by Monica Ali
‘You got kids, Harry?’
‘No. No kids.’
‘Just as well,’ she said. ‘You being a writer,’ she added. ‘Need your peace and quiet, I expect.’
‘Actually–’
‘I thought it would be better out here. It has been better,’ she improvised, ‘in some ways. Have you met my husband?’
‘Ah, not yet,’ said Stanton. There was a fly crawling down her neckline and on to the curve of her breast. Four months since he’d had sex. There was nothing you could do with those arms.
‘He don’t . . . he doesn’t go out much. You’ll have to pay a visit. You know where we are.’
He could have walked her to the car then. Instead he fetched another beer and let her talk. It could have been the sweat gathering in the hollow of her neck. But it was not that. He wanted something from her and it was not sex but something baser. One day, he knew, he would write about this place.
She appeared once more at his door and this time it was morning and she was not interesting. ‘I’m interrupting,’ she said, miserable, when he poked his head out. ‘He’s not here,’ he told her. She swayed and rubbed her arms and gave off such a general air of hopelessness that Stanton wanted to kick her. ‘If you see him,’ she said and ran down the stairs to the car. Stanton went to his cell cursing the whole damn family.
In the evenings Vasco produced white paper tablecloths and three dishes of the day, which were always piri-piri chicken, pork with clams and a grilled fish with boiled potatoes. ‘Mister Stanton,’ he said, ‘what do you think of this war in Iraq? Everyone here is against it, apart from the government of course.’ He handed out the menus. ‘Terrible business,’ said Stanton, pretending to study the items. ‘Exactly,’ cried Vasco. The way he squeaked still surprised Stanton, who always expected a baritone from a fat man. ‘Exactly, terrible business but has to be done. Everyone is saying to me, “Oh, they make the Empire, these Americans.” And I tell them, “Shut up, what do you know?” Of course they make the Empire. United States of America will not be threatened. We had a big empire too–’Vasco turned purple and began to wheeze, tears in his eyes. It dawned on Stanton that he was laughing. ‘Five hundred years ago.’
Dieter and his Dutch woman had chicken and Stanton had a fish that kept watching him as he ate it. ‘I heard,’ said Dieter, ‘that Ruby is pregnant.’
The Dutch woman said, ‘Who is the father? She probably doesn’t know.’ She snorted and tapped the table.
An unbidden image entered Stanton’s mind: the Dutch woman astride Dieter, tensing her buttocks, shaking her breasts, snorting. The couple spoke briefly together in German. He touched her knee and she stroked his hair, which Stanton found repulsive.
There was the brothel next to the GNR. Dieter went there sometimes, only for a drink, he said. Portuguese women – Stanton had decided years ago, and confirmed it many times since – were not beautiful. Even the best-looking ones had something wrong, some fatal flaw: bad teeth or eyebrows that met or a figure that would be perfect save for the pigeon toes. It marred their beauty but it did not always make them unattractive. Sometimes it was precisely what made them desirable.
The Dutch woman said, ‘I am sick to death of seeing all the donkeys here.’
‘Oh, absolutely right,’ said Dieter.
‘The way they tie them, back legs like this,’ said the woman. She brought her arms parallel and close together to demonstrate. ‘It’s so cruel.’
‘The dogs too,’ said Dieter. ‘So badly treated. In Germany you would be locked up.’
Vasco came personally to clear the table, an honour he reserved for Stanton. ‘In Provincetown we did four, five hundred covers a night.’ He looked round at the empty tables. ‘Imagine. Four, five hundred.’ He rolled away balancing the plates.
‘I think,’ said Stanton, ‘that Ruby has an addict for a mother.’
‘Chrissie? You mean her arms, ja?’ Dieter unfolded his legs and stretched out. His crotch bulged. Stanton wondered what his story was. To ask would break the agreement. It was comfortable to drink with a man who didn’t bother you that way.
‘Needle marks.’
Dieter shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t think so.’
‘What then?’
‘Fleas.’ He smiled. ‘Go to the house. Then you see what I mean.’
‘But the boy doesn’t have them,’ said Stanton. ‘Or the girl.’
‘I’ll ask you – do you get mosquito bites?’
Stanton said that he didn’t, not very many.
