In search of beaches. Will report back with detailed analysis of several of the locations discussed above. dimanche, le 25 avril
We took a holiday every year when I was young. Never anywhere too exotic, and never with my father. He claimed exhaustion from his business, until he retired and couldn’t use the excuse any longer. By the last year of school, my best friend was one of my male cousins. We have the same coloring, the same small sharp features and freckles. People think we are twins. We still acted like children, taunting and hitting each other. But that year there had been a new undercurrent of tension: we started to watch one another cautiously, for signs that one of us knew something the other didn’t.
So, our mothers take all the kids on holiday together. We drive to Brighton. I’ve never been so far south. And six of us in the car, it’s cramped, the journey feels a lot longer than it must have been. My mother’s sister, my cousin’s mother, has brought a bag of cassette tapes to keep us entertained.
Her taste in music is nothing like ours, but thankfully nowhere as antique as Mum’s. We know all the lyrics to her tapes, and we sing loudly, car windows down. It’s a sunny day. We think the holiday will be perfect.
When we get there, the beach is horrible, wet and windy. There’s nothing to do for three days. The mothers stay in and watch telly; we kids go out looking for an amusement arcade. I beat all comers at air hockey until no one will play me any longer. We spend all of our money on cotton candy, penny arcades, and chips.
I come back to the hotel, the mothers are still watching television. My cousin is in the bathroom. He’s singing, obviously unaware that the echo that makes singing in the shower sound so good also means everyone outside can hear him. He’s singing a Madonna song, and the frankly sexual lyrics-not to mention his falsetto-disturb me somewhat. Without meaning to, I can imagine him imitating the dancers in the video.
The other thing I realize is only that morning I was in the shower too, while everyone sat inside poring over street maps and the papers, and I was singing the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.” mardi, le 27 avril
I’m staying in a hotel right on a river in Spain; the river goes only a few miles until it reaches the sea. I take a walk by myself. Not far from the hotel-the spring is very warm and sunny, and I am distracted by the flowers. The air smells drier and cleaner here than in the UK.
My camera is low on batteries, but I manage to take pictures of some flowers. Violet bursts of bougainvillea, orange starburst-shaped blooms I’ve never seen, tiny pink flowers in a smooth-trunked tree’s branches.
There are more sidewalk cafes than anything else. I sit at one, in a green plastic chair under an umbrella emblazoned with the name of the local brew, sip a sangria and feel like an obvious tourist. Men who pass sometimes comment to me, more often things to each other. From what they say, it seems like they notice a woman’s hair before anything else.
Because I have worn the wrong shoes for any kind of walking, I have to turn back and go home early. But instead of retreading the same route along main roads, I loop through the cobble-paved back streets where white and yellow stucco crumbles off flat-faced buildings. There are two churches, their names spelled in gay tiles pressed into the plastered walls. I try to take a picture of one but the battery of the camera runs out. I could buy new ones, but I don’t know the word for “battery,” and am already acutely aware of my strangeness to the locals. The hotel is a cool refuge when I get back. jeudi, le 29 avril
So I’m sixteen, or close to it. One day my cousin and I are at a swimming pool, treading water by the ladder at the deep end. He has been asking about some girls I know. I am vaguely dismayed that his taste in women is running to the obvious-tall blondes and dark-haired girls with chests everyone stares at. Plenty of the boys have received favors from these girls, but they wouldn’t look at my cousin nor his geeky friends twice, and he knows it.
Our friendship is becoming uneasy. Because we are related, we can and do share everything. Because of our age, attraction is possible-but, obviously, off-limits. When the subject of sex does come up, being shy and clever as we are, we couch it in the most neutral terms possible.
“If I wasn’t your cousin, and didn’t know you, I’d probably be attracted to you.”
“Me too. If I wasn’t your cousin. And didn’t know you.” And we know what we mean. Then an awkward silence, usually followed by a simulated farting noise to bring things back to the mundane. These conversations foretell the sort of relationships I will have with men through university, a parade of pale, gentle boys who are too shy to admit their desire until they are too drunk to care. A lot like the few people I dated at school, really, but with better access to alcohol. Sometimes my cousin’s friends express an interest in me; he fends them off with protestations of my tomboyishness (“She would break you in half if she heard that”) or maturity (“She wouldn’t look twice at a child like you”). I was terribly mature; I’d even tossed a boy off in a cinema, don’t you know.
There are other things as well. We don’t know it for a year yet, but I’ll be going to university, my cousin won’t. His A levels were good, and he had offers, but he didn’t follow through and his mother didn’t press. He thinks he wants to be a Royal Marine or a mechanic. I think he’s crazy. A decade later he ends up working prep in a commercial kitchen.
I pull myself up the side of the pool and scramble out in the direction of our towels, grab them both, walk back to the water.
“Hey,” he says, a little louder than absolutely necessary. “You’re walking differently. Does that mean you’re not a virgin anymore?”
“Yes,” I say, straight-faced. He starts to get out of the pool, and I throw his towel in the water. This is how he knows I care about him.
He’s not sure whether I’m kidding or not, and doesn’t press for details. I prepare a fake story anyway, just in case. When his mum comes to collect us, we both sit in the back of the car, and he just whispers names.
“Marc?”
“No.” Marc was in my year, and taller than the rest of the boys. He also spits when he speaks without realizing it and follows me around too often.
“Justin?”
“No.” I have a crush on Justin; my cousin is the only person I’ve ever told; I hope he doesn’t tell anyone else. Before leaving for university, I will tell Justin all this in a letter, and he will never speak to me again.
He senses my discomfort. “Eric. Has to be.”
The joke candidate. “No way!” I say, but refrain from giving him a nipple-twister, because to do so would compromise the new air of maturity this lie has conferred.
It doesn’t matter much anyway. Within a month it happens for real, with my cousin’s best friend. While I flinched, I didn’t make a noise. And as far as I can tell, my gait was no different the day after than it was the day before. vendredi, le 30 avril
I fly east, to Italy, to meet friends. The plane is small and crowded and the heavily made-up flight attendant screams at a child who keeps running up and down the aisle, even when the plane is taking off and landing. It’s not clear whom he belongs to; his parents are making no effort to stop him.
The first thing I do after setting my bags in the cool tile hallway is go to check e-mail. And there’s a small surprise, a message from Dr. C over in San Diego, who must have gleaned my e-mail address from A2. It’s a short but affectionate note dating from two days previously. I reply with an equally short and cheerful message.
Mai