by S. L. Grey
A flurry of guinea fowls traipse across the row of graves, absurd and precise in their spotted suits. I briefly consider them, but, no, feathers won’t do.
Why should death provoke a normal response? Why should I be sane and measured, coldhearted in reaction to my loss? That’s why Zoë’s haunting me now: because I’ve tried so hard to tamp her down, to carry on with my life as if it could ever be normal again. I must not allow my scars to heal; I must not allow Steph to pressure me into forgetting her. My life is defined by my scars, and to deny that is to deny that I ever loved Zoë. I’ve been depriving Zoë of her voice, of an effect on me; I’ve been depriving myself of my scars. More than anything, the home invasion brought that into focus for me: I am nothing without my pain; I am nothing without my rage and my fear.
I squat down by her gravestone, squeezed into Odette’s father’s family plot, between her grandmother and an uncle.
ZOË SEBASTIAN
the stone says, and the seven years, three months, and one day she lived with us.
MOURNED BY MARK AND ODETTE
WE WILL MISS YOU FOREVER
Those words are not enough to honor her, I know now, and what we wrote there, Odette and I, is a promise never to forget.
I didn’t plan it, but that afternoon when I left my first session with Santé, I spotted something dark on the side of the dirt road, knotted into the veldtgrass and rubble mounded along the drainage ditch. I knew it was some sort of animal and I stopped the car in case it had been run over and was still alive. Perhaps I could do something for it. I got out, approached slowly, careful not to frighten it. It was fairly large—bigger than a rat and smaller than a dog. Perhaps a ferret or an otter or something wild. I can’t say how, but it felt wild—I had a distinct sense of its life-force and its desperation to live.
But when I got there, I saw that it was a domestic cat, and it was dead, ripped open. It must have been hit by a car going very fast. It must have died instantly. Fascinated by its body, I squatted down to take a closer look. The skin on one side of the wound was peeled back off the muscle, just like I’ve seen rabbits skinned on a cooking show.
My mind turned to those buckets of hair in the Petits’ apartment, and suddenly I understood. I felt a sense of clear direction that I haven’t felt for as long as I can remember. Hair is an archetypal symbol of vitality, sexual vigor, life-force. Think of Samson and Delilah, Rapunzel, Ophelia, the hair-cutting shame rituals practiced the world over. That’s what they were doing: it wasn’t just filth, a sign of their perverse degradation; the Petits (or whoever they were) were collecting life, distilling vitality, a talisman against the cold, life-sucking mood in that building. I felt guided; I finally felt some compelling purpose in my drifting life. Zoë knew the answer all along. Her hair collection succeeded—she healed Odette, after all. Perhaps it was too late, but Zoë was asking me to try. When I decided what to do, the raw-burned Zoë-shaped hole in me soothed, the hook in my heart eased for just a moment, and I knew that she’d approve.
I know it’s not normal to remove a dead cat’s pelt and keep it, unless you’re a biologist or taxidermist, but that’s what I did. It made complete sense to me at that time. Hair was life-force distilled, even after death—it never rots away with the body. A little collection of hair would be my talisman against the death all around me. It might even help me start to live again.
Now I stand up from my daughter’s graveside and turn my hands over, run my finger over the cuts and bites and gashes from the last few days. They sting, even though I’ve been disinfecting them. I must have scraped my hands on the weeds or perhaps there was some barbed wire hidden in the grass.
I only intended it as a memorial for her; I didn’t expect Zoë to get involved. But when she came to me in class the next day and gave me some of her own hair, I knew I had done the right thing. After my session with Santé that next afternoon, I found more roadkill. I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I’m unsure. Yesterday, when the sangoma came, Zoë told me it had to be alive to work.
Along the peripheral road, a funeral cortège arrives. I brace myself to leave in case they come this way, but the cars move on up to the far corner of the cemetery where the newer plots are laid. A scattered group of mourners walks up behind the cars, carrying bouquets and gaudy framed pictures of the deceased, some glancing over at me as they pass, and I see myself as I am: a sad, folded man in a suit, squatting over a weathered grave with an old shoe box.
