by Elna Holst
She shakes her head in disbelief. “Laugh—sleep. Long laugh—long sleep. Bad. Bad Dimanche. Ren—need—want—no long sleep. Lovely, lovely Dimanche.”
She takes my stump in her hand and brings it to her lips, and I tremble as she nips at it like an animal might—like the love bite of Chien—I feel it, but I don’t; my skin has only partly retained its sensitivity, its viability. Dr James takes notice, distantly, dispassionately, but I press her back into the amnesiac recesses of my broken mind, because I don’t want her, she’s too late, not now, not now when I have found—
“I’m falling for you,” I whisper, as the fire crackles, as Chien growls a little because we are moving; I am being moved. Ren scoops me up and on to her lap, and I’m welling up, my heart beating like a piston. “I didn’t think it would be possible. I’d never have thought.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I AM IN the jungle, not too far from the house, peeing, when L’Ours comes.
I am frightened out of my wits where I sit—exposed, vulnerable, piss spilling out of me, its scent, no doubt, catching the big brute’s attention; it is sniffing the ground, the trunks, the foliage, closing in, and I’m frozen with it; I forget all that Ren has taught me, all but my own instant panic.
L’Ours’s giant head comes up, and its beady eyes—black and shimmering like the oily backs of blowflies—ogles me, head-on. Without thought, my hand goes up to my neck—my necklace—my emergency whistle!
I put it to my lips, blowing feebly through clenched teeth, and L’Ours looks mildly affronted at the noise. It’s not loud enough, not loud enough by a long shot.
Filling my lungs with air, I blow with all my might, my chest collapsing with the effort, as everything happens at the same time: L’Ours scampers off, a rainbow of exotic avifauna alight from the trees, and Ren comes running—my personal tornado to the rescue, heeding my call—but.
But something goes wrong. She staggers and falls to her knees, a few feet away from me, and then Chien turns up behind her, livid, shaking a long black-and-yellow rope furiously between his maws.
“Stay where you are,” Dr James shouts to Ren who is staring unseeingly out into the jungle, and I—she, the doctor—rush over, putting all my weight on to Ren’s shoulder, pinning her in place, as Chien drops the dead snake to the ground.
“It bit you?” I ask, though it’s a mere formality—her left ankle is already swelling, angry red erupting under her skin.
She tries to turn around to see, but I shove her down on the ground, Dr James snapping with authority: “Don’t move!”
“Hurt.” Her voice carries a note of incredulity, amazement.
I bob my head in agreement. “Snake.” And then I break. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, fuck, fuck, fuck, this is all my—”
Chien pulls at her hair, like he always does when she’s down, and she lifts an arm to grab him and I roar, “No!”
They both jump. Ren’s arm falls again. Chien sits.
“Look, you have to stay still, okay? You have to stay completely still or you’ll fall asleep, Ren—you’ll fall asleep like Maman, and—goddam you that’s not going to happen on my watch. So—stay!” I look frenziedly from one to the other. “Good Chien, good Ren. Stay.”
Ren starts to nod, and I catch her head between my hand and my stump, growling, “Completely. Still.”
She blinks.
“Good.”
Now—pressure bandage. Dr James unceremoniously strips me of my skirt and tears it up in broad, functional swathes. This should be hard, this should take a long time, but somehow, for Dr James, it doesn’t. She is in the zone, eyes on the bite, counting the precious minutes until she can get it stabilised—the minutes during which the snake’s venom is allowed to flow unrestricted through my beloved’s lymphatic system.
A curious, high-pitched moaning echoes between the trees, within my skull, and I look up, but Chien and Ren look just the same, mouths shut, eyes bulging slightly as they await my next command.
I am the one making the sound. Dr James slaps me.
“Focus,” she grunts, as she gingerly lifts Ren’s foot into my lap, removing the debris from off the forest floor before she starts winding. Ren sucks in her breath.
“I’m sorry.” Dr James utilises my vocal chords to say, her breezy tone of voice foreign, brutally jarring with our present dire straits. “It’s got to be tight. It’s our best chance.”
