The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  Julia wanted the children to believe in pots of gold, in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas, but Eileen said they should manage the children’s expectations at Rainbow Nursery.

  ‘Life isn’t a picnic, you know,’ she said.

  Parfait

  When I drove back to Tarifa with more paintings for the gallery, the owner greeted me like an old friend. All my paintings had sold, he said, people loved them.

  ‘I’m so pleased for you,’ said Antonio, as we sat drinking coffee and eating pastries in the Paseo de la Alameda, where we’d first met.

  ‘It’s you who rescued me,’ I said, feeling the sun on my skin, and feeling good, so good, like I never thought I’d feel again. ‘I’ll always be grateful. None of this would have happened without you.’

  ‘So,’ said Antonio. ‘Are you making lemonade?’

  He winked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Love?’ said Antonio. ‘Have you fallen in love? You’ve been gone a while. We assumed it was a woman.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’ve been painting.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Antonio. ‘Life’s for living.’

  I thought of my sisters, but it never did me any good thinking of them. Then I thought of Pierre, and Wilfred, and Víctor. I wanted all of them to live too – if life was for living.

  I felt bad about my easy life.

  I went back to the coach and called Pierre, who now had a phone.

  ‘I’ll pay for you to come to Spain,’ I said. ‘Life’s so much easier here.’

  ‘I’m not looking for an easy life,’ he said.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I said.

  ‘Justice,’ said Pierre.

  ‘Not revenge, I hope,’ I said.

  ‘It’s only language,’ said Pierre. ‘Call it what you like.’

  ‘Can I change your mind, Pierre?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll never leave Burundi,’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to send you some money,’ I said. ‘Please will you spend it on something that would make you happy.’

  Though who knows what made Pierre happy these days?

  I rang Víctor.

  ‘Do you and Wilfred want to come over here? I’ll pay for you both.’

  ‘I’ve got my school and Wilfred’s got his farm, Parfait,’ said Víctor. ‘But thank you – and I’ll tell him.’

  ‘I’m going to send you both money,’ I said. ‘Please will you try to enjoy it?’

  I didn’t feel better.

  I felt churned up, as if I’d tried to buy what shouldn’t be bought: peace, or goodness, or something.

  I went down to the streets to dance.

  ‘Are you the artist?’ said a young girl with a long dark plait, sitting close to me on the sofa, drawing me, tempting me with the smell of her perfume and her glistening red lips, which would be soft to kiss.

  ‘You’re the one whose brother drowned, aren’t you?’ she said.

  I jumped.

  She stroked my cheek and leant herself against me.

  The one whose brother drowned?

  I got up and left.

  But I was restless.

  I didn’t sleep well.

  In the early morning, I turned on the radio, and I heard on the news that a migrant boat, with 515 people on board, had sunk near Lampedusa, in Italy. The Italian coastguard had rescued 155 of them. 515 - 155 = 360. Nearly the same number of days in the year. A dead person for every day.

  I went to get out my easel.

  I set it up outside the coach.

  Then I stopped.

  The one whose brother drowned.

  More brothers had drowned.

  I knew that painting wasn’t enough.

  I should do something.

  Deeds, deeds, my father used to say.

  I thought of Daffodil Wilfred, and I thought of Víctor.

  I should drive to Lampedusa and try and help, I thought, but I couldn’t face it, I’m ashamed to say, not on my own.

  So I sent some money instead.

  Augusta

  As Julia walked back from the nursery in the evenings, she realised that Eileen was making her sad, and she knew that she didn’t want to be sad.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be sad if your husband was dying of cancer?’ I said to Julia.

  ‘There will always be someone somewhere dying of cancer,’ said Julia. ‘I want to choose to be happy.’

  I’m still thinking this through – whether it’s OK.

