‘So you do want one of your own.’
Anna didn’t react. This was a test: a reminder that Mattie hadn’t forgotten their previous encounter. After a pause, Mattie relented.
‘Most of them live around the greenhouses,’ she said.
Anna had noticed lean-tos clustered around the edges of the greenhouses, constructed from corrugated iron, old plastic wrap and even metal from tins of fertilizer. They were straight from the Third World. Was she really going to knock on the doors of one and ask its inhabitants if they knew of a Senegalese man who’d died?
But Mattie hadn’t finished.
‘And they all congregate in the morning, to get work,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know, but Richard will,’ said Mattie. She stood up and shouted for him. Richard sauntered over, hands in his pockets, and stood over them, legs apart.
‘Where do the Africans meet to get picked up?’ asked Mattie.
Richard described an intersection about a mile out of town.
‘They arrive early,’ he added. ‘Before seven.’
‘It’s Sunday tomorrow,’ said Anna. ‘Will they be there?’
Richard gave her a pitying look.
‘Yes, my dear,’ he said. ‘They do work weekends.’
Walking away from Mattie and Richard, Anna mused on how the pair seemed to know far more about the plight of the African workers than she did, yet appeared so unconcerned. It hadn’t once occurred to her to confide in them, to appeal for their help. Then, she wondered how she would get to the intersection. She couldn’t ask Tommy, and felt loath to request another lift from Jaime; she didn’t want him to think her presumptuous. Besides, she doubted he would get up that early.
She left the market and started back down the ring road. Ahead of her were the limp flags of the police station, the scene of her humiliation, and a thought came to her: perhaps she didn’t have to rely on anyone else to drive her at all.
9
It had seemed such a brilliant, obvious plan. But as the airport bus pulled away, leaving Anna alone at the entrance to the long-stay car park, her spirits dropped. This was partly a natural response to the sight of a land ruled by concrete, metal and plastic bollards, where nature was represented only by a few pushy weeds breaking through the baked asphalt and, just visible in the bleached-out sky, the outline of distant mountains. She also realized it was not going to be at all easy to find her car.
Before her were acres of vehicles, similar as newborns. Most people coming here would, of course, have some vague idea of the location of theirs. Anna could remember the first three numbers of the plate, but the vehicles were packed too tightly together to be able to view them from a distance. She wandered through the ranks, the bag she was carrying bumping against her thigh as she pressed the key fob in the direction of any red car, hoping that one of the anonymous metal lumps would flash and become hers.
The car would be filthy after eighteen months, she thought, and narrowed her search to only the dirtiest vehicles. Still nothing. It occurred to her there was a chance the car wouldn’t be here at all: maybe they were junked after a certain amount of time. But she was its registered owner. Surely they would have contacted her? She thought of the pile of unopened post on the shelf behind the bar.
She kept walking, smelling warm dust and leaking fuel. Some of the cars bore finger graffiti, of the usual I wish my missus was this dirty variety. Surely the Spanish youth, however bored and disenfranchised, didn’t come all the way out to the airport to draw on cars?
God, this was depressing. There was a story behind all of these abandoned hulks, variations on hers and Michael’s. Each one marked the grave of a dream. That silver Citroën, with an ejaculating penis etched on the back windscreen: she imagined it bought with high expectations; the seats impregnated with the owners’ sweat and suntan lotion and melted ice lollies. The inside of the boot scratched from the ornamental water feature bought on giddy impulse for the garden of their new villa. Now, that villa belonged to the bank and its former owners were back in the UK, three kids crammed in a two-bed flat, strained and bickering, snapping the telly off at the opening credits of A Place in the Sun.
On she went, pressing the useless fob and wiping windows to peer inside until, suddenly, there it was.
