Chapter 7: The Walk

The nurse said that after the first day you forget. By the third morning Peter has decided she never wore one.

He doesn't forget in the shower, where he soaps round the steel like a man cleaning a tap. He doesn't forget on the guesthouse stairs, or when he sits, or when he crosses his legs out of habit and uncrosses them in a hurry. He forgets least of all at night. His body keeps its own hours, the hours of any healthy man of thirty-five, and twice now it has woken him before dawn, hard against the tube and going nowhere. The ache pulls him out of sleep like a hand on his shoulder. Both times he has stood in the dark bathroom splashing cold water where it counts, then sat on the edge of the bed and read the leaflet by the light of his phone.

Some discomfort at night is normal and soon passes. Enjoy your stay!

Soon, it says. It doesn't say how soon.

On the second day the heat finds it too. Everything here is damp all the time: his skin, the sheets, the pages of the paperback he brought and hasn't opened. By evening there is a raw pink line where the ring sits, and he remembers the nurse saying powder.

So the next morning Jessica takes him to the pharmacy. She is on her school break, two weeks with nothing to do but him, and she has decided he will see the town properly. It's the capital, which on an island of a hundred and twenty thousand people means a main street, a market under a tin roof, a harbor with two grey coast guard boats, and a government building painted the same pastel as the website.

The pharmacy is narrow and cool and smells of camphor. Behind the counter a thin man of seventy in a cardigan, in this heat, looks up from his newspaper and says a few words to Jessica in her language. She answers. Then he looks at Peter, and not at his face, and Peter understands that the pharmacist watched him come in through the door.

"I need some powder," Peter says. "Talc. It rubs."

"For the visitors," the pharmacist says in careful English, and reaches behind him without looking, to a shelf that apparently exists for this. A small white tin. "Twice a day. Dry well first. Not too much." He puts it in a brown paper bag and folds the top over, and over again, and presses the fold flat with his thumb.

Jessica pays before Peter can get his wallet out. Her ears have gone red.

"Who was that?" he asks outside.

"Mr. Tane. He's known me since I was born." She takes his arm. "By tonight my mother will know."

"Know what?"

"That my visitor rubs."

He laughs, and she laughs, and then neither of them can stop, there in the middle of the main street in the heat, her forehead against his shoulder.

It isn't only Mr. Tane. At the market the women behind the fruit stalls look up as he passes, and their eyes go to his walk before his face, and they smile, amused and a little sorry for him. One of them, a heavy woman with her arms full of the green scaly fruit, calls something to Jessica, and Jessica calls back, and the whole row laughs.

"What did she say?"

"She says the first week is the worst."

"And the second?"

"She didn't say."

A boy of about ten runs past them, turns, and does a few steps of Peter's walk, stiff-legged and solemn, until his mother cuffs him. On the harbor wall an old man sits in the shade of a tree with his hands folded on a stick, and when Peter goes by he lifts his chin in a slow nod, one man to another across a waiting room.

"He's caged," Jessica says, when they're past. "Since before I was born."

"How do you know?"

"Everyone knows. He goes to the clinic every three months, for the check." She shrugs. "It's a small island."

Peter looks back. The old man has gone back to watching the boats. Peter thinks of four in the morning and the cold tap, and tries to make it into thirty years, and can't.

"Why not the card, then?"

"Some men want to keep what they have." She squeezes his arm. "Come on. I want to show you my school."

The school is shut for the break, a white building behind a fence, with the lagoon painted on its front wall. She wants to show him her classroom, but the sill is high, and on tiptoe she can barely point over it: her desk, the picture cards, the twins' places in the second row. He lifts her by the waist to give her the height, and has to put her down again quickly. She is warm and laughing in his arms, and he is learning, slowly, not to hold her like that.

---

Jessica counts the days without meaning to. Five gone. Nine left.

