‘So, you’re all right,’ he says. ‘Every day I want to speak to you. So many times I’ve wanted to pick up the phone, just to hear your voice and know you’re OK.’
‘I call you all the time,’ you confess, but there’s a click at the other end of the line. The conversation is over.
In the bathroom, you sit on the edge of the tub, feeling dizzy. You could call him back and tell him you still want to have his children, still want to wait.
But you don’t call him back, because he’s married to someone else. You’re moving back to London, the place you belong, and he’s moving back to Mexico City, the place he belongs, the place where he was married in front of hundreds of people, hundreds of witnesses, hundreds of affluent, well-dressed, well-spoken Mexicans. Carlos did something bad, but everyone forgave him and he married his dead girlfriend’s best friend. There were six different bands. There were fireworks. Maybe there was a stucco mansion; you’re not sure. He never described his family’s house. That part you made up.
The day you leave New York, you tip the dusty rose-petal pot-pourri into the trash. In London, at Smythson’s on Bond Street, you buy a new address book and decide not to copy Carlos’s telephone number into it.
Your life changes. You work at the concert promoter’s office, then take a new media job at the BBC. London is expensive, so you move to Shepherd’s Bush, drink fewer cocktails, buy an Oyster card. You don’t work so late in the office anymore, or eat bar snacks for dinner. People invite you over for supper. Your friends have names like Emma and Kate, not DJ Jeffy. You only go out with single men.
Late in the summer you meet a man named James at a barbecue. He’s a tall, good-looking barrister, and all your female friends are envious. He takes you out to dinner and to the theatre; you go away for weekends to Brighton. After six months, you’re a real couple, hosting dinner parties together at your flat, watching films together on the big-screen TV at his place. Going out gives way to staying in. You have sex the way some people eat dessert: occasionally and furtively, as a special treat. You hardly think of Carlos at all. One day you realise you can’t remember his last name.
After a year, James suggests moving in together. He says it will save time and money. You’ll merge your books and DVDs and measuring jugs and appliances. At some hazy point in the future, he hints, you may get married, perhaps in a marquee on your aunt’s lawn. She lives in Somerset; he’s seen the lawn. It’s broad and picturesque, sloping down to the river’s edge. Very Merchant Ivory, he said at the time.
You can see this wedding: the trays of burnished-gold Pimms, the hazy summer evening, the pyramid of profiteroles. Girls dangling their slingbacks in one hand, paddling in the river. Your strapless dress, the bag packed for a honeymoon in Croatia, Turkey, Marrakesh. There won’t be fireworks, of course: this is an English wedding, and it’ll be light until late in the evening, anyway. No fireworks, no Mexicans.
So you say no. You’re very fond of James, but you don’t want to live with him or marry him or merge with him in any way. You don’t want a big wedding to feel guilty about when you sit there in marriage counselling four years later, in love with someone else.
When you tell him this—or some of this, at least—he looks both sad and relieved. There isn’t a scene of any sort, because James isn’t one for scenes. James is English. He takes things on the chin. He cares deeply about some things, but women are not high on that list. He doesn’t have to care, anyway: London is full of women like you—a thirty-something living in a one-bedroom flat who buys tea towels from the Tate Modern and lamps at the Conran Shop sale. The New York thing made you different, but you hardly talk about the New York thing anymore. You don’t tell people about flying to Los Angeles, or going to the Grammys, or getting Big Daddy V a blow job in Rome. It sounds like boasting. It sounds like a lie.
The evening you and James break up, he kisses you on the cheek and wishes you all the best. He says he’ll be back at some point for his things. You can’t even think of what those things are, apart from a spare toothbrush that needs to be thrown out, and a half-drunk bottle of gin. It takes him several goes to manoeuvre out of his parking space. You stand in the doorway of your flat, wondering if you should wave or not. You decide not to wave. He appears not to notice.
On a drizzly day, two years after you move back to London, you’re in the back of a taxi driving along the Hammersmith flyover.
