Homing

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Last time Paula had seen her, a year ago, Mariette had been emphatically made up – Egyptian eyeliner, dark lipstick, hair henna-red. Then it had seemed childish to Paula, melodramatic; but now she missed the colours. Mariette’s naked face was powdery and dry, not the way a young girl’s skin was supposed to look. And she’d grown so thin: it was painful to see. Especially knowing what had happened, as Paula now did.

  Mariette’s skinny arms were knotted like cords across her chest. A paperback book was caught in the awkward clinch, pushed into one armpit. She’d squeezed an index finger between the pages to keep her place: Paula could see that the top joint of the finger had gone white. Mariette had irritated her in the car, reading all through the silent journey to the park.

  Paula headed for the shade of an old rubber tree, Mariette trailing. The grass had worn away to earth around the humped roots.

  “How about here?” She dropped the bag of beers on the ground, where the sand was pocked with ant-lion holes like miniature craters. Just beyond the rubber tree, the lawn ended and the wooded bank rose. A narrow path, edged with worn brick, led up into the pines.

  Mariette shrugged again, then bent from the waist to help herself to a beer. An elegant movement, shaped by years of ballet lessons. When she saw her cousin twist the bottle open with a practised snap of the wrist, Paula knew she should’ve brought the six-pack after all.

  Setting the bottle carefully on the uneven grass, Mariette subsided just beyond the tree’s shade. That ballerina trick of going from standing to sitting in a single fold. Then she stretched out on her stomach, ankles precisely crossed, as if she’d decided beforehand how to compose her body. Shifting her elbows together, she held the fat paperback open in both hands. It had a red-and-black cover, featuring, as far as Paula could see between Mariette’s fingers, a dead hand floating in blood-coloured light. She could feel her cousin slipping away; she must try to say something, now, before Mariette turned another page.

  Paula moved unwillingly out of the shade and sat down cross-legged next to her cousin. “Detective book?”

  “It’s about forensic pathology,” Mariette answered in a faint voice.

  Paula had read one or two books like that. Maggots and blood spatters and knife cuts.

  “It’s interesting,” Mariette offered unexpectedly. “I might be a pathologist when I leave school.”

  Mariette hadn’t been to school since July, Aunt Denise had said. Paula shifted her legs, pulling her knees up. Sitting cross-legged made her thighs look fat, and the grass was prickling. She’d considered bringing a blanket, but had decided against it: the crocheted patchwork had seemed old-womanly, fussy. “Isn’t it a bit gross?” she asked. “Dead bodies and all that.”

  Her cousin gave a cool half-smile, not looking up.

  Paula ploughed on. “I wouldn’t want to read that kind of stuff. If I was you.”

  Mariette went still. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” Paula flushed, but she was already pink from the sun and perhaps it didn’t show. She clenched her toes inside her running shoes. “You know.”

  Mariette’s eyes did not leave the page, but they no longer scanned the lines. “Did my mother ask you to talk to me?”

  “No … well. My mother.”

  Paula wondered if she would prefer her cousin to cry. Tears might make this easier.

  “I’m fine,” Mariette said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, if you ever do, you know—”

  “I’m fine.” Mariette closed the book, first carefully folding down a corner of the page to mark her place, and put it to one side on the grass. Then she pulled her legs under her and stood, ankles together, beer in hand.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said, and headed off up the path into the trees, reaching out to strip a leaf off a bush as she went. She walked quickly, not looking back.

  Paula sank back on the grass, reminding herself: patience. Mariette was the hurt one, the one who must be cared for. Paula must abide.

  She picked up the book and flipped through it. The pages fell open at the place Mariette had marked: … retracting skin from the cranial … Her gaze flicked away from the words. She’d never had the stomach for this kind of writing, the formalin-soaked relish of it. She always imagined herself the body on the slab, not the steely forensic pathologist with implements in her gloved hands. She flipped to another page. Now the pathologist was cooking a romantic dinner for two. Paula pushed it away.

