Black Dog Summer (23 page)

“I don't know, Sedi. I sure as hell hope there is.”

“Which is why I must go to Swaziland,” she says. “To find out.”

“I guess.” Their reflection in the blank face of the kitchen window is made wild and blurry by the thrumming rain outside, and to Thabo it looks as though the kitchen is dissolving. He shuts his eyes and makes a few mental calculations: how much could he sell the house for? The market is lousy. Maybe he should keep it and rent it out: the rents in Cortona Villas are high, maybe even enough to cover the mortgage. With the market the way it is, he can probably pick up a new property at a really good deal.

“Thabs?” Lesedi says.

“Uh-huh?”

“Don't get another place in a town house complex. Just a regular house, OK? A place where we won't be spied on every minute of every day.”

“Somewhere with no Body Corporate?”

“Exactly.” She smiles. “Now I'd better get upstairs and start packing.”

“And we've got some serious ‘going away' sex to get covered too,” he says, and her laugh is drowned out by another peel of thunder.

I leave the Matsunyanes. I rise up out of the house, through the madness of the storm and into the calm above. The sky here is inky and studded with stars, and below me the carpet of clouds heaves and roils, lit up from within by electric flashes that smell like burnt rain.

BRYONY, TYLER,
and Gigi step out of the front door into the unseasonably cool morning to find that the garden is a wreck: all the flowers have been pulverized by the hail, and the once colorful flower beds are a mulch of bruised, browning petals and broken stalks.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Adele mutters when she comes out behind them and spots her potted lavender. Half the gray-green stalks have been broken. Their damage perfumes the air and the tips of Adele's fingers as she brushes the plants on her way past.

The lawn is dotted with shredded leaves and small branches that have been ripped from the surrounding trees, and Bryony kicks bits of the litter aside as she follows her mother and brother down the path towards the garage.

Gigi stops to inspect the remains of a tattered nest that must have been blown from a nearby tree and is now lying on the ground beside the path. There are two little broken eggs in it. She touches the edge of one translucent, speckled shell and looks up to see if she can spot the bereaved parents. The sky, wiped clean and brilliant blue by last night's rains, is empty.

“Come on, Gigi. You don't want to be late on your second day of school,” Adele calls from the garage and climbs into the driver's seat. “You too, Tyler, get a move on.”

“You can have the front for a change, Bryony,” Tyler mutters to his surprised sister, nudging her out of the way so that he can slide into the back beside Gigi.

Gigi's shift away from him is almost imperceptible, but it is enough to make his face pink with confusion. For the hundredth time since it happened, he remembers her fingers flicking along the inside of his lip. He turns to glare out of the window. Why won't she even
look
at him now?

Bryony stretches out in the luxury of the big front seat and clips in her seat belt as Adele reverses out of the garage.

“Oh no!” Bryony gasps.

“What?”

“The fever tree. Look.” The slender, powdery green trunk of the little tree that stands between their driveway and the Matsunyanes' has bent and split in last night's storm, and half of the branches hang from shreds of bark, their small leaves and broken thorns crushed into the white pebbles.

“Oh damn,” Adele says, braking beside it to get a better look. “Those trees take ages to grow.”

“Is it going to have to be cut down?”

“Hmm, maybe some of it can be saved if they saw off the broken parts.”

“Shame.” Bryony stares at the raw, pale innards of the tree that are now exposed. “It looks sore.”

“Since when are you so worried about trees?” Tyler sneers from the backseat.

Bryony doesn't answer. Adele's slow reversing has now revealed that the Matsunyanes' garage door is open, and she can see Mr. Matsunyane loading what looks like a suitcase into Lesedi's car trunk.

“Looks like someone's going on a trip,” Adele says, and waves to Mr. Matsunyane as she accelerates past.

Gigi squats on top of the closed toilet lid, not daring to touch the surface of it with anything other than the soles of her school shoes. It is quiet in the bathroom. She is the only one in here, crouching on her loo seat in a stall at the far end of the row. The bathrooms are gloomy, but this particular stall glows a strange green from the light filtering through the leaves of the creeper whose verdant growth has covered the small, high window.

