‘OK, I suppose.’
‘Did you tell him everything?’
‘I think so. At least I tried to.’
‘Oh Jenny, are you OK?’ She had that faraway look she sometimes got. It reminded me of me. She nodded slowly, but said nothing. ‘Do you have any regrets about it now, Jenny?’ I asked as gently as I could. Her reply took a long time to come.
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘not about what I did, only about who I am.’
* * *
Another summer came and went. Another postcard arrived from Jenny, this one a photo of her taken bungee jumping at Victoria Falls. She returned, high and exuberant, and described the experience to me. She told me it was normal to get bloodshot eyes. The idea of your own blood not being able to keep pace with the speed of your fall was too much for me. Jenny revelled in it.
‘You’re in this harness thing standing on a bridge to nowhere and when you look down at your feet it’s as if you’re wearing bifocal lenses. Your feet are in sharp focus and then there is a line where the platform ends across the middle of the lens and everything on the other side is a blur. You switch to long-distance focus and suddenly it seems strange that those feet belong to you. The imminence of what you’re about to do takes hold of you in the pit of your stomach. There is no dividing line between physical and mental. Your organs seem to be shouting out from different parts of your body. And then you jump. And you leave a trail of sound behind you, like the vapour trail from a plane. Everybody does, you can’t help it, sound floods out of you; some people shout, some people scream, some people laugh.’
I mused in private about doing something like that myself. Not bungee jumping, no way, but going somewhere, like Jenny, on my own. I browsed mentally through some of the remote, glossy landscapes I’d seen in coffee table books and wondered what it would actually be like to stand, alone, at Ayres Rock, or the Grand Canyon, or at the top of one of the world’s great waterfalls. I wouldn’t need the buzz of the jump to bring the experience alive for me. I would be content to take in the natural wonder on its own terms, as a view to see and breathe and smell. I travelled in my imagination not just to Victoria and Niagara Falls, but to falls my reading took me to: Iguazu Falls on the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay; the single stream of Angel Falls in the depths of Venezuela’s jungle.
Even my new flatmate, dreamy Karen, had been an unlikely participant on a university expedition that had taken her hippo counting in the depths of the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. Maybe one day I would surprise people. Maybe one day I would surprise myself.
Chapter 50
I did do a trip sooner than I expected, but this one was not alone. Johnny was due to take Sarah, his new girlfriend, to visit his parents in Kenya for Christmas. I had met her only once. Not naturally confident in the kitchen, I had gone to enormous lengths to pre-cook a lamb dopiaza, following each step to the letter in a recipe from one of the Curry Club Cookbook series. I took longer than usual to get myself ready, too, uncertain about how to dress, wondering what Sarah would look like. She was beautiful – and blonde. I expected her to be pretty, but for some reason the fact that she was blonde shocked me, as if this were some kind of betrayal to the memory of Jenny. I knew that this was absurd and yet I found myself condemning her for it! She wore a sleek, black dress, in stark contrast to her straight blonde hair, and I regretted my decision to wear jeans.
She and Johnny sat on the sofa and I noticed with a certain relish, which I assumed was associated in some perverse way with a loyalty to my sister, that their body postures did not even remotely mirror each other. Then I realised suddenly that I’d been so intent on my observations that I hadn’t noticed the question she’d directed at me. There was an uncomfortable pause. I felt about ten years old. Johnny broke the silence with laughter. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to Pippa. She spends half her life on another planet!’ He said it with warmth, but for the first time something in me rebelled against his ready assumption that he knew me so well. It smacked of an ownership he had no right to. I felt relegated. A momentary look of displeasure flashed on Sarah’s face. The familiarity in Johnny’s tone of voice had not escaped her, and for a second he was the butt of unspoken anger from two directions.
Then the curry exploded. I had transferred it to a glass dish, which turned out not to be ovenproof. Johnny rushed into the kitchen and, when he realised what had happened, burst out laughing. I forgot where I was and laughed too, till tears wet my eyes. Sarah sat still on the sofa, looking beautiful.
