Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
"You'd have to ship in the feed," says Paul. "They don't grow it here. The feed weighs more than the eggs. Besides, the eggs come in from the States."
"What's that got to do with it?" says Rennie. Paul only smiles.
"They catch the thief," the woman says to Paul as they're heading for the door. "The police take him on the boat today."
"He's lucky then," Paul says to her.
"Lucky?" says Rennie, when they're outside.
"He's still alive," says Paul. "They caught another man, last month, stealing pigs up at one of the villages; they pounded him to death, no questions asked."
"The police?" says Rennie. "That's terrible."
"No," says Paul. "The people he was stealing the pigs from. It's a good thing for this one he only stole from tourists. If it was locals they'd have kicked his head in or taken him out and dumped him into the sea. As far as they're concerned, stealing's worse than murder."
"I can't believe that," says Rennie.
"Look at it this way," says Paul. "If you get angry and chop up your woman, that's understandable; a crime of passion, you might say. But stealing you plan beforehand. That's how they see it."
"Is there a lot of that?" says Rennie.
"Stealing?" says Paul. "Only since the tourists came in."
"Chopping up your woman," says Rennie.
"Less than you might think," says Paul. "Mostly they beat or slice rather than chop." Rennie thinks of cookbooks. "There's no shooting at all. Not like in, say, Detroit."
"Why is that?" says Rennie, hot on the sociological trail.
Paul looks at her, not for the first time, as if she's a charming version of the village idiot. "They don't have any guns," he says.
Rennie is sitting on a white chair in the beach bar of the Lime Tree, where Paul has left her. Parked her. Stashed her. He has a boat coming in in a few days, he said, there are some things he has to take care of. Rennie feels peripheral.
Is there anything you need? he asked before he went off.
I thought most of the stores were closed, she said.
They are, he said.
Something to read, she said, with a touch of malice. If he's so good at it let him try that.
He didn't miss a beat. Anything in particular?
Anything you think I'd like, said Rennie.
Which will at least make him think about her. She sits at the wooden table, eating a grilled cheese sandwich. What could be nicer? What's wrong anyway? Why does she want to go, if not home, at least away? Paul doesn't love her, that's why, which ought to be irrelevant.
Don't expect too much, he said last night.
Too much of what? said Rennie.
Too much of me, said Paul. He was smiling, calm as ever, but she no longer found this reassuring. Instead she found it a symptom. Nothing could move him. He kissed her on the forehead, as if she were a child, as if he were kissing her goodnight.
Next you're going to tell me there isn't very much, said Rennie. Right?
Maybe there isn't, said Paul.
Rennie didn't know she was expecting anything until she was told not to. Now they seem vast, sentimental, grandiose, technicolour, magical, ridiculous, her expectations.
What am I doing here? thinks Rennie. I should take my body and run. I don't need another man I'm not supposed to expect anything from.
She's a tourist, she can keep her options open. She can always go somewhere else.
"I am disturbing you?" It's a statement, with the force of a question. Rennie looks up: it's Dr. Minnow, in a white shirt open at the throat, balancing a cup of coffee. He sits down without waiting for an answer.
"You are enjoying yourself at the home of your American friend?" he says slyly.
Rennie, who believes in personal privacy, is annoyed. "How did you know I'm staying there?" she says. She feels as if she's been caught by a high-school teacher, necking under the boys' gym stairs. A thing she never did.
Dr. Minnow smiles, showing his skewed teeth. "Everyone knows," he says. "I am sorry to interrupt you, but there are some things I must tell you now. For the article you are writing."
"Oh yes," Rennie says. "Of course." Surely he doesn't still believe she's going to do this, now or in the future; but apparently he does, he's looking at her with candour and assurance. Faith. "I don't have my notebook with me," she says, feeling more and more fraudulent.
"You can remember," says Dr. Minnow. "Please, continue with your lunch." He's not even looking at her, he's glancing around them, noting who's there. "We are seeing how the election is going, my friend," he says.
"Already?" says Rennie.
