Alentejo Blue

by Monica Ali

  ‘Nice place,’ said Stanton. ‘It’s got . . .’

  ‘Potential,’ said China. ‘Hear that? Jay’s back with the goats.’

  The bells were low and rich and full of honey. They walked back in time to see Jay run down the slope and through the herd, flapping his arms and grinning. Ruby was there, wearing a cleanish dress and the butterfly sunglasses though it was nearly dusk. Stanton faced her directly, the others at his back. He was close enough to smell her, but for the stink from the cow and the shit. There was something about this place that made you stop caring about anything. Her tongue flickered out and touched the mole above her lip. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ said Stanton, silently. She watched his lips. ‘Yes,’ she said in her ugly nasal voice. ‘I’m going.’

  Chrissie came outside. ‘One of these days,’ she said, petulant, ‘she’ll get herself killed.’ She had a bucket of chicken feed in her hand. ‘Want to come with me?’ Chrissie gestured vaguely at China and Jay moving among the goats, meaning they were occupied.

  He walked behind her watching the way her backside moved beneath the thin fabric of her skirt, the ridges rising and falling on her calves, the red rings of bites around her ankles. His throat began to ache. They passed round the side of the willow to the furthest outbuilding. The sky was turning red. Her lips were hideous orange. She put the bucket down and took a step back, kicking it over. He kissed her without taking her in his arms. She did not seem surprised. She did not attempt to hold him but her tongue was active, forceful. Brandy and a sharp tang of vomit. ‘Back there,’ he said and went up to the wall. He turned her round and lifted her skirt and made short work of it. He reached forward briefly and circled her wrists with his hands, the scabs pressed into his palms. She did not cry out or move her hips or even deepen her breath. ‘Thank you,’ he said and zipped his trousers. Behind them the chickens pecked the ground. When he went to the truck and untied the rope the calf stood over the severed head and cried.

  He went straight to his notebooks and flicked back and forth to find the place where he had listed Blake quotations, all those he thought he might be able to use. Here it was on the fourteenth page. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. He poured a drink, turned on his computer and worked long into the night.

  Jay came the day after next. It was the usual time but Stanton was still writing. ‘I’m getting behind,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, give me a few days, I’ll come over and see you.’

  ‘Don’t matter,’ said Jay, turning. His Manchester United top hung almost to his knees.

  Stanton followed him out. ‘You understand, right?’

  ‘Don’t matter.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to come.’

  Jay stopped. Without turning he said, ‘Yes it is.’

  Stanton suppressed a sigh. How did he end up looking after this boy? He’d had enough. ‘Listen, the reason I came out here . . . Look at me, Jay. Look.’

  But the boy would not.

  Stanton squeezed the back of his neck. Too many hours in front of the screen. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I could use a break. How about a Coke?’

  ‘Don’t matter,’ said the boy.

  ‘Will you stop saying that? Stop being a baby and get yourself a drink. It’s doesn’t, anyway. And it does.’

  They sat on the terrace steps, not speaking. Jay pulled a long string of gum out of his mouth, wrapped it round a finger and sucked it back for another chew. He crouched low to watch ants. He turned over a beetle that had got stuck on its back.

  ‘How’s the puppy?’ asked Stanton.

  ‘She ran away.’ Jay scratched in the dust with a twig.

  ‘She might come back.’

  ‘No,’ said Jay. ‘They never do.’

  Stanton searched for something wise or comforting to say. ‘Got any spare gum?’ he said.

  ‘No. Tina’s having babies soon. She’s the pig.’

  ‘Great.’ He wondered if Dieter was right about Ruby, and if Jay knew. ‘Jay, don’t you have any friends around here? Your own age, I mean.’

  ‘At school,’ said Jay. ‘Only see them at school, really. Thought you said it’s doesn’t, anyway.’

  ‘What I said . . . never mind.’

  Jay stood up. ‘That’s me mum’s car.’

