Black Dog Summer (29 page)

“I'm going to lock us in the room as well, OK? There's a key in the door, which is why I chose this room. But even then they might break through, so we have to hide.” She maneuvers Bryony into the wooden shell of the cupboard and arranges her so that no toes or bits of dressing gown stick out. It smells of chipboard and dust. “You have to stay very still.”

Gigi closes the cupboard and runs over to the bedroom door to shut it and lock it from the inside. Then she hurtles back to the line of cupboards and opens another of the floor-to-ceiling doors.

“I'm right in the next one, OK, Bryony?” she whispers as she struggles, and then succeeds in closing the cupboard door behind her. It is unexpectedly dark in the cramped wooden space. She taps on the board that separates her from Bryony. “I'm right here. It's OK; if we wait, they'll go away.”

THE DOG'S
name is Bella. She's a long-haired Alsatian with a bushy tan-and-cream tail, a slender black muzzle, and two orange eyebrow spots that give her an expression of permanent concern. She has been a tracker for the K9 unit for over two years, and she has been responsible for finding lost children, missing children, and murdered children, dead bodies in rubbish dumps, hikers on mountainsides, arms caches beneath floorboards, and wanted felons on the lam.

Now she stands on her hind legs beneath the kitchen window of number 22 Cortona Villas with her front paws up against the sill and whines.

“There's a good girl. Good girl.” Her handler, Eric Masondo, ruffles the fur on the back of Bella's neck when he comes up beside her. Bella sniffs the rim of the small window and looks back at Eric with a pleading expression.

“We can't fit through there, now, can we, Bells?” he says, and she whines in response. Eric tries the window, but it has been securely latched from the inside.

“We need a set of keys for this house,” he calls to the manager of Cortona Villas Security, who is puffing up the path alongside the policewoman and her partner, a tall slender man with coffee-colored skin. “Immediately.” Bella gives a loud emphatic bark of agreement.

“Jeez, I am not sure where those could be. I know that the owners gave them to the estate agent some time ago, but then the place was taken off the market . . .” He scratches his chin and shakes his head. “Now, where would the keys to twenty-two be?” Bella barks again. The manager of Cortona Villas Security radios through to the office.

“Look, we have no idea what the situation is inside this house, and we can't bugger around waiting for keys that might or might not be
here, OK?” Eric Masondo glances at the policewoman, who nods her head, once. “We're breaking in.”

Once Gigi has shut herself inside the cupboard, the room is silent. I hover at its center. The air in the empty bedroom hangs heavy and strange, and despite the fact that there is no sun outside the window to cast any, shadows seem to form and dissolve in every corner.

I peer through the cupboard door to look in on Gigi. She is curled up in her cramped wooden cell. Jewels of sweat glisten on her ashen forehead, and her mouth moves but no words come out. Her eyes are wide and staring.

In the next partition I find Bryony trying to force the gag out of her mouth by working it with her teeth and tugging downwards on the dressing gown cord behind her back. Her face is puce, and her nostrils flare in and out as she struggles for breath. Just then, the knotted cord slips from its spot over the gag, but instead of setting her free, it is now tugging tight around her throat, weighed down by her bound hands. Her eyes pop open wide and she makes a gurgling sound. She tries to move her hands upwards behind her back to loosen the tension in the cord, but she hasn't got the strength or the space to lift them much at all.

If she loses consciousness, the weight of her hands pulling on that cord will strangle her.

No!

And suddenly I am out of time, darting like a hummingbird between the girls, who now seem frozen within their dark cubicles.

Gigi!
I scream, but I am not even a breath of wind to move a mote of dust.
Help her, snap out of it!
Of course, Gigi cannot hear me. Just inches away from her choking cousin, she sits rigid, staring blindly at the tiny lines of light that seep around the edges of the cupboard door.

In a fragment of a moment, I am with the knot of people clustered at the front door of the empty house working on the lock.
Move!
With glacial slowness, one of the men prepares to kick open the lock.

