Black Dog Summer (13 page)

She suddenly remembers how dusty her mother's splayed legs had looked in the afternoon sunlight as it poured into the farmhouse kitchen through the open door. Her bare knees had been oddly
fleshless, like those of a bird. A heron. Gigi fights the urge to hurl her plate to the floor and run from the room; instead she sits frozen but for the tears that slide down her cheeks and roll into her neck.

Bare legs; bright bloody smears on the bluish pale skin of her mother's shin.

Gigi starts to shake, and the fork rattling on her plate makes Tyler turn from the TV at last.

“Gigi?” His knee vanishes, leaving a cool patch on her leg below her shorts. His eyes go very wide when he sees the state she's in. “Shit, are you OK?”

“Gi?” Liam jumps up from his seat and comes over to her, gently removing the rattling plate from her lap. “Come, angel. It's all right, come here.” He cradles her back with his hands and helps her to her feet. When she puts her arms round him, her skin looks very white against the sun-baked brown of the back of Liam's neck.

Bryony, Adele, and Tyler watch in silence as Liam leads the sobbing Gigi from the room. Over the sound of the TV they can hear him murmuring comfort to her as they climb the stairs together.

“Well, I guess it's a good thing that Gigi has
someone
in this house that she feels comfortable with,” Tyler mutters, placing his own unfinished plate of food on the floor beside Gigi's abandoned one. He rubs his hand over the knee that made contact with her smooth, warm leg. There's a strange, hot ache in his belly when he thinks of the girl's arms around his father's neck. He tightens his hands into fists.

“I mean, what's with the two of them anyway?” Tyler asks his mother. Adele's face is pink and her eyes very bright. “How come she knows him better than the rest of us? Did Dad used to visit Aunty Sally and Gigi on that farm where they used to live?”

Adele finally swallows the lump of chicken that's been sitting in her mouth since Gigi began her sobbing fit. It leaves the same bitter taste that she's come to associate with guilt, but it has now taken on a far more familiar flavor from her past: pungent, salty betrayal. She tasted it first the day, all those years ago, when Sally told her the truth and Adele banished her from the house. It was vivid on her tongue later that same evening when she made Liam promise her he'd never contact her sister again.

“Who the fuck knows,” she says, and Tyler's eyebrows shoot up into his bangs.

On the single-seater chair in the corner, Bryony pulls her legs up underneath her body and holds very tightly on to the edges of her dinner plate. The shadows have grown and thickened. They've seeped out from between the sofa cushions and ballooned out from the folds in the curtains, and even when she squeezes her eyes shut she can see them.
They're here to stay.

Upstairs, Gigi sits on the racing-car duvet and sips from the glass of water that Liam has brought her.

“You feeling better now, Gigisaurus?” he asks, and she gives him a shaky nod in return. “You're doing really well with all this, hey? Such a strong girl, just like your ma.”

“I don't feel strong.” Her fingers squeeze around the glass.

“Me neither.”

“You miss her too?”

“Like crazy,” Liam whispers.

“Everything is so bloody stupid.” She's gripping the glass so tightly now that she can no longer feel it between her fingers. “I just want to go back in time—”

She suddenly remembers the vegetable smell of the water beneath the deck as she spread out her yoga mat, then the open padlock and the gate swinging wide on its metal hinges . . .

“Ja,” Liam agrees, thinking back to when he still had a choice: Adele in her high school uniform with her slanted eyes that promised secret, thrilling things; or Monkey in those funny baggy T-shirts she used to wear to varsity, her own round eyes so sincere that looking into them had made him feel confused and uncomfortable inside his own skin. “Doesn't work like that, I'm afraid, my girl.”

“I know that,” Gigi snaps. “I was just saying.” She sets the glass down, hard, on the bedside table. The silence in the room is suddenly awkward. “Shouldn't you go back downstairs to be with your family?”

“You're family too, Gigi . . .”

Gigi shrugs.

“But you're probably right. I'm in quite a bit of trouble.”

