By Nicola Lazenby
She shook her head. Of all the things to do on a Saturday night in Barcelona. All it took was a Morrissey song she had only ever heard about twice in her life, and too many cheap Mojitos. “Take me out tonight. Take me anywhere I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care”... She wondered how many people Morrissey had gotten laid.
It had been one of those hot summer ideas people sometimes have when they get a glimpse of the romance in something they are about to do. When they think of the way they will tell the story later. That really was the only romantic thing about having sex without a condom up against a sink. She was on a bus to France in the middle of Summer. Outside the brutal sun baked the houses on the hillsides and the tar ahead until everything shimmered and waved and collapsed into heatstroke. She was on a bus to France and all she could think about was the tiny skeleton buried in the back yard on another continent. She was on a bus and there was nowhere she could go.
The air conditioned coach was gliding efficiently through the thick Spanish heat. Erin sat at the back, plugging her anger with her earphones. Erin hadn’t spoken to her all morning. Arianne chewed a loose bit of skin from the side of her thumb. Yesterday she was a virgin. Fuck. She smirked into her reflection in the window. Yes, fuck, quite literally. She turned to look back at Erin through the gaps in the chairs. Erin shot her a glare from under her eyelids then gazed deliberately out at the cruel sun stripped landscape. Arianne felt hot in the pit of her stomach.
Ben Shiresford. Remember his name, she had thought, as she stood in the dark bathroom mopping a towel between her legs. That’s the least you can do. “It was lovely”. God. She shut her eyes and pulled her knees up. She looked around at the other passengers, sweating, bored, limp in their seats. Were they also in their own personal quiet desperation, somewhere behind their closed eyelids?
“I need my wallet,” Erin, her mouth set like a reprimand.
Arianne was getting angry. The critical voice in her head had had free reign for most of the day already, spitting venomous black accusations into her thoughts. They slithered and scuttled around in her mind like insects. It was just about all she could take without Erin’s silent judgements radiating out all over the bus. She thought better of starting up the argument again and reached for her bag, wincing slightly.
“You probably have an STD,”
“Don’t be stupid, Erin. It’s sex. It’s physical. I’m stiff, not infected,”
But even as she said it another nest of angry ant-thoughts broke open and began to swarm. She could feel their pinching mandibles, sudden and painful. Was HIV as big of a deal in Europe? Other STDs? How long until the warts/rashes/discharges would tell her? She was quite old to be losing her virginity, she thought. Although how old was twenty-three these days? Surely these were the kinds of idiot things teenagers were supposed to do. Although not Erin, Arianne almost snorted, the irony of the situation being that Erin was the youngest, and the most responsible of the two.
Erin took her wallet and walked away back to her seat. She was old enough to have an opinion but still young enough to be ruthlessly critical about the things other people did. Especially her older sister. Especially after her stupid behaviour last night. Everything was conveniently black and white when you were a teenager who hadn’t made any Real mistakes yet. Real mistakes, with a capital “R”, belonged to adults, and that’s how it had been since the day they had found the bones in the back yard.
She was seven, and Erin was four, when they dug up a shallow grave of human bones. Squatting out in the humid December garden, the beetles shrieking so loud and making her teeth vibrate, Arianne squeezed the sticky soil in her fists and toes. The small skull was grinning. She picked up her plastic dinosaur. Its moulded gaping mouth with teeth and a red tongue was full of dirt. Its eyes were frozen open. She made him walk around distractedly. Erin began to cry. Arianne pushed the end of the dinosaur tail into an apricot near her foot. Hundreds of them surrounded her, rotting sweetly into the ground. Worms and ants exploded out of it. One of the crawling things, a millipede or something, began to creep up Erin’s leg and she wailed even louder. It might have bitten her but Arianne couldn’t remember.
Their mother had come outside to see what was happening. When she saw them there, squatting over the hole, she had gone pale. She had let the half empty mug she was holding fall from her hand and turned around slowly, walking back to the house in measured steps. Not long after that their father had come out and gathered them up, breaking the strange pull of the empty skull, so that finally Arianne’s mouth gaped open and she cried without a sound. With her eyes wide open.
