What did these presents do for her sister? They gave Alma the opportunity to release the scream she held always in her chest. Her father would bloat his throat like a bullfrog and make belching croaks, and was not above chasing Alma around and slipping a frog down the front of her dress. Alma told Katya once she never got rid of the feel of the slime. These days, Alma’s children have no pets.
But that’s Alma’s issue, not hers. Katya and frogs, they’ve always got on well. And she knows quite a bit more about them now than she did, having spent the previous night studying her new field guide. She checks again on her friend. No movement. “Come on,” she tells it. She reaches in with a fingertip and taps its cool back. It flinches, flexing its toes. Alive, then.
At last, she sees a shape making its way up the long white corridor of palms, growing larger and assuming the unmistakeable lineaments of the PPR-mobile. She clutches her tin can to her chest and waves. She’s pretty pleased to see her van, and Toby at the wheel.
Mongooses prove to be stimulating van-mates. Toby has done his best, trying to confine seven of them in two of the maximum-security, specially designed, humane carrying boxes, but they’re slippery customers, liquid and lithe and with a nasty bite too. As the van bumps out of the parking lot, already they are starting to slither out of the boxes, popping latches, squeezing through holes the size of keyholes.
“Oh shit,” Toby mutters as one of them comes poking its head through the sliding window that separates the cab of the van from the back.
Katya beats it back with a light bop on the nose, and tries to wrestle the window closed again; it sticks halfway. There’s a mutinous jostling going on in the dim rear.
“So this is the SPCA lot, then. What’s the story?”
“Someone was trying to export them as exotic pets. Trying to cash in on the ferret trend, you know? Unbelievable.”
“Huh.”
She’s not sure she likes the terse worldliness of his tone; this is her business, after all. Nor does she appreciate the casualness with which he is spinning the wheel of the PPR-mobile. But Toby is not half as cool as he’d like to make out. He’s somewhat wild-eyed and white-faced after his three days at the helm of Painless Pest Relocations.
“Slow down. God. No wonder they’re getting overexcited. So let me get this straight – they’ve been in the back of the van all night?”
“Well, shit, I didn’t know what to do – getting them in there was hell, and then – well, they’re crazy, Katya! I didn’t know where to put them, or, or anything. I chucked in some water and some muesli, and – yaouw!” He jerks the wheel, skids and comes right.
Another jailbreaker has got through the barricade, shinned up the back of his headrest and dug its claws into the top of his cranium.
“Oh bugger,” she says, thrusting the tin at him. “Grab this for a sec.”
He takes it blindly and steers with one hand while she untangles the mongoose from his hair – ignoring a lance of pain in the ball of her thumb – and forces the animal into the rear. It’s chaos back there: mad eyes and sinewy loops of fur. She jams the window as far closed as it will go and examines her thumb.
“Shit! The little fucker bit me!”
“I told you.”
She presses the bleeding puncture to her thigh. Her poor bloody lacerated hands. She should get a rabies shot, but knows she won’t get around to it. She’s been gnawed on by all sorts, and has been lucky so far.
“Maybe I should drive, Tobes,” she says, taking back her tin.
“I’m fine!” he snarls, weaving.
“Out of control, Tobes. I can’t believe you left them in there all night.”
She taps her fingertips lightly against the tin in what she hopes is a soothing rhythm: like raindrops on a tin roof, like rustling leaves, that’s the effect she’s going for.
“Did I mention that we don’t kill animals, here at PPR?”
It’s true: not even by accident. Some injuries, some nasty bites of her own, but thus far no casualties. Let’s hope Toby himself won’t be the first, she thinks. Alma would murder her.
In the end, they just drive on out to the sandy wastes of Baden Powell Drive, out to the Wolfgat Reserve, reverse the truck into the dunes, open up the back and let the outraged mongooses pour out of their busted cages. She counts them off, one to seven, as they slither into the bushes, and Toby mutters “voetsek” after them with what seems to her to be unseemly, and not very PPR-ish, venom.
