Chains of Sand

by Jemma Wayne

  “Only if you choose to follow the plan.”

  “Okay I’m not articulating it properly. I mean, are you a feminist?”

  “What? Of course I am. I mean, not an out and out burn your bra kind of feminist, but as in I think women are equal to men.”

  “But you’re not burning your – very nice by the way – bra.”

  She grins and adjusts the black strap that has nudged its way into visibility. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no need to. I can vote instead.”

  “Aha.”

  “What are you aha-ing about?”

  “Because it’s not an issue anymore.”

  “Actually-”

  “Okay I know there are feminist ‘issues’ but it’s not the big Issue, for you, here, today.”

  “Okay…”

  “And nothing is. It’s done. We play at adventure. We pretend passion. I just don’t care.”

  She raises an eyebrow again.

  “No but I want to care,” I clarify. “And I know you’ve never been to Tel Aviv-”

  “And will never go to Tel Aviv.”

  “Okay. But the city is amazing. Tripping over itself with newness, dynamism, fire. None of this watered down damp squib nonsense.”

  “So now you’re moving ’cos of the rain? Daniel, have you ever considered that you can find your fire here? You just need to look for it.”

  She drains the last of her wine and gestures to the waiter for another glass. I catch her up and raise my hand to signal for two. Despite a friendship that spans more than ten years we have never actually been out drinking just the two of us. Safia leans forward and rests her chin on her hand. Her hair tumbles about her face. She is truly beautiful, not merely sexy or cute or hot or pretty, but beautiful, more so now at 28 than a decade ago. Her eyes are a deep green and bore into me.

  “Too complicated,” I say.

  “To look for fire?”

  “Maybe to find it.” I touch her hand. I have no idea what I’m doing, but for a moment Safia doesn’t move. For a moment, I think I feel her fingers underneath mine responding. For a moment, her eyes don’t look away. But then we are in the next moment and she gives my hand a friendly squeeze, placing it perfunctorily onto the table.

  “I meant look inside yourself. Not look at me!”

  “Yeah yeah, I know,” I grin. “Stop throwing yourself at me then.”

  “Too complicated, Dan,” she agrees.

  And then we kiss.

  ***

  By the time I arrive back at work the next day I have already eaten my way through an entire plastic container filled with Break Fast leftovers and masturbated twice to the thought of Safia. The kiss was short, quick to dissolve, candyfloss on the tongue. She likes me, always has, and I like her, but nothing is ever going to happen. We established this, agreed upon it. It was in some ways a relief to finally voice the quandary, admit it to each other. On the other hand, we fucked an hour later. On her couch, her heels and skirt still in place, her black bra and excitingly matching knickers peeled off, our normal back and forth banter replaced with a new physical repartee. Now I can’t stop thinking about her. Physically can’t stop. My morning moves with an uncommon intensity, like trying to sleep at gunpoint, everything brought into fiery focus. I call during lunch, but she doesn’t answer. I check my phone three times that afternoon and so many times that evening that I lose count. I text her once, but there is nothing.

  Over the next few days I don’t sleep well. I am dreaming again but for once not about Israel. My head is full of her. Hot, fiery sensations that when I wake leave me drenched in sweat. But on Sunday, Safia finally texts, and tells me she can’t make coffee.

  It shouldn’t matter. It can’t matter. But even as the weekend passes things remain different. I am different. I am awakened. Or alert. Or something else I can’t quite place. But I can’t get her to pick up the phone. I start to feel foolish trying. But try anyway. One morning I forgo the tube and run to the office in an attempt to ease out the knot in my stomach. But it doesn’t work. I still feel knotted, tied. The only remedy is busyness. And as another week trudges by I force myself back into bank chitchat, the rush to finish a report, the calls to clients, the questions from journalists whose inquiries I have to deflect even though I know the answers because I don’t have media training. Structure. Parameters. Entanglement. Slowly, that feeling of fire starts to dwindle. Most nights the following week I am still in the office at 9pm, dinner ordered to my desk or wolfed down much later in front of recorded episodes of television series I will never have enough time to catch up with. Safia cancels another coffee. By the time I get around to washing up the mouldy Yom Kippur remnants, I can no longer smell her perfume on the shirt I was wearing and can barely remember that fleeting feeling of prayerful pause. I begin dreaming again of beaches.

