Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
Lora laughs again. She's delighted, as if the whole thing is a joke she's telling. "It's great," she says. "I love it. It's them all right, everyone knows. Prince always knows which one's the CIA. When you're in local politics you have to know."
"Aren't they too old?" says Rennie.
"They don't have much of a budget for down here," says Lora. "Listen, who's complaining? Everyone tells them stuff just to keep them happy; if they didn't have anything to put in their reports someone up there might get the idea they're senile or something and send down somebody heavy. Of course they're supposed to support Ellis, that's the official line, so Ellis loves them, and Prince loves them because they're so dumb; even Minnow doesn't mind them all that much. Sometimes he takes them out to lunch and tells them all this stuff about what the U.S. should be doing to avoid a revolution, and they write it all down and send it off, it keeps them busy. As for them, they haven't had so much fun since they got to go through the wastebaskets in Iceland, that was their last posting. They tell everyone he's a retired bank manager."
Maybe he is, thinks Rennie. Lora is laughing too much. "So who is he really?" she says. Paul, she means, and Lora picks that up too quickly, she's been waiting for it, the shrug and the answer are right there. "A guy with four boats and some money," she says. "Guys with boats and some money are a dime a dozen down here. It's the ones with boats and no money you've got to look out for."
Rennie eats the rest of the bread, slowly, feeling more and more dim-witted. She may not have asked the wrong question, but she's asked the wrong person. She knows she should pretend to believe the answer, that would be clever, but she just can't manage it.
Lora must sense this; she lights another cigarette from the butt of the first and leans forward, resting her elbows on her spread knees. "I didn't mean to laugh," she says, "except it's so funny, when you really know."
The boat is pulling around into the harbour, out of the wind, and they turn on the smelly motor. Around Rennie people are stirring, gathering up small parcels, stretching their legs out. The harbour seems crowded, small fishing boats, a police launch, yachts at anchor, sails furled, bright flags fluttering from their masts. The Memory threads through them, trailing grey smoke. Ahead the pier swarms with people, waving, calling.
"They come down for the eggs," Lora says. "And the bread. There's never enough eggs and bread here. You'd think someone would get a bright idea and start a bakery or something."
"When you know what?" say Rennie.
Lora looks at her with that posed smile, then leans over and forward, getting into the right position for the truth, the confidence. "Who he really is," she says. "Really, he's the connection."
The Memory hits with a soft thud; there's a line of tractor tires nailed along the dock to keep it from scraping. Already there are men roping the boat to the shore. Rennie's caught in the scramble, legs around her head, it's like a football team walking across her. There's a lot of shouting, friendly she thinks. In self-defence she stands up, then feels it will be safer sitting down; but Lora's pulling at her arm and there's a man on his knees in front of her, digging for the box. She stands up again and hands reach for her, she makes the leap, she's been landed.
Right in front of her there's a small woman, not five feet tall. She's wearing a pink cotton skirt with red flamingoes on it and a black jockey cap, and a red T-shirt with PRINCE OF PEACE on it in white. Now Rennie remembers her.
"You got my food?" she says, not to Lora but directly to Rennie herself. She says nothing at all about heart medicine. It's an old face, but her black hair is in pigtails today; they stick out sideways from under the jockey cap.
"It's here," says Lora, and it is, she's holding the box upright, steadying it with one hand.
The woman ignores her. "Good," she says, to Rennie alone. She takes the box by its sides and lifts it onto her head, much more easily than Rennie could have done, balancing it on the woolly jockey cap. She steadies it with one hand and marches off without another word to either of them. Rennie, who's been expecting a cross between Aunt Jemima and a basket case, watches her go. What will happen when she opens the box? Rennie can hardly believe she knows what's in it. But if Rennie can believe the geriatric CIA she can believe anything. Possibly this woman's the local gun runner.
Still, Rennie can't quite imagine her opening the box, unpacking the gun, assembling it if it needs assembling, and then what? Does she sell them, and if so, who's buying? What are they used for, here? But these questions are not ones Rennie needs the answers for. Yesterday she would have asked; today she knows it's safer not to. The box is off her back, which is where it should be: off.
