The Collected Stories (12 page)

Through my love it was the experience of my own future death I was passing through, for the life of the desperate equals the anxiety of death, and before time had replaced all its bandages I found relief in movement, in getting on buses and riding to the terminus; and one day at Killester I heard the conductor say to the driver as they sat downstairs through their ten-minute rest, ‘Jasus, this country is going to the dogs entirely. There’s a gent up there who looks normal enough who must umpteen times this last year have come out here to nowhere and back,’ and as I listened I felt like a patient after a long illness when the doctors says, ‘You can start getting up tomorrow,’ and I gripped the black umbrella with an almost fierce determination to be as I was before, unknowingly happy under the trees, and the umbrella, in the wet evenings that are the normal weather of this city.

The shark stank far as the house, above it the screech of the sea birds; it’d stink until the birds had picked the bones clean, when the skeleton would begin to break up in the sun. The man reluctantly closed the door and went back to making coffee. He liked to stare out the door to the sea over coffee in the mornings. After he made the coffee he put the pot with bread and honey and a bowl of fruit on the table in the centre of the red-tiled floor. The windows on the sea were shuttered, light coming from the two windows looking out on the mountain at the back and a small side window above the empty concrete pool without. He was about to say that breakfast was ready when he saw the woman examining the scar under her eye in the small silver-framed mirror. Her whole body stiffened with intensity as she examined it. He cursed under his breath and waited.

‘It makes me look forty.’ He heard the slow sobs. He lifted and replaced a spoon but knew it was useless to say anything.

‘If we get the divorce I’ll sue you for this,’ she said with uncontrolled ferocity in a heavy foreign accent. She was small but beautifully proportioned, with straight wheaten hair that hung to her shoulders.

‘It wasn’t all my fault.’ He lifted the spoon again.

‘You were drunk.’

‘I had four
cervezas
.’

‘You were drunk. As you’re always drunk except some hours in the mornings.’

‘If you hadn’t loosened that rope to put in the cheese it wouldn’t have happened.’

He’d bought a fifteen-litre jar of red wine in Vera, it was cheaper there than in the local shops, and had roped it in the wooden box behind the Vespa. When he was drinking at the bar, she’d loosened the rope to put some extra cheese and crystallized almonds in the box. He hadn’t noticed the loose rope round the wickerwork of the
jar when leaving; it had made no difference on the tar but the last mile was a rutted dirt-track. The Vespa had to be ridden on the shoulders of the road not much wider than the width of the wheels. Drowsy with the beer and the fierce heat, he drove automatically until he found the wheels losing their grip in the dust on the edge of the shoulder. When he tried to pull out to the firm centre of the shoulder the fifteen litres started to swing loose, swinging the wheels further into the loose dust.

There was all the time in the world to switch off the engine so that the wheels wouldn’t spin and to tell her to hold his body as soon as he knew he was about to crash, and he remembered the happiness of the certainty that nothing he could do would avert the crash. Shielded by his body she would have been unhurt, but her face came across his shoulder to strike the driving-mirror. Above him on the road she’d cried out at the blood on his face. It was her own blood flowing from the mirror’s gash below her eye.

‘I’m ugly, ugly, ugly,’ she cried now.

‘The doctor said the scar’d heal and it doesn’t make you ugly.’

‘You want to kill me. Once it was Iris.’ She ignored what he’d said and started to examine two thin barely visible scars down her cheek in the mirror. ‘She tore me with her nails when she wanted to kill me. Both of you want to kill me.’

‘All children fight.’

‘Jesus,’ she swore. ‘You even want to take her side. You want to pretend that nothing happened. Jesus, Jesus.’

‘No.’ The man raised his voice, angry now. ‘I know all children fight. That they’re animals. And I do know I didn’t want to kill you.’

‘Everything I say for do you criticize. Always you take the others’ side.’ She was again close to crying.

‘Earlier it starts in the morning and earlier,’ he said about the fighting.

