Black Dog Summer (8 page)

Adele hated jacaranda season because of all the bees that would hover over the flower-coated ground. They hid inside the blossoms until disturbed by your footsteps, when they would zoom out and zip around your ankles. Adele always felt ambushed by the bees, as if they were lying in wait for her instead of just going about their innocent, pollen-collecting business.

Once, Liam picked her up to carry her over a jacaranda-strewn bit of road. I was so busy staring at the way her hands clutched on to the back of his brown neck, her fingers so carelessly rumpling his hair, that I forgot to look out for bees myself, and was stung in the soft curve at the back of my left knee. I cried out in surprise and pain, but they were laughing too much to hear me. I had to bend and contort to scrape the pulsing sting out of my reddening flesh with the edge of my student ID card. It ached for the rest of that afternoon.

THIS TIME,
when Gigi wakes, she knows that there's no going back to the numbness. She clutches the empty pill bottle so tightly that the plastic warms, almost seeming to become a part of her hand. She listens to the morning birds outside the window. No more dullness; I can sense all of her.

At home on the farm, the dawn chorus had been a symphonic riot of sound, but here it is sparse enough for my daughter to make out individual calls.
Wood pigeon, bulbul, weaver, hadeda, lourie . . .
she forces herself to focus on identifying each bird, but, despite her efforts, her mind begins to slip, gathering speed as it plummets towards the thoughts she can no longer hold at bay.

Gigi sees viscous blood, like ink leaked from a red pen, pooled around the scuffed wooden legs of the kitchen table. She can smell it now, too, just as she could then (just as Jemima could, from her enclosure outside). Gigi remembers sitting on the kitchen floor and listening to the cat's frantic pacing and scratching as the meat-and-metal scent of blood overwhelmed them both.

“Gigi?” She turns her head to see that Bryony is awake and staring at her from the bed on the opposite side of the room. In the dim bronze light of morning, her young blond cousin looks strangely featureless, nothing but pupils hovering above a pillow. Gigi closes her eyes once more and tries to slow down her breathing, but she is so rigid with tension that fresh sweat seeps out of her skin and into her already soaking sheets.

“I know your pills are finished,” Bryony whispers. “I heard you taking the last one in the middle of the night.” Gigi doesn't respond, but Bryony can see the frantic movements of her cousin's eyes beneath their gray lids. “Does this mean you're going to get up now and have breakfast with us?”

“What day is it?” Gigi croaks, eyes still squeezed shut.

“Sunday.”

A week. I have been dead a week. Gigi's story thread, a bruised, dark red, whips round and snakes back into the past. I follow.

Last Sunday, Gigi had woken early and gone outside in her pajamas to practice her sun salutations alone because Simone was in Scotland. Gigi liked to do her yoga and think of Simone performing the same flowing moves half a world away in an icy stone castle by a loch somewhere.

As she stepped off the stoop, the crumbly orange soil of the driveway was cool between her toes. She could've put her mat down in the clearing beneath the lucky bean tree, where she and Simone usually performed their morning asanas, but the close proximity of Johan's cabin made it impossible to feel the calm she craved.

She walked all the way down the curving dirt drive to the gate, unlocked the padlock, and headed left towards the dam.

The dew clinging to the tips of the grass stalks caught the early sun, making the pathway look as if it was flanked by a thousand tiny lightbulbs. When she finally arrived at the rickety deck, she unrolled her yoga mat with a flap that sent a flurry of birds winging upwards out of the reeds. She could feel the shape of the wooden planks through the mat beneath her hands. Downward-facing dog.

Gigi doesn't want the memory of the day to progress beyond that quiet moment, but it does. It races all the way to the gathering storm clouds on the hill, the farm gate flapping open, and the acrid smell of excited male sweat that hovers like a strange new poison sprayed over the yard.

Gigi makes a high, helpless sound like some strange engine starting up. It makes Bryony's stomach plunge and churn.

“Are you all right?” Bryony asks. She grips the hem of her duvet with fingers that are suddenly icy cold. “Do you want me to call my mom?”

