For now Kiru
Is a woman
From Algeria
With dark hair
swishing down her back and an easy, charming smile. She is wearing a black bikini. The blue shift over it is damp at the bottom, occasionally clinging to her thighs, bearing small trails of sand.
After the burning ceremony, she picks up Matthew, a scientist from a makeshift bar on the beach; light off the huts casts a warm glow on their skin. The soft-bodied women pair off with men who are still high from their ritual. There is alcohol flowing, a social lubricant that makes any gathering less awkward. Kiru assesses these women clinically, knowing their flaws will rise to the surface of clear water before breaking through. She listens for it. Matthew is talkative, eager. They laugh, carrying their drinks to the back end of the beach, deep into the belly of trees and land that feels joyously remote. There is the occasional rare white orchid and empty bottles of alcohol containing formations of past nights. Music from a stage at the far end of the beach filters through. Gulping rum, they are joined by iguanas eating sap from the pale trees that makes them dazed, and one-eyed water crickets from a tale man forgot to include in the Bible.
I’m so happy I burned the clothes I arrived in! Matthew flicks a petal from his Hawaiian-patterned shorts. Oh yes! It’s liberating, as if a shackle’s been broken. There is something in the air here. I feel like another version of myself. And the women fuck!
We can do anything here.
You are like Einstein, Kiru offers, pulling him closer. Like his equation of general relativity, mutating in the fabric of space and time.
Yes! he says, a look of wonder in his eyes at her, the surroundings, the possibilities.
I am Gpv = 8 π G (Tuv + p n g v v).
He knocks back his drink. Matthew considers himself a eunuch because of his impotency. She tells him about the shape and girth of an invisible penis he will gain by the time the night is over.
Do you know what betrayal tastes like? she asks.
There is a burden to carrying salty alphabets on my tongue.
Matthew blinks up at her, heady, tipsy, a little confused.
Three hours pass. Kiru becomes annoyed. She cannot imagine Matthew reaching for the sound of bones tumbling in water, succumbing to being realigned in the frothing white, stark against it, brightly lit, and carrying mouthfuls of seaweed with stories of their own to tell. She realises she cannot love him. His receding hairline elicits sympathy, not attraction. His snaggle-toothed breathy revelations about science had begun to grate. He would yammer on endlessly until she strangled him on the shoreline.
Catching him unaware, she sticks her fingers into his chest, melting flesh. The charred scent rising up to their nostrils as a pattern of smoke unwinds from his chest, shaped like small nudibranch. She reaches through bone, a blueprint at birth washed away by the pumping of blood. Her fingers reach further in, finding his misshapen heart. She runs a finger over the muscle, over the pumping rhythm she has already caught with the damp folds of her vagina. He is hypnotised by the gleam in her eyes, the baring of her teeth, the lightning-blue lines of light running beneath her skin as though she is a circuit.
Her fingers grab his heart, pulling it right out. A sucking sound ensues, followed by a vacuum.
He makes an aaargh noise. It is surprise. It is relief. It is tender.
A carrier pigeon hovers above, shedding a feather that tumbles into the vacuum in his chest, skimming the last conversation he had with an air stewardess once on an easyJet flight about the weight of atoms. The feather tumbling in the dark will change colour once it hits the bottom. The carrier pigeon will report this to others in its flock.
Kiru finds a quiet spot to eat his heart, beneath a tree oozing sap, enjoying the shelter under its drooping, white, palm-like leaves. She is ravenous. His heart tastes of cigarettes, red wine, tiny bits of aluminium, of small murmurs machines hadn’t detected yet. She polishes it off in four bites, licking her fingers clean. Then, she stands beneath the ghostly tree holding her arms up to the light; she sheds her skin.
Now she is
Afro-haired
Long-limbed
And brown-skinned
with the pretty face of a young woman in Cuba who runs a stall making small art pieces from food, who has a beauty mark on her face that changes position slightly depending on the humidity.
