It needs a sling. I eye the scraps of fishing net and sift through what's there. I spend the next hour tying together loose ends of the nets, wincing with every tug and pull, fashioning a makeshift triangle as best I can. Thinking ahead to how I'll tie it around my neck, I use a length of thread to measure the distance from my shoulder to elbow, make a mental guess and tie a knot, hoping I've got the sling height right.
Satisfied it's the best it can be, I grab one of Gloria's stray socks I found lurking in the bottom of the rucksack and ram it into my mouth. Biting down hard, I ease my arm into my sling. The pain makes me roar inwardly but I'm convinced I made no audible sound.
The sling is a good fit but pain relief is a long time coming. I distract myself by assessing my supplies. Half a litre of water a day will get me to Wednesday, so that's day I have to leave. I figure if I hold out until then, whoever is looking for me will assume I'm dead or long gone.
My food supplies match the water. I have two protein bars, two chocolate bars, a small pack of peanuts and some chick pea snacks. If I spread that over two days, and leave early on the third, I should survive, and if I save the nuts, they'll give me enough energy for the walk.
The day drags on. I feel myself weakening by the hour and my state of mind isn't helping. I keep asking myself if all my campaigning is worth it? There has to be a better way, a less dangerous way forward. I've put my loved ones in peril out of my own stalwart drive. It hits me like a hard slap that all these years I've been selfish in my treatment of Paula. I've not respected her enough for who she is, not only as the mother of my child, but a shrewd, capable, caring woman who gave up her life to be with me. She doesn't deserve this. She doesn't deserve to lose her life twice, once when she came to the island, and a second time because of me. Tears well and spill. I brush them away. I need to get a grip. I'll walk back on Wednesday. I'll be there when the commission winner is announced; to celebrate or not, I don't care. I picture Gloria's pretty face, her adorable if impetuous nature, I picture Bill and Angela, who came to be near their only daughter and granddaughter. All of them I am responsible for and I should have stepped up to that responsibility long before now.
Tourism
I didn't sleep well. Gloria took up the middle of the bed as is her wont. She's still flat on her back with her arms spread wide, her right hand grasping one of her rabbit's ears. I was left with a sliver of the mattress. I spent much of the night lying on my side staring into the dark, reminiscing.
I remembered the first time I met Celestino, climbing down the stairs to the subterranean art gallery in a little plaza in Haría, admiring the artworks on display, thinking I might buy something small, approaching the man standing by a small desk with my inquiry to find he was the artist. We chatted. He was amused by my dreadful Spanish. There was a spark. We both felt it. I hadn't wanted to leave. I must have stayed down there a whole hour.
Over dinner that evening, I discovered him to be a deep, ethical and considerate man. I opened my mind to him. I isolated the moment I opened my heart as well. Fell in love, or more likely tripped over and there it was, there he was, with arms spread wide ready to catch me. It was early in my third holiday on the island, and I spent most of the rest of my stay with him. Like all holiday romances, our interactions were intoxicating and it was hard to leave. I booked another holiday soon after, and a few months later I was back. The attraction was strong, overwhelming, and when he asked me to spend my life with him, I swooned.
Then common sense kicked in and I returned to my old life in Suffolk, to my job and my home minus my new love. Whenever I recall that time, I see the painting he gifted me, the way I would gaze at it with longing. I wanted to jump on a plane and be with him forever, but it felt like insanity. It was a work colleague, Joe, who finally persuaded me. 'What I wouldn't give to trade places with you,' she said. 'Live in paradise with the man of your dreams? How could you think of turning him down?'
That missing, and the aching, hollowed out feeling that came with it, feels in the recollecting pure and clear. Besides, I'd been in control. It was my decision. When someone goes missing, the sense of loss is different. Anxiety doesn't ache; it grips. Awake beside my daughter, my belly clenches with worry. Every now and then I feel angry with him for putting me through it all. Then I lie still, unable to shake myself free of the anguish, as though through all those years of feeling neglected, I rejected him in retaliation to protect my heart, and now that he is gone I crave a chance to make amends.