The interior was no different to the others yet it felt instantly familiar, its identity confirmed by a jumper of hers in the footwell of the passenger seat. Anna laughed with delight. Unlocking the driver’s door, the car’s trapped air hit her: an unholy mix of milk, old socks, cement, paint. A stew of her past. As Anna sat in the driver’s seat and adjusted it to her position, she realized that she was surrounded by Michael’s stagnated breath: an hour and a half of his exhalations as he made his escape from her. She opened the windows to disperse the funk, and put the key into the ignition.
Nothing happened when she turned the key and it occurred to her that, after eighteen months, the battery might be dead. Cursing, she got out and checked that the jump leads were still in the boot – they were, along with a spare can of petrol – but there was no one around. She got back into the driver’s seat and, after several more tries, stamping on the accelerator, the engine kicked into life. The car was suddenly full of music – Michael had been listening to a CD on his journey. It was one of hers: the music to the film Magnolia. A suitably plaintive soundtrack to his desertion. She snapped it off, and then noticed the fuel gauge had flown to the right, as far as it could go. So, Michael had stopped to fill up at the garage just before the airport, as if he was returning a hire car. A small, surprising act of consideration.
Anna put on the wipers, and took the parking ticket from the dashboard as they feebly scraped the windscreen of some of its sticky film. 28 August 2008. 08.14. Not many people knew, to the minute, the time their lover bailed out on them. She picked up the jumper in the footwell: a delicate, grey-blue cashmere number that had cost her over a hundred pounds. An unthinkable amount now, and imprudent back then, but she’d justified spending money on clothes because she wanted to look right for him.
Also on the floor was an empty plastic film envelope, which she recognized as the packaging for The Economist. She wouldn’t have left the wrapper like that; it must have been Michael. She imagined him parking up, spotting the unopened magazine on the floor and deciding to take it for the journey. Whilst she was waking up at the finca to find her world had caved in, he was settled on the plane, catching up on the Latvian referendum. It cancelled out any credit for the full fuel tank.
When the windscreen was clean enough to see out of, Anna put the car into gear and slowly drove over to the exit gates. High up in the booth sat a young woman, her hair scraped back and gelled, like an air hostess’. She wasn’t looking at her phone or reading, as one would expect of an underemployed person in a long-stay car park booth, but staring into the middle distance. After a beat, she glanced down at Anna and held out her hand for the ticket. Her white shirt, cut too tight at the shoulders, strained at the movement.
Anna got out of the car and stood at the window, level with the woman.
‘Look, I can’t pay this,’ she said, in Spanish, showing her the ticket. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have the money. Could you possibly let me out, anyway?’
The woman said nothing, just tilted her head to one side, as if she had been here before. As Anna started to explain why the car had been left for eighteen months – omitting the drink-drive element – the woman looked to the side, not making eye contact as she listened. Despite heavy make-up, the bumps of acne were visible on her forehead and chin, and Anna felt sorry for noticing them. She looked barely out of her teens, but was wearing an engagement ring. Would a young woman in love, working with only a thousand dusty cars for company, be sympathetic or repulsed by the plight of an almost-forty-year-old at the other end of the line?
As she finished the story, Anna held up the carrier bag containing the bottles she’d brought, left over from the lottery night.
‘I can offer you some cava,’ she said, wincing to acknowledge the feebleness of the bribe. The girl didn’t say anything. She took the ticket from Anna’s hand and scanned it under her machine.
‘It’s four thousand one hundred and forty euros,’ she said, raising her eyebrows. ‘Wow.’
‘Is that the biggest you’ve had?’ said Anna.
‘Personally, yes. But you are not the only person who has not wanted to pay their ticket.’
Anna nodded, carefully, waiting. She wondered whether the girl was purposefully drawing this out, relishing her power.
‘Last week, I was offered a pair of shoes, from someone’s feet,’ the girl continued. ‘Old smelly shoes! And the lady was annoyed I didn’t want them! “They cost two hundred euros new,” she said. “You can sell them.” Like, thanks!’
Anna laughed at the outrageous cheek of this other woman, as she was meant to.
The girl held out her hand for the bag.
‘I will drink it with my fiancé later.’
