Touch (23 page)

‘And where are you from?'

‘From the UK.'

‘Ah, from the UK! That is good! Eeh!'

Miles turns to the smallest girl.

‘And what is your name?'

The little girl is too shy to speak and her mother chuckles, touching her cheek with the back of her hands, a graceful movement that sways through her whole body.

‘She is called Angel!'

They bid farewell and part there on the pavement. Miles crosses the road to the Shangri-La and the woman walks slowly into the night, into the fuming city. When Miles reaches his room, he sees that he's been crying.

 
* * *

 
Carol looks up from the cursor where it blinks on the screen. The moon is enlarged, almost orange, and misshapen now. The gas pipes gleam on the hillside, bleached of colour, a hundred open mouths gulping the night. The scar in the earth is a deep shadow across the contour of the hill.

Tonight she misses Miles. She hasn't lit the fire, but the central heating is at work, quietly filling the house with heat. The fridge hums in the kitchen and when her fingers press the light switches in the girls' bedrooms the bulbs brighten at once. She runs her fingers over their old CDs. Boy bands. 
Take That. Wham
. How they'd scorn them now! They've out-grown everything left behind here. Carol thumbs their school textbooks lined neatly on a shelf. She opens the wardrobes to find a single tee shirt with George Michael's picture on it swaying from a hanger.

When she looks from the window there is a fox on the lawn, crouching in the light cast from the dining-room window. When she looks again the fox is gone, if it ever existed. She imagines the dark pupil of its eye, the way it watches the moon to hunt by without any knowledge of what's to come, how it will die or why.

Carol pulls the curtains closed and runs the bath, watching the bubbles she has made there gather through the steam. She undresses, touching the faint silver stretch marks on her belly with surprise. Then she steps into the almost unbearably hot water and lets herself sink, inch by inch, until only her nipples with their dark aureoles break the surface.

 
* * *

 
It is five-thirty in the evening. Shadows have lengthened, termite mounds on the open land have taken on a deep ochre hue and the sun is mild, like autumnal light back home. The woman with the baby is sprawled asleep on the pavement in her black wrap and soiled red blouse. The baby is asleep too, not cradled in her arms in the shelter of the spiked fence, not tied to her with a cloth, but lying on the bare tarmac between its mother and the road where cars poison the air. Saliva glues its face to the tarmac. Pedestrians step over them. They neither pause nor look down.

 
* * *

 
Surgical biopsy involves removal of all or part of a breast lump
for microscopic examination to determine whether cancer is
present. When an excisional biopsy is performed, the entire mass is
removed, along with a surrounding margin of normal-appearing
breast tissue. This procedure is usually done with local anesthesia. 
Sometimes the surgical biopsy is preceded by a procedure to mark
the area in the breast that needs to be excised. Using breast X-rays
or ultrasound, a radiologist places a sterile, thin wire into the lump
so that the surgeon can excise the correct tissue. When an incisional
biopsy is done, the same procedure is used, but only part of the
lump is removed. After the biopsy specimen is obtained, a pathologist will analyse it and prepare a report documenting the findings.

 
* * *

 
The last consignment of computers has been loaded and Miles is in the office with Agnes, checking through the final paperwork. The lights blink, fail, re-ignite as the generator cuts in from the basement. A puff of smoke drifts past the window. There is load-shedding on the national grid so they have electricity one day – if they're lucky – and none the next. He notices a dark scar on Agnes' arm and wants to ask her how she got it, but a personal question is unthinkable. He asks her to re-confirm his flight for tomorrow. He sends Carol a quick email to say he'll be home soon. He's using web mail and sometimes he forgets to save a copy of his own messages. He wonders how many have gone astray. What happens to lost emails? He imagines them shrivelling like salted slugs.

He thinks about his garden, the rows of bean canes, the line of beetroot he needs to pull, the half dozen pumpkins, the mess in the shed he promised to sort out. When he goes out for lunch the boda-boda drivers wave as usual and he dismisses them as usual. He thinks about Carol back there in the cold. Here, the sun is almost overhead. Its heat is brutal on his thinning scalp. He's left his bush hat in the hotel and walks in shadow as much as possible. When he nears the café, a small boy approaches him with his hand held out. Miles has no change. He stoops down to the boy.

‘Wait for me and I will bring change.'

The boy looks at him blankly. Maybe he doesn't know what change is. Maybe he doesn't understand Miles' northern English accent. Maybe he doesn't speak English. Miles tries again.

‘Wait here. I will bring money.'

The boy holds his hand out pleadingly. As he steps into the gloom, Miles hears him say in perfect English.

‘But I am hungry
now
.'

