Becoming Strangers Read online

  13

  GEORGE SLIPPED THE PLASTIC CARD into the slot of the key mechanism on their door three times but each time was too impatient, shoving the handle before the lights turned green. He knocked and called out.

  'I say, Dorothy, it's me, let us in, I'm having no joy with this card thing.' He waited, licked his lips, he was dry, dry as a bone. When he thought of Dorothy he thought of a nice cup of tea waiting for him. He kicked the door softly, 'Come on dear, pull yourself together, get a move on.'

  He tried the card once more, took his time and stumbled into the room that was being blown by the rapidly turning fans. There were loose papers from the hotel brochures all over the floor. He called her name again and stepped on to the balcony. She wasn't there. Probably she'd popped out for a spot of lunch. His watch showed three. The beds were made, tidy as a stack of fresh lumber. He'd just have a little lie-down while he waited for her, rest his eyes.

  14

  THE LITTLE OLD LADY—her daughters called her 'Mrs Tiggy-Winkle'—attracted only a little attention as she left the main gates of the resort. Perhaps one or two of the staff were surprised to see that she wore a coat in the blazing heat. Nobody noticed her stand opposite the gates for a quarter of an hour or so as if she were a passing stranger considering it as a subject for a little sketch. She began to walk on the right-hand side of the road. She was pleased to discover that there was no traffic.

  Over the years, a few times, Dorothy had gone to the door, picked up her bag and her hat and coat and buttoned up to leave them all. The buttoning had seemed to take forever, her jaw moving all the while, grinding grievance. Once or twice she'd gone to the end of the road and stood at the bus stop, blinking, her chest heaving with the phlegm caught in her lungs. Each time, the bus came and went and she'd let it go on its way and gone back home. It was no easier to go back than to leave.

  Now, she was faced with a long slow incline, a hill that promised to reach a plateau. Ahead of her, she saw the swishing sugar canes, shaking shaggy haircuts. The heat was intense. She had no idea what the time was as she'd left her watch behind. The walk was slow and tiring, so soon. She was old and useless, just like they all told her, but there was no point in getting upset over that. When she reached the plateau and saw the sugar fields stretching golden and righteous ahead of her, and to her left and right and beyond them at the sides a blue which might be both land and sea, she took her coat off, folded it neatly, then popped it under a tall hedgerow. She took a swig from the little bottle of water she'd brought, swilling it around her dry mouth, up in front of her teeth, feeling it loosen her gums. She pulled the fabric under her arms away from the skin and stepped onwards.

  She had had to warn them, the girls and George, about herself, without really saying anything; she didn't want anyone to panic. She knew it was coming on before the doctor did, whatever it was they called it. The bloody wicked thing was she couldn't remember the name of it! You had to laugh. She wasn't stupid, she'd been a bright young thing, read everything she got her hands on, always in the library, before George. She could remember that place in such detail, all the different smells, the listed rules, the little catalogue cards in dark blue, titles in capitals, author in small letters, the dank promising smell between the shelves, then the yeasty smell of the books themselves and the Lily of the Valley on the head librarian when you went to get your library card stamped. She used to think that the gate to heaven would be like that, kindly but official with the smell of flowers. All of that she could bring to mind, and much of her childhood with it, but she couldn't remember the name of her own illness! There were lots of words that had just gone, disappeared. Her world was closing down. Every time she got to the place in her mind, which took her a long time to get to, there was a sign before it, 'Closed.' Before they'd come away, there had been a day when she couldn't think what day of the week it was.

