Mothers

by Chris Power

  ‘I’m sorry. What’s wrong?’

  At this new impertinence Eva, whose eyes had dropped to the cobbles at her feet, looks up. Anger sparks inside her. ‘It’s personal. I don’t want to talk about it.’ After she has spoken she feels, for just a moment, that he will hit her.

  He flaps his hand as if batting a fly. ‘You’re rude,’ he says, and walks past her.

  She takes a few steps in the opposite direction before she stops and turns. ‘You have no right!’ she shouts after him. ‘I am unwell!’

  He doesn’t turn, only makes a mouth of one hand and opens and closes it.

  ‘You have no fucking right,’ she says, but not loud enough for him to hear. Looking around, she sees a cobble dislodged from its bed. She reaches for it, pulls back her arm and hurls it at the man. It lands beside him and skitters down the street. He turns, incredulous. ‘You’re a fucking madwoman!’ he shouts. He steps towards her and stops. He turns, first to his right then to his left, flexing his hands into fists then blades, fists then blades. Eva cannot move. Her breath is fast and thin. If he comes closer, she thinks, I need to run.

  She turns and walks, the adrenaline making her feet stutter against the cobbles. She knows she will replay this encounter for days, for weeks. She turns into an alleyway that heads steeply downhill. A cat with matted fur and a chewed ear slides past her with a wary flick of its head. She must escape the tangle of these small streets. She must reach the sea.

  *

  Extensively rebuilt following the heavy bombing it suffered during World War Two, Le Havre has struggled to return to its position among France’s main cargo ports. The city remains busy with ferry traffic to Britain and Ireland, however, and it is worth some exploration, if only on the way to somewhere else.

  As soon as she returned from Ireland, Eva made plans to go away again. She didn’t want to be in her flat, which still felt like a temporary residence two years after she moved in. Half of her things were still in boxes. She had moved around after she left Sweden: France, Milan, a suburb of Washington DC. She has been in London for the last ten years, not because she likes it more than anywhere else but because it was where inertia set in. More and more often, though, she found she didn’t want to be walking its familiar, dreary streets. She had a two-week booking at an advertising agency in Hammersmith, a job she virtually slept through. She worked with her headphones on, and communicated as much as she could get away with by email. The work, retouching photographs for a series of brochures, was simple, but what she supplied was barely satisfactory and she knew they wouldn’t use her again.

  The day she finished, a Wednesday, she got on a train at Waterloo and took an overnight ferry across a flat Channel from Portsmouth to Le Havre. When she arrived her hotel room wasn’t ready, so she left her luggage and said she’d be back in the afternoon. She stopped at a cafe for coffee and a pastry. It was years since she had been in France, the first place she had gone when she left Sweden for good. She had worked as a waitress in a hotel outside Poitiers. It had been a strange time, not least because she didn’t know the language very well. She made one real friend, a sous-chef called Denis. He had no Swedish and very little English, but they both loved the Cure and when all else failed they would recite song titles back and forth: ‘All Cats Are Grey’, ‘Sinking’, ‘Three Imaginary Boys’. They liked the saddest songs best. Denis was a few years older, with a wife and young son. They had promised to keep in touch but their letters had petered out. She hadn’t thought about him for a long time. Did he remember her?

  In the enormous space of Avenue Foch trams and a stream of cars moved past. Long modernist blocks loomed. There were few pedestrians. The sky was whitegrey and a cold breeze came from the sea, which lay at the end of the avenue. Standing at a crossing her eyes filled with tears, so completely that for an instant she couldn’t see. Spasms hit her body. She wanted to wipe the tears out of her eyes, but couldn’t lift her arms. There had been episodes like this after her mum died. The sensation, so long forgotten, was instantly familiar. She felt ridiculous, but she couldn’t move. She was a tree in the wind, powerless to do anything but endure. Another spasm went through her and she thought she might be sick. She heard a voice and lifted her head towards the sound.