What’s wrong with me? I should have brought flowers for Zoë’s grave, not a box of hair.
I sit on the grave’s edge and lift the lid of the box. Here’s the twist of blond hair to one side. I’ve tried to keep it separate from the pelts, which are starting to smell.
It has to be alive, she said to me.
I know it was just a message from my own mind. I know as well as Steph knows that Zoë doesn’t exist in a physical sense—she’s dead. All I’m experiencing is a particularly vivid set of symbolic images that’s finally helping me process Zoë’s death. It’s been brought on by the psychotherapy, I’m sure, dislodging the symbolic patterns of my thought and rendering them concrete. But that doesn’t mean I should discount what my unconscious is telling me.
Squirrels scurry up and down the pines and dart between the headstones. Zoë used to call them squillos; Odette and I didn’t have the heart to correct her—it was just too cute. I take out the bag of peanuts, rip it open, and toss one on the pathway a few yards ahead of me. It’s not long before a squirrel approaches, grabs up the nut, and stands staring at me, quivering on its back legs, sniffing for more. They’re obviously used to being fed here and are almost as tame as the brazen squirrel gangs in the gardens in the city.
I chuck another peanut, halfway between it and me. The squirrel darts closer. Then another, only a foot away. Now I glance around me to see that nobody’s watching, place a nut in my palm, and wait.
The squirrel hesitates to come within an arm’s length; it’s jittery, keeps darting looks back toward its cohorts. But it can’t resist. It goes for the nut and I close my left hand over its shoulders. It squirms and scratches and tries to bite, but I have it in a tight hold, pinning its legs to its body.
The creature’s heart is rattling so fast I think it’ll pop. Its fur is warm and soft; a second ago, it trusted me.
“Sorry, squillo,” I say, and let it go, tossing a handful of nuts far down the path for it to collect. The real Zoë, my living daughter who died irretrievably seven years ago, would never want me to kill an animal for her. I look back down at the box, the brown blood and shiny bits of flesh blooming damply against the cardboard. She wouldn’t want this either. I pick out the skein of blond hair from the box and put it in my pocket. On my way out, I find a trash can and throw the stinky box away. It’s too late to save her, I realize at last. I was never going to save her.
As I drive away, southward, not back home, I think of that headstone, the only place in the world that our names are set in stone together: Zoë, Odette, me. I park outside a little shopping center in Bergvliet, halfway to the sea, and dial.
“Hi, Odette.”
A silence, a bracing, a gathering, the whole length from Bristol to Cape Town. “Mark. Hello.”
“I’m disturbing you, aren’t I?”
“No, not really. Same old.” Sounds of children in the background. She has two, I think. She never got remarried. The last I heard, she was living with another guy, not their father. “Saturday morning, you know. Football, shopping.”
“How are you?”
“Okay. And you?”
“Okay, thanks.” Then I realize I didn’t call Odette to swap pleasant lies. “I’ve been going to therapy.”
“Oh?” Instantly wary.
“Yes. It’s been bringing back a lot of”—ghosts?—“memories.”
“Sure. I suppose it would.” I can hear the effort she’s making to sound civil.
“I didn’t want to disturb you. I was trying to remember. It
’s horrible how things get blurred. Funny question, I suppose, but was Zoë a cat person or a dog person?”
“You called to ask me that?”
“I don’t know. Something’s come up. She always hated cats, didn’t she?”
“Hated cats? No. She loved them. Remember—you even got her those Hello Kitty sneakers for her seventh birthday.”
“Hello Kitty? I don’t think so.”
“You did, Mark.”
“Nah. I got her those little black high-tops with Scooby-Doo on them.”
“Uh-uh. Why on earth would she want those? She hated that cartoon. It freaked her out. She got scared easily. You seriously don’t remember?”
Her tone is fraying around the edges. She’s still angry with me. She’ll never forgive me, and I don’t see any reason why she should. “Okay, thanks. Sorry to disturb you.”
