Weeks in Naviras

by Wimpress, Chris

  ‘I’ll be down there for about half an hour, I need to chat to Rav,’ he announced late one afternoon when the sunlight was turning vanilla.

  ‘Sure, how about I have a bath then we can meet you down there?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  With Bobby napping next-door I lay still in the bath, thinking back on the conversation with Lottie and Gail, wondering if I’d ever feel the need to leave James but also whether or not I could cope living in such a small village, miles from anything. I didn’t mind my life, it wasn’t perfect and there was no denying my faith in James had been severely damaged, but I was forced to admit that I quite liked being the wife of an MP, it was different, varied and often pleasantly challenging. What else could I do, become a boring lawyer and single mother? It didn’t exactly appeal.

  Eventually I got out and wrapped one of Lottie’s large fluffy towels around me. I’d been staring at the fisherman painting idly as I’d been lying in the water. It didn’t seem off-balance, which I’d taken as Luis’s code that he’d not put a message behind it. Sure enough when I took the painting off its hook I was disappointed to find the alcove empty. I hung the painting back up and pulled the bathroom door open. I jumped when I saw Luis standing at the top of the stairs outside the open door to the bedroom. He screwed up the piece of paper in his hand. We both stood there, staring at each other. His hand clenched, mine clutching the towel.

  ‘Oh sorry, Ellie, I thought you had gone down to La Roda with James.’ Even under his tan I could see his face turning red.

  Eventually I said, ‘Well, at least it means you can give me that message personally.’ I looked down at his hand and then back at his face. Then I let go of my towel and it dropped to the floor.

  He looked down at me and back up, then took two steps forward and we were together, slowly at first, kissing but otherwise not touching at all. He didn’t try to draw me in, he waited for me. Then we were on the bed. I was surprised at how soft his face was, had always expected his stubble to be rough. We never closed the door, we couldn’t stop to. Maybe because we started out with me naked and him clothed, maybe it was just Luis’s way. It could be both of these things and others, but it was the most exhilarating thing. Not the sensations themselves but the intent behind them, the care and silent determination which went into them. The sense of transgression and revenge in what we were doing, the correction of an imbalance.

  We had just seconds to lie there. I recovered my rationale and grabbed my towel. He put his clothes on quickly and quietly. ‘We have to talk about this again,’ he said, and left without a kiss or anything. I went next-door and quickly submerged myself in the bathwater.

  Bobby had slept through it all. I woke him and picked him up, taking him down to La Roda with me. The village looked so nice that evening as I walked down the street, beyond its usual loveliness. There must’ve been a lot of moisture in the air because the sky was a pink haze with only the tiniest flake of high cloud. James was sitting outside La Roda, talking on his phone. He nodded at me as he continued to talk. ‘Well yeah, he knows where all the bodies are buried. I wouldn’t bring it up, wait to see if he gives it to you first. Yup.’

  His accent had been slowly changing. Becoming more clipped, less strangulated on the vowels. He’d slowed down his words, too. Everything was more of a proclamation, a mini-speech. He’d also taken to calling all men in the political bubble by their surnames. I’d once heard him on the phone referring to Rav as ‘Malik’, when he’d thought I wasn’t listening. This didn’t apply to any of the women though, and certainly never Rosie, who never required the clarification of her surname at all. There was only one of her.

  ‘That was a long bath,’ James said casually once he’d hung up, not putting the phone down but immediately thumbing out a message.

  ‘I almost fell asleep in it,’ I said. ‘Then I was waiting for Bobby to wake up.’

  ‘He’s slept enough?’

  ‘About an hour, that should tide him over.’