  Her vision began to make sense again. She saw her own face, stricken and doubled: her reflection in the lenses of a large pair of sunglasses worn by a middle-aged woman in a long black coat. ‘Est-ce que vous vous sentez bien?’ The woman’s mouth was a rich red, small and cruel, but her voice was consoling. She reached out and held Eva’s wrist. ‘You speak English?’ she said. ‘You are OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eva said and smiled even as another sob came out of her. The woman drew a tissue from her handbag. Eva nodded thanks. She blew her nose and took a deep breath. It had passed. Its ferocity had scared her. She asked the woman if there was a church nearby. She needed quiet.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘Turn left, walk straight. Saint-Joseph. You will see it. It is …’ She held her hands diagonally apart to show the scale, but to Eva it looked, also, as if she were asking for a skewed hug. The gesture was childlike, at odds with her severe appearance.

  ‘Thank you,’ Eva said. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

  ‘You are welcome,’ the woman said slowly, gravely nodding her head and stiffening her body, as if she might salute.

  Saint-Joseph was concrete and immense. Its blocky edifice supported an octagonal spire that looked more like a scale model of a skyscraper than a church tower. The vast interior was as hushed as Eva had hoped. It was, perhaps, even empty: she couldn’t see anyone else. The noise of the street outside was very faint. Massive, undressed concrete pillars rose in groups of four, lashed together by horizontal crosses. Spotlights blanched the grey pillars yellow-white. There weren’t any pews, just rows of theatre-like seats upholstered in cream fabric. Eva found the empty chairs eerie in their blankness. She preferred to look at the church’s windows, fitted with thousands of small panes of stained glass: blue, yellow, orange and green, although on that sunless day the panes were dull, dead. Eva walked around a railing that separated the altar from the congregation and stood beneath the octagonal tower. She didn’t know what she was doing there. She didn’t know what she was doing in France.

  ‘What am I doing in France?’ she said out loud. She repeated it, then repeated it again, placing the stress on different words in turn. ‘What am I doing in France? What am I doing in France? What am I doing in France?’ She asked herself once more and felt the ground quiver. She fell back against the railing and lifted her head. The tower’s uniform sections of concrete and glass sped away from her, their diminishing perspective pulling her eye towards what looked like a black aperture at its apex. This is what a bullet must feel like, she thought, just before it gets shot from the barrel.

  Eva went back to the hotel and told the manager she wouldn’t need the room.

  ‘You stay somewhere else?’ He sounded jealous.

  ‘I have to leave,’ she said. ‘I have to go home.’

  ‘But you are only arrived.’

  ‘Yes. I have to leave today.’

  On the late-afternoon ferry Eva stood on deck and looked back at the city through a soft but very cold rain. She saw a shining light and realised, as the ferry began lurching across bigger waves, that she was looking at the spire of Saint-Joseph. The cross, thrust high above the city, shone out. She continued to stare, no longer seeing. The next time she noticed what she was looking at, there was only the churning sea.

  She remembered that crossing on the catamaran to Mljet. Josip had surprised her by honouring his promise. She tried to explain what happened the night before, but he lifted his hand to indicate that she didn’t need to. Their legs were touching, and shook lightly with the engine’s vibration. Of all the Adriatic islands, Eva read in her guidebook, Mljet might be the most seductive. From the harbour they took a taxi, and Josip showed her the cave where Calypso kept Odysseus, broken ground sloping down to it. A
lone, close to the cave’s mouth, Josip stood behind Eva and pressed his erection against her back. She leaned back slightly, and his arms snaked around her. He cupped her breasts and squeezed. She squirmed and he continued to press, until finally they were dropped into a sort of crouch, like skiers. His wrists were in her armpits, and his elbows pressed into the top of her tensed thighs. The sea stretched out in front of her. His shallow breaths were sour with tobacco.

  ‘Let’s go closer,’ she said.

  He straightened up immediately and stepped away from her. He seemed angry. ‘Come,’ he said, as if ending a dispute, ‘I will show you.’

  That night they ate at an open-air trattoria, sitting on a stone terrace set with white plastic chairs and tables. Eva’s hunger was enormous. She drank a carafe of white wine – Mljet wine, Josip told her with pride as he filled her glass – and started another before their food arrived. She called for schnapps when their main courses came. ‘To our meeting!’ she said, cracking her glass against his. She tried to teach him ‘Helan Går’, a drinking song, but he couldn’t follow the words. With her coffee she drank an oily, abrasive grappa.

