Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  Love, Chita

  I was straight on the phone to Roland. I knew in the summer he had every other weekend free, but I didn’t know which. But I did know I had to pin him down. But I didn’t want to frighten him off. I told him I had a friend I really wanted him to meet. Hey, I’ve got a friend coming to stay I really want you to meet. But I didn’t make too much of it. We settled on the last weekend in June. Perfect. Then I remembered that Roland, being so time-poor, could be a little unreliable, so I told him, serious-joking, that it was written in blood. Immediately I heard a hesitation, but ignored it, telling myself he was accustomed to me overstating things. I dashed off an email to Chita with the dates. A day later, two emails arrived in my inbox: Chita, and Roland. Well, there’s a good sign.

  Great, great, great! In this stage of my life to feel welcome is the best of gifts I can dream of. Thank you so much. I was waiting for an inspiring destination for the last week of June and now I have it. I confirm timetables: Flight FR9911 arrive BOH at 14.00. Some days before let me know about weather to select my clothes (something elegant, just in case?) Looking forward to seeing you in your own territory. Kissessss.

  Chita

  Who is this person you want me to meet? I’d love to see you two too . . . so I’ll write in sweat rather than blood. Love to your animals, vegetables and selves,

  Roland

  Hi Roland

  A Mexican friend living in Spain is coming to stay for a few days . . . and you speak Spanish . . . How about weekend 25/26 etched in sweat, but hopefully no tears?

  K x

  Damn. He was bound to smell a rat. I told Chita to bring boots.

  – Boots! I look forward to beautiful walks. Any special need from Spain? How much wine can I bring? Are you inviting a lot of male candidates to your party? ChuChuChu The Mexican lady ready for new adventures . . . God bless you.

  Chita

  Ola Chita

  As far as male candidates, remember quality not quantity! Nearer the time I will let you know what the weather is doing.

  K x

  I liked Ola Chita, it also means wave Chita.

  ‘It’s all going a bit too smoothly,’ I told Jonathan.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s going to cry off. I just know it.’

  I imparted my plan to Judy, who was a mutual friend of Roland’s. I showed her a photograph of Chita. My excitement was infectious. We agreed Roland must not bottle out. We agreed there was every chance he would. Another postcard arrived. A flower unfurling with a collage of flames licking out.

  Inmovile in the middle of the forest, feeling the scent of the air, listening the drops over the dry leafs and the vibrations of life under my feet. Contemplating. This is not a poem. Just impressions. They disappear very fast. They seem not to exist and yet they can stop the time and make me feel alive. What to do?

  Chita

  My agreeable husband looked glum as I walked in the door. ‘He’s cancelled,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got a text.’ Jonathan shook his head, knowing that I would be crestfallen.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s in Wales. Working on a composition.’

  ‘But he promised! I knew it! Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  I was straight on the phone to Judy. ‘He’s cancelled.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I knew this would happen.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘This could have been a lovely thing in his life. Someone to escape to every now and again. And a lovely thing in her life too. It would have been so perfect.’

  ‘I’ll ring Cait,’ Judy said. ‘She’ll talk to him.’

  It was true. Cait was Roland’s best friend and probably the only person who might persuade him. She could say anything to him, she’d known him for years. She’d seen him through thick and thin, but mostly thin.

  That evening, an email from Roland in my inbox:

  I could come Sunday, but probably wouldn’t arrive till eleven a.m., but I can stay over Sunday eve. Let me know.

  Roland

  Great! Let Sunday be etched on your bones.

  Kx

  One night with a day either side would have to be enough. I felt like a bully, though, gobbling up every moment of Roland’s precious time, and I wished I’d been able to engineer it without such brute force. On 24 June, I set off to pick up Conchita.

  I saw her the moment I drove up, standing outside Arrivals. Her flight must have come in early. She looked worried, but her face lit up when she finally saw me. We hugged. She squeezed me so hard my sunglasses stuck into my face. I bundled her bags in the car and we drove away.

