Dancing Girls and Other Stories Part 8

Between the First Cla.s.s cabin at the front and the Tour-ist Cla.s.s is the tiny kitchen. As she goes through it, at the tail end of the line, Annette sees a rack of lunch trays, with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and desserts with snap-on lids. The drink trolley is there too, parked out of the way. She takes several of the sandwiches, three bottles of ginger ale and a handful of vacu-packed peanuts and stuffs them into her purse. She does this as much because she is hungry as for any other reason, but she is thinking, too, that they may need provisions. Though they will certainly be picked up soon, the plane must have sent out a distress signal. They will be rescued by helicopters. Still, it will be nice to have some lunch. She considers momentarily taking a bottle of liquor too, from the drink trolley, but rejects this as a bad idea. She remembers having read magazine articles about delirious sailors.

When she gets to the chute leading down from the open doorway she hesitates. The blue watery surface below her is dotted with round orange discs. Some of them have already made considerable headway, or have they been blown? From a distance the scene looks delightful, with the orange circles twirling on the sea like wading pools filled with happy children. Though she's a little disappointed; she knows this is an emergency but so far everything has been so uneventful, so orderly. Surely an emergency ought to feel like one.

She would like to take a picture of the scene, with the orange against the blue, two of her favourite colours. But someone at the bottom is calling to her to hurry up, so she sits on the chute, placing her knees together so her skirt won't blow up, holds her purse, her camera and her folded coat firmly on her lap, and pushes off. It's like going down a slide, the kind they used to have in parks.

Annette finds it odd that she should be the last one off the plane. Surely the captain and the stewardesses ought to have remained on board until all the pa.s.sengers were safely off, but there is no sign of them. She doesn't have much time to think about this however, because the round boat is in a state of confusion, there seem to be a lot of people on it and someone is shouting orders. "Row," the voice says, "we've got to get away from here... the suction!"

Annette wonders what he is talking about. There are only two paddles in any case so she settles herself out of the way and watches while a couple of men, the owner of the voice and a younger man, paddle at either side of the boat as if their lives depended on it. The boat moves up and down with the waves, which are not large, it rotates-one of the men must be stronger than the other, Annette thinks-and it moves gradually away from the plane, in the direction of the afternoon sun. Annette feels as though she's being taken for a boat-ride; she leans back against the swelling rubber side of the boat and enjoys it. Behind them, the plane settles imperceptibly lower. Annette thinks it would be a good idea to get a picture of it, for use when they are rescued and she can write up the story, and she opens her camera bag, takes out her camera and adjusts the lens; but when she squirms around so she can get a better view, the plane is gone.

She thinks it ought to have made a noise of some kind, but they are quite a distance from where it was.

"No sense in getting too far away from the crash site," says the man who has been giving the orders.

There's some-thing military about him, Annette decides; maybe it's the trimmed moustache or the fact that he's older. He and the other man ship their paddles and he begins to roll a ciga-rette, taking the papers and tobacco from his breast pocket.

"I suggest we introduce ourselves," he says; he's used to directing.

There are not as many people in the boat as Annette at first supposed. There's the two men, the one who says he's in insurance (though Annette doubts this), and the younger one, who has a beard and claims to teach at a free school; the older man's wife, who is plump and kind-look-ing and keeps saying "I'm all right,"

although she isn't, she's been crying quietly to herself ever since they've been in the boat; an overly tanned woman of forty-five or so who gives no clue as to her occupation, and a boy who says he's a university student. When it comes to Annette's turn she says, "I write a food column for one of the newspa-pers." In fact she did this for a couple of months, before she got onto the travel page, so she knows enough about it to be able to back it up. Still, she is surprised at herself for lying and can't imagine why she did. The only reason she can think of is that she hasn't believed the stories of any of the others, except the plump, crying woman, who could not possibly be anything other than what she so obviously is.

"We've been d.a.m.n lucky," says the older man, and they all agree.

"What are we supposed to do now?" says the tanned woman.

"Just sit around and wait to be rescued, I guess," the bearded schoolteacher says, with a nervous laugh.

"It's an enforced vacation.""It'll just be a matter of hours," says the older man. "They're more efficient about these things than they used to be."

