Salt (23 page)

‘I remember,’ she said, triumphant, as if the clincher in her argument had occurred to her. ‘Out of your own mouth you said it, when I first arrived in Als. When I was prosecuting my diplomatic duties: when I asked you to take me to the women’s dormitory you
said no, that you could not. So there is a law there, isn’t there, a law preventing you from going to that place if you’re a man.’

I laughed a little. ‘There’s no law,’ I said. ‘There are many women there who would not like to see me, I think. They would beat me up, throw me out. But that does not make it a
law
. And besides,’ I said, after a little while. ‘Why should I wish to go there?’

Rhoda Titus did not answer this for some time, except with a gentle shaking of her head from side to side. ‘There might be many reasons,’ she said, eventually.

‘Why, though? To meet a woman? I might meet her at any time. Why else?’ When there was no reply to this, I said, ‘I can tell you why I think you ask, indeed. Because
you
have a law, you naturally immediately think of breaking that law. You squash that desire deep in your heart, perhaps, because you think it wrong, but you feel it anyway. So then you have the law, and then you need police and army to prevent people breaking the law, and you need prisons and executions to punish those who do, and you need something greater than all this; you need the edifice of thought in which you wish every citizen to live, the prison in which thinking the opposite of the law is forbidden. And what we have chanced upon, in Als, is that without the law in the first place you need none of this.’

She shook her head, but said nothing in reply.

‘It seems,’ I said, slowly, ‘that we have different purchases on freedom. From this bunk, the view is of Senaar as a nation of slavery.’

This brought a reaction. ‘But it is Als that is enslaved . . . to savagery. To your own primitive lusts and urges. To the ego and monstrousness inside each person.’ She was really quite heated. ‘None of you comprehend the beauty, the
liberty
of service: of feeling something larger than yourself, of gladly worshipping God. Freedom for you is always freedom
to
, but there are other freedoms, and the freedom from the self is the greatest.’

This was so splendid an idiocy, so passionately voiced, that I tipped my head backwards and laughed with joy. ‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘There is passion in you after all, for all that your upbringing teaches you to squash it deep inside! For the first time I can see you as a
beautiful woman!’ I leapt up suddenly, the vodjaa warm in my bowels, and cast myself across the car towards her. Her eyes sprang open with the suddenness (it was a look like fear) as I grabbed the back of her neck and had a lengthy kiss with her mouth.

When I pulled back, her face was absolutely frozen, white with passion, motionless as it struggled to register desire past its own internal censors. Her eyes were very open. I had felt little desire to have sexual intercourse with Rhoda Titus for most of the journey, but there was something now that wrestled my desire upwards, that hauled the snake-charmer’s animal from its box. I was still holding my vodjaa glass in my left hand, so I drained it and tossed it away. With the free hand I grabbed Rhoda Titus by her hair, and pressed my body against her, so that she sagged and fell back against her bunk.

She was making little gasping noises, desire sounding almost like sobbing. Perhaps she was trying to say something, to push the words past her internal censor. But all I felt then was the stretch of her flesh, palpable to my own body through the fabric of her clothing. Her breathing was jumpy. I had another kiss, and then raised myself a little to feel the dunes of her breasts. She was managing to say something now, a tiny whispered voice, but the words were less important than the little, raspy texture of the whisper itself. I was complete in my desire.

I started pulling off some of my clothes, but as I did this she started bucking and wriggling beneath me, so I had to pause to hold her down with one of my hands. At first I pressed her face, but she still struggled, so I moved my large hand to her throat. This had the advantage of drawing both of her own hands to my wrist, scrabbling and grabbing at my arm, fruitlessly trying to pull up the deep-rooted tree of my arm, planted against her neck. I pulled off my clothes, except my undershirt, and fumbled left-handed with her hooks and eyes; but Senaarian clothing is strange, and I had to rip some of them to get them loose. Her body was very pale, salt-coloured, a silvery and freckled series of silver arcs, thigh, hip, the loose flesh of her belly and the sides of her body under her arms against the bunk. Her face was
red now, but I had seen it red with blushing so often that this did not look out of place. Pale like a candle, with a flame-coloured face. She was trembling, her legs jerking with little spastic motions. The languages of desire that her body speaks were curious, and difficult to decipher. I pulled my hand from her neck, and she convulsed with a huge indrawn breath; then I replaced it with the left hand, the better to enable my right hand access to her thighs, squeezing them apart and placing myself inside her. At this, she went very still, and then as I started thrusting, she ground herself against me, wriggling and struggling with renewed effort.

