by Bella Pollen
God knows, I wish I could sleep on aeroplanes. Disconnected and temporarily excluded from life on earth below, it seems the only sensible thing to do, but as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude, the moment the signs are switched off and the clink of the drinks trolley soothes the nerves of even the most neurotic of flyers, I fall prey to philosophical musings. While down on earth babies are being born, wars are being fought and couples argue over burnt steak dinners, I sit buckled into my seat and make endless pacts with God. I can spend long hours in this way, plotting personal revolutions, planning get-outs, but always with the safety net of knowing that as soon as the wing begins its downward tilt and the reality of hard ground rises up to meet us, this brave new me, this ghost of my future, will fade back into the ether where it belongs.
But not tonight. As the blinking lights of Phoenix airport appear below like a defiant grid of life on an inhospitable planet, I feel a surge of adrenalin. Tonight will be different. Tonight there is no turning back. In about an hour’s time we will be at the head of the immigration queue. Poised for entry. The customs official will give me and the children no more than a cursory once-over before stamping our visa forms.
‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ he will ask.
The pickup truck has a side-swinging motion that the Mexican corrects every few seconds, bringing it back into line on the right side of the road. Every time my eyes begin to close with the rhythm, the wrench of the wheel forces them apart again. Right now I’d give anything to slip between clean sheets, sleep until it’s time to let tomorrow begin, but the silence in the truck feels reproachful. No doubt the Mexican is pissed off at having to pick us up – well, too bad. Quite apart from the fact that I would have killed the three of us falling asleep at the wheel, the town is so remote I would never have found my way there in the first place.
I study his profile surreptitiously. He is more Spanish-looking than I remember – though it wasn’t until we cleared customs that I experienced a moment of panic: what on earth did he look like? What if I didn’t recognize him? What if he didn’t remember me? What if he didn’t show up at all? I’d held a vague picture in my head over the last few months of a shortish middle-aged man with tightly curled hair greying at the edges and a brushstroke of a moustache, but the truth is, all I could be really sure of was that he looked, well . . . Mexican, and at Phoenix airport, as it turned out, that wouldn’t exactly have made him stand out from the crowd.
It’s cold in the truck. I hunch my shoulders into my jacket and check the heating dial on the dashboard. There are pockets of warmth coming from somewhere, but they’re no match for the night air leaking through the distressed seals of the cab’s windows. The temperature takes me by surprise. The last time I’d driven down this road it had been over a hundred degrees, hot enough to bubble the tarmac and melt the soles of my trainers, hot enough to sting the back of my throat and lodge there like some solid mischievous thing. It had been late September then and, on both sides of the road, grassland had rolled towards the hills like a golden sheet billowing in the wind. On the other side of the windscreen now, there is nothing to be seen. The road ahead is completely deserted and whatever might lie on either side of it hidden by the density of night.
Jack sighs from the back seat and I turn round to check him. His fringed suede water bottle, bought at the airport, is slung around his neck in a potentially lethal knot. His face is filthy. A still-life of the journey’s bribes and snacks. The corner of his mouth droops slackly and a trail of dribble has leaked down his chin onto his neck where it has dried into a chalky mark. He sleeps in his customary upright position, a pose I’d always assumed was the result of all those years imprisoned in unforgiving baby car seats, but recently have come to understand is simply a mark of his independence, his two fingers up to the adult world. Jack has always had a certain irritation and impatience at being small, as if his babyhood and now youth were no more than inconveniences unfairly foisted on him, and consequently he’s always treated them as something of an affliction, an accident of birth that he’d have to overcome, like a club foot or a squint.
‘When are we there?’ Emmy slumps self-pityingly against the opposite window. ‘I’m sooo tired.’ Her voice cracks with exhaustion and tears. As I prop her up again, she opens a cyclopian eye in order to fix me, the mother of all her woes, with a baleful accusing scowl.
