The Slap

  She laughed. ‘I don’t think you’ve conducted a proper scientific survey.’ But she was blushing. The foolish, cliched compliment made her feel terrific. She glanced at her watch. ‘What time is dinner?’

  Was he smirking at her? She deserved it. Dinner was at eight o’clock. They had been reminded of this every hour on the hour at the conference earlier that day.

  ‘Relax, we’ve got time. We’ll head off in twenty minutes.’ He finished his beer and looked expectantly at her. She went over to the fridge and poured herself another drink. He was smirking, she was sure of it. The arrogant bastard, he probably did this all the time. A girl in every conference port. With that thought she slammed the fridge door.

  Art looked up, startled. ‘You okay?’

  ‘It’s been a long week. I’m just tired.’ She looked at him evenly and smiled cooly. ‘Maybe I’ll have an early night tonight.’

  Art laughed and shook his head. He fumbled in the inside pocket of his jacket and threw a small packet on the table.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Diet pills. For when we go dancing.’

  ‘Are we going out dancing, are we?’

  ‘Sure we are. There’s no early night for you.’

  She picked up the box from the table and read the side of it. The information was printed in Thai and badly worded English. She laughed and chucked the box back on the table. ‘I don’t think so. It’s been a long long time since I’ve touched speed and I have no interest in doing it again.’

  Art’s face expressed mock outrage. ‘These are no gutter drugs, lady. These are legal and above board.’ Art narrowed his eyes. ‘So, you have dabbled with speed? I’m not surprised. I knew you were a woman with a past.’

  ‘Exactly. And that’s where taking drugs belongs. In the past.’

  He shook his head vigorously. ‘I disagree. And you disappoint me. There’s nothing to worry about. As I said they’re perfectly legal. I picked them up from a pharmacist this afternoon.’ He winked at her. ‘Don’t you just love Thailand?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think of Thailand. I haven’t seen very much apart from hotels, conference centres, Khao San Road and shopping malls.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why we must go dancing. We must.’ He looked at her eagerly.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  They did go dancing. Of course they did. Aisha allowed herself two champagnes at dinner, just enough to feel light-headed but not to lose control. She and Art shared a mango brûlée and then he slipped her two pills under the table. She rubbed them along her fingertips, then, furtively, she slipped them into her mouth, took a quick sip of champagne, and looked nervously down the table.

  No one was looking at her, they were too drunk to notice anything.

  Art’s arm was resting on her chair. She leaned back against it.

  After dinner everyone moved to the hotel bar for a spirit. She found herself squeezed between one of the Americans and a Dutch veterinarian whom she’d hardly spoken to during the conference. He was exceedingly tall, fair, in his late forties, but with a cherubic innocence that made him seem much younger. He was eloquent and witty and it was clear that he thought Aisha attractive. Wondering if it was the first flush of the drugs, she found herself striking a pose, wanting to appear beguiling, flirting with him. She knew that Art’s eyes were following her every movement.

  It was midnight when, as a crowd, they scrambled through the hotel’s revolving doors into the sticky humid heat of the tropical night. Taxi drivers tooted loudly for their attention. Art called two of the cabs over. The Dutch man got into the back seat of the first cab and Aisha went to follow. Cooly, but firmly, Art gripped her arm and pulled her aside. Along with Yvonne and Oskar, they took the second cab.

  In the back seat, Aisha experienced a delicious wave of euphoria as the vehicle seemed to glide over the twinkling lights of the city. The taxis sped down the freeway that formed an enormous arc over the sprawling metropolis below. Aisha was aware of sweat: hers, Art’s, Oskar’s, the driver. The moist, dank air seemed to have weight, to be sinking down from the sky into the very earth itself, into the thick sludge from which the city had emerged, the jungle earth to which assuredly the city must one day return. The flickering frantic neon lights were a valiant refusal, a defiant protest against this very inevitability. The cab veered off the freeway and it seemed to Aisha they were all plummeting with it down to the fervid world below.

