Homing (17 page)

…
ROARING
…

She knocked her head against the wall in fright and came quickly awake. Lurching forward onto her hands and knees on the cardboard floor with a gasp, she listened.
Something here.

Only when the sound came again – another snort, shorter and guttural, a whistle, then that groaning roar – did she recognise the snoring.
A man.

Had he been there all along? She hadn’t seen him, there in the dark corner behind the green net. At first, her eyes took in only the ragged honeycomb of the nylon; then her gaze slid through the gaps to the shapes beyond.

Huge, charcoaled soles, and gigantic toes pointing slightly inwards. She saw now why the footprints had been so deep and defined: his feet were shod with calluses as tough as hooves. Leaning forward silently, she found the long, narrow legs, disappearing at the knees into the folds of a dark coat, fists clenched against his thighs. And at the far end, jammed against the rocky confines, a face turned away, exposing a sinewy neck. The cords of the throat seemed to strain against each ferocious snore, stressed by the passage of air. Asleep, but not at ease. The sound of his struggle filled the cavern.

Again the world seemed to shift and correct. The colours dirtied. The roof was suddenly too low, the air too thick. As if regaining a lost sense of smell, Elly was penetrated by the sour stench of an unwashed body, of days-old drinker’s sweat. She had made a mistake. She had passed somehow into another country: this was not the land of acorn-cup teacups and leafy beds.

Stealthily, she reversed, in a slow-panic scuttle like a crab’s. But halfway across the space a star of light on the far wall hooked her eye. The sun was reflecting off something lying on a ledge in the wall, just above the sleeping giant’s chest. A little alien figurine, chrome, with glittery-black almond-shaped eyes in its big head. It took her four or five motionless seconds to understand what it was doing here, this detached piece of herself: her key ring. Her keys.

He’s just a bergie, Elly calmed herself. She crawled closer, pushing past the shreds of green webbing. Knelt at the man’s side. She kept her breaths small and unobtrusive: crab breaths, sand-flea breaths. She was so close now, she felt his odorous heat on her face. The big man groaned, sighed, gave a phlegmy rumble, but did not wake. The key-ring alien, eye-level, stared back at her with the stunned gaze of a hostage. It looked impossibly bright: a child’s thing.

The roof was too low for her to stand, but kneeling, she could barely reach across his great bowed chest. She had to balance on the balls of her feet and lean forward, bracing herself with her left hand against the rock. She arched over him, sucking in her stomach, reaching for the keys with her right hand. The bare skin of her belly was only millimetres from his clothing. The substance of the overcoat was unidentifiable, with a dull shine, like the matted, slightly oily hide of an old animal.

She didn’t see him wake; only felt the huge hand closing over her right arm, above the elbow. The grip was unlike any human’s she had yet experienced: no give in it at all, as if her arm were instantly set into a stone cuff. In a stiff movement from the waist, the man sat up, crumpling her back onto her folded legs. She was helpless, a lizard in his fist. His mouth was close to her cheek now, and she smelt his tigerish methylated breath.

She saw every fine detail of his face. It was worn and weary – although she was surprised to realise, from the smoothness of his neck and forehead, that he was not an old man. A gull feather was stuck in his matted beard. His skin was muddy, rubbed on the ridges and prominences with a mineral grey like pencil lead. Impossible to tell what colour that skin had been originally, to imagine it clean, soft, a baby’s cheeks. The pupils of his eyes were gigantic, rimmed by a narrow ring of milky blue. But he wasn’t blind.

“Sorry,” she said.

He raised his free hand, and with a thumb so worn and hard it might have been encased in plaster, he rubbed her eyelid, her cheek. Scowling at the smear of blue paint and sparkles that came off on his skin.

“It’s …” she swallowed. “It’s a costume. Dressing up.”

He didn’t understand. He shook her, left and right, as if to dislodge some sense from her mouth. She pointed crookedly with her chin at the keys on the cave wall.

“My keys. I just want my keys. Then I’ll go.”

His grip hadn’t shifted or slackened. He held her a little raised from the ground, so that she could not rest her weight fully on her feet. Her legs started to ache beneath her. But he was patient. They held the pose for a minute, two – long enough for the sun to move its precise needle away from the keys, and into her right eye. She dipped her face. He opened his hand, letting her fall painfully onto her folded legs. Elly rolled on her side, watching him. His eyes moved over her, rested on her lap. She watched his fingers creep forward, touch her skirt. She did not breathe.

