by Sarah Perry
A month after graduating—modest library of German set texts consigned to an attic, their pages curling in the damp—she had encountered an advert in a student newspaper: Assistant Aid Worker sought, Quezon Aid Foundation, Manila. Experience of teaching languages desirable, twelve months fixed-term contract, apply online. Manila? How utterly unsuited she was to bolting across the globe on a whim! And yet (there was that familiar, seething, furtive sensation; the notion, never confessed to anyone, that she alone was being watched by a loving and attentive eye)—might she? That night she studied a map of the Philippines, with its look of a donkey’s head composed of many small pieces; looked up its national language, with its composition of Spanish and native dialect. It seemed to her impossibly charming to find that one’s senior by so much as a fortnight should be addressed as Kuya or Ate: elder brother, elder sister. The nape of her neck pricked. She felt herself like a dumb-seeming but restless sheep which had suddenly spied a gap in the hedge.
What, then, had she expected—some indolent tropical city, growing out of the stones of the Spanish colonies: palms in the garden, unfamiliar spices, men for whom her weak-tea English face was compelling? What she discovered was this: that a foreign country is both more foreign and more familiar than the traveler imagines. It was foreign, but in ways for which daydreaming in her Essex bedroom could never have prepared her: the barefoot child selling mango dipped in salt from a high chair on the street with a boil on his scalp the size of a calamansi lime, the mere fact of the heat, the shopping malls kept cool to allow the wealthy to wear their furs, the shanty towns that had a strong scent of washing powder: these things left her reeling. But in the particulars it was somehow very ordinary. The traffic was heavier in the mornings, and pop songs drifted up from karaoke machines in the shanty towns; teenage girls in plaid school skirts sat laughing on walls eating chips, and the photocopier in the charity’s office jammed most often when deadlines were most pressing. It depressed Helen, who felt it proved beyond doubt that she herself was so ordinary, so circumscribed by appearance and parentage, that—even so far from home a new moon tilted at an odd angle—her life could never be anything but narrow.
Scratching the bite on her arm, and thinking nothing of it, she left her flat. Above her on a balcony her neighbor grated coconut into a plastic bowl and sang along to the radio. Helen attempted her Tagalog—“Magandang umaga Ate! Kamusta na po ang anak nila?—Good morning! How is your son?”—and waited, smiling, for the lengthy response, then struck out for Aurora Boulevard. She taught English to the nineteen girls that lived in the Q.A.F.’s well-appointed home, and found her duties easy. She knew herself to be looked on with faint pity (sometimes they pinched her cheeks in fondness, and found them disappointingly thin) but also with ardent affection. They admired the earrings she wore, and her long cotton skirts; they tried to curl her hair, and praised her if she sang.
That afternoon, in the long and sleepy hour when work of any kind was impossible, since the heat seemed to thicken one’s blood to paste, one of the older girls flicked Helen on her elbow. “Look, Ate Helen, what’s this, eh? You got bit and it’s gone bad.”
“Just another mosquito bite.” But Helen looked at her forearm doubtfully. It no longer itched, but had swollen and developed a scarlet rim. It looked, she thought, as if she had acquired another nipple, as witches were said to do.
“No, no, Ate! Ipis, di ba? Cockroach! Dirty! My uncle, he had one, bit him right here”—the girl gestured to her neck—“went very bad, very very bad. You need penicillin. You got money, Ate? You better, di ba!”
Helen pressed an experimental finger against the scarlet spot. It emitted a single droplet of pus. “All right,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. Now thirty minutes’ sleep, please, then we do our verbs.” On her way home she bought from a street vendor a warm bag of pancit noodles, and ate them on the balcony, feeling her blood beating in the bite. That night she shook the small fridge in the corner to scare out the cockroaches biding their time beneath it, and killed thirty-nine with the sole of her shoe.
The following evening she discovered on her arm a swollen place the size of her palm, the centre of which had opened up, creating a small uneven cavity. It was as if the heat and the dense wet air accelerated all the mechanisms of her body so that a degradation of the flesh which in England might have taken a month had happened overnight. If she clenched her fist, pus trickled sluggishly out. In one of the alleys beneath Aurora Boulevard, she knew, there was a pharmacy: she’d seen its green light shining from her window. The accepted wisdom of the English traveler was this: keep to the familiar routes. But what harm could come from a detour of no more than a hundred yards, when her arm throbbed and ached? Nonetheless she shivered in the shadow of the great road roaring and whining overhead: here cheerful shanty towns with their scent of laundry powder and of noodles on the stove gave way to single beggars squatting on squares of cardboard, or little groups of men, in vests drawn up over sweating stomachs, that fell silent as she passed. It was all filthy, with the filth of humans and machines living an uneasy truce, and she saw for a shocked moment a broad fissure in the concrete in which someone had been sleeping. A stump of candle burned on a ledge; black cloth dripped from the gap. The heat was appalling—it was a punishment: red welts were raised on the flesh of her thighs and rubbed to bleeding with each step, and the sweat that poured into her eyes was as salty as the sea. She cradled her swollen arm against her breast, and hurried on—past a naked infant, past a squatting woman sorting beer-bottle caps and murmuring. She reached the pharmacy in tears, though the tears were not precisely about the aching bite, the naked child, the heat: they seemed to have more to do with a feeling that all her life she had tried to outrun the disappointment at her heels, and at last it had caught her up. She stood for a moment in light cast on the pavement by the green cross shining above the shuttered window, heard laughter above the remorseless good cheer of pop songs on the radio, and pushed open the door. A schoolgirl sat cross-legged on the counter chewing sugar cane. She looked wryly at Helen, who felt more than ever that she was shabby and small and ill-equipped. The girls said, to nobody, “Americana Siya.”
