by Zoë Folbigg
Hector puts his lips to the camera. His voice lowers to a whisper and he mumbles something about soya.
He got me soya?!
Cecilie can’t seem to hear what he’s saying without seeing him say it, so she fills the rectangle with her face again.
‘What is it?’ she repeats, searching Hector’s beauty for reassurance.
He says it again. ‘It’s me. Soy yo.’
A whisper travels across a gulf, an ocean, a sea and a fjord, and arrives in Cecilie’s living room, filling her eyes with meltwater.
I must have misheard.
She takes a deep breath and puts her hand to her lips.
‘You? You’re my present?’
‘Sí.’
Condemnation turns to elation.
I can’t believe it.
‘How?’
‘I’ve saved money. Everything I earned at the newspaper just about covered living, I managed to save enough from the department store for a flight. Abuelo said he’d give me a little to help with hotels. I’m coming to Europe.’
‘Oh my god! Where?’
‘London? Paris? Oslo? Wherever is easiest. I could fly direct to London, Amsterdam or Paris. Madrid is probably too far for you. But I can connect to Oslo.’
‘I could meet you wherever, and bring you here.’
Could. Cecilie doesn’t believe this can be real, but wants to.
‘I will meet you wherever, and bring you here.’
Hector smiles.
‘What about… What about… Pilar?’ There, she said it.
‘It’s over. We’re done.’
Hector ponders just how far up Pilar’s leg Benny’s hand has reached by now; if they’re still in the bar that is.
Cecilie doesn’t want to ask how, not now anyway.
‘When?’
‘How’s Christmas?’
Green lids flutter frantically.
‘I want to see you tomorrow.’
Hector laughs. ‘Christmas is my best chance of getting time off. The paper shuts down for one week, I’m sure they’ll give me another off. The women in Lazaro’s will cover me, I know it.’
They never liked Pilar anyway.
Cecilie sinks back into the low grey sofa as warm bubbles fizz around her feet and her stomach.
‘I can wait,’ she says, with certainty.
Minutes ago, Cecilie thought she’d never meet Hector Herrera, but at thirty years and seven hours old, she’s just received the best birthday present of her life.
Thirty-Five
Hector closes the cracked lid on his laptop, leans back in his chair with fingers interlocked behind his head, and exhales at the ceiling.
Relief.
Europe isn’t cheap, but that’s six weeks to save everything he can. It’d be worth it for just one day with Cecilie Wiig. Paris sounds good. Meeting under the Eiffel Tower. He’s sure he can fly to Paris from Mexico City.
Hector’s phone rings, interrupting his racing brain. Unknown number. He assumes it’s Cecilie calling him with a flirty postscript.
‘Paris, mi amor,’ Hector says as he answers. ‘I’ll find out about flights from DF to Paris.’
‘Hector?’
It’s not Cecilie’s voice at the other end.
His heart sinks.
‘What do you want? I said I’m done.’
‘Come get your whore wife.’
‘What?’
‘She shat in my bed when I was fucking her and now she’s not breathing.’
‘WHAT?’ Hector rises, kicking back the old wooden church chair, and stands alert.
‘She’s not breathing. She shat and she puked and now she’s lying here like the dirty whore she is.’
‘Do something, Benny. Get her to the hospital, I’ll go straight to Urgencias, I’ll meet you there.’
Benny is silent at the other end of the phone. Weighing up his options.
‘DO IT!’
‘No, man, come and get her, clear up her shit. I’m going out.’
Hector races down five flights of stairs from his apartment, through the arcade and out onto the street. Taxis, drinkers, revellers are crossing the town with plans and purpose, going from bar to bar on this busy Saturday night, and the traffic is thick. Hector has no idea which way to turn and looks up and down the street at the cars and mopeds beeping at him.
La Villa.
He starts running – it’ll be quicker on foot, even mopeds are getting stuck in the melee – to the Villa Infantil three streets away at the quieter end of town. Past cars snaking nose to tail. Away from the main roads onto pretty cobbled streets. Running, running, racing to get to Pilar before she stops breathing forever, although he doesn’t even know where she is or how the hell he can find her before it’s too late.
