It’s sunny out there. Alma’s not one for the inconvenience of shade trees, shedding leaves and pushing up the lawn. Katya sighs and steps down onto the grass. They all turn and look at her: Alma, Toby, the dark-haired twins and Tasneem. Kevin’s not here – he’s often away on business – but that hardly seems to matter. Alma and her offspring are a family, complete in themselves. Able to absorb Tasneem, it appears, but not quite Katya.
“Hello, all,” she says.
Toby flaps the girl toddler’s arm back and forth in a wave.
“You look smart today,” says Tasneem, annoyingly. Katya’s wearing nothing particularly chic: new black jeans, a fitted shirt. Perhaps the girl thinks she’s made a special effort.
“Sorry about yesterday,” Toby says at once. “The house, and that.”
“Yeah, well.” She gives the twin a skew smile. “Anyway. Maybe you could tell me where you put the goddamn corkscrew.”
“Third drawer under the sink,” says Tasneem, although her eyes are appraising. Is Auntie Katya panicked about her corkscrew? Does she drink too much?
In turn, Katya watches the teenagers, covertly examining their exposed skin. Alma was exaggerating, of course, about Toby being bitten all over. He’s porcelain and sea glass. How on earth did the Grubbs’s dingy genes recombine to create such a specimen? Both Toby and Tasneem seem unscathed, in fact. Fresh out of the box.
But then Toby turns his head and Katya sees a small cut on his cheek, a thin stroke of red just below the eye. She can feel her own cheeks and the back of her neck go cold at the sight.
She waits until only Toby’s eyes are on her, then touches her face with a fingertip. He shrugs and makes a face.
Apologies. Katya is not, she’s been told, very good at them.
At least the blood was not Tasneem’s. Some comfort in that, a drop of sick relief. At least it’s all in the family.
They’ve set up a trestle table. With knives and forks and napkins. Katya allows herself to be led, like an invalid, to her seat, and for the first few minutes there is a careful silence.
Salad! What bizarre children are these? They eat the salad, what’s more, with great seriousness, concentration and invention. Toby lays out bowls of greens and chopped reds and puréed yellows, and proceeds to construct elaborately layered lettuce parcels. Tasneem punctures the skin of a tomato with her fine incisors. Toby’s jaw grows huge when he chews, and his Adam’s apple bounces as each masticated bundle goes down.
They have both recovered their perfect good humour. Perhaps an aunt’s fury, like a messy house, is easily defeated with youth and resilience. Katya meets Tasneem’s eyes across the table, and they conduct a rapid, wordless truce, sealed with a blink on Katya’s part; on Tasneem’s, a dab of the lips with a paper towel.
She can put all this greenery into her system, but she will never be made of the same flesh as these pure children. They would never have touched that bully beef – food of the underworld. Perhaps, having eaten it, she now must return again and again to Nineveh.
The noise of their eating, full of snaps, rasps and crunches, adds an air of briskness to proceedings. It would become intolerable if they had to share very many more meals like this, but for now, she’s just grateful for the lack of conversation.
The kids look like pretty insects to her: little garden helpers, mandibles moving. Toby is lean and long, with those giant eyes and triangular chin, mantis-like. He even has his hands held up and clasped, unconsciously praying for something. Why has she never seen it before? The twins: tight grubs. Tasneem is beetle-like, glossy, busy.
Compared to them, she feels too soft to be an insect herself, too indolent. A moth at best, quietly moulting moth-matter in the corner. She dips her proboscis humbly into the salad dressing. All yesterday’s anger has dissipated. It’s their age, she thinks. The invincible age. How can she deny them anything?
Tasneem, fuelled, is now putting the plates and cutlery through new manoeuvres: double-quick, they’re stacked and ferried through to Annabel in the kitchen. The table stands at ease, awaiting further orders.
Now Toby has an infant on each knee, and Alma is hovering behind him, and it’s like a diagram of reproduction. Katya’s in awe: all this new flesh that has emerged from her sister’s body!
