OxCrimes

  The Caterpillar Flag

  Christopher Fowler

  ‘So, where are you off to, then?’ Lily heard the taxi driver who was taking them to Victoria Station ask. She could only see the back of his head through the glass. It was as smooth and hard as a pebble.

  ‘Spain,’ her father replied. ‘We’re moving there.’

  ‘Oh, Spain.’ There was the disapproval of experience in his voice. ‘Let me give you a tip, mate. I’ll tell you what happens to people when they move to Spain. All they end up doing is reading and drinking, and they slowly fall apart. It ruins them. Reading and drinking. It’ll happen to you too. That’s what always happens.’

  Lily’s father did not give the driver a tip in return for his sage advice.

  The village of Cadilla, in the mountains above Ronda, isn’t famous for much; it sells raspberry-coloured gin and small plates of dried acorn-fed ham, and there are tiny, brightly coloured birds on all the telephone poles. The houses are whitewashed and shuttered against the searing heat, and have blue and yellow geckos painted on the walls. The wives wash their front steps and balconies first thing every morning, and beat their rugs against the walls of their houses, as the wives of England once did. From her open window Lily could always hear someone talking or sweeping. The Spanish children played ball games in the street and the English ones stayed inside on their Playstations. By May it was so hot you could cook an egg on the iron plate that covered the old well in the plaza. There was a hotel with eight rooms, a cobbled town square where the older boys hung out and fishtailed their bicycles past Eduardo’s café, a church the English never attended except at Christmas, and a restaurant the locals wouldn’t use because the owner once cheated his neighbour in a game of cards. Everyone knew each other.

  It was early summer in 2012. Lily was being taken from Manchester to Cadilla because she was prone to pleurisy and the air here was hot and dry. She was nearly nine years old. Her parents had taken a one-year rental on a small white house with a tiny sun-baked yard edged about by orange trees in glossy red earthenware pots. After a month her pale skin freckled and darkened to a smooth caramel, her chest cleared and her nights passed silent and uninterrupted.

  From almost anywhere in the town the view was framed by two mountains, one topped with an actual ruined castle. Between them were miles of green fields and brown rocks, and beyond those an azure ribbon of sea separated Spain from the coast of Africa, where a town called Tangiers was so fiercely illuminated at night that it blotted out the starlight above it.

  Lily’s parents had their own contradictory reasons for moving. Geoffrey had been made redundant from the wine wholesaler he worked for in Manchester, and had taken a new job exporting sherry to England. Every Tuesday morning he travelled to Madrid or Jerez or London, returning on Thursday evening. He said that coming to Cadilla was a fresh start for them. Lily’s mother Paula ran an online auction site selling discounted designer handbags, and she said they had moved here so that they could stay together as a family and her father wouldn’t have the same temptations, whatever that meant.

  Lily’s new school was six kilometres away, and they had arranged for the yellow school bus to collect her from the town square each morning, along with four other ex-pat children.

  In Manchester, Lily’s mother had never liked her going out, but here it seemed she was forever pushing her out of doors. They were all still at the point where the sun was a novelty. Almost at once, an astonishing thing happened. The family started having meals together, especially at the weekends. They sat in the shaded town square drinking thick dark cortados and sharp orange juice, and had crispy-edged eggs brought to them in little frying pans. Paula and Geoffrey even started holding conversations that didn’t end in anger. Lily slid down in her seat and looked from one parent to the other in goggle-eyed satisfaction.

  Whenever they went to Eduardo’s café, there was always one other table occupied. Celestia was a tall, elegant Englishwoman in her seventies who had once lived in London, in a place called Shepherd’s Bush. She had moved here because of a divorce, a family fight, a devotion to bullfights and a passion for chain-smoking cigarillos. She knew everyone in town, including the man who had once robbed her house, and who turned out to live right next door. His name was Paolo, and he had a sullen, burned look. She gave his children money to show that he had been forgiven, and her ostentatious displays of largesse brought a certain amount of distant respect, along with a little resentment. She explained that she did not miss Shepherd’s Bush, because who in their right mind would, but she did on occasion miss England.

