The Gate Theory

by Kaaron Warren

  ~~~

  After the shift was over, the head nurse took me to the suburb of Lami, where we looked at second-hand clothes which smelled so full of mould and mothballs you could never wash it out. We went into the dark, rotting shed which passed for a market. Piles of vegetable waste sat in their own sludge, but on the tables were beautiful purple eggplants, hands of bananas, small, aromatic tomatoes. The nurse talked in Fijian to the stall holders and they smiled at me, nodding, welcoming.

  “Artist!” one of them said. “Oh, mangosa!”

  “Mangosa means smart,” the head nurse said. “She says you are smart if you are an artist. There’s the dog,” she whispered. She pointed at an enormous yellow mongrel. He sat with his back against a post, his back legs stretched out, his front paws lolling. He sat like a man. I’ve never seen balls the size of those he displayed, bigger than cricket balls and a dark grayish pink.

  “He’s the one they say got poor Dog Girl pregnant. They say her children are running for local council.” At last she laughed and it finally sank it she was joking. I felt thick, slow and patronising, that I would believe such a thing.

  I paid for the vegetables and I paid for the taxi to drop her home and take me to my flat. Local wages are so low, my per diem from my Australian benefactor was higher than her weekly wage.

  We passed St Martin’s on the way. “They are mental in there,” the taxi driver said, tapping his forehead. When I didn’t respond he twisted to look at me, the steering wheel turning with him so we veered across into traffic coming the other way. “Mental crazy,” he said. “Don’t go in there.”

  He seemed chatty, so I asked him who he thought ‘that girl’ might be. He looked at me in the mirror.

  “It might mean anything to anyone.”

  “But what does it mean to you?”

  “The same as it means to any taxi driver,” he said. “In the story she never gets old. Fresh-faced, sparkle-eyed, she smells of mangoes in season. Not the skin part, the flesh, chopped up and sweet on the plate. She picks up a taxi near the handicraft market in town. It’s always at 5:37. A lot of us won’t pick up a girl from there, then. She climbs into the backseat and gives you such a smile you feel you heart melt, all thought of your family gone.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “No, but my brother has. She asks to go to the cemetery and if you pry and ask who is there, she will say, ‘My mother.’ You want to take her home and feed her. You keep driving and you can’t help looking at her in the mirror because she is so beautiful. She wears no jewelry apart from a small pendant around her neck. It nestles just here.” He touched his breastbone with a forefinger, then spread his fingers as if holding a breast.

  “I think that’s enough,” I said.

  “The pendant has a picture of Krisna, fat baby eating butter. You turn the corner to reach the graveyard and you wait for her to tell you where to pull in. You feel a great coldness but the door is closed. You turn around and she is gone. Nothing of her remains.”

  I shivered. It was an old story, true. But it frightened me.

  Taxi drivers love to tell stories of the things they’ve seen, the people they’ve picked up. I dismissed it as an urban myth, but I heard it again, and again. Always a brother, or a best friend, and they always told it with a shiver, as if it hurt to talk.

  ~~~

  On my next visit to St Martin’s I walked up to the old lady, Malvika. “I am that girl,” she said. Between her breasts I saw a pendant, Krisna eating butter.

  “You had a taxi ride?” I asked. “Is that right?”

  “I…” She nodded.

  “Will you walk with me? Let’s walk. I have sweets.” I whispered this last to her, not wanting the others to follow. All the women here walked slowly, their feet dragging on the floor, as if their feet were lead and they were too tired, too weak, to lift them each step. The women looked up at visitors but their eagerness was frightening. They wanted to tell you, give you their stories, and they wanted treats. Sweets to suck is mostly what they craved, sugar being the easiest addiction. Sugar ran out here because the women spooned it into their pockets, poked a wet finger in there during prayer or while they swept, then sucked that sugar off.

  We walked across the driveway and around behind the art therapy room. I didn’t want to sit inside on the hard stools. It was dusty and stank of bananas and sweat. I wasn’t sure how I’d fix it, but fix it I would have to. We found an old bench in the shade behind the building and sat down. “I told this many times,” Malvika said. “A hundred. Two hundred. They stopped writing it down.”

  “I can write it down,” I said. I took out my sketchbook and I didn’t write; I drew.

  “My mother died and father was happy to find a girlfriend the next day. He didn’t visit my mother’s grave but at least he gave me money for a taxi. I finished my job at 5:30 and went to see Mother before going home. There were not many taxis because everybody had finished work but this one stopped. This one.” She closed her eyes. I thought of the head nurse’s description of Malvika’s arrival and my heart started to beat. I didn’t need to hear this story; I would do nothing about it. But I wanted to hear it. I did . I wanted to hear of suffering and pain. I wanted to draw it on my paper, capture the detail of it.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “He was a nice man and asked me questions about work and school. Then he asked about boys and my body, words I didn’t like. I was not brave enough to tell him to stop but I didn’t answer him.

  “When we reached the cemetery he pulled right inside. It was raining and he said he didn’t want me to get wet though of course I would, standing out there. He stopped the car and jumped out while I gathered my things. He opened the door for me and I thought that was kind. But he didn’t let me out. No.”

