In the Palm Read online

  A NineStar Press Publication

  www.ninestarpress.com

  In the Palm

  ISBN: 978-1-950412-71-6

  Copyright © 2019 by Elna Holst

  Cover Art by Natasha Snow Copyright © 2019

  Published in May, 2019 by NineStar Press, New Mexico, USA.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at [email protected].

  Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content, which may only be suitable for mature readers.

  In the Palm

  Elna Holst

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  About the Author

  For the ones I lost

  and for the lost ones

  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Chapter One

  I AM DRUNK and about to chop my hand off. There is a correlation between these two states of being, or becoming; but it isn’t that I am crazed and delirious from the alcohol. On this short notice, it’s the only anaesthetic available to me—and the hand needs to go.

  Despite my grogginess on first coming to, I recognised the symptoms of a necrotising infection: the tissue death eating away at my digits—the fifth and the second are already black, all but falling off on their own—the red and purple nebulae spreading over the back of my hand, my palm, inching up towards my wrist.

  I need to amputate. I need to amputate right now, if there’s even the remotest possibility the bacteria haven’t reached any of my vital organs yet.

  There will be time enough for questions later—with a little, or rather a freighter-shipload of luck. Because I do have questions. Like, where am I?

  Who am I?

  What am I doing here?

  Checking that I have my penknife at the ready, I start tightening my primitively devised tourniquet: a stick and a belt. It’s like something out of a survivalist’s wet, apocalyptic nightmare.

  Fortunately—incomprehensibly—there were two minibar-sized bottles of whisky in the sorry, debris-filled excuse of a handbag I had slung over my shoulder, caught at my hip, and wound across my chest in a way that restricted my breathing when I regained consciousness. I was alone, drenched and shivering like a stray, on this abandoned strip of beach in No Place.

  Maybe I’m a recovering alcoholic. It would explain the blackout. But it seems unlikely, since the spirits performed their magic after just a gulp or two, offering a warm, tingly sensation that managed to put a cap on my agony, strengthening my resolve.

  I am not going to get the tourniquet any tighter. My right hand is shaking as I reach for the puny knife, making sure I have the rags I have torn out of my shirt within easy access.

  “This is going to hurt so bad.” I tell the knife conversationally—like the drunk I am, at present—and I am struck by a thought that makes me laugh grimly. “I sure hope I’m not a leftie.”

  Screaming like a banshee to get my adrenaline pumping, I swing the blade down over my left wrist with as much force as I can muster.

  Chapter Two

  SO HOT. SO hot, yet so cold, yet so hot, all the same. Stars dance before my eyes, and it could have been delirium, but no: it’s the night sky. An endless, otherworldly expanse vaulting above my head like an exploded piñata, each star a soaring, scintillating scrap of space. I have never seen a night sky like this before; I’m quite certain, though who will take the word of an amnesiac, a fevered amnesiac, lying in the sand—the impossibly fine white sand, like snow (if only it were snow, I muse through the wool in my brain, to cool the flames within) beside her severed hand? How did I manage? How could I have cut through bone with nothing but a penknife, even if it is a high-quality, all-the-trimmings sort of blade? I have bled through my ad hoc bandages—have I? No, they’re good, if grimy.

  “Water.” I want to tell the coyly twinkling stars overhead, but my cracked lips won’t cooperate. “Wa-eh,” I actually say, breathe; and tears of hurt—and gratitude, because yes, I am in fact still breathing—stream down my immobile face, pooling in the shells of my ears.

  “Need.” I try next and snort because it comes out as “Nee” and this seems funny, somehow; I can’t explain.

  I am waging a losing war against unconsciousness. I probably won’t wake again, I think morosely. And then, as the sky looks to be falling…falling on top of me, the very universe ready to claim me as fair game. Oh, but it’s been grand. I can’t remember the particulars, but I think I enjoyed the ride.

  Chapter Three

  I MARK THE spot in the sand, where I have buried my left hand, with a pile of seashells. It’s superstitious of me, really; at the hospital, the organic waste materials—apart from the samples sent to pathology—would have gone straight to the incinerator, forming part of the jumble-sale bonfire of defunct remains: feet, hands, hearts, innumerable stillborns, bits and pieces of livers, lungs, breasts, and appendixes. I must have removed my share of appendixes? I prod, but my mind remains a stubborn blank.

  All I know, with a conviction that appears rooted in the very marrow of my bones, is that I am a doctor. Some kind of doctor. The rest is a soapy blur.

  I was a doctor. What I am now remains to be seen.

  I am a one-handed person, to start with.

  I am standing on a beach, in a tattered jade dress suit, clutching a dirty, white leather handbag, like a visitor to a conference gone mind-blowingly, bone-chillingly wrong.

  I’ve lost my shoes. I glance down at my dusty, brown-streaked feet. This is a surmise, not a memory, per se. I’m fairly confident a person dolled up in a jade dress suit of obvious quality (silk, I think) would have been inclined to wear shoes.

