Love on the Road 2015

Home > Other > Love on the Road 2015 > Page 6
Love on the Road 2015 Page 6

by Sam Tranum


  I wanted you to enjoy the sensation of taste. To savour the creamy delights we’d spent fifteen minutes selecting at the chocolatier’s. You’d be eating baby food for the next week.

  After you left for Dr Bart’s clinic on the Thursday, I let Diego curl up on my lap and have a sleep. I pummelled and kneaded his sleek fur, and tried not to think about what was happening to you. It didn’t work. How much do we fall in love with the image a person’s face projects? I thought about articles I’d read about burns victims who’d had plastic surgery and then didn’t recognise themselves, even when surgeons had performed technical miracles. Would you still feel like you? How much does the way you look matter? How much would you change because of what was happening to you?

  I visited the museum of fine art to distract myself. That didn’t work either. I moved our belongings to the next apartment we’d be staying at, one more suited to post-operative needs. I was like an expectant father, pacing, waiting for the moment I could stop worrying and light that cigar. I shopped, and filled the fridge with puréed mush and ready-made smooth soups for when you came out. Eventually it was time to catch the bus to Kortrijksesteenweg, where Dr Bart had his clinic. I arrived at 7.30 PM as instructed, but wasn’t allowed to see you straight away. I tried to fight off the hollow feeling that had been churning inside me all day. I knew it would only disappear when I was able to see you, intact and alive.

  Although you were disorientated and claustrophobic behind your water-filled face-cooling mask, you still managed to grunt a few words. Your face looked visibly shorter, in spite of the inflammation. I didn’t stay long, figuring you needed to rest. Lost in my thoughts on the bus back to the apartment, I managed to miss my stop. A combination of inattention, and my rudimentary French meant I ended up in the next city. My usual sense of adventure had abandoned me. I wanted to be back in our temporary home. I got a train and taxi back.

  I returned to Kortrijksesteenweg late on Friday morning to accompany you back to the apartment. You seemed to have recovered massively overnight, though it may have been an illusion, as you were wearing your own clothes instead of the blood-soaked gown I’d seen you in the day before. Your forehead was stretched tight with inflammation, and you didn’t recognise yourself in the mirror. In the apartment, I was kept busy reapplying cold packs to your face every forty minutes, trying to coax you to take teaspoons of fluid, making sure you had your medication on time, helping you to the bathroom, and keeping you from getting bored when you weren’t sleeping. It wasn’t a romantic holiday, but I was glad we were together and pleased I could do something of practical use.

  That night, Etienne and Gina, who owned the complex we were staying in, were entertaining in the courtyard outside our apartment. I poked my nose through the curtains and saw people sharing bottles of wine, laughing and enjoying elaborate courses of food that were brought out of the kitchen. I looked at the half finished, liquidised gruel in your bowl. It was streaked with blood.

  You woke in the middle of the night, eyes swollen with sleep and surgical intervention, hair curving in random directions. The disorientation that accompanies dreams cloaked your words. There was desperation in your voice as you described your dream to me. You seemed delirious, though your skin was cold to touch. You spoke of a dog the size of your little finger. You followed it into a dream garden and found finger-sized apes lolloping in the grass. You couldn’t form hard consonants like ‘p’ and ‘t’. They came out as sibilant whimpers. I asked you to repeat several phrases. It took a long time, and you needed to write some of it down. But it seemed important to get it out.

  That is when I realised the value of having someone who cares about you when you are recovering from surgery. If I hadn’t been there, you could have paid to have a nurse visit you daily. It may have even been possible to find someone to take a night shift, to ensure you weren’t alone if anything untoward happened. You wouldn’t have had someone to laugh with you, however, and share the simple joy of an absurd dream. That can only come from someone who knows you, someone who wants to know about the phantasmagoria that haunts you at night.

