The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

‘Do you think my library friends want to meet Julia’s dance friends then?’ I said. ‘Because I don’t think they’ll get on at all.’

  ‘But that’s what happens at parties,’ said my mother.

  ‘My riding friends are a bit too into horses. Like, it’s a bit weird,’ I said. ‘They have horse stickers on their cars and horse earrings and horse wash bags. And my library friends only like poems. Like, in the whole world.’

  ‘I’m sure there are some poems about horses somewhere,’ said my mother.

  I just stared at her, because what on earth could you say to that? Did she honestly think people would be sitting about reading horse poems when they were sixteen, when actually they’d be smuggling in alcohol and snogging each other behind the blossom trees. At the very very least.

  ‘It makes me feel stressed thinking about it,’ I said.

  She looked at me strangely.

  ‘Isn’t it fun to invite all your friends?’ she said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘The most fun,’ I said, ‘is not inviting Robin Fox.’

  We’d decided to ask for doves for our presents, inspired by Pally Alvárez, but my father was not at all keen.

  ‘We can’t be traipsing around the crescent trying to catch birds every night,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a surprise for you both. At the party,’ said my mother.

  Which took my dread to new and dizzying levels.

  ‘Her surprise is going to be awful, I know it is,’ I said to Julia.

  ‘Stop it, Aug,’ she said. ‘Let’s try these new wax strips on our legs. I’ll do yours. You do mine.’

  ‘You haven’t got any hairs.’

  ‘I have, but they’re blonde.’

  ‘Your children will be apes like me,’ I said. ‘Look at Diego – he’s turning into a werewolf.’

  ‘Stop it!’ said Julia, giggling.

  ‘His chest’s going really hairy,’ I said, screwing up my nose. ‘It’s creeping out of his shirt collar. Do you like it?’

  ‘I like him so I like it,’ she said, sounding a bit defensive, I thought.

  ‘Do you really?’ I said. ‘Go on, be honest.’

  Julia looked flustered.

  ‘Would you like him if he got fat? Totally obese? Twenty-three stone?’ I said, and I was enjoying myself, marching about the bedroom as I talked.

  ‘Aug, stop it,’ she said, and it was as if she couldn’t decide whether to laugh, or stay sensible, and I felt determined to win her over.

  ‘Would you like him if all the hair on his head fell out and he was totally bald?’

  A little giggle bubbled up inside her.

  ‘You’re laughing like you used to!’ I said. ‘Don’t stop!’

  ‘Let’s get on with the waxing,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s get on with the laughing,’ I said. ‘What do you think Mum’s surprise is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Julia.

  ‘Dad as a Strip-o-gram?’ I said. ‘He’ll come in dancing in a mankini with a rose between his teeth.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, but the giggle was down there, bubbling, like it used to, and it bubbled right out – she laughed, out loud, couldn’t stop.

  ‘You’re laughing!’ I said. ‘It’s like old times.’

  I grabbed her and hugged her.

  ‘Oh stop it!’ she said.

  I knew that Julia’s Stop it meant I like it.

  I also knew that there was quite a lot of Stop it I like it going on with Diego because we caught them at it on the sofa when they thought we were all out at the A level Choices Evening and we came home early because we didn’t have any supplementary questions.

  I’d already chosen.

  English, French, Spanish and Latin.

  And that for me was perfect, parfait, perfecto and perfectus. I wouldn’t have said no to some heavy petting on the side, but as yet there were no offers. I put it down to my lack of meaningful bosoms.

  When it came to the moment of the cake-cutting at our sixteenth birthday barbecue, my mother had Diego lined up to bring in a wicker basket, which opened, releasing a volley of white doves, which flew over the blossom trees in our back garden as everyone sang Happy Birthday to you and showered us with presents and kisses.

  Then my father gave quite a bad and awkward speech, with some jokes he’d got from a book called After-Dinner Speeches.

  But everyone listened and laughed and clapped at the right time.

  Was that a bit self-indulgent, I wondered, asking a load of people to come round to your house to find out from your parents how great you were?

  And bring presents.

  But actually, it was quite nice, being liked.

  En masse.

  Parfait

  Time seemed to pass very slowly in the hut in the car park, but – with little to demarcate the days – the weeks and months merged with my grief, and before I knew it, I’d been there over a year.

  I went to the café every day to give myself some kind of rhythm, but the gypsy man was never there.

  Augusta

  Diego had bought Julia her own dove for her birthday, which had a ruffle on its head like the letter Z. My father looked anxious, but the dove would be kept at number 13, with Pally’s dove, in the creamy dovecote.

  So it was only me who was doveless, which rhymes with loveless. And I was that, too.

  Julia spent hours training the dove to land on her hand.

  She liked to say that it would come to her call.

  But that was actually bullshit.

  Julia and Diego’s love went on growing and his chest-hair went on growing, and the dove learnt to carry messages between their houses, written on rolled paper and placed into a small tube attached to the bird’s leg.

  ‘Does that thing have fleas?’ my father asked.

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ said my mother.

  ‘The neighbours must think it’s a bit strange,’ said my father.