Anna smiled hesitantly as she lifted the bag up to the window.
‘So I can go?’ The girl nodded.
‘If a guy did that to me, I would destroy him,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as much to herself as to Anna. Then, waving away Anna’s repeated thanks, she opened the barrier to let her drive away.
Turning onto out the coastal road, Anna felt wobbly behind the wheel, driving as hesitantly as a tourist fresh off a charter flight. She turned on the radio and then snapped it off – she wanted to concentrate. The plastic grain of the gear stick grew familiar again under her palm, and soon she was in third, then fourth, and it had all come back to her. Uncertainty turned to exhilaration as she hit the speed limit, settling back into her seat as if she and the car had never been apart.
The fugitive element added to the thrill. Although her driving ban was long up, Anna suspected that she would need to have her licence officially reinstated and what she was doing now was, strictly, illegal. But it was only a matter of paperwork, surely: in the unlikely event she was pulled over, what was the worst that could happen? Nonetheless, she found herself checking her rear-view mirror every few seconds.
A wind had started up, sending dust devils whirling down the scrubby baked verge. Although never busy at this time of year, the road was unnaturally quiet: Anna felt that hers was the only car for miles. She drove past billboard adverts for fertilizers, past shallow pits where building excavation had barely begun. Past the entrance to the Plaza del Sol, marked by that fallen concrete obelisk. And, at the edge of town, the fanciest restaurant in the area, the entrance flanked by two concrete lions, where she and Michael had gone to celebrate buying the finca.
Anna found herself steering into the car park of the restaurant and turning off the engine. She felt hyped and discombobulated, not yet ready to go back to the bar. On the gravel beside her, a vast seagull stood for several moments – as motionless as she was – before letting out a loud caw and lifting off vertically.
She hadn’t been to this restaurant since that time with Michael. They’d been so ecstatic that night. The maître d’ had taken one look at them and given them the best table in the house, on the terrace overlooking the sea. He later told Anna, when she went to the loo, that he had presumed they had just got engaged, and indeed that was exactly how it felt. That evening, as they ate bisque in the evening breeze, the sky a water-colour blotch of pink and blue and the sea churning beneath them, they had started discussing their building plans, but the conversation soon turned to each other, asking questions and listening enraptured, as if it were their first date. Everything she said was fascinating and valuable and, as they talked, Michael had taken out his pencil and, without a word, started sketching her on the paper tablecloth, as if it were impossible to be opposite such a face and not try to capture it.
Now, the single-storey building looked woebegone and disrobed, its ferns dying and the lions chipped and stained, like a nightclub when the lights are turned up.
Still unwilling to move, Anna saw some bits of paper tucked in the driver’s door pocket, and pulled them onto her lap. Relics from her old life; receipts from builders’ yards, supermarkets and garages. An electricity bill that had somehow escaped her lever arch file. An appointment card from a cruddy beauty salon in Marea, now closed down, where she’d slipped off to get her legs inexpertly waxed. And, on the back of the card, in her own handwriting, Anna noticed a list of words: TOMATO-ZIZEK-GYPSY.
She had long forgotten what exactly these words signified, but knew what the list was. A crib sheet of conversation topics for an evening with Michael in the dying months of their relationship, when she was desperate to keep his interest.
Looking at the words, Anna felt pity for the person who wrote them, and a more abstract sadness for how life could turn out. Of course, neither that glorious, heady dinner in the restaurant nor those miserable final evenings were the nub of her and Michael’s relationship. The truth lay at some point in between. She didn’t know where that point was, and, unlike her car, she’d probably never find it. Maybe it didn’t really matter now. She turned the key in the ignition, and continued her journey into town.
The next morning Anna set off at 6am, driving slowly through Marea’s dark, empty streets. The only sign of life was a cat tearing into a bin bag, which fled at her approach. Without traffic it took only ten minutes to reach the spot Richard had described: a featureless intersection just off the coast road. Parking up on the verge a discreet distance away, she turned off the engine and wound down her window. The road was deserted. There were no sounds of nature down here; the scrubby grass on the verge was too denuded to support even a cicada. Even the wind had stilled. Suddenly chilly, Anna put on the cashmere jumper from the footwell of the car. Unworn for so long, it felt clammy and foreign against her skin.