She looks around for Paul but he's gone already; she spots him up on the road, getting into a jeep, with another man and the driver. Elva's on the beach, walking along with the machine-gun box on her head, as if that's the most normal thing in the world.
"She's amazing," Rennie says to Lora. "That's a heavy box. I thought you said she had a heart condition," she adds. Now that she's safe she can risk it.
"That's the other grandmother," says Lora, lying without much energy.
"And they're both called Elva," says Rennie.
"Yeah," says Lora, "this place is crawling with grandmothers. The old bitch, you see the way she didn't speak to me? She hates it that I'm living with Prince, but she also hates it that we don't have kids. Around here, if you don't have kids you're nothing, that's what she keeps telling me. She wants me to have a son for Prince, so she can have a great-grandson. For Prince, that's what she says. 'You too smart to make babies?' she says. At the same time she hates it that I'm white; but she thinks she's practically related to the Royal Family, my Princess Margaret, my Prince Charles, last time I heard they were all white, eh? You figure it out."
"Maybe she's just old," says Rennie.
"Sure," says Lora. "Why not. Where you staying?"
Rennie hasn't considered this. She's just assumed there would be a hotel.
"But it's the election," says Lora. "They might be full up. I can ask for you, though."
When they step onto the beach Lora takes off her shoes, so Rennie does too. Lora's carrying her camera bag for her. They walk along the packed sand, under the trees, palm trees. The beach is wider than the one on St. Antoine and it's fairly clean. Boats are hauled up on it, turned over. Above the beach the town begins, one main road, a couple of foreign banks, a couple of stores, all two-storey and white; a church, then square houses, white and pastel, scattered up the hillside.
They come to a cliff jutting into the sea and wade around it, hitching up their skirts. Then there's more beach and more palm trees, and finally a stone wall and some steps. There's a sign, seashells glued on wood: THE LIME TREE. The hotel's hardly bigger than a house.
"The food's not bad here," Lora says. "Only, Ellis is trying to squeeze them out. He wants to buy it and put in his own people. Funny thing, their electricity keeps going off."
"Why?" says Rennie. "Why would he want to do that?"
"Politics, is what they say," says Lora. "They're for Minnow. What I figure is, he hates anyone making money. Except him, of course."
"If this man is so terrible," says Rennie, "why does he keep getting elected?"
"Search me," says Lora. "I'll see about the room." She walks off towards the main building.
Rennie's standing in a beach bar, surrounded by low wooden tables and chairs with people in them. She sits down and piles her bags on the chair beside her and orders a rum and lime. She drinks it, looking out at the boats in the harbour, the flags: Norway, she thinks, Germany, France for sure, and some others.
The rum is going right into her, smoothing her down from the inside. She can relax now, she's off the hook. One hook at any rate.
At the table beside her there's a young couple, the girl brown-haired, lightly tanned, in a white dress, the man in jogging shorts, his nose peeling. The man is fooling with his camera, expensive enough but jammed. "It's the light meter," he says. They're
There's a small dock in front of the Lime Tree, and on it there's a man, shouting and waving his arms. Rennie watches him for a moment and decides that he's teaching three girls to wind-surf: there they are, out in the harbour. "Upright!" the man shouts, lifting both arms like an orchestra conductor. "Bend the knees!" But it's no use, the sail collapses and the girls topple almost in unison into the sea. In the distance the two German women from the hotel are wading around the cliff, their skirts hitched up, carrying their suitcases. One of their sunhats has blown off into the water.
Rennie wonders where Lora is. She orders a cream cheese and banana bread sandwich from the bar, and another rum and lime. She goes back to her chair and moves it so it's out of the sun.
"May we sit here?" says another voice, a woman's. Rennie looks up. It's the old American couple, in their adventurous shorts, their binoculars hanging like outsized talismans around their necks. Each of them is carrying a glass of ginger ale. "There don't seem to be any other chairs."
"Of course," Rennie says. "I'll move my things for you."
