Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Mrs Brand looks at her suspiciously. She’s the shrewd one, of course. Katya remembers her commanding presence from the bottom of the garden, the strength in her pure blue eyes.

  Mrs Brand nods, that’s all. And then drives on to the house.

  “Poes,” says Toby. He seems close to tears. “Bastard.”

  “Yup. And I carried her all that way, so careful.” Somehow, in death, the frog has become female to Katya, too. “Come on, stop messing with it.”

  She’s behind the wheel, and Toby is sitting with the box on his lap. She’s thinking, poor Toby. This humane stuff, it’s a joke really, it will never fly. It’s not what people want. Eradication is the future. And this poor boy, he’s just not cut out for it.

  Katya watches Toby hold the frog tragically on his palm – that long palm, so unlike a Grubbs’s – and she wants to take the little splayed corpse away from him, clean his fingers and fold them up.

  “Come on, chuck it out,” she says now to Toby. “Seriously. It’s not really endangered – it’s a just a regular swamp frog. There’s lots more where that one came from.”

  He gives her shocked eyes. Poor child. He is too young to understand. The compromises that must be made.

  “Close your mouth,” she says.

  The sky up ahead is streaked with delicate clouds, high and white, like the veins in the marble of the countertops of Nineveh. Weather’s changing.

  When she gets out of the van at the gates of Nineveh, she notices the power and intensity of the frogsong. They’re going mad out there with massed amphibian jubilation. It’s irresistible: Katya’s mood lifts, despite the subdued atmosphere in the van. She feels half-frog, half-girl, lapping at the moisture in the air, so dense and rich. Her frog skin is wet and alive. She bounds over to the giant gates on frog legs, clutches the bars with frog fingers, throat pulsing with excitement. Home!

  Pascal’s putting the leash on the big dog. Soldier seems jumpy, shivering his hide and lifting his paws as if he doesn’t like the feel of the earth. Pascal pulls shut the door of the guardhouse and slings a faded backpack over his shoulder. He seems less confident without his dark glasses, his small eyes touchingly exposed. He looks distinctly like someone about to duck out of a situation.

  “Where are you going? What’s up?”

  Pascal wrinkles his long nose. “Rain’s coming. Look, just look at him.”

  Soldier is certainly behaving very oddly. The dog is jerking his muzzle to and fro, sniffing the soil and then throwing his head up, ripping at his chain. She can’t see any sign of any creepy-crawlies, though.

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Afterwards.” He pauses, gives her a measuring look. “You will be okay here?”

  “Oh, sure, sure. Except. Well, what happens, if you go?” she says. “What about security?”

  He taps the walkie-talkie on his shoulder. “Same story. Press the red button, I will hear.”

  “But will you come?”

  “Someone will come. And I am not far away.” He raises his chin in the direction of the shack settlement, and for the first time she realises that that’s probably where he lives.

  He opens the gates a crack, and slips through sideways. Soldier has to wriggle to squeeze through the gap. Pascal hesitates. “You sure? Maybe you don’t want to wait. They are not nice, these insects.”

  She is tempted for a moment. Nineveh will feel naked without a guard at the gates, particularly without the unflappable Pascal. But she resists. “It’s okay. Thanks, but this is what I’m here for, after all.”

  He shakes his head. “Just push this closed when you are finished, yes?”

  He leaves the big gold padlock hanging by one arm. Then man and dog start out down the corridor, which has grown sombre in the changed weather. The fronds of the palms have lost their glints and hang heavy on their stems like the plumage of great, sodden birds. Soldier pulls ahead, clearly glad to be free of the place. They don’t look back. Pins of rain start to prick her skin.

  Toby helps carry her collection boxes and supplies over the wooden bridge and up to Unit Two. Then he extends a pale hand through the driver’s side window, and she waves to him as he cranks the van around and heads off into the rainy evening, bearing the body of the unfortunate frog. Katya has a moment of unease when she snaps the padlock shut – but surely Pascal means what he says, that he’ll come if there’s trouble? And better locked in than out, right?

