Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes

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СКАЧАТЬ and since moving in she’s changed nothing, barely added or subtracted a single item. She hasn’t even moved the furniture, although some of it drives her mad: there’s an old filing cabinet blocking the space between the kitchen and the stairwell, for example. The double bed is far too large for the small bedroom, and surplus to her requirements. But she likes the fact that this furniture has a history – a name scratched on the underside of the table, a seventies rainbow decal stuck to the bedroom window. It makes her own tenancy seem more plausible: someone else has managed a life here, in this same space. And if she starts shifting bookcases and beds around, she has a feeling the whole place might go haywire or just cease to work, as if she were trying to reassemble a complex machine she’d rashly taken apart. She’d do it all wrong.

      Preparing the bath is a minor ritual. Katya likes it very hot, and always uses a great deal of bubble bath or cloudy bath-oil – the better not to see her own skin through the water’s lens. Only the pale curves of her breasts break the surface. Sinking into the perfumed foam, she closes her eyes and goes through her day, emptying out her mental pockets, sorting the change into piles. But she can hear indistinct noises coming through the pipes, booming and sonorous, and the sunken pit of the building site keeps intruding into her thoughts. Its slick sides, its watery base. The mud like sweating flesh. The roots of the city, after all, do not run deep. A few meters down, and there you have it: raw earth, elemental.

      She turns face-down and floats like that, eyes and mouth submerged. An unnatural posture, a sensation of slight risk; a person can drown in two inches of water. She summons again that sense of downness – of space under the surface – that the filthy hole across the road has opened up inside her. Depth, which the city conceals with its surface bustle. You forget what’s underneath. A sudden vision of the deeps beneath the city, alive with a million worms, with buried things.

      She surfaces with a splash of water over the edge of the bath. Rattled, that’s how she feels. Headachey and wired and slightly nauseous, out of synch, not winding down apace with the day. Is it the stinking hole in the ground outside, the sense of things rearranging around her? Or is it the mention of her father – the old man popping up without warning after all this time? Seven years without a sniff of Len, and now here he is again, pissing on her territory.

      Maybe it’s just that damn garage door that’s getting to her. All the wear and tear, the rot and disintegration, the distressing entropy of built things.

      “What I wouldn’t give,” she says out loud. “What I wouldn’t give.”

      For what? For a little bit of – not luxury, exactly, but ease. To be moved effortlessly from one action to the next, as she imagines some people are moved: the ground flowing like a conveyor belt beneath them, the world smoothing their passage.

      That man she met today – he lives in such a world. Trimmed lawns rolling under his expensive shoes. She recalls his whisky scent. His mass. His handshake. She is something of a connoisseur of male handshakes, and that was a good one: dry, not a bone crusher or a loose parcel of phalanges either. She does not like being touched, mostly, but when she is it should be firmly. His hands made her think of the hands in the old Rothman’s cigarette ads in magazines from her childhood – belonging to airline pilots, admirals. Solid and squarely reassuring. Those faceted wrists extending from naval cuffs, with clipped nails and a light dusting of hairs, holding out a pack of smokes.

      She reaches a dripping arm over the edge of the bath and takes his card from the top pocket of her overalls. Quality card, textured, cream. Turns it over. Martin Brand, Brand Properties it says, under a blocky logo. On the phone, Mrs. Brand had pronounced the surname the English way, but Katya prefers the Afrikaans meaning. She likes the way the blunt sound of the word holds a secret conflagration. She touches the edge of the card to her lips.

      On the bathroom ceiling, she spots a jagged new crack across the plaster. It’s an accusatory shape: of smiting, of lightning bolts. The kind of thing sent from above, in punishment for some clear crime. The kind of thing one calls down upon oneself.

       3

       CRACKS

      The call comes a few mornings later, as she’s rubbing her hair dry after another bath and observing Derek through the upstairs window. He’s on the opposite pavement, his back to her, weaving something – a piece of tape or ribbon – through the holes in the fence. It’s absorbing, and the phone startles her.

      The voice on the line is lush; she can almost smell the musk on the woman’s breath, hear the smack of her lipstick. Sales call, Katya thinks, or someone following up on an unpaid bill.

      “Miss Grubbs?”

      “Who is this?”

      “Painless Pest Relocations?”

      Katya adjusts her tone. “That’s us – how can we help?”

      “Hold the line for Mr. Brand, please.”

      Silence, filled with furtive clicking. Derek’s still busy down there. He must have been cold last night, she thinks. She could’ve gathered blankets, made food, offered coffee...but she’s never done that, in all her years here. Never taken anything to Derek and his friends, never given them more than an empty Coke bottle to return for deposit.

      “Grubbs!”

      She remembers his voice, although now it’s clear of the burr of drink. She looks down at herself – she’s in a towel – and takes a moment to mentally slip into her overalls and button them up.

      “That’s what they call me.”

      “Then that is what I shall call you too. I believe we met at our garden party – perhaps you recall? You were wearing a rather fetching green.” His voice is like marble, heavy but polished, evoking those giant stone spheres you see rotating in streams of water outside corporate headquarters. It would be reassuring, if not for its slightly mocking tone.

      “White shirt,” she says. “Too much to drink.”

      “And more before the day was out, I’m very much afraid.”

      Derek has moved on. The ribbon he’s left behind makes a zigzag pattern in the wire, like those webs made by spiders on acid.

      “So now,” Mr. Brand’s voice continues. “I have a problem, a persistent problem, and I would like to engage your services. If you’re available.”

      “Depends,” she says. “What sort of job are we talking?”

      “What sort of job? Caterpillar wrangling, of course – what else?”

      After the call, she sits quietly for a few minutes, considering. Down below, a schoolgirl – white shirt, gray trousers, Mary Janes–strolls past Derek’s handiwork without a glance. She might be from the family that moved in recently down the road. Passing by, the girl casually pinches the end of the ribbon between her fingers, and as she walks on the zigzag unravels, lashing up and down through the wire, until the fence is empty again and the ribbon trails behind her like a tail.

      A feather drops onto Katya’s shoulder as wings clap across the space above her, and she looks up to see duct pipes, a blackened walkway. She takes it as a good omen: the beasts are here. City pigeons, in their proper place.

      She’s СКАЧАТЬ