by Joanna Glen
They all three shook their heads.
My father said, ‘It’s so good to watch the English news,’ and he sat, oddly upright and urgent, asking our opinions on things that wouldn’t normally interest him.
On the way home, we saw that behind the tiny village of La Higuera, there was a huge building project going on, stretching for miles. The boards on the outside were in English: NEW TOURIST COMPLEX – LUXURY ACCOMMODATION, LUXURY POOLS, LUXURY SPA, LUXURY GOLF COURSE, LUXURY WATER PARK, LUXURY EXCURSIONS. There were black men pushing wheelbarrows, digging, putting up scaffolding in the burning heat.
‘Terrible smell of sewage,’ said my father.
I felt sorry for the black men working so hard in the searing heat.
The next morning, when we went to the table with the daily newspaper on it in the village shop, there was a photo of the fish-clouds shoaling down the beach. But underneath, beyond the buried boat, under the trees, there was a black man, lying face down on the sand – maybe, I thought, one of those workers from out on the main road, sleeping on the beach.
‘That’s our special spot!’ I said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
My father hurried us out of the shop, and said that there was no money for the newspaper today.
‘Come on, Julia!’ he said. ‘Why are you dawdling about in there? Here, let me carry the basket. Let’s go! We’re going to have our last day in the garden.’
‘Not the beach?’ I said.
‘It’s such a lovely garden and we’ve hardly spent any time in it,’ said my mother.
‘I’d like to go to the beach,’ I said.
‘We’re staying in the garden,’ said my mother.
My father walked about wiping his face with a handkerchief and looking at his watch, and we were allowed to dip into the natural pool. Julia sat in the shade reading.
‘Are you sad we’re leaving?’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘I can’t wait to go home now,’ she said.
‘You can’t wait? But we were marking off the days for months before we came.’
‘It’ll be nice to be back where everything’s normal and familiar and there’s nothing to worry about,’ said Julia.
‘Nothing to worry about?’ I said. ‘What is there to worry about here?’
‘We’ve got the Half-Term Fair to look forward to,’ she said. ‘And then it’s Angela Dunnett’s Hallowe’en party.’
‘That’s over two months away.’
‘But she’s having fairy lights and a DJ,’ said Julia sadly.
‘I couldn’t care less about Angela Dunnett’s Hallowe’en party,’ I said. ‘I want to stay here forever.’
‘I’m ready to be home,’ said Julia, and she smiled, half-closing her eyes as if she was looking right through my eyeballs to somewhere beyond.
‘Julia, what is wrong with you?’ I said.
‘Probably homesickness,’ she said.
‘But I’m home, aren’t I? You can’t miss a house with no one in it.’
‘I just don’t want to be here any more, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘You don’t want to be here? You’d rather be there?’
She nodded, and it seemed as if her eyes filled with tears.
‘Will you tell me, Julia? What’s wrong?’
‘Everything will be the same again once we’re home,’ she said.
‘Promise?’ I said.
‘Promise,’ she said.
But there are some things you can’t promise.
You can never promise that everything will be the same again. Nothing is ever the same again.
On our last evening, my stomach aching with the pain of seeing it all and smelling it all for the last time, we went to the square, to the Tienda de la Playa, which sold towels and jewellery and sunhats and sunglasses.
I expected that Julia and I would spend ages deciding how to spend our five euros, but we walked in, I pointed to some leather wristbands on a rotating stand, and Julia said, ‘Yes fine.’
‘But there might be other things,’ I said.
‘These are fine,’ she said.
We walked out into the square in the warm evening air, which tickled my shoulders and smelled of honeysuckle and sea. The cobbles were lumpy beneath my espadrilles, and, as we walked along the beach road, the crickets were summer-crazy in the long dry grass, and the egrets were flying to the big old tree where they loved to perch, hundreds of them, lighting up the dark under the moon.