‘Who was its cause? If we ever get a divorce …’

‘O Jesus Christ,’ the man broke in, he clasped his head between his hands, and then steps sounded on the hard red sandstone that led from the house to the dirt-track. The woman at once moved out of sight to a part of the L-shape of the room where the cooker was, whispering fiercely, ‘Don’t open the door yet,’ and began quickly drying her face, powdering, drawing the brush frantically through
her wheaten hair. He made a noise with the chair to let whoever was outside know he was coming as she whispered, ‘Not yet. Do I look all right?’

‘You look fine.’

The man moved with exaggerated slowness to the door. Outside in the sun-hat and flowered shirt and shorts stood Mr McGregor with an empty biscuit tin and a bunch of yellow roses.

‘I thought your wife might like these,’ he proffered the yellow roses, ‘and that you might find this useful for bread or something.’

He was their nearest neighbour, a timber millionaire who’d built the red villa with its private beach a few hundred metres up the road for his retirement, and now lived with his two servants and roses there. Even his children wouldn’t come to him on visits because of his miserliness. He got round the villages in a battered red Renault, but once a month the grey Rolls was taken out of the garage for him to drive to the bank in Murcia. Money and roses seemed to be his only passions, and out of loneliness he often came to them with roses and something like the empty biscuit tin which otherwise he’d have to throw away.

‘Would you like to have some coffee?’ the man asked when his wife had accepted the roses.

Over the tepid coffee they listened for an hour to the state of his garden, the cost of water, and the precariousness of the world’s monetary system.

When he’d gone they examined the empty biscuit box. Huntley and Palmer figrolls it had once held, and suddenly they both started to laugh at once. The woman came into the man’s arms and lifted her mouth to be kissed.

‘We won’t fight, will we?’

‘I don’t want to fight.’

‘Don’t worry about the eyes. We’ll never have the divorce?’

‘Never.’

She started to clear the dishes from the table, humming happily as she did. ‘It’s bad to fight. It’s good to be brisk. Do you know who loves you?’

He said, ‘I think you’re very beautiful,’ glad of a respite he knew wouldn’t last for long.

‘Why did we come here to this shocking country in the first place?’ the woman accused.

‘It was cheap and there was sea and sun and we thought it would be a good place to work,’ he enumerated defensively.

‘And you know how much work has been done?’

‘Yes. None.’

‘We could have stayed in hotels as cheaply as it costs to rent here. Neither of us wanted to leave Barcelona when we did. But because those phoney painter bastards had to have a taxi because of their baby you came when you did. They wanted you to come to get you to pay half of their taxi fare. When we could have travelled slowly and cheaply we had that terrible fourteen-hour drive, with the baby slobbering and crying.’

He remembered the scent of orange blossom coming through the open window, small dark shapes of the orange trees outside the path of the headlights and Norman, the painter, saying, ‘Smell the orange blossom, sweetie, isn’t it marvellous, isn’t it marvellous to be here in Spain?’; and then turning back to yell into the darkness of the taxi, ‘For Christ’s sake, sweetie, can’t you get him to shut up for one minute?’

‘Yes. It was horrible but we were dependent on them for the language,’ the man said.

‘We would have managed.’
The woman enunciated each word separately, in slow derision.

‘They put us up after the crash,’ the man said.

‘Yes, but even you insisted on leaving, with him strutting naked round our beds with an erection, going on about the marvels of nudity and bringing those awful paintings up for us to see when we had no choice but to look at them.’

‘We’ve finished with those people.’

‘They practically had to shit all over you before you did anything.’

One day they came with their child to the house to swim in the sea and Norman had behaved as if in his own house. He’d gone upstairs after swimming and started to shower without asking. The man had asked them to leave. It had been the last straw.

‘They’d practically to shit all over the house before you asked them to leave,’ the woman taunted.

‘Can’t you shut up and give me some peace?’

‘And now we can’t even open doors or windows because of the shark. I don’t know what brought us to this country. Why did I ever leave my own birches?’ She started to cry.

‘Can’t you, can’t you shut up!’ the man said. ‘And you’re not going to provoke me into hitting you. That’s too easy.’

