The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  ‘The soldiers and the police killed about ninety people between them in Bujumbura at the weekend. One of them was a young boy called James who’d gone out for sugar. I don’t know what it is but I can’t seem to get that boy out of my mind.’

  ‘Why don’t you come home to Spain?’ I said. ‘Bring Wilfred too.’

  ‘I’m wondering,’ said Víctor.

  He’d never said that before either.

  When the call ended, I painted rose petals the colour of blood falling from the sky over Burundi and floating over the lake so that the whole of its surface was scarlet red.

  Augusta

  For our next outing, I bought tickets for my mother and father, Diego, Lola and Fermín to go to the Tower of London to see 888,246 ceramic red poppies, which tumbled out of a bastion window, representing every serviceman – British or colonial – who had died in World War 1.

  The blood swept lands and seas of red

  Where angels dare to tread …

  The anonymous poem had been found in a soldier’s unsigned will.

  There was a homeless man outside the station, and when I stopped, my father stopped his wheelchair.

  ‘Can I get you a sandwich?’ I said.

  ‘Anything,’ said the homeless man, who had sores all over his face.

  My father didn’t say that we shouldn’t get wrapped up in it, he didn’t say that it wasn’t our business, there were so many of them, half of them were on drugs and the other half were crooks – no, he didn’t say any of that.

  Julia, he didn’t say any of that.

  No, you won’t believe this, but he came with me to the Co-op and chose tuna and cucumber and added in a bottle of Lucozade and a Mars Bar.

  My father and Jim went on painting. Neighbours came over and climbed aboard the Victorian caravan and chatted. Barbara Cook moved her white plastic garden furniture from the back lawn to the front, so that people could come and sit with her and pass the time of day.

  ‘When I first arrived,’ said Lola Alvárez, ‘I could never understand why you sat at the back of your houses and locked your neighbours out. In Spain, we sit at the front. The old ladies bring their armchairs onto the pavement.’

  ‘That would look rather a mess,’ said my mother.

  ‘Oh, Jilly,’ said Lola Alvárez, and tears welled up in her eyes, which always happened when she spoke to my mother.

  Barbara bought fake-fur rugs for the plastic chairs, and she made the neighbours hot chocolate as the leaves started to blow across the crescent and we headed towards 5 November, the one-year anniversary.

  I must tell Julia.

  What?

  About the anniversary of her own death?

  About the pedlar man’s caravan, which was coming to life in front of our eyes, and which would never have been bought if she and Graham hadn’t died.

  I sat at the white plastic table with Lola Alvárez and Barbara Cook, watching my father and Jim as they worked away, quietly, together.

  ‘Jim and I have moved back into the double bed,’ said Barbara, blushing. ‘He’s started going to AA, and then of course there’s the whole business of the restoration, which is part of it.’

  ‘Restoration,’ I said. ‘That’s a very big word.’

  ‘It will take months,’ said Barbara. ‘Jim’s going to build a shelter for the caravan so that they can work in the rain, him and your father. It’ll keep them going through the winter, don’t you think?’

  Parfait

  In November, Pope Francis went to Africa: to Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic, the first time a pontiff had flown into active armed conflict.

  Wilfred took a knife and cut big pieces of cardboard from the boxes in his store, and he put them together in a long line on the hillside, and he wrote across them with black marker pen, PAPA HELP MY COUNTRY BURUNDI.

  It made me cry when Víctor told me.

  Víctor said to Wilfred that he wasn’t sure the Pope was calling in on Burundi. Wilfred shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the sky.

  ‘Maybe he was hoping his aeroplane might divert to read his message,’ said Víctor.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  Yes, maybe the Pope would remember that there was a forgotten country in the world called Burundi – a dark country full of heavy hearts whose name was light as a feather.

  It rained on the cardboard and the ink dissolved and the words flowed down the hillside into the lake to be eaten by crocodiles.

  The Pope never came by.

  Augusta

  In Hedley Green, it rained through December.

  Cheerful Christmas songs came on in the shops.

  Over a year had passed.