  The grass was starting to feel like tiny blades, even through her shorts, and she could also feel movement – ants under her legs. Worms. But when she checked she saw nothing, just pink leaf impressions on the soft flesh of her thighs. She moved back into the shade of the tree, idly looking for ants to feed to the ant-lions. But there were none. She opened another beer.

  Mariette stayed away for ten minutes, twenty. The light grew soft, shadows lengthened. It was dim in the trees beyond the lawn.

  Look after her, Paulie; you know what a bad time she’s had. Take her out for the day, just one day. Talk to her.

  We were never that close, Mom.

  Mariette had been different, apparently, since July. That’s when Aunt Denise had come home to find the house burgled, Mariette unconscious in her room. There’d been terrible bruises on the girl’s neck; she’d been choked and – Paula’s mother had hinted – perhaps worse. Denise had not told all of it. That was four months ago. Mariette herself had said nothing about the incident in all that time. For the first week, she hadn’t spoken at all.

  What do you mean, close? She’s your cousin, Paulie. You used to play together.

  Long ago, on the beach. She’d been given her cousin’s hand to hold. Mariette was an outgoing, pretty five-year-old, hair in pigtails, wearing pink panties and nothing else. Her small hand was mobile in Paula’s. It was an easy accident to happen. The little girl had squirmed from her grip and run away, straight down to the water. In that brief moment, it didn’t occur to Paula to stop the child, or even that she could: her cousin’s will was stronger, even then. Paula had not taken a single step towards the sea.

  The undertow had grabbed Mariette by the ankles and tipped her so her head went under, stayed under for thirty seconds or more. Only then did Paula shout. Aunt Denise had rushed forward to grab the little girl by an arm and a leg and lift her clear, turning in the next moment to stare in disbelief at the nine-year-old standing like a lump on the shore.

  They’d pressed at Mariette’s white chest with their hands and she’d puked up water and thin bile and then started coughing, staring between coughs not at her mother but fiercely up at the sky. Afterwards, wrapped in a towel on the back seat next to Paula, Mariette had seemed tired but pleased. What a brave girl, Paula’s mother had said. Not looking at Paula.

  Eleven years later, Paula could still feel the shame, but also the curious disappointment she’d experienced. There had been, for a few short moments, a simple curiosity, a desire to watch what happened when the child’s clockwork legs carried her into the sea. As if Mariette were a little machine that Paula had devised in order to test an idea.

  “Hey!” The shout was piercing, so buoyant that Paula didn’t immediately recognise the voice. Then Mariette came running down the path, laughing like a child, and Paula started to laugh too, feeling that some kind of breakthrough had unexpectedly occurred. She almost opened her arms to embrace her cousin – it felt that natural.

  As she neared, Paula saw the flush in Mariette’s cheeks. Strands of dark hair were twisted around her neck.

  “It’s a man! I found a man!”

  Mariette came up to her, closer than they’d been all day. Her whole posture had changed: now not primly upright, but leaning forward, eagerly taking hold of Paula’s arm with both hands. Her grip was strong.

  “What?”

  “There’s a man in the bushes. A dead man. Come see, come see.” Mariette was tugging at her arm.

  Paula resisted the pull. A guineafowl ga
ve its rusty-swing call somewhere lower down the sloping lawn and she was startled, as if the creak of dismay had come from her own throat. “Mariette … are you sure?”

  Her cousin’s face snapped shut. She snatched her hands back and turned away. Ahead, the path tilted up through the trees, away from the sunny lawns and into shadow. Mariette stalked up the slope, grace lost, with the stiff, determined gait of a child heading for the waves.

  And so Paula followed, in under the pines, into the damp shadows where the light failed. She watched Mariette’s white hands swinging at the ends of her black sleeves, disconnected from her body in the gloom. The path looped back down, but Mariette plunged off it, straight up the steep, trackless slope. Thick undergrowth grew here, and Paula felt the twigs scratch blood from her hands. Grunts escaped her as she pushed her way through, wrenching the branches out of her path. Then the slope flattened out and she came up with relief against a fence. Mariette was waiting, gripping the wire. She’d lost her beer bottle somewhere along the way. Paula stopped, breathing through her nose to conceal her panting. She gave a little laugh, to show that she didn’t really mind.

