‘You’re not starting to develop a social conscience, are you Nick?’ I ask him, laughing over the brandies between us. This is classic Nick drunken drivel. Nothing is safe from the knife edge of his cynicism and yet there is something clean about it. He says what he thinks. He doesn’t care what other people think, a bit like Jenny, except Jenny was always pushing for reactions. In a way I envy both of them.
‘Take the company I was telling you about,’ he gabbles on, ignoring my comment, ‘the one that wanted advice on their branding strategy. Do you know the difference between organic growth and growth through acquisition?’
‘Fuck off, Nick, I haven’t been away that long.’
‘Just checking. Well, they had acquired about a dozen different organisations. Their branding was all over the place, an alphabet soup of different logos and standards, but basically they had it sussed, because they paid enough lip service to the idea that it was people that mattered. So their employees worked their buns off and looked the other way when those who were surplus to requirements in the newly acquired organisations were made redundant.’
‘What’s your point, Nick?’
‘The point is that they took things at face value, because what was being said was what they wanted to hear.’
I have a momentary flashback, a vision of my mother, quietly wringing her hands and saying, ‘It didn’t happen.’
How on earth did Nick land a job in consultancy? He says it was someone he knew who got him the job, someone who ‘owed him one’, someone who just happened to work in a company that offered ‘branding solutions’. I couldn’t imagine how he had ever got through the first interview, but he had become their best researcher, the one they sent out to get under the skin of how people felt about the company they worked for or did business with, what the company stood for in their eyes. Opening tin cans – yes, it made sense that Nick should find his niche in a line of work that delved into human motivation and then served it up with a new logo.
I look at Nick with blurred vision and notice that he is smirking. His head cocked to one side, his eyes, bloodshot and marble blue, taking me in, and a sudden distance springs up between us. I think of his girlfriend, asleep, alone on the last night of their one-week holiday, and I feel guilty. I didn’t want to take away your last Greek orgasm, I want to say to her, it’s just that we haven’t seen each other since he left Argentina. There is so much to catch up on and only one night to do it before he returns – with you – to England. He is fond of you, you know. He told me so after you left us. Will it last? I don’t know. He is unsure, I think, underneath it all, of who he wants to be, but aren’t we all? Would Ignacio and I have lasted if I hadn’t run away? But the woman Ignacio was drawn to wasn’t really me . . . and my reasoning buries the question.
‘Jenny?’ Nick’s hand has brushed my face to bring me round.
‘Pippa,’ I say.
There is a space, which could turn into laughter, or curiosity, or concern. In the end I get confusion.
‘I don’t think I can call you Pippa, Jenny.’
It’s late. We’ve both had too much to drink. We both miss the humour of his words. It occurs to me suddenly that Jenny, the real Jenny, would have been the perfect woman for him. I feel something flush through me, something between sadness and irritation. Bollocks, I think, looking at Nick with affection. I am overemotional. Nick has dealt well with the drama I have offered up to him tonight. Between the teasing and the revelling he has accepted the story that fell from me finally in simple sentences to shut him up. He has done something for me tonight that no one else could. He has understood.
‘Nick,’ I say, reaching over to ruffle his hair. ’If we’re going to stay in touch, you’re going to have to start calling me Pippa.’
‘What about Pips?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Or old slag?’
I shake my head, laughing.
‘Nutter?’
‘Nope.’
‘Gorgeous?’
‘Go to bed.’
‘Pippa, then – on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You call me Hunk.’
Chapter 60
There is a slackness in me after Nick has gone. It’s as if I’ve been breathing in for weeks, and the act of letting go for just one night has destroyed the muscle tone in my stomach. I feel as if I need to wear a wet suit to hold me in again. I swim further out to sea than I have ever dared.
And I take another emotional risk, more of a ritual perhaps than anything else, like throwing a pebble into the sea: I send a postcard to the last known address I have for my mother. The words find their way, somehow, from the act of finding my father.
Dear Mother,
I don’t know if this will reach you, but I want you to know that I have found our father. I don’t understand, Mother. He seems a good man. What happened? What on earth went wrong? I am sorry, this is not very fair after so long, but there are pieces of my life that I need to recover after what happened . . .
Does she even know about Jenny’s death, I wonder in a moment of ice, or will she think I’m talking about Frank? I let the ambiguity lie.
I hope you are OK.
I am grateful for the boundaries of the postcard. I hesitate, and a lame tide wells up inside me.
If you want to contact me, here is my email address . . .
I get a message from my father saying that he cannot make it on the date we had planned, but suggesting we meet in Athens again, a week later. Light with relief that I will not have to deal in either lies or truth to explain my father’s presence here, I ask Andreas if I can change my day off. His wife nods knowingly at him and he touches my arm gently, as if he were my own father giving his blessing to a first date.
* * *
I wake up one morning light-headed with the remnants of a dream. I have to fight the sense of certainty that I have been talking to Jenny. I was falling through clouds when I saw her. She seemed to be sunbathing on the wing of a plane, suspended in midair, a look of serenity on her face that I had never seen before.
