While they throw down the pills with what is left of the rum, Fallow pours himself a water from the kitchen canister and stands with his back against the worktop and drains the glass and wipes his wet beard. In the lounge they laugh and in laughing strike their knees or the threadbare arms of the chairs. They pass the bottles round. Heads arc back to swallow the pills, gullets working, like herons sucking down carp.
The door onto the outer hall opens. Fallow catches Eleanor’s eye when she enters and she smiles and sets her backpack onto the floor. From the kitchen she looks back at Vincent and Griffin and Frank and Sal with their pills and their rum.
She takes a cup from the sink and fills it with water and Fallow watches her drink. Her face is round and speaks of centuries past in the fullness of its lips and the small perfect form of the nose and the eyes dark and endearing and tapering to points in their corners.
Whenever he looks at Eleanor, which is certainly very often, he is reminded of windswept Asiatic steppes and a beauty almost antiquitous in its purity. Or maybe he is just being racist. Her skin is milky and framed in black hair that shines despite the dust like a curtain of silk.
Eleanor stands quietly by, looking into his eyes like one awaiting a reply to something unspoken. When he meets her gaze she looks down at the floor again, as if they are strangers in a lift. As if he hadn't once seen her naked, bathing herself with a sponge. He remembers the gap in the door and the thin pale frame kneeling in the tub. Water running from the clenched sponge in rivulets over her stomach. And she had seen him and gasped and later wept.
Maybe that’s why she speaks very little.
