Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  We did not want to leave for the disco before half-past ten. Tracy’s mum agreed, explaining to her husband that, ‘This is the continent, nothing gets going until late.’

  He laughed, ‘Except the mosquitoes, because I’m eaten alive every evening at dinner.’

  Karen piped, ‘Can I stay up and drive there with them?’

  The late start allowed us to negotiate to be fetched after midnight, at half past. Tracy’s dad decided, ‘Seems reasonable.’ And her mum smiled, drawled, ‘My little pumpkins.’

  Later, when we drove away, the tyres growling in the gravel, she called from the patio, ‘Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.’

  Tracy hooted a laugh.

  When we arrived, Tracy’s dad gave us extra money in case we should need a taxi in an emergency, and found us a nearby rank. Outside the disco, we strained to hear his instructions over the careless slams of car doors and the thumps of the music through the walls. Everyone seemed to know one another, they crowded around their cars, on their cars, tipping beer bottles to raised, parted, fish-like lips.

  ‘Remember,’ Mr King’s face delved for seriousness, ‘two drinks, no more.’

  Tracy tittered, ‘Doubles.’

  Inside, the dance floor was hardly larger than the spherical mosaic of mirror which rotated overhead. The bass beat knocked through my ribs and motorized my heart. I followed Tracy to the bar, where we bought our drinks. The rum smelled like glue in the Coke. All around us, perfumes and aftershaves cloaked their wearers like masks. We stood in front of a mural of a palm tree which was symmetrical and pert, quite unlike the real, reptilian, prehistoric growths of scales and spikes in the car park. I was standing there, by the mural, when I saw Pedro. I saw him and in a minute or two my soul was drawn to him like the measured, mysterious draining of my shower-water back down to the earth and towards the equator. I knew what I was here to do, I knew that I could still do this. He was lolling on the bar with a friend and in a sense there was nothing particularly striking about him: he was tall, slim, nice-looking, in jeans. But his teeth and the whites of his dark eyes and the shine on his black hair seemed to me to burn like the brilliance that people claim to see beyond the darkness when they are dying, the brilliance that draws them forward.

  I turned to Tracy. ‘Time for my second drink, I think.’

  Her eyes widened, her blank gaze dropped to my full glass.

  ‘Trust me,’ I said.

  And that was how I ended up next to Pedro, which is why he turned to me, and when we spoke. And this was all that we did, for the whole evening: somehow we talked, easily, for hours, even though my Spanish is limited to shopping and his English to textbook introductions. I was careful not to betray Tracy’s trust: I talked to her, too, I never stopped talking to her; I talked for her to Pedro’s friend because they were obviously keen on each other. Not quite keen enough, in her case, in the end, because eventually she saw some people whom she knew from the beach, went over to say hello, stayed with them and became heavily involved in a conga. Pedro and I had to lean close to each other to catch the words which travelled like whispers but had been spoken loudly. I watched his mouth work on unfamiliar words: his face worked hard, and he smiled harder.

  The time was taken by this slow turning of words, and only now do I realize that I had had no idea of what to do, what was expected of me or what could or should happen or not happen between us; only now do I realize that in a foreign country, even this, especially this, is a foreign language. But why did I lie, why did I leave untouched his unspoken assumption that I live in England? When he asked if I would come to the disco again, I told the truth: Thursday.

  When we had to leave, Tracy squeezed my shoulder and reassured me, ‘I’ll tell Dad that you’re on your way,’ then turned to Pedro to chime, ‘Ciao,’ before ambling away over the car park, her stiletto heels croaking on the concrete. And this was when Pedro and I had our kiss, this was when the small space that had been between us was turned inside out. A mere minute or two of kissing but I was shaking, so much so that I could have been a cartoon character who cracks and crumbles into pieces. By the time that we stepped back from each other, I had forgotten how to say goodnight in any other way, and could only smile as I turned away.

