Staunch

by Eleanor Wood

  As for so many reasons, I am so glad that I have Ann with me. Through sheer force of will, she has the power of being able either to charm or freeze out whoever she wants to with a small eyebrow movement or hand gesture.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she will say politely but firmly.

  No apology. No explanation. No budging.

  Nobody ever questions her or bothers her further – or is remotely offended.

  I wonder if this is a form of staunchness that is even learnable. I have the charm, sometimes, but it’s indiscriminate. It’s like in sci-fi movies when superheroes haven’t learned to control their powers yet. I just can’t get the balance right. Although, by this age, I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m ever going to be staunch to the fierce degree that Ann is.

  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m young(ish) or Western, but everywhere I go, people want to chat and take selfies with me – or ‘click pics’, as this is hilariously known locally. As I’m small and dark, and usually wearing a kaftan bought on a market stall, I like to think I fit right in, but disappointingly, this is not actually the case. My fringe gets a lot of comments; people don’t seem to have fringes in India.

  After we get back and I discuss this with other people who have been to India, I find that it is a very common practice. People here are friendly and inquisitive about foreigners. It seems to be a self-perpetuating phenomenon – one person will chat and ask for a picture, then other people will overhear and want to get involved. Before I know what has happened, a large queue will have formed.

  Apparently this is particularly common in small villages and towns; or at tourist attractions, where there are a lot of domestic tourists who might also be from smaller places.

  I honestly feel like I get a small taste of what it must be like to be Madonna going out in public. It holds us up when we’re out and about. The first time it happens – two women come up to me in Panaji, grinning and miming camera-clicking motions – I am so confused, I think they must be talking to somebody else. Maybe someone they know, or Britney Spears, is standing behind me.

  Then they both put their arms around me, press their faces up to mine on either side, and snap about a hundred photos on their phones. Then they have a little chat with each other about the fact that I have large sunglasses on, so they reach into their handbags and get out their sunglasses, which they both put on for more photos. One of them has a baby in a pushchair, so they haul the baby out and hold him up so that he can also be in a photograph with me. The baby cries throughout and I don’t blame him. I’m not Britney Spears. He does not want his photograph taken with me. Perhaps his mum will show him these photographs one day and try to explain to him. I expect he will be just as confused as I am.

  The two women both hug me before they carry on their way, giggling happily. I am so discombobulated by what the hell just happened that I – shamefully but automatically – check they haven’t nicked my purse out of my bag.

  Back in Benaulim, it happens a few times on the beach, but not as often. Anywhere there are crowds, it’s open season on selfie time. At the touristy churches in Old Goa, or in the streets and markets further afield, there is often a long queue for having photographs taken with me.

  The irony is I am horribly unphotogenic, and these strangers must now have camera rolls full of crap pictures of a sweaty, lank-fringed woman at various Indian tourist landmarks. It’s very harmless and it’s quite funny.

  It even happens to Nan and Rose, at length, on our day trip to the Aguada Fort. The fort is (logically) at the top of a hill, overlooking the water, and there is no such thing as the dreaded ‘health and safety’ here. There’s no ‘it’s political correctness gone mad!’, much is the pity. To explore the fort, you walk along the slippery, chalky track up the hill, in order to then walk around the edge of some very high-up crumbling walls, where there is no safety rail or anything to stop you falling off the steep cliff edge.

  Ann and I want to go and have a quick look, so we leave Nan and Rose sitting on a bench at the bottom, while we join the crowds to go up and walk around. As usual, the joke is on me. While I am perfectly capable of dashing up there with both fitness and enthusiasm, Rose and Nan watching serenely from below, I am also extremely clumsy. Almost immediately, I slip over on the dusty ground and scrape my foot. A big flap of skin is hanging off, but I don’t say anything as there’ll only be a fuss. Once we get up there, I’m not scared of heights, but it does feel a bit perilous to be skirting these high walls, single file as that’s all there is room for, right on the edge of a drop down to the sea. All the young Indian tourists around are casually laughing, chatting and attempting to take selfies with me, while I grimace and try my best to cling to the disconcertingly smooth, shiny fort walls.

