Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes

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СКАЧАТЬ That to keep things exactly as they are requires arduous maintenance, like a lawn needs cutting or a body needs feeding. Such ceaseless labor to shore up the world.

      A rocking motion catches her eye. A girl has come to lie along the top of the neighbor’s garden wall, on her back with hands folded on her stomach. She’s wearing gray school trousers, one knee up and tossing to and fro. Eyes closed and dreaming, ears laced with the thin white cords of an iPod. Wire-fed, recharging. Fifteen, sixteen? So young, so weary. What could make such a new creature so tired?

      She feels Toby’s stare as a physical pressure, leaning on her right shoulder.

      The girl sits up abruptly from a deep sleep of music. She pulls out the earplugs and regards them down her nose, head lolled back on her shoulders. Then she swings to the pavement and stretches her arms behind her back, pushing out her chest like a dove sunning its wings. Pretty. Katya recognizes her now: it’s the girl from down the road, the one who unpicked Derek’s spider web.

      She’s compact, with elastic-looking legs and calves: a body made for backflips and handstands. Coppery skin, short hair slicked back behind her ears, snub features and strong, clean cheekbones. Diamond nose-stud, to the left. Small mole on cheek, to the right. Dark eyes, more watchful than unfriendly. Maybe shy rather than sly; it’s hard to tell.

      “Howzit,” says the girl. Not shy, then.

      “Hi.” Katya turns her attention to the garage door. Let the young deal with the young.

      “See what they’ve done over the road?” says the schoolgirl.

      “Uh, yes. Kind of hard to miss.” Toby laughs and gives her his sweetest gape. Hopeless!

      But the girl’s observing him in a not unfriendly way. “So, have you guys got cracks?”

      “Crack?” says Toby.

      “Cracks, cracks in your walls. From the vibrations. From the machines.”

      Toby looks at her, worried. The girl quirks a shapely eyebrow. “Look.” She points at the wall she’s just been sitting on. Sure enough, there’s a diagonal crack down to the tar. Has it always been there?

      “And look, look there, it goes all across the road. I’m telling you.” Now the girl is skipping out into the road – really skipping, like a small child – and pointing at the tar, which does indeed look ominously split open between her feet. She points out the length of the crack with a toe, hands in the air to balance. Her gray trousers ride up to show her ankles, thin relative to taut parabolic calves, in short white socks.

      Is she younger than Katya had thought? Older? She has one of those strong faces where the bones set early and stay good for decades.

      “You living around here?” asks Toby.

      The girl ducks her head in a sideways nod. “Around. You?”

      Oh, please.

      Katya fiddles with the garage door a little longer before giving it up. It’s now genuinely impossible to open without the handle. The girl is watching with arms folded across her chest. Toby has turned to stand by her side, similarly cross-armed. Copycatting.

      “Toby, do you need a ladder, or what?”

      “No, it’s cool, I can get up by the garage roof. It’s easy.”

      She notices the girl is spreading her legs wider across the crack in the tar, showing further, unanticipated lengths of calf. Toby’s smile is stretched to breaking across his face.

      “Now?” she says, snappier than she intends.

      “Just now.”

      “You be careful.”

      Inside, Katya tracks onto the carpet some kind of khaki sludge from the road. She fetches the broom and pan from the kitchen corner – where a new black crack snakes up the wall.

      The old house is built on sandy foundations that have been subsiding for decades, and she’s used to the odd warp and split, the plaster running like a laddered stocking. Like the lines on her own face, she can’t quite remember when each crack in the house appeared or lengthened; but she knows their shapes, their long italic slants, their seismograms. This one, though, she’s never read before. Inky, sharp-edged, viciously jinking. It seems mischievous. Her first irrational thought is that the girl is somehow behind it, playing a joke.

      Can it really have jagged all the way through the earth from the demolition site across the road? How deep does it go? Does it run through the whole house, bottom to top? She imagines it slicing through her walls, her foundations, through the earth deep beneath the road, straight and thin as a laser beam, cross-sectioning the cakey layers of earth, gravel, sand, tar. She shoves the broom back in the corner, although it can’t conceal the flaw.

      When the phone rings, it’s so loud it seems it might split the cracks open wider still. She snatches it up before it can do more damage. “PPR.”

      The pause on the other end is ironic. “It’s only me, Kat.”

      She makes her hand relax, lowers her voice. “Sorry. Hi. Your son’s on my roof, if you’re looking for him.” This is usually the reason for Alma’s calls.

      Katya associates her sister strongly with telephones. Certainly, these days, phone calls – or more usually, text messages – are their main mode of communication. But it goes back further.

      When Alma was thirteen and Katya ten, Alma started to run away. Sometimes she was gone for days, sometimes weeks. And then forever: at seventeen, Alma left and didn’t come back. But Katya continued to hear from her. Alma would phone at odd hours, from call boxes, from unknown destinations, across immense distances. Sometimes there would be long gaps in their communication. This was before cellphones, and with Dad on the move, it wasn’t always easy for Alma and Katya to find each other. But they made a plan with Aunt Laura, a distant cousin of Len’s, who resided immovably in Pinelands. Every time she had a valid phone number, Katya would inform Laura, and receive Alma’s current number in exchange – all while resisting being pumped by her aunt for further tragic family gossip.

      One way or another, every few months Katya would hear her sister’s dry whisper on the other end of a phone line, or sometimes a few moments of the kind of silence that was unmistakeably Alma’s: a silver crackling static. Katya started to lose the memory of what her sister looked like. She saw only a delicate figure, floating in a cloud, somewhere very high and very cold. An ice princess, barely real, weightlessly revolving around the still point of the phone receiver which connected them. Where are you, Katya would ask, where have you gone?

      Oh Kat, Alma would sigh, her breath filtering though the rosette of holes in the receiver, ice crystals forming in her little sister’s ear. Each time Alma hung up, Katya was sure she had vanished entirely, like frost in the morning.

      The next time she saw Alma, it was three years later and Toby had just arrived, a pale infant of mysterious provenance. By this stage, Alma had started to peroxide her hair. Was it to match her child’s? With her pale skin, it was indeed as if all that time Alma had indeed been out in some blanchingly cold world.

      “Hey Al, it’s so strange,” Katya now finds herself saying. “I’m crossing Dad’s path. He’s working again.”

      “How СКАЧАТЬ