‘Don’t volunteer an opinion, you mean?’
‘Let me do the talking. I don’t want her to take offence.’
‘Well, sorry to be so offensive,’ I retorted crisply. ‘I promise to be sweet and charming.’
Iris tried to muster a smile; it tugged her lips outwards, then collapsed. ‘I’m afraid of that, too.’
I found myself wishing her smile could have held just a little longer. Guilt arched through me, but as usual I felt powerless against it.
*
It strikes me that we do a lot in this life out of fear, and most of those things aren’t pleasant or constructive. It’s a negative energy. It halts us in our tracks. Stops us living the lives we imagine for ourselves. I didn’t realise just how much of a grip fear had on my sister until I found myself high in the mountains which shaped the expanse of Gran Canaria’s inner landscape, clinging to the door handle and pleading with her to slow down with each hairpin bend. But she seemed possessed. More determined than I remembered. As if the relentless heat had frazzled her brain and altered her personality.
She actually wasn’t going that fast. It just turned out I wasn’t good with narrow roads that kinked and twisted around ravines and canyons. A different sort of fear to the one controlling my sister. This was real; not of my own making. I ought to be used to mountains, living on the edge of Snowdonia, but this journey was hair-raising on an altogether different scale.
We had left behind the rippling dunes and oasis-like hotels of Maspalomas and followed a route towards Tejeda that seemed straightforward enough on paper, if only from the view that there weren’t many wrong roads to take. Iris wasn’t a fan of the technological advances of sat navs. Trying to scroll through emails on her phone could fluster her.
As we’d left the coast behind, there had been a sudden bleakness to our parched, scrubby surroundings. Around the hustle and bustle of the crowded resorts I felt as I always had on holiday, safe enough. But we seemed to have strayed into an apocalyptic wasteland; there was nothing predictable about it.
‘You should have stayed behind with the baby,’ said Iris, more than once. ‘I’m not turning round now.’
I wasn’t asking her to. I wondered if it was her own misgivings speaking, or whether she was just annoyed with me.
I’d taken refuge in the back to entertain the baby, who was clearly unhappy. The air-con in the car didn’t seem that effective. The sun seared in and I found myself wishing we’d brought those stick-on mesh shades that Iris had on her car windows back home. The wasteland had given way to more dense green vegetation, but I was queasier by the minute, and couldn’t appreciate anything. The musty stench in the car didn’t help.
It got to a point where I had to beg Iris to stop. We were in a wooded area now, reminding me of the Center Parcs we’d gone to last year for a long weekend. I tumbled out of the car and lurched towards a tree, bringing up what was left of my breakfast. Iris didn’t pass comment on this when I returned to the car a while later. She just handed me a wipe and suggested I sit up front. The baby had finally gone to sleep.
For once, I did as my sister suggested.
*
An eternity later, we arrived at Drew’s aunt’s finca. Although I still felt nauseous, I was instantly drawn by the rough, whitewashed walls, red-tiled terrace, deep pink blooms spilling out of pots and over the boundary wall. This was no brash, modern holiday villa. The place oozed history, even if it looked more plush now than it ever had in its past. According to Iris, Casita Mimosa had probably been a modest, utilitarian house on a plantation. After all, a finca was technically an ‘estate’ in its original sense, she insisted on telling me, as if I wanted to know.
Casita Mimosa was outside the small town of Tejeda, set back from the main road. We’d got lost, and Iris had stopped in a square to ask directions. The ancient, diminutive woman who had helped us, all in black, shrivelled face, had put down her straw basket and flapped her hands manically as she spoke. Iris smiled, nodded and thanked her. From the entire exchange, I only understood ‘Gracias’.
So here we were, at long bloody last. If no one was home, I might possibly throw myself over the nearest cliff; or scream and rant, at the very least. I was in a dark mood. Before we could approach the small house, though, the rustic, studded, wooden door was flung open, and an old man stepped on to the terrace, shielding his eyes from the brightness. Iris clambered out of our demonic rental car and straightened her back as she went forward, hand thrust out, chin up. Behind that confident façade, as if she were walking into a job interview, I could tell she was nervous. She spoke in Spanish again.