  Geoffrey told her about the taxi driver’s advice, and she gave a throaty laugh. ‘God, I could think of a lot worse ways to go than that, couldn’t you?’ she said, throwing back her head and blasting out a contrail of cigarillo smoke. ‘I sold up in Shepherd’s Bush, had the name of my greatest love tattooed on my right buttock and grew my lovely hair long, and now I sit here at Eduardo’s reading and drinking and watching the world go by. How perfect is that?’

  Lily’s father studied her with vague disapproval, but said nothing.

  Celestia spoke a kind of Spanish filled with loud, round vowels, the kind English ex-pats spoke. She mainly used it for issuing commands to Eduardo and his waitress Lola, who was half the age of her boss and was said to have replaced his dead wife. Lola crossed herself whenever the church bells sounded, and became flustered if more than three of the café tables were filled at once. Celestia watched it all.

  ‘I see them come and go,’ she told Lily’s mother. ‘Everyone has a story. It’s quite fascinating. You’ll have to learn to slow down a bit, though. The sun takes its toll. If you try to do too much, you run out of energy around lunchtime. When the heat hits forty I get dizzy spells and the only thing that will shift them is a lie-down with an iced towel. Paolo’s wife often brings me one. Such a drab little thing, but terribly sweet. They both are, really. Four adorable children and as poor as church mice. I do what I can for them.’

  Celestia had a son who was a doctor in London but they weren’t on speaking terms. Lily overheard one of the ex-pats telling her mother that there had been an argument about money and a will. She had a better connection with the locals than any of the other ex-pats. The ladies of Cadilla acknowledged her in the scorching streets as they passed each other on the climb to the bakery, even though they clearly thought the English mad. If they wanted to live in Spain, why not choose a town caressed by Atlantic breezes, like Cadiz? Why burn up here, spending half their lives behind thick, cool walls or bobbing about in swimming pools like greased ducks?

  ‘I’d love to be in London for the Diamond Jubilee,’ Celestia confided. ‘The Queen has always been in my life, right from when I was little. My mother gave me a diamond that once belonged to King George VI. I have it still and will show you one day.’ Lily always saw her through a cloud of pale blue smoke, puffing away, surrounded by wine glasses and full ashtrays, and could not imagine her as a little girl, but she liked to visit her house because she could see Africa from the upstairs rooms, which were dark and cool, and the garden had a tiny green swimming pool which Celestia allowed her to use.

  One time, she looked through the fence and saw the children next door sitting sun-stunned and silent in their scorching bare yard. They were wearing swimming costumes, even though they had no pool. Celestia didn’t let them come over because four was too many, and she liked to sleep in the afternoons.

  ‘There are going to be street parties all over England for the Queen,’ she said. ‘Like the fiestas here.’ She showed Lily a book filled with crowns and state carriages and Union Jacks. ‘The Queen loves children. Whenever they make a gift for her, she sends out a royal letter thanking them.’

  Which set Lily thinking. Her Spanish lessons were boring, and when school finished it was still too hot to play, so she decided to make something for the Queen.

  Celestia was the only one with an illegal Sky box, but last time, just as the village’s ex-pats s
at themselves around the television to watch a royal occasion – poof – the signal vanished. The crazy widow who ran the table linen shop said the Devil had taken the picture away. It turned out that the man who once robbed Celestia’s house had chosen that particular moment to swipe her satellite dish, so Celestia went next door and took it back, and in the spirit of forgiveness they all got drunk on Manzanilla and Sprite. She doted on Paolo, even though he stole from her, and used him to drive her to the bullfights in Ronda. Paolo rarely spoke, and mutely accepted his strange new role.

  Lily sat on Celestia’s madly colourful rag-rug and watched a nature programme about a type of green worm that could spin silk. Lily watched in fascination as they arched and wriggled along branches, leaving behind delicate white cat-cradles.

