Walkers (53 page)

Jennifer whispered,
Paul.’

There was a moment’s pause. She knew
that he had woken up instantaneously, and that all he was doing now was
deciding behind those closed eyelids whether he ought to sit up and be angry,
or keep his eyes closed and pretend that he was still asleep, or listen to
whatever nonsense it was that Jennifer was going to tell him.

‘Paul,’ Jennifer repeated.

He opened his eyes. Hazel-coloured
irises, too pale to be really attractive. He stared at her without speaking.
Perhaps he hadn’t made up his mind yet what kind of mood he was going to be in.

‘Paul, I’m sorry to wake you, honey,
but I think I’m sick.’

‘Sick? What do you mean? You mean
nauseous?’

‘Well, kind of, but not exactly.’

He propped himself up on one elbow.
‘Not exactly? What exactly does that mean – not exactly?’

‘It’s like my stomach’s turning over
and over. It won’t stop. I feel like I want to throw up, but I can’t.’

Paul dropped his head back on to the
pillow. ‘Jennie,’ he said, tiredly, ‘I don’t expect to be woken up at the crack
of dawn just because you have a stomach-ache. I have a long hard day ahead of
me. I need to get some rest. Now, why don’t you go to the bathroom and fix
yourself some Pepto-Bismol or some Alka-Seltzer and then come back to bed and
settle down?’

‘Paul, it isn’t that kind of a
sickness.’

‘How many different kinds of
sickness are there?’

‘Paul, there are lots of different
kinds of sickness. This is more like – I don’t know – this is more like a
period sickness.’

‘Jesus, Jennie, if it’s a period
sickness, then take whatever it is you take for period sickness.’

Jennifer protested, ‘My period isn’t
even
due,
Paul. And, besides, I
haven’t been having periods for six months.’

‘Then maybe it’s time you did. Maybe
that’s what the pain is. Your body, telling you to stop fucking around with it
and treat it like a body ought to be treated.’

‘Paul...’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jennie, what do
I have to do to get some sleep around here? If you’re sick, go make yourself a
cup of tea and read a book or something. There’s nothing 7 can do about it, is
there? I mean, in all seriousness, what can I do? It’s your stomach. Take it out
of this bed and go take care of it, all right?’

‘Paul, please...’

‘Jennie,’ said Paul, in a warning
voice, and Jennifer knew then that if she persisted, he would really lose his
temper. When he said ‘Jennie’ in that particular way, he was drawing a chalk
line in the air, and that chalk line meant this far, you understand me, and no
further.

At another time, on another
occasion, she might have considered that it was worthwhile arguing. But this
morning she felt too sick and too miserable, and so she climbed slowly and
unsteadily out of bed and slipped on her pink nylon-fur slippers, and groped
for her dressing-gown on the back of the bedside chair. Paul made a production
out of turning over, and readjusting the pillow, and settling himself down for
the short remainder of his allotted night’s sleep. Not that he
would
sleep, Jennifer thought, with a
startling amount of bitterness, as she turned around and looked at him from the
bedroom doorway. He would lie there and smoulder in wakeful martyrdom; but he
would lie there without moving until the alarm went off, and even then he would
press the snooze button, to give himself five minutes more self-pity.

She went through to the brown-tiled
kitchen. Outside, it was already bright, and three California quail were out on
the patio, pecking at the stale crackers which she had put out for them. She
filled the coffee percolator with water, and went to the pantry, but though she
felt hungry, she knew that if she tried to eat anything she would probably
vomit. She sat down on one of the kitchen stools, with her head in her hands,
and tried to suppress the cold roiling in her stomach, while the coffee
percolator went
baloop,
blip,
billip,
blip.

The coffee was almost ready when she
felt the first sharp pain. It was so unexpected, but so agonising, that she
jumped off the stool and screamed out loud.

The stool fell clattering on to the
tiled floor behind her, and Jennifer dropped to her knees, clutching her
stomach.

‘Oh my God!’ she cried out. ‘Oh,
Paul! Oh, my God! Paul!
Paul!’

