Homing (6 page)

She’d packed her bag and soon was heading out, before the rush-hour traffic hit. It was easy enough to break away: Daniela had few commitments, apart from Thom himself. There was little need for her to work. She’d studied interior design, long ago, but she’d been out of it so long, she wouldn’t know how to begin again. Thom was older, with family money as well as a partnership in an architecture firm. She’d met him when she was young, straight out of college, and they’d married quickly. He’d always supported them financially. It’s what they both wanted.

The car radio helped. Its tunes and chatter loosened the small stone of dread that lodged in her chest on days like this. She turned it on as she left Cape Town, the buildings giving way on either side to the broader contours of the countryside. The car was a new one, a convertible, and she wasn’t used to it yet: her hands seemed too small on the steering wheel, as if barely holding on, her feet just reaching the pedals. She was a petite, pretty woman, with black eyes and long, silky hair. Thom could pick her up and carry her easily, like a child.

The place, near Sutherland, was a longer drive than she’d realised, and the sun had already set by the time she checked in and collected the key to her chalet. In the dark, she hardly saw the surroundings, was glad only to collapse onto the double bed, into sheets that looked like they were cast-offs from the farm family’s own beds, but very clean. The places she chose for these trips were good, but not luxurious. When she checked her cellphone there was no reception.

She lay for a while staring up at the thatch ceiling, wondering what he was doing, whether he’d come home yet. When he was feeling this way, he sometimes stayed out drinking for hours. She worried that things might be getting worse, his depressions more frequent. Perhaps they should try the pills again.

With difficulty, Daniela turned her thoughts away, directing them into a small box, one containing a few considered images. She thought about the flat. They were redoing the lounge. New paint: matte or gloss? There would be different upholstery for the lounge furniture; new cushion covers. The couch was still unworn, but it would need to be re-covered to match the look. She had to choose fabric. Sea green, she thought. With pale-gold trim.

Eventually, sleep seeped in through a crack in the lid of her quiet thoughts, and she was gone.

In the morning, Daniela emerged to find that she was very far from anything, in a flat, dry landscape. The actual farmhouse was almost invisible behind a clump of bluegum trees. One or two other chalets perched near the main building, but hers was out on the edge, and naked without a shield of trees. Disconcerting: in the night, she had imagined herself not so distant from other sleeping people.

A faint, straight track came past from the direction of the farmhouse, with a tin arrow on a pole, pointing towards a ridge in the middle distance. The arrow said
OLD LEOPARD TRAP
in white-painted letters.

The path was much the same texture as the bare ground on either side, and mostly distinguished by its different colour: silvery blonde against khaki. Caused, Daniela supposed, by feet scuffing the crust in a place where rain seldom disturbed it.

There was no particular reason to walk on the path rather than beside it, but she obeyed the arrow and kept to the paler strip. She was wearing thin-soled shoes – Italian leather, a gift from Thom – but perhaps it wasn’t far to go.

When the path split, another signpost led her left, onto the low ridge. Coming up the rise, she nearly walked right past the trap, it was so well camouflaged; but the path stopped short and so did she. At last she divined the heap of stones to one side of the path: coffin-shaped, open at one end. It reminded her of those cases of grit that caddis-fly larvae build, but giant-sized.

It was a puzzle, set but unsolved. A leopard trap. For killing leopards, back when they still lived in these parts. Not for metamorphosis, but for ending. It looked crudely made, but it must be skilfully put together, and very strong. She could only imagine what force in a frantic leopard’s back and haunches might once have been thrown against the walls.

The thing drew her closer. Perhaps it was the pressure of the big sky above her – the trap was enticing, a private space. She had the curious urge to climb right in. Why not? She was half smiling at herself as she crouched down.

But it wasn’t that easy. Leopards were smaller than she’d realised. She tucked her elbows close and wriggled on her belly into the narrow vault. It was a tight space, but long enough to fit her, head to toe.

