By 9pm the room was full with flushed Brits. The radio was playing back-to-back naff hits. Anna was overheating, her wool dress welded to her skin. She circuited the room with the cava – she must stop giving away free booze soon – and topped up Karen’s glass. As she poured, Anna avoided Karen’s gaze, staring at the cowl-neck of her top. Despite her height, Karen’s shoulders were as narrow and sloping as those of a wife in a Renaissance portrait. A few fallen blonde hairs had caught on the sequins; Anna resisted the urge to pick them off.
‘Ooops!’ said Karen, and Anna snapped to attention just before the wine cascaded over the top of the glass. She apologized and retreated to safety behind the bar. She watched Karen lean in to say something to Tommy. Was she archly remarking on Anna’s lack of pouring finesse? Or simply reminding him that their home insurance policy was due, or that he must check the oil in the Rover?
Anna didn’t know this woman at all. She was guilty of reducing her to someone bloodless, without irony or sex appeal, to justify her dalliance with Tommy, but her few interactions with Karen had done little to counter the impression. Karen was not a drinker, preferring weak coffee. ‘I like to see the bottom of the cup,’ she’d told Anna once when asking for one and Anna, to her shame, had said, ‘Oh, you want instant?’ and had made a show of looking under the counter for the Nescafé, although Karen was hardly the only customer who had asked for it. Karen’s conversation seemed to be limited to her grandchildren, and her mission to sell their villa so she could get back to them. The only time she had really talked to Anna was to ask if Anna could Photoshop the golf course in the images of their villa on the website, turning the course’s grass back into the verdant green it once was.
‘I know you used to be a graphic designer,’ she’d said.
‘I am one,’ Anna had replied, but agreed to help out.
Now, Anna continued watching Karen, as she and Tommy talked, Karen holding her glass in the palm of her hand, its stem between her fingers. Did Karen sense that Tommy’s affections had been diverted elsewhere? Anna imagined her discussing her fears, delicately phrased, with a trusted friend. Of course Tommy still adored her. They were a great team! Periods of drifting apart were inevitable in a long marriage. Maybe she should become involved in his hobbies, learn to play golf?
As if Anna’s thoughts had summoned her, she saw Karen was making her way over to the bar, Tommy close behind.
‘Karen has something to ask you,’ said Tommy, too brightly. Karen produced a folder from her bag, and placed it tentatively on the bar.
‘I was wondering whether, if you have a moment, you might be so kind as to take a look at my little book,’ she said. ‘I want a nice cover design, you see, and you were so clever with our website.’
Anna looked down at the folder. Printed in Curlz typeface was a sticker bearing the title: Sun, Smiles and Sangria: Our Spanish Adventure!
Anna glanced over at Tommy, who had his perma-smile on.
‘I didn’t know you were a writer,’ she said to Karen.
‘Oh no, no,’ said Karen, horrified. ‘It’s just a silly thing. Only for family and friends. A little memento of our time here, before we go.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Anna, with as much sincerity as she could muster, and then felt awful, as if her uncharitable thoughts about Karen had been exposed for all to see. The next moment, she found herself clinking a glass to get some attention, before clambering onto a chair.
‘Señores y señoras,’ she said, looking down at their open, pink faces. ‘I know it’s not quite time yet but I think we should raise our glasses and toast the end of the year. And here’s hoping that 2010 treats us a little better and we all sell our bloody houses!’
The crowd cheered. Anna raised her glass towards Karen, as the toast was really for her.
‘Well, easy for you to say, Miss Six Hundred Euros!’ heckled Richard, and Anna gave a coy shrug.
As she clambered down from the bar, ‘The Power of Love’ by Huey Lewis came on. Mattie and Richard started dancing, Richard with his knees chivalrously bent to ease the height difference.
Tommy was still standing at the bar.
‘Happy New Year!’ he said, glassy-eyed and soppy. He put his hand on her arm, then quickly turned to slap Graeme on the shoulder – ‘Happy New Year, old cock!’ – to cover his tracks.
