‘What about a big cock then?’ asks the Boy.
The stunned silence begs to be filled, so the Boy continues.
‘Can’t be all that difficult. And it’s all a phallic ceremony anyway, so why not a big cock? And a fanny.’
Am I more surprised by what he’s suggested or that he said phallic ceremony? Who would’ve thought that the Boy had such an impressive vocabulary? Kids truly can amaze you right enough.
‘Get out,’ shouts my wife.
‘He’s only joking,’ says Peter.
‘It’s quite funny, Mum!’ Amber agrees.
The anger freezes on my wife’s face then melts like one of Peter’s crappy ice-sculptures. She starts laughing and then we’re all laughing. All except the Boy, who looks a bit annoyed.
‘Well maybe we needed a bit of light relief. How about we take the bottle through and watch a DVD?’
‘Only if I can choose,’ says Amber. ‘It’s my big day coming up so you’ll all just have to put up with it!’
Peter looks confused, I nod vaguely and the Boy seems on the verge of panic. He’s over-played his hand with cock and fanny and hasn’t been exiled from the Family Intervention after all. There’s no escape. He too must sit, again, through the premier cru Hollywood cheese which is Father of the Bride, Amber’s all-time favourite movie. At least we don’t have to talk. It might be excruciating to sit and watch Steve Martin’s credibility melt from his marshmallow face, but at least no-one has to say anything. There’s just the odd uncomfortable catch of the eye, everyone except Amber eager to be released from this mawkish evil.
My phone blinks. I made the mistake of leaving it on the arm of the chair. My wife’s noticed. She’s looking at me suspiciously, probably wondering why I’ve put it on silent and why I don’t answer.
I take it with me to the toilet and delete Adelina’s details from the contact list. Not that this’ll stop her calling. Again I search in the reflection of the bathroom mirror for shame, embarrassment, something. Nothing there. Nothing but the usual gormlessness. I close my eyes, open them to my mother’s expectant face. She puts a finger to her lips and inclines her head, have a look behind me. The camera pans sideways and there’s John Tannehill, an eternal sadness in his dark eyes. He tips a shy finger to his sailor’s cap, as if now I know about him he should say hello. My mother squeezes his hand. How did she look at my father after she met brooding John? Were her embraces brief, the expression impatient and the arms limp? The world can take sixty years to change or happen in the blink of an eye.
Somewhere behind me the incidental music of Father of the Bride swells to a sentimental crescendo. My mother grimaces, no place for manipulated sentiment for her. I’d invite her back to the living room but she’d just switch off the TV and take Amber aside. Are you sure? If you are then how do you know, how will you cope when the delusions detonate?
When I open the door I find myself nose to nose with the Boy. He’s holding a can of Stella.
‘Can I have this?’
‘Don’t let your mum see.’
I follow him into the kitchen. He cracks the can and guzzles it down, crosses to the sink and bows to his reflection in the window. Then he burps, a truly amazingly loud burp, then another, dropping into a ninja pose with each new belch. What’s he thinking as he watches me watch him? When he runs out of gas he bows again. Sometimes one’s all you need, he says.
The Boy leaves me alone in the kitchen. I look down at my silent phone. I know I can’t avoid it anymore. I have to see if there’s any letters in the PO Box. I have to go back to Cuba.
Before Sunset
5.30am. Zigzags of light streamed through the slatted window. I sat up and surveyed Adelina’s old bedroom, converted into tourist accommodation some years back when her parents got permission to run a casa particular. She was sleeping in her brother’s room next door. Like her childhood, Pedro too was long since gone, working in a tobacco factory down Santiago way.
The fridge hummed, full of Bucanero beer and over-sweet Cuban cola. Apparently a fabulous dolls-house built by her father once sat in that corner. All those things that once belonged, all gone.
Sleep wouldn’t return. I lay thinking of the woman on the other side of the wall. It wasn’t anticipation I felt, more a see-saw mingle of attraction and unease. But no tension was apparent when I made my way onto the veranda. She was sitting on the balcony reading a book and looked up with a smile. Good morning to you Mr Jim, what shall we do today?
‘I’ve never seen a horse and trap before.’
‘I used to want my own one when I was a little girl.’
‘I wanted a motorbike.’
‘I had a doll, Margarita. She was my favourite. I wanted to sit her beside me and we’d ride around the village. Every day we’d do our rounds, picking up things for my mother and father.’
‘You sure you wouldn’t have preferred a motorbike?’
‘I still get a little bit sad now when I see the old men clipping along. It’s a reminder of all those things I’ll never do.’
‘It’s all so far away though.’
‘And harder to remember as time goes by. Sometimes I have to force myself.’
‘But then you start to trust it a little less.’
‘We should just let them go, memories. They’ll mean more if we let them come and go when they will.’
‘Even if they don’t come back?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you, I don’t think you’d want to forget everything.’
‘Yes I would! Well . . . sometimes. We all get older and we all get more and more sentimental. I don’t want to end up like my grandmother, staring at old photographs for hours on end.’
‘You think that’d happen?’
