by M J Dees
Selma’s face broke into a smile.
“No, I’m just fucking with you. You should have seen your face.”
Selma laughed so loud she looked like she might lose control of her bladder at any moment. “Ah, it was priceless. I thought you might need a little diversion. You’ve got to laugh haven’t you?”
Teresa was not laughing.
“No. Don’t take it so hard. Of course, I don’t think you’re involved,” the smile disappeared from Selma’s face, and she leant so close that Teresa could smell her minty breath. “Or do I?”
Selma glared at Teresa for a very long time. Teresa swallowed her excess saliva. Then as suddenly as it had vanished, Selma’s smile returned.
“Hah! Had you again didn’t I? Come on cheer up.” said Selma, an inane grin plastered all over the face that Teresa wished she could punch.
“Teresa, I need to ask you something. You didn’t tell me that you spent the night in the hospital, or that you were involved in a robbery and murder at a dentist’s. That’s what I came here for to…” Selma trailed off as she struggled to reinsert her gun into her trousers. “I just need to get this in…”
A deafening crack. Teresa watched in horror as Selma slipped off the sofa mattress to the floor in an ever-expanding pool of blood.
‘Shit!’ exclaimed Teresa, concerned about the blood on the floor but becoming aware of the fact that she needed to do something about Selma bleeding to death.
Teresa had called the emergency services and tried to explain as best she could that they should come and get the bleeding police officer. She went over to Selma and, with some effort, managed to roll her onto her back and, locating the wound, tried to apply pressure as best she could until help arrived.
During what seemed like another very long time, Teresa tried talking to Selma in the vain hope that she might come round.
Chapter Six - The Ex-husband – 20th January 2014
“So what you are saying is that she has a problem with alcohol?” the Judge had said.
“Well, I didn’t want to say so, but I guess, yes. After the incident. That’s what it comes down to.” William had said with a smug smile almost eclipsing the smugness of his smart suit.
‘This is what it has come down to.’ Teresa remembered, picturing the man with whom, five years before, she thought she might spend the rest of her life. They had exchanged rings. They had exchanged bodily fluids. She had spent two days in a hospital trying to squeeze his offspring out of a hole that was not large enough until the British doctors decided to cut her daughter out of her. Her daughter whom she now loved more than anything in the world and whom he had stolen from her. The English cunts had taken Annabel, her angel, her darling, her reason for being.
Teresa contemplated ‘the incident’ as she sat in seat 24c on flight TP0351 to Lisbon where she would change for another trip to Porto, where she would change yet again for another flight to São Paulo. ‘The incident’ hadn’t been that bad. They had made a big deal out of it, making it sound worse than it was. Yes, she enjoyed a drink or two, yes, she should not have been in the car, but her daughter was hungry, and there was no food in the house.
She’d had a few drinks before she went to the airport. She had needed them to get through the ordeal. She had tried to judge it just right so that the flight attendants wouldn’t think she was drunk. Teresa didn’t enjoy taking off and landings. They were right up there with cockroaches and flapping birds’ wings on her list of things to avoid.
This was the cheapest flight she could get out of this god-forsaken country with its pompous stuck up Queen and its arrogant stuck up people in their fancy suits and big offices who used big words to steal babies of mothers who were just going through a hard time. Cunts.
William had taught her that word. It was the only useful thing he had done. The shit. Teresa wondered whether she had to wait until after the plane took off before she ordered a drink from the hostess.
Teresa questioned whether she had been a bit rash buying a ticket to Brazil. She wasn’t sure where she would get the money to fly back to England to visit her daughter, where the money would come from to pay off the credit card she had used to buy her ticket to Brazil. She imagined Skyping with Annabel, but she couldn’t help feeling that she had made a huge mistake and wondered, as the aeroplane began reversing away from the gate, whether it was too late to get off the flight.
