The Amnesia Clinic (21 page)

Sally Lightfoot’s arrival changed everything. Alone, we might have got through our adventure without coming to any harm, but with her on the scene it was inevitable that things would go too far. She was like a horrid catalyst, energising things, making every personality clash more heated and intense. Although we didn’t know this at the time, we should have been suspicious from the beginning.

I mean,
I
should have been.

She must have been heavy-footed with her Chevrolet pick-up, because we heard its roar over the rain, and stopped laughing, forgetting the fact that Fabián’s chair had been eaten from beneath him by a parrot with a grudge. Fabián got to his feet clumsily and, when she came in, I stood up as well. In the self-important manner of boys to whom responsibility has been lent, we welcomed our visitor and imparted android-like the preset message: Ray’s not here, he’ll be back in a minute, can we get you a drink?

She threw us from the start.

‘Is it here?’

At first, I put her in her early thirties. I found out later she was late twenties. She wore a familiar backpacker-style uniform: a blue bandanna that swept back cropped blonde hair, bulging combat trousers and no-nonsense brown boots. These, like the rest of her, were coated in a fine layer of dust in spite of the rain. Her skin was another contradiction: pale, though she looked like an outdoors person. An animal tooth dangled from a leather string around her neck, breaking up a bright red T-shirt roughly cut off at the arms.

‘Is it here?’ she repeated. Her accent was plausible in both Spanish and English, but tinged with something that I thought sounded Scandinavian. ‘
Está aquí
? Is it here? Can you two boys speak?’

‘Um, Ray’s not here. He’s the owner. He’ll be—’

‘You’d know what I was talking about if it were here. It’s not here. That’s good.’

Holding the bandanna in place, she pushed her hands on to her forehead as if to locate a thought. One fine lick of hair spilled forward. All of it would have been held back were it not for the fact that her wedding finger was neatly, charmingly severed at the middle joint. She screwed up her eyes into tight triangles that looked as if they’d been block-cut into her face and remained in this position for half a minute, her body quivering and coiled like a watch-spring. Then, the thought apparently located, the triangles flew apart again and her pale hands dropped to her sides.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good. It’ll be here soon. That means I can stay, if I’ve got my tides right, which I can’t guarantee. I bet you two don’t know your tides. You don’t look like proper beach bums to me. I’ll have a beer and something to eat, please. And a bed.’

‘We don’t work here,’ I said.

‘But we can help,’ said Fabián. ‘A beer, you say. No problem. Allow me. Please: take a seat, if you can find one that hasn’t been eaten by our parrot.’

He went to the fridge behind the bar, pulled up a wet, glistening bottle of Pilsener and gave it to her, wiping the neck with a handful of his shirt.

‘As for the food, I’m afraid that Raymond, our maître d’, is busy at present negotiating with the Port Authority, but he’ll be back shortly.’

Sally Lightfoot took the bottle without looking at him, drank a long draught of beer, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘There’s nothing to eat?’ she said.

‘My name is Fabián. This is Anti. We’re guests here too. Much as we’d love to help you, we don’t know where the food is. But perhaps you’d like a piece of me to chew on while we wait for Ray to get back?’

‘I don’t eat meat as a rule,’ she said. ‘But then I suppose you’re only poultry, aren’t you? No. I’ll wait.’

Fabián turned away awkwardly. He hadn’t expected this feisty response.

‘What’s your name?’ I said, hoping to steer things back on course.

‘Sally Lightfoot.’

Fabián snorted and plunged back in. ‘Are you a Red Indian?’

‘Do I look like a Red Indian?’ she said to me. ‘Your friend isn’t very bright, is he? You must be the brains of the outfit.’

Fabián, two-nil down, began tidying up the remains of his chair in a businesslike fashion. The rain scraped across the thatch above us like fingers.

‘Interesting name,’ I ventured.

‘It isn’t real,’ she said. ‘But if you get on the right side of me I might tell you where I got it from.’

The routine that followed seemed to be part grooming ritual, part safety check. She ran her hands up the length of her ankles, one leg after another, as far up as the trousers would allow. Then up her arms, the left hand starting at the right wrist, smoothing the freckled arm until her thumb rested in the armpit, and back. Finally, the right hand started at the left wrist, sliding to the left pit and back again, arriving and lingering where the third finger of her left hand came to its end. She caught me watching and closed her fingers over the stub, both concealing and caressing it.