He is greeted by the waitress like an old friend.
Hello, how
are you?
The girls leaning against the tall glass dispensers of coffee beans smile welcomingly. He orders coffee and a sandwich, thumbing through the
New Vision
. When he emerges to find the boy, he has gone.
But I am hungry now
. The logic of this is cruel. It is a whip. A sjambok of impeccable consequence.
Hungry now
. Of course. Why should he wait when the muzungu is so rich? But was it safe to give the boy a thousand-shilling note? Wouldn't he have been set on by older boys, by the desperate men that lurked on the wasteland, drunk on waragi? And where was God in all this? Where was his light?

Only the sun cauterising his scalp tells Miles how long he's been standing in the road with sun cream stinging his eyes. A marabou stork lands a few yards away. Between its shoulder blades is a knob of red flesh, like an exposed organ. Its wedged beak is huge and efficient. He watches it step away with the gait of a bird born to marshes and reed beds, delicately lifting its feet from the water and replacing them on the burning pavement.

 
* * *

 
Carol has told Miles nothing. She has an appointment at the hospital. Oncology. Such a cold sound in that word, like water congealing to ice. Maddy had given her a funny look when she asked for the morning off, but she'd said nothing. Carol's fingers stray to her breast as she watches the bowed heads of the children in her class. A first-form group. They're watching her warily, wondering what has happened to their teacher. Yesterday she let herself go and yelled at them when they were noisy. It was as shocking as if she'd smashed a window.

That night she sits looking into the garden. The moon is hidden beyond slow clouds. They drift clear to show its decayed remnant above the rooftops. The orange bellies of pumpkins lie distended in their beds.

Carol wonders what Miles will be like when he gets home this time. He's distant after a trip, incommunicative for days after the first kiss and the little presents. The coffee beans and packets of tea, the copper or bone bracelets and earrings he brings her. She remembers Zanzibar, still there as she imagines it, washed in sultry, clove-scented heat. At least Miles has his work, in which he believes. She wonders what he sees out there, but she is gifted with imagination. She doesn't need to know. Once she'd looked into his sketchbooks and seen the things he'd sometimes tried to tell her about after a glass of wine, but couldn't. Sometimes she finds him staring through the French windows at dusk gathering in the garden. Once she found him sobbing at his desk. For no reason, he said. And not to worry, these things just come over you when you're tired.

One day, she thinks, he won't make it home to ordinary things: to autumn, to jobs in the garden, their village decorated with Christmas lights. Or home to the kitchen table where they sit and share breakfast and talk and drink coffee. Sometimes she reaches out to touch him in bed and he turns away. Then they are like those marble statues that lie side by side on medieval tombs, pretending to sleep through death.

 
* * *

 
At Entebbe, the toilet floor is swimming in piss. The attendant is pushing a yellow wave from side to side with his mop, but the drains are blocked. Miles tiptoes through the flood and stands before the urinal, his bag slung over his shoulder. He has learned not to be squeamish. Such things are all in a day's work. A cloudy tide gurgles, rising and falling in the porcelain. It rises again, higher this time, threatening to spill over. Miles imagines an aquifer of rancid piss welling from below the airport to engulf him. He zips up and retreats.

Miles sleeps on the flight from Entebbe to Schiphol. He wakes with a stiff neck, then dozes again. Each hour is unbearably slow. He thinks of the desert slipping away beneath the belly of the plane, of Libya, Sicily, Italy, the Alps, then France. The aircrew pad about the cabin, smiling ghosts of the air-conditioned atmosphere. They offer water in foil tubs, headphones, an extra blanket, formula milk to the woman with the crying baby.

It's a direct flight, shaving a couple of hours off the journey. Once he spent seven hours at Nairobi waiting for a connection. Now even the hour-and-a-half at Schiphol is unbearable when home is so close. It's seven o'clock Dutch time, six am at home. He'll get in to Manchester at seven-thirty, local time, and Carol will be waiting for him, since it's a Saturday. She'll ask him if it was a good trip and he'll say yes, fine. It was fine. A good trip. He'll remember how much he loves her and ask if she's ok and enquire about the girls. They'll argue about who should drive, because he's had a long flight and she's tired after a week of teaching and preparing lessons and being alone. He'll drive, as he always does, because he feels wide awake by the time the plane touches down.

On the last leg of the flight he dozes most of the way, refusing the stodgy cheese roll and coffee served for breakfast. At last the Fokker jet is banking through clouds, its wing light dipping towards the moors, dark green fields, the motorway's necklace of amber beads. Miles feels the undercarriage bump as it falls open. Then the city appears, lit below them, still distant. Soon, a reservoir and stone villages as the plane arcs out again. Then suburbs, brick houses, a factory, a church and school. The plane circles, the land rises to meet them. The wheels touch with a thud, lift, thud again. They decelerate and the force of it shunts Miles forward in his seat. There is a collective sigh in the cabin, the click of seat belts as they taxi.

