Fermentation (3 page)

BEAUMONT

A gentle, sweet, creamy cheese with a soft rosy rind and subtle flavour. Do not eat if distended or bitter.

‘I feel sick,’ I said.

‘You want to be sick?’

‘Yes. I'm going to throw up.’

Serge stepped out of the way just in time. I sat down on the pavement and vomited into the gutter.

Until the moment when the thin slip of paper turned from blue to pink we had simply been two people in love, and then I started to vomit. I sat in the bathroom on the rim of the bath and stared at the test result in disbelief Serge knocked on the door to see if I was all right and I slipped the paper out to him.

‘What's this?’

‘It's a test result.’

‘I don't understand,’ he said and I unlocked the door and held out the packet for him to see.

‘You’re pregnant.?’

‘Yes.’

He stared at the paper and then turned it over as though looking for a message written in invisible ink.

‘It's hardly a message from God. Are you sure? It looks blue to me. That's blue.’

‘It's pink. I saw it change colour. That is not the colour it started out as. It's pink. That's why I've been feeling sick.’

Serge took a step towards me and as he did so he dropped the slip of paper and knelt down to retrieve it. When he stood up he took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom. He made love to me that morning more gently than he had ever done before and when we
had finished I lifted the sheet up over my head.

‘You look like an ivory moth,’ he said as I brought the sheet down to rest over us.

Serge still wanted me to learn to eat fire. I allowed him to keep all his equipment in my apartment in a small kitchen cupboard under the sink. There he stashed bottles of paraffin and torches and sheets of old cotton which he'd tear into strips and bind round the torches.

‘I still want to teach you,’ he said more than once every week, usually when he was packing his stuff into his bag ready to go out. ‘Tell me when you're ready. You'd love it,’ he'd say, taking my face between his hands, brushing my skin with his fingers. ‘Let me teach you. It's quite safe.’

‘Why? I don't expect you to learn to write stories.’

‘That's different. Fire-eating's not a job.’

‘It frightens me,’ I said. And I'd hold up my hands and
make as if my fingers has been burnt, putting them into my mouth to assuage the pain.

‘Just imagine,’ he'd say. ‘A fire-eating pregnant woman. There haven't been many of those. In fact you'd probably be the first.’

‘I'm feeling ill. I don't want to eat fire.’

He shrugged his shoulders and I could see he was hardly listening. He was looking at the pregnant woman and the acts she could perform.

‘You'd be extraordinary,’ he said.

‘I'd be arrested. For roasting my child.’

‘We could call her Joan of Arc.’

‘She'd look like a pig on a spit and no man would want her,’ I replied, but Serge shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She would have flame-red hair and her eyes would dazzle anyone who dared look at her. She would dance circles of fire around all men who desired her.’

‘Sounds as if you already do. Who is she?’

Serge looked at me and then turned to leave the room.

‘I was teasing,’ I said quickly. ‘I love it that you want this child.’

‘Sure you do,’ he said.

‘You do want this child?’

He stood on the far side of the room and looked at me for a time without speaking. I could rarely, if ever, tell what Serge was thinking. His eyes were dark and stared right through me. Sometimes I felt he made me disappear altogether.

‘How can you ask that?’

‘I just did.’

‘And I just told you,’ he said quickly.

Serge went out most days to work and I would sit at my desk and try to write. Sometimes he would leave early in the morning before I awoke and stay out till after I had fallen asleep. We missed whole days like that. It was hard to keep track and yet it didn't seem to matter. When I awoke on the second or third day of his absence, he would be eating in the kitchen or sitting in the living-room watching TV and it was as though he had always been there. He filled the gaps of his absence perfectly. He was always with me.

One night he came home after being away a few days. I was in bed asleep with the window open and the heat as my blanket. I felt Serge climbing into the bed and turning me over. He kissed my face and my neck and I could feel his hands brushing against my stomach and then all I could see were the child's baby-blue eyes. It was as though it were watching us, as though there was a third person present, and I pushed Serge away.

‘I'm sorry.’

