The Apartment (18 page)

I didn't send it to them; instead I wrote:

ARE YOU SERIOUS?????? A GOOD REVIEW? Go fuck yourselves. Also, why are there no other people living in your goddamned building????

I didn't send that either (it's still in my drafts folder). Instead, I wrote a furious email complaining about our treatment and sent it to the house swap site, copying in the Petits. Now bubbling over with righteous indignation, I stared at the computer screen. It was definitely time to get out of the house and blow off some steam. I gathered up the sunscreen, Hayden's beach toys, and a towel, shoved them into a bag, and headed out. I strapped her into the car seat, and she babbled away happily to herself as I tried the engine. It just ticked over. The battery was dead. The alternator had been playing up for ages, and I knew it was only a matter of time before it died. I tried it again and again, despite knowing it was useless, while sweat stuck my dress to my back. Without the air-con, Hayden and I had to get out of the hot car as soon as possible. I hit the steering wheel with my fists, mouthing, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” so that Hayden wouldn't hear me cursing out loud. She'd already witnessed enough out-of-control behavior from her mother for one day.

I'd promised her the beach, and now what? With no car, the day stretched ahead interminably. Hayden and I could walk to the park, but it would be steaming at this time of day. And we couldn't take a minibus taxi to the beach: Mark had made me promise that I'd never use one with Hayden because he saw them as unsafe, and I couldn't disagree.

I climbed out of the car and unstrapped her. Oddly for her, she didn't question or whine about the change of plans.

“Hey.”

I turned to see the guy from next door. “Hi, Karim.” I tried to smile at him but could only manage a grimace.

“Car trouble?”

“Mm-hmm. My own fault. Needs a new alternator, but I've been putting it off and now the battery's dead.”

“I'd offer to give you a jump start, but I only have a scooter.”

“Thanks. We were only heading to the beach anyway.” Hayden gave him a shy wave. “Do you want to come in for coffee?” It popped out before I could stop it.

He was taken aback. “Now?”

“Yeah. Look, it was just an idea. It's fine if you don't have time.”

He checked the time on his cell. “Sure. Why not? I have to get to work, but I've got time for a coffee.”

“Great!” This time my smile was genuine. I didn't care that he was only being kind, that he might have read the desperation in my eyes.

He was good enough to play
Frozen
with Hayden and Mermaid Barbie while I made the coffee. I felt fluttery and excited, like I was on a date. I know how that sounds, but it had been weeks since I'd hung out with anyone my age.

“I'm sorry about last night,” I said, when Hayden was absorbed with Princess Elsa and her Duplo castle (fuck knows where Mermaid Barbie had got to), and he sat with me at the kitchen counter.

He was looking at me in confusion. “Sorry about what now?”

“Our alarm. It went off last night again. We'll get someone in to fix it soon, I promise.” Thinking,
Before or after we buy a new alternator?

“Oh. I didn't hear it.”

“Were you out late?”

“Nah. I was in all night. Strange that it didn't wake me—I'm a light sleeper. Hey, I meant to ask, where did you go?”

“When?”

“You told me last time you went on holiday.”

I took a sip of scalding coffee. “Paris.”

“Oh, cool.”

“Not really.”

And then I found myself telling him everything. Well, almost everything: I left out the part where I discovered my husband clutching a dead cat. Karim was an excellent listener, interrupting only once when I told him about Mark discovering the hair in the closet.

“Hang on…
Hair?
What kind of hair?”

“Hair trimmings or something. Mark said there were buckets of the stuff.” I didn't mention Mark's twitchy behavior after he'd returned from disposing of it, nor did I dwell on the fact that I hadn't actually seen it for myself.

“Ew.”

I told him about the peculiar noises we'd heard in the night, the oddity of a building in a desirable area being empty. And then I came to Mireille's suicide. Verbalizing it really underscored the bizarreness and the horror of what we'd been through. I was also aware that it didn't sound plausible.

“That's hectic,” he said when I wrapped up the story, adding a footnote about the Petits sending me a message asking for a review.

I didn't know him well enough to gauge if he believed the story or not.

He drained his mug. “Listen, thanks for the coffee, but I'd better get going.”

“Really? I can make you another.” I knew I sounded desperate, and again I didn't care. I didn't want to be alone. I didn't want Hayden and me to be alone, counting the hours until Mark got home.

“Sorry.” He started heading for the door. “I'm going to be late. Great coffee, though.”

He waved at Hayden, and I followed him to the front door. I reached around him to let him out, my bare arm brushing his. “Thanks for listening,” I said.

“It was quite a story. And thanks for the coffee.”

