Fermentation (4 page)

I did as he said, all the time thinking of the skin on the
young girl's face and the way Serge had caressed it so gently. I
was
jealous of his touch and for a moment I wanted the flames to come closer, to burn me. My head ached where Serge was pulling at my hair.

‘Now you are going to swallow,’ he said. He pushed the burning torch closer to my face and then away and then closer and finally he put the whole of the torch into my mouth and I could feel myself burning and choking. ‘Close your mouth,’ I heard his voice shouting and I closed it against the flames and when I opened it again I breathed out, and fire leapt from within me. I was breathing out fire that leapt in the air and then there was absolute silence.

Serge released his grip and leant down and put his mouth to mine. He touched my lips with his tongue and kissed me and then he threw me back against the couch like some discarded piece of rubbish.

‘You're mad,’ I screamed. ‘You could have set fire to everything. You could have killed us both. You're mad.’

‘Us both? Is that you and the baby, or you and me?’

‘Now who's jealous? Now whose skin's fucking green?’ I felt the room beginning to spin around me and I put my head down between my legs. ‘I think I'm going to be sick.’

‘Try a lemon.’

‘They're too fucking bitter.’

‘You should know,’ he said, walking towards the door.

Moments later he was gone. I thought he would slam
the door behind him but instead he left it open and I sat and stared out into the dark corridor listening to the echo of his steps growing fainter and fainter.

When I heard the door to the building close I got up and followed. I ran down the stairs and out into the street. Serge was only a little way ahead of me and it didn't take me long to catch him up. He knew I was behind him and then I was by his side walking in step but he didn't look at me. He just kept walking, his hands deep in his pockets, and eventually I stood still on the pavement and watched as he disappeared round the corner. I stood like that for several minutes. I felt someone push past me. I thought, if I walk round the comer Serge will be standing there waiting for me. All I need do is walk a few steps further and look round the corner. He will be standing there waiting for me. I walked slowly and when I came to the corner I stood and looked at all the people passing by.

I went back to the apartment and sank down on the floor and wept in the silence.

Serge did not return to the apartment that evening. I had to take a long shower to wash away the black smudges from my face and arms and to scrub out my mouth which tasted of ashes. Afterwards I cleared away the torches and mopped up the floor where I had spat out the paraffin and then I prepared some food: a large panful of macaroni cheese made with some cream cheese that was left in the fridge. It was comfort food; a dish my
mother used to serve when I was sick as a child. My body could not seem to decide between hunger or nausea. At one moment I would want to throw up and in the next eat without pause.

After I had finished my meal I went and sat by the window. I thought I might glimpse Serge standing in the street or walking towards the building but he didn't appear. The apartment seemed more empty than it had ever been before when Serge had left. I went to the wardrobe in the bedroom, took down a green shirt that belonged to him and pressed it to my face. It smelt of him, his sweat and the smoke and the paraffin, and I pushed my hands deep down into the empty sleeves and then curled up on the bed and fell asleep.

As he watched from a chair in the corner of the room I ran my fingers along a line of eggs that were arranged in order of size on a table. There were tiny quails’ eggs and hens’ eggs and speckled ducks’ eggs but my fingers stopped when I reached a large white goose egg that lay at the end of the row dwarfing all the others. I picked this egg up and then went and lay down on the bed under the window. I rolled the thick oval shell between my hands, down the middle of my stomach and between my legs before finally lifting it and cracking the shell into two halves on the window ledge and then letting its heavy golden centre fall on to my stomach.

‘Come here,’ I said and he approached the bed and
stood over me and stared down at the yolk that lay quivering on my skin like a huge yellow eye. I held my hand out to him and he climbed on top of me and lowered himself down to meet me, all the while being careful not to touch the egg, not to let skin touch skin. He kissed my eyes and my lips and my neck, holding his weight on his arms, aware of the yolk that lay between us.

His mouth was soft and his saliva sweet. He ran the tip of his tongue from my mouth down my neck to my dark full nipples and I rose beneath him as he encircled them, turning them hard. I wanted to crush the yolk against his skin but he held me down, putting the full weight of his body against my wrists so that I found it difficult to move, and then he sucked on my breasts, gently clasping my nipples between his teeth and drinking from the skin. His tongue slipped down my body to where the yolk lay whole and complete, a perfect sack of thick rich liquid that rested on my soft belly ready to split and spill.

Carefully he opened my legs and brushed his hand against the soft velvet creaminess of my sex. He pushed against me, his sex against mine, and I felt my whole being open out towards him as he gently pushed himself inside me, all the time holding himself back from touching the eye of my stomach. I knew he wanted to shove himself against me, to ram himself deep inside my flesh, but he couldn't allow this. The yolk lay between us, staring upwards, like the pressure of a
long-held promise, and I was forcing him to take his pleasure with a measured, almost detached precision.

