Black Dog Summer (3 page)

“Bryony?” She hears the click of high heels on cement. “All right, sweetie. Come along to the sickroom with me. We'll get you a tissue and some sugar water. There we go. Up you get.” Strong hands and the smell of perfume and suddenly Bryony's on her feet. She opens
her eyes to see her hated school shoes swimming next to Miss Botbyl's elegant pointy ones. “I'll be back in a moment, girls. Please take your seats and get your homework out. Amanda, I'm leaving you in charge till I get back.”

“Miss Botbyl?” Bryony asks as her teacher leads her through the now quiet corridors towards the school office. “What's a jellyside?”

“I've no idea. Some kind of pudding, perhaps?”

“Oh. OK then, what's a massacre?” Bryony asks, thinking back to the way the word hung like a rotting black flag in the sunny bedroom that morning.

Miss Botbyl doesn't answer, but her arm tightens round Bryony's shoulder.

Gigi has moved. Her left arm is higher up on the pillow than it was at my last visit. Her eyes, however, are still closed. Bruised gray eyelids in a pale gray face on a cloud-white pillow: she looks like a child made of storms.

I keep expecting to feel pain at the sight of my hospitalized daughter; I'm waiting for it, but anguish, it seems, is one of the things I need a pumping heart to experience. Just as I've been doing with Bryony, Liam, and Adele, I observe Gigi from a clean, breathless place unmuddied by emotion.

She's not here with me, listening to the stories, and she's not in the story, so where have the storm winds taken her? There is no one to ask, and no time to find out.

Follow me
, the story howls. It screams. There's no way I can ignore it.

Sticky threads.

Bryony.

“
Noun: the indiscriminate, merciless killing of a number of human beings, or a large-scale slaughter of animals
.” Bryony whispers it a little louder now that she's outside, but the words seem no more real. Earlier, when they'd arrived home from school and Tyler had vanished
into the bathroom for one of his mysterious, lengthy episodes, she'd braved his off-limits bedroom, scowled at the picture of a woman with her top slipping off that he'd recently made into his laptop's desktop wallpaper, and Google-searched the word “massacre.” She then had to look up the word “indiscriminate” as well, but luckily Tyler stayed in the bathroom for a really long time.

So now she knows. She expects to feel different, but she doesn't. Also, she still has no idea just exactly how this dictionary definition relates to her aunty Sally in her billowing purple pants. Bryony balances on the cobbled border that edges the flower bed, challenging herself not to touch the earth on either side as she walks along it, following the route it makes all the way round the side of the Wilding property. The further she gets from the too-silent house where her mother weeps behind one blank door and her brother listens to his iPod and looks at pictures of girls in bikinis on the Net behind another, the better she is able to breathe.

But the word still follows her. It follows her all along the boundary wall, round the side of the house, and to the spot where the big black plastic wheeled dustbins are housed in neat wooden cabins to hide their unsightly functionality until they're ready to be wheeled out on Tuesday and emptied by the rubbish-collecting men. Bryony hoists herself up onto the smooth slats of the dustbin house and walks carefully on the joists so as not to go crashing through onto the bins beneath.

She shuffles to the wall that borders the neighboring garden and peers over the top of it. She sucks in her breath, because right there, kneeling on the floor in front of the plate-glass window of the back room she uses as a home office, is Mrs. Matsunyane. Bryony knows that Mrs. Matsunyane's first name is Lesedi because that's what it said on the letter that landed in their postbox one time by mistake, and also, thanks to her previous spying sessions, she's heard Mr. Matsunyane call out to her.

To Bryony, Lesedi looks too young and lovely to be a Mrs. Anybody. She wears Levi's jeans and sneakers and color-coordinated tops and dangly earrings, and her hair hangs in long glorious licorice braids down her back.

Bryony's convinced that there's something
special
about Lesedi. She has often noticed the strings of earthy tribal beads that she wears around her ankles, and she's sure that there's something interesting hiding around Lesedi's neck too, because when she leans forward, there's a pointy bulge beneath her top.