How can my children possibly understand what’s going on? Why they’ve been dragged on this endless painful journey, away from their home, from their friends, their father – and for what? To spend a year in some jerry-built cabin in the middle of God only knows where because of a whim, some barely explicable desire for escape that I had no longer been able to ignore.
‘I still don’t understand why you insist on going on ahead,’ Robert had said for the umpteenth time as he’d kissed the children at the departure gate. ‘It could be months before I can get away.’
I hadn’t answered him because what was there to say? Once you lose the power of communication with someone, nothing makes sense between you any more and months were exactly what I was counting on.
Unhappiness is a dangerous thing, like carbon monoxide. You don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, it’s formless and colourless, but it poisons slowly. It seeps into every pore of your skin until one day your heart just stops beating. And I’ve been wondering. How did my mother put it? The summer she took off? A wind was rising over the Orkneys the day she upped and blew out of my world forever. But before there’s any debate about repeat behavioural patterns and the hereditary nature of bolters, I have to point out one significant difference. In the summer of 1983 my mother didn’t take her children with her. She didn’t pack their favourite chewed teddies and leaking finger paints and Emmy’s clock with the cat’s eyes, whose tail wags along in time with the seconds. No. My mother left me behind, sitting on the beach, the underside of my trousers packed down with cold wet sand as I dug for lug worms, happy, oblivious, dreaming of beans on toast while my father knelt behind me and cried fat salty tears into a pile of nearby seaweed.
Sleep must have somehow come then, because when I open my eyes, the truck has stopped. I unclip the seat-belt and feel stiffly for the door handle. The Mexican is hauling suitcases out of the back and tossing them to the ground, small puffs of smoke gusting out of his mouth at the exertion. Even unconscious, Jack is not an amenable child, his limbs remaining obstinately rigor-mortified. I shake him awake and push him out into the cold night air, then scoop Emmy into a fireman’s lift and the three of us stumble towards the cabin’s deck where the Mexican stands silently, holding the fly screen open. Once we’re safely inside he nods his head curtly and climbs back into the truck, leaving all the luggage in a sloppy pile outside the cabin door. I bite my lip in irritation as the ignition fires into life.
I push the children up the narrow wooden staircase, tossing Emmy onto my bed before going back to rescue Jack, who has somehow got left behind and is hunched, wide-eyed, on the top step as though shot by a sniper in the first wave of a surprise attack. At least the cabin has been made habitable. There are sheets on the bed and a shrunken striped woollen blanket on top. The sink in the corner still has rust stains down one side but hot water trickles from the taps, and the loo, whose incessant gurgling drove Robert crazy last time we were here, appears to have been fixed. Most luxurious of all, a reading light has been rigged up via the central overhead beam and connected to a yellowing switch on the wall. The children quickly lock themselves into their familiar sleep positions. Emmy, stretched out horizontally across the pillows, her long black hair splayed around her head in tangled Medusa locks, while Jack lies in repose in a T-junction with her shoulder. There is a bout of feral growling when I attempt to wash their faces and I give up. What does it matter if they spend the next year encrusted with dirt? What do I care if they run naked through the brush and their feet grow over with soft fur like baby wolverines? In this ‘big adventure’ of ours, there must surely be perks f
or them too. Jack’s hair smells of cauliflower and urine. The H&M label on his T-shirt is sticking up against his neck. Height 125 cms, 7/8 years old, it reads and for a second I sit down on the bed, overcome by a wave of emotions I am simply too tired to identify.
After a few minutes of dozing upright I have the brilliant notion of peeling off my own clothes and getting into the bed, but as I move around the room I feel a nubble of something on the floor which, though solid initially, yields under the pressure of my foot. I kneel down and flip back the rug. It’s a dead mouse. Or the putrid, rotting remains of one. Squashed flat, its legs and paws are spreadeagled across the floorboards like a miniature hunting trophy. For an optimistic moment I wonder whether I can get away with leaving it till morning, but the revulsion factor is too high. There’s no obvious mouse-scraping utensil to hand and a quick rummage through the overnight cases produces nothing helpful. In desperation I yank open the drawer of the bedside table and finally luck out with a box whose hinged lid lends itself nicely to the task. Balancing the corpse gingerly on the lid with one hand and fumbling with the rusted catch on the window with the other, I shake the whole disgusting mess out. Then as soon as it’s safe to, I laugh, thinking of the fuss Robert would have made. ‘I mean surely it’s not unreasonable to be angry!’ I can hear him shouting. ‘Haven’t we been paying him to caretake the place? I mean, haven’t we, Alice?’
