Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
day before she’s due to go, she packs her bags. She has to stand on a chair to pull the suitcase off the top of the bedroom cupboard – it’s been ages since she’s gone anywhere, and the bulky old thing is buried under a mound of spare blankets and the pieces of a broken chair. The suitcase is one of the few things Len ever gave her – or rather, that he left behind.
Katya was twenty then. She’d been helping him out with the work full-time for three or four years, after she quit school. They were staying in a truly appalling hotel in Durban (cracked and leaking toilet bowl, dried matter – perhaps blood – on the walls). One morning he was gone, leaving her with the bill and a curious sense of gratitude: she would not have escaped in any other way. Later, their current employer came knocking, and she understood why he’d needed to disappear. Some expensive power tools had gone missing. Len had a habit – or perhaps a principle – of walking away from a job with more than he brought in.
But perhaps he’d just decided it was time to go. Katya suspected that Len was getting bored with her, now that she was grown. She was no longer so eager to please, but she didn’t make much effort to quarrel with him, either. She was starting to apprehend her own boredom, too, and to sense the fatigue of the years ahead, grinding along with Len in the driver’s seat. Len ever more whisky-soaked, their travels more haphazard and accident-plagued. At some point she’d started to be repelled by the stink of killing that clung to them both. She wanted to be clean. And she wanted to be still: to have one place that she belonged to, that belonged to her.
Along with the suitcase, Katya inherited a couple of nets and traps and the like, which she kept. And two pairs of Len’s underpants, which she did not. She wrinkles her nose at the pungent memory.
Zintle had made the same face when recalling Len Grubbs, the exterminator, and Katya sympathises. It is the family smell, Eau de Grubbs. It comes from living on the road, from working with animals and chemicals. Not a bad smell, necessarily. Does Katya smell the same? (And could Zintle sniff her out?) Probably. Although, of course, this is famously the thing that one cannot tell about oneself.
Alma has it too, despite her potpourri, her talcs and creams. On Alma the scent seems to translate into a kind of sexual signal. As soon as she hit puberty, boys took one sniff and started to follow her around. While never once losing her composure, Alma used this power to pull herself away from her family and out into the world. Hand over hand. Grasping at the bodies of boys and men, hanging on like a drowning girl, desperate to be dragged clear of the swamp. And it worked. Whoever the faceless boy was who fathered Toby, he made Alma’s return impossible. After that, she lost her enthusiasm for sleeping around: there was no need. And now that she’s married to solid Kevin, Alma can devote herself full-time to eradicating the troubling odors of her former life.
It’s something too intimate and shameful for them to talk about, but Katya knows her sister is still terribly self-conscious about the smell. As a child, Alma would scrub and scrub, any time they got close to a bathroom. These days, Alma has three bathrooms in the neat home where she lives with her husband, their young children – twins, a boy and a girl – and Toby. It’s a place where every object has been carefully chosen and positioned. In the bathrooms and the main bedroom are dozens of bottles of expensive scent, body spray, deodorant. But they say the body has a signature, molecular; that it doesn’t change. Under her perfume, Alma still has the family aroma.
Sylvie’s smell was different. It is one of the few definite pieces of information Katya has about her mother: her musky, talcy smell has persisted more strongly than any visual memory. Going through her father’s abandoned things that day when she was twenty, Katya found a loose photograph of an impossibly young, grinning Len with shoulder-length hair, arm slung around a voluptuous brunette. She recognized nothing about the woman – except a version of her own full bust, and something of Alma’s distance in the eyes – but she accepted on the evidence that this was Sylvie, her mother, fresh out from England and newly married. Immediately, Katya felt the need to turn the picture upside down and not look at it again.
During her twenties, Katya held on to very little. Her possessions were so few that they fitted inside Len’s: his suitcase and one of his old box traps – despringed, defanged – which she’d stuff with clothes and haul from house to house. Each time she moved, she threw out more of the heavy past. But the photo she has kept, all these years. Now it’s hidden right at the back of the filing cabinet. Every couple of years she fortifies herself with a whisky and sneaks another peek. Over time, the woman’s face speaks to her less and less. Young Len, on the other hand, seems to grow more vital with every year spent in the cabinet dark. She’s never shown Alma the picture. It is her own guilty piece of Sylvie, kept for herself alone.
The suitcase tumbles down from the top of the cupboard onto her head, bringing with it a chair leg, the body of a fish moth and the smell of her father’s things. He’s here now, coming towards her out of the dust; his body is darkness crawling with the floaters of her sun-dazzled eyes. He smells strongly of campfires, of mothballs, of bleach and tobacco. He catches something from behind her ear, holds it tight in his hand: a conjurer’s trick. He smiles and holds out his palm, and she sees it is crossed with gold, with something rich and glinting and alive: a dragonfly.
“Aitsa,” he’d exclaim: “Surprise!”
The trick was meant to make her and Alma laugh, or flinch. She never knew which. Sometimes he let the little creature go, and sometimes not. And sometimes there was nothing in his fist at all. Sometimes it was just a fist.
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