She had bought her ticket in a moment of anger with that bastard William for stealing her daughter. She had used her mother’s illness as an excuse but now, as the effects of several large gin and tonics began to wear off, and the fog began to settle, and she thought through the implications of being stuck thousands of miles away from her daughter she started to panic. What could she do? Leap up and start shouting ‘stop the plane’? She had lived in England long enough to have absorbed enough fear of embarrassment to prevent herself from causing a scene. But what else could she do? Once in Lisbon, she did not have sufficient funds to buy a ticket back to England. She wasn’t even sure what her entry status would be if she attempted to return through immigration. What had she done?
She watched the terminal building shrinking outside the window. She was sweating.
“Don’t worry.” said the woman who sat next to her and Teresa realised that she must be contorting her face with angst.
Teresa felt like a terrible mother. Abandoning her daughter, her asthmatic daughter who had so often been ill and whom Teresa had slept beside in hospital during those long, breathless winter nights.
Teresa felt helpless and stupid. She smiled at the woman and stared outside, at Heathrow accelerating past the window and at England and her daughter disappearing beneath the clouds below her.
Chapter Seven - The Doctor – 18th January 2016
The bus tossed Teresa around in her seat. The sun streamed through the window, toasting the seat next to her. As the bus gathered speed, a breeze would force its way into the open window and then disappear as quickly as it came when the bus ground to a halt at each bus stop, traffic light or traffic queue.
Teresa’s headphones compounded the uncomfortable heat. They were designed to keep the sounds of the world out of her ears, but they also had the unfortunate side effect of trapping the heat. Usually, Teresa would tolerate this, as the benefit of her music drowning out the surrounding noises of São Paulo, compensated. At times, the noise still managed to penetrate to her ears even when she listened to her music at full volume.
Today her headphones didn’t seem to be working, and the vocals sounded as if the singer had been placed in a tin bucket and dropped down a 300 foot well. This was disappointing for Teresa as she had just downloaded Belle and Sebastian’s new album to try to cheer herself up and had been looking forward to listening to it. She listened to it anyway, played from the bottom of a pit. Even Belle and Sebastian playing at the bottom of a mineshaft was preferable to listening to the ambience of São Paulo, thought Teresa.
Saci, the mischievous one-legged character of Brazilian folklore must have struck again. Teresa had inherited the habit from her mother of blaming any minor misfortune on the red-capped, pipe smoking black boy. She had a heard a striped cuckoo as she left the house that morning and, as her mother had often said, that was a clear sign that Saci, who was able to turn himself into the bird, was around and up to no good.
When the first bus she had caught had broken down, her fears had been realised, and now she was travelling in the intense heat of the afternoon.
A teenager got on and sat next to her, cocooned in headphones. Teresa toyed with the idea of asking the teenager to listen to her Belle and Sebastian album or asking whether she could listen to the teenager’s music to establish whether the fault was with Teresa’s phone or her headphones, but the teenager didn’t look approachable, so she didn’t bother.
An electronic sign outside read 34°C. In the street, office workers were heading to or from lunch and didn’t appear anywhere near as distressed by the heat as Teresa.
As the bus turned a corner the sun, which Teresa had been careful to avoid when she chose her seat, swung round and shone on her. Teresa was fair for a Brazilian and her skin, despite having been drenched in sun cream this morning, she would struggle to deal with this bombardment of UV for long.
A woman ran for the bus; a bare-chested black man dragged a large sack of recycling, men wore suits. These made Teresa want to sweat even more. She passed air-conditioned shops, offices and banks, envious of their cool interiors.
The bus passed in front of a slum, a favela, where the front of every tiny self-built house had been converted into a shop or bar, and over a river, which smelt a little less awful because of the rain the day before that had washed away some of the filth.
Teresa felt guilty when someone older than her got on, wondering whether she should relinquish her seat but opted instead to avoid eye contact, pretending she hadn’t noticed them.
Car fumes blew in the open windows on the breeze and Teresa coughed.
