Baby Read online

  ‘You’ve got to buy us groceries,’ Cynthia says. ‘Anahera and I have discussed it. You’ll fill up the dinghy. So you nearly sink.’

  Gordon laughs. ‘You’re pretty interesting,’ he says. ‘There are some hugely interesting things here, to be found.’

  She shuts herself in the cabin and weeps a bit. She’d like to have her crying done by the time Anahera returns, and to be engaged in an activity. But Anahera comes back sooner than expected, and immediately Gordon starts asking her things, and Cynthia knows he’ll be touching things and touching her, so she stays where she is. He’s unashamed, like a huge infant. When Cynthia does come back out, they’re playing cards. Anahera asks if she wants to join in, but it looks hard, boring and stupid, so she says no. After dinner they play some more. In the cabin, waiting for them to finish, Cynthia looks at Ron’s number again. When she’s done more than enough waiting, she sticks her head through the door. ‘Are you nearly done? It’s a shit-hole in here. It stinks.’

  Gordon laughs knowingly. It does.

  Anahera scrunches up her face, as if confused. It doesn’t matter, Cynthia doesn’t move. Anahera says, ‘If you want we’ll pack up after this round, in say, ten minutes?’

  ‘No,’ Cynthia says, ‘that’s too long.’

  She sleeps in the cabin.

  Later, she wakes and hears them. There’s talking she can’t make out, then a sound of Gordon flopping over. They’re in bed.

  ‘Well, no. But—’ from Anahera.

  ‘They all do the Tinder thing. It’s their normal.’

  There’s a noise of shifting bedding, like Anahera’s grabbed his head and moved on top of him. He groans, and she says, ‘Gordon, you don’t know a thing about women.’

  He laughs in deep splutters, and Cynthia thinks there are thuds of Anahera pummelling his chest. Then she must stop, because he says in a deep, smooth voice, ‘We all need someone, that’s all I’m saying.’

  Quiet, then, ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Hey,’ and there’s shuffling again. They’ve settled against each other. ‘Hey,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ she tells him.

  39.

  Breakfast is couscous with canned tomatoes. It must be an apology, and it’s delicious. They eat together. ‘Gordon, you’re going to get groceries today, as many as you can. On your own card,’ Anahera tells him. He salutes, and keeps eating. He’s wearing Cynthia’s father’s pyjamas. Anahera washes the dishes, and he changes on the deck. When he’s ready to leave he folds them and puts them in Anahera hands.

  After he goes she tells Cynthia, ‘If they haven’t come for us, I don’t think they will. We just need to get his money and we’ll go.’

  Cynthia shrugs, happily, but there’s a change in Anahera’s eyes. ‘You must be tired?’ she asks. ‘He’s big, I imagine, to be in bed with. You must be exhausted.’

  Anahera sighs, like a mother or a cleaning woman, and gets up to dry the dishes.

  ‘Don’t you see? You don’t have to dry them at all!’ Cynthia says. ‘There’s a rack, you can just leave them on the rack! They dry themselves, effectively.’ But she stops. Discussions on this subject only ever become sad and philosophical.

  ‘This isn’t a big boat, Cynthia,’ Anahera says.

  Cynthia doesn’t mention that as the extra person, Gordon should be doing them. She says instead, ‘We used to be such dirty girls, Anahera! Before he arrived.’ She’s embarrassed at the way Anahera’s name seems to glug in her mouth, like it did before they knew each other. There’s a hard clunk of her tongue over the ‘r’, and a quick ‘a’ at the beginning, like in the small, dismal word ‘ant’. She knows, Anahera always cleaned. It just didn’t seem like much till Gordon arrived. Still, as she must, she continues audaciously, ‘We were kidnappers, and we suntanned, and we had better biscuits. He’s going to come back with shortbreads, and they’re so dry.’

  Anahera flinches at kidnappers, but only says, ‘I don’t like Tim Tams, Cynthia, you like Tim Tams.’ Then she sighs again, deeper and drier this time, and re-wipes a plate.

  ‘I don’t even know what biscuits you like!’ Cynthia says, but it comes out more like wailing.

  Anahera turns and shrugs in a cooperative way, as if it’s not important.

  ‘Tell me something,’ Cynthia says quickly. ‘While he’s gone—who would you rather kiss: Katy Perry or Beyoncé?’

  ‘Beyoncé.’ Anahera puts the plate away, finally.