As the room turns to grey in the first moments of the day, I slip out of bed and put on the dressing gown Angela gave me to wear: one of Bill's. Knee length, brown, it wraps almost twice around my body and smells of something like Brut. My feet are cold on the tiled floor. I hurry through to the living-room floorboards. At the kitchen end of the room the ceiling ends and a large skylight encloses what was once an open space in the roof. I stand in the patch of sunlit floor and warm my feet, preparing myself for a continuation of the discussion of Celestino's whereabouts that is sure to take place when I join my parents, already moving about in the kitchen.
Bill sits down at the head of the kitchen table as I enter the room, placing his cereal bowl beside a sheaf of printed matter. He seems distracted; his hair, wispy and white and in need of a cut, is uncombed and he's dressed for the day in yesterday's beige polo top and pants. I pull out the chair next to his where a place for me is laid, and help myself to the coffee on the table. Bill shovels a few mouthfuls of his cereal and chews vigorously. Then he stabs the papers with the handle end of his spoon and says, 'This island is going to the dogs.'
'Morning dad.'
'What's happened now?' Angela says in that careworn manner she puts on.
'They're proposing yet another desalination plant.'
'Where?'
I think of the rocky coastline, already built up between Costa Teguise and Puerto del Carmen. And the sprawl of hotels and holiday villas that was once the quaint fishing village of Playa Blanca.
'Arrecife.'
'Oh dear.'
'Not 'oh dear'. It's infuriating. Does Celestino know about this?'
'Bill.'
'Of course, he does,' Bill says, answering his own question. 'He knows as well as I do that this island can't take much more.'
It's always the same conversation: tourism. One way or another, everything on the island revolves around it. Arguably one of the dullest topics of conversation anyone could have, other people's holidays, yet you couldn't step outside your front door and not be affected by it.
'Won't it be wind powered?' I read somewhere of the possibility.
'How many turbines will that be, Paula,' he says, ever the pessimist. 'No, it'll be fuelled by oil, like the rest. More money for the big boys. And that's beside the point. It's not sustainable.'
'More water equals more tourists, you mean,' I say, warming to the topic, my mind welcoming the distraction, the sense of normalcy it provides.
'More water guzzling golf courses, most likely.'
'I dislike the tourism industry here as much as you do,' I say, recalling that time not so long ago when I cleaned holiday lets in Punta Mujeres. 'But there's thirty-five per cent unemployment on the island as it is. What would the people do without it?'
'Tourism is not the answer. You know full well that most jobs in tourism are low paid. And what about the all-inclusives? Tell me how they benefit the rest of the island. As it is, most holidaymakers don't venture beyond their enclaves, and the same goes for the expats, which does nothing or close to nothing to benefit the island's broader economy.'
'We're expats, Bill.'
He ignores his wife. Keeping his gaze fixed on me, he adds, 'Tourists come here to feed off the island. They're parasites, and parasites give nothing back.'
'You can't blame the holidaymakers,' Angela says, pouring Bill a cup of coffee.
He almost snatches it from her hand and sets it down by her bowl. 'Why not?'
'Just eat your breakfast.'
/> I put my elbows on the table and my face in my hands. Bees dance about amongst the flowers in terracotta tubs on the patio. The toaster releases its catch.
'He shouldn't upset himself,' Angela says, addressing me as she returns to the table with the toast. 'He was up half the night surfing the web.'
'I couldn't sleep,' he says, leaning back in his seat. 'You know, Paula, what's needed here is quality not quantity.'
'Bill, please. You're being a snob.'
'An environmentally and culturally aware sort of tourist,' I say, hoping my comment will ease the tension.
'Or expat.'
'One who cares and contributes.'
'Tourists with a fat wallet, you mean,' Angela says.
'That wouldn't help,' Bill says. 'Money doesn't necessarily result in quality.'
'Just the pretence of it.'
