Small World (23 page)

scents.

The smell of eggs and orange juice and warm bread rolled over her, fragrant as the first smells of spring, and her stomach gurgled in anticipation. For one uneasy second, she thought she might vomit, and then it was all right. The tray was heavy, made of silver and chased with a delicate design, but she didn’t really look at it. It was to be expected; it went with the room. It was enough of a struggle to get it to the bed, and then to heave herself up next to it. Blackness swam behind her eyes; she had to lay back until it passed.

At last, she could lift the fork to her mouth. It was the best food, she thought, she had ever eaten. Five stars. She giggled. She ate it too fast.

Her stomach rolled again and the orange juice sent up an acid aftertaste. She pushed the tray to one side of the bed and pulled the sheets and blankets tight around her. For the moment she was all right again. Warm. Not hungry. Not thirsty. The pain had become merely aches and bruises. •

The wall and the Hand came back to her. She pushed away the thought of them. They could not have happened. They had not happened. She had been delirious with hunger, and perhaps a continuing shock. She still did not know what had happened to her. She had had an accident, that was apparent. She could have sustained head injuries, concussion, something, that was not serious enough to require hospitalization, but still might cause her to see things, nightmare things. She closed her eyes tightly, shutting it out.

Someone had fed her, at last. All would be explained and understood, in time. She was sick. It was enough to do, to try to heal herself. Her body demanded her attention again. She was sick, sick to her stomach. She felt all greenish and low. The too-quickly consumed food gathered in a nasty, greasy lump in the pit of her stomach. She groaned.

She had not the strength to fight it. Over the side of the bed, aiming for the floor, she opened her mouth, and it all came up and out, still quite distinctly eggs, and toast, and orange juice. She felt rather distant from it, could look at it as if it were someone else’s mess, and note the sourness.

‘Oh goddamn and shit,’ an enormous rasping voice boomed, ‘she’s being sick all over the bedclothes.’

She closed her eyes instantly. It was enough that the sour food was in her nostrils and mouth, right back to the back of her throat. It was enough that her ears heard voices from outside, voices larger than human. She couldn’t bear to see, again, the wall disappearing, or that Hand, God’s or Whoever’s, probing the room, reaching for her.

The rasping voice went on, berating her and someone else, she was sure someone else was being dressed down. The someone else responded, a deep, hesitant protest. Someone Else was protecting her, defending her from the rasping voice that was angry with her

for being sick.

It was a dream of being seven again, the evening of her birthday party. She had gorged all day, at Grammie’s and Aunt Reenie’s and at home, at the big party, on the sweets she loved. Her mother objected repeatedly, warning she would be sick, and the others kept saying
It’s her birthday, Leona.
Before that incantation of privilege, her mother fell silent. And Leyna had gone to bed and been terribly sick in the night. Her mother, summoned by the choking cough of her vomiting, flew into a rage.

‘How do you like your birthday now, you little pig?’

And her father, following her mother, trying to calm her. ‘For God’s sake, Leona.’

'Where’s your mother now, and your sister Reenie?’ she screamed at him, ‘now there’s puke all over my coverlets and on my rug?’

‘Lee, the child is sick.’

‘I see that! I see that!’

And she pushed Leyna from the bed, cursing the whole while and calling her a pig. She swept the bedclothes and the rug into a heap and snatched the soiled nightdress from Leyna’s shivering, feverish body.

‘I’ll bathe her,’ her father had offered, and started to lead Leyna out of range of her mother’s wrath.

But she wouldn’t let go. ‘Don’t be silly, go back to bed. You have to work in the morning. I’ll do it.’

And do it she did, as roughly as possible, and muttering between buckets of cold water poured over Leyna’s head, ‘How do you like your birthday now?’

'What a goddamn mess,’ Dolly said in disgust.

‘I’ll clean up,’ Roger volunteered.

‘Of course you will. It’s your fault.’

Dolly was looking for a new cigarette. She stuck one in her mouth and rummaged for her lighter.

