by Helen Walsh
He ducks his face down to meet hers, and still holding the creature, he tips her chin up with the tip of his thumb and moves his lips towards hers. She closes her eyes for one second, willing it to happen, before turning sharply away and stretching her neck so she’s looking right through him into Emma’s room. The door is open.
‘No.’
She brings her head back round to face him. His eyes seek hers.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Please.’
She gulps. It hurts.
‘Once,’ she whispers. ‘Then we go back.’ Her breathing is staccato. She swallows hard, fighting to control her pitch and timbre. ‘Yes? We go back to how it was before.’
He nods. She takes a step back, and away from him. He drops to his haunches and releases the lizard onto the balcony. He stays where he is, squatting, staring at the waxed floor.
Jenn steps over to him; stands over him. She loosens the belt, slips her bathrobe open. He lifts his chin, rests his head against her thigh. She is still swollen and he finds her easily enough. Her thighs are trembling slightly and he grips her buttocks to steady her. His tongue is measured and precise.
She is aware of Gregory humming on the other side of the wall, a plug being pulled, and a little way behind her, their daughter making her frustration known.
She rocks with him, muttering and whimpering. Weightless. Her whole body lifted; cut adrift and yet anchored firmly to his mouth. A tenuous, tingling thread. And her legs give way so she becomes the thread. She can feel it approaching, a gentle burr like the rail tracks before the train approaches, intensifying; and she can taste the metal of the tracks in her mouth as his tongue pushes her to the edge.
He pulls away, and it is so sudden, so cruel, that she almost lashes out. He gets to his feet. There’s just a sliver of space between them as she stands there, panting, hanging wide open. She tries to find his eye line, pleading with him to finish her off, but he will not look at her. There’s no semblance of dignity, now – she doesn’t care what he thinks. She just wants it, this, purged from her body.
‘Do you want me to beg? Is that what you want?’
He shakes his head, tucks a piece of hair behind her ears tenderly. His hand reaches down between her legs, cupping her, holding her in, stopping her from falling apart right there in front of him. She groans loudly and pushes herself down into his hand and tries to wriggle against it but he pulls away. He stands up, pulls down his shorts.
‘Look.’
She closes her eyes. Shakes her head.
‘We can’t,’ she begins. His mouth is on hers; his tongue is jabbing around her gums, the wrinkled roof of her mouth. He pulls away a second time.
‘Look at me,’ he says.
She looks him in the eye. She reaches out and cups his balls and squeezes gently. Nathan closes his eyes, bites his lip. Then he steps into her, furious. And when it hits her, it slams her hard and fast, as life once had.
She’s steeling herself for some kind of rebuke as she secures the belt of her dressing gown in a knot and taps meekly on Emma’s door; but in the stretch of silence that follows, Jenn is no longer sure. Her pulse soars. Her fate drives through her.
Emma saw them. She’s drowned herself.
The voice that calls her in is shy and unsuspecting and Jenn lingers outside the en suite and waits for her pulse to slow. On the other side of the wall she can hear the scrape of Greg’s chair as he settles at the desk once again; and from Nathan’s room, music: some plaintive Middle Eastern melody played out over a techno drum beat. The villa resumes its proverbial rhythm. She pushes open the door.
Emma is sitting in the bath, the plastered ankle elevated on the ledge. The water has almost drained.
‘I’ve washed myself,’ she says. ‘Just need some help getting out.
She is bashful in her nakedness, her arms folded across her breasts like a pair of bat’s wings and, not for the first time, Jenn is struck by how much, and how quickly, their relationship has altered. It wasn’t that long ago that Emma would sail into their bathroom, usually without knocking, and take a shower while Jenn was in the bath. Sometimes she’d wander in just to chat. She’d perch on the toilet with her knees tucked under her chin, or she’d sit on the lip of the bathtub and dangle her feet in.
