Becoming Strangers Read online

  'Not at all! Annemieke is married to a hero. Her husband went out for an entire night to find an old lady, who went missing from the resort.'

  With polite interest, secondary to his rapport with luncheon, the owner raised his bushy eyebrows to look in turn at Missy and Annemieke, sucking his fingertips.

  'Of course, it turns out the lady has Alzheimer's/ said Jason with head-shaking disbelief. 'Her husband ought to have thought things through before they came away.'

  'Can you imagine,' said Missy, her right hand raised, 'the old woman walking, all alone, in the heat, a stranger, going nowhere.

  'It's sad,' she said, looking at her husband with sudden intensity, 'isn't it?'

  He squinted at her but apparently saw nothing in it, for he looked distant and shook his head lightly.

  'We saw an old man walking along just off the freeway outside of Charlotte once,' Beverly began, 'with a suitcase. We slowed down, Joe and I; I mean nobody walks on the freeway, do they? It was so weird. And with a suitcase. When we asked him what he was doing—'

  Her husband cut in, 'He said, "Going home" so we asked him where it was and he wouldn't say a thing, just kept walking.'

  'Well,' Beverley went on, opening her mouth and letting it sag, 'we just couldn't drive off, I said to Joe, what if he's just got out of a prison. If we'd seen something on TV or in the papers, afterwards, and seen his face we'd never have forgiven ourselves. You think of JonBenet Ramsay, that sort of thing, child abuse, pornography, the Internet...'

  'No,' said Joe, 'we had to do something. So we called the police and we just kind of trailed him in the Jeep for a ways, until they showed. He kicked up a bit of a fuss, the old-timer, tried to fight them off.'

  'You should have seen him, he was all rough shaven and his clothes were awful. Poor man, I mean he was probably just really old. Don't I always say, shoot me if I get like that...'

  And I always say, I'm not going to jail for you, darling,' he put his hand on hers.

  The other laughed, circulating the coleslaw and potatoes that the Captain had prepared.

  'The mentally ill are a real danger...' started the owner. 'To themselves as much as anyone. I'm on the board, don't ask me how, of this institution in Maine, and you wouldn't believe what the folks there have to put up with. The truth is there just aren't enough places to lock these people up. The prisons take some, but the prisons are fit to bursting with drug users. How do we find enough places to stow all the people we cannot include in our society? This is the conundrum. Our European friends haven't solved it, so it's down to us. It's a big question and something that costs us a great deal of money.' He swung his head from side to side, a dead weight.

  That old fellow, going nowhere, I can't get it out of my head,' said Missy. 'Looking for his home ... it's symbolic,' she said, struggling now. Jason beckoned to the Captain and he refilled all of their glasses, starting with Missy's since Jason indicated he should.

  'Maybe he wanted to die there,' said Beverly.

  'Maybe,' said Annemieke, taking her chance to speak, 'an animal instinct. Some run away from it, of course. Like Jan.' She looked away, out to sea. There was a small silence.

  'Annemieke's husband is, very, very ill,' said Missy.

  'I'm sorry,' said the owner, grasping a piece of French bread and tearing it between his teeth. Annemieke looked at him. His skin was tanned, his hair short and well managed, his frame, naked from the waist up, was like a handsome property, but his eyes were dull.

  She got up to tidy the plates away and was held away by the Captain, who came leaping up from the rear of the boat.

  'My job,' he said and so she sat back down, alone with her thoughts; as the others drifted away to their various discussions, Annemieke drifted to memories of her boys as children.

  She could recall reading stories to them, a boy either side, soft nubuck-like skin on hers, their lips against her cheek, either side, as she read, the mother's voice ripening in her chest. She thought how every year brought three or four favourite stories that she would be required to read constantly, she could remember them in succession: the Gingerbread Man, the Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin. She recalled the Kings final demand, 'You spin this straw into gold by the morning and tomorrow you shall be my bride.' 'He was a greedy man,' Marcus would say each time and she would nod. She had joined them there in those certainties, then.

  'Would you like to go for a swim?' said the Captain, putting his head up from below, standing on the stairs. 'We're going to be in a good clear place for swimming, just off a bay. In five minutes.' It was about three in the afternoon.

