Dead Head

by C. J. Skuse

  Contentment fell down gently on my shoulders like feathers.

  There was no backwards, no forwards, only this. I had to hold onto it, no matter what.

  The only time I’d get angry was when Tenoch would remind me this was a stop-gap. Thoughts would start fizzing and I’d have to leave the room.

  ‘Shame you won’t get to see them bloom,’ he said, coming back across the pool terrace from the gym one afternoon as I was planting out some honeysuckle along the back fence.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’ll be another month or two before they’re strong enough to go in the ground. Maybe one more month till they come through. You will be gone before they get much bigger.’

  And then he just walked away. No look back, no return. Leaving me still on the homeward slide towards my doom. And the feathery cloak of happiness vanished and my heart hurt all over again.

  And yet. And yet.

  One morning in early February, Tenoch noticed me scratching my mosquito bites on my neck when we were having breakfast.

  ‘You’re driving me mad with all that scratching, gatita.’

  ‘I don’t have leather skin like you. I’m not used to it. What’s “gatita”?’

  ‘It’s just a name. Means little cat.’ He smiled and as he did, Dorothy’s mother Sophia called her ‘pussycat’ on the TV. It was like something my dad would have called me. I’d forgotten what it was like to be someone’s daughter.

  See, why give me a pet name if he didn’t want me around? If he didn’t have some affection towards me? It didn’t make sense. What it did do was give me a tiny slice of hope.

  A bite made its presence felt on my arm. ‘Ugh, they’re maddening.’

  ‘You put that cream on the shopping list, no?’

  ‘Yeah, I tried it, but it didn’t work. I need something stronger.’

  ‘There’s a pharmacy in the town. I have to go down there tomorrow for some business anyway. Why don’t you come with me? They will help you.’

  ‘Am I allowed to visit the town, do you think?’

  ‘Sure. There aren’t many tourists around yet. Do what I do – keep your head down, and don’t draw attention to yourself. Borrow one of Marisol’s hats. Anyone asks, you’re my daughter.’

  And we went back to watching The Golden Girls and eating our quesadillas and drinking lemonade squeezed from our own lemons.

  ‘Haha, Rose is going out with a midget,’ he laughed. ‘Typical Rose.’ He shook his head, like he knew the woman intimately. I laughed too. He liked it when I laughed at the same time as him.

  As I went up to bed that night, I caught a glimpse of the painting of Marisol on the stairs. His precious daughter, with her scrappy plait trailing behind her, lying among the golden flowers. The girl whose hat I was permitted to borrow, and who he could barely talk about without blubbing. I wondered what had happened to her. I wondered if he’d called her gatita as well. I wondered if I could grow my hair as long as hers.

  The coastal highway at the bottom of the hill stretched far into the blue distance. It was bordered by an endless line of tall palms and sprawling hotel complexes, interspersed with taquerias, ice cream parlours or heladerias, supermarkets, tobacconists, liquor stores, boutiques and souvenir kiosks.

  Tenoch gave me an hour to look around and get what I needed to at the pharmacy, and said to meet him back at a little panaderia to pick up some of his favourite – apple pie – for a treat that evening. I found the pharmacy in a side street off the beachfront and the guy sold me a giant bottle of calamine, some brown hair dye and a few boxes of antihistamines. With time to kill so I browsed the other shops – I bought a Spiderman comic for David because I learned he loved comics, a football for Saúl and a yarn pig for Mátilda.

  As I was walking out of one store, a swinging A-frame on the sidewalk caught my eye:

  Galería de Salomé Casta

  Open till late. 10 per cent off ceramics while stocks last

  There was an arrow pointing along the seafront towards the Distrito de Arte. I had to go and see if Rafael was there – to see if he was as flawless as I remembered.

  I found the gallery along a wide cobbled street, nestled between others selling the same kind of stuff – seascapes, glass-blown sculptures, beach scenes, tapestries and bronzes. The original works by ‘Artistas Locales’ bore the most eye-watering price tags but basically all looked that looked like they’d been done by toddlers.

