by C. J. Skuse
‘We had one of these in rehab,’ I told her, patting the planter.
She eyeballed me. ‘Are you a drug addict?’
‘No.’ I maybe should have lied, but I didn’t want to around Caro. ‘I had brain damage when I was a kid. Had to learn to walk and talk again. I went to this rehab place in Gloucester where they had this garden – some charity built it. And it had all these flowers and herbs in that you could eat off the stem. I always feel peaceful around plants.’
‘So do I,’ she said. ‘But these are all fake.’
I raked my hand through the soil. ‘Real soil but fake plants?’
‘Mostly, yes.’ Caro didn’t say anything for a whole minute – she sipped the rest of her cocktail, set down her glass and reversed her chair out from under the table. ‘Come along.’
‘What?’
‘We’re going into Valencia, aren’t we?’
‘You said there was nothing to do there.’
‘Well, we can do nothing together, can’t we?’
‘But you never get off the ship.’
‘And you’d never read lesbian pulp fiction before the other day. So there’s a first time for everything.’
We didn’t bother with any excursions or escorted activities – instead we took a taxi into the old town, found a bar and got absolutely shitfaced. Turns out it was one thing the 87-year-old and I had in common – we both liked to drink. Not to excess, just to that point where nothing matters and if your arse caught fire you’d just laugh and carry on drinking.
Agua de Valencia became the third entity in our relationship. Fresh Valencia orange juice, cava, vodka and gin. And it meant every word of it. We found this great little dive bar, cool from the midday scorch, its walls covered in signed black-and-white photos of famous Spanish people who’d visited over the years – I didn’t recognise any of them. We stayed there for hours, drinking AdV and talking about our lives.
Well, Caro talked and I listened and drank.
I learned she’d been a model in her twenties having been scouted when she was a secretary for a woman’s magazine in London. Her five husbands read like a spotters guide of red flags. Charles, the First, was a photographer who beat her up. George, the Second, was ‘born the wrong side of the royal blanket’, and had a double life as a spy for the Nazis – he ditched her after their second child was born. Henry, the Third, ran up gambling debts she had to pay off when he croaked and Number Four, William, was shagging her brother, even on the day their baby was born. Clive, Number Five, monitored her calls, tracked her car, and ran over her dog. After that, she gave up on marriage and went cruising.
‘Don’t you miss your children?’ I said.
‘Every day. But it hurts me to think about them. So I try not to. I’ve only been in love once in my life. True love.’
‘Your little side dish on Capri, you mean?’ I leaned forwards so my chin rested on my folded hands.
She sat back, stroking the side of her glass. ‘We will meet again, some sunny day.’
‘How did you know you were in love with her?’
‘When you’re in love, you feel like anywhere they are, that’s your home. Safety is like a prison sometimes – I experienced that in a couple of my marriages – the trick is to find safety with an open door that neither of you want to walk through.’
‘I don’t get why you’ve never visited her,’ I said. ‘If you haven’t been off that ship in eleven years, you must have passed Capri loads of times.’
‘Sixteen times.’
‘And you’ve never wanted to go and see her? The love of your life?’
‘It was fifty-odd years ago, Hilary. She wouldn’t remember me.’ Caro’s smile faded. ‘She might even have… passed over.’
‘You could find out,’ I said, resting my heavy head on my hand.
‘I like to remember her as she was,’ said Caro. ‘I don’t want to go to Capri and find a grave. That would be too awful.’
‘Have you never even googled her?’
‘Wouldn’t know where to begin. But I’ll tell you this, Hilary,’ and I knew she meant what she was about to say cos she put down her glass. ‘There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wish things had been different. That the world had been kinder to the idea of us. That I’d had more courage.’ She put her hand to her neck and pulled out the square pendant that hung under her dress. She fumbled for the clasp, took it off and handed it to me.
I studied the image – it was a square cameo, the softest blue with two white figures almost-kissing on top. Two figures with hair blowing in the wind and ripples of sea and a crescent moon in the background.
