Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  On the edge of the pueblo there is a disco: Discoteca, in neon. A whitewashed breeze block cube surrounded by a car park. Whenever I step onto my balcony into near-silence in the early hours, I can hear the pulse and even see the sign far below in the black valley; not the word, Discoteca, but a small blur of blue. I want to know if Dean has been there, but he refuses to tell me where he has been when he has borrowed the car. Usually, though, he stays home in the evenings: he comes home late, weary, mucky from having watered lots of gardens; he showers for hours, then eats his way through the kitchen, then lounges over every piece of furniture in turn with his feet up on every other piece, but suddenly he is in his bedroom, drawn into the darkened darkness of his bedroom and sleeping a shuttered sleep.

  The end of the day is my favourite time, my time, a few hours that no one else seems to know, a few hours that seem to pass everyone by because they are in kitchens, bathrooms, cars, bars, preparing for the coming evening. There is an hour or two when the sun is below the horizon but dusk has not yet inked the sky. And then, for a while, the heat is neither the slashing heat of the day nor the thick heat of the night. And I kid myself that this is no heat at all, that the colourless glaze over the valley is thin, cool air. If I am not at the pool, with nothing on my mind but the number of lengths that I have swum, then I have another favourite place for this favourite time of mine: I like to sit with my back against the back wall of the villa, my barely bikini-strapped back on the white-hot wall in the place where the villa stops and the terraces start; the place from where the terraces start to step away. I am high up, way above the pueblo, looking down on toy cars sliding to and from the main plaza in radial streets; but I am below the villa, the crockery-clattery villa. I am almost hidden and quite alone.

  Later, much later, I like to lie on a towel on the balcony in the shiny black sky and search the airwaves for John Peel, edging back and forwards on the illuminated dial through fuzzy French and Spanish and listening for his familiar voice, oddly both doleful and cheerful. And for several hours I track the arc of the blazing moon over me as his voice lisps and fades. The sky, here, is freckled with bluish stars; some of them shiver. So many stars that somewhere, on some of them, there is bound to be life; but because there are so many, we can never know. One less yes-or-no for me to worry over. These times – earlier, my shoulder blades warm on the wall, later, my eyes on the clotted-cream moon – are the only times when I am happy that I have nothing to do, and these times come only when the sun has dropped away.

  Recently the days have seemed even hotter than usual because of the fires. This week, I have seen two fires: a week ago, the clean blue skyline showed a smudge of smoke which, later, in darkness, became a weal; and then three days ago, on a hillside near here, the stumpy trees glistened red and the sun was fogged by smoke for hours. So much smoke from nothing much, from scrub and a few sparse olive groves. For a few days a silky layer of ash appeared and reappeared on every exposed surface: the car, the balcony, the patio table and chairs. We wiped and wiped but our cloths turned the ash to mud. Whenever I stood under the spluttery shower, I watched the remains of the smoke sink between my toes and snake along the bottom of the bath to the plughole.

  We have heard of people having to leave their homes, speeding away with a car-load of possessions; we have read in the local paper of walkers hurrying down from the hills to the caves but then dying in them from the smoke. A fire can happen anywhere, to anyone. A splinter of glass is enough, the sparkle turning into a spark. So now I spend my days watching helicopters and planes watching the hills for sparks and suspiciously dim hazes. And when they fade into the dusk, I watch alone. As the sky darkens, hardens, I look over the lumpy blackness for red. When we had our fire, I tracked a blue spark over the reddening hill: the beacon of a solitary police car crawling as far as possible into the scrub, as near as possible to the flames. I knew that the police were keeping watch and wondering what to do. But there is never much that they can do. Except warn us. And I do not trust them even to do this, to notice that we are here, or to care that we are here. So when those speedy electric-blue wings of air dropped down and the car slunk back into the pueblo, I stayed on the balcony for a while and then went back three or four times in the early hours to check that we were safe. I saw black trees in the blackness, they lit up as they died.

