Black Dog Summer (11 page)

Gigi grinds her teeth together, hard, and fights for air.

She tries to breathe back the plant sap and dung and dust scent of home, but all she can conjure up is the salty tin smell of blood.

“HEY, DOMMIE,
do you remember when we both pretended to be Hermione Granger?”

“Oh, ja.” Dommie grins and rolls her pencil across the large, smooth expanse of the art room table they're sharing. “We were such dorks.”

“I know.” Bryony takes her own pencil and draws a soft, curved line across the sheet of paper. They're supposed to be making sketches of ideas for the “What South Africa Means to Me” interschool art contest, but all she can think about is yesterday's storm and the way that ghastly white mask seemed to stare at her before it fell from the Matsunyanes' wall.

She adds another pencil curve to the first, creating the outline of the pointed chin just below that awful open mouth, and then scribbles firmly over all of it.

“Bryony, don't waste paper, please. If you've made a mistake, use an eraser to rub it out,” Miss McCrae says as she swoops past the desk trailing a cloud of cloves in the wake of her gypsy skirt. “Just think of the poor trees, dear.” Bryony dutifully turns the piece of paper over and readjusts her grip on the pencil.

“Man, I can't believe I spent so much time trying to make my hair frizzy to be more Hermione-ish,” Dommie says, smoothing the corkscrew curls that she now wears scraped back into a brutal ponytail to keep any sign of frizz from springing to life. “I must've been out of my mind.”

“Uh-huh.” Bryony places the tip of her pencil on the page. “But all that magic stuff that we were so into . . .”

“Oh, remember when we made those bamboo wands? We put all sorts of weird stuff inside them. We were so sure they would work.” Dommie giggles, recalling how they used strands of Bryony's silver-pale hair as a substitute for unicorn tail.

“Do you think that maybe . . . I dunno . . . there really are people who can do spells and stuff?” Bryony asks. “Like for real?”

Dommie looks at her friend for a long moment, one hand still on her curly hair, pencil poised over her paper.

“Bryony? Are you planning on presenting a blank sheet of paper as your design entry?” Miss McCrae asks as she and her spice cloud drift past their desk once more.

“Um, no, I'm just . . . thinking.”

“All right then, but think a little faster, dear, there's only half an hour to the bell.”

Bryony bends over the desk and quickly moves the pencil across the page. She's drawing the mask again. She can't seem to help herself.

“What do you mean, ‘people who can do spells'?” Dommie whispers once their teacher has moved on.

“Just . . . like put curses on things, or make things move from a distance and stuff. Like some kind of witch, or something.”

“Jeez, Bryony, sounds like you're watching too much TV, as my dad would say.”

Silence. Bryony begins to fill in the mask's dark open mouth, pushing the pencil harder and harder into the page.

“Oh my. That's rather interesting,” Miss McCrae says, coming to a stop behind Bryony's shoulder. “A tribal African mask, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Ritual and mystery. Nice idea for the beginnings of a theme, Bryony. Although, I must say, you've made it look rather scary.”

“Ritual?”

“Oh yes. Tribal masks are not just African décor items, dear; they've been used for centuries in all sorts of ceremonies.”

“For what?”

“Oh, I don't know, making rain and talking to the ancestors, that sort of thing. Sangomas and whatnot.” Miss McCrae smiles and moves off again.

“You mean witch doctors?” Bryony asks in a strangely loud voice. “Magic?” The murmurs and scratching sound of pencils cease as girls all over the room turn to stare.

“Well, I suppose so,” Miss McCrae says into the silence. “But a
witch doctor is not the same as a sangoma, Bryony. Witch doctors are believed to be like the bad guys who put curses on people, and sangomas are the good guys, the healers.” And then she claps her hands lightly together. “All right now, come on, everyone; back to your work.”

“What's up with you?” Dommie mouths, but Bryony just shakes her head and shrugs. She tries to smile as if nothing is wrong, but the corners of her mouth don't seem to be working properly.

