The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

I started off copying great Spanish artists from his History of Art book in pencil. We moved on to pastel. Then we tried some paint.

  Looking through Víctor’s book about living European artists, I found an artist called Sami Terre who had skin the same colour as mine and wore his black hair in lots of long plaits. He’d been born in what he called a shithole on the outskirts of Brussels and started out making graffiti.

  ‘Can you make my hair like this?’ I asked Gloria and Douce, pointing to his photograph.

  ‘Who are you getting yourself so handsome for?’ said Gloria.

  I shook my head.

  They got to work on my hair, with Amie Santiana who lived on the homestead next to us and knew all about hairdressing.

  As I walked out of the hut the next day, I found I was standing a little taller. Because, if Sami Terre was raised in a shithole but went on to be famous and written about in books, it could happen to anyone. It could even happen to me.

  The African mourning doves were calling in the acacia tree opposite the hut – krrrrrrr, oo-OO-oo – as I took the photograph of my parents’ wedding out of the Memory Box. In it I found the little card my father had given my mother on their wedding night.

  ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ it said. ‘The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.’

  It made my mind up.

  This was something I could change.

  The place we lived.

  I did have the courage, I knew I did.

  I began to paint a portrait of my parents, falling into each other on their wedding day, my father in a dark suit and my mother in the shiny wedding dress lent to her by the Baptists.

  ‘Tell me I’m right to go,’ I said to my father’s photograph, but it didn’t answer.

  I worked at the painting hour after hour, covering it with an old mat, telling everyone they mustn’t look at it, not yet.

  Even when my arms ached from banana-picking, I still painted.

  Then it was finished.

  Víctor came down on his bike, and the rest of them gathered around, and, feeling suddenly shy, I took off the mat to reveal the painting.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ said Víctor. ‘A total natural! Stay here and you’ll become a famous Burundian artist.’

  The rest of them stared at our mother and father, perhaps hoping that they might walk off the page and come and live with us in the hut again.

  ‘This is how we’ll earn money as we go,’ I said to them all. ‘By painting portraits.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ said Pierre. ‘I’m going to stay here and fight.’

  ‘Fight?’ I said. ‘Fight as in struggle?’

  ‘Fight as in anything it takes,’ said Pierre.

  My father’s twinkly eyes and his cheek, his turning-the-other-cheek, stared out at us from the easel and stopped twinkling for a second.

  ‘What would Pa say?’ I said.

  ‘And what good did it do him? Refusing to retaliate? Breaking the chain?’ said Pierre.

  Wilfred sat staring.

  The girls looked sad.

  Víctor said nothing.

  ‘When are we leaving?’ said Zion.

  Then, one by one, we all walked quietly away from the easel where my mother and father stayed laughing love into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Patience, Little Bro,’ I said, and I tried to cheer myself up by dancing about with him, the way I imagined flamenco dancers might dance, though, looking back, it was some other way altogether.

  ‘Come and join in!’ I said to the girls. ‘You sway your hips like this, and you lift your arms and twist around – and the girls wear bright-coloured dresses like butterflies.’

  ‘You can shout out Olé whenever you feel like it!’ said Zion.

  But Gloria said, ‘You dance, boys. I like watching.’

  Douce nodded.

  Whenever Zion and I found ourselves alone together, we’d say Olé and do our special up-down high-five as a way of believing in the journey we would make.

  ‘Olé Olé Olé Olé.’

  Augusta

  My mother was starting to circle possible destinations for the summer of 2004 in red biro, and I asked Mr Sánchez whether Spain would be a good place for a holiday.

  ‘I’d avoid the Costa del Sol, Augusta,’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘It’s full of English people!’

  Then we both laughed like conspirators, as if we knew how boring English people were, and I started to wonder if I were actually Spanish and the stork (ha ha) had dropped me in the wrong place. I obviously knew quite a bit about sex by now – and not only from the scenes in An Instant in the Wind. No, the internet had arrived – at other people’s houses. My parents continued to favour paper. My mother had bought us a book on sex, and she threw it into our hands, keeping the focus on how special it was to have babies, a great privilege for every woman, she kept saying.

