Tremble (19 page)

“Now if you sit here for five minutes I’ll print out the results, but from what I could see on the screen everything looks absolutely normal.”

Normal. He inadvertently glanced at his palm—the outline had faded slowly over a period of twelve hours and finally disappeared leaving nothing, not even a rash. Regardless of circumstances, Gavin had decided he would not go to a psychologist. A pragmatic man who had always regarded therapy as an indulgence for people who hadn’t grown
up with priests, he was convinced that whatever was bombarding him with these visual and aural hallucinations was too real to be explained as a psychological reaction to his divorce. No, the CAT scan was the last physical check—and if anything else manifested he planned to take more radical action.

The radiologist looked up from his screen.

“Just as I thought, totally normal, both hemispheres showing absolutely no sign of lesions or tumors. I’ll have the scans sent over to your doctor in the next week, Mr. Tetherhook. By the way, I love that new building of yours, Bridgeport. It really is stunning.”

Gavin stepped out of the hospital doors.
Normal, I’m normal
—the phrase ran through his head like a new marketing campaign.
Gavin Tetherhook, property developer supreme, was recently vindicated in his fight for full control of the Bridgeport development after a long legal battle with his ex-wife Cathy Tetherhook
. Gavin could see the headlines now, could see himself post-divorce: independent, handsome, healthy. Hell, he might even start the Pilates class Amanda had been nagging him about to combat the middle-age spread that had started to thicken around his hips. Yep, the vision of the yacht was coming back: himself on deck with his kids, but this time with wife number two—blond, groomed, but a good fifteen years younger than wife number one.

His reverie was interrupted by his mobile vibrating with delicious intimacy against his thigh. He reached into his pocket and checked the number. Amanda again, as if she’d intuited his sudden change of heart. He almost answered, then changed his mind. Let her wait, he’d ring later that night.

He reached the car, which he’d parked under a jacaranda tree. As he bent to pull open the door he felt an unexplained chill. The hairs prickled at the back of his neck. Resisting the immediate instinct to look behind him he ran his gaze across the ground. The car and the pavement surrounding it was enveloped in a bizarre shadow that seemed to have an emerald tinge to its darker parts. Gavin froze, his hand still on the door handle, trying to muster up the courage to look up. The shadow had the jagged outline of something vast, something organic…. It was wrong, terribly wrong.

Clutching at his polyester jacket, desperately seeking comfort from the synthetic weave that caught at his fingernails, Gavin took a deep breath and looked up.

The jacaranda tree was small—there was no way it could be casting a shadow of such magnitude. His heart suddenly racing Gavin leaped into the Merc and sped off. He bent over the wheel, eyes glued to the road as the car swallowed the tarmac faster and faster. For one horrific moment he thought the shadow had followed him like a massive hovering bird but just then the car drove into sunlight. It flooded the plush interior like sudden comfort. Three blocks later Gavin pulled to the side of the road and wept.

“She’s a live wire is old Saturday Honeywell, that’s for sure. But she’s the best man for the job, there’s not a paleobotanist in the country that can match her expertise.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Gavin could tell that his colleague—a civil servant in the Ministry of Planning and Environment who specialized in land clearance and contra-deals with corrupt developers such as Gavin—was wondering what the hell a notorious antienvironmentalist like himself wanted with a radical botanist.

“Found something, have you? ’Cause if it’s of national significance you’re gonna have to fess up. Times have changed, there’s a lot of green dollar now in native flora.”

“Don’t worry, Jeff, I’m not hiding anything.” They laughed together and some of the tension crackling along the phone line dissipated. “It’s a private matter, nothing the ministry need worry about. By the way, how
is
that charity of yours getting along?”

After Gavin put the phone down he made a note to donate a couple of thousand dollars to the Barrier Reef Foundation—unspoken barter for the ministry to leave him alone for a few more months.

Saturday Honeywell’s phone number stared up at him, her name round in his mouth. Wishing for the impossible he evoked an image of a svelte scientist with her hair neatly scraped back, indicating a pragmatism he anticipated would anchor his fears forever rather than the typical ratbag environmentalists he was used to dealing with.

He felt a twinge in his balls. It reminded him that he hadn’t had sex
for over a month. He gazed out his office window across the river that snaked lazily through the city. Perhaps he would see Amanda that night—what harm could it do? It might even take his mind off his growing anxieties. He shouted to his assistant to put a call through.

