The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  But there was nobody I wanted to phone.

  It was too painful.

  The thought of what I might say.

  The first night, I couldn’t sleep with the strangeness of having so many unknown human bodies around me, and with the noises bodies make and the smell of too many men in too small a space.

  The second night wasn’t much better.

  On the third, I said goodnight to the Senegalese men and set off along the main road to Tarifa to see if I could find Antonio.

  Or maybe, the thought came to me, to see if I could meet a Spanish girl down where he lived, where there was duende and flamencura and juerga and all those other untranslatable words.

  Perhaps there, behind the port, with Antonio’s friends, I would find that girl I was always dreaming of, the one who I hoped was dreaming of me.

  Augusta

  Julia found me taking my old cream book from under my mattress.

  So I had to come clean about the pedlar man.

  ‘Start looking from the outside in,’ I said, and I let her digest the illustration, from the ridged bark of the trees, the tiny segmented bodies of the caterpillars in graduated shades of green, and then, nervously to the centre, to the majestic gypsy caravan, too beautiful to look at – with the butterflies whose markings and names I knew off by heart: the Adonis Blue, the ragged orange-black Comma, the luminous Green Hairstreak and the purple-eyed Peacock, flashing red. And beyond the caravan, the wide-open horizon.

  It made me long for something so much it ached.

  Parfait

  Antonio was at the café.

  ‘Will it be happening tonight?’ I said.

  ‘You never know,’ said Antonio. ‘But we’ll head down there around midnight.’

  I wandered around Tarifa. I found an art shop and stared at the paints and brushes and canvases.

  When midnight came, I set off, quite nervous, with Antonio, down to the dark streets, where men were sitting on ripped armchairs, passing round wine.

  ‘You know the music is not only music,’ a man with a ponytail and a hat said to me, offering me the bottle, not really looking at me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Duende can be destroyed in a second,’ said a tattooed man with a white vest who was sitting alone on a sofa with a guitar beside him taking up the rest of the space as if it were his pet dog.

  ‘Como la vida,’ I said. ‘Like life.’

  When I said this, the hat-man with the ponytail moved to a stool over in the corner, and he closed his eyes, and he opened his mouth, and he started to sing, and his voice split up into strands, fraying, as if there was blood on his vocal cords, or in his heart. The man in the vest picked up his guitar, which turned out, indeed, to be a living thing, and a woman appeared from behind the curtain of a doorway, with a black shawl around her shoulders, holding her skirt. She started to dance.

  ‘Ay!’ she said, a single stifled cry. ‘Ay!’

  People came out of doorways saying, ‘Ay!’

  I felt a lifetime of longing.

  Actual physical longing.

  Which I didn’t know I had inside me.

  It just came out.

  The man squeezed his arms to his sides as if he were holding in something utterly uncontainable. The dancers’ eyes locked. Their feet slammed against the stone.

  I couldn’t work out what I felt.

  Other than terrified.

  Of what they chose not to hide.

  Things that were inside me too, hidden.

  Inside us all, I assume, if we dare let ourselves feel them.

  And then the song.

  El querer quita sentido – I knew this verse, I had it on one of my napkins – love makes you lose your mind.

  Lo digo por experiencia – I say this from experience.

  The man with the ponytail went on singing, with his eyes tightly closed.

  Porque a mi me ha sucedido – because it has happened to me.

  Augusta

  I have the old book on a shelf inside the caravan.

  It’s open at that page, the page where Julia’s eyes fell.

  I read her the poem aloud.

  ‘Which verse do you like?’ I asked her.

  ‘The one where he gets himself a wife and a baby,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I find that a bit too tidy,’ I said, ‘and I wonder if it’s racist to talk about a baby brown. Though, if I’m honest, I think black babies are cuter than white ones, don’t you?’

  ‘They’re all cute,’ she said. ‘Even the ugly ones.’

  His caravan has windows, too,

  And a chimney of tin, that the smoke comes through;

  He has a wife, with a baby brown,

  And they go riding from town to town!

  ‘I’d like to go riding from town to town,’ I said. ‘I love the thought of never settling anywhere, always being on the move, and I guess I wouldn’t mind a brown baby.’

  ‘I like the thought of getting married, building a home and making it beautiful,’ said Julia. ‘So does that mean we’ll never see each other, when we’re adults?’

  ‘Not if you stay here in Hedley Green,’ I said. ‘Because by then I will be travelling through Burundi in a gypsy caravan or taking my holiday on a dhow in Zanzibar or riding across the Sahara Desert on a camel.’

  ‘Could you maybe come and visit me sometimes in Hedley Green?’ said Julia.

  ‘Don’t you want to be extraordinary?’ I said. ‘To have an extraordinary life?’

  ‘I’m happy to be ordinary,’ said Julia.

  ‘You wouldn’t seriously stay here?’ I said. ‘What do you like about here?’

  ‘It’s home,’ said Julia.

  ‘Not my home,’ I said. ‘You’re my home.’

  ‘But I won’t be forever. We’ll both marry different men and live different lives,’ said Julia. ‘You spend the first part of life binding yourselves together and the second tearing yourselves apart. It’s like there’s something wrong with the system.’

