by Joanna Glen
But now I wonder if I’ll ever go inside it again.
Now that I have no key.
I walk past it and stare over the gates.
The Alvárez family rent it out to strangers these days.
I watch different couples in shorts and bikinis lying together on the Moroccan bed in the back garden – you can see it from the left-hand side, if you stand at the right angle, looking over the prickly pear bushes.
I watch these strangers cook fish on the stone barbecue late at night.
When we went there as a family in 2004, Julia wanted to have a barbecue, but my father said he didn’t know where to get the charcoal.
My mother said they didn’t eat sausages here, she’d looked in the butcher’s window, and there weren’t any – there were only fish, alive-looking with eyes and mouths and tails.
‘I think that was the fishmonger,’ I said.
‘And, anyway, how would you clean the barbecue?’ she said.
So, instead, we used the gas hob and the microwave and got take-away chickens that turned on spits.
As a treat one lunchtime, we ate at the restaurant on the beach – Restaurante Raúl, whose owner (unsurprisingly) was called Raúl. He had thick dark hair and a fat hairy belly and he wore a straw hat. He took Julia and me to see the donkey he kept in his field, with its thickset furry neck and cross face, and he let us stroke his thoroughbred mares. He said he rode his horses in the early morning when no one was about, and he suggested that this was a lovely time to have a picnic on the beach and see the sun rise over the mountains. I translated for my family. He mimed to my mother and father that Julia and I could have a little ride around the field, but they mimed back pointing at their heads and the ground.
‘Sombrero!’ said my father. ‘Sombrero!’
Not only did my father look like a total English idiot, but we also missed our chance to go riding.
Raúl’s wife, Teodora, had the smoothest caramel skin, and the kindest black eyes, and, when she heard how disappointed we were, she gave Julia and me free crema catalana ice creams.
She made us paella with mussels in and fried chanquete fish which you ate whole with your fingers (even their eyes) and the local speciality of seared tuna, cooked with grapes. My father refused everything except Spanish omelette.
Raúl didn’t seem to do much work. He walked about chatting to everybody, eating sunflower seeds.
‘Do you think they can understand each other, talking that fast?’ said my mother.
‘Sounds like a bloody aviary,’ said my father, pulling up the sports socks my mother had bought him. He did not look himself in shorts, and I preferred it in the evenings when he put trousers on over his burnt pink legs.
We visited the dark church in the square on the Sunday evening. It was full of gold with alabaster statues and gloomy paintings of the Virgin Mary, and Jesus writhing on the cross, like my grandmother’s necklace.
Each day, we went to the tiny village shop by the roundabout, and we pointed to baked barras of bread, to fat tomatoes and nectarines, which the woman in the pale blue housecoat put in brown paper bags, and my mother put in Lola Alvárez’s Moroccan basket for our lunch.
My father let me buy the daily newspaper in Spanish so that I could spend all day translating it with my dictionary on the beach, happy as anything.
We paddled and swam and surfed on body boards and got knocked over by the waves, and we went for walks way down the beach to have our picnic in our special spot, where nobody else went.
Our special spot, my mother named it.
Our special spot was right at the end of the beach, marked by a crop of holey rocks, and a glade of pine trees and little pools left behind at low tide. There was a blue wooden boat buried in the sand, and we often sat amongst its contoured edges to eat our lunch.
Looking back, I see that my father was trying to get away from the Spanish men with dark skin and hairy chests, who stood, legs apart, at the busier part of the beach, swigging from beer cans and addressing comments to him he couldn’t understand.
This spot was special for him because he could hide his burnt knees and his inadequacies, and he didn’t have to ask for ice creams at the kiosk, pointing furiously, panicking, handing over the wrong money.
‘We could get a family pack of ice creams from the shop,’ said my mother.
‘Much better,’ said my father. ‘Whichever one I point to, they never have it. But the Spanish people get whichever ice cream they want.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I said.
‘When I ask for things, they all start laughing,’ said my father. ‘I feel as though they’re mocking me.’
There were no ice cream stalls or laughing foreigners in our special spot.
There was only us.
I make myself go down there some days, and I wonder if I should put something up to remember us – the four of us – a sign saying: ‘The Hope family was happy here. For a bit.’
The place now hangs heavy with sadness, not just my own.
Perhaps I should commission a sculpture – maybe a tree, I was thinking, with four outstretched branches, like human arms.
Parfait
There are places – aren’t there?
Places which are so full of feeling you hardly dare return to them.
I wonder which place it is for you.
For me, one of those places is Tangier.
Before we got there, the port of Tangier, where Víctor had once stayed with a Spanish priest, was a fairy-tale town from One Thousand and One Nights, with narrow streets full of lamp-lit cubic houses tumbling down to the harbour.
When we arrived, it was even more magical than that, I guess, because of what had come before. And in my mind, it’s made of jewels: emerald, sapphire and aquamarine.
