Not that there could have been any coming together tonight. She was still coldly furious when I left the house, half-way down a second bottle of Pinot Grigio and forty minutes into a whispered phone-call with her demonic little sister in Aberdeen. It’s like he’s trying to sabotage the wedding, why else wait until now? Maybe JC’s got the answer in a song.
I’m drunk when I leave the town hall just after 11.45, waiting for JC outside. There’s a woman standing at the bottom of the steps, wrapped up against the cold, maybe here to pick up the porter.
Crowgirl stands a few feet away, rubbing her hands and trying to catch my eye. She’s seen me laughing with The Star, knows she won’t get near him and is happy to settle for me. I’m not yet drunk enough to forget that these are not my own eyes I’m looking through. They’re Whiskyman’s and Whiskyman’s only ever got me in trouble over the years. A knee-trembler round the back? My poor willy would be frostbitten before I’d unfurled the main-sail. She’s a sturdy lass, so slapstick at best, X-rated Harold Lloyd. Still, the thought is vaguely appealing to the sex-starved ego of a 50 year-old man and I’m glad when JC appears.
He chats with Crowgirl for a couple of minutes before she staggers off with her friend from the bar.
‘You know her?’
‘No flies on you eh? Shona’s at every gig.’
‘Have you?’
‘Course I have! Just the once though.’
‘Really. I was just thinking about it myself.’
JC starts laughing. ‘You’re a horny bastard. Course I haven’t been with her!’
I skin up a rollie for JC and start on one for myself. There’s still a few punters straggling out of the hall, a noisy group of young lads, fifteen or so, standing in the foyer. One of them gives the thumbs up to JC, who waves back. Almost all of them are wearing check shirts. Funny how the uniforms come round again, I had a red and black one just like that when I was their age. The porter leans against the shuttered hatch of his lodge. He looks asleep on his feet but is suddenly all action, rattling his set of keys, ushering the boys out the doors.
They surround us, pissed but friendly, all wind-milling arms and breathless compliments for JC. I stand to the side and smoke my fag, watching the woman come up the steps.
She’s wearing one of those ear flappy Davy Crockett hats and a brown duffle coat. I turn round, expecting the porter to greet his wife. But he’s locking up the doors without even a glance outside. The lights go off, leaving only a vague orange glow from the few street-lamps. The woman stops a couple of steps below me. I watch her take off the hat. Even in the half-light I know the black hair spilling across the shoulders, the deep brown of those eyes. A shiver runs down my back but not from the cold, the more incongruous shiver that comes of spending too many hours in the tropical sun, too much time in that pulsing Cuban heat.
‘I thought you would be here tonight,’ she says. ‘You left me JC’s music, remember?’
Time. It can stop. Just like this.
‘Have you enjoyed reading about your mother’s life?’
I feel the flush creep up my neck.
‘It’s what you always wanted, after all. To know.’
She’s still so pretty.
‘Vinales2004? Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten all about Viñales?’
Soft Top, Hard Shoulder
Mid-afternoon. Havana silenced by the juddering floor-fan. My mother’s little roof-hut on the top floor of Luis’s casa had become a furnace. I walked her rooms and sat on her bed, stood at the balcony for a long time. Again the old waiter from the café on the corner was looking up.
Ornaments and books, jewellery and clothes. A life was laid down, I figured, a directionless trail into the tumble of our own wilderness, further and further into the mountains and mist, ever-stretching to that final day we’re not even aware of until it’s upon us, past us. Each trinket and object I packed away felt like a stepping-stone lifted from the path my mother had laid, winding back the years until the landscape was empty once more.
