Читать книгу Nineveh - Henrietta Rose-Innes - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIt’s strange, what disgusts people. Who would scorn the friendship of a gecko, for example: golden-eyed, translucent-skinned, toes splayed on a farmhouse wall? Who could resent a long-legged spider, knitting its silver in the corner of a room? But they do: people will pay to have them killed, poisoned, destroyed.
Katya does not destroy. This is her skill, her niche. So she will relocate a wasp nest, reroute a caterpillar invasion, clear a roof of nesting pigeons, wrangle housefuls of mangy cats. She does not turn up her nose at cockroach infestations, gatherings of mice, strange migrations of bees and porcupines. She’s even faced down baboons, although that’s unusually robust work. Generally, she prefers the smaller beasts. She encourages spiders and is friendly to pigeons, which others unkindly call rats of the air. Her philosophy is to respect any creature that gets by in the city, ducking and diving, snatching at morsels, day by day negotiating a new truce with the humans among whom they live. Survivors, squatters, and invaders. Tough buggers. They have their place.
Mostly, they do no real harm. They’re objectionable only because they’ve wandered from their proper zones, or because they trigger human shudders. But Katya does not shudder. Not ever. Slinging a snake round her neck like a scarf, the dry scales smooth as water on her latexed palms – no problem.
This is the job: helping these small sojourners in a strange land. Putting the wild back in the wild, keeping the tame tame. Policing borders. Sometimes, part of her wants to reverse the flow, mix it up. Take this box of caterpillars, for example, and tip it out in that Constantia palace they just left, even if it means chaos, screams and ruined dresses, soft bodies crushed into the lawn.
But that’s her dad’s voice. His angry humor.
Len Grubbs: a lifelong vermin man. An exterminator. He never bothered too much with keeping things straight or putting them back in their rightful places. Traps and poison, that was what he knew. He was often bitten – once by a puff adder. Even in that agony, he’d taken care to beat the snake to death. It was hand-to-hand combat, the way Len Grubbs did the job.
Katya’s work, by comparison, is a relatively gentle business, one concerned with rescue and cleansing; but it brings out this mischief in her, this hardness. Perhaps because of what she deals in, what her dad dealt in before her: the unloved. The unlovely.
In Newlands forest, they carry the boxes up through the pines and into a stretch of indigenous trees. Katya’s glad to have Toby with her on this lonely path. It can be nerve-wracking, going into the forest alone, although she likes to think that a woman with a box of repulsive caterpillars pressed to her chest is safe enough against most assaults.
They are in a part of the forest she doesn’t often visit, off the path. This is Toby’s idea. He’s spotted a tree here, apparently just the thing for caterpillars. She notes, with interest, something else about her nephew that she did not know before: this lurking about in forests.
He’s taken his shoes off in the car and his big feet pad confidently ahead of hers on the pine-needle bed. Seeing him move against the branches, some glowing pale in the darkening air, she thinks again that he is like a young tree. Despite his narrow frame, his lank hair, his liquid eyes, Toby is not a limp person. Indeed, he has a kind of springy resilience, like green wood. And there is the vegetable greenness of the veins beneath his skin, his slightly sappy body scent. I’m a vegan now, he told her recently. Perhaps that’s why he’s growing so fast: photosynthesis.
Over the years, Katya has seen him transform from stocky white-blond child into elongated teen. Not pretty; his face is too broad in the forehead and sharp at the chin, the nose over-long. But he does have those luminous eyes set deep behind long lashes, and the thinness of his lips is offset by their charm – the way he presses them together between smiles, restraining soft thoughts. Girls would surely go for that? His height would be in his favor, too, once he filled it out. Broad shoulders. Longshanks. Long fingers, right for guitar-string picking round fires. Tall like his father, no doubt, Katya thinks. Not like us. Toby’s hair is also evidence of his paternity: of the pale father Katya never met, but who seems to be revealing himself in stages through the body of his child, stretching Toby’s teenage limbs, flexing Toby’s long, unGrubbsish fingers.
The Grubbs look is small but well muscled, with short legs and disproportionately long arms. Monkey-folk. Snub, monkeyish faces, too. In her sister Alma it’s cute, with her long pale hair. Katya’s always worn her hair trimmed short, and it’s darker, like her dad’s. They carry themselves the same, straight-backed and quick. Katya’s ears, mysteriously small, must be from the other side; so too, perhaps, her large breasts. But in all other ways, their mother Sylvie’s influence, like her memory, is faint and fading. There are many more body parts in which Katya can discern, all too clearly, Len’s vigorous strain.
