Life Times (73 page)

She is the one: – There. There he is.

Of course, when you find him you see there is no one like him, no bewilderment. They are all laughing in the conventions of greeting but his eyes have their concentrated attention for her. It is his greeting of the intervals between street lights, and of the kitchen. This weekend which ends weekends seems also to be the first of winter; it's suddenly cold, wind bellies and whips at that tent where he must have slept, remote, between weekends. It's the weather for hot food, shelter. At the restaurant he chooses curry and rice for this last meal. He sprinkles grated coconut and she catches his eye and he smiles for her as he adds dollops of chutney. The smile is that of a greedy boy caught out and is also as if it were a hand squeezed under the table. No wine – the father has to drive, and young men oughtn't to be encouraged to drink, enough of that in the army – but there is ice cream with canned peaches, coffee served, and peppermints with the compliments of the management.

It was too warm in the restaurant. Outside, high-altitude winds carry the breath of what must be early snow on the mountains far away, unseen, as this drive in return to the camp carries the breath of war, far away, unseen, where all the replicas in khaki are going to be shipped. No heating in the family car of those days, the soldier has only his thin, well-pressed khaki and the daughter, of course, like all young girls has taken no precaution against a change in the weather, she is wearing the skimpy flounced cotton dress (secretly chosen although he, being older, and a disciple of the sea's mysteries, probably won't even notice) that she was wearing the first time they walked to the cinema. The mother, concealing – she believes – irritation at the fecklessness of the young, next thing she'll have bronchitis and miss school – fortunately keeps a rug handy and insists that the passengers in the back seat put it over their knees.

It was easy to chat in the preoccupations of food along with the budgerigar chitter of other patrons in the restaurant. In the car, headed back for that final place, the camp, the outing is over. The father feels an obligation: at least, he can tell something about the diamond mine, that's of interest, and soon they'll actually be passing again the site of operations though you can't see much from the road.

The rug is like the pelt of some dusty pet animal settled over them. The warmth of the meal inside them is bringing it to life; a life they share, one body. It's pleasant to put your hand beneath it; the hands, his right, her left, find one another.

He doesn't like to be interrupted, there's no need to make any response, even if you still hear him. The right hand and left hand become so tightly clasped that the pad of muscle at the base of each thumb is flattened against the bone and the interlaced fingers are jammed down between the joints. It isn't a clasp against imminent parting, it's got nothing to do with any future, it belongs in the urgent purity of this present.

The hands lay together, simply happened, on the skirt over her left thigh, because that is where she had slipped her hand beneath the woolly comfort of the rug. Now he slowly released, first fingers, then palms – at once awareness signals between them that the rug is their tender accomplice, it must not be seen to be stirred by something – he released himself from her and for one bereft moment she thought he had left her behind, his eight-year advantage prevailed against such fusion of palms as it had done, so gently (oh but why) when they were in the dark between trees, when they were in the kitchen.

The hand had not emerged from the rug. She followed as if her eyes were closed or she was in the dark, it went as if it were playing, looking for a place to tickle as children do to make one another wriggle and laugh, where her skirt ended at her knee, going under her knee without displacing the skirt and touching the tendons and the hollow there. She didn't want to laugh (what would her father make of such a response to his knowledgeable commentary) so she glided her hand to his and put it back with hers where it had been before.

The hand, his hand, pressed fingers into her thigh through the cotton flounce as if testing to see what was real about her; and stopped, and then out of the hesitation went down and, under the rug, up under the gauze of skirt, moved over her flesh. She did not look at him and he did not look at her.

At the taut lip of her pants he hesitated again, no hurry, all something she was learning, he was teaching, the anticipation in his fingertips, he stroked along one of the veins in there in the delicate membrane-like skin that is at the crevice between leg and body (like the skin that the sun on manoeuvres couldn't reach in the crook of his elbow) just before the hair begins. And then he went under the elastic edge and his hand was soft on soft hair, his fingers like eyes attentive to her.

She has no clear idea of where his hand is now, what she feels is that they are kissing, they are in each other's mouths although they cannot look to one another.

Are you asleep back there? – the mother is remarking her own boredom with the mine – he is eight years older, able to speak: Just listening. His finger explores deep down in the dark, the hidden entrance to some sort of cave with its slippery walls and smooth stalagmite; she's found, he's found her.

The car is passing the mine processing plant.

Those others, the parents, they have no way of knowing. It has happened, it is happening under the old woolly rug that was all they can provide for her. She is free; of them. Found; and they don't know where she is.

At the camp, the father shakes the soldier's hand longer than in the usual grip. The mother for a moment looks as if she might give him a peck on the cheek, Godspeed, but it is not her way to be familiar.

Aren't you going to say goodbye? She's not a child, good heavens, a mother shouldn't have to remind of manners.

He's standing outside one of the tents with his hands hanging open at his sides as the car is driven away and the attention is upon her until, with his furry narrowed sight, he'll cease to be able to make her out while she still can see him, see him until he is made one with all the others in khaki, replicated, crossing and crowding, in preparation to embark.

If he had been killed in that war they would have heard, through the grandmother's connections.

Is it still you; somewhere, old?

N
o one of any kind or shape or species can begin to imagine what it's like for me being swirled and twisted around all manner of filthy objects in a horrible current. I, who was used to, knew only, the calm processes of digestion as my milieu. How long will this chaos last (the digestion has its ordained programme) and where am I going? Helpless. All I can do is trace back along my length – it is considerable also in the measure of its time – how I began and lived and what has happened to me.

