As we made our way to the car, I saw a man in tight beige riding breeches leaning his back against the door. He was short and swarthy. Ingrid told me he was the riding teacher, Leonardo, the man who rented her the cortigo. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at her, then his gaze shifted to me.
I moved my hair out of my eyes. I could feel him slipping something to me in his gaze, like a dodgy drug deal in a pub where someone slips a wad of dirty banknotes to someone else. He was threatening me.
He was telling me he did not have a high opinion of what he was looking at, that I was someone who must be cut down to size, to a size he could manage to frighten with his eyes, which were the avatars of his mind.
He was making me weaker.
I had to strike down his gaze, which was his mind, to cut off his head with my gaze, just as Ingrid had, more literally, cut off the head of the snake, so I stared right back and slipped my own gaze into his eyes.
He froze with the cigarette stuck mid-air between his thumb and forefinger.
Ingrid suddenly ran to him and kissed him on the lips. That seemed to wake him up. He high-fived her, slap, hand to hand, while Ingrid leaned athletically towards him, his hand still in her hand because they hadn’t let go of each other during the high five.
It was as if she were coming in with a sort of betrayal — yes, I might be with her, but I’m not like her, I’m with you.
They started to speak to each other in Spanish while the horses stamped their hooves in the stables nearby.
I’m not sure what it is that Ingrid wants from me. My life is not enviable. Even I don’t want it. Yet, despite being on my knees in lack of glamour (my sick mother, my dead-end job), she desires me and wants my attention.
Ingrid was telling Leonardo all about seeing off the snake. He pressed the bicep of her right arm with his bitten-down fingernails as if to say, My, how strong you are, to see off a snake on your own.
His brown leather riding boots came up to his knees.
Ingrid looked ecstatic. ‘Leonardo says he will give me his boots.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You will need these boots to ride my best Andalusian. His name is Rey, because he is the king of horses, and he has a beautiful mane, like you.’
Ingrid laughed, braiding her hair with her fingers as she leaned in to him.
I turned to Leonardo, and my voice was calm. ‘She will ride the Andalusian with a bow and arrow in her hand.’
Ingrid lashed the back of her hand with the ends of her hair. ‘Oh, really, Zoffie? Who will I shoot?’
‘You will shoot me. You will shoot the arrow of your desire into my heart. In fact, that has already happened.’
She looked startled for a moment and then she clapped her hands over my mouth. ‘Zoffie is half Greek,’ she said to Leonardo, as if this explained everything.
Leonardo gave her a friendly, soft punch. He would bring round the boots sometime and he would show her how to polish them.
‘Gracias, Leonardo.’ Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed. ‘Zoffie is going to drive me home. She is a learner driver.’
Lame
I haven’t slept for three nights. The heat. The mosquitos. The medusas in the oily sea. The stripped mountains. The German shepherd I freed who might have drowned. The relentless knocking on the door of the beach house. I have locked it now and don’t answer, except for yesterday, when it was Juan. It was his day off and he offered to take me on his moped to Cala San Pedro. It is the only beach with a freshwater spring. He said we could drive half the way on the road, then his friend would take us there by boat. I told him my mother was in a melancholy mood. I am her legs and she is lame. I don’t know what to do with myself. I have started to limp again. I have lost the car keys and I can’t find my hairbrush.
The incident with the snake and then Leonardo undermining me kept colliding with my other thoughts.
I was frightened when I took the axe from Ingrid’s hand. But not frightened enough not to want to know what will happen next.
Leonardo has become her new shield.
My mother was speaking to me but I was not listening, and she could tell because she raised her voice. ‘I suppose you had another happy day in the sunshine?’
I told her I did nothing, nothing at all.
‘How wonderful to do nothing. Nothing is such a privilege. I have been stripped of my medication and I am waiting for something to happen.’
She glanced at the gangster watch on her wrist. It was still ticking. It told perfect time. She was waiting for something while her watch ticked. It was hard for her to come off all her medication. Waiting for new pain was the big adventure in her life. While she waited she tore off small pieces of soft white bread, rolled them into a ball in the palm of her hand and sucked them for hours. The bread pellets resembled her pills and gave her some comfort. She was waiting. Waiting every day for something that might not appear. A rhyme I had learned in junior school came to mind.
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
‘Whatever you are waiting for may not arrive,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t there yesterday, and it is not here today.’ I asked her if she would like something more substantial to eat than bread.
‘No. I only eat because I can’t take medication on an empty stomach.’
I puzzled over this and then turned away from her and gazed at the shattered screen saver on my laptop.
‘I suppose I am boring you, Sofia. Well, I am bored, too. How are you going to entertain me tonight?’
‘No. You entertain me.’ I was getting bolder.
She adjusted her lips to look even more hard done by than usual. ‘Do you think a person in pain with no help is a sort of clown?’
‘No, I do not.’
The constellations of my screen saver floated past my eyes, misty, undefined shapes. One of them looked like a calf. Where will it find grass in this galaxy? It will have to eat stars.
Rose prodded my shoulder. ‘I told the doctor I have a chronic degenerative condition. He confesses he knows very little about chronic pain. He says this might surprise modern patients, and I am surprised, because what are we paying him to do? He said my pain has not yet yielded up its secrets. All I know is that my pain magnifies every day.’
‘Do your feet hurt?’
‘No, they are numb.’
‘So what kind of pain magnifies every day?’
She shut her eyes. She opened her eyes. ‘You could help me. You could go to the farmacia and buy me my painkillers, Sofia. You don’t need a prescription here in Spain.’
When I refused, she told me I was getting plump. She demanded a cup of tea, Yorkshire tea. She was missing the Wolds, which she hadn’t seen for twenty years. I brought the tea to her in a mug with ‘ELVIS LIVES’ written across its side. She grabbed it from me and looked aggrieved, as if I had given her something she had not requested and was forcing her to drink. Was it the ‘ELVIS LIVES’ that made her do that scowling thing with her lips? Would it cheer her up to remind her that Elvis was actually dead? Grievance. Grief. Grieving. She more or less inhabited a building called Grievance Heights. Is this where I will have to live, too? Is it? Has Rose already put my name down for an apartment in Grievance Heights? What if I can’t afford to live anywhere else? I must remove my name from that waiting list, that long queue of forlorn daughters trailing back to the beginning of time.