The Mask and Other Stories

by Nesta Tuomey

  In the bedroom she was momentarily daunted by the vast double bed, but the snowy innocence of the bánin bedspread reassured her and she giggled as the pillows plumped to meet her.

  ‘What we need is food,’ Jim suggested.

  When he was gone the room was full of echoes, the walls had a tendency to rush in on her. She stared dreamily at the ceiling, imagining a very long paintbrush in her hand as she traced satyrs and nymphs on the virgin surface. It was the way her thoughts were turning. He was back.

  The hot charcoaled meat went straight to Anne’s gut. She ate with dainty greed, chip after chip, but he was finished long before her and balled the greasy paper deftly into the waste-basket.

  ‘Not bad after six wodkas,’ he teased, loosening his tie. She pouted, still embarrassed by her slip. ‘Order breakfast, will you.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ Anne hazarded.

  ‘Try them!’ He stretched his length beside her.

  Languidly she lifted the receiver. ‘Hello there,’ she began, ‘We... that is I would like...’ The First Officer sniggered and she pulled a bold face at him, holding down her top lip with kitten teeth. ‘...to order breakfast.’

  ‘Room number?’ the night porter asked with cold enquiry. Anne hesitated.

  ‘Two-twenty,’ Jim supplied.

  ‘Continental brekkie or yummy bacon and sausage?’ Anne giggled.

  ‘Kindly put the gentleman on!’ The voice barked. ‘Like ruddy alley cats!’ he was heard to remark. Jim gave his order soberly and replaced the phone.

  ‘I suppose he thought we were in bed together.’ Anne’s voice was defiant.

  ‘He wouldn’t be far wrong.’

  Anne blushed. When Jim pushed her back on the pillow she responded with a fierceness which surprised them both, permitting, if not actually encouraging, his hand which had insinuated itself inside her dress. The straps fell away. She felt herself floating, dissolving in his grasp. ‘Wait!’ he checked her passion.

  When Jim turned back he held something half-concealed in his hand. Anne stared with puzzled eyes. It had the deceptive innocence of the scented hand freshners on the inflight mealtrays. As he tore at the tinfoil she realized her mistake.

  Under his busy fingers his member grew taut and was tautly enclosed. Anne was conscious of shock as she saw his hand. He had no left thumb. It was a tuberous growth, squashed and inert, against the straining rubber. Loathing and amazement grew in equal proportion but she was unable to look away. She was at a loss to know how he had managed to conceal it from her. She possessed a sixth sense about such things. He completed his preparations and urgently turned to her, kissed her eyelids, pressed against her.

  Anne did not know how to extricate herself, her mind paralysed by panic. In some dim recess of her mind the obligation of six vodkas weighed heavily. In her rigid embrace Jim thought he knew the reason. He reached a hand and extinguished the light.

  With the rushing darkness his deformity ballooned to monstrous proportions in Anne’s mind. She saw it sitting malevolently on her breast, nesting in her thighs. The vodka rose like a hot fetid spring to her throat and she thrust him violently from her.

  Jim let her go. Perhaps he had never really believed in his ability to make it with the ice-goddess. And then she was off the bed and crashing despairingly into furniture and walls, like some ungainly trapped bird, in an effort to get back to her own room before adding further shame to the evening.

  Hanging over the toilet bowl, weakly staring into a froth of orange zabaglione-like puke, she was even able to make a little joke of it. Saved by the sick! Funny, she mused, despite the sobering experience drink had turned out to be her salvation. Once again she had escaped intacta. She felt reprieved.

  She looked in the mirror and her tragic eyes detected some indefinable change. She was no longer a Romney but a Goya, she decided, her dreamy gaze settling on a crocheted antimacassar adorning the chair-back. The Maja?

  With a flourish she draped it low on her forehead entranced by her reflection. Not an entirely wasted evening, she decided, turning away at last to begin the ritual of bedtime. After all, doing something, anything, on stopovers was what counted!

