The Santiago Sisters

by Victoria Fox

  Simone met Emily’s glare and raised it several notches. She would not lose.

  ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that, madam.’

  ‘Screw you, Simone.’

  ‘You shut that mouth right now or I’ll shut it for you!’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  Brian stepped in. ‘Now, now, ladies …’

  ‘Lysander’s allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants,’ raged Emily. ‘He’s in his room this minute getting high off his nuts and neither of you two gives a shit.’

  ‘He’s doing what?’ Simone stormed into the hallway. Behind, Brian crooned, ‘OK, let’s everyone take it easy …’

  Simone headed for Lysander’s room and threw open the door. But the sight that met her eyes wasn’t of Lysander—handsome, dark, rangy Lysander, with a curl to his spoiled, upper-class lip—skinning a joint or bent over one of his elaborate bongs; it was Lysander, butt-naked, reclining against his pillows and receiving a dedicated blow job from a redhead. Simone’s lips parted in shock. She didn’t know where to look. Lysander was coming hard. His eyes met hers as he ejaculated into the redhead’s mouth. In the corridor, Emily giggled. ‘Oops,’ she trilled, ‘my mistake!’

  Post-climax, Lysander was unfazed. ‘All right … Mummy?’

  Lysander’s accent was so sharp you could skewer cubes of meat on it.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ Simone rasped. The redhead jerked up, clocked their audience and flung herself off the bed. She grappled for her clothes, her breasts jiggling as she tried and failed to cover her modesty. From the front Simone saw she was older than Lysander—quite a bit older, in fact. Lysander lit a cigarette.

  Simone fought to keep her eyes off Lysander’s dying erection. He made no attempt to conceal it. It was huge. Why couldn’t Brian share that family trait?

  ‘You’re disgusting!’ Mortified, Simone turned on her heel. ‘Do not touch me, Brian!’ She flapped him off. ‘Whatever you do, do not bloody touch me!’

  Before she disappeared back inside the master suite, she heard Emily wheedle: ‘So, Daddy, can I please go to the party? See, I’m not as bad as ‘Sander …’

  And, predictably, depressingly, Brian’s castrated consent.

  ‘I just don’t understand why you can’t take control of them more!’

  In the back seat of a blacked-out Mercedes rushing through Piccadilly, Brian placed a hand on his wife’s knee. Simone resisted the urge to recoil against the window: after all, they soon had to put on a convincing show for the cameras.

  ‘I try,’ he said pathetically. ‘You know how strong-willed they are.’

  ‘Or how weak-willed you are.’

  ‘They’re yours, too, you know.’ Brian said it as if he were sharing a prized chain of Umbrian holiday homes, not a host of cancerous growths in the armpit.

  This time, she did flinch. ‘They already have a mother.’

  ‘But only one stepmother.’

  God, it made her sound like some gnarled old thing in Cinderella. Oh, for a child of her own! Simone dreamed of it night and day. A girl—yes, a daughter, it had to be a daughter—whom she could mould in her own image. The girl would be her legacy, her gift to the world long after Simone’s own legend died. She would raise her as the ravishing, well-mannered, and impeccably groomed young lady that Emily Chilcott wasn’t and never could be. Simone wished for this immaculate creature so fervently that she thought she might explode. Yes, she had fame. Yes, she had riches. Yes, she had a wardrobe, and a stylist, and an army of fans that could topple the fucking monarchy, but all she yearned for was that most prized possession: a girl.

  It would never happen. Simone was biologically unable, even before the first flushes of menopause. She hadn’t always been. No, it hadn’t always been that way …

  ‘Here we are, baby,’ said Brian, as they pulled up at the red carpet.

  Their driver opened the door and the wall of sound that crashed in almost knocked her off her feet. Simone gripped her clutch and pasted on a smile. Cameras flashed and sparked. ‘Simone! Brian! Let’s see a kiss for the fans!’ And so on.

