Chapter Two: The Turning

I came back to myself on the hallway floor with the tile cold against my cheek and a taste in my mouth like a coin left too long under my tongue.

The light through the kitchen window was full daylight now. Hours gone. Swallowed whole while I lay there like I was dropped off a rooftop, and my first coherent thought, once thought became possible again, was that I needed to move before the day got any further away from me.

My body disagreed.

I got as far as my knees before the first wave hit, and it did not feel like sickness. Sickness has a build and a peak and a settling, something you recognise as it happens. This had none of that. It came in from everywhere at once, up through my molars, down my spine, into the soft place behind my navel, like every nerve in me had been rewired to the same live current and someone had just thrown the switch. I heard an awful moan come from deep inside me.

Curtains, I thought, in the middle of everything going on. And I have wondered since what it says about me that of all the things my mind reached for first, it reached for concealment.

I dragged myself along the skirting board using the wall for a spine because I couldn’t trust my own. Living room first. The curtains there were thick enough, good ones, my mother’s choice from years back when she still helped me pick things for a first flat, and I hauled them shut across a window already dimmed by cloud, my hands leaving smears on the fabric. Kitchen next, the smaller window over the sink, a tea towel jammed into the gap where the blind didn’t quite reach the frame. Bedroom last, and by the time I got there my vision had started doing something to the light itself, softening it and sharpening it in the same instant, so that the strip of afternoon leaking through the bedroom curtain gap looked less like sunlight and more like a wire, thin and white-hot, laid across the carpet.

I did not look directly at it again.

Bolt the front door. Deadbolt too, the one I never use because Pinelands is meant to be the kind of place where you don’t need it, the one my downstairs neighbour, Portia, laughed at me for installing anyway. The paranoid Zimbabwean, she’d said it kindly, teasing, and I’d let her think that was the whole reason. I turned it now with fingers that didn’t really feel like mine, thick and clumsy, the joints not answering in order.

Music. I don’t know why that came to me so fast. I guess some part of my brain that was still doing its job, still trying to keep me alive and unseen, understood before the rest of me did what was coming, understood that whatever this was going to be, it was not going to be quiet.

I got the speaker going. Not my usual playlist. Something with weight to it, bass heavy enough to carry through a wall, loud enough that Portia below me would roll her eyes and turn up her own television rather than come knock, loud enough that whoever was on the other side of the shared wall in 4B would grumble to their partner instead of getting off the couch. I know how this complex works. I have lived here two years and know exactly how much noise buys you a knock at the door and how much buys you nothing at all beyond a muttered complaint the next day in the parking lot. I was counting on the second kind. I was counting on the neighbours to not want to have to leave their own flats more than they wanted to be good neighbours.

Then it started in earnest, and I stopped counting on anything at all.

My jaw locked first. A grinding ache set in low in the joint, tested past anything a jaw was ever meant to hold, again and again, until something in there gave with a wet click I felt more than heard. My gums split along the front, top and bottom, a hot line no wider than a paper cut, and it was the worst thing that had happened to me yet, worse than the sunlight, worse than the confusion, because it was happening inside my own mouth and I tasted it before I understood it. Copper, and something underneath the copper that made my whole body want to gag and lean into the taste at the same time.

I bit down on a pillow. It didn’t help. I don’t know why I thought it would.

My spine curled backward, slow, vertebra by vertebra, bending on its own and refusing to stop for me. I ended up on the floor between the bed and the wall without remembering the fall, curled around myself, one hand fisted so hard in the carpet that two of my nails tore loose at the root. That pain I understood. Small, sharp, entirely human, almost funny next to everything else happening to me that night.

My eyes burned like someone had gone at them with the flat of a hot iron, not on the surface but behind it, in the sockets, in the muscle that moves them. I screamed then, properly, the first sound I let all the way out of my chest since I’d woken in the bush the morning before. The music covered most of it. Somewhere under the bass my phone buzzed on the nightstand, once, twice, a WhatsApp maybe, someone from work wondering where I was, and I could not have answered it if the building had been on fire.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, the hunger came in too, and it felt nothing like being hungry. Normal hunger is a suggestion. This was closer to an order. It sat low under my ribs, heavy and insistent, already latched onto one thing before I had any say in it. A pulse, somewhere close, warm and within reach. Some old animal part of me had worked out where the nearest supply of that warmth was before the rest of me caught up. Through the floor. Portia’s flat. Her heartbeat, if that’s what I was hearing, if that low double thud under the bass line was really hers and not just my own blood doing something new and terrible in my ears.

I put both hands over my own mouth and held them there until my knuckles went white enough to hurt, because that was the only plan I had. Don’t move. Don’t go to the door. Wait for whatever this is to finish doing whatever it’s doing, and do not, under any circumstances, let your body figure out that there’s a staircase between you and the thing it wants.

