The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  ‘You always need to go, don’t you?’ I said, and it came out quite mean. ‘You’re always rushing off.’

  ‘I like being busy,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s no crime, is it?’

  ‘You never used to,’ I said in quite a hard voice because I wasn’t going to be needy if she wasn’t going to be nice.

  ‘Things change,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ I said. ‘You didn’t use to be cold.’

  ‘I’ve just got a boyfriend,’ she said, and her measured and rather adult tone of voice annoyed me.

  ‘You changed before you had a boyfriend. You changed in Spain.’

  Now her cheeks coloured, and I could see something altering in her face, and I watched her pull at her sleeve, and her lips looked as if they were trembling.

  ‘Maybe I grew up,’ she said, but on the up, her voice broke.

  ‘It isn’t that, Jules,’ I said. ‘It’s something else.’

  I tried to smile at her because I hated us arguing.

  ‘I’ll be late,’ she said. ‘Diego hates it when I’m late.’

  She turned to go, but, as she turned, I could see her face crumpling up the way it always did before she cried.

  When she came home, she’d bought me a bunch of daffodils – they were still buds, closed up, green-ish yellow.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ she said. ‘I feel like you think I abandoned you. Diego and I wanted to say that you’re always welcome to be with us. Literally, any time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m so sorry about earlier,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

  Something happened inside me.

  In my heart.

  It was hurting my chest.

  ‘You’re crying,’ said Julia. ‘You never cry. Please don’t cry.’

  She took me in her arms and she smelled of Timotei shampoo and Diego’s aftershave and the tears were coming in big bursts, like when Barbara Cook was watching Graham and me on the swing-set.

  ‘I love you, Aug,’ she said, again and again.

  Then my mother came in.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’ she said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Julia.

  ‘Is it to do with Diego?’ she said, her face colouring and her neck rash coming on underneath her garnet birthstone.

  I look back and think she must have seen that it was me who was crying, not Julia.

  Surely.

  Julia wrote me a card in italic writing.

  I still have it.

  It says: ‘I can’t imagine life without you.’

  I brought it with me to La Higuera but I don’t look at it.

  Life without you.

  The card has a baby chick on the outside.

  The daffodil buds burst out, yellow and full of sunshine.

  They made me hopeful.

  Spring was coming.

  Parfait

  It was Good Friday.

  Not that good.

  I was sitting on a wall, with hundreds of other people sitting on a wall, above the square in Tarifa.

  I’d got myself a job as a security guard in a car park – six in the evening until six in the morning. It was terrible pay, but it was pay, and I now had somewhere to go at night.

  I sat on my broken armchair in the hut next to the up-down barrier, with the radio playing bad Spanish pop music and the street light shining in my eyes, and my alarm going off every ten minutes to keep me awake.

  Every time I woke, I jumped, and every time I slept, even for ten minutes, I was in the sea. And so was Zion. But we’d become separated, and the sea was cloudy. He was turning, spiralling downwards through the water, right into the depths, facing away from me. I was trying to catch his attention, trying to say something to him from far away. But every time I opened my mouth, it filled with sea.

  The sound of the alarm.

  The strange shocked jump, as if I was falling off a cliff, and I came to on the chair, and I set my alarm again.

  I felt exhausted, inside my veins, inside my bones, as I watched the Holy Week procession come by: big platforms called pasos, swaying on the shoulders of the costaleros, who were hidden underneath.

  The first paso carried three wooden crosses.

  I thought of my father telling us that the thief on the cross was forgiven, on the spot, despite everything he’d done.

  Everything I’d done.

  I couldn’t bear to think of it.

  I thought of my mother, and I fingered my tin daffodil as the next paso came by, a huge single wooden cross, with the choir following – boys and girls, their jeans and trainers sticking out of the bottom of their white robes; men with beards; women in red lipstick. All singing forgiven, forgiven, forgiven.

  A woman in black, with a Spanish comb in her hair, came onto the square, bent double and started to lament loudly using what seemed to be words from the bible. And when she’d finished, she got straight up off her knees and went to the side to smoke a cigarette and chat to her friends.

  Round came the choir again into the square.

  Forgiven forgiven forgiven.

  Perdonados.

  The words disappeared down the hill, a faint echo now on the air. Going going going. Like watching a bird fly away. Smaller smaller smaller until it was nothing. But the bird sang inside of me.

  Loud inside of me.

  Forgiven, forgiven, forgiven.

  ‘Your choice, boy, but I’d take it!’ my father used to say with that big wide smile across his face. ‘Otherwise, it was a waste of all his pain!’

  Augusta

  Diego bought Julia an incubator of chicken eggs for Easter because she liked baby anythings. She put the incubator on the side table, and on the first night, the biggest egg started to wobble when we were eating supper, and a tiny cheep came from inside it and it made us all feel a bit tense.

  My father kept staring at it, saying, ‘I’m not sure I want to get wrapped up in this.’

  We ate our raspberry jelly without speaking, and somehow when it went down my throat, I felt like I was eating egg yolk and albumin and vitelline membrane.

  The other eggs lay still in the incubator.

