Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  With his sack over his shoulder and his staff in hand, he looks like some despised and disreputable personage out of folklore: rat-catcher, Pied Piper. A ferret or two up his sleeves. The world is a messy business and he is the man for messy business: he’s in there wrestling with it, blood-stained and dripping juices. Got to get your hands dirty, my girl.

  He turns a thick knot into the neck of the sagging plastic bag and dumps it at his feet, then pulls another from a pocket of the overalls. Her overalls, her black bags. He pauses to wipe his fingers on his trouser-leg – a streak of brown matter – and turns and lopes off again towards the far side of the property, disappearing between the two far buildings.

  She opens the door and steps outside.

  There are many of them spilling out of a slit in the side of her dad’s killing bag, which is a hideous thing, the living and the dying crawling heedless over each other in the folds of plastic, the walking wounded picking up the relentless march and continuing across the bodies of their brothers.

  She picks up one of the dead beetles.

  Perhaps she has never looked so closely at the body of an insect, really looked, examined its joints and facets. She has seen many small deaths in her life, and perhaps there is no great tragedy in the destruction of an insect. Or hundreds of them. But it is still a death, and she mourns the undoing of a creature as finely made, as beautifully wrought as this one. It seems hammered out of some rare metal, chased and moulded. Knight at arms, tiny samurai; its suit of armour crushed and pulled apart.

  She feels the violence in her body. The careless damage. Repair is not possible, but retribution is easy.

  Too easy. It’s right there in front of her, at her feet. Katya swings her boot and kicks the red button.

  Perhaps she is expecting something more dramatic: a signal, a siren, a shriek that will instantly bring her father to heel. But if there is such a shriek, it happens on other wavelengths. Possibly it disturbs the fine antennae of the beetles, perhaps it blows through them like wind through a field of grass. But she hears nothing. She waits, the only noise the beating of her own heart. Her father is still out of sight behind the far building, and for a moment it’s possible to replay the action, to imagine the button unpressed.

  But only for a few moments. Because after that things start to happen very quickly.

  Pascal arrives, this time in a car, a proper quick-response vehicle in white with blue trim and a dayglo yellow stripe down the side, just like a cop car. He looks remarkably official as he hops out, gun – and god, are those handcuffs? – swinging at his hip. Katya’s never seen him move so fast, and she feels a twinge of doubt. The first inkling that perhaps, somehow, a mistake has been made.

  He opens the back door of the car and another shape appears, straining and panting. Soldier. She’d forgotten about Soldier. The heavy dog lumbers down onto the mud, like a grumpy politician exiting his chauffeur-driven limo. At once she sees he’s uneasy. His small ears flatten against his head. He picks up his paws and swings his muzzle from side to side.

  A procession of beetles passes through the gates of Nineveh. The flow parts around the wheels of the parked squad car and continues down the driveway, destination mysterious. Dog and man stare at the ground and shift their feet with expressions of equal disgust. Soldier bristles, and you can almost see the hair standing up on the back of Pascal’s neck. A deep and richly vibrating growl starts up in the cavern of Soldier’s chest. Pascal leashes him just in time: the dog lurches against his straining arm.

  “What is it?” says Pascal irritably, peering through the bars of the gate. “I told you these things would come and bother you.”

  “No, it’s not the beetles …”

  “What, then?” But then Pascal stops short and lifts his head, listening.

  She doesn’t have to say a word. Pascal can hear what she can hear: the crump, crump of her father’s killing blows, distant now, and above that her father’s whistle. His happy working song. She knows the tune: it’s the one she heard floating up from the beach when she went walking in the swamp that first day. Pascal fumbles with the padlock and comes through, but it’s hard to work with Soldier pulling at him, so he quickly shackles the dog to the gate. It takes a few attempts to get the clip on the bars. It’s just a plain dog leash, slightly thicker than normal, but still something one would buy in an ordinary pet shop. Katya would prefer to see something specially designed for this weapons-grade animal.