‘Jenny, what are you doing here?’ I ask her, budging her along with my shoulder as I settle beside her, legs dangling over the silver edge to nowhere.
‘This is where I live,’ she laughs. ‘It’s not that bad, really – fantastic view and I bump into all-sorts up here. You’d be surprised.’
‘What do you mean, Jenny?’ She taps me and points at a puffy yellow cloud, a few feet away from us.
‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’
She has her own Greek god living on a cloud next door. I laugh and hug her.
‘It’s good to see you, Jens. I thought you’d deserted me.’
‘Never,’ she says, and I feel whole again.
I realise that there are voices all around us and I begin to see people coupled with all manner of objects, swarming through my vision.
‘Why does everyone seem attached to something?’ I ask, confused.
‘It’s our version of an address: the circumstance of our deaths, the anchor to our previous lives. Mine is the wing of a plane. There are others on staircases, in cars, rivers, mountain crevices. There is one old goat who died from a stroke in the middle of an orgasm with a prostitute. He will spend the rest of his after-life sleeping with her! We’re the lucky ones. The others are in hospital beds surrounded by tubes and machines.’
‘But it sounds horrible, Jenny,’ I say, unable to believe that she can stay so calm.
‘Oh no, it’s not that bad. There’s no pain, you see, and these are only our addresses, the place where we sleep. We can come and go as we please during the day. We can choose the age we want to be for the day, or at least any age we were before we died. There are babies here who will never grow up and old people who choose to play with them one day and mother them the next. You can’t get bored, because there’s so much variation, so much unpredictability. I tell you what,’ she says, leaning towards me, with a look of mischief that is
so familiar I feel like crying. ‘It makes for some very interesting perspectives on sex.’
‘You’re allowed to have sex?’ I say, incredulous.
‘Of course we are. What kind of an afterlife would it be with no sex? You see Tom over there, the one I showed you on the yellow cloud? He died in a parachute jump when he was twenty-seven. Anyway, I’ve had sex with him on the day before he died, when he was excited about the jump he was going to do for charity, and then I changed his nappy the following day!’
‘So you’re OK, then?’ I laugh, not altogether comfortable with the concept she has just offered me, but focusing on what I need to know to take back with me.
‘Yes, I’m fine. I miss you, but I’m not going anywhere, and one day we’ll be together again.’
A bus is drawing towards us across a roll of cloud and I realise with the conviction of dreams that it is my bus. Time to go.
‘Thanks, Jens. See you soon.’
‘OK, Tootlepips. See you Sunday.’
A piece of ice shoots through me. ‘What did you say, Jenny?’
‘See you some day.’
‘Oh yeah, OK, see you some day. I love you.’
I feel cold and warm all day after this dream. I am an atheist. I do not believe in spirits, although I think that perhaps people’s energy stays with us in ways that we do not understand. The dream is so obviously a kind of wish fulfilment, giving me the reassurance I crave that Jenny is fine, that we will see each other again, and yet I find the details disturbing. I am scared by what my mind is capable of inventing – and of how real Jenny seemed. No matter how hard I fight it, I feel as if something has happened, as if some kind of communication has taken place.
I wonder what Ignacio would make of this, and I want to reach out suddenly to Ana, ask her all the questions I shied away from in Buenos Aires. Does your sister visit you in your sleep? How do you live without her? How does someone whose sister has been tortured ever smile again?
Chapter 61
I have started a relationship. I marvel at it. A truly postmodern relationship, carefree yet risk-free, constantly redefining itself, spinning out of control and yet utterly under control, fantastically penetrative without invasion or possession, and it doesn’t matter what I look like when we meet. I could have acne and be dressed in a sack and he would still find me exciting. It’s true love, fuelled by that greatest stimulant of all – the imagination!
We met only a week ago and already he has seen more sides of me than most men would see in a lifetime. He is changeable, unpredictable, challenging, exciting. He has let me into his deepest fantasies and I am happy to be the cliché – his housewife in the kitchen, his whore in the bedroom.
I am happy because he fulfils a need that lies somewhere deep in many women and because there is no threat. I can come in the safety of knowing that, even though we have only known each other for a matter of days, there is absolutely no danger of contracting anything from him. It used to alarm me that Jenny could be so unafraid and unaware of the risks of unprotected sex. She always assured me she used a condom, but I didn’t believe her.
We met in a chat room for the nearly thirties. None of that what shall I wear, do I look OK, what will he think of me crap. It was love at first word! There is something peculiarly powerful about the opportunity a virtual affair can give you. It’s hard to make mistakes, or to judge or be judged. It is a constant process of discovery and invention, a game where the rules can change whenever you want them to.
At least that is how I feel for the first few days. I have opened a door deep inside and I let our fantasies mingle and meet and spark off each other. I give vent to the sexual frustration that doubtless has been building inside me, despite me, in the months that have gone by. Do I wonder who the person is behind the words? No. There is no person behind the words, just concepts. The mystery is a source of excitement in itself, a source of opportunity, just as darkness can sometimes be more of a stimulant than making love with the light on. I feel closer to Jenny, more authentically close than I felt when I tried to live out her lifestyle in Buenos Aires, trying to have sex for the sake of it. It is as if I am learning about sex all over again, as Pippa this time, gaining my own insight into the pleasure that silver-lined so much of Jenny’s darkness.