Today, Lesedi's top is yellow, and Bryony can see that she has accessorized her outfit with some kind of special white makeup around her eyes and a lovely headdress of dangling beads that shiver when she moves. However, because of the way her neighbor's furniture is arranged, Bryony still cannot see what exactly it is that Lesedi is fiddling with on the hardwood floor at her knees.

And then, Lesedi looks up. Not at Bryony, who gasps and ducks below the top of the boundary wall, but directly at me. It should not be possible, but she stares straight at me with still, dark eyes that seem to gleam between their rows of curly black lashes. How does she see me? Am I a faded photocopy of my old tall, blond Monkey shape? Am I a patch of shadow, a sliver of light? Lesedi doesn't let on, merely lowers her head in a slow, respectful nod of greeting.

With that nod I am suddenly baked red earth that has been pounded by dancing feet. I am warm aloe sap that drips from a rip in a leaf like slow-running wax from a candle. I am the petulant “go-away” call of a gray lourie and the pulse of a thousand drums.

But when Lesedi looks away, the sensation is gone.

Liam comes home from work early, and the hello hug he gives Bryony, who has been waiting for his return, is brief and distracted. “Where's Ty?” he says, dropping his briefcase beside the front door.

“In his room.” Bryony slides her bare foot over the porcelain hall tile and listens to the squeak it makes.

“Go and call him, Bry.”

Adele comes out of the lounge. The two smoky ovals of her sunglasses, which she seems to have given up taking off at all since the funeral, flash in Liam's direction.

“Tell him we want a family discussion,” Liam says, and brushes his palms down the pockets of his suit.

“About what?”

“Fetch your brother, Bryony. Now.”

“OK, OK, I'm going. Jeez.”

“And don't say ‘jeez,' ” Adele calls after her as she runs up the stairs, “it's common.”

“Dad says it all the time,” Bryony mutters, bashing on the Keep Out sticker on Tyler's bedroom door.
Maybe if I keep thumping it, it'll finally peel off
. Tyler's iPod is blaring through the wood at the top of its little synthetic lungs. “TYLER!”

“What's the goddamn panic?” Her brother wrenches the door open. He's still wearing his school shirt and trousers and Bryony doesn't know how he can bear to; her uniform starts coming off in increments from the moment she gets into the car for the ride home.

“Dad's home and he wants a family discussion.”

“Oh shit.” Tyler swears a lot. Liam calls him the angry young man, but Bryony doesn't see what on earth he's got to be so cross about half the time. Also, he's fifteen, which is hardly
young
, in her opinion. “OK then, little one, let's get this crap over with.” He follows Bryony back down the stairs, and then the two of them stop, just near the bottom, as if about to pose for a family photograph.

“Right, guys.” Liam shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his charcoal suit trousers. “We need to have a little chat about your cousin Gigi.”

Bryony thinks of the little girl with the plaits in that photograph and worries the edge of the stair carpet with her toe. Half of the smile scab came off earlier in the garden, and the toe face is disappearing.

“I know you've been concerned about her welfare, and I'm sorry we've been keeping you in the dark about this whole ghastly episode, but there have been all sorts of . . . things to sort out.” Liam glances towards Adele with a strange, fearful look on his face. Adele doesn't notice. She's too busy staring at the floor through her sunglasses. “I guess we've been trying to protect you lot from the worst of all of this.”

“The worst?” Bryony says.

“Where is she? Gigi?” Tyler asks.

“She's been transferred from a hospital in Louis Trichardt to one closer to us. She's at the Sandton Clinic at the moment.”

“Hospital? But you said she wasn't hurt.”

“She's not injured, but she's in terrible shock,” Liam says. “She's currently under sedation.”

“They've had to knock her out with drugs?” Tyler shakes his head and sits down on the bottom step.

“She's just . . . well, understandably she's feeling very lost and alone right now.”

“I bet.” Tyler starts picking at one of his toenails, and Bryony gives him a little kick to get him to stop. It has no effect.

“I need you guys to be a little mature about all of this, OK? This girl has had a very hard time, and, up until now, she's had no one to turn to.” Liam glances at his wife, but she continues to avoid his gaze. “But all that's about to change because, tomorrow, Mom and I are going to be fetching her from the hospital and bringing her home.”