 
* * *

 
Carol watches her face in the mirror. Her eyes look tired and are ringed below with mauve like a pigeon's plumage. She's touched up her hair and put on a smart skirt. She remembers how much she's missed Miles and how familiar love is. She's made the bed up with clean sheets and planned a nice meal and a good bottle of wine because they need to talk now. She's even brought in logs from the store to fill the basket beside the fire, though she never usually bothers when he's away.

She rang the girls last night and has all the latest news: Emily's new job, Sarah's MA. She finds the car keys hanging just where they should be on the kitchen hooks and closes the front door behind her. The steering wheel is cold in her hands, but the car starts first time and she reverses into the road, which she knows she shouldn't do. She sees the village street dipping down ahead, its rows of grey stone houses still asleep apart from one grey feather of smoke. A boy is pushing newspapers into letterboxes. Leaves fall into the road from the copper beech in the doctor's garden. Dawn light rises behind the hill, showing the stack of yellow pipes, the scar that diggers have gouged into the earth. Stone walls spider across the fells, weighing down the fields. She sees the sky that holds Miles safe, incandescent above the morning sun. She changes gear, feeling cogs grind then mesh, turgid with cold. The house shrinks in her mirrors, its windows on fire under the faint ruin of the moon.

The old man sits on the steps of the white-painted church smoking his first cigarette of the day. His wife has been sick. She can't stand the smell of tobacco smoke in the house any more. Slow light flickers over the surface of the harbour. The blue-and-yellow-painted fishing boats are motionless, hardly moving because the sea is hardly moving. There is still a faint image of last night's moon settling beyond hills of ochre rock with their stubble of pines. The sky is pale, the air thickening under the rising sun. The old man smokes, occasionally tugging at the peak of his faded denim cap. The sun heats the town, soaking into the terracotta roofs, raising a stink of rotting fish.

A boy comes along the narrow street carrying a long loaf of bread under his arm. He wears a blue-and-white-striped tee shirt, khaki shorts and sandals. The old man watches the boy's smooth brown legs go by, noticing the dimple of paler skin behind his knees. It could have been himself sixty-odd years ago.

A large dog comes out from the butcher's yard, pulling its chain, and the boy stops to stroke its mangy coat. The dog is old and useless. Joaquim should have put it down years ago. But he's soft, for a butcher. The boy skips on and the old man lets his eyes rest on the sea again, narrowing them against its glare. His father and brothers had all been fishermen, but he'd never trusted the sea. And he'd made sure he never had to, working in the quarry, blasting back the hillside to make new roads. He'd kept his feet on the land, never even learned to swim. He dips his head then spits in the direction of the dog that still tugs at its chain.

The last apartments to be built in the town are perched on the hillside behind the church, set on platforms cut out from the rock. The new road leads the way and the apartments follow. Now families from Barcelona come out for weekends in Japanese four-by-fours that are too big for the old streets. They live life to a different rhythm, staying up all night to party in the new night clubs and discos along the bay, then lying in bed all morning, squandering the first cool of the day. They're rich and they know nothing of struggle – not as he has known it.

The old man takes a last drag of the cigarette and pinches it out between his thumb and finger. A lifetime working with stone has calloused them so that he doesn't even feel the heat. He stands up slowly, stiff from sitting so long on cold stone. He pushes back the denim cap to scratch his temple. When he lifts the lid of the waste bin to throw in the spent cigarette there's a stink of mackerel heads and sardines. Everything decays quickly here; everything is consumed by the sun.

 
The next day, the old man takes up the same position, easing himself onto the church steps. He thinks of the statue of Christ they've erected inside, that sly smile playing across his bronze face. In his day, they'd smashed the faces of plaster saints with their rifle butts. But no one talks about that time now, even though there'd been fighting all the way from here to Figuères. No one would talk about it, and maybe that was for the best. Even the street signs are in Catalan since Franco died. When the Republic had been crushed and the foreign volunteers gone home, he and his comrades had got out, running over the border into France. Only when things had eased had they drifted back, one by one to their villages. Or they never returned. Those that did, like him, found work and kept their heads down. They kept silence like a vow. His brothers had stayed with the sea, always, but he'd been different, felt and seen something else in the life he wanted. He'd always hankered for land – a piece of his own land. But that had never been.

