Bodily Harm (23 page)

Well, it turns out he’s having an identity crisis, boy, am I sick of those. Before this he’s only made it with younger, dumber chicks, women who’re easy to impress, he says, and he’s never tried it with someone like me, notice he meant old and wise, like an owl maybe.
If you have to be a bird, which would you rather be, a chick or an owl? He’s not sure someone like me would think he has anything to offer besides sex, and he wants to be valued for himself, whatever that is. Chinese! He wants a long-term meaningful relationship. I can tell he was a bedwetter as a child. Maybe still is for all I know.

I’m sitting there with my hair not brushed and I really have to pee, but I don’t want to interrupt him because he obviously finds this important, and I’m thinking, I’ve heard this before, only it used to be women saying it to men. I can’t believe it! And I’m thinking, do I want a long-term meaningful relationship with this guy? And then I’m thinking,
does
he have anything to offer besides sex?

Well, the answer was no. But that didn’t used to matter, did it? How come it matters all of a sudden? Why do we have to start respecting their
minds?
Who keeps changing the rules, them or us? You know how many times that’s happened to me since then? Three more times! It’s an epidemic! What do they
want?

My theory is that when sex was such a big deal, above the waist, below the waist, with stages of achievement marked on it like the United Appeal thermometer, they wanted it that way because you could measure it, you could win, scoring, you know? Our team against their team. Getting away with it. One in the teeth for Mummy. So we said, you want it, fine, we want it too, let’s get together, and all of a sudden millions of pricks went limp. Nationwide! That’s my theory. The new scoring is
not
scoring. Just so long as you keep control. They don’t want love and understanding and meaningful relationships, they still want sex, but only if they can
take
it. Only if you’ve got something to lose, only if you struggle a little. It helps if you’re eight years old, one way or another. You follow me?

Jocasta paid for Rennie’s lunch. That meant she thought Rennie was in terrible shape, on the brink of death in fact, since ordinarily she never paid for anything if she could help it.

I’m hardly dead yet, Rennie wanted to say. But she was touched by this gesture, it was support after all, Jocasta had done what she could. She had paid for the lunch, which was a big thing, and she’d been as amusing as possible, a cheerful bedside visit in the terminal ward. Talk about your own life, life after all goes on, shun morbid subjects. A positive attitude does wonders for out-of-control cell division.

Rennie walked back to the apartment, unsupported, one foot in front of the other, keeping her balance. When she got there Jake was sitting in the livingroom. There were two beer bottles, Carlsberg, on the floor beside the plump pink chair. Ordinarily he never drank from the bottle. He didn’t get up.

Once Rennie would have known why he was there, in the middle of the day. But he would not have been sitting in a chair, he would have been hiding behind the door, he’d have grabbed her from behind.

What’s wrong? she said.

Jake looked up at her. His eyes were puffy, he hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Neither had Rennie, as far as that went, but every time she mentioned it it turned out he’d slept even worse than she had. They were competing for each other’s pity, which was too bad because neither of them seemed to have a lot of it lying around, they’d been using it up on themselves.

Rennie went over and kissed Jake on the top of the head. He looked so awful.

He took her hand, held on to it. We should try again, said Jake.

If I could do it over again I’d do it a different way, says Lora, God knows. Except maybe I wouldn’t, you know? Look before you leap, my mother used to say, not that she ever did, she never had the time.
When they’re right behind you you don’t look, you only leap, you better believe it, because if you don’t leap that’s fucking it, eh? Just keep moving, is my motto.

The year I turned sixteen my mother got a job selling Avon door to door, so she wasn’t there in the afternoons when I got home. I didn’t like being there in the cellar with just Bob, he gave me the creeps, so I used to hang out after school with Gary, that’s my boyfriend. Sometimes we’d skip after lunch, and we’d have a few beers in his car, he sure loved that car, and then we’d neck afterwards. We never went all the way. Everyone thought it was the girls like me and Marie who went all the way, but mostly it was the nice girls. They figured it was okay if you were going with the guy and you were in love with him. Sometimes they’d get caught, that was before the Pill was a big thing or abortions either, and Marie and me would kill ourselves laughing, because we were the ones always getting accused of it.

At that high school they thought we were the tough girls and I guess we thought that too. We wore this heavy eye makeup and white lipstick, I guess we were something. But I never let myself get too drunk or carried away or anything. When the nice girls got in trouble their parents bought them trips to the States to get fixed up, but I knew what happened to you if you couldn’t afford it. Somebody’s kitchen table. There was one girl a couple of grades ahead of us at school, she tried it herself with a knitting needle only it didn’t work. The teachers told us it was some kind of a rare disease but everyone knew the truth, it got around. As for me, I knew Bob would make sure I’d be out on my ass just as soon as he could throw me out, and that would be it.

Gary liked me to stop him, he said he respected me for it. He wasn’t the motorcycle type, he had a job too on weekends. It was the other kind you had to look out for, the ones with money. No one at our school was a millionaire or anything but some had more money
than others and they thought they were the cat’s ass. I never went out with them, they’d never ask me anyway except to somewhere like the back of the field hut. It was all how much money you had. If you had enough you could get away with anything, you know?