She wonders how age has changed her father. Bald, maybe. Last time she saw him, his hair was thinning. His face seemed less balanced, the features fiercer and more pronounced; the eyes and nose had come to dominate his small, rounded head. Len’s expression remained largely the same, however: imperturbable, scornfully amused. She sees that expression often, although she hasn’t seen her father for years now. It’s in her mirror, most mornings.
Toby comes to a halt in a small clearing under a twisted tree. Round the base of the trunk are some planks and smooth stones, arranged in a circle. Candle wax melted onto the stones.
“How did you find this place, anyway?”
Toby shrugs, an exaggerated movement with his newly broad shoulders. “I come here with friends sometimes,” he says.
“Huh,” she says. “Really.”
It is, clearly, a place one would come to smoke pot; she was a teenager too, once. Something else she had not known about Toby.
Katya touches a hard, furred seedpod. It’s a wild almond, the same species Jan van Riebeeck used for his famous hedge, meant to keep Khoisan cattle-raiders out of the old Dutch settlement. Could this even be one of the original trees?
Dad taught me all that, she thinks.
The branches creak and shudder. Toby’s high above her head, his broad feet gripping the trunk.
“Oy, get down here. No time for messing around.”
He drops to the ground next to her in a scatter of twigs.
Funny child. Cartoon boy. He’s always had these sudden energies and exhaustions, frisking one minute and dropping off the next, falling into a snooze on the spot. He lopes or lounges or mooches; he bops, he buzzes, he bounds. Katya pictures him getting out of bed on a good morning, leaping two-legged into his jeans. When he rests he is inert; awake he is effortlessly alert, bright and clear-eyed. There is no transitional state: Katya has never seen grit or sleep in his eyes.
He crouches next to the collection boxes and looks up at her, waiting.
“You do it, Tobes. You know how.”
She watches him unlatch the lid, lift out a caterpillar in his long fingers and place it on the bark of the tree. He’s developed a confidence in his work: the way he bends to stroke or scoop up some little hapless wayfarer. Some mangy cat or cockroach down on its luck. The family touch.
“How cool is this?” he whispers as the creatures resume their march.
Kneeling side by side, Katya and Toby watch the sinuous threading of the caterpillars’ bodies. The tree is well chosen; the beasts approve.
“All done,” he says, his voice softened and deepened by the dusk.
A vision from memory fits itself imperfectly over the scene. Surely it was here, or near to here, years ago, and at dusk...She’d been walking...No. That’s not right. She was a child, she was not by herself. It was the two of them. Her and Dad. She could smell his roll-up tobacco. They’d come out onto a path in the near-darkness, with the trees closing a tunnel above them. They were working.
Look. Dad was down on his haunches, intent, his whole body aimed at a spot on the ground. She crouched down next to him, carefully soundless. Proud of her soft feet, her silent approaches.
A black shape, twitching on the sand. At first she thought it was an insect of some sort, a dull butterfly moving its wings. But, leaning in, she saw it was mammalian: a shrew, the size of the top joint of her thumb, engrossed in some fervid action. So absorbed that it paid them no mind, even when she put her face close. Its pelt was slightly darker than the leaf litter, its paws delicate and fierce. She understood for the first time why shrews were emblems of ferocity, for this tiny creature was engaged in an act of carnage: it was gripping an earthworm that was trying to escape into a hole. The shrew was hauling the slimy pink-gray body out of the ground, hand over hand like a seaman with a fat rope, and simultaneously stuffing it into its jaws, wide open to accommodate the writhing tube. It was ridiculous, obscene, impressive.
They sat there for a long time, watching this miniature savagery, until all the light was gone. Her dad rose to his feet without using his hands. She admired his wiry strength, his woods-sense. She mimicked the movement, swaying a little to keep her balance. Another time, he might have brought the scene to a close with a shout or, worse, a foot-stomp, but that evening he stood quietly. It was not often that her father went so still.
The silence of that long-ago evening, the tree-trunks black against a luminous evening sky...the scene has a religious feeling in her memory. Is it possible that Len took her hand to lead her down through the trees? Surely not.
“Hey,” says Toby. “It’s not working.”
It’s quite dim under the tree where he released the caterpillars. Some cling to the bark, some have fallen to the ground, some are wandering off into the undergrowth. The discipline of the corps has been shattered, the general has lost his command.