  She gets back inside just as the rain starts for real, and carries her bags through into the kitchen. She feels tense, excited; skin tingling from the damp. She kicks off her shoes and wanders from room to room, looking out from each window. No circling bicycle, no lonely watchman’s fire.

  Outside, the voices of the frogs build and build, until the rain builds in turn and drowns them out. The rain is what they’ve been waiting for, what they’ve been reeling in with their song. They’ll be mating soon, and laying eggs.

  Perhaps that’s what it was all about, that strange scene with Mr Brand. Frog-mating season! Laughing still, she falls flat on her back on her bed. She takes the safety pin off her overalls and slides her hand in. She holds her palm experimentally over her ribcage, over her breasts. Her hands are much smaller and cooler than his were. Impossible to recreate that heavy touch. Impossible to recreate any of it: now that she’s away from him, the whole incident seems unreal. She cannot imagine, in sober recollection, how it came to be that their two unlikely bodies collided in that way.

  A problem, in her erotic life. An inability to imagine these encounters, before or after each event. Her adventures have always been this way: easy to fall into, rather surprising as they happen and somewhat ridiculous immediately afterwards. Her partners are unlikely, and she never really sees them coming. Or going, as they do.

  She met her first boyfriend when she was seventeen. That didn’t last long. She was still with her father then, working as his assistant. The boy was a student. She wanted to stay with him, curl up in the manky hollow in the foam mattress on the floor of his commune and never leave. They fought about it, Dad and her. Len wanted to move on; there was some job he’d heard about in Pietermaritzburg, something a friend of a friend had told him about.

  At the height of the argument, she hit her father in the face. It surprised her, mid-swing, how much she wanted to. He hit her back, and broke her nose. That night she bled all over her boyfriend’s pillow.

  It was the first time the violence between Katya and Len seemed cruel and deliberate, rather than some kind of mad collateral damage. It felt right. This was the proper way, the only sufficiently emphatic way, to go about splitting up with her father. And it had worked for Alma, after all.

  Alma’s definitive moment of violence happened when she was seventeen, too. Len had moved them temporarily into a rented flat, all three of them together in a room. The girls were getting too big, though: too old for this life, but also too large, and growing daily. There was less and less space between them all. Soon they’d be rubbing up against each other like the branches of a cramped tree, chafing shiny patches on each other’s bark. There were more and more fights between Alma and Dad, with Alma retreating ever deeper into the silence that enraged Len the most.

  On that day, Katya was sitting on the windowsill, a book raised between her and the squalls of Grubbs family life, and so she didn’t see the start of it. Perhaps it was Alma who hit first, lashing out at last. Whatever she did, Len was faster. By the time Katya looked up, he had Alma’s fingers gripped in his hand, bending them back so far you could hear the snapping.

  Alma didn’t cry, or even cry out. She went very pale and sat down quickly in a chair, her hand held up in front of her. It still looked a lot like her hand, but wrong, skew. All of them were quiet, and all of them knew: at last, after all the bashing and battering, something had been broken – on purpose, and for good.

  Katya doesn’t remember Alma’s leaving, or if she said goodbye. She does remember sitting with her father in that rent
ed room, that same day or one soon after, Len on the bed fiddling with a butterfly net. Katya was on the cramped windowsill, feet up, noticing how much bigger the room was now that Alma was gone. Len put the net over his head, pulling a face to make her laugh. She looked at all the new space between her and her dad. And she was gripped by a fear, like a child’s dread of the darkness under the bed, of stepping down alone onto that expanse of drab carpet.

  Years later, bleeding in her boyfriend’s bed, Katya felt like she’d finally made that journey across the carpet and out of the room. But after she’d spent a week with the student, his housemates told him she had to go. She was too strange, too rough, too young, and she smelt bad. She remembers stepping out into the white sunlight outside the house, with a small rucksack and nowhere to go, stripped of connection to every human thing. Her face was still sore and bruised. She never did fit in with that university crowd, anyway.

