Black Dog Summer (7 page)

“I'm not really hungry anymore,” Bryony says, and Adele responds by making a horrible gasping sound and bursting into fresh tears. “But I'll eat it anyway. It's OK, Mom.” Bryony hurriedly picks up her half-eaten slice of toast, but Adele just shakes her head, squeaks the chair back from the table, and leaves the kitchen.

“Well done, Bryony,” Tyler mutters.

“Oh, can it, Tyler,” Liam says as he follows his wife out of the room, “stop being so goddamn holier than thou all the time.”

And then it's just Bryony and Tyler and four plates of half-finished food and a stripe of late-morning sunlight across the wooden table.

“I bet she's put a curse on us.”

“What are you on about now, Bry?”

“Ever since Gigi got here, all anyone can do is fight.”

“That's not her fault. She's not even awake. She can hardly be blamed for this family's bullshit.”

“I guess.”

“You're one weird kid, you know that? You always think someone's cursing someone.”

“So maybe they are.”

“Maybe you should lay off reading those books about witches and wizards and stuff all the time. It's turning your head.”

Bryony watches her brother finish the last few mouthfuls of his food. She shifts on her chair, and the skin on the backs of her bare legs stings as it sticks to the varnished wood. “Did you know about the blood thing, Ty?”

“What?”

“About Gigi being covered in Aunt Sally's blood?”

Tyler wipes his mouth and then tosses the crumpled paper napkin into the center of his egg-streaked plate. “No, I didn't.”

“How long do you think she was sitting there before they found her?”

“Listen, Bry, I wouldn't give it too much thought, OK?” The unexpected kindness in his voice causes a slithering feeling in Bryony's stomach.

“OK.”

“She'll be fine. We'll all be fine. Just put your head down and wait for the crap to pass.” Tyler gets up from the table and ruffles the top of his sister's head as he walks behind her chair.

“Hey! You're messing it up,” she says, and removes the hair clips she put in earlier that morning; they are silver with yellow pineapples on them, a color that Adele is always telling her she can't pull off. Bryony stares at the miniature plastic fruit for a moment, then jams the hair clips into the pocket of her shorts.
Stupid
, she thinks.
Everything's just stupid.

I leave Bryony sitting alone at the kitchen table.

Suspended within the center of the story roar, I feel around for another thread to follow instead; the house is full of them, woven tight in some places and unraveling in others. I hunt for Gigi's, but again, the pills she's taken make it impossible to find.

I pick up a navy-blue thread in amongst the tangle. This one feels familiar and solid and carries with it the faint smell of mown grass and aftershave. I follow it up the stairs and into Bryony's room, where Liam is kneeling on the floor beside Gigi's bed.

“Gigi?” he whispers, but she sleeps on, lost in her chemical void. Liam smooths the grimy hair back from her forehead, revealing a pale constellation of freckles. Are you in there, Gi? He finds the pill bottle on the floor by his knees and takes a moment to read the label. “You're still OK, Gi, aren't you?” It's not a question; it's a plea.

You were always such a sweet kid, just like your mom. She was the sweet one and now . . .

The force of his feeling sideswipes me and pulls me under, a powerful wave that tumbles me till I rip my skin on grainy sea sand and there's a searing, salty pain in my mouth, my nose, and my lungs—I am drowning. Such grief.

Oh, Liam.

I drop the navy-blue thread. I flee the Wilding home as fast as I can.

The story sound hisses at me like an enraged, trapped animal. I clutch at shadows, blind and screaming, to try to block the noise as I race down streets, through shopping mall parking lots, around corners, and across school hockey pitches, until, finally, I stop.

I know this place.

The houses along the tree-lined street are old, nothing like the ones in Cortona Villas, but they have been brought up-to-date with expensive sandstone cladding, sleek brushed-steel house numbers, and electrified fencing. The house where Adele and I grew up is still surrounded by a large white wall, but the black iron gates that used to rattle when we swung on them as we waited for Daddy to come home from the office have been upgraded to electronic ones.