They lay across his fake satin sheets, Amanda’s long torso arranged perfectly as if she was conscious of the way her body fell. Gavin was convinced that she was: everything Amanda did seemed calculated. The twenty-three-year-old was almost as tall as he, an ex-gymnast and an aspiring model. Amanda taught four Pilates classes a day, except on Sundays when she practiced Ashtanga yoga in the morning and rode a horse in the afternoon. In other words she had absolute control over the lithe small-breasted body that lay like a reclining python beside Gavin’s own naked body. Feeling a little vulnerable about his thickening perimeter, the property developer pulled up the sheet.

“Why cover up? You’re beautiful,” Amanda purred in that irritating little-girl voice she adopted whenever they’d had sex—only in this case they hadn’t.

“Don’t patronize me,” Gavin replied, then immediately regretted his harsh tone. It wasn’t her fault he was distracted. In truth he’d never fully engaged with his women, even his wife. He could never relate to descriptions he’d read in books about the emotional surrender men felt at falling into the body of the woman they loved. He was always a little removed, as if his consciousness was floating above his body, a small helium balloon jerked along by his galloping penis.

Gavin looked at Amanda’s rippling abdominal muscles that undulated toward her naked pubis…perhaps his eye
was
too cold, too critical.

“Did you notice?” Amanda purred. Gavin glanced at her again, wondering if he’d missed a body piercing or a new haircut.

“The total Brazilian, silly!” she giggled, pointing to her crotch. “I did it for you—not a hair left.”

“It’s okay,” he grunted, wondering if he should raise the question that hung over them, thickening the air like humidity.

Amanda rolled onto her stomach and faced Gavin’s back. The three
scratches had already begun to form thin white scars. Could they be war wounds from a secret lover?

“Gav, how did you get those?” She ran her cool fingers across the bumpy ridges.

Panicking slightly Gavin searched wildly for an explanation.

“New suit I had altered—silly bugger of a tailor left a pin in. Why?”

“There isn’t anyone else? I mean, if there was you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

He kissed her shoulder. “Baby, of course there isn’t. I promise. Listen, I’m sorry about…” He couldn’t bring himself to actually say the words. Under the sheet his flaccid penis lolled against his thigh like an accusation.

“It’s okay, I know it happens a lot to men your age,” Amanda murmured, curling up under his arm. Spoken like a true twenty-three-year-old, Gavin thought, fighting the urge to run from the room.

“Yeah well, it’s never happened to this man before.”

“It’s the divorce, it must be really stressful,” Amanda continued, unaware that she was moving in a very dangerous trajectory. She’d tried everything—fellatio, blowing on his balls, a full body massage, even tickling—but he’d failed to grow hard, and frankly she was feeling a little demoralized herself. Maybe he’d stopped finding her attractive. She sneaked a look at herself in the full-length mirror opposite—was that possible, she wondered.

“You don’t love me anymore,” she whined, her guard slipping. An uncharacteristic tiny pool of sweat began to gather in the hollow of her hip.

“I do, baby, I do,” he answered automatically, already calculating ways of getting rid of her before nightfall. She was so perfect with her immaculately plucked and waxed eyebrows, her manicured fingernails clipped to just the right length and varnished mauve. Originally he’d been attracted to her because of the boyish figure that seemed to defy its own femininity with breasts that were hardly there, hips more reminiscent of a young boy’s than a woman’s, a body that still dominated over nature and the onslaught of gravity. She was always impeccably clean, never seemed to perspire, and her scent was a very faint lemony fragrance that didn’t even hint at the fruity earthiness that even his pristine wife exuded at certain times of the month. In short,
Amanda seemed unnatural and this was precisely what Gavin had loved about her. But now? Now he couldn’t even get an erection.

“Mandy baby, look, I’m dealing with some very big issues right now—you know, men’s stuff I can’t really share. But listen, remember that holiday I promised you—New Orleans? We’ll go there in the summer. In the meanwhile, let’s take a break from each other for a couple of weeks while I get sorted out, eh?”

“You’re not leaving me, are you?” She sat up suddenly and her blow-dried raven hair shiny with product—Gavin had always loved the slightly chemical smell of it—slid around her shoulders, just like in a television commercial.

“No, I promise. I just need to get some distance to really be able to give myself to you.”

He wondered how she’d believe such bullshit, but Amanda, looking at him with wide black eyes, seemed to hang on his every word.

“I understand. Men are like that,” she said. “I read about it in that American book. They need to retreat into their cave and then they spring back at you like a ball at the end of a piece of elastic. Well, Gav, I’m here for you when you’re ready to bounce back,” she announced with a very serious air.

Just to bounce up would be good at this point, Gavin thought darkly, and reached over to hand her back her clothes.