“No!” Gigi howls. Her face is purple, scrunched up and shiny like a newborn's. She convulses on the mattress and then wrenches the duvet up and over her head. Bryony stares at the white feet that are now coverless at the bottom of the bed.
They don't look real.

“I'll just get you a glass of water,” Bryony says, and she stumbles
out of bed and runs to the bathroom. She forces her impending tears to stay in as she fills a glass at the tap. She has no right to cry; she can't even remember what Aunty Sally looked like, except for those silly purple pants from the photo.

When she gets back and quietly places the glass of water on Gigi's bedside table, the shuddering mound of bedding has gone still. Bryony notices that there is some kind of reddish sand stuck in the groove around each toenail of Gigi's slender unreal feet.
The indiscriminate, merciless killing of a number of human beings.

At least, I hope it is sand.

Bryony picks at the peeling paint on the bedroom doorframe and watches Adele tiptoe towards Gigi's bed. The duvet lump is still motionless. Her feet must be getting cold.

“Gigi, sweetheart? It's Aunty Adele.” No response from the lump. Bryony winces as a shard of dried doorframe paint that she's been picking at stabs under her fingernail.

“I've brought you some cereal, OK, love? You need to sit up and have a bite to eat. It's muesli. Nice and healthy.” Adele gives the lump a brave smile. “I remember that your mom was very into her health food.”

Bryony slides the paint shard beneath another fingernail, testing to see how hard she can push it.

“Gigi, I just want you to know that we all understand how upset you are, and what a horrible thing you've been through, but we worry about you. You really are going to have to eat something.” The duvet mound remains utterly still. Adele turns, and, once more, Bryony notices how thin her mother's skin has become lately, like paper that's gotten wet.
Maybe it's from all the crying.

“I'm heading out to Woolworths to get some groceries now, Gigi, but I'll be back again soon,” she says, and then to her daughter: “Bry, you going to come with me?”

“ 'K.” Bryony follows her mother out of the room and down the stairs, relieved to be away from the duvet mound. “Is Gigi going to be all right, Mom?”

“Of course she is. She just needs a good meal.”

Bryony thinks back to her father jumping up from yesterday's breakfast table:
She'd been hunched over her dead mother for who knows how long. The blood had dried over the both of them, for Christ's sake.
She remembers how the goops of egg yolk from her dad's knife had later solidified into shiny yellow scabs on the kitchen table.

Yellow yolk. Red sand. Toenails.

“She didn't eat it, Mom.” The muesli bowl is heavy in Bryony's hands as she offers it to Adele to check. It feels as if it is filled with cement rather than a disgusting lump of congealed cereal. Her mother's lips pinch together.

“Maybe she just doesn't like muesli,” Tyler mutters as he flicks through the TV channels and back again, sound muted. “Wouldn't blame her. The stuff's gross.”

“What's gross?” Liam asks as he walks into the room. He's still wearing his golf shoes, and Bryony notices that there's a small clump of soil and grass sticking to the bottom of the left one. She smiles up at him, but he doesn't seem to notice. Bryony wants to ask
Did you have a good game, Dad?
because that is what she usually does, but she doesn't.

“The muesli that Mom tried to make Gigi eat,” says Tyler, eyes still glued to the TV.

“You gave her muesli?” Liam asks Adele. His nose is pink from the sun and there are still sweat patches darkening his pale blue shirt.

“I tried,” Adele says. “Sally was always on some kind of healthy organic mission, so I thought it would be the kind of thing Gigi'd be used to.”

“With milk?” Liam asks, forehead crinkling even further.

“Well, of course with milk, what else?”

“But Gigi's a vegan,” Liam says.

“A what?” Bryony asks, but no one answers. Tyler is looking at Adele, who is looking at Liam, who is suddenly looking at the turf clump on his shoe. There is a long, horrible silence.

“And just how exactly do you know that, Liam?” Adele finally asks
in a sharp, frightened-sounding voice. The room is very quiet except for the whispering murmur of the muted TV. “Because the child hasn't said a word in three days. In fact, she's barely been conscious.” Bryony wishes she could put the bowl down; it's starting to feel odd and slippery between her fingers and it would make an awful mess if it fell on the kilim rug. “And you've either been at work or at your beloved golf course since she got here . . . So please, how is it that you're on intimate terms with her lifestyle choices?”

