Becoming Strangers Read online

  'I think she wants you to play catch,' said Adam, trying not to laugh.

  'Sure, sure,' said Jan, holding the ball by a thumb and a fingertip.

  24

  'WE'VE GOT TO STOP meeting like this,' wheezed Bill Moloney, lowering himself into the Jacuzzi with winces and expletives, on account of the heat of the water.

  She had expected him and she might also have expected him to say something like that. Annemieke took one damp magazine page away from the next and came to an image of a woman feigning sleep in a deck chair, dressed in a gabardine long-skirted coat and lace-up boots. It was time to start thinking about the autumn clothing season. This autumn she would do as they suggested, start with the essentials—of which there were many.

  'Good magazine?'

  She nodded.

  'They found the old lady then?'

  She nodded again and said nothing. Let him suffer.

  'Goo-ood,' he said, stretching the word as he put his face back to take in the sun. He was wearing skiing glasses, with mirror lenses in a black rubber frame, taping his rugby-damaged ears to his head. 'Actually I did hear about it. That manager chappy told me this morning when I had my breakfast. Thank the Lord, eh?'

  'Thank my husband and the young man. They were out all night. While the rest of the men in this place slept in their beds.'

  'Did you not get much sleep yourself?' he asked, sitting forward.

  She saw herself in miniature in the mirrors of his lenses.

  'No,' she said, 'not really, no.'

  'Well, I'm sorry to hear that. And with your husband being so ill like, it's no wonder you're upset. But I suppose he wanted to go.'

  'Yes, of course.'

  'I've been thinking about what you told me the other day and I wanted to say how sorry I am. I know you think I'm a big fat eejit...'

  'What is that?'

  'A fool, a moron, an imbecile...'

  'Yes, yes, I understand. Your accent, it's hard to follow.'

  'I'm from Ireland originally. The North. Lived a long time in South Africa though, so it's a mess. It's all mongrel. What was I saying?'

  'That you're a big fat imbecile.'

  He laughed out loud, a great whoop of a laugh, and she smiled.

  'Now will you stop that!' he remonstrated, 'I said no such thing. I said that you think that's what I am. Listen, I've got things I need to say to you. They're important. I have to say them.' He removed his glasses with an effort and where they had been the skin was white and covered in tiny bubbles of sweat. His eyes were pale blue, large and surrounded with tiny blond lashes that blinked impotently. He laid the sunglasses behind him and turned to her with both of his hands pressed together, the supplicant, his fingers touching his nose.

  In the background, she saw that Beverly was leaning forward on her sun lounger.

  'Listen to me,' he said, 'friend to friend. Brother to sister. I know how it is. I was you. I am you. When a person comes up against the brick wall of his or her self, the self they don't like and they can't change themselves or swap themselves for something better, what they do is they swap their partner. Not just once, but lots of times. That's what adultery is, it's a dead end. Now I know, because I did it. What I want to know is what you're going to do when he dies and you have to face the fact that it's not him, it's you, you don't like?'

  Annemieke said nothing, but her chest rose and she sighed heavily as she tried to master her annoyance.

  'Look, this amateur psychology...'

  'Let me go on,' he said.

  'How typical of a man to fail to see the obvious alternative! That it is possible that a woman has the same attitude to sex as a man.'

  'Look, when it comes to fantasy action in the sack I'm hardly your prime candidate. Tell me, was it my love handles, my hairy back or my three chins you were attracted to?'

  Annemieke looked at him steadily.

  'I am not looking for help.'

  'But you are. You are married and yet you had an intimate experience with a complete stranger. That's like shouting, "Here, over here!"'

  'You are extremely old-fashioned, Mr Moloney. You are almost a romantic.'

  'No, you're the romantic!' he said, raising his voice, then lowering it when she put an admonitory finger to her lips. Beverly was now sitting at the pool edge with her back to them, but in hearing distance.

  'What I am,' he said in a hoarse whisper, going painstakingly slowly over his words, and now she remembered his accent from some film she had seen about terrorists, 'is a recovering alcoholic with his own set of rules for staying sober, who turned himself around because of his wife dying. That's realism. The romantic is the one who believes that another person can set them free. I don't because I know they can't. She couldn't do it for me. She knew it, I knew it. There's not one other human being on this earth that can save you. But that's what you think, that's why you do it.'

