Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Look, it’s a ghost town,’ Jack says wearily. ‘There are no shops in ghost towns.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ghosts don’t have any pocket money.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they don’t have chores.’

  ‘But I’m hungry. I want breakfast.’

  ‘I know, me too,’ I pacify her.

  ‘I’m sorry. We’ll get some breakfast soon.’

  I smooth-talk the children on. Temerosa consists of seven cabins apart from ours, each separated by windy stretches of path covered in twisted desiccated leaves which crackle noisily under our feet. The cabins are different sizes, but all variations on a common vernacular of porch, deck and gabled windows. The first two we explore have stone foundations and outside walls covered in reddish cedar-wood shingles, most of which have warped and flipped up at the bottom revealing longer horizontal wooden planks beneath. Although at some point there appears to have been a cursory attempt at decoration, no one paint colour has been used to finish any one cabin. Some walls are whitewashed, some raw wood, others have remnants of a faded turquoise around the door frames. To the back of the second cabin, we climb down a dry wash and short-cut our way to the third. An enormous cottonwood tree is growing at the bottom of the wash, its branches drooping tiredly towards the ground like an overworked giant. I touch my hand to the trunk, which is carved with graffiti: initials, nicknames; ‘Li’l Foozy’ and ‘Pearl’ linked forever by arrows piercing a roughly scratched wooden heart.

  ‘Mummy, I’m so hungry,’ Emmy says again.

  ‘I don’t understand why we can’t have breakfast now,’ Jack says. ‘Why do we have to wait till later?’

  ‘Because we don’t have any food right now.’

  ‘But without food we’ll starve,’ Emmy whimpers.

  ‘Eat Jack then,’ I suggest and she giggles. Jack is less easily diverted. He has smelt blood and prepares to close in for the kill.

  ‘And why,’ he eyes me meditatively, ‘do we not have any food?’

  ‘Because I forgot to buy any.’

  ‘So how are we going to have breakfast, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Don’t say “for God’s sake”,’ I say automatically. ‘In a bit, we’ll borrow a truck and go to town.’

  ‘Why can’t we borrow the truck now?’

  I take a deep breath. Currently, I am the fly whose wings Jack likes to pull off.

  ‘Cos it’s a little early and I don’t want to wake up the man who drove us here.’

  ‘But I’m hungry now,’ says Emmy.

  ‘So eat the fruit bars,’ I say, playing my trump card. I fumble for them in the backpack and wave them in front of her face.

  ‘Nooooo,’ she wails.

  I nip at the wrapper with my teeth. ‘Come on, it’s good, what’s wrong with it?’ I tear off the end strip and chew determinedly. ‘Yum, yum, see how delicious?’

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  She’s quite right, of course. It’s filthy. Nevertheless I hold it irresistibly close to her nose, hoping that some olfactory instinct will snap into action and send a signal to her mouth to open. Instead she knocks it to the ground and stamps on it. ‘I’ll die before I eat that. Die, do you hear?’

  ‘Die then, brat,’ says Jack, nudging at a stone with his trainers.

  Emmy drops to the base of the cottonwood and adopts a squat position. Her favoured form of protest is 1960s university student and she does it really well, refusing to be bulldozed by threats or moved by entreaty. Only total capitulation to her petition of human rights will normally shift her. Still I go through the motions.

  ‘Emmy, if you don’t get up, I’ll have to leave you here.’

  ‘Leave me then.’ Her voice begins to rise and screech like a string quartet warming up. ‘Just leave me here to die – to die, d’you hear, because I’m starving to death. STARVING TO DEATH.’

  I look at her helplessly. My job as a landscape designer has allowed me to spend most of my children’s lives studiously avoiding the drudgery of childcare, calling on impossible work deadlines, meetings of vital importance, phone calls that simply couldn’t be delayed, all in order to back up my case for not having to give in to the tedium of pushing-swings-in-park duties. I know there are some parents who can make space stations from toenail clippings and igloos out of potato peelings and I wish I were one of them, truly I do, but the patience and imagination required for that kind of activity simply never made it through to my gene pool. Now, as realization slaps me in the face that I have committed myself to an extended period of au pair/babysitter/nanny-free single parenting, I am tempted to fall into a heap of quivering motherhood.

