by Sam Thompson
Tarry clutches of lobster pots lay here and there, and the reek of decaying fish rose everywhere from the water and the pebbles. Gusts of wind battered along the strand. Andie stopped to watch some men launching a boat, rattling it down the stones and splashing in after it, thigh-deep, roaring at each other. She laughed when the wind snatched at her dress and chucked sheaves of her hair across her face. Dawn observed the long central groove of Andie’s abdomen appear under the thin wind-flattened fabric. Some youths with bicycles had stopped above to watch, too.
Andie barely looked any different now from her long-necked, gracefully equine school self, except that she had become a fraction fuller in the upper arm and around the waist. Dawn was able to judge these changes because she had spent a lot of time over several years gazing at Andie. She knew the appearance of her arm crooked on an exercise book, and that of her neck bent forward, revealed by fallen hair, viewed sidelong from the next seat. She knew well the stances Andie adopted when viewed full-figure from a distance, long after they had ceased to speak. Today Andie was no longer quite so self-contained in her movements. When she was excited – when she expressed astonishment at a detail of the life of a language assistant, or as she tried to pick her way back up the pebbles while evading the wind – her eyes seemed to point askew for a moment.
They climbed back up to the promenade. Andie licked her upper lip and said she could taste the salt. Among the trestle tables and the bunting, the young men were now laying a series of small bonfires. Here the promenade was not marked off from the sea by any railing: instead the ground sloped straight down into a broad, shallow slipway. As they watched, one of the men chased another into the water, shouting, then pushed him so that he fell, and immediately dived headlong after him. They began to wrestle, coughing and hooting.
Dawn explained that these were the preparations for a festival they had every year. Tomorrow there’d be a kind of party. No, she wasn’t intending to go, it wasn’t like that. It was really just for the locals. An indigenous tradition. Andie noticed that the tables were arranged in a bulging semicircle, as if backing away from the city towards the sea. I wonder why that is, she said; but Dawn didn’t know.
They walked on. Andie had been working as a receptionist in a solicitor’s office until a few months ago, but she was going to apply to train as an actress when she got back home. She had always liked drama at school. Not that this was enough in itself, she knew, but what could you do except give it a good try? When it was a passion there was really no choice. But that was for next year. For now she was seeing where her travels took her. To begin with, she and a friend had been travelling together, but it hadn’t worked out and they’d gone their separate ways. Don’t look so worried, she told Dawn, it’s not a problem! Anyway, she preferred travelling by herself. Really, that was the whole point.
Before they could say anything else, a body blocked Dawn’s path. She tried to move past but he dodged to keep in front of her. He was doing it on purpose. The young man’s arms were spread, his palms exposed. He was watching for her reaction. He wore a sag-necked T-shirt and threadbare, bleached-out cotton shorts; several other young men, identically dressed, were loitering on the far side of the street. One drawled out a comment either on the accostment or on something else entirely.
She tried again to walk on and again the youth prevented her. She ought to know better how to deal with this, she thought furiously. She was supposed to know her way around here. She couldn’t guess what he wanted from them. She risked a look at his face. His lips were dark red, and narrow as a cut except for a central cherry; his eyebrows were dense bars, so regular and sharp that they might have been plucked. She realised that she knew him. She had seen him around the language school, and he’d been in one or two of her classes. She was nearly certain his name was Charles. They had never spoken, but now, seeing her recognition, he grinned, and spread his palms wider.
He pointed from Dawn to Andie and back, establishing the relationship between them. He introduced himself to Andie and, when she looked blank, Dawn translated for her. Andie gasped in happy comprehension and told him her name in return, separating the syllables with care.
But the conversation went no further, because a small young woman with dark, short hair appeared beside them and spoke sharply to Charles. Her voice was low-pitched and hoarse. The rhythm of her words matched the jabs of her forefinger in the air, but Charles didn’t seem troubled at all. He gave a quick humorous bow to Andie and Dawn, then walked away with the girl. He caught her hand with a darting motion and twined his fingers into hers. For a moment she tried to resist.
In the streets, later that evening, several men made a show of admiration. Dawn had not had time to put in her contact lenses and once, as they walked, a man seated on a street-corner bollard made an obscene observation, in a loud, cordial voice, about girls in glasses. Andie asked what he had said, and then had to stop walking in order to laugh. The youths killing time on the streets, with their tar-streaked shins and stained cotton shorts and their body hair showing dark through their T-shirts, had a way of gaping, with heads forward and mouths hanging, that implied a violent, voluntary stupidity. Dawn could imagine them battering their skulls together like goats until their foreheads were dented enough for the lives they wanted.
Up ahead the preparations for the festival looked complete. Flags and banners fluttered from the lamp posts above the tables and the unlit bonfires. A group of men in cut-off trousers dumped an enormous tuna fish, bigger than a person, on the paving stones. Andie grabbed Dawn’s arm at the sight of it. Once the men had laid it out, dappled and gleaming, they moved away, wiping their hands off on their thighs. They were replaced by five women with knives and buckets, who began to butcher the fish, wrapping lumps of its meat in paper and passing them to a school of small girls who darted around the carcass.
