Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes

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      Now, the park is off-limits. In fact, it hardly exists: it’s been bulldozed. The demolition finished a week ago, but she’s still not used to the change. Even now, steering the PPR-mobile round the corner to her house, her heart gives a lurch to see the road so altered. It looks unbalanced, as if the whole street tilts away from her house and down towards the disturbing gap on the other side. There’s more sky than there was before. She can even see a piece of the mountain over the far rooftops, deep slate blue today and wearing a cap of cloud.

      Katya stops the car in the driveway and walks across the road to look at the excavation. The fence is as chill as it looks, pulling the heat out of her hand and into its metal grid. As she moves, her fingers bump-bump in and out of the gaps in the wire, catching and losing grip. The sections of fence make silky looping patterns against each other, shimmering and aligning.

      Fat tire tracks curve out onto the road, under the padlocked gate and over the edge of the pavement. A trench has been dug; old foundations lie exposed, strata of concrete and twisted metal pipes. Cloudy water pools at the bottom of the excavation. The ditchwater smells like long-buried coins. Leaning on the wire, she stares down into the pewter water and sees the wavering outlines of buildings and streetlamps, a sunken city that might still be raised, intact. But the surface of the water is opaque. Herself a blurred reflection in dirty milk.

      Of course the destroyed park is no surprise. She’s watched the deterioration from her upstairs window, stage by stage. First the jungle gym, the slides and the roundabout, the swings and the seesaw: each one uprooted and tossed aside, jumbled like the toys of a big, bad baby. Now the climbing frame is upside-down in the corner of the lot, paint chipped, concrete club feet in the air. The demolition made a surprising amount of ruckus and dust, considering that there wasn’t much to start with: some trees, a few park benches of mundane municipal design, a yellow-brick toilet block. Brick shithouse, she used to say to herself in the mornings when she glimpsed it through her upstairs window, liking the sound of the words in her mind. Now that little joke is gone. One tall blue gum, pale-skinned and statuesque, an old-fashioned leaning beauty in whose branches multitudes had sung and nested: now that’s a loss. A squad of men with chainsaws took the tree apart, hauling the pieces away like joints of meat; and then they came for the park’s human dwellers. Derek and his gang came out stumbling, blinking, old soldiers led at gunpoint from caves. Their shopping trolleys dumped on the pavement, their mattresses like misshapen fungi pulled from the soil. And then the digging machines moved in, chipping their muzzles into the earth. Each stage brought its own wails of suffering and indignation. Now the excavating beasts have clamped their jaws and rested their topsoil-bearded chins on the ground. Something new will be rising up here soon.

      This is what happens when you don’t pay attention, Katya thinks. Things change; the pieces move around. She doesn’t like it. She’s troubled by change. Toby’s presence, for example. It’s not like she could turn her own nephew down when he came asking for the job. No, she’s glad to have him. But she’s lived and worked alone for a long time now, and to have someone tagging along is distracting. It’s his vigor that she finds troubling, the speed of his growth. He’s a new plant butting up from the soil, pushing her aside: her own roots are so shallow.

      She plucks herself with a twang from the wire, and turns back to her house. Behind her, the water sloshes in its hole, a mud tongue clicking in a cold mouth.

      The five houses in the row are two-story Victorians, high but narrow, pretty but decrepit, with a low wall fronting what once must have been five small gardens, now cemented over. She doesn’t really know her neighbors. There’s an old couple on the corner, and a family with a teenage girl who recently moved in two doors down. The other two houses are used as student digs. Katya lives at the end of the row, her garage right next to the alleyway. She crosses over the road, fishing out her keys.

      There are many things she loathes about the garage door: its peeling wood finish, the perverse ridge on its steel handle that bites into her fingerbones, its pig-like keening when it does agree to open. She always approaches it like a wrestler heading into a tough bout, cracking her knuckles.

      Irritable, she tugs at the rusted handle. The wood has swollen and it’s sticking even more than usual. With spite in her heart she leans in to give it another wrench, really putting her weight into it. This time, the metal pulls right out of the rotten wood and her knuckles scrape across the door. She staggers back, clutching the detached handle.

      “Damn it!”

      She stares at her hand, stained now with a shit-like smear of rotten wood and rust and, yes, blood: the skin has been broken. The wet splinters in her palm, the wrench in her shoulder, the messiness of it all...She hurls the handle over towards the black municipal wheelie bins that stand in a row in the mouth of the alleyway. It bounces dully off the nearest lid and skitters into the space behind.

      “Hey!” cries a hoarse voice.

      “Oh fuck, what now?” She peers round the corner into the dark of the alley. There are a couple of draped brownish figures down at the far end. She makes out a mattress, a tangle of gray blanket, a black plastic radio held together with duct tape. One of the figures raises a ragged hand, and she recognizes the trailing bandage.

      “Jeez, sorry, Derek man! Sorry.”

      Derek, who swathes his head and limbs in patterned rags, who leaves intricate sculptures made from toothpicks and cigarette boxes outside Katya’s front door. There’s a grunt from the dimness. “Got any smokes?”

      “Nothing today, sorry.”

      “Eina, you hurt yourself, girlie,” says Derek.

      There is blood dripping from the side of her hand. “Flesh wound. I’ll live.” She blots the blood on her overalls.

      Derek and his crew are mostly hospital survivors: of the psychiatric clinic in one direction or Groote Schuur in the other. Dazed and abandoned, patients who never made it home. There’s the tall blind man who is led through the streets at a rapid clip by his squat, hawk-eyed companion. The slim woman whose features were once delicate, and who’s always dressed in good clothes, but whose bloodshot eyes and ravenous panhandling quickly disperse any air of gentility as soon as she gets up close. Flora and Johan and their disappearing / reappearing baby. Dreadlocked Mzi, the shouter. A gentle bunch: the only bother has been the odd late-night singing and quarreling sessions. When they occupied the park, their nest of mattresses and blankets and tarpaulins was always tucked away discreetly in the bushes. Sometimes there was a small fire going – an almost pastoral scene.

      Nobody else used the park: it would have been strange to see any actual mothers bringing actual children to play there. Turnover was high. Residents came and went, moved on or passed away, to be replaced. All but Derek. Derek has outlived them all, his age indeterminate but immense, his face not so much wrinkled as armored in plates of weather-toughened skin.

      She gives him a wounded wave. “Goodnight.” To hell with the garage. If anyone wants the van tonight they’re welcome to it.

      Inside her house, she kicks off her shoes and goes through the small lounge into the open-plan kitchen area. It takes half a dozen steps, wall to wall. The house is small, containing only a few gulps of sticky air; the carpet feels gritty underfoot. Katya runs water over the graze on her hand. The grime of the excavated hole has mingled with the rust from the garage door to taint her blood. Tetanus, lockjaw. A bath, that’s what she needs. She climbs the narrow stairs – so steep! Today, СКАЧАТЬ