‘Two Hearts’ by Phil Collins. Others joined in the dancing, self-conscious shuffling, the fairy lights casting a kindly glow over their efforts. People had started to buy rounds; in these straitened times, such largesse had become rare. They invariably bought a drink for Anna, too, and each glass she clinked and knocked back unleashed more fondness for these nice, ordinary people, who had accepted their lives weren’t going to be magnificent, and were making of them what they could.
Just before 11pm, the door opened and Anna looked over – surely, this must be Simón – but it was another African, young and rangy, a large bag slung over his shoulder.
‘No thank you very much,’ bellowed Graeme from the bar.
The man waved his hands.
‘No, no,’ he said in a muffled, unconfident voice, holding out a piece of paper.
Graeme took it, and frowned. He looked over at Anna.
‘He has your name written down.’
Anna leaned below the bar to turn down the music and the chatter in the room died with it. She stared at her name, in large, unequivocal capitals.
‘I have money,’ said the African man, pulling a thick, folded envelope from his back pocket and offering it to her.
‘Anna, what’s going on?’ said Mattie. ‘Are you a drug dealer?’ She gave a shrill little laugh.
‘House,’ said the African. ‘House. Here for house.’
‘Wait, I can’t hear properly,’ said Anna, although she’d heard just fine. She ducked down below the bar to turn the radio off and gather her wits. She stood up too quickly, getting a head rush. The man waited, holding the envelope. The room was silent.
‘You’re here for the keys to my house?’ she said.
‘Yes!’ The man nodded, pleased to be understood.
Graeme was peering out of the front door.
‘There’s more of them out here,’ he reported.
‘You were sent by Simón?’ Anna asked the man.
‘Simón, yes, yes,’ he said, smiling.
‘Anna, do you want me to deal with this?’ said Graeme, in police mode.
‘No,’ said Anna. She couldn’t look at the Brits; she felt as if she had been pushed up on stage. She had not quite sobered up enough to deal with it.
‘Where is Simón?’ she said to the African. ‘I ought to speak to Simón.’ She spoke slowly and loudly, as if he was deaf, in the tone she hated to hear from others.
‘Please,’ said the man, and he pushed the envelope towards her. He looked at her, head slightly cocked, as if they were the only two in the room. He was standing directly under a clump of fairy lights, and the colours danced across his skin. He looked barely out of his teens, with a pointed chin and deep-set eyes fixed on hers, and in his look, Anna saw fear. She thought of her encounter with Simón: his coiled impatience, how she felt obliged to comply. And that was with her, a white woman from whom he wanted something. What would he be like with this man if he interrupted Simón’s New Year’s Eve to tell him he had failed to get the keys?
Beyond him, what was once a room full of affable individuals now felt like a silent, hostile chorus.
Had Simón even said the house was for himself?
‘Please,’ said the man again, quietly.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, and turned, face burning, to find the card that Simón had given her. With her back to the room, she called the number. He answered after one ring – sí? – so quickly she was caught off guard.
‘Oh, hola. It’s Anna,’ she said and, when he didn’t respond, added, ‘the finca woman?’
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘Everything alright?’
‘I didn’t realize you wo
uldn’t be picking up the keys yourself,’ she said, stumbling over the double negative in Spanish.
A pause.
‘Yes. You met Almamy. He is an old employee of mine, a trusted friend. I am giving him and his fellows a holiday. A reward for their hard work.’
‘Oh. Right. So you won’t be staying there.’
‘That’s OK with you?’ he continued. ‘To be honest, I didn’t think to mention it. With someone else, maybe – but you did not seem a narrow-minded person.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m not. It’s not a problem. I was just . . .’
‘You received the money OK?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
Anna glanced back at the room. Everyone was turning their attention on her, except for Mattie, who was offering the African man her glass. Anna watched him politely take a sip, whilst keeping his eyes fixed on Anna.
‘If that is all,’ said Simón, ‘I will go back to my dinner.’
