Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Okay,’ he agrees and I realize he was expecting far worse.

  ‘Good.’ I hand him the packet of biscuits I’d brought from home.

  ‘So how was it?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Come on, tell me what you did.’

  Jack shrugs and bites into an Oreo.

  ‘They didn’t let me climb the rock,’ Emmy says from the back seat. ‘It’s so unfair. Everybody else got to.’

  ‘Maybe they thought you couldn’t climb.’

  ‘Of course I can climb,’ she says scornfully. ‘All children can climb.’

  ‘One of the other boys only has one arm,’ Jack says.

  ‘What happened to the other?’

  ‘Got caught in the reaper.’

  ‘God. I look at him, horrified. How awful.’

  He shrugs again. ‘It happens.’

  I study his profile for trauma from the day’s events, but his expression is hard to read. I try to remember the last time my son really emotionally engaged with me and feel depressed when I can’t. Maybe Jack’s a particularly bad case but up to a point it’s true of most children. Think of all the worry, panic and guilt you endure in the first years of a child’s life. Think of all the boundless patience, understanding and love you pour into the bottomless hole of their need. But say you were to die before they were seven or eight, would any of it really have made a lasting impression on them? Case in point, my mother left when I was six and I don’t really remember her. Oh, I know that she had short hair and delicate features but only because I’ve looked at the photograph book my father keeps in his bookshelf. The day I was born, my father gave my mother a plover’s egg. It was pale green and dappled, almost perfect except for the tiny pin hole in the top. She hadn’t wanted an egg as a birthing present, though. She had wanted lilies. Something that smelt nice in the hospital, something that made her feel beautiful and special, but the thing is, you can’t get fresh-cut lilies in the Orkneys.

  8

  Emmy has taken to school like a mongoose to crocodile eggs. Geography seems to be the only subject she’s taught, but she can’t get enough of it. Within the space of a week, she is impressively well informed about erosion and rock formation and piously instructing me in her new Margaret Thatcher voice not to tread on certain types of desert top soil (contains valuable oxygen) lest I irreversibly damage the earth and doom us all to never-ending drought and destruction.

  At break, instead of the sedate game of hopscotch she might be enjoying at her nursery school, Devil’s Slide kids scramble up the piñon and juniper of the rock face and throw stones at each other’s heads – and Emmy, who, on flat ground, is the clumsiest thing imaginable, collecting broken toes and dents in her forehead like other children collect baseball cards, scrambles with the best of them.

  ‘Today I cut my head so deep you could see my brain,’ she says proudly.

  ‘How great! What colour was it?’

  ‘Mummy!’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you haven’t checked it out in the mirror?’

  More chuckling.

  ‘Jack, get over here! Let’s take a look.’

  ‘I’m not looking at her disgusting brain.’

  At bath time she presents me with her battle scars: arms decorated with a myriad of raw scratches, vermilion-coloured bruises like stepping stones up and down her legs, blackened torn fingernails caked in dust. ‘School is cool,’ Emmy announces. At lunch, older children regale juniors with details from their winter project on prehistoric cultures, the local Hohokam, farmers of the desert, and far more interesting, of course, the cannibalistic Anasazi who apparently liked nothing better than to nibble on their fellow Indians in the fourteenth century, and whose remains are scattered around the desert caves of the Four Corners region to the north. Devil’s Slide itself is the cliff from where a group of Apaches, their weapons depleted, chose to freefall to their death rather than give in to the grisly torture of their enemies, all of which Emmy laps up with ghoulish fascination. Any day now, I expect her to arrive home flexing a tattoo of a fat green snake on her left bicep, sign of a newly minted member of the notorious Cobra gang, modern-day warriors who rule the darker areas of the Indian rez.

  Instead of the grind of homework, I give the children Spanish lessons, courtesy of my Waterstone’s tapes. Forget the blind leading the blind, this is the dumb leading the deaf.

  ‘El río está helado, I intone on the way home in the car.

  ‘¿Sí? ¿Qué? they reply politely.

