Becoming Strangers Read online

  Before that there was Annemieke. But she became a prisoner of his faults, according to her. She was a professional hostage. She grew up in Antwerp after the war—with her mother's self-aggrandising stories, tales of the Jewish community being dragged away despite her noble efforts. Her mother told her that they themselves had some Jewish blood. It could have been them on the trains! She said it was a miracle they were alive. The father denied this. 'You exaggerate,' he said every time that Jan saw them together. His wife's earliest memories, she told him once, were of night-time stories that drifted into unwarranted confessions and secrets. (Her mother told her that she despised the father, that her life was over the day they got married.) 'What use is a life without love?' she had moaned. 'God forbid that you should suffer such a thing. Love is everything,' she had impressed upon her daughter.

  Jan thought as little of the mother as she did of him. Sunday afternoon visits, once a month, were odious to him. The father spent the time in his greenhouses, leaving Annemieke, Jan and the children to listen to the mad old woman hold forth on the latest roundup of nonsense she had read the week before in the newspapers and magazines that printed the bad news. The mother was the sort of person who read enough to be a menace. She had scientific terminology to excuse each one of her hatreds. Jan wished she'd knit instead. When the father was dead and buried, the old woman moved into a retirement complex up on the coast, just thirty kilometres away. It soon became every Sunday afternoon that the two women sat in the old woman's seaside apartment, the children drinking fizzy drinks, and discussed the 'emotional climate' of Annemieke's childhood home as if this was all that endured. Jan watched them from the balcony, overlooking the sea, where he went to smoke a cigar. He was a non-smoker at the time, but a cigar took time and he persuaded himself that this was some sort of compensation for the visit. With books and tapes passing between them every weekend, the mother supplied Annemieke's growing attachment to various self-help fads. Their ideas fed a nostalgia for an imagined brutality, they spoke of bruises and scars with conspiratorial smiles and sighs.

  Tired of it all, Jan asked Annemieke, in front of the children and the mother, whether the father had in fact battered them. The mother spoke up.

  'There is physical damage and there is emotional damage that can be done, Jan, and who is to say which is the worst?'

  'But did he actually hit you?' said Jan on the way home in their BMW.

  'Oh, mother exaggerates,' said Annemieke; and then, slipping blithely into her father's personality, she would complain about her mother.

  Jan suggested she get a job, but she couldn't, it was all so stupid, so meaningless. She couldn't be like him, moving vehicles around the country for profit. She was busy with the children, the home, the mother, and her various women's groups. At these groups, on weekday nights, she gleaned the cant of several philosophies that suited her, from Freud to feminism, she swallowed them whole. She said things like, 'Woman is the nigger of the world.'

  As a young woman, when they met, she had been agile in every way—funny more often than not. As she grew older her humours hardened and were broken only by small compliments. Not from him, for those were discredited immediately, but from others.

  Some nights, before he became ill, especially after dinner parties for some reason, he considered shooting every one of them in the beds where they lay.

  Your cancer is wish fulfilment, Annemieke had told him.

  It was a second-hand idea. André had shared the thought with Jan at work; five days later his wife repeated her lover's hypothesis.

  9

  GEORGE WAS PARCHED when he woke, on account of the three or four glasses of Scotch he'd had with Jan at the bar, after the ladies had retired for the evening. Dorothy was moving about the room, her nightgown like a blancmange on guy-ropes, creeping and bending and sighing. She was attending to the boiling jug kettle and making them both a cup of tea. They had a small jug of milk in their refrigerator; it was changed every day. 'Where are the cows?' he'd asked the girl who did their room and she had looked at him blankly. He'd mooed once or twice and made the hand gesture of milking a cow. She'd backed out of the room shaking her head and muttering.

  They sat together on the balcony supping their tea, strong and astringent as the new light. He sighed in deference to the tea.

  'Could get used to it here,' he added. His wife said nothing. He told himself she was getting hard of hearing, but really she liked to keep herself to herself as much as she could. He pressed her for an answer.

