Mothers

by Chris Power

  A freighter cuts south through the sun-silver water. Her destination lies north: a lighthouse on the headland, squat and brilliantly white. It is perhaps another three kilometres. It’s barely 10 a.m. but the heat is powerful. She is grateful for the wind gusting off the sea. She enjoys the way it snatches at her then just as suddenly lets her go.

  Up close the white masonry of the lighthouse is less immaculate. Tapering stripes of rust run from the iron balustrade around the diamond-paned lantern room. The lantern flashes: two quick bursts every ten seconds. She counts twenty of these, and when she looks away her eyes carry a lurid afterimage. She goes into the dim, windowless gift shop and for a few seconds stands still, unable to see anything. She buys a postcard: an old black-and-white picture of the lighthouse.

  Behind the lighthouse, in a hollow that shelters it from the worst of the wind, is an outdoor cafe. People are sitting in couples, trios and quartets at its trestle tables. She finds an empty table and orders a beer and a plate of squid from a waiter with drooping eyes, like a bloodhound’s. She looks back along the length of her walk and to the north, beyond the cafe, where the Pyrenees end. The sky is a high, greyish blue. There are clouds out to sea. She finishes eating and lights a cigarette. She orders an espresso and takes out her guidebook, a tattered brick that covers all of Europe. It is old – it belonged to her mother – and has grown soft as a phone book from use. The pages are loose, and she has lost several regions in transit. Because of its age it is almost worthless as a source of information: disconnected telephone numbers, inaccurate maps, descriptions of restaurants and bars that closed down long ago. Nevertheless, its contents fascinate Eva. Opening it at random, the way she has done since she was a little girl, she finds herself in the Baltic. It has three gulfs, she reads: Bothnia, Finland and Riga. She looks at the map, the sea light grey, the land dark grey. The sun is at its peak. She lights another cigarette and flips the book’s pages, their movement stirring the silver-grey flakes in the ashtray. She is somewhere in the Carpathians. She is in Provence. She is in Innsbruck. It is one of the pages the book likes to fall open to, as if prompting her. She looks at a black-and-white picture of grand old buildings lining a square festooned with sun umbrellas. Above the square looms a vast wall of wrinkled rock. The mountains are thickly forested on their lower slopes, blank white at their peaks. She feels the cold air gusting off them and blowing through the square, where she sits at a cafe waiting for … This is where her reverie breaks down; she is not sure who, or what, she is waiting for. The caption beneath the picture says: Innsbruck, the sophisticated capital of the Alps. She reads the brief description of the city, only half paying attention to words she has read many times before. Her fingers move across the map of Austria, tracing the thin, crooked lines of its rivers.

  She walks back to Cadaqués by the same route she took to the lighthouse, on dusty trails that wind along the coastal ridges. She measures her pace because of the heat. The trail thins and she moves onto the verge of the winding road, away from the sea and the wind. Pebbles clatter across the tarmac, dislodged by her running shoes. She passes a barren field where breezeblock walls start and end at random, marking out patches of scrub or a few ragged sage bushes – their pepper and lemon scent infuses the still air. A van passes her, white, with a narrow ladder at the back. Its horn sounds, an irritated bleat swallowed by the hot air and the pulse of cicadas. Was that meant for her? She hears the tone of the engine change and she tenses, not wanting the van to stop here on the quiet road, but it is only shifting to a lower gear as the road rises.

  Eva is hungry by the time she gets back. She has a glass of wine and a plate of ham on the shaded terrace of a small seafront bar, but the wine tastes sour and the meat, webbed with fat, sickens her. Her period is due, she thinks; maybe that’s it. As she is leaving the bar a man, sitting alone, stands and inclines his head.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he says. He is English. Handsome, tall, fair, neatly dressed in white polo shirt and blue shorts.

  Eva smiles weakly. She doesn’t want to talk.

  ‘You’re English …?’ the man says. ‘Speak English?’

  ‘Swedish,’ Eva says. ‘But yes, I speak English. I live in England.’

