Becoming Strangers Read online

  20

  THE ISLAND'S VILLAGES were spaced at about ten minutes' drive from each other. One home would become ten and then thirty, right on top of each other, and at the centre of each was a corrugated iron roof with a few tables at which men sat about, drinking. At a fishing village, a group of men were washing down the wooden blocks that they used to gut the fish they brought in, and women were sitting dangling their legs from tables that had been cleaned earlier. Jan watched from the open car window. Women wandered in and out between their homes and the central shelter. Bottled beer was drunk and often a board game was played, lit by the paraffin lamps or single bulb that swung from a beam. They heard music and laughter and much banter, loud accusations and ripostes that followed at a higher pitch. They were forced to slow down as men in the cars in front of them slapped hands with passers-by or stopped without warning to talk to a friend.

  From a bar, some men recognized a driver in one of the cars that was ahead of theirs and they were jeering at him, calling him 'a fucking idiot,' and the man's responses caused them to laugh uproariously and redouble their cries.

  The three men sat and waited.

  Adam was driving, and George was alongside him, with Jan in the rear. Adam would stop the car and lope off into a bar, hailing the men there with an easy-going 'How you doing?' Although he was a stranger, they smiled at him. It was the longhair, thought Jan. The tattoos. A man could go about the world nowadays and be universally liked, that way. When he was young, there'd been the brief fling with hippydom, and then it was romp all the way to the grave wearing better clothes than one's parents. Nowadays, adolescence need never end. But his sons' clothes were certainly more expensive than his. Evolution care of Armani. He smiled.

  Now Adam was accepting a beer, conveying with his body language thanks and the time pressure of his task. His own button-down collared shirt felt like a shroud about his neck. He put two fingers to it and pulled the opening.

  Adam sat down on a stool with the men, wide-kneed, explaining where he worked and what he was doing; when he had them on his side, smoking one of their cigarettes, he explained the situation. Necks craned as the group in the bar looked towards the car. George and Jan sat there watching. Jan felt the weight of his face, long and serious.

  'I wish I hadn't said what I did earlier today, if you recall,' said George. As he was sat in front of Jan, in the dark, Jan could not see his face, only the glint of his glasses in the driving mirror.

  'What? Oh, about the other women?'

  'Yes. I feel bad about it. Meanwhile Dorothy was going missing.'

  'George...' he said as a soft and comforting reproof, having nothing of substance to support it.

  'You get confused. You get everything out of order until something forces you to get things in order.'

  'Yes.'

  'Something happens to make you see clear.'

  'Yes.'

  'You must have thought, what a bloody old fool! I bet you see clear, don't you, Jan? With the cancer on your mind and all. At my age I ought to. Didn't I? Pray God I don't have to lose her to make me see clear. Be no good to me then.'

  Jan said nothing. They were quiet for a while, together in the warmth of the night. Slightly tired, Jan felt himself grow comfortable and almost forget why they were there until Adam came back and jumped into the driving seat, slamming the door behind him.

  'Nope,' he said, 'let's go on. I left them the number of the hotel. They'll keep their ears and eyes open. Seemed like good folks. Think they'll do some asking about.'

  He started the car.

  21

  IT WAS JUST PAST MIDNIGHT when they reached the capital of the island, a city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, with a small hub of maybe eight or nine buildings over ten storeys. The city followed an inlet from the sea for a couple of miles and then lost interest in itself. Around the commercial centre were settled the town's main activities—duty free sales and twenty-four-hour amusement arcades—and the centre of its history: a small parliamentary building from the 1700s with a lean-to church. Beside the arcades, small dark rooms were the main bars and Adam proposed to take a wander down two or three side streets. Any lingering tourists were going home to resorts or cruise ships, vaguely disappointed, and residents were settling back down, having indifferently served these folk with food and drink.

  Jan suggested he and George take a street.

  'Stay where you are,' said Adam, 'with him. I can whip round the area pretty fast on my own.'

  George sat still, his left arm outstretched, looking at his wedding band in the lamplight from above the car.

