Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Luke was so unperturbed, so casual, so easy, in fact, following his chat with Jim, that instead of returning straight home in anticipation of Sara’s probable arrival, he strolled off along the beach in search of Ronny’s elusive black rabbits. He even took his camera with him. Maybe this would be the start of something? He couldn’t be a landscape man, not straight off, that was asking too much, but he could be a dot on a landscape man. Any dot would do. A rabbit, a bird, a rat, even.

Sara, for her part, was thoroughly fearful and flustered. It was by no means unusual for her to act on impulse, but her impulses were invariably uniform, dull and doggedly predictable. Fish on Friday. Cheese scones. Skimmed milk. Germolene. She had thought long and hard about what to wear. In the mirror her own face stared back at her, weather-beaten. A buffeted face. Brown, although not with a posh tan or a holiday tan, but with an outside tan — the kind of tan workmen had, and bin-men. She had bright blue eyes and black hair. But her hair was wiry and it wouldn’t go , not anywhere, it hung around her face, sulkily. It stuck up.

In her cupboard there was precious little to choose from. After a time she decided on something frivolous. Anything wintery was too serious, too full of weight and intent. So outside she threw on her best, long summer dress — even though the summer was over — and inside she wore the special bra and pants that she saved for medical examinations. All new. All bright white. Utterly unimpeachable.

She sneaked out of the house through the back door. Lily was in. She was upstairs in the bathroom. She’d complained that there was never any hot water when she wanted it, so Sara had quietly switched on the immersion. Twice Lily had stood before her, both times draped in a large brown towel.

“Do you think I’m dirty?”

“Of course not.”

“Am I the kind of girl whose friends write about her to magazines?”

“Pardon?”

“Why are you wearing your best summer dress?”

“I’m not. And stop scratching your neck. That’s just tan.”

“I know! I told him it was fucking tan!”

“Told who?”

Lily ran upstairs to check in the mirror again.

She returned later and hung around in Sara’s bedroom.

“Is that lipstick?”

Sara’s eyes widened. “Lip balm. They felt chapped.”

“What I want to know is this,” Lily mooched, not having listened, “how come the bald one knew I was dirty when I’ve never even spoken to him before? It must’ve been the fishy one who said it first.”

“You aren’t dirty.”

Sara slipped perfume and some face powder into her handbag. “Haven’t you bathed yet?”

“No.”

“Isn’t the water hot enough?”

“Of course it’s hot enough…”

Lily’s eyes tightened and her jaw jutted out from the smooth coastline of her face. “Christ almighty. Is it any wonder that I have no self esteem?”

“I wasn’t…”

But like a pretty pleated skirt at a country dance, Lily flounced right on out.

Connie pressed her nose to the sheets of paper. They smelled of tobacco and floor polish. Not traditionally exotic aromas, but in this, her own particular context, she found them bewitching. She was sitting at a desk in the guest bedroom of her mother’s house. The room was a forget-me-not blue with a navy trim halfway up the walls and bright white above. Pine desk, pine bed, high-polished pine floors. Everything spotless. She wore a pair of reading glasses which sat far down on her small nose and slipped if she blinked.

♦

Something bit me in the night and now I’m sick. I have nets over my bunk and these stunted ochre-coloured candles which I burn while I sleep in an attempt to keep the mosquitos at bay. But there are bites on my belly, two of them, either side of my navel, like rusty little anthills. The local man — he’s no doctor and he speaks no English — expressed no interest in the lumps. Instead he blamed the rain. It’s the rainy season, he said, and made the sign of rain falling .

Yet Louis reckons that they could be something more sinister. So I lie in my bed to please him, and although outside it’s stupidly damp, inside it’s still relentlessly hot, hot, hot. The smell of the candles enters everything. Their scent is similar to cardamom only more acrid. Their aroma stinks up my clothes and my sheets and my hair. I taste it under my nails. I find a brown dust in my nostrils. I have a pathetic cough .

You should hear me, Ronny, with my pathetic cough .

The smell gets behind your eyes and feels so intense, like a bee buzzing in the ridge of your nose, also it tangs bitterly on the back of my tongue. I try constantly to swig it down with glasses of boiled water, but the vinegarish taste just clings and cloys. So what good after all were my countless precautions? I caught this tiresome sickness anyway, and it doesn’t even amount to what Louis would call A Proper Ailment. It has no dignity. It isn’t grandly tropical like I’d hoped. It isn’t a fever or a temperature or anything like that. It is simply a heaviness .

I can feel every bone. Even my individual ribs, which as I breathe are like hard iron hoops tightening around my chest. My knees feel terrible. It’s true! Like a gorilla’s heavy knuckles, dragging, dragging. I tried to rub them with my hands at first, but my actual knuckles soon grew numb and weighty and ineffectual .

Pity me, Ronny!

Naturally, for all his apparent concern, Louis refused point blank to call out the proper doctor again. Again? He had come once already a month ago when a blister on my heel went septic and my whole foot turned a whitish blue colour. That often happens here. The local people use forest herbs to prevent infections, even the chimps do the same, Louis says, but neither he nor I are botanists .

Anyway, I bound it up. I ignored it. It didn’t hurt. And then one day the skin came loose. The layers had separated and resembled a flaky, filo pastry. But harboured underneath this fragile crust were a hundred writhing orange worms. A bright, vibrant, zesty tangerine. A crazy synthetic colour. Orange bodies tipped with jet-black pin-heads .

I went mad. When the doctor came he burned them out. He was disgusted that neither Louis nor I had taken any kind of first aid course back at home. He was a sour, grey-haired, safari-suited New Zealander who clearly thought us both fools. And his fee was exorbitant. Louis literally spewed. He was livid .

So I was glad of the local man, when he came to my shack, inspected my hands, my neck, my ankles and then stuck his tongue deep into his cheek with a correspondingly speculative shrug of his shoulders. One of the trappers — we call him Monty, Christ knows why — told Louis afterwards that the heavy bones are a sign that the soul is light and longs to fly away. Like a butterfly, he said, or like a wild jungle parrot in a keep net .

But nobody keeps me, Ronny .

I have a window. No glass in it. And through the window I can see the forest and the sky as I recline on my bunk. The dense forest and the high grey sky. The air oozes with different sounds. As I lie here, heavy-boned and hopeless, I can detect the calls of twelve distinct birds. The monkeys chatter and squeal relentlessly. I hear the chuck and hiss of a stream. The trees, the leaves, the warm wind. I hear them .

And most of all I hear the rain. The soft earth sucks up its sudden tears so readily with its ardent red-hard lips. I hear nature’s lovemaking — the perpetual tickle and thrill of it all — from this my sick-sick bed. But where do I fit? Hidden in my shack. A nut in its husk? Perhaps, I tell myself, I am the earth’s pale tongue. Or a small, dull bud. Or a heavy chrysalis. An insect? A turning, yearning, bleached, blanched milk-white aphid .