Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  Whenever I came back from town for the evening they were already home, patio door shut, curtains drawn. And it was for this, and only this, that I pitied the woman: she never went into the garden in darkness. No one else stayed around, in the evenings; everyone went into town, which I did not do because I did not want to walk alone on unlit roads. I watched them leave, each family buzzing around their one torch. Later, the only sound was the clatter of palm leaves, which, initially, I mistook for the splatter of water on hard soil. I would go on the trail of honeysuckle, slowly circling bushes to coax the scent. Sometimes I had to wait for the creamy moon to be drawn up through a steam of cloud. Then everything in this dry land was slippery with moonshine: the flat roofs, the red rocks, the ruffled Atlantic.

  This morning, earlier than necessary, my neighbours shepherded their suitcases through the garden to the luggage store. When the maid came, she pushed a cot from their villa onto their patio, to air. Metal cage and wipe-down mattress. The bars were ablaze in the sunshine, but later, when I heard the wheels follow her away, I was shivering.

  I had seen the man’s suspicion that there was something wrong with my mind or my life: because why else come here alone? Or – and – my life was too good for my own good, nothing but bikinis and books. I could see that this was closer to her opinion: in her eyes, I was slim and leisurely. But they were wrong. I am here to gather strength for an operation. It is the surgeon who needs the strength, though: there is no other way to a heart than to saw through the breastbone.

  In a routine check, three years ago, my blood pressure gave me away: too high one moment, too low the next. So the doctor listened to my heart and heard the murmur. I cannot separate murmur from discontent: a murmur of discontent in the white clench of my ribs. A complaint to which I would have remained deaf. I had been so sure that I would know if I was ill, I would have symptoms, pains and lumps. It was odd to have to be informed of a failure of my own body. The doctor has explained about the backwash of blood, that she can hear the whoosh of blood up and away into my body and then a sigh as a little drops back down into my heart through the leaky valve. I am bleeding into my own heart. A heart which has to work harder and harder to send enough blood around my body, and will become strained and sunk in pooled blood: Weak and flabby were the doctor’s words for my heart.

  I had been brought up to dread cancer, busy and messy. Not this trickle to death, not this tiny mechanical defect. For thirty-three years I have lived with this leaky valve of mine; for three years I have been monitored, and now my doctor says that it is time for a small repair. As simple as that, as far as she is concerned. But I can only think that, in the time before such operations, I would have died of this one tiny imperfection. And when I think of all the hearts in the world, and of all the hearts that there have ever been, I am amazed that almost every valve will fit and stay watertight. Blood-tight. I am amazed that so many bodies are so perfect.

  Technically, I am dying: without an operation, I will die, but not for years. But with the operation I will die as soon as I am opened, because the surgeons will disconnect my defective heart and divert my life through machines. My doctor says that when they are happy with their stitch-in-time, they will turn my blood back to me, and I will thaw and live again. I am not quite sure that I believe her. Recently I asked her, ‘Can I leave this leak?’ She laughed as she said, ‘Oh no,’ meaning, Not if you want to stay alive. Which was not what I asked her. Lately I have not been quite sure what I want. Except a holiday: I knew that it was time for a holiday. I came here, on holiday, to think everything through, which, so far, I have failed to do. Often I ponder the reassurances of my doctor: ‘With a new valve you’ll be as right as rain.’ When I asked her if I could continue to delay, she was stern: ‘You need to have this operation before you can get on with your life.’ I think that she might have meant children. I am not sure what I think about children. I have found it impossible to think of babies with this heavy heart of mine.