  Mum and Dad had the caravan, and the caravan community who now gathered on Barbara’s plastic chairs, under the party gazebo that Jim Cook had borrowed from the Dunnetts. He’d also bought a chimenea from Homebase to keep everyone warm.

  I knew I couldn’t be here for another Christmas.

  I went to number 13.

  I told Diego I was leaving.

  He asked if he could come too.

  He assumed I was going to La Higuera.

  I assumed I was too, though the thing in my head was more of an idea than a plan.

  Lola Alvárez said we were welcome to have the house. She and Fermín were planning to stay in England for Christmas anyway.

  ‘Have it as long as you like,’ she said. ‘You can stay six months, as far as I’m concerned. Go and enjoy the sunshine! You really need it.’

  I went to pack my case and found it full of Julia’s clothes. I put them on Julia’s bed.

  ‘Leave them there,’ said my mother. ‘It makes me feel she’s coming back.’

  She sat amongst them, feeling them with the palm of her hand, and later she laid Julia’s wedding dress over her pillow.

  As I packed, she did up the forty-five silk buttons, and undid them again.

  My mother and father, and Lola Alvárez, drove us to Gatwick Airport on 5 December. On the radio, a young boy with a haunting voice sang ‘Silent Night’ but the night felt neither calm nor bright. ‘Sleep in heavenly peace,’ he sang, filling the car. ‘Sleep in heavenly peace.’

  I half-loved half-hated flying in aeroplanes.

  ‘We’re nowhere,’ I said to Diego.

  He frowned.

  ‘I found a new word for heaven,’ I said. ‘I’ve reached I again in the dictionary.’

  ‘You’re not reading the dictionary again, Augusta?’

  ‘It consoles me.’

  I dragged the huge dictionary out of my hand luggage.

  ‘Look!’ I said. ‘I never noticed this word before. Iriy. In Slavic mythology, storks were thought to carry unborn souls from Iriy to earth. Iriy is a mythical place where birds fly for winter, from where babies emanate and where souls go after death.’

  ‘It’s all bollocks,’ said Diego.

  He put his jumper over his head and went to sleep. Like Olly Macintosh. Do all men do this, I wondered. But there were several un-jumper-headed men around me.

  I flicked idly through J to L, to love, which had the shallowest and most pathetic of definitions. I closed the dictionary.

  I picked up the free newspaper and I read about a probe that was circling Saturn, taking photos of Earth.

  When Diego woke, we couldn’t find anything to say to each other.

  We landed.

  We caught a taxi.

  We hardly spoke.

  As we approached La Higuera, through the olive fields, you could see huge kites like bunting in the sky, to the left of the beach. I held my breath as we came into the village, and the taxi turned left along the beach road, and it pierced me, the sight of it all, as we drove past Restaurante Raúl, and past the shop where Julia stole the newspaper.

  The taxi stopped.

  We got out.

  I looked down to the dunes.

  There was the artist I’d seen with Olly Macintosh: he was on the beach, painting. I paid the driver and I wal
ked towards him. I looked at his face, his smooth dark skin, his fat bunch of tied black plaits, his muscular arms, his right hand, run with veins, flicking his brush. I wasn’t sure what he was painting – he’d just started.

  For a moment, I forgot.

  I stood and looked at him. I was fascinated by him, like you might be by a work of art, or a sculpture, or the character in a book who you dream about for years after you finish reading.

  Diego said, ‘What are you looking at?’

  And I said, ‘Nothing.’

  In the square, there was one bar open, the bullfight sending crackly TV applause across the cobbles.

  ‘Let’s go and eat something,’ said Diego. ‘Come on!’

  The clock on the church tower chimed eight times.

  There was the artist again. He was pulling a huge Christmas tree out of a coach with two other men – one with a hat and a ponytail, one with a vest and tattooed arms.

  ‘That’s the artist who was on the beach,’ I said to Diego. ‘I think he lives in that coach.’

  Diego didn’t answer.

  As the men pulled the tree into position outside the church, with ropes and ladders, we walked over to them.

