by Monica Ali
Sophie closed the book. She was thirsty, really thirsty. Her lips, her mouth, were dry. The old couple in their vegetable patch came into her head and made her want to cry. Oh, God, she thought, it’s coming again. Her mind began to race, it wanted to get away. A hand with fingertips missing, her mother peeling potatoes, Jonnie Singh saying, ‘Miss, please, miss, can I go?’, Huw pushing back his fringe. If she had a glass of water. If there were somewhere to sit down. Something old, something new. Her mother had given her a brooch. She would wear it in her hair. Huw in his suit and tie, coming through the door. An eagle, they’d seen an eagle. If she slept with another man she’d know. Up the aisle and through the door and over the rainbow. Christ, it was and it wasn’t. That’s just how people are.
‘Excuse me,’ someone was saying. ‘Are you OK?’ It was the young woman in the red jacket, her boyfriend standing behind.
‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘Thanks. I was just . . . a little dizzy. Now I’m OK.’
The woman paused then turned away. ‘It’s kind of spooky, yes?’ she said over her shoulder.
‘It’s not,’ said Sophie quickly. It sounded rude and she wanted to say something else, to be nice, but the couple had carried on walking and now she had missed her chance.
She went slowly along the line of the tiles as if treading a tightrope and stood by the Founder’s tomb. There was nothing, nothing wrong. There was a cast of sunlight on the floor, shrugged off by the window. Sophie stared at it and sank.
‘God always welcomes us back,’ Reverend Chambers had said. He never took a biscuit but he touched every one on the plate. ‘I mean, if we’ve been away. He understands.’
Huw said something sarcastic. He barely covered it up.
Please, she thought, and raised one foot to rest against her knee, please, I would like to know. I don’t want everything to be nothing. What’s the point? If I open myself will you let me in? If I open my eyes will you let me see? I am trying. I’m helping myself now but I need . . . I need . . . What I’m asking for, I don’t think it’s too much, I’m asking you to see me.
She stood for a while and was calm. Her lips no longer felt dry. She looked at the walls of yellowing bones and thought, it’s a long time since I prayed.
Huw walked across, scratching his head. ‘It makes you think,’ she said to him.
He took her arm. It was time to leave. ‘Certainly it does,’ he said.
They walked through a tangle of Moorish alleys to the Praça do Giraldo and went into a pastelaria for a late lunch.
‘Do you want to do more churches after?’ said Huw. Sophie shook her head.
‘We’ve done quite a few, I suppose.’ He bit into his toasted sandwich and burned the roof of his mouth.
He took a napkin from the plastic dispenser on the table and wiped away a string of cheese. The napkin was thin and slippery, like cheap toilet paper. The coffee machine clattered and hissed. A man in white overalls delivered boxes of cakes stacked on a fork-lift trolley. A waitress bent over to inspect them and Huw stared at her varicose veins. They should have found somewhere proper to eat.
‘Not the most glamorous, is it?’ he said to Sophie.
She picked out a toothpick and snapped it in two and looked away.
Her sister had got married in a register office. That didn’t kill her parents. Sophie built things up into problems. He would just have to be firm.
‘Do you want coffee?’ he said.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘if you want to.’
‘God,’ he said, ‘don’t let me force you.’
‘I’ll have one, I said.’
He pulled out his wallet. ‘No. Let’s not. I want to go.’
On the way back to pick up the car they looked in some tourist shops. They were all the same: hand-painted earthenware, ceramic cockerel fridge magnets, tiles saying ‘Portugal’, crocheted place mats, leather belts and novelty items made out of cork.
‘Do we need a cork cruet set?’ said Huw. ‘How about a cork hat?’
Sophie picked up a cork wine cooler and put it down. ‘I’m not in the mood for shopping,’ she said.
Back on the street he tripped over a basket of white plaster churches. ‘Why don’t they keep the goods inside the damn shop?’
