By Light Alone (37 page)

She had to work to bring out the smile and the flickering eyelid coyness, because her throat was raw from where he’d gripped it. But she kept her wits. ‘Just the tip of it, unless – no!’ She grinned. ‘Never tell me that’s the
whole thing
?’

Again, Abda did the Waali thing, making her wait for an instant before revealing whether he was going to manifest displeasure or pleasure. But then he was laughing again, and bringing her past all the others and through the kitchen door. ‘Have a taste,’ he instructed her, and he dipped the handle-end of the big wooden spoon in the soup, and slipped it into her mouth like a dick. It was scalding heat of it, and she ‘oo-oo-oo’ed, which made Abda laugh louder.

Later, after he’d eaten, Abda took her back to his big bed and hammered her against the mattress for ten long minutes. She didn’t need to simulate her gasping, for he was so heavy and bore down on her chest so mercilessly that he forced the air out like a bagpiper. Afterwards he rolled off with a pleased look on his face. She took this for a good thing. He lay, face upward, eyes closed, and muttered something for a minute or longer, but not in any language Issa could understand. Then he was asleep.

She stayed four days and four nights in the house. For most of that time she was in one of Abda’s bedrooms, which wasn’t ideal. The door was locked, nobody thought to bring her any hard food, and she had to lean out of the window to warm her hair in the sun. Each night Abda came to her again. He didn’t want anything too elaborate, sexually speaking: her on top, facing away from him, bouncing up and down so that her bony ass bounced against the swell of his big belly. Or else he got her to lie down, which was a little tricky, because his weight was pretty much smothering. But he finished up soon enough, and then roused himself, slapping his stomach with his big hands. He got al-Schawarma, his cook, to bring up many metal plates of sizzling food, and an extraordinary mess of odours steamed the room. He ate, and drank from a litre plastic bottle of white wine, and filled himself; and he permitted Issa to have little licks of his spoon, but no more. Most of the hard food was like acid upon her tongue, and she had to gulp water. ‘How can you eat this?’ she gasped. She was proper amazed. ‘It is like eating fire.’

‘Oh,
you’re
the fire-eater,’ he laughed. It took a while to understand what he meant. The sun, the sun.

He fell asleep eventually, his sphere-stomach creaking and burbling like a bathysphere squeezed by abyssal pressures in the deep ocean. Issa dozed at the side of his bed. She had a dream in which the sun spoke to her. It said: I am a fish, the greatest leviathan. It was orange as a goldfish, with a peripheral fringe of flame-shaped fins all about its face. Its voice was like the Preacher’s voice, only echoier. And the sky was as blue as any ocean. ‘You are fire, and how can you be a fish?’ Issa asked the dream. ‘Fire cannot swim through water.’ She looked again, and the fish had the face of Mam Anna, and its passage through the cold waters sheathed it in a great mantle of steam the colour of white gold. I am fire, said the sun. And you eat me.

Briefly, Issa was the Waali’s new favourite. The bedroom door was no longer locked during the day, and she had the run of the house and roof.

One morning he chivvied her about her inability to eat any of his previous night’s curry. ‘When you get big with my child,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to get the taste for hard food. Besides, you are too skinny.’

‘Skinny as a sunbeam,’ she said.

‘You must plump up!’ he declared, gravely.

And for a week or so she settled into a new rhythm. Rather than hang around the house, where there was nothing to do, she ventured outside. Abda didn’t seem to care. Preacher and Mam Anna were walking up and down in the intermittent sunshine, talking. When she saw Issa, Anna embraced her. ‘How is things?’

‘I am the new Waali-wife.’

Issa told her everything, and didn’t even mind the Preacher loitering, eavesdropping. Mam Anna was pleased for her. ‘I am worried about Nik, though,’ Issa confessed. ‘He has a hatred for me, and he is the Waali’s son, after all.’

Mam Anna waved this worry as if were flies. ‘He’s a fool. Abda has three older sons, and they are in the world, and they are making their ways. Abda do nothing but despise his son Nik.’

‘Children are the only wealth in this world!’ intoned the Preacher.