How many can say they have a plan, or have the courage to admit where they should have branched off, the moment truly ripe for the road less travelled? Mostly I just made the choice and fuck it, the best-fitting stone settled in place with a good hard stamp and on to the next, the next, the next, trying to outrun the doubt. It was up to others to cast God-like judgement across my works, to stand in my battered shoes and claim to understand why this choice was taken and not that and for crying out loud was it not obvious that particular decision was wrong, so why didn’t I stop, just a moment’s pause to take stock, weigh the options? But when was the optimum moment for reflection? Self-knowledge was ever-evolving, never complete, midnight’s certainty the morning’s doubt. I might as well chuck the balls in the air and see what comes bouncing back down off my empty head.
Luis appeared just after four. I guzzled down the bottle of water he offered me. The old man shook my hand again then hovered in the doorway. Maybe he wanted to make sure I showed some respect and didn’t just throw her stuff around. Did you know her, did you truly know her? How would Luis answer, Luis who stayed and Luis who sighed and if I looked up the old man would be sure to be wringing his hands, because that’s what he was supposed to do.
I went on packing and didn’t notice when he left. Who cares what the old fucker thought, I was going to fling her stuff in boxes as if I was going to a car-boot sale. I picked up Siddhartha and a dog-eared copy of The Dhammapada. A folded sheet of paper fell from the pages and I read a handwritten poem called This Night. It was pretty good, she should have stuck at it.
The occasion demanded a soundtrack. I put in the iPod headphones and gleefully chose Talking Heads debut classic. Psycho Killer, No Compassion, Who Is It?, a viciously inappropriate soundscape to my mother’s fast-disappearing past, the jewellery that must have meant something, the skirts worn in places that would never again be remembered, the endless bits of paper, like notes left to herself, fragments of thoughts maybe destined for a diary.
But I didn’t find any diary and didn’t want to. I lay back on the bed, loudly singing along to Tentative Decisions. What would solemn old Luis make of that? I was sleepy now. Care had to be taken, I didn’t want to fall asleep in my mother’s rooms, surrounded by all this ephemera that might sink deeper in dream, force a more profound reckoning. I had to get out of there, back to the Inglaterra before it got too late, and get drunk and so fuckin what.
For two days I worked alone. Adelina was busy teaching. I phoned my wife, who sounded distracted as she asked about Spain, as if she had one eye on a turned down TV.
‘I won’t ask how you’re doing because she doesn’t deserve any reaction. Anyway, you came to terms with it a long time ago.’
I walked with my wife’s words into Havana’s night, through the Malecón’s phantom gloom of pimps, glitter-eyed addicts and sorrowful lost, all the tired whores of back-land Cuba come to blow through the city like dust and always someone else to take their place. I thought about the terms they had come to, how my own story would compare. I felt restless, even nervous, the caricature I’d created of my mother in childhood starting to fragment. The emptier her apartment became, the more her existence was physically erased, the more she swelled in my imagination. All those belongings with their questions. Where had she bought them, where had she been all these years, what was she doing here, there, anywhere?
It was disturbing to think that in death she might become even more of a burden. The photo albums piled it on, all those hundreds of pictures. I began to see her in context, the battered hiking boots in the wardrobe worn in the photo of her with some students on a trip to the Sierra Maestra, the striped yellow and black t-shirt flung on the bed and seen in a Santa Clara bar-room snapshot. All those smiles. They chipped away at my distortions, corroborating Adelina’s evidence: her popularity, the voluntary work in village schools, the political activism with international solidarity campaigns. I couldn’t help but return to the photographs I’d
found in the little wooden box. I studied them over my dinners in the Mercaderes restaurants, laying all twelve on the tablecloth one evening while I waited for Adelina.
‘His name is John Tannehill.’
I looked up, surprised, holding the photograph of the man with the haunted gaze. ‘John Tannehill?’
Adelina put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Your mother mentioned him once and showed me that photo.’
‘Do you know anything about him?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘She must have told you something?’
‘And a good evening to you too!’ She picked up my glass of red wine and drank it down. ‘That is your punishment.’
I smiled. ‘Sorry. I’ve hardly spoken to anyone for days. I’m a bit obsessed.’
She nodded at the photos. ‘So I see.’
