‘You’ve put a password on?’ she said.
‘Indeed,’ he said.
Anna smiled up at him, expectantly.
‘Ten euro minimum spend to use the Wi-Fi,’ he said.
‘Oh, come on, Sweeney, don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘I’ve helped you out loads.’
He looked down at her, face drawn and implacable.
‘I gave you all that vinegar, remember?’ she said. ‘Dozens of bottles. I didn’t ask you for money.’
‘Out of my hands, I’m afraid,’ he said. Anna let out a growl of frustration and snapped the laptop closed.
‘There’s an Internet cafe in town,’ Sweeney added, as he turned away.
Anna had walked past the Internet cafe before, registering it only to wonder how such places still survived when even her ancient neighbours, Rose and David, had broadband at home. Its narrow, out-of-the-way street seemed a fitting location for such an anachronism.
Arriving there now, Anna winced at her lack of imagination. Of course, it wasn’t aimed at her, or the other Brits. The windows were plastered with posters offering mobile phone deals and money transfers to Africa, using photos of winsome young girls in plaits and old women in tears of gratitude. Around them, making use of every available inch of glass, were homemade notices on scraps of paper in a variety of languages. Similar to the small ads in the back of the English newspaper, she supposed, but most were even more general and terse: the single word Work, followed by a mobile number. Then, there were enigmatic notes targeted at one other person: Julian, Oct 24, get in touch, with a phone number. Anna thought of the notice boards in travellers’ cafes during her Bali trip in the late nineties; those pre-email forums for rekindling lost connections.
The cafe was three quarters full, the customers all African men. A Spanish girl behind the counter took Anna’s money and pointed her to a spare terminal. A melancholic pop song played, lyrics in Arabic, and there was a delicious smell in the air: on the counter was a large bunch of fresh mint that the girl was making into glasses of tea. Bottles of water and soft drinks were also on sale. On a table near the front desk, a dozen mobiles were attached to charging leads, like dogs tied to a railing.
A couple of the computers were housed in private cubicles, and their occupants sat in silence, heads bowed and shoulders hunched to further block the view of whatever they were looking at. Amongst those out in the open, however, the atmosphere was lively. The men chatted to each other as they typed whilst some, wearing headphones, talked loudly to people on Skype. Anna recognized their animated manner from her own similar calls back home. All good! Best thing I ever did. Oh yes, work’s going well. Postcard conversations, sent over a wall of dishonesty. People back home didn’t want to hear the full truth, nor did anyone want to admit it.
Anna logged on at the terminal, beside a man playing a furiously fast card game online, and stared at the empty search box. After Michael had left, she had, inevitably, spent the odd evening at her laptop, looking for clues to his life without her. He wasn’t on social media, so she had combed his friends’ profiles searching for photos of him. Even the most innocuous mention of his name, any sign that he was existing without her, threw her off course for hours. In the end she had given up googling him, and it was one of the few resolutions she had stuck to. It had been over a year, now.
Be strict, she told herself, as she typed in his name. Focus. She’d search only for Michael’s paintings from his time at the finca, nothing else.
There was a yowl from the man beside her as he lost his game. Anna leaned closer to her screen. The first two results under Michael’s name were a website and a Twitter feed. Neither had appeared when she last searched for him: it was like going back to a familiar neighbourhood and seeing new buildings had sprung up. She opened the website. It was of the stylish, minimalist variety, the home page just a single image of one of his paintings with his name laid across in lower case Courier. Anna was reminded of Simón’s business card; the arrogance of that lack of information.
She clicked on recent work. And miraculously, there it was, third from the top – exactly what she was looking for. Plasticulture: greed v nature. Six paintings of the landscape of southern Spain, exhibited in a group show at an East London gallery the previous autumn.
‘Yes!’ she exclaimed out loud – after a morning of disappointments, something, finally, had gone her way. Infected by the animation of her card-playing neighbour, she even found herself giving a self-conscious air punch. Without stopping his game, the man looked over and nodded his approval.
