Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  “How much better he looks!” she said, standing close by Arnel.

  “He was in pain,” he said. “But he’s better now.” And unconsciously he nodded towards the bed, and Helen saw on the patient’s bare upper arm a square plaster, thick and white and very clean. Then Arnel bent to pick up the leather bag he had carried, and Helen saw it contained three square paper packets labelled in green type. He swiftly zipped it, and for a moment she was conscious that he did not meet her eye; then he gave her his arm with a courteous gesture and said, “Want something to eat? Let’s get burgers. He’ll sleep a long while now.”

  They fell in love, Helen Franklin and Arnel Suarez: little sister, older brother. It was not the agonized rapture that Helen had imagined, and to which she had always doubted she was suited, nor was it the bickering and dislike that novels told her were the precursors to desire. It had instead a quality of being inevitable, or of being meant, as if each had been fitted for the other, and now served their proper purpose after years of aimless misuse. At first it had simply been a matter of liking each other, in that inexplicable way of strangers instantly at ease. They ate together; gave their personal histories (dressed up, just a little, to please); produced for each other, with a flourish and bow, the songs they liked best, the films, the food. She asked to be taught the names of the chemical compounds he memorized as he studied; she taught him German words that ran to fourteen syllables. He was, she discovered, studious, serious, sometimes seeming older than his years; he often studied late, and his eyes grew tired, so that she would say, “No books for you today, Kuya,” and walk with him to Manila Bay with her arm in his, to eat jackfruit and ice cream on the harbor wall. One afternoon she’d looked at him, and laughed, because he’d made some joke, and he had been her friend; then she had looked away over the Pasig to the tower blocks glittering in the lowering sun, and back to the man beside her, and it was like the change of season from spring to summer heat. He was not her friend, could not be merely that: all at once he was a body, also, urgently present, his forearms bare, with fine black hair growing densely at the wrist, his neck damp because it was hot, his fringe (she saw this tenderly) needing a cut. Then (the sun on the Pasig went very quickly down) she, too, was a body—she felt it, as if it were something newly acquired: there was her forearm, longer than his, but not as broad; there was her leg, and it was very near his, very near indeed; there was her back, which ached; there was her abdomen. It rose and fell, fretful. She put her hand there. “Kuya!” she said, and he put his hand there, too.

  In his presence she felt herself to be enough: not too small and too drab, but that other girl secretly nurtured on Christina Rossetti and bottles of jasmine scent. Standing at the square mirror bolted above the sink in her flat she did not think her hair lank and mousy, but watched instead how sleek it shone beneath the strip light. She wound a string of seed pearls round her wrist, and he rolled them aside, and kissed her there. The instant fondness with which she’d watched him remove and replace his glasses the evening they had met seemed to have been the forecast of still finer weather. She made a loving study of him, and what she learned she stored away, privately: if she had had any other friend but Arnel, she still would not have shared them. It was all hers—how suddenly he moved from serious to playful, and back again; how he pronounced certain English words in a manner that caused her to suppress a laugh; how often he was her tutor (“No, little sister—like this.”). Nobody, she felt, had ever seen in him what she had seen. When they first shared a bed that, too, was easeful, as if they had done so many times many years ago, and had forgotten it until that moment. “Elder brother,” she would say, putting her hands on him, on the body that had somehow, she always felt, made her also a thing of flesh: “Have we met before? Do you remember me? Do you remember this?”

  Helen, who had always been assiduous, neglected her work. Instead she traveled with Arnel to places beyond Manila, where she found the undiscovered country she had longed for. Late in July, before the first rains, they drove to a volcano in Arnel’s jeep, singing to a radio that hissed and spat. As they reached the crater lake fissures opened in the rock and gave out plumes of steam; everywhere mint grew in dense green thickets, and mingled with the smell of sulphur, so that it smelt as if all the inhabitants of hell were cleaning their teeth. Helen held the hand of her lover and looked down into the green lake boiling below. She tried to summon the memory of her old room in the dreary pebble-dashed house in England, and the smell of her mother’s kitchen—tried also to look ahead into a future obscured by the volcano’s steam. But there was nothing either before or behind her: only Arnel, and her feet beside his on the hot earth. That first sensation of having been called into being by his presence never left her: he looked at her lovingly, and in doing so made her worth loving. In September they returned to Manila, and he devoted himself more than ever to study, growing thin, seeming irritable, sleeping late; saying once, with exasperated tears, “It’s for you, you are my responsibility now, you see that? What would you want with me if I had no decent work, no way of caring for you?”

