As a child I used to love unwrapping sugar cubes. But I didn’t take sugar any more. I sipped the coffee and leaned back in the wicker chair. I felt almost human again. Away from the kids and the tents and the incessant bustle of the camp-site I felt as though I was back in the real world. An adult world. And I wanted Mike to share it with me.
Cleo and Frankie had thought that coming to France would make me forget about him. Certainly, whenever I was herding children on and off coaches or making sure that they were where they were meant to be, I hadn’t the time to think about him. The day that we’d used black refuse-sacks as raincoats because we had nothing waterproof left to wear, I’d actually been glad he wasn’t around to see the state I was in!
But I missed him. I wished I hadn’t walked out on him. I wished we’d had the belief in ourselves to work things out. I wished I knew where it had all gone wrong.
‘Hello, Paula.’
At first I thought I was hallucinating. I’d been thinking about him, after all, and I have a powerful imagination. I blinked and blinked again.
‘Mike?’ I looked at him in amazement.
He sat down opposite me. His straw-coloured hair flopped over his eyes. His face was pale. He looked tired. The gamine waitress who’d served me earlier rushed out to take his order.
‘Having a good time?’ he asked.
I knew that I wasn’t wearing any make-up. That my hair was a complete mess, destroyed by the rain and the sea and the sand. And that I was wearing one of Frankie’s oldest T-shirts because I’d lent my last dry one to Anna Boland who’d wanted to wear green today and her green one had been ruined in the flood.
‘The weather’s been dreadful,’ I said.
He grinned and looked less tired. ‘I heard. Storm clouds all along the Mediterranean bringing heavy and persistent rain. According to Sky Weather.’
‘How did you know where I was?’ I asked. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I rang Cleo’s. Kevin told me.’
I looked cautiously at him. ‘Why did you ring Cleo’s?’
‘To find out where you were, of course.’
‘Why?’
His look at me was equally cautious. ‘Because I miss you, Paula. Because I think I was mad to tell you to leave and because you never should have left. Because I love you.’
My coffee was going cold in the cup in front of me. The gamine waitress was watching us through the window of the café.
‘Words are easy.’ I tried to keep the wobble out of my voice.
‘I know.’ He sighed. ‘I got caught up, Paula. In earning enough to help us buy a house. In feeling that it was important. In thinking that the prospect of a partnership with Jimmy was more important to me than how I felt about you. And I was wrong.’
‘I was a nag,’ I told him. ‘I complained all the time. Maybe I should have tried to understand more.’
‘I don’t want to go home without you,’ said Mike.
‘You wanted me to leave,’ I said.
He reached over and took my hand. ‘I never wanted you to leave,’ he told me. ‘I was angry.’
‘I didn’t want to go,’ I said.
‘Come home, Paula,’ said Mike.
‘There’s still three days of the holiday to go,’ I told him.
‘Why don’t you leave the kids with Cleo and Frankie and we’ll book into a hotel somewhere?’ he suggested. ‘Where we can stay in bed all day and I’ll even give you a massage.’
It sounded like heaven. All I’d dreamed about for the last week was a hotel room with clean sheets and room-service!
I smiled ruefully. ‘I can’t do that. I have to stay with the kids.’
He nodded. ‘I don’t want to leave you, Paula. Even if you’re in a tent and I’m in the hotel.’
I made a face at him. ‘You don’t know how much I long to be in a hotel.’
He smiled at me and suddenly he was the old Mike again. The Mike I’d loved and had married. It was as though the last few months had slipped away. ‘When I heard you were on a camp-site … !’
‘I love you,’ I said.
He leaned across the table and kissed me on the lips. And then we both got up, still kissing. I opened my eyes. The gamine waitress was smiling in delight.
And the touch of the sun was deliciously hot on my shoulders again.
