Black Dog Summer (12 page)

Dr. Rowe glances down at his file: the girl had been crouching beside her mother on the kitchen floor when the police found her. The mother had been dead for hours, her face beaten into a purple, inhuman pulp, and her clothes slashed and bloody. Cause of death: asphyxiation from strangulation. The other victims, two white men, no relation to the patient, had been lying on the floor a little distance from the woman, both of them bound and gagged. Cause of death: loss of blood due to laceration with what appeared to be a machete. According to the report, Gigi was found to be unhurt and intact, and it was later revealed that the blood that had dried to a rusty crust along the one side of her face (right in her nostrils and inside her left ear) and had solidified her clothes onto her body like rigid bandages had not been her own.

She'd made no statement to the police, hadn't spoken at all, in fact, so there was no way of knowing how long she'd been on the floor like that holding on to her mother's lifeless hand. It was a domestic worker who had finally alerted the police and called them out to the scene. The weeping Phineas Radebe had also identified the three bodies, seeing as no one could get anything out of Gigi at all.

Dr. Rowe rubs his hand across his forehead and looks across at the girl. His stomach churns. There'd been too much melted cheese on his tramezzini at lunch; he should've scraped some of it off.

“OK, Gigi, I am not going to press you to talk about this when you're not ready to.” Gigi's fingers twist and twist in her lap. Dr. Rowe glances back down at his notes and sees that she did, in fact, say something before they took her to the hospital. She'd asked Mr. Radebe if he could feed someone, or something, called Jemima. “Perhaps you can tell me a bit about what you feed Jemima?”

Gigi glances up then, her eyes searching his kind face for a second before darting away again. Dr. Rowe doesn't smile. He knows that Gigi doesn't want smiles.

“Mice.” Her voice is flat. “Jemima's a serval.”

“Ah, glorious creatures, those.”

“You know what a serval is? Lots of people don't.”

“True, but I happen to be a very keen nature buff. Tell me, do they really jump as high as the books say they do? I've never seen it myself.”

“Ja,” Gigi says; she reaches across and touches the waiting tissue with the tip of one finger. “Jemima can leap higher than my head, from like just standing still.”

“Wow.”

“And she does somersaults and stuff, twisting and turning in midair. She's a real show-off.”

“It sounds like the two of you are pretty close.”

Silence. Dr. Rowe shifts in his chair, trying to ease the gas that is building in his guts. He really should've ordered the tuna.

Gigi is holding herself terribly still, taking tiny sips of breath so as not to break apart into sharp little pieces. She focuses on the corner of tissue till it seems to expand and fill the whole room with bleached whiteness. Her eyes ache.

In and out, little sips of breath.

“Gigi?”

But Dr. Rowe has been in the business long enough to know that his patient is not going to say any more. Not today.

Adele sits in her car in the parking lot outside and waits for her niece to emerge from the building. She closes her raw eyes and leans her head back. Her body aches to sleep, but her haranguing thoughts won't let her. In her lap, her hands are clenched into fists, her fingernails going from pink to white to mauve.

Purple fingernails.

Adele and I always used to share nail varnish when we were teenagers. She liked to paint her toenails, and I used to color in my fingertips, under the misguided impression that it made my long hands look less monkeyish. I remember how Adele once spent fifteen whole minutes selecting a shade of nail varnish from the array of little bottles at the big pharmacy in the mall. She'd asked Mom to take her there especially, so that she'd have the most options to choose from. The rich, bluish burgundy shade that Adele finally picked looked to me like clotted blood, but from the satisfied expression on her face I imagine it must've made her feel edgy and darkly alive.

She bought the nail varnish on the afternoon before her fourth date with Liam. I'd been numbering their encounters as closely as she had, so when I walked into the lounge to find her sitting in front of the TV but not seeing it, I knew she was waiting for night to fall. We were both counting the minutes till she would be with him again. I watched her from the doorway, saw how she kept glancing at her socked feet with those freshly painted burgundy toenails beneath. Clearly, she was planning for Liam to see her naked feet. How much more of her nakedness was she going to share? The nail varnish was worldly looking, dangerous. Sexy. My stomach clenched and then fluttered and then clenched again. The flickering light from the TV danced over my sister's face, but I couldn't read her expression. I wanted to know what she was thinking. Did she have the same breathless feeling in her chest that I got when I thought of him?