‘Me, they leave alone also. But some people –’ Dieter raised his beer – ‘they fall in love with. What I mean is, some people just have bad luck.’
The Dutch woman pursed her lips. ‘There is a reason for everything,’ she said with false humility. ‘Even if we do not know it. You say bad luck. Better perhaps to say bad karma.’
There were few interruptions to his days. He saw less of Dieter, preferring on many evenings to share his sundowner with the shepherd, with whom conversation was not required nor, indeed, possible. He had reached the part of Blake’s life that he called the country interlude, a three-year stay on the Sussex estate of William Hayley, the poet’s patron. Stanton invented a milky-skinned maid with startled eyes and gave her to Blake as an experiment in passion that exceeded all visions. This morning, though, the work faltered. Breaking his rule, he left his computer and walked out into the garden under the hammering sun. The earth, dry and dead, crumbled beneath his feet. He walked to the far boundary where a wild vine covered the stone wall. The grapes were small but soft. He tasted one and spat it out.
At the north-east corner of the garden was an olive tree. It was a hideous old thing, twisted and scarred and clinging to life. Stanton walked to it. He was twenty-eight when his first novel was published. Paradigms in Eight Tongues. How much easier it was to write then, thinking he knew about life.
If a man is to have success, he thought now, it is better that it comes later, when he can really appreciate it.
A handful of succulents dotted the stony ground, timid little blue flowers among the spiky leaves, but most of the earth here was exhausted. Stanton surveyed his domain, black sunspots dancing in his eyes. He pushed on round to the far side of the house and slid a short way on loose clods, down to where the septic tank was buried and the grass grew long and lush.
The next day was Sunday. He rose early as usual but decided to rest. He lay all morning on the kitchen floor where it was coolest. He read four short stories from a collection of new writing that had been sent by a newspaper shortly before he left London. They would have another reviewer by now of course. What would he have said, in a review? He could barely muster an opinion. It was too hot. He dozed on the floor and dreamed of a dog with orange eyes that stole into bed with him and closed its jaws around the back of his neck.
He woke in the afternoon with pain shooting from his shoulder down his right arm. He was filled with remorse for the wasted day. Rubbing his arm he went to wash and accused his reflection of many things. He brushed his teeth, drank a beer and brushed his teeth again. Then he drove to the village, parked outside Vasco’s place thinking he would come down soon for a drink, and walked up the narrow streets towards the church. Two cars passed, Stanton flattening himself against the walls to let them through. When he got to the marketplace, a patch of rough ground bisected by the steeple’s shadow, people were still setting up. It was billed as a festa, a fête, but in England it would be called a car-boot sale.
Some people had tables; others put their wares on a blanket or directly on the ground. An old man sold wood carvings. Another sold herbs grown in sawn-off plastic bottles. The local crafts cooperative displayed rugs and hand-painted tiles. There were piles of second-hand books and comics. There were glowing jars of honey and glinting bottles of olive oil. A woman with a gold brooch and silver sandals sat behind her scales weighing out bread and cakes. There were families who had cleared out their junk and spilled it in front of their cars. A vase
, a radiator, old shoes, wooden bowls, lidless teapots, broken furniture, mysterious plastic objects of indeterminate use. These same families wandered the market acquiring other, equally useless possessions with which to replace those they hoped to sell.
All the estrangeiros are here, thought Stanton as he watched Ralf pressing orange juice in his bizarre contraption. Several of the German crowd hung next to him, trailing children in combat gear or miniature hippie dresses. Ralf had an old sewing table that he had converted into a juicing machine. With his feet he worked the treadle that spun a rod which pressed a lever that pumped up and down on a little plastic orange squeeze. To fill one cup took an age. Ralf charged one euro per cup.
‘Now why is that so fucking beautiful?’ The voice had that dragging time-lag quality peculiar to the hardened drinker.
Stanton became aware that he had fallen into a kind of trance, watching the treadle move up and down and the rod go round and round. The heat could do that to you.
The man who had spoken sniffed loudly. Out of the corner of his eye Stanton saw that the sniff had come too late. A long string of snot fell from his nose to the ground. The man turned and offered his hand. ‘Michael Potts. Everyone calls me China. Call me whatever you like. Who said that thing about a name being like a torch?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ said Stanton, shaking hands. The man, Potts, wore the filthiest pair of jeans he had ever seen.
