by Chloe Turner
The largest piece is as big as the palm of Camila’s hand. It curls up there like a sharp-edged bowl. Blown glass with a swirling bolt of blue; it reminds her of a fresco in the Basilica back home, the many-towered cathedral which dominates the far bank of the Ebro from her mother’s tiny flat. Something of the blooming skirts of Goya’s Queen of Martyrs captured here in vitreous, bubbled transparency. She thinks back to times when she gazed up at the dome’s fresco as a child: sliding along the cathedral’s smooth pews with her head tipped back, while her father ran soft cloths over gilt angels, and mopped marble floors around the sandaled feet of the day’s last tourists. And then, when what was left of her small clan gathered under the dome for the first Día de los Muertos after her father’s death, she remembers wondering who would dust the angels now.
There was no question in Joanne’s mind as to who smashed the vase, and why. She called Camila—screamed for her—from the front room. Camila had to leave the children alone at the kitchen table. Not that they were concerned: they barely looked up, busily fashioning a rocket from the badly-rinsed contents of the recycling bin.
Tiptoeing amongst the fragments in stockinged feet, Joanne was already at fever pitch by the time Camila came through the door. It was a fight about much more than the vase, of course, but that alone could have done it. Camila has no idea how she provoked it, but distrust has festered between them from the start. Since the day Camila arrived, Joanne has winced if the girl so much as looks at her work, her shoulders hunching as if judgment has fallen before Camila has had a chance to say a word.
Ironically, Joanne’s artistry is the one thing she admires about the older woman, most of all the blown glasswork which emerges like crystalline mysteries from the iron-roofed workshop at the end of the lawn. Left alone, Camila has often run her fingertips over ripple-edged vases and bowls, and over those strange, interconnecting forms—purple, bleeding into green, bleeding into blue—brittle sea creatures worn smooth and stranded on the piano’s lid.
Joanne was just drawing breath—the eye of the storm—when the two women heard a squeal; the screech of the table’s feet across the slate tiles, and the muffled thuds of two sets of footsteps up the few stairs from the kitchen.
‘She broke it…’
‘It was mine. He took it…’
‘I had it first…’ ‘No…’
Camila’s arm shot out without thinking, a barrier across the entrance, preventing the children from straying onto the broken glass. Owen began to squirm at once, never content to be contained. Beca’s shoulders were shuddering with tears. Camila bent to squeeze them still, and the little girl nuzzled into her neck. Joanne was frozen, mutely pained, the field of glass between her and hers.
‘David.’ Joanne broke her silence to yell for her husband. Her eyes didn’t leave Camila’s. Upstairs, there was the squeak of boards from one side of the ceiling to the other, as David made his way to the landing and down.
It didn’t start like this. Should never have turned out like this. The day Camila arrived, the whole family piled up to Stansted to meet the plane. Owen’s orange jump-jet T-shirt was the first thing Camila saw when she walked into the arrivals hall, dazed after a bumpy landing and the glass of cheap Tempranillo the businessman beside her had insisted she join him in, before rubbing his fat fingers up her thigh.
The children loved Camila from the moment they met her. They mobbed her, giggling at the brightly foiled frutas de Aragón she unwrapped for them, tiny paws pulling at the short lace skirt she was already regretting, as the reality of a British summer’s day took hold. David was solicitous: kissing her on both cheeks, snatching up her bag, refusing to take the trolley further. Joanne rolled her eyes, asked about the journey, patted Camila on the arm—stiff, but not yet unfriendly. Camila thought of her mother’s enveloping arms and reminded herself that six months would pass quickly.
