by Patrick Gale
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You tried to leave the ship.’
‘No, I– ’
Don’t lie. I find out everything. You tried to leave in Miami and you were too late. You could have left today, like Bee. Why didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t– I don’t know.’
‘Well? What?’
‘I didn’t want to leave you.’
She ate another grape, leaving him to stand before her still.
‘Doesn’t it worry you, what people say about me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You tell me, Lawrence.’
‘I– You mean about … about you!’
She nodded and looked at him expectantly, piercing a third grape with her nails.
‘They … Some of them say that you used … I mean …’ Her scent was everywhere in the cabin. He had surprised her as she changed from her performance dress and she had on a long silk wrap. The heat in the room seemed to emanate from her, from her neck and chest. He could hardly breathe. He realized they had left port again. The ship was swaying below his feet. ‘They’re just stupid stories.’
‘What are?’
He gulped.
‘They say … They say you used to be a man.’
There was a pause then she said,
‘I know. Does that bother you?’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘But if it were true?’ He shrugged. He wanted to look away but could not. He felt rooted to the carpet. ‘If I used to be a man, what would that make you?’
‘You’re a woman.’
‘Now I’m a woman.’
‘So it is true.’
Now it was her turn to shrug.
‘If you leave now,’ she said, ‘you’re never coming back.’
‘I don’t want to leave.’
‘Then take off your clothes. No. Stay where you are and take off your clothes.’
She sat eating grapes and watching him strip. He was ashamed at how excited this made him. He took deep breaths to no avail. She looked at his face, down to his groin then up at his face again.
‘Now lie down,’ she said. ‘No. Not on the bed. I don’t want the sheets all rucked up. Put this on that,’ she added, tossing him a condom, ‘and lie on that rug there.’
He did as she said and lay down, feeling the ship roll gently beneath him. If he shut his eyes, he could imagine them in an aeroplane, breasting clouds instead of waves. She did not join him immediately but walked to the bathroom where he heard her brushing her teeth, blowing her nose and using the loo. Then she turned out all the lights except for the dim one out on her balcony, sat astride him and rode him like a horse, brushing his hands aside whenever he tried to touch her. She did not kiss him and did not speak. He cried out when he came but she rode on in silence, only registering her pleasure, if that could describe something so focused and mirthless, by spasmodic pincer motions of her thighs against his waist and ribcage. She dismounted as tidily as if he had been a chair and pulled her wrap back on.
‘Now you can go.’
‘Can’t I stay?’
‘I need to sleep.’
‘Can I … Can I see you– ’ he began and she cut in.
‘I’ll let you know.’
He dressed clumsily in the shadows and hurried out. Being used like a male whore should have killed his interest in her, but the experience was novel and intoxicating. For the next few days, he experienced the sort of addictive degradation on which women’s magazines grew fat. He had no shame. Under Darius and Reuben’s satiric gaze, he became indeed a kind of prostitute. He worked out to make his body hard for her, he washed two or three times a day, he kept his clothes neat and fresh and otherwise spent his waking hours waiting for the cabin telephone to ring or for a smirking waiter to bring a summons from her.
She was not always cold. Sometimes she was nearly loving. Often she let him kiss her for hours but go no further, until his lips were tender and swollen as his insulted privates. When he told her he loved her, and he did this often, she laughed, not always unkindly, but gave him no reason to hope.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said. ‘You hardly know me. Besides, we’re hopelessly incompatible. Do you think that chair could take us both?’
Once she made him squeeze into one of her dresses and dolled him up with make-up and a wig as if he were less lover than toy. Once she spent hours teasing him.
‘Now that you’ve had me you should try it with a real man. I know you’d enjoy it. You could surrender completely. Let him fuck you. It would be so good for you. One of the engineers, perhaps. That one with the red beard. So liberating. And Bee’s brother’s attractive. Why don’t you let him have you?’ When she refused to stop he pressed a hand over her mouth and she lashed out like a stevedore and knocked him down. She walked out and left the door open so that he had no option but to leave too. Her punch gave him a black eye.