  But then Mariette hitched up her skirt (a line of pale, sinewy leg), took hold of the wooden fencepost and climbed over, nimble in her heeled boots.

  Paula didn’t bother to protest. With difficulty, she followed. She was not agile, and the toes of her running shoes were too snub to fit the diamond gaps in the wire. She teetered on top, the fence rocking under her, thinking for an awful moment that she would fall with a leg on each side. But she made it over.

  Mariette had broken through the bushes into a small clearing where the sunlight fell onto rubble – bricks, rusty cans and broken glass, all knitted together with grass. On the other side, the bushes pressed thickly against another fence, then more trees; beyond, a glint of water from the reservoir.

  Mariette was pointing at a tangle of old rubbish. Her skin was white, the ribbon at her neck intensely black. “There!”

  “I can’t see anything, Mariette,” Paula said in a calming tone, still trying to control her breathing.

  “Look.”

  Transmuted by Mariette’s pointing finger, the pile of rags took form. A blue anorak. A pair of shoes. A bundle of yellow-grey sticks, loosely threaded through the bright, imperishable synthetics, grass pushing up between them. Then Paula made out a yellow skull, staring straight up, the jaw still attached by leathery shreds; hands twisting out of the blue sleeves, skin peeling back from the delicate bones of the fingers like dry leaves curling …

  How lonely, was her first thought. She felt no revulsion. There was no smell. It was dry and unfrightening. She noted the cheap fabric of the clothes, the worn soles of the shoes. Poor man’s clothes. The body had been there a long time – months, years. How could it have passed unwitnessed through all the garish stages of death? To reach this state of quietude.

  Paula moved towards the body, feeling some need to cover it: shut up the eye sockets, fold the arms and legs, zip the sad anorak … something.

  “Don’t go too close,” Mariette said. “It’s evidence.” She was talking swiftly, intently. Her hands were on her hips, not tucked up into her armpits now. “They need to bring the forensics team in here as soon as possible, cordon off the scene.” Her eyes were bright as she lifted her hair and twisted it up with both hands, giving her flushed neck some air. “It’s a man, don’t you think? Must be a man.” She shook her hair loose again. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like, to find a body.”

  Paula didn’t watch them gather up the remains. When she saw them carrying the narrow bundle on a stretcher down to the road where the mortuary van was parked, she thought they treated it roughly.

  But the policeman was gentle. The large man sat next to Mariette on a white bench next to the park entrance and took her statement, pressing on his knees. The ballpoint pen kept pushing holes in the paper, and Paula worried about him getting ink on his trousers. His uniform was immaculate. An enamel nametag said MAJOLA.

  Mariette, next to him, was straight-backed again, her hands on her own sharp knees, staring ahead and talking with quick animation.

  “It was a man; I could see at once it was a man. And of course I knew it wasn’t a natural death,” she was saying. “From the position of the body. There’d been a struggle. Abrasions, bruising. And cuts – multiple knife cuts.” Her voice was trembling now, tissue paper floating above a fire, on the edge of combustion. “The blood had … pooled around the body.”

  The policeman raised soft, puzzled eyes. “Blood? Where’s the blood?”

  Paula started shaking her head, but he wasn’t looking at her.

  “A blade with a thin cross-section,” Mariette continued. “But cause of death was strangulation. Fractured hyoid bone. Classic.”

  Sergeant Majola had stopped writing now and was staring at Mariette.

  “Excuse me,” said Paula. She motioned the policeman away, and he stood and walked with her a little way up the lawn. Mariette stayed on the bench, staring bright-faced into the last of the sun.

  “My cousin is upset,” said Paula. “We didn’t go that close. There was no blood or anything. Just what you saw. That’s all.”