Annette volunteers the information that she has some food and they all congratulate her for being so resourceful and foresighted. She provides the wrapped sandwiches and they divide them up equally; they pa.s.s around one of the bottles of ginger ale to wash them down. Annette doesn't say anything about the peanuts or the other two bottles of ginger ale. She does say, however, that she has some seasick pills if anyone needs one.

She's about to toss the plastic sandwich trays over-board, but the older man stops her. "No, no," he says, "can't throw those away. They might come in handy." She can't imagine what for, but she does as he says.

The plump woman has stopped crying and has become quite talkative; she wants to know all about the food col-umn. In fact they are now a festive bunch, chattering away as if they are on a huge sofa in a recreation room, or in the waiting room of an airport where the flights have been tem-porarily held up.

There's the same atmosphere of time being pa.s.sed, from necessity but with superficial cheer. Annette is bored. For a moment she thought something real had hap-pened to her but there is no danger here, it is as safe in this lifeboat as everywhere else, and the piece she would write about it would come out sounding the same as her other pieces. For exploring the Caribbean, a round orange lifeboat strikes an unusual note. The vistas are charming, and you have a body-to-body contact with the sea which is simply not possible in any other kind of boat. Take some sandwiches and plan to stay out for lunch!

The sun sets in its usual abrupt, spectacular fashion, and it's not until then that they begin to get worried.

No heli-copters have appeared, and none of the other lifeboats is in sight. Perhaps they paddled away too quickly. They haven't even heard any sounds of distant rescue operations. But "They'll be along, all right,"

the older man says, and his wife suggests they have a singsong. She begins with "You Are My Sunshine,"

warbling in a church soprano, and con-tinues through a repertoire of once-popular favourites: "On Top of Old Smokey," "Good Night Irene." The others join in, and Annette is momentarily amazed by the number of words to these songs that she herself can remember. She goes to sleep during one of the choruses, her winter coat pulled over her; she's glad she brought it.

She awakens feeling groggy and clogged. She can't believe they're all still on the boat, it's beginning to get annoying, and she is boiling hot under her coat. The rubber of the lifeboat is hot too and there's no wind, the sea is as flat as the palm of your hand with only a sickening groundswell. The others are sprawled listlessly around the boat's circ.u.m-ference, their legs in awkward tangles here and there. An-nette thinks to herself they'd be better off with fewer people in the boat, but immediately censors this. The two women are still asleep; the plump one, the singer, lies with her mouth open, snoring slightly. Annette rubs her eyes; the lids feel dry and gritty. She seems to remember getting up in the night and squatting perilously over the edge of the boat; someone else must have made this effort and failed, or not made it at all, for there is a faint smell of urine. She is very thirsty.

The older man is awake, smoking in silence; so is the one with the beard. The student is drowsing still, curled in a heap, like a puppy.

"What should we do?" Annette asks.

"Stick it out till they come for us," says the older man. He doesn't look so military any more with his day's growth of stubble.

"Maybe they won't come," says the bearded man. "Maybe we're in the Bermuda whatchamacallit. You know, where those ships and planes vanish without a trace. What made the plane go down, anyway?"

Annette looks at the sky, which is more like a flat screen than ever. Maybe this is what has happened, she thinks, they've gone through the screen to the other side; that's why the rescuers can't see them. On this side of the screen, where she thought there would be darkness, there is merely a sea like the other one, with thousands of castaways floating around in orange lifeboats, lost and waiting to be rescued.

"The main thing," says the older man, "is to keep your mind occupied." He flicks his cigarette b.u.t.t into the water. Annette expects to see a shark emerge and snap it up, but none does. "First off, we'll all get sunstroke if we aren't careful." He's right, they are all quite red.

He wakes the others and puts them to work construct-ing a shade, which they make from Annette's winter coat and the men's suit jackets, the b.u.t.tons of one inserted into the b.u.t.tonholes of the next. They prop it up with the pad-dles, lashing it on with neckties and stockings, and sit under it, with a fleeting sense of accomplishment. It's hot and stuffy, but it is out of the sun. Again at his suggestion the men turn out their pockets and the women empty their purses, "to see what we've got to work with," the older man says.