  “He is not happy, this one,” Pascal mutters. Soldier gives a high yap like a Pekinese. He’s starting to drool. Pascal steps back and regards the animal, hands on hips. “I can’t take him in like this,” he says. He turns his sour gaze 360 degrees, taking in Katya, the insects and the buildings of Nineveh. It’s clear he has no stomach for hunting down a trespasser through those infested byways.

  “Did someone break in?” he asks. She just shrugs.

  The dog begins to whimper as Pascal starts to pick his way – almost comically, on the tips of his toes – through the debris of dead and alive beetles that strew the mud. Soldier and Katya watch him all the way until he disappears around the back of one of the buildings.

  She takes her seat on the bench at the entrance, tucking her feet up and keeping a wary eye on the dog. Soldier is indeed unhappy. A trained animal is orderly at heart, an enemy of chaos, and Soldier is profoundly disturbed. The smell and the touch of the beetles, clearly, is abhorrent to him. As the minutes tick by, he becomes more and more agitated, biting at his toes, pacing left and right, straining at the lead for laboured seconds until he seems about to strangle himself.

  Minutes pass. The day turns dry. The road leading out of Nineveh is a tunnel of shadow, although the heads of the palms are lit with glassy sunlight. Clear skies again; the frogs are silent. The march of insects thins. Apart from Soldier’s whimpering, it’s utterly quiet.

  Then Soldier stops dead. Stops his whining. Turns, alert but calm, and stares past her, up the driveway. She turns, too, and sees the big silver car rolling down the aisle of palms. It’s amazing: at a distance of a hundred metres or more, Soldier has sensed the approach of a figure of authority, an owner, a boss. It has calmed him; he is ready to be deployed.

  She stands up nervously, crosses and uncrosses her arms. Then clasps them behind her back.

  The car stops just outside the gate. When Mr Brand emerges, she feels a deep and unanticipated blush welling up from her collarbones and over her cheeks. But she need not worry: if he recalls their indiscretion over the coffee table only the day before, he shows no sign of it now. He’s wearing a linen suit and has become once again completely impermeable. She cannot imagine slipping one of her grubby fingers in between any of those tautly tailored buttons.

  He comes through the open gate, and she picks her way over the mud to join him. As before, on the grass at the Brands’ house, she has the feeling of moving slowly across a lit stage, in full view. The earth on either side is scattered with iridescent bodies.

  He’s turning a slow circle, glaring. “What a godawful mess.”

  “Not exactly like the brochure, is it?”

  He looks at her as if trying to recall who she is. But then he claps his hands. “Grubbs,” he says. “Right, so what’s going on? I understand there’s been some kind of break-in?”

  She feels relief. This imperious man will dig them out of any mess. She briefs him on the situation.

  He barely looks at her as he listens and nods, listens and nods. “Well then,” he says. “We’d better sort this bullshit out.” Such authority: Soldier is entranced. “Where’s my security?”

  She hesitates, then points vaguely towards the buildings. “This person I saw – I don’t think he’s dangerous, exactly …”

  He grunts at her; not quite an acknowledgement. He goes over to the dog and snaps his fingers.

  “Careful, he’s nervous,” she warns, but there’s no need. Mr Brand’s hand is the one Soldier desires: he licks it, presses the side of his jaw against the
wrist. When Mr Brand grabs his ears and twists them like rags, Soldier gives an adoring gurgle. And a slap to the ribs puts the dog instantly into war mode: pointing his muzzle left and right, staring fixedly at points on the horizon.

  At that instant, Len chooses to swing jauntily around the corner of the far building, sack on back, twirling his golf club and whistling. He stops in his tracks when he sees them.

  They stand and look at each other, and to Katya they all seem connected, points on the diagram that the guards have been transcribing in the mud for months with their bicycle wheels. Katya and Mr Brand and Soldier on one side, and her father, the far, wandering point, distorting the square. It is the kind of arrangement that would disturb a lover of order and symmetry. Like Mr Brand. Or a dog.

  Her father shifts from foot to foot. Katya can see that Soldier has fixed on him, is standing with his legs braced, pointing rigidly in Len’s direction.

