Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Inside the flat, she cleans the mud from the floor. She puts out overalls for him, one of the ironed and folded pairs she brought from home. She looks into his pathetic sack of possessions: a razor, a comb, rolling papers, some scuzzy pairs of underpants. They look awfully like the ones she used to have to soak in the bath for him when she was a child – surely not? As she removes each dreary item from the bag, she feels herself loading up with a greater and greater freight of sadness and unwillingness. Each one of his possessions claims some more space here.

  He comes back much later. His mood is still high, and he’s chatty. Maybe he managed to flog that rusty bed for a few bucks after all.

  For supper they eat the pink flesh of the processed meat. She doesn’t even consider making him a different meal, one using the food she bought so hopefully for herself. She knows what Len likes. They swig it down with the last of the bright red syrup. She serves these things to him and she serves herself a helping too. She feels it sliding down her throat, staining her insides. Her dad smokes pungent tobacco, which he’s obtained from somewhere. The rain resumes.

  “So that’s where you’ve been hanging out then,” she says. “Down in Unit One, all this time.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a funny old time. That hole in the floor … Things got a bit out of hand.” His voice is animated again: he’s taking some pride in his story. “It wasn’t a bad little operation. Nobody ever came to check what was going on. I even shipped out a couple of these big bloody plaster lions!” He chuckles soundlessly. “Lions! Down the plughole! Got a good price for them off some lady outside the garden centre. Four hundred bucks the pair. Cash.”

  “Clever.”

  “Well, thank you. I thought so too at first. But now, well, see for yourself: those goggas have got a bloody freeway. Single-minded fuckers, they are. Won’t take no. That and the rain, and the damp coming up, well. That’s why I started coming up to Unit Two, you see. Plus the toilet’s fucked down there.”

  “So what were you waiting for? Why didn’t you just leave?”

  He stubs his cigarette out moodily. “And go where? Home? Where’s that? I came to your house, you know. Walked past it a couple of times. I’ve seen you there.”

  For some shaming reason, her thoughts turn to Derek: her father might have seen her talking to the old man, denying him, turning away. She looks down at her fingers, which are constructing a Derek-esque artefact out of burnt matches and Rizlas on the table.

  Len sniffs. “And your sister wouldn’t have me. Oh no.”

  “Can you blame her?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I never did anything to her.”

  She’s speechless for a moment. “Christ, Dad.” She holds her own hand up in front of his face like a piece of evidence. “What about this?”

  Len stares at it with a kind of cunning, as if it’s a half-wild animal, a spider or a crab perhaps, that needs strategic handling. “Accidents happen,” he says at last. “Accidents happen.” But he seems to feel that something more is needed. “It was like this,” he says. He leans forward and takes Katya’s hand. His old skin feels warm against hers, slightly oily. His palm and the pads of his fingers are tough. “It was just like this. It’s what you do to control a creature, a wild thing attacking. That’s all I meant to do.”

  And with that he separates out one finger, two – the middle finger and the fourth finger – and gently pushes them back until she can feel the sinews pull. Not painful. He holds her hand in that position, his eyes on hers, willing her to understand. “My hand just slipped, that was all, I was too strong. Do you see?”

  What she is thinking is that he has never held her hand before. Skin on skin. It is the gentlest touch he has ever given her, the most earnest communication.

  She thinks also: he remembers. He knows precisely. Right hand. Third and fourth fingers. He remembers it as well as Alma does. She pulls her hand from his, feeling the irregularities of his skin against hers, his old knuckles across her palm, like a length of knotted rope worn smooth from use.

  She makes a fist in her lap and covers it with her other hand.

  “And Sylvie?”

  Len looks up sharply. She’s managed to surprise him. “Sylvie?”

  “Sylvie. Mom. What did you do to her?”

  He gives a huff, as if someone has shoved him in the chest. It’s a laugh, but there’s nothing cheery about it. “I did bloody nothing to her. I couldn’t hurt that woman if I tried. Built like a tank. No darling, in case you didn’t realise, she left us. Walked out, back to England, back where she came from, bye-bye and thank you very much. Never saw her again.”