She’s feeling prickly, out of place again. Frogs in her pocket. She has not yet told Alma about her meeting with Dad, and now she doesn’t think she will. The risk of another argument is too great.
Katya idly picks up a toy from the grass at her feet. It’s a plastic frog – you pull a string out of its wide, smiling mouth, and as it swallows back the string a tinny song plays. She holds it up with a smile.
Alma returns the smile, but her eyes are severe: she will not acknowledge this, not now. “It’s from Kevin’s brother,” she says. “Cute hey?”
The frog tugs Katya’s finger, trapped in the pull-ring, back against its plastic mouth. It’s actually slightly painful. She removes her finger with a sigh. This is all very wholesome, but it’s enough. She thinks of Mr Brand, his venal weight, his gold signet ring, his fine substantial handshake. The others barely look up from their play when she pushes herself away from the table.
“Love you and leave you,” she says. “Business calls.”
Tasneem smiles and Toby waves, and the twins wave too. But Alma rolls her eyes, and Katya knows why that is: it’s their father’s voice that Alma hears when Katya speaks like that.
12. SACRIFICE
The lawns of Constantia seem bland and sterile after the less showy, more intricate pleasures of the wetlands. All is orderly, apparently clipped into obedience – but a pest-relocation expert can always tell where the pockets of anarchy lie in a landscape. There, for example: those hadeda birds; they shouldn’t be here at all. Big raucous loafers with their pterodactyl beaks and their rackety cries. They’re immigrants here, newcomers from the north, shouldering aside the guineafowl. She feels a certain admiration for these shifty troublemakers. As pests go, they make worthy opponents.
At the Brand’s house, she parks next to the rockery, shoulders her bag and walks up the lawn. The place seems vast and quiet without a party going on. Blue water laps in the bean-shaped swimming pool. Silver-trees whisper sidelong to each other, flat hands turning to disguise the sound.
The caterpillar tree is looking healthy, if still a little shaken by its recent experiences. A few new leaves are already budding. Out of habit, she pokes around in the flowerbed, looking for ant lions, stick insects, chameleons.
Something zings through the air overhead. Katya ducks, then looks around. Beyond the flowerbed is another, broad plateau of lawn, and placed upon it in the distance is a familiar figure swinging a golf club. How pleasant to spend your days in games and entertainments! Distance reduces Mr Brand’s impressive bulk and he looks merely stocky.
The arc of the ball is beautiful, though, and draws the eye – until one of the hadedas sculls across the sky beyond, mocking the golf ball’s dumb trajectory. The man pauses his game to lean on his club, eyes following the bird. The hadeda gives one derisory haw and flaps into a treetop. Katya steps out from behind the flowerbed.
A large stretch of lawn can be a stage, exposing and framing a body placed upon it. Walking across it now, she is acutely aware of the shape she makes, bright green on pale green, notebook clutched to her chest. Walking on grass is silent, though, and it takes a moment – in which she might change her mind, turn, run away – for him to see her coming. He does not exactly react, just pivots on his golf club to face her more directly: another actor on the green stage. He is too distant for her to see his expression.
As she gets nearer, he looms taller, growing more solid with every step she takes. Now she can see he is looking at her with a tightly closed mouth. It might not be a smile.
“Mr Brand,” she says, with a cheerful-worker grin.
“Grubbs,” he says. “Grubbs Junior.” But like Zintle, he’s lost some élan.
“You wanted to see me?
You asked me to come.”
This is a fuck-up already, she can feel. He seems tired today, annoyed. Just look what he’s wearing: a saggy blue tracksuit. Clearly he’s forgotten about their appointment. And just look at her, clutching a frog, grinning like an idiot, buttoned up in poison green and burdened with a number of complicated motivations. Not a beguiling package.
What they need here is a whisky.
“Marvellous,” he says. “Come inside, let’s have a drink. My wife’s gone out.”
Indoors, sniffing the bar no doubt, Mr Brand recovers some of his earlier vim. The house is cool, capacious, high-ceilinged, smelling of wood-polish and lavender. There’s a lounge with glass patio doors looking out over the lawns and the pool.