Annette has forgotten everyone's name and sug-gests they introduce themselves again, which they do. Bill and Verna, Julia, Mike and Greg. Julia has a pounding head-ache and takes several of Annette'saspirins-with-codeine. Bill is going through the a.s.sortment of handkerchiefs, keys, compacts, lipsticks, travel-sized bottles of hand lotion, pills and chewing gum. He has appropriated the two remaining bottles of ginger ale and the peanuts, which he says will have to be rationed. For breakfast he lets them each have a Chiclet and a cough drop, to suck on. After that they take turns brushing their teeth, with Annette's toothbrush. She's the only one who has travelled light and thus has all her toiletries with her. The others used suitcases, which of course went down in the hold of the plane.

"If it rains," Bill says, "this boat is perfect for catching water," but it does not look like rain.

Bill has a lot of good ideas. In the afternoon he spends some time fishing, with a hook made from a safety-pin and a line of dental floss. He catches nothing. He says they could attract seagulls by flashing Annette's camera lens at them, if there were any seagulls. Annette is lethargic, al-though she keeps prodding herself, reminding herself that this is important, this may be the real thing, now that they have not been rescued.

"Were you in the war?" she asks Bill, who looks smug that she has noticed.

"You learn to be resourceful," he says. Towards evening they share out one of the bottles of ginger ale, and Bill al-lows them three peanuts each, telling them to sc.r.a.pe the salt off before eating them.

Annette goes to sleep thinking of a different story; it will have to be different now. She won't even have to write it, it will be her story As Told To, with a picture of herself, ema-ciated and sunburned but smiling bravely. Tomorrow she should take some pictures of the others.

During the night, which they spend under the sunshade, now a communal blanket, there is a scuffle. It's Greg the student and Bill, who has. .h.i.t him and now claims he was making a try for the last bottle of ginger ale. They shout angrily at each other until Verna says it must have been a mistake, the boy was having a bad dream. All is quiet again but Annette is awake, she gazes up at the stars, you can't see stars like that in the city.

After a while there is heavy breathing, surely she's imagining it, but there's a distinct sound of furtive copula-tion. Who can it be? Julia and Mike, Julia and Greg? Not Verna, surely, in her corset which Annette is positive she has not taken off. Annette is a little disappointed that no one has made a pa.s.s at her, if that sort of thing is going around. But it was probably initiated by Julia, that sun-tanned solitary voyager, this must be what she goes on va-cations for. Annette thinks of Jeff, wonders how he reacted to the fact that she is missing. She wishes he was here, he would be able to do something, though she doesn't know what.

They could make love, anyway.

In the morning she scans their faces for signs, revealing clues as to who did what, but finds nothing. They brush their teeth once more, then rub hand lotion onto their faces, which is refreshing. Bill pa.s.ses round a package of Turns and more cough drops; he's saving the peanuts and the gin-ger ale for the evening meal.

He devises a strainer out of his shirt and trails it over the side of the boat, to catch plank-ton, he says. He brings in some messy green stuff, squeezes out the salt water, and chews a handful thoughtfully. The others each take a mouthful, except Julia who says she can't swallow it. Verna tries, but spits hers out. Annette gets it down; it's salty and tastes of fish. Later, Bill does manage to catch a small fish and they eat chunks of that also; the hot fish smell mingles with the other smells, unwashed bodies and slept-in clothes, which are rubbing against Annette's nerves. She's irritable, she's stopped taking the pills, maybe that's why.

Bill has a knife, and with it he slices the plastic sandwich trays in two, then cuts slits in them to make sun goggles, "like the Eskimos," he says. He has definite leadership abil-ity. He unravels part of Verna's sweater, then twists the pink wool to make the strings to tie them with. They have abandoned the coat sunshade, it was too hot and the pad-dles had to be held upright all the time, so they fasten the plastic trays over their faces. They smear their noses and lips and the exposed parts of their foreheads with lipstick from the purse collection; Bill says it will be protection against sunburn. Annette is disturbed by the effect, these masks and b.l.o.o.d.y markings. What bothers her is that she can't tell any more who these people are, it could be anyone behind the white plastic faces with slit eyes. But she must look like that too. It is exotic though, and she is still func-tioning well enough to think of taking a picture, though she doesn't take it. She ought to, for the same reason she's kept her watch conscientiously wound up, it would help morale by implying there is a future. But suddenly there's no point.

