Bodily Harm (11 page)

There’s a truck making its way through the crowd now, slowly; in the back is a man wearing a white shirt and mirror sunglasses, barking at the crowd through a bullhorn loudspeaker. Rennie can’t
understand a word he’s saying. Two other men flank him, carrying placards with large black crowns on them.
ELLIS IS KING
. “The Minister of Justice,” says Paul.

“What sort of trouble?” says Rennie, wondering if she can get a refund on her excursion ticket if she goes back early.

“A little pushing and shoving,” says Paul. “Nothing to get excited about.”

But already people are throwing things at the truck; fruit, Rennie thinks, they’re picking it up from the stacks on the sidewalk. A crumpled beer can hits the wall above Rennie’s head, bounces off.

“They weren’t aiming at you,” says Paul. “But I’ll walk you back to the hotel. Sometimes they get into the broken glass.”

He moves the table to let her out, and they push their way through the crowd, against the stream. Rennie wonders if she should ask him about tennis courts and restaurants but decides not to. Her image is fluffy enough already. Then she wonders if she should ask him to have lunch with her at the hotel, but she decides not to do that either. She might be misunderstood.

Which is just as well, considering the lunch. Rennie has a grilled cheese sandwich, burned, and a glass of grapefruit juice out of a tin, which seems to be all there is. After the Jello pie she takes out the map of Queenstown and pores over it with vague desperation; she has the unpleasant feeling that she’s already seen just about everything there is to see. There’s a reef, though, on the other side of the jetty that marks off the harbour; you can go out in a boat and look at it. The picture in the brochure shows a couple of murky fish. It doesn’t look too promising, but it might yield a paragraph or two.

The map shows a shortcut to the sea. Rennie envisioned a road, but it’s only a rudimentary path; it runs behind the hotel, beside
something that looks like a sewage pipe. The ground is damp and slippery. Rennie picks her way down, wishing her sandals had flat soles.

The beach isn’t one of the seven jewel-like beaches with clean sparkling iridescent sand advertised in the brochure. It’s narrow and gravelly and dotted with lumps of coagulated oil, soft as chewing gum and tar-coloured. The sewage pipe runs into the sea. Rennie steps over it and walks left. She passes a shed and a hauled-up rowboat where three men are cutting the heads off fish, gutting them and tossing them into a red plastic pail. Bladders like used condoms litter the beach. One of the men grins at Rennie and holds up a fish, his finger hooked through the gills. Rennie shakes her head. She might take their picture and write something about the catch fresh from the sea and down-to-earth lifestyles. But then she would have to buy a fish, and she can’t carry a dead fish around with her all day.

“What time you meet me tonight?” one of the men says behind her. Rennie ignores this.

In the distance there are two boats with awnings, more or less where the map says they should be. She plods along the beach; when she’s well past the fish heads she takes off her sandals and walks on the wet packed sand near the water. To the left she can now see the mountains, rising steeply behind the town, covered with uniform nubbled green.

The boats don’t leave until high tide. She buys a ticket from the owner of the nearest and newest-looking one,
The Princess Anne
, and sits on the raspy grass in the shade of a bush. The other boat is called
The Princess Margaret
. There’s hardly a lineup: a grey-haired couple with binoculars and the ingenuous, eager-to-be-pleased look of retired Americans from the Midwest, and two girls in their teens, white and speckled. They’re both wearing T-shirts with mottoes:
TRY A VIRGIN (ISLAND), PROPERTY OF ST. MARTIN’S COUNTY JAIL
. There’s half an hour to wait. The girls peel off their T-shirts and
shorts; they’re wearing bikinis underneath. They sit out on the filthy beach, rubbing oil on each other’s parboiled backs. Skin cancer, thinks Rennie.

Her own dress comes up to her neck. Although it’s sleeveless she’s already too warm. She gazes at the deceptively blue sea; even though she knows what kind of garbage runs into it nearby, she longs to wade in it. But she hasn’t been swimming since the operation. She hasn’t yet found a bathing suit that will do: this is her excuse. Her real fear, irrational but a fear, is that the scar will come undone in the water, split open like a faulty zipper, and she will turn inside out. Then she would see what Daniel saw when he looked into her, while she herself lay on the table unconscious as a slit fish. This is partly why she fell in love with him: he knows something about her she doesn’t know, he knows what she’s like inside.

Rennie takes the three postcards out of her purse, “St. Anthony by an early unknown local artist.” She addresses one of them to her mother in Griswold. Her mother still lives in Griswold, even though her grandmother is dead and there’s no reason at all why her mother can’t move, travel, do something else. But she stays in Griswold, cleaning the red brick house that seems to get bigger and both emptier and more cluttered every time Rennie visits it. Where else would I go? says her mother. It’s too late. Besides, my friends are here.

One of Rennie’s less pleasant fantasies about the future, on nights when she can’t sleep, is that her mother will get some lingering disease and she’ll have to go back to Griswold to take care of her, for years and years, for the rest of her life. She’ll plead illness, they’ll have a competition, the sickest one will win. That’s how it’s done in Griswold, by the women at any rate. Rennie can remember her
mother’s church group in the front parlour, drinking tea and eating small cakes covered with chocolate icing and poisonous-looking many-coloured sprinkles, discussing their own and each other’s debilities in hushed voices that blended pity, admiration and envy. If you were sick you were exempt: other women brought you pies and came to sit with you, commiserating, gloating. The only thing they liked better was a funeral.