  ‘This is new,’ said Diego, nodding at the huge tree.

  I held back, saying nothing.

  ‘We’ll have the ceremony on Christmas Eve,’ said the artist in Spanish. ‘I hope you’ll both come.’

  He made dimples in his dark cheeks when he smiled.

  ‘It’s in aid of the refugees – a tree to remember the dead,’ he said.

  Oh, not the dead.

  We’d come here to forget them.

  ‘We never had a tree before,’ said Diego as we went into the bar. ‘I wonder who the guy is.’

  Precisely, I thought.

  Stop it, I thought.

  We sat at the bar, and ordered tapas: tortilla, spicy patatas bravas, prawns in garlic.

  There was Raúl who owned the restaurant – his dark eyes twinkling under wild eyebrows, chewing a toothpick – with the old men in grey trousers and grey caps gathered around him, elbows on the tiled counter, half-watching the bull collapsing onto the sand.

  ‘Now don’t I recognise you two?’ said Raúl, and he slapped Diego on the back and kissed me on each cheek as we re-introduced ourselves.

  Once we’d finished eating, he took us out across the square, down a side street, past the cats eating fish skeletons on the plastic bins, tumbling out of cereal packets and old shoes. I crouched down, and the cats fled back into the rubbish, but a tiny black kitten pushed its nose out of a can. She nuzzled my fingers, rubbing her heart-shaped face against my palm.

  I felt like crying.

  But I didn’t know how to.

  No tears had come.

  Not one.

  Since the day she died.

  ‘Come on!’ said Diego.

  But I didn’t want to leave the little cat.

  I wanted her to go on nuzzling my hand.

  I stood up, and the three of us walked to Raúl’s house, climbing the outside steps to his roof terrace, which overlooked his restaurant and the beach beyond. Next door to his restaurant, a foreigner had built a concrete cube with glass sides, which he’d turned into an art gallery.

  ‘It doesn’t suit the place,’ said Raúl. ‘Why would we need an art gallery in La Higuera?’

  He pulled aside a hanging checked tablecloth on the line to show us his new telescope, and I looked through it at the huge glittering sky. I thought of the probe circling Saturn, showing us that Earth was a tiny star like all the rest, with all of us crowded onto it. Everything – everything – is mysterious, I thought.

  ‘Come on, Augusta,’ said Diego. ‘I’m knackered.’

  I wondered if Diego had kept saying Come on to Julia all the time.

  We walked down the steps and into the kitchen to greet Raúl’s wife, Teo, in a haze of frying prawns. She threw her arms around me. Her hair had turned white, and she was quite beautiful.

  ‘Would you like to come riding with us?’ said Raúl. ‘Now your father’s not here to stop you?’

  He laughed.

  I saw my father standing – standing like he used to when his legs worked – with his pink knees, saying ‘Sombrero! Sombrero!’ with a horrible English o.

  ‘I’d love to come,’ I said. ‘I don’t care about riding hats.’

  Back at the house, in my bedroom, I wrapped myself in a blanket, but I was still cold. I remembered lying here, naked in the heat, fanning Julia with one of those little battery-fans. Fanning away, laughing, so un-warned.

  In the morning, Diego and I went to the bar in the square for breakfast – tomato and garlic on toasted bread.

  ‘Do you remember when Julia was a shooting star in that dance show?’ I said to him. ‘She twirled across the stage so fast we all thought she was going to take off?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about her any more,’ said Diego. ‘It’s all we ever talk about.’

  ‘We’re keeping her alive,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t keep her alive,’ said Diego. ‘We have to let her die.’

  The garlic turned to metal on my tongue.

  ‘Do you want to drive to Cádiz to buy a telescope for our roof terrace?’ I said. ‘It could be our Christmas present to each other. Light.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of feeling depressed,’ said Diego. ‘This is the end of it. The start of a new life. It’s got to be.’

  Don’t forget her so quickly, I thought, you loved her half her life.

  ‘You can’t stop being sad,’ I said, ‘and it’s a big pressure trying. I think Julia tried too hard to be happy.’

