Homing

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  I stood listening, although I could hear very little over the panic of my heart, the shock of entry. Where was he?

  I was in a large, high room, but dark. Tall orange curtains lined the room to the left. The morning sunlight lit them with glowering colour, but did not penetrate. In the dimness I sensed disorder: a sharp disturbance in the air, a suspended energy, as if a very loud noise had just stopped.

  “I need a cigarette,” the woman called.

  She was in the bedroom. Slumped back on the cushions of a double bed, her gown hanging open. I looked away from the heavy globe of one exposed breast. Smooth, strong legs were crossed at the ankles. She had an extraordinary body, like a voluptuous doll, long and full, but there was something strained in her pose.

  “Cigarette,” she said.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Here.” She nodded at the bedside table, and I went close to pick up the pack of smokes and the lighter and pass them to her. She fumbled, and at last gave up with a cry, letting the unlit cigarette fall into her lap and curling her hand into her chest. There was something wrong with it, with both her hands. She tried to push herself up on the pillows but whimpered again, and fell back clumsily.

  “Oh dear,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “So you’re here for Bernard, I take it?” she said, talking over me. “You’re the new one?” She looked at me sideways, almost sly. Hair fell across her mouth and she blew it away.

  “Maybe I should go.”

  “Well, Bernard was here,” she said. “Look – see.” She held up her hands to me, laughed. “Look at the size of it. This one’s broken, I think.”

  One wrist was badly swollen; the knuckles of the other hand were red and scuffed and she held them stiffly. One of her fingernails, I saw now, was snapped off.

  “Do you want … should I call a doctor?”

  She snorted, scornful. She looked at my bare feet – white, with pink lines where the seams of the new shoes had pressed; then moved her cold gaze up my body to my face. I stood quite still. The only movement I couldn’t control was that of the blood into my cheeks, again.

  “I just came to pick up my manuscript,” I said.

  “Did you, darling?” she said. “Now please would you light my fucking cigarette. I can’t do it myself, you see.”

  I placed a cigarette between her lips and lit it. A broad mouth, beautiful full lips, clearly defined. Lines were beginning to cut down on either side of her nose, but they only added emphasis to her features. I watched her smoke, the cigarette propped between cramped fingers. At length she finished, let the butt fall on the floor. I watched it singe a black mark on the wood.

  “So. I need a hand here,” she said. I stood, reaching out to take her arm. She yelped and pulled away. “Not that one, Jesus!”

  I went around and supported her under the other arm as she rolled off the bed and struggled erect. Her armpits smelt strongly, a mixture of sweat and scent.

  “Over there.” She nodded towards the dressing table and I led her there. After staring bleakly into the mirror for a while, she tried to hold her hairbrush, but I could see that her hand was weak. She shoved the brush at her hair, and then let it drop with an irritated click of the mouth.

  “Would you,” she said.

  I picked up the brush. Her hair was tangled, and not like mine: the texture and wave so different that I didn’t know how to shape it. I had to lay my left palm flat on her head to hold it still while I brushed. Up close, I could see that the honey colour was dye, the silver roots showing, but the texture was still lush. The hair, catching on my fingers, felt dead and warm and damp. I controlled the urge to pull back, rip out the clinging strands and run away.

  In the mirror, my body was eclipsed behind hers. Heat came through the silk of her gown, from her fleshy shoulders, her sculpted neck. I couldn’t ignore the red marks that sat there like a collar, or her suddenly wet eyes. But when I tried to meet her gaze in the mirror she evaded me so fiercely, and with such rigid shoulders, that I knew I shouldn’t speak. Slowly her back straightened and her shoulders pulled back, and she was queenly again.

  “It’s done,” I said, the hair combed out at least, the strands persuaded flat.

  She nodded. I pulled back the chair and she hobbled to the centre of the room, shrugged her nightdress to the ground, and stood tall.

