‘Surely I can get him out,’ she burst out. ‘It’s my house. Do you remember, that bit just behind the almond trees? I just want them to go, Mum. They’re doing something weird. There has to be some way I can make them go.’
Silence from Janet’s end. Then she said, falteringly, ‘Darling, I don’t understand. Your house . . . ?’
‘No, no,’ said Anna, defused. She rubbed her face. ‘Not mine. That’s what she said to me. My friend.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Janet with relief, as if her daughter suddenly recounting another person’s distress in direct speech was nothing to question.
‘Look, I can hear you’re busy,’ said Anna. ‘Let’s speak another time.’
‘OK, darling,’ said her mother. ‘And how is everything with you?’
‘Oh, fantastic,’ said Anna. ‘Wonderful. Great.’
They hung up, and she drank a copita in one, and then another straight after, trying to cauterize her frustration. Anna knew she had a part to play in her and her mother’s feeble relationship, but her reluctance to confide in Janet was the result of decades of inadequate responses. She thought back to when she told Janet about Michael leaving. ‘Well, he was very attractive . . .’ her mother had said, sorrowfully.
She’d talked to Michael a lot about Janet, back in the early days. If Marie-Anne was a hammer drill when it came to what she thought Anna should be doing with her life, Janet was the opposite; so diffident that even if she did have opinions, she would think it presumptuous to offer them. As if she didn’t feel she had the right to expect anything, or make a mark on the world. Anna had never heard Janet express any anger or disappointment over Derek’s abandonment of her when Anna was tiny; she seemed to feel it was her due, that she’d never have been able to keep a charismatic man like him. When the dull, pedantic Bill came along, Janet allowed him to sweep her up, without resistance, not questioning whether he was right for her or not.
Michael had once declared that ‘self-absorbed people make the best parents, because they see their children as extensions of themselves.’ At the time it had seemed wise and incontrovertible, like everything Michael said, but actually, thinking about it now, it didn’t make sense at all. Both Janet and Derek were self-absorbed, in their different ways, and where had that got her?
Anna had another copita. Another mental wound reopened. During the early days in Spain, she and Michael had explored their new country, spending the night in little towns, getting drunk in neighbourhood bars with strip lighting and toothpick wrappers on the floor and greasy legs of jamón above the counter that knocked them on the head when they stood up. In one of these places, the song ‘Just the Way You Are’ came on the radio.
‘This is our song,’ Michael had murmured to Anna, as she pressed against him. The comment surprised her – it seemed too sentimental a thing for him to say – but she was delighted and kissed the side of his neck.
He corrected himself. ‘I mean, it’s your song.’
At the time, tipsy and love-drunk, Anna hadn’t thought that much of it – he had realized the phrase ‘our song’ was a cliché and changed his wording. But in light of his desertion, the hints he had given about their intellectual incompatibility, the comment took on a different hue. The song’s lyrics proclaimed a lack of need of clever conversation; it was a patronizing tribute to the non-challenging partner from her out-of-her-league love.
Anna necked another glass, furious at the memory. On top of the condescension, the sentiment was a lie: clever conversation was apparently just what he did need, and she was not enough for him, as he gravely explained when he finally deigned to answer her calls, four days after bailing out.
Anna noticed she’d finished the bottle. White wine didn’t really count; it was just one step up from water.
The next morning Anna woke with a jolt, so early it was still dark. The vivid dream did not immediately dissipate and it took the steady red light of the security alarm on the wall to reminded her where she was, and that she was alone. On the arm of the chair sat her phone; on the floor beside it, an empty glass which had held the final, beyond unnecessary nightcap. Checking the time on her phone – 5.20am – she saw an unfinished, unsent text to her father. Hi Dad, I was just thinking about something. You know I went to Bali, too? In my year off? I only chose it because you had lived there and I believed you when you said you would meet me out there and show me around and I . . .
