by Joanna Glen
Shewellery and shecrets.
Julia was twirling off in the wind, with autumn leaves falling around her, and her secret was twirling with her, but however fast she turned, she was never able to dislodge it.
Parfait
I drove the coach to a scrap of scrubland outside Tarifa.
I went down to the art shop, and I bought paints and brushes and an easel, a big sketch pad, different sized canvases.
I set myself up outside the coach, amongst the lorries, my easel in the sand, with a stone stuffed under to keep it even, and I took the small canvas. I painted a man sitting on a rock as the sea came in. The holey rock was sticking out of a sheen of water, with a slight mist across it, and the man was looking out to the horizon, biting the skin of a green lemon.
On the next canvas, I painted a mirror, and inside the mirror was the square where we danced, with the old sofas, and Paco in his hat, and beyond and behind was the port. The mirror was dissolving into streams of mercury.
Then, on the largest canvas, I painted a girl who could have been my sister, Gloria. The skirt of her dress was made of satin ribbons in rainbow colours, and as she danced, turning in circles, faster, faster, the different colours flew out of the ribbons like paint, splashing the white walls around her, making unlikely shapes like countries that don’t exist. As I went on painting, her dark plaited hair started releasing brown paint, as she twirled, and then the paint shot out of the skin on her arms, and the gold of her earrings.
Augusta
‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ I called after Julia as she twirled. ‘I’d rather have a gypsy caravan than a husband.’
‘If I get rich,’ she called, ‘I’ll buy you one like the pedlar man’s, and you can go travelling from town to town.’
‘Is the pedlar man thrown in?’
‘I thought you didn’t want the husband.’
‘Let’s have some more cider.’
On we went into a bleary evening in our bedroom looking at old photo albums, which were losing their stickiness so that photos flew out onto the floor as we turned the pages. We lay on our fronts on the carpet, our legs kicking into each other’s legs, with the ease of familiar flesh, and with cider headaches, and a lingering hum of dread about our separation – mixed, for me, with the gorgeous anticipation of finally getting away from Willow Crescent. From my father. From my mother.
My mother opened the door and took photos of us. Double-conkered, legs entwined, and me jumpy with nerves and excitement.
My mother was always crying in the weeks before I left for Durham.
‘I can’t believe it’s all over,’ she kept saying.
‘What’s all over?’ I said.
‘Us,’ she said. ‘This.’
She gestured around her at the walls and the floor and the airer which was suspended over the boiler, where our knickers hung in a tidy row, stretched taut, as she liked them.
‘Will you miss my knickers?’ I said, smiling.
‘You’ll buy new ones in Durham,’ said my mother, ‘and I won’t be able to recognise them.’
She lurched for the back door and went outside.
‘Is she crying?’ I said to Julia.
‘It will be so strange without you,’ she said.
‘Do you remember we used to have those pants with the days of the week on?’ I said to Julia. ‘And Mum used to get in a total stress when I wore Tuesday on Friday.’
‘You loved wearing Tuesday on Friday,’ said Julia. ‘I never understood why.’
I kept finding my mother staring at herself in the mirror in the days before I went to Durham.
‘What are you looking at?’ I said.
‘The future,’ she said. ‘I’m starting to look like my mother. I can see wrinkles coming in the same places she has them.’
My mother’s bathroom mirror fell off the wall, and she brought it to us, as if it meant something.
‘Bad luck,’ she said. ‘Seven years of it. Until 2015.’
‘That’s all nonsense,’ I replied.
‘It’s all breaking up,’ she said.
‘We’ll make a mosaic,’ said Julia.
I never knew how to comfort my mother, but Julia did.
She tried to see the future in the mirror, and the mirror cracked.
I’m really not superstitious – I happily walk under ladders, and I don’t touch wood or throw salt over my shoulder – but the future, the seven years that would take us to 2015, was coming at us like a train.
Yes, like a train.
The future was a train.
And the train could not be stopped.
Autumn strode onwards, browning the leaves, loosening them, as I too was being loosened.
‘They’d never cope with us both leaving at once,’ said Julia, who was going to train to be what was apparently called an Early Years Practitioner, which my mother called a nursery nurse.
She would go to a local college, living at home, in our half-empty bedroom, with my tightly made bed which would remain tightly made for weeks at a time.
I felt guilty, as usual, but nothing would have made me stay in Willow Crescent. I was pawing at the ground.
I was making my way down the Durham University reading list. I was reading El Cid and Don Quijote, Unamuno and Calderón, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca.
Crickets, frogs and the lurking night …
Like the garden at the back of the house in La Higuera, where I once lay dreaming on the Moroccan bed.
That Moroccan bed.
I read the line to Julia to see if it made her think of the Spanish garden. She said it didn’t.
Lorca hypnotised me – I read him in Spanish, I read him in English, I was back in the South of Spain, I was surrounded by blood and knives and roses, drowning in his symbols – life like running water, death, a river stopped.
Parfait
Antonio visited me at my coach in the scrubby car park, and he brought Paco with him, in his hat, with a book of poetry, and Luis, in his vest with his tattoos on display all down his arms – roses and knives and drops of blood, or were they tears?