She is speaking English. Ren has no way of understanding her, but she closes her eyes, her lips thinning to a line. I want to kiss her. I want to wrap her in my arms and howl out my anguish, curse this place, these circumstances, my own devastating impotence—but the doctor won’t let me; she has shut me out, relegated me to the waiting room at the back of her mind. She gets up, holding her hands up for Ren and Chien to stay put, and goes off in search of splints.
BY THE AID of Maman’s blanket, I drag Ren back the hundred or so yards to the house. She is drifting in and out of consciousness, heavy as a pile of stones, but darkness is encroaching on us, hard and fast, and I have no time to stop and rest, to cave in to weakness and wretchedness. We have spent all day in the jungle, stretched out on the ground, gazing up into the canopy.
Ren hasn’t spoken a syllable, malleable as a sick child—a—a dying patient—while I have kept up a steady stream of chatter, the life story of Dr Miranda James spilling from my lips helter-skelter, and Chien has kept watch, never stirring from our sides.
She’s an odd bird, this doctor. I still don’t know how she ended up here.
Using the last of my resources, I pull Ren’s lax body up and on to the bed, and as her eyelids open, I shake my head, pressing a dry kiss to her forehead, at last.
“No, love. Rest. Sleep a while. Not too long, mind you. Not—” I choke up, crumbling to my knees, and there is nothing either Dr James or anyone else can do about it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
OVER THE COURSE of the next week, I leave the house only to find food to keep all three of us alive: mangoes, coconuts, eggs that I pilfer out of birds’ nests, clams that I pluck from the mulchy, slimy floor of the riverbed. Chien stays with Ren on these occasions, though he grows restless if I am gone for too long—torn between which of his mistresses needs his protection the most. He makes me smile, faintly, when there is precious little to smile about.
Ren has caught an infection. She is melting with fever, wasting away before my very eyes; and I can do nothing, despite my years of training and practice, despite my recent reconnection with Miranda James, MD. At least, the venom doesn’t appear to be fatal. But so many other things are.
We have to get off this island.
By way of company, I continue reading Elodie’s diary, late into the night, because I can’t sleep—I don’t dare fall asleep. Elodie’s long-since resolved difficulties distract me; her escape through the ravaged country of Democratic Kampuchea with Hav is unparalleled, fantastical, heartbreaking. It shouldn’t have been possible.
And then she falls pregnant.
I gulp, and Chien’s head shoots up—even though, of course, I knew this would happen.
Ren stirs in her sleep. I put Maman’s book away and change the palm leaves I have spread underneath her, before washing her off with pre-boiled water and a rag of cloth: the last of my old skirt. I have torn up my dress jacket as well. It doesn’t matter—I don’t need it. I can use Elodie’s dress until… For as long as it takes to find a way out of here.
With a clean cloth, I dribble water into Ren’s mouth.
Maman and Hav are making plans to go to sea, in a tiny boat that they have traded for some pieces of jewellery that belonged to Grand-mère. It niggles at me. I have forgotten something. The last missing piece—the thing that will make the picture complete. I pick up the diary again and leaf past a few entries, until:
We are in the boat, Hav and I and my round belly, and all the motley necessaries we have gathered—mostly mine, as Hav, like a good Buddhist, thinks nothing of earthly possessions. Even
so, and because of his very earthly love for me, I suppose, he has indulged me in carrying the knick-knacks I sneaked out of our house in Kampot with. There’s my new calendar, sent to me by the aunt I will never know, this notebook, a few magazines (I don’t know why; when did I think I would have leisure to peruse Elle—to look at—and yet, they are a comfort to me; like fairy stories; like je-ne-sais-quoi), and the quilted throw which Mother made for me before—before all this.
We are in the boat, Hav and I, and the little one inside me, who has started moving, rocking like the sea. At first, I thought my menstruation had ceased because of malnutrition, as for most women in the area, or so I’ve heard through Hav. That he has not been reported, captured, sent away, or worse beggars belief—but there are still those who, underneath the enforced veneer of state atheism, cling to the Buddha in their hearts.
