Black Dog Summer (31 page)

She peers around the doorframe of the next room and sees Bryony, asleep in her bed. She blinks at the bright mark around Bryony's neck and the ring of bruises around each of her wrists. For a moment, she is unsure about how the wounds came to bloom on her cousin's tender, pale skin; was it the black men? Did they come as she knew they would?

No. It was me.

She shuts her eyes again, the better to absorb this sudden knowing. She probes her inner world cautiously, feeling out for that guilty swirling place, that mottled and sick-feeling center seeping acid that had become such a familiar retreat inside her.

But it is gone.

She opens her eyes with a start, and scours the strange room as if the answer to the mysterious disappearance of her darkness is hiding behind the window blinds or lurking under Bryony's bed. After a moment, she realizes that her cousin is awake and staring at her with huge blue eyes rimmed with sore pink-looking flesh.

“I'm sorry,” Gigi whispers. The words feel wonderful. They taste like hot, buttery popcorn. For a moment, it looks as if Bryony is going to say something back; her mouth moves and a soft hiss comes out of her damaged throat before she closes her eyes and lets her head fall back against her pillow.

“I really thought they were coming for us, Bry, and I know it sounds dumb and you probably don't believe me, but I didn't know I was hurting you,” Gigi says. “I didn't know much of anything.”

Silence.

Gigi watches Bryony's chest as it rises and falls with each silent breath.

ADELE REPLACES
the phone receiver with great care, as if it might suddenly explode in her grip and send chunks of her flesh flying off in all directions. She stares down at the notepad where she just wrote down the number that Gigi's psychiatrist, Dr. Rowe, has given her. Her script is round and even. Top marks for neatness, Adele.

The number is for a school in KwaZulu-Natal that she has never heard of, a private holding pen for the druggie kids and difficult teens from well-off families that no one knows how to handle. Adele imagines plonking Gigi in her car and driving there through the brown flat fields of the Free State and then along Van Reenen's Pass with its winding ribbon of road and those lovely green hills: the route of countless family holidays from her childhood.

From the backseat of her own parents' car, she and Sally had giggled and bickered and played license-plate word games and I Spy and eaten hard-boiled eggs and cheese and tomato sandwiches out of crumpled foil, counting the slow hours until they'd be close enough to spot the first impossibly delicious blue patch of sea.

One year, they had fought bitterly over a little plastic bucket and spade that was the exact color of a Granny Smith apple; neither of them had been the slightest bit interested in the yellow one with the red handle. Adele remembers running down the beach clutching the apple-green bucket to her wet swimming costume in triumph but has no recollection of how it came to be hers.

She remembers her sister many years on from the beach holidays at Umhlanga: Sally pregnant with Gigi. She can see Sally's pale arms curving over her protruding stomach and the little knob of belly button pushing through the fabric of her T-shirt like the knot of a balloon.

Lesedi maneuvers her car slowly through the afternoon quiet of the Cortona Villas streets and marvels at just how far she has come in the past six hours: there are no cinder-block cubes with corrugated-iron roofs and straggly vegetable patches here, no funny little igloo-shaped outhouses surrounded by fleshy, spike-leafed aloes. Every red-bricked street is swept and litter-free, edged with blank-faced garage doors (well oiled, of course) and tidy little garden gates.

Lesedi smiles at the clipped edges of the immaculate front lawns until she passes number 22. The patch of grass outside the empty unit is crisscrossed with drying tracks of mud as if troops of people have trudged in and out of the property in the rain. Lesedi slows down even further, and notes the round little divots of soggy earth pushed up by what can only have been a running animal. A dog.

She tightens her grip on the steering wheel and gives her head a brief shake. She can't help but glance across to the passenger seat, and then into the rearview mirror to check the back, half expecting to see the pale monkey-woman coming along for the ride. The car is empty.

Round the corner and past the next two blocks, she finally sees the remaining brave little arms of the storm-damaged fever tree beckoning her home. Beside it, the Wildings' garage door stands open, and Lesedi peers in, just managing to catch a glimpse of Bryony's retreating back as her father leads her from the car and out of the garage towards the house. The child's fair hair is all mussed up at the back, as if she's been lying on it, and, although she sits behind a sheet of glass, Lesedi's nostrils are suddenly filled with the astringent smell of disinfectant.