‘Lorca understood us,’ said Paco, opening his book. ‘Love, longing and death. He got it. And they killed him for it. Antonio says there’s a lot of killing in your country – is that right?’
‘Oh there is,’ I said. ‘Far too much killing. But enough of that. Won’t you read me a poem?’
‘The guitar weeps …
like water weeps,
like wind weeps
over snow.
It cannot be silenced.
It weeps for things
far away …
Evening without morning,
the first bird dead
on the branch.’
I started to paint.
I painted the Fischer’s lovebird, rainbow-feathered, dead by the stream – and Luis picked up his guitar, and Antonio went on smoking.
Sometimes when they came, Paco sang, but mainly he read, and his voice painted Lorca’s poems in my mind.
So vivid, so rich with colour.
I’d never experienced words as alive as these.
I painted twilight trembling in the bulrushes at the river’s edge, and a flock of captive birds moving their long tails in the shadows, and fields of olive trees opening and closing between the hills like a fan.
Augusta
‘In Lorca’s poems, he talks about a pinned butterfly pondering its flight. If you think about it, it makes you feel kind of dizzy,’ I said to Julia.
‘I hate pinned butterflies in glass cases.’
‘Do you think that’s what we all are?’ I said. ‘Pinned butterflies who think we can fly?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Julia, ‘and I’m not sure thinking too much is good for people. It sends them a bit crazy. Stop thinking so much, Aug. Be happy.’
‘In Lorca’s plays, there’s this character who’s supposed to be De
ath. Listen, I’ll translate. I’m coming, freezing my way through walls and through windows! Slice open your roofs and slice open your hearts to warm me up!’
‘I think it’s horrible,’ said Julia. ‘I hate the sound of Lorca.’
‘Listen to this one!’ I said to Julia. ‘This one isn’t horrible. Doesn’t this make you think of the road to La Higuera? The olive fields opening and closing like a fan?’
‘Aug,’ she said. ‘Can you stop reading bits out? They really don’t mean anything to me.’
Parfait
It was Paco who persuaded me to try to sell my paintings to the art gallery in the old town.
‘They might not be able to feel the emotions in them like you can,’ I said, because I was nervous. ‘We all see things differently.’
The paintings were part of our secret life together. The thought of exposing them to other people, the thought of assuming people might pay money for them, that was something altogether different.
‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ said Paco. ‘The gallery doesn’t take them. Life goes on.’
‘But I’d feel such a fool,’ I said.
‘We’ve told you they’re beautiful,’ said Paco. ‘Why won’t you trust us?’
So, in the end, we walked together – or perhaps more accurately they walked me – through the medieval stone arch, down the cobbled streets of the old town, and I forced myself, sweating with nerves, after several false starts, to open the door of the gallery.
I stood tall, I threw out my shoulders and I shook my head so that I could feel my plaits on my cheeks like Sami Terre.
I introduced myself, smiling, tripping over my Spanish words.
The thin man who owned the gallery, who was wearing a buttoned-up white shirt with a kind of black shoe-lace tie, shook my hand.
He asked to see the paintings.
Antonio, Paco and Luis were waiting outside the door with the canvases.
I nodded at them, and they burst in.
The gallery owner eyed them with some suspicion.
Antonio talked too much.
I sweated.
Luis looked a bit violent in his vest.
Paco kept saying, ‘The paintings were inspired by the poetry of Lorca, and by Cante Jondo. Did he say?’
‘I’ll take them all,’ said the gallery owner, without asking to see my documents, without asking me anything at all.
He called me over.
‘This one,’ he said, pointing to the man chewing lemon skin, looking out over the sea. ‘What does it mean?’
‘What do you think it means?’ I said.
‘Loss,’ said the man. ‘The pain of it.’
I nodded.
‘Yours?’ said the man.
‘Everyone’s,’ I said.
‘This one, the girl with the ribbons?’
‘It’s everything we feel underneath,’ I said, ‘coming out.’
The man nodded.
As I turned, I caught sight of the girl’s long neck and her dignified face, and she was singing Hosanna, I could hear her.
And I went back.
‘On second thoughts, I’m going to keep the dancer with the ribbon skirt,’ I said. ‘She’s my sister. And.’
I stopped.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
The man handed me back the canvas.
As we walked back to the coach, Antonio said, ‘Parfait, it’s time to call Víctor. The poor man must think you’re dead. You need to tell him about your paintings, how they’re going to sell them in the gallery. Then you need to tell him what happened to Zion, and find out how the rest of them are.’
‘Is it really you?’ Víctor asked me.
His voice trembled.
The wind blew up in my heart.
‘You’re alive,’ he said, and his voice sounded strangled. ‘You’re alive.’
‘Víctor,’ I said, my heart beating. ‘Zion didn’t make it. I didn’t know how to tell you.’
Víctor said nothing, and it made me hold my breath and clench my fingers.
‘It was my fault,’ I said. ‘Your friend told us it was too windy to cross.’
‘He never told me,’ said Víctor. ‘He didn’t return my calls.’
