“So how do you feel?” Jim said.
“Me?” Ronny was cheerful. Resolutely. “Absolutely great.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “I see you’ve got the fire burning.”
Jim noticed that Ronny’s hands were shaking. He quickly stood up. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Uh…” Ronny nodded.
Jim went into the kitchen. He dished up the pie. He could hear the fire crackling in the other room. He picked up the plates and walked through. He stood in front of Ronny and offered him his plate. Ronny put out one hand to take the plate, then his other. Both hands. A battle took place, inside him, on his face. But he could not take the plate. He suddenly grew stiff. He froze. It was as though he was restraining something huge inside him. An uncertainty. A monstrous indecision. A blank-ness. He was paralysed.
Jim put down the plates.
“Oh God,” he said, “I shouldn’t have made you go. I knew it was wrong. I have a powerful instinct for survival. That’s all. It’s my downfall. It’s horrible.”
Ronny tried to speak. He whispered something. Jim couldn’t hear. He drew nearer. He put his ear close to Ronny’s lips, then closer still until finally he heard him. Such a little voice.
“I’m lost. I’m lost. I’m lost.”
Jim felt sick. “No. You’re not lost.”
“I’m lost. I’m lost.”
Jim grabbed hold of Ronny’s hand. He had never held another person’s hand before. His mother’s hand, perhaps, when he was very small. He had been held himself, forcibly, but he had never held.
“Help me, Jimmy,” Ronny said.
Jim could see in Ronny’s eyes that he was leaving. He was walking away. His pupils were big at first but then they grew smaller and smaller until they were almost only pin-pricks. Little black tadpoles drowning in a dense, swampy green. He was far. He was further. Like his whole soul was vacating.
Jim wanted to speak, but what could he say? What did he have to say? Nothing. Nothing. He tried to reach inside himself for something concrete, but all he could find was Monica and her words. Monica and her world. Because Monica had a strength, a colour, a real solidity, but hidden inside an almost infinite uncertainty.
Jim started speaking. Randomly. Babbling.
“Come back,” he said, “I have something to tell you. I have a friend,” he said, “called Monica. She’s far away too. Far away. And she’s trying to find this missing ape. She calls it the oran-pendic. It lives in Sumatra. In the rain forests. They have volcanoes. And the world’s largest flower. She says in the summer the whole place reeks so violently of pepper that your nostrils feel fiery.”
“Pepper?” Ronny’s voice, dazed, dead, an echo.
“Pepper. From the plantations…but there’s tea and timber and coffee too. It’s a kind of paradise. Fertile and steaming and opulent and lavish. The very opposite of this empty place.”
“Oran…?”
“Pendic. Which means upright. He’s covered in a pale-coloured hair. He has no big toes. She says he walks the forest but he’s so alone. He mistrusts. He’s full of fear. And she has no real evidence that he exists, just one brief sighting. She’s never even seen him but she loves him. She believes in him and that’s enough. It’s all instinct with Monica. She’s so…” Words failed him.
Ronny closed his eyes and saw a chasm. He gasped.
“Intense,” Jim said, “that’s it. She’s so intense. There’s this story she told me,” Jim paused and then started off again, winding himself up like a clockwork mouse, a watch, a musical box, “about the day she went to take a photo of the world’s largest flower. Rafflesia arnoldii. She’d been spending all her time in this bat cave and so she didn’t want to go at first…”
“Bat cave?”
On Ronny’s face, a flicker of recognition.
“Yes, yes…bat cave…” Jim pounced like a spider. The cave. The darkness. He started talking. And before he knew it he was weaving a yarn. He was spinning it and braiding it and twisting it. And Ronny was found and bound and reeled in. Slowly, surely, safely, soundly.
He was hooked.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Twenty-Two
Lily was invincible. She placed one foot in front of the other and that alone proved it. Legs are strange, she thought. Pink and stick-like and joined at the top but they work in a way that is truly extraordinary. She loved herself. She stared down the dark road.