“Well, then perhaps you shouldn't have lied to them about not knowing me.” Gigi looks down at the bedding, tracing the outline of a racing car with one finger. She thinks of the soft, frightened look on Adele's face that keeps emerging from behind her kind smiles. “I'm not stupid, you know. I've noticed.”

“Look, things are complicated—”

“You grown-ups just love that word, don't you? It's like an excuse for everything.”

“Gigi? I don't—”

“Mom always used to use it after you left the farm after one of your visits and I would ask her why she was crying.”

“Crying?” Liam takes a step towards the bed, and then stops. He suddenly doesn't know what to do with his hands.

“She would be all fine and busy with the animals and meditating with me sometimes and stuff, and then you would come and it was like starting all over again for her. Back to the beginning when she was all messed up. You should've just left her the hell alone.”

Liam sways a little on his feet. All the blood seems to have drained out of his head.

“What was the point? I mean why did you keep coming anyway? You guys never had an affair or anything even though you were like nuts about each other. You never even held hands. I know. I used to spy on you.” Liam opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out. “Pathetic.”

“Shut up,” he snaps at last. “You don't have a clue about half the stuff you're talking about.”

Gigi dips her head to hide the fresh brimming tears.
All those visits and never there when she needed you. Not there when the men came in.
She doesn't want to cry again. She hates herself for crying again. She reaches down deep within for the strange new hardness that has begun to grow there, and slips inside it, where all is numb and still and black.

Liam no longer sees the girl hunched over on the bed in front of him. He battles for breath, vision swimming, and waits for the frantic rise and fall of his chest to calm before leaving the room. He pauses
on the landing, then wipes his sweating palms on his shirt and heads back down the stairs.

Gigi's outburst releases me, and although I know the respite will be brief before I have to enter the fleshy mess in the Wilding house once more, I flee back to northern Limpopo, where the air tastes thick and sweet and vibrates with insect buzz and the liquid burp of frogs. Although I still can't get home, I surrender to the memory of it. I can see exactly how Gigi looked at ten as she dragged Liam off to see the tiny pawpaw tree she'd nursed into a sprout from the glossy discarded pips of a long-ago breakfast. He'd barely have time to extract himself from the car and she'd be on him: grabbing his arm, grinning up at him, jumping up and down at the sight of him, all the things that I longed to do, but couldn't.

“You know how I don't have a dad?” she'd begun after we'd waved him off once again and stood together in the stillness left behind by his latest car. “So does that mean I can choose one?”

“Well, you've got loads of dads here, hon,” I said, sliding the padlock through the two ends of the heavy chain around the gatepost and clicking it shut. “There's Seb, and Phineas, and Johan, and even Hugh.”

She pulled a face. “I don't even know Hugh. He's only been here like a few days, Ma.” She took my hand and we started to walk back up the long drive (which was really only two ruts cut by car tires through the ever-encroaching vegetation). “And he'll leave again, just like the other overseas people.”

“True.” Simone was always inviting fellow inner-peace searchers to live with us and volunteer at the shelter for a while. The foreigners loved it on the farm with the animals and the quiet, and would always leave brown from the sun, and skinny from all the vegetables and beans and physical work, promising to return. “OK, not Hugh then.”

“But the others aren't my real dad either.”

I had only known Gigi's real father for two weeks, a silly holiday romance in Cape Town that ended with a bout of nausea and a panicked trip to the chemist for a do-it-yourself test. I remember Adele's
expression at the news, her cry of
Oh, Monkey, you did it on purpose, I bet! Ever since Tyler was born you've been dying for a mini-monkey of your own.

“No, but that doesn't really matter, Gi; they love you just the same.” The sun baked down on us, and I could feel the moisture springing out at the base of my skull and making my head itch.

“Can I have Uncle Liam for my dad, then?” My hand was boiling in Gigi's grip. I longed to pull it away from her but forced my fingers to relax.

“He's already your uncle, silly billy. He can't be both.”

“Oh.”

My feet kept skidding around on the sweaty rubber soles of my flip-flops, and my toes were coated with fine red powder from the dusty path. I huffed out a breath of silent frustration.