About two o'clock Greg, the student, starts thrashing around. He lunges for the side of the boat and tries to get his head over into the sea. Bill throws himself on top of him and after a minute Mike joins him. They hold Greg down on the bottom of the boat. "He was drinking sea water," Mike says, "I saw him, early this morning." The boy is gasping like a fish, and he looks like a fish too in his imper-sonal plastic face. Bill removes the mask, and the human features glare up into his. "He's delirious," Bill says. "If we let him up,he'll jump overboard." Bill's plastic mask turns, pointing itself toward the other members of the group. No one says anything, but they are thinking, Annette knows what they are thinking because she is thinking the same thing. They can't hold him down forever. If they let him up, he will die, and not only that, he will be lost to them, wasted. They themselves are dying slowly of thirst. Surely it would be better to ... Verna is rummaging, slowly and painfully, like a crippled b.u.mblebee, in the heap of clothing and debris; what is she looking for? Annette feels she is about to witness something mundane and horrible, doubly so because it will be bathed not in sinister blood-red light-ning but in the ordinary sunlight she has walked in all her life; some tacky ritual put on for the tourists, tacky because it is put on for tourists, for those who are not responsible, for those who make the lives of others their transient spectacle and pleasure. She is a professional tourist, she works at being pleased and at not partic.i.p.ating; at sitting still and watching. But they are going to slit his throat, like that pig on the beach in Mexico, and for once she does not find it quaint and unusual. "Stay out of it," the man in the light-green suit had said to his wife, who was sentimental about animals. Could you stay out by wish-ing to?

I can always say it wasn't me, I couldn't help it, she thinks, visualizing the newspaper interview. But there may not be one, and she is therefore stuck in the present, with four Martians and one madman waiting for her to say something. So this is what goes on behind her back, so this is what it means to be alive, she's sorry she wondered. But the sky is not flat any more, it's bluer than ever and recedes away from her, clear but unfocused. You are my sunshine, Annette thinks; when skies are grey. The quality of the light has not changed. Am I one of them or not?

The Resplendent Quetzal

Sarah was sitting near the edge of the sacrificial well. She had imagined something smaller, more like a wishing well, but this was huge, and the water at the bottom wasn't clear at all. It was mud-brown; a few clumps of reeds were growing over to one side, and the trees at the top dangled their roots, or were they vines, down the limestone walls into the water. Sarah thought there might be some point to being a sacrificial victim if the well were nicer, but you would never get her to jump into a muddy hole like that.

They were probably pushed, or knocked on the head and thrown in. According to the guidebook the water was deep but it looked more like a swamp to her.

Beside her a group of tourists was being rounded up by the guide, who obviously wanted to get the whole thing over with so he could cram them back onto their pink and purple striped turis...o...b..s and relax. These were Mexican tourists, and Sarah found it rea.s.suring that other people be-sides Canadians and Americans wore big hats and sun-gla.s.ses and took pictures of everything. She wished she and Edward could make these excursions at a less crowded time of year, if they had to make them at all, but because of Edward's teaching job they were limited to school holidays. Christmas was the worst. It would be the same even if he had a different job and they had children, though; but they didn't have any.

The guide shooed his charges back along the gravel path as if they were chickens, which was what they sounded like. He himself lingered beside Sarah, finishing his cigarette, one foot on a stone block, like a conquistador. He was a small dark man with several gold teeth, which glinted when he smiled. He was smiling at Sarah now, sideways, and she smiled back serenely. She liked it when these men smiled at her or even when they made those juicy sucking noises with their mouths as they walked behind her on the street; so long as they didn't touch. Edward pretended not to hear them. Perhaps they did it so much because she was blonde: blondes were rare here. She didn't think of herself as beauti-ful, exactly; the word she had chosen for herself some time ago was "comely." Comely to look upon. You would never use that word for a thin woman.

The guide tossed his cigarette b.u.t.t into the sacrificial well and turned to follow his flock. Sarah forgot about him immediately. She'd felt something crawling up her leg, but when she looked nothing was there.

She tucked the full skirt of her cotton dress in under her thighs and clamped it between her knees. This was the kind of place you could get flea bites, places with dirt on the ground, where people sat. Parks and bus terminals. But she didn't care, her feet were tired and the sun was hot. She would rather sit in the shade and get bitten than rush around trying to see everything, which was what Edward wanted to do. Luckily the bites didn't swell up on her the way they did on Edward.

