Incantations

by SIMS, MAYNARD

  I first saw her when I was looking at the Barbary apes. Gibraltar has these apes that live on the higher parts of the rock. They’re a bit of a tourist attraction, well that and the casino are about all the attractions there are, in total. Dog population doesn’t warrant a mention in any guidebook.

  It was one of those guided tours, though the English woman who acted as the guide seemed more interested in taking calls on her mobile telephone than she did in imparting any knowledge she may have had about the historical events in the life of the rock. That initially irritated me because there is a wealth of history, much of it British maritime events.

  There was a short but noisy argument between two people I had taken to be Germans, but who were apparently Swedish. I had noticed her earlier, when we boarded the coach. Her skirt was a little too tight, though it suited her tanned legs, and her hair seemed far more blonde than it had a right to be. I supposed she attracted me, but in an obvious black underwear and red lipstick kind of way.

  The guys were wrong that I had never had a girlfriend, although none of the girls had got past the second date before dumping me. I never really knew why until a friend of one of them, trying to be kind or cruel I couldn’t tell, told me Paula had found me too self absorbed, too ‘tight assed’. I didn’t wholly understand this comment until she expanded it for me.

  Apparently I gave no indication I needed any other person in my life apart from myself. That made me sound selfish, which I’m not. But I am, or was, self sufficient, and until I found the right woman for me, that was how I intended to remain. Sex was never a problem; the Corporation pays well, and there are always discreet arrangements that can be made; easier to maintain one’s anonymity that way as well.

  ‘Well, I’d love to say this Katrina is a looker, Ron, but can you show me which one she is?’ Pete had finished looking at all the photographs.

  Tom laughed, spraying a mouthful of beer over his legs. ‘You mean there’s more than the one girl?’ He couldn’t avoid the hint of incredulity that invaded his voice.

  I wasn’t sure what Pete meant but I knew that wasn’t it.

  ‘No,’ Pete said very slowly. ‘There aren’t any women in there at all.’

  Tom reached for the three packs to look for himself. ‘None? Where is she, Ron? Not a little make believe to fool us poor boys?’

  He didn’t seem as if he was fooling around but I laughed uneasily because Pete could only have been making fun of me. I had taken too many photos of Katrina if anything. He was spoofing me for being too enthusiastic.

  I passed round some more cans and some sandwiches, and dimmed the lights. The digital DVD footage would show us together, and I could control the remote. I pressed ‘Play’. Pete belched and then settled himself. Tom carried on half looking at the packs of photographs but more absorbed now in the moving images.

  Okay, the first part was boring, with shots of the airport, the hotel, and the beach, not warm enough in March to enjoy it much, apart from the occasional brisk walk along the sea shore. Then we got to the middle of the holiday, and the time I had met her.

  She slapped the man she was with, a full-blooded whack that left a red mark on his pale cheek. He shaped as though he was going to return the blow but glanced across to see if anyone was watching. The others in the tour group had moved away, reserved and unwilling to get involved. I was staring unashamedly, and when he realised he couldn’t stare me out he said something guttural and began to march off down the hills back to town. I walked across to the girl and asked her if she was all right. She was smiling.

  Up close she possessed a more innocent look than I had imagined. Her complexion was uncluttered by makeup and her hair appeared natural. My initial casual attraction now took a stronger foothold. She looped her arm through mine and I felt a warm breast against my arm.

  ‘Do you want to hear some of the history or shall we make our own?’ Her words, sluttish in one interpretation, were said with such a tremor that I believed them to be genuine. We booked a taxi, ignoring the dark stares of the tour guide, and headed back into town. I learned her name, and the fact that the man with her was her fiancé. He would go back to their hotel and pack his bags, she told me. He had done it before when they argued. This time she might just let him go she said. My heart raced when she did, because the implication was that I was the reason she didn’t need him anymore.