“Christ, Addy,” Liam mutters, lifting his golf cap and rubbing a hand through his damp, flattened hair. “It was on her hospital chart.”

Adele looks down at the knot her fingers are making in her lap. “Well, seeing as you're the expert, you can tell her that she's expected to join us for dinner at the table this evening.”

“Addy, I don't think—”

“I promise she won't have to eat anything with a face, or anything that came out of a cow.”

“It's a bit soon—”

“But she will be up, and she will be at the table.” Adele's voice is very calm and hard, like smooth stone. Bryony swallows and adjusts her grip on the muesli bowl. The warmth from her hands is making it give off a sick, sour smell.
Out of a cow.
There's another long silence. Tyler and Bryony share a brief look.

“You're probably right, doll,” Liam says at last, turning to leave the room. “The poor kid has to eat sometime.”

Did you have a good game, Dad?

Liam goes into Bryony's bedroom and closes the door behind him. For a long moment he stands, motionless, staring at the pale blue, cherry-patterned lump. There's a small tuft of mousy hair protruding from the top of the duvet, and, at the sight of it, he almost bends double in sudden, overwhelming pain. He breathes hard through his mouth and straightens up again.

“Gi?” He walks over to sit on the floor beside Gigi's bed. “Do you remember that song, that one by Toto that your mom would just listen to over and over again? The one about rains in Africa?”

Liam notices the dirt on his golf shoe for the first time. Staring back across the room to see where he's left a few marks on the carpet on his way over, he clears his throat, and then begins to sing.

His voice is almost a whisper, the tune barely discernible. Halfway through the first verse, Gigi's hand slides out from beneath the cherry duvet.

Liam takes the warm fingers in his own. They're long and skinny, just like her mother's. He hums his way through the chorus.

He is quiet then, for a long time.

“ ‘Wild dogs in the night,' ” Gigi finally mutters, her voice muffled through the bedding. “That's the next line.”

“Oh ja. I remember now.” Liam squeezes the hand. “Thanks, Gi.”

“My mom loved that stupid song.”

“I know.”

“It's totally corny and ancient and the lyrics don't even make sense.”

“I know, but your ma was a sucker for that stuff, hey?” Liam waits. He can hear the faint sounds of Tyler's frantic channel switching from downstairs.

Gigi lowers the duvet cover from her face, and Liam tries not to recoil at the grayness of her skin. Only her eyes show any color: vivid blue rimmed with lilac and dark pink. “I have to get up, don't I?”

“It would probably be the best thing, Gigisaurus.”

“Your wife was in here earlier; she seemed kind of stressed out.”

“Your aunty Adele is seriously worried about you, my girl. I don't think we'll survive the fallout if you don't at least try to join us for supper.”

“She tried to feed me milk.”

“She won't again. I talked to her about that. She knows you're a vegan now.”

Gigi lies back on her pillow and stares at the ceiling stars for a moment. “I guess I must stink like a hog,” she mutters at last. “Can I have a bath first?”

For a brief second, when Gigi walks into the kitchen, Bryony's not sure who she is. The warmth of the bathwater has pinked her cousin's
skin, and with her hair all clean and her dressing gown gone, she looks almost normal.

“Hi, Gigi, just in time . . .” Adele chirps, as if Gigi has been having dinner with the Wildings for weeks and her presence in the kitchen isn't a rare, astonishing thing. “Could you please help Bryony cut the tomatoes for the salad? That knife's a bit too sharp for her.”

“No it's not.”

“Hush, Bry, you cut yourself last time, remember?”

“That was the other knife, the red one.”

“Well, that's the one I'm talking about. The brown one's useless on tomatoes.” Adele marches over and yanks open the knife drawer. Bryony notices that her mother's fingers tremble as she pulls out the sharp serrated knife and hands it, red plastic handle first, to Gigi. “This thing's devilish, but it's the only one in the kitchen that doesn't reduce tomatoes to mush.” Adele gives a sort of smile and whisks herself back to the stove. Gigi does not move. The two round, fat tomatoes wait patiently on their wooden board, intact.