And then one single thought is enough to bring the whole venture crashing down on me. I wake with a start one night: how do I know that it isn’t Frank, the man who abused us, the man who deceived our mother, the paedophile. Frank’s eyes are there, gloating in the darkness. A can of worms has spilled itself into my brain. It could be anyone. Frank or the Blue Masturbating Machine, a man with a wife and children asleep in the next room or a man too old to get an erection, a man who has raped his sister or a pimply underage adolescent. I feel sick, physically sick with something I will never get rid of. I push it down, this can of worms, down into the deepest part of me, down into a part of me that only Jenny will ever come near.
Chapter 62
My father seemed preoccupied the last time I saw him. I think he shares my preference for the anonymity of a bar or restaurant in Athens to anything more personal.
‘So, tell me about Buenos Aires. What was it like?’ A safe question, and I rose to it.
‘Well, when I first saw it from the sky, I nearly panicked. It just looked like this ghastly flat endless concrete smear on the earth.’
‘Smear?’ He always asks me to explain a word he doesn’t know.
‘Like a stain, when you drop red wine on the carpet.’
‘Ah, I see . . .’ I waited for the signal to go on and it came eventually, but the pause was a long one.
‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘when you are down at street level, the trees make it bearable. I loved the sense of street life they have. When one of the top teams wins an important football match, people of all ages just pour onto the street, beating saucepans and drums. There is always noise. Sometimes it’s suffocating, but there is something vibrant about it.’
‘Vi– vibrant. I think I know that word. Yes . . .’ Again that long pause, when it’s hard to tell if he is thinking of the right words in English or just thinking. ‘Yes, your mother was vibrant and you, you too are vibrant, like your mother.’
I wasn’t used to being called vibrant and I wasn’t used to being compared to my mother. I found it disconcerting and he sensed it, seamlessly changing the subject. ‘But tell me more about Buenos Aires.’
And so goes our tango dance. Measured swerves and arcs, painlessly sidestepping any hint of danger or mediocrity that might threaten the ease between us. I do not know enough about Greek men to know what is typical about him, but I sense a deep-seated lack of convention by any culture’s standards. He combines a childlike curiosity with a sensitivity that leaves the object of his curiosity intact. Whether the object is a book, a person or a political view, his approach is the same. He is like a lion that pads around his prey, observing not to kill, but to learn and to protect. Maybe this is called tolerance. What do you think, Jenny? Is that what he is, what he stands for? Tolerance? So why did he walk out on Mother? Every now and again, as we dance across Athens, the question wakes up and gnaws at my ankles like a homeless rat.
I sense his reluctance to introduce me to his real life and family, and I am sensitive to this. Was this what was on his mind last time? Did he think I would hold it against him? I tried to reassure him by showing that I was happy just to be in his company, without defining what this meant, leaving our tango to run its course.
We stood at the top of the Acropolis, overlooking the dwindling hordes of camera-noosed tourists. The month of September, too, was waning and my father, gently circling, asked me a question.
‘Pippa, your work is going to stop. What will you do?’
I didn’t know. ‘I think I will go back to England. I think I need to find a job to go back to.’ This was a very simple thing to say, and as I said it I believed in it. I had done enough ghost-hunting.
‘Do you want to go ba
ck?’ The lion padded closer, but I felt no fear.
‘I think I do.’ This was what it was like to be defenceless and safe at the same time. I had not felt anything like it since Jenny left me, but then suddenly, perversely, I felt extremely lonely. My father sensed it. He held me in his thin arms and we just stood there, saying nothing. We walked then, father and daughter, side by side. For all Mother’s comments about our olive looks, I could see no physical resemblance between my father and me, or Jenny.
‘Do I look anything like your sons?’ I wondered abruptly.
My father frowned, just as abruptly. Was this too much then, too inquisitive?
‘I didn’t mean . . .’ I faltered, wanting to reach for my glasses. When I’m nervous I still forget I’ve got contact lenses, I still miss the physical sensation of something between me and the rest of the world.
‘No, no,’ he interrupted. ‘You are OK to ask. It is just . . .’ He paused, searching a mental dictionary. Did he need the same dictionary in his own language? I’ve noticed that his English gets worse when he becomes emotional. Don’t worry, I wanted to say. I’m sorry I asked. I don’t need to know.
‘Pippa . . .’ He looked old all of a sudden, and it was my turn to feel protective.
‘It isn’t important, honestly,’ I interjected, to bring us back to the silence that was so easy.
I could have finished that sentence with more words, but they remained unsaid. I do not need any half-brothers to make sense of my life. It is enough to have found a father.
Chapter 63
I can feel my mind taking shape around a sense of purpose. For the first time forward-looking. Forgive me, Jenny. Wait for me on your cloud. I will be there some day, but in the meantime I need to stop drifting. I need to start planning what to do with the rest of my life.
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