Before embarking on her avowed silence she had informed Jan that he could end the stand-off at any time by driving her down to the nearest town so she could return home. Erica couldn't drive the Freelander or she would have left by herself and fuck Jan.
Her dramatic vow had only ignited Jan's stubborn streak: he had refused to drive her. If their three-month relationship was going to end it was going to end on his terms. To Erica's ever-mounting rage he decided to go ahead with his holiday as though she weren't there. He had spent the last two days sunbathing in front of their log cabin. His toned body was visibly turning brown in the blazing sun. He sat in the sun-lounger and read books – the airport thrillers that he knew she despised – and pretended Erica wasn't there.
After two days of silence Erica had had enough. She decided to perform a raindance to put an end to Jan's holiday.
The problem had not been that Jan disliked anal sex. Far from it – anal sex was seldom far from his fantasies. The problem was that Erica had asked for it. Raised in a conservative Norwegian farming family, Jan had certain ideas about how nice girls behaved. While not professing the religion of his parents he had absorbed much of its moral tone. Porn stars might ask for anal sex, his girlfriend could not.
Then there was the problem of how she had phrased it. 'I like anal sex,' she had said. The implication was not lost on Jan. Not only did she want anal sex, but she had had anal sex before, with other men, and had enjoyed it. With other men. It was all too much for him.
He had shouted at Erica for the first time since they had met. Words such as 'slut' and 'whore' had flowed freely from his mouth. That was when Erica had decided to stop talking to him.
"Stop prancing around Erica," said Jan. "You're getting in my sunlight."
"It's a raindance," said Erica. She would not speak again for two further days.
She flung her body round in strange shapes, taking full advantage of her yoga training as she danced, silent but for her breathing. Seeing two short sticks lying near the woodpile she grabbed them and waved them around in spontaneously devised patterns, leaping and whirling around Jan's sun lounger. He looked at her and sighed heavily.
"When are you going to stop this nonsense Erica? You're thirty-one years old for god's sake."
The dancing went on.
A raindrop fell. Then another. Jan looked up. Clouds had swept up from behind the hut. There was a pitter patter on the pages of his book. Erica whooped in triumph, dropping her sticks and holding her hands out to catch the droplets.
Jan stood up and began to gather up his clothes and fold up the sun lounger. As he did so Erica took off her t-shirt, still dancing.
"Oh for God's sake Erica."
Off came her shorts, off came her bra, off came her panties. She danced naked in the now torrential rain as Jan ran for cover. She howled and screamed with delight, rolling over in the wet grass, splashing in the rapidly forming puddles.
Jan began to boil up water on the stove in the kitchen part of the sitting room, intending to make coffee. He was sure Erica would tire of her antics soon. Sure enough, the bestial noises outside were quickly replaced with silence.
He was pouring the water into the handheld filter when the door of the hut creaked. He looked up and at first couldn't see Erica. Then he shifted his gaze towards the floor in response to a movement. Erica was crawling through the doorway on hands and knees, naked and dripping.
Jan put the pot of water down and watched in disbelief as she entered the hut on all fours. She ignored him completely and commenced to roll around on the rug beside the table to dry herself.
"Christ Almighty. You've gone insane. When are you going to stop this?"
She ignored this, finished drying herself, then ambled off, still on all fours, towards the hut's single bedroom.
Jan finished making his coffee. Before settling down at the window seat with his book he peered round the door into the bedroom. Erica was curled up on the duvet, which she had pulled off the bed and arranged on the floor in a corner of the log-walled room. Her face wore a contented expression.
"Fine!" shouted Jan over his shoulder as he walked away. "I'll take you down to town as soon as the rain stops! Happy now?"
But the rain didn't stop. It seemed to intensify, solidify. It battered like waves against the large window in front of Jan's seat. After some fifty pages or so of his book Jan looked up to see Erica padding in from the bedroom. She ignored him, her face blank, and headed for the kitchen section. Raising herself up on her knees she pulled some crackers and a lump of cheese off the worksurface. Without moving from that position she began to nibble away at the cheese, then at the crackers, then at the cheese again. When she was full she put the remaining food back on the work surface then scuttled – there was no other word for it – over to the table and rubbed the side of her head against one of the legs. She purred quietly as she scratched.
Jan jumped up, threw his book down, pulled on a coat and rushed out the door. He came back some minutes later, dripping and angry, to find Erica curled up on the window seat.
"The road's a river. Half washed away. We can't go anywhere until it dries. Are you happy now?"
There was no answer.
It rained and it rained. The time for them to return to the city passed and still it rained. Jan called the emergency services on his mobile but when he said they had enough food for a week he was told to ring back when they got hungry. There were too many real emergencies to attend to.