  ‘I think the silk hardens and is woven into clothes,’ her mother explained distractedly when she was asked later that evening. ‘Why?’

  ‘David Attenborough says the worms are found in hot countries, so I thought it would be really cool to find some and collect their silk, and make something for the Jubilee.’

  ‘I’m really up against it, timewise,’ her mother replied, tapping away at her computer keyboard.

  Lily knew exactly where to look for the worms. A few straw-hatted tourists sat in the town square rustling their out-of-date English newspapers and drinking beer. The budget airline passengers were sixty kilometres to the South, frying themselves in oil at the coast.

  ‘I come from Manchester,’ Lily told Lola, the waitress in the village square café, who was nebulously horrified by the idea.

  ‘I thought it was a football team,’ she said, puzzled.

  ‘No, it’s a city like London,’ she said.

  ‘London where they all run around going buzz buzz, like bees?’

  ‘Yes but we live here now,’ Lily explained. ‘Where can I find these?’ She showed the waitress a picture of the silk worms in a National Geographic magazine that one of the tourists had left behind.

  Lola squinted at the picture – she was supposed to wear glasses but made more tips when she left them off. ‘I know these things,’ she said, tapping the picture with a pink frosted nail. ‘They are in the bushes behind the convent.’

  The last of the nuns had died of disappointment in 1973 and the convent finally fell down. The man who robbed Celestia’s house was the town’s builder, and instead of removing the rubble he just painted it white. Poppies and lavender grew up between the rocks, and myrtle and wisteria and big green bushes with thick dark leaves that nobody knew the name of. Lily climbed over the bricks to the bushes and saw them, dozens of bright green hairy caterpillars scalloping the leaves, so many that they were dropping off the branches like commandos. She made a nest of leaves and put it in her mother’s linen shopping bag, then filled the bag with caterpillars. Their hairs made her itch and left red bumps all over her hands, so the next time she used her mother’s washing up gloves to gather them.

  Lily planned to use the caterpillars to make a Union Jack which she would then post to the Queen in time for her Jubilee. She decided to say that it was from Celestia. She wanted the Queen to know that even though the most loyal of her subjects had moved all the way from Shepherd’s Bush to Cadilla she was still a part of her country.

  As she sat in her room trying to work out how to make the caterpillars surrender their silk, she could not avoid listening to her parents downstairs. Her father said they had worked hard in England so that they could make enough money to live like people with no money in Spain, and now they had no choice but to stay here. Her mother complained about missing her friends and the shops in London, but said it was worth it not to have you go back to your old habits. Her father said they couldn’t have it both ways and besides it was good for the girl. Lily thought if she made the silk Union Jack, it would remind her parents of their life in England and they would stop sniping.

  Every morning for a week she went down to the waste ground behind the convent to check inside the bushes for the caterpillars. A fresh crop had appeared; the latest ones were black with orange stripes and fewer bristles, so she placed them in a separate bag. As she looked deeper into the rockery scrub she found different types, some with black and yellow stripes and horns, some emerald with crimson spots. It took four days to gather enough of them.

  Lily knew they could make silk because they used it to attach themselves to leaves when they were ready to make a chrysalis. They were hairy so that other creatures would find them hard to eat. They became visibly fatter with each passing day, but she found no evidence of silk.

  Because she wanted to surprise her parents with her ingenuity, she used Celestia’s garden to lay out the shape of the caterpillar flag. She told the old lady what she was trying to do, but did not explain her purpose. First she drew the outline of the Union Jack, which was tricky because some stripes were thicker than others, and it had to be the right way up. Then she marked out the flag with pins and cotton, and set the caterpillars within the narrow rows of thread. They would be forced to move up and down the different areas of the flag, spreading their silk as they travelled, leaving behind the finished pennant. Lily had the determination of innocence, a doggedness that could not be slowed by lack of results.

