Love on the Road 2015 (7 page)

You will have completed a year of living in your new gender by July, eligible for the next stage. The recommendations have been made, and the psychologist and endocrinologist have forwarded letters. You are undergoing another round of pre-operative blood tests and X-rays. You have asked me if I’d be prepared to use my annual leave to accompany you to Thailand for your surgery. I have said yes.

After more than thirty years, love has evolved into an unseen entity that beats steadily through my life, like cardiac tissue. I don’t have to think about whether I actively
love you, any more than I have to plan blinking or taking my next breath. It is as automatic as peristalsis and as enduring as the rocks that surround us in the Port Hills.

All along she called him Gerard. It was not his name. When the game ended, she stayed Mariam for a while, but he would slip. She enjoyed calling him Gerard, partly because that game had tickled them both so hard, and now it was a kind of trace. There was another game where she was O and he was M, but that was a sexual game, grinding and full of spluttered words, burrowing and friction. There were no games now. She sat on her suitcase at his local airport, waiting for the driver they would send, because he had fallen from a ladder and lost the use of his legs. He couldn’t piss, he said. Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t have an erection.

There had been no need to say that. She notes a young man heading her way from the car lot.

At the house, he is dressed for her, wearing a printed shirt she had bought for him when they were together, three decades ago. He wears this shirt every time they meet. Winter in Amsterdam, summer in Sydney, spring in Addis. Always this shirt. At first she stands a few metres away from him. The room is messy. A creative man’s disorder. She sees that crankiness has just left his face and his chin juts out, raised, ever-searching. He lifts an arm that has become
womanish. His fingers are lean, reptilian, nails bitten to the core.

She takes his hand, feels the cool pads envelope her sticky digits. She folds to her knees and cries in his lap. It smells of an old man’s trousers, old man’s urine.

The same young man pushes his wheelchair out to the patio. Before following, she removes her espadrilles and feels her feet embrace the tiled floor, a kiss on the tarmac. She looks at her bent toes, black nail polish. It hits her that he can’t feel his anymore, he has to look at them like dirty mementos in a house-girl’s soapy hands. She remembers his toenails scratching her in bed, his knees cool behind her knees. She smells food: the ponderous palm-nut soup she hasn’t eaten in an age.

She hears his summoning from outside. If anything, his voice booms louder now. Perhaps because he feels imprisoned? But he has always snapped at her, snapped at most people. Her views of him have not yet shifted from able to disabled. She thinks of centaurs. The upper body fused to another creature, the surging of the arms, the tossing of the head and neck. She remembers sweat clinging to the fine hairs of his chest, the taste of it. She thinks his smell has altered.

It is a shock to see how crowded the yard has become. The palms lofty above the rooftop. No one has cut them. His fingers plunge into the red soup, wear a glove of its viscous colour.

‘Sit down.’ He points to her. ‘You know I hate to eat cold food.’

The young man uncaps her beer. She sits down. The soup steams. The scent reaches into her. The sea, too, sends her tendrils through the dusty, clacking leaves. It’s not far
from here. The veranda rails are rusty. Chunks of concrete have fallen off, landing in soft dirt below where, she hears, there are children. Are they his children? Begotten long before he fell to the ground here? A friend – Nana Yaw – had said there were dozens of them, an unchecked, almost tribal reproduction. But Nana Yaw had a bitter tongue.

‘You don’t look any different,’ he says to her.

She raises her eyebrows and looks out. Once, they were accomplices. Now she wonders about the smell coming from his trousers and whether the young man takes him to pee or there is a bag for it. And whether this mercy mission is going to include sitting on the loo all night after downing his cook’s food.

‘Not used to this anymore?’

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘But I’ll give it a go.’

He pushes his plate away, half-eaten, and drinks his beer from the bottle. She thinks he drinks a lot of beer sitting here. He has a paunch. He watches her wash her hands and begin the soup.

‘You know I like to watch you eat.’

He stares at her; he has often stared at her. Occasionally, her eyes cross his. Long ago, she begged him not to make a study of her, an understanding of each flinch of her nerve-endings. He once wrote a poem to her nipple. ‘Morning nipple, mid-morning nipple, my nipple.’ Better poems have been written. The soup is hot and her eyes water. Her mouth feels like a ravaged cavern and she feels the food sending a marker into her chest. A flag planted deep.

