Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  The doctors had told her to watch her food intake. Which meant that she sat in front of her precise portion and watched our food intake, our raiding of each other’s plates. Mum would have determined our portions, braying about fairness and slimness. But when she turned away from the table, Auntie Fay would push some or most of her Mum-measured meal across to one of us, to the obvious loser. I did know that, day by day, she had to test her urine to track the level of sugar in her body. There was never any evidence of this procedure except the little box of sticks, for dipping, which looked not unlike her packets of cigarettes.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Mum continued to reminisce, recently, ‘she was so weak that there were times when she couldn’t get back up off the toilet, when we thought I’d have to go in there and drag her off.’

  I do remember the mosquito bites: she was bitten much more than any of us, which, we decided, was because her blood was sweeter than ours. Her treatment of her bites became another nightly ritual, simultaneous with the tan inspection, but turning her prized dark skin candy-pink with calamine.

  Her second summer, she had insulin: lots of little clear glass bottles lining a black box at the back of the bottom shelf of our fridge. So now there was a new ritual: injection. We watched the creamy sheen of her fingernails on her sun-polished thighs, stomach, or upper arm as she searched for a new site for the needle. She explained, and explained again and again because we wanted to hear one more time, that too many injections into the same patch would eat away her skin and leave a hole. We held our breath, knowing that her surface area was finite – more finite than most – so that sooner or later she would have to deal with holes. Then, to our relief, a new patch would swell between her thumb and forefinger and suddenly shorten the lowered needle. We never saw any hole; on the contrary, the skin would rise briefly as the needle came clean away.

  Sometime during the summer, Auntie Fay taught me to inject her. I do not remember why, I cannot remember if I asked her. She taught me to concentrate on the syringe: before the insertion of the needle, I had to flick any obstructive air bubbles from the clear liquid; then before forcing the insulin from the syringe, I had to pull slightly on the plunger, to check the absence of blood in the needle, to ensure that I had not slipped into a blood vessel. These were the definite cautionary measures in the procedure. The actual sliding of the needle into her skin remained a mystery, but always seemed a success. For the moment that the needle was in place, I had to hold steady. I had to avoid the stir and tug of sharp steel in her skin. Sometimes she laughed, but motionless and low over the needle, more of a purr than a laugh, and muttered, ‘Don’t walk away, Renee,’ slow and sharp like a private joke, but I hardly dared to allow myself a twitch of a smile. Then, ‘Wow,’ she would exclaim, but no louder, as the plunger squeezed the last drop of the dose into her skin, ‘you’ll make a wonderful nurse.’ Which, in those days, I took as a compliment, and was, in those days, the best compliment that I had ever been given. When the tip of the needle had reappeared, thin silver from lush gold skin, I could see Mum’s frown: she was fascinated, but unconvinced that this was a healthy holiday activity. Auntie Fay would say, ‘I’ve never known hands like these,’ and, ‘they’re steadier than my own.’

  This was the summer when Mum discovered the local lepers. Somehow she found out that the white palace high in the hills on the other side of the valley was a sanatorium built at the turn of the century. It was run by nuns for people with leprosy who were sent by missionaries in South America. We were told that there were no longer any lepers in residence, or they were no longer infectious, or not from a distance, or not nowadays, or there was a cure: the accounts that Mum began to bring back to the finca were incomplete, muddled, contradictory, poorly translated from the local grapevine. And, in any case, she believed none of them. According to her, there were lepers in the hills and their disease was let loose in the air. And there was a direct airflow from the sanatorium to our finca; far superior, presumably, to all other lines of airflow in the valley, because no one else seemed worried. Or perhaps it was she who was far superior, perhaps the inhabitants of the local towns were so stupid that they had not noticed the loss of their fingers and toes over the decades. She paid no attention to other people, and became desperate to leave. But our return tickets were for two or three weeks’ time. So we were stuck. With her. Most evenings, she telephoned Dad, and we had to wait for her, to sit by the amplifying booth with various villagers and listen – or try not to listen – to her repetition of the one word, lepers. Even Auntie Fay did not know what to say. Sometimes, when we looked across the tiny hot room to her, she would respond with a flicker of her Nazi impersonation, that deliciously ridiculous narrowing of her face and eyes; a last resort to try to make us laugh.

