Sex and Death (20 page)

‘What did Uncle Frank do to make you stop talking to him?' I asked, trying to play down the importance of the matter. Her answer was brief.

‘He acted like an asshole.'

She was in a good mood that day and it reassured me that she had taken my question lightly. Almost immediately afterwards she left the kitchen to go and welcome her guests.

When I got to the hospital on Monday morning, I found Frank with a ventilator in his mouth. I tried to hide how upset I was. I made a joke about the device and he smiled beneath the mask.

That was the day we began the custom of watching films together on his computer. First we put on
Blow-Up
, and then
The Best Intentions.
I sat in the visitors' chair and, from there, we held hands again, touching each other in a totally relaxed way. They were casual caresses, almost distracted, on the nape of the neck or along the arms, but to me they were delicious. We would spend
hours like that, touching the other's skin in silence, while on the screen a story unfolded to which we hardly paid any attention.

Every afternoon, on the return bus journey, I gave Verónica a run-down of these visits. I told her of the affection I felt for my uncle and gave her a detailed progress report of how close we were growing: ‘Today he brushed his fingers against my lips'; ‘today he just touched my ear.' One afternoon, however, my friend let me know she was not on my side at all.

‘You don't seem to have a clue what you're doing,' she said, her voice sharp. ‘You're running a real risk. You'd be better off not coming to the hospital at all.'

It was shortly after this, perhaps a day or so later, when Verónica unexpectedly opened the door to our room to announce that her mother had lapsed into a coma. She was sobbing more than howling and, although it was completely justified given the circumstances, I couldn't bear for Frank to see her like that. And so I suggested we leave the room and go down to the cafeteria.

Once there, she ordered a coffee and let the cup grow cold in her hands. I, meanwhile, gulped mine quickly down, eager to return as soon as possible to the intensive therapy ward, but not quite daring to leave my friend on her own. Neither of us said anything. She stared at her coffee, I at the visitors coming and going through the main doors of the hospital. In the midst of this multitude I suddenly made out my grandmother, accompanied by my mother and my uncle Amadeo.

‘They're going to Frank's room!' I said to Verónica, desperately. ‘How did they find out he was here?'

‘I told them,' she confessed, without looking up. ‘Forgive me, but I thought you were in danger.'

I almost smacked her.

‘Go home and pretend you don't know anything. Do it now while they're going up the stairs.'

Instead of taking her advice, I ran over to catch up with them.
As soon as the lift doors opened, I heard my mother's angry voice in the distance, but her words were completely indistinguishable. Once I was in the corridor where Frank's room was, I pressed my face up against the door to listen, and what I managed to hear was the following: ‘. . . twenty years and when you find her you try and do the same thing to her.' At that moment, a nurse came past with a trolley full of medicine and gave me a knowing smile. My uncle's reply was drowned out by the clinking of her medicine bottles. I wondered what family secrets came to light in that ward every week or, alternatively, would remain hidden forever. I couldn't wait any longer and opened the door with no thought to the consequences. As soon as I was inside a pristine silence fell, only faintly interrupted by the heart monitor, which made clear Frank's agitation through its fluctuating display. The air in the room was unbreathable. There was pain in my mother's eyes and humiliation in my uncle's face. I felt bad for them both.

Without adding a single word, my mother took me by the arm like when I was a little girl. I felt the pressure from her tense fingers on my skin, the same fingers that had fed me, dressed and undressed me my whole childhood. No ideology, not even the tenderness my uncle brought out in me, could resist her touch. Out of all the imprints of my childhood, hers was without doubt the strongest. I let her lead me downstairs and then out to the car park where she had left her car. My grandmother and Uncle Amadeo remained in the room. I wondered what it would be like for Frank to have his mother's hands close by.

I spent that night wide awake, watching as the rain grew heavier, then lighter. I must have got up at least ten times to see if my grandmother had come home. On one of these occasions, it occurred to me to go into the study and look for the photographs I had seen a few weeks earlier. This time I didn't stop to look at the childhood pictures. I took the images that had been sliced into and spread them out on the carpet like someone about to piece
a jigsaw puzzle together. My task was to imagine or guess at the missing pieces. Unlike my grandmother's, my parents' bedroom was at the other end of the house. The risk of them catching me in the act was minimal. What I hadn't thought of was that, like me, my mother couldn't sleep that night, either. When there wasn't room for one more photo on the floor, I looked up and saw her watching me in silence from the doorway. Her long nightdress that fell to her ankles made her look like a ghost. I had to make an effort not to cry out. Her bloodshot eyes revealed she'd been crying recently. I kept quiet for a few minutes to see if she felt like giving me some sort of explanation, but my strategy didn't work and I chose not to push it. Outside, the rain had stopped. My mother sat down next to me on the floor and helped me to gather up the photos. When we'd finished, we put the box back in its place and settled down on the sofa to wait in silence for the sun to rise. I looked sideways at my mother, wrapped up in her own thoughts. She must also have had lots of questions with no answer, which, out of respect for me, she chose not to formulate.