She finds Patrice smashing a lobster’s head on a rock. He has an elaborate, cartoon-like moustache which tickles her funny bone, and a Romanian accent.
Are you enjoying the festival? Kiru asks.
Oh, yes! Very much. It’s nice to be around other men like me.
You mean other eunuchs?
Well … you know, men who understand. I’ve been celibate for five years. Now I want to break that vow.
I am understanding. I understand that people who die through sudden accidents don’t know they’re lucky because it’s quick. I understand when you destroy something you give it the opportunity to be born again.
I’ll take your word for it! What an unusual creature you are. He is drawn by the smoothness of her skin, the beauty spot he cannot take his eyes off for some reason.
I can re-enact one of your strongest memories. Would you like to see?
Surely there’s only one answer to that! He is smiling. His mind is distracted by the lobster dangling from his fingers, dripping rivulets of water onto his feet. Badly injured, the lobster is attempting to escape to the second shoreline the carrier pigeons have drawn with their beaks.
Kiru re-enacts his most indelible teenage memory: when he rescues a boy from a house fire. It was terrifying, exciting. He was driven by instinct, recklessness, adrenalin. He watches open-mouthed, astounded that she knows this. Her blue shift rides up her thighs a little as she performs.
Later, she discovers that Patrice’s wife died five years before. Of course he is saddened by his loss. She is sad about this unfortunate turn of events.
She cannot compete with his dead wife or the memories she left behind that float and duck between his organs. She wants to leave a bite mark on his collarbone that he will stroke even after they’ve faded. She wants to breathe against the pulse in his neck as though she can tame its movements with her breaths.
I’ll build a new penis for you from a current, she says. Not leave you with the old one that still carries the touch of your wife’s fingertips.
He laughs uncomfortably, replying, When I was a teenager I used to dream of Pam Grier sitting on the edge of my bed holding a rocket.
She smiles at this. It is a sincere curving of her plump lips, which are intoxicating to him. Kiru wants to apologise for the things she cannot tell him.
If only you could hit your head on rocks below shimmering surfaces of water and not be fazed by the impact or your blood momentarily blinding fish.
If only you were how I imagined you to be.
What do I do with the disappointment of this? With the gap in between?
What do I store there for cold, isolating winters you will not be a part of?
She eats half of Patrice’s heart in the early hours of the morning when the island is still asleep. She dumps the other half in the waters of the blue sea for a whale that has recently given birth in the Pacific, longing for the call of its young. She recalls the gathering of carrier pigeons swallowing patterns of nudibranch-shaped smoke from Patrice’s chest, the shed feather turning to gold in the darkened vacuum of his chest.
Small, golden triangles rise to the surface of Kiru’s skin. She glows in the hazy grey light of dawn, watching mist softening the lines of mountains for what the day will bring. The island’s creatures create a gentle din to run her fingers over.
A tear runs down Kiru’s cheek. She is lonely. She wants to fill the ache that grows inside her, that isn’t knowable no matter which corner of herself she reaches it from, no matter whose footsteps she temporarily borrows to do so. It is vast. And she is like a small chess queen loose in the sky, clutching at shapes,
at possibilities which amount to nothing as she opens her hand on the crash down.
After she sheds her skin, she watches it in the water. It is like a diving suit with a face, carried away by ripples.
She does not know what it is like to have female friends. She spends two to three hours interacting with the soft-bodied women who speak as if words are foreign objects in their mouths, whose lungs she can hear shrinking while the iguanas crawl around the island without heads that have vanished.