  There was a cemetery next to the apartment. I walked there mainly for exercise, but I was also curious about what people chose to mark the resting places of their loved ones. It was a huge graveyard, inundated with little, round worm casts that made me think of subterranean creatures having a party in that nutrient-rich environment. By Sunday, you were ready for a small walk. I took your arm, led you to my favourite spots. You cried when you saw little graves marked with plastic windmills and rain-choked teddy bears. I showed you the graves with what appeared to be just-in-case breathing holes, small chimney-like vents by the sides of the plots. I assumed they were there for people who were afraid of being buried alive, but I didn’t know for sure. There were a lot of them.

  You slept a lot for the next week and discovered that ice cream was quite soothing. It was a useful addition to the soups and liquidised mush I’d been feeding you. I was keen to find nutrient-dense foods to help build you up again.

  Whilst you slept, I explored the canals and watched water rush in through the sluice gates. I went running through an industrial zone, following a sign that said CUPRO CHIMIQUE, assuming it would be a copper smelter. A mountain of metal distracted me: a collection of discarded parts for recycling. Curls, spikes and tangles, some rusted, some not, formed a mound two to three stories high. It seemed like millions of unidentifiable items were competing to poke through the surface. Distant plumes of smoke curled up into a clear sky.

  Unused train tracks ran parallel to the road. A little further on, I saw an abandoned train with little trees growing on the carriages. I got back to the apartment to find you’d just woken from another vivid dream.

  With the help of a piece of paper and sign language, you explained how you’d been coaching three-year-old Russian basketball players in your sleep. The children in your dream referred to you as The Duchess. It seemed really important to you that you get all the details correct, despite your difficulty forming words with your torn, swollen mouth. Even with the inflammation, you had the wide-eyed look of a child who had woken from a vivid dream. You gripped my hand as you described leading the children down nauseatingly steep steps with a sheer drop on one side. In the dream, you were alternating man-woman-man-woman-man-woman-man. The scene shifted to your workplace. People were treating you as female, referring to you as ‘she’, but using your old, male name. I guessed there would be a lot of dreams like that over the next months.

  You’d made arrangements with the HR department to return to work as your female persona. Despite our anxieties about how a large organisation would deal with your situation, their conduct had been exemplary. An appropriate email had been composed and sent to all the relevant people. Name badges and uniforms had been prepared, so you’d be able to return to work after the recovery break as ‘she’.

  On Tuesday, you had your post-op check with Dr Bart. In the waiting room, we met someone who was about three days ahead of you in the procedure. She’d come from Austria and spoke clear English, so she was able to give us an idea of how things would progress over the following few days. The fact that she was able to speak clearly was more exciting than the fact that she could speak English. That night, we shared a beer to celebrate the fact that your recovery was progressing as it should. I sipped a dark Kasteel Donker, my first beer in a week. I’d been keeping you company in abstaining from alcohol. We were both a little dizzy after one small glass of the malty brew. I squinted at the small print on the label and discovered it contained 11 percent alcohol. We didn’t open a second bottle.

  It was your birthday on Friday. I gave you a card and a massage. There was no present, as I planned to get you something when you were feeling a bit better. We left Ghent that day. We planned to go back to the UK so you could recover with family. We were due to take the Eurostar from Brussels. It was a skin-fryingly hot day.

  We took the opportunity to visit the Atomium in Heysel. Th
e iconic building opened in 1958 for Expo 58, that year’s World’s Fair. It consists of nine aluminium-coated spheres joined by struts, in a formation that is supposed to represent an atom of iron. There were exhibits of ‘modern’ 1950s paraphernalia, including souvenirs from the time. The Atomium was originally created to promote the use of atomic energy, in an era when we were even less aware of its long-term problems and uncertainties than we are now. (Half of Belgium’s power comes from nuclear power stations.) We took the stairs up to the restaurant, where we had a drink and looked out over the city. A son et lumiere show in one of the spheres delighted us, lights projected onto a multi-faceted sculpture in the centre of a dark room. Another sphere housed sleeping pods for children on overnight school trips.

