Black Dog Summer (32 page)

“Come on, Monkey.” She glanced at me, sensing my disinterest. “Don't you think Jasmine and Jennifer need a holiday?” She picked up my rag doll, held her to my face, and gave her a little waggle. Jennifer's cloth arms and legs flapped around in a mad dance, making me smile.

“Ja. I guess so.” I took the doll from my sister, ending the dance, but then put her right back down on the rug again and slid my fingers back between my toes.

“Do you want them to go somewhere else?” Adele asked.

“Not really.”

“Then what's the matter?”

“I don't know. I guess I just don't really feel like playing dolls right now.”

“You say that a lot lately,” Adele said, covering her doll's face as if to stop her from hearing me. “Don't you like them anymore?”

“No, it's not that, it's just . . .” I stared down at Jennifer's blank stitched face. It was impossible to tell my sister that Jennifer had just somehow stopped being alive for me, and that our usual games now made me feel silly and self-conscious and bored.

“It's OK,” she said quickly, suddenly not wanting to know my reasons. “You don't have to do anything. I'll look after Jennifer and find her something to wear.” She picked up my doll and held her against her chest, stroking the back of her woolen head to comfort her. “She'll be well taken care of, don't you worry, Monkey.”

Now.

Adele
, I say, hijacking her memory.

For a long moment, she does not look at me but continues to cuddle the doll to her neck.

Please
. The child me's voice has a deeper harmonic to it. My sister shakes her head, not wanting to hear it. She closes her eyes. Her hands gripping Jennifer have gone bone white.
Please look after my Gigi.

Adele jolts upright in bed and rubs her fingers over her damp face. She listens to the comforting, everyday buzz of Liam's electric shaver coming from the bathroom, and waits for her heartbeat to slow back down to normal.

Gigi, dressed in her school uniform and a pair of Tyler's socks, opens the bedroom door and steps out onto the landing. At the distant sound of a toilet flush coming from Adele and Liam's en suite, a sudden stab of panic grips her guts, squeezes hard, and then almost immediately lets go. Whatever happens, whatever they decide to do with her, she will deal with it. The men did not come and Bryony is safe and that is all that matters.

Bryony's bedroom door is closed. Gigi lightly touches the white-painted wood before continuing past it to get to the stairs.

The clock on the kitchen wall ticks like the throb of blood in a vein. Gigi counts the seconds as she makes herself toast with peanut butter and a mug of rooibos tea. She chews mechanically, listening to the clock and the hum of the fridge. She has to take a sip of tea for each swallow because without it her mouth is too dry for anything to go down. When she is finished, she sits at the table with her hands on her lap and counts her breaths. Every time her thoughts try to slip off somewhere else, she brings them back, gently, as if training an exuberant puppy, just as Simone once taught her to do: breath in, breath out, up to seven and then start again from one.

Adele appears in the kitchen doorway and freezes when she sees Gigi all dressed and ready for school. “Oh,” she says.

They hear the sound of rushing water in the pipes; someone upstairs is taking a shower.

“You're all ready for school.” Adele rubs the crumples of confusion on her forehead with nervous fingers. The second her eyes meet Gigi's, they slide away.

Beneath the tabletop, Gigi's own fingers clench till the tips go numb. “Yes,” she answers. Her voice is almost a whisper.

“Right, then,” Adele says, launching herself into the kitchen and heading towards the coffee machine. Her vision blurs. In her head, the girl sitting at the table with her hair in a neat ponytail and her oversized, wrinkled school uniform looms enormous for a moment and then shrinks down to the size of a teacup. Adele clutches the edge of the sink for support as she turns on the kitchen tap.

She suddenly remembers exactly how Sally's little rag doll had felt when she'd pressed it against her neck all those years ago. Its stuffed cloth body had been soft and defenseless, like a sea creature that had lost its shell.

BRYONY SITS
up in her bed and stares around the room, trying to place the hour. It feels as if she's been asleep for days. What day is it? What time? She gets up on legs that no longer wobble beneath her and walks over to the window. She pulls the curtain open and looks out. The sunlight has lost that peachy early-morning look, moved on past lemon yellow, and now burns bright and clear. It must be well after school starting time.