“They’re not swarming like they were.”
She shrugs. It’s true. She’s tired. “We tried, Tobes. We can’t win ’em all.” He looks so downcast, she doesn’t add that most of the catch will be devoured by birds, otters, snakes. The mountain is full of such tiny battles. It’s all contested territory, overlapping, three-dimensional, fiercely patrolled. Millions of miniature turfs, the size of her palm, of her footprint, her fingernail.
Katya stands and brushes the leaf mulch from her knees. “Get us out of here, Tobes. I’m hopelessly lost.” Although it’s not really possible to lose yourself here in the forest, with the mountain on one side and the city on the other.
Toby points and moves, stepping long-legged over logs and pushing through dry bracken; not the direction she would have chosen. Some small thing goes scuttling away from them, unseen at their feet in the undergrowth. There is a chatter, a rustle, a clap of wings. She imagines the caterpillars finding their spoor, inching slowly home behind them.
Coming out from under the trees, Toby and Katya stand for a moment entranced by broader views. The switchbacking path pauses here on a bare shoulder, allowing them views up to the exposed face of the mountain, and down, out to the sweep of the city below.
“Let’s go home, Tobes. Before it gets dark.”
Driving home after dropping Toby off at his mother’s house in Claremont, she feels tired and virtuous. She’s not always so energetic. On occasion, she’s simply offloaded creatures at the side of the road, or decanted the cold-blooded types straight into the Liesbeeck Canal. She feels bad about that, though. Fish are tricky. When she was younger, she sometimes went swimming up on Tafelberg Road, where the mountain streams collect in deep concrete tanks before passing under the road. Someone once freed their goldfish into one of those pools, where they reproduced madly and filled the water with lurid flashes. The feral fish didn’t last: probably they ate the available tadpoles and then starved to death. The next time she checked, the tank was devoid of any life, piscine or amphibious. A relocation experiment gone horribly wrong.
There used to be a play-park right opposite her house, a small one but quite lushly treed, where she’d release the beasts if she was feeling lazy. Over the six years since she started this business, the park absorbed an astounding number of creepy-crawlies and minor menaces without ill effect, soaking them up like a sponge. For a while it became an object of slightly queasy fascination: how much biomass could that small square hold? It was a magician’s handkerchief, enfolding and disappearing a thousand rabbits. Were all the animals eating each other? No doubt there was some run-off, some trickle of mice and midges out into the surrounding streets and drains, but she can’t say she ever noticed, and the park’s human inhabitants – the five or six vagrants living behind the toilet block, Derek and his friends – never complained.
Now, the park is off-limits. In fact, it hardly exists: it’s been bulldozed. The demolition finished a week ago, but she’s still not used to the change. Even now, steering the PPR-mobile round the corner to her house, her heart gives a lurch to see the road so altered. It looks unbalanced, as if the whole street tilts away from her house and down towards the disturbing gap on the other side. There’s more sky than there was before. She can even see a piece of the mountain over the far rooftops, deep slate blue today and wearing a cap of cloud.
Katya stops the car in the driveway and walks across the road to look at the excavation. The fence is as chill as it looks, pulling the heat out of her hand and into its metal grid. As she moves, her fingers bump-bump in and out of the gaps in the wire, catching and losing grip. The sections of fence make silky looping patterns against each other, shimmering and aligning.
Fat tire tracks curve out onto the road, under the padlocked gate and over the edge of the pavement. A trench has been dug; old foundations lie exposed, strata of concrete and twisted metal pipes. Cloudy water pools at the bottom of the excavation. The ditchwater smells like long-buried coins. Leaning on the wire, she stares down into the pewter water and sees the wavering outlines of buildings and streetlamps, a sunken city that might still be raised, intact. But the surface of the water is opaque. Herself a blurred reflection in dirty milk.
