Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘You were at the meeting last night, weren’t you?’ I venture.

  Nora’s mouth opens like a trap door to receive a cold onion ring. ‘Folks round here are ignorant and mean.’ She chews methodically. ‘They’ll crap over anybody to keep themselves out of the dirt.’ The next onion ring isn’t large enough to necessitate the heavy artillery of her teeth. Nora swallows it whole and washes it down with beer. ‘It’ll come back on ‘em, though.’ She shoots me a look. ‘Sit down, why don’t ya? You ain’t here for a room so what do you want?’

  I slide into the booth. On the plate in front of me the remains of the steak have run aground in a black pond of stagnant blood.

  ‘Well you probably won’t believe it, but I was after a haircut.’ I haul the M&M menu from my pocket and smooth it out on the table.

  The sight of it provokes a snort from Nora. She grabs her beer and sucks noisily at the glass, then clears her throat and tweaks a small amount of escaped mucus from her nose.

  ‘Let me see that.’ She snatches the paper and laughs thickly. ‘Girlie, I haven’t cut hair for twenty years. Which is probably the last time they changed that menu.’ She tosses it back across the table. ‘Why, the green chilli burger has been special of the week for the last four.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ I shrug, feeling stupid. ‘I just saw the ad, then I happened to see the sign for Wildcat Canyon and . . .’

  ‘Something wrong with your life that you need a haircut?’

  ‘No, why? Should something be wrong?’

  Nora nudges some bread through the grease on her plate. ‘I cut hair for fifteen years an’ I’ll tell ya one thing I learned. Women only cut their hair in times of crisis. Hell, you ever see a woman used to have long hair who gets herself a short back and sides . . . you gotta know she’s in trouble.’

  ‘Do you really think that’s true?’

  ‘Sure it’s true.’ She sweeps the dirty plates aside. ‘It’s somethin’ a woman always has the power to do, even when she loses control over everything else. Cuttin’ hair is a cry for help.’ Nora’s eyes thin. ‘What is it? . . . Your man bin ignorin’ ya?’

  ‘I—’

  She waves her hand dismissively. ‘I don’t wanna know.’ She digs into the recess of her backside for the snappy bag of tobacco. ‘Want some?’ She pinches two fingers-full.

  I shake my head. ‘At the meeting you said you left out water for immigrants.’

  Nora nudges a filament of stray tobacco from her lip back into her mouth then rubs her front teeth. ‘There’s misery everywhere you look,’ she says eventually. ‘People dyin’, children sufferin’. You can shore up your country with trenches and barbed wire and walls and broken glass on roofs but it only ever leads to one thing and that’s more death an’ more misery. People need to eat and their families need to eat an’ if that makes me a bleeding-heart liberal, so shoot me. Yeah, I put out water, I give medical help when I can and the rest of the folks be damned.’ She spits the tobacco onto the plate. ‘You Australian?’

  ‘English.’

  A small estuary of juice runs down the side of Nora’s mouth. She blots it onto the polyester of her shoulder and leans forward across the table. ‘I found one once.’

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘A Mexcin, an Indian. From Honduras or Guatemala, hell them brown folk all look the same from down south. He was sitting under a tree – legs all hiked up, elbows restin’ on his knees.’ Nora lifts the cap off her head, punches its cavity before putting it back on again. ‘Jes’ sitting in a natural position, head back against the trunk, like he was takin’ a rest from the sun,’ she laughs mirthlessly,’ ‘cept out here in summer, there ain’t no rest from the sun.’

  ‘What happened? Did you bring him here?’

  ‘Didn’t seem to be no bones broken,’ she says matter-of-factly, ‘leastways not as far as I could tell. Didn’t seem to be nuthin’ wrong with him at all ‘cept he’d tried eating cactus and his mouth was all bloody from the spikes, that and some kind of animal, mice or rats mebbe, had started eatin’ away at his hands.’

  ‘Oh.’ I finally understand what she’s saying.

  Nora shakes her head. ‘Buried him right where he died, under that tree.’

  ‘So do you go out looking for people in trouble, or do they turn up here?’