  “I am not your little sister really,” she had said, and laughed, and kissed him: “I can make my own money, here or in any other city!” But she had felt, secretly, that it was very consoling, to have someone to lean against. If he steps away, she thought, I’ll fall.

  Though they visited Benjie often, he grew no fonder of Helen in that time. She recognized in him the nature of a child who has been spoiled, and because of that will always be arrested in youth. His mother would come, clucking and squabbling with the nurses, bringing plastic boxes of the food he liked best, and which he ate in huge quantities—thick slices of pork fat cooked in peanut butter, or meat stewed in pints of its own blood. She paid little attention to Helen, seeming merely to take her presence for granted. Helen discovered that the ease she felt when alone with Arnel was always compromised in the presence of others, as if they were all looking at her with censure and surprise.

  In time she discovered that those small, square plasters which Arnel brought in his bag and took out with hesitant, secretive looks were a way of easing the kind of pain that would drive you mad, if you let it. “Fentanyl,” said Arnel, and explained how morphine penetrated the skin, and kept Benjie from howling in torment as the crushed nerves in his spine transmitted bolts of pain from hip to foot. Without ever inquiring further, Helen understood that these were costly, and beyond the purse of either the hospital or the Suarez family; that he simply helped himself to the pharmacy store now and then, amending records as required, confident he would not be caught. Helen had seen for herself the effects of the drug, which within fifteen minutes settled the writhing patient, giving him the flushed and sated look of a sleeping toddler. “The thing is to be careful,” said Arnel, putting a plaster on his brother’s back, pressing it with his palm: “He wants more and more but in the end it’ll kill him if he lets it. But only another month they say and he’ll be in a wheelchair and after that, who knows? Walking, maybe.”

  Whenever she felt unwelcome—because Mrs Suarez came bustling in, or the mocking schoolgirls who, it transpired, were cousins, and children of cousins—Helen felt herself drawn to the narrow corridor beyond the little ward. It was always the same: the feeling that here were those forgotten by staff and family—that here the cleaners and the administrators didn’t care to come. A bloody footprint remained on the threshold of the doorless room, and had not been cleaned off: it simply wore away with time, until all that remained was the scant impression of a heel. Sometimes it would be silent in there—only the sound of the scarlet bougainvillea tossed in a breeze and rustling against the shrouded windows—and sometimes she would hear it again: the frantic rubbing and scrabbling, accompanied by a rhythmic groan. One afternoon, made brave by curiosity, she went in. The room was small and dark. A single bed was set against the far wall, its curved white-painted frame identical to those she had seen elsewhere. A glass of water and an empty dish were set on a stool beside
it. Someone had dropped a piece of sweet food in the corner, and masses of ants busied themselves there. The chair where she had seen the weary woman with the bleeding feet was empty. The air was moist, so that Helen felt it against her skin, as if it had substance; there was the strong scent of flowers past their best. Through the gloom Helen made out the figure on the bed: a woman, very thin, lying naked under a thin sheet. The sheet was not white, as hospital bedding should be: it had once been floral, and the pattern had faded to indistinct pale blotches. Here and there were darker marks which (Helen stepped closer) perhaps were blood. One arm lay above the sheet, and the fine tubing of a saline drip entered the back of the thin dark hand. All this Helen saw with relative calm; but as she drew closer she felt a kind of sinking contraction in her stomach. The worn sheet was damp with sweat and enclosed the woman closely, and the whole impression was of a body somehow disorganized. The arm above the sheet was, she saw, thin but whole; the one beneath it seemed almost to have dwindled to nothing at the bicep, as if there was nothing there but bone fine as splinters. The torso was uneven: the sheet sank deeper than it ought at the woman’s breast. The left hip and thigh were worn down; the left foot truncated, as if shorn of its toes. Then the woman’s head, which had been turned away, rolled against the thin pillow, and dark eyes met Helen’s. They were vast, and wet; they regarded her with a steadfast appeal. Her nose was only two black slots above an upper lip half gone. As Helen watched, she raised her arm and began to rub at her stomach with a frantic motion and to grunt as she did it; the action seemed to relieve something in her, and she gave out a high sustained moan. Appalled, Helen turned and ran. It was not the grotesquerie of the woman’s mutilated face and body that drove her from the room, but the feeling that to witness such degradation and humiliation was to somehow take part in it: that her eyes might wound as much as knives. Walking blindly down the corridor she jostled a nurse with an armful of linen and said: “I’m so sorry—I’m so sorry.” Evidently there was something in her voice which gave the nurse pause. Smoothing the sheets with a swift practiced movement he tilted his head and looked at Helen. Then he looked beyond her, to the open door, from which the sound of rubbing and groaning came quietly out, and rolled his eyes, and smiled. “Ah, you’ve been in that room? It’s all right: sometimes people look. One time she was in the papers and they came with cameras, you know? I sent them away. I like her. It’s not good or fair, what happened. But it was months ago now, and nobody comes. They forget everything in the end.”