  There was the obligatory naked sculpture – the odd bronze wang looming over me as I ambled around. I couldn’t sniff out the picture Salomé had painted with her period clots, thank God, and the old nut job herself held court at the front of the gallery, giving short talks about the pieces in Spanish. She didn’t look insane. She reminded me of Golden Girl Dorothy – tall and stern-looking in a long-sleeved blue silk dress with chunky bead necklace.

  I stopped beside a huge ornate wall sculpture of shining gunmetal, formed into a shark with all these tiny suckerfish attached to its back. Two hundred and forty thousand pesos. Next to it was a drawing of a mother and child – the mother holding the infant, both their heads turned away. It was the simplest black charcoal drawing but I couldn’t stop staring at it.

  ‘Hello, young lady,’ came the voice.

  I ventured a peek. Salomé looked right at me, her last customers just leaving. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, are you English?’ she said. ‘How lovely. We don’t get many English visitors to this area anymore.’

  Thank fuck for that, I thought.

  ‘Did you see anything you liked?’

  ‘Yes, lots of things,’ I lied. ‘I like this one a lot.’

  ‘Madre e Hija. Yes, it’s perfectly understated, isn’t it? I noticed you looking at the oil paintings in the window by my nephew.’

  ‘Rafael?’

  ‘Rafael Arroyo-Carranza. I’m exhibiting him all this month.’

  Of course he would have such a beautiful last name. But there was one flaw at least: he couldn’t paint for shit.

  ‘They’re… lovely.’ I pretended to study one that looked like a naked chalk Dolly Parton screaming into a bin.

  ‘Isn’t he magnificent? The passion in them. He’s beginning to share his work more with me, after years of persuasion.’

  ‘He’s quite something,’ I said, glancing at picture next to Dolly which looked like an irradiated cock and bollocks.

  ‘His pieces are all reserved but he has plans to do a few more. What brings you to Rocas Calientes?’

  ‘I’m staying with my uncle. Helping him out. He has a bad arm.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, hand to her chest. ‘You wouldn’t be the English girl, would you?’

  ‘Which English girl?’ I said, mild arrhythmia just starting to kick in.

  She burst into laughter. ‘I’m sorry, Rafa said he met this brunette at the airport a few weeks ago and she hadn’t told him her name. He was quite taken with her,’ she beamed. ‘He said she’d introduced herself as a maniac.’

  I laughed. ‘Oh, he remembered me?’

  ‘He certainly did. He said you were beautiful and you made him laugh, two attributes devilishly hard to find in another person.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ Except I did know about that and I swelled with joy. The Hottest Turtle thought I was both beautiful and funny.

  Gusset dryness = history.

  She hooked her finger towards me and led me towards the back of the shop where she rooted around in her pocket for a key to unlock a set of drawers beneath the cash register. ‘When he was here, he came to the gallery every day hoping you’d turn up. He said he’d told you about the place.’

  ‘Yes, he did. I didn’t think he would remember me.’

  ‘Well, he did, and he was a little disappointed you didn’t show up. I said if you ever did come in, he should leave a note for you, you know, on the off chance that you might want to see him again.’ She fished out a small scrap of paper from the drawer. ‘Here it is.’
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  She handed it to me. I opened it out:

  Hey, Maniac. I came down here a few times but I must have missed you. Maybe you’re busy. If you want to hang out anytime, ask Sal for my number. Been thinking ‘bout you, that’s all. Rafael ☺

  ‘Oh shit,’ I said, reading the message again, before Salomé grabbed it from me and scribbled down his number on the back.

  ‘Only if you’re interested, of course,’ she said, going to hand it to me but withholding it at the last second.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I spluttered, ‘of course I am,’ grabbing the note from her and holding it as though it was the map to the lost city of Atlantis.

  ‘Good. Because if you hadn’t been I’d have thought you really were a maniac. He’s special to me. And he’s been hurt before.’

  ‘Me and him both.’

  ‘He’s coming here in a few weeks to help me move premises. Maybe you could spend some time with him? He’d love to show you around the place.’

