Extract from 'This Devastating Fever'

Virginia leant forward as a child might. She sipped. Her mouth was full of the thick stuff. She gagged then swallowed. Her mouth opened again. Her husband put his spoon to it. The operation became mechanical. It continued, this war between them, for the next two hours.

It was a summer's day: bright and long. The curtains, though, were drawn. Drawn too was the woman who sat, distressed, in a chair in the darkened room. She found clothes difficult and the ones she wore hung loose on her fragile frame: a long and faded velvet skirt, a shapeless dark shirt. The outfit was hot. It oppressed her. Her hair was in a bun. She had worried at it and strands straggled. It was as if she wanted to look as mad as possible: her derangement to speak with eloquence.

Virginia refused to catch the eye of the man who hovered next to her. His hand shook as he offered her another spoonful. His hand was always trembling. Some days it was an effort to feed himself, let alone his wife. His fingers were long and delicate, his body was lanky also. He was like some primordial insect, Virginia thought, waiting to strike (yes, she knew it was the female that ate her mate, but she liked the image all turned about). His melancholy, lined face was, in some ways, a mirror image of hers. All that was loving and soft about him was around his mouth. Yes, her husband had a beautiful mouth and Virginia could see that it deserved kissing.

'Vanessa?' she asked. It was Vanessa's kisses she needed most, would need till the day she died.

'You told me she wasn't to visit you,' Leonard said.

'I've changed my mind.'

Leonard said nothing. He was not a man who changed his mind easily and he did not understand the willfulness with which she changed hers . The sheer - lightness, yes, that was the word - with which her mind untethered itself. He offered himself as her mooring and she accepted the offer. Now they both wondered if they understood the nature of the contract they had entered. Certainly she never expected this. This intrusiveness. That he would always be there, forcing food upon her.

She lifted her arm with sudden force and the brown muck went over Leonard, over her, and the rest splodged on the floor. They were making her fat, she knew they were and she was, in fact, right to think that, for by the time that long hard summer was done her body would be plump; fatty folds of milk-white flesh would hang from her. Her brain would be fat also; overfed, lazy with lack of use. There were no books. There was only this: dull days of beige food and white milk.

'Stop,' she said.

Leonard did not know what he expected of married life, but it was safe to say it wasn't this. He put the spoon down.

'Be sensible, mandrill,' he pleaded. 'Otherwise it will just take longer.'

He didn't understand - or wouldn't, or couldn't - that longer made no difference to Virginia. In those long hours and days and months time was all Virginia had. There was nothing else. She moaned softly and looked away from her husband. Why wouldn't he leave her alone? Leonard stood up, bowl in hand, as if to leave, but that too seemed unbearable.

'I am sorry,' she said.

Leonard returned to his chair.

'Here.'

Virginia leant forward as a child might. She sipped. Her mouth was full of the thick stuff. She gagged then swallowed. Her mouth opened again. Her husband put his spoon to it. The operation became mechanical. It continued, this war between them, for the next two hours.

Virginia sighed. Leonard drifted. He suddenly found himself thinking of a beach. His beach. Whenever he remembered this place he thought of the stench. If it were a liquid it would be thick as tar, its temperature boiling. If it were a sound it would be a siren.

It is thick with Arabs and he waves a staff in front of him, like a scythe, to clear the way. Arabs, Leonard finds, understand what is between men. That violence is a language between them. This is just one among the many reasons he prefers them to the Hindus (a lazy bunch) or the Buddhists (they think the island is theirs). The putrescence of the oysters is incongruous when the sea is so clear and blue, the beaches in the distance so white. A man can watch the sun rise and set here, so broad is the vista, so wide and flat is the northern part of the land. He despises the place yet finds himself wondering, not for the first time, if he will ever again see such glorious skies.

These days of rotting flesh caused delirium. Not just of the spirit but of the body also. It is the flies: they cover everything. You could fancy that this coast line was a long room in an enormous house; the flies a dark shimmering rug. It seemed impossible that so many tiny living things could make such a solid mass. Underneath them lies shells so sharp they can slice through flesh. In England the animals within are a delicacy. A briny succulence that slid down the throat suggesting oceans and bigger worlds. But here it is what irritates the oyster that is prized.

Some pearls are misshapen; some white, some black, some pink. Some are perfect translucent spheres. Or will be discovered to be so when the oysters has decomposed and the slime has been washed away. Some pearls - half perhaps - will be returned to the loin-clothed divers: they curve out and away from the boats, a rope tied to their ankles, plunge down to ocean floors. It is only the peg on their nose that keeps the sea from their lungs and stops them hemorrhaging. Leonard does not know what it is to almost drown every day; to have lungs full to bursting, tight pain in the chest transformed to red sheen behind the eyes. But working here might kill him, there is no doubt about that. As he thwacks his stick - to the left, to the right - the gesture becomes more of a flailing. A tall diver, some six-feet tall, almost knocks him over as he runs towards the shore. The diver holds a hand to his heart and bows slightly, in apology. Leonard nods his head. 'No harm done,' he says, though his words sound insubstantial. He cannot be heard over the insect hum. The rug is pulled from under his feet; he crumples into the surging mass: of men, of flies, of rotting flesh.

Divers hold him aloft. They carry him to his tent. The voices in his head spill out of him; the chatter of a family and a lifetime. He is a Jew, nothing but a Jew. His father died he left them poor his mother's talk won't ever stop and oh there is a girl he is disgusted she is disgusting her dark lips opened and inside her is a pale pink glistening.

Leonard has never been safer than he is among these strong and muscular men. They don't understand a word he says. Some part of him will remember this. Language is a mask, you can hide behind it. A man puts a wet cloth to Leonard's brow, a bullock and cart are hitched, and with a shudder he is slowly dragged inland, to a doctor. It is ten days before he becomes conscious but during that subterranean time - he dreams he is trapped in a dream in which he struggles to wake up - the smell of rotting things never leaves him: it is in his nostrils, his hair, it fills his throat, the cells of all his organs. It will never leave him. Nor the memory of the first flash of a silver white pearl among the festering grey.

Leonard would never quite erase this knowledge: there was beauty to be found everywhere. In gunmetal skies of war-torn London, in the ravings of his wife. When she looked at him it was with a rage so pure it seemed to him a kind of evil. All jungles are evil. He heard again the clack-clack-clack of a leopard's teeth, the hysterical chattering of the monkeys before they misjudge the distances between the branches and fall into the leopard's jaws. Oh, to be hated as she hates him. Oh to be loved as she loves him. She will not take him into her body she will not give into what is rotten about her. One day she will write a letter to him: No two people have ever been so happy as we. The pearl. That is the pearl she will give him.

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