As she enlarged the thumbnails, however, her sense of triumph evaporated. She had seen some of Michael’s paintings in their early stages, up at the finca, and remembered them as mildly expressionistic yet still representative of reality. But either her memory had deceived her or Michael had reworked the pictures once back in London, as the images in front of her now were abstract to the point of incomprehensibility. The land and sky were painted almost identical shades of grimy off-white, whilst the greenhouses were a formless, bright green mass. And crucially, far from being a distant aberration, the structures now appeared vast, a blob devouring the countryside. As huge as the one there now, if not larger.
The scene was distorted for emotional effect, surely. Deflated, she looked around the cafe, this time taking in the chipped MDF partitions and grimy, clunky equipment; the thick snakes of exposed wires along the skirting and the tile which had come off the wall, revealing the hardened glue beneath it. The man next to her gave a jarring shriek, slapping his hand on the table and gleefully cursing his opponent.
Anna turned back to her screen and moved the cursor towards the log off button. Then, she paused. Clicking on Michael’s website, she’d felt barely anything – a faint flutter, perhaps, but it was more like a reflex, a muscle memory, incomparable to the pain of her previous online excursions. Had time finally done its work, and inured her to him?
She clicked the about tab on Michael’s website. Under some terse biographical details, there was a photo of him at his easel: black and white, a heavy contrast lending him deep hollows under his cheeks and brow. His forehead was furrowed and he wasn’t looking at the camera, too engrossed to even give a minute to his own publicity.
Anna gazed at the photo and felt a pleasing sense of detachment. The sight of him left her unmoved, as if she were looking at a mere arrangement of different tones, rather than an image of the man who had demolished her. Maybe she had been over him for months, but hadn’t realized, like a leg fully healed within its plaster cast.
Emboldened, she opened another tab and looked at the second search result under his name, his Twitter profile. So he had taken Farah’s advice. She quickly scanned the first few dozen entries. They appeared to be confined to his life as an artist: re-tweets of praise for his work, quotes from magazine articles, droll opinions of shows he had seen, the odd aphorism. Here he was, building his brand. The most personal it got was the news that he was going on an artist’s retreat in Bordeaux.
Anna kept scrolling. There was nothing here she wished he were saying to her, or that made her miss him in the slightest: in fact, the opposite. Wasn’t it a relief not having to pretend she got his jokes? To knew what he meant by liminality and negative capabilities?
Then, she spotted a re-tweet that jarred amidst Michael’s sober content. Homemade crumpets? Damn right. Recipe here. #lotsofbutter #simplysatine.
Anna clicked through to a photo of a winking young woman with a sharp jawline and short dark hair in a punky undercut. Her bio read Satine Simpson: cook, blogger, campaigner, overachiever. The name rang a bell. Frowning, she turned back to Michael’s website and checked the credit on the photo of him at his easel. Yes, it was her.
Anna’s inner smoke alarm went off. No good could come of further investigation into this woman, she knew, but it was too late. The noise in the cafe faded to nothing and she stared at the screen, scrolling through Satine’s tweets.
Hey, men in the Brit
ish Library – I’m here to WORK, ok?
Oh Copenhagen, we will only be together for 18 hours – let’s make the most of it. #getreadyvesterbro
Nice profile in ES mag today (ignore the ‘high priestess of hipsterdom’ crap)
Props to the Observer for the baddass review of #simplysatine
Apols to everyone who couldn’t get into my launch last night. #bullshitfireregs
Happiness is: when you and your man both get onto the same artists’ retreat. #mercibordeaux!
Anna’s chest filled with concrete, but deep within was a pulse of satisfaction at having been proved right. Merci Bordeaux! She opened a new tab, searched Google Images and there they were, Michael and Satine, at a gallery party just a fortnight earlier. Beer bottles in hand, they posed for the camera, tucked into each other. Satine was wearing a fedora and denim dungarees, a slice of her pale, bare torso on show. Was she early twenties? Late twenties? Young and beautiful enough, in any case, to look good in dungarees.
