Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
At the end of the week Jake got a case of Montezuma's Revenge. Rennie bought a bottle of sweet pink emulsion for him at the corner farmacia, running the gauntlet of sucking mouths, and he allowed himself to be dosed. But he wouldn't lie down. He didn't want her to go anywhere without him, he didn't want to miss anything. He sat in a chair, clutching his belly and limping to the bathroom at intervals, while Rennie consulted him about her piece. "Mexico City On Less Than You'd Think."
I'm supposed to be doing this other piece too, she said, for Pandora. It's on male pain. How about it? What's the difference?
Male what? Jake said, grinning. You know men don't feel pain. Only when they cut themselves shaving.
It's just been discovered that they do, she said. Tests have been done. Papers have been presented. They wince. Sometimes they flinch. If it's really bad they knit their brows. Come on, be a nice guy, give me a few hints. Tell me about male pain. Where do you feel it the most?
In the ass, Jake said, during conversations like this. Enough with the instant insight.
It's a living, she said, it keeps me off the streets. Where would I be without it? You wouldn't feel so much pain in the ass if you'd take the poker out.
That's not a poker, it's a backbone, he said. I got it from pretending to be a goy. Girls can never tell the difference.
Only between the backbone and the front bone, she said. She sat down on his lap, one leg on either side of him, and began to lick his ear.
Have a heart, he said, I'm a sick man.
Beg for mercy, she said. Do boys cry? We have ways of making you talk. She licked his other ear. You're never too sick, she said. She undid the buttons on his shirt and slid her hand inside it. Anyone as furry as you could never be too sick.
Enough with the voracious female animalistic desires, he said. You should all be locked in cages.
He put his arms around her and they rocked slowly back and forth, and outside the wooden shutters a bell rang somewhere.
Rennie walks back on the shadow side. After a few blocks she realizes she's not entirely sure where she is. But she came up to get to the church, so now all she has to do is head down, towards the harbour. Already she's coming to some shops.
Someone touches her on the shoulder, and she stops and turns. It's a man who has once been taller than he is now. He's wearing worn black pants, the fly coming undone, a shirt with no buttons, and one of the wool tea-cosy hats; he has no shoes on, the trouser legs look familiar. He stands in front of her and touches her arm, smiling. His jaw is stubbled with white hairs and most of his teeth are missing.
He makes his right hand into a fist, then points to her, still smiling. Rennie smiles back at him. She doesn't understand what he wants. He repeats the gesture, he's deaf and dumb or perhaps drunk. Rennie feels very suddenly as if she's stepped across a line and found herself on Mars.
He runs the fingers of his right hand together, he's getting impatient, he holds out his hand, and now she knows, it's begging. She opens her purse and gropes for the change purse. It's worth a few cents to be rid of him.
But he frowns, this isn't what he wants. He repeats his series of gestures, faster now, and Rennie feels bewildered and threatened. She gets the absurd idea that he wants her passport, he wants to take it away from her. Without it she could never get back. She closes her purse and shakes her head, turning away and starting to walk again. She's being silly; in any case, her passport is in the safe back at the hotel.
Wherever that is. She can feel him behind her, following her. She quickens her pace; the slip-slop of his bare feet speeds up too. Now she's almost running. There are more people on the street, more and more as she runs downhill, and they notice this little procession of two, this race, they even stop to watch, smiling and even laughing, but nobody does anything to help her. Rennie is close to panic, it's too much like the kind of bad dream she wishes she could stop having, she doesn't know why he's following her. What has she done wrong?
There are crowds of people now, it looks like a market, there's a widening that in Mexico would be a square but here is an amorphous shape, the edges packed with stalls, the centre clogged with people and a few trucks. Chickens in crates, fruit stacked into uneasy pyramids or spread out on cloths, plastic pails, cheap aluminum cookware. It's noisy, dusty, suddenly ten degrees hotter; smells engulf her. Music blares from tiny shops crammed with gadgets, the spillover from Japan: cassette players, radios. Rennie dodges among the clumps of people, trying to lose him. But he's right behind her, he's not as decrepit as he looks, and that's his hand on her arm.
