Black Dog Summer (5 page)

“Does Gigi being there mean you're not coming to my house this evening?”

“No, of course I'm coming; it's Shabbat.”

“Ja,” says Dommie, and gives Bryony a long look. “Of course.”

For the first time in as long as Bryony can remember, Tyler has not shut himself up in his room as he usually does the moment they arrive home from school. Today, he hovers on the landing outside her bedroom as if waiting for something. He's still wearing his school shirt and gray trousers, but his feet are bare, and, for the first time, Bryony notices that his toes have a few long hairs on them, like her dad's.

Tyler peers around the doorframe and watches Gigi sleep for a moment.

“Same position?” Tyler whispers.

“Same position,” Bryony replies.

“Wow, that stuff they gave her to zonk her out sure does the trick, hey?”

“Ja.” They glance at one another, and then both suddenly have to duck out of the bedroom to let loose a gale of snorting, spluttering laughter.

“Shit,” says Tyler, trying to stop himself. “We shouldn't be laughing.”

“Are we not allowed to laugh ever again now?”

“No, man. It's just . . . well, is she all right, just lying there like that? I mean, she hasn't eaten anything since she got here last night.”

“Looks like she hasn't eaten anything in a while,” says Bryony, peeping around the doorframe once more. Above the cherries, Gigi's ribs rise and fall, rise and fall.
If she wasn't wearing that gross gown I could probably count them from here.

“Shouldn't we wake her? What do Mom and Dad have to say about it?” Tyler asks, and Bryony shrugs.

“This morning, Dad just said it was the drugs.”

“Ja, but still . . .”

“And Mom's in her room.”

“Crying again?” Tyler asks, glancing towards their mother's closed bedroom door.

“Ja.”

“Shit.”

“Let's just go downstairs and watch some TV.” Bryony rubs one foot against the other, itchy to be away from the ribs and the cherries and the chemical smell.

“I really think we should wake her.”

“What, are you nuts?”

“She can't just lie there for days and days, Bry. What if she needs the loo or something?” The look Tyler gives her stops Bryony's giggle in its tracks. “If she doesn't eat it could be serious.”

“She smells.”

“Bryony!”

“Well, she does. Of hospitals.”

Tyler rolls his eyes at his sister, and she watches as he pauses for a moment, clearing his throat and straightening his shoulders. He steps into the bedroom, and in a few short strides he is at the foot of Gigi's bed. Bryony stays rooted to her post by the door, twisting the hem of her T-shirt between her fingers.

“Hey there.” Despite the throat clearing and shoulder straightening, Tyler's voice still comes out all wobbly. He reaches down and gives the raised bedding over Gigi's toe a gentle nudge. “Hey, Gigi?”

Her eyes open. (For the briefest of seconds I can sense her vivid purple swirl of confusion and panic.)

“I think maybe you should have something to eat or something.” Now that his cousin's enormous blue eyes are open and staring right at him, Tyler's shoulders are not quite as sure-looking. “Or something.” He pulls at the buttons on the front of his white school shirt. Gigi's expression is utterly blank. “Um, I'm Tyler.”

“I know,” she breathes. It is the first time she has uttered a word
since her arrival the night before. She blinks, swallows, and then shifts herself up a little on her elbows. Her collarbones stand out like the handles of a bicycle beneath her pale, freckled skin.

“I could get you some toast,” Tyler says, encouraged, but Gigi's eyelids have already gone heavy, her brown lashes poking out of red rims covering up the blue within. “Or maybe just a glass of milk?”

“A glass of milk?” Gigi makes it sound as if Tyler has just offered her a liter of fresh pig's blood. Her voice is thin and empty, like fat-free dairy. “No thanks.”

“OK . . .” Tyler shifts from one bare foot to the other, and Bryony wonders if that patch of her bedroom carpet is going to have a gross cheesy boy's-foot smell in it from now on. Not that it matters, seeing as it is not, strictly, her room anymore.

“So you're too old for milk?” Tyler says, smiling. “Tot of whiskey? Bottle of beer?”