Of course the destroyed park is no surprise. She’s watched the deterioration from her upstairs window, stage by stage. First the jungle gym, the slides and the roundabout, the swings and the seesaw: each one uprooted and tossed aside, jumbled like the toys of a big, bad baby. Now the climbing frame is upside-down in the corner of the lot, paint chipped, concrete club feet in the air. The demolition made a surprising amount of ruckus and dust, considering that there wasn’t much to start with: some trees, a few park benches of mundane municipal design, a yellow-brick toilet block. Brick shithouse, she used to say to herself in the mornings when she glimpsed it through her upstairs window, liking the sound of the words in her mind. Now that little joke is gone. One tall blue gum, pale-skinned and statuesque, an old-fashioned leaning beauty in whose branches multitudes had sung and nested: now that’s a loss. A squad of men with chainsaws took the tree apart, hauling the pieces away like joints of meat; and then they came for the park’s human dwellers. Derek and his gang came out stumbling, blinking, old soldiers led at gunpoint from caves. Their shopping trolleys dumped on the pavement, their mattresses like misshapen fungi pulled from the soil. And then the digging machines moved in, chipping their muzzles into the earth. Each stage brought its own wails of suffering and indignation. Now the excavating beasts have clamped their jaws and rested their topsoil-bearded chins on the ground. Something new will be rising up here soon.
This is what happens when you don’t pay attention, Katya thinks. Things change; the pieces move around. She doesn’t like it. She’s troubled by change. Toby’s presence, for example. It’s not like she could turn her own nephew down when he came asking for the job. No, she’s glad to have him. But she’s lived and worked alone for a long time now, and to have someone tagging along is distracting. It’s his vigor that she finds troubling, the speed of his growth. He’s a new plant butting up from the soil, pushing her aside: her own roots are so shallow.
She plucks herself with a twang from the wire, and turns back to her house. Behind her, the water sloshes in its hole, a mud tongue clicking in a cold mouth.
The five houses in the row are two-story Victorians, high but narrow, pretty but decrepit, with a low wall fronting what once must have been five small gardens, now cemented over. She doesn’t really know her neighbors. There’s an old couple on the corner, and a family with a teenage girl who recently moved in two doors down. The other two houses are used as student digs. Katya lives at the end of the row, her garage right next to the alleyway. She crosses over the road, fishing out her keys.
There are many things she loathes about the garage door: its peeling wood finish, the perverse ridge on its steel handle that bites into her fingerbones, its pig-like keening when it does agree to open. She always approaches it like a wrestler heading into a tough bout, cracking her knuckles.
Irritable, she tugs at the rusted handle. The wood has swollen and it’s sticking even more than usual. With spite in her heart she leans in to give it another wrench, really putting her weight into it. This time, the metal pulls right out of the rotten wood and her knuckles scrape across the door. She staggers back, clutching the detached handle.
“Damn it!”
She stares at her hand, stained now with a shit-like smear of rotten wood and rust and, yes, blood: the skin has been broken. The wet splinters in her palm, the wrench in her shoulder, the messiness of it all...She hurls the handle over towards the black municipal wheelie bins that stand in a row in the mouth of the alleyway. It bounces dully off the nearest lid and skitters into the space behind.
“Hey!” cries a hoarse voice.
“Oh fuck, what now?” She peers round the corner into the dark of the alley. There are a couple of draped brownish figures down at the far end. She makes out a mattress, a tangle of gray blanket, a black plastic radio held together with duct tape. One of the figures raises a ragged hand, and she recognizes the trailing bandage.
“Jeez, sorry, Derek man! Sorry.”
Derek, who swathes his head and limbs in patterned rags, who leaves intricate sculptures made from toothpicks and cigarette boxes outside Katya’s front door. There’s a grunt from the dimness. “Got any smokes?”
“Nothing today, sorry.”
“Eina, you hurt yourself, girlie,” says Derek.
There is blood dripping from the side of her hand. “Flesh wound. I’ll live.” She blots the blood on her overalls.
Derek and his crew are mostly hospital survivors: of the psychiatric clinic in one direction or Groote Schuur in the other. Dazed and abandoned, patients who never made it home. There’s the tall blind man who is led through the streets at a rapid clip by his squat, hawk-eyed companion. The slim woman whose features were once delicate, and who’s always dressed in good clothes, but whose bloodshot eyes and ravenous panhandling quickly disperse any air of gentility as soon as she gets up close. Flora and Johan and their disappearing / reappearing baby. Dreadlocked Mzi, the shouter. A gentle bunch: the only bother has been the odd late-night singing and quarreling sessions. When they occupied the park, their nest of mattresses and blankets and tarpaulins was always tucked away discreetly in the bushes. Sometimes there was a small fire going – an almost pastoral scene.
Nobody else used the park: it would have been strange to see any actual mothers bringing actual children to play there. Turnover was high. Residents came and went, moved on or passed away, to be replaced. All but Derek. Derek has outlived them all, his age indeterminate but immense, his face not so much wrinkled as armored in plates of weather-toughened skin.