  ‘If anyone was ever going to have a comedy accident in a place like this,’ I say to Ann, ‘you know it would be me.’

  ‘Don’t you dare, girl,’ she replies. ‘What would I tell your grandmother?’

  Like my sister, Ann is very practical. As such, she despairs of me at times. My sister is – entirely justifiably and with fondness – forever rolling her eyes and saying ‘oh my God, I thought you were supposed to be clever’ when I do something illogical and stupid. I can sense the same feeling in Ann.

  Fortunately, I manage to make it off the walls and back down the hill otherwise unscathed. We get back to the bench where we left the others to find a crowd swarming around them as if they are a particularly interesting part of the tourist attraction.

  We learn that the crowd is made up of an entire extended family, two brothers and their wives and their many, many children of various ages. The youngest is a tiny baby. They have propped the baby up on Rose’s lap while the adults all snap hundreds of photographs.

  ‘I’m not sure what’s going on,’ Rose says, ‘but they seem very pleased about it.’

  Of course, when they see us, we must be in the photographs as well. Ann, of course, politely declines and they are neither offended by this nor keen to challenge it, such is the Ann power. I have to pose with the wives, who are both much prettier than I am. My nan tells them in Urdu how beautiful they are.

  So, of course, next they are enchanted that Nan can speak Urdu and have to take a dozen photographs of her. By the end of it, I feel pretty much like a hungry exploited model must do at the end of the working day.

  But the selfie thing is generally so bizarre, it’s kind of fun. It’s only when the dudes are really intense about it that things can get a bit unsettling.

  One evening we get a car and drive out of town to a restaurant called Martin’s Corner, which is legendary and very popular with locals and tourists. There is live music and you can get a lobster dinner for a price that is ridiculously low by Western standards.

  We drink fenny cocktails and eat whole lobsters. There is a guy playing a Casio keyboard and doing covers of light pop hits from around 1960–1985. This is the style of live music in most of the restaurants here and we love it, some of us in a more ironic way than others. My favourites are the inevitable Lionel Richie covers. One night on Benaulim beach, ‘Careless Whisper’ is an unexpected and ridiculously exciting bonus. I video it on my phone and send it to my sister. Sometimes we still watch it.

  We drink some more cocktails and sing along to Abba and the Carpenters. It’s really fun here. It’s a Saturday night and lots of extended families around us are having dinner out. We are, as always, the only table of women.

  The waiter, whose name badge says he is called Frank, keeps stopping by the table to see if everything is OK, looking at everyone apart from me. Even without eye contact, the service is impressively attentive.

  ‘And, may I ask a favour …’ he says eventually. ‘I would like permission to take a picture with the young lady.’

  He looks at the others expectantly. Ann shrugs: I’m big enough to speak up for myself. Nan and Rose both immediately express delight at this and agree loudly and enthusiastically on my behalf.

  ‘He lik
es you, Ells!’ they exclaim, as if a fifty-year-old stranger called Frank is totally my type and exactly what I’ve been waiting for all these years.

  When I say I find the whole thing a little bit odd, they scoff.

  ‘He’s sweet. Just play along. You’ll make his day.’

  I think they enjoy the collective attention on our group.

  Frank keeps hovering around the table, checking if we need more drinks while our glasses are still full, and reminding us repeatedly that we mustn’t leave before he gets his picture.

  When we have finished our dinner, he gets me to stand with him very formally on a small flight of stairs. He puts his arm around me stiffly, he immaculate in his starched, short-sleeved white shirt. Me sweating in my baggy Batman T-shirt and a long Seventies skirt I bought second-hand when I was twenty. I have no idea why he wants to have his picture taken with me.