Edward was back along the path, out of sight among the bushes, peering around with his new Leitz binoculars. He didn't like sitting down, it made him restless. On these trips it was difficult for Sarah to sit by herself and just think. Her own binoculars, which were Edward's old ones, dangled around her neck; they weighed a ton. She took them off and put them into her purse.His pa.s.sion for birds had been one of the first things Edward had confided to her. Shyly, as if it had been some precious gift, he'd shown her the lined notebook he'd started keeping when he was nine, with its awkward, boyish printing-Robin, Bluejay, Kingfisher-and the day and the year recorded beside each name. She'd pretended to be touched and interested, and in fact she had been. She herself didn't have compulsions of this kind; whereas Edward plunged totally into things, as if they were oceans. For a while it was stamps; then he took up playing the flute and nearly drove her crazy with the practising. Now it was pre-Colombian ruins, and he was determined to climb up every heap of old stones he could get his hands on.

A capacity for dedication, she guessed you would call it. At first Edward's obsessions had fascinated her, since she didn't understand them, but now they merely made her tired. Sooner or later he'd dropped them all anyway, just as he began to get really good or really knowledgeable; all but the birds. That had remained constant. She herself, she thought, had once been one of his obsessions.

It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't insist on dragging her into everything. Or rather, he had once insisted; he no longer did. And she had encouraged him, she'd let him think she shared or at least indulged his interests.

She was becoming less indulgent as she grew older. The waste of energy bothered her, because it was a waste, he never stuck with anything, and what use was his encyclopaedic knowl-edge of birds? It would be different if they had enough money, but they were always running short. If only he would take all that energy and do something productive with it, in his job for instance. He could be a princ.i.p.al if he wanted to, she kept telling him that. But he wasn't inter-ested, he was content to poke along doing the same thing year after year. His Grade Six children adored him, the boys especially. Perhaps it was because they sensed he was a lot like them.

He'd started asking her to go birding, as he called it, shortly after they'd met, and of course she had gone.

It would have been an error to refuse. She hadn't complained, then, about her sore feet or standing in the rain under the dripping bushes trying to keep track of some nondescript sparrow, while Edward thumbed through his Peterson's Field Guide as if it were the Bible or the bird was the Holy Grail. She'd even become quite good at it. Edward was nearsighted, and she was quicker at spotting movement than he was.

With his usual generosity he acknowledged this, and she'd fallen into the habit of using it when she wanted to get rid of him for a while. Just now, for instance.

"There's something over there." She'd pointed across the well to the tangle of greenery on the other side.

"Where?" Edward had squinted eagerly and raised his binoculars. He looked a little like a bird himself, she thought, with his long nose and stilt legs.

"That thing there, sitting in that thing, the one with the tufts. The sort of bean tree. It's got orange on it."

Edward focused. "An oriole?"

"I can't tell from here.... Oh, it just flew." She pointed over their heads while Edward swept the sky in vain.

"I think it lit back there, behind us."

That was enough to send him off. She had to do this with enough real birds to keep him believing, however.

Edward sat down on the root of a tree and lit a cigarette. He had gone down the first side-path he'd come to; it smelled of p.i.s.s, and he could see by the decomposing Kleenexes further along that this was one of the places peo-ple went when they couldn't make it back to the washroom behind the ticket counter.

He took off his gla.s.ses, then his hat, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. His face was red, he could feel it. Blushing, Sarah called it. She persisted in attributing it to shyness and boyish embarra.s.sment; she hadn't yet deduced that it was simple rage. For someone so devious she was often incredibly stupid.

She didn't know, for instance, that he'd found out about her little trick with the birds at least three years ago. She'd pointed to a dead tree and said she saw a bird in it, but he himself had inspected that same tree only seconds earlier and there was nothing in it at all. And she was very careless: she described oriole-coloured birds behaving like kingbirds, woodp.e.c.k.e.rs where there would never be any woodpeck-ers, mute jays, neckless herons. She must have decided he was a total idiot and any slipshod invention would do.

But why not, since he appeared to fall for it every time. And why did he do it, why did he chase off after her imagi-nary birds, pretending he believed her? It was partly that although he knew what she was doing to him, he had no idea why. It couldn't be simple malice, she had enough out-lets for that. He didn't want to know the real reason, which loomed in his mind as something formless, threatening and final. Her lie about the birds was one of the many lies that propped things up. He was afraid to confront her, that would be the end, all the pretences would come crashing down and they would be left standing in the rubble, staring at each other. There would be nothing left to say and Ed-ward wasn't ready for that.