  Most Fridays over the subsequent weeks I make it to my parents’ house for dinner. Sometimes Pete is there with Gaby, sometimes he is not, and occasionally neither of them is present because Gaby has had another row with Mum and is refusing to enter the house. I try a few times to talk with Gaby. Despite her conviction, and despite my recent wading into her kind of water, I’m not certain she’s certain. Though, for the record, I like Pete, and tell her so. We go to TGI Fridays ordering potato skins (no bacon), and nachos, and try to describe to the young waiter the ingredients of a San Francisco cocktail, which no longer appears on the menu. These days, neither of us would select this restaurant as a place to dine, but when Gaby passed her driving test she would sometimes pick me up from school and bring me here. I think she was on some kind of mission for a while to make sure I was okay. Dad’s business was floating and Mum was flat out with the dental practice, and it was just after Grandma Adele died, and nobody seemed to notice that I was getting more migraines again, so I suppose she felt like somebody should check in. It feels therefore like the right venue for checking in on her.

  We don’t unravel anything shocking. She loves Pete, that’s it. In a ‘Can’t live without him’ way, Dan, and don’t want to. You’ll know what I mean when you find it. Besides there is not enough time for elongated probing. Some weekends I spend every daylight hour and part of the night at the office. Others I smoke with Robert or party hard at clubs with money I rarely have enough time to spend, on girls who are never as perfect as Hayley or imperfectly perfect as Safia.

  For another three weeks straight Safia cancels coffee. The last time, when pressed for an explanation, she gives the simple response: 2 complicated. I have ruined everything and I text her this. She doesn’t reply. I decide not to push, I don’t think I can bear another cancellation, I don’t know why it is frustrating me so much anyway, I don’t know how we got here. Then late one evening she texts when I am already in bed and suggests dinner. We cannot find a date for nearly a month but I type the arrangement into my phone, I set a reminder, and for a while I abandon my Internet searches about making aliyah. This is not intentional, but I am busy searching for restaurants where I can take Safia. A week or so before our meeting I discover in the inside pocket of my suit jacket the crumpled admittance ticket I’d needed for the first Rosh Hashanah shul service. I discard it and replace it with a lottery scratch card.

  Without noticing, the memory of autumn begins to fade. I buy a new coat and wrap myself deep within its woollen protection, then fold it carefully on my lap making a good Kindle rest for tube journeys that remain too hot. I am reading a book Safia suggested months ago and use the notes function so that I’ll remember the witty commentary I am constructing inside my head. At the beginning of November, the world prepares for Christmas and I dutifully buy greetings cards for the people who will expect them before arranging to be out of the country for as much of the season as possible. In the end, work commitments meant that I never made it to Israel for the wedding in October, but Robert and Debbie are going out to visit Debbie’s sister over Christmas and have invited me to join. When I tell my parents t
hey raise their eyebrows but do not comment. They are spending a week in New York themselves and Gaby is going skiing so it is comfortable to interpret my choice of destination purely as a desire to seek out the sun. Plus, they are tiptoeing, as though by not mentioning Israel I might forget it was ever something I wanted. But of course I haven’t forgotten. Even with the whisper of Safia I haven’t forgotten. I carry it with me like the smile I can never quite muster for a 6am tube journey; an emotion I know I’m capable of, but don’t, yet, have the inclination to express. I wonder if Safia will mention it, but on the day of our dinner she cancels again.

  ***

  Now

  4

  It is difficult to concentrate on the whiteness of the slopes, their purity and unblemished surface. Pete wanted both of them to rise early to appreciate this newness and Gaby is trying hard to embrace the snowy clarity; but even at the top of the run, standing on the tip of the world, she is distracted and cannot escape the feeling that something serious, something important, is about to be lost.