‘I’d had a bit too much to drink and I managed to hit my face on the bedside table,’ he said, when Darius knowingly asked if he had walked into a door.
She never let him stay the night. She never encouraged him to talk about himself. Just once he tried to talk about Lucy, about how badly he missed her, and she turned on him, harshly rebuking him for his self-pity.
‘You loused up,’ she said.
It was one of the moments when she seemed at once most womanly and least female.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jerome’s information was correct. Ever since leaving St Martin, the captain had been warning them of the possibility that their cruise might be affected by the progress of a hurricane – hurricane Esmé. Sure enough, when they reached the Virgin Islands they were forced to spend an unscheduled night sheltering in the lee of St John and St Thomas as the terrible wind sped through. There were scenes of panic on board, spread by some passengers from Florida who knew what a hurricane could do, but the shelter had been chosen well; the wind barely winged them since the eye of the storm was several miles away. They rolled and pitched sickeningly as rain lashed the windows. Several passengers suffered falls on the staircases, many were nauseous from fear and motion and a few glasses and bottles were broken, but nothing more dramatic befell the Paulina. However it was thought best to remain where they were until a new, safer course could be decided on for their return.
As always, Lala had inside information. She came to Lawrence’s cabin early in the morning, while it was barely light, and told him to get dressed quickly.
‘We’re stuck here another day,’ she said, ‘and I’m going stir crazy, so I’ve bribed an officer to put us ashore for a few hours. He’s radioed for a boat. We can walk about. Maybe go for a drive. Come on. Don’t bother shaving.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘A bit of wind. A bit of rain. No worse than what you get at home.’
They slipped down to the embarkation gate seen only by maids and waiters and were helped down to a small water taxi.
There was a light drizzle and the air was hair-dryer warm. Lala had dressed in a black trouser suit with just an orange scarf tucked under the jacket to make her decent. With the heat, she grew careless of the scarf. The waiter in the shabby little café where they ordered breakfast was so transfixed by her cleavage that he poured juice on the table and had to move them in a flurry of apologetic mopping up. They sat where a hatch was swung up onto stilts to form a makeshift veranda decorated with scarlet hibiscus planted in old petrol cans. Out in the bay, the Paulina appeared almost delicate and spotlessly white against the storm-darkened waters. Framed by flowers and sun-bleached pink and blue paintwork, the view would have done a cruise brochure proud.
Lala drained her coffee cup and clicked it decisively back in her saucer.
‘It’s been fun,’ she said.
‘It still is.’
‘Lawrence,’ she said and laid a hand on his with unexpected solicitude. ‘We’re screwing on a luxury liner in a Caribbean hurricane zone. This is not life.
This is holiday.’
‘I’ve got no house, no business. I’m free,’ he assured her. ‘I could be your chauffeur.’
‘I don’t have a car.’
‘Your secretary.’
‘I never write letters.’
‘Your gardener then.’
‘I don’t lay the help.’
‘Please.’
‘You’re so cute when you beg.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Sorry. I don’t mean to tease. I just– I don’t want you building châteaux in Spain, is all. We have a few more days. Let’s keep it light.’
‘But– ’
‘You’ve got a marriage to dismantle and a kid to find. When this is over you have to rebuild your life. I’m not the one to build it with. Just look on me as some kind of extreme therapy.’
‘I love you.’
‘Ssh. Stop it.’ She glanced over at the waiter who was needlessly polishing a nearby ashtray.
‘But I do. I’ve never felt like this.’
‘Oh listen, you!’ She smacked the tabletop impatiently. ‘You’ve just never had a tranny before. For what it’s worth, I’ll never forget this either.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. You’ve left your mark.’
‘Am I supposed to be flattered?’
‘Believe me. When a girl this age opens both eyes wide, that’s flattering.’
