The Underneath Page 8

  “I got into playing at a refugee camp near Kigoma. Turned out I have natural talent. I’ve been getting into shape.”

  “What kind of shape?”

  “Shape. Toned muscle. Svelte. I’m svelte.” He smiled. “The resurrection of svelte self.”

  They looked at each other, but she could only see this fuzzy version of him; his eyes were out of focus like the rest of him, and it wasn’t a metaphor, it was just poor bandwidth.

  “Hey, Sam, I need to run something by you.”

  “Sure.”

  “I think something’s happened in this house, to the owners.”

  Sam’s image froze for a moment. “What did you say? The link dropped.”

  “In this house. The people who own it. I think they might be missing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

  She outlined the story—Ammon and Frank’s cupboard, Alice, the surgical bootie. Sam leaned back, arms crossed, “You know what I think?”

  Kay waited.

  Skype made a little whoop and Sam vanished, a black screen, then a message popped up. Please wait while we get your call back.

  He came back, he was saying something about camping.

  “What? You’re breaking up.”

  Sam flickered, the video went out. Instead, Sam typed a message:

  They’re camping in Alaska.

  She dialed again, several times, but the connection kept dropping out. And then Sam was off-line. The generator had broken down or run out of fuel or Ali hadn’t paid the phone bill and Egypt Telecom had cut him off. Sam was pushing back his chair, finishing his dark, sweet Arabica coffee, he was stepping out into the street, into Cairo, into the blare of horns and nightlife, tea-sellers and pick-pockets, the air so thick with diesel fumes he could feel it brush against his face like an animal pelt.

  For 15 years, she’d been stepping out of that door, into that street, writing, documenting, reporting. All those words, all those miles. She wrote about one war, and when it stopped or the editors lost interest, she waited for another. She’d felt so necessary, the work so imperative. Now the dirty, hot roaring world carried on without her and the Wilsons were camping in Alaska. Or they’d gone to a beach house in Maine. Or even simpler: to their cabin in Granby so they could rent out this house for money.

  She slid down off the toilet’s tank, sitting on the lid, pressing the phone to her forehead. She could not account for what she felt: an unhinging. She was not so certain of the seam between fact and narrative. Words were malleable. This house may be secluded or isolated, it may be haunted or merely empty. It was a matter of the adjective. The interpretation was hers; the words were spells. The Wilsons were in Alaska, they were keeping themselves to themselves. Or they had disappeared—they had dispersed, floated away.

  And here she was, keeping herself to herself. If she and the children disappeared, how long would it be until Michael noticed? A month? Six weeks? He was on his way to a remote mining camp in Côte d’Ivoire, there’d be no internet. He might call on the sat phone from time to time, leaving message after message. He’d believe she wasn’t replying out of pique. No one was expecting to hear from her. Parents, friends, anyone who emailed her. We’re on vacation in a remote location with no phone or internet. It may take me a few days to reply.

  18

  HE HEARD SHEVAUNNE’S TV THROUGH the thin walls. You always you never you don’t love you cheating bitch you broke my I hate I love I never you always never— The soundtrack to her life was the hearty laughter of strangers, the violent haranguing of jilted lovers. She could not stand silence, she could not stand solitude—those long, cold minutes when she had to live with herself.

  He thought about what he’d read today in her file about Jake. What had been done made beating a child merely dull. The report didn’t say if Shevaunne had been directly involved, but that did not matter. She was guilty. She had carried on living with the man who hurt her son, scoring with him, until Jake was found and the cops were hailed and Shevaunne went to prison.

  How readily she’d come with him, just the whiff of smack, and she got into his car with her child. He’d thought, then, that she was just a junkie and neglect of her child was the worst of it, malnourishment, filth, sour milk. But the consistency—he recalled the words—the consistency of abuse. And the precision of it. How particular, how thoughtful. And consistent. Day after day.