  'When I was young, no one wore wedding rings, not men. Never thought I would but she went and bought me one for an anniversary present, years after we were married, and I've always worn it. Thirty-odd years I should think.'

  His shoulders sagged. He couldn't seem to take his eyes from his hand.

  'Back as soon as I can,' said Adam, leaning through the car window and giving the roof a double bang as he turned away.

  'Sure,' said Jan.

  'Her hands have always been so dry, the wife's. She uses a hand cream. It's purple and perfumed, smears it over her wedding ring, she's been using it for years, it's made the gold go dull. I can see her now wringing her hands together to get the full benefit. Like she's keeping her tools in good nick, that's all. She's not vain. If there's any lotion left over, it gets dragged up to her elbows.' He laughed. 'I suppose it's got animal fat in it or something. She's not what you call delicate. She was busty when I met her with the body underneath turned nice. Now she's a bit doddery, her body's propped up with this and that. Bloody corsets! That's her age group, you see. But she can be nimble. Hotfoots it up to the gate to greet the postman. She can make it up the garden in a half run when the phone rings. Actually it's a bit of a game between us, you get into them, don't you, when you've been together for years, I always try and beat her to it. She gives me the evils if I do, I can tell you.'

  He was quiet for a while, watching a group of teenage boys kicking a can around under the lamplight of the small park outside the parliament buildings. A whoop went up as one of the boys, with the can between his ankles, jumped sideways, let the can into the air and then kicked it towards the rubbish bin that they'd placed central to them all.

  'I don't suppose it's been an easy life for her. We've always worked long hours all of our years, the both of us.'

  Jan felt for his own wedding ring; for a hard thing it was soft, worn by time.

  'She's a marvel with the cooking.'

  'Oh yes?'

  'Yes.'

  The boys were exchanging high fives and picking up nylon tracksuit tops and T-shirts and parting ways. As an afterthought, one of them quickly hopped back into the park to put the rubbish bin back underneath a lamp and he balanced the can on top of the refuse.

  'Yes. Good English cooking.'

  'Is that possible?'

  'Bloody right. Steak and kidney? Cottage pie? Shepherd's pie? Lasagne?'

  'That's Italian, lasagne.'

  'No it's not.'

  'Sure it is.'

  'It ain't.' George was adamant.

  They were quiet again.

  'I never ate it in Italy,' said George, 'not like Dorothy can turn it out. She's a good person, Jan.'

  Jan was quiet.

  'Do you know what I mean?'

  'Actually, George, I think it is a failing in me I don't often see the good in others. Perhaps because I think everyone is like me.' Jan gave a curt laugh.

  George turned around in his seat, it was quite an effort as his back was set from sitting there, and he looked Jan right in the face.

  'What a load of rubbish, mate. Who else but you would be sat here in the back seat of a hire car listening to an old man drivel on like a silly old bugger in the middle of the night?'

  As George raised his head in the half-light, Jan saw the loose flesh under the man's eyes, cheeks and chin. He blinked and swallowed.

  'You will h
ave her back, your Dorothy.'

  'Yes, but will I? See, see...' Jan heard his teeth grind.

  'What do you mean?'

  'There's more to it than I've let on, mate. I'll never get her back in a way. She's gone for good. Listen. The wife, she's not really with it, in a manner of speaking, not all the time. She slips in and out. Behaves strangely. She's always been a bit on the sneaky side so I never thought nothing of it. She was always closing things up when I went in the room. She's secretive, over nothing.'

  'Well, so am I. Aren't you? As we get older...'

  'The other day I saw her shoving something under the seat of the sofa one time, so I said to myself, what the devil has she got to hide from me, I'll get her out the room and have a look. So I tell her that Mrs H. from up the street is at the gate and she pops out and while she's gone I look and blow me, it's a bleeding pack of crisps. Now why would she be hiding that?'

  'Maybe she thought you'd eat them.'