  She shook her head.

  'Otherwise, why not masturbate?'

  'Don't get personal with me.'

  'I apologize,' he said, sitting further back, his tone altered now, his voice level, 'but it's not your man's fault that he couldn't change your life, couldn't change you. You ought to know that. Given that he's dying. For his sake and for yours. You might want to forgive each other.'

  'As you said, you're in no position to preach.'

  'No,' he laughed roundly, 'I'm the opportunist, walking towards the noise of the party, caught in Gods headlights. I'm just stuck really and that's the truth.'

  She smiled weakly as she sat up to help herself to a sip of her lime and soda through a straw. 'You have a way with words.'

  After a moment or two he picked up his glasses from the edge of the Jacuzzi, hauled himself out of the tub and launched into the swimming pool with a belly-flopping dive, soaking the newspapers of the American group and causing Harry to shout out, 'Easy!'

  She watched him perform a series of lengths of the pool with determination and energy, taking great bestial breaths of water as he turned at each end.

  25

  RELUCTANT TO EXPOSE DOROTHY to the general public, George suggested he go to the bar to bring them back a pizza.

  He'd left Dorothy up on the balcony all on her own, reading. A women's book. Historical romance, he thought it was termed, 'Fanny Fuss-a-lot' or what-have-you; all trumped-up emotion and unnecessary anxiety. Bored, he himself had picked up one or two of them, she'd given him the nod saying, 'It's historical,' but they had different ideas of what history was. 'See,' he'd said, 'with history, you've got this that happens, then that, important people, and someone makes a mistake and tries to cover it up, someone else gets the wrong end of the stick, and an incident happens, like a war. Then a country somewhere gets another new name, one of those that's had several already. That's history. Not some young girl getting herself up the duff by the young Master.'

  Dorothy had argued with him that there was a kind of history—what she called 'social history', a new thing, all about normal people. 'Who cares about normal people?' he'd said, 'we got enough to worry about without worrying about normal people, some folks we don't know, people who don't matter.' She'd got the idea from the granddaughter. He'd tried to put her right but she'd got funny about it. She'd gone on about how she liked it anyway.

  When she was quite sure that he was gone, she relaxed, put her book in her lap and closed her eyes. Inside her eyelids, she saw two pools of yellow like egg yolk.

  'Do your worst, sun, there's bugger all left of me for you,' Dorothy said. She pulled her skirt up over her knees, smiling right into the face of the sunshine.

  The book was covered in plastic, it was on loan, it was hot in the sun. She smelt it and thought of the countless packed and picnic lunches she'd made for George and the kids and the grandchildren over the years, happy times. She liked the way cheese and tomato tasted after being wrapped together in clingfilm and left in the sun; it took her back, that taste, and as for the smell of a hard-boiled egg that was a day old or so, well it was hea
venly! Just a whiff of that eggy smell and she could see George racing here and there with the girls—piggybacks, fishing, kite flying. He was good like that, a doer.

  She'd have been better off with a thinker but there you go, you make your bed. When she said to her mum it was him she was going to marry the old girl had said, Til tell you what my own mother said to me, "You make your bed and you have to lie on it."' It hadn't made any sense until it was too late. Nobody can tell you nothing when you're young. Nowadays, anyone could tell her anything and she could see they had a point. 'You get so much more open-minded as you get older,' she thought. Her own mind was as open as a sieve and sometime soon the holes were going to win out over the mesh. She couldn't hang on to a thought for long, even the bigger things were dropping through. Memories or statistics, dates and numbers, which were more important? That her mother hit her with the ladle when she burnt the breakfast porridge, or that they lived at number 42 Seaview Avenue, Bexhill-on-Sea, TN40 6BI? What about the phone number, was that more valuable than the memory of George's face, sitting at the back of the coach with the cow shit on the back of his trousers, after a day trip to the countryside, the day they had their first kiss? What did she need more?

  Dorothy shrugged at the sun and pulled in the book, closer to her chest.

  George had always been jealous in a funny pernickety way. Not a romantic way. He'd tried to stop her reading. He couldn't stand it. He nagged her, stood over her, couldn't let her be. He'd always have a reason why what she was doing was stupid. He reasoned her out of everything. She'd got so much hidden in that house of theirs even she couldn't find it. They'd think she was a senile old goat when they came to clear out after she died. Books, letters, chocolate bars, bits and pieces. She longed to be alone, to be private.