  Simone had picked out her outfit personally, a Versace emerald-green drape dress with scoop neckline. Everyone said that, after forty, one should cover one’s décolletage, but Simone disagreed. She hadn’t been using five-hundred-pound face and neck creams the last twenty years for nothing.

  ‘You look tired.’ Michelle Horner, Simone’s manager and one of the most cutthroat women in the business, stole her at the end of the press queue. Simone had always thought Michelle resembled a whippet, especially tonight, in a grey trouser suit and pumps, her nose appearing even longer under the lighting. Michelle wore glasses on the end of her nose, amplifying the effect. ‘All OK on the home front?’

  ‘Same old.’

  They entered the atrium, where champagne was circulating. Heads turned. In certain spheres Simone was known as The Ice Queen. She wasn’t sure where or how she had picked that up, but it was certainly an easier façade to maintain than the poor joke-a-minute suckers who had cultivated a comedy precedent and had to spend the rest of their days working the room like a court buffoon.

  ‘Terry Sheehan wants you for January Fight,’ Michelle was saying. ‘I told him we’d consider the script but it would have to be something special what with the Jonasses ringing off the hook and Sindy Reinhold at Paramour calling every hour of the day. I said, “Terry, we’re not getting out of bed in the morning for less than ten, and if you don’t like it you can bite me.” Between you and me, he’ll be scrabbling in his toilet bowl for coins. This is a waiting game and we’ll wait.’

  Simone was only half paying attention. Across the space, a fellow forty-something actress had arrived. The woman was single, attractive if not ragingly successful, and in her arms she carried a gorgeously sweet black baby boy.

  ‘Where’d she get that from?’ Simone cut in.

  Michelle followed her gaze. ‘The kid?’

  ‘Of course the kid—I thought her husband ran off with that bit of fluff.’

  ‘He did. She wanted a child, though. So she adopted.’

  Simone narrowed her eyes. That sounded awfully simple. ‘Is it awfully simple?’

  ‘For ordinary people, I shouldn’t think so. For her, maybe.’

  ‘Where do you get them from?’

  ‘That one came from Africa.’

  ‘The internet? Are they in a catalogue or something?’

  Michelle stepped back. ‘You’re not considering it, surely,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What does Brian think?’

  Right then, Simone couldn’t give a hooting crap what Brian thought. He wouldn’t know what it was like to go through life with no child to call her own. He wouldn’t understand. As with all else in their marriage, Simone would make the decision herself and then she would inform him of it. His opinion mattered not a jot. ‘Michelle, I want you to look into it for me.’

  Michelle was used to dealing with her clients’ whims—this one would blow over in a week. ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Do you want a brown one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A Chinese one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mexican? Filipino?’

  ‘I’m not ordering a goddamn takeaway. I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll get you some information.’

  ‘Good. This could be the missing piece, Michelle. It really could.’

  Brian joined them. On a happy impulse, Simone leaned in to kiss his cheek. A passing paparazzo captured the moment. ‘Hello, baby,’ he said, chuffed.

  Hello, baby …

  Except it wouldn’t be a baby. She had her own reasons for that. It would be a child. Hello to the child who was somewhere out there, halfway across the world, waiting to be plucked from poverty to riches, from obscurity to the spotlight, from nothing to having it all. What little girl wouldn’t want that?

  She smiled. It would happen—and soon.

  For
, when Simone Geddes put her mind to something, she did not fail.

  4

  Argentina

  In the autumn, without explanation, Señorita Gonzalez was fired. Diego appeared to make the decision overnight, and Calida didn’t dare question it—except to her sister.

  ‘What happened?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think he found out what she was really like?’

  ‘Maybe. Who cares? She’s gone now.’

  Teresita was flicking through one of their mama’s romance novels. Calida frowned: she could read her twin just as easily as the words on the page.

  ‘You know something,’ she said. ‘About Gonzalez—I can tell.’

  ‘No, you can’t. You don’t know everything about me.’