They are on the beach below the guesthouse in the afternoon, when the heat is too much for anything else. A little way along the sand two boys in the navy blue shorts of the national service sit on folding chairs beside a square of rope and stakes, guarding a tortoise nest, and argue over a game on a phone. Her brother is out on the boats this month, somewhere off the north coast, and writes to their mother twice a week, mostly about the food.

Peter comes out of the sea and up the sand toward her, and she watches him do it. Wet hair, pale shoulders going pink even though she made him wear her sunscreen. The swim shorts cling. She has seen visitors on this beach all her life, the hard little shape under the wet cloth, and looked away as politely as from a man doing up his zip. She doesn't look away now. He walks the visitor's walk, careful on the slope, and when he drops onto the towel beside her he does it in two careful stages, a hand first, then a knee.

"Better?" she asks.

"The salt stings." He lies back and shuts his eyes. "It's fine. Ask me again in nine days."

So he's counting too.

His phone lies on the towel between them, and a message from work lights it up, then another. Someone called Dave, something about brackets. Peter opens one eye, reads them, and turns the phone face down on the towel.

Making sure the bits fit.

She thinks of Dale on the child's chair in her classroom, his knees up by his ears. Somebody who checks that the measurements are right. It would be so easy. Three sentences. There is a job. It's yours if you want it. You could stay.

And then he'd stay in that. A man who comes to work is a visitor until the state makes him a citizen, every day of it, and after that the law is his for good: the two, and the choice. She has watched him for five days now. The careful walk. The hand that goes to his pocket to shift the steel when he thinks she isn't looking. The pink line he hid from her yesterday with a towel. Last night at the guesthouse door she sat in his lap to kiss him goodnight, and he went white and lifted her off.

She can't ask that of him. Not while he says nine days the way a boy says it before the end of term.

And under that, smaller and worse: what if she asks, and he says no.

She lies down beside him and puts her hand on his chest, on the salt drying there. Down the beach the boys have stopped arguing. One of them has fallen asleep in his chair, and the other sits with the phone on his knee, watching the sand where the eggs are.

---

On the seventh evening there's no rain, only heat that doesn't lift when the sun goes down, and the fan above the bed pushing the same warm air round and round.

Peter lies on his side and watches Jessica come back to herself. She is sprawled across the sheet with one arm over her eyes, breathing hard, her skin shining, the taste of her still in his mouth. He has got good at this in a week. He has had little else to get good at. Every evening the same: the door locked against the owner's flowered disapproval downstairs, her dress over the chair, his hands, his mouth, and Jessica coming apart under them with her heel drumming on the mattress, while his own body strains into the steel and gets nowhere.

Tonight the ache is worse than it has been. Not sharp. Deep and heavy, low in his belly, a fist that won't unclench.

She takes her arm off her eyes. Then she reaches down.

"Let me," she says. "There must be something."

Her fingers find him around the ring, underneath, where there's still skin to touch, and for a second it's wonderful, and then it's ten times worse. He catches her wrist.

"Don't. It only makes it worse." He breathes out through his teeth. "Don't."

"Sorry."

"Not your fault."

She settles against him with her head on his chest, and they listen to the fan. Downstairs a radio is playing. A dog barks somewhere along the beach.

Seven days. Then the yellow door, and the nurse with her envelope, and a plane, and his flat with Carol's boxes in the spare room, and Jessica shrunk back to the size of his phone. A picture of a meal again. And then what? Another visa in the summer, two more weeks of this, and back. Again at Christmas. Years of it, the screen and the steel, taking turns.

He hears himself say it before he has decided anything at all.

"Marry me."

She goes still against his chest.

He thinks: what have I just done. He thinks: I meant it. Both at once. Downstairs the radio changes to a song with drums.

Jessica sits up. She looks at him for a long moment, her hair stuck to her cheek, her eyes enormous. He starts to say something, to take it back or to say it again properly, and she doesn't let him. She kisses him, hard, with both hands on his face, the way she kissed him on the station platform before she would answer.

When she pulls back she is laughing, and her eyes are wet.