  She retreated to Aunt Laura’s couch in Pinelands. It was at this time that Katya reacquainted herself with Alma, who turned out to be living in Mowbray, not too far away. Katya visited her a few times in her tiny, impeccable bachelor flat – evidently, too tiny and impeccable to accommodate Katya – and held the new baby on her lap. Alma, only twenty then, seemed both exhausted and triumphant, like a soldier returned from a tough campaign. She was further away than ever, standing on the other side of some wide desert of experience, and too tired to call to Katya over the distance. Alma never spoke about Toby’s genesis. Katya never spoke about her broken nose, which she’d briefly hoped might be some new bond between them. In lieu of chat, they handed the baby between them.

  Toby had not yet gained the robust wriggliness of his toddler years, and Katya was afraid that she might snap an arm or a neck in some gesture of untrained affection. So she sat completely still, the baby growing heavy on her legs, until the sense of paralysis and claustrophobia almost overwhelmed her. Alma, watching with eyes red from sleeplessness, always seemed to wait until just this moment to retrieve the child – deftly, even with her crooked fingers – and let Katya go.

  After a few weeks, Katya’s residence at Laura’s became intolerable to them both. And so – it still shames her to remember this – Katya found out where her father was, and she went back.

  Her hands fall still; her chest moves up and down softly. Outside, the wind is folding the rain into fluted columns. She thinks of her neighbours, not too far away, in their small shacks with the rain hammering on tin roofs. And what about Derek and his companions? She wonders what they’ll do in the rain, now that they have only the alley for shelter.

  She pictures Derek getting wet, his saturated bandages growing heavier, pulling him to the ground and plastering him there like soggy toilet paper. When she gets home, she’ll give Derek some cash, or an old jersey or two. Promise.

  One thing she can say about herself: she has never been ungrateful for a roof, never taken it for granted. Roof, bed, floor, walls. It still seems incredible to her that she has them all, all at the same time; that she’s got this much right.

  The solitude feels precious to her. She is the only person left here, in Nineveh, and the thought fills her with precarious peace. She swung it, didn’t she? She thinks she swung it. Zintle will draw up the contract: that’s what he said. She can stay.

  She remembers the dead frog falling to the ground. A little sacrifice. Small price, she tells herself, for a measure of sovereignty. It’s been a long walk from there to here: from the pavement outside that godawful student digs to a place where she can touch the walls and floors with almost frictionless pleasure, as she does here in Nineveh.

  She feels cautiously free, a tool that has escaped its users. She is a trowel tossed in the air, gleaming for a moment with reflected light, uncertain where to fall. Certainly, she no longer feels Mr Brand’s heavy hand upon her: he might be her employer, but he’s not her master.

  But there’s something niggling at her. Some part of it that doesn’t feel real, or certain. Perhaps because she knows that tools are not made to be free. By definition, they are used.

  And she has a feeling that she knows what’s coming next.

  She waits.

  It doesn’t take long.

  Rats-in-a-rat-trap, squashed-flat!

  The knock comes loud and clear, resonating through Unit Two and waking her from a doze. She’s on her feet at once.

  There’s a chance it might be Toby. Come back to drop something off, some item she forgot in the van. But she knows it’s not.

  Everything is very dark. She feels her way through the flat to the front door. She’s getting to be quite good at this; she hardly needs her eyes. Through the peephole, she can see that the motion detector has triggered the light, but it only backlights a hunched shape. Not Toby. Toby’s silhouette is tall and slim: when he comes to her front door at home, he wavers in the pebble glass like a piece of seaweed teased by the current. Too short to be Pascal, too burly for Reuben. No, this silhouette is something else. The shadow figure raises a fist and hammers the door.

  She knows that if she stands very still in the unlit hallway, she will not be heard or seen. She barely breathes. The visitor is undeterred. He presses his face close to the peephole, blacking it out. Then he withdraws. He slaps the door, swears, and seems to move away.

  Katya waits, paralysed, hands clasped in front of her, until the motion detector has once more relaxed its vigilance and switched off the light outside.

  But she knows he’ll be back. She will not have to wait for long. She cannot sleep now.

  An hour later, again:

  Rats-in-a-rat-trap, squashed-flat.

  And this time she opens the door.

  13. RATS IN A RAT TRAP

  “About bloody time, I’m fucking freezing out here.”