“Are you cross, Ma?” Those little wet fingers pressed and tugged.

“No.”

“You
look
cross.”

“I'm just hot, Gigi, for goodness' sake. Let's get a move on, shall we?”

“You're always so grumpy when Uncle Liam leaves.” She let go of my hand, and for a second it felt cool and free.

“Well, so are you, Miss So-and-so.”

“Ja, but you're
much
worse than I am.” Her feet stamped in the dust, and a baby acacia sapling with a full coating of thorns snapped beneath her sandal and scraped hard over the top of my foot.

“For Christ's sake, child. Now look—”

“Don't swear, Ma. Right words and right action, remember?” The thorn scrape stung as it filled with salty sweat.

“Don't you start quoting the frigging Buddha at me, Gigi. I'm not in the mood,” I hissed, and she sucked in her breath and stormed ahead, arms folded across her chest.

“Maybe I can just choose my mom as well then,” she muttered.

I kept forcing one leg in front of the other through the stifling afternoon. Gigi stomped up the veranda steps ahead of me, but I stopped just short of the beckoning shade. The itch of incessant heat crawled all over my skin.

THE WILDING
house is filled with the restless quiet of no one sleeping. Tyler has thrown off his bedcovers but is still somehow too hot. Maddening slicks of sweat glue his body to the sheet, and although the window is wide open, he can find no relief from whatever it is that burns inside him.

In the adjacent room, Gigi lies on her back with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands clenched into fists, and Bryony blinks at the dark, trying to swallow down the rising certainty that the shadows in the room are deepening.
Stop being silly, Bryony.
But they are. Over on Gigi's side of the room, the darkness has intensity and weight, and when Bryony slides out of bed, she has to edge her way past it to get to the door and the relief of the upstairs landing.

She stands for a moment, feeling the familiar itch of the carpet beneath her toes and staring at the vague shapes of doorways in the gloom. She can just about read the “Keep Out” on Tyler's, and make out the chip in the paint of the bathroom door from the time last year when she bashed into it while taking a forbidden ride on his skateboard. Her parents' door is a blank oblong at the end of the landing that gives nothing away. She takes a step towards it, then freezes when she hears a noise from downstairs.

Suddenly, last night's nightmare is vivid once more, and her heart squeezes still before speeding up to a thundering madness. Lesedi draped in segmented tapeworms. The thumping of an unseen drum.

She almost darts back into the bedroom, ready to dive under the warm duvet and tuck it tight over her head, but the memory of Gigi's bloody, legless dream-feet stops her cold. Bryony turns and, with her arms folded into a shield across her chest, tiptoes to the top of the staircase and peers down it. The porch light shines through the blocks of glass on either side of the front door and makes yellow patterns on
the hallway tiles. She heads downstairs towards the relief of that light, but just as she reaches it, the noise happens again and Bryony gasps.

There's someone in the TV room!
She tries to quieten her breath, but she seems to need to suck in more and more, and it rasps in and out like a hurricane.

“Addy?” someone says.

“Dad?” Bryony follows her father's voice, light-headed with relief. “Dad, why are you still up . . .”

And then she sees the bed made up on the couch. She recognizes the pillow from her parents' bedding set. Her father blinks up at her from beneath one of the sleeping bags that she and Dommie use for their sleepovers. His hair is all messed up on the one side, sticking up in a little cockatiel tuft over his left ear.

“It's OK, Bry,” he says, shifting himself up to sitting and giving her a weak smile.

“But why are you . . . why aren't you sleeping upstairs with Mom?”

“We had a little fight, darling, but don't worry, everything will be all right.”

Bryony shifts her weight from foot to foot and wishes that she'd come downstairs to find a burglar instead. Or even a witch doctor covered in disgusting tapeworms. Somehow this is worse.

“What are you doing up, Bry?”

She wants to tell of the nightmare bloodied feet, but her father, with his mysterious connection to her cousin, has become a stranger lately, and telling him something so private is suddenly impossible.
Maybe this is how Mom is feeling. Maybe that's why Dad's sleeping down here.