Becoming Strangers (7 page)

'Well, as you like to say, yes and no.'

'This is your version of paradise, though.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'You like this sort of thing. Elegant society.'

'If you think it's much fun for me to come away for the last time, again, then you're mistaken. It was the boys' idea, not mine.'

'You sound bitter. But it's me who has to do the dying.'

She pushed her wineglass away from her.

'Don't I know that!'

He looked down at his body. It was very bad form to die slowly, he had learned.

'I am sorry.'

'Oh, don't say things like that, Jan. It makes it worse.'

He meant it though. He swallowed and looked hard at the barman, signalling for a whisky to go with the wine, then changing his mind and ordering two. She did not disagree.

'We need to talk,' he explained as the drinks were served. He was waiting for the right moment. He would take her hands in his and he would say, let's go all the way back to the beginning, let's be two people without this past we have made, let us be friends. Let us do something silly together, now while there is time.

But the barman was taking a long time and his wife was looking at the other people around them, so he started to speak, quickly.

'Do you know, I haven't been so drunk in a long time.'

'No, that's true.'

'I owe you an apology. As you know, I didn't choose for this to happen to me, but I should not have let it win so completely.'

She took a breath and reached for her drink.

'You did not choose it. Neither did I, nor the children. But it was given to us and we have had to deal with it.'

'I am ashamed, Annemieke,' now he took her hands in his, 'I wish I were a better, stronger man. Dying does not make you good. Nothing makes you good, not even the life we want can do that, not even success.' He looked over at the Americans. A man was checking his watch against the time on the bar clock, his wife was running her fingertip around the inside of the rim of her eye. He looked beyond them, saw the flowers nodding, the shapes blurring and blending in his confused distant vision.

'Will you sit down?' he asked her. She shook her head.

'I have been bad company these last years. I am sorry.'

She did not want him to say sorry. It would require her to say the same, surely, that was why people said it, and she felt incapable of that.

'Don't worry,' she said.

But, like Bill Moloney, he wanted something from her it seemed, he pressed her.

'I am not worrying. I have decided not to worry, that is the point, you see I'm going to loosen up.'

Bill Moloney presented himself at the other side of the bar, elbowing one of the Americans aside, gently and with apologies.

She laughed with her head back. 'You have drunk too much, Jan-tche, you will be back to your usual self tomorrow!'

He was hurt by the way she scoffed at him. He said angrily, 'Ah, yes, I forgot, you know how to live.'

'I make no excuses for myself, I don't pretend to be what I am not.'

Across the bar, Jan noticed the Moloney fellow withdraw abruptly and he felt sure that they had been observed. He felt it was disgraceful, even though plenty of people did it, to bring such misery on holiday. And then he hated the holiday too.

'Not so loud,' he said. He noticed she had finished her drink and was passing the empty glass over to the waiter.

'Not so loud,' she mimicked, not so loud. This is all we have heard in the house. You have become so obsessed with your life in a technical sense that you have not lived it at all.'

'Happily, the same cannot be said of you. Have you sent De Vries a postcard?'

She turned towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. She bent her head to get her eyes squared with his. 'Look, Jan, what do you want? It's been a lousy end to a lousy marriage. Do you want me to say something else? Just because you are dying I am supposed to change, to be noble? For six years? I feel young inside. I feel like an eighteen-year-old. I am not dying. You have robbed me of too many years and yes, I resent it and I've had enough. I have always been honest with you.'

He had heard this before, this last part. It was not the right place, there were people watching and yet she had dashed his hope from him, she judged and categorized his life and now she would do the same with his death. He would speak.

'Annemieke, your honesty is miserable. It is rude. This honesty of yours does not uncover any truth, it allows you to do as you please.' He stopped because his anger was getting ahead of him, and then he slammed his hand down on the bar making their drinks jump and he said, 'It is convenient!'

'I'm not a philosopher. How lucky for you that you are capable of seeing the truth. Add another note to your book.'