  “Dad,” she says, but her voice is too soft, and anyway almost immediately eclipsed by her father’s, raised in a yell.

  “Brand, you cunt! Where’s my money?” He lifts his rusty golf club in the air.

  She takes a step forward. “Dad.”

  Mr Brand’s response is a masterstroke. It is deft, minimal, eloquent. He leans down and unclips the leash around Soldier’s neck.

  For a moment, nothing moves. Then the big dog gives a grunt and a start, as though the air has been whacked from his lungs by a clap on the back, and he’s off, picking up the pace as he submits to the ancestral dream of dogs: the hunt, the kill.

  It takes Len a moment, but then he too lurches into action. Running across the mud field, comical as his knees lift and fall in the green overalls, his arms pumping. In the bright sunlight it seems like a game, a man and his dog romping across a playing field. Len turns and lashes out with the golf club, but Soldier leaps into the air, paws tucked up like a showjumper clearing the rail.

  A noise comes out of Katya’s mouth, some incoherent protest, too weak for a shout; the noise simply escapes from her, leaking like blood from a cut underwater.

  She turns her head away.

  There’s a terrible shrieking, not an animal sound; more like the scream of wood going through a sawmill. It stops short and then there is a patch of silence. When she raises her head to see, at first she doesn’t understand the scene.

  Her father has vanished. It is Soldier and not Len who is cringing, rubbing his muzzle into the mud as if to cool it after a burn. Mr Brand gives a snort, perhaps of appreciation. “Bastard! Bastard smacked him on the nose!”

  Mr Brand takes a few steps into the mud and then stops, looking down at his shoes with a curse. “Fucking mud,” he says. He lights a cigarette and goes to sit heavily in the passenger seat of his car. “Where’s my goddamn security?” He starts thumbing something into his cellphone.

  Soldier struggles to all fours, shakes his massive head as if to rid himself of a fly, and staggers off around a distant corner.

  Katya pushes the big gate open once again, slips through the gap, and follows.

  15. MAZE

  She is running through the maze of a ruined city. A city emptied out by plague, sheathed in mud, scattered with the small, ruined bodies of its meanest inhabitants. Carapaces crunch under her feet as she runs. She can make out muddy human footprints, overlapped by paw prints in the muck.

  The architecture seems to have proliferated since she last came through here, growing corridors and portals. She turns left and right and left again, and sees no dog, no guard, no father.

  She finds the rusty golf club on the ground. Further on, there’s another black bag, spilling its grisly treasures onto the ground. The mud is wrecked with claw tracks. Some of the beetles wriggle weakly on their backs. And here: there is blood on the ground, red mammal blood. Footprints widely spaced – running hard.

  In a courtyard, there’s an angular figure reclining on the edge of a dry fountain. Pascal, leaning on one elbow, his dark-blue uniform as elegant as ever except for rims of mud on the trouser cuffs. He gives a laconic salute.

  “Where is he? Where’s my dad?”

  He shrugs, flicks his cigarette into the inch of muddy water that has collected in the bottom of the fountain. “Gone,” he says. “Anyway, I’m not going to chase that old man. Have you seen my dog?”

  She turns and runs in the other direction. She finds the perimeter wall, puts her fingers to it, runs.

  She comes out at the back of her own building, in the narrow alleyway, and sees it immediately: the small bathroom window is open. A drip of something dark on the plaster below the frame. A shape hunched on the ground. A dog, sitting patiently. A dog that has treed its quarry.

  In one muscular movement, Soldier twists to his feet and comes at her, growling and stiff-legged. There is nowhere to run so she shrinks to her haunches against the back wall and covers her head with her arms. He comes close, so close she can feel his body heat, feverish with the chase. He smells of wet fur and something else, a bitter canine excitement. Black breath on her cheek. A gleam of light strikes his eyeball from the side. Wetness where the flap of his torn ear meets the skull. He grunts softly as he smells her, his massive body tense and trembling, breathing her in.

  A faint whistle: Pascal’s call. The dog turns its head in frantic relief, races away, leaving her kneeling in the mud.