  Tracy leaves tomorrow. I am supposed to be there with her, now, but I am trapped here. By rain. The rain in Spain, Sally chirps whenever she moves to a window. She leaves this rain in Spain in the air because there is no more to say; no hope for us of any plane. Or car, because the road to the pueblo is flooded, the dip in the road has become a deep pond. This morning, in one of the lulls in the storm, Dad drove down very slowly with Dean, their tyre-tracks two deep sluices. When they returned ten minutes later, the vivid mud had turned our car tabby-coloured.

  Slamming his streaked and speckled door, Dad shouted up to the balcony, ‘No go: too much water in the dip.’ This was news to us, this had been the only trip down the road in two days.

  Sally squealed, ‘Will we starve, then? Or will they drop supplies for us?’

  Sprinting up the steps, Dean mumbled to Mum, ‘If you’re desperate, I can wade through.’

  ‘Action Man,’ I said.

  ‘Fat chance of starvation,’ Mum told us. ‘We need to finish up the contents of the freezer box.’ Because there has been no electricity for two days.

  Nor water: every turn of a tap brings a parched strain, but no water. When Mum discovered that we had no water, she remembered, ‘The Chryslers told me that this would happen: when there’s no power, the local pump packs up.’

  So, Sally’s other little joke is, Water, water, everywhere …

  There is enough to drink, in bottles; but what I want is a bath: all I want, now, is a bath. I want warmth; I want the hard white shine of the bathroom; I want to lock a door on my family.

  For two days we have been here in the main room, surrounded by candles stuck onto saucers and towels rucked beneath doors and heaped into the fireplace to soak up leaks. The towels swell and smell. Because there is no electricity, we have no music to drown the roar of rain on the roof. Mum has returned to her roots, to the olden days, writing letters all the time: bowing over her pen and paper in a halo of candlelight, she looks like a Victorian lady. She is even wearing glasses, the reading glasses that she never normally wears because she never normally reads or writes. The next time that she criticizes me, I can say Boys don’t make passes …

  Our candles are a shiny, slimy white; they are, in Dad’s cross words to Mum, a false economy: each one pools on the saucer within a couple of hours and then we are one snuffed wick closer to darkness. Whenever anyone has to go to the bathroom, we are one candle down and darker.

  When we try to sleep, we are woken by a swell of the storm. Last night I was woken by the sound of someone falling down as a dead weight on to the floor upstairs; but in a moment I remembered that there is no upstairs here: I realized that this was thunder, again. Sally ran to Mum and Dad’s bedroom, and stayed with them. For an hour or so I lay listening to the storm, the rips in the sky above me. The chinks in my shutters were pale and pulsing, the sky was never free from lightning. Today I am so tired, the darkness that I see around my eyes in the mirror is more than shadow thrown by the candle. All that I want now is to melt into a tub of clean, steaming water; I want to close my strained eyes and stop time, stop the painfully slow turn of time, I want to surface only when everything is back to normal. I cannot quite believe that everything will not be normal when I next look; but somehow, at the same time, I have forgotten how the world was ever any different from this, any better than this.

  Yesterday I went to the windows or onto the covered balcony every quarter of an hour or so to check for any break in or lightening of the cloud. From the windows I could see nothing but pus-yellow smoke, a kind of cloud that I had never seen before. On the balcony, I was stunned by the sizzle of the rain in the mud where our road had been. Mum kept telling me to be patient. She said that the Chryslers had told her tha
t this weather would come, that the summer would break like this, with storms and rain for a couple of days. She told me, ‘Your problem is that you haven’t learned to take the rough with the smooth.’ She is always so keen to tell me about the problems she thinks that I have. She seems to think that I have a lot of them. ‘This weather is only for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘Once a year for a couple of days.’

  But not this couple of days, surely: why this couple of days, my couple of days?

  ‘Tracy will understand,’ she decided, earlier today. ‘She’ll know what has happened, she knows that you’re stuck up in the hills.’

  You said it. I was stuck up in the hills, staring into the silvery veil of rain, when I should have been having a laugh with the Kings. And I knew that, in a few hours’ time, thirty miles down the coast, Pedro would assume that he had been stood up. He would give up on me and I would never find him again. Earlier, on several occasions when the rain ebbed for a while, I tried to persuade Dad, and even Dean, to take me, to take a chance, to take the risk, but eventually Dad decreed that, rain or no rain, the roads are dangerous and no one is going anywhere.