‘Might have been me. Got a pitch over there, mate. Come and see us.’
Stanton wanted to get back to Vasco’s, but Jay got to him first. ‘Bought anything?’
Stanton shook his head. ‘Thought I might get some things for the kitchen. Plates, you know, and things.’
‘Got this.’ Jay held up a little glass ball filled with coloured water. ‘You hang it on a string and it keeps the flies away.’
‘Oh,’ said Stanton. ‘How does it work?’
‘Dunno. Probably doesn’t. Look who I found.’
Chrissie sat on the open boot of the Renault 4. On a blanket at her feet she had arranged a few pans with broken handles and some rusting agricultural equipment. Her skirt looked like one of Ruby’s, swirling patterns in purple and pink. She had better legs than Ruby. ‘Don’t be a pest, Jay.’
Stanton picked up a tool, a clipper or shear of some kind with a semi-circular aperture. ‘What’s this for?’
‘Bullock castrator,’ said Chrissie. ‘China wants to ask you something.’
China came up with a bag of cakes. He gave it to Jay. ‘Make yourself sick now, carn’ya?’ He had red eyes and blasted cheeks. There was something about the way he stood that made Stanton think he had once carried muscle, though that time had long since passed. Another burnt-out case. ‘Listen, mate. I need a favour. Need to borrow that lovely truck of yours.’
There was no way he was going to the Potts house. Stanton sat on the terrace nursing a gin and orange and looking at his truck. He didn’t mind doing anyone a favour. But he could not get involved. Once he went over there they would start to assume. A pair of jays danced over the bonnet and went off squabbling into the woods. He had come out here to work. He had come to be alone. They cared nothing for that and he – the heat of indignation rising now – did not care to be involved.
He drove over around five o’clock, a bottle of Macieira on the passenger seat. The house was in a valley at the end of a track that took senseless sharp turns, twisting first one way then the other. There was bamboo down here and a weeping willow and a false pepper tree by the first outbuilding. The light showed gold through the corks on the hillside. This place could be beautiful.
Stanton passed the wrecked truck. The boy had been lucky. There were several other cars down there, carcasses really, brambles growing out of their ribs. He parked a short distance from the house. The smell was terrible. Beyond the house was a series of caravans and some more outbuildings. A calf wandered up from behind the van and poked its head through the window. It made a tragic noise.
China came out from the house. Stanton climbed down and walked through a cowpat. ‘Shit.’
‘Mind yourself.’
China led him through the manure. ‘There she is,’ he said, bending into the trench. ‘Apple of my eye, she was. Cracker.’
The air was thick with the stench. Stanton could hardly breathe. ‘I’ve brought a rope,’ he said and went back to the truck, gagging.
The rest of the family gathered. ‘Want to hold her?’ asked Jay, offering his puppy. ‘Knew you’d like her.’
‘Trust you to get in the way.’ Chrissie had slides in her hair. Lipstick on her mouth – a bad colour, too orange.
Ruby sat on an old crate holding her nose.
‘Jay,’ China bellowed. ‘Get out of the fucking way.’
The cow had fallen into the trench at the back of the house and broken her back. China had dug it, he explained, because the house was getting damp. ‘Drainage, like,’ he said. The plaster had come away from the outside wall exposing the clay bricks beneath. Stanton wondered about the foundations.
‘Fucking council,’ said China. ‘They’re supposed to come and take it away. You can’t leave a fucking dead cow like that. Fucking health hazard.’
‘How long she been there?’ Even supposing the truck would take the weight and pull her out, what then? Was he supposed to take her away with him? Tow her back to his house?
Jay stood at Stanton’s elbow, away from his father. ‘Five days. No, six. Took her a day to die.’
‘Jay,’ said his mother in a warning tone, unable to specify a crime.
‘Right, that should do it,’ said China, patting the rope where he had tied it round the cow’s neck. ‘Better back the truck a bit closer.’
Stanton looked in the rear-view mirror as he started the engine. The Potts family lined up at the edge of the trench, bathed in syrupy light. Sadness, like a rolling fog, closed in on him. I must stay away from them, he thought.
China banged on the side of the truck. ‘Mate,’ he shouted, as if proposing a pub crawl. ‘Let’s go.’ Stanton put the engine into first and let the truck crawl forward until he felt the resistance. ‘Let’s go. Go!’ called China. Stanton moved into second and pressed gently on the accelerator. The truck made a sudden lurch.