  Brilliantly, though, I have tricked them into believing that chores – sweeping the deck, setting the mousetraps, securing garbage against the raccoons – are a legitimate fixture of their after-school curriculum. Woodwork, a particular success, takes the form of me lying on the sofa drinking margaritas while they struggle in and out of blistering winds fetching blocks of wood for the fire and scorching their little fingers on damp matchbooks printed with ‘God Bless America’.

  I don’t immediately appreciate the effect all this is having on them until one night, after a tremendous crack in the sky, a storm breaks with such intensity it takes the power out with it. It’s early evening and as the cabin darkens and I realize the lights aren’t going to come back on anytime soon, I offer to take the children to Ague for a hamburger dinner. Both Jack and Emmy immediately begin synchronized wailing.

  ‘It’s all right, my chicks,’ I say tenderly, ‘I know it’s scary, but we’ll just throw on our boots and drive to town.’ Renewed moans from the children.

  ‘I don’t want to go to bloody Ague.’ Jack beats his fists against my, chest. ‘We want to have marshmallows for supper and light fires. Why do we have to go to Ague when this is the best day of our lives?’

  ‘Best day of our lives,’ Emmy gurgles.

  Later, when I blow out the candles, I look at them, faces pressed against the window, looking at the orange mist outside and discussing what lies beyond, and I realize with a pang that they’re beginning to change. Gone is the me, me, me of their former London selves; it’s as if everything they are experiencing has jumpstarted their curiosity and suddenly the whole world is opening up to them. And, for the first time since we arrived, all the doubts and guilt I’ve been pushing down so hard slowly seep out of my body and I begin to feel cautiously optimistic.

  9

  The first thing I ask Duval to do is have the workers enlarge my bedroom window.

  There’s a grunt.

  ‘What?’

  Pause. ‘Cabins out here traditionally don’t have big windows.’

  ‘Well I know, but then traditionally they don’t have a view either.’

  ‘There’s a pretty fine view from the front deck.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but the thing is, I’d like to have a view from my bedroom so I can see it when I wake up.’

  Pause. ‘Those windows were built small for good reason.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Keep warmth in, keep the sun out.’

  ‘Well now we have a stove, so there’s plenty of heat, and I come from a city that gets sun about three days of the year so . . .’

  Pause. ‘It might not be practical, is all.’

  I mentally stamp my little foot. ‘How about you cost it, then I can decide whether it’s practical or not?’

  ‘It’s your dollar, ma’am,’ he says mildly.

  I move in with the children while the Mexicans work in my bedroom. Enlarging a window turns out to be a swine of a job. I had imagined it to be merely a question of hacking out the right-sized square and popping in a piece of glass. But no, apparently there are other considerations: structural forces, the re-cladding of walls, reframing, etc. not to mention placing a special order in Phoenix for a ten-foot piece of glass, subsequently delivered by a tough female driver who negotiated her way along the Temerosa road in a twelve-wheeler lorry. ‘How on earth did you manage that?’ I asked her. ‘I would have given up on the first bend.’

  ‘Women round here don’t quit on a job,’
she said bleakly, cracking open a Budweiser with her teeth.

  As soon as the glass is fitted, Duval stands aside for me to take a look. The bedroom faces south and where before was visible the merest sliver of mountain, a smidgeon of tree and the thinnest slice of sky, like enticing thumbnail prints in a holiday brochure, there is now a stunning panoramic view.

  I’m busy telling Duval what a success it all is, and suggesting, perhaps a touch patronizingly, that we opt for the same in every cabin, when there’s a thud. A small bird smacks against the glass at tremendous speed and plummets to the deck below.

  Emmy had been sitting on the floor organizing plastic tubes of glitter and nail varnish into pleasing colour coordinates, while Jack, bored, had been knocking them over with his feet. Now they both leap up and gallop downstairs. By the time I catch up with them, Jack’s struggling to slide open the stiff lock of the back door and Emmy has hoisted herself up on the stove to see through the window. Outside on the deck, a beautiful jewelled hummingbird lies on its back, feet in the air, panting.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s only stunned.’ I edge Jack aside, wondering whether mouth to beak is appropriate, but no sooner do I get the door unlocked than a raven swoops down right in front of us and snatches up the humming-bird in its claws. Emmy hides her face with her arm and forces a strangled noise out of her throat. Jack stares at the departing predator. ‘That is so cool,’ he pronounces, awestruck. Emmy looks confused. She blinks once then stills her oscillating lower lip. ‘So cool,’ she breathes.

