The Apartment (19 page)

“I saw a documentary the other night.”

I snort out a laugh. “Even if I did agree, we can't afford it.” My refrain. “I've just taken out another overdraft to pay for Jan's bloody alarm system. Anyway, Steph'd never agree to having someone like that in our house.”

“Don't you worry. I'll convince her. I'm very persuasive, you know. Especially when it comes to what's best for you, my friend.”

When I get home later, it's to find Carla in my living room, drinking the Meerlust Geoff gave me at my UCT send-off, watching my TV.

She looks me up and down, as if I'm the unexpected intruder. “What have you done to yourself?” she says.

“Where's Steph?”

She looks at what I'm holding in my hand. “Why don't you put that away and clean yourself up?”

I go through to the kitchen, turn on the kettle, and put my parcel in the box in the pantry, then come through to wash my hands and arms in the bathroom. In our bedroom, I dump my shirt in the hamper, put on a clean tee, and go to rejoin Carla in the living room. But as I step into the hallway, I see Steph backing carefully out of Hayden's room. She turns and startles when she sees me. For an unguarded moment her face is blanched and her eyes wide; then she gathers herself, frowns, and beckons me into the kitchen.

She folds her arms, stands ten feet away from me—as far as possible in this room. “Where've you been?” she says.

“Who invited
her
over?” I hiss.

“She invited herself over, of course.” She doesn't bother to lower her voice. “Where have you been?”

“Therapy. Traffic was bad.”

I can see her clenching her jaw, forcing herself not to respond, not to accuse me of anything, not to start anything while Carla's here, but she can't help glancing at the clock on the wall. It is after nine.

“Is Hayden okay?” I ask, trying to deflect her.

“Jesus, Mark. No, she's not okay. She's completely unsettled. She can't get into a deep sleep, and I think she's becoming sick again.”

Not for the first time today, I worry that Steph might be making Hayden sick, or at least that her anxiety is having a bad effect on her.

“Listen, Steph,” I say as Carla comes through from the living room and stands in the kitchen doorway. “Maybe you've been here in this house by yourself too much. We could put Hayden in day care. Maybe it's time we should think about finding a job for you.”

When Marlies the sangoma rattles up to our house just before noon two days later, I'm not in the mood. And she does rattle—her beaded bracelets and dangly necklaces and the cloth bag draped over her shoulder hammer against her drum as she locks up her Kia on the roadside and crosses, ignoring the shout of a couple of stoned homeless people who're leaned up against the neighbor's wall.

I watch her through the front window as she opens the gate and then stops. She puts down the drum and her bag and frowns up at the house. Under her beaded headband and her long skirt, she seems to be about my age—late forties maybe—squat body, a clutch of drained and unkempt pale hair scraped out of the back of the headdress. She seems to sniff the air for a minute, wobbling slightly on her legs as if standing in a gentle tide; then she picks up the drum and bag and turns away, back to the gate, where she stops again, undecided.

I help her choose. Now that she's here, there's no point in her leaving, is there? I open the door and call out: “Hi. Marlies?” I can't bring myself to call her “Gogo Thembi.”

She looks at me and scans me with the same hesitant eyes as she's used on the house.

“Everything okay?” I step down from the porch toward her. “Can I give you a hand?”

“No,” she says.

“Are you going to come in?”

She takes a deep breath in and follows me, muttering something low under her breath—whether in Dutch or isiXhosa or Elvish, I can't tell. I let her in the front door, and she closes it behind her, as if she's the one who's ashamed of this transaction. She puts her things down in the hallway and puts her hands on her hips and tracks her eyes around the entrance.

“Your wife and child are out, yes?”

“Yes,” I say. One of the rare things Steph and I have agreed on lately is that Hayden definitely doesn't need to be involved in this.