Rosalyn Chissick
Rosalyn Chissick is an award winning literary novelist. She has won prizes for her poetry and for extracts from her novels, Catching Shellfish Between the Tides, and Colourbook (Sceptre). She has ghostwritten four books (including a Sunday Times bestseller) and has written for the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, the Sunday Times and Elle. She has performed her poetry in venues as diverse as Glastonbury Festival and The Dalai Lama’s temple in India. Rosalyn is working on her third novel, Your Favourite Thing. The opening section recently won a competition with LiteratureWorks, an Arts Council organisation, and was featured as its podcast of the month.
This story is for Ludwig.
Caravan
Rosalyn Chissick
The ticket collector does not look at Tara as she speaks.
‘The ringmaster, you say? You want to speak to the ringmaster.’
She looks at Tara then and sees that she is wearing an anorak, plimsolls, silver combs in her hair.
‘His caravan is the third on the right.’ She waves her arm into the distance. ‘You can wait for him there, if you like.’
Waiting for him in his caravan. Counting the drops on the walls. Perfect rust-coloured marbles. The walls are splashed grey metal. Thin, beige carpet. A pot and mug in oily water in the sink. The wind whistles under the door and this could be him, tramping through the mud, boots negotiating beer cans, broken bottles and carrier bags.
Tara stands up, sits down. The footsteps hiss away. Boots on metal steps, one, two. The bang of a door. Laughter. Voices. A woman leaning back in a chair perhaps, showing white teeth.
Tara is sitting on his bed; she is feeling the shiny satin of his sleeping bag under her fingers. She is looking at the picture of a woman by his bed. Her eyes follow Tara around the room. She imagines the ringmaster making coffee in the morning under those slanting brown eyes.
When he comes in, she will say: ‘I saw you performing tonight. I was in the second row. I thought at one point – when an elephant was balancing on two legs and you were talking to it, so close – you looked up and saw me.’
It is after midnight. The moon looks like a broken toy in the sky, its angles too sharp. On a shelf, a book about boats. Black and white pictures of cabins and hulls, flat seas rising up like water walls.
When the ringmaster returns to his caravan, morning is criss-crossing the hills in lemon lines and there is a woman on his bed, asleep. Her hair has fallen across her face so he cannot see her, only the dark green of her anorak. He wonders how he knows her.
Plimsolls, bare legs, the shifting grey of her skirt. Her hair is an orange fire on his pillow. He sits in the chair and he watches her. The way her body shudders when she breathes.
The ringmaster smokes a cigarette, blowing smoke into the air between them. Five a.m. She is hunched into a ball now; one arm flung out towards him. He lights another cigarette, stays sitting very still so that when she wakes and stretches her arms and wonders, for a moment, where she is, seeing the photograph of a woman with slanting brown eyes and then the book about the sea – she does not know – the metal walls – he is looking at her, has been looking at her and she does not know for how long or what he has seen and she wraps her arms around herself, drawing in her knees.
‘How long?’
‘Long?’
‘Have you been watching me?’
He leans back in his chair, looks at his watch.
‘How long?’ she asks.
‘An hour.’
‘An hour?’
‘Or more.’
And he is smiling. Looking at her. He will not look away.
‘Look away,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘Because you are embarrassing me.’
‘You are on my bed,’ he says, ‘in my caravan.’
And he carries on looking. His eyes are green. A pale, almost translucent green.
‘I saw you performing last night,’ she says. ‘I saw you juggle flames and eat razors. I saw you make coins appear from behind a boy’s ear.’
He is looking at her again.
‘You were in the second row,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘I remember now.’
‘I thought at one point,’ she says ‘– when an elephant was balancing on two legs and you were talking to it, so close –’
‘I looked up,’ he says, ‘and I saw you.’
She does not know his name.
‘Jake.’
‘Jake?’
‘My father’s and my grandfather’s name.’
‘What is your favourite colour?’
‘Green.’
‘Do you tell the truth?’
‘Usually.’
She says: ‘Don’t you want to ask me anything?’
‘No,’ he says, ‘there is time.’
