by M J Dees
On Saturdays when she had money, she would go to 25 de Marco where the streets and stores were as crammed full of shoppers as they were cheap Chinese-made tat. Teresa loved all the tat. Rows and rows of useless items made of plastic from halfway around the world. Once she found a tin box with a picture of the Eiffel tower under the words ‘Welcome to London’. She was so excited at finding it that she bought every one she could find and gave them away as presents.
There would be no shopping trip today. Teresa would have to wait another week before her salary arrived in her bank account. She put her breakfast bowl aside. Put her feet up on her black velvet poof and sighed.
Chapter Fourteen - The Cat - 1st February 2015
Sunday began as a repeat of Saturday. A lay-in followed by breakfast and TV. Then the phone rang.
“Teresinha?” a voice asked. It was her sister whom she hadn’t spoken to since her mother’s funeral. She seemed cheery despite the recent loss of a parent
“Would you like a cat? I have two adorable little kittens, and one has your name on it. Oh, they’re so adorable sis,” Teresa hated when anyone called her Sis or Teresinha. “Come on sis; they’re gorgeous.”
“But I don’t have the money to look after a cat.”
“I’ve got everything here that you need, bowls, tray, I’ve even got a little scratching post for you.”
Teresa was confused. Why was her sister trying to be nice to her? Had her mother’s death left her unhinged?
“He needs one vaccine a year, and I’ve a friend who’s a vet, and she said she would do a deal on the castration,” Teresa’s sister continued. “Look, I’ve sent you a picture. He’s so lovely.” As she spoke about the cat, her voice increased in pitch until she became a soprano.
Teresa was feeling lonely. A cat might just be what she needed. But she was struggling with the rent, and she couldn’t move to a cheaper flat, her contract wouldn’t expire for another year.
“Well?” her sister asked.
“OK, I’ll take him,” Teresa said, throwing caution to the wind.
“Great. I’ll bring him round now.” her sister hung up.
Teresa looked around at the mess that seemed to creep in on all sides of her and realised she had quite a bit of tidying up to do before her sister arrived with her critical comments.
She chucked sweet wrappers, random pieces of paper, junk mail, old receipts and a variety of other detritus into plastic bags and stuffed them into drawers. Next, she circled the flat recovering the contents of the cutlery and crockery cupboards and reuniting them with their filthy colleagues next to and in the already full kitchen sink.
She hurried into the bedroom and changed, collecting all the dirty clothes that littered the floor and depositing them in the, also full, laundry basket.
The bathroom was necessary, so she collected all the hair from the floor of the shower and deposited it in the small bin overflowing with used toilet paper. Emptying its smelly contents, she replaced the bag with a new one, took the old bulging sack of shit, and dumped it by the front door.
The kitchen bin was next. The lid was now propped up by a mountain of packaging and orange peel and had long given up trying to keep the contents inside and. Teresa managed to free the edges of the bag from the bin’s clutches with a handful of the contents tumbling onto the kitchen tiles. When she eased the bag from its plastic retainer, putrid liquid dripped from the underside of the bag into a pool which had already collected in the bottom of the bin. A swarm of fruit flies hovered; investigating what sticky rotting delights might be in store.
Teresa barely had the house into a half-decent state when she heard her sister outside.
“Teresinha, Sis!” her sister shouted.
Teresa unlocked both locks on the door and the padlock on the security gate and let in her sister and the cat.
“Look. Didn’t I tell you he was adorable?” Teresa’s sister said in an ‘I told you so’ voice as she let the tiny black lump of fluff out of the travel box.
Teresa’s heart melted as she saw the little kitten, too small for its fur that stuck out in all directions. Its head seemed large, and its small grey eyes seemed to get lost in its black face. The kitten was black except for a napkin of white under his chin like a lost diner in search of his table.
‘Ah great,’ thought Teresa. ‘A black cat. All I need is some more bad luck.’
The tiny kitten was so cute, and Teresa felt a smile crack her face for the first time in as long as she could remember as she watched the little animal become surprised by almost everything which surrounded him.
“Isn’t he gorgeous?” her sister asked, watching the tears well up in Teresa’s eyes.
Teresa nodded, unable to speak as she held back the tears. She felt all the emotion that had been bottled up inside since the death of her father welling up to the surface and couldn’t repress it anymore. The floodgates opened.
“Hey, that’s what sisters are for.” said her sister, thinking it was all about her. She put an arm around Teresa.
“Thank you.” Teresa managed to blurt through the sobs.
She decided to call the cat Oliver after the TV chef whose programmes she had watched while she was in London. They had kept her company during her long days at home with Annabel while William was at work.
Teresa spent all day, after her sister left, playing with Oliver. Periods of frenetic activity among the cat toys Teresa’s sister had brought alternated with periods of resting on Teresa’s lap being stroked, tickled and pampered.
When Teresa decided it was time to go to bed, Oliver was just entering a phase of frenetic activity, and Teresa had to wait until she managed to wear out the tiny creature before she could lift him into his box and disappear off to bed herself.
