There was a smile touching his lips as she pounced.
He was keen-eyed and long-armed, yes, as he had told the boy-god. That had not left him over the years. But in this place he was armed only with the wisdom of the desert. There was nothing between him and her claws.
She was a duma, a huntress in her own right. She was prey for no man.
And she tore through him easily.
Dajan cried out, stumbling in blood beneath the weight of her body.
Esu, watching from the distance, furrowed his brows. He mumbled words beneath his breath and continued to shake the cowrie shell.
“All men are crossroads,” he whispered in a singsong voice, “and all women are gateways.”
Out on the plains, Dajan died. The claws of the duma flayed the skin from his body. But there was a smile on his face.
He was wise.
The duma stood over him, claws and teeth red from the kill. She made a noise deep in her throat and began to nose through the still-warm remains of the hunter. Her claws swept through the rags of skin, searching, always searching. She saw a movement among the bloody strips and nudged the refuse away. Beneath, she saw the first glimmer of gold. Then an eye dark as desire. Gold and brown.
With a low growl she swiped away the last pieces like the hen scratching away at the earth to form the continents of the world. From the space she had cleared crawled the lean form of a cat. The duma knew the pattern of his skin, knew it from long ago. There was no pride this time. He smelled of the desert, the sharp scent of sand and the lonely wind.
The second duma rose and shook free of the remnants of his former life. He could feel a change within him, another path, another story.
Warily, he took a step towards her. She snarled and batted at his head with her paw. He hesitated, but the gesture was playful—coy.
He tilted his head slightly, keeping it low to the ground, and made an inquisitive noise.
“Shall we hunt?” he asked in the language of the duma.
“Our prey?” she growled in a voice as soft as the feather of a guinea fowl.
With a soft huff of breath he said, “Ubora, King of the Antelopes.”
Atop the hill Esu watched with a half-mocking grin as the two of them raced through the tall grass, little more than a blur of gold and brown. Absentmindedly, he scratched at his crotch.
“Sly,” he mumbled, “sly as a woman’s eye.” He ran his hand through his stubbly black hair and carefully bound it up within the stretch of red cloth.
With that, his arms stretched out into the wings of a heron. In a moment, he was nothing more than another flash of silver in the night sky, an arrow shot from the bow of the Moon towards the fleeing light of his prey.
“The house sat so perfect and still in the shadow of the mountain. Like it could wait forever. Like it needed no one—the waiting was enough.”
SHIP HOUSE
I am the law of your members,
the kindred of blackness and impulse.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware . . . Beware. . . .
—Anne Sexton, “Rumpelstiltskin”
Her mother had become an old woman by the time Eileen came back to Ship House; she and the house in the shadow of Table Mountain had both sunk in on themselves, both had their backs broken by the winter rains and the too-hot summers of the South African Cape, their foundations crumbling to dust and gravel. Eileen’s mother wore old pearls and a red-and-white shift dress underneath a thin, woolen sweater. Her face was like Eileen’s face, almost. Her eyes had the white-blue of milk. Her hair was so thin she looked nearly bald.
“This is what happens,” Andrew had told Eileen before she left, “when you get to be her age. It’s no surprise that things aren’t quite working right.”
Andrew hadn’t come with her. Even though he knew she was the weaker of them, he had had not come. He had stayed to look after Emma.
“Emma’s barely fifteen,” Andrew had said, “and, God, you know what she’s like, hon, but she’s not stupid. Let her see where she comes from.”
“No,” Eileen had said. “She couldn’t even play in the backyard there, not with, well, you know. It’s not safe. Not for my daughter. Not even at my mother’s house.”
So Andrew had not come. He had left her to do this alone.
Eileen had hired a special taxi to take her to Ship House upon the advice of one of her friends who still regularly travelled back to Cape Town. The regular taxis, she had been told, couldn’t be trusted. Her driver wasn’t white, but she supposed that was okay. She couldn’t tell for sure. He was polite. He took her bag and made sure she settled comfortably into the backseat of the car. Ten minutes later she was driving past the shanty towns with their little houses made of plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic, the lines of laundry—bright blue, salmon, violet and indigo, God, the colours were bright! Unnatural!—fluttering in the sticky-hot breeze. The taxi made its way up the side of the mountain. All of a sudden, there it was: the hard ridge of the South African coastline laid out beneath her and Table Mountain looming above, thick and exposed as a varicose vein.
It was home.
It was home, it was home, but it didn’t feel like home any longer.
And when Eileen embraced her mother, her mother sank into her arms the way a cellar sinks into the muck: in three awful, slow stages.
“Oh, mother,” Eileen said.
“You’ve come back.”
“It’s time for us to be done with this place,” she said. “You can’t be trundling around with no one else here. You’ll slip and break something, and then what will we do?”
“Nothing, dear,” said Eileen’s mother. “I’ll just lie there until they find me.”
“No one will find you, mum.” Eileen disentangled herself carefully.
“Shush up, daughter mine,” her mother whispered. Her teeth clamped down. Snap. And then she smiled again. “There’s someone who will find me here.”