Johnny didn’t bother to try and turn us into friends after that, and a certain taboo developed around the subject of Sarah, for reasons that neither of us spoke of. So it came as a surprise when Johnny told me one day, only a month before they were due to go to Kenya, that he had broken it off.
‘You didn’t like her, did you, Pippa?’
‘Well, exploding curries are obviously not conducive to lasting friendships!’ I laughed, trying to sidestep what I was honest enough to admit was a totally unfair judgement on my part.
‘What was it you didn’t like about her?’ He pushed me.
‘She just seemed so wrong for you, too polished, too shiny.’ I couldn’t help thinking of rock-related metaphors!
‘So, the thing is . . .’ He looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable all of a sudden. ‘I’m still due to go to Kenya and my parents are expecting me to bring a friend, so why don’t you come with me?’
* * *
When I asked Jenny whether she would mind, she took a long time to answer. ‘I mean, there’s nothing else in it. You do realise that, don’t you?’ I floundered, wondering what I was doing.
‘Pippa, even if there was,’ she said finally, very evenly, measuring each word in a way that must have felt alien to her, ‘that wouldn’t be a reason not to go. If you want to go, go.’
We looked at each other like strangers on a salt plain and I felt for a horrible moment that we were walking backwards, facing each other, but walking away.
Chapter 51
The first thing I noticed was the sky. The word that came to my mind again and again when I tried to pinpoint what it was about it that was so different was ‘bigger’.
‘Don’t ever let me attempt to write poetry,’ I said to Johnny one languid afternoon after a long curry lunch with his parents. Slightly heady from the wine, we had nevertheless gone for a drive into nearby Hells Gate Park and were sitting on a rocky outcrop, gazing over the plain below.
‘And why not?’
Something about the freedom, the spaciousness of this view, fuelled by the wine in my veins, made me want to throw up my arms and burst into song. A gentle recklessness that I was not used to bubbled inside me and I improvised aloud.
Oh the wonder of Kenyan skies
A thousand clouds, a thousand sighs
Bluer and deeper and more alive
Over dry land where acacias thrive.
Compared to the skies we have back home
The skies over here are . . . bigger.
‘You are the oddest person I’ve ever met,’ said Johnny amidst the laughter that cascaded between us.
His parents were warm, easy people with a gentle disregard for convention, which surprised me. At first his mother struck me as rather prim and proper, but her laugh was like Johnny’s, and when it escaped her it was impossible to think of her as a retired diplomat’s wife. I watched her reaction one day when their cook broke a glass and cried out in distress with blood streaming from his arm. She washed and dressed the cut, and soothed him with cool, calm words, and I wondered what it would have been like to have had a mother like that. She claimed with a certain pride that Johnny’s father had gone bananas since he had retired. At last he could say what he thought to anyone who cared to listen. Years of restrained behaviour and political motives at dinner parties had thrown into relief the things that mattered to him: discussion without an agenda; ideas which did not necessarily lead to action; whisky overlooking the lake; the lazy
trust of Colobus monkeys who took their siesta in the trees of their front garden. There was something a little sad, though, in that he had led a life, which, at least at one level, so obviously hadn’t suited him, and it made me look inwards and wonder what was really important to me. What did I want out of life?
Johnny took me on safari. We drove to a patch of coast south of Mombasa and then back through Tsavo National Park. We were away for ten days. We were sitting in complete and comfortable silence on the stone veranda of one of Ngulia’s bandas, overlooking what was surely one of the most peacefully green valleys in the world, when it happened, finally. It was early evening, just before dusk, and the grey, slow-motion shapes of elephants swayed close to the river below us. I was transfixed, and it took time for it to filter into my consciousness that I, too, was being watched. Where do we get that sixth sense from? The certainty that someone is looking at us or following us? My skin prickled with sudden self-consciousness and I felt the blood colouring my face, delaying the moment when I would need to turn and face his eyes. ‘Pippa, come here,’ was all he said.