  Chrissie had on a floppy straw hat and a long skirt. She’s dressed up, thought Stanton.

  ‘I’ve told you about bothering Harry.’

  ‘I invited him.’

  ‘Watch this, Mum.’ Jay ran up to the terrace. ‘I can walk on my hands now. Been practising.’

  ‘Don’t show off, Jay,’ said Chrissie.

  ‘Look, Mum. See this.’

  ‘All right, Jay. We’ve all seen it.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Stanton. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Your dad wants you,’ said Chrissie. ‘He needs some help.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘How should I know?’ said Chrissie, whining. ‘You best get going.’

  Jay rubbed his head. ‘How about you?’

  ‘How about me? You can walk back. I’m on my way to the shops.’

  ‘How about you?’ said Jay.

  ‘Kids!’ She tried a laugh. ‘I’ll be going in a minute. I’m just having a word with Harry first.’

  Jay stayed where he was.

  Stanton smiled and rocked on his heels. Someone told him once that the children of alcoholics become adept at sensing mood swings, reading body language.

  ‘I’ll wait for you at the car,’ said Jay. ‘You can give me a lift back to the road.’

  ‘Well,’ said Stanton. Thank God the boy had stayed.

  Chrissie tipped her head to one side. ‘I could kill him.’

  ‘So,’ said Stanton, ‘you’re going shopping.’

  Chrissie rubbed her arms. ‘You bastard,’ she said softly, getting up.

  A forest fire burned for three days and nights on the hills that hid the sea. A firefighter was hurt, only slightly. The newspaper reported sixty-seven dead in the heatwave. Stanton kept a bottle of water on his desk and it grew warm before he had finished a page.

  Eventually he came to a lull. He went out and bought a football for Jay and a vase for Chrissie and a bottle of cachaca and a bag of limes to make caipirinhas. He picked up a pair of sunglasses with diamanté studs along the arms but put them back again.

  ‘Mate,’ said China, who had come out at the sound of the truck, ‘let’s have a fucking drink.’

  He had thought of it as a visit to see Jay but he realized now that it wasn’t.

  ‘Been out all day with the goats,’ said China. ‘Something special like. People don’t realize.’

  Chrissie took the vase without a word. Jay whooped at the sight of the football, which made Stanton feel bad. Ruby, thankfully, was out. He explained how to make the caipirinhas with lime juice and sugar and plenty of ice and Chrissie went to the kitchen. She set doilies on the tray, one under each glass.

  ‘Blinding,’ said China. ‘Jay, take that fucking ball outside.’

  ‘What do you like about them?’ said Stanton. ‘The goats.’ He watched China spread against his chair, the slight tremor in his hand as he brought the glass to his lips. It was China he had come for; some atavistic instinct he appealed to, a desire to see the demons at work.

  ‘Goats,’ said China, his voice dragging like a broken exhaust, ‘you look at ’em long enough you see the universe. Good and evil, love and war, God and the Devil. Know what I mean?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Chrissie.

  ‘Shut up,’ said China, not quite shouting. ‘Who asked you? Where’s my lighter? There’s one billy . . .’ He leaned forward so that Stanton could see the scarlet rims of his eyes. ‘He don’t know when to stop. He’s so horny I daren’t turn my back on him.’ He slapped his thigh and hooted, a little spray of snot landing in his lap. ‘We think we’re that much better than animals but I tell you something for free – you watch ’em long enough you learn a lot. A g
oat with the horn is like a man with a mission. Made by the same Creator to the same design. Yes, you certainly learn a lot.’ He lit the joint and passed it to Stanton.

  Stanton took a drag and managed not to cough. He passed it to Chrissie and their fingers brushed together. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The quotation entered his head and he saw at once how to rework a passage that had given him trouble.

  China got out of his chair. He looked around, picked up a filthy T-shirt and blew his nose on it. ‘I’m going to check on Tina. She’s a little darling, she is.’ At the doorway he looked over his shoulder. ‘Listen, mate, my home is your home. Anything you want, you take it.’