But it was the cloth he was interested in: his tannin-brown nail fingered it slowly, sleepily, the light scattering in little silver moons off the fabric.

“My keys. Please. I just—”

He hit her full in the face, an open-hand slap with a palm like a piece of wood. Her whole head rang.

“This is my place.” A husky voice, unused. “Mine.”

Elly nodded stupidly. Nobody had ever hit her like that.

He became animated, businesslike. He clicked his fingers, a startlingly loud noise, like branches snapping. All impatience now.

“Cigarettes. Cigarettes. Come.”

Quickly obedient, she zipped open her pouch, pulled out a crumpled packet of Stuyvesants and handed it to him. He checked how many were left, then nodded towards the purse.

“And that. Come come come.”

She did what he said, handed over the whole purse, money, credit cards, whatever. He put it into an inside pocket of his coat without checking.

“Ja. Now
voetsek
.”

Elly was plummeting helplessly younger, three years old now, tears coming.

“My keys …”

“
Voetsek!
” Raising a hand.

She stumbled backwards, scrambled somehow back through the wormhole cave, the rustling aperture, out into the white-out sun, panting, safe for a second.

He followed from his hole, coat flapping, roaring, flinging sand like a great sand lion. Then there were stones coming at her; she was brought to her knees by a pebble to the cheek. As she struggled up again, something hard and shiny cut her lip and fell into the sand. Stinging, she picked up the keys and ran blindly uphill, headlong.

Out into the dune field she ran, away from the sea, into a wasteland: broken glass and bottlenecks and human shit, flies gathering around bloody things in the bushes. She was surely lost now, lost for good.

But in truth it is only ten or fifteen minutes before she stumbles over a dune and sees the parking lot below. Maybe more, because the sun is at its full and furious height, and she is quite incandescent with sunburn, sizzling with cuts on her feet, her face, her arms. Maybe an hour or two.

Or perhaps much longer. Because standing there she knows she is changed, quite changed. And who are these children, turning their blue-streaked faces towards her now with sharp cries of relief, their costumes torn and spoiled?

And as she descends the dune, it seems to the others, too, that Elly is altered. Taller maybe, more substantial; and walking with the long, deliberate stride of some much larger being.

The girl was expensively dressed: a lambswool coat in a luxurious shade of caramel; a silk blouse over jeans. Her red beret was vivid against her dark hair and skin. Despite the heels on her sharp-toed shoes, she moved quickly, working her way through the evening shopping crowds at the entrance to the Pick n Pay. From her thrusting shoulders, you might have thought she was hurrying through the throng to some urgent appointment.

Maja slipped the hat off her head and let it drop to the floor beneath the feet of the crowd. Bareheaded, she was invisible to her followers, vanishing into the multitude like a swimmer ducking underwater. Quickly she slipped down a side corridor and into the first small congested shop to her left.

Peeking out from behind a shelf, she watched the passageway through the plate-glass window. A man walked past, fast, muttering into a walkie-talkie. Plainclothes security, she guessed. Trailing behind was a younger, slender man in a security guard’s uniform, the mall’s pseudo-heraldic crest embroidered on his red breast-pocket. He paused and looked towards Maja, but not directly; he didn’t seem to see her. He was a boy really, barely older than Maja herself. His short Afro was a neat helmet framing a round, open face. He held his walkie-talkie slackly, as if it didn’t belong to him. Glancing into the glass shopfront, he raised a hand to touch his perfect hair, then moved on.

Maja waited three, four beats before breathing out. Only then did she register her surroundings: puppy baskets, aquariums, pet toys hanging in cheerful bunches from hooks on the wall, the warm hamster smell of sawdust and urine. She leant against the wall, closed her eyes and tried to slow her breathing. Her fingertips found the wire bars of a birdcage. A pet shop, of all places.