‘Beatrice’s father used to sculpt cameo jewellery. She was going to take over the business when he retired. She made it for me.’ I handed the pendant back to her. She tucked it inside the collar of her dress. ‘You ever find a love like that, you fight for it. Promise me.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘No, I mean it. You do what you have to do but you fight for it. Fight for him, her, whoever they are.’
‘I doubt it’ll happen for me somehow.’
‘Why do you say that? Anything is possible.’
‘Nah, not for me.’ I drained my glass.
‘Promise me,’ she said again. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
‘OK, I promise,’ I scoffed. ‘What if I did some googling for you and found out where Beatrice lived now?’
‘No, don’t go to any trouble.’
‘It wouldn’t be any trouble. Can I look for her and find out if she still lives on Capri?’
‘Why do you want to?’
‘Because I do. I want to do something for you for being my friend.’
‘You don’t have to do anything for me. A friend is a friend, it doesn’t require invoicing.’
‘She might be a way off the ship for you.’
‘I like living on the ship.’
‘Yeah, but you’re lonely. Beatrice is your home. You should go home. I would if I could.’
‘Why do you say that? Why can’t you go home?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘A man?’ she guessed. ‘You’ll find someone else.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Law of averages. They’ll appear, right when you least expect them. Maybe right when you most need them. That’s how I met Beatrice.’
‘But you lost touch with her.’
‘No – I let her go,’ she explained, pouring herself another AdV from the carafe. ‘You have to be better than you want to be, I’ve found. And I needed to be happier in myself to be better. Your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds and you choose what to plant there – good or bad. I only planted bad seeds. And I lost her.’
I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew she was right. I remembered what Bobby Fairly had told me – The price for freedom is everything you once were, Rhiannon. I had to be better than I wanted to be. I had to be more Hilary. There had to be some good to extricate from the wreckage of Rhiannon.
Caro topped up my glass. ‘Oh bollocks, let’s finish this one awf, shall we? Could be dead tomorrow.’
‘You’ll outlive us all,’ I said.
‘Not with this fucker in my chest cavity I won’t.’
It took me a few moments to understand. ‘You’re dying?’
‘We all are. I’m just further along the conveyor belt.’
And I didn’t mean to but I snapped and threw my glass to the floor where it shattered into a million pieces.
‘Well, there was no need for that, was there? That’s just childish.’
‘I WANT TO BE FUCKING CHILDISH!’ I shouted. ‘Everyone leaves me.’
‘Well, I apologise for getting breast cancer to piss you off but there we go.’ She patted juice from the table with her napkin. ‘Who else has left you?’
‘Everyone. My baby… I lost my baby.’
‘When was this?’
‘Recently,’ I said.
‘You’re still grievi
ng. It will take time but you’ll get there.’
‘What if I don’t?’
I wanted to spill all the fucking tea, tell Caro everything, like the child she had called me, desperate to confess bad behaviour. Ask her advice on what Géricault had said at the press conference. Ask why they were suggesting I’d hurt my baby when all I’d wanted was her to be safe. But despite how pissed I was at that moment, I knew telling Caro too much was a one-way ticket to the slammer. So I kept schtum.
‘We all feel love, so we all feel pain,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t. Not until now.’
‘Of course you do,’ she said again. ‘You love your baby. I love all my children, despite what shits they became. If any one of them needed me in their lives, I would step off this ship in a heartbeat. I would stop the world.’
‘Would you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I dunno if I experience love the way everyone else does. The brain injury I got – my sister said it smashed all the love out of me. I don’t deserve love.’
‘Of course you do. Maybe your sister underestimated you?’ Caro suggested. ‘Maybe love has smashed all the hate out of you?’
What, like a reverse Breaking Bad? Was I breaking good? A tear rolled down, landing in my glass with a plink.
