‘Here he is!’ Jen exclaims, emerging from behind a bush, her white, Lycra catsuit still loosely dangling – like a giant used condom – from around her hips. ‘It’s everybody’s favourite cancer-victim!’
Gene stands frozen, like a statue, sweat cascading down his cheeks, staring at his phone. He is re-reading a text from Sheila which says simply, ‘We rlly nd to spk about V. URGENT!’
‘Hello?’
He finally glances up. Jen stands before him, the upper half of her torso encased in only a skimpy, gold bikini top.
‘Bloody hell, Jen!’
He shoves the phone away and rapidly averts his gaze, his offended eyeballs seeking temporary respite in the cool green spears of a clump of ornamental grass. He looks pale and distracted. It suddenly occurs to Jen that the moisture on his cheeks might not be sweat after all, but something infinitely more perturbing.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks, scowling. ‘You’ve been behaving really weirdly ever since you got here.’
Gene bends forward and retrieves a rusty, old padlock from the grassy knoll. He inspects it, with interest, then murmurs, ‘Antique …’ and drops it again. He peers up into the sky where a low-flying plane leaves a curling vapour trail in the heavens’ gently beaten Turkish-blue enamelwork. The contours of his face seem oddly sharp – as though freshly etched in a new – less kind, less congenial – shade of chalk.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jen repeats, almost panicked, now. ‘You look really pale.’
‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.’
Gene drags his eyes back down from the heavens, reeling them in like two errant kites on unreliable strings. But his pupils will not be curtailed. They jump and start like hatching frogspawn in a murky pond.
‘Are you ill?’ Jen’s aghast.
Gene doesn’t answer. He feels temporarily disconnected from his usual, brash familiarity with vowels and consonants.
‘Dehydrated?’ Jen demands. ‘Did you have a row with Sheila? D’you need to sit down?’
Gene remains very still, as if stillness alone can forestall the things he has done and the things he must soon be compelled to do.
‘I’ve really messed up,’ he eventually murmurs, half to himself, his lips barely moving. The eyes remain unfocused.
‘Messed up? How?’ Jen takes a small step closer.
‘I can’t tell you’ – he smiles, wanly – ‘but it’s bad.’
‘Why can’t you tell me?’ Another small step.
‘Because it’s …’ he slowly shakes his head.
‘You don’t think I can be trusted?’ Jen’s deeply offended.
Gene shakes his head again, laughing to himself, hoarsely. Then:
‘Yes.’
‘Gene!’ She cuffs him – possibly a fraction harder than just playfully – on the shoulder. He takes the blow, still laughing, his eyes moistening with tears. His insides feel all sharp and tense and tightly packed, like the compressed coils in an old-fashioned sprung mattress.
‘Okay, you’re officially freaking me out, now!’ Jen snaps. ‘Just tell me what’s wrong!’
‘Nothing.’ Gene closes his eyes. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute. I’m just having a little … a little moment, that’s all.’
‘Why? About what? Is it the ball?’
‘Ball?’ He opens his eyes again.
‘The lost ball?’
He turns and glances around him, fuzzily, as if only just getting his bearings. He’s at the golf course – he’s inside his own body – it’s a fine day – there’s a kid in the rough a short distance away searching for something, valiantly poking around in the undergrowth with a specially fashioned twig.
‘Is the boy taking part in the Children’s Tournament?’ he asks.
‘No. He’s here with me. I brought him. You seriously don’t think I can be trusted?’ Jen persists, hurt.
‘That outfit …’ Gene sighs, appraising her, almost mournfully, ‘not really your average golf club attire.’
‘It’s my African-Warrior-Queen-Space-Bandit look.’
Jen puts her hands on her hips, thrusts out her chest and poses.
‘I see.’ Gene’s none the wiser.
‘I’m Shaka Zulu’s Martian wife.’
She puts her hands behind her head, messes up her hair and angles her hips.
‘Very fetching.’ Gene smiles, wanly.
Jen stops posing. ‘You think I can’t be discreet?’ she challenges him, growing increasingly irritated by his dislocated air. ‘Well how d’you fancy this for discretion?’ She draws a deep breath. ‘See the kid?’
