One Big Damn Puzzler

  Only, he thought, as if you could ever be only. He had stopped the alternate blinking now and as his eyes recovered from the blurring it always induced he realized the haze had been nothing more than the mosquito net over Lucy’s bed. A stab of anxiety went through him. He felt the pull of the Captain Cook. That he should be there. He wasn’t quite sure why this should be, apart from because that was where his work got itself done. After all, it was the place where he’d been assaulted, but perhaps, too, it was also his proper home on the island. If it were true that the dead walked the island, then he felt sure the half-built hotel was where his father would look for him.

  ‘You must have been dreaming,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Yes, I guess I must.’

  She started to climb back into bed. But William jumped out the other side. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not now. I thought I saw a spirit and I was right. You are a spirit, an evil one, trying to stop me working.’

  She tried to look innocent. It was a fair accusation. While it was true that she wanted to go to bed with him, not just for the sex – although she needed that – but also for the indulgence of watching him afterwards while he slept, she wanted too to prevent him completing his task. She knew how important it was for an ethnographer not to impinge upon his or her subjects. An ethnographer was there to record and draw conclusions without becoming part of the picture. Even the smallest most accidental intervention could upset the balance of an isolated society. If that were so, then what catastrophe might William cause?

  ‘Would that be such a very bad thing?’ was what she said now.

  ‘Of course it would. I’m the only hope these people have of obtaining justice and reparation. I can’t let them down.’

  ‘But are you sure justice and reparation are what’s right for them? Most of them have adapted to losing limbs perfectly well. Until you stirred them up they simply accepted their injuries as the result of bad magic. Shit happens, that’s how they look at it.’

  ‘They didn’t have any alternative then. Now they have me.’

  Lucy was wearing a thin silk bathrobe. She grabbed some underwear and stepped into it under the robe. He felt the concealment of her body, a body his eyes had been free to roam these past few days, was an act of hostility.

  ‘You know, you live in a very black and white world, don’t you? Don’t you ever think things might be a bit grey where they meet? Don’t you think things aren’t always so crystal clear?’

  He began picking his clothes from the floor where he’d discarded them the night before and putting them on. ‘What are you trying to say? You sound like Managua. He’s a nice enough guy but he’s pretty reactionary, too. It’s in his interest to keep people as they are. It maintains his special position.’

  ‘These people have got along for thousands, maybe millions, of years without anything more than they have now. Are they any less happy than the people back in America? You’ve seen what a little contact with the West can do, it’s why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m here to put it right.’

  ‘You can’t put back missing limbs with money and Coca-Cola. Replacing poto with baseball isn’t going to improve things for anyone.’

  ‘Except the rats.’ He was smiling at her. She didn’t feel like making a joke out of it. She felt like crying that he couldn’t see what was so obvious to her. That he couldn’t put himself in the islanders’ shoes. Not that they had any, of course, other than the high heels she’d given the she-boys. He was holding his hand out to her, inviting her back into bed. Her first instinct was to refuse. She didn’t want to let the cross feeling evaporate without a victory. On the other hand she didn’t want to go on feeling it any longer. She took his hand.

  As they made love again, slowly and kindly in a conciliatory way, William thought that as long as they could do this, provided they had this, they didn’t have to be on opposite sides. I’m not worried about us, he told himself. I’m definitely not worried.

  Lucy was trying to lose herself in the physical pleasure of the moment, but somehow she couldn’t manage it. An itch of irritation bothered her. Why did he keep squeezing her breasts in this way? First the right, then the left, two squeezes for that, then the right again, and again, and then another two squeezes for the left. Could he really imagine she enjoyed it? How well would she have to know him to be able to tell him that she didn’t? What if they never got to a time like that?

  His hands moved away from her breasts and she was able to concentrate better on what they were doing. Never mind, never mind, she told herself, putting more energy into it. If she worked him hard enough maybe he would fall asleep after and she could lie beside him and watch him and the feeling would come back.