  She soon noticed that the caterpillars’ poo changed colour when she fed them different vegetables. After peppers and thistles they left greenish trails, and after carrots they left red ones. But for the Union Jack she needed blue and white, so she used onions for the white and chopped green and yellow peppers up together to make what she hoped would be blue.

  No matter what she fed them, there was still no silk to be seen. For another five days the caterpillars ate and excreted and continued on their peristaltic way, up and down the corridors of cotton, to no avail.

  Lily asked Celestia what she should do. Her neighbour proved evasive, and sat in her usual place at the café table beneath a stratocumulus of smoke, silent and thoughtful. She was on her first glass of sherry and her first pack of cigarillos. She had tied her long auburn hair up in a bun and looked like a mad and rather wonderful gorgon. They were both aware that time was running out, for the Jubilee’s postal deadline was fast approaching.

  Finally, she stubbed out her cigarillo and said, ‘I think we should cover them up with cardboard and leave them until the end of the week. I’ll ask Maria Gonzales what to do.’

  Maria Gonzales was about a thousand years old and knew everything. She ran a strange, dusty shop that sold organic honey, dried shrimps, wind chimes, homeopathic medicines and shawls, but at the back there was an internet café of sorts consisting of three ancient computers, a Hewlett-Packard printer that nobody knew how to work and a table covered with out-of-date health-care magazines.

  She and Celestia held a meeting that started with coffee and glasses of Oloroso and ended up encompassing most of the older ladies in the village. Given that they spent most of the day there and the Oloroso was twenty-two percent alcohol, it was a wonder they managed to walk home without falling into bushes or getting run over.

  Now that the initial euphoria of the move had worn off, Lily’s house had become a place of sullen silences. The only thing worse than her parents arguing was them not speaking. She longed to hop over the yard wall and cross the village to see how the caterpillar flag was progressing, or just see if there was even a single thread of silk, but her mother made her stay inside and read her Spanish lessons.

  The diurnal shadows slid over Cadilla like ghosts fleeing the heat. Monday morning arrived, the start of the very last week when the flag could be posted to Buckingham Palace in time for the Jubilee. Unable to contain herself any longer, Lily rose and ran over to Celestia’s house. Although it was already hot, the old lady had yet to make an appearance, so Lily ran around the back to the garden and found the cardboard oblong where it had been placed beneath an orange tree.

  Carefully removing the lid, she looked inside. The cotton threads and pins were still there but the box was empty.

&nbs
p; ‘I’m sorry, Lily.’ She looked up to find Celestia standing beside her in her blue satin dressing gown, a cigarillo balanced lightly between her fingers. ‘I’m afraid they went away.’

  ‘Where did they go?’ Lily asked.

  ‘To the trees. It was time for them to pupate.’ Celestia knelt beside her with some difficulty. ‘You can’t control nature, my love. Nature always does what it needs to do. Whenever we try to interfere, things have a habit of going their own way.’

  Lily looked in the trees but she couldn’t see where the caterpillars had gone. She packed up the plan and the cardboard, the cotton and pins, then thanked the old lady for her efforts. The last thing Celestia said before Lily went home was mysterious; she said perhaps something could be done.

  Just before nine o’clock the following morning, her mother asked her to go down to the shop for some milk, and Lily set off through the hilly white streets. There in the middle of the road was an extraordinary sight. Running towards her, her black skirts and saggy yellow cardigan flapping, her coral necklaces chattering like teeth, was Maria Gonzales.

  ‘Tell him to stop!’ she shouted, waving at someone behind Lily. She had a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and was pointing wildly.

  Lily turned and saw a white van moving off. ‘Wait!’ she shouted, dashing after the postal van and running alongside it. Maria threw her the package as if passing a rugby ball – she had a strong arm on her for an old lady – and Lily slipped it through the open window of the van.

  The incident stuck in her mind later because it was the most energetic thing that had happened in the village since they arrived. Maria Gonzales never explained why she was in such a rush, and returned to her shop to sit in the cool gloom among the pots of organic tomato marmalade and string sweaters.