  ‘You’re moving?’

  ‘To a bigger spot, a few doors down.’

  She was waiting for something – for me to commit to a definite yes. But I couldn’t decide if I wanted to inflict myself on Rafael. He seemed like a decent guy, despite obvious artistic dyslexia. And no good man deserved me.

  So I said it. ‘I don’t know if I’m… what he needs.’

  Salomé stepped back, seemingly shocked. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘I’m kind of high maintenance. Every rose has its thorn.’

  ‘Is that Jung?’

  ‘No, Miley Cyrus.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, here is another one for you – every heart sings a song incomplete, until another heart whispers back.’

  ‘Ooh, that’s good.’

  ‘Plato. I think. Or the other one. Socrates. No, I think it’s Plato. My philosophy is a little rusty.’

  ‘Well, it was nice to meet you, Salomé. I hope to see you again.’ I pocketed the note.

  ‘Yes, I hope you see you again too, uh— sorry, I missed your name…’

  And I said it, for the first time ever, without thinking – I said my brand-new name. The name I was going to have for the rest of my life.

  All the way back to the Hacienda, the sky darkening, I chitter-chattered like an excited baby bird. Tenoch, one meaty hand on the steering wheel, one slinged-up arm leaning out of the window, kept his eyes on the road.

  ‘You seem happier now, gatita.’

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ I said, dabbing some of the cool calamine lotion on my bites with small pinches of cotton wool.

  ‘Good.’ He smiled at me – a dad smile.

  ‘And I thought of a new name.’ I told him what it was. His face bore no expression. ‘Well? What do you think? Is it white-bread enough?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a good name. A pretty name.’

  ‘I went to this little art gallery and I met the lady who runs it.’ I screwed the lid back on the calamine. ‘And I said it when she asked me… that feels better already,’ I said, looking at all the chalky discs of lotion all over my legs. ‘Dad used to put calamine lotion on my chickenpox when I was little.’

  ‘You had chickenpox?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, when I was about nine. Why?’

  He looked at me before placing a tender hand to my chin and turning it from one side to the other. ‘These scars, they chickenpox?’ He was referring to the one below my right ear and next to my nose.

  ‘Yeah. And a couple on my tummy.’

  ‘You can add those to your list,’ he said.

  ‘What list?’

  ‘For your surgery. Ask them to graft them for you. I had it done myself, it doesn’t take long. Or they might use lasers now, I don’t know.’

  My heart dive-bombed. ‘Do I have to have surgery?’

  ‘Of course. You have paid for it.’

  ‘But what if I… stayed here, out of the way?’ I asked. ‘Would I still need it?’

  ‘You need to be gone from here by April. That’s what you’ve paid for.’

  ‘But if I stayed and kept you company? I can be useful to you.’

  Tenoch didn’t say no right away. He put his hand down into the bakery bag and plucked out a macaron. ‘How can you be useful to me?’

  ‘I can help you around your house. Keep the house clean.’

  ‘I have Celestina for that.’

  ‘Well, I can do other things, I don’t know. I buried the bodies. I can bury as many bodies as you need. I’ll do whatever. You know you can trust me.’

  He didn’t speak for a long time. I didn’t think he was going to say anything at all. As the car passed the front gates of the Hacienda and swung a left onto the hard standing at the back, he switched off the engine and leaned across to remove a leaflet from the glove box. He handed it to me.

  ‘The Xochiquetzal Clinic and Medspa Centre,’ I read aloud.

  ‘It’s not far. Cabo San Lucas. I had some work done there myself. Dr Gonzales is a good friend of mine – I would trust him with my life.’

  ‘Please, Tenoch.’

  ‘Your first consultation is next week. They will do the first procedure the week after. If you want to be truly free, you have to change your face. It’s hot property, and it’s becoming more recognisable by the day, you understand?’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘But what?’ he glared at me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, all fizzy in my chest again. It was useless nagging him. He was a closed door and surgery was the only one open to me. I had no choice but to walk through it.

  ‘What work did you have done?’

