Drowned Sprat and Other Stories (5 page)

When I was a girl, my Papa would say to me — he was a New Zealander who met my mother here in France during the War — he would say to me, ‘Stop playing to the crowd! Stop holding the floor!’ he would say. ‘Get back in your box.’ He did not understand that, for me, to turn away from an admiring face is entirely against my nature; he could not comprehend that his idiomatic command to retreat to my box only brought into my mind a horrifying image of myself lying in my shroud, hands clasped.

So, I have played to audiences real or imagined all of my life — and it has brought me no end of pleasure. I like to imagine what thoughts go through their minds, every detail of their appreciation of me. Right now, for instance, there is a boy, outside the beach kiosk, watching me. He has two sisters flanking him, but they are younger and more interested in the twenty flavours of ice-cream brought down to Menton from
Nice, some of them so disgusting that just to read their names is enough to make one bilious: beer, licorice, mimosa.

The boy’s mother has seen me now too, and she pauses in the lighting of her cigarette. It is hot today and I can see she is overdressed and bothered, and would like to be like me, stretched out on my foam-rubber pallet, entirely oiled and lying on my back in the sun. Would her breasts be as beautiful as mine, as firm to the touch, as sweetly positioned on the top of her chest? Mine are smooth with silicone, buoyant and brown. Would her stomach be like mine, sculptured stone? Would her limbs be as fleshless?

They don’t have the technology yet for my neck, for my upper arms, my thighs — though it’s on its way and will be available by the time my admirer requires it. Smoking now, about forty and overdue for some eye-work, she is sitting on a low brick wall on the other side of the narrow road between the beach and the row of kiosks.

And she will require the work eventually, my admirer, who is drawing in toxic smoke over there, watching me. Every woman in the world will want it, eternal youth — and if they can afford it, most will succumb. The money I’ve spent! From my third husband I inherited a fortune — and most of it is gone.

When I sit up the beach spins around me — the brown of the basting bodies, the gaudy towels, the bright primaries and whites of the beach umbrellas — a whirl of colour. So lightheaded am I that I must roll first to my hands and knees before gaining my feet. For seven years I have had trouble with this manoeuvre, and every time I attempt it I remember the face of the liposuction operator who damaged the nerve in my right leg. I remember his Oriental face and I imagine him watching me now, his narrow eyes heavy with remorse. What grace have
I inhibited? he asks himself. How fortunate it is that her beauty overwhelms her halting step!

A man has joined the woman now, a Saxon with close-cropped hair in a golden fuzz. He’s big, like a German, like a Swede, like an Australian. Like her, he’s seen a lot of harsh sun and is prematurely aged. Bulging slightly in her Lycra shirt, her bra straps cutting little valleys into her shoulders, his tired-faced wife smiles at him and offers him a drag on her cigarette and it occurs to me then — it makes my performance all the more bittersweet, the pleasure I take in it more acute — that he reminds me of my father.

Now I am promenading towards them, towards the shower by the path, my thighs slipping noiselessly past each other: they haven’t touched for thirty years. Do they guess that I am fifty-five? I place each foot carefully, one in front of the other in the sand, so as not to jar my tendons, my distended knees. I would like to have some bone shaved from them, and my elbows, to bring the joints more into the line of my limbs.

For my next operation I will travel to Algeria. Surgeons in the south of France are grown reluctant to touch me, because of my little heart problem.

My feet find the concrete disc set into the sand, my hand finds the tap. I know this tap well, its little idiosyncrasies, because I’m here every day in summer — even through these August crowds. A slight jerk, the metal pipe gurgles and one drop extrudes from the showerhead. I extend my tongue and turn, so that the handsome blond brute can admire my derrière.

‘Look!’ It’s one of his children. ‘That lady’s got no bum cheeks!’

The dear, sweet little family. They know not, but they will be my favourite audience of the day, for no other reason than that
they are my father’s countrymen. To hear their English — the thick, slightly stupid-sounding vowels, the muffled, woolly consonants: it is like a nursery rhyme from childhood, a cosy song sung by my late, lamented Papa.

‘She’s incredible!’ comes the mother’s voice as I turn back to them slowly, taking another drop on my tongue on the way through.

‘Don’t stare at her,’ says the father.

‘Why not?’ says the mother. ‘It’s what she wants. Incredible.’

She said it again.
Incroyable
.

I turn once more, another jerk of the tap, another drop to the tongue. I don’t want the water to touch my skin and ruin my carapace of oil. The boy says something — I don’t catch it. It’s earnest, serious, querying, like Jacques Cousteau or whatshisname, David Attenborough. Perhaps he is asking his mother a scientific question about how I came to be like this. The girls listen to her whispered answer too, their mouths full of icecream. Children generally like my hair, which is a pure blonde, tied in a high, smooth bun on top of my head, my blue bandanna a moat to its castle. Wearing it up so soon after a lift shows my stitches, but I decided this morning after close examination in a mirror that the space behind my ears would benefit from some air.