  It Could Only Happen In Nerja

  Three girls away on holiday together worked out better than two, especially when one was disappearing off all the time as Millie was. In the beginning her friends Carol and Sandy put it down to being away from home and parental supervision but were soon attributing it instead to the magical atmosphere of the Spanish place they were staying in, to the languid impulses inspired by the hot Andelusian sun. Both had to admit its power was working on them too, at times making them act in an uninhibited, even irresponsible fashion so very different to their usual more moderate behaviour.

  And then one morning, after a hectic night disco dancing, Sandy found herself rudely shaken awake and, struggling up through the layers of paralyzing sleep, opened her eyes to find Carol leaning over her with a worried expression. “Please, please wake up, Sandy,” she was begging. “Millie didn’t come home last night. Look! Her bed hasn’t been slept in.”

  Sandy reared up to peer blearily at Millie’s bed and then at the clock, before collapsing back on the pillow. “For heaven’s sake!” she groaned. “It’s not yet seven.” desiring nothing more than to be allowed go back to sleep. But Carol insisted she sit up and discuss the situation, not relenting until Sandy had put her legs over the side of the bed, and only then going into the tiny kitchenette to make them coffee.

  ‘This is serious,” Carol said solemnly. “Anything could have happened to her.”

  Sandy did not take such a gloomy view but as the hours passed and there was still no sign of the returning Millie she began to be worried too. By ten o’clock they were both of them in the panics.

  “Nothing for it but to go to the police,” Carol decided, pulling on her shorts and running a comb through her unruly hair. “Get a move on, San, no time to be lost.”

  Ready at last, they were about to go below when they heard the street door banging and Millie came slowly, tiredly up the stairs, merely waving a languid hand at them before going on into the apartment.

  At once, the others rushed after her crying, “Millie, we were so worried about you. Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Falling on to the bed, Millie was asleep before they could put any more questions to her.

  Twice more that week Millie stayed away from the apartment all night, not returning until the sun was high in the sky and the lizards running over the terra-cotta tiles. “What’s this? The Spanish Inquisition,” she demanded, when they fussed over her, anxious for some sort of explanation. Where had she been, what had she been doing?

  “Honestly, the pair of you are worse than my mother,” she exploded, pulling the sheet irritably over her head and lying still, wanting only to catch up on her sleep.

  “Isn’t she the limit?” Carol sighed in frustration, and Sandy threw up her eyes to heaven, grabbed her sunhat and towel and headed for the beach, determined not to miss any more of the glorious sunshine.

  The truth of it was that since the evening Millie had wandered into his disco in the arcade, José Luis had been giving her a big rush. Earlier in the holiday she had fallen hard for Pierre, a muscular life-guard she had met on the Burriana Beach, but the nightclub owner had quickly replaced him in her affections and now Spain was clearly winning hands down over France.

  The Spaniard was the perfect foil for Millie’s fair prettiness, a robust young man with fine dark eyes, a mop of lustrous black curls and a permanent five o’clock shadow on his thrusting chin. A truly masculine, hirsute man. “One really hot guy,” agreed Sandy and Carol when they eventually met him, instantly charmed by his courteous manners, his flattering habit of kissing their hands and murmuring “¡Bellisima!” which naturally pleased them. So this was the guy monopolising all their friend’s waking hours, they mused, admiring and envious by turn.

  It was the girls’ first time to Spain,
indeed their first time abroad. All three were art students and eager to fraternise with the olive-skinned youths they encountered in the discos, or lounging about the cafes in the town square; Millie, perhaps the most eager of all. From the beginning she made no secret of the fact that she was susceptible to the Mediterranean male and might even marry one some day; if she met the right one, she airily stipulated, but without any real intention of giving up her freedom for a very long time yet.

  The others, her bosom friends since kindergarten, were familiar with Millie’s often expressed pre-nuptial ambitions which ranged from climbing the Pyrenees and painting them at first light, to learning Japanese calligraphy, and perhaps the most challenging of all (and which they were most in sympathy), of seeing her paintings hanging in the Royal Hibernian Academy.

