Homing (2 page)

“That’s what it is,” Ray said. “The light, the reflections. It’s confusing them.”

“Well. They probably have lice. Or bird flu. They look a little off.”

The next day, Ray went out and bought a big bag of birdseed, and after that the pigeons came twice a day, which Nona thought was excessive. Mornings and evenings, they sat waiting for Ray in a row on the wall, raising their tails to defecate down its pink flank. At least, thought Nona, most of them faced the alleyway, shitting judiciously down onto hotel property, too.

They read in the Tonight section of the
Cape Argus
that it was a luxurious place, patronised by politicians and celebrities, both local and international. Some evenings, they could hear the revels: laughter, music. On one occasion, fireworks. But none of this gaiety spilled over onto Ray and Nona. The pink wall dammed it up, diverted it like water, leaving them dry. All they got was the coloured glaze of party lights reflected in the windows, and the vibrations of popular songs through the bricks.

Nona moaned about the noise going on till all hours. Ray didn’t seem to mind so much, or even to notice. Twice a day the birds came to his feet, and he fed them. Nona, though, felt on edge, distracted by the flare of the evening sunlight and then the shadow that followed. Even as the hotel lit up for the evening, gloom gathered at the base of the wall and flooded the alley to its mouth.

What she did not confess to Ray was how the pulse of the music excited her – even prone on the ratty deckchair, on the shady side of the wall, among the dandelions and pigeon crap. It made her shift and sit up, straining to decipher the noises. Shrieks of pleasure. Crashes, laughter. Girl pushed in the pool? Smashed champagne glass? Some sounds were clearer than others. Once, sitting there beside Ray, she heard the distinctive pop and fizz of a champagne bottle, and then – miraculous – a cork came flying over the wall and landed right in her lap. She turned to Ray, eyes wide. But he was half-asleep and had not seen. She gripped the cork with her fingernails, digging them deep.

Nona had to walk all the way around a surprisingly large and irregular block to get to the hotel entrance. As well as the playing field and the retirement home, several other small streets and properties seemed to have surrendered to the hotel grounds. She followed the boundary wall as it crooked left and right, at times trailing a hand on its high-quality matte surface, guessing at what it might conceal. What was the meaning of each swell and dip? What palatial amenities – indoor swimming pool, putting green, tropical glasshouse – could require these annexes and niches, this complex outline? It was impossible, now, to recall what had been there before.

It was noon when she came out onto the main road, holding her small bag close, and followed the wall along a last straight run to the entrance. It was a grand, curlicued wrought-iron thing, painted glossy black. The guard seemed surprised to see a human being on foot at the gates, but opened them a crack to let her through.

From the entrance ran an avenue of palms. Ahead, the building was indistinct: a shimmer of pink, the suggestion of steps ascending. The palms had not been there before, nor could they have grown so fast. They must’ve been transported whole from somewhere else, and then stuck into the soil like candles on a birthday cake. Nona remembered seeing a fully grown palm tree travelling down the road some months before: the bole laid flat on the truck bed like a giant’s body on a bier.

She proceeded up the avenue, glancing side to side at the tended lawns, the cool greens and whites of the flowerbeds, the dappled light. There were very few people around. A gardener in green overalls stood motionless by a wheelbarrow, and a couple of tennis players patted a ball to and fro on a clay court in the distance. The air felt expensive in here, and easy on the lungs: more richly freighted with oxygen, perhaps. How could this all fit into what had been a small field, a block of flats, a modest neighbourhood?

Luxury, ease, light; it was disorientating, even exhausting. The avenue was longer than it seemed, and it felt like she was journeying miles, a pilgrimage, with only the grass-scented air to sustain her. By the time she reached the white marble steps leading up to the entrance, Nona might as well have been down on her stockinged knees.

Once inside the glass-fronted lobby, though, things speeded up marvellously. She was floated in, as if on a gentle swell, to beach at the front desk – a long bank of smooth wood just the right height for weary elbows. The light was subdued, and on the back wall a bank of keys with brass tags gleamed like a dragon’s flank in a cave. Between this glimmer and the desk there flitted red-coated shadows, attentive, diffident.

A young woman with dark eyes, dark polished skin and a red tuxedo jacket came forward, tilting her head.