My beginning is ingestion – yes, sounds strange. But there it is. I might have been ingested on a scrap of lettuce or in a delicacy of raw minced meat known as, I believe, Beefsteak Tartare. Could have got in on a finger licked by my human host after he'd ignored he'd been caressing his dog or cat. Doesn't matter. Once I'd been ingested I knew what to do where I found myself, I gained consciousness; nature is a miracle in the know how it has provided, ready, in all its millions of varieties of eggs: I hatched from my minute containment that the human eye never could have detected on the lettuce, the raw meat, the finger, and began to grow myself. Segment by segment. Measuredly. That's how my species adapts and maintains itself, advances to feed along one of the most intricately designed passageways in the world. An organic one. Of course, that's connected with perhaps an even more intricate system, the whole business of veins and arteries – bloody; our species has nothing to do with that pulsing about all over in narrow tubes.

My place was warm and smooth-walled, rosy-dark, and down into its convolutions (around thirty coiled feet of it) came, sometimes more regularly than others, always ample, many different kinds of nourishment to feed on, silently, unknown and unobserved. An ideal existence! The many forms of life, in particular that of millions of the species of my host who go hungry in the cruel light and cold my darkness protected me from (with the nourishment comes not only what the host eats but intelligence of what he knows of his kind's being and environment) – they would envy one of my kind. No enemy, no predator after you, no rival. Just your own winding length, moving freely, resting sated. The nourishment that arrived so reliably – years and years in my case – was even already broken down for consumption, ready mashed, you might say, and mixed with sustaining liquids. Sometimes during my long habitation there would be a descent of some potent liquid that roused me pleasurably all my length – which, as I've remarked, had become considerable – so that I was lively, so to speak, right down to the last, most recently added segments of myself.

Come to think of it, there were a couple of attempts on my life before the present catastrophe. But they didn't succeed. No! I detected at once, infallibly, some substance
aggressive
towards me concealed in the nourishment coming down. Didn't touch that delivery. Let it slowly urge its way wherever it was going – in its usual pulsions, just as when I have had my fill; untouched! No thank you. I could wait until the next delivery came down: clean, I could tell. Whatever my host had in mind, then, I was my whole length aware, ahead of him. Yes! Oh and there was one occurrence that might or might not have had to do with whatever this aggression against my peaceful existence might mean. My home, my length, were suddenly irradiated with some weird seconds-long form of what I'd learnt second-hand from my host must have been light, as if some – Thing – was briefly enabled to look inside my host. All the wonderful secret storage that was my domain. But did those rays find me? See me? I didn't think so. All was undisturbed, for me, for a long time. I continued to grow myself, perfectly measured segment by segment. Didn't brood upon the brief invasion of my privacy; I have a calm nature, like all my kind. Perhaps I should have thought more about the incident's implication: that thereafter my host
knew I was there
; the act of ingestion conveys nothing about what's gone down with the scrap of lettuce or the meat: he wouldn't have been aware of my residency until then. But suspected something? How, I'd like to know; I was so discreet.

The gouts of that agreeable strong liquid began to reach me more frequently. No objection on my part! The stuff just made me more active for a while, I had grown to take up a lot of space in my domain, and I have to confess that I would find myself inclined to ripple and knock about a bit. Harmlessly, of course. We don't have voices so I couldn't sing. Then there would follow a really torpid interval of which I'd never remember much when it was over . . .

A contented, shared life; I knew that my host had always taken what he needed from the nourishment that came on down to me. A just and fair coexistence, I still maintain. And why should I have troubled myself with where the residue was bound for, when both of us had been satisfied?

 

O how I have come to know now! How I have come to know!

For what has just happened to me – I can only relive again, again, in all horror, as if it keeps recurring all along me. First there was that period, quite short, when no nourishment or liquid came down at all. My host must have been abstaining.

Then—

The assault of a terrible flood, bitter burning, whipping and pursuing all down and around into a pitch-black narrow passage filled with stinking filth. I've become part of what is pushing its path there –
that
was where the nourishment was bound for all the years, after the host and I had done with it, a suffocating putrefaction and unbearable effusions.

Jonah was spewed by the whale.

But I – the term for it, I believe – was shat out.

From that cess I've been ejected into what was only a more spacious one, round, hard-surfaced, my segments have never touched against anything like it, in my moist-padded soft home space, and I am tossed along with more and many, many kinds of rottenness, objects, sections of which I sense from my own completeness must be dismembered from organic wholes that one such as myself, who has never before known the outside, only the insides of existence, cannot name. Battered through this conduit by these forms, all ghastly, lifeless, I think I must somehow die among them – I have the knowledge how to grow but not how to die if, as it seems, that is necessary. And now! Now! The whole putrid torrent had somewhere it was bound for – it discharges (there is a moment's blinding that must be light) and disperses into a volume of liquid inconceivable in terms of the trickles and even gouts that had fed me. Unfathomable: I am swept up in something heady, frothy, exhilarating; down with something that flows me. And I am clean, clean the whole length of me! Ah to be cleansed of that filth I had never suspected was what the nourishment I shared with my host became when we'd taken our fill of it. Blessed ignorance, all those years I was safe inside . . .