Laurie stooped to wash her feet and shins, and between her buttocks and thighs he saw the downy line of her vulva. He looked away, at the wall, then up through the arrowslit at the dizzying movements of the clouds, and thought of the satellites somewhere beyond, the great wings shining against the moon…But he could still feel his penis hardening, pressing painfully against the rough blankets, and his heart racing.
He heard the drip and sigh of water as Laurie stepped out from the tub, then the pat of her wet footsteps as she crossed the hilly floor. The seal hissed when she opened her bag, which lay on her pallet near the far wall. There followed many wing-beats of silence. The night seemed to turn and race. He almost expected to feel the air shifting, the room changing, to see the sky start to tumble and blur, the lights of the passing vehicles to fan across the walls. Hal to be there beside him. Then the silence broke. Again, Laurie’s footsteps: the scuff of her bare feet, growing louder as she came towards him.
He turned and looked up. She stood over his pallet. Her shoulders were sloped, and in the darkness her face was blank, without expectation, staring through him. He sat up a little and pulled back the scratchy sheets. In silence, she stooped and rolled in beside him, still cold and a little wet, smelling of the disinfectant. And she was shivering—or perhaps it was him. Perhaps they were both shivering.
She put her arms around him. Across his shoulder and down to the small of his back, the tips of her fingers rested on the scar. He put his own right arm around her, and saw the spinning quaternary lights in his watch gleaming on the moisture that still beaded her shoulder. But his left arm didn’t seem to belong quite anywhere, pinned awkwardly between them. He’d forgotten how strange it was, to hold someone else’s body against your own.
He was observing himself, wondering where all this would lead, would end. Faint on her breath was the nutty odor of the biscuits they’d eaten back at the van. And she smelled warm and womanly too, clean and human, yet misty and so very different, of the sea, as Borderers always smelled, even when they lived in the Zone and didn’t eat kelp. He was lying with his hips held a little away from her, conscious of the pressure of his erection. But then she drew in and pressed her hand harder against his back, pulling him closer, settling the wings of her hips against his, and in this strange and sudden contact he imagined his erection fading, could even feel the soft, apologetic space it would leave between them. He saw how she would roll back from him and away across the dark room. Morning would come, and the moment would be gone, easily forgotten.
But no. He closed his eyes and felt her breath and the sharing of their skin. She shifted a little, and there was the soft friction of her belly against him. Involuntarily, he pressed too, and she leaned her head to his from the unfocused dark and opened her lips against his mouth. He reached to touch her wet hair, the nape of her neck, traced the smoothly ridged line of her back and buttocks. As he did so, her breath grew in his throat and her mouth widened and she pressed harder against him. It seemed so natural now. He knew, too, as she raised and lifted her leg a little and his hand slid around and his fingers explored and parted the opening of her vulva that this moment would send cracks and ripples through his life. But it felt too sweet and plain and natural to be anything more than what it was: the joining of two people.
Their mouths popped apart. She rolled forward and eased herself higher up against him, offering her breasts. He took a nipple into his mouth, and her hand went around his penis and a finger traced a line and he wondered for a moment if he wasn’t about to come.
But no. She settled back, drawing away more of the stiff blankets, lying with her legs raised and parted. He clambered around her knee and eased himself over her. She guided him in, and he pushed gently deeper, in no hurry now, looking down at her in the ribbon of arrowslit light as her throat arched and her eyelids quivered and the generator sounded somewhere even though there were no lights here and the south wind blew towards the Endless City. There was the sound, too, as he sunk and pressed deeper and their hips rolled, of soft slow moaning in her throat. A singing, almost. The sound Laurie Kalmar made in her dreams. The sound she made to the net.