  Saturday didn’t bring you the rest and recovery you needed. My sister hosted a family reunion. It was the first time you’d got together with your brother and sister for more than eleven years. All families have skeletons in proverbial cupboards, and ours was taken out and given a good kicking that day. It was time for forgive and forget – and, by the way, your brother is now your sister, be nice and say hello. It is always the people who are closest that are affected the most by major change, so we were prepared for some raw emotions about your transition.

  My sister glued together all the factions with the best adhesive of all: food. Her dining table groaned under the weight of twenty curries. I’d made a cake. Your siblings were reserved to start with. My brother-in-law made tentative moves between watching football with the guys, and sitting between both his sisters in the garden. A sweltering sun beat down onto reddened shoulders. Your sister took a small cloth bag out of her purse and gave it to you. Inside was a tiny wristwatch. It had been your mother’s. Two toddlers, one from your family the other from mine, skirted around each other, avoiding one another with careful precision. The adults, however, had reconnected. We were pleased but exhausted at the end of the day.

  That was nearly a year ago. Not long after the reunion, we returned to New Zealand. Your wounds slowly healed, people became accustomed to using your new name. We launder your work uniforms, and there are skirts and blouses rather than trousers and shirts. I carry a drawing in my handbag of a specific type of vibrator recommended by the psychologist. I haven’t ventured into a sex shop to purchase one. I can’t see that it would offer any benefits over the one we already own. We are not perfect, we fight and bicker like any other couple. We laugh a lot too.

  You will have completed a year of living in your new gender by July, eligible for the next stage. The recommendations have been made, and the psychologist and endocrinologist have forwarded letters. You are undergoing another round of pre-operative blood tests and X-rays. You have asked me if I’d be prepared to use my annual leave to accompany you to Thailand for your surgery. I have said yes.

  After more than thirty years, love has evolved into an unseen entity that beats steadily through my life, like cardiac tissue. I don’t have to think about whether I actively love you, any more than I have to plan blinking or taking my next breath. It is as automatic as peristalsis and as enduring as the rocks that surround us in the Port Hills.

  5.

  Enfolded

  Catherine McNamara

  All along she called him Gerard. It was not his name. When the game ended, she stayed Mariam for a while, but he would slip. She enjoyed calling him Gerard, partly because that game had tickled them both so hard, and now it was a kind of trace. There was another game where she was O and he was M, but that was a sexual game, grinding and full of spluttered words, burrowing and friction. There were no games now. She sat on her suitcase at his local airport, waiting for the driver they would send, because he had fallen from a ladder and lost the use of his legs. He couldn’t piss, he said. Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t have an erection.

  There had been no need to say that. She notes a young man heading her way from the car lot.

  At the house, he is dressed for her, wearing a printed shirt she had bought for him when they were together, three decades ago. He wears this shirt every time they meet. Winter in Amsterdam, summer in Sydney, spring in Addis. Always this shirt. At first she stands a few metres away from him. The room is messy. A creative man’s disorder. She sees that crankiness has just left his face and his chin juts out, raised, ever-searching. He lifts an arm that has become womanish. His fingers are lean, reptilian, nails bitten to the core.

  She takes his hand, feels the cool pads envelope her sticky digits. She folds to her knees and cries in his lap. It smells of an old man’s trousers, old man’s urine.

  The same young man pushes his wheelchair out to the patio. Before following, she removes her espadrilles and feels her feet embrace the tiled floor, a kiss on the tarmac. She looks at her bent toes, black nail polish. It hits her that he can’t feel his anymore, he has to look at them like dirty mementos in a house-girl’s soapy hands. She remembers his toenails scratching her in bed, his knees cool behind her knees. She smells food: the ponderous palm-nut soup she hasn’t eaten in an age.

  She hears his summoning from outside. If anything, his voice booms louder now. Perhaps because he feels imprisoned? But he has always snapped at her, snapped at most people. Her views of him have not yet shifted from able to disabled. She thinks of centaurs. The upper body fused to another creature, the surging of the arms, the tossing of the head and neck. She remembers sweat clinging to the fine hairs of his chest, the taste of it. She thinks his smell has altered.