  The days swam deep into August, airless under the heavy sun. Mum shut the windows and doors on the view of the white palace and the blue hills. She barred them not simply with the faint spangles of their wooden-framed mosquito nets, nor with their shadowy shutters, but with the glass panes which were usually left untouched until winter. In the daytime, she came outside with us because the air did not move even when we moved, but stuck to our skin and paved the patio. And she was prepared to risk a lot for a tan; there was no point to the holiday if she went home without a tan. But the winds came when the sun was gone, and then she preferred to stay indoors. Indoors, the air became hard to breathe. Sleep was impossible before we had risen from our beds, tiptoed across our tiled bedroom floors and opened our own windows. Mum did not seem to sleep. One morning I rose to find her on the balcony looking down over the town: during the night, one of the rare Saharan winds had come, carrying sand, to sprinkle the streets and stationary cars. ‘See?’ she proclaimed, her tone a weird mixture of exaltation and fear, ‘I was right.’

  But I wondered, ‘About what?

  This had crept up on us: in the beginning, we had tried to ignore her, to carry on with our lives as normal. Auntie Fay had winked at me through the steam from one of her many cups of tea and whispered, ‘Let it pass.’ But it was impossible to remain untouched by Mum’s frantic words and her relentless fastening of our windows; and she was forever fiddling with the kids’ scabs, looking for signs. So Auntie Fay and I decided to find out more. But from where? Back home in England, Dad seemed to have discovered that leprosy was a bacterial infection. Auntie Fay and I knew that this meant that it was almost certainly true that there was a cure, an antibiotic. But this was irrelevant to Mum: she reported Dad’s finding to us without any relief; worried, perhaps, not by death but disfigurement. Then, in the village, over coffee and crisps in a bar, a chatty expat told us, ‘Leprosy is only very slightly infectious’; and another joined in, cheerfully, with, ‘You’re much more likely to pick up TB, here.’ Which worried me because I had not had a BCG, I had not been allowed to join the queue of my classmates with their lopsided shirtsleeves because I did not have Mum’s permission. Because she had been worried about scarring.

  When we left the bar, Mum told us, ‘You shouldn’t believe everything that you’re told,’ by which she meant that we should not believe anything that we were told. ‘Who are all these sources of information, anyway?’ she wailed, rhetorically, ‘they’re only men.’ And none of us could argue with this. On another trip, to another town, we worked our way along a shelf of dictionaries in a bookshop until Auntie Fay could translate for us: ‘The main symptom is a whitening of the skin.’ She laughed, ‘Well, girls, I definitely don’t have it.’ But Mum decided, during the next few days, that Yolanda did have leprosy. So, despite our protests, she took us all to the local doctor on one of his days in the village. In his dark little room, she sat down and heaved Yolanda into her lap. We stood behind her chair, near the door. She showed Yolanda’s nose to the doctor, pointing to the skin and saying, ‘Not here before, nada, do you understand? Comprende?’

  Yolanda’s eyes narrowed on the fingertip until they crossed.

  ‘Faze,’ Mum panted, ‘translate for me.’ />
  But Auntie Fay could only say, again, sadly, ‘Mags, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her.’

  Mum continued, to Auntie Fay, to the doctor, ‘But she has never been like this before.’

  The doctor leaned slowly and heavily over his desk, to pull and rub the skin on Yolanda’s nose. Then, retreating, he shrugged wildly above Mum, and said a small, sharp word.

  Mum called, ‘Faze …?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Auntie Fay admitted.

  ‘Que?’ Mum demanded of the doctor, ‘Que?’

  So he repeated the word, twice. Pecker. Pecker.

  Spanish for nose?

  But beside me, Auntie Fay said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  The doctor turned in his chair and pulled a heavy old book from a shelf on the wall behind him. He hummed a single note into our silence as he scraped through the pages, and then he pointed to a word, showed Mum, displayed the book to show all of us with his mottled fingernail: Lentigo.