On the card Rennie writes that she’s well and is having a nice relaxing time. She hasn’t told her mother about Jake leaving, since it was hard enough to get her to accept the fact that he’d moved in. Rennie would have dodged that one if she could, but her mother was fond of phoning her early in the morning, at a time when she thought everyone ought to be up, and the phone was on Jake’s side of the bed. It would have been better if Jake weren’t in the habit of disguising his voice and saying things like “The White House” and “Fiedlefort’s Garage.” Rennie finally had to explain to her mother that it was only one male voice she was hearing, not several. Which was only marginally acceptable. After that, they didn’t discuss it.

Rennie hasn’t told her mother about the operation, either. She stopped telling her mother bad news a long time ago. As a child, she learned to conceal cuts and scrapes, since her mother seemed to regard such things not as accidents but as acts Rennie committed on purpose to complicate her mother’s life. What did you do
that
for, she would say, jabbing at the blood with a towel. Next time, watch where you’re going. The operation, too, she would see as Rennie’s fault. Cancer was a front-parlour subject, but it wasn’t in the same class as a broken leg or a heart attack or even a death. It was apart, obscene almost, like a scandal; it was something you brought upon yourself.

Other people think that too, but in different ways. Rennie used to think it herself.
Sexual repression. Couldn’t act out anger
. The body, sinister twin, taking its revenge for whatever crimes the mind was
supposed to have committed on it. Nothing had prepared her for her own outrage, the feeling that she’d been betrayed by a close friend. She’d given her body swimming twice a week, forbidden it junk food and cigarette smoke, allowed it a normal amount of sexual release. She’d trusted it. Why then had it turned against her?

Daniel talked about the importance of attitude. It’s mysterious, he said. We don’t know why, but it helps, or it seems to.

What does? she said.

Hope, he said. The mind isn’t separate from the body; emotions trigger chemical reactions and vice versa, you know that.

So it’s my fault if there’s a recurrence? I have cancer of the mind? said Rennie.

It isn’t a symbol, it’s a disease, said Daniel patiently. We just don’t know the cure yet. We have a few clues, that’s all. We’re looking for the X factor. But we’ll get it sooner or later and then people like me will be obsolete. He patted her hand. You’ll be fine, he said. You have a life to go back to. Unlike some. You’re very lucky.

But she was not fine. She was released from the hospital, she went back to the apartment, she still wasn’t fine. She longed to be sick again so that Daniel would have to take care of her.

She constructed a program for herself: schedules and goals. She exercised the muscles of her left arm by lifting it and pressing the forearm against the wall, she squeezed a sponge ball in her left hand twenty times a day. She went to movies with Jake to cheer herself up, funny movies, nothing heavy. She began to type again, a page at a time, reworking her drain-chain jewellery piece, picking up where she’d left off. She learned to brush her hair again and to do up buttons. As she did each of these things, she thought of Daniel watching her and approving. Good, he would say. You can do up buttons now? You can brush your own hair? That’s right, go to cheerful movies. You’re doing really well.

She went for an examination and to get the stitches out. She wore a red blouse, to show Daniel what a positive attitude she had, and sat up straight and smiled. Daniel told her she was doing really well and she began to cry.

He put his arms around her, which was what she’d wanted him to do. She couldn’t believe how boring she was being, how stupid, how predictable. Her nose was running. She sniffed, blotted her eyes on Daniel’s pocket, in which, she noted, he kept several cheap ballpoint pens, and pushed him away.

I’m sorry, she said. I didn’t mean to do that.

Don’t be sorry, he said. You’re human.

I don’t feel human any more, she said. I feel infested. I have bad dreams, I dream I’m full of white maggots eating away at me from the inside.

He sighed. That’s normal, he said. You’ll get over it.

Stop telling me I’m fucking
normal
, she said.

Daniel checked his list of appointments, looked at his watch, and took her down for a swift coffee in the shopping arcade below his office, where he delivered an earnest lecture. This was the second part of her life. It would be different from the first part, she would no longer be able to take things for granted, but perhaps this was a plus because she would see her life as a gift and appreciate it more. It was almost like being given a second life. She must stop thinking of her life as over, because it was far from over.

When I was a student I used to think I would be able to save people, he said. I don’t think that any more. I don’t even think I can cure them; in this field you can’t afford to think that. But in a lot of cases we can give them time. A remission can last for years, for a normal lifespan even. He leaned forward slightly. Think of your life as a clean page. You can write whatever you like on it.

Rennie sat across the table from him, white formica with gold threads in it, thinking what a lot of facile crap he was talking and
admiring his eyes, which were an elusive shade between blue and green. Where does he get this stuff, she thought,
The Reader’s Digest?

How many times have you used that one? she said. Are you just saying that because I’m a journalist? I mean, if I were a dentist, would you say, Your life is like an empty tooth, you can fill it with whatever you like?

Rennie knew you weren’t supposed to say things like this to men you were in love with, or to men in general, or to anyone at all for that matter; making fun was rude, especially when the other person was being serious. But she couldn’t resist. He would have had a right to be angry, but instead he was startled. He looked at her for a moment almost slyly; then he began to laugh. He was blushing, and Rennie was entranced: the men she knew didn’t blush.