Freya had never seen a bird eat another bird. She was fascinated.
Then, one morning, it came into the camp.
When she and Ben walked through the flap of their tent into the early morning sun, the bird was standing a few feet away from them, its head slightly skewed. It was even more magnificent from up close: its plumage shimmered in different hues of deep brown, and its neck was a cascade of black-and-white feathers. The bird immediately took notice of them, locking its eyes on them. It was clear that it was watching Ben rather than Freya; as soon as Ben moved, the bird moved too. Ben took a step down from the tent platform, and the bird took a step towards him.
Their parents were nowhere to be seen.
The campsite was set in a half-moon, the straight edge looking out towards the pan and the tents placed along the curve; the kitchen and bathroom stood in the centre. Against the outside wall of the bathroom, a tap was dripping and had formed a shallow pool during the night. It was this, Freya later decided, that must have attracted the bird. It had been standing at this pool when it first noticed them.
But now its attention was fully on Ben.
Ben took another step down; the bird mirrored him, taking a step forward.
Freya lingered behind.
The bird was moving its neck as it walked towards Ben, whipping it back and forth in an S-motion, like a snake that had reared back. In the heron’s eyes, an ancient thing: lethal curiosity, apathetic territoriality. It came for Ben with a single-mindedness, an eager and cold-hearted fury. It scared Freya, suddenly so close to a wild animal she had seen kill. ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘be careful.’
Ben was now on ground level, only a few feet away from the bird. Between them, their father’s car was parked. ‘I need to pee,’ he said. ‘It’s just a stupid bird.’ He took a confident step forward, waving his hands above his head. The bird was still thrashing its head towards them; it was an unnatural movement, a warning. Ben began to move towards the bird, shouting loudly. The bird puffed up its feathers and flapped its wings.
Ben stopped.
Freya was still on the steps, wary and watching.
Ben decided to walk the other way around, clearly hoping the bird wouldn’t turn and follow. But as soon as he did this, the bird moved, headed him off – swiftly, without a sound. As Ben moved back again the other way, the bird did the same. It was trapping him; it wasn’t letting him pass. ‘Walk along the edge of the camp,’ Freya told him. He nodded. But as he turned to walk along the tent edges, the heron followed.
Ben began to run, and the bird ran after him.
‘Ben,’ Freya yelled, ‘get inside a tent!’
Ben looked behind him and quickly entered one of the unoccupied tents.
Seconds later the bird began striking the tent with its beak, tearing holes in the canvas.
‘What’s going on?’ Ranger Daniel said, appearing at a run from behind the kitchen.
‘My brother is in there,’ Freya said, lamely. Ben was screaming at the bird; Freya could hear the untamed fear in his voice.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said, running towards the bird, waving his arms and shouting, mimicking Ben. Freya relaxed at this; she expected the bird to take flight. But it merely turned towards the ranger and advanced. Acting quickly, the ranger took out his gun and let off a warning shot. At the sound, Freya shrieked. She heard Ben shout out, and then go quiet.
The bird took no notice of the gunshot. It continued advancing.
And Freya knew what would happen before it did.
The ranger shot another round.
Blood burst forth on the bird’s puffed breast.
The heron fell limply to the ground.
Not even at the moment of death did it make a sound.
The gunshots brought their parents racing. Chaos ensued. But Freya only had eyes for the fallen bird, lying in its own blood. Dead. She walked towards it, transfixed. Sitting down next to the body, she took the bird’s neck into her lap; it was lighter than a pillow. Its blood smelt salty, like dried meat. ‘They can be very aggressive and territorial,’ she heard Ranger Daniel say to her parents.
Freya looked deeply into its lifeless eyes, then down at her wet hands. Where the bird’s blood was spilling over her white knuckles, her child’s skin.
Dripping from her small fingers into the dust.
Freya felt the same way that day, sitting in the pool of the bird’s blood, as she did last night, walking away from Cheery’s dead body.
Before this, Freya would have guessed that killing someone, even hurting someone, would leave her feeling damaged and alien. But it hasn’t. It has left her feeling alive and triumphant. It has filled her with a kind of peace, a serene certainty.
Freya Rust, twenty-one, art student: this is the story she used to tell about herself. The story she whispered every night before she went to sleep. The story her brain knotted together from facts, scenes, memories.
But stories change.
What if she tells herself a different story? A story that is more persuasive, more seductive, more intense than real life. How easy it becomes, in the solitude of grief, in the anger, to shrug off one reality and begin living in another; an awful slippage between the reality she knows and the one she is creating. She stands slowly, walking through the discarded clothes on her floor, finding herself on the balcony, looking over the dimming lights of Hatfield, looking over the city. Cities are just like stories. A city is designed; a city is written. A city has a beginning, a middle, an end. A city has patterns, themes, hidden agendas, unexpected corners, dark depths. Just like a story, a city repeats itself; a whole collection of stories that collide and intertwine and tangle and feed off one another. Grow, change, devour, die, reincarnate. The city, documenting her grief on its walls and roads and trees. A city of stories, a story of cities.
