Black Dog Summer (15 page)

Later that evening, after I had scrunched up my shredded skirt and thrown it into the dustbin, I noticed that my ankle was swollen from where I'd twisted it. I bent down, with my face so close to the bin that the smell of rot almost choked me, and pressed my fingers into the tender, puffy flesh as hard as I could.

“TYLER.” BRYONY
leaps up the stairs after her brother and jams one of her feet into the gap before he can close his bedroom door on her. The door bounces off the hard leather of her school shoe, and she's glad that, for once, she didn't take her shoes off in the car on the way home.

“What?” Tyler asks with an impatient frown.

“I don't want to go into my room,” Bryony whispers.

“Gigi won't bite, you know. She's a vegetarian, remember?”

“Oh, ha ha.”

“Come on, Bry, you're being daft. Just ignore her.”

“You wouldn't say that if she was in your room all the time,” Bryony hisses.

Tyler's face goes pink. “Look, just deal, OK? I've got homework to do,” he says, and kicks her foot out of the way before closing the door.

Bryony stands in the middle of the landing and takes a long, slow breath. Usually, she would just have to endure Gigi's presence long enough to grab some clothes before racing outside to spy on Lesedi, but after their encounter beneath the fever tree the other day, and then the ghastly nightmare, the mere thought of seeing her neighbor makes her want to throw up. Her toes squeak against each other as she wiggles them inside her shoes.

She glares at Tyler's irritating Keep Out sign for a moment before suddenly clenching her fists, pivoting round on her heels, and marching into her bedroom.

Gigi is not there.

Bryony stops short and stares at the racing-car duvet cover on the spare bed; it is smooth and flat for the first time, quite clearly a product of Dora's expert bed-making skills. Gigi is not on it, or under it,
or curled up under her own bed (Bryony checks to make sure) or in the cupboard or hiding behind the curtains.

A laugh bubbles out of her as she kicks off her shoes, tugs off her socks, and flings herself down onto the carpet. She raises her feet into the shaft of sun that burns through the window and smiles at the way the edges of her toes turn transparent pink against the light.

Gigi goes from room to warm, empty room, leaving a trail of flip-flop footprints in the fine layer of dust that coats the floorboards. In the absence of occupants and furniture in the empty unit of number 22 Cortona Villas, the wood seems to have exhaled its essence into the air, and the whole place smells of sun-soaked timber. Gigi breathes in deeply, reminded of the smell of thatch back home.

Breaking in was easy. The garden gate had been left unlocked so that the Body Corporate garden service can continue to keep the lawn mowed and the pool clean, and after Gigi closed it behind her, she'd had more than enough time and seclusion to scour the outside of the house for a possible way in. One of the windows in the kitchen had not been properly latched. She'd pushed against it to loosen the catch and then pulled it open and wriggled through the small gap onto the cool granite kitchen counter, jumping to the floor with a soft slap of flip-flop on tile.

And now number 22 Cortona Villas is hers.

After exploring the ground floor, Gigi climbs the stairs, marveling that even though the house has a layout identical to that of the Wildings, without any furniture or curtains it seems vast and echoey. Upstairs, she goes from room to room, peering out of the windows and opening cupboards, light-headed with the relief of being alone and unobserved at last.

(But she isn't unobserved, of course. Fleshless and endless and still strangely free of feeling, I am at my daughter's side.)

Finally, she sits down in the corner of the large, sunny master bedroom, figuring that, should anyone wander into the garden below, she'll be invisible up here. The moment she stops moving, however, Gigi feels strange, as if all her veins and nerves are still in motion
beneath her skin. She scratches her arms. She pulls on the ends of her hair and rubs the rubbery-feeling skin on her face before dropping her head into her hands.

Everything itches.

A stripe of cool shadow inches across the room and slowly slides across her body.

But still, Gigi burns.

Using a sharp splinter of wood pulled from a piece of damaged baseboard, Gigi slowly pierces a number of angry, aching lines on the skin of one calf. Dots of blood seep out of the raw carvings, and she tries to rub them away so they won't stain her jeans when she rolls them back down.