  FORTY-ONE

  AFTER PREP SCHOOL William and Sandy Beach went their separate ways and William was relieved to be able to be himself again, to escape from the persona that Sandy Beach had created for him, namely that he was a rich socialite (this based on his parents owning a beach house), a wealthy wastrel who masturbated a lot. So he was alarmed when at his first freshman party at Harvard Law School he heard a voice behind him say, ‘Well, hello Wanker.’

  He turned and found Beach, who in the five years since their last meeting hadn’t changed a bit. His freckled face, topped by an unruly shock of ginger hair, was still that of a weedy, geeky ten-year-old. The thick black frames of his spectacles gave the impression of an extraterrestrial, and not one of the cuddly kind at that.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ hissed William by way of a greeting. Even though he knew it was useless, since his natural kindliness was, as they say, written all over his face, he tried to make himself look threatening. ‘Don’t ever call me that.’

  Sandy Beach gave him a knowing look. ‘Oh pardon me, have I touched a sore point? Still at it, then? Still beating your meat, huh? Still flogging your log. Still shaking the snake. Still handling the goods. Still holding the pole.’

  ‘Shut up,’ whispered William. ‘I was never that into it. You leaped to the wrong conclusion, is all. You got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’

  ‘While you had hold of the right end of it,’ said Beach, miming furious masturbation with one hand and giving William a powerful nudge in the ribs with his other elbow.

  ‘Cut it out,’ said William and this time he must have actually appeared threatening because Beach stopped masturbating and held his palms up in a fending-off motion. ‘OK, OK. Jesus, some people never change. Still can’t take a joke, huh?’

  ‘I can take a joke all right,’ said William. ‘I just can’t take the same joke over and over again any more. I think it’s time we moved on.’

  There was silence for a moment or two. They both looked at their drinks.

  ‘Actually,’ said Beach, ‘I have moved on.’

  ‘From what?’ said William.

  ‘From masturbation,’ said Beach. ‘Not that I was ever into it on your scale.’

  ‘And where exactly did you move on from it to?’

  ‘Women,’ said Beach. ‘Sex.’

  ‘Sex?’ said William. He couldn’t keep the croak of incredulity out of his voice. Sandy Beach had actually found someone who’d agreed to have sex with him. ‘You’ve had sex?’ He couldn’t stop it coming out as, ‘You’ve had sex?’

  Beach tried to fight off a smug smile and lost, a bit too easily, William thought. His geeky head was wobbling from false modesty. ‘I was at this party, see? My first night here. Can you believe that, my first night here? Well, I’m at this party, trying to look cool, but you know feeling a little nervous when this chick—’

  ‘Chick?’ The word kind of exploded from William. He couldn’t believe he’d heard Sandy Beach of all people use it.

  ‘Girl,’ said Sandy Beach. ‘It means girl.’

  ‘I know what it means, for Christ’s sake,’ said William.

  Beach stared at him for a moment, completely baffled by this outburst. But he was too absorbed in his own story to linger long on this puzzlement. ‘Yeah, well, this chick
walks right up to me and asks me to dance. So I try to tell her I’m not much of a dancer but she just kind of grabs me and says, “Don’t worry, just hold on to me.”’

  ‘She grabbed you?’ said William.

  ‘Yes, she grabbed me. Anyway, it’s a slow record and she puts her arms around me and starts pressing herself against me. Kinda grinding her pelvis into me? I tell you if I hadn’t had the most enormous hard-on to cushion me, I’d have had serious bruising.’

  He took a sip of his drink and looked casually around the room.

  ‘Well, go on,’ said William. Immediately he didn’t know why he’d said that, but then realized it was the sheer sensationalism of Sandy Beach having had a sexual encounter.

  ‘Well, we did that for a bit and then we had some drinks and then she invited me back to her place, which luckily was only a very short cab ride away. Very fortunate that.’

  ‘Extremely lucky,’ said William, remembering Beach’s legendary stinginess. ‘Saved you having to pay too much cab fare.’

