Significance

by Jo Mazelis

  They drive south. They have a small tent. Some money. Suzette’s duvet in a bin bag. Clothes in suitcases. A plastic carrier bag with soap, shampoo, razors, deodorant, toothpaste, brushes, nail cutters, tweezers. A radio that eats batteries, a couple of torches, hers and a large one that’s spattered with paint and oil, his. Along the way they will add to their belongings; a camping stove, a saucepan, knives, a tin opener and a cheap corkscrew that breaks the first time they use it. They hug the coast, here, dotted helpfully about, are the municipal campsites France is so famed for. Subsidised by the government, simple in their arrangements, but egalitarian in principle. One family may park up in their motor home, plug themselves into the electricity supply and spend their evenings watching T.V. while others put up their tent, spread a blanket on the ground, make a simple meal and in the dimming light watch only one another’s faces. Or the stars.

  They move through the country, the days pass. Soon it will be September and the campsites will all close and the weather will change.

  Suzette and Florian have no regrets, but the money is running out.

  They drive into a small town, following the signs which direct travellers to the campsite. Here on the edge of town is a church and before the church a larger-than-life crucifix. The figure of Christ has been cast from metal and painted white, but there is a crack in the figure’s left shin that is barely visible until it reaches the top of his foot where the metal has rusted copiously, pouring out a dark red stain that has all the violence and vivid horror of blood. Stigmata. Or an accident of physics.

  Suzette crosses herself. Florian does not see the statue, his eyes are on the road, he’s tired and hungry and wants to get there, now, soon; not get lost which they have done more than once. Suzette crosses herself as she too does not want to get lost. As in lost in purgatory, for her sins are multiplying. Soon she will need to go to confession.

  It’s late when they arrive at the gates of the campsite. Once they are booked in, the caretaker of the site changes the sign to full. Suzette and Florian take this as a good omen. Someone is looking after them.

  A group of men are playing boule on the green in the last of the light. Children’s voices can be heard calling and echoing one another in some sing-song game. People cross and recross the campsite carrying rolls of toilet paper or towels and washbags, some are in dressing gowns, some in shorts and t-shirts. Others carry plastic bowls full of pots and pans to wash. One man has a large silver fish and an enamel plate and long thin-bladed knife; he holds them all in his folded arms, almost defensively.

  Suzette and Florian put up their tent, eat bread and cheese and apricots, then climb into the tent pulling the duvet in after them as if it were a recalcitrant and overgrown child. Or a cloud.

  There is a slight chill in the air the following morning. The towels they had hung on a hedge the night before are damper now than they were yesterday.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Florian says.

  Holding hands they leave the campsite and follow the signs to the beach. On a bulletin board near another church, Suzette sees a card that reads ‘Housekeeper/gardener wanted. Non-residential. Couple preferred.’

  ‘We could do that,’ she says.

  ‘Non-residential,’ Florian says. ‘No room at the Inn.’

  ‘We could get somewhere.’

  They walk on, deep in shared thoughts. Neither needs to voice what is worrying them. They have reached the edge of the known land; beyond there are dragons.

  The paved road ends and there is a path that winds down to the pebble beach. The tide is out and only a few souls are about so early. Walkers with dogs, one man up to his waist in the water with a triangular net, catching crevettes.

  They walk under the cliffs, the rocks stirring and clacking beneath their feet. Florian stops and begins to search the stones as if he has lost something. Suzette does the same though she does not know what she is looking for.

  ‘Ha!’ he says and stoops to pick up one roundish bit of rock about the size of an egg.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A fossil. A sea anemone.’

  ‘Really?’

  She takes it from him, turns it over in her hand. It’s the colour of slate, similar in shape to a doughnut peach, plump and round with an indentation at its centre, marked with white dots that run in clear lines that fan out like the petals of a flower.

  While she studies it, Florian begins searching again. She cannot believe that he can possibly find another, as one is miracle enough, but soon he’s found one more.

  But two is enough. He straightens his back and looks up and around. They retrace their steps, walking slowly and thoughtfully, happy in the moment.

  ‘Look at that house,’ he says and points up.