  She was what I was not: a grown woman, full size, full-formed. Her skin was slightly creased and scuffed with the marks of age, but she was strong, her skin bronze in the low light, almost golden. Shaved everywhere. Her breasts and buttocks were rounded, her shoulders straight, the muscles in her back long and clearly defined. She did not look like a woman who’d been beaten up. She looked like a woman who had been in a fight, like a wounded warrior.

  “Fetch me my clothes,” she said, not looking at me. Her tone was distant. Her eyes were fixed on her own body in the mirror, staring as she touched the marks on her arms and her neck. I turned and found the underwear lying on the floor. Leopard print, a matching set. Tacky, sexy, expensive. She put her feet through the holes in the panties and I drew them up, face flaming and turned away. I had never been so close to another woman’s body, except perhaps my mother’s. I looped the bra straps over her arms and fastened the hooks behind her back. She managed to ease her breasts into the cups by herself, hooking her thumbs under the wire and bending forward with a slight wince.

  Her dark-brown wrap dress was easier. A heavy, slithery material, cut to hold her curves. She led me barefoot to the front room. I knelt at her feet and held the leather boots upright for her, pulling the zips up the backs of her warm calves.

  “Bag,” she said. “My make-up’s in there.”

  I had not imagined I would ever do this for another person. I barely knew how to put make-up on myself, but under her terse instruction I twisted out the lipstick and carefully filled in her lips with deep blood colour. Her lips were so well defined it was easy, like colouring in. The silvery-green eyeshadow was trickier, and she impatiently twitched her face away from my attempt with the mascara. But she let me dust her cheekbones, rust red. Under my hands, I saw her face taking shape, animating, hardening.

  At last I put the make-up kit back in the leather bag and hung it off her shoulder. Then I opened the front door for her, and walked a step behind her as she headed for the lift doors. I pressed the button.

  She turned to look down at me. Magnificent, restored, as if her body had grown younger and stronger with each cosmetic layer.

  “God, don’t look so fraught.” Her voice was clear, each word precisely cut. “Stay, if you like. He’ll be back soon. I’m sure he’s eager to see you.”

  The lift doors opened and she stepped inside, facing away. Pressed the button for the ground floor with her thumb, without a flinch. She had her back to me, but I watched her face in reflection. Her image was golden in it, gleaming, sharp. Hers was the form for which this machine had been made, for which its sides had been polished to a shine. And then the doors pulled closed across the vision, and she was gone.

  The lobby was silent again. I went back into the flat and pulled back the long curtains, wanting to get my bearings. The wall was glass, revealing a blue, enormous view: the side of Signal Hill, the tiny bright houses and mosques, the harbour, the sea. So high.

  None of it mattered, I thought, as long as I stayed up here on the twenty-second floor. All this belonged to the sky world, to dreams. Only when my feet touched ground would time resume.

  On the wall, there was a framed print of the familiar author photograph. Blown up large, but revealing nothing new, no detail that I’d overlooked. It remained a stranger’s face. In the sunlight spilling into the room, I saw broken glass on the floor, an overturned chair.

  All I could think of were those two handsome profiles, his and hers. How ferociously they must’ve clashed! Kisses like bites, teeth bared. How much I’d wanted, only that morning, his lips against my neck.

  Under the photo was a telephone table
, and I saw that something had slipped behind it and lay against the wall. It was my manuscript, still in its large envelope, unopened. I bent to pull it out, brushed it off. A lot of work had gone into those pages.

  I put on my shoes and went out into the lobby. The numbers above the lift door were changing: someone was coming up. I pushed open the fire door into the stairwell. Twenty-two floors was a long way to walk in heels, in shoes that still needed wearing in; there would be blisters. But I liked those shoes, I decided; they suited me. I tucked my book beneath my arm and started down.

  The Unknown Soldier

  Callum was left at the library every Saturday morning at eleven o’clock by his mother when she went for gym and lunch with her friends, and was picked up again at four after she’d done her nails. It was a long five hours.

