Black Dog Summer (26 page)

The room smells of codeine, sugar, and stale breath, and something acrid and animal-like, which Gigi finally realizes is herself. She gets off the bed and pulls yesterday's school tunic off over her head before unbuttoning the sweat-drenched shirt and peeling it away from her skin. Glancing over to make sure that Bryony is still oblivious, she then takes off her underwear and pulls her mother's old dressing gown from the cupboard and wraps it around herself.

The bathroom seems very bright and cold after the bedding cave, and Gigi holds on to the side of the tub for support as she turns the hot tap on. The water gushing and swirling into the whiteness makes her head swim, so she looks out of the window at the sullen, overcast sky. Then, as if suddenly instructed to get a move on, she straightens up sharply and strides over to the medicine cabinet and opens it without looking at her reflection in the mirror.

Rows of little pill bottles, rolls of bandage, half-squeezed tubes of mysterious ointments, and two sets of tweezers stare back at her. There's also a box of Band-Aids, a pair of very sharp-nosed nail scissors, and a man's razor with some white residue around the handle from not being rinsed properly. Gigi shudders as she imagines Tyler running the blade over his almost hairless chin.

Behind her, the bath is almost full, and steam rises from the searing water to condense on the windowpanes.

Bryony wakes to the sound of rain and the indistinct hum of the vacuum cleaner somewhere downstairs. It hurts to open her eyes, and she has to keep rubbing them to get them to work properly. She sees that the lump has gone from the other bed, and after looking around the dim room to make sure, she breathes out in relief to find herself alone. Gigi must have gotten up at last and gone to school like a normal person. Bryony remembers the demonic look on her cousin's face and the terrible screech of her voice as she forced them out of the room last night, and feels strange, icy goose bumps rise up all over her skin.

Bryony tries a tiny swallow and winces at the raw rasp at the back of her throat. Her skull feels dry and clogged, and her mouth tastes awful. The water glass that Adele left beside her bed is empty. Very cautiously, she sits up, waits for her head to feel less woozy, and then slowly gets out of bed. As soon as she's upright, all the fluid in her body seems to collect in her bladder, and she speeds up her shuffle in the direction of the bathroom.

She pushes open the bathroom door and stumbles into the room, blinking her sore eyes against the steam.

And then she sees Gigi. She's sitting in the bath with her thin hair plastered to her skull and her eyes shocked, enormous, staring back. Neither girl moves.

Bryony is almost about to dart back out again, mortified, but then she sees the welling parallel lines of blood blooming up on her cousin's left upper arm and a pair of red-tipped nail scissors clutched in her shaking fingers. Her gaze slides back to lock on Gigi's, but out of the corner of her eye she can see slender trails of bright blood snake their way down Gigi's arm and billow out in soft pink clouds when they hit the bathwater.

For a very long moment, the girls remain frozen. The steam drifts and swims around them in the cool currents created by the open door. Waves of aching dizziness pound through Bryony's skull.

“What—” she finally croaks, but Gigi cuts her off by suddenly rising out of the bathwater like a spare, otherworldly nymph with tiny, sharp-pointed breasts and prominent ribs.

“You don't look very well, Bryony,” she says, her voice quavering as it tries to hold on to its forced, motherly tone. “Are you feeling all right?”

“No,” Bryony whispers, staring at Gigi. Her cousin's naked skin is very pink from the heat of the bathwater, and her bones almost seem to shine through it, making her look as if she could be made out of colored, cloudy glass. The blood leaking out of her arm mingles with the water on her skin and forms diluted rivulets of red that pool on the ends of her fingers.

“Come, let's get you back to bed, then,” Gigi says, stepping from the tub and wrapping herself in a waiting towel, immediately
marking it with rusty smears. Blood courses down her arm, drips off her elbow and onto the bath mat. “Where's your medicine?” Gigi marches to the medicine cabinet, swings it open, and starts rifling through the bottles.

“I don't . . .” Bryony's voice wavers, and she sways on her sore feet. “I just want a wee.”

“Of course.” Gigi turns round and gives her a strange, sharp smile. Water drips from the ends of her hair and soaks into the top of the towel, and the blood continues to flow from the gashes on her upper arm. “Go on, then. I'll wait outside.”

