In Constant Fear Read online

  She never made a big thing of it, but I knew Lile’d been pregnant on several occasions. For some reason, she’d never managed to get it quite right—either she’d wanted it and miscarried, or her situation’d been impossible and she was forced to terminate. Whatever, it’d been a torturous thing to have to go through, and even after all those years she still had days when it skewered deep down into her guts.

  What she never told us—what the birth of Thomas eventually prompted her to confess—was that there had been one survivor. When she was approaching forty and getting acutely aware of the fact that hookers don’t go on forever—taking chances, riding bareback to stay competitive—she fell pregnant yet again, and this time it presented her with a real dilemma: time wasn’t only running out on her career, but also on her chance to be a mother.

  In the end, the maternal tug was that bit stronger and she set out to reinvent herself, to build a new, normal life: renting a little apartment, fixing it up, getting it ready for the baby. She knew it wasn’t gonna be easy, and no way could she see more than a month, or even a couple of weeks, into the future, but she didn’t care about that, only bringing her child into the world: her contribution to humanity, her family, that would be just as good as anyone else’s.

  As Life and Luck would have it, little Sean was born with severe disabilities. He couldn’t walk, was incontinent—he couldn’t even feed himself properly—and Lile was utterly beside herself. She did her best, but with all his special needs, she found it really hard. She left him, she went back, she left him, she went back, she left him—six times! The problem was, she blamed herself: the life she’d led, her many customers, the numerous drugs—recreational and otherwise—all those things she’d done to keep herself from simply getting flushed away.

  She thought she could cope, live only for Sean, but she wasn’t strong enough, and in the end, she put him up for adoption. The only problem there was, no one else was strong enough either, and he ended up in this soulless, decaying and penny-pinched institution. Every time she visited she came away with yet another piece of her heart cauterized. It hurt so much sometimes she just couldn’t go through with it: she’d deliberately miss her stop on the subway, or walk past when she got to the gate, or even get to the door to his ward and see all those that society had forgotten (most, of course, who later ended up on the Island) and not have it in her to enter.

  Finally, she gave up: she was a useless piece of shit and no good to anyone or anything. She forced herself never to go there again, even at Christmas, even on his birthday, those times when it hurt the most, she’d go to a bar and drink herself into a memory-free stupor.

  She never found out who sent the letter, but it made her cry for almost a week. She hadn’t seen Sean for thirteen years; she’d always imagined him still in that God-forsaken institution, dying slowly, or maybe even dead—but it turned out, that wasn’t the case. The thing was, just like us out on the Island, trapped in our own version of a God-forsaken institution, little Sean had been given the tiniest drop of hope, of belief and encouragement, and he too fought back. Whoever it was wrote to Lile, they wanted her to know that he was about to graduate from high school.

  Lile went along to the ceremony, skulking in the shadows at the back of the hall, sobbing so loudly when Sean struggled up the steps to receive his diploma she had to leave. When she finally calmed herself down, she returned to see him with this couple—older than her, but gentle and homely, delighted smiles on their faces, taking it in turns to give him a hug: her son, who she’d given to the world, who she knew she didn’t have the right to cause even the slightest of ripples in his life.

  She walked away and never ever saw him again, still feeling like a useless piece of shit, but on this occasion at least, one helluva happy and proud one.

  I guess that’s the sorta tale you save for a special day, when the weather locks in and won’t let you out ’til you confess, or a drunken night that’ll have no morning, no dawn to soothe away the pain. For sure Delilah only talked about it when she appeared to have no other choice. Where Sean was now, she didn’t know, and actually, I didn’t think she cared that much. It was enough for her to know he was happy, and far more importantly, that he’d made a damn sight better life for himself than she had.

  I could’ve gone out and seen what Jimmy and Gordie were up to, maybe even acted as a crash-barrier between Hanna and Gigi, but I had it in mind to give myself a bit of a treat. I still got those books I took from the bookstore in the City: Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Dickens and Pasternak. I think I told ya, when I first started reading, out on the Island, I realized two things: the first, that I wasn’t anywhere near as dumb as I used to think; and the second, that reading’s one of the greatest pleasures life has to offer. Books take me to another place, one that I never would’ve gone otherwise; they’ve also helped me to express myself a whole lot better. I can articulate stuff now that before I could only grunt about. And I worked at it, too, I really did, not just for myself, but for Lena as well. She inspired me that way: to be the best man I could possibly be.

  I’d read all four books—For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Tale of Two Cities, The Grapes of Wrath and Doctor Zhivago—any number of times, but I could always stand to read them again. My favorite was The Grapes of Wrath—I’m not declaring it the best, just that it was my favorite, maybe ’cuz of all that trekking across the land, looking for salvation; it’s something we could really identify with.

  I thought back to the old days, when I was with Mr. Meltoni and he used to tease me for being illiterate, for never having read a book or knowing anything about what he called “the finer things of life.” But ya know, those writers he used to talk about with such authority?—Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and the like—I don’t think he’d read even one of them. The only thing I ever saw him read was the racing page. He just gave off this aura of being knowledgeable and sophisticated, and everyone believed him. I bet I could speak about literature now and he wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about. All he knew was a few quotes, ones that everyone knows and can smile at with recognition so they can congratulate themselves on how clever they are.