The sound of engines filtering in from the faux street outside has been steadily intensifying as large, glossy cars return home to their identical garages. She knows she needs to leave. With shaking fingers, Gigi wipes the splinter clean, tucks it back into the patch where she pulled it from the baseboard, and gets to her feet.

She goes downstairs on legs numb with pins and needles, and slips back out of the kitchen window of number 22 just as the sky is starting to go powdery gray at the edges. She hovers behind the garden gate, waiting for a pause in the homecoming traffic before easing it open and darting out of the tiny gap.

Feigning a casual evening stroll, she heads back in the direction of the Wilding house, unaware that her exit has not gone unnoticed. Lesedi, sitting in the passenger seat of her husband's GTI as they head out to Spar to buy the milk that she forgot to get earlier, turns her head just in time to see the girl shut the gate of number 22 behind her. Lesedi notices her skinny arms and clenched fists and the dust patterning the child's jeans, and narrows her eyes at the hurt she can sense beneath.

Then Lesedi sees me.

I am the sharp hooves of goats trotting along a dusty mountain track and the whisper of hot wind in the slender, knotted limbs of the fynbos shrub.

And then the GTI moves on.

In an effort to become more likable, Adele promised herself that if Gigi returned safely, she wouldn't ask where she'd been. So, despite the fact that she has spent the last hour in a state of white-lipped terror at the girl's mysterious absence, all she says when Gigi walks through the front door and into the entrance hall is: “Dora's been making you a butternut risotto for supper. Sounds yummy, hey?”

Gigi does not look at her aunt. She shifts from foot to dusty foot, clearly desperate to dash upstairs and burrow into her bed once more, but Adele has placed herself at the bottom of the stairs and stands like a linen-clad, quivering barrier to entry.

“I think I might even have some of it myself instead of what the rest of them are eating.” The cheery words sound ridiculous the moment they are out of her mouth. Adele bites her lip.

“I kind of need the loo,” Gigi mutters.

“Oh,” Adele says, her resolve slipping, and allows Gigi to edge past her. The girl smells of dust and timber.

“There was a call for you while you were out,” Adele says, and Gigi freezes.

“A call?”

“A long-distance one. From overseas.”

“Simone!” Gigi turns round and her cheeks flush. “Is she going to call back? Did you get her number? Can I speak to her?”

Adele takes a step backwards. The naked neediness on Gigi's usually impassive face is startling. “I didn't know when you'd be back,” Adele says pointedly, “so I told her to call again tomorrow.”

Gigi nods and blinks away tears.

“You've got an appointment with Dr. Rowe in the morning,” Adele continues. She wants to add: So don't pull a vanishing act, but she just smiles. “So I told Simone to call around lunchtime.”

“OK.” Gigi turns away and starts to climb the stairs once more. She grips the banister. There's a circle of brown dirt on each knuckle, and some dried blood around her fingernails from when she wiped it off her leg.

“It's the same Simone that was friends with Sal when we were kids, you know,” Adele calls after her, trying to engage her niece in a little more conversation. “I knew her when she was growing up. She was always a real sweetie.”

Gigi pauses for a moment, then continues up the stairs.

Simone.

When I arrived at the Limpopo farm with all my bags, clutching an overused, soggy tissue in one hand and my daughter's dimpled fingers in the other, Simone swooped Gigi up in her arms and hustled her off to show her around, leaving me some much-needed space to sob myself senseless in my dressing gown inside my new, strange bedroom.

She ran the sanctuary, organized volunteers and fund-raising, talked to the local farmers and rural communities about conservation, cooked for the humans, prepared food for the animals, cleaned out cages, drove all over Limpopo to collect injured creatures, and still had energy to sit for hours into the night and talk to me when I needed it. I remember how tender she was with my daughter when, clutching a small, stiff, rust-feathered body in her palm, she sobbed over her first loss: the sudden death of the hoepoe chick she'd been hand-rearing.

Exactly one year after our arrival, another bedraggled female in need of rescue found her way to the sanctuary. She was a young serval with a gold coat spotted with black, enormous ears, and a mangled hind leg. Her mother had been killed by a trap just a few meters away from the one in which she'd been found.

