Weeks in Naviras (19 page)

You’ve made me feel alive again. xxx

This was quite true; dropping my towel in front of Luis had ignited something; intangible at first, slow-growing but permanent. Before that I’d been timid, thankful for silver linings and reminding myself things could always be worse. I didn’t change overnight, that would have been unlike me. It took me another four or five years to assert myself fully and my regret just before Ben Gurion, not immediately before but in the weeks before, was that it had taken me to the age of thirty-five to have that moment in Room Seven, that spark.

You’d expect what happened between Luis and I to further estrange me from James, but that’s not how it played out. It was number one on my list of Things Nobody Else Can Tell You. How Luis had been with me, it made me understand what my needs were. James hadn’t been giving them to me, but perhaps I could train him, I thought. It’s quite wrong to presume that adultery can destroy a marriage. It took mine off life support. The problem was the spark of Luis needed replenishing, and as it turned out nobody else ever seemed to possess a source of it, not anyone else whom I could get
my hands on, at least.

The avalanche comes in waves. Sometimes I’ll stop moving and try to dig myself out of the snow, only for another pile to tumble from above, sending me cartwheeling further down the slope. There’s no pain or injury though, not even when my body hits planks of wood and even a couple of large rocks. I don’t see anyone else tumbling through the snow, perhaps they’ve all disappeared the way Gavin did, I think.

When the cascade finally stops I’m buried up to my waist in powder. It’s quiet now, the incongruous unnatural sound I’d heard earlier has stopped. Somehow I’ve managed to hold onto my sarong, but unsurprisingly my sandals are both missing. As I try to pull myself out of the snowdrift I feel something for the first time, exertion. Yes, it’s a struggle and it’s making my limbs feel tired. For the first time I’m cold, shivering in fact. The snow stings my arms and legs, although not as much as perhaps it should.

‘Hello!’ I call out indiscriminately. ‘Gavin?’ My voice doesn’t seem to travel far, there’s no echo.

I’m at the bottom of the valley, I’m guessing, the part which’d been obscured by low-lying cloud when I was up in Catseye. The sky’s blank, it’s hard to tell if that’s because of the fog or the large plumes of snow from the avalanche. There’s no sign of the sun but it’s possible to see about twenty metres ahead where there’s a rock wall, sheer and smooth. Whether it’s part of a mountain or something else I can’t tell, I can only see a few metres up before the wall fades into white haze. Little streams of snow are still winding their way down the mountainside from behind me, coming to rest against the side of the cliff, forming little dunes which I have to step over as I walk along the side of the wall, heading down and away from the ruined ski resort. I know I don’t want to go back, that’s for sure.

I keep walking for what feels like a few minutes perhaps, before a cavity appears in the side of the cliff. It’s about two metres high and a metre wide, exactly the right size for an adult person to fit through. There’s obviously a tunnel down there, framed by an arch identical in size and shape to the one above that rogue passage back in the wine cellar. Another conduit, I think, into somewhere else, someone else’s afterlife. Maybe I should just stop, wait for resolution. But no, that’s the old me thinking, and I’m expunging her.

The sides of the tunnel are uneven and it gets dark very quickly as I take further steps inside. My body’s changing; or perhaps I’m becoming more aware of it. I’ve been floating along semi-weightless for ages, now gravity’s exerting itself with a vengeance, trying to pin me to the ground. Most of all I’m freezing, the cold goes right to my bones. My toes curl up as they touch the rock floor. I’m acutely aware of the arthritic fluid inside my ankles.

I’m getting tired and stop for a moment, trying to lean against the rock wall. I let out a gasp of shock as my shoulder blade touches the side, it’s so coarse and cold. On reflex I pull my body forward and away from it, which seems to require a monumental effort. I don’t know whether to go back – it’s only now I’ve stopped that I realise the tunnel’s been slowly descending. I can only see a faint sheen of light behind me on the ground. I’m scared, but of what, the dark? I faced the destruction of Catseye without any fear at all, what’s changed?