I don’t know how long that part lasted. Long enough that the light at the bedroom curtain’s edge changed colour twice, gold going to grey going, eventually, blessedly, to the flat blue of evening. Long enough that at some point the knock came.

Three raps, official-sounding, and a voice through the door I recognised as Themba from the complex’s security company, the older one, patient, the kind of man who’d clearly had this exact conversation with this exact building a hundred times before and expected to have it a hundred times again.

“Sir? We got a noise complaint. Music’s very loud, hey. Can you turn it down a bit.”

I couldn’t speak. I don’t know what would have come out if I’d tried, and some cold, clear, surviving part of me did not want to find out with a witness standing three metres away on the other side of a door I’d locked for exactly this reason.

He knocked again after a pause, a little harder.

“Sir, I need you to turn the music down or I’ll have to log this one. Last warning, hey.”

Log it. Not come in. Not call anyone above him, not the body corporate, certainly not the police, because that would mean paperwork and a whole evening he didn’t want to spend on a noise complaint in a building where nothing worse than noise complaints ever happened. I heard him wait a beat longer, weighing whether this was going to become his problem in any real way, and then I heard his radio crackle something and his footsteps go, unhurried, back down the corridor toward the lift. Somewhere behind him I caught the murmur of a door opening a crack, someone from a neighbouring flat checking that the disturbance was being handled by someone who wasn’t them, and then that door closing too, satisfied, returning to its own evening.

That is, I think, the truest thing I can say about where I live. People here will send a man in a company polo shirt to your door before they’ll come themselves, and once he’s gone they consider the matter closed, whatever might still be happening on the other side of your wall.

I did not turn the music down. I don’t think I could have reached it.

Sometime after that, the worst of it began to loosen its grip, the way a fever breaks, not all at once but in a long uneven slide, waves further apart, then further apart again, until I was simply lying on my own bedroom floor shaking, drenched through my shirt, my mouth aching around teeth that did not feel like mine and did not, when my tongue found the edges of them in the dark, feel like they were going back to what they’d been.

My phone had stopped buzzing a while before that. I made myself reach for it anyway, some late attempt at being a person who still had a life outside this room. Four messages from my supervisor at the firm, the first mildly annoyed, the last openly concerned, are you okay, you’re never off comms like this. Two from my cousin Rutendo in Harare, unrelated, a video of her daughter’s birthday party, three exclamation marks, nothing that needed an answer tonight. One from a number I hadn’t saved, a woman named Zanele I’d been on two dates with in January and never called back properly, hey stranger, you still alive out there lol.

I looked at that last one longer than it deserved.

I thought about calling my mother. She followed me down from Harare a couple of years after I did, and we live maybe twenty minutes apart on a quiet evening, close enough that I sometimes catch myself wishing for all the kilometers that used to sit between us, back when there was an actual border keeping her from simply arriving. There’s nothing but traffic now. 

I thought about it the way you think about touching something you already know is hot, a fast imagining of the whole conversation before you’ve moved a muscle toward it, her voice going tight the way it does whenever I mention feeling unwell, and what would I even tell her. Mum, I woke up in a bush covered in someone else’s blood and then my teeth rearranged themselves on my bedroom floor. Say that out loud and she’d be at my door inside the hour, no matter what time it was, close enough by then to see whatever this was doing to my face. The last thing either of us needed was her standing there asking questions I had no way to answer.

I thought about Keanan. I still call him my closest friend here, though it had been two months since we’d actually managed to see each other, both of us always saying we’d sort out a time and never getting round to it. Keanan was coloured, from a family in the southern suburbs, and most of the people I’d let get close since I arrived looked more like him, or white, than they looked like the majority of the country. Some of it was the language. The rest was comfort. You’re either welcome into the ingroup or you’re not.

With Xhosa women, it was usually fine. Guys were hit and miss. I could tell within a minute whether my accent was going to be a problem, the moment it registered on someone’s face. Most of the time it wasn’t anything. Enough times it was, though, that I never stopped watching for it.

None of that was a rule. It just happened sometimes. I thought about what I’d say to him tonight and couldn’t finish the thought. Whatever I said, I’d become something he had to manage. A worry. A project. I’d spent most of my life being the one people didn’t have to check on, and even after everything that had happened to me in the last day, I wasn’t ready to give that up.

So I put the phone face down on the carpet beside me and I lay there in the dark with the music finally, mercifully, running itself down toward the end of the playlist, and I did not call anyone.

I ran my tongue along my own teeth again instead, slower this time, feeling what I’d become while nobody was looking, because there was nobody else in the room, or in the building, or in the country, who I trusted enough yet to let see what I’d found.