  ‘Me too!’ Cynthia’s toes are wriggling. ‘Do you miss our old days sometimes?’

  Anahera pauses. ‘Yeah.’

  Cynthia beams. ‘He’s just so boring, and he’s got a honky nose.’

  Anahera looks at her, as if the word might still be hanging there in the air, in front of her face. She laughs. Cynthia blinks. Anahera likes her and that’s the truth. They only need to get back to the island where everything went so wrong, and let destiny set it right. There, Gordon was nothing and they were in each other’s orbit.

  ‘We need to go back,’ Cynthia says. ‘To our island. To stretch our legs, because we can’t go into town, and we can’t be like this a moment longer.’

  Anahera waves at the window, and the distance behind it. ‘It’s a crime scene. It’s disappeared.’

  This isn’t true. ‘Pussy,’ Cynthia says quietly.

  ‘What?’

  She didn’t mean it seriously, but the way Anahera’s looking at her makes Cynthia feel like a rude, breast-sucking little boy. She’s ashamed. ‘Pussy,’ she whispers, glaring at Anahera’s face.

  ‘We’ll never find it again,’ Anahera says definitively.

  ‘He used your toothbrush,’ Cynthia tells her.

  Gordon returns in the dinghy, moving very slowly but paddling hard. He’s red-faced, and Anahera gets him a cup of water. The dinghy’s absolutely full, with food piled high around his sitting hips. Anahera ties it up, and it floats oddly, dangerously, as if it’s on the brink of sinking. She unloads it, bending down towards him while he sits there.

  Cynthia stands back and watches Anahera’s hands move things from around Gordon’s hips, then his waist, and finally his feet. There are ten big water bottles, the same number of instant pasta sachets, a bottle of dishwashing liquid, one of vodka, and a bag of apples. There’s a way Anahera grabs the food products that Cynthia doesn’t like, and she stops noticing what they are. When Anahera leans down, over the edge of the boat and towards Gordon in the dinghy, her breasts are at his face level. Her hands and arms graze him, and he sits there as solid and dumb as a post, still puffing a little.

  Cynthia waits for some instruction, but it doesn’t come. Not until Anahera’s shifted every last thing onto the boat does Gordon, still with blood in his face, get out to help put it away. Cynthia swivels to watch them, now they’re in the kitchen. Gordon’s shoulders touch Anahera’s, and a couple of times they each reach for the same item and Gordon beams so big that even though Cynthia can only see Anahera’s back, she knows he’s being smiled at.

  Anahera pours three cups of Fanta, and drinks hers while making some mac and cheese with fresh broccoli on the stove. She uses three packets, which seems excessive. Gordon probably got too many. He swallows his Fanta in a glug, and pours himself some milk. ‘Smells good,’ he tells Anahera. Then to Cynthia, ‘I am thinking,’ he says, ‘during my long paddle. You are a young woman, Cynthia, and I find your ambitions inspiring. Very.’ He nods at her. ‘To become a news presenter, you said to me. It was your dream.’

  She ignores him. Anahera doesn’t turn from her pot.

  ‘I am thinking, we should act out our fantasises. Self-love is so nice here!’

  There was another thing she told him: that she and Anahera were in a real relationship. It makes her want to drown herself, to slam her head down into the table like it’s water. She bites forwards, but it’s like apple bobbing, words are too big for her and slip away from her mouth. She can’t breathe. She’d like to throw herself away, into the water, and to die. Still, she lies more. ‘Yeah, my father thought
I should do it. He knew the people. But then I got into a specific postgrad thing, and I felt that was more important.’

  Neither Gordon nor Anahera asks a single question. Anahera slops mac and cheese into three plastic bowls and they eat it.

  Cynthia’s in the bathroom, examining her regrowth in the mirror. Gordon leans on the doorway and says, ‘I invented a philosophy, it is: if you are not making your own dream, you are making someone else’s. I ask you now, do you believe in your own self-love?’

  She lets her hair go and looks instead at his eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I know your island. You will go back to it.’

  She turns on him suddenly. ‘How do we know we can trust you?’

  ‘Oh!’ Gordon shifts quickly backwards. ‘Oh, for what?’

  Cynthia pushes past him, to get out.

  ‘I will think about it for you,’ he tells her. ‘I will think of a reason.’

