A Rip in the Veil (13 page)

They burnt my father next morning and I stood as close as I could. For an instant I met his eyes. He roused out of his stupor, drew in a lungful of scorching air and screamed that he was Benjamin ben Isaac, and that hear all, hear all that the Lord our God is one. Only one. I hope God heard him.

Dolores they burnt a week later, and it was awful, awful, awful. And to one side was Hector, and I walked over to him, spat in his face and promised him he would pay. My husband dragged me away, but not before I saw Hector pale.

My son was born. I didn’t care. I painted. All day I painted, and one day I heard that Hector Olivares was tied to his bed, stricken by an inexplicable burning disease. I smiled and added further touches of red and black to my picture.

I recalled Geraldo’s story, and I painted exquisite swirls of blue and green, and in the centre a point of beckoning, soothing white. I went to visit Hector, bearing my painted canvas as a gift of sweetmeats on a plate. He looked awful; no youthful radiance, only a suffering husk, eyes sunk so deep into his grey cheeks they shone black, not blue. Did he hope I’d come to forgive him? Heal him? He took the extended painting and looked. Before my eyes he vanished away, and I was filled with black joy – until something clawed at my legs and dragged me along.

So many lives, so many places; these I don’t remember nor recall. Not important. I painted. Oh, God how I painted. I fell, and fell, but always to new places, new lives, never back to where I belonged. At my heels was always Hector, accursed, angry Hector, no longer ill and weak, but full of life and purpose; to find me and punish me.

One day I realised one fell towards what one saw at the bottom of the funnel of light. I had painted myself to a dull, dreary place, had to leave, hurry, go, before Hector grabbed me and had me burnt like a witch. I locked myself into my little attic, they banged up the stairs, pounded on the door. I held my painting between my hands, closed my eyes, and in my head rose the image of the previous place – Greece somewhere? Two seconds later I was there.

But no matter how I tried, no matter how hard I prayed, I have not once been able to bring forth the image I need to take me back home. God’s punishment, I think. I don’t always like God.

Yet another fall through time and I was overjoyed at the sight of the Guadalquivir. This was my river, my city. But not my time. For days I wept. So close, so damned close! And then on a bridge I met him. Magnus. I knew immediately he was meant for me. Did he feel the same? Hands hovering millimetres from each other, eyes that met, darted away, met again. My man. A new life, a new beginning. My past receded, my hunger to return was dulled. And no Hector. For years and years no Hector.

One day I woke, looked into the mirror and screamed. Not my face, but an old, old face, shrivelled into an elongated raisin. I blinked. The image returned to normal. I began noticing other things. How if I was angry fire rushed through my veins, scalding my fingers.

I spent hours in the shower, before my mirror, looking for signs of my real age. I splayed my hand against a sheet of paper, thought about Hector, and the paper crackled under my touch. And in my brain it grew; a clamour to go back, to die. Maybe that’s the way it is; life becomes tedious after years and years of living. But not my life, not my precious days with Magnus.

I fought these whispers. I closed my mind to the alluring sounds and smells of my childhood city that seemed to float constantly around me. One day I succumbed, squeezed out ultramarine and azure on my palette, added dabs of forest green and lime, and began to paint. That is five – no, six years ago by now. My studio is littered with my magic swirls, and not all of them work, most of them don’t, they lie flat and lifeless on the table. My magic is dying, and exponentially my anguish is growing. What if I don’t make it home? Will I ever die, or have I cursed myself as well as Hector? And where is he? I sense him close, and at the thought my fingers, my toes begin to burn. So much anger, so much hate. I set my digit to an empty canvas and it sizzles and turns black. Oh my God; what have I become?

Sometimes I sit in my studio, surrounded by all my paintings, and I can hear them; my people, my family spring to life for an instant. My mother laughs at something my father says, my grandfather whistles as he paints. Magic. Dangerous magic. I should burn them all, every single one of them. But I can’t. I have to go home, I want to stay here. Magnus. Does he know I love him?

I am Mercedes Gutierrez Sanchez. Once I was Ruth. When I hold my hand up to the light, I see the flames that curl inside my fingers. I must go home – or self-combust.