The pain was right inside her
uterus, so intense that she didn’t believe that she could bear it. She felt as
if her womb were actually being torn apart, or stabbed, or twisted around and
wrung out, like a dishrag. For a moment, she went into shock, and her heart
bumped as slowly as a grand-piano falling off a precipice, bump, fall, bump,
fall. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she began to shudder and grind her
teeth.

Paul came into the kitchen, naked,
angry. White chest and shaggy pubic hair.

‘Jennie! What the
hell’s -’
he shouted. But then he saw
her rolled-up eyeballs and the way she was shuddering, and without saying
anything else he went straight over to the wall telephone and punched a number.
‘Ambulance – I want an ambulance, quick! Fourteen-forty Paseo del Serra. Yes,
it’s my wife.’

Then he knelt down beside Jennifer
and held her in his arms and said, ‘Honey?’

Slowly, the pupils of her eyes sank
back down into view, although she still looked glazed.

‘Honey?’ Paul persisted. ‘Listen,
honey, I’ve called for an ambulance.’

‘Paul,’ she whispered. She scarcely
moved her lips, as if she were trying to ventriloquise; as if she wanted to
speak to him without her body finding out what she was doing. ‘Paul... it hurts
so bad... I can’t stand it.’

He started to lift her up. ‘Come on,
Jennie. Come and lie down on the bed.’

‘Don’t move me,’ she whispered.

‘Jennie – you can’t stay here on the
kitchen floor...’

‘Don’t move me! For God’s sake, Paul, don’t move me!’

Paul stared at her closely. ‘Jennie,
honey, you just can’t stay here on the floor.’

Jennifer began to judder and shake,
and a long string of saliva dangled from her lower lip. ‘Oh God, Paul, it hurts
so bad. It’s like something’s biting me. It’s like there’s something inside me
and it’s biting me.’

‘Honey, it’s probably
food-poisoning. That’s a symptom of food-poisoning, that sharp pain like that.
It must’ve been the veal. You have to be careful with veal. Was that fresh veal
you bought, or frozen veal? I’ll sue that market for everything they’ve got.’

Jennifer could scarcely hear what he
was saying. The pain inside her uterus was growing steadily more severe, as
nerve after nerve was stripped away. The wriggling grew more excited, too, and
when Paul gently opened Jennifer’s dressing-gown to look at her stomach, he
could see the convulsive movements for himself, quite clearly, as if her
muscles were turning and contracting in grotesquely exaggerated peristalsis.
Her skin was actually rippling, and rising, as if something were pushing at it
from inside.

She threw back her head, so that the
veins in her neck stood out like dark blue worms, and she screamed. It was the
most terrible scream that Paul had ever heard in his life, even worse than the
woman he had heard screaming on the Ventura Freeway, after her arm had been
severed in a car-crash. This scream was so agonised, so desperate, that Paul
found himself screaming, too, shouting at the top of his voice, begging her to
stop it.
‘Stop it! For Christ’s sake,
stop it!’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, she did
stop. She stared at Paul as if she didn’t know who he was, and then she slowly
lowered her eyes until she was staring at her stomach.

An extraordinary hissing noise came
from the back of her throat, a low hoarse hissing, as if she were having
difficulty in breathing.

Paul said, fearfully, ‘Jennie?
Jennie, what is it? For God’s sake, Jennie, you’ve got to tell me!’

His eyes followed hers, down to the
stomach. The wriggling continued, but now a darkish lump had appeared under the
skin, like a very severe bruise, or a constricted hernia. Jennifer was staring
at the lump in horrified fascination, and even though she was suffering pain
far more terrible than anything she had ever experienced before, she remained
quiet, expressing her agony by hissing, and clenching her fists, and by praying
and praying inside of her head that this was all a nightmare, that it wasn’t
real at all, and that she would have only to say, ‘Paul – wake me up,’ and it
would all be over.

She didn’t ask him to wake her up,
however, because she knew that it wasn’t a nightmare, and that if she
did
ask him, it wouldn’t make any
difference. She was awake, and the gnawing pain inside of her body was real. Oh
Lord, please save me.