‘What's the matter?’ he said and put his hand out to touch me, but I pushed it away and Serge got up from the bed and went into the living-room. When he didn't return I went to find him, but he had fallen asleep on the couch. He was too tall to lie straight. His body was curled up like a child's, his head resting on the palm of his hand.
For a while I sat on the floor in the corner of the room and watched him sleeping. The lines of his face were lost in the shadows and he looked different somehow to the person I knew, a stranger in the dark of the room. At one point he opened his eyes and looked over to where I sat. He smiled at me in his sleep.

‘I'm sorry,’ I said but he had already closed his eyes.

The sickness persisted. I threw up in the mornings and in the afternoons and the smell of the vomit began to mingle with the smell of the rubbish wafting up from the streets.

‘Try these,’ Serge said one night when he returned home. He was carrying a small bag from which he took out three lemons. ‘I've heard if you suck on a lemon when you want to be sick it stops the feeling.’ Then he stood in the kitchen and started juggling them in his hands. ‘Fresh lemonade's good too.’

‘Who says?’

‘I read it somewhere.’

‘Do I smell?’

‘A bit. After you've thrown up.’

‘It's not attractive, is it?’

‘Just try the lemons. They're supposed to help. I don't like seeing you ill.’

‘You smell too sometimes.’

‘I absolutely never smell,’ he said, laughing and throwing the lemon across the room for me to catch.

‘Maybe I'll learn to juggle.’

‘You're throwing up enough as it is.’

‘Very clever,’ I said, and I chucked the lemons as hard as I could at his head, but each of them missed.

The next day when I went up to the markets I took one with me. I caught the Métro and sat in the carriage counting the stops and holding a lemon segment in my hand. The woman sitting opposite me was dressed in tight-fitting snake-skin trousers and a snake-skin top and as I looked at the strange green scales my vision became blurred round the edges and everything grew pale and watery. I held the lemon to my nose and then I sucked on it but its bitterness made me feel even worse and I tipped the contents of my bag out into my lap and then threw up in it full force. My vomit was salmon-coloured and when I had finished being sick I placed the lemon on top of it and then snapped the bag shut. The snake woman smiled at me.

‘They never worked for me either,’ she said, curling one long, virid leg round the other. ‘Try a mint next time,’ she said.

When it came to my stop I got off and dumped the bag in a bin. Outside in the markets I walked past animals: tanks full of locusts and fish and cages full of hens and rabbits that stank and looked sick. A large cage of white mice sat on a pile of crates. They scrabbled around in the sawdust and a man put his hand down and swung one up by its tail. He dangled it in the air and kissed it on the nose. Its
eyes were pink and transparent like fish eggs. I walked on through the food stalls where the wasps were feeding. A small boy picked a plum up from under a stall and held it out to his mother.

‘Don't eat,’ I heard her say. ‘There are maggots.’

People swatted at flies in their hair.

‘It's disgusting,’ the words were whispered again and again.

I found a cheese stall: a long table with a white cloth. The man had brought farm cheeses into the city to sell but everything was crawling with flies and I turned away and then I smelt the fire.

I walked through the crowd and shortly afterwards saw Serge and a small group of his friends gathered under a railway bridge chatting and drinking. I was about to walk over and join him. I recognised a couple of them: Boo the knife-thrower, who was dressed in an old Russian costume, and Stephane. There was a girl there too. She walked up to Serge. She was very young and pretty with red hair that fell in thick curls round her bare shoulders and I saw her put her arm around him and he bent down and kissed her. I watched as they both began unpacking his bag and preparing the bandages. She picked up one of the torches and wrapped a thin cotton strip around it and I saw Serge showing her how to wrap it so that it was just tight enough and then she took a drink from the bottle of paraffin and swirled the liquid round in her mouth like a fine wine before lighting the torch.

Serge stood behind her and lifted her arm and then I saw him direct her to spit over the flame and as she did so the flame roared out of her mouth and I stood there and watched. When she had finished she laid the torches down and turned around to face Serge and I saw that the right side of her face was completely disfigured. Serge put his hand out to her cheek and softly ran his fingers down the deeply scarred tissue. He bent down and blew on her skin and she laughed and he kissed her and I felt my whole stomach dip.