These pale sticks, she told herself, will take me from here to there in no time at all. She wondered what distance consisted of and whether you could abuse it. Then she plotted her route via Ronny’s sticky expulsions. She inspected the wide sky for meteors. She whistled.
Near home, soon enough, on the farm’s long driveway, close to the fence which ran along the boar pens, she hunted for Ronny’s second ejaculation. She was counting down. She was dot-to-dotting. She had nothing better to do.
Three different places, she inspected, and in none of them did she find what she was looking for. Ahead she saw a shadow in the roadway, like a puddle. That’ll be it, she told herself, and drew closer. But then she stopped. It was not a liquid but a solid. A small thing. Hunched over. Engrossed. She held her breath. She skirted, tremulously.
But she could tell that he had good ears. He was a wild one. And he walked on little stumps, but not quickly. He shifted his position. He was not afraid of Lily although caution was inscribed deep within his genes. His giant head was domed. And his mouthparts, they were moving. He was licking. He was gobbling.
Lily edged, she pulled as wide as she could but she was hinged, somehow, on to this thing. It held her in. It plotted her perimeter. Needle-toothed. He chewed. He growled as he ate, unintentionally, breathing laboriously through his flat, misshapen nose. And what was he eating?
Oh God, she whispered, You’re eating Ronny! What are you doing?
But the creature did not respond. He remained stooped. He kept on scooping. And Lily kept on edging until she was past him. And then she walked and walked, in slow motion, feeling something ghastly at the back of her.
♦
Sara had bathed. Her hair was coiled up in a towel. Her head was buzzy with regretfulness. A kind of sweet-bitter-sweetness.
Lily came in wiping her mouth. Like she’d been kissing. She had mud on her nose and savage eyes. She smelled of bile. Sara tried to smile but there were miles between them. It was easier not to speak. And so much cleaner.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Twenty-Three
Ronny, darling.
We’re still not speaking. Louis and me. He’s slow to forgive. It takes him a while. Each new situation leaves him spinning. He has to dig in his heels hard, hard, take a deep breath and then struggle to acclimatize.
So I’m back in the cave. The bat cave. You understand these places, don’t you, Ronny? These dark places with tough, rough walls. With each notch, each rocky dimple so staunch and reliable? And every single, individual breath and rustle and whisper and footfall I make is answered by the dark’s harsh leathery voice. The darkness attends. It never ignores. With its black eyes and soft grip it asks for nothing, it gives nothing.
And here I find a balance. Because if I were a scale I’d be tipping, Ronny. I’d be all lopsided. I’d be tilting. I don’t want to tilt. But I was despairing; walking in the forest, surrounded by brightness but not seeing. Understanding how every single natural thing here has its own special place except me. (And Louis, naturally, but he doesn’t care less where he fits.)
I don’t want to be the exception. I so want to merge. It was eating me up. I saw myself as an excrescence in the forest’s vivid walkways. I was pink and bald in the midst of its green. It was painful. I was squinting and gaping and scrabbling for shade. But then I found the cave. The bat cave. It’s a giant. Its roof is all bat-fleshy, like suede. Upside down and dangling. These bats, they chatter. They shit. They blister. Their radar bounces. I’ve been getti
ng the feel of it in my jaw. I know it sounds crazy. Inside the soft parts of my mouth. The radar gets trapped, temporarily, and sparks from cheek to cheek like static electricity.
Why the cave? I don’t know why. Perhaps because if they were hunting for me I’d run to this place. And so might he. The oran-pendic. He could be here. He could be near. Am I grabbing at straws? Louis thinks so. But he would. He’s so methodical. He’s so unforgiving. He’s so marginal. Do you know what I mean?
In the darkness I can dream I see him. This pale ape. This toe-less man. And he, like me, is flattened up against a wall. Not in the main cavern but in an anti-chamber. A crevice. We both feel around blindly, like deep-water fish. Touching, whispering, bumping, retreating.
