by Carol Mason
I doffed him with the book. ‘Stop it. It’s unnerving. Go creep somebody else out.’ I saw that slightly impish expression of his. Then slowly, undergoing an easy transference of concentration, he slid his index finger underneath one of my bra triangles, moving the material away from my skin so he could see my nipple. Then, with his eyes fixed there, he circled it until it stood up like a prune. I was mortified. ‘Stop! What if people see!’
‘Oh, here we go…’ He groaned and stopped. ‘Who cares who sees, Ange? It’s not like you know them, or are ever going to see them again.’ He flopped onto his back and left me alone now.
I’d ruined the moment. Poor Jonathan. Sometimes I think I was so busy trying to prove to him that I was who I was, and he shouldn’t even bother trying to change me, that I sabotaged not just his good time, but my own too.
The couple in the water are still wrapped in a floating embrace. For some reason I feel turned on now. Does he know that if he did send me somebody it would be fruitless? I couldn’t feel the same. I would always compare.
I slide my hands behind my back, and without thinking too much about it, undo the strings of my bikini and whip the top off over my head. The breeze feels so refreshing against my skin. I lie back and enjoy this ticklish sensation, imagining Jonathan is here and the tingling feeling is of him circling my nipple with his tongue, in public; to hell with whoever might watch.
~ * * * ~
When I come in the door, my mam quickly picks up the book that’s lying on her chest and pretends she hasn’t just been napping.
‘Hello blossom.’ She’s got ‘bed head’ down her left side. Her features look softened with sleep. ‘Is the beach nice?’ She’s wearing one of her full-length 1950s cream slips that she always wears for bed. I used to think it made her so glamorous. Sometimes, as a kid, when she went out shopping, I’d try one on, and lounge there on her bed feeling glamorous, pretending to be her.
‘Yeah. It’s nice.’ I flop onto my bed and suddenly feel quite wiped out.
‘Did you bare your little buzzums?’
‘My what? No! And less of the little!’ I stretch out my arms and legs like a starfish, depositing sand on the crisp white bedspread, and gaze at the high, white ceiling, still feeling a bit horny and unsettled. I wonder if Jonathan could possibly have heard me that night, when I asked him to keep his promise and send me a lover. Are the dead always in tune with the living? Or do they have to make a point of switching on, like you’d turn on a radio and find your favourite station? Because I’m thinking of changing my request. Rather than send me the next love of my life, perhaps he could just send me a holiday romance. My mind flicks to the attractive Greek man from the store. How did he get on my dial?
‘What’s the matter?’ My mam peers at me over the top of her hardcover.
‘Nothing.’
‘Pull the other one. Something is. I can tell by your face.’
I look away.
‘You’re missing him, aren’t you?’ Her voice is a soft whisper. ‘I know these things because I’m your mammy. And mammies know when they have a sad babsy on their hands.’
Her tender perception makes my eyes burn with tears. ‘I wish we’d never come.’
‘It was your idea.’
‘It doesn’t matter whose idea it was.’ I catch myself enjoying snapping at her, and hating myself for it.
‘Don’t be a spoilsport! We’re here now. We have to have a good time.’
‘No we don’t. Who said we do?’
She looks at me, sadly. But it’s a steel-edged sadness, as though she’s not going to be my whipping boy. ‘Why don’t you go and find a boyfriend. Have a bit of the rumpy. Do something productive.’
‘I don’t want to find a boyfriend. You go find one.’ I try to keep my voice light, as though I’m really not picking a fight with my own mother; this is just a peculiar form of conversation.
‘Maybe I will.’
‘Good.’
‘Maybe it would be.’
She goes back to reading her book. I wait for her to say something else but she doesn’t. I kick my flip-flops off and stare at my bare toes that are etched with sand. The fuzzy sound of young male voices and mocking laughs come from the room next door.
‘I don’t know how you can be so damned happy!’
She pretends to continue to read. ‘I’m strange like that.’
I watch her for a few moments, while she keeps up the act of ignoring me, my self-pity annoying me. Eventually, she puts her bookmark in the page, claps her novel closed and lays it beside her on the bed. ‘You don’t have to be like this with yourself, you know,’ she says.