When he came, he held me down firmly until I could feel the muscles in his arms and legs relax and then he carefully let go of my wrists, which were white where he had clasped them, and pushed himself up.

‘Now eat it,’ I whispered into his ear and put my hand on his head and forced his face down to my stomach. ‘Eat it,’ I said as his whole body tried to resist me. He looked at me and then he wrapped his mouth around the warm yellow yolk and sucked the whole from my stomach. The skin broke in his mouth and thick yellowy liquid spilled from his lips.

When I awoke Serge's shirt was twisted tightly around me and in the heat of the night it was wet with sweat. I could see the lizard sitting in its tank where Serge had placed it at the foot of the bed. It was quite motionless and it was staring straight at me with its cold dark eyes. I tried to close mine, but each time I did so all I could see was Serge lying next to Justine, kissing her softly on the scarred side of her face. The lizard's tongue flicked out in the dark.

I got up. In the apartments opposite people had dragged their mattresses on to the balconies and lay on their backs with their eyes to the sky. I could see their dark outlines, lying stacked like refugees under the hot moon. Madame R – (Serge and I had named all these
characters) was sitting in her armchair by the open window fanning herself with her husband's newspaper and I could see Doc, who lived directly opposite me, sitting up in bed reading one of his medical books. There was no privacy in the heat of night. What would otherwise remain firmly closed was opened for the world to see. Carlotta returned from work a little after four am. She took off her blonde wig to wipe away the sweat and lit a cigarette. Sometimes she would take her clients up to her flat and Serge and I would sit at my window and watch the dimly lit shadows which their bodies cast against the walls, but usually she worked on the streets. ‘She probably prefers it like that,’ Serge said. ‘There's no intimacy on the street.’ That night I watched as she smoked her cigarette in the dark and then stretched out on the balcony.

No one could sleep in this heat which made everyone drowsy. Instead we were all day-dreaming of cool nights, between cool sheets. Everyone was dreaming of sleep.

I sat up like this until dawn. Everything was hazy in the early-morning sun as though someone had sketched the buildings over parchment. Three small sparrows were dusting themselves at the base of a tree below. The earth appeared to crumble at the slightest touch of their wings. The city was returning to dust.

PROCESSED CHEESE

Processed cheese is usually made with pasteurised milk. It possesses little taste, less aroma and is most often flaccid. If at all possible, it is to be avoided. Never serve at dinner parties.

Serge returned a few days later. I had been out to look for him in all the places he usually frequented but I hadn't seen him. I saw Justine instead. I came across her sitting in a café. Part of me thought I should simply walk by, but then I found myself taking a table in the corner where I had a good view of her. I liked the idea that she didn't know me, had never met me, and therefore couldn't see me. For all I knew Serge had never told her about me and I didn't exist at all.

Her face fascinated me. I wanted to reach out and touch it. You could see where the veins had risen on the shiny pulled skin and how her mouth was slightly twisted where the flames had eaten into the muscle.

‘How did that happen?’ I would casually ask her one day. I would be a nosey passer-by, or a plastic surgeon offering hope of a miracle skin graft.

‘I am learning to eat fire. My teacher. He was demonstrating how to breathe out the flames and the flames caught my face.’

‘But that's terrible.’

‘Not really. It's brought us closer together. It was an accident, but he likes the scars,’ she'd say.

I watched as she gently tugged her long red hair and pulled it over her cheek to hide her scars. She drank her coffee and read from a book and eventually she paid her bill and left. I had thought of following her, to see if she led me to Serge, but something inside stopped me.

On my way back home I stopped off and bought some fruit and vegetables at a market by the river and then walked through the streets to the apartment. The girl with the blackcurrant crew-cut was sitting on a sofa outside the salon. She was wearing a dress the colour of lemon curd and drinking a purply-blue drink out of a glass filled with ice.

She smiled as I walked by. ‘You live upstairs, don't you?’ she asked.

‘Yes I do.’

‘Ever thought of having a haircut?’

‘Not really. I've thought of having it dyed, though.’

‘What colour? We have lots of colour charts. Our speciality is dyeing,’ she said, pouring some of the strange purple liquid into a second glass and handing it to me.

‘Red.’

‘Really? Red?’

‘Yes. What's wrong with red?’ I said, sitting down next to her on the sofa and sipping the drink.

