300 Days of Sun (2 page)

I was lucky. I caught a movement inside the wheel, then a powerful white wing extended and then folded in on itself. These weren't just any birds' nests: they were storks' nests, and I was absurdly relieved to see the great creature settling down safely for the night. During the past week there had been unpleasant incidents of storks being found poisoned. Then, a corpse was left on the steps of the town hall. It was a substantial creature. Its wings were broken and spread. Blood matted the white feathers. The outrage had provoked a spontaneous protest, though whether that was against the stork killers or current town hall policies it was impossible to say. Various noisy marches had clogged the town in recent days; these seemed to be political, ahead of a local election, and the word for corruption—­
corrupção
—­was hard to mistake.

A line of stalls was starting to open in the public garden. Vendors had filled them with traditional cakes and desserts to offer the crowds coming for the nightly Folk Faro concert on the waterfront, which already seemed like contrived joviality, as authentic as cheap plastic dolls in national costume.

Outside the grand café in Rua Dr. Francisco Gomes, posters were propped up on easels. One was for a candidate in the forthcoming election, another for a talk about Old Faro. A group of men and a few women stood outside talking animatedly. The place still intrigued me but I went on past this time, down the street to the bar-­bakery where they were happy for me to sit at a table outside with just a drink at a time when most of the tourists were looking for somewhere to eat dinner.

In reply to the last of Marc's emails, I spent twenty minutes writing and rewriting, trying to find the right words to explain how I felt. In the end I deleted it all and wrote: “Please do not come. I need time on my own.” A gulp of wine, and I pressed Send.

 

ii

I
was certain it would be a long wait for Nathan the next morning but he loped up almost on time, wearing knee-­length shorts, a red T-­shirt, Converse sneakers, and his rucksack over one shoulder.

“No one else coming?” he asked, looking around.

“Not yet. We're the first.”

Beyond the jetty where ferries left for the island beaches, the sea was a wide expanse of harsh glitter. Boats scored dark scratches over the silver as they puttered in and out of the harbour and towards the waterways of the lagoon. The salt marshes lurked green and alien on the entrance to the ocean.

We sat on the grass at the foot of the old city walls, watching a man and a woman as they crossed the railway tracks to fish; they sat side by side, hunched over their rods. We waited for twenty minutes but none of the others turned up. It was a relief to be able to speak normally in our own language; even when we spoke English to our fellow students, we had to water down our expressions and choose our words carefully. Nathan chatted easily about nothing in particular (fish dishes he had tried, the covered market, how to dig for clams) as beach trippers trooped onto the open-­sided double-­decker ferry to Praia de Faro, filling it almost to capacity.

“Come on, let's go,” he said. “We don't want to have to wait for the next one. If any of them was coming, they'd be here by now.”

We were the last aboard. The steel gate on deck clanged shut behind us, the engine thrummed, and the ferry moved away from the quay while we were still climbing the steps to the top deck. We managed to squeeze into a space on a bench seat.

“You know the ferry boats have no insurance—­or so the rumour goes.”

“Well thanks, Nathan. You might have saved those comforting words until we actually arrived.”

“If the worst comes to the worst, it can't be that deep.”

The ferry took a channel through the marshes. On either side of this sea road, green fields sprang up from narrow mud beaches.

“Did you see this from the air when your plane came in?” I asked. “I couldn't think what it was at first.” The interlocking islands of the marshes formed miles of green lace on the water, like a wide frill that hung from the edge of the mainland.

“No. I came on the bus.”

At sea level, this delicate lace-­land was unexpectedly solid. Storks and other large birds pranced regally over the grass, stopping to delve for food. After a while, we began to see low, whitewashed houses that gave the lie to the impermanence of these narrow strips of sea marsh.

“They look as if they've been there for centuries,” I said, not bothering to explain my train of thought. “But over there, the buildings look as if they're sinking.” Two stone cottages, pockmarked and desolate, seemed to be straining to keep their windows above watery ground.

“I'd have my house on the other side.”

On the south-­facing bank, a row of wooden cabins suggested a ramshackle, shantytown scene: old car tyres were piled up to protect a row of saplings; a palm grew at an angle in front of one dwelling on a front stoop; tarpaulin flapped in the wind, slowly being shredded by the gusts. Small rowing boats rested at anchor close by, along with fishing lines and rusting buckets.

“A boat, a wooden house . . . clam digging,” said Nathan. “Sorted.”

