Peacock Emporium

by Jojo Moyes

  ‘Would you like a coffee? We’re still serving.’

  He was as dark as the Italians but taller, and he wore the discomfited expression of someone who considered that a warm day in England qualified as cold weather. He was dressed in the blue scrubs of the local hospital beneath an old leather jacket, and his face, which was long and angular, was almost immobile, as if he were too tired to move it.

  Suzanna realised she was staring and looked abruptly at her feet.

  ‘You do espresso?’ His accent was foreign, but not Italian. He glanced up at the board, then back at the two women, trying to gauge the reasons for the smaller one’s barely suppressed merriment, his unwitting role in the strange atmosphere.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Jessie, beaming at Suzanna and then at him. She grabbed a cup and placed it, with something of a flourish, under the spout of the espresso machine, motioning to him to sit down. ‘In fact, if you’re prepared to spare me a few minutes, I reckon you can have this one on me.’

  Eleven

  The peacock bass is an aggressive, belligerent fish. Despite its deceptive iridescent beauty, it is mean enough to straighten a hook and bend a fishing-rod almost double. Even a four- or five-pounder can wear a man out in under an hour. It evolved in the same waters as the piranha, the alligator, the armour-scaled piraracus, creatures as big as cars, and routinely fights rivals even bigger or more dangerous than itself. But unlike other fish of South America, the larger it gets, the harder the fight, so that in the flowing waters of the Amazon, its natural habitat, it can grow to thirty pounds, providing a sparring partner worthy of Moby Dick himself.

  It is, in short, a mean fish, and when it shoots from the water, several feet up, it is easy to detect in that prehistoric eye a hunger for the fight. You can see its attraction to a young man keen to prove himself in the eyes of others. Or even an older one keen to retain his son’s respect.

  Perhaps this was why Jorge and Alejandro de Marenas liked to fish. They would pack up the fishing-rods, take Jorge’s big four-wheel-drive to the airport and catch a flight to Brazil to spend two, maybe three days flexing their muscles against this cichlid, then go home with satisfactorily broken tackle, bloodied hands, having satisfied some elemental sense of man’s eternal struggle against nature. It was a biannual pilgrimage for them, not that they would have described it as such. It was the one place, Alejandro often thought, that they felt truly at ease with each other.

  Jorge de Marenas was a plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires, one of the best: his client list contained over three thousand names, many prominent politicians, singers and television personalities. Like his son, he was known as Turco, due to his rather Middle Eastern appearance, although when it was said of him, it came more often with a reverential sigh. The women came to him increasingly young, for higher bosoms, slimmer thighs, noses like this television presenter or bee-stung lips like that starlet. With a manner as smooth as the skin he re-created, he satisfied them all, injecting, hauling up, filling and smoothing, often shaping and reshaping the same people over the years until they resembled more startled versions of themselves ten years previously. Except Alejandro’s mother. He would not touch his wife. Not her plump, fifty-year-old thighs, her tired, furious eyes, camouflaged by expensive makeup and the religious application of expensive creams. He didn’t even like her dyeing her hair. She told her friends proudly that it was because he thought her perfect as she was. She believed, she told her son, that, as with builders and plumbers, the job waiting at home was always the last to be considered. Alejandro himself could not say which version was correct: his father seemed to treat his mother with the same detached respect that he treated everybody.

  For while his mother was almost stereotypically latina – operatic, passionate, prone to dizzying highs and lows – he and his father were an emotional disappointment, both unusually even-tempered and, especially in the case of Alejandro, possessing what was often described as an almost offputting reserve. His father defended him against this (frequently made) charge, saying the men of the Marenas family had never felt the need to communicate as they did in soap operas, with angry, posturing confrontations or extravagant declarations of love. Possibly this was because Alejandro had been sent to boarding-school from the age of seven, possibly it was because Jorge himself was not a man who vented emotion easily – the very attribute that made him such a good surgeon. That biannual fight with the gamefish was the one occasion on which both father and son would let loose, emotions briefly unbuttoned in the swirling waters, laughter, anger, joy, desperation all expressed from the safety-net of waders and a waistcoat full of hooks.