  By the time I left university and started employment my isolation from conventional relationships was firmly in place. I was good at my job, easily able to cope with the daily office banter, and clients warmed to me, although none ever spilled over into social engagements. The fears my mother still expressed when we spoke on the telephone seemed ill founded; inside I felt satisfied. There remained a blind faith that against all the odds I would meet my soul mate, my rock to which I could cling when the ways of life got too much for one. Until then I was content to amble through my daily routines.

  ‘Okay where is she?’ It was either Tom or Pete, but by now I had all but forgotten they were there. The DVD film was about two thirds of the way through and all the filming of Katrina seemed to have been in vain. She didn’t appear on the film at all. I grabbed the fallen photos from the floor and leafed through them. Some I didn’t remember but others, where I knew exactly what should or should not have been captured on film, weren’t as they should have been. There were staged shots that worked well apart from the fact that the central character in them wasn’t there.

  The DVD moved slowly along, and there were parts of it where it was evident I was with someone. In a few scenes there was a kind of shadow beside me that might have been from a person, but there were no actual images of that person on film. There were other scenes where I was in a club fashioned as a cave, with artificial rocks and fake candle lighting.

  ‘Why the fascination with the décor? Looks pretty second rate.’ Tom was glancing at his watch now and making signals to Pete.

  ‘She’s there, those were, these are, pictures of her.’

  ‘Nope, it looks more like a wall and a few tables to me, Ron.’ Pete was amused. I knew what he was thinking. The saddo does it again.

  ‘I didn’t make her up, guys. She was real. That’s the club she took me to, I took film of her.’

  ‘Right. Listen, Tom, I’m going to move on over to Julio’s. Join me?’

  They both stood and my sense of panic at being left alone, with the empty pictures and film was out of all proportion.

  But by then I already knew that I wouldn’t be alone, even after they left.

  In desperation I lifted my shirt. ‘Okay if she didn’t exist who did these?’

  Tom grimaced and Pete looked away at the bloodied tatters that adorned my chest. She had shown me a piece of rough history that was for sure.

  As they opened the front door and stepped out into the night Tom said, ‘Next time you pay a hooker try to get one who wears slightly less pointed stilettos before she steps on you.’ And they were gone.

  Gibraltar in March is pleasant enough, with the breeze constant but fairly warm. We strolled along the street, hand in hand now, and it felt so normal and I so casual about it that my brain began to tell me things my body was already realising. When we stopped for some food her leg played with mine under the table, her foot rising into my crotch as the waiter brought the bill.

  Her hotel was nearer than mine so we went there. I was nervous her fiancé might still be there but in my heightened mood that was all part of the ritual I clearly had to endure. Her room was empty of him and his things. Her pale skin drifted in and out of the shadows created in the room by the ceiling fan and the half drawn shutters at the window. As she danced before me, stripping away her clothes, her shift from centre vision to half hidden in the corners of the room was enticing. If only I could still feel that way about her now.

  She was athletic but allowed me the pretence of leading in our movements. Her cries, her caresses were taken up and carried away by the seagulls that were on constant guard on t
he balcony all through our performance. I had never felt so fulfilled, and not just physically, where to be truthful I was an onlooker part of the time. My spirit was lifted, my heart entrapped, and the fissures that ran through my body reached far deeper than the layers of skin. She pulled, tore, ripped and laid bare the skin, blood acting as an additional lubricant to her desires.

  By the time darkness descended and I walked the mile or so back to my own hotel I was exhausted but no one would have thought so from my energetic steps. We had agreed to meet in a small club in the central square in town.

  The flight back, when my holiday was over, was long, dull and pitted with memories. I couldn’t say I felt used, that would have been immature. I didn’t even think I had been had because she’d paid her way, she hadn’t asked anything of me. I assumed the fiancé had returned and she had received a better offer.

  My cottage was musty, and the open windows invited in the country sounds that had been absent for the few days away. An owl screeched, the stream at the end of the lane was full and rushing, a low wind ruffled the trees.

