Mothers

by Chris Power

  ‘You say that, Liam,’ said Cameron, ‘and it would be great if you did, but you’ll probably end up doing something … less productive. Come to Nice. Get me back whenever.’

  Liam saw himself beside the water with Miguel, under an empty blue sky. They were the only two people on the beach. He handed Cameron a plate. ‘Eat your noodles,’ he said.

  *

  On their second night in Nice they went out with a big group of Miguel’s workmates: Americans, Belgians, Germans, Slovakians. By midnight everyone was very drunk. At the last bar, Moby Dick’s, rounds of shots were ordered. Liam felt the alcohol charging through him. Miguel raised a pack of cigarettes in his direction and tilted his head towards the door. They went outside. It was the first time they had been alone that weekend. They stood away from the other smokers, a little way down the otherwise quiet side street.

  ‘So I wanted to email you,’ Liam said, ‘but I didn’t know if I should, or if you’d want me to.’

  Miguel looked past Liam, back to the bar. He balled his hand into a fist, raised it to his head and knocked it against his temple, then grasped Liam’s arm and pulled. They jogged down the street, their shoulders bumping. Liam looked at Miguel, but Miguel only looked ahead. A pace behind Miguel, Liam crossed the broad, empty road that followed the seafront. They climbed over the promenade railings and dropped down onto the pebbles. The streetlights illuminated a band of the empty beach, and beyond it Liam saw a ragged white line where small waves were breaking. At the base of the promenade wall, where they stood, no light fell. Miguel turned Liam around and pushed him up against the wall, its stone sharp against his chest. Miguel’s hands worked urgently, popping open the buttons of Liam’s jeans. He tugged them down roughly. He used his foot to push Liam’s legs apart, and yanked his hips backwards. Liam felt a sharp, hot pain and pressed his palms against the stone. He cried out and pulled away, shaking his head. Miguel turned him around, knelt in the sand and took him in his mouth. Liam stood frozen in the wall’s dense shadow, the hiss of the sea before him and cars sweeping past on the road above. It had never felt like this. He knew he would never forget the way it felt.

  *

  Liam wrote to Miguel after Nice, cutting and pasting his address from a group email, but there was no reply. A month later, Cameron told him Miguel and Nuria were getting married. Liam saw Miguel once more after the wedding announcement, after Nuria contacted him to suggest a surprise trip to Berlin for Cameron’s birthday.

  At a club that had once been a power plant, Liam and Miguel wandered off separately then found each other again. They hid themselves in the corner of a dark side room. Miguel was fast, rough. He pressed Liam against the wall and pushed himself inside him. Liam moaned loudly, unable to stay silent. The pain of it, excruciating at first, was swallowed by something larger: a numbness that grew into a boiling joy. He felt Miguel’s hands on him. He felt the wall’s cool brick under his hands. Afterwards they kissed, Liam angling his face down towards Miguel’s.

  ‘I really like you,’ Liam whispered into Miguel’s ear. Miguel smiled and pressed his palms against Liam’s face.

  ‘You are a good guy,’ Miguel said, butting his forehead against Liam’s.

  Liam had planned to ask Miguel about the wedding, if it was what he really wanted, but at that moment it was the last thing he wanted to talk about.

  *

  After Berlin Liam emailed Miguel a second time, a couple of lines saying how much he had enjoyed it, and that he wanted to talk. Maybe Skype? Nothing came back. As the date of the wedding approached Liam wondered if he should go, the thought of it filling him with fear and eagerness. It must mean something, he thought, that he had been invited at all. Sick of trying and failing to not think about Miguel, Liam headed for Soho on a mild midsummer night with the intention of going with another man. Alone on the upper deck, as the bus jounced over potholes, he let himself imagine this was the first night of a new life. Before Miguel there had been nothing like this, but maybe he had always wanted it.

  He walked into the first place he came to on Old Compton Street and sat at the bar with a drink. To his surprise, it wasn’t long before someone was talking to him. Posh. Blond. Handsome. He said his name was William. ‘Or Will, if you like.’

  ‘The best Will in the world,’ Liam said. He was nervous and knew he sounded foolish, but Will laughed – surprising Liam again – and after that the conversation was easy: jobs; music; travel; food. They had another drink, then another. Will asked Liam if he wanted to get some fresh air.

