Chapter 4: Ribs

It was nearly lunchtime. The tour group had been bussed out of the classified Nevada Nuclear Testing Site to a nature reserve just on the other side of an indomitable yet totally porous steel fence. The guide disturbed even this brief repose by excitedly chatting through all the variations of flora and fauna that was supposed to exist there.

Lora parroted the tour guide, ’Here we can see a trail of droppings from the beautiful Desert bighorn’

This raised a snigger from a boy on the back row who had otherwise been silent all day. Pearl could understand why it might have been funny because it was poo, but she now wasn’t in the mood to laugh. “More than 1500 species” the guide had said, ‘would be fossilised in Trinitite for the rest of time and sold in the gift shop as paperweights’ thought Pearl, her head very much in the fireball and still at the age where animals deserved more empathy than humans.

A palpable tension between adult and offspring hung over the group, split by age, philosophy, and islands of petrified plants. The youth skulked on the periphery like vultures, plugged into walkman and gameboys, yet ever ready to pick fault with their elders, who crowded around an ice box, speaking with the forced joviality and conspiratorial union of colleagues.

Pearl looked up from the sand pattern she had drawn with her finger to catch sight of a grown man struggling to open his beer. He looked so silly that she felt a tinge of pity, aligning his plight with her fathers, who’s intelligence did not translate to dexterity or grace. They were all variations of the same man, she thought, as she watched her father among the others trying to construct a barbecue, there was a strange tussle as they overthought the direction it should face in relation to the wind and were jankily pirouetting around the grill. Pearl imagined them as cartoons or turning up in a screwball as the bow-tied playthings of a gangsters moll, who would tickle their Adam’s apple, call them cute and they would melt into a sappy puddle, awkward as two dimensions in a world of three. Pearl felt it was perhaps ironic that these were the very same people tasked with communicating a crucially important message to a unquantifiable civilisation 10,000 years from now. She cast her eyes back down to continue with her lovely shapes, a hello kitty inside a heart inside a flower with smell waves coming off it haloed by stars.

Back in the present, the men had entirely lost their appetites to design and the barbecue resembled brutalist architecture, or minimalist sculpture, which against the backdrop of the desert looked quite beautiful but had taken so long that the teenagers were now existentially ravenous and Lora had started smoking, armed with the unarguable reasoning that it was an appetite suppressant. The smoke signal did nothing to hasten the debate about the safest optimum cooking temperature, estimates of when they would reach it and whether it was too late to marinade. The guide who had been sitting peacefully on a directors chair in the shade of the tour bus could bear no more of these pedantic nerds and their bad mannered children so set down her diet coke, took up the tongs and waived them all away. A cheer briefly rose as the first rib was lain.

As the smoke rose Pearls stomach lurched, only just about over the derangement of breakfast she couldn’t bear the prospect of sitting on an improvised table of masticating strangers, being confronted with an overfilled plate, especially in this heat. She had never felt hunger in the same way as others, for her food was mostly disgusting, she found it weird that people spent so much time on it. She also didn’t understand or appreciate the ceremony that surrounded it, the entrapment of meal times, the enforced company, the closeness to people’s chewy saliva sounds and satisfied noises, the confusing smells, the way the food sat lazily inside of her and she feared the feeling of fullness it gave her. Her mother supplemented her extremely fussy eating and psychosomatic allergies with liquids, powders and supplements, the food of flagellants and astronauts.

“Just the skin please” she would ask the dinner ladies at school when custard was being served. Sweetly they humoured her, and the sad helping would sit in the middle of her plate like a placenta. The skin, for Pearl, was a delectable membrane. It was not the flavour, which was plastic and yellow, but the texture, the feel of skin, in her mouth. It was alluring, magical, the custard, the seemingly inanimate thing, had formed its own skin, its own interiority.

The other kids, understanding in quite a sophisticated just how funny and revolting this was, would repeat it to her in the playground or amongst each other, ‘Just the skin, please.’ Both grossed out and captivated when watching her tongue lap it off the fork. Pearl totally understood why they didn’t want to sit next to her at lunch, she knew she was disgusting. Her habits drew anger and pity from the adults, it was seen as form of self-harm, a grotesque affectation, the mark of a spoiled brat. Pearl felt this was probably all quite fair and true but ultimately couldn’t help it. If an entire plate was forced on her, she would first try and siphon it off to more wholesome appetites, but if they chose to forgo the association she would have to hold her nose and chew fast, massage her throat to get it down. Being skeletal, allergic to everything and almost transparent, she played alone a lot. The other kids tolerated her but never included her in anything except to treat her as a curiosity to be examined. When she breathed in her skin was so pale that they could see a map of purple and green veins beneath.

Ribs were burning on the grill, puffing aggressively in all directions, weird warm odours of sun-wilted side-plates emanated from bursting tupperware. Pearl felt crowded with unwanted sensation and needed to get away from it all. Her invisible man outfit and the lure of the open grill gave her an opportunity to wander off unnoticed, walking until the

offensive smells became faint and her smoke-singed eyes stopped stinging, then she began to slow down, breathe deeper and admire the desert, its strong, hostile plants and the obnoxious brightness of their flowers. She loved how the plants were spiky, how they lived without water, half remembering something about humans using the fluid inside cacti to access other worlds through visions. So spikes didn’t always mean to harm. The small spikes made her think of the function of the bigger spikes. She wondered about the waste that would be buried here, was this like the cactus milk, was it magical?