Magnus closed the book. He rested a trembling hand on it, fingers caressing the cover. Why hadn’t she told him this before? Now he’d never have the opportunity to hold her hand, comfort her with his presence. I wish you’d trusted me enough to tell me, he thought. In his head rang her laughter. Trust you? My sweetest, sweetest man, I’d trust you with my life. But you would never have believed me. He sighed; no, he probably wouldn’t.

“
Herre djävlar.
” He tried to smile at John, hoping to see something in the younger man’s face that would relegate all of this to the make believe. Instead he saw shock. Magnus groaned, large hands wringing the note book. Why, oh why, hadn’t he thrown it out with all the other rubbish in the cabinets?

John extricated the notebook from Magnus’ hands. “It’s late,” he said, “let’s go to bed. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

With John’s arm around him, Magnus made it up the stairs. And Alex? His little girl, where was she? Had she been catapulted down a funnel just like the unfortunate Geraldo?

Chapter 10

“This is beautiful,” Alex murmured a few days later as they stood on a crag. He didn’t reply, his arms open to embrace all that openness. “Where exactly are we going?” She shaded her eyes as she looked towards the south. He took her by the shoulders and turned her southwest.

“There.” He pointed into the hazy distance.

“And how much longer will it take us?”

He shrugged. “A week? Two? I don’t want to walk straight back.” He smiled down at her. “If you release a homing pigeon, where will you look for her?”

“At home.”

“Precisely.”

“They will always come looking,” she said.

“Aye, but once I’m home, I’ll get fair warning.”

“Not if that bloody Luke is still around.”

“He isn’t, and if he is, he’ll rue it. Hillview is closed to him.”

He turned her back south and drew a half circle to indicate how they had walked, moving vaguely northeast for some days before beginning the long turn west. He stood with his hands on her shoulders and sniffed her, inhaling her scent. He tightened his hold on her shoulders, and she leaned back against him. He let his hands slide along her arms and then sat down, pulling her down to sit beside him.

“My mother hated this,” Alex said. “She said it felt like the heavens were planning to fall on her and squash her flat. Magnus always laughed when she said that, promising he’d stand and hold the sky above her head should it happen. It didn’t comfort her in the least, and she’d sigh and tell him that she was a city girl, and that to her nature at its best were the planned gardens in Seville, her home town.”

“Well, to each his own,” Matthew laughed.

“A
cada uno lo suyo
,” Alex nodded, “one of my mother’s favourite expressions.”

Matthew lay back against the warm rock, staring up at the nothingness above. Should the sky fall down he imagined it would be like being smothered in a featherbed, a slow drowning in an enveloping softness. His mind leapt from one kind of enveloping softness to another, and he lay in the sun with his eyes closed and felt his cock stir. He wondered what it would be like, to undo those glinting buttons of her djeens and pull them off her, and if she’d want to keep that bra thing on or not. Not, he decided, sinking into a far too pleasurable daydream, one hand moving downwards. He sat up so fast it made his head spin, looking down at Alex who lay beside him, a contented expression on her face.

“So, you’re Catholic.” Unfortunately; all papists were destined directly for hell.

She opened one eye. “I am?” She sounded very surprised, and Matthew swallowed back on a chuckle.

“Well, aye; if your mother’s Spanish, she’s a Catholic, and then so are you.”

Alex made a very disinterested sound. “I don’t think I’ve even been baptised, and I’ve definitely never been to mass or confession or all those other things you’d do if you were a Catholic.”

“You’re not baptised?” He was scandalised.

Alex opened both eyes, raising herself on her elbows. “I don’t think so. My parents weren’t that much into religion.”

“But…” He cleared his throat. “That means you’re a heathen!”

“No I’m not. Heathen are people living in primitive countries that have never heard of God. If anything, I’m agnostic.”

“Agnostic?” Matthew said. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t believe in God?”

Alex regarded him with obvious caution. “Of course not, it’s just that I don’t think you need to be part of a church to believe in God. I can just as well pray to Him here, out in the open, as in a dark and smelly little chapel, right?”

“Hmm.” He decided to drop the subject – after all, her spiritual welfare wasn’t his concern. But deep inside, he knew that he wanted it to be, every facet of Alex’s life he wanted to be his concern. It shook him to the core to admit that.