Whenever I’d come in late Bob would be there, sitting at the kitchen table with his cardigan sleeves coming unravelled, and he’d look at me like I was dirt. He didn’t slap me around any more though; I was too big for that. I used to get Gary to park right in front of the kitchen window, it was half below street level because we lived in a cellar, and we’d neck away like crazy right where Bob could hear us and maybe see us too if he looked out.

Then I quit school and started working full-time, at the pizza takeout, it was no great hell but it was money. I figured I’d have enough soon to move into my own place, and Gary said, Why don’t we get married. That was what I wanted then, I wanted to get married, have kids; only I wanted to do it right, not like my mother.

It was pretty soon after that I let him go all the way, it was okay because we were getting married anyway. It just happened that way, we didn’t have a safe or anything. It was in the back seat of his car, right in broad daylight behind this reservoir where we used to go. It was uncomfortable as hell, and I kept thinking someone would come along and look in the window. There wasn’t all that much to it, except it hurt, not a lot though, and I couldn’t figure out what they were always making so much fuss about. It was like my first cigarette, I was sick as a dog, though I ended up smoking in a big way.

We didn’t have any Kleenex or anything so we had to use this old undershirt he had in the trunk, to polish the car with, he made some joke about running me through the car wash. When he saw the blood though he stopped laughing, he said everything would be okay, he’d take care of me. What he meant was we were still getting married.

I had to go to work that night, I was working three evenings with two afternoons off, so I got Gary to drop me off at the apartment so I could change into my uniform. After I did that I went into the kitchen to make myself some dinner, I could get free pizza at the shop but by that time I couldn’t stand the sight of it. You don’t like it so much once you know what they put into it. Bob was in there as usual, smoking and finishing off a beer. I guess by that time my mother was supporting him because he didn’t seem to be in the television business any more.

His damn cats came over right away and began rubbing on my legs, they must’ve smelled it, like I was a raw steak or a fish or something. It was the same when I got the curse, when I started using Tampax they’d fish the used ones out of the garbage and go around with the strings hanging out of their mouths, the first time Bob saw that he was so proud, he thought they’d finally caught a mouse and those were the tails. When he found out what it really was he was mad as hell.

I kicked one of the cats away from my legs and he said, Cut that out. I started opening a can of soup, like nothing was happening, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle, and I could feel Bob looking at me and all of a sudden I was scared of him again just like when I was little.

Then he stood up and took hold of my arm and pulled me around, he hadn’t tried the belt routine for a while, he hadn’t put a hand on me for years, so I wasn’t expecting it. I slammed into the refrigerator and this bowl on top of it fell off, my mother was keeping the used lightbulbs in it, she had this idea she was going to paint them and make Christmas tree ornaments out of them and sell them but she never did, it was the same as her other ideas. Anyway the lightbulbs broke and the bowl too. I thought he was going to slap me around but he didn’t. He just smiled down at me with those grey teeth of his with the fillings showing and the black gums
around the edges. If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s bad teeth. Then he put his other hand right on my tit. He said, Your mother won’t be home till six, and he was still smiling. I was really scared, because I knew he was still stronger than me.

I thought about screaming, but there was a lot of screaming around there and people had this thing about minding their own business. I reached behind me and picked up the can opener from the kitchen table, it was that kind with the prong, you know? And I shoved it into him as hard as I could, and at the same time I brought my knee up right into his balls. So it wasn’t me that screamed. He fell onto the floor, right onto the lightbulbs and the dish of cat food, I heard that sound of glass breaking, and I ran like hell out of there, I didn’t care if I’d killed him or not.

I phoned my mother the next day and told her why I wasn’t coming back. She was really mad, not at him but at me. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe me, she did and that was the trouble. You’re asking for it, she said, you flaunt it around enough, it’s a wonder every man in the city didn’t do the same thing a long time ago. Later on I thought maybe I shouldn’t of told her. She didn’t have that much in life and God knows he wasn’t much either but at least she had him. You won’t believe this, but I guess she thought I was trying to take him away from her. She wanted me to apologize for sticking the can opener into him, but I wasn’t sorry.

There’s a line between being asleep and being awake which Rennie is finding harder and harder to cross. Now she’s up near the ceiling, in the corner of a white room, beside the air-conditioning unit, which is giving out a steady hum. She can see everything, clear and sharp, under glass, her body is down there on the table, covered in green
cloth, there are figures around her, in masks, they’re in the middle of a performance, a procedure, an incision, but it’s not skin-deep, it’s the heart they’re after, in there somewhere, squeezing away, a fist opening and closing around a ball of blood. Possibly her life is being saved, but who can tell what they’re doing, she doesn’t trust them, she wants to rejoin her body but she can’t get down. She crawls through the grey folds of netting as if through a burrow, sand in her eyes, blinking in the light, disoriented. It’s far too early. She takes a shower, which helps a little, and gets dressed. Routines are calming.

The box under her bed is making her very nervous. She doesn’t want to let it out of her sight, but she can hardly take it to breakfast with her. She locks it in the room, convinced that once she’s around the corner it will hatch and something unpleasant will emerge. All the time she’s eating, watery scrambled eggs, she worries about it. She could check out of the hotel and leave it behind in the room, she could try for the next flight out, but that would be risky. The Englishwoman would be into it before she was down the stairs, and there’s no doubt about it, she’s the police-phoning type. She’d make sure Rennie got arrested at the airport. The only thing to do with it is to get the box to Elva as quickly as possible and then forget about it.