Bodily Harm (42 page)

Rennie says she can. I suppose you’re telling me not to write about what happened to me, she says.

Requesting, he says. Of course we believe in freedom of the press. But for them it’s a matter of saving face.

For you too, thinks Rennie. Have you any idea of what’s going on in here? she says.

The Council of Churches made an inspection and was satisfied with the conditions, he says, too quickly. In any case we can’t interfere in internal matters.

I guess you’re right, says Rennie. She wants her passport back, she wants to get out. Anyway it’s not my thing, she says. It’s not the sort of piece I usually do. I usually just do travel and fashion. Lifestyles.

He’s relieved: she understands, she’s a woman of understanding after all.

Of course we don’t make value judgements, he says, we just allocate aid for peaceful development, but
entre nous
we wouldn’t want another Grenada on our hands.

Rennie looks out the window. There’s a plane, coming down at a sharp angle across the oblong of sky, it flashes, silver, up there in the viciously blue air. It must be the afternoon flight from Barbados, the one she came in on, only now it’s on time. The situation is normalizing, all over the place, it’s getting more and more normal all the time.

Actually I’d like to forget the whole thing as soon as possible, she says. It’s not the sort of thing you want to dwell on.

Of course not, he says. He stands up, she stands up, they shake hands.

When they’re finished, when Lora is no longer moving, they push open the grated door and heave her in. Rennie backs out of the way, into the dry corner. Lora hits the floor and lies there, limp, like a bundle of clothing, face down, her arms and legs sprawled out. Her hair’s all over, her skirt’s up, her underpants ripped and filthy, bruises already appearing on the backs of her legs, the heavy flesh of her thighs, massive involvement, or maybe they were there already, maybe they were always there. There’s a smell of shit, it’s on the skirt too, that’s what you do.

The older one throws something over her, through the bars, from a red plastic bucket.

“She dirt herself,” he says, possibly to Rennie, possibly to no one. “That clean her off.”

They both laugh. Rennie’s afraid it isn’t water.

They go away, doors close after them. Lora lies on the floor, unmoving, and Rennie thinks
What if she’s dead?
They won’t be back
for hours, maybe not until the next morning, she’ll be alone here all night with a dead person. There should be a doctor. She picks her way carefully around the outline of Lora, the puddle on the floor, blood mixing with the water, it was only water after all. She looks out through the bars, down the corridor, as far as she can see in either direction. No one’s there, the corridor is empty and silent, the lightbulbs hang along the ceiling with loops of wire in between, at regular intervals. One of them is burnt out. I should tell someone, thinks Rennie.

Rennie is in the kitchen, making herself a peanut butter sandwich. There’s a radio on somewhere, a soft blur of noise, or maybe it’s the television, a blue-grey oblong of mist in the livingroom where her grandmother sits propped in front of it, seeing visions. Rennie cuts the sandwich in four and puts it on a plate, she likes small neat ceremonies like this, she pours herself a glass of milk.

Her grandmother comes through the doorway between the diningroom and the kitchen. She’s wearing a black dress printed with white flowers.

I can’t find my hands, she says. She holds out her arms to Rennie, helplessly, her hands hanging loose at the ends of them.

Rennie cannot bear to be touched by those groping hands, which seem to her like the hands of a blind person, a half-wit, a leper. She puts her own hands behind her and backs away, into the corner and along the wall, maybe she can make it to the kitchen door and go out into the garden.

Where is everybody? says her grandmother. She starts to cry, screwing up her eyes like a child, scant tears on the dry skin of her face.

Rennie’s mother comes in through the kitchen door, carrying a brown paper bag full of groceries. She has on one of her shopping dresses, navy blue.

What’s going on? she says to Rennie.

I can’t find my hands, says her grandmother.

Rennie’s mother looks with patience and disgust at Rennie, at her grandmother, at the kitchen and the peanut butter sandwich and the groceries she’s carrying. She sets the bag down carefully on the table. Don’t you know what to do by now? she says to Rennie. Here they are. Right where you put them. She takes hold of the grandmother’s dangling hands, clasping them in her own.

The sunlight is coming in through the little window, it falls on the floor in squares, in one of the squares is Lora’s left hand, the dirty blunt fingers with their bitten cuticles curled loosely, untouched, they did nothing to her hands, shining and almost translucent in the heavy light. The rest of the body is in darkness, in water, the hand is in the air. Rennie kneels on the wet floor and touches the hand, which feels cold. After a moment she takes hold of it, with both of her hands. She can’t tell from holding this hand whether or not Lora is breathing, whether or not her heart is still moving. How can she bring her back to life?

