Read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for Free Online Page B

ligament, banded with paler creases – till, with the third pass, it was all one colour.
    She rubbed his hand, the back, the palm. It made the sides of his fingers itch. Once she turned the plate on its strap to the back of her own hand and took his two great ones in hers, stepping away.
    One arm glowed clean in evening light. His other was the fouled grime-grey that, since his return to the station, he’d never thought of as other than part of him.
    ‘Rats aren’t supposed to forget stuff they knew before they went to the Institute. Do you mean to tell me you’ve
never
used one of these before?’
    ‘I didn’t …’ he began, unsure if the question was about meaning, telling, or use.
    ‘“Let’s get on with it …” Your father never called you in from some social therapy group like that? Where I grew up, that always meant to a kid it was time to come in and get clean – with one of these.’
    ‘No.’ He frowned at her, realizing she wanted something more. ‘Didn’t have no father.’ But he wasn’t sure if that would do.
    She dropped his hands, stepped up again, reversed the plate again and moved it over his cheeks, his hair, his forehead. With a quick turn she trowelled its edge along the crease beside his left nostril, beside the right, now up behind his right ear, behind the left, across his eyebrows – ‘Close your eyes.’ (He already had.) – brushing off the slough every two or three passes. ‘Pay attention to what I’m doing. Because I’m going to want you to do the sameto me, later. Having someone give you a clean-up like you were a little kid is the most sensuous thing in the world, I think.’ She passed the plate on to his chest, down his stomach, along his hard, dry flank. ‘Does it feel good?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    She gave him a grin and a small push on one shoulder. He sagged backwards a little and came forward again. So she said: ‘I meant, turn again.’
    He started turning.
    ‘Eh … stop. With your back to me. No, like that –’
    The tickling dropped down one shoulder, began again along the valley of his spine, then repeated down the other. It moved about one hip, circled on one buttock.
    And stopped. ‘Wait a minute.’ She stepped past him.
    He watched her put the plate down on the transport floor and climb back in. Again she squatted in the shadowed clutter. When she stood, stepping back to the edge, she held a … black, ragged glove?’ ‘We might as well try this, too.’ She jumped to the sand with the awkwardness often shown by the very tall. ‘Hold out your hand. No, the clean one.’
    His knuckles were large as sun-wrinkled fruit, his wide nails still as gnawed as in childhood.
    Both forefingers in the wrist opening, she slipped the glove over his hand – not really ragged. It had been slit in a dozen or more places, the bands held here and there by lengths of metal fixed inside. He felt them slip over his fingers’ broad crowns, his knuckles, under his palm’s callus.
    Elastic bits stretched.
    His hand distended the bands as far as they would go, so that what had been a glove was now a web of black ribbons across the rayed ligaments that ran from wrist to knuckles or over the veins that raddled across them.
    ‘Let me turn it on now –’ which apparently meant snapping the metal clasps together at his wrist:
    What happened next was fast and complex, but he followed its parts as though he were being patiently taught and rehearsed and taught and rehearsed again in their workings by the most skilled Muct instructor.
    A pedal voice – ‘… stupid, stupid, stupid …’ – that had begun sometime in unremembered childhood whenever he’d been asked questions he couldn’t answer, that had continued whenever he’d been asked questions he’d had to answer ‘no’, and that had finally come whenever he’d been asked any questions at all or even had to ask them, suddenly became audible. A tiny voice, still it had insisted as relentlessly (and as unobtrusively) as