  She'd decided to speak to George about it. He'd been down in the tool shed and she'd gone down and stood in the doorway, and he'd said, 'Still in your nightgown? Not going to Madge's today then?' And there she was, wood shavings all over her slippers, her long nightie picking up wood dust too, and she had what she'd prepared to say right on the tip of her tongue. 'Look,' she'd wanted to say, 'something's happening in my head, I'm not right, but please just put up with me, don't get the doctors involved and don't tell the girls. Please just look after me, please.' But she'd said instead, 'Who's Madge?' and she'd felt like she ought to ask, as a matter of urgency, because she had the horrible feeling that it was someone she knew really well, maybe it was a niece or a sister or even one of her own children. 'Don't come that with me,' he'd said, 'go and get yourself dressed and I'll take you in the car, you'll have missed the bus by now.' She'd touched his arm, the hairs were like electric fuse wires, always ginger there and he'd shaken her off without looking at her. 'Go on,' he'd said roughly. His voice went hoarse the same way when their oldest daughter told them she'd lost the baby.

  'Who's Madge?' she'd said, stepping back into the garden, feeling like springs under her feet the planed-off wood curls that he'd swept outside. She watched him hobble down to the runner beans and the compost heap, but he hadn't heard, he hadn't answered her and so she'd gone back up to the house. When he came in later and found her sitting in the front room he didn't mention getting the car out.

  So all she said to him and to the girls, was, 'I shall be quite happy when it's my time to go.' And they teased her, 'Oh, when's that then, Mum, let us in on the secret, will you?' It was all she could do. At least they knew she wasn't suffering.

  Coming down the hill the other side of the plateau, she could see a small hamlet, a cluster of makeshift houses, each slightly elevated with four stumpy wooden legs. When she got there, she would have another sip of water. A long chicken-wire-fenced area to the left of the road led to the first of the dwellings. Inside the run were chickens and monkeys. On the steps of the home a surly-faced woman stood with her hair in rag curlers, a baby at her hip and glamorous if well-worn slippers on her feet. She looked sternly at Dorothy. Underneath her legs a long pale yellow mongrel dog was curled and he raised his head to look, then went back to sleep. The woman nodded and so Dorothy returned her nod and said, 'Good day.'

  The woman cracked a smile.

  'How's it going there?' she asked.

  Dorothy nodded quickly.

  'Fine, thank you. Lovely day.'

  'If you say so.' Her voice was deep and singsong. Then she sat down, shaking her head over the baby, and laughing with real amusement.

  In front of another house, a boy stood up on the pedals of his bike, balancing it with his legs tense, ready for the unexpected. Seeing her, he grinned and called his friends, and a group of children came out to watch her, their mothers stood in the doorways that were hung with lace moving lazily in the slight breeze. A couple of old men, sitting smoking with their backs against used tyres, called out to her and raised their hands in salute. She felt like the head of a carnival parade and quite naturally raised her hand to return their greetings. No one approached her; they let her go on her way, a fleeting oddity.

  Two teenage girls, also with their hair in rags, sat knees-together on the steps of a blue-painted tin-roofed house. In their pink and yellow dresses, they looked quite a pretty picture. If this was poverty then it had colour to it, she thought, and a slow easiness that did not suggest hunger. It must have been early evening, the people relaxed without the need for entertainment. They all seemed to be perched as if watching, but there was nothing to watch.

  'How lovely,' she said.

  She was able to peep inside quite a few of the houses and see into them. Each of them had lace at the windows and many of them had frippery, fabric and lace over the chairs and tables. The houses were painted the colours you found in a box of chalks: solid blues, reds, oranges, pinks and yellows. Inside, the furniture was useful; she saw the very things her own children laughed at her generation for, plastic homewares and useful coverings. She spied the ends of
legs or a portion of a back, a head turning, an arm reaching as the lacy curtains blew this way and that. She wished for herself the life that was lived inside them.

  Poor! she thought, spitting out the word. They have no televisions, that's it! She tutted and tusked. 'Now don't go thinking that these people are good, Dorothy,' she warned herself, 'no people is either good or bad, no matter what they have or don't have...' But wasn't it easier to be good when you didn't have so much to worry about, wasn't it just easier? Hadn't people been better once? With their front doors open, small things to celebrate. The girls told her it was rose-tinted nonsense.

  'There was still crime back then, Mother,' they told her. The granddaughter would explain to Dorothy how media this-and-that and how the police forces this-and-the-other and how it was all different and yet all the same.