  He takes this extremely seriously and is determined to get the correct pose, giving terse instructions and rejecting several shots. I genuinely start to wonder if we’ve misunderstood his request and he thinks this is our official engagement photograph. It’s only when our taxi arrives to take us back to the hotel that he relents and is forced to accept one of the inferior shots. Otherwise, I think we might have been there for hours. I wonder what he’ll do with the pictures and can only conclude it’s like people who take videos at gigs and then never watch them again. It’s about the getting, not the having. I guess I can relate.

  However, Frank is bettered a few nights later by Dev. Dev’s restaurant is on my daily round of stalls, right at the end of a small strip of shops before the dirt track down to the beach. It’s the emptiest of all the restaurants, and the décor is – let’s say – incongruous. Dev is a slightly chubby guy in a tight shirt and he evidently wants us to think he is very cool. He tells us he has friends in Manchester and he has aspirations to be an international DJ. He seems like a bit of a local big shot.

  I think his restaurant would be a lot more appealing if it were decorated more casually, like all the other beach shacks. However, Dev has decked his place out like an Ibiza super-club, as imagined by someone who has never been to Ibiza. The chairs are upholstered in brightly coloured crushed velvet and the lights are rigged up so that they flash in different colours. We feel kind of bad for him, so eventually we agree to go to his restaurant.

  Fortunately, we are not quite the only people there, but it’s still pretty awkward. It’s a vast restaurant, and there’s just us and a Russian family on the other side of the room. Dev rhapsodises about his cocktail menu and says he teaches bartending courses in Mumbai, then does not have the ingredients available to make Ann a Martini. We’re not sure what’s in Rose’s Piña Colada, but it’s definitely not quite right. The ladies are understandably getting irritated, and I just want to fall through a hole in the floor and disappear. Poor old Dev’s tight shirt is getting sweatier by the minute.

  ‘With the greatest respect, may I ask you a question?’ Obviously, he addresses the elders of the table and I brace myself for the inevitable selfie. ‘I would like to present a gift to the young lady. Simply as a friend.’

  This is so leftfield we are all genuinely dumbstruck. Which is how I, who always insist on paying my own way on a date lest I be beholden to a man, end up sitting very awkwardly at the table and being made to close my eyes while he puts a clunky plastic necklace and bracelet on me. There’s then an ensuing palaver when he insists on accompanying me to the mirror hanging outside the loos, so we can both admire this great and not-at-all-inappropriate gift. Dev keeps nodding and smiling at me, and I do my best to fashion my face into an expression that is both polite and not too encouraging.

  I find myself wondering for the rest of the trip quite how this transpired: has he been waiting for this occasion and prepared in advance, or does Dev have a box of plastic jewellery stashed under the bar, just in case a woman he likes the look of happens to come in for dinner? I remain mystified by the whole thing.

  Still, the weight of these gifts weighs heavily upon me for the course of our dinner. The four of us spend the rest of the evening looking at each other sideways and trying not to laugh.

  ‘Any girlfriends with birthdays coming up?’ Ann asks me with a wink.

  Actually, it’s not a bad idea.

  The whole exchange is just so awful and uncomfortable. I’m sure it is well intentioned on his part, but I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do. I have no idea what the correct response to this is, or how I am supposed to behave.

  I guess maybe it is just a nice gift to give a ‘friend’ but, having been quite natural and relaxed before, I’m now too nervous even to smile at Dev, in case he takes it the wrong way. But then I feel guilty, like perhaps I’m being unfriendly. In turn, I then begin to feel cross that the onus is on me.

  When we leave, even Nan and my aunts are a bit befuddled by the whole situation.

  ‘My goodness, for once I didn’t really know what to say!’ Rose exclaims. ‘How awkward.’

  I feel guilty that, whatever his intention, Dev’s gift has the opposite of the desired effect. We do not go back to his restaurant again. Every time I walk past, I wave sheepishly before scuttling off as quickly as possible.