If she had even considered airing a twenty-year-old grievance with her father, what else had she done at the thin end of the evening? Warily, she checked her sent texts. Yes, there was one to Tommy at 1am: a lengthy justification for dumping him, laden with clichés. You’re such a lovely man. It’s not you, you must know that. Even, I want us to be friends. Far too overwrought for what was just a casual affair. Anna knew that her motive in texting him was not noble; she was after reassurance, for him to tell her how much he adored her. She thought of him waking in a couple of hours, rolling over in bed to check his phone; propping himself up on his elbow to shield the screen from Karen as he read it.
She shifted, and her laptop dug into her side. It was under the duvet with her. Once, drunk online shopping meant underwear or vintage lettering sets from eBay. In the recent past, it was usually a flight back to the UK. At a certain time of night, it seemed so irresistibly easy. For as little as €24.99, she could be out of here; at 2am, after a couple of bottles, all the counter-arguments faded into the background. She could just bail. Cut her losses and get out, like so many others had done. Pack a carry-on bag and spend the last of her money on a flight home, leaving the keys in the lock. Be on the Gatwick Express by tomorrow lunchtime. Start again from scratch. The next day, her sense restored, the flight time would pass by, the ticket wasted. Over the past year, four empty seats had headed back to Gatwick, carrying her ghost.
She prised open the laptop, the screen lit up in the darkness. Yes, she saw, she had tried to get onto the airline website, but her escape attempt had been thwarted: the €64.99 payment had been blocked by her bank. God, she really was in the red.
There was no point in bailing out, anyway. The bills from the finca and the bar would follow her. Tommy had told her about one woman who had done a flit and found herself being door-stepped by debt collectors in her flat in Southampton. Anna pictured herself in a single room in a house-share in an outer-London suburb, opening an electricidad demand. Standing in the queue at the discount supermarket, ignoring a +34 call on her phone.
The laptop screen went to sleep. Looking at the red eye of the security light in the corner of the room, she was struck by an intense loneliness. Stronger, even, than those awful few weeks up at the finca after Michael had left. It was like an out-of-body experience; a different and more frightening feeling than the panic she often felt in the dead of night, as if her ribcage was full of moths who lay dormant during the day.
The impotent fury she had felt towards Simón, the feeling she had gone to bed on, was now turned on herself. What a fool she had been. Maybe this was just what she deserved for putting everything in one basket. Two baskets – Michael and the finca. Maybe it was some sort of poetic justice if the finca was destroyed. The place had been made to measure for a life she was no longer going to have – why not let it be torn apart and put to different use, like an unworn wedding dress cut up for tea towels?
But it was the nearest thing she had to a home. This apartment wasn’t one, and neither was London any more. That, as much as the practical reasons, was what stopped her taking all those one-way flights she’d booked. She wanted, desperately, to get back to London – but the London she’d lived in before Michael. Before her friends started buying leather sofas and using phrases like ‘forever home’ and spending all weekend with their families. When arrangements didn’t have to be made three weeks in advance. When things were there for the taking. Before Anna had realized that, just from one ill-timed decision to trust a man when he told her that she was his future, she’d missed her chance to be one of
those women cycling around with an empty baby-seat on the back of their bikes, advertising both the fact they had procreated and that they had someone at home looking after the child.
And now, all her friends were onto their second. At least with the first, there still seemed time to catch up, and the personality changes motherhood wrought on her friends – preciousness, fussiness, insularity – could be blamed on lack of confidence. Come the second, it felt like they were gone for good. During her last visit home, the previous Christmas, Anna had understood that it wasn’t that Jess and her other parent friends pitied her; rather, that they didn’t have the headspace to think about her at all. When Anna talked about Spain they said, ‘Oh, how wonderful! We must visit!’ No one said, ‘What the hell are you doing? What’s really going on? This isn’t you.’ How lonely it was, to be taken at face value.