And then there it happened, the peak, the hiatus, the outside-time moment where you hang for a moment at the top of the dune and then the rapid slide down the other side back towards the trench in which all the rest of our life is conducted. It happened rapidly, but then I had been without sexual intercourse for many days.

They say that the seed of a man has a salty taste.

I was more breathless than the brief exercise might have prompted, so I lay on her as if she were a mattress until my lungs calmed. Then I hauled off, and pulled my trousers back on.

‘A release,’ I said to her, grinning. ‘A release. That is another definition of freedom, that feeling.’

She was looking at me now, without expression, her breasts bulging upwards and sinking down to the rhythm of her own gasps. I refilled my vodjaa glass and drank it. ‘The pleasure was less for you, I think,’ I said. ‘But if we have it again, I will not be so rapid.’

But she was gathering herself, sitting up, clutching her torn shirt about her torso. Then she tumbled from the bunk to her feet and pushed through to the driving cab.

I finished my vodjaa, and pulled on a shirt. The Whisper had now died down, so I decided to set off driving again. I came through to the front, and Rhoda Titus uttered a little groan. She was standing, in a shirt and naked from the waist down, over by the right window. I smiled at her (because the dimples in her thighs where they connected with her knees delighted me) and pulled myself into the driver’s seat.

I charged up the drivepole, but Rhoda Titus rushed from the cab. Assuming she had changed her mind and wanted to lie down, I started the car going, but the faint
clack
of the back door alerted me to something else happening. I got to my unshoed feet and dogged through to the back of the car, but Rhoda Titus had gone.

This was ridiculous. She was many days’ walk from humanity, and would die. I squeezed through the lock, opened the back door and jumped down myself. My mask snapped into place.

The sun had gone down, with only the thinnest train of inky purple on the western horizon to indicate its passing, but the stars were out. In the unlit wilderness, and without a moon, they shimmered in their millions. Some moved (ships in orbit), most lay like sparkling pips scattered on black soil. The whiteness of the salt desert was ghostly in this meagre light, the shadowy impressions of humps and curves lost in the fuzzy blackness. It was perfectly still, and the only noise was the hum of the car at my back. The salt was cold against the palms of my feet, and the air was very cold against my face. I called out, ‘Rhoda Titus!’ (it is difficult to shout through a mask) and my eyes became slowly tuned to the extremely low light levels. There was no sight of her. I rounded the car, and came round to the back again. Then I saw her, dark hair and her shirt camouflaged but the double streak of white of her naked legs visible, scissoring as she dashed up the face of the next dune over. It is not easy to run on the fine salt of deep desert, and her footsteps dug into the stuff and laboured her way.

I called after her, and she stopped, turned, looked at me, with her hand over the fork in her legs like an old representation of Eve out of the Garden.

‘Where are you going?’ I called. ‘You can’t survive in the desert!’

She said nothing, but sank backwards, and curled herself up like a child on the bare salt ground.

I had been feeling good, but this behaviour introduced a note of irritation into my mood. I clambered back in the car, and went through to the front to turn off the engine. For a few minutes I simply sat there, and waited for Rhoda Titus to come back through, but
presently I deduced that she had decided to freeze to death, or thirst to death, or to find some other desolate way of ending herself.

I went back through the car and outside again. Rhoda Titus was still there, crouched and hunkered down against the salt of the next dune. I bellowed across to her, ‘I’m going now, but the back door is still open.’ Then I got back into the car, started it up, and drove off.