She was far away now. Pushing deep with him. He could feel that his own moment was approaching too. The air shimmered. A series of shocks, jolts, close to pain. Yes. And even now. Far more than he’d expected. He looked down at Laurie. She’d ceased to push, was smiling. Had she come too? He hoped so. But he was no expert, he was Father John, a priest; there was no way of his telling. She squeezed his penis in farewell as he diminished inside her. He lay back, grabbing the edge of the sheet, pulling it over them.
Laurie turned over and pressed herself against him with her chin on his shoulder, her knee drawn over his thigh. He could feel her breathing, and knew from the pressure of her face against his neck that she was smiling. And how could this ever be wrong? The arguments and recriminations that he’d expected seemed reluctant to stir. No, you couldn’t give yourself to everyone, equally. Not all the time…
“What made you decide?” he asked.
“When? Just now…?”
“I mean when you saw me in Trinity Gardens after the rain. What made you come over?”
“You looked lost,” she said.
He closed his eyes. Somewhere in the hills outside the town, a bird or animal was screeching. Then the wind. He could feel it on his face, coming with the night through the arrowslit, cooling his sweat. Hot liquid was somehow filling his eyes. He felt a tear trickle down his cheek, meeting Laurie’s mouth. He felt her tongue lick it away. And why was he crying? And what was that sound? Again, it was just the wind. The wind.
FEELING SLEEPLESS, HAPPY, PUZZLED, John collected his belongings in the morning gray of their many-bedded room. Laurie had already straightened the blankets of the pallet where they’d lain—as if it mattered, and the people wouldn’t burn everything. Now her head was stooped while she reordered the contents of her bag, the fall of her hair parting to show the back of her neck and a pale line of scalp.
“Shouldn’t we check about the koiyl market here?” she said, fishing for a tissue and then blowing her nose.
He shook his head. After last night he wanted to move on quickly. “The leaf hasn’t been harvested yet. Who would there be to talk to?”
“As you say.” Laurie walked over to him. She put her arms across his shoulders and looked up at him. Her scent was dark, real, sweet. He could feel the air from the arrowslit brushing his hands as he placed them on her warm hips. He could feel the whole planet revolving.
“You didn’t sleep much,” she said, “did you? I mean, after we had…” She paused, careful. “After making love.”
“I just liked watching you.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back at him with her green eyes. Then she kissed him.
Just watching you. Was this, he wondered, the first lie?
It was not like any other morning as they carried their bags down through Tiir’s tumbling, hay-scented streets to the van; it was brighter, the wind seemed sharper, with Laurie walking beside him. And as she hummed, and her eyes followed a kitten in a handcart, and she spoke to the guard at the walled gate and jumped the low stone wall of the field where the van was parked, he felt the tug of part of him moving with her.
After an hour of rattling and banging along the ill-made road, Laurie stopped the van for him to take over the driving. Later, he stopped for her. The rhythm of the journey began. Black dead trees surrounded them, and the reek of old fires. The burnt-out forest seemed endless, but they pushed on, neither of them wanting to spend the night in this place. Finally the trees faded to ashen scrub, and John and Laurie rejoined the bigger highway where the trucks and the grainy lights of the phosphate mines streamed in the distance. Reaching Sadiir after dark, they were stared at and followed by the same children, shown the same room in the same and only hotel by the same hotelkeeper.
A large and amazingly ugly insect scuttled into the wall when John and Laurie pushed the mattresses together. Bu
t there was an appealing domesticity about rearranging this filthy room. Here, far from anything, he almost wanted people to know. And the bed-making process was arousing, too. Laurie noticed and laughed. He hugged her, and the room seemed to brighten.
After they made love and all the lights went off, he lay tracing his tongue from the tip of her left breast to her shoulder, tasting her sweat and the charcoal of the forest. Finally she rolled away from him and padded out of the room and along the corridor to wash herself. He sat up and shook a few dead bugs off the sheets, hoping that this time his own phylum-specific secretions would be enough protection for both of them. This truly was a different life, a different way of seeing. Then she came back and lay beside him, propped on one elbow, smelling of soap.