Shit.
Bang bang bang. Hector’s fist rattles on the door of the orphanage, knowing that Sister Miriam, Sister Juana and Sister Virginia will all be asleep at this time on a Saturday night.
No answer.
Bang bang bang.
‘Come ON!’
Hector’s fist is clammy and cold.
‘It’s me! Hector!’ he rattles on the thick wooden front door, flailing like a child treading water, trying not to drown.
A startled Sister Miriam opens the door. Her exposed hair is as grey as the habit it’s usually hidden under. Her mole-like eyes widen with worry.
‘Where does Benny live? I have to get to Benny’s hacienda. NOW!’
‘Hector, cálmate cariño. Whatever is the matter?’
‘It’s a matter of life and death, I never asked and you never told me, but please tell me you know where Benny’s hacienda is, I have to get there…’
Sister Miriam puts her small wire glasses on tiny confused eyes, magnifying them and waking them up.
‘Hacienda? Benny doesn’t live in a hacienda. Benny lives at the back here, cariño. In the former Patrón’s quarters.’
Hector is gobsmacked – but relieved.
She’s here.
‘Here?! Benny’s lived here all along?’
‘He lives here now yes, but there’s no access this way. And the children are all sleeping. You’ll have to go round to Hidalgo and knock there. But what’s the urgency…?’
Before Sister Miriam finishes speaking, Hector is already running to the end of the block. He turns left out of sight and Miriam closes the front door. Confused and concerned. She knows all of Hector’s faces, but she’s never seen him in such distress.
Please don’t stop breathing please don’t stop breathing.
Left again, onto the cobbles of Calle Hidalgo, past colourful houses of bright green, yellow and blue and a thud thud thud on the door of the former Patrón’s house.
No answer, but the door is unlocked, so Hector charges through. The Patrón, Eduardo Sánchez, gave most of his land to the church so they could open an orphanage, and he lived a humble life in the small home that backed onto it. But he had long since died, and Hector assumed the house had been bought by a private landlord. He had no idea the church owned it all, and Benny’s squalid and murky existence was going on right under the nose of the women who brought him up.
Hector scans the dark room. Cockroaches whizz out from underneath pizza boxes. Empty bottles and dirty needles litter the floor. Ashtrays teem over. This isn’t the grand and gaudy ranch Hector pictured Benny conducting his dealings from. It looks like a low-grade narco has been squatting there between deliveries. Hector bursts into the bedroom and cries out when he sees Pilar’s naked soiled body on the bed.
‘Nooooo!’
Through thin skin and bone, he can see that Pilar’s chest is just about rising and falling, but she’s struggling through vomit stuck in her windpipe.
‘PILAR!’ Hector shouts, climbing onto the bed. He straddles her and coughs as he inhales the acrid mess around her. Hector lifts Pilar’s grey chin to tip her head back and help clear her airwaves. She splutters vomit in his face and her hollow chest convulses; the blue heart ta
ttoo pulsates ever so slightly. Hector slaps Pilar’s cheek, at first gently, repeatedly, growing stronger until she attempts to open her eyelids. ‘That’s it, deep breaths…’
Hector hears the familiar huskiness of Pilar’s voice, rattling in the depths of her cough.
She’s alive.
He finds the corner of a less sullied sheet on the floor and flicks it for cockroaches, then pulls the shit and vomit-smeared mess out from underneath Pilar, trying to wipe any off her as he does, and wraps her up like a parcel in the sheet from the floor. Hector lifts his corpse bride with ease onto his shoulders and stands.
‘Come on,’ he says to no one. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Thirty-Six
November 2018, Suffolk, England
‘Oooooh!’ says the crowd as a peony shell of purple sparks rains down over the school field.
‘Ahhhhh!’ says Kate into Jack’s ear as she pulls him tight into her faux-fur trimmed parka. Chloe was too cool to come to the annual fireworks party at her old school, but Izzy is sipping a mug of tomato soup as she curls into her dad’s fleece, and Jack seeks solace from the noise he’s pretending he’s not scared of in the comforting folds of his mother’s waist.
