Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
pull it together.”
He smiles at her appeasingly. Toby’s smile has a comic quality: his teeth are small and gappy, milk-toothy almost. Pink, clean gums like a puppy’s. With his mouth open, he seems much younger than his years. Katya often wants to tell him to relax. In repose, when he thinks no one is looking, his face falls into lovely somber lines; like his mother, slight melancholy suits him.
The uniform fits Toby better than it does her. They don’t make them in short, busty women’s sizes. Katya’s is rolled in the leg and tight in the chest. You can get Chinese ones, made for smaller people, although not for ones with bosoms. But Toby, slender and tall, fits his like a bricklayer, ditch-digger. Like someone who’s meant to be wearing it.
Toby’s job, largely, is to do the heavier lifting; there is surprising strength in those spidery limbs. Katya watches him as he positions the first plywood box and the tin chute, all made to her careful specifications. Once everything is in place, he steps back and holds one arm behind his back at the elbow as he stares up at the tree. The posture is hard to pull off with excess meat on your torso. Or breasts. It’s a pose Katya’s seen adopted by lean farm laborers out in the country. Like them, Toby knows how to conserve his energy.
It is, in fact, the same stance as the lanky gardener’s, who stands downslope with his arms and his bent leg mirroring Toby’s, his overalls faded blue to Toby’s bright green, his skin dark to Toby’s paleness. It’s like they’re waiting to perform some kind of symmetrical dance.
Time to move into action. First, Katya appraises the swarm, walking around the tree and glancing up and down, guessing at numbers. Then she leans in, nose inches from the thin dorsal hairs of the creatures on the bark. You have to find the chief caterpillar, the general. (A general and not a queen. To Katya, disregarding the facts of biology, all caterpillars are male: foot soldiers. Perhaps it is their small, helmeted heads.) With one hand Katya reaches in, breaches the flow and picks out a robust individual, one who looks fat and juicy and determined, and with a particularly fine ruff of orange fur.
It is best if the client is there to witness this ritual, to see the skill involved, but in this case the client is so repelled that she’s observing from a distance of a hundred meters. Katya can see her down there in a blue dress, hands on broad hips, watching as waiters and servants scurry behind her. Music is striking up. A classy party: they have employed a string quartet. There is a line of white-sheeted trestle tables, caterers laying out plates and glasses. Soon the guests will be here.
Katya places her prize wriggler on the rim of the tin spout, head downwards, urging him on with little prods. Then the trick is to get the next one in line latched on; and then the next, following on the numerous soft heels of his brother. Once they are in the narrowing chute, it’s hard for them to reverse direction, back into the stream. The system is designed that way. Once you get some movement going, it’s easier: caterpillars, like migrating wildebeest – very slow, small ones – have a strong herding impulse. They sense a stirring, they start to push. Perhaps they feel some dim invertebrate anxiety: that the swarm has not yet been consummated, that this is not the right tree, that a better tree awaits, that they will be left behind. This is as far as her study of caterpillar psychology goes.
Soon, there is a modest caravan of furry beasts marching down the spout. A conga line. Once it’s happening, it is beautiful, in a way: a river of caterpillar flesh flowing down the tree, peeling away, leaving the branches stripped and affronted. Once the leader drops off the end of the spout and into the box, there’s no going back, no turning tail.
“Yeehaw,” says Toby. He jiggles side to side, excited by the slow stampede of the worms.
Caterpillars are easy.
The swarm is quite extensive: only the one tree, but it’s a thick and comprehensive infestation. It takes two boxes. They’re custom carriers, holes punched in the wooden lids to let the catch breathe. Katya closes the boxes up and latches them tight, then stacks them one on top of the other. Surprisingly heavy, and shifting slightly. Katya puts her ear to the lid and can hear them moving: a damp sound, not the dry scuttle you get with your hard-shelled customers. They’re strong, these small creatures, working together. Individually, easily crushed beneath the heel; but if they all pulled together...she pictures them carrying her off, and Toby too.
“Alright Tobes,” Katya says. “Mission accomplished. Let’s get these cuties out of here.”
Toby loops his long arms around the boxes and lifts them from her. Then he balances them on top of his head, a hand on each side, and ambles down the lawn, singing happily to himself. It sounds like “I Shot the Sheriff”.
It can’t be helped: Toby’s a sweet-natured kid. He has a radiance to him that communicates alertness, good spirits, a readiness to greet the world and give it the benefit. Katya is fleetingly ashamed of wishing him older, cooler; for imagining the years of his youth away.
The gardener, who’s drifted closer, looks at her and she smiles. She’s easier with this man than she would be if she were out of uniform.
“How will you kill them?” he asks.
“We don’t.”
“What do you do with them?”
“We release them into the wild,” she says. “It’s a strictly no-kill policy.”
This is the point at which most people start to laugh, or wrinkle their faces in disgust. But the gardener just nods in a thoughtful way, snipping closed the jaws of his clippers.
As they near the house, Katya can see that guests have started to arrive. Middle-aged men in pastel shirts and slacks, women in summer dresses. She and Toby are not dressed to blend in here, with their bright green Painless Pest Relocations overalls and their palpitating capture boxes.
Now Katya sees again, down towards the swimming pool, the figure of their employer, Mrs. Brand, gesturing tightly up at them. Shakes of the head, shooing gestures. She’s ashamed of her caterpillar problem. The creatures have swarmed overnight, disgusting her; she cannot allow them to perform their congregation in sight of her fastidious guests.
Well, Katya has no desire to mingle with the party-goers; but the woman’s rudeness wakes inside her an inner voice. Fuck you, lady, it says. Katya smiles and keeps on walking.
Toby peers at her from around the boxes.
“Just keep going,” Katya says.
They pick their way down to the front entrance. A few guests stand next to the organically curved pool, drinks in hand; as the PPR work party comes through, they scatter instinctively. Katya and Toby are like people in hazmat suits, their catch pulsing radioactive in their hands. If Katya could rattle like a snake, she would.
Their employer is a foursquare, handsome lady, with short frosted hair. Her dress – waist cinched between broad hips and bosom – matches eyes so blue they look almost blind. Those eyes are fixed on Toby and Katya with open hostility, as if they really are going to rip open the boxes and strew worms around.
“You were supposed to be done by three,” she hisses.
Katya matches her stare with a blank one of her own. “Sorry. Coming through.”
This job. It brings it out in her.
Specifically, it’s the uniform. When Katya puts on her greens, something changes in her. She becomes cockier, more aggressive, but in the passive way of a servant. Also more stylized in her movements and her words: acting out the role of a working man. It’s heady. But peel off her boiler suit and she’s soft again, a lamb, a girl.
The house has a large parking area, at the end of a shaded driveway, which has started to fill up with luxury cars. Katya opens the back of the minivan, her pride and joy. The van’s not exactly new, but she likes the fact that it’s knocked and dinged and gritty, carrying traces of its previous owner. You can tell it was ridden half to death by some mean old bugger with a bony ass – the driver’s seat is so hollowed out, Katya needs two cushions to see over the steering wheel. She’s fitted the vehicle with bars, turning the