Homing (11 page)

And so she must continue. She must allow Auntie B to brush out her hair as she had once brushed Celia’s; she must go down to the sea and collect for Auntie A the pieces of broken plates and bowls. She must be serene, and persuade them that Celia’s heart had found in her own generous breast a peaceful resting place.

In the morning, when she was packing the car, Amelia and Belle came out to say goodbye. Amelia was carrying a large cardboard box.

“If you have to go, take a little something with you,” said Belle.

It would be a clay pot from the village. Belle often gave her presents from the workshop; Marion’s flat was full of them.

Driving back along the dirt road, she passed through the village and saw the women walking in twos and threes between the rondavels and the pink-plastered hexagonal houses, carrying paraffin tins and plastic drums on their heads. Not porcelain or clay, but functional. They made pottery for tourists, but for fetching their water, they used what worked best.

Back home in the city, Marion opened the cardboard box and found not a clay pot but Amelia’s partially reassembled vase. It was carefully bound up in thin sheets of foam rubber and sticky-tape. She took it gently out of its wrappings and placed it on the dresser.

“Auntie A, it’s beautiful,” she said on the telephone.

“It’s just an old broken thing,” said Amelia, sounding pleased. “Of course half of it’s still down at the bottom of the ocean.”

“But what if you find more pieces to fit?”

“Then you’ll have to come and get them, won’t you?”

After the phone call, Marion stood before the vase on the dresser for a long time. She had positioned it not centrally, but to one side. Next to it, invisible, was another, vanished vessel: the clear glass vase that used to stand on this same dresser when she was a little girl.

She touched the sides of the vase, the smooth patches of porcelain, the rough absences where the chicken wire showed through. And she was calmed by the feel of it. These broken pieces would not hurt her: spoils of empire, casualties of storm and wreckage, softened and blunted by time. Lovers on a bridge, a willow tree. And broken as it already was, she in turn could do the vase no further harm. Running her finger over the smoothed-off edges, she poked her fingertips into the gaps, feeling the parts that would always be missing, and the parts that were whole again.

Victor selects a square of glass and touches it with his palms. He’s very high up: from where he stands, he can see the whole long flank of the mountain and, on the other side, the Cape Town suburbs fanning out to the sea. At his feet is a stained concrete surface never meant to be seen, and before him rises a shining dome, three times his height. It reflects the soft pink sunrise and his own lean figure. His face is severe, deeply lined for a man still in his thirties, and determined. Only Victor himself can see something daunted in the eyes.

He blinks it away and shifts to the side, so that he’s looking instead at one of the rising steel beams. The beams support the dome, converging like the ribs of an umbrella. From street level, they seem as delicate as lines of latitude and longitude on a model globe, but up close, each is as broad as a big man’s hand. The glass they support is thick and greenish, a cloudy mirror. Where it’s bolted into grooves in the beams, there’s a gap between glass and steel, wide enough to admit fingers.

Victor finds the grooves, grips and leans back so that the weight hangs from his shoulders, and braces his feet against the glass. Up he goes now, climbing the curve, hand over hand.

Near the top, where the gradient eases out to almost horizontal, he picks a pane and lays himself flat, belly and chest against the glass. Below, the mall is waking, busying. At 9 a.m. the interior lights snap on, muted through the tinted pane. And then the glass becomes porous, revealing its depths.

Here, now. This is the place.

At this moment, Victor is calm. He shifts his gaze in increments from near to far. First, he concentrates on the surface of the glass. The reflection of his own eyes. This is not hard: all it requires is a kind of squint. Then, when he’s ready, he takes a breath and cautiously extends his focus. Pushes it through the glass and into the space beyond.

The dome floats above the open atrium of the shopping centre. Down there are mezzanine floors with ornate railings, escalators, elevators. Victor concentrates on these forms. It’s easier than contemplating the drop itself, the body lengths of space. Deliberately he moves his gaze from feature to solid feature, eyes gripping one detail at a time, down, down, all the way down through three storeys of light and movement to the tiled floor at the very bottom.