Golf courses, swathes of lush green grass in a desert—it's a hedonistic folly, a travesty, an insult to the land and its people. I have to agree with him. In the final analysis, the island is so small it can barely contain the influx, but I also think the various interested parties manage the situation well. Besides, tourism is a global phenomenon, not one restricted to this rock.
'Any economy that relies so heavily on tourism is fundamentally insecure,' Bill says sagely. 'Pity the old ways are all but gone.'
'It was a hard life though.'
'Mm.'
The subject exhausted, he returns to his cereal bowl. Angela sits opposite me, and proceeds to butter her toast with quick swipes of her knife.
I put some bran flakes and milk in my bowl and shuffle the flakes about, my appetite fading. Cereal from cardboard boxes, milk from the fridge, bread baked and sliced in a bakery, browned in a toaster, life here was never so easy. How must it have been for the farmers' wives of days gone by? Toasting maize on open fires, milling it by hand to produce the island's staple, gofio. Every farmhouse had a molino de mano, a hand mill carved from basalt. Women milling while their men laboured on terraces high on the mountainside, terraces they'd made and then edged with dry stone walls. When the domestic chores were done the women, protected from the wind and the sun by high-domed hats secured with scarves tied tightly beneath their chins, would go and labour alongside their men, planting, weeding, harvesting and partaking in the view. Always the tremendous view. A view that might have made up for the arduous labour. But three, four, five, six hundred metres—it's a long way up and a long way down. Some farmers chose to remain at the mountaintop, building their homes on the crest, or at the edge of the cliff, anywhere the soil was tillable and the mists rolled in. Anywhere the rain fell greatest. It's far from the bucolic idyll of the peasant farmer and not at all the plentiful existence of farmers tilling the flatter, wetter land of Suffolk. Here was hardship on an exceptional scale, and those steadfast Lanzaroteños have to be commended for the numerous techniques and inventions they created to survive.
Those not so steadfast left, or fled, following the migration routes to the Americas, escaping the volcanic eruptions and the droughts that plagued the island. The population remained small, growing little until the 1960s when tourism first took hold, but it wasn't until the last few decades that the tourist industry began to devour the island in its entirety. There are few places to escape to. Some locals, craving time to relax in a place far from the invasion, have re-occupied the once abandoned village of Tenesar, no more than a cluster of rundown buildings fronting the churning ocean of the northwest coast, and surrounded by malpais. Celestino told me about it. Accessed by a gravel road, Tenesar sounds like one of the most inhospitable places I can imagine. I wanted to visit to see for myself but Celestino wouldn't take me. 'Best leave them alone, Paula,' he'd said, honouring the locals' wish for privacy.
I force down the remaining bran flakes and slurp the last dregs of milk in my bowl. Bill pours over his papers. I, too, crave a more sustainable tourism, one not riven by overdevelopment. Especially since that overdevelopment is the result of exploitation and corruption. But I struggle to think of a holiday destination that hasn't fallen foul of those two human weaknesses. It always comes down to short sightedness and greed. Yet Bill isn't exaggerating, despite his tendency to pontificate; on Lanzarote, corruption is a story to match the days of its conquest.
Not long into our relationship, Celestino told me the story of the day a German tourist arrived, fell in love with the island and asked to buy a field of potatoes. Duly purchased, the German then profited from his sale of that field to a construction company wishing to build a hotel. A bunch of local officials soon saw an opportunity for gain. The German had given everyone an idea. Celestino went on to describe how some government officials had their family and friends purchase land from farmers, then arranged for the land to be re-zoned so they could sell it on to property developers, this time for a huge profit. It was a scam that corrupted all of those involved, except for the farmer whose land it was. All those involved in the initial purchase, all involved in the rezoning, all who turned a blind eye to it, all who spent the proceeds of the property deals, all those lured by sweet deals, all those with greasy palms, all who knew about it and kept quiet for fear of repercussions, everyone from local government officials and staffers, to the lawyers and their families, the developers and beyond. The corrupt practices of those early initiators metastasised at a tremendous rate. Celestino started campaigning when he realised no environmental protections written into law were making a jot of difference and no one ever seemed accountable.
