Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  “No teabags. Anyway, I see you’ve helped yourself. How long have you been up?”

  “Oh, hours. Early bird gets the worm, eh?” He nods at the paling window. The rain’s still coming down, if less heavily. “Now’s the time to get working.”

  “It’s my job, Dad,” she says. “Mine.” Her voice is a bit too loud, and she’s leaning forward, hands clenched on the edge of the table. That’s better: she’s waking up. Ready to fight – eager for it, even. A long time since she’s felt this.

  He snorts in mild amusement and lunges forward, dabbing at her left shoulder. What he brings away is something gaudy, greenish-blue, clinging to the backs of his fingers. He holds it up close to her face. It’s her friend from the vlei, the funky, iridescent beetle with the jointed feelers.

  He lets it run over his clenched knuckles, then cups his fist loosely around it. It crawls out under his thumb. “Little cutie,” he says. “Promeces palustris. Looks harmless, doesn’t it?”

  That’s the gogga?

  “Hey …”

  He holds it in his fist again, puts his other hand over the end of the fist and shakes it like a dice in a cup.

  “Give that back.”

  “What? Oh, you want it? Okay.” He leans forward and, with a click of his fingers, lets the beetle loose behind her ear. Reverse conjuring.

  “Fuckit, Dad.” She fishes it, wriggling, out of her collar.

  He chuckles. She slams the window open and shakes the beetle off her hand into the air.

  “Whoops, lost one there!”

  “Christ. Dad …”

  But he’s off again, pacing through the house, combatively clicking his knuckles. That sound, the syncopation of her childhood.

  She follows him helplessly through the rooms.

  “Good thing you pitched up, Katyapillar. I was starting to lose my grip here, I’ll tell you that. My place is not so bad in the summer, but when it’s wet! And these bloody guards – bloody Nigerians or whatever—”

  “Pascal? He’s Congolese. And Reuben’s a local.”

  “Whatever. Shit! Try to get them to do anything! And Brand? Total cunt. Never pays anyone. Fuck him.”

  Len talks and talks and talks. When she was a kid she’d try to keep up: run as fast, talk as loud. Now, though, she’s had more experience with temperamental creatures. She must remember to move carefully around him, do nothing to startle.

  “See, I realised that bugger wasn’t going to be paying up. But I liked the place, I saw opportunity here. I had my thing going. I had access, coming and going, no problems. But then they took my bloody thumbprints off the system. So I had to take the back entrance. The tradesman’s entrance, you might say.”

  She can’t stop listening to him, can’t stop herself from contracting a dose of his chaotic energy. He’s filling the house up with his voice, with his smell. He rolls smoke after smoke, ashing on the carpet. He starts leafing through her notebook, scoffing at this or that. She catches herself laughing, laughter forcing itself out. It’s humiliating, like being an overtired child who can’t stop the giggles.

  She has to slow him down, slow herself down too. Because it’s now that the bad stuff happens, now that things wobble a little out of control: the tooth knocked out by a wild swing of a hand, the collarbone snapped. Many times in her childhood, a fit of this high hysterical mood led directly to an emergency-room visit for her or Alma.

  “Did you get my little present then? Eh?” He bounces his fist along the tabletop, hop hop, and clicks his tongue. He’d always done spot-on animal impressions.

  “Was that you? The frog in the shower?”

  “Strongylopus grayii! Clicking stream frog, they call it. Nothing special. You always did like those slippery buggers. Remember I used to bring them home for you?”

  He’s got her. Because she does remember; and yes, she did love those frogs. He catches her smiling.

  “So do you want to see it? See where your old dad’s been spending his days?” He’s eager, like a child. “You want to?”

  And actually, she does.

  Outside, Nineveh is filling up with watery mud like soup into a bowl. Terrible drainage: that’s another thing she could have told Martin Brand for nothing. Her father leads her down the stairs from the terrace to ground level, and then splashing through the mud around the side. She didn’t notice it before, but there’s a narrow strip of ground at the back, just wide enough for a person to pass between the building and the perimeter wall.