  Stanton followed Chrissie into the kitchen. The roof was plastic sheeting over untreated wood beams. There was a puddle of something – it had not rained for weeks – in the middle of the floor. Chrissie put more ice in a plastic bag and smashed it with a hammer. Stanton slipped his arm around from behind and held her wrist. He felt her grip tighten on the hammer before she let it drop. It was over quickly and this time they did not kiss. When they went back to the sitting room Ruby was there, hugging her knees to her chest.

  He was drinking in the bar next door to the Casa do Povo and thinking it was a long time since he had driven home not drunk when he noticed her. He ordered a pineapple Sumol and took it over to her table. She had a pink satin handbag with a stain on it and a beaded scarf that she had placed on the chair opposite, as if reserving the space. Stanton knew she would be alone. He moved her things and sat down.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she said, her voice coming out gassy.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Stanton.

  She turned her head and chewed her lip and then flashed back at him. ‘If you’re going to sit there I’ll have a beer.’

  ‘I’d be delighted to buy you one,’ he said, ‘when you’re eighteen.’

  ‘Ha, ha, very funny, my name’s Bugs Bunny.’

  ‘Good one,’ said Stanton. ‘Look, I’ll move when your boyfriend gets here. You’re meeting your boyfriend, aren’t you?’ He glanced at her stomach but there was nothing he could tell from that.

  Ruby looked out of the window. She reached up and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘Deaf doesn’t mean stupid.’

  ‘I know,’ said Stanton, speaking the words aloud this time. ‘I’m sorry.’ The shame seemed to spread from his anus, which contracted and released and contracted again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. She kept her hearing aid turned to him like a steady reproach. ‘I’ll buy you that beer if you like.’ Nothing. In the pit of his stomach there was a deep absence. He was sorry for her and he was sorry for himself. He thought of the pub at the top end of the Archway Road, and the horse brasses round the fireplace. He could walk in there most evenings and find someone to talk to; Roger or Connor or Sinead or a whole bunch of them to bitch and moan and sneer with.

  ‘Not much to do, is there, in the village? Not at your age.’

  Maybe she really could not hear him. A light down spread out from the hairline at her ear to the puppy-fat along her jaw. The mole beneath her nose looked ticklish, like a crumb sticking there. Have it your way, thought Stanton, shaking it all off.

  She heard him standing up or saw from the corner of her eye. ‘You can always find something,’ she said. ‘If you try hard enough.’

  ‘I expect so.’ He sat down and wished he had moved faster.

  ‘Party in Milfontes tonight. Should be good.’ She did the thing with the tip of her tongue reaching up to the mole.

  Christ, he thought. Here I am.

  China came through the door as if he meant to take it off its hinges. He was drunker than usual. His jeans looked as if they would stand on their own. ‘Mate,’ he bellowed, ‘let’s have a fucking drink.’ He noticed his daughter. ‘Get yourself home now. It’s late.’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Ruby. ‘And don’t fucking shout. Showing me up as per usual.’

  China leaned over the table, hulking his shoulders forward. ‘Showing you up? Showing you up? You’ve shown yourself up. A long fucking time ago, my girl.’ His jaw hung open and Stanton gazed inside at the red and the black.

  China straightened up, the fight gone out of him. ‘Ah well, fuck it. Do what you like.’

  ‘I will,’ said Ruby. She gathered her bag and scarf and went out, everybody watching the swing of her hips.

  ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ said China when he had lined up the brandies and the beers, ‘I don’t mind telling you that in the old days I’d have knocked her for six. Not my style any more.’ He lifted his drink and spilled a little down his chin. ‘You got to let things be.’

  Stanton was weary. ‘Your philosophy of life.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said China. It was just about possible to make out the whites of his eyes beneath the web of red veins. ‘When I was big on control, I was really big on control, know what I mean, and I controlled a patch of Yarmouth, ran nearly over to fucking Cromer, know what I mean, and what I said –’ he slammed his glass on the table – ‘went.’