  Diego called around, and we all said what a great idea the eggs were.

  The next day, the wobbling and the cheeping started again in the biggest egg, and the tip of a small beak pushed through the shell. It struggled about, pecking, tapping, smashing, and we all held our breath.

  Then the miracle!

  The chick shoved itself through, exhausted and wet, and collapsed on its side in a nest of eggshell.

  It lay panting as my father took loud gulps of water.

  The chick still didn’t move.

  Diego came, and by the time Julia had let him in, the chick had resurrected and dried and puffed out and was strutting about, yellow and fluffy as anything, and it was the sweetest thing we’d ever seen.

  So it went on, night after night, until the final chick came out of the final egg, collapsed, panting, got up and walked round and round in circles, leaning left, with a twisted wing, smashed into the side of the incubator and died. We waited and waited, we prayed and prayed, but it didn’t come back to life.

  After Easter, we had revision sessions at lunchtime.

  I remember it was Latin revision, and I was looking out of the window, when I saw Julia walking alone on the path.

  She stopped by the sundial and stared at it, the way the shadow fell on the hour-lines, to tell the time.

  The earliest sundials are shadow clocks from Egypt, dated at 1500 BC. I guess human beings have always wanted to tell the time.

  To know how long is left.

  Julia was reading the quote that is engraved on the bronze plaque.

  ‘The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.’

  ‘Adjectives,’ said the teacher, ‘come after nouns in Latin. Like in French. And Spanish. But not English.’

  I put up my hand.

  �
�There are exceptions,’ I said, looking out at Julia still reading the sundial.

  ‘For example?’ said the teacher.

  ‘For example, time enough,’ I said.

  ‘Yes yes yes,’ said the teacher. ‘Time enough.’

  When I looked out of the window, Julia was still staring at the sundial.

  Her face had turned quite still.

  Parfait

  Now I had a little bit of money in my pocket, I liked to sit at a café in the Paseo de la Alameda – an open kind of square (though more of a rectangle) framed by palm trees, near the port. I would drink black tea in the sun and watch people – their bodies, their faces, the way they walked, or held hands – especially the couples. I wondered what it would be like to be a couple.

  ‘I often see you here,’ said a voice, and the owner of the voice came over.

  He was a small stocky man – I’d seen him here before.

  His skin was like leather and he had a scar on his left cheek, thick dark hair and stubby fingers.

  He drew up his chair.

  ‘You always look troubled,’ he said, and the smoke from his black tobacco floated up my nose.

  I plucked the lemon out of my tea and bit at its green skin, and I tried to smile at him.

  I liked his face.

  He’d seen things.

  He knew things.

  A bit of pain.

  Pleasure too, I thought.

  ‘Biting the lemon – you know the song?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Cante Jondo,’ said the man, and he looked around him, as if he was about to tell me some great secret, and then he whispered, ‘You know about it? People call it flamenco but it should be called Cante Jondo. Deep song.’

  ‘Flamenco!’ I said, remembering Víctor dancing round the kitchen. ‘Yes! Spanish dancing – I know about that.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t start with the dancing,’ said the man, shaking his head. ‘It starts with the song.’

  ‘I’ve never heard about flamenco songs,’ I said. ‘I thought it was a dance.’

  ‘Then you’ve never lived,’ he said, and he sat back, as if he was weighing up whether to go on, and he inhaled with a big sucking noise, held the smoke inside, sitting quite still, before exhaling.

  ‘Spanish dancing!’ he said to himself, once, twice, three times, and shaking his head, and we sat there for a while, on our wicker chairs, the man smoking and me biting the green skin of the lemon.

  ‘It doesn’t actually start with the song,’ said the man, laughing.

  ‘You said it did start with the song!’ I said, and I smiled at him – it was so good to talk. It was so good – something about this encounter was so good.

  The man went on laughing. Then he leant forward, so that his face was up close to mine, and he winked at me, and he took my hand, and he held it in his, and he squeezed it. Then he put his other stubby hand on top, so my one hand was sandwiched between his two hands.

  Touch.

  The touch of a person.

  ‘So does it start with the song or doesn’t it start with the song?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, if I’m going to teach you about Cante Jondo,’ said the man. ‘You will have to enjoy a little mystery, a little paradox, a little razón incorpórea.’

  Disembodied reasoning, I translated in my head, probably frowning; it didn’t seem to make much sense to me.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said the man. ‘It’s untranslatable. And anyway, only gypsies have it. Only gypsies have flamencura. Duende.’

  I hadn’t heard either of those words, and I was still chewing on how I was supposed to have disembodied reasoning.

  ‘Are you a gypsy?’

  The man knocked back his head and started laughing again.

  ‘Claro!’ he said. ‘Claro! Look at me!’

  The man picked up a napkin and took a pen from his pocket and, on it, he wrote some Spanish words, shaped like a verse of poetry.

  ‘This is one of the soleares,’ he said, giving me the napkin.

  I took it.

  ‘It’s a present,’ he said. ‘Un regalito.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, folding it.

