by Elna Holst
“Cassée?” The woman’s eloquent eyebrows shoot up. “Faut pas reparé?”
“Non.” I enunciate, shaking my head, trying my hardest to be a French speaker. I’m shaking all over, for that matter. “Pas possible. Je t’en pris. Laisse-la.”
At long last, she moves the hand away from my stump. I exhale raggedly.
“Dommage.” The woman clicks her tongue, patting the stinking flesh and my handless arm intermittently. Her eyes have grown soft and dolorous.
“Oui.” My eyelids are heavy and slow-moving, my voice seeming to come from far away. “Tant pis. Too bad.”
I am so very, very sleepy. These last three days on my feet, pushing towards the unknown heart of the land, the terrain all but impassable. I could have used a machete, a hand axe, but all I had was my penknife, my handbag filled with coconut and nicotine gums, my cumbersome, self-styled sandals—which I’ve lost, I realise, at some point. I’m not sure when.
And for what? What help can I expect from this crazy person, this enfant sauvage, who carries around human remains—dug up! But when? How long has she been watching me?
The figure by my side shifts. I put my stump on her leg, and the simple feeling of warm skin against my own, the minute vibrations of life coursing through this fellow creature, makes me quake and sigh.
“Please don’t leave. Please. Ne bouge pas.”
The Eyes blink down at me. With my arm slung across the stranger’s lap, I stop fighting the inevitable and close my heavy lids.
Chapter Nine
IT TASTES SWEET and yellow. Though yellow isn’t a taste, but a colour; it’s my mind striving to place this experience, to put a name to it: a fruit, soft, drupaceous when ripe, it’s…
“Mango.”
My eyelids twitch. I am licking my lips, chewing, swallowing—eating before I am even fully awake. Goosebumps of pleasure prickle my skin; it’s so good, I want, I crave, I need more.
Another morsel of the fruit is buffeted into my mouth. I suck at it greedily.
“Mmm.” My hand goes up to my neck. I am sticky with fruit juice and perspiration—how long, I wonder, my eyes straining to focus, my throat feeling faintly bloated, has this been going on?
“Bon, bon.” A hand caresses my stomach. The rough palm against my skin—my completely exposed skin—sends a thrill through me that has nothing whatsoever to do with the pleasure of feeding. I tense up. The hand withdraws, but only to slip a fresh piece of mango between my lips.
My nipples are pointing skywards. Like my stomach, like my neck, like my entire body from top to toe and back again, they are bare and vulnerable, and shamefully, confusingly turned on.
Shooting up into a sitting position, I wrap my arms over my chest and stare awkwardly into the Eyes.
“What are you doing? Where am I? Where are my clothes?”
The islander’s face is a blank. I fight back the urge to pull at her matted, black hair, to throw myself at her and—
“Vêtements!” I indicate my naked body, while simultaneously doing my best to cover it up. “Oú?”
The woman cocks her head. She catches a bead of sweat trickling down my brow.
“Trop chaud.”
The air goes out of me. Yes, I am too hot—the fever seems to have come and gone again, and I suppose removing my clothes would be a reasonable recourse. Like feeding me and keeping me hydrated. I bow my head.
“Merci,” I mutter, grudgingly.
The islander says nothing. She stands and starts walking away, the wild dog that’s been resting a few feet off getting up to follow her.
“Wait!” Like a big crybaby, I shuffle to my feet, tears immediately spilling down my face at the prospect of being left on my own again. “Please, I didn’t mean to. I…”
The woman has bent down and is picking something up from among the undergrowth. As she comes back, she is holding out my dress jacket and skirt, washed and dried and neatly folded into squares.
“Vêtements.”
“Oh! But…” I accept the bundle as if I were accepting a dry-cleaner’s delivery at the Hotel Danielle. The clothes feel perfectly, luxuriously crisp, completely out of sync with our surroundings. “How did you…?”
The Eyes slant shrewdly. “Ren clean. Clothes for Dimanche. Now come, go.”