  ‘Right!’ the man says, as if Eva has provided an answer he has long been looking for. ‘Forgive me, I really don’t want to intrude but I’ll regret not asking; would you have dinner with me?’ His eyes flash. He enjoys his boldness, she can tell.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, smiling, ‘that’s nice of you, but I’m with someone.’ She waves her left hand, even though she wears no rings.

  The man smiles and nods, unembarrassed by the rejection. ‘I’m very sorry I disturbed you,’ he says.

  She goes back to her hotel, showers, and sits with her book on the balcony: Moberg’s The Emigrants, which she neglected to read at school and now feels she should know. But the pace is plodding and there is too much description. She drops the book to the tiles and closes her eyes. When she goes inside, the contrast between the bright day and the dim room makes it difficult to navigate. The brown and white bathroom fittings have turned a sickly green and yellow. She lies down on the bed and feels a breeze pass through the balcony doors. It makes the euros curled on her bedside table tremble. She falls asleep.

  Hunger wakes her. The room is dark. She ate dinner at the hotel once before and promised herself she wouldn’t do so again, but the nearest restaurant is a fifteen-minute walk and she is so tired from the hike that she doesn’t want to go further than downstairs. It isn’t only tiredness: part of her is worried about running into her English admirer.

  Eva orders a tuna salad. Everything except the lettuce is tinned. The tuna is grey and heavily dressed with a jelly-like substance that tastes of sugar and margarine. If she hadn’t been so fearful, she chides herself, she could have gone to the supermarket and eaten on the balcony: olives, a pepper, a sausage, a peach. The olives here look like tiny apples. As she tries to cut an artichoke heart it sags and fans out under her knife, its layers parting like the pages of a book. A clear fluid spills from it and spreads across her plate.

  Realising she is hunched low over her meal, Eva uncurls and straightens her back. The light is low and yellowy, and her reflection in the window is murky: her skin is grey, her eyes pools of soot. She is sitting stiffly upright, clutching her knife and fork like weapons. The room around her is spectral. At the table beside her, drab and indistinct, she sees a couple. Are they staring at her? She hears a whisper and laughter and turns away from the window to look at them. They are young, twenty-somethings. Both tall, both slim. She hasn’t seen them at breakfast or around the pool. The woman, her back to Eva, is wearing a bikini top, and the paleness of her skin suggests they are newly arrived. She hears snatches of their conversation: ‘the woman … the woman … that woman …’ It’s her they mean. The young man laughs, but when his eyes meet Eva’s he stops. They are laughing at her dusty trainers and her tired leggings, at her top that gathers at the belly and her puffy eyes and table for one. Why are the tables so close together? She could reach out and pull the woman’s blonde hair, yank her down across the table and drag her fork across that long, white back. Or she could use it on herself. Go up to her room, draw a bath, numb her arms and puncture the white skin of her wrists. White as that back. White as the belly of a fish. Caught between her neighbours and her reflection, Eva looks down at the table. I don’t fucking care what they think, she tells herself. Don’t fucking care. Don’t. Fucking. Care. She stares at the remains of her salad: brown artichoke, grey tuna, white lettuce stems. When the waiter comes to take it away she waves him off. Until the couple beside her are gone she will not move. She remains in her chair as if turned to stone.

  *

  Shut off from the rest of Yugoslavia by the rugged Dinaric Alps, the Dalmatian coast is notable for its large number of islands, coves and channels. The waters of the Adriatic are warm, salty and mostly shallow, with a maximum depth of 1000 metres. The coastline’s climat
e is Mediterranean. The soil is generally poor, but olives and grapes flourish.

  Earlier that summer Eva had flown from London to Zagreb, then taken a train to Split. In Split she caught a bus that travelled along the coast road to Dubrovnik. A couple of hours into the journey the bus passed briefly into Bosnia, and Eva held out her passport for inspection by a border guard who didn’t even look at it, just walked up and down the aisle and sent them on their way with a tired wave.