Move!
But I know that, even if they could hear me, they are never
going to find the girls and get into the bedroom in time. Only Gigi is close enough to help Bryony. How can I make her understand?

There must be a way I can stop this. There must be someone who can hear me.

Lesedi.

With the thought I am by her side.

Lesedi, freed from the bonds of urban Joburg life, is doing what thousands upon thousands of women all over Africa are doing in the bright afternoon light: peeling, cutting, chopping, washing. With her hands immersed in an enamel tub full of sun-warm water, she rubs at a stubborn clump of soil that clings to a small knobbly sweet potato and glances across the sunlit yard to where Ma Retabile is snoring in the green shade of a twisted acacia tree.

For a moment, Lesedi pauses, thinking of Thabo and her lovely house and her Elizabeth Arden skin-care products all lined up in the bathroom cabinet; then she shakes her head and smiles. Since her arrival yesterday, she and Ma Retabile have discussed the best herbs to use for stomach cramps and a new way of preparing caju bark to make tea for colicky babies, and thrown the bones for a man who came walking towards the hut with a sorry expression on his face and a bundle of fresh peaches wrapped in a cloth.

Lesedi has not spoken a word of her Cortona Villas conundrum, but just being by Ma Retabile's side has sparked something inside her, and she has gained a surprising sense of clarity on how her two worlds might meet. She's realized that it is pointless to try to hide who she is from the people she lives alongside; and, equally, she knows that she cannot consult in a hut, because that is not who she is either. But already, she can see how her new, smart consulting room in Johannesburg could look with its plaque on the door and elegant wooden furniture in the waiting room. No more hiding in back bedrooms at home and hoping that the neighbors don't cotton on; she will set up proper rooms, have business cards printed on thick, textured card stock, walk so tall that the word “sangoma” will become just another suburban norm.
Darling, I've got a sangoma appointment at three, could you fetch the kids from tennis? Please just make sure that Jayden doesn't leave his shoes in the locker room again.

Lesedi grins, placing the washed potato on the plate on her left and picking up a new, soily one from the pile on her right. As she dunks it into the creamy brown water, her vision suddenly clouds, and her skin goes ice cold. She gasps as the bright yard vanishes behind a tracery of darting shadows. The toffee-colored chicken pecking at the ground a little distance away pauses mid-peck, suspended in time.

Lesedi.
At first, her name is whispering wind in dry grasses. Then it becomes a cry that seems to emanate from the surrounding hills:
Lesedi, help me! She's going to kill her.

Ancestor?

Lesedi's body remains frozen in the act of falling backwards, her foot about to hook the rim of the enamel bowl, but she is no longer in the dusty yard with the green mountains peering down at her. She finds herself inside what seems to be a cupboard. She's overwhelmed by the sound of gasping. Her own breath suddenly chokes in her throat.

In an instant, Lesedi can feel little Bryony's peril, can sense how close the child has moved to the shadowed side. She can feel Bryony choking as the weight of her hands pulls the cord tighter around her neck. She remembers the black dog warning. She longs for breath.

You have to stop it.
My plea echoes Lesedi's own, frantic heartbeat.

But the girls are hundreds of kilometers away.
Lesedi's lungs are screaming, her blood pounds.
YOU will have to stop it, Ancestor.

But I am nothing!
The web of shadows erupts in a cloud of panicked white moths that flutter into Lesedi's face and catch in her throat.
I cannot move or touch anything. Gigi cannot hear me.
Along with that of the helpless girl in the cupboard, Lesedi can feel her own life stuttering, flickering out. She needs to breathe.

ANCESTOR, TELL ME YOUR NAME.
It takes all her remaining strength to command the shadows. It works. A thin stream of precious air rushes into her mouth.

Sally.
The wordless reply. More air. Lesedi gulps it down.
No. Really it is Monkey.

Monkey.
Lesedi concentrates hard, head still swimming.
You may not think it, but you do have power. Look at what you've just done to me. You are an Ancestor now, a custodian of stories.