Outside the field is coming to life. Footsteps, voices, the clanking sound of pails. She can smell the beginnings of a fire.
He says: ‘You are coming with us, aren’t you?’
Who is there to leave? An old aunt, a cousin with runaway fingers, neighbours who gossip and rearrange the world.
‘An old aunt?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘My mother’s sister and her son. I have lived with them for most of my life.’
And now she is sitting with him in her aunt’s red lounge and the clock is ticking. There is the clatter of china cups on saucers, the scrape of a knife against a plate. His mouth is filled, crumbs on his lips and dotting the front of his blue T-shirt.
‘You want to take my niece with you.’
‘She wants to go.’
Hooded eyes, he thinks. And a face that looks as if it has been fashioned out of crêpe paper – one snag and it will all pull away.
‘You want to go?’
Tara says: ‘It is a calling.’
Nuns get a calling and hermits and priests. A small insistent voice inside their ear: this is the way, this is the way. This is her calling: to be with him.
‘A calling?’ The aunt snorts.
‘Yes,’ says Tara. ‘This is what I’m meant to do.’
Then they are walking up the stairs to the attic and Jake is filling all the space in the hall and Tara is saying: ‘Wait outside.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the mess. I don’t want you to see.’
But while she is rummaging through her things and selecting and discarding – a book, a box of matches, a piece of polished stone – he comes and stands behind her. She feels him before she sees him, passes him a pair of jeans, T-shirts, shorts. He folds them into the rucksack. A notebook, a towel, a jar of face cream. The paperback book by her bed, her pillowcase, a small pile of letters.
Tara’s aunt stands in the doorway.
‘My watch,’ she says. ‘I want you to have it.’
Tara takes the watch. It is light and cold. The face is white and smooth, sculptured gold hands, one tiny diamond. She fastens it around her wrist.
‘Hurry,’ says Jake.
They run through the streets. Her rucksack is on his back, her hand in his hand.
‘Quick,’ he says. ‘Quick.’
Darting across roads and around corners. They collide with a metal dustbin and its lid spins across the pavement, clatters in the kerb. Running through the streets that she knows: the painted doors, the trees arching and bending, the corner shop where a woman is standing in the doorway.
The big top has been taken down, animals in cages, wooden boxes on trailers. A line of caravans and cars. Without make-up and sequins the women flicking ash out of car windows and the men leaning back in car seats look ordinary. Passing them on roads or seeing them in lay-bys or service stations, you would see ordinary-looking people in jeans and jumpers with tiredness around their eyes.
‘Where did you find her?’
Jake says: ‘She found me.’
A woman leans out of a window, winds her fingers round Tara’s arm. She has tiny green eyes and pink-painted lips.
‘What can you do?’ she says.
The circus drives for hours. Flamenco guitars on the radio. Hot air blows through the windows like a hairdrier on full power. In the early afternoon, they pull off the road to share sandwiches and nut-brown coffee. Cigarette after cigarette.
The woman with green eyes pulls Tara’s hand into her lap. Holds it there, pressing her palms with light sticky fingers.
‘I’m Pearl,’ she says. ‘I can read you. But not now,’ she says, ‘not here.’
It is late when the line of caravans and cars pulls off the road again. The sky is speckled with stars. The animals are fed: bales of hay and oats, sacks of vegetables and bananas. Then the fires begin. Flaring into the blackness.
Tara watches Jake wrap potatoes in silver foil then poke them into his fire. She drinks tea from a plastic beaker. Pearl comes to sit with them, peeling her nail polish off in strips.
When she stands, shaking the shiny polish curls from her dress, Pearl leans towards Jake and whispers into his ear.
‘You can’t frighten me,’ he says.
But Pearl is laughing. A big, rippling sound that catches in her throat.
The night feels huge around Tara, nothing familiar except the bristled side of Jake’s face and the way his fingers are tearing a blade of grass over and over. She falls asleep in her clothes. Wakes to find she is on his bed with his sleeping-bag over her legs. He is in the armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, a brown wool blanket falling off his chest.