The corners of Gigi's mouth move as if she just might smile, but it seems her face is too heavy for that. She closes her eyes and flops her head back against the wooden headboard with a clonk. It must hurt, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“Don't drink milk,” she whispers. Those bruised eyelids twitch. Tyler stands with his hands shoved into the pockets of his school trousers and waits at the bottom of the bed.

“Gigi?”

Nothing. He shrugs and turns away.

“Zombie,” Bryony mutters as Tyler walks back towards the bedroom door.

“What?”

“She's a zombie, Ty, I'm sure of it.”

“You're impossible, Bryony.” He grins, shakes his head. “It's just the tranquilizers.”

“How much longer will she be on them?” Bryony imagines Gigi crashed out in her spare bed for years, gradually growing older and older, her hair eventually covering the pillow and growing down to join the carpet on the floor beneath.
Sleeping Beauty, only in a saggy dressing gown, and minus the “beauty” part.

“Dunno.”

“Ty?” Bryony says, before her brother can shut himself up in his room again. “If Mom stays in her room until supper, tell her I'm at Dommie's, OK? I have to get there before sunset.”

“You know you're not Jewish, right?” he says, smiling, his eyebrows lifted up and lost in the floppy blond of his bangs.

“I
know
.”

“You're sure the Silvermans don't mind you gate-crashing their religion every week?”

“I'm not gate-crashing, Tyler. Mrs. Silverman invited me.”

“Once. She invited you once. I don't think you've missed a single Friday night dinner at their place since August.”

“So?”

“It's just weird.”

“
You're
the weird one.”

“You going to convert or something?”

“Shut up.” She turns to hide her red cheeks and starts running down the stairs.

“Good Shabbos, Bryony,” Tyler calls out after her.

“Shut
up
!”

The afternoon hangs still and yellow and full of the sound of ticking clocks. Bryony is tired of staring at the motionless Gigi, and it's still too early to go to Dommie's house, so she balance-walks along the cobbled flower bed border in the garden once more. Today, her journey takes her all the way out of the front gate. She shuts it behind her, blocking out the garden, and stares up the street towards Dommie's.

It isn't a real street; real streets are not paved with russet-colored bricks in a neat herringbone pattern and dotted with wrought-iron curlicued lampposts and street signs, but the designers of Cortona Villas had obviously been trying to capture the quaint charm of a Mediterranean village. They might have succeeded better if the entire complex had not been landscaped by someone who clearly had the wrong brief, because the plantings maintain a distinctive indigenous African flavor: spiky aloes, succulent elephant plants, and pebbles
flank the paths, and between each two adjoining driveways stands a pale-green-barked, white-thorned fever tree.

Bryony hovers beneath the delicate, fluttering shade of the fever tree that grows between the Wildings' driveway and the Matsunyanes'. She drops to her haunches and fingers the warm white pebbles lying at its base. Soon she has a small collection, the most circular ones that she can find, and folds the front of her T-shirt up into a little pouch in order to carry them.

“
The indiscriminate, merciless killing of a number of human beings,
” Bryony whispers, and with each word she drops a round pebble into her shirt with a soft click.

“What've you got there?” The voice startles Bryony and she jumps, sending the pebbles tumbling out of the cloth and scattering across the bricks of the driveway. She turns to see Lesedi Matsunyane standing by her own garden gate and staring at her. She wears a long skirt with a picture of the Johannesburg skyline printed on it, and, beneath its hem, Bryony notes a pair of bare brown feet.

“Um. Nothing. I wasn't going to take them . . .”

“Interesting.” Lesedi smiles and walks closer.

“I wasn't—”

“The way the stones fell.” Lesedi comes beside Bryony to peer down at the scattered pebbles, and Bryony breathes in the smell of warm soil and cinnamon. After studying the pebbles for a moment, Lesedi glances sideways at Bryony with a tiny frown line between her perfect brows. “Hmmm.” And then, at last (I have been wondering if she will do so again), she looks up at me.

This time Lesedi's attention brings with it the ozone smell of approaching thunder and the sensation of a sun-warmed lizard skittering over my scalp.

“How did they fall? Why's it interesting?” Bryony asks, thrilled at Lesedi's fragrant proximity and the sudden mystery of the fallen pebbles.