The stones were right-angled slabs that seemed compressed from dense grey mud. The size of shoeboxes, some of them, with chinks of sky showing in between. The floor was crisp sand in which pebbles were tightly clasped, not a thing growing. Bringing her hands up awkwardly before her chin, she looked down at the dim space where the leopard’s paws must have scrabbled – as if she were expecting to see prints still impressed there, a last message. But nothing, just sand as smooth as if ironed. No living thing larger than an ant had touched it for years.

She saw now how the machine worked: you crawl in, exploring, perhaps lured by a bait of fatal meat, and there’s no turning back. A stone is rolled across the mouth; a trapdoor drops. And then pain.

Shifting, she felt her shoulder rub against the rock, and her hips. She turned her head and shards of sky pressed into her eyes, blue against black. Her cheek touched stone. And all at once it grasped her: the horror of the trapped creature, of the trap, this box precisely measured out for her own length and breadth …

She whimpered and reared, bashing her head. Bright and dark patches pursued her as she struggled backwards, out and onto her feet.

And then the fear was gone. Daniela looked down at the trap and it was functional again: humans at work, doing their obligatory killing. Yes, a machine to take a living cat and turn it into bones and pelt. Such things had been necessary, once. She felt her interest switch to the design of the thing. How would it work, exactly? How might she make it better, if she had sheep or goats to defend?

Now that she’d found it, it was impossible not to see the trap against its background. It was in fact quite different to the shapes of nature around it. The only related objects were the straight line of the path and the small sign on its pole at the bottom of the hill. Human things.

It was already very hot. Impatiently, she brushed off her cotton blouse and trousers; she was usually so careful with her clothes. The cellphone, finding reception, buzzed in her pocket. She let it ring, once, twice, three times. There was a long pause, and then the voicemail signal. She let it play. The message would be silence: a wordless plea from Thom, from the city. He always wanted to hear her, to know where she’d gone.

This would not have happened in the early days of their relationship. She would never have left his call ringing. She would’ve dropped everything and gone to his side, wherever he was. She’d tried so hard. But Daniella had learnt, since then: she knew when to shut her ears and hold her voice. Because what difference would it make, to answer him now?

In the afternoon, showered and changed, she went over to the farmhouse, where there was a lounge and kitchen. Other visitors were there, a couple that earlier in the day she had seen striding along the path in proper hiking boots. The woman was making sandwiches: white bread with cheese. They chatted about the heat, the walk.

“We couldn’t see that leopard trap,” said the woman.

“It’s hard to spot,” Daniela agreed, watching the woman bear down on the bread, making squares into triangles and smaller triangles again. “Just a big stone box. Nothing special.”

The woman appraised her, knife poised. “You’re here alone? Because, if you wanted to join us for supper …? There’s plenty.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” Daniela smiled formally. “But I’m okay, really.”

As she left the room, the woman’s smile dug into her back like a pebble. Daniela had spoken more coldly than she should have. But she knew how strangers observed her on these solitary trips: sometimes with pity, and sometimes with unseemly curiosity. Sniffing her for scandal. Often, men would try to pick her up.

One day, she thought, I might say yes. It was the first time this had occurred to her. It seemed a remote idea, one to put away for the future; but not impossible. These weekends away were such ruptures, such odd holidays from the close embrace in which she lived with Thom. She wasn’t quite sure who she was, in these rented rooms, so far from the city and from home. She might do anything.

Something brought her out of sleep, into a room grown incomprehensibly dark and with no one beside her. She was afraid to raise her hands from her body or to lift her head; a breath above her face, she sensed the grit, the coldness, the weight of stones packed tight …

She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, staring into the dark. Then she put on her thin shoes and a woollen jersey over her pyjamas and went outside.

The path was a white stain in the moonlight. She walked along it to the ridge. It was a ruthlessly clear night, pure black and silver. At the side of the trap, she knelt. In between the heaped stones there were chinks of dark. But the blackness was full and breathing, and she knew that something was in there. Just like she always knew when Thom was home, before she’d put her key in the lock.