  ‘Not for every woman,’ I said. ‘Some women can’t have children.’

  She gave me the you’re-being-difficult look so I didn’t bother to bring up the way the privilege could also be suffering, or the way Barbara Cook loved and suffered every day of being a mother so that the two things became one. I didn’t bother to talk about the fact that love might be the hugest word there is in the world and that we would never, across a whole lifetime, work out what it meant. I didn’t say that if we put love on one side of the weighing scales and suffering on the other, we might change our minds and decide suffering was bigger. Then I found myself wondering if actually love and suffering were on the same side of the scales. And you couldn’t have the one without the other. Then I couldn’t decide what was on the other side of the weighing scales. But I didn’t say any of this aloud, and my mother went on running through her list of warnings against the use of tampons, in particular the risk of toxic shock syndrome.

  ‘But, quite apart from that,’ she said, ‘they can be extremely painful when you put them in your. Put them in your. Put them in your.’

  She never found the word.

  ‘Vagina,’ I said.

  My mother squeezed the new packet of extra-thin sanitary towels she was holding in her hand at the shock of the word said aloud, and she started to talk about holidays instead, putting down the sanitary towels and picking up her holiday spiral notepad.

  ‘Spain is supposed to be very safe,’ I said. ‘And I would also be able to practise my Spanish like we practised French in Brittany.’

  Spain, my mother wrote, underlining it twice.

  The Alvárez family’s Spanish house wasn’t on the Costa del Sol, but on the Costa de la Luz, I told my mother. In a village by the beach, called La Higuera. Which means fig tree. Higos are figs and you don’t pronounce the h.

  The next year, in August, Diego’s family would be going to Argentina for a family wedding so we could (possibly) rent their holiday house with fig trees in the garden for a much-reduced price. They’d be going at Christmas for the special festivals.

  My father said, ‘It’s all very different out there. Apparently, Lola sunbathes without a swimsuit on in the garden. They probably all do that sort of thing over there. And it’s jolly hot, you know, in summer. Sweltering. It may not suit us.’

  He was right.

  It didn’t suit him.

  Yet we plotted and persuaded to get him there.

  I look around me as I write, here in La Higuera, thirteen years after we first came. How I love its fig trees and its palms, its warm air and wild winds.

  There we were, innocent and dreamy.

  So excited.

  ‘Two months to go,’ I said to Julia, crossing off another day on the chart we’d stuck to the back of the wardrobe door.

  ‘Will we be different when we come back?’ said Julia.

  ‘Course we will,’ I said, smiling.

  I remember us packing for Spain, suitcases open on the bed and the sun coming through the bedroom window and landing in that little pool, over in the corner, where
there was, where there is, one of those triangular-shaped stands, made to fit in corners. On it are our awards – all my academic cups, made of fake silver, and my one riding rosette clipped to the top, and Julia’s dancing trophies in the shape of gold ballet shoes. I remember specks of dust falling through the sheet of light, bits of our own skin.

  I’m looking down at my hand, brown from the sun because I live here now.

  The skin of my hand.

  Mano in Spanish.

  Mano mano mano – man-o – man-oeuvre – man-overboard – man-o-tee, but I think it’s manatee actually.

  They are sometimes called sea cows – dolphin things with rounded noses. Like the pilot whales we saw from the boat out in the Straits of Gibraltar, heading off from the port at Tarifa.

  That day.

  Parfait

  ‘Will you come?’ I said to Wilfred. ‘This is the last time I’m going to ask you.’

  Wilfred shook his head.

  ‘We’ll make a new home with hammocks in the garden.’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘A hundred per cent?’ I said. ‘Because once we’ve gone, you won’t be able to change your mind. This is the day to decide.’