  There was a dancefloor below the terrace, and a band playing folk songs and pop. Josip stared at her intently as they danced. He looked as if he wanted to scold her and was searching for the words to express his anger. Because of what happened at the cave? Let him stew, Eva thought. She was determined to have fun tonight. She was surprised at how lightly he moved. He became less angular when he danced. He moved his hips. She wanted to have sex with him. She pictured the scene from the afternoon as if she had been someone else standing at the cave’s mouth, watching them fuck: she half-crouching, he behind her with brow creased, the same furious look on his face as now, pressing himself further and further inside her.

  The dancefloor had filled. Turning her back, Eva danced into Josip. She pulled his arms around her waist. She ground against him and lifted his hands towards her breasts, but when he realised what she was doing he resisted, and she couldn’t move them any more. The music’s tempo increased and her movements grew wilder. She collided with other dancers. She piled her hair on top of her head and left her hands buried in it as she thrashed her head from side to side. She ground against him more firmly still and colours sprayed across her closed eyes as the band played louder, faster. The accordion reminded her of fairgrounds. The sound of it made her feel sick.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ she said.

  Back from the dancefloor stood a grove of tall pines. White chairs, scattered in twos and threes between the trees, almost glowed in the night. The darkness throbbed with the din of cicadas. Eva could smell the trees, their needles soft beneath her sandals. She sat down, and felt a layer of gritty dust against her legs. Josip lit a cigarette.

  ‘Can I have one of those?’ she said. He pulled the packet from his shirt pocket and pushed up the lid with his thumb. She hadn’t smoked in many years and the flavour brought back the first time she tried, in a schoolfriend’s garden shed. The shed had smelled of creosote, motor oil and pine resin. The smoke made her lightheaded. Her queasiness gone, she stretched with pleasure. Her eyes were getting used to the dark, and the trees’ bark seemed to shine. It was patterned: grey scales, dagger-shaped, repeated over and over, with darker channels between them. She reached out and gripped one of the scales. The wood was soft, and came off the tree very easily. ‘Why do you look like that when you dance?’ she asked, waving the piece of bark slowly like a fan.

  ‘Look like what?’ Josip said.

  ‘Angry,’ she said.

  ‘I look angry?’

  ‘Yes. Like—’ She pulled a face like his, only more grotesque: brows low and lips in a tight pout.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like that. I just did it.’ It was too dark for him to see, of course. She could only make out the shifting glint of his eyes.

  ‘When I dance I concentrate,’ he said. ‘Dancing is not easy.’

  ‘What else do you do that requires such concentration?’ She heard her words slur. He was silent. This wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be playful, and for Josip to be playful in response, and for this lightness to be effortless and to last and last, but he was silent. She threw the bark at him and it hit his chin and fell onto his chest. He left it there and didn’t say anything. ‘Then you say …’ she prompted, smiling. He was silent. The band was playing something slow now, and deeper in the darkness, above the insect hiss, a man’s voice spoke sharply. He spoke for a long time, and when he finally stopped there was no reply.

  *

  The village follows the line of a half-dozen small coves. At points along the street beside the water’s edge there is no railing, so watch your step.

  It is Eva’s last day in Cadaqués. She wakes early and takes a pastry and coffee onto the hotel terrace. It is shaded at this hour, and the chairs and tables are damp from the rain that fell in the night. She hears talk drifting down from the balconies above, German, French and English voices making plans for the day. Above the sound of a protesting child a woman repeats, ‘Arrêt, arrêt, arrêt,’ calmly but relentlessly.

  When she has packed, Eva takes the books she brought with her down to a bookcase in the TV lounge. The Emigrants, which she will never finish, and two thrillers she didn’t even begin. She used to read all the time. Proper books. She had enjoyed it more than anything, seeing all the things a life might hold. A printed sign stuck to the top of the bookcase reads Biblioteca | Bibliothèque | Library. She slips her books, pristine, between creased, watercurled neighbours.

