I returned to Café Playa and gulped down my cortado like the village alcoholic downing his morning cognac.
There she is.
The woman in the men’s shoes is standing by my table. Straight and tall, like a soldier girl. Looking out to sea. At the boats. At the children swimming in giant plastic rings. At the tourists who have laid out umbrellas and chairs and towels on the sand. The diving-school boat is now loaded with all its equipment and pulls away into the ocean. The brown Alsatian, who I have not yet freed, is still rattling his chains.
‘My name is Ingrid Bauer.’
What is she doing standing so close to me?
‘I am Sophie, but Sofia is my Greek name.’
‘How do you do, Zoffie?’
The way she says my name is like a whole other life. I’m ashamed of my sad white flip-flops. They have turned grey in the summer.
‘Your lips are splitting from the sun,’ she says. ‘Like the almonds split on the trees of Andalucía when they are ripening.’
Pablo’s dog starts to howl.
Ingrid looks up at the diving-school roof terrace. ‘That German shepherd is a working dog and should not be chained all day.’
‘He belongs to Pablo. Everyone hates him.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m going to free the dog today.’
‘Oh. How are you going to do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
She looks up at the sky. ‘Will you make eye contact with him when you undo the chains?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wrong. Never do that. Will you make your body still like a tree when you approach him?’
‘A tree is never still.’
‘Like a log, then.’
‘Yes, I will be still like a log.’
‘Like a leaf.’
‘A leaf is never still.’
She was still looking at the sky. ‘There is a problem, Zoffie. Pablo’s dog has been badly treated. He will not know what to do with his freedom. The dog will run through the village and eat all the babies. If you are going to unchain him, you will have to take him to the mountains and let him run wild. In that way he will be truly free.’
‘But he will die in the mountains without water.’
Now she was looking at me. ‘What is worse? To be chained all day with a bowl of water, or to be free and die of thirst?’ Her left eyebrow was raised, as if to ask, Are you a bit of a hysteric? You’ve had a waiter push open two doors to find a man who isn’t there, you don’t know how to turn off a tap, you don’t know how to drive a car and you want to free a feral dog.
She asked me if I wanted to walk on the beach.
I do.
I kicked off my flip-flops and we jumped over the three concrete steps that separate the café terrace from the beach. There was something about that jump, the fact that we did not walk down those steps, which made us both run at the same time. We ran fast across the sand, as if we were chasing something we knew was there but couldn’t yet see. After a while we slowed down and walked along the shore. Ingrid took off her shoes and then she looked at me and threw them into the sea.
I heard myself shouting No No No. I hitched up my skirt and ran to grab them from the waves. When they were finally clasped to my chest, I walked out of the sea and gave them back to her.
She dangled one in each hand, shaking out the water and then she laughed. ‘My God, these shoes. I didn’t mean to frighten you, Zoffie.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. I was frightened anyway.’
Why did I say that? Was I frightened anyway?
We kept on walking, dodging the sandcastles that children were building with their parents, intricate kingdoms with turrets and moats. A girl of about seven was buried to her waist, her legs buried alive, while her three sisters sculpted a mermaid’s tail. We jumped over her and started to run again until we arrived at the end of the beach. When I dropped on to a bank of black seaweed by the rocks, so did Ingrid Bauer. We lay on our backs, side by side, gazing up at a blue kite floating in the blue sky. I could hear her breathing. The kite suddenly crumpled and began its descent. I wanted my whole life so far to slip away with the rolling waves, to begin a different kind of life. But I didn’t know what that meant or how to get to it.
A phone was ringing in the back pocket of Ingrid’s shorts. She rolled on to her stomach to reach for it and I rolled over too, and then we moved closer. My cracked lips were on her full soft lips and we were kissing. The tide was coming in. I shut my eyes and felt the sea cover my ankles and what came to mind was the screen saver on my laptop, the constellations in the digital sky, the swirls of pink light which are gas and dust. The phone was still ringing but we kept on kissing and she was holding on to my shoulder with the medusa sting, squeezing the purple welts. It hurt but I didn’t care, and then she broke away from me to answer her phone.
‘I am on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?’ She held the phone towards the waves, but her slanting green eyes were looking at me. At the same time, her lips were mouthing, I’m late, ve-ry late, as if I was to blame for whatever it was that had made her late.
I was so confused I stood up and walked away.
When I heard her calling my name I did not turn round. The mermaid girl who had been buried in the sand by her sisters now had a full fan of a tail, decorated with shells and small pebbles.
‘Zoffie Zoffie Zoffie.’
I kept on walking in a daze. I had made something happen. I was shaking and I knew that I had held myself in for too long, in my body, in my skin, the word anthropology from the Greek anthropos meaning ‘human’, and logia, meaning ‘study’. If anthropology is the study of humankind from its beginning millions of years ago to this day, I am not very good at studying myself. I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven’t a clue about my own logic. Suddenly that was the best thing that ever happened to me. What I felt most was the way she had squeezed the medusa sting on my shoulder.
She is drinking peach tea in the plaza and she is too hot because her blue and black checked shirt is for winter not for summer in Andalucía. I think she thinks she’s a cowboy in her work shirt, always alone with no one to look at the mountain horizon at night and say my god those stars.
The Knocking
Tonight someone is tapping at the windows of our beach apartment. I have checked twice and no one is there. It might be the seagulls or the wind blowing sand from the beach. When I look in the mirror, I do not recognize myself.
I am tanned, my hair has grown longer and wilder, my teeth look whiter against my dark skin, my eyes seem bigger, brighter — all the better to cry with, because my mother is shouting at me, shouting things like, You haven’t tied my shoelaces properly. Every time I run to kneel at her feet and tie them again, they come undone until I finally sit on the floor, put her feet on my lap and untie all the old knots to make new knots.
It was a long process of unpicking and unravelling and starting all over again. I asked her why she needed to wear shoes at all. Especially shoes with laces. It was night and she wasn’t planning on going out.
‘I can think better in shoes with laces,’ she said.
She is reclining on a chair, staring at the whitewashed wall while I attend to her feet. If she let me turn the chair, she would be staring at the night stars. It would be the smallest movement to change her view but she is not interested. The stars seem to insult her. Every one of them offends her. She tells me she already has a view in her mind. It is of the Yorkshire Wolds. She is walking the trail, the grass is lush and springy, rain falls softly on her hair, it is the lightest rain and she has a cheese roll in her rucksack. I would like to do that walk with her in the Yorkshire Wolds, I’d be happy to butter the rolls and read the map. She half smiles when I tell her this but it’s as if she has already forsworn her feet to someone else. I am nervous tonight. I can still hear someone tapping at the windows. It might be the mice that hide in the wall.