Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  These flights are very expensive, but they are worth it. Three times a year, there and back again. Seven days in the air.

  ‘Now you will sleep, Mrs Marion, and you will be ready for your grandchildren. Your son, he will be coming to meet you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Robert always meets me.’

  I sleep a little, and wake to the sound of them getting breakfast ready. I can smell coffee, and warm bread. I comb my hair, move my seat to a more upright position and look at the menu. I’ll have a dish of fresh tropical fruits to start. Three different kinds of melon, with pineapple and mango. There’s granola, yoghurt, a variety of breads and pastries. I never bother with the cooked breakfast. It’s too early – or perhaps too late. The best thing at breakfast is the fresh orange juice, and the silver pots of coffee with their curving spouts. They are wonderful at pouring coffee, even when there’s turbulence.

  There’s turbulence now. The seatbelt sign goes on and suddenly you can sense the rush of the plane, the speed at which it’s going. It’s not a very nice feeling. Things begin to bump and rattle.

  ‘Cabin crew, take your seats,’ says the calm voice of the captain. I can’t see Aimée. I know she will be troubled that the service has been interrupted. Everything is so carefully timed on board.

  The plane rushes, jolts, and then, sickeningly, it drops with a bang. The engines roar. We are going steeply downwards. No one says a word. I grip the sides of my seat and think of Aimée.

  The plane levels out, and the captain’s voice comes back on to the intercom, unruffled. ‘Sorry about that, folks. We hit some rough air so we needed to lose some altitude to get out of it. We should be fine now.’

  The cabin relaxes. We are still rushing forwards, but the plane is steady again. After a few more minutes the cabin crew leave their seats and begin to move around, although the seatbelt sign stays on for us. There is Aimée. I catch her eye and smile. She pauses for a second.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Marion?’

  ‘Yes, dear, thank you.’

  I spread butter on a poppy-seed roll. It comes in little curls on a white dish. I’m thirsty, in spite of the water I drank in the night, and very hungry. I try half the roll with eucalyptus honey, and decide that I prefer it without. A young man stops with his coffee pot and pours a long, dark, fragrant stream into my cup. Aimée is busy with that woman’s baby again.

  There’s a sense of expectation now. It won’t be long before we land. People are tidying things away, going to the toilet, scrutinising themselves in tiny mirrors to see what those who come to meet them will see.

  I’m quite ready. The young man whisks away my tray. That’s the last meal of all. Suddenly he turns and with a smile places a small white box on my table.

  ‘Chocolate,’ he says. ‘For later.’

  I put it carefully into my bag.

  As we leave the plane, the cabin staff flank the exit, smiling and wishing us well. I give Aimée a special smile. She is such a lovely girl.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Marion,’ she says.

  ‘See you again, I hope,’ I say, because it’s always possible. Now we are out of the plane, walking along the steel tube to our destination. Soon we won’t be passengers any more. We’ll be back in our own lives, the lives we’ve made. I take a deep breath. My journey is over. I think of Robert, Melanie, Jess, Rory and little Clara. They smile in my mind’s eye, and for some reason their smiles are mixed up with the gentle smiles of Aimée. Everyone is impatient at the carousel because the bags are a little slow. A young customs officer questions me about my immigration card, and asks if I’m sure I have no fruit, plants or seeds with me. I smile at her and say no, and she smiles back, just a little. She is quite a burly girl, in shorts. Full of purpose, she moves off to the next passenger. So different from Aimée, but professional too, in her way.

  There’s my bag, with the green ribbon around its handle. I grasp it, lift it and heave it down beside me. I walk through Customs and suddenly there is the Arrivals Hall, glaring bright, milling with people and placards. Faces bulge, smiling past me. There are two little girls jumping up and down, clapping. A woman runs into their embrace. I calm myself. Take a deep breath, Marion. Look carefully. Don’t panic. He’s bound to be here.

  The faces steady. I scan each one as the placards joggle. And there he is. He was there all the time, standing close to the rope in the same poorly fitting jacket that all the drivers seem to wear.

  On his placard is written: ‘Mrs M. W. Buchanan’. I go up to him.