Kate turns to George to savour the moment. Bright lights in the night sky illuminate his eyes and she feels connected. This is the first time in months Kate has felt any real unity with George, total harmony in their family. He keeps looking up, fixated on the fireworks, and doesn’t notice Kate’s contented glance.
It’s the annual Claresham Church of England Primary School family firework night, the first Kate has organised since she became chair of the PTA. Three months of blood, sweat and tears and her gunpowder plot has paid off. Practically the entire village has turned out for a brilliant event, and Kate feels as triumphant as the supernova rocket they’re watching head into orbit.
‘Mum, your phone…’ Jack’s freckled face looks up towards his mother.
‘What was that, poppet?’
Kate can’t hear it under the whizz bang boom, but Jack feels a vibrating hum against his ribs as he hugs his mum’s dimpled thigh.
‘Your phone’s ringing.’
Kate decides to ignore it. It’s probably the same withheld number that has called six times this week, and the person at the other end hung up every time. On the other hand, it could be one of the suppliers at the school tonight, needing to reach Kate because the kitchen has run out of frankfurters or the DJ has locked his Minion costume in the van with his keys.
Please no, it’s all going so smoothly.
‘Give Daddy and Iz a cuddle, they’ll keep you warm, I need to see who this is…’
Kate walks inside the school building and pulls the bobble hat off her head. She takes her phone out of her jeans pocket as it stops ringing.
Withheld number.
She feels a mixture of annoyance and relief.
Blasted PPI, I bet. Although they never hang up…
Kate wants to get back out for the grand firework finale, the crescendo to a backdrop of ‘Carmina Burana’, but ‘Withheld number’ flashes up again and the phone starts to ring. She stops in her tracks.
One last chance.
‘Hello?’ Kate says into the mouthpiece as she walks into a quiet classroom, so she can hear the caller. Or not hear the caller, if it’s another crank call.
‘Hello?’
Her mouth sits at an agitated angle.
This is ridiculous.
Suddenly a mousy voice speaks, just about audible against the sound of ‘I Like to Move It’ coming from the school hall down the corridor. The DJ has put his Minion costume on and is warming up.
‘Hi. Is that Kate Wheeler?’
‘Speaking.’ Kate’s mildly annoyed voice wobbles as she strains to hear the meek voice at the other end of the line.
I’m going to miss the finale. The disco is about to start.
Silence again.
‘Look, who is this? Why do you keep calling?’
‘My name is Bethany. Bethany Henderson. I was your husband’s PA.’
Suddenly the caller has Kate’s full attention.
‘Oh. Right. Yes, Bethany, I remember you. How are you?’ Even in the strangest of circumstances Kate’s default setting switches to polite. A pause punctuates the classroom with a thousand possibilities. Kate looks up at the handwriting display on the wall in front of her. Iterations of Goldilocks retold by Year 1 children. Her eyes land on a cartoon of a vacuous blonde. ‘Why are you calling?’
‘It’s your husband. He’s been cheating on you.’
Thirty-Seven
November 2018, Tromsø, Norway
Karin Wiig sits on her low grey sofa drinking a large glass of red.
‘Ah, it is so good to be home, darling, if I never see that odious Finn again I will be happy. Shame he’s not up for re-election for another three years…’
Cecilie curls into a ball on the sofa next to, but not touching, her mother. Close but distant. Cecilie is dreamy and not that interested in European politics. Her mother can’t be doing with the mundane mechanics of the small-town outpost her daughter is anchored to. Tonight is a rare moment of closeness, as the two of them sit on the sofa watching Dirty Dancing.
‘I need to go to Brussels the week before Christmas, I was thinking you might like to come with me, so we can pop to Bruges for some market shopping – how does that sound, darling?’
‘Thanks, Mamma, I’m not sure.’