  The last light was leaving the sky as the bus pulled into Dubrovnik. Stepping down onto the tarmac Eva saw a red digital display hanging from the bus terminal’s canopy. It alternated between time and temperature: 21:30, 21ºC. The place was swarming, and saturated in a fluorescence that gave everything too much definition. Waiting in the heat and fumes for the driver to open the luggage hatches, Eva felt everything drop away from her, a sensation like a plane hitting an air pocket. The busy scene around her evaporated into uninterrupted white, and the sound of voices, engines and announcements dwindled to a hiss. She floated queasily, submersed. Then, as if propelled to the surface, it all rushed back at her: the world returned. She fell back and sat heavily on the kerb. She watched the driver scrambling around inside the luggage hold, yanking out the last few bags. His trousers had sagged. She read the words GOOD MAN repeating around the elastic band of his underwear.

  The small tourist information office in the terminal was closed. Eva found a bench and pulled out her guidebook. She felt self-conscious, as if everyone walking past could see how indecisive she was being. On the bus journey she had circled some Old Town hotels on her map of the city, despite it being thirty years out of date. But whether they still existed or not she wanted to be somewhere quickly, right away, to shut out the lights and sleep for as long as she could. The thought of a taxi was intolerable. She found a listing for a hotel a short walk away, on Gruž Harbour. Standing in the overlit lobby she didn’t pay attention to the price, just handed the receptionist her card.

  The next morning, feeling stupid about her strange panic, she checked out and moved to a small hotel in the Old Town. In the afternoon she wandered the streets, unable to resist sliding her sandalled feet over their extraordinarily smooth flagstones. It was the way she had often walked when she was a child. ‘Pick up your feet, Eva,’ she heard her mum telling her.

  Everywhere she went she seemed to be surrounded by tour groups, all following guides holding little flags with the name of their cruise ship on it. She made a game of avoiding them but she couldn’t win, they were everywhere. That night, at a crowded outdoor bar on the fringe of rocks between the city walls and the sea, she met Josip.

  ‘I buy you a drink?’ he asked, and Eva said yes, she’d have a beer. Getting ready to go out she had pretended she was going to find somewhere low-key where she could have a drink and sit and read her book, but she had really wanted a place like this, with music and a young crowd. She had left the book in her room.

  They spoke about the most basic things – what Dubrovnik was like, what London was like – but they made each other laugh. He looked like he was in his twenties, and Eva thought he might be ten or even fifteen years younger than her, but she didn’t care.

  ‘Dubrovnik is …’ he said, pausing the way he often did midway through his sentence, carefully evaluating what to say next in a way Eva liked, ‘… is beautiful of course. But the life, the tourists. It doesn’t always feel like a … real city.’

  A cruise ship was leaving port, its hundreds of cabins lit gold. A few people around them catcalled. ‘Tourists,’ Eva said with disgust, giving the ship the finger. She laughed. She was drinking her third bottle of beer.

  ‘They are leaving. That’s good,’ Josip said. There was a pause. ‘Shall we leave, too?’

  Standing alone in Josip’s kitchen, restless with alcohol, Eva looked at his fridge door. A magnet in the shape of a bird clutched a postcard in its claws. On the postcard was a photograph of a church on a square with a fountain and arches. One side of the square was lined with brightly coloured houses. She plucked it from the bird’s grip and turned it over. On the back there was scratchy handwriting in English:

  Josip, I think of you. I am in Slovakia now wearing rain coat picking chestnuts. Markéta x

  The legend on the card said ‘Poprad, Slovensko’. Eva put it back and heard the toilet flush. Josip came into the kitchen, his face grave.

  ‘You would like a beer?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  In bed, the darkness cut by a yellow stripe of streetlight falling through the shutters, Josip moved above her. She thought she could hear rain outside, but when she turned her head the noise stopped. She moved her hands from Josip’s chest and gripped his hips and pushed him away.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Josip said, panting. He pressed against her hands a little, forcing her elbows down into the mattress. She pushed against him more firmly and squirmed towards the wall at the head of the bed, dragging him out of her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He told her it didn’t matter. They lay in the dark not speaking. Then he asked her if she would like him to take her to Mljet. ‘It is somewhere you would like to see.’