She would deny everything anyway. "What do you mean? Of course I saw it. It flew right over there.Why would I make up such a thing?" With her level gaze, blonde and stolid and immovable as a rock.

Edward had a sudden image of himself, crashing out of the undergrowth like King Kong, picking Sarah up and hurling her over the edge, down into the sacrificial well. Anything to shatter that imperturbable expression, bland and pale and plump and smug, like a Flemish Madonna's. Self-righteous, that's what it was. Nothing was ever her fault. She hadn't been like that when he'd met her. But it wouldn't work: as she fell she would glance at him, not with fear but with maternal irritation, as if he'd spilled chocolate milk on a white tablecloth. And she'd pull her skirt down. She was concerned for appearances, always.

Though there would be something inappropriate about throwing Sarah into the sacrificial well, just as she was, with all her clothes on. He remembered s.n.a.t.c.hes from the several books he'd read before they came down. (And that was an-other thing: Sarah didn't believe in reading up on places beforehand. "Don't you want to understand what you're looking at?" he'd asked her. "I'll see the same thing in any case, won't I?"

she said. "I mean, knowing all those facts doesn't change the actual statue or whatever." Edward found this att.i.tude infuriating; and now that they were here, she resisted his attempts to explain things to her by her usual pa.s.sive method of pretending not to hear.

"That's a Chac-Mool, see that? That round thing on the stomach held the bowl where they put the hearts, and the b.u.t.terfly on the head means the soul flying up to the sun."

"Could you get out the suntan lotion, Edward. I think it's in the tote bag, in the left-hand pocket."

And he would hand her the suntan lotion, defeated once again.) No, she wouldn't be a fit sacrifice, with or without lo-tion. They only threw people in-or perhaps they jumped in, of their own free will-for the water G.o.d, to make it rain and ensure fertility. The drowned were messengers, sent to carry requests to the G.o.d. Sarah would have to be purified first, in the stone sweat-house beside the well. Then, naked, she would kneel before him, one arm across her breast in the att.i.tude of submission. He added some ornaments: a gold necklace with a jade medallion, a gold circlet adorned with feathers. Her hair, which she usually wore in a braid coiled at the back of her head, would be hanging down. He thought of her body, which he made slimmer and more taut, with an abstract desire which was as unrelated as he could make it to Sarah herself. This was the only kind of desire he could feel for her any more: he had to dress her up before he could make love to her at all. He thought about their earlier days, before they'd married. It was almost as if he'd had an affair with another woman, she had been so different. He'd treated her body then as something holy, a white and gold chalice, to be touched with care and tender-ness. And she had liked this; even though she was two years older than he was and much more experienced she hadn't minded his awkwardness and reverence, she hadn't laughed at him.

Why had she changed?

Sometimes he thought it was the baby, which had died at birth. At the time he'd urged her to have another right away, and she'd said yes, but nothing had happened. It wasn't something they talked about.

"Well, that's that," she said in the hospital afterwards. A perfect child, the doctor said; a freak accident, one of those things that happen. She'd never gone back to university either and she wouldn't get a job. She sat at home, tidying the apartment, looking over his shoulder, towards the door, out the window, as if she was waiting for something.

Sarah bowed her head before him. He, in the feathered costume and long-nosed, toothed mask of the high priest, sprinkled her with blood drawn with thorns from his own tongue and p.e.n.i.s. Now he was supposed to give her the message to take to the G.o.d. But he couldn't think of any-thing he wanted to ask for.

And at the same time he thought: what a terrific idea for a Grade Six special project! He'd have them build scale models of the temples, he'd show the slides he'd taken, he'd bring in canned tortillas and tamales for a Mexican lunch, he'd have them make little Chac-Mools out of papier-mache... and the ball game where the captain of the los-ing team had his head cut off, that would appeal to them, they were blood-thirsty at that age. He could see himself up there in front of them, pouring out his own enthusiasm, gesturing, posturing, acting it out for them, and their re-sponse.... Yet afterwards he knew he would be de-pressed. What were his special projects anyway but a subst.i.tute for television, something to keep them enter-tained? They liked him because he danced for them, a funny puppet, inexhaustible and a little absurd.