“I am not American,” said Helen. “I’m English.” She shivered in the thin cool air of the shop. The girl attended to her sugar cane, and hummed along to the radio; it seemed she had lost interest. Behind the counter, between cheap metal shelves stacked with paracetamol, diarrhoea medication and face-whitening cream, strips of blue plastic fabric hung in a doorway. They moved, as if someone had just passed through. In a distant darker room beyond them someone in a white shirt stood. Is it possible that Helen felt, as she pressed a finger to the wound on her arm and watched a thick green fluid rise up, that a pair of watchful eyes was on her then—as it seemed there’d been when she was young, and walked home from school, with the strap of her satchel biting her shoulder? Certainly there was that telling prick at the nape of her neck, like that of a prey animal crouching in long grass; but then the room was cold, and the air moved across her. A young man came out to greet her. His shirt was buttoned to the neck; in his pocket, a biro had begun to leak. He wore his hair rather long, and had combed it into a parting which might have given him a look of severity had he not been smiling as he came through, and had he not gone on smiling when he saw his visitor. “Magandang gabi, ma’am,” he said, bidding her a good evening; but she felt at once that the “ma’am” was not the unearned deference which so often came her way because she was white, but was largely ironical. He shook the schoolgirl a little roughly, and said something that made her laugh, and leap down, and go out giving Helen a pert, amused look.
“Can you help me?” said Helen. “I need someone to tell me what to do.” She was conscious of speaking more crisply and more slowly than she ought, and fretted that the man would notice, and be affronted; and indeed it seemed he did notice, since he responded with a swift fluidity she took as a rebuke.
“Of course! The pharmacist is not here until the morni
ng, but I am in training, and we have everything you might need. Are you sunburned? It’s often sunburn, with tourists.”
“I am not a tourist!”
“No?” He took a pair of glasses from his pocket, and put them on.
“I work at the Q.A.F.—the Quezon Aid Foundation,” she said, then wished she hadn’t: he raised an eyebrow, and smiled, and said, “OK. That’s very good of you.”
There was silence. Helen looked at him, and could not remember what it was that had brought her here. Then the radio began to play a song which she recognized—it was a more than usually foolish one, and it made each smile at the other, as if to say: it’s awful, isn’t it, but don’t you know all the words?
“All right then,” said the young man, briskly, returning his glasses to his pocket. “What can we do for you?”
“It’s this,” said Helen. She came forward, and placed her forearm on the counter as if it were an object she had been carrying and was glad to set down. In the bright bluish light of the shop her skin looked sick. The infected bite had spread, it seemed, in the brief time of her standing there: it was possible to make out a single thread of scarlet extending towards her wrist.
The man grasped her wrist and drew her arm towards him. He rolled it this way and that, the better to inspect the wound; it was both intimate and absolutely disinterested, and Helen was conscious that she was holding her breath.
“Something bit me,” she said. “A cockroach?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “This needs cleaning. Want me to do it for you? I have hydrogen peroxide. Then maybe some penicillin. You’ll be fine.” He reached for a large white bottle, and held it out inquiringly. Helen mutely nodded, and watched as he sluiced the liquid into the swollen cavity. It hissed, and stung; he did it again, and she saw the cavity grow a little larger. It seemed impossible to query or resist. He sealed the bottle and said, “You probably have streptococcus. You should have penicillin. The pharmacist would say the same. Does it make you sick?”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Helen; then she said, stumblingly and shyly, “Thank you, Kuya.”
Delighted, he laughed. “You’re welcome! You think you are younger than me? I don’t know, you seem old, because you are quiet. Tell me your age.”
“Twenty-one.”
“OK then, little sister! I am twenty-three, di ba.” He laughed again. “You are the first American to call me Kuya. I like it! You can come back here, any time.”
