Len would always take something away from a job: motorbike parts or cigarettes or silverware or, on one occasion, the entire back seat of a car. Sometimes to sell, sometimes just to show that he could. It was a point of pride, not to come away with empty pockets. She feels his presence here now in Nineveh, as surely as if she’s smuggled his smelly old bones home with her from that depressing mall bar. Staining the air with his tobacco breath, dulling the surfaces with his worn fingerprints.
Katya stacks the tiles away on a kitchen shelf. She strips off her dusty clothes and redresses herself in a new uniform, still stiff from the laundry. She paces the white hallway like a general, plotting to reclaim lost territory.
There’s no help for it. She will have to employ extreme techniques to lure the buggers out, wherever and whatever they are. It’s entrapment, sure, but what can you do? She needs to know what she’s dealing with before she talks to Mr Brand again.
She’s not going to eat any more bully beef, so she spoons half of it onto a plate, using heavy cutlery she finds in one of the whispering drawers. Chops it into chunks the size of sugar cubes with a ferociously sharp knife.
Then she moves around the house, looking again behind cupboards and under beds. Everything is so snug, so well butted together and carefully fitted, it is almost impossible to find a nook or crevice. Instead, she deposits the chunks of flesh straight onto the floor, in corners, into the backs of drawers. It’s an old trick of the trade. Draw the vermin if they do not come to you. Call them out, if they are not being sufficiently pestilential.
Reuben has done well. The foods he selected are not ideal sustenance for a pest-relocation expert, it is true, or at least not a high-class one such as herself; but they are absolutely ideal, in fact the preferred foodstuffs, for a wide range of pest and vermin. Bully beef! Chemically addictive, and it lasts forever.
If she has any small housemates, they will show themselves now, if only for the love of processed meat.
Dreamland turfs her out into the middle of impenetrable darkness. She lies on her back listening to the night silence, which now has an added intensity. A listening quality. The house, which seemed muffled and lifeless before, is now more like an ear: whorled, attentive, magnifying every faint sound – including her own small bodily noises.
There. A scritching, a scratching. Pause. And a rattle-rattle. Despite the thickness and quality of the walls, the sounds vibrate through them, through the headboard of the bed and into her skull. The hunted creature inside her wakes, sits up and cocks its ears. The tentative scratching seems extraordinarily loud, but she knows from experience that the smallest creatures make the biggest racket, particularly when you cannot see them. A mouse pawing a packet of Tennis biscuits can sound like a pack of wolves. A lone cricket suggests a maniac with an electric drill.
The bedside light does not respond. Electricity must be gone again. Katya’s feeling for the headlamp she keeps on her bedside table, an old habit, when another noise makes her pause. Because this noise is completely unmistakeable. Footsteps in the corridor: one two, one two. Human. Nothing else sounds like that.
The unseen feet proceed down the passage. Now they are passing her door, but she sees nothing in the blackness. Dark though it is, the steps seem confident, as if their owner knows exactly where he or she is going. She knows he’s reached the kitchen when she hears the fridge sigh open. A furtive pause. Feeding?
More footsteps, and a metallic gushing. Deciphered: it is the sound of pissing, of piddling, of urination. She believes it is a man, from the echoey, reverberating quality of the noise. This is someone standing up, boldly. As they do. No flush.
She could, conceivably, make a dash for the exit while the intruder is thus preoccupied. She could slither out from under the covers, crawl through rooms, feeling her way by touch across the variously slippery and padded, rough and smooth surfaces of this flat, navigate her way to the front door, scuttle downstairs to Reuben and Pascal. This thought traverses her analytical forebrain as she lies motionless in the dark. The deeper, more primitive regions revert to small-animal mode: lying very still in the dark is always the preferred course of action.
Anyway, she’s certainly not going to leap naked from her bed to confront the bad man in the gloom. It is too tempting to squeeze shut her eyes – an extra layer of blackness in all the dark surrounding her – and hope for morning.