Caro sat back, glass rested against her necklaces. ‘There’s love, right there. Hurts, doesn’t it? It’s the greatest feeling we were given the capacity for but it’s also the most painful. I think I would rather experience it than not.’
I drank and drank until the angry flame for Ivy dulled and went out. I drank until I was happy and laughing about every single little stupid thing. I didn’t care if the entire Spanish police force marched in and loaded me into a straitjacket and a Hannibal mask.
Old Moneybags paid our bar bill, thank God, and I wheeled her chair outside where the sun was still beating down and the day wasn’t done with us. ‘Do you want to have a mooch round the square before the ship leaves?’
‘Oh no thanks,’ she said. ‘I need another church like I need another tumour in my tits.’ And we were laughing again. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced. ‘Let’s go and find something stodgy to mop up all this booze.’
The rest of the afternoon, we wandered about the old town laughing at hats on souvenir stalls, eating churros and free samples of roasted snail, tapas and Spanish sausage. I couldn’t be arsed to be Hilary so I let the act slip and went a little more Rhiannon. There was something about Caro which made me feel like I could be more myself – to a point, anyway. After lunch we flagged down a cab large enough to accommodate Caro’s wheelchair and went to Jardin Botanico – the botanical gardens.
It was my kind of place – parkland, flowers, stray cats everywhere. But I felt so ill. I puked in a bush and lay down on a bench groaning.
‘I’m never drinking again,’ I said, my head spinning like a top. I’d gone from spoilt child in the restaurant throwing food to pissed teenager on a park bench in one hour. Around Caro I had regressed.
Caro parked her chair next to me. The giant trees offered a cool shade from the scorching sun, and every so often a cat would appear and nuzzle our legs or snuggle up in the flower bed to sleep. One sat directly in front of us and licked its own arse clean.
‘I wish I could do that,’ she said.
‘Yeah, me too. I’d never need another man again.’
There were a few beds in bloom, quite odd for January. Caro said Spain had a warm winter which explained it. ‘The flowers don’t know what month it is – all they know is warmth so they come out.’ A welcome smattering of almond blossom sprinkled down on us as a breeze blew through the grove.
Caro read from the leaflet as we walked round. She didn’t need her chair the whole time and she’d get out when she felt like it to stretch her legs. Except when there was an ice cream kiosk in sight and then she was straight back in it so we could jump the queue.
‘There’s an orchid house too. Cacti and succulents, we’ve done them. Greenhouses, done. Ponds. Palms. Ooh a physic garden! This way, come on.’
We came to a small area near the back wall marked ‘Plantes Medicinales’. Raised beds packed with shrubs. Caro knew what they all were from studying the little signs. I knew nothing because it was all in Spanish.
‘So what have we got here?’ she said, bending over. She plucked a sprig of lavender and held it against her face, inhaling it deeply. ‘Mmm, no better smell.’ She handed it to me. I smelled it too. If I hadn’t felt so sick and headachey from all the alcohol I’d consumed that morning, I’d have agreed.
‘Spearmint, Echinacea, yarrow, sage. Evening primrose. Oh, I adore primroses. They’re my favourites. We used to go picking them as children. You’re not allowed to these days.’
‘I used to take that for my bitch fits. PMS.’
‘Evening primrose? Did it work?’
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Arnica. Peppermint, lemon balm, marigold, rosemary, St John’s Wort. That’s mmm, that’s witch hazel.’
‘Can you bathe your vadge in these?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Caro rolled herself towards the next section – ‘Plantas Peligrosas. Have a guess what that means.’
‘Plants they use to make Pellegrino?’
‘Dangerous Plants,’ she said with a twinkle. ‘Henbane, Manzanilla – apple of death. Strychnine, Brugmansia – Devil’s Breath – Belladonna and Hemlock too. That’s how Socrates died, hemlock.’
‘Oh right.’
She fumbled around in her handbag and produced a pair of small white gloves, pulling them on before bending over and tearing up a couple of sprigs of hemlock, wrapping them carefully inside a clean hanky.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Picking some. If it gets too much I can boil this up in water and knock it back, can’t I?’
