The collected stories (13 page)

'It was that shirt,' he said. 'Ameena's shirt. She did something to it.'

I said, 'You're lying. Jika burned that shirt - remember?'

'She touched me,' he said. 'Doc, maybe it's not a curse - I'm not superstitious anyway. Maybe she gave me syph.'

'Let's hope so.'

'What do you mean by that!'

'I mean, there's a cure for syphilis.'

'Suppose it's not that?'

'We're in Africa,' I said.

This terrified him, as I knew it would.

He said, 'Look at my back and tell me if it looks as bad as it feels.'

He crouched under the lamp. His back was grotesquely inflamed.

WORLD S END

The eruptions had become like nipples, much bigger and with a bruised discoloration. I pressed one. He cried out. Watery liquid leaked from a pustule.

'That hurt!' he said.

'Wait.' I saw more infection inside the burst boil - a white clotted mass. I told him to grit his teeth. Tm going to squeeze this one.'

I pressed it between my thumbs and as I did a small white knob protruded. It was not pus - not liquid. I kept on pressing and Jerry yelled with shrill ferocity until I was done. Then I showed him what I had squeezed from his back; it was on the tip of my tweezers

- a live maggot. 'It's a worm!' 'A larva.'

'You know about these things. You've seen this before, haven't you?'

I told him the truth. I had never seen one like it before in my life. It was not in any textbook I had ever seen. And I told him more: there were, I said, perhaps two hundred of them, just like the one wriggling on my tweezers, in those boils on his body.

Jerry began to cry.

That night I heard him writhing in his bed, and groaning, and if I had not known better I would have thought Ameena was with him. He turned and jerked and thumped like a lover maddened by desire; and he whimpered, too, seeming to savor the kind of pain that is indistinguishable from sexual pleasure. But it was no more passion than the movement of those maggots in his flesh. In the morning, gray with sleeplessness, he said he felt like a corpse. Truly, he looked as if he was being eaten alive.

An illness you read about is never as bad as the real thing. Boy Scouts are told to suck the poison out of snakebites. But a snakebite

- swollen and black and running like a leper's sore - is so horrible I can't imagine anyone capable of staring at it, much less putting his mouth on it. It was that way with Jerry's boils. All the textbooks on earth could not have prepared me for their ugliness, and what made them even more repellent was the fact that his face and hands were free of them. He was infected from his neck to his waist, and down his arms; his face was haggard, and in marked contrast to his sores.

WHITE LIES

I said, 'We'll have to get you to a doctor.'

'A witch doctor.'

'You're serious!'

He gasped and said, 'I'm dying, Doc. You have to help me.'

'We can borrow Sir Godfrey's car. We could be in Blantyre by midnight.'

Jerry said, 'I can't last until midnight.'

'Take it easy,' I said. 'I have to go over to the school. I'll say you're still sick. I don't have any classes this afternoon, so when I get back I'll see if I can do anything for you.'

'There are witch doctors around here,' he said. 'You can find one - they know what to do. It's a curse.'

I watched his expression change as I said, 'Maybe it's the curse of the white worm.' He deserved to suffer, after what he had done, but his face was so twisted in fear, I added, 'There's only one thing to do. Get those maggots out. It might work.'

'Why did I come to this fucking place!'

But he shut his eyes and was silent: he knew why he had left home.

When I returned from the school ('And how is our ailing friend?' Sir Godfrey had asked at morning assembly), the house seemed empty. I had a moment of panic, thinking that Jerry - unable to stand the pain - had taken an overdose. I ran into the bedroom. He lay asleep on his side, but woke when I shook him.

'Where's Jika?' I said.

'I gave him the week off,' said Jerry. 'I didn't want him to see me. What are you doing?'

I had set out a spirit lamp and my surgical tools: tweezers, a scalpel, cotton, alcohol, bandages. He grew afraid when I shut the door and shone the lamp on him.

'I don't want you to do it,' he said. 'You don't know anything about this. You said you'd never seen this thing before.'

I said, 'Do you want to die?'

He sobbed and lay flat on the bed. I bent over him to begin. The maggots had grown larger, some had broken the skin, and their ugly heads stuck out like beads. I lanced the worst boil, between his shoulder blades. Jerry cried out and arched his back, but I kept digging and prodding, and I found that heat made it simpler. If I held my cigarette lighter near the wound the maggot wriggled, and by degrees, I eased it out. The danger lay in their

world's end

breaking: if I pulled too hard some would be left in the boil to decay, and that I said would kill him.