  Sometimes during the day the helicopters and planes drop water from the air, they snap open their trap doors to bomb the flames and I see the waterfalls fizz to vapour. The Chryslers say that one of them, somewhere, sometime, flew too low and was snatched down by flames. Why is there no invention, something clever, something other than water, a foam to cover these tinderbox hills from the rays? Apparently the water comes from swimming pools; the helicopters swoop, hover and suck from the squeaky-clean pools of the holiday-makers. They can choose whichever pool they like, take however much they need: one minute, a mirror full of sky; the next, an empty basin of blue tiles. They do not seem to have touched the pueblo’s pool, where, yesterday, the sunken ash stirred and whirled up around me.

  Mum and Dad came back from their three villas with a letter for me. Our letter box is in a wall of boxes in the pueblo, a small silver door opened by a tiny key which shivers like a charm on Dad’s clanky key-ring. The letter had come by air, flying banners of stamps and Par Avion stickers. Sometimes I have letters from friends but this was a note from Tracy King who is not quite a friend but was in my class. She is coming to Spain with her family on holiday next week, to a town which is slightly less than an hour’s drive from here. Do drop over, she writes, for lazy days and crazy nights!

  She has written on airmail paper, turquoise and noisy, in primary school handwriting, the letters formed and joined exactly how she was told to form and join them all those years ago. Tracy King is neither lazy nor crazy, and nor, I suspect, are her days and nights, even on holiday. She is famous for her mother; her mother is famous because she is on the PTA Committee, and every other committee, most of which are her own inventions. Her mother fund-raises, organizes, supervises. She wears make-up that looks like make-up, she constructs her face from foundation and blusher and her teeth look false. Tracy takes after her down to the double chin and fiercely folded arms, and her eyelashes look like weapons. She is bustly, busty, fussy, fond of pleats; she is bossy although no one takes any notice. There is a little sister, and I remember that her Dad is rumoured to be having an affair simply because he is so much nicer than her Mum.

  The surface of the pool wobbles, threads of sunshine coiling and bouncing like bedsprings. Mr King reaches for his towel, water sliding from him and steaming on the paving stones. He is so brown, so smoothly and uniformly brown, that from here his skin looks like fur, or velvet. Tracy, her mum and her sister Karen have to be careful: they are striped with sunburn and strap marks, they have burned in strips and slabs in colours ranging from uncooked dough to tinned meat. Blotchy and pinched by bikinis, they sit in cones of shade, stuck to loungers, the backs of which have been raised like those of hospital beds to prop them up. We are around their pool, their own pool. I am lying on my tummy on my lounger, topping up the tan on my back, feeling the sunshine press on my shoulder blades and pool in the small of my back. I never burn, and, anyway, I am practised, I know exactly what I am doing; and there are very few marks on me because we live so far from anywhere that there are plenty of private places where I can undo my straps. Around their tummies they each have a roll of flesh, protective and quaint like a rubber ring. I have a very different type of body: the bodies in my family are cradles of bones, we are ribcages and pelvises linked loosely by spines and we can see the precise articulation of each joint in each limb.

  Around and underneath their loungers is everything that they need: squeezy bottles of lotion, chilled bottles of chocolate milk, floppy piles of magazines. They drink their dense, dark milk through curly, joke straws. Mum would never buy chocolate milk because of the expense and the calories. But here they seem to survive on it, with c
hicken and chips. I had chicken and chips with them last night; I was staying for the night and we went out for a meal, the choice of restaurant having been put to a vote. In the restaurant, I was trying to be brave, probing beneath the crackling skin to strip the feeble bones, trying to cope with the slimy pink-streaked flesh which made me think of blood-stained phlegm, when Mrs King came to the rescue with a snowy forkful from her own plate. ‘There,’ she murmured, tapping another forkful on to my plate, then another. Now, from her lounger, she is calling to her husband, ‘Gilly needs a top up, Dickie.’ I know that she means another bottle of the milk, this is the term that she likes to use, to drawl: a top up.

  I raise my head, look up into a bank of chlorine-spiked sunshine. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Relax,’ she tells me.

  I am relaxed. ‘Really,’ I try again, ‘I’m fine.’ In fact I am full.

