by Doreen Finn
I’d got as far as fifty-four when she squealed, ‘Stop!’
I ran towards my friend. The boys had pushed Beth up against the tree. Red Shirt had his hands on her stomach, her T-shirt ruched by his searching fingers. The other was trying to kiss her, his lips fat and rubbery. Beth twisted her face this way and that to get away from his seeking lips. Her hands pushed at his shoulders. ‘I said stop!’ The boys laughed, but they didn’t stop.
Red Shirt pulled at Beth’s top. ‘An American, eh? Come on, baby, you know you want it. Aren’t all Yankee girls gagging for it?’
‘Leave me alone!’
Dropping the racquet, I shoved Shaved Head. I surprised myself with my vehemence, the fury that surged. ‘Let her go!’
‘Fuck off, you.’ He elbowed me, his bone making contact with my ribs. I pushed him again, my hands flat against his back, and again he elbowed me. Stumbling, I lost my balance and fell.
Brandishing Beth’s tennis racquet, I stood back up, stepped forward and swung wildly, with far more strength and confidence than I had felt all afternoon on the court. Metal hit bone and the boy fell back. His hands shot to his face, to his ear. His face was a still life of shock. Blood spurted from a gash I’d opened up under his cheekbone.
‘You stupid fucking bitch!’ he screamed. ‘Look what you’ve done.’
Red shirt laughed. The injured boy turned on him, his hand holding his face. Menacingly, he stepped towards him. ‘What the fuck is funny? What are you laughing at?’ Blood seeped through his fingers and dripped onto his white T-shirt.
I dropped Beth’s racquet, grabbed her arm, and we ran while the boys were distracted. Too soon, they ran after us, their footsteps gathering speed. We didn’t stop. We couldn’t. To stop would be the worst thing we could do. My breath burned in my lungs, blood pounded in my ears. My feet hurt from running, but we didn’t slow down. When we got to the traffic lights at the big intersection, I ran straight out into the traffic. Beth screamed my name, but I didn’t care, didn’t stop. I couldn’t. If I stopped running, I was dead. I knew that Beth had followed from the screech of brakes behind me. The blare of a horn. A man’s voice, swearing at us out the car window. Stupid bitches. You deserve to be run over.
At the far side of the intersection, we stopped. Hands on knees, breathing over and over. We looked back; the boys were standing at the traffic lights. More cars were passing now than when I’d run out and they couldn’t follow us. It didn’t stop them shouting threats, though, and making obscene gestures at us.
‘Beth, come on, let’s go. We have to get home.’
Off we ran again. Houses, gardens, trees, all blurred past. We didn’t stop till we were close to home and were certain that the boys were no longer following us.
‘Not a word about this,’ Beth said, when we finally ducked into the lane. We leaned against the wall, panting. ‘Not a word, do you hear me?’
‘Why?’ I couldn’t believe she didn’t want to tell anyone. ‘But they could have really hurt you. We should tell your parents.’
‘And what, have them ground me for the rest of the summer? No way, Megan, and don’t you dare think you’re going to breathe a word to them. Got it?’
I wasn’t a tattletale. In school, I never told the teacher about someone else’s misbehaviour. But this, this was different. We could have been hurt. Killed, even. ‘We have to. What if we see them again? Or if they find us?’ Cautiously peering around the corner, I saw no one other than a family of three, an old lady with a shopping bag on wheels and a couple with their arms around each other.
The old Beth was reasserting herself again: the queen bee, first in the pecking order. Leaning into me, she squeezed my arm. ‘I will never speak to you again if you say anything. Anything at all.’
My arm hurt under her fingers. ‘But our racquets are still down at the park.’
‘So? I’ll send my dad down to get them when he comes home.’ Beth released me, once again dismissive. ‘We’ll say we forgot them.’
‘But what about the boys? What if they’re still looking for us?’
Beth shook her head, her hair swinging. ‘They’re not.’
‘But what if they find out where we live?’
My imagination was running riot now, seeing the boys breaking down the green garden door and finding us, smashing the locks on the house and forcing us out of our beds. I could still hear the crack of the racquet on bone, the slow-motion opening of skin and the gush of blood.
