by Luke Davies
That night at dinner, at a restaurant in Chinatown, Tom proposes to Tess; so the day, and the beach, are always to have a special significance, and as I grow up I’m told the story many times. A few years later, when Tess is pregnant with me, and so near full-term that her eating habits have become truly bizarre, Tom wakes before dawn one morning and finds her in the kitchen, ravenously polishing office-cream and trying to butter Sao biscuits at the same time.
‘Let’s go to the beach,’ she grins, the vanilla ice-cream dripping from the sides of her mouth. ‘I really feel like a swim!’
They arrive at Balmoral just after 6 a.m. on a deserted weekday morning. Tess’s bulbous, shining stomach fits into no known bathing costume, or at least none she’s willing to buy.
‘I’ll swim in my underpants and bra!’ she exclaims.
Tom, always more circumspect, frowns and says, ‘Are you sure that’ll be all right here?’
Tess laughs and pats her stomach. ‘What are they going to do, arrest a pregnant woman?’ She kisses him on the cheek. ‘Anyway, I’ve got you here to fight them off.’
They walk down to the water across the crisp morning sand. Tom stands admiring the view; the harbour surface is pulled tight like a mirror. He watches Tess disrobing.
‘Aren’t you going to come in?’ she says.
‘No, it’s too cold. You’re the one who’s crazy!’
She stands still for a moment, her underpants almost disappearing beneath the bulge of her belly, her inflated breasts resting expectantly on the beginning of that grand curve.
Tom thinks that small flames might flare out from his fingertips, such a burning love does he feel for Tess and for the baby she carries inside her, and for their future. Our future.
Tess moves into the still water, spreading out the first ripples of the morning, her arms trailing behind her and her fingertips gliding on the surface as she descends gradually to her waist. Tom sits down on the sand and hugs his knees to his chin. ‘I love you so much,’ I’m sure he murmurs into his pullover.
‘Owww, Tom! Ohh, God, it’s so-o-o cold!’ Tess turns and faces him, her face split from ear to ear by the brightest smile he’s ever seen. She jumps up and down on the spot. Tom watches her stomach, in which lies curled their baby, me, as it bobs above the water and submerges, bobs and submerges.
‘I can’t go under,’ she cries, breathless.
‘You can do it,’ he urges. ‘You can do it, Tess.’
She takes a deep breath, holds her nose and drops into the enveloping water. For an instant Tom watches the ripples scramble in a miniature mayhem where she disappears; then, almost immediately, the water bulges upwards and her slicked golden head breaks the surface as she shoots up into the air, squealing, ‘I did it! I did it!’
A month later I am born.
I have tried to explain that my father was not well for many years. He so slowly went away that I could turn my attention to other things. He was going away in prison, he was going away through my years with Matt, he was already a great distance away when Matt died. He was closer than ever to gone as I headed off to Europe. I don’t know that I’ve got the details right. I’ve tried to create the whole thing, but it’s all, as I’ve said, such a fog. All just a guess at what was inside someone else. And it was extraordinary, the relief I felt at boarding that airplane for Paris.
I’ve led a good life I’ve led a good life I’ve led a good life. My father’s head continues to pound, through the Melleril, through his deepest sleep, through his dreams. He dreams repeatedly of Danny Boyle, who died in prison, his head caved in by a frenzied attack with two billiard balls tied inside a woollen sock. Danny Boyle the informer, the dog. Prison treachery, nothing to do with Tom; he didn’t even want to know. Tom had hardly even spoken to Danny—they had nothing to say—but he had been fascinated, from a distance, by the young ratbag’s cocky sarcasm. On the morning shift in the kitchen roster, it was Tom who had found Danny in the pantry, the floor dark red like a skating rink of blood, Danny’s head so flattened and distorted that at first Tom had thought it was a joke, some mannequin, perhaps, placed by the prison officials to test Tom’s reactions.
