Bunny and Shark (6 page)

“Upstairs?”

“Let's just sit awhile.”

“Here?”

“Sure. Anywhere is fine.”

Sex with a young man when you're just “passing” for young. Not yet old. Something you do with pleasure, yet stand outside of to observe: a certain ravenousness brings you there quickly; reckless false moves he believes in, so you marvel; a violence you haven't felt in awhile and know you could only tolerate a handful of times. How long could this intensity last? So you smile and stay with him. Love is always getting mixed up with lust at his age. You think: tenderness and an endless hard cock. So you do it twice.

Afterwards, while you had your eyes closed to dream yourself out of the hell and back into the cool caressing smell of marble, freshly cut, he got dressed again. It wasn't perfect and he knows it, and you don't care. He offers you a drink and you open your eyes, see the flash of his skin that matches the amber liquid he's putting into your hand. As he plunks onto the other end of the couch, a hot night breeze drifts in over you both.

Ice tinkling in the oily amber liquid when you're dying of thirst. Suck the cubes and he brings his face close to yours: a narrow nose and eyes that see you but also seem to be looking right through you, or far off to some other distant purpose. You guess Dutch because of his name and accent, when he says, “I'm Flemish. That, and . . . other things before.” You feel your eyes narrow, trying to sort through what he can mean against your own prejudices: his skin colour is so distinctly from the island. He looks like he'd be the brother to all those young girls who walk around with older white men, driving their cars, toting their babies. And then the very word Flemish: something antiquated in your mind. He is from here but also has those northern traits: dark circles under the eyes and a refined, narrow nose. Like in those paintings you saw once in a book on Coke-Bottle's coffee table. But this young man has nothing to do with all that red drapery and those high foreheads. And yet, you know his sense of home is divided somehow.

He brushes his hands over your legs. “And these?” The welts are brilliant red and have been brought to life again by the shower and the sex. Now that he's had you, he eases back onto his own couch. You see he is fascinated, but underlying this is an arrogance that, no matter what, will make your time in his life temporary.

“I'm new to the island too.”

“You are?” You nod, as he looks you up and down examining your parts, one by one, to distill you down to something he can understand.

Deflect his calculations by holding his eyes to yours. That way men have of assessing you both for your beauty-value and your use-value. As if they are torn between the two. Cunning, but there is something else, some underlying motive that drives him. You lay back and run your hands through your hair. You're so tired, you realize, and wish you could just fall asleep right here in his enormous white couch. Letting your eyes close again, dozing, you feel the taut rungs of his breast and shoulder bones brush past you. The sound of the tap, then a little while later a kettle boiling. And his voice, suddenly animated and loud:

“I've been invited by the local baron it seems. To a party.” He laughs and looks to you questioningly. You say nothing. “He accosted me yesterday in a café, I have no idea how he knew who I was. Anyway, I'd love it if I went with someone. I like that you're not from here either.”

Your eyes flash wide. Heart flickering in two directions at once. The use of that word ‘baron' said like a joke can only mean one thing: the bastard. The bastard's having a party just as he always would for a newcomer. Your innards writhe at the fact that his life hasn't changed despite having so recently murdered you. But this feeling is calmed by the remote thrill of this young man wanting to see you again.

Best to say nothing, even though you are dying to ask more. Half an hour passes, and why this mutual peace passes as though in love, you can't say. And you both seem to drift off, to tune-in to the blare of crickets and warm wind from the balcony. You sleep awhile, naked legs intertwined.

Then both of you at the door, a little shell-shocked, teetering on your feet over the queerness of standing next to each other, not sure now where your intimacy stands.

He looks at your feet questioningly.

“Don't worry, I left them by the car.” His brow furrows then smooths as you blow him a kiss.