I’m sure there was a hexagonal courtyard with a tiled fountain. I’m sure there was a shady garden at the back of the priest’s rust-coloured house, and I’m sure he served us food on pottery plates with geometric designs in green and sapphire-blue like a peacock’s tail. I’m imagining peacocks strutting about on the lawn, but they weren’t there.
José María?’ Zion said to the priest, in his best Spanish accent, screwing up his face, with that slightly cocky way he had.
The priest smiled.
‘María?’ said Zion, turning his voice high, like a girl.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, thinking, Zion, please don’t offend him, he’s our only hope.
But the priest laughed, a throaty laugh, like Víctor’s, and I missed him. I missed his voice. I missed his big hands gesticulating. His bad flamenco dancing. The way he loved me.
‘It means Joseph Mary,’ the priest said to me, gesturing towards Zion. ‘And girls can be called María José – the other way round.’
I explained this to Zion, as well as glaring at him.
‘It’s a bit like heaven here,’ I said, ‘after the places we’ve been,’ and I looked out over the bright green lawn, and the little jets of water spurting in turning arcs around the edges so that the palms trembled and glistened.
‘You honestly walked?’ said José María. ‘You’re not having me on.’
‘Well, we did whatever worked,’ I said. ‘Walked. Hitched lifts. Hid in trains.’
There were things I didn’t want to remember about the journey, things that we’d chosen not to talk about. How long the nights were. And how dark. The man in Algeria who tried to sell us to old men; the roadside fights; the dumps where gangs sniffed glue; where the storks strode over the rubbish pecking out human eyes – that’s what people said.
When I look back, what I remember most is never daring to sleep at night. And how tired I felt.
‘Was it worth it?’ said José María.
‘I hope so,’ I said, looking at Zion, feeling that it had to be worth it.
‘What makes you want to live there?’ said José María.
‘It’s a peaceful country,’ I said, and my voice came out hard and deter
mined, in case he was going to try to contradict me, or dissuade me – it was far too late to be wrong. ‘We’ve known so much violence, you see, in our lives, and a lot of death. So we’re going to build a new life where we can be happy and safe. That’s the plan, anyway.’
‘Ask him if it’s true,’ Zion said to me. ‘Ask him if Spain is as wonderful as we think it is.’
‘Is Spain the most wonderful country?’ I said to the priest.
He smiled.
‘It all depends,’ he began.
‘He says it is,’ I said. ‘And we’re nearly there. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Zion.
‘Olé?’ I said.
‘Olé,’ said Zion.
Augusta
On the twelfth day of the holiday, when we were two thirds of the way to our special spot, we came across four or five groups of people sunbathing with no clothes on at all. The men had willies like big dripping sea slugs, and the women didn’t hold their legs together to hide their private parts and their triangle of hair. And the children bounced about not seeming to find it alarming that their parents had no swimsuits on.
My father said, ‘Keep going!’ and he accelerated through them as if he was walking through a battlefield and we were all about to get shot.
‘Come on come on come on,’ he shouted at us, as we practically ran to our special spot.
But it was as if something had spooked my father. He couldn’t quite settle with his book. He kept saying, ‘I hope the paedos won’t be there on the way back.’
‘They aren’t necessarily paedophiles,’ I said, with my mother shaking her head at me behind my father’s back, her eyes wide and glaring. ‘They may just like to take their clothes off.’
My father kept getting up from his towel to see if they were coming any closer.
My mother kept saying, ‘Are you all right, darling?’
‘It’s disgusting,’ said my father. ‘There are children about.’
My mother pushed her fingers into the nape of my neck under my hair, which is what she always did to stop me saying things, as if I had an on-off switch like a doll.
‘Why don’t you read us some poems out of your book?’ said my mother.
So I read to them.
‘Nobody heard him, the dead man.
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.’
‘Haven’t you got something a bit more cheerful?’ said my mother.
‘But don’t you see?’ I said. ‘It’s about how we can misinterpret each other. They thought he was waving but actually he was drowning. Dad thinks they’re paedophiles but actually …’
‘How about another one?’ said my mother. ‘Something funny.’
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’
Julia gave me a funny look.
My mother pursed her lips.
My father stared at me as if the f-word had paralysed him like a stun gun.
‘They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.’
‘I think that’s enough of that one,’ said my mother. ‘I didn’t know poets were allowed to swear. What about that one about ducks I used to read you? Julia, you know that one.’
‘I won’t have that language,’ said my father.
‘Oh I’m not sure I remember all the words of the duck one,’ said Julia.
And I thought how strange language was – one letter turned duck into fuck. Just like that.
‘Go on,’ said my mother.
Julia had the pained look on her face she used to get when she couldn’t find a way to love us all at the same time. When she felt our happiness dissolving. But she started, looking awkward, because this was really a children’s poem and we were fourteen, and about to start our GCSE courses:
‘All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!’
‘You go on, Aug,’ said Julia.
So I chose this verse:
‘Everyone for what he likes!
We like to be
Heads down, tails up,
Dabbling free!’
Then I said, quick as anything: ‘You could read that verse as pro-naturism, if you think about it. Look over there!’