She pushes the window open wider and sticks her head through the gap, breathing in the green smell of just-cut grass. She can hear the muted roar of a lawn mower somewhere close by and, on top of that, the light, buzzy zipping sound of bees in the lavender pots by the front door below her window.

Without really thinking about it, she touches the tender welt on her neck, running her fingers along the slight bump in her skin. Her index finger comes to rest in the hollow of her throat, and it is still there when she hears her parents' footsteps on the landing outside the room.

“Look who's up,” Liam says in a jolly tone as he pushes her door wider to step into the room. His smile looks not very well glued on.

“Feeling better, my girl?” Adele asks, coming in behind him.

Bryony blinks at them both. She can't remember when her parents last came into her bedroom at the same time like this. Her birthday? No. Maybe the one before last. It looks like they're stepping onto a stage, about to launch into a song-and-dance routine.

“You must be hungry. I've brought a treat.” Instead of sashaying into a number, Adele walks across the room and places a bowl on Bryony's bedside table. “Jelly and custard, just the thing for a girly-pie with a sore throat. Come and have some, darling.”

“For breakfast?” Bryony asks in astonishment. “You guys are acting seriously weird.”

She trots over to the bed, climbs back onto it, and picks up the bowl. A slithery spoonful of jewel-red wobbliness covered in sweet yellow goo slips down her throat. She takes another. It is only after her third spoonful that she realizes her parents are staring at her as if she is an alien from another planet.

“Your voice,” Adele says at last, her own oddly croaky all of a sudden. “It's back.”

“Oh,” Bryony says. “Ja, I guess it is.” She watches her parents exchange a look. “Why aren't you at work, Dad? What day is it?”

“It's Friday, love. But I just popped home to see how my girl was getting on.”

“I'm feeling better. Tonsillitis gone, I think,” Bryony says through another mouthful of pudding.

“Oh good.”

Two more spoonfuls go down. Adele and Liam share another look. Liam clears his throat.

“Now that you're talking again, Bry, your mom and I would really like to ask you a few questions about . . . the other day.”

Bryony dips her spoon into the bowl and very carefully sheers off a thin slice of jelly. A corner of it slips off her spoon: a delicate flap of transparent pink that catches the light before she puts it to her tongue.

“Darling”—Adele sits down on the duvet beside her—“we need to know what happened on Wednesday when you stayed home from school. How did you and Gigi end up at that abandoned house?”

“I was really sick and I had some medicine,” Bryony says. “Gigi was scared and we needed to find somewhere safe.”

“That makes no sense—” Liam starts, but Adele cuts him off with a look.

“What was Gigi scared of?” Adele asks in a gentle voice.

Bryony glances up at her parents and then back down again. “Just . . . stuff.” She shrugs. “She was remembering things, from the day Aunty Sally died. She just freaked out a bit.”

“Freaked out?”

“Liam, for heaven's sake, keep your voice down.”

“But all that blood in the bathroom? How did . . . did you and
Gigi have a fight?” Liam steps closer to the bed and drops down to his haunches. Bryony can see the shapes of his knees pressing against the dark stripes of his suit trousers. She remembers the shiny points of the nail scissors poking into her cousin's flesh.

“Is Gigi's arm OK?” she whispers. “Where is she?”

“She's at school.”

“And her arm?” she repeats, insistent.

“The doctors stitched it up nicely when you two were in hospital.”

Bryony concentrates on drawing lines in her custard with her spoon. The jelly is almost finished. “I'm actually feeling quite tired again, now,” she says.

“I know, darling, but it's very important that you tell us how you got those marks on your neck and on your wrists. Were you tied up? Did Gigi do that to you?”

Bryony is quiet for a long time.

“It's OK to tell us, darling. We understand that it must've been really scary and you probably don't feel like talking about it, but we need to know what happened.”

“It wasn't scary,” Bryony says in a different voice. She scrapes the last of the custard into her spoon and lifts it to her mouth. “It was just a game.”

