Cabin Fever (3 page)

Behind the glass walls of the theatre people were darting, dazzled by the lights after their broken hours in the dark. The actors walked among them in their day clothes, their faces plain with cold cream and delight. The girl and the boy stood semi-nude in the gardens and listened for other footsteps on the sandstone, for cracks to come between door frames, for walls to widen and spill light and noise in a flood.

But nobody came back into the gardens where they stood, dizzy with the African lavender drifting up from the terrace below, its holiday feel and narcotic stink. She stretched the cotton down over her body and waited.

He was gracious. He paused only briefly, so that his long brown hands were caught in the fabric, surprised. The Saturday feeling rose up in her again and she saw all of him in that instant – the hairs on his chest, defiant; the solid astronomical meat of his sides.

I’m looking at a half-naked man, she thought, and I think I’m going to touch him.

He lifted his arms slowly over his head again and pulled his new T-shirt over his chest. It wasn’t the plants she could smell with their reversed evening circuits, the blades of pubic grass, the exposed roots and the wandering oaks. It was him and all his satellites. There was night-flowering jasmine in his armpits; his crotch was cinnamon; jungle love was all around. She smelled flowers trying to sprout in the cracks of her own body, felt the green zing in the fingers that was the planets knuckling down, the charge travelling from the middle of the Earth all the way to where they stood, lightning its way to the surface, tuning the forks of their feet.

Then he caught her around the waist and pulled her to his body, and his arms were hard, the safety bars clamped down for lift-off. Part of her panicked. She wanted to struggle but his eyelashes fluttered against the back of her neck. He drew back to check and then angled his feathered head down again. She pressed her lips to his mouth – and then the smooth planes of his cheeks, and then his glassy forehead.

After phrenology there is no going back: the kissing gate swung open. They breathed. Oxygen rushed in, renewing her fingerprints. While she stood up straight he had jimmied her ribcage windows: he had turned the dials of her insides. With his tastebud codes, with his skeleton key, she had been diddled with coat-hanger love.

This is what a man feels like, she thought. I had forgotten. She spread her palms and felt him with every ridged finger; on him she laid her head in the old family way. The skin at his throat was sweet and cool, as if he’d been swimming in some lunar lake, black and sweet, dislodging the stones on the bottom.

In the gardens the sprinklers came on, jetting drops over squirrels and bergies and cars in the parking lot while the girl and the boy stood on the next level, high and dry-mouthed, metal in every pore, wishing for rain.

‘I have a third nipple,’ she said.

‘Really?’

She nodded. Her head was full of pollen, of feathers and of flight.

‘Will you show it to me?’

He held her hand and led her to the cement stairs at the back entrance, where the lights burned everything orange as orchards. The gas canisters leaked and growled in their cages; their lazy fog drifted above the theatre, smelling of sulphur and control rooms.

He laid her down sideways. He bent her over and lifted up her shirt. On her skin his hands were warm.

He drummed his fingers on her jerky xylophone spine.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘I know,’ she said, lame and unmusical. ‘It fell off. It wasn’t really a nipple. It was more a sort of a mole. Like a Rice Crispie. People kept trying to pull it off because they thought I had something stuck to me.’

‘It fell off?’ He drew back and sat down sadly on the stairs beside her.

She shrugged. ‘One day I woke up and it had come off during the night. Just disappeared.’

‘Just like that?’ he said, to make sure.

‘Just like that.’ She pulled her shirt down.

He sighed with disappointment and lay down like a dog. His lips were swollen hot and pink with kissing, as if the sun had risen inside his mouth. His speech was slow with the burning.

‘You’re trying to show me something that isn’t there anymore.’

She shrugged again; there was nothing to say. Their wings were packed flat, ready for retraction. She expected the husks to flutter down to the path and lie next to their old clothes like the flying ants that invade summer houses, desperate for electricity, dashing themselves dry against the tiles.

He said casually to the sprinklers, ‘I have an extra toe.’

‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

He sat up on the stairs and began to pull off what was left of his spacesuit – first his boot and then its thin black sock. She waited for the hothouse buds of his ankle, the faint fur on the bridge of his left foot.