She should have been better prepared. Jenn’s friends never tired of discussing the dreaded teens, they joked how adolescence had made monsters of their delightful children; but when it happened to Emma, she struggled. Jenn could never quite grant her the same level of understanding and sympathy that her friends did their spiky teens. They seemed to buzz off it, forever trying to best one another over whose child had committed the most despicable crime, and they’d serve up their anecdotes with a sprinkling of amusement, a flash of pride. Jenn didn’t get it. There was nothing intriguing about Emma’s mood swings, nothing funny about the way she spoke to her these days. It was sad and it was hurtful. After everything Jenn had done; everything Jenn had given up. It felt like betrayal.
‘So how are we going to do this? Let’s see …’ Jenn makes a conscious effort to twist her face away from Emma’s body as she leans forward and slips an arm beneath her armpit. ‘Put your right hand around the top of my back.’ She bends from the knees and takes the weight of her with her hips, like she was taught before hoists became compulsory. But Jenn is out of practice: it’s been a long time since she manually lifted a patient, and she can’t quite lever her upwards from this awkward angle. She releases her grip and lowers Emma back down into the bath. Emma’s breasts are exposed for a moment. Their womanly fullness, contrasted with Emma’s childlike coyness, brings Jenn close to tears.
She looks away and tries again – ‘Ow! Ow!’ – and fails. ‘Sorry, Em. Bit out of practice.’
‘Well remind me to stay clear of whichever nursing home you’re in charge of when I’m a decrepit old cow.’
Jenn draws herself upright and laughs. She places her hands on her lower back and digs deep with her thumbs. For a few fleeting seconds, what happened out there on the landing – didn’t. She’s here, immersed in the moment, enjoying this rare episode of levity with her daughter.
Emma extends her hands, impatient now. ‘Come on, it’s not like Health and Safety are watching. Just pull me out.’
Jenn nods. She’s aware of her own heavy breathing, lifting her chest; the solid choke of shame in her throat as she takes her daughter’s hands and hauls her up.
She sits on the bed and towel-dries Emma’s hair. Rubs sun cream into her shoulders. She’s drawn to a beauty spot, the size of a pin prick, on the back of her neck. She can’t help but think it: does he know it exists? Does he kiss it? Where else does he kiss? She will not dignify these thoughts. At the other end of the corridor, he turns up his music. Greg slams their bedroom door. Jenn’s eyes go back to the beauty spot. Back to the landing. It happened. You did that. No going back. Her brain is boiling. She cannot cool it down. She has to get out. She helps Emma into her shorts and makes her excuses.
She lies back on the lounger. She can hear laughter from down on the cala. The incessant slap of flip-flops on the beach road. The gecko is there on the patio; it freezes for a moment and pins her with its globular eyes. What? You saw nothing. It zips along the edge of the pool, disappears into the scrub. Upstairs Greg is closing the shutters. The music has stopped. Under the glare of the sun, none of it seems real.
14
‘Never really seen the point of the guided tour,’ Greg says, gesturing to the coachload of tourists inching past on the hairpin bend. ‘I mean you only truly know a place if you discover it for yourself.’
They are ten minutes into their journey to Sóller and the car’s puny air conditioning is yet to kick in. The air is dense and suffocating, yet Greg is still insistent that the air con will start to function, any minute; he’s asked them to keep the windows up.
Jenn lowers her face to the air-vents. A wheeze of something lukewarm wafts out across her chin. Exasperated, she winds down the window. Greg
mumbles, ‘Thanks for that.’ She pretends not to hear. The rush of cool air on her cheeks is gorgeous. She dangles an arm out, sweeping the roof of the pine forests and the sea with the tips of her fingers. She can taste the ocean. Greg gives up and winds down his window, too. She tilts her head right out and trains her eyes on the sea. The road twists and dips through the headland.