  Staying by the window, I remembered the dogs, the family of starved dogs in their enclosure on bare ground, beneath the feeble tree. Would they survive? How could they survive? But how would they die; do – how do – animals die of rain? What did they feel, what would they make of this sudden, total change in their world? When I came away from the window, trying to stop thinking, Dad and Dean had gone to the garage to service the car. Making good use of their time, as Mum wasted no time in telling me. The car that should have been taking me to freedom was being taken to pieces. For other, future trips, trips in a future that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Cleaning the engine with filthy cloths, Dad and Dean would need our precious water to wash their hands: Making bad use of our water, I replied to Mum.

  A little later, on the balcony, I could hear them: those intermittent wordless utterances of satisfaction or concern, the indecipherable language of men who are working on something mechanical. Back indoors, Sally had begun to organize games, formal games for which she had to find boards and packs of cards in cupboards and drawers. Now she has played for hours with everyone but me.

  Mum keeps telling me to come away from that window. Once she added, ‘This is no one’s fault, you know, Gillian.’

  This is your fault, for going bankrupt, for coming here, for making me come here with you.

  In twenty-four hours’ time, Tracy will have flown through this rain; she will be home, watching Only Fools and Horses or something.

  Earlier Mum had said, ‘You can write to her.’ And now she keeps telling me that This is not the end of the world.

  How little she knows.

  10

  DON’T TOUCH IT, DON’T IGNORE IT, STAY CALM

  Earlier today, I was called to my daughter’s school because she had said fuck to the headmaster. Not that this was what I was told, of course: I was told, by his secretary, that there had been some trouble. She called me, on his orders, to ask me to fetch Sylvie: I’m afraid that there has been some trouble, involving your daughter. Could you please come and fetch her? What she did not tell me was that Sylvie was refusing to leave. Perhaps I should have known: trouble is nothing new, but I had never been called to fetch her. I rushed to the school. As I ran down the corridor towards the office, towards the headmaster who stood in his open doorway, I called, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ and then I heard her, ‘Don’t fucking apologize for me.’

  I went into the office, saying, ‘Enough.’

  She was occupying a chair on the nearside of the desk, one of the two chairs which are for parents. Her mouth resembled a piece of wire, thin but tough; her chin was cocked; her arms were folded too high for comfort. But her shoes did not quite reach the ground. She told me, ‘No, it is not enough, nothing is enough for these people,’ and announced, ‘I’m staging a sit-in to protest against vivisection in the biology labs,’ started to explain, ‘they butcher animals …’

  I murmured, ‘I’ll butcher you,’ before turning to the headmaster, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Gray, but she has been working rather hard, lately.’

  He stepped – swaggered – into the room. ‘Unfortunately, I have seen no evidence of that, Mrs Rees. And your daughter has informed me that she fails to give an expletive deleted for scientific progress.’

  ‘Not at the expense of lives,’ she corrected, before appealing to me, ‘you don’t know what they do …’

  I told him, ‘My name is not Mrs Rees; Rees was my married name.’ I was sure that I saw a smirk. ‘Is that funny?’ I turned and pointed to Sylvie, ‘You,’ then pointed to the door, ‘out.’

  She slid forward in the chair, to implore, ‘Mum …’

  I stood my ground, did not lower my arm.

  So she slipped from the chair, strode to the doorway and away. I heard the secretary, in the corridor, adding her disapproval: ‘Well.’

  In this confusion, I turned to the headmaster and said, by mistake, ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  Sylvie hurried ahead to the bus stop, pausing only to whirl around and scream, ‘So, you think that they should be allowed to cut up mice and frogs’

  She was so far ahead of me that I had to shout: ‘I think that there are other ways to win hearts and minds.’

