My Life With Eva

by Alex Barr

  “Where’s the rest of your group?” Liz asks.

  The girl suddenly sits up on her stool so her head comes level with Liz’s. She’s wearing army boots, a long wool skirt, and a leather jacket.

  “I’ve lost contact.”

  Liz thinks of bleeps from space dying in a NASA control room.

  “So how will contact resume?”

  She hears a sound behind her, and turns before the girl gathers her thoughts to answer. Another student has appeared, a small-boned boy her own height, with blue-black hair and a round face a delicate shade of caramel.

  “Hello,” she says.

  “Hello, please tell me what we must do today.”

  His chubby features show the strain of trying not to show he’s unhappy. Liz knows the expression, she’s seen it in her mirror.

  “Hasn’t Don told you?”

  The boy looks blank.

  The girl says kindly, “Mr Mockridge.”

  The boy’s face creases with effort, trying to remember all the things Mr Mockridge said.

  “He’s lost touch with his group,” says the girl, in an accent Liz can’t place. Derby? Leicester?

  The boy looks at the two foreigners, then opens his sketchbook while they look on. Inside the cover is the project sheet. He rereads the aims, objectives, and submission dates, then begins to search through the sketchbook, as if his group has got in there like pressed flowers. An oil-pastel sketch makes Liz catch her breath. A study of a boat lily, bold and beautiful, an explosion of reds and greens and purples.

  Hard footsteps come out of nowhere. The boy closes his sketchbook as Don strides in. Liz had almost forgotten what he looks like: pale blue watery eyes, pale red-gold beard, high noble balding brow.

  Now aims and objectives will come to life.

  He frowns. “Les?”

  “Liz.”

  “Liz, of course, Liz.” But he still looks puzzled.

  She laughs. “I have got the right day?”

  “Oh yes. Yes of course. It’s just that they’re all out on site. Damn, damn.”

  Something cold crawls through Liz’s insides. She replays Jack’s breakfast, the smear of egg she wiped off his chin with her finger before rushing him to the day nursery. More sharply than she meant to, she says, “These two have lost their groups.”

  “Yes.”

  She waits for him to say more but he doesn’t. Ah, but of course. Sink or swim. They’re adults now, have to interpret aims and objectives for themselves. After all, education (she remembers reading) is a system for creating failures.

  Don looks preoccupied. He mutters, “Llangollen, damn,” looking like a prophet and checking his watch. Liz winces at his pronunciation.

  “What’s happening in Llangollen?” she asks, correcting him.

  Don flashes a grin and she remembers their first meeting.

  “Been asked to pick up some stuff there.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Left behind last week. First Year residential project.” He chews his lower lip. “You could come.”

  “Wherever I’m useful. As long as I’m back by five.”

  Don looks at the students. “Mel? Ismail? Fancy a trip?”

  It’s exactly right: four of them, four seats. Yellow polypropylene shells bolted to black steel frames, two each side of the table. Liz beside Ismail faces Don. Mel beside Don faces Ismail. No-one can pull up a chair from another table, no-one from another table can borrow one of theirs. An expanse of quarry tiles slides into the distance, under the door with the sign Canolfan Crefft.

  No-one’s talking. Maybe Don has reduced them to silence like a Zen master, like Socrates. Fixed them with his watery blue eyes: ‘But what d’you mean when you say a building doesn’t fit in? Or is well-proportioned? When you parrot the saying “Less is more”?’ Forced them to admit they haven’t digested Architecture. Which is where I come in, thinks Liz. A dose of educational liver salts.

  The figures on the Craft Centre shelves are mostly female—mermaids and warriors in fake bronze with long upper lips, proud nipples, and vermicelli hair. Liz asks Ismail what he thinks of them.

  “I cannot judge such work.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Malaysia.”

  “So do you have different aesthetic criteria?”

  The way he looks at her she might have spoken Welsh. She focuses on Don for help, but of course, he’s done the spadework, it’s for her to rake the tilth and pull weeds. They’re punch-drunk from his challenges. She wonders whether Ismail thinks Canolfan Crefft is just an unfamiliar word in English. Or is he amazed to find, in this Extremadura of Britain, a language with a different flavour?