It would be her daughter’s birthday in a week, and Teresa knew that she would have to contact her ex-husband to organise a time to speak to her and explain why she wouldn’t be coming to England after all. Felipe had proposed to her and had agreed to take her to England on their honeymoon, but now the stupid bastard had gone and vanished.
Teresa had failed to put any money aside. She worked as an assistant in a school. Most of her salary went on rent and other bills including the credit card debts she had racked up in the turbulent period following her petulant return to Brazil.
The driver pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor as the bus struggled to ascend a steep hill. Belle and Sebastian were no /match for the engine, which howled its way passed the headphones and filled Teresa’s ears.
Teresa was middle-aged. There was no denying it. She was past forty, and its arrival was now a distant memory. She was also overweight. There was no denying that either, though she did her best to avoid scales whenever possible. She didn’t consider herself to be good looking though she had managed to get herself into relationships on some occasions and she thought this wasn’t on the strength of her personality given that her personality was a major factor in some breakups.
She was feeling depressed, more depressed than usual. Given that she had been the victim of a violent robbery, her boyfriend had probably just committed suicide, and her sister-in-law had shot herself in Teresa’s living room, it was understandable that she should be feeling a little down.
She spent most of her waking hours in a constant state of irritation, by her situation, by the people around her, and this annoyance with everything that surrounded her often manifested itself in her voice whenever she spoke to people. The effect of this was to alienate most of the people she met.
This was not her intention. She had, like most people, an innate desire for people to like her, but she had a manner that rubbed people up the wrong way, and so far, she had seemed powerless to do anything about it.
Teresa detested her life since she returned São Paulo; she craved to be back in England, that stupid pompous, arrogant England where she could be near her daughter. Her deepest fear was that her present situation would form the rest of her life and that she would never escape and maybe never see her daughter again. At least not for a very long time by which time the maternal bond which she was worried might already be slipping, could be lost forever.
The bus arrived at the metro and Teresa alighted and followed the crowds into the station, down the escalators and onto the packed platform.
The train pulled into the station and Teresa squeezed her way into the carriage past indifferent commuters unable to decide whether they should disembark. She negotiated as far inside as she could until a man reading Basic Biomechanics, a book whose size matched the man’s stature, blocked progress. She peered over his shoulder, or rather, around his arm and noted he was engrossed in a chapter on photosynthesis.
‘Fascinating.’ Teresa’s sarcastic brain kicked in.
At that moment, Belle and Sebastian gave up, and Simple Minds took over, promising Teresa a miracle. She had long yearned for a miracle. Teresa had tried her hand at many things: a cleaner, a waiter, a lover, an environmentalist, a wife, a mother. She hadn’t managed to stick at any of them and hadn’t achieved any real success, most painfully with regards the last.
‘So who am I?’ she often mused. This question had plagued her even more after the events of the previous week.
She listened to Jim Kerr singing: ‘Promises, Promises’.
Most song lyrics she was able to match with an embarrassing memory. This song now had two such associations. The first was an inebriated night in a karaoke bar when during a shouted performance of the song she pissed her pants. The second was more recent and more painful.
Teresa realised that the train had already arrived at Consolação and it was time to change. She shuffled along the moving walkway, which wasn’t moving. It never worked in the mornings, never, but now had decided not to work in the afternoon as well. The shuffled journey along the walkway reminded Teresa of the near-fatal motorway journeys she sometimes made from the city to the coast and back. Always waiting for an opportunity to move into a gap, in this case, to walk past the man with a weird limp in both legs who was holding up the other commuters like an aged truck belching black smoke with a queue of cars trailing him up the hill. Teresa saw the big ‘biomechanics’ man in a parallel queue, which seemed to be moving quicker than the human caterpillar of which she was a part - the commuting equivalent of the post office queue.
