Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  To me, Chianti sounds Indian.

  ‘Lovely,’ Mum shouts to him, as she begins to hurry down the driveway. ‘Driving?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he laughs, all tanned twinkles, ‘Heathrow.’

  ‘Safe journey, then.’ Suddenly she stops, so that I nearly bump into her. ‘But what about the cat?’

  Gordon and Derek have a tabby, Dolores.

  Gordon flaps a chamois leather. ‘Oh, our lovely lady, Tilly, has promised to come in twice a day to feed her. In return for holiday pay.’ Momentarily, he bites his lip. ‘Have you met Tilly?’ he asks, but much more quietly. I sense that he feels that he has failed in some obscure rite of neighbourliness by not having introduced her to us.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mum says, confidently.

  ‘Lovely lady,’ he confirms, almost sings in praise.

  Gordon and Derek had been gone for four days now.

  ‘She’s there again,’ I tell Mum. The bike is there again; the boy is there again.

  Mum says nothing.

  On the first day that Gordon and Derek were away, Mum went to the fence when she heard Tilly in the garden in the evening; and from my bedroom, I heard their chatter. A few moments later, Mum breezed past my door with a pile of towels and announced happily, ‘She wants to be a nurse.’ Like Mum; unlike me. Mum wanted to be a nurse and then she wanted me to be a nurse. I wanted to be a vet and now I want to be nothing.

  The day before yesterday, I saw Tilly arrive on the back of a motorbike, or, rather, on the back of the driver, a boy: they were Siamese twins, cupped, bound in jeans and leather jackets. They did not remove their helmets but swung from the bike and snaked behind the hedge towards the house with black bloated heads. The bike was in the driveway for an hour or so.

  Yesterday there were three bikes in the driveway for three hours, and the rasp of reggae from the corner of the garden that we cannot see from our house. I watched Mum frowning at the bikes from her bedroom window; she spent three hours in her bedroom with a duster, a can of polish, a feather duster, wet cloths, and the Hoover.

  Today there is one bike and no noise. So we are going into our garden. Mum settles on her sunlounger, knitting. I sit on the grass and spread the newspaper beside me. The sole sound is the chirp of the knitting needles. The needles, long thin bones at the end of Mum’s fingers, are flashing in the sunshine. They are flashing a code for the pattern. I know nothing about knitting. I sift through the newspaper for the TV page and then scan the schedule for the evening: a mini-serial at nine o’clock, continuing for half an hour after the News at Ten. Reading about the mini-serial, I hardly hear the sound from Gordon and Derek’s garden, the three sounds; or perhaps I hear them as the signal for the mumble of the newsreader, the hourly high-pitched beeps. But now I hear them again. I stop, pressing the newspaper into the grass, and listen. There are more beeps, four, and I can hear that they are filled with breath, Tilly’s breath.

  The needles have paused. I glance at Mum but she is frowning into her lap. Is she frowning at the knitting, the sunlight, or the sound from next door’s garden? The needles resume, sliding against each other. But Tilly’s breaths begin again, longer, louder, a tuneless song. The needles continue ticking, faster. Tilly is reaching for something, or moving something: this is how it sounds, hard work and desperation. But no, because I know what I am hearing: I watch films, I know these sounds. I glance again at Mum, wondering whether we should exchange smiles, but she is staring ferociously at the woollen blotch spreading in her lap. Suddenly Tilly’s siren drives into the still hot air of the neighbouring gardens: once, twice, three times, a kind of pain; and a broken, final, fourth call. And now silence except for the tut-tutting of Mum’s needles. Mum shifts on the sunlounger, wrenching the canvas, drops the knitting onto the grass with a flourish, and says, ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’

  Tilly’s white forearms lie along the top of the fence like two basking cats. Her chin rests on a lattice of fingers. Presumably she is standing on something; the laundry basket, perhaps. She is smiling, watching Mum hose the garden. The jet of water chips at the soil in the flowerbed. I have taken refuge on the patio.

  ‘I’m glad that you’re here, next door,’ she muses.

  Mum turns very slightly towards the fence, the jet of water slipping across the surface of the soil.

  ‘I didn’t want this job but I do want the money. And, believe me, it’s easy money.’

