by Laura Marney
His right leg steps out easily enough but the material is bunched round his other ankle. He can’t see very well in this darkness and he’s scared to use his hand to pull his shorts off in case it bites him so he lifts his left leg and shakes. It’s no use; he can’t get them off. Holding the shorts in place with his right foot, he tries to tug his other leg out. He’s tugging so hard he begins to lose his balance and cries out in terror. He’s hopping backwards to keep from falling over. Hopping takes him out of the shadows, out into the bright sun where at last his leg pulls free. He’s puffed out with the effort and as he sighs his relief he looks up to see a crowd of tourists from the boat scrutinising him.
He is not wearing pants he now remembers. This morning he decided it was too hot for pants and anyway the elastic chaffed his groin yesterday and gave him an angry rash. Panic and dilemma throw Donnie’s mind into a series of bullet points:
• I can feel air on my arse but no scorpion.
• It’s still in my shorts.
• These people can see my cock.
In a frenzy he stamps all over the shorts, his pale cock jiggling, unprotected from the scorching sun. Then he stamps on them again, this time methodically working from top to bottom, right to left, making sure every inch of the khaki safari shorts are well trampled. At the very edges of the pockets he takes the shorts within two fingers and, bowing his body out, gingerly shakes them. He doesn’t want it landing on him. In the midst of this he becomes aware that someone is calling his name.
‘Donnie, Donnie!’
It’s Bertha. She is hurrying towards him, bustling through the bemused tourists. From the tone of her voice Donnie understands that Bertha is angry but she doesn’t know about the scorpion.
‘Donnie, what are you doing?’
Bertha seems distraught.
‘There’s a scorpion…’
‘Put your shorts on, please!’
‘Bertha it was in my shorts!’
Bertha comes and stands beside him with a hand on his shoulder, shielding his nakedness from the assembled audience. She whispers gently, ‘Get your fucking clothes on, Donnie.’
The thing that Donnie is now most aware of is that he is standing in front of Egyptians and a large party of his shipmates, with his shorts ground into the dust and his penis dangling.
Gritting his teeth he checks the inside of the shorts before carefully pulling them up. His fellow travellers don’t even try to hide their laughter. They titter openly at the strange looking blue-white man who has his cock out.
Chapter 19
Donnie would like to walk away with his head held high but the pain of the bite on his undercarriage is such that he is forced to walk with his legs open, as if he has just soiled himself.
On the bus back to the boat Bertha isn’t speaking to him. Donnie continues to speak to her, he has to; this is an emergency.
‘I’m telling you, the thing crawled up my shorts and bit me, how is that my fault?’
Bertha is not inclined to comment, she turns her head and squints out of the window into the blinding sun.
‘The thing is, I’m in need of medical attention. Is there a doctor on the boat? Coz if there isn’t they’ll have to send for one, are we insured for this?’
‘Insured against mosquito bites? I don’t think so,’ says Bertha evenly.
‘I’ve told you it wasn’t a mosquito. I’ve got to see a doctor, I need to know what’s going on with my arse, it’s nipping like fuck.’
Back on board Donnie quickly establishes that there is no doctor. However, an officer, who is qualified to administer first aid and has experience of dealing with scorpion bites, will take a look at it. It is the best they can do and Donnie must accept this treatment or none at all. The officer is very professional and ensures that the proprieties are observed. Donnie is given a white gown and instructed to make himself comfortable on the consulting table of the tiny first aid room. He lies firstly on his back then on his belly but it’s no use. To accommodate the officer examining the affected area, he has to kneel doggie fashion on the table with his bare arse in the air. Never before has Donnie felt so vulnerable.
On sight of the wound the officer is quick to reassure Donnie that he believes it to be a mosquito bite.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Ah, this is a very common complaint sir; we see this all the time. I can assure you that there is no danger. It is true that the location, at the perineum, is a little unusual…’
‘Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
Donnie has already told the officer how sore it is, surely the guy can see the pain he’s is in by the way he jumped when his bum cheeks were probed? Does he imagine Donnie is enjoying this? Never in his life has any man touched Donnie’s bum. Never in his life has he exposed his arsehole to anyone. Surely he has not suffered all of this because of a fucking mosquito? But he is left with no choice but to meekly accept the antihistamine tablets and cream he is offered and get down off the table.
