by Unknown
She sat up again and looked worried. There was a pause. Leaving Frank’s makeover to Katharine had not been a complete success. She’d bought him a pair of very large, brightly coloured plastic beach shoes – Crocs – the sort that were currently operating a mysterious power over the middle-aged and the middle-classed, despite the fact that they caused the wearer to resemble Bob the Builder. Laura had voiced their concerns to Richard earlier in the day.
‘Never mind,’ said Richard with the lack of awareness of the importance of such things that only comes with many years of marriage. ‘At least she’ll notice him.’
Frank was not so sure either. He hesitated on his way up to bed, turning this way and that before the full-length mirror in the hallway. He looked doubtfully at his feet, which were encased in bright turquoise plastic. Adrian thought of Daffy Duck. Laura thought of Road Runner.
‘I’m having second thoughts about these Crocs,’ he called.
Katharine and Richard came out of the kitchen and stood beside him. They had Crocs on too – orange and purple.
Adrian winced.
Laura said, ‘What’s wrong with flip-flops?’
Perhaps
THEY WERE all nervous and none of them knew what to expect.
Adrian kept his leg pressed hard against Frank’s all the way over France and most of the way over Spain. Laura sat between her parents and ate her way steadily through Twixes, Bounties, KitKats and Pringles. She cast anxious glances back to where Frank sat with Adrian, and for most of the flight, she allowed Katharine to put her arm round her shoulders.
Frank tried several times to sleep. Each time he closed his eyes there would be a few moments of stillness before he sensed Adrian’s face millimetres from his own. When he opened his eyes it was to find a pair of pale blue irises staring intently at him.
‘Just checking you’re alive.’ The boy’s voice was breaking these days and a crop of livid spots had appeared across his chin.
Frank sighed. ‘I’m not dead, Adrian, I’m asleep.’
Frank wasn’t really trying to sleep. Sleep wouldn’t come, he knew that. He had his eyes closed in order to distract himself from the drinks trolley that kept being wheeled up and down the aisle, clinking invitingly. And he had his eyes closed to try to still the anxiety that had sent his back and neck into spasm so that turning his head was impossible. He closed his eyes again and counted up to seven.
‘Ow! For Christ’s sake!’
Alarmed, Katharine’s and Laura’s heads twisted round and peered through the gap in their seats. Frank rubbed his thigh ruefully, looking at Adrian in disbelief.
‘Sorry,’ said Adrian.
‘What did you do that for?’
‘Numbness is one of the first symptoms of deep-vein thrombosis. It’s okay, though. You’re not numb.’
The five of them were the first off the plane when it landed at Granada. They crossed the tarmac to the small terminal building. Soft, thyme-filled air was warm on their faces. Purple mountains slumbered against a pale sky; the last of the sun bled crimson in bands to the west and Katharine struggled to contain a hope that wanted to fly from her mouth in a cry. Yes, here, of course, it was possible. The hope ballooned inside her like a child and she held on to Laura’s arm. Here, surely, anything was possible.
Passport control was deserted. When a member of staff did finally arrive, his cap was awry and he apologised cheerfully for not being at his post. He waved them through with barely a glance at their documents. Automatic doors swept open and they stepped hesitantly into the arrivals hall like actors surprised by the curtain. Richard cleared his throat and looked left, then right. No one was sure how this was to be managed, and now they were here they felt suddenly shy. To their right was the exit, to their left a deserted café. Katharine looked to the exit and touched Frank’s arm. The doors slid open and shut. People arrived. People left.
Frank said, ‘Right then,’ and wandered outside.
‘Come away,’ said Katharine as the children tried to follow him. ‘Come away over here,’ and she led them to a row of plastic seats, where they sat stiffly, craning their necks to watch. ‘We’ll just wait here while Dad sorts out the transport.’
