comorbid

by Ika Bittern

The plane drops onto the tarmac with a stuttering impact that runs up my spine. I have not slept, and the dry air has ravaged my sinuses. Mary is still asleep on my shoulder. I picture, in deliberate detail, cracking the heel of my hand across her face. How her neck would jolt with the impact, the delicious shock and the slow pleasure of the bruise. She shifts, rolls her neck, smiles up at me. When I do not return it, her eyes widen, then turn liquid with meaning. The weight of her skull has ironed an ache into the muscle of my neck.

It takes forever to disembark, and the temperature keeps creeping up. I think longingly of the rain we left behind, a dense spray against the glass of the departures hall. Eventually they funnel us out of the plane, straight onto the asphalt. The hard ground breathes heat, saturates the air. In every direction there is flat concrete and a bleary sky. Along one side of us runs a chain-link fence through which is visible an expanse of dust and stunted vegetation. Exposed, freighted with carry-ons, we hurry across the sullen ground like ants. The terminal building crouches indifferently over us, its glass face hardening the glare. Fresh wells of sweat spring up over the slowly drying crust of my ay armpits. Mary is wilting: her head droops. Her overstuffed backpack swings from one strap, jostles between us like a tantrumming kid.

The automatic doors of the terminal swallow us up. The instant hit of the air conditioning is delicious. I am ill-dressed for the hot weather in stained tracksuit bottoms and boots. When Mary saw me there had been a twitch of disappointment in her face. A hole poked in the fantasy. I didn’t care. I had been paid in advance. She soon got over it. Accepted it, metabolised it, until it was part of what she’d wanted all along.

The passengers move like a thick liquid along the long, bright, arbitrary corridors. Everyone looks a little lost. A few taut, starched businesspeople clacking on the tile. Groups of drunk women. A couple pause on the moving pavement to kiss, a hand cradling the back of a neck. A very young girl throws herself to the floor and refuses to move. Her squeal of outrage flaps up to the ceiling, collides with the glass, falls dead upon the tile. We press on.

Eventually the corridor throws itself open to a broad, skylit hall. We are finally at the border. In the queue for passport checks an exhausted teenager sits on a duffel bag with her head between her knees, shuffling forward every few minutes. Mary sighs, shifts her weight from foot to foot in her faux-hippie sundress and athletic trainers. I read and reread the information on my passport. When I am called up to the booth I slide it confidently under the glass. The border guard has dark eyes like cameras. When he asks me the reason, I am travelling my mind goes white. Blank and pure like the walls and floor and sunlight.

Mary has booked a car for us. It’s a matter of passing from one bubble of aircon to another: the gasp of heat now feels less like an oppression and more like a novelty. Then we are in the cool, dark interior. The driver collects our baggage from the carousel: we sit and wait, breathing the dark smell of the leather seats. The car is so large that we are far away from each other. Mary reaches an arm towards me, like a question. I close the space, put my hand chastely into hers.

Her hand stays there, still and white, as we make the transfer to the resort. I watch the back of the driver’s head, close-cropped, his eyes in the mirror. Beside me Mary is wired, practically simmering. She’s waiting. Wanting. I was going to wait until we were at the resort, but I really don’t care enough to deny her. I gesture at her: she leans over, straining at the seatbelt so it cuts in where her shoulder meets her neck. I put my mouth to the shell of her ear so she can feel my breath as I speak: goosebumps ripple across her thin, freckled arms. She sits back, cants her hips up and braces her feet. The driver’s eyes flick to her, then me: I give him an easy nod, and he looks back at the road. The scrubland reeling past the window is punctuated by motorbikes and squat buildings. Mary has her underwear around her calves: they catch on her trainers as she extricates her legs. She hands them over to me, flushing a little. They’re a pair of pink cotton briefs with a butterfly pattern, marked at the crotch with a pearly dampness. I make eye contact once again with the driver as I stuff them into my pocket.