"I do not mean the results," says Dr. Minnow. "I mean the practices of this government. Ellis is winning, my friend. But not honestly, you understand? This is what I wish you to make clear: that Ellis will not have the support of the people." It's the same measured tone of voice he's always used, but Rennie can see now that he's far from calm. He's enraged. He sits with his thin hands placed one on the other, on top of the wooden table, but the hands are tense, it's as if he has to hold onto them to keep them from moving, lifting, striking out.
"The only votes Ellis is getting are the ones he buys. First they bribe the people with the foreign aid money from the hurricane," he says. "This I can prove to you, I have witnesses. If they are not afraid to come forward. He give out the roofing materials too, the sewage pipes, the things donated. On St. Antoine this bribery is effective, but here on Ste. Agathe it does not work. Here the people take the money from Ellis but vote for me anyway; they think this is a good joke. Ellis knows this trick will not work here on Ste. Agathe, he knows the people are for me. So he has been playing with the voters' list. When my people go to vote today, they find they are not recorded. Even some of my candidates have been removed, they cannot cast a vote in their own favour. 'Sorry,' they tell them. 'You cannot vote.' You know who he put on? Dead people, my friend. Half the people on the voters' list are dead. This government is being elected by corpses."
"But how could he do that?" says Rennie. "Didn't your party see the lists before the election?"
Dr. Minnow smiles his crooked smile. "This is not Canada, my friend," he says. "It is not Britain. Those rules no longer apply here. Nevertheless I will do what the sweet Canadians would do. I will challenge the results of the election in the courts and demand another vote, and I will call for an independent inquiry." He laughs a little. "It will have the same results here as it has there, my friend. None at all. Only there it takes longer."
"Why do you bother?" Rennie says.
"Bother?" says Dr. Minnow.
"If it's as rotten as you say," says Rennie, "why do you bother trying to do anything at all?"
Dr. Minnow pauses. She's shaken him a little. "I agree with you that it seems illogical and futile for me to do so," he says. "But this is why you do it. You do it because everyone tell you it is not possible. They cannot imagine things being different. It is my duty to imagine, and they know that for even one person to imagine is very dangerous to them, my friend. You understand?" He's about to say something else, but there are screams, from over near the kitchen door, the yacht people at the tables are looking, getting up, already there's a cluster of them.
Rennie stands up, trying to see what it is. It's Lora. She has one arm around Elva, whose eyes are closed, who's silently crying. There are red splotches on her PRINCE OF PEACE T-shirt. Her face is streaked, mapped, caked, dark red.
Lora sits at a table, one leg crossed, ankle on her knee. In front of her is a rum and lime and a glassful of ice cubes and a white enamel basin full of dark pink water. Elva is sitting beside her, still crying, her hands in her lap. Lora is washing away the blood with a blue washcloth from the hotel.
"Maybe I should lie her down," she says to Rennie. "What do you think?"
"God," says Rennie. "What happened?"
"I don't really know," says Lora. "I hardly saw it, it was too fast. One minute Prince was outside this polling station, just talkin
"Is he all right?" says Rennie.
"I don't even know that," says Lora. "I don't know where he went. He'll turn up, he usually does."
"Did she get knocked down by accident or something?" Rennie says.
"Her?" says Lora. "Hell no. She had her hands around the Justice Minister's neck, she damn near strangled him. They hit her on the head with a pistol butt to make her let go."
"Is there anything I can do?" says Rennie, who isn't too comfortable: the sight of the blood in the white basin is making her feel sick. Maybe she can go for Band-Aids and then she'll be off the hook.
"Get me some cigarettes," says Lora. "Over at the bar, Benson and Hedges. Maybe we should take her home."
"Marsdon," says Elva. "Some time I kill that boy."
"What?" says Lora. "What's she saying?"
"Marsdon start it," says Elva. She stops crying and opens her eyes. "I hear him. He call the Justice Minister a bad name. Why he need to do that?"
"Shit," says Lora. "Marsdon thinks everybody has to die for the revolution. His revolution, is what he means. He'll do just about anything to make sure they do. I wish he'd take off those stupid cowboy boots, I bet he sleeps in them. He thinks he's God's gift, ever since he came back from the States. He was in the army up there, it did something to him. He saw too many movies and now he thinks he's a hero. If Prince gets elected, Marsdon gets to be the Minister of Justice. Shit, can you picture that?"
