Kiss Me First (8 page)

I asked them whether they had been here the previous summer. They said yes, so I showed them the photo. They consulted each other in a foreign language, and finally the man said that they did remember an English woman on her own who looked similar, but her hair was longer and they were pretty sure that her name wasn’t Tess. Something longer, beginning with S.

Of course, I had anticipated that Tess might have used a different name when she was out here. I asked them to remember any more details of her clothes or what she had said. They couldn’t but said they would tell me if anything came back to them. I won’t get too excited, though. More evidence is needed.

Afterwards, I went back to my mattress under the tree, and had just dozed off when I felt a little tug on my hand. It was Milo. He said, ‘Annie says, do you want to come with us?’ Over at the van, Annie had slid the back door shut and was in the driver’s seat. She said she was going into the main town to go to the bank, and thought I might like to come along and get some food.

‘A woman can’t live on biscuits alone,’ she said.

‘Will there be an Internet cafe there?’ I asked.

‘Should think so,’ she said. ‘It’s a big tourist dump by the sea.’

I sat in the front with Milo; the baby was in the back. I’d been in a van before, when we moved mum’s furniture to the storage centre, but this was different. For a start it was ancient and the air inside was hot and unsavoury, like plastic, milk and old socks baking in an oven. The floor was thick with books, leaflets and CDs, and the windows were plastered with tatty, bright stickers. There was a strange furry thing dangling from the mirror, and when Milo saw me inspecting it he told me it was the foot of his pet rabbit.

‘It was a natural death,’ said Annie, as she wrenched the steering wheel with what seemed like a huge amount of effort. The van made worrying noises from deep inside, like the sound of mum clearing her throat in the morning.

As we began crawling down the bumpy path, Annie said, ‘So, what’s the deal with this friend you’re looking for?’

I had already given Annie the story once, of course, when I had shown her Tess’s photo on the first day, but started reciting again how I was looking for an old friend who I believed was still in the area. She cut me off.

‘No, I know that you’re looking for her. But why?’ She glanced over at me with a sly little smile. ‘Do you love her?’

When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘It’s OK if you do, you know.’

I thought it best not to dignify her question with a response, so I said nothing and looked out of the window. It worked, and she changed the subject, offering up information about herself. Although I wasn’t particularly interested, when I realized I didn’t have to say anything back I relaxed a bit, and there was something quite soothing about looking at the scenery and the lilt of her voice as we drove along.

Her American accent reminded me of Adrian, and when I closed my eyes I was taken back to his podcasts; although, of course, what Annie was saying was not nearly as interesting. She talked about her life back in Connecticut, where she had a small business making handmade wooden furniture and shared a house with another single mother, and about Milo’s father. She had ‘given him the heave-ho’ when Milo was two, but he saw his son sporadically.

‘Bet you’re wondering about the little one, huh?’ she said, gesturing to the baby strapped to a seat in the back, although I hadn’t been. She said that she had wanted another baby but didn’t want the hassle of a man, so had had a ‘well-timed screw’ with a stranger. She confided that she sometimes worried about whether the children would be damaged by not having a father figure in their lives.

‘I don’t think fathers are that important,’ I said.

‘Oh, really?’ she said.

I told her that I had never known my father, that he had disappeared when my mum was still pregnant and it hadn’t done me any harm at all. Annie made a ‘hmm’ noise, and then said, ‘Did your mum mind not having a partner?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘We had each other. She always said she didn’t need anything else as long as she had me.’

Annie asked me about my father, and I told her what I knew: that he used to work in Ireland selling cars, that his dream was to own a racehorse and that he had elegant hands, like mine.

As we drove, I noticed the landscape changing. Now we were out of the hilly area and onto level ground, the trees had been replaced by large low tents made out of tatty white plastic, one following on from another so that they seemed to form one never-ending structure. I asked Annie what they were, and she said they were greenhouses, growing salad for supermarkets.

‘It’s where your tomatoes come from,’ she said. I could have told her that I didn’t eat tomatoes, but I didn’t.