He looks away from her when one of the children cries. She notes his lips twitch: he usually shouts at them. He casts his eyes back at her.

‘They your kids?’ she asks.

‘No, why?’

He has always lied to her face. They weren’t meant to last more than a minute. A hot night, a dirty fusion, they were secretive. Then she let him tower over her. They once met in a street bar. The street bar closed. They stayed on the grubby metal chairs in the breeze block cubicle next to the gutter. Talking first, his arching talk, her spilling answers, until the city was quiet and he climbed over her and a baptism took place, water coursing from the bowels of somewhere, cheap beer fraying at the back of their throats. She now thinks these episodes were helpless and theatrical. She has had better lovers on clean beds. Men who didn’t need an arena or the night’s clawing.

She finds a hard rind in the soup and removes it from her mouth.
Wele.

‘You know I hate
wele
in the soup.’

He smiles. There was another game. She was Pig Meat. He was Bush Meat. She loved him because he had found what was common between them, he shone a light hard on her.

‘You know,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe I have you sitting here across from me. This is what I have always wanted.’

Sitting before her, flanked by palms scoring the punch-blue sky and the powdery wall behind him, there is no evidence of the wheelchair. He is a free man sitting there, free to wander to the railing and light a cigarette, lean over the rail showing off his shapely rump and long thighs, turning back to peruse her at the table. His hair is pulled back in his legendary, scruffy ponytail. His beard has grown long. He looks like a man in one of his own documentaries.

‘So where shall I take you this afternoon? What would you like to see?’

She hasn’t given any thought to what she would do here. She knows nothing about this country now. There is almost a week before them. Her throat tightens. He had called her only recently, eight months since the fall. Initially, he had been to the States for an operation. There had been a glimmer of hope, a keen doctor, cousin of a filmmaker friend. It hadn’t worked. The soup sits in her stomach, a queasy burning. She flushes her throat with beer.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you tired?’

‘No, not at all.’

Perhaps she had expected him to be more miserable, more of a recluse, even ashamed of what had happened to him. Perhaps she was ashamed. She wasn’t used to it yet.

‘I want you to have a good time here.’

The young man drives them to the local beach. It is a trial to watch him parcelled into the car, the young man sweeping him from one seat to the other, one arm under his bottom, the other curved around his back. She watches him belt himself in. She sits in the back with a straw hat. She has changed into her swimming costume and now wears a sundress. Her arms feel flabby, her skin mottled. She is self-conscious. The dress is fairly long. She has brought flip-flops.

In the car, as they drive, she wants to cry and he turns around and sees her. She places her cheek on his shoulder and he cups her other cheek with his hand, which is cool. There is a snatch of his old smell between his fingers, deep where the skin forks apart. Her tears finish and she pulls
away. He looks out the window. He has bundled his hair into a knitted cap.

Though the car park is full, his driver heads directly to the sandy entrance to the beach. She sees the water glittering, waves crashing, hears reggae from massive speakers. Helpers rush to the vehicle, standing in a circle when the driver lifts out the wheelchair, pulls the arms apart, placing a printed cushion on the seat sling. She sits there, watching him scoop up her old lover, arrange his trousered legs. She gets out. The crowd of hawkers and ragamuffins jostles around her, hands extended with peeled oranges, cinnamon gum, nail clippers. Ahead, the young man has tilted the chair and pulls him as a donkey with a cart. She looks at him and he is laughing at her grim face, telling her to get a move on.

They settle under a beach umbrella plugged into the sand outside one of the bars, a shack really. It is a busy afternoon but a table has somehow been freed for them. She senses he comes here a lot. With friends from the old days, not family members, the people he caroused with. Mostly men. She knows that the women who interested him all became lovers. Many would be weary of him now. She senses he also comes here alone and likes to strike up conversations, offering a beer to the coconut boy or a Danish pilot. She remembers his world views were almost sensual. He chiefly represented himself.

One of the young waitresses gives him a warm kiss on the cheek and his arm grasps her back, fingers in a star. She wonders if he can still have an erection. The girl is ripe and very dark.

They are served beers. The young driver has disappeared.
Later she sees him standing under an awning alone, sipping Fanta.

‘Would you like a swim?’

‘Not yet, not really.’