  She squeezed her hands together. “He pushed into the back seat and he took what my husband should have had. He hit me many times. As he climbed out, I tried to get out the other door but he slammed my fingers. He dragged me out into the mud and forced my face down into it. Then he did more terrible things, tearing and hurting me.”

  She thrust her fingers into her pocket and brought them out covered with sugar. She sucked them.

  “He picked me up and shoved me into the taxi. He could have left me there but he thought of a way to cover up his crime. He drove me up the hill to the hospital and dumped me here. I couldn’t speak sense for two days and by then it was too late.”

  “And he invented the ghost story to explain where you had gone, in case people saw you getting in his taxi?”

  The old lady looked at me and smiled. “I am that girl.”

  I thought, You cling to your youth. You dream of being young again, before this happened to you.

  The head nurse came around the corner. “There you are! You shouldn’t take her away. She is very unwell. Very fragile.”

  ~~~

  I went home to paint in the afternoon light. Rain obliterated Suva Bay and was headed our way, so I had to work fast. My painting of Malvika disturbed me, because I had the sense of her as a young girl more strongly than of her as an old woman.

  The hair on her chin. I knew there was a long, dark hair, but did it curl? Which side of her face was it on?

  I hailed a taxi and had him stop at a roadside market, where I bought bananas and pawpaw with the change in my purse. Nobody would question me if I came with fruit.

  Out of habit I asked the driver about That Girl. This one said, “She disappears. I can show you the place.”

  ~~~

  I went to Malvika although it was close to dinnertime and the hospital didn’t like a break in the routine. She sat outside the door of the dorm. The other inmates used the door at the end of the verandah.

  She sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open. She didn’t blink. Her mouth was open and saliva had dried around her lips.

  “Omigod,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  The nurse stopped me. “No, she’s in a state.”

  The old l
ady’s eyes were reddened and dry. I stared into them, looking for a sign of life, but nothing. There was no pulse. No breath. I remembered nothing of my first aid training and didn’t want to put my mouth on her anyway.

  “We must lay her flat,” I said. I could do that much. The others watched me.

  “You should leave her comfortable,” Sangeeta said, shaking her head. She smelled of burnt hair.

  “We must call the doctor,” I said, but even as I spoke I was thinking, “Prussian Blue. If I mix Prussian Blue with Titanium White, water it down, I’ll get her dead eyes. I’ll paint an image of herself as a young girl in there, then wipe it away and paint the blank.”

  “She’s empty,” the nurse whispered to me. “Her ghost is taking a holiday. She will be back. Just wait.”

  Five minutes passed and I knew I had to take charge. I called for the doctor on my cell phone. He said, “No hurry. The nurses will call for the morgue when they are ready.”

  I squatted beside Malvika. I wouldn’t get this chance again. The hair on her chin; it didn’t curl.

  And it happened. After ten minutes, maybe fifteen, Malvika began to twitch, blink her eyes, then she curled over into a ball and rocked.

  “She…has a doctor examined her?”

  “They are not interested.”

  “How often does this happen?”

  “Sometimes. It rests her. She is happier for days afterwards.”

  No one else seemed concerned and I wondered if it was my western woman ways which made me so terrified of an old woman who could die and come back to life as if she was merely sleeping.

  I sat quietly and sketched their night time routine. That calmed me. Malvika sat up, demanding sugar. Yellowish saliva trails covered her chin. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her eyes were still out of focus and almost purple, it seemed to me. Her left cheek was reddened, as if the blood had already started pooling there.

  I sketched those marks of death.

  ~~~

  I didn’t go back to St Martin’s for a while. I was offered a commission from a wealthy Frenchwoman and the lure of the money, plus the idea of having my work hang in France, convinced me to take it.

  One afternoon, feeling frustrated with the pretty French-woman’s face, I pulled out my portrait of Malvika. It made me feel ill to look at it. I had not painted a dead woman before. In the background I had painted a clock, set at 5:37.

  I thought of the taxi drivers and how easily they repeated the legend of the disappearing girl. How happily they unconsciously supported their rapist companion. I knew that I would not be able to finish my portrait of Malvika until I knew her as a young girl, traced her steps over and over again.

  I began then a week, or was it two? Of catching taxis after five, outside the handicraft centre. I did it a dozen times, maybe more. Some of them told me proudly, “A lot of drivers won’t pick up young girls from there. But I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  One evening, the driver said, “You been shopping?” His eyes looked at me in the mirror but not at me. Beside me. I’ve always found cross-eyed people hard to talk to.

  “Yes,” I said, though I had no bags.

  “You girls going dancing tonight?”

  “Girls?”

  “You and your friend.” He nodded at me. Beside me.

  I felt prickles down my right arm, as if someone had leaned close to me. I didn’t believe there was anyone there, but I didn’t want to look. I shifted nearer to the door, and turned my head.

  Nothing. No one.

  The driver said something in Hindi.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hindi,” I said, but he spoke more, pausing now and then as you would in a conversation.

  “Your friend is very shy,” he said.

  We turned up the road to the cemetery, heading for St Martin’s. I had to continue, my heart beat with it. We passed the cemetery, pulled into St Martin’s. The driver turned around.

  “Where…is…your friend?” he shouted. He didn’t look like a man who shouted. “Where is she? You pay me.”

  “Will you wait? I just want to see something.”

  He shook his head, already driving away as I shut the door. “Where is she? Where is that girl?”