I turned away from Beth and threw up over a patch of weeds that had died in a corner of the lane. My hands on my knees kept me from falling over. Beth clicked her tongue and stalked off, leaving me there in the dusty heat, the afternoon light turning orange, the taste of vomit in my mouth making me sick again.
15
Dusk was slipping over the garden, a gradual purpling of the sky as the sun began to sink. The scent of phlox and evening primrose was heavy on the warm air. My eyes tingled with the stirrings of tiredness. Beth was teaching me how to play Scrabble. We were outside, on a blanket. The record player had been dragged out earlier by Beth, and now a Pink Floyd album circled in the fading light. Pink Floyd were new to me, their dreamy guitars swirling in the hush of the garden . My crayon rendering of the album cover had been discarded when we started playing Scrabble. It had been difficult to fill in the details with my stubby crayons, and the man with his suit on fire looked as if he was wearing an orange suit and hat. I needed better art supplies for detailed drawing. Some fine pens, something like that. Maybe I could borrow some of Gemma’s when she wasn’t using them. My art would never improve if I didn’t have the right materials. My mother would disagree, of course, would remind me that talent isn’t based on what you have in your hand, but what you have inside you. She said the same thing when I’d asked if I could get a new tennis racquet and not have to use her shameful relic that was almost too heavy to lift. Talent lies within.
I didn’t agree fully with her.
Beth placed seven tiles on the board, lining them up with a z I had put in my star word, jazz. Pride had almost rendered me speechless as I’d laid my squares out. Pride, and a good amount of one-upmanship over Beth, who was far better than me at everything, it seemed.
Beth and I hadn’t spoken a word about what happened with the boys in the park two days before. What frightened me was the possibility of what could have happened. Being pushed up against a tree and having a boy’s unwanted lips on your skin, well, that was something that could be dealt with, walked away from. But it was what could have happened that scared me, the dark shadowed possibilities that looped themselves around in my head and didn’t let go.
Beth’s word didn’t look like any word I had ever seen before. Quetzal. I tried to pronounce it. Beth shook her head. ‘No, no, the sound is a hard c, as in cat. Quetzal.’
Her tennis serve may have been too good for me to return, and the amount of clothes she owned was more than my entire family added together had in our collective wardrobes, but I wasn’t letting her get away with invented words. No way, José. ‘That’s a made-up word.’
‘No, it’s not! It’s a bird.’
‘Doesn’t sound like any bird I’ve ever heard of.’ Around us, robins and blackbirds rustled in bushes, perched on branches, trilled evening songs into the quiet air. Those were birds.
‘Mom!’
She turned to her mother, who was reading a cookbook in a deckchair near the record player. Judith’s hair glowed red in the dying light of the day. A drink of something clear sat within arm’s reach. Her glass was shaped like an upside down triangle, with what looked like two olives on a cocktail stick inside. Her book was inches from her face. Sarah and Gemma never let me read in bad light. It will ruin your eyes, they always said.
Beth raised her voice. ‘Mom! Tell Megan what a quetzal is.’
Judith put her book on her lap, the cover facing up. Something to do with southern cooking in the foreign kitchen, whatever that meant. ‘It’s a bird, Megan.’
/> I looked from mother to daughter, unwilling to believe them, unwilling to allow Beth to win yet another game with a word that I had never seen before.
‘It’s from Guatemala,’ said Beth.
‘It is, Megan.’ Judith picked up her glass. ‘It’s the national bird of Guatemala, which is in Central America.’ She drained the clear liquid.
‘Is that water?’ I asked.
Judith held the glass up. ‘This? I wish! No, it’s a martini.’
‘What’s a martini?’
‘It’s a cocktail.’
‘Why do you put olives in it?’
Judith twirled the triangular glass on its stem. ‘Because they suit the taste.’
‘Can I have one?’
‘An olive or a martini?’
I considered this. ‘Both.’
Judith shook her head and laughed. ‘Sorry, honey. No can do on the alcohol front. But an olive you can certainly have.’
Olives were another thing the Americans loved. They could be green or black, and sometimes they had orange things stuffed inside them. On second thoughts, I didn’t really want one. They looked a bit strange. ‘No thanks.’
