The New Girl (Downside) (20 page)

But still no place to pee.

The fireplace room had no exits other than the one he’d come through so he backtracked through the serpentine corridor. Or so he thought. He passed the two doors he had looked into and
came back to his room. Only now it wasn’t his room. The space was much the same size, but instead of containing his bed and backpack, this one housed a stack of loose floor tiles and a
collection of concrete statues. Set into the far wall was a green door.

Jesus, he should have brought breadcrumbs to drop behind him. And the need to piss was becoming urgent.

Through the opaque-paned door was a warm expanse of terracotta floor tiles and black granite and hard-oak kitchen shelving. It looked like a kitchen in a catalogue, an impression compounded by
the fact that the windows were all sealed over with wood-veneered chipboard. And it was vast, bigger than any dream kitchen he’d ever seen. These people were probably expecting to have the
extended family – an entire clan of moles by the look of it – round when the building work was completed. If this was the house of a mafia boss, how many hits and takeovers would it
take to finish the construction? The counter tops were lined with coffee makers, interspersed with sandwich toasters, industrial-sized hot-water urns, mounted can openers, sandwich presses, rice
steamers, blenders. The further he walked inside, the more it looked like a kitchen showroom.

Of course! Import-export. That would explain everything. It was the perfect business for recent immigrants and would explain the half-finished opulence. Keeping the warehouse at home would help
keep the business off the taxman’s radar, and it would serve as a neat front for the more illicit business he imagined the mysterious ‘Father’ practised.

Ryan heard a noise and turned around, straight into Mother. His forearm swiped her side and scraped against something hard and knobbled under the lacy material of her bodysuit.

‘I’m sorry, I...’ he said, trying his hardest not to wipe traces of her off his arm.

She looked at him curiously. ‘Can I assist?’

‘I... Sorry... I was just wondering where the toilet is.’

‘Toilet? That... Yes. You do not have a bag,’ Her face twisted in an expression he couldn’t read. ‘There is a convenience that is suitable for upside citizens in the
hallway. I will show you.’ She led him out of the kitchen through a lounge area that was overstuffed with furnishings like another department of the showroom. The room was rank with the
petroleum odour of plastic still clinging to it, but just underneath that, a smell of wet soil. Mother noticed him looking at the clutter and she smiled her skew smile at him. ‘We have not
been here long, so have not converted the entire abode. Primo, is it not? We are attempting to decorate just in the local style as we have seen in the facsimiles.’

‘Yes, uh... it’s very nice.’

She opened the door of the guest bathroom near the front door; Ryan tried to brand the exact location on his mental map of the house. ‘Here is the convenience.’

As he pissed, he took in the pictures framed on the bathroom walls. Pictures of cows and trees and kittens in baskets, as if they’d been cut haphazardly from
Women’s Monthly
Magazine of Cheap and Generic Kitsch.

‘You will find next door in the closet the implements for your labour,’ Mother said to him through the door. ‘You may start in the greenery patch, then sweep the dust. Walk
where you will, but remember not to transgress on the upper level. That is for the family only.’

‘Sure,’ he muttered. You don’t have to repeat yourself.

He rinsed his hands and dried them on his jeans. When he came out of the bathroom, Mother was gone.

After a few hours of digging and hoeing, he had completely shucked off the disappointment of the morning’s excursion. He was relieved, in fact. Petty theft aside, he was
not cut out to be a criminal, to live in paranoid fear of the enemies he’d make. Sure, a hundred grand would have made his life easier, but if he was honest with himself, he knew he’d
never get it. He’s always been the sort of man who likes to work for his money, and now, bending his back and pushing his shoulders, sweating into the soil, he felt like he was earning an
honest wage, not like that menial, meaningless, computerised crap he had done back when he had a full-time job. Besides, he didn’t want to add a man like Duvenhage to his growing list of
enemies. He was a sick pervert, and he should be exposed. Ryan still had the files, and he’d think of some way to get them to the police without involving himself. In the meantime he was safe
here, and was earning good money to do good work. That’s the way he should have lived his life all along.