The jacaranda tree outside her window is bare and she can see the old women sitting in the branches of the tree, watching her, nodding silently in agreement.
She needs to do it.
She needs to kill Abraham October.
She reimagines the night she saw Abraham at that bar. This time, she has a gun in her hand. This time, she pulls the trigger. The shots burst out. He lies dead in the parking lot.
Freya Rust wouldn’t have had the courage or audacity to kill a man. But she isn’t Freya Rust any more. She is someone else, no one else.
Stories change.
Once upon a time there was a young woman named Freya, whose brother was killed by a demon. She became a fierce warrior and avenged him. She slayed the demon. And as a reward, they made her a god.
4
Mr October remembers the happiest day of his life with savage accuracy.
He was sitting on his back porch, his presents unwrapped before him (two charcoal drawings of his parents, long dead), and as Sara handed him a glass of champagne, he said, ‘Thank you, wife,’ and she smiled. She sat down across from him, her hand resting on her stomach, her dark hair wispy, her swarthy eyes distant. She took a sip of tea. ‘Stop worrying,’ he said. She was always worrying: drifting ahead, devoting her days to the future; whispering urgent premonitions to herself.
‘I just want the baby to come,’ she said.
‘Where has Sophie gone?’
‘She’s at Frennie’s. She’ll be home soon.’
He sat back and let the early evening spread across his skin, while Sara began chatting casually about her exhibition, opening that weekend at the small gallery in Charles Street. Everything in that moment was blissful, stable. He liked his job, he liked his house, he loved his wife and child. And he was content to wake up every morning and rouse them from bed with coffee and the news on the radio, content to spend his evenings eating his wife’s samosas, watching soapies with her on the television she’d bought despite his protestations: ‘My money, my decision.’ In that moment time did a strange thing. Something it hadn’t done since he was twenty: it slowed down.
When he was young, he always seemed to have time to spen
d doing not much of anything. There were hours that he could waste away with his friends; days were long and unending, nights were absolute – colourful lights flashing and warm bodies dancing. Pleasure never ceased, drama and disagreement were over quickly, no wound was deep, no trauma was permanent. Sex was beautiful, and stilling; as if someone had gone and thrown a soft white blanket over him, everything was paused. Life stopped just for him. He was that powerful; he was a god of time.
But when he was no longer young, the years began to hurry, began to outpace him. It happened gradually and it happened all at once. He married and had a baby; he accrued debt; he settled into a job he thought would be fulfilling, but turned out to be capricious. His life began to settle, coalesce, take on a permanent, irreparable shape. He became dissatisfied. But recently, Mr October had found a second adolescence, a second period of timeless happiness, where everything was how it was meant to be. His daughter was growing into a good, kind person. His wife wasn’t sick or angry or stricken; she was strong and just. His debts were paid; his work was becoming meaningful again.
And then.
Sara: losing the baby. Sara: overcome with heartache. Sara, sick. Sara, dead. And he found out that happiness could make you blind, too.
And now.
Now, when he remembers his wife, he remembers her as she was in those final months, constrained in her shed – shrivelled, pockmarked, stinking. The Sara before that, the vital, whole woman he married, is trapped in a little bubble of memory which floats to the surface only occasionally. Almost twenty years of marriage decimated, struck down, overcome by that hateful, drugged-up version of Sara: ‘Are you going to keep me in here for ever, Abraham?’ she asked the first night he put her in there, her manic face aghast. ‘You’re too weak for that!’
It’s a terrible thing, to have been happy. It sits in the small of his back, like an itch, a part of him that is still sitting at the table with Sara, waiting for Sophie, so they can have dinner together. How rare it would have been, how miraculous, if he had been allowed to die that day, to be taken from the world when all he knew was happiness. It would have been an act of pure mercy.
All he has now is the memory of happiness. A memory that is exactly like a perfect, coral-lovely shell: put it to your ear and for a moment you are lulled by the sound of a distant ocean. But confront the shell for what it is, and you’ll realise that it’s just a dead thing. A dead thing that is far away from home, its songs nothing but the echo of a former life – nothing but a screaming, stormy lament.
5
‘He’s still in custody.’
‘He hasn’t said anything yet?’
‘No. I had a private word with him last night. I made your feelings clear.’
‘Keep me updated.’
Slick slips his phone back into his pocket. His friend sounds confident, but that’s because his friend can’t read the signs. Slick, though, sees them very clearly.
He has known for a while now that he would have to leave the city eventually. He knew it as soon as he shot Benjamin Rust: that was the moment he lost control of it all, that he became too confident for his own good.
His friend tells him that Lucky hasn’t told the detectives anything, yet. Probably because Lucky is trying to protect Sophie; maybe she’s asked him to be quiet until they pay the last of the money. Where are you? I need to see you. The messages from Sophie October have been coming in all morning. He ignores them. They feel like a trap.
The world is cold, and he has to buttress himself against the wind. He is sitting on a bench in the station, waiting for the train, watching the pale world, the metallic sky. The tracks are surrounded by lush vegetation, hiding the street from view. The station is quiet, only a few other commuters huddling in the warmth of the little anteroom. The man who runs the kiosk is smoking, letting the blue smoke drift in the blue air, across the train tracks, and away.
