by Elna Holst
Ren glances over her shoulder at the body in the corner. I had almost forgotten about it. The things you get used to!
“Maman sleep. Ren draw alone.”
Sorrow—grief—gut-wrenching despair for the little girl left with her dead mother on an uninhabited island slams into me like a physical blow. How young was she? How long had they been here? How old is she now?
All these questions, superimposed over my own questions, my own loss, still fresh, still disorienting, and I don’t know what to do to stop this nightmare—except. Except here we are.
“I could read out loud to you. This is your history, Ren. We could find out—maybe we could find out how you and Maman came to be here. We could retrace your steps—oh! Would you like that?”
She looks at me sluggishly, and I know in my excitement I have used too many words, too fast.
“Dimanche like little friend Maman?”
I nod fervently. “Yes, it tells the story of—”
She stands up and gives me a weak smile. “Ren like story. For bedtime. Dimanche come find food?”
“But…” I fall silent. For her, this is practically verbose. She is making an effort. And she’s right—the diary has been lying abandoned for (twenty? thirty? forty…?) years. It’s not likely to contain the secret and up-to-date timetable for the ferry off No-Name Island. At best, it’s a bedtime story. After we have seen to our daily sustenance.
I take her hand and let myself be pulled off the mattress. “Thank you.” I smile shakily. “I’d love to come.”
Chapter Eighteen
I’D LOVE TO come. Obviously, I did not think this through. I had envisioned us scuttling out to stock up on coconuts and fruit, quickly returning to the warmth of the fire inside. I had not seen us standing in a muddy stream for hours, pelted by the driving rain, as Ren looks to be sieving through the water for fish.
Every so often, she throws one over to me, and I am supposed to catch it and put it in a handwoven, basket-like thing, without it slipping through my fingers, as I stand knee-deep in the wet. My teeth are chattering. My stump is chafed raw against the basket. This is not going well.
“Ren,” I gripe, as I’ve dropped yet another of her catch back into the water, my cheeks flaming with equal parts guilt and exasperation. “We’ll catch our death out here. It’s useless, I’m—I’m not much help. Maybe I could, you know, cook instead?”
At first, I think she is just ignoring me. I can’t see very far through the rain. Then a cold panic seizes me at the thought of being left out here on my own, and I am about to start hollering, predators be damned, when two arms close about me from behind. I sag against her, too relieved to speak.
“Good Dimanche,” she trills in my ear. “Much fish. Good catch.”
I lean my head back to gaze up at her, wondering if she’s lost her mind. She is rubbing my belly through the drenched material of my clothing, and even though I could have sworn I was too cold to heat up again any time soon, a seed of warmth unfurls through my abdomen.
“Look,” she says encouragingly, and I follow her example and peer into the basket. It’s more than three-quarters full.
“Oh!” I look up at her and back at the contents of the basket in astonishment. “I don’t… How did that happen?”
Somehow, she has grasped the burden out of my hold and slipped an arm about my waist. Without further ado, she leads me up and out of the creek, and I’m too worn out to protest, too confused, until at the edge of my field of vision, I spot Chien rising up on his hind legs on the other side of us and releasing another fat, white-bellied fish into the basket.
I stop in my tracks.
“You—you tricked me!”
Ren grins and tightens her grip around me as we make our way through the mud, and it registers with me that for the first time there’s a real rapport between us, an actual, smooth interchange, as she shakes her head and says, “Chien good fisherman also. All work together. All eat sleep good.”
THE NEXT FEW hours we spend in companionable silence, cleaning and deboning our catch, flattening them and tying them up on a wooden frame to smoke and dry by the fire. I am impressed by Ren’s economy, her savoir-faire; she appreciates my skill with the penknife. Chien just loves us—simply, for no reason, or because we are fellow creatures who provide a place of warmth and food and shelter from the elements. He licks my fishy fingers, and at the back of my largely defunct professional mind I know I should be worrying about contamination, about germs. His happy, wagging tail makes it impossible, though. I throw my arms around him, and again, there’s a sudden tension, my skin pricking at the feeling of being watched. I turn my head to peek at my savage saviour. Her eyes, in the dusky twilight of the hut, are pitch-black.