When Annie stopped the van for Milo to have a pee I got a closer look at the greenhouses. The plastic was opaque but you could see shadows inside, and in places the sheets were torn or had come away from the structure so you could glimpse behind. I saw endless rows of leaves and shapes of black men, stooped amongst the greenery. It must have been unbearably hot in there. What was especially noticeable was the silence. The manual labour sites I’ve passed before are always quite noisy, but there I could hear no sounds of voices or music, just the soft hiss of the water sprinklers. Annie had told me that there was a drought in the area – the river near the commune had almost dried up – so it seemed odd that these greenhouses were using up so much water. Immoral, almost.

Back in the van, Annie explained that the workers were African, mostly illegal immigrants. The coast on this part of Spain was almost the nearest part of Europe to Africa, she said, and the immigrants would get on boats and cross over secretly at night in search of a better life. Some would venture further into Europe but most stayed here, working in the greenhouses, because they had no papers.

After an hour and fifteen minutes we reached the town. Annie parked crookedly by the road and said we should meet back there in an hour, and then she took the children off with her to the bank. I walked in what felt like the direction of the town centre. It was a sprawling, dusty place, with low-level buildings, and seemed oddly quiet and deserted. I found a sign with a picture of waves on it, which I took to be the sea, and followed it. Towards the beach the buildings grew in height, which seemed wrong to me, like tall people standing at the front of a crowd and blocking the view for everyone behind.

The streets were busy nearer the seafront, full of holidaymakers. They couldn’t have looked more different from the people in the commune. Their clothes were normal, shorts and vests, and they were either very white, very pink, or overly tanned, but not in a way that made them look more attractive. People were sitting at tables outside cafes drinking beer, although it was only 4.30 p.m. Shops sold cheap plastic beach equipment and blared out pop music. One, oddly enough, was full of toasters and microwaves. All the signs on the shops and restaurants were in English, and the rows of newspapers outside the shops were English, too.

I don’t know whether I was just relieved to be out of the commune, but I found it all quite pleasant. There was a breeze coming in from the sea, carrying on it a comforting blend of smells – chips, suntan lotion – and everyone looked familiar, like the people in Tesco Extra, only happier and more relaxed.

After a few minutes wandering around, I found an Internet cafe. I paid two euros and logged on. At the terminal next to mine, a hugely fat woman with a breathing problem was looking at pictures of lawnmowers on eBay. First, I went to Facebook, but when I put in my details found that I had forgotten my password; it had been supplanted in my head by Tess’s. It took three tries to remember that it was mum’s second favourite TV programme,
inspectormorse
.

Once in, the scroll of status updates on my page had so little meaning to me they might as well have been in Russian. Even the faces and the names of my ‘friends’ seemed unfamiliar; even when I used to see them in person at school I didn’t really know them, and now they might as well have been total strangers. Tash, Emma, Karen – random names affixed to random silly young girls, all liking this, linking to that, getting excited about something or other.

I logged out and checked my email. Fourteen messages, but they were all spam.

After that, I just sat there, staring at the Google toolbar on the screen. I had spent days thinking about getting online, but now that I was, I couldn’t think what to do. I could hardly start a game of Warcraft; even if I remembered my login details after all this time, I only had forty-eight minutes before I had to meet Annie back at the van, barely enough time to get my avatar into his armour. I had a fanciful image of him being uncooperative and bolshie, hurt after all my months of neglect, refusing to put his arms into his chain-mail vest, letting the sword fall from his fingers when I placed it there.

I logged off, with seventeen minutes still remaining on my time. Next to the Internet place was a small supermarket, and I went in. Inside it was freezing cold and goosebumps sprang up on my arms. It was a bit like a Londis, except half of the shop was taken up with alcohol. I was worried all the products would be in Spanish, or strange foreign food, but most were English, things I recognized, like Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Walkers Crisps. I bought three family sized bags of crisps and two packets of Hobnobs.