  She sees the house high on the hill above the beach, its face turned to meet the sun. It’s a beautiful house, the ground floor is white stone with a redbrick trim at its corners and around the downstairs windows and the front door. The upper half is a steeply pitched roof with three dormer windows at the front and two more at each side and at both ends tall red chimneys. All of the windows are shuttered.

  ‘It looks empty,’ Suzette says.

  ‘Yeah. What a waste.’

  ‘But it’s so beautiful.’

  Later, having called about the housekeeping job and left a message, they dismantle the tent, pack everything in the car and drive back to the now deserted beach. They park a short distance away and, taking only a torch and a couple of useful tools, they make their way to the empty house. The only obstacles are a padlocked gate and a wire fence that is easily scaled. The gravel drive is overgrown with weeds.

  ‘Why would anyone abandon such a house?’

  ‘Someone grew old and died there. Maybe they had no one to leave it to. Or there’s a dispute over the will.’

  As the front door is sealed shut and visible from the road, they sneak around the back of the house which nestles against the hill and is shadowed by overgrown trees. Florian finds a window whose metal shutter has already been half-prised open. With a crowbar from the car he manages to bend it back so that he creates enough space to crawl through.

  ‘Might have to smash the glass,’ he says, but then with the merest tug he manages to open the window. ‘Not even locked.’

  While Suzette holds the torch he climbs through. She hears the soles of his shoes slap the tiled floor as he jumps down.

  ‘Kitchen,’ he says, then whistles in appraisal.

  She follows, passing him the torch, then wriggling through and into his waiting arms.

  ‘Wow!’

  The room is still furnished; there is a table and chairs, a dresser with some crockery, pots on the stove. In the next room there is not so much, brighter squares of wallpaper where pictures once were, a few worn-looking cushions and a large and expensive looking Turkish rug that has been half rolled up as if someone suddenly changed their minds about the merits of taking it.

  ‘Let’s get our stuff,’ Florian says and for the next hour they go to and from the car, Suzette passing stuff up to Florian as he sits on top of the fence either dropping things onto the weeds below or climbing down to deposit them more safely.

  They unfurl the carpet, throw a blanket, then a sheet, then a duvet on it and their bed for the night is made. They put their camping stove on top of the big stove in the kitchen.

  They make love and talk about the onset of winter, of their good luck. The next day they wake to changed weather, a cold wind from the north and gathering clouds that threaten rain.

  They explore the rest of the house, the creaking wooden stairs, the pink bathroom, the three bedrooms, one of them equipped with a narrow single bed, another with a double bed frame but no mattress. Upstairs the smell is dry and dusty like chalk and wood dust and talcum powder mixed together.

  They sneak away from the house by tracing a path through the trees and find that in one corner the fence ends giving easy access to the road. They walk up the steep hill then into the small
town where they buy candles and bread and fresh pastries and vegetables.

  On their way back it begins to rain and the sky grows strangely dark. Distant thunder rumbles as they race towards the house.

  Suzette climbs nimbly through the window and as Florian is passing through the bag of food, someone not very far away, calls out, ‘Hey! Hey you!’

  Florian glances around to see a man standing by the fence and knows the man has seen him too. He scrambles through the window and lands badly, turning one ankle and smashing his knee on the stone floor.

  The thunder is growing louder. Lightning flashes, illuminating the window he has climbed through but only the edges and cracks around all the other windows.

  Florian imagines he hears the man’s voice calling after him again, but what with the torrential rain and the gusting wind and the intermittent thunder he can’t be sure.

  Limping, he struggles to refasten the window, then together he and Suzette lift the scrubbed pine table on its side and put it over the window, then they push the enormous old fridge freezer against the table and stand in the darkness waiting.

  Their ears are deceived when the noise of nature is partly blotted out, and comforted by the closeness of the dark cave of the house, their nearness, their shallow breathing, the faint creak of a floorboard when weight is shifted from one foot to another. Minutes pass. The storm moves away, retreating by degrees, the thunder is muted by distance, the flashes lose their magnesium- bright violence, the rain devolves into a more reasonable patter. No voice continues to call, no animal bays at their door. Nothing now can touch them. They are safe.