‘Yeah, must look a bit strange.’
‘You need to get out of the city.’
‘I don’t want to go to the beach again.’
‘Not the beach, somewhere quiet.’
Adelina wanted to go by Viazul bus but I insisted on a car. If she’d had a bit more self-confidence she might have thought I was trying to impress her when I chose the black Audi A4 cabriolet from the top-end hire place in Miramar. But I was only out to impress me. I’d taken a few steps beyond myself in the last few days and liked it. I felt like taking a few more.
Imagine my wife’s face, Jim in a flash motor with a pretty brunette, zipping west from Havana. Vorsprung durch, the suspension earned its price as the tyres crumped across the pitted sections of autopista. There were few vehicles on the road, the odd patchwork Lada and snub-nosed Soviet lorry crammed with people, staring at us through diesel fug.
She wore big wraparound shades and a green headscarf that flapped in the wind. When she smiled I thought she looked like Penelope Cruz. She tried to convince me that her parents would be pleased to meet me. They met Helen a few times. If this was meant as reassurance it just made me feel uncomfortable. I had to relax, the real Jim Drever was at home, remember? This new Jim was a distillery CEO. He could handle the weird, he hired fancy motors and empathised with his dead mother. You will like Viñales, she told me. It takes its time.
Mojotes, she said, pointing out strange limestone outcrops that scattered the valley floor like an abandoned game played by long-departed giants. Time had eaten the rocks away, leaving dark, sharp-edged hollows, trees and creeping vegetation. Hawks circled high in blue, trucks edging past as we weaved towards the village. The earth was chocolate brown here, tilled by old men with ploughs pulled by oxen. Slow and methodical, up and down, fighting back against the pine and palm that would smother everything if left unchecked.
Entering Viñales was like stepping into a scene from every movie about Latin America I’d ever watched. The road stretched one, two miles and dead straight. No dirt-track these days but still the odd man on horseback clipping along the asphalt, roving dogs and fat men dozing in chairs under shaded arcades, the copper-blue cupola of the church in the main square; echoes of a past still close to hand, frowning at modernity. The Audi felt absurd, a ridiculous imposition. I wondered if this show of conspicuous consumption was more offensive to the faces following our stately drive up the main street than my assumption that because they were poor they’d give a shit. I took off the aviator shades anyway.
‘I am so sorry for your mother.’
Adelina’s mother Brunhilda took both my hands in hers. She was no more than five feet tall, skinny as a rake and tanned a deep brown. Only when I said thank you did she turn her attention to Adelina. I wondered if her cursory embrace of her daughter was made out of respect to my assumed grief. Her pot-bellied husband with bald head and pencil moustache followed her down the path from their small, blue-painted house. Again a handshake, a reassuring pat on the shoulder. I felt uncomfortable accepting their condolences when my own emotions were so ambiguous. Brunhilda’s husband suddenly broke into a beaming smile.
‘José,’ he said, jabbing at his chest. ‘No hablo inglés.’
I repeated the action on myself. ‘Jim, no hablo español.’
José exploded in hacking laughter and both Brunhilda and Adelina jabbered at him in Spanish. José rolled his eyes and beckoned me towards the house, miming the tip of a glass to his mouth.
Brunhilda had put together quite a meal. She and José looked on proudly as I surveyed the table set out on the little veranda in the back garden. She went through the dishes one by one; white bean soup with potatoes, boiled lobster, rice with black beans and crisps made out of yams.
‘I hope this wasn’t done just for me?’ I asked Adelina.
‘No. Not just for you. For Helen too. She visited a few times. She helped my father paint the balcony.’
I looked at the faded pink of the low surrounding wall. There she was again, wiping her brow as the cicadas pulsed, looking up into endless blue before stooping to dip the brush. Then José was handing me a glass of neat rum and I was looking again into his twinkling eyes.
‘She doesn’t come home too often,’ said Brunhilda.