The next morning I went to the clinic without spending even an hour in the lecture theatres at the university. My grandmother let me in, her face distorted with tiredness. I asked her to leave us alone for a minute and, to my surprise, she accepted wordlessly. Frank was semi-conscious. With a hesitant gesture, I put my hand under the covers and took his, searching for some kind of answer. All that I found in his skin that morning, however, was a cold, motionless piece of flesh, an entirely unrecognisable feeling.

Porto Baso Scale Modellers – all three of us – were out the retail park and vectored for home, motoring up the slow lane of the
autopista
to the very familiar sound of King Crimson's
Larks' Tongues in Aspic
– stuck in the CD player of Norman's old Peugeot since summer 2010.

Clear of Benidorm, Norm was insisting, ‘Bob Fripp. Real honest-to-goodness, dynamic front man; his uncle Alfie was last of the 39ers you know.' Norm's fingers scampered for the solitary CD case then quit. ‘You never tire of the classic Crimo.' He turned his smile aside for the briefest instant from the carriageway.

I looked out to my right. ‘You've mentioned this.'

Henri is from Luxembourg and didn't leave it long enough before asking from the back seat, ‘May we please change over to radio please?'

I can report our en-route weather conditions for that one-hour journey home were highly favourable; clear alarms of full summer in the wild rose of the motorway central reservation. For a week roaming, balmy winds had been rampaging across the north country then down through our region; high cirrus bandings were fixed in the blue sky like the white streaks on fatty bacon. But the tags of chop on the sea were gone, so the day had turned still and warm – the car air con fixed at 1. Right out over the Med, a solo contrail dragged across the clearing roof of the afternoon.

‘What equipment's that?' Then Norm immediately answered himself, ‘Airbus 320.' His chin had sunk, his eyes looked up
under his ginger lashes. He never wore shades.

‘Not a 737? The squat fuselage.'

‘That is an Airbus, my friend.'

‘Henri?'

We heard Henri unclip his safety belt and shift across the back seat in order to peer upward. ‘Where?'

‘Starboard, two o'clock.'

‘That's a three-seven.'

Norm used his irritated voice. ‘That's an Airbus.'

‘It is the Boeing. Put on some Rayban.'

There was a tense pause. ‘Well then, Henry.' (Norm always anglicises the name.) ‘800 or a 900?'

‘Cannot tell unless you bring up flightradar24 on your phone. Probability would say an 800. Commercial traffic is boring today.' He shifted across and put the seatbelt back on. Then as a bitter nostalgic coda, ‘Not like the seventies.'

Norm grunted. Reluctant agreement.

I asked the old plane-spotter's classic, thinking Henri might never have heard it up in the Benelux realm. ‘What kind of hot snacks is the trolley serving then?'

Henri took in a breath and I thought he was going to offer some accurate suggestions, but he held an obscure peace.

Passing down to our right, with its white cells of new moorings and erect phalanxes of yacht masts, was the huge new supermarina, recently dug out the edge of this country. Aligned with us, the sun caught each hammered wavelet and fired it back like ten thousand polished dustbin lids.

The speed limit was 120 but Norm held a steady eighty, until every possible variation of vehicle seemed to have overtaken us. He buzzed the Peugeot off at toll 63, each of us thrusting respective widower, bachelor or divorcee pot bellies upward, groping down into our pockets for loose change.

We crossed through the terraced orange groves behind Calaborir, the cypresses black in the late afternoon high above the wide bay, then descended through Villafeliz into Porto Baso. As is usual on the return from our adventurous little jaunts to the Benidorm retail park, I had phoned ahead on my ancient Nokia and we parked in beside The Brave Gurkha.

*

I myself keep the www.portobasoscalemodellers.net website up and running: spry and of-the-moment.

