by Unknown
And now she felt bad because Kiff had been good and demanded very little in return. She had met him in late December, the night she arrived in Granada. She went into the bar by the bus stand, the bar that every Spanish town has, where the sports channel blares and a row of men watch the screen from their stools, where the floor is littered with ash and sugar wraps, and the sound of table football and pool punctuates the air. She remembered seeing him look up at her as she came in. He said he heard her schoolgirl Spanish as she ordered a drink and tapas. He watched her shy glance as she scanned the room for someone who might help her find her feet. He brought her to Lanjarón, a spa town south of Granada. It was Kiff who introduced her to others at Los Mariscos, the bar where the expats gathered. He got her a room to stay in and found work for her every now and then. She taught English conversation to the hairdresser’s daughter and the garage owner’s brother; she helped out in the kitchen at Los Mariscos. She got stronger. She began to sleep at night, and each day she walked. She walked for hours. From her window she could see tracks and trails traversing the hills and valleys around the town. It pleased her to find her way to one of these and walk until she could no longer see her way back. And at night, sometimes during those ten weeks, sometimes she slept with Kiff. That surprised her. She had not expected to be desired, but in Spain she began to notice that she was no longer invisible. She felt men’s eyes on her, and women’s too, as she walked down the street.
It was the daughter of a friend of Kiff’s who found Laura’s YouTube Missing video and brought Bea news of the family’s arrival in Granada. It was Kiff who clicked the ‘I think I know this person’ button on the Missing People website, and it was Kiff who persuaded her to come to Granada airport.
Bea imagined what Precious would say if she could see her now, going the long way by sea, by train and by bus. She had been asked for her passport only once, getting off the ferry at Vigo, a lifetime ago, back in October. She had waited for a crowd and tried to slip through unnoticed but the uniformed officer had spotted her and demanded her documents. She had been rather impressed by her ability to dissemble, calling out to an imaginary friend ahead of her, ‘Oh, Bea! Bea! Hang on, I think I’ve lost my . . .’ then searching in her bag, crouching and pulling out underwear and shoes and holding up the queue. She had looked nonplussed, flustered then embarrassed, pulled out her library card, dropped her staff pass and then her driving licence and was finally waved through with an irritated shake of the head. There had been a teenage Bea, who sometimes shoplifted, took money from her mother’s purse, ran away to Brighton once. Disappearing at fifty, the teenage Bea came back to her. If anything, at fifty it was easier. If you were a woman of fifty, you didn’t have to be good because nobody expected you to be bad. Precious would approve of that.
Bea tasted the salt on her lips. She wondered if she were hungry and ate a handful of seeds. There were things she wanted to tell Precious that she couldn’t tell Kiff. She wanted to tell her how she missed her garden; she had ideas and plans for it and hated to think of it neglected by Frank. She wanted to tell her how she could remember nothing about work, it had left no mark on her at all, and how that couldn’t be right after all those years. She wondered what Precious would say if she told her the journey had taught her that mealtimes are for men and children, not women, indeed meals are for men and children, not women, and she would like Precious to know that she was right – she should return all the cookery books that Frank had given for all those Christmases. Not just Frank either. Patrick too. Well, he should have known better. He should. And one year he gave the same one to his wife, she happened to know that for a fact. Two for the price of one. ‘You already cook for them,’ said Precious. ‘It’s not cookbooks you need, it’s a cook! I mean, look at your kitchen shelf. Nigel, Marcella, Claudia, Delia . . . Delia? Who are these people, Bea? And what are they doing in your kitchen?’
‘Speaking of food, Precious, I’ve discovered something else on my travels.’
‘You have?’
‘The truth is that I don’t much want to eat. I’m not hungry at breakfast or lunch or at dinner, and as I choose not to eat solo at a table for two opposite an empty chair, I find I get by on very little money for food. So for all those weeks, those weeks travelling from Vigo by bus through Zamora, Valladolid and Toledo, then on through Cordoba and Seville to Granada, I’ve eaten when I’m hungry and lived on oranges and nuts and chocolate bars.’
‘That’s not going to keep body and soul together, girl.’
‘Body and soul manage rather better if they’re apart.’
‘You’re too thin. And your hair . . .’
‘I like my hair short.’
‘You look like a stick. You look like a matchstick.’