In the dreams Danny is always alive, swaying in the corridor, his head pulped and his shoulders smeared with flecks of brain, smiling at Tom through the blood. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he’s saying. ‘I’ll be all right. Just give me a minute to catch my breath.’ And when Tom tries to touch him, to reach out his arm and steady him, it is always the same. Danny waves him away with a nonchalant flick of his hand. ‘No, no, I’m fine. A minute is all I need. A minute to catch my breath.’
But the image of Danny Boyle, alive yet dead, is so frightening that often Tom wakes up at this moment. It is the deep heart of night, the hour before dawn. The absence of sound is made the more evident by his panicked breathing and the thud of his heart. The words are always lingering from the dream as he sits upright in the bed and stares into the darkness. A minute to catch my breath.
Zooming
SUMMER SOFTENS INTO EARLY AUTUMN. MY FRENCH continues to improve. I get two shifts a week working at the bar of a tiny smoky nightclub near Pigalle. I want to make my money last. I meet the captain and we get drunk at a brasserie one golden afternoon in which it seems even the swallows are bursting with excess energy. The crowds move along the Boulevard St Germain in a pleasant blur. Our meeting begins with a coincidence and ends in a three-day affair. Affair is a strange word. I like the French equivalent: aventure. Adventure. Sitting at my sidewalk table, I notice the beautiful woman at the table beside me: tall and pale with black hair and black eyes; high cheekbones and a thin face and luscious lips, in her early forties perhaps. The woman looks up. We smile at each other. I am reading Matthiesson’s The Snow Leopard and I look at her book and see that it is Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in English. It’s reason enough to talk.
‘That’s a beautiful book,’ I say. I hold mine up. ‘We’re almost reading the same thing.’
The woman studies my cover. ‘I haven’t read that one,’ she says. ‘Is it good?’
‘It’s great.’
‘So…I suppose you could say what separates us is the snow.’
‘Right, the snow.’
‘Where are you from?’
We move to the same table and don’t stop talking for hours. The woman is Laura Almeida, briefly a Portuguese screen star in her early twenties who was too strong—it’s her own strange description—even for cinema. Preferring a life at sea and a man in every port, she joined the Portuguese merchant navy at twenty-three. Eventually she became a captain in charge of the largest cargo ships, at thirty-five. Now she’s forty-three and lives in Lisbon, and is in Paris—‘We’re nowhere near the ocean,’ she laughs, ‘but it’s a good junket’— for an international conference of ships’ captains. She speaks five languages, including flawless English and French.
And I know immediately that she is anchored in the centre of her heart. As this woman, this force, moves through my life for three days, I feel a rush of vertigo, a luminous pull.
We talk all afternoon, switch from coffee to wine. It seems we’ve been friends for a lifetime, so comfortable do we feel with each other. A little drunk, we go back to Laura’s hotel. That night, for the first time since high school, I kiss a woman. Her conference is over and the weekend stretches ahead. I experience for the first time the full impact of desire for someone of my own sex. Laura Almeida is a sinewy goddess naked on the bed. For three days we make love and when we are not making love we talk and order room service and watch cable TV or walk the streets of Paris. It is a tender time. On the second day I go home to get some rest and a change of clothes. I ring Laura, who answers drowsily in the hotel room.
‘My body feels filled and empty at the same time,’ I say. ‘I was catching the metro home. Even when I cross my legs I’m tingling.’ Later that night I return and fall into her arms once more.
‘We may never see each other again,’ Laura says. ‘I hope we do, but it
happens: you meet people, you never see them again. Come to Lisbon some time, by all means. But I’ll be with my husband and kids.’
‘So here we are then.’ I laugh. ‘Trapped in the middle of the beautiful today.’
We tell each other stories. There is little room for sleep. There are ten million people in Paris yet dawn comes to the city like a cool private whisper of light swishing through the roses in the flowerbox that hangs outside the french windows.
‘There’s usually not much point talking about sex,’ I say, ‘but I have to tell you this. When I came before it was…it was…it’s hard to describe.’
‘But try. I want to know.’
‘Okay. Let me see. You know those kitsch kind of lamp things from the sixties—it’s a globe of glass, and when you touch it, the forks of light scatter out to reach your fingers, kind of like lightning?’
‘I know those things.’