  The trio were sojourning for the month of August in the Costa del Sol by courtesy of their indulgent parents. They had chosen Nerja, or to be precise Millie had, her fancy captured by all that she had ever read about El Balcon de Europa as well as the many pictures she had pored over, infatuated by its sweeping coastline and panoramic views. It sounded ideal, the other two agreed. And so it turned out to be.

  From the first moment of setting foot on Iberian soil Millie had been their natural spokeswoman, confidently bargaining (in atrocious Spanish) with the conserja of Los Patios Apartamentos for a better rate, exerting her charm (which was considerable) on the woman’s husband and sons so that they would more readily carry the easels and other bulky paraphernalia up the narrow stone stairs to the apartment.

  On settling in and getting to know their immediate neighbours, a Chinese businessman who kept everyone awake into the small hours playing honky-tonk music and two serious-looking Spanish youths who worked in a local Cambio, Millie led them confidently through the town in search of amusement, much as she had done during their first months at the art college when she had rapidly become the leading light of all the student parties and rags.

  That first week they had roamed the town, absorbing the foreign scents and sounds, and pausing often in the open-air cafes over coffees and sketch-pads to capture the pulsing life about them. Millie’s talent lay in portraiture and she made dramatic use of charcoal and pastels, inspiring one doting senora to offer payment for an enchanting sketch of her little daughter.

  “¡Ole! This will put Vino on the table,” Millie gloated, anticipating the generous fee coming her way. Good as her word, she returned to the apartment triumphantly brandishing a bottle.

  When, after a few days, the girls changed location to the Burriana Beach, Millie’s brief romance with Pierre blossomed and died, Sandy enjoyed a fling with an American engineering student travelling through Nerja on a college grant, and Carol survived a traumatic two-day relationship with a Swedish poet who, at the end of it, took her gold watch along with her virginity.

  Despite such distractions they worked dedicatedly, even with flair, and at the start of their second week took time off to make the hot and dusty bus journey some fifty kilometres distant to the capital of Malaga and there, to see their first bullfight.

  “I don’t think I want to see this,” Sandy shuddered when the first bull came charging into the arena but stayed, nevertheless, fascinated to the end, peeping fearfully through her fingers until with a final showy flourish the last bull was dispatched.

  As was to be expected it was a dramatic and gory spectacle – six bulls in toto were killed that day – and after it, (though they could not know it) they had produced their best work of the entire holiday while still under the wildly disturbing influence of the corrida. From every corner and sill of their apartment proud matadors in their suits of blue and silver bravely unfurled magenta and yellow muletas, causing the conserja when she called with her hot-eyed sons in attendance, to vigorously applaud their efforts.

  “¡Espléndido!’’ she exclaimed over the vivid paintings.

  “¡Ayee! Espléndido!” softly repeated the sons, gazing calf-eyed at the girls.

  Their feverish burst of creativity left them exhausted and for a time the girls downed brushes, themselves too, and lay dizzy and lethargic in the blossom-scented courtyard. During this recharging period Millie met her Spanish Waterloo in the shape of José Luis, and fell instantly under his spell, causing her friends to marvel at how quickly she had forgotten Pierre, and to wonder just how long this particular infatuation would last.

  But Millie was untroubled by such unromantic considerations. She was enjoying herself far too much, bubbling over with irrepressible good spirits which male adoration inevitably produced in her, and by the same token when suffering the lack of it, the grim opposite was true. This Sandy and Carol could readily attest to, having more than once been at the butt-end of her capricious humour.

  So now they suffered her raptures glad at least that she was no longer behaving so secretively, knowing they would not have to endure her euphoria for too long, not if the past was anything to go by. Inevitably, José Luis would be given his walking papers, like all the others; the thought causing them a certain amount of regret for he was one really nice guy, they both agreed, Millie’s best so far.

  “Not only hot but decent and sincere,” Sandy approved. “Lovely manners too.”

  Carol nodded, having learned from her disillusioning experience with the poet that such virtues were to be rated higher than honeyed words. “Oh, yes!” she agreed enthusiastically. “José Luis is a gentleman.”