  It took less than ten minutes for a deep sinking feeling to settle. I was silent as Chita regaled me with details of her inner states. Words like fire, flight, heart, soul, desire, destiny and pain rushed out. I could feel my face freeze into a pained smile. She said I was an angel, but her mouth was turned downwards as she spoke, her eyebrows knitted into deep furrows. This was a worrying start. Had I not been aware of the extent of the inner turmoil of this passionate soul? Or had I just forgotten? The last few occasions we met, brief as they were – a dinner, a swim, a snatched lunch – she had, now I came to think about it, been on a sort of helter-skelter of elation, to descend only moments later into torment and anguish. At the time, I’d put this down to the upset of her life and Latin fire. And I have always been attracted to free spirits and a bit of untamed wildness. Fine for me, but not so fine for Roland, or for Chita, for that matter. But now I was thinking about it more carefully, something buried was resurfacing – that maybe there was a glimmer of a suspicion that a darker force was at work here. The Chita sitting next to me now was a troubled Chita, on the edge of a precipice. At any moment she could be soaring up to heady heights or plummeting down into the abyss. If I knew anything at all, I knew this was one thing Roland could definitely do without.

  The first evening of Chita’s stay we were invited to a neighbour’s birthday celebration. We had to walk across two fields. Chita looked breathtaking. Head-turningly divine in night-sky velvet and a rose silk shawl. She sang all the way there and spent the evening charming the hosts, then playing with their children upstairs. I looked across the crowd a couple of times and saw her laughing with some lucky guests toasting themselves in the warmth she radiated. What had I been worrying about? This was the Chita I remembered. But the following day my fear was rekindled. I found poems written on tree bark. Jonathan’s boyhood eyeless teddy, who lived in the spare room, had been put downstairs (and chewed by the dogs), because, she said, the bear had been staring at her. Foolishly, we watched a DVD of the Frida Kahlo movie, Frida. Chita identified wholly as Kahlo in whom she found a connection to her deepest psyche. Tears filled her eyes. Anything – and, it seemed, almost everything – reminded her of her own life’s disappointments, of things she’d lost, and of what was lacking. I worried about her. There seemed nothing I could say that did not double back onto her situation. Everything was profound and intense. Everything I tried to make things better only seemed to make them worse. Far worse. I became wooden, tongue-tied, drained, nervous, allergic.

  ‘Do you read much, Chita?’ I asked, as we drove to the shop to buy some milk.

  ‘Well, I have nothing in my life,’ her smile folded downwards. ‘No person to take my time, or love in any way, so of course I have much time for reading books,’ she said.

  I began to treat her like an invalid. Rugs, hot water bottles. She began to get ill. I changed tack. We made bread together. I said kneading bread was wonderful because you could take out all your frustration on the dough. Like a punch bag. She began to knead. Punching and punching. Then her shoulders sagged. She broke down in floods of tears and told me her last lover was arrested for beating her.

  ‘But I thought he was some kind of meditating holy guy?’

  ‘So much hatred. How could someone hate me so much to wa
nt to kill me?’

  ‘Oh, Chita,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be with someone like that.’

  ‘I made him something beautiful for his birthday. He wrote to me with terrible hate. How can someone say such bad things when you have made something with so much love?’

  ‘Meditators are a worry,’ I said. ‘They’re always, well, meditating. One is dead, surely, long enough.’

  She looked nonplussed.

  ‘Chita, I think it might help to dampen the fire. Just a little. Of course your fire is beautiful, but sometimes it is raging out of control. Maybe you need to earth yourself.’

  She was staring at me. I thought I was getting somewhere. I continued, emboldened. We could try together? Put the fire aside, just for a while. Little things, I suggested. Her email address for example, maybe it was too . . . inflammatory? I told her that although I loved it, I could also see it as metaphorically shoring up a passionate image that might be too intoxicating. Whereas something like, say . . . FloraRio, might be more calming? I was heading down a rabbit hole fooling myself I was climbing a mountain. I said I thought she was flying too high and diving too low and that it might damage her. She watched my hand movements. She told me other people had talked to her this way and used the same hand movements. I said that the world, that people, might not be able to live up to such high hopes and expectations. Her face fell. Her beautiful eyes were drooping like a deer’s. I was in too deep. I knew I must back off. Because I knew I could not see it through.