She strode on ahead. Huw tried to catch up but his foot was hurting and he was forced to stop again and take the weight off it for a while. The street, which had been quiet, suddenly filled with young people carrying books and files. If Sophie looked back now she wouldn’t see him. All these students hogging the road. It was her fault, anyway, for walking off like that. He was going to take his time.
He sat down on the kerb and eased off his shoe.
I’m not going to spend the rest of my life at the bank, he thought. I’m not going to be a lifer.
Some of them – most of them – they can’t see beyond. Not me, he thought, not me.
The students flowed around him. They talked loud and fast, as though they were about to be kidnapped and this was their last chance to speak. A bag knocked into his head. ‘Desculpe,’ said a girl bending down to him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I needed a new one in any case.’ She shrugged and walked quickly away.
Huw rubbed his foot. If it swells up, he thought, how am I going to get it back in my shoe? He shivered and realized it was far too cold to be going about in a shirt. All the students had jumpers or jackets. They hadn’t been fooled by the sun.
It occurred to him that Sophie would have to drive again. He sighed and tested some weight on his foot.
The street had cleared again now and Huw looked up to the far end where it began to rise steeply and then curved away under an arch. Sophie had not waited. He picked up his shoe and began to ease the lacing wide apart.
Huw was dawdling and that was all right with Sophie. He didn’t need to hurry up and she didn’t need to wait. She wasn’t quite sure which turn to take but then she saw the Misericordia and got her bearings again. They had looked round the church in the morning. ‘What do you call this style?’ Huw had asked. ‘Don’t know,’ said Sophie, ‘baroque?’ Huw looked in the booklet they’d got from the tourismo. ‘Mannerist,’ he said, ‘apparently, but it seems more like High Kitsch to me.’
She thought about the way he had said that, with a smile on his face, as if gold leaf and carvings proved everything, as if that settled it all.
At the cathedral she paused and looked up at the odd mix of Gothic arches and Romanesque battlements and watched a middle-aged man come out and cross himself beneath a photograph of the Pope; he lit a cigarette as he stepped out of the porch.
She had decided to wait until they got home before she told Huw. He might think she was breaking off the engagement.
Perhaps she was breaking off the engagement.
She edged along the square, past the side of the monastery-turned-hotel where they had stayed, the pillars of the Roman temple coming into view.
A bellboy ran out to an arriving car, chased by a phalanx of fallen leaves. Sophie stood on the corner outside the hotel, one arm in the shade and the other in the sun.
What she was going to suggest was a postponement. She couldn’t just rush ahead and get married when it would mean something different to each of them. When she didn’t even know what it meant.
It seemed, suddenly, ridiculous that they so lightly, so casually, had agreed to be bound together for life.
They had left the bag in the car when they checked out so they went straight round to the car park. There were citrus trees set in the gravel and Huw picked a couple of oranges.
‘Don’t,’ said Sophie.
‘What?’ said Huw. ‘Don’t be so uptight.’
‘You would be. If someone took something of yours.’
Huw bent and set the oranges beneath a tree. He held up his hands. ‘All right. I’ve put them back. Now let’s be nice.’
‘You started it,’ said Sophie.
Huw took both her hands. ‘Sophie. Have you been spending too long in the playgroun
d?’
She smiled but pulled away. ‘Probably.’ She walked back to the tree and picked up the oranges. ‘May as well have them now. They’ll only rot on the ground.’
‘Whatever.’
‘If my kids say that I tell them off.’
Huw zipped his finger across his mouth.
‘So what happened to your foot?’
‘Tripped,’ said Huw. ‘You’ll have to drive.’
‘I don’t mind.’
He was about to throw the keys over but changed his mind and walked round. He hugged her into his chest and said, ‘Next holiday we’re going to Vegas.’
‘How about Ibiza? Hit the clubs?’
She looked up and it seemed that they might kiss but they did not.
‘Huw,’ she said.
‘Hang on,’ said Huw, ‘I can hear a Pipit.’
‘–’
‘I can’t see one though. No, no, no. It’s . . . what is it . . . can you hear how he keeps changing the call? He’s whistling . . . now he’s buzzing . . . listen to that clear note now, completely different tone.’