He felt outclassed by her, and yet he was still sure even after all these years that good was on his side. He took his glass in his hands and supped the whisky like a mug of soup.

'This is ... terrible,' he said. He had bags under his eyes; to her he looked both doleful and importunate.

The very sight of him annoyed her.

'You know,' he said, 'when I think of you in the early days, I miss you, Annemieke. I knew from the beginning we had our difficulties, our differences. But you were a friend once. Now it seems as if there is nothing, no safe place. I thought...' He put his empty glass down on the counter and it slipped in the wet until he steadied it. Then he closed his mouth and was silent.

She held her glass between her breasts and looked away. She was thinking about the days after his death, the quiet house, the boxes on the floor, the boys making coffee in the kitchen, touching her back as she knelt, the sudden heart-starting sound of the phone ringing.

He went on, clearing his throat, muttering miserably, 'Nobody needs to win. Nobody needs to be right. Nobody cares about us, who's winning. I had an idea, you see, how to do it.'

She heard his voice crack and looked quickly at him, and she saw her younger son, Ben, saw the way he looked after admitting to her he had an overdraft again. In spite of her cold and hard mind, her mother's heart arched like a swallow making a circle of the sky, turning south for the winter.

G
EORGE SLIPPED THE PLASTIC CARD
into the slot of the key mechanism on their door three times but each time was too impatient, shoving the handle before the lights turned green. He knocked and called out.

'I say, Dorothy, it's me, let us in, I'm having no joy with this card thing.' He waited, licked his lips, he was dry, dry as a bone. When he thought of Dorothy he thought of a nice cup of tea waiting for him. He kicked the door softly, 'Come on dear, pull yourself together, get a move on.'

He tried the card once more, took his time and stumbled into the room that was being blown by the rapidly turning fans. There were loose papers from the hotel brochures all over the floor. He called her name again and stepped on to the balcony. She wasn't there. Probably she'd popped out for a spot of lunch. His watch showed three. The beds were made, tidy as a stack of fresh lumber. He'd just have a little lie-down while he waited for her, rest his eyes.

T
HE LITTLE OLD LADY
—her daughters called her 'Mrs Tiggy-Winkle'—attracted only a little attention as she left the main gates of the resort. Perhaps one or two of the staff were surprised to see that she wore a coat in
the blazing heat. Nobody noticed her stand opposite the gates for a quarter of an hour or so as if she were a passing stranger considering it as a subject for a little sketch. She began to walk on the right-hand side of the road. She was pleased to discover that there was no traffic.

Over the years, a few times, Dorothy had gone to the door, picked up her bag and her hat and coat and buttoned up to leave them all. The buttoning had seemed to take forever, her jaw moving all the while, grinding grievance. Once or twice she'd gone to the end of the road and stood at the bus stop, blinking, her chest heaving with the phlegm caught in her lungs. Each time, the bus came and went and she'd let it go on its way and gone back home. It was no easier to go back than to leave.

Now, she was faced with a long slow incline, a hill that promised to reach a plateau. Ahead of her, she saw the swishing sugar canes, shaking shaggy haircuts. The heat was intense. She had no idea what the time was as she'd left her watch behind. The walk was slow and tiring, so soon. She was old and useless, just like they all told her, but there was no point in getting upset over that. When she reached the plateau and saw the sugar fields stretching golden and righteous ahead of her, and to her left and right and beyond them at the sides a blue which might be both land and sea, she took her coat off, folded it neatly, then popped it under a tall hedgerow. She took a swig from the little bottle of water she'd brought, swilling it around her dry mouth,
up in front of her teeth, feeling it loosen her gums. She pulled the fabric under her arms away from the skin and stepped onwards.