Suddenly, I jerked to life. I marched up to the sofa and ruffled her hair from behind.

“Sally!” she yelped, spinning in her seat to scowl at me. “Come on, man.”

“What?” I was all innocence. I climbed over the back of the sofa and slid down to sit beside Adele. “What's with the face, Addy?”

“My hair, you putz. I just blow-dried it.”

“It looks great.”

“Well, it did before you messed it up.”

“Oh please, it's fine.” I picked up the TV remote. My own hair was overdue for a wash. Adele wrinkled her pretty little nose. Could she smell it? “I can't believe you're watching this drivel, Addy.” I changed the channel, turned up the volume.

“Oh my
God
.”

“What now?” I asked.

My sister had gone pale. She was staring at my fingers. Each one was tipped with a bluish burgundy nail. “You used my new nail polish.”

“Oh yeah. I saw it in your room and thought I'd give it a go. It's a bit hectic. I'm not sure what you were thinking with that one!”

Adele glared at me. The edges of her lips went white. I could see she was furious.

“What? You've never had an issue with me using your things before.” We shared clothes and makeup and books all the time, always had. Why was this so different? Why did I get the feeling she wanted to scream and slap the TV remote out of my hand?

Adele got up off the couch and stormed out of the room.

“What's up now, for goodness' sake?” I called after her. Adele didn't answer. I could hear her in the bathroom, hunting for something in the cabinet. Then there was a long silence. Even from the lounge I could smell the sickly acetone stench of nail polish remover.

Adele has been sitting in the car for over an hour. Her bottom feels numb, and her legs are stiff as she forces them to work the pedals. The car jerks out of the parking space, and Adele feels absurdly nervous, as if the teenager sitting in the passenger seat beside her has suddenly transformed into a driving instructor and is evaluating her every move. She glances across at Gigi and the misery on the young girl's face is palpable. Adele fights the urge to reach over and stroke one of her clenched hands.

When they emerge from the underground parking and into the
brilliant sunlight, Adele slips on her sunglasses, and the sensation of the plastic connecting with the bridge of her nose brings back that now familiar, overfull pulsating inside her temples. She wonders if Gigi also feels her grief in overwhelming waves of physical sensation, like a sickness.

But perhaps it's different for Gigi, because there's no guilt.

Adele grips the steering wheel as hard as she can and clenches the muscles in her belly to try to stop the regret from rising up to settle in its familiar spot at the back of her throat. Before her sister's death, Adele had no idea that the state of “missing Monkey” had become an integral part of who she was, flavoring her every breath with a lemon-pip bitterness for nearly a decade. And now it all seems so ludicrous: all she had needed to do was to pick up the phone to end the ache; all those days, all those chances . . . but not anymore. Now the taste is permanent. One day, she will die herself with its ugly sharpness still coating her tongue.

“I wish . . .” Adele begins; stops. She clears her throat, hoping to dispel the embarrassing voice wobble. “I wish we could share it, Gigi.”

Gigi's eyes don't move from her hands. She gives no indication that she's heard Adele at all.

“I mean, we've both lost someone we care about. Maybe it would be easier for us both if we could talk about your mom a bit. Share the memories we have of her.”

Gigi turns to Adele, her red-rimmed eyes almost metallic in their hardness. Her mouth twists.

You're right,
Adele thinks.
I have no right to poach your memories after throwing her away like I did.

Alongside the guilt that has taken up permanent residence inside her gut, there's a hollow new hunger for this girl to allow her in. As Adele steers the car through the boom gates of Cortona Villas, she resolves to do more, to try harder. Gigi must love her. She must.

Gigi stares out of the car window at the rows of immaculate, identical Tuscan-style houses slotted safely into their adjacent manicured
gardens. None of the window frames are peeling, none of the door lintels are uneven, and the roofs are all neat geometric patterns of reddish clay tiles. At the farmhouse, tufts of graying straw were always slipping out of the thatch over the eaves. She loved walking around the house and pushing them back in, relishing the satisfaction as each reed slid back in to join its brothers. From the looks of it, nothing is out of place here in Cortona Villas.