She thumbs over her shoulder towards the distant Israel. Gene nods. He sees the kid.
‘Ransom’s secret love-child!’
Gene’s eyes widen.
‘And he doesn’t have the first clue about it!’
‘Who doesn’t?’ Gene demands. ‘The kid?’
Jen nods.
‘And Ransom?’
‘Not really sure …’ She shrugs, tying the arms of her catsuit into a knot around her waist. ‘Plays a close game, that one.’
‘Have you said anything?’
‘Nope. But I kind of hinted. The kid’s mother’s Jamaican – his manager’s sister, and the dates definitely add up.’
‘So – hang on – his mother’s Esther’s sister?’
‘Yup.’ Jen nods. ‘I tried to tell you last night on the phone. She’s over here for the birth. She’s this strident environmentalist. Wages a one-woman campaign against the Jamaican tourist industry. Calls it “parasitic” – the New Colonialism. Very sharp. Very scary. But the kid’s a complete sweetheart.’
Gene scratches his head, trying to take this all in. ‘So what exactly are you hoping to achieve by …?’
‘Not sure.’ Jen shrugs. ‘I’m just playing it by ear. Having a bit of fun. Generating chaos. I’m visualizing myself as some kind of toxic, intergalactic super-being who’s been dropped on to the earth from another galaxy by a mischievous deity. We have a completely different moral outlook in my part of the stratosphere. More arbitrary, more stringent, more sophisticated. Am I the bad girl?’ she ponders, tip of her right index finger pressing into her chin, eyes raised in a semblance of deep thought. ‘A skinny, blonde scourge? A dark mistress of anarchy, artifice and contrivance? Or am I’ – she swaps to her left index finger and raises her eyes to an adjacent angle – ‘the complete opposite? An inspirational, Lycra-clad angel-sprite, single-handedly fighting the forces of disinformation with my trusty, golden bazookas, straw wedgies and deadly mascara wand?’
Jen produces her mascara wand from what seems like thin air.
‘So this isn’t still all about Stan …?’ Gene hazards a guess.
‘It’s like he brings out my Gaia energy,’ Jen sighs, gazing over towards Ransom (who is obsessively inspecting his hairline in a couple of the photographer’s sample shots). ‘I’ve not really got a handle on it myself yet. It’s very strong, very instinctual … And like I say, I’m not even entirely sure if it’s to the power of good or evil.’
‘Well maybe you need to try and work that out before you –’ Gene immediately starts to caution her.
‘It’s like being on fire!’ Jen interrupts, enthused. ‘It’s amazing! It’s like I just woke up. It’s like … it’s like Jen’s finally coming into focus. She’s arrived! She’s here.’
‘You were always here,’ Gene assures her. ‘You’re generally very present, by and large.’
‘Really?’ Jen looks bored. ‘I’m not so sure.’
‘If you want my advice …’ Gene starts off.
‘Oh God, no. Don’t spoil it with your sensible advice,’ Jen clucks. ‘Good advice is the last thing I feel like hearing right now. Pshaw to good advice! Good advice is like, urgh, yawns-ville, foot-tap, eye-roll.’
‘Well maybe there’s a useful message in that,’ Gene counsels.
Jen stares at him for a few seconds, ruminatively, then her focus shifts slightly, and after another, shorter, somewhat more spec
ulative pause:
‘Holy fuck, Gene! You little scamp!’
He glances over his shoulder, spooked.
‘Do my eyes deceive me,’ Jen demands, with a pantomimic gawp, as he turns back around to face her again (still none the wiser), ‘or are those a bunch of filthy love bites on your neck?’
There are no empty tables in the crowded hospital canteen. Sheila scans the room, her eyelids weighted by an excess of painkillers. She is precariously balanced on one crutch, her handbag swinging on her shoulder, her free hand clutching on to a packet of egg mayonnaise sandwiches and a piping-hot cappuccino in a sealed, plastic cup. She eventually fights her way over to a spare chair in the corner, smiles at the table’s glowering occupant and asks if she might occupy the seat.