It was not just that skirt, of course—it became apparent quickly that few of her clothes were suitable. Joanne urged her to go shopping, at her expense; to buy more. (To cover up.) There is no shortage of money here. Whatever David does in that glass-fronted box in the city, it pays for this comfortable Victorian villa. For the fridge with its doors which open like an embrace. For the sleek car on the pavement outside, which is treated to waxes and steam-cleans as if it were some pampered pet. And for her, Camila, of course; David has paid her well. She has sent home €400 each month, leaving tear stains on the letters her mother has sent in reply. But despite Joanne’s fluttered notes and hints, Camila has found herself hardening to the weather. Donning tough soled boots under floating dresses as a sole concession to autumn’s approach. Even folding that lace skirt over at the waist so that the lower half of her thighs, still deep copper from a summer spent waitressing in a Tarragona beach café, are bare to the breeze.
She and David were thrown together from the start. He likes to be home to bathe the children each night, and Camila, unsure whether it was her place to do so, got into the habit of kneeling by his side. Only rarely did Joanne displace her. Joanne’s working hours are erratic, so the children would sometimes go days without seeing their mother, and Camila found herself offering cuddles and kisses in compensation. Joanne blamed the tyranny of the glass. When using moulds, she preferred to cast at night, she said, free from distractions. And the concentration required for free-form sculpting left her exhausted and vague, wandering through the kitchen in her heavy overalls, calipers or a length of blowpipe still clasped in one grey Kevlar mitt.
Joanne would often miss dinner, leaving Camila and David to eat alone, and then perch later on a stool with a sandwich, answering David’s enthusiastic questions—technical queries, about melting points, crimping and annealing, desperate attempts to break the ice—in short, staccato bursts. She is thin, Joanne, painfully so, and on the rare occasions she leaves her long, pale neck unwrapped in scarves, her clavicles stretch her translucent skin whip tight. Camila has never seen them touch each other. Sometimes David reaches a hand towards his wife, but she always skids away under it, as a silk cloth slips over glass.
From time to time in these past months, Joanne has gone away. For a weekend, usually. Some weeks ago, she stayed away for five days. There was no warning, though David spoke of a conference as if it had been long planned. In Joanne’s absence, Camila grew bolder, stretching and then breaking the strict rules by which Joanne imposed herself on the household. Camila let the children dress themselves, mixing colours and patterns as they chose, swapping Beca’s bland T-shirts and skirts for bright dresses with ruffles and bows, which she found in the midweek market in town. She allowed the children to stay up late, and when David returned from work, delayed by the train, he found them dancing in the formal front room, bouncing on the sofas’ plump cushions, their faces flushed and high. He ushered them out, gesturing towards the glassware, but he laughed as he chased them up the stairs.
On those evenings, Camila began to cook food from home: spiced longaniza sausages with fried eggs and migas, and almojábanas pastries flavoured with sugar and anise. When David opened a bottle of wine with dinner, she accepted a second glass. On the night before Joanne’s return, he opened a second bottle.
Camila pulls a final fragment of glass from the matting now. It is cold down here on the floor, as if a void beneath the carpet is sucking the heat from the room. She folds her arms under her small breasts and sits back on her heels. Tiny slivers still glitter amongst the rug’s fibres, but they will have to wait for the Hoover’s indifferent grasp.
She didn’t know—why should she?—that this vase was Joanne’s favourite. That it was the first vessel David’s wife blew unaided. That the wrap of blue that curled through the heart was drawn from a cobalt cane Joanne chose for her mother’s eyes. But he knew.
And it was not Camila who left the door to the front room unlocked, the heart-shaped vase lifted down from its place on the mantelpiece to a side table, where it stood no chance against Beca’s exploring fingers and Owen’s aeroplan
e arms. She saw his face when he came in—reluctant, but he was prepared to take the blame. David had stoked this fire.
But Camila didn’t let him. Instead, she nodded at Joanne’s accusations, let the outburst envelop her, impressed by the heat that had risen in this brittle woman. David, beside her, visibly diminished as his wife spoke; he was weak and insubstantial now. Camila watched him shift his weight from one foot to the other, his fingers fidgeting along the undulations of the radiator behind his back.
