The Distance

by Zoë Folbigg

  Talk tomorrow, sorry, I have to go. Oscar’s busting my balls.

  OK cool, you can tell me more about your drawings then…

  Drawings?

  Of me.

  Oh, they’re beautiful. You’re easy to draw. I didn’t actually need to know about your first lover, I was just curious.

  Hector couldn’t shake the image of a young Cecilie entwined with an older man, so he logged off and went to the water cooler to fill his plastic cup.

  Goodbye.

  Cecilie typed, with a familiar urge to do something forbidden.

  Twelve

  May 2018, Suffolk, England

  ‘Sorry I’m late, I had to go back for my notebook, just in case I miss anything.’ Kate feels a drop of sweat run down her back as Melissa Cox, pink and yellow and calm because she’s already been there for ten minutes, stirs her coffee.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I was just looking over my handover notes.’

  Kate pulls up a chair in Jack & Jill’s deli cafe and unravels her wrap scarf.

  ‘I ordered a raspberry Bakewell slice. Do you want one?’

  Kate feels the stretch around her thighs. ‘I shouldn’t.’

  Melissa doesn’t dwell on whether Kate is or isn’t having cake and opens her notebook to get down to business. She talks Kate through the highs and lows of being chair of the PTA and gives her all the banking books, event notes and contacts for the annual list of fundraisers on the school social calendar. Kate scribbles diligently in her book, trying not to ask too many questions, trying not to witter, trying not to get in a flap.

  ‘You know you’ve got this, don’t you?’ Melissa asks.

  Kate looks up, as if she’s missed something.

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘This chair malarkey. You’ll be fine. You’re good with numbers. You’re good at fighting fires. You’re super organised. Everyone likes you…’

  Everyone likes me?

  ‘Just make sure no one takes the piss. Venetia has a knack of talking loudly so people think she’s taking loads on, but she isn’t as hands-on as she makes out. And Hilary does need nudging now and then, but she’s OK with that, so don’t feel you have to apologise to her all the time.’

  Kate’s very good at apologising all the time. She apologises to her daughters when she tells them off; she apologises to George if the veg is ever-so-slightly overdone. She even apologised to Jack’s friend Samuel’s mum when Samuel bit Jack in the back and left his dental imprint there for a week.

  ‘OK, I’ll try not to.’

  Melissa’s phone rings and she quickly rejects the call.

  ‘Dave,’ she says, with a sigh.

  Kate knows Dave Cox left Melissa last year, but she doesn’t know why or how it happened. Genevieve Walton at Beavers said he’d run off with someone at work, but Kate doesn’t know Melissa well enough to ask what occurred; how long she had her suspicions; whether she saw it coming.

  A young waiter comes to clear the table.

  ‘Can I just take your empty cups?’ he asks.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Kate, as she leans back.

  Thirteen

  June 2018, Xalapa, Mexico

  ‘Baby, wake up, you’ve got school.’ Hector is on his knees on the bed, rubbing the bony sierra of Pilar’s spine, the contours of her flat chest anchored into the core of the mattress. He shakes the sharp blade of her shoulder, gently. ‘Pilar!’

  A fist lashes out, restrained by a once-white sheet.

  Hector ducks out of the way with a frown. ‘Eh! Don’t take it out on me! You gotta get up. You got kids waiting for you.’

  An arching nose appears from under black matted hair. Pilar’s Moorish skin looks pasty, and Hector can’t tell if the black shadows under her eyes are caused by last night’s mayhem or last night’s mascara.

  ‘What happened, baby?’ he asks, eyes widened with concern.

  Pilar flops back into the bed.

  ‘Benny Trujillo happened,’ she murmurs, her face seeking comfort against the pillow.

  Hector slips off the bed as hatred and fear rise in his neck.

  Cálmate. Calm yourself.

  He slinks out of the bedroom and into the open living room and kitchen space of their apartment, scratching his topless torso and looking for a distraction to calm his rage. Hector has surprised himself by how calm, how tranquilo, he’s been lately, and he knows what his new demeanour is down to.