Two men and a woman were bent double, brown legs planted in triangles, as they chopped at the mud with axe-­like tools with one hand and grubbed in the soil with the other. Plastic buckets stood close by.

“Hard work,” I said.

“But worth it. Best clams in Portugal.”

I smiled but said nothing. It was refreshing, being with someone who soaked up so much information and pumped it back so guilelessly. I wondered about his bullshit filter at times, but as mine seemed stuck on maximum cynicism, I reckoned that between us we struck some kind of balance. I certainly didn't buy the idea of Nathan as a clam fisherman.

F
aro beach is long and sandy. That Saturday it was also crowded. We took our shoes off and walked along the edge of the water for a while. A carpet of grasses floated on the surface, broken up by the waves that flung it onto the sand.

“I wasn't expecting quite such a green furry sea.”

“It's not always like this,” said Nathan. “The marsh got ripped up by the storm the other night. Bits and pieces are still being brought in by the tides.”

We stopped when we found some sunbeds under straw parasols for hire. Nathan would just have flopped down on the beach where we stood, unwilling to pay the ten-­euro fee; I insisted on paying, on the basis that I was the fair-­skinned softie who needed some shade and comfort.

I had hardly put down my bag when he pulled off his shirt and ran down to a patch of grass-­thatched sand where the shore shelved, paused a second, then pitched forward to dive into a breaking wave. His head popped up and he slicked the long hair back off his face, seal-­like. He turned and waved, gesturing me to join him. In many ways, he reminded me of my younger brother, the same cocksure bravado alternating with naivety. I was nearly six years older: thirty next birthday. I felt a twinge of self-­consciousness, but quickly got over it. All Nathan wanted was easy company in the hours before he could go off again into the nightclubs to find some action.

I shrugged myself out of my dress and ran to the sea.

“
If a stork builds a nest on the roof of your house, ­people here say you have received a blessing: you will live long and be wealthy, and you will be lucky in love,” said Nathan. “That's what the old bloke outside the tobacconist's says, and that's why he's guarding the one on the lamppost. Sits all day on the bench next to it shaking his stick at anyone who gets too close. But why would anyone want to attack the storks?”

“Do we know it's deliberate? I mean, the poison could be in some new crop spray, or—­?”

“They all think it's deliberate.”

“But who would do that—­and why?”

“Who knows? Horrible, either way. And it's bad luck if a storks' nest comes down, or a bird dies.”

I peeled a strip of grass off my wet arm. Our swim had felt a lot more pleasant than it looked. The temperature of the water was blissfully cool and the long rollers that folded against the shore were invigorating.

“They can last for decades, storks' nests,” Nathan continued. “The birds return to the same nest and the same mate each year. The old bloke asked me how long I thought the record was, for a nest to be used. I said fifty years and he shook his head. Wrong—­it's centuries! And there are records to prove it, he reckons.”

He lay back on his sunbed, hands behind his head. The sun sent a searchlight through the gaps in our straw parasol and picked out the brown muscles and ridges of his chest. I forced myself to look away to where a doughnut vendor trudged up the beach, calling out the words emblazoned in red on the white box he carried:
Bolas de Berlim
.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Always. Those doughnuts are good.”

“I brought a picnic, actually. Nothing very exciting, just from the supermarket—­some bread and cheese and fruit, and some little custard tarts. I wasn't sure what we'd find for lunch here.”

He fell on what I brought out of my bag with childlike appreciation. There was only mineral water to drink but he gulped it down with as much enjoyment as if it had been cold beer, all the while offering comments and observations.

“Portuguese girls . . . are very attractive, but don't they just know it. A bit too pleased with themselves for my taste. But that might just be because I haven't got lucky yet.” He winked as if to imply it was only a matter of time.

“I thought you had—­down at the clubs.”

“No. I met a nice Spanish girl the other night—­and an Irish girl. They're everywhere, Irish girls. It's all the Ryanair flights. Mind you, half of them think they're landing a bit closer to Lisbon than it turns out. This girl, right, she says to her mate,” he put on a passable Irish accent, “ ‘Didya not read the small print, Siobhan? It's de small print where dey tell you where de floight for fifty pee is
really
going!' ”

We both laughed hard. As I said, Nathan was the easiest of companions. I didn't regard any of his questions as intrusive, because he was so happy to answer mine. So when he asked me, “Is your bloke coming to see you, then?” I gave him an honest answer.

