‘ So, what will you do?’ said Grace. ‘When are you taking the test?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to do, Grace. Tell me what to do.’ Grace looked at me with his wise grey eyes.
‘I can’t tell you, doll. This time you’re on your own. But you know I’ll always be there. A nutritious home-cooked meal. A little carefree banter.
A shoulder-pad to cry on. You know that.’
I couldn’t explain to Grace how I felt. I couldn’t articulate the words that were churning in my head. On the island I was so consumed by Sykes’s anguish that I hardly gave myself a thought. Now I was pierced by barbs of panic. I thought about my blood. I looked inside myself, under my skin, listening for the tiny explosions, the deadly pyrotechnics of exploding cells. The susurrus of proliferation. The click of a trigger. I scrutinized my skin for any sign of contaminated sap. And I knew that when the sign manifested itself I would welcome it. I would be relieved. Because now I would own part of him. I would be inseminated. He would be inside me until I died, passing through my body, flowing though my heart. We would be linked forever. Blood brothers. The thought of taking a test, bleeding into a bottle, and then waiting to receive the revelation through the mouth of a stranger appalled me. This was too intimate. Too close. This was my life’s blood they would be fucking around with. It was my proof. I didn’t want some rubber-gloved, spotty technician wisecracking as he siphoned and decanted my future.
‘I think I probably won’t take the test,’ I said to Grace.
‘Is that wise, doll?’ said Grace. ‘Won’t you be frantic, not knowing?’
‘I’m frantic anyway,’ I said. ‘And I’ll know. When the time comes, I’ll know.’ Grace got up from the table and walked behind me. He placed his hands on my shoulders and leaned down to my ear.
‘Don’t you even want to know what sex it is?’ he whispered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know very well what I mean,’ said Grace. ‘You’re not so much worried about having been infected as you are about not having been impregnated.’ The blood rushed to my face. How could Grace divine so accurately what was fulminating in my brain?
When Grace left, I went into the bathroom and took off all of my clothes. The mirror over the basin was small so I had to examine myself in halves, climbing onto a chair to inspect my buttocks and the backs of my legs. The only symptoms I could detect were those of middle age. My waist had thickened. There were grey hairs on my chest. My dick looked redundant and slightly ridiculous.
I got down from the chair and looked myself in the eye. You phony. I thought and then I thought of what Sykes had said about living the wrong life and it occurred to me that maybe we’re all trapped in the wrong life. The one that should have gone to someone else. It’s like a lucky dip where you scrabble about blindfolded trying to pull out the luckiest life and then you find that the one you get doesn’t fit or bits of it don’t suit you or it’s broken but it’s the only one you’re allowed so you have to bend it or rewire it so that it more or less works.
‘You play the hand you’re dealt, daughter,’ Fabulina once said. ‘What else can a poor gal do?’
I opened the cabinet and took out a razor blade. I slit the skin of my index finger and held it over the basin. The blood splashed down onto the white porcelain. It looked rich and scarlet and potent. I touched the wounded finger to my tongue and tasted the salty red. Life and death.