  Usually, anyway. This time, for Alejandro at least, the uncomplicated physical pleasures of the trip had been muted by the conversation that was yet to come, the knowledge that although his chosen career had been considered by his family the worst hurt he could inflict on them he was about to do worse.

  The trip had been complicated from the start: Jorge was unsure whether he should be seen to go, conscious that many of his friends were not just missing their own fishing trips and a retreat to the family estancia but, faced with devalued fortunes and inaccessible savings, were now considering ways to leave the country altogether. He was doing okay, he said, but he didn’t want to put his friends’ noses out of joint. It didn’t do to gloat about one’s good fortune when so many were suffering.

  Maybe I am about to even things up a little, thought Alejandro, and felt a stab of anxiety.

  Alejandro had meant to tell his father on the walk from the lodge, but Jorge had been preoccupied by a bite that had made his foot swell and caused him discomfort while he walked, so Alejandro carried his things and said nothing, his hat tipped low against the sun, his mind whirring with projected arguments, anticipated confrontation. He had meant to tell Jorge when his father had tied on his plug, a gaudy thing the size of a horseshoe, with the decorations of an Indian festival, the kind of lure that made European anglers shake their heads in disbelief – until they hooked their own bass, of course.

  He had meant to tell him when they hit the water, but the sound of the rushing creek and his father’s intense concentration had distracted him, forcing him to wait until the moment was lost. Then, on their favoured quiet stretch between the derelict shack and the standing timber pile, just as Alejandro found himself choking on the words, that were fully formed in his mouth, his father had hooked a great brute of a thing, whose eyes, briefly visible, caught theirs, even from thirty feet, with The same mute fury as Alejandro’s mother when Jorge announced he would be late home again. (It didn’t do to get too angry, she said, after she had replaced the receiver. Not with things the way they were, and he the only man they knew still making money. Not with all those putas floating around him with their plastic grapefruit tits and adolescent arses.)

  This tucunare, as the Brazilians called it, was big even by Alejandro’s father’s standards. He announced its arrival with a yelp like that of a surprised child, as the plug was assaulted in the water with a sound like an explosion, and motioned his son over with a frantic head gesture – he had needed both hands on his rod just to keep it in his grasp. Whatever conversation had been planned was swiftly forgotten.

  Alejandro dropped his own rod and sprinted for his father, his eyes fixed on the furious commotion just under the water. The bass leapt from the water, as if better to assess its opponents, and both men let out a gasp at its size. Then in the split second in which they were stunned into immobility by what they had seen, it bolted for the maze of rotting tree-trunks, sending the drag into the high-pitched screech of an aircraft plummeting towards earth.

  ‘Mas rapido! Mas rapido!’ Alejandro yelled at his father, as the older man strained against his line, everything but that combative fish forgotten. Shaking its head, the bass dislodged at least one of the hooks from the bait, its bright orange and emerald green scales shimmering as it fought the line, the gold-rimmed black eye of its caudal fin taunting them as it flashed above the water, as aggres
sive and alluring as the peacock’s tail after which it was named. Alejandro felt his father falter a little, his mind spun by the sheer ferocity of their battle, and clapped him on the shoulder, glad for once that it was his father who had lured the magnificent fish, glad that it was he who had a chance to display his superiority in the water.

  That said, it was not a swift victory. In fact, for a while they were not sure whether it was going to be a victory at all: reeling it in and out, taking turns to haul on the line as each grew weary. In and out, nearer and nearer the fish came, shaking its vast head to dislodge the coloured hooks from its mouth, thrashing ever more angrily, turning the glassy surface of the water to foam, as it was brought to the shore.