‘It's grape juice,’ she said. ‘You just don't strike me as a red person. I had you down as a secret blonde. Ask
yourself this. Do you have a lot of red in your wardrobe? Does red complement your skin tone? Is your personality red? Do you like red meat? Do you eat a lot of red vegetables? Do you wait for a red light before you cross a road? These are questions you should consider.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘Do you see red a lot? That is a very important question. I myself am a mixture of blue and red,’ she put her hand to her head. ‘Five days out of seven I feel very blue and then every now and then I see deep red. Those days are very ugly. But you see, don't you – purple is my colour.’

‘I see red a lot,’ I said.

‘Are you pregnant?’

‘What's that got to do with it?’

‘Are you?’

‘I'm pregnant, yes.’

‘Are you exercising?’

I shook my head.

‘Come inside, I want you to meet someone.’

She stood up and put down her drink and I followed her inside the shop. The girl with the bouffant was combing through someone's hair.

‘This is Peggy,’ the blackcurrant girl said. ‘And my name is Rachel. Peggy teaches yoga. She'll show you some good exercises.’

Rachel turned to Peggy and relieved her of the comb and then Peggy took a pillow off one of the chairs and put it on the floor.

‘Lie down with your head on the pillow,’ she said, beaming at me and kneeling down on the floor. ‘I'll show you something that isn't very strenuous. Close your eyes. Now keep your body relaxed and breathe in and out so that you are aware of your breathing. Contract your thigh muscles as hard as you can. Hold that tension and slowly release it. Now tighten your stomach muscles. Hold the tension and slowly release it. Do the same with the muscles all over your body. One by one tighten them and then slowly release the tension. Let your body flow. Let your body open out. Feel the tension slipping from your shoulder blades. Let your thoughts drift away and your breathing control you. Feel lightness and sweetness enter your body at every breath and when you exhale feel the poison leaving your body. Your body is soft. Your skin is like silk. Open your body out. Spread your limbs out.’

I lay on the floor listening to Peggy's voice and feeling myself slowly drifting away. I was a giant cheese and my body was spreading and oozing out like an over-ripe Camembert on a large white plate. When I opened my eyes again Peggy and Rachel were standing over me smiling. The woman whose hair Rachel had been combing was still sitting in her chair. She was watching me too.

‘How do you feel?’ Rachel said.

‘Great. Thank you.’

‘Come down any time,’ Peggy said. ‘I could show you the cat position and a few others which are good for pregnant women.’

As I left the salon Rachel came to the door.

‘I still think blonde,’ she said. ‘Red's a bit cheap.’

‘You're right,’ I said.

I walked slowly up the stairway to my apartment. I could feel almost immediately that Serge had been there some time before me, as surely as if a ghost had passed through my body, and when I entered the apartment I saw him standing by the window in the dark.

‘You came back,’ I said as he turned round. ‘It's good to see you.’

‘You too.’ He bent his head slightly.

‘You look tired.’

Serge nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am tired.’

‘Are you staying? Are you hungry?’

‘No. I'm not staying. I'm going to go.’

‘To Justine?’

‘Don't do that.’

‘I'm sorry. Are you hungry?’

I switched the light on in the kitchen and put the bag on the table and began to unpack some of the vegetables. ‘I've got salad and things,’ I said as I began washing tomatoes and lettuce in the sink and then I felt his arms wrap round my waist. His face brushed against my neck. ‘I've missed you,’ I said. He kissed my neck gently. ‘I'm sorry. About Justine. I'm getting muddled,’ I said. His hands turned me round to face him and he kissed me again and then stared at me.

‘Listen, I'm going away for a while. Stephane has a job in Geneva. They need a fire-eater and I said I'd go.’

‘Would you have left me a note?’

Serge put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small scrap of paper. On it he had scribbled: ‘I'm leaving for Geneva tonight. They eat cheese there for breakfast! Back soon. Love Serge.’

‘It was good of you to write.’

‘Sarcasm doesn't suit you.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You're right. Your stuff's in the cupboard, I'll see you when you get back.’

‘I was waiting for you, you know. I wanted to see you.’

‘You'd better go.’

‘Yes,’ he said. I started to talk again but he held up his hand. ‘I'll see you soon. Okay? Will you be okay?’

‘I'll be fine. Thanks for waiting.’

I managed to walk past him and into the bedroom where I lay down on the bed. On the far wall was a large mirror with a photograph that a friend had taken of the two of us stuck into the frame. We were standing outside the gates at Versailles and Serge was laughing and making a chopping movement with his hand. I lay on the bed staring at the image while my body slowly drifted away.

