Picnic on Nearside (29 page)

It was a tacit conspiracy between them to be serious about the stories, but that was the whole point. That was the only way it would work, as it had worked with Harra. Somehow, this adult woman was interested in playing the same games he was.

Lying in his bed that night, Piri felt better than he had for months, since before Harra had become so distant. Now that he had a companion, he realized that maintaining a satisfying fantasy world by yourself is hard work. Eventually you need someone to tell the stories to, and to share in the making of them.

They spent the day out on the reef. He showed her his crab farm, and introduced her to Ocho the Octopus, who was his usual shy self. Piri suspected the damn thing only loved him for the treats he brought.

She entered into his games easily and with no trace of adult condescension. He wondered why, and got up the courage to ask her. He was afraid he’d ruin the whole thing, but he had to know. It just wasn’t normal.

They were perched on a coral outcropping above the high tide level, catching the last rays of the sun.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess you think I’m silly, huh?”

“No, not exactly that. It’s just that most adults seem to, well, have more ‘important’ things on their minds.” He put all the contempt he could into the word.

“Maybe I feel the same way you do about it. I’m here to have fun. I sort of feel like I’ve been reborn into a new element. It’s
terrific
down there, you know that. I just didn’t feel like I wanted to go into that world alone. I was out there yesterday . . .”

“I thought I saw you.”

“Maybe you did. Anyway, I needed a companion, and I heard about you. It seemed like the polite thing to, well, not to ask you to be my guide, but sort of fit myself into your world. As it were.” She frowned, as if she felt she had said too much. “Let’s not push it, all right?”

“Oh, sure. It’s none of my business.”

“I like you, Piri.”

“And I like you. I haven’t had a friend for . . . too long.”

That night at the luau, Lee disappeared. Piri looked for her briefly, but was not really worried. What she did with her nights was her business. He wanted her during the days.

As he was leaving for his home, Harra came up behind him and took his hand. She walked with him for a moment, then could no longer hold it in.

“A word to the wise, old pal,” she said. “You’d better stay away from her. She’s not going to do you any good.”

“What are you talking about? You don’t even know her.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Well, do you or don’t you?”

She didn’t say anything, then sighed deeply.

“Piri, if you do the smart thing you’ll get on that raft of yours and sail to Bikini. Haven’t you had any . . . feelings about her? Any premonitions or anything?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, thinking of sharp teeth and white death.

“I think you do. You have to, but you won’t face it. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not my business to meddle in your affairs.”

“I’ll say it’s not. So why did you come out here and put this stuff in my ear?” He stopped, and something tickled at his mind from his past life, some earlier bit of knowledge, carefully suppressed. He was used to it. He knew he was not really a child, and that he had a long life and many experiences stretching out behind him. But he didn’t think about it. He hated it when part of his old self started to intrude on him.

“I think you’re jealous of her,” he said, and knew it was his old, cynical self talking. “She’s an adult, Harra. She’s no threat to you. And, hell, I know what you’ve been hinting at these last months. I’m not ready for it, so leave me alone. I’m just a kid.”

Her chin came up, and the moonlight flashed in her eyes.

“You idiot. Have you looked at yourself lately? You’re not Peter Pan, you know. You’re growing up. You’re damn near a man.”

“That’s not true.” There was panic in Piri’s voice. “I’m only . . . well, I haven’t exactly been counting, but I can’t be more than nine, ten years—”

“Shit. You’re as old as I am, and I’ve had breasts for two years. But I’m not out to cop you. I can cop with any of seven boys in the village younger than you are, but not you.” She threw her hands up in exasperation and stepped back from him. Then, in a sudden fury, she hit him on the chest with the heel of her fist. He fell back, stunned at her violence.

“She
is
an adult,” Harra whispered through her teeth. “That’s what I came here to warn you against.
I’m
your friend, but you
don’t know it. Ah, what’s the use? I’m fighting against that scared old man in your head, and he won’t listen to me. Go ahead, go with her. But she’s got some surprises for you.”