  Still Mum does not speak. The jet of water concentrates on the rhubarb.

  ‘Because it’s always immaculate in there.’ Tilly nods towards Gordon and Derek’s house.

  The jet switches to the base of a rose bush.

  ‘They don’t need me.’ She gazes at the soupy soil beneath the roses. ‘It was my mum’s idea, she collared Gordon in church, said I needed work.’ She watches the jet of water arc above the clematis. ‘No one says no to my mum.’ She laughs joylessly and detaches herself from the fence.

  The hands reappear almost immediately with a packet of cigarettes. She cocks the packet at Mum.

  ‘I don’t,’ mutters Mum.

  Tilly turns and jabs the packet towards me. I sense Mum stiffen. I lower my eyes.

  ‘Lovely house.’ The voice is muffled. She is craning with a cigarette towards a lit match. She pauses whilst the tip of the cigarette darkens and disintegrates. Then she removes the cigarette and smoke spills from her mouth into our garden. ‘Lovely garden, too, and we had fun yesterday with their washing line.’ She laughs, coughs, turns over her hard white wrists to reveal red weals.

  Water rattles the base of the fence.

  ‘But of course I hate them, I hate men like that.’

  Mum drops the hose. It stiffens, swells, twists, hisses water into the grass.

  ‘They’re good people,’ she seethes, as she walks away.

  9

  STOOD UP AND THINKING OF ENGLAND

  There they go, the little car bunny-hopping from pothole to pothole, back wheels kicking cartoon-clouds of dust. That tin-box, Tizer-red car that they bought when we arrived here. Down the track towards what they call el pueblo, which by now I know means the village. They play at Spanish, say the odd word in Spanish, as if that is enough to make this place our home. But I know that their pueblo is not quite right: sometimes they try too hard, they sway their way through the word, poo-ay-blow; other times, too shallow, slap-happy, pwebla. Too English.

  So, what shall I do today? The same as I do every day, I suppose; the same as I have done every day for the month since we arrived here. The same as I will do every day until school starts, Spanish school, when I am supposed to transform into a Spaniard. There is no one here to stop me from doing whatever I like: the catch is that there is nothing to do. Every day I watch the car bounce away, then I return to the darkness of the villa, the darkness of wooden shutters. This darkness is supposed to be cool; but nothing, nowhere, is cool here. Mum complains that if I woke earlier, I would do more with my days. But no time is early enough, here. I know, because I wake in the early hours, two, three, four o’clock. And when I wake in my wood-dark room I am on my back under my sheet like a corpse and the heat is asleep on top of me, wheezing mosquitoes over me. When I surface again, later, six or seven o’clock, the heat is everywhere, all around my room and on the balcony and the patio, lying in wait for me. By nine, the air is swollen with noise. The sounds of the valley evaporate and hover in a dense, fine rain: the chainsaw barking of chained-up dogs, the thumps of quarrying and construction, the relentless chipping into and building onto these hills. Sometimes there are sounds that I cannot place or explain away: the line of cars moving slowly through the valley and the unbroken scream of their horns, a spooky scream which I took to be some kind of siren, some kind of warning, until Mum and Dad’s new friends, the Chryslers, explained that this was a wedding convoy.

  This is what I do, every day: I have breakfast, to take up some time; I search the kitchen, trying to find something that will do for breakfast, biscuits, usually – soggy Spanish bis
cuits which melt in my mouth to cover my teeth with a thick almond paste; I have tea without sickly Spanish milk but with a slice from the lemon that Mum and Dad keep in the fridge for their G & Ts; then I sunbathe for a while, but for no reason because I am not going back home, I have no one to whom I will show my tan. And for hours I look over the hills. There is nothing to see, they never change. But they are here, they are everywhere here, and there is nowhere else to look, except the sky, which is hard on my eyes. These hills have been here for – what? – thousands of years? Millions? Mum read aloud from her guide book that, hundreds of years ago, Moors lived here, hiding from Christians. ‘Obviously they didn’t know,’ she laughed, making one of her better jokes, ‘that’s Jehovah’s Witnesses will find you anywhere.’ Thousands of years ago, these hills would have encircled the sea, this valley would have been a bay, but nowadays the sea has shrunk away, ten miles away, and these hills have no purpose, they hold nothing. I can see that they were made by water, they have the look of water, there are ripples in the rock, but nowadays they are deadly dry. From here they have the look of pebbles, spectacularly smooth, but up close they prickle with bushes and shower loose stones. From here I stare up at them and they stare me down. I should know every ripple, every ridge, every ribbon of pink or blue, but there is too much to know, I could look all day, every day; which is, I suppose, exactly what I do.