And when Joanne finished at last, shoulders slumping with the effort of the invective but still defiant, Camila knelt at her employer’s feet. She plucked the first of the fragments, lining them up on a folded newspaper beside her knees, while the family shuffled out around her. Beca slipped free to reach for her, but it was David who pulled the little girl back, shepherding her into the hall. Through the closed door now, there are fragments of a conversation. Camila hears ‘flight’ and ‘morning’. ‘That girl’ and ‘mistake’. A taxi being booked for an early hour.
Camila picks up the largest shard again, with its drape of spun cobalt inside. She wraps it in a tissue, the blue even more vivid against the white. Sharp edges subdued, she tucks it into the pocket of her skirt. By sunset tomorrow, Camila will be back on the banks of the Ebro, back in the arms of her mother. But she will take with her something from the glass-blower’s heart.
A Raft of Silver Corpses
It began with the octopuses.
They started turning up in rock pools, as commonplace suddenly as shore crab and blennies; unlikely jellies which half-huddled under the sand, squirting from their siphon if approached. Dogs barked at them, and the octopuses would wave a tentacle back in disdain. Sometimes they’d march out of the pool altogether: crouching outraged on the weeded rocks, bobbing up and down on the bladderwrack, passing through colour changes from milky white to blood red.
It was all a great joke, at first. Children were delighted with these comedy interlopers, leaning in to watch them prance about in the pools. Garish in their displays, the creatures seemed bizarre, shocking even, amongst the muted gobies and shrimp and even the anemones—snakelock and beadlet and daisy—which had previously seemed exotic. All sorts of stories emerged: of an octopus juggling with empty periwinkle shells, tossing stones from the pool, stealing a sandwich from a picnic. There was even talk of a girl who made friends with one, letting the creature wrap its tentacle around the thin skin of her wrist, taking it home to live in the bath.
The stories swiftly turned sour when the octopuses began coming up the beach. Just at night, at first: evening dogwalkers talked of finding them mired in sand right up at the tideline, mantles expanding and contracting, blue blood leaking from their beaks. Then, two were found on the lifeboat slipway in broad daylight, heaving themselves towards the boat shack like old women walking into the wind. One lively specimen made it all the way to the Spar in the clutch of shops set back from the harbour wall. It had backed itself into a gap between the fridges, flashing through colour changes as if it were trying to pass on a message in code. It wasn’t a localised phenomenon. There was a full-page picture in The Times: a little boy in a PAW Patrol T-shirt, stretching out his index finger to meet an outstretched arm.
*
The starfish came next, but they did not come out alive.
Thousands of prickly corpses were thrown up on the beach in a single week, by an unusually savage spring tide. The herring gulls gorged on them, deserting the bins outside the chippie in favour of the soft, yellow underbellies of these beached sea stars. And it wasn’t just seabirds: magpies and crows, and even a scrawny buzzard came to feast on the unexpected bounty.
But the birds barely made a dent in the numbers. And even when the Sun, Moon and Earth slipped out of alignment, and the tides receded, the starfish kept coming. Soon, the beach smelt rancid, like a fish shop with the fridges down. One starfish was thrown out with such vehemence, it hit the soft concrete in the latest extension of the sea wall and stuck fast there till the morning. When it fell, it left a five-pointed depression behind.
*
When the fish died, they did so all at once, with a violence that shocked everyone.
As if some tipping point had been reached, their oxygen-starved bodies rose to the surface as one. As luck would have it, it was a perfectly still day: a terrible raft of silver corpses, as far as the eye could see, floated together across the bay.
Repulsed already by the foetid starfish remains, people needed no further reason to avoid the beach. The dog walkers made alternative arrangements to meet up in the woods or by the reservoir. The much-mocked early morning litter-picking parties were suspended: after all, what would they be cleaning the sea for, now? Uncollected, a wedge of plastic fragments began to build in a wide arc at the high tide line, a primary-coloured torc of soft-drink bottles and nurdles. A broken window in the surf shack was left unfixed. And though it was almost May, no attempt was made to recruit a lifeguard for the season.