  ‘They’re too scared to come here. Naa, I do shifts with my buddy Milt and some others. We find ‘em, water ‘em, let ‘em do a bit of work round the place and mostly they’re grateful for it, though I had one bunch turn up recently and flat demand I rustle ‘em up some eggs. Had a good mind to call the Border Patrol,’ her mouth turns down, ‘for all the use they’d be. Bunch of cock-suckin’ losers.’

  ‘They seem pretty efficient to me.’ It’s my turn to snort now. ‘They’ve had me up twice already for speeding.’

  Nora’s eyes narrow to nickel slots in her puffy face. ‘Border Patrol?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You sure of that?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Border Patrol ain’t authorized to ticket people.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Speeding’s a cop’s business.’

  She sees the look on my face and guffaws. ‘Girlie, there are more fun ways of gettin’ screwed round here than handin’ your money over to the Border Patrol.’

  Goddammit, Winfred, I think wearily, is nobody out here what they seem?

  ‘So what about that haircut of yours?’ Nora is still wiping tears of laughter from the corner of her eyes.

  I tell her I was only looking for a trim, mention split ends—

  ‘Turn around, I’ll do it for you,’ she says then chortles at my expression ‘I won’t snip your ears off, girl, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’

  It’s exactly what I’m afraid of, but it’s too late. Nora’s already fetching scissors from behind the bar and when she starts to rake over my scalp with a manky comb, I don’t query whether she oughtn’t to wet my hair first, I don’t demand a copy of Vogue to read, or check to see whether leave-in conditioner will be applied sparingly to my tips because, frankly, I’m thinking to hell with it – today just can’t get any more Kafka-esque.

  Nora combs and snips and combs and snips. And although I can smell the tobacco on her fingers, she’s surprisingly gentle. My sleepless night begins to manifest itself as an ache behind the eyes so I close them – the smell of the food and the noise of the scissors and the mustiness of the air all having a strangely soporific effect.

  ‘You asleep?’ Nora taps the scissors against the side of my head.

  I deny it but she merely chuckles. ‘Always had a light touch,’ she boasts.

  ‘Why did you give up then?’

  Nora tilts my head away from her. ‘Saw a TV programme once about an earthquake in Turkey. There were hardly any survivors but they found one, a woman, still alive, buried under a concrete slab. So they cut away this slab real careful, then they dug with their bare hands till they could see her, an’ there she was! Lyin’ flat on her side, an’ she was fine, jes’ fine, not a drop of blood on her – but still they couldn’t pull her out.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Cos she had this long black hair and her hair was trapped. There was this old man helpin’ with the rescue operations and he finds himself apologizin’ to her. “We can’t get you out, I’m sorry,” – like he’s gonna have to leave her there, so she gets freaked an’ asks, “Why can’t you get me out?” An’ he says, “Cos your hair is trapped.”

  ‘“Go ahead and cut my hair,” she says, but he says he can’t. “I can’t cut your beautiful hair,” he says, and starts crying like a baby . . .’

  Nora stands in front of me and squints at my face. ‘Anyways, you’re done and there’s no charge for it. Now there’s a haircuttin’ place in town right close to the Baptist Church – ain’t nothin’ special, but if you git home and don’t like what you see, you can go there and pay for a repair job.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell her, squinting into the
circus mirror reflection of the kettle and amazed and rather grateful not to have a mohawk. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  16

  Emmy wakes screaming in the middle of the night.

  ‘Shut up, Emmy,’ Jack is moaning as I reach her bedside. ‘Shut up, shut up.’

  ‘Shh, go back to sleep, Jack.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ he explodes burrowing under the pillow.

  I put a hand to Emmy’s forehead. She’s burning up and the sheets are soaked. Worried, I carry her writhing body to my room and hold her fast while I grapple with the child-proof cap of the Calpol. I force the spoon into her mouth mid-scream and the sticky pink lava oozes out, hopelessly gumming up her hair. Most of the next spoon trickles down her throat and she momentarily stops crying in order to choke.

  ‘What is it Emmy?’ I whisper. ‘Does it hurt anywhere? Is it your tummy? What is it?’

  But she just starts screaming again. On the FeverScan her temperature reads 104. I sit, holding her on the bed, trying to keep calm. Children always have high temperatures, they can shoot up and down within the space of minutes. It means nothing. It’s just a fever, flu . . . Dear God, why is she still screaming? Her arms flail out and she clutches her head like a mad thing.