  Tm good and ready,' she said aloud.

  The truth was he couldn't bear her being elsewhere, when she could be listening to him. Once he'd used to get narked if she went into town, or had her head in a book, and now neither of them knew where she went from time to time. Only Him upstairs knew where she was heading, bit by bit. Being shipped over in pieces.

  She looked at her old Timex watch. Twelve-fifteen. He'd be back soon.

  'Don't go out,' he'd said, and the sod had put her shoes up on the bathroom cabinet where she couldn't reach them.

  26

  EACH DAY AT THE RESORT was fair, to the same specifications, part God-given, part man-managed. The sun shone, a breeze blew, the flowers bloomed, the pool was clean. Breakfast was laid out, beds changed, tiles mopped, cutlery cleaned, splats of dinner wiped from floors, splashes of sticky drinks rubbed off the bar, garbage to be emptied and removed and piled into the hidden stinking containers where the flies went mad in ecstasy, but these things happened before the main act or offstage. Some hundred men and women came together to make it all perfect for the forty or so people that inhabited this little paradise for a week, and they did so every week, even in the off-season when there might be just half the number. Burns was required to provide the service required for physical stasis.

  'The main thing about: good service, is that it's so good you don't know it's happening. That's my theory,' Steve Burns had said to his staff at one of the first weekly team meetings. It wasn't his theory, in a proprietary sense, but it was an organizing notion that he adhered to with some conviction. He had his own individual interpretation. His overly thick-framed glasses spoke of that. Every time he put them on, he knew who he was. He looked like a 1960s scientist. It was quite a popular look with musicians, students, that sort of crowd.

  The staff gave service that tended towards the morose.

  'You can't teach it,' he thought to himself; that dry, witty, evasive manner of the restaurant and hotel world's staffing crème de la crème. It was a European thing. A throwback to 1930s Europe—arch eyebrows, a brittle laugh, the implication that superiority was not completely conferred by the arrangement of paid services.

  He was watching Benjamin, one of his barmen, bending down to pass the Dutch lady a drink at the Jacuzzi. He looked miserable.

  'Engage with them a little bit,' he said to Benjamin as the man walked back to the bar with his empty tray. He stepped inside the bar with him. 'Watch how I do it.'

  The American crowd was already hanging about the bar, by eleven-thirty, looking for the 'lite' drinks they had on drip-feed throughout the day. Diet this and diet that. Had they any idea what the chemicals in that stuff were doing to their systems? They seemed anxious, and were jostling slightly, sharing what they knew of the story of the recovery of the old lady.

  'You'd do better with a decent drink in you,' said Steve, grinning at the tall blond man who had remarked that he knew the chairman. 'Let me get you a beer or a nice glass of wine. On the house.'

  'No, thanks,' said Jason abruptly, adjusting the waistband of his swimming shorts and folding his arms across his chest. 'Your problem's solved, then.'

  'What's that? Diet Cokes, three. The old girl? The lost sheep? Yes, yes, on their way back with her now I expect.'

  'Must be a relief.'

  'Sure. Ice and a slice? All round?'

  Jason nodded. 'Uh-huh, uh-huh,' he said as if counting, as if keeping his temper. 'Minimum effort, too. You didn't even have to lose a night's sleep over it!'

  Steve looked awkward. Of course he slept, what was he supposed to do, pace up and down?

  'There wasn't much else I could do, Sir, beyond what I did,' he smiled briefly.

  'You know the Danish guy's a bit of a hero.'

  'Who? Oh, yes. Dutch. And our employee, young Adam.'

  'Did you know the man is seriously unwell?' Jason picked up one of the drinks and showed it to his wife who got up from her poolside lounge chair and came over. 'The Danish guy, I mean. He's sick. And he spent the night looking for one of your guests.'

  'I didn't know that, Sir. No.'

  'He's a hero.' Jason took a sip of his drink and squinted at Steve. 'Some folks go the extra yard.'

  'Yes,' said Steve, helping himself to a glass of water.

  'He deserves some sort of a thank you from your hotel.'