  We had dinner in La Roda, mainly so James could keep an eye on his phone. When we returned to Casa Amanhã the restaurant was in full swing but Luis had gone home to help Carolina with an essay. He and I barely spoke for the next two days, he seemed to find reasons not to be up at the house. On the few occasions we did see each other he acted perfectly normal, as though nothing had changed. We even shared a game of pool together one night in La Roda. We’d not wanted to exactly, but everyone else had played each other. He beat me easily, but as the short game went on I thought about how deadpan he could be. Nobody would ever have known. In days before he’d been flirting ever so slightly with Gail, but with me he kept his distance. To take a shot he’d go around the whole table to avoid passing me. Despite what he’d said, we had no further discussions that trip; the only conversation was one-way, when I left a note behind the painting on the morning we packed up and headed for Lisbon.

  You’ve made me feel alive again. xxx

  This was quite true; dropping my towel in front of Luis had ignited something; intangible at first, slow-growing but permanent. Before that I’d been timid, thankful for silver linings and reminding myself things could always be worse. I didn’t change overnight, that would have been unlike me. It took me another four or five years to assert myself fully and my regret just before Ben Gurion, not immediately before but in the weeks before, was that it had taken me to the age of thirty-five to have that moment in Room Seven, that spark.

  You’d expect what happened between Luis and I to further estrange me from James, but that’s not how it played out. It was number one on my list of Things Nobody Else Can Tell You. How Luis had been with me, it made me understand what my needs were. James hadn’t been giving them to me, but perhaps I could train him, I thought. It’s quite wrong to presume that adultery can destroy a marriage. It took mine off life support. The problem was the spark of Luis needed replenishing, and as it turned out nobody else ever seemed to possess a source of it, not anyone else whom I could get my hands on, at least.

  Cave

  The avalanche comes in waves. Sometimes I’ll stop moving and try to dig myself out of the snow, only for another pile to tumble from above, sending me cartwheeling further down the slope. There’s no pain or injury though, not even when my body hits planks of wood and even a couple of large rocks. I don’t see anyone else tumbling through the snow, perhaps they’ve all disappeared the way Gavin did, I think.

  When the cascade finally stops I’m buried up to my waist in powder. It’s quiet now, the incongruous unnatural sound I’d heard earlier has stopped. Somehow I’ve managed to hold onto my sarong, but unsurprisingly my sandals are both missing. As I try to pull myself out of the snowdrift I feel something for the first time, exertion. Yes, it’s a struggle and it’s making my limbs feel tired. For the first time I’m cold, shivering in fact. The snow stings my arms and legs, although not as much as perhaps it should.

  ‘Hello!’ I call out indiscriminately. ‘Gavin?’ My voice doesn’t seem to travel far, there’s no echo.

  I’m at the bottom of the valley, I’m guessing, the part which’d been obscured by low-lying cloud when I was up in Catseye. The sky’s blank, it’s hard to tell if that’s because of the fog or the large plumes of snow from the avalanche. There’s no sign of the sun but it’s possible to see about twenty metres ahead where there’s a rock wall, sheer and smooth. Whether it’s part of a mountain or something else I can’t tell, I can only see a few metres up before the wall fades into white haze. Little streams of snow are still winding their way down the mountainside from behind me, coming to rest against the side of the cliff, forming little dunes which I have to step over as I walk along the side of the wall, heading down and away from the ruined ski resort. I know I don’t want to go back, that’s for sure.

  I keep walking for what feels like a few minutes perhaps, before a cavity appears in the side of the cliff. It’s about two metres high and a metre wide, exactly the right size for an adult person to fit through. There
’s obviously a tunnel down there, framed by an arch identical in size and shape to the one above that rogue passage back in the wine cellar. Another conduit, I think, into somewhere else, someone else’s afterlife. Maybe I should just stop, wait for resolution. But no, that’s the old me thinking, and I’m expunging her.

  The sides of the tunnel are uneven and it gets dark very quickly as I take further steps inside. My body’s changing; or perhaps I’m becoming more aware of it. I’ve been floating along semi-weightless for ages, now gravity’s exerting itself with a vengeance, trying to pin me to the ground. Most of all I’m freezing, the cold goes right to my bones. My toes curl up as they touch the rock floor. I’m acutely aware of the arthritic fluid inside my ankles.