  ‘No, no, nothing to do with the fare.’ Beach looked at him puzzled. ‘She paid the fare.’

  William smiled and nodded, as though to say, of course, how could I have been so stupid as to expect you to pay it?

  ‘No, it was lucky because if it had been any further I might have been arrested. A coupla more miles she would have had all my clothes off in the back of the cab.’

  ‘She took your clothes off in the cab?’

  ‘Not so much took. More ripped. Well, she tried to. I don’t mind telling you, it was a close call.’

  ‘Just how drunk was this girl?’ asked William.

  Beach didn’t appear to register the implication. ‘She sure was hot for me. We got to her place and she fucked me on the doorstep. Couldn’t find her key quick enough so she just pulled out the old secret weapon and plunged it in there and then.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said William.

  ‘Then she found her key and we went inside and did it some more. Every which way. Positions you couldn’t possibly imagine – well, maybe not you. I guess you do a lot of thinking about that sort of thing with your um, hobby—’

  ‘I told you not to mention that,’ said William.

  ‘OK, OK, I won’t! Keep your hair on, man. Your secret’s safe with me. I swear on my grandmother’s grave I’ll never mention it again.’

  ‘Do you two know each other?’

  It was a tall, dark-haired girl. A bit like Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy, William thought.

  ‘We were at prep school together,’ said Sandy Beach. ‘My name’s Aaron Beach but everyone calls me Sandy. This is William Hardt. Better known as Wanker.’

  ‘Wanker?’ said the girl.

  ‘It’s a British term for a prodigious masturbator,’ said Beach. There was a weird kind of smile on his face which William had never seen there before. At first he thought Beach was about to throw up. Then, to his horror he realized it was meant to be seductive.

  ‘Your grandmother’s grave,’ William hissed at Beach out of the corner of his mouth. His anxiety level was rising. This girl was stunning and she thought he was a pervert.

  ‘I forgot,’ said Beach. ‘She’s not dead yet.’

  ‘It’s – uh – not true,’ William said to the girl. ‘It was an ugly rumour he spread because of a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Misunderstanding! Huh!’ said Beach. ‘Well, what were you doing in the bathroom for an hour and a half if you weren’t masturbating?’

  ‘That’s difficult to explain,’ said William, trying to decide – not for the first time – whether it would be better to be considered a depraved onanist or an obsessive-compulsive nut.

  ‘You can’t explain it because it’s true,’ said Beach.

  ‘I think he’s right,’ the girl said. ‘There’s something funny about your eyes and everyone knows what causes that.’

  William stopped the alternate blinking and transferred the action to alternate molar grinding. It meant he couldn’t answer the girl, but on the other hand it wasn’t visible enough to make him look a lunatic. At least he hoped not.

  Beach had his hand on the small of the girl’s back. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said. ‘Or would you maybe like to dance?’

  As she was steered away the girl looked back over her shoulder and smiled at William but he couldn’t even smile back. He was at an advanced and critical stage in the tooth grinding. He didn’t want to have to start all over. He wouldn’t have any enamel left on his molars if he did that.

  He went upstairs to the bedroom where the hosts had put the guests’ coats and took his. He folded it and put it under his jacket so as not to make himself conspicuous as he slipped through the throng downstairs to make his getaway. He noticed Beach had lost the girl and was talking to a couple of geeky-looking freshmen. His shrill tones carried across the party hubbub and the last words William heard as he exited the front door were, ‘It was just lucky it was only a short cab ride. Another half a mile and I’d be in jail instead of telling you guys this . . .’

  A hundred yards or so along the sidewalk, William heard footsteps hurrying after him. Some instinct overrode his concentration on an elaborate crack-stepping ritual and he turned. It was the dark-haired girl. She smiled. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘My name is Lola. Now, tell me, why were you winking at me?’