A final scuffling is followed by a mysterious silence. At length, she starts to wonder if she did in fact hear the whole thing, whether it was not some seepage from a dream. And anyway, it’s not possible to keep rigidly still, primed, listening urgently into the silence, for very long; eventually the persuasion of the mattress and the swaddling sheets and the darkness will coax you to lower your guard. The body might clench in fright, but the mind, eventually, lets go.
She waits and waits, but she hears nothing more.
And so the tension leaks from her body like water, and she sleeps.
Fuck. The knowledge is in her the moment she wakes, as if it’s been waiting by the side of the bed like a faithful hound. In the house. A man. Her heart wakes a second after her brain and gives a bound of alarm.
Is he still inside?
Nothing happens for many minutes. Her heartbeat slows and her mind calms. As she tries to pin down a precise memory of the night-time sounds, they grow more indistinct, and the longer she lies there, the less and less likely it seems that anything really happened.
Nonetheless, she makes an effort to be swift and silent when she gets out of the bed. First, she dresses. Once more she slips on her defensive greens. Removed from the care of the laundry lady, these are becoming worryingly soft and creased. They are losing their effect. Still, she zips up briskly. The overalls are something, at least: some protection. Now if she needs to flee the flat shrieking, she can do so without shame. She picks up her notebook. She will approach this in a professional manner. Anyway, she needs the loo.
Cautiously she pokes her head out of the bedroom. All clear. No menacing thugs, no bodies. Once more she does a careful tour of the entire flat, peeking into every corner, heart in mouth. Nada. Nothing seems missing from the fridge, but she can’t be sure. She checks the front door. No sign of a break-in, but something must have come in this way. Someone: there are very few creatures, barring the odd monkey or clever cat, who can open closed doors. And none that she knows of that can do so when the door is locked. With thumbprint recognition, no less.
The bathroom looks precisely the same as it did before. She scans the white surfaces. More than most places in the flat, the bathroom is of an immaculate blankness. It would take a criminal of vast confidence to transgress in a place of such lustrous surfaces, receptive to the lightest touch. An intruder would surely have left something of themselves: fingerprints, even DNA, displayed on the tile as on a microscope slide. But the porcelain is unsmeared. The taps are tightened.
To catch a beast, you need to be still, as still as she’d been in her bed last night; you need to let things come to you. She scans the bathroom quietly, moving only her eyes, focusing on each square inch in turn.
The toilet. Is that a foreign droplet on the rim? And in the bowl … She recalls no flushing sound from the night before. Is there a yellow tinge to the water? She goes down on her knees and inspects. Perhaps. The slightest tint. Is there a musky, sweet and salty tang in the air above the bowl? Has it been … polluted? She could put her head down there, take a sniff – but something fastidious rises up in her. Although she has done worse in her quest for fruit flies, mites and larvae, has rolled pigeon droppings in her palms to test consistency, has savoured the rarest of animal exudates (snail urine and moth vomit, meerkat piss and gecko ejaculate), she will not do this. She flushes the toilet once, twice. Runs all the taps.
In its secret places, she notices, the bully-beef bait is untouched, the chunks of processed meat still crisp-edged, incorruptible.
10. VIP
From the outside, the security box is a child�
��s drawing, a Monopoly house, with its four walls and neat, pitched roof. There is a voice coming from inside: a sports announcer.
Peering in, Katya sees a man’s face, unnervingly close. Reuben is tipped back in his seat, with his feet on a small table and his shoulders against the wall just below the window frame. There’s a narrow sill there to support his head. He seems peaceful, despite the apparent discomfort of this position. She notices his hands folded on his belly, over the thick leather gun-belt. His one finger is tapping.
She knocks on the window right next to him and he jerks upright, kicking the table askew as he looks around wildly for the intruder. She smiles at him through the glass and gives a wave, but he stares at her with a kind of horror.
Jumpy, jumpy. His hand, she sees, has gone to his hip, although now it floats away. She notes again that it is a real, large gun. Perhaps she should be a bit more cautious around these guards, despite their smiles, their pixie bicycle bell.
“Hi,” she says. “Let me in for a sec please, I just want to ask you something.”
There’s a surreptitious movement behind him in the gloom. She recognises Pascal, concealed in the small but unaccountably dark, almost purple, confines of the Security Node.
