Bodily Harm (5 page)

A good cry will do you good, said the nurse. But you’re lucky, they say there’s none anywhere else, some of them are full of it, they cut it out and it just pops up somewhere else. Rennie thought of toasters.

Daniel brought her a pamphlet called
Mastectomy: Answers to Down-To-Earth Questions
. Down to earth. Who wrote these things? Nobody in her position would want to think very hard about
down
or
earth. Are there any restrictions on sexual activity?
she read. The pamphlet suggested that she ask her doctor. She considered doing this.

But she didn’t. Instead she asked him, How much of me did you cut off? Because she was in love with him and he hadn’t noticed, her tone of voice was not all it should have been. But he didn’t seem to mind.

About a quarter, he said gently.

You make it sound like a pie, said Rennie.

Daniel smiled, indulging her, waiting her out.

I guess I should be relieved, said Rennie. That you didn’t hack off the whole thing.

We don’t do that any more unless there’s massive involvement, said Daniel.

Massive involvement, said Rennie. It’s never been my thing.

He follows up, said the nurse. A lot of them, they just do their number and that’s that. He likes to know how things work out, in their life and all. He takes a personal interest. He says a lot of it has to do with their attitude, you know?

Jake brought champagne and pâté and kissed her on the mouth. He sat beside her bed and tried not to look at her wrapped chest and the tubes. He spread pâté on crackers, which he’d also brought, and fed them to her. He wanted to be thanked.

You’re a godsend, she said. The food here is unbelievable. Green Jello salad and a choice of peas or peas. She was happy to see him but she was distracted. She didn’t want Daniel to walk in, trailing interns, while Jake was still there.

Jake was restless. He was healthy and healthy people are embarrassed by sickness, she could remember that. She was convinced also that she smelled peculiar, that there was a faint odour of decay seeping through the binding: like an off cheese. She wanted him to go quickly and he wanted to go.

We’ll get back to normal, she told herself, though she could not remember any longer what
normal
had been like. She asked the nurse to adjust her bed so she could lie back.

That’s a fine young man, the nurse said. Jake was a fine young man. He was all in place, a good dancer who hardly ever bothered to dance.

Rennie climbs down the steps of the plane and the heat slips over her face like thick brown velvet. The terminal is a low shed with a single turret. It looks grey under the weak lights of the runway, but as Rennie walks toward it she sees that it’s really yellow. Over the doorway there’s a bronze plaque thanking the Canadian government for donating it. It’s odd to see the Canadian government being thanked for anything.

The immigration officer is wearing a dark-green uniform, like a soldier’s, and there are two actual soldiers leaning against the wall beside him, in crisp blue shirts with short sleeves. Rennie assumes they’re soldiers, since they have shoulder holsters with what look like real guns in them. They’re young, with skinny innocent bodies. One of them is flicking his swagger-stick against his pantleg, the other has a small radio which he’s holding against his ear.

Rennie realizes she’s still clutching the aspirin in her left hand. She wonders what to do with it; somehow she can’t just throw it away. She opens her purse to put it with her other aspirins, and the soldier with the swagger stick saunters towards her.

Rennie feels a chill sweep down her. She’s about to be singled out: perhaps he thinks the bottle she’s holding contains some kind of illegal drug.

“It’s aspirin,” she says, but all he wants is to sell her a ticket to the St. Antoine Police Benefit Dance, Semi-formal, Proceeds For Sports
Funds. So they’re only police, not soldiers. Rennie makes this out by reading the ticket, since she hasn’t understood a word he’s said.

“I don’t have the right kind of money,” she says.

“We take anything you got,” he says, grinning at her, and this time she understands him. She gives him two dollars, then adds a third; possibly it’s the price of admission. He thanks her and strolls back to the other one, and they laugh together. They haven’t bothered with anyone else in the line.

In front of Rennie there’s a tiny woman, not five feet tall. She’s wearing a fake-fur shortie coat and a black wool jockey cap tilted at a rakish angle. She turns around now and looks up at Rennie.

“That a bad man,” she says. “Don’t you have nothin’ to do with that one.” She holds out to Rennie a large plastic bag full of cheese puffs. From under the brim of her jockey cap her eyes peer up out of her dark wrinkled face, she must be at least seventy but it’s hard to tell. The eyes are bright, candid, sly, the eyes of a wary child.

“This my grandson,” she says. She opens the coat to reveal an orange T-shirt.
PRINCE OF PEACE
, it says in large red letters.

Rennie has never seen a religious maniac up close before. When she was at university an economics student was rumoured to have run through his dormitory one night, claiming to have given birth to the Virgin Mary, but that was put down to pre-exam tension.

Rennie smiles, as naturally as possible. If this woman thinks she’s Ste. Anne or whoever, it would be best not to upset her, not in the immigration line at any rate. Rennie accepts some cheese puffs.

“It my grandson, all right,” says the woman. She knows she’s been doubted.

Then it’s her turn, and Rennie hears her say to the immigration officer in a shrill, jocular voice, “You give me trouble, my grandson blaze your arse good for you.” This seems to have the desired effect, for the man stamps her passport immediately and she goes through.

When he comes to Rennie he feels he has to be extra severe. He flips through her passport, frowning over the visas. He wears thick bifocals, and he pushes them further down on his nose and holds the passport away from him, as if it smells funny.

“Renata Wilford? That you?”

“Yes,” Rennie says.