  We sealed up the outside door again that night, and any other cracks we could find, but the way it’d rained, I couldn’t imagine those weevils were still around. They’d either drowned or been washed away, or maybe they’d continued their migration up to higher ground. In fact, when I thought about it, I wondered if that was it? Instinct had told them a big storm was on its way and they’d been hightailing it up into the hills.

  Thomas woke up crying at one point, sounding more than averagely distressed, and I was across that room quicker than I would’ve thought possible, making sure he wasn’t being bothered by invading insects, but there was nothing. I picked him up, Lena sleepily inquiring if he was okay, but she was back to breathing heavy even before I could answer. It was too wet to walk him outside so I just sat in a chair, rocking him back and forth ’til he finally fell asleep.

  I stayed there with him in my arms all night, I guess feeling a bit more secure that way, that I could keep a close eye on him. At one stage I had to hand him over to Lena for feeding, but as soon as he’d stopped sucking and started trying to blow bubbles, she gave him back and I resumed my seat, thinking there was no way I could sleep, but actually nodding off within a few minutes.

  I awoke to find the little guy silently lying there staring up at me, those big blue eyes again expressing astonishment. I mean, what could I say? Get used to it, kid. I’m your old man and nothing’s ever gonna change that.

  It was hard to believe we’d had so much rain the day before. Even the areas that had been temporarily flooded were now more or less dried out. I went over to check on the wheat fields and was relieved to find that they’d recovered; everything was pointing skywards again, bursting with life, new ears of wheat appearing and rapidly transforming themselves into golden nuggets for us to grind into flour.

  I called in on Jimmy in the barn, stopping
dead in my tracks as I entered: the tandem had been given a new paint job, in fact, repainted in just about every color of the rainbow: yellow, blue, pink, red, purple, the original green. Not only that, it was now sporting stripes, spots, a pair of horns on the handlebars—and it’d been christened “the Typhoon Tandem.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Gordie decided it needed a little pimping,” he smirked, almost as if he saw it as revenge for Lena’s and my buckling the wheel. “Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, ready to acknowledge that maybe we deserved it, though Lena wasn’t gonna have to suffer the way I was.

  “Think I might head over to Nick’s later,” he told me, “if you feel like coming along?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “I wanna talk to him about that weevil smorgasbord we so generously provided.”

  Once again Gigi joined us. You either got her or the “lovebirds” (as she called them), rarely both, and after the big stand-off on the porch the day before, this wasn’t likely to be an exception. I did ask Jimmy, as Lena was staying with Thomas, if he thought Lile might like to come along, but getting up over that hill’s quite a challenge for her now. I don’t know if she’d ever told him how old she was exactly, but since we’d been out in the country and she’d run outta stuff like make-up and hair dye, Lile was looking a lot older. In fact, I think Jimmy’d been under the impression that he’d taken up with a younger woman; now he probably wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t just her appearance; she seemed permanently weary, like an old battery that couldn’t be properly charged. Not that I reckoned there was anything wrong with her—she was just getting old, like we all do eventually.

  After the rain everything felt and looked that bit fresher, and when we got to that point at the top of the hill where you could look down into both valleys it was almost uplifting, like we’d been cleansed along with everything else. However, as we descended toward the other smallholdings, the mood began to change. It was Gigi who noticed first, probably ’cuz she was the youngest and got the best eyesight.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  I never said anything, just kept walking, expecting to see signs of life at any moment—a distant figure, smoke from a chimney—but she was right, there was nothing.

  “That’s weird,” Jimmy commented.

  “They’re around somewhere,” I said, a little dismissively.

  We walked on, all three of us scanning the valley, trying not to react but slowly becoming more alarmed.

  “I don’t like this,” Jimmy muttered. “Definitely not cool.”

  “Maybe they all burst into flames,” Gigi joked, but Jimmy and me didn’t even acknowledge that she’d spoken.

  As we approached the nearest dwelling, I started to call out, softly at first but then turning it into a real bellow: “Hello! . . . Hello!”

  Still there was no sign of anyone and I went to knock on the door. We waited for a while; I tried again, but still there was no answer.

  “Let’s go to Nick’s,” I said. “He ain’t going anywhere, not with Miriam.”

  We went over to Nick’s place, again calling out, knocking on the door, but still with no reply.

  “I don’t get this,” I said, scanning the length of the valley, but Gigi decided on a little more direct action, trying Nick’s door and finding it open.

  “Hey, hey!” I shouted, but she was already inside.

  We followed on behind, going from room to room, noting a few things had been taken. There was no sign of life, not even Miriam; no evidence of a struggle, they’d just upped and left by the look of it.

  “Where’ve they gone?” Jimmy asked.

  We went back outside, and stood on the porch, still half-expecting to see someone approaching.

  “Something must’ve frightened them off,” Gigi said.

  Jimmy and me momentarily exchanged looks, not wanting to say anything or ponder too much on that idea.

  We checked several more dwellings, but it was the same story: looked like everyone had grabbed a few essentials and taken off.

