Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  ‘We have to ride this bit out,’ I told Chita, ‘it will pass.’

  I gave her a glass of water.

  ‘Let’s eat something,’ I said.

  I reeled over towards the bread bin and started hacking off slices of bread. Then I made a salad with rice and things I found in the fridge. The effort was gargantuan. My head wanted to go horizontal and my eyes wanted to watch clouds. Shit, it was nearly two o’clock. And I had to get dinner sorted. Then Chita ran off.

  Roland and Jonathan were still lying on the grass laughing.

  ‘Guys, you’ve got to help. She’s spinning out. She’s never taken them before.’

  ‘Oh no.’ They both looked genuinely concerned. ‘Bring her back.’

  ‘She’s embarrassed. She feels left out.’

  ‘Bring her back. We should all be together.’

  I found Chita in the bathroom and persuaded her to come out. She leant heavily on me as we made our way across the lawn. The dogs accompanied us. She bent down to stroke Jessie. Roland and Jonathan gave her a big hug. They apologised and told her it would be all right.

  ‘You like it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ they smirked, they did.

  ‘But I feel like I’m falling,’ she said. ‘Like the sky is charging away.’

  They liked that, they said. She seemed to calm down. Then without warning she was up again, running across the lawn out of the gate and across the field. Even the dogs looked spooked. They followed. I followed. We all followed. Chita was making a strange winnowing noise. She was dancing, then she crumpled on her knees again.

  ‘When will it stop?’

  ‘When will it stop?’ I asked Roland and Jonathan. I felt shit, too. I assumed much of it was the exhaustion of trying to hold it all together, of swimming against the tide and trying not to say the wrong thing for three days – and what made it even worse was that Jonathan and Roland still looked like they were having a really nice time.

  ‘Big error,’ I muttered to my agreeable husband, under my breath.

  ‘It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘For you, maybe. And what about supper?’ I glared.

  Now Chita was standing out in the field in the long meadow grass between two ash trees. Her arms were outstretched and her head was dangling like a crucifixion. Her face was contorted. I was hoping our neighbour wouldn’t come past. Then the crucifixion turned into a dance. The dogs were not sure what to do. Jump up or leave well alone. They left well alone.

  Half an hour later we were all lying on the lawn again. Conchita was curled up in the foetal position with Jonathan stroking her back. She began to cry. He told her everything was all right. Roland stroked her back too. She cried some more. They hugged her. They rocked her shoulder gently like a baby in a cradle. Her crying got less and less. Then started up again, and got more and more. Roland said mushrooms can open all sorts of doors. (Including some best left shut, I feared.) He said lots of other comforting things. Roland and Jonathan are naturally kind, that is their nature. Their kindness began to mortify Chita. She said she had spoilt our day. I was thinking this whole matchmaking malarkey had spoilt the week.

  An hour later and everything was happy. Chita was dancing to Cuban music in the house. I was in a hammock. The boys were in the same place they started in. Slowly everything started to ease out. We walked down to the river to a small swimming hole and jumped in. We swam in circles, round and round. The water was cool and clear. And everything was okay. We had dinner outside, candles flickering, some miracle salad and a chicken that appeared to have roasted itself. Our guests were none the wiser. The remaining mushrooms were buried (by me) deep in the compost heap.

  A few weeks later a bulging letter arrived from Spain. I tore open the envelope, and it was full of red leaves. Chita wrote that she had recaptured her sense of herself.

  But my real identity is like a feather that I try to capture in a windy day. I need to be light and transparent as an angel but I don’t know how to do it. Maybe I should concentrate on the words which were said at the mass from the Apocalypse: ‘There was a woman with a dress of sun, standing on the moon with a crown made of twelve beams of diamonds’.

  ‘That was bad of us,’ I said to Jonathan. ‘I feel bad, I wish I was a better person.’

  ‘Easy in hindsight. I’m not sure what we could have done?’

  ‘I could have stopped you. Thrown away those bloody mushrooms.’ Blame subtly transferred to him.

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ Jonathan said.