  She’s about to ask, but he deliberately looks away. She withdraws the tentacles of her attention.

  Mel asks Ismail, “Where’d you buy that pen?”

  “KL.”

  He takes it from his shirt pocket and hands it to her. The tutors smile—ah youth, when drafting pens are a novelty. Mel studies it from between the curtains of her hair. She’s opened her leather jacket, revealing a black cotton T-shirt on which, printed in silver ink, is a crude drawing of a winged potato. Under it, in Lucida Blackletter, the words:

  Seeking love

  Taking flight

  Mel gives back the pen and turns to the figures on the shelves.

  “They’re semi-perfect,” she says defiantly.

  Liz smiles and nods. The students are free to like anything as long as they justify their choice.

  “What exactly d’you mean by semi-perfect, Mel?”

  At last, a discussion on aesthetics. Or the ghost of one, because Mel’s reply stays locked behind her eyes. She blushes, blotchily. Don sighs. Maybe this is not the time.

  “Well this beats Staff House,” Don says.

  “Yes?”

  “A change from weak coffee and weak conversation.”

  Liz wonders about the rest of the staff. This morning she was keen to meet them. Their conversation’s weak? But maybe they have kind eyes.

  “What are we picking up, Don?”

  “Tents. Boxes of magazines.”

  “Magazines?”

  “The publishers send boxes of complimentaries. We hand them out on the week. A lot get left.”

  “Which?”

  “The ones no-one wants.”

  Liz looks at Ismail and Mel. How many magazines did they want? Silence falls, because of course, at twenty past the hour angels pass.

  She asks them, “What did you do on the week?”

  They both look at Don.

  He says, “Environmental interventions.”

  “What, exactly?”

  Mel says, “We hung stuff in trees.”

  “Ah.”

  Liz’s heart warms. She pictures brilliant artefacts high in oak trees, wedged in bright angles of sky defined by dark branches. Crimson masks, long feathered tubes, webs of blue nylon rope hung with sheet metal curlicues and painted peg-dolls. A celebration. She’ll see what they did and it’ll all make sense: the course, the current project, the way groups have formed.

  No use being impatient, trying to plug into the year group instantly. Especially after years out of touch raising Jack. Setting up little pine blocks and arches and round red columns for him to knock down, instead of selecting facing bricks and floor finishes. Reading Johnnie’s Little House instead of The Architectural Review. Turning out letters to practices, ‘Dear Sir/Madam, I am 27, and …’ But now she has this work for one term, one day a week.

  “Let’s go,” she says. “Let’s see these interventions.”

  It seems the residential week was at a farm camp-site. In the barn loft Don, farting gently with effort, bundles up tents and passes them to Ismail, halfway up a ladder. Breasting each tent like a figurehead, Ismail retreats to ground level. He and Mel roll the tents carefully, tucking in guy ropes, and thrust them into the bags Liz holds like giant condoms. Liz carries them to the van. The smell of canvas, the bits of grass and manure, remind her of
old summers, school camps, undercooked potatoes, watery cocoa, whispered secrets:

  ‘Liz? What do you want to be?’

  ‘An architect. And you, Megan?’

  ‘Own a fleet of yellow rowing boats with names like Taliesin and Baldur.’

  She goes back in. The barn is of random rubble, but the doorway is edged with red engineering bricks, beautifully laid. When she turns to look outside the field is a hump of green dissolving in a bright wash of rain.

  They finish the tents. Don and Liz leave Mel and Ismail in the barn and look in a shed for the magazines. The cardboard boxes have sagged with damp, and when they lift them the magazines slide out like flatfish. Endlessly repeated, the cover picture of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, the world’s tallest.

  “Bollocks to this,” says Don.

  He finds some plastic feed sacks and starts to bundle them in. Liz watches, hypnotised. Words and words, pictures and pictures, on glossy paper, sliding into the white, brown-smeared sacks.

  “What do we do with them?” Liz asks.

  “Ditch them.”

  “Recycle them? Shall I get the students to help?”

  Don laughs. “If you call it helping.”

  Liz wants to know about Mel, the texture of her days.

  “Did she print that T-shirt herself?”

