Black Dog Summer (10 page)

WHEN BRYONY
walks into her bedroom after school and sees Gigi sitting motionless on the cherry duvet, staring at the bitten ends of her fingertips, she feels all itchy with irritation. Bryony marches to the cupboard, wrenches it open, and hunts for a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. At her back, her cousin (who does not seem even remotely related to the girl who ate peanut butter beneath Granny's dining room table all those years ago but is rather a coalescence of those strange new shadows that appeared in unexpected corners of the house after
the
phone call) doesn't move a muscle.

Bryony changes in the bathroom, leaving her school uniform in a heap in the corner, and then runs down the stairs and outside into the garden.

The afternoon heat is solid and resolutely breathless, and in the distance a thick duvet of steely-gray storm clouds coats the horizon. She shifts her shoulders against an ache she can't quite define and makes her way to the front gate to wait beneath the fever tree. The stones are warm at her feet, and above her head, the leaves hang limp in the still air. She waits for five long minutes. There is no sign of Lesedi.

Little beetles of impatience skitter up and down her bones and force her back into the garden and all the way up to her spy post on top of the dustbin housing. She crouches behind the wall and looks over. Her shorts feel prickly, and a slime of perspiration coats the backs of her legs. The Matsunyanes' place is closed up and silent. Nobody's home. She puffs out a breath that lifts the bangs from her sweaty forehead for a brief blissful moment before they fall back down again.

Bryony rises up on her haunches and tests the top of the wall, resting her palms flat on the dusty plaster before putting more weight
on them, and then finally swinging her whole body up. From this exciting new vantage point, she has a far better view of the Matsunyanes' garden. The lawn is smooth and bare, a bland, unfinished mirror image of the colorful flower beds, rockeries, and borders of Adele's landscaping on the Wilding side. It looks like it's waiting for something.

Bryony stretches out a toe and prods the replica wooden slatted structure covering the Matsunyanes' dustbins. She climbs down onto it, and then even further, sucking in her breath at the tickle of forbidden grass beneath her feet. After a heart-thumping pause, she creeps towards the plate-glass window that she's spent so much time watching from over the top of the wall, and stares into the room. There's a desk in the corner, a puffy brown leather chair, which looks as if it's been exiled from a lounge suite in some other more important room, and a large cabinet with lots and lots of little drawers in it. Against the back wall there are strange dark folded shapes: some like heavy winter coats hung up on pegs, and others that look like rolled-up rugs leaning upright. Bryony cups her hands to block the glare on the glass, but she cannot make out what the peculiar items are.

She notices a weird kind of feather duster leaning against the wall in one corner. Its handle is decorated with patterned rows of beads, making it seem a bit too fancy for housekeeping. The feather duster part doesn't look quite right either. Bryony peers closer and then suddenly twitches backwards from the glass.
It is hair!
A whole clump of some kind of hair, as white as her own, is tied on the end of the beaded stick.

Gooseflesh springs up on her arms and legs. She glances back around at the empty garden. The storm clouds have moved in with stealthy speed and now cover almost all of the sky, turning it a bruised greeny gray. The gust of wind she so longed for earlier now tugs at her shorts and lifts her sweaty bangs from her forehead. Bryony shivers.

It's going to start pouring any minute, and, despite the clotted feeling at the back of her throat from seeing that hair “feather duster,” Bryony risks one more look into the room. As she stares in, one of the coat-like objects on the back wall begins to move slowly. It is gradually unfolding and slipping from its peg.

Bryony freezes.

The folds of the dark fabric slip down to reveal a sliver of what looks like a white painted face. Little prickles of heat spring out all over her scalp.
It's a person.

The cloth drops a little further: two slit eyes, a straight nose, and, finally, a dark gaping mouth. Bryony has stopped breathing. A sudden blast of wind pushes her closer to the window as if it wants to smash her right into the glass just as the dark cloth finally falls to the floor.