  When I vacated my villa, this morning, I stayed in the garden for a while. Through a bush I could see a child on a seesaw, but only the one child, only half of the fun. And those solitary rises and falls seemed too slow, to be in slow motion. Then, with the whole day to kill, I went for a stroll. All week I had stayed away from the beach because of the colonies of toddlers, the swell of their screams. But today, hot and homeless, I perched on a rock by the shore. Below, a baby was discovering sand; a German baby, whose mother’s words of enthusiasm clattered on my ears, but whose face told me that this was special even in a life in which so much is new. Sand swirled around his tiny fingers until his mother carried him away to the water. I stepped from my rock, then lay down. How many years since I had been on, in, sand? I was stunned by the warmth and smoothness, which I did not remember from childhood, this must have been unimportant when I was a child. When I am home, I will come across this sand for weeks: in my bag, my books, my shoes. I love to think that this island will travel home with me, even on my body, gritting my toes and making golden candyfloss of the hairs on my arms.

  At the end of the day, coming up from the beach, I made my way here for coffee and to watch the sun melt on to the horizon. My neighbour came and went: even though we have hours until our flight, without our villas we are already returned to our separate lives. I am turning cold. The air is thin with the clean chill of water; because it is winter, even here. I have watched the holiday-makers drain from the beach in this faint wash of dusk, but now in the distance some people are arriving: no, children, a small group of them, their busy feet skimming the tidal froth and stirring the custardy sand. Dark children whom I have never seen before. They are under the supervision of a man, but barely, because they kick flurries and only when I see the tracks do I realize that there is a pattern to this, that this is a team session, a training session. It is not these tracks that impress me, however, but the laughter: the smiles rise familiar in my eyes, like a memory; but new, too, as a possibility. Propelling themselves over the shadowed sand, they take me with them: somehow these low-flying children in a blood-orange sky have put a topspin on my heart.

  5

  POSSIBILITY OF ELECTRICITY

  For Pat Ashton

  I remember Dad reading aloud the advert for the finca, I remember that when he quoted, ‘Possibility of electricity’, Mum looked up from the small plastic bowl of Sebastian’s baby food and warned, ‘No, Mike.’

  He peeped around the newspaper and laughed, ‘You don’t want electricity, Mags?’

  Her tongue clicked on her sip of the baby’s Banana Surprise, the temperature of which she was checking.

  Dad’s eyes switched emptily to the ceiling, then back behind the paper, as he reminded her, ‘Good God, woman, I am an electrician.’

  But the electrics turned out to be different in Spain, in an old finca on a high terrace of olive trees, and, anyway, he was not there when we needed him. His plan was that the finca would provide cheap holidays in the long-term for his family of five children, but for now he could spare no more than a week away from work because of the necessary loans. Anyway, the problem was sometimes more serious than he could have solved: during our first holiday, at Easter, the whole village was without power for days. During our second holiday, in the summer, our own supply showered suddenly from our shiny new sockets. When we were safely back home, and Mum was complaining to Dad, he could only remind her that he could not always come away with us because he had to work to fund these holidays of ours.

  She shrieked, ‘But I don’t want these holidays, these aren’t holidays, our lives are in danger.’

  All that he could do was wail, ‘But I’ve bought you a finca, a lovely finca.’

  She replied, ‘It’s not lovely.’

  He said, ‘The view is lovely.’

  She said, ‘But we don’t live in the view. I don’t do my washing in the view.’

  Whenever she tried to explain that she would rather have no holiday than stay alone in the finca, he would protest, �
��You’re not alone, you have the kids’

  Her lips would tighten but she would manage to say, ‘Exactly.’

  Like an accusation, he would say, ‘You have Renee.’

  Me: I was twelve; I had had my first period in the finca and been unable to flush away my sanitary towels because of the cesspit, and I had been unable to visit the local pool for almost a whole week.

  He would laugh and call to me, ‘Don’t walk away … eh?’

  And Mum would shout at him, ‘Oh stop, will you? Just shows how little you know: walk away? She never leaves her lilo.’

  This was his cue to turn on me and shout, ‘You should help your mother more, Renee.’

  But Mum was beyond help, in Spain. This was not the Spain of her dreams, of cheerful, flamenco-dancing peasantry. This was Franco’s Spain. There was a policeman who was always on duty in the village, in the middle of the Plaza, with a gun. My mother had two comments for him, never said to his face but muttered like charms whenever we trooped across the Plaza under his mirrored gaze, whenever our reflections slid across his icy black shades. One was a threat, ‘No one waves a gun at my kids,’ although we kids had never seen him wave his gun at us or at anyone else (and eventually, bored, we began to wish that he would wave his gun). And her other comment was the put-down, ‘He fancies himself.’ The beauty of this was that he was very obviously unfanciable. As far as I was concerned, everyone in the village was unfanciable.