  They walked up Greek Street, past tides of smokers washed from the bars and restaurants. At the top of the street Soho Square lay in darkness, hemmed in by partly lit buildings. Will gripped Liam’s shoulder.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ he said. ‘I know where we can squeeze through.’

  Liam nodded. His mouth was too dry to speak. The light from the nearest lamp post fell at an angle and cut Will’s face in two, silver and black. They walked along the narrow pavement between parked cars and the spiked railings that ran around the square. At one corner, in a patch of shadow, a single railing was bent in a shallow V. It looked like a raised eyebrow, which made Liam smile. Will slipped through the fence and he followed.

  In the darkness Liam focused on Will’s blond hair, its faint glow like a clouded moon. What was happening, what was about to happen, seemed unreal. They stopped. Will turned, smiled, said, ‘Come here,’ and cupped Liam’s jaw in his hands. His tongue was hot, large, searching. It pushed, hard, to the back of Liam’s mouth. Liam’s tongue answered, pushing back, but Will’s did not give. Will moved his hand to Liam’s groin and, finding no erection, started rubbing the heel of his hand up and down, up and down. Liam pulled his head back and Will followed, laughing lightly, keeping his mouth locked onto Liam’s. With Miguel it was like they adhered to one another, but his body and Will’s were at war. Will’s tongue filled Liam’s mouth greedily, sloppily. There was too much of him. He took Will’s shoulders and pushed. He backed off and Will reached for him, but Liam knocked his hand away.

  ‘Fucking cock tease.’

  Liam stopped going out after that. It wasn’t because he had spent all his money on a ticket for Mexico – he could always run up more debt. But after his encounter with Will an old feeling returned: a curtain that separated him from the rest of the world.

  Cameron noticed the change. ‘I don’t like you spending so much time alone,’ he said one night, after coming home to find Liam asleep with a scatter of beer cans around him, his body slid halfway off the couch. ‘You want some shifts at my place?’ Cameron managed a venue that hosted corporate events.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Liam said, dazed from beer and sleep, ‘this is my me-time.’

  Liam had a job, at a second-hand bookshop five minutes from the flat, that made few demands of him. He was having his first drink earlier and earlier in the day. He had made an attempt to write, but didn’t get further than opening the Word document, last modified two years earlier, and scanning it for five minutes before closing it again. In his memory there had been more, and it had been better.

  A month before the wedding he broke his self-imposed ban and went on Nuria’s Facebook page looking for pictures of Miguel. He saw him beside Nuria, standing in front of a table filled with gifts. Miguel’s right arm ran around Nuria’s back, his hand cupping her hip, her hand resting on his. His left hand was placed delicately on her waist. Liam scrolled down further, past pictures of Nuria hugging her friends, news stories, cartoons, quotations, GIFs. He scrolled faster then stopped, moved back up the page. Here was Miguel standing in the ocean, white garlands of foam around his shins. He was wearing cut-off jeans and his brown belly was taut, his hands stretched up over his head. Liam felt the stone of the promenade wall against his chest. The angle at which the picture had been taken made it look like Miguel was holding the sun’s white, blurred circle between his hands. By the time Liam arrived in Mexico it would be more than a year since Berlin. Nothing will
happen, he told himself. Something will happen.

  *

  Because Miguel and Nuria had friends coming from so far away – from Europe, South America, the US – they had planned a week of activities leading up to the wedding. The first of these was getting together all the overseas guests, and some of Nuria’s oldest friends from Mexico City, at a rented villa in Acapulco.

  When Liam and Cameron left London there had been ice on the ground, but here the temperature was in the mid-twenties. On the beach, his back to the ocean, Liam looked at the white hotel towers and apartment blocks standing along the shoreline. He was drinking a mixture of beer, spiced tomato juice and clam broth that had been recommended to him by a couple of Nuria’s friends as the best thing for a hangover. People lay scattered on loungers beneath a mushroom-like cluster of sunshades, one or two making occasional trips to the water. The previous night had been long and loud, and although Liam had been last to bed, in the blue light of dawn, he was sure some other people must feel as bad as he did.