  “What did happen?” said Helen.

  The nurse shrugged. “Acid,” he said. “Her lover was a janitor. He had strong acid to clean with. He thought she was a cheat, threw acid on her, teach her a lesson. It happens. Some men like to keep their possessions safe and tidy for themselves.”

  Helen swallowed at bile rising in her throat. “Will she get better? Does she have family, that comes to see her?”

  “She’s poor, di ba? No family. There’s a charity pays to keep her here but the money doesn’t go far. We do what we can, but I think the acid goes on burning—every day, it goes a bit deeper, gets to her bones. How does she live, that’s what I say. How does she go on living? I ask the Blessed Virgin to take her but still she goes on.”

  “Is she in pain?”

  “Oh yes: very bad. Too much. Well, we do what we can about the pain, but the itching we can’t stop. You’ve seen her scratch, scratch, scratch? That’s the scars coming. All day sometimes, scratch scratch scratch. I tell her: Rosa, you stop that, you’re bleeding, but on she goes.”

  “Why does no one help her?” Helen heard the childish, bewildered rage in her own voice, and could do nothing to quell it. The nurse shook his head. “What can we do? There’s no help, no hope.” He paused, and smoothed at the folded sheets in his arms. “You want to help? There’s a chair in her room, always empty. Sit in it. You think you could do that?” Then he left, giving Helen a chastening look, which was not unkind.

  Not always empty, thought Helen, seeing again that weary woman resting her head in her hands, and how her feet had bled against the hard tiled floor. Then she heard her name—Helen? Little sister?—and love made her forgetful. “Coming, Kuya!” she said, and went, shedding with each step the pity and horror that filled the small dark room behind her.

  At night she gazed up at the turning ceiling fan. She saw the thin hand on the sheet, and the misshapen body under the worn sheets; saw, still more vividly, the seated woman with the bleeding feet, and how slowly she’d raised her head. That old sensation of being watched overcame her: never the feeling of being scrutinized by a paternal being intent on admonishing her every sin, but something more intimate, more attentive. It was almost possible to believe that the woman with the bleeding feet had been waiting for her—indeed that she had been watching and waiting for many years—that if Helen had only waited she’d have seen a gaunt face gazing at her with a horrible love. In the thick heat of the Manila night she began to shiver: what ought she to do? How might she ease that feeling of being watched, and moreover of being weighed in the balance and found wanting? She thought again of her old, small life—of the begonias in her mother’s garden, of her father tapping the barometer in the hall, and saying “another fine day”—and though her lover’s body was only inches away, and it seemed impossible that they could ever be parted by more than the reach of her hand, she thought: I think I’d go home if I could.

  In the morning she woke Arnel. “I want to do something good,” she said. “When you visit Benjie, I am going to sit with a patient in the hospital. Her name is Rosa, and she has no one.”

  “If she has you,” said Arnel, “she has everything.” Then he said, “When Benjie comes home there’ll be a party and I think it might be soon. Yesterday he walked up the steps—he complained the whole way but then he always was lazy. He won’t need the Fentanyl much longer. I’m glad. I am not clever enough to be a thief.”

  Two days passed, and Helen felt herself followed. In the offices of the Q.A.F. she wrote letters and filed papers and heard the frantic rub of a thin hand on a thin sheet; in the muddy heat of the afternoon, caring for a nursery class, she cradled a sleeping child on her lap and grew cold, with the alert chill of one who knows they are watched. She had failed, she had failed: this was all she knew. She had stood beside a woman in distress—a woman as she was, in distress as she supposed she might one day be—and she had run. Well: this would be remedied. That evening she took to the hospital a bunch of pink bougainvillea picked from where it poured over the wall of the Q.A.F. home, and two bottles of iced tea. Then, having watched the petulant Benjie hold out his arm for Fentanyl, she went down the dark corridor, half-hoping to meet the nurse again and have a witness to her virtue, and stood for a moment at the empty doorway. The bloody heel-print had worn away. Then, quietly, in case the woman was sleeping, Helen stood beside the bed. The dark head on the pillow turned. Above the ruined face the large and liquid eyes glowed. “Rosa?” said Helen. “Rosa?” She sat on the little stool set beside the bed.