You could see the treed suburbs below, awash in the brightest hues of reds and orange.
“Did you know that Johannesburg is one of the most treed cities in the entire world?” I heard myself say.
Noah and Sindi both turned and looked at me curiously.
“Don’t ask me how I know that, though, or why.” I gave a shrug. “But I can also tell you that Pretoria is known as Jacaranda City and has over 70,000 Jacaranda there. I can also tell you that the Jacaranda tree was brought to South Africa in the 1800s from Argentina. They are actually not indigenous.”
“I didn’t know that,” Noah said, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. It was directly above us, and it was making the autumn air warm and pleasant.
“Neither did I,” I said, “until one second ago.”
“I wonder what other interesting facts you’ll suddenly remember,” Sindi said, walking to one of the storage lockers on the roof.
“Don’t know.” I tried to reach inside my brain again for something to grab onto. But once more, I was faced with the same dilemma: the blank nothingness stretching out in front of me. It seemed that I wasn’t able to find anything when I looked for it, but rather that it found me when it wanted to. Dr. Cohen had been right: trying too hard to remember anything didn’t work. We reached the storeroom and Sindi slipped the key into the lock and turned. And then, she bent down and lifted the door up with a loud whooshing sound. I peered inside. It was dark at first, and then something flew at me out of the darkness.
“Don’t worry. Sometimes I get bats in here,” Sindi said. “They usually just fly away.”
But of course, it didn’t fly away . . .
CHAPTER 25
“Uh . . . guys,” I said, turning in circles as the bat flew around me over and over again.
“That’s weird,” Sindi said. “They usually can’t get out of here fast enough.”
“Guuuyys!” I started to feel panicked as it seemed to swoosh towards me, do a full circle around my body and then fly off into the air, only to come straight back for me and repeat the action. I flapped my arms and it darted away from me again, only to turn around once more and fly at me. I fell to my knees with a squeal and crawled as fast as I could into the storeroom, where I hid behind a rail of clothes.
“What is it with me?” I threw my arms into the air when Sindi and Noah came inside. “I’ve got this weird thing with animals. They all seem to hate me.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Sindi said, flicking the lights on.
“Trust me, it’s not. In the last few days I’ve been attacked by two birds, a rat ran away from me, lizards tried to eat my face and now I’ve been dive-bombed by a bat!”
“It’s true! I can vouch for it,” Noah said.
Sindi put her hand on her hip and looked at me. “Maybe you’re a pet psychic.”
“A what?”
“This chick that lives next door to me hired one when her dog started peeing on the floor. The psychic reckoned that a dog had died in the flat before they moved in and its spirit was still there haunting the place so her dog was marking its territory.” We all looked at each other then, as if timed, burst out laughing.
“She paid three hundred Rand a session for it,” Sindi said, which made us laugh even more. Once our laughter tapered off I took in my surroundings.
“This is . . . I wasn’t expecting so much!” I stared at the racks of clothes in front of me, tightly packed together in rows with a small path down the side that looked like only one person could squeeze down. Sindi walked up to the first rack of clothing and pulled it towards me. All the racks were on wheels, making it easier to move them around in the tight space.
“This is what I was thinking for you,” she said, as I walked up to the clothes and looked at them. I ran my hand over them: jeans, T-shirts, some cardigans and pullovers. White, blue, gray, black and beige.
“These are some essentials I keep for shoots. You always need a pair of jeans and a white tee. Try on whatever you like,” she said.
“I don’t know my size.”
Sindi looked me up and down a few times. “You’re a small in T-shirts, and