The ground ahead of me is more uneven, as I discover the moment I try to take a step forward and nearly trip. I stub my toe, painfully, on a sharp outcropping of stone and yell. My toe throbs. I can feel the muscles in my chest constricting, my breath, yes my breath, coming in cold. There’s a wind down here and it’s biting when it gusts.

In response to my yell comes a dull moan. First briefly, but then again and for longer. Then there’s another noise, difficult to describe. Similar to cat’s purr, but lower in pitch and angrier. It comes in pulses, the vibrations going through me. It stops, then repeats after a few seconds.

I feel sweat forming on my forehead, trickling down my back despite the cold air. I take tiny steps forward, trying to make as little noise as I can. It’s getting lighter ahead of me, but I still have to be careful because the ground beneath me remains craggy and treacherous. Still I can’t bring myself to touch the sides of the rock wall for support.

Eventually I come to a corner, all the time the moaning getting louder and punctuated by the vibrating noise, which sometimes rises in pitch. I look around the corner into a much larger, almost circular chamber where Morgan Cross is standing on a tiny ledge level with me, clinging to the side of a dark, sticky-looking pillar in the middle of a void in the centre of the room.

There’s almost no floor in front of me, just a ledge about three feet wide circling the walls. Where the floor should be there’s just empty space, all the way down past rows of large imperfect, distorted hexagon-tiled walls, running down for what seems like half a mile into darkness. The walls aren’t golden like honeycomb, some bigger than others and bulging, sagging outward. Some of the hexagons on the walls are broken, punched through from the inside with bits of their crust still sticking out.

The pillar Morgan’s clinging to runs all the way to the ceiling, if there is a ceiling, up past rows more of the same large hexagonal pattern, endlessly into bright, cold light which isn’t blinding but still hurts my eyes, makes them weep. The president is the source of the moaning. She’s almost naked, seemingly wearing only the remnants of her white blouse, its hem trailing down over the tops of her legs. Her hair’s clumped together, damp from sweat and blood which has formed little streams, snaking down her pale body like external veins. Her arms and legs are dotted with large pustules, circular and red. Both her arms are held out to her side, curling around the pillar, her hands trying to keep a grip on it. Her heels are wedged tightly against a small ledge, maybe only a foot wide, but because the outcropping’s so small her toes curl tightly over its edges. There’s nowhere for her to go but down.

One of her eyes is missing, a scarlet void where it used to be. I can see terror in her remaining eye but also weariness. She hasn’t seen me because her remaining eye’s staring down into the darkness beneath me. I can’t immediately see what she’s looking at, but then I see something moving, drawing near.

It’s crawling out of the gloom, up the side of the wall. Its features come into view as it grows nearer and larger. It has a mouth, two impossibly large mandibles curl down and outwards, almost as long as the two gently pulsating antennae above its matte black teardrop eyes. It’s hard to make out its size, but as it nears us I make out its two wings protruding from its dark abdomen, a single orange fuzzy stripe running around its middle. Now my eyes have adjusted I can make out another three of them clinging to the sides, also crawling quickly upwards towards us. Every few seconds one of them briefly vibrates its wings, that’s the source of the purring sound.

The wings on the nearest bee begin buzzing more loudly. It casually takes off from the side, rising up slowly and drawing level with us before turning around, causing Morgan to shriek and then say ‘No,’ over and over. It’s almost the same size as her, she begins to wail as it approaches. She can’t use her hands to push it away because she’ll fall. It lunges at her, she tries to move her head out of its way and so instead the creature pulls back, curling its abdomen around so its barbed stinger is facing the president.

The buzzing gets louder as the bee lunges at her again, sinking its sting into her remaining eye. I can’t see her face because the creature’s in the way, but I hear her muffled scream. I think she’s about to fall, but she steadies herself as her attacker backs off, meandering back down into the pit, the remains of Morgan’s eye dangling from its stinger. It settles back on the side of the wall, dropping the eye into one of the busted hexagonal apertures before starting to eat it. I’m sure I catch it grinning.