She is speaking French, a child’s variant of French, and I’m not sure whether it is for my benefit, or whether there is another language, a mother tongue, lurking underneath. It doesn’t matter. For now, all I feel is a deep, bottomless, inexpressible happiness at this simple gift, despite its utter lack of practical use in the place in which we are: my clothes, carefully rinsed through and aired out. I hug the bundle to my chest.
“Oh, thank you, thank you.”
The islander lifts her satchel from off the ground.
“Go together, Dimanche and Ren.”
“Dimanche?” I shrug into my jacket. I had forgotten how uncomfortable the material feels against my skin. The islander has it right. Under the shielding canopy of the jungle, being naked is infinitely preferable. It’s just… Well. “Ren?”
The woman’s lips twist up, ever so faintly. It’s the first spectre of an approving facial expression I have observed in this peculiar being.
“Dimanche.” She taps her finger decisively against my chest.
“Oh.” She’s named me. It is, undoubtedly, an arrogant, high-handed, verging on boorish thing to do, but, all things considered, rather practical. “I’m Dimanche.”
She nods, a look of deep-seated satisfaction on her that is half comical, half unsettling. I touch my hand to her chest and she stills, her jaw slackening.
“Ren?”
She dips her head in response. All of a sudden, those penetrating eyes refuse to meet mine.
“To go,” she repeats gruffly. “Dimanche come.”
Chapter Ten
CHIEN RUNS AHEAD of us, sure of his trail. It is an unimaginative name—not really a name at all. Chien is Dog, pure and simple. So why didn’t Ren just call me Personne, or Femme? Dimanche has a pleasing ring; it makes me think of speaking, of angels. It makes me feel important, real in some way: someone who is deserving of a proper name. It’s not until darkness begins to descend that I remember, with a start, what it actually means. Chien stops, his tawny pelt catching the last rays of the sun from the west—or what I suppose is west. I have no notion of ever having been much of a navigator.
Dimanche means Sunday.
I am named after a day of the week.
“What day is it today, Ren?” I ask, feeling piqued, as the islander halts by her dog’s side, looking about her in much the same way as he does.
Ren does not reply. She’s not one for speaking unless she has some information—some order!—that she herself considers vital to impart. I swallow back the sour taste in my mouth.
“Where are we going—”
Ren claps a firm hand over my lips. With the other, she pulls me tight against her, her forearm acting like a vice across my ribs. I gag and splutter. Then I feel Ren’s breath against my ear, her barely audible “Silence”—more a sensation than a sound. My body slackens. Ren’s pulse beats against my spine.
Something moves among the foliage. The wet, leathery, slappy noise of the dense growth moving heralds something big—but quiet. Chien moves closer to us: Ren and Dimanche, Dimanche and Ren, locked in a not-quite lovers’ embrace.
“L’Ours,” Ren mouths against my ear, and it is; a great bear is unhurriedly making its way between the stems of the trees. Its head turns towards us; its blond snout delicately sniffs the air. It quickly loses interest, however, continuing on its solitary way. My legs have turned to jelly. I am grateful and embarrassed that Ren effortlessly holds me upright.
“Chase honey,” Ren croons, slowly relaxing her grip and letting her hand drop from my mouth down to what appears to be her favourite spot: across my stomach. She pats it lightly. “No bad.”
“Fuck,” I swear to myself, blithely ignored by the enfant te
rrible who is still holding me, still fondling me companionably. “I think I might have peed myself again.”
“Hungry,” Ren suggests, and I’m uncertain if it is a question or an announcement. “To eat.”
AS IF I were a babe in the woods, Ren seats me on the ground and posts Chien as my guard. To top it off, she produces another mango from her satchel and places it in my lap.
I finger it hesitantly. I can’t help thinking, my stomach clenching as a result, that it is not the first time this fruit has lain in one of my hands.
“Are you still walking around with that abomination in there?” I eye her knapsack of horrors and nourishment.
Ren points at the mango. “Sweet. For Dimanche.”
I puff out a breath of air. “All right, all right. I’ll eat it. Don’t you want any?”
She stands stubbornly silent, obviously waiting for me to do as I’m told.