He ground up a dark brown sugar lump with his spoon, mashing it into his coffee dregs.
‘You’re not half so old as you like to make out. You just act older so no one will notice your age.’
‘And sometimes for a woodcutter your perceptions are quite eerily camp. The drizzle’s stopped. Pay for these and we can take a walk.’
The air was thick with the scents of moist earth and wind-damaged vegetation and so humid it felt like warm drizzle on the skin. They walked slowly up a lane out of the tiny port past waking households and dozing cats, radios playing soca and mothers calling impatiently to children. The hurricane’s calling cards were everywhere. Palm leaves and tree branches dangled at unhealthy angles, windows were still spattered over with mud, bushes bore incongruous pieces of litter like scrappy, ill-matched flowers.
They walked close but not touching. The atmosphere was saddened but still sweet. With the deranged optimism of love, he decided, as they walked, that she was having second thoughts. She had been testing him in the café. She had opened a door to give him a chance to flee and if he could just prove his resolution to remain, she would relent and keep him with her.
They reached the preserved ruin of an eighteenth-century sugar plantation where a tower still commanded a view across to the British territories.
‘I came on a holiday here,’ she said. ‘Years ago. Before the cruise ships started spoiling it all. I stayed round there. See those houses on the beach? Nutmeg Bay. I’d forgotten how lovely it was.’
He took her hand and kissed her, backing her against the cold stone wall of the look-out point. That was when he heard the growl.
It was almost inaudibly deep, like a far off engine. Looking over his shoulder, Lala tensed, her hands freezing in the act of caressing his back.
‘Jesus,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t move.’
Of course he had to then. He turned and froze also. It was orange, tawny white and black, beautiful and outlandish on the lawn where tour guides stood to assemble their groups. Its ears rode back, its tail thrashed in an awful parody of a domestic cat and it growled again, this time baring its fangs. It was thirty feet away, possibly less. Its paws seemed big as cushions. Its belly swung as it walked.
‘Don’t turn your back,’ Lala hissed. ‘Not unless it runs,’ and she began to edge along the wall back towards the lane. Heart pounding he did the same. The tiger followed them. Then its slow padding quickened to a brisk walk.
‘Run,’ Lawrence said.
‘No,’ she muttered.
‘Come on,’ he shouted and tugging her hand, took to his heels.
She kept alongside him for a few seconds then cried out and fell. Stumbling, he looked back and saw the great cat had knocked her to the ground on her face and was nosing at her hair and neck.
‘Get away!’ he yelled at it. ‘Gaarn!’ Amazed at his own courage, he made a dash back at it, arms wide, eyes agog, letting out a kind of roar. It looked up from Lala’s body and sprang after him instead. Now he ran, sprinted, yelling as he went. ‘Help!’ he shouted, ‘For God’s sake, help! Police! Anyone! Help me please!’ As he sprinted, he sensed it closing on him, tensed his shoulders for the impact of steel claws and musky tonnage of fur. Some children ran shrieking behind a gate. A driver honked his horn. At last a group of men with sticks and shovels, road workers probably, stopped him, releasing his breathless, incoherent babble, and he saw that the beast was no longer in pursuit.
He explained what had happened and one of them ran to call the police while another darted into his house and returned with a rifle. Heart racing, lungs in a heaving agony, for all his sessions on Spencer’s purgatorial Stairmaster, Lawrence led them back up the lane and along the track to the ruin. They glanced wildly about them, sensing teeth and claws in every bush, but there was no trace of the tiger beyond its footprints, clear in the mud, where it had pursued Lawrence down the hill.
There was no trace of Lala either. There was blood on the grass where she had fallen and Lawrence quickly spotted the orange chiffon scarf which had been torn off her neck and left snagged on a tree’s trailing branches. He sagged onto his knees in the mud grasping it so tightly that the police had to prise it from his shaking fingers. It was torn and soaked at one end in blood that was still warm to the touch.