  ‘Mrs Buchanan?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just the one bag?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It is expensive to hire a car with a driver from the airport out to Kilmora Park, but worth it. I sit back and fold my hands in my lap. The journey takes about twenty-five minutes, if the traffic isn’t too bad. The city streets give way to broader suburbs. The kind of area where families live. Quiet, green, inexpensive. The driver knows the way.

  We are there almost too soon. Uneasiness clutches at my stomach as I get out of the car. I’m no one’s passenger now. I pay the driver. He offers to help me with my bag but I tell him I am fine. I go up the path to the front door.

  It’s a nice little guesthouse. I found it three years ago, on my second trip. I always have the same room, facing over the garden. They don’t do meals, apart from breakfast, but there’s a kitchenette where you can cook. I’m used to the routine. There’s a mini-market nearby which has a good selection of ready meals, and I buy cold meats and cheeses too, to make up my packed lunches. And I’ve got the chocolate, for later. I’m always quite all right on my own.

  I press the bell, drop my shoulders, relax. Mrs Carmody is a nice woman. She’ll be expecting me.

  THE MEDINA

  ‘THE MEDINA IS like a dream. You never know what you will find here. All the things you have lost.’ Najia smiles. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’

  Najia’s English is perfect. She spent four years in Manchester, writing her PhD, while Jamal was a senior registrar there. Jamal’s ahead of us now, his broad back solid in the crowded, glinting medina shadows. The two little girls, Amina and Khadija, swing on his hands and coax him from embroidered purses to glittery red slippers. I stop by a date stall. The date-seller springs to life, plucking fruit from different piles, amber, chestnut or sticky black.

  ‘Taste,’ says Najia. ‘Which do you like? How many?’

  ‘Those, the pale yellow ones.’

  Najia settles a price with the date-seller.

  ‘It’s a good place,’ she says.

  ‘I’m glad I’m with you,’ I say.

  ‘You’ll soon learn enough Arabic to manage,’ she says.

  I’ve been here a month now. New job, new flat, a dazzle of words and faces. Everything’s new, even me. I feel bare and tender, and sometimes I feel afraid.

  We wander deep into the warm, pungent maze of the medina. High above, the sun struggles to squeeze through the matting that protects us. But it won’t get in. For centuries, the sun’s rage has been kept at bay here.

  ‘I don’t come here often enough,’ says Najia. ‘We’ve got into a faster way of living. The medina is so different. Sometimes I think you could find anything in the world here.’

  The little boy who’s been following in the hope of being my guide bobs up again at my elbow. His eyes are a startling faded blue. Najia bends down and talks to him. He listens, then skips off, like one of her own children.

  ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘I was telling him that he must go to school, or he will always be poor. Look, Jamal’s stopped. We’ll have tea now.’

  We duck into a stone doorway and down a flight of steps into a large, cool tiled room.

  ‘Coca-Cola!’ the children say. We settle on divans and Najia props the cushions behind my back.

  ‘Like this. Now what will you have? Coffee? Lipton’s?’

  ‘Mint tea.’

  Khadija bites off the tip of a pastry sh
aped like a crescent moon. Dreamily, Amina blows down the straw into her Coca-Cola. Outside, the web of buying and selling spins endlessly. Donkeys struggle with their loads, bare-legged boys wade in dye at the tannery, children carry dough to the bakers’ ovens and return with trays of bread. Through the bustle the pulse of the medina beats steadily, as it has beaten for hundreds of years.

  ‘I want to stay here forever,’ I say.

  ‘No more teaching,’ agrees Najia. But Khadija joggles her mother’s arm.

  ‘Can we buy mint?’

  ‘Can we buy the mint? Yes, soon, Khadija.’

  ‘For tea?’ I ask.

  ‘No. A big bunch to hold under our noses when we go to the tannery. It smells terrible there, but we thought you would like to see it.’

  Jamal’s still talking to the café owner.

  ‘A former patient,’ explains Najia. ‘Amina, don’t blow bubbles. Frances will think you don’t know how to drink Coca-Cola.’