She felt a warm pressure on her finger and looked down, startled. She was being clutched by a miniature hand. Then two thin orange-furred arms thrust through the cage bars, pushing up the sleeve of her coat, grasping at the bright rings on her fingers …

Maja shrieked and pulled away. The arms retracted and she stared at the small, varicoloured creature inside the cage: it had mustard-yellow fur on its back and limbs, a white chest, a round grey head and a white mask around its eyes. Five or six similar animals watched from the corners of the large enclosure.

“Squirrel monkey,” said a voice. “She won’t hurt you; she just likes shiny things.” A man approached and opened the cage door. He grasped the monkey in a big hand, transferring its grip to his own meaty forearm. It clambered quickly up his arm and perched on his shoulder, gripping his earlobe and peering at Maja with glittery eyes. The pet-shop manager’s eyes were larger but not dissimilar: deep-set, dark, blank and yet shrewd. He was a solid man, his square face blued with stubble around the jaw. “She’ll hoard them away in the straw, if she can’t eat them.” He looked down at Maja’s rings and then at her face. “Just can’t help herself.”

Flustered, Maja tugged her coat sleeves down over her hands, casting a glance at the door. The security guards had strolled back into sight. The younger one was still fiddling with his walkie-talkie, but the older one was alert, scanning the shops.

“Listen,” she said quickly as the man’s gaze panned towards them, “can I use your toilet? Urgently.”

The manager nodded at the far corner of the shop, and Maja made her way down an aisle of dog chews, passing a tall, domed cage where a grey parrot beak-and-clawed across the bars. Behind her, the doorbell dinged and the manager turned his attention away.

The bathroom was tiny: just a stained basin with a mirror, and one toilet in a cramped cubicle with a swing door. The fittings weren’t new like the rest of the shopping centre; it was almost as if the shining mall had been built around this grubby, much older chamber. Pictures of kittens and puppies were pinned to the wall. The room smelt of toilet freshener, but nothing bad.

Sighing, Maja looked at herself in the mirror, tucking her glossy black hair behind her ears. The earrings sparkled. She held up her hands, backs towards the glass, and let the cuffs of her coat fall back to show the rings. Easy to try on, easy to walk off with. They glittered splendidly in the light of the bare bulb. As she stared, she felt splinters of bright sensation spilling upwards in her throat from her stomach: panic, pleasure.

She wanted to leave now, to be away from here, home, but it was safer to wait a little while first. So she went into the cubicle and sat on the closed toilet lid, pulling her knees up to her chin. Still she felt exposed: there was a space of about a foot under the cubicle door, and the door itself wouldn’t close properly. Through the crack she could see a sliver of the tarnished mirror. Wrapping her arms around her legs, she felt the adrenalin crest and die inside her.

Every time, she was left trembling. Today had been very close, very daring – she had never taken so much before, nor such expensive things. Diamonds.

She’d told herself no. But still she’d done it, had tried on the jewels, had felt their cool, spiky weight against the skin of her fingers and earlobes. It had taken only a moment’s distraction. Saturday evening, last weekend of the month; the crowds were heaving. The assistant had turned her back on the glass cabinets for a minute, and Maja had slipped out of the shop, pushing her jewelled hands into her pockets.

Almost at once she’d felt the presence of the store detectives behind her, gaining. She’d nearly stopped; the desire had been there, had been strong – to turn and show herself to them. But it hadn’t happened. She’d kept going, she’d got away. Again.

Her nails dug into her ankles, even through the jeans. She saw again the furry fingers of the squirrel monkey, with their strange human nails, clutching at her sleeve. Thin rims of dirt around the edges, like the fingernails of a dirty baby.

Maja’s nails were perfect. Her father paid for her trips to the salon, as he paid for her clothes and the sporty silver convertible that waited for her in the underground parking lot. He’d bought that for her two months before, when she’d passed her driver’s licence. The clothes he liked her to wear made her seem much older than her eighteen years. They were what allowed her to walk into smart jewellery shops, persuade the sales assistants to slide open the cabinets.

Of course, her father would buy her any jewel she wanted, if she asked him. But she never did.

Once, when she was eleven, shortly after her mother left, she’d asked her father for a pet, a guinea pig or a hamster. Nothing ambitious, not a puppy or kitten. Even a goldfish would’ve been okay. But he’d shaken his head, delivering in his smile an exact ratio of fondness and disapproval.