I wandered on behind her as she took sly cuttings of all the most poisonous plants in the garden, all of them bearing yellow ‘No tocar!’ warning signs and each one with several more exclamation marks than the last.
‘You won’t be allowed to take them back on the ship,’ I told her. ‘How are you going to get them through security?’
‘I’m an old, disabled woman. Officials tend to rush me through because I hold everybody up. Carry on, I say. Use their own prejudices against them.’
I got that. And I’ll admit it was useful having Caro in a wheelchair. People gave us the best tables, pushed us to the front and generally ignored us wherever we went. But I still didn’t like her taking the plants.
‘Ooh look at these.’ We came upon a small tree whose beautiful trumpet-like flowers drooped towards the ground like they were bowing. ‘Los trompetas de angel – Angel’s trumpets,’ she announced.
‘Pretty,’ I said.
‘Pretty lethal,’ she chuckled. ‘These are the most dangerous flowers here. A botanist did a talk a few months back on the ship – they contain some terrible toxins, like atropine. They look beautiful but they’re killers.’
Kind of like me, I thought.
‘We should take a few,’ said Caro, reaching out to the blooms.
‘Are you insane?’
She plucked some of the flowers and wrapped them in a hanky.
‘No,’ I said, standing my ground. ‘Put them back. Put it all back.’
‘What?’ she said, turning round to face me.
‘I don’t want you to take any of it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to die.’
She removed her gloves and tossed them in a litter bin. ‘It’s not something you have any control over. Every day I become frailer, more scared. What have I got to live for? Sitting in a wing-back chair, pissing myself to Judge Rinder? You have your life ahead of you.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Of course you do, silly girl.’
‘I don’t have anything. Or anyone.’
‘That’s silly talk—’
‘—why can’t you live as much as you can fo
r now? Then go home and die there?’ I bubbled with rage.
‘Because my home is the ship.’
‘Your home should be on Capri. With Beatrice.’
‘Capri is in the past.’
‘The past can hurt, but you can either run from it or learn from it.’
‘Is that Rousseau?’
‘No, it’s the baboon from The Lion King. But he’s right, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. And your baboon knows what he’s talking about,’ she laughed.
‘So you just want to die, is that it?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘I might die as well too then.’
‘You’re drunk and vulnerable, I’m not listening to this.’
‘I’m serious. I don’t want to live. I wanna die as well. We’ll do it together.’
‘You’re young enough to get over your baby. You’ll bounce back.’
‘I don’t want to bounce back. So if you eat that stuff,’ I marched over to the hemlock and poised my hand, ready to pluck, ‘so will I.’
‘No, don’t touch it!’
‘I will, I swear.’ My hand hovered underneath it. My head swam – I was still so nauseous. ‘I thought you were my friend.’
‘I am your friend. We’ve had a lovely day, haven’t we?’
‘But why do you have to die?’
‘Cancer isn’t terribly negotiable.’
‘I know. My mum and my dad died from it. They both decided OK, that’s enough treatment. Nothing else worth staying around for. I’m off now. Not a thought for anyone else. And you’re the same.’
I zoned in on a bed of lantana flowers, pinks and yellows in bloom too early. I staggered over and tore into them, ripping their heads off left right and centre, throwing them at Caro, wrenching and kicking them asunder.
‘You’re a fucking. Selfish. Bitch!’
Petals flew, the air filling with the sweet scents, until all around me were bare, brown stems and spikes. When I was done, I traipsed back through the pink-and-white carpet towards a bench and slumped down. My hands were covered in small red cuts.
Caro walked towards me. ‘Look at the mess you’ve made.’
I felt a hand on my chin and another on the side of my face, forcing my head up to look at the torn-out roots, the pink-and-yellow petals scattered around. I closed my eyes, my eyelids crushing out two tears. She reached into her sleeve, pulling out a clean handkerchief, drying my cheeks with it.