“Look, Ariel. I’m so sorry. But I’m going now.”
“You’re going to miss me terribly, because from now on you won’t be like other people. In about a week you’ll start realizing the maggots are taking over your body. You’ll be in a lot of pain and no painkillers will be of any use because the maggots will eat the painkillers.”
Panicked, he moved towards the door, but she followed him.
“Just for your sake I will stay here another ten days. Ten days, Michael. But don’t tell anyone, especially not your doctor. If you do, and I think it’s possible you will, you mustn’t mention me at all, or they’ll come here looking for me. In fact, your doctor will call the authorities if he realizes you’re a maggot person.”
He touched her arm. “I’ll come and see you.”
“I’m taking a big risk telling you all this. Most of my kind would just clear off now. But I’m not like them.”
He stepped out of the door into the slanted, early-morning sunlight. The mistral was blowing, and he watched the frothy sea rolling in. He breathed deep, steered his steps back through the sandy, grassy pine woods along the rutted track where people took their four-wheel-drives down to the dunes in summer.
He took one last look at the house, where she was still standing by the gate, her hair blowing in the wind, then shook his head to be rid of her.
6
A few times in the days that followed he made his way to the dunes and lay in the sand behind a tuft of sea grass, with his binoculars trained on the house — like a regular psychopath. Nothing ever moved there. Just once he saw the Alsatian emerge and flop down on the front step. Minutes later Ariel came out with a morning coffee and sat down beside him. They stared out at the sea, a sort of deep moroseness hanging over them.
At the sight of her face so far away, he found himself missing her; all that caustic wit and energy of hers, wasted on a sourpuss dog when she might have used it to much better effect on him.
A few days later he woke up in the night with an excruciating pain surging through his body. He twisted in the bed, listening to the strange grunts he made when the pulsating pain grew too much to bear, especially in the region of his heart. He seemed to hear the sound of tiny teeth methodically working their way through his edible mass.
Like a succulent plant being stripped of its leaves and flowers.
His thoughts turned to Ariel in her scruffy bungalow, all by herself and struggling with her delusions. Should he not have stayed and helped her?
This pain is psychosomatic, he told himself.
But before long he began to wonder; her predictions came back to him. The pain turned to waves of cramp passing across his skin with a sort of churning effect that he recognized from the evening in the hammock, as if his muscles were being resynchronized by maggots moving in ranks beneath his skin, passing like an infestation of locusts from one organ to another.
His heart — he felt — had already been vanquished, replaced by a tight ring of maggots flexing their tiny bodies to pump the diminishing bloodflow through his disappearing veins. The hours passed in excruciating torment. At first light when he left his bed to go to the bathroom, he was stunned with fear when he filled the toilet bowl half to the rim with thick red blood and unspeakable lumps he dared not even think about.
She was right, he thought, glittering with sharp terror.
He’d read somewhere that when the human body comes to the end of its life, the mind often goes through a moment of light-headed clarity. But if these were his final moments, how could it be that he felt himself trembling with such energy — like a battery fully charged? He felt strong enough to kick the door down and sprint up and down the hills for miles. And how could he explain this sudden raging hunger that drove him into the kitchen, where he methodically worked his way through an entire honey melon and peeled off slice after slice of sticky prosciutto, swallowing almost without chewing?
As he stood there, he felt another spasm of hemorrhaging, as if another major organ had just been consumed. Quickly he reached for the sponge. How much blood was there in a man, he asked himself? At what point did the heart resignedly admit that it was only pumping air?
The blood continued running down his legs, collecting in a pool around his feet. Liters and liters of blood. A rivulet started moving across the kitchen floor towards the cooker. He picked up a mop, and cleaned it up. As he worked, the gush turned to a trickle. Then stopped.
After taking a quick brackish shower beneath the rumbling spout, he pulled on a pair of baggy canvas trousers, laced up his shoes and stood in the kitchen, arrested by the sight of his painting of the cone-shaped mountain. Sunlight, entering through the top half of his kitchen window, was illuminating its high ramparts, where a stratospheric wind seemed to be attempting to clear a few whisks of cloud. He saw the figure of Ariel leaning out to hang a shirt on the washing line. But when he leaned in closer he saw that it was just the top half of a human skin.
What seemed beyond all doubt now was that Ariel had knowingly passed on her parasite. Which meant that everything else she’d said was also true. Including her invitation for him to go with them to Switzerland.
He closed the door behind him but left it unlocked and stood on the front step for a moment, listening to the swifts. It was a familiar sound, reminding him of long empty afternoons.
I am not like you, he thought, watching their darting forms. You always come back. But I won’t.
7
Alain was pretty decent about it. Michael turned up in the middle of the morning news bulletin, but he was invited in and given a syrupy coffee from a blackened pot, topped up with milk that had boiled and formed mucous membranes.
Ceremoniously, Alain turned off the television and sat down with a grave frown.
“Are you troubled, my dear boy? You look troubled.”
Michael thought about it, and oddly enough decided that he wasn’t.
“Actually I just came to say goodbye.”
“Off to England, are you?”
“No. To Switzerland.”
There was a ponderous pause, while Alain turned the bread he was frying in deep oil, cracking a few eggs also and tipping them in. Alain didn’t have much of a notion of healthy eating. He filled two plates and put one of them in front of Michael, nodding at him with a simple, monkish exhortation: “Eat, my son.”
Michael obliged, whilst launching into an explanation. “There’s been a bit of a development. I met a girl.”
“Aha.” Alain’s eyes flashed like a checkered flag. “And she’s broken your heart?”
“No…”
“Taken your tranquility? Involved you in bestial practices?”
“Alain, it’s nothing you could ever understand.”
“Ah, well, that’s true, I’ve spent my life avoiding the tainting influence of women. It’s a question of control, Michael. The minute one lets them in close they start to colonize one. Women have fearsome appetite for territory. They start to till the ground and prepare for the next generation. They’re dynastic and not quite in command of their own desires, poor things.” He stopped with a shrewd glint in his eye. “I saw her, of course, that peripatetic thing. A handsome girl, very likely devilish, I’d say.”
“Certainly devilish, yes. I sort of liked her.”
“Of course you did, you liked her for all the wrong reasons.”