That night she slept. If she dreamt her typical anxiety dreams, she couldn’t remember them. When her alarm went off, instead of pressing snooze, as usual, she rushed out of bed to see whether Oliver was awake.
He was in his box peering out at Teresa’s face grinning back at him.
While Teresa made coffee, she chatted to Oliver. Asking him what kind of night he had had. Whether he had slept well, done a wee, eaten any food.
As the last drops of coffee dripped into the jug, the machine gurgled and spat making Oliver jump backwards in alarm.
Knowing she couldn’t put off the fact that she still had to go to work. Teresa went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She contemplated how she had become so fat. As she dressed, she struggled to squeeze into her clothes but even if Teresa had the money; she didn’t want to buy new clothes for a body this fat.
When it came time to leave, Teresa shut Oliver in the living room at which point began to cry most dramatically. Each of his tiny, high-pitched, weak meows cut deep into Teresa, and it was all that she could do to close the front door and leave him in the house alone.
The journey to work seemed a little more bearable. Rather than getting annoyed by the other commuters, Teresa found herself wondering what Oliver was doing and whether he had enough to amuse himself.
Even at Paraiso where people forced themselves into the carriage as if they were cattle on the way to slaughter and then forced themselves out of doors on the other side at Brigadeiro like the opening of the January sales. Even this herd of pushers and shovers didn’t faze Teresa.
She was still tired, but it was a good tired.
At the school, she met Mariana getting a coffee in the lunchroom.
“How’s it going?” Mariana asked. Teresa told her all about Oliver and how guilty she felt for leaving him alone.
“Get another cat,” Mariana suggested.
“What do you mean?”
“They can keep each other company
Teresa thought about it. What would the difference in cost between one cat and two be? Would it be double?
Teresa sent a text to her sister asking if there were any more kittens available and her sister replied that Oliver’s brother had yet to find
a home. Did she want him?
Teresa thought. Did she want him? Two cats to look after. Oliver must be so lonely stuck in the kitchen all by himself
She texted her sister saying that she would take the other cat. Her sister replied that she would bring it around that night.
Chapter Fifteen - The Beach - 3rd February 2015
“We get paid on Friday. I’m going to the beach,” said Mariana in between sips of sweet lunchroom coffee. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“But what about the cats?” Teresa racked her brain for more excuses.
“They’ll look after each other. Just make sure they’ve got enough food.”
Teresa couldn’t think of any plausible reasons not to go.
“OK,” she acquiesced. “I’ll come.”
Mariana smiled.
“Great. Bring your bag; we’ll go straight from work.”
The journey from São Paulo to the beach should only take an hour and a half but on weekends during the summer cars, filled with luggage, clogged the lanes.
“What time is it now?” Mariana asked.”
“Eight,” said Teresa glancing at the pink, cheap, plastic Hello Kitty watch that she’d won at a fairground and ended up using every day.
“And what time did we leave?”
“Four?”
Mariana stared at the dent in the bumper of the car in front.
“Four hours and we’re still not at the bottom of the Serra yet,” she said.
“If it’s like this now. Imagine what it will be like during Carnival,” said Teresa
“Forget about it. It’s going to be a mess.”
They sighed in unison.
Two hours later, they pulled up in front of an eight-foot wall topped with electric fencing broken by an eight-foot-high gate which began to swing open when Mariana pressed a button on a small plastic device clipped to the sun visor. Teresa heard dogs bark. It reminded her of Oliver, and Ramsey stuck at home with a mountain of dried cat food and each other for company.
When Mariana’s mother opened the gate, Teresa knew from whom Mariana had inherited her personality.
“Girls!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, cackling like a banshee even though it was past ten at night.
Teresa eyed the dark, tree-lined, street to see whether there were any neighbours about to complain but it save for a few dried leaves and a couple of small branches which must have come down in the last storm, there was nothing.
Mariana’s mother led them through the decorated house and sat them in an expensive looking kitchen where she produced cakes from nowhere.
“Mum! I told you I’m on a diet.” Mariana complained.
“Nonsense,” protested her Mother. “You get this stuff down you. There’s plenty more where these came from.”
Teresa wondered where they had come from and whether she could go and live there, wherever there was, but she was also conscious of the fact that she was struggling to get into her clothes as it was. Nevertheless, she helped herself to some of the smaller slices of the cakes that looked the least fattening - carrot and coconut. What she wanted though, was a large gin and tonic.
Despite the consumption of sugar, Teresa felt herself struggling to keep her head upright and her eyelids open, so when Mariana suggested it was time for bed she agreed with relief.
That night she dreamt she was back in England on the hen night to which she had been subjected in the run-up to the sham of a marriage. This time, she was not touring the bars of the freezing northern town of Newcastle, filled with bikini-wearing teenagers whose slim, toned bodies had made Teresa ashamed of her own. She was in the hills of Malvern where her ex, William, had taken her on the only holiday they had together where she felt happy, felt she was part of a couple.