  ‘It’s nothing strange at all,’ I told my parents. ‘This was the usual thing in Persia in the fifth century. And in the twelfth century, all the main cities of Syria and Egypt were linked by pigeon messages. And, in fact, for years, there was a proper pigeon airmail service between Great Barrier Island and Auckland. And India’s Police Pigeon service was only stopped in 2002. And also Paul Reuter, who you may have heard of …’

  ‘Where do you get all this stuff from?’ said my father.

  Maybe this was why I didn’t get any heavy petting – too much weird information spilling out of my mouth.

  Parfait

  One day the gypsy man was back.

  He was sitting smoking, holding a small lemon tree in an earthenware pot, which partly hid his face. He peeped out to one side when he saw me, like you do with babies, and a kind of warmth came over me – I hadn’t felt that for a while.

  ‘You never told me your name,’ I said.

  ‘Antonio.’

  ‘Parfait.’

  We shook hands, and I had the feeling I’d arrived, or I’d fully left, or I wouldn’t be this sad forever.

  ‘I thought of you,’ he said.

  ‘I thought of you too,’ I said.

  ‘Did you keep on reading the verse?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And here’s a lemon tree!’ said Antonio.

  ‘Is it for me?’ I asked. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘They told me you came every day.’

  He handed me the tree.

  ‘First you taste the lemon skin,’ he said. ‘Then you plant one of the pips and let the lemons grow.’

  He smiled broadly, then gestured that I should come closer.

  ‘Then you make lemonade! Get it?’

  He looked very pleased with, well, everything – himself, me, the lemon tree.

  I put the little lemon tree on the table, and I found I couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘So, have you ever actually listened to this Cante Jondo?’ said Antonio.

  ‘The concerts he
re for the tourists?’ I said.

  ‘No no no,’ he said. ‘Cante Jondo should never be organised. Or booked. Or paid for. It must be spontaneous. Just rise up wherever. Wherever there are people and emotions and something in the air, and gypsies – gitanos – plenty of wine, plenty of life. La juerga!’

  I nodded, trying to imagine what that would feel like.

  Duende. Flamencura. Razón incorpórea. Juerga.

  The untranslatable words were multiplying.

  ‘Where all of us live who came down from Seville,’ he said, ‘in the streets behind the port, it sometimes happens. I’ll take you with me. First, grow your lemons.’

  As I walked to work in the security hut, I felt that something was changing in me.

  I put the lemon tree on the little stool outside the hut, and I watered it. Then I sat out there on my chair, trying to imagine what Antonio had told me: the tone of the guitar; and the compás – the rhythm of the clapping; and the twists and turns of the performer; and the way that when all three came together, spontaneously, wrapping around each other in the dark, duende came.

  The lemon tree grew new lemons, with skin that was yellow as sunshine.

  Augusta

  Julia became even more radiantly beautiful.

  But her eyes still didn’t sparkle.

  If you looked carefully.

  Which most people didn’t seem to.

  Her beauty blinded them.

  This can happen, I guess.

  Marilyn Monroe?

  Princess Diana?

  My mother had a scrapbook about Princess Diana, and when she died, she made my father plant a white rose called Tranquillity, and for a while there was a little framed photograph – that one of her sitting alone in front of the Taj Mahal – in our flower bed.

  ‘You don’t think Julia looks a bit sad?’ I said to Diego.

  ‘Sad?’ he said.

  He took photos of her, with her long blonde hair falling over her shoulders like Rapunzel, and the dove on her hand.

  The whole world was in love with her.

  The whole world was not in love with me.

  But, on the appearance front, things were most definitely looking up. Proper tits, no spots, legs less spindly now, a bit – only a bit – of a bum, skin that kept its tan (my best feature). It wasn’t all bad.

  Julia spotted that Specsavers were doing cool black framed glasses for £20, so I dispensed with the wire frames and danced down the high street like a new woman.

  I decided to go to the student hairdressers called Fringe Benefits where Julia’s friend, Amy Atkins, who wasn’t so dizzy any more, cut my black hair into a blunt fringe and chopped half of its length off. My mother nearly collapsed.

  I have a photo of myself, holding a Hallowe’en pumpkin, my eyes gleaming underneath my ruler-straight fringe, ringed by the thick black frames of my glasses, with a very determined look on my face.

  I was determined.

  I was determined that now was my moment.

  I was sixteen and three months – and no tongue but my own had ever been inside my mouth.

  This was pitiful.

  Tragic.

  I had to get kissed.

  We were off to Tattershall Common Fireworks in Diego’s car, and Diego, who was now nineteen, had a friend over from Cádiz called Javier, who told me he worked in the sales office of the massive new holiday complex outside La Higuera, where people could pre-order their apartments before they were built and design them to their own specifications.

  Javier was sitting in the back seat with me.

  ‘I know exactly where you mean,’ I said in Spanish.

  ‘Exactamente,’ I said again.

  Then I couldn’t think what else to say.

  But what I could think was how nice his after-shave smelled.

  Exactamente.

  How much he smelled of.

  Well.

  Man.

  And how very close he was.

  To.

  Me.