‘That’s something else you don’t get to find out about yet,’ she said.

Fabián, who had retreated to the corner with a beer, now cautiously advanced again and sat at the table with us. Brewed coffee and dried lime juice had sweetened in the wood of the cabin to a smell like brown sugar – a microclimate, trapped inside by water. This day would not be consumed in a blaze like the one before: it was drowning.

We sat in silence beneath murky rafters and half-broken lantern strings, amid the shattered timbers of chairs and tables, as water beat down on the sand outside.

‘Ray should be back soon,’ I said, clearing my throat.

‘Meanwhile, why don’t we go and see if it’s arrived,’ said Sally.

‘What is it you’re waiting
for
?’ said Fabián.

‘You’ll see. Come with me.’ She stepped through the curtain of water and on to the beach.

Great steps of shoreline had been munched away in our absence and the water continued to pound in, grey as dishwater. Needle-sharp rain drilled from above, combining with the onslaught of the Pacific overbite to create a damage machinery of jaws and sewing machines. Sally
seemed at home in the storm: whilst Fabián and I squinted against it, her face appeared to free itself up, relaxing into the weather.

‘Can you see anything?’ she said.

‘What are we looking for?’

‘The horizon should look different. The texture of it will change. Then you’ll know.’

Fabián looked as mystified as me. We followed awkwardly after her. Plenty of storm-tossed debris fretted the shore – nail-studded driftwood, a rusty oil drum, palm leaves, green coconuts – but none of it could be said to fit her description.

‘Maybe the storm’s holding it back,’ she mused. ‘Maybe I’ve got it wrong.’ She had taken off her boots and now trod the sand with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. ‘It needs to be here, you know. I can’t stay if it doesn’t get here. Have either of you got any binoculars?’ Streaks of rain dabbed away at the dust on her face.

The rain eased off a little. A thin gauze of mist drifted in.

‘I need it to get here. Then I can relax.’

‘What
is
it?’ said Fabián.

‘It’s my livelihood.’

‘Yes, but what
is
it?’

‘Did you say the texture of the water had to change?’ I said.

Between swells, fifty feet out to sea, the water seemed rougher than ever, almost jagged. A low, wide shape, floating mostly unseen beneath the surface, was washing up; alarmingly, it seemed to be moving.

A drip of water fell off her nose and Sally Lightfoot smiled.

‘Here she is,’ she murmured.

Whatever it was seemed simultaneously to be trafficked
and buffeted by the water, and not to obey its rules. Its ripples didn’t make sense. The shape shifted in the mist even as it drew near. I became conscious of a sound, too: a squabbling, squawking noise of disagreement, emanating inexplicably from the object in time with the strange movements on its surface.

‘I’ve been pursuing her for a week now. There’ll be no money if I only get part of her. Okay, we can go back inside now. She’ll still be here in the morning.’

‘Can you please tell us what that is?’ said Fabián.

‘Isn’t it obvious? It’s a dead whale.’

‘Oh.’

Pause.

‘Sally. If the whale is dead, then why is it making a noise?’

‘Oh, that. Those are my helpers. They only get to work on it when it’s very near the shore, when they know they’re safe.’

Pause.

She glanced at us and sighed in exasperation. Then she opened her arms to the rain, grinned broadly and shouted:

‘Vultures!’

We stared dumbly out to sea.

‘Come back inside and I’ll explain.’

We followed in silence, keen not to say the wrong thing in this world of new rules.

‘I’ll show you,’ she said, walking round the side of the bar towards the main roadside entrance to the cabins. She untied ropes and lifted a tarpaulin that covered the open back of her blue pick-up truck. The whale bones heaped beneath it gave off an oily, faintly rotten smell and were piled in chaotic clusters where they had been thrown. It was like peering into a desecrated mausoleum.

‘See? These are what I’ve collected so far. I’m cutting her nose-to-tail, and it’s a race against time. Her skull rides up front with me on the passenger seat and the rest of her is
back here – apart from what’s left in the blubber. She’s only a baby, of course, or I’d need a much bigger truck.’

‘Bit muddled up,’ I said, trying to work out which bit went where.

