by M J Dees
She scanned through his other messages to his mum and dad and sister. The general collection of abbreviations that Teresa struggled to decipher. Why hadn’t he gone to his family? That’s what confused Teresa. Was his relationship with them as bad as he had said? Why not just go to them if he couldn’t take things any longer? She made herself a large gin and tonic and then felt guilty that she had been so selfish, thinking about herself when Felipe could be. She couldn’t bear to think what might have happened to him.
She heard a sound of clapping from outside and put down the phone, shut Ramsey in the living room and walked to the door, unlocking it. Selma stood at the other side of the gate. Teresa’s brother’s wife. Teresa fumbled with the keys as she tried to open the gate then hugged Selma before her sister-in-law pushed past her and into the kitchen. Teresa closed the gate and door, then stood, feeling like a spare part as she watched Selma examine Felipe’s note.
Selma pulled out her phone, dialled a number and within a moment was talking rapidly. Teresa could never understand Selma at the best of times because of her slang. Even when Selma was speaking to her slowly and directly, Teresa struggled to understand, so this conversation was impossible to follow, except for the occasional ‘he’ and ‘her.’
Teresa gave up watching and sat on a kitchen chair, picking up Felipe’s phone.
Selma hung up and turned to Teresa. She looked at the phone in Teresa’s hands.
“Is that his?” she asked.
“Yes,” Teresa replied and handed the phone over to Selma.
Selma tapped the screen then examined the contents for a moment before pocketing the device.
“Shit.” thought Teresa, but she’d always felt intimidated by Selma and was not about to ask for the phone back.
Then came the questions, just routine Selma assured, trying to ascertain where Felipe might have gone and whether the note meant what it seemed to say. The questioning seemed to Teresa to go on forever. Teresa remembered a conversation she’d once had with Felipe at the beach when he had told her that his preferred method of suicide would be drowning and she described the location to her sister-in-law.
Selma several times invited Teresa to spend the night at her house, but each time Teresa refused.
“It’s very kind of you,” said Teresa. “But I just want to be left by myself to gather my thoughts.”
After several more attempts to convince her and a protracted and awkward phone conversation with Teresa’s brother, Selma prayed for her and then left her alone.
Teresa felt lonely in the empty house and yet she couldn’t help the strange sensation that, at any moment, she might see Felipe round every corner. She let Ramsey out of the living room, made herself another large gin and tonic. She took it into the bedroom. Felipe was not there. She slipped off her clothes and crawled under the sheets. Ramsey, her remaining black cat, seemed aware of her distress, curled up close to her. Everything else could wait until tomorrow.
Teresa tried to sit up unable to move. Someone seemed to have secured her somehow. She had her hands tied. She was back in the dentist’s surgery fastened to the chair. The dentist was there. He had his back to Teresa but reached out a charred arm from which black, putrid skin began to fall away revealing pink cooked flesh and bone.
The dentist turned his charred face to Teresa, and his bony hand removed his blood-stained surgical mask to reveal Felipe’s tormented face.
“Water.” Felipe’s ghost pleaded with her. “Why did you let them bury me? You know I’m not dead.”
Dead Felipe leant closer to kiss her, pieces of his decomposing nose falling onto her face.
Teresa opened her mouth to scream as loud as her lungs would allow, but a slither of burnt flesh dropped into her mouth stifling all sound and causing Teresa to vomit.
She awoke, sitting upright. A pool of vomit soaking into the thin sheet which covered her lap and now began to stick to her sweat and vomit covered thighs.
It was still dark. Teresa bundled up the wet sheet as best as she could and, trying her utmost not to drop any vomit on the carpet, carried the sheet into the bathroom and dumped it onto the cold tile floor.
Switching on the light, Teresa glanced at her pallid face in the mirror before dousing it with cold water.
She patted her face dry with the hand towel that smelt of Felipe. She could feel the anxiety welling up inside her as she contemplated where he might have gone or what he might have done.
Teresa switched off the bathroom light then hovered in the bedroom. She decided against going back to bed and chose instead to go into the kitchen and make herself a drink.
She watched the ice clink as it tumbled into the glass and then seemed to crackle with delight as Teresa poured in a generous helping of gin. She had developed a taste for gin during her years in England and had found this cheap brand on her return to Brazil. Even the tonic seemed to fizz with enthusiasm as it joined the mix.
‘If Felipe were here now.’ she thought. ‘He’d be reminding me how gin causes depression.’ How ironic that seemed to her now as she took a large gulp of her cold fizzy drink that seemed the best thing she’d tasted in days or at least hours.
Teresa slumped on her makeshift sofa, a mattress on two piles of pallets, and listened to the rain that had started to fall outside. She had just finished the glass when fatigue got the better of her, and she curled up where she was and dropped off to sleep once more.
Teresa woke, wondering where Felipe was. Then her memory came flooding back to her, and she shivered in horror wanting to go back to sleep and forget about it all, but it was too late. Her head was already full of the images of the dentist, and Ramsey had decided it was time for Teresa to feed him. There was nothing more she could do but get up and face the day.
