The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  That is blue, I thought, looking at the blue line.

  I put the plastic stick in my pocket, and I couldn’t think where I could hide.

  So I went into the church.

  Because it was dark in there.

  The blue line is – there was a painting I hadn’t noticed before – my child.

  The holy child embraced his mother, pushing himself up against her with great energy, cheek to cheek. Mary, in the painting, in her blue dress, looked almost embarrassed by the child’s physicality.

  I knew I was embarrassed by my own – it had always been a shock to me. But, of course, I would now be revealed.

  The blue line is my child.

  I put my hand on my belly, and then I went and knelt, I’d no idea why. It’s something people do in churches. But I wasn’t kneeling before God. I was kneeling before Julia.

  I was pregnant, by her husband, and she was dead, and her husband blamed me for it, and the candles were flickering.

  Now Parfait definitely won’t love me.

  Not now.

  I’m so sorry, Jules, I’m so sorry.

  For my words – if they hurt you. For telling you things you didn’t want to hear about the world. For making your life not simple.

  I got to my feet to light a candle, which is another thing people do in churches.

  I looked around me – nobody was in here.

  Julia, I whispered, I’m sorry if you had to watch us, Diego and me, I hope you didn’t, I don’t know how it works. And I know it was wrong. Very wrong. And also, I’m sorry if I could have helped you and I didn’t. If I could have stopped you, and I didn’t.

  Forgive us our trespasses.

  If you wanted to be stopped.

  That stopped me, that thought.

  I looked at Mary, at her son’s cheek pressed up against hers. Like Rose’s cheek was never warm against Julia’s. And for a fraction of a second, I understood.

  Julia wanted to be with her, to feel her warm cheek, like Mary had.

  Mary knew what it was to be pregnant at the wrong time, although, obviously, she’d done nothing wrong, and was just a vehicle, I supposed, for the story.

  I wondered if she minded being a vehicle.

  I wondered if I minded being a vehicle.

  She couldn’t have known what her journey would be.

  None of us does.

  I looked at Mary’s baggy blue dress. I would wear baggy dresses, like she did. I like baggy dresses anyway.

  This orange one I’d bought was tight, like flamenco dresses always are, but I’d bought it before I peed on the line. To have faith in not being pregnant, I bought a tight dress.

  I only slept with Diego once, and by mistake. Such a mistake. And because I was sad.

  Shit shit shit, I thought.

  The whole thing’s probably over.

  The thing I most want.

  I walked out of the church, holding the dress.

  They were moving the silver Virgin into position for the procession.

  I went to Restaurante Raúl, to the Ladies again, and I changed into the dress. I glanced in the mirror. I wondered if I might – perhaps – be beautiful tonight. With my sunned face, and my black hair pulled up with a mantilla comb, and my orange flamenco dress, like the dancers wore on Mr Sánchez’s film.

  All the things you’ve ever done, that’s what Mr Sánchez asked – would it be heaven or hell?

  Now I knew.

  I arrived at the feria after the Virgin had passed by. Parfait came down the hill towards me, and we walked back, side by side, to the striped canvas caseta where everyone was sitting on hay bales, drinking sherry from Jerez, a town just up the motorway, where they train horses to dance.

  The women were wearing coloured dresses like mine, and we looked like the songbirds which they still sadly keep on their balconies in cages in La Higuera.

  ‘One day I’ll dance the streets releasing them,’ I told Parfait. I liked the picture it made in my head. It felt hopeful. Like the painting of the girl with satin ribbons for a skirt which was hanging in the coach.

  Augusta Hope.

  Maybe.

  Parfait put a white rose in my dark hair.

  The music began.

  You remember what Mr Sánchez said.

  He said that duende came only sometimes.

  That the conditions had to be right.

  Just right.

  It was dark that night.

  The guitar moaned and wept, and a lone female voice, dusty and low, was carried on the warm air. The guitar and the voice melted into the clapping of the crowd, and Parfait started to dance, slowly, and an intoxicating energy bubbled under the surface of his smooth conker skin, like boiling water.

  He knew how to do this.

  He must have been taking lessons too.

  I started to dance.

  Parfait reached for me and withdrew.

  Reached and withdrew.

  I leaned right back, and I let my body say the things I hadn’t been able to say to him.

  He did too.

  As my body stretched, I could feel my extremities fizzing, the tips of my toes, my nipples, my fingers – and my scraped-back hair pulling the skin of my scalp.

  We shaped ourselves to each other’s bodies, outlines of each other, but we couldn’t touch, that’s the dance, you mustn’t touch.

  We raised our hands, grazing each other, nearly.

  But not.

  Duende.

  Here it was, curling up the street, like a genie.

  We were not touching.

  But we were so close.

  We were echoes of each other, reaching for each other, like a surgeon, on the cusp.

  Of opening up a body.

  Of plunging in his hand.

  The purpose being healing.

  The strings of the guitar wept.

  And we were three parallel lines of fire.