  Julia and Diego asked me to stop telling them about Burundi and about all the other horrible things that were happening in the world. They sat eating dinner in the little conservatory they’d added at the back of their maisonette, watching the doves fly and the leaves of the coral bark Japanese maple turn from rich green to butter yellow.

  ‘We don’t watch the news,’ Diego said to me. ‘It’s too depressing – and anyway, we have our own lives to live, our own worries.’

  ‘No honeymoon baby,’ said Julia. ‘I hope it’s all going to be all right.’

  Although she could love the babies at her nursery, she said, she couldn’t make the light shine in their eyes like their mothers did. Even the mothers who didn’t seem nice at all.

  But when she did, quickly, get pregnant, her eyes didn’t shine at all.

  ‘Everyone is someone’s baby,’ she said. ‘I’ve never thought of that before.’

  I laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ she said.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said.

  ‘It’s just being pregnant,’ she said. ‘Hoping it all goes OK.’

  I pushed the trolley around the library, putting books back on shelves, feeling like a tea-lady. You got a First from Durham University, I said to myself, and here you are – a library assistant in Hedley Green. You need to do something with your life.

  My novel was stalling.

  ‘Do you think you can write about a country you haven’t visited?’ I said to Julia.

  ‘You know more about it than the people who live there,’ she said. ‘But I guess it’s hard to imagine things we haven’t been through.’

  ‘There really is a guy who’s set up a rose farm outside Bujumbura,’ I said. ‘I read about him on the internet – and he’s lost nearly his whole family. All that’s left are his roses, and there’s only so much you can write about roses.’

  ‘Could you un-kill his family?’ said Julia. ‘Bring them back to life. I wish we could do that, don’t you? In real life.’

  ‘What? Undo time?’ I said. ‘Who would you un-kill first?’

  She half-closed her eyes and shook her head.

  ‘Jules, what is it?’ I said.

  ‘If I decided to climb a tree, and you were watching and I fell off and died, whose fault would it be?’ she said.

  ‘Yours for climbing the tree,’ I said. ‘Especially if it was a stupid tree to climb.’

  ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Oh good – is that right?’

  ‘Yes, as long as I at least tried to help.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she said.

  ‘If I didn’t try to help, would I go to hell?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Grandma’s always talking about hell,’ said Julia. ‘She says it’s the whole point.’

  ‘The whole point of what?’ I said.

  ‘Can you go to hell for not helping?’ said Julia.

  ‘I don’t know anything about hell.’

  ‘Perhaps hell is not being able to get away from things we’ve done wrong.’

  ‘Jules, you’ve never done anything wrong,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ said Julia.

  ‘Eventually I’ll have to,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to get a real job, and that job won’t be in Hedley Green, will it, let’s be honest.’

  ‘Please stay until I have the baby,’ said Julia.

  ‘I’m going to call her Rose Augusta,’ said Julia.

  I
put my arm around her.

  ‘I’m honoured,’ I said. ‘And you are totally sure about this pink colour for the room, aren’t you?’

  She nodded, smiling.

  ‘It’s definitely a girl, isn’t it?’ I said, as I dragged the roller through a tray of candy-floss-coloured paint, wincing.

  ‘Surely you of all people would be happy with pink for a boy?’ said Julia, eyeing me quizzically, her face so radiant suddenly, happy, I thought, yes, happy.

  She started cutting up her old childhood dresses to make a patchwork quilt for the cot, and I pointed at the hexagons of material and said, ‘Our fifth birthday. The Christmas we got the trikes. That sunny day in Mousehole. Grandma’s birthday at the hotel.’

  I kind of wished, for a reason I didn’t fully understand, that she wasn’t cutting up our duplicate dresses, but that was ridiculous, so I said nothing.

  Julia bought a white cot, a fold-out bed (in case of disturbed nights) and a Moses basket with white lace lining on a stand. The ceiling light was a hot-air balloon with a basket underneath. I bought a little plug-in dome which projected gold stars and a crescent moon onto the ceiling.

