By Light Alone (36 page)

Adel Bary was only the second man she had been with.

But it was the aftermath of this experience that was most instructive. So, Mam Anna sent four girls, and a blade, and they grabbed Adel Bary behind the nettlefield. All the rest they girls come to watch. Mosa and Atene held him down, and Petal grabbed hair and hacked shreds off with her knife. How Adel Bary wailed! He was, Mam Anna said, like any toddler. But his wails lost force soon enough, he was sobbing more than anything, and his whole body shook with feverish little sobs. Petal had the biggest knife, and she cut at his hair, and cut, and left him with nothing but a few tufts, and a scratched and bloody scalp.

After that Adel Bary went to beg hard food from Abda, to tide him over till his hair grew again. And Abda called Mam Anna to come tell him what occurred, so Mam Anna went up, with a hipsway in her step that the girls could read for confidence. She was there half an hour, and at the end of it Abda himself had been persuaded that justice had to be done. The girls gossiped about what lewd thing or things she had done for Abda; or whether the power of her rhetoric had been enough. Then Abda had two of his gunmen grab the boys, to contribute his display of public justice to proceedings. He liked to do this, every now and then, just to remind people who was in charge. First Oma, although he was let off lightly. Lev, one of Abda’s right-hand men, cut the soles of his feet with a knife. But Adel Bary was punished properly: bound with cord so that his elbows touched behind his back, the last of his hair was shaved clean. He wept piteously whilst this went on, and afterwards he was cut loose to wander the village. How freakish he looked, bald and teary-faced! But his former friends knew better than to associate with him. He tried begging for hard food with everyone. He must have understood this was long odds, longer than hope. But he tried it nevertheless. What else could he do? One strange thing was that he came to Issa first of all, weeping, not apologizing for what he had done to her, but trying to sell her an incoherent plan that she could seduce one of the gunmen in return for just enough hard food to keep him alive till his hair grew back. Issa felt no particular anger as far as Adel Bary was concerned, and neither was she aware of any internal callousness, or any of the satisfactions of revenge. But she felt a complete disconnection between him and her. The idea that she would work to keep him alive was not outrageous so much as it was baffling. At any rate, he gave up bothering her, after a while. By the end of the week he was so weak that he could hardly walk without staggering. He left the village anyway. ‘He should have walked away as soon as he was shaved,’ was Mam Anna’s opinion. But Issa knew why he hadn’t; because his mind was perfectly empty of
where he was going to go
. A bald man, absolutely poor, trekking the friendless road.

‘Don’t pity him, no,’ said Mam Anna. ‘Pity is a scarce resource. You hoard it, girl, keep it for your later.’

And not all the men were as bad as Adel Bary. Rageh, for instance, who didn’t lounge about with the other men, and didn’t join the huddle. The other men mostly talked, or else played cardgames with greasy plastic cards.— Creased and seamed items, these, despite the
UNCREASABLE
! boast-logo printed on the back of each. Rageh wasn’t part of that crowd. He preferred going off by himself, liked to spend time observing the world. Round to the north of the village, behind Abda’s compound, a hefty metal tether had been set in the rock of Beard Height. This was where the blimps were tied. They leaked a little, because everything in the world leaked a little and nothing was absolutely tight; but that meant that the fields here were woman-high with weed. Wild rhubarb, bolted, extruded-looking, white as picked-bones curling in amongst masses of dark green nettles. Rageh told Issa that, no question, this was where the best bugs were to be found. Since it was impossible to penetrate the thicket, Issa had to take this on trust. There were certainly many flies – too many for Issa’s comfort, really. The thicket, and the sewage tunnel that didn’t go anywhere half-set into the downslope of the hill, were the worst place for flies. Switzer had somehow obtained tomato seeds –
tomato the most beautiful food God ever put on the planet
,
red as strawberries but more luscious
,
the original fruit of sin of the Garden of Eden
she claimed, which led Issa to believe that she’d never actually
tasted
tomatoes. She had tried sowing them in at the open half-pipe of this sewer. But they had not prospered. Switzer had pulled the weeds clear to give the tomato seeds a chance, but the weeds had grown back too quickly and choked them. Or else the seeds had been duds. That was very possible too. Tomatoes remained an abstract and imaginary food.

