by Maggie Gee
I wanted to know why Sarah couldn’t love me. I wanted to know what was wrong with men, and if women would ever love us again. Whenever I had enough time to be lonely, I still wondered, still brooded.
It was a waste of time, of course. I turned over again, knocking my elbow, and told myself to be sensible, I was fiftyone, I should know better. It was just the heat, something physical, random, that made her memory so sharp that night. Tomorrow we’d leave Euro, if all went well, and say goodbye to her forever. Great, I told myself. Go to sleep.
So Luke would never see his mother again, and I …
But that was all in the past. I turned over, crossly, and banged my knee, and accidentally switched Dora on, which gave me the idea to use her cooling fan. ‘Hallo, how are you?’ she asked, too loudly. ‘Be quiet, Dora,’ I hissed, wearily. I turned on her fan. ‘Everyone’s asleep.’
There was a pause, and I hoped she had obeyed, but in fact she had slipped into her ‘Logical Assessment’ programme. I jumped when she said, in the same bright voice, not at all the right voice for three in the morning, ‘That is not correct. You are not asleep, I am not asleep.’
‘I’m not asleep either,’ Luke said quite loudly from the front seat where he was lying.
‘Damn,’ I said. ‘So no one’s asleep. You should be asleep,’ I told my son. ‘Big day tomorrow.’ But inside my head a tune was playing, unforgettable, ‘Nessun Dorma’ in a sunlit timewarp, and we had just met, and my fate was sealed …
‘Too hot,’ Luke said. ‘Open the window.’
Sarah. How did we lose one another?
I’d thought we were safer with the window closed, on the edge of the town, in a car with French plates, so easily identified as one more group of vulnerable refugees. But Dora’s fan was noisy, and the night was long, and after all I still had my Magnum … And two men together made a lot of methane. I opened the window, said, ‘Go to sleep,’ and tucked the gun underneath the seat where my hand would find it straight away.
With the window open the night came alive. The olive trees rustled, the crickets sang – a high thin noise like electricity, trembling and shrilling through the moonlight, and there was a faint cool waft of green herbs, a promise that we were somewhere near water. I began to relax, to dream, to doze …
In my dream, children were laughing and shrieking. There were three or four of them, playing with Dora and feeding her lemons, which she didn’t like. They laid them on the ground like a clutch of yellow eggs, not understanding she could never reproduce, and Dora told them it was all my fault, and then it was Sarah who was kicking the lemons, she was shouting at me for deserting her, saying I’d forgotten to make love to her, and everything seemed to end with Sarah, would I never get away from her?
I woke up, startled, to hear children laughing, shrieking with laughter, very close. The velvet oblong of open window held something moving, something alive, and as it turned briefly towards the moonlight, it became a face with two bright eyes, and I was half-standing, cursing, shouting, fumbling for my gun, unlocking my door –
I chased them off before I realised who they were. Halfnaked bodies, matted hair. The wild boys again, the kids, the salvajes. They ran as if frightened, but they laughed as they ran, and hooted Spanish words that I was sure were insults.
I got back into the car. Luke was sitting up, staring out of the window at the hot darkness. Neither of us slept much after that, listening to one another’s restlessness, the rustling of the trees, the birds waking up, for there were still birds, still singing, in Spain.
Goodbye, Sarah. Goodbye, my love. I was migrating south, as the swallows did.
It was hard to get up, next morning, with a dry mouth from wine the night before. My right arm was still awkward and painful, and the new aches from sleeping in the car jarred unpleasantly against the old ones. Luke was very quiet, and kept staring around him as if he had left something behind, which he had, of course, or soon would have done.
I had an address, supplied by Paul’s lover. The woman who answered after thirty rings looked frightened, and only halfopened the door. She spoke in Spanish, through thin red lips, and Luke translated to his dunce of a father. We had to go back up into the hills. She told us the name of a little granja where we could find the man we needed.
We drove back up a narrow road with bends so sharp we seemed to hang in the air. It was exhilarating, doing it at speed. The sun was already getting hot. Luke was giving me directions, but we soon got lost, and turned up the wrong track into a ghost village. I shouted at him a bit, a lot, of course I was nervous, and he was nervous. Too much was hanging on all this. It was the longedfor end to all our adventures, and instead we found three or four low stone hovels with broken windows and a scrawny cat, yowling at us as I gunned the engine and yelled at Luke, spurting small stones.
