Little Deaths, page 18
She got up and started packing.
Cleis slept for nearly ten hours, then woke up long enough to be fed some soup. When the soup was gone, she went back to sleep.
When it got dark, Jane lit all three Coleman lamps, even though the heat was overwhelming. If Cleis woke up in the middle of the night, the first thing she wanted her to see was light. Bright, artificial light. She stood by Cleis’s bed, hesitating: the other bunk was covered in open suitcases and piles of clothes. Moving them would wake her. Jane drew back the sheet and fitted herself carefully around the strange mix of bone and muscle and pregnancy that was Cleis, and fell asleep almost instantly.
When she woke up it was still the middle of the night. Cleis was whimpering, burrowing into her neck. ‘Sshh, sshh. I’m here. What is it?’ But then Cleis was clinging to her and crying and Jane was stroking her side, shoulders arms side of breast ribs belly-bulge hip and back, up and down, telling her it was all right, it was all right, and then the heat Jane felt was more than the hiss and spit of Coleman lamps, more than the warmth of a humid Belize night. And Cleis was no longer sobbing on her neck but kissing it, and the arms wrapped so tightly around her were pulling her in, until their mouths were almost close enough to touch, and Jane’s arm was under Cleis’s neck, supporting her head, and her leg was wrapped over Cleis’s and her other hand stroking her breast, her hips, her thighs.
‘Kiss me,’ Cleis said.
Jane expected her lips to be dry and rough, but they were soft as plums.
At first they made love as though they were underwater: coming together too fast, bumping, drifting apart, but then they were moving together, rising towards the surface, a roaring in their ears, and the muscles in arms and thighs and belly were clenched tight as each breathed the other’s breath as though it were the only oxygen available.
‘Show me I’m real,’ said Cleis, and slid her palm up to the hot slick between Jane’s thighs. ‘Come in my hand.’ And Jane did.
‘They lay in each other’s arms, slippery as newborns, while Jane kissed Cleis’s forehead, again and again.
‘I’ve packed almost everything,’ Jane said as they ate breakfast. Cleis was wearing a long shirt. Nothing else would fit her. ‘We need to get you to a clinic as soon as possible. You look like you’re ready to give birth any minute.’
Cleis rested a hand on her belly. She nodded but did not say anything.
‘I’ll check the jeep as soon as we’ve had breakfast.’ Jane decided not to mention her worries about the passability of the trail in this wet weather. ‘Will you be all right for the journey?’
Cleis moved her eyes sideways, lifted her shoulders slightly in a who knows? gesture.
‘Well … do you feel well enough at the moment?’
Cleis nodded, then seemed to realize she would have to give more than that. ‘Everything is very strange for me. Different. Sitting here, talking to you, is like looking through a kaleidoscope. Someone keeps twisting it out of shape, and then I don’t know who you are, or who I am, or what we’re doing here. Talking is sometimes … difficult.’
Jane did not want to ask the next question, because she was scared of the answer. But she had to know. ‘Do you … Is leaving what you want to do?’
Cleis hesitated, then laid a hand on her belly and nodded. Jane knew she would get no more from her for a while.
They set off at midday. It was cold and pouring with rain. Jane helped Cleis to the passenger seat, more because of Cleis’s mental state than any physical disability. Cleis moved easily, muscles plainly visible beneath her skin. Once she was in the jeep Jane wrapped several shirts around her bare legs.
It was slow going. Twice, Jane had to climb out of the jeep and tuck canvas under rear wheels that could find no traction in mud. But she did not mind the rain or the mud or the cold: she was getting Cleis to safety.
All this time, Cleis sat in her bundle of clothes, silent and distant.
Eight miles down the trail they came across a tree that had fallen across their path. Jane turned off the engine. ‘Stay here. I’ll go take a look.’
The trunk was too big to drive over and the undergrowth on either side of the trail was too thick to drive through. Jane walked back to the jeep. ‘I’m going to try to hack us a path around this thing.’ She reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out the machete. ‘Just stay here and keep the windows and doors locked.’ Cleis did not seem to hear her. Jane rolled up both windows and locked the doors, hesitated, then took the car keys. ‘It might take a while.’