  ‘Look, Emmy.’ I squat down. ‘This is my fault, so I’ll make you a deal. You stop making a fuss right now and you can eat whatever you want for a whole week.’

  The snivelling stops and a look of true cunning passes over her face. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Well, okay, obviously not anything—’

  ‘You said anything,’ Jack reminds me coolly.

  ‘Well obviously you can’t just eat chocolate all day long, but you can choose any meal you want for a whole week and I promise I will give in without a fight.’

  ‘Me too?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Both of you, okay?’

  Emmy pretends to weigh up the offer but, God knows, she can recognize a good deal when it’s on the table. ‘Okay.’ She stretches out her arms to be picked up and I pull her onto my lap.

  ‘It’s just that I’m tired,’ she whispers.

  ‘I know.’ This is Emmy’s standard apology and I accept it with good grace. I try to set her on the ground, but she clings, rubbery-legged, around my hips.

  ‘Mummy Mummy wait there’s something else. I just have to ask you a question.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Because it makes me scared in my body and I don’t know if it’s true and I don’t want you to just say it’s okay I want to know the truth because it really makes me sad.’

  When she’s upset or tired, Emmy talks like this; very long sentences without punctuation, all delivered with great seriousness and sense of urgency in a desperate pleading voice that flips my heart over. I steel myself for something apocalyptic. Has Emmy, with her child’s extra-sensory perception, picked up that something is a little out of kilter with her parents’ marriage? Has she decided after careful deliberation that living 7,000 miles apart is not exactly a normal state of affairs for your average nuclear family? And if so – then how to answer? Questions about God, sex and lesbians, I can field without difficulty, but justifying the big D, for any parent, remains the final frontier.

  ‘Look, she’s gone,’ was how my own father chose to put it that first evening as he placed a plate of beans on toast in front of me. ‘And she’s not coming back.’

  ‘Never?’ Only later did it occur to me that this was an event way out of the ordinary.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to look after you now and I’m going to do everything just as well as your mother.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. And suggested he start by heating up my beans.

  I look into Emmy’s trusting face, knowing that whatever she asks, I will inevitably fail her. She glances nervously at her brother, then yanks my ear towards her mouth.

  ‘Is it true that Jack is really a vampire?’ she whispers. ‘Because he says he is and he swears he is and if he IS a vampire AND he sucks my blood then I will have to be a vampire as well and I don’t want to be a vampire because I don’t want to live on blood.’

  I hold her close to me while she cries, rolling my eyes at Jack over her shoulder, then I hoist her onto my back and walk on.

  The rest of the cabins are in a grim state of repair, their doors and facades peppered with gunshots like constellations of black stars. Inside, the floors are littered with great mountainous piles of poop, rusting metal cans and little shiny pieces of broken crockery.

  ‘Treasure,’ Emmy says hopefully, dropping to the
ground.

  ‘Rubbish,’ Jack says dismissively. He kicks a can against the wall.

  The seventh and final cabin is bigger than the others, a long rectangular building with nine windows down each length and a wide porch wrapping around three sides. This was once the main boarding quarters of the town, housing both the kitchen and dormitories. We circle the outside, sizing it up. A hefty chunk of the side porch is covered by a bush with a trunk the colour of ox blood, its texture so smooth it feels as if it’s been planed and sanded by a sculptor. A length of mosquito netting has been nailed over the front porch and the rusted spring base of an old mattress leant up against the hand rail. A workman’s boot sits on top of a lubricant barrel as if admiring the view, which, to be fair, is spectacular. I shade my eyes against the sun. I can feel its strength now, almost as though someone has placed a warm iron on my back. The snow on the mountains looks like a wash of silver. There’s nothing that far out, not a telegraph pole, or pylon, not a house, or a road or a living soul to be seen.

  ‘What’s that?’ Emmy whispers. The fly screen is banging rhythmically against a mouldering door frame.

  ‘Wowaaaaaaa.’ Jack waves his arms around his head in the universally accepted impersonation of a person wearing a white sheet with snipped-out eyes.

  ‘Ghosts?’ Emmy, the uncynical, queries, wide-eyed.