  On Sunday morning, Roland arrived at eleven. It was the hottest day of the year. Spanish hot, even. We lazed around in the garden. Chita followed me into the kitchen to tell me that I was right about Roland. I smiled and gulped. Outside I could see my agreeable husband rattling a large plastic zip-up bag. Roland grinned.

  Oh no. Oh please no.

  Jonathan and Roland had taken advantage of the final two weeks when you could legally buy fresh Mexican magic mushrooms online before new legislation came in. They’d bought half a kilo between them and Jonathan had been drying them in the garage. As far as he and Roland were concerned it couldn’t be a better day.

  ‘But we’ve got Bea and Roy coming for supper,’ I implored.

  ‘So? It’s only eleven o’clock.’

  ‘But you haven’t tried these before. You haven’t a clue what they’re like.’

  ‘Perfect opportunity. Isn’t it, Roland?’

  I wanted to rein this in, but didn’t want to look like I was reining it in. I didn’t want to be the controlling person. But this was definitely not in my plans. This was insider sabotage.

  ‘What about Chita?’ I looked across, willing her to veto it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have never tried these things. Are they fun?’

  ‘Very fun,’ laughed Roland. ‘We hope!’

  ‘Come on, it’s Roland’s day off.’ Jonathan said. ‘It will be fine.’

  ‘Really?’ I sounded unconvinced. ‘Well, it’s up to everyone else,’ I said curmudgeonly.

  Roland took three. Jonathan five! I took one. Chita took one.

  ‘Take a half,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe . . .’

  ‘But if I take a half and you all take more, then . . .’ She lifted her shoulders, eyes wide and round.

  ‘If you’re sure, Chita.’

  ‘Well, I am not sure.’

  Nor was I. Except about one thing. I was furious with Jonathan. I breathed out loudly and stared hard at my disagreeable husband with his fistful of shrivelled-limbed homunculi, but he swallowed them all. Blue ones, brown ones.

  I’ve never really been a drug-taker, not even in my very early youth. If I ever smoked anything it was more, as a reformed smoker, for the tobacco. But I had quite liked the zaniness of mushrooms. There was something natural about them. Organic. I liked stories of indigenous peoples dancing for three days. Or the Laplanders who discovered the hallucinogenic properties of amanita as they watched their reindeer get hooked on the fungus and leap gigantically about. In Ireland I took magic mushrooms a few times in my twenties and once laughed for two days. How glorious to laugh for two days. In Mexico I washed down the tongue-drying peyote cactus with coconut milk still in its shell, followed by shots of tequila, and swam the whole night under the stars in a warm phosphorescent sea. I wasn’t so bothered about the drugs, but I did like the freedom and I did like laughing. Whenever I saw schoolgirls on the train in hysterical laughter, I smiled. I knew how it felt, well, happy, intoxicating, exhausting. So maybe this would be all right? Then maybe it was just what we needed. Maybe it was just what Conchita needed. Laughter. The best medicine. So I went with it. I popped my mushroom in my mouth. Then immediately began to worry again. But then I thought we could have a really nice time, and let all the intensity just float away, and everyone could get on really well. And then I thought, maybe too well. Conchita might become smitten with Roland. And if anything was crystal clear to me by now it was that my matchmaking plans for Roland were a really bad idea. Just the last straw of complication he did not need. And it would be the last thing Chita needed too. And it would all be my doing. She could fall head over heels, and Roland, in some stoned, thick-hided, male way, could be oblivious to everything. He was so friendly, he might unwittingly lead her on. And she was so friendly and beautiful and . . . By now I was chewing my cheek. I swore to God I would never bloody matchmake again; no, from now on, I would never, ever meddle in other people’s lives.

  Absolutely nothing. Zilch. Not a thing. We were gardening. Planting seedlings in the vegetable patch. I looked across to Chita. Hadn’t seen her happier. It was sunny and calm. She was trilling away, humming and laughing a bit.

