his life; his stories were all in his head. But Katya likes to do it. Making records is one way to keep things squared away.
She slides out the small pencil she uses for such things – so much more practical than pens for working in the field – and makes a neat heading:
NINEVEH
Katya negotiates a fee with Zintle for a reconnaissance trip to Nineveh. Mr. Brand, it seems, expects her to stay on the property in the “caretaker’s lodge.” Normally she wouldn’t agree to this, but given the scale of the project – and the generous fee promised – she decides to make an exception. A few days should be enough to assess what needs to be done.
The day before she’s due to go, she packs her bags. She has to stand on a chair to pull the suitcase off the top of the bedroom cupboard – it’s been ages since she’s gone anywhere, and the bulky old thing is buried under a mound of spare blankets and the pieces of a broken chair. The suitcase is one of the few things Len ever gave her – or rather, that he left behind.
Katya was twenty then. She’d been helping him out with the work full-time for three or four years, after she quit school. They were staying in a truly appalling hotel in Durban (cracked and leaking toilet bowl, dried matter – perhaps blood – on the walls). One morning he was gone, leaving her with the bill and a curious sense of gratitude: she would not have escaped in any other way. Later, their current employer came knocking, and she understood why he’d needed to disappear. Some expensive power tools had gone missing. Len had a habit – or perhaps a principle – of walking away from a job with more than he brought in.
But perhaps he’d just decided it was time to go. Katya suspected that Len was getting bored with her, now that she was grown. She was no longer so eager to please, but she didn’t make much effort to quarrel with him, either. She was starting to apprehend her own boredom, too, and to sense the fatigue of the years ahead, grinding along with Len in the driver’s seat. Len ever more whisky-soaked, their travels more haphazard and accident-plagued. At some point she’d started to be repelled by the stink of killing that clung to them both. She wanted to be clean. And she wanted to be still: to have one place that she belonged to, that belonged to her.
Along with the suitcase, Katya inherited a couple of nets and traps and the like, which she kept. And two pairs of Len’s underpants, which she did not. She wrinkles her nose at the pungent memory.
Zintle had made the same face when recalling Len Grubbs, the exterminator, and Katya sympathises. It is the family smell, Eau de Grubbs. It comes from living on the road, from working with animals and chemicals. Not a bad smell, necessarily. Does Katya smell the same? (And could Zintle sniff her out?) Probably. Although, of course, this is famously the thing that one cannot tell about oneself.
Alma has it too, despite her potpourri, her talcs and creams. On Alma the scent seems to translate into a kind of sexual signal. As soon as she hit puberty, boys took one sniff and started to follow her around. While never once losing her composure, Alma used this power to pull herself away from her family and out into the world. Hand over hand. Grasping at the bodies of boys and men, hanging on like a drowning girl, desperate to be dragged clear of the swamp. And it worked. Whoever the faceless boy was who fathered Toby, he made Alma’s return impossible. After that, she lost her enthusiasm for sleeping around: there was no need. And now that she’s married to solid Kevin, Alma can devote herself full-time to eradicating the troubling odors of her former life.
It’s something too intimate and shameful for them to talk about, but Katya knows her sister is still terribly self-conscious about the smell. As a child, Alma would scrub and scrub, any time they got close to a bathroom. These days, Alma has three bathrooms in the neat home where she lives with her husband, their young children – twins, a boy and a girl – and Toby. It’s a place where every object has been carefully chosen and positioned. In the bathrooms and the main bedroom are dozens of bottles of expensive scent, body spray, deodorant. But they say the body has a signature, molecular; that it doesn’t change. Under her perfume, Alma still has the family aroma.
Sylvie’s smell was different. It is one of the few definite pieces of information Katya has about her mother: her musky, talcy smell has persisted more strongly than any visual memory. Going through her father’s abandoned things that day when she was twenty, Katya found a loose photograph of an impossibly young, grinning Len with shoulder-length hair, arm slung around a voluptuous brunette. She recognized nothing about the woman – except a version of her own full bust, and something of Alma’s distance in the eyes – but she accepted on the evidence that this was Sylvie, her mother, fresh out from England and newly married. Immediately, Katya felt the need to turn the picture upside down and not look at it again.
During her twenties, Katya held on to very little. Her possessions were so few that they fitted inside Len’s: his suitcase and one of his old box traps – despringed, defanged – which she’d stuff with clothes and haul from house to house. Each time she moved, she threw out more of the heavy past. But the photo she has kept, all these years. Now it’s hidden right at the back of the filing cabinet. Every couple of years she fortifies herself with a whisky and sneaks another peek. Over time, the woman’s face speaks to her less and less. Young Len, on the other hand, seems to grow more vital with every year spent in the cabinet dark. She’s never shown Alma the picture. It is her own guilty piece of Sylvie, kept for herself alone.
The suitcase tumbles down from the top of the cupboard onto her head, bringing with it a chair leg, the body of a fish moth and the smell of her father’s things. He’s here now, coming towards her out of the dust; his body is darkness crawling with the floaters of her sun-dazzled eyes. He smells strongly of campfires, of mothballs, of bleach and tobacco. He catches something from behind her ear, holds it tight in his hand: a conjurer’s trick. He smiles and holds out his palm, and she sees it is crossed with gold, with something rich and glinting and alive: a dragonfly.
“Aitsa,” he’d exclaim: “Surprise!”
The trick was meant to make her and Alma laugh, or flinch. She never knew which. Sometimes he let the little creature go, and sometimes not. And sometimes there was nothing in his fist at all. Sometimes it was just a fist.