Antonio was hooking smoke rings on a stick, trying to catch them before they disappeared, and Paco and Luis were looking at the ground, and I felt the first tear running down my cheek.
‘Wilfred!’ called Víctor. ‘Come over here! Parfait’s alive!’
Then something quite unexpected happened.
Wilfred opened his mouth.
He said, loudly, ‘My brother!’
I heard it down the phone, and I yelled out, ‘Wilfred!’
I hadn’t heard his voice in so long I’d forgotten the texture of it.
The second tear came, the third, the fourth, I was wiping my cheek with the back of my hand.
‘Put him on,’ I said.
Wilfred said down the phone, ‘My brother!’
The best words.
My brother.
And the worst.
My brother.
Then nothing else.
Only his breathing.
Víctor came back on.
‘Also, Víctor,’ I said, now a bit bashful. ‘I sold some paintings to an art gallery in Tarifa.’
Now it was Víctor’s turn to yell at me.
‘Parfait,’ he said, when he’d stopped yelling. ‘Peace is on its way. This time, it’s going to happen. The ceasefire’s holding. The government soldiers and the rebels are working together. Our dreams are coming true.’
Augusta
It was time for me to leave home. Julia and I went to Claire’s Accessories on the high street and bought each other cheap silver rings, in double, and A and J initials, and hung them on chains around our necks, and I felt warm inside, and then cold at the thought of being without her.
We all drove up the A1, with my mother handing out sandwiches which tasted of Tupperware, and my father saying, ‘Put your lid underneath. Or the crumbs’ll go everywhere.’
We queued for keys and student cards and gowns, with my mother and father anxious to be getting onto the A1 and back to Willow Crescent.
Julia kept holding my arm, and saying, ‘It feels so far away.’
The three of them drove away from Hild and Bede College, leaving me on the black tarmac, wearing my A and J necklace, waving with one hand, feeling the shape of two conkers in my pocket with my other. Julia was looking the other way. They drove down the A1 in silence, Julia told me later, and this made me wonder if perhaps my mother and father would miss me, as I’d always suspected they wouldn’t. That perhaps they would be sad to be without me.
When their car had disappeared out of sight, I sat at my desk, switching the silver desk light on and off and turning the pages of my dictionary – A-B-C-D.
‘Come on Augusta,’ I said aloud, and I didn’t recognise my own voice, here in my little room at the end of the corridor, at the top of the stairs.
I got up from the desk chair and looked out of the window at a small patch of grass with nothing and nobody on it.
A room with one bed in it.
Would I ever get used to that?
I opened my door.
Then I closed it again.
I went back to my dictionary.
Dingle – a deep wooded valley.
Dingoes; dining cars; dinner jackets, with which I would become accustomed at Durham; dioestrus, a period of sexual inactivity, that is, my whole life; and on to Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who highlighted the need for natural, uninhibited behaviour regardless of social conventions; and diogenite, which was a stony meteorite.
Which would I go for? Who would I be? Would I follow Diogenes into wild self-expression at Durham University or continue my journey as a stony meteorite?
Someone put some music on in the next-door room, and I couldn’t hear anything except the beat. I wondered what my neighbour looked like and what he or she was
doing the other side of the thin wall.
I opened the cupboard door and swapped my T-shirts with my jumpers because you wore T-shirts more, so, logically, they should be on the middle shelf – and more accessible.
I sat back down and picked up one of my Converse trainers and wrote Shit-scared in green pen. Because I could. Because my mother couldn’t tell me not to swear.
Then I wondered if I really wanted to walk around with Shit on my shoe. So I coloured Shit inside a green rectangle.
And it looked. Well. Shit. Then I felt really cold.
And I remembered everyone had said how freezing it would be in Durham, and I swapped the T-shirts and jumpers back, because, actually, in a place like Durham, which is practically in Scotland, you want to have your jumpers on the middle shelf, where you can get your hands on them.
I looked at the big grey jumper I’d bought when we went to a shop in Wales called Shelley’s Sheep. My mother tried to buy me one of those awful ones with rows of white sheep on, and one black sheep, third row down.
No, I chose something that was made in the Andean mountains. I pulled it out of my newly folded Durham cupboard, which smelled of bleach. Pachamama it said on the label. The fertility goddess who causes earthquakes in the Andes.
I’d like to cause an earthquake, I thought, just one, just once, inside a gorgeous man, of which there might be a few, behind all these brown doors, waiting to explode at the sight of me.
I pulled on the huge grey jumper with knitted Aztec symbols on the back in cream.
I looked at my watch.
One hour until the drinks.
I read the pink sheet again.
6.30 pm. Drinks with the academic staff.
I circled 6.30 pm with the green felt-tip pen and drew flowers around the academic staff, still feeling cold.
I needed to pee but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out into the corridor, or into the communal bathrooms, where I would meet somebody.
At six o’clock, I pulled off my Andean jumper and pulled on a black dress I’d bought in Hedley Green Oxfam (where I loved, to my mother’s horror, to shop).
I looked at my watch.
Five past.