  We stare at the fly screen as it opens and shuts but if it’s not from ghosts, it must be from boredom because there’s not a whisper of wind. Not a shrivelled leaf moves on the oak trees. The air is absolutely still.

  ‘Come on,’ I tell the children, ‘there are no ghosts here.’ But of course this isn’t true.

  Over a hundred husky old miners have at one point lived and died in Temerosa and there are nights to come when it feels like a haunted wind blows through this town. Sometimes I lie in bed and think of them; sleeping cheek to jowl, hungry, frostbitten, wiring candles to their hats, boiling leather shoes and sucking on spaghetti laces as those interminable winters went by, as their bodies froze inside out and their minds slowly rotted with obsession for that one giant nugget they dreamed of holding – and they’d not been the only prospectors who dreamed of riches out here. Up until last fall, Temerosa had been owned by a conglomerate of developers from Toronto, one of whom, an old friend of Robert’s, had come to him for a loan pending a more formalized investment in the business. As a property developer, nothing appeals to Robert quite so much as the ‘big idea’ but unfortunately his feverish optimism is never tempered by much sound commercial rationale. His Toronto friend’s big idea was buying up deserted towns all over the American West then renovating them for resale. Before he got very far the stock market crashed and their funds withered. For once, Robert lucked out. He would never get any of his dollars back but instead we found ourselves in possession of a mystery 500-acre property in Arizona.

  I yank back the screen and put my foot to the wooden door. Inside the big front room, wooden planks have been torn up and the floor is covered with stacks of pebbles and yet more animal droppings. A blackened burnt-out fridge stands in one corner and a sofa in another, stuffing oozing from a succession of gaping tears, as though it had gone mad from loneliness and indulged in a frenzy of self-mutilation. To the back of the room, a door opens onto a long corridor which runs the length of the building, cutting through a maze of smaller interconnecting rooms. The whole place smells rotten and musty. But there’s another smell as well, one harder to identify, which creeps up my sinuses like ammonia, some lethal mining gas about to render us unconscious. I’m about to grab the children and pull them out when, just behind me, Emmy starts to wail – a high keening noise that rises and increases in volume with each intake of breath. I’m on the verge of panic myself until I see what has spooked her. On the walls of the adjoining room, animal skins – bats, skunks, deer and even a lion – have been stretched and pinned into menacing vampiric shapes.

  I clamp my hand over Emmy’s mouth and we beat a retreat. Outside, in the safety of bright sunlight, I suck fresh air into my lungs and glance back at the boarding house. The glassless windows stare back at us like the eyes of a blind man and for a moment, overwhelmed by the enormity of the job in hand, I feel a knot of unease deep in my stomach.

  ‘Mum!’ Jack whispers, tugging on my sleeve. ‘Someone’s coming.’

  The Mexican, with his averted eyes and sad moustache, is slowly making his way up the track towards us, the dour expression on his face a dead giveaway. What a cushy job he’s been used to. Self-appointed sheriff of a town with no citizens, being paid for taking care of a bunch of cabins so dilapidated there is nothing he could possibly maintain. No wonder he is surly and unhelpful. Up until now all he’d had to contend with were a couple of self-satisfied developers waltzing in once or twice a year to throw their weight around. And now here I am, with my snivelly whiter-than-white urban brats, crashing in on his own peace and refuge. I take the children’s hands and we slowly head down the hill to meet him. I wonder whether to ask him about the letter but it’s hard to know how to phrase the question ‘Have you been sleeping in my bed?’ without sounding like a peevish Goldilocks – besides, there is the small but not irrelevant fact that he has been caretaking this place for the last five years.

  When we’d first come, Robert had attempted to cross-question him. What exactly had this so-called ‘caretaking’ entailed? But he’d got nothing more enlightening than a shrug and a ‘No ispeek Ingless.’ Irritated by what he’d perceived as deliberate lack of respect, Robert had been in favour of firing him on the spot, but I thought I’d noticed something else in the man’s eyes, an expression I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  ‘Yeah, a willingness to rip us off,’ Robert said sourly once he’d realized that we were now solely responsible for the Mexican’s wages. ‘Besides,’ he’d added petulantly, ‘I hate Mexican food.’