No wonder Sarah despised him.

Edward stepped on the remains of his cigarette. He put his hat back on, a wide-brimmed white hat Sarah had bought for him at the market. He had wanted one with a narrower brim, so he could look up through his binoculars without the hat getting in his way; but she'd told him he would look like an American golfer. It was always there, that gentle, patronizing mockery.

He would wait long enough to be plausible; then he would go back.Sarah was speculating about how she would be doing this whole trip if Edward had conveniently died. It wasn't that she wished him dead, but she couldn't imagine any other way for him to disappear. He was omnipresent, he pervaded her life like a kind of smell; it was hard for her to think or act except in reference to him. So she found it harmless and pleasant to walk herself through the same itinerary they were following now, but with Edward removed, cut neatly out of the picture. Not that she would be here at all if it wasn't for him. She would prefer to lie in a deck chair in, say, Acapulco, and drink cooling drinks. She threw in a few dark young men in bathing suits, but took them out: that would be too complicated and not relaxing. She had often thought about cheating on Edward-somehow it would serve him right, though she wasn't sure what for-but she had never actually done it. She didn't know anyone suitable, any more.

Suppose she was here, then, with no Edward. She would stay at a better hotel, for one thing. One that had a plug in the sink; they had not yet stayed in a hotel with a plug. Of course that would cost more money, but she thought of herself as having more money if Edward were dead: she Would have all of his salary instead of just part of it. She knew there wouldn't be any salary if he really were dead, but it spoiled the fantasy to remember this. And she would travel on planes, if possible, or first-cla.s.s buses, in-stead of the noisy, crowded second-cla.s.s ones he insisted on taking. He said you saw more of the local colour that way and there was no point going to another country if you spent all your time with other tourists. In theory she agreed with this, but the buses gave her headaches and she could do without the close-up tour of squalor, the miserable thatched or tin-roofed huts, the turkeys and tethered pigs.

He applied the same logic to restaurants. There was a perfectly nice one in the village where they were staying, she'd seen it from the bus and it didn't look that expensive; but no, they had to eat in a seedy linoleum-tiled hutch, with plastic-covered tablecloths. They were the only customers in the place. Behind them four adolescent boys were playing dominoes and drinking beer, with a lot of annoying laugh-ter, and some smaller children watched television, a pro-gram that Sarah realized was a re-run of The Cisco Kid, with dubbed voices.

On the bar beside the television set there was a creche, with three painted plaster Wise Men, one on an elephant, the others on camels. The first Wise Man was missing his head. Inside the stable a stunted Joseph and Mary adored an enormous Christ Child which was more than half as big as the elephant. Sarah wondered how the Mary could possibly have squeezed out this colossus; it made her uncomfortable to think about it. Beside the creche was a Santa Claus haloed with flashing lights, and beside that a radio in the shape of Fred Flintstone, which was playing American pop-ular songs, all of them ancient.

"Oh someone help me, help me, plee-ee-ee-eeze ..."

"Isn't that Paul Anka?" Sarah asked.

But this wasn't the sort of thing Edward could be ex-pected to know. He launched into a defence of the food, the best he'd had in Mexico, he said. Sarah refused to give him the consolation of her agreement. She found the restaurant even more depressing than it should have been, especially the creche. It was painful, like a cripple trying to walk, one of the last spastic gestures of a religion no one, surely, could believe in much longer.

Another group of tourists was coming up the path be-hind her, Americans by the sound of them. The guide was Mexican, though. He scrambled up onto the altar, preparing to give his spiel.

"Don't go too near the edge, now."

"Who me, I'm afraid of heights. What d'you see down there?"

"Water, what am I supposed to see?"

The guide clapped his hands for attention. Sarah only half-listened: she didn't really want to know anything more about it.

"Before, people said they threw nothing but virgins in here," the guide began. "How they could tell that, I do not know. It is always hard to tell." He waited for the expected laughter, which came. "But this is not true. Soon, I will tell you how we have found this out. Here we have the altar to the rain G.o.d Tlaloc..."

Two women sat down near Sarah. They were both wearing cotton slacks, high-heeled sandals and wide-brimmed straw hats.