“What was a game? Gigi tying you up? Strangling you? That was a
game
?” Liam forces himself to pause, take a breath. “Don't be silly, my girl.”

“It was a
stupid
game, that's for sure,” Bryony says, and places the bowl on her bedside table. “But I asked Gigi to tie me up like that. I wanted to try it. She said it was dumb but she did it anyway. Because I asked her to.”

“Why in God's name did you ask her to do that?”

“To see what it was like. Aunty Sally was strangled. So I wanted . . . to know.”

Liam and Adele seem to have stopped breathing. Outside, in one of the neat green gardens of Cortona Villas, the lawn mower growls and whines.

“How did you know she was str— We never mentioned that to any of you . . .” Adele trails off.

“It all turned out OK.” Bryony climbs back beneath the covers and turns over to face the wall. “Gigi realized that I was being an idiot and got really worried about me and she untied the dressing gown cord and I was fine, so I don't know what the big deal is about.” She squeezes her eyes shut and waits.

Finally, after what feels like forever, the mattress shifts as her mother stands up. Then she hears her parents leave the room and softly close the door behind them.

Bryony has chicken-noodle soup for lunch, drinks a glass of apple juice with Dora watching her like a hawk to make sure she finishes it, and then, still in her pajamas, walks outside into the garden, down the path, and through the wooden gate, stopping only when she gets to the fever tree beside the Matsunyanes' driveway. She places her palm on the lime-colored bark, sliding it up until it rests on the torn place.

For the hundredth time today, Bryony thinks about Gigi's story: the men, the blade, the blood, and Aunty Sally dying on the kitchen floor. She touches her throat, once again, and wonders how long it will be before her mother comes back from fetching Tyler and Gigi from school. She imagines the car pulling up and Gigi getting out and what will happen next. What will Gigi say, if she says anything at all?

What will I say?

Bryony presses her fingers against the welt on her neck, hard and sudden. She swallows, and then releases the pressure.

“Hey.”

She spins around at the sound of the voice, kicking the warm, dusty pebbles. It is Lesedi. She's in Converse sneakers, dark blue jeans, and a soft gray T-shirt that has the outline of a butterfly on it. She leans her head against the wooden post of her garden gate and gives Bryony a cautious smile.

“How are you doing, Bryony?”

“OK,” Bryony says, and then clears her throat. “You went away.”

“I did. Now I'm back.”

Bryony looks down at her feet. She pokes a pebble with her smile-toe and it rolls over with a click.

Lesedi notes the child's bruises and remembers the dark cupboard and the feeling of a band across her own throat. “I'm very glad to see you up and about.”

“How did you know I was sick?”

“You're at home on a school day. In your pajamas . . . and anyway, word gets around. You know what this place is like, hey? Everyone seems to know everyone else's business.”

Bryony does not look up. A car drives past.

“I'm sorry I told on you.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. You were right. Absolutely right. And so was the Body Corporate. This is no place to run a real business, now is it?”

Bryony removes her hand from the fever-tree trunk and runs her palm over her pajama shorts.

“I am looking for a proper spot to rent to run my sangoma practice, by the way, a real professional consulting room,” Lesedi says. “Thabo and I have found a few options. I'm still deciding which one will work best, though. Hey, I might need some help in choosing furniture for the waiting room, if you're interested?”

The top of Bryony's white-blond head moves in what could be a nod.

“I'm going to have fancy business cards and everything. What do you think of that?”

Bryony nods again. Stronger this time.

“You know, there are many ways of being a sangoma, just like there are many ways of being anything else in this life. Everyone has a choice to do things with light, or to work in the dark. Just in case you're still wondering, I am partial to the light, myself.”

“It's not always a choice,” Bryony mutters.

“No?”

“You were right.” Bryony looks up at Lesedi. Her eyes are blue with threads of gray in them. “About the shadows in my house.”

“Ah.”

“But the darkness wasn't Gigi's. She didn't choose it.”
It was hijacking her
,
thinks Bryony.
It got in when she saw the things those men did. They brought it with them and some of it slipped off and got inside Gigi when they killed Aunty Sally.