Bea laughed. ‘And I must be fit. I walk everywhere now. I feel light and well and at home in my body for the first time since I was ten.’
‘You’re too thin and you look like a stick.’
‘Kiff didn’t think so.’
‘What kind of a name is Kiff?’
‘You’d be surprised how little food you need. I conserve my energy.’
‘Your teeth will fall out. Come home.’
‘I may go and see Patrick.’
Precious didn’t say anything to that, just ate her yoghurt and scraped the corners of her mouth with a fingernail.
‘What do you think I should do, Precious?’
But Precious was turned away, looking at the foamy trail of their route tapering in a lazy arc back towards the land.
‘Tell me what I should do, Precious. I need your spicy bad advice.’
Bea got to her feet and stood by the rail. She bundled the blanket under one arm and looked down into the wake. She thought of the End of the Pier Game and how Katharine refused to play it. Once she got wise to it, she wouldn’t come to the end of the pier at all so that Bea would rollerskate alone, past the theatre and the old people, the lovers and the fishermen right up to the furthest end where Daddy used to put her on his shoulders and pretend they were on the bow of a Viking ship returning to Denmark with plundered silver and cattle. In the days after Daddy, she would bend and lower herself upside down through the rails, turn her feet out like a clown so that she wouldn’t roll in (although if she did, it thrilled her to know the skates would make her sink like a stone) and hold Teddy, Teddy who had lost his fuzz in patches here and there and who smelt of straw and sleep; hold him at the end of stretched-out arms over the roar and surge and dare herself to let him fall to the fishy deeps below. She never let Teddy drop exactly. She threw him into the air sometimes, to feel the loss and horror pitch in her belly. And once she let Katharine’s doll drop. But the doll wasn’t Teddy; it floated and bobbed with its eyes closed and it didn’t work, she didn’t get the feeling, she just felt bad and empty.
Bea retched again, leaning as far over the railings as she could. A twisted spasm rose up inside her so that she opened her mouth and waited until a thin grey stream fluttered out of her and was snatched away by the wind.
‘Arggh, that was the wine, Precious, not seasickness. I don’t get seasick and I don’t miss the flying one bit. In fact what I like about buses and boats is how long it takes to get everywhere!’ But Precious wasn’t interested in transport. She said, ‘Where exactly are you going, Bea? You seriously going to see Patrick? Have you thought there might be a problem with that?’ Bea chewed at the seeds. She shook her head. ‘There isn’t a plan. There’s a map. It’s just . . . I’m just . . .’ She tried to conjure an image of Patrick but his face was hazy like the horizon. She tried to summon the feeling she had once had for him but her belly was hollow and all that came to her was a damp river bank, the smell of cowshit and grass, a child somewhere who called, Mum!
She shivered and looked up. Weak winter sun warmed her face but her fingers were cold on the patched and salted railings. The blue-black flank of the sea rose and fell and her time alone in Spain, that early limbo time before Kiff and Lanjarón, flickered through her mi
nd. She had called herself Katharine then, first for disguise, out of fear of discovery, and then for comfort. Those stunned and empty days of October, then November, she had kept moving and rarely slept in the same place twice. She was no Laurie Lee. She was too anxious and desolate to explore the town. Instead, she surveyed varnished pine, limp nets and portraits of Christ from her single bed.
She pressed the tears from her face. ‘You should have stayed with Kiff in Lanjarón,’ said Precious, giving her a poke with one long purple nail. Bea twitched her shoulder away and shook her head. ‘No. It wasn’t me.’ She sat down on the metal deck, clutched her knees to her chest and cried out into the wind: ‘It wasn’t me!’
Ever
‘HE’S NOT such a bad chap, you know, Katharine,’ Richard said after their second day in Granada.