“I called yesterday,” Nona said. “I have a booking. Single room. Your special.”

The carpeted foyer damped her words and made them unconvincing. But nonetheless, they had magical effect. The young woman found her booking, received her credit card with a smile – as if it happened every day, as if one did this all the time – and handed her one of the brass-fobbed keys like a winning ticket. Number twenty-three.

Nona found herself smoothly transferred into the care of a slim youth with neatly braided hair, the male twin of the receptionist. Polite hands lifted her bag, and she was conducted through the cool embrace of the elevator doors, up to a higher realm, and out into a corridor that seemed to her unaccustomed eyes to be carpeted in gold. Although the young man held her bag and not her arm, Nona had the feeling of being intimately escorted. She was tired, but she barely needed to lift her legs; the wondrous carpet flew her to door twenty-three, which fell away to admit her. And then the bellhop had withdrawn, and the door had closed soundlessly behind her, and she was kicking off her shoes and falling across a bed as crisp and cool as a drift of foreign snow.

Some time later, she arose and took a turn around her room, inspecting the surfaces, the knobs and drawers. She and Ray had only ever stayed in rundown country hotels, two-star affairs, or campsites. She fingered the fruit arrangement, peeked into the minibar and examined the bonbon placed on the pillow. It was all strange and extravagant: this lavish provisioning, so blindly generous. Rare gifts, for anyone with a key.

Through the window, sky. Nona opened the frame a crack and leant out, but felt no change. The air outside, clean and bright, was of a piece with the conditioned air that filled the room. She looked down.

And there it was. Three storeys below, beyond a strip of garden and just visible over the top of the boundary wall: the alley, the house, the pigeons. The wall cut off half the road from view, and only one empty deckchair was visible.

From this unfamiliar angle, she saw that the windows of their house were too small, and unevenly placed. A couple were cracked. You could see the plumbing on the back wall, with a nasty stain spreading from one pipe. Down on the ground, at home, she never noticed these things, but with height and distance the blemishes pulled into focus. It was shameful; repulsive, even. She felt a hotel guest’s resentment of this disappointing view.

The pigeons – diligent heads bent, tapping away – made variegated patterns on the tar. Black and grey and white and mauve, each bird unique. They seemed to feed in silence: the clicks of claws and beaks were sounds too delicate to reach her.

Now something else, a blunt grey knob, pushed into the frame. It was her husband’s head, surprisingly thin on top, inclined towards the birds. An intimate view. Almost embarrassing – like seeing the bare feet or buttocks of a dignified stranger. An arm was extended, in its frayed, familiar cardigan sleeve. After a moment, a bird hopped onto Ray’s wrist. He seemed absorbed.

Seeing him from this unfamiliar angle, exposed as he was, Nona felt rebuked. She’d lied to him about this weekend, as she’d seldom lied in her married life. She’d used money from her own small savings to pay for the room, and told Ray that she was off to visit her sister. Now the cost seemed much greater than it had when she’d cut out the ad for the two-night special, or slid the credit card over the desk. These were pleasures owed to him, she knew. Poor Ray! So little luxury in his life!

But at the time of her decision – champagne cork still slightly damp in her palm – some action had seemed urgently required.

And perhaps he was glad that she’d gone, that she wasn’t there to disquiet him with her sighs and carping, her impatient rustling of the newspaper.

She dropped her eyes. Immediately below her window, peppermint grass flowed thickly to the base of the wall. There were parasols and camellia bushes and white garden furniture. You might sit down there of an evening, sipping a chilled drink, and never guess at what lay just an arm’s length away, on the shabbier side of the wall.

Yet another attentive shadow in a red jacket appeared beside her garden chair, this one with a drinks menu. Everyone working here was young and unobtrusively attractive: eyes that took note but did not linger, voices low, manner deferential yet flirtatious to a finely judged degree. The waiter leant forward, showing her the tops of his long eyelashes.

“Gin and tonic, why not?” she said.

