There was no response. They had closed down entirely, now. The very young one at the back was still compulsively glancing over towards the hill. The one with the neat beard started talking to the others in their own language – no doubt, ordering one of them to alert Simón. She should go back to the car. But, she thought, if Simón was coming anyway, and she was screwed, then she might as well see what was behind that hill.
Anna started walking forward, past the men and the well and the coop, and began climbing the hill. Her hill. She forced herself not look back to see if the men were following or making that phone call, focusing instead on the movement of her legs and the view ahead of her; the yellow, dry grass; the curve of the top of the land; the crisp outline of the mountains beyond it. Perhaps Simón would be standing there, arms folded, waiting for her.
She reached the top, and stopped short. Before her was a sea of grimy plastic. The greenhouses that had so upset Michael two years earlier had vastly expanded – they now covered every inch of land between the bottom of the hill and the edge of the forest. The nearest structure was close enough to see the blurred shapes of workers moving around inside. Giant tins of fertilizer lay discarded around the perimeter, and she heard the hum of some irrigation system, like artificial cicadas.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Almamy draw up beside her.
‘You work here?’ she said. ‘Simón owns this?’
He nodded.
‘How long has this been here?’
He shrugged. ‘A long time, I think.’
The late-afternoon air nipped at her; from somewhere in the valley came the sound of goat bells. She glanced over her shoulder towards the finca, its stone roof visible beyond the almond grove. What was once her home now seemed like a folly, innocent of the monstrosity that had crept up beside it, rendering it next to worthless. No pool was one thing; a well feeding three acres of dirty plastic another. Not to mention a legion of exploited workers as neighbours.
She turned and started slowly back down the hill. Almamy followed her.
Back at the well, the other men were sitting on the ground, waiting. The phone was back on the pile of clothes.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said, not looking at them. Her voice sounded reedy and defeated. ‘Please don’t tell Simón I came.’
It was a vain hope, she knew. Not looking at them, she walked back into the almond grove and started towards the car. She noticed that Almamy was still following her.
‘You don’t have to see me out!’ she said, stung at being escorted off her own land. But he had another motive.
‘What is your password, please?’ he said, in a low voice, as they wound through the trees.
‘What?’
‘The password. For Wi-Fi.’
‘Oh,’ said Anna, nonplussed. She told him, and he nodded his thanks. Then she remembered she had closed the account a year ago, when she’d left. ‘Sorry, forget that. It doesn’t work any more.’
He shrugged good-naturedly, and continued to walk with her. Then, in the same conspiratorial tone, said, ‘And how is your friend Martha?’
‘Martha?’
Almamy nodded eagerly.
‘You mean Mattie?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘How is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. Then, seeing his face fall, added, ‘I mean, she’s fine.’
‘Tell her Almamy says hello, please.’
They continued walking through the grove, more companionably now. The finca came into view, and this time the sight reminded Anna of why she had come. She seized the opportunity.
‘That necklace. In the house. Over the fire,’ she said, casually. ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’
Almamy frowned.
‘Gree gree?’
‘The necklace thing,’ she said. ‘Leather. I saw one like that the other day. On a man. It was around here.’ She touched her stomach and paused. ‘He was on the beach.’
Almamy’s face, so alive when asking about Mattie, clouded over.
‘No comprende,’ he said.
And with that he turned and slipped back through the grove.
Jaime had got out of his car and was leaning against the gate, hands stuffed into the pockets of his Adidas top. He took one look at Anna’s expression and her stiff, fast walk, and turned back to the car to start the engine. Without a word, she climbed in the back door, and he reversed down the path.
Moments later, just after they had turned onto the mountain road, another car approached. Jaime pulled in to let it pass. A black BMW. Anna caught a glimpse of the driver, that seal-like black hair with no parting, and flattened herself down in the back seat.
Jaime glanced back at her, bemused.
‘You know him?’
‘Who?’ she said, hearing the BMW’s expensive roar subsiding into the distance.
‘Mr Ruiz.’
‘You know Simón?’ she said, still not lifting her head from the seat.
‘Sure,’ said Jaime. ‘Everyone knows him. I used to work for him. He was in construction, before that was fucked. Is he going to tear down your house?’
He seemed faintly amused by it all. Anna remained flat on the back seat and didn’t reply. After a while, Jaime put on the CD. The fast music fed her agitation and as she stared at the roof of the car, her body jolting as the wheels bounced over the unpaved road, she thought: if Simón was going to tear down the finca, she could hardly feel more outraged than she did now.
7
As they reached the outskirts of town, Anna asked Jaime to drop her off at the police station. It was only as he drove off that she realized she’d been too distracted to pay him his thirty-five euros.
The comisaría was one of Marea’s grander buildings, with a neo-classical facade in custard yellow fronted by high gates and a row of limp flags. But attempts to impress ended at the automatic doors. Rows of screwed-down seating, vending machines and an ever-present cleaner mopping the floor gave the reception area the ambience of the departure gate for a delayed night flight.