I tried to slip my arm through Julia’s, but the minute I did that, my arm felt like it wasn’t mine, or like it was dead. So I took it out again.
‘So what’s been your best moment?’ I said.
‘Oh I can’t think. The dolphins?’ said Julia.
‘You didn’t even look at the dolphins,’ I said.
‘Why are you interrogating me?’ said Julia, and my stomach knotted because I couldn’t reach her.
‘What’s been your worst moment?’ I said.
She looked away.
‘What kind of question is that?’ said Julia. ‘There are no worst moments on holiday.’
‘This is my worst moment,’ I said.
Julia said nothing.
‘This is the worst moment in my life,’ I said. ‘You won’t talk to me.’
‘I’m probably just tired,’ said Julia.
What else could I say?
I remember a heaviness in my stomach as I lay in bed in the thick dark of the shuttered room. I remember hearing her turn over one way and then another, and I remember the air, as it is here on summer nights, dense, nearly solid, suffocating me.
I too turned over. Over. Over.
We were both awake.
We both knew that we were both awake.
But we didn’t speak.
I tried lying still.
Dead still.
That’s what I would do – I would die to make her love me.
But I still didn’t dare talk to her.
I didn’t dare say to her, ‘What’s wrong?’
Hours seemed to pass.
Then I heard her rhythmic breathing.
And I felt as if I could breathe again too.
But I couldn’t sleep.
When it was still dark, the sun about to rise, without saying a word to anyone, without asking permission from my parents, I got up and walked down to the beach, to our special spot, and I sat on the sand, with the pine trees behind me where you could see through to the three white houses at the back of the beach road.
I wanted to see if anything had changed.
It hadn’t.
There were only the shadows of the trees and the noise of the waves, crashing in, back and forth.
I sat right at the edge, picking up shells and putting them in my pocket, and letting the waves spray my face.
I could feel little specks of anxiety inside me, moving, like bacteria under a microscope.
It was time for me to say goodbye.
It made me feel sick inside.
To be leaving.
Especially to be leaving behind something much bigger than Spain.
Something that I would never have back.
I didn’t know this, but I knew something.
I felt a strange pain in my stomach.
As if something inside me was breaking.
‘Where on earth were you?’ said my father.
‘We were worried sick,’ said my mother.
‘Are we still Justa?’ I whispered to Julia in the car on the way to the airport.
She smiled at me.
‘Are you thinking we’re too old for Justa?’ I said.
‘We can be Justa if you want us to,’ said Julia.
I hated that reply, the way it wasn’t a reply at all.
I knew what I wanted.
I was asking her what she wanted.
I looked down and she was drawing on her hand with a biro.
She was drawing waves in the sea, completely even, rows of joined cs like they’d bee
n that day on the beach.
She had such a steady hand, such beautiful writing, even in the car, driving.
Cccccccccccccccccccccc
There was our house, orange-bricked, triple-garaged, static, ugly and entirely unchanged by what had happened to us.
My mother seemed energised by arranging the washing into piles of whites and coloureds. My father retreated to his shop. Julia went to show Angela Dunnett and Amy Atkins her tanned skin and leather wristband. She’d bought them each a rubber with the Spanish flag on.
I hadn’t bought anything for Ian or Ali or Moira. Ian was only interested in computers, and Ali, who I knew from riding, would have wanted something horsey even though she already had everything horsey you could buy anywhere in the world. Moira had the kind of family who only believed in home-made presents, and I certainly wasn’t going to be making her something out of shells. None of them, in short, would have wanted a rubber with the Spanish flag on. Anyway, Ian and Moira were still on holiday, and Ali had gone to see her aunt who had a horse.
I felt lonely.
So I carried on with my research into Burundi.
When Julia came back, my mother said, ‘Did they like the rubbers?’
‘In America, rubber means condom,’ I said. ‘So it’s advisable to say eraser. In case any Americans are around.’
‘There aren’t any in this house,’ said Julia.
I started to laugh.
But she wasn’t laughing.