And on that last visit back, she had felt left behind by the city itself, too. Just a few years away had turned her into a tourist, walking too slowly, getting flustered at ticket machines, disapproving of the amount of packaging in supermarkets. Her clothes didn’t look right. The good places she knew to get a drink were no longer good. She would meet friends on newly fashionable market streets and be overly conscious of the twenty-somethings flitting around. Lithe, insouciant, potent, they still had the power to dazzle and disorder. Watching them, her situation appeared stark. She saw herself through London’s eyes: an almost middle-aged woman. She could wander around the city for weeks by herself, dolled up, lingering in galleries and cafes, making eye contact, and not be picked up by anyone she wanted to be picked up by. Things would no longer happen to her.
And out there somewhere, maybe in the next street, ready to be bumped into, was Michael. Men like him had no shelf-life. He would be adored until death. Women didn’t care that he was a tosser. She hadn’t.
After that visit, she found herself longing to get back to Marea, where standards were low, where she was still considered hot stuff and the days were not mined with painful memories. Getting through customs at Gatwick felt like shrugging off a hefty backpack and, for a half an hour, sitting in the seafood bar at Terminal 3, she felt at peace. Anyone looking at her would see a lone woman, still relatively attractive, who could be going anywhere, to meet anyone. They didn’t know the truth.
Anna realized her heart was pounding fast; she pressed a cushion against her chest to try and smother the hammering. Outside on the window ledge, pigeons cooed.
At 6am the heating clicked on, and as the radiators warmed up they woke the peculiar scent of the apartment: traces of past inhabitants that had settled into the pores of the place. Instant soups, Lynx, duty-free perfume, aftersun, dirty nappies.
No. She couldn’t bail. She had her pride. She was someone who did things properly, saw them through. She must salvage something from her time here, otherwise the waste would forever weigh on her. She’d give it six months. Stay focused and concentrate on squeezing everything she could out of the bar. Open every day for the full twelve hours, make an effort, be charming to the customers. Copy Sweeney and put on theme nights, do some two-for-one offers. Make a renewed effort to sell the finca. No booze; or at least, in the evenings only. Go back on Facebook, reconnect with old colleagues, start putting out feelers for possible work in London. Then she would be returning with something; or, at least, the knowledge that she had done all she could.
Anna had made such resolutions before: there had been any number of early-morning epiphanies, witnessed by the red eye of the security alarm. Was it a case of them stacking up to a tipping point, she wondered. Or was it more mysterious, like conception; after many shots, one would randomly take hold. Hopefully, the key was just meaning it enough.
Beyond the thin curtains, the light was rising, bringing out the shapes of the furniture. She would begin her new start now, she decided. She would go for a swim.
Anna had never seen Marea this early. The street cleaners must have just been, as the promenade tiles were slick and gleaming, but she felt as if she was the only person in town. A couple of stars were still visible and there was a bite to the air. The palm trees stood motionless. The sea would be freezing, but she needn’t stay in there long: this was more of a symbolic dousing than a proper swim.
As she walked down the steps to the beach, the rising sun was reddening the sand and casting a golden film over the textured sea. On the other side of the bay, the outline of the mountains was vivid against the brightening sky, but the apartments and hotels clustered at their base were still indistinct; for a moment, the scene was as nature intended. A flock of tiny birds zipped around overhead, in too much of a hurry for this time of day, as if they were rehearsing for the evening ahead. In the absence of any man-made noise, the waves seemed as loud as an aeroplane taking off.
Anna stood still, using the beauty of the moment as an excuse to delay getting in the water. The sky above the sea was now slashed with violet and pink, as lurid as an inspirational poster: an unnecessarily epic show for low-maintenance Marea. Don’t waste it on us here! she thought.
That weekend at the finca when Farah and Kurt came to stay, Michael had been telling his friends about his decision to paint the greenhouses rather than the natural landscape, because beauty was banal, and there was only one response to it. Kurt had quoted Oscar Wilde in response: ‘No one of any real culture talks about the beauty of a sunset.’ Trailing behind them, Anna had thought of the notebook she had kept from her trip to Bali when she was nineteen, filled with lengthy, unoriginal, deeply felt attempts to pin down the wonder she was experiencing, trying to squeeze every drop out of a trip she had spent two years saving up for.