"I better now," says Elva. She takes an ice cube out of the glass and pops it into her mouth.
"She's still bleeding," says Rennie, but Elva's already walking away, steadily, as if there's nothing wrong with her. "Shouldn't you go with her?"
Lora shrugs. "What makes you think she'd let me?" she says. "She does what she likes. When you get to be her age around here nobody can tell you a thing."
"Does she have somewhere to go?" Rennie says. "Someone who can take care of her?"
"She has daughters," Lora says. "She has grandchildren. Not that she needs taking care of, mostly she takes care of them. This whole place runs on grandmothers."
A girl from the hotel comes and takes away the basin. Rennie feels a little better, now that there's no actual blood. The people are back in their chairs, voices are normal, the sun shines on the boats in the harbour. Lora has her cigarettes now; she lights one, blowing the smoke out through her nostrils in a long grey sigh.
"The whole thing was Marsdon's idea," she says. "Prince running in the election. He never would of thought it up himself. Marsdon would run for God if it was open, except who would vote for him? Nobody likes him, everybody likes Prince, so he had to talk Prince into doing it for him. Prince thinks the sun shines right out of Marsdon's ass and nobody can tell him any different, so what can you do?"
"Do you think he'll win?" Rennie says.
"Christ, I hope not," Lora says. "I hope he loses. I hope he loses so bad he never even thinks of doing it again. Then maybe we can get back to some kind of a normal life."
Rennie trudges up the road towards Paul's house, because where else is there? She wishes Paul had told her when he was coming back, but she's hardly in a position to demand it. She's only a sort of house guest. A visitor.
There's no cool side of the road, and the asphalt is so hot it's almost melting. No one is sitting on the porches at this time of day; nevertheless, Rennie feels she's being watched. Halfway up the hill she's overtaken by a crowd of schoolgirls, ten or twelve of them, different sizes but all in heavy black skirts and white long-sleeved blouses, white bows in their hair, bare feet for the most part. Without asking or saying anything two of them take her hands, one on either side. The rest of them laugh and mill around her, examining her dress, her sandals, her purse, her hair.
"Do you live near here?" she asks one of them, the one holding her right hand. She's about six, and now that Rennie's speaking directly to her she's shy; but she doesn't let go of the hand.
"You have a dollar?" says the one on the left. But an older girl puts a stop to that. "Don't be so bold," she says.
"Are you cousins?" asks Rennie. One of them attempts to explain: some are sisters, others cousins, others cousins of some but not of others. "Her daddy the same, her mother different." When they reach Paul's gateway they let go of her hands without being told: they already know she's staying there. They watch as she goes up the steps, giggling behind her.
Rennie has no key, but the door isn't locked. Until recently, Paul said, you never had to lock your door, and he's still not in the habit. She goes out to the hammock and rocks herself, waiting for time to pass.
Half an hour later a short brown woman in a green print dress with large yellow butterflies walks in through the door. She nods at Rennie but takes no notice of her after that. She wipes off the table, washes the dishes and dries them and puts them away, cleans off the top of the stove, and sweeps the floor. Then she goes into the bedroom and brings the sheets out. She carries them into the garden at the side of the house, where she washes them, by hand, in a big red plastic pail, using water from a small tap that comes out of the water tank. She rinses them and wrings them out and hangs them up. She disappears into the bedroom again, to make up the bed, Rennie assumes. Rennie swings herself in the hammock, watching. She ought to pretend to be doing something important, but she can't, she's too uneasy, she can almost smell what it feels like to be cleaning up after other people's feeding and sex. She feels superfluous and both invisible and exposed: something so much there that nobody looks at it. The woman comes out of the bedroom with Rennie's pink bikini underpants from the day before. Presumably she's going to wash them.
"I'll do that," says Rennie.
The woman gives her a sideways glance, of contempt, puts the underpants on the kitchen counter, nods again, and goes down the steps to the road.
Rennie gets up and locks the doors of the house and mixes herself a drink. She lies down on the bed, under the mosquito net, meaning to take only a short nap. Then someone is touching her neck. Paul. A faceless stranger.