‘It’s all different birds,’ said Sophie.
‘It’s not. It’s the same one. It’s a Lark. He’s having fun. Calandra Lark maybe, if I could see him then I’d know.’
‘Shall we get in the car?’ She opened the door and threw the oranges on the back seat. Then she closed the door again. ‘Or do you want to look for him?’
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘we are going to have some fun here, you know. I like our little village, don’t you?’
‘I do, actually. It’s lovely. I might just potter around tomorrow if you drive out to the lagoon.’
He rubbed her shoulders. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK. And we’ll go out for a few drinks in the evening. Observe the locals. That writer guy might be there. Bet he’s got a few stories to tell.’
Sophie wrinkled her nose. ‘Best avoided.’
‘Well, if he’s there, he’s there.’
‘But not with us.’
‘Not with us, no.’
‘I mean,’ said Sophie, ‘that I didn’t like him.’
Huw stopped massaging. He passed a hand over his face. ‘Right. I should have known.’
‘What does that mean?’ cried Sophie. ‘You mean you should have known that I’d be so uptight?’
‘All I said is we might have a drink with someone and you get fucking hysterical. Some people might call that a little uptight.’
Sophie held her throat. ‘Oh, oh, if a woman makes a strong statement she’s hysterical. That’s right! And why would I want to have a drink with that awful, fat-lipped, drunken old cynic? Why would you even suggest that, why?’
Huw stared at her. He backed away slightly and put more weight on his bad foot than he had intended. He winced and drew breath and looked around and kneaded his thigh. He laced his fingers together at the back of his neck and pulled his head forwards. Then he looked up and opened his mouth and closed it again.
Sophie’s lip trembled as she started to speak. ‘You don’t even know . . .’ she said.
Huw thumped the bonnet. ‘What do you know about him?’ he shouted. The sound of his own voice appalled him. He wanted it to stop. But it went on. ‘What’s so special about you?’
‘I’m not going near that man,’ she screamed, though she could barely remember him now. ‘He was horrible. I hate him. And . . . and . . . I don’t want you to talk to him at all.’
Two kitchen boys came out of a service entrance for a cigarette break. Huw looked at them and they studied their toes.
‘You’re crazy.’ He almost whispered it, hobbling round to the passenger seat.
She looked at him over the gleaming red roof of the hire car. Her eyes were full of reflected light. ‘That’s just it,’ she said softly, ‘I am.’
A window on the first floor opened and a maid shook a duster outside. The kitchen boys squatted with their backs to the wall, blowing smoke from the sides of their mouths.
Huw sniffed and cleared his throat. ‘I want to make you happy, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Sophie. She stood on tiptoe and reached her arms across the roof.
Huw stretched out and held her wrists and she grabbed his as though they were drowning there in the car park, clinging on to this bright red raft.
9
THE STATION AT GARVÃO WAS THREE WINDING kilometres from the village, where it could sleep in peace, and it was a hall of dreams: a yellow-stone fantasy of fin-de-siècle Paris, broached through a Manueline porch, heightened with Italianate finials, and crowned with a Moorish cupola. The cupola, though it often leaked, had been greatly admired through the generations by a colony of mouse-eared bats.
At seven fifteen on the twelfth day of October a ferret, looking sensibly left and right, crossed the tracks. A minute later the wind woke a bunch of leaves and dust and chivvied them across the platform and beneath a bench where they settled down again. At seven seventeen a voice clanged down a distant metal nose and through the tannoy to announce that the arrival of the seven twenty-one was delayed by six minutes exactly. The message was delivered in a peremptory manner as though nobody, in any case, would hear.
When the train pulled in two people got off, a man and a woman from separate carriages. The woman wheeled her case straight off the platform, through the hall and into the car park but the man set down his bag.
He looked up at the dreaming edifice, the powdery sheen of the stones, and down at the new-laid double-gauge tracks that the train was leaving behind. For a few moments he held still, as though there was something he was trying to hear or smell or recall.