"You'd have to be a citizen," she says.

"Is that a yes?"

"It's the law. Only a citizen can marry a citizen." She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. "A visitor can't. You'd have to live here. Become one of us."

"Then I'll become one of you."

"You don't know what you're saying."

He probably doesn't. He knows a few things. That if he were one of them, a child would count. That a man here gets two, and then he chooses. From this bed two seems a long way off. Two seems like plenty, the most he ever pictured, back when he pictured it at all.

"I'd have my two," he says. "Like anybody."

"Like anybody," she says softly. She lies back down on him and rests her hand on the steel, lightly, and leaves it there.

She goes home at ten. He notices it only later, lying awake under the fan. She hasn't said yes. She hasn't said no either, and he has no idea what happens next.

---

Jessica takes him home to her mother two days later, because she meant the kiss, and in her family a thing like that goes through the house before it goes anywhere else.

She tells her mother first, in the kitchen, in their own language, while her mother cuts fish. Ruth is small and quick, with the same round face as her daughter and grey pinned up in her dark hair, and she listens without stopping the knife.

"A visitor," Ruth says.

"He'd become a citizen."

"The one with the powder."

"Mama."

"Mr. Tane said he was polite." The knife goes on. "A foreign man. Who goes home when his two weeks are done."

"He'll come back."

Ruth doesn't answer that. She lays the fish in the pan, and the oil spits, and she says without turning round, "Lay the table. Three."

Peter comes at seven, in the loose trousers and a shirt the guesthouse owner ironed for him with a face like a funeral. He is walking better. The powder has helped, or he has learned the walk. He holds out a bunch of flowers from the market and says, "Mrs. Arapo," with a little English half-bow, and Jessica loves him so much she has to look at the floor.

Her mother puts him at the end of the table.

It's the chair nobody sits in. There are four chairs, and there were three of them, and since her brother went to the boats there are two, and the chair at the end has stood with its back to the window for eighteen years. Jessica can't remember anyone sitting in it. Not guests, not her cousin, not her brother when he grew tall enough to want it. Her mother puts Peter there without a word, as if it were nothing, and serves him first.

Peter doesn't know. He clears his plate and says the fish is the best he's had on the island, which is true, and Ruth accepts it as her due. She asks him questions in her careful schoolbook English, and he answers them. His work. His parents, in Chester, alive and well. Whether it is true that it rains every day in England.

"Not every day," Peter says. "It just feels like it."

On the sideboard behind him stands the photo of her brother on his first day on the boats, grinning in the blue of the service, with the sea behind him. Peter turns in his chair to look at it.

"Your son? He looks like Jessica."

"He looks like his father," Ruth says.

Nobody says anything after that. The fan turns. Peter, who can't know what he has walked into, looks from one of them to the other and reaches for his water.

Ruth puts down her fork and folds her hands.

"And how many children?"

Jessica freezes. It's her own question, word for word, from the hill in Scotland, and she hears it now the way he must have heard it then, from someone who has no right to ask it and asks it anyway.

But he doesn't stumble this time. He puts his knife down.

"None, Mrs. Arapo."

"None." Ruth studies him for a long moment, and then at her daughter. "Well. That is something."

Jessica knows what it means. Whatever else he is, foreign, pale, a man in a device who buys powder from Mr. Tane, he has both of his two. Nothing spent on some other woman somewhere, no child in England with a claim on him. Her mother is a practical woman. She counts.

And Jessica knows what her mother doesn't say. That a man with two to give can still leave.

Ruth gets up and brings the fruit, the fresh green ones, split open on a plate. She sits down again and doesn't take any.

"Jessica tells me you have asked her to marry you."

Peter goes red to the roots of his hair.

"I have. I should have come to you first. I'm sorry."

"Yes," Ruth says. "You should have." She lets that sit until it has done its work. "And where would you live?"

She asks it of Peter, not of her. He sits in the chair at the end of the table, the one nobody sits in, and opens his mouth to answer.