  ‘We’ve got to get over it,’ said Diego, knocking back his little glass of coffee and slamming it on the table. ‘Draw a line. You might not want to, but I want to be happy. You only live once.’

  ‘Do you think you only love once?’ I said.

  But he didn’t answer.

  ‘I don’t expect to get over it,’ I said. ‘It’s inside me, and I expect things to grow from it. Like in flower beds, you put shit on the mud, and plants grow.’

  ‘That’s where we’re different,’ said Diego, raising his hand at the waiter. ‘I want to leave the shit behind now. Find another flower bed. For me it’s time to move on.’

  ‘That sounds a bit callous, Diego,’ I said. ‘I don’t get what you mean. Another flower bed? It’s only been a year. What are you saying? You’re going to start dating again?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said. ‘But I can’t live in the past forever.’

  He ordered another coffee.

  I stared at him.

  ‘I’d feel a bit weird if you started bringing girls back to the house,’ I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  But I had a strange fizzing feeling inside me.

  He tipped his coffee down his throat, and we got up to walk home.

  Outside the shop behind the beach, there were white doves, which made us both think of her – instantly – but we didn’t say.

  ‘They come from Palomar de la Breña,’ said Diego. ‘Did you ever go and see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘It’s like an enormous old dovecote, with its own streets. It used to produce about a hundred thousand birds a year for meat, I think.’

  ‘People don’t eat doves.’

  ‘They did in the past,’ said Diego. ‘It was to feed the crew who were going off to conquer new lands, when we were an empire.’

  ‘What is it with Europeans and conquering?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t we just call by for a visit? Did we have to nick their countries?’

  ‘Why do you make everything such a big deal?’ said Diego. ‘Can’t you accept things?’

  ‘Please let’s go to Cádiz and buy a telescope,’ I said to Diego because I didn’t want to argue. ‘I want to learn about the moon and the tides and the names of stars.’

  I went into the shop to buy some bottled water, and the woman, still in the light
blue housecoat, with her fat upper arms filling the short sleeves, asked after Julia.

  ‘She died a year ago,’ I said. ‘We needed to get away.’

  I paused, and then I said, to my surprise, ‘My mother preferred her.’

  There, I’d said it.

  It was easier to say it in Spanish words – I didn’t know why.

  ‘Or was it that your sister preferred your mother?’ said the woman, her mouth now pinched with bitterness.

  I looked at her.

  ‘I have daughters too,’ she said, unsmiling.

  I’d trusted in her fat arms, but her words hurt me.

  ‘Es recíproco,’ she said. ‘El amor.’

  Is love reciprocal, I wondered.

  Is it some kind of Pavlovian reaction?

  Someone decides to love you so you just love them back.

  Had I loved Olly Macintosh all those years simply because he loved me? And if somebody else had chosen to love me, would I have loved them instead? Was I that biddable? If so, I was a danger to myself.

  And isn’t it the job of mothers and fathers to love first, and to love equally, and to love better than their children? Or was I supposed to help them love me by being what they wanted me to be?

  Whatever that was.

  I knew, of course, exactly what that was.

  They wanted me to be Julia.

  She was exactly what they would have chosen.

  We bought the telescope in Cádiz on Christmas Eve, though I don’t think Diego especially wanted to, and by the time we arrived for the ceremony in the square, there were baskets of gold cut-out planets and stars, and pots of black felt-tip pens and collection dishes for the migrants and their families.

  Diego and I walked forward and gave our donation.

  I let him pick a planet, layered with gold oil paint. I wrote Julia on the back. I let him pick a star. I wrote Rose on the back. Then I wrote one for Graham Cook.

  Men climbed the step ladders, and small children crawled under branches with their grandparents’ names written in smudged black pen, which is what we all become in the end.

  A series of letters.

  A word.

  Which gradually falls out of use.

  The artist spoke into the microphone.

  ‘The authorities say that approximately three thousand seven hundred and seventy migrants and refugees lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach a place of hope in Europe this year,’ he said.