Turning the bend as I retraced our tracks I went too fast again and nearly killed us, and this time it was Luke shouting at me, calling me a fool and a maniac and demanding to get out. He was shrieking, screaming, his voice shooting up to soprano again before it sank croaking back to adulthood. He had never gone this far before, and I know I deserved it, but it was a shock. I was used to him deferring to me. Of course I wasn’t frightened of my own son, but the strength of his anger was alarming.
The sun was getting up high in the sky. It blazed like white metal on the distant sea. I drove hellforleather up another steep turning and plunged into a little wood, dark shiny holm oaks, black after the brightness – as I braked, I saw them.
Mother naked.
Why did that phrase come into my mind? A couple, two couples, mother naked, struggling together on the ground, and others lounging by the road, watching – longhaired, slender, animal shapes of more salvajes, lithe, slinking, and they suddenly scattered, as we rocketed through – the watchers scattered but the couples continued, and I saw more clearly, from the corner of my eye, the moment before we shot out of the wood and back into the blinding light, they were fucking, oldstyle, they were making love; naked, oldstyle, natural fucking.
I saw or imagined something else, as well. Behind them, playing on a bank where a tree had fallen and lay uprooted, three or four naked babies played, watched by two women with long black hair.
I felt sick and shaken as I drove on. These animals had babies, and we could not. How on earth would they look after them? It was criminal, it should not be allowed. Sex on the ground, en masse, out of doors …
‘I’m sorry, Luke,’ I said, after a minute. I could see a little white granja in the distance, and this time I was sure we had found our goal. I sneaked a sideways glance at him, but he was staring straight forward, probably embarrassed, fourteen was surely a sensitive age – I remembered my own parents embarrassing me by trying to tell me things I knew.
‘That was horrible, wasn’t it?’ I said, quietly. I wanted him to know I knew he was upset, but I didn’t want to say too much. His expression wasn’t encouraging. ‘If you want to talk about it, that’s fine.’ He said nothing.
‘I’m hungry,’ he remarked abruptly. ‘Starving. That must be the place we want.’
This time he was right, and two hours later we had our tickets, and it was midday, the sun was beating down above us, and Pedro, the short swarthy man who’d sold us the tickets, was giving us directions for getting our visas from a man called Juan who would see us through, since we had tickets from Pedro, and I had spent four million ecus, but it didn’t matter, we had nearly made it. Besides, I’d be able to earn money in Africa. The brighteyed dwarf I had just made rich was expansively friendly after the deal, which made me even surer that I had been rooked, but I didn’t care, with the tickets in my hand, feeling their corners press into my fingers –
‘Too hot for the boy,’ Pedro said, pointing upwards at the unbearable disk of the sun. ‘El rubio, yes. He stay with me. I give him bread, wine, cheese. Padre go down and get the visas. The boy stay, have siesta, be happy. I have sons, daughters, everything.’
‘Not
at all,’ I said, in my fractured Spanish. ‘He comes with me. We stay together. Thank you very much for offering.’
I don’t know if the little man understood, but Luke did, and he wasn’t pleased. ‘I’m not coming,’ he said, very definite. ‘It’s going to be endless waiting in queues. I’d like to stay here. You go, Dad.’
I nearly insisted. And he would have come. I think even then he would have come, if I had shown him how worried I was. But I wanted to give him enough leeway, I didn’t want to play the heavy father, and also I thought about the little man’s daughters, ‘sons, daughters, everything’. Perhaps Luke wanted to meet the daughters. I only wanted him to be happy. And so I agreed, without a fuss, without showing Luke how hard it was to let him out of my sight for an instant, without showing him how much I cared. And that is why I torment myself, why I shall always torment myself, because we’d quarrelled more in two days than in our whole lives as father and son, and maybe he thought I hated him, maybe he genuinely didn’t realise that I’d thrown everything up for him.
My choice, not his. I don’t reproach him –
I blame myself. Stupid, blind.
