Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
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 it takes to keep them from falling down, from wandering off or spilling out in the wrong direction. It’s disheartening to see that respectful inattention is not enough. That to keep things exactly as they are requires arduous maintenance, like a lawn needs cutting or a body needs feeding. Such ceaseless labor to shore up the world.
A rocking motion catches her eye. A girl has come to lie along the top of the neighbor’s garden wall, on her back with hands folded on her stomach. She’s wearing gray school trousers, one knee up and tossing to and fro. Eyes closed and dreaming, ears laced with the thin white cords of an iPod. Wire-fed, recharging. Fifteen, sixteen? So young, so weary. What could make such a new creature so tired?
She feels Toby’s stare as a physical pressure, leaning on her right shoulder.
The girl sits up abruptly from a deep sleep of music. She pulls out the earplugs and regards them down her nose, head lolled back on her shoulders. Then she swings to the pavement and stretches her arms behind her back, pushing out her chest like a dove sunning its wings. Pretty. Katya recognizes her now: it’s the girl from down the road, the one who unpicked Derek’s spider web.
She’s compact, with elastic-looking legs and calves: a body made for backflips and handstands. Coppery skin, short hair slicked back behind her ears, snub features and strong, clean cheekbones. Diamond nose-stud, to the left. Small mole on cheek, to the right. Dark eyes, more watchful than unfriendly. Maybe shy rather than sly; it’s hard to tell.
“Howzit,” says the girl. Not shy, then.
“Hi.” Katya turns her attention to the garage door. Let the young deal with the young.
“See what they’ve done over the road?” says the schoolgirl.
“Uh, yes. Kind of hard to miss.” Toby laughs and gives her his sweetest gape. Hopeless!
But the girl’s observing him in a not unfriendly way. “So, have you guys got cracks?”
“Crack?” says Toby.
“Cracks, cracks in your walls. From the vibrations. From the machines.”
Toby looks at her, worried. The girl quirks a shapely eyebrow. “Look.” She points at the wall she’s just been sitting on. Sure enough, there’s a diagonal crack down to the tar. Has it always been there?
“And look, look there, it goes all across the road. I’m telling you.” Now the girl is skipping out into the road – really skipping, like a small child – and pointing at the tar, which does indeed look ominously split open between her feet. She points out the length of the crack with a toe, hands in the air to balance. Her gray trousers ride up to show her ankles, thin relative to taut parabolic calves, in short white socks.
Is she younger than Katya had thought? Older? She has one of those strong faces where the bones set early and stay good for decades.
“You living around here?” asks Toby.
The girl ducks her head in a sideways nod. “Around. You?”
Oh, please.
Katya fiddles with the garage door a little longer before giving it up. It’s now genuinely impossible to open without the handle. The girl is watching with arms folded across her chest. Toby has turned to stand by her side, similarly cross-armed. Copycatting.
“Toby, do you need a ladder, or what?”
“No, it’s cool, I can get up by the garage roof. It’s easy.”
She notices the girl is spreading her legs wider across the crack in the tar, showing further, unanticipated lengths of calf. Toby’s smile is stretched to breaking across his face.
“Now?” she says, snappier than she intends.
“Just now.”
“You be careful.”
Inside, Katya tracks onto the carpet some kind of khaki sludge from the road. She fetches the broom and pan from the kitchen corner – where a new black crack snakes up the wall.
The old house is built on sandy foundations that have been subsiding for decades, and she’s used to the odd warp and split, the plaster running like a laddered stocking. Like the lines on her own face, she can’t quite remember when each crack in the house appeared or lengthened; but she knows their shapes, their long italic slants, their seismograms. This one, though, she’s never read before. Inky, sharp-edged, viciously jinking. It seems mischievous. Her first irrational thought is that the girl is somehow behind it, playing a joke.
Can it really have jagged all the way through the earth from the demolition site across the road? How deep does it go? Does it run through the whole house, bottom to top? She imagines it slicing through her walls, her foundations, through the earth deep beneath the road, straight and thin as a laser beam, cross-sectioning the cakey layers of earth, gravel, sand, tar. She shoves the broom back in the corner, although it can’t conceal the flaw.
When the phone rings, it’s so loud it seems it might split the cracks open wider still. She snatches it up before it can do more damage. “PPR.”
The pause on the other end is ironic. “It’s only me, Kat.”
She makes her hand relax, lowers her voice. “Sorry. Hi. Your son’s on my roof, if you’re looking for him.” This is usually the reason for Alma’s calls.
Katya associates her sister strongly with telephones. Certainly, these days, phone calls – or more usually, text messages – are their main mode of communication. But it goes back further.
When Alma was thirteen and Katya ten, Alma started to run away. Sometimes she was gone for days, sometimes weeks. And then forever: at seventeen, Alma left and didn’t come back. But Katya continued to hear from her. Alma would phone at odd hours, from call boxes, from unknown destinations, across immense distances. Sometimes there would be long gaps in their communication. This was before cellphones, and with Dad on the move, it