Late in the afternoon Kiru rests in one of several boats moored on the island. She thinks of the stray items the soft-bodied women have begun to stash away: two fire extinguishers, a telescope, a high wooden chair with a dirty velvet seat, three propellers, and two cable cars. She panics with her eyes closed, as she is prone to doing occasionally. She is tired from the energy she expends prowling the island. Her tiredness results in strange visions that carve a path through the day. She dreams of a catastrophic darkness where everything falls away one by one, orbiting in a black star-studded distance above the earth with warped frequencies that result in it all falling down again in the wrong place: with the sea now a glimmering sky, the sky a weightless, cloud-filled ground, rock faces hiding in caves, mountains made of the island’s creatures leaking tree sap, trees uprooted in panicked flight, alcohol bottles filled with new weather shot through with spots of ice, eunuchs emerging from a fire charred, offering to hide bits of their lives in shed skin. When light from the black star-studded space above the earth threatens to split her head in two, Kiru sees herself sitting on top of the mountain of island creatures eating fossils one by one, but she knows this will not do. She clambers out of the boat.
By the time she finds Ray from Madagascar fixing one leg of the stage at the far end of the beach, Kiru is
A curvy Mediterranean
Beauty with a
Boyishly short
Pixie cut.
Amber nudibranch from the telescope lens have made their way to them but Ray has not spotted this. He is wiry, handsome, a little sweaty from his efforts. He has a brutish slash of a mouth. As if things had accidents there. Other men pass to wander the island’s pathways, mountains and peaks. Some emerge from the beach huts with daylight waning in their eyes. By now the soft-bodied women, her competitors, are gasping for air between conversations, grabbing bits of sand that slide through their fingers.
Can I help you? Kiru tugs down her shift, watching Ray’s head.
No, thanks. Don’t move, though, he instructs. Somehow you standing there is making this task more bearable.
Why are you fixing the stage?
He chuckles, throws her a bemused look. Because if I don’t, some musicians among us might get injured.
You cannot fix all the world’s stages. What do they do when you are not there to help? Injury is part of living.
This is true but I can’t just leave it knowing people could get hurt. Besides, I have a soft spot for musicians. I think I may have been one in a past life.
What are you in this life? She kneels then, sinking into the sand, shallow pockets to catch odd bits of conversation.
The stage is even again. He dusts his hands on his backside. I’m a fisherman.
Something in her turns cold. A thin film of frost finds its way into her insides.
She sees herself dangling from a hook in the ceiling of his shop, bright purple. He is surprised that she has adjusted to the air of the shop despite the hook inside her trying to catch things that take on different forms. Despite the hunger she will spread to other creatures, who do not know what it means to truly be insatiable, dissatisfied. She knows to listen to her visions when they come. Her eyes are patient, understanding. He feels compelled to say, I don’t know what instrument I played in a past life.
I can tell you, she says. She stands. Tiny spots of blood on her shift have dried to a barely noticeable decoration. She begins to make the noise of an instrument that feels familiar, that sounds eerily accurate, like a horn maybe, yet he cannot place it.
They hang around the stage area into the evening, watching a series of performances and fireworks exploding in the sky she imagines assembling into bright lava-filled tongues. Later, they go for a walk.
Tell me how you became a eunuch. She encourages, touching his arm.
Overhead, the carrier pigeons drop blank scrolls in different parts of the island.
I had testicular cancer.
I’m sorry for your cancer.
Don’t be, he says. We killed it.
They hold hands. Intermittently, he tries to guess which instrument she mimicked.
He is unsuccessful.
On her walk back through the trees, the gauzy light, and beneath the knowing bold sky, Kiru eats Ray’s heart naked, mouth smudged red. How could she place her heart, her future, in the hands of a man who didn’t even know what instrument he was destined to play? His heart tastes like a small night tucked in the plain sight of a morning, like standing on a brink with your arms outstretched, like eating a new kind of fruit that bleeds. She notices the soft-bodied women are now in the white trees shrieking.
Over the next four days of Haribas, Kiru eats seven more hearts. By the time she heads back to the shoreline on the last day to sleep in white waters, she is now
A little girl
Sporting pigtails, pregnant
From eating the hearts
Of ten men.