My mother made a special album of the holiday, and the photos she’d taken on the beach made Julia’s boobs look enormous. My body – lying on the sand – looked as long and flat as an ironing board.
The photos made me blush.
I couldn’t believe my mother was showing these half-naked photos of us quite casually to the neighbours, to Jim and Barbara Cook, to John and Janice Brown, to David and Hilary Hawkins, to the Dunnetts, to Diego Alvárez.
To Diego Alvárez.
What was the woman thinking?
‘I think we need a little trip to Debenhams,’ said my mother the next day.
‘What for?’
‘Seeing as you two are becoming young ladies.’
‘What are you insinuating?’ I said.
We did go to Debenhams.
A lady with enormous bosoms came at us with a tape measure.
‘You don’t need a bra,’ she said to me. ‘There’s nothing there yet!’
Perhaps you could auction off some of yours, I thought, in batches.
She brought a selection of bras for Julia, white with tiny coloured bows in the middle.
I sat on a small plastic chair.
‘Do you want anything else, Augusta?’ said my mother.
‘No thank you,’ I said.
I went back to my research on Burundi.
Lake Tanganyika was forged from the earth’s crust as the tectonic plates moved and tore apart, forming a huge split and a kind of freshwater reef.
‘In Lake Tanganyika, there are two hundred and fifty endemic cichlid species,’ I said to Julia.
‘Can’t you say fish?’ said Julia.
‘Do you find me annoying?’ I said, smiling, trying to smile – except that my lips were turning down at the ends.
‘Course I don’t,’ she said.
I tried to get control of my mouth, thinking, Pull yourself together, what’s wrong with you?
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. I love your words. You know I do.’
She reached out her hand and touched my shoulder, and I couldn’t think what to do so I just sat there, thinking, Why does everything feel like this? Like we don’t know each other – or something.
I got up.
‘I’m going to see Jim Cook,’ I said, thinking that perhaps he might have another dream up his sleeve, and, even if he didn’t, I couldn’t bear to stay here any longer.
Although my father had banned us from visiting the Cooks, we both used to sneak to number 2 through a gap in the hedge in the back garden, so that the other neighbours wouldn’t see us and tell our father.
My mother had asked me more than once if I’d ever seen Jim drinking alcohol in the daytime, and I said no, although actually I had. I didn’t want to get him into trouble.
When I went through the hedge to talk to Jim Cook about my research into cichlid fish, he said, ‘Why don’t we make an aquarium which looks like a miniature version of Lake Tanganyika?’
I assumed he wouldn’t do anything about it, but he did.
He bought a special filter and bluish lights and an antique-looking Roman pot and he set the water at 78 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 25.5 degrees Celsius, and we waited for the nitrogen cycle to establish.
Then came the best bit: choosing the fish.
The fish man, also known as an aquarist, by the way, helped us to choose callochromis melanostigma – which had long gold fins like hair combs – and callochromis raspberry heads (what a name!) with a pale pink blush about their faces, and cyprichromis leptosoma katete, my total favourite, as these little fish glowed gold and sapphire and aquamarine.
Parfait
I walked up and down the beach by the sea, looking for signs – real physical signs. The boat. As well as other kinds of signs. From above. I hoped God would speak to me, but God didn’t. Not aloud anyway.
But perhaps God was speaking to me in the fish surfing in on the waves. Perhaps the fish were God’s way of saying that Zion had come in on the waves. Or perhaps the fish were God’s way of saying that he hadn’t. That’s the problem with reading signs from God.
‘What are you saying?’ I said aloud.
‘What was that?’ said a voice in Spanish. ‘Can I help you?’
It was a guy about my age.
He was smoking weed.
‘No,’ I said.
He tried to do a high five.
But our hands just missed each other.
He laughed.
‘Who the hell were you talking to?’ he said, still laughing, kind of hysterically.
‘Nadie,’ I said. ‘No one.’
He laughed even more.