The reception building is white, sleek, and rounded: its appearance is somewhere between a seed pod and a luxury hospital. The car rolls up on a paved driveway shaded by palms. The heat is still intense but here it feels like a luxury, something people pay for rather than try to avoid. Mary is cautious as she steps out of the car, trying to keep her legs together: I hold out my hand to her and she takes it. She takes small, hesitating steps, one hand surreptitiously tugging down the hem of her dress.

She’s slightly ahead of me: I watch the backs of her thighs move and try to enjoy the power she’s given me. I can’t, quite. It itches, doesn’t fit me: it’s someone else’s, come to me second-hand. She’s planned everything, scripted a whole drama. I’m almost irrelevant. Inside the reception, a diffuser exhales lemongrass: wooden surfaces, rounded shapes, plump staff in linen uniforms. Trailing plants suspended from the ceiling. Mary stands facing me, her head bowed, hands clasped in front of her. I give her name at the desk, hand over our passports to the pretty clerk, who listens earnestly and types with soft, precise fingers.

When we have our room key, I insist on taking the stairs. Mary flushes. She ascends the stairs with the mortified dignity of a captive princess. I stay close behind her, letting her feel my shadow. Her back is narrow and delicate beneath the thin straps of her dress, her hair up to expose her neck. I allow myself to be large, careless in my movements. A little threatening. I slide into the thing she wants me to be.

Our room is spacious and invitingly sterile: the bed snowy and marble-smooth, the bathroom smelling of jasmine. The maid has folded the towels into the shape of two swans, their necks bent together into a heart at the end of the bed. The large window shows me a rectangle of sea beneath the hard horizon line, the blue sky, a distant flank of land furred with trees. There are two armchairs the colour of wet sand: I sink into one. Mary hovers, unsure if she should sit. I give her no indication. I stretch my legs out in front of me, lean back, and think about the money she has put into my account.

In many ways, this is an easy job. At the end of a shift at the hospital, my legs were like lead. Day and night fused under the pressurised fluorescent lights. Everyone there was old: age-spotted hands against white sheets, the lights showing off every pleat of skin, every mole. every stye, every swollen vein. I had no interest in any of them. They were mounds of flesh, slowly collapsing, to be monitored, fed, washed, drugged. When death swept suddenly across them, they were to be noted and sent to the morgue. After my shift I stood in the underground car park and smoked and inhaled exhaust fumes.

I liked my job because it gave me a very real power. The knowledge of it would fill me up like a dangerous light. I never acted upon it. I made mistakes, of course, as anyone would, but never hurt anyone on purpose.

There was one patient, a man, greenish and jocular with a barking cough. He flirted with the other nurses in a stuttering croak, gasping between words under his oxygen mask. His skin was very dry and translucent and flaked over your hands when you touched him. I wiped him down brusquely with a sponge. He watched me with beady humour as I turned his limbs and cleaned beneath the flaps of skin. ‘You’re an angel’, he said. ‘An angel.’

I brimmed with anger, sudden and expansive as a gas leak. The yellow blade of his smile whittled me away: each insolent touch of his eyes pulled something off from me. I was merely the block from which he was carving the woman he wanted to see. I wanted to dig a knuckle into his ribs, make him feel the power I was holding over him. I didn’t. He died without my intervention, that sickening grin zipped away forever.

I left nursing and took on this kind of work because I wanted to work less. And because I didn’t want anyone to think I was a good person. Of course, as with any powerful female role, there are the excuses and apologies – domme, dominatrix, the female suffixes qualifying and softening and reassuring. But I am not a fantasy: what I do is not therapy or play. I really am, I think, a violent person. A dangerous person. I enjoy thinking about this.

I have Mary strip, shove her down on her back. Folds appear in the pristine bedsheet, radiating out from where her weight rumples the fabric. I look her over. She’s pretty when you really look at her, but not at all striking: no strength in her features, the tones of her face watery and without contrast. Her body is very thin and fragile looking, with dark spots that make her skin look whiter. The appearance of delicacy makes me feel cruel. I go to her bag, find the sets of handcuffs I made her buy: unpadded, municipal steel. I secure her hands to the headboard. The tension in her arms pulls her chest taut, flattens her breasts. As she breathes her ribs press up against her skin, like swimmers trying to breathe.