Michael’s trousers were rolled up to expose his bare ankles and brogues and he had grown a substantial beard. Anna recognized the look from her last trip home, when a pocket of East London appeared to have been colonized by the Amish. Annoyingly – inevitably – it suited him. And he was smiling. Beaming, actually. When Anna had been with him, he had seen photos as a chore.
So, Michael was now a happy hipster with a hot hipster girlfriend. His hand was on Satine’s arse. Her left arm was curled around his waist. And on her hand, just visible, something glinted.
Anna leaned in for a closer look, her face only a few inches from the screen. Maybe it was just a normal ring. But her investigative energies had been diverted: she needed to know. There were three minutes left on her time at the terminal. She turned to Satine’s blog, Simply, Satine. That enraging comma! The subtitle was Food, feminism and flights of fancy. She scrolled through recipes and opinions, photos of dogs, canals, bikes, cocktails, gaunt body parts and young people in neon Ray-Bans, until she found it, dated the previous month.
An Announcement
Time: 2230. Place: E5. Occasion: dinner with the A team. We’re putting the world to rights over lamb chops and strong liquor. We talk dogs, Bieber, the future of radfem. We act out scenes from The Wicker Man in memory of Ted Woodward. Have the obligatory dance-off to Run DMC. It’s all good.
Then, I call for silence and get up on the table. I can put it off no longer. Suddenly, for the first time in years, I feel nervous.
I have to tell them that M has asked me to marry him, again. And this time, I’ve said yes.
Me. The girl who rants about the patriarchy at any opportunity. Who led the Ms Selfridge campaign. How am I going to tell them I have finally been persuaded to get hitched? And that the only reason I can give defies rational analysis.
Simply, love.
Without warning the screen went blank, as if the computer was taking Anna’s wellbeing into its own hands. Anna continued to stare at it.
Simply, love.
The din around her was suddenly unbearable. She pushed back her chair and stood up. As she moved towards the exit, threading around the terminals, the cafe door opened, and Paco entered.
Anna stopped, shaken out of her absorption by the incongruity. She had vaguely assumed he never left the beach, let alone went online; it was like seeing a sea mammal walking on dry land. He looked different today, more muscular, as though his head were welded straight into his neck.
Anna looked away in the hope he wouldn’t notice her; she wasn’t in the mood to talk. But Paco seemed to be in a hurry, taking a bottle of water from the desk and sitting down at a terminal, with no offer of payment. The girl behind the counter just smiled at him.
Anna slipped out of the cafe and trailed home along the dull, dim streets. The streetlamps around these parts weren’t lit at night, to save money. It wasn’t quite warm enough for people to be outside at this time yet; the windows she passed glowed with TVs and the bursts of laughter tracks. The buildings looked as if they were all constructed in the same fortnight in 1982, and painted sickly yellows and pinks. When she and Michael had first visited Marea, she’d made a wry observation about how Farrow & Ball could bring out a range for the town: Own-Brand Mustard, Tinned Salmon. Through a window, she saw a man hold a baby up above his head. An elderly man lay splayed in the doorway of a shop, snoring. A butcher’s shop window was filled with spongy duvets of tripe. As she got closer to the centre, to the old town, the streets widened and turned from rough, uneven paving stones to cobbles, buffed from half a century of the soft-soled summer shoes of tourists. She passed the window of a sweet shop, fizzy cola bottles arranged beautifully on a silver platter, as if they were oysters. Here, the streetlamps were left on.
Anna was still in a daze. Not because of Michael – she barely recognized that bearded, beaming man. She missed how he had made her feel, for that first year, but she didn’t miss him at all. No, it was Satine who had thrown her.
She’d had the same raw materials as Satine, once. She’d been young and good-looking and bright. But she’d lacked the crucial binding element: the self-belief that made you think the world needed to hear your take on feminism or your twist on a bacon sandwich, or know what your feet looked like wearing a toe ring. It was the glue that held a person together and made them someone to be reckoned with, and convinced men to stay with them forever. Without it, you could be demolished with a few blows and left for rubble.