That night you walk the long route back to the shore. Into the blackness you spot an abandoned sailboat, invisible but for another boat nearby spilling light onto it as it tips and totters on the waves. You ready yourself, disrobing. The gold dress fits fine wrapped around your head and you rush down the cold sands, naked, and stride into the warm waters. They invite you. Your strokes are powerful. You've eaten, drank, fucked, and have a plan: to accompany the young man to the bastard's party. It's then that you realize that with all the echo of his tongue still burning on your skin, you forgot your NAUI card and the packet of money in the young man's bathroom. Panic turns your heart for a second. Then as you go underwater, and stay below so long, you wonder if you still need to breathe to stay alive. You wonder what really matters anymore for your survival? The symbolic value of those objects vanishes, as below you, the ocean opens up like a consciousness, a galaxy of dimmed green flecks in which your heavy mammalian body becomes muscularly slow, almost dissolved. The envelope of money and the identity card have no currency here. Money and Bunny can't help you anymore, you think. Eons away, stars pulse like tiny bright minerals. You come up gasping for a giant breath of air, and you drift, breathing hard, your thighs brimming ovaline and spent against night sky, until your head gently bumps up against the boat. As you lay in the clean sailor's bed, the rock of the boat draws you into a calm, lucid sleep.

Day six dead

(In which Bunny goes to the

family lands.)

C
OOL AND OVERCAST
. The main sail flutters. This boat is much like the rest but with some country-chic flair. You run your hands along the lacquered honey-brown panels. You push the ruffled floral cover off and go to eat whatever's in the fridge. A cold hotdog nearly gags you. You make up the bed, at the same time searching the drawers underneath for a swimsuit.

You find a Laura Ashley bikini, two sizes too small. Busting out of the B cups, you wonder what to do with the gold dress you'd worn on your head for the swim. Pretty soon it's going to be like a relay of clothes left between sailboats. How funny if you were to return to a boat and find your original outfit, the one you wore over the cliff. Now, the options before you: dresses in mauve and dusty blue, with white bibs in the shape of triangles, diamonds, and circles. Over your dead body . . .

You wind the still-damp gold knit back around your head while eating a carrot, and rifle again through the drawers. The lady of the ship is clearly an Avon investor. You set the distinctive pink case on the bed and open each of its shiny black drawers, taking out some things. Then pat and mop your face, armpits, crotch, pulling aside the bikini bottom, and wash your vagina with a wet face cloth because you're within arm's reach of the sink. Looking in the mirror you apply baby-pink cream that is cold against your cheeks, then a layer of beige powder, followed by sand, pink, then turquoise eye shadow, forming a dramatic zigzag gradation right up to your eyebrows. Then thick mascara and liner. Gloss on the lips. You feel better now. Even the babyish bikini makes you look cute and it'll go with your curls. Maybe you'll even spend some hours tanning today.

But once in the water simple thoughts are replaced by a tranquil blankness. You swim with your head above the surface to protect the Avon. The waves lap calmly against your chin, warm and tingly. As you come near the shore, the scene unfolds before you in slow, lazy detail, mostly people arranging their towels for a day of lying down. The stillness of the palm trees and the solemn sunbathers on the beach steady you. All that sun being soaked into leaves and skin gives a meditative rhythm to your strokes, a tranced repetition, and a pall of sunlight, a nothingness, is cast over the ocean, blaring over the surrounding sand, so that your mind opens and strange thoughts enter. Scenes of yourself in perfect solitude, wandering stretches of the island invisibly, living contentedly off scraps, being fed by the town, the jungle, and the ocean, then more active visions of yourself carrying out quiet, calculated but absurd acts fueled by the feeling of injustice. Soft apocalypses blow up in your mind. You set random fires with the last flame of a found lighter, smash a lowland rock soundlessly through a car window. Shit on a doorstep at dawn. Or kinder acts that would be like rewards to strangers. You don't know why, but somebody would be given the gift of something stolen from the plaza boutiques; as you walk the warm concrete mains some man might be drawn aside, into the bushes, for a silent, expertly executed blow job. You see how your body could morph daily, how it could come closer in look and kind to the blinding brightness of the island, how it could transform by night into the dark sway of sultry bars bordered by the succulent morbidity of the mountain with all its foliage. Living outside of yourself and time. Adopting the clothes of others. Maybe even a mask, maybe made up of your own hair? Or stalks of dried leaves, fruit detritus, broken sunglasses, things plucked from the garbage, to make yourself truly unrecognizable. Tunnel-visioned, muscular and untouchable, something symbolic so you could wander more freely in your new Bunny power.