‘Like what?’
‘Guilty. That you’re alive and he’s dead.’
The words rip me open. Sometimes just Jonathan and dead in the same sentence sends this staggering blow of disbelief into me. I’ll want to curl over and blare for the wrongness of it. Still.
‘You can’t let yourself be happy because you think you’re being disloyal to his memory.’
That choking sensation. The build-up of pain in my nose. ‘That’s unfair! And completely untrue. Aren’t I allowed to have my off moments? I thought you were supposed to be my mother and I didn’t have to put on an act for you. You make it sound like I’m en route to the funny farm.’ Maybe I am.
‘Don’t be mad. Of course you don’t have to put on an act with me! Nobody’s saying you shouldn’t have your off days. But you have to remember something, too, Angela… Jonathan was robbed of a life. But you weren’t. He’d have wanted you to accept his death. You don’t have to go on being angry and unhappy to prove that you still love him.’
I think about this for a while. ‘Anyway, what would you know?’ I used to ask that of her a lot when I was a kid. When she used to push me to do the things that were supposed to be good for me: things that she never did. It was a question I knew she didn’t really have a good answer for. It was my exercise in having the last word.
‘What would I know? I lost my mother. I lost my father. My sister. I lost your father, didn’t I? There was a point in my life when I felt I was always losing everybody.’
‘But you weren’t my age when my dad died. And you said yourself you were never happy. He was never right for you.’ She always looked happy. My dad was a good man. They rarely fought. Maybe he wasn’t ambitious, and his idea of celebrating her birthday was to have an extra pint for her down at the pub, but he meant well, even if he never quite put the intent into action. Yet she always said she wanted more. She had a house. She had clothes—even if they weren’t always new ones, she looked better than anybody else’s mother because she was so pretty. Yet sometimes there was a far-off expression in her eyes. Presumably when she was thinking of more. I couldn’t imagine what more meant.
‘Your father was in my life for nearly thirty years. I still get days where I can’t believe that he’s not here any more. I still dream the same dream, where I know he’s got lung cancer, but instead of him getting worse he just stays the same. Somehow we go on living on borrowed time. I’ll wake up relieved that he didn’t die. And then, of course, I realise it was just a dream.’
The pain in the bridge of my nose moves swiftly around my head. I didn’t know she had dreams like these. Because whenever I’m with my mother I always feel I have to try hard not to get too close, to ward off the inevitable agony when I do eventually lose her.
‘Do you ever dream of Jonathan?’
‘No,’ I lie. Well, it’s a part lie. I dream of him less.
But I used to dream of him all the time. The things I’d have thought had the least place in my heart came back to me the strongest. The tiny bald spot on his jaw that was the pink colour of newly-healed skin. The zzz-sound of him shaving in the bathroom. The details would be so strong that my breathing would go scarily shallow. I’d force myself to stay awake because the alternative was something that scared me, almost literally, to death.
‘You know, maybe there’s going to be somebody
just as good for you as Jonathan was, waiting around the corner. Somebody who is supposed to follow Jonathan. Maybe this is just how your life was meant to go.’
I can’t have this conversation.
She turns onto her side, props her head on her hand. The colour of her petticoat lies somewhere between the porcelain of her skin and the amber of her freckles: the only true colour being those luminous Tiffany-blue eyes. ‘Angela, the thirties and forties are a magical time for a woman. Because at that age, you’re at your wisest, yet you can still make men go weak at the knees. Whereas when you get to my age, you only make their legs go because they were probably going to collapse anyway.’
She studies my unchanging face.
‘You’ve still got a lot of life to look forward to. But you can’t see the road. You can only see the roadblocks.’
I turn my head away sharply, meaning, enough now.
‘Do you want to know something?’ she says after a while, and I don’t, but I have a feeling it won’t make a difference. ‘I wish I were in your shoes, because you have a life ahead of you, not just the end of your life.’ She looks frustrated and sad for moments. ‘I don’t want you to turn out just like me, Angela. I’m a very unhappy, messed-up old fruit cake!