  'When will we get back?'

  About five.'

  Going on to the roof of the yacht, she saw the Americans stretched out, sunbathing. The owner was sitting next to Missy rubbing oil on to her back.

  37

  WHENEVER JAN THOUGHT OF THE CARIBBEAN, he thought of the rich and sticky aquamarine of sea and sky. In Belize he'd lain watching formations of clouds that seemed impossible, maps of countries, giant marlin fish suspended, rapiers on their snouts, clues and signs amidst the ruffles of God's bed skirt. He did not seek answers in the Belgian sky which was a mute grey from day to day. But in the Caribbean where the sea and sky divide the world between them, the land is just a gesture on the part of the sea. The lesson for the day is written up above, for you to follow.

  Jan lay on the sand, still naked, with his shorts draped over his privates, one eye open squinting at the sky.

  When he sat up he saw Laurie emerge from the water, a steady-footed, dripping diva, making straight for him. His stomach turned with apprehension. She sat down beside him, squeezing the water from her hair behind her head, and he saw out of the corner of his eyes her breasts, soft and damp. He was afraid for himself and he cleared his throat several times.

  'This is paradise! Here and now!' shouted Bill from the water, leaping like Neptune.

  'He is very true,' said Laurie, and Jan frowned momentarily at the peculiarity of her Hong Kong English expression. 'I think there is no heaven, I think it is our job to make one on earth, while we are alive.'

  He smiled and kept his face straight ahead, concentrating on Bill as if he were his own child, at risk in the sea. He remembered his daydream about her.

  'You are beautiful, Laurie.'

  She smiled, cocking her head at first, with her eyes and mouth questioning—then they were steadied by the blossoming of comprehension. Her upper body rose and fell a few times and she did not blink. Before she could say anything he said suddenly, 'Can you help me?' He paused, 'I don't know what I mean by that.'

  In front of him, on her knees, she put her fingers about his wrist and turned it over so that the soft skin over his veins was facing upwards. She looked at it, then she brought it to her lips and kissed it.

  Thank you,' he said, feeling the mixture of the sun and the beer collide in his chest.

  38

  'WELL, YOU HAVE CERTAINLY GIVEN US some entertainment, Bill. We needed it,' said Jan amiably when a dripping Bill joined them to towel off and put his shorts back on.

  'You're right. A tense crowd yesterday. That's why I wanted to get out. They'll be an irritable lot tonight, burnt no doubt too.' He looked up at the sun, and sighed with pleasure as he drained his beer.

  'My wife tells me you are a Christian, born again.'

  'Now, do I look like a Christian?'

  Laurie put her hand up to her brow to shield her eyes against the sun and to see him. 'But anyone may look like a Christian,' she said.

  Bill sat down, adjusting his shorts a little as he did so.

  'I am a Christian, indeed.'

  Jan nodded. 'What does it mean?' he asked, then added, 'I don't mean to be rude. I was raised as a Catholic, so was my wife, but I don't think we'd describe ourselves as Christians.'

  'Catholic, Protestant, Muslim...' said Bill. 'All of that shite throws me, you see. I have my own relationship...! couldn't speak about the way another man believes.'

  'But w
hat does it mean to you?'

  'I'll tell you.' He stopped for a while, considering the sea. 'It means trying to bring God into the centre of everything I do, to make him present, even now. Sometimes you're so heavy you can't make room or you don't make room and sometimes you're so light, you forget. You fail constantly and that's what I find so cheering, failing all the time. One of the worst.'

  Laurie stretched her legs and lifted her face to the sun. Jan leaned forward, agitated and rocking, as if he were hungry.

  'How can you know for sure? I never knew, not even as a child.'

  'Well, it's different for everyone, isn't it. For me it was a miracle.'

  Jan was sad suddenly. A face in a tomato, a cross in a potato, some sort of reported healing at Lourdes, all of the hopes of mothers with ailing children, women who might as well wish as pray.