  We talked around it for days, but we both knew we should have been more responsible, that we shouldn’t have let it happen. We had not been our best selves. I sent Chita a book of Mimmo Paladino prints. There were pictures of hands reaching out, and faces, goblets and night birds, with a sense of both dizziness and equilibrium. Chita was a woman with a dress of sun standing on the moon with a crown made of twelve beams of diamonds. We were children of the earth and its dark deeds.

  THE ANTICIPATED CELEBRATION

  What we once called The Birthday Weekend, we now call The Birthday Debacle. It wasn’t the weather, even though we left London at the end of April in a balmy 26° C, and got off the overnight sleeper (first class) at Pitlochry Station in sub-zero wind-lashing rain. And it wasn’t the train, even though our eagerly anticipated dinner of haggis and neeps came out of a tin. We loved it anyway. We were excited; I told the guard we were excited. We struck up conversation with a retired nuclear physicist and his wife going to Skye. Where else could you do that, but on a train to Scotland? It felt like an adventure, as if we’d gone back in time. The problem was the hotel.

  Jonathan found it. It wasn’t the B&B on Rannoch Moor I had set my heart on, because when Jonathan rang months and months ago, the owner told him not to worry, he could book nearer the time, and so instead of booking there and then, he rang back nearer the time when it was fully booked. So this was the replacement hotel. A fifteenth-century coaching inn on a loch! Alastair Sawday’s guidebook recommended it. And it had been awarded Good Hotel Guide 2007 Inn of the Year. ‘It’s your birthday,’ Jonathan said, ‘we can’t stay in a B&B’. For this wasn’t any birthday, it was a landmark birthday with a nought at the end.

  ‘And it has a library,’ he said.

  ‘A library?’ I repeated, with wistful longing.

  And here’s the odd thing: I had never really stayed in a hotel before. Not in Britain anyway, not a proper one. There had been no occasion for me to do so. In far-flung places I had stayed in pensions and cheap hotels, or bamboo huts on the beach, but nearer home it was always B&Bs, or friends, or camping.

  I imagined peat fires, and long walks, and kippers for breakfast, and whisky in heavy glasses. So I got him to check. Yes, yes, peat fires, kippers for breakfast. They told him they had a room where you could see the loch from the bath. He booked the room. I saw mullioned windows and musty antiquarian leather-bound books about lairds and Celtic battles and deer stalking. He showed me the website. It said, ‘Set in ten acres of our own private gardens’. I saw rolling lawns down to cold crystal waters, and daffodils, and rhododendron bushes billowing out across the drive. It said, ‘Real Scottish style hospitality’. I imagined antlers and tartan rugs and heather, and it said, ‘friendly, efficient yet relaxed’. Yes, yes, we wanted relaxed. The website said, ‘We will surprise you’. Yes.

  It’s not that the fifteenth-century Scottish coaching inn picture in my head is dashed by the prominent ’70s extension with dark wood chalet-type windows. Nor the no drive, the no rhododendrons, the not many daffs, the no sweeping gardens and the no lawn to the loch. We don’t care about that. The mountains will be our garden. We smile our way with our bags to reception, where the efficient South African receptionist tells us he has put us down for dinner at seven p.m. Oh, too early, we explain. He looks troubled. We suggest eight-thirty p.m. He shakes his head. Eight? Not possible, he is afraid. He has us down for seven. After quite a struggle we settle on seven-thirty. No matter, we’ll probably
be tired on our first night.

  The South African receptionist gives us a tour of the hotel. We walk through clean lobby areas and corridors with Habitat sofas and vases of long stalks of South African dried cotton. No antlers, no mullioned windows, no tartan rugs, no heather. The library is a modern Swiss chalet with large wooden rhino ornaments, there is a wall of magazines, and a wall of gaudy travel books on South Africa, and a wall of cook books. The owner is also the chef, the receptionist proudly tells us. My husband used to be a chef. He worked in a well-known restaurant in Australia called You & Me. Once he cooked for the Prime Minister Bob Hawke, for his daughter’s private wedding party; he has even cooked with Michel Roux! I’m hoping he doesn’t get too chummy with the chef here; Jonathan is a walk in, pick up a knife and start chopping sort of a guy. The receptionist is still telling us things but I’m not listening. I just want to get to our room.