  He was indeed, and according to Millie much more besides. So she told her friends at every opportunity, when she wasn’t busily telling him. Not only was he muy simpatico but he was also affectionate, witty, generous to a fault, and what was even more striking (considering the language barrier) intuitively tuned in to what she was about to say, even before she knew it herself.

  “Truly miraculous,” they indulgently agreed, and began again regretfully speculating on how many more days it could possibly last...three, four? Even less, as it turned out.

  After one more blissful day and night Millie and José Luis were estranged. Being Millie she involved them at once in the broken romance, storming into the apartment that evening at half-past ten (an unusually early hour for one more used to coming back at dawn) and made her announcement as dramatically as she knew how.

  “It’s over! Caput! Finished! Don’t ever mention his name to me again!”

  What it was all about neither Sandy nor Carol could make out, merely that the lovers had foundered on the rock of Millie’s obstinacy, but which rock she was never to make clear. To be honest, Millie wasn’t absolutely sure herself.

  It seemed that one minute they had been kissing, the next in the middle of a row, frightening in its intensity and apparently sparked off by something she had said about spending the night (which was half-over anyway) in his apartment. “It is most improper for you to be here at all,” he had told her with a severe primness which at first drew her laughter and then her anger, all the more since it had never seemed to bother him before. But when she reminded him of this he refused to listen, marching up and down the room, (looking so broodingly romantic that Millie was temporarily diverted into reaching for her sketch-pad) and saying with terrible scowling emphases.

  “No one, but no one, must point the finger at my novia.”

  It was the only clue the girls had. It seemed that Millie, like Caesar’s wife, must be above reproach. Amusing, they agreed, but rather sweet too. After all, it showed that he respected her and, more importantly still, had honourable intentions. But Millie railed against what she saw as the Spaniard’s presumption, his overriding possessiveness, his manipulative and chauvinist manner. The list was endless.

  “But Millie, surely you’re going to give him another chance,” Sandy implored in distress. Even Carol fully supported this view although usually prosaic in such matters, stoutly maintaining if a fling was over it was over! At the same time Carol had often wondered if the Swede had not stolen her gold watch whether she would have given him up so easily. But
now it was Millie, not herself, on trial so she said firmly, “Sandy’s right. You must give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Not on your life” Millie frowned. “He had his chance and he blew it!”

  Nothing either of them said could change her mind. José Luis had been judged and found wanting. For hours the girls sat up fortifying themselves on Spanish brandy and curiously mulling over the Spanish temperament which could blow so hot and then so cold. No longer was José Luis seen to be simpatico but two-faced and conniving. All those chicken paellas and champagne and shrimp suppers he had bought her were merely a ploy to worm his way into her affections. Even his intuitive powers, so widely praised in the beginning, were now scornfully discounted.

  And so the subject was hashed and rehashed until the other two, initially all sympathetic attention, began smothering yawns and wistfully eyeing their beds.

  “Oh, hang José,” Millie cried, sensing their slackening interest. “Wouldn’t he be smug if he could see us now?” She heaved herself off the bed and began restlessly prowling the floor, brandy glass lopsidedly held aloft. “My poor little ring,” she suddenly whispered, gazing forlornly at her bare finger. This was the slim gold band José had given her on their second date, placing it tenderly on her finger while whispering passionately “Mi preciosa, mi princesa.” All week she had been calling it her engagement ring but when he had escorted her back to the apartment that night she had dramatically thrown it back at him in the courtyard, affecting not to care whether it had gone into the fountain or landed in some other murky, perhaps, irretrievable spot.

  “We could go down now and search for it,” Sandy suggested, feeling sorry for her. “I’m sure we could find it even in the dark.”

  “Yes, let’s go!” Carol agreed, resigned to no sleep that night.

  At once, Millie brightened and the three girls rushed to the courtyard where they darted about like so many cabbage butterflies in their pale night clothes, scrabbling along the ledges of the ground floor apartments and poking their fingers in the gritty soil about the palm trees. Until Sandy’s cry of triumph signalled success.