“I am not American—I am English,” said Helen, laughing because he was laughing. Then the man frowned, as if an unseen hand had reached out to admonish him. He nodded at her arm, which still lay on the counter between them. “You must drain it, you know? Squeeze, hard. It’ll hurt, but it’s only pain. Throw away the tissues, or whatever. I’ll give you penicillin, three times a day, seven days. Then it’s just a scar, and you go home and say to your friends: see, I was in the tropics and was bitten by a snake, or maybe a lion. Excuse me.” He went behind the plastic curtain and Helen stood alone in the shop. It occurred to her that her face had begun to ache, and because she had been smiling so much; she tried to be decently sombre, but found she could not. When he returned, he held a paper bag. “In here you have some dressing, some tape and lint, and your penicillin. Don’t forget you must take them all, right? Even when it’s better.”
Helen paid, feeling obscurely transgressive for having acquired medication without a doctor’s intervention, and taking the paper bag said again, “Thank you. I was worried, but now I’m not.”
“You’re welcome. Come back and tell me how it is, yes? We can get you a doctor, if things go bad.”
“Thank you, Kuya,” said Helen at the door.
“Goodbye, little sister! Goodbye.”
When Helen Franklin walked back under the filthy shadow of Aurora Boulevard, she almost thought she saw, deep in that candle-lit break in the city concrete, a figure all in black—in long robes of black, very odd in that broiling heat—but gave it no more than a glance, because something had lightened in her, and caused her to hold up her head and walk home singing.
When she returned to the pharmacy it was proudly done, to show the young man the diminished scarlet circle on her arm, and the healing wound. In the days that had passed since her first visit she had been astonished to find that the city—even the vile black rags hanging from the sagging power lines, and the reek from the drains—had begun to charm her. At night she stood sucking the sugared flesh from tamarind seeds on her balcony and could make out, in the distance, the bloom of the pharmacy light beyond the ranks of tilting shacks. The mere presence of the man whose name she did not know rippled out across the city, as if she’d seen a precious stone dropped into a muddy pool. She looked at the blue-white flesh of her wrist, and at the tendons moving there, and marvelled that he had touched it. In comparison to that single exchange over the counter—elder brother, little sister!—the two boyfriends with whom she’d dutifully shared her college bed seemed nothing more than charmless children. Of course it was absurd, but no more than Rilke had promised in her small Essex bedroom, while her mother boiled frozen peas downstairs.
Outside the pharmacy, a schoolgirl stood. “Hello,” said Helen, who recognized her scathing look, the way she ate her piece of sugarcane. This time two friends were with her: each looked Helen up and down, and laughed. Helen flushed. The girl relented, and said, “He’s in there, ma’am. He’s in there. You want to see him, right?” Her friends laughed again. Overhead the green light flickered. Helen pushed open the door. He was standing at the counter with his back to her, and at the sound of the opening door he made a hasty movement out of sight. Then he turned and she saw that in the intervening days he had changed. The neat line of his parting was awry, so that hair fell into his eyes, which were swollen with lack of sleep. He held a small leather bag, which he quickly closed and hid behind the counter. There was a long moment in which Helen stood silently awaiting recognition that did not come, then he smiled and said: “Little sister! How is it? You still have your arm, at least.”
“I wanted to show you,” said Helen. She went forward, and stretched out her hand. “Look! Almost gone. It got pretty bad—one night it ran all down my arm, and it smelt, it actually smelt!—but now look!”
He took her arm between his palms, which were very cool. He lifted it to the light, and made a great show of inspecting it, and said at last: “Top marks. See, you’ll have a nice scar.” And for a moment she saw her arm through his eyes, and saw that indeed there was something pleasing about the deep uneven dimple that remained.
Then she said, “Are you all right?” because it had never seemed to be quite the ordinary transaction of professional and customer, and it felt right that she should ask. He met her query without surprise, and released his hold on her arm. “Bad news last night,” he said. “My brother Benjie is a student—law, you know? He’s the clever one—and crashed his motorbike. Broken hip, broken pelvis, the nerves in his spine bruised. It won’t kill him but—” He shrugged, and Helen was at once rinsed with a feeling of pity. Her hand, which was not far from his, moved towards him, and fell short.
“I am so sorry. Will he be OK?”
“Eventually. But he suffers, you know? I don’t like to see it. I’m going there now.” He was silent for a time, and Helen tenderly watched as he pushed back a lock of hair. Then he said—not with diffidence, as if he thought he might be refused, but with a frank look of invitation—“Do you want to come with me?”
And Helen, neither embarrassed nor taken aback, said, “I’d like that, thank you.” Then she said: “My name is Helen, by the way.”
“Arnel Suarez,” said the young man. He smiled, and looked a little less weary. “Nice to meet you, little sister.”
“You too, elder brother.”