  One thing: Len has never lied to her.

  “So she didn’t have an … accident.” When she’s finished saying this, a marathon sentence, she has to gasp a breath: she’s run out of air.

  When he speaks, his voice is almost kind. “No, sweetheart. She was often running off, you know. It was nothing new.”

  Katya sits unmoving, balancing this new piece of information very carefully in her mind, a crystal ball. If she moves, it will roll and shatter and possibly slice her to bits.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, she says.” Len folds his arms and shoves his chair back with a squeal. The mood’s changed again: he seems angry, but also energised, determined. “Oh is right. I was the one who looked after you back then, you and Alma. And that, Katyapillar” – he slaps a hand on the tabletop – “is why we stick together now! Right? You with me. We start tomorrow on this job. You deal with the boss, I handle the field operations. We’re a team.”

  She stares at the table.

  “Up bright and early, eh? Early bird. What’s the matter?”

  Katya looks at him and she thinks: This is impossible. This cannot happen.

  She thinks: I have lived my life since the age of twenty in an effort to get away from this, from this, from exactly this.

  14. ARMED RESPONSE

  In the early hours, as if a tap is turned off, the rain desists. Katya wakes. In the brief spell of silence that falls on Nineveh, Len’s sleeping grunts and moans cease too. His body has always seemed wired to the natural world like this, sensitive to its shifts.

  For a brief interval between natural acts, there is a pause, a hush before the orchestra begins. The conductor raises his baton. The creatures of the night wait for the next movement. When it comes, there is no noise. It is rather a change of state – as if the air is charged differently, or has crystallised. Perhaps it is because the moon comes out from the clouds and she sees shadows, washed clean and sharp by the rain, falling on the carpet. Perhaps it is the sense of attentiveness she feels, inside this room and outside, a million small things listening, purposeful, on the edge of some great metamorphosis. Whatever it is, she feels propelled outside, onto the terrace.

  Although it’s early – what, four, five? – people are already awake down in the shacks, probably getting ready for long taxi commutes to work; there are glimmers in doorways, the light of paraffin stoves. The moon is still above the rim of the sea, setting alight the patches of water down in the wetlands. From here she can see that the vlei has grown, the smaller pools linking up to form a twisting lake flowing around black islets of ground. In places, the water seems to lap right up against the outer shacks and infiltrate the muddy alleys between them. It must be hellish in winter: flooded and freezing.

  The electricity’s acting up again. The cold globes of the lamps flicker and revive. There’s a soft, rhythmic clack, clacking, like knuckles cracking all over Nineveh. It’s the locks on all the doors, snapping on and off, on and off, as the electricity wavers. Clack, clack. The lights come on. Off. On again.

  Inside the walls, the mud is shining; it could be groundwater, raised up by the rains and lit by the moon. There are no big puddles, though, but rather a crosshatching of silver, like frost on the ground, blazing in the light under the standing lamps. And it’s … crackling. Like ice splintering.

  She takes the stairs down from t
he upper terrace, the plaster slippery under her bare feet. Nineveh is breathing, flexing in a complex new rhythm that is alien to her: it is not the rhythm of a heartbeat, it is nothing warm-blooded.

  The plank path is cool; damp oozes between her bare toes. The moon picks up shards of dull light, like pieces of flint embedded in the mud.

  What are those things, catching the light?

  They’re moving.

  Swarming.

  Between her and the walls of Nineveh, the mud is alive. It whispers and it clicks. She feels a touch on the top of her bare foot; the tentative brush of a feeler. Things scuttle over her feet. The whole surface is alive with tiny creatures, stirring, swarming.

  Katya walks out among them. The lamps flicker on, off, on, and stay steady.

  She hasn’t expected the beauty.

  She goes down on her knees, she puts her palms down flat on the boards. They run over her knuckles. Their carapaces glitter purple, green and gold. Thousands of them. She examines one on the back of her hand. It waves its jointed feelers wildly in her direction, semaphoring something: insectoid exuberance, the joy of the swarm. Or desperate warning. Or mad lasciviousness. Or something. It unsheathes delicate wings from beneath its hard elytra, but then tumbles off the edge of her hand and into the seething tide of its fellows. Not a big flyer, then. This exodus has been more a march than a flutter.