Reluctantly, they let her in. She can smell hot electronics and dagga. Inside, the space is compact, containing the fundamentals of life. She notices with interest a grey telephone in the corner: an actual landline. There are other, more intimate artefacts. Stubs in a tin ashtray. An empty two-litre plastic Coke bottle by the door. A blanket folded away on a thin cotton-covered mattress in the corner. The sweet-sour smell of men living in an enclosed space, with a strong base-note of dog.
Although there is barely room for one person in here, they manage to shift around the puzzle pieces of furniture – table, two rickety chairs – to offer her a seat. She notices Reuben hastily stubbing out a joint and tossing it through the cracked-open window, while Pascal, presumably giving him cover, edges forward to shimmy the chair into place on her side of the table, extending an arm as he does so to mute the TV.
Finally, after all this furniture-moving has been concluded, they find themselves arranged as follows: the two guards standing stiffly together on one side of the small card table, Katya sitting on the other as if she’s interviewing or firing them. It is not an arrangement that affords any of them much comfort. Reuben looks shifty, Pascal distracted – his eyes keep sliding sideways to the screen, where an apparently enthralling soccer match is playing out.
It’s very stuffy and crowded in here; they’re all closer to each other than they would normally be, adding to the sense of crisis.
“Hi guys, sorry to bother you,” she begins – and then pulls herself up short. She is an investigator, she thinks, and as such, it is no bad thing to develop a certain distance from her subjects. In this situation, her greens are not the ideal outfit. In authority, they rank somewhat below a security guard’s uniform. Especially when they’re not accessorised by socks or shoes – she dressed in a hurry.
“Pascal, Reuben.” She pushes her feet firmly forward under the table, then recoils when her bare toe nudges something warm and solid, like a heated cowhide bolster. The bolster growls, and Pascal snaps a command and reaches down to grip something – Soldier’s collar, she hopes.
“Sorry,” she says, shifting back in her chair, her feet tucked in as far as they can go. “Okay, this is going to sound strange, but did either of you come into the flat last night?”
Pascal controls his eyeballs’ irresistible drift to the TV screen. Reuben widens his slightly and sucks in his cheeks.
“Inside? Your place?” asks Pascal. “We couldn’t do that even if we wanted.”
“We’re not entered into the system,” says Reuben, lifting his thumb to illustrate, a faintly insulting gesture.
“Why?” asks Pascal, catching on a little faster. “Did you have problems?”
“I heard someone come in last night. Someone used the bathroom.”
They look at each other. Silence. “This was on Two. Unit Two,” says Reuben slowly.
“Two. My floor.”
“It’s not possible,” says Pascal. “Are you sure you didn’t dream?”
“Yes! God. You can come and see for yourselves, upstairs. Someone was there!”
They shoot their eyes at each other again. The soccer game is forgotten.
“Well. Why didn’t you call us?” Reuben asks. “Next time, call us. You got our number? I’ll write it down for you.” He makes no move to do so, however.
“Or this.” Pascal leans down and slaps a hand against the wall, startling her – and Soldier, too: she feels a displacement of warm air under the table as the dog jumps. They’re used to slower movements from the tall guard. Next to his hand is a bright red button, like the ones in her apartment but bigger and closer to the floor.
“Right,” she says, momentarily thrown. She’d totally forgotten about those buttons.
“Press it. It is battery-power, too.”
“Right.”
“So ja, we’ll come and have a look, if you like,” says Reuben. “But I really don’t think anyone was there.”
“Yes, we will deal with it,” says Pascal. He touches the gun on his hip. “Don’t worry.”
And they wait for her to leave. As she walks away from the hut, she hears the soccer game cranked up to full volume again.
She sits at the kitchen counter and opens her notebook. It’s still terribly empty. And dirty – dappled with blackish thumbprints. And Mr Brand requires a report. She tries to concentrate.
Here’s how it is, you tightwad bastard.
She bats Len’s voice away. But what else is there to say? She’s stumped. On the one hand, there is Nineveh’s sterility. There’s something odd about a place where there’s no sign of life whatsoever: no fly bothering the windowpane, no tiny transparent spider abseiling on its filament from the edge of a door-frame. Nothing but curious sounds in the night.