Once alone in the bathroom, Bryony pulls down her pajama bottoms and sits down gingerly on a toilet seat that feels as if it is made of ice. She glances over at the pointed ends of the nail scissors resting beside some drips of blood on the white edge of the tub, and then looks away. She shuts her eyes so as not to see the pale pink bathwater or the blots of red on the bath mat and the smears on the edge of the medicine cabinet and begins to cry silently, her raw throat constricting in painful jerks as tears pour down her cheeks.

LESEDI SITS
on the colorful mat spread out on the mud floor of Ma Retabile's house and leans her back up against the unplastered, gray cinder-block wall. She takes a sip of hot, sweet rooibos from her enameled tin mug and smiles, thinking back to how horrified she'd been when she arrived at this place to do her apprenticeship, all those years ago. She'd been brought up in a nice house in northern Johannesburg, been sent to the best schools, and dropped out of varsity to end up on the floor of a glorified shack.

“You're remembering too,” Ma Retabile says with a wheezy chuckle.

“I felt like an alien when I first came.”

“I remember. You couldn't even speak Siswati properly!”

Lesedi grins.

“You were such a whitey.”

“It's not so easy to tell the difference anymore,” says Lesedi with a smile. “It's the new South Africa, remember.”

“Ayeye,” Ma Retabile says, “I am a dying breed.” She crosses one leg over the other with a slight jingle of beads and shells, and Lesedi marvels at the state of the soles of the older woman's feet. Even the cracks have cracks.

“You could do with a pedicure, you know that, Ma?”

“Haibo!” Ma Retabile yelps, and waggles her crusty toes in Lesedi's direction. “What do I need someone rubbing on my toes for, hey? My feet are that ticklish I would probably kick the poor girl in the head.” They both fall about laughing, and the creases around Ma Retabile's eyes deepen into plowed furrows in the earth-colored skin of her round face.

“It's good to be back, Ma.”

“Good, then maybe sometime you can tell me why you've left
your nice husband and comfy, comfy life to come and sit on my dirt floor, hey?”

“I will, Ma. Soon,” Lesedi says, and then suddenly freezes.

“What is it?” Ma Retabile asks, her own smile fading.

“Something . . . I don't know.” Lesedi shakes her head. Despite the warmth of the room, fresh goose bumps rise up along her arms and legs. “I just had the bad feeling.”

“Uh-huh.” Ma Retabile nods in understanding. She waits for Lesedi to continue.

“Before I left Joburg, I saw a black dog.”

“Haibo.”

“A dog-cloud.”

“Not good. But it wasn't for you?”

“No,” Lesedi says, staring off into nothing for a moment. “It wasn't for me.” For a moment, her blood seems to slow in her veins, and the hand holding the mug goes slack. A small dribble of sugary tea spills onto her jeans, shaking her from her reverie.

“Did you warn the one it was for?”

“I tried.”

“Whiteys, they won't listen, hey?” Ma Retabile says with a shake of her head.

“Tell me about it.”

“COME NOW,
let's get you better,” Gigi croons as she spoons another sugary helping of medicine into Bryony's mouth. “We've got to get your strength up for the journey.”

“Mom only gives me one,” Bryony mumbles as she sees Gigi tip the bottle for a third time.

“Nonsense. I stayed home especially to look after you, you know.”

“You did?” Bryony vaguely notes that Gigi is now dressed in jeans and a top and her red flip-flops. The cuts on her left arm are still leaking a little, but most of the blood has congealed into dark stripes.

“How are you feeling?” Gigi asks, placing a hand on Bryony's forehead as if to check her temperature. Through her medicated, fevered fog, Bryony realizes that this is the first time Gigi has ever touched her.

“Cold.”

“Then let's warm you up.” Gigi bounds across the room to grab her oversized dressing gown. The strange, frantic energy that seems to have overtaken her since Bryony walked into the bathroom continues to build. “It could rain again at any moment and we've got to get you to a nice safe place,” she says as she bundles Bryony into the gown and ties the cord tight around her waist.

“A nice safe place?”

