Homing

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  The spiral parking ramp looked like an outsized fossil ancestor of a staircase. It was almost complete, and they could walk all the way up to the roof. At the top, the view was nice, but Victor was more interested in the noise and purpose of the building site.

  This was a dusty world inhabited by grimed, brute figures, their workman’s overalls and their faces powdered the same dark grey, their mouths covered in cloths against the dust. Some climbed on rickety scaffolding. Metal shrieked on metal. Sparks from an angle grinder cruelly illumined one man’s face and hands, and the sound of drilling echoed off the concrete surfaces and found its way under the rim of Victor’s hard hat and into his skull. These men did not smile at him.

  Victor couldn’t see how this could ever be transformed into a mall, one with polished floors that his mother might skate across with her shopping cart; it was impossible. His father, perhaps, felt the same. There was a stiffness in his dad’s body, in the way he tightened the scroll of blueprints in his hands. Each time the foreman slapped an unfinished surface, shouting over the clatter and grind of construction, his father gave a tiny flinch that only Victor could see. The project was running very late.

  He had been told to stay close, but his father was soon distracted, arguing with the foreman and poking his finger at the rolled-out plans. The boy looked around. He was trying to match these rough walls to the clean edges of the architect’s model in his dad’s office: that perfect miniature had so delighted him. He drifted a few steps away, and then a few more.

  He found himself at the edge of the deep hole that gashed down the middle of the building. This is where the dome would go, eventually – on the model, a faceted cardboard hemisphere the size of half a bowling ball.

  There were barriers and yellow safety tape around the edge of the hole, but it was possible to lean forward and peer down to the lower levels. The dim, unfinished tunnels down there were exciting. Like the caverns where dwarves mined for gold in the fantasy books he loved reading. The ground floor was more complete than the higher levels; they’d even started laying tiles. In the very centre, a circular pattern of some glinting metal was set into the floor. He could just make it out: a compass rose.

  Directly below him, on the unfinished first and second floors, two men were engaged in a vertical dance. The lower man, small from where Victor stood, was stripped to the waist. Over and over, he bent, took a red brick from a wheelbarrow and lofted it with a backhand movement straight up past his chest, with such accuracy than it sailed weightless into the hand of the man on the level above him. Victor had seen, and been mesmerised by, such rhythmic chains in the past; but he had never seen bricks propelled with such power, straight up. He could see the sinews pull in the man’s arm, the pads of muscle in his dark chest shifting. Tireless: bend, hoist, release …

  The movement of the bricks seemed effortless, but even from up high Victor could see the sweat running off the men’s bodies, the forced speed in their movements. They were pushing, parts of a machine worked past its limits, strained to breaking. The lower man paused to wipe sweat from his brow, taking off his hard hat and setting it aside. He glanced up – did their eyes meet for an instant? Or was Victor just a blur in the corner of that worker’s dusty eye, dark against the ring of white sky?

  Victor looked away, strangely shamed. When he dared to look again, the burdened dance had resumed.

  Something batters up through the glass dome towards him, filling Victor’s vision. He flinches back from the gleaming face upturned, eyeless, avenging.

  A wash of vertigo. Reeling, for a moment he loses up and down, feet floating, hands too slick to grip, toppling helplessly into the sky …

  He shudders away from the glass. With a squeak of damp palms, he pulls himself into a crouch and stays that way for a moment, until the world rights itself. Pewter clouds, his own face white in reflection – and it’s just a sheet of glass again, depthless.

  A shape lurks beneath the surface, though. He cups his hands to look, and after a moment makes it out: a helium balloon, butting up against the dome, pulled loose from some child’s wrist. He laughs – a rasping sound, too loud.

  The breeze in the metal struts set up a buzzing resonance that puts his teeth on edge. He’s dizzy, like a weathervane swinging free. Beneath him, the building seems unstable, bricks quivering in their courses – all those old, unruly bricks, still trying to fly.