The roofs of the town are made of ridged clay tiles and from his vantage point at the church they fall away in rows to the quayside. The old man lights up his one cigarette of the day, watching swifts flicker out from under the eaves on scimitar wings. They're feeding on invisible insect swarms and he hears their young chittering with hunger. He found one dead in the street once, its feathers iridescent, its legs stumpy and wasted. That was the only time the swifts touched down. When they fell, too exhausted to fly on, and died where they lay. He'd heard that they even made love in the air. Their whole lives were spent on the wing between Spain and Africa.

He thought of Lisa, that first time, before the fighting. The little stone barn in the valley that led down to vineyards above the next bay. Her eyes wide, the black dress almost hiding her in the gloom. And the heat, the sudden blush of sweat as he touched her. Touched her breasts and buried his face in her hair. The way she'd pushed him away then pulled him into her fiercely, biting his shoulder and tearing at his shirt. Now their daughters were married and had moved away to the city. Lisa has grown old, troubled by angina, hobbling down to the shops on her arthritic hip. But she won't let him help her prepare meals or clean the house, even though he wants to. It isn't his place. It hurts him to think that the girl he loved has grown old. He'd wanted to die first, for her to live forever. Forever young. Maybe she would. Maybe that's what the priests – those liars – meant by heaven.

The boy comes along the street, wearing the same clothes, carrying a bottle of Vichy water and a loaf of bread. The dog paddles out on its short length of chain and the boy holds out his hand to be licked. He pats the dog's head and the dog nuzzles him. Strange. Nobody had made much of that dog for years, and now here's this boy stroking it. Making a fuss. Pablo, Joaquim the butcher's dog: grown fat and decrepit on scraps. Not a bad life for a dog. The old man watches the boy walk away with jerky, impulsive steps, the way a young lamb or calf walks. The boy is distracted for a moment by a swallow, looking up and shading his eyes at its steel-blue flash from under the eaves. The old man catches his eye and smiles. For a moment the boy seems confused, then he too smiles and walks on.

The next day, the same. But the old man calls across to the boy in Catalan as he goes by.

‘Good morning dog-boy!'

The boy looks startled, raising a hand to scratch his nose, almost dropping the loaf. He replies in Castilian. A city boy. His parents are probably loaded.

‘
Buenos dias!
'

The old man grins and points to the dog that still gazes after the boy in the street. He speaks in the boy's own language.

‘You've made a friend for life there boy! Old Pedro's never had so much fuss made of him.'

The boy shrugs, drawing up his shoulders, a fluid gesture of defiance.

‘He's just an old dog. It's ok.'

He says it in a matter of fact manner, looks directly into his eyes, and the old man rocks back uneasily under his gaze. It's as if the boy lives in a world where all things are equal. An old dog, an old man, what's the difference? The boy walks on, holding his shoulders just a little higher.

 
The next day the old man waits but the boy doesn't come. He smokes two cigarettes for once, tugs at his cap, watches the dog wander out on its leash and sniff at passers by. But the boy is nowhere to be seen. The sea glitters. The town heats up like iron in a forge. Swifts scream over the rooftops and a hawk appears briefly, hovering over the scrubland above the town. The boy doesn't come and the old man sits in the reek of fish, watching the sea, thinking of Christ's mocking smile in the cool darkness of the church behind him.

He goes back home and sits in the shady kitchen of their house, watching Lisa prepare the lunch. She's making tomato bread and there's a strong scent of basil and raw garlic. Lisa puts the dish down on the table and watches him slyly.

‘You're quiet today. Have the seagulls taken out your soul in the night?'

‘Not the seagulls.'

She turns away, rubbing garlic over the flat loaf.

‘It was you, my sweet.'

The old man speaks hoarsely, his voice thickened by the garlic, by his wife's sudden alertness to him.

‘You tore my mind away and threw it to the sea!'

He rises and kisses her behind the ear where her grey hair is pinned into a bun. Lisa grins, her laughter rusty as an old key turning.

‘That'll be the day old man. The day I stop your dreams!'

But he's already half absent, examining his fingers spread out on the tabletop. All that banter! It's just words. He throws them out like ashes from a volcano. And they don't amount to much in the end. Just ashes, where there'd once been fire.

They eat lunch slowly, sipping the weak red wine he's brought from the bodega. The sea seethes beyond slatted shutters, closed against the sun. A breeze billows in the net curtains, as if an invisible intruder is at the window. Then he takes a siesta, sleeping beside his wife as sun bakes the town.

 
The next day the boy is there, as usual, trotting along the street to where the dog hangs out its tongue. The old man greets him with narrowed eyes. Bright shears of sun flicker over the bay.