  Through the walls he heard her snuffling sounds as she turned in her sleep. She slept so well in her vast cavern of sleep, the sleep of the innocent. She was innocent, heroin made her innocent, it was the junk, the smack to blame. But she knew exactly how much a boy of five was worth. And to whom.

  Ben began to wonder how he could live with her through the long months to guardianship. But this was part of a larger question: why she lived at all. Her body sucking oxygen, the blood cycling obediently through her veins. Nature culled the useless, but humanity was brimming with it.

  When she first moved in, he’d hidden the bills. No one would get far with his credit card details, but junkies would steal anything, sell anything, even the screws you had the TV screwed to the wall with. He remembered his mother removing the light bulbs, the shower curtain, the sheets, and selling them to a tweeker who would sell them on to a different motel across town. Ben kept the bills in an envelope taped to the back of the fridge. He kept other papers here, the logging manifests, his gun licence. This was no guarantee she wouldn’t find them. She might notice faint skid marks on the floor from where he’d moved the fridge. Junkies were cunning.

  He was so deeply in debt, he was tens of thousands in debt, the repairs on the equipment, the cost of the new processor, the small-business taxes, the insurance, the property taxes, the hospital bills from five years back when the crummy lifter broke and a log cracked down on his head, serious concussion, ambulance, overnight in the hospital, high deductible, 15 grand owed. He added up all the years it would take him to pay off his debt if he continued to pay the minimum—297 years.

  Carefully, he placed all the bills to his left and discarded the envelopes on the floor. Then he divided the bills into three piles. One pile had red letters or heavy block letters and always exclamations, words like FINAL and COLLECTION AGENCY softened by imploring notes, “If you need assistance please, please, please contact our customer service agents please.” Then he added and subtracted, he moved one bill to another pile, like a shell game. Perhaps he could phone Visa once more, perhaps they would give him another month. Or he could reduce his payment. Again. Thousands, thousands and thousands. He could not make the numbers stretch or shrink. Numbers were solid, like stones, pebbles, boulders. He was buried under the weight of them, a grave.

  He wrote out the checks. He was particularly careful with the check for the feller buncher: he left out his signature. It had been a year since he last did that, so he could probably get away with it. If he was nice to Juanita or Susie in customer service—“Jeez, I’m so sorry, ma’am, I forgot to sign the check? What a dumb mistake”—he could get another two weeks without the late penalty, the 24.9 percent screw-you interest.

  The light on the ceiling created a cocoon, softly spun around him. He could not see out into the night. He imagined Ed down the road sitting at his kitchen table, wondering how he would pay for a new baler. And all along the road, through town and across the country, kitchen table lights connected people like him, the bill payers, with their cups of coffee, their check books and calculators, the cold pits in their stomachs.

  When he paid what he could pay, he carefully put stamps on the envelopes. Then he took the outstanding bills, tapped them into a neat stack, and put them back behind the fridge.

  This next shipment would be his last, he knew that now. He couldn’t trust Shevaunne or “undercover bitches.” Things were shifting, Slim had warned him. He hadn’t cared before. Prison might even be a relief to be stripped of all responsibility—three hots and a cot. For a moment Ben simply stood. Anxiety prickled up his arms, swarmed
across his face with special heat, then down through his chest, clamping around his groin so he felt his sphincter tighten.

  He went into Jake’s room. He sat on the side of the bed, watching the sleeping boy. Children reveal who we truly are, he thought. The best and the worst we are. They bring us home to ourselves. He lay down, curling his body around Jake, as if in a storm, he would take the brunt of it on his back.

  19

  We were driving across the South Sudanese border to Moyo, having heard that General Christmas was forming an alliance with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Independence Front—or SPLIF, which was hilarious, except for the dead people, huts burned, girls (of course) raped. But by the time we got there, SPLIF and General Christmas had squabbled; he had sulked off back to the Congo. Sam and I were itching, having picked up fleas in a shepherd’s hut.

  Sam caught one and showed me: it was fat with blood, its abdomen the size of a pumpkin seed. I examined it. “How do you know it isn’t a bed bug?”