Pushing the hair from her face, she arranged the perhapses in her mind and stacked them carefully into a fragile tower of possibility. Perhaps Bea had seen Laura’s Missing video, and if she had, how could she not be moved by it, by Laura’s slight time-lapsed face telling Bea she loved her, by Laura begging Bea to make contact, letting Bea know of their journey to Spain? And perhaps the ‘I think I know this person’ response that Hazel from Missing People had reported was genuine. Hazel had warned that ‘no confirmation is available at the present time’, but perhaps (crazy thought) Adrian was right about maps and history and the routes people take through life. Perhaps her children knew her sister better than she did herself. She watched Frank, framed by the doors. But six months? Bea, here? Doing what? Living how? She shooed away the ‘Unidentified’ page of the website that hovered always in her mind. A page she had scoured a hundred times, ‘Caution: this material may prove disturbing to some viewers’, reconstructions and sketches that she knew by heart, ‘found on a beach’, ‘found in woodland’, ‘found at a service station’, but again and again, ‘found on a beach’. Laura’s leg was warm and narrow against her own. She forced herself to abandon the Unidentified and recall instead the Found, the many unbelievable stories of reunion. ‘Missing brother found abroad.’ Yes, she blinked hard in concentration. ‘Runaway saw herself on a poster.’ Yes, she could see how Bea might need some space, some time to find herself. She shook her head. The clichés threatened to topple the perhapses and she leant back against the wall. She took a deep breath in and began again. Perhaps. Perhaps Bea was here. She peered out at the glass doors where Frank hovered. Perhaps Bea would see Frank and if they just sat here a while and let them talk, perhaps if Frank remembered what to say, remembered what not to say, if . . .
And then Bea did see Frank.
From the car she sat in, fifty metres away, parked up on one side of the car park, she saw him. She watched him hesitate on the pavement, tug at his cuffs and stare. She saw him rock on his heels, look up at the mountains and take a deep long breath of Andalusian air. Love, faint and meagre, pulled at a place low down inside her. Swifts screeled and soared. Orange blossom and aviation fuel drifted on the air.
Bea held her breath. She sat absolutely still. Vague and far off, Frank looked a stranger to her now. A plane roared and groaned and he moved out of sight. She exhaled and looked at the floor.
‘See anyone?’ said Kiff from the driving seat beside her.
She shook her head. She knew she must concentrate, try to pull the many loose and stray pieces of herself together. They had sat in the car park for hours. Muscle and sinew in her had turned rigid as terror prowled the edges of her mind. It was very nearly more than she could bear.
She could feel Kiff looking at her, feel him wondering whether to touch her shoulder with the hand that rested on the back of her seat. She sat forward and frowned, studying the exit. She saw Frank’s head again for a moment, as he wandered to and fro behind a minibus being loaded with luggage.
‘We could walk over,’ said Kiff.
Walk over? She could barely sit up. The trembling she had been fighting all afternoon returned. She squeezed her eyes shut and looked into the dark. She was torn between the then and the now and the numberless nights in between, nights measured by church bell and dog’s bark, prolonged and creeping nights in the shuttered dark, when panic had to be talked down like a suicide on a ledge. Sedimentary nights. She opened her eyes and shuddered at the memory of those first weeks in Spain: the slow interment of herself beneath layers of time and space until the past and the impulse to return was muffled and remote. She prayed that the children didn’t appear.
Kiff wanted to check inside the building. He felt that he should. This was the last flight from London. Today was the day mentioned, repeated, em
phasised by Laura in the video. He looked over at the woman in the seat beside him. She wore a peppermint shift dress cut square at the neck. One tanned knee was crossed over the other. One sandal hung loose from the toes of her foot and she called herself Katharine. You’re not Katharine, he thought now. You’re Beatrice. He looked at her face, which was turned away from him, her mouth moving a little to some conversation in her head. Beattie maybe? Bea? If he raised his hand, he could touch the back of her head, where the hair was darker and cropped thick and soft over bone, or there, at her temple, where it was greying and bleaching against tanned skin. She looked sometimes beaten, worn and tired round the eyes. But it was her mouth that he always looked at. She had a wonderful mouth. What was she? Mid-forties?
‘Plan B, then?’
She nodded. Kiff’s tired, leathery face was turned towards her. The rough beard and wraparound shades hovered near. He wasn’t expecting a kiss, there was no romance in their occasional couplings; she knew he was just trying to read her. She had let him think Plan B was a journey they would take together. She had used him a little, which was bad. He was a kind man, an ex-husband, ex-builder, an ex-pat. Kiff, the estate agent, fixer and friend. He had a distracted, worn-out air that in England might look seedy, but out here in the sun and the light, busy with his building projects, his contacts and his lingo, he was rugged, handsome almost, a cowboy riding the Sierra Nevada in his Nissan Navara.