  I remember my Louise, sucking bright-blue Slush Puppie through a straw. And now she grabs a cup of coffee from the hospital machine at 2 a.m., to keep herself awake. Louise said I should take the job here. Morocco’s only a few hours away, Mum. It’s not China.

  And it’s not as if I need you any more. Louise would never say it, but it’s true. She is twenty-five years old, and qualified. My daughter, the doctor. I must be very proud of her, and I am.

  ‘Well,’ says Jamal. ‘Shall we move on?’

  When he was twenty-one, before I met him, Joe spent a year in Morocco as a tutor in an English family. He talked about it sometimes, after a few drinks. Picking warm oranges off trees. Talking all night on a roof-top terrace in the moonlight. The sound of fountains, and the call to prayer. But he never went back. I don’t think he wanted to be a tourist in a place where he’d felt he belonged.

  Joe kept a pair of battered Moroccan slippers, and a photograph of the three little boys he’d taught. He still had the slippers with him in that hotel in Bradford, two years ago. The hotel people packed them up with the rest of his things. Joe was at a sales conference, sweating through presentations, staying up drinking so he wouldn’t look like an old man. They don’t like old men in sales.

  Joe hated hotels. His idea of hell was turning on the TV to find a computerised welcome and a discreet mention of the adult channel.

  Why did I let him go on with it? Why didn’t I hold him close and say, ‘Joe, give it up. We’ll go travelling. You can learn Arabic. What does money matter? You’ve only got one life.’ But we weren’t the sort of couple who could say such things.

  He lay on that hotel floor all night, and I knew nothing until the phone rang. I was taking the rubbish out. While the hotel manager went on talking, the black bag slowly settled and tipped over, and the air sighed out of it.

  We’re back in the narrow medina lanes.

  ‘Yes, Khadija, we’ll get the mint now,’ promises Najia. But as we go past a jewellery stall my eye is caught by a necklace of turquoise beads. They would be perfect against Louise’s clear brown skin. I pick up the necklace, to judge the size. Yes, it’ll fit. I’ll ask Najia to bargain for me.

  She’s disappeared. I can’t see Jamal or the children either. They were here a second ago; they can’t have gone far. But Najia’s often said how easy it is to get lost here in the medina. You only have to take a wrong turning. This place is a maze.

  I put down the necklace, and hurry on. The stall-keeper shouts after me, and a donkey’s sharp hooves clatter a few inches from my sandalled feet. That child’s at my elbow again, the same boy, the blue-eyed one. Has he been waiting for me?

  ‘Guide, guide, speak good English, very good guide.’ He presses up against me. He’s pushing me against the wall and suddenly I’m afraid for my bag, my ring, my English possessions that hang off me like keys to open up a life this child won’t ever have.

  But he’s just a little boy. Najia talked to him as if he were one of her own. I squat so my face is level with his.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No guide.’ I try to hold his quick glance. ‘You go to school. You have a future. But no guide, thank you.’

  He stares back. Does he understand? His face is stubborn, lower lip thrust out, eyes tense on mine. Then another child calls, and my little boy darts across the lane. He squats in the doorway with his friend, and suddenly he’s a child like any other child, playing marbles.

  And this is when I find you, Joe. You were here all the time. As I search for Najia through the brown and gold dapple your shape appears, leaning against the wall where the lane forks two ways. You’re looking back at me, waiting for me to notice you.

  ‘Joe,’ I say, but my voice is trapped. You swing away from the wall in a youthful, supple movement. You’re going left. I stumble after you, and when I reach the corner there you are, walking away, but not too fast. You’re letting me catch up. And how strange that you’re wearing Moroccan clothes: a pair of loose, creamy-white trousers, and a long shirt. Your hair’s longer, too, and there’s no grey in it.

  ‘Come on, Frances. Why are you so slow?’

  Was that your voice, alive with laughter? You turn to me again and smile, but you don’t stop. You step under an arch, and disappear. A few more yards and I’ll see you again, just ahead of me – Joe, wait, I’m coming—

  My arms are out and I’m full of joy, running towards you, my Joe, young and new and tender, both of us back again where we were before the years and the presentations and the mortgages and the slow separation of our lives.