Not to boast, but we have all the latest links to the official Airfix, Revell and even Humbrol model paint websites; all slapped up there smartish by yours truly, especially when prodigious developments transpire: such as when Airfix took the Armstrong Whitworth Sea Hawk FGA6 out of 1:72 and did a limited edition in 1:24! And not just in 1959–60 Fleet Air Arm colours of 806 Naval Air Squadron out of RNAS Brawdy either. You could have painted that big sucker in RNHF colours out of RNAS Yeovilton, if that really tickled your fancy.

Now we at PBSM are always striving to boost membership and to bring in a somewhat younger constituency – younger than ourselves that is – to draw the youth off the Facebook, get a set of assembly instructions into their left hand and a modelling airbrush in the right. The male youth that is.

As well as patience, dexterity and a need for sobriety, scale modelling gives you a sense of history that didn't do us any harm when we were younger blokes. Did it now? But this is why I don't want photos of Norm, Henri or me up there on our website, brandishing our latest completed aircraft – one look at us, smiling by the barbecue with our bellies, our baldness and our bad shirts, and any potential young lads would scarper.

I'm not being stuffy and all
Daily Mail
, but I don't expect any
Spaniards to join up with three old expats like us – there's this bloody language barrier thing, though Henri has the lingo off – more or less; your standard life-is-for-living Spaniard has no intrinsic hatred of the well-made aero scale modelling kit. Admittedly, the Spanish air force never fielded a very interesting native fleet, unless you give a little credit for the civil war's old Polikarpov I-16, with, hopefully, a natty Popeye insignia painted on its upper rudder. But certainly any younger blood of any nationality would be very much appreciated by us in Porto Baso Scale Modellers – some spry fellow who could throw himself with real enthusiasm into Gulf War One/Two aircraft – or even these bloody drones – who would want to build a 1:24 drone? Search me. Yet several kit companies do offer them. It takes all kinds in the universe of scale modelling.

There have been several email responses to our website ‘Contact'. Well, two. Both of which I responded to promptly. One was from a young lad called Joe (‘sent from iPhone') who was clearly English but he vanished when I invited him to pop round Henri's for our next meeting. Then the other email was from a camera shop in Valencia, offering to rent us reflectors and synchronised standing lights – labouring under the unfortunate misunderstanding that the modelling we were involved with was of the glamour variety: poolside nude photo shoots.

*

There is full disclosure among we Porto Baso Scale Modellers that Henri's place is best for our Saturday meetings and occasional group construction sessions. The old Luxembourg civil service pension speaks for itself. Henri has a three-bedroom villa up in the pine range with its own pool and barbecue terrace. In each room the dusted cabinets, even tallboys (he has a cleaning lady in three days a week), are filled and topped with expertly completed and painted plastic model kits in all scales.

Henri's tastes run exactly similar to Norm and me – namely classic aviation – 1960s and 70s civilian airliners, seaplanes, WWII props and Cold War jets; but we start to wind down with the onset of the boring F-15 era, though we'll never sniff at a Tornado or a Starfighter. It's not just planes for Henri though. You will see a gallant representation of German WWII battleships, torpedo boats, landing craft, Allied and Axis tanks, Apollo 13, armoured cars, light and heavy artillery pieces with operating gun crews and even two D-Day dioramas with lettering, entitled ‘Ruined French House' and ‘Gun Emplacement'.

A tall glass case (locked) is in his front room, sheltered from the scourge of the summer sun which can fade a colour scheme in just two months. Here Henri has the models he is proudest of. Some are especially rare: the Kabozi Co.'s much sought-after mid-1980s kit of the Messerschmitt Me 262 – in perfectly rendered mottled camouflage. There was also the Bohums DC-8 Super 61, boldly reproduced in the mad Braniff colour scheme. Here also is his De Havilland Mosquito in 1:24, completed when Henri was just fourteen years of age in Clervaux. It is hard to discern any drop in his high level of modelling skill, even at that early age when the eyes were so sharp and daring was so great – though I would just point out that the embossing of the silver cockpit frames shows a slight and displeasing thickness which wouldn't escape Henri's exacting standards of today.

That afternoon we gathered around Henri's spacious kitchen table. Even here Henri had placed some finely completed models on top of the cupboards. With Norm's cautious driving, our takeaways from The Brave Gurkha really required a bit of a reheat in the microwave. Norm lectured us at length on the thermal mass properties of microwaves and how you must heat the curry sauce and the rice separately. It was all a bit of a production line, getting the rice, main curry sauces and side dishes piping hot, and
then, amidst this hubbub of rather anxious, peckish old chaps who love their snap, came the clanging of that hand-rung Don Quixote doorbell. Norm's aloo gobi was going round and round on the revolving plate; Henri was stooped down to closely monitor it through the microwave view window and spoke slowly, ‘John, would you go to the door, please tell Mrs Kroll her cat is not in my rear garden, please.'