The smell in here is horrible, but at least she is alone. At least she doesn't have to try to pretend that she understands what on earth is going on in algebra. The teacher seems to be talking in another language. Although she seems to be up to speed with English,
history, and biology, Gigi has quickly realized just how sorely her home schooling was lacking in the math and the other science departments.

The impala herd appears to communicate in another language too, full of references she has no clue about, like TV shows on cable, something called WhatsApp, and people she thinks must be pop stars, but she's not quite sure. No one talks about the Four Noble Truths, or how to give subcutaneous rabies injections to small mammals, or what it's best to do to get a terrified mongoose to start eating. It is becoming clearer and clearer that Gigi is another species altogether.

She digs in her blazer pocket and pulls out the badge that she found lying on the school lawn during first break. It is blue and shiny and says something in Latin, and she thinks that it's probably indicative of some kind of academic achievement; she's seen others like it pinned onto some of the less sporty-looking impalas' blazers. This one must've fallen off. Gigi runs her fingertips along the glassy top, then turns it over and releases the pin. It's very sharp, made to stab through the thick fabric of a blazer lapel with no trouble at all.

She rolls down her left sock and touches the badge pin to the soft hollow beneath the pointed, pale triangle of her anklebone. It tickles. Then she presses, hard, shutting her eyes and focusing on the feeling of the metal sliding into her skin. Tears spring out from under her eyelids and she bites her lip. Her sweating fingers slip on the slick badge, but she readjusts her grip and stabs once more before ripping the pin out of her flesh, clipping it closed, and shoving it back into her pocket.

Gigi has a handful of crumpled toilet paper ready to sop up the blood, and as she sits with it pressed against the tiny wound, she stares at the blooming red flower seeping and growing across the white paper. When it is almost saturated, she replaces it with another before lifting the wet, red piece up to her face and breathing in the smell of meat and metal. Her stomach heaves, but she forces herself to inhale it again.

“Hey, did you hear?” Dommie whispers to Bryony across the art room desk. “Your sangoma left this morning.”

“Left?” Bryony pauses in her drawing. She has abandoned the
mask idea for her “What South Africa Means to Me” picture and is now happily drawing a dung beetle with different designs in each stripe on its shell to represent each of the eleven national languages. “Like how do you mean?”

“I mean gone, vamoosed, left the building. My mom and some other board members went round to visit her yesterday to tell her off about the running a business thing and she told them not to worry, she was going away. And then this morning, she went.”

“Oh.” Bryony feels strange, as though her head is suddenly very light and is going to go floating up towards the ceiling. She clenches her jaw as hard as she can to stop it from doing any such thing.

“I thought you'd be thrilled.”

“I am.”

“Then why do you look so weird?”

“Just got a little dizzy, that's all.”

“Your nightmares will probably stop now that there's no longer a witch doctor living next door.”

“Ja,” Bryony agrees.

“Girls, let's have less whispering and more drawing, please,” Miss McCrae says in a firm voice as she stops beside their desk to take note of their progress. “Nice, Dommie, you've got a real sense of movement there.”

Bryony glances up at her teacher and gasps.

“Goodness, what is it, Bryony?”

“Your earrings.”

“I know, aren't they adorable?” Miss McCrae smiles and touches one of her dangly earrings with a finger. “They're Scotties. My favorite of the terrier family.” A little carved black dog glitters as it swings on the end of its silver chain, back and forth, back and forth, beside Miss McCrae's tanned neck.

“Lovely,” croaks Bryony, and bends her head down over her work. She has to concentrate hard to keep from throwing up.

Lesedi winds down the car window and breathes in the rich scent of earth and low cloud. A woman selling small, hard-looking mangoes
from a plastic bowl at a rickety table by the side of the rutted road shares a luminous smile, and a small boy with a herd of floppy-eared goats waves as Lesedi drives past.

Hello, Swaziland.

Ahead, the road swoops upwards and then curves left behind the aloe-spotted, green skirts of an approaching mountain.
It's good to be back.

