Fermentation (6 page)

I got up and crouched down by the side of the bed to
watch more closely. I could see small beads of perspiration had formed on the girl's white thighs and I leant my head closer and began to lick her skin, tasting the salt of her body, and then the man stopped what he was doing and drew me up on to the bed. I knew what I needed to do. I was thirsty and I bent my head down and began to drink of the young girl's sweet juices, lapping at her dark sex like I would suck over-ripe fruit, and as I sucked I could feel my own sex swelling. And then I felt it, the raw silk being placed between my legs, and the man began to draw it over me, gently at first and then rougher, and my whole body felt as though it were collapsing inwards, folding in and melting through my sex which throbbed like a precious ruby. My tongue dug deep into the girl, straining now for every last drop of her juices, and her body writhed in a frenzy. I could see when I lifted my head that her wrists were covered in blood where she had pulled against the ties that bound her. I drank again, this time digging my fingers into the girl's flesh, tracing and imprinting my desire on her skin, until finally I felt the silk being withdrawn from between my legs and immediately I lay down on the bed exhausted and closed my eyes.

When I re-opened my eyes light was streaming in through the windows. I looked about me, blinking at the sun. The girl was no longer lying on the bed and the room was empty. I stood up and went back to the room where I had undressed the night before. My clothes lay on the bed just as I had left them. Once I had dressed I
walked through the house trying to locate both the man and the girl, but everywhere I looked confirmed my fear that not only were they not there but that the whole house was empty. There was no sign that anyone lived there at all. No ornaments, no clothes in the wardrobe or towels in the bathroom. It was a shell: a house, perhaps, that no one had ever lived in.

The previous night we had entered through the back door and this was the door I chose to leave by. It closed behind me with a click and I found myself in an enclosed courtyard which was empty also except that lying on the white paving stones at its centre was the blue scarf I had seen the night before. I walked over to the gate and tried the door but my heart already knew it would be locked. There was no way out either backwards or forwards. I was trapped.

Presently I picked up the scarf and pressed it to my face.

The sun was low in the sky and long shadows danced on the walls. Once again I was tired. I never seemed truly to rest in my sleep and I had begun to notice that each time I awoke I felt increasingly lethargic. I wanted to lie down again and sleep but I knew my body wouldn't allow me that luxury so instead I rose and went to stand in front of the mirror. It had become a ritual, as though I no longer existed without this looking-glass feedback. My body felt completely misshapen. All the clothes I was used to
wearing – the little white T-shirts, the short summer skirts that stopped mid-thigh, my Levis – everything seemed to belong to someone else and, as if in confirmation of this fact, as if I needed one, I then felt a definite kick from within. The baby was moving and the kick made me jump as though a volt of electricity had been shot through my body. The look of surprise on my face was palpable. My eyes seemed to grow wide and I smiled at my reflection.

I envied my child its dark watery sack and I thought of the time I had found a cave by the sea when I was seven and of the pool deep within; how dark it had seemed to me then as I stood by its edge and imagined all the strange fish that must swim in its depths. I had been frightened and ran out into the blinding light to find my mother. Now, as I stood in front of the mirror, I thought of my child swimming in a pool such as that; out of sight, protected from the light and the heat, and I wanted to join it, to leave my mother behind and swim in the pool in the depths of the cave.

EMMENTAL

Silky-smooth jacket, pale ochre interior, spherical holes evenly distributed throughout. This cheese has a distinctive if slightly sweet taste and is prone to sweating.

When I thought it was time, I made an appointment for an ultrasound at the hospital. I took one of the city's silver buses as the journey was long and sat opposite an old woman in a black shawl who stared at me over her basket of shopping. Through the smells of petrol and dust I was sure I could detect a strong odour of fish. At first I thought it was coming from her basket, but when we reached my stop and I stood up I could see her basket was empty. She smiled up at me as I stared down at her and her face cracked like dry earth.

The hospital was a tall, white building which stood on one side of a tree-lined square of shops and cafés. The centre of this square was filled with white sand and benches for patients or shoppers to sit on. Groups of young children would stand around this area playing. Some would sit on the ground with old magazines and keyrings with pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus enamelled on them and warm cans of fizzy drink spread out in the dust for the visitors to take in with them.

By the time the bus had dropped me off, it was late
afternoon and the building had thrown an awkward shadow out over the square. The city had been transformed into a giant sundial with its buildings marking off the hours. I stood in the four o'clock shade and looked around me. The hospital had peeled in the heat and under the white paint you could see a previous layer of pink as if it were skin. As I stood there, a young girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen came over to me clutching an armful of half-dead flowers. She was very slight with large blue eyes, made all the larger somehow by her thinness.

‘Buy some?’ she said, thrusting a bunch of spider lilies up at me with a scrawny hand and smiling. She had a baby strapped to her back whose pale head lolled against her as though its spine had been snapped. Saliva dribbled from its mouth. I gave her some money and took the bunch of flowers and she walked away to where her friends stood in a huddle at the side of the square. From behind she looked like one of the bent old women who walk the streets begging for money.