  Throughout the day, I drink cold drinks: I love the fizzy lemon here, which sizzles on the roof of my mouth like real lemon; a proper lemonade rather than the fizzy clear syrup that we had back home. In England. From time to time during the day I have a slow shower – slow not by choice but because of low water pressure – and once or twice I wash my hair, then dry off in the sunshine so that I am blonder, now, than I have ever been; blonder, even, than that blonde baby in the family photos, the baby that was me, once upon a time. Washing away my colour, day by day, I look less and less like a Spaniard. Then, dry, I lie in the sun for a while, before, in the middle of the day, returning to the darkness of the villa, where I try to write letters home to my friends finding I have less and less to tell them. Sometimes I step into the sun for a moment, onto the paving stones for a brief moment to burn the soles of my feet, to feel the burn on the hardest skin that I have.

  They will not be gone for long, today. Apparently there are only three villas, today, perhaps three hours of work. I know the routine: sweep, swab, tidy, before tackling the bed linen, swapping clean for dirty. Or soiled, as Mum would say; soiled seems to be a laundry word, a word for laundry. Today she said, ‘If you’re so bored, why don’t you come with us?’ I’ll tell you why: because I don’t want to have to deal with other people’s soiled laundry, that’s why. This was your plan, remember, not mine. Because this is her job, now: cleaning and tidying other people’s villas. (Not our own; not that this is our own, we rent from the owner, Herr Someone-or-other, who has bought himself a bigger villa, now, somewhere else). Not that Mum would say that this was her job, cleaning and tidying: no, she and Dad are Managing Agents. This was Dad’s invention, he likes titles. Before, he was a Managing Director. And, before, we had someone to clean and tidy our house, but she was never called a Managing Agent, she was called The Maid: Maria, from Columbia. Mum is always telling me how everyone envies us, how everyone wants to leave what she and Dad call the rat race and come to live in Spain. Not so very different, in a way, from Maria and her relatives: Maria was always telling us how her relatives envied her because she had come to live in a free and rich country; those were her words, free and rich. Mum says that I should be happy, that Spain is a lovely place to live, full of cheap fruit and sunshine. But the fruits that I like are raspberries and blackberries, neither of which grow here. And there is too much sunshine, so much sunshine that we have to cover our windows and live in darkness. If Dad had not lost his business, would we have come here? He says that no one was to blame for what happened to the business. Recession. Rat race and recession. Bankruptcy and blame.

  So, people pay Mum and Dad to clean for them, to help the flow of holiday-makers. To keep a white river of bed linen flowing through the villas. But they have to be careful, in case they are denounced: this is the word for when a Spaniard informs the police that a foreigner is working without a permit. So, to the locals, this housekeeping is simply something that Mum and Dad do to help friends. But to the villa owners, Mum and Dad call this a nice little family business. They mean that Dean works with them, repairing shutters, fitting shower curtains, watering gardens. Dean is too old – just – to have to go to school. So he can stay English, burning his nose and his knees, and yelling ‘Allo mate to everyone, even to the Germans. He is old enough to have stayed home on his own, if he had wanted; he could have found a job and a room. But he came to Spain, he tells everyone, to try his luck. What does he mean by this? I think that Mum and Dad think, hope, that he means work. But I think that he means girls. I overheard him telling one of his friends, before we came here, that Spanish girls are gorgeous. But what would they want with him? Not that Mum and Dad would agree: I am surprised that this Spanish sunshine is so important to them because, in their opinion, the sun shines from Dean’s every orifice. Mum says that he is good with his hands, which is lucky because he is no good with anything else, like his brain. Certainly he was never any good for the one task required of an older brother: bringing friends home. There was something wrong with each one of the friends of his who hung around our house: horrid long hair; beard; bad breath; too many drugs; pet python.

