Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
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The call comes a few mornings later, as she’s rubbing her hair dry after another bath and observing Derek through the upstairs window. He’s on the opposite pavement, his back to her, weaving something – a piece of tape or ribbon – through the holes in the fence. It’s absorbing, and the phone startles her.
The voice on the line is lush; she can almost smell the musk on the woman’s breath, hear the smack of her lipstick. Sales call, Katya thinks, or someone following up on an unpaid bill.
“Miss Grubbs?”
“Who is this?”
“Painless Pest Relocations?”
Katya adjusts her tone. “That’s us – how can we help?”
“Hold the line for Mr. Brand, please.”
Silence, filled with furtive clicking. Derek’s still busy down there. He must have been cold last night, she thinks. She could’ve gathered blankets, made food, offered coffee...but she’s never done that, in all her years here. Never taken anything to Derek and his friends, never given them more than an empty Coke bottle to return for deposit.
“Grubbs!”
She remembers his voice, although now it’s clear of the burr of drink. She looks down at herself – she’s in a towel – and takes a moment to mentally slip into her overalls and button them up.
“That’s what they call me.”
“Then that is what I shall call you too. I believe we met at our garden party – perhaps you recall? You were wearing a rather fetching green.” His voice is like marble, heavy but polished, evoking those giant stone spheres you see rotating in streams of water outside corporate headquarters. It would be reassuring, if not for its slightly mocking tone.
“White shirt,” she says. “Too much to drink.”
“And more before the day was out, I’m very much afraid.”
Derek has moved on. The ribbon he’s left behind makes a zigzag pattern in the wire, like those webs made by spiders on acid.
“So now,” Mr. Brand’s voice continues. “I have a problem, a persistent problem, and I would like to engage your services. If you’re available.”
“Depends,” she says. “What sort of job are we talking?”
“What sort of job? Caterpillar wrangling, of course – what else?”
After the call, she sits quietly for a few minutes, considering. Down below, a schoolgirl – white shirt, gray trousers, Mary Janes–strolls past Derek’s handiwork without a glance. She might be from the family that moved in recently down the road. Passing by, the girl casually pinches the end of the ribbon between her fingers, and as she walks on the zigzag unravels, lashing up and down through the wire, until the fence is empty again and the ribbon trails behind her like a tail.
A feather drops onto Katya’s shoulder as wings clap across the space above her, and she looks up to see duct pipes, a blackened walkway. She takes it as a good omen: the beasts are here. City pigeons, in their proper place.
She’s always liked parking garages, their in-between feel. No matter how glossy the shopping precincts that lie above or below, the parking garage is always a brute dungeon of raw concrete. Not a wild space, but not civilized, either. The dark corners and crevices make her urban-pest sensors prick up. Here you get your rats, sometimes your pigeons. Not a terribly varied fauna, but a resilient one, dark-adapted.
This parking garage is nothing special, the usual stained concrete and unfinished pillars. The old PPR-mobile looks dusty and out of place between the Beemers and Mercs. She lets her fingertips glide over the sleek flanks of the cars – metallic shells so like the carapaces of giant beetles – as she moves between them to the stairwell.
A short flight of stairs, and then a swing door and an abrupt change of atmosphere. There’s a well-lit, carpeted lobby and a lobby-man in a cinnamon uniform; he takes her name and her picture with a webcam like a tiny Death Star. Then she has to press her thumb to a glass screen that glows with a bluish light. They say not a word to each other. He points silently to a space behind her right shoulder, in a banishing-from-Eden gesture, and she turns to see a large notice board of names and floor numbers.
Brand Properties, it says on the board: fifteenth floor.
“Thank you,” she murmurs.
On floor two she’s joined in the lift by a good-looking young man with satiny skin and a sharp black suit; on floor four, a bony woman carrying a tray of samosas. Nobody speaks, and none of them meet each other’s eyes, although she attempts a brief flirtational skirmish in the polished metal of the lift wall with the young man. She tries to snag his eyes, but he’s too good: she can’t get an angle on him. He’s staring off into a corner, not looking at anyone – not even himself. It seems unnatural, but also a skill: who could look at nothing, surrounded by mirrors? He gets out on the eighth floor, samosa lady on the tenth. Katya ascends alone. She imagines herself a cosmonaut in her green flight suit, trapped in a space-capsule. If it goes any higher, it might hit zero gravity.
When the doors sigh open on floor fifteen, she steps out into another white corridor, teal carpet with a diamond pattern underfoot. Disk-shaped light fixtures of smoked glass like flying saucers are set into the ceiling. She pads down the corridor, the only sound the sub-audible buzz of some electrical system – air-con, lighting. There are no windows, and it’s impossible to say how far she is from real air and sunlight. This honeycomb bears little relation to the monolithic office block she circled earlier, looking for the parking entrance.
She counts the numbers on the doors. There are offices to the left and right, but no apparent occupants. Some show signs of recent activity, and a rapid exodus. Through doors ajar, she glimpses humorous postcards stuck to corkboards, a toppling pile of printouts on the floor, a chipped cup dumped in a sink in a tiny kitchenette. It’s like the Marie Celeste. Can business really be that bad?
At the end of the corridor, where it turns a corner, there is at last a window, looking down onto the roofs of other city buildings. The foreshore: land stolen from the sea. The rooftops have been put to various uses. She sees gardens and stacked plastic chairs and heaps of scrap metal and even, on one, a gazebo and what seems to be a water feature. She can make out the fat torpedoes of koi fish circulating down there, the size of grains of rice but the shape unmistakeable. She has no idea all this had been going on above her commuter-level head. Most of the rooftops are grimy, though, not meant to be seen – like the top of the fridge in a short woman’s house.
Down the other end of the corridor, just before it takes another corner, a cleaning lady leans on her silent hoover and stares down through a similar window. Katya wonders how the city’s streets are marked for this woman, with what humiliations, curiosities and pleasures. The two of them, sole survivors of whatever mysterious plague has wiped out everyone else on the fifteenth floor, gaze down upon the grubby topside of the town.
The woman gives her a quick, flat glance and looks away, gunning the vacuum cleaner. It’s a reminder. She is not floating here; she is working. Katya is working too. She passes the woman in the corridor without troubling her with another glance.
As she comes round the next corner, she sights life: not Mr. Brand, but another solidly potent figure, dark against the brightness of the corridor. It comes towards her with hand outstretched and a gleaming smile.
The woman is glossy and round and fragrant as a sugar plum, with toffee-apple lipstick, a deep but elevated cleavage and apparently knee-less legs that taper smoothly from nyloned thigh to stilettoed heel. Her globular haircut shines like black silk and is, Katya assumes, a quality weave.
She has no trouble recognizing the woman immediately: this is the owner