She walked along the main street with the rest of the girls. Other hen parties were checking into hotels they passed on their way. In their hotel, there was a party and William was there but he was angry with Teresa for some reason and started to drink large quantities of vermouth while Teresa thanked the departing guests for coming. It could have been a rerun of their wedding if it had been her drinking the vermouth. Then she was back in the street on her way back to the train station with the rest of the girls. It started to snow, and everyone began singing White Christmas, then she woke.
She turned over and drifted into space between awake and sleep. There she had another dream. She was at the school, and her students were starting to fall asleep. She couldn’t remember any of their names so she couldn’t call them to wake them up. Instead, she decided to show a video that she hoped might engage them a bit more. She turned on the projector and clicked on a link. A window popped up, and the video began to play. The students raised their heads to gaze in half interest at the moving images on the screen.
Then another window popped up and then another, but instead of an engaging educational documentary, these pop-ups contained videos of an explicit sexual nature. Naked bottoms, an erect penis, vaginas, tongues caressing and massaging large breasts.
Try as she might, Teresa seemed helpless to close the windows. No sooner did she click on the small red square in the corner to close a window showing a well-endowed woman masturbating, and then another would pop up with a well-endowed naked blonde fellating a horse.
By clicking on small red squares like a frantic electronic version of splat the rat, Teresa was able to close all the wanking, sucking, fucking, slapping and licking images but by this time pandemonium had broken out in the classroom. Children were screaming, banging desks, throwing chairs and losing it. Teresa managed to restore order to the classroom, which now resembled the scene of looting with papers, and chairs scattered this way and that. Even after the chaos had abated and some of the more conscientious students had begun picking up the debris, one of the students, who was new to the school, picked up a chair and threw it into the middle of the class.”
“What’s your name?” asked Teresa.
“Fernando Enrique.” came the confident reply.
“What are you doing? You know you’re going to have to clean all this up.” Teresa attempted to give him a hard stare.
“No, I won’t,” Fernando Enrique replied with astonishing defiance. “You’ll have to clean all this up yourself anyway.”
Teresa was speechless. She was amazed that the boy possessed the temerity to be so rude, but she also knew that he was right, that she would never get the class to tidy up the mess before the bell went and they rushed out of the door without her permission. She would have to tidy up during the break so that the other staff didn’t think she couldn’t control them. She knew she would waste half of the rest of the morning if she tried to get the students to tidy the room themselves.
She woke up sweating and looked around the strange room in a panic. It was a few moments before she realised she was in Mariana’s mother’s house and could sink back into her pillow with a sigh of relief
Teresa turned the stainless steel dial, and the hot water stopped cascading out of the showerhead and dripped off her hair and body. Sometimes she felt more hungover in the mornings after she hadn’t drunk. She struggled into the swimming costume and beachwear she had set aside then found her way back to the kitchen where Mariana and her mother were already dipping into an enormous breakfast spread that covered the huge table.
“Here’s the sleepyhead.” chirped Mariana’s mother, looking at the clock that Teresa realised it was almost ten thirty.
“You must have been tired,” commented Mariana. She gestured to the seat next to her. “Come and sit here. Coffee?”
Teresa nodded, smiled, and sat down. The same selection of cakes and buns as the previous night covered the table, plus French bread, ham, cheese, jam, hazelnut spread and peanut butter. Teresa wondered how many people they were feeding.
“I went for a run this morning,” Mariana boasted. “I’ve just got back and had a shower.”
Teresa raised her eyebrows in amazement. It was already hot, and it
was still just ten thirty in the morning.
“How far did you go?” asked Teresa, not wanting to know the answer.
“To the end of the beach and back. I guess that’s about twelve kilometres.”
Teresa thought she might start to hate Mariana.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said.
“Well, it’s just a question of habit. You start building up the distances. I did the São Paulo marathon last year.”
Now Teresa was confident she was going to hate Mariana. How could she eat all these cakes and still run those distances?
“Eating after exercise is the best time to eat,” Mariana advised. “The body burns all the calories.”
“What about this water shortage then?” Mariana’s mum asked.
“Well I think that Teresa has it worse than me,” said Mariana.
“Yes,” Teresa admitted. “I don’t have water in the evenings. It makes it tough to do the washing up. It’s a good excuse.”
Neither Mariana nor her mother understood her little joke.
“Don’t you have a tank?” Mariana’s mother asked, still not grasping why anyone would not want to do the washing up.
“Yes,” Teresa replied.” But it only supplies water to the bathroom. So showers are OK, and I can flush the toilet, but I’ve got no water in the kitchen. I have to fill the kettle in the bathroom and boil the water. I’ve been saving the water from the washing machine and using that to flush the toilet.”
Mariana and her mother wrinkle their noses in disgust.
“Would you like to go to the beach?” Mariana changed the subject.
“Yes. It’s sweltering isn’t it?”
“That’s alright we have shade.”
Even with the shade, the beach felt like a frying pan in which Teresa was the sausage. The sand reflected the heat onto Teresa who just sat and panted like a dog while Mariana ran to and from the sea. Then she saw it, stood at the edge of the beach where the sand began to give way to long grass. Just at the brink of the long grass, a striped cuckoo stood there and looked at Teresa. Teresa stared back, and they looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed like an age.