She put her palm against the stone. It had lost every speck of sunlight it had gathered in the day, drawn down into the well of earth. She could feel the ground draining her body’s warmth too. She gripped a corner block.

The stone moved unexpectedly, sliding out sideways with a hollow, grinding sound. A black breach, an exit. And a rush of relief, as if something had been held inside, like breath. She felt the wisp of a feline spirit wafting past her hands, through the broken gap in the stones and up into the roofless night.

But after a suspended second the structure could not hold: the end of the trap collapsed with an icy clatter. The moon spilled light deep inside, where moonlight had not been for years – perhaps for centuries. Daniela bent to pick up a piece of fallen rock, about the size of a brick but much heavier. She thought for a moment of taking it home with her, a keepsake; but the idea of putting a piece of this small death-house inside her own gave her a feeling of inside-outness, and she let the slab drop to the ground.

She walked a few paces further up the ridge and tried for cellphone reception. Then she listened to Thom’s staticky non-messages, one after the other, trying to discern the quality of his stillness.

She drove back to town early the next morning. The long lines of the country folded up again around the car, enclosing a landscape that grew ever closer, denser, more intricately patterned. Daniela’s attention moved from the horizon and fastened itself on the dashboard, the multiplying lanes of the highway, the buildings forming up in ranks on either side. By the time she took the turn-off to home, the transformation was complete: the city rose thickly around her, stained, signed and tracked, cutting off any longer view. In one of its million niches lay Thom.

She was weary by the time she got to the underground parking. In the mirrored elevator, she saw that her face was sunburnt, with clownish whiteness around the eyes where her sunglasses had sat. The lift was rapid and faintly perfumed: it was an exclusive apartment block.

After she’d opened the door to the flat, she stood completely still for a moment, to listen. Her eyes sought out the damage. In the past, she had come back to find dislocated plumbing, doors pulled off hinges, pictures from frames. Thom directed his despair always against material things. It was not a chaotic violence, but rather a grimly driven dismantling. This time, the backrest of the sofa had been laid open, the stuffing protruding from a slit like something that had long desired release. Beneath the expensive upholstery were folded wads of yellow foam, cheap pine boards tacked together. In one place the skirting board had been levered away from the wall, revealing a black gap that went down who knew how far – perhaps beyond the concrete and pilings of the building and into the cold earth itself.

She felt distant from the damage. It had always been Thom’s flat, really. Designed by him, paid for by him. Daniela thought rather, and for the first time, about the people who’d built these rooms, and who would repair them. She had seen blueprints, of course, but had never before been curious about the process of building, of raising the plans off the page. Someone must’ve laid bricks, one by one; someone must’ve covered them with these smooth coats, these tiles and plaster and paint.

She wished that Thom had gone further this time, had ripped the skin right off.

The air was rank. He would have stayed inside, not eating or bathing, with the windows closed. She moved around the flat, opening up, letting out the musty smell. Again she felt the passing of black spirits over her hands, as she had in the night at the leopard trap. With every bolt undone, there was release; some pressure was relieved.

She cleaned a little, righting chairs and closing cupboard doors. Some of the damage – the cuts in the sofa, the dents in the wooden floor – would not be so easy to undo.

She circled slowly, wiping, fixing, setting to rights. Her circle turned closer and closer around the bedroom, the bed, the man, until she could no longer avoid him and she knelt by his side at the edge of the mattress, hands resting on her thighs. She felt quite calm now, even tender. She could smell the spent arousal coming off his flesh.

Thom was lying quietly, fully clothed, under the covers. She knew the exhaustion that overtook him, afterwards. He would not remember everything. He would wake soon and have to piece it together from the evidence.

He opened red eyes.

Thom, she said.

He blinked at her.

She put out a hand and pressed a strand of damp hair back behind his ear. Thom, she said again.

Behind her she could hear the sounds of the day coming in through opened windows. She sensed, too, a door that might be opened, that she might pass through if she chose. He turned his head so that her hand lay over his lips. Opened his mouth slightly around her fingers.