My own reflections about the island always brought me back to Celestino, as though the two were twinned, like suns. This time I'm brought back with a lurch. It was Celestino who educated all the Crays on the island's corruption. It's what binds him and Bill; they're comrades in arms. Whenever we get together for dinner, after the food is eaten and Gloria asleep, the two men spend hours mulling over some dirty deed or other, Celestino telling Bill all he knows about corrupt practices on the island and Bill wading in with various scandals in the UK and Europe and the United States. Bill trying to tell Celestino that Lanzarote is small potatoes by comparison and Celestino refusing to have it. I suppose male rivalry has to anchor on something.
'I really need to find him,' I say aloud.
Bill looks up.
'Perhaps you should call the police.' Angela sounds as worried as I feel.
'It's still too soon for that,' Bill says.
'Forty-eight hours?'
I exchange glances with Angela.
'He's a young, fit, healthy man. And he's a local. There's been a terrible storm. I expect you'd be fobbed off, Paula. Better to wait a bit longer, I'd say.'
'Then, do you mind having Gloria? I want to keep looking.'
'Oh, Paula.'
'You go off and do what you feel you need to,' Bill says.
As though she's been summoned, Gloria comes running into the kitchen in her pyjamas, clutching her toy rabbit by its neck.
'Granddad!' Her eyes are wide and bright as day. She runs around to the head of the table and leans against him, her little face pressing against the mound of his belly. Then she steps back and pulls at his arm. Bill stands and takes her outside.
Back in Haría all looks as I left it yesterday. Walking through the house, standing in each room, I can't shake the sense of unfamiliarity in the objects that surround me, that on Saturday morning were so familiar I hardly took any of it in. Now an empty feeling pervades the place. Climbing the stairs to our bedroom, hearing the familiar creak of the treads, the feeling intensifies.
After a quick scan of the room, I grab a pair of shorts and an old T-shirt thinking after a shower I'll keep busy for a while cleaning Gloria's bedroom; it will ease the anxiety and give me time to decide what to do next.
A shower refreshes me a little and I'm soon back in the kitchen. My gaze settles on the landline and the dull green of the unlit message indicator on the console. The absence of that flashing light reinforces in me a growing despair. I take one look at the cloth a
nd detergent beside the sink. Cleaning a bedroom? —It's something my mother would do. Tea will more likely help me think. I fill the kettle instead.
With mug in hand I go outside and sit beside the tree planted in the centre of the patio. Celestino told me once it was a drago tree. He said it was special but I can't remember why. The bees are in overdrive amongst the lavender, geraniums and herbs in full flower, making the most of the short season. I make a mental note to water the pot plants that will soon be dry, despite Saturday's rain. Again, I feel as though I'm turning into my mother. Angela's first thought always concerns practicalities, serving to assuage her anxiety over one thing or another. Is this a family trait passed down through the female line, manifesting belatedly in me in the face of my own anxiety? Yet upon putting down my cup and turning on the hose, setting the spray to a soft drizzle, directing the flow first here then there, watching the leaves bow under the weight of the droplets, the soil in the pots change colour in the wet, the calming effect inherent in tending things that have little chance of disappearing since they are rooted to the spot, doesn't escape my notice.
A quick rap on the front door takes me by surprise. I turn off the hose and hurry to answer it, my heartbeat quickening.
Shirley hovers out on the pavement, all breezy in an oversized silk dress of ocean blue, adorned with a blue pearl necklace and sea horse earrings.
'Come to see how you're faring,' she says, giving me an appraising look as she steps forward to enter. 'Still no sign of him then.'
I let her in and lead her to the patio.
'I'm thinking of calling the police,' I say as I retrieve my tea.
'I don't think Celestino would like it if you did that, to be honest.' She bunches together her lips in one of her stern pouts, the wrinkles on her face deepening, and with a critical sweep of my garb, she adds, 'Get your glad rags on and come with me.'
A Matter of Latitude Page 7