“Karim…what I told you about Paris. It was all true. I know how it must sound. Sorry for unloading on you; we hardly know each other and you must think I'm some kind of—”

He waved me into silence. “I didn't think you were bullshitting me. Thanks for telling me about it. And sorry you had to go through that.” He paused. “We should do this again.”

I felt a momentary charge between us—I'm sure I wasn't imagining it or searching for an ego boost—then he left.

Still fluttery, but feeling strangely lighter and less unsettled than earlier, I called Mark again, left a message about the car, and asked him to have the alternator replaced. Fuck the cost. I cleaned the house, thankfully not discovering any more displaced belongings, then rooted through the freezer looking for something to cook for supper.

The hours crept by.

By six that night, Mark still hadn't returned home. I fed and bathed Hayden. I tried his cell phone over and over again. I lost count of how many times I tried it. His last lecture was at three, so unless they'd asked him to fill in for the evening classes—and he would always let me know if this happened—he should have been home hours ago.

Seven p.m. dragged into seven thirty. I put Hayden to bed and she fell asleep almost immediately. I paced, wondering if I should call the hospitals, alert the cops. But he'd done a similar thing last night after his therapy session. The area's usual dusky sounds—the bark of a neighbor's dog, the screech of tires—had an eerie, threatening edge.

In the end I caved and called Carla. “Is Mark with you?” I barked at her the second she picked up.

“No. Why would he be with me? Wasn't he supposed to go to his therapist again today?”

Was he? And why hadn't he told me that? “He's not back yet.”

“Have you tried his cell?”

“Many times. He's not picking up.” I was past caring if she thought our marriage was in trouble or not.

“You sound stressed, Steph.”

“That's an understatement.”

“Shame, Steph, it's been hard, I know. And I'm sorry about what happened in Paris. On top of everything else…” I could hear the faint sound of voices and laughter in the background; she was at a party, a restaurant maybe. “Listen. Mark told me that you think some of your things have been moved. I've been thinking, and it's possible that
maybe
I brushed up against a few items when I went in to check the house. But I certainly didn't rearrange anything on purpose. Didn't even make myself a coffee.”

I didn't quite know what to say to that. Perhaps it
was
all in my mind. Could I have rearranged the books in the bedroom during the hectic spring cleaning session just before we left for Paris and forgotten about it? I suppose I should have apologized for accusing her—even by proxy—of riffling through my things, but the fact was I still suspected her of doing more than just innocently brushing up against the furniture. In the end I settled for, “The house feels weird.”

“Of course it does, Steph. You were brutalized in it. That's completely understandable. And then your lousy experience in Paris. Well, it's a wonder you can even bear to stay in there for five minutes. And now Mark isn't home. Do you want me to come over?”

“No! I mean, thank you, but I couldn't ask you to do that. It sounds like you're out somewhere.”

“It's nothing important. It's no trouble; I'm in the area. I'll be there in ten.”

She hung up before I could dissuade her. But to be honest, part of me was relieved that I wouldn't be alone. I watched
MasterChef Australia
for a few minutes, jumping when the gate buzzer sounded despite steeling myself for it. Carla arrived dressed in some kind of Tibetan-monkish robe laced with gold thread, a waft of booze trailing behind her. Perhaps, I thought, this was why she was being so kind: she was drunk. She gave me her usual air-kiss treatment. “I tried Mark as well,” she said the second I let her in. “No answer.”

She gripped my wrist with her cold fingers and pulled me into the kitchen. “Come on. You need a drink.”

Before I could stop her, she pulled out one of Mark's bottles of Meerlust, a present from an old university friend, and dug in the drawer for the bottle opener. She poured us both a glass, moving around the kitchen with more possessiveness and confidence than I'd ever felt in it.

She leaned against the counter and took a slug of wine. “You know, I've been thinking about what you've been saying about the house. About the bad vibes.”

I took a sip from my own glass. The wine was smooth and woody—delicious. Mark had been saving it for a special occasion, and now I knew why. “It's probably just my—”

She flapped a hand to cut me off. “I know how it sounds. Bad vibes, blah blah. Mumbo jumbo, sure, but just hear me out.” She took a dramatic swig of wine. “God, that's good. What about getting someone in to erase them?”

“Erase what?”

“The bad vibes.”

“You mean like an exorcist?”

“Like a sangoma, a healer.”

I laughed. Carla didn't.
“Seriously?”

Carla nodded. “Seriously.”

“Carla, Mark and I are atheists. We're not even slightly spiritual.”

“Yes, I know. But what can it hurt? Maybe it's all in your head. Maybe it is just your imagination. But then again, maybe you picked up some bad energy in Paris, brought it back with you. You guys had a tough time there. Why not keep an open mind to these things?”