And then, and then – the digits themselves, all six, bunched pinkly as blooms from a magician’s sleeve. They steamed gently with the exposure. He wiggled them in the aquarium light, and she saw that it was true.

‘It’s real,’ she said. There was no trick or sleight-of-hand, no now-you-seeit-now-you-don’t. There they were, and there he was, her hybrid polydactylist. Her eyes knew the truth but her brain kept dialling other numbers.

‘How do you know which toe is extra?’

‘I think it’s this one,’ he said, and gripped the second from the end. ‘But it’s not vestigial. It has a bone and everything.’

She wanted to touch that toe but she couldn’t ask. The unfractured architecture of his face – the bones and jaws, the Samson pillars – stopped her.

And not just that. All the rest of him, too, that he would let her handle – the dip at his throat, the flesh of his lobes, the loose change of his nipples, and lower.

And lower. His belly with its love and intestines curled against her; his cotton pockets she turned inside out; the head of his penis, silky as an eyelid in sleep.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

He didn’t shrug and say, It’s mine. I hated it before but I’ve learned to live with it. It is a part of me.

What he said was, ‘Of course. It helps on the trapeze.’

T
HERE WERE SO MANY BAGS
. Karina tried to measure them in kilos, but her mind resisted the mathematics. She had stopped trying to make sense of everything days ago, when she had first driven Saul to rehab. Now they only stood and looked, she and the gardener. Every so often Maxwell giggled with nerves – a high-pitched snuffling – while he waited for further instructions. Karina must know what to do.

He was a small, shy man in overalls the precise electric blue of the Eighties. He hadn’t wanted to go through every drawer, toolbox, suitcase, golf bag in the filthy garage, but Karina had stood stiffly by with her arms over her stomach and made him rummage through his employer’s secrets. She hadn’t been able to force herself to do the same. I would, but I can’t stand on chairs to reach the highest cupboards, she told herself. What if I fall and lose the baby?

She was terrified that the clinic (the Funny Farm, sang her brain, but she pushed the interruption back) would contact the police and they would turn up to search the house, that it would be her fault, as it always was. Karina had already spent days – as fast as her back and her belly allowed her – going from room to room, sorting through likely hiding places, imagining Saul’s choices. She had left trails through the dust like a snail where the vacuum cleaner hadn’t erased the evidence of their past lives. The lost things left a residue, nestled snugly in balls of aggregating cat hair and the grime from ceiling boards imperfectly aligned. Even the roof was precarious. Karina had laid the items beside her on the rug: one pearl earring, the diary from her breathless first year, stubs of plane tickets to places she wouldn’t see again.

Now she weighed those tokens against the sheer amount of the marijuana in the garage. It astounded her. And how neatly and consciously it was packed: first into plastic bags, and then into anything that had come to Saul’s hand – used envelopes, Checkers packets, missing socks. There were mounds of weed, whole landscapes shredded. She thought of earthquakes and floods, of the people who live in dangerous places and wait for the plates to shift.

‘Put it back,’ she told the awkward Maxwell. ‘Just stack it there, against the wall, for now.’ He ducked his head and began, scurrying like an ant, relieved to have something to do. Karina bent with difficulty – God, her back was killing her; she was sure the ligaments were pulling away from her spine – and picked up a polythene bag that said
BANANAS
:
R
9.27. Best by 01.04. She left Maxwell to his task.

She ducked inside the house. In the movies people were always flushing their drugs away. She made her way unsteadily to the bathroom, where there were still sticky yellow drops on the black and white vinyl flooring. Up close you could see where someone had forced a join in two of the sections: dirt gathered in the crack.

Karina undid the knot with her fingernails. Even at arm’s length the stink rushed up to meet her, a green genie from a bottle. Coughing, she emptied it into the toilet bowl, blowing the last powdery crumbs from the corners of the plastic bag. She brushed the strands from her fingertips, each one a smelly filament that tarred, that feathered. The dagga bobbed in the water.