  I’m getting tired and stop for a moment, trying to lean against the rock wall. I let out a gasp of shock as my shoulder blade touches the side, it’s so coarse and cold. On reflex I pull my body forward and away from it, which seems to require a monumental effort. I don’t know whether to go back – it’s only now I’ve stopped that I realise the tunnel’s been slowly descending. I can only see a faint sheen of light behind me on the ground. I’m scared, but of what, the dark? I faced the destruction of Catseye without any fear at all, what’s changed?

  The ground ahead of me is more uneven, as I discover the moment I try to take a step forward and nearly trip. I stub my toe, painfully, on a sharp outcropping of stone and yell. My toe throbs. I can feel the muscles in my chest constricting, my breath, yes my breath, coming in cold. There’s a wind down here and it’s biting when it gusts.

  In response to my yell comes a dull moan. First briefly, but then again and for longer. Then there’s another noise, difficult to describe. Similar to cat’s purr, but lower in pitch and angrier. It comes in pulses, the vibrations going through me. It stops, then repeats after a few seconds.

  I feel sweat forming on my forehead, trickling down my back despite the cold air. I take tiny steps forward, trying to make as little noise as I can. It’s getting lighter ahead of me, but I still have to be careful because the ground beneath me remains craggy and treacherous. Still I can’t bring myself to touch the sides of the rock wall for support.

  Eventually I come to a corner, all the time the moaning getting louder and punctuated by the vibrating noise, which sometimes rises in pitch. I look around the corner into a much larger, almost circular chamber where Morgan Cross is standing on a tiny ledge level with me, clinging to the side of a dark, sticky-looking pillar in the middle of a void in the centre of the room.

  There’s almost no floor in front of me, just a ledge about three feet wide circling the walls. Where the floor should be there’s just empty space, all the way down past rows of large imperfect, distorted hexagon-tiled walls, running down for what seems like half a mile into darkness. The walls aren’t golden like honeycomb, some bigger than others and bulging, sagging outward. Some of the hexagons on the walls are broken, punched through from the inside with bits of their crust still sticking out.

  The pillar Morgan’s clinging to runs all the way to the ceiling, if there is a ceiling, up past rows more of the same large hexagonal pattern, endlessly into bright, cold light which isn’t blinding but still hurts my eyes, makes them weep. The president is the source of the moaning. She’s almost naked, seemingly wearing only the remnants of her white blouse, its hem trailing down over the tops of her legs. Her hair’s clumped together, damp from sweat and blood which has formed little streams, snaking down her pale body like external veins. Her arms and legs are dotted with large pustules, circular and red. Both her arms are held out to her side, curling around the pillar, her hands trying to keep a grip on it. Her heels are wedged tightly against a small ledge, maybe only a foot wide, but because the outcropping’s so small her toes curl tightly over its edges. There’s nowhere for her to go but down.

  One of her eyes is missing, a scarlet void where it used to be. I can see terror in her remaining eye but also weariness. She hasn’t seen me because her remaining eye’s staring down into the darkness beneath me. I can’t immediately see what she’s looking at, but then I see something moving, drawing near.

  It’s crawling out of the gloom, up the side of the wall. Its features come into view as it grows nearer and larger. It has a mouth, two impossibly large mandibles curl down and outwards, almost as long as the two gently pulsating antennae above its matte black teardrop eyes. It’s hard to make out its size, but as it nears us I make out its two wings protruding from its dark abdomen, a single orange fuzzy stripe running around its middle. Now my eyes have adjusted I can make out another three of them clinging to the sides, also crawling quickly upwards towards us. Every few seconds one of them briefly vibrates its wings, that’s the source of the purring sound.