‘Yeah. A little container of lightning. That’s the image I’m thinking of. There’s one of those down there, between my legs. The light was flickering and sparking and beginning to grow more intense. And then all the tiny forks of lightning gathered together and—phoom!—turned into this single ray of light. Maybe it shot off through my head.’ ‘And it’s out there wandering the streets.’
‘Yeah, a UFO. A sexual UFO! Completely crazy, zapping all the tourists on the Boulevard St Michel!’
Later she says, ‘This is more than coincidence. The way it happened—bang. Do you believe in coincidence?’
‘I believe different things on different days,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just that coincidence is such a beautiful thing.’
‘Maybe. Well, whatever. But I feel something good with you. Do you know what synchronicity is? The fortuitous intermeshing of events. An old sailor in New Orleans told me that once. His name was Zuzu. He spoke perfect English. He was always drunk, but that’s exactly what he said. How could I forget words like that? Especially when I had to look them up in my dictionary that night. Synchronicity: the fortuitous intermeshing of events. But how do you think those events come about? There was a scientist once who was talking about the way progress is made. He said, “Yes, but did you ever observe to whom the good accidents happen? Chance favours only the prepared mind.” You have to be open to the arrival of these things. And here we are, arrriving at each other.’
We lie silent for a long time. It must be 6 a.m. The doors to the balcony are wide open and the wind chimes Laura has hung—‘my travelling music’—tinkle gently. The dawn birds of Paris are beginning to pipe and twitter and from somewhere in the distance the cooing of pigeons drifts to us from the lintels of the old university buildings.
We tell each other everything: on and off for three days our lives unravel, backwards, like skeins of coloured threads trailing behind us.
‘I may be thin but I’m very strong when I need to be,’ says Laura. ‘I’m good at physical things—swimming, drawing, steering a boat. When I started in the merchant marine, they had me doing all the shitty jobs that everyone has to do—testing me, because they thought I was so frail, to see if I could do the same jobs as the men. And of course I could. They had me hanging by ropes down a forty-foot hold, scrubbing the walls, suspended there. I loved it. I did it all. I had the brains, I had the guts, I had the willingness, and of course I had the physical strength.’
Watching her talk, I am distracted. I lean over, kiss her softly.
‘Tell me another story,’ I say, a while later.
‘It’s funny you say that,’ says Laura. ‘I’ve already been wondering whether I should do that. I’m going to tell you something I don’t tell often, to anyone. Just because most people would think me crazier than I already am. A little too crazy, this story. But true: you see, that’s the beauty of it. I’ll tell you this story because it’s about strong bonds. It’s about sensing things. It’s about recognising when someone important passes through your life.
‘This has happened with you, you see. My meeting with you. Our coming together like this. And I’m going to tell you about something that happened seventeen years ago, something that happened to me out of the blue— just like that—in New Orleans again. Like in that cafe three days ago.
‘But before you think I’m crazy, let me explain one thing. I’m Portuguese, okay? And we are not like other Europeans. I think what makes Portugal a nation is the sea all around it. Or not exactly all around it. But it’s an island, surrounded by Spain to the north and east and by the Atlantic to the west and south. I think that between the known evil of Spain and the unknown ocean—which could bring hope, you see—the Portuguese people always chose the ocean, regardless of politics or religion or trade.
‘It means that Portugal is a port, and above all a port of departure. There’s the eternal desire to leave, to go some other place, to be somebody else, and not to think of Portugal as a nation in itself. This creates an eternal dissatisfaction. It’s what we’re known for. Portuguese have the sailor’s sense of never being at home. That’s why I’m a sailor. We’ve discovered a new emotion for ourselves and we call it saudade—’
‘Say it again.’
‘Saudade.’
‘Saudade. It’s beautiful. What is it?’
‘It’s a dwelling on our sadness, a longing for another time. A nostalgia, even for things you’ve never experienced. We sing of it in the music we call fado—that means fate. I don’t know if saudade was born with the sea or if the sea was born with saudade. It doesn’t matter. Saudade starts with the sea, and fado too. The simple fact of going to sea, leaving family and lovers behind, meant saudade for everyone. But it’s much better to be a sailor than an actress, you know. An actress just gets surrounded by bad people— everyone wants a piece of you; they don’t have enough of their own. But a sailor learns to become herself.