  I step into a wall of light. I am out of the medina, blinking in the glare.

  ‘Frances!’

  It’s Najia.

  ‘I’m so sorry. We thought you were following, then we realised you’d missed the entrance.’

  Jamal and the children come up, holding bunches of mint.

  ‘But you didn’t get lost,’ says Jamal. ‘You found your own way.’ He smiles. ‘You are at home here, Frances.’

  I say nothing. I know you’re still here somewhere, Joe, enfolded in the maze of lanes. You lean against a wall, watching the leather-workers. You are wearing cool, loose clothes and you are happy. You’ve slipped out of time and found yourself here.

  ‘Did you like the medina, Frances?’ asks Najia. ‘Do you want to come here again?’

  WOLVES OF MEMORY

  JAY WAS WAITING for her by the steps. Together they ran down them two at a time, because already the ferry had swung round from the other side of the harbour. Its light showed dim through the falling snow. Lizzie slipped, caught the rail and felt Jay grab her arm on the other side. They were at the bottom of the steps, across the road and down to the wharf. The ferry turned and backed towards them.

  How heavy the snow was now. Lizzie’s heart banged from taking the steps too fast and nearly falling. The ferryman steadied her as she stepped aboard, but he didn’t look at her. She’d never seen him before. She blinked snow out of her eyes and saw that this wasn’t the usual ferry. It was far smaller, just an open boat with seating down its sides for half a dozen passengers.

  ‘Jay, this isn’t our ferry,’ she said, and was about to get off when the ferryman said:

  ‘There’s too much ice now for the regular ferry. It’s this or nothing.’

  Every day that week they’d been talking about the ice. No one had ever seen anything like it. Each night the ice thickened and spread, so that ferries had to run in the narrow channel left open by the flow of the river.

  ‘Do you go to Castle Wharf?’ asked Jay.

  ‘We go everywhere,’ said the ferryman. He cast off, and then he was at the wheel and they were turning out into the water.

  At once they were in a world of snow. Wharf, road, cranes, warehouses all disappeared. Even the noise of the traffic was muffled. For a long time the boat chugged on. Too long, Lizzie thought. They should have reached Castle Wharf by now. It was only ten minutes to school from there, but they were still going to be late. The ferry’s light showed nothing ahead of them but fal
ling snow. How could the ferryman know where he was going? What if they crashed into the ice, or into another boat?

  ‘Did you finish the maths?’ Jay asked her.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said. Her stomach hurt. She would never have got into a car driven by a strange man, and yet because it was a boat she’d let herself do it.

  ‘You’re great at art, though, Lizzie,’ said Jay.

  The noise of the engine sank to a putter. The boat was barely moving, or maybe it was going round in a circle and that was why they weren’t getting anywhere. They should ask him to put them ashore, never mind where. As she was thinking this, the ferryman left the wheel and came nimbly to where they sat.

  ‘No chance of making Castle Wharf,’ he said, ‘but I can take you downriver.’

  ‘Downriver?’

  ‘Tide’s high,’ he explained, as if that was all they needed to know. ‘We’ll go out through the Basin.’

  Lizzie knew what he intended. The river snaked around the city, bringing huge tides with it. You could get out of the Floating Harbour through the Basin, but ferries did not go there. The ferryman meant to take them through the deep, dark-sided Gorge where water bubbled on the mudflats at low tide, and hot springs sent up steam in the cold mornings.

  He meant to take them into a blind world of snow and seething water, instead of to school.

  ‘Jay,’ she said, but he was staring at the ferryman with his lips parted and an unfamiliar look on his face.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

  ‘But we’ll have to sign the Late Book!’

  ‘We won’t go to school at all,’ said Jay boldly, and he took her hand.

  She thought of the noise the classes made as they ranged from room to room. She thought of explaining yet again her undone homework and her too-short skirt; of a whole day running late; of the tired, angry faces of the teachers and the lonely quiet in the detention room. The way they said ‘E-liz-a-beth’ when she’d been Lizzie from the day she was born. The only good thing about school was going there with Jay, and coming home with him again.