‘I thought you said life was only depressing if you let it be.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’ She glares—not really at me, more at life in general. ‘I don’t want to grow old gracefully. I want to grow old disgracefully. I want to rock the walls of this life until this house falls down… When next-door’s nineteen-year-old is lifting his dumbbells in the garden, I’m peeking behind that curtain going, Corr! But oh no, it’s wrong and distasteful. I’m supposed to behave myself. But I don’t want to behave myself! Suddenly I’ve stopped being a woman and become a senior citizen. And senior citizens aren’t really male or female in anyone’s eyes. They’re just old. I’m a member of this club that grants me all these privileges, yet there’s no glamour to being in this club. Young people aren’t lining up to get in. The paparazzi aren’t hiding out in the bushes...’ She shakes her head, angrily. Tiny thread veins bloom on her cheeks. ‘You know, the best thing they can say about Tony Bennett is that he’s eighty?’ She laughs humourlessly and throws her hands in the air. Her face looks staggeringly young. Like I always remember her, and I hope I always will.
‘What’s Tony Bennett got to do with anything?’
‘I’m trying to make a point! That when you get older your age becomes your achievement. It’s pathetic. It’s a damned crime against humanity.’
‘Mam, you’re not eighty like he is!’
‘No but I’m a whisker away from being seventy.’
‘Get serious! You’ve just turned sixty!’ I try not to laugh, because I know she won’t see any funny side.
‘What’s ten measly years?’
She really is serious. I feel for her because she looks all steeled into a corner, and I’m just across from her, in mine, but there’s a massive divide between us, because I can’t help her out of hers any more than she can help me out of mine. ‘Don’t get so het up! Think of your blood pressure!’ I tell her. But it’s the worst thing to say.
She glares at me. ‘Did you HAVE to say that right now? Something OLD like that! Could you not have said something like… like… keep calm. Mind you don’t go into an early labour?’
We hold eyes. She seems momentarily taken-aback by her own wackiness. ‘Angela… all I’m saying… is that life goes by frighteningly fast. And I don’t want you regretting wasting yours, like I regret wasting mine.’ Her voice softens and goes very quiet. ‘Just remember one thing Angela and then I promise I’ll shut up.’
‘Can I get that in writing?’
‘You will outlive your worst pain. Dogs die of a broken heart. People don’t.’
I turn my head away from her, gaze at the balcony doors so she can’t see my eyes fill up. The problem with us is we’re each other’s Advil that we’re trying not to take.
She goes back to reading her book. In my peripheral vision I see her give a tiny, exasperated little shake of her head. A voice warns me that one day I’m going to regret keeping my guard up with her, it’ll seem like such a wasted battle with myself. I sneak a peek at her impossibly young-looking hand that holds her novel, the long, elegant fingers with the splashes of red polish on the nails. The tender sight of her chokes me.
I get up quickly, and go and push open the balcony door for air, and an oven blast of heat comes at me.
‘Ay-up sexy!’ A young lad appears on the balcony next to ours. He’s wearing leopard-print trunks and nothing else. He looks like he just woke up at three in the afternoon. His breakfast is a can of Stella. ‘What’s your name then? Is there two of you in there, then? What’s the other one like?’ he wiggles his eyebrows. ‘Them your Bridget Jones knickers?’ He points to a pair of my mam’s ‘big’ knickers drying on the back of a chair.
Why has she done laundry? We’ve barely been here a day!
‘I’m Steve-o,’ he raises his can, in greeting. Then three bleary heads shoot around the door. ‘And this is Cock-head, Lil Bill, and Jimmy Gonads.’ Bleary eyes trail a path from my chest to my crotch.
I run back inside and clash the doors shut. ‘Good God!’
‘Who-head, and Jimmy what?’ my mam slaps a hand over her mouth while her cheeks flood red and she tries hard not to laugh.
‘It’s not funny! It’s disgusting! What was I thinking of coming here with you of all people? It’s a bloody cesspit, this place!’ Such a far cry from my previous five-star travel.
I hear the faintest escape of a titter. Her shoulders jag up and down.