For the first ten minutes I made sure to drive very slowly indeed, below even a walking pace. Still nothing. Then I turned a little, and instead of riding the ridge of the dune I was on I slipped a little over the other way, so as to duck out of sight of Rhoda Titus’s vantage point. This had the right effect; within minutes, I heard the door clack open behind me, and then a tempest of coughing in the back of the car. Rhoda Titus, I assumed, had inadvertently sucked in air through her mouth as she scurried to catch up with the retreating car, and so she spent twenty minutes or more hacking up the residue of the chlorine from her lungs.

I concentrated on driving, I remember. Speeding the car a little, drifting down and up dunes at a narrow angle of attack that meant I travelled miles up each mighty dyke and miles down the other side. After a while it was very quiet behind me, with only an occasional ratcheting cough in the dark.

I drove until I was tired, and then went through. I could see, in the light from the cab, that Rhoda Titus had put on her clothes again, and had then put on her overcoat, and had then climbed into the bunk’s sac wearing all that. The lapels of her coat were visible over the edge of the sac. But she was asleep, and I did not disturb her: I stepped out of the car to secure it against the morning’s Whisper, and then I took myself to bed, to a satisfying sleep.

The next day, Rhoda Titus did not get up, and would not engage in conversation with me, but I did not mind this. I had embarked on the journey for solitude, and in truth I was now weary of her company. I ate in silence, and drove in silence. At dusk, I called through to ask her to secure the car against the Whisper (she had watched me do it often enough, and yet had never offered her help), but she did not
reply. So I went through and did it myself. She was sitting, still in her coat (but at least it was unbuttoned), eating strands of pasta with her fingers. Her neck was blotted with inky bruises, like a tattoo necklace. Her chin, just below her mouth, was a little grazed from the rubbing of my new beard. I found these marks of wear queerly attractive.

I fetched myself some food from the Fabricant, and sat opposite her. But she did not meet my eye.

‘Another two days, I think,’ I said.

Nothing.

‘In two days we shall be at Yared, and you can go your way.’

At this her eyes danced up to meet mine, and I could see her glittering with some stifled emotion. But then she dropped her eyes again, and I was tired with talk.

After the Whisper I drove on again, until tired, and then I went through. The lights were still on in the back, and Rhoda Titus was kneeling in prayer by her bunk. The sound of my footsteps startled her out of it, and she rose quickly.

I spent an hour reading at random from my notepad, but now Rhoda Titus seemed to be looking at me.

‘Stop staring at me,’ I said, when I realised that she was. Her eyes immediately dropped.

At this I fed myself quickly, thinking how tiresome the pasta was; how stringy, and how the saltiness of everything took the savour even from the salt. Then I drove on.

The following day I saw the first signs of Southern habitation. A dumper truck wandered past us, on its way to the deep desert to bury some toxic waste presumably. Rhoda Titus dashed into the cabin when she heard the rumble of its distant engines, and waved at its black, blank side like a child. It was the first time she had come into the cab for many days.

Late in the afternoon we came across some houses, and a compound of some sort. I called through to Rhoda Titus to ask if she wanted to be dropped off here, or taken deeper into Yared itself. She did not reply, and so I trundled on. Eventually, an hour short of
the Whisper, I came to a central square. Several cars were parked in a grid in front of a foliate dome, which had the letters spelling out SPINAL RAILWAY hologrammed, standing out from the curving roof. So I pulled the car in backwards, with the door close to the over-arch of the building (we all were in these habits automatically, to minimise being in the pathological sunshine). I stifled the engine.

For a while I was content to simply sit, to stare at the place I was now in. After so many days of nothing but blank white desert, of salt stretching sand-like all around, of the bright sun and the dark night, there was something almost obscene to my eye in the mess of this settlement. So many strewn buildings, so many little shapes. The littleness of humankind. And, from time to time, a person would emerge, bug-like, to dash through the sunshine and disappear into the dark of another building. A train of cars groaned through the square and wandered away. Everything blared the banality of everyday doings; it all seemed painfully small. I realised, with a shudder of my heart, that I could hardly stand it. After sublimity, this. Even the thought of Rhoda Titus in the back of the car struck me as a sort of contamination.