‘Show me a person who’s not sentimental and I’ll harness myself to that trap and you can ride me around the village all day.’
‘I’m up for that! But what about the neighbours? They’d call you el loco.’
‘Ha! You mean la loca. They do not need another excuse to talk about me. None of them will let me forget the past. Ever. That is why I don’t like dwelling on memories.’
‘Tell me about it. You know last night’s dinner? If I was back home and got up in the morning and did a fart, you know, just a little quiet one, when I got to work someone would ask if I’d enjoyed my lobster and white-bean soup the night before. Guaranteed.’
‘Jim!’
‘I kid you not.’
‘What I meant was – ’
‘I know what you mean. I stopped taking much of an interest in what people said about me a long time ago, way back in school. My reports were always saying I was ‘‘distracted’’, ‘‘uninterested’’. They were right, I was uninterested. In the whole fuckin lot of them.’
It should have been more difficult to talk like this. It usually was. But even the silences had no pressure to be filled. I didn’t absent myself from the situation in that usual cautious way. When my wife once told me that I’d become a ghost I took it as a compliment. Being a ghost was fine, it meant never adapting to any context. Just maintain that distant presence. It was expected.
Not that I had always been a ghost. My wife and I had once talked as Adelina and I did now. The implication was obvious, but I didn’t pay it much attention. The strange thing was that I had no fear in talking like this, opening up to a stranger. If I felt an occasional twinge of discomfort then what did it matter? Adelina was staying in Cuba and I would soon be going home.
All these moments? They would disappear like every other. Just leave it all to the ghost . . . Back home I would drift again through other peoples’ lives, peering back at Adelina with unshared thoughts that could become anything I wanted, or chose, in the absence of ever seeing her again. So I let it go, all the little moments of that over-exposed day, all our tumbling words. I let everything drift up into blue to scroll and dart like the wings of those anonymous little birds catching the silver glinting sun.
That sk
y. A blue that stands out in a lifetime’s memory more attuned to grey, a blue returned to again and again at the most incongruous of times, clearing the table, stuck in a motorway jam as the rain falls, zoning out as the TV drones. A sudden azure memory that unnerves with the depth of the possibilities it suggests. Once I was fifteen, lying on a West Coast beach and staring into a near-identical sky, suddenly so desperate to get out, into the world, wherever. I knew the insistence wouldn’t last and I had to make the decision now. But I didn’t. Every blue will eventually tarnish and on the edge of my gaze the clouds were already gathering.
‘Why don’t you come home very often?’ I asked Adelina.
‘I do come back. That’s just my mother. If I visited once a day she’d want me to do it twice. I make a point of coming back, to show that I haven’t run away and whatever people say doesn’t matter.’
‘About Floriano?’
‘And Raul, my husband. He was from the village too. He was a popular man, good-looking. His father was a guerrillero leader in the 1950s and in Cuba that counts for a lot. No-one could believe it when one of the sons of the revolution ran off to Miami. It was scandalous, but it couldn’t have anything to do with Raul, of course. It must be someone else’s fault, my fault.’
‘That’s so unfair.’
‘That was why your mother was such a friend. She never judged me about anything.’
‘I have to give her that, I suppose.’
‘She was right about David as well.’
‘David?’
‘He came from France. Toulouse. He was on a trip with Les Amis de Cuba. There was a social evening at the school and a friend invited me along. That was where I met him. Do you believe in destiny?’
‘Well I’ve not – ’
‘Good. It’s nonsense. All that stuff about fate, if you think about it anything can be fate. But it’s only the thing you’re actually looking for that you call fate. Those other times when you find absolutely nothing? Or you find something you don’t want to? We never call that fate.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘But that’s not what I told myself at the time! No, meeting David was meant to be. My husband and son were gone and I wanted to disappear, I wanted this man to make me disappear.’
‘Let me guess, he wanted to take you back to France?’
‘I know, it’s embarrassing! It was all such a beautiful charade.’
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed about.’
‘That is exactly what your mother said. She didn’t try to talk me out of anything. The night before I took David to meet my parents she said it didn’t matter that he was soon going home. I should just enjoy the moment for as long as possible. But she seemed so sad when she said that.’
‘As if she was speaking from experience.’
‘I think so.’
‘It was that man in the photograph. John Tannehill. He must have been an old boyfriend. Why else keep his photo all those years?’
‘Perhaps. Helen did not talk about her life before Cuba and it was not my – ’
‘There’s always someone, isn’t there? We have to forget them or put up with being haunted.’
‘That sounds . . . deprimente.’
‘I think my mother was haunted by John Tannehill.’
‘How do you know?’
‘All those years and she never managed to escape. Maybe she didn’t want to.’
‘If only it was so easy!’
‘Is that what you want to do?’
‘No . . . Of course not.’
But it was. Escape. It was the ever-present but anonymous theme in the background of everything she told me about her family, Floriano, and this love-struck Frenchman with the bald head. I saw it too in her impatient gaze as we walked the dusty street, in the overacted exchange with the old ice-cream vendor, who greeted her with loud bluster and flailing arms, a forced friendliness she felt compelled to match, in the sour nod from the museum attendant who suddenly disappeared, leaving us alone with echoing steps and the growing tension that comes of knowing you’re not welcome here so just go please, go now!