“Good,” she says. “It's better for the small one not to be here.” For a moment I'm lulled into a sense of normality. I looked at the documentary Carla recommended on YouTube, and apart from some sensible comments from a professor of anthropology—where Carla picked up her semi-convincing arguments about philosophies and therapeutic systems—nothing about the suburban sangomas themselves inspired any confidence. It all looked like a ridiculous act to me, aging hippies indulging their need for drama and ululation, sprinkling their middle-class diction with explosions of
Eish!
and
Wena!
and
Aikhona!
, phrases they picked up from the
Madam & Eve
cartoons they read with their herbal tea when they're off duty. And of course the rural elders who trained them just did it for the easy money. Why wouldn't they? There's an ex-postman from Liverpool who's now a sangoma; his British pounds must have done his trainer's village a lot of good. There was a vegetarian sangoma from Sandton on the show, who had the trainer slaughter the goat and the chickens for her.

So far, though, apart from the getup, Marlies is behaving like a normal person, not putting on an act. She seems convinced about herself, which helps me ease into this charade. Let this be an experience I can open myself to; it's like listening to somebody else's story for a while; that's all.

She's now started to wander off, and I trail her into the living room. “But your other girl,” she says, staring at the photos on the bookshelf and at the beading around the ceiling. “She's still here.”

My mood turns immediately. Fucking Carla. She must have told this woman my whole bloody history. When will she understand that it's nobody's business? “No, there's no other girl.”

Marlies doesn't bother to turn to me as she says, “She's the one you need me to take away.”

No. No. There's a pull inside me, like a hook going in and ripping out.

“Hang on,” I start to say, but she's opening her cloth shoulder bag, muttering under her breath.

“We need to appeal to the ancestors, ask them what is their plan.”

I don't want Zoë erased. I never want her to leave me. That is not what I want. I hurry up to her, trying to ward her back into the hallway without touching her. “Let's leave it, you know. It's fine. It was just something my wife wanted. You can go. Let's do this another time.” I'm battling to keep my voice calm.

Finally she looks up at me, just for a moment, and says, “It's out of your hands.” Then she moves over to the far corner of the room, whispering gently under her breath as if trying to seduce the shadows.

My body tenses and my mind starts to focus in animal instinct. She's become a direct threat to my child. The hook goes in again, rips out more of me. But still, somehow, I can't bring myself to touch her, to wrestle her up and throw her out of the house. It feels somehow as if she's protected.

So I stand in the doorway and talk, my fucking solution to everything. I try to raise my voice, try to sound authoritative. “Listen,” I say, “this is our home and you must leave.”

But Marlies is not listening. She's squatted down and has started burning something, her voice now beginning to rise into an unintelligible gibber. “Did you hear me? You need to go.” I approach her, but the smoke she's making is thick and acrid, shit smelling, and somehow I can't find my way through it.

At the same time the witch stands and waves the burning leaves under my face, now yelling something, her eyes rolling back, the vibration from her lips and chin rippling down her whole body. The sound from her chest is too low, too loud, and I need to back away. I gasp, sucking in a lungful of smoke, which causes me to gasp again. I have to breathe it out but my chest is ground into a spasm and the smoke has broken into my body. I can feel it invading every cell.

And now there's something wrong with my eyes, because I see flashing lights against gray fog and shapes forming out of the mist. There's the shambling shape of a hunchback, a man in ancient clothing grasping at a stab wound in his chest. A metal face lurches at me, clanking open to reveal only a skull. The waxen skin of a Nazi soldier comes too close to my face, the smell of rot trailing it as it passes. A broken man swings a hatchet at a small, cowering figure. Three large men in balaclavas shout orders as they thunder down the wooden hallway.

This is not real. I've seen this before. It's just a memory.

And as if I've willed it away with my affirmation, the fog clears to reveal my living room, almost as it was, but now dark, when the morning sun was just shining in. As the last drapes of fog clear, one shape remains standing. A small girl. She looks at me, cocking her head.

It can't be, but it is.

I look behind me. The witch doctor is gone, but I can still hear her sobbing gasps. The smoke is still in the air, but now it smells sweet, like incense.

Zoë is staring at me, angry, deep blue rings around her eyes, a smear of vomit over her chin. And now she winces and starts to cry, as if something she loves has been crushed in front of her. The hook pulls inside me again, and I know she's feeling the same thing.