I'm just a dead white woman.
Lesedi feels a cord tighten around her neck again.
I know nothing of ancestors and such things.
White moths pour back out of the shadow clouds, swoop in sickening circles, and then settle all around Lesedi and into the far distance, a menacing silver carpet of pulsing wingbeats.

You are Africa's daughter, you were born in Her lap and you died in Her arms; She embraced you your whole life, and now you are a part of Her. Not the soil and scrub part, but the story part. As such, as an Ancestor, you can reach Gigi.

But I am nothing but a memory to her.
A wailing gale rises, whipping up the shadows around Lesedi into dark, coiling towers of smoke.

Then BE a memory
, Lesedi commands.

The pale moths rise up around her in a whirl of wings. They gather and coalesce to form the tall figure of a woman. Streams of creatures make up a long flowing skirt, slender feet, and strands of hair that fly back from a rustling, shifting face. The swarm figure rushes at Lesedi as if about to rip her apart with long fingers made of a thousand furred bodies. But when they reach her, the moths are soft against her face, caressing her, bringing her breath back with their wingbeats. The moths then begin to settle all over Lesedi, covering her from neck to toe in a delicate, shimmering mantle.

I was Sally, but now I am more.

Ants in my marrow, tadpoles in my throat, sun on my scalp, swallows swooping in the breath in my lungs. Stories singing at me.

I can be memory.

The front door of number 22 Cortona Villas bursts inwards as Eric's booted foot connects with the now weakened lock. Like an arrow from a bow, Bella darts past his legs and into the bare hallway. She pauses and looks back at her partner with worried eyebrows raised.

“Find the scent, girl.”

Bella's tail wags furiously. She wiffles her sensitive nose along the floorboards and starts up the stairwell with Eric close behind. Suddenly, she gives an anxious bark and speeds into a run, her claws clicking on the wood.

My daughter sits in the dark. Her arms are wrapped around her knees. Her eyes, wet with tears, stare but do not see. Centimeters away, on the other side of the chipboard partition, Bryony's arms quiver as she battles to hold them high enough behind her back to release some of the tension around her throat. Her awareness is slipping, and she begins to float. Soon she will see me.

No.

Be a memory.

I see a thread I've not noticed before: like a story thread, but different. It is as fine as sewing cotton, and pale. It is accompanied by the lightest sound of bells. I follow it. It gets stronger; I grasp it and it thickens to string, and then rope, beneath my non-hands. The bell sound grows louder.

And then I arrive, right inside Gigi's idea of me.

I am every moment she and I ever shared. I smell cinnamon cookies and turmeric tomato curry and library books and Savlon antiseptic and horsehair and wild cat and soil. Colors overlap and meld and swim, and the bell chime is lost amidst the sound of my voice in a thousand moments.

Gigi, would you like another slice of Marmite toast?

Here we go round the mulberry bush . . .

Come on, Gigi, it's hot.

You want to call her Jemima? But she's not a puddle duck, she's a serval, you silly sausage.

Ignoring the noise, I force myself to hunt for the brightest, clearest me.

I thought it would be the me on the kitchen floor with my hair full of blood and my skirt all torn and the dark hands around my neck. But it's not.

“Mom?” Gigi called, and I turned from the drying orange soil covering the jackal family's grave to watch her approach. Gigi at eight years old. The pigtails that she insisted on doing herself were skewed, one
higher up on the side of her head than the other, and there was a small tuft of hair left out of both trailing down her back. She scrunched her eyes against the sun as she walked across the clearing to join me in the shade of the bottlebrush tree, and the scattering of freckles on her nose converged, making her look even more serious.

“Hey, love. How's it going?”

“Horrible. Simone's not talking to me.”

“I wouldn't worry about that, Gi. She's not talking to anybody today.”

“Is she still sad about the baby jackals?”

“Ja.”

“But why? She told me that nothing really dies, Mom, that when we pass on we all kind of blend together into a big ball of light and then little bits break off the ball to become new lives in baby things.”

“My, you have been talking to Simone a lot, haven't you?”

“She
likes
to talk to me,” Gigi said with a look that could've been accusing had she put a bit more effort into it.