  The library was on the second storey of the city hall. The books were stacked in high-ceilinged, wooden-floored rooms and corridors that snaked one into the next, lit by fluorescent lighting. Tall sash windows ran down one side of the building, through which Callum could glimpse a mysterious roofscape: gutters and chimneys, drainpipes and narrow, inaccessible courtyards sunk three storeys deep. He longed to explore out there, in the secret passageways and hidey-holes created by the sloping angles of the roofs, but he had never dared.

  On the other side of the building, the windows looked out over the Parade, with its brightly coloured stalls selling fabric and knock-off running shoes and cellphone covers. Every now and then a policeman would walk his horse through the street children and car parkers and people streaming from the bus rank. Callum thought he might like to go down there one day, when he was old enough: look at the things on sale, touch the flank of one of those sedate horses with their straight-backed riders, or sit at the foot of the stone statue of the man in fancy uniform, who often had a seagull on his head.

  “Don’t you move one single toe out of that library,” his mother always said when she dropped him off. “You hear me?”

  So, like a prince in a tower, he didn’t go out, not onto the rooftops nor among the people. Instead he wandered all over the big town hall: the long corridors tiled in brown and yellow, the echoing public toilets, the security entrance with the bored policeman and the metal detector. He travelled up and down in the old cage lift, pretending it was a deep-sea submersible vehicle; he fed smuggled breakfast-toast crumbs to the pigeons on the window sills.

  And he read. During the week, he wasn’t a big reader, but on Saturdays he had to fill the hours. There was a quiet corner right at the back of the last room, in the history section; hardly anybody disturbed him there. He’d lie on the floor between the shelves with a pile of books and page through them, looking at pictures. He liked books about old wars and soldiers best. Tanks and aeroplanes in soft black and white, young men in uniform saluting for ever. It was dim and peaceful, with no light directly overhead and only one narrow sash window at the end of the aisle. Sometimes he’d even doze off. But sooner or later the librarian, Miss Galant, would poke her face around the corner, and he’d have to sit up and look alert.

  After hours in the library, he felt dulled, his eyes unfocused; a kind of sickness came over him after staring too long at line after line of print against off-white paper. At these times he hated the books. The worlds they revealed seemed uniformly dull and melancholy – a drabness that somehow seeped into the world outside the pages too. The bright market stalls, the crowds, even the horses; everything was far away, printed in faded ink. On Saturdays, sometimes he almost forgot that there was a real world outside the library, that these books were only its shadows and reflections. When that happened, he knew it was almost time for his mother to come.

  Then he’d stop reading and rest his head against the cool backs of the books and stare up at the window, hoping for a pigeon to land. Once, a pair had built a nest on that window sill, and babies had hatched from eggs that looked like small hen’s eggs. But the chicks had grown and flown away, and for a whole year now there had been no activity at the disintegrating nest.

  Not much sunlight came through the window; it looked out onto one of the building’s narrow internal wells. If Callum crouched down he could see a patch of sky. Below, the walls plunged down to concrete at ground level, punctured by a few small windows that Callum had never seen open. A few feet below the window sill was a ledge, about half a metre wide, painted in dull silver roof-paint. It would be easy to climb out onto it. To the left of this, a rusty ladder was bolted to the wall, leading invitingly up to a pitched roof. Thin metal rungs, like a drawing of a ladder. So many times he’d imagined slipping through the window, walking along the ledge, gripping that ladder in both hands and climbing – where? Up, out. One day he would push up the window and go.

  One Saturday morning, just after his hurried mother had dropped him off, Callum saw a young man come running along the pavement. Running, but not like you run in a game. It was flat-out, every muscle in his slight body forcing him forward, legs hurling their last strength into every stride. When you see a person run like that, Callum knew, someone was after them: police or murderers.

  The woman standing next to Callum sucked in her breath and muttered something in Xhosa. Callum flinched up against the stone building as the young man neared them, a camouflage jacket flapping open to show his white T-shirt. He looked young, a teenager. As he hurtled past, Callum smelt the sweat and fear coming off him. The corner of the jacket swung out and the zip stung Callum on the cheek; then the boy was gone, past the town hall and down a side street.