  He comes in busily, pushing her aside, bringing the breath of the swamp. It’s too dark to make out his face, but there’s no need for that. He seems hump-backed: some kind of bag on his shoulder. She closes the door slowly behind her.

  “Hello Dad,” she says. “Thought it might be you.”

  “Hello my girl,” he says. “Storm’s a bastard, eh?” He moves, with surprising speed and accuracy, down the dark passage to the bedroom. She hears the bed creaking, as if under a great weight. Her dad has always commanded more gravitational force than his actual mass would suggest. She follows him wordlessly. He’s sitting on the edge of her bed, back bent and hands between his knees: a dark shape against the white of the duvet. In the dim light from the window she can see his hair slicked back, his forehead shining with rain.

  “Dad. What are you doing here?” And how did you get in, she wonders, remembering the padlocked gate.

  “I’m buggered, my girl,” he says, and his voice sounds frail, older. “We’ll talk tomorrow, eh? I need some shut-eye.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Tomorrow.”

  He gets the bed. She takes the couch in the lounge. It’s not uncomfortable. She doesn’t sleep, though. She doesn’t take her clothes off. Although they’re in different rooms, all night she senses him: he sleeps deeply and loudly, rasping, farting, moaning in dreams. She smells him. Outside, the rain comes down.

  Oh, but she’d forgotten how he was in the mornings.

  She wakes to find him putting on a show for her, striding barefoot up and down the lounge carpet like he’s on a catwalk. Lips pursed in a soundless whistle. Any minute now he’s going to turn up the volume.

  Of course he knows she’s awake and watching. He’s put on the overalls – her overalls – and is twitching and adjusting them as he prances, shrugging them back into their original shape. His ankles show, and he bends – neat bend, neat body, he always had a trim physique – and rolls down the legs to match his slightly greater height. Wiggles his shoulders around, flexes and releases his pectorals: the fabric that strains over her breasts falls loose on him. He rolls down the cuffs over his bony wrists. He tugs at the collar, smoothes the lapels.

  Still half asleep, she sees herse
lf: aged, desexed, capering. It’s an old, familiar mirror and a cruel one. Dad.

  Len lifts his feet one by one and cracks the joints, curling his hairy toes. Gun-shot knuckle cracks, his old morning chorus. “Fits like a glove.” He grabs her ankles through the blanket. “Get up, you lazy Katyapillar! Cup of tea for your old dad? Come on, stick on some clothes. You’re not decent!”

  Her throat is swollen. A frog without a croak.

  When he wants to, Len can be still as stone. She’s seen him creep up soundlessly behind a rabid bat-eared fox, and watched him wait unblinking for a wasp to remove itself from his eyelid. Right now, though, he’s the noisiest man alive. Karrump, karrump, stomping through into the kitchen, bashing things around in the fridge.

  She is sinking, sinking, she is heavy as stone. She lies there considering. The sense she had earlier, of being a tool free in flight, of falling through air and light: it is gone. What she feels is that she has been tossed from one iron grip to another; one man has thrown her and another has caught her. A sure grasp. A familiar one. And she feels what a tool feels. She feels gravity. She feels inevitability. Because that is what a tool is: something designed to the purpose of the workman, to extend the workman’s hand. To receive the dirt from the palm of the holder. To be dug into the ground.

  She is a child, a five-year-old. She is tiny, and she is heavy enough to drop right through these floorboards and into the mud.

  “Get out here!” he yells from the kitchen. “Haven’t you missed me?”

  Even in his chipper, sarcastic voice she hears her own. She sleepwalks through to join him. In the kitchen, he’s switched all the lights on and he’s sitting on the stool as if they’re back in a bar, his legs bent jauntily, the green jumpsuit straining against his knees. He looks at her with bright eyes. Same glass green as Toby’s – funny, how she never saw that before. And despite herself, she has to laugh (always): he’s got out the bully beef and he’s digging in. With relish. It’s not lost on her, that this is the prey she was really luring with her silly cubes of meat. She might as well have put tobacco out, or left whisky. He’s drinking the red Sparletta too. As she watches, he drains a bottle. “Lovely,” he gasps, pulling his mouth away with a plop. “Aren’t you going to make your old dad a cuppa tea?”