  ‘I had some tattoos removed. And a facelift. Rhinoplasty. A few chemical peels. I’ll show you a picture of how I looked before.’

  When we got inside, I sat at the dining table and flicked numbly through the leaflet. Every picture was of some scraped-face angel-white-toothed pre-pube who’d had every procedure going and felt ‘fresh and ready for life’s challenges’. I was not these women. I did not want to improve my face or brighten my outlook. Though the tummy tuck was worthy of a second look.

  Tenoch brought in a scrap of paper and slid it across the table top. It was a mottled photo of a family sitting by a pool, raising a drink and squinting into the sun. A woman handing out slices of cake. A twenty-first birthday balloon tied to the back of a young woman’s chair. The man sitting next to her had his hand behind her head, doing bunny ears.

  ‘Can you see me?’ asked Tenoch.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Is that your daughter?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, pointing to the birthday girl. ‘And that’s me next to her.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘That’s you? Your face…’

  ‘That’s what a facelift and a nose job does. It changes the fundamental parts of your image.’ He stared hard at the photo before lifting it to his mouth and kissing the girl, then the woman handing out the cake.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  He didn’t answer that. Instead he said ‘My point is – there is life for you to live after surgery. New face. New name. New people.’

  ‘Is Tenoch not your real name?’

  He didn’t answer that either. ‘You have given yourself a second chance. My advice – take it with both hands. Get out there and make good of it.’

  ‘But how? Where do I go?’

  ‘Not my problem.’ He stood. ‘You want quesadillas again tonight?’

  ‘No please, please listen to me,’ I said, sliding out my chair. ‘I need to stay here. I don’t have anywhere else.’

  ‘This place is not for you. Do you never think why?’ I frowned. ‘You dug a grave for four men last week. Does it not scare you who those men were? If more men will come here?’

  ‘I can take care of myself.’

  ‘Not here you can’t. This is cartel country. You may think you are brave, that you have bested your enemies in little old England but you cannot fight the cartel. You can’t bring a knife to a gunfight.’

  ‘Teach me how to use a
gun then.’

  ‘Haha, I’m not about to give a serial killer a gun.’

  ‘But I can defend myself if more men come here. I can defend you.’ I followed him into the kitchen where he started grating cheese into a bowl. ‘We can be ready for them together and finish this.’

  ‘Could be more of them next time. They will never stop.’

  ‘Why? What do they want?’

  ‘Revenge. Amongst other things.’

  I was too busy freaking out about being flung out into the big wide world to really question what he meant by that. No matter how hard I worked in the garden, nor how many après-workout smoothies I made him, nor how many times I watched The Golden Girls and laughed in all the same places as he did – I was out on my ear. The thought of being on my own again made me realise how fucking weak I truly must be.

  All my life I’ve had someone propping me up. First Mum and Dad, then Seren until she went to the States, by which time I had Craig and the PICSOs. When Craig was arrested, I had Jim and Elaine. On the ship, it had been Caro and the Prossers. I was a parasite, a suckerfish, like the ones on that shark in Salomé’s gallery. Looking for the next host.

  Now here I was clinging to Tenoch, a stranger.

  Something would turn up, I kept telling myself. A cunning plan. A miracle, even. I’d take anything. In the meantime, I tended the garden and kept my mouth shut and my eyes open. It always opened up my thoughts.

  And a thought did occur to me, the following day.

  I’d given the children their presents from town. They loved them, Saúl especially – and I got three hugs which made me so happy I could have cried. David read his comic from cover to cover. Mátilda still wanted Richard E. Grunt as well as the yarn pig I had bought her but I stole it from her dungaree pocket and said he’d run off to join a piggy circus, which she seemed to accept.

  Tenoch had seen the present giving and bided his time.

  ‘You will find new people,’ he told me over breakfast, still sweaty from his workout. ‘Don’t get too reliant on them.’

  I pushed my uneaten Pop Tart away. ‘I like them. They’re good kids.’

  ‘I know, but they will not be around here forever.’

  Fury bubbled in my core. I seethed as he wanged on and on.