  The new window is a magnet for small birds. So much so that, morbidly, the children take to keeping a Chart of Death which they mark with gold stars as PAM! one after the other, starlings, hummingbirds, tiny blue-grey things I can’t identify – even with the help of a bird book I buy in Ague – thud into the glass like feathered kamikaze pilots, blinded by the awful reflection of the sun. Under the watchful eye of ravens, which now constantly circle the perimeter of the cabin like grim reapers, we try everything – positioning hideous plastic owls from the hardware store on the outside rail, hanging bird feeders from the porch beams – but the birds are simply too stupid, too short-sighted, or both.

  The systematic obliteration of Arizona’s petit oiseau population is not the only window-related problem. By two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun, on its travels east to west, hits its highest point over the mountains and the temperature in the room soars to an unbearable level, only beginning to dissipate again around seven when the cool night air and the baking heat pass each other stealthily through the gaps between glass and wood. Duval does not comment on either the dead birds, the white sheet I eventually nail over the window to save them or the fluctuating temperature conditions in my bedroom. But then it doesn’t appear to be in Duval’s nature to comment on much. He listens, he responds in kind, but social chit-chat is not exactly his forte. Nevertheless we fall into some kind of modus operandi. Every morning at first light, Duval’s truck drives along the windy path, tyres throwing up clouds of dust in its wake. In the back, the men sit hunched together, knees held tight to chests, heads down against the grit. By the time we leave for school, the beat of hammers and the monotonous whine of the drill has broken the peace and silence of the town.

  Now that the children are at school, southern Arizona is my oyster. With a view to at least getting our own cabin together, I begin to explore the country, driving further and further afield, weaving around dirt roads, barrelling through tiny towns with no more than a post office and gas station to show for themselves. I stop in at yard sales and trawl through tables of dirty glass bottles, battered cowboy boots, boxes of naked Cindy dolls with tangled hair and missing limbs, jars of stewed apricots, embroidered dishcloths, lethal-looking knives and watches that no longer tick. I stop off at pawn shops and watch skinny teenagers racked with pustulating acne sidle round the counters where the guns are kept while Mexican children offer flea-bitten kittens for sale for a dollar.

  As the days fly by, the back of the truck begins to fill up with an eclectic assortment of 1950s furniture, frosted beer glasses, funky lights and box after box of unused linen sheets.

  In a small antique shop, I find a cowhide stacked up inside a cupboard. Its white fur has discoloured a little, but nothing a dry clean wouldn’t sort out. I ask the old lady whether she has any more. ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘got some right out back here.’

  I follow the hunched, achingly slow figure through the shop and into a stale-smelling living room where a wedding photo is prominently displayed on top of a cabinet filled with the gloomy knick-knacks of widow-hood, a porcelain sheep and shepherdess, a white bobbled punch bowl with glasses hooked to its side. The old lady pushes open the fly screen and steps out onto her porch.

  ‘There,’ she says.

  I look for a rug on the sun-bleached wood, but she taps my shoulder and points to a small group of cows grazing peacefully in the distance.

  ‘You can have Merleen or Lorraine or Eleanor.’ She fixes me with watery eyes. ‘Jest as soon as I git ‘em butchered.’

  My quest for kitsch results in two punctured tyres on the butterscotch truck, both of which I get fixed at the M&M, a truckstop west of Ague which has a sign offering ‘A Square Meal and a Hot Wheel’ and a constant stream of gleaming Mac trucks rolling in and out, with names like ‘Road to Perdition’ and ‘Duel for Life’ painted on their front cabs. The proprietor of the place is called Dud and has the smallest piggy curl of a tail growing from the back of a wide sunburnt neck. His face is deeply weather-beaten, and when he opens the customer hatch he reveals himself the owner of a massive pigeon chest which is thrust out in front of him as he walks me through to the workshop at the back. The mechanic I’m turned over to is small and sinewy, and wearing a peaked leather hat set jauntily over white hair, making him look like one of Santa’s elves. A Dobermann pinscher playing with an oily cloth jumps at me, licks my fingers then bites me playfully on the calf. ‘Ouch, hey,’ I gasp. Blood seeps through my jeans.

