Becoming Strangers (11 page)

In it Annemieke was lying on the hotel bed in her bikini with the boys' toy cars and tractors parked all over her body. He'd come in the door, spotted them, driving the little plastic-tyred vehicles up and down her and said, 'Wait, I want to play,' but first he'd dipped the tractor into an iced drink and driven it over her tummy, then clipped it again and driven it up the inside of her leg. They'd shared a heavy and certain look and he'd raised his eyebrows, quickly looking down at his crotch. She'd covered her mouth with her hand so as not to laugh out loud. 'Can't they go and play in the road?' he'd moaned and fallen on the bed atop her, whispering into her ear, 'I'll be an old man when I get the chance to have you in the afternoon.'

I
T WAS HER HABIT
to take a single cup of very good coffee in the morning, with sugar if she needed it, but this morning she had had three. Jan had called her before seven to let her know that the couple was reunited and they were all on their way home. By eight, her mouth was dry from talking. Missy and the brown-haired woman, Beverly, were either side of her. Their husbands were by the outer doors, on cellphones. The other English couple, Harry and Maxine, had gone off to play tennis.

'Bloody silly,' Harry had said before they went, 'when you think that the whole thing could have been so easily prevented.'

'It could have got really nasty too,' Maxine had added and Harry had nodded in her direction, his eyes glazing over as he looked at the breakfast buffet. 'If you're going up, get us another blueberry muffin, love.'

'Alzheimer's,' Missy was saying again, 'it can be so harrowing for the family. Even though it's hard, you have to get them in a nursing home, otherwise they just take over your world, it's tragic.'

'It is tragic,' Beverly agreed, 'it's something that I dread, losing my mind.'

'The rest you can get fixed, but not your mind,' Missy added with a smile.

'So that's the story,' Annemieke concluded, using her hands to signal the finale.

'Well, good for your husband and that young guy for finding her,' Beverly began.

'Sure,' said Missy, taking a sip of the decaffeinated coffee that had just been placed in front of her. 'I can't do too much stimulation,' she had explained, rolling
the final word off her tongue as though it was an extremely dangerous euphemism.

'Well, I'm proud of my husband,' said Annemieke, folding her napkin, 'my Jan. His own health is not strong. He has been very brave. To lose a night's sleep is a big sacrifice for him, sleep is hard to get with his illness. I hope that George appreciates him.'

'He has insomnia? It's just an awful thing to live with,' Missy said.

Annemieke fixed her eyes upon her.

'He is dying of cancer. He has just a few weeks left, they say.'

'Oh my God.'

'Oh my God.'

Annemieke stood up and gave a crooked half-smile. She looked into the gardens beyond the windows and took a deep breath. 'This is our last vacation,' she said.

C
HARLOTTE WAS A VERY TALL WOMAN
, confident and long-limbed. She wore her hair pulled back from her face. She was laughing in response to something Adam had said as she strode ahead of them, through the wire front gate, fending off the children, waving a hand in front of her face to fan herself. It was hot early in the day; her home was on a hilltop plateau, on a grassless plot opposite sugar cane fields.

'Dorothy,' she cried as she entered the house and she
might have been calling a child that had been at a sleepover party to let her know her parents had come.

Dorothy was holding a mug of tea, her smile flickering as she moved into the light of the porch. George put a single arm round her and hugged her to him, tea and all.

'Don't have a go at me about it, George,' she said, her voice muffled by his body so that only he could hear her. 'Just don't say anything for once, please. Just this once.'

'All right, all right,' he was saying, 'it's all right now. Everything's going to be all right. You gave me a scare, a terrible scare. I thought I might not see you again.'

'No such luck,' said Dorothy, pulling away from him and setting her tea down. She put both hands up around his face and kissed him on the lips.

'I don't want to lose you, even if you are a bleeding nuisance.' The others looked away.

Charlotte had picked up her own cup of tea and gestured to the two men, 'Want some?' They shook their heads. They were standing in the scrub of the front yard, a small girl was holding out a dog-chewed yellow ball to Jan, which he took at last. It was dripping wet. The long-eared mutt was looking at Jan with a leer, drool hanging off its mouth, tail mustering a slight wag. Two boys appeared from behind the front door and came out to see what Jan was going to do with it.

