Tenterhooks Read online

  ‘Up there.’ She jerked her head towards the hills behind him, but no one saw her eyes.

  ‘Oh no,’ his concern bent him towards her, cut his tone to a whisper, ‘none of them have leprosy.’ Suddenly he flew close to a laugh, ‘Do you think I’d live here if there was any danger?’

  Her head, chin, came up; her eyes were narrow.

  Hurriedly, he tried to explain, ‘The institution is for rehabilitation. There are a few people who have had leprosy and are learning to function, so that they can come down here to live normal lives.’

  Normal lives, down here? I looked at Auntie Fay.

  Her silent reply was the opposite of her Nazi: a crumpled, barely contained smile.

  As we walked away from Alistair Emery’s villa – or casa, as he had seemed to prefer – Mum shivered and said, ‘Don’t you just want to go home and wash and wash?’

  We knew that she was referring to Alistair Emery, not to the leprosy behind us in the hills.

  Auntie Fay said, ‘He’s not after you, Mags.’ Her voice was unusually faint, like a wheeze.

  Mum stressed, ‘Nor my son, if I have my way.’

  Layla mused, ‘No one’s after Sebastian, he’s too young.’

  We went home to our finca, and, quite quickly, disease was forgotten: within a few days, Mum had returned to a state not wildly dissimilar to normal.

  But there always seemed to be a death when we were away in Spain: one year, the pope – one of the popes, I do not remember which one; another year, Elvis. Mum’s line on this was a swirl of wonder and dread: Someone always dies when we’re here. And I would have to explain that this was likely because we were away for so much of the year: someone had to die, during those summers. We learned of these deaths by relying upon Auntie Fay’s wobbly translations of the newspapers that were on sale in the town which we visited occasionally.

  ‘Just think,’ Mum breathed, again and again on the way home, when we had read the news of Elvis, ‘if we hadn’t come into town this week, we’d never have known.’ These deaths brought us up sharp in the seemingly endless sequence of identical days. Elvis did not mean much to me: a dimply smile in clips and stills from cheerful old films that I had never seen; or the ballooning white catsuits, spotlit in the purgatory of Las Vegas. Neither Mum nor Auntie Fay had been keen on him, but the news made them remember other singers and actors whom they did mourn. Mum had tears in her eyes over Montgomery Clift. I was an equal in the reminiscence of one of Alias Smith and Jones; the cute, dark one. I joined in the lamentations over the shotgun which he had turned on himself. For a whole evening, our refrain buzzed with the drugged mosquitoes, and sank into our cups of watery, rind-sour sangria: he was lovely; oh, he was lovely, wasn’t he.

  The morning after the sangria, we woke to no water. Our electricity supply was, by now, much more reliable, but we had problems with water. By the kitchen sink Mum sang out her bitter, disappointed, ‘Here we go again.’ The taps strained noisily. Instantly, I was thirsty, dirty, and much hotter than usual. I went onto the balcony to begin the routine: look for signs of tampering workmen on our land, and then for cars in the village below collecting from the common water supply, from the mountain spring. Up on our own hill we were usually the last to know about a problem, because somehow, contrary to all known natural laws, our pipes retained a supply for longer than anyone else’s. We had to know if our problem was part of a bigger problem, or merely our own. I never knew which was worse: a bigger problem was ominous, but there was strength in numbers; but our own problem was a bigger problem, in a sense, because no one bothered about repairs for the British women on the hill, and we had no car to fetch supplies. As I was looking for clues, Auntie Fay came from the bathroom with two footless socks of white cream. ‘I need water,’ she said, calmly, perhaps fazed, ‘because I’m de-fuzzing and I have five minutes before this stuff starts on my skin.’

  ‘Look,’ I pointed into the olive grove, to the man who was possibly the cause of the crisis and therefore our saviour. I could not see what he was doing, if he was doing anything, but he had a little van, he wore overalls of Mao-blue, and there were tools on the ground around him.

  Standing next to me, Auntie Fay pushed me and said, ‘Go, quickly, and ask him.’