I thought back to what Mireille had said just before she killed herself, which seemed less like gibberish now and more like a warning:
I think maybe it will go with the last people…
Now I must take it with me, or it is with you.
“A sangoma, though. How would I even get hold of one?” The sangomas I knew of were charlatans, guys who advertised their trade via fliers in Cape Town station, offering a cure for everything from TB to erectile dysfunction.

“I know one. She came over from Holland ten years ago when she had the calling.”

“Wait…she's white?”

She shook her head sadly. “Not all Dutch people are white, Steph.” But even Carla could see that I was in no mood to be patronized and she changed her tone. “But, yes. She does happen to be white. So what?”

“Have you ever used her?”
And if so, for what?

“No, but I met her at a friend's book launch and we hit it off.”

Well, that's okay, then.
I wanted to laugh in her face. I thought about asking how someone from Amsterdam went about getting “the calling,” but I didn't want to get into a discussion about cultural appropriation. Instead I merely said, “Sure, why not?” Thinking next we could try a priest, a rabbi, and, finally, if all else failed, a divorce lawyer.

But Carla was already tapping a message into her phone. The answer pinged straight back, almost as if the whole thing had been prearranged. “She can come the day after tomorrow.”

I was about to respond when I heard Hayden calling me. “I'll just be a minute.”

Carla waved me away and grabbed the wine bottle to pour herself another glass.

Hayden was sitting up in bed, hair mussed, her nightlight casting princess-shaped shadows on the wall. “What is it, monkey?”

“Mumma. It's under there. I heard it.”

“Under where?”

“The bed, Mumma.” Now she was whispering. She didn't looked scared, simply tired.

“What is? The lady again?”

“I don't know, Mumma.”

“There's nothing under there, Hayden, but Mumma will look-see, okay?”

“Okay, Mumma.”

I got down on my hands and knees again and peered into the gloom under the bed. And just for an instant, a skittering, shadowy thing, flat and blank-faced and multi-limbed, darted for me like a trapdoor spider lunging for a fly. I jumped, knocking my head on the edge of the bed, blinked, and looked again. There was nothing there except for the lone sock I'd seen before.

“So what Poe's really dealing with is somatized desire, the physiological and psychological expression of illicit yearnings that have no other way out. Their doppelgängers allow them to act out desires that polite society would never allow. It's the same in
Jekyll and Hyde,
of course. And we know from Stephenson, Stoker, Gilman, that the construct of polite society is the flimsiest veneer that covers a cesspool of abuse and corruption.”

I'm scared to look up at the class. For some reason, this lecture is suddenly flowing from a place of genuine interest; today it's feeling less forced, less labored and dutiful than it has for years. Something's clicked in me, and I feel engaged with my subject matter like I was when I first studied it. But if I look up, I know I'll be met by that same depressing wall of twenty-three blank, bored faces. I suppose I can understand students at first-year level finding themselves marooned in a module they hate—expecting an easy, rote credit, they'll find they made the wrong choice. But the apathy and disinterest of third-year undergrads who've made the informed decision to take this module—one that's all about sex and death and dreams and blood—bewilders me. Why do they bother? Why are they here?

I glance across at my notes and rub my temples. I've become used to this constant exhaustion, but that doesn't stop me from wishing I could sleep. The bloody alarm went off again last night—this morning, whenever—and Steph went crazy, setting Hayden off. Of course the little girl will react like that when she sees her mother in a flat panic. For my part, I felt surprisingly calm as I scouted for the cause of the malfunction. It's another symptom of my improvement, I think. I'm able to remove myself from a situation; I'm starting to trust that the worst has happened and we'll be okay. That they're not coming back. The monsters threw their worst at us in Paris and we made it out alive. We'll be okay.

I feel all right; I really do. The therapy session was fun as an intellectual exercise. I can see how all those psychodynamic themes play out in the stories I'm teaching this semester, but Steph's really the one who should seek help. She's always alone in that house with Hayden—she could do with someone to talk to—and after last night I'm starting to wonder whether there isn't some sort of Munchausen thing going on, Steph feeding Hayden's fear, terrifying her just so that she can come and rescue her. If that's the case, I can't let it go on.

When I hear a giggle from in front of me, I realize that I've paused for rather too long. “Sorry, where was I?”

“They're just kids,” Lindi reminds me whenever I stand in the office kitchen, complaining to her about the students' apathy. “They're tired. They've been working night shifts to pay for their fees or their drugs, they've been having panic attacks and nightmares, they've had breakups. Their lives are dramatic and consuming. Try not to take it personally.”