  'I say, could get used to it here.'

  'Well, there's not much point in that, is there?'

  'It's just a turn of phrase.'

  She was silent.

  After a while he spoke again. 'Nice fellow, that Jan. We had a talk last night, must have been talking more than an hour or so...'

  'Chewed his ear off, did you?'

  George drained his tea and studied the sea view.

  'Well, luckily not everyone shares your bad opinion of me.'

  He rose to put his teacup inside and stopped as he went through the double doors to say, 'More tea?'

  She shook her head for too long a time. She seemed to be struggling with her mouth to get her teeth in a comfortable position. She was right, she was getting old. He could see it in her, but not in himself, thankfully. He raised his eyebrows at his reflection in the mirror over the sideboard and left the teacup where she could easily find it to rinse it out.

  He'd barely been able to sleep for thinking about the conversation he'd had with Jan. Poor chap, on his way out and yet, as George had pointed out, he himself might kick the bucket first. But he hadn't really believed it and Jan had said as much, 'You look like you're indestructible, George, men like you go on forever.'

  'I don't worry, you see,' he'd said, 'not about my life. I worry about the family, but if you was to ask me whether it had been a good life I'd say yes it had. Mostly on account of the war. I feel privileged to have been a part of something like that. No matter which way you look at it, it was right what we did. How many people can say as much?'

  He took his cap and told Dorothy he was going out for a turn around the grounds before breakfast. She could wait or she could go on ahead, he said.

  'I'm not hungry,' she said, 'I'll wait till lunch and see if I can manage something then. Maybe a slice of quiche or something light.'

  'That's good of you, dear,' he said, raising his eyebrows. Much of what he said and did was for his own benefit nowadays. He didn't kiss her, but let himself out with a feeling of pleasure.

  Strolling out through the main staircase, past the restaurants and on to the pathway, he saw the staff dotted about the place tending to it all. A man in a straw hat frowned as he attempted to fasten a rose tree to a long stake. George stopped to watch until the man took off his hat and wiped his forehead, and turned to look at George.

  'Hard to keep 'em going in this heat,' George said.

  The man laughed. 'H'every day is same,' he said, 'this not Piccadilly, rainy old London town.'

  George laughed too. 'I was in Africa during the war,' he said, 'that was hot.'

  The man looked serious again and said nothing. Even though he looked old, George realized suddenly that he was probably too young to have been alive during the war. Jan had been polite. For who, now, was there just 'the war'?

  He wandered past the outside pool and pressed his face against the cool glass windows of the spa. They might have their massages today. The South African chap with the Irish accent had been at the bar, quite a jolly fellow, and he'd said he'd had a good one. A 'rubdown,' he called it. Funny chap, nervy, a bit of a boozer.

  There was an annex being built on to the side of the spa, they were in mid-construction, the area was roped off. George was surprised to see a solitary figure on his knees in the middle of a half-tiled floor, bare-backed, fingers splayed over the black and white tiles he'd just laid. He was tanned, with hair in a ponytail and a cap on backwards. On his back was a tattoo, an eleph
ant with many hands and a crown on its head. George peered closely. The window was open and he could hear the man talking to himself, sounds of reassurance.

  'Not a bad job,' George ventured.

  The man turned around, he was all sinew, a young fellow. He cracked a broad grin.

  'Cheers,' said the young man.

  'For a beginner.'

  'Can you tell?'

  'Well, you've got 'em a little bit skew because your pug's not even. What you got there, a cement mix is it?'

  'Yeah, it's got the acrylic in with it. Floor's not even underneath.'

  'Your job is to make it even, see, to correct it. Use the cement. I did a spot of tiling once or twice; I'm no expert but I'll give you a hand if you like.'

  The young man looked about them. 'I don't think it would go down too well with the management.'

  George nodded.

  'I'm supposed to have this done by ten.'

  George shook his head. 'You'll never do it. You've got about twenty square foot still to cover.'

  'Well, come on then!'