Plan B. She had studied the road maps, the sea routes and the trains. She had them with her in her bag. She brushed a moth from her dress. It was time to move on and leave Spain behind.
‘Valencia,’ she said, and to herself she recited the litany: Valencia, Genova, Brindisi, Ithaca.
‘Sounds good to me.’
She touched his arm. ‘Wait.’
It was Adrian. He stepped from the terminal door, hair aflame above his pale face, and tall. Impossibly, incredibly tall. How did that happen? Bea smiled and bit her lip; tears pricked the corners of her eyes. Her fingers touched the door handle and pulled. His height was physical evidence of how long she’d been gone, of how far she had come. She put one foot out. He turned as he walked, looking up and around, eyes sweeping the slip road, the car park and the people gathered here and there.
He looked back to the building as Laura came out, a bundle of papers to her chest, papers that fell, then flew so that she had to chase and stamp them down to the ground. Laura hadn’t grown. Her hair was longer and she wore her breasts ratcheted high up on her chest, a tight, low-cut T-shirt displaying them defiantly to the world. She looked like a small, angry woman. She stopped to stick a poster to a pillar, pressing the edges hard, then handed posters to a group near the door. Adrian swooped round her, jumped in front of the doors so that they opened to produce a trolley piled high with cases and attached to Richard, who pushed it, phone to his ear, stopping to turn and call back inside. Half in, half out, he allowed himself to be manoeuvred fully out and parked to one side by Adrian, who reached through the doors and brought out a stooped, frail figure. Mum? No. Could that be Katharine? He handed her to Laura and called his father, who had wandered away and was taking slow, deliberate strides, talking up at the sky, down at his feet, spinning on one foot and holding up a hand to his family to just wait one moment, one moment, please. Sorry, but I have to take this call, it’s Tokyo. Then Adrian was running up towards the taxi rank at the front of the building, leaping into the road to avoid a gaggle of people and trolleys, hopping from the path of a bus, leaning through the window of a taxi then running back to the terminal exit to round up his family. He looked over at Kiff’s car as the taxi reversed. He looked across the slip road and directly at the dust-covered Nissan parked to one side under scrubby sapling. Bea withdrew her foot and shrank down in the seat. She said, ‘All at sixes and sevens, you are.’
‘What?’
‘Not you, me.’ She dropped her head down to her knees and groaned.
She spoke into her lap. ‘Have they gone?’
‘Nope.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘They’re getting in the taxi. They’ll be going to the hotel. I have the name of it here.’ He pulled a printout of Hazel’s email from his pocket: time of arrival and departure, hotels in Granada, Seville, Vigo, phone numbers, itinerary.
Bea didn’t look at it. It was too soon; too soon and too late. If they’d come during the bad time, the hollow, speechless time before Christmas, then maybe she’d have had no choice but to be rescued. But now . . .
‘You should write to them,’ said Kiff. ‘Let them know you’re all right.’
‘I have.’ She wiped her eyes with her hands and pulled three envelopes from her bag. Dear Katharine, Dear Mum, Dear Frank. She passed them to him. ‘Can you post these for me when you get back from Valencia?’ That’s what she’d spent the last few days doing. Writing the letters that she could bear to send.
Kiff took them. ‘I see. I’m going back to Lanjarón but you’re not. Is that it?’
She knew Kiff’s work was slow at the moment. She knew he fancied a short adventure with her, a trip through Italy to Greece and then who knows where. No, you don’t have to take Kiff, she told herself. You don’t have to be good. She sat up and looked towards the place where she had last seen Adrian. Another family stood there now. Adrian was gone.
‘So, I’m coming back and you’re going on from Valencia?’
Bea turned from him. Was there going to be a scene? He wasn’t going to change suddenly into a husband, was he? How long had they known each other? Two months? Three? She was fairly sure she wasn’t the only woman he slept with. Really, men were hopeless on their own.