Around five that afternoon, he heard a metallic clang and rattle and peered through the bushes to see a station wagon pushing through the gates. Instead of parking in the garages where
he’d slept the night before, the car drove on up to the side of the house and the man with the cane and the big head got out of the driver’s side, limped round and opened the back door.
The girl got out and, like a radar, swivelled her head to where Ryan was standing up in the higher terraces of the garden. She made him out through the bushes, stared at him for a moment, then
bared her teeth. She might have been smiling, but despite himself, Ryan thought it was a signal of rage or desperation or – God help him – passion, or all three compounded.

The girl lifted her hand halfway, then went into the house. The driver limped back to shut the gates. That must be Danish. What did Mother call him? The ‘tame brown’? What the hell
did that mean? He was a pitiful figure, but although he had some sort of crippling disease that made him skewed and lopsided, and though his head was swollen to double the normal size, in some way
he was more recognisable and less strange than the woman and the girl. Maybe he was South African; that might explain it.

After his day’s work Ryan grabbed the loaf of bread and tin of jam from his makeshift nightstand and headed through into the kitchen, pleased to remember the route. He was quickly finding
his bearings in the house. It was beginning to feel, if not like home, like a plush furnished apartment hotel. Space, privacy and comfort. And a wad of hundreds stashed in his backpack. After all
the shit of the last week, he’d landed with his bum in the butter, to be honest. A song came into his head.
I gotta feelin’
something something.

He tapped out the tune on the counter top as he slotted two pieces of bread into a toaster and pushed the slide down. It didn’t seem to respond so he followed the power cord out of the
machine and crouched down under the counter to trace it to an electrical socket.

That tonight’s gonna be a
something something.

He was hungry. He was looking forward to his toast. He realised he hadn’t eaten anything since the morning.

He was still searching for a socket when he heard the click of heels entering the kitchen.

‘Hello, Mother,’ he said, and then looked up as she approached. It wasn’t Mother; it was the girl. He’d never seen her out of her school uniform and she was dressed in a
discomforting outfit of vintage dress and high heels that were both too big for her, and a straw hat, as if she was in one of those old French paintings of riverside picnickers. She was dressed
like a small copy of a picture of a woman.

In this get-up, another girl perhaps would just be playing the fool, expecting to be laughed at, but this girl was not playing. That milk-pale skin was flawless and her grey eyes burnt through
him. He was hot where her stare landed.

‘Hello, mister,’ she said and he realised he’d never heard her voice before. It was deep and rich and sombre, not the voice a young girl should be using. The spacious,
hard-surfaced kitchen was the perfect auditorium and the space between them vibrated with the sound. It grabbed his guts. ‘I am Jane. How’re
you
doin’?’ She held
out her hand like her mother had. A strange little girl playing at being grown-up? Or what?

‘I’m Ryan,’ he said, emerging at last from under the counter and standing up straight. His heart was beating in his groin. He couldn’t drag his eyes away from hers. The
toast limpened in the disconnected machine and Ryan pressed his hands to his brow. A thundering pain was starting up in his head.

‘Danish took me scouting this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Do you want to see what I got?’

Ryan glanced around him. ‘Uh, okay.’

She raised her left hand, which she’d been holding clamped to her side, extended it to him and opened it slowly, proudly.

There was some sort of insectoid mess smeared over her palm, spiky shards and yellow-green entrails trickling over her pale wrist. A very meaty locust, probably, which she had crushed in her
eager grasp.

‘It’s a burd,’ she said, pronouncing the word like a foreign term.

‘No, it’s a—’

‘It flies in the sky.’ She stretched her smudged palm to the ceiling, looked up to it and grinned – that same animal snarl baring miskept teeth, but this close he could see the
unguarded delight in her face.

‘It’s pretty,’ he said.

As soon as he got back to his room he had tried Karin again. This time, instead of flicking off, it went to voicemail. He thought quickly. ‘Listen, Karin. I’m in the hospital. I... I
had an accident. Please tell Alice that I’m okay and that I love her. That’s all I wanted to say.’ He thought he’d sounded convincing. A critically injured man trying to
make amends. He needed Alice to call him, and if a little white lie was going to make that happen, it was all for a good cause.