  The wings on the nearest bee begin buzzing more loudly. It casually takes off from the side, rising up slowly and drawing level with us before turning around, causing Morgan to shriek and then say ‘No,’ over and over. It’s almost the same size as her, she begins to wail as it approaches. She can’t use her hands to push it away because she’ll fall. It lunges at her, she tries to move her head out of its way and so instead the creature pulls back, curling its abdomen around so its barbed stinger is facing the president.

  The buzzing gets louder as the bee lunges at her again, sinking its sting into her remaining eye. I can’t see her face because the creature’s in the way, but I hear her muffled scream. I think she’s about to fall, but she steadies herself as her attacker backs off, meandering back down into the pit, the remains of Morgan’s eye dangling from its stinger. It settles back on the side of the wall, dropping the eye into one of the busted hexagonal apertures before starting to eat it. I’m sure I catch it grinning.

  Padlock

  One person arrived in my life as two others left it, all in fairly quick succession. My father went first; although he didn’t die, he simply ceased to exist. His doctor explained it to me gently; it had a name, some syndrome named after the clinician who’d first categorised it. Alcohol-induced dementia was the easiest way of describing it.

  ‘Your father’s liver and other organs are functioning reasonably well,’ said the doctor, looking directly at me as she explained how there’d been an alarming rise in such cases over the years. ‘Quite remarkable, given his drinking history. But I’m afraid the degeneration can’t be stopped now, even if he abstains from drinking. It’s irreversible, unfortunately.’

  ‘What’s the prognosis?’ I was feeling nauseous, but that’s probably because I was nearly four months pregnant with Sadie. Bobby had given me almost no morning sickness and I hadn’t been prepared for it.

  ‘He could live for another twenty years.’ The doctor was gentle, you could tell she’d had many similar conversations. ‘But more often than not there’re complications before that, owing to the lack of mobility.’ She warned me that mania and delusions were likely. ‘You have to prepare for the possibility that your father will become someone you don’t know any more. It’s the hardest part for relatives but it’s best to be forewarned, I think.’

  I told people it was early-onset dementia; much easier to sum up in a sentence, everyone understood and offered their sympathy. We had to move him to a nursing home in Eppingham, where he was the youngest resident by a good ten years. For a while I tried to juggle seeing him with work, the kids, everything else. I was run ragged and began to question the point of seeing Dad at all. He’d spend all day in his room at the nursing home, not speaking to anyone. Even though he was only seventy he quickly became the most demented resident, often when I’d visit him he wouldn’t even acknowledge me. James quickly stopped accompanying me, saying it was pointless.

  ‘She lives here, you know,’ Dad told me once, during a brief moment of clarity. ‘Your mother, she’s just in the next room. She comes to see me every night.’

  He didn’t notice me sobbing; perhaps he thought I was laughing because he looked at me suspiciously. The nurses told me Dad would often mistake one of th
em for Mum, would get angry with them for leaving him at night. ‘He’s just very confused,’ they’d say. Him and me both, I thought.

  He should’ve been frightened at the state he’d managed to get himself into, but instead was just oblivious. It was me who was frightened, and exhausted. How many years would he linger in this mental twilight? How often should I go to see him? It concerned James, too. ‘You’ve got to make sure you visit him at least twice a week,’ he said one Sunday night. ‘I’m worried if we just leave him to rot in there, the nurses’ll tell the papers and it’ll look bad on me.’

  Obviously everyone was delighted when the Tories got back into office, and Rav was widely credited for much of the party’s messaging, even though it didn’t improve his prospects for landing a seat next time. Although James insisted hardly anyone knew about the incident at the gym, Rav had been pigeonholed by the machine and it seemed impossible for him to do change things. The local associations had become suspicious of anyone who’d previously worked at Westminster, suspected them to be a stooge from the leadership. James didn’t bother to intervene; he always wanted Rav to be his special adviser and wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardise that. Certainly James had no interest in helping Rav to overcome his crisis of sexuality, I often wondered whether anyone other than me was really batting for him.

  ‘My parents are thinking of moving back to Pakistan,’ he’d told me. ‘If that happens then things might get easier.’