  The building’s rear is blank brick decorated with a tangle of piping, punctured by two small bathroom windows, one below the other. They pause under the windows. The lower one is just about eye-height, but nothing is visible through the textured glass. The rain is soaking them in a way that you’re supposed to mind, but which she never has minded, not really. As a child, she spent many hours with her father like this: in mud, in rain, shivering with cold, holding tools for him or keeping a lookout. Now, they stand in the rain as if it isn’t really happening.

  “Had to find a way around the bloody fingerprint contraption,” Len explains as he lifts his hands above his head and feels along the window frame. “Beep, beep, those friggin buttons, drove me crazy …” He digs his fingers in under the frame, flexes the wrists and pops the hinged window open.

  Something occurs to her. Her own bathroom window, standing ajar, is directly above this one. A drainpipe runs up past both of them. “Dad – don’t tell me you climbed up there.”

  “Unit Two. Bitch to get into. I’m not as young as I once was.”

  “You climbed up there? To use the loo? You’re insane!”

  “Oh, well, it’s not that hard. Gotta be smallish, of course,” he says. “I see you’ve put on a bit, by the way. Just like your mother. Well, give it a go.”

  He braces his foot up on an elbow-joint of pipe and slaps his bony knee. It takes a moment, but then she understands that he wants her to hoist herself up. She hesitates. This is more intimate physical contact than she’s had with Len since she was a teenager. But she puts a hand on his shoulder and a foot on his knee and levers herself up.

  It’s strange. His body under her hands is so spare. The strength is still there, but his muscles have lost their rubbery resilience; his shoulder feels narrow under her hand and his knee wavers under her weight. Her father is getting old. It is the first time that she’s thought of him as anything close to frail. She climbs up his body and grabs onto the window frame.

  Relieving them both of the awkward contact, she thrusts upwards and pulls her torso over the edge. She peers in at a cool, obscure space. It’s clumsy, not the right way of doing it, and she feels like she’s going to plunge face-first onto the floor on the other side. But her hands find the toilet cistern, and she somehow worms her way through on her belly and brings her legs after her and unwinds herself in an ungainly manner into the dim bathroom.

  Her feet find purchase on a slimy surface. Water soaks into her shoes, enough to cover her toes. It seems that Unit One has been thoroughly flooded. She wades forward a few steps and waits while her dad nips in behind her, still limber.

  They’re in a gloomy, splashing place. The first thing she notices is the smell. It is not a foul odour, but the smell of living things, their wastes and exudations. Spittle and musk, mould and decay. Intimately linked to the smell is a sense of indefinable disorder. Chaos hangs in the air like a shout. It is like some wild animal has been kept locked up here. Stronger than anywhere else within the walls of Nineveh, she can feel here in this dank apartment the presence of the beasts.

  The light clarifies. The bathroom is identical to the one upstairs, but stripped of all its fittings. A grid of grouting on the walls shows where tiles used to be. Katya makes her way through into the passage, hand trailing on one damp wall. The carpet is gone. The floorboards feel spongy, and her steps are completely silent.

  The dimensions are familiar: the floor plan is the same as Unit Two’s. But it is transformed. What she sees is a strange duplic
ate of Unit Two, one existing in some degraded alternative world. Or that same shiny apartment in twenty years, fifty – a place that has lain in ruin for decades.

  There is very little of the original decor left. The doors have been taken off their hinges. The furniture is gone, except for a simple wooden table and two straight-backed chairs in the lounge, like a scene from an interrogation room. The fixtures have been pillaged. In the kitchen, broken pipes and straggling electric wires poke out from the wall where the plug points used to be. The walls themselves are streaked, their lower margins green with mould: a tide-line. There is mud on the floor, silted in thin ribbons and piled in the corners, as if a secret river has whispered through the apartment and then sunk away. In between are patches of lush moss growing across the wooden floors. Katya can even see small mushrooms – each a parasol of tender flesh – running along the skirting board. It is bizarrely beautiful: a meadow, a glen, a dell. An in-between place, where things overlap, where the vlei steps inside and the indoor world escapes into the wild.