‘I’m sure someone at the museum will know how to put her back together,’ said Sally. ‘All I know is they sure as hell won’t pay me unless I give them the complete package.’

‘Who won’t?’

‘Natural History Museum of Caracas. Flat fee of $5,000: One Complete Humpback Whale Skeleton. Tax free, no questions asked. They want it to put in their lobby. Been tracking her down the coast since she washed up dead halfway down Colombia last week. She washes out to sea every couple of days, then comes back in with the next tide. I watch her wash up, spend the day cutting what bones I can out of her – with a little help from my friends – then I let her go out again and head south.’ She drew the tarpaulin back over her hoard. ‘You think this Ray will be back yet? I’m starving.’

She was already out on the beach by the time Fabián and I got up on Saturday morning. For some reason, Ray was unsure about the new arrival and aired his suspicions whilst frying eggs for us behind the bar. How can something so commonplace as breakfast have so much power? I can still taste the eggs Ray prepared for us that morning: the browned, crispy edges of the white; the velvety yolks, burst open by us over hunks of dark, heavy bread.

‘All I want to know is, on what authority is she going round cutting up that animal?’ he said, jerking the cast-iron pan around before him. ‘You know, if everybody went around dissecting every animal they came across … I don’t like it. It doesn’t seem right.’

‘Doesn’t sound like you,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t she do
it, if it’s there and it’s already dead? Why shouldn’t she make the money rather than let it sink into the sea?’

‘I’ll tell you why. Because it’s disrespectful to the animal,’ said Ray, poking in my direction with his spatula. ‘You kids think you’re smart, but you don’t know everything.’

Fabián was swabbing his face with alcohol – something he seemed to have been doing almost obsessively since we arrived. ‘I agree,’ he announced, dropping cotton wool freighted with grease into a shell ashtray. ‘I think it stinks, what she’s doing.’

He’d picked an odd time to evolve a conscience, but I ignored it. ‘What are we doing today?’

‘I said I’d take Sol treasure hunting again,’ said Fabián, lighting a cigarette.

‘How are you going to find any more “treasure”?’ I asked. ‘You only had one of those medallions to start with.’

‘Well, maybe today we’ll find some real treasure, shit-stick. But I take it you’d rather stay here and bum-suck that weird woman.’

‘At least she’s not underage,’ I said under my breath. I was terrified Ray might overhear, so it wasn’t a very effective retort. I ended up saying it so quietly that I don’t think Fabián heard it either, which in hindsight could only have been a good thing. He looked daggers at me anyway, so I drained my coffee and walked out on to the beach.

Sally Lightfoot knelt in lively morning surf and decaying whale blubber, sawing away with a large carving knife. Her bandanna rode high on her head and she wore a pair of blue rubber gloves that covered her right up to the armpits. As she worked, the vultures argued with each other across the contours of the flesh like truculent old men, their heads darting in and out from their ragged, brown bodies. Several even burrowed their heads all of the way into the whale so
that their slender necks resembled the wrists of hidden, rummaging hands. Evidently the birds were entirely at ease by now with their strange human companion.

‘Aren’t they afraid of you?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said, without looking up or stopping to cut. A thin strip of blubber adhered to her cheek, which was coated in a thin film of sweat. Her hair had fallen forward over the bandanna again. ‘They’re very pushy indeed. Doesn’t bother me, though, so long as they don’t get cocky and steal any of my bones. I’m getting to the end of her now, and the bones in the tail are much smaller, so I have to watch them a bit more.’

She pushed back the hair with a curled left wrist and I noticed the sag in her glove at the point of the missing finger.

‘It’s getting to the point where I could cut the tail away from the rest of the body, then take it away myself to dissect in private and leave all this behind. But the truth is, I think I’d miss them working there alongside me. You probably think that’s a bit weird, don’t you? Ngah! Get out of there.’

She had managed to cut away most of the flesh from a large bone towards the front of the whale’s tail, but still it wouldn’t come out. I stepped forward to help.

‘No you don’t. There’s no room for brute force in this job. Be typical if I got this far only to have some eager little monster like you stepping in and snapping a vertebra. Besides, I’m doing this on my own. That prize is going to be all mine when I go to claim it, and that means I have to do all the work myself.’ I turned away to head back to the bar. She stopped cutting momentarily. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t stay and talk to me while I work.’