The first time he tried this, he failed. He’d touched the glass with his forehead and recoiled after just one glimpse. He had not yet learnt the trick of the incremental gaze. The next time, it was easier. Now he finds he is able to lie still and contemplate his fear. Because the fear is still there, of course.

The thing is, he can picture it so easily. The consequences. The sequence of events. It would all happen quite quietly. First just a snap, like the snap of fingers, and a small crack would jag across the pane directly under the weight of his body. A broken corner would drop cleanly from its frame, leaving a triangle punched out of the reflections. The breeze would assume a different pitch. From far below, faint cries would float. Small faces would look up, then scatter out of frame. And then, after a ceremonial pause, a creaking would start up, and a soft, percussive popping as glass and metal shifted, trying to adjust to a balance of forces fatally skewed …
tap … tap tap
…
tap
… A chain reaction, working its way through to the edges, each failure in the structure triggering the next until tiny cracks infested the dome.

And then the collapse; and a million fragments debouching into the waiting vault, losing their brilliance all at once, like a swarm of bees dropping from sunlight into shadow.

Leaving only a skeleton, a drawing, the concept of a dome. Through which it would be possible – easy – to plummet like a stone.

He closes his eyes. His heartbeat shakes the glass. It is a pond, and he a weightless insect dimpling its surface. The membrane holds. His breathing slows. He opens his eyes.

No sounds from below penetrate the glass, but there’s already much activity down there. Foreshortened bodies of shoppers cross the distant floor, eyes fixed on their own paths through the arcades or on the gilded arrangements in the shop windows. If they were to glance up, they’d see him easily, framed. But nobody looks.

Directly below him are the two elevators, uneven pistons moving in their shafts, their loops of cable bellying out as they rise and tightening as they fall. On the ground floor there’s a fountain: he can see the sequins of coins tossed into the shallow pool for luck. Escalators flank the space, one up and one down, and in between and around move the people. Only Victor, suspended over three deep mall storeys, is still. Watching the complex flow, he can see it all as a model, an animated diagram. It calms him.

But of course this is only the shallows. He must dive deeper.

Victor fears falling, but that is quite ordinary. Common, even. Below that fear, attached to it like an anchor at the end of a weed-slimed chain, is another, heavier dread. And that one is specific and unique, his very own.

He closes his eyes again and takes a breath, a man about to go deep. To touch the wreck.

He was ten years old, with a red hard hat which he had to hold to stop it slipping over his eyes. The foreman greeted Victor’s father with nods, and smiled at the architect’s son. Someone rapped knuckles on his helmet, and the hollow knock so pleased him that he kept tapping and scraping his fingernails against the plastic to make that loud, private sound.

The spiral parking ramp looked like an outsized fossil ancestor of a staircase. It was almost complete, and they could walk all the way up to the roof. At the top, the view was nice, but Victor was more interested in the noise and purpose of the building site.

This was a dusty world inhabited by grimed, brute figures, their workman’s overalls and their faces powdered the same dark grey, their mouths covered in cloths against the dust. Some climbed on rickety scaffolding. Metal shrieked on metal. Sparks from an angle grinder cruelly illumined one man’s face and hands, and the sound of drilling echoed off the concrete surfaces and found its way under the rim of Victor’s hard hat and into his skull. These men did not smile at him.

Victor couldn’t see how this could ever be transformed into a mall, one with polished floors that his mother might skate across with her shopping cart; it was impossible. His father, perhaps, felt the same. There was a stiffness in his dad’s body, in the way he tightened the scroll of blueprints in his hands. Each time the foreman slapped an unfinished surface, shouting over the clatter and grind of construction, his father gave a tiny flinch that only Victor could see. The project was running very late.

He had been told to stay close, but his father was soon distracted, arguing with the foreman and poking his finger at the rolled-out plans. The boy looked around. He was trying to match these rough walls to the clean edges of the architect’s model in his dad’s office: that perfect miniature had so delighted him. He drifted a few steps away, and then a few more.

He found himself at the edge of the deep hole that gashed down the middle of the building. This is where the dome would go, eventually – on the model, a faceted cardboard hemisphere the size of half a bowling ball.