‘Are you sure she’s all right?’ she continued.

‘Sure. ’ Roger drew the wall gently out of its slots. ‘Probably ate too much on an empty stomach. Or too fast.’

Dolly inhaled the cigarette smoke gratefully. It covered up the faint smell of sickness nicely. She loathed sickness.

‘Why don’t you get something to bathe her in?’ Roger suggested.

It was something to do and would take her out of the room a minute, away from the stench. She came back from her bathroom with a small basin full of water, a bar of soap floating in it, and with a hand towel on her arm.

‘This do?’

‘Sure.’

Roger barely glanced at it. He was engaged in the delicate operation of unwrapping the teeny tiny woman from the soiled linen without getting too much of the sick around the bedroom.

‘She all right?’ Dolly asked again.

Roger nodded. The small body, wrapped in a sheet, was in his palm. She was curled up like a sleeping child, her hair in damp dirty tangles that made a dark pillow under her head.

‘She looks ghastly,’ Dolly observed.

He smiled. ‘She’s been through a lot. Shocks. The physical shock and then the mental one, that’s only just starting. It’ll take some adjustment. But she’ll be okay.’

“‘The human mind can adjust to anything,”’ Dolly quoted. She rolled the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger gently.

‘Yeah. Exactly.’

Roger unwrapped the sheet. She was entirely naked. The bruises were dark patches on her skin. Some of them were as dark as the patch of her pubic hair. The aureolae of her breasts were the faintest of all the shadows on her skin. He dipped her into the water with one hand and used the other to move a little of the tepid fluid over her, as gently as he could.

‘Will you wash her hair?’ he asked Dolly.

Dolly put aside her cigarette. She touched the small skull tentatively. It was creepy, like touching a mouse or a squirrel.

‘Just a second,’ she said and left the room again. She came back with a teaspoon.

‘Like that,’ she told Roger, rearranging Leyna so that Roger’s hand supported her body up to the base of the skull. The head was free so that her hair hung down between Roger’s thumb and index finger.

Dolly used the teaspoon to wet the hair thoroughly, and then lathered it with the bar soap. It wasn’t the best thing for hair but it would do for the moment. It was surprisingly pleasant to rinse out the soap, to feel the silky strands of hair slipping squeakily between her fingers.

‘There,’ she announced, with some satisfaction. She looked at Roger over the basin and smiled proudly.

‘Good job,’ he murmured, and carefully lowered the little body into the hand towel.

‘I don’t know how she can sleep through that,’ Dolly said. ‘The water should have brought her to.’

Roger grinned. ‘She’s not asleep. She doesn’t want to look at us. I’m going to wrap her in a dry handkerchief and put her on your bed, okay?’

‘Ummm.’

You ought to get some clothes for her.’

‘That’s all taken care of, darling.’ Dolly’s voice came to him through the dollhouse. She had her face right in it.

‘Now for this mess. Oh, ugh.’

Roger wandered back to find out what she was fussing over. She held out the little chamberpot.

‘Good,’ Roger said. ‘Everything’s normal.’

Dolly pushed it at him. ‘You like it, it’s yours.’ i’m going to test it. See if she’s all right.’

‘Better you than me. I thought you said she was.’

. ‘Well, she is. But there’s nothing like a spot of pee to really tell the whole story, is there?’ Roger giggled.

‘Blecch. Don’t make any messes, please. There’s been enough of those made today.’

She turned back to the dollhouse. ‘Listen, you’d better hook up :he water system. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life emptying a thunderjug and giving baths and shampoos. It’s too much like being somebody’s mommy.’

'Do it right away,’ Roger promised, ‘after I have a peek at the pee. I’m all set for it.’

It was a chance to sneak a burger or a hero or maybe even a pizza and a beer, while ostensibly at the drugstore collecting the urine-testing equipment. It wouldn’t take any time at all. He really did want to test the sample. Then he could be sure his teeny tiny woman was really all right.