Jane hurried, swinging the machete heedlessly through vines and flowers. Her arms were aching and her face itched with spattered sap by the time she had a path cleared.
She hurried back to the jeep. ‘That should—’
Cleis was gone. A pile of empty clothes lay on the passenger seat.
‘No,’ Jane said quietly, ‘not now.’ She would not let the forest have her. ‘Do you hear me?’ she bellowed. ‘I won’t let you have her!’
She crashed through the undergrowth, smashing past branches, pushing through tangles, the machete forgotten. She had no idea how long she trampled through the forest, blinded by grief and rage, but eventually she found herself by a stream, sobbing. She wiped the tears from her eyes. Maybe Cleis was already back at the jeep. Maybe she had just wandered off for a moment then remembered who she was. Yes. She should get back to the jeep.
But the jeep was still empty. Jane sat behind the wheel, staring into the trees until it was dark. Then she switched on the lights and drove back to the shack.
She did not unpack the jeep. For the next five nights she left a Coleman lamp burning on the step, just in case. She barely slept any more, but wandered through the trees, calling. On the sixth night she did not go back to the shack. Perhaps if she stayed out here, lived as Cleis lived, she could understand. Her back itched: her shirt was filthy. She took it off, left it hanging on a branch.
That night she slept curled up on a tree bough, like a jaguar. Like Cleis. She woke hours later, heart kicking under her ribs. Did jaguars dream of falling?
The next day she wandered aimlessly through the forest, eating fruit where she found it. She ran her hand across the surface of a puddle, wondered what it would be like to have paws heavy enough to break a paca’s back, how it would feel to lean down to lap with a great pink tongue, to see the reflection of round golden eyes and white whiskers. She wandered. Time ceased to mean anything much.
Maybe it would not be so bad to walk through the forest on four feet. The world would look very different, but things would become very simple. And she would be with Cleis.
She found herself back at the shack, taking a large knife from the table. It did not take long to get back to the ruins. She knelt by the glyph wall. She would cut open her own shoulder and ask Ixbalum to give her the change salve. Then she could join Cleis. They could be together. She laid the knife against the muscle of her left shoulder, and cut. Her blood was shockingly red, the pain incredible.
She blinked at the knife. ‘What am I doing?’
She had to find a way to get Cleis out, not to lose herself. She threw the knife away from her, and stood up, holding her arm. The cut was deep. It needed cleaning up. She had to get back to the shack.
That night, as she lay on her bunk, bandaged shoulder aching, the endless chorus of frogs and insects fell silent. Jane was suddenly full of hope. She pulled on her boots, and went to the door. Then she heard it, a low moaning yowl, like a cat on heat. A big cat. The yowl leapt to a scream, then another. The scream turned into a tight cough. She heard harsh panting, hissing, and then that terrible scream.
‘Cleis!’ Cats sometimes fought over territory. Jane snatched up the lantern and ran out into the dark, following the noise. Fifty yards into the trees the screaming stopped and there was a thrashing in the undergrowth, then silence. Jane ran harder.
There was no sign of the cat, but it had flattened an area of undergrowth with a diameter of about ten feet, and the grass was covered in blood. She cast about for tracks, or a trail of blood, anything. There was nothing. Exhausted, she headed back to the shack and lay down, refusing to imagine what might have happened to Cleis.
Someone was shaking her shoulder. Jane opened her eyes. Cleis stood before her naked, thin as a rail, holding something. Must be a dream. Cleis was pregnant.
The shaking did not stop.
Thin. Jane sat bolt upright. Cleis was holding a baby. ‘Take her. She can’t stay with me.’ Cleis thrust the child at Jane, then opened the door.
‘Wait!’
‘I can’t. She’s been fed. Take her away from here.’
‘No. I’m not going anywhere without you.’ Jane climbed out of bed, scrunched the blanket into a nest, and laid the child down. ‘I’ll follow you, leave the baby here.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I can. I will. You’re not well, Cleis. You need to leave with me. I want you to. Please.’ Cleis stood, uncertain. ‘Don’t you want to?’
‘Yes!’
‘Then why don’t you?’
‘I can’t!’ Cleis backed up against the wall.