Adelina looked offended. ‘I come when I can, I am very busy.’
‘My daughter in Habana, my son far away in Santiago, my sister in London – ’
‘London,’ I said.
‘For a long time, yes. I am sent a letter every now and then. Apparently I have a nephew and a niece but I have never seen them. I probably never will. Cuban stories are complicated Jim, if you spend any time here you will know that.’
‘Habana!’ José suddenly exclaimed. ‘Beeg seety.’ And another explosion of laughter.
‘I always hoped she would stay here, work in the little museum.’
‘Mother, the museum was boring.’
‘Ah such a disappointment to your mother that you did not stay.’ A quick wink at me that Adelina didn’t notice.
‘Si, si,’ nodded Jose, sadly, ‘el museo, el museo.’
‘Every time, it is like this every time I come home. My mother just cannot forgive!’
‘Did you hear that Jim! I am sure you treated your dear mother with more respect.’
I didn’t answer, just nodded. The mix of Spanish and English seeped into quick-falling night. The kitchen light spilled out, glowing on the walls my mother had painted. Had she had told them anything about me, where exactly had she begun the story of what brought her to Cuba?
That evening Adelina and I walked into the little town. Few lights shone. The streetside cafés were almost deserted, the occasional patrons all men, sitting quietly in the parasol shadows, beyond the fluorescent arc-dazzle of the inside bar. I felt mildly drunk. I let the night in, let it settle.
‘This is a place made for stories,’ I said, and didn’t feel embarrassed.
‘I agree.’
We took turns, sitting in a little bar beside the crossroads, thirty seconds each to pass on something from our lives. I told her about my work as a Stillman, how the distillery had always seemed to be alive, a huge pulsing organism breathing heat and light into the cold and dark of the surrounding moor.
‘It sounds so romantic.’
I wanted to say there’s nowhere more romantic than right here, right now, this dusty roadside café in old Cuban night, with its unknown beers and Ciego Montero soft drinks perspiring in the heat and the curling smoke of Hollywood Blue cigarettes, the wilting mint in a glass on the bar.
But I said nothing.
‘So different from here.’ And she told me about her childhood in Viñales, that growing, impatient sense of somewhere beyond.
‘I wanted to get away, once. But I stayed home. Anything you try to outrun will eventually track you down.’
‘That makes me feel sad.’
‘It’s the truth.’
Neither of us spoke. Back home the barking dog in the distance would be a bleating sheep, the soft heat on my face an Arctic scour. But the same keening awareness that came with a lull in a loaded conversation, the buzz in my ears that may be the
sound of my blood, the study of my hands. ‘I told you I had a son,’ she said eventually.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you not ask where he is?’
‘It’s none of my business. I didn’t know you, not enough to ask.’
‘Do you want to know?’
‘I do.’
‘Then ask.’
‘Ask you about your son?’
‘Yes. I want you to ask. I give you permission to know!’
‘Ok. Tell me about your son.’
I watched her closely, her face in profile as she looked away from me, out across the road.
‘I haven’t seen him since my husband took him to Miami three years ago. We had split up a few months previously and he had always talked about getting out of Cuba. I did not imagine he would take my son with him. But he did, he risked my little boy’s life on a leaking boat. I hate him for that. But they made it. A lot do not.’
I wanted to take her hand but didn’t. I felt shamed by her openness. I’d lied to her back in Havana and hadn’t told her about my wife and children. For reasons I didn’t want to dwell on.
‘That is when I realised your mother is . . . that she was a good person. She took me in to her apartment and she put me back together again. There were many evenings, long nights, when I thought I would go mad. She treated me like a daughter when I felt as if my own mother was blaming me for the loss of Floriano. She did not speak a lot about her past Jim and I cannot speak for her then. But I know what she was to me, I remember that kindness.’
‘You must miss him so much.’
She smiled. ‘I will see him again. I have to believe that. What are we without hope?’
The Stillman Page 12