  Parfait

  I went back night after night.

  I couldn’t stop myself.

  It consumed me.

  Paco jabbed my arm and held his own heart.

  ‘Cante Jondo is for when you’re beyond consolation. You know that.’

  I felt my eyes fill with tears.

  ‘I do know that,’ I said, and I felt the ache of my loss – of all my losses – inside me, as if all my organs were bursting.

  ‘It’s like the lament of the land that can never be sky,’ said Paco.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I let the words into me without trying to make sense of them because this was what I was learning. That making sense isn’t everything. Perhaps this was disembodied reasoning. Razón incorpórea.

  It was a windy night, and Paco began to sing with the gusts coming in from the sea, and the man in the vest took his guitar, and a woman, a new woman I hadn’t seen before, came from a doorway, and a man rose from a chair to dance with her.

  As they pursued each other, in the dance, they were somehow more alive than anyone else alive on the planet, that’s what it seemed to me. These dancers could burst through walls, I thought, walk over water, through fire. As they danced, they were bound together as if by an invisible thread, holding them as they tried to tear apart.

  Then it rose up, duende, it was here, and everyone rose up together, as if the whole earth was rising up from its core, as if the dead were rising from graves, the dead and the not yet born.

  Paco sang:

  ‘If anyone doubts the love I have for you.

  Take this knife and open my heart.’

  I found that I was starting to move, and with my body I was speaking, and this was new to me, that you could say things with your body – If anyone doubts the love I have for you – for you, Zion, wherever you are at sea, at sea, at sea, I am at sea but I am dancing because we said we would – take this knife and open my heart.

  There seemed to be people emerging from every door, up th
e street, down the street, and all you had to do was let go and become part of the pattern, as if you were a tiny jewel in a kaleidoscope, being turned by a power on the outside.

  I let go.

  Augusta

  Julia and Diego would go to parties together and dance and kiss in the corner and park Diego’s car in the car park at the bottom of Old John Brown’s Hill to have sex. Or ‘make love’ as Julia liked to call it.

  ‘I’m not sure love is something you can make,’ I said. ‘Like in Craft Club.’

  And Julia said, ‘Oh, Augusta!’

  She said she’d done it quite a lot of times now, but it was still a mystery to her. Sometimes it made her feel happy and sometimes it made her feel sad, but she had nothing to be sad about.

  ‘Is that true?’ I said.

  ‘Well, perhaps we all have things to feel sad about,’ she said.

  ‘Please tell me the things that are making you sad, Julia,’ I said. ‘Is it that you grew up too quickly once you started going out with Diego? Is it that your childhood ended too fast?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Something happened in Spain,’ I said.

  ‘We just had breakfast on the beach,’ she said, ‘and Dad was in quite a weird mood.’

  ‘Dad’s always in quite a weird mood,’ I said.

  ‘Not when he’s at the shop,’ she said. ‘That’s where he’s his happiest. I guess we all have different dreams for our lives.’

  ‘P-lease!’ I said. ‘Please don’t tell me that when he was our age, his dream was to own a shop selling school uniform. Because if that’s true, it is sad sad sad.’

  ‘Or if it’s true, he’s the luckiest man alive – because his dream came true. Maybe small dreams are better than big ones.’

  ‘I like making up daydreams where I have sex with Javier on the beach at La Higuera, in the dunes, or down at our special spot,’ I said. ‘Do you think that’s normal?’

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘But the thing is, Aug …’

  ‘I know Javier doesn’t like me,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. It makes no difference to the dreams. I don’t like him either.’

  She looked sad.

  The thing is what?

  Why didn’t I let her finish?

  ‘Do you like sex?’ I said.

  ‘Sex is quite strange,’ said Julia.

  ‘Does it feel as though you turn into one person while you’re doing it?’ I said. ‘Like they told us at youth club.’

  ‘I never thought about it,’ she said.

  ‘And when you come apart, does it hurt?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Does it make a kind suction noise?’ I said. ‘Like this?’

  I stuck my finger in my cheek.

  ‘Augusta!’ said Julia.

  ‘I just wondered,’ I said.

  ‘Sex isn’t really something you can talk about.’

  ‘Is that because I haven’t done it yet?’ I said.

  ‘Well, there are some things you have to experience to know how they feel.’

  ‘But don’t we all have experiences all the time that are only ours. None of us can ever imagine being someone else. Isn’t that why being human is lonely? Because however many words there are in a language, they never express the actual thing, the actual feeling, the actual being ourselves?’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Julia, and the skin on her face changed, gained a strange bumpy texture, and tiny hairs stood up all over her cheeks.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said. ‘What other experiences have you had that are making you lonely?’

  ‘I’ve gone on the pill,’ she said. ‘But I still make Diego wear a condom. For double protection. And sometimes I feel bad for all those little half-babies slopping about at the bottom of the condom. Little dead tadpoles, which served no purpose at all. They lost a race. And that was it.’

  Parfait

  ‘When we fall down,’ my father used to say, ‘we get up again and keep running. Run with perseverance the race marked out for you.’

  That was what I thought when the Senegalese men told me the news.