  ‘Dickie,’ she says conclusively.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he confirms. I can hear that he is circling the pool, his bare soles clicking on the paving stones, the spilled water lisping. He is breathing roughly, he was only in the pool for a moment or two, having dived in to cool off. Whereas we like to shuffle reluctantly into the deepening and freezing water up to the tops of our thighs, the point when suddenly there is no going back; and then, with screams, we throw ourselves forward. My head smashes down, the surface becomes a thin silvery-blue line over my brow, the water roars into my ears and my breath becomes noisy. Then, half-acclimatized already, we spend quite a while lolling in the water, or clinging to the walls, our drenched hair drying into ringlets.

  ‘You’re on holiday,’ Tracy’s mum purrs to me, ‘enjoy yourself.’ I have already been invited back for the last two nights of their holiday.

  ‘Girls,’ her girls, now, ‘are you okay?’ For chocolate milk.

  ‘Top up, please.’

  ‘Me too, Daddy.’

  ‘And a little vino tinto for me, Dickie, darling.’

  She is so keen for them to enjoy themselves. If my mum asks us if we are okay, her question is more like an accusation. Usually she simply warns us, Don’t drink all of that at once.

  Mr King bends to pick up a bottle of suntan lotion from beneath Tracy’s lounger. ‘Petal,’ he says to Karen, ‘have you bathed in any asses’ milk, recently?’

  ‘Daddy,’ she giggles.

  ‘Well,’ he lobs the bottle gently and accurately onto the end of her lounger, ‘I don’t want my fair-skinned princess to turn into a blister.’

  Tracy’s mum speaks to me: ‘You look super with your hair so much blonder, you know.’

  I smile; yes, I do know.

  ‘Whoever would have thought that there was a blonde bombshell hidden away in that brunette!’

  But I knew; and there were others who seemed to know, too. And, anyway, I was never a brunette; she must have been trying to avoid saying mouse. Her own hair is mousy, with highlights which are anything but; they have turned her grey. Tracy has a perm, a style which comes close to corkscrew curls.

  ‘Have you seen Lucinda Lightfoot’s mother, lately?’ Tracy’s mum asks all of us, asks no one in particular, ‘Have you seen that perm?’

  No one replies: no, no one seems to have seen Luce Lightfoot’s mum since she had a bob; but our imaginations are beginning to whir.

  ‘Not that perm is the word, really. Complete and utter mistake is the word.’

  Gossip, again, but in her laid-back style: unlike my mum, who questions, probes, then turns sniffy and disapproves of us. Tracy’s mum lives in our world, in an odd way: from her committees, she knows people who we know. Sometimes she has insider information for us.

  Karen pipes, ‘Mrs Lightfoot? Her? More like Mrs Heavy-boots.’

  Her mum laughs, ‘Oh, Sweetie.’

  Mr and Mrs King laugh with Tracy and Karen; my mum and dad laugh at Dean, Sally, and me.

  But now Mrs King turns serious: ‘Unlucky woman, that daughter of hers hanging around with that drug-taking crowd.’

  Clubbing crowd. This is not insider information, this is something that everyone knows.

  Tracy pipes, ‘Luce could be very pretty if she tried.’

  ‘Yes,’ a note of surprise from her mum, ‘yes, I suppose so.’

  If she tried? A trying prettiness, like Tracy’s prettiness: like a newly-upholstered chair, expensive, solid, and scratchily sparkly. Luce is pretty, but her prettiness is a different kind. A real kind. I remember that she has brown hair and an olive tone to her skin which is similar to the foundation which Tracy wears when she is going somewhere special. But Luce’s colour could never come from make-up. Tracy’s foundation tends to look thick and dark yellow like damp sand. But now she is wearing nothing but a bikini and the polish which is hardening on her toenails. She has cotton wool like bunnies’ bobtails between her candied toes. Like this, she is prettier than I have ever seen her. Unarmed of her shoulder-bag, round-shouldered in her bikini, she is prettily puppy-fatted. But this evening she will squeeze into a dress and sharpen her features with eye- and lip-pencils for our trip to her local disco.

  My bed is a haven from the daytime hardness of sunshine and cold water. This sheet, tucked to tighten slightly over my legs, to bind me to the bed, has closed around my feet like cupped hands.