I took the Métro home and waited for Serge to come back. It didn't take long for him to return. He brought me a large bunch of eskimo roses.

‘They smell good,’ he said. ‘Smell them.’

I put my face to the flowers.

‘They're beautiful,’ I said as he kissed me and then he laughed.

‘You've got pollen on your nose. You look like a clown.’

I felt anger rise inside me as I went to the mirror in the hall and looked at my face smeared with gold dust.

Serge put his equipment down on the kitchen table and then went and had a shower. I listened to the sound of the water and when he had finished he came through to where I was sitting.

‘Have you had a good day?’

‘Yes,’ he said, sitting down opposite me at the kitchen table and lighting a cigarette. ‘Put them in water or they'll die.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Over by the markets.’

‘Did you meet friends?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘I was with friends.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘Boo and Stephane.’

‘Just Boo and Stephane?’

‘A few others. Is this leading somewhere?’

‘It's conversation,’ I said. ‘I just wondered if you were with any friend in particular.’

‘I was with friends. Plural. Boo, Stephane, Justine.’

‘Justine?’

‘A friend.’ Serge got up from the table and opened the fridge door. ‘I'm hungry,’ he said.

‘Is she a special friend? Justine?’

‘What is this?’

‘I want to know what the word “friend” means exactly to you.’ My voice was rising.

‘Exactly?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Are you jealous? You
are
jealous. You're ridiculous,’ he said, closing the fridge door gently and coming to stand behind me. ‘Justine is a friend, that's all. I've known her since she was a child. She wants to learn to eat fire. She's always wanted to learn. You haven't.’

‘What happened to her face?’

‘Her face?’

‘Yes, Serge. Her face. What happened to her pretty little face?’

‘You've seen her?’

‘Right.’

‘When did you see her?’

‘Today. What happened to her face?’

‘She's always liked fire.’

‘And you like teaching her?’

‘Yes, I like it. I like teaching her. I like passing on my skills. You've never wanted to learn.’

‘I don't want to learn, so you screw someone else? Is that it? Is that what's going on?’

‘You've lost me.’

‘I saw you kiss her.’

Serge began to massage my neck. ‘Try and relax. She's a friend. There's nothing between Justine and me. You're imagining where there is nothing to imagine. You're tired,’ he said, leaning down and kissing me.

He smelt wet and soapy and part of me wanted to turn round and wrap my arms around him. To kiss him because I believed him.

‘Was the accident your fault?’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Well, was it? Did you bum her? Did she scream out in pain and now you feel guilty and that's why you sleep with her?’

‘Stop it,’ Serge said. ‘These questions are stupid.’ He was continuing to massage my neck and I thought I could feel his grip becoming tighter. ‘You’re tired. Justine is a friend.’

‘Stop touching me,’ I said and then I turned round and caught his face with my nails.

Serge put his hand up to the blood.

‘I'm sorry.’ I whispered the words in the silence.

‘You're ridiculous.’

He grabbed me by the hair and pulled my head back as far as it would go until I was gasping for air like a fish.

‘Let's see how green your skin is,’ he said, bending down close to me so I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face. ‘It's seeping right through you,’ he said and then with one hand he picked up a bottle of paraffin that sat on the table.

‘You're hurting.’

‘No I'm not. I'm going to teach you something.’

He forced the bottle between my lips and made me drink the liquid. It tasted strong and oily, like the idea of taking petrol into your mouth, and I thought I would vomit and then he forced my head down to the floor and told me to spit. He picked up a torch from the table and held it lengthways between his teeth, and still holding my head by the hair he lit a match and set light to the torch. He pulled me from the kitchen into the living-room and threw me down on the sofa, leaning his whole weight against me, holding my head back over the arm of the sofa as though I were in a dentist's chair, and then very slowly he began lowering the torch down towards my face. I could feel the warmth of the flames.

‘If you struggle, you get burnt,’ he said. ‘That's the rule, so open your mouth and open it wide or you'll end up looking just like Justine.’