All at once, Nona felt happy again. The ease was back, the sense of smooth movement, although she was sitting quite still – at the heart, in fact, of a profound stillness. She and Ray, she saw, lived backstage of a perfect piece of theatre. The lighting in the garden was impeccable: even and mellow, unaffected by the alleyway’s brassy reversals of glare and gloom. The only sound was a precise ticking in the air: the piston spritz of unseen sprinklers, or perhaps it was the hushed beat of luxury itself. The gin appeared, in a tumbler chocked with ice. She sipped, and felt the coolness trickling down into her belly.

Some things weren’t controlled, however. There were white and olive streaks on the battlements: sure enough, the pigeons had left their mark on this side of the wall as on the other. And across the table top, a line of ants negotiated the crevasses and cul-de-sacs of the lacy metal to a spill of sugar at its centre. She imagined, warmly, their tiny ant amazement at this manna. They made her think of Ray: their earnest, uncomplaining labour, their focus on the small satisfactions before them.

She bent down to trace the line of insects to its source. It disappeared into the lawn, and emerged again to doodle up the corner of a flower planter, along its edge and through a tiny crack at the base of the wall. So: lowlife ants from the wrong side, smuggling out the loot. Again she wondered: how long? For ants and birds and grassroots to level this wall again, speck by speck, to break open the path that had been blocked?

But she didn’t really want the wall broken down. What she wanted was for it to draw open and enclose her husband, their house, their life – put them on the right side, within this charmed perimeter of sugar and gin and shade.

She drank steadily, watching the ants come and go. Her glass emptied, and was filled. The evening light dimmed, while high above, the windows of the hotel started to shine – the angle oblique, the light more forgiving than it was at home. Small globes flickered on in the shrubbery, and the wall was bathed in dapples of rose and amber. Between the lights, the dusk seemed to soften and expand, becoming capacious. Patio doors opened and walls dissolved, making space for music, trays of cocktails, waiters, guests – such guests! Their clothes were precious and their scent was rare. Women leant at elegant angles, calves taut above high heels. Men shouted with laughter, gloriously assured. Half a dozen languages licked at Nona’s ears. More red-coated servers danced from the shadows, carrying ice buckets and bottle after bottle of champagne.

Nona did not speak to anyone. She was content at her table, letting the crowd wash around her. She tickled her lip with the silver bubbles in her constantly refreshed glass; she smiled at the dark-eyed waiters. She kept half an eye on the wall, but in all the flow and movement it stayed where it was; it didn’t crumble or sway. Nona and the wall were still.

Ah, but it must’ve been the drink. Later she would barely remember leaving the party, finding her way inside, the walk along the hushed corridor. But she would retain the feel of everything: the textures of wallpaper, wood and carpet. (Had she stumbled?) All so rich and inviting, so lush to the touch. Was there a young man by her side, red-coated, bright-eyed, holding her arm? Perhaps. Certainly she felt accompanied, but it might’ve been the scented air of the place that was so solicitous, that took her weight and guided her hand to the proper door handle, that pressed it down.

The night was a dream of surfaces, sheathing her, pressing her down: luxurious friction.

Nona did not usually sleep naked, or on her stomach, but that was how she awoke. She was in a cool, dark place. She discerned the firmness of an unfamiliar mattress, and then – out of one eye – the grey field of a curtained window. With some popping of vertebrae, she broke the bed’s hold, rolled onto her back, wedged herself up against the pillows and took stock. The room was bleary and ruffled. Against the habits of a lifetime, her clothes were strewn on the floor. And something else. There were small but troubling shapes in the dimness beyond the foot of the bed. A breeze belled the curtain and something pushed through with a rustle.

She took a moment to let the scene develop. The curtains sucked back out against the open window, as if the air in the room were plumping up, and more grey light infused.

Hunched figures were arranged on the sill, on the desk, on top of the standing lamp. Six, seven of them. A fidgeting crowd of small, dour spectators. At the foot of the bed, one shook out its wings impatiently, stepped side to side and ejected a splatter of white onto the duvet. In their small eyes, their sideways but steady observation, she saw a husband’s chastisement.

Her head hurt. Nona leant over to the bedside table, poured herself a glass of water and drank deeply. The pigeons cooed and shuffled, turning their heads this way and that to follow her movements. She’d never thought of birds’ faces as expressive – or even as faces; more as carved heads set with bead eyes – but these ones certainly looked attentive. Expectant, in fact.