On the other side of the road, in a dip in the low dunes, Khayelitsha begins: a dusty ocean of tin roofs and walls, wind-battered, the colour of sand and smoke, stretching to the horizon. Table Mountain a pale rumour, far on the other side. The place is bigger every time she drives this way. The road is barely holding, lapped by drifts of sand. The wind relentless. The dunes walk halfway across the tar and the cars have to swerve around them. From the other direction, the shacks are being forced towards the sea by the pressure of the makeshift metropolis behind them. She thinks about the cluster of wood and tin homes near Nineveh. That’s growing too, creeping outwards through the marshland. Reaching out to the next informal settlement and the next, linking up, sewn together by taxi routes and shortcuts through the bush. Perhaps this is the real city, and the patches of brick and plaster are the oddities, the stubborn holdouts, too rigid to move or grow.
They pull away, sand crunching under their tyres. Katya can see that Toby, like her, is tired. Adult responsibilities, even three days’ worth of them, seem to have worn his natural good cheer a little thin. Try another twenty years, kid.
But there’s something new about his manner: a tension which she senses has nothing to do with the trials of the job. He’s chewing his lip and, she notes, every now and then ducking to observe himself in the rear-view mirror. He rearranges his fringe to no effect.
“How do I look?” he says. “Do I look tired? I think I look tired. Check these rings under my eyes.”
She lets the comment hang in the air a beat or two. “You’re gorgeous.”
He shoots her a glance. She’s waiting for his gappy smile – she’s missed it.
“So what’s the can all about?” he asks.
“Bully beef.”
Toby wrinkles his nose as if he’s never heard anything so gross in all his life.
“But look. Inside. Observe.” She hinges open the top. “Pretty, huh?”
“Oh!” His eyes widen in appreciation. “She’s lovely.” For Toby, the beastie world is female. He beams down at the VIP in the manner of a doting father peeping into a bassinet. “Can I?” He picks up the can and upends it on his hand. The captive slides out and squats on his palm.
“Careful. It’s a jumper.”
But Toby has the hands; the creature sits there quietly, untroubled. It’s no bigger than the top joint of his thumb, a beautiful dappled grey-brown with a pale golden line running down its spine. An unostentatious frog, no poison reds or blues, but with a quiet woodland beauty of its own.
It pulses its throat enigmatically. It must be weighing up its options: to leap or not to leap. The essential frog question.
Such fragile creatures, frogs: the delicate webs between their toes, their liquid eyes, the soft flesh of their undersides, and above all their tender skins … Easy to see how the slightest shift, a fractional drying out of the world, would affect them violently, with such a moist and flinching barrier between their insides and their outsides. The strength in the legs always comes as a surprise.
“Mom says you two used to keep these. As pets.”
Surprising, that Alma’s told him this. “They’re quite good company, actually. Although they don’t keep you warm at night.”
It’s evening by the time they get home, and Katya’s tired and irritable after the long day. Lights are burning upstairs in her house. Toby brings the van to a halt and sits there, eyes flickering to the bedroom window and back.
“So,” he says, and does a drum roll on the steering wheel. “Hey, check it out. Dere
k the man.”
There on the opposite side of the road stands the forlorn figure of Derek, today wearing a pink shawl over his head and with his left leg cocooned in a floral scarf. Still clinging on.
“Ahoy, Derek!” cries Toby, pushing open the rusty window.
Derek totters around in a three-sixty, confused. “Ahoy,” comes a feeble cry when he spots them. “Got some smokes?”
“Nah, sorry.”
“You give him cigarettes?”
Toby shrugs.
Over on that side of the road, new brick walls have thrown themselves up overnight. “Holy shit,” she says, “It’s going up fast, whatever it is.”
“Think it’s flats,” says Toby. “So, anyway, you know that girl?”
“What? What girl?”
“Tasneem. From up the road. You know, the one we met outside.”
