I smiled and she laughed. When Julieta glanced at us, she looked anguished. Perhaps the rare complicity she observed between mother and daughter had lifted her own lost mother out of her coffin and placed her somewhere in the room with us. Rose and I looked happier than we actually were. I had spoken freely but my mother had stopped my words with a joke. She had banged her fist, insisting I did not have a problem, and she had made it sound like a compliment.
All the same, Mr James seemed confused and dejected. We had veered way off track. There had been a detour, a diversion, a delay. Rose might be in a wheelchair, but she had been strolling through the alphabet, lingering in the lonely spaces between alpha and omega, and she had come up with words like ‘owd’ and ‘whippet’. They did not fit the story he was making with his questionnaire which sat like The Truth on his lap.
He lifted up his hand and held it in front of his mouth while he whispered to Señor Covarrubias, who nodded and then probed his pocket for his phone. I could see he had received seventy-three emails while he had been ticking and circling with his ballpoint.
‘The Gómez Clinic has given me hope.’ My voice trembled, but I think I meant it.
Gómez swiftly interrupted me and began to speak in Spanish to the senior executives. It was a long conversation. Now and again, Julieta interrupted. Her tone was efficient, even harsh, but I observed that her emotions were running high. Her left hand was touching her throat. When she raised her voice her father shook his finger at her.
The electrocuted vervet gazed at us all.
Mr James stood up. ‘It has been a pleasure to meet you,’ he said, lowering his silver head in the direction of my mother’s lame feet.
Señor Covarrubias kissed Rose’s hand. His nose was slightly flattened, as if he had been in a fight.
‘Profunda tristeza,’ he said in a deep, tired voice. He dipped his plump fingers into his pocket and took out his car keys with new energy, as if he wanted nothing more than to run to his white limousine parked in the grounds of the clinic and break the speed limit to Barcelona.
After they had left Gómez asked me to leave the room. ‘I wish to speak to my patient in private,’ he said.
Rose shook her bent arthritic finger at her solemn, unsmiling doctor. ‘Mr Gómez, your stuffed primate’s glass cage shattered very near my daughter’s head. She has a small glass splinter near her eyebrow. Please put a cloth over the cage in future.’
As I made my way to the door, I thought I saw the light go out of my mother. At the same time, I saw her beauty come in. Her cheekbones, her soft skin — she was suddenly vivid, as if she had become herself.
Vanquishing Sofia
All is calm. All is quiet.
The sun is rising.
A black column of smoke is coiling in the sky. There has been an explosion somewhere far away.
I set off on a hike in the mountains as Gómez had advised, surrendering to the harsh landscape, discovering its detail, the perfect form of the small succulents growing between rocks, the lustre of their skin, their geometry and fleshiness. A bottle of water was stashed in my rucksack, headphones clamped over my ears as I listened to an opera, Akhnaten, by Philip Glass. I wanted big music like fire to burn away the random terror that was crawling under my skin. Lizards flashed under my trainers as I walked away from the black smoke in the sky and into the arid valley, heading in the direction of what looked like the ruins of an ancient Arabian castle. After about an hour I stopped to rest in their shade and look for a trace of the path that would take me back to the beach.
She was waiting for me in the distance.
Ingrid sat astride the Andalusian in her helmet and boots. High in the dizzying sky an eagle spread its wings and circled the horse. The delirium of the music thundered through my headphones as she galloped towards me. Her upper arms were muscled, her long hair braided, she gripped the horse with her thighs and the sea glittered below the mountains.
At first I was watching passively, as if I were staring out of a train window at the disappearing landscape, but as she got nearer I became aware of how fast she was riding. I knew that Ingrid played her own strength right to the edge. She took risks and made calculations but sometimes it didn’t work out. She had beheaded her sister and she was coming to get me too.
I fell to the ground as if I had been shot, lying flat on my stomach with my hands over my head, the blood in my own body pushing and pulsing like a dark river while the sound of hooves pounded in my ears. The sun turned to shade as the horse jumped over me. The heat of its body was fierce and feral as my heartbeat hammered into the warm earth beneath me.
Ingrid had merged with the sky as she sat high on her kingly horse. My headphones and iPod were lying in a tangle between clumps of thistles and the sunbaked stones but the music was still playing. Its swell and might were now a trickle of tinny sound merging with the bigger sound of the Andalusian’s high cries and the smaller cries of invisible desert animals.
‘Zoffie, why are you lying on the ground like a cowboy?’
She was pulling at the reins. I realized she had stopped at a distance away from me. I had panicked and flung myself on to the dust and thistles but it had been my own hands that had ripped the headphones off my head.
‘Did you really think I was going to run you over with my horse?’
I looked up into the ancient, black, glassy eyes of the Andalusian while Ingrid shouted above it, ‘Do you think I am a murderer, Zoffie?’
It is true that I believed she would break my bones with Leonardo’s horse.
I must have skinned my knees when I fell to the ground because when I eventually stood up my jeans were ripped.
I limped across the thistles and stones towards the horse.
‘Have you written me off, Zoffie?’
‘No.’
‘Then give me your shirt.’
Standing on tiptoes, I lifted my sweat-soaked shirt over my head and placed it in Ingrid’s outstretched hand.
The sun lashed my shoulders.
‘Why do you want my shirt?’
She held on to my hand and pulled me closer. ‘I gave you a gift, but you gave me nothing back in return. It’s hard to embroider silk. It’s not easy. It slips away. I sewed your name with a thread called August Blue.’ She was still gripping my hand while she worked the reins, as if she was nervous that I would slip away, too.
I had broken the rules of exchange. She had given and I had taken, but I had not reciprocated.
A gift like love is never free.
August Blue.
Blue is my fear of failing and falling and feeling and blue is the August sky above us in Almería. Her helmet has slipped over her eyes. Blue are her tears and the struggle to live in all the dimensions between forgetting and remembering.
She let go of my hand and nudged the horse with her knees.
I watched her adjust her helmet and disappear into the dust with my shirt tucked into the saddle. And then I untangled my headphones from the thistles and put them over my ears, took out my bottle of water which was now hot, and drained the lot.
I began the long walk home in the midday sun in my bra and ripped jeans and sweaty trainers, iPod poking out of my back pocket, headphones again clamped to my ears. I felt alive and roaring as I gazed at the sea below me with its medusas floating in the most peculiar way.
As the desert birds cried out above my head, I was not sure Ingrid’s forbidden desire for me was a debt I could ever repay with a gift. Not even with the clothes off my back.