Viñales. I understood the place as soon I got there. The only difference was the mind-stunning sun replacing monotonous grey. All that stuff about the multi-dimensions of global culture, all that rich tapestry of experience and attitude, it’s all crap. The only difference between us is the weather. Adelina could be Inuit or Chinese and I’d still see in her the single-track roads of my youth, the smug teachers who saw the in-built limitations before I did, in the New York streets I so confidently walked in teenage movietime because I suspected that was as close as I’d ever get. Yes, I’d long-since made my peace with place. Which made her need to escape seem so naive. The thing is, in that little town, with all its beautiful strangeness that gave the world such soft-focus romanticism, I started to believe she would. It was a matter of the right disposition. She had it, and only lacked the confidence to know that the impossible decisions are the ones that ultimately prove the easiest to make.
We took bicycles to the San Vicente valley. We watched the clouds clear grey to wispy cirrus and spotless blue, under-coloured by full-spectrum greens, never so many shades; palms and Caribbean pine, wiry grasses, mimosa ferns palpitating at the slightest touch. No nuance but bold contrast, the white-washed wood of cottage and out-house, the iron-reds of corrugated roofs. The senses took turns, smell of dust and melting tar, humidity and sudden cool.
We talked when we stopped, glided silently through hamlets and their hidden farmers, past the little booths beside the yawning caves that took the tourists from white dazzle to ancient dark, away from peering trucks and flashing, weaving motorbikes with their unending echoes of goodbye as engines patched and re-patched bounced from limestone peak to valley leaf and finally faded, leaving bird-call, ticking heat and laboured breath. We watched each other as we cycled, glancing back or looking forward, unsure what would come next, if anything. Where the valley topped out we decided to turn back. The caballero we passed on the steep climb ten minutes earlier arrived with easy step and a little brown dog, an unconcerned smile. He took the offered bottle of water and touched his hat, veering into the bush, the crowding greens waving here, over here, but none giving him away.
I kissed her then, or Adelina me. Perhaps we reached for each other at the same time. But what does it matter. We kissed is all, in black shade by the sun-white road. The salt of each other and the sweat of our hands. I will accept no promises from you, she said, and a little part of me began to hope. I won’t make any, I replied, and wondered if I would.
Seven
‘It’s a while since you’ve been here, eh?’
He stares at me blankly. Has he registered the question, does he even know where he is?
‘Yes, it’s been a while.’
As if he’s guessed: is this the answer you’re looking for? ‘I better show you round then.’
He looks down at the Welcome mat. He doesn’t move. I’m struck again by how skinny he is. He’s wearing bottle green cords and a mustard coloured tank top that hangs off him. It’s a slow dematerialisation. One morning he’ll be gone, a pile of clothes all that remains. His right arm hangs limp by his side. I never did ask the nurses about that. If there was a problem they should’ve told me, I shouldn’t have to ask when they’re the ones getting paid.
‘Here.’ His impossibly light hand slips into mine. We move along the hallway.
‘Where’s Nurse Davidson?’
‘She’s away, Dad.’ The nurse had followed us back from the home to settle him in and helped me lug in his rise and recline chair. Soon as we set it down beside the fire she was offski.
I show him the downstairs toilet and the kitchen. He’s slow going up the stairs but doesn’t seem too frail. The old posters of Backstreet Boys and Westlife that I’d forgotten to take off Amber’s wall briefly hold his attention, then the shelf of fluffy Eeyores. He paces around, like a cat searching for familiarity. His fingers trail along the duvet and
he picks up the alarm clock from the bedside table, staring at it for a long time. ‘Can you hear that tick ticking? It’s like listening to your life being counted down. No, it’ll have to go.’
I can’t hear any ticking but say nothing. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Tea?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘C’mon downstairs.’
I’ve been saving the living room for last, the room where he’ll spend his days. He makes straight for his hydraulic chair and picks up the remote, raising it to the tipping position. ‘Technology,’ he says, leaning back on the raised chair with his hands gripping the arm rests. He presses the remote and the chair whines gently back down to the sitting position, taking him with it. ‘Don’t you be playing with this, right?’ he wags a finger, ‘you’ll break it.’
‘Not even a wee go?’
‘No.’
‘C’mon, not even one little – ’
‘No!’ he shouts.
He’s not a joker, how could I forget. I think he’s embarrassed then realise he’s crying, staring at the unlit fire. Spatial disorientation, they call it, familiarity should be established as soon as possible, the distress triggers minimised. But I’ve failed already. It’s mid-afternoon and last night’s ashes haven’t been cleaned out. This, I know from long experience, he can’t abide. I have to drag him out of the ashes but all I can say is ‘it’s going to be strange for a while.’
His fingers drum on his knees. ‘Yes. ’
‘You’ll be ok?’
‘I don’t want to be a burden.’
‘Don’t say that, you – ’
‘Jim!’ He almost spits my name. ‘I want to know if you’re happy for me to be here. ’
The Stillman Page 15