The Secret Wound

by Deirdre Quiery

  “Oh my God.” She laughed. “We will expect to be educated and entertained then during your visit.” She laughed, placing a hand over her mouth.

  “No pressure then. How did you meet Cornelia?”

  The question was swallowed into the silence which fell over the room as Angelina entered. Everyone stopped drinking, talking, smoking and stared at her. She was wearing the tiniest of blue jean shorts, a black and cream polka dot blouse and silver stiletto sandals.

  “What would you like a drink Angelina?” Barry hurried to her side.

  “What are you having?” Angelina smiled down on Barry below her, her blonde curls brushing against his face.

  “I was waiting for you to arrive before deciding.”

  “That’s very restrained of you.” Angelina transferred her weight from one stiletto to the other.

  “Can I show you something first?” Barry pointed to the spiral stairway.

  “Of course.” Angelina tottered across the floor and followed Barry upstairs.

  ♥

  In Cornelia’s bedroom, Barry whispered to Angelina,

  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you all day. I know what they mean about love driving you crazy. I’m madly, insanely, wildly, in love with you.”

  He lunged towards her, taking her in his arms, pulling her into an embrace. As he kissed her, he moved his head slightly to the right and left to deepen the contact with her lips. He closed his eyes, aware of the softness of their merging with one another. Then he felt Angelina resist and pull away from him. She moved her head backwards avoiding contact with his lips. He kissed her chin and neck as she pushed him towards the bed.

  Barry sat shaking on the white linen duvet; eyes wide open, unable to speak. Angelina took a few steps backwards towards the bedroom door the way a cat moves when it is retreating from a potential fight. She hissed at him.

  “I’ve told you – I don’t want any more of this. It was a one-off mistake. I had too much to drink that night. It should never have happened. If you don’t stop this – I am handing in my notice to Cornelia and you will never see me again. You can explain why that has happened to Cornelia or I will. Do you understand?”

  Barry threw himself heavily back on the bed and covered his face with his hands. The words he uttered were hardly audible.

  “But I love you. I don’t love Cornelia. You’re killing me.”

  Angelina clasped her hands together as though she was in prayer. Her voice softened a little.

  “I’m not killing you. You are inventing something which is not real. You don’t love me. You can’t love someone you don’t know. You don’t know me. I came upstairs with you to beg you to stop sending me those texts, making innuendos and trying to catch my eye every time Cornelia is not looking at us. I find it harassing, embarrassing and frightening. I’ll say it for the umpteenth time – it was a one-off mistake. Do you get it? You’re right – you are crazy. So wise up or go and see a psychiatrist. If you can put this behind you, I can and we can be friends. If you can’t …” Angelina took a deep breath and steadied her voice, “So what we do now,” Angelina paused, “is we go downstairs, act normal and stay that way. Am I making myself clear?”

  Barry moved his hands away from his face, continued lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling, sobbed.

  “I’ve never heard you sound like this before. Yes, you’ve made yourself clear. I’ll do what you say. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Barry struggled to sit up, resting his elbows on the bed, gazing at Angelina with soft teddy bear brown eyes. He listened as Angelina whispered before twisting around to face the door.

  “Don’t be a fool. You never found me. How can you lose me? You used me.”

  ♥

  Downstairs, Cornelia perched on the arm of the sofa, announcing.

  “Dinner will be ready in five minutes. Gurtha as it is your birthday, I’m doing one of your favourites – green thai curry – with all the trimmings.”

  Stephanie schmoozed over to Gurtha, picking a glass from the silver tray on the table.

  “You’re staying in La Torretta – isn’t it a bit isolated?”

  “That’s what I want – space, isolation, no fixed line telephone – only the mobile, no internet, no television, and no running water - stepping back to learn from Nature.”

  Stephanie sipped her wine and shook her head.

  “I don’t think I would like that. I’m too much of a Los Angeles girl.”

  “Santa Monica isn’t Los Angeles” Todd interrupted. “It’s a surreal world.”

