‘In Spain, you drive on the right-hand side of the road.’
I laughed and Rose told me the time on her new watch.
‘We are going uphill, so you need to change gear. Can you see there is a car trying to overtake us?’
‘Yes, I can see him.’
‘It’s a her,’ she said. ‘A her is trying to overtake you because she has perfect visibility, she can see there are no vehicles coming in her direction. It’s one o’clock, by the way.’
Driving was a breeze after working the coffee machines, just as Rose said it would be.
Something was rolling around in the boot. Every time I turned a corner it banged against the sides. I slowed down and the car suddenly jerked and stopped.
‘You have to find a better balance between the brake and the accelerator. Into neutral and start again.’
The Berlingo lurched forward and the object in the boot rattled around.
‘That is not neutral.’ Rose adjusted the gears for me and we were off. ‘It is not your lack of a licence that worries me, it is your lack of spectacles. I will have to be your eyes.’
She is my eyes. I am her legs.
After we arrived in the car park at the end of the village and I had pulled up the handbrake, Rose announced she had a new chauffeur.
My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
She stretched out her finger to touch the oiled curls on the nape of my neck. ‘I’m not sure what you’re doing to your hair, Fia. You remind me of the taxi driver who got lost taking your father and myself to our hotel in Kefalonia for our honeymoon.’
She gestured to me to pass her the keys. ‘Your father was very proud of his hair, and I was forbidden to touch it. In those days his hair was long and fell to his shoulders in soft black curls. In the end, I began to regard it as symbolic hair.’
I did not want to know any of this. But as she had told Gómez, I was her only.
When I opened the door for her in my new role as chauffeur, she told me she would walk home. Walking was, apparently, no problem at all. I turned my back on her and searched the boot for the object that had been rattling around. When I eventually found it, I guessed that Matthew must have hidden it in the boot after he picked up the hire car and signed off the papers with Nurse Sunshine.
It was an aerosol of blue spray-paint.
Rose was leaning against the trunk of the palm tree at the end of the car park. She was bent over as if carrying something too heavy to bear.
Horseplay
The Kiss. We don’t talk about it but it’s there in the coconut ice cream we are making together. It’s there in the space between us as Ingrid scrapes the seeds from a vanilla pod with her penknife. It’s lurking in her long eyelids and in the egg yolks and cream and it’s written in blue silken thread with the needle that is Ingrid’s mind. I don’t know what I want from Ingrid or why she enjoys humiliating me or why I put up with it.
It seems that I have consented to being undermined.
She shows me the clothes piled in baskets all over the floor of their Spanish house and pulls out a white satin dress with thin, fraying straps. It has a stain on the hem but she says it would suit me. She’ll mend it when she gets round to it because she knows my medusa stings hurt all the time.
They don’t hurt all the time but I don’t want to disappoint her. While we wait for the ice cream to set in the freezer she twists a strand of my hair around her finger. ‘Let me cut out this knot,’ she says.
She reaches for a pair of ornate, sharp scissors lying on top of one of the baskets of clothes. The blades saw through my hair. When I turn round she is holding a thick strand of my curls like a trophy in her hand. I feel uneasy but it is more exciting than waiting for my mother’s side effects and withdrawal symptoms. Perhaps feeling uneasy is a side effect?
‘Zoffie, do anthropologists steal heads from graves to measure and classify them?’
‘No, that was in the old days. I’m not looking for heads in graves.’
‘What are you looking for, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Really, Zoffie?’
Yes.
‘Why is nothing interesting?’
‘Because it covers up everything.’
She punched my arm. ‘You spend too much time on your own. You should make something with your hands.’
‘Like what?’
‘A bridge.’
If Ingrid is a bridge leading me across the swamp beneath it, she keeps taking a few of the bricks out every time we meet. It is like an erotic rite of passage. If I manage to cross the bridge without falling into the swamp, perhaps I will be compensated for my suffering? Ingrid’s lips are luscious, soft and full. She is poised, a woman of few words, but the word she has chosen, Beloved, is a big word.
She commands me to sit in the garden with Matthew who has just returned from work.
He is lying in a hammock slung between two trees in the shade. ‘To-day was an ex-per-i-ence.’ Matthew pushes his foot against the tree and the hammock starts to sway from left to right. ‘The hardest thing, Sophie, is to get people to be themselves.’
He waves his hands at the leaves above his head, as if conjuring a self that might be true enough for him.
It turns out that Matthew is a life coach. He teaches senior managers to communicate better, to sell their brand and put it across with humour and vigour.
Is Matthew being himself?
He is friendly but shifty, and I don’t blame him because his girlfriend is messing with me and he’s messing with something too, but I’m not sure what’s going on. Something like his right hand wrote a blue message to Julieta Gómez while his left hand caressed Ingrid Bauer’s long, tanned thighs.
Ingrid carries out a tray of her home-made lemonade, a pair of silver tongs, a sprig of fresh mint and a jug of ice. After she has formally kissed Matthew on his cheek, she fills a plastic glass with ice and then pours the lemonade, adding a slice of lime and a few leaves of mint. She is not exactly a wife. More like a cocktail waitress who is also an athlete and a mathematician. She has studied geometry and she is a seamstress with clients in China. She is also ‘a big, bad sister’, but she doesn’t want to talk about that.
Matthew’s hobby is collecting wine. He has gone on a few courses taught by the masters, the buyers and sommeliers who focus on a particular grape, or a region where the grapes are grown. Here in Spain he has found a fellow wine expert, a horse-riding instructor called Leonardo who owns a cortigo — a country house with its own stables. Ingrid rents one of the rooms there in order to sew. She works on Tuesdays and Wednesdays — just two days because life is short — and Matthew, who is also short, misses her when she is away from him.
‘Zoffie, perhaps you would like to see the cortigo? My machines are old, from India. I bought them on eBay and they have never broken down. They are heavy, really beautiful objects.’
Matthew looks bored, so she starts to talk about him. He finds himself very lovable and Ingrid seems to love him. He is radiant with self-belief.
Everything I know about myself is cracking and Ingrid is the hammer.
Matthew insists she sits in the shade. She ignores him and sits in the sunshine by my side.
He lifts up his head and smiles at me, as if we both share an interest in Ingrid’s well-being. ‘Tell Inge to move out of the sun. She’s got pale skin, so it’s not healthy.’
I shake my curls at him. ‘Sunshine is sexy.’
Matthew scoops out a mint leaf from his glass and begins to chew on it. ‘That’s a tricky one, Sophie. There are debates in the scientific community about sunshine. It warms the planet every day, but it also makes us blind.’
‘Blind to what?’
‘Our everyday responsibilities. It is very seductive.’
While we are on the subject of responsibilities, he wants to know about my mother. ‘So did you pay a lot of money to the Gómez Clinic?’