Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

I looked up at him. ‘We are responsible for a baby. It has no one else.’

‘Only if I accept responsibility.’

The prospect of being alone with a baby made me panic, and I heard an ignorant, desperate stranger’s voice – mine – babbling. It wouldn’t make any difference, I argued, and the words poured out of me. It need not alter anything. Babies were hauled around in slings, left in cloakrooms, given to someone else to look after. A baby could be as unobtrusive, and as uneventful, as one wished it to be.

He listened in silence. At last he stirred. ‘Even I know better.’

I bent my head. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘We won’t talk about this again. I will deal with it.’

Obviously it was not the end of the discussion, but there was only so much I could take. Anyway, I had to think.

Hal got up to check the fire and to exchange a few words with the guard. I remained where I was. Sweat gathered under my arms and in the dip of my back. But inside I felt cold.

We went to our hammocks in silence. That night, I heard Hal tossing and muttering in his sleep – then, and in the nights that followed, when I lay awake and faced the problem with which I had been presented.

We were polite and solicitous, almost strangers. Ironically, I began to feel better, less sick, and accompanied Hal on the planned trips. It was the closest physically I had ever been to him, but it was the proximity of two people who had elected to be on either side of a divide.

On the Monday of the third week, I woke from my customary uneasy sleep to a heavy cramp in the small of my back. Searching in my rucksack, I found the aspirins and tossed a couple of them down.

During the day, the cramp transferred itself to my stomach. I took yet more aspirins and slogged on. That night, in desperation, I begged for a glass of brandy from the medicinal bottle in our equipment. Hal peered at me but, with the new politeness, did not inquire further. He said only, ‘Big day tomorrow.’ We were scheduled to travel up-river again. ‘Hope you’re up to it.’

I squared up to him. ‘You’re being cruel.’

‘Yup,’ he agreed. ‘I am.’

‘Hal, it was a mistake.’

‘I’ve got the picture. And I am behaving badly. But we came out here to do something else. Let’s do it. Then think.’ He softened a little. ‘Just let me get used to it, Rose.’

When it was time to leave, it was clear that I was incapable of swinging out of my hammock, let alone paddling up-river.

Hal bent over the hammock where I lay, my face screwed up with discomfort. His drawl seemed more pronounced. ‘What do you want me to do?’

I tried to sit up but failed. ‘Hal, do you think there’s somewhere I can lie down properly? I need firm ground under me.’

He stroked my face and, for a minute or two, we were back to where we had been. ‘I’ll see what we can do. Then we’d better get you out of here.’

‘I might be losing it,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to, Hal. It has a right to live.’

To his credit, Hal did not reply.

He and the guides set about constructing a rough pallet and they laid me on it. Hal tried to radio Quetzl but a tropical storm raging in the area made reception impossible, and by the time he got through, all the available planes had been commandeered. He managed to consult a doctor, who thought that if I rested there was a chance that I could stave off a threatened miscarriage. He gave Hal some basic instructions and advised him to get me down to Quetzl as soon as possible. What, he asked Hal, was I doing in the rainforest pregnant? The worst bit was that he forbade me to take any more aspirin.

Hal bent over me on the pallet. I shifted and felt sweat inch down my legs to the blood-coloured mud floor. ‘Any better?’

‘Worse.’

‘Poor Rose.’

I had the strangest sensation that my body was rotting. ‘Do I smell?’

‘No.’ His lips brushed at my wet cheek. ‘You look beautiful.’

‘Light’s bad,’ I said.

Hal postponed the longer trip up-river, but I persuaded him to make an alternative day trek to check out a reported sighting of the Indians. To do him justice, Hal was reluctant, but I knew the form and I made him go. ‘I can’t move yet but I’m not in any danger so go.’

He took my hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

It seemed stupid to be angry and distant. ‘You are my joy, Hal.’ He caught his breath audibly. ‘You give me the profoundest joy, the sharpest and the tenderest feelings and there are times… when I think we’re merged with each other. I just want you to know that.’

He stared down at me for a long time. Then, leaving food and water within reach, he briefed the porter who remained to stand guard. Through the opening in the hut I watched him load up and move off.

The day crawled by. I fixed my gaze on a tree framed in the doorway. Its leaves were palmate and shiny, and the bark was fretworked by holes, which revealed flesh coloured pulp. Too late. It reminded me of the dead man in the river.

I studied the map. It was almost noon, and Hal was scheduled to have reached the point where the river curved back on itself, but you could never be sure in the rainforest. At two o’clock he would be heading back.

The map dropped on to the mud floor.

The porter looked in, went away. On the dot, tropical rain drove spears into the clearing then vanished. The leaves steamed with moisture and figures materialized through the steam in the clearing – singing, dancing Yanomami, their feet beating the forest floor into blood-coloured mud. I woke. I dreamt. I shifted from one side to the other.

A few hours later, the pain returned with sickening force and then it was all over.

In the descending dark, I fought against my body, which I was unable to control. No angels, no lit candles here.

I must have cried out, for the porter sidled into the hut. He took one look at me and came back with a drink. It tasted disgusting but I was past caring.

As it grew darker, I drifted in and out of sleep. I was drenched in sweat and wet with blood. There was nothing, no one, for my slippery hands to hang on to, nothing except my loss. Nothing except the dark, beating heart of the jungle.

It was not enough that Hal was my profoundest joy. There were other important things in life. I wanted the responsibilities that Hal did not. Above all, I wanted to keep my children. That was my freedom – a little shaky perhaps, a little circumscribed, but possible. My choices were as simple as Hal’s, but different.

There was no point in looking for Hal. Not now, not ever. He was set on his path, and I did not wish to spend my life loving and waiting and then, as time crawled by, just waiting. Neither was I going to trek along jungle paths and paddle down rivers with this body and its biological design flaw.

The timing was wrong.

I woke with a start as Hal came into the hut, carrying a pot of water. He was very excited. ‘Rose! We saw them and they stayed long enough to make contact. I got some fantastic shots. It was a good trip, the best trip. Couple of blisters on my feet, which I must see to, but, first, I’m going to wash you. It was like nothing I’ve done before, it was…’ He peeled back the cotton sleeping-bag. Our eyes met.

He tried so hard not to let anything show. But the sudden lightening of the gentian eyes told me how deeply the shadows of what might have been had frightened him.

‘Let me wash you, Rose?’

God knows how, but Hal had managed to heat the water. How I had craved the ordinariness of warm water. Carefully, tenderly, he sponged me down and, in my fever state, I imagined that the floor was running red. Without hiding place, without defence, I allowed him to do this for me while I flinched at being so exposed, so female.

Hal kept talking, softly, sweetly: ‘I’m paying special attention to your feet because feet are important. If they don’t feel comfortable, nothing does. That is the first law of the traveller.’ He prised open the spaces between my toes, the water dripped through them and then he dried them. ‘Happy feet?’

‘My feet are very happy, thank you.’