  She made her presence known almost immediately. The bathroom door opened and closed. I was so tired from the flight that it was a second or so before I realised there had been a sound, and a movement independent of me. Mentally I blamed a draught or something and closed the window; glad to shut out the commotions outside. Then, just as I pulled the latch across, I had the awful feeling that it was the familiar noises from out in the real world that I should be embracing, and not the previously safe environment I was now trapped within.

  The club was well known in the town, it being the only nightspot with any spark of life to it. You could see it from the elevated main street where most of the shops were. It was down some steps, in a small square. There weren’t queues at the door but enough people milling around to make me glad I was meeting someone, and wouldn’t be on my own with so many others.

  Then I noticed the people were standing around outside but no one was actually entering the club. In fact it was evident as I got nearer to the entrance that the club was closed. A policeman was standing nearby, and he told me in perfect English although his ancestry was clearly Spanish, that the club had been closed for a few months. No, he hadn’t seen a pretty blonde lady, and his look told me what he thought my enquiry actually indicated.

  My work suffers constantly, and the promotion I was due was passed to someone else; Tom as it happens. Mother doesn’t pester me any more about finding someone nice to settle down with. The last time she visited, just before Easter, she found female underwear in the bedroom and assumed I was living with a girl but didn’t want her to meet my mother. ‘Too ashamed of the old girl, is that it?’ I don’t hear from her much these days.

  It began with movement, subtle, almost ephemeral, simply playing in the shadows, like a feather caught in a soft wind. Then the bath would be wet, before I ran the water. There would be a lingering scent in the room, earthy yet light. Wounds would mark my body in the night, though I couldn’t remember how.

  I saw her once, after a couple of months. I was in the front garden, getting some weeds out of the lawn, and she walked out into the lane. I fumbled with the trowel I was using, dropped the waste sack I was using to collect garden rubbish, and by the time I got out onto the lane she was nowhere to be seen, but it was her.

  The skirt was still a little too short, and the hair, longer, but just as blonde, white almost as if she was very old. She wasn’t though, or at least she hadn’t been to me. Not in that hotel room, with the gulls carrying away our passion, while the solitary walls I had built were dismantled brick by exquisite brick.

  The privacy I craved after the labours of my parents failed seems a world away now. The attention is constant, so much more than with a mere wife or partner. I feel invaded each minute of each day. The dreams of sharing my life with someone special must have had a different meaning.

  In fact I can see her tonight, or a reflection of her. Cooking pasta, I can catch her occasionally out of the corner of my eye, sitting on the window ledge, watching me at work in the kitchen. The room is in darkness, save for some candles on the dining table; sometimes I try to maintain a semblance of normality.

  As I sit I watch her walking towards the table. She does seem older than I remember. The skin isn’t as smooth as I recall, the lips less red, the eyes not as blue. Her smile isn’t as inviting, although she does seem to want me to join her. She seems to beckon to me, but her anger looks so violent that I remain seated.

  She is standing behind me now, and I have to admit to a feeling of anxiety. Her body presses into me as she leans across me, over the table, and blows out the candles.

  THE PAIN COLLECTOR

  Joanna had the taxi drop her off at the end of Halifax Road. She paid the driver, a taciturn man with a lazy eye and bad skin, and watched the cab depart in a haze of blue diesel fumes.

  Halifax Road was two rows of Victorian terraced houses, lined with plane trees, statuesque with their mottled bark and high canopies of green. Years ago the road was a respectable habitat for moderate wage earners – people who worked in the shops on the high street, and those who spent their working lives at the laundry, the town’s biggest employer. But those days were long gone, as was the laundry, although the building was still there, its single chimney standing sentinel over the town. A modern shopping precinct sounded the death knell for the high street, and now, in the first decade of a new century, the area was in terminal decline.

  Halifax was now a road of anonymous neighbours and twitching net curtains; front yards containing rusting cars and dismembered motorcycles. Number seventy-three was one of the neater houses in the road. The front of the house was freshly painted and some attempt had been made to fashion a small rock garden with colourful alpine plants to bring a splash of brightness to an otherwise drab outlook.