“I hope not.”

“Why's that then?”

“I'm running away from him.”

“Like that, is it? How long you been together?”

“A ­couple of years.”

Nathan reached for his cigarettes, not offering me one. I don't smoke, and he knew that by then. He took a drag and sucked the smoke into his lungs like nourishment before exhaling. “What did he do wrong?”

“Long story.”

“Aren't they all.”

I said nothing.

“What can you do, except be as kind as possible?” said Nathan.

He was a sweet boy. For a minute I did wonder about telling him a bit about Marc and how he still wanted it to work out between us, whilst I had never intended our arrangement to be permanent. I'd seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and was racing to meet it.

“That's all you can do,” I agreed.

The trouble was, I had tried being kind, but that meant staying to listen to all the arguments to stay. And even if I did capitulate, our relationship was not the only thing that wasn't for me anymore.

“Is he a journalist, too?”

“No.”

I was quite surprised Nathan remembered what I did for a living. It hadn't been mentioned since that first evening at the cocktail bar with the rest of the language course students when we all threw chunks of biography at one another. I certainly hadn't brought it up, mainly because it wasn't strictly true anymore. Learning some Portuguese was my way of treading water while I worked out what to do next.

“Must be interesting, though, being a journalist,” said Nathan. “Bet you enjoy it.”

“I do,” I said, truthfully.

“You work for a newspaper, right?”

I hesitated.

“Only, I wanted to ask you—­”

“Actually, I'm here because . . . I was recently made redundant.”

“Shit. That's tough.”

“Yes, well. Onwards and upwards.”

“What're you going to do? You can get another job, yeah?”

“With any luck. Newspapers are like every other business in these tricky times: cutting down on margins, and that means staff. It's not so bad. If I don't get another job straightaway, I can always freelance.”

“Course you can. You must have loads of experience. I mean, journalists know how to find out anything, don't they—­so all you need to do is find out where the work is and go for it.” He nodded encouragingly.

I had to smile. “Something like that.”

We lay back after eating and dozed. “I'm going to burn if I stay here much longer,” I said after a while.

“We could walk from here to see the whale, if you want,” said Nathan. “The one that was in the papers.”

I hadn't realised this was where it was.

W
e smelled the dead whale before we saw it. Newspaper reports couldn't convey the rank, cloying nature of rotting fish and sweet putrefaction that reached up the beach and pulled crowds of the curious towards its source. Sightseers were held back by a rope circle staked in the sand. The jawbone was the size of a tree trunk. One side of the whale was cruelly exposed, like the open engine of a broken-­down bus, trailing viscous organs in the wet sand.

“Was that what killed it, or did that happen after it died?” asked Nathan, holding his nose as he leaned closer.

“Hard to say.”

“Poor thing.”

It was high tide and waves nudged gently at the body. The skin of the great mammal was being cured to leather with every new day it was exposed to sun and wind and salt water. I wondered whether it was shrinking, whether it would eventually shrivel to a gigantic black sac. What with the dying storks and now this, it was hard not to feel that nature was struggling.

Nathan interrupted my thoughts.

“When you said, earlier, about finding out things. How do you start?”

“Sorry?”

“How do you find out about something that happened years and years ago. How do you prove it's true?”

I turned to look at him. He was staring out to sea, eyes unreadable.

“That's a ‘how long is a piece of string?' question.”

“Seriously.”

“Well . . . you'd start with what you know is fact, and work from there. There are records that can be checked, and ­people who can provide answers, and one fact leads to the next until you start to build up a picture that can be verified.”

“Even if it was quite a long time ago?”

“It can be done. How easy it is depends on how long ago it happened. Whether ­people are still alive to tell what they know. Whether there exists any evidence that can be traced. Anything is possible, though that doesn't mean you can get a story to stand up every time. Are you interested in journalism?”

“Might be.”

I assumed that was why he was asking, and it struck me that he had many of the qualities that made a good reporter, even if they were currently undeveloped. We wandered back along the shore, musing about the whale and the story it had brought to the town. It had to do with a human need for answers and a desire for the world to make sense. Some of the more lurid representations—­there was a national colour magazine that had run a six-­page spread complete with photoshopped blood—­pointed to a less attractive need to be entertained by misfortune.

It was only as we were boarding the ferry that Nathan got to the point and I realised how badly I had misunderstood him.