Book Excerpt: Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes
Last week, Henrietta Rose-Innes launched her highly-anticipated third novel, Nineveh, at Kalk Bay Books. In Nineveh, pest exterminator Katya Grubbs finds her world coming apart when a contract to rid a luxury state of its unwanted creatures forces her to address the unexpected guests of her own past.
Today we bring you an excerpt from the novel, read by Rose-Innes at the Kalk Bay launch. You can also watch a video of Rose-Innes reading from the book here.
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In Newlands forest, they carry the boxes up through the pines and into a stretch of indigenous trees. Katya’s glad to have Toby with her on this lonely path. It can be nerve-wracking, going into the forest alone, although she likes to think that a woman with a box of repulsive caterpillars pressed to her chest is safe enough against most assaults.
They are in a part of the forest she doesn’t often visit, off the path. This is Toby’s idea. He’s spotted a tree here, apparently just the thing for caterpillars. She notes, with interest, something else about her nephew that she didn’t know before: this lurking about in forests. He’s taken his shoes off in the car and his big feet pad confidently ahead of hers on the pine-needle bed. Seeing him move against the branches, some of which glow pale in the darkening air, she thinks again that he is like a young tree. Despite his narrow frame, his lank hair, his liquid eyes, Toby is not a limp person. Indeed, he has a kind of springy resilience, like green wood. And there is the vegetable greenness of the veins beneath his skin, his slightly sappy body scent. I’m a vegan now, he told her recently. Perhaps that’s why he’s growing so fast: photosynthesis.
Over the years, Katya has seen him transform from stocky white-blond child into elongated teen. Not pretty; his face is too broad in the forehead and sharp at the chin, the nose over-long. But he does have those luminous eyes set deep behind long lashes, and the thinness of his lips is offset by their charm – the way he presses them together between smiles, restraining soft thoughts. Girls would surely go for that? His height would be in his favour, too, once he filled it out. Broad shoulders. Longshanks. Long fingers, right for guitar-string picking round fires. Tall like his father, no doubt, Katya thinks. Not like us. Toby’s hair is also evidence of his paternity: of the pale father who Katya never met, but who seems to be revealing himself in stages through the body of his child, stretching Toby’s teenage limbs, flexing Toby’s long, unGrubbsish fingers.
The Grubbs look is small but well muscled, with short legs and disproportionately long arms. Monkey-folk. Snub, monkeyish faces, too. In her sister Alma it’s cute, with her long pale hair. Katya’s always worn her hair trimmed short, and it’s darker, like her dad’s. They carry themselves the same, straight-backed and quick. Katya’s ears, mysteriously small, must be her mother’s; so too her large breasts. But in all other ways, Sylvie’s influence, like her memory, is faint and fading. There are many more body parts in which Katya can discern, all too clearly, her father’s vigorous strain.
Hands, for example. When they used to eat together in the old days, Katya would find herself staring at Len’s short fingers, attached to square, functional palms. When she looked down at the table, there they were again: those same hands, if smaller, less shopworn versions, clenched around her own knife and fork. She was always scared of developing Len’s bulbous knuckles, which he’d crack in the ears of his children to wake them in the mornings. Toby comes to a halt in a small clearing under a twisted tree. Round the base of the trunk are some planks and smooth stones, arranged in a circle. Candle wax melted onto the stones.
“How did you find this place, anyway?”
Toby shrugs, an exaggerated movement with his newly broad shoulders. “I come here with friends sometimes,” he says.
“Huh,” she says. “Really.” It is, clearly, a place one would come to smoke ganja; she was a teenager too, once. Something else she did not know about Toby.
He crouches next to the collection boxes and looks up at her, waiting.
“You do it, Tobes. You know how.”
She watches him unlatch the lid, lift out a caterpillar in his long fingers and place it on the bark of the tree. He’s developed a confidence in his work: the way he bends to stroke or scoop up some little hapless wayfarer. Some mangy cat or cockroach down on its luck. The family touch.
“How cool is this?” he whispers as the creatures resume their march. Kneeling side by side, Katya and Toby watch the sinuous threading of the caterpillars’ bodies. The tree is wellchosen; the beasts approve.
A vision from memory fits itself imperfectly over the scene. Surely it was here, or near to here, years ago, and at dusk … She’d been walking … No. That’s not right. She was a child, she was not by herself. It was the two of them. Her and Dad. She could smell his roll-up tobacco. They’d come out onto a path in the near-darkness, with the trees closing a tunnel above them. They were working.
Look. Dad was down on his haunches, intent, his whole body aimed at a spot on the ground. She crouched down next to him, carefully soundless. Proud of her soft feet, her silent approaches.
A black shape, twitching on the sand. At first she thought it was an insect of some sort, a dull butterfly moving its wings. But, leaning in, she saw it was mammalian: a shrew, the size of the top joint of her thumb, engrossed in some fervid action. So absorbed that it paid them no mind, even when she put her face close. Its pelt was slightly darker than the leaf litter, its paws delicate and fierce. She understood for the first time why shrews were emblems of ferocity, for this tiny creature was engaged in an act of carnage: it was gripping an earthworm that was trying to escape into a hole. The shrew was hauling the slimy pink-grey body out of the ground, hand over hand like a seaman with a fat rope, and simultaneously stuffing it into its jaws, wide open to accommodate the writhing tube. It was ridiculous, obscene, impressive.
They sat there for a long time, watching this miniature savagery, until all the light was gone. Her dad rose to his feet without using his hands. She admired his wiry strength, his woods-sense. She mimicked the movement, swaying a little to keep her balance. Another time, he might have brought the scene to a close with a shout or, worse, a foot-stomp, but that evening he stood quietly. It was not often that her father went so still.
The silence of that long-ago evening, the tree-trunks black against luminous sky…the scene has a religious feeling in her memory. Is it possible that Len took her hand to lead her down through the trees? Surely not.
“Hey,” says Toby. “It’s not working.” It’s quite dim under the tree where he released the caterpillars. Some cling to the bark, some have fallen to the ground, some are wandering off into the undergrowth. The discipline of the corps has been shattered, the general has lost his command. “They’re not swarming like they were.”
She shrugs. It’s true. She’s tired.
“We tried, Tobes. We can’t win ’em all.” He looks so downcast, she doesn’t add that most of them will be devoured by birds, otters, snakes. The mountain is full of such tiny battles. It’s all contested territory, overlapping, three-dimensional, fiercely patrolled. Millions of miniature turfs, the size of her palm, of her footprint, her fingernail.
Katya stands and brushes the leaf mulch from her knees. “Get us out of here, Tobes.
I’m hopelessly lost.” Although it’s not really possible to lose yourself here in the forest, with the mountain on one side and the city on the other.
Toby points and moves, stepping long-legged over logs and pushing through dry bracken; not the direction she would have chosen. Some small thing goes scuttling away from them, unseen in the undergrowth. There is a chatter, a rustle, a clap of wings. She imagines the caterpillars finding her spoor, inching slowly home behind them.
Coming out from under the trees, Toby and Katya stand for a moment entranced by broader views. The switchbacking path pauses here on a bare shoulder, allowing them views up to the exposed face of the mountain, and down, out to the sweep of the city below them. She’s lived and worked in Cape Town her whole life, but there are still places in this city she’s never been. She tries and fails to find her house down there, among the familiar landmarks. She shivers.
“Let’s go home, Tobes. Before it gets dark.”
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- Nineveh is published by Umuzi, an imprint of Random House Struik
Book details
- Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes
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EAN: 9781415201367
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Apr
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