  “Bed bugs are fatter, rounder, with shorter legs. It’s definitely a flea.”

  As we drove on, I began to feel them crawling all over me, at first assuming it was my paranoia. But then I glanced over at Sam, and two monster fleas crawled out of his shirt, up his neck. I pulled open my shirt and saw three meandering across my chest. “Son of a bitch! Stop!”

  Sighting a deserted spot, Sam pulled over and we got out. We tore off our clothes, shaking them, slapping them against the ground. Within seconds, several dozen people had materialized from the bushes. I considered how we appeared to them: two white people taking off their clothes and dancing around, possessed or deranged. Certainly, we were entertaining, for the crowd began to hoot and laugh, grown men bending over in fits, children howling and falling about. Sam released his inner stripper and shimmied for the crowd, pranced and gyrated, but when he approached his new fans to shake hands, they ran away screaming.

  “See what happens when you take your clothes off!”

  “Ach, Kay, they’re just jealous.”

  We got back in the car, which was still full of fleas. Within minutes, we were covered again. There was nothing we could do; the car was infested. At the next village, Sam bought a large bottle of the local gin and began rubbing it over himself. I grabbed the bottle and took a swig, arguing that if it couldn’t prevent flea bites it could at least alleviate their effects. Six hours later we were in Juba.

  Through his connections, Sam had upgraded us to the Hilton, a cathedral of marble and glass built on a former slum. We staggered into the gleaming lobby just after dusk, filthy and stinking of gin. A contingent of Chinese investors looked at us in alarm; the receptionist retained her tourism-school smile as she stretched her arm as far out as she could to hand us the key.

  Sam turned to me, bewildered: “Is there something wrong with me, honey?”

  “You’re just a bit dirty, dear,” I fussed him with my hand, dust lifting in a cloud around him.

  We made the elevator, the doors shut, and we began scratching madly. Just as I had put my hand into my trousers to itch my crotch, the doors opened. A man was standing there. He was tall, Caucasian, carrying a digital camera. He calmly raised an eyebrow. “I’ll take the next one.” The doors shut gently.

  Sam snickered, “Your future husband.”

  *

  A shower when you are filthy, sweaty, and tired is better than the best sex. There is something deeply sensuous in getting clean, you attend to your body as a lover might discover you, a process of increasing focus. I stood under the stream of hot water, watching it turn brown as it swirled down the plug hole. The water soothed my skin. I lathered the fragrant hotel soap, behind my ears, between my toes and fingers, in my belly button. It took five minutes for the water to run clear, three shampooings to clean the dust from my hair, then I stood like a supplicant at the altar of hot, clean water. Drying myself, I discovered I was covered in flea bites; I counted more than a hundred on my abdomen, constellations over my thighs and buttocks. I looked like I had the pox.

  Sam was already at the bar. He’d bought me a whiskey on the rocks. He was very merry. He admitted he’d counted several dozen bites on his ass.

  “How do you see your own ass?”

  “In the mirror. Angle the door mirror in and you get the reflection of your backside off the bathroom mirror.”

  “But why, Sam, why did you want to see your own ass?”

  “It’s better than the front view.”

  “Oooo. You sound like a woman, all self-critical.”

  “You ever heard of mirror balls?”

  “Do I want to?”

  “It’s an affliction of middle-aged men. You can’t see your balls anymore except in a mirror.”

  “I’m so glad I don’t have balls.”

  “Me too.”

  We were giggling and drinking when my future husband walked in. Sam nudged me in an obvious way so that I spilled my drink, then hailed him over.

  “Hey.” Sam offered him the bar stool next to me. “Can we buy you a drink?”

  The man laughed and took the seat. “I’m Michael,” he said.

  “And we’re just colleagues,” Sam pointed to me. “Not even friends. She’s totally 100 percent available.”

  “My pimp,” I smiled. “He takes 20 percent, just so we’re clear.”