  'It's sort of hard to believe that with everything that went on last night, you're just carrying on as normal round here. I think people feel, well, they want to see some sort of acknowledgment, you know,' his wife interjected, coolly.

  'Well, I will personally make sure he and his wife get nothing but the best attention from our staff, you can be assured of that, Sir.'

  'Like you assured me you were personally going to find the wife.' Missy squeezed Jason's arm and gave him what might have been either a reproachful look or a coquettish invitation to an afternoon in bed. It was hard to tell.

  'I hear you, loud and clear.' This was what he'd been taught. Make sure they know you have heard them, then hopefully they'll fuck off.

  'Did you know the old lady's got Alzheimer's?' said Missy.

  'Oh really?' said Steve. 'I didn't know that.' The stupid old git! To have brought his wife to their resort when he knew she was likely to do a runner at any moment! Why hadn't he been told?

  'So you'll give them some sort of recognition then, a party or a gathering?' the wife went on.

  'I was planning to have a party actually, after dinner tonight,' he said, as the American couple walked off, the man with a hand on his wife's bare arse. It was only when she turned around to walk off that it become apparent she was wearing nothing more than a thong.

  Steve looked at Benjamin. Benjamin grinned, then apologized.

  27

  AFTER LUNCH AT THE BAR and an afternoon with his eyes closed, lying by the pool, the events of the night seemed unreal. Jan was uncomfortable but too weary to do anything about it. He had exhausted himself. His head stuck to the canvas cover of the lounger mattress. He moved it left and right feeling the sun strike him with great golden slaps whichever way he turned. He saw, again, George and Dorothy standing together on Charlotte's porch.

  'I don't understand anything,' he said to hims
elf, 'except that everyone seems closer to knowing anything than I am.' He sat forwards on his chair, dropping his feet into the flip-flop shoes that were either side of him. He watched the beads of sweat run across his chest and down the central canal, ending as a small pool in his belly button.

  Opposite him, a Chinese woman was spreading a towel on to a vacant sun lounger. He had not seen her before. She was wearing a structured black swimming costume. Before she sat down she stood with a hair clip between her teeth, pulling her shoulder-length black hair back from her face to fix it in a ponytail. She bent forwards like an athlete, straight from the waist, and took a paperback from her rather ostentatious handbag; it had an unwieldy gold logo dangling from the zipper, large enough to cover half of the face of the bag and yet when it fell over, she looked down but did not move to stand it back up. Reclining, she raised one knee, and felt for her sunglasses, which were, like her bag, black and gold. Before she put them on, she noticed something and went to wipe them on the end of her towel and as she did so, she saw him looking at her and she gave him a broad smile, showing some teeth.

  He went for a swim, principally so that he could look at her without being seen. His head dipped in and out of the water. With each glimpse, his feeling grew that there was something Hollywood about her. Her smile had made him think of the screen goddesses captured on the newsreels he'd seen as a child in the cinema at Brugge. They would raise a hand to the crowds from the steps of a steam train—polite, patient, sure of themselves.

  Back on his lounger, he saw that Annemieke had left the Jacuzzi and gone off to their room for a late-afternoon siesta. She had complained all morning about her fatigue. She wanted to be fresh for supper. She didn't want to get too much sun. She was determined to look after herself this holiday, she said.

  With his eyes closed, he was in a void. His senses were unoccupied but his mind wandered after them, as if manufacturing dreams, patching memories together. In them, he was a free man, no wife, no children, no history, just himself. He rounded a corner on a summer's evening in a big city, Brussels, Paris, London, even New York, and came upon himself and the Chinese woman together at an outside table, near a noisy kitchen extractor unit on the wall outside. He felt weightless, he was all heightened perception. He could dance with his feet planted, choose to say anything, choose truth or choose concealment. Becoming strange to himself was pure joy; it was she who owned the new person. Her regard created him. If she liked what she saw then he would live. His heart lurched suddenly like a ship banging into a harbour wall. The two of them were squeezed between other couples, tables askew on cobbles. Elbows were pressing down to preserve some sort of balance between the faces that confronted each other. He saw people drinking things they didn't mean to (it was Saturday night), and saying things they couldn't afford (it was late). He wished he hadn't taken notice of them. It was their eyes now through which he saw himself, the middle-aged stoic with a stern face strung out on a new addiction, high on his self-created problem.