  They had been at a club on a cliff above the city. At some point Cameron had talked Nuria into teaching Liam to dance. ‘He doesn’t want to,’ she said, smiling and shaking her head, but Cameron kept insisting until she stood and held her hand out above the drinks crowding the table.

  ‘You have to move these,’ Nuria shouted above the stamping beat, rotating Liam’s rigid hips with her hands. The club was busy but the dancefloor was sparsely populated, and Liam felt embarrassed by this public lesson. Nuria took his hands, put them on her hips and rested her wrists on his shoulders. She undulated casually and her straight black hair swung behind her. She stared at his waist and smiled at what she saw. A few men danced closer, looking at Nuria. Liam thought of her moving like this with Miguel, and the thought brought Miguel closer to him. He wanted Nuria to look at him the way she looked at Miguel, to be able, for a moment, to see what Miguel saw. His hand on Nuria’s hip made him think of the photograph he’d seen, of Miguel’s hand cupping it. He tightened his grip on Nuria’s hips and tried to make the same flowing movements with his own. It was like fucking, the way she was moving. ‘Good,’ she said, but when he looked up her expression – although it was hard to be sure as the lights flickered across her face – seemed taunting. He couldn’t move the way she moved, and he laughed to distract her from his staccato thrusting. She pulled him close, her fingernails digging painfully into his neck. ‘You have to let go,’ she said.

  Liam pulled away, shrugging an apology. ‘English hips!’ he shouted above the music, backing off the dance-floor. Nuria flicked her hand dismissively and continued to dance. Liam touched his neck, feeling the indentations left by her nails. Then Cameron cannoned into him, a bottle of tequila in his hand, and he didn’t remember a lot after that.

  On their last day in Acapulco they took a trip on a glass-bottomed cruise boat. They crossed the bay, and at the foot of a cliff the engines were cut. Everyone crowded onto the top deck to watch a cliff diver. Only Liam stayed below. He hoped Miguel would notice and take the opportunity to join him; since he had arrived they had only exchanged a few pleasantries. Liam, hungover again, his mouth gritty and his head throbbing queasily, listened to the guide’s loud voice, distorted by the boat’s tannoy. The man repeated the words ‘Click-click camera’ over and over, like a prayer.

  Because of the narrow view available from the lower deck Liam couldn’t see the diver, only a sandy strip of cliff with green waves curling at its base. After what seemed like a long time he heard cheers and saw a small splash, followed by a bigger cheer. He saw the diver in the water, waving at the boat. He saw Miguel coming down to the lower deck and he tensed in anticipation, then saw someone else behind him. Nuria. ‘Here you are,’ she said, sitting down beside Liam. Miguel waved vaguely and sat on her far side. ‘How come you’re not upstairs?’

  ‘I burn,’ Liam said, lifting and shaking his milk-white forearm.

  ‘But your brother is up there.’

  ‘He got all the good genes,’ Liam said. He laughed, too loudly and for too long. Embarrassed, he cleared his throat and rubbed his face.

  ‘This isn’t the real place for cliff diving, anyway,’ Nuria said. ‘That happens around the bay. La Quebrada. They dive at night with torches; they look like falling stars. It’s super-touristic, but I think it’s impressive, anyway.’

  Liam nodded, and then Nuria placed her hand on his arm, gently but firmly, as if she were consoling him. Her hand radiated warmth. He smiled at her and looked past her at Miguel, who was flicking something from his shorts. Water slapped against the hull. Liam expected someone to say something, but no one did. The engines sputtered to life. People began to drift down to the lower deck, and Nuria stood to answer someone’s question about what was going to happen next.

