Black Dog Summer (24 page)

“You're here,” she says. Unlike Simone's, Gigi's tears aren't anywhere near done. She can feel them all throbbing and swelling behind her eyes, but she forces them back in, trying to mirror Simone's decorum. “When did you get back from Scotland?”

“This morning.” Simone sits on the edge of the sofa with the floral cushions on it, and the fabric of her loose pants hangs down so that Gigi can see how thin her thighs have gotten. Her eyes look as though they've lost something too, as if some of the light that was in them before has been left behind in Scotland. “It was a ghastly flight,” Simone says in a bright, chatty voice as Gigi sits down on the sofa beside her. “I think that if Dante had lived today and spent twelve hours in a tiny airplane seat, his circles of hell would've been somewhat different.”

It feels like decades since Gigi's heard someone talking about things like Dante and hell circles. Simone and her mom often made literary references:
I have to do something with my English degree, darling.
At the memory of her mother, Gigi dips her head and stares at her knees poking out from beneath the ugly brown school tunic; they look pale with mottled bits of mauve in them. She pulls down the hem of the skirt as far as it will go.

“Isn't this a lovely house? You've landed with your bum in the butter, haven't you, Gi?”

“It's all right. I miss home, though.”

“Me too.” Simone's voice drops to a taut whisper, all forced cheeriness gone. Her hands clench in her lap as if she's trying to squeeze the blood right out of them. “I still can't believe that those men just marched in there and did those terrible things . . .”

“It's going to be all right,” Gigi says, placing a hand on top of Simone's clutching ones. “You'll make it better again. You're good at healing broken things.”

“Oh, Gi.” Simone flicks her head back hard, as if trying to shake the imagined images of the massacre out of it. “There's no way I can ever go back to that place. Not after what happened.”

Gigi's stomach swoops. “Of course you can. You know, get back on the horse like you always say.”

Simone remains motionless. Gigi can hear the hiss of the kettle boiling in the kitchen and the sound of Bryony's voice somewhere in the house.

“I've sold the farm, Gigi.”

Gigi looks down at her knees again. She can feel the thumping of her heart all through her body, but especially in the wounded hollow of her ankle. There's a strange buzzing sound in her ears.

“How . . . What do you mean, sold it?”

“A friend of my father's has been wanting to buy the land for years, and so I contacted him from Scotland and we made a deal. He's been very kind. He even packed up all our things and organized for them to be transported down to my brother's place here in Joburg.”

“Oh.” Gigi takes her hand off Simone's.

“Seb's folks had already collected anything they wanted after the funeral, to remember their boy by.” Simone's voice trembles as she tries to keep it steady. “And Johan's sister came by and did the same.”

At the mention of Johan's name, Gigi opens her eyes very wide, forcing away the memory of his body as it lay crumpled up against the grimy kitchen baseboard. There'd been a gash across his wide, lovely chest, with the stuff in it congealing and clotted, reminding her of Simone's homemade black currant jam. There had been flies.

“I told you over the phone that the animals have all found new caring homes, didn't I?” Simone says.

“But where are we going to live?”

A plane flying overhead slices through the thick afternoon air and fills the room with engine noise.

“You live
here
, Gigi.”

“No I don't. I've just been
staying
here until you get back.”

“But, sweetie, I'm not coming back.”

There is a very long pause as Gigi tries to get enough breath into her lungs to speak.

“What? I don't . . .” Her suddenly numb mouth isn't capable of forming any more words.

“I can't live in a country where people can just march into your home and violate everything you've built and slice you and your family to pieces for no goddamn reason whatsoever.” Simone's voice has a ragged edge to it.

“But you always said that the farm was where you felt the most free.”

“I know. I used to feel that way, Gigi, but everything's changed now.” Simone's face crumples, and she lets out a small sob. “I'm so sorry, hon, I'm just not nearly as strong as I thought I was.”

Gigi pinches the skin above her knees.

“I have decided to emigrate to the UK,” Simone whispers. “Thank goodness for my British passport. I just came back here to see you and my family and to tie up all the loose ends.”