  “I don’t get it,” Jimmy said. “Nick’s cool. He’s not just gonna up and leave.”

  For a while we wandered around aimlessly, feeling helpless and confused, wondering what to do. Should we search for them? Did they need help? Did this have something to do with crazies? We even tried shouting up to the hills and the surrounding forest, but there was nothing, not even an echo.

  “Big Guy,” Jimmy said, indicating the nearby wheat field.

  Their fields stretched way out into the distance and had been well in advance of ours, all of it ripe and golden the last time we’d been there—but that wasn’t what Jimmy was pointing out. The whole thing had been stripped and from what we could see, there wasn’t an intact ear anywhere.

  “Those damn weevils,” I muttered.

  “Looks like it.”

  It was a hard thing to imagine. Thousands, millions, I guessed, of weevils cutting a huge swathe across the country: a big black wave of them sweeping up from our place, over the hill, and then down into the next valley, on to bigger and riper pickings. It was also surprising that from what we could see, they appeared to have a diet of nothing but wheat.

  “Maybe that was what scared them away,” Gigi suggested.

  It did make a kinda sense, but it didn’t altogether sit that easy. We’d fought them off; surely Nick and the others would’ve done the same?

  Eventually we made our way back up the hill, no one talking, still not sure what’d happened and in a strange way feeling like we’d been abandoned. We’d lost our only neighbors, and been left to face an increasing threat on our own.

  When we got back to the farm and told the others, they were every bit as dumbfounded as we were, asking all manner of questions we had no way of answering: why hadn’t they sent someone over the hill to tell us? Why hadn’t they come to us for help? Were we sure it was weevils?

  Later I went out and checked our fields again. Just that one day of sunshine (and maybe all that rain) had created yet another bewildering leap skywards. The overwhelming majority of what the weevils had left was now plump and apparently ready for harvesting. It was a miracle, and time for us to start thinking about how we were gonna to mill the wheat, though Jimmy had told us not to bother, that we could leave that to him.

  I wasn’t really sure why, but for some reason I found myself going around checking on Lena’s guide wires; reattaching stuff that had been blown off during the storm, digging a couple of new holes for posts that had become unstable in the sodden soil. It wasn’t exactly the greatest alarm system ever, especially as only one of us was guaranteed to hear it, but for some reason knowing it was there made me feel that bit more secure.

  It didn’t happen too often, and I’m not altogether sure what the reason was, but that night Thomas not only fell asleep with no trouble at all, it looked like he was gonna stay that way. In fact, he was so quiet in that snug little nest of his, I checked on him a coupla times to make sure he was okay. It made for an unusually relaxed evening, and after dinner, Lena poured us both some hooch—unless I was reading the signs incorrectly, in the mood for a little love-making.

  It wasn’t the way it used to be—before Thomas, I mean—and I wouldn’t’ve expected it either. Maybe it never would be like that again. I just figured that if I left it up to her, let her make the decision, then eventually we’d find our balance again—a different one maybe, but it’d be the right one for us. And anyways, let’s be absolutely honest about it, at my age I ain’t always got the energy myself. When it did happen, and providing we didn’t get any interruptions from Master Thomas, it was still one of the best feelings I’d ever known.

  Pardon me for being so indiscreet, but when I was younger, I used to have a more than healthy sexual appetite, but sadly, no way of fulfilling it. Problem was, I was never all that comfortable in the company of women (the archetypal “big guy”—who never ever got the girl). Some guys can chat away with women th
ey’ve just met as if they’ve known them all their lives; with me, I talked to women I’d known all my life as if I’d just met them. It was like that for so long, well into my twenties, that eventually I decided that if I wasn’t gonna miss out on that side of life altogether, there was only one way for me to receive a little sexual pleasure.

  Took me four months to summon up the nerve. I knew where to go—the wrong end of Union; everyone knew that, but I didn’t think I’d ever persuade myself down there. That first occasion was one of the most embarrassing episodes of my life. It just didn’t feel right: she was a total stranger, we’d exchanged barely a dozen words, and there we were participating in the most intimate act two people can. But gradually, shit to admit, I did become something of a regular, with several ladies; some who cared, some who didn’t, some who I left with a smile on my face, some who I left with my heart so heavy I thought it might’ve stopped. But my pledge to myself as I skulked back to where I’d hidden Mr. Meltoni’s limo was always exactly the same: I’ll never, ever do that again.

  See, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. I remember the last time I went, I got into this slightly weird mood: I didn’t want sex, I wanted something else. I wanted this short, rather homely little Latino lady to tell me she loved me, that was all. She didn’t have to touch me, or me her, just declare that in that moment she had more feeling for me than any other person on this earth. Crazy, huh? I mean, she did oblige, but not all that convincingly. It even went through my head that those people who ran those places were missing a trick: there should be “emotional whores”—rooms where you could go and be told you’re a special person and worthy of love. I think it’d be a real money-maker. I mean, I might’ve been lucky enough to have found Lena, but there are plenty of people, men and women, out there who don’t have anyone and I reckon they’d be happy to pay handsomely for someone to spend thirty minutes filling in those great aching voids in their wasteland hearts.