  Only now do I realize that there has been no word from Tracy for a while. I listen for her, and tune into the buzz and hum of deepening sleep. And I warm to her: hard-nosed Tracy become slack; square-shouldered Tracy rolled into crooks and folds. I know that even in my sleep I have been thinking about coming back here, looking forward to coming back here. I have been lying here but my thoughts have been thinking themselves, they have been running even when I have been turned from them. Since I came to this country, this is the only kind of sleep that I have had: every morning I wake bemused, aware that I have been kept busy. The less I do during the day, the busier I am in my sleep. What was Tracy saying, before she fell asleep? Her words had become slower, her voice had seemed to come from somewhere smaller than usual, which had made her sound sad.

  She has had no gossip for me, I have realized that she has no news because there has been no school for a month: her life, like mine, has been stopped for the summer months, the detail in our lives has been bleached by the sun. Before she fell asleep, she asked about Pedro. And she mentioned Rory: her only mention of him, in two days. And a shy mention. And I had always thought of her as fearlessly nosy. Fearsomely nosy. For two days I had known that I owed him something more than this silence; I knew that if I could mention him, I would be not simply speaking of him but somehow speaking up for him. But how could I introduce him into the conversation? Remember Rory? And then what? What if she simply said yes? What would I say? Well, so do I. Well, of course I do.

  Since we moved here, I have been taking change coin by coin from Mum’s purse, day by day, and banking this booty in a sock in my drawer. And every week or so, on an evening when I am walking home alone from the pool, I detour into the phone box and use this small sum to call Rory, who tries to call me back. But lately we seem to have had nothing much to say to each other. And this nothing much is quite unlike the nothing much which made our phone calls so long when I lived down the road from him. Nowadays our hurried, coin-devouring conversations allow no time to do anything other than swap news. And this summer there has only been so much news to swap. Whenever I am standing there inside the steel frame of the pueblo phone box, listening to the fizzle of the invisible line between us, I remember how we would lie together for hours on the settee or in the park. I remember how I loved the warmth of him. But there is so much warmth here: how would we have been if we had grown up here? What I loved was to have him close to me. But now he is a thousand miles away.

  Earlier, this black hush was jangling with Tracy’s tapes, and shimmering with clothes, jewellery, and powder puffed from the clamping jaws of our compacts. The scorch of deodorant in the air was enough to shrivel the mosquitoes. With my mascara wand, I turned my eyelashes into wings; my
opened, darkened eyes watched my face emerge as if from sleep. Little Karen was perched on Tracy’s bed, her bare thighs the shape and colour of milk bottles. ‘Here,’ she would command Tracy, and then fasten a button or straighten a skewed seam. Her running commentary seemed to be made from someone else’s lines, she sounded like a child in an American sitcom: ‘Breathe in and think of England.’ Sometimes she and Tracy did a double act: ‘Mummy met Daddy at a dance, but at first she thought that he was a spiv …’

  So that Tracy fed her the next line, ‘But then …’

  ‘Well, then …’ and then I heard how their mum had been won over.

  From time to time, their mum’s face loomed around the door, extending her ribbed neck before popping back into the darkness to make a show of leaving us to ourselves. She made a show of envying us, too; she wanted us to enjoy ourselves and she wanted us to know that we were enjoying ourselves: ‘I wish that I was going with you,’ then, later, ‘Think of me, girls, stuck home with a grumpy old Hector.’

  To which Karen objected, ‘Poor Daddy!’

  Her mum bared her teeth in an impression of a smile. ‘Oh, don’t you worry about poor old Daddy, he’s lucky to have me.’

  She wants Tracy to have a boyfriend. As far as I know, Tracy has never been involved with anyone. But during my two days here her mum has hardly stopped mentioning Peter Lawley. Peter Lawley was two years above us, and next year he is Head Boy. These name-drops seem to imply that he has something to do with Tracy, but he seems to have more to do with her mum. Karen copies, telling little stories which have no point other than that they revolve around him. And then their dad remembers to fall into line, with an occasional playful hitch of an eyebrow, ‘Oh, Peter …’ Tracy smiles but says nothing; Peter Lawley seems to be a friend of the family rather than her own.