But the old man insists on doing it himself. "My name is Abbott," he says, "and this is Mrs. Abbott." He holds the chair for his wife, who sits down and fixes Rennie with eyes round as a baby's.
"That's very nice of you, dear," she says. "We saw you on the reef boat. Disappointing, we thought. You're Canadian, aren't you? We always find the Canadians so nice, they're almost like members of the family. No crime rate to speak of at all. We always feel quite safe when we go up there. We go to Point Pelee, for the birds. Whenever we can, that is."
"How did you know?" says Rennie.
Mrs. Abbott laughs. "It's a very small place," she says. "You hear things."
"Nice though," says her husband.
"Oh yes. The people are so lovely. So friendly, not like a lot of places." She sips her ginger ale. "So independent," she says. "We have to go back soon, we're getting too old for it. It's a little primitive down here, on Ste. Agathe especially, they don't have many of the conveniences. It's all right for younger people but it's sometimes difficult for us."
"When you can't get toilet paper," says Mr. Abbott.
"Or garbage bags," says his wife. "But we'll be sorry to leave it."
"You don't see many beggars," says Mr. Abbott, who is looking at something in the harbour through his binoculars. "Not like India."
"Do you travel a lot?" says Rennie politely.
"We love to travel," says Mrs. Abbott. "It's the birding, but we like the people too. Of course with the exchange rate these days it's not as easy as it used to be."
"You're right about that," says her husband. "The U.S. borrowed too much money. That's the whole problem in a nutshell. We should stop living beyond our means."
"He ought to know," says Mrs. Abbott, proudly and fondly. "He's a retired bank manager." Mr. Abbott now has his head tilted back and is looking straight up.
Rennie decides that Lora must be wrong. Surely two such innocuous, kindly, boring people cannot possibly be CIA agents. The question is, how can she get rid of them? They appear to have settled in for the afternoon. Rennie waits for the pictures of the grandchildren to make their appearance, out of Mrs. Abbott's sensible canvas shoulder bag.
"Do you see that man over there?" says Mrs. Abbott, pointing towards the bar, which is more crowded than when Rennie first arrived. Rennie isn't sure which one, but she nods.
"He's an international parrot smuggler," says Mrs. Abbott, dropping her voice.
"A parrot smuggler?" says Rennie faintly.
"Don't laugh," says Mrs. Abbott. "It's a big business. In Germany you can get thirty-five thousand dollars for a mated pair."
"The Germans have too much money," says Mr. Abbott. "It's coming out of their ears. They don't know what to do with it."
"It's the St. Antoine parrot," says Mrs. Abbott. "They're very rare, you know. You don't find them anywhere but on St. Antoine."
"It's disgusting," says Mr. Abbott. "They give them drugs. If I ever caught him with one of those little parrots I'd wring his neck."
From the horror in their voices, they could be talking about a white-slave ring. Rennie concentrates on taking this seriously.
"How do they smuggle them?" she says.
"On the yachts," says Mr. Abbott, "like everything else around here. We made it our business to find out about him. He's not from here, he's from Trinidad."
"Then we reported him to the association," says Mrs. Abbott, pleased. "It didn't stop him but it slowed him down. He didn't know it was us, though. Some of them are dangerous and we really aren't equipped to deal with that sort of thing."
"Not at our age," says Mr. Abbott.
"Which association?" says Rennie.
"The International Parrot Association," says Mrs. Abbott. "They're quite good, but they can't be everywhere at once."
Rennie figures she'd better have another drink. If surrealism is taking over the world, she might as well enjoy it. She asks the Abbotts if they would like another ginger ale, but they say they're quite happy. In any case it will soon be dusk.
"Roosting time," says Mr. Abbott happily, as he stands up.
This is Rennie's third rum and lime. She's fuzzy, but not too fuzzy. It's occurred to her several times that there's no boat back and she doesn't have a place to stay. She supposes there's always the beach.