“What? What surprises?” Piri was shaking, not wanting to listen to her. It was a relief when she spat at his feet, whirled, and ran down the beach.

“Find out for yourself,” she yelled back over her shoulder. It sounded like she was crying.

That night, Piri dreamed of white teeth, inches behind him, snapping.

*   *   *

But morning brought Lee, and another fine breakfast in her bulging bag. After a lazy interlude drinking coconut milk, they went to the reef again. The pirates gave them a rough time of it, but they managed to come back alive in time for the nightly gathering.

Harra was there. She was dressed as he had never seen her, in the blue tunic and shorts of the reef maintenence crew. He knew she had taken a job with the disneyland and had been working days with her mother at Bikini, but had not seen her dressed up before. He had just begun to get used to the grass skirt. Not long ago, she had been always nude like him and the other children.

She looked older somehow, and bigger. Maybe it was just the uniform. She still looked like a girl next to Lee. Piri was confused by it, and his thoughts veered protectively away.

Harra did not avoid him, but she was remote in a more important way. It was like she had put on a mask, or possibly taken one off. She carried herself with a dignity that Piri thought was beyond her years.

Lee disappeared just before he was ready to leave. He walked home alone, half hoping Harra would show up so he could apologize for the way he’d talked to her the night before. But she didn’t.

*   *   *

He felt the bow-shock of a pressure wave behind him, sensed by some mechanism he was unfamiliar with, like the lateral line of a fish, sensitive to slight changes in the water around him. He knew there was something behind him, closing the gap a little with every wild kick of his flippers.

It was dark. It was always dark when the thing chased him. It was not the wispy, insubstantial thing that darkness was when it settled on the night air, but the primal, eternal night of the depths. He tried to scream with his mouth full of water, but it was a dying gurgle before it passed his lips. The water around him was warm with his blood.

He turned to face it before it was upon him, and saw Harra’s face corpse-pale and glowing sickly in the night. But no, it wasn’t Harra, it was Lee, and her mouth was far down her body, rimmed with razors, a gaping crescent hole in her chest. He screamed again—

And sat up.

“What? Where are you?”

“I’m right here, it’s going to be all right.” She held his head as he brought his sobbing under control. She was whispering something but he couldn’t understand it, and perhaps wasn’t meant to. It was enough. He calmed down quickly, as he always did when he woke from nightmares. If they hung around to haunt him, he never would have stayed by himself for so long.

There was just the moonlit paleness of her breast before his eyes and the smell of skin and sea water. Her nipple was wet. Was it from his tears? No, his lips were tingling and the nipple was hard when it brushed against him. He realized what he had been doing in his sleep.

“You were calling for your mother,” she whispered, as though she’d read his mind. “I’ve heard you shouldn’t wake someone from a nightmare. It seemed to calm you down.”

“Thanks,” he said quietly. “Thanks for being here, I mean.”

She took his cheek in her hand, turned his head slightly, and kissed him. It was not a motherly kiss, and he realized they were not playing the same game. She had changed the rules on him.

“Lee . . .”

“Hush. It’s time you learned.”

She eased him onto his back, and he was overpowered with
deja vu
. Her mouth worked downward on his body and it set off chains of associations from his past life. He was familiar with the sensation. It had happened to him often in his second childhood. Something would happen that had happened to him in much the same way before and he would remember a bit of it. He had been
seduced by an older woman the first time he was young. She had taught him well, and he remembered it all but didn’t want to remember. He was an experienced lover and a child at the same time.

“I’m not old enough,” he protested, but she was holding in her hand the evidence that he was old enough, had been old enough for several years.
I’m fourteen years old
, he thought. How could he have kidded himself into thinking he was ten?

“You’re a strong young man,” she whispered in his ear. “And I’m going to be very disappointed if you keep saying that. You’re not a child anymore, Piri. Face it.”