Mam Anna slapped him twice to drive him away at this; and settled Issa in the crook of her armpit, as they both lay in the sun. ‘Don’t be fearful of Abda. He may look like a big feller, but he’s the weakest of the Waalies in this part of the world. I been up and down to the sea, with the Blimp, more times than I can recall. You see other Waalis run their villages rather different.’

‘How so?’

‘Oh,’ said Mam Anna. ‘Look at how Abda leaves all the men just lying about in the sun, or playing cards! Other Waalies take their men into a militia, train them up. To defend the village, or maybe attack another village, or to hire them out as soldiers. But Abda is too lazy to be bothered organizing a militia. He’s too lazy even to order
Lev
to organize a militia.’

Issa thought about that. ‘So the village isn’t defended?’

‘You’re quick, you’ve a wit,’ said Mam Anna, indulgently; ‘and later you can go over my feet with a wet cloth.’

‘So why don’t some nearby Waali come take it, if they’ve a militia and we’ve not?’

‘Because Abda’s brother is a minister in the national government,’ said Mam Anna. ‘And all the other Waalis know it. If they try, the government would make a media show of bringing in actual army. So we rub along, and we do rub along.’

Issa understood: Abda was weak. Of course it was true. But she deduced a different moral from this. Mam Anna thought not only that a weak Waali was one she could manipulate (and so she could), but that this made life more comfortable than it might otherwise be. Issa had a wordless comprehension that a weak Waali was a less stable Waali, more vulnerable to outside pressure, and more capricious in his own power.

Still, who was she to challenge the authority of Mam Anna?

For a couple of weeks things went well. She picked up various sorts of tidbits, and her stomach got used to the stretching sensation of having stuff inside it. She got so used to having food in her that on the days when she didn’t get to eat she felt the shards of actual hunger inside her. When Abda came in her mouth she could swallow it down without indigestion. One evening, post-coital, he said to her: ‘You are too skinny. But you’re young, and that makes up for it. Make up some way.’ She was emboldened by this to ask him: ‘How old are you, Abda?’ ‘Sixty,’ he said. ‘Sixty years of age.’ He said it with pride.

The sun turning over in the sky, day-slow, bending the shadows one way and then another.

The dogs were drinking out of the water trough: a noise like two men clapping.

The exhaustless sun.

But then everything went wrong. It happened in a moment.

At night, in Abda’s bed: she was on her knees and elbows and Abda was taking her from behind. The irony of it was: she was actually thinking, in that pride-goeth-before way we humans are good at: ‘Better this than him on top, squashing me.’ Although she was only thinking it in an idle sort of way. Abda was pulling himself a long way out and pushing himself a long way in, making the sort of noise that Issa knew meant he was about to come.

Then he screamed. He reeled back, pulling entirely out of her, squealing like a braking train.

She was very scared straight away, wriggling round on the bed to sit, holding her knees to her chest. ‘What have you done, woman?’ he bellowed. He was clutching his manhood, bent over. ‘What have you – have you
bitten
me?’

She couldn’t stop herself crying. ‘What? What?’

‘What have you
done
?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘By the food of God I’ll burn you on an
open fire
, you bitch!’ he howled.

‘What?’ she wept. ‘What?’

He hobbled over to sit on the edge of the bed, still clutching himself, and swore at her some more. She could see that his cock was bleeding. ‘Lev!’ he bellowed. ‘Lev!’

Lev came in, went out, saw what had happened immediately, and went back out for wipes and a bandage. By this point Abda had calmed down, but this made Issa more scared than ever. She clutched herself. She was shivering hard with pure fear. ‘Fuck, the
fuck
,’ Abda gasped, ‘what the fuck’, and so on, and so forth, as Lev – impassive – tended his cut glans. Right on the end, bisected by the cut to give him a cross design there.

The whole house was roused by his noise, of course. Al- Schawara brought in a bottle of brandy, and Abda guzzled it like fruit juice. Issa could feel the wall shake behind her naked back as people thumped up and down stairs.

When Lev had finished, Abda came over and grasped Issa by both shoulders. ‘You cut my flesh, woman,’ he said. ‘On a most delicate place. I cannot forget it.’