  'I wish I could get myself kidnapped,' she said, stopping to rummage around the bottom of her bag for a lone Murray Mint. She found one and stood, sucking on her sweet like a duck gobbling bread.

  15

  JAN WAS AWAKE. It was the evening, they had gone to bed drunk, before the sunset, agreeing to rise for dinner. His wife slept, silent and solid beside him, the fan causing a small ripple of white sheet to flicker over a freckled shoulder. He had his head on the pillow, but was lying on his side so that he could feel, quite palpably, the pulsing of an artery in his neck. He could hear it too. It sounded like a clock ticking. It did more for him than a solitary thought could do and so he waited there until he had what he needed from it, then he turned and looked at his wife. A small trickle of saliva lay across her cheek and he knew the smell of it, the dead breath creeping out under cover of liquid.

  He really did want an armistice. He had called her, in their time together, fraud, coward, liar, and he knew that these might apply to him also. It was no good calling her these things, when the fact was that he was lying there beside her. They were complicit. He'd spent each day with her amassing evidence to prove himself better than her and dying had served him up another way to be better, to be more right. That was the truth of it. He was a fool.

  He got up to smoke a cigarette on the balcony. He had taken up smoking again in the last month. He took a beer from the fridge and sat in the dull black heat of their balcony with the door open, careless of the air conditioning seeping out and the warm air stealing in. He wanted her to smell the smoke; he wanted her to mind him.

  He had seen at dinner that George was impressed with Annemieke. As she aged Annemieke's face was decked with excessive emotion, like an old maid's Christmas tree—loaded, angry, ready to let something tumble. Her eyes were strained, mascara weighed heavily on lashes, but she still looked good. She looked better without make-up. Her eyes were the grey of the North Sea she had looked at many times from her mother's apartment in Blankenberge. They used to make him think of a drop of ink on to watercolour paper, dark at first, fading outwards.

  Of course, old George liked the way she looked. Men liked her because she looked like she would provide the entertainment. Her fellow Dutch or Belgian women chose to wear stern, forbidding, expensive brands in dark green, brown leather and navy. Annemieke hoarded a mass of clothes, bobbled and baubled, which refused folding and rioted in the wardrobes. From the shelves a sleeve here or there stretched down towards the clothes hanger, dripping with crocheted cherries, too many zips and cuff buttons shaped like anchors or hearts.

  He had thought at first that her wearing eye make-up in bed was charming, acquired from some magazine advice column typical in the 1960s—or it might be some slatternly laziness, and this thought appealed to him perhaps more. One evening, in the early days, before the children, he spotted that the colour of the eye shadow had changed from green to a pearlized white shimmer, which matched her nightdress. He had felt cornered. Yet when she ceased to wear it in bed, he was dejected. Accidentally, he found the tubes of cosmetics in her drawer; she kept them still and he became jealous. By then he'd become merely a tenant of her bed-tent, profiteer of her capable circulatory system in wintertime.

  Looking into the room, he saw her turn a little, kicking at the sheets. Her feet suffered too, along with her eyes. She stuffed them into too tight too high heels, put plasters over blisters and sloughed away red patches to leave raw patches. Finding the dry skin razor in their bathroom, the foot carpaccio in the bidet, had turned his stomach. She could not abide sheets over her feet, so those red paddles of pain turned in the night-time air.

  He extinguished his cigarette and went back into the room. He put on the lamp by his side of the bed and picked up his book. He had known the light would wake her. She was roused and frowned at him, lifting her head.

  'It smells of smoke in here.'

  'Sorry.'

  'Can't you sleep?'

  'No. Insomnia.'

  'Why don't you take something?'

  She turned and nestled her head once more into the pillow and he saw her shoulders slacken. Before she was quite asleep again, he put his lips between her shoulder blades and kissed her there.

  The phone rang. It was George.