The woman she addresses is slight, of colour, and wears a heavy pair of square, tortoiseshell reading glasses which have slipped halfway down the bridge of her nose. Her small face is framed by a mass of wild, curly black hair. Her full lips shine with Vaseline. She has dark rings under her eyes.
‘Sure,’ she says, after a long, five-second pause, ‘feel free.’
She twitches her nose then returns to her book. It’s entitled The Diary of Frida Kahlo – An Intimate Self-Portrait. The cover is an arrestingly amateurish daub by the artist of herself in the guise of a scary, witch-like wild-woman. This cartoon is – by sheer coincidence (and in the loosest possible sense) – a fairly accurate depiction of the general overall demeanour of the person currently in possession of it.
Sheila sits down, with a grunt. Her lone crutch falls to the floor. She curses under her breath. The glowering woman gazes up at her, laconically – a further five seconds pass, another nose twitch follows – then she sucks on her tongue and bends over to retrieve it.
‘You fall?’ she demands, in her husky but nicely modulated Jamaican accent. ‘Or something fall on you?’
‘Something fell on me.’ Sheila takes back the crutch, with a nod of thanks. ‘An electricity meter. I tried to block it with my shin …’
The woman bursts out laughing. Her laugh is like the warning bark of a hyena. Several people turn to peer at them, alarmed.
‘I’m waiting for an x-ray,’ Sheila continues (somewhat discomforted by the laugh herself). ‘I blacked out mid-way through a baptism – just for a couple of seconds, tops – and my parishioners insisted on dragging me down here. The doctor thinks the bone might be chipped.’
She pauses (embarrassed by this high level of unburdening). ‘They only have one free crutch in casualty. Somebody stole the other.’
‘Shins can be dicey,’ the woman muses. ‘I crushed both my shins one time during an anti-logging demonstration in south-eastern Venezuela – Bolivar State. Been there?’
Sheila shakes her head.
‘Well site security “accidentally” rolled a twenty-ton pile of timber on to our small group of protesters. One man was killed outright – decapitated – a local indigenous tribesman, a chief. Father of twelve girls. Another lost both his legs. I broke both feet. Shins were crushed. The nearest hospital was twenty-nine hours away. Dirt roads. Mountain passes. They called for a helicopter but it never came. We did the journey in an open-backed Land-Rover. We had one bottle of water between five of us and nothing to eat. The pain was incredible. I had two blood transfusions. Contracted a rare form of hepatitis as an added bonus.’
She grimaces at the memory, twitches her nose, and then returns to her book, a slight sneer playing at the corner of her lips.
Sheila gazes at the woman for several seconds, uncertain how to react (Awe? Sympathy? Incredulity?), then unwraps her sandwiches, takes a bite and carefully eases the lid from her coffee cup. She watches the woman read.
‘I really enjoyed the Heyden Herrera,’ she eventually murmurs.
The woman ignores her.
‘His biography of Frida Kahlo,’ Sheila adds, almost to herself.
‘Never read it.’ The woman glances back up again, takes a sip from her glass of orange juice and snaps a small chunk from the end of her unappetizing-looking organic flapjack.
‘It’s very good.’ Sheila shrugs.
The woman pops the flapjack into her mouth then appraises Sheila from under heavily weighted lids as she chews.
‘Why?’ she eventually wonders.
‘Well it’s very detailed … uh … nicely anecdotal, cleverly structured, beautifully illustrated … Oh, and he pulls no punches about the serious artistic and emotional ramifications of her tram accident.’
‘Tram accident?’
The woman twitches her nose.
Sheila nods.
‘There was a tram accident?’
‘The handrail went straight through her womb,’ Sheila expands. ‘She was eighteen. The bus was criminally overcrowded. It’s what defined Kahlo as an artist – as a woman. She could never have children. She spent her entire adult life in unendurable pain. That’s basically what her paintings are all about.’
‘Hmmn …’ The woman continues to appraise Sheila, eyes still half-closed, then eventually murmurs, ‘You remind me of … What they call that old girl again? Sister Mary Beckett? The art critic?’
‘Sister Wendy Beckett,’ Sheila corrects her (uncertain whether to be pleased or offended). ‘Well I’m very flattered …’ (she opts to settle for the former), ‘although I’m not actually a nun, I’m a minister.’