Satine wouldn’t have let Simón into her house. She wouldn’t have embarked on an affair with Tommy because she was grateful someone wanted her.
Anna thought of one image of Satine she had seen on her blog, sitting on her father’s lap, arms around his neck. My main man. She reminded Anna of one particularly confident girl at school, who had told the others that her dad constantly said to her: ‘Sissy, when you walk into a room, those people are lucky to have you there.’ Others at Anna’s school would bemoan their dad’s over-protectiveness: how they would vet their boyfriends, threaten to kill them if they hurt their baby girls. They told Anna she was lucky not to have to deal with that.
Back at the bar, Anna shut the door behind her, and poured a copita. She noticed a strong smell of damp. Was it always like this, or was there a leak?
Outside in the square, the church bells started ringing the hour. Anna counted the chimes – nine – and thought of all the couples in the world sitting together on the sofa, watching TV. She rose off her stool and leaned forward over the bar to inspect the optics. Tequila! That was it. Fetching a glass, she pressed until it was half full. Far too much, but it would save her coming back again. She took a sip, and winced as the spirit pinballed up against her neurons.
Another few mouthfuls, and she was buzzing. After months of wine-sodden days and fuzzed discernment, leading inexorably to a melancholy bedtime, this state of sharp, exhilarating intoxication seemed a revelation, a bracing smack across the chops. And it had been just here, within her reach, all this time! She took another gulp and got to her feet. The bar was like a tomb: she needed to get out. And she needed company.
The beach steps were ill lit at night. In the dense darkness beyond them, the waves roared. As she approached, Anna could see three vague male shapes and the glowing tips of a couple of joints. By the time she was close enough to realize that her driver was not amongst them, they were looking at her and it was too late to retreat.
‘Where’s Jaime?’ asked Anna, in Spanish.
‘He’s not here,’ said one of them, in English.
‘I can see that,’ she said, in Spanish. ‘Do you know where he is?’
‘At home, I guess,’ he said, in English.
Anna looked at the guy, and he looked back at her. Was that a smile or a smirk? He was the one with pale eyes; dark and stocky, with short, curly hair. Maybe she should ask him back? No. She sensed a lack of kindness in him. He was playing to the other two: they would mock her later.
So might Jaime, of course, but better the devil you k
now. Not that she really knew him at all.
One of them gave her directions to a street in the new part of town, a few minutes’ walk away. Anna glided across the square, the cobbles slippery underfoot. The tequila was still working: she felt heady and boosted. Outside Sweeney’s, a couple in their fifties sat in silence over their beers. You’re not going to have sex tonight, thought Anna, but I am.
She found Jaime’s street, even though there was nothing to distinguish it from the others in the new town: narrow, strewn with washing lines like bunting; lit windows behind grilles and net curtains.
At Jaime’s house, Anna paused only for a moment, in case she lost her nerve, and rang the bell. In so far as she had imagined it at all, she thought he might share a flat with friends, and was prepared for more smirks and joshing. But the door was opened by a woman, her age or a bit older, with two-tone dyed hair, like a badger’s nose. The woman looked at her quizzically, and Anna opened her mouth, about to give the excuse of a wrong address, when a young girl appeared, pressing herself into the woman’s side and staring up at Anna. Of course: this was his mother.
Anna smiled and, trying to sound casual, asked if Jaime was home.
The woman’s bad hair didn’t obscure the fact that she was extremely beautiful: fine-boned and doe-eyed. Born in another place, she could have been a hedge funder’s wife or a news anchor. The little girl at her side was holding a green bean, twisting it around her fingers. Behind her, in the room, Anna could see a cat eating from a bowl, pulling a piece of meat onto the floor to better concentrate on it.
‘He’s in his office,’ Jaime’s mother said, indicating across the road. ‘Knock before entering.’
Anna looked across to a parked car. Jaime’s car. The interior light was on and there he was on the passenger side, reading a book. The seat was pushed right back and his shoeless feet were wedged against the dashboard.
Under the Sun Page 14