The New Girl (Downside) (34 page)

Ryan shifts around the kid and hears his mother trotting up as he jinks right down another corridor. He doesn’t look back.

Stay calm, he tells himself. It’s just a kid and a security guard. It’s not that bad. Surely. It will be okay. If he’s in luck, Alice and Karin will be here soon.

He checks his wrist, but he’s not wearing a watch. Come to think of it, he can’t remember the last time he wore one. What happened to his watch?

He goes into a phone shop. There’s a woman in a white blouse and black suit jacket sitting behind the counter. She’s wearing a yellow scarflet around her neck like an air hostess.
She’s looking down at her keyboard.

‘Hi. I wonder if you can tell me the time.’

She looks up at his face and gasps, but professionalism constrains her. He watches her frightened eyes scan the cut of his shirt, the weave of his tie and calculate his worth.

‘It’s... it’s uh...’ She swallows something down and checks her watch. ‘It’s twenty to six.’

‘Thanks.’ Ryan tries to smile his reassuring smile, but it doesn’t work so well any more. If Karin and Alice are coming tonight, they’ll be here soon. He turns to
leave.

‘Anything else I can...?’ The sentence trails off behind him, the woman obviously relieved she won’t need to finish it.

Ryan hurries down the escalator and takes up his place on the bench on the mezzanine level. An old wino clutching tiredly onto a bottle in a brown plastic bag shifts away from him unconsciously
but doesn’t look over at Ryan.

Ryan keeps his head down as more children and parents walk by and as security guards circulate, thinking only about the end of their twelve-hour shift. He peers at the escalators from under the
lip of the hood until, at last, he sees Karin’s thin form riding up to the top level. But where is Alice? Ryan lifts his head and scans the atrium, ignoring the double-takes and hastened
steps of the passing shoppers who notice him.

He almost doesn’t recognise Alice when she passes close by him, far behind Karin’s wake. She’s dressed all in tight and too-short black, her hair dyed darker than he’s
ever seen. She’s carrying a single red rose. Worst of all, she’s clutching the hand of a tall and pimply boy in faded black jeans and T-shirt. His mousy hair’s in a failed coxcomb
and he’s walking slightly ahead of her with a confident swagger he simply has no reason for.

‘Alice!’ Ryan jumps up and follows them up the escalator, elbowing a bag-laden woman aside, forgetting everything he’s prepared. ‘Alice!’

She turns around and her face curls in disgust. She stumbles at the top of the escalator and walks away, scanning ahead for her mother. The geek strides along with her.

‘Alice, wait! It’s—’ He wanted to do this somewhere quieter, somewhere he could explain to her why his face has changed. She’s almost running now. She glances back
at him, not a hint of recognition in her eyes. He tries to catch up and she ups her pace.

‘Mom? Mom?’ she’s saying, and now she pulls her hand out of the boy’s. They’ve rushed into a corner between the bookshop, a jewellery shop and a pizzeria. She has
to turn around.

Ryan holds his hands up. He stands still, tries to sound calm. ‘Alice. It’s me.’

The boy steps forward. ‘Listen. Just leave her—’ he squeaks, losing his nerve when he gets a good look at Ryan’s face.

This boy was not part of the plan. ‘Fuck off!’ he hisses at the boy. The kid looks like he’s about to wet himself. He takes two steps backwards, and Alice takes two towards
him. Some space is better than none.

‘It’s me. Dad.’

She looks at him. Stares at his face longer than anyone has since he got it. She shakes her head, backs away, holding up the rose like a talisman, like a crucifix to a vampire.

‘I promise, Alice. I’ve just... I’ve just had... I can explain. Can we sit somewhere?’

She’s still shaking her head. She steps back to the boy and grabs his hand again. ‘No. Leave me alone, you fucking freak,’ she says.

‘Alice. Come on. You know it’s me.’ Ryan walks towards her. He reaches out and takes her arm.

She drops the rose and Ryan steps on it as he advances, feeling the soft crush of the bud under his thin-soled shoe. ‘Leave me alone!’ she screams in a shrill yell.
‘
Mommeeeeeee!
’ She sounds like a five-year-old. Ryan’s never heard her so afraid. He lets go and turns, and walks straight into Karin, who knees him in the groin. It
doesn’t hurt Ryan, now he’s been fixed, and he stumbles on, trying to get past her. Karin rakes a sharp shoe point down his shin, grabs a clawed handful of hood and face, and
twists.