“You have a guest?”

“Yes!”

“Hmmm.”

“How did you know we have a guest staying?” Bryony stares hard
at the pebbles, but they just look like oversized mint imperials scattered on the paving in no particular pattern at all.

Lesedi is about to answer, but she checks herself and starts again: “I saw your mom and dad arriving home last night with a girl in the car.”

“Oh. She's my cousin, Gigi. I'm Bryony, by the way.”

“Pleased to finally meet you, neighbor-Bryony.” Lesedi's formal handshake makes Bryony blush. “I'm Lesedi.”

“Hi.” Bryony's voice is a squeak.

Lesedi looks down at the pebbles again, and the frown between her brows deepens. “You must be careful,” she says in a soft voice. “Be careful.”

“Of what?” Bryony breathes. For a long, still moment, nothing moves but the pattern of dappled shadow cast by the slender fever tree branches above their heads.

“Of messing around with ‘communal area' property,” Lesedi says in a different tone. She smiles and walks back towards her garden gate once more. “The Body Corporate of this place is run like a military institution. You might get court-martialed for even looking at these stones.”

“Oh.” Bryony smiles back, wondering what a court-martial is.

“Well, I'd better be on my way then, Bryony. See you around.”

“See you around, Lesedi.”

The candlelight strokes the stems of the silver knives and forks and glints off the hair clips that Shane Silverman has borrowed from his sister to hold his yarmulke on. When Dommie's mother waves her hands above the twin flames and then raises them to her face as if pulling the light right into her temples, an electric shiver races down Bryony's spine and all the little blond hairs on her arms stand up on end.

“Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha'olam . . .” Bryony breathes in the throaty, mysterious words as Mrs. Silverman sings them, and shuts her eyes.
Something magical is happening. I just know it.

Bryony resents her parents for not being Jewish or, in fact, for not
being Catholic or Native American or Zulu or anything interesting at all. The annual, tense flurry of decorations, food preparations, and arguments with extended family members over who's doing what at Christmas is no substitute for a connection to something ancient and powerful as the Silvermans seem to have.
So unfair.

Bryony wants magic, and this low-lit dining table with its plaited loaves nestled under lace napkins like fragrant babies waiting to be named is not quite the same thing as the Hogwarts Great Hall, but here at least she can believe that such things are possible.

My intrusion on the Silvermans' Shabbat dinner feels impolite, and I hurry to pull myself free of Bryony's story. The noise begins its relentless buzz the moment I leave the prayers and chink of cutlery on china, but I continue to head for the darkening sky. Straightaway it rushes at me and pours right into me, filling me up till I am the entire horizon stretched from end to end across the earth.

Nocturnal creatures stir and step out into the cooling air to sniff at the scents that the day has left behind, and I can almost feel the soft pressure of their footsteps: dusty paw pads, claws that dig, and the delicate, tiny-boned toes of mice.

At the rescue center in Limpopo, out behind the kitchen, we used to keep a large chicken-wire cage full of mice. Keeping them ensured that we could provide regular meals for the small wildcats, snakes, and birds of prey that passed into our care and, with a bit of luck, out again and back into the wild.

When we first moved from Johannesburg to join Simone on her farm in the northern part of Limpopo, watching those silky little pockets of fur with feet at each corner dashing up the tree branches and ducking into the hidey-holes of their enclosure was torture for me. All of that industrious living and whisker twitching for what: to end up as nothing more than a mini-meal for something with bigger teeth?

Even though Gigi was only five when we arrived, she had no such dilemma. I remember her in a tiny pair of denim dungarees and city sandals lugging a bucket of food from the kitchen to the mouse cage, and then, later that same day, watching Phineas feed a small selection of the rodents to Bratboy, the milky-tea-colored caracal whose
arrival at the sanctuary had coincided with ours. Bratboy had been brought in with a raging attitude and a foreleg that had been horribly damaged in a gin trap. He had spent the first few days of our stay under partial sedation as Johan, the resident conservationist, who had abandoned his veterinary practice in favor of tending to the creatures that Simone took under her wing, cleaned out his wounds and tried to reset his leg.