Bryony is on top of the dustbin housing once again. Over the wall, in the Matsunyanes' ground-floor back bedroom, Lesedi, wearing her headdress with the dangling white beads and a stitched blanket over her shoulders, throws her head back and starts making a strange noise. Bryony can only hear faint edges of it from her vantage point, but it seems to be a chant, and it goes on for a while. Bryony gapes, riveted. The man in a suit whom Bryony watched Lesedi welcome ten minutes ago is sitting across from her, on the other side of a woven rug. As with Dora before, he has removed his shoes. Lesedi holds what looks like a straw bag with an open top. She shakes it and shudders and empties the contents out on the rug. Bryony cranes forward to see what falls out, but she can make out only small white and brown objects. They don't look worth all the fuss.

(I know what Lesedi is doing. She's throwing the bones to read messages in the way the pieces fall. Seb used to have a friend called Mike, who was one of a few white male sangomas in the country. Mike was one of my favorite guests ever to visit the sanctuary when I was still Monkey. He was soft-spoken and freckled, and wore his traditional garments and blobs of white face paint with quiet authority that stopped the astonished stares almost at once. Gigi was in love with his hair, which he wore in gingery dreadlocks that bounced when he walked. She bugged me to allow her to do the same with her own for weeks after his visit. I remember Mike saying to Simone once: “Throwing the bones is no different from you reading your Tarot cards. They're a way to focus energy, to enable the diviner to step aside from all their own headstuff and let something bigger speak through them.”)

Bryony's heart is thumping behind her ribs. She pulls back from the wall and climbs down to the ground. She wants to go inside and do something normal—even homework would do the trick—but she finds that she cannot. Instead, she follows the flower bed all the way to the gate and goes out to stand beneath the fever tree. After long minutes, her pulse slows and her breath comes more easily. She picks up a white pebble, studies the tiny veins of gray threading its powdery surface, and then puts it down again. Finally, the Matsunyanes' front gate opens, and the man she watched in Lesedi's room emerges. He is sweating in his smart suit, his face glowing like chocolate about to melt in the sun. He presses the button on his remote control, and a shiny car in the guest parking bay responds with a cheerful “blip.”

“Hi,” Bryony says, and the man jumps, startled, unaware that he was being watched.

“Hi.” The man glances from left to right, then speeds up to a trot as he nears the sanctuary of his BMW.

“Hey, Bryony!” Bryony spins around to find that she's being watched too. Leaning on the gatepost and wearing a pair of khaki cargo pants and a crisp white T-shirt is Lesedi herself. (For a moment I am dew glittering on grass tips and filigree spider's webs, and all the dusky space in an evening sky.) Lesedi smiles across at her little blond neighbor. “Are you planning on making all my clients feel so uncomfortable?” she says, and Bryony blanches.

“Clients?”

“Oh yes. I thought you'd have figured it out by now, standing at your fever tree sentry post.” Lesedi winks and crosses her smooth brown arms over the front of her T-shirt. “I've got a little illegal concern going on here, but you know that already.” Her eyes go round with studied concern. “Hey, you're not spying on me for the Body Corporate, are you? I know it's against the rules to run a business from home in this perfect, precious little place, but I'm not causing any harm, am I? And anyway, what's a businesswoman to do?”

“Um.” Bryony's mouth is dry and her voice comes out in a croak. “I don't know.”

“So you won't tell on me then?”

“No.” Lesedi smiles one of her warm delicious smiles again, and
Bryony notices just how perfect her teeth are. Like a Colgate ad. “I don't even . . . No. Of course.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“What do you do? I mean, what sort of business?”

“I guess you could call it counseling. Possibly consulting . . . Helping people is a good way of putting it.”

Bryony thinks back to the mask, the beaded headdress, and the woven rug; Miss McCrae's comments in art class; and her latest bit of Google research done on Tyler's laptop before she came outside to climb the dustbin housing.

“So you're not a sangoma, then?” she blurts, blushing a violent pink the moment the words are out of her mouth.

“I see you have been spying, little Bryony.”

“No I—I didn't . . .” Bryony nudges one warm pebble with her smile-toe.

“Shush, it's OK. I admire the desire to seek the truth; it shows an innate belief in the need for more justice in the world.”