I want to do it right away. But she’s looking at me with wide, expecting eyes, so I talk to her, rub my hands over her nipples and feel them stiffen. ‘Pretty little tits,’ I say. ‘But I think we can make them prettier.’ I take the needle out of my pocket, show it to her, turn it so the light runs down it in a long thread. She breathes sharply, raises her neck, as if unsure if she should try to get away. But then she relaxes, softens like butter, and I know I’ll get my way. I lean down, rest my cheek against one breast, feel the flat bone beneath. ‘Breathe in,’ I tell her, and she does: everything in her contracts in fear and desire. I position the needle so it’s just poking into the nub of her nipple, and then press through. It passes through quick and clean, the soft flesh unresistant, easy. I feel a thrill, a relief, like popping a spot. A little blood wells placidly around the sharp tip, now protruding from the nipple. I take a photo on my phone, adjust until her face is in the frame, eyes closed, tears on her cheeks, the breast with the dart right through it. I take the head of the needle and withdraw it slowly, enjoying the smooth pull: Mary whines, and I tell her to breathe shallow, keep her chest still. I lower my head to look at the little pinprick, now bleeding more generously. The iron smell blooms warm in the air. Through the hole I thread a silver ring. ‘To keep you open for me.’

She’s shuddering. It doesn’t bother me much. She said she wanted to push herself, test her boundaries. I’m interested to see how elastic she can be, to see how her desire stretches to accommodate mine. When she opens her eyes, I can see the soft, broad acceptance in them.

Mary’s anorexia is obvious. Embarrassingly so. It isn’t high season, so the resort’s restaurant is more than half-empty: the waiters lean on tables and talk quietly in their own language. In a corner is an illuminated tank of lobsters with elastic around their claws. Mary orders tuna and spends fifteen minutes cutting it into ever smaller pieces while talking incessantly, until her plate is a mess of shredded flesh. I eat my steak.

The waiter takes the plates, and we are left with the white tablecloth between us, still very clean. I order two desserts, a tiramisu and a passionfruit panna cotta. Mary protests that she doesn't want anything. It’s the most fight I’ve seen from her yet, but she deflates when I look at her. The plates arrive, fancy, dotted and lined with coloured gels and creams, like edible punctuation. I tell the waiter to put them both in front of her. ‘Eat,’ I say, when he’s gone. I drink my wine, tasting its noxious darkness.

She looks at me, her face drained, and for the first time her eyes are hard, a wall. I reach across the table and touch her face, trail lower, to where I can see the outline of the ring I’d put through her strain against the material of her top. I pinch the metal through the fabric, tug hard – she follows the pull, leans down to counter the force, eyes pitched up at me.

She eats the desserts. In the candlelight I watch a spider pick its way delicately across the tiled floor.

The next day is predictably beautiful; the sun fanned across a uniform blue sky. Mary watches me eat breakfast, thick wedges of damp cheese and dry bread, while she nurses a black coffee. The buffet room looks out over the beach: I can see a few sunbathers, an armed guard strolling boredly. Mary woke up with her pierced nipple flushed an angry red: she gasped when I touched it with my finger. When I squeezed it it emitted a thin pinkish pus. The saltwater would help, I told her.

The sand on the beach is printer-paper white, darkening where the sea laps it. The sea is room temperature. It is the same colour as the swimming pool behind us, chlorinated turquoise. I wade out to sea in my black athletic swimsuit, my legs like great white trunks growing out of the water, until I’m submerged to my waist. I duck under the water and swim, open my eyes to watch the bits of debris twirling in the filtered green light, like a dirty aquarium in a shopping centre. I can see Mary’s legs, cut off at the waist, moving tentatively over the stones. I break out of the water in front of her, spraying her with a fine spittle of sea, my hair slicked down to my head like a shark in a film. I watch her tamp her slight fear. Then I pull her until she’s submerged to her chin. The salinity hits the infected wound: she hisses like water in a hot pan.