She awoke tucked between sheets so crisp and clean-smelling that they were glassy to the touch. Astonishingly, she herself smelt of soap. Felt clean. She lay still for an instant, enjoying the sensation of being cared for. It was the sound of running water that made her sit up. She slipped from her bed, this time not bothering to pull a sheet off to wrap herself. The bed was freshly made. She couldn’t disturb it. It was time she acted like a proper guest in someone else’s house. With the aid of the furniture, she reached

the bathroom door.

Her laughter, weak as it was, spontaneously joined the splashing of the water into tub and basin. She flipped the lid on the toilet gleefully and looked down into her own reflection in the small pool at the bottom of the bowl. She closed it and sat on the lid to catch her breath. After taking a glass of water to soothe her dry throat (but not too fast, she warned herself), and another one to put by her bedside, she turned off the taps she had left on. She crawled back into bed, marginally stronger, and with a feeling of delicious well-being.

The nightmare was over. She had closed her eyes and feigned sleep until it really was sleep, and the horrors had passed. She looked around at the solidity of walls and furniture. This was sanity (cleanliness, running water) by any measure.

Now she was not much troubled by hunger. She knew why. It was like fasting; she’d fasted before. Not for a diet, but in a seige she’d gotten caught in, the one that had made her name in television journalism. Five days the crew had gone, cooped up in a shell-shattered Hilton in the no-man’s land of a Middle Eastern city’s center. Four days before the Canadian soldiers who were the United Nations peace-keeping force had escorted them out, the beseiged had consumed the last stale candybars in the vending machines and drunk the last warm Cokes. The hotel kitchens had been looted by the employees on the way out, and what little remained had been fouled by vermin. One of their number was wounded, with a bullet-shattered knee, and nearly died from shock and blood loss. The hotel had been strewn with bodies, and bodies piled up by the entrances and by certain windows with useful views. The vermin had become very active in the five days of the film crew’s imprisonment. After a while, appetite hadn’t been a problem.

During her recuperation, a military doctor had told her that stress would kill appetite, as the body concentrated on survival. The genetic inheritance of a foraging species, he told her. And after a certain time without food, the body’s chemistry changed, and the stomach ceased to clamor. The body settled down to consuming itself. It was at this point that sustenance had better be resumed or real damage would occur.

But euphoria was a common side-effect of starving, and so were mystical visions. She was close to euphoria, so strong was her sense of well-being. The mystical visions, she reflected, she could wait for. She had her nightmares, that was enough.

And the wall rumbled and complained and rose again. She sat up straight and screamed as if in agony. She shook her fists at the rising wall.

it’s not my birthday!’ she screamed, it’s not my birthday.’

This time the Hand did not stop at the outer wall. It entered and she fell silent, paralyzed with fear. It moved closer and she saw the chamberpot, grasped between thumb and forefinger like a china acorn. It passed her and descended. The enormous loglike fingers poked and prodded at the commode. She stared at them, the knuckles that were all leathery wrinkles like an elephants’s knees, and at a scar, shaped like a blunt arrowhead, that pointed across the back of the Hand. It withdrew at last, with a flash of scarlet, a great pool of shiny scarlet, and she knew it was a Woman’s Hand.

'There now,’ the voice like a fingernail drawn over chalkboard said, and it was very close and loud, so that she winced away and covered her ears. ‘Roger?’ it said questioningly, and faded away, taking with it a cloudy mass of lilac and gray. She dared not look up, to see if it had a face. Hadn’t she learned in Sunday school that the sight of God’s face was reserved for Judgment Day? And even the strong possibility that the joke was on the human race, that God was a painted female, did not erase the certainty that on Judgment Day, we would all be dead.

She curled up tightly under the covers. She prepared to die.

Roger,’ Dolly said softly, ‘did you know this was going to be a problem?’ Her tone of voice suggested he should have.

Should have,’ he confessed, using a ploy that worked well with his mother. He thought of it as Beating Her to the Stick, i’ll set up a sound system. Something to magnify her voice and damp down ours.’