I wish I could say that we made love like moonstruck lovers who melt into each other’s bodies and find their souls. Or first-time lovers, who discover each other with slow, deliberate exploration as if they are remembering the other person’s body to paint it later. Or old lovers, so familiar with each other’s habits and desires that their shared orgasm is as sure and safe as the strokes which lead to it. Or uninhibited lovers, whose screams follow whispered fantasies of another woman’s breasts.
But our lovemaking was not like any of that. We did not make love like lovers. We made love like friends, with a bashful warmth, a gentle fervour, which was somehow sexless and failed to banish the taboos that lurked beneath the surface. The transgression of friendship. The long sexual silence in my life since Eddie. Jenny.
When he came finally, quietly, almost apologetically, I turned away from him and cried, quietly, apologetically. He held me and, in sleep, we became lovers at last, wrapped in the smell of each other’s skin.
Chapter 52
‘Pippa, it’s OK, I don’t mind. I have no right to mind, but I don’t mind. I don’t want you to feel bad.’
Two emotions welled inside me: gratitude and irritation. These were emotions that didn’t, shouldn’t, go together. She had spoken immediately, not even waiting to find out what had happened, whether there was any need to say what she had decided to say. That was so typical of Jenny. She was so sure of herself and, of course, she was right. She had tapped straight into the guilt she sensed in me the moment we saw each other again. I felt tongue-tied, as I so often had as a child, relying on Jenny to say what I was thinking, to tell me what I was thinking, yet I knew this was unfair. I knew that she was being generous and I knew that this was exactly what I needed to hear. I needed to know that it wouldn’t come between us.
‘It won’t come between us, you know.’
‘You cow!’ I laughed at last. ‘Do you remember Mrs Forster?’
‘Yes?’
‘I remember the first time I went to her house and she kept embarrassing me by saying what I was thinking. Am I so transparent that my thoughts are written all over my face? Am I really so mind-bogglingly dull? Is there no mystery behind this forehead?’
‘You’re delirious!’
‘I’m happy. Thank you, Jens.’
We laughed and hugged and got drunk.
We never spoke about what had actually happened in Kenya. In time it became quite natural to speak about my relationship with Johnny. In time their shared past became a story in a photo album with no claims on the present. The only subject where references were oblique was our sex life. It was the only thing that was ever taboo between us. Maybe Jenny had learnt after all that, in some cases, ‘not telling’ is better for everyone.
Dreamy Karen got married and Johnny moved in with me. Slowly we had learnt to create the distance from friendship we needed to allow us to discover each other again, as lovers. Slowly we moved beyond the highs of discovery into the mixed landscape of the stable couple, where gentle power games creep in and hitherto unimportant facets of domestic life become the battleground for asserting control. Shoes, which appear to have walked willy-nilly all over the flat, a teaspoon left in the wrong place, music at the wrong volume – the clash of insignificant habits becomes a reason to doubt compatibility, yet in this landscape there were many moments of comfortable camaraderie and affection, flashes of insight, pleasure shared.
And then everything changed.
Chapter 53
Unlike Jenny, I was never qualified to teach. I drew on my knowledge of learning another language and my imagination. I delved into my own love of Spanish and came to the conclusion that speaking another language allows you to recreate yourself, without the inhibitions you assume, wrongly, are an innate part of your character. I was shocked and delighted to discover that one of my very first students, who spoke English with remarkable fluency, had a stammer in his own language. English held none of the associations that stifled his confidence in Spanish, and speaking a foreign language allowed him to redefine himself.
I sought students whose level of English was already good enough to act as a doorway and I helped them through to the possibilities that lay behind it. I assumed that people were fundamentally creative and that even the sternest bank managers loved fantasy. The teacher’s mask gave protection. The intimacy of one-to-one gave freedom.