‘You’ll be all right. There’s Lesley and Jules. There’s Pinkie.’ She spluttered something that should have been a laugh but wasn’t quite.
‘Isn’t that your husband?’ Kiff pointed to the entrance of the car park.
Sure enough, there was Frank, quite near, helping a young woman get her bags in a car. What in God’s name had he got on his feet? The woman slammed the boot closed and thanked Frank politely. He took a step towards her and pulled pen and paper from his pocket. A taxi swung into the car park and stopped. Adrian got out, sloped over to Frank and pulled him away.
‘Ex-husband,’ said Bea.
‘What happened?’
She sat back in her seat and pressed the window closed. They both watched as the taxi drove away, four heads crowded in the rear window.
‘Our marriage walked out on us. Months ago. Frank’s fine.’
‘And the children?’
Bea swallowed but said nothing. She fumbled in her bag and put her glasses on, spreading the map open on her legs. Kiff started the engine.
‘Vale. Vamos.’
Falling
THE FERRY left Valencia the next morning. Bea sat in the stern and watched Kiff and the harbour wall recede. He raised one hand, the hand holding the letters, and waved them at her. As the land peeled away, taking Kiff and her time in Spain with it, she felt her back and shoulders relax. There were barely a dozen other passengers. A few backpackers, and four elderly Italians freighting domestic appliances back to their island lives. Bea had boarded the ferry, her driving licence ready as ID, but no one was interested; it was off season, it was the sea. The sea had its own rules, and with her shorn hair and tanned skin, she looked, she realised now, more Mediterranean than English.
Kiff remained where he was until he was a speck in the distance. She knew he would post the letters, and she made him promise not to get in touch with the family until after the time they were due to leave Spain. She could trust him to do that, she was almost certain. The wind picked up as they left the shelter of the land, and Bea wrapped herself in the cream and black Moroccan blanket Kiff had taken from his car. It was dusty but soft and she was glad of it, for she had no desire to leave the deck. She wanted to be transported backwards from the land this way, with no vision of the journey ahead. She felt steel and water rumble, shudder up through her bo
dy. She tipped her head back and looked up at the sky. This was the way to travel. It was the art of falling, like the leaps off the cliff at Hastings.
A spasm gripped her guts abruptly. She gasped and leaned forward over the rails, panting like a dog into the churn and twist below. Yesterday at the airport had unsettled her perhaps, and for the first time in months she had drunk alcohol the night before. Two glasses of rough, raw Rioja. ‘Idiot,’ she told herself. Alcohol was toxic to her, the journey through Spain had taught her this at least. Precious knew that already, of course. Precious barely drank at all and never had. Once she told Bea that going through the change was just that. Change. ‘You have to stop poisoning yourself the way you’ve been doing all your life.’ In England Bea had tried cutting down on the booze but she found there was always a reason for that glass or three at the end of the day. She had one because of a bad day, because of a good day, because she was tired, because Frank was having one. Precious was right. The last year, since the menopause took hold, she felt the wine sap what little energy she had. But since she’d reached Spain – she breathed shallowly; her stomach felt tender – now it occurred to her that the repeatedly firing furnace, the hot flushes, had receded then ceased altogether. ‘It’s a call to arms, Precious,’ she said, smiling down at the precipice of black metal below. ‘Change or die! Get out of there – that toxic office, those nylon clothes, that overheated bedroom, that stalled marriage, that bloody fridge full of—’ She moaned and retched violently, emptily, over the rail.
Wiping her mouth with the blanket, Bea sat down on a damp bench. She hadn’t slept the night before. They had booked into a cheap hotel. Although sleeping with Kiff was the very last thing she wanted. She’d hoped for single beds, but no, it was a small double. It was the least she could do, she thought, as he laboured on top of her, and the bed creaked and groaned below. She lay awake most of the night, listening to him sleep. When she woke in the morning, it was to the end of a dream that slunk into the shadows like an intruder. Uneasy, she shook Kiff awake and made him take her to the port hours before the ferry left. She was impatient for him to be gone. She could not bear to be with him a moment longer, she thought, as he drank his coffee, ate a pastry, had another, bought a paper, chatted to the men by the water, then saw her safely on to the boat.