  Still, if he’s been here five years, then he and he alone would have been around to oversee the building works to our cabin. He would know where to get the propane for the stove, how to pump the water from the well, how to unblock the sewage and restart the generator. If anyone has an idea how to access the local contacts or find inexpensive labour, it’s going to be him. Besides, dammit, at this point in time, he is the one and only person I know in the entire state of Arizona.

  ‘¡Buenos días, señora!’ he mumbles gruffly, eyes sliding away from mine.

  ‘¡Buenos días!’ I nod back at him. It would really help if I could remember his name, but I can’t and I don’t know enough Spanish to ask it.

  He bends down to Emmy. ‘¡Buenos días!’ he says softly. Emmy turns and presses her face into my jeans. He straightens up again and holds out a paper bag.

  ‘Desayuno.’

  I’m confident that my scanty three words of Spanish will soon be augmented by a course of language tapes I bought from Waterstone’s a good month before leaving. The only reason I picked them out from the legions of Biarritz-style offerings on the shelf was because I read on the blurb that the teacher had taught Doris Day to sing ‘Que será será’ in flawless tones, but despite this inspiring recommendation, I have so far failed to start the course. The Mexican, however, is undeterred.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he translates.

  ‘Gracias,’ I say, surprised. ‘Gracias.’

  He thrusts his hand into the bag and draws out a packet of Fruit Loops, a carton of milk, and three slim paper sachets of cherry Kool-Aid. ‘Para los niños, he adds. ‘The children.’

  Jack and Emmy stretch out their hands and make cawing noises like starving baby crows and in response to this he suddenly grins. With a shock I wonder whether I have misjudged him. It’s possible that his perpetual look of sullenness is less of a mean-spirited thing and more of a physical unkindness. When he smiles, the right-hand side of his mouth shoots up in the traditional manner, but the left side seems loath to follow, instead remaining stubbornly horizontal, which in turn gives his face the frozen look of a mild Bell’s palsy sufferer. />
  ‘Gracias,’ I say again.

  ‘No problem.’ He smiles again and this time I notice the gaps where two of his back teeth are missing.

  I smile as well and stick out my hand. ‘Alice.’

  ‘Benjamín,’ he says. His J is soft. Benjhamin.

  I have absolutely no intention of firing him.

  3

  ‘The truck is good,’ Benjamín says. I step up onto the metal footplate and hop into the cab. He slams the door after me, giving it a couple of slaps with the palm of his hand before walking round to the front. ‘See?’ He holds up the towline and hook still attached to the front fender. ‘Big engine, very strong.’ Then he presses his fingers to the hinge of his jaw, as though necessary to relocate it back into its proper place before committing himself to a final declaration. ‘The truck is safe.’

  The truck is a 1986 extended Dodge pickup and to those who believe the glamour of their ride correlates directly to the state of its disintegration – and I happen to be one of them – then this surely represents a very grand set of wheels indeed. First and foremost, it’s a wonderful colour. I’ve never before seen a car or truck that was butterscotch coloured. I’ve certainly never heard any car dealer say, ‘Why, yes, Mrs Coleman, you can have it in forest green, black, or could I perchance interest you in the butterscotch?’ Anywhere else in the world a toffee-apple truck might look a little out of place, but here, under the orange sun, against the ochre and red of the rock face, well, it just looks tastefully camouflaged.

  Size-wise, the front cab seats five people and the flatbed at the back is long and wide enough to transport a small Boeing 747. This back section also comes with an optional shell, like a lid on a giant re-usable can of sardines, so if you wanted to, you could even sleep in it. Above the Arizona plates Benjamín has fixed a spare tyre and wired an extra brake light through its centre.

  Sitting up in the cab, yanking down on the clunky gears, brings on every Thelma and Louise fantasy I’ve ever indulged in, and I soon begin to visualize myself and the children, glowing and bronzed from regular outdoor activity, lying in the back, smoking roll-ups, covered in a great shaggy skin of a bear – possibly a bear that I have myself wrestled and overcome in an altogether separate fantasy – and staring dreamily at the heavens while meteorites flame across the night sky from Jupiter to Mars.