"Slow down," says Paul. And it is Paul, in the same shorts but a blue T-shirt, carrying a string bag full of lemons. The man is right behind him, smiling again with his gaping jack-o'-lantern mouth.
"It's okay," says Paul. Rennie's breathing hard, her face is wet and must be red, she probably looks demented and certainly inept. "He just wants you to shake his hand, that's all."
"How do you know?" says Rennie, more angry now than frightened. "He was chasing me!"
"He chases women a lot," says Paul. "Especially the white ones. He's deaf and dumb, he's harmless. He only wants to shake your hand, he thinks it's good luck."
Indeed the man is now holding out his hand, fingers spread.
"Why on earth?" says Rennie. She's a little calmer now but no cooler. "I'm hardly good luck."
"Not for him," says Paul. "For you."
Now Rennie feels both rude and uncharitable: he's only been trying to give her something. Reluctantly she puts her hand into the outstretched hand of the old man. He clamps his fingers around hers and holds on for an instant. Then he lets her go, smiles at her again with his collapsing mouth, and turns away into the crowd.
Rennie feels rescued. "You need to sit down," says Paul. He still has his hand on her arm, and he steers her to a storefront cafe, a couple of rickety tables covered with oilcloth, and inserts her into a chair next to the wall.
"I'm all right," says Rennie.
"It takes a while for your body to adjust to the heat," says Paul. "You shouldn't run at first."
"Believe me," says Rennie, "I wasn't doing it on purpose."
"Alien reaction paranoia," says Paul. "Because you don't know what's dangerous and what isn't, everything seems dangerous. We used to run into it all the time."
He means in the Far East, he means in the war. Rennie feels he's talking down to her. "Those for scurvy?" she says.
"What?" says Paul.
"On your pirate boats," Rennie says. "The lemons."
Paul smiles and says he'll go inside and order them a drink.
It isn't just a market. Across from the cafe they've set up a small platform: orange crates stacked two high, with boards across the top. A couple of kids, fifteen or sixteen at the oldest, are draping a bedsheet banner on two poles above it: PRINCE OF PEACE, it says in red. A religious cult of some kind, Rennie decides: Holy Rollers, Born Againers. So the woman in the airport with the Prince of Peace T-shirt wasn't a maniac, just a fanatic. She knows about those: Griswold had its lunatic fringe, women who thought it was a sin to wear lipstick. Then there was her mother, who thought it was a sin not to.
There's a man sitting on the edge of the platform, directing the kids. He's thin, with a riverboat moustache; he slouches forward, dangling his legs. Rennie notices his boots, riding boots, cowboy boots almost, with built-up heels. He's the first man she's seen here wearing boots. Why would anyone choose to? She thinks briefly of his feet, stifled in humid leather.
He sees her watching him. Rennie looks away immediately, but he gets up and comes towards her. He leans his hands on the table and stares down at her. Up close he looks South American.
Now what? thinks Rennie. She assumes he's trying to pick her up, and she's stuck here, wedged in between the table and the wall. She waits for the smile, the invitation, but neither comes, he just frowns at her as if he's trying to read her mind or impress her, so finally she says, "I'm with someone."
"You com
Rennie says yes.
"You the writer?"
Rennie wonders how he knows, but he does, because he doesn't wait for her to answer. "We don't need you here," he says.
Rennie's heard that the Caribbean is becoming hostile to tourists, but this is the most blatant sign she's seen of it. She doesn't know what to say.
"You stay around here, you just mess things up," he says.
Paul is back, with two glasses full of something brown. "Government issue," he says, putting them down on the table. "Something the matter?"
"I don't know," says Rennie. "Ask him." But the man is already sauntering away, teetering a little on the uneven ground.
"What did he say to you?" says Paul.
Rennie tells him. "Maybe I'm offending someone's religion," she says.
"It's not religion, it's politics," says Paul, "though around here it's sometimes the same thing."
"Prince of Peace?" says Rennie. "Politics? Come on."