‘Anyway, the quetzal is Guatemalan. I’m sure we have a picture of one somewhere. I’ll show it to you when I find it. Scarlet chest and shiny green wings. In New Mexico, Guatemalans often kept pictures of quetzals in their houses, to remind them of home.’
‘They speak Spanish there,’ Beth said.
I thought of the yellowed photographs on Gemma’s wall, scissored years before from a newspaper, the line of tango dancers. I remembered a stack of photographs I’d seen once, when Gemma’s trunk had been open. People marching, a banner held by many hands. Liberación. Mouths open in protest. Fists raised. Others of groups of men, their faces blackened from being underground. Los mineros . The miners, men who spent their working lives finding tin. They hadn’t looked angry, not like the protesters in the previous shots. Instead, they just seemed resigned. Had Felipe taken the pictures? I imagined him, kneeling on one knee, lens aimed at his subject. His quest to take the perfect photographs and the price he paid for it. I had tried to decipher the words in the pictures, but it was impossible. Gemma had gently taken the photos from my curious hands, had closed the trunk. And I, wary of the ghosts, had not pursued the matter further. ‘And in Bolivia.’
‘Exactly,’ said Judith. ‘Clever girl.’
‘I’m clever too.’ Beth’s voice, darkened with sudden sulkiness. ‘She’d never even heard of a quetzal.’
Judith bent over and kissed the top of her daughter’s head. Beth squirmed away, thunder in the set of her mouth and her furrowed brow.
Sarah appeared on the deck, watering can in hand. ‘Beth, you’ll have to turn that down. It’s too late for music now.’ Sarah’s face was shadowed by the deepening twilight. Her silver hair, cropped close to her head, glowed white. She smiled when she saw Judith. ‘I didn’t see you there.’
‘The music is my fault.’ Judith went over and turned the volume down so low that I could hardly hear the swirling guitars any more.
Sarah made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. I just don’t want anyone complaining that we’re keeping them awake.’ She poured water over the parched pots on the deck. For a moment, the only sound was the sudden rush of overflowing water seeping through the wooden boards before hitting the ground below. ‘Ten more minutes, Megan, do you hear me? It’s bed time.’
Beth nudged me. ‘Want to go night swimming?’
‘What, now?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Not now, silly. Later. When everyone’s asleep.’
Daniel’s voice floated on the quiet air, calling to his sister. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left him with his jars in the hideout.
‘Can we bring Daniel?’ I knew he wouldn’t come, would not want to disobey his mother, but I didn’t want to leave him out. Guilt nibbled at me.
‘I don’t mind, but he has to bring Stevie.’
I didn’t pursue it further. Beth’s interest in Stevie was inexplicable.
Judith moved beyond the French doors, her shape silhouetted against the gauze of the voile curtains. A lamp flickered inside. A moth flung itself against the glass of the door.
‘Where’s your dad?’
Beth shrugged. Her hair swayed, the colour of raw silk in the shadowy dusk. ‘Out. He’s always got something on. Or so he says.’
‘What do you mean?’
Beth bit the nail of her index finger. ‘He likes to be out. Faculty dinners, drinks parties. That sort of thing.’ She swept the Scrabble tiles into a pile. ‘It makes him feel important. He’s teaching some summer class, even though he doesn’t really have to. He’s technically free till September.’
Beth leaned towards me. Her breath was ticklish against my neck. ‘My father had an affair. That’s partly why we’re here.’
I pulled away slightly. ‘What’s an affair?’
There it was again, the language of adults, the terms they used to couch their own activities, make them less displeasing to themselves and others. It didn’t sound like something good, though, and I glanced again at the French doors and the shadows the lamp threw against the curtains. Judith was nowhere to be seen. The record player was gone, back indoors on the sideboard, Pink Floyd silenced.
Beth laughed, then she pulled on my ponytail. ‘Oh, poor Megan. Do you not understand?’
‘It’s just a word,’ I snapped. ‘So what if I haven’t heard it before? I’m not American.’
Again, that laugh, the all-knowing mocking laughter of the upper hand. ‘It’s nothing to do with being American. My father had an affair with one of his postgrads. It means they had sex. And then it all ended and someone found out.’
I knew about sex. Gemma had told me the previous summer and had asked me not to discuss it in school, or with Daniel. ‘I don’t want to be branded further,’ she laughed. ‘But it’s better that you know about it. It takes the sting out of finding out when you’re older.’