Somewhere in that reverie, the real scene comes up abruptly. The contrast smacks you when your foot hits the shallow point of sand and you stumble up onto the beach full of people. It is now, as your heavy thighs readjust to land and you drag your body forward, that you remember what it is you have to do:

Air dry, and march to town like you own the place. Those words sit unsteady in your mind as you step forward, the aloe ladies with their baskets passing you on their way to the resorts. Something in your walk, your eyes without sunglasses, makes you doubt you'll hold sway. You're not carrying a single thing in your hands. How will you buy hair dye with no money? How much time do you have left?

At the central square you sit by the edge of a café and watch the men in their fifties with young, exquisite girls on their arms. Beautiful girls, Russian dancers, you've seen them all before at cocktails and parties. At your own parties. They'd fawned over you, admired your good taste, what you said, what you didn't say. They were pregnant and growing silent. Driving their old boys' sports cars into town, finally secure. Finally they could breathe. You shake your head. Of course, of course, those girls aren't stupid.

You have no idea how long or how far you may have to walk in the coming days. Land now. It's harsher than the ocean. How it sits there, laid out under the sun for hours like that, with nothing to cool it off. You squeeze your eyes shut. Open them again onto the crisp scene of shoppers and drinkers and high-pitched music and movement in all directions. The lowlands, where you need to get to, are opposite to the town: dusty, rocky, lined with desolate roads. You'll walk like the maids do. From villa to villa, a plastic trough full of cleaning products in one hand, the other hand wiping your brow.

Which you do endlessly until you're sure there isn't a stitch of eye shadow left on your lids. Nothing happens. No one looks at you. No one notices you. Nobody recognizes you or calls out to you with a big smile on their face to buy you a drink, and nobody takes your arm in theirs and makes aimless small talk to maintain the circle of friendship. You're getting hungry. Screw those carrots, you should have eaten three hot dogs instead!

And you realize you've let the day get away and it's too late now to find a way to the lowlands. You're not prepared for that. You at least need a water bottle or a ride of some sort. You decide to walk in the other direction, the eastern part of the island is flatter. The names of the villages there are like saints.

Walking calms you. Gives you time to think about your past and your future. You don't want to dwell on the here and now, it's too wide open, too loose, there are no borders to cling to.

As you approach a village called Saint Francis you feel your step lightening, your body becoming airy. You go freely into places you wouldn't normally go. You go along walkways that are broken and overgrown, narrow green paths lined with random things: arrangements of driftwood, potted palms with cracks and dirt spilling out, geckos, dogs, faded clothing left behind. Your eyes are bright and alert, opened wide onto plots with fences painted red and turquoise. Looks your way are mixed: the men and women, sweeping walkways or busying about their properties, call out to you or say nothing. You've let your posture go a little. With your sweat and rumpled dress you feel you blend in. But of course you don't.

“Hey lady,” one calls, casually.

Another looks at you as if it's curious that you are there. But not really. Not curious enough to stare.

Here you are clearly an outsider, since these are the family lands.

You keep walking. Children playing a game push past you. You've been ambling up a mountain road and haven't seen a car in ages, when one finally comes cranking and chugging along little faster than your walk. As it inches by, something about the passenger catches your eye. The shape of his head is familiar, you recognize the profile as he turns to the driver. He is laughing, speaking another language. You see now it is him: the young man. He doesn't recognize you. The car passes on by.

Where it heads it is much cooler. You are wandering the young man's way, not following him.

When something else catches your attention. A thin bright green snake goes steadily over the cracked mud of the road. Ordinary for it to be there, except that as you approach, the snake slows down, loiters at the base of tree, no longer hunting for a nest of lizards or mice, but rather stalling by curling this way and that without apparent purpose. When it finds a post from which to inspect you, you meet eyes. Then you are following the snake as it moves gracefully towards a dense area of palms, behind which are shadowed houses held in by a splay of pathways barely wide enough for a car.

/ / /

Night catches up to you. You were daydreaming, sitting on a stump watching the hypnotic uniformity of the jungle, the slow turn from brilliant green to the colour of a hunt at dusk.