“You don’t speak much of your mother.” Matthew broke an agreeable stretch of silence.

“No,” she said, all of her signalling that with this very short answer the subject had been broached, discussed and closed.

“Why not? You talk so much about your father. Is she dead?”

Alex sighed. “As far as I know she isn’t even born yet, is she?” She looked away, hands clenching into fists.

“You know what I mean.”

Her reticence was making him curious. He let his eyes travel over her, wondering if her mother had bequeathed the strong bones, those pointed ears with no earlobes to talk of, and that wee dimple in her cheek. He narrowed his eyes, trying to recall who she reminded him of. He was inspecting her far too openly and she frowned.

“I hate it when you do that,” she said, levering herself over the side of the crag. She dropped to the ground and stood waiting for him.

“Do what?” He landed beside her.

“Look me over as if I’m a choice piece of steak.” She sat down at the base of the rock. Matthew muttered an apology and lowered himself to sit beside her. He snuck her a look, his brain snatching at several half-baked comparisons. Sweetest Lord! He reared back from her, muffled an exclamation.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Margaret! She could be Margaret’s sister!

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she demanded, brows pulled into a frown.

“It’s nothing, I sat down on a thistle or such.” He made an affair of looking for this thistle, all the while peeking at her.

Slowly he relaxed; aye, there was a resemblance, even a strong resemblance, but it was no more than that. Both had blue eyes, both had the same well-defined, arched brows and similar facial structure, but Alex’s hair was a vivid, curling brown, here and there threaded with strands of treacle and honey, glints of deep, dark reds. Not like Margaret’s waves of black, a rippling pelt of shiny silkiness that fell like a waterfall down her back when she pulled out the pins. He leaned back against the crag, cleared his throat and smiled at her.

“So, your mother.”

*

Alex closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. She didn’t want to talk about her mother. Even leaving aside that last horrifying afternoon – no, don’t go there – Mercedes had been uncomfortable to grow up around. Too intense, too…well, weird.

He kicked at her foot. “Alex!”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why don’t you want to talk about her?” he asked back.

She hitched her shoulders.

“Ah, lass, I’m sorry. Is she dead then?”

Alex shook her head, feeling an uncomfortable rush of heat up her throat and cheeks. She had no idea; she supposed Mercedes was dead – she should be – but she wasn’t sure, not anymore. Alex pulled her legs close and studied the barren landscape. No cars, no distant tractors, no distorted music from a passing vehicle. She missed that, all those sounds that she belatedly realised had tied her to her time.

“Mercedes,” she said, “her name is, or will be, Mercedes.”

“Mercedes? And that’s a Spanish name?”

“Well it certainly isn’t Swedish or Scots,” she replied with irritation. “Her first name was really Maria de las Mercedes, but as every second woman in Spain is called Maria in one form or other, she was always known as Mercedes. And her sister was Dolores, but I never knew her. She’s dead.” And taboo; Mercedes clammed up whenever Alex asked her about this unknown aunt.

“She’s an artist,” Alex went on, smiling at the memory of her mother in front of her easel: smudges of crimson and cobalt on her hands, emerald green streaking her arms, and that ubiquitous cigarette, lying forgotten in the ashtray as Mercedes bent forward to add yet another miniscule dot of zinc white to her latest masterpiece.

“She painted the occasional cat or horse for me, but mostly she painted…” Her voice drifted off as she tried to think of how to explain the disturbing canvases that flowered from her mother’s hands. “I think she painted grief, grief and loss, you know?”

“How’d you do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But when you looked for too long at her paintings it was as if a silent scream built inside of you.”

Matthew looked pale and Alex laughed dismissively.

“Silly, right? I guess she was good with her brushes, twisting those columns of colour so that they pulled your eye in; always red and orange, always like a huge fire that surged and struggled against the constraints of the frame.” Alex stared off across the faded greens and browns that stretched in silence all around them. “Sometimes she painted small canvases, blues and greens with the odd dash of white. John always complained that they gave him a headache, made his stomach heave, and he’s right, they were rather weird, disconcerting somehow.”