  She assumes that it is Daniel. She didn’t say anything to her parents about his trip to Israel. She didn’t want to say anything because their father is insisting that the whole moving thing was a whim, like Daniel’s teenage sherbet straw empire or the surfing malarkey. He thinks there’s no way Daniel would give up the life he’s jumped through a million hoops to construct. Their mother thinks so too. Despite the current volatility of their own relationship, Gaby has had enough conversations with her mother to see that she is easing into a new confidence regarding Daniel, one that increases in direct proportion to the amount of time lapsed without the subject of Israel being broached. But they are wrong. Daniel does not just forget things. He thinks. He plans. When he was eight their mother offhandedly told him that he could only have Mortal Kombat for the Playstation if he bought it himself – a ploy to make sure he never got one – and she didn’t think of it again until almost a year later when Daniel produced the necessary sum from money he had apparently earned from relatives or found down the crack in the sofa. It is not just a holiday. It is a test, a trial. But it is not a fair one. The sun always has a satisfying flavour and disguises as sand the dust beneath one’s feet.

  Gaby digs her poles into the fresh snow and begins her descent. She has skied since childhood and the movement up and down comes naturally, the letting go, leaning forwards even when trepidation warns to lean back. Pete however has picked for them an icy black run and she should be concentrating. She fell hard yesterday and it has jolted her confidence, it has made her more aware of the rocks to the side, to the edge of their posted path. She imagines Daniel navigating similar rocks but in a deep blue sea and on a different sort of skis. She wants to tell him that this leisure, this feeling of flying, this is not how life will be, not the reality. The reality is bombs, explosions, guns. He does not understand what it means to have real enemies. He says things have changed, things are calmer, that the whole world is a warzone now. He reminds her that he was only two trains ahead of the one that was bombed on the 7th of July. But how can he fail to see that this way, he is choosing to put himself on that train? He is Jewish but surely he is British more. He is not one of those fanatics who clothe themselves in the garb of another century and refuse to see that the world has moved on. He is not an untrammelled Zionist unable to see the faults of the Jewish State. He is not religious. Not without success. Not without anything. Why does he want to trade it all in? For what? Israeli girls? Heat? God? Is there even one?

  A snowboarder swerves past Gaby, too close, and she falls hard for the second time in as many days. It doesn’t hurt, but now Pete is out of sight and one of her skis is half way across the run. She will have to pigeon step to it slowly. She has never enjoyed this element of skiing; having to push on because there is no option to go back, knowing all the while that an apparition may suddenly appear from behind and knock her down.

  When she reaches the bottom of the slope, Pete is waiting for her. He has lifted his goggles to peer towards the run and his normally bright eyes are a clouded blue. “What happened to you?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” She leans over her skis to kiss his sunburnt nose. “I just fell again. Lost my ski. I don’t know why I’m going so badly.”