‘Where was I? Ah—the story! Yes. I have no idea where I was going with that. So. Seventeen years ago. I was—let me see—I was twenty-six years old. I was working on the freighter Peter Pan out of Lisbon. We were in New Orleans. I had a date with a boy I’d met—dinner and a movie. A sweet guy. I had a great time in those years. I was wild. I made love with a lot of people. They couldn’t keep up with me. Then I’d go to sea, and I loved my solitude and the hard work. Anyway, we were in this cafe in New Orleans. When the waiter walked up to us I looked at him and I felt I’d been hit. I was dizzy. I knew this man—you know what I mean? I mean, I knew him. I knew him from somewhere. The closeness I felt to this person was intense.
‘I had to play it down a bit—I mean, I was on a date with this other fellow. Besides, it was pretty obvious that this waiter was gay. That wasn’t the point. I was obsessed with him—couldn’t get him out of my mind. I went back to the cafe the next day and thank God he was there. We talked a little and organised to meet the next Friday for a coffee. I was open with him; what else could I be? I said, “I feel something strong here. That’s why I came back.” He said, “So do I. It’s weird.” It had been obvious that he felt something about me, too. So the Friday. That would be my last full day in New Orleans.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Daniel. His name was Daniel McLaren. So there’s three days before we meet, and I’m so obsessed, he’s in my mind so much, that it’s really getting to me. How do you say it in English? It was bugging me. What’s going on here? I asked myself. I was getting nervous. It almost felt like a supernatural thing. I was a realist back then, you know. If I could touch it, then I believed in it. For one whole day I lie on my bunk in my cabin and try to calm down. Outside the boat, the port is busy—have you ever been to New Orleans?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a great place. Wild, a little kooky. Do you know this word?’
‘Yeah, kooky. Yeah, okay.’
‘So I’m trying to calm down. I’m…meditating. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. I mean, I’ve actually become worried about why I’m so excited about meeting this guy, about what the hell is going on. So I’m saying, “Think, Laura,
think. What is it about him? Do you know him from somewhere?” Or maybe I’m praying—I didn’t believe in God, of course: “God, help me out here. Explain to me what’s going on.”
‘A whole day on my bunk. I remember the reflection of water coming through the porthole in the middle of the day. It was like this liquid pattern shimmering on the ceiling.
‘Now here’s where it gets weird. I’m telling you this, but I don’t tell many people. I’m awake, but I go into some kind of trance—I really do. I’m no longer in the cabin, I’m no longer on the ship. All of a sudden I’m in a cottage. It’s all pretty primitive—a fire, a big pot, a dirt floor. I’m aware of everything, the smells, the texture of my dress. It’s all unfamiliar but it’s totally real. I can see the dirt beneath my fingernails. And I know it’s Ireland. I know it’s a couple of hundred years ago.’
Oh dear, I think. ‘Wow,’ I say. But it’s a lame wow. There had to be a catch, I think. Past lives. I should be going soon.
But Laura continues. ‘It’s not a pleasant place. A man is screaming at a woman. It’s my mother and father. He starts to hit her. Is this Daniel? I say to myself. No, it’s not him. But I seem to have the power to move around in this dream, or whatever it is. So then suddenly I’m a little older. It’s still Ireland, the same area, but a different cottage. And I know what I’ve done. I’ve married someone, to escape that situation, the parents, the madness, the fighting. But I’m terribly unhappy. It’s turned out that my husband is drunk all the time. I’m terrified. He’s walking up the path and I can hear the crunch of his feet on the gravel and he’s about to come in the door and I know at some point soon he will find a reason to hit me, hard. I’m in my cabin on board the Peter Pan in New Orleans but I’m also in this cottage in Ireland and it’s not pleasant but I know I have to solve this mystery. Is this awful man Daniel? I ask myself. And I know the answer: no, this is not him either.