Finally Adele looks up at Liam, but her eyewear makes her expression impossible to read.

“To stay,” Liam adds.

“The night? Where's she going to sleep?”

“For God's sake, Bryony,” Tyler says, “the poor kid just lost her mom and just about all the other people she knew, and you're worried about her invading your bedroom?”

“What other people?” Bryony says, thinking:
the indiscriminate, merciless killing of a number of human beings.

“Aunty Sally and Gigi lived in a sort of commune, remember?” Adele finally speaks. They all turn to look at her as she brings a fresh tissue out from behind her back, almost as if she's performing a magic trick. She wipes under the sunglasses, and they jog up and down with the motion of her hand. “There were quite a few people living all together at that animal sanctuary place, Bry, and it wasn't only Aunty Sally who died. It's very sad. We're very lucky that Gigi wasn't there when . . . it happened.”

“Did anyone else survive?” Tyler asks. Nobody answers. “Come on, guys, I know you're trying to protect us and all that, but one quick Google search and I'll find out anyway. We can't be the only people in the country that don't know.”

“There were two domestic workers out at church, and another
woman, Aunty Sally's best friend, who wasn't there when it happened. She's very fortunate to be overseas at the moment,” Adele says.

(Simone. Of course, I remember. She left to attend a conference at Findhorn in Scotland just over a week ago. Simone has shiny brown hair; Simone dripped lavender essential oil on my finger that time I burnt it so badly. I remember sitting in the kitchen on a winter morning, clutching a mug of tea and watching her teach Gigi how to do yoga sun salutations on the stoop. Their breath made little frosty clouds in the cold air. So Simone is alive in Scotland. She's not in the story. Not yet.)

“But all the rest were killed?” When Bryony speaks the words out loud, they don't sound quite real, and she has to bite back a burst of inappropriate laughter at the weight of them.

“So, how many people—?”

“I hardly think that we need to discuss this now, Tyler,” Liam says.

“And Gigi's coming here?”

“We're her family.” Liam rubs the new lines on his forehead and swallows hard. “And she needs a stable environment.”

“Is there no one else she can go and stay with?”

“Christ, Bryony!” Tyler shouts, his face going red to match the fresh pimple that's brewing on his chin.

“I didn't mean I don't want her to stay,” Bryony retorts, “I was only asking. It's not like you've ever hung out with her either, or anything. I bet you can't even remember what she looks like. She's practically a stranger.”

“She has nowhere else to go, don't you get it?”

“OK, calm down, both of you.” Liam's face is all sharp lines and no color.

“I know this is a lot to take in, kids,” Adele says, “and I am well aware that it was us”—a sharp glance from Liam makes her pause—“mostly my doing that kept you cousins from getting to know each other properly, but I can't take back the past.”

“No,” Liam says, and suddenly leaves the room, marching through to the kitchen with stiff, controlled strides.

“I owe my poor sister, and Gigi is coming to live with us, and that's
the way it is, all right?” Adele finishes. She is shaking. The tissue flutters in her hand.

To live?
thinks Bryony.

“All right,” says Tyler.

“All right.” Bryony's response is a small, uncertain echo.

The spare bed in Bryony's bedroom is so hidden under an avalanche of clutter that if you didn't know, you'd never suspect there was a bed under there at all. When Dommie sleeps over, the girls usually just haul everything off it and then dump it all back on the next morning. Sometimes they don't bother, and the two of them curl up on the floor in a pile of sleeping bags instead. Bryony takes a step towards the puffy rubbish dump of a bed and notices that her hockey stick is buried within the madness.
Jeez, I haven't played hockey since last year.

“Staring at it isn't going to get the job done.”

Bryony turns to see Adele standing in the doorway with a pile of clean bedding in her arms. Over the top of the blue duvet cover with the cherries printed on it, her eyes are finally sunglasses-free and more burnt-looking than ever. Bryony wishes that her mother would suddenly smile because, although she knows that Adele used to smile quite a lot, she can't seem to remember what she looks like when she does.