  “Why do you say that?” Gurtha stabbed a toothpick into a crushed olive.

  “It’s a freak show. You see the weirdest people on Venice Beach creating a whole world of people endlessly distracting themselves.”

  “That’s rich coming from you. All you have done in your life is to seek success by distracting people.” Stephanie punched him playfully.

  Cornelia walked into the centre of the lounge holding a flat bronze gong suspended from a thick cord. She thumped it with a wooden mallet. A discordant clash vibrated around the room.

  “Dinner is served.”

  Barry and Angelina descended the stairs and, arriving first at the dining table, sat facing one another.

  Gurtha surveyed the table. Todd had taken a seat beside Barry and was feeling the texture of his pink silk shirt and making a commentary on it which Gurtha couldn’t hear. Stephanie was on Todd’s left directly across the table from Gurtha. Cornelia swept into the room sitting herself down between Gurtha and Angelina and facing Todd. She took a deep breath, placing her hand on Angelina’s shoulder.

  “What was Barry showing you upstairs?”

  Angelina laughed, passing the basket of bread, with alioli and olives.

  “A very good product he discovered for removing the lime scale from beneath the rim of the toilet. The water is so hard here; it will make cleaning a lot quicker.”

  Barry nodded, “Firewater. Lethal if you mix it with bleach. If you breathe it in, you’re dead.”

  Cornelia interrupted - standing up and raising her glass, “Let’s toast to Gurtha – to his birthday and to his forty days in Mallorca.”

  ♥

  For many years, Todd, originally from Los Angeles, had been a film Director primarily working on a well-known TV detective series called ‘Cops Unleashed’. He kept a house in Palos Verdes to the south of Los Angeles, whereas Stephanie lived in Santa Monica in a small apartment on Venice Beach above a tattoo parlour. Stephanie was his girlfriend with Japanese eyes, the result of one too many skin pulls around her ears. If you had to guess at Todd’s age, you would say that he was sixty-five. You would be wrong. Todd was eighty years old, thirty years older than Stephanie who was the same age as Cornelia.

  Stephanie had met Todd on a film set when he was directing a TV comedy series in which Stephanie played a supporting role. She knew how to make a man laugh. She also knew how to make a man feel that he was being funny - a winning combination. They struck up a relationship within the first week on set.

  Todd’s large detached house on Seaside Boulevard had a manicured lawn and a track which led down to a path skirting the Pacific Ocean. Every morning before breakfast a newspaper would appear on the front lawn. Before the arrival of the flying paper, Todd could be found walking the path, watching the mist settle like cotton wool on the sea below and waiting for the orange sun to push its way through the clouds into a watery pale blue sky. It was the most peaceful part of the day for Todd, before the mid-day sun burnt the mist away and revealed the slow moving flow of the ocean below. He spent six months in Palos Verdes and six months in Mallorca each year. Stephanie, who continued her acting career, visited him for two months each year in Mallorca.

  When they were in Los Angeles she lived in her apartment in Venice Beach and Todd in his mansion in Palos Verdes. In Mallorca, she stayed in Todd’s house sharing the same bedroom.

  Back in Cornelia’s house Gurtha sipped the green thai
curry sauce with a soup spoon as Cornelia served Thai sticky rice into a small bowl. The conversation hummed around the table, at times increasing in intensity, at times fading away to almost nothing. As Angelina passed spring rolls to Barry, Stephanie fed Todd with crispy seaweed skilfully delivered with clicking chop sticks and Todd rolled crispy duck with a hoisin sauce into a pancake for Cornelia. It seemed to Gurtha that they were communicating with one another like bees do with their pheromones. Gurtha reflected how each bee in a bee colony has a role – the worker bees, the queen and the drone - and wondered what might happen if conditions within the colony were disrupted. Dipping a prawn cracker into his green curry sauce, Gurtha continued to daydream. He glanced across at Barry and Todd - were there not now three drones around the table and only two queen bees? How would the imbalance created by his arrival affect the colony?