  ‘There are all different types of song in Cante Jondo. The seguiriya and the soleá help us when we feel we’re beyond consolation. So we’ll start there, shall we, with a soleá? There’ll be time to get to the alegrías later – the cheery ones. That’s the right order for you, don’t you think?’

  The man smiled into my eyes, getting up from the chair.

  ‘You’ll read the words, won’t you?’ he said. ‘They bear re-reading.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Will I see you again?’

  ‘I’m going back to Seville for a while,’ he said. ‘Things are a bit complicated. But I’ll be back.’

  Augusta

  Diego had started buying me a present whenever he bought one for Julia. She’d clearly told him to.

  The best of Diego’s double presents were two stunt kites. He’d ordered them from Spain, where they held competitions near La Higuera. They were great big things – a giant pink butterfly for Julia, and a kind of ferocious-looking turquoise dragonfly for me. If you were good at it, you could make them leap and dive and circle round each other.

  We were not good at it. As it turned out. We took them up to Old John Brown’s and the kites dive-bombed repeatedly to the ground on top of us, leaving us all crying with laughter.

  It was good to hear Julia laugh, but she laughed less, and when she wasn’t thinking about anything, you could tell she was thinking about something.

  ‘No no no!’ she shrieked in her sleep. ‘He is!’

  ‘Who is?’ I said.

  ‘He is,’ she whispered back at me.

  ‘Diego?’

  ‘No no no!’ she said, with a strange rasping voice. ‘His hand.’

  ‘You’re shouting things out in your dreams,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Nobody can help dreaming,’ she said.

  And that is true.

  I spent hours inside my own head, dreaming too. There was not a lot happening outside – my body seemed to have come to a standstill, and even my periods only turned up when they felt like it.

  I was the caterpillar who went into the chrysalis and came out a longer and thinner caterpillar, while Julia grew wings and flew, dazzling, into the sky.

  Julia’s boobs grew round, and every three months, she went up a bra size, it seemed to me. My nipples turned from flat to pointed, two pencil leads under the thin fabric of my school shirt, which, mortifyingly, showed through. And I still – still – didn’t need a bra.

  But that November, when I was fifteen and three months, and giving up hope, a slight swelling took place underneath my pointed nipples, as if someone had injected my chest with yeast. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and joy surged through my body.

  Transmogrification!

  Metamorphosis!

  Finally!

  Julia went through her underwear and I slipped on one of her old bras – and it fitted!

  The future was coming.

  I took the cream book out from under my mattress and I stood in our bedroom, and I said the words of the pedlar-man poem over and over again, staring out of the window.

  Then I felt a bit of an idiot.

  After I stopped feeling an idiot, I let myself dream of the life I would have when I grew older, when I would flee from Hedley Green in a gypsy caravan and travel across the globe at the reins of a dapple-grey horse, with pans clanking from hooks in the roof and geraniums growing in the tiny window-boxes and my wooden gypsy bed draped in Indian saris like our neighbours, the Hassans, wore.

  I’d read stories in the Sunday magazines of real people who didn’t care about going to school or washing their car or mowing the lawn – they crossed the Sahara Desert on camels or cycled over mountain ranges or sailed around the globe, living in far-away ports underneath starry skies.

&nbs
p; Parfait

  In the port, there was a huge cruise ship moored up with rows and rows of thousand-euro windows and two hydrofoils which took tourists to the markets at Tangier – oh, Tangier!

  On the tarmac at the back, in front of a row of tiny modern shops, there were folding boards set out on the concrete, advertising trips to see dolphins and whales, or diving courses.

  I sat and translated what the gypsy man had written on the napkin.

  I wished he hadn’t gone back to Seville.

  It was nice to talk to someone.

  Me muero yo – I’m dying.

  De pena voy a morirme – of sorrow I’m going to die, or I’m going to die of sorrow, more like.

  Como me muero mordiendo la corteza del verde limón – as I die biting the skin of a green lemon.

  The taste of grief.

  That’s what it was about.

  Grief like green lemons.

  I’d paint it.

  As soon as I had enough money, I’d buy paints.

  I learnt it off by heart, wondering why the adjective green wasn’t after the noun lemon, like it was supposed to be in Spanish.

  Augusta

  Year 11 rushed by.

  Twelve subjects.

  The Second World War, the parables of Jesus, algebraic equations, butterflies in mixed media, conductors and insulators, defining and non-defining clauses, cell vacuoles, chemical formulae, To Kill a Mocking Bird, verb declensions in three languages, active and passive mood, indicative, subjunctive.

  In June, Julia laboured, sweating and sighing in exam halls, whilst I cruised through to A levels with hardly a backward glance.

  My mother tried to cheer her up in the evenings by planning our sixteenth-birthday barbecue which would be held in the garden for our friends in the crescent, Julia’s friends from the dance school, mine from riding and the library club – and our favourite school friends, who, except the slightly odd ones – Ian and Moira – preferred Julia to me.

  ‘Who are parties for in general?’ I said to my mother.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said my mother.

  ‘Is this party for us or for the people coming?’

  ‘Well, obviously for both,’ she said.