Oh Lord, please don’t let me die. Oh
Lord, whatever you ask me, I’ll do it.
Please,
Lord; please, Lord; please!
Paul
heard the distant yipping of the ambulance siren, and squeezed Jennifer’s hand.
‘You hear that, honey?’ he reassured her. ‘Only a few minutes longer, and the
medics are going to be here.’

Jennifer lifted her head, and said,
hoarsely,
‘Too late.’

‘Now, come on now, Jennie, that’s no
way to talk. Why, they’ll have you in the hospital in ten minutes from now, and
then you’ll feel fine. Come on now, honey, I promise you.’

Jennifer repeated, even more
hoarsely than before, ‘Too...
late.
Too
. . .’

Then she buried her hands in her
hair, and clenched it so tight that Paul could hear her scalp skin tearing away
from her skull. She opened her mouth wide, and this time she screamed and she
screamed and she wouldn’t stop. She screamed so loudly that Paul didn’t hear
the ambulance turning into Paseo del Serra, nor did he hear the paramedics
ringing at the door.

‘Jennie! Stop it! Jennie!’
he roared at her, over and over, until their faces were only inches
apart – she screaming white-faced and agonised, he screaming red-faced and
furious.

Suddenly, Jennifer’s scream turned
to a descending moan of disgust and terror. She looked down at her stomach
again, her hands still tugging at her hair, and the black bulge was bigger than
ever, and moving. Paul stared at it, too, unable to imagine what it was; all
kinds of strange and horrible ideas tumbling through his head in quick
succession. A kind of a blowfly, maybe, that had buried a colony of eggs
underneath her skin, and which were suddenly hatching out. A hard lump of
undigested food that had somehow penetrated the stomach lining, and which her
body was trying to repel.

But the reality of it was even more
horrible than Paul’s imagination. For as Jennifer screamed and the paramedics
pounded at the door, the bulge on her stomach stretched out until the skin that
covered it was almost transparent, and then the dark twitching object inside
bit right through it, and bright red blood splattered out – all over her gown,
all over her thighs – and a flat eel-like head appeared, silvery and streaked
with blood, with a staring and expressionless eye. The head waggled and turned,
and Paul could do nothing at all but stare at it in total fear and total
disgust.

He was so shocked that he had
forgotten that Jennifer was still screaming, and he certainly didn’t hear the
glass breaking as the paramedics forced an entry with a fire axe.
‘Paul!’
screamed Jennifer.
‘Oh, Paul! Oh, God!’
Paul snatched
wildly at the eel’s head. The first time, too scared, he missed it; but the
second time he went closer and the eel darted forward and caught the side of
his hand in between jaws that hurt as much as a red-hot barbecue fork.
Automatically, Paul whipped his hand away.

The eel clung on, and he dragged the
whole length of it, four feet, out of the hole in Jennifer’s stomach. Jennifer
fell back on to the floor. Paul heard her head crack. But all he could think
about was the eel that had fastened itself on to his finger, and wouldn’t let
go.

He lashed the eel against the wall,
but still it kept its grip. He lashed and he lashed in rising panic, but
however hard he hit it, it refused to let go. He was so confused, so
frightened, that when two paramedics suddenly appeared in the kitchen, all he could
do was hold up the eel like a fishing trophy.

‘Snake!’
one
of the paramedics shouted, and immediately unhitched a large knife from the
back of his belt. ‘You see to the woman – I’ll deal with this.’

The paramedic came forward, lunged,
and then gingerly grasped the eel by the middle of its body. The eel thrashed
and struggled, but the paramedic managed to hook it over the kitchen table, and
keep it pressed down against the butcher block.

‘You want to look away?’ the
paramedic asked Paul. He had a young serious face with large brown eyes and a
bushy brown moustache. Paul swallowed, closed his eyes, and said in a voice
that didn’t sound at all like his own, ‘Just do what you have to do, okay? But
quick, it hurts like all hell. ‘The paramedic placed the edge of the blade
close to the eel’s head. Meanwhile, the other paramedic, who was kneeling over
Jennifer, said, in awe, ‘Jesus, Tony, this woman’s got a hole in her stomach
you could drive a truck through.’