My last memory is of Luke’s back, turning away from me, looking outwards, gazing back across the yellow hill to the little black crest of trees on the skyline, the little wood we had driven through, the little wood with those naked creatures. The squat little man who had taken our money put one brown corded hand on his shoulder and grinned at me fatly, showing one gold tooth. ‘Very okay with me, señor,’ he said, and I nodded, and went away.
Driving back through the wood, I saw no one at all. Maybe we had dreamed it, the whole strange tableau, I told myself, and my spirits rose.
Now it will be plain sailing, I thought, the worst is over, we are home and dry.
I’d imagined getting visas from an embassy, but the address I had been given was a dingy office block. Upstairs – and there were no lifts, only stairs – there was a door which announced, in fading letters, SUBAGENCIA CONSULAR, and then a string of specialities: Tramitación de Visas, Pasaportes, was it? Licences for Importatión/Exportatión, and then, thank heaven, in smaller letters, Immigratión/Emigratión etc. It was all apparently ‘Autorizado’ by the Council of the ‘Estados Ajricanos’.
Behind it was a warren of openplan offices, with peeling plastic and dusty posters. I asked for the Ghanaian department, but a yellow-faced woman laughed at me. There were three or four Juans in the Inmigración section my friend in the hills had indicated, but in the end I found the right one, or one who acknowledged he knew Pedro. Juan was tall and thin and baked dry, with an acute pot belly like a pregnancy, and he chainsmoked incessantly, the acrid smell of nicotine tobacco that seemed so foreign, so twentiethcentury, for at home, of course, cigarettes meant dope …
Sometimes I long for it. You need it, here. But nowhere in England now is warm enough to grow cannabis.
Juan smoked sourly and never smiled. He was intensely cautious, and unwilling to admit he had a special connection with the man who sold the tickets, but ‘Si, le conozco,’ he said, and shrugged, exhaling like a dying dragon, scaly, leathery poisonous. At last he suggested we go outside and discuss the matter over a beer, but once we were in the open air he changed his mind, and we went to the car, and drove to a deserted factory on the outskirts where I suddenly thought, he intends to kill me, they’ve had our money, now they’ll silence us, but I knew I would never let anyone kill me while Luke was alive and needed me.
He showed no signs of doing anything dramatic, though his smoking in the car nearly choked me to death, and he sat with his arm over the back of the seat, halfturning around so he could see our belongings, his little brown eyes darting fiercely about, picking everything over, valuing, calculating. He told me there was a fee, for a visa. An enormous fee, way beyond our means, nearly all of the million we still had left after paying so much to the crook in the hills. I pointed out how much I had paid for the tickets. He pretended not to understand me, telling me instead how much they were worth, which was a figure ten times less. I told him exactly how much money we had left. He said we would have to pay in kind. I offered our car, since I knew we would never be able to ship it across to Africa.
He grinned for the first time, showing the gaps in his big rare teeth, filled with dull gold. ‘All the world offer the car,’ he said in bad English, contemptuously. ‘I no want your old coche, señor.’ This was the first sign of open aggression, but he smiled after he said it as if it were politeness.
He put his hand on Dora. ‘Make the switch,’ he said. ‘I like this one. I see him muchas veces on the screen.’
I knew what was coming, but I had no choice. Forgive me, Dora, I had no scruples because we had already lost so much, our home, our past, Briony … Only Luke was left. Anything for Luke. ‘Switch on,’ I muttered. ‘Yes, yes.’
Within five minutes Juan was besotted. Having given no sign of animation in one or two hours’ discussion with me, he became a boy, laughing inanely whenever Dora spoke or moved. He seemed particularly taken with her strokeyfeely panel, and the way she chuckled when he tickled her. I hoped he were not some appalling kind of pervert. To be honest, I preferred not to know. ‘Is maravillosa,’ he told me, earnestly. ‘She go to make my English marvellous. You give me this one, señor, and your visas – no problema.’
I told him yes, it was a deal, but I could not give him Dora now, I should have to let Luke say goodbye. ‘They’re like brothers,’ I said, ‘or brother and sister.’
He wanted to come with us – he didn’t trust me, or else he was too much in love to say goodbye – but I refused, and in the end he let us go, with one of the visas on account, I suppose lest I disappeared for good and got our visas somewhere else. He was to give me Luke’s when we returned with Dora, and we shook hands keenly, and his hands were sweating, a pervert’s hands, I was nearly sure.