The last time you saw Carlos, you were saying goodbye in the street. You think you remember a tree twisted with fairy lights, but you can’t be sure about this detail anymore. You remember clinging to him. When he kissed you, the sensation of his mouth on yours, his face so close, made you feel intensely happy and desperate at the same time. Your last kiss was soft and slow. You’d had three months of afternoons and evenings, love and talk, and this was where it ended—in the street, Carlos standing on the sidewalk and watching your taxi drive away.
The sky that evening was the deepest blue and empty, unfurling like a long ribbon above your heads. When you gazed back at him through the grubby back window of the cab, he was standing, still and rumpled, on the curb. Your faces were turned towards the place you last stood together.
Now you’re just looking out the window at nothing in particular, watching the rain dribble down the glass. Traffic is heavy, and the taxi crawls. You’re passing a huge billboard advertising tequila. A grinning man wears a sombrero and holds a giant bottle, its label painted the colours of the Mexican flag. A bubble as big as a swimming pool reads: ‘The real taste of Mexico’.
The brown-skinned man on the billboard looks happy. He’s probably just been to a big wedding, and heard a lot of music, and seen a lot of fireworks. Perhaps he knows that some day a reckless, love-drunk foreigner will sit with him in a bar and promise to bear his children.
Thinking of the sound of his voice still makes you happy, even though you haven’t heard it for years, and may never hear it again. You hope that wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, he’s happy as well. So you smile up at him and blow him a kiss. Rico was right. He looks like he works in McDonald’s. He looks like he sells oranges on the street.
(2008)
Overseasia
Lloyd Jones, from The Book of Fame
We had arrived to a tidy world
a spoken for world
We lined the carriage windows
and gaped at the thatched cottages
at the tidy figure in the paddock
the tame hedgerows
There appeared to be little in the way of landscaping left to do.
At the Globe in Newton Abbot we sat on the edge of our made beds.
Now what? we wondered.
Jimmy Duncan called a practice.
We felt oddly self-conscious.
We did not want to interrupt England.
We did not want to draw attention to ourselves.
We practised our scrum, our special ‘wedge’ formation devised off Tierra del Fuego.
Billy Stead got the backs going—Billy Wallace and Mona Thompson in from their
wings, weaving inside and out, first Billy on the cut, then Mona. Freddy Roberts on a
drifting run, the inside pass to Jimmy Hunter who links with Smithy. In this way we
began to sow our patterns onto the lovely English field.
Our first injury on English soil: McDonald tore an ear at practice.
For some days the ocean foamed in our ears. The Atlantic continued to roll beneath
the English streets. In the lobby of the Globe Hotel, Frank Glasgow threw his arms
around a column. Billy Wallace steadied himself as if catching his balance on an
unsteady log. The English hotel maids giggled behind their hands as Billy Stead’s
arms flew up and he yelled ‘whoaaah!’ on a run across the sloping red carpet to the
safety of the bar rail.
We woke to English sounds—the scullery, slushing water, roosters, crows, the shuffle of tea trolleys, the
song of the washerwoman squeezing her mop at the end of the hall. We lay in our beds, cataloguing these scraps of ‘Englishness’ for future use. Later we sat up in our beds and pulled back a corner of the curtain to see what was happening down in the street. We could see donkeys with kindling tied to their flanks wobbling down the hill lanes to the market outside the hotel, where thick-ankled women in white pilgrim shawls set down vegetable baskets next to the loaves and round cheeses. In the first few days we were like shy crayfish. We weren’t sure how to place ourselves in that scene outside our window. On the first morning we watched Billy Glenn then Corbett try to insert themselves—Billy Glenn with his hands behind his back and the false calm of someone determined to ignore a growling dog; we saw him lean forward then it was as if his feet wouldn’t carry him any further. Corbett took a more direct route to the bread cart; once there, he looked fiercely up and down the main street. Then a local happened to ask him a question and Bill took a backward step, fright took hold of his face, he shook his head and hurried away back to the hotel lobby. Jimmy Duncan wandered at leisure to a park bench by the watch tower. He yawned into his hand and plopped himself down, crossed his legs and lay his head back to bathe in the early morning sunshine. It was a lesson to us all.