  On the Plaza, there was one shop, with a counter, which made life difficult for anyone who could not speak the language: ‘Renee!’ my mother would summon me from the doorstep, and give me her orders, ‘two pounds of tomatoes …’

  At home, I would not have had to do the shopping.

  The first time, I objected, ‘But they don’t have pounds, here.’

  ‘Translate for me, then!’ she shrieked.

  I had no notion of weights but I went sullenly, randomly, for a kilo, which seemed to do the trick.

  There were no public telephones, so we had no contact with Dad unless we went after the evening’s shopping to the telephonist’s house and waited our turn to sit in the booth in her front room. When we came home from our first holiday, Mum complained to Dad, ‘They can hear everything that I say to you.’

  He said, ‘But you’re not speaking in their language, they hear nothing but noises.’

  She tipped her sunburnt nose into the air and despaired. ‘Shows how little you understand about communication.’ Then she launched into, ‘They starve their cats, and they’re Catholics.’ By this time she was desperate. ‘They starve their cats but they call themselves religious,’ she gabbled, ‘and I’m a heathen, you can see it in their eyes.’ A heathen, bending down in a short dress to stroke the Plaza cats, her wedding ring skimming their spines.

  Eventually Dad decided that something had to be done: he decided that the next time he sent us to the finca, he would send Auntie Fay with us. Auntie Fay was not our real Auntie, she was a friend of my parents but particularly of Dad because Mum did not have friends, not really. Women did not have friends in those days, they had children. And Mum had a lot of children. Auntie Fay was unusual because she had no children. And she was useful because she went to Spanish evening classes. Her husband was Dad’s friend, or not exactly a friend: he was an architect for whom Dad had done some work. Auntie Fay worked for her husband, too, which was how they had met and married: Dad told us that she was a draughtsman, one of the best in the business. A lady draughtsman, he said. Mum said (and routinely told us not to repeat) that Auntie Fay’s husband was a boring old sod. If I had ever met them, I did not remember.

  I realize, now, that when Auntie Fay first came on holiday with us, she must have been about thirty. I was thirteen, so Mum was thirty-six. Layla was eleven, Alicia was six, Yolanda, four, and Sebastian, two. Mum liked to explain the five year gap between Layla and Alicia by saying, ‘I had my second wind when I was thirty.’ Mum liked to refer to us as a household of women (she did not count Seb, because he was a baby rather than a boy, and babies are part of women). Auntie Fay was one more woman: we were a finca-full of women sent to the heat for the summer, grass widows in reverse.

  Auntie Fay was sent to keep us company but she came for the sun, below which she lay, naked, all day. Mum had always been a fanatical naked sunbather but would fidget, cursing the flies and her sweat, propping herself on pillows and tipping off loungers, or pacing the balconies, wobbling, in front of the french windows, to inspect and harangue her full-length and slightly distorted reflection. Auntie Fay lay still and small, she laid herself out on her towel and moved only in accordance with a precise schedule of exposure: she was aiming for an even tan, to the extent of including the underside of her arms. Sometimes when we came to talk to her, she would start to laugh as if she was being tickled, and shriek, plead, ‘Get off me!’ so that we soon learned not to cast our cool shadows on her skin. She was ash-blonde and pale-eyed but her skin did not burn. Which was lucky, because she did not believe in lotions, in protection, in dilution of the precious rays.