As a child, the orderliness of other people’s houses mystified and slightly frightened Katya. It’s only now that she can look at a place like this, the high shine on it, and recognise the labour of a battalion of servants constantly refreshing and protecting these immaculate surfaces. A never-ending task: even as she watches, a thin film is forming over things, over the glass coffee table, the dried flower arrangement, over the figure of Mr Brand himself.
He clatters around in a corner bar and brings two tumblers of neat whisky over to a glass coffee table. There’s a couch on one side and two easy chairs on the other. Katya hesitates, takes the couch. She sees him pause and make some quick calculation of his own, then choose the other end of the sofa. The cushion sinks with his bulk, and she feels tipped irresistibly towards him.
“So. Something to show you.” She brings out the box with a touch of theatrical flourish. For its appearance today, she has transferred the frog out of the tin can and into the smarter wooden cigar box. She positions it front and centre on the coffee table.
“In the box?” He takes a small pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and slips them on. They make him look both elderly and shrewd, and the balance of the meeting tips back to business. He is, she realises, waiting for his employee to open the box. He does not expect to do anything for himself, here.
She takes her time, laying out her notebook on the table, smoothing flat the pages. He’ll find her squiggles incomprehensible, but at least they are evidence of some sort of diligence. A bit of ink, spilt by her on his account. In her bag she also has a typed report, which says very little.
She is giving herself a bit of time to think. Because there are several factors here for her to weigh up, certain things to reveal and certain things to conceal. She must remember what she is here to achieve.
“You’ll be pleased to know,” she begins, “that I’ve found something very interesting on the grounds of Nineveh. I’ve obtained a sample.” She snaps open the box like a jeweller flashing a ring in front of a hesitant groom.
She tips the frog out onto his coffee table. Touches it with the tip of her pencil. She’s feeling at one with the creature now, like they’re in synch, a carnival double act. As if she need only call out a sum, two plus two, for the frog to tap out the answer with one of her webbed feet.
Mr Brand looks coldly at the frog, who lets out a surprisingly loud hiccup. It is the first time today the creature has broken its silence.
“It’s a frog,” says Mr Brand.
“Well, yes.”
“A frog. One frog. You bring me one frog. This is what I’m paying you for.”
“No, well. This is obviously not your infestation problem, as such. That will take more time. I understand the insects surface after rain.” She blunders on: “But this is something special we have here.” She herds the frog onto her palm with the shaft of the pencil. Strokes it soothingly with the point.
She looks up and Mr Brand is staring at her. His head is cocked to one side, his fingers tracing the rim of the glass. “You Grubbses and your frogs,” he says with an indulgent air. “Frogs! Your dad tried that one on me, too, you know. Tried to sell me a bucket of them. Why the hell should I care about a frog?”
Already she can feel things slipping from her control. She takes a breath and launches her pitch: “Because it’s a complication.”
He grunts. “Grubbs, what’s your point?”
“My point being that this is a most unusual environment that you have here. With all the endangered animals.”
“Endangered animals? What, rhinos?” He laughs aggressively, thrusting out his chin.
“Well, like this one. Heleophryne rosei.” She moves her hand towards Mr Brand to illustrate her point. The frog is cool, still and strangely heavy in her palm. “The Table Mountain ghost frog. Enormously rare. Critically endangered. Only found in a few streams on Table Mountain. And, as it happens, on your property.”
He holds his grin, waiting for the kicker.
She gives him an apologetic smile. “The thing is, I’m legally bound … I have to report it to the Parks Board. It may affect things. Delay things.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. I’ve built a bloody river through the property! For the goddamn frogs! What more do they want?”
“The thing is, you might need someone on the property to deal with this situation. On a more permanent basis. Maintenance staff, as it were.”
“Being yourself.”
“Being myself. I could stay on in the caretaker flat. I think you’ll find my rates are reasonable.”
“How long?”
“Ongoing.”
He gives an indignant snort.
She presses her advantage: “Because, you see, you could bring your tenants in right away. If someone was on-site, controlling the situation. Monitoring the complex ecosystem.”