“Does it?” Bryony's not sure what Lesedi means, but it certainly isn't the telling-off she expected. She looks down to where the bottoms of Lesedi's cargo pants crumple up over her bare feet and notices that her toenails are painted a delicate shell pink. As far as Bryony's aware, sangomas wear skins and gallbladders tied to their icky hair and hang out in dark little shops in the center of town full of crocodile guts and dried leaves. She also once heard someone say that sangomas sell tapeworm eggs to people who want to lose weight and the worms then hatch in their tummies and eat half the food they swallow. And then, in case that's not disgusting enough, when the worm gets too big, you get a special poison to drink which makes you poo the whole horrible thing out of your bum and flush it down the loo.
Gross
.

Bryony stares at Lesedi's pretty toes and giggles. Tapeworm poo and pale pink pedicures just do not mix.

“I was only kidding, of course,” Bryony says. “I obviously know you're not one of those.”

“Do you now?” Lesedi's voice is calm and unreadable, and Bryony's grin falters. She remembers the hairy, beaded feather duster
leaning up against the wall of that peculiar room; wasn't there something similar in one of those Internet pictures?

“Well then, Bryony-with-the-cousin-who's-come-to-stay, in that case, I'd like to offer you a little advice . . .” Lesedi steps closer, and Bryony nods, her throat inexplicably tight. “You might find you do better in life if you trust your instincts rather than your eyes.” The last word is almost a hiss, and as she says it, Lesedi opens her own very wide so that the creamy white shows all around the brown.

Bryony gulps. Even the tips of her fingers seem to be sweating.

“Go home now,” Lesedi whispers, and as she does, a gust of wind rushes through the quiet town house complex, sucking up sand and fallen leaves with its hot breath and sending them dancing up the faux street.

Bryony doesn't need to be told twice. She bolts back into the garden, and the wooden garden gate shudders on its hinges as it slams shut behind her.

“SO, GIGI,
tell me how you're feeling today.”

Gigi feels as though she's going to throw up. She stares hard at the blond wood of the small table at the side of her chair. On it is a floral tissue box with one white tissue pre-pulled out of the slit at the top. The corner of the white tissue poking up looks clean and expectant. Gigi clenches her hands into fists, and then forces them open again. They feel very hot through the denim of her jeans.

“Is there anything you'd like to talk about?” Dr. Rowe asks after minutes of silence have ticked by. “How are you fitting in at your uncle and aunt's place?”

“OK, I guess.” It's the first thing that Gigi has said since Adele walked into the bedroom an hour and a half ago and announced in a no-nonsense voice that it was time for her psychiatrist appointment. In fact, it's the first thing she's said all day. The sensation of Gigi's voice croaking out makes her instantly nauseous. She shuts her mouth quickly to swallow it down.

“Are you managing to get any sleep, Gigi?” A shrug. “Aren't the pills any help? Remember, the ones I prescribed to you while you were still here at the hospital?”

“They're finished,” she says, and Dr. Rowe's eyebrows lift, just a tiny bit. He considers his young patient for a moment before speaking again.

“I see.”

“You could give me some more, you know . . .” Gigi looks up at Dr. Rowe at last. “Like make out a prescription.”

“Well, yes, I could; but that probably wouldn't be a very good idea considering you seem to have relied rather too heavily on the last lot. How many did you take a day?”

Gigi shrugs, staring back down at her hands.

“Medication can be very handy in helping us cope when things get too overwhelming, but it doesn't actually make any of the bad stuff go away. All that pain still has to be dealt with at some point, doesn't it?”

Another shrug. Gigi twists her hands together, watching how this makes the skin on her fingers go mauve and then white.

“You might find some relief if you tell me a little about what happened that day, Gigi.”

Silence. (I notice that my daughter's story thread is all bunched up and twisted into knots. It's the color of spilled wine, and just as sour, and it fills the room from wall to window, ceiling to floor, winding tight around her throat.)

The afternoon sun beats against the western window of Dr. Rowe's hospital consulting room, but they're protected from its heat by the bluish UV glass. Dr. Rowe dislikes the way the glass makes the world outside seem strange and overcast, like something from a sci-fi movie, but it's either that or swelter.