Anna had been here before, for the registration procedures required of all foreign residents, and for the drink-driving matter, although the finer details of that night were hazy. Her enduring memory was of Michael taking a seat two away from her, and his expression as he looked at her across the gulf of moulded plastic.
‘It could have been you,’ she’d said, flushed with shame.
Spain’s alcohol limit was strict – a single glass of beer would push you over.
‘Well it wasn’t, was it,’ he’d replied, as if having the bad luck to be caught was yet another failing of hers.
Today, there were half a dozen people waiting in the reception, including a couple who looked as if they had bedded down for the day, with foil-wrapped food on their laps. The spicy smell mingled unhappily with the lavender-scented chemicals from the cleaner’s bucket. Anna joined those hovering around the window. After the elderly woman ahead had given a long account of a theft by her lodger, Anna stepped up to the glass. The policeman was writing something, head bowed, but from his careful side parting Anna recognized him as the man who had dealt with her on the night of the drink-driving incident. Of course she would get him. She didn’t have time to move before he looked up.
‘Sí?’
There was no flicker of recognition. It had been almost two years, she thought; he must see dozens of people a day.
‘I wanted to ask about the man whose body was found on the beach,’ she said. ‘The African.’
‘That case is closed,’ he said. Although somewhere in his forties the man had a disconcertingly cherubic look, with full cheeks and dark-pink lips.
‘What happened to him?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said. ‘But the case is closed.’
She frowned. ‘But what if I have new information?’
‘What exactly is the information?’ he said. He didn’t bother to inflect the end of the sentence, such was his lack of
interest in her reply. He’d had the same tone during their interview, when Anna had stammered away about how sorry she was, how she really wasn’t the kind of person who did that sort of thing.
‘You should look into Simón Ruiz, he’s a tenant up at my house. I think he might have something to do with it. I don’t know what, but I think there’s something going on up there. And he’s digging this well . . .’
The policeman’s chin lifted.
‘Simón Ruiz is your tenant?’
Anna nodded, although there was something in his tone that made her falter.
‘As I say, Miss Moore, the investigation is closed,’ he said.
His eyes were on hers. She hadn’t given her name this time. So, he did remember her. The look he was giving her now had the same level of disgust as when, during their previous encounter, he’d given a slow, deliberate account of the time he’d had to scrape a six-year-old drink-drive victim off the road.
Behind her, Anna heard a sigh, and the policeman looked over her shoulder towards the next person. Anna turned and left, waiting impatiently for the automatic doors to release her and then, on the street, picking up speed until she was at a sprint. The soles of her five-euro supermarket pumps were so thin she might as well have been hitting the pavement barefoot. Pedestrians stared and cats fled as she flew past: people didn’t tend to move fast in Marea. She ran through the pinched streets, under washing lines, past a Spanish boy kicking a washing-up sponge; a weightless football. She didn’t know exactly why she was running, whether out of shame at her past or frustration with the present.
As she turned onto the road leading to the square, she slowed down, panting, as a thought came to her. That glimpse of Simón in his car, as he headed to the finca. There was no doubt that the men would tell him she’d been there. If not Almamy, then certainly the hostile one from the house. She imagined Simón striding over to check on progress at the well, and receiving the news in furious silence.
She checked her phone, but he hadn’t called.
Anna walked gingerly to the end of the road and looked across the square. The bar was shuttered, as she’d left it. No BMW purring outside. Out in the square, pensioners pottered around the barren fountain; the mild weather was holding up. The ice-cream parlour had opened for the first time that year; a serving girl stared blankly out over the pastel mounds. Sweeney brought out pints for a couple on his terrace. The church clock chimed 3pm.
Anna fought the urge to retreat, to duck into one of the anonymous little old-man bars she’d passed and stay there forever. Instead, she made herself move forward, stepping out from the safety of the dark side street and padding across the square to her bar. She was crouching down to open the padlock on the shutters when she heard the slam of a car door and there he was, striding towards her. He stepped smartly up onto the terrace and stopped a few feet away. Too close. Anna stood up and backed into the shutters, the metal jabbing her shoulders.
‘My men say you were harassing them,’ he said, pulsing with anger. He was wearing a polo shirt, his delicate forearms crossed at his chest. ‘Do not go up there again. I’ll have you arrested.’
‘I’ll have you arrested,’ said Anna, although she had just attempted and failed to do exactly that. ‘You can’t just dig a hole in my land.’
‘A “hole”,’ he said, with contempt.
‘OK, a well. Whatever.’ She flushed. ‘You can’t do that.’
Simón smiled mirthlessly.
‘It’s a borehole, actually. And if you knew anything about “your land”,’ he said, ‘you would know that it is sitting on a reservoir which belongs to the valley. Anyone growing agriculture nearby is entitled to draw from it.’
‘That’s not true!’ she said, but she heard a quiver in her voice. Was he right? Was this in the small print of their contract when they bought the place; one of the clauses she had skimmed over, half-understood?
‘It’s been true for eight hundred years,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should have done your research. You want to look out at lovely views in your little paradise, but we need to eat, I’m afraid. And we were here first.’
He had relaxed now; arms uncrossed, a condescending smile. Anna looked away from him, over his shoulder. The T-shirt woman was at the door of her shop, watching them; meeting Anna’s gaze, she ducked inside.