She had had to warn them, the girls and George, about herself, without really saying anything; she didn't want anyone to panic. She knew it was coming on before the doctor did, whatever it was they called it. The bloody wicked thing was she couldn't remember the name of it! You had to laugh. She wasn't stupid, she'd been a bright young thing, read everything she got her hands on, always in the library, before George. She could remember that place in such detail, all the different smells, the listed rules, the little catalogue cards in dark blue, titles in capitals, author in small letters, the dank promising smell between the shelves, then the yeasty smell of the books themselves and the Lily of the Valley on the head librarian when you went to get your library card stamped. She used to think that the gate to heaven would be like that, kindly but official with the smell of flowers. All of that she could bring to mind, and much of her childhood with it, but she couldn't remember the name of her own illness! There were lots of words that had just gone, disappeared. Her world was closing down. Every time she got to the place in her mind, which took her a long time to get to, there was a sign before it, 'Closed.' Before they'd come away, there had been a day when she couldn't think what day of the week it was.

She'd decided to speak to George about it. He'd been down in the tool shed and she'd gone down and stood
in the doorway, and he'd said, 'Still in your nightgown? Not going to Madge's today then?' And there she was, wood shavings all over her slippers, her long nightie picking up wood dust too, and she had what she'd prepared to say right on the tip of her tongue. 'Look,' she'd wanted to say, 'something's happening in my head, I'm not right, but please just put up with me, don't get the doctors involved and don't tell the girls. Please just look after me, please.' But she'd said instead, 'Who's Madge?' and she'd felt like she ought to ask, as a matter of urgency, because she had the horrible feeling that it was someone she knew really well, maybe it was a niece or a sister or even one of her own children. 'Don't come that with me,' he'd said, 'go and get yourself dressed and I'll take you in the car, you'll have missed the bus by now.' She'd touched his arm, the hairs were like electric fuse wires, always ginger there and he'd shaken her off without looking at her. 'Go on,' he'd said roughly. His voice went hoarse the same way when their oldest daughter told them she'd lost the baby.

'Who's Madge?' she'd said, stepping back into the garden, feeling like springs under her feet the planed-off wood curls that he'd swept outside. She watched him hobble down to the runner beans and the compost heap, but he hadn't heard, he hadn't answered her and so she'd gone back up to the house. When he came in later and found her sitting in the front room he didn't mention getting the car out.

So all she said to him and to the girls, was, 'I shall be quite happy when it's my time to go.' And they teased
her, 'Oh, when's that then, Mum, let us in on the secret, will you?' It was all she could do. At least they knew she wasn't suffering.

Coming down the hill the other side of the plateau, she could see a small hamlet, a cluster of makeshift houses, each slightly elevated with four stumpy wooden legs. When she got there, she would have another sip of water. A long chicken-wire-fenced area to the left of the road led to the first of the dwellings. Inside the run were chickens and monkeys. On the steps of the home a surly-faced woman stood with her hair in rag curlers, a baby at her hip and glamorous if well-worn slippers on her feet. She looked sternly at Dorothy. Underneath her legs a long pale yellow mongrel dog was curled and he raised his head to look, then went back to sleep. The woman nodded and so Dorothy returned her nod and said, 'Good day.'

The woman cracked a smile.

'How's it going there?' she asked.

Dorothy nodded quickly.

'Fine, thank you. Lovely day.'

'If you say so.' Her voice was deep and singsong. Then she sat down, shaking her head over the baby, and laughing with real amusement.

In front of another house, a boy stood up on the pedals of his bike, balancing it with his legs tense, ready for the unexpected. Seeing her, he grinned and called his friends, and a group of children came out to watch her, their mothers stood in the doorways that were hung with lace moving lazily in the slight breeze. A
couple of old men, sitting smoking with their backs against used tyres, called out to her and raised their hands in salute. She felt like the head of a carnival parade and quite naturally raised her hand to return their greetings. No one approached her; they let her go on her way, a fleeting oddity.

Two teenage girls, also with their hair in rags, sat knees-together on the steps of a blue-painted tin-roofed house. In their pink and yellow dresses, they looked quite a pretty picture. If this was poverty then it had colour to it, she thought, and a slow easiness that did not suggest hunger. It must have been early evening, the people relaxed without the need for entertainment. They all seemed to be perched as if watching, but there was nothing to watch.

'How lovely,' she said.