Bertha is sleeping when, by necessity, he swaggers cowboy-style back to the cabin. Just as well. He’ll have to admit to her later that it is, after all, a mosquito bite. The room feels blissfully chilly, Bertha is lying naked, her body cool and inviting, there is a slight tang of her sweat in the air but the last thing Donnie wants right now is sex. His undercarriage is beginning to feel ticklish and this worries him. He forces himself to resist the irresistible urge to scratch. With every beat of his heart the pain throbs in his bottom.
Exhausted and tearful with the humiliating events of the day, he steps easily out of his shorts and leaves them where they fall. He scratches his armpit, sniffing his fingers to see if he really does smell as bad as the Egyptians. He is unable to tell but decides on a shower anyway, a cold one. After he has carefully soaped and rinsed he removes the showerhead from the wall and scooshes the cold water up his bum. The relief is instantaneous. He tinkers with the taps and produces a forceful jet that he aims at his rectum. This is ecstasy, not only is it taking the heat and the itch out of the bite but it actually feels really nice, sexy in a strange way.
But no sooner is he out of the shower than the heat and the bite start to bother him again. There is no point in getting dried, it will only make him sweat more but as he is about to return to the cool of the bedroom he spots Bertha’s make-up mirror and has an idea. Although she’s sleeping she could wake up and it would just be the icing on the cake if she were to catch him doing this. This has been the most shameful day of his life but it could always get worse. He slides the snib and locks the door as quietly as he can. Donnie places the small mirror in the middle of the bathroom floor and squats over it.
He has never seen himself from this angle before. It is not a pretty sight and, not for the first time, he wonders what women get out of sucking men’s cocks. The idea is disgusting to him, especially from this point of view. He knew he was hairy arsed, he has explored it with his fingers often enough, but he had no idea it looked so bad. Coarse ginger hair sprouts from bluish puckered skin and, slap bang in the middle of this weird forest, a white pimple the size of a fingernail. Donnie laughs when he sees it. It’s incredible to think that a thing this small can cause so much pain and burning mortification.
By the time Bertha wakes, Donnie has been in the bathroom three quarters of an hour and has scooshed himself three times.
‘Let’s go to dinner, there must be something we can eat,’ says Bertha as she applies a sunburn-soother cream.
Donnie doesn’t want to go to dinner. Why would he? The dining room is full of boring bastards, every one of them puffing themselves up about what good jobs they have and what posh areas they live in. And he can’t even slag them off, Bertha doesn’t like it when he talks people down, it’s negative, she says. Daphne never seemed to mind, she quite enjoyed the names he invented. And anyway, most of those bastards were there today at the ruins, there’s no way he’s going to sit there while they laugh at him.
‘I’m not actually that hungry, pet.’
‘Well, I’m fucking starving. I need to get out of here, I’m starting to get cabin fever.’
Donnie has got the opposite of cabin fever, whatever that’s called; he never wants to leave the cabin again. It is his place of security, it’s out of the relentless sun, it’s cool, if a bit noisy, the air conditioning machine seems to be getting louder, but he can do what he likes in here. If he wants to sit bollock naked with his legs open and the cool air circulating round his family jewels, he can. If he wants the relief of a scoosh up the arse he has only to go to the bathroom. Outside the cabin there are burns and bites and ridicule. Outside is dangerous.
‘Come on love, get your kit on,’ says Bertha.
Does she not realise how humiliated he has been today or does she just not care?