  Parfait

  ‘Miss work tonight, Parfait,’ said Antonio. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Find a day job.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Why don’t you try that massive building site just before you get to La Higuera? They’re always looking for people.’

  ‘I don’t have any papers.’

  ‘You won’t need papers there.’

  I smiled.

  ‘So how’s your pain?’ he said.

  ‘How did you know about my pain?’

  ‘I assume it was a death – or the end of a love affair?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘That’s all there is, isn’t there? Love and death. Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Keep giving me the napkins,’ I said. ‘I like to memorise the words. It helps.’

  ‘Read this,’ he said.

  I folded the napkin and put it in my pocket for later.

  I had quite a collection now.

  Su grito fue terrible – his cries were terrifying.

  Los viejos – the old people, the old ones.

  Dicen que se erizaban los cabellos – say it made their hairs stand on end.

  Y se abría el azoque de los espejos – and the mercury flowed from the mirrors.

  I wrote the words on the dusty window of the hut.

  I memorised them.

  His cries were terrifying.

  Too loud for my dreams to contain.

  But now, as I walked, the huge Levante wind blew down across the hills to my right, bending the palms and causing the sea, to my left, to eddy and surge and swell and spray.

  As it did that terrible night.

  And perhaps I could ask the wind, which now whipped great sheets of sand from the beach and tore branches from trees, to take Zion’s cries.

  And perhaps I could ask the God of the wind to take him.

  And keep him safe for me.

  Perhaps, as I walked into what I hoped was a new beginning, I could try to face what was un-faceable in the thick air of my dark hut.

  Zion wasn’t coming back.

  Whether fish were jumping in the sea or not.

  Whether the woman found her engagement ring or not.

  Whether Zion spoke to me in dreams at night or not.

  And what would he want me to do now?

  That young boy whose head was full of hopes and dreams and plans, plans of houses on the beach, and well-paid jobs, and the money to buy plane tickets for Wilfred and Pierre and Douce and Gloria so that we could collect them by car from Seville Airport and party on the sand, and drink Spanish wine, and be happy.

  Zion wouldn’t have wanted me to go back.

  He would have wanted me to stay and live and work and love and dance.

  Olé olé olé olé.

  I was coming to the building site, and the clouds floated past like boats – the boats I’d told Zion would carry us to Spain, when it was all make-believe.

  I threw out my shoulders, like I used to when I was still a boy trying to be a man for Zion, yes, for Zion, I drew myself tall and I asked to see the foreman.

  After I’d taken the job, I saw a signpost.

  1 kilometre.

  Palomar de la Breña.

  Paloma means dove, so palomar must mean dovehouse, dovecote, I supposed.

  I walked down the dusty track to what looked like an old country farmhouse in the natural park – and there was a huge dovecote, with slightly crumbling stone arched walls, over ten metres high, arranged in parallel streets, with thousands and thousands of dove nests, and a central canal where they gathered to bathe and drink.

  I sat on the wall, and I thought of the Fischer’s lovebird bathing in the stream above the colline – its face olive green and coral, its wings bright green, with a golden yellow neck and a purple-ish tail, like a rainbow – and I thought of my little bird mother, and how much my father loved her.

  I wondered if I could find love that w
as as true as theirs.

  Augusta

  What I was waiting to receive, in the backseat of Diego’s car, was not, of course, true love.

  Not even fake love.

  Not love of any sort.

  I was waiting for a tongue, and, being honest, pretty much any tongue would have done, up to a point.

  The level crossing gates were down and we sat, Javier and I in the back, with Diego driving and Julia beside him, waiting forever in the traffic jam.

  There I was, bra full to bursting, frayed denim skirt, black tights and Converse trainers on which I’d written poetry in green felt-tip pen.

  There I was, cusping, which isn’t a word, but I needed a new word for this strange breathless bubbling-up feeling – a heady mixture of desire and hope and hormones.

  Javier turned around. He suckered his mouth onto mine, and he started digging his tongue down my throat like a drill. Diego turned the radio up. The crossing gates opened.

  The train shot past.

  Drills, trains, opening gates and fireworks in the distance – it was sexual metaphors galore as we kissed and kissed and kissed, before jumping out of the car and rushing along in the rain to Ooh and Aah at the jewelled sky, me feeling as if some important threshold had been crossed, holding my heart to try to stop it jumping out of my chest.

  Paradisiacal!

  Parfait

  On the building site, I was working alongside dozens of Senegalese men, building a huge holiday complex, a kind of fake new city, which would extend across the fields as far as you could see.

  The Senegalese men offered me a bed in their casa patera, patera being the name of the little wooden boats they’d come over in. It was – though I didn’t like to think it – not much better than a squat.

  I took my lemon tree, and I put it in the tiny inner patio where we all kept our trainers so they didn’t smell the house out. There were ten beds in a biggish room, a kitchen and a bathroom – and we had to put coins in the metre for hot water. They smiled at me, and they faced Mecca and kneeled on the floor to pray, and everyone took it in turns to clean and make dinner.

  The thinnest one, who called himself Carlos, offered me his phone.

  ‘I’ve got a discount to Africa – you’re welcome to use it,’ he said.