‘
Hola!
'

The boy looks up from patting the dog. A string of saliva hangs from its muzzle, swaying and gleaming in the sun.

‘
Hola
.'

The boy is already almost past him.

‘Hey, what's the big hurry?'

The old man pinches out the cigarette stub and the boy comes to a halt, watching wide-eyed.

‘Doesn't that hurt?'

‘Hurt?'

The old man laughs, rubbing at his stubble.

‘I've got hands like iron, boy. Feel them!'

He holds out his hands and the boy touches his fingertips.

‘What happened to them?'

‘What happened to my hands? Why work, boy, work!'

He scuffles his feet in the rope espadrilles and fixes the boy with a hard stare.

‘I wasn't much older than you when I started work at the quarry. See those villas up there?'

He gestures behind the church and the boy shades his eyes to where the white apartments glare.

‘I helped cut those out of the hillside. My God, in my time I must have lifted a mountain and put it down again!'

The boy clutches the loaf, anxious to leave. But he's an inquisitive boy.

‘How did you get it out?'

‘How? Dynamite and sweat! Phoof!'

The old man blows out his breath and explodes his palms together.

‘Dynamite, then picks and shovels and bare hands.'

The boy nods and walks on, no longer curious.

‘
Adios!
'

‘
Adios
, dog-boy!'

The old man watches him go. Heat shimmers on the hills and blue shadows bloom under juniper bushes and clumps of prickly pear.

 
Dynamite. First they drilled a line of holes at the cliff edge and then dropped in the charges, packing them so that the explosion would force the rock outward. Then the fuses were laid and the red flags raised. When the switch was thrown a line of dust jumped at the sky and then a whole slab of the limestone would shear away, hanging for a moment as if it had abandoned God's time to fall into human time. Into its fever of change. Then the report of the explosion would bound over the bay, echoing back from the mountains and the walls of the ruined monastery opposite.

The old man feels in his pocket for a match. They should have dealt with the fascists in the same way. Those bastards. They should have dynamited them off the land. But his brothers had been fishermen, not interested in politics. They understood only the sea, the way it tugged at their nets. The way the sun rose from it, then fell back into it each day. The way it drew its shoals towards their boat each night to feed them or half-feed them. The way it kept them in poverty. The old man strolls down to the harbour, smoking and greeting people as he goes. He's smoking too much these days.

 
Joaquim's daughter goes by on her moped waving at him with her bare arm, her bathing costume rolled up in a towel between her legs. There are at least three fascists he knows of in the town. Not just people who'd believed, but paid-up fascists who'd carried a gun. They'd kicked over the traces pretty quickly when Franco died. Then Juan Carlos had come back. What a joke! It'd taken a socialist government to give them a king! But he's too old to heat up those grudges now.

He goes into a bar and orders pastis, knocking it back in one jerk of his arm. The peasants had always been unreliable. Treacherous. Never trust a peasant. A communist school-teacher from Montpellier had told him that when they'd gone on the run. He could still speak good French after those years over the border. He'd sent Lisa money from his job there, labouring on the roads. Somehow she'd made ends meet, raised their first daughter and waited for his return. And she's still waiting. Waiting for him to come back to her. An exile can come home, but he can never return. The old man has a child by a woman in France that Lisa knows nothing about. 
Françoise
. Another daughter. A baby girl with creamy skin, chubby hands and dimpled knees. He remembers coils of blonde hair. But he hasn't seen her in over fifty years. These things happen. In wartime anything can happen. He wonders if she has kids of her own by now. Grandchildren. Unlike Lisa, she has never aged. And he knows that's a lie, too.

The pastis has cleared the old man's head. He walks out of the village to the headland where the tourists are crowded onto the pebble beach. He walks slowly now, careful of the youngsters on mopeds who race up the street. When they'd played here as kids there had been hardly any visitors. Then the villagers had grown wine, hewn stone, harvested the sea. And no one in the outside world had really cared. Now the new roads he'd helped to build had opened up the whole coastline. There was a new marina, yachts, a sailing club for the smart set from Barcelona. People in the town made money, whereas in the old days they'd just got by, or starved.

Here on a promontory of rock there's a diving board set up so that swimmers can launch themselves into the sea. The beach is full of tourists: mothers with pale, stretch-marked flesh, fathers barking at their kids, beautiful suntanned girls who preen in the water, calling to young men who swim around them, vying for their attention. Further out, there are snorkellers, their masked faces pressed in the water, staring down into the depths of the sea. He notices the boy climbing the iron ladder. Six steps. He stands for a moment, water streaming from his brown skin. Then he dives in, clean as a harpoon.