‘How long have the greenhouses been there, that size?’ Anna said. ‘When we arrived, they weren’t that big. They weren’t anywhere near the bottom of the hill.’
‘You are wrong,’ he continued. ‘They have always been there. Long before you came. I think you are confused.’
He took a step towards her and sniffed, pointedly.
‘Perhaps you are drunk.’
‘No, I’m not!’ cried Anna, before she could stop herself. She knew she had lost now. Her forearm twinged; she realized she was squeezing the padlock key hard in her fist.
‘You are disgusting,’ he said. ‘You Brits. Coming here, because you’ve failed at home. Becoming drunkards. Driving drunk. You could have killed my daughter.’
Anna stared at this loathsome, precise man. How did he know about her conviction? She recalled the policeman’s face that morning when she mentioned Simón’s name; his refusal to even hear her out.
Simón started walking back to his car with the air of someone who held all the cards. But he was wrong.
‘I know what you did with that man,’ Anna called after him.
It was a long shot. But Simón stopped, his back to her.
Triumphant, Anna pressed on.
‘I saw the body myself, on the beach,’ she said. ‘You should expect a call from the police.’
Even from behind, she saw Simón relax. He continued walking to his car.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘I think that you are still drunk.’
His BMW was blocking the side street and a queue had formed behind him; drivers began leaning on their horns. Anna stayed standing until the car had pulled off, and then crouched back down at the padlock, calves trembling. She opened her tightened fist; the key had left a reddened imprint on her palm.
Once inside, Anna locked the door of the bar and sat at the counter with a copita. As the shock of the encounter with Simón wore off, she felt stranded, like a child at the high end of a seesaw outweighed by an intransigent bully at the bottom. The only point she had scored against him was ephemeral – that pause when she had first mentioned the dead man, before he had relaxed again and delivered his parting shot. But what could she do with that, without any proof of his involvement or anyone willing to investigate?
As for getting back the finca, the options open to her looked unappealing and pointless. She imagined herself in some municipal library, leafing through pages of dense, technical Spanish, trying to find the relevant section on land laws. Selling her remaining possessions at the car boot sale in order to raise enough for a session with a lawyer; one tiny step on the lengthy, uncertain, expensive journey to evict Simón and the men.
The bar was horribly quiet. Anna got up and turned on the radio, heard a blast of manic chatter, and snapped it off again. Instead, she switched on the glass washer, for its low, comforting rumble, and refilled her copita. God, how she longed for someone to share the burden, and tell her what to do. Or, better still, to deal with it themselves. Impulsively, she called Tommy; his phone rang once before she came to her senses and hung up.
How would Michael have reacted, if he’d been here for this? She’d rarely seen him tested, had always tried to shield him from difficulties. Even when they’d been threatened by a junkie with a scaffolding pole in Granada, she had instinctively stepped in between the two men. Presumably, once upon a time, when he still loved her, he would have been at her side, battling to evict Simón, vowing to get justice for the dead man on the beach. But such speculation seemed perverse: after all, if he still loved her, she wouldn’t be in this position.
In the square, the church clock chimed t
he half hour; Marea had excessive timekeeping for a place where most residents had little to do. Anna thought back to that moment when she and Michael first climbed the hill beyond the almond grove and glimpsed the greenhouses. Simón claimed the structures had always been bordering their land, as large as they were now, but Anna didn’t remember it like that at all. Back then, they were just a flash of plastic, far off in the distance. She was sure of it.
The size of Simón’s agriculture empire was unimportant in the scheme of things, but, in the absence of solutions to bigger issues, it moved into the foreground. It worried her, the prospect that she might have so badly misremembered. Had that plastic ocean really been there all this time, just out of sight behind the hill? A vast presence, teeming with silent men, pressed up against her land? She found she was swivelling back and forth, violently, on the stool. Maybe this was how it felt at the beginning of losing your mind, realizing that your memories could no longer be trusted.
Her phone was there on the counter. She could call Michael, and ask him to put her mind at rest and confirm that those greenhouses were just a speck in the distance when they first arrived. But even in her fevered state, she knew this wasn’t wise. As far as she was aware, Michael had no idea of what she was up to now. For all he knew, she had blossomed in his wake and was now shacked up in the finca with a dashing Spanish intellectual, surrounded by babies and chickens and interesting friends and incomparably better off than when she was with him. Even the scantest information about her circumstances now would puncture any such visions, let alone the fact she was living in the derided Marea.
She stopped swivelling. His paintings. He’d captured that view behind the hill, many times. He had an agent, and a gallery; or at least, he did. The pictures might be online. Galvanized, she found her laptop and tried the Internet, in the hope that it might have started working. When it didn’t, she put her laptop under her arm, unlocked the bar door, and ran over to Sweeney’s, perching on the edge of his terrace to catch his signal.
She’d done this several times before when her Internet was down, but now Sweeney’s network appeared to be locked. As she tried again to connect, a shadow fell over her: Sweeney, the crotch of his baggy jeans level with her face.
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