"Well, his name's Prince, really, and the one you just met is Marsdon. He's the campaign manager," says Paul, who doesn't seem to find any of this odd. "They're the local excuse for communists, so they stuck the Peace on for good measure."
Rennie tastes the brown drink. "What's in it?" she says.
"Don't ask me," says Paul, "it's all they had." He leans back in his chair, watching not her but the space in front of them. "They're having an election, the first since the British pulled out," he says. "This afternoon they'll make speeches, all three parties, one after the other. Prince, then Dr. Minnow, that's his corner over there. After that the Minister of Justice. He's standing in for Ellis, who never goes outside his house. Some say it's because he's always too drunk; others say he's been dead for twenty years but no one's noticed yet."
"Dr. Minnow?" says Rennie, remembering the man on the plane. With a name like that there can't be two of them.
"The fish," says Paul, grinning. "They use pictures here, it gets around the illiteracy."
The signs and banners are going up everywhere now. ELLIS IS KING. THE FISH LIVES. Everything looks homemade: it's like college, like student elections.
"Will there be trouble?" says Rennie.
"You mean, will you get hurt?" says Paul. "Yes, there will be trouble. No, you won't get hurt. You're a tourist, you're exempt."
There's a truck making its way through the crowd now, slowly; in the back is a man wearing a white shirt and mirror sunglasses, barking at the crowd through a bullhorn loudspeaker. Rennie can't understand a word he's saying. Two other men flank him, carrying placards with large black crowns on them. ELLIS IS KING. "The Minister of Justice," says Paul.
"What sort of trouble?" says Rennie, wondering if she can get a refund on her excursion ticket if she goes back early.
"A little pushing and shoving," says Paul. "Nothing to get excited about."
But already people are throwing things at the truck; fruit, Rennie thinks, they're picking it up from the stacks on the sidewalk. A crumpled beer can hits the wall above Rennie's head, bounces off.
"They weren't aiming at you," says Paul. "But I'll walk you back to the hotel. Sometimes they get into the broken glass."
He moves the table to let her out, and they push their way through the crowd, against the stream. Rennie wonders if she should ask him about tennis courts and restaurants but decides not to. Her image is fluffy enough already. Then she wonders if she should ask him to have lunch with her at the hotel, but she decides not to do that either. She might be misunderstood.
Which is just as well, considering the lunch. Rennie has a grilled cheese sandwich, burned, and a glass of grapefruit juice out of a tin, which seems to be all there is. After the Jello pie she takes out the map of Queenstown and pores over it with vague desperation; she has the unpleasant feeling that she's already seen just about everything there is to see. There's a reef, though, on the other side of the jetty that marks off the harbour; you can go out in a boat and look at it. The picture in the brochure shows a couple of murky fish. It doesn't look too promising, but it might yield a paragraph or two.
The map shows a shortcut to the sea. Rennie envisioned a road, but it's only a rudimentary path; it runs behind the hotel, beside something that looks like a sewage pipe. The ground is damp and slippery. Rennie picks her way down, wishing her sandals had flat soles.
The beach isn't one of the seven jewel-like beaches with clean sparkling iridescent sand advertised in the brochure. It's narrow and gravelly and dotted with lumps of coagulated oil, soft as chewing gum and tar-coloured. The sewage pipe runs into the sea. Rennie steps over it and walks left. She passes a shed and a hauled-up rowboat where three men are cutting the heads off fish, gutting them and tossing them into a red plastic pail. Bladders like used condoms litter the beach. One of the men grins at Rennie and holds up a fish, his finger hooked through the gills. Rennie shakes her head. She might take their picture and write something about the catch fresh from the sea and down-to-earth lifestyles. But then she would have to buy a fish, and she can't carry a dead fish around with her all day.
"What time you meet me tonight?" one of the men says behind her. Rennie ignores this.
In the distance there are two boats with awnings, more or less where the map says they should be. She plods along the beach; when she's well past the fish heads she takes off her sandals and walks on the wet packed sand near the water. To the left she can now see the mountains, rising steeply behind the town, covered with uniform nubbled green.