An image came of blood streaming down her finger from the splinters of a wine glass he’d swept once from her hand, the look of triumph on her face as she said, ‘Now we see the street angel in his royal colours – nothing but a mean, mean bully.’

‘You’re going to have to accept the fact of your own hatred. There’s no use absolving it temporarily by provoking me to violence.’

‘Bah,’ she said, ‘I laugh at that. I wouldn’t even bother to answer that.’

The man swept the dead spiders and scorpions and lizards across the floor of the empty pool and shovelled them out on to the bank. The dry scorpions broke into sections but the spiders and lizards lay stiff as in life on the bank of old mortar and gravel.

The clean floor of the pool was ready for the waterman when he came. He backed up his small tanker, originally designed to carry petrol or fuel oil, to the edge of the pool. He’d saved the money to buy the tanker by working for one year in a steel works in Düsseldorf. He connected the ragged pipe to the end of the tanker, and when he turned the brass handle the water started to run into the pool with several small jets leaking out on the way. The woman came out in a blue bathrobe trimmed with white on the edges, and the three started to watch, in the simple fascination of water filling an empty pool.

‘The fish, the fish it stinks.’ The man pointed to the shore.

‘Yes, it stinks,’ the man answered.

‘What did you think of Germany?’

‘The roads, great roads, much speed.’

Then suddenly he stiffened, gave a sharp cry of fear, and seized the shovel by the side of the pool, pointing to a scorpion between two stones close to the wall of the house. In a panic he started to
beat it with the shovel until he made paste of it against the bone-hard ground. When he’d put the shovel aside he caught his ankle in his hand, miming gestures of pain.

‘Bad, bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen men made babies by the stings.’

‘It’s the only thing outside the humans that commits suicide,’ the woman said.

It was a favourite subject of hers, the parallels between animal and human behaviour. It bored him.

Mention of suicide suddenly brought back the early days of their relationship in that country of snow and birch trees and white houses rising out of red granite against a frozen sea, a light of metal that made the oranges and lemons shine like lamps in the harbour market. It was before they married. He was waiting for his papers to come and they were living in one of the houses along the shore close to the middle of the city.

‘It’s owned by the Actors’ Union for the actors when they get too old to act,’ she’d explained to him.

‘But how does it happen that you who are young and successful can get a room here?’

‘There’s not enough old ones. They have empty places.’

‘But where are the old, then?’

‘They’ve gone to the seaside.’

He at once accepted that the Actors’ Union had two houses, and the elderly had a choice of a house in the city or a house by the seaside, until an evening over brandies and coffee with a friend of hers, the quiet Anselm, who was more interested in the history of rocking chairs than in his legal practice, had remarked, ‘It is extraordinary that the Actors’ Union give the retired a choice of a house in the city or by the sea.’

‘Why?’

‘She said that the reason she had a room in the old actors’ house was that there were vacant rooms because some of the retired preferred to live in another house at the seaside, that they had choice.’

‘No, no.’ She’d overheard from the kitchen. ‘No, no. I meant that they’d gone to the suicide.’

He grew aware of her hostile stare at the pool’s edge. Perhaps he was neglecting the waterman. Quickly he asked him if he’d have something to drink. He wanted water. When they’d given him the
drink and paid him, the waterman told them he’d to hurry away to bring two loads of water for the Canadian’s roses before lunch.

As soon as the tanker moved towards the dirt-track the man started to pump the water up to the tank on the roof, though he knew the woman was staring at his back with arms folded. The wooden handle of the pump had split, was held together with a rope, and was loose and awkward about the iron spike.

‘I want to speak to you about something.’ Her voice was cold.

‘What?’ he stopped.

‘When I was talking to the waterman you never listened to one word.’

‘I did.’

‘What?’

‘About the scorpion.’

‘Anybody’d see you were miles away but you want to be listened to yourself. And you start to pump to avoid having to listen to anything.’

‘I want to get the water up.’

‘Be honest. You’re either pumping water up. Or oiling the floor. Or walking on the beach. Or drunk in the rocking chair staring at the sea. Or running to the village for one thing or another.’

‘Someone has to get the things.’