  ‘Is it all right?’ asks my apprehensive husband as we unpack our things in our squarish, tartanless, rugless, suburban-looking room.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. (That’s all I say.) I squeeze his arm.

  As I mentioned, we usually camp or stay in B&Bs. I’ve certainly never been in a hotel like this, with robes in each room and Molton Brown soap dispensers. There’s no telly, which is a good thing. I don’t need to watch it, and would hate the sound of other guests’ tellies coming through the wall. And no radio either. That’s . . . fine. We don’t need Radio 4 every morning. I just hope Nelson Mandela doesn’t die (he didn’t, well, not for another six years). Or Bob Dylan. Those would be big historic events that I would like to know about, I feel, and I wonder how the guests felt after the Twin Towers came down and they knew nothing about it. I won’t let these questions bother me, for this is The Birthday Weekend. And there is a bottle of champagne on the table and a card that reads: Hope you have a wonderful stay, best wishes Sara and Pete. And yes, you can see the loch from the bath. Until the loch disappears – but that’s not the bath’s fault. Until later I discover that it actually is. The mist from the hot water makes the windows fog up on the inside. But that doesn’t matter because there is already mist on the outside, and then it begins to rain so you can’t see the loch anyway. But I’ve always liked the rain. We can read. But not in bed. No sitting up in this £300 per night bed (yes, I eventually bludgeon this information out of my spoiling-me-rotten husband), because the roof slopes away at a forty-five degree angle just above your head. No matter! We have two upright chairs to sit upright in. ‘The dinner better be good,’ I mutter to myself. It will be. ‘This is the Inn of the Year.’

  The dinner is good. Ish. But first we have to move our table from the one under the speaker with the very loud easy-listening piped music. A relief to Jonathan who has, on a previous painful occasion, witnessed me pull out the wires. I have osso buco, but it was stupid of me to choose anything with asparagus, when we grow our own and can cook it freshly cut straight from the garden, as we did just before we came. Although didn’t the website say ‘fresh local produce’ on our tables? Of course, it’s too early up here for asparagus; I crunch them down and don’t mention a thing. I do get a bit anxious when our wine is taken away and does not reappear. It comes back. Then is taken away again. We are being punished, I suspect, because Jonathan didn’t want the someone along in a minute to give advice on the wine. He wanted to choose it for himself. And now I come to think of it (while waiting for the hostage wine), wasn’t it a bit bloody odd to be rung up in our room, five minutes before seven-thirty p.m., to be, let’s say, jogged along? And, dare I say it, don’t any Scottish people work here? Ah yes, foolish of me, Scottish style. Although this doesn’t explain the very large black and white photographs of Chef as Little Boy in South Africa all the way round the white dining room. Just as I almost sarkily say something, our host, Sara, sweeps by. She knows our names, she knows it’s my birthday weekend, she has perfect skin and perfect beige hair, perfect nails that glint with a sheen, her hands are perfect, latex-glove clean, her clothes are oatmeal-coloured and matching. I thank her for the champagne she left in our room – and the personal card. She graciously accepts my thanks and backs off to the next table.

  Jonathan is smirking.

  ‘What? Did you order it?’

  He tells me hotels do that. It’s what you pay for. He often travels for work. In Germany, he tells me, they leave a chocolate on the pillow.

  I’m slightly crestfallen. I thought it was something special they had done because he had told them it was my birthday. He shrugs kindly.

  ‘What about the card?’ I ask. ‘They do that for everyone?’

  He looks a bit doubtful. ‘Well. Maybe that was for your birthday.’

  Jonathan gets up and goes to the loo. A French waitress dives over, picks his napkin up off his chair, folds it and puts it next to his plate. No sooner has she done so than the South African waitress swoops on it and repositions it on his chair. The South African waitress glares fiercely at the French waitress. Bloody hell. That night I check my pillow, but nothing is there.