After the shopping I still had almost half an hour to go before meeting Annie, so on impulse I decided to have a waffle in a cafe, attracted by the large colour photographs of the food displayed outside. The waitress spoke English. On the table next to me was an old man in a wheelchair, being fed what looked like a sausage sandwich by a woman of his age. It made me wonder whether mum and I should have made more of an effort to have a holiday in the final years. The subject had come up, but we decided that it would be too complicated, travelling with all the equipment and all the lifting. Seeing this couple beside me, however, made me think that it could have been possible. We wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere hot like Spain, because MS had made mum intolerant to heat, but perhaps we could have tried Cornwall. There was a series she liked that was filmed in a village there, and she had always wanted to visit it.

At 5.30 p.m. I met Annie at the van and we drove back. Arriving into the commune car park, I heard music coming from a van I didn’t recognize: new arrivals. I asked Annie to let me out and went over to them. The door was open, and a group of young men were lounging around inside, a mass of brown, hairy legs. They were foreign – Italian, I think – and, although they had what I think of as the ‘commune look’ – messy hair and bare chests and wooden bead necklaces – they didn’t yet have the mouldy appearance that the others here have. I gave them my Tess story and showed her picture. They gathered around to peer at it. One of them then said, ‘Ah, yes, Luigi remembers her, don’t you, Luigi?’ and then did a sort of sideways kick aimed at his friend next to him on the settee. They all started laughing, and one of them said something in Italian I didn’t understand and swivelled his hands in what I suspect was a rude gesture. I had to question them further, quite sternly, to ascertain that no, they did not know Tess, but were simply having a joke.

I noticed that they were drinking wine from a bottle and so, as I left, I informed them that the commune was alcohol-free.

I spent the rest of the evening under the tree, then had some food and a wash with my Wet Wipes. Now it’s 9.46 p.m. and I’m back in the tent. Outside, the sound of drumming has stopped, and the insects have taken over.

Embarking on Project Tess, it didn’t take me long to realize that if we were ever going to get the job done I would have to take matters into my own hands. Over the next few days, she forwarded to me seemingly random email exchanges, photographs and diary entries, with no supporting information or context attached. It was like someone packing for a holiday by sticking their hand in their wardrobe, pulling out the first thing their fingers touched and flinging it into a suitcase. There was no system to it at all.

Just one example: early on, she sent me a photo of herself and another woman, labelled
Me and Debbie
. But there was no context – when the photograph was taken, who ‘Debbie’ was, the history of their relationship – without which the photo was near to useless. And, when she did explain things, they often didn’t make sense. For instance, on questioning, Tess revealed that she and this Debbie had been close friends for a while until, out walking one day, Debbie had neglected to stop and stroke a cat they passed on the street. Tess seemed to think that this was sufficient cause to terminate an otherwise good friendship. As I say, one’s natural presumption is that people do things for a reason, that there’s consideration and meaning behind their actions, but with Tess, more often than not there wasn’t.

Furthermore, the information she provided was riddled with inconsistencies. The Grievous/Godless Mary question was only the start of it. (It turned out to be Godless.) She seemed hazy on details, as if they didn’t matter.
Oh, sometime in the summer
, she’d say;
Jim Something
. Part of it was her ‘flaky’ personality; part, I suspected, her condition. I had done some research into bipolar disorder and depleted memory was a common symptom. It was exacerbated by drugs; in Tess’s case, lithium.
Energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded
, I read. I resolved to contain my irritation, and take control of the situation.

I made up a spreadsheet of what I would need from her, and in what order. The first request was for basic practical information: full names, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth of herself and her family, plus bank-account details and other things of that sort.

A fairly simple request, you’ll agree. But even this she seemed to find difficult. For instance, she claimed to not understand the need for her National Insurance number –
my brother’s hardly going to ask for it, is he?
– and then, when I pressed her, she said that she didn’t know it and didn’t know where to find the information. To speed things up I told her to phone the tax office. When a day had passed and she hadn’t done it, I phoned them up, pretending to be her, and got it myself.