One person arrived in my life as two others left it, all in fairly quick succession. My father went first; although he didn’t die, he simply ceased to exist. His doctor explained it to me gently; it had a name, some syndrome named after the clinician who’d first categorised it. Alcohol-induced dementia was the easiest way of describing it.

‘Your father’s liver and other organs are functioning reasonably well,’ said the doctor, looking directly at me as she explained how there’d been an alarming rise in such cases over the years. ‘Quite remarkable, given his drinking history. But I’m afraid the degeneration can’t be stopped now, even if he abstains from drinking. It’s irreversible, unfortunately.’

‘What’s the prognosis?’ I was feeling nauseous, but that’s probably because I was nearly four months pregnant with Sadie. Bobby had given me almost no morning sickness and I hadn’t been prepared for it.

‘He could live for another twenty years.’ The doctor was gentle, you could tell she’d had many similar conversations. ‘But more often than not there’re complications before that, owing to the lack of mobility.’ She warned me that mania and delusions were likely. ‘You have to prepare for the possibility that your father will become someone you don’t know any more. It’s the hardest part for relatives but it’s best to be forewarned, I think.’

I told people it was early-onset dementia; much easier to sum up in a sentence, everyone understood and offered their sympathy. We had to move him to a nursing home in Eppingham, where he was the youngest resident by a good ten years. For a while I tried to juggle seeing him with work, the kids, everything else. I was run ragged and began to question the point of seeing Dad at all. He’d spend all day in his room at the nursing home, not speaking to anyone. Even though he was only seventy he quickly became the most demented resident, often when I’d visit him he wouldn’t even acknowledge me. James quickly stopped accompanying me, saying it was pointless.

‘She lives here, you know,’ Dad told me once, during a brief moment of clarity. ‘Your mother, she’s just in the next room. She comes to see me every night.’

He didn’t notice me sobbing; perhaps he thought I was laughing because he looked at me suspiciously. The nurses told me Dad would often mistake one of them for Mum, would get angry with them for leaving him at night. ‘He’s just very confused,’ they’d say. Him and me both, I thought.

He should’ve been frightened at the state he’d managed to get himself into, but instead was just oblivious. It was me who was frightened, and exhausted. How many years would he linger in this mental twilight? How often should I go to see him? It concerned James, too. ‘You’ve got to make sure you visit him at least twice a week,’ he said one Sunday night. ‘I’m worried if we just leave him to rot in there, the nurses’ll tell the papers and it’ll look bad on me.’

Obviously everyone was delighted when the Tories got back into office, and Rav was widely credited for much of the party’s messaging, even though it didn’t improve his prospects for landing a seat next time. Although James insisted hardly anyone knew about the incident at the gym, Rav had been pigeonholed by the machine and it seemed impossible for him to do change things. The local associations had become suspicious of anyone who’d previously worked at Westminster, suspected them to be a stooge from the leadership. James didn’t bother to intervene; he always wanted Rav to be his special adviser and wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardise that. Certainly James had no interest in helping Rav to overcome his crisis of sexuality, I often wondered whether anyone other than me was really batting for him.

‘My parents are thinking of moving back to Pakistan,’ he’d told me. ‘If that happens then things might get easier.’

‘That’s encouraging, and now things have calmed down, maybe you could look at dating someone?’

‘Are you kidding? Things won’t calm down, if anything they’re going to get more intense.’ There was a stubbornness to his thinking on the issue, oddly out of kilter with his usual pragmatism. Still I would gently prod him about it, maybe an act of transference on my part.

Despite James’s comfortable retention of Eppingham and his immediate appointment as prisons minister, his majority was only slightly up and by less than the national swing. ‘I might’ve got a Cabinet job had my majority been more thumping,’ he told me, after Drake formed the government. ‘A few people are asking questions.’