“You’re not entirely new to this,” she said.
“There were times before I was a priest. A girl called Jan-is…” He frowned, unable to think of her last name. “She had a sense of the ridiculous, a sense of humor. It made up, I suppose, for what I didn’t have myself. She was just someone I knew. We had the same friends and went to the same parties and dances. She’d look at me, and we’d share a joke at the stupidity of it all, which no one else saw. We’d be sniggering, and everyone would wonder why…”
He smiled, gazing up. Feeling, even now in this distant room, a ticklish, silvery bubble of mirth ready to rise and break inside him. “So we used to dance together, and of course people started thinking of us as a pair. And we began to kiss outside in the dusk the way the other kids did.” He paused. This was at the same time—it had to be—that he was seeing Father Gulvenny at the church, debating the meaning of existence, looking for the fire within. Also the time when he lost hope that Hal would ever recover. He wondered how it was that your life became arranged into these fragments. “I’d go around to her house in the evenings. We’d walk out down the drive holding hands, in our best clothes. I don’t know…” he said, trying hard to remember those pastel evenings, Janis with her long chin and that gleam in her eye. But, along with her last name, so much had slipped from his memory.
“You made love with her?”
“Yes, but it was never serious. The joke was that we probably had more fun, physically, than the others who were so fumbling and intense, so ashamed to say what they wanted out of fear they might lose the person they wanted to do it with…” He smiled. “But I only realized that much later on, when I had to listen to people’s problems as a priest. Janis and I drifted apart. We made love, but we were never really lovers. There wasn’t much to keep us together.”
“And Hal? Was he in a coma then, when you were seeing Janis?”
“Hal was pretty much then as he is now.” John took a breath, feeling the tensions of his flesh where it touched Laurie’s, the cramp that was coming into his muscles, the itch of some insect dying in the sweat that had pooled beneath his spine.
“Did he mean to kill himself?”
“I don’t know.”
“If not suicide, what would you call it?”
“An accident—that’s what we always called it. Hal’s still alive, and it was an accident. No one’s ever thought of a better word. My mother’s holding on, still hoping—and hope can become a kind of addiction. She’s like me, I suppose. She still wants to know why…”
“Perhaps he just gave up.”
“But if someone like Hal gives up,” John said, “how are the rest of us supposed to keep going?”
THE FIRST MORNING BACK, he was up early. Bella gave him breakfast before Felipe came down, and he had time to cycle up to Santa Cristina before going to the clinic. There was no service until that evening, but he was grateful for the cool transparency, beneath a sky already glowing like hot iron, of the air inside the decrepit church. It smelled faintly of the incense that Felipe had used in the few services that he had given, clanking up here in his cart and on his leghelpers, while John was away. And the Inmaculada, John saw, had gained a few new ornaments in his absence. He played the cards that had been left in the tray, refraining, as he always did, from using the translat until he tried to decipher the words himself. But either way, they made little sense to him.
He arrived at the clinic to find a queue stretching around the block. Nuru, his feet up on the desk in the backroom, wore a new white coat and an air of importance.
“Fatoo find the mountains?” he asked.
John, already feeling tired and hot, disliked Nuru’s newly proprietary attitude to his desk, and the reek of disinfectant had begun to sting his eyes. “Let’s just see how you managed, shall we?”
Nuru raised his hands to shrug, then pointed at the doctor’s screen, which was already on. He remained seated at the desk and watched as John scrolled through new records that detailed a treatment rate that was almost double anything he’d ever achieved.
