Sometimes whole houses fall into the ground. Roads too. Those are sinkholes.
No wonder she feels so sick in her stomach. Whenever the tremors begin she sees a coffin fall through its hole. Further and further down it falls, head first. Then the stone falls on to the coffin and everything breaks, the wood and the stone. And then she sees that poor corpse, with its rigid eyes and broken bones, falling down the tunnels.
Or she sees a house with everything still inside and the people hanging upside down from the windows as it falls. And then the house smashes into the bottom of the earth.
She wants to be cremated. Ash is light. It stays above ground. If you’re ash you get blown away with the first wind. You won’t sink into the depths.
She turns towards Pop. She can move her limbs now. The lame feeling has gone. Some light comes into the room, but it’s still grey outside. Pop lies on his back with his mouth slightly open. His nose is very sharp and white, and his eyelids are flickering. His hands make little shivering movements on his chest. He’s dreaming. She watches Pop as he dreams. She can see he’s watching his dream from the way his eyeballs move to and fro under his eyelids. She’d love to be able to peep through a hole in the back of Pop’s head so she could watch with him. He smiles a little smile. Must be a nice dream. She’s glad, ’cause sometimes Pop wakes up looking like he’s seen a ghost. That’s when he has a white nightmare. It’s the same dream, he says. Over and over again. In the dream, he’s surrounded by white. White in front and white all around him. It’s so bad he can’t see anything but white. It makes him feel suffocated. When he’s inside the white he can still hear, but he can’t see anything and he can’t get out again. And when he tries to break out, all he sees is more white. White what? she asks, but he doesn’t know. Wool? Clouds? Sand? Soap-suds? Teeth? Walls? Milk? He must know what it is, if it’s so white. But he doesn’t know. It’s just white, he says. White nothing. Pop says the dream makes him feel scared and lonely. He says he wouldn’t mind any other colour, even black. Or red-green-yellow-blue. Just not white. On days when Pop dreams white he’s even quieter than usual. Then he just sits and looks at the world. But right now she can see he’s not dreaming white. ‘Oooh,’ he says in his sleep, like someone getting a big surprise.
Surprises come in colours. Yellow roses. Yellow dresses.
Yellow’s her favourite colour. She wouldn’t mind dreaming about yellow every night of her life. But not yellow nothing — she wants to dream about yellow things. Roses and dresses and things that move, things that smell nice. All in yellow. When Pop dreams white, she’s sure he doesn’t move like he’s moving now. Then he lies dead still. But in that case, how will she know he’s dreaming?
Gerty also seems to be dreaming white nowadays. She doesn’t move when she sleeps. In the old days she used to dream she was chasing cats and playing ball. Then her ears, eyebrows and feet used to twitch, and she used to growl and carry on in her sleep. But not any more.
Mol suddenly sits bolt upright. It’s Gerty! That’s what feels wrong. Where’s Gerty? She wants to get up, she wants to go look. Now, immediately. She begins to move, but she feels completely paralysed. She’s been awake for a long while now, so this is a different kind of heaviness from that other feeling. Now she’s sitting upright, wide awake — and lame.
No, not Gerty! She hears ‘click-click’. It’s Toby. Toby never comes to her before she’s properly awake. But Gerty’s always with her, even before she starts waking up. At the foot of the bed, next to the mattress, or somewhere else in the room. Here comes Toby now. But he’s not coming from Pop’s chair in front, where he usually sleeps. And he’s not walking his usual path, either. He’s coming from the bathroom. He takes just two little steps into the room and then he stands at the door with his ears pricked. He looks at her and wags his tail once or twice. Then he looks back to the bathroom and back to her again as she sits there, upright, unable to move. ‘Ee-ee-ee,’ he says softly. He remains standing, right there, and she sits as though she’s stuck to the bed. No, God, please, no.
‘Aaah-aaah,’ Pop yawns, here next to her. ‘Aaah-aaah,’ he yawns again. ‘Such a nice dream, Mol, so nice. What you looking at like that?’ Pop lifts himself up on to his elbows and looks where she’s looking.
‘Morning, old Toby,’ he says.
Toby waves his tail once, and then again, looking over his shoulder to the bathroom. ‘Ee-ee,’ he says.
‘Ee-ee-ee yourself,’ says Pop, yawning again. He lies down on his back, puts his hands behind his head, and smiles. To think that Pop should smile on a morning like this. It’s not something she sees very often. Most of the time he just swings his legs off the mattress. Then he sits there resting his head on his knees. For a long time he sits like that. After a while it looks like he doesn’t ever want to let himself go again. She always has to say to him: come now, Pop, stand up, put some clothes on so we can go to Shoprite, or something like that. Pop says he’s got no strength left for anything any more. But now he’s lying there with his hands behind his head and he’s smiling. And she doesn’t know how to say it to him.
‘Toby,’ she says. Her voice feels like it’s coming from a strange place. She tries to clear her throat, but it sounds funny.
‘Maybe he just wants to pee,’ says Pop. ‘I’ll do it now-now. Just listen to my dream first. Ai, ai, ai, such a nice dream, Mol. If only I could dream like that every night.
‘I was dreaming,’ says Pop, ‘that we were all in heaven. Me and you and Treppie and Lambert. But we were dogs. Dogs with wings. We weren’t walking, we were flying, and we could talk. Dog-angels, that’s what we were. And the people-angels looked after us, but we didn’t eat dog food from tins, we ate at the Spur. Every day. We ate T-bones with knives and forks and we all wore the jerseys you knitted for us, Molletjie, just nicer, jerseys like rainbows, and that’s why we had serviettes stuck into them, so we didn’t mess on the nice jerseys. Every now and again the people-angels came to ask if there wasn’t anything we wanted, and you said you didn’t want a T-bone, Mol, you wanted honey on toast with white bread and lots of butter, and then you began to break off small pieces and you fed them to me, but my mouth was full of T-bone, and you said it didn’t matter, sweet is nice. Do you have any idea how delicious T-bone and honey-bread taste, Mol? Mol, are you listening to me? Isn’t it wonderful? I really tasted it in my dream, honey and T-bone and toast. And I could taste much better than usual. I wonder if dogs really taste everything so nicely. That dream has made me hungry, man.’
‘Pop, Toby …’ she says.
Pop waves his arm. It’s nothing. ‘Hey, Mol, wasn’t that a lovely dream? And it’s not all, you know. When we finished eating at the Spur, we flew out the windows — forget walking up and down stairs! We didn’t have to pay a cent in that Spur in heaven. The people-angels flew with us and then we played magic balls in heaven. They throw the balls and we fly after them, high, high above heaven’s green lawns, right to the sun and the moon, and then we fly and catch the balls in our mouths and bring them back for the angels, and we put them down at their feet. Magic balls that look like little suns and moons. They make little sparks in your mouth like that sherbet stuff Lambert used to like so much when he was small. What was that stuff called again? Spacedust! Then we went to bed. We all slept in hammocks strung up from the stars. And all you could see were our ears and our tails as we lay there in our hammocks among the stars. The stars all have points in a circle, but actually they’re postboxes with a mouth so you can post letters to your loved ones on earth. In fact, they’re two-way postboxes with doors at the back that you can open, and every day you get mail from your people on earth. Every day we get letters from people we don’t know, but they say they’re family of ours. Then we read them to each other. Dogs can read too in heaven, you know. The letters are full of nice news from the world below.’