  Although the furniture has been removed, the flat is not empty. A millipede propels its miniature standing wave along the wall. A blue dragonfly buzzes past her, wings shivering. Other, shadowy shapes are heaped in the corners: bricks, metal poles leant up against the walls. Doors and counter tops and sections of wall-to-wall carpet; a big coil of hose; a stack of the spiny grids of burglar bars. Cold taps, hot taps, sections of pipe.

  The place is a warehouse, she sees now, containing the stripped-out ornaments and accoutrements of Nineveh. A strange dim auction-house for subterranean beings, or a kind of museum, a catalogue of objects from the daylight world. She remembers now the odd things missing from the luxury flats – the patches of bare floor, the missing towel racks. If she’d explored the rest of Nineveh more carefully, gone up into the upper storeys of the other buildings, perhaps she would have seen much greater damage.

  She goes to the bedroom; she knows the layout blindfolded. There’s a sodden sleeping-bag on the floor, like a blue sea slug wedged against the wall. A row of empty bottles. An ashtray on the windowsill and a million roll-up butts on the floor. How long has he been down here? Surely it could only be possible in the dry weather.

  She’s piecing it together. This is the middle world, lying beneath the clean light and sumptuousness of Unit Two. Below this is an even danker world: the crawl-space under the building. She looks for, and finds behind the kitchen counter, the ragged hole in the floor. The plank that covered the opening is missing now, and the water level is high. The black surface winks at her from a couple of feet below the floorboards. The rains must have pushed the water up all over the wetlands. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to move under the building now. Even as she watches, a piece of wooden beading goes floating past.

  And then a single beetle crawls up through the gap, over the lip of the broken floorboards. Promeces palustris. This is their portal.

  Katya is flushed with a kind of admiration for Len’s fiefdom: it’s import/export. Beetles in, building materials out. It’s the kind of breaching of boundaries that someone like Mr Brand could not be expected to imagine, or anticipate, or guard against.

  “You sly old bugger, you,” she says.

  There’s a clanging sound in the bedroom and she goes through to find her father wrestling with an iron bedstead. He’s got it half up on its hind legs but then somehow got stuck, one arm thrust through the springs, so he can’t set it down again. He totters. The whole thing looks obscene, like the bed-frame is trying to mount him.

  “Need some help there, Dad?”

  He wheezes but won’t ask for help. She takes pity on him and steps forward, supporting the frame while he disentangles himself.

  “What were you trying to do?”

  He gives her a swift little look of dislike. “They’ll give me some money for it. Not much, but still. But we need to take it out the front way. Can’t get it through the floor.”

  She’s reaching for the cold metal without a thought. The willing tool. Any awkwardness between them is erased by a job to be done: they both seize on it gratefully.

  Her father used to get her to carry things often, in the old days. He always made her take the front, often the heaviest part, so that she was walking fast, too fast, with him rushing her from behind, the fridge or bed-frame chipping painfully at the back of her ankles. Going down stairs was the worst, trying to outrun the weight of the thing. Now, again, she takes the forward edge. They guide the bed down the passageway and into the hallway, pausing only to let her swing open the front door. They move surprisingly well together. Nothing falls on toes or cuts into ankles or gets set down on fingertips.

  They’re out in the cold blustery air and she leads him along towards the pedestrian gate. He’s weaker than he used to be, that’s for sure. She walks too fast for him, and he drags on the burden, trying to slow things down. She presses on. She is strong.

  When she pulls up short in front of the gate, Len runs into her from behind. His breathing is ragged, but neither one of them is going to mention that. The door opens for her thumb and they manoeuvre the bedstead outside. He’s gone silent now; a little sulky.