“There isn’t, mum.” (An old fight.) “That’s why I’m here.”
The wind plucked at her mother’s hair like harp strings, setting them loose to float in the air. It was January—but even the wind blew hot here on the other side of the world. Eileen had forgotten the tang of the salt air; milkwood, gladiolas, and freesias; underneath it all, the bitter-sick smell of the Caltex Refinery. The way the heat hung in the air like a second kind of light. Suddenly she was five years old again—back when things had been safe, back when she had learned the stories of the grandfathers: fairy tales, the kind in which stepsisters were left mutilated and forced to dance in hot iron shoes, the stories of Hansie and his sister Grietjie lost in the woods, the story of Raponsie and her long ladder of hair, and Repelsteeltjie, Granny Tamsyn’s favourite. The stories had scared Eileen viciously until she begged her mother to sit next to her bed through the night. There were other stories too, how the elephant got its trunk and the sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo, but it was the old tales she remembered best, the ones she had heard at the feet of her uncles, her great-aunts and her grandmother.
“They’ve all gone now,” Eileen told her mother, “Jacob and Rees, the great-aunts Johanna and Eirlys—Granny Tamsyn was the last but that was three, four years ago.”
“That’s not right,” her mother said. “I just saw Tamsyn last week. She brought me koeksisters from Bree Street. There might’ve still been some for you if you’d come sooner, but as it is I’ve gobbled them all up.”
“No, mum.”
“Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.”
“Let’s go inside, mum,” she said. “Why don’t you take me inside?”
The house was called Ship House.
It had been named, Granny Tamsyn had told her when she was little, by one of the grandfathers who sometime d
uring the war—“Which war?” she had asked; “Shush up, dearie,” she had been told—had been stranded on a massive boat in the middle of the ocean. This house—this rambling half-mansion of a thing with its twelve arches and three terracotta roofs, its silences and croaks, its rooms so lush in daylight and so deeply oppressive after sundown when the heat of the day sunk into its bones—this house, Granny Tamsyn said, had reminded him of his time adrift. Eileen had never questioned it as a child. The house sat so perfect and still in the shadow of the mountain. Like it could wait forever. Like it needed no one—the waiting was enough.
Now Ship House felt strange on the inside to Eileen: too small and too large at the same time. The boards her mother passed over silently creaked under Eileen’s feet. “Go home,” they groaned. “Leave us to our ways,” they whispered. “Traitor,” they hissed.
Eileen wrestled her suitcase into the vestibule, grunting and sweating in the flush midday heat. Dust motes skittered through the light, settling on the gleaming backside of a giant ebony elephant. Her feet tangled on a coarse pink-and-blue rug. What would she do with all these things when she packed them up? They wouldn’t fit in the apartment back home. She ought to call Andrew, she knew, but—
“Come along, my button,” her mother said, “don’t linger.”
—would there even be a working phone? Had anyone bothered to keep up the payments to the electrical company?
“I thought you arranged for a cleaning service. Dr. Jans said you had.”
“I did,” her mother said. She paused to straighten an old photograph of the cable car that ran up the side of the mountain. “But I cancelled it. I don’t like them touching my things. Not them. Fingerprints everywhere. Strangers running through the house!”
Eileen didn’t say anything to that, but she felt a pang sharp as a needle.
She abandoned her bag in the hall, and followed her mother over the step into the sitting room where the family used to gather in the old days. “Quiet,” whispered the boards. “Let her sleep, let her rest,” they muttered.
Let her rest. Yes, she thought. Let her rest in the ground. In a little grave behind the house.
She shook her head, tried to unthink the thought but it sat like a stone in her mind. She did not want to think that way about her mother. But it was hard, sometimes. Oh, but it was hard. Andrew should have come, he should have, he should have, he should have, he should have—
The sitting room was as Eileen remembered it. There was Granny Tamsyn’s seat, and the matching set for the great-aunts Eirlys and Johanna, and for the uncles Jacob and Rees. Three generations had gathered here. The years had accumulated in the house: they were a weight, a presence, substance, form, smell. They clung to her fingertips like dust when she touched the ancient upholstery. Eileen helped her mother into her proper place. Her brittle knees clicked together under the white and red patterned dress like marbles or fine-boned china.
“They steal things, you know.”
“They don’t, mum.”
“They do. They come up from the ravine. They come at night, while I’m sleeping. And they take things.”
“Oh, mother,” said Eileen. “Oh, mother. It’s okay. Please don’t fret. I’m here now.”
And then her mother’s hand was in her hand, and they were clinging to each other. Adrift. The only two passengers left on the ship.
“No,” her mother said. “Oh, no, no. They have such little feet. Such little feet pattering across the floor, coming to take my things away.”
“No,” Eileen whispered. “I’m here.”
“Oh, lovey,” she said. “They do not care. One is as good as two. One has always been as good as two when they come for you.”
The men came in the night. That’s what her mother had said.
Oh, mother, she thought.