  She waits. It’s silent, just her and the black square of that window. She stands and goes over to it. The stain on the window frame is, in fact, a line of beetles, marching out of the house. A slow leak.

  “Dad?”

  He must have come at a run and leapt up to catch the sharp edge of the window. Agile old bugger, even when wounded. It’s too high for her, and there’s nothing to stand on. Finally Katya digs her boot-tip into a narrow gap between drainpipe and wall and hauls herself up and over the frame, dropping down onto the bathroom floor.

  As she enters the passage, boots sucking on the wet floor, the air grows dim around her. She enters the kitchen. Greenish, underwater light shifts and flexes, and the air is filled with buzzing. The curtains flutter.

  Curtains?

  There are no curtains. The windows are masked, not with cloth, but with a fabric far finer and more rare: the thousand upon thousand twitching bodies of beetles, jewelled, swarming, flicking their wings, coating the room like crystals of amethyst inside a geode.

  They cluster on the floor, the wall, the ceiling. Katya reaches out a hand, setting off a chittering flight. As beetles drop from the windowpanes, the light shifts and redistributes, swirling like cloudy water. She walks through to the bedroom, opening up windows, scattering a chaff of insects.

  In the lounge, the air is dark and murmurous.

  At the wooden table sits a figure, quite still and upright. There is something wrong with his skin, his hair … A human shape perhaps, but built of insect wings. Beetles crawl across his skin.

  She can hear the drip drip of water. Tick tick of insect locomotion. And something else: a ragged rhythm, like air sucking through a punctured straw. Struggling for breath. She goes to the seated figure, reaches out. The insects flutter off him and for a moment, seeing the wetness beneath, she thinks they are flying away with parts of him, that those lightly grasping feet have somehow drawn from him an outer layer of skin. But Len’s face emerges. His eyes are closed. She lays her fingers down gently, gentle as insect feet. The laboured breath stutters and resumes. She feels her way in the dim light, careful. Here is the dip below his throat … Her fingertips move across to his shoulder, find a ragged indentation, tender. Something oily and warm.

  With a gasp he comes awake, glaring. “Katyapillar,” he says. “What the fuck did you do?”

  She sits down opposite him in the straight-backed chair. Their image in a hundred thousand compound eyes, watching from the walls.

  “Oh shit, Dad, shit, he really got you there.” The blood has saturated his left sleeve from shoulder to elbow. “I’m sorry.”

  She reaches over the tab
le again. Len flinches away. Fair enough. She does not trust the gentleness of her own touch. Perhaps it would hurt him more than help.

  “You need a doctor.”

  “Ah,” he says, rotating the shoulder and flinching. “Dunno. Should be okay. Seen worse, had worse.”

  For the first time in her life, she wonders: is it her father who plagues her, or is it she who plagues her father? Perhaps all this time she’s been the one: the pest, the infestation, the thing he cannot winkle out or shake off or eradicate. The one that keeps on turning up again, spoiling things. And look at this pain she’s brought him now.

  A loud thump rattles the table and she jerks her chair back, startled. Is the floor giving way? But it’s coming from above: footsteps. Someone is moving back and forth upstairs, in Unit Two. It sounds like things are being moved around, thrown down. Someone going through her stuff.

  “Fat bastard,” says Len. “Listen to him.”

  Together they listen as the raps and thuds reverberate through the building. Is she this noisy? Has her father been listening to her every thump and grunt, her night-time monologues coming through the boards?

  Katya wonders if Mr Brand will think to look for them down here. One thing about having a belief in the fixed nature of things, in walls and floors: it gives you a certain disadvantage. Mr Brand, for all his solid confidence, in fact because of it, cannot look beyond the obvious, cannot see past the evidence of the concrete world. He can’t consider that perhaps the walls are false, or that the floorboards might conceal strange depths. Despite his rage, he would not think to punch through a wall: it would not occur to him that walls are breachable. In Mr Brand’s world of certainties, such an in-between place is hardly possible; it barely exists.