  And then there were no more words between us: we stood in silence in the bus shelter. I was thinking my way through the crisis, deciding to ring the headmaster when we reached home, to apologize and try to gauge the depth of Sylvie’s disgrace. To discover if she would be allowed back into school, and if so, when. The corner of my eye vibrated with her pacing, craning, tapping, frowning, her show of impatience and contempt. Turning away, weary, I wondered: did she act alone, or were there others, who gave up, gave in and left her there? I knew that it was quite likely that she had acted alone: she is an accomplished lone operator. Perhaps because she is an only child. So I did not waste my breath, risk disappointment by demanding, Who put you up to this?

  The bus came, and I followed her up the steps but was left to pay for her. Which was fair enough, I suppose: she had not asked to be taken home. When I turned around, I saw that she had gone towards the back, to one of the two long seats that are turned from the others to face into the aisle. I went to the opposite one, because it would have seemed odd to perch next to her, so close yet unable to see her. But then we travelled for ten minutes without exchanging a glance. Ten unbroken minutes. Her eyes avoided mine. I do not think that I have gazed at her for so long since she was a baby.

  She was slumped, her shoulders slipped sideways but the soles of her shoes still not quite low enough to reach the footplate. She did not look unhappy: and of course not, because she was away from school, on her way home, with time to think up new plans. Suddenly I wondered: what do other people see, when they looked at her? Not those who know her, not my friends or her teachers, but the people on the bus: what did they see? A pretty, petite sixteen-year-old. Even if petite is no longer a word with much currency away from dress shops, and pretty no longer a compliment, I believe, to which girls particularly aspire. I imagine that Sylvie would prefer sultry, or something. Which is tough, because she is pretty, just plain pretty: despite dabbling with lipstick and mascara, she has a natural look, one which reminds me of sun-warmed wood. She is very unlike me: I am a natural and bottle blonde. I like to keep on the bright side of blonde; and I know that grey is supposed to make the victim look distinguished, but I am a dumpling and nothing would make me look distinguished, not even if I took to wearing a monocle.

  Presumably in other people’s eyes, the eyes of people on buses, Sylvie is a dream daughter. But they do not know about her conscience, and how her conscience has very little to do with dreams. She lives to the tick of her conscience, utterly without compromise. She has never turned her combative gaze from anyone. Apart from me, even though there have been only the two of us since she was three years old. But I have been caref
ul never to give her much cause for complaint. And I do not count, because there are far more important battles to be won; her campaigns are focused, and focused outwards. She bypasses me, her attention slides in my direction, comes close, and there is a sticky moment, but then she is off on the trail of untruth and hypocrisy.

  The problems began in her first week at school – ten years ago – with her plimsolls; where to wear them or where not to wear them, I do not remember the details. Most recently, she decided to boycott her school’s compulsory Christianity: when forced to attend assemblies, she whistled through the prayers. Which was when I was called to school to Discuss the situation. Which meant, defuse the situation. Which I managed, but this time I doubt my chances: a whistle is one problem, an expletive quite another.

  We are home, now, but still wordless. I have made some tea, and properly: sloshing the pot with hot water, stirring the leaves. So now we are waiting for the tea to brew. Our silence passes with the silent tick of the leaves around the pot and their turning over into the bottom. I am busying myself with the shopping that I bought earlier, before I was called to the school. I have bought a jumper. The plastic wrapper bears the advice, To avoid suffocation, keep away from children. How very true: this shopping seems to come from another world, when the day was simply one of my two half-days off per week, when the day was my day, and not yet taken over by Sylvie and reduced to chaos. She is leaning emphatically onto her elbows, onto the table, looking down onto the tabletop.

  I have to do this, it is my job as a mother: I open with, ‘Do you have to be so confrontational?’ Confrontational was the word used by her headmaster during the row about the whistled prayers.

  Her eyes snap up to mine, ‘What?’ The tone closer to fury than to irritation.

  Don’t act dumb, ‘You know what.’

  She drops back in her chair. ‘Of course I have-to-be-so-confrontational,’ the latter words mimicked, but ridiculously, her head wobbly and her eyes wide. ‘Confrontation is what this is about. These people need confronting. The problem is that they are never confronted with what they are doing, with what they have done.’