  As one, everyone on the pavement turned to see what avenging force was on its way. Two seconds later, they appeared: two men sprinting, but not with the boy’s frantic forced stride. Their speed was confident, purposeful. They were older than the boy; harder. Callum smelt nothing except the Vicks scent of the woman next to him; she had pulled him towards her, and the silver star pinned to her soft breast pressed painfully into his cheekbone. As the pursuers came past, he saw that one of them, wearing a black tracksuit top, held a knife. Their faces seemed like knives too, hard and sharp, their long legs like blades slicing past each other. When they reached the next corner, they paused, looking left and right, then chose the same direction that the running boy had taken, as if they’d sniffed him out.

  The woman clicked her tongue in disapproval and released Callum. He turned to her nervously, but already she had moved away. Blood beating in his ears with excitement, he made himself walk and not run into the library.

  He didn’t feel like sitting alone in his quiet corner today. He lingered near Miss Galant’s desk. Miss Galant: young but severe, with a neat dark bob and a finely cut, heart-shaped face. Her skin was dark and perfectly smooth and she wore heavy black eyeliner. Callum thought she looked like Cleopatra, whom he’d seen a picture of in The Ancient World: beautiful but fierce. You could hear her high heels three rooms away, going off like warning shots on the parquet floors. Sometimes she was nice to him, but today she was too busy to talk.

  He wandered out into the corridor, along to the grand marble staircase which nobody used, and stood looking up at the names. Above the broad landing, carved in white marble and picked out in gilt, was a list of all the young men who had died in the war, long ago. The names were framed by a border of thousands of little golden tiles that shone in the dusty light. Callum always looked for the name that was the same as his own, C. Reid, which appeared under the section Died of Wounds. The list gave no dates or ages, but Callum imagined C. Reid as young, not too many years older than himself. He wondered about the kinds of wounds that could kill you. He imagined himself as that young soldier – C. Reid – expiring in a hospital bed, all wrapped up tight in bandages, feeling the lifeblood seeping out of him just the same.

  When he looked down, he saw the drops of blood on the marble floor, and for a shocked moment he thought they’d come from his own body. But then he noticed that the blood drips ran all the way along the ground floor corridor, across the landing and on up the stairs to
wards the library. Neat, circular starbursts. Their colour was frightening – not the bright scarlet of his knees when he skinned them, but darker, tinged with black; thick-looking blood that spoke of some deeper, mortal wound. Were they going up or coming down?

  He followed the trail towards the library. The blood drips led through the turnstile, under the sharp, perfect nose of Miss Galant, along the carpeted floor past the computers. The librarians were busy – high-school kids asking questions – and they had not noticed the bloody trail. It led past the novels, the big print, the books on Geography and Dinosaurs, deep into the halls of Hobbies and Cooking, Psychiatry and True Crime, and on into the bowels of Ancient History. As Callum followed, the splashes of blood seemed to get bigger, but their deep red was less visible against the polished wooden floors.

  There was no one else in the History room, except one little old man looking at books on the South African War. The trail disappeared around the corner, into the last row of shelves: the bleeding creature had gone to hole in Callum’s own hiding place. Callum crept closer, trailing fingertips along the Roman Empire and Pre-Columbian Civilisations. He paused at the corner and held his breath. The Boer War gentleman creaked out of the room behind him and then it was only Callum and the spots of blood, and whatever had dropped them. He coughed – to give warning but also for bravery – and stepped forward.

  At first Callum thought the figure was crouching to look at the titles on the very bottom shelf. But there was something wrong: he was curled up tightly, head below his knees. He didn’t look up, so Callum coughed again and he lifted his head. At once, Callum knew him. It was the running boy.

  Now, he wasn’t looking so good. His camo jacket was gone and there was a bright-red oval patch on the right-hand side of his white T-shirt. His arms were brown, but his face was bleached almost grey. He was holding his hand over the wound, and Callum could see something red and shredded between his fingers – he wasn’t sure if it was blood-soaked T-shirt or flesh. He took another step closer.