Hidden behind their smooth blank walls, identical garden gates, and electric garage doors, the villas give very little away . . . but there's something different about number 22. Gigi leans closer to the window, fighting the tug of the seat belt against her collarbone. Up against the electric garage doors of number 22 is a pile of dusty twigs and leaves, and those at the bottom of the heap look gray and crumbly with age. A pile like that would be quickly displaced by the constant opening and closing of the garage door, but instead, it has a staid, settled look about it. Number 22 Cortona Villas is vacant.

Gigi sits back into her seat and puffs out the breath she's been holding.

Gigi sleeps and dreams of dusty leaves.

Across the silent bedroom, Bryony squirms beneath her duvet. (She's got the cherry one tonight. Earlier, she ambushed Dora at her ironing board and left specific instructions to put it on her bed, and to let Gigi have the old one that once used to be on Tyler's. It has racing cars on it.)

The back of Bryony's neck is slick with sweat and her fingers clench and unclench at her sides. In her dreaming, the bedroom is hollow and huge, and someone, somewhere, is playing a tribal-sounding drum in a constant, irregular rhythm that sets her teeth on edge. Bryony dream-walks across the room to her cousin's bed. Two white feet are sticking out of the bottom of the bedding, their soles rimmed with orange sand. She pulls back the duvet: the bed is empty, save for two bloody, torn-off shins with the feet attached.

She runs, screaming, searching for her mother, her father, Tyler, anyone! Room after room, corner after corner . . . the house is empty
but for the throbbing drum. Finally, Bryony bursts out of the front door and into the night air, only to find that her way is blocked. It's Lesedi. The woman stands beneath the porch light dressed in Aunty Sally's billowing purple pants, with ribbons of tapeworm draped across the skin of her bare chest and shoulders. Her face has been painted in some kind of white makeup, and when she grins, the tapeworms all lift their flat, segmented heads and grin along with her. Lesedi opens her mouth to speak, and although Bryony is terrified, she knows that whatever is about to be said is very, very important.

Bryony wakes, rigid, with tears leaking from her eyes and into her hair. She huddles over onto her side and hides her face in the cool cotton cherries. Her heart is thumping, echoing the drum that pounded through her nightmare. She aches to get up and go to her parents' bedroom for comfort as she used to do, but for some reason she does not. She lies as still as she can, waiting for the thumping to stop and praying for morning to come.

THE WILDINGS
have started eating their dinner in the TV room, chewing their food in the flickering light of the screen in preference to the mortifying silence of the dinner table. Adele has instructed a mystified Dora to cook special recipes for Gigi from the new book she bought called
Vegan Delights
. Poor Dora, baffled by the notion of meat-free, keeps adding chicken stock in along with the pulses and vegetables because that is what she's always done, muttering to herself over chopped eggplant and split red lentils about having to cook a whole extra dish every night for the grumpy girl who has never even said hello. Gigi doesn't notice that her dinner is tainted with death; since
that day
, death, it seems, is a flavor she's getting used to.

Tonight, the single-seater in the far corner of the TV room that Gigi usually chooses is occupied by a scowling Bryony. Liam and Adele share the one couch (pressed as far into the opposite sides of it as possible), so Gigi has to sit beside Tyler on the other. He lounges with his legs sprawled wide, and his one bare knee keeps bumping into hers, wobbling the plate of mush that balances on her lap.

Gigi steadies the plate and glances across at him, but he's staring intently at the screen, and his floppy blond bangs hide his eyes. Gigi tries a small mouthful of her food, swallows it, takes another. Bump, bump goes Tyler's knee. She can feel the hairs on it, new man-leg hairs that tickle. She shifts her body as far away from the bumping as she can and, for a few minutes, eats in peace. Then the knee is back. Not a bump, this time, but a slow press of skin against skin. Gigi goes ice-cold inside, and suddenly her mouth tastes as if it is full of blood. She tries to edge away from the knee, but the sofa arm hems her in.