“It don’t look like you.”

“It’s a bad picture,” Rennie says. She knows she’s lost weight.

“Let her in, man,” one of the policemen calls, but the immigration clerk ignores him. He scowls at her, then at the picture. “What the purpose of your visit?”

“Pardon?” Rennie says. She has to strain to understand the accent. She looks around for Dr. Minnow, but he’s nowhere in sight.

“What you doin’ here?” He glares at her, his eyes enlarged by the lenses.

“I’m a writer,” Rennie says. “A journalist. I write for magazines. I’m doing a travel piece.”

The man glances over at the two policemen. “What you goin’ to write about here?” he says.

Rennie smiles. “Oh, the usual,” she says. “You know, restaurants, sight-seeing, that sort of thing.”

The man snorts. “Sight-seein’,” he says. “No pretty lights here.” He stamps her passport and motions her through.

“Write it good,” he says to her as she goes past. Rennie thinks he’s teasing, as such a man at Heathrow or Toronto or New York would be. They would say, “Write it good, honey.” Or
love
, or
sweetheart
. They would grin. But when she turns to give the required smile he’s staring straight ahead, through the plateglass window to the tarmac, where the plane has already turned in the darkness and is taxiing again for take-off between the rows of white and blue lights.

Rennie changes some money, then waits while a tired uniformed woman pokes through her purse and her bags. Rennie says she has
nothing to declare. The woman scrawls a chalk mark on each of her bags, and Rennie walks through a doorway into the main room. The first thing she sees is a large sign that says,
THE BIONIC COCK: IT GIVES YOU SPURS
. There’s a picture of a rooster; it turns out to be an advertisement for rum.

There’s a crowd outside the door, taxi drivers, and Rennie goes with the first one who touches her arm. Ordinarily she would talk with him, find things out: beaches, restaurants, shops. But it’s too hot. She sinks into the marshmallow-soft upholstery of the car, some derelict from the fifties, while the driver goes far too fast through the winding narrow streets, honking at every bend. The car is on the wrong side of the road, and it takes Rennie a moment to remember that this is in fact the British side.

They wind up a hillside, past houses she can make out only dimly. The headlights shine on massive bushes overhanging the road, with flamboyant red and pink flowers dangling from them like Kleenex flowers at a high-school dance. Then they’re in the lighted part of town. There are crowds of people on the streetcorners and in front of the shops but they aren’t walking, they’re just standing or sitting on steps or chairs, as if they’re inside a room. Music flows through the open doorways.

Some of the men wear knitted wool caps, like tea cosies, and Rennie wonders how they can stand it in the heat. Their heads turn as the taxi goes by, and some wave and shout, at the driver rather than Rennie. She’s beginning to feel very white. Their blacks aren’t the same as our blacks, she reminds herself; then sees that what she means by
our blacks
are the hostile ones in the States, whereas
our blacks
ought to mean this kind. They seem friendly enough.

Nevertheless Rennie finds their aimlessness disturbing, as she would at home. It’s too much like teenagers in shopping plazas, it’s too much like a mob. She discovers that she’s truly no longer
at
home
. She is away, she is
out
, which is what she wanted. The difference between this and home isn’t so much that she knows nobody as that nobody knows her. In a way she’s invisible. In a way she’s safe.

When Jake moved out, naturally there was a vacuum. Something had to come in to fill it. Maybe the man with the rope hadn’t so much broken into her apartment as been sucked in, by the force of gravity. Which was one way of looking at it, thought Rennie.

Once she would have made this man into a good story; she would have told it at lunch, with the strawberry flan. She wasn’t sure what stopped her, from telling anyone at all. Perhaps it was that the story had no end, it was open-ended; or perhaps it was too impersonal, she had no picture of the man’s face. When she was outside, walking along the street, she looked at the men who passed her in a new way: it could be any one of them, it could be anyone. Also she felt implicated, even though she had done nothing and nothing had been done to her. She had been seen, too intimately, her face blurred and distorted, damaged, owned in some way she couldn’t define. It wasn’t something she could talk about at lunch. Anyway, she didn’t want to become known as a man-hater, which was what happened when you told stories like that.

The first thing she did after the policemen had gone was to get the lock fixed. Then she had safety catches put on the windows. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched, even when she was in a room by herself, with the curtains closed. She had the sense that someone had been in her apartment while she was out, not disarranging anything, but just looking into her cupboards, her refrigerator, studying her. The rooms smelled different after she’d been out. She began to see herself from the
outside, as if she was a moving target in someone else’s binoculars. She could even hear the silent commentary: Now she’s opening the bean sprouts, now she’s cooking an omelette, now she’s eating it, now she’s washing off the plate. Now she’s sitting down in the livingroom, nothing much going on. Now she’s getting up, she’s going into the bedroom, she’s taking off her shoes, she’s turning out the light. Next comes the good part.

She began to have nightmares, she woke up sweating. Once she thought there was someone in the bed with her, she could feel an arm, a leg.

Rennie decided she was being silly and possibly neurotic as well. She didn’t want to turn into the sort of woman who was afraid of men. It’s your own fear of death, she told herself. That’s what any armchair shrink would tell you. You think you’re dying, even though you’ve been saved. You should be grateful, you should be serene and profound, but instead you’re projecting onto some pathetic weirdo who’s never going to bother you again. That scratching you heard at the window last night wasn’t coming from the outside at all.