A bird hidden in the grassland gives a call, and then comes running from the undergrowth. A duck-like, mud-brown bird that stops dead when it sees the gathered people. It gives another squawk before bursting into the air, panicked.
A hamerkop. A lightning bird. Impundulu.
It was his mother who taught him about the lightning bird. His mother who was neither Zulu, nor superstitious, but told these stories to scare Slick and his father – who was superstitious, who believed his bad luck and his unemployment, his weakness for alcohol, was the work of a witch – away from any wrongdoing. The legend differed each time his mother told the story: sometimes impundulu is made from lightning, and is only visible in bird form when seen by a woman; sometimes, he takes the form of a beautiful young man; most times, he is black and white and full of rage; other times, his feathers are red and gold. But one detail remained constant: impundulu is always the servant of a witch.
It is said that impundulu cannot be killed by blades or bullets, only by fire.
Fire. Slick has often wondered if his father’s stray cigarette that evening was in fact propelled by the rumours about Mrs Yengeni; the dark rumours that she stole children and dabbled in witchcraft. Worse, in foreign witchcraft. Maybe the things that have happened to Slick since then have been the work of Mrs Yengeni’s impundulu; the revenge of the lightning bird whose mistress his father had tried to kill.
It was a shock to his child’s mind when Mama Africa, the night he came running from that house covered in the blood of a young boy, had wrapped him in a blanket, put her large, slender arms around him, and called him ‘my little impundulu’. It only struck him much later that he must have been the one who told her about impundulu; she snatched up his story and repurposed it for her own use. All the more trustworthy because she could do so in his own language. And now, of course, when he tells the story of the lightning bird to himself, it comes in Mama Africa’s voice. Not his mother’s, not his own. Mama Africa’s interpretation, Mama Africa’s facts.
Mama Africa disappeared one day, just like that. There are stories about why she disappeared – that she was caught up in a battle for territory she couldn’t win, that she was assassinated, that she was arrested.
That she abandoned them.
When he thinks of her now, he likes to think of a dark gambling den; Mama Africa, laughing wickedly at her own victories, free of her disguises at last.
His fingernail catches on the ridge of the scar on his arm, and the pain flares.
That morning, when he was standing naked, barefoot, on the cold cement floor, he watched the blood drip from his thigh onto the ground and he wondered: How many times have I bled for this city? How much of me has flowed through its streets?
As he dressed, he thought about the threads he has spun all over Pretoria, the threads that lead from him to every person who buys his drugs, every person who is happy because of him. Who can be satisfied and forgetful because of him. Who has realised that the past isn’t worthy or gratifying, but destructive. Because of him. He imagined the strings that lead from all the people of the city whose lives he has changed, who have been affected by him, by his power and his violence. The connections, the coincidences, between those threads. The stories, the pain, and the pleasure. Slick, the puppetmaster. Slick, the king. And he took up the can of petrol and doused his thin mattress, his empty floor. He emptied it out over the small mountain of unsold drugs he had created in the early hours of the morning.
And he struck a match, and burnt it all to the ground.
Fire.
He can still smell the smoke on his skin, in his hair.
Over the sound of the arriving train, the hamerkop gives another call.
6
It’s the bloody fingerprint she can never get out of her head which glimmers across her imagination at odd moments, glistening and wet; the pristine red imprint of her mother’s thumb, fine as a spider’s web, shining on the white handle of the phone. It’s the way her own thumb fit so precisely over her mother’s blood-print, so exactly that it blocked it from sight, as if her mother hadn’t been there, minutes b
efore, picking up the phone, trying to call for help, trying to live.
It was up to Freya to call the police. To pick up the bloodied phone – the landline, in her mother’s study, with the large floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the back garden, with its fig and apricot trees gnarled and shadowy, where anything could be hidden, anything could come unexpectedly out of the darkness and press its white, angry face up to the window frame and see her, see her. And she would be frozen by its eyes, unable to move. And the thing that came out of the night would have a canine smile and hungry eyes and bloody red-hot skin, and it would press its lips to the window and breathe, and she would have no choice but to watch it as it came through the window and curled slender fingers around her throat and squeezed.
She had to dial the number herself – 10111 – and wait for someone to answer and then tell the person that her parents were dead – dying – and please send someone, send the police, this was an emergency. An emergency! And put the phone back down. And stare out into the night, incapable of movement, frozen, stricken, until the light of dawn came creeping across the garden, banishing all the monsters that lived there. (‘Only in your imagination, darling.’)
Except that night, that night a monster had come, out of the real shadows, the real hidden parts of the garden, and into the real house; and it had killed.
She wasn’t sure what woke her up, although she later realised it must have been the smell of their blood. When she awoke, her first thought was: stew. Her mother, cooking stew. (‘When you were a baby you were always waking up at the smell of frying beef.’) But her second thought was: Why is it so quiet? The silence warned her there was terror ahead.
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