“I . . . I guess I’m not.”

“Do you know what to do?”

“I think so.”

She reclined beside him, drew her legs up. Her body was huge and ghostly and full of limber strength. She would swallow him up, like a shark. The gill slits under her arms opened and shut quickly with her breathing, smelling of salt, iodine, and sweat.

He got on his hands and knees and moved over her.

*   *   *

He woke before she did. The sun was up: another warm, cloudless morning. There would be two thousand more before the first scheduled typhoon.

Piri was a giddy mixture of elation and sadness. It was sad, and he knew it already, that his days of frolicking on the reef were over. He would still go out there, but it would never be the same.

Fourteen years old! Where had the years gone? He was nearly an adult. He moved away from the thought until he found a more acceptable one. He was an adolescent, and a very fortunate one to have been initiated into the mysteries of sex by this strange woman.

He held her as she slept, spooned cozily back to front with his arms around her waist. She had already been playmate, mother, and lover to him. What else did she have in store?

But he didn’t care. He was not worried about anything. He already scorned his yesterdays. He was not a boy, but a youth, and he remembered from his other youth what that meant and was excited by it. It was a time of sex, of internal exploration and the
exploration of others. He would pursue these new frontiers with the same single-mindedness he had shown on the reef.

He moved against her, slowly, not disturbing her sleep. But she woke as he entered her and turned to give him a sleepy kiss.

They spent the morning involved in each other, until they were content to lie in the sun and soak up heat like glossy reptiles.

“I can hardly believe it,” she said. “You’ve been here for . . . how long? With all these girls and women. And I know at least one of them was interested.”

He didn’t want to go into it. It was important to him that she not find out he was not really a child. He felt it would change things, and it was not fair. Not fair at all, because it
had
been the first time. In a way he could never have explained to her, last night had been not a rediscovery but an entirely new thing. He had been with many women and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t remember it. It was all there, and what’s more, it showed up in his lovemaking. He had not been the bumbling teenager, had not needed to be told what to do.

But it was
new
. That old man inside had been a spectator and an invaluable coach, but his hardened viewpoint had not intruded to make last night just another bout. It had been a first time, and the first time is special.

When she persisted in her questions he silenced her in the only way he knew, with a kiss. He could see he had to rethink his relationship to her. She had not asked him questions as a playmate, or a mother. In the one role, she had been seemingly as self-centered as he, interested only in the needs of the moment and her personal needs above all. As a mother, she had offered only wordless comfort in a tight spot.

Now she was his lover. What did lovers do when they weren’t making love?

*   *   *

They went for walks on the beach, and on the reef. They swam together, but it was different. They talked a lot.

She soon saw that he didn’t want to talk about himself. Except for the odd question here and there that would momentarily confuse him, throw him back to stages of his life he didn’t wish to remember, she left his past alone.

They stayed away from the village except to load up on supplies. It was mostly his unspoken wish that kept them away. He had made it clear to everyone in the village many years ago that he was not really a child. It had been necessary to convince them that he could take care of himself on his own, to keep them from being overprotective. They would not spill his secret knowingly, but neither would they lie for him.

So he grew increasingly nervous about his relationship with Lee, founded as it was on a lie. If not a lie, then at least a withholding of the facts. He saw that he must tell her soon, and dreaded it. Part of him was convinced that her attraction to him was based mostly on age difference.

Then she learned he had a raft, and wanted to go on a sailing trip to the edge of the world.

Piri did have a raft, though an old one. They dragged it from the bushes that had grown around it since his last trip and began putting it into shape. Piri was delighted. It was something to do, and it was hard work. They didn’t have much time for talking.

It was a simple construction of logs lashed together with rope. Only an insane sailor would put the thing to sea in the Pacific Ocean, but it was safe enough for them. They knew what the weather would be, and the reports were absolutely reliable. And if it came apart, they could swim back.