  ‘I know you can’t actually like those books. Come on, A Prince’s Affair?’

  Teresita bristled. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she countered.

  Calida could list the reasons from the covers alone—plastic men in open shirts with chests like dolls, smooth and hairless, and bright white teeth; how Julia swooned over their aeroplanes and chunky watches and forgot about the life that was right here in front of her. Calida thought the books looked like nonsense, but she didn’t say so, because she didn’t want to prove her twin right. They did know everything about each other—and in that case Calida didn’t need to explain what she disliked, nor Teresita what she enjoyed, so it seemed safer to walk away, and to try not to think about what Teresita was keeping from her, and why she hid it so deep, out of sight.

  A month later, the girls were watching television in the barn when the phone rang.

  Calida went through to the house. She lifted the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the line sounded far away. It was a woman.

  ‘Es la policía,’ it said. ‘My name is Officer Puerta and I need to speak with Julia, wife of Diego Santiago. Is that her?’

  They manoeuvered Julia into the back of the Landrover with difficulty: she hadn’t taken the car out in years and professed to have forgotten how—and besides, how could she operate a vehicle at a time like this? She was a wife in crisis.

  ‘My husband,’ she kept gasping. ‘What’s happened to my husband?’

  ‘We have to get to him, Mama,’ said Calida. She was terrified but she couldn’t show it. She had to stay strong. She helped her sister into the passenger seat and held her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her firmly. ‘It will be all right.’ Teresita gazed back at her with a stoic expression, and it was an expression Calida couldn’t decipher. She couldn’t find a way into it. It closed on her as firmly as the car door.

  Calida had driven on the shrubland before, but never on the roads and never without Diego. She crunched the gears as they rocked and bucked down the pot-holed drive, and she tried to remember what her papa had taught her about checking her mirrors and coordinating her feet. It helped to hear his voice, guiding her.

  Please be OK, Papa. Please, please be OK.

  Eventually, they met the highway. Vehicles rushed past at speed. When a gap opened in the traffic she set the Landrover in motion and immediately stalled, trapping them across the oncoming lane. ‘Move!’ screamed Julia from the back.

  Calida floored the gas and the car lurched forward. Car horns screeched. The wheel spun in her fingers and she grappled for control, finally setting them straight.

  She followed the police officer’s directions. Everything was alien, sinister. Thoughts whirled as she turned south to the waterfront. Mauve clouds streaked the sky over the town lake. Calida could see the pulsing red beams from the police vehicles and the lump in her throat swelled.

  You’re going to be OK. You have to be OK.

  In her heart, though, she knew.

  All her life her father had been a rock, as solid and constant as the mountains of home—but lately, he hadn’t been right. Since Gonzalez had left, Diego had become unpredictable, suspicious, checking up on the girls, calling them trouble, shouting at them for the tiniest thing. What had happened? What had changed? Once, he would never have left them at night while he went to town. Now, it happened more often than not. She had listened at the door while her mama spoke to Officer Puerta, watching Julia’s knuckles grow paler by the second. There had been an accident.

  They reached the blockade: a ribbon of tape, police talking grimly into their radios, and, beyond that, into the dark, dense fog of the night, a shape she couldn’t make out and didn’t want to see. Calida brought the car to a stop. They opened the doors and climbed out. Calida attempted to be close to her sister but her sister didn’t want to be close. Instead, Teresita wrapped her arms round herself and turned away. Calida swallowed a lump of sadness. I need you, she thought. Don’t you need me?

  A woman saw their approach and crossed the tape.

  ‘Come with me,’ she told Julia. ‘The girls stay here.’

  Teresita was watching the police lights. ‘What’s happened to Papa?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  The question stalled Calida. She knew the word that wanted to form on her tongue, the natural, logical word, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  Calida would reflect on that moment and the tormented days that followed as frozen segments in time, as still and silent as the images on her camera. Diego pinned against the tree, the brief, ruthless frame of his body before he’d been covered; Julia with a handkerchief to her face, crying for him or for herself; Teresita refusing to weep, even once, and refusing her sister’s sympathy and shutting herself away.

