The doorbell rings for a second time and Jamie picks up the tray. Big laughs this time from the doorstep. Recognising the voice of a neighbour, I decide to join them. The cold hits me as I descend the stairs, so that when I reach the door, I put my arms tight around Jamie’s thin waist and press myself to him. Linda, who lives two doors down, is mid-sentence and does not acknowledge my appearance. Her full attention is on Jamie, making sure he is OK, smiling and acting up to lift his spirits in a way that would usually irritate me. My role is so all-consuming that the passing concern of others can feel like an encroachment, or in my more vulnerable moments, a criticism, as if I am not trying hard enough. But tonight, I let Linda’s words wash over me. I even allow myself to enjoy the determinedly buoyant talk. I hold Jamie close, combining our warmth against the cold, and I look over his shoulder at the tray, letting the bright colours and sweet smell take me away to simpler times, times I wonder if I will ever experience again, like trips as a kid to the bakery round the corner after swimming with my dad on a Saturday morning to buy split jam doughnuts as a treat, synthetic cream running down my chin.
‘Come in, Linda,’ I find myself saying. ‘I’ll make some tea.’ It will be the first time anyone on the street has crossed our threshold and tonight it feels like a space that would be welcoming. But Linda refuses, fusses about getting her dinner ready, though she carries on talking. I sense myself drifting from the talk but try not to stray too far, thinking about the day after we moved in when Linda came to introduce herself. She brought a pot of winter-flowering pansies, which I have placed here on the front step. It isn’t a flower I like, and the pot is not to my taste either, so I am proud that I have kept it here and taken care of it. I notice Linda’s eyes flick to it several times during the conversation.
I have tried other ways to assuage all our fears, taking Linda a cutting from a plant she had admired in our front garden and promising to contribute an honesty book stall for a charity event at the community hall. But I do not know what Linda really thinks of us, a young couple whose lives started far from here, and who have moved in with no connection to this place, except that the house prices match our circumstances. Talking to Jamie now, Linda may well be thinking of the old man who used to live in our flat, wondering what we have done with the bench he used to sit on at the front of the house or why we did not bother to trim the hedge as neatly as he had. Like other recent newcomers to the street, Jamie and I remain apart, essentially a self-contained unit, despite everyone’s efforts. How self-contained will I be without him?
A few moments later, walking back up the stairs ahead of him, I have the sense of reaching the summit of something, a giddy satisfied feeling. While wanting to cling on to this sensation, I find I cannot help myself. As Jamie sets down the half-empty tray in the kitchen and turns to face me, I look back at him and I reach behind his head for that soft place again, knowing that with this simple caress I will once again lose my grip.
AMANTHI HARRIS
IN THE MOUNTAINS
Every day she walked alone on the slopes beyond the guesthouse or sat for hours on the crumbling red ochre, drawing the mountains encircling the valley. Her pencil traced ridges, followed fissures and ruptures and the sudden bursts of green thrusting thickly up along seams of hidden water. She peered down at the clusters of the houses nestled in hollows, searching their rootedness for a sign. She longed for a sign to show her the way, now that she had run away to Spain, to this endless sunlit stillness: a new calm, a new perfection. At the guesthouse, Beatriz, the owner, told her about a market the next day in the village. Anya went alone, through olive groves and a carpark, the cars seemingly abandoned before an opening to a narrow shaded street: the entrance to the labyrinth. Its walls were formed of the bodies of houses joined together as one heavy mass, chalk-white with lime. The windows were shuttered, the balconies empty. Ancient chestnut doors hid lives within, and disused chambers.
At the centre of the labyrinth was a small round plaza with a single silver birch tree and a tiled fuente, water splashing from three spouts into a stone trough. Sellers had set up tables of herbs, oils, soaps, incense, olive wood sculptures, red wine, rough brown bread and cakes with wet dark berries and plums glistening inside. Anya wandered through the bodies and voices and sat at the edge to draw. She saw Beatriz in the crowd, kissing everyone who came to greet her. Beatriz, who had lived in Madrid before, had spoken of her friends from the village, who, like her, had come to the mountains to make new lives. Some had succeeded while others had been overcome by the force of that clear pure stillness: a promise, a void, a magical mirror, mesmerising and luring the unsuspecting into delusion, stilling thought, dulling desire.
An old man in a corduroy blazer came past and stopped, leaning on his walking stick, to look down at her drawing.
‘Long ago, I used to come here to draw,’ he said. ‘In those days there were no roads, only tracks.’
‘You live here?’
‘For forty years. If you come to my house I’ll show you my watercolours of the village – it was very different then. People still kept animals on the ground floor. You should have seen the flies!’ He chuckled.
She didn’t know what to say. She often didn’t. She never knew what to speak of when talking with strangers.
‘Well, see you,’ he said, and went slowly up a slope past the fuente.
She returned to her drawing, but the old man had disrupted her. He had sounded English, a foreigner in the strange village that he had claimed for himself. Why had he stopped to talk with her? In England she never sketched outside; she never wanted to. Now she kept wanting to draw, everywhere she went.
‘Have you seen the cacti?’ The old man was back, holding out a gnarled cactus leaf covered with white encrustations. ‘It’s the cochineal bug. All the cactii in the village are infested.’
She had seen them on her walks, the big-lobed cactii with their broken limbs, rotting and weakened by the life gathered on them.
‘You can make dye with it,’ the old man said. ‘It’s what they used to make the red coats of the British army. And you can paint with it, but you’ll need to stop the colour fading: maybe vinegar or salt – you should try it. I have a lot of cactii in my garden, if you want to experiment.’
‘Maybe,’ she murmured, trying not to encourage the man.
Why did he keep coming to her? He clutched his stick as he leaned down to place the leaf beside her, then staggered up past the fuente again.
‘I see you’ve met David,’ Beatriz said, coming over. ‘He’s a famous artist in Spain.’
‘He’s invited me to his house to look at paintings.’
‘He must have liked your drawings.’ Beatriz studied Anya’s sketchbook. ‘You’re good! You should go. He loves to teach. I can see the two of you becoming good friends!’
But Beatriz didn’t know about Anya. Anya was not good at making friends. In the office her manager had told her to get better at teamwork, but Anya hadn’t known how. She had trusted no one at the office, feeling their pity and disdain of her, a certain wariness around her, that she had been glad to leave behind.
‘Go and see David,’ Beatriz urged.
‘Is it safe to go alone?’
‘Safe? Ah, don’t worry, it’s nothing like that, he really will just talk about painting – you won’t be able to stop him! Tell me a time and I’ll come and rescue you!’