  “Complete with smudges.”

  “But she did it. Does Ismail like her?”

  Don laughs again, and fixes her with his blue eyes, slightly bloodshot.

  “He doesn’t mix. They don’t, you know. How can they when they don’t drink?”

  When the sacks are loaded Don goes to tell the farmer they’ve finished. Liz finds the students silent in the barn. She asks Ismail to show her the interventions. She expects to be led outside, but he opens his portfolio, which it seems he carries everywhere, and takes out a photo album. He’s filled it with different shots of the same subject: a ribbon of mown grass curving through a meadow.

  “This is intervention.”

  “Good photographs. Is Ismail your surname or Christian name?”

  Right away she blushes, because of course none of his four names are Christian. There they all are on her copy of the year list. Most of the names are in upper and lower-case, but the Malaysian names are all upper-case. Perhaps because they pay higher fees, thinks Liz. Ismail, it seems, is a middle name. He doesn’t respond.

  They stand in the barn doorway, watching the white sky. Mel removes her jacket and drapes it on one shoulder like a hussar. On her back, under another winged, many-eyed potato, is the rest of the poem:

  You won’t know me

  Till you bite.

  “Did you do this potato poem, Mel?”

  “It’s a currant bun,” she murmurs, fixing her brown eyes on Liz significantly, drawing her into her world. Liz feels a slight panic, as if stuck alone with Mel on a desert island.

  To change the subject she asks them both, “How d’you get on with Don?”

  Now she’ll hear how, in sharp discussions, the word design has been taken apart and put back together like Rubik’s cube.

  Ismail says in his precise, fruity voice, “Very critical.”

  “We get on his wick,” adds Mel.

  “You two?”

  “Everyone. When he gives out a project, he looks as if we’ve all pissed our pants.”

  Liz is about to say, “Surely not, Mel,” but Ismail snorts with laughter. He puts a hand over his mouth, trying to stop himself. He keeps it there, an expensive watch on his wrist, and says as if from a well or cistern, “I overhear what our head of department say to our course leader.”

  He pronounces our with two syllables. Liz is charmed.

  “What did he say?”

  “Only send staff to Llangollen who are not useful.”

  Liz frowns and tilts her head back, as if to say, ‘No more.’ But he made a passable attempt at Llangollen.

  Silence again. They wait. Liz begins to get anxious. Will they set off in time? But Don strides back through the rain.

  “Are we fit?” he asks.

  He farts again, and coughs to disguise it. They hurry to the van and Don gets into the driving-seat. He looks puzzled when Liz stands at his window.

  “What about the environmental interventions?”

  Now she knows he’s eager to get back she’s less anxious about time. He gets out automatically, neither willing nor resentful, and strides up the field towards a gate. The others follow. Their shoes squish in the hollows. The grass by the gate has been churned to mud by cows. They cling to the thick round gateposts to get by.

  In the middle of the next field is a big ash, a tangle of ancient branches. Liz looks up but sees no masks, no feathers, no bright metal. Don looks around his feet, no doubt for the mower track, but it seems to have grown over already.

  “Here,” says Mel.

  She points to the trunk at head height. Liz looks closer. A rusty nail has been driven in, and hung from it by a screw of green wire is a piece of sheep bone. On it someone has written, in black marker pen, ORNAMENT IS CRIME. Ismail unpacks his camera with its bulky telephoto lens and records the vestigial artefact.

  Round the other side of the trunk Liz discovers more. Bits of card, bone, and blue polythene, nailed up and scrawled on in marker pen. One reads LESS IS MORE. Someone has drawn a line through MORE and written A BORE. Someone else has crossed out the whole lot and scribbled LESS IS LESS. Liz remembers these well-worn apothegms from her own student days.

  The rain starts up again, a complex flurry of sound high on the ash leaves. Native leaves and yet alien, trapping tiny wedges of sky. Big drops fall half-heartedly on their heads. Further out the rain dances among the cowpats, and lying open to the sky are some of the magazines no-one wants.

  They retreat against the trunk for shelter, backs to the bark. In a ring. Clockwise: Liz, Ismail, Mel, Don, Liz again. She wants to shout out, as she did as a child when the rain drummed on leaves.