We took heart from Jimmy’s lead and soon were a familiar sight about Newton Abbot. We were invited out to musicals and theatres, to public smoking concerts. At the invitation of Lord Clifford and the Earl of Devon, Gallaher, Jimmy Duncan, Billy Stead and Mister Dixon went for a ride in a motor car and came swaggering back to the Globe with shining faces. They’d travelled over one hundred miles into the English countryside. The rest of us walked. Or we cycled. We cycled through the green countryside to Teignmouth, Totes, Paington. Along the Devonshire lanes we saw elements of ‘time’ and ‘order’ bundled up in thick hedgerows, backed by wide-spreading elms, fern, ivy, mosses and wild flowers. And when you looked at those elms and mosses and wild flowers you found yourself looking past them to the gorsey clay hillsides of home. In one you saw the start of something and in the other the pretty finish.
Did we feel at home? Among the English, and English things?
But we had these things too: sparrows, thrushes, macrocarpas. Tea and potatoes.
On the coast walk between Carbis Bay and St Ives, we found the odd patch of gorse,
even cabbage trees.
We recognised the mould from which we’d been cast. In the mannerisms and trans-
actions of the people, we saw ourselves—the way a barman with one neat action
sweeps the bar top dry before setting down a pint of Guinness
the chirpy skill of the fruiterer filling the bag with apples and spinning it to a twist
at the opening
the matey banter of the cabbies, and the tenderness with which they spoke to their
horses: ‘Go on ’ome with yer Samantha’
the knowledge of oceans contained in the faces of the Devon and Cornishmen
the same measuring sideways glance out the corner of an Irishman’s face when a
leg-pull was on
and this! the same nutty obsession for the state of the weather
and that English silence aboard trains, wily as trout
the choreography and fair play of the English in numbers; first, the
women and the children, then the gentlemen
the time given to the discussion of dogs
or, on the stillest of mornings, with the world hanging by a thread,
the maniacal urge to laugh at the top of our voices
That was us as well.
*
Time and time again, we’d catch them looking at us,
measuring and evaluating.
They felt our biceps
asked us to step up on the scales
stared down our throats
counted our teeth
and challenged us to Indian arm wrestles.
*
Then that first game in Devon
Played in golden farmlight.
On the train up to Exeter we hardly spoke to one another.
Our attention wandered out the carriage window but nothing caught our interest.
A sail boat.
An elderly couple, the man with only one arm holding a fishing rod.
A dog wagged its tail.
The world didn’t look a serious enough place for our mood.
Where the train left the coast to follow the edge of a marshland Mister Dixon got
to his feet; he scratched himself and looked perplexed. He walked up and down a
few times. He fossicked in his pocket for his speech notes and tips on VIP greetings.
In Exeter we visited the great cathedral and walked around the city streets. We were supposedly taking an interest but O’Sullivan and Stead kept needing to find a toilet, and Mister Dixon kept disappearing into the graveyard with his speech notes.
After lunch at the Half Moon Hotel, our two coaches followed the river to the County Ground. We crossed the river, passed under a bridge and turned down a narrow street of houses. At the end of the street we could see long lines of people passing through the gates, the men in caps and top hats and the women in sun bonnets. We sunk back in our seats, eyes averted to the coach upholstery.
Christ! They were coming to see us! We closed our eyes and silently prayed that we wouldn’t make fools of ourselves.
Entering the ground we tried not to look but couldn’t help ourselves. In every direction you saw people. The stand was full, and the area behind the bike track; between there and the rows of houses people stood five, six, seven deep while upon the roof-line solitary figures clung to chimney pots.