I go to her. “It's all right, sweetie. I won't let her take you away from me.”

But she's looking through me, to where I was standing before, talking over me as if she can't hear me. “I must show you something,” she says, in a voice that's not hers, the sound of it grating through pain-clenched teeth. I hear a knocking sound coming from behind my ear.

I follow her as she leads me through to the kitchen, pushes the swollen door into the pantry.

She opens the cardboard box I've been using, the one I've stashed behind the gas bottles for winter. “What have you done, Mark?” she says.

I look down, into the box. “I wanted to make you better. I wanted to bring you back, love.”

“No,” she says. “It has to be alive.”

“Mumma, everything smells bad.” Hayden scrunched up her nose the second we walked through the front door. Mark and I had decided that it was best for her not to be present while Carla's sangoma did her thing, and now that the car was fixed, I'd taken her to the beach and then to Pick n Pay for the afternoon. I wished now that we'd been able to stay out longer, but she'd become testy in the supermarket, the day's heat making her irritable. And she was right: the whole house reeked of burned sage or whatever crap the sangoma had used to “cleanse” it.

Mark emerged from the kitchen, mumbled a greeting, and dutifully helped me with the plastic grocery bags. He looked furtive, as if I'd just caught him watching porn.

“So?” I said, hefting Hayden into a more comfortable position on my hip. “How did it go?”

He shook his head. “Exactly as you'd expect. I have no idea why I agreed to it.”

“
We
agreed to it.”

“Yeah.”

“The place stinks. What did that woman use in here?”
And why did you let her?

He shrugged. “I don't know.”

I slid Hayden into her chair, promised to make her cheesy pasta, and started to unpack the groceries. I pulled at the fridge door, but it wouldn't open—it did that sometimes. I gave it an almighty tug that almost caused it to fall on top of me, and this time the door flew open, exhaling a foul whiff of vinegar and spoiled meat. The source of the rotten meat stench seemed to be a half-finished packet of bacon, which shouldn't have gone off so quickly, and the vinegar stench clearly emanated from an opened tub of pickled herring I didn't remember buying. And that wasn't all. A bottle of tomato sauce had spattered its contents over the vegetable drawer, already drying to a sickly crust.

“Did you do this, Mark?”

“Huh?” He was miles away again, frozen mid-move as he packed spaghetti into the cupboard.

“Did you move stuff around in the fridge?”

“No. Of course I didn't.” He sounded irritable, annoyed that I'd jolted him out of his thoughts. “Why would I?”

“Well, someone did.” I stepped aside so that he could look at the damage himself. Fucking Carla. It had to be her. It would be like her to show up when the sangoma was doing her thing. She wasn't one to miss the action.

He showed no surprise at the mess. “I'll clean it up.”

“How did it happen, though? Did Carla—”

“Not now, Steph.” He looked meaningfully at Hayden.

“Mark—”

“Someone must have knocked against the fridge during the”—he flapped a hand above his head—“the cleansing.”

“It looks deliberate to me.”

He didn't answer, merely rooted the bleach and a clutch of rags out from under the sink.

While I made Hayden's food, he doggedly picked through the fridge, pulling out the trays and rinsing them under the tap. It seemed to me that he was deliberately avoiding looking at me. I had to ask him twice if he wanted something to eat, and he mumbled something about eating earlier. The smoky stench had erased my appetite.

Hayden picked halfheartedly at her pasta and yawned. “My tummy feels funny, Mumma.”

Mark chucked the cloth he was using in the sink and approached her. “You want to come watch a movie with Daddy?”

I couldn't tell if he genuinely wanted to spend time with her or if he was looking for an excuse to get away from me. She nodded and yawned again, and stretched out her arms to him. Somehow I stopped myself from snatching her from him, and instead leaned against the kitchen counter and listened to the opening track of
The Lego Movie.
I couldn't face clearing up. I wanted to convince myself that the sangoma's juju, or whatever it was, had worked, that the house was now free of its taints, but the mess in the fridge had shaken me. It had to have been Carla, but I couldn't quite believe that of her. The smoky odor wasn't receding; if anything, it was getting stronger. And I still couldn't bring myself to open a window.