There is a lesson I love. Conditional tenses: if X hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have done Y. If I hadn’t done Y, I wouldn’t be here . . .
I ask you to make a list of all the things in your life you feel good about, anything at all: a relationship, a hobby, where you live, an aspect of your job. Then I ask which is the most tenuous, the most ‘surprising’, and we string together a whole list of coincidences that have led to the present. We glorify the past; we turn it into a story.
Then I take you one step further. I ask you to imagine where you would like to be in five years’ time. Who do you want to be with? What do you want to be doing? Now I ask you to jump into this ideal future and explain how you got there. And again we create a story, but this one is even more powerful. This one taps something inside you that the day to day buries. This one dresses your secret desires in the safety of conditionals and you leave the lesson with a strange feeling of optimism. That is my strength.
But there is also a downside. Alone, it is easier to be drawn to regret; there is a darkness in turning life into a string of conditionals. It is a darkness I have learnt to live with.
If Jenny had not got pregnant, she might have stayed with Johnny. They might have worked things out. If she had not pushed him away, he would not have turned to me for understanding, grown so close to me. If I hadn’t accepted his invitation to Kenya, he would probably have met someone else, someone more suitable, someone who had nothing to do with Jenny or me. If Johnny and I had not started a relationship, Jenny and I would have spent more time together than we did. Maybe I could have helped her. Perhaps she would have settled. But she didn’t.
Her bungee jumping became a symbol, a clue to her obsession with escape. If I hadn’t inspired her with second-hand pictures of Angel Falls and Iguazu, perhaps she wouldn’t have decided to go to South America. If she’d chosen another trip, if she’d chosen to do a camel safari in Africa or Australia, to climb a mountain in India or tour the jazz clubs of America, she wouldn’t have been on the Austral flight. She would not have died.
And if she had not died, something in me would not have died. If I had not lost so much, I would not have been driven to find her. I wouldn’t have followed in her footsteps. I wouldn’t have walked out on Johnny without explanation, much as she did, and turned my life upside down by coming to Argentina, where it happened.
If I hadn’t felt somehow guilty, I wouldn’t have blamed myself for not being there for her. If I hadn’t wanted so very badly to understand her, to be near her, I wouldn’t have neede
d her identity to cloak my loneliness. I wouldn’t have sought to discover what it was that I had failed to understand about her. I wouldn’t have tried to reach her by bringing her ghost to life.
But her absence tore me apart. I, Pippa, did not exist, could not exist without Jenny. When I checked into the hotel on the day I arrived in Buenos Aires and they asked me my name, I heard myself say, in a voice that was no longer mine, ‘Jenny.’ My name is Jenny. Pippa is gone.
PART THREE
Chapter 54
My days have a pattern. I have lined them with the soft cushions of routine. I wake early, momentarily thrown by the sunlight funnelling through my small bedroom window and a snatched glimpse of the sea. I walk across the dirt divide between my lodgings and the taverna where I work, past a dog still sleeping and the distant sound of a cock crowing beyond the point where the villas end. Breakfast is the same every morning: fruit and honey, creamy yoghurt and thick, black coffee. I eat alone, grateful, and staring into nowhere.
Mornings are my own. I fill them with chores and the sea. The beach here is made of a kind of shingle, which turns silver underwater. I swim in endless green and feel, not peace, but a calmness that all the routine in the world cannot give me on land. My skin is nutmeg brown in the water. Later I will spend hours on my feet, going back and forth between kitchen and verandah, taking orders, carrying trays heaped with Greek salad, calamari and cold beer for the tourists. They will be both disappointed and relieved to discover that I speak English and will ask me to explain bits of the menu to them, assuming that I speak Greek. They will not know that I have learnt just the bare minimum, that the curiosity which used to make me good at languages is paralysed somewhere inside me. Some will ask me how long I’ve been here, what I’m doing here, and I will feed them reluctant snippets with none of the fervour that flavoured my CV in Buenos Aires.
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