Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes

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СКАЧАТЬ So.” Zintle leans forward confidentially. “We have a residential project which has been experiencing some problems.”

      “What kind of problems?”

      “Various. Not very nice ones, to be honest.”

      “Cockroaches, rats, mites?”

      “Well...let’s just say it’s a comprehensive pest situation.” She’s up on her feet again – when she moves she’s fast – and holding out a hand. “Here we are.”

      There’s something laid out along one wall on a table, under spot lighting. It’s an architect’s model, showing several buildings and their surroundings. Everything is white, the only markings the patterns of edge and shadow.

      The scale is hard to make out at first. Katya sees a complex of four or five flat-topped, tiered buildings – ziggurat-like – arranged at angles around a central plaza. Elaborate walkways and arches and courtyards connect them, and tangles of what she supposes are ornamental plants drape over the edges of the stepped roofs. They look like tufts of white hair pulled off a hairbrush. A fountain, ringed by tiny benches, marks the center point of the plaza. A long driveway, decorated with a double row of miniature palm trees, strikes off to the edge of the model, and the whole is contained by walls.

      “This is Nineveh.” Zintle’s dark fingers with their scarlet tips are vivid against the cardboard. A gorgeous giantess, reaching down from the clouds.

      “Nineveh?”

      Zintle shrugs. “It’s just a name,” she says. “Sort of a theme. One of the early investors was from the Middle East, I think.”

      Katya allows herself a moment to enjoy the calm of the miniature scene. There are model people down there, also colorless, frozen in attitudes of purposeful enjoyment: striding along a boardwalk, sitting at an outdoor table. A couple lean on a balcony railing. What they’re staring at, though, has not been included in the model. The ground breaks off just beyond the boundary wall, as if some other-dimensional cataclysm has swallowed up a chunk of reality. The architect’s manikins stare into the void – through the actual window, onto the vista of the real city beyond: full-color, blurred, gigantic. They look on the abyss with no discernible expression.

      “It looks big,” says Katya. She’s never worked an entire estate before.

      Zintle taps a nail on the roof of one unit. A smaller building on the border of the model, right up against the wall. “You’d have access to these, uh, servants’ quarters. Or shall we say, the caretaker’s lodge. It’s two units, for the maintenance staff. The other buildings are shut up.”

      “Never used?”

      “Not yet.” Zintle clicks her tongue, suddenly exasperated. “Such a shame. Beautiful accessories, all furnished and ready to go. Show flats! It was built over a year ago, you know? Was supposed to be filled with residents by now. Top residents. But there was a string of disasters. All the copper wire was stolen, for one. Half the reclaimed area collapsed into the bloody swamp. Excuse my language. This disaster, that disaster. The landscape gardening didn’t work out, everything got eaten by goggas. Had to redo all the interiors. It was a plague! We thought they were gone, the previous guy assured us... well.” She splays her palms in a let’s-not-go-there gesture. “Now the security staff tell us that they’re back. We can’t move anyone in until it’s sorted. Losing pots of money. You understand?”

      “Goggas?”

      “They bite. Like I say, we got a guy in to sort them out, but between you and me, he was useless. Made things worse, actually. Creepy old guy.” She crinkles her nose in remembered disgust, as if at a bad smell. “We had to get rid of him.”

      “Yes, well. Some of these older companies, they’re very outdated. I have a different approach.”

      “I would hope so.”

      “You can’t be more specific about these...goggas? You’ve seen them?”

      She holds her palm towards Katya and wiggles her fingernails, evoking scurrying legs. “Yugh.”

      “Centipedes?”

      “No, no. Here, sort of...” Zintle grabs a pen and pad from the desk and scrawls a few assured lines. A cartoon bug. A button body with spindly legs sticking out in all directions – three on one side and four on the other, Katya notes – and a bundle of antennae like cat’s whiskers. She’s surprised Zintle hasn’t included a pair of googly eyes.

      “A beetle? Does it fly? Does it swarm?”

      “Swarms. Eats the curtains, poos on the rugs. Nightmare.”

      “I see.”

      Zintle is suddenly brisk. “Well. Time runs short. I should just give you this dossier ...” She hands over a glossy cardboard file. “Perhaps you’d like to peruse that, and get back to us with a quote? It’s a fairly urgent situation.”

      “Right then. I’ll have to go out there of course, check it out.”

      Zintle is standing now, smoothing her suit down, shaping her hair back into its slick curve with a palm of a hand, taking Katya’s arm and ushering her out. She’s good at this maneuver, very professional. Before she knows it, Katya’s back in the lift, doors closing behind her, on her way down to earth again.

      Toby is waiting opposite her house, nose poked through the fence, the diamond wire pressing into his cheeks. He’s staring at the demolition site. It’s the first time he’s been here since the bulldozers came through.

      “Fucking hell,” he says tightly. “How could they do that?” This place means something to him, too, Katya sees. She briefly feels their lives, hers and Toby’s, overlap, anchored to the same plot of land.

      “Here today, gone tomorrow,” she says. “Nothing lasts forever, kiddo. What are you doing here?”

      “Mom said. Your gutters.”

      “Gutters? Oh, okay, I suppose.”

      Alma is always doing this: worrying about Katya’s living arrangements. It was Alma who’d explained to her sister about vacuuming, for example, and about painting walls. Who persuaded her to put a damn door on the garage in the first place. When Toby was only ten or eleven, she started dropping him off at Katya’s place to sort out all the odd jobs that Katya had no idea needed doing. Now Toby comes alone, usually by minibus taxi along Main Road, with a screwdriver in his pocket and a dopey smile, eager to fiddle with a squeaky floorboard or mold on the bathroom ceiling. Katya suspects he’s not very good at this kind of DIY, or any more interested in it that she is herself; but he’s always willing to give it a shot.

      It’s Len’s fault, that Katya doesn’t know about houses. After the loss of their mother, when the sisters were little, they never really had a house, or not for long. Len kept them moving, job to job and place to place. They’d pass through with a nomad’s contempt for the townsfolk. A dozen different schools. Many nights next to the spare tire in the back of the old bakkie, the pickup always stank of bird shit and pesticide and sometimes blood. They never did stand steady on the ground beneath their feet. But Katya always imagined that once you got to settle down, once you had that stack of bricks and mortar, it was solid. She hadn’t realized how restless bricks and mortar are: how much effort СКАЧАТЬ