Anyway, the family won’t be able to see the wounds from where they are, on the other side of the road. And the hairpiece does hide away my burnt, broken ends.

A final dart of water to slake my tongue before I begin to make my way between the bodies, back to my sponge pallet on the sand, carefully, carefully …

‘That was lunch,’ I hear the woman say, and she laughs.

My thong, my old brown favourite, flops between my legs
like a bandage. I don’t enjoy the sensation and look forward to lying down. I always liked to walk slowly anyway, to give people time to appreciate me. When my beauty was more widely appreciated, I was sought after all up the Côte d’Azur, from San Remo to Saint Tropez …

Now, if I raise my head from my pillow, I can see the family finishing their ice-creams and the mother wiping the face of the smallest girl. They are obscured for a moment by crowds and then they come past me, towards the point, which they will not enjoy. It is thick with dog shit, which the Antipodeans seem to dislike even more than the Americans do.

The little girl has come to stand beside me. She is perhaps four years old. In the high sun her fair hair flares in a nimbus around the dark shape of her head. I would squint up at her, but my face is both chemically paralysed and surgically tight, so I cannot. My poor eyes take the full brunt of the sun. What is she doing? I don’t trust her.

Head on one side, she puts her still-sticky hand deep into the pocket of her shorts and produces a glob of red sweets, jellies, all glued together. With the utmost concentration, ignoring her sister calling from a distance away, she detaches one moist oval pastille from the bunch and holds it out, briefly, over my stomach. After a moment she reconsiders and bends over me to gently insert the sweet between my lips. I can see her face now, the maternal tenderness in her blue eyes, the way her little mouth is pursed with concentration, the way she devotes herself to the impulse to sustain me. The sweet adheres to my teeth, it clamps my jaws shut. Then a second sweet is held to my mouth between the black-nailed thumb and forefinger, and the tiniest frown — or is it just the desire to frown? — shifts the pale skin of her brow. A moment passes before my little saint understands
that I cannot accept another and so eats it herself, very quickly, chewing and swallowing so close to me that I can hear every pulse of liquid mastication.

‘Anna!’ The sister is calling again.

The child jumps up as quickly as a bird taking flight and I turn my head to watch her go in her little red sandals, her hurrying, plump legs still with a baby’s shape to them.

A drop of water, a tear — I suppose that’s what it is — rolls from the corner of my left eye, over the bridge of my nose and into my right. Through it the little girl blurs and jumps, taking her waiting sister’s hand and hurrying with her down the concrete path towards her mother, between the high fence of the Stade Rondelli and the smooth, sunbaked rocks above the sea.

The window is jammed. It won’t open or shut, and the sun struggles to pierce the greasy glass.

As usual, when I wake she is still asleep. She sleeps through anything.

A fly rubs its paws on the bridge of her nose. One morning I entered her and she woke up only when I started moving. She is a stupid woman, but I like her red hair, white skin and lilting voice. She says she loves me.

There were tears last night. There will be tears again this morning when I wake her to ready her for her journey. I will prepare her in ways she will not know until it is too late.

She rolls over, her hair shifting on the pillow like weeds in the Sargasso Sea. Her violet eyes open and look at me. I bask in the purple light for a moment. I can’t help myself. A small white hand threads itself through my chest hair, she nuzzles her
moon face into my breast, and soon I feel the tears slip over my skin like silk. I turn her over, and we dampen the bed another way. Towards the end she smiles at me, fleetingly.

I smile at you because I love you. I smile at you because I don’t want you to know how heavy my heart is — how I’m dreading this separation even though it’s only for a few days.

But I will be home. Home in Ireland. And you will follow me there. If only it could happen as quickly and as fearlessly — this flight from living death to something I can scarcely remember. As quickly as conception, that confident leap to existence. That happens all too fast. I amaze myself. Even among this heat and misery, with no money of my own, I’ve held on to my resolve not to tell you. Not until we are at home. We will visit my parents in Armagh, and my angry, always angry sister in Belfast. Perhaps she is still in Belfast. Perhaps she is in another country, her red hair stinging the air in hotter streets. She talked once of going to Australia, where her eldritch voice would captivate, and her anger calcify into white turds of boredom. In my experience angry women are the most bored of anyone when they give up. If it were to happen to me, that calm, I would float in it like seaweed in a pool, different cool lengths of me fingering different depths, and too pliant for even the sea to enjoy manipulating me.

Your hand on my stomach is so heavy I can hardly breathe. It’s as if you already know I am inhabited and would press it out, a pulpy mass on the sheets.

Ah, my lovely — you have seen the stupidity of the situation. I saw it flash through those lilac depths, a tiny silver fish. You are onto something.