The boats don't leave until high tide. She buys a ticket from the owner of the nearest and newest-looking one, The Princess Anne, and sits on the raspy grass in the shade of a bush. The other boat is called The Princess Margaret. There's hardly a lineup: a grey-haired couple with binoculars and the ingenuous, eager-to-be-pleased look of retired Americans from the Midwest, and two girls in their teens, white and speckled. They're both wearing T-shirts with mottoes: TRY A VIRGIN (ISLAND), PROPERTY OF ST. MARTIN'S COUNTY JAIL. There's half an hour to wait. The girls peel off their T-shirts and shorts; they're wearing bikinis underneath. They sit out on the filthy beach, rubbing oil on each other's parboiled backs. Skin cancer, thinks Rennie.
Her own dress comes up to her neck. Although it's sleeveless she's already too warm. She gazes at the deceptively blue sea; even though she knows what kind of garbage runs into it nearby, she longs to wade in it. But she hasn't been swimming since the operation. She hasn't yet found a bathing suit that will do: this is her excuse. Her real fear, irrational but a fear, is that the scar will come undone in the water, split open like a faulty zipper, and she will turn inside out. Then she would see what Daniel saw when he looked into her, while she herself lay on the table unconscious as a slit fish. This is partly why she fell in love with him: he knows something about her she doesn't know, he knows what she's like inside.
Rennie takes the three postcards out of her purse, "St. Anthony by an early unknown local artist." She addresses one of them to her mother in Griswold. Her mother still lives in Griswold, even though her grandmother is dead and there's no reason at all why her mother can't move, travel, do something else. But she stays in Griswold, cleaning the red brick house that seems to get bigger and both emptier and more cluttered every time Rennie visits it. Where else would I go? says her mother. It's too late. Besides, my friends are here.
One of Rennie's less pleasant fantasies about the future, on nights when she can't sleep, is that her mother will get some lingering disease and she'll have to go back to Griswold to take care of her, for years and years, for the rest of her life. She'll plead illness, they'll have a competition, the sickest one will win. That's how it's done in Griswold, by the women at any rate. Rennie can remember her mother's church group in the front parlour, drinking tea and eating small cakes covered with chocolate icing and poisonous-looking many-coloured sprinkles, discussing their own and each other's debilities in hushed voices that blended pity, admiration and envy. If you were sick
On the card Rennie writes that she's well and is having a nice relaxing time. She hasn't told her mother about Jake leaving, since it was hard enough to get her to accept the fact that he'd moved in. Rennie would have dodged that one if she could, but her mother was fond of phoning her early in the morning, at a time when she thought everyone ought to be up, and the phone was on Jake's side of the bed. It would have been better if Jake weren't in the habit of disguising his voice and saying things like "The White House" and "Fiedlefort's Garage." Rennie finally had to explain to her mother that it was only one male voice she was hearing, not several. Which was only marginally acceptable. After that, they didn't discuss it.
Rennie hasn't told her mother about the operation, either. She stopped telling her mother bad news a long time ago. As a child, she learned to conceal cuts and scrapes, since her mother seemed to regard such things not as accidents but as acts Rennie committed on purpose to complicate her mother's life. What did you do that for, she would say, jabbing at the blood with a towel. Next time, watch where you're going. The operation, too, she would see as Rennie's fault. Cancer was a front-parlour subject, but it wasn't in the same class as a broken leg or a heart attack or even a death. It was apart, obscene almost, like a scandal; it was something you brought upon yourself.
Other people think that too, but in different ways. Rennie used to think it herself. Sexual repression. Couldn't act out anger. The body, sinister twin, taking its revenge for whatever crimes the mind was supposed to have committed on it. Nothing had prepared her for her own outrage, the feeling that she'd been betrayed by a close friend. She'd given her body swimming twice a week, forbidden it junk food and cigarette smoke, allowed it a normal amount of sexual release. She'd trusted it. Why then had it turned against her?
Daniel talked about the importance of attitude. It's mysterious, he said. We don't know why, but it helps, or it seems to.