Benjie Suarez slept in a small ward on the ground floor of a shabby hospital, whose gray tiled floors gleamed wet with disinfectant. “I know someone here,” said Arnel, with a pride that made him shy: “I p
aid to get him a room, so he wouldn’t have to be over there.” He gestured to a long bright room in which many beds with identical frames of white-painted iron were set in columns against bare walls. It was noisy, so that Helen doubted how ill its residents were: in a far corner three men in day clothes were gambling with beer-bottle caps on the lap of a patient who’d long since fallen asleep. The room where Benjie rested was by contrast small and sombre. There were three other patients, all of them elderly, and there was in the air the unmistakable scent of bodies which would not outlast the year. The windows here were coated with plastic, which diffused the harsh light, and made soft shadows on the floor. One sloped half-open, revealing the clotted scarlet flowers of a bougainvillea. Turning fans in wire cages faintly moved the air.
“Benjie,” said Arnel, and approached the bed. The young man stirred, and revealed a soft, fleshy face, which was rather like that of his brother, but which Helen at once disliked. He was pale, and as he stirred he moaned and grimaced. A plastic bag of saline hung from a steel hook above the bed, and his body beneath the thin cover looked overly large, with proportions all awry. A clear rubber tube extended from beneath the sheets and ended in a large glass flagon with a small handle; beads of blood collected in the tube and gathered into a stream that fell into the flagon and the inch of scarlet fluid at the bottom. “Benjie?” said Arnel, sitting on the single stool beside the bed, placed his leather bag beneath it. Helen watched him, and found so much to admire in his slight frown, and in the movement of his hand on his brother’s arm, that she was startled to find both men regarding her. Arnel looked fondly at her, though with amusement; the patient meanwhile scowled, with the petulant open dislike of a child. He said something swiftly to his brother, and Helen understood the meaning, if not the words—that she was unwelcome, and nothing much to look at besides. All the ease and comfort she felt in the company of Arnel vanished: she became conscious of the sore welts raised between her thighs, of the spots on her chin which bloomed scarlet in the heat. “Magandang umaga,” she said, hoping to impress or mollify; but the young man smirked, and then—arrested by pain—turned his head against the pillow and cried out. It was not necessary for her to understand the words he used: it was the disbelieving railing against pain which has never needed a translator. It struck her that pain was as intimate in its way as pleasure: she said, “I’ll leave you with him, Kuya—maybe I’ll go find some water,” and went swiftly out. She could not turn left, since there was only that vast ward, impersonal, inhuman, seeming more of a jail than a hospital; instead she turned right, where the corridor seemed at once to narrow and grow darker. Here the windows were concealed behind lowered blinds. The scent of disinfectant dwindled, and the floor was gray against the skirting boards; there were no fans, so that the heat and humidity intensified, making each indrawn breath a mouthful of dank warm water. A nurse passed by, harried and ill-kempt: he held three files of paper, which he scrutinized as he walked, so that he did not see Helen pressing anxiously against the walls. At the end of the corridor there was a doorway from which the door had been removed. Its broken hinges glittered in the faint light coming from beneath a lowered blind. It was all very quiet, but not with the tranquil quiet of empty spaces. Helen leaned against the wall, wondering how long she should wait, and as she waited a sound entered the silence. It was not a human voice, or the ordinary interruption of footfall on the hard floor, but a kind of rooting, scratching sound. It was swift and frantic, rather like the sound of an animal scrabbling in earth, but with the high unmistakable note of fabric against fabric. It stopped, and then began again, still more frantically, and then it was accompanied by a voice. It was not a cry of pain, but a kind of rhythmic wordless grunting almost lusty in its fervor. Helen’s heart began to thrum—she moved forward—there again was the scrabbling, scratching sound, and above it a grunting that gave way to a moan. She crept forward, towards the empty doorframe, and saw on a hard chair just beyond the door a woman who slumped as if very weary. She wore long, loose black clothes, and it seemed that in this room were many fans blowing against the heat, since the clothes moved about. But she was very still, and could not have been the source of the noises, and Helen stepped forward once more. Then the seated woman began to raise her head—very slowly, as if it caused her great effort to do so; the fabric that draped across her feet lifted, and Helen saw that they were bare, and bleeding. She must be injured, and waiting for someone to see her, thought Helen; but the thought did not console her: she became terribly afraid of what she might see when at last the slow-moving head lifted and showed the woman’s face. Turning away, she heard her own name called down the corridor—“Helen? Little sister?”—and went gratefully towards it, breathing swiftly as if she’d been running, and not merely standing mute and still beside the wall. Arnel stood at the doorway beckoning her in. His brother was sleeping now, and a pink flush had spread across his fleshy cheeks. He looked like a very small child, with curls clinging to the sheen of sweat on his forehead, and one hand raised palm upward on the pillow. Had it not been for the glass flagon of blood at the foot of the bed, she would have thought he was simply worn out by a long day.