The man broke into a slow smile and shouted something over his shoulder. Iris turned to me, where I was lolling like a ragdoll, half out of the car, wondering if I was going to vomit again. On wobbly legs, I heaved myself up and forced my feet, in their worn Birkenstocks, over to the sun-drenched terrace.
‘I am Tito, Esperanza’s husband,’ said the old man, holding my hand firmly as he shook it. He spoke in English to me. ‘Your sister says you don’t know Spanish?’
‘No.’ I smiled wanly, apologetically. ‘Iris is the expert.’
‘I lived in England for many years, when I was younger,’ said Tito. ‘I worked in the diplomatic service. You are lucky. Many people of my generation here speak little English. But my wife, of course, she is fluent in many languages. She has lived all round the world.’ Tito’s eyes crinkled with pride.
I liked him, but I couldn’t pinpoint why; there were probably many reasons. He was weather-beaten and brown, craggy like the mountains around us. Yet his hair was as white as a Welsh frost and matched his crisp shirt, the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows.
At that moment, though, a woman stepped on to the terrace, and I sucked in my breath.
She was a vision. A genuine beauty, in spite of her age.
I know, I know. I have the arrogance of youth on my side. I shouldn’t say ‘in spite of’. Maybe I should be more politically correct, but what would be the point of cozifying this story? To ingratiate myself with you, perhaps? Ah, but then it wouldn’t be the truth, and I promised myself when I sat down to write that I would be nothing if not honest. I’d been deluding myself for too long. Since those fleeting days in the sun, I’ve come too far to commit more lies to paper.
‘This is such a lovely surprise!’ said Esperanza, spreading her arms wide before embracing us, the flapping sleeves of her long, cerise kaftan reminding me of some wild, exotic bird. ‘I’ve wanted to meet you both for so long. I’m sorry I couldn’t be at your wedding, chica.’ She squeezed Iris’s hand. ‘Drew is my favourite nephew. My only nephew, I admit…’ She laughed. ‘Such a good boy, always. But the pictures I have seen of you, they don’t do either of you justice. Such lovely girls, no, Tito?’ She looked to her husband for confirmation.
He smiled as he glanced up from arranging additional chairs around a white, wrought iron table. ‘Si, muy guapas,’ he agreed.
I got Tito’s drift, and felt my cheeks flush. As if I cared what I looked like, really, I reminded myself grimly. Beneath the blush, I was probably an anaemic grey right now. And I suspected there may have been sick in my hair.
‘But what about la niña?’ asked Esperanza. She looked from me to Iris inquiringly. ‘You have brought the baby with you, no? And my Drew, where is he?’
‘Back in the UK, swamped with work,’ said Iris. ‘But he’s out here next week.’
Drew’s aunt – her eyes as dark as her nephew’s, with the same almond slant and dense lashes – clapped her hands together ecstatically. ‘Then you must come again with him! I haven’t seen him in too long. We talk on the phone sometimes, but it’s not the same.’
I’d gone back to the car to unbuckle the baby from her car seat. She felt hot to my touch, her pouting face flushed. I walked back over to Drew’s aunt. ‘This is Asha Mae.’ I was about to offer her to Esperanza to hold, when my sister snatched her from my arms.
‘She doesn’t look
right,’ said Iris. ‘I’d better change her nappy and try to cool her down. Is there anywhere inside I can…?’
‘Si, si, of course.’ Tito nodded.
‘She’s just hot,’ I said. ‘Maybe if we strip her down, give her a drink… She’s alert, not floppy. I don’t think she’s ill.’
I wasn’t sure my sister was even listening to me, though.
Once she’d retrieved the changing bag from the car, Tito led her into the shadowy interior of the small, white house.
I was left with Drew’s aunt, her sculpted eyebrows raised as she stared after Iris; an expression I couldn’t translate. She turned back to me, patting her black hair, meticulously dyed and twisted into a chic bun at the nape of her neck.
‘Please,’ she said, gesturing to a chair set back in a puddle of shade, ‘sit down. I’ll prepare some refreshments in a moment. You look as if you could do with a cool drink.’
‘I think I’m a bit dehydrated. It isn’t a journey I want to repeat, although I know I have to, in reverse. We’re staying in Maspalomas.’