Had he expected me to pound the streets of Eppingham when I was seven months pregnant? Probably not, but he’d never been very successful at hiding his view that the timing for a second baby was awkward to his mind. Maybe that’s why he’d become so retiring in bed in the year leading up to the election. I pointed out that he’d not been in Parliament particularly long, and that he was still practically the youngest minister in government. That didn’t seem to count for much in James’s eyes, he’d mutter about how some Cabinet members lacked any prior experience, questioned what was so special about them.

Sadie was born two months after the election, though she came reluctantly and was only days from being induced. She took longer and gave me a lot more pain than Bobby had, and from the moment she was born she screamed. The most unhappy baby I’d ever encountered, she’d bawl almost constantly whenever she wasn’t sleeping or feeding. It went on for the first three months and James couldn’t cope with it, complaining he couldn’t do his job on so little sleep.

That August I went to Naviras without James, initially we were all due to go but overcrowding in a couple of prisons caused some minor riots and he had to co-ordinate the government’s response. Lottie didn’t pay much attention to the news from Britain, but said the government there could learn a thing or two from the Portuguese. ‘Here, they don’t just lock people up when they go off the rails, they try to work out the root cause of the problem.’ We were sitting down at the beach bar, Lottie cradling Sadie while Bobby played on the sand with another boy about his age, whom he’d befriended earlier in La Roda.

‘I think they’ve tried that, Lottie, and there’s always a backlash.’

‘That’s because Britain’s essentially a protestant country, darling. All punishment and no forgiveness.’ She never made too many enquiries about Sadie, but she must’ve wondered. After all, it was pretty obvious that James and I were worlds apart by that point. Sometimes I felt aggrieved that Lottie never showed much interest in my life in Britain; perhaps she was still getting her intelligence on me from Gail.

‘I haven’t seen much of Luis,’ I said, casually. That was true, although of course there’d been a note waiting for me behind the painting.

‘Well, he’s just working out that running Casa Amanhã’s not quite the breeze he expected to be,’ Lottie beamed. ‘I’ve always made it look easy.’

‘But he’s doing a good job, no?’

‘Oh, it bumps along,’ Lottie smiled as Sadie opened her eyes and giggled at her. ‘But I’m trying as hard as I can to be hands-off. It’d be easier if I had children of my own, grandchildren by this point, no doubt. But that’s always been my decision and you can’t grumble in these circumstances, can you?’ Lottie always found ways of telling me in the abstract what she thought about things.

Bobby was old enough to stay downstairs in Room Six that week, with Sadie in her cot upstairs with me, remarkably placid and sleeping through every night in Naviras, even when Luis came to see me after the restaurant had closed. It was taking me a lot longer to recover from giving birth second time around, but for Luis it was more about touching; stroking my forearms or my hair, lying on his back and letting me sprawl across him. I’d often lie there, watching as the pre-dawn light gave his tanned body a blueish tinge. He’d always leave us as the sun was rising before Lottie and Carolina woke. I held on to memories of those times, they caused me to somehow accept my joke of a marriage. After all, how much happiness is one person entitled to? I’d known more than many. Once you know what it is, how it feels, how much more of it do you really need or deserve?

When the time came for us to head off to Lisbon, Lottie kissed Sadie and Bobbie on their foreheads. ‘Don’t wait too long to bring them back, darling,’ she said. ‘I just love the energy they bring to the place.’

‘Why don’t you come to see us in Britain?’ I was trying to load our ever-expanding arsenal of children’s belongings into the back of the taxi, the driver none too keen to help.

Lottie snorted. ‘Britain’s gone to the dogs, darling, people like me don’t belong there.’

‘You’re starting to sound old, Lottie.’ It was meant to be a joke but didn’t quite work.

‘I’ve still got some life in me, the question on my mind is whether you have, my girl.’ She gave me a hug before I got into the back of the car.

That Christmas Rosie landed herself a job at the Treasury on the communications team. It annoyed Rav and riled me, too, because it just seemed so symptomatic of Oliver Drake’s administration; mediocrity constantly rising to the top. Those who conformed to groupthink seemed to flourish while anyone who displayed original thought was deemed somehow dangerous. I wondered whether James had put in a good word for Rosie with the Chancellor; if he had, neither of them mentioned it when we took her out for a curry in Westminster to celebrate. I barely ate anything, watching instead how incredibly rude Rosie had become towards Rav, constantly denigrating him in front of us.