I remember how cold the metal felt that one long afternoon in my second to last year of high school when our parents told me and Adele that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer. I remember feeling weirdly disconnected from my body as I walked out of the house with this new, icy news inside me. I crossed the brown, crunchy winter lawn, strode past Mom's roses, which had been pruned back to nothing but thorny sticks poking out of the flower beds, and stopped when I saw fourteen-year-old Adele clutching on to the gate and looking out at the street, just as she used to do when we were little.

She'd come outside in her slippers, and I could see the outline of her newly curvy torso through her thin jersey. She must've been cold.

I came up beside her and climbed onto the gate too. Her nose was pink and her cheeks were wet. She didn't look at me. A car drove past. Inside it, there were people carrying on their normal lives with no clue that our dad was sick and might die.

“Assholes,” I said.

“Yeah,” Adele agreed. She was shivering.

I shuffled closer, unwound half of my scarf, and tucked the one end around her neck.

“Thanks.”

“Sure.” My voice wobbled.

“I hate this.” Adele leant her forehead against the chilled metal bars.

“Ditto.”

“Nothing's ever going to be the same again, is it, Monkey?”

“No.”

“Think he's going to . . . ?”

I was glad she didn't finish her question. The word was as impossible to hear as it was to say. It hung between us and clung to us both, just like the woolly scarf.

“I don't know, Addy.” I put my arm around her shoulder, and that's how we stayed until the sky started to go orange at one corner. The bars of the gate had chilled our fingers into stiff claws. We walked back to the house holding on to each other to stop the scarf from pulling and strangling us both.

Now I plunge through the iron ribs of the new gate and into the
green garden. The first thing I notice is that the tipuana tree is gone. I remember the vast reach of its strong, curvy limbs, the perfect thumbprint rows of leaves, the whirling helicopter seedpods, and the exuberant yellow, crumpled-tissue-paper flowers that used to litter the ground beneath it.

Adele and I used to hate walking under the tree because of the foamy bugs that lived on the branches and would spit drops of insect goo into our hair. But it was fun to climb. I loved scrambling up as high as I could go and looking down over the surrounding gardens.

My most memorable tipuana-tree-climbing occasion happened years after my bark-scrambling days were done. I was already well into my second semester at university.

It was the day Liam challenged me to a climb.

Had we still been in high school, Liam would've been the jock (he'd been captain of the school cricket team, for heaven's sake) and I would've been the weird, arty chick who read poetry, and we would probably never have exchanged a word, but although he was studying towards an LLB, and I was doing a bachelor of arts, we sat beside each other once in our only joint class: English Literature.

As I was walking home from the bus stop after lectures, I heard the grumble of an engine and turned to see a rather clapped-out old Ford Sierra slowing down beside me. Inside it was the gobsmackingly unattainable blond god who'd sat beside me in Eng Lit 101 earlier that day.

He leant out of his open window and squinted against the sun. “You live on this street?”

“Ja.”

“Me too. Number seventy-seven.” He looked up at me, shading his eyes with one hand. “Did you walk all the way from the bus stop?”

“Yeah, it's not so far.”

“I can give you a lift home tomorrow if you want. Just meet me in the campus parking lot if you fancy a ride. Look for the dodgiest car in the lot.”

“Um, OK.” My breath came in shallow little gasps.

“ 'K. See you then.” He grinned and drove off.

The next day, I waited by his Ford Sierra, and, as promised, he
drove me home. The next day, he did the same. At first, we sat side by side in silence, but then, quite suddenly, we were talking. We talked about our classes at varsity and the lectures we liked or didn't like, the people we had been to school with, our families, our first pets, our first dates, and, just like that, we were friends.

Soon, Liam was parking his Ford Sierra in my parents' driveway and following me inside the house, rather than dropping me off outside the black iron gates. Most days, he'd stay till just before dinnertime.

After three months, we still had not run out of things to say to each other, although sometimes the delicious torture of sitting beside Liam overwhelmed me, and I would go dry-mouthed and silent. He smelt like freshly mown grass clippings, and occasionally the fine golden hairs on his lean, tanned arm would brush against mine.

One afternoon, while we were making the most of the end-of-summer sun on the stoop, Liam challenged me to a climb up the old tipuana tree.

“You're on!” I said, and we both jumped up, jostling into each other and laughing like kids as we ran towards the tree, racing to be first to scramble up the trunk.

