Black Dog Summer

For Grant

I HAD
just put the coffee on the stove when they came.

I remember washing out the mugs at the sink. I paused when I caught the whiff of something strange slice through the coffee-scented warmth of the kitchen. The smell was bitter, a waft of pungent onion mixed in with alcohol. I stood for a moment with the washing-up gloves still on my hands and tried to place it.

“Morning, Monkey,” Seb said, drawn from his bed by the friendly morning bubble of our old Italian-style coffeepot. He scratched his stubble and yawned widely.

“Morning. You sleep OK?”

“Not too bad. I'm getting better at being alone in that bed, but not much.”

“Simone will be back in a week, Seb.”

“I know,” he said, and grinned. “I'm pathetic, aren't I?”

“Please, I bet she's waking up in her icy bed in Scotland right now and missing you just as much.”

I turned back to the sink just in time to catch a dark spot of movement in the yard outside the window. “That's strange. This must be the first Sunday in living memory that Phineas and Lettie didn't set off to church at dawn.”

“No, they left,” Seb said through another yawn. “I heard them take the pickup out early this morning. I think the world would have to end before Lettie would permit them to miss a Sunday service.”

“Then who was—”

“Jesus!” Seb yelled, and I spun around to see a strange man hurtle through the open doorway. For a second, my eyes locked on the intruder's. They were very wide open in his dark, sweat-streaked face, the whites yellowed like the sweat patches in the underarms of an old T-shirt. His gaze flicked from mine to the thick splintered plank of
wood that he held in one hand, and before I could even draw breath to scream, the yellow-eyed man had slammed the wood into the side of Seb's head and sent him sprawling across the kitchen floor.

And then two more men came through the door.

And then I screamed.

WHEN I
was alive, I had hair that was white in summer and the color of dead grass in winter and long, too-skinny fingers that, early on, earned me the nickname Monkey. Now, I no longer have fingers of any kind, or nails to break when helping Johan and Phineas fix the wire fencing around the perimeter of the farm, or any fences to fix, for that matter.

But something seems to have gone wrong with my dying.

I always thought that when the moment came, I'd follow the light or join the stars or whatever it is that's supposed to happen, but I have been dead for three sunrises, and I am still here.

I try going as high up away from the ground as possible to see if I can pass a point where things will suddenly snap into place and a tunnel will open and there will be a big glossy sign saying, “Afterlife. Exit ahead.” From way up here, southern Africa looks like a creature that's rolled over to expose the vast curve of a mottled brown belly with a gray tracery of veins. Far off in one direction, I can see the white frill of surf that borders the dark turquoise of the Indian Ocean.

But there's no sign, no “snap,” no tunnel. Nothing.

I go higher, high enough to see where the layer of blue above me turns into black, but the only thing that changes is the noise. It gets worse.

The noise. It has taken me a while to work out what the whispering, humming, singing, screaming awfulness comes from, but now, on my third day of not being Sally anymore, I think I have it figured out. The noise comes from Africa's stories being told. Millions upon millions of them, some told in descending liquid notes like the call of the Burchells' coucal before the rain, and some like the dull roar of Johannesburg traffic. Some of these stories are ancient and wear fossilized coats of red dust, and others are so fresh that they gleam
with umbilical wetness, and it would seem that, like me, they're all bound here, even the stories that are full of violence and blood and fury, and there are many of those.

At first, I couldn't distinguish one story thread from another within the solid roaring wall of sound, but now one of them seems to have separated itself from the rest. It is a pale, slender thread with an escalating alarmed tone, like the call of a hornbill looking for love. This small story has my living blood still in it: I can sense it pulsing through the body of my sister (who now sits weeping at her dressing table) and fluttering alongside the tranquilizers in the veins of my daughter as she lies between the white and blue sheets of a hospital bed.

It's just one story amongst millions, and yet it has become so loud now that it drowns out the others. It is howling at me, raging, demanding my attention. I look closer to find that this small, bright thread of story weaves out from the moment of my passing and seems to tether me to this place. Perhaps this is why I have not left yet. Perhaps I have no choice but to follow the story to its end.

Yes,
it screams,
follow me. Listen to me.

It does not stop screaming.

And so I look for an opening, a beginning to grab on to . . . I try Gigi first, but my daughter is lost and floating on a chemical sea and is not, it would seem, present in the story herself right now. In the hope that she'll be back soon, I stay and watch her chest rise and fall beneath the ugly hospital gown they have given to her to wear.

But Gigi remains absent, and the story howls at me again, even louder. It is unbearable. I have to move on.

I try my sister, Adele, but regret, like a too-thick synthetic blanket on a sweltering day, is wrapped tight around her. It reminds me of the ones that the women waiting for taxis by the side of the road in Musina would use to tie their babies onto their backs. It is olive green with blotches of brown and the occasional sharp starburst of ugly red, and it prevents me from getting close.

Liam?