  At one point Alejandro held his father’s waist, feeling his broad back hard and straining with the effort of holding on, his feet struggling to keep purchase on the slippery riverbed, and it struck him that he could not remember holding his father before. His mother was all hands and lips – so much so that in his adolescence she had occasionally repelled him – but now he understood that she needed something his father had refused, whether out of genuine inability or bloody-mindedness, to give her: occasional male attention, a mildly flirtatious respect, love. Given the disappointment he had been to her in other areas, it was the least he could do.

  ‘Mierde, Ale, have you got your camera?’ Finally, spent, they half sat, half lay together on the riverbank, the fish like a sleeping baby between proud new parents. Jorge caught his breath, then struggled to his feet. As he held it, still blank-eyed and furious in death, his middle-aged, tanned face was illuminated with hard-won triumph, a rare unguarded joy, his arms sore and flexed under each end as he held it up to the gods. It was the best day, he said, that he had had in years. A day to remember. Wait till he told them at the club. Was Ale sure he had the pictures?

  Alejandro asked himself several times, afterwards: How could I have told him then?

  Jorge de Marenas was going to pop into his office before going home. The traffic headed out to the Zona Norte was always terrible at this time, and since the trouble had started, even a man like Jorge didn’t feel safe sitting in a jam.

  ‘Luís Casiro got his new Mercedes stolen, did I tell you? Didn’t even have time to get his gun from his jacket before they had pulled him out. Hit him so hard he needed fourteen stitches.’ Jorge shook his head, gazing out at the traffic around him. ‘Fernando de la Rua has a lot to answer for.’

  To the right, through the smoked-glass window, Alejandro could see the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, their headscarves white against the greenery around them, embroidered with the names of the Disappeared. Their apparently peaceful demeanour was deceptive, belying the thousands of photographs that had decorated the park for over twenty years: sons, daughters, whose murderers, each knew, might have passed them in the street. The economic downturn had not deterred them, but it had given the rest of the city’s inhabitants a new focus, and they looked tired and ignored, upholders of yesterday’s news.

  Alejandro thought briefly of the girl baby he had delivered almost three months ago, those he had seen handed over subsequently, their births christened with tears, then pushed the thought from his mind. ‘Pa?’

  ‘Don’t tell your mother how much we had to drink last night. My head is sore enough as it is.’ His father’s voice still carried the satisfaction of the catch. Beside them, a colectivo, visibly belching diesel fumes, slowed to four or five m.p.h., just slow enough for its departing passengers to hit the pavement running, while those waiting launched themselves on board. One man, tripping and failing, yelled and shook his fist at the departing bus.

  ‘I think she is going through the change,’ his father said, meditatively. ‘Women often become irrational then.’

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘She’s got so paranoid about security she will hardly leave the house. She won’t own up to this, of course. Not even if you ask her. She will make excuses, say the ladies are coming round for her charity works, or it’s too hot to go out today, but she’s no longer leaving the house.’ He paused, still cheerful. ‘And she’s driving me mad.’ The size of the fish had made him garrulous. ‘Because she’s not going out, she’s dwelling on things, you know? Not just the economic situation. Not just the security situation, which I grant you is bad. You know you’re more likely to be mugged in the Zona Norte now than in the slums? The bastards know where the money is, they’re not stupid.’ Jorge exhaled, his eyes still fixed on the road ahead. ‘No, she’s become obsessed about where I am. Why am I ten minutes late back from the office? Didn’t I know that she feared I’d had an accident?’

  He glanced in the mirror, unconsciously checking that the coolbox containing the fish had not tipped over. ‘I think she thinks I’m having an affair. Whenever she asks me why I’m late, she immediately asks about Agostina. Agostina! Like she’s going to give a second glance to an old man like me!’ He said it with the confidence of someone who didn’t truly believe his own comments.

  Alejandro’s heart was heavy. ‘Pa, I’m going abroad.’

  ‘Everything is magnified, you know? Because she has too much time to sit and think. She has always been the same.’

  ‘To England. I’m going to England. To work in a hospital.’