“Where did Chien come from?”
She bobs her head tersely. “Good Chien. Good Dimanche.” She speaks through gritted teeth, as though she is trying to convince herself and making a miserable job of it.
I give her a small smile. “You don’t have to be jealous of Chien. I could hug you too. I mean, if you want me to…” My voice trails off. I would love to hug her—it’s just, I don’t entirely trust myself to let it stop there, and—and she’s such an innocent. A virgin on virgin land. The whole setting throws my moral compass off course.
“Dimanche…hug?” She looks at me earnestly, expectantly. There’s really only one thing to do.
Giving Chien a final pat and signing to him to stay put, I rise from my cross-legged position and come around to Ren’s side of the fire. She holds her arms out to me.
“Oh! You little—you do know what a hug is!” I scold, but I can’t stop myself; I kneel and wrap my arms around her, even as her eyes sparkle with mirth.
“Love hugs,” she mumbles, and I hold her tighter, pressing into her, my arms a vice around her shoulders. She strokes my back, her hands coming down to envelop my behind, lifting me up and into her, until I’m straddling her. I stop breathing.
“Ren, I—”
Her expression is keen, intense; her mouth open. I close my eyes as a judder of want runs through me. Her palm skims my cheek.
“Lovely,” she says thickly, and her hand continues down my neck, coming to a rest on my shoulder, her thumb caressing the hollow between my collarbones.
I swear rudely in English. Then, switching to French, my voice brittle to the touch, I announce: “I think the stew’s ready. We had better eat.”
Chapter Nineteen
I AM SWOLLEN with longing, continually sopping, like the ground, the walls, everything outside. Ren’s amorous advances increase by the day, by the hour, and it takes all of my last vestiges of self-control to rebuff her, lightly, good-humouredly, after what I have decided constitutes an appropriate amount of time for a friendly embrace.
At night, as soon as I hear her drowsing in her hammock, I take the brunt off the day’s accumulated tension. It doesn’t take much; I am ripe for the picking. I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.
But there is Elodie’s story to distract us. As I read her mother’s words out to her, Ren stays quiet, absorbed, her expression dark as I relate how time ran out for the few foreign families of Kampot Province, and how her grandparents and aunt were deported across the border to Thailand, while Elodie—Maman—escaped in the night with the monk, Hav. Short, choppy, maddeningly broken-off notes portray their flight through the jungle, the real-life horror shows enacted in the peasant villages they passed—their survival against all conceivable odds.
“Bad people,” Ren’s forehead furrows. Her vocabulary is growing daily, although to call her loquacious would be a stretch. No, she’s more of a hands-on woman. I hide my burning face. “Why?”
I don’t even know where to begin. “People… It’s complicated, you know? Living together… It’s hard.”
I am woefully unequipped to explain the last forty years of political upheavals in Cambodia. Or anywhere.
She takes my hand and touches my knuckles to her lips. Yes, she has disc
overed—or rediscovered—kissing. I assume I have Maman to thank for that.
“No hard,” she opines. I have to smile despite myself.
“It’s different when there’s a lot of people. Though I assure you, it can be hard even with just the two.”
She shakes her head in bemusement. “Silly people. Good be friends.”
“I can’t argue with that.” I close the book and place it back under the mattress. It has become a ritual. “Bed?”
Ren rolls her eyes and then looks up furtively at me. “Cuddle?”
Startled, I open my mouth and close it again. She’s never used that expression before.
“Ren,” I say, working to keep my voice level. “I am not Maman. It’s—between two adults, it’s—not the same.”
“What be?”
“It just isn’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t be Maman for you. I am sorry, Ren.”
She hangs her head. “Want no Maman.” She waves her hand towards the Dark Corner. “Have Maman. Want Dimanche.”
I groan. She rises to her feet and moves away from me then, and all at once my arguments, my clever, tortuous arguments, seem null and void; I only know she is tugging at my heartstrings, this strange, wonderful, one-of-a-kind person, this survivor of survivors, who has wrapped her large, gentle hands around my very soul.