  My muse, thought Stanton, stabbed through with resentment. ‘What brought you out here then?’

  China smiled, loose-lipped, slack-jawed. ‘Mate,’ he said slowly, as if to comfort a dying man. ‘Mate. What brought any of us? On the run, ain’t we? On the fucking run.’

  Connor, at last, sent a letter: six pages of black Mont Blanc rollerball on pale blue Basildon Bond. Five pages of dreary news wittily rendered and on the sixth page this:

  Roger, you may recall, was due to publish his masterpiece in July. Well, that should have told him everything he needed to know. Eight long years of toil and his publisher decides on July? The month for chick-lit, the collected bon mots of pre-pubescent columnists and monographs on crop rotation in fourteenth-century Westphalia. Of course he hasn’t left the house since.

  Stanton lay back on the bed. He looked at his toenails, ingrained with dirt, the right big toenail chipped and peeling away at the corner, the nail on the little toe black though he did not remember banging it. He lay there gazing at his feet until darkness took them and the cicadas made audible his thoughts: insistent, streaming, unintelligible.

  He had taken the truck to the garage to get the clutch looked at. When he got back Chrissie was waiting for him.

  ‘I’ll have to start locking the door,’ he said.

  She had her arms wrapped around her chest, her hip bones were a pair of razor shells and her pubic hair was surprisingly dark. ‘I thought we should. At least once. You know, with our clothes off.’

  ‘Chrissie,’ he said, unbuckling, ‘do you think Ruby saw us?’

  She turned on her stomach and spoke into the pillow so he could not catch the words. He ran his palm down the ridge of her spine and on to the shallow slope of her buttocks. She put her arms behind her back, wrists together. There was a spot of blood on the sheets from her forearm. ‘Turn over,’ he said.

  She obeyed him but when he looked into her face there was nothing he could read except a kind of helpless defiance. He had seen once a picture of a protesting nun in a distant country who wore a similar expression as the flames licked up her robes.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Chrissie.

  ‘Do you think she saw us?’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she said, and pulled his head towards hers.

  She came nearly every day. When she was not there he sat on the terrace spitting olive pits into an old can or shuffling a deck of cards, or he chopped wood and stacked it in the shed for the cool winter months that were not far off. He did no writing.

  They got into a rhythm. When he heard her car he went to the bedroom and lit candles though the flames disappeared in the sunlight. He liked the way she dozed on her side with her hands between her knees. He liked the way she shivered when he ran his hand down her back. She always sighed as she took off her bra.

  ‘What’s the point of these?’ she said, blowing out one of the candles.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s romantic,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to like it.’

  Whatever pleasure she took she kept largely to herself.

  ‘Run away with me,’ he said.

  She was making the bed. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

  ‘Venice,’ he said, catching her round the waist. ‘Monte Carlo. Rio.’

  ‘I’ve lost my hair slide,’ she said. ‘Did you see me put it down?’

  He asked about Ruby. ‘She was,’ said Chrissie. ‘But she isn’t now. Miscarriage.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Stanton.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  She scratched her arms until they bled.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Jay came only once when she was there. Stanton pulled on his trousers and went to the door. ‘Come back in a couple of hours, can you?’ The car, he thought. Jesus. ‘Your mum came round. She’s in the woods. Thought she might find you there.’

  ‘Tina,’ said Jay. He put his hand up to shield his eyes as he looked out towards the corks.

  ‘She had her litter?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jay. ‘She’s et ’em though.’ For a moment he looked solemn and then he began to giggle. ‘They’d have been et in the end anyway. That’s what me dad says.’

  Chrissie was dressed and sitting at his desk. ‘English,’ she said, ‘was my best subject at school.’

  They ran out of steam, got to the end of each other. They both knew it. Still, he had to say something and it would be a delicate business. He sat out on the steps shuffling cards and waiting.