They hear the surge of the accelerator before they turn the hairpin bend and almost run into the back of it: a white Citroën van, splayed across the middle of the road. The driver is revving the engine, struggling against the incline. Boxes and suitcases have been stacked haphazardly onto its roof. A skinny girl in denim shorts stands with her back to them, directing the driver through his wing mirror. Greg slows to a stop behind the van. He clicks his tongue, slaps his thigh with one hand. Jenn shares his frustration. The stalled jalopy is falling to bits – the rear bumper has come away on one side, and the exhaust rattles and judders as it pumps a flume of dark grey smoke into the mountain air. On the other side of the van, in the oncoming direction, a line of cars and coaches is starting to build and this, in turn, is fusing yet more panic into the driver’s thinking. He revs again, inching forward minutely before slamming on the handbrake as its tyres smoulder and the van slips back again. The girl slaps the van’s back doors hard, warning the driver to brake. She goes round to the front of the van, shaking her head. The driver revs again. The jalopy lurches forward again; rolls back.
‘Are they stoned or something?’ Jenn says. Her voice is carefully modulated, free of prejudice.
Gregory blows through his cheeks.
‘No, not stoned, just very dim-witted.’ He extends an arm out in front of her, points impatiently for the water bottle. She passes him the plastic container, warm now, and he drains the remaining few inches in one go. He holds it out for Jenn to take back. Her hand stays resolutely on her lap, forcing him to slot the empty bottle in the side compartment of his door.
‘What now then?’ She sighs. ‘Can we turn back and go another way?’
‘Jenn. Sóller is just there,’ he whines, pointing across the bay.
She hunches her shoulders and stares out of the window. Greg runs a finger down the side of her arm, and over-compensates with a smile. He points once more to the honey-coloured town resting in the bowl of the valley. ‘Diez minutos, once this prick gets his act together.’
The van stutters forward, rolls back. Back and forth, back and forth – it goes on in this vein. Greg shuts down the engine, sticks his head right out of the window with his eyes shut to the sun.
‘You might want to call the restaurant, Jenn. Tell them to push us back.’
‘I didn’t book,’ she murmurs.
Still leaning out of the window, he grunts at the earthen cliff face.
‘Guess we’ll be eating in the square after all, then.’
‘Come on, Greg! Like, when have we ever, in all our time coming here, needed to make a lunch reservation? Even the feted Residencia,’ and there’s an edge to ‘feted’. ‘We walked straight in last year and bagged a prime spec.’
He reaches out, finds her knee, and gently taps it. Taps out a little note of frustration. Like he always used to with Emma when she was younger; when he had to explain something about the world that she really ought to have known.
‘Darling,’ he cocks his head, half turns to her, ‘when have we ever been here in high season?’
He’s right, of course. Until this year, they’d been habitual crowd-dodgers. Early June, or mid-September were favourites, but they’d been in deep mid-winter, too, and loved it. Though this year, Emma’s exams had put paid to that. July, the coach tours, the squalid heat – it was all brand new to them. She sits low in her seat, feeling a touch martyred, and badly regretting her decision to rise to him. The voice that comes from behind them takes them both by surprise.
‘One of the rare privileges of a fee-paying school, I guess.’
Greg rotates his whole upper body to face the unlikely antagonist. His top lip, curled up and pocked with beads of sweat, is trembling slightly.
‘Privileges? How do you mean?’ he says.
‘Licence to take the kids out whenever you please.’ Nathan’s voice is level, reasonable.
Jenn turns her head back to the cobalt sea, wishing with all her heart that she could stand on that stony ledge and plunge right off, and in. She’s with Nathan on the school thing, of course – but she can’t let him know. It’s Jenn who has stumped up the high season ransom – almost a thousand euros more expensive for their flights alone. It’s Jenn who gave up criticising and debating Greg’s parental decisions; decisions she’s seldom had a say in. It’s his little girl, after all. It’s she who lost her mother, no matter what epithet Jenn bestows upon herself; whatever she does for Emma.
She can feel Greg bristling, hungry to take him on – but any kind of retort would seem churlish. Childish. There is nothing Greg can do but sit back, watch the van – and stew. The grating gear change, again; the engine revving madly, the jump forward and the almost immediate listing back. Back and forth. The wheels spin wildly and the van jerks from side to side. For one moment it seems like the tyres have got some purchase on the gritty surface, but then the engine cuts out and this time the van gathers pace, rolling back towards them.