Teresa sat up and shuffled off the sofa. She wandered into the bathroom and realised how clean it was. The bedroom had been tidy too and, as Teresa walked through the rest of the house, noticing that the living room and kitchen were also spotless. Why hadn’t she noticed this yesterday? So, he’d tidied the house before he left.
Teresa felt even guiltier now. But there was no reason she could think of for not making coffee so, after feeding the hungry cat, she did that and sat down.
Teresa was on holiday. One of the benefits of working in her school was fifteen weeks off. It would be at least another two weeks before she would have to go back to work and explain anything to anyone. The trouble was she would have to spend those two weeks dealing with her family and Felipe’s family and all the questions.
Teresa was listening to the coffee machine spitting its contents into the glass jug and watching Ramsey munching on his breakfast when a slow round of applause outside the gate caught her attention. Teresa shut Ramsey in the living room again and went to the door. Oh God, it was Selma.
‘Bloody hell. What time is it?’ thought Teresa. She tried to change her facial expression from annoyance to welcome as quickly as she could but without much success.
“I’ve had some news,” said Selma looking at Teresa in her dressing gown and slippers.
“What is it?” Teresa looked at Selma and realised it was not good.
“They’ve found his clothes,” she said. “And his wallet.”
Chapter Three - The Lover – 7th December 2008
Teresa lay on her back on the bed with her legs apart looking at the bald patch of the doctor, who stared between her knees at her disappointing cervix. Between contractions, she looked at the man beside her and wondered how she had arrived at this point in her life.
He used to come into the coffee shop, in Waterloo Station, where she had been working. He spoke undecipherable sentences to her she was sure must have been delightful but that, after two weeks in the country, she could not understand. Of course, she was not the one taking the orders, one of her fellow Brazilians on the tills would hand her a cup and tell her what to make. She knew how to make the drinks because she had it all explained to her in Portuguese, but the conversations wh
ich went on with her friends on the tills and the customers remained alien to her.
It must have been about six months, during which time she began to understand his advances until, after rejecting him on at least three occasions, she agreed to go with him on a date. She learned how he had become addicted to caffeine in the process of finding opportunities to speak to her over the counter, and that his name was William, and he was a bit of an environmentalist.
He invited her to visit his environmental collective, the Gaia community, where Teresa met a collection of people sporting hairstyles the likes of which she had never seen before, from blankets of dreadlocks collected up under knitwear to shaved heads. In between her shifts at the coffee shop, occasional cleaning jobs and even more occasional visits to the language school, which were meant to be the reason for her visa, she would visit William at the collective where she began to volunteer.
William was a paid member of staff, paid through National Lottery funding, and he would joke on the rare occasion he bought a lottery ticket that he was paying himself.
Within another six months, Teresa had moved out of her flat share in Harlesden and into William’s flat in Stockwell where he proposed to her, and she accepted, and within six more, she had discovered she had become pregnant.
Still fearing the Catholicism of her parents, she arranged the wedding and executed it in extreme haste, so that the bump would not show. Less than six months later, Teresa found herself in an NHS ward being told by a balding man that her cervix was too stubborn to dilate enough and that they would have to do something.
Chapter Four - The Fiancé’s Family – 13th January 2016
Teresa found the cemetery a very dull place. They were all there. The sister. The Mother. The Father. The Brother. All teary. Some of them must have travelled through the night to be there. Teresa hugged them all and made all the right noises, but she was surprised to find that she didn’t want to cry in the slightest. It made her feel guilty, and with that sensation alone, she was able to maintain a solemn countenance. Her overriding emotion was one of embarrassment. She was conscious that Felipe’s family might be blaming her for his demise and this knowledge made her feel uncomfortable. She tried to stay out of the way as much as possible while at the same time seeking to look interested in proceedings which she considered a pointless exercise and, in fact, a complete waste of everyone’s time. Even though Teresa believed in the afterlife, she also believed that now he was dead Felipe was no more than a fleshy sack of body parts. The Felipe that Teresa had known, loved and hated, had departed before she’d arrived home and this ceremony to bury a bag of molecules irritated Teresa just as much as everything else in her world.
Teresa was suffering. But not from grief. She would suffer her grief on her own, away from these people. She watched Felipe’s mother, Lucretia, bawling her eyes out like the drama queen she was. Teresa wondered whether she had displayed the same extremes of emotion earlier this morning when she had selected the designer clothes she’d chosen to wear for the funeral. Felipe’s father, Jose, sat at the side trying not to notice the antics of his wife. The fact that he had one eye the other being a glass replacement for the eye he had lost in a strange accident in the operating theatre made the job of ignoring his wife easier. The freakishness of the situation was that he had been the surgeon operating at the time. The accident had led to retirement and the opportunity for his wife and children to spend the results of his settlement claim, from the very expensive private hospital, which did not want its very particular clients to hear that faulty operating theatre equipment had almost blinded one of their leading surgeons. Teresa felt sorry for Jose, not least for having to live with Lucretia for so long. He was a broken man, long accustomed to his wife telling him what to do. Lucretia had selected Jose’s clothes too judging by the uncomfortable manner in which he sat in them. Felipe’s sister, Patricia, was doing her best to be a young Lucretia. Going through exaggerated motions of grief, embracing her mother and doing her best to let everyone know that she cared.