She hopes to fall in love one day. For now, she hollers, a call that signifies the end of a mating season for her. A hallowed echo the mountains and mist recognise but sends panic into the crevices of an island rupturing; clusters of uranium erupt, rooftops of huts catch fire; life rafts made from felled trees dot the shoreline, waiting for something dark and sly to hatch on them; moored boats hold the soft-bodied women from the earth, only able to breathe for four days before running out of their allocated air. But the eunuchs are not dead. They are trapped on the island, dazed, meandering around without hearts wondering why the musical instruments buck in the water, why the carrier pigeons are now one-winged and blind, circling scrolls with guidance for the next festival. Kiru leaves St Simeran in this state.
It is
An alchemy
A purging
A morning sitting on
Its backside
A thing of wonder fluttering
In the periphery of
A god’s vision.
DAVID CONSTANTINE
THE PHONE CALL
The phone rang. I’ll go, he said. Normally he left the phone to her but they were cross so perhaps he wanted to put himself even more in the right. She remained at the table. This keeps happening lately, she thought. Oh well, what if it does? He came back: It’s for you. – Who is it? – He shrugged: Some man. By the time she came back he had cleared the table, washed the dishes and was watering the beans – his beans – at the far end of the garden. She stood in the conservatory, observing him and trying to make sense of the phone call. A long summer evening, birdsong, everything in the garden doing nicely. But she could tell, or thought she could, that he was watering the beans much as she supposed he had washed the dishes: to be indisputably in the right. She could almost hear the voice in his head, the aggrieved tone. Not really pitying him, nor herself either for that matter, but because she did not want it to go on till bedtime, she walked down the garden and stood by the beans that had grown high and were crimsonly in flower. She smelled the wet earth. He turned and came back from the water butt with another full can. That’s good, she said. He said nothing, but he did nod his head, and she saw that the job, which he loved, was softening him. When he had emptied the can, he said, One more.
She waited, watching him, thinking about the phone call. Over his shoulder, as he finished the row, he asked, Who was it then? Some man, she answered. He said he’d met me twenty years ago, on that course I went on. The husband put down the empty can and looked at her, mildly enough. What course would that be? – The course you gave me for my birthday, the p
oetry course in the Lake District. You said I’d been rather down in the dumps and a course writing poetry in the Lake District might buck me up. All my friends said what a nice present it was. – Oh, that course, the husband said. And the man who just phoned was on it with you, was he? – Well he says he was, but I can’t for the life of me remember him. I said I could, but that was a fib. – But he remembered you all right, enough to phone you up after twenty years. – To be absolutely honest, I’m not even sure he did remember me, not me myself, if you know what I mean. He said he did, but I’m not so sure.
The husband turned away to put the can back by the water butt where it belonged. She watched, wondering more about the man who had phoned than about her husband and his questions. Did he have a name, this man? he asked, returning. Yes, he did, she answered. He said he was called Alan Egglestone. But I honestly don’t remember anyone of that name on the course. I remember who the tutors were, and two or three of the other students, but I don’t remember an Alan Egglestone. Then the husband said, Well it was a long phone call with a man you can’t remember. You must have discovered you had something in common, to go on so long. Yes, she answered, I’m very sorry I left you with the washing-up. I couldn’t see a way of ending it any sooner. I didn’t have the heart to interrupt him. Now the husband looked at her as though, for some while, he had not been seeing her for what she really was. Don’t look at me like that, Jack, she said. I’m not looking at you like that, he replied. I just don’t know what you could find to talk about with a complete stranger for so long. Perhaps you’ve been on his mind for twenty years. Perhaps he’s been writing you poems for twenty years. I very much doubt it, she answered, beginning to feel tired, and not just of the conversation about a phone call, but, as happened now and then, of everything. Jack must have seen this. It was pretty obvious. Nobody else of his aquaintance lost heart quite so suddenly, quite so visibly, as his wife. I’m not getting at you, Chris, he said. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I was only wondering what this Mr Egglestone had to say to you that took so long.
Best British Short Stories 2020 Page 4