  A million souls in the street. Bands of youth standing, smoking, outside nightclubs; women sitting on the footpaths chatting, their babies sleeping on their laps; stalls on every corner emanating the smell of meat and fish and lemongrass and ginger. Aisha had not been to Asia since her children were born but she remembered the liberation that could be experienced in this chaos of dirt and heat and noise. Australia would seem sterile and antiseptic for the first few days of her return. Art, who had sat in the front with the driver, turned and looked at her. She returned him a smile full of rapture and delight.

  The cab pulled up in a small, dusty street filled with bars and cafés. Bored Thai waiters and stoned white tourists were sitting at outdoor tables watching the ubiquitous television screens. Aisha stared at the largest screen. It was playing the new Brad Pitt movie. His voice was drowned out by the mechanical, ferocious pulse of the music coming from the clubs. Usually Aisha couldn’t abide doof-doof but now she found herself swaying and tapping, enjoying the music’s frenzied single-minded dedication to movement and to dance. Art led them up a narrow stairway, into the music, and she moved straight to the dance floor, unable to resist the compelling, thumping beat. The dance floor was filled with youngsters, drunk European backpackers, but she did not mind. She closed her eyes and found a space of her own amid the jerking bodies. A screeching female vocal called out through the throng: My love, my love, my love.

  Art had slid in next to her. She sensed it even before she opened her eyes. Art was dancing with her, Yvonne was dancing with her, Oskar and the Dutchman. They were all dancing with her and she was the centre of the dance. She closed her eyes again. My love, my love, my love. The drugs had not led to a loss of control; if anything they seemed to have brought her lucidity. She was aware of the whole world around her, the light, sound, sensation. It was years since she’d danced and she found that her body was moving confidently to the music, unselfconsciously, her movements smooth, unexaggerated. Art, she was pleased to see, was also a good dancer. She must take Hector out dancing in Bali. It had always been a point of pride for her, his skills and his ease as a dancer. Hector loved music and in his dancing he proclaimed it to the world. Art was good but he was not as good as Hector. She closed her eyes again. My love, my love, my love.

  The DJ’s drop into the next track was clumsy, the rhythms clashed and the resulting noise was ugly and discordant. But the crowd was cheerful, forgiving. Aisha almost let out a squeal of delight as she recognised the hypnotic whiplash of the song—Beyonce’s Crazy in Love. Melissa had adored the song as a toddler. Aisha and Hector would fall about laughing watching their naked daughter wiggle her bum in rapt imitation of the singer’s movements on the video. The dance floor was full, she was surrounded by flesh, by joy. They were all singing. She was complete in her body, her mind and body were one, and the one was the dance. All that mattered was the dance. It came to an end too soon, the frantic rhythms faded into the dull, unvarying thud of a track she did not recognise. Aisha walked away from the dance floor.

  The toilets were disgusting, crowded: the suffocating stench of excrement, the floor flooded. Aisha splashed water on her face, careful to not get any in her mouth, and she slipped through the mob of girls into the corridor outside. Art was standing there, his tie loosened. A lanky Thai lady-boy, heavily made up and wearing a shimmering gold lamé dress, was chatting him up. Aisha walked over and put her arm around Art.

  ‘She your girlfriend?’

  Art cocked his eyes sheepishly. Aisha winked at him and turned to the drag queen, nodding. At that moment
Art turned to her and kissed her full on the lips. The drag queen squealed.

  ‘You are one lucky lady.’

  Art’s mouth tasted salty, of spices, chilli, lemongrass. Gently he broke away from her. He was looking into her eyes. ‘I’m one lucky man.’