“The crack chick. What about her?”
“Well, actually …” But he doesn’t have to continue. His telltale eyes keep creeping up to the lit window. Ah, she thinks. Romeo. Juliet. Christ.
“She’s here? Toby, in the house?”
“Well, yeah. Just for a few days, though, she’s been helping out. With the work, and that.”
“With the work?”
“Ja, she’s really good. At taking notes, and that. And the money.”
“With the money.”
“She does accountancy at school. She’s great, you’ll see, you’ll really like her.”
“Look, it’s been a long day, let’s just get inside, shall we? Get this shit out of the van. Actually you can do that by yourself. Put it all in the garage.”
“Jees.” Toby stalks off towards the garage door, which he despises even more than she does.
There’s a bash on her passenger-side window, and a mangled bird beats the glass with grey feathers.
“Derek,” she says wearily. Knocking on her window with one bandage-swathed fist. She cracks the window down two thumbs. “Got nothing today, man.”
He steps back but keeps her fixed with a disapproving stare as she gets out of the car and steps around him.
There’s a rumour that Derek once had a life, a job as a civil servant. And there’s something about him that makes this plausible. Right now, for example, his expression is that of a summons-server for traffic court: unamused, unbending, perhaps a little disappointed in her.
Derek’s bandages don’t cover real wounds, or not physical ones anyway. He always has them on, and they move from limb to limb according to his fancy. But still, swathed as he is, he is an eloquent figure of suffering pride. He’s followed her to the gate, is standing too near. He is a tall man, even powerful, when you stop to let yourself consider it.
“Nothing today,” she says again, irritated. “I’m sorry.” She opens her door and goes in quickly without looking at him again.
It’s immediately clear to her that something has happened. Some alien force has passed through the house like a shockwave. There’s a freshness. A sense of space and light. As if the walls and ceilings have stepped back from each other a few paces. The sensation is so acute that she stands for a few moments, uncertain, the key still in her hand as if there is another, invisible door that still requires opening.
But she can’t investigate the odd sensation just yet because the girl, Tasneem, is in the front room, standing on Katya’s couch with her knees braced against its back, one hand splayed on the wall, looking up at the ceiling. She twists around to smile at them. It’s a pose that shows off a limber body: white vest creeping up against dark skin, camo shorts. The backs of her knees are slightly paler than her taut shins. A pair of slip-slops lie on the carpet.
Toby wriggles through, mongoose-like, to insert himself next to her. Both of them stand there smiling at Katya – the girl lightly, Toby with a kind of naked pleading. He so wants her to be kind! Katya can see he’s stretched tight: damage might be done by the lightest pin-prick.
“This is Tasneem. Tas, Auntie Katya.”
The girl bounces down from the couch and sticks out her hand, a grabby strong handshake, and smiles to reveal large porcelain teeth. “Ja, we met. Whoo, you guys smell really bad,” she says.
“Mongoose piss,” says Toby authoritatively. “It honks.”
The girl points up at the wall above the couch. “See it?”
“See what?” Katya twists to look.
“See? Big one, too.”
“What?”
“Crack,” say Tasneem and Toby in unison. The girl’s bounced up onto the couch again, demonstrating.
And Katya does see. The crack has grown huge. Shit, it’s a finger wide, and not quite dark in there: there’s a leak of illumination, a slight stain of sunset light spreading from some fissure in the outside wall. Toby steps up onto the couch, puts his ear against the wall to listen, then holds his hands out as if warming them at a ghostly braai.
“Check, there’s a breeze,” he says.
Katya reaches between the bodies of the two young people. She raises a palm, experimentally – not touching, just holding her hand before the crack. From the guts of the building, a light wind stirs. She pulls away, almost stumbling as she steps backwards off the couch.
“Does that mean it goes right through?” asks Toby. “All the way?”
“I don’t know. How should I know? Shit.” It’s chilled her, that breath coming through the crack.
