by Gabi Moore
“So, I was just …’fun’…”
He kicked the ground.
“Obviously, this conversation isn’t very much fucking fun…” he said and spat into the grass. I hated him just then. I wanted to slap him right across his big arrogant face.
I tightened my own jaw. Fine. I could handle it. I could handle this.
“Well, if we’re only just going to end things and it doesn’t mean anything to you, then why bother carrying on at all? Why not just end them now?” I said. I balled my hands into fists to stop them from shaking. He looked wounded for a second, but then laughed.
“Yeah, good point. Thank you. So glad I had you to point that out to me,” he said, his voice dripping with bitterness. He flung the branch he had in his hand to the ground and stared daggers at it.
“Off you go then, don’t let me fucking keep you,” he spat. He couldn’t even look at me. Somewhere deep in the back of my throat, a painful, angry knot rose up and choked me, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I threw my own basket on the ground and took off in the other direction, the stinging tears blurring my path back to the dorm. It was though someone had kicked my guts and split open a bag of acid inside me, and now it was bubbling over and I didn’t know how to stop it from spilling everywhere.
I raced home and flung myself on my bed, a flood of sobs wracking my body.
Chapter Nineteen - Penelope
Without Vik, things lost their luster. Malawi all at once seemed so maddeningly brown.
The thing about this country is that nothing is for free here. Nothing at all. Every last little scrap costs you, sometimes dearly. The garden was too expensive. There was no way around it. For every measly maize plant we hoped to coax out of the ground, we poured in straw, and fish fertilizer, and barrels of water. I don’t know how much of my life went into each cob, into each little kernel, but it was a lot. And it was a lousy return on investment.
After a while there was no point pretending anymore. The villagers politely came to visit the plot occasionally, and Mama Tembi did her best to appear grateful, but the fact was that nobody needed that community garden. Nobody wanted it. The maize would get eaten, once we finally managed to get it out the ground, but it was clear what everything would have preferred to have: currency. Gainful employment. Proper housing.
I felt ashamed of the garden after a while. I had simply trusted that the mission leaders had known what the correct thing to do was. The Malawians would get a community garden, end of story. Sounded good, but a few months in and I realized: the mission leaders never even came here. They had no idea what they were doing. The Malawians needed good sewage and internet and proper roads and something to export. The longer I stayed here, the more the whole thing seemed like a joke.
I was a different kind of disappointment I felt when I first arrived. An obvious kind of disappointment. Dirt was one thing. Poverty was one thing, and scorpions. That was all fine, I guess. What was really getting me down was how badly I had thought any of this through. How little of an effect I was really having. Why had nobody told me? That I was wasting my time?
The heat beat down on me, out in that open field. I threw my body weight down onto the spade and tried to wrench it out again. The skin on my hands was beyond sore, but I didn’t care. If I couldn’t do anything useful in this place, at least let me dig a proper hole. At least let me get the stupid stuff in the ground, and put that damn seed in there, and at least I could claim that as a triumph, no matter how small and stupid it might be.
Lots of things felt stupid these days. I had no clue anymore, to be honest. It sounds stupid, but I missed him. It sounds stupid, but I couldn’t see him again. I just couldn’t go back. And it sounds stupid, but even now, a whole lifetime since I had picked through those weeds to his cabin, even now, I still felt him, in me.
He didn’t wash out of my skin. When I woke up in the morning, he was still there somehow, inside me, aching, the first thought in my brain. My stupid brain.
I hadn’t heard from Dylan in ages, too, although that was a less complicated situation. He didn’t know what I had been doing here, without him, but he didn’t need to. He could tell just through the few messages we exchanged, that I had gone. I had broken free. And I wasn’t ever coming back. Something had been released in me, and I wasn’t going to pack it away again. Not for him, not for anyone.
There were some new missionaries. They avoided me. I wondered if people were gossiping about me. I didn’t care. I threw my weight into the spade handle again and wrenched it, pulling out a rock in clumps of dead grass. Things had grown here before, and died. The soil kept giving and giving, although it got tired. I reached down and crumbled the clumps in my hand. At least there was soil. At least, if you fed it and tilled it, the soil could give you something marvelous in return. The thought provided me some comfort.
I stood back up again, wiped the sweat from my brow. I wanted to puke.
“You OK, mama?” one of the other workers asked me.
I nodded. We carried on working.
I liked working with them. Seven of us there were, in total. We worked for the most part in silence. We found a rhythm together: down came the spade, out came the soil, in went the fish, on went the straw, then over with the spade again to bury it all in. Then again down with the spade, out with soil… again and again they worked. Occasionally there was a joke or someone cursed a rock that ruined the flow, but together we were a loose machine, working that field like there was nothing else to do with life.
I could go home. I guess. But why? Why not just extend my visa and…?
I couldn’t dust the powdery red soil off of me. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. He had dug deep into me, loosened the clumps and now strange parts of my heart and mind were exposed for the first time ever. My eye caught a fat, pale yellow worm wriggling away from my spade tip. The sight of it made me retch and before I knew it, I was bent double and vomiting into the hole I just dug.