At 3 pm we walk out in single file, Glasgow pulling his headgear on. O’Sullivan trips on a clod of mud and reddens with embarrassment. Billy Wallace’s eyes dart to all corners of the field; he locates the posts, takes a couple of backward steps then jogs back. Billy Stead notes the roll of the turf and where at one corner it slopes away on the grandstand side of the ground. Gallaher bends down to pick up a clod of mud and throws it away. Steve Casey underarms a pebble. Jimmy Hunter wipes away a nervous yawn. In the short time that it takes us to walk out to the middle we look for a dozen diversions.
Then a crow flew across the ground and every one of us looked up to follow its flight. Our eyes swam in the blue skies. The sunny day was nothing like what we’d been told to expect at this time of year. George Gillett wore a tweed hat at fullback.
Our first points on English soil came within three minutes of the start. Fred clears from a scrum to Billy Stead, a sweet transfer to Jimmy Hunter. Jimmy runs hard at the defensive line; the Devon men try to wrap him up but Jimmy’s legs keep pumping and that’s when we first saw the alarm on the faces of the Devon players. You saw the Devon men back on their heels, hands in the air. Jimmy was supposed to fall over. Every other player they wrapped up falls over. They weren’t used to Jimmy’s civil disobedience. But a horse wouldn’t have stopped Jimmy. Behind his maddening release of energy were six weeks at sea, hours of shipboard training, hours spent imagining such a moment as this, through ice storms and tropical heat. Jimmy spins free, as easy as passing through a revolving door and goes over near the posts for Billy Wallace to convert. That was just the beginning. George Smith crossed for four tries. Carbine got three. George Gillett went over for a try with one hand holding on to the brim of his sun hat. We scored twelve tries in all and were up by fifty points before Devon answered with a penalty goal.
The ease with which we did it surprised everyone, the crowd, the newspapermen, ourselves included. We heard later that several London newspapers came out the following day with the wrong score. The telegraph operator transcribing the dots to letters had ‘corrected’ the 55 – 4 scoreline to read in favour of the English County champions.
Later that afternoon in the chandeliered light of a hotel in Exeter we rose with the Devon men to toast the King and sing our national anthems. We were so happy and with the cha
mpagne glowing in our cheeks we belted out a haka that had the ashtrays and champagne flutes bouncing on the tabletops.
Outside the hotel a huge cheer went up. Thousands stood in the dark where earlier in the day we’d passed unnoticed. They wanted to shake our hands. They slapped our backs. They seemed to know us or want to know us. We shook their hands. ‘God bless.’ they said. God bless. We smiled with uncertainty, wondering if this was the right thing to do.
They were so appreciative and we were so grateful.
*
News of what had happened at the County Ground had reached Newton Abbot around six that evening. The stationmaster was first to hear. He’d tipped his cap and shaken hands with Jimmy Duncan earlier in the day. He wrote down the score on a scrap of paper and sent one of his assistants off with it to the innkeeper. Within a short time the news had passed along the doors, from house to house. Now it was just after eleven at night, and as we stepped from the train a huge crowd of men, women, children and their dogs cheered as we made our way to the drays to take us to the hotel. A brass band walked ahead of us through the main street of town playing ‘The Road to Moscow’. As we arrived at the Globe the hotel manager raced out in his shirtsleeves to greet us. We climbed down from the dray and the excited crowd closed in around us. They wouldn’t let us inside until they’d heard some words. Say something to us. Speak! So, from the upstairs balcony, Mister Dixon leant his weight on the balustrade as we’d seen him do so often at the ship rail and put across a typically modest view. ‘Naturally we believe in our system, but it would be premature, premature I think, on the strength of one match to express an opinion about it ….’ The crowd looked disappointed. The voice didn’t quite match the deed. The content wasn’t quite there. They shuffled restlessly. George Nicholson correctly read their mood and with Cunningham rallied us for a haka. ‘…who! who! ra! ra!’ They loved that; they clapped and begged for more. They pulled on our shoulders and who-raaaed in our faces. They wanted to hear more. Mister Dixon looked at his timepiece. Nicholson, though, slapped his long thighs and Cunningham rolled his eyes. Pakeha atea! Ring a ring a pakeha …. The street thrilled. The dogs howled in the English night.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 134