'I think she wants you to play catch,' said Adam, trying not to laugh.

'Sure, sure,' said Jan, holding the ball by a thumb and a fingertip.

'W
E'VE GOT TO STOP
meeting like this,' wheezed Bill Moloney, lowering himself into the Jacuzzi with winces and expletives, on account of the heat of the water.

She had expected him and she might also have expected him to say something like that. Annemieke took one damp magazine page away from the next and came to an image of a woman feigning sleep in a deck chair, dressed in a gabardine long-skirted coat and lace-up boots. It was time to start thinking about the autumn clothing season. This autumn she would do as they suggested, start with the essentials—of which there were many.

'Good magazine?'

She nodded.

'They found the old lady then?'

She nodded again and said nothing. Let him suffer.

'Goo-ood,' he said, stretching the word as he put his face back to take in the sun. He was wearing skiing glasses, with mirror lenses in a black rubber frame, taping his rugby-damaged ears to his head. 'Actually I did hear about it. That manager chappy told me this morning when I had my breakfast. Thank the Lord, eh?'

'Thank my husband and the young man. They were
out all night. While the rest of the men in this place slept in their beds.'

'Did you not get much sleep yourself?' he asked, sitting forward.

She saw herself in miniature in the mirrors of his lenses.

'No,' she said, 'not really, no.'

'Well, I'm sorry to hear that. And with your husband being so ill like, it's no wonder you're upset. But I suppose he wanted to
go.'

'Yes, of course.'

'I've been thinking about what you told me the other day and I wanted to say how sorry I am. I know you think I'm a big fat eejit...'

'What is that?'

'A fool, a moron, an imbecile...'

'Yes, yes, I understand. Your accent, it's hard to follow.'

'I'm from Ireland originally. The North. Lived a long time in South Africa though, so it's a mess. It's all mongrel. What was I saying?'

'That you're a big fat imbecile.'

He laughed out loud, a great whoop of a laugh, and she smiled.

'Now will you stop that!' he remonstrated, 'I said no such thing. I said that you
think
that's what I am. Listen, I've got things I need to say to you. They're important. I have to say them.' He removed his glasses with an effort and where they had been the skin was white and
covered in tiny bubbles of sweat. His eyes were pale blue, large and surrounded with tiny blond lashes that blinked impotently. He laid the sunglasses behind him and turned to her with both of his hands pressed together, the supplicant, his fingers touching his nose.

In the background, she saw that Beverly was leaning forward on her sun lounger.

'Listen to me,' he said, 'friend to friend. Brother to sister. I know how it is. I was you. I am you. When a person comes up against the brick wall of his or her self, the self they don't like and they can't change themselves or swap themselves for something better, what they do is they swap their partner. Not just once, but lots of times. That's what adultery is, it's a dead end. Now I know, because I did it. What I want to know is what you're going to do when he dies and you have to face the fact that it's not him, it's you, you don't like?'

Annemieke said nothing, but her chest rose and she sighed heavily as she tried to master her annoyance.

'Look, this amateur psychology...'

'Let me go on,' he said.

'How typical of a man to fail to see the obvious alternative! That it is possible that a woman has the same attitude to sex as a man.'

'Look, when it comes to fantasy action in the sack I'm hardly your prime candidate. Tell me, was it my love handles, my hairy back or my three chins you were attracted to?'

Annemieke looked at him steadily.

'I am not looking for help.'

'But you are. You are married and yet you had an intimate experience with a complete stranger. That's like shouting, "Here, over here!"'

'You are extremely old-fashioned, Mr Moloney. You are almost a romantic.'

'No, you're the romantic!' he said, raising his voice, then lowering it when she put an admonitory finger to her lips. Beverly was now sitting at the pool edge with her back to them, but in hearing distance.