“Penny! You’re sick! Come let’s go, enough work for you today…” one of them said, and grabbed me by the arm. I was dropped off at Mama Tembi’s, naturally, and then bid adieu. I felt awful. It was empty inside, just Mama Tembi cleaning up and a cat winding its way through the stool legs. She gave me a Grandpa headache powder and rested a broad hand on my back, stroking me with sympathy.
“How’s the garden?” she said.
“Crap,” I said and groaned.
She laughed and clucked her tongue.
“Ey, I don’t know what you’re doing out there anyway. Why don’t you go work with Valerie at the school instead?”
I gave her a leery look.
“Because I came to work here on the garden. So I’m working on the garden.” Besides, Valerie could go to hell.
She took my chin in her hands and lifted my face to hers, giving me a long, hard look.
“How are you feeling?”
“Crap,” I said again, and tried to wriggle away from her. But she held me firm and peered into my eyes. Strangely, something like anger flashed over her face.
“I’m sorry, Mama, I’m just …just tired I think. Working too hard. I’m going to go home and sleep it off, ok?” I said, hoping I hadn’t offended her.
“Yes, go home and sleep it off. Good idea” she said and patted my back again. She stood to carry on with her cleaning. “Ask Valerie tonight to give you some proper medicine, she always has something.”
“I won’t see Valerie tonight, she’s spending the night with her friend from London.”
Mama Tembi paused and looked at me. Oops. Had I said something I shouldn’t have? Blown Valerie’s cover somehow?
“Friend from London?” she asked, coming back towards me.
“Um, I think she mentioned she just wanted to visit them this evening or something. I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.
“There’s nobody here from London. She doesn’t have a friend from London,” she said, looking at me in a way that made me uncomfortable.
&nbs
p; “Well, I don’t know, she just told me …maybe you should ask her?”
“This friend, they arrived last week? With the other missionaries?” she said.
“No, no this is an old friend she’s been visiting for ages.”
Mama Tembi’s brows knitted, but then she smiled and threw her hands up.
“Nevermind, maybe she just didn’t mention it! Maybe in the next village” she said and left the room in a hurry.
It took a long while to form in my head.
But the thought eventually did crystallize, slow and hard and with painful edges, in my mind. Once it was there, I felt stupid for not seeing it before. Of course. There was no friend from London and there had never been. Valerie was visiting him. She had always been visiting him.
The cat sidled up to me and slinked its tail round my leg. I looked down at its inquisitive face.
Then I threw up all over the floor.
Chapter Twenty - Penelope
Some chickens were loitering around the front door. I shooed them away and stumbled into the dorm room, slamming the door behind me. Inside was painfully quiet. Eventually, even the protests of the chickens outside died down and I was left alone in there with my thoughts and Valerie’s washing hanging over the sink.
I shuffled over to my bed and tried to push down the retching sensation. No matter which way I sat, or how I twisted my torso, waves of nausea kept washing over me. I put a hand to my stomach, almost begging it to calm down.
I shuffled over to the bedside table and pulled out a small hessian pouch bundled with a string. Bent double off the edge of the mattress, I laid out its contents on the floor between my feet: a cheap clay pipe, some matches and a bank bag of dried herbs that could be tea leaves, if you weren’t looking too closely.
I grimaced through the bilious feeling at the back of my throat and tried to focus on placing a small amount in the pipe, tamping it down, lighting it. It took the most supreme effort, but this was the only thing that could calm my nerves these days. Vik had herbs for everything. Herbs to rest the mind, herbs to calm the stomach and herbs to bring on deep sleep. Of course, I never even had any of these problems before I met him in the first place, but that was another story.
I put the tip to my lips and inhaled. I held the puff in my lungs for as long as I could manage and then let it go, sinking into the mattress. God, that felt better. My fingers went to all the other things I had in the drawer. Everything in this damn room was shared with Valerie, but this drawer was mine. I took everything out and set it on the floor, like a witch doctor trying to read the future, except instead of chicken bones I had Chappie wrappers and paperclips.
I looked at the brown envelope from Dylan, empty now except for his message which these days seemed written in a language I couldn’t speak anymore. The first few were light and peppered with exclamations and smiley faces. Stay safe! I love you! There were other letters from him, but they grew shorter and shorter. One month it was Looks like you’ve gone native!! Haha just kidding, but it’s good you’re adjusting. The next month, a little tension appearing. It’s strange how little you mention the wedding. The month after that, Still alive?! Haha just kidding, but really, I’m not hurt, you could just let me know what the hell it is you’re doing over there. And the most recent one, the last and possibly final one, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and you know how I feel about ultimatums in relationships…
I had started reading that one but never finished. I’m not sure why. Maybe I knew how it ended: you’re a bad girl, Penny, so come home as soon as possible so I can ignore you and show you just how bad.
I also had a bible, some coins, gum, and several small, unopened parcels. Vik’s parcels. Filled with rare and pungent dried flowers and roots meant to discourage a baby from taking hold. All the women used these herbs. Vik would reach up his long torso and fetch one from a tin on a high shelf, and tell me to take it carefully, with water, on an empty stomach in the morning. What I had really done was smiled, nodded, taken it home and stashed it here in this drawer, where it and several more like it stayed, unopened. There were more than nine parcels.