  He sensed our eyes, and looked around, across the crumbly terrace of tough thin trees, up to our balcony. He was young, he was a boy, his face and eyes smoother than any or indeed anything that I had ever seen in Spain. He was so very dark against the scabby glitter of the tree trunks.

  I said, ‘I can’t.’ Because I was wearing a bikini, and I was fifteen: I knew that I was a lump of pale puffy flesh stippled with stubble and mosquito bites.

  She said, ‘Just say agua and quando?’

  ‘No –’ I know that ‘– I have to go and put on my dressing gown.’

  She protested, ‘You look fine, you look lovely.’

  And, anyway, ‘I won’t understand what he says back to me.’

  So she turned and went down the steps, calling, anxiously, ‘Señor … Señor.’

  As she stumbled towards him through the big dried clots of clay, he smiled harder and harder. But not at her foamy legs: he did not take his gaze from her wide, luminous eyes.

  I was too far away to hear the conversation. On the balcony I could hear only the rattle of the thin dry leaves, like lizard’s tongues.

  Mum came on to the balcony, flat-footed with suspicion. ‘What’s going on?’

  I turned to her but said nothing, suddenly I was sick of her questions. She could look for herself.

  We turned together towards Auntie Fay, far away on the choppy soil, and she smiled and waved. Beyond her, behind her, the boy’s head was nodding, bobbing, his black hair blindingly shiny. They seemed to exchange a few more words, and there was the splash of a laugh, netted by the squat trees. Then we watched Auntie Fay’s brilliant legs as she waded back to us. For a moment, she disappeared beneath us, but unwound breathless from the spiral staircase on to the balcony to tell us, ‘We’ll have water now for five minutes, for me; and then he’ll switch us back on, properly, in a few hours’ time.’

  Stepping aside for her, Mum wailed, ‘What if he forgets?’

  Auntie Fay strode past us, her legs burning but her eyes as calm and clean and unlikely in the sunshine as chlorine-sizzling pools. ‘He won’t forget.’

  A few minutes later, when we were waterless once more, Auntie Fay came back to the balcony from the bathroom, and lay down near Mum and me. Lying on my towel, I could see the boy through the stony lace of the balcony wall and its openings for rainwater. Auntie Fay warned, ‘Renee, you have shadows on you.’

  ‘Good, because I’m hot.’

  Mum said, ‘Go indoors, then.’

  But I did not move. The boy was busy, but I did not know what he was doing: the constant soundless clatter of his movements slid through the long moments like a breeze on water.

  Mum murmured into the sky, to Auntie Fay, ‘Your nice water-boy reminds me of Tommy Hale.’

  But this boy was nothing like Tommy Hale. Tommy Hale was an apprentice joiner who sometimes worked with Dad: chippy, to Dad’s sparky. He was always in our house, and not always when Dad was home. He was dark, yes, but in a pale way. His hands were pale, Mother’s Pride pale. Rough with cuticles and splinters. There was no mystery to Tommy Hale. His eyes hopped behind Mum like hungry birds. And their whites were white, not washed turquoise like the eyes of the water-boy as they opened up, now, for me. The water-boy had moved to work below the balcony. I sat up, quickly, dropped the eyes. The sun was high, now, the sunlight running all over the sky. I burned with irritation: how could we sunbathe, with this boy so close?

  Auntie Fay said, ‘Get down, Renee, you’re blocking my sun.’

  I shifted across my towel and began to work suncream into my shoulders.

  Auntie Fay mused, ‘He reminds me of my lovely little brother.’

  I hurried, ‘Does he speak English?’

  Her reply began with a
laugh, which came as a cough because she was lying down and her lungs were lagged with smoke. ‘Balham dialect.’

  ‘Not your brother,’ I explained, whispered. ‘The boy. Because he’s working beneath us.’

  ‘Oh,’ this was a sigh, followed by words which I missed, but which were happily dismissive, sounding something like, ‘Let him be,’ or ‘Leave him there.’