Jane sat down. She did not want Cleis to bolt. ‘Come and sit. Just for a moment. We’ll have some tea.’
‘No. I can’t, Jane. I really can’t. I have to stay here. Under the trees. It’s where I belong now. I need to stay.’
‘You need to look after your child.’
‘No. Don’t you see? It’s stronger even than that. I need to be out there, to live. I need it, like I need water, or air.’
‘I’ll follow you. I’ll leave the child here and I’ll follow you.’
‘Then she’ll die,’ Cleis said, sadly. And it was that sadness, that resignation that finally told Jane that Cleis would not change her mind. Could not. That Cleis would rather run through the trees than stay here, or anywhere, with Jane. If it was not for the tiny life on the bed …
‘What if she … what if she grows up to be like you?’
‘She won’t. If you take her away. She’ll never miss what she’s never had.’
‘I love you.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ She moved to the bed, picked up the baby, put her in Jane’s arms. ‘Love my child for me.’
They did not say goodbye.
She wrapped the child carefully in a clean shirt and walked down to the village. Two women took a look at her face and went back inside their huts. Ixbalum’s hut was empty. A bunch of children gathered at the edge of the trees. Jane stood in the middle of the clearing and addressed the air. Where is Ixbalum?’
A chicken clucked.
‘Where is Ixbalum?’
A woman put her head out a hut and called to one of the children, shouting instructions. The girl listened, looked sideways at Jane, then darted into the forest. Jane waited patiently. The baby in her arms yawned and opened its eyes. They were the colour of brand new copper pennies.
The girl came back with Ixbalum.
‘You did this,’ Jane said finally. She thought she saw pity on Ixbalum’s face, but perhaps she imagined it. ‘I need your help. I’ll need milk.’ She pointed to her breasts, then the child. Ixbalum walked over to her hut and disappeared inside. Jane waited. She did not know what else to do.
Ixbalum came back out holding a pile of soft rags and a gourd. She held them out. The gourd was full of milk. Some spilled on Jane’s thumb as she took it. She sucked at it: rich, not cow’s milk.
‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew.’
But Ixbalum shook her head wearily and pointed to Jane, to the baby, and made a flicking motion with her hand. It was unmistakable: Go away.
‘I’ll go for now, because that’s what she wanted. But you better … You keep her safe for me. Just keep her safe.’
The journey to Benque Viejo was not difficult. No more trees had fallen across the skidder trail and the baby, whom she called Penny, because of her eyes, slept soundly in the cardboard box Jane had strapped into the passenger seat. She stayed in Benque Viejo only long enough to buy diapers and baby formula and a feeding bottle, fill tanks with enough gas to get her to the capital city, Belmopan, and to make a phone call to the niece of the ex-governor, on Ambergris.
‘Katherine, I want someone who will fill out a birth certificate, no questions asked.’
‘Who on earth for?’
‘My adopted child.’
Silence. ‘Well that’s a turn-up for the books. Are you sure? Think of the scandal if you get back to England with a baby in tow …’
‘I don’t care about that anymore.’ And she did not. She really did not.
She climbed back in the jeep. Penny opened those startling eyes, stretched. Jane wondered if she would look like Cleis when she was older.
ISOBEL AVENS RETURNS TO STEPNEY IN THE SPRING
by
M. John Harrison
This was a story I could not turn down, despite my initial doubts that it fit the parameters I had in mind for Little Deaths. But as the story went through the editing process and I reread it a few more times, I thought about Isobel and her odd yearnings and my doubts vanished.
ISOBEL AVENS RETURNS TO STEPNEY IN THE SPRING
The third of September this year I spent the evening watching TV in an upstairs flat in North London. Some story of love and transfiguration, cropped into all the wrong proportions for the small screen. The flat wasn’t mine. It belonged to a friend I was staying with. There were French posters on the walls, dusty CDs stacked on the old-fashioned sideboard, piles of newspapers subsiding day by day into yellowing fans on the carpet. Outside, Tottenham stretched away, Greek driving schools, Turkish social clubs. Turn the TV off and you could hear nothing. Turn it back on and the film unrolled, passages of guilt with lost edges, photographed in white and blue light. At about half past eleven the phone rang.