“Hospital,” she whispers.

Just then, one of the back doors of Liam's white Mercedes swings open and the skinny cousin-girl climbs out. She stands with her palms pressed against the smooth metal for a moment, head bowed. There's a patch of white gauze on her left upper arm.

“Come on, Gigi.” Adele pokes her head into the garage. Her hair is shorter than before, her face pale and pinched-looking, and her voice weary. “It's time to come inside.” The girl nods; Adele retreats. The girl slowly raises her head and looks towards the street. Her eyes meet Lesedi's, and, for a second, Lesedi sees something black flutter
within the blue. A robin calls from the fever tree, one high, clear note, and then the small, ragged patch of dark is gone.

Tyler turns his pillow over so that he can lie on the cool side and tries, once again, to get comfortable on the TV room couch. The house is humming with silence, and has been ever since the girls arrived home from hospital that afternoon. Tyler is surprised at just how much space his little sister's voice used to fill, and its absence is like a rip in the suburban normality of the household that he has spent so much energy resenting.

“Are you OK, Bry?” he'd said, shocked by her dark ugly bruises, and even more horrified when she'd tried to answer him but couldn't.

“She's doing much better.” Liam had spoken for her, ruffling Bryony's grubby-looking hair. “The doctors say the tonsillitis is winding down and she should be right as rain in a day or two.”

Right as rain?
Tyler had wanted to yell.
She's had the bloody sound strangled right out of her.

And now the strangler herself is in
his
room, surrounded by all of his stuff, including the iPod, which he now wishes he'd remembered to grab when he'd gathered his pajamas together for a night on the couch. “Just for a night or two,” his mother had assured him. “She can't share Bryony's room. Not after . . .” Her voice had trailed off, and she'd left the room. Not after
what
?

Tyler thinks of the blood on the bath mat and the welt on Bryony's neck, and the way that the policeman had described finding them:
curled up in each other's arms, terrified, as if they were hiding from something.

Tyler squirms as a strange little worm of revulsion wiggles up the back of his throat; he's remembering Gigi's thin, ice-cold fingers right inside his mouth.

Gigi lies and stares at the blank ceiling of Tyler's bedroom and finds that she misses the chemical greeny glow of the luminous stars that are glued to Bryony's. She glances around at the posters, but it's too
dark to see any detail, and then looks over towards the door, which has been locked from the outside.

“It's just for tonight, Gigi,” Liam had said in a strange, cracked voice as he'd stood in the doorway, turning the key over and over between his fingers. “I'll open it in the morning, first thing. Do you need one more trip to the loo?”

Gigi shuts her eyes.

In the adjacent bedroom, Bryony dreams. She's walking towards Dommie's house. The light is golden green and filled with small fluttering insects with translucent wings. Suddenly, a large Alsatian with a dark muzzle, a shaggy flame of a tail, and worried ginger eyebrows steps out into the road in front of her. Bryony stops. The insects drift around them both, caught in currents on the breeze. The dog gives its tail a cautious wag. Bryony takes a step closer. She holds out her hand.

The dog trots over to her, tail now wagging furiously. It drops to its haunches before her and then rolls over to expose a belly the color of cream. Bryony bends down and buries her hand in the warm fur.

I WAIT.

I wait for Liam to remember me.

He does so while brushing his teeth, eyes locked on to their own reflections in the bathroom mirror. Perhaps it is the smell of mint from the toothpaste that makes him think of me. We once shared a choc-mint ice cream that we bought from the man with the icebox on his bicycle who used to wait outside campus to ambush exhausted students with sweet, childish treats. I remember watching Liam's tongue as he licked the pale green frost and then, when he handed the ice cream to me, casually placing my own into the depression his lick had left behind.

He is not thinking of me with the ice cream, though. He is remembering the rusty padlock on the farm gate in Limpopo, and the last time he saw me alive.