Very carefully, this is important, she turns Lora over, her body is limp and thick, a dead weight. Dead end. She hauls Lora over to the dryest corner of the room and sits with her, pulling Lora’s head and shoulders onto her lap. She moves the sticky hair away from the face, which isn’t a face any more, it’s a bruise, blood is still oozing from the cuts, there’s one on the forehead and another across the cheek, the mouth looks like a piece of fruit that’s been run over by a
car, pulp, Rennie wants to throw up, it’s no one she recognizes, she has no connection with this, there’s nothing she can do, it’s the face of a stranger, someone without a name, the word
Lora
has come unhooked and is hovering in the air, apart from this ruin, mess, there’s nothing she can even wipe this face off with, all the cloth in this room is filthy, septic, except her hands, she could lick this face, clean it off with her tongue, that would be the best, that’s what animals did, that’s what you were supposed to do when you cut your finger, put it in your mouth, clean germs her grandmother said, if you don’t have water, she can’t do it, it will have to do, it’s the face of Lora after all, there’s no such thing as a faceless stranger, every face is someone’s, it has a name.

She’s holding Lora’s left hand, between both of her own, perfectly still, nothing is moving, and yet she knows she is pulling on the hand, as hard as she can, there’s an invisible hole in the air, Lora is on the other side of it and she has to pull her through, she’s gritting her teeth with the effort, she can hear herself, a moaning, it must be her own voice, this is a gift, this is the hardest thing she’s ever done.

She holds the hand, perfectly still, with all her strength. Surely, if she can only try hard enough, something will move and live again, something will get born.

“Lora,” she says. The name descends and enters the body, there’s something, a movement; isn’t there?

“Oh God,” says Lora.

Or was that real? She’s afraid to put her head down, to the heart, she’s afraid she will not be able to hear.

Then the plane will take off. It will be a 707. Rennie will sit halfway down, it will not be full, at this time of year the traffic is north to
south. She will be heading into winter. In seven hours she’ll be at the airport, the terminal, the end of the line, where you get off. Also where you can get on, to go somewhere else.

When she’s finally there, snow will be on the ground, she’ll take a taxi, past the stunted leafless trees, the slabs of concrete, the shoebox houses, they’ll stop and she’ll give the driver the correct amount of money and she’ll walk up the stairs and through her own front door, into the unknown. She doesn’t know who will be waiting for her, who will be there, in any sense of the word that means anything. Perhaps nobody, and that will not be fine but it will be all right. Wherever else she’s going it will not be quietly under.

She’s drinking a ginger ale and thumbing through the in-flight magazine, which is called
Leisure
. On the front, up at the top, there’s a picture of the sun, orange, with a smiling face, plump cheeks and a wink. Inside there are beaches, the sea, blue-green and incredible, bodies white and black, pink-brown, light brown, yellow-brown, some serving, others being served, serviced. A blonde in a low-riding tie-dye sarong, the splotches reddish. She can feel the shape of a hand in hers, both of hers, there but not there, like the afterglow of a match that’s gone out. It will always be there now.

The ginger ale tastes the same as it used to, the ice cubes are the same, frozen with holes in them. She notes these details the way she has always noted them. What she sees has not altered; only the way she sees it. It’s all exactly the same. Nothing is the same. She feels as if she’s returning after a space trip, a trip into the future; it’s her that’s been changed but it will seem as if everyone else has, there’s been a warp. They’ve been living in a different time.

There’s a man sitting beside her. Although there’s an empty seat between them he moves over, he says he wants to see out the window, one last glimpse as he puts it. He asks if she minds and she says she doesn’t. He’s standard, a professional of some sort, he’s wearing a suit and drinking a Scotch and soda, he’s selling something or other.

He asks how long she was down for and she says three weeks. He says she doesn’t have much of a tan and she says she’s not all that fond of lying around in the sun. She asks what he does and he says he represents a computer company. She wonders if he really is who he says he is; she’ll wonder that about everybody now.

Vacation? he says.

She could pose as a tourist but she chooses not to. Working, she says. She has no intention of telling the truth, she knows when she will not be believed. In any case she is a subversive. She was not one once but now she is. A reporter. She will pick her time; then she will report. For the first time in her life, she can’t think of a title.