Katharine lay motionless beneath the sheet, eye mask and neck support carefully in place. They had walked miles that day, up through the Moorish quarter to the square of San Nicolas at the top. Frank insisted it offered the finest view of the Alhambra, which must be seen from afar before actually visiting it. Then they had trudged back down the hill, over the river and back up the other side to the palace and gardens themselves. It had taken hours, and as Katharine kept saying, it was most unlikely that Bea would let herself be seen in a place as public and as photographed as either of those, even if she was there, which in her opinion was unlikely. Adrian walked ahead wherever they went, consulting the map. Richard and Frank strolled together discussing the Moorish conquest and the defeat of the Visigoths. Laura lagged behind putting posters on fences and handing them out to passers-by. Katharine found herself largely alone during the day, watching her feet as she plodded upwards, past cafés and doorways that smelt of cigarettes and mint tea. Now her feet hummed and fizzed under the sheet. She hadn’t realised how unfit she was, unlike Richard, who had clearly been putting in the hours at the company gym. She could hear him taking off his underpants and shirt, then wandering around the room, picking her clothes up from the floor. She wondered whether a sleeping pill might be wise. There had been a lot of barking during their first night. An awful lot of barking.
‘I mean, I know he’s not your favourite person, darling, but when all’s said and done, he is our children’s uncle and in point of fact he is remarkably—’
Katharine sighed. ‘Adrian thinks he saw her.’
Richard shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that he didn’t. He wanted very much to see her and so he—’
‘He said he saw her in a car at the airport.’
‘Well why didn’t he tell us to stop?’
‘Because she saw us and then drove away. Or rather was driven.’
Richard looked out across at the view of the Generalife lit up against the night. There, clearly illuminated, he could see beauty and meaning and grandeur on a scale that endured. He could hardly tell Katharine that where the search for her sister was concerned, he could see nothing of the kind. Indeed, he was beginning to feel that it might be better if they never found her. After all, history was buried all around them; who was to say whether—
‘Where is Adrian now?’ asked Katharine, sitting up in bed and pushing up her eye mask. She looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. ‘You did hear what he told me today, didn’t you? You did hear that Frank has got himself a lodger? He’s got a bloody lady lodger holed up in Bea’s house, keeping it warm for him till he gets back from his fucking trip! Where is Adrian now?!’
Richard cupped his balls and cleared his throat. ‘He’s out with Frank.’
Katharine threw back the sheet and put one leg out of the bed. Rapidly Richard pulled on his underpants and put a hand out to stop her. ‘Katharine, they’re looking for Bea. That’s what we’re here for.’
Katharine started to cry. ‘They’re not going to find her here and you know it.’
Perhaps Precious was right and Bea would get herself to Patrick somehow. She felt despair at having got there too early, rushed off there before she discovered that Bea had no passport. Would Patrick want her? He had contacted Precious, she knew that. Precious said he was wanting reassurance that it wasn’t his fault, forgiveness of some sort, but he had not gone so far as to ask what he might do to help. And anyway, thought Katharine, what would be the point of replacing a Frank with a Patrick? Who knew what kind of a man Patrick would be without a marriage to support him? She watched Richard clipping his toenails and thought how Bea should have married someone like him – tall, dependable, solvent, normal. She felt the sleeping pill pull at her consciousness. Their father had been tall. Richard was a little like him but without the accent or the cycle clips, and Richard was hopeless with his hands – he couldn’t make a balsawood model if his life depended on it.
It worried her that her memories of her father seemed only to be of his hands and his feet. She could not retrieve a complete image of him; all the complete images were in photographs and they were useless, they were lies. Once he was dead, when she was little, she feared thinking of him because of what must be happening to his body. It seemed impossible and horrific to her that he should be lying in the ground left alone to dissolve, and that had been when the sleeplessness began. There had been one night, a week or two after he died and after there came no answer to her repeated small ‘Are you still awake, Bea?’, when she experienced not the fall, the drop into sleep that she so dreaded and feared, but the sensation of being hurled to a place. The hurl took time, and the terrifiying velocity and speed of the journey was matched by the beating of her heart and the physical sensation of terror. That place, she was sure, could only be death. Somehow she had got herself out of her own bed and into Bea’s, where she clung to her sister’s talcy body, shoving and poking her sides until she woke and turned and put her arm round her . . .
Katharine fought for breath like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface and sat bolt upright in bed. It came to her with a terrible clarity. That was why Bea was lost. She used men to navigate by. She set her sights on men. Fatally, Bea thought men would save her, when really, what might have saved her was . . . Katharine struggled for the answer, flailed around for the truth before it slipped from her grasp. What was it? Richard was there at her side, solid, loving, calm. She felt the warmth of his hand on her arm and tried to push it away, tried to retain the truth she had glimpsed. ‘Shh. You mustn’t worry.’ She concentrated and closed her ears to him. It was work. That was what it was. Gratifying, demanding, worthwhile work. ‘Adrian is fine with Frank,’ soothed Richard, trying to make her lie down again. No. That wasn’t all. There was something else. ‘It’s a process, darling.’ What the hell was it? ‘For Frank and for Adrian. A healing process.’