It was disgusting, of course, but it wasn’t something I thought about much.
But Chris? Chris? Father, husband, professor. And now Chris, who liked my mother. My mother was fragile, hurt. She didn’t need the attention of a man who had affairs with students.
Beth picked at a cut on her hand. ‘My mom took it badly. She made my dad move out for a while, and then she just sat around our apartment all day, and when I was in bed she used to drink bottles of wine.’ She sighed.
Sarah appeared again. The light from the kitchen behind her threw a yellow glow on her back. She had her dressing gown on, a light flowery wrap that stopped just above her ankles.
‘Megan, in you come.’
I got to my feet. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘What about later?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh come on, Megan. Don’t be a baby. It’s fun.’
‘I’ll see,’ I said and ran to where my grandmother waited.
Truth was, I didn’t want to get into trouble, and I most especially didn’t want to worry Sarah. Night swimming would have to wait for another time.
Inside, Gemma was reading in the front room. The radio played in the corner, something soft and jazzy. She looked up when I came in, folded a bookmark between the pages and put her book aside. The fireplace, empty and swept out for summer, had a candle where firewood would be in winter. The fireplaces were in almost every room, even the bedrooms, identical black cast iron. The candle Gemma had lit was almost burnt down to a stub.
‘Off to bed?’ She held her arms out. I squeezed onto her lap. ‘You won’t be able to do this for much longer!’ She smoothed my hair off my face, ran her fingers over my ponytail. Her eyes were dark green in the half light. I touched her cheek. I knew I should tell her about Chris and the student, warn her. But what words did I have then to speak adequately about revelations of such enormity?
My mother kissed my forehead, my chee
ks. ‘You’re very serious. Is everything okay?’
I wound my fingers through her hair, rested my face against her. Her skin was cool to the touch. ‘Everything’s fine. I’m just a bit tired.’
Gemma rested her cheek against the top of my head. Her breath was warm, comforting.
I needed to protect my mother. Her ghosts weren’t enough.
I had to be strong. And good.
My mother needed me.
16
I heard voices, just like the first time, the night of the garden party. Nights were so quiet then that the slightest disturbance to the hush, the merest trembling of the silence, travelled through the darkness and reached me, light sleeper that I was. My flung-open window admitted the low whispers, the stifled laughter.
I crept down the stairs. The kitchen doors were open onto the deck and I stepped outside, careful not to make a sound. Just as they were the last time, my mother and Chris were night swimming. The record player was back outside, Pink Floyd spilling into the darkness. Gemma’s hair was in a plait, falling over one shoulder. She and Chris were sitting in deckchairs, in the same spot where Judith had sat only a few hours before. Gemma, I wanted to whisper. Don’t do this. Don’t try and be Judith, or replace her. It won’t work. Chris had sex with his student and everyone knew. He was sent away because of it, and now he likes you.
But I couldn’t say a word.
I hid on the wooden steps, the feathery bougainvillea obscuring me in the darkness. Wine glugging in a glass. The faint chink of the bottle being set down quietly on the flagstones. The wooden scrape of a deckchair being moved. I poked a hole in the bougainvillea, just enough to see through.
Chris was splayed in his chair, which he had pulled into position beside my mother’s. They both faced the garden, the flowers and fruit bushes just abstract shapes in the non-light. A glass in his hand was almost empty and he soon reached for the bottle again. A string of fairy lights rigged above the French doors was the only source of illumination, apart from the candle in a jam jar set on the patio between my mother and Beth’s father. The lights were new. Who had hung them? The moon was silver in the night sky, the barest hint of light in the navy expanse. Orion’s Belt, its three studs visible, glittered off to the right. Gemma had told me when I was small that it was believed the pyramids at Giza had been built so that their points aligned perfectly with Orion. They weren’t aligned any more, so either the world had tilted, or the theory had been wrong. I liked to think of it, though, all those thousands of years ago and the Egyptians building tombs for their dead, placing them so the stars would watch over them, guide them to the next world. Gemma had sat with me in her lap, a large book of photographs on the table in front of us. I remembered those moments, and I still loved to be close to my mother, keep her in sight and out of harm.