RACHEL ZADOK
Sister-Sister
KWELA BOOKS
For Julian,
who has never asked me to get a real job
The road swallows people and sometimes at night you can hear them calling for help, begging to be freed from inside its stomach.
— Ben Okri, The Famished Road
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
— John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
Prologue
Dreaming-Dreaming
The woman dreams she approaches KwaNogqaza Falls, just as she did on the night of her initiation ceremony, twenty-five years before. She reaches the pool at the bottom of the waterfall and sinks to her knees to pray, but the sandy bank collapses and she slips into the water. The Inkanyamba swirls around her, dragging her down to the river bed where weeds dance with creatures half snake, half fish, and long-bodied crabs watch from crevices in the rocks, eyes like jelly-berries on silver stalks.
“Dig,” Inkanyamba tells her. She buries her arm up to the elbow. Sand clouds the water, enveloping her in a storm of glittering grains. Her fingers close around two smooth stones.
The serpent-god takes her into his mouth and spits her out at the surface. She is no longer in the forest. A beach stretches out before her. The woman walks along the sand with the pebbles in her hand. Before long, she comes across a dead gull lying just above the tidemark. Two white chicks sit on the bird, picking maggots from its feathers. As she watches, the water subsides until there is a single blue on the horizon. Where there was ocean, there is only sand. The dune grasses shrivel. The trees in the coastal forest sicken, dropping leaves until they are nothing more than splintered grey trunk and branch. The world dies as the chicks grow fat on their dinner of maggots.
There is a searing pain in her hand. She opens her palm and looks at the pebbles, perfect white ovals, identical save for a scab that discolours the purity of one. She picks at the scab with her nail. Blood wells from the pebble and a sound like that of a mewling baby fills the air. The stone shudders and rolls away from her prying finger towards its twin. They merge, becoming one. She contemplates the single stone in her hand, but before she can glean meaning, it splits in two and her palm begins to bleed.
Someone shakes her. The woman opens her eyes and sees Sizane leaning over her.
“It’s time, Mama,” she says. “The baby is coming.”
PART 1
Spookasem
One for Me and One for You
I stand at the edge of an overpass as another bleak dawn spills over the city stretched out below. Office blocks rise into the leaden sky like a jawful of giant’s teeth. The wind swoops through, picking a fight with the caged trees lining the pavements, stripping the branches. Leaves dance down the street with plastic bags, paper wrappers and tin cans, a rumble-tumble of discarded things. Only the sunshine sway of a Shoprite packet stops me disappearing into all that grey.
The same wind that steals warmth from flesh and leaves from trees jives the yellow bag down the road. At the corner, it catches a sideways gust and jellyfishes into the air. I watch it float towards heaven, thinking maybe the soul of a plastic bag is a helium balloon, and I pray it makes it all the way up; but before it can reach the second floor of Capital Bank, the wind drops it back down to ride the pavement to and fro, to and fro, pacing-pacing like a strung-out whore.
Traffic lights perform acrobatics for the empty streets. Flick green, flip orange, flick-flack red. And behind me the highway, circling the city like a concrete snake, waits for us.
I turn my back on the slumbering city and wander down the curve of the overpass to the highway, where Sindi spent the night in a wreck at the side of the road. She’s curled like a worm on the passenger side, on the only seat that hasn’t been ripped out to find a new life as somebody’s couch. The lace of one of her boots hangs loose, almost touching the road through a hole in the rusted floor. It must have come undone in the night; she hasn’t taken those Hi-Tecs off since she lifted them from the Salvation Army charity shop when the soles of her sneaks wore through. Her coat she grabbed from the back seat of a careless man’s car. My sisi is a talented thief. I lay my hand against the once plush wool of the coat, now matted as her hair and glittering with frost like Next-Door-Auntie’s eyelids on shebeen night. Her lips are a dead-man shade of blue.
“Blue lips to count blue cars,” I whisper, pressing my finger to her mouth to steal an ice-cream kiss. The kiss is a memory of the time we lifted a Cornetto from Joe Saviour’s fridge and lay on the grassed embankment above the highway, counting cars with stolen sugar on our tongues. Zooming-zooming streaks of red, zooming-zooming streaks of blue. Our greedy eyes gobbled the white stripes. We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we’d never been and thought we wanted to go.
Leaning into the junk through the missing driver-side door, I try to make out the time on the dashboard clock. The dash is retro, the clock analogue: just two hands and four lines at twelve, three, six and nine. It doesn’t work, but I want to know when it stopped. I like to know that things stop, because sometimes it feels that we never will.
For Sindi, walking is better than standing still. When you walk, things change. Mama Moon slides from skinny sliver to bloated belly; as her baby grows, we circle the city. In summer, if it rains, sunflowers seed in cracks and sprout and bloom, and each time we pass, they’ve changed. The stems thicken, the petals brighten and the seed cluster grows blacker than a nest of hungry beaks. Then comes the day when nothing grows there any more, when all that’s left of that yellow sun is a dried, brown husk.
Leaving Sindi to sleep, I drift over to the buckled crash-barrier and sit down. I sink into the dent, run my fingers over the rusted scars. If I wanted, I could sense what twisted the metal. Ghosts clamour in my ears. They want to tell me their stories, but I don’t like to listen. Everybody’s got a story. I have a story of my own.
Across the highway, the salmon-pink boundary wall of a townhouse complex jars against the barren embankment like a bright mirage projected onto the dawn. It hurts more than my eyes, so I turn to the safety of the grey road and block the complex out completely by shutting an eye.
One-eyed, I watch sunlight spike over the horizon, but before