  Further out, where the bay opened into the ocean, the boat stopped again above a statue on the seabed. ‘The Holy Virgin of Guadeloupe,’ the guide intoned piously, his amplified voice crackling. Everyone crowded around the boat’s glass bottom. It took Liam some time to work out what he was seeing in the cloudy turquoise water. A few metres down a woman stood on a weed-covered rock with her hands joined in prayer. Her upturned stone face was spattered with moss and clams. Her eyes were blank. The weeds waved slowly at her feet. If he was down there with her, Liam wondered, would the noise from this crowded boat reach him? She looked so lonely. A squadron of small silver fish sped to a halt beside her, paused, shot away. There had been a statue of Mary, Liam remembered, at his family’s parish church when he was a child. Our Lady, they called her. Throughout the service, whichever pew he was fidgeting on that week, Liam always found his gaze being dragged back to her. She wore a blue cowl over a white robe, and her face was infinitely kind. She held one of her hands down by her hip, palm upward, and the other was raised at shoulder height, two fingers together as if she was holding an invisible cigarette. To her left, on the wall behind the altar, hung Jesus, his skin torn and his eyes rolled back in an agony that looked, the closer Liam got to sixteen and the announcement of his atheism, increasingly orgasmic. He felt again the hot surge of Miguel inside him, and the rough brick catching on his hands.

  *

  Liam and Cameron spent the days before the wedding in Mexico City. They stayed in Zona Rosa, Nuria and Miguel’s neighbourhood, at the cheapest hostel they could find. One night Nuria’s family held something called a posada at their house, a little way out of the city centre. ‘We sing songs about Joseph and Mary coming to Bethlehem,’ she explained. ‘We eat a lot, drink a lot.’ The garden was strung with lights, and a large cabana set with tables of food and drink. Nuria’s parents gave a short welcome speech to their guests, including some sentences in English for the non-Spanish speakers. They were glamorous, her father tall and thin with a silver moustache, her mother big-featured: large lips, a prominent nose. The man and woman beside them, Liam realised, must be Miguel’s parents. They were short and overweight, and beside the elegance of their hosts their clothes looked cheap.

  The day had been warm but the nights were very cold, near freezing, and many of the guests clutched hot mugs of chocolate. Liam approached a table filled with bottles and poured a large measure of whiskey into his. After the singing, led enthusiastically by Nuria’s mother, a piñata in the shape of a star was brought into the garden. One of Nuria’s brothers scrambled onto a flat roof to hold one end of the rope it hung from, while the other used a tree branch as a pulley. Nuria went first. Blindfolded, she held the pole above her head like a samurai. She stepped forwards and backwards as the piñata dangled just above her, her head twitching as if in response to its movements. She raised one leg, karate style, but as everyone laughed at her clowning she struck, too quickly for her brothers to jerk the piñata away. Her blow tore through the papier-mâché, and sweets and toys and what looked like scratch cards gushed from the smashed star. Everyone cheered. Nuria laughed as she lifted her blindfold and held the pole in the air in triumph. The prizes glimmered at her feet.

&n
bsp; Later, when he saw Miguel leaving, Liam followed him onto the dark driveway at the front of the house. He knew Nuria was staying with her parents until the wedding, and that Miguel was alone in their apartment. Here, as in Acapulco, Miguel had barely spoken a word to him. As the security light above the garage flicked on, frosting the driveway white, Liam called his name.

  Miguel stopped, turned.

  ‘You’re going to have to talk to me some time,’ Liam said.

  Miguel smiled, not unkindly. ‘No I am not, Liam,’ he said, and turned and walked into the darkness.

  After everyone else had gone, Nuria and Cameron stayed up late, sitting in the cold drinking vodka and retelling old stories. Nuria, a thick blanket over her legs, had her feet in Cameron’s lap. Liam was relieved when she suggested he go inside and find a couch to sleep on.

  He was woken the next morning by Nuria’s parents leaving the house: he heard them talking to her in the hallway. Her mother said something that made everyone laugh. Liam showered and found Cameron in the kitchen where the maid, a young woman called Xoco, fried them quesadillas for breakfast. Nuria said Xoco wanted to practise her English, but when Liam said, ‘Hello Xoco, how are you?’ she only smiled at her shoes and shook her head.

  A book about Aztecs lay on the kitchen table, and Liam flipped its pages as he ate. He saw photographs of stone serpents, ruined pyramids and blocky humanoid statues whose faces expressed pain and fury. He stopped at a picture of a brightly painted stone disc. Carved into the stone in low relief was the dismembered corpse of a woman, white bone jutting from her severed legs.

  After breakfast Cameron went back to bed, and Liam and Nuria sat in the sunny garden. The family’s beagle, Helecho, snarled and convulsed on the grass. He writhed on his back, the top of his head pressed into the ground; his eyes rolled and his paws hung limply in the air.