I wasn’t laughing.
He walked on.
I could swim out.
And keep swimming.
And swimming.
But I didn’t let myself get in the water.
As a punishment.
‘Have you lost something?’ a girl said to me when I was down on the beach. ‘I once lost my engagement ring in the sea.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to her.
‘I found it,’ she said, putting out her tanned hand. ‘It was kind of a miracle. So maybe you’ll find whatever you’ve lost.’
Was it a sign?
‘What have you lost?’ said an old lady as she put on her swimming hat in the early morning, before people arrived.
I stared at her.
She was covered in freckles, and the skin on her arms and legs hung in folds.
No words came out of my mouth.
There were no words to describe what I’d lost anyway.
She shook her head at me and plunged her body into the sea.
Augusta
One day, something went wrong with Jim Cook’s tank, and he found all the cichlid fish floating on the surface, dead. Graham moaned and bashed his head against the tank, smash, smash, smash.
Jim Cook, who’d been so keen to create Lake Tanganyika in his sitting room for Graham, lost heart when the fish died, and he said he was done with fish and he put the aquarium up for sale in the Hedley Green Gazette that same day, without telling Barbara.
Barbara moved into the spare bedroom.
When I was listening the other side of the serving hatch, I heard her say to my mother, ‘There’s nothing that would fit neatly into the gap where the aquarium went.’
The gap sat there staring at you in the sitting room, reminding you of how beautiful it once was. In fact, Barbara Cook said to my mother, the hole was like the hole in their marriage.
My mother and Barbara Cook spent hours leafing through the Ikea catalogue thinking what might fit snugly into the space where the Tanganyikan tank had been. In the end, they settled on a special teak drinks cabinet, with an up-and-over door. But Jim Cook could never keep his hand out of that cabinet.
Now that the aquarium had gone, Barbara had to take Graham out and about much more, which was totally exhausting her, she said, though she might have been exaggerating to make Jim feel bad. I did my best to bump into Graham whenever he was out in his adapted buggy because I always had this feeling that I had a special responsibility towards him.
As I analyse my own behaviour, sitting some distance now from being a child, I wonder if I just liked to be different from everybody by being friends with Graham Cook. Was it one more of my unusual choices? I certainly liked to think I had special linguistic powers that made me understand his noises. Or maybe there was actually something nice about me.
Who knows?
But soon after the selling of the aquarium, I bumped into Graham up by the roundabout, and I swear he said to me, hidden under all the moaning noises, ‘Fish fish fish.’
That made my mind up.
Parfait
The waves came in and out, in and out.
But the waves brought nothing with them.
Except plastic bottles, with rubbed-off labels.
Bits of broken-off polystyrene.
Weed.
Cuttlefish bones like little white surfboards.
A flip-flop.
I stared at the flip-flop.
Zion didn’t wear flip-flops.
Augusta
It wasn’t long until the Fair – it came every year for one day in the October half-term and closed down the whole of Hedley Green high street.
Poor Graham Cook could never go to the fair because he found it over-stimulating.
And my father didn’t go because all the fair people were crooks.
I had started practising my hoop-la skills with a kind of manic zeal in the garage some weeks before. In order to win Graham Cook some new fish (a good thing), I stole £20 from my mother’s purse (a bad thing). You got 3 goes for £1. And 3 x 20 = 60 goes.
Now, if I had been truly a good person, I would not have stolen the £20 but rather used the £15 which my parents had already given me for my own enjoyment at the Fair. But the £15 I kept for my own pleasure, prioritising the gorgeous old merry-go-round with its painted horses, palomino and dapple grey, with real hair manes and red leather stirrups. We always went on the merry-go-round first, and had done since we were tiny children. There were still grown women finding their favourite horse. There was also the big wheel, which gave me a special kind of thrill, the way we soared over Stanley Hope Uniforms, the way we could see the top of Old John Brown’s Hill and the back gardens of Willow Crescent.