Bryony walks up to the fever tree and inspects the places where the Cortona Villas gardeners have neatly amputated its broken limbs. They have also swept up the fallen leaves, but Bryony can see one papery thorn still jammed in between two pebbles. She steps closer, avoiding the thorn, and places her palm on the raw blond patch of torn trunk. She is surprised to find that it is slightly damp, as if the tree has been sweating.

“Sorry, tree,” she whispers under her breath. “You look too skinny now, like a certain cousin of mine.”

Bryony glances around to make sure that she's alone, although there's seldom anyone about this early in the afternoon, and the absence of Lesedi and her tapeworms from Cortona Villas is almost tangible, like a seasonal shift in the air. Then she carefully puts her arms around the fever tree's wounded, lopsided trunk and rests her head against the warm green bark.

“You'll be OK,” she whispers, and shuts her eyes and feels the tree beneath one cheek and the soft breeze on the other and for a moment forgets about her nightmares and the Gigi-zombie and her mother's permanent tension and her dad's strange sadness and just breathes in time with the movement of the remaining branches above her head.

The sound of an approaching car engine startles her out of her reverie. Her first horrible thought is that Lesedi has come back, but the car is neither Mr. Matsunyane's silver GTI nor Lesedi's dark blue Polo. It is a small maroon Kia with rental company stickers on its windows, and when it pulls up in the guest parking bay opposite the house, a slender woman with shiny long brown hair gets out and then carefully locks the car door behind her.

The woman is wearing floaty caramel-colored pants and flat leather sandals and has a chunky string of reddish wooden beads wrapped around one delicate wrist. As she crosses the road towards Bryony, the breeze carries the scent of herbs and flowers ahead of her.

Bryony's heart begins to thump.

“Are you Simone?” she blurts out, and the woman pauses, startled.

“Why, yes I am,” she says with an uncertain smile.

“I'm Bryony. Have you come for Gigi?”

“Gosh, aren't you an intuitive one?”

“She's inside. Come, I'll take you.”

“She's upstairs in my bedroom.”

Gigi, lying on her side on top of the racing-car duvet with her knees held in close, can't hear the words, but she is alert to the excited tone in Bryony's voice and the singsong syllables of her own name floating up from the garden below.

The front door opens and shuts, and Gigi, who has been staring across the room at the cherries on Bryony's bedding for so long that her vision is now all patchy with bright fruit shapes, slowly sits up and swings her legs off the bed. Her wounded ankle throbs, but she doesn't allow herself to rub it.

Footsteps pound on the carpeted stairs, and then the bedroom door flies open and Bryony bursts in, pink-faced and out of breath. “She's here,” she says.

“What?” Gigi's mouth is stiff from another day of silence. “Who?”

“Simone.”

Gigi blinks; then she almost levitates off the bed, jams on her flip-flops, and hurtles past Bryony and out of the room. She barely sees the stairs beneath her feet and then the Persian rug of the hall as she races towards the lounge. There, finally, standing beside the sofa, deep in serious-looking conversation with Adele, is Simone.

Gigi stops. There's an avalanche of sobs fighting to get out of her aching throat, but her lips are pressed tight. Something is different about Simone. The set of her shoulders and the hard little points of her bare elbows prevent Gigi from running towards her.

“Simone?” she whispers, and the woman turns and smiles despite the tears that spring at once from her eyes. Gigi goes to her then, and inhales the Turkish-delight-sweet smell of geranium as she curls into her arms.

“I'd better get that kettle on, hadn't I?” Adele mutters. “Come on, Bryony.”

“But—”

“No buts. Off we go.”

Bryony trots out of the room behind her mother, who is pulling her ever-faithful sunglasses down from their spot on the top of her head (where she always seems to keep them now) and over her raw eyes.

Simone pulls away from the embrace too soon and wipes her cheeks. “Well, who knew there were any more tears inside this old girl, hey?”

Gigi stumbles to regain her balance as cool air rushes in to take the place of Simone's scented warmth.