  It wasn’t that he kicked, or moved with any force at all. He was lulled, caught in the rhythm of the brick dance, the arm dipping, straightening, flexing, the brick escaping upwards … but somehow he must’ve come forward, dreamy, perhaps winging his foot out in sympathy with the tired grace of the human pendulum below. He barely felt his toe catch and nudge the half-brick lying there on the edge. He only saw it hanging mid-air – a cartoon brick – before it was plucked down straight, as if pulled on a string. A line in a drawing, connecting the tip of his running shoe to the forehead of the man at the bottom. That face far below, turned up to meet the blow.

  One quick step backwards, and the scene was concealed, the men erased, as if they’d never been. If there was a cry, it was lost in the noise of construction.

  He went to his father and stood behind him, putting the larger body between himself and what had happened. His heart was beating fast but his mind was already hardening, refusing the images. He pushed his hand into his father’s bigger palm. His dad squeezed his fingers impatiently – not now – but Victor hung on.

  Then someone started shouting, over by the scaffolding, looking down, up and down again. Waving at the foreman. But his father had already turned away: he seemed tired, in a hurry to go. Victor needed to pee, urgently and without warning, like a little kid about to wet his pants.

  Together they walked back down the long spiral of the parking ramp. Nobody stopped them. A trickle of urine ran hot down the leg of his trousers, but his father would only notice that once they were back in the car and driving away. All the way down, Victor did not turn to look back, nor did he release his father’s hand.

  This memory has not always been so detailed, so complete. Victor’s child-mind wrapped up the incident and sunk it deep. He never talked to his father about what happened, and perhaps his dad never knew; but then again, he was never taken back to visit a construction site.

  What remains are pictures in dreams, shot through with dread – a falling brick, a man’s faced upturned. Sometimes, he’ll be stumbling through shadowy, half-finished tunnels, tripping, reeling. And falling. He dreams often of that. Usually it is agony, laceration. But sometimes he falls ecstatically, through a veil of glass, the floor rising to receive him in a cloud of gems. Or he has already fallen, and is laid out on a drift of shattered crystal, his skin and hair dusted with splinters. Above, a jagged hole admits the summer sky and light sifts through the vault, and heavy figures gather round him, dusted grey.

  It happened six or seven weeks before, on a mundane shopping trip. He’d come to the mall, not one he would normally visit, to pick up an old watch from a specialist repair shop – he has his own small business, dealing in antiques. He’d been walking across the central atrium, watching the ground, when he saw the brass compass decoration set into the floor. He stopped short, mid-stride. One leg on north, one leg on east.

  What?

  Something … something … a forgotten word, a forgotten name, tickling the back of his mind. The sounds of the shoppers around him muted to a hush. Slowly he turned his head, taking in the proportions of the building, the arrangement of space. And then he looked up. And was flooded by the light of memory, falling down upon him from the dome.

  A brick falling, a man’s face upturned.

  A compass rose, his father’s hand.

  Victor stood there for a long time with his head rocked back on his shoulders, quite still. His bladder cramped in fear. Because he knew: he would have to go up.

  It took a week to work out how to get to the roof via the parking garage. Another week before he could brin
g himself to touch the glass. It was the worst vertigo he’d ever experienced: his head reeled; he shook as if the ligaments connecting the bones of his legs had perished away like old rubber. His bladder ached, although it was empty. And he made himself climb. And lie flat. And look. Because after a while – ten minutes, twenty – the memories came.

  It’s easier now. He’s come here seven or eight times, and each time, the images shift a little further into focus. Still the forms are blurred; they lack the crisp focus of a ten-year-old’s vision. Probably they always will. Parts of the story are missing. Where is the moment of impact, the brick connecting? That he cannot see, yet.

  And when he does? Perhaps then the glass will melt away, and release him.

  “Hey!”

  Victor sits up with a jerk. The voice is from outside his head, from below.

  “Hey!”

  Down on the concrete apron, a guy in a red security-guard uniform is staring up at him from the base of the dome, palms planted on the glass.

  “Hey,” says Victor.

  The man gestures. “Come down off there.”