  Wilfred pointed to the rope around his ankle.

  ‘You want to stay with Claude?’ I said.

  Wilfred took me by the arm, leading me to the patch of earth where we’d buried Claude, and there, at the foot of a cypress tree, was a pile of stones, with a fresh red rose in a little clay pot. He’d scratched the name CLAUDE into the bark, and he’d drawn tally marks, four upright lines and one diagonal, in fives, for every day since he died – they went stretching up and around the trunk.

  When I saw those tally marks, I put my arms around him. I was taller than him, and his face fell into my chest.

  It made me cry to feel him crying.

  To feel his feelings and not be able to change them.

  Three years since Claude died – and what it must be to lose a twin.

  I couldn’t bear to remember the sight of Claude in the corner of the burnt hut.

  Three months since the girls disappeared, and no one had seen a sign of them since.

  The pain was too much for me.

  And the guilt.

  Wilfred pulled away, still holding my hand, and he drew two question marks in the earth.

  ‘What are you wondering?’ I asked. ‘Why you didn’t hold Claude’s hand? Where the girls have gone?’

  He nodded, then nodded again.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Me too.’

  He pointed to the rope around his ankle, and our tears made trails down our legs and ran along our dry feet into the earth.

  ‘Will you forgive me if I go?’ I said.

  Wilfred nodded and pointed to the tree.

  ‘Do you find a flower every day for Claude?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘I can’t bear the pain here,’ I said, and I knew that this was really why I was going.

  I wasn’t really going for Zion.

  I was going for myself.

  ‘I’m going because I can’t bear the pain here,’ I told Víctor. ‘So don’t say I shouldn’t go. Because I can’t hear it any more. And I can’t bear it any more. And I can’t live here any more. Without them all.’

  Víctor looked away.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Parfait,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll miss you too,’ I said, clenching my jaw.

  ‘Perhaps Wilfred would like to come and live here at my school,’ said Víctor. ‘He can help me with the garden, do some odd jobs, teach the children football, learn sign language.’

  Víctor paused.

  ‘That’s a thought,’ he said to himself, his face brightening. ‘Sign language might bring him out of himself.’

  ‘He’s not deaf, you know,’ I said. ‘It’s just that he has nothing left to say.’

  ‘He might find some new things to say by living somewhere new, doing new things,’ said Víctor. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘That you’d have him here?’

  ‘Of course. And I’d have Pierre too. The girls, if …’

  ‘You’ll keep on looking for them?’ I said.

  Víctor nodded.

  ‘You’re my blessing number one,’ I said. ‘My father told us to count our blessings, and I count you a thousand times, Víctor. You’re a thousand – a million – blessings. Maybe more. Bendiciones infinitas.’

  ‘Well, look at you, Mr Fluent!’ said Víctor, and he hugged me.

  ‘It feels like thank you doesn’t quite cover it,’ I said, smiling at him.

  ‘Don’t give up hope in this place,’ he said. ‘Even if you go, you could always come back. I think peace is coming, I can smell it. They say that the civil war could be over by the end of November. Things change, you know, Parfait.’

  Augusta

  Things change.

  Sometimes quite unexpectedly.

  With one tiny action.

  Like booking tickets to Seville.

  My mother kissed my father’s sweaty hair and bided her time. There were aeroplanes and foreigners and a language he didn’t know and renting a car and driving on the right and he was full of worries.

  But my mother had taken to the idea with some passion, and Julia and I fanned that passion like a pair of bellows. We blew and we blew so that we all three burned to go to Diego’s family house, which sat at the back of a huge slab of beach, where the Atlantic waves came crashing in.

  My father had no hope of denying us Spain, the Coast of Light, the little village called The Fig Tree. We heard the rise and fall of the crashing tide in our dreams from our beds in number 1 Willow Crescent for months before we got there.

  We anticipated.