There were barriers and yellow safety tape around the edge of the hole, but it was possible to lean forward and peer down to the lower levels. The dim, unfinished tunnels down there were exciting. Like the caverns where dwarves mined for gold in the fantasy books he loved reading. The ground floor was more complete than the higher levels; they’d even started laying tiles. In the very centre, a circular pattern of some glinting metal was set into the floor. He could just make it out: a compass rose.

Directly below him, on the unfinished first and second floors, two men were engaged in a vertical dance. The lower man, small from where Victor stood, was stripped to the waist. Over and over, he bent, took a red brick from a wheelbarrow and lofted it with a backhand movement straight up past his chest, with such accuracy than it sailed weightless into the hand of the man on the level above him. Victor had seen, and been mesmerised by, such rhythmic chains in the past; but he had never seen bricks propelled with such power, straight up. He could see the sinews pull in the man’s arm, the pads of muscle in his dark chest shifting. Tireless: bend, hoist, release …

The movement of the bricks seemed effortless, but even from up high Victor could see the sweat running off the men’s bodies, the forced speed in their movements. They were pushing, parts of a machine worked past its limits, strained to breaking. The lower man paused to wipe sweat from his brow, taking off his hard hat and setting it aside. He glanced up – did their eyes meet for an instant? Or was Victor just a blur in the corner of that worker’s dusty eye, dark against the ring of white sky?

Victor looked away, strangely shamed. When he dared to look again, the burdened dance had resumed.

Something batters up through the glass dome towards him, filling Victor’s vision. He flinches back from the gleaming face upturned, eyeless, avenging.

A wash of vertigo. Reeling, for a moment he loses up and down, feet floating, hands too slick to grip, toppling helplessly into the sky …

He shudders away from the glass. With a squeak of damp palms, he pulls himself into a crouch and stays that way for a moment, until the world rights itself. Pewter clouds, his own face white in reflection – and it’s just a sheet of glass again, depthless.

A shape lurks beneath the surface, though. He cups his hands to look, and after a moment makes it out: a helium balloon, butting up against the dome, pulled loose from some child’s wrist. He laughs – a rasping sound, too loud.

The breeze in the metal struts set up a buzzing resonance that puts his teeth on edge. He’s dizzy, like a weathervane swinging free. Beneath him, the building seems unstable, bricks quivering in their courses – all those old, unruly bricks, still trying to fly.

It wasn’t that he kicked, or moved with any force at all. He was lulled, caught in the rhythm of the brick dance, the arm dipping, straightening, flexing, the brick escaping upwards … but somehow he must’ve come forward, dreamy, perhaps winging his foot out in sympathy with the tired grace of the human pendulum below. He barely felt his toe catch and nudge the half-brick lying there on the edge. He only saw it hanging mid-air – a cartoon brick – before it was plucked down straight, as if pulled on a string. A line in a drawing, connecting the tip of his running shoe to the forehead of the man at the bottom. That face far below, turned up to meet the blow.

One quick step backwards, and the scene was concealed, the men erased, as if they’d never been. If there was a cry, it was lost in the noise of construction.

He went to his father and stood behind him, putting the larger body between himself and what had happened. His heart was beating fast but his mind was already hardening, refusing the images. He pushed his hand into his father’s bigger palm. His dad squeezed his fingers impatiently – not now – but Victor hung on.

Then someone started shouting, over by the scaffolding, looking down, up and down again. Waving at the foreman. But his father had already turned away: he seemed tired, in a hurry to go. Victor needed to pee, urgently and without warning, like a little kid about to wet his pants.

Together they walked back down the long spiral of the parking ramp. Nobody stopped them. A trickle of urine ran hot down the leg of his trousers, but his father would only notice that once they were back in the car and driving away. All the way down, Victor did not turn to look back, nor did he release his father’s hand.

This memory has not always been so detailed, so complete. Victor’s child-mind wrapped up the incident and sunk it deep. He never talked to his father about what happened, and perhaps his dad never knew; but then again, he was never taken back to visit a construction site.