  ‘Jest a puppy,’ the Santa’s elf says and winks.

  While in town I buy ingredients for whatever new foodie delight I have settled on for the evening. The irresistibly titled Trials of a Wilderness Bride, plucked from the shelves of a second-hand bookshop along with a grease-spotted copy of The Joy of Cooking, has useful recipes for things like corn bread and something called calf fries, which turn out to be breaded testicles. Much as I long to place a brace of fried testicles onto the children’s plates in the evening just to hear them scream, it’s surprisingly hard to find even such a thing as a leg of lamb round here, let alone the range of speciality cuts required for such an exotic dish. Even the Wal-Mart in Tucson fails me with its rows of homogenized geometric shapes which appear to bear no relation to any known animal. When I ask, adrift in aisle 101, whether they might have such salubrious a thing as an organic chicken, the helpful Wal-Mart lady adjusts her permed crown of hair with one six-inch nail, cocks her head to the side and muses, ‘Organic chicken . . . now then, would that be made of soy?’

  Foolishly, I complain about this to Benjamín and, before I know it, a decapitated local lamb is delivered. ‘You said you wanted fresh meat,’ Benjamín says, dragging the carcass from his truck and tossing the saw down after it.

  ‘How many more animals must die?’ Emmy cries, although she doesn’t really, but would I’m sure if she only knew that her mother has recently sanctioned the slaughter of an adorable little piggy who will shortly be taking up residence in our freezer in the form of buff paper parcels filled with bacon bits and shoulder roasts.

  I’m like a secret drinker with my new cookbooks and instead of refining drawings, or musing on the volatility of cesspits, I find myself guiltily dipping into grills and steams and roasts. Jack and Emmy are appalled by my foodie volte-face and speak of the days of macaroni cheese like war children deprived of fresh eggs. I remain unmoved. Morally, of course, I have the upper hand, but geographically, too, I now hold the higher ground. It’s either my cooking or
they can go down the hill for Benjamín’s legendary broth de coq.

  ‘The choice is yours,’ I tell them gleefully.

  Usually when I get back from town, Duval and I meet for a ‘walk-through’ of the building site. Unlike the sometimes inane task of prettifying window boxes for capricious city dwellers, renovating a house feels intensely satisfying – taking something tired and broken down and restoring form and function to it. I’ve decided that houses are not unlike the women I’ve become so tired of dealing with. Both need constant primping, painting and good lighting. When they’re brand new and prettily decorated everyone is in love with them but sooner or later they get old, their shine begins to fade, bits of them wear out and need replacing. Should they not be properly looked after they become susceptible to dry rot and during prolonged cold spells tend to freeze altogether.

  As soon as they see us coming, the Mexicans stop work and break for lunch. Cans of soft drinks, thermoses of coffee and sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper all materialize from somewhere and are consumed in huddles, with only the occasional flicker of curiosity directed at me from under the brim of a hat. After my daily snoop is complete and I’m once again considered to be a safe distance away, the men trickle back into the cabins and the hammering and sawing begins afresh. Despite my friendly little waves, despite my jolly little ‘Buenas tardes’, my cheery ‘¡Hola!’ and perky ‘Hace un buen dia ¿no?’, in fact despite all other salutational plums that drop from my mouth courtesy of my language tapes, no fruit of friendship has been tossed my way in return. Nevertheless I am starting to recognize my crew, if not by name, if not by face, then at least by clothes. Working the drill is red baseball cap, who is not to be confused with the Bank of Texas T-shirt guy, currently digging up the ground, who in turn looks alarmingly similar to, though a little older than, denim jacket man, who was clearly separated at birth from black jeans, black shirt, gold bling, who I swear I once heard addressed by the name of Ramon. Despite such promising anthropological inroads, it’s hard not to merge these flashes of skin tones and features into one single airbrushed photofit of ‘Mexican worker’.