‘Good fucking God!’ China yelled. Chrissie covered her face with her hands. The puppy jumped out of Jay’s arms and ran for the house. Ruby moved forward with a curious expression, as if smiling through a great amount of pain.
‘Christ,’ said Stanton when he saw what had happened.
‘Cool,’ said Jay. ‘Look at all them maggots.’
China began to laugh. He bent double and held his knees and laughed until he caught a coughing fit. The cow’s head lay on the ground with the rope round its neck, spilling maggots and a fat black tongue.
‘They went flying,’ said Jay. ‘Maggot bomb. You should’ve seen it.’
Ruby crouched over the head. She seemed to be speaking to it. Little rolls of fat splayed out under her knees. Abruptly she got up and walked away.
Chrissie finished vomiting into the trench. She wiped the sides of her mouth with the back of her hand, tugged her skirt down and smoothed the lap. ‘I don’t know about anyone else,’ she said, patting her hair like a hostess whose guests have arrived a little early, ‘but I could use a drink.’
They sat inside on high-backed leather-padded chairs and drank Stanton’s Macieira. Ruby disappeared and Jay played on the floor with the puppy. China smoked a joint and spread himself across his seat like a man preparing to hold court. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said and tapped ash on the floor. ‘People look at me and they think –’ he made a humming noise – ‘they think what a washout. What a sad fucking sack.’ He held up a hand as if to stay protests. ‘I know that. I ain’t stupid. But I tell you something for free. All the things I wanted to do, I gone and done ’em. I never said to meself – hang on, China, what’s Auntie Maude going to say? Fuck Auntie Maude, if you’ll pardon the expressio
n.’ He lifted the puppy on the end of his foot and tossed her gently back towards his son. ‘All right, some of the things I done are not that clever. Drugs are not clever. But I done ’em because I wanted to, my choice like. Cleaned me act up now, of course.’ He leaned across and poured another drink. Chrissie kicked off her sandal and massaged her foot. Her eyes met Stanton’s for a moment, then they both looked away.
‘What does he want all them goats for? That’s what people say. Forty goats I got. You’ll see ’em later. They know their way home and when it starts to get dark they always find the way. Jay’ll go and get them if they don’t. Won’t you, Jay? I had the money, so I got ’em. People don’t like that. You see –’ He paused to toke hard and keep the smoke held in. Stanton thought, this is his favourite speech and it has to be savoured. ‘If you have a desire, act on it – my personal philosophy of life. How many people do you see what are happy, truly happy?’
Stanton showed his palms.
‘No, mate. You don’t. You don’t see ’em because they’re gravediggers. Burying their desires, the whole fucking lot. So fuck Auntie Maude I say. Fuck the village. Fuck the lot. My personal philosophy. That dog’s just pissed on the floor, Chrissie.’
‘Jay,’ said Chrissie, flexing her ankle.
‘Run and get the goats, Jay,’ said China. ‘I’m going to show our guest around.’
There was a pig in the first caravan. A little sink in there and a folding table. The windows had curtains too, a sophistication which the house lacked. The pig was expecting, China explained. He had to take her away from her mate, give her a little privacy now. The other two caravans were entirely derelict but the way China saw it they’d be restored, get back on the road one day. They picked a path through goat dung, cowpats and chicken shit. Stanton was beginning to itch. He thought of Chrissie’s arms. Three sheep stood uncertainly at the edge of a makeshift wooden pen, as if they had forgotten what they were supposed to be doing. China was going to kill one next week. If you had animals it wasn’t right to let someone else do the killing. First time he’d tried to kill something it was a duck for Christmas – there’s one there now – he’d used an air rifle, thought a single shot would do it but no, he’d filled it full of lead in the end, fucker wouldn’t die, their internal organs are that small, hard to get a direct hit you see, Chrissie wouldn’t cook it, they had hotdogs out of a tin. The swimming pool had become a landfill, the rubbish piled almost to the top. There were another two pigs chained to a pole outside a falling down outbuilding, performing a porcine morris dance. ‘That’s it,’ said China, his eyes even redder from the grass. ‘The chicken house is up the other end, but you don’t need to see that.’