Up in the sky, the stars are out in force. Cold air blows around the room. It smells earthy and unfamiliar. Except for Emmy’s snoring, a faint puckering of air in and out, there is absolute quiet. What a miracle this silence is. No car parking outside, no slamming of doors, no heavy tread on the staircase to the bedroom, no reek of cigars or hand laid expectantly on my shoulder. Ha! We’re here, we are finally here and to hell with poor little dearly departed Mickey Mouse, to hell with Robert’s bombastic rants, because this is it, we’ve made it, and as I climb into bed, curl around my children and wait for sleep to come, I feel as smug as a cat who has taught herself to swim.
2
I’m woken by the phone ringing. ‘You sound sleepy.’
Next to me the children barely stir, their eyes half closed, like a pair of alligators lying in wait for some unsuspecting prey to disturb the surface of their watering hole.
Outside the window, night is still inky black. I fumble for the watch under my pillow. ‘Robert, it’s five in the morning!’
‘Sorry,’ he says a little sulkily. ‘I’m in Geneva, I got the time difference confused.’ There’s an awkward pause, then, ‘Look, I just wanted to know you’d arrived okay.’
‘We’re okay,’ I tell him and promise to call later.
‘Love you,’ he says, then waits a couple of barren seconds before hanging up the phone.
Relieved, I close my eyes once more but it’s no good. It’s there again. A subconscious prick of puzzlement which takes a few minutes to work through the fog in my head.
The wooden box is on the floor where I’d left it, its lid still smudged with a veneer of mouse goo, its contents strewn on the wooden boards – a small hollow silver cross and a roll of paper secured with a faded strip of cloth. I ease off the tie and carefully unravel the paper, half hoping for missing deeds or a treasure map, but it’s just a letter. Strange. Unable to face a single night on the pitiful excuse of the cabin’s resident mattress, I’d had our spare bed and bedside tables, along with some crates of books, shipped over from London. But neither this crudely made box nor its contents belong to me and whilst it’s a romantic notion that one of the full-bellied removals men should have stolen away to a dark corner of the van for a chocolate Hobnob and a perusal of his morning mail, it’s an unlikely one; the letter is written in Spanish and headed the University of California.
The Mexican then – had he slept here last night? Had he put on his pyjamas, waxed his moustache and thrown back the covers of the bed before turning his attention to the contents of the box, pausing only occasionally to glance out at the moon as it waxed and waned over the town? Perhaps. The paper is old and brittle, the ink so faded it’s hard to make out the words. Curiouser and curiouser. I trace my hand down the lines as though their secrets might rise up like Braille beneath my fingertips and inexplicably I’m overcome by a sense of foreboding. A deep chill, like the proverbial phantom, passes through my body, and I quickly roll the letter up again and stow it back in its box.
The kitchen, too, is chilly in the stillness of the morning. I pull on jeans and a jumper while the water gathers bubbles in the saucepan. Tiny mouse turds cling to my feet. I brush them off and hurriedly add shoes. There is nothing so useful as a dustpan and brush in the kitchen, but I find two more saucepans, one with a stunted handle, a scratched frying pan, still with a layer of congealed grease from God only knows what, and a few loose pieces of mismatched cutlery the size of gardening tools. Except for the pack of coffee, the fridge is empty and I curse myself for forgetting to ask the Mexican to buy supplies, then reverse this and curse the Mexican instead, adding lack of breakfast-buying initiative to the man’s growing list of crimes, which so far includes indefensible ill temper, poor house-cleaning and, of course, lousy pest control. There’s nothing to feed the children except some fruit bars still in the zip pockets of their aeroplane backpacks which have already been passed over in disgust. So much of my energy in the past few months has been concentrated on pressing the pause button on our lives, that I’d given precious little thought as to what lay ahead, feeling in some superstitious way that to do so might jinx our exit route.