  ‘Emmy, does your neck hurt?’ I say urgently. ‘Emmy.’ I snap on the light, watching to see if she flinches, then pull up her nightdress to look for a rash. The one that either does or doesn’t go when you press a glass to it. Oh, God, meningitis, whose symptoms are as well known to a parent as the Lord’s prayer. This happened once before, when Jack was small. The doctor who came round had eyes rimmed black with tiredness. ‘If a child’s temperature reacts in any way to Calpol, it’s not meningitis,’ he’d said. ‘It’s the only way to tell.’

  I sit through the next hour, biting my lip, holding Emmy close, trying to think of ways to endure the screaming calmly, praying for her to cool down, praying for her to suddenly pass out in the muck sweat of a fever peaked, but as the minutes tick by she becomes increasingly fitful. I put my hand on her head for the hundredth time. She’s hot. Really hot. Each consecutive black square on the FeverScan lights up green and I try to quell my rising panic. If Calpol doesn’t bring the temperature down within the hour, you’re supposed to call the doctor. I look at Emmy and snap out of my daze. Right, I think. Call the doctor. Call the doctor.

  But I have no doctor.

  ‘What is it?’ Jack is standing sleepily in the doorway. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why doesn’t she stop screaming?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say shakily. ‘Look, stay with her, okay, make sure she doesn’t fall off the bed.’ I run downstairs and find the number for the medical centre in Ague, but it’s answered by only the most cursory of messages. The clinic is shut until nine a.m. No night service. It’s two a.m. I dial my GP’s number in London and page the night doctor, but the system won’t allow me to punch in an overseas calling code.

  ‘Mummy!’ Jack is shouting, near hysterical. ‘Mummy, come back. Mummy, please!’ I race upstairs, Duval’s warnings flooding back to me. What if she’s been bitten by that spider he was talking about, the brown recluse? What if, right now, her flesh is beginning to soften and turn necrotic? What if she has that mouse disease, Hunter’s, apparently so prevalent round here? I remember the feel of the dead mouse under my foot our first night. How many times have I let the children scramble through the cabins, breathing in the deadly ammonia of stale droppings? Dear God, what if she’s been bitten by a snake and no one noticed? Except I’m being ridiculous. I check their bedroom and mine every night. Of course she hasn’t been bitten by a snake and I curse Duval for filling my head with so much paranoid terror I can barely think straight. In the bedroom Jack is staring down at Emmy on the bed. Her screams are shorter now, high-pitched, urgent. I strip off her nightdress. She’s boiling.

  ‘Go get a wet towel, Jack,’ I order. He stands stupefied. ‘It’s okay.’ I steady my voice. ‘Use cold water, but do it now.’

  I check her body, but who can tell if there’s a rash amongst Emmy’s plethora of scratches, her eczema scabs, her patches of dry skin and bruises? Who could say if she had a rash, had been bitten by a spider or simply neglected by a crappy mother? Jack races back with the towel and I sponge her down then wrap her loosely in the sheet.

  ‘Turn off the sun,’ she moans.

  ‘It’s just the light, baby.’

  ‘Turn off the sun, the wolf is coming,’ she screams, and then, without warning, she convulses, her arms and legs spasm and her head jerks from side to side.

  ‘Emmy!’ I shout. ‘Emmy! EMMY!’ I want to shake her, to restrain her, do something, anything to stop it, but I don’t dare. Her eyes turn back into her head. She goes suddenly rigid then seems to relax in my arms, her eyes closed.

  ‘Jack, get your shoes and a jumper.’

  ‘No, no.’ He stands white with fear, sobbing hysterically.

  ‘Go!’ I shout and he turns and runs. I throw on my own clothes and grab my bag. Benjamín will help us. Benjamín will know where to go.

  Benjamín doesn’t answer the door. I bang again, shout his name, but the cabin is silent, empty. Back in the truck Jack sits ramrod straight, holding Emmy in her blanket as though she is something putrid and dangerous which might explode at any given moment.

  ‘She’s going to die, isn’t she?’ he says dully.