“But you hate the cold.”

Simone says nothing. The sound of her breath is loud in the still room.

“You hate it.”

“Gigi—”

“You always said you hated it.”

“I know.”

Gigi stands by the torn fever tree and watches as Simone crosses the road, opens the trunk of her hired car, and pulls out a large, faded
blue suitcase. The case thumps onto the pavement, sending up puffs of dust around its little wheels, and then rattles and swerves as Simone steers it back towards the Wildings' garden gate.

“I wasn't sure how many things of your mom's you wanted to keep, Gi, so this is a bit of a hodgepodge of your stuff and hers that was sent to my brother from the farm. Your kudu horn is in here. I know how fond you were of that.”

Gigi doesn't answer. She rubs the back of her wrist across her eyes and blinks to try to clear her vision. The sun is low on the horizon, and the light it sheds is gold and thick and buttery, making Cortona Villas look like a movie set: flat, newly erected, and painted to look almost too real. Simone herself looks no more convincing, as if she's nothing but a slender animated figure constructed from pixels.

“Tell your aunt thanks so much for the offer of dinner, darling, but they're expecting me at my brother's house before it gets dark. We're all a little highly strung about safety at the moment—as you can imagine.” Simone tilts her head to one side and tries a smile. “Don't be cross with me, Gi; I'll see you before I go back to the UK, I promise.”

Gigi looks away and focuses intently on wrapping her fingers around the handle of the suitcase.

“It's such a relief to see you so well settled in here. What a lovely family, hey? They really deserve to have a super girl like you join the ranks.”

Super girl.
Gigi doesn't recall Simone ever saying such inane things before. She used to talk about healing energy and the preciousness of life and could quote all sorts of things from the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali's sutras.

Simone leans across the bulk of the suitcase to give Gigi a geranium-and-lemongrass-oil-scented hug. Through the fine fabric of her top, Simone's spine is like a warm string of beads, and Gigi imagines digging her fingers through the thin flesh, gripping one of the bones, and then ripping the whole thing out in one swift movement. For a second, her arms tighten.
I could beg. Maybe if I beg her, she'll change her mind.

But then Simone kisses her cheek and steps away, and Gigi's arms flop back down to her sides.

“I'm amazed at how strong you are, Gi. After all you've been through. Your mom would be so proud.”

Gigi shrugs, turns, and, dragging the clattering suitcase behind her, walks towards the house.

I follow Simone for a while, hovering above the little maroon hood of her rented car as she drives (badly, as it happens, she's clearly unused to the clutch) through Johannesburg's evening rush-hour traffic. She is weeping behind her steering wheel and taking in oxygen in big, sobbing gasps. Her nose is running but she doesn't bother to wipe it, and her beautiful face looks as if it is disintegrating beneath tears and snot.

Simone was never a big crier, even when we were at primary school together in our blue uniforms, white socks, black shoes, and uncomfortable regulation royal-blue panties. As I remember it, there always seemed to be
something
to cry about in those years, and I often felt as if my tears were hovering just below the tissue-fine surface of me, waiting for an opportunity to spring free. But my small-boned, fragile-looking best friend, Simone, hardly ever cried.

As an adult, Simone seemed to continue to motor on through life in just as dry-eyed a fashion, but there was one occasion when I saw her fall apart . . .

Gigi and I were just approaching our fourth anniversary on the farm in Limpopo and had become as much a part of the scenery as Seb's old, ploddy Polonius and the saggy-bottomed sofa that lived on the stoop and sent up clouds of dust and animal hair every time someone flopped down into it.

One night, Simone and Seb were driving back from the successful release of a steenbok on a nearby game farm when they swerved to miss a pothole on the dark gravel road. They felt the jolt of an impact and heard a squeal, and in the spill of the headlights could just make out an animal scrambling to its feet and running off into the night. Seb got out of the pickup and crouched down to inspect the tracks the wounded creature had left: in the moth-flecked light of his flashlight he could see that the prints were those of a jackal, small, most likely a female. They drove back to the farm in shocked silence.

