In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley Page A

thought she was asleep, but she was not. She was trying to train herself to do without sleep.
    ‘I would never put her in danger,’ Maria said.
    ‘You know that I did not mean it like that,’ Vidal Francisca said. ‘But there is a risk, given the current situation. As you know very well.’
    ‘She helped Stephano at Mass, she helped me in the clinic,’ Maria said. ‘It was good for her in all kinds of ways. Especially, it was good for her to get out of town. You know how much she loves nature.’
    ‘There is nature here. An unfortunate abundance of nature,’ Vidal Francisca said.
    The Child felt a squirm of disgust. She loathed the way the man used jokes to try to trivialise any argument he was losing. She loathed his unctuous manner and his wide smile, so white, so false. His habit of never passing a mirror without looking into it. The slick of black hair brushed back in an attempt to disguise the island of naked scalp on top of his head, and the little pigtail he liked to stroke and twirl. His air of effortless superiority. His unassailable assumptions about the way the world worked.
    Her mother said, ‘I appreciate your concern, Vidal. I do. But I think I know what’s best for my daughter.’
    ‘My concern is as much for you as your daughter,’ Vidal Francesca said. ‘Also for Father Caetano.’
    ‘Stephano would not allow me to go if he thought there was a risk.’
    ‘Those people should come here. At least until the current situation is resolved.’
    ‘The forest is their home.’
    ‘They don’t live in the forest.’
    ‘They go to and fro. It’s where they get their food. It’s where they do everything that’s important to them.’
    ‘You realise that some of them could be wildsiders,’ Vidal Francisca said. ‘And if wildsiders think you are useful to them . . . I know I don’t have to explain it.’
    ‘Now I understand. This isn’t about my daughter. It’s about me.’
    The Child recognised the tone in her mother’s voice and knew that she was angry and was trying to hide it. And felt a little gleeful thrill, wondering if her mother had finally seen through the man.
    ‘I care for you both.’
    ‘The clinics are an important part of my work, Vidal.’
    ‘The hospital board might take a different view.’
    ‘Is that a warning?’
    Vidal Francisca started to say that he was only trying to explain what others on the board were thinking, but Maria cut him off, saying that he could tell his friends that if they had any concerns about her work they should speak to her directly, saying that she had three operations tomorrow, she needed to review her notes.
    In her dark bedroom, the Child felt a sudden surge of happiness. So solid she could hug it to herself. At last Vidal Francisca had overreached himself. Her mother had taken charge of the course of her life after the death of her husband, and Vidal Francisca had been very careful to respect that freedom. But now he’d shown that he was no better than all the other men who presumed that they knew what was good for women, who believed that women needed the protection of men because women were weak and essentially childish.
    So the Child hoped that this little spat might be the beginning of the end of Vidal Francisca’s patient siege of her mother’s honour. It had begun after he’d been appointed to the hospital board. Soon afterwards, he’d begun to drop by the bungalow to discuss matters related to the running of the hospital and gossip about the affairs and petty rivalries of the town’s prominent citizens. Maria had started to look forward to these visits, tidying the bungalow, dispatching the Child to the care of Ama Paulinho. Soon enough she and her daughter were visiting Vidal’s house, as guests at parties or other social gatherings, or dining in splendid isolation on the terrace that overlooked the sloping garden and the fields of the sugar-cane plantation beyond.
    At first, the Child liked these visits. Vidal expressed what