  ‘Lentigo,’ confirmed Mum, and suddenly she began to chant, with determined calmness, ‘Oh God, Oh God, Lentigo, Lentigo.’ Just as suddenly, she asked him, ‘What do we do?’ but turned immediately to Auntie Fay.

  Immediately, Auntie Fay repeated the question in Spanish.

  Another helpless shrug from the doctor: nothing.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Auntie Fay, superfluously.

  But Mum was already saying, ‘They don’t care, do they? It’s all mañana and nada, to them, over here. Life is cheap, here.’ She stood up, dropping Yolanda to her feet, but the doctor half-stood with them and reached over his desk to press his huge palm briefly on Mum’s forehead.

  ‘Sol’ he said, with a long, slow smile, ‘mucho sol,’ and removing his hand, he shook his head, no, no; indicating Yolanda, then indicating Mum with a laugh which cracked into a cough.

  In his open doorway, Mum turned and said loudly to all of us, ‘He smokes, did you hear his chest? What kind of doctor smokes? Well, let me tell you: a Spanish doctor.’

  No one moved. Auntie Fay’s top teeth came down on her lower lip; her eyes widened and did not blink. Then Mum took Yolanda’s hand and they span from us down the corridor towards the sun-bleached open air. I picked up Sebastian, and Auntie Fay led the girls. When we reached the main doorway, we saw that Mum had stopped in the middle of the courtyard, that she was ignoring Yolanda and glancing around the buildings. She waited to hear the flap of our flip-flops in the dust before she commenced the lecture.

  ‘This is a hard country; this is a country, remember, which fought a civil war, which is the very worst thing that a country can do.’ She turned to us and urged, ‘You must remember that, girls.’ Marching ahead of us, she mused, darkly, ‘Brother against brother.’

  I squinted through the thick sunshine for Auntie Fay’s wide eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Auntie Fay muttered in reply, but slowly, as if she was thinking hard.

  Layla called after Mum, ‘England had a civil war.’ She was fairly new to secondary school, and to History, and still had enthusiasm for both.

  From the corner of my mouth, I managed a quick, ‘Shut up, Layla.’ Which she caught full in the face, whirling her sun-speckled eyes to mine.

  She bridled, ‘Shut up yourself.’

  Ahead of us, Mum stopped so suddenly that Yolanda bumped into her legs and bounced.

  I hissed to Layla, ‘Civil war is the least of our problems.’

  Mum turned to us to emphasize, ‘I meant, in my lifetime.’

  And suddenly I had had enough.

  ‘Not quite,’ I corrected her, loudly; I was, by this time, an old hand at History. I had had enough of Mum’s stories, I wanted some truth, and I wanted it loud.

  Auntie Fay dropped Alicia’s hand so that she could lay the iced tips of her fingers on my bare burnt shoulder, to remind me, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  But I had to tell her, ‘It matters.’

  And she gave up, shrugged, her fingers falling from me; she nodded, her eyes fixed on the shine of her pearly toenails in the dust which had lapped into her flip-flops. After a fortifying sigh, she looked up at Mum to ask, ‘What do you want to do now, Mags?’ and followed with a series of encouraging clucks for Yolanda, the terminal case, who took this as belated permission to cry.

  Over Yolanda’s wail Mum said, determinedly, ‘We need to find help.’

  Help was Alistair Emery, whose company Mum would not normally seek because there were rumours about boys. The rumours came from the other local expats, who specialized in rumours; but, for once, Mum did not want rumours, she wanted someone who knew something. And Alistair Emery knew a lot. Before his retirement, he had been a master in a famous public school. As we walked up the hill to his villa, I pondered the pricey education of public schools, the benefits of which we would now have, for free, for a few minutes. Would I pass Maths, if Dad paid? Could Alistair Emery explain molecules to me, and should I ask him?

  According to Mum, he did not only know school subjects: she said that he had been in Spain for longer than anyone else, by which she meant any of the other expats, and so he knew every English-speaking source of expertise in the region; and much more importantly, he knew how to go home in a hurry. She said, ‘He has his uses.’ And then, occasionally, she continued, ‘Lentigo,’ and, ‘God.’

  After each God, Alicia piped, ‘Yes?’ Which was, to her, at her age, a joke.