Within minutes, the dawn spectacle was over, leaving in its wake a plain old blue morning, like any other. The air was briny and fresh and the sea had a serene, pearly quality that belied its frigidity.
She had to go in. Leaving a puddle of clothes in the middle of the beach seemed too much of a statement, somehow, so she took off her shoes to feel the chilly sand between her toes and headed for the cluster of dark rocks at the far end of the beach.
As she approached, she glimpsed something move beside them. A cat? But as she drew nearer, a boulder-size shape straightened to the height of a man and looked in her direction.
Paco. Anna stopped, feeling wrong-footed and intrusive, as if the off-peak beach was his domain. She raised a hand in greeting but before she could decide whether to carry on, he started towards her.
‘Hey hey,’ he shouted, in Spanish. ‘Miss, come here, quick!’
When Anna didn’t move, he shouted for her again, more agitated, beckoning with both arms. He was wearing dark clothes, a long-sleeved top and trousers, and there was little contrast between them and his tanned skin. She glanced over her shoulder – the town waking up now, a few lights on in the nearest hotel – and then started walking quickly towards him.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, as she came close. ‘What’s happened?’
As she spoke she glanced beyond him. She saw something green – some discarded clothing? – and then, in a lurch of recognition, saw that the cloth was a T-shirt and that the T-shirt was clinging to the body of a man on the sand. An African man who, from his stillness and the way his legs were splayed at an agonizing angle, was almost certainly dead.
Anna stared at the body, her chest heaving. She looked back at Paco. His eyes were wide and he started talking fast, stumbling over his words and gesticulating.
‘Wait, slow down,’ she said, shakily. She put her hand on his arm. ‘I can’t understand.’
He expelled a breath before starting again, at the same speed. As he talked, they edged closer to the body. One arm was raised over the man’s head, shielding most of his face. He was young, in his teens. He was wearing jeans and his sprawled limbs were uncommonly long and thin. Beside him, where the rocks met the water, bobbed a collection of plastic bottles, like a cluster of spawn.
‘Who is he? Do you know him?’ asked Anna.
‘No!’ barke
d Paco, perturbed, and started explaining again, this time just slow enough for her to understand. He had been sleeping under the tarpaulin in his boat, as usual, and had woken to the sounds of voices nearby. When he looked out he had seen two men carrying something across the beach, towards the rocks. He had called out, and the men had dumped their load, run back to a car on the road and driven off. He had then gone over and discovered the body. That’s when Anna had arrived.
As he babbled, Anna’s gaze was locked on the body. It was impossible that someone so young, so viable, could be dead. His dark, delicately muscled arms were as hairless as a child’s. The T-shirt had a logo on the chest pocket – a grinning hippo brandishing a paintbrush. She felt compelled to take in every detail of him.
‘They carried him,’ Paco was saying again. ‘I saw. They came from there.’ He pointed inland.
Anna nodded absently, still transfixed on the corpse. She shifted slightly, so she could see the eye that was shielded behind the man’s raised arm, and recoiled. The whole iris was bright red, so that the pupil floated in a pool of blood. Nausea rose in her throat and she clasped Paco’s shoulder – even under his top she could feel the wiry hairs. She wanted to cover the man’s eyes, pull down the lids like she had seen in films, but she didn’t know how to do it, how much pressure to use. Besides, it seemed an intrusion.
It also occurred to her that, if this was a suspicious death, she shouldn’t touch the body.
She looked away from the man’s face. An extra waistband poked over his jeans; he seemed to be wearing two pairs. The jeans were thin, and there didn’t appear to be anything in the pockets. Then she saw something else, at the top of his exposed slice of stomach, half-covered by the T-shirt. It looked like a string around his waist, tied tight, cutting into his flesh. She moved closer, to touching distance. There was something attached to the string that wasn’t immediately visible against his dark skin: a leather pouch, about the size of a matchbox. Under the T-shirt were the outlines of several more similar shapes.
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