  They have tomato soup for dinner that night, with more broccoli, carrots and leek. Then sausages. After dinner, Anahera and Gordon play cards again. At ten, Cynthia tells them it’s time to switch the table for the bed, she wants to sleep. They do, but Anahera doesn’t lie down with Cynthia, she goes out to sit under the washing-line with Gordon, talking.

  Cynthia creeps out into the deep night. The air and water are one big nothing, and her hands disappear in front of her, into the black. It’s very difficult, but she plants her feet firmly onto the narrow walking platform along the side of the boat, one after the other, and holds tight to the support bar like it’s a hand reached out to save her. The screws are loose, they must be, because the bar shifts when she does, but Cynthia doesn’t worry or even think about drowning. She moves closer, slowly, silently, and hears Anahera say, ‘All my problems, he solved them all. But he’d get this look on his face, you know, this smug-generous look. And it would just stay there for hours and hours, after I’d thanked him, thanked him twice and made his dinner, and I’d know he was waiting for me to thank him again.’

  Cynthia clings tight. Her hair itches at the edge of her forehead, but she doesn’t move her hands.

  ‘Mmm,’ Gordon says. ‘I know what you mean.’

  It’s the boat that shifts. Cynthia’s feet slip and she squeals. Neither of them says anything, and both stay silent while she makes her way back around the side of the boat, then to bed.

  He’s a mindless speaking thing; a tongue, and he’s crawled out of the cabin and smeared his spit and noise all over Cynthia’s boat, her home and Anahera. A tongue: a big flaccid muscle, out and wriggling too far from its mouth. He’s not where he belongs, and because of him there’s no place for Cynthia either.

  40.

  The next morning Cynthia’s desperate in a sexy way. She licks Anahera’s neck, unabashed like a dog, from her collarbone to the lobe of her ear. ‘You’re nice, really,’ she whispers. Anahera grins, still mostly sleeping. ‘Yeah, I am.’

  Cynthia snuggles her till they’re both hungry.

  ‘I am too!’ Gordon shouts from outside, where he’s fishing, and Cynthia’s not at all surprised by his listening. Anahera gets up and makes porridge, then tells them to save her some while she swims. Gordon takes more than he should, and Cynthia has to take less than she wants so there’s some left over.

  ‘I’ve made up my answer,’ he says, ‘to your important question of yesterday. You can trust me because you can trust Anahera. She is pressed down on me like a thumb. She kissed me so good, hard, last night.’

  Cynthia doesn’t go cold hearing this, she settles into the cold she already is. She’s calm. She knows—and Gordon must have his own inklings—that they’re bad women, and dangerous. Some kissing is nothing. Cynthia shrugs.

  He sits, still waiting for a response, but she’s given one. She finishes her porridge and throws the bowl in the sink. It clangs but it’s plastic. Anahera’s a whore, but Cynthia’s not worried. What she understands is this: their shame, and their pride too, are engines, whirring now. The game’s started, and Cynthia will play it.

  Anahera clambers back onto the boat and stands dripping in the same place she did when she first confessed her island to Cynthia, announcing their destiny. She looks around, and notices the lack of porridge in the pot, then Gordon’s fingers at the elasticated collar of his shirt. She notices Cynthia too—Cynthia can feel her guts and posture under Anahera’s eyes. The hard coolness in Anahera’s glance makes Cynthia think of the moment just before Toby fell from the tree. There’s something she didn’t notice then, but she remembers it now all the same; Anahera’s face just before he fell, enraptured. He wanted to impress her, and he did.

  Anahera’s neck stretched right back, her face lifted to him, and a twitch in her lip as if a hook were through it, pulling. Light falling onto her cheeks through the trees, and into her eyes. Her hands held slack in the shadows, forgotten, beside Cynthia. But her heart, and her blood! Anahera’s blood must have moved so fast as they stood there together, quickened by seeing him, and Cynthia’s sure she has more of it than a usual person. Murderess, Cynthia thinks, and who knows? Anahera might have been thinking the same of her for weeks.

  Her love for Anahera is laced with something better than love: destiny, fate. Clearly, Anahera is some things. No matter. All Cynthia wants is to stand beside her again, amid the trees. Cynthia’s regrowth is black, and long now. Her hair at the ends is dry from salt. Even her new fat is something; she only needs Anahera to bite it off. They’re of the same wilderness; the same badness. She’s proud, she won’t be hurt. Gordon simply can’t be with them.