Their dad tucked them in that night. They hadn’t seen their mother since the afternoon. Arianne whispered to her him that she didn’t want her dinosaur anymore. When he asked her why she said it was because she could see its bones. He told her that she should keep it for a little while longer, and that if after tomorrow she still didn’t want it then he would take it away. He left the room and Arianne looked at her dinosaur in the yellow bedside lamplight. She felt a strange mix of pity and ruthlessness, feeling sorry for it but being afraid of it as well. She didn’t like the way the white plastic showed through in the places where the green paint had worn off. Especially on the tip of the tail. That was the worst. Probably because she put it in her mouth too often.
Erin was rubbing her heel up and down the wall absentmindedly, eyes closed, sucking on a dummy she was too old for. Her foot, in a little purple sock, made a rustling sound as it brushed against her drawings stuck up beside the bed. Every few minutes her breath would catch and stutter in her chest, aftershocks and tremors. Arianne got up and took her dinosaur out to find her father. He was in the yard.
The sky was inky, staining the clouds strange shades of blue and purple, and the moon was a white bone eye. She could see his form near the place where they found the bones. He moved in the shadows, stepping on rotten apricots. She could hear the scrape of digging.
“Daddy,”
There was a soft sound coming from him. A low, animal sound.
“I don’t want it Daddy,”
He turned suddenly. She imagined seeing his eyes flash silver like the dogs at night, “Come here. Bring it here.”
She walked over and gave him the toy. There was a black plastic bag and a shovel lying next to him. A big hole in the earth had been opened up and it lay shadowy and deep.
“It’s gone now, see? Daddy took it away.” Arianne nodded, fiddling with the dinosaur’s left foot. Her father took the T-Rex and put it into the black plastic bag, then scooped Arianne and the bag up. He walked slowly across the garden, feeling unearthed, like a hole in the night time, clutching two of his children to his chest.
It was years before Arianne heard the story from her mother. How there had been three babies. Arianne and Erin, and one in between. How her mother had had to sit in the bath tub. One of the many things she had tried must have done it. She had known there was no going to the hospital. Arianne’s father had found her out in the garden, digging a hole under the apricot tree. “So it will grow another way”. He had fought with her. He had even dug it up once, but she had become so wild he put it back, making her promise to go and see someone. She told him to go fuck himself and that he couldn’t possibly understand and that this was how women did things before there were hospitals or shrinks. She ate apricots every season.
For a long time there had been quiet panic in Arianne’s house, mostly from her father, as he tried to make sure his wife would never do something like that again. He sensed the fault line in her, the rumblings just below her surface. He felt a shadow lingering near her, small and child shaped. It was only when Erin arrived, squirming and alive, that something clicked back into place. And for a while there was relative peace. He had consoled himself with the belief that she had panicked, not felt ready for another one so soon, and there was nothing he could have done even if he had come home earlier or listened when she had told him something was wrong. And then his two little girls had dug up their secret in the garden.
So what was going to happen now if Arianne was pregnant? This was a thought that ran through both Arianne and Erin’s minds at relatively the same time as they lay that night in their hotel room, their backs to one another. Like their father, both girls felt a twinge of responsibility for their mother’s wellbeing. To watch her. Monitor the tremors. Erin knew Arianne wouldn’t keep it. Arianne knew what Erin was thinking. Both of them were angry for the same reason, but blamed it on each other. If you hadn’t found the bones.
The bones, even thought they had been tied up in a black plastic bag and “taken away”, were still very much here. Even in France. They were folded into the hotel bed, beneath the sheets. They were in the hand luggage from the bus, still not unpacked on the floor. They were what Arianne carried around with her, possibly in her womb, a few cells big. They were crawling up Erin’s legs getting ready to bite. Even the moon, bone white, was grinning like a skull. The same moon that shone down somewhere in Pretoria on the house where their parents lived.
Maybe this was how the baby would return to them. Crawling back from the world of the dead into a warm womb to be born again. Maybe, Arianne thought, this was what happened when you buried things, when you made them go away, when you threw them out. The white plastic showing through the green paint. Maybe after so many years of carrying things for her mother this would be the final, most tangible manifestation.
The next morning when Arianne woke up she lay in bed, slowly contemplating the day before. On the dressing table, among the things they had dumped there haphazardly in their exhaustion when they arrived, stood a white bowl she hadn’t noticed before. Complementary, welcoming them to the hotel. It was full of fruit. It was apricot season in France.
