Homing (16 page)

In the morning though – when she awoke on the couch, having slept very uncomfortably under a crocheted throw – she felt a niggling unease. All she could think of was that she had to return him somehow, like a lost dog or an overdue library book. And how would she go about it? She had no idea who to call. The police? The idea filled her immediately with guilt and fear. Perhaps she could just take him back to the new stadium, drop him off there at the tradesman’s entrance? A riddle for someone to solve. Because of course – she saw now, in the daylight – she couldn’t keep him.

First, though, she would make them some tea. They could sit outside on the balcony, watch the people pass below. She hesitated only briefly outside the door to the bedroom, then pushed it open.

The bed was empty, perfectly made up. Luki’s ball positioned at its foot.

She hurried to the front door, saw that the bolts and chain had been loosened.

The doorknob turned in her hand and the door pushed open, nearly tumbling her backwards in fright. Elizabeth stood in the doorway, staring back at Mrs Engelbrecht in almost equal surprise.

“What’s wrong, what’s happened?” cried Elizabeth.

“What do you mean?”

“No, it’s just, you look … your hair is all …” Elizabeth ran her hand over her own doek-covered head. She leant past Mrs Engelbrecht to peer inside the flat, frowning at the rumpled couch. “Has someone been here?”

“No! No.” Mrs Engelbrecht steadied her voice. “I’m feeling unwell. I didn’t sleep. In fact I have a shocking headache.”

Elizabeth turned her severe gaze back to the old lady’s face. “Do you need the doctor?”

“Oh, good heavens, no. I just need a lie-down.” She applied suggestive pressure to the door. “Perhaps I could ask you to come back tomorrow?”

Elizabeth resisted, pushing back and tapping a fingernail against the doorjamb.

“You sure.”

“Yes, positive.”

“Ja, okay. But I’m worried about you now.”

Elizabeth turned to leave, suspicious.

Just as Mrs Engelbrecht was about to close the door, she noticed the morning paper tucked under Elizabeth’s arm. “Wait!” She reached out and plucked at it. “Can I see that?”

“Do you want me to come in and read?”

“No, just … I wondered what happened. About the football player? That Frenchman.”

“Oh, that.” Elizabeth snorted in amusement. “No, they found him. He’d passed out at some shebeen.” She made a tippling gesture with her cupped hand at her mouth. “French!”

Mrs Engelbrecht went still, her fingers clamped to the page.

“They found him?”

“Ja – see for yourself. Yesterday afternoon already. Can you believe it.” Elizabeth lifted her arm, releasing the paper to Mrs Engelbrecht’s fingers. The loose inside sections unfurled, the pages separating out and subsiding to the floor.

The panes of glass in the balcony doors shook lightly in their frames. Both women turned to look. An electronic whine lanced the air, and a voice addressed them. The voice of a hidden giant, it seemed: muted but huge, garbled, vaguely haranguing. Vibrating through walls and floor. Then came rising strains of music: the anthem, they recognised. The roar of a multitude.

“World Cup,” said Elizabeth. “Now it starts.”

It was two weeks later, when Mrs Engelbrecht was on the way to the shops with Elizabeth – battling against the flood of tourists – that she saw him again. He was in the parking lot outside the bottle store, chatting with some of the other young men who hung out there, trying to make a few coins off the crowds. He wore a car guard’s luminous-orange bib, which jarred with the familiar yellow shirt beneath it.

“These Congolese,” said Elizabeth, clicking her tongue. Luki gave a couple of yaps and tugged at the lead. Eager to play.

He looked up and saw her then. Mrs Engelbrecht recognised his long face, even saw the pink of a healing scar curling around behind his ear.

Holding her eyes, he put out a toe and hooked an empty bottle up from the ground. He flicked it into the air – light touches, using his knees, his shoulder, his chest. And dropped the old lady a slow wink as he punted it away, a flash of silver spinning across the tar.

Waking, she was for a moment surprised by the bright-blue hand that lay before her face. The fingers flexed, then made a fist.

That’s my hand, then, thought Elly. Christ.

She sat up, squinting against the odd, prismatic light. Beside her, Mac lay on his back, Nadia with her head on his belly, hand resting on the cobalt skin. The pigment on their bodies had bled a little into the sand, creating a delicate corona around all three.