  Present Day

  The older I get, the more I make a point in life to try to avoid either giving or receiving advice. It’s very rarely a good idea. Resentment always happens one way or the other.

  My friends are so different from me. Our decision-making processes – and what we want to achieve from them – are not in any way the same. I know myself quite well by now. However, many of my friends seem to have a lot of opinions about my life. So many well intentioned but utterly unhelpful opinions.

  By this point, I have some close friends I have known for a few years now, who only know me as single and chaotic. They have no memory of ‘Ellie and K’. They never came round for dinner in our old flat, or realize that for over a decade I had no juicy gossip in my life, ever. This is still mind-blowing to me, it’s so bizarre. It’s like they only half know me, and I keep having to remind them that my life used to be very different.

  They don’t even realize that, three years on, I still wake up some mornings confused that K isn’t there. We were so close for so long, it still feels like a phantom limb and I’m semi-resigned to the fact that maybe it always will.

  It also means that I have girlfriends who have been with their boyfriends for two or three years, and think that – compared to me, the depressed spinster borderline-alcoholic with the hilarious self-deprecating stories – they have all the answers and can advise me on relationships. I nod and smile politely, and say I’m happy for them that they have found something that works so well for them. They never pick up on the subtext of this, which is good for you, not for me.

  There are also the friends who helpfully say they remember exactly what it was like being single and worried about life (when they were fucking twenty-six, or whatever), or that they envy me living alone because they’re so independent that they actually really enjoy it when their husband goes away for, like, four days for work.

  Crucially, I manage not to snap at them that I have lived with two men quite harmoniously – to varying degrees – and I have a pretty good idea of what it’s all about, even if that’s not what I’m doing at the moment. I do not point out that the relationships they’re humblebragging about all over the place (‘relationships are hard!’, ‘you have to compromise sometimes!’) are not even a quarter as long as my most significant relationship.

  Even more importantly, I do not point out that I think their husbands and boyfriends are not necessarily worth boasting about quite so loudly. I have these thoughts, because I am a horrible and judgemental person, but I manage not to say them out loud. However, the truth is, I just can’t seem to rouse any interest in nice, ordinary men.

  The problem is, I just cannot settle. Like my great-grandmother before me, I am incapable of settling. Occasionally, I think maybe I shoul
d try to live more like some of these friends – like, maybe it would be kind of nice just to have a decent, medium-funny boyfriend with a beard and a Gap jumper to watch boxsets and eat a baked potato with or whatever. But every time I attempt to consider it, the rogue voice in my head starts shouting loudly. Fuck that, I want to marry Picasso! Fuck that, I want to marry David Bowie and Ted Hughes and George Harrison. I still can’t quite give up on the idea of extraordinary.

  ‘What exactly do you want?’ Ann asks me, sitting on our balcony overlooking the sea, with a glass of wine from the minibar.

  ‘Ted Hughes, basically,’ I say, without really thinking about it.

  ‘A man who drove two women to suicide. Great plan, Ells.’ She laughs, even though we both know it’s not actually that funny.

  I may not be prepared to take advice from my friends, but I come to realize pretty quickly that Ann is a good person to take advice from. While we’re away, she and I talk about boys a lot. We talk about everything a lot, actually. It’s the most time I’ve ever spent with her, by a long way, and getting to know my glamorous youngest great-aunt better is one of the huge joys of the trip for me.

  If you don’t know her well, she can seem intimidating. She’s good-looking, witty and clever. Cleverness somehow seems to come out of her pores; you could know it without ever even speaking to her. She’s a retired teacher and she has the greatest breadth of knowledge and interests of anyone I know: she genuinely loves books, art and theatre, but also politics and sport. She’s seen every film and read every book, and doesn’t show off about it – but if you happen to mention it, she’s a real enthusiast. She loves reading the Classics and watching live athletics and keeping up with any and all world events, to name but a few hobbies. I know very few people who have the combination of academic intelligence and common sense that Ann does.