Yellow lamps light up in the small houses, and you hear footsteps, the sound of family members coming home for supper. Pots banging, the din of cooking, the talk of what happened that day. You feel the urge to listen and be part of it.

Without thinking you walk a path that leads straight to where the young man is. How you know it's him you have no idea, but sure enough you are leaning against the wooden slats of a house, out of view. You hear soothing music, then his distinctive voice. His outsider tone separates him and yet you sense he is more than welcome.

“So you've come back to claim your acres.”

“I have.”

“It's here for you, you know that. All you have to do is take it, choose it.”

“I'm truly grateful, I am.”

The sounds of smoking, someone rocking nearby with a baby.

“Always and forever these lands are just waiting here, for their family to come find them and build something. What will you build?”

Silence. You sense the young man leaning over.

“The land is foreign to me still.”

“You were born here. Right here in this very house. That's why.” Chuckling. “The house remembers you! It's called you back from your other place.”

“Well that's where I live now. Where I have to stay.”

“You'll see. You'll see. Tomorrow we'll go make the tour, find you a good house plot where you'll be happy and bring your wife to come back to.”

Something in your heart plummets southward. His voice murmuring neither yes nor no.

You edge deftly away from your eavesdrop feeling mercurial, heavy and light at the same time. You retrace your steps through the tangle of roads until you come out to the main road. Compared to the cool darkness you came from, this feels like a highway. Your mind is heading beachward as if in a trance, ushered along by the hush of the jungle, and then the large S of the snake appears. As it moves, its rhythm becomes the buzzing shape taking form in your brain. Two perfect arcs intertwined. The life of the island and . . . The snake snaps and you run full-out to the shore, throwing off your clothes and diving in.

As you skim along the surface of the black, choppy water, you look up to see you are surrounded by boats full of people. All the boats are busy tonight, lights on deck blazing, couples watching the stars, people yelling from one side to the other. You've come to assume that there would always be one boat available to you.

You are losing sight of your plan. You consider squatting on the young man's land once he leaves. Or, what? To squat on your own land?

Suddenly tired and deflated, you swim back to shore, to the gold dress you'd tossed on the sand. You shake out your hair and walk to the bar. When you arrive you make the best of yourself in a mirror. Come out, Bunny. The type of man you used to know is there.

Dark, slick, perfumed. Older. Tactless, with all signs of wealth encumbering his neck and wrists, his small balletic feet in Italian leather slip-on shoes. He is the spitting image of the bastard.

You amble his way, already holding his eyes, the room seems to have conspired to this, it is cosmic timing, you know before it happens that it will all work even though it shouldn't – you aren't actually his type – and nothing to lose, you arrive at his side:

“If there is anyone in this bar worth taking home, it's you, gorgeous.”

He grins. And falls for it. So much so that he hasn't even glanced at your bare feet, nor at other things that designate you as slightly trash. Already his meaty hand is on your waist pulling you closer to him.

You chalk up your success to habit. The hunger to be liked, to be powerful, to be seen, is fading, but you stumble through the motions anyway, walking through a version of your past behaviour, some final vestige of the Bunny power. You have to do it one last time to prove it to yourself that it isn't the answer.

“I was just thinking of leaving.”

You clamber along the pavement to his car, barely held up by his drunken clutch, and agree to go to his place. You whisper in his ear: the promise of other delights, your body at his disposal, your companionship for a night of drugs. All of the above if he wants. You feel mildly shocked that you haven't heard of him, or seen him before, but there are so many newcomers to the island, an influx you notice only once you're in the casinos or big restaurants.

Entering his mint villa, the man ignores you, setting himself directly at his glass dining table, clearing the magazines and papers with a brush of his arm. Backing away with the first glimmer of regret, you watch him from a distance, see him as a hunched-over helmet of shiny, black hair. You keep this circle of black with its thinning centre in view as you amble about his Deco-revival apartment. The single glass of wine in your system inspires you. The reawakening, the shivers the tinkle sounds give you: of diamonds, of crystal, of the sequins on dresses going by you at parties. In the bathroom, you place both hands firmly on the deep vermilion counter. You turn your head from side to side in the bulb-lined mirror, seeing the echoes of your youthful beauty still just-there, when you hear the man call you.