Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  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 sides of the fenced square make silky looping patterns against each other, shimmering and aligning.

  Fat tyre 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 there 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 bluegum, 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.

  One day, uniformed guards also removed the park’s human dwellers. Derek and his gang came out stumbling, confused, blinking, like old soldiers led at gunpoint from caves. Their shopping trolleys dumped on the pavement, their blankets and 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 vigour 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 double-storey Victorians, high but narrow, pretty but decrepit, with a low wall fronting what once must have been five small, identical front gardens, now cemented over. She doesn’t really know her neighbours. 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 veneer, the perverse ridge on its steel handle that bites into her fingerbones, its piglike 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.

  “Bugger!”

  She stares at her hand, stained now with a shitlike 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 grey figures down at the far end. She makes out a mattress, a tangle of blanket, a black plastic radio held together with duct tape. One of the figures raises a ragged hand, and she recognises the trailing bandage.

  “Derek! Jees, sorry, Derek man. Sorry.”

  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 and 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 shoehorned into the space.

  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 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 metres 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.

  Underwater, she can hear noises coming through the wall – indistinct, but booming and sonorous. Can it be Derek and his gang in the alleyway, signalling up through the pipes?

  Poor old Derek. Before its destruction, he’d always occupied the park toilets, along with an eccentric crew of variously damaged and abandoned figures – most of them outpatients, or dazed survivors, from either the psychiatric hospital in one direction or Groote Schuur in the other: the patients who never made it home. She knows them all by sight, if not by name. 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 is always dressed in clean, good clothes that change from day to day, but whose bloodshot eyes and ravenous panhandling quickly disperse any air of gentility as soon as one gets up close. Flora and Johan and their disappearing/reappearing baby. Dreadlocked Mzi, the shouter. A mostly gentle bunch. Around here, you hardly ever see the tougher, savvier street kids who occupy other pockets of the city. The only bother has been the odd late-night singing and quarreling sessions. Their nest of mattresses and blankets and tarpauli
n was always tucked away discreetly in the bushes behind the toilets. Sometimes there was a small fire going. The encampment was in some ways a reassuring scene, almost pastoral. Nobody else used the park, after all: it would have been strange to see any actual mothers bringing actual small children to play there.

  The turnover was high. The park residents came and went, moved on or passed away, to be replaced by new ones. All but Derek. Derek, whose head and limbs are always asymmetrically swathed in patterned rags, and who leaves intricate small sculptures made from toothpicks and cigarette boxes on the pavement outside Katya’s front door. His face is not so much wrinkled as armoured in plates of weather-toughened skin. Derek has outlived them all – his age is indeterminate but evidently immense.

  She thinks about getting dressed, gathering blankets, food, making coffee … She’s never done that, in all her years of living in this house. Never taken anything to Derek and his friends, never really tried to speak to them, never given them more than an empty Coke bottle to return for deposit. Those lives are scratchy, they scrabble like twigs against her window.

  She surfaces with a blurt 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.

  She never knew much about houses before she moved in here. It’s her father’s fault. After the loss of their mother, when Alma was six and Katya only three, 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 nomads’ contempt for the townsfolk. A dozen different schools. Many nights in the back of the old bakkie which 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 realised 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.

  This house, for example: she rented it furnished – how else? – and since then 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 big double bed is far too large for the small bedroom, and surplus to her own requirements. But 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. And 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 managed a life here, once, in this same space.

  It’s disheartening, then, to realise 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 labour to shore up the world.

  “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, permanence. 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 nor yet a loose parcel of phalanges. 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 Rothmans cigarette adverts 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, extending a pack of smokes to the viewer.

  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 her 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.

  3. CRACKS

  The 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 around the construction site. 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.

  “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.” He has a voice as smooth as 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.”

  Downstairs, Derek has moved on. The ribbon he’s left behind makes a zigzag pattern in the wire, like the 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, grey trousers, babydoll shoes – 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 civilised, 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 dressed in a cinnamon uniform, who takes her name and also takes 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 samoosas. 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 can gaze at nothing, surrounded by mirrors? He gets out on the eighth floor, samoosa 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.