  FORTY-TWO

  AFTER THE BREAKTHROUGH with ‘can’, there was no stopping Purnu. Having grasped the principles of how reading worked he couldn’t wait to add to his limited vocabulary of one word. It made things tough on William. After three weeks he was just beginning to lose his inhibitions about crapping in front of other people and to enjoy the camaraderie of the shitting beach. He was able to exchange a greeting or two with his fellow crappers without wishing to die of shame. But now Purnu had taken to lurking at the edge of the beach, watching and waiting for William to finish so he could collar him for another lesson. It put back in most of the tension involved in communal crapping that William had managed to lose. What made it worse was that as soon as he straightened up, signalling the end of his bowel evacuation, Purnu would rush over and inspect his dump, along, of course, with the usual crowd of sensation-seekers. So sometimes William rose early to be one of the first on the beach and get finished before Purnu even appeared. Purnu was too afraid of evil spirits to come into the hotel on his own, so William could get started on his work without being delayed by another reading lesson.

  William wouldn’t have rated himself as much of an expert on giving instruction on how to read. He’d picked up just enough from listening to his mother teaching Ruth’s small daughter, the way she must have taught William himself, to know the basic principles. He also realized that the lessons would be easier and the whole process be speeded up if he did a bit of preparation. He’d taken on board that Purnu’s interest had been awakened by spelling a word he knew. So during his interviews with the amputees he listened carefully for the words they used most and jotted them down in his notebook. Purnu duly learned ‘pig’, ‘fug-a-fug, ‘bomb’, ‘yam’ and other words in descending order of popularity.

  In a matter of a week Purnu was able to read whole sentences at least competently, even if no less contentiously. One big problem was tenses, which didn’t seem to exist on the island. The natives had a cavalier attitude to time. Unlike most Westerners, especially William, they did not concern themselves with ticking off how much of their time on Earth had passed or computing how much might remain. Yesterday, today and tomorrow blurred into one continuum. They didn’t need any more than the present tense. Past and future didn’t bother them too much.

  ‘What is mean, “He stepped on a mine”?’ objected Purnu one morning when he’d actually arrived outside the Captain Cook before shitting so as to make sure of nabbing William. ‘What is be “stepped”?’ It was one of a set of sentences William had written out the day before and given to Purnu to read for homework. They all related to everyday life on the island.

  William had to think. ??
?“Stepped” is the past tense of “step”.’ This got a blank reception. ‘Well, I guess another way of putting it would be to say, “He did step on a mine.”’

  ‘What is be this word “did”?’

  ‘Um, it’s the past of the verb “to do”.’

  ‘Well, why you is not just say, “He is do”?’

  This was getting them nowhere. ‘Um, forget “did”,’ he said.

  ‘Forget “did”? But what for I is want for do that? I is come here for learn spell words. I is not come for learn word and then forget straight away. Also, is be plenty easy word. DUH-I-DUH. Did. I is not want for waste easy word like that.’

  ‘I’m not talking about wasting it. It’s just not helping anything at the moment. So let’s just forget it for now.’

  Purnu sighed. ‘That is be whole point. I is not be sure I is can forget now. DUH-I-DUH. See? Is be so easy for remember, is be so hard for forget.’

  So it went. But in spite of all the arguments and interruptions Purnu made startling progress and then a different problem arose. He could read but he didn’t have anything to read. So William took to borrowing books and magazines from Lucy. He had to pretend they were for him because Purnu had sworn him to secrecy lest Managua find out. Purnu wanted to spring it on Managua when the time was right. Ripeness was all, as far as he was concerned.

  So it was that, lips moving all the time – almost like someone with OCD, thought William, watching him – the sorcerer ploughed his way through out-of-date Vogues and Cosmopolitans, a few New Yorkers, a chicklit novel that Lucy had idly picked up at an airport, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Pride and Prejudice and four copies of the Reader’s Digest from the 1970s that Lucy had found abandoned in her house. You could say Purnu had catholic taste.

  One day he trotted eagerly after William at the end of shitting but William turned to him and said, ‘No lesson today.’

  ‘No lesson?’ Purnu’s face fell.