One day I thought I felt a snake. Hibernating, on a rocky shelf. Thigh-high. And the shock! But then I realized that it was a root. An ancient root from a giant tree that flowered once, far, far above.
Sometimes visitors come. With their torches, their unbearable voices and their sharp-eyed guides. I watch them from my crevices. They don’t find me in this labyrinth.
And he is here, somewhere, watching me. I feel it. I am hunter and hunted. I am avoider, avoided. I am complete. Replete.
Men arrive daily to scoop up the bat shit. Louis tells me they make medicines with it. They use it for fertilizer.
One day Louis came himself to try and find me. He called out my name and my name rebounded. I was a spider. I was all eyes. He couldn’t see where he was going. He wasn’t acclimatized. He grumbled and stumbled and his hands were hungry on the walls. I stood close by him but he couldn’t tell. I even smiled at him but my teeth were as black as the darkness that spiked them.
Two weeks in the cave. In before light, out after nightfall. This is a dark world. Louis gives me bitter glances when I return. He gives me the coldest cold shoulder but he doesn’t speak. He thinks I know something that he doesn’t know. He’s growing distrustful. Last night I heard him taking the film from my camera and then replacing it with another.
My ears have grown so sharp that I can hear my hair and my nails growing. My skin is a soft dough-white and I absorb everything. I eavesdrop, I intercept. And like an exotic woodpecker on a sky-high line I wire tap, tap, tap.
Hear me knocking, Ronny. M.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Twenty-Four
Nathan was rota’d on for the Sunday shift with Laura and Laura’s dumb friend Karen. The office wasn’t open. They were merely sorting; slotting stuff into cubicles, tagging it and then tapping it on to the database. Filling in and keeping on top of things.
Mid-morning, Laura consulted Nathan over some art books. They were in a plastic bag. They came from a specialist art bookshop in the West End. Some were in English, others were in foreign languages; Spanish, Italian. Laura was still stuck at that desperately helpful stage. She had yet to evolve from private eye to clerical worker. “Perhaps we should phone the bookshop,” she suggested, “the receipt says they paid by credit card. Over a hundred and thirty quid, in fact.”
“They’ll find them here if they want them.”
Nathan, stiff-necked and dismissive, waited at the keyboard. He wanted some details so that he could type them in and then abandon the edit.
But Laura had pulled one of the books out of the bag and was turning its pages. Here, after all, was a whole world of art and gloss and gorgeous paper which smelled like high quality furniture polish. Spain. The Prado Museum. El Greco’s bloodless gristle. His pale pigments and aching holy ligaments. Then blue. Then red. Goya. All that drowning. Those inky eye-rollers. The lolling.
“Look, a dog,” Laura smiled, “swimming!”
The Italian Renaissance. “Just smell the paper, Nathan.” Karen had sniffed already. Laura offered him the open book. He swallowed hard and took it. He sniffed at it. It was open on a very particular page. He looked and then he looked again.
“What’s wrong?”
Laura moved closer and peered over his shoulder. She loved the musky scent of him. Man. Soap. Hair oil. And although Nathan wanted to, he just couldn’t stop staring. Laura glanced at the picture and then at the adjoining script. “Antonello da Messina,” she said. “It’s called the Pieta. 1477.”
Then she read: “The picture is remarkable in its use of the prominent psychological diagonal which goes from Christ’s face to his right hand…”
She inspected the picture. It was Christ with an angel. Christ, crucified, down from the cross, still breathing, perhaps, a wound bleeding profusely under his right nipple. Head back, eyes closed, mouth falling open. A little angel at his right shoulder supported him. Her face shining with tears. And they were all alone. Just these two.
“How amazing!” she pronounced, feeling uneasy. Because there was something not quite right about the picture. Something amiss. Christ had a tiny sheet on his lap which barely covered him, and his hand, not the psychological hand (which was curled back, all cramped and uncomfortable) but the left hand which rested on his thigh, had its fingers curled in a particular way…it verged on the indecent. It was sex and death and other stuff that Laura didn’t much relish contemplating.