*
It was usually a battle to get funding for the harbour wall, with the sea defence budget spread so thin these days, no matter how many times council taxes were raised to boost it. As a result, the ancient barricade which had been founded in sturdy granite hewn from the hills behind the village had been maintained with the cheapest brick money could buy. These last months, though, money had somehow been found. No one had asked many questions, not wanting to know what vital service had been cut to allow for the mountain of limestone and concrete riprap which had arrived on vast flatbeds throughout the spring. Faceless men in yellow high-vis had fashioned a rubble fortress along the seafront.
But on the day after the fish died, the village came together beside the lifeguard shack one last time. The school choir gathered on the slipway to sing a song, the children holding tight to their ties, wincing into the wind. Then, with pebbles and cement and their bare, red hands, their parents raised the wall another metre, so they didn’t have to see what they had done.
Show Me What You’re Made Of
It was one of his things, saying that: ‘Show me what you’re made of,’ jutting his chin. It’d always be said in jest—to the stranger at the bar as he pressed a flaming sambuca into their palm, to the kid he challenged to a race to the end of the beach—but there was always an edge to it, right from the start. He’d said it to her on their first date, challenging her to an arm wrestle on the corner table of The Crown’s snug bar. Di could see Ella in the background, doing those are-you-okay? waggles with her eyebrows, but she’d been drinking tequila since the news came out about her ex’s baby that afternoon. She didn’t feel the twist in her arm until the morning, and even then she’d blamed it on the way the spilt spirit made the beer mat slide under her elbow.
Looking back, it had always been there, that edge. When they fought, sometimes Di would catch Michael sitting on his hands, or prising open a fist under the table like he was trying to work his fingernails into a clamped shell. But there was a gentleness about him too… or a controlled stillness, at any rate. You could see it in the way he used to play the guitar with his eyes on the horizon, his fingers drifting over the strings, barely grazing them. And watching him with a leaf beetle crawling across the callouses of his palm was the same: he’d stop whatever he was doing to let that glittered bug take its time. Of course, when you knew he would later tweeze off each of those six fine, articulated legs and lay them alongside the severed carapace of its lime-burnished wings, it tarnished the picture somewhat. Because that was the other thing about Michael: he had to get to the heart of everything.
In the early days of the relationship, there didn’t seem anything sinister to it. Odd, sure, but back then it had been as much about the rebuilding as the taking apart. An old Triumph came first—a ’78 Bonneville—just a blackened shell when he bought it from the car boot sale at the power station. A violin next, then an old hand-loom they found in the barn behind the cottage, and after that, it was his father’s watch. Each had their innar
ds splayed across the workshop floor, faithfully recorded on paper as such, like the exploded schematic in a how-to manual. And then, with varying degrees of success, came the reconstruction.
The motorbike seemed to come easily; they’d ridden it together all the way up to Applecross, where he proposed at the top of the slipway with a ring his mother had lent him. And he repaired the loom so well, they were able to sell it on eBay. But the fragile veneer of the violin did not take so well to the indignity of deconstruction. He wore his father’s watch on their wedding day, though the mechanism had not turned since the day he’d released the spring and tipped the brass cogs across the kitchen table. When she joked about it while they waited to greet their guests at the door to the marquee, he gripped her wrist so tightly she was left with a pink welt like a watch strap of her own.
That first winter, he spent a few weeks inside, after squaring up to a bigger man in the pub. But when he came home, he touched her with such exaggerated gentleness she let him back into her bed. He’d lost his job because of the conviction, and afterwards he took to spending hours alone in the workshop, the doors locked behind him. He rarely went anywhere for long, but while he visited his mother in the hospice one morning, Di opened the side door with the key he kept under the log basket. She saw then that his interest had shifted, from the mechanics of repair to something more like an inventory of parts. There were no more of the diagrams like engineer’s blueprints. Instead, the constituent parts of whatever had taken his fancy were lined up sentry-like, graded by size and shape, everything with its place. She could acknowledge that there was strange beauty in the order of the thing.