We don’t have much to eat, but we should reach some piece of land soon enough, some place where we can hide away quietly until I have given birth.
And then, I will be a mother. How odd that sounds!
The next paragraph is illegible—smudged by seawater, by tears? Perhaps both. I turn the page, a knot of foreboding in my stomach.
The storm has abated, and our little boat has been cast up on a foreign shore—an island, I think. We are alive, the baby inside me and I, but at what cost!
I cannot—
But I must! May the Holy Virgin forgive me, for the sake of my child, for the sake of whom I have—oh, Mother, Father, Claire! Oh, that I never—
Hav is dead. By all rights, by all reason, I should be too. Would that I were. Would that I had never fulfilled that demented dying wish of his, and yet—
His child shall live. His child, his son shall be called Ren, for so he conjured me, so he whispered to me, over and over, as our stocks of food were dwindling, as he forbore to eat in order that I and the baby might live long enough to reach land once more.
I tried to reason with him—I begged him that he would eat, would drink, that he wouldn’t leave me, leave us, that I couldn’t bear it—I never—
But that is nothing! For what he made me do, in the end, has turned me into a true outcast, unfit to ever walk among other human beings. I have tasted—
I have eaten (write it!)
I shall destroy the boat. I shall burn—
I shall—
The madness—the meat—the madness—the meat—the madness—the meat—the madness—the meat—the madness—the meat—the meat is being born—
She has his eyes. She suckles at my teat, healthy, plump (oh!), streaked in blood—she devours me. I shall—
I have thrown away the knife with which I cut his flesh, her umbilical cord. I should have kept it, for Ren’s sake, but I— From here on, all shall be for her. Already I have cost her her father, her history, our only means of transportation, the one useful tool— I thought I hated her, those first days, not even a son—nothing, nothing is as it should be— I would drown her in the creek, like a kitten, but she—
She gripped me. She holds me in the palm—
of her hand.
The rest of the pages are blank. But no—as I turn to the last page, benumbed, clammy, my brain shrinking, buzzing with horror, there’s a scrawl, right at the bottom of the sheet.
Forgive me, chérie. According to my calculations, which are fallible, to say the least, you are six years old, and I never showed you how to read this. But I have taught you all I know about survival, about living, living, living, until you have surpassed me, even at your tender age. This may be my last lucid hour—it is too late, too late!
I cannot wish it, any of it, undone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“YOU CAN’T FEEL anything when I touch you here, can you?” Dr James looks up from the uncovered leg of her patient, and I shake my head at her and rephrase the question in French.
Ren looks at me dully. There’s a sharp stench of sickness and, to be perfectly honest, faeces about her, even though I have been so careful about changing and washing, washing and changing—a natural-born nurse I am not.
It seems to bother her, and as I think back on all our interactions, I realise she is fastidious, my love. Who’d have thought? The illiterate but cleanly—pristine—feral child.
“You want a wash.”
I get up to put on water, fetch the rags, but she stops me; her fingers catch at her mother’s dress. My dress.
“Dimanche.”
The hairs at the back of my neck prickle: to hear her voice again, at last, to hear—my name. I flop to my knees by her head, bending over her, my doctoring forgotten with the relief, the unbridled joy of having her with me again.
She scrunches up her nose.
“Bath.”
I smile and kiss her cheek, and her hand cups the back of my head with something of its former strength returning as she steers my lips from her cheek to her mouth. She doesn’t exactly taste of roses and mint, but I don’t mind—I’m glad we are kissing, because otherwise I would be laughing from the release of tension, from the bliss of welcoming her back to the land of the living anew.
Gently, she pushes me away and tries to sit up.
“No, Ren, you don’t have to get up, I’ll bring—”
She grunts and sways a little.
“Bath,” she repeats, like a broken record. “Ren and Dimanche. Together to go. Big water, much dirt.”