It's raining; heavy drops like tacks patter on the tin roof. The huge leaves outside the window move in the wind, making a sound like the dragging of thick cloth across a floor. Something's loose out there.
Rennie's both avid and melancholy, as if it's the last time. More and more the emptiness of this house reminds her of a train station. Terminal, the place where you go to say goodbye. Paul is being too tender, it's the tenderness of a man boarding a troop ship. A man who can hardly wait. Wait for me would be the proper thing for him to say; he'd have no intention of doing the same himself. But she doesn't know where he's going. He's not giving anything away.
"If I were noble," says Paul, "I'd tell you to get the next boat out to St. Antoine and get the next plane out to Barbados and get the hell back home."
Rennie's kissing him beside the ear. His skin is dry, salty, the hair greying there. "Why would you do that?" she says.
"Safer," says Paul.
"Who for, you or me?" says Rennie. She thinks he's talking about their relationship. She thinks he's admitting something. This cheers her up.
"You," he says. "You're getting too involved, it's bad for you."
Rennie stops kissing. Massive involvement, she thinks. He smiles at her, looking down at her with his too-blue eyes, and she wonders whether she can believe a word he says.
"Take the plane, lady," he says, very sweetly.
"I don't want to go back," Rennie says.
"I'd like you to," says Paul.
"Are you trying to get rid of me?" says Rennie, smiling, fearing it.
"No," says Paul. "Maybe I'm just being stupid. Maybe I want there to be something good I've done."
Rennie feels she can make her own choices, she doesn't need to have them made for her. In any case she doesn't want to be something that P
She thinks about going back. There will be the hedgehopper to Barbados, the wait in the steamy airport among the secretaries, just-arrived or in transit, lonely and hopeful, with their vague expectations; then the monotonous jet and then the airport, sterile and rectilinear. It will be cold outside and grey, and the wind will smell of diesel fuel. In the city people will be hunched into their winter coats, scuttling heads-down along the sidewalks, their faces not flat and open like the faces here but narrow and pallid and pushed into long snouts, like the snouts of rats. No one will even glance at anyone else. What does she have to look forward to?
Jake came over to pick up his suits and his books and pictures. He had his new lady's car downstairs, his own was on the fritz. He didn't say whether or not the new lady was in it, and Rennie didn't ask. Lady was his own term, a recent one. He had never called Rennie his lady.
He made several trips, up the stairs and down again, and Rennie sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. From the hooks above the stove there were now things missing, pots, frying pans, which had left round haloes of lighter yellow on the wall, penumbras of grease. From now on she would have to decide what to eat. Jake decided before: even when it was her turn to cook he decided. He brought home all kinds of things: bones, wrinkled old sausages filmed with powdery mould, rank and horrible cheeses which he insisted she had to try. Life is an improvisation, he said. Exploit your potential.
Rennie's potential had been exploited, she didn't have any left. Not for Jake, who stood awkwardly in the doorway, holding a dark blue sock, asking if she'd seen the other one. Domesticity still hung in the air around them, like dust in sunlight, a lingering scent. Rennie said she hadn't, but he might try the bathroom, behind the laundry hamper. He went out and she could hear him rummaging. She should have gone somewhere else, not been here, they should have arranged things differently.
She tried not to think of the new lady, of whom it was not right to be jealous. She didn't know what the new lady looked like. To Rennie she was just a headless body, with or without a black nightgown. As perhaps she was to Jake. What is a woman, Jake said once. A head with a cunt attached or a cunt with a head attached? Depends which end you start at. It was understood between them that this was a joke. The new lady stretched out before her, a future, a space, a blank, into which Jake would now throw himself night after night the way he had thrown himself into her, each time extreme and final, as if he was pitching himself headlong over a cliff. It was for this she felt nostalgia. She wondered what it was like to be able to throw yourself into another person, another body, a darkness like that. Women could not do it. Instead they had darkness thrown into them. Rennie couldn't put the two things together, the urgency and blindness of the act, which had been urgent and blind for her too, and this result, her well-lit visible frozen pose at the kitchen table.