Now there would only be two of us. I parted from Juan with too much alacrity to switch Dora off, but she was silent in the car as we drove back into the hills, and I felt her heavy presence behind me like a hand of shame upon my shoulder.
I decided I had to try to explain. Perhaps it would make it easier for her to begin a new life with Juan.
‘Dora,’ I began. ‘We’re going away. Luke and I. To Africa. You can’t come with us. I’m very sorry. Very sad that you can’t come.’
‘You are very unhappy?’ she said, sounding muted. ‘I’m sorry that you’re unhappy.’
‘ Well, I’m not, really,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘I’m happy I can go with Luke. Just unhappy that you can’t come with us.’
‘You are unhappy because I can’t come with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suggest,’ she said, always logical, ‘that I come with you, then you won’t be unhappy.’
‘You can’t come with us.’
‘I can go with you.’
It was almost as if she were arguing with me, but of course it was just her logic module. ‘Actually, Dora, I have sold you.’ It sounded terrible, put like that.
‘I am consulting my vocabulary,’ she said, but her tone was disapproving. ‘So, you have transferred me to a purchaser in exchange for money. Is that correct?’
‘No, no, I wouldn’t sell you for money. I sort of had to exchange you for some visas,’ I said. ‘For Luke. So he could escape to Africa.’
‘I am consulting my vocabulary,’ she said again, then after a long pause, ‘Visa is not in my vocabulary.’
‘It’s a sort of – travel pass,’ I said.
‘So you have transferred me to a purchaser in exchange for a travel pass,’ she said. ‘Yes, I understand. I have a question, please. What is the name of this purchaser?’
‘Juan,’ I said. ‘He likes you very much.
‘I am searching,’ she said. ‘Yes. I was talking to this Juan. Fiftythree minutes ago.’
She sounded perfectly calm about it. I ventured an opinion. ‘You’ll soon forget us. He’s very nice.’ Heaven forgive
me for lying to her, but we were getting near, and I wanted it over.
‘That is incorrect,’ she said, rather loud. ‘I cannot forget you. You are in my memory. Everything you say is in my memory. Also Sarah is in my memory. And Briony. And Luke’s voice, singing –’
‘Yes, yes. That’s why we’ve come back to say goodbye to Luke. I hope you feel okay about it.’ It was mad of me, really, to ask about her feelings, but she sounded so human, one forgot she was a robot –
‘I feel. Very bad and very sad,’ she said, shocking me to my selfish centre. Surely she had only said that before when we hadn’t been able to feed her promptly?
‘I feel sad too,’ I said, subdued. ‘But you will be very happy with Juan.’ I forgot, as so often, that she had no future tense, that everything either happened in the present or else the past, where it became information.
‘That is not correct,’ she said, sullenly. At least I heard sullenness where maybe none was. ‘I am not very happy, I am not with Juan. You are in error. Or perhaps joking?’
She suddenly reminded me of Sarah, always contradicting or questioning. Dora was appealing because she was biddable. Now she had turned awkward, so good riddance, I thought. ‘Oh piss off, Dora,’ I said, and braked, and switched off before she could search her vocabulary.
I felt triumphant, hotly triumphant, as I drove up the track that led back to the little white granja where I had left Luke. I had done it, somehow, I had pulled it off, the tickets this morning, and now the visas, I’d succeeded where so many failed. Surely my son would be proud of me.
The farm looked the same, but prettier in the afternoon sun, more mellow, more pleasing to the eye than when we had driven the track that morning, uncertain, anxious. Now, five hours later, things were different. This afternoon I knew my son was there, and the deal was done, and everything was settled. It grew quickly larger against the brown hillside, the whitegold stone with its glittering windows. I saw a little figure outside, but couldn’t make it out. Was it waving, flapping? I thought it was Luke, but it wasn’t Luke, too dark to be Luke, too short, too everything. I screwed up my eyes to see in the sun. It was the little fat man who owned the villa, and I realised he was waving in agitation. Perhaps I was late, perhaps they had been worried? I screeched to a halt on the stones outside.