I peered into the living room to check on Mark and Hayden—they were both staring blank-faced at the screen and didn't notice me spying—then returned to the kitchen and opened my laptop, hoping that the house swap site would have finally responded to my furious email about the Petits' behavior. It hadn't. Nor had the book agent got back to me, although that was understandable, as she'd had the full manuscript for only a week. I daydreamed idly about book launches, picturing (to my shame now) Carla seething jealously in the back of a crowded bookstore.
Maybe,
I thought,
I should use the time to join a temping agency. Mark had mentioned something about me returning to work in front of Carla two days ago—he could've at least waited until she was out of earshot.
Restless, I made myself a cup of tea, then surfed around on the internet for a while, telling myself that I'd hunt for a job in the morning. The spectacularly handsome real estate agent we'd spoken to in Paris had said his boss wouldn't be able to help us with our inquiries about the Petits for another week at least, but I couldn't see the harm in sending him an email. I dug in my bag for the business card and sent him a message explaining who I was, that I was looking into the history of the Petits' building and was curious about why it was empty.

I logged on to Facebook, feeling a rush of guilty joy when I saw that Karim had sent me a friend request. Seconds after I accepted it, a message from him blipped onto the screen:

He had a point. I couldn't forget that Mireille had mentioned that other people had stayed in the apartment—it was entirely feasible that the Petits had lured other people into their place via other means. I should have thought of it myself.

I paused for a second, then wrote:

There was no answer for a couple of minutes, then:

A shiver of anticipation: Mark would be at work from ten until four.

<3?>

Next, I typed in the building's address and “accommodation to rent in Paris.” Bingo: I couldn't be sure, but it looked like it had once been listed on another house swap website. But when I clicked on the link, nothing came up. I scrolled through link after link until I came to Parisdreaming.com, which catered to American travelers seeking budget accommodation. Below the same picture of the bathroom that the Petits had posted on our house swap site there was a single review:

Don't stay here. It smells bad & has no air-con. Don't be fooled into thinking your getting a bargain because it is not worth it. We left after 2 days.

The review was posted last July, but there wasn't a place for me to leave a comment, and when I clicked through to the site's contact details I hit a “page not found” wall. Frustrated, I pressed the go-back key, but after half an hour of fruitless searching, I couldn't seem to locate the page again. I was about to give up when I came across a link to an accommodation forum for ex-pat Brits. A thread had been started by a Mrbaker9981 in September last year, entitled
DON'T STAY HERE.
The poster had written the Petits' address in caps, followed by:
came across this hellhole on a cheap accommodation site that conveniently is no longer active. Worst place I have ever stayed in. Hot, smelly, and owners didn't show up and refused to give us a refund after we left early. It was haunted as well and not in a good way. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Two other posters had responded with messages along the lines of
thanks for the heads-up
and
is there a good way to be haunted?
but Mrbaker9981 hadn't replied to them.

Heart beating harder, I signed up to the site, left a message saying that I'd stayed at the same “hellhole,” and shamelessly begged Mrbaker9981 to contact me. I included my email address—I didn't care if I got spammed because of it.

On a whim, I googled the username in case he was signed up to other forums under the same moniker. And I struck gold. He appeared to be active on two other sites:
The Guardian
's Comment Is Free, and loveulots.co.uk, a “discreet” hookup site for married people. Without hesitating, I joined the dating site (I had to pay two hundred rand to do so and fill in a questionnaire) and went to his profile. I scrolled straight to the “leave a message” button and left a slightly more desperate plea, asking if he was the same man who'd posted on the accommodation forum and entreating him to get hold of me to share information. The site's rules stated that I couldn't leave my email address unless he messaged me back.

