Bodily Harm (30 page)

He didn’t want me going out on the boats with Paul, he didn’t want me having anything to do with Paul in that way any more, he was jealous as hell. I guess I was a sucker for that, too. He wanted me all to himself, nobody else ever wanted that. He wanted us to have a baby. I never felt that important before.

As for Paul, you know what he did? He shook hands with me. That was all. I thought I was going to cry but instead I laughed. And I thought, that’s what it’s been like all along, sleeping with him and everything, there’s been nothing more to it than that. Shaking hands.

Rennie wakes up in the middle of the night and Paul is still there, she can hardly believe it; he’s even awake, he’s a shape in the darkness, above her, resting on one elbow; is he watching her?

“Is that you?” she says.

“Who else would it be?” he says. She doesn’t know. She reaches out for him and he’s tangible, he doesn’t go away.

It’s early morning. Rennie can hear a sound outside the window, a bleating. She gets out of bed and looks: it’s a goat, right beside the
house, with a chain around its neck attached to a stone so it can’t wander off. She wishes it would shut up. Two men are nearby, hacking at the shrubs with machetes. Gardeners. One of them has a transistor radio, which is thinly playing a hymn. Paul is still asleep, he must be used to it. She was dreaming there was another man in the bed with them; something white, a stocking or a gauze bandage, wrapped around his head.

When she wakes again Paul is gone. Rennie gets up and puts on her clothes, then wanders through the house looking for him. It’s nobody’s house, it could be a motel, it’s empty space and he’s left no footprints. It occurs to her that she’s just spent the night with a man about whom she knows absolutely nothing at all. It seems a foolhardy thing to have done.

She goes outside. There’s a tree beside the porch, covered with pink flowers, a swarm of hummingbirds around it. It looks arranged. The too-bright sunshine, the rock garden, the road below it along which two women are walking, one carrying a large tree limb balanced on her head, the foliage and then the blue harbour dotted with postcard boats, the whole vista is one-dimensional this morning, a scrim. At any moment it will rise slowly into the air and behind it will appear the real truth.

There’s a noise coming from behind a clump of trees to the east, a desolate monotonous wail, a child. It goes on and on, as if this is a natural form of speech, almost like breathing. A woman’s voice rises, there are thumps; the child’s howling changes in intensity but not in rhythm.

Rennie looks through the telescope, which is focused on one of the yachts. There’s a woman in a red bikini, lowering herself into the water; the telescope is so strong that even the roll of fat above the bikini bottom, even the striations on her belly are visible. Is this
Paul’s hobby, peering at distant flesh? Surely not. Yet the telescope confers furtive power, the power to watch without being watched. Rennie’s embarrassed by it and turns away. She swings herself in the hammock, trying not to think. She feels deserted.

When Paul still doesn’t come back, she goes into the house. She checks out the refrigerator for something to eat, but there’s not much. Ice cubes in the ice cube tray, a tin of condensed milk with holes punched in the top, a small paper bag full of sugar, some yellowing limes, a pitcher of cold water. Noodles in the cupboard, a bottle of rum, a packet of coffee, some Tetley’s teabags, a tin of Tate & Lyle golden syrup with a string of ants undulating around the lid. They skipped dinner last night and she’s starving.

The logical explanation is that Paul has gone for food, since there isn’t any. She wishes he’d left a note for her, but he doesn’t seem like the note-leaving type. The house is very empty. She walks through the livingroom again; there aren’t even any books or magazines. Maybe he keeps his personal things on the boat, the boats. She goes into the bedroom and looks into the closet: a couple of shirts, a spear gun and a mask and flippers, jeans folded on a hanger, that’s it.

In the bureau there are some T-shirts, neatly stacked, and stuck at the back of the top drawer a couple of photos: colour snapshots, a white colonial house with a double garage, a green lawn, a yellow-haired woman in a shirtwaist dress, smiling to reveal slightly buck teeth; hair short and close to the head, an unsuccessful permanent growing out, two little girls, one blonde, one reddish-brown, both in pigtails with ribbons, it must have been a birthday. The mother’s hands on their shoulders. The sun casts shadows under their eyes so that even though they’re smiling they look slightly disappointed, the disappointment of ghosts. In the other picture Paul is there too, much younger, a crewcut but it must be
him: a shirt and tie and pants with sharp creases, and beneath his eyes the same shadows.

Rennie feels she’s prying but she’s into it now, she might as well go on. It’s not as if she’ll use it for anything: she just wants to know, she wants to find something that will make Paul real for her. She goes into the bathroom and looks through the medicine cabinet. The brand names are unrevealing: Tylenol in a large bottle, Crest toothpaste, Elastoplast, Dettol. Nothing unusual.

There’s another bedroom, or she assumes it’s a bedroom. The door’s closed but not locked: it opens as easily as all the other doors. It is a bedroom, or at least there’s a bed in it. There’s also a table, with what looks like a radio on it, a complicated-looking one, and some other equipment she can’t identify. In the closet there’s a large cardboard box standing on end. The address label’s been torn off. It’s full of styrofoam packing beads, but otherwise empty. It looks very familiar.

There’s someone in the house, walking across the wooden floor. She feels as if she’s been caught in a forbidden room, though Paul hasn’t forbidden anything. Still, it isn’t nice to snoop in other people’s houses. She comes out, closing the door behind her as quietly as she can. Luckily there’s a hallway: she can’t be seen.