She gives him a wounded wave. “Goodnight.” To hell with the garage. If anyone wants the van tonight they’re welcome to it.
Inside her house, she kicks off her shoes and goes through the small lounge into the open-plan kitchen area. It takes half a dozen steps, wall to wall. The house is small, containing only a few gulps of sticky air; the carpet feels gritty underfoot. Katya runs water over the graze on her hand. The grime of the excavated hole has mingled with the rust from the garage door to taint her blood. Tetanus, lockjaw. A bath, that’s what she needs. She climbs the narrow stairs – so steep! Today, more than most days, she feels how they’ve been shoe-horned into the space.
She rented this place furnished, and since moving in she’s changed nothing, barely added or subtracted a single item. She hasn’t even moved the furniture, although some of it drives her mad: there’s an old filing cabinet blocking the space between the kitchen and the stairwell, for example. The double bed is far too large for the small bedroom, and surplus to her requirements. But she likes the fact that this furniture has a history – a name scratched on the underside of the table, a seventies rainbow decal stuck to the bedroom window. It makes her own tenancy seem more plausible: someone else has managed a life here, in this same space. And if she starts shifting bookcases and beds around, she has a feeling the whole place might go haywire or just cease to work, as if she were trying to reassemble a complex machine she’d rashly taken apart. She’d do it all wrong.
Preparing the bath is a minor ritual. Katya likes it very hot, and always uses a great deal of bubble bath or cloudy bath-oil – the better not to see her own skin through the water’s lens. Only the pale curves of her breasts break the surface. Sinking into the perfumed foam, she closes her eyes and goes through her day, emptying out her mental pockets, sorting the change into piles. But she can hear indistinct noises coming through the pipes, booming and sonorous, and the sunken pit of the building site keeps intruding into her thoughts. Its slick sides, its watery base. The mud like sweating flesh. The roots of the city, after all, do not run deep. A few meters down, and there you have it: raw earth, elemental.
She turns face-down and floats like that, eyes and mouth submerged. An unnatural posture, a sensation of slight risk; a person can drown in two inches of water. She summons again that sense of downness – of space under the surface – that the filthy hole across the road has opened up inside her. Depth, which the city conceals with its surface bustle. You forget what’s underneath. A sudden vision of the deeps beneath the city, alive with a million worms, with buried things.
She surfaces with a splash of water over the edge of the bath. Rattled, that’s how she feels. Headachey and wired and slightly nauseous, out of synch, not winding down apace with the day. Is it the stinking hole in the ground outside, the sense of things rearranging around her? Or is it the mention of her father – the old man popping up without warning after all this time? Seven years without a sniff of Len, and now here he is again, pissing on her territory.
Maybe it’s just that damn garage door that’s getting to her. All the wear and tear, the rot and disintegration, the distressing entropy of built things.
“What I wouldn’t give,” she says out loud. “What I wouldn’t give.”
For what? For a little bit of – not luxury, exactly, but ease. To be moved effortlessly from one action to the next, as she imagines some people are moved: the ground flowing like a conveyor belt beneath them, the world smoothing their passage.
That man she met today – he lives in such a world. Trimmed lawns rolling under his expensive shoes. She recalls his whisky scent. His mass. His handshake. She is something of a connoisseur of male handshakes, and that was a good one: dry, not a bone crusher or a loose parcel of phalanges either. She does not like being touched, mostly, but when she is it should be firmly. His hands made her think of the hands in the old Rothman’s cigarette ads in magazines from her childhood – belonging to airline pilots, admirals. Solid and squarely reassuring. Those faceted wrists extending from naval cuffs, with clipped nails and a light dusting of hairs, holding out a pack of smokes.
She reaches a dripping arm over the edge of the bath and takes his card from the top pocket of her overalls. Quality card, textured, cream. Turns it over. Martin Brand, Brand Properties it says, under a blocky logo. On the phone, Mrs. Brand had pronounced the surname the English way, but Katya prefers the Afrikaans meaning. She likes the way the blunt sound of the word holds a secret conflagration. She touches the edge of the card to her lips.
On the bathroom ceiling, she spots a jagged new crack across the plaster. It’s an accusatory shape: of smiting, of lightning bolts. The kind of thing sent from above, in punishment for some clear crime. The kind of thing one calls down upon oneself.