*
Over the course of the next two days Jan came to hate the two room hut that had once seemed so idyllic. He would open the door of the tiny en suite shower to find Erica there on hands and knees, tossing her hair with pleasure as the water streamed over her. Or he would walk from the bedroom into the living room to find her stretched out in front of a mysteriously lit fire, squirming her face and one shoulder against the rug, making growling noises of pleasure. Once he found her by the kitchen sink enthusiastically lapping at a bowl of soup he had intended to consume himself.
*
After attempting to rescue the duvet from the corner of the bedroom and receiving several bloody scratches to his hand, he got a sleeping bag from the car and slept in it on the bed. If she read any of the thick John Steinbeck tome she had brought with her he failed to catch her at it. To all intents and purposes she had become an animal. As far as he could tell she did nothing but eat, sleep, shower and shit - never once rising onto two legs.
But in the end it was the silence that got to him. Four days – four days! – in which she had said nothing except that one stupid phrase. He longed for human interaction. A few words of conversation. Anything to reassure himself that he existed. He experimented with talking to himself but Erica seemed to crawl into the room every time he did so and she made him feel self-conscious. When Jan thought back over his life he realised that, night-time aside, he had probably never gone more than six hours without talking to another human being. He wondered how much silence it took to send a man insane.
And on the fourth day he cracked.
He was staring out the window, bored now of all his books, bored of cooking, terrified of the enveloping silence and the ceaseless drumbeat of the rain, and suddenly Jan could take it no more. He leapt to his feet.
"Okay! Okay! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I called you a whore! I'm sorry! What more do you want me to do? I'm sorry!"
Erica padded in from the bedroom, where she had been snoozing. She looked up at him, her gaze considered, calculating, like a cat watching a goldfish.
"What?! I'm sorry! Really, I'm sorry. Just talk to me! I'm going mad here. What do you want me to do?"
She beckoned quickly, then stabbed her finger downwards at the floor.
"What? You're kidding?"
She jabbed her finger down even more firmly. Jan slowly began to crouch, then dropped heavily onto his knees, suddenly giving up. With a deep sigh he leaned forward and put his hands flat on the floor.
"We're going to dance to make the rain stop," said Erica.
"What? No! You're kidding."
But she was already trotting towards the door of the hut, her behind eloquently expressing that she had nothing more to say. Jan followed her, his knees scraping painfully on the wooden floor beyond the rug. She opened the door and they both crawled out into the rain, she wriggling her shoulders as the rain hit her bare skin, he grimacing as his clothes glued to his body.
Then Erica was dancing, not like a human this time, but like a spring lamb, like a wolf in an orgy of violence, like a reindeer plagued by flies, like an antelope on the savannah. She bucked and leapt on all fours, span and rolled. Pranced for a moment on two legs, then dropped back down again, tossing her wet hair in glee.
After a moment of shock, Jan joined in. There was no choice. It was the only way to save his sanity. He too leapt and pranced like a four-legged beast. The two of them danced around each other like dogs locked up for too long in a small flat. When Erica whooped, Jan whooped too. When she howled at the sky he followed suit. Jan felt awkward, clumsy next to Erica, but he gave it his all, worried that she might refuse to speak to him if his dancing was half-hearted.
And then suddenly Jan wasn't dancing because he had to. Without his permission there was a transition, a change of mental state at some level a long way beneath his conscious mind. His fear and hatred were dissolved in the joy of the bodily movement, the sheer release after four days of suffocation. He danced because he wanted to. The naked woman and the clothed man gambolled together in the soaking grass and the soaking sky, crying out in animal voices as they exulted together in their existence.
And then something brought Jan back to awareness. The surge of energy drained from his body. He looked around as he danced, his body feeling heavy suddenly. Yes, there was no mistaking it, the rain was slowing. It was definitely lighter than it had been only moments before. He stopped dancing, shook droplets of water from his hair with a shake of his head, got up on his knees and looked at the sky. And there it was: a break in the clouds. The rain was already slowing to a trickle.
Jan lowered his head to see Erica gazing at him, a strange expression on her face. And then she could hold it in no longer. She was laughing. Laughing at Jan. She laughed and she laughed, pointed at him, clutched her stomach. So uncontrollable was her laughter that she rolled onto her side, her body convulsing. But there was nothing bestial about this laughter, no trace of the hyena in it. All the animal attributes she had adopted over the last two days had fallen away. She was fully human now and her laughter was fully human too. She struggled to rise, then looked at Jan and fell back into the grass again, laughing too hard to move.
Jan rose from the ground, clumsy and dripping, no pretence at dignity left in him. He looked down at Erica for a moment as though searching for words, then turned and slunk back toward the cabin.
The Storm was read by Mandy Lalley at the Liars' League Birds & Beasts event on 11 September 2007.
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