  “You’ve been in another world since we got here. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She nods but he insists that they take a break, have some coffee, which really means a weak shot of caffeine swimming in milk and smothered in cream. How can she resist? They prop up their skis and move without consultation to the café they both love. This is not their first trip to this resort in Val-d’Isère and they are no longer careful to explore, accepting quietly that they are happier with the comfort of known pleasures than the risk of places still obscure. She cradles a hot mug in her slowly defrosting hands and tells him she has been thinking about Daniel. Pete nods sympathetically and lets her vent, but he is not as concerned about her brother as she would like him to be. To be fair, it is not the first time she has brought Daniel up and she is relaying nothing new, besides which Pete finds it difficult to understand why she is spending so much time obsessing about a sibling who is grown up and has a mind of his own. Pete has lived away from his family since the age of seven when his parents sent him and his twin sister to boarding school, separate ones. They speak regularly, but it doesn’t bother him that his parents live in Singapore or that his sister has recently moved to Dubai. It makes their gatherings more special, he says, the time they spend more precious. She can see that there is some truth to this. They have been sharing the small chalet Pete’s parents own with all of his family – which is now extended to include a brother-in-law complete with bouncing baby boy – for almost a week and they are yet to have a single argument. Pete’s mother fusses too much over everybody’s warmth, his sister Jane’s smoke-scratched voice directs traffic too often, Pete himself has regressed into what she assumes is a teenaged insistence on leaving wet towels on the floor, and his father is an inordinately loud snorer; but nobody has said anything. It is as if each one of them knows the fragility of their relationships, the short time they have to work on them, and so they treat them with extra care. Either that or they simply don’t know one another well enough to be brazen with their opinions, interacting as she would with her friends not her blood, always with just a thin veil of civilisation and restraint. Perhaps this is how she will become with Daniel if he moves away. Perhaps they will finally stop squabbling. Perhaps it will be good. Suddenly however she longs to be small again and running madly through the house, chasing Daniel who has stolen her diary, both of them being shouted at by their mother to be quiet, to just stop.

  Pete finishes his coffee and signals to the waitress to bring the bill. “Ready to go up again?” he asks her. “We should try to get in a good morning ’cos you know we have to stop early this afternoon.”

  She nods. She has remembered. It is Christmas Eve and they have promised to be back by three to help decorate the tree. It is a hallowed tradition for Pete’s family and she has been part of it for the past two years, mucking in as they hang the decorations they have wrapped in tissue paper and packed away the year before, smiling at the explanations they gleefully offer about when each one was picked or how a particular china reindeer came to have a broken leg. Her freshness to the gathering is almost becoming a tradition in itself, she the reason they are able to tell stories of times she wasn’t present at to remember for herself. She wonders if it will always be this way, if she will always be a little bit on the outside, or if in time they will forget that their histories are not the same.

  They manage to arrive back at the chalet only a few minutes late. Susan and Keith are already drinking eggnog while their daughter Jane struggles to contain baby Henry who is attached to her breast and grasping the feeding apron she is attempting to use for modesty and with which Gaby can’t imagine ever bothering amidst family. She will have to adjust to this she supposes, when it is their baby,
her boob. Or else shock them. “Tree in five minutes,” Jane tells them. Pete helps Gaby to lift her skis onto the rack in the hallway then they shake the last bits of snow off their jackets before stripping down to their matching thermals, and joining the rest of the family in the lounge. Susan hands them both a glass of eggnog and quickly the room fills with discarded pieces of tissue paper, multicoloured shards of tinsel littering the floor, and anecdotes Gaby pretends not to have already heard. When the last of the sun disappears, they turn on the fairy lights and marvel at the way they set off the tree. The twinkling reminds Gaby of the remnants of the candles her own mother burns on Friday nights until they have disappeared, and suddenly she realises that today is Friday. Usually she would be preparing to drive the short distance to her parents’ house where they would break the challah, drink wine. The image makes her feel uneasy, detached slightly, like when she was 11 at some sleep-over at a girlfriend’s house and it was finally time to sleep and the sugar was wearing off and all at once she was acutely aware that she didn’t have her own bed or the stuffed animal she was too old to admit to wanting. But it is strange now to find herself missing such small customs, such trivial, irrational, antiquated things.

  “Gaby,” Pete cuts in. “What do you think?” The tone of his voice tells her that he is repeating a question. “Are you daydreaming again?”

  “It’s lovely,” Gaby answers, touching one of the sparkling lights. “It’s beautiful.”

  “You’re tired sweetie aren’t you?” Susan says, pouring her some more eggnog and smothering her with a blanket. “We’ve had a hectic few days haven’t we? You need a good night’s sleep.”

  “Susan’s eggnog will see that you sleep well!” Keith chuckles.

  “Give some to Henry then,” Jane jokes.

  They all laugh, and Pete slips his arm around her, and Gaby takes a sip.