  He taps his baton against the glass, and Victor grunts in alarm. He tries to lift his hand, lift a foot, but he’s stuck; if he pulls away from the surface now he’ll start trembling, he’ll skitter right off.

  The guard seems undecided. He takes a step away, then towards the glass, shuffling his feet closer while leaning back to keep Victor in view. He heaves a breath, making a decision, and then launches himself up. He’s dextrous, finding handholds and pulling himself up the slope without pause. Then he’s right up close, panting slightly. He’s much younger than Victor had realised – a skinny teenager with a cocky stance. Hands on his hips, where a baton and radio also hang. The uniform is painfully bright against his dark skin.

  “You know,” Victor says carefully, “this is terribly dangerous.”

  But the kid is distracted: he’s seen the view, and for a moment the seriousness of his mission is lost in tree-top elation. He laughs, spins on his heel. He’s moving too fast for Victor’s liking, everything twisting and jutting in different directions: baton, chin, elbows. Disturbing the equilibrium Victor has so painstakingly obtained.

  “Go down,” Victor says. “Please. This is not safe.”

  The boy jumps in place, flings out his arms and legs and stares at Victor, wide-eyed with comical panic.

  “What?”

  The guard repeats the gesture with more emphasis, spreading his fingers and raising his eyebrows: get it?

  Oh, right. Victor recognises the caricature: a man splayed, like something caught on a car windscreen. “Right. That’s me.” He raises his hands cautiously, echoing the pose. “So you saw me from down there.”

  “Oh, I saw you.” The boy has a winning smile. “But now tell me.” He scuffs the toe of his boot against the glass. Even in the paramilitary boots, his ankles look stalk-like, the trousers blousing out of their tops. “Tell me, seriously. What are you doing up here?”

  Victor is thinking: two bodies on the glass. The weight of two.

  The scarlet kid goes down on his haunches – every move makes Victor tense up – and gives him an understanding smile. “You want to jump? Thinking about it? How come, man?” He pats Victor soothingly on the shoulder, shakes his head. “Because also, you know, this glass will never break. Too thick.” He takes his hand away and gives the dome a lusty slap, like a plate-glass salesman demonstrating its virtues.

  “No,” says Victor, “I know.” He tips his head towards the glass. “Go on, have a look. It’s a whole different view.”

  The guard drops from his haunches to his knees – whap go his kneecaps, smack go his palms, every sound a blow – cups his hands around his eyes and peers into the glass.

  Victor sees a puff of vapour form on the surface, at his open mouth.

  “High,” the boy breathes.

  Victor watches the boy’s body stiffen as his gaze penetrates, piercing the soap-bubble reflections. Sees something enter him, some kind of crushing weight that presses him against the glass, as if his personal gravity has just increased fourfold.

  The breeze is up, and Victor can hear a light whining through struts and crossbeams. The dome is cloudy blue, this time of day. The vapour clears from the glass: the boy has stopped breathing. When he’s been motionless for too long, Victor puts a hand lightly on his shoulder, to break the spell.

  The guard startles away from the glass. Moving like an old man now, he carefully turns around and sits next to Victor, never letting more than one hand or foot leave the glass at a time. He stares blindly at the mountain. “So high,” he says.

  Then one of his legs starts to tremble. Victor takes hold of the knee to still it. The nightstick makes a batting sound against the glass. Victor moves his hands to grip the guard’s arms. The crisp uniform, with its black epaulettes, feels almost empty: it crumples in his grip around the knobs of the shoulders.

  “Don’t look down,” Victor says.

  The boy, panicked now, pushes back against him with a sharp elbow – followed by the weight of his whole body, leaning in to Victor’s chest. He smells sweet and sour. New cloth, fresh sweat.

  “Okay,” Victor says. “It’s okay.”

  In the end he has to pull the boy’s hands away and turn his body around so that it faces inward, chest to the glass. He takes the trembling feet and places them one by one on the metal struts. First left and then right, curling the fingers around the grips. Repeat, moving down. It’s cumbersome, and it becomes harder the further down the slope they move. The guard keeps collapsing onto him, growing heavier and limper every second. On the last slippery pane Victor lets them both go, so they slide together into a heap at the base of the dome. The guard pushes his face against the glass, against the exhausting reflections. They slump there for a while, breathing.