  Tiptoeing, they go through to the room they have chosen as their haven. They light the candles, eat the bread and the tomatoes, drink the wine from odd glasses they have found.

  A sudden noise like someone taking a sledgehammer to a huge stone breaks the silence. They each picture some violence done to their sanctuary, uniformed men with battering rams or one man with some ghastly machine, a farmer with a tractor.

  Florian gets up and prowls around the house looking and listening. He goes upstairs and into the bedroom with the empty bed frame. The windows are shut and behind them are metal shutters. But one window, perhaps because it faces the sea and the unadulterated salt-kissed wind has latches and hasps that are so rusted that they bend and break easily. He pulls this window out. The rinsed cold air floods into the room, over his face, the skin of his neck, his hands and arms. Now there is only the metal shutter and he pushes this at one corner where the brick it is fastened to is already crumbling. It pops out and with a push it bends allowing him to see outside.

  ‘Suzette!’ he calls. He is as excited as if he has found treasure.

  She answers with a faltering voice, then runs upstairs to join him.

  ‘Look at this!’ he says.

  She goes to him and bends to peer down through the window and through the triangular space where the metal shutter has buckled away.

  A cool mist falls on her face as she sees the sea directly down below her with only a narrow fringe of vegetation between the footing of the house and the blue-black agitation of the waves.

  ‘You wanted to live by the sea, didn’t you?’ Florian says and touches the back of her neck. When she has tied her hair up, as she has now, he is always surprised by how perfect and slender her neck is. He can never resist touching it.

  She responds by turning from the sea to him. They kiss, tasting salt on one another’s lips.

  ‘Come on, let’s go to bed,’ he says. ‘No one is going to come and evict us at this time of night. By the morning we’ll be gone.’

  Holding hands they went back downstairs, both still wary of invasion and listening for sounds, but by now even the rain had stopped and outside the clouds had parted and dispersed leaving only veils and shreds that drifted across the waning moon.

  They drifted towards sleep in one another’s arms, Suzette hearing what he’d said earlier over and over in her mind, ‘In the morning we’ll be gone.’ It reminded her of that bedtime prayer, ‘If I should die before I wake…’ And ever since she was a child she had often closed her eyes to sleep, half expecting death. You cross yourself in hope of salvation and ask for it before sleep just in case.

  The abandoned house stood on chalky-white limestone cliffs. They gave the area its name, Cote d’albatre or the Alabaster Coast. But the coastline has been retreating at a rate of 20 centimetres a year. Cliffs like these are excellent sites for fossil hunters as what has been hidden for millennia is readily released as landslides, erosion and water seepage gnaw away at the land.

  This was why the beautiful house with the grey slate mansard roof, the flint and brick walls, the gabled dormer windows, was empty.

  Just as Florian predicted, by the morning they were gone.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to those friends who read first drafts of this book: Katy Train, Mark Matthews, Laurel Goss, Deryl Dix, Mark Robinson, Ann George, Tony Graham and Ceri Thomas.

  Thanks are also due to Literature Wales and The Royal Literary Fund for their generous support.

  Many thanks to Penny Thomas at Seren, and to Lizzie Clarke who very kindly posed for the cover image.

  Extract from The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (Basic Books, 1973) with kind permission of the copyright holders.

  Extract from A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE.

  About the Author

  Jo Mazelis is a writer of short stories, non-fiction and poetry. Her collection of stories, Diving Girls, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book and Wales Book of the Year. Her stories and poetry have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, published in anthologies and magazines, and translated into Danish. She worked in London as a graphic designer, photographer and illustrator for City Limits, Women’s Review, Spare Rib, Undercurrents and Everywoman, before returning to her home town, Swansea, where she now lives and writes.

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.serenbooks.com

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  © Jo Mazelis 2014

  ISBN 978-1-78172-187-2 print

  ISBN 978-1-78172-189-6 kindle

  ISBN 978-1-78172-188-9 ebook

  The right of Jo Mazelis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: © Jo Mazelis

  The publisher works with the financial assistance of

  The Welsh Books Council