  Jorge had definitely heard him now. There was a lengthy silence, not sufficiently interrupted by the traffic reports on the radio. Alejandro sat in the leather seat, his breath held against the coming storm. Eventually, when he could bear it no longer, he spoke quietly: ‘It’s not something I planned . . .’ He had suspected it would be like this, but still felt unprepared for the weight of guilt that had settled upon him, for the explanations, apologies, that were already begging to be spoken. He stared at his hands, blistered and criss-crossed an angry red from the nylon lines.

  His father waited until the traffic report was finished. ‘Well . . . I think it’s a good thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is nothing for you here, Ale. Nothing. It is better you go and enjoy life somewhere else.’ His head sank into his shoulders, and he exhaled in a long, weary sigh.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘It’s not a question – you’re a young man. It is right that you travel. It is right that you have some opportunities, meet some people. God knows, there’s nothing in Argentina.’ He glanced sideways, and the look was not lost on his son. ‘You need to live a little.’

  The words that sprang to Alejandro’s mind seemed inadequate so he closed his mouth on them.

  ‘When are you going to talk to your mother?’

  ‘Today. I got the papers through last week. I want to go as soon as possible.’

  ‘It’s just . . . it’s just the economic situation, right? There’s nothing . . . nothing else that makes you want to leave?’

  Alejandro knew that another conversation was hovering between them. ‘Pa, the state hospitals are on their knees. There are rumours that they don’t have enough money to pay us by the end of the year.’

  His father seemed relieved. ‘I won’t go to the office. You need to talk to your mother. I’ll drive you.’

  ‘She’s going to be bad, uh?’

  ‘We’ll deal with it,’ his father said simply.

  They traversed the three sides of the square and sat in traffic before the government buildings. His father placed a hand paternally on his leg. ‘So, who is going to help me hunt peacock bass, eh?’ The unforced animation of before was gone. His father’s professional mask was back in place, benign, reassuring.

  ‘Come to England, Pa. We’ll hunt salmon.’

  ‘Huh. A child’s fish.’ It was said without resentment.

  The Mothers of the Disappeared were ending their weekly march. As the car began to head back, Alejandro watched them as they folded their laminated posters carefully into handbags, adjusted embroidered headscarves, exchanged greetings and held each other with the loose affection of long-standing allies before they headed for the gates and th
eir lonely journeys home.

  The Marenas house, like many in the Zona Norte, looked like neither the flat-fronted, Spanish-influenced shuttered manses of central BA, nor a modern glass-and-concrete structure. It was a curious, ornate building set back from the street and, in architectural style, most closely resembled a Swiss cuckoo clock.

  Around it, carefully manicured borders fringed sculpted hedges, which disguised the electric gate, the newly installed bars on the windows, and hid from immediate view the security booth and guard at the end of the road. Inside, the wooden floors had long given way to shining expanses of cool marble, upon which sat expensive French rococo-style furniture, polished and gilded to within an inch of its life. It was not a comfortable-looking house, but while the front rooms spoke of a cool social superiority, inviting guests to admire rather than relax, the kitchen, where the family spent most of their private time, still housed a battered old kitchen table and several shabbily comfortable chairs. Their disappearance, Milagros, the maid, had sworn, would mean the immediate end of her twenty-seven-year tenure with the family. If they thought that after a hard day’s cleaning she was going to squeeze her backside into one of those modern plasticky things, they had another think coming. As it was widely agreed that Milagros was often the only thing standing between Alejandro’s mother and the sanatorium, the chairs stayed, to the unspoken satisfaction of all parties. And the kitchen remained the most used room in the seven-bedroom house.

  It was here that Ale chose to speak to his mother, while his father supposedly busied himself in his study, and Milagros shuffled backwards and forwards across the marble floors with a mop to eavesdrop on the conversation and make the occasional pertinent exclamation. His mother sat upright at the table. With her helmet of blonde hair, she was unrecognisable as the dark-haired beauty of the wedding photographs in gilt frames that littered the house.

  ‘You are going where?’ she said, for the second time.