  The morning after their wedding, Hector woke up feeling furry-tongued and foolish, and decided to stop drinking, there and then. He didn’t touch a drop during their honeymoon on the Gulf Coast – only water or watery fruit punch for the groom, while the bride drank daiquiris with her desayuno of eggs and pancakes.

  When Señor and Señora Herrera got back from honeymoon, Hector stopped smoking weed and, ten days later, cigarettes. It wasn’t as difficult as he thought, it was the habits that were the hardest to break, not the addictions. Despite seeming like someone who laughs happily through life’s shitstorms, when Hector is determined to do something, he faces the struggle head on and does it.

  He was determined to study art at university, even though Benny said art was for fags and university was for pussies; he was determined to get a job at La Voz as an illustrator, even though Benny said working for a newspaper would make him a weasel; and he was determined to get away from Benny and end their deepest of ties, even though he feared for his own life in doing so. And waking up a married man, Hector just knew that he had to quit drinking, and his determination alone would get him through it.

  Hector was smart enough to know he had to change his habits, his patterns, before he could change anything else. So he stopped rolling from his newspaper office to the cantinas after work. He stopped taking Pilar for tacos and micheladas in a diner. He stopped looking for her, dancing in a club at 2 a.m. He told Ricky and Elias that he had work to do, commissions to draw. He started staying home and spent his evenings on the sofa sketching; sketching women, sketching animals, sketching mythical beasts, some grotesque, some beautiful. He joined La Voz’s five-a-side football team and saw improvements in his shape and agility every week that the editorial squad squared up to the advertising boys.

  Yet now, three months later, out of pure muscle memory, in a moment of anger and exasperation, Hector feels the pockets of his cargo shorts in the hope that a packet of Delicados lies within.

  Of course it doesn’t.

  The habit, and Pilar, were the hardest things about giving up. Ricky and Elias soon stopped asking Hector out and relied on Efrain and Heriberto to bring the whisky and the laughter to the party. But Pilar was less forgiving about him not wanting to go out any more.

  Hector stood firm. He didn’t miss the fog. He didn’t miss the drama. He didn’t miss the hangovers. He didn’t miss the rows and the rages, although Pilar still rages on, as she did last night before she walked out.

  Hector pads barefoot to the fridge to open a carton of orange juice and swigs from it to replenish himself.

  Tranquilo, he thinks, aware that his left hand is scrunched into a fist. He opens his palms to release the tension and walks across the room to the panel of windows that overlook the noise of horns and smells of sizzling huevos rancheros below. It is 8 a.m. and already the town is bustling, children are on their way to school.

  Hector swigs again and lowers the carton of orange juice. On the box is an animated orange with arms and legs, dancing a conga at the front of a line of fruity characters. A lime with a cheeky smile. A muscleman mango flexing his arms. A sexy strawberry fluttering long eyelashes. The picture reminds Hector of Jugo’s California, Benny’s juice bar, and his first foray into business all those years ago. Hector chokes a little and puts his free fist to his bare chest to help ease out an uncomfortable cough.

  He recovers and looks around the room. Torn sketches he tried to piece together with magic tape lie in a pile on the coffee table. He looks at the fragments; an iridescent eye on a shard of paper looks back at him, challenging
him to speak up and fight for himself, even though he is tired of fighting.

  Hector walks back into the bedroom and places the juice firmly on the rickety wooden bedside table.

  ‘This will help,’ he says.

  Pilar emerges from under the sheet, turns gingerly onto her back, and raises a spindly arm to her brow. Hector fluffs up his vacant pillow next to her, taking his anger out on the synthetic stuffing, nursing his rage as well as her hangover. He props the pillow up against the rough spikes of the whitewashed plaster wall and Pilar rises to lean on it.

  Hector passes her the orange juice and she sips clumsily. A trail of orange trickles from the corner of Pilar’s claggy mouth and onto the sheet that clings to the blue heart above her breast.

  Hector lowers his voice so he can speak calmly and sincerely.

  ‘You know you shouldn’t hang out with Benny Trujillo and his friends, hey? They’re not good people.’