Hearing my discomfort, she relents and babbles on a little to comfort me. “It was definitely Hello Kitty. I remember thinking it was odd of you to go in for something so gendered. In fact, I’ve got the picture on my computer; I’m sure of it. I’m going to find it and email it to you.” She was always kind like that. We loved each other.
“Thanks.” I hang up and notice the sign for a little pub in the center: one of those cheap steel signs sponsored by Castle Lager, WALTER’S BARREL. Why not? Steph only expects me back at four.
Locking the car, it strikes me that my suit is going to look odd in a place like this. But I have no choice; there’s blood on my shirt. I check myself in the side mirror, button my jacket tightly, and push my way inside. It’s only noon, but the bar’s pretty full and stinks of yesterday’s sweat and smoke and grease and today’s beer. The front window is completely painted over by an advertisement, so I can barely make out anything in the gloom apart from clusters of men, maybe a couple of women, staring up at the TV screens, which are showing a rugby match.
I sit down at the bar, as the man behind the counter eyes me as if I’m taking a regular’s seat. Normally this would be enough to send me back outside and home to my local, familiar, safe café, but not today. I sit up straight and order a draft. The barman gets pouring without a word.
“Getting married?” A man, two seats away, has turned to me with a friendly, toothless smile. He’s eyeing my suit, wearing tracksuit trousers and a stained T-shirt himself. “A last dop as a free man?”
“Uh, no. Meeting,” I say. “That sort of client.”
“Sure,” he says, looking back up at the screen above the bar.
“Who’s playing?” I say.
“Stormers and Force.”
“It’s a bit early for rugby, isn’t it?”
“It’s in Perth,” he says. “Australia.” He shifts his body away from me, turning his face back to the screen. “Ja, you know. Super-rugby what-what.”
I can’t help feeling like I’ve disappointed him. For a minute, I wish I could have come in here with an interesting story—a story of altar shirking or last-night prostitutes—one that would help him escape for a minute.
I take a deep pull from my tasteless beer and look around the space. Now that my eyes are accustomed to the gloom, I notice the mismatched, stained, and scratched dark-wood furnishings, the quiet drinkers looking up at the screens as if they’re portals away from their lives and they’ve just closed forever. It’s not the time of day for jolly drunks, and it’s too early in the season for anyone to get excited about the game. There’s a step up to a room with a few pool tables, where music is playing from a fake jukebox, a molded plastic front with a satellite station playing obligatory radio pop from a speaker inside. A couple of young women move listlessly to the music. I can’t tell if they’re drunk or stoned or just tired, but it’s wrong to see people moving like that at noon.
I stare up at the TV and it seems just a couple of moments later when my phone buzzes, but when I look in front of me, my glass is empty and the first half of the game is done and there’s an advert for a car playing. My phone’s beeping in my jacket pocket. The barman juts his chin at my beer glass and I nod and check the message on my phone.
Nice, if a bit weird, to hear from you. You sounded strange. Hope all’s okay with you?
Here’s the picture.
x
I push back from the bar, vaguely aware of the patrons looking at me as I stumble over the worn wooden floor, following my instinct to the bathroom, through the pool room, through the arched hallway toward the smell of piss and pink freshener blocks and finally get to slam a door behind me and gasp at the pain of my shock.
When I’ve gathered myself, I splash water on my face, trying to ignore the grime on the basin glaring clearly in the daylight that streams through the high-level windows. I flick the phone on again, trying to immunize myself. I’ve seen this picture before. I had a copy of it myself, but it was on my old computer and I just backed all those photos up onto a drive and never looked at them again. Zoë with her birthday shoes. And her smile that shreds me all over again.
It’s a while before I hear the knocking.
Someone says something. A woman’s voice, gentle.
I stand up, try to straighten myself, wet my face again. In the mirror I see blood on my shirt.
Knocking again. The voice. I can’t make out what it’s saying.
The door’s opening.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a, Papa?”