  George slipped his shoes off. He entered the new room by a side door and crept around the edges, then got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the middle, wincing and exclaiming a couple of times.

  'All right?' asked the fellow.

  'Yes, until I get up,' said George, 'I'm seventy-nine, you know. Aches and pains are something shocking, but there's life in me yet.' He offered the young man his hand, 'George Davis.'

  'Adam,' said the young man.

  'From London are you'?'

  'Hackney, born and bred.'

  'Right, then you might know a thing or two about hard work. We're all right in the middle here, but it's the cutting the tiles to go round the edges that's the bugger, right? That's what's going to take the time. You want to get to the cutting, my eyesight's not marvellous, and I'll get you straightened out in the middle here.'

  'Sounds good,' said the fellow and they went to their work. By ten they were more than half the way through.

  'We'll have it done by eleven if my back holds,' George had said, straightening himself with a great moan. Through the windows he saw Jan's wife in the Jacuzzi and he gave her a wave. She didn't see him. She was busy talking to Mr Moloney. She looked angry.

  10

  AS BILL MOLONEY GOT INTO THE JACUZZI, the waters leapt up like the slops from, a bucket, and splashed over the side of the pool, leaving a semicircle of dark grey on the surrounding paving. He moved to sit next to Annemieke. He couldn't have been less appealing to her, as he sauced himself with the water, the same highly antiseptic water that was so detrimental to her dermatological moisture balance. He sluiced underneath his armpits, then he put his hands up behind his head, showing the strands of wet hair that hung like seaweed from those discoloured diamond shapes.

  'I've been keeping an eye out for you,' he said.

  She considered leaving, but was not inclined to make a display of her thighs and bottom as she exited the pool. Her sarong was over at her pool-chair; there had been next to nobody there when she and Jan had come down. She gave a small hard laugh, like a cat coughing up a fur ball.

  'Really?' she said, touching the thick golden crossbar of her sunglasses.

  'You've heard about the mating pandas at the zoo, now? The sign outside the male's cage, well, it got the panda ladies enraged, it said, "Eats shoots and leaves." Now I didn't want you to think I was that sort of an animal.'

  She closed her eyes. 'Fine.'

  'Would you like to join me for lunch?'

  'No, thank you.'

  'Ah, come on now...'

  She lifted her sunglasses quickly and her eyes hurt in the glare of the sun. 'Look,' she said, 'you have surely seen last night that I am here with my husband.'

  'Oh, yes. Looks like a nice fellow. Don't worry, I'm a very subtle man in my own way, it's hush-hush as far as I'm concerned.'

  'No. It's not hush-hush. It's just nothing. Nothing at all.'

  'Nothing?'

  'To me, it was nothing.'

  'Well, it didn't feel like nothing to me.'

  'Are you going to let the matter drop or are you going to become a problem?'

  'Well, there's no need to get yourself all flatulent over it,' he said. And then, just as she thought he was at last taking offence, his moon-like face—half of it bathed in a red allergic reaction, to the pool, to the sun, to his drink, she did not: know what—broke into a warm smile.

  'My husband is terminally ill,' she said, 'he is dying of cancer. I don't want him upset.'

  'It seems like you're the one who's upset, now.'

  'Well, think what you like. It's really not important to me.'

  He put his hands into the water to rest them on his knees and looked squarely at her. 'I'm an innocent, so I am, but a lovely lady like you, going about doing things that you're unhappy over, now why would you?'

  They were in precisely the right place for this conversation, she thought, in hot water, up to their necks in it, and though she wanted to get out into the neutral air or better still bathe in the cool waters of the pool, she was stuck there, like a lobster in a pot.

  'Look, I'm not the sort who goes around shagging willy-nilly like that,' he smiled, squeezed his eyes shut as if to erase those words and started again, 'What I mean to say is, I know what it is to struggle with the earthly appetites. Well, just look at me; you can see who's on the winning side. It's not my iron will, now is it? We're just two people, you see, we don't know each other. It happened,' he held up his hand to stop her saying anything, 'it did happen, so it did, we can't undo it, and I'll accept it when you say it wasn't for you. But I'll also say I don't believe it. Ach, what I wanted to say was, don't feel bad about what happened. It doesn't make you a bad person. Well, not entirely.'