The kids bounce off the couch again, getting in front of her, getting in her way. She pushes past them, walks through into the kitchen. Drops her bag and stands and stares.
It’s like a strange dream. It’s her house, but changed. A suspicious quantity of light seems to be billowing in through the windows. The blinds are gone, that’s it. The panes are clean, clear as water. And the filing cabinet, the old grey steel one that used to hunker just here, at the inconvenient corner of the staircase and the kitchen nook, where she used to bash her thigh on it in passing – it’s vanished. The side table, the pine one with the chunk of wood under one leg to stabilise it: also gone. Everything is shining unnaturally. The floors, luxuriating in the air, gleam. It takes her a moment to realise that this is due to the absence of rug. Everything is stripped down, spare, scrubbed. Has she only been away a few days?
“I feel like Rip van Winkle,” she says. Blank looks from the kids. “What happened?”
“Looks good, eh?”
“What have you done? Where’s … where is the goddamn filing cabinet?”
Why, of all precious things, she should fix on this dour item of office furniture to accuse them with strikes her as farcical even as it comes out of her mouth. She doesn’t care. “Toby, the bloody carpets? Where the fuck is everything?”
“We thought you’d like it,” says the girl quietly, behind Toby’s shoulder. But not without a certain pious tone.
“We did! We thought you would! Come on, Aunt Katya, don’t freak out! Don’t freak out!” Toby takes her hand, coaxing, consoling, desperately grinning. “Come on, it looks great, doesn’t it? We cleaned everything! Check! Check!”
She pulls her hand away. Now he’s flipping open kitchen cabinets, flicking on lights, showing her lined-up cereal boxes and sorted silverware. Somehow she’s close to tears. That poor old filing cabinet, with its constipated paper guts. Its awful old jammed-up sliding drawers, hanging skew. Its patches of black rust.
“Where is it?”
“No, don’t worry! We have it, it’s in the attic!”
“Attic? What attic?”
“Look – look! Let me show you! We haven’t thrown anything away, it’s just – we did a little fung shway on this place, just while you were gone. We thought it would be a surprise for you.”
“What?”
“Feng shui,” says Tasneem at his shoulder, holding back a laugh. She darts her eyes at Toby. “Gee, some people pay to get their houses cleaned.”
“Is that so?” Katya turns on the girl. “Should I write you a cheque?”
“Hey!” Toby steps between them
. “Jees!”
A panic is growing in Katya’s chest, but at the same time, some distant part of her marvels at the spectacle of this kid, this soft-headed youth, stiffening his resolve. She can see him straightening his spine to defend his girl. He makes brave eyes at Katya. She has never seen Toby infatuated before, but of course: he would be one of love’s heroes, indomitable.
She’s shaking her head. “Fuck.”
“Katya …”
“Fuckit, Tobes! You cleaned the house!”
Toby’s frantic: he’s holding out something … What? Her notebooks. They’ve been taken out of the filing cabinet and lined up on a newly cleared shelf. Propped against them as a bookend – and what perverse genius led them to this? – is the picture of Sylvie. Shining behind glass now, in a cheap clip-in frame of red lacquered wood.
She doesn’t feel herself grabbing the picture, but it’s in her hand and she’s hurling it overarm with a surge of relief as the tension in her arm translates into the throw and the missile spins out of her grasp. Clean follow-through! She’s not aiming at anything, but the frame barely misses Tasneem’s head and smashes instead into a clay bowl filled with fruit Katya did not buy, and everything shatters on the bare floor, and there’s oranges and apples all over the place. The sound is great, perfect, just the right pitch and crunching reverb to satisfy, and she feels it shuddering through her, and she hears too the voice that comes out of her, a bellow of rage: “I don’t even like fucking fruit!”
And then the kids are gone, and she looks around in some confusion to find them all the way over on the other side of the house, by the front door, eyes huge, shrinking together and gripping each other’s arms like a hapless couple in a horror movie. It’s funny: she laughs.
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