I can’t tell you why I did this. I’m not even sure myself. I only knew that I did want to do it. After weeks of fighting with tired soil to grow a crop nobody wanted, the idea of growing something inside of me seemed unthinkably alluring. I knew it was crazy. Of course I knew that. I had sat in bed here many nights trying to imagine what I would do. I couldn’t go back home and marry Dylan. Not after everything. And as much as it hurt me to admit it, Viktor was no knight in shining armor either. He used me. But in our many arguments, I guess he had been right about one thing: I had used him too. I needed an excuse to run away, and he had “excuse” written all over him in big, tattooed letters.
But I certainly didn’t need him anymore.
I had this beautiful secret growing inside me now, and somehow nothing else seemed to matter quite as much as it did before. I took another drag of the pipe and waited a little for the soothing smoke to gently loosen the nauseas feeling. It was working. I stood quickly and snatched up each of the parcels, taking them to the bathroom.
If you had told me a year ago that I would be standing here, in the middle of deepest darkest Africa, in a rundown bathroom with a pipe dangling from my lips, steadily flushing tiny parcels of potent witch doctor herbs down the toilet, I would have laughed in your face. I was engaged to be married to an unnervingly “good man”, I was supposed to wear a chic but modest white wedding gown and I was meant for a clean, easy life.
I watched a parcel whizz round the aged toilet bowl as I yanked the chain from above, and then it disappeared down the hole and the water filled up again. I plopped in another. It was a waste, of course. They were difficult herbs to find, and took time to prepare. I could almost see his careful fingers on the intricate folds on the paper of each parcel. But nevermind. I had what I really wanted from him now.
A long, long time ago, I had prayed for the perfect man. A good man. I got Dylan Moore, everything a girl like me was supposed to want. But deep down inside, another part of me prayed for something else.
A bad man.
And now growing in my belly was living proof that no matter how pretty life is on the surface, your real desires, what you really want, well, those things find a way. They’re underneath, waiting. I yanked the chain and watched another parcel go down, and then another, and another.
When I was done, I walked back to the bed and sat, glad that the nausea was almost completely gone, and in its place a delicious, warm feeling. Everything was going to be alright. Without Dylan. Without Vik. Just me and my …I couldn’t say the word yet. “Baby”.
I crouched down and took Dylan’s letters, and in an instant I began to tear them up, into tiny, square pieces, smaller and smaller. Head full of smoke, I imagined the paper was his brittle, two-dimensional body, and I was tearing him apart. The pieces were so small he’d never put himself back together again. When all the letters were torn, I swished the pile to muddle the pieces. These I burnt on the stove.
I ate one of the candies in the drawer and threw the rest away, along with the paperclips and other sundry trash in the drawer. As I rose to go outside and throw everything in the outside skip, I heard footsteps on the stones outside. Valerie?
I froze and pricked my ears. The door opened softly and she stood there for a second, looking at me. Her face was different somehow. Her hair looked like shit, which was certainly a first, and the skin under her eyes seemed both puffy and deflated.
In other circumstances, I might have said, “Oh you’re home!” or “hey!” and smiled, but on the other side of a few puffs of chamba, all of that seemed pretty pointless right now. I went outside, tossed my bag of trash on the skip and came back in. She was lying on her own bed, knees up and hands crossed behind her head. It was her preferred pose for when she was feeling philosophical, or had something to rant about. Which wasn’t often.
“Remember what you said t
hat time we were almost hijacked? About how it’s hard to know whether you’re the good guy or the bad guy?” she said at last, contemplating the ceiling.
“Pretty sure I never said anything like that” I said.
“No, no, you did. You were saying that maybe even bad guys think they’re the good guys, so how can you ever really know, right?”
“I think you might have misunderstood me…” I sat down on my own bed. I was suddenly hit with a wild urge to run away from her, and this room. I wanted my own place.
“Well anyway, I think you were right. It’s not so simple, you know? I think sometimes the one everyone thinks is the bad guy is actually the good guy” she said.
I took a deep breath. I tried to force out of my mind the image of her, with Vik’s rough hands wrapped around her hips. His tight, hard muscles …they had felt like mine. But as I looked at her lying back on the mattress, hair fanned out, I could see the ghost of him on her, and I felt the nausea returning.
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s bothering you?” I said, trying to sound neutral. I realized: it would make me so happy to hear that he had hurt her. That he had fucked her and tossed her aside. It was a nasty, childish thought, but I turned it over in my mind slowly, and decided to keep it. Only I could handle Vik. I had learnt, over the months, to take his immense body, to tame his violent energy and please him in ways that only I could.
I hated her. But at that moment, I hated Vik as well. And hoped in my heart that they if they were going to hurt me so badly, then they’d get a little of that pain too.
She let out a big sigh.
“If I tell you a secret, promise you won’t tell anyone else?” she said eventually. I smiled inside. It wasn’t very Christian of me, I know. But then again, I think I had stopped being a Christian the second Vik slid his giant cock into me and fucked me till I nearly passed out.