  'No. Don't like them, they get under my dentures. She'd been forgetful for years, we'd teased her about it, it's got worse and worse and she gets her words muddled up or forgets them and has these funny little panics about it. She can't remember the simplest things and she gets all angry with us when we try and help her. Starts shouting, nasty stuff, terrible some of it, the things she brings up from the past and sort of turns them ... Well, I spoke to the doctor about it when I went for my own check-up and he said, bring her in. I told him, she wouldn't go, so he said, tell her just for a general, as I need to get my records up-to-date. 'Course, she wouldn't go. He calls me up a few weeks later, he's a good sort, asks how it is and I said, well it's funny you should call because we've had a terrible day. She went up to the shops to get the pensions, same as she always does on a Thursday but then she was gone for hours. The old bloke that runs the post office saw her sitting on a bench and she said to him she was ever so embarrassed but she'd forgotten which way to go home. Fifteen years she's made that walk. "George," he said, "I'll tell you straight, it sounds like Alzheimer's." And he sent me a few pamphlets, which I read and gave to her. She put them aside, somewhere and Lord knows where, I asked her for them as I meant to show the girls, but she'd forgotten where they were. Bloody Nora. She keeps saying, I'm just getting old. Let me get old in peace won't you? So I have done. And now this.'

  'George, I am sorry.'

  'I didn't want to face it, Jan, see, because then something would have to be done. Things would never be the same again.'

  'Yes,' said Jan, 'I see that.'

  Adam came back to the car and leaned through the open window.

  'Man in the last bar I went to says his cousin told him she'd met a nice old English lady who seemed a bit confused. Gave me her address. Said the police had also been by, his brother's a policeman, he'd told him the same thing.'

  They exchanged looks. Adam's eyes were large and clear and his head was ducked so that he could see them and they him; the lighting cast a halo over the blond ratty hair that had come loose from its elastic band during the drive. He turned his rueful smile on them. It occurred to Jan that for Adam human beings were ultimately harmless and one could afford to be widely affectionate. Jan himself was his opposite, he realized, as off-putting as the young man was winning, a stranger everywhere, whereas this young man was at home abroad, anywhere.

  'He asked us to pop by the woman's house first thing, rather than now, as she's got four young kids,' said Adam.

  'Is Dorothy with her?'

  'Seems so. He didn't know much except that his cousin, her name's Charlotte, had asked her brother to go to the police but they came to his house, first, as it happened. They told him to let her know they'd pop round first thing. Here's the address.' He held out the piece of paper and George took it.

  'Where is it, then?'

  About five miles from the hotel, inland. Not even a village, just a few homes together. A hamlet you call it.'

  'She must have walked,' said George. 'She bloody did as well. She walked off.'

  'Cheer up,' said Adam, 'we'll have her back with you soon enough. We should head back towards the hotel, then pop round to see this lady, Charlotte. What do you think, Jan?' he asked, putting his right hand behind George's seat as he reversed back.

  'Ya, ya,' said Jan, 'good idea. When it's daytime, first thing.'

  He rolled up his window and peered through the glass as they passed through the villages and towns that were now barely lit.

  He was reviewing a scene in his mind. There was him, standing just outside his bedroom, holding the door ajar, dressed in his pyjamas, shouting at the top of his voice to make himself heard over heavy metal music. It must have been more than four years ago, before he took any of his trips away.

  'Turn the music down,' he had been shouting, over and over again, until finally the music just stopped altogether as if the power button had been pressed and his youngest son stepped out of the living room.

  'What's your problem?'

  'I'm trying to sleep.'

  'It's four in the afternoon.'

  'I said, I'm trying to sleep. I am dying here!' he'd shouted.

  Annemieke had tutted as she went past him and he'd reached up to the bookshelves and grabbed a book and thrown it after her. The bookmark fell out, it was a Polaroid photo taken in the 1970s on holiday in Spain. He'd put it away when he saw what it was.

