large and rather gross Ford, she thought she detected a certain superiority, a certain condescension directed towards her by its owner.
Fuck you. If I'd arrived in the Jaguar you'd have known who I was.
The woman left the Ford and minced towards the hospital. (Look at the mutant in her black Crimplene pant suit!)
Bettina stood beside the Fiat and picked cigarette butts off her white linen jacket. She was late. As she hurried across behind the Crimplene pant suit, she remembered that she had a pussy full of semen. It was only held in by a Kleenex and a pair of panty-hose. He would smell it. He would know. She wondered whether she should go home but hurried forward, catching her five-inch heel in a metal grating and falling heavily.
'Fuck it.' She had grazed her leg.
The Crimplene pant suit, summoned by the urgency of her obscenity, had hurried back.
'Are you alright?'
Bettina, her leg bleeding, her linen jacket ripped, sat up and gave her most charming middle-class smile. 'Yes,' she said, 'thank you so much.'
In the hospital she had to fight off the nurses who wanted to fix up her knee. If they had known she didn't have knickers on they'd have been scandalized. If they got a sniff of her pussy, God knows what would happen.
She backed away from them, her knee smarting, her lips smiling politely.
'Thank you ever so much,' she said, emphasizing the 'ever' in an English sort of way. 'But I'm in a hurry. I'll fix it when I get home.' She would have liked to have picked the nurses up by their necks and shaken them for their dreary ambitions and their dreary lives. Their sunburnt noses irritated her. They carried their bedpans and buggered up their insides lifting heavy weights. They went back to the suburbs and had families. They ran around answering buzzers and falling in love.
There, Bettina thought, but for the Grace of God, and so on.
'Sit closer.'
'No, no,' she smiled. 'I'm fine.'
'Why are you sitting so far away?'
'I think I'm getting a cold,' she lied. The fishy smell rose from between her legs and in her guilty imagination it assumed the splendid obviousness of a smoke flare spewing upwards from her discreetly tailored lap.
'Had any visitors?'
'Oh,' he laughed, that famous deep brown laugh, and for a moment he looked so
The table in the comer was piled high with fruit. There were pineapples and bananas and passionfruit and grapes, so many grapes, and custard apples and avocados. He was proud of these offerings, she saw, but when Bettina looked at his table, she thought only that it represented the monstrous lack of originality of his friends.
'Eat some,' he said. 'I can't eat it all. Please come and sit here.'
He stretched out his hand. He would never believe, in his wildest dreams, that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as 'tem-perament' or 'wine' as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.
'Come and give your old man a kiss.'
She kissed his hand, making a joke of it.
'On the lips.'
She leant across the bed and kissed him quickly. Of course she loved him, a little at least.
'Phew,' he said, wrinkling up his nose.
Betrayed, she burnt red.
'What have you been up to?'
'Nothing.'
'You've been drinking whisky,' he said.
'Oh, yes,' she said, and added bravely, 'with Joel I got a bit drunk. I fell over in the car park.' And she withdrew a little to show him her bleeding knee. 'I ripped my jacket.' She could feel herself still blushing and he was looking at her with those big dark eyes, as if he knew. But that was a trick of his, not an intentional trick but a misleading sign. He saw nothing. It looked as if he could see everything and people always gave him credit for it.
She dragged the horrible plastic orange chair another inch closer and leaned forward to hold his hand.
'You can bring it closer than that.'
'I'm alright.' She stank. 'What's the matter?'
'Nothing. I'm fine.'
'You've got something on your mind.'
He never knew what was on his mind until he was ques-tioned about it. He would not let himself see his own worries and even his own mind, she thought, was a strange territory to him and it always needed someone else to come along and sift through it and point out interesting or painful things to him. Often she would find him frowning, and, after due ques-tioning, he would say: 'ah, I think I must have a headache.'
But she would not question him today. That slight contrac-tion of the brow could be caused by, probably was caused by, the fishy smell he would not acknowledge.
'I'm going to die,' he said.
'Why do you go on with that?' She didn't mean to snap, but she felt accused. There was no logical, medical reason for him to think he should die.
'Don't be angry.'
'I'm not angry.' Yet she was. Unreasonably angry.
'You're frowning like a bulldog.'
'You're only talking yourself into it. It's like your hives...'
'I don't talk myself into hives.'
'You always know when you're going to get them.'
'I can feel them coming on. I can feel them before you can see them, that's all.'
'You're not going to die.'
'You don't understand,' he said, 'listen to me: I don't mind dying.'
Why did he always give you the feeling that he knew things, that he knew she had dreamed his death a hundred times and now, meekly, he held out his throat to be cut. He would make himself die to show her how wrong she was. She looked at that long sinewy arm, the hairy wrist that emerged from the pyjama coat, and thought about its life and saw, before her eyes, how it would be dead, decaying. She saw maggots, crawling things, and looked up at his face.
'I don't want you to die!' She said as if her secret wish were the core of the problem and once she had said this the problem was solved.
He looked at her with astonishment.
'Why don't you believe me?' she said.
When he didn't answer her (he couldn't think of what to say) she lapsed into angry silence.
'Do you believe in God, Bettina?' She winced. If she had been religious she would have believed in Satan and would have found him, in her terms, 'generally less boring'. But religion represented all the goody-goody two-shoes and she found it embarrassing even to talk about.
'You won't die,' she said. She had torn the crutch of her pantyhose somehow.
'Something very strange happened to me when I had the attack,' he said. 'I haven't told anyone.'
'You should tell the doctor,' she said warily. If her panty-hose had torn...
Bettina shifted in her chair.
'I had a vision.'
'It was lack of oxygen,' she said confidently.
He had a distant look in his eyes like he did when he watched Casablanca on the television. 'I left my body and went up in the air.'