  In the car on the way home, Mariette was as quiet as before, but in her face there was something different: a little light, a little colour. Her long hands came up to the ribbon at her neck, fingertips together and palms facing out, an inside-out prayer. “A horrible way to die,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t want to go that way,” said Mariette. There was something different in her voice. A note of quiet triumph, perhaps. As if something, or someone, had been conquered.

  Glancing sideways, Paula saw that her cousin had undone the ribbon, was rubbing the silky stuff between her fingers. Her neck showed no mark.

  “Your book, we left your book behind,” Paula remembered.

  Mariette smiled, privately, at her own reflection in the side window. “That’s okay,” she said. “It wasn’t such a good one anyway.”

  She rolled down the window a crack and trailed the ribbon out of the car. It fluttered for a moment, a strand of seaweed in the flow, then whipped away behind them as she let it loose.

  Burning Buildings

  Hein was building a castle out of matchsticks on the kitchen table. Quietly, Anna placed the groceries on the floor between her feet, raised the camera to her eye and took the picture: Hein, biting his bottom lip, a match held up between his blackened fingernails. The click did not startle him. He was used to her.

  “Nearly finished now,” he said without looking up. He dabbed a precise blob of glue onto the tip of a matchstick flagpole. The castle was impressive, the largest he’d ever made.

  Anna did not go to kiss the top of his head, her usual greeting. She put the shopping on top of the fridge – bread, milk, cigarettes, big pack of matchsticks – and sat down at the table, folding her arms. She was small and dark, neat in her movements. He picked up a new box of matches with a shake that sounded like a tiny gun being racked.

  Matchstick-building was Hein’s latest project: he loved the combination of construction and fiery destruction. He’d spent thousands of matches on elaborate fantasias, complete with minarets, drawbridges, buttresses. When he finished a piece, the two of them would carry the table carefully out into the backyard, and Anna would take photographs while he burnt down his creation, mimicking the screams of its tiny inhabitants. The table – actually an old piece of autopsy equipment, liberated from the hospital by one of their medical student friends – had a steel surface perfect for the job. It was now pitted and blackened from these conflagrations, and burnt matchsticks littered the concrete of the backyard like little twisted corpses.

  Hein planned to build and burn an enormous matchstick edifice in a public place one day, with Anna to record it on film. Secretly, she doubted that this would happen, knowing that he would soon grow bored and find a new enthusiasm.

  M
eanwhile, her photographs lay in piles in the kitchen or were stuck up on the walls with plastic tack, their corners curling as if they’d been salvaged from a real disaster: images of fiery destruction presiding over the house. At night, Hein and Anna drank whisky or brandy – always those amber drinks that taste of flames – and watched the cities burn.

  “So what’s wrong?” he asked, carefully splitting a match lengthways with his Stanley knife.

  Anna opened her mouth, but the answer seemed to stick, as if too large to escape her chest.

  “What?” He looked up, knife in hand.

  Before she could answer, a grey dove flew in through an open window and flapped about from wall to floor and back to the window, beating helplessly against the wrong pane of glass. Glad of the distraction, Anna tracked it with her camera, preserving its panic in three quick shots full of blurred feathers and sunlight through the dusty glass. It made another dash across the room, crashing into a matchstick tower on its way.

  “Ah fuck!” cried Hein, rising from his seat.

  The bird pressed itself to the cornice and watched them with an inky, flustered eye.

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  Anna’s father used to keep pigeons, and he’d taught her how to hold and stroke them in such a way as to soothe their tiny brains. So she knew how to take the bird deftly in one hand, wings fast against the body, legs straightened, the whole bird folded up as neatly as a big warm flower-bud. It’s easy to give such small animals heart attacks: one must be gentle. Its head swivelled from side to side, seeing her with first one eye and then the other, the pea-sized heart pulsing wildly from fear of some disaster beyond the comprehension of a bird. Anna could have stilled it with one squeeze. She turned to show the dove to Hein.

  “Get it out of here. It’s wrecked my castle.”

  Anna explained: “You can break their wings, if you do it wrong. This is how you pick up birds.” She showed him her neat handful. “Like this. You hold the wings and the legs so it can’t flap and hurt itself.”