  She takes a final walk to the village, where she will have lunch before leaving. The day is hot. The sun presses itself into her. On a track away from the road, a shortcut she has found, she bends to study the desiccated corpse of an octopus. Only when she is on her haunches does she realise it is a twisted length of underwear elastic, caked in dust and dirt.

  It is the weekend and the village is busier than she has seen it, filled with day-trippers and promenading families. Surprised by the crowds around the main plaza, facing the sea, Eva leans against a telegraph pole to watch people come and go. On the junction box beside her is a photocopied flyer, curled at the edges, for a recital by a Japanese pianist. A round sticker has been placed over the pianist’s face: ¡Si, Independència! in white on red. She has seen waiters and shopkeepers wearing the same badge. On the plaza a band begins to play and people, locals, dance in a ring, joining hands and holding them aloft. Eva turns and continues walking around the bay, towards its quieter northern tip.

  Ahead of her a group of tourists are standing with hands on hips, apparently stunned by the sun and sea. One of them says something in German and points. The others stare at the sea and nod, as if it were speaking to them. A tall woman says something about ‘luft’. Air. The woman’s companions smile and take exaggerated, snorting breaths. Eva feels a sudden love for them. She wants to stand among them and admire the water and breathe the air. She wants to point at the trees, and the cliffs, and the sun.

  But the group moves on, leaving Eva alone. She looks out to sea and knows that the horizon is only the limit of her vision: the water goes on for endless miles. Dizzy, she bends to grasp the hot, smooth slate of the promenade wall. She hangs her head down and laughs. In the water below her, children are paddling and pulling starfish from rocks. A father is teaching his son to snorkel and the child’s legs thrash, yellow flippers on his feet. Above them, on a clear blue day, a woman is hanging on for her life, her head down and her hair falling towards the pavement. Yesterday she stood screaming in the street. She thought about slitting her wrists. She stares along the length of herself, at her breasts and belly, at her hips and thighs. The sun warms her nape. A soft breeze, like a breath, dabs her cheek. She came here to decide, and she has decided. She will go to Innsbruck, sit on the square and feel the wind that comes down from the mountains. There is a river there; she has traced its course with her finger. It runs on to meet the Danube, mingles, separates, and is
something else completely by the time it empties into the sea.

  THE HAVÄNG DOLMEN

  Several months ago, while travelling in Sweden, I experienced something I have given up trying to explain. In fact, since it happened I have tried to push it as far from my mind as possible. But yesterday afternoon, searching for an errant set of keys, I found, nestled deep in a coat pocket, an acorn that I plucked from its cap in the forest beneath the fortress of Stenshuvud. Then it was smooth and green, but now it is tawny, and ribbed like a little barrel. You wouldn’t know it was the same acorn I picked on a whim, but holding it I felt again the compulsion that propelled me, at the end of that strange day, into the burial chamber at Haväng.

  It was the end of September. I was attending a three-day conference in Lund. It finished early on a Friday afternoon, and with the weekend ahead of me, and nothing to hurry back to London for, I elected to stay. My colleagues recommended some sites – Iron and Stone Age, neither eras of particular interest to me, but I thought why not. The only one I had heard of was Ale’s Stones, Sweden’s Stonehenge, built on a clifftop above the Baltic in the shape of a great ship.

  I had presented a paper at the conference, ‘Digging Deeper: On the Aetiology of Archaeological Belief’. It was good work, and I was excited about the presentation, but the few people who turned up lacked the ability to grasp even the simplest of the points I was making. It was a blessing when it was all over and I could leave Lund. I needed some time away from people.

  Escaping the rush-hour traffic I drove my hire car east on Riksväg 11 to Simrishamn, a small fishing village on the eastern coast of Skåne, Sweden’s southernmost county. I drove between gently sloping hills, past apple orchards, and beside the ruffled green seas of sugar beet fields. The weather swung rapidly, as it had all week, between showers and sun.

  Approaching Simrishamn on the coastal road I saw a rainbow springing from the sea. I pulled over and got out of the car to admire it. It arced from the water and disappeared into a low, dark cloud. Its bands had an unusual solidity. The wind gusted, and the grey sea was ridged like a tilled field. I felt a long way from the stuffy rooms and obtuse debates of Lund.