After she'd been stitched up, the serval kitten, whom Gigi had promptly named Jemima, slept in Simone and Seb's room so they could bottle-feed her every three hours. On the second morning of her stay, Jemima developed a horrible infection, and Simone's care duties suddenly doubled with dressing changes, medicines, and monitoring. She must've been exhausted, but you'd never have known it. She still looked fresh-faced and lively, and whizzed around as usual, tending to various tasks and then dashing indoors to feed and comfort the squealing cat.

“Hey, Mones, why don't I take over Jemima duties for a bit?” I said one afternoon as we cleaned out an enclosure that had housed the black-backed vulture with a damaged wing that we'd released back into the wild that morning. There were droppings on top of droppings on every surface: a thick crust of stinking white. “Just to give you a break for a few days.”

“Oh no, don't take her away from me.” Simone smiled and wiped her wet face with the back of her wrist. “It's so rare that I get to treat any of these guys as pets.” Most often, we had to keep our distance as much as possible. Animals that are too familiar with humans are especially vulnerable in the wild, but Jemima's injuries would prevent her from ever being able to fend for herself out there. She was here to stay. “I'd be bereft without my serval cuddles.” I thought of Jemima's small fuzzy face and large appealing eyes and felt a little pang.

“Well, then let me finish up here. You go and have a cup of tea and chill, or something.”

“That sounds—” She was interrupted by a loud wail and the appearance of a sobbing Gigi.

“I fell.” There was a large bloody scrape in the smear of dust coating her left knee.

“Oh dear!” Simone dropped her scrubbing brush, and we both went to Gigi's side. I inspected her knee. Nothing a Band-Aid wouldn't fix.

“How did this happen?” At my question, Gigi pointed a shaking finger towards the paddock. “I told you not to try and ride Polonius again until Seb organized that saddle from the van Rooyens.” This was not the first Polonius-related injury in the past few days. “Goodness, Gi, we've got enough wounded creatures to worry about without little girls going and doing daft things to themselves every two seconds.”

“It's
not
every two seconds,” she howled at me. “And it hurts.”

“Polonius is an old dear, but he's still a great big animal, Gi. You're going to have to promise your mom and me to stay away from him until we get that saddle, OK?” Simone wiped tears and orange dirt from my daughter's cheeks with the hem of her T-shirt. “Seb will give you some proper lessons, I'm sure. All right, peachy-pie, let's go and get you cleaned up.”

“I've also hurt my elbow, see?”

“Ow, that looks nasty. Come on, time for a bit of antiseptic cream and some Rescue Remedy.” Simone hugged Gigi and looked at me. “Unless your mom . . .”

“I'm sure Gigi's in the best possible hands.” I picked up the scrubbing brush. “I'll stay on vulture poo detail.”

“Thanks, Sal.” She took Gigi's hand. “Gi, you'd better watch to make sure I don't put the Rescue on your knee and the antiseptic cream in your mouth!”

Gigi laughed through her tears and let herself be guided towards the house.

When Jemima was older and had moved out into a large enclosure of her own, I spent as much time with her as I could. She was affectionate and playful, and seemed to be an even better salve for my hidden wounds than those Simone could administer with her talks and tea. I remember sitting beside Jemima's long body and watching Simone and Gigi chatting together about something over by the kitchen door. How was it that Gigi seemed to fit so well into the curve of Simone's arms? Unlike with Jemima, who was deliciously yielding beneath my hands, whenever I held Gigi, we were somehow all angles.

What will Simone say to soothe her now?

AT FOUR
in the morning, Bryony is dragged from deep sleep. She lies alert, wondering what could've woken her. Then she hears a strange, long, deep hiss of breath. She forces her eyes to open and blinks across the room, waiting for the dawn shadows to resolve into shapes she can recognize.

Gigi is out of her bed, hunched on the carpet in a painful-looking, twisted position. She does more of that weird breathing and moves into another position, and then another. It looks to Bryony like her cousin is doing some kind of peculiar dance, breathing like Angel at school (who has sinus issues) with each bend and stretch. Bryony holds herself motionless and watches in silence, fascinated.