“Fine. Have it your way, then.” I raise the fruit to my mouth and take a healthy bite. Juice dribbles down my chin. For the second time today—which might or might not be Sunday—the wild woman’s lips twist into a semblance of a smile. She holds her hands up and looks steadily from Chien to me. “Resté.”
I keep gnawing at the succulent fruit, refusing to respond. I might not remember enough to make sense of my past, my present, my perilous future—but one thing I am overwhelmingly clear about: I am not used to taking orders.
Still, I muse, as Ren turns and disappears into the thicket, and Chien makes a little whiny noise, before slumping down on his hindquarters beside me and surreptitiously scowling at me, where the hell am I supposed to go? As much as I hate to admit it, being provided with canny protection from my strange surroundings, plied with mango and water, and even cared for, should the fever rear its ugly head again, is exactly what I need. The truth of the matter is that Ren is a godsend. If only she would give that overbearing blooming attitude a rest.
And also, stop touching me in ways that make my head spin.
“Wildly inappropriate,” I grumble and snigger at my own wit.
Chien growls.
“Oh, shut your trap, will you?” I hold out the last of the mango in the flat of my hand and giggle as the dog grabs at my peace offering, his long, uneven tongue tickling my palm.
Chapter Eleven
REN RETURNS AFTER dark to find me drowsing, my left arm thrown across Chien’s back. I want to stay mad at her, but I can’t, even though she pets me in much the same manner she does Chien, as if to say I’ve been a very good human, yes, indeed. She is carrying a brace of fresh-caught fish—I can’t really see, but I can smell them, hear Chien’s happy yowling as she throws him one.
I almost yowl, too; I’m so delighted she’s back. My body goes rigid with the effort not to throw myself around her neck and make her promise never to leave me again. I’d cut off my right hand. Figure of speech, of course. That, after all, would be practically unfeasible.
Ren drops the fish, two cold and plump and slippery silver specimens into my lap. Though everything is silver beneath the moon; something…something niggles at me, some half-remembered line of a poem. She points from the fish to my handbag. I screw up my eyes in bewilderment, trying to make out her features, but it’s impossible; the moon is behind her.
“Cut,” she says, finally, as if she has been racking her brain for the verb. “Good, Dimanche.”
Of course. A thrill of something or other runs down my spine, a queer mixture of disgust, fascination, and pride. She watched me gut a fish only a few mornings ago. She knows I have some skill with the blade.
“Dimanche cut,” she repeats. “Ren fire.”
“Oh! Lovely,” I say, grabbing my penknife from out the bag and proceeding with my allocated task. “I didn’t know you had matches. I’m pleased. Hey, when we get to your place, maybe I can use your phone or radio or whatnot, whatever it is you use to communicate with the outside world? Or maybe you’ve already…is help on the way?”
The islander ignores my flow of prattle, as she has done all day. Instead, she builds up a conical shape of twigs and leaves and some sturdier branches and brings something out of her satchel. Not matches. It looks like nothing so much as two pieces of rock.
It’s as if she has inadvertently flipped a switch in me, and memories come flooding back—Dani and me, the nameless me, in the forest, not far from our respective houses, trying to light a fire like the cavemen did in our quaint, junior-level history books. It was a wet, drab day, and I was shivering all over, suspense turning to misery, as I sat for hours in the cold mulch, watching Dani knock two pebbles together. Dani the bright and fair, Dani of the tow-coloured hair: Dani, my neighbour, Dani, my first…
“That’s never going to—”
It takes Ren all of ten seconds to get a fire going from the sparks. She blows on it, and in the orange glow, I can see a twinkle of cheer in her lustrous eyes. Clinking her stones together like a pair of castanets, she deposits them back into her satchel.
“Fire,” she says nonchalantly, and I want to slap that smug expression off her face, because Dani tried so hard, and she just… But I don’t, I hear myself gushing, “Wow!”
Her grin broadens. She sits back with her hands resting on her thighs and ogles me unabashedly, by the light of the blaze.
Heat creeps up my neck, my cheeks, prickling my scalp. Cross and ill at ease, I turn my gaze back to my chore, slicing viciously at the poor fat belly of the second fish. Fucking vain, fucking… I run the knife all the way up to the head. She’s not the first flaming person on the planet to have lit a campfire.