  Do you know how big and powerful that word is – anticipating? It fills you up so that you’re tingling inside, and we tingled with Spain, with heat, with the Coast of Light, with fig trees, and castanets and guitars, so that by the time we were on the aeroplane, we were like champagne, with the cork coming off.

  Just coming off.

  Just coming off.

  Cabin crew ten minutes to landing.

  My mother and father clutched each other’s hands, amazed that we’d made it thus far, praying under their breath. The aeroplane wheels came down, making noisy jolts underneath us.

  Bump bump.

  Welcome to Seville.

  Where the temperature is.

  Where the temperature is thirty-five degrees.

  My father drew a handkerchief across his worried forehead. He’d survived the flight but would he survive the thirty-five degrees? We bundled into our hire car, my mother with the map spread out on her knees, shaking.

  ‘Concentrate!’ said my father. ‘Concentrate!’

  ‘Just keep driving on the right!’ said my mother. ‘The right! The right!’

  ‘We mustn’t get this wrong!’ yelled my father. ‘Don’t let us end up in the city centre!’

  It felt like the city centre was some kind of black hole from which we’d never return.

  ‘Don’t let us end up in the city centre!’ said my father again.

  ‘That’s it!’ said my mother. ‘That’s the road!’

  ‘Don’t tell me so late!’ said my father.

  ‘Drive on the right! The right!’ said my mother.

  ‘I am driving on the right!’ said my father.

  Somehow, corks starting to rise, to rise, we found ourselves driving along the road at the back of the beach, turning in, and Julia and I leapt out to open the gate in the way that Diego had explained to us, and the cork came off and we were there!

  We ran down the track to the beach in our bikinis, in bare feet, and the waves were as big and as crashing as Diego had told us, and there was a man at the back of the beach with a little trolley selling polystyrene kites, and my father bought one.

  My father bought one.

  Of his own volition.

  When he didn’t like buyi
ng things.

  He didn’t like spending money on things he considered to be junk.

  Julia tied the kite to her plait, and the white polystyrene bird followed us as we walked, the four of us together, as we paddled, as we saw tiny slithers of silver fish jumping on the rolling waves, iridescent and catching sun rays.

  We laughed.

  We pointed.

  We felt the spray on our faces.

  And we were.

  Happy.

  I stop writing for a moment, and I climb up the tiny ladder to the roof of the caravan. I look out at the beach, and I think, the four of us were there. We were right there with the sand dissolving in vertical tunnels under the heels and soles of our feet. The sand where we stood is long gone, but the house remains.

  The house belonging to the Alvárez family is made of rough stone, inside and out, and it has wall-hangings in Indian fabrics on black iron poles. The beds have metal bedheads and white sheets, with linen bedspreads in washed-out colours: aquamarine, sand, palest pink and coral. On every window sill, there are shells that Diego and Pally collected on the beach and bits of misshapen driftwood. The windows have wooden shutters, and the floor is made of terracotta stone. The front of the house opens onto a sandy garden with swirls of palm and olive trees, with hammocks hanging between them. The back of the house has a veranda with a thatched roof, and dotted around the lawn are fig trees, and there’s a tiny stone dip pool, and if you’re lucky, you can find baby frogs swimming up and down doing breast stroke.

  There’s also a four-poster carved wooden bed made in Morocco, which you can pile up with jewelled cushions. Like the bed of a North-African ancient king. It’s a throne of a bed. It demands attention – and it stands right at the centre of my life.

  It is, in every sense, forgive me, seminal.

  (That wasn’t really supposed to be a joke – I just have no control over the way words strike me, how extraordinary they are, layered with meaning.)

  I look at the Moroccan bed, and it looks at me.

  I loved that house from the moment I first saw it in August 2004. I loved it again when I went back in 2011, though I wished Julia had come with me. And I loved it again – and much more deeply, and much more painfully – when Diego and I escaped here before Christmas in 2015. And I love it still, despite everything.