  Michael looked at me, and I realized he had not stopped looking at me since he’d entered the bar. I have since wondered if this is his trick, his shtick, how he makes all women feel special, how he makes Barb feel. He focused absolutely as if every movement I made fascinated him; it was an almost anthropological inspection. He studied my hands on the glass of whiskey, the pale freckles on my cheeks, the V at the base of my throat. It was weird and sexually thrilling.

  After three hours of drinking and bar snacks, Michael and I left Sam chatting up an Ethiopian Airlines flight attendant. In Michael’s room, he peeled off my clothes. With his fingertips he touched my flea bites, and then he leaned in, connecting them with his tongue. In the morning we said goodbye, good luck, we didn’t trade emails or numbers. He was heading to Djibouti and me with Sam back to Nairobi. I did not think of him again.

  Then, a year later, we bumped into each other in the arrivals hall in Lagos. He was with a crew on his way to film the Ogoni oil fields, I was covering the memorial of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. We were familiar, we were like old lovers. We immediately went to my hotel room, to bed.

  “I have a map of your body in my mind,” he said.

  “The flea bites? I looked like the London Underground.”

  “No.” He laughed and put his face against my belly. “Your topography, valleys, hills, slopes.”

  I believed him, I still do. Whatever the lies and obfuscations of our marriage, we were true in that beginning. I never imagined that those plump hours of happiness and room service would have to last us for years and years. How we would one day scrape the bottom of the jar, scrape and scrape until love was just gone, the last of the strawberry jam.

  He asked me to the wedding of friends in Paris. And I invited him to Lamu for New Year’s Eve. How glamorous we were, how we grabbed the pendulum as it swung us lightly away from the slums and the war zones and the refugee camps, from the blood and the stinking latrines. We were journalists, we never stayed too long.

  20

  The rain slapped fussily on the windshield. Kay peered ahead, hunched behind the wheel, a little old lady trying to see. Logging trucks, milk trucks roared by, regardless. It was like being in a car wash, hit from all sides with tides of water. Kay clung on.

  “Mum, do you still love Dad?” This from Freya in the back.

  “What?” Kay said, though she’d heard.

  “Dad. Do you still love him?”

  “Freya, sweetie, I’m trying to drive.”

  “But it’s a simple question, it’s not algebra.”

  “Love isn’t a thing that is or isn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

&n
bsp; “It doesn’t stop or begin,” Kay attempted.

  A silence. Then: “So you don’t love him.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “He loves you.”

  He does not, Kay thought. She caught Freya’s eye in the rear-view mirror: “We love each other, we’re married, it’s just sometimes—” Another truck sped past, its wake breaking in a wave over the windshield.

  “You don’t even sleep in the same bed.”

  “Frey—”

  “Are you getting a divorce?”

  “Jesus Christ! I am not having this conversation anymore.”

  “One-dollar fine!” Tom sang, shattering Kay’s hope that he hadn’t been listening.

  At Kamp Wahoo, Tom ran through the rain into the building, forgetting to say goodbye, but Freya slipped her arms around Kay, kissed her cheek. “I love you, Mum.” And the slightness of her arms, the scent of her, the crumb of toast caught on her lip: how Kay wanted to hold on, press tighter, pull her daughter back into her body. But that wasn’t the point, the point was letting go before Freya pulled away, the point was timing the moment of release so she didn’t cling to her daughter.

  There.

  Freya spun toward a group of girls sheltering under the porch; they turned to greet her. Freya made friends so easily.

  *

  At White’s, she roamed the aisles, list in hand. She’d had to learn how to shop, how to cook. Before children, food had appeared or been acquired in finished form. On assignment, she’d eaten what she needed to achieve sufficient caloric intake, street food, snacks. If there had been no food, there were always cigarettes and Coca Cola. Or she had been staying in hotels with room service and buffets. When she and Michael had lived in Nairobi they’d had a cook, as well as the ayah for Freya, and Kay simply gave the cook the money, he did the shopping, he produced the fine meals.

  Kay struggled to move beyond macaroni and cheese, and if she did, she was castigated by her children.