I picked it up. ‘Hello?’
It was Isobel Avens.
‘Oh China,’ she said. She burst into tears.
I said: ‘Can you drive?’
‘No,’ she said.
I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll come and fetch you.’
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m here. You can’t come here.’
I said: ‘Be outside, love. Just try and get yourself downstairs. Be outside and I’ll pick you up on the pavement there.’
There was a silence.
‘Can you do that?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Oh China. The first two days she wouldn’t get much further than that.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ I advised.
London was as quiet as a nursing home corridor. I turned up the car stereo. Tom Waits, ‘Downtown Train’. Music stuffed with sentiments you recognize but daren’t admit to yourself. I let the BMW slip down Green Lanes, through Camden into the centre; then west. I was pushing the odd traffic light at orange, clipping the apex off a safe bend here and there. I told myself I wasn’t going to get killed for her. What I meant was that if I did she would have no one left. I took the Embankment at eight thousand revs, nosing down heavily on the brakes at Chelsea Wharf to get round into Gunter Grove. No one was there to see. By half past twelve I was on Queensborough Road, where I found her standing very straight in the mercury light outside Alexander’s building, the jacket of a Karl Lagerfeld suit thrown across her shoulders and one piece of expensive leather luggage at her feet. She bent into the car. Her face was white and exhausted and her breath stank. The way Alexander had dumped her was as cruel as everything else he did. She had flown back steerage from the Miami clinic reeling from jet lag, expecting to fall into his arms and be loved and comforted. He told her, ‘As a doctor I don’t think I can do any more for you.’ The ground hadn’t just shifted on her: it was out from under her feet. Suddenly she was only his patient again. In the metallic glare of the street lamps, I noticed a stipple of ulceration across her collar bones. I switched on the courtesy light to look closer. Tiny hectic sores, closely spaced.
I said: ‘Christ, Isobel.’
‘It’s just a virus,’ she said. ‘Just a side-effect.’
‘Is anything worth this?’
She put her arms around me and sobbed.
‘Oh China, China.’
It isn’t that she wants me; only that she has no one else. Yet every time I smell her body my heart lurches. The years I lived with her I slept so soundly. Then Alexander did this irreversible thing to her, the thing she had always wanted, and now everything is fucked up and eerie and it will be that way forever.
I said: ‘I’ll take you home.’
‘Will you stay?’
‘What else?’
My name is Mick Rose, which is why people have always called me ‘China’. From the moment we met, Isobel Avens was fascinated by that. Later, she would hold my face between her hands in the night and whisper dreamily over and over—‘Oh, China, China, China. China.’ But it was something else that attracted her to me. The year we met, she lived in Stratford-on-Avon. I walked into the cafe at the little toy aerodrome they have there and it was she who served me. She was twenty-five years old: slow, heavy-bodied, easily delighted by the world. Her hair was red. She wore a rusty pink blouse, a black ankle-length skirt with lace at the hem. Her feet were like boats in great brown Dr Marten’s shoes. When she saw me looking down at them in amusement, she said: ‘Oh, these aren’t my real Docs, these’ are my cheap imitation ones.’ She showed me how the left one was coming apart at the seams. ‘Brilliant, eh?’ She smelled of vanilla and sex. She radiated heat. I could always feel the heat of her a yard away.
‘I’d love to be able to fly,’ she told me.
She laughed and hugged herself.
‘You must feel so free.’
She thought I was the pilot of the little private Cessna she could see out of the cafe window. In fact I had only come to deliver its cargo—an unadmitted load for an unadmitted destination—some commercial research centre in Zürich or Budapest. At the time I called myself Rose Medical Services, Plc. My fleet comprised a single Vauxhall Astra van into which I had dropped the engine, brakes and suspension of a two litre GTE insurance write-off. I specialized. If it was small I guaranteed to move it anywhere in Britain within twelve hours; occasionally, if the price was right, to selected points in Europe. Recombinant DNA: viruses at controlled temperatures, sometimes in live hosts: cell cultures in heavily armoured flasks. What they were used for I had no idea. I didn’t really want an idea until much later; and that turned out to be much too late.