The moon was still visible, holding out as the morning lightened around it. The plot of land beside her car bore a shallow excavation pit. A few discarded sacks of concrete powder sat on its perimeter. The developers behind that one were relatively lucky: they’d barely started before everything combusted. Nonetheless, the land remained fenced off, with security notices warning of guard dogs. As if anyone would want it now.
She thought back to her studio in London. From the outside, the flats didn’t look like much: the original Victorian bricks of the building facade were chipped and the small windows were permanently dirty from the bus route outside. Some of them had spider plants pressing up against the glass, as if the flats had been overrun by vegetation. Anna’s was tiny, but it was hers, and she had made it beautiful and loved it. Although she didn’t have much contact with her neighbours beyond nods on the stairs, she’d felt an inherent sense of community. Most of the people living there looked to be single, or just starting out. The building’s age had made her feel connected to history, carrying on the tradition of people coming to London to make their way.
She had given that life up for Michael, and now, here she was.
She felt a rush of profound loneliness. Never mind her mission to uncover the truth about the dead man: she had to leave this dead place. She turned the ignition key and then stopped, one notch before the engine turned on, as she spotted something ahead. There, in the distance, it was coming down the road from the east, where the sky was flushing. Something yellow. Two things. Three. They weren’t cars, but much smaller and slower. She watched as the specks grew larger, and were revealed to be African men on bicycles, wearing high-vis jackets.
Anna clicked back into focus, and watched. When the three reached the intersection, they carefully laid their bikes on the ground and leaned against the safety rail. One had a smoke. Then they waited, in the pearly dawn light.
A minute or two passed. Anna jumped as another bike flew past her window. She turned to see more coming from the opposite direction, and more still arriving along the main road from inland. A dozen, twenty, thirty men: all on bikes, all in neon jackets, all converging on the intersect
ion. Anna watched as they got off their bikes, some talking to each other, others sitting by themselves on the ground.
Another five minutes passed. Then, a large pick-up truck rattled past Anna’s car, shaking the window, and slowed to a halt at the intersection. As the men clustered around it, Anna was reminded of scenes of refugees converging on food aid. A man got down from the driver’s seat and talked to a group, and after very quick negotiations, seven men lifted their bikes onto the back of the truck and climbed in after them. The truck pulled away, heading west.
The sun had risen now, and its rays glinted on the spokes of the bikes belonging to the men still waiting. Five minutes later, another truck appeared and the same transaction took place, only this time the driver didn’t even get out of his seat and did all the talking from his window. Eight got into that truck.
A silent voyeur, Anna watched as a third truck came and took five more men, leaving around a dozen. The sky was now fully light, and other cars were zipping past her at infrequent intervals. She waited with the men, growing restless along with them. Out of the window, she watched a dung beetle laboriously roll a brown ball along the tarmac.
By half past seven, there hadn’t been a truck for a while and it all seemed to be over. Some of the men picked up their bikes and resignedly rode away. This was Anna’s cue: she didn’t want to leave it so long that they had all cycled off and she had to chase them in her car. She started the engine and drove the short distance to the intersection, turning into the spot vacated by the trucks. The remaining men stopped and stared at her with reserved interest as she pulled up.
Anna undid her seat belt and put on a smile. At least these men didn’t have a boss. And this time, she had given some thought as to what she was going to say.
She got out of the car, said hola and asked if any of them spoke Spanish.
A handful nodded. They all looked at her, waiting, wary. What could this woman want from them? Like the men at the finca, they were young – all under thirty, she guessed, and some much younger. She saw that several of them had protective goggles and flimsy paper masks looped over the handlebars of their bikes.
Under the Sun Page 17