The Amnesia Clinic (25 page)

‘Oh, come on. The fish won’t hurt you. Jump in.’

Obediently I fell forward, ducked under the water and pushed myself towards her, emerging near her with my hair swept back from my face. I had taken a mouthful of water, intending to spit it at her as I came up, but as I twisted upright to find my feet between the fish on the rocks beneath, her legs clutched my waist, pulling me in and grasping me. She retreated slowly into a small but deep bay on the opposite side of the pool, bringing me with her. I bounced awkwardly on the floor so as not to tip forward. The fish were concentrated and agitated here, as if in anticipation of a feeding frenzy. As if Sally Lightfoot had power over water creatures.

‘Boy,’ she said, her hooded, triangular eyes on mine.

I watched her pupils dilate as her legs shrank and tightened around me. The friction between the two thin pieces of material between our legs had become a hot new world. Without consciously deciding to, I arched my back, jutting towards her, and her mouth opened a little. Certain she had me now, her legs relaxed around mine, her feet tracing lazy lines up and down the backs of my legs.

‘Boy,’ she repeated. ‘Did you know the Indians call waterfalls “the sperm of the mountains”?’

My reply, if I had formulated one, was cut off when she brought her slippery lips to mine. Her tongue tasted of wet apples. Her fingers sank into the water, pulling my shorts down at the front, and with her other hand she popped the stub of her ring finger into my mouth, tracing the outline of my lips in saliva. Then she moved the hand around the back of my neck, clutching me there, holding my gaze.

‘Shall we feed the fish?’ she said, turning with her right hand on me, pulling slowly and steadily, her eyes on mine, until, looking away from her, I came in gossamer tendrils that spiralled downwards in the water. Sure enough, a rising fish scooped it up, taking every last blob. One last bit must have clung lazily to the end, because a fish swam up and kissed me for it. I continued to look away into the water, ashamed to look her in the eye as she withdrew her hand.

‘How’s that for primordial soup?’ she said.

‘Don’t you ever regret chopping off your finger?’ I said, as we walked back. I could think of nothing else to say to her.

‘You are what happens to you. And it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. Even if I regretted it, it would still be me.’ She stopped walking. ‘You’re nothing but a patchwork, you know. A patchwork of what’s happened to you. I just added a little piece to yours. And now you have a real story to tell your silly little friend.’

She smiled, popped a cold kiss on my cheek and looked away again. ‘By the way, I’ll be leaving as soon as we get back, and you will never see me again.’

The thought that she might leave before we did hadn’t occurred to me. I had envisioned an altogether different scenario: a teary farewell as Fabián and I stepped on to a bus and rattled off into the sunset, followed by a last-ditch realisation on the part of Sally Lightfoot that she needed me. She would chase after the bus for a while, but it would be too late. Then, a few weeks later, I would be emerging from the school gates, sporting unawares with a group of slender, attractive, female classmates, and something would make me stop and look up. She would be standing motionless on the other side of the street, wearing a desperately hopeful smile, and would break into a run as she approached, etc., etc.

Not, ‘You will never see me again.’

When we got back I made straight for our cabin to determine in private how to react to the news. Kicking open the door with suitable melodrama, I threw myself on the foam mattress, bringing down my mosquito net again in the
process. I lay in the dark and shouted into my pillow once or twice before the sickly concentration of marijuana and cane alcohol in the air became apparent. I lifted my head, looked over and saw him.

‘Jesus. What happened to you?’ I said.

Fabián lay sideways on his bed with his back slouched against the cabin wall and his legs tangled in front of him where they had fallen. I unbolted the wooden shutter and opened the window. He flinched at the light. Although he was pale and sweating from booze or dope or both, there was something else. His plastic bottle of cane alcohol was almost empty and his arm, which before had merely been scalpy, now glistened in the half-light, wet and red. Thin seams of blood sprang at the corners of his lips and he’d streaked his forearms with dried skin through rubbing messily at the holes.

‘Did you fuck her, then?’ Speaking opened the cracks in his lips up even more.

‘Fabián, Jesus …’

‘Did you fuck her? I’m not jealous, I’m just interested. You did, right?’

‘What have you done to yourself?’