  ‘Are you okay, Chita?’

  ‘Yes. I feel nothing.’

  But barely a few seconds later, I had to admit to myself I was beginning to feel a bit nauseous. And then I was beginning to feel a lot nauseous.

  Jonathan and Roland were lying on the lawn with the dogs, talking about building coracles and swimming in streams. We went and joined them. The conversation got more and more divergent and winding and outlandish, then more tangential and a bit surreal. Chita rolled over, stroked a dog. I could see that Roland and Jonathan were really quite out of it. They talked. On and on. I joined in. Then I started to laugh. My head hurt. We were all laughing. Except Chita was lying facing the other way. She was hugging the dog. I could see her shoulders begin to shake. Up and down. Was she laughing too? I hadn’t a clue but I suspected the worst. And then she ran away.

  I caught up with her in the kitchen. She turned. Her mouth strung like a bow, the stricken face of tragedy.

  ‘Chita? Chita?’

  ‘Oh, I am so isolated,’ she wailed.

  ‘What do you mean, isolated? We’re all together.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand what’s happening.’

  ‘We’re a bit out of it, that’s all. We’re being a bit stupid.’

  ‘Stupid? What do you mean stupid?’

  ‘I mean silly. Tonta. Tontaria. Estupida. You know, messing about, joking, ridiculous, a bit stoned.’

  ‘But this is not stoned.’

  ‘Well, no, it’s . . . it’s sort of like that, though.’

  ‘But I don’t understand what you are saying. I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t know your lives. I don’t know you. You all have each other. I never have friends like this. How do you have friends like this? In Spain it is not so. I am alone. Alone.’ A sob shuddered out of her.

  My nausea was really setting in. The sun streamed in the window. I could see Jonathan and Roland lying in the sun, talking, laughing. Oblivious – of course. I felt an overwhelming urge to back out of the kitchen, to just go and lie in the sun.

  ‘Chita, come back. Be with us. It’s all right. It’s just the mushrooms making you feel paranoid. It will pass. I promise you. I’m sorry. We should never have taken them. It’s all my fault, I should never have let
them.’

  ‘No, but you cannot be sorry. I have taken them. I am old enough. I have made the decision.’

  ‘Yes, but if you’ve never taken them before, well, it wasn’t a good idea. It was stupid of us. Completely stupid.’

  ‘No, but now I spoil everything. I have ruined everything. How can I go back now? This experience is giving evidence to me who I am. Who I cannot be. I came in hope of a miracle. All the open windows in my head are shouting, Who are you?’

  I stood there, not knowing what to say. Conchita with such high hopes of a rescue mission. And it could not be going more horribly wrong.

  ‘It is a terrible feeling. A terrible feeling,’ she cried.

  ‘I know I . . .’ I really wanted to lie in the sun, really, really a lot.

  ‘When will it stop? When will it stop?’

  ‘It will stop. I don’t know when exactly. But very soon. You will feel better. I promise. This is just the bad bit.’

  ‘Bad bit? You never told me about a bad bit.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I . . .’

  I tried to tell her about the Laplanders and the reindeer.

  ‘I must leave tomorrow. I shouldn’t have come and brought my problems with me.’ She looked at me suspiciously. The look got worse.

  Terrific. Here in front of me was the one person who should never try mushrooms. I had managed to drag her out of her country and set up a situation to tip her over the edge. With a bit of self-doubt, self-loathing and humiliation thrown in. Well done. Very much the ex-angel now.

  Outside the sun was shining, the ash tree leaves were fluttering, Jonathan and Roland were still laughing, lying on the grass, still oblivious to the meltdown.

  ‘Oh but Chita, we were having such a nice day, it’s lovely outside, let’s go and lie under the tree. Please, let’s all be together.’

  My head was being squeezed dry. My mouth was desiccating. Drink water. Drink water. I filled up a big jug. How could my first attempt at matchmaking go so wrong? Then I remembered who, in the first place, led us all astray.