“Do you like it?” She spoke.
“No.”
Nathan closed the book.
♦
He went home. He caught the Tube. She knew his route. She left the office just shortly after. She found him on the platform. Deep down underground. The Tube arrived. She climbed on with him. It was virtually empty. They didn’t sit.
“You took the book.”
She was not accusing. He breathed harder, restraining something.
“Why did you take it?”
He shook his head. They didn’t speak again. But she went all the way home with him.
In his living room he put down his briefcase. “Will you report me for this?”
Laura shook her head, almost shocked at the suggestion. “I imagined you were planning to return it,” she said quietly. As though she knew! She had such faith in him. He nodded.
“I just want you to fuck me,” she added, astonishing herself almost as much as Nathan, “because I’m honestly starting to hate you and I really want to flush it right out of my system once and for all.”
Nathan was appalled. Against the door, fully clothed, gasping, he did exactly as she’d asked.
♦
Later, much later, he spent hours just gazing. He stared in wonder at the thirteenth-century Christ-as-Masturbator. And the angel. A little angel-optician, liny, tearful, bobbing at his shoulder. A languid warmth filled him. From his teeth to his prick to his toes. For the first time in his long life he was truly, unspeakably, ineluctably suffused.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Twenty-Five
The car was the only thing Connie wasn’t selling. It was completely her own. She drove one-handed, blinking herself awake, eating a greasy brioche from the services. Her mother had begged her not to go. Sunday morning. Her arm was still in its sling but it felt as normal. She yanked the sling off and used the arm without even thinking. In fact she was almost convinced that all the fuss had been merely a conspiracy to stop her from leaving.
Gravesend to Sheppey was no distance. But she took a diversion to Cobham en route, where her aunt lived. Her father’s sister. She had packed a case. Enough clothes for a week. The letters in their bright ribbon. And also a cheque for the amount of twenty-five thousand pounds. Her mother had signed it in lieu.
It was all so dreamy. The motorway. Crumbs on her lap. It had rained at first and then a shaft of light cut through the clouds and nearly blinded her. She drove on into it, squinting.
Her aunt was exquisitely dithery, which was, Connie felt, just as things should be. She drank some tea. She was loitering.
“You look so tired.”
“Do I?”
“Are you sleeping properly?”
“Yes.”
“And where will you go now?”
“To Sheppey.”
“And where will you st
ay?”
“I don’t know. In a hotel.”
“But you have an uncle…” her aunt went and found her address book, “he runs a farm.”
Connie frowned. “But I’ve never even met him.”
“So I’ll ring them.”
She rang them. Someone was dead. A vacancy. She needed to feel useful, to fill it.
Connie barely registered the conversation. She was idling in neutral. I am free of all ties, she thought, and I have a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds. I could take my little smart car and head for Sheerness, drive it on to the ferry and then drive it off again at the other side, just randomly.
It wasn’t escape. No. She had yearned for the shock of resolution, the force of will, the sense of sacrifice, of application, to complete her obligations to her father. Before this moment it had all been procrastination. A yearning. A waiting. And yet now that she was moving, now that she had that cheque on her person, now that her willpower had finally been located, shaped, funnelled, she felt an overwhelming urge to do something new with it. To channel it elsewhere.
Was that wrong? She could be the girl in the car commercial who just drove and drove. Or she could be like Monica and search for something that was missing. A missing something. But she was too short to be the girl in the commercial and her hair was too curly, and of the many things she had yet to discover that were missing from her life, the main one Was still her own self. Was constancy.
When her aunt handed her a piece of paper with an address on it and specific instructions, Connie slipped it into her pocket, fully intending to ignore it. But in her pocket her hand located something she did not remember packing. Her passport.
In that instant she felt certain that if she had troubled to open her passport and inspect her own pale face in the small grey portrait within, she would have discovered two harsh words boldly inscribed across her sweet, round cheeks: DIRTY FRAUD.
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