Outside the air is clear and still. I sit cross-legged on the wooden boards of the deck, feeling steam from the coffee condensating against my face. After a while tiny sounds become discernible – the rustle of a leaf, a bird cry, a noise, amplified by silence, of a door banging against its frame. It’s the near light of dawn and all around the whispers of night time are fading as creatures disappear down warrens, drop bottom first into holes, crawl backwards into fissures in the ground. My head starts whirring with all the things I need to do, and I begin making a list – a lifelong solution for keeping panic at bay. For starters, the cabin needs a lot of work if we’re to survive living in it for a whole year. A repaint, a better kitchen, curtains at the very least – abruptly, I put down the pen. A weak orange sun is creeping over the furthest peaks of the mountains to the east. It lights up every successive range, finally sweeping across the immediate landscape, glinting sharply as it touches on the tin roofs of the other cabins, just visible a few hundred yards down the hill.
Temerosa is a ghost town, one of hundreds of abandoned mining communities which sprang up out of the silver rush of the nineteenth century and consequently died in the glut of the twentieth. The town is built into the cleft of a hill on a small rocky plateau from where the landscape extends back as far as the eye can see, which is, in fact, forever. To the south lies Mexico. To the north are the flat plains and hazy peaks of the Patagonia Mountains beyond which lies the great American West, a strange and wild country representing an escape and freedom so great that, for a long moment, I find it hard to breathe.
‘Where are we going?’ Jack asks.
‘To see the town.’
‘I’m cold.’ This from Emmy.
‘Come on, don’t be silly, it’s not that bad.’ But she’s right; despite the sun, it is cold and the air is dry. I can feel it greedily siphoning the moisture out of my skin, pore by pore. I touch a finger to my lips, already chapped and rough.
‘I want to go home,’ Emmy says.
‘Let’s walk quickly then.’ I take her hand.
She snatches it back. ‘No, home, London.’
‘Why do we have to see the town?’ Jack says, trudging two steps behind us.
‘Because it’s so pretty here! It’s so different! We’re going to have such fun!’
‘How?’ This last one from Jack, of course.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question. How are we going to have fun? Right this second, with the children gro
uchy, listless and hungry, with no food in the fridge, no truck to get us to a shop, I haven’t the faintest idea. How are we going to have fun in the long term? How will this adventure pan out? What will it be like to be alone with Jack and Emmy for the foreseeable future? I don’t know either, but the hanging of curtains aside, I’ve been making plans. They may not be practical enough to ensure eggs in fridges but they’re plans all the same: we’re going to read a hundred books and complete 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzles, we will jog up mountains, learn to speak Spanish and make chipotle sauce. We are going to buy a pickup truck and head off west of the sun and east of the moon – stop in one-horse towns with names like Rattlesnake and Fort Defiance. But before we do any of these things, we will search out the most shamelessly greasy bacon ‘n’ cheese burger in the whole of America and kiss the bow-legged short-order cook who has grilled it.
‘Will there be a shop?’ Emmy asks.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Jack snaps.
‘Mummy said it was a town.’ Emmy’s mouth turns down; close to tears, she’s clutching the top of her arm.
‘Jack! Did you pinch her?’
‘Certainly did not!’ Jack says furiously.
‘Did Jack pinch you, Emmy?’
‘Yes.’ Emmy starts crying. ‘I just wanted to know if there’s a shop. That’s not unreasonable, is it? Surely that’s not unreasonable?’ I turn my head away to hide a smile. What is unreasonable is how endearing it is in a five-year-old, when it’s so annoying in Robert.