  It transpired that Diego had been drinking. Not just that night but every night before. Calida didn’t understand why. Her papa was a responsible man—not a drunk who got smashed in a bar and walked out into the middle of the road in front of a truck and got hit so hard his lungs collapsed and his heart stopped beating.

  Diego had been her compass, her anchor and her ally. Now, he was gone.

  Calida mourned him quietly and alone. Her mama’s door remained closed.

  ‘Are you awake?’ she whispered into the dark.

  Weeks later, in bed, listening to her twin’s sleeping breath, Teresa shivered. She thought of her papa picking her up when she was five and swinging her over his shoulder, tickling her until she screamed with laughter. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  You killed him. You have to live with that for the rest of your life.

  Guilt and confusion hounded her every minute.

  Papa died because of me.

  Teresa had pushed him to it. In telling her father what she knew, she had set the wheels in motion. She had watched his face fall, heard his pleas not to tell her twin, delighted when he’d dismissed Gonzalez. She’d enjoyed that he spent more time in the bars, away from the farm and away from Calida. She hadn’t considered that his shame had turned him into an addict, or that he would wind up killing himself.

  How was she to know that?

  ‘Are you awake?’ She tried again.

  Silence came back at her. Perhaps, if it hadn’t, she would have told Calida the truth. Her sister would have kissed her and told her she wasn’t to blame—it would all be OK; they would get through it together. But there the silence was, cold and accusing. Teresa sat and climbed down the ladder, her feet meeting the floor, pale toes against dark wood. Her nightdress was thin and her legs were bare. She crept into Calida’s bunk and lay down next to her, felt the heat of her sister’s body, and put an arm round her slumbering shape, using the other to pull the blanket up to her chin.

  Calida moaned as a freezing ankle touched hers.

  A yawn, a sigh, then nothing. Sleep.

  Teresa longed for the same oblivion. She snuggled into her twin’s back and held hard, thinking if she held hard enough they could be close again, like they had been when they were little. Everything seemed so complicated these days. It wasn’t simple, like it used to be, when all that mattered was each other. She had kept
her father’s secret because she’d been scared—and then because she had wanted to shelter Calida in the way Calida had always sheltered her; she hadn’t wanted her sister to lose faith, like she had, in the only man in their life. But the more time passed, the deeper this wedge drove—a point of divergence on the cusp of adolescence. Teresa inhaled her sister’s skin, a scent she would never lose because it lingered on her own body, and wished she were more like Calida. She had thought she was doing the right thing in getting rid of Gonzalez—but since when had she been any good at that? Calida was the one who did the right thing, who fixed, mended, and made better.

  Since Diego’s death, Calida had set to with grit and purpose while Teresa hung back, thinking, I’m twelve. I don’t want this to be my life.

  Every time she looked at Calida, she saw her own failings—at having robbed them of their papa, at not wanting to stay and toil, at wishing she could be far away from their home—and the reasons why Calida would always be the better twin.

  At last, she withdrew from the covers and left the safety of her sister’s side. For a moment she stood alone in the gloom, the boards scratchy beneath her feet. Through the window, the gate at the foot of the track seemed alive, pulsing in the moonlight, lit up like a pearl. She returned to her own bed, her heart thundering.

  I’ll get away from here one day. I’ll make Mama proud. I’ll be rich and successful and all the things she wants me to be. Then I’ll have done something right.

  Comforted by this, Teresa reached for Fortune’s Lover and read it beneath the blankets for a while, until her arm started to ache from holding the torch.

  When at last she surrendered to sleep, the story grasped for her unconscious and, in her dreams, she walked through the farm gate and kept on walking.

  She dreamed of billionaires and red carpets, of palaces and yachts, of sparkling blue swimming pools and satin purses stuffed with notes.