  Hector and Aisha had been together for nineteen years. In all that time she had never been unfaithful. She had been with other men before him, but only a few. She silently counted them as the lift sped to Art’s floor. Eddie, tall, good-natured, what the girls back then referred to as a ‘hornbag’. Their courtship began on the beaches of Scarborough. He was older, she was gratified that someone so popular, so attractive, had made a play for her. But she quickly became bored with him and dumped him as soon as she started uni. The only good thing to come out of being with Eddie was her friendship with his sister Rosie. After Eddie there was a boy she had met at a party in Northbridge, a half-Croatian guitarist with the beginnings of a heroin problem. Michael was tall, just like Eddie, but that was the only similarity. Michael was certainly not dull. Instead, he was moody, unkempt, unshaven and noncommittal, and he might just have broken her heart if she had let him. She did not let him. It was not just his drug addiction. At that time what pissed her off more was his inability to return messages or keep to appointments. She did not find his masculine evasiveness endearing or masochistically romantic and when he took a week to return a call, she asked her mother to say she’d call back. She never did. After Michael there was Mr Sam De Costa, her tutor in anatomy. Sam was thirty, also tall, married, stylish and always well-dressed, passionate about European cinema and early rock and roll. Their affair lasted the whole of her second year of veterinary science. That had definitely been love and Sam had definitely broken her heart. Soon after the breakup she had a drunken one-night stand with an inexperienced young science student. She’d ended up in his dorm and he had passed out before coming. She had stumbled out of his room and gone back downstairs to the party where she followed another inexperienced young science student back to his room. She had fucked both of them in order to feel desired again. Sam’s abandonment of her had made her feel so gutted that she believed she could never be whole again. It had broken her, led her to step into the shadows of annihilation, but she had not succumbed. The closest she came was scraping the edge of a knife against her wrists and acting like a silly self-loathing whore with those two science undergraduates. After that she transferred her studies to Melbourne. Soon after she met Peter, a carpenter, the brother of another vet student, and they had dated for six months. He was only a few years older than her, and she had felt very little for him. But he was very attractive, virile and confident. They also looked good together and she found that this was important to her. The sex with him was the best she had ever had. Peter, however, had fallen in love with her and in order to make him hate her, she slept with his best friend, Ryan. And then she met Hector.

  Eddie, Michael, Sam, the two undergraduates, Peter, Ryan and Hector. Eight men, the only thing they had in common was that they were tall and good-looking. As was Art. It was not much of a pattern.

  She could hear Art pissing in the bathroom. She fell onto the bed, her head was spinning and her mouth felt dry. His room was indentical to hers, watercolours of Buddhist temples on the wall, an unadorned desk and chair, a thick cushioned armchair, generic hotel floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the neon and lights of Bangkok below. The sound of his urinating was faintly repellent to her. Eight men and now Art would be her ninth. She was hardly a slut. She heard the toilet flush. She was married, she was a mother, she was about to sleep with another man, a stranger really. She was a slut. She would have sex with Art, that would be it, a one-night affair, she would file it away, far from her life, far from her family and marriage. It would not count. It would not be part of her life.

  Art was standing at the foot of the bed. He had taken off his tie and slowly he began to unbutton his shirt. There was nothing effeminate about his actions; he was being deliberately slow, he seemed firm and confident. He flung off his shirt and she looked at his chest, smooth, almost hairless except for the few long, fine black strands around his nipples. His trousers bunched clumsily around his crotch. She could tell he had an erection.

  ‘What’s your wife like?’

  He stopped. Aisha knew that she was stalling, that she had not fully committed to what was about to happen. She had thought the decision made—in the cab, at the dance club, back at the hotel, in the lift—but she could stop it all now. She could make it not happen. Art stretched out next to her on the bed. She was overwhelmed by the pugnacity of his smell, sweaty and masculine, like Hector but not Hector. His hand was slipping over her thigh. He was lifting her dress and she was aroused.

  ‘My wife is beautiful. And smart. She works in public television. Her family is French-speaking and apart from her perfect English she also speaks Spanish, Catalan, Russian and passable Arabic.’

  ‘What does she do in television?’

  ‘She produces documentaries.’

  ‘She sounds brilliant.’

  He drew his hand away from her and rolled over onto his back.