‘Yes. Sorry,’ she said.
‘Well, adiós.’
He hung up.
Anna turned back to the room, glancing down at the thick envelope on the counter, its corner touching a slick of spilled cava that had soaked the paper. Then, looking only at the African, she smiled, reached over to the keys and handed them to him. The anxiety fell from his face. He thanked her profusely and hurried out of the bar, bag at his shoulder. The door banged shut, and the room remained silent. Anna ducked down behind the bar to turn the radio back on, loud.
4
The following week, Tommy drove Anna to the Plaza del Sol. On the way, he told her that his neighbour Sue Wallace was worried about some graffiti that had appeared on the side of her villa.
‘She says she’s heard that’s what these gangs do – like, secret signals, telling each other how many people live in the house, whether they have a dog or whatnot.’ He checked over his shoulder as he steered the Rover into the entrance of the site, marked by a felled concrete girder. ‘She thinks it’s saying that she’s on her own, because they know that Martin has gone to Cheshire for his knee op.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Anna, from the back seat. ‘It’s just tagging, some kid bored over Christmas. Look.’ She indicated the walls they passed as they crawled through the moribund estate. ‘Graffiti everywhere.’
‘She said it was different,’ said Tommy. ‘Like it was a sign.’
Anna said nothing.
They pulled up in their usual spot, the driveway of a house in a secluded plot on the north side of the development. There was no need for such discretion. Although there were signs that others also used the place for illicit purposes – the graffiti, fly-tipped sofas, empty bottles and syringes – in all their visits, Anna had never seen another human. Even the cobwebs stretched across the redundant street signs and never-used benches looked long-deserted.
The Plaza del Sol was modest compared to other aborted housing projects in this part of Spain, the monolithic ghost towns whose only visitors now were dying cats and the news crews and student photographers drawn to the irresistible visual metaphor. Typically for Marea, this one was an also-ran. It consisted of a boulevard, a parade of bricked-up shops, a playground and around fifty housing units abandoned at various stages of their construction. Some had their ribs in place, the girders wearing a skirt of concrete. Some had only just been conceived, marked out squares on the bare ground. A handful were shells that at first glance appeared habitable, with windows and tiles in place, but these details only served to emphasize their deadness. The fierce wind that swirled down the thoroughfares and propelled the roundabout in the playground was the only vital force around.
‘You’d think that they would have started using this place for cycling proficiency lessons,’ said Anna.
She had made this observation before to Tommy. Once, she’d felt grateful she could repeat herself with him and he wouldn’t pick her up on it.
‘Anna . . .’ started Tommy.
‘I’m not going up there to check on them!’
She found herself on the verge of tears. This was a new emotional tenor for them, and, in the rear-view mirror, she saw Tommy flinch. For a moment, sitting in the back seat, Anna felt like a teenager. First she was Tommy’s wife; now his daughter.
‘Thing is,’ Tommy said, carefully, after a pause, ‘people are worried that they might be plotting something. Getting their mates together, coming down to steal our stuff.’
‘That’s what black people do, is it?’
‘Don’t be like this, poppet,’ pleaded Tommy. ‘It isn’t about that.’
‘Right,’ said Anna. ‘So if Diane and Terry from Lowestoft had rented my place, you’d be suggesting I go up there and check on them, too.’
‘Really, Anna,’ said Tommy, turning to face her. This was forceful behaviour: the new side of her had brought out a new side to him. ‘It’s not about race. It’s about being . . . realistic. Seeing the situation for what it is. You know as well as I do young African men do not rent crumbling old fincas for a holiday.’
‘It’s not crumbling,’ she said. ‘Besides, you’re forgetting about Simón. The Spanish guy. He was the one who rented it. I googled him, he seems legit.’
She had actually done this, although Simón Ruiz had brought up hundreds of entries – the name appeared to be the Spanish equivalent of David Brown – and she hadn’t waded through them all. She had, however, found one picture of Simón at a charity event, arm around the waist of his pretty, dark-haired wife.