'What I am,' he said in a hoarse whisper, going painstakingly slowly over his words, and now she remembered his accent from some film she had seen about terrorists, 'is a recovering alcoholic with his own set of rules for staying sober, who turned himself around because of his wife dying. That's realism. The romantic is the one who believes that another person can set them free. I don't because I know they can't. She couldn't do it for me. She knew it, I knew it. There's not one other human being on this earth that can save you. But that's what you think, that's why you do it.'

She shook her head.

'Otherwise, why not masturbate?'

'Don't get personal with me.'

'I apologize,' he said, sitting further back, his tone altered now, his voice level, 'but it's not your man's fault that he couldn't change your life, couldn't change you. You ought to know that. Given that he's dying. For his sake and for yours. You might want to forgive each other.'

'As you said, you're in no position to preach.'

'No,' he laughed roundly, 'I'm the opportunist, walking towards the noise of the party, caught in Gods headlights. I'm just stuck really and that's the truth.'

She smiled weakly as she sat up to help herself to a sip of her lime and soda through a straw. 'You have a way with words.'

After a moment or two he picked up his glasses from the edge of the Jacuzzi, hauled himself out of the tub and launched into the swimming pool with a belly-flopping dive, soaking the newspapers of the American group and causing Harry to shout out, 'Easy!'

She watched him perform a series of lengths of the pool with determination and energy, taking great bestial breaths of water as he turned at each end.

R
ELUCTANT TO EXPOSE
D
OROTHY
to the general public, George suggested he go to the bar to bring them back a pizza.

He'd left Dorothy up on the balcony all on her own, reading. A women's book. Historical romance, he thought it was termed, 'Fanny Fuss-a-lot' or what-have-you; all trumped-up emotion and unnecessary anxiety. Bored, he himself had picked up one or two of them, she'd given him the nod saying, 'It's historical,' but they had different ideas of what history was. 'See,' he'd said, 'with history, you've got this that happens, then that, important people, and someone makes a mistake and
tries to cover it up, someone else gets the wrong end of the stick, and an incident happens, like a war. Then a country somewhere gets another new name, one of those that's had several already. That's history. Not some young girl getting herself up the duff by the young Master.'

Dorothy had argued with him that there was a kind of history—what she called 'social history', a new thing, all about normal people. 'Who cares about normal people?' he'd said, 'we got enough to worry about without worrying about normal people, some folks we don't know, people who don't matter.' She'd got the idea from the granddaughter. He'd tried to put her right but she'd got funny about it. She'd gone on about how
she
liked it anyway.

When she was quite sure that he was gone, she relaxed, put her book in her lap and closed her eyes. Inside her eyelids, she saw two pools of yellow like egg yolk.

'Do your worst, sun, there's bugger all left of me for you,' Dorothy said. She pulled her skirt up over her knees, smiling right into the face of the sunshine.

The book was covered in plastic, it was on loan, it was hot in the sun. She smelt it and thought of the countless packed and picnic lunches she'd made for George and the kids and the grandchildren over the years, happy times. She liked the way cheese and tomato tasted after being wrapped together in clingfilm and left in the sun; it took her back, that taste, and as for the smell of a hard-boiled egg that was a day old or so, well
it was heavenly! Just a whiff of that eggy smell and she could see George racing here and there with the girls—piggybacks, fishing, kite flying. He was good like that, a doer.

She'd have been better off with a thinker but there you go, you make your bed. When she said to her mum it was him she was going to marry the old girl had said, Til tell you what my own mother said to me, "You make your bed and you have to lie on it."' It hadn't made any sense until it was too late. Nobody can tell you nothing when you're young. Nowadays, anyone could tell her anything and she could see they had a point. 'You get so much more open-minded as you get older,' she thought. Her own mind was as open as a sieve and sometime soon the holes were going to win out over the mesh. She couldn't hang on to a thought for long, even the bigger things were dropping through. Memories or statistics, dates and numbers, which were more important? That her mother hit her with the ladle when she burnt the breakfast porridge, or that they lived at number 42 Seaview Avenue, Bexhill-on-Sea, TN40 6BI? What about the phone number, was that more valuable than the memory of George's face, sitting at the back of the coach with the cow shit on the back of his trousers, after a day trip to the countryside, the day they had their first kiss? What did she need more?