It isn't dark yet, but beneath the overhanging porch roof the waitresses are setting the tables for dinner, lighting the candles inside the little red glass chimneys. The tables outside are full now, with yacht people, and the bar is lined with men, brown and black mostly. Some of them look familiar, but maybe they aren't. She spots a pair of boots, that one she knows anyway, the man with the South American moustache. This time he's ignoring her. There are a few white men with the leathery dull skin and the dry albino hair of those who spend constant time in the sun.
While she's walking back from the bar, Dr. Minnow steps onto the patio. He hasn't come along the beach but down through the garden behind the hotel. He's with three other men; two of them are wearing T-shirts that say THE FISH LIVES, with a picture of a whale, and, underneath, VOTE JUSTICE PARTY. The third man is white and thin; he's wearing a safari jacket and tinted glasses. He stays a little behind.
Dr. Minnow spots Rennie and comes over to her at once. The two men head for the bar, but the third hesitates a moment and then comes over too.
"Well, my friend," says Dr. Minnow. "I see you are covering the election after all." He smiles his crooked smile.
Rennie smiles back. She thinks he's treating it as a joke now, and she can handle that. "From a bar," she says. "All good journalists cover elections from bars."
"I'm told it is the best place," says Dr. Minnow. His accent is broader here, he's less controlled. Rennie thinks he's had a few himself. "Everyone is here. For instance, that is our Minister of Justice over there. He is preparing himself for his defeat." He laughs. "You will excuse me for talking sedition," he says to the white man with him. "This is a compatriot of yours, my friend. He is with the Canadian High Commissioner in Barbados; he come here to see why no one attend the diving program sponsored by the sweet Canadians."
Rennie doesn't catch the name, it's something Middle European, she thinks. A multiculturalism functionary. The man shakes her hand.
"I understand you're a journalist," he says. He's nervous.
"I just do food," says Rennie, to make him feel better. "Things like that."
"What could be more important?" he says politely. They both sit down.
"I tell you why, my friend," Dr. Minnow says. "The sweet Canadians wish to teach the fishermen how to dive so they don't get the bends and come up crippled. What do they do? They hire an expert who comes just at the lobster season when the fishermen all have to be out fishing. That's the money they live on. There is no conspiracy, it is al
The man smiles and takes out a cigarette, a brown one, and screws it into a black holder. Rennie decides this is pretentious. It embarrasses her that her country's representative is wearing a safari jacket. Where does he think he is, Africa? He could at least have chosen a different colour: the beige should not wear beige.
"You know what they're like," he says. "Governments have to deal with governments in power, which does not always produce the most accurate information."
"Are you going to win?" Rennie says to Dr. Minnow.
"Yesterday," Dr. Minnow says conversationally, his eye on the Canadian, "the government offer me a large sum of money to go over to their side. Minister of Tourism, they offer me."
"I take it you didn't accept," says Rennie.
"Why cut your own throat?" says Dr. Minnow, who seems very pleased. "I have not read Machiavelli for nothing. If they offer, it means they are scared, they think they could lose. So I turn them down, and today they are slandering me in a new way. Before it was Castro, now they say I am in the pocket of the Americans and the plantation owners. They should make up their minds, one way or the other. It confuses the people: they may think I am neither, which would be the truth. If we begin to believe the truth here, that would be the end of Ellis, and also of the Prince of Peace, as he calls himself. He think he got the true religion, all right." He stands up.
"Tomorrow I will make a speech on the problems of garbage collection, among other things," he says. "It is one of our most urgent problems on these islands, what to do with the garbage. You should attend, my friend." He bestows one more smile upon Rennie and moves away towards the bar, the neutral-coloured Canadian trailing.
As she's coming back from the bar again, Rennie sees the two German women climbing the stone steps. The bottoms of their dresses are dripping wet and their hair has come unglued and is hanging in wisps and strands; their faces are dangerously pink. They seem to have abandoned their suitcases. One of them is supporting the other, who is limping and uttering little shrieks of pain. Both have been crying, but as they enter the bar and the ring of curious faces that quickly surrounds them, they pull themselves together. Someone offers a chair.