Just as I did with Gigi as she crouched inside that cupboard, I follow the slender story thread back, and slip into the memory along with him.

“Care to escort me to the front gate?” Liam grinned up at me through the open car window and gestured to the passenger seat. “Get in.”

“I've got muddy boots on, Liam.”

“Doesn't matter.”

I walked around the car and climbed into the dark gray, leather-scented interior. I placed my feet very carefully on the carpet, but I still saw a mustard-colored streak on the pristine pile. I hoped it wasn't something's poo.

Liam began to move the car slowly along the rutted track of the driveway. I watched the back of his hand on the gear stick: knuckles
covered with tanned skin and little golden strands of hair. The vibration from the engine seemed to throb right through my boots and the soles of my feet, up through my legs and into my lap. We arrived at the front gate too quickly. I tried to ignore the heat in my groin as I climbed out of the car and made for the gate.

“I can't believe you still think that silly thing is enough protection out here,” Liam said as he watched me unlock the padlock. There was a clank of metal as the chain swung down and slapped the side of the gate.

“You say that every time,” I said.

“I mean it every time.”

It's easier this time, to change the memory. The sudden sweet mint stench of toothpaste is overwhelming. I take charge of the memory now, and I know Liam will hear me when I speak:

You were right, Liam. Every time.

Liam's skin goes pale. A gust of warm wind sighs in my ears.

Don't abandon her.

“Sally?” His lips are bloodless now. He does not blink.

Please, Liam, don't send my daughter away.

Liam chokes on mint foam and spit. The electric toothbrush drops from his hand, bounces on the edge of the basin, and goes flying across the floor where it hums against the tile grout, still vibrating. He grips the edge of the basin and coughs and coughs until at last he manages to steal a breath. His face, when he looks back up at the mirror, is crimson.

Gigi stands in the middle of Tyler's bedroom. She picks at the edge of the white bandage on her left upper arm and then touches her fingertip to the sticky patch that the peeled-up corner leaves behind on her skin.

“What am I supposed to do now?” she asks the silence. She stares at the closed door. The sound of the bedroom key turning in the lock had woken her earlier, but no one had said anything or poked their head into the room. Is she allowed to leave?

Gigi knows that she must be in very big trouble. The bruises on Bryony's neck and wrists are like great big black marks against her name and there will be consequences, she knows that. “Big trouble,” she whispers. The skater boys and bikini girls in the posters on Tyler's walls stare back down at her, not disagreeing.

For a moment, her face twists and a sob lurches up her throat, but then she forces it back down.

She takes a big breath and glances to where her school uniform is draped over the chair by Tyler's messy desk. She'd grabbed it last night before bed when Adele had told her she wouldn't be sharing with Bryony. Gigi reaches out and touches the heavy fabric of the tunic. Below the chair, her new school shoes stand like two giant shiny-shelled beetles.

“I forgot the socks,” she says. Again, the sob threatens. Again, she swallows it down. She marches over to Tyler's cupboard and wrenches it open. He must have a pair of white socks in here somewhere.

And now, Adele.

I don't have to wait long for my sister to think of me. She is awake in her bed, lying on her side and staring at the bright block of yellow light created by the early sun streaming through the blind on the east-facing window. She is remembering.

“Monkey, let's make them go to the beach.” Adele smoothed out the woolen braids of her rag doll as she placed it beside mine on the rug between us. “Hey? What do you think?”

Adele had just turned seven. She was wearing the dress with the sailing ship printed on the front and little puffed sleeves that used to be mine. I remember being glad when I grew out of it because the armpits made me itchy, but Adele loved it. She pulled the skirt down over her knees and then reached out and patted her doll's soft belly.

“Jasmine could do with a break, you know. She told me earlier. We can get them all ready for their holiday and then take them outside to the pool, hey?”

I watched Adele as she began to rifle through the pile of dolls' clothes that had been tipped out on the rug earlier, searching for
suitable outfits for a beach holiday. I slid my fingers into the gaps between all my toes and pushed hard, liking the feeling of stretching skin.