  She thought he was sweet to ask, and that in the morning he would make an excuse and they would never see each other again.

  *

  North of Galway begins the vast, desolate landscape of Connemara, scoured by ice and strewn with rock.

  Earlier that year, at the beginning of spring, she had rented a small cottage outside Clifden, in Connemara. Standing in the lee of a large hill, its back turned to the sea, the cottage looked over sloping fields divided by high stone walls. The bogs were humped with moss and heather and bedraggled sedges. Everything was dull, grey and green and brown, except for occasional sprays of yellow wildflowers that hung above the ground in little galaxies.

  It rained all week, so hard that the mountains were never more than dark smears on the horizon. The firewood got wet. Rather than call the owner, whose phone number was printed on a laminated sheet of paper taped to the kitchen countertop, Eva spent most of the week mummified in blankets. A shivering mass, she paced the cottage’s small rooms when she could no longer sit still. She jumped on the spot until she was breathless and warm. Sitting in a large, lumpy armchair she read novels from the cottage’s collection: Ian Rankin, John Buchan, Pat Barker. She read them all at once, switching between them whenever she felt like a change. Characters and events slipped from one book into another, creating a new, incoherent but exciting story. She didn’t cook, only drank mug after mug of tomato soup with buttered white bread.

  At last one morning the rain stopped and a lance of sun pierced the front of the house. Light spilled down the hillside. Eva pulled on walking boots, tied a jumper around her waist and almost ran from the house. The beach was no distance. She marched over the springy, uneven ground. The sedges brushed her jeans, leaving dark slashes. The rain resumed, sudden as a tap, and Eva’s stride became a trudge. She passed a line of sodden, defeated hazels. Rocks and seaweed lay scattered on the beach. Water bubbled up around her footsteps in the sand. The beach was on an inlet, and on the opposite shore two white ponies stood on the hillside, motionless in the rain. Their manes hung in lank corkscrews.

  She turned a circle on the shore. On a nearby hill she saw some kind of monument, a black wing pointing at the sky. She saw the rise that hid her cottage. Little mouths opened and closed on the surface of the water, the rain falling into them. The sand darkened. She could just walk in. The thought, small and simple, arrived like a bird alighting on a branch. She turned and walked quickly back to the cottage.

  In the living room, wrapped in towels, she looked at a framed photograph of the peat bogs in summer. The land was scored with dark lines where the turf had been cut. The harvested sods lay beside the trenches in small black stooks, drying in the sun. She thought of the coldness of the water, and gripped the towels more tightly around her.

  The next day a c
at scratched at her door and she fed it tuna from a can she found at the back of a cupboard. It stayed. They ate together and stared out of the window. She read from her guide to Europe, and the cat dragged its cheek along the corner of the book’s spine. She fell asleep with the book in her lap and woke up in the thick-shadowed dusk, overwarm and confused. At night there was a light pressure at her back, and she felt as much as heard the rich thrum of the cat’s purr. After three days it disappeared. Outside the windows the rain stood in solid silver walls.

  *

  Away from the shore, the warren of backstreets provides interesting options for more discerning diners.

  It is on one of the steep, undulating streets away from the seafront that Eva sees him again, the man who asked her to dinner. The narrow, shadowy street is residential; there is no helpful shop to slip into.

  He holds up a hand in greeting as they near one another. He is wearing the same clothes as before but in different colours: grey polo, white shorts.

  ‘Hello.’ Eva smiles, not intending to stop, but the man moves into her path.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, sounding casual. ‘I just wanted to say something. You mind?’

  She shakes her head. An overweight Spanish woman in black skirt and shirt seesaws past, a squeaking yellow bucket in her hand.

  ‘I’ve seen you wandering all around here,’ the man says, smiling in a way that suggests bemusement rather than happiness. ‘I know you aren’t with anyone. Look, that sounds …’ He holds his hands up, palms out. ‘I have no problem with you not wanting to have dinner with me, but I asked politely and I would have appreciated an honest answer.’

  She wants to close her eyes and wish him away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It was rude of me. I’ve been unwell. I am unwell.’ She is surprised to hear herself say the words.