  On the window sill, Julia put a tiny sleeping cat with the smoothest black fur, curled up in a basket. It was so real that it actually breathed – you could see its tiny ribcage expanding and contracting.

  It was Friday night, the night Diego went to the gym and my grandmother came round. My mother was cooking spag bol – does anyone say that any more?

  ‘Just like old times,’ said my mother, handing tea through the serving arch as we all gathered in the lounge to watch TV.

  ‘I never knew snakes could move so fast,’ said my father.

  ‘Why aren’t you watching, Augusta?’ said my mother.

  ‘I’m watching and reading.’

  ‘What a horrible title,’ said my mother. ‘What is that book? Blood Wedding?’

  ‘I’ve told you about it before – it’s a Spanish play.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Kind of everything really – and more every time I read it, if you know what I mean, life, death …’

  ‘She’s stopped moving,’ said Julia, running her hands over her stomach.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ said my mother. ‘She’ll be having a little sleep.’

  ‘But she normally moves all the time.’

  ‘Can you feel anything?’ said my father. ‘Do you want me to run you up to the hospital?’

  ‘Oh, there’s her little foot,’ said Julia, and she took my hand.

  ‘I think that’s her heel,’ I said.

  It was so strange to feel a living heel inside Julia, pushing through her skin, like pastry, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, that was in my W. B. Rands book too, squealing little blackbird beaks. I remembered Julia’s chicks, especially the last chick, which crashed into the plastic side of the incubator and died before it had lived outside the shell.

  The television snakes came at the young deer from all directions, and they crushed it to death in a scaly ball of knotted squirming muscle.

  ‘You can see why Satan is seen as a snake,’ said my grandmother, seeming energised.

  ‘Shall we turn off the snakes?’ said my father.

  ‘But it’s true,’ said my grandmother. ‘Satan was the one who made childbirth painful, wasn’t he? As a punishment for eating the apple.’

  ‘She only ate an apple!’ I said, laughing.

  ‘But the most important thing is that you forget very quickly,’ said my mother firmly. ‘Giving birth was the best moment of my life.’

  ‘A woman soon forgets her suffering because of her joy that a child is born into the world,’ said my grandmother, pushing her glasses down her nose and looking over them.

  My mother nodded gratefully.

  ‘And in my case,’ said my mother. ‘Not one child but two wriggling little bundles. First Julia, pale and calm, like a little china doll …’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Then me – red and cross with thick black hair like a dog.’

  ‘You were my best-ever gifts,’ said my mother.

  ‘I talk to Rose when I can’t sleep,’ said Julia. ‘I feel like I was born to be her mother.’

  When Diego arrived from the gym, he was brimming with confidence inside his taut manly body, as if he was about to break out of himself.

  ‘I think it’s time for bed,’ said Julia.

  ‘I’ll drive you home, Mother,’ said my father, whose own mother, Rose, had died when he was a boy. His father had told him she’d gone away and would soon be back, and maybe he was still waiting. Maybe that was why his fingers shook.

  My grandmother, Nellie, got to her feet, clutching her black patent handbag with her stiff hands.

  ‘If men had to have babies,’ she said, ‘the human race would die out!’

  My mother smiled at her, but my grandmother didn’t smile back.

  I think my mother has always felt she doesn’t measure up, which I understand.

  So strange, the way we pass things on, perhaps the things we least want to.

  I must remember that.

  ‘Have you heard of a TENS machine?’ said my grandmother to Julia. ‘Supposed to be very good. That’s what Constance said anyway.’

  ‘The hippie woman recommended it,’ said Diego.

  ‘She’s keen on natural childbirth,’ said Julia. ‘No drugs. No epidurals. She said women were made to give birth.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have been accounting for Satan.’

  ‘She’s quite right,’ said my mother.

  ‘Women can do other things,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be right there by your side,’ said Diego. ‘Down at the south stand!’