She kissed Rageh. Oh he wanted to do sexual things, naturally enough; but she was clear that she didn’t, yet, and he was ruled by her. Nevertheless it was an interesting thing to kiss him: kissing mouth to mouth, for long long stretches of time, kissing until her lips went numb. They liked to go behind the shrine, down amongst the grass there, and lie together, innocent as Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve had ever been innocent.

One day some Spartacist wanderers stopped at the village in their ongoing travels. They soon gathered a crowd down by the roofless fac; mostly men, but some women too who wandered down to see what the fuss was about. Three Spartacists, each taking turns to speak, although one was a much more effective orator than her two fellows. ‘What strength is given to us!’ she cried aloud. ‘More than the rich – our strength is greater than theirs! We can go where we choose! Hunger cannot consume us, as it does the wealthy. We are stronger, and gifted, and pure! So why do we live as slaves?’ Issa’s heart beat faster at this, and little sparks of hope gleamed anew in her mind; but people around her muttered as if the answer were obvious, and Astra, whose two-year-old clung about her neck, walked off in disgust. But the Spartacist woman grew more and more passionate as she went on. ‘We are many, they are few,’ she said. ‘We are strong and they are weak. We can endure, where their life is pitifully contingent! Why do we not simply rid ourselves of them? Join with us, live with us and for us and for the greater cause! Become something bigger than yourself! Rise like lions after slumber! Comrades, the revolution
is
coming.’

Bolted nettles, growing behind her, swayed in the breeze, an intense green colour in the bright sunlight. Their shadows trembled and pulsed at her feet.

Then Abda’s men came down, waving their firearms and hooting at the Spartacists to fuck off. The three of them went away, blithely enough, singing some song in a foreign language about colours and flags – a kindergarten song, perhaps. That afternoon, when the sun was hottest, and Issa’s blood tingled with all the sugars in it, she retreated under Mam Anna’s canvas roof. Several of the women there were talking about the coming revolution; how likely it was, or how unlikely. The visit had stirred the soup, and no mistake. ‘What do you think, Anna?’ Issa asked. ‘When is the revolution coming?’ Mam Anna took the pipe from her mouth and said: ‘I remember Triunion.’ But none of the others knew what this meant, and pestered her to explain. ‘I mean,’ she said, eventually, looking weary, ‘that they tried their revolution not many years ago, in Triunion, which is a place over the Western Sea. These Spartacists, they hoped to kick all the rich and bald out of that place, and they spoke big and grandly about going on from there to seize all the tropics. From Cancer to Capricorn was they slogan. But did – not.’

‘What happened?’ ‘What happened?’

‘The poor had the bodies, and the voices, and the righteousness. But the rich had the guns. And guns count for more than righteousness, or voice, or body.’ She shut up, then, and when prevailed upon to say more, all she added was: ‘It broke this Spartacus movement, is what it did. Now they’s just a few wanderers and hermits, like those who spoke today, who don’t understand that it is over.’

The next day Issa went off with Rageh, right round to the far side of the Beard hill, in amongst the bushes of scrub, the two of them kissed. Rageh broke off repeatedly to beg her to touch his manhood, or plead whiningly to let him do it to her, and each time he did so made her laugh more than the time before.

After the punishment of Adel Bary, Abda took an interest in Issa again. One day Lev poked his big head in under Mam Anna’s canvas ceiling, massy bone sphere and boo-boo eyes, chin and upper lip velvet and shiny half-fuzz cranium. ‘Abda requests the pleasure,’ he said, in his low voice. Issa might almost have thought the ceiling thrummed with his voice, but it was only the hot wind. So she stepped out into the blinding heat of midday. The two of them made their way, walking slowly because it was so parchingly hot, up to the compound. Lev was a man who spoke little, as a rule, and since none of the women in the village knew what he did for sex he was assumed to be gay; although if he had sex with any of the men in the village,
they
didn’t talk about it. Perhaps he simply did without, although that seemed unlikely.