I’m almost insulted. “You’re not that dirty, I’ve tried…”
She looks under her brows at me, and I follow the direction of her covert gaze, take in the layers of gunk and crusts on my own chest; even though I have kept my hands and lower arms meticulously clean. I chuckle softly. I can’t take offence—I’m minging, no two ways about it.
“I guess I’ve been distracted.”
She grips my chin.
“Good Dimanche. Brave Dimanche. Fight snake and win.”
My face flames. Dr James, of course, has heard it all before: grateful patients, zealous patients, patients ready to fall at her feet and pledge their renewed lease on life to her. But never like this. Never up close and personal. Never—as Dimanche.
“Actually, Chien killed the snake.”
A dog’s head pops up between us, on cue, his funny, ugly, charming snout fervid for acknowledgement.
“Good Chien,” Ren concedes, patting his pelt roughly the way that infallibly reduces him to puppyish squeals. She doesn’t take her eyes off me, however. Not for an instant. Not to save her life.
THE WATER ISN’T exactly cold—it never is. Nervously, I watch Ren bob on her back, floating like a corpse in the moonlight. Her bitemarks have healed, her body has fought back the infection, but still: it gives me pause to see her like this. These mortal limbs which, up until a few hours ago, when she sat up and demanded a bath and food—I switched the order of her demands; it was all I could do; the woman has a will of iron, thank the powers that be—I had the sole care of. It amazes me, and chills me, to see them splayed out like this, in eerie monochrome. I swim over and catch her foot, needing to check, to see. She kicks out at me playfully.
“Hey!”
I snigger and splash a feeble amount of water her way, and then her head is under the surface, and I cry out—as her arms close about my waist, pulling me under and into a tight, breathtaking, underwater embrace.
She rubs against me like a dolphin, bubbles of air dribbling from out her nostrils. We are like shadows down here, and it’s too strenuous, not at all what we should be doing. I shake my head vehemently, pushing at her with my stump, even as my legs wrap around her hips. She cocks her head and, with fishlike ease, she brings us back up to the surface, both of us gasping, for a few moments, regaining our breaths.
“Touch?”
Her mouth is at my neck, just at my jawline, and the monosyllable sends a shock of warmth through my system. My thighs tighten about her. I try to protest, weakly, so weakly it comes out as a breathy sigh: “You’re not well yet, Ren. We shouldn’t…”
&
nbsp; Her hands clamp around my bum, pulling me up and tilting me, until the slickness of my sex rubs against her, and I moan.
She relaxes her hold. “Touch?”
“Fuck.” My hair is floating around me. It’s grown long—longer than Miranda James was ever known to wear it. I stare helplessly at my cocky patient-turned-lover, and incline my head, admitting defeat. “If you… If you think you have the energy. Touch. Please.”
She pulls me up until my torso is out of the water, my legs around her midriff, and my wet left breast in her mouth, her sucking hard, swift, brutal, and exactly what I need.
I moan again and she keeps rubbing, sucking, lifting and tilting, until I’ve lost all sense of time and space and direction, until I am all body parts and water and moon.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“WE HAVE TO go, Ren. We have to get out of here.”
She has healed extraordinarily well. Seated across from me, there’s not a trace of her recent infirmity apparent; she looks only a little tired, a little wan. I have been talking non-stop for the last hour: about Maman, about prion diseases and psychological trauma, about the world, about Dr James.
I don’t know how much of it she has taken in. She seems to have got the gist of it. I hope.
“Mi–randa,” she essays, and I nod my encouragement.
“Yes, that’s me.”
She looks lost. She looks more lost than I have ever seen her, and I don’t know: can she even imagine…?
She takes my hand and brings it to her lips, her kiss the touch of a feather in my palm.
“Lovely Dimanche.”
I shiver. I shiver but stand firm.
WE BURY MAMAN where she sits. It seems like sacrilege to remove her after so long. My heart aches afresh for Elodie and her strange companions in the grave: the bones of a long-dead female dog, and the decaying left hand that was once a part of me. It’s an all-and-sundry collection. Flotsam and jetsam. Lost and Found.