  Parfait, duende and I.

  Withholding ourselves.

  Exposing our pain.

  Going underneath.

  I don’t know how long we danced.

  But I noticed that the guitar had stopped playing, that all the people had gone home. That we were a man and a woman on a street. Alone. That the polished Virgin had been long returned to her dark box in the dark church.

  There were thrown roses on the street, cut down, like my mother and father used to scythe the blue flowers which they thought were weeds.

  Your weeds are my flowers, that was what Lola Alvárez said, do you remember?

  It was soon dawn, I was still wearing the flamenco dress and we were on the beach, but I still didn’t tell Parfait what was happening inside my body – why he wouldn’t want me.

  Parfait sliced an orange into four.

  I put a quarter-orange in my mouth.

  And Julia collapsed with Diego behind Mr Dunnett’s shed.

  I want to collapse too.

  With this man.

  ‘Tell me the rest of your story will you, Parfait?’ I said, feeling him like heat beside me.

  Which is something you can do, tell your stories.

  Instead of collapsing.

  I suppose.

  He breathed deeply, the way he always does, as if he’s sampling the air for the first time, and a bright orange dragonfly, the same colour as my dress, hovered above the damp sand, like a spark of fire.

  ‘They come over from Africa,’ I said. ‘Orange-winged Dropwings.’

  Parfait smiled.

  ‘I assume it’s easier for them,’ he said. ‘The journey!’

  It landed on my hand.

  Parfait stared at the dragonfly as it darted from my hand to my dress.

  ‘It makes me think of my father,’ he said. ‘He loved beauty.’

  He told me more about his father, and his mother, about Víctor who’d come with hope and would perhaps be beaten by Burundi, like Parfait was. He told me about the hillside and the stream and the rainbow Fischer’s lovebird, and about a day they
all went swimming together in the lake and the sun shone and they were happy.

  ‘You’ve left lots of things out, haven’t you?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘But I think you get it anyway,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  He moved a little closer to me, and I could hear him breathing.

  ‘You feel somehow like home,’ he said.

  Now I could hear myself breathing.

  ‘You do too, Parfait,’ I said, and I wanted to reach out to him, to touch him, but I didn’t, I went on talking, as a substitute. ‘It’s called nostos in Latin. That’s how we get the word nostalgia. It means aching for home.’

  ‘I always had some kind of ache inside me,’ said Parfait.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know anyone else had that ache.’

  ‘I always assumed everybody had it,’ he said.

  We were talking fast now, our words crashing against each other.

  ‘I thought I’d been born into the wrong life,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone I knew was born into the wrong life,’ said Parfait. ‘So I came looking for the right one.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  A pause.

  ‘Maybe I was looking for you, waiting for you, before I even met you? Is that possible?’ he said. ‘Because it’s kind of cool.’

  ‘That’s like time travel. I like that. Chronology is so suffocating, isn’t it?’ I said, smiling.

  ‘If only we could rewind,’ he said. ‘Do you ever think that?’

  ‘Shall we go in the water?’ I said, and I started to get up, and maybe he’d follow.

  If only we could rewind.

  ‘I don’t like to,’ he said. ‘Not any more. I used to love swimming in the lake.’

  ‘With the cichlid fish?’ I said, smiling. ‘Two hundred and fifty species of them!’

  I walked down to the edge of the water because I couldn’t sit so close to him any longer, without exploding.

  He stayed sitting.

  ‘If you could rewind your life,’ he said, ‘but you could only change one thing, what would it be?’

  Sleeping with Diego, I thought.

  Then I felt sick.

  Julia dying.

  Obviously.

  What was I thinking?

  I turned around.

  ‘My sister once asked me if people could be un-killed,’ I said.

  ‘When will you tell me about your sister, Augusta?’

  ‘Not today,’ I said.

  If you could change one thing.

  Only one thing.

  We said nothing.

  The sun came up behind us, pink flames from the mountains.

  On 5 November, I worked.

  Didn’t think.

  Couldn’t bear to think.

  It had been two whole years since I’d heard her voice.

  Parfait was painting, all the time.

  Dragonflies, butterflies, chrysalises, wombs.

  I didn’t want to think about wombs.

  He seemed consumed, so I tried to seem consumed too – which is quite hard to fake. I don’t know if you’ve tried it.

  At night, I wrote bad poems.

  There was a volcano rising up. Or there was in me, anyway, and possibly in him. He was harder to read.

  He never once made any attempt to cross the plastic partition at night, though I lay awake, shamefully wishing that he would.

  ‘Parfait, I’ve been wanting to ask,’ I said to him, finally, sitting outside the coach, finding it easier to talk in the dark. ‘Is there anything I should know about you? A girlfriend? Or …?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  He looked up.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  I went into the coach for my scarf – to hide my belly, which wouldn’t, ultimately, hide.

  ‘Why haven’t you been in love?’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for the right person,’ he said. ‘And also.’