She reaches for him because she has fallen asleep in her clothes again and woken to see him looking at her. She reaches for him because he is sprawling in the armchair and the blanket he has wrapped around himself has fallen to the floor.
‘No,’ he says.
He stands quickly. His hair is tangled, his shirt creased and falling out of his jeans.
He walks. Through the fields, between the caravans, along the lanes.
Tara waits for him, listening to the wind in the trees and the soft jangle of the animals’ chains.
Sharing his bedroom, his shower, his kitchen. Imagining what he feels like up close, the things the woman in the photograph knows.
In the morning she asks him, sitting at the table, spreading jam on toast.
‘The woman in the picture – did you love her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she the reason?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And no.’
The next day Tara follows Pearl between the caravans and back to her trailer. There is an empty whisky bottle outside the door, two beer cans, a bin bag spewing crisp packets and banana skins.
Standing by the door in the glare of the morning sun, Pearl pulls her dressing gown around her. The hem is black.
Walking up the steps, she leaves the door open wide. There are clothes everywhere. Stockings, dresses, blouses and scarves. There are glasses everywhere too, winking from chairs and shelves. The air smells of perfume and smoke. Ashtrays crammed with butts smeared lipstick pink.
‘How long have you known Jake?’ Tara asks.
Pearl says: ‘Forever.’
‘And the woman in the picture?’
‘The one by his bed?’
‘Yes, did you know her too?’
‘Yes,’ Pearl says. ‘Her name was Alice.’
Alice. Now Tara has a name for her.
‘What was she like?’
Pearl is sitting by her dressing table, smoking a cigarette.
‘I don’t want to talk about her.’
‘What about her and Jake?’
‘No. I will read you,’ she says. ‘Give me your hand.’
Pearl tells Tara: ‘Y
ou will work with lions.’
And Pearl tells her: ‘You will have a child.’
And Pearl tells her: ‘Jake will never love you.’
Squeezing Tara’s hand tight in the cramped, dirty trailer.
‘You can’t know that. How can you know?’
‘It is here,’ says Pearl. ‘All I’m doing is reading. Jake will never love you.’
‘Because of Alice?’
‘No,’ says Pearl. ‘Not her.’
‘Come,’ Pearl says, ‘come now.’
Pearl takes Tara into the lion’s cage and stands with her on the straw.
‘My mother worked with the lions,’ Pearl says. ‘Big cats rolled over at her feet. When a lion was sick my mother spent the night with it in the cage. Once I saw her asleep with her face on a lion’s chest.
‘She trained me. Seven years old, walking around the ring behind her, snaking my whip. Less than half the size of a lion and I could get it to do what I wanted. Would you like to touch one?’ asks Pearl.
The lion is several feet away but there is heat all around him. Tara steps forward and the lion stays very still so that she can stretch out her hand, slowly, stiffly, into the heat and touch, for a moment, the tangled thickness of his mane.
Tara can feel the rumble of the lion’s breath and the red drum of his heart.
‘Will you teach me?’
‘Yes,’ says Pearl, ‘and in return you shall tell me secrets.’
First the lion has to get to know Tara: her smell, her voice, the way that she moves.
Tara feeds the lion chunks of meat, watches teeth shredding.
‘Don’t turn your back,’ says Pearl. ‘And never look away.’
Pearl is measuring Tara for a costume. Deft fingers and tape whizzing over breasts and hips. The mound of Tara’s belly, the distance between her thighs and the ground.
‘What colour?’
‘Green,’ says Tara.
Sequins like fish scales, netting, lace, a plume of feathers.
Pearl lends Tara fishnet stockings, stilettos, a lipstick.
Numbers on a scrap of paper. A mouth filled with pins.
Jake and Tara are eating pasta. Slurping tomato ribbons into their mouths. A candle drips wax on to the tablecloth.
Girls' Night In Page 33