Dinner is not as bad as it might have been. The head waiter puts them at a table for two at the back near the kitchen. Donnie believes that this is not motivated by sensitivity to his embarrassment but revenge for not tipping. Bertha has the chicken and tells him it is delicious. Donnie requests bananas, unpeeled. Between them they drink two and a half bottles of wine. The wine has a tremendously relaxing effect, soon Bertha and he are laughing and for a while Donnie forgets about the bite. As they make their way back to the cabin there is a pleasant breeze in the night air and they stop to enjoy the view from the deck, strange beautiful Egypt, like nothing they’ve ever seen before. Throughout dinner Donnie has been as charming and as funny as he can be and it has paid off. Bertha leans in to kiss him. Her drawbridge is down and Donnie is confident of toe-wiggling tonight. As he opens the door to the cabin he wonders what kind of effect a blow job would have on his injury.
The air conditioning machine has stopped whining and the floor of the cabin is covered in two or three inches of brown dirty water. Bertha’s open suitcase, which was underneath the air con unit, is saturated. Floating in the filth on the floor are some of Bertha’s most expensive designer tops, the contents of his and her toilet bags, next month’s Vogue magazine and lots of large dead insects. Bertha screams.
Donnie catches up with her on deck. She is leaning over the rail crying.
‘I hate this place. I want to go home!’ she wails petulantly. ‘I can’t go back in there. Did you see those bugs on the floor? What is wrong with this bloody country, and my Vogue, I haven’t even read it!’
She hasn’t seen her case yet then, thinks Donnie; wait till she finds out about that.
‘Listen love, I’ll try and sort it out. You go back to the bar and wait. Tell the steward what’s happened, I think it’s the air conditioning, but for God’s sake don’t tell them we had it on full blast.’
‘You weren’t supposed to have it on that high, did you not hear the noise it was making?’
Donnie can’t believe she’s trying to pin this on him.
‘And did you not hear the noise it was making?’
‘Oh fuck off!’
*
Donnie nips back to the cabin and paddles in. He has to turn the dial on the air con unit back to where the steward showed him to set it. The duty officer arrives and, despite Donnie shouting and swearing at him, is extremely apologetic. He leaves and comes back minutes later with two of the cleaning wallahs who set about sluicing the muck out of the cabin. When the water level drops and the bugs have been removed, Donnie goes in and starts clearing up, he doesn’t want these Africans touching his wife’s underthings.
The Vogue magazine is a goner; even if it could be dried out the pages are stuck together. The designer tops are woebegone rags, he wrings them out as best he can but, as far as he knows, all Bertha’s clothes are dry-clean only. His shaving cream is probably saveable but the whole lot will have to be chucked out, they’ll be infected with God knows what kind of horrible Third World diseases. As he is bagging the toiletries he spots a familiar plastic packet.
It is a month’s supply of Neboxar, his brand of antidepressant. The pack is three-quarters full; he didn’t know he still had these. Thank God Bertha never saw them. For a minute or two he considers salvaging them, the blister pack looks undamaged and if ever he needed alleviation from symptoms of stress it’s now, but they’ll be no use right now. Experience has taught him they take weeks to work. They’ll be back home by the time the drug kicks in. Better to hold on and get an uncontaminated supply when he gets back. He quickly buries them at the bottom of the rubbish bag and hands them to the cleaning guy to get rid of. Bertha would go mad if she knew he’d been on prescription drugs.
*
Bertha can’t stop crying. This has been the most miserable holiday of her life; all her clothes are ruined. She has spent the last three days in T-shirts supplied by the crew which read ‘My parents cruised the Nile and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’. She has no make up, no sunscreen, nothing. They are stuck with this smelly, bug-stained sweat-box of a cabin with the broken air con. The captain claims they don’t have the parts on board to fix it, it is ‘kaput’, he says. The first cabin they were in, the perfectly good cabin that Bertha booked, is now occupied and there is nothing else available. Donnie has ranted and raved at the officers but he has only succeeded, with his hysterical empty threats, in making a complete arse of himself. Again.
And there is something else. The worst thing of all: her medication is missing. When the steward locked up the bar and there was nowhere else to go she was forced to return to the cabin. It was then that she realised that not only were the entire contents of her suitcase destroyed but her toiletries bag had been thrown out along with her antidepressants. She hates Donnie for this. He must have seen them, he must have picked them up and thrown them away but he’s saying nothing. He has no right to do this to her. He’s probably angry because she didn’t tell him but what business is it of his? She needs those fucking pills.