And I’m not the first person to have deboned a fish or two by said campfire, but even so, I can’t keep the satisfaction in a job well done from showing on my face, in my movements, as I spear the fruits of my labour onto the sticks Ren holds out to me.
“Bon, bon,” she hums and nods, and I squirm and preen like a child receiving a condescending compliment from a favourite distant relative.
We don’t talk much after that. Ren grills the fish over the fire, the smell and anticipation of my first cooked meal since—whenever—making my stomach growl louder than Chien. I stare, riveted, mouth agape, until I notice I am staring as much at the nude cook as at the dish being prepared, and I turn away, abruptly, holding my hand out to beckon Chien to my side. He sniffs at me suspiciously. Then, as if he suddenly recalls the offering of mango, his tongue darts out to give my hand a long, broad lick.
“No bite,” Ren observes, a touch of bemusement to her otherwise distinctly flat tone of voice. “Good Chien. Good Dimanche.”
My hackles rise. If she expected him to bite me, why didn’t she warn me off trying to befriend the beast in the first place? It’s not like I have a surplus of expendable limbs.
Chien nips at my finger. I yelp, overreacting, I know, but I’m tired and hungry and—and stranded on a desert fucking island!
“Love bite,” Ren shrugs, as she pulls the hot, crisp-looking fish out of the fire and slides them on to a broad, green leaf of a kind I’ve only ever seen on TV before (I’m quite certain). “No problem.”
“It might be a problem for me, thank you very much,” I sulk, but softly, in English, because she’s right, really; of course she’s right, and besides, she’s scooting closer, the ‘plate’ of fish in her hands, and I’m willing to agree to anything, to sign away my soul, just about, for one single, flavourful, hot and steamy bite…
Ren slips her fingers into one of the fishes and pulls out some of the perfectly cooked, white and thready meat. She nibbles at it and nods approvingly, before she holds it out to me, but not to take—oh no, that would be entirely too civilised for the Queen of No-Name Island—no, she holds it up to my lips, which are quivering, and God help me, I’m too far gone to stand upon ceremony, too greedy not to part them and let her push it into my mouth.
“Oh, hmm,” I moan, as the taste of the fish—subtle, warm, indescribable—fills my mouth, and my eyes close; my hand clutches at the lapel of my dress ja
cket. “Oh, bloody… Mmm.”
Ren makes a noise. It is somewhere in the region between a laugh and a cough—a dry, ragged sound, as though wrenched from her throat involuntarily. I open my eyes, but she has turned away from me, busying herself about the dying embers of the fire, the rest of the fish carelessly left in my lap, staining the fabric of my skirt. I pick it up and have at it, reining in my squeals of delight, my groans of gourmandière rapture as I observe, out of the corner of my eye, the gooseflesh visible over the islander’s upper arms, the way her pert nipples pucker in the quiet, still-balmy night air.
Chapter Twelve
I WAKE UP sticky with heat, sandwiched between Ren and Chien on the ground beside our extinguished campfire. I have no memory of how I got here; no memory of how the indigenous woman’s hand came to rest proprietarily on my hip, the full length of her pressed against my back, as Chien’s furry head nuzzles between my neck and chin.
What I do remember is the blissful fullness of my belly, humming and licking my fingers to catch the last scraps of our meal, my eyelids drooping with an exhausted breed of contentment.
My throat gurgles. Both the dog and the woman encircling me shoot up like Ferdinand the Bull stung by the proverbial bee.
It’s too funny. I can’t not laugh.
Ren hisses. There’s a real glint of horror, of out-and-out fear in her expression, that makes the giggles die away from my lips.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” I raise my shoulders apologetically, sitting up in a cross-legged position. “I’m sorry I laughed. But the way you two stood to attention—you have to admit, it was pretty hilarious.”
“Rigoler,” Ren breathes, her eyebrows drawn together. “Dimanche sick?”
“Sick?” I repeat, confusedly, a tad breathlessly as her hands start investigating: feeling my forehead, my neck, my collarbones, sweeping in under my jacket and— “Hey!”