‘You don’t fucking touch my daughter!’ she’s yelling, high on adrenalin. He can see the sweat beading on her top lip. She has no idea who he is.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he’s saying as he shakes himself loose from her grip. He’s trying to make for the exit when a weight smacks him from behind. He’s hauled over and
pepper spray jets into his eyes. Someone’s sitting astride him, knees paralysing his arms. He can’t bring his hands up to cover his face, and more of the stinging liquid is sprayed onto
it. Someone else kicks him in the groin before he’s hauled up. Ryan could almost laugh.

Later, after the security guards have made him wait in a sweat-smelling, windowless cubicle, have taken a photo of him and loaded it and the details they’ve found on his
new driver’s licence laboriously onto their computer system, they cut him loose.

‘Nobody’s pressing charges,’ the scarred security man says. ‘But you don’t come back here.’

Ryan feels a magnetic pull back to the house, back to Jane. She never screams when she sees him. But it’s almost too simple. The tang of predestiny – as if they knew all along he
wouldn’t stray far and that’s why they don’t care if he goes out – sparks a last little ember of rebellion in him. He doesn’t go where people tell him to go, he tells
himself, but it’s a small voice, feeble and unconvincing. Maybe it’s time to grow up, get real, make the best of his restricted circumstances. That’s something he’s avoided
throughout his life. Maybe that’s something only kids do, that constant kicking against authority. He’s nearly forty, for fuck’s sake, and he’s still floating around in the
world, completely untethered. Especially now. His last anchor, Alice, is gone. So maybe Jane’s right. He belongs there; he has a job.

That last little voice of independence inside him turns the Volvo left at Sovereign Street instead of taking him straight across. He’s going to try one final time to revisit his past, to
regather those pieces of himself that he’s lost.

He parks a few houses down from Ma Beccah’s house and walks the rest of the way. The night air is cold now and he tugs the hood down over his head and pushes his hands deep into the
pockets of his jacket. A shower of plane leaves falls around him as the breeze gusts.

As ever, the front door is unlocked. Ryan pushes through and goes down the passage and to his room at the back, hoping Ma Beccah won’t see him. He tells himself that he’s here
because he just wants to collect the rest of his things, but somewhere else inside, he wants to be where he was – who he was – before this all started. If he had just kept his nose
clean at the school, if he hadn’t been so stupid as to get involved with the girl next door, if he hadn’t—

But he stops himself. He knows it all started a long time before that.

He’s so used to this dark path through to the small room, the floorboards creaking here and there as they always did, the smell of the tenants’ cheap meals clinging to the air, that
he’s surprised when his door doesn’t open. He instinctively pats his pockets for the keys before he remembers he’s been gone for too long. He rattles the doorknob as if it will
miraculously open.

‘Out! Out!’ Ma Beccah’s standing in the doorway to the sitting room. Just like she protects her house, she protects herself without hard, aggressive metal, without locks and
gates and guns, but through the sheer force of her will and righteousness.

‘Ma Beccah,’ he starts, then swallows the rest of his words. He draws the cowl over his head and retreats without another word or a glance.

‘There’s nothing here for you.’ Ma Beccah’s voice follows him.

The last strand of habit holding him here turns him right at the gate and along to Fransie’s house. The light’s on at the porch, but the old man’s chair is empty. As his eyes
grow accustomed to the darkness, he notices a slight movement in the shadows. The space beside the house has been cleared; Tess’s fantasy castle, what she thought was her safe space, has been
deleted. Nonetheless, the girl stands there in a dark fleece top, her arms folded close around her chest. Ryan remembers their previous encounter; she seemed light, charmed. Now she stands sullen
and scrapes her shoe at something on the scrubby patch of lawn, unsmiling, disengaged. Some light has gone out in her. He could make her happy, couldn’t he?

She looks up when she senses him standing on the pavement looking over the low wall and screams. It’s a gut-ripping scream and before Ryan can process the shock, Fransie is running down
the stairs with a bat in his hand. Ryan races up the road, away from the car, afraid to pass in front of Ma Beccah’s house again, but soon Fransie has caught him. For the second time tonight
he feels a wallop over his kidneys and he stumbles to the pavement, tearing the knees of the suit and skinning his palms. Fransie cracks him a blow over the skull and Ryan rolls into a foetal ball
at the base of a wall.