  “This way,” he says, pulling her off to the side. She lets him take the lead. They are light-footed people but their burden makes them heavy; their feet sink deep into the mud.

  They come out in a grassy clearing that she hasn’t seen before: a clear patch of grass, decorated with cowpats and hoofprints.

  “Here,” he says. “Down. Put it down, dammit.”

  They put the bed-frame down and she takes a seat on its bare springs. The metal is cold against the backs of her thighs. Her father clasps his hands behind his back and stretches his arms. Click click go his joints.

  “Pissing down,” he notes, but it’s really just a drizzle now. “Actually I need a piss.”

  Katya watches her father dispassionately in the rainy light as he shuffles off towards a bush. He seems tired out, shrunken. He always had a certain style – dapper, one might even call it, despite his filthy clothes; but now they bunch loosely around his shanks. It looks like he’s been wearing her uniform for weeks, and worn it in to his body’s requirements: his sharp knees and elbows, his odorous groin and armpits, his miserly old-man buttocks and chest. She can’t imagine putting it on again after this.

  He returns slowly, doing up his fly. The skin of his face is drawn tight, the cheeks threaded with tiny broken veins. Under the greens he wears a string vest, yellowed, antique. Those broken shoes, one flapping open at the toe. The backs of his hands are speckled with age. She sits with her own hands hanging between her knees, watching the rain bead the bed-frame. With the old, one must be patient. Patient, perhaps even kind.

  “Got a smoke?” he asks.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  He sits next to her at last with a squeak of springs and fumbles a squashed packet from his pocket.

  “Dad. What’s going on? What are we doing here?”

  “This is where they come to do the pick-up. For the scrap.”

  “Oh.” Brilliant, she thinks. Scrap-metal crooks. She watches him pat himself down for a lighter. “So, do you have some kind of arrangement with these people? An appointment? Do they even want this old thing?”

  He shrugs. “They don’t like the heavy iron so much. More the aluminium. Copper pipe.”

  “So this is it. This is what you’ve been up to, all this time – pinching scrap metal?”

  He looks at her sourly. “What else am I supposed to do?”

  He looks so downcast and damp, sitting hunched over on the raw bedsprings. She glimpses the loneliness of his existence. The clammy months of hiding and waiting. The pathetic exchanges of rusty scrap that must be his only human contact.

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Jesus. You can help me. Help me with the damn job.”

  If she was expecting gratitude or softness, it does not come. He sniffs loudly and wipes the back of his hand across his damp nose. “B
loody right,” he says. “You need the help, I’ll tell you that for free. Ten legs!”

  “What?”

  He flicks her chest, right on the badge. “How many legs that thing got? Can’t even tell your insects from your spiders, my girlie. From your mites! You need the help, oh yes.”

  And with that he abandons the bed, and is marching back along the way they came. His back is straight, and he seems to have regained his spirits. Every now and then he shakes his head and chuckles to himself. Ten legs!

  Just before they come up against the wall again, he stops short, distracted by something in the bushes. Turning, she makes out a movement: it’s the tile girl, dressed in tight jeans and a yellow jersey and carrying a Shoprite bag over her head. She comes towards them and smiles, and Katya smiles back. But it’s Len the girl’s looking at.

  He clears his throat. “See you later, eh Katyapillar? I need to have a word.”

  And then he’s bustling off, a smile cracking his face. She watches them from a distance, watches how they stand talking to each other. Len is clearly making an effort. The girl’s friendly and relaxed, hands on hips. She pushes Len’s shoulder playfully. She is not afraid of him, not at all.

  Katya is lanced by a jealousy she has no guard against, and turns away. When she turns back again, they’re walking away. The girl ahead, her father tailing behind. He’s carrying her Shoprite bag for her.

  At the pedestrian gate, she pauses on the threshold, deciding. At length she goes back, finds a piece of broken brick under the boardwalk and props it in the doorway so that her father, when he’s finished his business, can join her inside Nineveh.