Cecilie doesn’t want to go anywhere. It is two weeks since Hector Herrera said he was leaving his wife and coming to Europe and she hasn’t heard from him since. That hollow gift. The grand gesture. Nothing. Cecilie knows Hector had read her texts. She knows he ignored her calls. But she can’t work out why he suddenly shut her out, why he ghosted her, just at the point she was planning a trip; to finally leave the Arctic Circle, for the first time in years, for a romantic rendezvous behind Big Ben or under the Eiffel Tower – and her confusion and dejection is making her not want to go anywhere.
‘Why so listless, Cecilie? I’m sure Espen will give you time off work for a trip with me.’
‘Yeah, but there’s the library and the cafe… I can’t just drop everything and go.’
I said I’d drop everything for him.
‘Darling, babies will keep gurgling, coffees will still be drunk, and the world won’t stop turning just because you’re taking a long weekend away. Come on, get out of here for a few days. Andreas was telling me how keen he is to get you to Copenhagen – and it’s such a wonderful city. Where’s your adventurous spirit, Cecilie?’
Cecilie looks at the fire roaring in the hearth and her eyes lose focus.
‘Which reminds me. Christmas. We need a plan.’
‘What do you mean a “plan”, Mamma? It’ll be the same as ever. Espen and Morten won’t want to host in their flat – so we’ll do it here, I can cook it again.’ Cecilie feels despondent. She had imagined this Christmas being different, but it’s going to be the same as all the others.
‘You did do a delicious dinner last year. But your uncle and aunt want to join us; they’re not going to the US this Christmas, and I’ll send for Mormor and Morfar again. Their carer might want to stay, but let’s hope not.’
‘That’s fine, Mamma, I can cook for… nine. Morten is a great sous-chef.’
‘What about Andreas? There’s room for him at that table.’ Karin gestures her wine glass towards the window.
‘He’ll be with his kids.’
‘Invite them!’
Cecilie looks at the crackle of a kamikaze flame, darting out of the fireplace. ‘Mamma, we broke up.’
Karin puts her glass down on the oak coffee table and repositions herself.
‘Why?’ she asks, running her fingers through her sleek silver bob. ‘I mean, I know he was married, but he was such a good sort.’
‘He was divorced, Mamma, they had divorced. But it wasn’t that. He just wasn’t the sort for me.’
He’s
not Hector.
Karin looks at her daughter in bewilderment. ‘But he was so… genial. So affable. He had such good potential.’
Cecilie follows the flames in the fire and decides not to respond. She feels too broken to put up a fight.
Karin perches on the edge of the sofa now. Her body upright and tense.
‘Did you do this because of The Mexican?’
Cecilie doesn’t answer and Karin puts a hand to her brow.
‘Darling, you’re living in a dreamworld. Your brother said The Mexican got married.’
Cecilie thinks of Pilar, her tight dresses and full hair, and feels wretched.
‘Me ending things with Andreas has nothing to do with The Mexican… with… with… Hector.’ Cecilie struggles to say his name out loud, she’s so unaccustomed to it. ‘Just because Andreas likes me, and I’m thirty, doesn’t mean I’m going to settle down with him, convenient as it might be for you.’
‘It’s not convenient for me at all!’ Karin says, taken aback. ‘I just want you to be happy, Cecilie. You’re so alone.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be happy with Andreas. I don’t love Andreas.’
‘And you love someone you’ve never met? Darling, do you know how crazy that sounds? And clearly you’re not happy obsessing over a man you’ve never even met, I’ve never seen you so miserable. At least Andreas put that beautiful smile back on your face.’
‘Don’t, Mamma, I can’t go through this right now…’
Cecilie uncurls from her foetal ball on the sofa and stands. Her heart going up in flames like the logs on the fire.
‘Where are you going?’
‘For a walk.’
‘It’s snowing. It’s dark!’
‘I don’t care. I just need some space before I say something I’ll regret…’
Cecilie grabs her snow boots from the shoe caddy by the large front door.
‘Something you’ll regret? Don’t turn on me, young lady,’ Karin snaps sternly.
‘Young lady? I’m thirty!’
‘Then act like it. When I was thirty I was dealing with the shitstorm your father left us in and breaking my back to make a living, to build this. So get real, Cecilie.’