Greg, still stewing, is slow on the uptake and Jenn reaches across and belts the horn with the balls of both fists. The van rolls and rolls. She can see it before he does and it is simple: if the van builds up enough momentum, it will push them over the cliff ledge.
Greg fires up the engine, spinning his head round wildly through the back window to gauge their options. Bumper to bumper all the way back to the bend: ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ He pumps the accelerator, slams into gear, moves forward a few feet and tries to reverse away from the edge of the cliff – but there’s not much more than a foot or two’s leeway before he realises they’re penned in. He gives it one last wild swing of the wheel and tries to move back, then he surrenders with a howl. He calls out her name and ducks down into the dashboard. And the moment is no longer than the space between the beat of her eyelids, but it is enough.
Jenn hears the clap of a hunter’s gun on the other side of the mountain. She opens her eyes. They are still there. In swerving to avoid them, the driver has plunged his van into a bumpy scrap of scrub, a foot or two below the bend on the other side of the road. Impatient drivers are already easing their way past, gesticulating at the driver, beeping their horns. Jenn turns round to find Nathan cradling Emma. He gives her a guilty look – what else could I do? Jenn is crushed. Forlorn. Yet she feels the overbearing pith of the moment. That was a line, there; just then. That was it. From now on things will be different. Tonight she will set Nathan straight. Tomorrow he will tell Emma that the Nigel Godrich interview has been brought forward – and he will leave.
15
She scopes the plaza, eyeing each of the terrace cafés in turn. There is not an empty table in sight. A procession of hopeful diners patrols the square, affecting nonchalance but ready to swoop the moment la cuenta! is called out. Greg and Emma sit on the church steps; Nathan is reading a plaque. Somehow the task of finding a table has fallen upon Jenn, but it’s too hot and the plaza is impossibly crowded. She takes shelter for a moment under an orange tree, ties her hair back, drawing out the ritual so the feeble breeze can air her armpits. She catches a whiff of herself – the metallic bite of panic gone stale. She finds her deodorant, sprays herself, and brings her arms back down to her sides. Right in front of her, two families begin squabbling over a table that’s about to become available. She shuffles over to the throng of bodies that has grudgingly morphed into a queue outside one of the bigger cafés, changes her mind, and ambles over to the water fountain. Greg can see perfectly well what it’s like, down here. If he wants a table with a view so badly, he can fight for it himself. How can he even think that way? How can he walk away from a near-death experience and the first thing on his mind is lunch? And what was wrong wi
th her suggestion, anyway? A bocadillo in the café up by the tram station might not be nearly as quaint as the main square, but there’s something gutsy and flavoursome about that café. It’s real. Old men sit out back smoking all day, and even their tobacco smells real; like her dad’s Condor Ready Rubbed.
She settles on the broad stone wall that surrounds the fountain. There is not much she can do to avoid the sear of the sun, but the spray soaks her dress, and she can feel the cold of the stone seeping through her thighs; and it feels good. She twists her upper body round and ladles water over her wrists. She can hear Greg’s voice; authoritative, yet strangely needy. She looks up and scans the square. She spots them on the other side of the plaza, by one of the expensive cafés with bright red awning. Greg is making a beeline for a table, talking into his phone while pointing out Emma’s crutches to the mâitre d’, who gestures towards the patiently waiting queue. Greg holds his phone away for a moment and, seemingly, takes the restaurateur to task. He’s shaking his head, pulling his embarrassed daughter close, as though to say: Have a heart! Can’t you see my daughter is crippled! Nathan stands a couple of yards back, grimacing in apology to the others in the line. The flustered mâitre d’ relents and shows them to a table that has barely been vacated by a couple of weathered old pensioners. Greg nods briefly, then pulls out a chair for Emma. She collapses into it, limp; dramatic. The old couple shuffle off, shaking their heads. Gregory goes back to his phone call, his hand alternating between his hair and the sweeping gesticulations with which he peppers the conversation. He ends the call, stares at his phone for a beat, then summons the waiter with a flourish of his big hand. He cranes and peruses the square. He looks directly at Jenn for a moment – but he does not see her. Only now does Nathan join them.