So I continue, keeping my head down: “We can never be sure whether the situations Poe presents in the tales are merely symptoms in his narrators' hysterized imaginations or whether they really happened. You see—”

“Excuse me.”

I almost don't hear and trundle out a few more words before a shifting and creaking bring me to a stop and I finally raise my eyes from the invisible audience of rapt acolytes embedded in my desktop and up to the real youngsters in front of me, who're craning around in their desks to the back of the classroom to see who's spoken. At first I can't see her, my eyes taking a while to focus farther than a couple of feet. Bright sunlight's glaring in between the blinds of the broad window along the side of the classroom and the kids' faces are sliced into two halves of shade and light.

I glance myopically toward the origin of the voice and she continues her question in a round, exotic accent. “What do you mean ‘really happened'? It's fiction,
n'est-ce pas?
” She's at the back of the class, completely obscured by a trio of students in the row ahead who have shifted their desks together. I don't recognize her voice as I do some of her classmates'—it's the beginning of the semester and she may have swapped in from another stream—but at the same time there's something familiar, something warm and resonant about it.

“Well, yes, it is fiction, but depending on the structure of the story, there are several levels of reality between the author, the narrator, the protagonist, and the reader,” I say, taking refuge behind a wall of theoretical discussion. “In this case, I'm speaking about reality on the narrative level; the disjuncture between what the narrator is describing and what—”

Then one of the boys in the row ahead of her turns in his seat, revealing the student in a glow of slatted light, and I'm struck silent. I know this girl; I place her immediately. She's been in my thoughts every day; I've thought about her every night as I've tried to sleep. It's the girl from the museum. It's Zoë, glowing golden in the sunlight. Zoë, alive and fourteen years old. I drag my eyes away and down.

I don't know how I get through the rest of the class, but twenty minutes later, chairs scrape and desks clatter. I've barely risked another glance upward in that time, and as the students file out, I suspect I've imagined her since no Odette-rasped blond angel trails the rest of them out.

As I watch them go, the last couple of kids turn back.
“Ooh la la,”
one mutters, and the other chortles. They're looking over my shoulder.

I turn too, and see her standing silent behind me, twisting a strand of her long hair in her fingers and scuffing one toe of her Scooby-Doo sneakers, just like the pair I bought for Zoë during her last winter, against the gray carpet tile.

“Viens, Papa. Regardes,”
she says.

I turn away, scanning the classroom—half to make sure that the place is now empty apart from us, and half hoping that the girl will be gone when I turn back. But she isn't, so I pocket my wallet and keys and follow her out into the corridor and then through the stairwell door. Wordlessly and without looking back, she leads me up to the sixth floor of the block. I struggle to keep up with her young body as she rounds the final half flight up to the rooftop exit, and by the time I push through the heavy emergency-only door that's always wedged open by smokers with a mangled paint can, adjust my eyes to the silvered glare, and catch my breath, she's sitting on a ledge, languidly swinging her legs.

Finally she turns to look at me as I approach. In the sunlight, I get a good look at her at last. She's not Zoë—she's a good facsimile, but her face is a mask. Despite her easy smile, there's something effortful in her eyes, like she's concentrating hard on playing a part. At least that's what I tell myself, because Zoë is dead.

“Come and see,” she says again, and again I catch the edge of an accent in her rich voice.

I push myself up to sit next to her, the tacky silvering burning my hands as I press on it. The ledge overlooks a lower roof across a narrow alley, where a grubby flock of pigeons is bobbing and jostling over the remnants of a pie, all watched over unseen by a dusty gray cat in the shadow of a stack of crates. Table Mountain looms over the cluster of boxy buildings scattered in its shadow as a pungent mélange of restaurant smells, trash, and exhaust presses on the stiff breeze into our faces. It flips a skein of the girl's hair into her eyes and she brushes it away before latching on to a hank and twisting it around her finger like she did in the classroom.

When she stops twisting her hair, several strands blow off her fingers and onto my shirt, into my face. I move to sweep them off, but she's looking out in the other direction, a vague smile on her face, and I find myself gathering the hairs together, winding them up, and putting them in my pocket.

“What did you want me to see?” I say.

She frowns, as if disappointed that I'm keeping up the pretense that brought us up here.

The gray cat has been looking up at us with its yellow eyes, flicking its tail in annoyance at our presence. Now it turns back to stalking the birds, jiggling its butt.

“Look at that,” she says.

“At what?”

“That disgusting thing.”

“What?”

“The
cat,
Papa. I hate cats,” she says, something cold grating in her voice. “They make me choke.”