Karina flushed the toilet. The mass swirled, a matchstick landslide, a sodden Amazon forest. It clung to the porcelain; it crept up the sides. Armitage Shanks, leered the toilet bowl, the letters peeping through the weed as the water level righted itself. Karina flushed the toilet again, hoping that that this time the result would be different. The dagga floated, an impassable geography. And there were fifty bags, a hundred and fifty! She squatted, resting her back against the cool impersonal wall. How many bathrooms had she waited in over the years, wondering what to do? Now she occupied the one in her own home and counted off on her married, swollen fingers ways to retrieve drugs. It wasn’t funny.

She considered and rejected every kitchen implement, mentally matching shape with purpose. She kept thinking of a line from her varsity tracts: the woman in false eyelashes, scrubbing the floor. Eventually she got up and shuffled through the house to find Saul’s special slotted pasta spoon. She would have to scoop the dagga out of the bowl and find another way to get rid of it. God, he pissed her off! Living with Saul was always about finding alternatives for things other people didn’t have to consider. In another time she would find herself ridiculous, but for the moment it was impossible to imagine what would come next – tomorrow, the weekend, New Year. There was only now, the endless banal present: the new horror that took up where the old horror had left off.

Karina had tried to like drugs because Saul did. ‘We don’t live in an
or
universe,’ he said the night they met. ‘We live in an
and
universe.’ He had leaned back against the pillar of the Rhodes Student Union, pleased with the effect. Karina immediately wanted to find this place too: she was a lazy traveller, easily led. Saul had smiled self-consciously. ‘I think too much,’ he had told her as she nodded, thirsty for information about his sojourns in the other world. ‘It’s like there’s a hamster wheel in my head.’ He had waved his cigarette in little circles, a censer. Karina had blissfully inhaled the used smoke because it had been inside his body. There were so many places they would go, that airy, inviting wave said, an infinite number of paths still to travel. Saul stood at the centre of them all.

One day at a beach party in Port Alfred she had bitten into a slice of chocolate cake, moist and heavy, lying untouched on a paper plate. It was so good that it seemed to waken some other hunger in her. Why was no one else eating? Karina had taken another two slices and then lain down next to Saul, who was propped up on the sand, smoking a fat joint and, on the outbreath, holding forth on his years in the Canadian school system.

When she had looked up, hours later, two girls had been sniggering at her. They had held their hands to their mouths and whispered. From the corners of her eyes people moved blackly across her vision but slipped sideways when she had turned to face them full-on. She had wanted to ask Saul to get up with her so that they could walk near the water for a while to clear her head, but her tongue had seemed swollen, a sea slug she couldn’t swallow and couldn’t spit out. Saul had sucked and puffed, sucked and puffed, his hand independent of his body. Karina had rested her head on his thigh. Through the material of his jeans she had heard his blood circulating. It had rushed towards her face with a roar that had made her lift her head again too quickly. She still couldn’t remember the rest of that weekend, though she had been turning sand out of her pockets for the rest of the term. Karina had never lost time before.

In the mornings then he had been slower, distant with the jet-lagging hangover, and she could keep up with him. But in the space of an hour he could shake off the ill-effects, like a dog on the beach. Time speeded up again and he was restored – healthy, solid, permanently out of her reach. Saul would never grow old. His hands refused to tremble; his breath smelled sweet. When Karina kissed him the taste of nicotine seared her mouth and left her inflamed and stinging; she thought of the Fireballs that she had sucked when she was in junior school.

There was less kissing once they were married. They moved to Fish Hoek, where everybody was learning to smoke, or had once been a smoker: people in various shadowy stages of withdrawal wandered the streets. Indoors, Karina made costumes for the theatre and gave voice lessons, sewing disguises, teaching mouths to speak. ‘They’re all against me,’ said Saul after his failed interviews. He sat at the kitchen table, rolling joint after joint and packing them in a Stuyvesant pack so that he didn’t have to do it later when his co-ordination went. He bought cigarettes in cartons, ordering anyone who went through duty-free to pick them up for him. ‘I’m trying my best, but nobody wants to give me a job.’

As she continued to work and Saul didn’t, Karina pricked her fingers, sucked them and thought that really what drugs did was move people further apart: they gave Saul somewhere else to be that was not with her. She would give him time. Surely he would come back when he saw that the place wasn’t habitable, that there wasn’t enough air there for both of them.