  In it Annemieke was lying on the hotel bed in her bikini with the boys' toy cars and tractors parked all over her body. He'd come in the door, spotted them, driving the little plastic-tyred vehicles up and down her and said, 'Wait, I want to play,' but first he'd dipped the tractor into an iced drink and driven it over her tummy, then clipped it again and driven it up the inside of her leg. They'd shared a heavy and certain look and he'd raised his eyebrows, quickly looking down at his crotch. She'd covered her mouth with her hand so as not to laugh out loud. 'Can't they go and play in the road?' he'd moaned and fallen on the bed atop her, whispering into her ear, 'I'll be an old man when I get the chance to have you in the afternoon.'

  22

  IT WAS HER HABIT to take a single cup of very good coffee in the morning, with sugar if she needed it, but this morning she had had three. Jan had called her before seven to let her know that the couple was reunited and they were all on their way home. By eight, her mouth was dry from talking. Missy and the brown-haired woman, Beverly, were either side of her. Their husbands were by the outer doors, on cellphones. The other English couple, Harry and Maxine, had gone off to play tennis.

  'Bloody silly,' Harry had said before they went, 'when you think that the whole thing could have been so easily prevented.'

  'It could have got really nasty too,' Maxine had added and Harry had nodded in her direction, his eyes glazing over as he looked at the breakfast buffet. 'If you're going up, get us another blueberry muffin, love.'

  'Alzheimer's,' Missy was saying again, 'it can be so harrowing for the family. Even though it's hard, you have to get them in a nursing home, otherwise they just take over your world, it's tragic.'

  'It is tragic,' Beverly agreed, 'it's something that I dread, losing my mind.'

  'The rest you can get fixed, but not your mind,' Missy added with a smile.

  'So that's the story,' Annemieke concluded, using her hands to signal the finale.

  'Well, good for your husband and that young guy for finding her,' Beverly began.

  'Sure,' said Missy, taking a sip of the decaffeinated coffee that had just been placed in front of her. 'I can't do too much stimulation,' she had explained, rolling the final word off her tongue as though it was an extremely dangerous euphemism.

  'Well, I'm proud of my husband,' said Annemieke, folding her napkin, 'my Jan. His own health is not strong. He has been very brave. To lose a night's sleep is a big sacrifice for him, sleep is hard to get with his illness. I hope that George appreciates him.'

  'He has insomnia? It's just an awful thing to live with,' Missy said.

  Annemieke fixed her eyes upon her.


  'He is dying of cancer. He has just a few weeks left, they say.'

  'Oh my God.'

  'Oh my God.'

  Annemieke stood up and gave a crooked half-smile. She looked into the gardens beyond the windows and took a deep breath. 'This is our last vacation,' she said.

  23

  CHARLOTTE WAS A VERY TALL WOMAN, confident and long-limbed. She wore her hair pulled back from her face. She was laughing in response to something Adam had said as she strode ahead of them, through the wire front gate, fending off the children, waving a hand in front of her face to fan herself. It was hot early in the day; her home was on a hilltop plateau, on a grassless plot opposite sugar cane fields.

  'Dorothy,' she cried as she entered the house and she might have been calling a child that had been at a sleepover party to let her know her parents had come.

  Dorothy was holding a mug of tea, her smile flickering as she moved into the light of the porch. George put a single arm round her and hugged her to him, tea and all.

  'Don't have a go at me about it, George,' she said, her voice muffled by his body so that only he could hear her. 'Just don't say anything for once, please. Just this once.'

  'All right, all right,' he was saying, 'it's all right now. Everything's going to be all right. You gave me a scare, a terrible scare. I thought I might not see you again.'

  'No such luck,' said Dorothy, pulling away from him and setting her tea down. She put both hands up around his face and kissed him on the lips.

  'I don't want to lose you, even if you are a bleeding nuisance.' The others looked away.

  Charlotte had picked up her own cup of tea and gestured to the two men, 'Want some?' They shook their heads. They were standing in the scrub of the front yard, a small girl was holding out a dog-chewed yellow ball to Jan, which he took at last. It was dripping wet. The long-eared mutt was looking at Jan with a leer, drool hanging off its mouth, tail mustering a slight wag. Two boys appeared from behind the front door and came out to see what Jan was going to do with it.