  The next morning at nine-twenty a.m. our phone rings. Are we are coming down for breakfast? Yes, we are. We double-check the five pages of hotel information in the leather binder on the side table. Breakfast is served from eight-thirty a.m. until ten. We both have a kipper. A very small kipper, quite a bit smaller than my hand. With a triangle of cold toast which is put on our table – this time away from the speaker – almost the moment we sit down. We get a thimble of marmalade. And a bottle-top of butter. But they’re probably right. It’s uncouth having one of those fabulously huge B&B breakfasts that last you all day. I suppose you might say it’s more delicate here. The milk jug is petite. So we have to ask twice for more milk and then we have to ask for it to be heated for the very weak coffee out of the very small cafetière. Who cares. Not us. Not until we are cornered within five minutes of sitting down to breakfast by the receptionist again about what frigging time we will be eating supper. Tonight we have a choice: seven or seven-thirty.

  ‘Oh.’

  The receptionist smiles a tight, efficient smile.

  ‘Um.’

  He lingers, tilting over the table slightly.

  ‘Do you need to know now?’

  He does.

  ‘How about eight-thirty?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Seven or seven-thirty p.m.’

  We take seven-thirty. I begin to fume. I want to drive to a pub instead, but we have already paid for bed, breakfast and dinner, and it’s my birthday and we are supposed to be having a fancy restaurant meal. When we get back to our room the ghosts have been in. Every time we leave it, they come. We never catch them. They like to tie the robes up. Tight. Tourniquet them around the waist. So if you quickly want to put one on, and you are dripping wet out of the loch-view bath, you have to perform an unexpected Houdini wrestle with the belt. It catches me out every time. I reach out, grab not a robe, but a corn dolly. And why am I calling them robes? We have dressing-gowns at home. The ghosts tidy things up. Or just move them slightly. Slip out for a second and they slip in, whatever the time of day. They empty the tiny kettle, so each time we have to fill it up again. And they empty the petite jug of milk on the tea tray (with no biscuits), so each time we have to ring for more. But worse. Much worse. The loo roll has been tampered with. These are not chocolate-on-the-pillow ghosts, they are loo roll-tampering ghosts. The ends (plural – you get a double loo roll holder for £300 a night) have been folded back into sharp points, like arrowheads. This mortifies me. That someone does this. Because lately, we have been trying to be eco-conscious and we don’t always flush the loo. So someone had to bend over my pee (though they probably flushed the loo first – equally mortifying) to fold the end of each loo roll up into a little point. I’ve never heard of such a thing. My husband has. He knows all about it. Hotel-world. The more I think about it the more appalled I become. That someone does this for a job. Worse. That someone tells someone to do it. Teaches them how, probably. And even worse than that, someone
, somewhere, dreamt it up in the first place. Made it part of hotel etiquette. This place is depressing me. Jonathan thinks I’m not cut out for hotels. But it’s not the ghosts. Even though now, each time we get back to our room, I obsessively check to see what they’ve done. I lift the bed cover. Look under the bed. ‘Maybe they’re still here,’ I say loudly. ‘Maybe they actually live in this room, with us.’ The loch-view window still looks like the ghosts have put tracing paper over it. As we back out of the door, I tell them to tie up the robes and fold the loo paper into sharp points.

  We walk all day. In the rain over pine stumps and boggy peat tractor-ruts. We see a white mountain hare, and high on a hillside we catch a glimpse of a huge herd of about seven hundred deer. Then we drive back quickly to have just enough time for a bath and a cup of tea. At ten minutes past seven, the raincloud lifts for a moment, a glimmering silver slither slips out of the tracing paper, a sudden glitter, a shaft of sun, and the loch suddenly appears in the loch-view window. There are swifts swooping. Swifts!

  ‘Let’s go and have a look.’

  Jonathan looks at his watch.

  ‘Come on, we haven’t seen it yet. It’s not far. It’s my birthday,’ I say.

  Just as we pass below our window on the way to the loch we hear the phone ringing. And ringing. And ringing and ringing. It stops. Then rings again. Do they think we are hiding in the room?

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Seven-twenty-four.’

  I take a perverse pleasure in the sound of the phone. We walk on to the loch. Pretending not to hurry. Jonathan walking a little fast, me trying to slow him down. At exactly eight minutes past seven-thirty we make eye contact with our host, Sara, at the dining room door. She bars the way. Yes, her arm actually swings out to stop our path.