And then Eddy Rivette heard something new: a rasp in the horse’s lungs that told him ’Isra was driving her too harshly and that, maybe, if only he could stay the pace of that gallop, the horse would have to slow sometime.
Both men heard both lungs racking, the runner and the horse both wanting the race over so that they could halt the pounding and gasp in air and air and normalize their hearts and lungs and shocked legs. No distance now. Just the turn and the few metres to the villagers at the store.
Eddy Rivette’s lungs gave. He slowed and stooped a little, his hand on his chest below his heart, the pain building up, the horse moving ahead. He would finish. He was professional enough to finish and he was strong enough to recover quickly. But he would finish last, second to ’Isra and his horse, and that good race would be run.
Horse and ’Isra were at the last bend, taking it with panic and joy, not sure but sure enough that in a moment there would be cheers and the cheers would be theirs. ’Isra glimpsed the flagging schoolteacher a metre and a half behind, half caught up in the hoof dust. He leant with his horse into the bend at the tree and urged her into it, leaning far out like a yachtsman as pivot to the bend. The white mare was upright and tired, taking the turn as best she could. She felt her rider’s weight shift towards the tree and went with it, too tired to resist. Her body came down. Her feet went away. She hit the dust of the track with her shoulder, the rest of her body bunched behind, hoofing the air, and sliding for a moment, doing the real damage to her tired white shoulder and to the man’s thin leg on which she had fallen.
Not a whinny from her, too tired and breathless. Not a cry from ’Isra, too shamed already. One small gasp from the teacher, a cry of victory suppressed through experience until the line was crossed. A great whoop from the villagers, from the cackle of Loti to the yelp of the schoolchildren, as the winner of the race crossed the line of shadow marked at the side of the store by a low and sinking sun.
FOUR. On Heat
I
ONCE a year, at high tide on the longest day, the tiger crabs come ashore to mate. They come in their millions, as docile and purposeful as pilgrims. Nowadays the solstice is a national holiday and the coast is swarming with people, too. They inspect the striped and shifting shingle of the beach and lift the plumpest crabs for the pot.
But when we were young the beach was free and empty. We helped my father with his plate camera. We collected swabs of sperm. We measured carapaces and pincers. We marked the shells of specimens in indelible ink. Father introduced us as his ‘young research assistants’ whenever the kelp-farmers or the fishermen paused to stare. His book was published in 1928 and, thereafter, we stopped coming to the solstice beach. He was too busy at the Institute and travelling abroad. But we were mentioned in the preface and thanked for our ‘tireless field work’ — and the new edition carries a photograph of the family, taken in 1926. My two younger sisters, fat and cheerful, are shaking crabs at the camera. My mother, dressed from throat to ankle in a then-fashionable bandok, is sitting cross-legged in the centre of our lunch rug. A book in her lap. A look of explosive irritation on her face. My father, his head turned against the wind, his eyes narrowed, is pointing at the camera and shouting instructions to the enlisted fisherman on how to focus and what to press. I am standing at father’s side — an awkward, bony twelve-year-old in a torn and spermy dress. Before and beyond us, reduced to stones by this still, black-and-white photograph, are the tiger crabs. Uca felix, father called them. Lucky crabs. Free from the tyrannies of courtship and concupiscence.
‘What is the mechanism which causes Uca felix to mate en masse on this single day?’ asks father in the foreword to The Secret Life of the Tiger Crab. ‘What is the chemistry of its procreative regularity?’ His book does not provide the answers. Its popular appeal lay in the final chapters where father contrasted the rigid breeding behaviour of the crab with the uneven profligacy of human kind. Nature is always patterned, he said. It was his theory — and regret — that the sexual life of Homo sapiens functioned in a state of disorder, ‘outside of nature’.
MY FATHER died in 1940. My mother, in a gesture which was both ironic and dutiful, buried him in a weighted casket just above the high-tide mark and planted a salt bush to mark the spot. The Institute put up a raised stone tablet with an inscription:
PROFESSOR T. D. ZOEA
1879–1940
Writer and Natural Scientist
There is a photograph of this, too, at the back of the new edition.
A THIRD photograph was not included, despite its combative prominence in my father’s study. How he loved that photograph and how we feared it. Its date was 1912. My mother and father stood like big-game hunters, striking poses for the long exposure of the filmplate in the darkness of the trees. All around them, blurred by impatience and playfulness, were a host of forest women, their arms latticed with cicatrices, their stomachs bulbous, their hilarity bombarding the grimness of my parents. ‘All Pregnant and Correct’ was my father’s title for the photograph. But my mother — and we three girls in our turn — found the laughing herd of women, their polished breasts and stomachs crowding the frame, oppressive.
‘That was taken during the expedition,’ my mother explained in those weeks when her illness made her reckless. ‘The Professor and I had just married. I liked him enough to travel with him in those days. We rode on donkeys for eight weeks from the railhead at Etar. He was noting species and I was logging them for him in the yellow ledger. I wrote “Two donkeys” at the head of each day’s list, and then the names that he called to me whenever there was movement in the undergrowth. It was as if we were not married, but still teacher and doting student … except that the Professor wanted sexual conjunction all the time, on the thinnest of pretexts. The moment we dismounted from our donkeys for rest or food the Professor would become attentive in that breathless, urgent way which so transformed him and so reduced him.’
We drew from her a portrait of my father made tense and engrossed by my mother’s presence, as if his self-control had been agitated by the bounce of the donkey. At night in their tent, with the moth lamp burning and the camp flaps shaking a beat, he would again go to her, saying, ‘Let me warm you’ or ‘You are beautiful in this light’ or ‘Hold me there.’ At his most wheedling, his speech would be, ‘Tonight I am tired. Take it in your hand and rub me to sleep.’ At his boldest, he briefly left the tent and returned like some foolish stranger to push money into her hand and say, ‘Be a whore for me. Pull up your night-clothes.’ Sometimes there would be tears of shame, too. But for them the only remedy was more conjunction. ‘Now we are married we can make love,’ he told her, ‘at any time.’ ‘Like animals,’ she said, meaning to tease him but also, perhaps, to induce a little forbearance and composure when next his tumescence demanded her attention. ‘No, not like animals,’ he said. ‘The very opposite to animals with their seasons, their ruts, their “heats,” slaves to chemistry. No, it is this which separates us from the animals, our capacity to enjoy our bodies as the whim takes us, ever receptive to pleasure. Any place, any time. Now, for instance?’