At daybreak the following morning, Seb and Simone got into the pickup and drove back along the same road, found the spot of the accident, and then proceeded to track the jackal's bloody and stumbling journey to her den. By the time they finally found her, she was close to death, her ribs broken and body clearly racked by internal bleeding. Snuggled into her heaving belly were two tiny, flop-eared offspring, trying to suckle. The pups were a few days old at most, eyes still shut and unable to use their fuzzy new legs for anything more than dragging themselves to a teat. Simone pulled off her T-shirt and wrapped them inside it as Seb hoisted the wounded mother into his arms, and they trekked in this fashion for over an hour through the singing, fragrant bush and back to the pickup.

By the time they reached the farm, red-shouldered, white-faced, and silent, the mother jackal was dead, and the babies, little scraps of tan and gray fur nestled inside Simone's lilac Save the Whales T-shirt, were squealing for their missed meals.

She tried that entire day to get them to drink from a tiny bottle, and then a syringe, using every trick she could think of, but the two little jackal pups wanted their mom and were having none of it; no more than a few meager drops got past their whiskery snouts and onto their quivering pink tongues.

Simone refused to give up; she stayed with those pups the entire day and all through the next night, refusing to let any of us take over to give her a break, trying to get them to take drops of warm milk from her shaking fingers, talking to them, hugging them against her skin to try to keep them warm, and eventually whimpering along with them in desperation as they grew weaker and weaker.

Finally, in the gray dawn hours, before the birds began their morning racket, she got one of the little guys to open its mouth and accept the bottle teat, but it seemed to have forgotten how to suck, and streams of pale milk just dribbled out of its jaw and soaked into the baby blanket it was wrapped in.

I found Simone a few hours later, holding the tiny, limp puppy corpses to her heart and staring out into the garden with hollow, gray-ringed eyes. Later that day, she and Seb buried the pups beside their mother in the little piece of land behind the old farm-equipment
shed that we reserved for the graves of the creatures who hadn't made it. Gigi stood at Simone's side and sang a good-bye song for the dead family in her high, lilting little-girl voice. The words were meaningless sounds, and the tune something she made up on the spot, but the sincerity behind it was naked and beautiful.

I watched, fascinated, as the tears streamed down Simone's sunburnt cheeks, collected beneath her neat little chin, and plopped down onto the vivid, freshly turned soil at her feet.

That afternoon, I returned to the grave site, but her tears, of course, were gone, soaked down into the red earth to join the little jackals beneath.

Adele had been expecting Simone to stay for supper and had instructed Dora to conjure up a rather peculiar collection of meat-free dishes and lay the table, but at the sight of her niece trudging up the stairs alone with that terrible dusty old suitcase, she'd quickly whipped off place setting number six and rearranged the remaining five to hide the gap. She needn't have bothered, for, once again, just as when she first arrived at the Wildings', Gigi has not come down for dinner.

“It's like eating something that's been scraped out of the bottom of a pond,” Tyler mutters after a mouthful of lentil biryani.

“Rubbish. It's surprisingly tasty,” Liam says, clearly in no mood to indulge
the angry young man
tonight. Bryony has to agree with her dad; she rather likes it, even though the texture is a little gluey.

“You sure you told Gigi we were about to eat?” Adele asks, and Bryony rolls her eyes.

“Yes, Mom. I've already told you.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing, of course. She just lay there under the duvet with her flip-flops on.”

“She's just upset that Simone isn't staying for dinner, that's all,” says Adele.

“Oh, Sim-o-ne,” Liam says, scooping up another forkful. “I remember Simone. I know she was really kind to your sister and gave her a new life and everything, but boy, what a tree-hugging nutcase.”

“Well, she's kind of hot for an old lady.” Tyler grins, shoveling in another mouthful of pond scrapings.

“Oh honestly, Tyler.”

“Well, she is, Ma. Nice bod.”

“Not at the table, please,” Adele snaps, and Tyler pulls a face. Bryony doesn't giggle; she's remembering the way Gigi's face looked when she stumbled into the bedroom with that weird suitcase after Simone had driven away.