THEY HAD UPPED STICKS FROM WOODSTOCK with the kind assistance of Ambassador Removals, she, Jan and James. The sheepdog they had acquired in Fish Hoek because it had seemed like the right thing to do. She came pre-named from the lady at the vet: suddenly everyone had a dog named Bella. “Maybe it’s Bela, like Lugosi,” Joanna told Jan, who was dozing on the couch. The dog watched them from between her paws, eyebrows like aerials.
Joanna watched with interest as James approached the sleeping Jan and then whacked both hands down hard on his father’s stomach, shouting, “Wake up, Daddy! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”
Then she fled. Jan wouldn’t forgive her for laughing.
She made for the cool place under the hedge in the lee of the house, twisting her ankle in one of those burrowing holes in the grass. What made them? She hoped there weren’t snakes here, or moles.
The refugee Bella was lying under the picture windows, panting in the shade. Maybe she could smell the underground water of the aquifer: over the weeks she had dug herself a shallow indentation and lay there on her belly, head between her paws, more terrier than sheepdog. It wasn’t even September yet. Summer was going to be horrendous.
But not as bad as 1981, Jo-Jo, said Doctor Renfield. Nowhere near as bad as that.
Joanna once had a boyfriend whose mother accused her of thinking too much. At the time she had privately considered that the woman could do a little more of it herself – especially with that hair – but she hadn’t said anything. You didn’t want to ruin the birthday party. But when she was stuck at home with James, thinking was what kept Joanna from running around in circles like a cartoon kitty, her tail on fire, smoke pouring from her ears.
She thought that life was harder for the sane – and by sane she meant people who still cared about what the neighbours thought – because the crazy bits were still there. They didn’t dissipate: they were just stored somewhere lower down. Everybody had them. They popped up to say hello when your attention was elsewhere. It was one reason that she and Jan were never going to enter those Amazing Race-type contests. She knew that he’d start in on her about where the map was, and she’d end up ventilating his shirtfront with the Leatherman on his belt. It was a good thing he didn’t know how close to the Abyss he really stepped.
Her father, for example, had channeled his particular weirdness into those joke books. All through Joanna’s childhood he made a living writing down all the terrible puns and shaggy dog stories and Knock-knock jokes he and his friends had told each other as kids – nothing mean or sexist or racist. The starving-Ethiopian and dead-baby jokes weren’t in the soft-cover books that were printed on butcher’s paper. Joanna had had to hear those for herself at school – and kjs was full of them.
Especially the year she was eight, the year of the forty-degree summer (and they weren’t even sent home from school, which was against the law), the year that the tips of her mother’s ears were burned to crisps at the hospital. Her favourite joke went like this:
Mommy! Mommy! Can I play with granny?
No! You’ve dug her up twice this week already!
She couldn’t wait for James to be old enough to understand them. Joanna sat down next to Bella and stroked the soft head. The sheepdog grinned and got up, wiggling her hindquarters. “Down, hound,” Joanna told her. “I wasn’t coming to play with you. Just be calm. We’ll sit here until the shouting stops.” Bella flopped down again, smiling.
There were so many things to investigate on the property. She couldn’t really believe that she, Joanna, and he, Jan, lived in a house like this. She idly picked a bur out of Bella’s fur. Like this hedge that was scratching her elbow, for instance. What was it? The leaves were round and shiny, the trunks of the tree knotted and bent at right angles to the wind, the way all the small trees on the peninsula were. Joanna peered at it. Milkwood? Saint-John’s-Bread. Whatever they were, they smelled like fresh semen. She peered under the hedge. This place was just sand – like the beach, really. You had to pour in a ton of compost and then it just disappeared: the good and nourishing soil swallowed by the needy and bland. They had tried to get some more fynbos going in the few bald spots on this side of the house but, so far, no luck. The other side was still a tangle of bush, as if the mountain had moved down to them, reversing the sea level. It had all been underwater once. She’d read on some tourist site that the shells in Peers Cave hadn’t been transported there by humans. She’d also read that the sea levels were rising again. Someday they’d be seeking shelter in that cave the way people had done for a hundred thousand years. People were already using it as a base. She’d seen another one of those fright-inducing editorials in The Lighthouse about five climbers – five! – being stabbed and robbed at its entrance.
But until Armageddon settled in once and for all, the mishaps were more domestic. Wasn’t it a luxury to have a garden to worry about? The bushes on this side of the safe walls of Joanna’s new house were straggly because they wanted sun. “Don’t we all,” said Joanna to the dog. “Some sun, and then a shady spot to lie in.” She stroked Bella’s fur and her hand trailed in the sand, where something hard moved and bit her.
Joanna shrieked and recoiled, thinking, Snake! They were all over Boyes Drive in the summer months, moving lazily over the hot tar and getting caught under the tyres.
Joanna scrambled back – Why wasn’t Bella moving? That damn dog! No fucking protection when she needed it! – and peered cautiously under the hedge.
The small white cross in the sand was leaning brokenly to the left. The rotted wood had splintered under her weight. Joanna felt her heart do a bollemakiesie. Oh, Christ! What was this? An animal grave? Had she been sitting on it?
She looked under the hedge again. There it was. And not just one, either. There were six crosses in total, hunched close to the wall, ranged in the sand like debris in the dunes. A couple of them had lost their cross-pieces and stuck up like the ruins of a tiger pit.
“Not a grave,” said Joanna under her breath. “A whole graveyard!”
She realised that she had been expecting to find something like this – something in a dark and minor key. The place really was too good to be true. Wasn’t it always? Joanna pictured the tiny bodies of beloved kittens and ancient dogs and budgies – and what? A hamster? A couple of rats? – decaying in the earth. They had had kids, hadn’t they, the previous owners? Grown up and moved away, the tiny underground coffins forgotten.
She moved in for a closer look. There was something peaceful about the scene compared to the chaos she could still hear coming through the lounge windows. The names of the animals would be written on the arms of the crosses. There might be a MUFFIN. Maybe a SYLVESTER or a WHISKERS or a PUSHKIN.
Joanna squinted at the markings in faint black Koki, the shadowed capitals of the city of the dead.
MINT, said the first cross.
MARJORAM, said the next.
THYME.