My heart spasms. “Who are you?” I say. “Why are you here?”

Her only answer is a shrug.

“What have you done with her?”

Now she turns. “With who?”
Wiss oo?

“With my daughter. With Zoë. When she was small.”

“She grew up.” Her green eyes lock into mine and I'm afraid she's going to push into me, kiss me, bite me, like she did at the museum. My thighs are burning on the hot ledge now and I'm lifting myself off it when there's a clash and a noisy plosion on the rooftop opposite. The cat has launched itself at the pigeons and they panic and shatter into the air, making directly toward us. Instinctively, I raise my arms to defend my face and my head, and I'll swear that I feel the birds' wings and claws scratching against me as they wheel and right themselves and swarm away.

When I've calmed myself enough, I see the girl at the edge of the rooftop, now flipping her legs over. I hurry toward her as she sits, lifts both her hands, and gathers her hair away from her face, twisting it behind her in a loose knot.

“Stop!” I say. “Be careful!”

She turns to me.
“Pourquoi, Papa?”

“Because I…”

“I'm always here.” She leans forward and tips herself over the edge.

Of course when I run and look over, there's nobody on the sidewalk below.

I'm still shaken by the time I get back to my office. Luckily, Lindi's door is closed, so I manage to avoid her well-meaning inquiries. Even though it's my consultation time, I lock my own door behind me and sit at the desk. It was only in my imagination, I tell myself, but my mind is at an uncanny distance from my viscera. What just happened—part of it, at least—was real, but I can't say where or when the reality changed to imagination. I'm trying to recall the order of events directly, but there's a blank spot over them that evades my grasp.

I can't explain it to myself, so I pick up the phone and call Carla. I end up telling her about seeing Zoë in the waxworks museum and how she has somehow followed me here.

“It's understandable, Mark, sweetie. You have such a rich mind—it's trying to help you out of your trauma, into a world where none of the bad stuff ever happened, into a world where Zoë survived. Of course there are layers of guilt associated with that thought—you blame yourself, though heaven knows we've told you it's not your fault. We'll—your friends will—just have to keep repeating that until it's played out.”

“But it's not just my mind, Carla. I've never experienced anything like this before. I'm not someone who goes wandering around in the grip of vivid hallucinations.”

Carla doesn't respond, and I read something judgmental in her silence. I need to prove—to her, to myself—that I didn't just cook this up. Then I remember: I push my hand into my trouser pocket, and, yes, there it is. I pull out the knot of blond hair I gathered. It's quite a big skein, more than I remember brushing off my clothes, but there it is—proof that something happened, that I didn't completely imagine a windy conversation with a long-haired girl.

“Anyway, it's high time I called Marlies.”

“Marlies?”

“I've told you a hundred times, Mark. My Dutch friend. The sangoma. She calls herself Gogo Thembi now.”

I remember now. Ever since the burglary, Carla's been threatening to have someone over to our house to cleanse it of the evil spirits. I thought she meant just a regular woo-woo spiritualist, but it's Marlies the Dutch witch doctor. “What's she going to do? Chase away our trauma with chicken bones and a hunk of Gouda?”

“You should open your mind a bit.” Her voice is cold; my flippant remark seems to have offended her. “That's your problem right there. Eighty percent of this country uses sangomas for all manner of problems. You don't have to be so fucking superior. This is a legitimate form of therapy. She can cleanse your house. Cleanse you.”

The liberal offense she's taken provokes me. “Since when are you the champion of African traditional medicine? Last I heard, high-fat low-carb was going to save your life, make you a better you.”

“Oh, fuck off, Mark. I'm trying to help. You have darkness in you—legitimate darkness, I know—but wouldn't you like relief? Since the attack everything's just become worse for you—and your family. Wouldn't you want to try
anything
to help alleviate your situation?”

“Christ, Carla. We don't need a fucking cleansing. I need some sleep.”

“You never ask for help. That's another of your problems, while we're on the subject.” She laughs. “But there are many people and many structures out there to help us when we're in need. The human family is vast. And it's good, Mark. Can you bring yourself to believe that?”

I don't say anything.

“Anyway, despite what you might think, African healing is not magic; it's not witchcraft. It's a philosophy, just as valid as any other religion or secular philosophy. Just like them, it's a therapeutic system, offering us solutions when times are hard. Nobody believes in real ghosts, but just like your priest or your therapist or your secular European atheist philosophers, sangomas can help you to chase down and understand your dreams, offer you life advice, help to exorcize your psychic ghosts.”

Her argument is convincing, if only because it relativizes everything into a mash of inoffensive spiritual comfort food. “What suddenly makes you the expert?”