  Sally goes to the villas with them, but to play rather than to work. Because she is ten. Sometimes Mum complains to me, ‘Why don’t you spend more time with Sally?’ Because she is ten, that’s why. Because she plays. I do not play; I am fifteen. She plays the play of a ten-year-old: she hauls one of those long-necked loungers away from the herd over the crazy paving patio into a patch of shade, then lies flat on her back on its segmented pink-floral-print cushion and whispers up into the sky, makes up stories. Mum and Dad never tell Sally to listen to the tapes, the Spanish lessons, because, they say, she is young, and will pick things up. Like bubonic plague, with any luck. No, too cruel, but I do wish that she would stop whispering in her sleep. Whispering, sighing, laughing wearily but politely into the blackness of our small, hot bedroom.

  I am supposed to spend my days listening to tapes. The tapes are supposed to help me when I go to school. But I have listened to the tapes a few times and I know that they will not help me.

  I would like two tickets to Madrid, please.

  Single or return?

  A one-way ticket to Madrid, please. But no, because what would I do in Madrid? I want to go to London, not to Madrid. Londra.

  Can you please direct me to the police station?

  Are they joking?

  How do you celebrate New Year in your country?

  Your country. But this is my country, now. Or so Mum and Dad tell me.

  Mum and Dad say that I will make friends, in time, here. As soon as I learn the lingo, they say. They know that I will have no English friends: the English here are old, retired, their conversations concern the local restaurants, whether vino y postre is inclusivo on the menu del dia; wine and pudding make their days, here. But how will I ever make friends, when I start school, by being able to ask for directions to the police station? The other day I had a massive row with Mum, I wanted to know what would happen to me, here. Stuck here, were my words, words which she said were unhelpful. She said, ‘You’re not stuck anywhere, Gillian.’ Her opinion was that I would do everything that I would have done in England, but in Spain. She said, ‘You’ll meet a boy, and he’ll happen to be Spanish; and you’ll marry him, and you’ll have children, and they’ll be Spanish, and is that so very awful?’ For some years I have had an ambition to be Prime Minister; but how can I be Prime Minister of a country where I do not live?

  I could escape, but to where? To the pueblo? Too far, too hot, even for the pueblo’s pool, before sundown. This weather keeps
me home. When I do decide to walk to the pool, Mum always calls behind me from the balcony, ‘Don’t drown, okay?’ I hate the walk because I have to pass the dogs: five of them, a family, in a small wire enclosure all day every day with only the shade of a solitary scratchy tree. I have no idea why they are there. In the beginning, from the road, from the car, this was all that I could see, which was bad enough, reminding me of those shoebox-sized cages of canaries lodged in the doorways and windows of houses in the pueblo, those window boxes of birdsong. But then, when I walked alone to the pool, I went down the track to say hello to them. And that was when I saw their bones, the claws of ribs, the Belsen pelvises. They were yelling for me, their noses in the wire and their tails very tall, curved, flagging me down. But what could I do, what can I do? Nowadays I can hardly face them, those shivery noses, those shaky tails. I have no money to buy food for them and there are never enough scraps for five. I want someone to tell me what to do. But I suspect that there is nothing that I can do that will make a difference to them. I have asked the Chryslers but they say that there is no RSPCA and if you can’t stand the sight of a few starving dogs, you’ll never survive in this country. I do not want to survive in this country.

  When I reach the pueblo I try to hurry through the sharp, dark gazes of the old men who hunch and scowl under the small black discs of their berets and over the bigger white discs of the tabletops outside the bar in the square. I think that I know how they would prefer me to dress, but I will not wear widows’ weeds for anyone. Sometimes, in the evenings, we drive to other towns where the bars feel friendlier and we can watch telly. Often I recognize the programme, the people in the programme, but they have fake voices. Once, we saw Dallas: JR’s Texan twang had been scrubbed from the soundtrack and he spoke in a Spanish growl which made me think of a matador even though I have never heard a matador speak. This was like a dream: in dreams, I know who someone is even if she or he has someone else’s voice or face; in dreams, this mix of bodies, faces, voices is unimportant, this mix of worlds.