‘You’re just too all over the place for this game,’ she’d told him as we were waiting for the bill. ‘You need to work out what you’re best at, then get on with it. Whatever that is.’

‘Come on, Rosie, Rav’s not had it easy,’ said James.

‘It never is, and just wait until Drake falls over,’ she replied. ‘How long do you think a lightweight like him will last - a year? Two at most.’ She often answered her own questions in that way. It reminded me of Lottie, perversely, even though the two were at opposite ends of my value system. Perhaps Rosie had picked up the habit from Lottie on her trip to Naviras, that wouldn’t surprise me given Rosie’s whole personality was little more than aggregated mimicry.

The start of the following year saw the first signs that Britain was running out of energy. The price of gas leapt without warning, the government was trying to find a way of keeping people’s bills down covertly. James and I discussed it one night in bed as he was going through his ministerial papers. He just snorted and said they were merely managing decline. ‘It’ll take years to work this out,’ he said, not looking up from his work. ‘And before that, things’ll only get worse.’

‘This all seems very sudden,’ I said. Energy prices had been a running sore for years, but prices tended to fall in the spring, not rise.

‘We’d no idea in opposition how bad things were,’ he said quietly. ‘A few of the old guard warned us, but you always think they’re just itching to interfere. Turns out they were right.’

‘So we’re screwed then?’

‘Well,’ he closed his ministerial box and looked across at me. ‘What this country needs is a government that lasts the distance. No short-termism. I doubt whether Drake can pull that off, not with a majority so small.’ His lips brushed against mine before he turned off the bedside lamp and lay on his side, facing away from me.

Time seemed to accelerate, as it often does when you’re too busy to catch your breath and assimilate things. I felt like I was being pulled along each day by an invisible force; the alarm at five fifteen, an hour of going through constituency casework before it was time to get the kids up, feed them, dress them, get them to daycare and nursery. Instructions for Paula scrawled on the whiteboard in the kitchen before a dash to the office, the whole process more or less repeated in reverse ten hours later. The only obvious punctuation was my twice-weekly visit to Dad, normally on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. With nothing to do or say during those hours, they were my sole chance to reflect. I wasn’t particularly happy, but was certainly a lot less unhappy than before. It was normal, which was surprisingly comforting as long as I ignored the nagging feeling that I’d have to come down at some point.

I found out Lottie was missing on a Tuesday in October, when the number for Casa Amanhã flashed up on my phone. I answered it expecting her to speak, instead it was Carolina, who’d come back from college in Lisbon.

‘Ellie, have you spoken to Lottie in the last two days? She went to collect some flowers to paint but she hasn’t come back.’

It was eight thirty in the morning and I was standing at in the hallway of our house in Eppingham, about to set off for work. By that point James was renting a bolt-hole not far from Parliament, Initially he’d stayed there only once or twice a week, then it became three nights away, sometimes four. He’d been moved in a recent reshuffle from prisons to immigration, far more demanding with urgent case reviews cropping up constantly. Sometimes a dangerous foreigner who’d been placed on the watch list would go missing and James’s phone would ring in the middle of the night. For all our sakes it was better for him to have somewhere in London to sleep, he’d insisted.

I continued to talk to Carolina as I made the short walk to the constituency office. ‘Where’s your father?’

‘He went to look for her; he borrowed a car from the beach bar. He told me to call you, but it took me a long time to find your number.’

‘And she didn’t mention anything about going away to him, I suppose.’

Carolina said Lottie hadn’t mentioned anything to Luis, who’d asked around the village to see if anyone knew where she’d gone, nobody had a clue. I texted James when I got to the office;
Call me, it’s urgent
. He didn’t reply for more than an hour, eventually calling me just after I’d arrived at work. ‘Hi, what’s up?’