  One day, we were paid.

  The next day, we were unemployed.

  The building boom was over.

  The crisis had come.

  Across Spain, half-built urbanizaciones lay like giant skeletons, flailing over hills and plateaux.

  In La Higuera, people left the complex overnight, abandoning cement mixers and stacks of paving slabs and bathtubs, even a coach that hadn’t yet been fitted for its luxury tourist excursions.

  A perimeter fence was built around the grey bones of the houses, which stood in the wind, with rusting wires sticking out of them, gaping doorways, dark spaces for windows – and the Senegalese men, who’d lost their earnings, filled shopping trolleys with pipes and refrigerators, patio chairs and iron fencing, to sell on.

  ‘Inshallah,’ said Carlos. ‘Whatever God wants.’

  I walked around the building site, trying to work out what to do. Absent-mindedly, I tried the door of the coach that had been abandoned, and it opened.

  It opened!

  The keys were dangling from the ignition.

  I set to work. I built partitions, a little kitchen, a bedroom with a view out of the large back picture window.

  A home, I thought.

  Zion, I said aloud, I’ve got myself a home.

  Get up and keep running, I thought.

  Augusta

  I used to love autumn, the way it begins mellow and warm, its sleepy wasps drunk on last fruit. I read The Lotos-Eaters to Julia on our picnic on the first day of October by the stream on Tattershall Common, when we’d drunk too much cider. I would soon be leaving her for Durham, and we were hanging on to each other.

  The Lotos-Eaters, I told Julia, was inspired by a visit that the poet, Alfred Tennyson, made with his friend, Arthur Hallam, to the Spanish mountains in 1829.

  ‘Our Spain, Julia, where we shall go again, the two of us. Let’s go to the mountains next time. The Pyrenees maybe. Or the Sierra Nevada.’

  I read aloud:

  ‘And deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake,

  And music in his ears his beating heart did make.’

  We drank more cider.

  And read more poetry.

  ‘Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast.’

  More cider.

  Leaves were starting to fall.

  Julia waded through the stream, glugging cider from the bottle, drawing her glass through the water where so many times we’d caught minnows and sticklebacks and tiddlers with our nets.

  I sat on the bank, watching her.

  The dipping sun caught the arched flecks of spray, caught the shapes of leaves, caught the outline of her hair, made it fuzzy, made her golden-haloed.

  ‘I love you too much, Julia,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine life without you.’

  ‘It will feel so strange when you’re not here,’ she said, coming to sit beside me.

  ‘I’ll be lost without you,’ I said, holding her hand.

  ‘Course you won’t.’

  She picked up a double conker with her other hand, still wrapped and spiky, she gave it to me and I put it in my pocket.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ she said.

  ‘Terrified. Exhilarated. Both.’

  More cider.

  More cider.

  ‘Promise you’ll stay in touch?’ said Julia.

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘We’ve made lots of promises to each other, Diego and I,’ said Julia, and I looked down at her feet in the stream, so white in the water, with perfect red nails.

  ‘I’m terrified of promises,’ I said. ‘What if you can’t keep them?’

  ‘You just do keep them,’ said Julia, and she drew up her knees, and rested her chin on them, and her pretty feet dripped water.

  ‘What if you make a bad promise?’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be right to keep a bad promise.’

  ‘Like what?’ />
  She turned to look at me, with that expression she used to get, as if she couldn’t believe the stuff that came out of my mouth.

  ‘Ian says his mum stays with his dad even though he beats her up. Because she made a promise when she married him,’ I said.

  ‘Is that why he wants to become a Druid?’ said Julia.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘You’re not getting engaged, Julia, are you?’ I said. ‘We’re so young.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, and she smiled. ‘We’ll wait a bit.’

  ‘I feel a million miles from doing that,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t got a boyfriend,’ said Julia. ‘Once it’s a person, it’s different.’

  ‘What if you get bored of him?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t if you promised not to,’ said Julia.

  ‘But what if you make the promise and then you do get bored?’

  ‘Then you act like you haven’t,’ said Julia.

  ‘Which is lying.’

  ‘Well then, you don’t let yourself.’

  ‘What if he gets boring?’

  ‘He won’t because you love him.’

  ‘But what if he does?’

  ‘You don’t think about it.’

  ‘That’s suppressing the truth.’

  ‘Oh, Aug,’ said Julia, groaning at me and poking me in the upper arm. ‘You’re like a persistent wasp. Let’s have some more cider.’

  We went back to the rug and opened two new bottles and glugged the cider down.

  ‘I will always love you, Aug,’ said Julia.

  She really was starting to slur her words, as, I realised, listening to myself, was I.

  ‘I will always love you too,’ I said, slurrily.

  ‘Look at you making promises!’ said Julia. ‘Once you’re thinking of a real person, you see, it’s all much easier.’

  ‘But I will,’ I said.

  ‘I will too,’ Julia said. ‘Course I’ll always love you.’

  ‘Shall we have rings?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, any excuse for jewellery!’ she said, except her j slightly collapsed into a sh sound.

  ‘And we’ll still have no secrets, won’t we, from each other?’ I said.