Later, after he had gone, I got up and sat on the couch in the living-room. A packet of his cigarettes was stuffed down the sofa back. I took one out and lit it and then held the burning end to the back of my hand. I held it close so that it burnt the tiny fair hairs on my skin. The heat tickled me and then I turned my hand over and quickly stubbed the cigarette hard into my
palm. For an instant there was no pain and then it was excruciating but I kept the cigarette there, grinding it down to a pulp until tears were pouring down my face, and I ran to the kitchen and held my hand under the cold-water tap. Every time I took it away from the water the pain returned and eventually I made myself an ice-pack and sat on the couch pressing it to my skin. By morning a watery blister had formed. It took several weeks for the wound to heal and when it did the skin was a different texture. It was a small shiny disk, like a vaccination scar. I would touch it occasionally. It made me feel sick.

My craving for cheese increased. One night at around twelve o'clock, desperate to eat, I was forced to go out on a shopping expedition to the late-night store between rue Marais and rue Bee. I didn't want to move. The heat had made me lethargic but I desperately wanted to assuage my hunger.

Outside the red machines were washing the streets in vain. The water slaked the pavements, dampening the dust and trickling down into the gutters between the piles of festering rubbish. There were several late-night bars still open with people sitting outside. A green light from a pharmacy display lit their faces, making them look as sick as the smell of the rubbish that lay mouldering around them. The stench was overpowering. It stung my nostrils and caught at the back of my throat. You could hear the flies and wasps as they swarmed in the warm
night air and crawled over the piles, hatching in their millions in the blood of sanitary towels and remains of chopped liver.

I walked quickly down the centre of the road.

The owner of the shop nodded at me as I entered, then held his fingers over his nose and raised his eyes to the ceiling. His fingers were pudgy, like fat little puppy dogs. I could see his wife in the small front room that adjoined the shop. She was large also and rarely seemed to move from her armchair. Sometimes when she waddled through to serve, you could smell the smell of sweat through her thick nylon dresses.

The only cheese I could lay my hands on in the refrigerated section of the late-night store was a small packet of the processed kind. I lingered for a while in front of the unit, trying to benefit from the cooler air it cast off Eventually I returned to the counter.

‘Not much of a choice.’

‘No deliveries,’ the man said. ‘If it continues like this . . .’ and he raised his shoulders.

I bought the cheese and returned home.

The cheese was exactly 10cm by 10cm in size and came wrapped in thick, see-through plastic. There were six slices in the packet which I cut open with a pair of nail scissors, holding it up to smell its contents but there was absolutely no aroma. Each slice was thick and pale. I cut some bread and put two slices of cheese on top and then toasted it and took the plate to my bedroom where I sat with it on the bed and watched soap operas on TV.
Afterwards The Falling Joys came on and sang ‘XYZ’ and I went to sleep.

I had no dreams that night, or at least none I could remember once I had awoken, and I felt disappointed, empty almost, as though I had been cheated.

I went into the living-room and sat down on the couch and began drawing little sketches of pregnant animals: elephants and spiders and matchstick women with huge pieces of cheese inside their stomachs. My favourite was a picture of a mouse with six Baby Bel lined up in its tummy like peas in a pod.

Later I took a shower and then went and stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. As a child I had rarely looked at myself in the mirror, or, if I did look, I never questioned the child that stared back. I took it for granted that it was me who stood there and hardly gave myself a second glance. Now I stared at myself but I hardly recognised the Siamese figure before me. My breasts were growing larger. My whole being was changing shape, transforming itself to accommodate the child within. I remembered a short film I had seen of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly and thinking how compact the chrysalis was and of the creature tightly packed inside. The molecules changed and re-formed themselves into bright shining wings and finally the camera showed the chrysalis split and the beautiful creature emerging and spreading its wings.

I ran my hand over my stomach. My skin was as smooth and expectant as a sealed envelope. I thought of
Serge sitting in some foreign city far away from me. I missed him; I missed hearing his voice and feeling his arms wrapped around me and his body close to mine. At times I wanted to write to him; I wanted to tell him about the heat. How it had grown steadily closer and how I could hardly breathe. I wanted to tell him that the city was returning to dust and would soon fall apart. Serge was in a place where there were cool breezes and the earth was green and fresh. He was breathing sweet air. I wondered if he would recognise me now. I stared at my face and the longer I stared the more distant I grew, like the photographs my mother kept of me as a child. I knew they were me and yet somehow they made no sense. I had disappeared.

When I went for my walk I waved at Peggy and Rachel through their window. Rachel was settling an old lady down under a dryer and Peggy was sticking plastic roses in her pink bouffant.

The sun shimmered on the pavement and the air was hot and hazy; the world outside my door was nothing but a mirage. An old woman crossed the street and asked me for some change. She held out her dirty hand and I gave her a few francs before she shuffled away.