  No one else said a word, not even Gott.

  Alistair Emery came onto his balcony to receive us with enthusiasm. I could not remember if I had ever seen him before: Mum talked so much about people that sometimes I confused her memories and mine. And this man was middle-aged, and in those days, all middle-aged men looked the same, to me.

  ‘Mrs Paulin, Mrs Paulin, Mrs Paulin,’ he announced, but this formal version was friendly, his equivalent to everyone else’s Mags. ‘And your friend, Mrs …’

  Auntie Fay smiled and said, ‘Lorne.’

  ‘Mrs Lorne, Mrs Paulin, and your many lovely children.’

  We had reached the top of the staircase. Cheerfully, Mum said, ‘All girls.’

  We all looked at her. And Alistair Emery looked at Sebastian, who stuck out his tongue, probably because this was what we had taught him to do when we stared into his face.

  Mum’s eyes were narrowed on Alistair Emery, but they widened wildly when she saw that she had failed to misguide him. She laughed, falsely, and said, ‘Except Sebastian, of course; and what a terrible, terrible tomboy he is.’ She laughed again, an even worse, even more false laugh; and the rest of us laughed, not much more normally, because Seb was so obviously not a tomboy. Seb laughed because he thought that the tongue had been a successful joke. So he stuck out his tongue again, but Mum shouted, ‘Put that away.’ And then suddenly, belatedly, there was silence.

  ‘Tea?’ Alistair Emery asked, after a moment. ‘Lemonade?’ he asked Layla, Alicia, Yolanda.

  His eyes skimmed Sebastian.

  ‘No,’ said Mum. ‘Thank you.’ She sank down on to a small wicker sofa, which mimicked the protest of her bones. She stayed forwards on the cushions, her elbows on her knees and her face propped in her hands. A suddenly small, suddenly white face. ‘What we need is your help. We have been to the doctor and one of my daughters has lentigo.’

  He frowned, gently. ‘Are you sure that you won’t have a drink?’

  ‘We’re fine.’

  We were not fine. Yolanda began to cry, for all of us. Auntie Fay took her to a wicker armchair; they sat together, the armchair shuddering. I sat next to Mum, on the very tip of the flowery cushion. Layla tried to perch on the arm, but I swatted her away. She knelt on the tiles, copied by Alicia and then by Seb.

  Alistair Emery said a conspiratorial, ‘Wait there,’ and went into the darkness of his doorway. In an instant, he reappeared, cradling a large new book. When he began to turn the pages, the smell of printers’ ink was fanned across the balcony: a strange scent in a country where every smell is washed with bleach.
As he turned, he was saying, ‘Lentigo … Lentigo …’ which Mum began to say with him, wearily, an echo, but urging him onwards through the pages to the truth. Then suddenly he exclaimed, ‘Ah!’ and flourished a magician’s smile. Raising the book, tipping back his head, he quoted, ‘Another word for freckles’.

  Beside me, Mum moved slightly, I heard that she moved although I did not see exactly how, up or down. Expressionlessly, she said, ‘Are you sure?’

  He smiled widely, the smile of a sitcom vicar. ‘Absolutely.’

  Her expression was contracting into a cross frown. ‘Let me see.’ Her arm came across me, into the air in front of me, and stayed there.

  ‘There’s nothing to see,’ he rejoiced, but gladly handed over the book.

  Alicia piped, ‘Mum thought that Yolanda had leprosy.’

  Mum nearly went for her, her wicker screamed. ‘No I did not.’ Then, almost immediately, she closed the book and poked it at Alistair Emery, turned a smile on him, told him, ‘But you can never be too sure.’

  He said, lightly, happily, confidently, ‘Oh I think you can.’

  Politely, Auntie Fay enquired, ‘Do you have leprosy in there?’ She nodded towards his hands, the book.

  He turned a frown down into the pages. ‘Leprosy … leprosy…’ And during his new chant, he managed, ‘May I ask: why the worry about leprosy?’ He passed the open book on two wide palms to Mum.

  She said, ‘Because of the lepers,’ took the book from him, did not look up.

  But he did not stop his smile. ‘Which lepers?’