Dawn explained that, as far as she understood it, the festival was for the city’s unmarried men. It was supposedly a celebration of some figure of archaic local folklore, some legendary personification of the city. But all it meant was that they had a barbecue, sang and danced, and took part in feats of strength and machismo: wrestling, drinking competitions, games of luck with painful forfeits. The meal was prepared by the city’s unmarried women, who also waited on the revellers, but didn’t themselves take part. It began in the afternoon and continued into the night.
Andie was highly amused to hear all this. That’s how it used to be, said Dawn, or at least that’s what I’ve read. It’s probably changed nowadays.
The women did seem to be preparing for something, carrying heavy-looking cardboard boxes, covered tureens and sacks of fuel pellets. A few groups of young men lounged at the tables, watching them work and drinking beer from small brown bottles. There were other early signs of festivity. A carnival figure, wearing white greasepaint and a scarlet ringmaster’s coat with a giant sunflower bobbing from the lapel, was prancing in between the passers-by, accosting the unwary with flourishes of a long-necked bottle. A fright wig protruded in stiff white tufts from beneath his bowler hat. He approached in a mincing waltz-step. Halting in front of Dawn, he poured clear fluid into a tin beaker, lifting his bottle up high to make a thin, bright stream in the air, and mimed an invitation to drink.
Dawn shook her head, and he transferred his invitation to Andie, mugging and winking madly. She wavered, then – oh well! – she accepted the beaker and tried a cautious sip. As she screwed up her face, the clown squealed in grotesque pleasure. He pointed after her, cackling, as they walked on.
Andie was smiling sportingly. That was sea water!
Next Andie wanted to try a bistro she had spotted near the promenade. She ordered metal saucepans full of mussels for both of them. She’d pay, she wanted to. Then she told Dawn that since they last saw each other, she had been married. It had been a year or so after she left school. He was nine years older and very good-looking and charming, but dishonest, as it turned out. It had been a mistake: she preferred not to g
o into the details.
The mussels were large, green-tinged and watery, and contained minuscule specks of sand that squeaked against the teeth. Dawn picked them off her lip and arranged them along the edge of the plate. At the next table, two girls were unwrapping something that lay between them like a human hand, damp, white and curled. It belonged in the sea. The head was decorated with fleshy whiskers. Its mouth worked weakly. One of the girls turned it over and bit into its pallid belly. Her teeth seemed to sink in easily: translucent skin stretched and separated. Her chin shining, she swallowed, and passed it to her companion.
To escape was the hardest thing in the world, Andie said. It had taken her a long time to realise no one was going to help her. She didn’t think it had made her less trusting, but it had made her a lot stronger. She had always known that he had a troubled past, but she had thought that investigating his history would mean she was too suspicious. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Dawn wondered if she should reach across the table, but her fingers were covered in grease.
She wasn’t working the next day, and they both slept late. They were not long up – Andie leaning against the kitchen counter with her coffee, Dawn sitting at the table getting ready to correct a stack of exercise books – when Charles appeared at the apartment.
He was dressed in the same clothes as yesterday. He carried himself like someone who knew the place well and had every right to be here. In the entrance hall behind him, three other young men waited, one sprawling on the sofa with his legs stretched out, the others shuffling their feet. Dawn couldn’t imagine how he had found out the address. But before she could find the right words to challenge him, he walked straight past her into the apartment, bowing in a small parody of civility.
As he entered the kitchen Andie gave him an uncomplicated grin, and waved hello. She didn’t seem surprised. He had apparently forgetten that Dawn was here. He took hold of Andie’s hand, his eyes flickering around her face, and said something. Dawn hesitated, and then explained to Andie’s look of eager inquiry that Charles and his friends had invited her to go with them to the feast at the seafront. Charles nodded in satisfaction, pulled over Dawn’s chair and sat down. He folded his arms, looked up at Andie, and said something else. It was a special honour for her to be asked, he was saying, a special chance. Usually, no one from outside the city. But he would take her.
He settled back to watch her make up her mind.
Andie heard the voices; they didn’t so much wake her as call her attention to the fact that she was awake. She felt fresh and clear-headed, as though she’d been asleep a long time, a sleep she had needed. The window was uncurtained and a searing placard of light hung awry on the opposite wall.
The voices were just outside the room. One of them, a man’s, deep and lazy, spoke with a heavy emphasis, just a few words at a time. By the sound of it he wanted something and was not going to leave until it was given. Dawn was responding, rebuffing his demands, it sounded like, in a placatory tone. Andie couldn’t really tell what it was about: they were speaking the local language. Well, it was nothing to do with her.
The door of her bedroom was half-open, and it seemed to her that the apartment door must be open too, with the speakers standing on either side of the threshold: she could picture them standing like that, Dawn perhaps even blocking his way in. If she got out of bed and put her head out into the corridor, she’d see. But she only pushed herself further up in the bed, and listened.