She doesn’t want him to see her body. Before, they used to glide together. Hours were spent naked, examining each other’s orifices, plunging until pain or fear or eclipse brought them back. Their intimacy has always haunted her. She wonders what he has done with other women.

‘You’re afraid I’ll check out your bum?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Like to see mine?’ He laughs. ‘You know, I’m going to make love to you before you leave this place.’

She shakes her head slowly.

They would always have the blueprints for each other’s bodies.

Before she is too drunk, she takes her towel down to the water’s edge. She needs to pee and figures she’ll do it in the sea. She wonders how long he will last after two beers. Maybe that is why the young man is waiting there. She doesn’t know how it works yet. She takes off her dress and wades in, dunking herself in the water’s cold clasp. Tropical, but the sea is always freezing. Ahead, the waves crash down and few people have gone out that far. She pees, a hot cloud on her leg. She was once caught in a rip here. Another time, a turd floated by her shoulder. She breaststrokes a little.

Refreshed, she walks back to where they were sitting, but his wheelchair is gone. She looks about. He can’t have moved far. Then she sees the young man pulling hard, flicking up sand, the wheelchair tilted behind him. The chair is swung around and parked. She feels like embracing him,
she knows the alcohol and drowsy sun are conspiring. She wonders if it is still illegal to go on the beach at night. They were encircled by soldiers once, down by one of the fancy hotels. The soldiers pulled down his trunks and played with him, laughing at his fine, spent cock.

The young man walks off to his shady spot under an awning. He stands there squinting at the surf.

‘How was the water? I’d like to have a swim with you. In the morning could be good.’

When he called to tell her what had happened, he said he wanted to buy her a plane ticket. He said he had to see her. He asked her about dates. She could not speak. Eventually she told him some dates and was able to put off work and foster out her animals. It was a long, fretful trip, partly because he had rewired her all over again and she was back in his orbit. The keenest, most stringent thing she had ever done was to leave him. But he had spoken so plainly. She had never heard him speak so plainly.

She wipes the rim of the green bottle, chinks hers with his.

‘Let’s sit awhile,’ he says.

The light softens after its bright peak. The day ends early here: it is dark by six o’clock. The sun seeps into her legs. She feels her skin tight and dry, wet behind the knees. Sand covers her shins. The chair is uncomfortable and she shifts from one buttock to the other. Her costume has dried quickly. She sees him looking at her arms. She covers her slight belly with her sarong. He has never worn sunglasses, his eyes have always stared at the world, even in the hottest places. She noticed reading glasses on the table at the house.

A hawker comes up to them with a tub on his head piled high with useless things. He stares at the man’s headdress,
then points to a shred of blue hair-netting that the girls use here when they scrub their skins. The seller has calves like yams and removes the contraption from his head, placing it on the sand and bringing forth socks, soap, chalk for ants.
Do they not want any of these fine tings
? But again, he points to the bright blue netting. He buys it with some greasy notes and gives it to her. It is a coarse blue spider web.

‘A gift,’ he says.

‘Thank you.’

He calls behind him to the ripe waitress who comes out laughing, her tray flat on her hip. The young woman curls her arm around his neck and their faces are close. She used to feel so scalded when other women came up to him. But now she identifies this pulse, it feels innocuous. She looks away. The driver has stepped out from under the awning and is speaking on his mobile phone. People are beginning to trail back to the car park. A tiny girl with masses of beaded plaits wears sagging swimmers and sucks her thumb. Her mother has deep-blue tattoos sunken into her shoulders, one laced across her chest. Other people have just arrived. Two men in wide trousers and printed shirts, two girls with tidy hair. They set out a little way from the speakers then drop to the sand in a group. No hand-holding, no kisses. There are still religious people here, with staunch values.

The waitress leaves, her broad bare feet kick up sand as she sways. He has bought a Guinness for the hawker.

She glances at his beige trousers and the socks and canvas shoes someone has fitted onto his feet. He looks like a slim girl wearing cast-offs. He always wore jeans before. Jeans everywhere. Through deserts. Bare-chested in the house when she was drenched with heat. She tries to imagine him
naked. His slack upper body tapering to the useless twins of his legs. She remembers taking him in her mouth, stroking his limbs. She remembers the weight of him, she can feel the different textures of him on her tongue.