  I remembered that her brother’s wife did not speak English. She was South American. For years we had been fascinated: ‘How can they be married if they don’t speak the same language?’ But Auntie Fay did not seem to think that this was a problem; she said that her little brother was the most happily married of any of her family. We loved her stories of her brothers and sisters, all seven of them. They were part of her growing up which was not merely BC: they were real, live, they were in daily contact from their different corners of London. Sometimes when they were children, when their father had gone and their mother temporarily failed to cope, they were taken briefly into care, as if they were going on a holiday. Anything but a holiday, though, and they went in twos and threes, diminished versions of the whole family. Yet Auntie Fay managed to tell us a lot of funny stories from their times in care, stories of escape.

  Usually, Auntie Fay was with us for a fortnight in the middle of our holiday, arriving and leaving by taxi. But this time she had come to us for our last three weeks, and was making her return journey with us. At the airport, she went with Mum to the toilets, and they were gone for a quarter of an hour. I had been left in charge of the luggage and the children. Layla had wandered off, Alicia and Yolanda had argued bitterly over and eaten all the caramelos which we were supposed to suck on the plane to help stop the pain in our ears, and Seb would not refrain from colouring the luggage labels with his crayons.

  Eventually Mum came across the freshly swabbed tiles, and I complained, ‘Where were you?’

  Calmer than perhaps I had ever seen her, she explained to me, ‘Faze has been crying in the toilets; she doesn’t want to go home, to go back to being alone.’

  There had been no secret: we knew that Auntie Fay and her husband were going to divorce, that he was going to marry someone else. I did not remember exactly when we had been told, between the jokes: we simply knew, it was a fact of life. For weeks we had heard Auntie Fay’s mentions of this new life AD, After Divorce. And she had not seemed upset. Nor had the prospect seemed odd, to us: her husband had never been in evidence, and her life seemed full of her brothers and sisters and their various crises.

  When Auntie Fay joined us, less than a minute later, her eyes looked smooth, not scoured by tears. Nothing was said, and we went slowly to the Departure Lounge, where she was waved ahead of us through Passport Control, ushered from our jumble of photos, names and faces, to bypass the strained Spanish head count. Framed in the plate glass view of the runway, she turned back, the frilled hem of her tiny dress fluttering against the lumbering, grounded planes; and, for me, as a Spanish soldier snatched my passport and scanned my face, she did the Nazi face, mouthed the word, Himmel.

  AD, she fell in love with a Spaniard, the teacher of her evening class in Lewisham. So she stayed in Spanish Two for another year, even though her language was perfect.

  She came to spend a week with us in Spain; only a week because she had a new job and did not want to take as much holiday as in previous years. In this new life of hers, time off was in short supply. She spent the week talking from her towel about the teacher, Fabian, his name pronounced in her perfected accent. According to her, the only problem with Fabian was that he would not marry her. Or not yet. So she would have to try harder, to work much harder on him. She tanned harder, during that one week, than in previous years; she tanned frantically to the hue of a blood blister.

  I stopped going on holiday with the family, I was seventeen and did not want to spend my summers with my mother and the kids; and, anyway, Auntie Fay stopped, too, because she had her new life, a different life. She continued to see Fabian for years, Mum told me, but he never married her and eventually he went back to Spain without her.

  I did not see her again for more than a decade, until she came to Yolanda’s wedding. Yolanda, youngest of us girls, is the first of us to have married. She belongs to a different generation: my and Layla’s generation, of baby boom babies, is the one that does not marry, or not when young, not until there is nothing more to do and we already have careers, homes, families. Alicia cannot marry her man because he is married.

  At Yolanda’s reception, I spotted Auntie Fay across the room. As far as I could see, the only change was that her blonde hair had been bleached blonder. She was standing with five or six people, she seemed to be telling them a joke or a story because their faces were broken up into laughs.

  Her own laugh was rattling around inside her, she sounded rather sore. I waved to catch her attention. Her gaze switched onto me, and the eyes narrowed. And I laughed, thinking that she was beginning the Nazi face for me. Then I saw my mistake: she was older, her eyes were older, pale, her gaze was slack and she was simply trying hard to focus.