  16

  IT WAS THE MANAGER'S first serious hotel. Steve Burns was thirty-five, he was single; he was committed to his new job. The resort was one of a chain of luxury re-sorts that were marketing themselves as 'taste and refinement in unexpected locations.' 'Taste and refinement' meant dark teakwood and uniformly white furnishings. The 'unexpected locations' were a result of the prime real estate in any popular resort area having been long since snapped up.

  The manager's job description was rather alternative, rather New Age. In bold letters he was instructed to 'deliver an experience that enables our customers to re-connect with his or her inner self in luxurious surroundings.' He was, however, from Manchester. Steve Burns. Down to earth. He'd laughed about the job title: 'Total Experience Manager.' He'd shown it to his friends down at the local that lunchtime after it came in the post, red-cheeked no longer from pride, but from the several beers and the stuffy public bar on the solitary hot day of the year. His friends quizzed him. He'd been a hotel manager, but now he was to be a guru, it was a promotion, surely. Like going from baker to bishop.

  'Look,' he said, 'you park seventy-odd middle class fat-arses round a swimming pool in the blazing heat, you get them up to pour booze down their necks, and then you drag them off to sweat it out on the massage table and they'll find their selves all right. I don't doubt they'll find that their true self, their inner child, is just what it was before they left home; a right greedy bast'd.'

  'Half your chance,' his friends had moaned and gone on to ask him about discount rates. Time to leave.

  Now he was sat, in khaki trousers and a white shirt, a silver chain round his neck, hairy ankles peeping out of brown leather boat shoes, on the corner of the big dark wood desk he'd been given. A dark wood fan, brass details, a colonial era reproduction, turned above him. Here he was presented as part Werner Erhard, part Ernest Hemingway. And essentially, he was perfect for all of it, the clammy-handed Mancunian grateful for the chance to rub shoulders with the moneyed classes.

  He'd already had his daily team briefing with senior members of staff, and now, last job at nine in the evening, he was running through one or two of the same points with Abner and Emma, the Catering Manager and Domestic Staff Manager. He found the Caribbean staff quite proper in a way, he'd expected more of the rum-swigging, pot-smoking, 'Here com' de Lilt', mon,' stereotype. But this particular island was one of the most religious places on the earth. It was almost impossible to get staffing for Sunday mornings. In a cunning pact with the forces of darkness, he held a weekly Saturday Night Fever party, dedicated to fond memories of school discos, and he worked the crowd hard to make sure there'd be no early risers. That way breakfast would be less of an issue and lunch an eggs-and-potato-settle-my-stomach-before-I-shit-myself sort of affair which could be managed by a line of just two or three in the kitchen.

  He was explaining to Abner and Emma that their jobs emanated from h
is own, which under his interpretation meant that they were 'alcohol facilitators.'

  'They're no trouble when they're passed out round the pool, are they?' he was saying. But Emma had been to college and was talking about increasing their captive spending—spa packages, tours—and even tipping.

  'Your Brits won't tip,' he said, matter-of-factly, turning over her other suggestions in his mind. He liked to present himself as someone on the side of the common man—and his drinking. He liked a pint himself. He persuaded himself that it was best not to milk the customers, but to make sure they came back.

  There was a small commotion outside the frosted glass double doors to his office and an old man burst in, wearing a string vest, trousers and braces.

  'Hello-hello, mate,' he said, 'can I help you, Sir?'

  'I've lost my wife,' the old man said.

  'Not entirely bad news, then,' he said, smiling broadly. Abner and Emma looked at him, both shocked and afraid. (Oh, the old girl would turn up; she'd be in the spa more than likely.)

  'Mr Davis, isn't it?' he said. He did his homework; he read the names and profiles of all his guests for the week. He'd remembered this couple, on account of their ages. He might have known there would be 'issues.' In his experience the geriatric punter was more hassle than he was worth. That and the new parent, terrible pains in the arse, expected everyone else to suffer along with them, couldn't get over their indignation that God or biology had done this to them, inflicted them with rheumatoid arthritis/a kid.

  'So, when did you last see Mrs Davis?'

  George was rubbing his jowls left and right with his big hand, 'Not since the morning.'