‘Are you okay? Can’t I come with you?’
I didn’t like to make her run behind me, but I needed to wash myself. I knew she was still there because she was shouting out poems — not her own — as we went, to remind me of the good things.
I stripped off and ran into the sea. I swam and jogged on the beach until I was exhausted. I lay down next to her with the sun on me. Soon, I’d dozed off. When I opened my eyes, she was sitting there wearing just a cigarette, her arms hugging her knees. Unlike the other women at the Centre, she never removed her clothes but always wore a long-sleeved top and ankle-length skirt.
‘What is it?’
She said, ‘You slept with her.’ Her hands shook as she drew on her cigarette. ‘Everyone in this hemisphere will have heard.’
‘But you didn’t cover your ears.’
‘I listened to your music. Every note.’
‘What will you do with what you heard? Write about it — or is it too human for you?’
‘If that was all I was capable of, I’d hate myself!’ She took my hand and placed it on her foot. ‘Will you look at me? We can’t have sex. You don’t want to. Perhaps you’ve had more than enough for today. I have never had an orgasm, and I am a virgin. Touch me, if you feel like it.’ She lay back. ‘Would you?’
After my earlier experience, I couldn’t claim to be erotically absorbed. I did begin to rub her with the palms of my hands; then, when I began to stroke her with my fingers and her eyes closed, my mind began to wander.
‘I need to borrow this.’
I took her notebook and pen, and began to make an inventory of what I found on her flesh. I did this, as they say on television, in no particular order. I went to what interested me.
The first thing I noticed was a light brown eyelash on her throat, one of her own. On her forehead there was one hard spot and one pus-filled, with several others under the skin. Her hair looked as though it had been dyed a while ago; parts of it had been bleached by the sun. It was hard to make out its original colour. Her lips were a little ribbed and sore, the bottom more than the top.
I found a purplish bruise, recent, on her side where, perhaps, she had knocked into a table. On her knees there were three little childhood scars. I ran my fingers along the still-livid scar where, I guessed, she’d had her gall-bladder removed. She had five painted toenails, all chipped, and five, on the other foot, unpainted: I guess she must have got bored. There was a lot of sand, mostly dry, between her toes, on the soles of her feet and instep.
She wore cheap silver ear-rings, but I didn’t feel she was interested in personal adornment. One ear lobe was slightly inflamed. I also found a leaf on her leg, several insects, dead and alive, in different places, and dirt on her leg. The skin around her fingernails had been pulled and torn. Her cheap watch told the wrong time. Her teeth seemed good; perhaps she had worn a brace as a child, but they were stained, now, from smoking, and one was chipped. There were random and quite deep scratch-marks on one arm (left), which I had noticed before but hadn’t attended to. They appeared to have been done with an insufficiently sharp object — a penknife, say, rather than a razor-blade — as if she’d decided to doodle on herself on the spur of the moment, without preparing.
I peered into her ears and mouth, between her legs and then her toes, where I discovered another insect; I looked up her nose — surprisingly hairless, compared to mine. On her chest she had scored what I guessed to be the word ‘poet’. On her thigh, there were other words which had been recently bleeding.
I wrote, in the fatuous modern manner, ‘This is a Person in the Here and Now Lying Down’, and jotted it down, forensically, working in silence for an hour. I kept the dead insects, the leaf, a couple of public hairs, an example of the dirt, a smear of blood and vaginal mucus, and a record of the words, inside her notebook. Mostly her eyes were closed, her breaths deep and long.
I awoke her from her ‘dream’, and showed her what I’d been doing.
‘No one’s ever done a nicer thing for me,’ she said.
‘Pleasure.’
‘You said to me once, what people want is to be known. Can I ask you: what is that scar you have?’
‘What scar? Where?’
She looked at me as though I were stupid, before pointing it out to me. It was under my elbow, in the soft flesh.
‘You don’t know what it is?’
‘I probably do,’ I said, irritably. ‘I don’t even remember where I got it.’
‘You don’t want to know yourself. You don’t know yourself as well as you know me. I don’t understand that. If you knew yourself you wouldn’t have done what you did with that woman.’
‘I don’t see why we have to know either ourselves or each other.’
‘But what else is there?’
‘Enjoying each other.’
‘Knowing is enjoying, for me.’
These were the sort of wrangles we liked. After, we walked back in silence.
I noticed, out at sea, a large yacht with little boats carrying provisions out to it. I’d forgotten that everyone from the Centre had been invited to a party on it that evening. I hadn’t taken much notice at the time, but there were numerous rumours about the owner. He was either a gangster, film producer or computer magnate. I wasn’t sure which was considered to be worse. I was surprised when Patricia announced at breakfast that we were all going. I was intending to miss it; I couldn’t see that Patricia would even notice my absence. How things had changed since then! Hadn’t she said to me, a couple of hours ago, ‘See you tonight!’
I couldn’t defy Patricia and remain at the Centre. If I was going to leave, I’d have to know where I was going.
I said goodbye to Alicia and went to the roof to think. I discovered myself to be even more furious than before about what Patricia had done to me, and furious with myself for having failed to escape untouched. I would insist on sleeping alone tonight, and leave for Athens by the first boat. I packed my bags in readiness. I was young; I could run.
5
I went to eat in a taverna in town, reading at the table. After a few pages, I thought ‘I can do this.’ I pulled some paper from my rucksack and started on a story, which offered itself to me. It was something seen, or apprehended as a whole — almost visual — which I felt forced to find words for. My hands were shaking; without literature I couldn’t think, and felt stifled by a swirl of thoughts which took me nowhere new. But writing and the intricacies of its solitude was a habit I needed to break in order to stray from myself. Some artists, in their later life, become so much themselves, they go their own way, that they are no longer open to influence, to being changed or even touched by anyone else, and their work takes on the nature of obsession. Margot once said to me, ‘When you think or feel something important, instead of saying it, you write it down. I’d love it to rain on your computer!’
It did. I put away my pen and paper, paid, and left.
At the Centre the voices, usually so quietly fervent, were almost raucous. Everyone, apart from Patricia, who had yet to appear, had gathered in colourful skirts, dresses and wraps. Some wore bells on their ankles; many wore bras. The night air, invariably sweet, vibrated with clashing female perfumes; jewellery flashed and jingled. Excitement about the party on the yacht was so high that some people were already dancing.
I was wearing my usual shorts and white T-shirt. I’d bought this body because I liked it as it was, a pure fashion item which didn’t require elaboration.
I laughed when I saw that Alicia had attempted to comb her hair, making it look even more frizzy. With the light behind her, she looked as though she had a halo. She also wore lipstick, which I’d never seen on her. It was as if she were trying out being ‘a woman’.