You are wanting to take coals to Newcastle, as the English say. This is sillier. Place us in the same fireplace and one of us would refuse to burn. We would never burn together.

Your father was a fighter. I could’ve talked with him, hey? After the silence, the sizing up. You know what they will say afterwards — only an Arab could’ve done that. The paradox is that they won’t know what I’ve really done. They will know I have killed you, and others besides, but they won’t know why. Your death to me is a tool, for them an instrument they scarcely know the use of. But I will make myself clear, and will not be regarded as a fanatic. Perhaps we will lower them all to a crouch, inches away from falling to their knees.

You are out of bed, looking for your clothes, complaining once again of how filthy you are. You don’t know what filth is.

I know you are looking at me. I know what you are thinking, but I have turned my back. I have never known a man with such resistance in his eyes. If it wasn’t for the warmth of your hands, the beautiful things you say in a language all lips, the shift in your voice when you speak of the future — I wouldn’t believe you love me.

I close the bathroom door. I don’t know you well enough to piss in front of you.

I must move quickly to check your bag, make sure everything is in place. We will leave for the airport in fifteen minutes.

In the bathroom you — what? Surprised there is still no blood? Do you think I haven’t noticed you haven’t bled, not for eight weeks or more?

My shirt is damp from yesterday’s sweat. My skin is crawling.

No matter where you are in the world you continue to do some things in the way you always have. I brush my hair in long lopes, from my scalp an orange slide to my waist. As a schoolgirl in front of the kitchen mirror I brushed my hair like this to catch the light. Now I do it to remind me of 
who I am. It reminds me of more than a dim reflection.

Once we were on a cliff top. The wind blew my hair into your face. You said my hair was a simoon, hot and laden with dust, a gust of Arabia in the salt air. You caught it and held it against your lips.

The walls of this room are pitted grey, made of something that used to be shiny. I dig the brush into my scalp and leave it there. I will have a pitted head. And my heart is pitted already, the bomb site of the soul.

At home my grandmother will talk to me of souls. She will talk of her immortality, then clasp my hand and tell me she is afraid of dying.

The Irish are so afraid of death, having been at close quarters to it at its most violent for so many centuries. Its familiarity has bred terror. If only it had bred contempt, then perhaps the fighting would have stopped. Contempt is a narrower emotion than fear and eventually gives way to indifference. It could become more of a torture to keep one’s enemy alive.

It’s quiet where you are. Have you gone? Perhaps to buy coffee, perhaps to escape me. I can never predict what you will do next.

I open the door quickly and you turn from the window, my carryall in your hand.

‘I was looking for cigarettes.’

She hands them to me from her pocket.

‘I have given you some money,’ I tell her. ‘Enough to get out, enough to get home at the other end.’

She is staring at me, tapping her hairbrush against her thigh. She wants to ask me where I got it from.

‘It’s here.’ I touch the side pocket of the bag.

She turns away from me, picking up pins and combs from the table and twisting her hair in the English-lady way she has. There are too many ironies about her for me to take her seriously.

‘I’m hungry.’ She looks up at me from under those white eyelids.

‘They will feed you on the plane.’

‘I’m hungry now.’

‘Too bad.’ Now she’ll cry.

But I won’t. I will just pick up my bag and go through the door ahead of you. I won’t even look back to see of you are following me. Just this once I will trust you to be there.

The cab stinks. Someone has vomited here in the early hours of the morning. Someone drunk and despairing. The driver notices her quell a retch, and smirks.

I didn’t mean to give you more life than you already have. Sometimes among all the changes, running from city to city, I have almost felt sorry for you.

This is the last time we will ride together. You and I have done rather well. But you would thank me afterwards, if you could, for this solitary flight. For the release, the ticket to a quiet place.

People will look up between the buildings and see a knife flash in the sky, a red slash in the belly of God. That will be you.

Later on dusty streets I will think of you and wonder if it is you between my toes.

My brain is clogged with hormones that make me bovine. I can’t think clearly. Your face has a strange sheen to it, lilac through the brown, like the dark face of a stained-glass saint with the sun behind you.

Your neck has the feel of steamed fish, a delicate meat. I would like to bite it, but we are surrounded by sweating bodies in cars. If we were alone I would do it, and you would scream. Women like you like pain, each spin of the clock to be a rimless wheel.

I lift the coins from my pocket and pay the driver. They fall into his palm, disappear. I carry your bags, your glittering death.

I am strapped in, numbed from the long wait. I ask a hostess for water. There is dust in my mouth.

I will go home and stand in the rain, be polished by the tears of God. When the sun comes out I’ll watch the limpid hills, and wait for the fiery blast, the simoon.

You will never come.

You would not survive in my country with its mad, old war, and I would never survive in yours.