She asked the first aid officer, she had to tell him but all he could offer was a mild sedative. The mild sedative turned out to be the same antihistamine he gave Donnie for his mosquito bite. She took them anyway, double the dose, and it did make her sleepy but it’s not enough.
If only Donnie could be straight with her. It’s always been the same. Bertha remembers when they first moved in together, all those years ago, when he hid in the bathroom to put his contact lenses in, when she sneaked into the bathroom to put hers in. She realised before he did when she found a pair of his glasses hidden at the back of a drawer. In five months of dating and nearly three months of living together neither had told the other that they needed help with their eyesight, it was pathetic.
She left her lens sterilising solution bottle in the bathroom deliberately to see what he would say but he said nothing. Then, one night after dinner, she took her glasses out of her bag and put them on to read the paper. Still he said nothing and continued to hide in the toilet putting his lenses in. Next time they were in Asda she lifted a bottle from the shelf and said, ‘We need more sterilising solution, don’t we?’ Donnie, like a terrified rabbit, simply nodded and scurried away round the shop.
He made it so difficult to be honest. When they were preparing to get married she tried a few times to tell him something, something important, but he made it so difficult. She wasn’t going to tell him at all, that was in the past and before she met him, but she knew he was going to find out. When they went to sign the register, he would see. He’d see that she had been married before. She nearly called the whole thing off but then it occurred to her that if she were going to call it off, she’d have to give him some kind of explanation. It was easier just to tell him. He took it surprisingly well. Never again did he mention it and never again did she.
He keeps disappearing into the bathroom. He refuses to leave the cabin although it’s hotter than hell without the air con and it stinks. All she wants is a little comforting. She only wants him to put his arms around her and tell her everything’s going to be okay, but he’s not interested. He spends half the day in the toilet. She can hear the shower running but
when he comes back out he’s not wet. What the fuck is he up to in there?
*
Daphne’s sick line has run out and she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t go back to work. The longer she stays away the more she doesn’t want to go back. She can’t go back. When she phones for an appointment the practice receptionist tells her that they have changed the system. It is an open surgery now, she can come down and she’ll be seen but she’ll have to wait and there’s no guarantee which doctor will see her. She wants Dr Wilson. Dr Wilson is kind and understanding and quite handy with her pen at writing sick notes.
She knows, through her previous Internet research on Donnie’s behalf, everything there is to know about clinical depression, but she’s not so sure that the doctor will remain convinced enough to give her another month’s line. She worries that she won’t be able to squeeze out the requisite tears this time. Daphne has rarely had time off work sick, it always seemed like a complete waste of time. Until now her positive attitude has always ensured a robust immune system. She feels like a charlatan and wishes she had a bona fide illness or injury.
Daphne opens the front door carefully and listens at the stair. There is no one around. She puts her door on the latch and walks to the end of the corridor. Taking deep breaths she steels herself and visualises a successful outcome. Then she runs full pelt along the corridor. She’s running hard, panting, leaning into the sprint, shoulder first, through the front door and along the hall, running at the inside wall. She closes her eyes and waits to hear the sound of breaking bone. But she can’t do it. At the last moment she swerves and lands in a heap on the floor, winded but intact. Her nerve is broken but not her shoulder. Daphne doesn’t feel a thing when, in an ecstasy of self-loathing, she bites her tight fist.
She tries on various outfits. A lot of her clothes look too cheerful but most of them don’t fit anymore anyway. None of the things in her wardrobe say I’m clinically depressed and about to top myself. Finally she settles for a baggy grey sweatshirt she used to wear to yoga. It’s too clean so she goes to the kitchen and carefully drips a spoonful of soup down the front, a nice touch, she thinks. The weather is too warm for it now but she puts on a big woolly scarf along with the voluminous raincoat that she wears each night to the deli. The scarf is the final touch making her look like a recipient of care in the community.
