Chapter 6: Straight Down

Jessica has been in the arrivals hall for an hour, because she couldn't sit at home, and she has changed her mind about the dress twice in her head since she got here.

People come through the sliding doors in clumps. Island families, a group of men in suits, an older couple with a cool box. Each time the doors open her heart goes, and each time it isn't him. Then they open on a man by himself, tall, pale as paper, in jeans that are much too heavy for the day, with his straw hair sticking up on one side. He's pulling a case. He walks a little stiffly, and once, when he thinks nobody is looking, he tugs at the front of his jeans.

She knows that walk. Every woman on the island knows that walk. The visitors all have it, the first day.

Then he sees her, and his whole face changes, and she stops thinking about anything.

She runs. She doesn't mean to; her feet do it. She throws herself at him and he catches her and lifts her right off the ground, and his arms are real around her, real, not a picture on a screen, and he smells of airplane and sweat and himself. She laughs into his neck. He's laughing too. He kisses her, there in the middle of the hall with everyone going round them, and she kisses him back and presses herself against him, all of her.

He grunts into her mouth, and not with pleasure. He shifts his hips back.

"Sorry," he says. His face is red. "Sorry. It's. They've."

"I know." She takes his face in her hands. "I know. I'm sorry. Is it bad?"

"It's not good." Then he laughs again, helplessly. "There was a man in there, Jess. In a tie."

"With the machine? Was it Mr. Hale? His wife had the baby on Tuesday while he was away, my mother heard at the market." She takes his hand. "Come on. You're cooking in those jeans."

She drives him in her mother's car, with the windows down. He sits in the passenger seat with his knees apart and looks at everything. She watches him look. The road along the coast, the sea in the blue he kept writing he didn't believe. The houses with their red roofs and the fruit trees behind every one. A line of nursery children in matching sun hats crossing at the lights, holding hands in pairs. The water tower on its hill.

"My mountain," she says, and points.

"It's magnificent," he says, completely serious, and she laughs so much she nearly misses the turn.

The guesthouse is near the beach, a low white building with green shutters and the hammock from the photo. The owner, a big woman in a flowered dress, gives Peter his key and gives Jessica a look. Jessica gives the look back. She is twenty-six, and he is a visitor with a device, and there is nothing in the world that can happen in that room that anyone could talk about. He'll drop his case and have a shower, and she'll take him to the place on the beach that grills fish, and that's all.

That's what she tells herself, going up the stairs behind him.

---

Peter's room is plain and clean, with a ceiling fan and a window onto the sea. As he puts his case down, it starts to rain. It comes all at once, warm and heavy and straight down, a curtain of water outside the window so loud it's like being back in the shelter, and Jessica laughs and says, "You see? Straight down," and then she's kissing him.

He has waited five months for this. He has thought about very little else.

Her dress has a zip at the back and he gets it on the first try this time, and she steps out of it, and she's wearing nothing underneath but a pair of white knickers, and she's even more beautiful than on the screen, browner, softer, real, the gold flower in her nose catching the grey light from the window. She pulls his shirt over his head. She undoes his jeans and pushes them down with his pants, and then she stops and looks.

"Oh," she says. A small sound. Sorry, and curious, and something else he can't name.

He can feel himself go red all over. And then he starts to get hard, because she's standing there almost naked and looking at him, and runs straight into steel.

It's not pain exactly. Not at first. It's pressure, a hard tight squeeze that gets worse the more he wants her, and he wants her more than he has ever wanted anything, so it gets worse fast. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and sits down on the edge of the bed.

"Peter."

"Give me a minute." Tax forms. Brackets from Stoke. She's kneeling in front of him in her knickers with her hands on his thighs. It's hopeless. "Christ. Okay. Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like that."

She laughs softly, and gets up, and lies down on the bed, and pulls him down beside her. "Then don't look at me. Touch me. You can still do that. I told you."

So he does. He kisses her neck and her breasts and her stomach, and slides her knickers down, and touches her the way he remembers she liked, by the fire, and then with his mouth, while the rain roars on the roof. She holds his head and says his name and other words, in her own language, words he doesn't know. When she comes it's with her back arched off the bed and her thighs tight around his ears and a long, shaking breath, and for a moment he forgets everything else.

Then he remembers. Because it aches. It aches like a bruise, a dull deep throb, steel and blood fighting each other, and there's nowhere for any of it to go.

She lies against him afterwards, warm and loose, tracing circles on his chest. After a while her hand drifts lower, and touches the cage, lightly, as if it might be hot.

"Does it hurt?"

"Only when I think about you." He laughs. It comes out wrong. "So, all the time, really."

"It's only two weeks."

"I know."

"Men live with it. Some for their whole lives."

"I know. You told me." He watches the ceiling fan turn. "How, though, Jess? Honestly. How?"

She thinks about it, seriously, the way she thought about whether her island was paradise.

"They get used to it," she says. "I think. I never asked one."

The rain stops, all at once, the way it started. Outside the window the whole world begins to steam.

They go to the place on the beach in the end, late, Peter in the loose trousers at last, and he eats everything she puts in front of him. At ten she drives him back, because her mother will be waiting up, and kisses him for a long time at the guesthouse door, and goes. He lies on the bed alone in the damp heat, with the fan turning overhead and his body aching and the sound of the sea, and he does not get used to it.

---

Jessica drives home slowly, with the smell of wet earth coming in through the open windows, and doesn't turn on the radio.

She keeps seeing his face when he sat down on the bed. The way he tried to laugh.

She has known about the cage all her life. Visitors wear the device, husbands with two children choose, her friends joke about it. She has never once thought about what it is like for the man inside it, any more than about what the fish think of the lagoon. She's thinking about it now.

Two weeks. Then the yellow door, the key, and he flies home, and she's back to a picture on a screen in a locked room with the fan going round. And after that?

A visitor can't stay. A visitor can't marry. Only a citizen can marry a citizen. She knows that like she knows the sea is salt. Until today it never mattered.

She parks outside her mother's house and sits in the dark car with her hands on the wheel. The stone is still there, at the back of her mind. Her fingers keep finding it.

She still hasn't told him about the plant.