  Angelina interrupted his reverie from the far end of the table,

  “Gurtha – the paintings arrived safely yesterday. I will begin to organise the exhibition and we can finalise the opening when you are back. Are you OK with that? I have the notes you sent Cornelia about which paintings should go where and in which sequence. I can make a start on it if that works for you.”

  Gurtha held a glass of wine into the air.

  “That would be marvellous. Thank you, Angelina for your offer of support and thank you, Cornelia for making such an effort in hosting a splendid evening.”

  He nodded at Cornelia, clapped his hands and automatically everyone joined in.

  DAY 6

  THE DAY after Cornelia’s party, Gurtha packed a small suitcase and boarded a plane for Belfast to collect Paddy.

  He settled into the window seat in row three. He smiled at the woman who struggled to place a bag under the seat beside him.

  “Did you have a good holiday?”

  “In parts - it was a bit too hot for me.” She sighed deeply. Her face was flushed red and beads of sweat drained around her eyebrows and formed two streamlets on either cheek.

  “I’ll be glad to get back to the rain.”

  She was a woman of about sixty five, most likely retired, with short spiky auburn hair, slightly grey at the temples. She wore a brightly coloured yellow and gold dress over black leggings.

  She twiddled with a large jade-coloured ring on her right hand.

  “I hope it’s a smooth flight. You don’t mind if it gets bumpy if I grab hold of you?” She touched him on the arm.

  Gurtha laughed, “That’s fine by me.”

  Gurtha closed his eyes. He thought about what had happened during his first six days. It was disappointing. Although ‘La Torretta’ provided him with a hermitage in nature, it hadn’t yet brought him any new insights about his life, peace or a sense of progress. Meeting Cornelia’s expatriate community gave him a sense of dissipating his time there rather than using it in a meaningful way. He began to think that maybe he had been hoping for something unrealistic. What did Gurtha think could happen in forty days? He had definitely hoped for something dramatic and transformative. He had imagined that forty days would offer an opportunity to stand on the edge of a metaphorical canyon, gazing down at the jagged edges of red outcrops razoring their way to a canyon floor. He could see the other side. That was where he needed to be. The only way to reach the other side was to fall into the canyon. Once there, he would be able to scramble up a small narrow path on the other side. It would be possible to fall into the canyon if he morphed into a white feather. Then he could drift, floating effortlessly wherever the thermals chose to take him and eventually settle on the pebbly, sandy floor, before morphing back into his body to commence his climb up the other side. Symbolically, that is what he had been hoping would happen. He would go to the depths of his being and soar to its heights – transformed – leaving his inner world of confusion behind and finding his feet treading on unfamiliar land with a certainty that he was on the right path, even if what would happen next was unknown.

  Now six days into his journey what was he doing? Nothing other than embroiling himself with an expatriate community within whose company he felt more like an actor dragged onto a stage where they were enacting a Greek tragedy. He didn’t know the part he had to play or which lines to say.

  The plane shuddered; Gurtha opened his eyes, glancing at the woman beside him who had fallen asleep. She gently snored as the Airbus A320 climbed over the sea. Through the window small yachts buzzed like flies out to sea, leaving a trail of white foam in the water. He recognised the island of Sa Dragonera sleeping in the sea with its iguana-like jagged back. The plane banked steeply to the right and flew over the Port of Soller. He squinted to see if it was possible to identify La Torretta. No, it was hidden, tucked within folds of pine trees and terraced stone walls.

  A refreshment trolley rolled by and the woman beside him sat up with a start, breathing heavily as she fumbled for her handbag under the seat in front,

  “A gin and tonic please, with Sour Cream Pringles.”

  The air hostess rattled a drawer open, “Slimline or ordinary?”

  “Slimline please.” She fumbled in her purse for euros.

  The airhostess tapped the order into a machine,

  “Would you like a double and save two euros?”

  “Yes please.”

  She turned to Gurtha, “I don’t normally fall asleep on a flight. I’m normally too terrified. Were you on holiday?”