‘You didn’t care much when he was alive.’ thought Teresa.
Then there was Felipe’s brother who had managed to select a wife as ferocious as his mother so that he could be as hen-pecked as his father. His wife, Izadora, sat at his side, critical. Just the expression on her face, her half-closed eyes, told everyone that, had she been in charge today, she would have done things better.
Their child, Carlos, sat fiddling with his phone. Teresa remembered how much Felipe had loved this ungrateful slob of a teenager, who texted his friends while Felipe waited to for burial as he lay in a wooden box.
Teresa looked at Carlos and thought about her daughter, thousands of miles away, she thought about the circumstances that had separated them and then felt guilty for criticising Felipe’s relatives when in truth the thought uppermost in her mind at that moment was whether she could get something to eat and drink.
Teresa knew there was a bakery across the street but was well aware she would be unable to leave.
She was waiting for it all to end. Everyone was very polite to her, but she kept thinking about how they blamed her even though Teresa knew it wasn’t all her fault and they had just as much a share in this as her.
While Lucretia was taking a break from her theatrics, Teresa felt she should spend some time at the coffin for appearance’s sake if nothing else. She approached the large box and looked over at Felipe. She’d been avoiding looking at him all this time. The undertakers had done their best to cover the marks where the fish had started to eat him. The coffin was open, and Felipe lay with his arms folded across his chest and a crucifix, which Teresa knew he would have hated, placed over his hands. Just as she was leaning over to take a closer look, Felipe sat bolt upright. Teresa let out a yelp of terror, and the rest of the gathering gasped in unison.
“Water,” Felipe said and then slumped back in the coffin.
“He wants water, get him some water.” Teresa blurted.
“It’s a miracle, praise the Lord.” Felipe’s mother declared, her arms raised as she rushed over to the coffin, pushing Teresa out of the way.
Jose handed Teresa a bottle of water, but Felipe was lying lifeless in the coffin, and no attempt Teresa or Lucretia made would revive him.
“Somebody get a doctor.” Teresa pleaded searching the astonished faces that surrounded her.
The doctor came but could find no signs of life. Nor could he explain Felipe’s apparent brief return to life.
After an afternoon of arguments speculation and verification, they agreed that Felipe was dead and that they should bury him without further disruption to the cemetery’s already disturbed schedule.
Teresa stared at the coffin. Unable to process the events she had just witnessed. It was as if it had never happened. Trapped air, she was told was responsible. And the request for water a fantasy devised by her already over-taxed brain.
But Teresa had known what she had witnessed and felt an overwhelming sense of frustration as they lowered the coffin into the family crypt.
Teresa wondered how much longer it would be before she could go home. She tried suggesting she could go and get a bus, but Selma was having none of it, and Teresa did not want to appear rude again.
As Selma walked to her car, Teresa found herself staring back at the cemetery from the metal entrance gates.
“Teresa, Teresa,” Selma shouted to her. “Teresa! Teresa!”
Selma was next to her banging on the entrance gates trying to get her attention.
Chapter Five - The Sister-in-law – 13th January 2016
“Teresa! Teresa!”
Banging on the security gate woke Teresa. She sat up, taking a moment to gather her wits. The banging continued.
“Alright, alright. I’m coming.” Teresa shouted, taking care to shut Ramsey in the living room.
Opening the door Teresa could see a furious looking Selma glaring through the bars of the security gate in the rain.
“What the fuck
is all this about?” Selma demanded, waving Felipe’s phone at her.
“I can explain.” Teresa pleaded as she opened the gate.
Selma dragged Teresa into the house, slammed the door, pulled a gun out of her trousers and waved it at Teresa.
“Give me one fucking good reason why I shouldn’t fucking well shoot you in the fucking head right fucking now,” Selma asked.
Teresa racked her brain for a good fucking reason.
“I…I…”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Teresa shut the fuck up. Selma waved the phone at her.
“Looks like you’re not blameless in this after all.”
“I can explain,” said Teresa, forgetting to shut the fuck up.
“I said shut the fuck up.” Selma reminded her.
Selma leant back on Teresa’s makeshift sofa, dripping from the rain. On one leg, the hand holding the phone and on the other, the hand holding the gun. Selma was a woman who enjoyed the power offered her by a weapon.
“So, what do you have to say for yourself?” Selma asked, now in a more relaxed tone.
Teresa was confused, not knowing whether to shut the fuck up or not shut the fuck up and tell Selma what she had to say for herself.
“Well?” Selma asked.
“Sorry Selma. It’s just that you told me to shut the f…”
“Don’t get fucking cocky with me,” Selma shouted, waving the gun at Teresa afresh.
“No, er, no, of course not,” Teresa started to sit down next to Selma. “It’s just the gun makes me a little, er, you know. But Selma, there’s nothing…”