  Pilar shoots Hector a petulant look but doesn’t raise her voice. She is always quieter when her hangovers are really bad.

  ‘You wouldn’t come out with me, viejo. Who else was I going to party with?’

  ‘You didn’t want me going out with you!’ Hector protests. ‘You walked out. You were mad at me. Remember?’

  A wave of confusion washes over Pilar’s sallow silhouette. Even the sun streaming in through the wall of glass to the bedroom balcony doesn’t lift her morning-after pallor. Hector perches on the bedside table, which strains a little under his thighs, and he watches Pilar as she tries to recall. All the anger she felt last night, that Hector spent the evening cleaning up after, and she doesn’t even remember it.

  ‘My drawings?’ he prompts, not wanting to revisit the anguish, but shocked that Pilar could forget so easily. Or, if she does remember, how she can brush over it without apologising.

  Of course she won’t apologise.

  ‘Oh, those…’ Pilar shrugs.

  Last night, just after Pilar had finished putting the finishing flick of thick black eyeliner to her hooded lids, she pleaded with her husband to join her for once, because he was turning into a boring old man.

  ‘No, baby, I’m gonna stay in,’ he had said apologetically, trying to avoid a row. Hector told Pilar he was going to work on some drawings he wanted to send to a children’s book publisher in Mexico City, that she should meet her friend Xochitl as she had planned.

  Pilar didn’t tell Hector that Xochitl had just cancelled, which was the real reason she was particularly irked that Hector didn’t want to go out last night – she hadn’t seemed to mind earlier. But she needed a drink after what had happened at work. So Pilar had stalked the apartment like a panther, her black hive of hair swishing into a predator’s tail behind her, sweeping and searching for an argument. She found it in one of Hector’s A4 sketchbooks, carelessly left lying on the small round dining table in the corner of the living room.

  Looking for something to take her rage out on, Pilar flipped open a book at random and found it. The book was filled, page after page, with sketches of Pilar. She was used to seeing herself in pencil, charcoal and ink. It was how Hector wooed Pilar in the first place, by turning her into a cartoon character and sending one of the kids from the orphanage to school with a sketch of SupaPila, folded up in his pocket, under strict instruction to hand it to Miss Cabrera. SupaPila was a kick-ass beauty, half superhero, half queen, lavished with bunches of flowers by a court jester with a Mexican eagle on his shoulder. After a few weeks, Hector pleaded with SupaPila to go out for a drink with him, and she sent a note back to the orphanage with her phone number on it.

  Over six years, Hector’s cartoons of Pilar became more sophisticated: from naked pencil sketches to a portrait in gouache that wouldn’t seem out of place in the Prado in Madrid, her aquiline nose and high hair able to hold their own next to Goya’s Black Duchess. Over time, Pilar had become indifferent to her portraits, but last night she scavenged her way through the book, picking out anything she could find to be angry about.

  ‘My nose isn’t that big!’

  ‘My ass doesn’t look like that!’

  ‘Why did you put a peinata in my hair? I’m Mexican now.’

  And as she flipped towards the back of the book, one of many that Hector filled years ago, her haughty, hawkish features dropped. Suddenly her portraits looked different. The eyes were pale. The breasts were rounded. The legs were strong. The hair was piled in twists.

  ‘This isn’t me,’ Pilar said in horror. ‘Who is this?’

  Hector rose from the sofa, calmly, to see what Pilar was looking at, hoping to rescue his notebooks, but he already knew.

  ‘Who’s this… this… güera?’ Pilar almost spat the word. One part enraged, one part satisfied to have found something to take her rage out on. ‘Is this the “pen pal” you talk to on your computer? Is this bitch the person you’re messaging on your phone day and night?’

  Pilar hadn’t even noticed that Hector hadn’t been messaging his pen pal for months.

  Hector glanced up at his artwork in Pilar’s shaky hands, and saw her face again. His heart shrank.

  I miss her.

  His solemn eyes and his refusal to answer enraged Pilar even more.

  ‘Did she pose naked for you? You having grubby little phone sex with some güera whore?’