He was out of the church quickly after Mass that evening and cycling down Corpus Vali in oddly mercurial light. Kassi Moss hadn’t been in her usual spot midway back in the pews, and although he had no pickups or deliveries to make, he felt vaguely worried about her. Days in the Endless City were longer now. Places he was used to seeing only in darkness were exposed in flickering light. And the heat was everywhere, pushed and sucked by the wind, as if the air too was trying to settle somewhere in the coolness that never came. He saw a woman’s face in the crowd that had gathered around an ice seller. She was jostled by those near her, and the drifting smoke revealed the brown flesh of a narrow cheekbone, strands of dark hair tucked behind one ear. She sensed his gaze, turned and looked at him, and quickly made the sign against the evil eye. She was older, thinner, not Laurie. A beggar called to him as he cycled past. But today he had no money. He’d forgotten his pouch—his translat too, he now realized, which lay with the pouch on the rail by the Inmaculada; a new and unplanned addition to the tributes to Our Lady. And the cassock he was wearing, in this heat, was absurd. He should have gone back to the presbytery after Mass and changed.
Mokifa now seemed just another part of the sprawl. The only difference he could see amid the buildings beyond the shock-wire was that the windows were closed. He imagined the people sheltering inside from the heat, clustered around coolers and purifiers. He dismounted in front of the Cresta Motel and walked under the archway into the shadow of the courtyard’s walls, picking his way between bags of soiled laundry and rubbish, brushing away the flies that, too sluggish to rise into the air, crawled over his cassock.
As always, Kassi’s office was open. But, pushing through the hot beads of the curtain, blinking in the windowless halogen-lit room, he saw that another woman was sitting at Kassi’s desk. She was youngish, one of Kassi’s helpers, her face scarred by the burrowings of the skin parasite for which she’d been treated here. John had seen her wandering in the background on his visits, emptying buckets and bundling up sheets as Kassi showed him from patient to patient along the dimming corridors and asked if it was all right to bring an end. But he and the woman had never spoken, and now she stared at him, her hands pressed to her narrow chest as if she’d never seen him or any other European before.
He reached to his belt and touched the space where the translat should have been.
“Where’s Kassi?”
The woman shook her head.
He pointed. “Is she upstairs in the wards?”
The woman moved her lips. He waited while she swallowed. “Kassi vendu,” she said eventually.
Vendu? Gone—going? He wasn’t sure. It was one of those context-dependent words.
“So she’s not here?”
The woman shook her head.
John rubbed his gloved fingertips together, plastic on plastic with the sodden flesh trapped beneath, as he looked around at the tiny office. It seemed oddly empty without Kassi, and the halogen lamp threw everything out of proportion, made holes of the shadows. The cheap plastic Christ was on the wall above the desk, a clear presence in the darkness and the stink.
He said gonenanh and left. A family of rats watched him from a bro
ken outflow in the courtyard, their paws delicately raised as they picked at something long and pale. Irritated, he walked towards them. After a moment of hesitation, they retreated.
Avoiding the temptation of shortcuts, he cycled back along Corpus Vali, then across the Plaza El-Halili to the Cruz de Marcenado. There was no discernible smoke rising from Martínez’s gabled house, and light glowed from only one of the top windows. A wounded caroni bird disentangled itself from an alleyway and, mewing, dragged itself across the street as John knocked at the door. He waited.
When the door finally swung open, the sour gust of ill-smelling air and Kailu’s face told him that Martínez was worse. John felt again for his forgotten translat, unable to remember whether Kailu spoke any European.
“How is he—ice uhe?”
With an odd, quick motion, Kailu shook her head.
“Look, if I…”
He made to step inside, but her face twisted. She spat at him.
“Inutel mal! Comma…”
He stumbled back as she lunged forward, her hands clawing for his silver eyes. She was yelling in Borderer, her voice clamoring down the hot dark street where the wounded caroni bird was still mewing, trailing blood in the dust. Shutters swung open, figures stood in doorways. Kailu was saying, Fatoo-baraka, you’re killing him, you’ve made him ill! She lunged again. It was an awkward dance, and he sensed that she didn’t quite have the final twist of whatever it took to actually touch him. Eventually a neighbor emerged, gripped her shoulders, muttered crooning words, and drew her away.
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