Afterwards, we go to lie out on the sand. Mary’s bikini is dark blue with tiny white spore-like flowers: the bottoms tie in bows on the side. It’s a juvenile attempt at sexiness. The sand spills onto her towel as she shifts around and a crust of dried-on salt and silt forms on her limbs and back, as if she were hardening, growing a shell. She reaches for her canvas bag, but I snatch it up from her. ‘I need to go to the room for something.’ The extended hand falls to the sand in surrender, stirring up a little huff of dust.

‘Don’t move,’ I say. I kick a little more sand over her, just to show I’m serious. The armed guard watches us without interest. I hike her bag over my shoulder. The sun beams straight down like an aimed laser. She crosses her arms over her stomach. In her resignation she is suddenly perfect, like a new corpse. ‘I won’t be long,’ I say.

I walk through the resort, take the long way around the pool to get to the bar. I ask the bartender for four buckets of ice. He nods, shows no curiosity. The people here have no interest in the tourists. They understand us as unserious. They do not concern themselves with our lives as one would not concern themselves with a child’s game.

I take up the handles of the ice buckets and walk back past the pool. A man in a polo shirt is spraying pesticide over a lawn. The droplets crack the sunlight into giddy shards of rainbow. I watch my step: the buckets weep a spotted track of condensation. I pass through the sliding doors of the building, take the lift up. In the corridor I pass the cleaning lady with her trolley. Her face is plump and rounded as an apricot, her hair pulled gently back from her forehead. Her black eyes hit my skin like pebbles: suspicion tightens her mouth. Perhaps because I am carrying the buckets. None of the resort guests ever carry anything.

I card myself into the room, where the curtains are still closed, giving the appearance of a soft-furnished cave. The maid has cleared away the cigarettes I’d smoked out of the window, the flecks of Mary’s sick that had dried onto the side of the toilet bowl. I feel like I am in the room of two better, cleaner people. I go straight to the bathroom and empty out the buckets into the bath: they thunk and clatter like a dropped tray of glasses. I run the tap as cold as it will go. I go to the bedroom and unpack Mary’s bag into the drawer by the left-hand side of the bed, where she’d slept: sunglasses, sunscreen, a colourful paperback, an Evian bottle. I take the water, sit on the edge of the tub, and drink it slowly. Then I smoke a cigarette, looking onto the sea: the resort’s restaurant building blocks out the stretch of beach where I’d left Mary. I enjoy the view better from a distance. It’s like a photograph.

Eventually, I walk back down to the beach. I’ve changed into a dark dress and a sunhat: I’m wearing Mary’s sunglasses. My flip-flops slap obscenely against the stone walk. Halfway down I stop to observe a lizard, stunned on the whitewash. Slitted, watchful eyes. When I reach Mary I stop a little behind her, let her turn to face me. Through her sunglasses the sand is the colour of cardboard. The tide has come in. Mary is sitting up, her back humped forward into a protective crook, her legs folded and tucked in, like a curled-up woodlouse. She has fanned her long, fine hair across her back and face like a veil.

She turns her head to me, abashed, and I can see the lurid redness daubed on the high points of her face, dashed along the parting of her hair. Red rosettes on her knees, as if she’d been kneeling on a hard floor, lashing down the slopes of her shins to her feet. Her back is the darkest, brick-coloured, raw and scrubbed-looking. She hugs her waist, forearms singed pink against the sheltered paleness of her stomach. ‘Come on,’ I say, and she hurries to her feet, unsteady. I touch her back, feel the heat pulsing off her: the dried-on sand rasps against the inflamed skin.

Some of the tourists we pass swivel their heads carelessly towards her, like exotic birds. She tries to walk quickly, barefoot on the hot stone, but I control the pace. I can see some of the discharge from the piercing has crusted on the white petals of her bra. When we get inside, I lead her to the bathroom, help her into the bath. She balks at the cold. She almost can’t do it, but I insist. I become soft enough to get my way. In she sinks, and the ice bobs up around her. I place a hand on her scorched brow, like a school nurse feeling for fever, and press her beneath the water.

The next morning, Mary’s nipple is encased in dried pus, like a little jewel. The flesh has turned purple and breathes a sweetish foulness. She hadn’t eaten anything all day yesterday, nauseous after the temperature shock. Today she feels the floor pitching beneath her, her head full of hard blocks that knock together when she moves. She wants to go to the doctor: I tell her she’s being stupid. ‘Body piercings always heal fucked up. It’s the process.’