  Her tanning, her non-burning, seemed like an act of will. After a week on her towel, she looked like the Bond girl who died of gold. During her second week, she worked on a darker finish. She darkened much more than I could manage in six weeks of sun. My skin was happy with gold, I reflected the sun with my light gilding of melanin, but her skin had to work much harder, to toughen and blacken to keep her safe and soft inside. Mum rarely came to the communal pool, but Auntie Fay never did so; she never came to see the rectangle of liquid marble, electric-blue and sun-veined, because the trip would have required clothes, straps, shadows, marks, and, anyway, water was sacrilege. Sometimes when she rose from her towel at the end of the day and wandered the patio to look at the view, we saw the fluorescent white flash of a Tampax tail. As the sun burned down into the hills, she liked to return to her towel to sit and see to her nails, twenty varnish-scented pearls which were quite unlike Mum’s yellow horns.

  In the evenings, she was a help with the shopping because she spoke some Spanish. What we wanted to hear from her, though, was her favourite expression, Gott in Himmel. We relished the accompanying impersonation of a Nazi: her thin nose became a bayonet thrust into the air, and somehow she seemed to make her eyes even paler than usual. Even Mum, who was a war baby and would not watch Colditz, loved Auntie Fay’s quivering Nazi. Then, over time, the Gott in Himmel became more hilarious when it slipped into Auntie Fay’s usual South London accent, a bored whine. But whenever we neared the Plaza, Mum would beg her not to say the words, not even in her London voice, not even some of the words (none of our faddy abbreviations, exclamations, in Himmel, then Himmel, and finally, simply, Gott in) because of the policeman.

  ‘Faze –’ Mum called her Faze ‘– remember, he has a gun, so don’t, for God’s sake …’

  And we would echo, ‘For Gott’s sake …’

  And Auntie Fay would promise: ‘No laughs, then, today, for our laughing policeman.’ Which made us giggle because this was so very unlikely: the policeman never revealed a glimmer of anything human, his expression was made for those twin black mirrors. So, whenever Auntie Fay filed with us across his dark shiny Plaza, she would settle for a mere, predictable, downward throwaway, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket …?’ And our orderly procession would shatter into laughter; even the kids, to whom the joke must have been puzzling.

  Auntie Fay’s speciality, however, was Irish jokes. One evening, when Mum was weak with laughter but fortified with sangria, she wondered aloud if Auntie Fay was being unfair to the Irish. Auntie Fay replied, ‘Listen, my Dad’s Irish.’

  We liked it when she told us about her family, about growing up: BC, she said, which stood for Before Chris, because Chris was her husband (the boring old sod, although we were not allowed to let on that we knew that he was a boring old sod). She told us about her old boyfriends, and we had favourites: we could never know enough about Emlyn, who, she had told us, was a location caterer, a Croissant
-server to the Stars; and we were forever frantic to know more about why she had not married Clive, who had proposed to her in the pouring rain, shouting, ‘Let it fall, let it fall,’ as she had tried to dash for cover, then murmuring hotly into her hair, ‘Drown, here, with me,’ when she had come back through the puddles to him. Her story was that she did not marry him because his surname was Deed and she did not want to be known as Fay Deed, Faded. We did not know if she was serious. Her laugh was a growl because she smoked. She went outside to smoke, her exposed skin sprayed with insect repellent, whilst we stayed indoors and burned lozenges of mosquito-killer in the jumpy plugholes beside our beds. She stood on the other side of the french windows, on the balcony, her dark skin damp with repellent, and blew her own breathy smoke to the fat moon.

  At the time I did not know how dangerous smoking was for Auntie Fay, who was diabetic: smoky sludge was lethal to her sugar-silty circulatory system. But cigarettes helped her to resist food, which was also lethal for her. Whenever she was on the balcony enjoying her mouthfuls of smoke, she could not hear us unwrapping and slurping caramelos. The first year that she came with us, she was newly-diagnosed and surviving without insulin. Or barely surviving, according to Mum, years later: reminiscing recently, she said, ‘And do you remember, Faze was so weak that she could hardly sit up.’ And I was surprised that not only did I not remember, but I had never known. To me, to us kids, Auntie Fay had seemed fine, or much more than fine, with her jokes and her relished nightly ritual of tan inspection, her purr of, ‘Am I brown, girls? How brown?’