  Joanna rapped hard on the old cast-iron knocker – there was no doorbell – and waited, resting her weighty suitcase on the grey stone step. The door was eventually opened by a short woman with a shock of red hair and small, piercing blue eyes. She was dressed in a green crushed-velvet dress and a midnight blue crocheted shawl. On her feet were petite, Arabian styled slippers, in her yellow-stained fingers a cigarette. ‘Yes?’ she said, her cobalt eyes drinking in the details of the young woman before her – the cropped brown hair, the slim athletic body, the pert, pretty face.

  Joanna shifted uncomfortably under the scrutiny. ‘You must be Mrs Eversleigh,’ she said. ‘You should be expecting me. My name is Carter, Jo...’

  ‘Joanna Carter,’ Mrs Eversleigh finished for her. ‘Yes, you’re expected.’ She pulled the door wide. ‘Come in. I’ll show you to your room.’

  Joanna followed the woman up a carpeted staircase. The house was tastefully decorated – Aztec designs in blue and terracotta – and there were no unpleasant cooking smells to contend with, though there was another aroma in the air, but this, Joanna decided, was the smoky scent of marijuana clinging to Mrs Eversleigh’s clothes.

  They stopped outside a cream-painted panelled door with brass door-furniture and a spy-hole. Mrs Eversleigh fished in a voluminous pocket in her dress and produced the key.

  The room was clean and comfortably furnished. The bed was single and covered by a pink candlewick bedspread. There was a simple plywood wardrobe, a straight-backed chair, a small chest of drawers and an equally small two-seater settee. A curtain was pulled back to reveal a tiny kitchenette, with Formica worktops and white cupboards. There was a two ring cooker with a tiny oven and a tub-like device that Mrs Eversleigh described as, ‘A washing machine for one. The instructions are in the drawer there,’ she added. She turned to Joanna. ‘Right. I’ll leave you to get settled in. I should have mentioned the bathroom. Out on the landing, the second door on the left. Okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Joanna said. And she meant it. This was far nicer than she’d dared imagine. Aunt Peggy had chosen well for her. ‘I take it my aunt has taken care of all the financia
l arrangements?’

  ‘Done and dusted,’ Mrs Eversleigh said. ‘Mrs Spencer has arranged everything. So it should all be plain sailing, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Joanna said with trepidation.

  Mrs Eversleigh took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Of course it will, dear. Don’t you worry. You’re going to work at a good school, and from what your aunt says you’re a very fine teacher.’

  ‘She exaggerates,’ Joanna said, smiling wanly and wishing her aunt would keep her opinions of her to herself. Joanna knew Aunt Peggy was as proud of her as she would have been of own daughter, but singing her praises to other people only increased the pressure under which Joanna continually found herself.

  She’d passed the school on the taxi ride from the station. From the outside the John Somers Primary School looked like a Victorian workhouse – yellow brick walls and a grey slate roof with cast iron guttering. She just hoped it would be more modern on the inside.

  She was unpacking her bag, piling her clothes neatly on the bed, when there was a tap at her door. The young man who stood there wore a baggy jumper and jeans. His hair was long and dishevelled and there was a thin beard covering his chin. ‘Hi, I’m Robert. I live next door.’ He stuck out his hand.

  Joanna introduced herself and shook his hand. ‘Are you a teacher too?’ she said, and mentally kicked herself for asking such a stupid question. Why on earth should he be a teacher? He could be all manner of things – an accountant, a computer programmer, a scientist, anything! Just because Brian was… She pulled herself up short and pushed the memory from her mind.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said, staring at her intently. ‘You’ve gone very pale.’

  She shook herself and managed to smile. ‘Sorry... yes... sorry.’

  ‘Actually, yes I am.’

  ‘Pardon,’ she said.

  ‘I am a teacher.’