She didn’t know how to interpret the tones of voices here. She hated this city that made her seem so stupid. Last night had been a complete waste of time. She didn’t know why she’d gone. Once it was over, she’d felt like an idiot for leaving Dawn, and all the more so because when she finally managed to get away she’d lost her bearings in the stupid city and had ended up walking around by herself until late, wandering long stone lanes for what seemed like forever. Finally she’d recognised Dawn’s building. She’d tried not to make any noise when she came in.
The night felt, now, like a story she had heard, not a place she had been for herself. Everything about it was unconvincing. Charles had seemed nice enough, but as soon as they got down to the waterfront he’d dived, shouting, into a squad of his mates. The whole promenade had been filled with men sitting at the trestle tables, sharing bottles of wine and eating grilled fish off paper plates, or standing around in gangs which continually broke up and reformed in laughing discord. The sun had set half an hour before. Heat had gusted from the bonfires. What had she been expecting? To talk to new people, to hear some singing and maybe do some dancing. But none of them had seemed to want to talk to her or even look at her. In a funny way, she’d had the feeling they hadn’t noticed she was there, even as they crowded around with excited chatter and much impatient gesturing. The city’s words had cloyed the air, thick and meaningless, and no one had seemed willing to switch to a language she could understand. They hadn’t offered her anything to eat.
Her bitterness began to drain away. She was bored thinking about their boring festival. There was nothing to look at in this room except the sun on the wall. It was like those times when she was six or seven years old and had stayed at home pretending to be more sick than she really was, for which her reward was a day that was genuinely endless, not in length but in breadth, in which she lay in her bedroom, not reading or sleeping or really doing anything, with afternoon light dusting through the blinds and the bedroom door and window half-open so the strange sounds of daytime were removed from her not by barriers, only by distance.
She couldn’t tell, now, why she’d stayed out as long as she had. She didn’t know why she hadn’t just left as soon as she realised that it wasn’t going to be a normal party at all but some weird old tradition. At a distance, she had spotted a few red-faced women watching her with disapproval, but the men had led her through the crowd and into the empty middle of the semicircle of tables.
They had drawn back and left her standing there in the centre of the space. The faces at the tables had turned towards her, and it had struck her as funny that all of them were looking away from the sea: it had been as if she was standing on a stage with the city as a backdrop behind her. The streets had been vacant, their brick mouths lamplit. Then something had changed in the men’s faces and she had seen the figure walking towards her.
As she listened to the voices in the hall, she saw how things might have been if only she had behaved differently from the moment she had arrived here. She saw herself going to a language school or, better, learning in private from Dawn, or by herself from a book, learning another language properly for the first time, not to please anyone or to persuade them of anything, not even because she needed to, but just learning to speak the language. Just staying and not telling anyone, and perhaps, in good time, disclosing her new knowledge to her friends. Why shouldn’t she?
The man who had appeared from inside the city, limping towards her where she stood on the promenade, had been very old: one of those frail, shrivelled old men you could easily mistake for an old lady, with the face so hollow and small and the sparse white hairs curling from the chin. He had pitched sideways every now and then as he came towards her. She had seen worms of yellow matter in the corners of his eyes, and caught a smell of sickness. But it was important to be nice to elderly gentlemen, and she was good at it, so she had greeted him with a friendly smile and got ready to offer him her arm if he needed it. He must have come for the festival too. Touchingly, he had decorated his coat with a rather bedraggled carnation.
She had been about to offer to help him to a seat, but he had gripped her hand with fingers which were narrow and knobbled as twigs but stronger than they appeared, and would not let her move. She hadn’t liked the intensity with which the clouded eyes looked up into her face. The men at the tables had watched as she had tried to draw away, but the old man had leant on her arm, threatening to fall, and tightened his grip so that, although he weighed very little, she couldn’t bring hers
elf to shake him off. Craning up towards her ear, he had begun to speak.
The strange thing was that, now, she could remember nothing at all about what he had said. At the time, she was sure, she had understood him – had even felt a swell of relief that someone was making the effort – but now it was gone, the old man’s story, whatever he had wanted to tell her. She only remembered that it had made her very uncomfortable and that she had known that she did not want to hear it. The ruined eyes had been fixed on her so hungrily. Lifted by a wave of nausea, she had tugged her arm from his clinging grip, and, before he could get out more than a few words, she had left.
A ripple of outrage or disappointment had followed her from the trestle tables, but she hadn’t cared. All right, yes, she had thought furiously, as she hastened away from the waterfront without looking back: yes, I’ve embarrassed myself again, I’ve come blundering in and shown myself up at your stupid festival that I don’t see the point of, I’ve probably let everyone down and I don’t even know how. Let me get away.
She felt tired. She wondered why she presented herself the way she did, why she could only wheedle her petulant demands of the world instead of being brave and humble and simple as she knew she could be. Why were all her actions forgeries and all her words lies, when the last thing she really was, was a liar? The one thing she wanted was to be honest with people. Why had she made such a fool of herself to Dawn with every single thing she had done and said? Dawn, who was never unbalanced, who had everything she needed and who never flailed around like a stupid marionette. Andie had tried her best, but there was a law that said wherever inside yourself you place what matters most, that’s where you will fail. The voices came down the corridor into the room but they told her nothing and she was not trying to listen.