  She won’t use her new knowing immediately. She’s daring now, but also in new self-control. She smiles sweetly at Anahera, her partner and lover, and ignores Gordon, then holes herself up in the cabin under the light of her phone, with their three squeezy last apples. In that dark little space, with her phone’s brightness right down to save power, her mind opens wider. Cynthia’s at war—with a man—for a woman. She watches The Bachelor for three hours. It’s all about how to fight your enemies by lying, kissing, fucking and dressing really well. All she needs to do is remember everything she knew in her old life.

  Either Cynthia or Gordon will be humiliated. The water and sky don’t care which, and Anahera doesn’t necessarily either. It doesn’t matter about the truth of anyone’s love. You either have the gumption and talent to win a place for what you’ll call your love, or you don’t and it means nothing—if you can’t swim, the water won’t hold you.

  The Bachelor girls fight and cry hard. Vienna wins even though she’s got a bad face, particularly when she cries, but Cynthia knows she’s tougher. She’s a killer, with new tan lines and an oiliness that won’t leave the nape of her neck. At midday, Anahera passes some canned soup through the gap in the door. Cynthia takes it, then takes Anahera’s fingers and sucks two of them. She pulls them hard with her whole mouth, right into the back of her throat. When they sit down to dinner, she’s going to tell Gordon, ‘You’re an ugly piece of shit and we all know it. Your ex-girlfriend knew it. Your time here is finite.’ He’ll act hurt and wipe his eyes, but she’ll tell him not to bother.

  She’ll ruin him at dinner, and seduce Anahera at night. How it works is, you tell a person what they are, then you tell other people what they are, and if they become that thing by your telling, you win.

  41.

  It’s baked beans, dinner. Gordon comes in and wipes his brow as if fishing was a hard day, and sits opposite them both. He combs his fingers through his hair, then pats where he’s growing a beard. ‘So, ladies,’ he says, leaning forward towards them, onto his elbows, ‘I hear the police here are silly and willy-nilly. Arresting everybody all over the place.’

  ‘Oh?’ Anahera asks. ‘Who’ve you been talking to?’

  ‘Just at the supermarket, my friends there.’

  Anahera laughs, so Cynthia does too.

  He waits for them to stop. ‘I am thinking now, we should make a practice. For if there is an emergency questioni
ng!’ He grins, ear to ear, like an infant who’s just been changed and spitefully peed himself.

  They say nothing. Anahera leans over and touches his elbow. He leans in and holds her shoulder, then pulls her forward. They kiss, gracelessly, over the table. Anahera shifts her bowl of beans aside so she can rest on her arm. Cynthia takes a bite of her bread, then puts in a spoonful of beans. She won’t listen to their spitty tongues, instead she chews, loudly, so they can hear. Sadly, she knows, this will be her chief act of aggression this evening. She adds more bread, swallows half of what’s in her mouth, and recommences chewing.

  Gordon unlocks his lips from Anahera’s. In a new, unaccented voice he says, ‘Do you have any awareness of the incident?’

  ‘No,’ Anahera says, but there’s a flinch in her neck, and Gordon’s seen it.

  ‘Where were you at the time of the incident?’

  Cynthia begins swallowing to answer, but Anahera interrupts her. ‘What incident?’

  ‘Ah,’ Gordon says. His accent and smile return. ‘Good.’ He looks at Cynthia. ‘Will it be fine if I steal her away tonight, for a little ride in the dinghy?’

  Cynthia looks at Anahera, and there’s a slight nod. ‘Whatever,’ she tells him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. He stands up and makes a little bow. ‘You are generous and mature.’ Then he turns to do the dishes.

  The paddle moves gently at the ends of Gordon’s huge arms. There are no waves, and the boat slips through the water like a tongue into a mouth, silently. They stop. It’s dark, they’ve not gone far. The moon falls on them like a spotlight. He’s murmuring to her, Cynthia can’t make out what, and Anahera murmurs back. It’s his moment, he’s alone with her. For all Cynthia knows he could be reciting a poem. She can’t see Anahera’s face, but she’s wearing a singlet, her arms are uncovered. The moonlight, or some reflection from the water, has glazed the skin of her shoulders just slightly blue. One arm is bent back, its elbow pointing, to hold the edge of the dinghy, and the other is lifted to touch the skin behind her ear, where Cynthia knows it’s soft.