  ‘Also what?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  My scarf was made of coral silk flecked with blue dragonflies.

  Olly Macintosh gave it to me.

  I wasn’t properly in love with Olly Macintosh, I knew that now. He was more of a trial run.

  ‘Didn’t you want to have a trial run?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I watched the soldiers rape my sisters, you see. Again and again and again. And there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It made me feel ashamed to be a man. I felt, somehow, stained by what had happened to them. And I chose a different way. With my body. To make it up to my sisters. And to please my father, I guess. He waited for my mother, you see, and …’

  ‘I admire you for that,’ I said. ‘For choosing.’

  ‘And maybe for myself too,’ he said. ‘And maybe also for …’

  ‘So you mean you’ve never slept with a woman?’ I said, creasing my brow.

  He nodded.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘But you’d like to?’ I said. ‘One day?’

  He smiled.

  I felt embarrassed.

  I fiddled with my scarf.

  I wished I was a dragonfly.

  Then I could be free.

  I wished he was a dragonfly.

  Then he could be free too.

  I wondered why it was so complicated being a person.

  ‘Can we go dancing again tonight?’ he said, drumming his fingers on the wooden table. ‘Will you put on your orange dress again? You looked so …’

  ‘I can’t wear my orange dress tonight,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  More drumming.

  ‘Can we go for a walk?’ I said. ‘I feel antsy.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Restless. About to explode.’

  ‘Perhaps you should explode.’

  ‘I don’t want to. Perhaps you should. You keep drumming your fingers on the table.’

  ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  We set out along the beach road.

  As we were approaching Raúl’s house, where the road turns right into the square, we heard the most terrible sound, like a child squealing in pain.

  We increased our pace, heading in the direction of the cry.

  It took us up the road where the bins are.

  We looked around us.

  Down into a pool of light from the street lamp.

  And there she was.

  Amongst the glass shards and the ants.

  Lying twisted.

  Terrible to look at.

  We stopped dead.

  The small black cat with the heart-shaped face.

  Caught up in a spiral of barbed wire around her body, cutting into her neck.

  It almost looked as if someone had wrapped it round her.

  She was bleeding, in spirals, and her fur was shot with little star-shaped holes.

  Her little ribcage rose and fell, rose and fell, so fast, with the pain.

  Parfait knelt down, and he picked her up.

  He stroked the bits he could stroke.

  As he held her, she stopped screeching, and he started, very gently, to unpick the wire knots from her skin.

  He said nothing.

  I tried to stem the wounds with my coral scarf, but there were too many, so all I could do was press it against her miniature body, cutting my fingers on the wire knots.

  Parfait went on undoing the wire, with great care, with great concentration, unhooking it from her skin.

  Her ribcage fell, rose, fell.

  We both stared at her tiny black body, willing it to rise.

  Rise again.

  It never rose again.

  Parfait put his big hand against the kitten’s back, and I laid
my palm over her tiny head.

  We stopped, conscious of some great gravity held in that little dead body.

  Parfait’s face was set.

  Almost immobile.

  He dug a hole in the sandy earth with a stick, and he buried the kitten under a fig tree.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said.

  But he didn’t speak.

  All of him was clenched and taut.

  Like a dam, holding back a tide.

  Then, unexpectedly, the tide came – except it was my tide, not his.

  Here, at last, were the tears I’d been waiting for.

  For two whole years.

  They rose up from inside me.

  When I’d stopped crying, I knew the moment had come.

  ‘You know when you arrived here in 2004? I have a photo here of a man lying at the end of the beach,’ I said, taking the folded newspaper cutting out of my pocket. ‘And, although I really hope it isn’t, I think it might be you.’

  ‘How do you have that?’ he said, and I could tell he felt exposed. ‘It was years ago.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said. ‘What were the bits you left out of your story?’

  ‘There was a storm,’ Parfait said to me.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I killed my baby brother, who’d trusted me with his life.’

  I didn’t want to hear, I couldn’t bear it.

  ‘A Spanish priest in Tangier gave us his boat. He was worried by the weather, and he told me not to go. It was the wrong boat and the wrong time, he said. But it looked calm from where I was standing. I knew nothing about the sea. And we’d walked all the way from Burundi and I was impatient to arrive. I tried to hold him. But …’

  He gestured to the sea.

  I remembered the wind on the beach that day, and the way it shook the shutters at night.

  ‘What was your brother called?’ I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted a name.

  ‘He was called Zion, and I’d promised him a better life, right back from when he was a little boy. It was such a terrible journey, but I thought it was worth it. To save him. Save both of us. Our family died you see. One by one.’

  ‘Mine too,’ I said. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘In England? People don’t die in England,’ he said.

  ‘People die everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘You never forget it when you let someone down that badly,’ said Parfait.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘My sisters were so badly damaged, and then they disappeared, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again.’

  ‘Are there any other brothers or sisters you haven’t told me about, apart from Wilfred?’