This long, empty beach was not one she recognised. They had arrived in darkness, and she remembered only a deserted parking lot, stumbling, a roaring tunnel. The tide was far out now across a stretch of sand that shone like wet cement. Behind them, an unbroken line of dune. By the height of the sun, she guessed it must be early morning; but already so hot. Putting a hand to her face, Elly was surprised by an insect flutter – the silver eyelashes. She’d forgotten. It had been a costume party: they’d gone as mermaids, all body paint and spangles. She tugged off the lashes and dropped them on the sand, and the sparkly light switched to a more terrestrial glare.

The surf receded before her as she stood and went to wash her arms and face; the paint was itching. Her skin goosebumped in the icy water, but remained stubbornly blue, dusted with points of glitter.

Elly was a small woman, spare and freckled; when she looked down over her flat chest, she could count the ribs. The skin was tight across her concave stomach, empty since yesterday lunchtime. Blue skin, silver bikini top, sequinned mini, and a silver pouch strapped where another girl’s belly would be. Her head ached a little, and the muscles in her jaw, from working it back and forth. It was the drugs: they always affected her that way.

I’m twenty-eight, she thought. Getting too old for this shit.

Their footprints wavered down the beach from the parking lot, erased where they dipped below the tideline, reappearing, three sets. Elly’s prints were tiny next to Mac’s. Nadia’s were also long, but slender. Elly placed her feet over her friend’s tracks, feeling in her knees the exact differences between their strides. Nadia, her oldest friend: they’d been playing together since they were seven, when they met in their leafy suburban junior school. Elly scuffed at the sand. She could only have slept for a couple of hours. It was too hot to stay lying here, though.

“Nadia. Mac. Time to go.”

They slept on, deep in their coupled slumber. Or maybe they were awake, just waiting for her to go away.

“Guys, I’m going to the car.”

They did not stir.

Elly trod in her own footprints up the beach – toes in heel, heel on toes. The milled trail skewed to and fro, up towards the tar, where she could see the mica glint of her car windscreen.

Automatically she touched the pouch around her hips. It felt flat and, she realised now, suspiciously light. She zipped it open. Bugger: the car keys. Had she dropped them? No – Mac was driving last night, wasn’t he? She looked back at her friends. They’d rolled towards each other, were lying embraced.

She turned away from them and glared at the wet sand.

Ahead, a fourth line of footprints cut across, straight up from the water: something that had beached during the night and struck out for the dunes. Elly went closer.

Large feet, larger than Mac’s, heavy and purposeful. She put her right foot into the stranger’s print. It was smooth-soled and deep, a sandy slipper. The soles were crisply defined, the big toes crooked a little inwards. She stood awkwardly for a moment, twisted at the hips. The left foot seemed impossibly far away: a huge stride, for Elly almost a leap. Her hips cracked when she tried it. Tiring, to inhabit this body. It required a strong, long-legged man. He grew before her, standing up suddenly and emphatically in his footprints: tall, broad-shouldered, handsome perhaps, walking away. She followed, concentrating on this tricky, loping stride.

The heat felt like dense liquid sinking into her scalp, and the sand underfoot was growing hotter too. She walked without thought – five minutes, ten, until colour and detail bleached from her vision. The prints became less distinct, finally lost in the looser sand. When she raised her eyes she found herself brought far up and away from the beach, right on the dune crest.

Below, she could see the clear insect-tracks of their night journey – intersecting with the stranger’s trail, which led straight as a ruled line to where she stood. The distant bodies of her friends were slight and motionless.

From here she looked down onto the other, secret side of the dune. Beyond was the steep wall of a higher dune, the dip between narrow and intimate, like the cleft between a sleeper’s arm and body. At the bottom, an irregular collection of boulders, some low grey-green shrubs. It looked quiet down there in the shade. She took two steps down, her feet pushing crescent sand-slides down the slope.

Hitching up the silver skirt, Elly squatted to pee. As her head dropped below the lip of the dune, the noise of the surf was abruptly stilled. Her ears were still numb and ringing from the long night, the bass, the voices. She remembered laughing uncontrollably; they’d been doing some silly dance move, shaking their mermaid tails.