  He looked into her eyes. They were blue, slightly bulbous. She wore heavy eye liner and sparkly green eye shadow. The eye liner was a little smudged as though her hand had shaken when putting it on. Or maybe she had been crying.

  “No – I’m not on holiday. I’m on a sabbatical.”

  She sipped on her gin and tonic, “What’s a sabbatical?”

  Gurtha rubbed his hands over his face.

  “It’s a kind of break – a time to step back and try to get a new perspective on life.”

  She offered him the tube of Pringles.

  “That sounds interesting. How will you know if the new perspective is better than the one you started with? Here, have some more.”

  She poured a third of the tube of Pringles into his hands.

  “Stop … thank you. That’s a good question. Are you a psychologist?” Gurtha straightened his back in the seat as he munched on the Pringles.

  “No. But I have been on the receiving end of help from a psychologist for three years. I’ve learnt how to be nosey.”

  Gurtha laughed.

  “I haven’t a clue how to answer your question. The best I can imagine is to say that some people think that life falls into two parts – the first part when you do things without really thinking – you’re on automatic pilot – working, earning money, friends, and family – all the normal things are happening and you feel fine. Then there is a kind of mid-life crisis and you want to head in a different direction – to change your life. Maybe I want life to have more meaning. I would love to have something in my life that is important – a transcendent cause – you might call it – for which I would be prepared to sacrifice everything. I haven’t got it. All I have got is a mid-life crisis.”

  Miriam looked away from Gurtha, her lips pulled into a solid line. She then looked at him directly and he noticed for the first time that her eyebrows were not real eyebrows but charcoal tattooed an inch above her eyes in a smooth arc. He smelt smoke from her clothes. Her hand shook only slightly but enough to draw his attention and to allow him to see the indentations in her stained orange first and second fingers.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what caused this mid-life crisis?”

  Gurtha hesitated for a few seconds, when he spoke his voice trembled a few notes higher, “My mother was murdered a year ago. We don’t know why and the killer has never been found. Ever since then my brain feels scrambled. Everything that I used to like, I don’t care for. I’m living in a flatland. If I was on a heart monitor – it wouldn’t register any peaks or troughs. I’m one of the living dead.”


  Miriam leaned towards Gurtha, taking his two hands and stared into his eyes, “How dreadful.” She placed her hands on his cheeks. Gurtha felt his face stinging with the heat from her palms and fingers. A current of energy zapped through his body, tingling down both legs before reaching his feet. It felt like an electric shock. It wasn’t unpleasant – only slightly unsettling. The warmth from Miriam’s hands made his face feel as if it was dissolving into flowing warm water which provoked a wave of anxiety to ripple through his stomach. When it passed he felt extraordinarily calm as Miriam withdrew her hands from his cheeks and rested them on her lap.

  “Some people call me a witch.” She laughed.

  “A white one of course.”

  She looked confidently into Gurtha’s eyes,

  “It will get better for you.”

  Gurtha smiled and nodded.

  “I hope so.” Enough about me – what about you - what do you like most about Mallorca?”

  “I like the dancing. I’m not a day person. I don’t like bright sunshine and heat. Isn’t that strange?”

  Gurtha lifted his hands in disbelief.

  “It certainly is. Most people come to Mallorca for the sun and the warm weather. Can you not go dancing in the dark in Belfast? It would be cheaper.”

  She laughed, throwing back her head in a turkey fashion with folds of flesh around her neck wobbling like cylindrical tubing Gurtha had seen shudder in Mallorca when rubble emptied from a top floor apartment.

  “But the darkness in Mallorca has a different quality to it.”

  She drained the last drop of gin from the plastic glass and closed her eyes.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll have a bit of shut eye. I didn’t go to bed at all last night.”

  “Of course – sleep away.”

  Two hours later Gurtha looked again from the window as the plane began its descent into Aldergrove airport. The green fields of Ireland below speckled with munching black and white cows told him that he was home. It felt good to be back – a sense of ease and comfort flooded his body. The plane shook from side to side in the crosswinds. Miriam opened her eyes and sat upright with her eyes darting from right to left.