But now it’s Sunday afternoon and she hasn’t called, and neither has Karin phoned back. Either Karin didn’t buy his lie, or she just doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a
shit about her either. But what about Alice? Did Karin even tell her? And if she did, what does it mean? Could it really be over with Alice?

For the tenth time today, Ryan feels eyes on his back. Jane’s down there, he knows. As he hauled the cleaning equipment out of the store this morning, she trailed him ten metres back,
slipping between columns and behind bushes, just as she has since Friday afternoon, as if she’s playing some private game of spies. He looks down over his shoulder and, yes, there she is,
gazing up at him from a slashed thicket, as still as one of the concrete statues. Her grey eyes burn into him and his skull pounds.

It’s not right, her being left to wander this building site all alone. The way she mooches about after him reminds Ryan of Alice when she was much younger, maybe four or five, testing her
independence but at the same time always safe in the orbit of her father, glancing across every now and then for acknowledgment that she was protected and loved.

He’s seen just how isolated and alone Jane feels at the school among those rich and cliquey kids; he’s seen the void she drags around with her, but it makes him sad that here in her
house, which can only feel like a hotel to her – a temporary stop, not a real, loving home – she looks just as alone and lost. What is it with these people who have kids and don’t
even love them? You need a fucking aptitude test to open a bank account or buy a cellphone, but you need no qualifications to prove that you can love a child. It’s just wrong.

Wouldn’t it be equally wrong for him to just leave her here, without at least showing her that she deserves love?

He’s managed to ignore her plight so far, as much as he loathes doing so. He’d love to show her that there’s good in the world, but he’s been mindful all weekend of how
his rashness with Tess forced him to move before he was ready.

It would be a mistake, another part of him mentions quietly through the screaming in his brain. He should just go.

Jane looks up at him curiously from within a bower of peach trees, and he imagines he sees pleading in her icy eyes. He remembers how she fingered his blood when it dropped on her head last week
at school, how he thought about a stabbed animal. He shouldn’t have anything to do with her. He should just leave.

Sometimes she disappears. At these times he gets the sense that she’s vanished into the entrails of the house. Her paleness makes him think of a subterranean creature, like the mole-people
her parents must be intending to entertain in the windowless new wing. In all the occupied rooms there’s that plastic smell underlaid by a pervasive dank smell of earth as if this is all a
facade for show while the family lives in a hole in the ground somewhere. When she’s not out trailing him in the garden, he can imagine the girl huddling in the dark underneath the couches,
hiding her pale body in a fort before the exposure of her next week at school.

But she always reappears, materialising like a flash of danger in his peripheral vision just as he’s feeling at ease, sending a warm spike into his guts. The ripping pulse she causes
behind his eyes has become familiar.

Now she half raises her hand again and yells, ‘Let’s get outta here!’

He can survive this. He mustn’t do anything stupid.

His phone trills in his pocket. It’s such an unfamiliar sound to him that at first he thinks it’s a bird until it kicks into the full rendition of Britney Spears’ first hit,
something Alice chose for him.

He puts the phone to his ear, glancing towards where he saw the girl. She’s gone, and he’s relieved. For some reason, he can’t keep his daughter and the new girl in his mind at
the same time.

‘Daddy?’

‘Alice, sweetheart.’ Ryan remembers to keep his voice down, to sound injured. He walks deeper into the thicket, finds a dark place out of sight.

‘Are you all right, Daddy?’

‘I’m okay, love. Thanks for calling.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I...’

‘Are you going to get better?’

‘I think so... Yes. I’ll be fine.’

‘Mom didn’t tell me until now. She doesn’t believe you. She says—’

A hadeda ibis clatters out of the undergrowth and blares away, squawking to its companion.

Silence.

‘Alice?’

‘I can’t fucking believe it, Daddy!
You are lying!
You’re not in the hospital!’

‘Wait. It’s... I’m... There’s a garden here.’