“I'd forgotten how much fun this is!” I yelped as I swung myself up onto a swaying branch, my hands stinging on the uneven bark.

“Wow, you're like a total monkey-girl,” Liam said, laughing. “I get the nickname now.”

“Hey, guys, what on earth are you doing?”

I looked down to see Adele standing on the lawn below. She smiled up at us, beautiful in her brand-new dress, her hair (so much thicker than mine) curled alongside the slender blue ribbons that tied over her shoulders to hold it up.

“Watch out for the spitting bugs, Monkey!” Adele called, but I was watching Liam. He was staring down at the curved, shadowy gap between the bodice of her dress and her creamy skin in such a way that, for the first time in my beloved tipuana tree, I experienced the nausea of vertigo. I tugged at my own sensible, high-necked T-shirt. I was pretty sure there were sweat stains in the pits. Monkey-girl.

“Hi, Adele.” Liam grinned down at her, and my nausea grew.
Holding my breath, I shuffled my way along the branch and started lowering myself to the one beneath.

“Hey, where're you off to, Monks?” Liam said. “You're not going to leave me here by myself, are you?”

I turned to look back up at him, my chest softening with hope, but his eyes were not on me: they were riveted on my younger sister, who, although still in high school, was already more womanly than I would ever be.

I remember trying to graze away the hurt by pushing my fingers hard into the rough bark as I hurried to reach the ground, but I was biting back tears by the time my feet thumped into damp, bug-spitty grass.

When Liam and Adele officially started going out several months later, I told myself that it didn't matter. But every time I saw him with my sister, it was impossible to maintain the lie: I was in love with Liam Wilding and it was killing me.

BRYONY IS
back on top of the wooden slatted dustbin cabin at the side of the house. The painted plaster of the wall between the Wildings and the Matsunyanes is chilly beneath her fingers as she grips onto it to look over. Lesedi is wearing the beads on her hair again, and she's not alone. There is another woman kneeling on the floor by the picture window with her back to the glass. The woman's hair has been brushed out into a puffy African halo, and her rotund backside squashes out over a pair of callused bare feet that look as if they've walked miles carrying heavy loads. There is something familiar about those feet. Bryony squints harder, scrutinizing the black pleated skirt with little roses printed on it and the shiny black pumps placed side by side on the wooden floor, when, suddenly, the guest-woman turns her head.

Bryony gapes at the familiar profile.
It's Dora!
Even with her hair all puffed up instead of the sky-blue head scarf that she always wears when cleaning the Wilding home from Monday to Friday, Dora is unmistakable.
What's she doing at Lesedi's? Why's she all dressed up like she's going to church?

Bryony squirms. The unfairness burns like a thousand little ant bites on her skin. Her room has been colonized by the sleeping zombie, her parents are fighting, she's not Jewish, and now, to top it all off, Dora gets to sit on those sunny Matsunyane floorboards without her shoes on. Bryony wants to be the one invited into that room; she aches to bask in Lesedi's perfect-toothed smile and be privy to all the secret goings-on next door.

She clambers down from her spying post, skinning her knee on the edge of one of the wooden planks. She crouches, eyes squeezed shut, and tries to swallow down the pain. “Shit,” she says, and she can suddenly understand why Tyler swears all the time; it seems to lessen the sting.

Bryony inspects her injury: the wrinkled skin on her kneecap has been scraped white, with little speckles of blood welling up in patches. Bryony touches the red beads with her tongue and tastes metal and dust.

If Dora can be Lesedi's friend, then why can't I?
She stands up, testing her knee as she straightens her leg. I'm going to make her like me. She strides back towards the house, newly resolved.
Something good has to happen soon.

As much as I want to have Lesedi look at me so that I can feel complete and deliciously empty all at the same time once more, I pull away and up into where the story noise is solid sound. Down below, suburban Johannesburg sprawls beneath me like a forest. In amongst the dense green I spot the bright red baubles of the flame trees and the first jacarandas in vivid lilac bloom. I remember what it was like to drive on the streets beneath the jacarandas, where the tar was carpeted in soft purple trumpet-shaped fallen flowers. If your car tires crushed them from just the right angle, the trapped air in their bases would escape with a glorious popping sound. It was like driving through a giant bowl of Rice Krispies.