“Wait.”
She turns to look at me. I take a deep breath.
“I want you too.”
MY NIPPLES ARE hard as pips, pushing and pulsing against the threaded fabric of Maman’s quilt. I have been dreaming of water, of mermaids, of being carried along on caressing waves—all completely out of character. I was never one to have surreal, fanciful dreams, but as I surface to consciousness, I become aware it wasn’t quite a dream. Ren, my very own piece of fantasy made real, is cradling me in her arms, her body aligned and fitted around mine like the missing part of a puzzle. Her hand moves from my hip and across the planes of my stomach, up to the start of my sternum—my xiphoid process, I think, mechanically. I let out a patchy sigh.
She stops, and her lips are warm and slightly moist against the nape of my neck, as if she just wetted them. Barely above a whisper, she mouths against me, my skin tingling at the intimacy of it: “Touch?”
I nod, my throat too thick to speak, and sigh again as her hand slides up to cup my breast. Warmth blossoms through me; a dull yearning settles in my groin. Ren rubs her thumb around the taut pucker of my areolae, and I let out a spontaneous hiss.
“Good?”
Her tone of voice is jubilant, enraptured—but there’s something else, the slightest knowing, teasing quality that sets me aflame—embarrassed, relieved.
Of course. She’s a forty-something woman on an uninhabited island. She has had plenty of time to explore the ins and outs of the female body.
Not such an innocent, for all that.
“Mm,” I agree, relaxing against her, giving myself over to the pleasure of her hands. Of course, of course.
Ren strokes her coarse palms along the length of me, lifting and coaxing me, emitting guttural sounds of approval and appreciation that have me teetering on the edge, eddies of liquid heat pooling in my limbs, my mind unravelling.
She flattens herself against me, the dewy dampness of her bush pressing into me, and it’s all I can do not to cry out with the thrill of it; I press my stump against my mouth and bite into it, hard.
Without hesitation, her hands find their way to the throbbing source of my plight; in an instant, she has pushed inside my welcoming slit. The fingers of her left hand flutter over my clitoris, but it isn’t strictly necessary; I am already coming, convulsing around her, hard and heavy as a steam engine, a freighter ship. A bloody monsoon.
Ren grunts and bucks against me. My orgasm has pleased her. Such a precious, precious—in the flow of it, I turn in her arms and pull her to me, kissing her softly, even as my hand trails down her frame.
“Come with me,” I lilt against her lips, and although she can’t possibly parse the sentence, she opens up to me instinctively, helping my hand on the way. She is lush and ready, her sex practically sucking me into place. As I fuck her, she keeps her eyes trained on me, an expression of absolute wonder on her; she is gripping my sides, muttering my name—yes—like a prayer: “Dimanche, Dimanche.”
I blink away tears, of what kind, I can’t say: ecstasy, passion, mourning, happiness? Her release is silent but powerful, a squeezing tug at me that has me gasping and laughing with euphoria.
“Oh, love,” I breathe, encircling her with my handless arm, refusing, for the present, to pull out of her. “Oh, beautiful, wonderful. Yes.”
Chapter Twenty
THE SECOND TIME I awake, my ears are ringing with silence. I can’t place it at first—can’t place myself in relation to it; but I am in bed, apparently, everything around me reeking with the sweet, sticky odours of love.
First flush. I smile wistfully, contentedly, stretching up my arms over my head; I can’t remember (no shit) the last time I was in the throes of having a new lover.
The unlikeliest of new lovers. I grin and turn to Ren.
Except I don’t. I bounce up straight, clutching at the cover. She’s not there.
“Ren?” I turn frantically to the hammock—no—the cooking corner—no, no. No Ren, no Chien.
With a growing, muddled anxiety, I pull on my skirt and dress jacket, stiff and a tad musty from disuse.
Still, my ears are ringing. I sob and bite my cheek in mingled fear and irritation.
“Buckle up, buttercup. Fuck’s sake, get a grip.”
Shoving my hair behind my ears, I skulk up to the door opening, my eyes squinting at the light. So much light. It’s—
“No rain.”