  'I know that, thank you.'

  'Having sex with a stranger, I mean.'

  'Please

  'When you're married. And your husband's poorly.' He grinned quickly and followed it with an apologetic stretch of his lower lip to either side of his chin. 'There are worse things. I know. I'm a terrible sack of shite myself.'

  'Please, Mr Moloney,' she said, slowly, attempting a false smile and finding that her lips weren't as crafty as they had once been, 'just leave me alone.'

  He raised both hands. 'I will,' he said, 'but I'll be saying to myself, she's suffering, that fine woman, and it's a terrible sad thing in a place like this, which is like paradise.

  'It makes you think,' he added, portentously raising a finger, 'where is heaven and where is hell? Are they inside or are they outside?'

  'Unbelievable,' she said, shaking her head.

  She went to get out, and slipped in her urgency. She raised one leg again and in stretching caused her bikini bottoms to gather indelicately in the cleft of her bum. Overheated and aware she was now showing all of her red-veined backside, she swore.

  'Can I give you a hand there?' he asked, standing up suddenly, and she felt the shadow of his bulk between her and the sun.

  She shook her head and this time made it out of the pool and over to her sarong, which she used to bandage herself quickly, her wet hair over her face.

  11

  WHEN JAN GOT TO THE BAR, George and his new comrade, Adam, were sitting before glistening glasses of beer and a half-empty plate of pizza. It could only have been midday, but there was a small crowd assembled, dipping cigarettes in and out of ashtrays, and beyond them, on the other side of the bar, a group of Americans facing determinedly away from the smokers, minding their accessories. One of their women was moving across them offering them sachets of artificial sweetener from a basket. She explained that she had had to go and get it from the restaurant.

  'They never have it here at the bar.' The others agreed that it was indeed bizarre. 'I asked them yesterday to keep some here, but they took it back up to the restaurant.'

  'More ice if you don't mind,' said one young tanned male, pushing his long glass across the bar, and five of his friends
fell back a footstep, exchanging looks and suppressing laughter as the barman handed him a single ice cube between tongs.

  'Yeah, you go easy on that frozen water stuff, young fellow,' quipped another man, aside.

  George and Jan were at the helm of the bar between the two factions.

  'Americans don't like second-hand smoke,' Adam had said, making his point with a nod of his head in their direction.

  'Everything's got to be new with them,' sighed George, wiping his brow with the barman's tea towel. He was pleased to see Jan, standing up briefly and moving a little to make space for Jan to stand alongside them. He explained to him their morning's work with a great deal of nudging whispering, casting suspicious looks at the barman and the other residents.

  'Don't want to blow the whistle on the young fellow,' he said to Jan in a heavy whisper. 'Had to help him out or he'd have never got the job done, see?'

  Pink-faced and happy, George raised his eyebrows in mock indignation as Adam regaled them with his disbelief at seeing the old fellow whip his shoes off and take to the job.

  'I couldn't keep up with him,' he laughed, 'and I'm thinking to myself all the while, this old boy, he must be at least sixty!'

  'Oh, very good, son,' said George wiping the back of his mouth with his hand, 'you'll go far. But not in tiling. Whose round is it?' he asked. Jan ordered in another three beers and they clinked glasses.

  'Cheers.'

  'Good health.'

  'Your health.'

  'And have you also come on a working holiday, Jan?' the young man asked, squinting at the sun.

  With his blond hair over one eyebrow and a slightly self-congratulatory expression playing around his mouth, he reminded Jan of their younger son. Jan shook his head and smiled, having already forgotten what he had been asked.

  ''Cos they want me to do a bit of work in one of the bathrooms this afternoon and I thought I might get you fine gentlemen to pitch in.'