I can’t believe she’s got the gall to find it funny! I glare at her. ‘And in future, don’t hang your great big dirty drawers on our balcony. Those buggers think they’re mine.’
A laugh bursts out of her so hard that she nearly cracks a rib.
Five
Last night I had a dream. I got off a train because I was going to meet somebody. It was foggy and there was nobody on the platform. As the train pulled away, the fog lifted. A man was standing there. At first I thought it was Jonathan, but then I saw that he was broader than Jonathan, with the dark, penetrating eyes of a foreigner, and he looked like he could use a good shave.
‘Kalimera!’ the young Greek tour guide welcomes me off the boat onto Mainland Greece. ‘Pretty lady. I’m Costas. You travel alone yes?’ Today is predicted to hit a whopping forty-six degrees. Mam wasn’t feeling up for a roasting, but, as we’d booked the trip, it made sense that at least one of us came.
This Costas takes off his 1970’s aviator’s sunglasses, as though to deliberately show me his eyes, and his intent in them, which is, in a strange way, vaguely amusing and quite flattering. He puts them in the back pocket of his stone-washed Levis, and his gaze, all hanging out like open heart surgery, fixes itself optimistically on mine. ‘Let me see your ticket. Ah, the pretty lady is travelling alone!’
Is it my imagination or does he say it pointedly loud for the benefit of the three Englishmen who board the bus ahead of me?
It’s about an hour’s drive to the site of Ancient Olympia. I get chatting to a friendly British couple and their fifteen-year-old son who boarded the tour from another hotel. The son excitedly tells me that he only came on the holiday for this particular daytrip. It registers, with a near paralytic clang of my heart, that Jonathan—the former All Ontario Four Hundred Metre Champion in Track and Field—would have loved this, even with his indifference to anything old.
As we stand in line to collect our passes for the archaeological museum, I observe, more concretely, the three Englishmen at the top of the queue who are having a good bit banter with Costas. There’s a nondescript ginger fellow and a blond. But it’s the other guy I’m surprised I’m only just properly noticing now. A tall, tanned man with light brown hair and clear-looking green eyes, who is, by anybody’s standards, a hunk, but wholesomely so.
We enter the mus
eum for a tour given by Cathy, who Costas tells us is our guide to the site. But I pay scant attention, because having now noticed the Englishman, I can’t quite keep my eyes off him. The statue of the Goddess Nike might be fascinating, but when I discretely swing my gaze my shoulder, to the tall, well-built figure of a man at the back of the crowd, Cathy’s gentle voice becomes like sound that’s had a blanket laid over it: faint and indistinct.
Stepping outside of the museum, and taking my last glug of bottled water, the heat is breathtaking. The Englishmen are laughing at something and I notice the good-looking one’s yellow T-shirt has something about ‘surfing’ written on the front. I wonder if they’re here on a team. He looks fit and outdoorsy.
I debate whether to go in search of a vendor to buy more bottled water before we embark on the tour of the site, but decide there’s not time.
‘The first official games were declared open in 776BC, and held in honor of Zeus, God of Men and God of Gods,’ Cathy tells us. ‘During the games, participating city-states were bound by a sacred truce to stop beating the hell out of one another and compete in sports instead!’ Cathy’s exuberance makes me think I’m going to find Olympia far more interesting than I was expecting. As she talks us through a tour of the Temple of Zeus and the Altar of Hera where the Olympic flame is still lit every four years, I see that the Englishmen talk between themselves, the ginger one’s voice and laughter occasionally rising above that of the crowd. At one point, when I look over, I think the nice one might have just been looking at me, but our gazes slide past each other, his a little too quick, mine a little too slow, so I’m not even sure it really happened.
When Cathy gives us fifteen minutes to go off on our own and explore, I wander in the opposite direction to the crowd, and find myself in the Byzantine Church, with its crumbling walls, where competitors used to pray for victory. I perch on what’s left of a stone altar enjoying the serenity, feeling, strangely, less widowed today—like there are two me’s—the single me, and the widowed me, and we’re somehow hinged, but the widowed me has just become unattached and drifted into the background.