She is at my side, lifting me up, skipping from her right leg to her left. Pure, unadulterated happiness overcomes me; I throw my arms about her neck, transported—the sun, the blessed, blessed sun is out. Ren is placing little tickling kisses along the rim of my ear, and Chien is snorting and yipping, circling us, unsure of what we are doing but determined to be part of it.
I laugh. I tip back my head and laugh like a fool, because it’s so much, too much—such unexpected bliss.
Ren stiffens. Her lips halt their exploration, her hold on me slackens, for just a moment, and then closes firm; I am off my feet abruptly, being carried inside, and I stop laughing, confused, blinking with the sudden return of dusk inside the cabin.
“What’s happen—” She drops me on the bed, and I gaze up at her, unnerved, because it’s not a surfeit of passion that has prompted her actions—no, it’s…fear?
She sinks to her knees, a low keening coming out of her, as she puts her head to my chest, her ear to my heart. I put my arm around her, as well as I can in this position, my smooth, fully healed stump awkwardly patting her hair. Even through the rough silk of my dress jacket, I can feel her tears.
“Ren—oh, Ren, what’s the matter?” I have to bite my tongue not to carry on, not to inundate her with my questions, my worry, my vicarious pain.
The keening goes on, her hands travelling up and down my body, clasping my flesh, rumpling my clothes, and—God help me!—I hear my own breathing become erratic, need gathering and rippling inside me, wherever her desperate hands grab and pinch.
She hears it too. She hears it, and in a beat, a breath, the blink of an eye, she is upon me, pushing up my skirt, her expression fervent, inflamed, despite her tears falling, dribbling down her round cheeks and chin and splashing on to me, and in the deranged, disjointed intensity of the moment, I think: We make our own rain.
I’m wet for her. Of course, I am. Even so, she pauses, the calloused pads of her fingers against my aching sex, her brows knitted together, trying to formulate the question, the password we have agreed on, and I make a weird croaking sound, drawing her to me, my head nodding yes, yes, yes.
She bites into my shoulder as she enters me and I arch my back to meet her, take her, deeper—yes.
One of us is s
obbing—I don’t know; both of us are making strange, gravelly noises, like beasts, like not-quite-humans or larger-thans. I run the edgy, uneven nails of my remaining hand over the naked skin of her back, and she responds in kind, driving into me, the flat of her palm slamming wetly against me, her tears falling, her teeth close to drawing blood. And somewhere, somehow, I am hazily aware that in another life, another time, I would be shocked, sickened—the doctor, the fastidious physician with her vinyl gloves, her heels clicking as she heads down the corridor from her office, click clock, click clock. “It’s nearly midnight, Dr James—don’t you have anywhere else to be?” My shift…ended…
The force of my orgasm makes us both howl like rabid dogs, like abandoned children—pain and exultation, terror and ecstatic enjoyment—I can’t tell. I can’t…just that I am Dimanche, here, now. I am not Dr James.
I cling wildly to Ren and she closes her arms around me, repeating the same monotone message, over and over, until at last I hear. “No sleep. No sleep.”
“TELL ME.”
We are sitting by the fire after our tea, huddled together, Chien resting his chin on Ren’s knee, his hindquarters pressed up against me. She is kneading the small of my back, her hand under my jacket, drawing lazy circles around the fused vertebrae of my sacrum. It feels so good, so soothing, I would purr if I could; instead, I drag my fingers through Chien’s shaggy coat, paying it forward.
Ren nods slowly. She knows—of course she knows—what I am referring to; she’s anything but dim-witted. She rubs her lower lip against her upper teeth.
“Maman,” she says finally, the licks and sparks of the fire reflected in her eyes. “Maman laugh—” She slaps her thigh and nods towards Maman’s corner. “—sleep.”
“First laugh?” I put my hand on her right thigh. “Then sleep?” I place it on her left.
Her head falls forward. Her shoulders hunch.
“Oh, Ren,” I touch her face, her jaw, her chin, until she looks up at me again. “Maman didn’t d— She didn’t fall asleep from laughing. I don’t know why, but I can promise you, it wasn’t from laughing. It’s a good thing when people laugh.”