I don’t know why I confided all that as I settled into the chair. I just came out with it, as if I’d been injected with truth serum. Babbling wasn’t my style, normally.
‘If you have a map, Tito will show you the quickest way back to the autopista. Don’t worry, Pandora. I’m sure your journey to the hotel won’t be as bad.’
I twitched slightly at the use of my full name, but she made it sound harmless, without the dreaded connotations attached to it. People had a tendency to joke about designer jewellery, or boxes holding all humanity’s woes. As if I hadn’t heard it all before.
Esperanza settled opposite me with a grace I could never emulate. She had dancer’s limbs. But that had been her job. Travelling the world, pirouetting from one stage to another, one husband to another. Drew had been nothing if not colourful when he’d described her life up to now.
‘I never had children, Pandora,’ she said. ‘Drew was the closest I ever came to a child of my own. I was already at the pinnacle of my career when my sister had her son. I like that word “pinnacle”, don’t you? Better than “height”, I think.’
My gaze fell away from hers, and I studied the intricate scrolls of fretwork on the table instead.
‘You opened the music box – didn’t you?’ said Esperanza, but without the sting of accusation I always got from Iris.
I felt my brow scrunch, my entire body stiffen in the chair. ‘There was nothing in it,’ I said, as if I had to defend myself, when the entire issue was so pathetic and pointless. ‘Plus, it’s broken.’
Esperanza shook her head. An amused smile toyed with her mouth. ‘It’s not broken, it just needs a special key to wind it. Isn’t there a small hole in the back?’
I hesitated. ‘I think there might be. Iris has it in her bag. She brought it with her.’ I paused again. ‘Was the key lost?’
‘No, not at all. I have it. I bought the box from a tiny antique shop in Vienna, where I was reliably informed that it was a magic box, and would bring good fortune to its owners as long as it was never opened.’
My jaw fell.
‘If it was opened, the magic and good luck would drain away,’ Esperanza continued. ‘So, aside from my instructions to keep it closed, I thought if everyone presumed the music box was broken, then no one would be tempted to open it. I kept back the key, so it couldn’t be wound up.’
‘You’re kidding me!’ I didn’t succeed in driving the scepticism out of my voice fast enough.
Esperanza’s smile finally broke, elevating her already high cheekbones. ‘Of course I am! It really is just an old music box.’ She wagged her finger at me. ‘Ah, but you see, for a moment I imbued it with something more, and you very nearly believed it, if only for a millisecond. Everyday objects like that, crafted by ordinary men: well, the only magic they have is the power we ourselves bestow on them. I gave that box “magic” when I told Drew and Iris never to open it. I’m sorry, querida, but I couldn’t resist when I heard your name was Pandora. Would you live up to your mythical namesake, or not? It was just supposed to be a bit of fun.’ She shrugged her thin shoulders.
‘Iris thinks it’s cursed,’ I said, scowling now. ‘She’s blamed me for everything that’s happened since the day I opened it.’
‘Oh! And why did you open it? Were you curious? You didn’t believe it was “cursed”, did you?’
‘No, of course not. But a load of bad stuff’s gone on since then, and Iris thinks I brought it upon us.’
‘And “bad stuff” had never happened to you or Iris before?’ It was Esperanza’s turn to sound sceptical. ‘You must forgive him, he meant well, but Drew did tell me something about you and your sister’s background. Your father left you, to set up home with another woman. Your mother was an academic and cared more for her books than her children… I’m sorry,’ she wavered, ‘I’m being too direct, aren’t I?’
‘No,’ I answered after a pause, realising she wasn’t. It was cathartic to hear it. My sister and I didn’t discuss it much; rarely picked at the bones of how we felt about having parents like ours, who didn’t value us. My childhood – still very recent for me, like a tacky, open wound – hadn’t been impoverished. Colourful Boden clothes and a decent education, if only for appearances’ sake. But the Victorian house we’d lived in had seemed icy cold, even in summer. We were neglected on an emotional level, a different sort of poverty we couldn’t shake off so easily.