I'd been so absorbed in my detective work I hadn't noticed that the house was now quiet and the movie had ended. In the living room, Mark and Hayden were asleep on the couch. She was lying on his chest, one of his arms loosely draped over her. Here's where I'm supposed to say that I was overwhelmed by a feeling of love, but I just felt that same uneasiness, as if his gesture was possessive rather than caring. I uncurled his arm—he didn't wake, and his skin was slimed with sweat—and picked Hayden up. She protested blearily, then flung her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, monkey-style.

As usual, I turned on her nightlight and lay down next to her on the bed. The sense that we weren't alone in the room didn't creep up this time; it flashed through me. I turned my head to the side and saw that something dark was lurking in the corner of the room next to the chest of drawers. A scream locked in my throat as I watched the blank-faced thing writhing in place on its multi-limbed form. I blinked, and it was gone. Frozen with fear, I didn't move for at least a minute. Gradually, I sat up, then scurried in a panicked burst to turn on the main light. The room felt empty again. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what my mind was trying to conjure up: a monstrous amalgam of the men who'd broken into the house and terrorized us. And again, when I checked under the bed, there was nothing but Hayden's lonely sock. After taking ages to muster up the courage, as if I half expected it to bite me, I reached under and grabbed it. There was something else a few feet from it. Zoë's hairbrush. The one that had fallen behind the chest of drawers. Or maybe it wasn't Zoë's. No matter: what the hell was it doing there? I wrapped it up in the sock, intending to put it in the trash can.

I couldn't leave Hayden alone, but nor could I sleep. Lights blazing, I read my way through her shelf full of picture books, determined to stay awake until the morning light came. I suppose I must have dozed off as the hours passed, because the next thing I was aware of was the sound of the shower running. Hayden was still in dreamland, her fists curled into her chest, her hair sticking to her forehead. Careful not to wake her, I got up and tiptoed down the hallway to the bathroom. I could make out the murmur of Mark's voice through the half-open door. Was he on the phone? Ridiculous—he was in the shower. I gently pushed the door open and listened. I couldn't make out any individual words through the spit-spattering of the water; then came: “I did it for you. I
said
I did it for you.” His voice rose with every word.

I ripped the shower curtain back, and he jumped and turned to face me.

“Why are you talking to yourself, Mark?”

“I wasn't…Hey, how about some privacy here?” He tried to chuckle, but it sounded like a death rattle. He wasn't the man I'd married, whom I'd once felt such desire for. Whatever mental battles he was waging were taking their toll on his body. He'd lost weight; I could discern every rib. His skin was corpse white and, despite the steam and hot water, riddled with gooseflesh, and there was a scribble of scratches and nicks over his arms. A bright blue network of varicose veins bulged beneath the skin of his calf.
Old,
I thought,
you're old.
He turned off the water and bent down to grab a towel. “Is Hayden up yet?”

“No, Mark. What's going on with you?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You've been distancing yourself from me and Hayden ever since we got back from Paris.” That wasn't true. It had started before then. Way before then. Since the night the men broke into the house.

He dried himself hurriedly. He'd lost too much weight. I tried to remember that firm body I'd lusted after, but all I could see were these stringy arms, this concave chest. His cheeks sagged. “I'm getting help, Steph. That's what you wanted me to do, wasn't it? I'm seeing someone like you asked.”

“Mark,
please
talk to me.”

“Go make us some coffee and we'll talk.”

“Really?”

He smiled. “Really.”

Had I just seen a flicker of the old Mark? But as desperate as I was not to let things slide even further out of my control, I knew that was just wishful thinking.

I looked in on Hayden on my way down to the kitchen. Unusually for her, she was still asleep. I hesitated and then peered under her bed. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. I dropped the hairbrush into Hayden's trash can, reminding myself to dispose of it later.

The kitchen still held a trace of that foul burned smell, the dishwasher needed unstacking, the stove was spattered with grease, and the microwave door was peppered with melted cheese bits from Hayden's supper. I dug through the cupboards, hunting for clean mugs. We were nearly out of the good coffee. Mindful that Karim was coming over later, I spooned the emergency blend into the coffeemaker, not caring if Mark noticed.