It’s her, the girl. She’s got a star on her pink T-shirt today, green jeans. On her feet are dopey Great Danes.
“You’re not her, are you?” I say.
“Not who?” Naut oo.
“My daughter. She’s dead.”
She comes closer, until she stands an inch from me. I can feel the electricity coursing through her body, charging every follicle in my skin. A shadow covers the light from the windows, but she glows with a Kirlian aura crackling purple and luminous black. I feel the energy reaching to me and sparking off me, burning as it invades. She opens her lips and tells me, “I am yours. I am your anything. I am what you want.”
Her breath is sweet and rotten, like fruit that’s too ripe. She licks my mouth with her tongue, then bites my lip.
“What do you want from me?” I say.
“I want you to keep me alive.” And now she touches my face, runs her fingers into the thin hair at my temple, and I’m blinded by an image that seems like mist, but I put my hands out and feel: it’s hair. I part it, push through it, and still there’s more; I’m cocooned in it. Soft, smelling of apple shampoo and fruity perfume. It’s life.
How I used to hold Zoë to my chest and breathe her scent; her sweat, her dirt, the natural oils, the apple shampoo. It was love; I loved her too much and she couldn’t breathe. I have her in me, her molecules still in my lungs.
A bang, a slam, the girl is gone, and there is blood running down my chin.
“Hey! Hey! What the fuck you think you doing with Dierdra?”
The man’s first swipe is slow and I duck under it, and behind him, in the corridor, there’s a woman staring at me with a mixture of fear and curiosity, like I’m an animal on exhibit. She’s thirtysomething and ugly and dark haired, and she’s wearing green jeans and a pink T-shirt with a star on it.
I turn away and get the man’s second punch at the back of my skull. I’m down on the floor, mopping up the piss with my suit, heavy weight on me, some muffled pummeling in my back before the weight is pulled off and I’m dragged out of the bar and pushed to my car. The barman hands me my keys and wallet. “Thanks for the tip, friend. Hope you don’t mind, I helped myself.”
—
It’s late when I get home. I’ve been thinking. About how I’m afraid of Hayden, of loving her so much that I suck away her life with my need. I killed Zoë, and even though I know there’s no way to bring her back, I can keep her spirit alive.
Steph is passed out on the couch when I come in, an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table; Hayden’s asleep in the armchair. When I go through to the kitchen, I find beer bottles dum
ped in the recycling bin, the good coffee mugs, the ones we keep for guests, in the sink.
I brush my jealousy aside. Steph’s entitled to guests, after all, and I need to get started; she could wake up any minute, though the fact that Steph’s drunk will help me. I throw my stinking jacket on the bathroom floor, take the scissors from the drawer, and approach Hayden. She’s fast asleep as only a toddler can be. I sit down next to her and smooth the hair back from her face.
When I start, I only mean to take a little.
Chapter 22
Steph
Snick, snick.
Brain muggy from the wine I knocked back after Karim left the house, I sat up, neck stiff from sleeping awkwardly on the couch.
Snick.
The only light came from the television, which was silently tuned to a home-shopping channel. A figure was hunched over the armchair where Hayden slept. I didn’t make a sound: I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. For a split second I was certain it was the slippery multi-limbed monster—the thing that lived under the bed—then it shifted its position and I realized it was Mark. Of course it was Mark.
Snick.
My voice came out in a whisper: “What are you doing?”
He froze, then looked over his shoulder at me. It was too dark to see his eyes, but he was gripping something metallic in his right hand—the light from the television bounced off it. Oh shit, he’s got a knife. Dismissing me, he turned back to Hayden.
Snick.
A dark curl drifted onto the wooden floor. Hayden’s hair. He was cutting her hair while she lay sleeping.
“Get away from her, Mark. Get away from her right now.” I spoke coldly and calmly. I couldn’t afford to panic: if I lunged for him or if Hayden woke suddenly, she could get seriously hurt. The clearheaded version of me, the person who’d taken over in the moments after Mireille jumped, was back when I needed her.