‘I’d just started high school when Iris turned eighteen,’ I confided. ‘She’d been like a substitute mother to me for years, though. She could have made more of her education if it hadn’t been for looking after me. I’m the reason she never went to uni.’
‘So,’ Esperanza sighed, ‘all this happened before Iris met Drew, before I gave them the music box. Yet – somehow, suddenly – a lump of carved wood and metal is to blame for everything terrible that happens to her?’
I tried to drag my fringe out of my eyes; it clung tenaciously to the sweat on my forehead. ‘Makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘To no one. Except Iris.’
Esperanza seemed to accept the sarcasm in my words; she’d been sarcastic with her own, after all. Her expression was more serious now, though, even concerned. ‘I’ll have to speak to her.’ She scraped back her chair across the terracotta tiles. ‘Let me get some drinks for us, and something to eat, too, I think. You need your strength. I’ll talk to your sister on my own later. It was never meant to go this far. But remind me, before you leave here today, to give you the key to wind it, Pandora. A music box should play music. From now on, it will. You’ll see to it, won’t you? It was such a pretty tune…’
My shoulders managed a weird shrug. I was uncomfortable making promises like that.
Esperanza hesitantly turned back to me, another smile illuminating her smooth, animated face. ‘On a happier subject – was it intentional to call the baby after me, in a fashion? I couldn’t let you all leave today without asking.’
‘Sorry?’ I didn’t understand. ‘Her name’s Asha… Asha Mae.’
‘Asha means “hope”, like my name.’
‘It means “life”, in Swahili,’ I argued.
‘And “hope” in Sanskrit. Didn’t you realise?’
‘I – No. I didn’t.’
Oh, the irony… I suppose I would have found out, at some point, but somehow it seemed apt that it was here, perched high on a mountainside, having travelled through the clouds to some sort of Oz, a mystical land closer to heaven than the real world.
As Esperanza drifted back inside, draped in her fluttering cerise silk, almost floating, like some Good Witch or vivid angel, I let out a cynical snort. Up to now, Oz had been in a storybook and in movies, and heaven belonged in a church. There had been no room for either in my life.
Maybe that made me cold and hard like my mother, whereas Iris was sensitive and brilliant and lovely. She made a much better parent than I ever could. Asha was lucky to have her.
But t
he last words Esperanza said to me, as we were leaving that day, were murmured during our parting embrace. She smelled of roses and furniture polish. ‘Asha Mae is beautiful, Pandora. A gift for both you and your sister. Aunts are important, too. You must never let Iris forget that.’
Like a lot of things, I didn’t understand the significance of her words until much later. I wish I could have told her how much I came to appreciate them.
*
That was the first and last time I met Drew’s free-spirited, eccentric relative. Iris and Drew went back the following week, but I stayed in Maspalomas with the baby, unable to stomach the journey, and because I had other distractions by then.
Three months after we met, Esperanza passed away from heart failure, her devoted Tito at her side. She hadn’t even told Drew she was ill.
Despite my reluctance to make a promise, in the months since her death I’ve often wound up the music box and let it play its soothing, tinkling lullaby. Mostly I do this when I’m scrolling through photos on my laptop. They arrive attached to long emails. Evocative landscapes, misty sunrises, cobwebs covered with dew, sometimes the odd woolly sheep. But always, they seem to capture something beyond the physical. Amazing pictures, from a stunning raw talent. I burst with pride when I look at them. They inspire me. Urge me to push on through my own daily grind.
I’ve skipped too far ahead with the story, though. My time on that island on the edge of the Atlantic wasn’t over, the day we travelled to the centre and back not quite done. Iris had yet to return us to our resort in the south, where the weather was normally more suited to holidaymaking than the north. She had yet to take it upon herself to make a diversion on the way back, because ‘it might be the only chance we ever get’, driving upwards in an almost perfect spiral to a dedicated viewing point.
Once parked, she dragged me out of the car to stare down into the immense crater of an old volcano, a caldera, as the wind whipped our hair and made us small and powerless. I even felt less car-sick – a brief respite only. Life just seemed in perspective somehow, as if we had been blowing up all the bad and shrinking the good for too long.
SUNLOUNGER 2: Beach Read Bliss (Sunlounger Stories) Page 6