  'My wife, Jerry, now, how do I tell you this,' Bill swallowed. 'Let's begin with the truth of the matter. Me, born loser. Jerry, long-suffering, hopeful. Hoping to get me off the booze. Now I can drink and stop at a glass or two, but earlier in my life I could not. I was, and still am, a rotten example of a man. I can say, hand on heart, that beforehand, I'd not done a good thing just because it was a good thing, you know, no strings attached. People had dragged me behind them in their kindness or I'd just been buffeted between people acting in their own best interests, thinking that it was me that had a plan. I went from Belfast as a boy, with my widowed mother, to South Africa, and God love her she dragged me behind her all her life.

  'She was a smart woman. She finished her education pregnant with me, raised me and taught English at Queen's University, Belfast, supporting the pair of us on a pittance. When my father died—he was much older than she was—she took up an offer to go to the University of Johannesburg to teach and so I grew up in South Africa, from fifteen years old. She was the bright one, I could barely count the fingers on my fat hands although like most teenagers I thought I was hot stuff.

  'She taught all day, the white kids, and in the evenings she went to the township, and taught there, the black kids. She was a good woman, God bless her. Her only weakness was nostalgia for the United Kingdom. In her later years she loved to have magazines with pictures of the Royals in. She didn't drink, apart from the occasional glass, she didn't smoke and if she ever took another man, I never knew of it. I can't remember her saying a clever thing, which you'd think she would being a University professor, but I certainly don't recall her saying a stupid one and that's something in a lifetime. Why, me on the other hand, blabbermouth!

  'I worked for a small company installing security gating on windows and doors. I had a bit of luck, there was a lot of call for it in the 1970s when I was starting off, and I copied into a notebook one day the names of the company's suppliers and some of their customers, then, the next year, I started up on my own with money from my mum. Bought a van, had a Nkosa chap help me out for peanuts and went door to door. Tutting and clicking, telling the black maid how those crazy motherfucker Nkosa could get in, if she was Zulu, and if she was Nkosa telling her how the Zulus would kill her in her bed. 'Course she would tell her mistress and give her my card. If they had gating I'd tell them it wasn't enough and if they didn't I'd read them their new religion. Fear was what we were peddling. I had ten or so teams of guys in vans with my name on driving round and round Sandton. It's a suburb of Jo'burg. You don't see one house that isn't a fortress. My work, most of that.

  'Now, I was an alcoholic. I went drinking from my teenage years. Dropped Mum home after she'd done her teaching and went out into the sticks drinking with whoever, Boers, English, I didn't care, and then in my twenties I had the money to be the hero in the place, standing round after round at one crummy place or another. I had a drinks cupboard at work and I'd start the day with a good scotch. I used to keep a bottle of the same stuff in the glove compartment of the car. When I got pulled over by the police, I'd be sitting in the driver's seat, helpful as you like with the bottle in my hands. "Oh, Officer, you gave me a terrible shock, so you did, Sir, I just had to have a wee nip of this stuff." That way they couldn't tell how fresh the smell of booze was. Aye, it worked a few times. Mostly they didn't care.

  'I had a love affair with booze. I don't think there is a type of it I haven't tried. Even the stupid shite they make for young women or old girls, chocolate liqueurs and the like. See I tried it all so I could get other people who were harder pressed to love the stuff to find something they did like. I couldn't bear not to have the company. When I got my own house I built a pub bar down one side of the living room. I had the top shelf, the middle shelf too. And mixers on tap. I had a Union Jack over it and pictures of the Queen framed and hanging behind it. Oh, my old mum loved to have a wee sherry sat up at it. And we had parties round it. Expats all of us, former Rhodesians, South African English, all old soaks. We'd get so fucking pissed up, play military marches and pub songs. We'd finish up hanging on to the bar to try to stand for the national anthem, half-saluting, the men, the women crying.