  Then Victor stands, grips the boy’s wrists and pulls him to his feet. He loops an arm around his shoulders, hefts his weight, guides his feet with his own. They walk to the low wall that edges the roof. On the other side is a ten-foot drop, down to the spiral ramp and the dimness of the parking garage. It’s easier exiting than climbing up: they just need to step over the wall onto the top of a disused vending machine, and then jump to the ground. It’s Victor’s usual route. He turns the guard around again, sits him on the edge, climbs down, holds up a hand. The young guard grips it, and stiffly makes it down to the ramp without letting go. His walk is a little wobbly.

  As they descend into the parking garage, the world becomes dimmer and louder. Three storeys of coiled, stalled traffic stand between them and the sunlit world. Once they have moved into the fumeladen space, the guard holds Victor’s hand less and less tightly. After the first turn of the concrete coil, Victor feels just his fingertips; at the second, nothing.

  Victor glances behind him every few moments to check that the boy is still there. And then, on the bottom level, suddenly he isn’t. Victor turns sideways to squeeze between two cars, and when he turns back again, the guard has vanished. He backtracks a little way. The boy is leaning against the wall, wiping his face with his arm.

  The guard inspects his sweat-stained sleeve. “That glass will never break, you know. Not in a million years.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  There’s a nerve jumping in the young man’s eyelid, an uncontrollable winking. Victor can see: a tremor has entered the world for him. What was stable has been shaken loose.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  The boy wink-winks at him. Victor has an urge to press his thumb, gently, onto the corner of that eye, to still the twitch.

  But instead he turns and goes on through the dark of the parking garage, heading for its mouth. His walk is steady. As he exits past the ticket machines and into the sunlight and the air, he feels something shatter, some shell as light and transparent as blown glass. And then he is through.

  Forensic

  It had been a mistake, she saw that now, to bring her cousin
here. Paula hadn’t come to this park since childhood, when it had been a limitless realm; but now she saw that it was small, about the size of a rugby field, and exposed. There were worn patches in the grass and a brandy bottle in the dry pond that had once held carp. She’d hoped the place would feel safe, but instead it was desolate.

  The lawn sloped up gently between patches of shrubbery to where a bank of pine trees, dark against the pale sky, shielded the reservoir beyond. Down near the entrance, a black nanny sat with a white toddler on a blanket, but otherwise the lawns were empty. A weekday afternoon. Paula wanted to get in under the trees, somewhere private and away from the road, but Mariette was dawdling behind, a dark figure afloat against the green.

  This was not the right place to come. The nanny was folding up the blanket now. Soon, Paula realised, she and Mariette would be the only people there.

  A guineafowl darted between the flower beds – a speckled mother followed by a row of droplet chicks. Mariette came up the slope behind the birds and then stopped, arms crossed, waiting.

  “Let’s go in the shade.” Paula pointed with her free hand; in the other she held four beers in a plastic shopping bag. She’d been unsure about the beers. Mariette was only sixteen, four years younger than herself, and she didn’t want to get her little cousin drunk. Or not too drunk, anyway. So she’d torn open the six-pack and left two bottles at home. Two each should be fine.

  Mariette shrugged. Her shoulders were made for shrugging, angular and mobile beneath her black long-sleeved jersey. There was little family resemblance between the cousins, except that both were tall and fair-skinned. Mariette had a small, square face, neat features – a wiry prettiness that Paula, softer fleshed, had always envied. The younger girl’s wavy hair, worn loose down her back, seemed freshly washed. But she was gaunt. The shine of her hair was at odds with the dead surfaces of skin and eyes. She wore a long brown skirt of some silky material, dark stockings and black suede boots with a heel. Clothes to conceal, but tight, their bandaging material exposing the sharpness of knee and elbow. A black satin ribbon was tied like a choker around her neck.