Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes

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      “Same crew, though?”

      “No, I’m different – different company, different approach.”

      “How?”

      “I’m humane. Painless. Different.”

      He taps his knuckle with the edge of the card. “Huh. Well, you better be. Because your father ripped me off quite spectacularly, you know that? Len Grubbs. Took my money, fucked around, fucked off. You can tell him I said so.”

      Katya is standing oddly, stiff and tight. The magic of the uniform failing. She makes herself shrug, casual. “I have nothing to do with that. I haven’t seen him for years.”

      He looks at her, nods and tucks her card into his top pocket. Crisp in the heat: fine cotton, no doubt. The man is sweating booze, but his clothes are holding up. And now here is the bluebell hostess at the corner of the house, gesticulating with her glass. Irritation registers in a momentary immobility of the man’s face but he gets to his feet, still smiling pleasantly. His movements are sharper and more energetic than a drunk man’s have any right to be. “Well, we’ll give you a try, I suppose. I might have some more work coming up.” Then he leans forward and slips his own card – appearing magically in his palm, a trick – into her pocket. Katya feels it through the material, sliding in. “I do think I prefer my caterpillar wranglers, ah ...” – and he looks her up and down, the ghost of a wink – “painless.”

      As the PPR van labors up the steep driveway, Toby is uncharacteristically still. A capture box is on his lap, his long fingers resting lightly on its lid, and every now and then he drums on the wood with his index and middle fingers: a private, soothing rhythm. Poor little creatures, torn away: their pilgrimage denied.

      “What was that all about?” asks Toby, rather sternly. “That dude.”

      “Nothing. Just the boss.” And she changes to first so that the sound of the engine stops further conversation. But around the curve of the driveway, she pulls over and takes out the cigar box, slides it open.

      “And now?”

      She cranks down the van window and tosses the caterpillars into the shrubbery. “A bit of insurance. Gives us something to come back for, next time.”

      “Aunt Katya!” Toby laughs. “Wicked! Where did you learn that one?”

      She takes a second to answer. “My dad,” she says. “My dad taught me that one.”

       2

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      It’s strange, what disgusts people. Who would scorn the friendship of a gecko, for example: golden-eyed, translucent-skinned, toes splayed on a farmhouse wall? Who could resent a long-legged spider, knitting its silver in the corner of a room? But they do: people will pay to have them killed, poisoned, destroyed.

      Katya does not destroy. This is her skill, her niche. So she will relocate a wasp nest, reroute a caterpillar invasion, clear a roof of nesting pigeons, wrangle housefuls of mangy cats. She does not turn up her nose at cockroach infestations, gatherings of mice, strange migrations of bees and porcupines. She’s even faced down baboons, although that’s unusually robust work. Generally, she prefers the smaller beasts. She encourages spiders and is friendly to pigeons, which others unkindly call rats of the air. Her philosophy is to respect any creature that gets by in the city, ducking and diving, snatching at morsels, day by day negotiating a new truce with the humans among whom they live. Survivors, squatters, and invaders. Tough buggers. They have their place.

      Mostly, they do no real harm. They’re objectionable only because they’ve wandered from their proper zones, or because they trigger human shudders. But Katya does not shudder. Not ever. Slinging a snake round her neck like a scarf, the dry scales smooth as water on her latexed palms – no problem.

      This is the job: helping these small sojourners in a strange land. Putting the wild back in the wild, keeping the tame tame. Policing borders. Sometimes, part of her wants to reverse the flow, mix it up. Take this box of caterpillars, for example, and tip it out in that Constantia palace they just left, even if it means chaos, screams and ruined dresses, soft bodies crushed into the lawn.

      But that’s her dad’s voice. His angry humor.

      Len Grubbs: a lifelong vermin man. An exterminator. He never bothered too much with keeping things straight or putting them back in their rightful places. Traps and poison, that was what he knew. He was often bitten – once by a puff adder. Even in that agony, he’d taken care to beat the snake to death. It was hand-to-hand combat, the way Len Grubbs did the job.

      Katya’s work, by comparison, is a relatively gentle business, one concerned with rescue and cleansing; but it brings out this mischief in her, this hardness. Perhaps because of what she deals in, what her dad dealt in before her: the unloved. The unlovely.

      In Newlands forest, they carry the boxes up through the pines and into a stretch of indigenous trees. Katya’s glad to have Toby with her on this lonely path. It can be nerve-wracking, going into the forest alone, although she likes to think that a woman with a box of repulsive caterpillars pressed to her chest is safe enough against most assaults.

      They are in a part of the forest she doesn’t often visit, off the path. This is Toby’s idea. He’s spotted a tree here, apparently just the thing for caterpillars. She notes, with interest, something else about her nephew that she did not know before: this lurking about in forests.

      He’s taken his shoes off in the car and his big feet pad confidently ahead of hers on the pine-needle bed. Seeing him move against the branches, some glowing pale in the darkening air, she thinks again that he is like a young tree. Despite his narrow frame, his lank hair, his liquid eyes, Toby is not a limp person. Indeed, he has a kind of springy resilience, like green wood. And there is the vegetable greenness of the veins beneath his skin, his slightly sappy body scent. I’m a vegan now, he told her recently. Perhaps that’s why he’s growing so fast: photosynthesis.

      Over the years, Katya has seen him transform from stocky white-blond child into elongated teen. Not pretty; his face is too broad in the forehead and sharp at the chin, the nose over-long. But he does have those luminous eyes set deep behind long lashes, and the thinness of his lips is offset by their charm – the way he presses them together between smiles, restraining soft thoughts. Girls would surely go for that? His height would be in his favor, too, once he filled it out. Broad shoulders. Longshanks. Long fingers, right for guitar-string picking round fires. Tall like his father, no doubt, Katya thinks. Not like us. Toby’s hair is also evidence of his paternity: of the pale father Katya never met, but who seems to be revealing himself in stages through the body of his child, stretching Toby’s teenage limbs, flexing Toby’s long, unGrubbsish fingers.

      The Grubbs look is small but well muscled, with short legs and disproportionately long arms. Monkey-folk. Snub, monkeyish faces, too. In her sister Alma it’s cute, with her long pale hair. Katya’s always worn her hair trimmed short, and it’s darker, like her dad’s. They carry themselves the same, straight-backed and quick. Katya’s ears, mysteriously small, must be from the other side; so too, perhaps, her large breasts. But in all other ways, their mother Sylvie’s influence, like her memory, is faint and fading. There are many more body parts in which Katya can discern, all too clearly, Len’s vigorous СКАЧАТЬ