It's just a mask! One of those creepy African masks.
Bryony almost giggles in relief. She rests her forehead against the cool window and gulps air at last. But then, just as she is about to leave, the mask, as if desiring to join the blanket that once covered it, suddenly slips off its hook and crashes to the floor. Bryony leaps backwards, stumbles, and then wills her legs to move.

She runs with blood pounding in her ears. The first drops of warm rain start to splatter down, and her feet skid on the dampening grass. Above the garden, the clouds open and the storm breaks. Bryony chokes on lungfuls of rain and hurtles towards the safety of the wall, running straight into the edge of the dustbin cover, oblivious as its sharp corner bites into her chest. She struggles for a grip on the wood, unable to see anything but the rain.

It moved. It fell, just as I was looking at it. It saw me!
Panic has turned her muscles into cottage cheese, but at last she scrambles up onto the Matsunyanes' dustbin housing and drags herself up and over the wall. Bryony lands so hard on the dustbin cover on her own side that one of the slats cracks and, for a moment, the splintered wood yawns like ragged teeth beneath her foot.

Bryony yelps and throws herself down to the muddy ground before sprinting towards the house, her wet blond hair plastered to an almost transparent sheen across her scalp.

I do not follow.

No. Something calls to me from that room with the masks and the beads and the hair, something that promises silence. I allow the call to rush through me, and all at once, although I can still see the rain and the grass through a shifting skin of shadow, I am no longer just in the garden; I am no longer sure where I am.

The charcoal-colored wind swirls and parts, and the white wooden mask that so frightened Bryony seems to hang in the air before me for a second before it resolves itself into a painted face. I notice dark smooth skin between the cracks in the white face paint. Black eyes with curly lashes. And then, a slow smile. Lesedi.

I see you, Ancestor.

I feel the words. They come at me from everywhere, resonating into the very center of me and echoing far, far out to the edges of the black sky.

For a moment, I am Africa's rain, nectar-sweet, thumping onto and soaking into brown earth. I am rank cowhide, dusty, twitching, covered with flies. I am river sand, washed caramel-sugar clean by the waters of a flooding stream.

Why have I not left?
I send my own wordless question back. It pulses and beats like the wings of a hundred birds around the white-painted face.
Tell me. Why must I follow the noise? Why am I still here with all the human mess and the aching and the past?

A shard of lightning flicks down.

I understand your frustration, Ancestor, I know what it is to have to follow a path that has been thrust upon you by forces you cannot see or understand.

The storm is both around and within me. For a moment it is me. Africa's thunder shakes through me like laughter.

You need to stay until the end.

I'm dead. What more of an ending do you want?
I wait. For a long moment, there's nothing but the rain.

And then:
Gigi
. My daughter's name is a wild wordless song that rises up on the wind, and for a moment, it is one high, clear note on the tumultuous air.

What about Gigi? What am I supposed to do?
But there's no reply.

Softly at first, barely distinguishable from the sound of the storm, the story noise returns. It banishes the white face and the voiceless voice, building to a scream until it is everything. Urgent.

I follow where it calls me. There is nothing else I can do.

Bryony hurtles in through the kitchen door and smashes straight into Tyler.

“Watch where you're going, Bryo—Jeez, you're soaking.”

“Was caught in the storm.” Streams of water race down Bryony's bare legs and puddle on the kitchen tiles.

“No kidding,” Tyler says, glancing down at the spreading wet patch on his school shirt. “Are you OK?” Bryony doesn't answer. “You're shivering like a maniac.”

“I know,” she mumbles through chattering teeth.

“What's up? You look kind of weird.”

Bryony shakes her head, and her blue-tipped fingers dig into the flesh of her arms.

“Go and get changed. You're going to catch pneumonia or something.” Tyler frowns. “Are you sure you're OK? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“There was something . . . weird . . . I dunno . . .” she manages through chattering teeth. “I saw . . .”

“You're not making much sense, Bry.”

“It was . . . There was this mask and I think . . . It was like there was a spell on it.”