  I can’t even remember my name.

  “Well, to hell with it, Darlene,” I rasp—it’s worth a shot, top of my head; but no, emphatically no, that’s not my name. “Whoever you are, you need a drink.”

  I have put the two empty miniature glass bottles that contained my extempore anaesthetic (Dalwhinnie) back in my bag. I’m not sure why—I’m not exactly a member of the Guides association (am I?)—but I thought I might need them. You never know.

  To be honest, I am more light-headed now than when I downed them. I’m severely dehydrated. If I don’t get a move on to—wherever—I’ll be just as dead as if I had never performed that little piece of rudimentary surgery on myself.

  “God, if I believe in you—” I stop myself. Nope, my guts tell me, sorry, hen. “Never
mind, then.”

  THE ISLAND ISN’T very large. And it is an island, I’ve found, after having spent a few days—I lost count quickly, what with the fever coming on at regular intervals; regular, that is to say, but difficult to come to grips with—recuperating by a spring of freshwater not too far from the beach where I…landed, I suppose. Washed up? Dropped out of the sky? Materialised out of thin air?

  The sand is making my missing limb itch. At the outskirts of my mind, while my temperature rises and falls, I can feel it, sense it, turning in its shallow grave—festering—made into a perverse voodoo doll of itself. My stump aches. It aches and bleeds and flames, and I don’t have any fresh bandages. I wish I hadn’t drunk all that alcohol in one go. I could have used it to disinfect the wound. But at the time, the whole ‘after’ scenario seemed like a vague and not very probable outcome.

  “You should be dead,” I repeat to myself, like a litany, as I gulp down the water I awkwardly scoop up from the stream with my right hand. Well, my hand. No need to specify now.

  The first day by the stream I spent bawling, drinking, and shouting. I called out for help every other minute or so during daylight, but the surrounding jungle remained recalcitrant, silent, refusing even to echo my own noise back at me.

  There are no signs of human habitation whatsoever. It makes my teeth chatter, in the midst of the tropical heat. I’m scared. I’m more scared than I can remember ever having been in my life—but that’s not saying much, since I can remember next to nothing.

  I’m pretty confident I used to have an office. A white coat. Perhaps a secretary? No, a team of brilliant subordinates, one with an Aussie accent, a handsome, permanently sneering young man, but the stunner was the all-American girl with the kinky auburn hair and eyes you could lose your soul to—House. House, M.D. I’m not remembering my life. I’m remembering a fucking television drama series.

  “Help!” I yell, my lungs hurting with the effort. “Damn you! Why don’t you come out and help me?”

  At last, from out of the dark, fecund greenery, something screeches back at me. I clap my hands over my mouth. Or rather, I clap my hand and my stump over my mouth, the bloodied rags of the latter smothering me with their sharp, metal aroma.

  Sheer terror rattles down my spine. Then I hear the faint but unmistakable flutter of wings, and my heart expands because of course: birds. Birds are everywhere, can get to any corner of the globe, even to the most forsaken desert island—and I start weeping.

  “I hate you,” I whisper into my hand and stump. “I’m so tired.”

  And hungry, naturally. Which is a good sign, a dispassionate, clinical part of me notes. I look around, taking in my sticky-green and teeming environs. Humans are omnivores. I am in a tropical climate. There has to be something.

  I fall upon a shrub with gleaming, yellow berries—sort of shrub, sort of berries—and stuff my face, after which I proceed to vomit spectacularly. I fall asleep—lose consciousness, if you will—right there in the pool of half-digested pulp and gut juices. When I wake up, my face is burning.

  The sun. I’ve strayed out from under the shadow of the canopy.

  “Go back to the water. And for fuck’s sake, stop trying to kill yourself.”

  Except, my legs won’t carry me. I have to crawl, the sand scorching my palm, my one palm, my poor… I crane my head abruptly. There are palm trees above me. Palm trees bearing large, green clusters of round fruit: coconuts. It has to be. I squint up at them.

  So close, yet so impractically far away—where’s your pet monkey when you need it? I half crawl, half hobble up to the closest trunk. Some kind of hitherto untapped reserve of energy seems to have kicked in at the prospect, the mere idea of that white, succulent… With all my might, I shove at the tree. The crown of leaves rustle, as if in mockery of me. I shove again, but this time the trunk won’t even budge.

  “Fine, have it your way.” I sit and lean my back against the palm tree. “I’ll just sit here and die of starvation, and it will be all your fault.”

  Bringing my handbag onto my lap, I open it. At some point, I don’t know when, I have had the foresight to top up my whisky bottles with water from the stream. It isn’t much. It isn’t nearly enough. When I’m done, I lick at the sweaty glass like a suckling babe.

  Angrily, I stuff the emptied bottles back into the bag, and there’s a plastic crunching sound from inside the lining, it’s been torn—there’s… Nicotine gums!