  Curtains

  I remember—I must remember—walking east on Hamilton Terrace that afternoon. The sun threw my shadow slantwise on the pavement. On my right across the waterway a tanker was unloading into huge cylindrical storage tanks. On my left I passed side streets that sloped upwards, as if Milford Haven was San Francisco. A gorgeous mix of clouds—pale grey tufts, white pompoms edged with gold, dove-coloured bands tinged pink—lifted my spirits.

  I walked on and just before the war memorial reached the block with the café. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I was satisfied. Pine chairs, plain green tablecloths, classical music (naturally) at low volume. A Polish girl brought me tea. No sign of the proprietress. Whatever happened, Harvey, I felt safe.

  I sat with a view of the estuary, the stern of the tanker just in view. I thought about my last conversation with you. I was about to leave when a soft voice startled me.

  “Waiting for your boat to come in?”

  A small woman, full-bosomed, with crow’s feet at her eyes and a red mouth pursed with amusement, was standing next to me. Not looking quite like the woman I’d expected, but still …

  I said, “I’d like to see a tall three-master.”

  “A dreamer! Maybe those tanks over there are full of dreams, not oil.”

  She had a faraway look. I thought her remark silly, but liked her plain linen apron, free of slogans. Then she was gone and I paid the Polish girl. A hint of her perfume lingered.

  ‘The sweet smell of the pure life’ you called it. Thin smoke from the incense curled upwards lazily.

  “So you’d like to be an arahat,” you said, grinning, your teeth very white against your beard.

  “A what?”

  “A being who has escaped the endless cycle of suffering. Keen to try? The first step may be the hardest.”

  “Bring it on,” I said. “I see suffering daily in my work. People who lose everything trying to prove their innocence. People who seem to age twenty years waiting for trial. I can’t detach from it all.”

 
You nodded. “You desire equanimity.”

  “Yes!”

  I remember how your stroked your beard and looked at the ceiling. “Desire is a funny thing, David. It’s at the root of suffering—you want what you haven’t got, you want rid of something nasty—so desire must be overcome. But paradoxically, only desire drives you to overcome it.”

  We both laughed. I said, “I have that desire. I will overcome.”

  “Good. We’ll do meditation together, then I’ll chant a blessing.”

  How long ago that seems.

  The energy from that conversation carried over into work.

  “So you’d like to be a partner,” Jane murmured.

  “Should I have waited to be asked?”

  “No, no. It may well be time. You’ve almost proved yourself. However, one last hurdle.”

  “Go on.”

  She pulled out three fat files and dropped them on her desk with a bang. “Three cases, David. Bloody awkward cases with irritating defendants. Wife-beater in Roch. Hit and run in Pembroke Dock. Drug smuggling trawlermen in Milford Haven. Take your pick.”

  I know I have to remember this, Harvey. As if my mind didn’t enter into it, my hand moved towards Milford.

  I’m trying to remember the morning Carys was in the shower singing Calon Lân. After the arahat conversation with you, I think, but before the conversation with Jane. I was listening to a Bach cantata on my new laptop, feeling guilty in case I was too attached to the excellent sound quality.

  Carys in a bathrobe leaned over me, smelling of Moroccan oil. The rich dark smell seemed at odds with her pale skin and fair hair.

  “We sang that cantata,” she said, an edge to her voice. “You should have come.”

  I sighed. “You know I dislike concerts. They usually start late, my back never fits the seat, and I’m stuck trying to be polite to people I hardly know.” I turned off the music. “Forgive me?”

  “I might,” said Carys, and kissed my cheek.

  The letterbox clattered. Carys collected the local paper, beaming.

  “We’re in,” she said. The lead story was ‘Choir’s Festival Success’, witha photograph of three rows of smiling faces, Carys at the front.

  “Well done,” I said, and gave her a squeeze.

  I studied the faces, wondering what drove them. Did they sing to soothe some dissatisfaction, or to add one more charm to a bracelet of delights? I felt irritated with their smug expressions, so unlike their wide eyes and urgent mouths when singing. But I remembered your teaching about loving-kindness, Harvey, and tried to overcome the feeling.