Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
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five houses in the row are two-story Victorians, high but narrow, pretty but decrepit, with a low wall fronting what once must have been five small gardens, now cemented over. She doesn’t really know her neighbors. There’s an old couple on the corner, and a family with a teenage girl who recently moved in two doors down. The other two houses are used as student digs. Katya lives at the end of the row, her garage right next to the alleyway. She crosses over the road, fishing out her keys.
There are many things she loathes about the garage door: its peeling wood finish, the perverse ridge on its steel handle that bites into her fingerbones, its pig-like keening when it does agree to open. She always approaches it like a wrestler heading into a tough bout, cracking her knuckles.
Irritable, she tugs at the rusted handle. The wood has swollen and it’s sticking even more than usual. With spite in her heart she leans in to give it another wrench, really putting her weight into it. This time, the metal pulls right out of the rotten wood and her knuckles scrape across the door. She staggers back, clutching the detached handle.
“Damn it!”
She stares at her hand, stained now with a shit-like smear of rotten wood and rust and, yes, blood: the skin has been broken. The wet splinters in her palm, the wrench in her shoulder, the messiness of it all...She hurls the handle over towards the black municipal wheelie bins that stand in a row in the mouth of the alleyway. It bounces dully off the nearest lid and skitters into the space behind.
“Hey!” cries a hoarse voice.
“Oh fuck, what now?” She peers round the corner into the dark of the alley. There are a couple of draped brownish figures down at the far end. She makes out a mattress, a tangle of gray blanket, a black plastic radio held together with duct tape. One of the figures raises a ragged hand, and she recognizes the trailing bandage.
“Jeez, sorry, Derek man! Sorry.”
Derek, who swathes his head and limbs in patterned rags, who leaves intricate sculptures made from toothpicks and cigarette boxes outside Katya’s front door. There’s a grunt from the dimness. “Got any smokes?”
“Nothing today, sorry.”
“Eina, you hurt yourself, girlie,” says Derek.
There is blood dripping from the side of her hand. “Flesh wound. I’ll live.” She blots the blood on her overalls.
Derek and his crew are mostly hospital survivors: of the psychiatric clinic in one direction or Groote Schuur in the other. Dazed and abandoned, patients who never made it home. There’s the tall blind man who is led through the streets at a rapid clip by his squat, hawk-eyed companion. The slim woman whose features were once delicate, and who’s always dressed in good clothes, but whose bloodshot eyes and ravenous panhandling quickly disperse any air of gentility as soon as she gets up close. Flora and Johan and their disappearing / reappearing baby. Dreadlocked Mzi, the shouter. A gentle bunch: the only bother has been the odd late-night singing and quarreling sessions. When they occupied the park, their nest of mattresses and blankets and tarpaulins was always tucked away discreetly in the bushes. Sometimes there was a small fire going – an almost pastoral scene.
Nobody else used the park: it would have been strange to see any actual mothers bringing actual children to play there. Turnover was high. Residents came and went, moved on or passed away, to be replaced. All but Derek. Derek has outlived them all, his age indeterminate but immense, his face not so much wrinkled as armored in plates of weather-toughened skin.
She gives him a wounded wave. “Goodnight.” To hell with the garage. If anyone wants the van tonight they’re welcome to it.
Inside her house, she kicks off her shoes and goes through the small lounge into the open-plan kitchen area. It takes half a dozen steps, wall to wall. The house is small, containing only a few gulps of sticky air; the carpet feels gritty underfoot. Katya runs water over the graze on her hand. The grime of the excavated hole has mingled with the rust from the garage door to taint her blood. Tetanus, lockjaw. A bath, that’s what she needs. She climbs the narrow stairs – so steep! Today, more than most days, she feels how they’ve been shoe-horned into the space.
She rented this place furnished, 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