Fransie hawks a throatful of phlegm and Ryan feels the weight of it spatter against the hood.

‘I see you around here again, I’ll kill you.’ Another fat wad of mucus hits him. ‘I promised my girl I’d never let anyone touch her again.’ A half-hearted
kick in the back and Fransie’s gone.

Ryan waits a few minutes before hauling himself up and sneaking back to the car like a whipped dog.

The next day – he thinks it is, it doesn’t matter any more – Ryan’s tending the small vegetable patch in the new house’s back yard, back in his ragged jeans and
sweatshirt, his new face uncovered. He checks the carrot and beetroot seedlings and carefully replaces the protective mesh. At this time of the year a frost is unlikely, but one could strike
without warning.

‘Why are there no beanstalks?’ Jane asks. She’s standing in a square of sunlight, enjoying the warmth. It’s not doing her skin any good, Ryan thinks, but he doesn’t
say so. He doesn’t want to lecture her.

‘It’s the wrong season for beans,’ he says. ‘But there will be carrots and beetroots in two or three months.’

She pulls a face. ‘If I wanted dirt produce, I could stay at home.’ She crosses her arms and cocks a hip like a sulky pre-teen. She
is
a sulky pre-teen, Ryan reminds
himself. That used to mean something different to him. He tries to remember what it was about her that so compelled him back at the school, but he can’t feel it. He remembers it, but
it’s like watching someone else in a movie. Jane’s just a little girl.

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ he says. ‘We won’t be here long enough to reap anything. Nothing will be ready before we go back.’

‘But there was living produce in the other abode,’ she complains.

‘That house had an existing vegetable patch. We’re starting one from scratch here, despite the fact that...’ He stops. It doesn’t matter. When he was down there, he felt
the uncomfortable pull from the hole in his head every time he thought to argue with the rules. Up here, there’s just numbness. The shunt hasn’t been renewed for weeks and the hole
doesn’t work on him any more. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. This is what it is to let go. Let someone else tell him what to do, no matter how illogical. If you just stop fighting
– stop trying to have an opinion – everything’s just simpler, isn’t it? It’s not like he has any option. It’s not like he has anywhere to go. Besides, he really
likes planting vegetables. It makes him feel like a monk, like he did at the mansion, in peaceful, directed service in the eye of the storm.

He digs out another neat furrow with his trowel and sprinkles in new seeds. ‘Are turnips any better?’

Jane twists her lips and turns back to the house.

For the third time today, Ryan sharpens the edge of the trowel with a stone, then pushes the point into the skin of his left palm. He watches curiously as the blood pools then seeps over his
wrist and down his forearm. Again he wonders if he’ll feel anything.

He twists the trowel’s sharp point in the gash.

Nothing.

Mindful that it’s her last day before she goes on maternity leave, Tara takes extra care packing away the books, double-checking to ensure that the kids have correctly
turned off the library’s computers. She wishes she’d listened to this morning’s weather forecast and worn something lighter. The back of her long-sleeved shirt is damp with sweat,
and the summer heat isn’t helping her swollen ankles or the morning sickness that’s still taking her by surprise deep into her third trimester. Still, she thinks, gazing at the neatly
ordered shelves –
her
neatly ordered shelves – what right has she got to complain? This is what she wanted. All her dreams coming true. A fairy-tale ending.

Sure, Kestrel Academy is still a private school – not quite the sort of needy institution to which she planned on applying when her permanent residency finally came through – and
she’s only part-time for now, but who knows? After she’s finished breast-feeding, perhaps she will take up the offer to teach here full-time. And at least Kestrel Academy has a far more
liberal approach to reading matter than Crossley College. Ms Traverso, the school’s head – a woman so New Age granola that Tara wouldn’t be surprised if she rocked up to assembly
one morning dressed entirely in dreamcatchers – has given Tara free rein, only insisting that she not order any books that might contain ‘hate speech’ or ‘anti-green’
messages. Tara can’t help smiling at the horror with which she imagines Clara van der Spuy would eye her collection of Harry Potter and Suzanne Collins novels. Not that Clara’s in much
of a position to do anything these days. According to Malika, who Tara occasionally runs into at the Eastgate Woolworths, Crossley’s old librarian succumbed to a stroke shortly after the
school went bust, and is stuck in some crummy institution on the East Rand. Shame, Tara thinks. She keeps meaning to visit her, but has never quite got round to it.