‘Just a bit pissed, that’s all. Cleaning. Nothing to worry about. So tell me, did you? Probably didn’t have the balls, as usual. Should have been you playing with the kid and me getting the girl; still, bet she regrets it now.’

A white bowl of roasted, salted maize sat in his lap, and he tossed a few pieces of it into his mouth before reaching down beside him to a bottle of
aguardiente
. Not only was he rubbing it all over his face, he was drinking it as well.

‘What’s happened here? Why are you behaving like some Vietnam veteran?’

He sat up straighter on the bed, then collapsed to the exact position he had been in before. The jerkiness of the
movement put me in mind of an old-fashioned wooden puppet.

‘Been a bit of an accident,’ he said. ‘It’s okay though. Sol hurt herself, but she’s okay, I think.
Madre de Dios
, this arm hurts.’

Through the window, I saw Ray striding towards our cabin. Ray never strode, and I had never seen him looking so purposeful: something was wrong.

‘I think we may have to go soon.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘May have to go quite soon.’

Ray looked in at the window.

‘Mind if I talk to you?’ he said to Fabián.

‘I’m sorry, Ray. It was an accident,’ said Fabián, getting clumsily to his feet and stumbling in the process. ‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s a bit upset, man. And she has a cut on her leg.’

‘Let me talk to her.’ Fabián careered towards the door and outside on to the sand, spraying roasted maize before him. The bowl landed with a clatter on the wooden floor. Ray held Fabián by the elbow, half holding him up, half stopping him in his tracks.

‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, kid. She doesn’t want to see you.’

‘It was an accident, for God’s sake. I would never hurt her.’

Ray steered Fabián firmly backwards into the cabin and stood in the doorway as he lurched back to his bed and sat down.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

‘I told you: it was an accident. We were up at the cave, trying to follow the path further back into the cliff, and she fell backwards. I tried to catch her, Ray, I promise. It wasn’t my fault. Next thing I know, she’s screaming and running away from me all the way back here.’

‘She – Jesus, this is awkward – she says you pushed her on purpose. She says you hurt her.’

‘I only meant to try to stop her falling. I swear. I would never hurt your daughter, Ray. Who do you think I am?’

‘Okay, listen.’ Ray stepped into the cabin and sat down next to Fabián on the bed. His hair swung forward on either side of his face, like curtains. ‘It’s your word against hers, but don’t worry: I know she can be a bit of a fantasist. I just think it’s probably for the best if you stay away from her for the rest of your stay, okay?’

‘But it wasn’t my fault.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t, kid.’

‘I—’

‘Please do what I ask and I won’t get mad. I know you guys are leaving tomorrow anyway, so let’s just forget about it and enjoy the last day. But don’t go near my daughter again. God, I hate confrontation. Can we forget about this now? I’ve got furniture to mend.’

‘It’s forgotten,’ I said, closing the door behind him. I watched through the window hatch as he loped back towards the bar.

‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ I said, turning to face the bed.

Fabián was crying in slow, soft sobs, like a wounded animal.

‘I couldn’t see the pathway,’ he whispered.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We took torches, but I couldn’t see any pathway into the rock. We got really far back. We even disturbed a load of bats who went flying out over our heads like something from a horror movie. Then we reached so far back in the cave that we couldn’t even see the daylight coming in behind us. I was sure it carried on, but the walls were getting narrower and narrower around us, and Sol started to freak out. Said she wanted to go home.’

‘What did you do?’

‘It made me so angry,’ he said, through a mouthful of tears and mucus. ‘I got so angry thinking that there might not be a way through. So I guess I might have lashed out at her. In the dark. But I didn’t mean to hurt her, I swear. It was just so frustrating. You have to believe me, Anti. I’ve got to go and see her, to say sorry. I’ll explain it to her. Then we can go back again tomorrow, with better torches or something.’

He straightened his legs again and half got to his feet. I don’t often surprise myself. My cowardice can generally be relied upon in any given situation. But what I did next was a surprise to us both. I planted a palm on Fabián’s chest as he got to his feet and shoved him back on to the bed.

‘I think it might be for the best if you stay here and sober up for a while,’ I said. ‘And I think both of us ought to stop with all this shit about the cave, and that stupid dome.’