  I will myself to think straight. Tucson. I’ll have to get her to Tucson. There’d be a hospital there, but where, in God’s name? Tucson is seventy miles away and who to ask in those deserted streets? It would be better to drive to Ague and raise help there. I sit, frozen with indecision, and then it comes to me, the thread of a memory. Ague. The town meeting. I close my eyes; see the woman with the turquoise belt buckle, hear her voice. Her two boys, problems with the bars, problems with drugs. Yes. That was it! Mexican pharmacists were no better than drug pushers. Everything was available over the counter. Pharmacies across the border were open twenty-four hours a day – and where there were pharmacies, there would be doctors.

  The Arizona sky is a navy blue, speckled with diamanté. I drive carefully, stunned by how unprepared I’d been for something to go this wrong. Every few seconds I look over at Emmy. Her head is sunk onto Jack’s shoulder, her eyes still shut. At least she’s conscious, making little mewling noises at regular intervals that tear my heart in two. Oh, God, how fragile life is out here . . . Oh, God, let it not be meningitis. Let it not be a brain seizure.

  Nogales, Arizona, is deserted. The motorway flies over the top of the town, but I am the only moving thing on it. Below, billboards for the Holiday Inn Express and Best Western Hotels flash by. Doggedly, I follow the big green signs for Mexico, past a Burger King, a McDonald’s, round a concrete-lined mini roundabout. I have no idea what to expect in the way of a border, but as I draw up to it I see it’s a huge official thing. Five lines of car checkpoints and customs buildings on either side. To the left traffic is creeping into the US from Mexico. I veer right. Two uniformed officials stand at one of the checkpoints talking to a truck driver, and it’s only now, right this second that it occurs to me that I do not have my passport and that I’m bound to need it, but before I have a chance to work out what to say, the car in front of me moves ahead through the barrier and I’m already winding down my window.

  ‘Nationality?’ the customs official asks; he casts no more than a routine eye over the children.

  I gulp, say American, and I’m through.

  Nogales, Mexico. Where am I? Where to go? The road takes me alongside a monstrous green wall – the border actual, I guess, made of corrugated iron, rusted and patched in innumerable places and crowned with two foot of wire netting angled inwards and held in place by metal rods, making it impossible to clamber over. One poster depicting white crosses and unmarked graves reads ‘Don’t go down a road when you can’t come back’. Another with a skull and crossbones instructs ‘Beware the “Polleros”. ¡No les pagues con tu vida!’ written in Hammer Horror lettering with
blood dripping from it.

  There is nightlife in Nogales, Mexico. Men hang in doorways and step out of shadows. An emaciated drunk leans against a telegraph pole, drinking some home-made brew through a straw stuck into a polythene bag. A car stands stationary, its front door open. The toe of a white ostrich-skin boot taps on the dirt of the road. When I slow down to ask for directions a man looms out of the darkness and, startled, I accelerate again, down to the end of the street, turn right onto a main strip of restaurants and shops and there, barely half a block away, is the comforting white and green neon cross of a pharmacy.

  The girl behind the counter is young and heavily made up. Underneath her white coat everything shines and flashes, the tiny sequins and pearls on her boob tube, the gold rings on her fingers. Even her crenellated black hair is covered in a glossy lacquer.

  ‘Hola.’ She smiles.

  ‘Necesito un médico.’ I hold out Emmy in my arms like a religious offering. ‘Ella está enferma, una fiebre, muy alta, a fever.’

  The girl’s eyes flick to the little television on which Tom and Jerry, dubbed in Spanish, are walloping each other with mallets.

  ‘I need a doctor, un médico. Do you speak English?’

  Her eyes focus on Emmy.

  ‘Papa! she calls.

  An older man, also in a pharmacist’s coat, materializes from the back.

  ‘Necesito un médico.’ I pull a bundle of American bills from my pocket. ‘Emergencia.’ I’m close to tears. The man listens to my strangulated Spanish then calmly picks up the phone.

  ‘I will call someone.’

  ‘You speak English!’

  ‘Of course,’ he says. He puts his hand on her forehead. ‘She’s hot.’

  I tell him she had some kind of fit, but that I don’t know what is wrong with her. Emmy is awake now and crying in a pitifully hoarse voice.

  ‘Emmy,’ I beg, ‘what is it, where does it hurt?’ I check her chest yet again. ‘Do you think it’s meningitis?’

  ‘¿La meningitis?’ The pharmacist makes a clucking noise against his teeth with his tongue. ‘Noh, I don’t think so.’