  It is a shock to see how crowded the yard has become. The palms lofty above the rooftop. No one has cut them. His fingers plunge into the red soup, wear a glove of its viscous colour.

  ‘Sit down.’ He points to her. ‘You know I hate to eat cold food.’

  The young man uncaps her beer. She sits down. The soup steams. The scent reaches into her. The sea, too, sends her tendrils through the dusty, clacking leaves. It’s not far from here. The veranda rails are rusty. Chunks of concrete have fallen off, landing in soft dirt below where, she hears, there are children. Are they his children? Begotten long before he fell to the ground here? A friend – Nana Yaw – had said there were dozens of them, an unchecked, almost tribal reproduction. But Nana Yaw had a bitter tongue.

  ‘You don’t look any different,’ he says to her.

  She raises her eyebrows and looks out. Once, they were accomplices. Now she wonders about the smell coming from his trousers and whether the young man takes him to pee or there is a bag for it. And whether this mercy mission is going to include sitting on the loo all night after downing his cook’s food.

  ‘Not used to this anymore?’

  ‘Not really,’ she says. ‘But I’ll give it a go.’

  He pushes his plate away, half-eaten, and drinks his beer from the bottle. She thinks he drinks a lot of beer sitting here. He has a paunch. He watches her wash her hands and begin the soup.

  ‘You know I like to watch you eat.’

  He stares at her; he has often stared at her. Occasionally, her eyes cross his. Long ago, she begged him not to make a study of her, an understanding of each flinch of her nerve-endings. He once wrote a poem to her nipple. ‘Morning nipple, mid-morning nipple, my nipple.’ Better poems have been written. The soup is hot and her eyes water. Her mouth feels like a ravaged cavern and she feels the food sending a marker into her chest. A flag planted deep.

  He looks away from her when one of the children cries. She notes his lips twitch: he usually shouts at them. He casts his eyes back at her.

  ‘They your kids?’ she asks.

  ‘No, why?’

  He has always lied to her face. They weren’t meant to last more than a minute. A hot night, a dirty fusion, they were secretive. Then she let him tower over her. They once met in a street bar. The street bar closed. They stayed on the grubby metal chairs in the breeze block cubicle next to the gutter. Talking first, his arching talk, her spilling answers, until the city was quiet and he climbed over her and a baptism took place, water coursing from the bow
els of somewhere, cheap beer fraying at the back of their throats. She now thinks these episodes were helpless and theatrical. She has had better lovers on clean beds. Men who didn’t need an arena or the night’s clawing.

  She finds a hard rind in the soup and removes it from her mouth. Wele.

  ‘You know I hate wele in the soup.’

  He smiles. There was another game. She was Pig Meat. He was Bush Meat. She loved him because he had found what was common between them, he shone a light hard on her.

  ‘You know,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe I have you sitting here across from me. This is what I have always wanted.’

  Sitting before her, flanked by palms scoring the punch-blue sky and the powdery wall behind him, there is no evidence of the wheelchair. He is a free man sitting there, free to wander to the railing and light a cigarette, lean over the rail showing off his shapely rump and long thighs, turning back to peruse her at the table. His hair is pulled back in his legendary, scruffy ponytail. His beard has grown long. He looks like a man in one of his own documentaries.

  ‘So where shall I take you this afternoon? What would you like to see?’

  She hasn’t given any thought to what she would do here. She knows nothing about this country now. There is almost a week before them. Her throat tightens. He had called her only recently, eight months since the fall. Initially, he had been to the States for an operation. There had been a glimmer of hope, a keen doctor, cousin of a filmmaker friend. It hadn’t worked. The soup sits in her stomach, a queasy burning. She flushes her throat with beer.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  Perhaps she had expected him to be more miserable, more of a recluse, even ashamed of what had happened to him. Perhaps she was ashamed. She wasn’t used to it yet.

  ‘I want you to have a good time here.’

 

‹ Prev