  ‘South stand!’ said my father, laughing appreciatively, as no doubt had the men in the changing room at the gym.

  The TENS machine was useless in the end, Julia told me, like trying to mop up the Atlantic Ocean with a small piece of blotting paper.

  Diego didn’t want me at the birth.

  He didn’t want my mother either.

  We wouldn’t have made any difference, and, anyway, I didn’t want to watch.

  The contractions started to come quickly and hard, and they rushed to the hospital.

  ‘Gates up,’ Diego texted.

  ‘Arrived.’

  ‘Agony.’

  ‘Unbearable to watch.’

  ‘TENS machine no good.’

  ‘Epidural.’

  Later, much later, when we arrived in Spain, a year and a half later, he said that he’d believed the hippie woman. He thought women’s bodies were made for it. He couldn’t believe it had to be so difficult.

  Yet it is so ordinary to be born, and so ordinary to die.

  350,000 births per day, apparently.

  And 150,000 deaths.

  Approximately.

  Around the world.

  That’s 15,000 births and 6,300 deaths per hour.

  250 births each minute and 105 deaths.

  Count to one.

  Four babies have arrived.

  Count to two.

  Two of us have left the world.

  Right now.

  As you click your fingers.

  If only we left the earth in pairs.

  Like animals leaving the ark.

  Two by two hurrah.

  Hand in hand.

  Or died together like roses on the same bush.

  It would be so much less scary.

  ‘I asked her if she wanted me to turn up the TENS machine,’ Diego said to me on the beach, once we arrived in La Higuera. ‘And she said something. I haven’t told anyone else. It was so out of character.’

  I waited, a bit nervous.

  ‘She swore,’ said Diego.

  ‘All women swear when they give birth,’ I said, relieved.

  ‘But not Julia,’ he said.

  ‘Even Julia.’

  ‘She said, Fucking TENS machine! And that’s when I got a bad feelin
g.’

  ‘It can be a good word, Diego,’ I said to him. ‘Swearing can really help, I’ve heard.’

  I wonder if it does.

  ‘But not Julia,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t say that. Did you ever hear her swear?’

  ‘Twice. One bloody and one fuck.’

  We both looked out to Africa – there were tiny lights shimmering in the dusk over the grey glass sea.

  Julia was impaled on her child, that’s what she said to me, that the baby felt like a rugby ball of flesh, completely solid, hard, immovable, jamming up her vagina, forcing it open.

  ‘I didn’t want her to suffer so much,’ said Diego. ‘She was in so much pain, and the baby wouldn’t come, and then one midwife ran out of the room, and I knew something was wrong, and there were people everywhere, like a circle around her bed, and I was pushed back. I hated that. Being pushed back.’

  The little girl was pulled out of her with the suction-thing, a ventouse, I think it’s called, and her tiny left arm was sticking up, apparently.

  ‘She must be exhausted,’ Julia said. ‘Poor little thing.’

  That’s what she thought when the baby didn’t cry.

  ‘Oh,’ said the midwife.

  And there was silence.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It is a girl, isn’t it?’ Julia said. ‘Because I’ve painted everything candy-pink!’

  But nobody answered.

  ‘Rose Augusta,’ she said. ‘That’s her name.’

  She lay back on the pillow.

  She remembered someone saying, ‘Just a few stitches.’

  People everywhere, talking over her.

  Not talking to her.

  Later they asked if she’d like to hold her baby, her baby who was dead.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the midwife. ‘This must be very painful for you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Diego said no.

  He walked out.

  He walked back in.

  Julia was holding her.

  She had pale hair, and she was wrapped up in a white sheet with no creases in it.

  ‘Two perfect little heels,’ Julia said to me later. ‘The way they used to kick. You felt them. Do you remember?’

  Julia stared at Rose.

  And Diego stared at Julia.

  And she asked for some scissors.

  And she cut a tuft of her fine blonde hair from her baby’s head.