But having summoned her Abda had no use for her right away. It was too hot for him and her to be slamming their privates together. So she lolled about in the cool big empty rooms of his house, and did nothing for a long while but watch. She watched people come and go; and some of them stopped to pass words with her, or some of them put their faces in another direction rather than look at her. Abda’s two dogs came over, skinny as furred skeletons, to sniff at her. Their noses were shaped like flitter snouts. Their breath smelt of dust and darkness. Then they were bored with her and away they trotted, one behind the other like a slinky-bodied eight-leg beast.

After that Abda’s kids came hurtling through into the room, moving as a pack, racing fast despite the heat. They came to crowd about her. The youngest was two year old; the oldest – Nik – old enough to be a man in any other situation, but not in Abda’s house, obviously enough, because Abda was the man in this house. As for Nik: well, Issa could see by looking at him that his main pastime was trying to get a nasty fury properly on the boil inside himself. He leered at her, and then ran off and the kids ran off in a straggly line after him, pied-piper-ish. But ten minutes later he was back, standing over where she was sat, her back at the wall. He just stood there and glared.

‘How old are you, anyhow?’ Issa asked.

‘My papa has brung you here as a present for
me
,’ he replied. He pulled down his pants and brought out his thing, starkstiff with lust. He held it
at
her in his right hand. ‘This going to hurt you hard,’ he promised.

‘Yeah?’

‘You won’t forget this in no hurry,’ he said.

She might have been scared, for he was the Waali’s son, after all. But she didn’t feel it in her to be scared. So she said: ‘That little thing, I’ll hardly notice going in.’

The other kids laughed, and for a heartbeat Nik laughed too. But then he remembered he was supposed to be mean-at-heart and a killer, so he bit his laugh off and put his young manhood away and spoke all the bad words he could at her. And by speaking them, he worked himself up into something like a rage. So he taunted her with what Adel Bary had done; and she retorted by asking where was Adel Bary now? This got Nik into a bigger tantrum rage, and he started trying to slap and scratch her. She had to jump to her feet and hold him off. He was Abda’s son – not his oldest son, for others, older, were elsewhere about the world – but his son nevertheless, and he had the habit of eating hard food. But she was still taller and stronger than him; and he wasn’t used to being fought back against, so she soon enough got the better of him. She caught his hand and swung him about on the pivot of it. He went hard into the wall, and left a bugsplat of blood on the plaster. Then he sat on the floor for a little, little dribbles, tomato-red, seeping from his nose, and he cried a little.

Soon enough, he got up and ran away. The other kids did not follow him this time, but lolled about the room with Issa, or wandered off on their own. He came back, of course, this time with Lev, and bearing the accusing finger. But Lev laughed, and called Issa a fine little devilla. So Nik went off in a rage. Issa cared nothing for that. After a while her blood started tingling with hunger in the dimness of the room, so she went up to the roof – by the main stairway, like a houseguest, and no slave – and lay in the sun. There were some splotchy white clouds against the blue, like blots of chewing gum flattened upon a pavement. A year before, and Issa might have wondered why she thought of chewing gum, something she hadn’t seen since she didn’t
know
when. It was a hard food people bought and ate even though it gave no nutrition
at all
, the ultimate in conspicuous consumption.

When the sun drifted listlessly behind the western places and the stars came out like a bright pox, Issa went back inside the house. She could smell food being cooked, and it made her mouth gush. So she joined the scrum of all the folk in the house, the guardsmen and wives, the kids and hangers-on, all trying for a crumb, or a lick. A light bulb snapped out, its filament fusing. It was one of two, and when it went the illumination all fled to the other side of the room, which gave it, somehow, the feel of a space that was tilted. Abda spotted her in the crowd, and came shuffling over in his huge red velvet slippers, and his psilk gown. He put his big hairy hand about her neck, from the front. ‘You fight with my son?’ he boomed.

Issa, torn between begging for forgiveness as piteously as she could, and replying with boldface heart, chose the latter. ‘Your son? I took him for your daughter.’

There was the merest –
hup
– pause, when nothing happened, and the space allowed in the uprushing fear that he was going to be very angry at this, and was going to squeeze her throat until she choked to death. But then Abda started laughing a proper Jabbahutt laugh. He removed his meaty hand from her neck to pat her on the back. ‘Maybe I didn’t
altogether
waste the money I spent on you,’ he grumbled. ‘I heard he showed you his stabber, then?’