‘Well you got hair like a nun,’ the woman counters.
‘You think so?’ Sheila raises her hand to her head. ‘I only just had it cut.’
‘It’s gay hair,’ the woman opines, with a mischievous snort. ‘Gay nun’s hair and that’s a fact.’
‘Thanks.’ Sheila smiles back, brusquely. ‘Ever considered a career in the diplomatic corps?’
‘It’s funny you should ask that …’ the woman snorts again, not remotely offended.
‘It is?’ Sheila’s nonplussed.
‘It is,’ the woman confirms, gnomically.
‘How so?’ Sheila persists.
‘I work in the field of human and environmental rights,’ the woman explains, ‘I spend my whole life rubbing up against arseholes and diplomats.’
‘A lawyer?’ Sheila asks. ‘Or a journalist?’
‘Lawyer, blogger, activist. Although I’ve been disbarred from practising in half the West Indies and most of both the Americas. I stir up shit, basically,’ she continues, taking another sip of her juice. ‘They call me a bitch-kitty, a rabble-rouser, a ball-breaker …’
‘You’re the anti-diplomat,’ Sheila opines.
‘Just like your good friend Jesus Christ,’ the woman smirks, then twitches her nose, then peers down at her book, then blinks, then twitches her nose again, then looks up. Sheila is anxiously combing her fingers through her hair.
‘The hair’s cute,’ the woman clucks. ‘I’m a big fan of those butch gay girls. I lived with two gay nuns in Barbados for six months one time. We was protesting against a two hundred million dollar landfill site.’
‘Any injuries?’ Sheila wonders, drolly.
The woman opens her mouth and loosens one of her front teeth. She then pushes it back in again, adjusts her glasses and returns to her book. As she reads the glasses slip back down her nose.
‘Are you prone to headaches at all?’ Sheila wonders.
‘Pardon me?’
The woman glances up, irritated.
‘Headaches?’
‘Why d’you ask?’
‘I notice how your glasses keep slipping down your nose. Mine used to do that all the time. I suffered from these really terrible headaches and I didn’t know why. Thought it might be an allergy or something. Turns out it was caused by reading through out-of-focus eyeglasses. When the glasses slip down your nose they automatically go out of focus. You’re straining your eyes without even realizing.’
Several seconds pass in quizzical silence and then: ‘A very lot of words come out your mouth,’ the woman observes, staring at Sheila’s lips, fixedly, as if they alone migh
t be at fault.
‘In the end I bought these things called Wedgees …’ Sheila reaches into her handbag (refusing to be intimidated) and withdraws her glasses case. She opens it and removes her glasses. She shows the Wedgees to the woman. ‘They’re small and padded … I got them by mail order. They fit snugly on to the end of each arm. Stop the glasses from slipping. I swear I haven’t had a single headache since I first bought them.’
‘A miracle!’ the woman exclaims, dourly.
‘Well they’ve certainly worked for me.’ Sheila shrugs.
The woman – clearly against her better judgement – takes the proffered glasses and inspects the Wedgees. She squeezes them, somewhat aggressively.
‘I do get headaches,’ she finally admits, passing them back, ‘and my son, Israel, gets them worse. He also wears glasses – reads a lot.’
Sheila carefully removes the Wedgees from the arms of her glasses, then indicates towards the woman to pass her pair over. The woman hesitates, grimaces, then takes hers off. Sheila grabs them and gently pushes the Wedgees on to the end of either arm.
‘Give them a try.’ She passes the glasses back to the woman. The woman takes them and puts them on.
‘Shake your head as much as you like,’ Sheila suggests, ‘they’ll stay in place.’
The woman shakes her head.
‘What you call these things again?’ she demands, finally fully engaged.
‘Wedgees. But I’m sure there are other brands …’
The woman shakes her head for a second time.
‘They won’t shift,’ Sheila insists.
‘They ain’t shifting,’ the woman confirms.
‘Told you.’
‘I do suffer from headaches,’ the woman reiterates. ‘I read a lot of contracts, lot of legal papers, letters, newspaper clippings on the computer, that kind of stuff.’
The Yips Page 39