By the end of the afternoon I had removed only twenty or so, and Jerry had fainted from the pain. He woke at nightfall. He looked at the saucer beside the bed and saw the maggots jerking in it - they had worked themselves into a white knot - and he screamed. I had to hold him until he calmed down. And then I continued.

I kept at it until very late. And I must admit that it gave me a certain pleasure. It was not only that Jerry deserved to suffer for his deceit - and his suffering was that of a condemned man; but also what I told him had been true: this was a startling discovery for me, as an entomologist. I had never seen such creatures before.

It was after midnight when I stopped. My hand ached, my eyes hurt from the glare, and I was sick to my stomach. Jerry had gone to sleep. I switched off the light and left him to his nightmares.

He was slightly better by morning. He was still pale, and the opened boils were crusted with blood, but he had more life in him than I had seen for days. And yet he was brutally scarred. I think he knew this: he looked as if he had been whipped.

'You saved my life,' he said.

'Give it a few days,' I said.

He smiled. I knew what he was thinking. Like all liars - those people who behave like human flies on our towering credulity -he was preparing his explanation. But this would be a final reply: he was preparing his escape.

'I'm leaving,' he said. 'I've got some money - and there's a night bus-' He stopped speaking and looked at my desk. 'What's that?'

It was the dish of maggots, now as full as a rice pudding.

'Get rid of them!'

'I want to study them,' I said. 'I think I've earned the right to do that. But I'm off to morning assembly - what shall I tell Inky?'

'Tell him I might have this cold for a long time.'

He was gone when I got back to the house; his room had been emptied, and he'd left me his books and his tennis racket with a note. I made what explanations I could. I told the truth: I had no idea where he had gone. A week later, Petra went back to Rhodesia, but she told me she would be back. As we chatted over the fence

WHITE LIES

I heard Jerry's voice: She's screaming for it. I said, 'We'll go horseback riding.'

'Super!'

The curse of the white worm: Jerry had believed me. But it was the curse of impatience - he had been impatient to get rid of Ameena, impatient for Petra, impatient to put on a shirt that had not been ironed. What a pity it was that he was not around when the maggots hatched, to see them become flies I had never seen. He might have admired the way I expertly pickled some and sealed others in plastic and mounted twenty of them on a tray.

And what flies they were! It was a species that was not in any book, and yet the surprising thing was that in spite of their differently shaped wings (like a Muslim woman's cloak) and the shape of their bodies (a slight pinch above the thorax, giving them rather attractive waists), their life cycle was the same as many others of their kind: they laid their eggs on laundry and these larvae hatched at body heat and burrowed into the skin to mature. Of course, laundry was always ironed - even drip-dry shirts - to kill them. Everyone who knew Africa knew that.

Clapham Junction

'The satisfaction of working snails out of shells,' said Cox, 'is the satisfaction of successfully picking one's nose.' He had been hunched over his plate, screwing the gray meat out of the glistening yellow-black shell. Now he looked up and said, 'Don't you think so?'

Mrs Etterick looked at him sideways. She said, 'I'm glad Gina is upstairs.'

But her expression told him that he had scored. Encouraged, he said, 'A horrible, private sort of relief. Like finding exactly what you need at Woolworth's. A soap dish. Those plastic discs you put under chair legs so they won't dent the carpet.'

'Now you've gone too far,' said Mrs Etterick.

Rudge said, 'And how is dear Gina? Is she any better?'

'She seems happy. In that sense she is better,' said Mrs Etterick. 'But hers is not the sort of affliction that can be cured in a place like Sunbury. She is so very backward in some ways. I say "affliction" -but that doesn't describe it. She is like a different racial type altogether, like someone from a primitive tribe. Terribly sweet, but terribly uncivilized. I sometimes think what a pity it was, when she was born that -'

Mrs Etterick faced her snails and reproached herself with a shudder.

'There is a kind of light in her face,' Rudge said. 'I noticed it when she let me in tonight. She was standing there like a very serious head prefect/

'She is nearly thirty,' said Mrs Etterick. i still have to wash her taee and comb her hair. Head prefects, in my experience, can manage those things. 1

( <>\ had finished his snails. He was smiling at Rudge.