  I stare at the bright, glistening foil package.

  “I didn’t know I was a smoker.” I shrug. “The things you learn about yourself.”

  Popping three of the square, blue-spotted gums into my mouth, I let my head fall back against the palm tree.

  “Christ, that hits the spot.” I drag my hand across my beady forehead, my sore, blinking eyes. “Fuck, yeah.”

  Chapter Four

  THE THUD DIDN’T wake me. I bat my crusty eyelids, a delayed dread sending a spurt of cortisol through my system. I fell asleep under a coconut tree. What was I thinking?

  I use my toe to poke at the large, green orb that has landed (I assume, though I was unconscious at the time) just an inch or so away from my left foot. It’s real, right enough. A gift from above.

  “Your aim’s off.” I pat the bole of the tree warily. “But thanks. Thanks all the same.”

  I get onto my knees in the sand and creep closer to this unexpected treasure. Something is pulling at my hair, to my right. My head snaps around. Nothing.

  I turn back towards the coconut, but still, there’s something. Trying to brush it away with my hand, I am met by an icky, gooey sensation that all but turns my stomach, before I recognise it—this feeling, dragged up from the recesses of my malfunctioning memory: I have gum in my hair.

  I tug at it and wince from the minute pain. I suppose I could leave it there. I am, after all, stranded on a desert island, barefoot, my clothes in rags—that is to say, the ones I haven’t literally pulled into rags to stem the blood flow from my newly-acquired stump. I’m dehydrated, febrile, half-starved, my skin red and blistery with sunburn; am I forgetting anything? Oh yes, the amnesia. I am No One in No Place, Going Nowhere.

  But it’s a matter of personal dignity. I don’t care if it’s a sign that the last of my mind is going: I’m not about to waltz around here with gum in my hair.

  “You’re not exactly waltzing, Matilda,” I breathe, through gritted teeth. Nice—but, regretfully, not my name either. I trap the wad of chewing gum in my fist and yank.

  “Ow! You bitch!”

  I shudder with the pain, blinking back tears, rolling the ball of hair and gum between my palm and stump. What should I do with it? You’re not supposed to just drop chewing gum on the ground, something about birds and beaks and…

  “Oh, for the love of crap.”

  Shaking my head at myself, I put Hairy Gumball in my handbag.

  “Now, how on earth am I going to get you open?”

  Frowning, I reach out and lift the coconut into my arms. On cue, it comes apart in two perfect halves in my lap.

  “Huh.” I look up at the palm tree, swaying softly overhead. I look at where the coconut was, and where, I now see, a pointy piece of rock sticks out of the sand. “What are the odds?”

  In the event I actually make it out of this whole debacle in one piece—well, almost—I’d better buy a lottery ticket.

  “Might make enough to retire to, say, a tropical island.”

  I cackle drily, cry a little, and bring out my penknife to cut the soft fruit meat out of the halved husks.

  AFTER THE FIRST feverish and delirious days, after I have located sources of water and food and learned to crack the coconuts open by dropping them, repeatedly, onto sharp rocks, I am slowly starting to feel human enough to take stock of my situation.

  The first thing I do is to return to the beach and sit staring out at the eye-blindingly turquoise and endless sea that stretches before me in every direction. There’s no land in sight, not even any other i
slands. But if I can just keep up my attention, if I can remain on the alert, surely some boat or other will come into view? A fishing boat. A freighter ship. A luxury cruise. Anything!

  The sun is bearing down on me. The interminable sea stays interminable. I brush away the hair from my perspiring face with my stump.

  It’s healing nicely. In all my misery, Lady Luck still, apparently, has the hots for me. My sense of gratitude is threadbare, to say the least.

  The second thing I do, which should probably have been the first, is to turn my battered handbag inside out and make an inventory.

  It contains, in no particular order:

  No mobile phone.

  No wallet.

  No house keys.

  No passport.

  One blister pack of nine remaining nicotine gums.

  One ball of three used-up gums interspersed with a significant amount of mousy brown–reddish hair (my own).

  Two glass bottles à 25 cl each, also known as my whisky bottles.

  My penknife.

  One cigarette lighter—which excites me no end until I find that it has been rendered completely useless from being immersed in seawater—broken.

  One plastic key card for room 206 at the Hotel Danielle in Sihanoukville.

  The stump of a yellow HB lead pencil.

  Hotel Danielle. That should ring a bell, but it doesn’t; even as I hold the key card up to the light, turning it in every conceivable angle, as though it isn’t so much a key to a hotel room as the glimmering clue that will unlock the barred gates of my memory.

  “Dani,” I mouth, and something, a very small something, stirs in me. It’s not my own name, but—I’ve known a Dani, at some point in my life.

  In my frustration, I almost take my teeth to the card. Apparently one of my go-to things to do for stress relief, if the gnawed-at stump of the pencil is anything to judge by.

  “Sihanoukville is in Cambodia.”