  'I met my girl, Jerry, through a friend who brought her along to the bar. Fresh from Rhodesia and a failed marriage. Forty and fine-looking. I was in my late thirties and a fat fuck. Shite-faced most of the time. Still she moved in with me and helped out at the office. Got me straight with a glass of gin in the morning. I'd be a shaking great jelly of a mess before it. Then she started on about me giving it up. You couldn't blame her. I nearly killed her several times in the ten years we were together. A few times we were driving and I passed out. Once we were in the Drakensberg Mountains and I fell asleep, Jerry grabbed the wheel in time and I woke up and put my foot on the brake, one wheel over the edge of the pass. Jerry wasn't much of a drinker. Thank God one of us wasn't. She used to rant and rage and say I was a godforsaken you name it, she'd go to leave but she'd always come back. Because I needed her, I begged her to come back. She was a wonderful woman but I drove her to distraction. You see she really did want to save me. She shaved all of her lovely long hair off, to make a point like. She took my electric razor and left the hair in a pile on the floor. I went in thinking we was being robbed by a very casual bald-headed fellow, sitting on my sofa looking out to the garden. It was her. I'll never forget that sight. She had streaks of mascara down her face. The maid was sitting in the yard with her broom, not daring to go in there. "Will you stop now," she asked me, "will you stop?" I said to myself, the dear girl's crazy, I shall have to look after her. As is said, I never did a good thing from intention. There was me at the middle of it all. What I needed. Sure I gave her girls some money from time to time, Jerry's daughters that is, but that was to keep her close by. My old mum died and I put a nice grave up for her, showy, like a raised tomb, but that was for me, she'd have hated it.

  'I had a heart attack aged forty-six. Struck down still cradling the smooth sides of the love of my life, that bloody bar. You should have seen the state of me. Huge I was, twice the size I am now even, I couldn't fit in a normal car which was fine because I had a luxury one. I couldn't take no more than a few stairs without stopping, wiping the sweat from me and wheezing for breath. She begged me when I came out of the hospital to see it as a warning. She chucked the booze away and converted the pub into a juice bar. God bless her, now will it be a papaya and ginger this morning, my love, says she, or shall we go o.j. and carrot mixed?'

  He laughed and laughed and Jan and Laurie started to laugh too. George and Dorothy came back into view; they had been walking in the waves, barefoot, in half-drenched clothes. Dorothy was holding her skirts up and together, evidently cradling a collection of shells. Bill waved at them.

  Ah, she was a marvel. She was my life,' he sighed and his chest heaved, 'she gave me everything.' He closed his eyes for a moment. 'I went back to the booze. I'm giving you the short version. It's hard enough to bear to tell it short. I went missing for an afternoon here and there. It was only the fact she didn't want to know that kept her from seeing it for a week or so, then she had to face it and we had a fight. I h
it her. And the next day when I came to, she was in the bathroom, lying on the floor. The bathroom cabinet door was open, the pill bottle lids were off and she'd done her best, her very best, to make sure she wasn't coming back.'

  Jan looked at Bill and seeing that his face was wet with tears that went unwiped, he looked down at his feet.

  'Got her pumped,' said Bill, 'pumped her out, they did, but it was just too late. See I'd slept till eleven or so and they tell me she took the pills in the early hours. She knew me, knew I would be unlikely to come round before lunchtime and my reliability as a drunk was the death of her.'

  Jan started to speak but Bill put a hand on him to stay him.

  'I was in the room with her when she passed away and knowing she was going, with the heartbeat weak on the monitor, hearing her fade, I just sat jabbering on about how I was going to miss her, how I couldn't live without her and so on and then it came to me, what about her? You big lump of shite, what about her? And remembering how she had a fondness for the beauty of the words in the Bible I said to myself, "Do something for her." And I picked it up, turned to the Psalms and started to read and then I asked God for His help, not for me, but for her because she believed. I didn't know how to pray so I just spoke, out loud, asked Him to love her better than I did. Suddenly the sun came into the room and a shaft of light went across her lower face as though the Lord Himself was bending over her kissing her and the light travelled slowly, caressing her body all the way down and I'm looking about myself and the window's a tiny little box and it's grey as you like outside on account of the height of the hospital buildings around. Like a fool, I'm turning, turning to see where the light's coming from and outside I hear this voice, in the hallway of the hospital, a man is walking up and down saying over and over "Jesus Christ" and you can't tell if he's cursing or praising, but it was a voice filled with immanence, like he's hanging on to the Lord's coattails. The Lord took her right from me into His arms and she and He made sure I saw it, made sure I knew it.