‘Karen was thinking that maybe they’re growing drugs up there.’
Anna snorted. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
Was it? All Anna knew for certain was that she wasn’t going to concede to Tommy. Just as she had refused to acknowledge the uneasy atmosphere in the bar on New Year’s Eve after the African left, turning up the music and pretending not to care that several of her customers called it a night before the clock struck twelve, leaving their grapes unswallowed. In the days since, she’d reimagined the moment as similar to a test in a fairy tale; as she handed over those keys a fog had cleared, exposing a gulf between her and the rest of the Brits.
In fairness, she knew that Tommy’s concern was less to do with race than her casual relinquishing of her house.
‘Don’t you care about what’s going on up there, Anna?’ he said. Although they were stationary, his hands were still on the steering wheel. ‘You don’t know these people at all. Have you even a deposit from them? References? It’s your property. Your asset.’
Anna stared through the window at a set of tyre prints that contemptuously scuffed the prematurely painted street markings. Must be from joyriders: maybe the same boys who spent their days smoking dope by the beach.
‘I hate the word “property”,’ she said, as if musing to herself. ‘It’s not an investment. It’s a house. A home.’
She heard her maddening, flattening tone, and wondered if Tommy realized that it was masking her own uncertainty.
Tommy exhaled, bewildered. They sat in silence for a minute, as the wind bullied the immature, neatly spaced trees lining the road and whipped in and out of the empty windows above their heads. Then, Tommy opened his door and came round to join her in the back.
‘I’m not very good at arguing,’ he said, reaching over to her.
His hand slid up her thigh, and his freshly shaven chin nuzzled her neck. Anna usually enjoyed sex with Tommy – six months into their meetings, he still acted as if he couldn’t believe his luck to be touching her – and at first she responded to him, pressing herself down onto his hand. Then, she stopped.
‘We can’t do this.’
‘No,’ he said, mouth at her jaw, ‘let’s not fight. I hate it.’
‘No. This,’ she said. ‘Us. I’m sorry.’
He pulled away to look at her, and she watched his face sag as her words registered. His hand went still, a dead weight on her leg. Sweet, guileless Tommy. She was almost as taken by surprise as him; she hadn’t planned this, or at least no
t consciously.
‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while,’ she said. How long? Since that awkward trip to the finca, where she was overpowered by the memories of Michael? Since New Year’s Eve, when he formed part of that suspicious chorus? Since twenty minutes ago?
‘But I thought we were happy,’ said Tommy, quietly. And with that, a phrase more suited to the breakdown of a marriage than the halt to a fortnightly knee-tremble, Anna realized that she should have done this ages ago.
‘I can’t stop thinking about poor Karen,’ she added. It wasn’t quite the truth, but it should have been the truth. It was the righteous explanation, and the simplest. Tommy winced, and then, in a sudden movement, opened the door and got out. He sank back into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and drove her back to the bar in silence, abruptly changing gears, eyes glued to the road.
That evening, Sue Wallace’s house was broken into. It wasn’t a standard, opportunistic break-in, either – a door left foolishly ajar whilst Sue was picking mint on her roof terrace. This was a professional job, efficiently executed whilst she was out at the supermarket. Bolt cutters, security grille prised off. And they had cleaned her out. Her jewellery, the electronics, clothes – all gone. Even her collection of audiobooks.
Graeme came to tell Anna the news the following afternoon.
‘Bit of a coincidence, eh?’ he said, leaning against the bar. Anna pretended to be cleaning the Stella Artois pump clip in order to avoid his gaze. You had to be careful with Graeme: his geniality ran as deep as a single coat of paint. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt, and his gravy-brown forearms lay heavily on the counter, ostentatiously bare. He liked to tell people that on the day he arrived in Spain he took off his watch, never to put it back on again.
‘I’m happy to go up there for you, my love,’ he said. ‘Just to check all’s in order.’
‘Thanks, Graeme,’ said Anna, eyes still on the pump. ‘But you’re alright.’
Under the Sun Page 8