Inside the hospital was momentarily cool and dark after the light of the city. I took instructions from a nurse at the front desk and then followed a series of signs that led me up a stone stairway to the second floor and afterwards along a near-deserted corridor. Coiled hose-pipes hung at regular intervals along the walls and beneath them stood large red buckets of sand with the word ‘Fire’ written on them. I wondered if the hospital incinerators were in operation and how many soiled
sheets and bloodied towels they burnt each day. Doctors were like gods while the fires burnt below. Somewhere far away a fly buzzed frantically against the glass of a window.

Eventually I found the number of the room which was printed on my appointment card and entered through heavy swing doors.

I sat in the waiting-room alone and looked at the posters of pregnant women that were stuck to the walls. All of these women were at various stages of pregnancy, their bodies fermenting and swelling while they waited for the signal that they could move on. My sister had said by the time you had your second or third child you would let anyone put their hands inside you, but these women all looked so serene and intact, as though no one had so much as laid a finger on them.

‘You can go in now,’ a nurse said, popping her head round one of three doors that led off the waiting-room. ‘Through there,’ she pointed.

I undressed behind a white screen and then put on a thin green gown which hung over the back of a chair inside the cubicle. When I emerged from behind the curtain the doctor was washing his hands. He told me to get up on the examination table and then he pulled up my gown so that my lower half was naked. He walked to the far side of the room and picked up a tube that lay on the counter, unscrewed its cap and then squirted some clear gel into the palm of his hand.

‘I am going to put some of this on your stomach,’ he
said, returning to my side and holding his hand out for me to look. ‘It will be rather cold.’

He laid the palm of his hand on my skin and smeared the gel with small circular movements. As he rubbed I could feel the size of my stomach under his touch. The reality of it rose like a huge dome in front of me. When I was alone and lying on my bed or standing in front of the mirror, I liked its shape and its size and the way my skin was smooth and taut like a white balloon. The child was forming me, and I the child, and this exchange was a secret between the two of us, but here in this room, with my stomach exposed and the doctor present, I felt it obscene. The child was my secret friend, the kind you read about in books, the kind that lonely children acquire, the kind who do not really exist.

‘Do we have to look at it?’ I asked.

‘It won't harm it.’

‘I don't really want us to look. It seems unfair,’ I said. ‘Like we're spying on it.’

‘I have to take a look. If you like you can keep your eyes closed. Now,’ he said in his mechanical voice, ‘I am going to place this disc on your stomach.’

Despite myself I propped myself up on my elbows so that I could see the monitor more clearly.

‘This machine,’ the doctor said, patting the metal box, ‘fishermen use something very similar to find shoals of fish and then they cast their nets and harvest them just like fruit.’ He flicked a switch and immediately I saw a
whole series of shadowy silver dots flickering in the arc of my stomach. ‘Salmon or sole?’ the doctor joked weakly.

‘That's it? It doesn't look real.’

‘Look carefully. Can you see, this is its head and this is an arm and these are its feet?’

‘Yes,’ I said, reaching over and touching the warm glass with my fingers.

It was like looking at a picture someone has taken of a ghost which has to be explained.

‘It's really there, isn't it?’

‘Of course it's there. Look at your stomach.’

I deliberately chose the long route home so I could stop off at the cheese shop. I walked through the streets with their smells of early-evening cooking wafting through the opened shutters. The aroma of boiling meats and cooking fat mingled with that of cigarettes and coffee, and rested on the air along with all the other vapours breathed out by the city over the past few months, gathering layer upon layer. The sky was fading now from pale blue to a darker, more violet shade.

I came to the bridge over the stench-ridden river and began to cross it. The water was again at its lowest ebb and looked thick with an oily effluent mass. It was more like a stagnant pond or a sewer than a river that changed with time, and you could see great clouds of mosquitoes shimmering over it. A crowd had gathered near the middle and people were leaning over the edge, obviously watching something below. I drew nearer and as I did so
a young woman walked towards me from the direction of the disturbance. She reminded me of photographs of my mother. She wore a scarf around her head just like my mother used to and had two young children with her who smiled at me as they grew close.

‘What's happening?’ I asked as she walked past me.

She stopped and turned for a moment. ‘Someone's seen a body. The river is being dragged.’

‘They're bringing it up?’

The woman nodded. ‘Probably a suicide. I saw them fish out a horse once. No legs,’ she said as she walked on hurriedly.

I watched as the little group disappeared, the children being pulled along by their mother like two miniature dogs. My curiosity aroused, I went and stood alongside the remaining onlookers.

Below us a police boat floated on the low tide of the river and I watched as two uniformed men released what looked like a long rope down into the water. The rope had a four-pronged hook on the end and I couldn't help thinking of the men who fished from the banks of the river under the chestnut trees. When it rained they would put up coloured umbrellas and some days the line stretched for miles. None of them talked to one another: they just sat and stared at the water. I never saw any of them catch a thing but they would return Sunday after Sunday to cast their lines and sit and wait.