  Pilar’s features became more jagged as she shouted, her face contorting like Picasso’s Weeping Woman.

  ‘No, baby, this is just my imagination, someone I made up. Someone from another planet.’

  ‘Then it doesn’t matter if I do this then eh, Hector?’

  Pilar ripped clumps of pages out of the A4 sketchbook and tore them into fragments, like a child having a temper tantrum. When she’d finished ripping the pictures of Cecilie, she started on the pictures she didn’t like of herself, before flipping through other sketchbooks, tearing, ripping, shouting.

  Hector walked to his desk and unstuck his parents’ wedding photo for safekeeping, then skulked into the bedroom, lay back on the bed and put his headphones on his ears. He scrolled his phone for his favourite song, her favourite song, and pressed play. Howling feedback, dirty blues riffs; ‘I Feel You’ ripped his heart out as Pilar tore the pages from his sketchbooks.

  *

  ‘You said you were meeting Xochitl, I wouldn’t have been cool with you going out with Benny if I’d have known. It’s too dangerous.’

  The sun’s curve floods through the window and into Pilar’s face, finally lighting her brown eyes.

  ‘Well, Xochitl is as boring as you. She wanted to stay in and catch up on her telenovelas.’

  Hector, sitting back on the creaking bedside table, leans his elbows on his thighs and makes a triangle with his fingers as he pushes them together.

  ‘I’m serious, Pilar. Benny and his friends are not the people a nice married lady from Spain should hang out with.’

  Pilar lets out a husky laugh. ‘You can say that again. Ayyyy, they party!’

  ‘It’s not funny. You don’t know what he’s capable of.’

  ‘But Benny told me you two were like brothers when you were little. “Olmeca and Zapata”, getting into little scrapes and adventures across the neighbourhood.’

  Hector rubs his eyes.

  ‘What happened with you two anyway? Why are you so uptight? He’s always good to me.’ Pilar turns to look up at Hector and he sinks into her eyes.

  Hector never elaborated on his history with Benny, only that it was history. He never told Pilar about the bad bits, because he thought those would become pretty obvious just by looking at Benny and his gang. But, Hector realises, like everything else with Pilar, her distorted way of thinking means she probably won’t ever see this for herself. She doesn’t even feel remorseful for ripping up sketches he spent years working on, that shrug told him she remembered perfectly well. But then Benny happened, and Benny Trujillo has a way of obliterating everything that went before him.

  Hector ignores the question and concedes. ‘Come on, I’
ll start the shower, you better get a move on,’ he says, standing, as he goes to help Pilar up from under her armpits.

  She flinches. ‘Get off!’

  ‘Pilar, you have to get up, get to school, you have thirty first-graders waiting for you.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I lost my job.’

  ‘You lost your job?’ Hector runs a shaky hand through his hair. ‘When? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I would have told you if you’d have come out last night,’ Pilar lashes.

  Hector stands and looks out the window. He looks out to Orizaba’s mighty peak and puts his hands to his mouth in despair.

  Pilar looks up, ever more petulant, outraged by his shock. ‘What’s your problem?! That fucking bitch Vicky said she had some complaints from the parents. I work my ass off for those kids and all their parents do is complain.’

  ‘Shiiiiiiit.’

  Hector scratches his fingers through the soft waves bouncing at his temples. His eyes dart from left to right, like the frantic Hector of old, trying to find a way to fix this; to fix Pilar. Since they got engaged her parents stopped sending riches from the Old World and they’ve barely survived on two salaries. How would they pay the rent on his alone?

  The pesos in the jar.

  Every time Hector hadn’t gone out chupando in the few months since he got clean, he put 200 pesos in a jar – his ‘chupito jar’ he called it.

  There must be seven or eight thousand in there.

  ‘My jar,’ he says, walking out of the bedroom to get it from the cupboard under the television. ‘That should buy us a few weeks for you to get another job,’ he calls from the living room while Pilar stays static in bed. ‘I was talking to Cintia and Mariana in Lazaro’s the other day and they were saying how rushed off their feet they were. Maybe you could ask there until you find another teaching job, or make an appeal to Vicky…’