  She tries to make sense of it. They seem to be swarming in one direction, up from the vlei and towards the gates and the road, and presumably on to the built and unbuilt homes beyond. Blind, seeking. A long march.

  The beetles smoothly lap her wrists, covering her like iridescent scales. They start to come up under her sleeves. She feels a little sting – just a tweak, an experimental pinch – on her upper arm, and she yelps and jerks to her feet, flapping and smacking. Beetle bodies fall off her with a patter, as more climb aboard her feet and start to work their way up.

  Retreat: quickly back up the stairs to the terrace. In the flickering circles of light from the lamps, the ground crawls with the gleaming backs of the insects. Seen from a height, it is like the inching progress of some huge multifaceted organism, feeling its way, finding its passage.

  She falters. This job is not for someone with only two arms, two legs.

  Her fingertips find plastic, she slaps the light switches but they’re all dead. She’s reduced to fumbling in the dark, finding the right knobs and ridges that will guide her through the flat. She stubs her toe painfully on the edge of a cabinet. Turn left from the hallway. Touch one door-frame, two. The bedroom.

  She stands looking down at the body of her father, barely visible in the dark. He sleeps like she remembers him always sleeping: solid, heedless, deep, on his back with his arms flung up on either side of his head like a child’s. She wonders what beds he’s inhabited since they last shared a roof.

  Quietly, she takes the few things she will need: her boots, her gloves. She carries a few collection boxes out to the terrace and, with one in each hand, heads back down into the swarm. The sky is growing paler at the edges.

  It’s like wading through some dry flowing substance, seedpods or grain. Millions of the things. She starts by lifting the beetles one by one, dropping them into the collection box, but soon she’s just dipping the rim of the box into the flow, like scooping water. Quickly the box fills with a dozen, two dozen wriggling bodies. As soon as they’re inside the box they go still, as if listening for danger. Or perhaps they have at last found the place they were seeking. They cling to the floor of the box, to its sides, to the underside of its lid. Two, three, four boxes she gathers in this way. It’s senseless: she’ll never stem the tide.

  Moonlight shows her the empty guardhouse. The door is unlocked. Inside, the chairs are arranged around the table, ghosts in invisible conference. The wooden walls feel flimsy. She wonders if the hut is actually anchored to the earth in any way, or whether the tide of insects might carry the whole box off on their backs. But it’s a safe place, out of the way and close to the exit. The collection boxes with their silent occupants slot in neatly under the table.

  A patch of yellow light suddenly illuminates the ground, cast down from a window in Unit Two. Electricity’s back, and Len has switched on the bedroom light. She wonders what he’s doing in there: smoking cigarettes, gorging himself on lurid meats, pissing in the basin. Then the lights snap off again. Has he gone back to sleep? Maybe, just this once, she’s got the jump on Len.

  She sits in a chair – Reuben’s? Pascal’s? Worn to the shape of one of them – rests her boots on a collection box and watches the parade through the child’s-play window.

  Her boot-tip strokes the wood of the wall, and comes up against a protrusion. It’s the big red alarm button, set low on the wall. It looks serious: like something that a bank teller might press, surreptitiously, under the table when someone’s pointing a gun at her head. She removes her foot.

  Her ankles prickle. When she runs her fingers over them in the half-dark, she can feel tiny bumps where the beasts have bitten her. Itchy. There are creatures in here with her. Her captured friends, and also a few at liberty. Scouts of the main army. There goes one now, a dark shape shouldering its way across the ceiling.

  “Snug,” she tells herself. “As a bug in a rug.”

  Bug in a rug. Not Len’s words, not his voice. They are blanket-wrapping words, smelling of talc and lipstick. Words that sit you on a lap and rub your back.

  Outside, the world is moving, leaving, driven without pause. A liquid rustle like a river flowing past.

  Katya reaches out to touch the cool plastic of the telephone on the desk in front of her.

  The rings go on for a long time, but at last Alma answers, blearily.

  “Kat. What time is it?”