Katharine pushed Richard away with all her strength. She sat up. ‘Nothing is healing,’ she wailed. ‘There is no healing in this.’ She banged her fist to her chest, then leapt to her feet. ‘Frank is not all right. Frank is a ruinous cunt!’ She threw the alarm clock at him. ‘Just fuck off out of here and fetch our son!’
Richard didn’t look at her. In pectore robur. He pulled on his clothes. Sophie had never sworn. Never, ever.
Katharine sank back on to the bed. The travel clock lay on the carpet by his shoes. The back had come off and its face was blank. She watched the shoes as he placed a carefully socked foot in each of them, then bent to tie the laces with his large gentle hands. If he picked up the clock it would be all right. If he picked up the clock they could rewind.
Richard straightened up and turned his feet away.
She stretched out her hand to the place where he had been. ‘Oh no,’ she whispered. She heard him take a weary breath in and pause.
‘It’s the children,’ she said, not daring to raise her face. She withdrew her hand and kept her eyes on the floor. ‘Have we been . . . reckless?’
His shadow crossed the room and she heard a floorboard creak.
She closed her eyes and swallowed. ‘Have we been careless with our children?’
When she opened them again, his
feet were back near her own. She felt the dry warmth of his palm as he drew it along her jaw. He tilted her face up to him. She took his hand in both her own and held it tight against her cheek.
Steel
WHEN THE boat reached Genoa, Bea was soaked from the spray and from the drizzle that had started up in the afternoon. She waited on deck, reluctant to disembark and enter the Italian grandeur spread out before her, proud villas sweeping up from the waterfront in pink and yellow. She missed the familiar hewn ruggedness of Spain. Reaching Ithaca became suddenly urgent. She needed to get there.
At the train station, she bought a ticket to Brindisi, a port in the south-east. The journey would take, as far as she could tell, two days and involve some changes that she only partially understood. As she pushed a wad of notes under the glass, she found she had more money left than she thought. That would be Kiff’s doing. It warmed her to think of that as she made her way to the platform. She should have enough to pay for a room in Ithaca for a couple of weeks at least. She folded Kiff’s blanket and carried it under one arm. It was mid-March. The island would be in flower; there would be almond blossom, figs, and peppery olive oil. In Ithaca, she thought, she would buy some inks and draw.
She boarded the train, sat in a window seat and waited for the rhythm of the tracks to begin. She ought to write to Kiff and she wanted to write to Adrian. She thought he might have seen her at the airport and she didn’t want him to think she didn’t care. The train rolled, lurched and stopped. Iron squealed on steel as it lurched again, then reversed. Office blocks, slums, motorways, fields, hills and quarries rattled by. She smiled at the thought of Adrian. He used to say that the landscape was coded in our genes, hard-wired into our brains. He explained that was the feeling she had when she visited Hastings – saw the sea and the lie of the land, the cliffs and the shingle beach. Perhaps it was why she loved the rolling hills and farmland of Ithaca, the rugged coast and stone beaches in deeply carved bays. It was Hastings but heated and in colour. In Hastings, with Adrian and Laura, she had showed them how to play the Storm Game, the game she used to play with her father, when they would run on to the beach holding hands, lean into the wind and shout and scream at the sea. Then their father would bundle them back up the hill, up the steps to their door, and the three of them, wet and breathless with laughter, would fall into the hall. Their mother would pretend to be cross and pull the rough jersey off over Bea’s head, rubbing at her hair with a towel that smelled of pie. The radio would be on. ‘Lift up your hearts,’ the radio announcer said, and after dinner, it was Listen With Mother. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ asked the radio, and on some days, when the washing-up was done and home had a calm and lemony air to it, their mother would allow them to slide on to the slippery warmth of her full, patterned skirt. ‘Then we’ll begin,’ and they would lie across her lap and listen, thumbs in their mouths and very still.