This shocked her out of tears. She went very still, expecting a neck-breaking blow, or a gun to her head. But instead he let go of her and turned his back. He left the room, with Lev behind him. Issa sat on the bed, and started shivering again. It was not cold; in fact it was a very hot night. She clutched her knees to her body. She stared at the wall, at the duckbeak shadow cast by the lampshade upon the plaster, and thought: a shaved head is the least I can expect, here. She tried to anchor her terror in practical considerations. If she were shaved, would she throw herself on Mam Anna’s mercy? Or would she leave the village and try her luck whoring for food down by the sea? But her mind’s grip on practical matters kept slipping. What had happened? How had she hurt him? She could not work out what had happened. She could not see how she had caused this sudden maelstrom of outrage and anger.

Galla, one of Abda’s house women, came through eventually and wrapped her in an old poncho with the Olympic logo on it. She led her out of the bedroom and took her downstairs to a basement. The bottom layer of the house, underground, where no sunlight ever penetrated: a barren set of rooms. ‘He’s a fury,’ she said, quietly. ‘What did you do to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Issa wept. ‘I honestly don’t know. I genuinely don’t know.’

‘Did you bite him? He had a girl once called Elen, she had a epileptic condition. One day: sucking his cock, had a fit, bit him. There was no blood, but I’ll tell you what he did. He laid her on the bed until her fit passed, and then he beat her hard on the skull, beat her so hard he got bits of skin with hair on between his knuckles. I saw it! She went simple after that beating.’

This story might have fuelled Issa’s hysteria; but instead, fire fighting fire, it quelled it. She felt calmer. ‘Will he beat me? How will he punish me?’

‘I don’t know what you
did
, lover-child.’

‘I don’t know either.’

‘How did it happen? Wait—’ She put her handsome head on one side, listening to the above stairs. The sound of commotion, muffled, from above. ‘Wait – there’s yelling. I’ll be back in a peck.’ She went out. The door banged shut, and a moment later it clucked to itself. Issa didn’t bother checking; she knew it was locked. So she wrapped the poncho around her, and lay on the narrow bed. The aircompressor motor was down in the room with her, making its continual slow drum-machine chug, and eventually she fell asleep to its shushing.

She woke as the doorlock was unsnibbed. Galla was back, with another one of Abda’s women: Dani. Both looked very sombre. ‘Tell me exactly, as exactly as you know, what happened,’ Gallas said.

‘He was having me from behind,’ said Issa, matter-of-factly, her voice still blurry with sleep, her mind not entirely logged-on. ‘Then, sudden, he wailed aloud, and kept wailing.’

‘You’ve got something up there?’

‘Up there?’ said Issa, thinking this a reference to the topography of the house.

‘Up,’ said Dani, patiently. ‘There.’

‘Mam Anna put in a length of hard plastic,’ said Issa.

‘Lie down, my dear,’ said Galla. ‘No, on your back. Yes, I’m going to have a feel up there.’ She wore no glove, and used no lubricant, so it was indeed an uncomfortable examination. But the physical discomfort took Issa’s mind off its anxious dread. It woke her up too, and as she lay there she regretted telling them about Mam Anna. She shouldn’t have mentioned her name. She could have said she put it up herself on her own. Of course, there was nothing they could do about it now.

Galla had her whole hand up Issa, and was pulling the face of somebody pondering a philosophical conundrum. Then the expression changed, and she got hold of the device and drew it out in one single movement. ‘He pranged his cock on that,’ said Dani. She sniggered. Then she stopped.

‘Maybe it came a little loose from the inner skin,’ said Galla, judiciously. ‘Or maybe it was just the angle, and the depth of his penetration. But he surely caught himself hard on it, on his most tender place.’

Issa had pulled herself up sat on the narrow bed, trying to braid her left leg around her right. More than the discomfort, and the lingering ache, she felt a new and horrible sense of diminishment. It was to do with being so horribly opened up.

‘His rage has altered,’ Galla said, wrapping the plastic device in a piece of plastic cloth. ‘It’s gone cold. That isn’t good for any of us.’

‘Dangerous times can be opportune for ambitious people,’ said Issa.