  “Early. Al, I need to ask you something. About Mom.”

  Silence on the other end: the old Alma freeze-up.

  “Dad says she went back to England.”

  Alma is quiet for a long time. “Well, maybe she did.”

  “I thought she’d had an accident. You let me think that. From when I was little, you let me think that. I always thought something terrible happened to her.”

  “It was terrible.” Alma is abruptly awake, loud in her ear. “He was terrible. To her. You don’t remember.”

  “But why? What about the hospital? I thought she was dead.”

  Another silence. “I never told you that. She was in a hospital, I think. I think … it was some kind of breakdown. But then after that she did leave. And I …” And then Alma’s combative voice stalls, and horrifyingly, she starts to cry. Suddenly, loudly, heartbrokenly. “I was only six! Six. Fuck!”

  “Oh, Alma.” Katya doesn’t know what to say to a crying, swearing Alma. She has no precedent. “Alma. Shhh. Shhh.”

  After some time, Alma’s crying sputters and dries up. Katya can hear her blowing her nose. “I suppose we should have talked about this before. I just …”

  “I know.”

  “It’s hard.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, you can stop with the shhh-ing now. I’m not one of your sick … parrots or something.”

  Katya waits. “So … do you have any idea where she is now?”

  “No. No idea.” Alma sighs deeply. “God, it’s early.”

  That tired, familiar voice coming down the line. Katya hasn’t felt quite so close to Alma for years.

  “So that’s it, then,” says Katya.

  “Yup.”

  “So Len is really all we have.”

  “God, don’t say that.”

  Katya laughs and they say goodbye. After she’s put the phone down, though, those last words sting a bit. Alma has Toby, has a husband and babies. And Katya?

  Katya has a beautiful plague, an army of insects.

  She slouches down in her seat to watch the beetles’ progress through the window. The shushing noise is soothing, almost hypnotic. Slowly, the conversation with Alma fades from her mind and she starts t
o feel the insistent rhythm of the swarm, its secretive white noise. Like the noise and motion of a waterfall, it is random, but within the chaos it’s possible to find eddies and troughs and secret tunes, tunes recalling long-ago lullabies …

  Thwock.

  She jerks awake from her trance.

  There’s something big outside: rhythmic, grunting. Coming closer and then retreating.

  It does not sound human. It certainly does not sound humane.

  She looks through the fairytale window. The sun has still to jump the wall of Nineveh, and everything is blue with shadow out there. There’s something moving across the mud.

  It is her father. He’s very visible, dressed as he is in the bright green uniform of Painless Pest Relocations, which seems to fluoresce in the dawn light. In his left hand he’s flourishing something black and shining: a rubbish bag. In his right hand is a long, thin stick. He walks out along the boardwalk, concentrating, looking down. And at first it seems like Len is dancing – stepping left, stepping right, a leap, a kick. The dance starts out slow and deliberate and becomes more and more exuberant. Then she sees: it’s a golf club in his hand and he’s swinging it, up, down, aiming and lashing out with a crump, crump.

  She is watching her father in his element, doing what he does best: eradicating.

  He makes his way across to the other side of the compound, then turns with the golf club held high. He’s having a fine old time, she can see. He has regained his vigour, his maniacal grace. He’s heading back this way, high-kicking like a crazy drum majorette. Smack! Smack! Escaping from his throat are eager hunting cries, obscene in their urgency. Having fun: he can’t hope to kill them all this way. At intervals he pauses to scoop, barehanded, the litter of beetle bodies into his rubbish bag.

  He heads straight towards her. Right outside the guardhouse, he strikes a pose, golf club slung over his shoulder, like a country-club caricature.

  He gives no sign of noticing her. The light is strengthening outside, and it’s dim in the guardhouse, and perhaps he truly does not see her through the cloudy window. He holds the golf club up, quivering, looks left, looks right, like he can’t decide which way to turn. She’s utterly still, and so is he, and she can tell from the way his head is cocked that he’s listening intently. Her head is bent the same way. Her father can stay still, but she can stay stiller, still as a lizard under a stone, and it is he who moves first, turning away in impatience.