She chews on her lip, says nothing. There’s a prickliness beneath my skin. We missed breakfast, and all I’ve had is instant coffee, which has turned to pure acid in my gut. She won’t even let me open the curtains, and the air con isn’t working. I feel like a lobster being slowly steamed alive. She blinks at me with a dumb solicitousness, like she wants me to save her. For a moment I am so angry that it burns up all the air in the room.

‘Get on your knees,’ I tell her. She hesitates. ‘Fucking go.’ She calculates, then does, untangles her legs from the sheets and slides down onto the floor, flinching as her burnt knees hit the carpet.

I choose my words carefully. ‘Tell me,’ I say, ‘what your fucking problem is.’

The sight of her placates me a little. Her hair runs down her face like tears. The scarred pinkness across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose is clownish, humiliating, a permanent blush. She sways a little, unsteady, as if underwater. ‘This isn’t how I thought this would be,’ she says.

She waits, but I give her nothing. She goes on. ‘I thought – I thought this would be a game.’

‘You told me you wanted the danger. You said that you wanted to see what you could take. Push past your boundaries.’

‘I know,’ she says. She’s nodding compulsively. ‘I know.’

‘Say it.’

She twists up in humiliation, like a worm held to a lighter. ‘I wanted this.’

‘Yes, you did. So, what the fuck?’

She breathes, hard and coarse. ‘It was meant to be a fantasy.’

I bark a laugh. ‘A fantasy? You fly to a foreign country with a stranger and tell them to hurt you however they want, and you expect them to act out your fantasy?’

She tilts her head up, slowly, until she’s holding my eyes. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I did pay you.’

The silence spreads out wider and thinner until it turns brittle, cracks through the centre.

‘So,’ I say. ‘What is this fantasy?’

She shifts a little on her stung knees, holding open the question. This is the worst part for her. It’s the same for all of them. The dumb-show of force and subservience is calculated to suspend this moment of having to say it. To own the terrible thing that they so badly want. ‘I–’ She fumbles, looks to me, finds no purchase on my face. ‘Hit me,’ she says, limply.

I smile at her, ironic, a little mocking. ‘Sure. Why don’t you lie down on the bed?’ She rises.

The sunburn ends at the base of her spine, where the skin is blanched and bare. In my left hand is my belt: I bring it down across her. It crackles electric: the flesh resounds with the shock, settles. I wait until the seared red line appears across the skin, then I do it again. Mary is crying into the sheets, a wet patch expanding beneath her. My head is full of livid foam. She’s outsourced her desire: she lies there, absolved, martyred, helpless against the awful thing she paid me to do.

I drop the belt, leave it draped across her: she’s still, shuddering, choked. I feel very bored by her, like I’ve exhausted the depths of her personality. I leave her there, take the elevator to down to the pool, and duck underwater.

It’s the cleaning lady with the apricot face who finds her. I imagine there might be some comfort in that it was somebody so professional, so unfazed by the sight of degradation. Her stopped heart prevented bruises from forming. The police come, whistle low at her prone corpse, stand around making small talk until I realise they’re waiting for me to bribe them. Mary’s wallet is full of her unspent cash. One officer, with heavy cologne and a sad, seasoned handsomeness, clasps my hand before he goes.

I remain in the resort until my flight is scheduled. The staff treat me without prejudice. No one shuns or consoles me. The cleaner smooths out the bedspread, erasing any imprint in the sheet. There is no change in the languid rhythms of the resort. It remains inviolate, devoted to leisure, a place without memory.

Mary is repatriated for her autopsy. Her funeral is lovely: thousands of pounds worth of white lilies honeying the air, their frail protruding tongues smearing red pollen over black mourning clothes. The mortician has done a wonderful job. The body in the open casket is smoothed over, waxy – as if, if you cut it, it would be the same all the way through. As if it never had any secrets.

Photo of Ika Bittern

BIO: Ika Bittern is a London-based writer and researcher.