Eileen was in her room now. Her very own room. She hadn’t called Andrew to let him know she’d got in as she’d promised, but, well, it would be late at home wouldn’t it? Or perhaps it would be early. Time flowed differently here, and she hadn’t caught the rhythm of the new hours yet. And what would Andrew say anyway? “She’s old, Eileen,” he would say. “Of course, she’s like that. It’s a shame, darling, but it happens.”
And Eileen was tired. She was very tired. And the room had beckoned to her. Her own little room. Her own sweet place, tucked away on the first floor. The same green walls, the same paisley curtains she remembered. The same pale orange shaft of light when the sun began its slow descent below the crest of Lion’s Peak. What a sad strange place it was, this room of hers. It looked nothing like Emma’s room back home, even though she had been much the same age, close anyway.
There were two twin beds, identical in size and shape and dressing, both with the same twisted iron headboards and the same loosely coiled springs. Beds for boys, really. Not for a little girl. Granny Tamsyn had said they belonged to her mother’s younger brothers—Jacob and Rees—when they had been little. The bed on the right was hers. She had never slept in the bed on the left.
There were old school notebooks on the shelves filled with her childhood books: an ornate collection of the tales of the Grimm Brothers done up with gold trim, alongside a dog-eared Afrikaans textbook, biology lessons and history notes: the dates of the first and second Boer Wars, the Krueger telegram, Mandela’s imprisonment.
Ja, she thought, and goeie naand. Good evening.
All of it such a long time ago.
The sheets she had claimed from the closet were stale and thin, but comforting nonetheless. By habit she had made both beds. She had always done that—kept the other bed made. For a sister, maybe. She had thought Emma might stay in the room if she ever came over to see the house. They could have shared it together. For a little while, anyway.
There were no sounds from outside. Silence. She could almost imagine the lonely expanse of the ocean all around her as the house bobbed up and down. Ship House.
Sleep grabbed at her. Twisted. She was caught in its net even though the sun still hung low in the sky, lighting up the black bulk of Table Mountain and, northward, the bare edges of Lion’s Head.
She was asleep, she was asleep.
And then she was not asleep anymore because the men had come.
This is what the men said to Eileen, ugly as fear, monstrous looming things that they were: “Do you remember my name?”
And this is what Eileen said to the men: “No, of course not, who are you?”
And the men grinned their horrible, split-faced grins, and their sharp, hooked nails twisted into her skin.
When Eileen woke it was to the sharp tang of vinegar in the air.
The smell made her think of the harbour. Getting thick bundles of fried fish wrapped in newspaper with Jacob and Rees. So hot, but then the way her teeth would break through the batter to find the cod so sweet on the inside. They used to sit on the docks together and watch jellyfish floating like little Coke bottles beneath their sandals. Rees had found them for her in Kramp’s Synopsis of the Medusae of the World—“Just a little sting,” he had warned her, “like a pinprick or a tack. Like your first kiss, over with quickly, ja? But then you are dead!”
Eileen felt dislocated. Lost in the memory. But then she heard her mother singing.
“Bobbejaan climbs the mountain,” she heard, “so quickly and so lightly—”
It was an old South African war song her mother had sung to her as a child. Like so many things from her childhood, its meaning had twisted over time and taken on darker shades: the Voortrekker, the endless feuds and fighting. At the heart of it was bobbejaan climbing the mountain, ceaseless and relentless.
Eileen swung her legs out over the side of the narrow bed. The bed on the left—Jacob’s, or had it been Rees’s?—was untouched.
“Mum?” she called out. She didn’t know what time it was, but there was hot, buttery-yellow sunlight streaming through the windows. The room was pickin
g up heat like an oven. She’d lost half the day already.
“Eileen,” she heard through the walls. “Be a darling, will you? Give your mother a hand.”
She found her mother in the elegant powder-blue bathroom off the second hallway, bent like a willow over a porcelain sink. She had stripped off her shirt, and her hair hung wet and dripping into the basin. Her body was so thin, the skin translucent as onion paper. Eileen could count the fluted bones of her shoulder blades.
Her mother turned at Eileen’s shadow in the doorway, and it was like watching the gnawed gears of a clock attempting to spin.
“You remember bobbejaan, darling?”
Eileen said nothing for a moment, struck by the sight of her. And then: “Ja, nee,” she muttered. “The baboon climbs the mountain to torment the poor farmers. It’s not a very nice song, mum.”
“Most childhood songs aren’t,” she clucked. “But they do their job. Do you mind pouring for me? It’s such a chore with my arthritis.”
Eileen took the silver jug her mother had left out on the vanity counter, and breathed in the vinegar sweetness of it. She had washed her hair that way every morning that Eileen had lived in the house. It was a kind of ritual.
Eileen poured the water over the mother’s downturned scalp and smoothed the soap out gently. She fetched a towel, patted away the dampness. She flinched, for a moment, as her fingers pressed against the hard shape of her skull.
“Mum,” she said, her tongue slow in her mouth. “You know why I’m here, right? You know that Dr. Jans called me about the fall?”
“Of course, darling,” she said. “But it was such a little thing.”
“It wasn’t, mum. Dr. Jans said you could have died if no one found you. You can’t live here on your own.”
Gifts for the One Who Comes After Page 16