“Well, that should be right up your street then, hey? Spells and stuff? Remember how you used to be so obsessed with Harry Potter that you used to try and get us all to call you Hermione?” Tyler grins. “You even wrote ‘Property of Hermione Granger' on all your schoolbooks, remember?” Mentioning this is usually the perfect way to elicit a blushing scowl and a slap from his sister, but she just continues to stare at him. Her eyes, with their wet spiked lashes, are open very wide. Tyler feels a squeeze of discomfort deep in his stomach. He trots into the scullery, drags a dry towel from the laundry basket, and then places it around his sister's quaking shoulders. “There. That better?” She nods, wrapping herself up tighter.

The towel seems to return Bryony to some kind of normality. Her gaze flickers over the kitchen. She notices an opened jar of peanut butter on the counter. Her expression hardens. “Hey . . .” she says. “What are you doing?”

“Making a sandwich. What, is that a crime now?”

“But you
hate
peanut butter.” She glares at Tyler, narrowing her eyes at the blush rising up his neck. “You're making it for
her
, aren't you?”

“What?”

“For Gigi. You're making her a sandwich or something.”

“So? What if I am?”

“Why bother? It's not as if she's going to suddenly talk to you or make you her best friend or anything.”

“She already has been talking to me; so there.” Tyler turns his back on his little sister, embarrassed at how childish he sounds. He busies himself with cutting a slice of bread and jamming it into the toaster.

“What did she say?” Bryony is too curious to maintain the accusation in her tone.

Tyler shrugs. “Nothing much.” He swirls the knife inside the jar, working it into the stiff peanut butter, and Bryony notices that the veins on his forearm pop up as he does so.

“Did you ask her how come she knows Dad?” she whispers, and he darts a quick look at her.

“No.”

Silence.

“Well maybe you should.”

“Ja, maybe.” The toaster pings. “Now go and get changed, for heaven's sake; you look like a drowned rat.”

Gigi finishes the toast, taking bite after mechanical bite until her mouth is left dry and sore. She's glad that Tyler handed her the plate and then left the room, because for a moment she thought he would stay and watch her eat. Something about the way he looks at her from beneath his blond lashes makes her feel too sharp-edged, too alive. She knows that he's trying to be kind and make her feel less of a stranger in this large, expensive house, but his attention brings too many memories hurtling to the surface. They close her throat and fill her mouth with bile.

Gigi darts a look across the bedroom to where Bryony, now in dry clothes, is rubbing her hair with a towel. There's a slight frown
between Bryony's pale eyebrows, and she's a million miles away, barely even noticing Gigi at all. After all the horrified looks shared over her head, the worried whispers, and the sympathetic smiles of the past week, Bryony's naked dislike is an honest relief. Gigi doesn't want to be asked if she's OK, she doesn't want to have Adele place a trembling, tentative hand on her shoulder; it all makes her feel too full, as if she might split open and spill out a thick, stinking stew of guts and dark mud all over the floor.

Gigi sits surrounded by Bryony's abandoned Barbie dolls, grubby soft toys, and Justin Bieber posters stuck askew onto the walls with oily lumps of Blu Tack and wonders if she remembered to close the window in her own bedroom back home. If she didn't, the monkeys will have gotten in again, probably knocking the curvy kudu horn and the collection of bones and stones that she keeps on the windowsill to the floor. She wonders if the monkeys (who have little black faces and gray bodies, like Siamese cats) will notice the crack in the corner of her room near the ceiling that looks like a map of the Nile, and swing on the frothy bridal extravagance of the mosquito net that's tied up and screwed into the creosoted wooden beam above her bed.

Gigi shuts her eyes and curls her body over her folded arms to try to contain the longing. She tries to remember every detail of the picture of Buddha, which was painted on the wall by her bed by an artist friend of Simone's called Angela, who came to stay on the farm last year. Angela was a small, loud American who'd been living on retreat in India for years before she came to volunteer at the rescue center, and she'd worked the letters of Gigi's name in Hindi to swirl with the clouds in the sky above Buddha's head.

Angela had already returned home to the States by the time the men came. Simone was in Scotland. Phineas and Lettie were at church. It had just been Johan, Seb, and her mother in the house.