Now I watched as the police pulled the rope up and then threw it out again. They could obviously see
something down there in the water that we couldn't, but they couldn't secure it. They threw the rope out a number of times and then suddenly the man who was holding the rope shouted and we could all see that it had grown tight. The man signalled for his partner to start winding the rope in on a pulley that was rigged up on deck. More people had gathered on the bridge now and I could see several had walked down to the riverbank and were sitting on the edge like picnickers.

The light was fading and the water looked black and murky. It seemed to take for ever for the object at the end of the rope to be retrieved, as though the river were bottomless or the body too heavy to pull through the water, and all the time we stood and watched. I could hear murmurs round me, people conjecturing at what the body would look like, whether male or female, young or old. Then suddenly there was a cry and the body emerged, jerked out of the water by one foot, naked, blue and wrapped in weed. It hung in the air, a trophy for the uniformed fishermen, its arms and legs dangling down, and we all stood and stared in silence. All one could tell was that it was a woman.

I walked further up the bridge and leant over as far as I could go. It was almost impossible to see her face but as I stood there one of the policemen pulled the rope and the body swung round almost ninety degrees. I wanted to see her more closely, I wanted to see her face, examine it, but from that distance and in the half-light of evening it was impossible. Now the police placed masks over their
noses and mouths. They began to lower the body on to a stretcher on deck. One of them, who wore gloves, grabbed her by the shoulders and then she was laid out and covered with a white sheet. I could see the water seeping through the cotton, outlining her most basic features as if she were a half-finished clay sculpture being kept soft under a wet cloth. The boat started up. They would be taking her to the city morgue to label her and put her away in a cold dark place until the time for burial. I was still holding on to the bunch of flowers I had bought outside the hospital. I threw them now on to the water, then turned my back on the scene and left the small crowd behind me.

Though it was late the shop was still open. As I entered, the bell rang and the cool mossy smell immediately made my body tingle. I hoped to see the owner again. Since my first visit I had returned several times and we had talked on more than one of these occasions. His name was Monsieur Montasio. Each conversation we had, he would teach me something more about cheese.

This evening the shop appeared to be empty; no one was serving and I was the only customer. I walked around, breathing in the cool-sharp air, and then I heard the sound of voices. Several people were talking and laughing. Abruptly the noise stopped and there was silence. I walked over to the door, thinking I should probably leave, when suddenly the old man's head popped up from behind the counter.

‘I was downstairs,’ he said in apology. ‘We're making
some cheese of our own. I'm sorry. We should have locked the door,’ and as he spoke he gradually grew taller.

‘You make cheese on the premises?’

‘In the cellar,’ he said, pointing to the floor behind the counter where I imagined a trap door to be. ‘Just a few. Most of the space is for storage purposes.’

‘Could I buy some?’

‘It's not ready yet. Maybe in a few weeks’ time. It has to mature.’

The old man allowed me to taste various cheeses and finally I settled on a Swiss Emmental which he recommended.

‘You see the holes?’ he asked, holding the cheese up for me to see. ‘When is a hole not a hole?’

‘When it's a half,’ I said.

‘Ah, you know the joke. Well, to most people a hole is a hole, but of course this is not true. Be a detective and know your quarry! Sniff out your cheese like a true cheesehound. An Emmentalian hole should be round and about the size of an eyeball or a large bullet. Know your holes and you'll find your cheese. Misread the signs and you'll take home an impostor,’ he said, putting the Emmental down and washing his hands under a tap. Afterwards he dried his hands, then carefully picked up the Emmental and placed it on a thick wooden board. He took a piece of wire and laid it over the cheese, measuring the cut precisely. ‘I'll let you know when our cheese is ready,’ he said.

When I returned home I went to the kitchen, unwrapped the Emmental and then looked it up in my book. Once again the book gave a fair-enough description of the cheese, but it was particular words that stuck in my mind and made me hungry as I read. Curdling, scalding, pressing, ripening. Words that wrapped round your tongue. And all the time I was reading I was consuming large chunks of Emmental. The salty taste filled my mouth and I rolled the cheese on my tongue and let its flavour spread through me.

This time when I lay down I thought of the body lying in the morgue and its pale milky skin slowly decomposing, and then I thought of the cellars in the cheese shop and of the old man and his staff gathered in the mushroomy silence, mixing the milk, draining and stirring the vast liquid masses, creating their gold. I could almost hear the milk drip, dripping into the metal pails.

I found myself walking through what I perceived to be a fairground. I asked a woman passer-by where I was and she replied that we were in the water-gardens of the Third Empress. I wanted to talk to her further but she said she was searching for her children and then hurried away into the crowd.

I wandered through the throng of people, watching as they flowed to and fro like tides about me. Their reflections shimmered in the many pools lit by roaring torches and a smell of fire filled the air. I caught glimpses
of faces I had known and in particular a man's face appeared in my vision. I began to walk cautiously towards him, but as I did so he began to walk in the opposite direction. I followed, trying to keep him within view, but as fast as I walked I could not catch up. At times I lost sight of him altogether and amidst the crowds thought I would never find him again, but, just when I least expected, he would reappear at some distance from me. I would see him playing with a child or talking with a stranger.