I find him sitting in the exquisite molded leather interior of his latest Mercedes. The car sits stationary inside the closed-up garage
and its solid white doors are locked. The keys are not in the ignition. They have fallen to the carpet beneath Liam's feet and rest beside the clutch pedal like silver puzzle pieces waiting to be solved. Liam's head, with its ever so slightly thinning spot on top, is pressed into the steering wheel and his whole body shudders as if it is trying to climb out of itself. He is weeping. His grief is a sharp, raw shock, and I recoil. Fast.

Not Liam.

Just then, Liam and Adele's daughter, Bryony, steps out of her bedroom and onto the sunny upstairs landing. My niece is barely recognizable. The last time I saw her she was a tubby two-year-old with shiny cheeks. She is eleven now, and her skinny legs poke out from beneath the skirt of her freshly ironed school uniform.

Bryony is so filled up with the urgent desire to be part of a story that I can feel it like heat radiating off her skin. I am startled to find that I can feel right inside her too: I can touch the raw ends of all those tender-vicious young-girl thoughts. For a second I pause, uncertain, but Bryony is my way in, and the story is demanding that I follow.

I do.

BRYONY STOPS.
Normally she would go downstairs to the kitchen to get some breakfast, but after a moment's considering, she walks in the other direction, heading for her parents' bedroom doorway at the end of the passage.

The morning sun beats through the muslin blinds of the bedroom window, making the room look as if it's been pumped full of golden gas. But there's a small, dark spot right in the center of it: Adele. To Bryony, her mother looks older than she ever has before, her skin almost greenish against the black fabric of her top. She looks just like Granny in that photo hanging on the wall on the landing.

Adele sits at her dressing table and looks at her greenish self in the mirror before lifting a tissue to wipe at her lower eyelids: first one eye, and then the other. The skin beneath her eyes is already pink and stretched-looking as if it has been scalded, which it very well might be, considering how corrosive salt is and how many tears she's squeezed out. There have been so many tears since
the
phone call on Sunday that Bryony is sick to death of them.

Aunt Sally wasn't sick to death; she was murdered.

Bryony wants to say “murdered” out loud, just to see how it feels, but that would only set her mother off again and Adele probably doesn't have enough moisture left to get her through the funeral as it is. Bryony leans her spine hard into the corner of the doorframe and concentrates on the feeling of her toes sinking into the soft cream carpet.

Golden morning light. Wipe, wipe, wipe under the lower lashes. Pink, burnt skin.

“You shouldn't wear mascara today, Mom. If you're so worried about it. You know you're going to cry some more, so just don't wear it.”

“Don't be daft, darling.” Adele's voice sounds thick and clotted from the crying still waiting behind it. “None of the women in our family can go a minute without mascara; we look like a collection of albino lab rats. You'll understand when you're older.”

Bryony looks down at her bare toes. There's a small scratch on the left big one that looks like a smile, especially with the two small freckles above it. She wiggles the smile-toe. Adele doesn't know that Bryony has tried mascara already. She'd been expecting a dramatic transformation from stubby-lashed child to devastating teenage beauty, but it had just looked as if she'd dunked portions of her face into some kind of deadly black glue. It took the whole rest of that afternoon to get it off and she still went down to supper looking like someone had punched her in both eye sockets.

“Aunty Sally didn't wear mascara, and she was a woman in your family.” Bryony clamps her jaws together too late, and the words swim out and gravitate towards the dark spot.

Actually, it's been so long since Bryony saw her aunty Sally that all she can really picture when she thinks of her is a pair of balloony lilac trousers that look like a nappy gone wrong. Aunty Sally was wearing them in an old photograph that Bryony found at the bottom of one of the kitchen drawers when they were pulling out the old units and putting in the new, shiny ones that Adele ordered a few months ago. In the picture, her mother looked smiley in a luminous way that Bryony has seldom seen on her actual face. Her arm was around Aunty Sally's shoulder, and between them both was a little girl with two plaits and freckles on her nose. The little girl was holding on to the lilac fabric of Aunty Sally's pants, twisting it into crumples with her small, chubby fingers. Bryony knows this is Sally's daughter, Gigi, and she's been told that she and Gigi once sat underneath Granny's dining room table and ate a whole jar of peanut butter, but try as she might, she can't remember it.

The purple-pants picture is the only photograph that Bryony has seen of Aunty Sally as a grown-up, which is strange, because there are quite a lot of family photos hanging alongside the one of Granny on the landing wall. Bryony couldn't tell whether Aunty Sally was wearing mascara in the picture or not, but she figures she wasn't. Adele
mentioned the fact often enough in a tone that implied that it was some kind of insult to her very Adeleness. “I fail to see how ‘finding' one's self, becoming a vegetarian, and living in a ‘spiritual community' to cuddle abandoned animals entitles one to waft around looking like a bag of faded washing.” When Adele saw Bryony studying the photo, she'd whipped it away with a dark look in her eyes that halted Bryony's indignant whine at once.