The man was neither young nor old. His head, which was shaved, was dependable and smooth except for the two creases where it joined the back of his neck. His eyes were dark and wide-set, sloping gently back and up. He wore black jeans, scuffed black shoes, a blue shirt, and a black cape, fastened with a gold chain and clasp.
He hoisted his bag and in long, even strides dispensed with the station, emerging just as the woman drove away. The car disappeared round a bend and the man stared down the empty road.
In a few minutes he would go home for a nap but first, as was his custom at the end of every morning shift, the baker took a bread roll and a bica, and sat out on the pavement in the broken-backed chair.
He sat with his legs splayed, leaning forward, his hands planted high up his thighs, thumbs hooked back and fingers curled so that he looked like a boxer waiting to go back in the ring. Baking, he thought, is tough and nobody knows it. The weight you lift, the heat you take, the hours you work, the time all spent on your feet.
He knocked back his coffee like a shot of medicine.
He was a small man, dark and hard, like a loaf left in too long.
Women, he thought, have never been bakers. Now that – now that – was a fact.
The man walked up the middle of the road, a holdall slung over his shoulder. ‘O senhor,’ he said, ‘I need a taxi.’
The baker nodded. ‘You’ve walked from the station.’
The man said nothing.
‘You’re not from here?’ the baker asked but the man gave no reply.
The baker cracked his knuckles. He changed his mind. He thought he knew this man. ‘You’ve been away?’ he said.
The man looked at him evenly and smiled. ‘I’m looking for a taxi, please.’
The baker brushed flour from his knees. ‘Be lucky, you would. If Silvio’s up before noon I’m a cat’s arse. On the drink last night.’
‘Which house?’ said the man. ‘If you would be so kind as to direct me.’
What the hell, thought the baker. Let him wake the lazy bastard up. Some people were up before dawn. ‘Second turn on the right, third house on the left.’ But he was sure he knew this man.
‘Thank you. You are very kind indeed.’
‘Oi!’ called the baker, as the man walked away. ‘I’ve seen you. On the television. What show? What show are you on?’
The man turn
ed, smiled, shook his head and continued up the street.
The baker tried to crack his knuckles but none of them obliged. Big shot, he thought. Arsehole. Stuck up. If you would be so kind.
Silvio opened the door in a rage and his underpants. ‘Somebody better be dead. Can’t a man sleep? Is somebody dead or have you woken me up to tell me . . . What? What? What is it?’
The stranger with the strong, shaved head looked him straight in the eye.
Silvio’s anger receded and he was filled with a sudden dread. For a moment he was certain that he was about to be called to account. I’ve always done my best, he argued. What else is a man supposed to do?
‘You are Silvio?’ said the man.
Silvio plucked at his underpants. ‘So what if I am?’ He was still half asleep and very hungover. Whose heart wouldn’t race a little when they got pounded awake like that?
‘This is your taxi?’
The man had a way of looking at you. Like he knew everything already and had never been surprised in his life.
‘OK, OK, I’ll take you,’ said Silvio. He tried to sound angry to cover his relief. He dressed quickly, brushed his teeth and spat and though his head was still foggy there was light in his heart, as if he had been given a second chance.
Silvio wore his sunglasses. It was a pre-emptive move. The sun was not yet out.
‘You came in on the early train, huh? From Lisbon. Or it’s the Portimão train gets in first?’ He glanced in the rearview mirror and nodded to the passenger, who was looking back at him. ‘I’m usually there,’ he said. ‘I try to be there, pick up whoever, you know. Nine times out of ten.’
‘Nine out of ten,’ said the man. ‘Top marks, more or less.’ There was something about his voice, something peaceful or soothing, the way it flowed. When you fell asleep by a river it made you feel the same way.
‘Ha!’ said Silvio. ‘Try telling my wife.’ He let the window down. ‘You want a cigarette? No? That’s another thing. The cigarettes. She gets these ideas. Me – I’m a smoker. So what?