He stares at her, and for the first time she feels he’s seeing her properly, sizing her up. Something changes, tightens, in the air between them. “You’re not, by any chance, trying to pull a fast one here, Grubbs Junior?”
“Not at all, sir.”
After a long moment, he breaks the stare and throws back his head in one of those big-dog laughs, slapping his thighs. He looks so easy, so delighted with them both, that she wants to lean over and give that meaty leg a good slap of her own.
He must feel where her eyes are, because now, without preamble or awkwardness, while she’s still wondering if they’ve done a deal, he leans forward on the couch and slides his hand in between the buttons of her uniform. His hand is so big it pops the button and she can feel his grasp taking in the whole side of her ribcage.
“Come off it, Grubbs,” he says. “You didn’t come all this way to talk to me about a frog.”
One part of her is so surprised that she’s caught with her hands in the air, pencil in one and frog in the other, a cartoon of astonishment. Frozen, while she decides what she feels about this.
Another part of her, of course, is not surprised at all. The part, say, that decided not to wear underwear with her overalls today.
And maybe it’s because of the young lovers she’s left at Alma’s, or her cracking-up house or the pain of the mongoose bite, but suddenly this is exactly what she needs. She pushes back into his grip, his strong cigarette-advert shake. It is all quite comfortable and unhurried, as if this is something they had discussed previously, perhaps under the vine in the arbour on the day they met, and she feels quite at ease to toss the pencil aside and pull his hand out by the hairy wrist and take a moment to lean over and lay the VIP back in her box and then unbutton the other buttons too and take his hand and push it back again. She kisses him; his mouth is broad and hot, much wider than hers, and tastes of whisky. He presses her down on the couch, a gratifyingly full-bodied clinch, and at some point in the ensuing fumble and grope he rolls on top of her and his elbow catches the edge of the table and tips the box off. The catches are loose, the frog springs free. A vaulting leap, straight at Mr Brand’s face.
She supposes it’s a natural impulse for a golfer, to swing at something at times of tension. Mr Brand, who’s pulled his arm up in pain, does not hesitate. Reversing the motion, he back-hands the frog in flight. Katya shouts and rolls out from under him, landing on her kne
es on the carpet.
Her VIP. Splayed on its back, pale belly agonisingly exposed. A leg twitches. Jaunty no longer. She cups her hand over the body and keeps it there, a beat, two beats. With her other hand she holds closed her greens.
Mr Brand sits back on the couch and takes a measured sip from his whisky glass. “I’ll be damned,” he says.
She picks up the corpse and puts it carefully back in its box. “Thing is,” she says, “it’s endangered. As we discussed.”
“God, sorry.” He’s laughing into his whisky now.
Her face remains stony.
“Shit,” he says. “Endangered, you say.”
“Yes.”
“Well, not on my property, it isn’t, apparently. Plenty more where that came from, right?”
“Perhaps.” She flicks shut the useless catches, one and then two. The moment is slippery with possibility; it could go in any direction now. “So. Should I speak to Zintle then? About a contract. For the maintenance work we talked about.”
But he’s squinting out of the window. “Oh, sure,” he says vaguely, swirling his drink. “Certainly. Have a word with her. She handles that side of things.”
She gives it a couple of beats. “And what should I do now?”
“What?”
“Should I go back to Nineveh? Do I carry on?”
He seems bored now: the game has grown tiresome. He cracks the whisky glass down on the table. “Well, you haven’t finished the job yet, have you? One fucking frog.”
Katya leaves her meaningless report on the coffee table and sees herself out. So much for that plan, she thinks.
But then again, maybe she got what she was hoping for after all.
On her way out, she stops the car in the driveway to replace the lost button with a safety pin. As she’s sitting there, Mrs Brand drives up in a Mercedes. Big car, silky engine. The driveway is narrow: Katya watches the gap between the cars close. The Mercedes slows to a crawl and stops. “Shit,” whispers Katya. Does the woman really want to chat? If they both opened their car windows, Mrs Brand would surely feel the heat off her cheeks, smell the musky waft from under her rigged-together overalls.
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