  6

  GUTS FOR GARTERS

  I have met my cousin only once, twenty years ago. I was eleven and he was five. Not that anyone had ever referred to him as my cousin. He was Connie’s kid. But I knew that Connie was my mother’s sister, which made her kid my cousin. My mother never used auntie for Connie: even when I was small, I understood that she was deemed unworthy of the term. And there was even less mention of an uncle: whenever my sister or I decided to use auntie for Connie or cousin for the kid, my mother permitted this to pass; but on the few occasions – before we knew any better – when either of us tried to refer to an uncle, she hooted, ‘Uncle! What uncle?’ This was before we knew the story, and we were puzzled: we knew about babies, so we knew that Connie’s kid had had to come from somewhere – from someone – in addition to Connie.

  Throughout my childhood I referred occasionally to Connie’s kid as my cousin, but this did not seem to help, he seemed no more like a cousin to me. He was nothing like my friends’ cousins, most of whom lived nearby and were no different from us. Those who lived elsewhere came to stay for summers and Christmases, bringing brand-new bikes and words, teaching us how to smoke and kiss. My cousin did not even live with my auntie and uncle; I had no auntie-and-uncle. I never knew how to answer that seemingly easy-to-answer question, Do you have any cousins? For many years I chose to say no, and sometimes to go further and claim that both my parents had been only children. Which was true, in a sense, because what kind of sister to my mother was Connie? Eight years younger and disappeared when she was eighteen. The baby turned up a year later, but from then onwards no one knew whether Connie was alive or dead. If I told people the truth, that I had a cousin who was fostered, they seemed to think that there was a child who was fostered by an aunt and uncle of mine; not that there was a fatherless child of my aunt’s who was fostered.

  But he was fostered, from when he was a week old. And five years later, we went to see him. We were on holiday, in the countryside, in a caravan, and Dad decided that we should stay for a second week when he drove back home to return to work. I overheard the discussion from my fold-down bed: Dad told Mum that, ‘There’s no need for you and the girls to hurry home.’ He told her that, ‘This little break has done you the world of good.’ All that she replied was a horrified, ‘On my own?’ But in the morning, when she told us that we were staying, she made this sound like her own idea.

  A fortnight is a long time in a field, even in wonderful weather. As the days slowed and the grass shrank around the shiny wheels of the caravans, our meals were reduced to the packet soups which were all that remained of a supply that had included mixes for trifles and lemon drizzle cake. Eventually Blossom proposed that Mum should skip the seemingly laborious rehydration of these soups, their simmering and her watchful stirring. She suggested that we could enjoy the sparkly powders like sherbet dips, with drinks of water as cold as we could manage. Mum
took this as a criticism, and yelled that she was not going to stand around in the village waiting for nonexistent buses and then drag hundreds of bags of sugary rubbish back from town for us. So she continued to frown over the temperamental Calor Gas cooker and we continued to live on her gritty soups and as many Mr Whippys as she would allow from the van which tinkled daily onto the gravel drive and parked humming in the shade of the sole tree.

  Every evening, Mum would stumble away over the unfamiliar terrain of the field to phone Dad. Ten minutes later, she would return in a much better mood, singing odd lines from her favourite records, having been whisked back to her own world in that tardis of a phone box. But then, early one morning, from one of the ripped canvas chairs, I craned to watch her retrace her steps in daylight with more confidence. From the phone box, she made two calls: during the first call she was folded over the mouthpiece, her head on one side, her Biro tapping the coin box before she wrote very briefly; during the second, she was standing to attention even as she worried an insect bite on the top of one foot with the toes of the other, and she nodded emphatically and wrote for longer. When she returned, she enthused, ‘We’re going on a trip today!’

  Blossom, who had drifted from her bed onto the warm metal steps in a cloud of sleep, was thrilled: ‘To the pictures!’

  Mum turned on her, ‘We’re not here in all this lovely fresh air so that we can spend all our time in some fleapit!’

  ‘Fleapit?’

  She announced, ‘We’re going on a train to see Connie’s kid.’

  Two trains, in fact: our windows scanned lots of villages and small towns, and I had an hour or so to invent futures for myself in every white house that dripped a froth of purple flowers. I did try to think about Connie’s kid, but I knew nothing more than his name, Nathaniel, and the names of his foster mother and father, Miriam and George. Throughout the journey, Blossom was busy as usual with questions.

  ‘Your sister …’ quickly, shrewdly, she revised this, ‘Connie: was she pretty?’