I left the cabin before I had the time to lose my nerve.

On my way to the bar, I heard the soothing sound of Cristina’s voice coming from the direction of the shower cubicle. The door was ajar and, as I passed, I saw her crouched inside, delicately applying a piece of cotton wool to her daughter’s leg. Cristina must have brought Sol in here to wash dirt from the cut before she dressed it, and although the girl now stood stoically beneath the still-dripping shower head, it was obvious from the jerky rhythm of her breathing that she had only recently stopped crying.

I put my head inside the door. The smell of antiseptic filled the cubicle.

‘Is everything all right?’ I said.

‘Everything’s fine,’ said Cristina. ‘Solita had a little fall, but she’s going to be fine now, aren’t you?’

The girl nodded automatically before wincing at the touch of the cotton wool.

‘That’s my brave little girl,’ said Cristina.

‘Fabián says he’s very sorry. And I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you,’ I said.

‘We know that, don’t we?’ said Cristina softly, still dabbing at the leg. ‘We know it was a mistake.’

‘It wasn’t!’ shouted Sol without warning, pushing her mother’s hand away as she did so. ‘It wasn’t a mistake! I’m not stupid. I told you. He pushed me! He meant to do it.’

‘Now stay calm, honey, please. I told you, you can’t be sure of that. Now just keep still while I do this and then we’ll go and make you a banana milkshake, okay?’

Sol nodded, pacified by the prospect of the milkshake, but I could see that she was still trembling with anger at the injustice she felt she’d suffered.

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Cristina to me, over her shoulder. ‘I’m sure it was an accident. Tell Fabián not to worry about it. Honestly.’

But there was less warmth in her voice than usual.

When I got to the bar, I found Sally Lightfoot in the middle of paying her bill to Ray. She had taken a wad of notes from her shoe and was peeling each one off carefully, counting it down on to a table as Ray read out the invoice:

‘So that’s two nights’ full board and lodging, plus – how many beers do you think you drank? That all? Okay. So that will make 15,000 sucres. Then again, you did tell an excellent story. Call it 12,000.’

It was heartbreaking to watch her leave. I tried to think of anything I could do to stall her, any pretext at all. But nothing came to my mind, and so I watched dumbly as each of my weakly-imagined futures dwindled away in front of me.

Sally’s wad of money had apparently come to an end, and what had seemed like an impressive quantity when it came out of the shoe had dwindled to a paltry-looking sum. The cash fluttered on the table in the breeze.

‘I keep the rest of my money in the glove box of the truck,’ she explained. ‘Safe-keeping. Back in a minute.’

Ray and I sat, gazing out through the palm thatch at the incoming tide. Two pelicans flapped past on the horizon.

‘Ray, I want to apologise …’ I began.

‘Forget about it, man. It’s in the past now. Just make sure your crazy friend stays away from my daughter until you leave. It was stupid of me to let a total stranger take her out for the day, and I’m sure that … Wait a minute.’ He narrowed his eyes and pointed north. ‘What the
hell
is he doing now?’

Fabián had escaped unseen round the side of the cabins and run off up the beach. Now he stood on the short outcrop of rocks at the north end. Standing Christ-like, his arms extended, he was facing out to sea, but he clearly very much intended to be visible. And then, as if we’d unwittingly fired a starting pistol simply by laying eyes on him, he began clambering away from us, across the boulders at the base of the cliff that led round to his cave, his unbuttoned shirt bulging behind him in the wind.

‘He better not be thinking of going across there while the tide’s coming in,’ said Ray, ‘because I guarantee you that this time he will kill himself.’

‘I’ll go after him,’ I said, getting up.

‘No. You haven’t got time. You’ll get caught too. I’ll go fetch the boat and we can go round and pick him u— … Bitch! Fucking bitch!’

The Chevrolet pick-up outside had roared into life, and we heard a spray of gravel as Sally Lightfoot and her whale skeleton reversed at speed on to the main road.

‘Sorry, kid. More important things to deal with,’ said Ray, leaping behind the bar to collect his car keys. ‘But I advise you to stop Fabián getting any further round that headland if the two of you intend to walk each other to school again.’
Cursing, he sped out of the bar towards the spot where his old Lada was parked.