They all tried not to look over there, at the diving buttocks in the sea, at the dabbling free, and we all sat in silence, with my mother shooting bullets at me from her eyeballs.
The wind came up, and palm fronds and sea holly and people’s sunhats started flying down the beach.
We looked out over the sea as the waves grew, as they started to pound the beach, curling at the top, making the letter C.
Ccccccccc – joined together – like children drawing waves across a page in cursive writing.
The waves rushed up the beach and soaked our towels, and the gusts sent sand whipping into our mouths and our eyes, and this was the perfect excuse for us to leave – because everyone was leaving.
That evening, we were going to eat spaghetti at the house, but my mother couldn’t get the gas to light so we ended up having the left-overs of the picnic. My father rang and left a very loud slow message on the gas people’s answerphone in English with a slight Spanish accent, although I’d offered to make the phone call in Spanish.
The wind only blew harder, and you could hear the palms creaking and the shutters shaking.
Parfait
We sat sipping special tea with mint and sugar in it, which José María poured from a silver teapot into little glasses, so hot you couldn’t hold them. We’d had a bath, and the housekeeper had given us funny leather slipper-things that kept coming off our feet. We weren’t used to shoes. Ours had worn out.
I was trying to pluck up the courage to say what I had to say, but sometimes words, though they are only words – are almost impossible to say.
God grant me the courage, I thought, and I felt inside the pocket of my jacket where I kept both the prayer card and my mother’s metal daffodil, which I’d stolen from the Memory Box. It was probably selfish of me, but I’d persuaded myself they meant more to me than to the others.
Go on, I said to myself, go on, spit it out.
Finally.
‘Víctor said you would lend us your boat to go on the final leg of our journey,’ I said.
‘Lend?’ said the priest, laughing, in a way I didn’t like. ‘How will you return it to me?’
I hadn’t thought of that, and it made me feel stupid.
I didn’t have another plan, and I was tired now, and desperate.
Desperate to arrive, as well as fearful, terrified in fact, that I would fail this last test.
I stood up straight and I shook my head so that I could see the plaits out of the corner of each eye, and I felt them on my cheeks, and I remembered the European artist, Sami Terre, who pulled himself out of a shithole, and I looked directly into the priest’s eyes.
‘I have some money,’ I said.
‘Money?’ said the priest.
‘From painting portraits,’ I said, thinking that the priest might be impressed.
‘I’m an artist,’ I said, which I’d never said before, and it made me feel not much better, as I’d hoped, but much more stupid.
‘I see,’ said José María, with a wry smile.
I thought how strange it was that you could walk eight thousand kilometres across a continent, and adults would still laugh at you.
‘So I have the money to buy your boat,’ I said, feeling like an idiot.
‘Oh, it’s only a flimsy thing, for excursions down the coast, or fishing,’ said José María, taking a keyring from a hook by the back door. ‘Come and have a look at it. And you’ll see.’
We walked down to the harbour, and José María let us through the gate, and I remember my heart beating hard because the thing I’d imagined was now too real.
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br /> ‘There it is,’ said José María.
The boat was made of rubber, thick rubber, with a big old engine.
A man with a moustache climbed off his yacht to come and talk to José María in a language I didn’t understand.
‘It looks good and strong,’ I said to Zion, trying to make my voice sound confident and assertive. Because I’d seen the shape of Spain over the water, right there, right there.
The man with the moustache went back to his yacht, and José María let us get into the boat to see what it was like.
‘You see,’ he said. ‘It’s only a rubber dinghy really. For messing about. When the wind’s died down, we’ll go out on a fishing trip.’
We sat down on the bench seats.
‘You can stay at my house as long as you like!’ said José María. ‘We’ll have some fun together.’
We climbed out of the boat, went out through the harbour gate and walked up the hill to his house.
‘Anyhow,’ José María said to us as we went through the gates to his garden, ‘they’re saying the civil war is nearly over in Burundi. It may be better to have a nice holiday here and head home. And I might be able to help you with that. Getting you back there.’
He winked at us.
‘Listen to that wind!’ he said.
‘What’s he saying?’ said Zion.
‘The war might be over,’ I said, keeping off the subject of the wind.
‘We’ve come all this way and the war’s over?’ said Zion, as the housekeeper came in to ask us what we’d like for supper – chicken or fish in the tagine.
‘They’re always saying the war’s over,’ I said. ‘Let’s wait and see! Chicken or fish?’
‘Chicken, please,’ said Zion.
The tagine smelled of spices and was warm and delicious, and we ate it with rice, and then the lady came with watermelon and bowls of ice cream. Soon we were sleepy and over-fed, and it was time for bed.
I went back to the kitchen for two glasses of water, and I thought how easy it would be not to go. I thought if we stay even one night here, we’ll get too comfortable. If we stay even one night, we’ll find a reason not to go. We’ll get to know him better, and we won’t be able to make ourselves sneak away. Grant me the courage, grant me the courage. I slipped the boat keyring into my pocket.