Teresa exited the air-conditioned metro onto the street where the evening summer heat was oppressive. Even the slight breeze felt like someone was following her around pointing a hair dryer at her. The next bus she jumped on had no air conditioning so no respite from the heat. At least she was able to get a seat. Bat out of Hell filled her ears, but the full volume and the enclosing headphones still failed to help her forget where she was. At least she had the courtesy to wear proper headphones that kept the sound in the vicinity of her ears, she thought, and not the cheap type that just sat in the hole in the middle of the ear and allowed everyone within a two-metre radius to share the tinny ghost of the baseline. Teresa thought back to some occasions when she was on a bus, and she could hear the music of a person from at least four metres away as if they were holding a pair of speakers. Goodness knows what damage they were doing to their eardrums.
It was not surprising she was in a bad mood, a worse mood than usual. She felt over the hill. 43. She’d always felt old. Even when she was young, she felt older than her peers. She was listening to The Beatles while her friends were listening to Gal Costa, Kim Carnes, Dalto and Ritchie. She had hated those songs at the time: Menina Veneno, Muito Estranho, Bette Davis Eyes, Balancê. Now she was older she would sing along to them in a Karaoke bar with the rest of them.
She used to read old classics like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky because she thought they made her look intelligent but now she couldn’t for the life of her remember the plots to any of the stories. She drank the distilled sugar cane, pinga, long after her friends had switched to vodka and she kept drinking long after they had stopped altogether.
She was on her way to her doctor, to be told off for drinking too much and eating badly. She was going to be late; she thought - even by Brazilian standards.
As it happened, she arrived, out of breath, into the delicious air-conditioned waiting room ten minutes late.
“The traffic was terrible,” she explained, but of course the receptionist was not in the slightest bit interested. What’re ten minutes? Most of the patients paid little regard for the appointment system and turned up when they felt like, a good half an hour after their scheduled appointment. The receptionist knew this well, and she allocated the appointment times to accommodate the fact. She took Teresa’s medical card and asked her to take a seat. Teresa knew she was in for a long wait. Appointments were held in low regard and never happened at their appointed time.
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Twenty minutes after Teresa’s scheduled appointment time, just ten minutes after Teresa’s arrival, Amanda was called. Amanda had been the other person in the waiting room when Teresa had arrived, and she had speculated about the reason for Amanda’s visit. Amanda looked like a church type, hair tied back in a ponytail with unnatural tightness, very plain clothes that nevertheless showed off the fact that Amanda had a body in better shape than Teresa’s.
‘Sexually transmitted diseases.’ Teresa concluded.
She calculated that Amanda might have, say, a ten-minute consultation. Teresa thought the doctor might even see her by 5:20 pm. A ten-minute consultation for herself and she could be out of the surgery by half past and back on the bus to Consolação. There was a very good chance she could make it to the kebab shop before the two for one offer ended at 7 pm. Teresa’s mouth responded in a Pavlovian fashion.
She reached for her phone to text Felipe before she remembered he was gone. ‘Get your arse in gear’ would have been the kind of thing she would have suggested, and he would have replied ‘ok, love you xxx’. She told herself it had been the bang on the head that had caused his depression and reassured herself that he had loved her in his way, but it was becoming difficult to convince herself.
Amanda emerged from the consultation room clutching a prescription.
‘For some vaginal ointment designed for sexual deviants masquerading as devout Christians,’ Teresa speculated.
Amanda’s consultation had lasted nine minutes. Teresa had timed it. Now the Doctor seemed to be on the telephone. No matter. He wouldn’t be long, would he? In her hand, Teresa clutched the results of her blood tests for which she had waited an entire morning in a clinic, without breakfast or coffee. Once the nurse had removed the blood into tiny tubes, the nurse warned Teresa not to lift anything and said she could go. Teresa hadn’t considered the weight of her paper bag to be of any consequence, so she held it with the forbidden arm just long enough to put the appointment paper away, but that was enough to send a tiny river of blood trickling down her skin and onto the floor of the clinic. Teresa pretended she hadn’t noticed, slapped a tissue against the source of the egress and hurried away. Collecting the results had been easier; she downloaded them off the Internet and used a printer at the school.