“This house isn't safe. Anyone could come in here and do something to us.”

“Oh,” Bryony says, not sure that she understands what Gigi is on about. “But Mom will be home soon.”

“Oh, mothers can't protect you, you know,” Gigi says, steering Bryony out of the bedroom and down the stairs. “They're pretty useless themselves when it comes down to it.”

From the kitchen, Bryony can hear Dora's daily Zulu soap opera
blaring from the radio and the occasional clank of things being put into cupboards. She wants to call to Dora but can't seem to make her voice come out enough to do so. In any case, what would she say? Maybe Dora knows that Gigi has to take her to safety, maybe she's just finishing up and is going to join them wherever they're going? Bryony's head feels like it's stuffed full of glue and crumpled-up bath towels, and the thoughts don't seem to be able to get from one side of it to the other. Gigi's conviction that they need to get out of the house makes Bryony feel as if she's missed some very important information that she's supposed to know about. She racks her brain trying to remember if Adele mentioned anything before leaving earlier this morning, but all she can recall are a cool hand and a few fragmented images from her dreams: a dog with its mouth open wide. Darkness.

She trips on the bottom of the too-long dressing gown and sinks down onto the hallway carpet. It is comfortable here. If she could just curl up here and sleep for a bit . . .

“No,” Gigi says through gritted teeth, hoisting Bryony to her feet again, “you have to listen to me. I've got to get you out of here. They could be coming at any moment.” Gigi hustles Bryony out of the front door and then shuts it behind them with a quiet click. The rain has stopped, but the garden is dripping wet and smells of sap and soil.

“Who could be coming at any moment?”

“The black men.”

“What black men?” Bryony stops in the middle of the garden path. The grass is very wet and cold, and her body beneath its enveloping folds of toweling is icy and shivery. She blinks at the overcast garden. It seems to be made up of very sharp edges and too much gray light. In the dark space beneath the leaves of the border shrubs, she's sure she can see the low, menacing shape of a crouching dog. When she blinks, it is gone. “I want to go back to bed.”

Gigi turns and brings her face in very close to Bryony's so that their noses are almost touching. “It's not safe,” she whispers. Her breath smells of unused stomach acid.

“Are you talking about the shadows?” Bryony asks.

“No.” Gigi shakes her head in frustration.

“There were some shadows behind the sofa cushions and over your bed and stuff. But I think they're all gone now that Lesedi has left.”

“I'm talking about the men.”

“Lesedi was a sangoma, you know. I think she tried to put a curse on me because I was spying on her. But I wasn't really spying, I just thought that she was nice and wanted her to be my friend and then I saw the mask and I didn't anymore.”

“I have no idea what you're on about. I think the sickness is making you delirious.”

“Deliri-what?”

“You're losing your grip on reality,” Gigi explains, impatient now. “Will you get a move on, please?” She tugs on Bryony's arm and almost pulls her over. “See, you can barely stand up by yourself. You're a total sitting duck. They'll get you, easy.”

“But—”

“Shush. Come on.” Gigi's tone is urgent now, and her eyes have a peculiar, hot look to them. She forces Bryony to move and marches her out of the garden gate, past the fever tree, and up the road. Bryony turns to look at the Matsunyanes' front drive and is surprised to find herself disappointed that Lesedi is not standing there in her Levi's and bare feet with those long, strong braided ropes of hair hanging down over one shoulder.

“Come
on
,” Gigi urges. “They're coming.”

BRYONY WAKES
to find that she's lying on something hard that pushes into her aching hip bone and her shoulder. It's the floor. Why is she on the floor? Did she fall out of bed? No, wait a minute, this is a wooden floor and the floor of her bedroom is carpeted.
Where am I?

“What's going on?” she mumbles, blinking her eyes to try to clear them.

“Shshsh!” Suddenly, Gigi is right up close to her face, pressing a skinny finger on Bryony's lips. “You have to be quiet.”

“Where are we?” Bryony says in a whisper.

“Somewhere secret that nobody knows about. They won't find us here.”

Bryony runs her tongue around her biscuit-dry mouth, trying to work up some moisture. She feels strange and heavy, and everything hurts. “I want to go home. I want my mom.”