Norm, in the tone of reading back a checklist, announced, ‘All curries are now at optimum temp.'

I stepped along the corridor where the grandfather clock of Henri's mother clucked with the faint aroma of its insecticide-crammed interior. I opened the front door.

‘Hey!'

Fiercely, I blinked once – said, ‘Look. We're not interested. You've got the whole wrong idea.'

They had actually sent in a bloody potential participant to Henri's. Since the bankers' recession, things must have been pretty grim in the camera trade. She couldn't have been north of thirty. I mean better, twenty-seven, twenty-six? And English to boot; break your heart just passing her on the street: sun-mashed hair and big cowboy boots at the end of skinny bare brown legs, denim shorts and wrist bangles, every finger decked with golden rings – apart from the matrimonial one – those coloured false fingernails like a Disney cartoon. I immediately glanced left into the villa garden of Mrs Kroll. With this one calling round, it looked like we'd not only ordered in food but also a Ukrainian private dancer from the White Love Club.

‘We're a model
aeroplane
group, love. Toy models.' I turned round and I swept my hand beyond the grandfather clock, along the corridor to the arched doorway where you could see into the front room above the pool. Models which Henri had constructed with their undercarriages fixed in the down position were lined up all along the sideboard, their engine nacelles angled proudly high.
A Pacific Operations catwalk: Grumman Hellcat, Jap Zero, Beaufighter. ‘We don't need flashgun reflectors or cameras, whatever. We're just three old blokes making toy
model
aeroplanes. Bloody daft little hobby, you know? Just whiling our time away.'

‘Cameras?' One tiny wonky tooth among a rack of dazzlers – a smile that would have crushed the entire sports team bus. She continued, ‘What you on about? I know. I'm Josephine. Emailed a month or so back and you give
me
this address. Didn't you? You said Saturdays. I'm up the hill, sat by the pool, stuck your address in the satnav, just popping my head in, aren't I?' She swung her hair around; beyond the crenellations of Henri's ornamental wall and the tangles of mature bougainvillea upon it, she indicated a silver SUV shape parked out on the road. She laughed very quick, two long earrings – a sequence of gold droplets – leaping excitedly beneath each lobe.

‘Joe! Sorry. I thought you were someone else entirely. Embarrassing. I'm John Bishop.' I held out my hand and she took it, her fingers felt like pretzels and the bangles clattered. ‘The blokes are here right now actually. If you feel okay. About coming in to meet them?'

‘Just a jiff; grab something out the car.' She lifted her gold sunglasses from where they hung on the neckline of her blouse and popped them directly onto her tanned face. She stepped out the shade and down the semicircle of stairs, all in just two long strides, wrists jingling, cowboy boots clicking, she was across that patio and out the gate in seconds, the car-key fob held straight out before her like a pistol; a little purse of skin at the elbow of her golden arm. I stood in the porch staring after.

Norm glanced up from the table in a profound bafflement as I returned to the kitchen, accompanied by a stunning young woman, holding in her arms an object wrapped in a lightweight fleece blanket. Later, with great concentration – as if struggling to describe the manifestation of a holy apparition on some mountain-side
– Norm repeatedly told me that he first thought this woman had run over a dog out on the road and had carried the poor creature in to place before us, seeking assistance.

In her mildly croaky voice, she called, ‘Hello all. Lovely day; is this all of us? You rascals having a sneaky curry while the sun's out, are you?' She held her head back with the burden in her arms and inhaled sharply through her prim nostrils. ‘Mmmmm. Where can I plonk this one then?'

We all froze, guilty at the abundance of food, paralysed by her unlikely youth and sudden beauty right there in Henri's kitchen. Henri just opened his mouth slightly. The curry dishes were slid aside so she could place the burden down. I did quick, polite introductions of names but she hardly looked at any of us and they just stared back at her. She unfolded the blanket and glared at what was there. ‘What do you reckon then?'

In the middle of the table, surrounded by tikka laziz, Goan king prawn curry and Brave Gurkha special chicken, was a beautiful 1:24 scale McDonnell Douglas DC-8 Super 61 – just like the one in Henri's display cabinet – the impossible-to-obtain Bohums limited edition, but instead of Braniff colours, this one was in the perfectly rendered, long orange-red-blue cheatlines of United Airlines' mid-seventies fleet.

Norm nodded. ‘Gosh. Exceptionally done I must say.'