  ~~~

  Malvika sucked her fingers at me. “Sugar? Sugar?”

  No one had cleaned her up and I could see the marks of death clearly, the yellowish saliva on her chin, the purple color of her eyes. “Have you been away? Out?” I said.

  She nodded. “I am that girl,” and she smiled at me.

  ~~~

  I finished my portrait of Malvika. The paint is very thick because I painted her over and over again; young, old, dead. Young, old dead. I could never decide which face captured her best.

  Return to Table of Contents

  Dead Sea Fruit

  I have a collection of baby teeth, sent to me by recovered anorexics from the ward. Their children’s teeth, proof that their bodies are working.

  One sent me a letter. “Dear Tooth Fairy, you saved me and my womb. My son is now six, here are his baby teeth.”

  They call the ward Pretty Girl Street. I don’t know if the cruelty is intentional; these girls are far from pretty. Skeletal, balding, their breath reeking of hard cheese, they languish on their beds and terrify each other, when they have the strength, with tales of the Ash Mouth Man.

  I did not believe the Pretty Girls. The Ash Mouth Man was just a myth to scare each other into being thin. A moral tale against promiscuity. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that the story originated with a group of protective parents, wanting to shelter their children from the disease of kissing.

  “He only likes fat girls,” Abby said. Her teeth were yellow when she smiled, though she rarely smiled. Abby lay in the bed next to Lori; they compared wrist thickness by stretching their fingers to measure.

  “And he watches you for a long time to make sure you’re the one,” Lori said.

  “And only girls who could be beautiful are picked,” Melanie said. Her blonde hair fell out in clumps and she kept it in a little bird’s nest beside her bed. “He watches you to see if you could be beautiful enough. If you’re thinner, then he saunters over to you.”

  He watches you to see if you are beautiful enough. He only helps those who will be beautiful when properly thin. If that’s you, then he saunters over.”

  The girls laughed. “He saunters. Yes,” they agreed. They trusted me; I listened to them and fixed their teeth for free.

  “He didn’t saunter,” Jane said. I sat on her bed and leaned close to hear. “He beckoned. He did this,” and she tilted back her head, miming a glass being poured into her mouth. “I nodded. I love vodka,” she said. “Vodka’s made of potatoes, so it’s like eating.”

  The girls all laughed. I hate it when they laugh. I have to maintain my smile. I can’t flinch in disgust at those bony girls, mouths open, shoulders shaking. All of them exhausted with the effort.

  “I’ve got a friend in New Zealand and she’s seen him,” Jane said. “He kissed a friend of hers and the weight just dropped off her.”

  “I know someone in England who kissed him,” Lori said.

  “He certainly gets around,” I said. They looked at each other.

  “I was frightened at the thought of him at first,” Abby said. “Cos he’s like a drug. One kiss and you’re hooked. Once he’s stuck in the tongue, you’re done. You can’t turn back.”

  They’d all heard of him before they kissed him. In their circles, even the dangerous methods of weight loss are worth considering.

  I heard the rattle of the dinner trolley riding the corridor to Pretty Girl Street. They fell silent.

  Lori whispered, “Kissing him fills your mouth with ash. Like you pick up a beautiful piece of fruit and bite into it. You expect the juice to drip down your chin but you bite into ashes. That’s what it’s like to kiss him.”

  Lori closed her eyes. Her dry little tongue snaked out to the corners of her mouth, looking, I guessed, for
that imagined juice. I leaned over and dripped a little water on her tongue.

  She screwed up her mouth.

  “It’s only water,” I said. “It tastes of nothing.”

  “It tastes of ashes,” she said.

  “They were hoping you’d try a bite to eat today, Lori,” I said. She shook her head.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I can’t eat. Everything tastes like ashes. Everything.”

  The nurse came in with the dinner trolley and fixed all the Pretty Girls’ IV feeds. The girls liked to twist the tube, bend it, press an elbow or a bony buttock into it to stop the flow.

  “You don’t understand,” Abby said. “It’s like having ashes pumped directly into your blood.”

  They all started to moan and scream with what energy they could muster. Doctors came in, and other nurses. I didn’t like this part, the physicality of the feedings, so I walked away.

  I meet many Pretty Girls. Pretty Girls are the ones who will never recover, who still see themselves as ugly and fat even when they don’t have the strength to defaecate. These ones the doctors try to fatten up so they don’t scare people when laid in their coffins.

  The recovering ones never spoke of the Ash Mouth Man. And I did not believe, until Dan entered my surgery, complaining he was unable to kiss women because of the taste of his mouth. I bent close to him and smelt nothing. I found no decay, no gum disease. He turned his face away.

  “What is it women say you taste like?” I said.