Within the hour the tiny island was in uproar, within two, the first television crews had arrived. The tiger, a mature male, had escaped from a small private zoo kept by a wealthy American eccentric, high in the island’s interior. A tree had blown down in the hurricane and smashed a section of fence sufficiently to allow the beast to escape. The police tracked it down in the woods and shot it. Lala’s body and other clothes were not found. A bloodhound was used but it was confused by the strong scent left by the tiger’s spoor and merely led the police back to the eccentric’s hideaway. The tiger’s body was destroyed before anyone thought to suggest that an autopsy report on the contents of its stomach might have provided conclusive proof one way or the other. The worst was assumed.
The remainder of the cruise passed him by in a blur. He surprised himself and Darius by not going to pieces, even during Father Xavier’s unctuous shipboard memorial service. He did not take to drink or medication, did not begin to abuse his fellow guests. He pursued an unwavering routine of swimming, working out in the gym and dutifully embarking on any excursion Darius suggested. His mind became entirely focused on remaining in America when the ship returned to Miami and finding Lucy. He talked it through quite calmly with Martha. (He had grown bolder at expressing himself – Bee and Lala’s unsparing tutorials had seen to that.) He would find work in Chicago, if that was indeed where his wife and child had settled. Having been born in America, a permit should be easy enough to come by. He would encourage Bonnie to file for a divorce so that his position would be quite unambiguous and he could negotiate joint custody. In this at least he could prove himself. Raising the child and providing for her should be his one success.
‘I’ll do whatever Bonnie wants,’ he told Martha. ‘I’ll see a therapist. Remarry. Anything. But she can’t stop me being a father.’
After raising a difficult daughter and weathering a marriage forged in painful compromise, Martha was wise enough to know better than to question his resolve. Instead she made her mild attentiveness a kind of conversational mirror, enabling him to argue with himself, and in the process came to love him as the passionate, slightly dim son she had always wanted.
Lawrence and his family were saved a second scandal because Lala meant so little to British journalists. Only one newspaper ran a story, under the headline Murder Suspe
ct and Transsexual in Man-eating Tiger Horror. However, because it was a paper notorious for grotesque distortions along the Prayer Doubled My D Cup and Slugs Ate My Baby line, nobody took the matter further. Elsewhere an international league of fans went into mourning and the café where the diva had downed her last coffee was renamed in her honour. Thereafter a small glass cabinet in Café Lala displayed, like a holy relic, an unwashed Pyrex coffee cup with a parting imprint of rouge extrême lipstick on its rim.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dora had never expected to return to America. It was a country of which even her happier memories had been soured. This trip was no holiday and was scarcely going to leave them any sweeter. She had gained no experience of cruise ships since her arrival in England with a baby and two suitcases but had, for some reason, expected them to have been modernized at the same rate as aeroplanes. As she and Charlie shared a taxi to the dock in Miami she had anticipated a building with all the comforts of an airport arrivals lounge; sofas, shops, carpet, a bar. She found instead an expanse of drab waterside concrete with a high corrugated iron roof, a kind of salty barn.
The situation could not have been worse. The Paulina had docked and a trickle of passengers was already disembarking and heading for the taxi rank and the waiting airport and hotel shuttle buses. There was nowhere quiet she could lead him, nowhere with soft edges and soft lights where she could break the news. Added to which, she had Charlie in attendance, mournful, shell-shocked Charlie, whose scarecrow face alone announced a tragedy. In the extremity of his grief, he appeared to have forgotten the bad blood between him and his son-in-law and was all loving, button-lipped sorrow. She realized too late that she could undoubtedly have contacted an official of the shipping line and had Darius and Lawrence paged on arrival, whisked through a priority channel and summoned to a place of privacy.
The emerging crowd was beginning to engulf her so that she had to strain her neck to keep an eye on the gangplank. She was just wondering whether she could divert Charlie for the few crucial minutes by sending him on some errand, when she saw them and they, in seconds, spotted her.