Slowly she felt the silence infiltrate her, like some cool fluid, saturating, insulating. She could hear the tiniest sounds now: a faint insect rasping; the trickle of urine rearranging grains of quartz; the scratch of a twig against sequins. A flame-red mite, the size of a grain of salt, crawled over her toe, carefully negotiated one hair, two, and trekked out across the blue-varnished toenail.

The stream of urine was absorbed instantly into a neat little sinkhole, and stopped. She turned on her heels, eyes slitted, to peer down into the dune hollow. Her eyes moved sleepily over the textures of sand, stone, leaves, the gaps and cracks of shade between them, random and harmonious.

Except. There: something dully silver against the rock. A man-made thing. Placed by human hands.

She stood up with quick instinct, wary, pulling down her skirt as the landscape’s camouflage fell away. The stones slid into a different focus, revealing their arrangement and their function: not ten metres away stood a house, with walls, a roof, a door. There, where one rock leant against another, she saw now that the chink between them was stacked with putty-coloured flints. A sheet of rusted iron was wedged at an angle between the boulders. Below it, a piece of plastic hung like a curtain – its grey gleam had caught her eye. Two neat lines of stones marked a pathway to this rough entrance, and the sand was trampled flat.

She should go now. But her eyes were so tired; they wanted only to rest in the blue shade between the rocks down there. A prickle of new sunburn seemed to push her forward, a soft-palmed hand on the back of her neck. The sand crumbled beneath her feet, delivering her, step by sliding step, down towards that shadowed lintel.

She touched the edge of the curtain – a sack for fertiliser or cement. The material was dusty, stiff but yielding. Perhaps no one had moved it for months, years. It parted with a rustle.

Her eyes were too sun-bleached to make out detail, but there was silence in there, the neutral air of an empty house. A kind of antechamber with a low, rocky roof. As she knelt, the shade fell on her head, sensuous, irresistible; it was like lowering her face into a bowl of cool water. She could feel the tightness of the sunburn softening as she was drawn in by the skin of her cheeks and temples. A shutter closed behind her eyes in a deep, quenching blink.

Sight returned slowly, in the grey filtered light. Elly breathed in experimentally. The place smelt inorganic. No fug of habitation, except perhaps by heatless creatures of frugal respiration: sand lice, insects, crabs. No scuttles. No sighs. The floor under her knees was cool – cardboard, the slightly damp, spongy texture not unpleasant. She crawled a little further, into a larger space. The roof was higher here. As her pupils expanded, soft shapes separated in the dimness. Smooth, round objects, blue and grey, nothing straight or sharp. Walls and floor flowing into each other, the corners softened by sand and by creased folds of cardboard.

White shells were placed in a line against the base of the boulder wall. A shelf of driftwood, carrying a chipped china cow. A plastic tea tray with a picture of a peacock on it, carefully propped against the uneven rock. Tins that had once held beans and pilchards, standing in ordered rows with their metal lips beaten smooth. The stub of a candle on a flat stone, a ghost of black smoke streaking the rock behind it. Stone table, stone stools. Beyond, the far reaches of the cave were concealed in dimness, a tattered green nylon fishing net draped across one corner. Nursery whispers: Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks. Elly let her breath out softly.

There was a shallow pit in the floor, lined with the dimpled mauve cardboard used to pad fruit boxes. It looked inviting. Elly crawled over and settled herself in the hollow, her legs stretched out. Too big for her, a giant’s easy chair – comfy, though. She felt her neck relax, then her back; she let go the weight of her head. So sleepy.

The walls and floor were flecked with sunlight coming through chinks in the stone. They looked like spots cast by a mirrorball, or like light dappling through the branches of a tree. Elly’s eyelids fluttered, flicking closed, the weighted lids of an antique doll. Like light through leaves … through leaves, through big green trees, through oak and plane and mulberry …

… down at the bottom of the school, where it’s wild. Me and Nadia play there before class, also at lunch, also after. The oak’s ours. We took it when the standard fives got too old for playing house and went away. We fought for it. The oaks are best, or big pine trees with lumpy roots. There’s battles and tea parties. We sweep the sandy floor and arrange our special things: our plates of bark, our twiggy knives and forks.

Our house still has its tree life, though. There’s fungus on the cutlery and ants in our leafy beds. And look, what’s that, under the rock we’ve made into a table, something black and scuttling … turn it over … poison centipede! Charging forward on its rippling million legs, its pincers waving …