Rudge said, k I meant there was a gentleness about her, something distinctly proper.'

'She broke a vase this afternoon. She kept asking me where she should put it. I could hardly hear her. She gets \er\ exasperated, awfully flustered. 1 came down the stairs. When she saw me she

CLAPHAM JUNCTION

started to juggle it. They don't have the same joints in their fingers that we do. Then it went crash/ Mrs Etterick dropped a snail shell with her tongs, as if intending to give drama to what Gina had done. She said, 'I think she did it on purpose.'

'Perhaps a plea for love,' Rudge said.

'Rubbish,' said Mrs Etterick. 'That vase cost less than a pound.'

Cox began to laugh. He was not a man given to expression, but the laugh accomplished his purpose; it complimented Mrs Etterick and it mocked Rudge. But it also slewed in his throat, and it was loud with greed.

Rudge said, Tve always wanted a daughter. Particularly at a time of year like this. Christmas. It seems part of the season.'

'You sound like her,' said Mrs Etterick, rising, collecting the plates. Rudge rose to help her, but she waved him aside, saying that she could manage.

Cox rocked his chair back and yawned. Then he said, 'Those snails were marvelous.'

'It's a sort of kit,' said Mrs Etterick. 'You get snail mince and empty shells in a box. You stuff the shells and heat them through. It's really very simple.'

She returned with a casserole dish on which spills of juice had been baked black on the rim. 'Cassoulet,' she said. 'I put it in the oven this morning. I had to spend the day shopping.'

'When I didn't see you in your office,' said Cox, 'I thought you were home, cooking. Now I don't feel so guilty.'

'I couldn't face the party.'

'It was all secretaries,' Rudge said.

'So you noticed,' Cox replied.

'I noticed you,' said Rudge.

Cox turned to Mrs Etterick. 'Are you going away for Christmas?'

'My plans are still pretty fluid,' she said. 'Gina's been on at me to make a week of it. That's a fairly grim prospect.'

Cox said, 'So you might be alone?'

'I'm not sure.'

The two men ate in silence. Upstairs, the radio was loud.

Mrs Etterick said, 'Gina's transistor. I decided to give her her present early. She will leave the door open.'

Cox said, 'I hate Christmas.'

Mrs Etterick filled Rudge's glass with claret and said, 'You'll be spending Christmas here in London, then?'

WORLD S END

'I have an open invitation in Scotland,' Rudge said.

'Snow in the Highlands!' said Cox.

'Rain, more likely. The Lowlands - Peebles,' said Rudge. 'It's my mother.'

'Will you go?' asked Mrs Etterick.

Rudge stared, holding his knife and fork, and with hunger on his face he seemed on the point of cutting a slice from Mrs Etterick's white forearm and stuffing it into his mouth. He lowered the implements and in a subdued voice said, 'That depends.'

'Such a lovely house you have, Diana. I hadn't realized you'd such a passion for oriental art. It's all frightfully dazzling.' Cox had finished eating and had lit a cigarette. 'Is this an ashtray, or a funerary urn?'

'Both,' said Mrs Etterick. 'Yes, we were in Thailand. That's where I lost my husband. He was at the university.'

'An academic in the family,' said Cox. 'Forgive me - I wasn't mocking.'

'He was the bursar.'

'Was it one of these tropical diseases?' asked Rudge.

'Yes,' said Mrs Etterick. 'She was about twenty, one of these heartless Chinese girls that are determined to leave Thailand. I can't tell you how beautiful she was. She set about him like an infection. They're in Australia now. I imagine she's quite bored with Richard these days. I got the Buddhas, the bronzes, the porcelain. You could pick it up for next to nothing then. The looters, you know. It was all looters.'

Rudge said, 'I was thinking of staying in town over Christmas. Perhaps taking in a show or a concert. Last year, I saw Verdi's Otello. Placido Domingo. Overwhelming. I've always wanted to attend the carol service at Saint Paul's. Something traditional.'

'Last year,' Cox said, 'Boxing Day, I went up to the Odeon in Holloway and saw a double bill. The Godfather - both parts. Best afternoon I'd spent in ages. Place was full of yobs.'