And on the other hand, in extravagant contrast, there is this profuse and teeming wilderness that lies beyond the white retaining wall: a tangled knot of bog and root and stem, chattering and scuttling, through which she has waded, which has caked and splattered her blackish-green. The rich pungency of the mud alone is evidence of the life force out there. The wetlands must be the hangout of ten million species, jewelled, slimy, creeping, thrashing, slithering, biting. On one side of the wall, there is nothing that one might consider a troublesome pest; on the other, everything. Perhaps it is the swamp itself that is the problem, one gigantic pestilential creature. Nothing less than complete drainage would solve that one. But how to express this in a neat, professional note or diagram?
Because it is essential that she does. Because if there is no pest problem, then there’s no humane solution and no reason for her to be here. And one thing she’s realised is this: she likes it in Nineveh. She’s not ready to go home.
She must try to be methodical, to stick with the programme. She has a tried and trusted routine, a way of going about things. Observations, course of action, outcomes.
She underlines NINEVEH one more time. She writes: Observations. She underlines this too, and then goes back to put a box around the main heading. Then she sits for a while, biting down on the butt of the pencil. She draws a diagram of Nineveh. She writes: Promeces palustris. She draws a floor plan of her flat, a cross-section. She thinks for a while more. She draws an inchworm smoking a cigar.
Nothing.
Now it comes again: the noise, the measured tick-tock. It seems to be right next to her ear. This time, finally, she tracks the radio beacon down to the bathroom. It’s coming, Psycho-style, from behind the shower curtain. She approaches. When she whips the curtain open, at first she sees nothing; the sound stops abruptly. White tiles, white grouting, silver taps and shower rose.
It’s only when she looks down that she sees the source of the clicking. It is so much smaller than the sound it generates. She crouches down low and,
although she’s not wearing her gloves, she scoops it gently into her palm.
Her captive flickers in her cupped hand like a secret. She takes it through to the kitchen, where her notebook lies open.
Katya doesn’t claim to speak the language of animals; often, they speak in imprecise tongues. But then again, sometimes a living creature is as clear and unambiguous a message as the world can give you.
She opens up her hand, and she lets the creature crawl – slowly, slantwise, like an idea – out across the page.
Aitsa.
At two o’clock, she waits for Toby on an ornamental bench just outside the main gates to Nineveh. A lavender pigeon perches on the wall behind her back. Staring.
“Sorry, china,” she says to it. “Nothing for you here today.”
The pigeon, spotting the obvious lie, cocks its head and directs a red-ringed stare at the bully-beef tin, holes punched in its sides, that she’s holding in her hand.
“Oh no no no no, not for you, this is precious shit in here,” she says, shielding the tin with her bag, giving it some shade. “This is VIP.”
She can feel nothing coming from within the tin, no shifts or vibrations of life, and she fervently hopes that her little passenger is sitting tight. They’re good at that, of course – squatting, saving up their strength for the right moment to make a leap. She opens the lid a crack and peeks at the subdued jewel gleam of the creature within, careful to keep a hand over the top of the tin in case of jumping incidents. She (or he) sits there quite still in the bully-beef can, on a cushion of damp toilet paper, in the inscrutable manner of amphibians.
Frogs are ambiguous gifts. They are what naughty boys are supposed to give to girls they like, in order to disgust them. They are what Len gave Alma and Katya to play with when they will little.
These frogs were received by the sisters in very different ways. When Katya found her frog – on her pillow, or in the tin trunk where she kept her tangled clothes – it was a gesture of secret recognition, and her delight only proved that she was more beast than beauty, just like him. There was unthinking cruelty in it, though, like there was in everything he did. Len never considered that she might want to keep her frog, after its dramatic appearance. That she might grow attached. She tried of course, the first few times, with jam jars and pond water and captured flies, but she had no technique then and all her frogs died. So each gift of a damp, glossyeyed creature was also the gift of its corpse. She sensed a lesson in this, although it’s unlikely Len intended one.
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