But it’s not Paul, it’s Lora, in a fresh pink dress with bare shoulders. “Hi there,” she says. “I brought you some stuff.” She’s at the kitchen counter, taking it out of a straw basket: bread, butter, a carton of long-life milk, even a tin of jam. “He never has anything in the house. I’ll make us some coffee, okay?”

She gets out the electric kettle, the coffee, the sugar; she knows exactly where everything is. Rennie sits at the wooden table, watching her. She knows she should feel thankful for all this attention, thoughtfulness, but instead she’s irritated. This isn’t her kitchen and she doesn’t live here, so why should it bother her that Lora is acting
as if she owns the place? And how did Lora know she’d be here? Maybe she didn’t know it. Maybe she’s in the habit.

“Where’s Paul?” says Lora.

“I don’t know,” Rennie says. She’s on the defensive: shouldn’t she know, shouldn’t he have told her?

“He’ll turn up,” says Lora lightly. “Here today, gone tomorrow, that’s Paul.”

Lora brings the coffee, a cup for each of them, and sets it down on the table. Rennie doesn’t want to ask for food, though she’s ravenous; she doesn’t want to tell Lora about missing dinner. She doesn’t want to tell Lora anything. She would like Lora to vanish, but instead Lora sits down at the table, settling in. She sips her coffee. Rennie watches her hands, the squat fingers, the rough gnawed skin around the nails.

“I wouldn’t get too mixed up with Paul if I was you,” she says. Here it comes, thinks Rennie. She’s going to tell me something for my own good. In her experience, things that people told you for your own good were always unpleasant.

“Why not?” she says, smiling as neutrally as possible.

“I don’t mean you can’t,” says Lora. “Hell, why not, it’s a free country. Just, don’t get mixed up, is all. Not that he gets that mixed up with most people anyway. Easy come, easy go. Around here there’s a high turnover.”

Rennie isn’t sure what she’s being told. Is she being warned off or just warned? “I guess you’ve known him a long time,” she says.

“Long enough,” says Lora.

Now there are footsteps and a shadow falls on the front window, and this time it is Paul, coming across the porch. He walks through the door smiling, sees Lora, blinks but keeps on smiling.

“I went for eggs,” he says to Rennie. “I thought you’d be hungry.” He sets a brown paper bag down on the table, proud of himself.

“Where in hell did you get any eggs, at this time of day?” says Lora. “The eggs aren’t in yet.” She’s getting up, to go Rennie hopes, she sets down the coffee mug.

Paul grins. “I’ve got connections,” he says.

Paul scrambles the eggs, quite well, they’re not too dry; Rennie gives him three and a half stars for the eggs. They eat them with jam and toast. There’s a toaster, though the only way you can get it to work, says Paul, is by short-circuiting it with a paring knife. He keeps meaning to get a new one, he says, but new toasters are smuggled in and none have come in lately.

After breakfast Rennie thinks she should offer to wash the dishes, since Paul did the cooking. “Forget that,” says Paul. “Someone comes in.” He takes her hands and pulls her to her feet and kisses her, his mouth tasting of buttered toast. Then he leads her into the bedroom. This time he takes off her clothes, not too quickly, without fumbling. She takes his hands with their blunt practical fingers, guides him, they slide onto the bed, it’s effortless.

Rennie comes almost at once, they’re both slippery with sweat, it’s luxurious, indulgent, gleeful as rolling around in warm mud, the muscles of her thighs are aching. He pauses, goes on, pauses, goes on until she comes again. He’s skilled and attentive, he’s good at it. Maybe she’s just a quick fuck for him, a transient, maybe they’re both transients, passing through, is that what Lora was trying to say? But she can live with that, it’s something, and something is better than nothing after all.

After a long time they get up and take a shower; together, but Paul is absent-minded as he soaps her back and then her breasts, carefully
enough but he’s already thinking about something else. She passes her hands over his body, learning him, the muscles, the hollows. She’s looking for something, his presence in his own body, the other body beneath the tangible one, but she can’t reach him, right now he’s not there.

Paul takes Rennie’s arm above the elbow as they step out into the white light. She wants to ask what they’re going to do now, but she doesn’t, because it doesn’t seem to matter. Go with the flow, Jocasta would say, and she’s going. She feels lazy and unhurried; the future, which contains among other things an overdraft at the bank, seems a long way from here. She knows she’s fallen right into the biggest cliché in the book, a no-hooks, no-strings vacation romance with a mysterious stranger. She’s behaving like a secretary, and things must be bad, because it isn’t even bothering her. As long as she doesn’t fall in love: that would be more than secretarial, it would be unacceptable. Love or sex? Jocasta would ask, and this time Rennie knows. Love is tangled, sex is straight. High-quality though, she’d say. Don’t knock it.

They walk down to the sea and along the beach. By now he’s remote but friendly, like a tour guide. Part of a package.

“See that building?” he says. He’s pointing to a low shed-like structure. It’s painted green and has three doors. “That made a lot of trouble here a couple of years ago. Ellis built it, it was supposed to encourage the tourists.”

“What is it?” Rennie asks, unable to see why it would be encouraging.

“Now they use it to store fishnets in,” says Paul, “but it used to be a can. A public can; Men, Women and Tourists. The idea was that the tourists would get off the boat and need a place to shit, and it
would be right there handy for them. But the people here didn’t think a thing like that should be down on the beach, out in the open like that. They thought it was indecent. They filled it up with stones, Tourists first.” He smiles.

“They don’t like tourists?” says Rennie.

“Let’s put it this way,” says Paul. “When the tourists come in, the prices go up. The big election issue this year is the price of sugar. They say it’s getting too high, the people can’t afford it.”