  ‘Aisha, I want to make love to you. At this moment I don’t want to think about my wife or about my life back in Montreal. I don’t want you to think about your husband or your life in Australia. I think you are possibly the most desirable woman I have ever met. I am not just saying that to seduce you further, it is the truth.’ He rolled back on his side and looked down at her. ‘I’m not interested in the morality of what we are doing, the right or wrong of it. I want to fuck you—that’s all that matters, all I care about at this moment. But I won’t if you don’t want me to or are too scared to. If we don’t fuck, it will be a regret of mine till my dying day.’

  He grinned and suddenly, without warning, he gently kissed her lips. ‘Don’t you want to fuck me?’ he asked.

  His purpose, his determination, his assurance convinced her. She had felt this once about Hector, the visceral swooning lust a woman could experience in a man. She took Art’s hand and slid it under the crotch of her new silk panties, and as she did that, she arched her neck, raised her face to his, and kissed him.

  An announcement came over the airport public address system asking for travellers on the next Garuda flight to Denpasar and Jakarta to proceed to their gate. The confirmation acted as a balm on the exhausted travellers around Aisha, and they began to talk excitedly to one another. Across the seat from her sat a young American couple, students, she presumed. The girl seemed agitated, as if the message from the loudspeaker had upset her in some way. Aisha’s practised medical eye took in the situation. The girl was under the influence of some drug; her pupils were dilated, her skin unnaturally flushed and she was sweating profusely, even in the artificial air-conditioned chill of the airport. The woman was overheating. It was stupid to be in such a state in Bangkok airport. She hoped the fool didn’t have any drugs on her. The girl began to cry.

  Aisha sighed, rolled up her magazine and forced it into her handbag. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  The boy’s face was grim. He too had probably taken some form of narcotic but his body was metabolising the drug much more effectively. ‘We’re okay. She’s a bit scared of flying.’

  The girl shook her head violently. ‘I’m not fucking scared of flying. I’m scared of bombs. I’m scared of getting blown up in the middle of the air.’ Her tone was not yet hysterical, but it could get there.

  Aisha looked across to the counter where a stewardess, still smiling, was clearly observing them. The girl seemed paranoid. That too could be the drugs.

  Aisha knelt before the girl. ‘We are perfectly safe. Thailand is very safe.’

  ‘There’s been bombings in Thailand.’ The girl had stopped crying, but wore a petulant scowl. It reminded Aisha of Melissa after a tantrum. The face was daring Aisha to argue with her.

  And, yes, she felt like saying, there have been bombings here, that is true. She herself had
felt flutters of fear on entering the airport, joining the queue for the security check; she had even experienced a moment of senseless panic on seeing two Saudi men in the queue. Grow up, she wanted to say to the girl—you want to travel, deal with it. This is the world.

  She took the girl’s hand. ‘I’m a medical practitioner. I think part of the problem is that you might need some food and water.’ She looked up at the man. ‘We’ve got plenty of time before the flight leaves. I’d get some food.’

  The boy looked grateful for her intervention.

  The girl scowled again. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Aisha rose to her feet. There was nothing more she could so. She sat back in her seat and took out her magazine.

  An elderly woman, heavily made up, was sitting next to her clutching a stuffed overnight bag. ‘That was very kind of you,’ she whispered. She was also American. They watched the boy lead the girl down the corridor.

  ‘My husband was exactly like that. He was terrified of planes.’

  Aisha nodded, curtly, flicking the pages of the magazine. She stopped at a perfume advertisement, two naked bodies, one black, one white, entwined such that their gender was a blur.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  Aisha faked a gracious smile and turned to the woman. ‘I’m Australian. ’

  ‘I’m going there, I’m going there.’ The woman was almost absurdly eager. ‘It looks so beautiful, and I just think Australians are wonderful.’ She beamed at Aisha. ‘You’re exactly like us.’

  Aisha resisted laughing. Art had said that too. What reassurance were the North Americans seeking?

  ‘Everyone loves Australians,’ the old woman continued, but was now sounding glum. ‘We just love you.’

  Aisha turned back to the magazine, and turned the page over. But the photograph remained vivid in her mind. Two bodies entwined, one black, one white, impossible to tell where one began and where the other ended.