You Don't Have to be Good (34 page)

‘What?’

‘Not you, me.’ She dropped her head down to her knees and groaned.

She spoke into her lap. ‘Have they gone?’

‘Nope.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘They’re getting in the taxi. They’ll be going to the hotel. I have the name of it here.’ He pulled a printout of Hazel’s email from his pocket: time of arrival and departure, hotels in Granada, Seville, Vigo, phone numbers, itinerary.

Bea didn’t look at it. It was too soon; too soon and too late. If they’d come during the bad time, the hollow, speechless time before Christmas, then maybe she’d have had no choice but to be rescued. But now . . .

‘You should write to them,’ said Kiff. ‘Let them know you’re all right.’

‘I have.’ She wiped her eyes with her hands and pulled three envelopes from her bag. Dear Katharine, Dear Mum, Dear Frank. She passed them to him. ‘Can you post these for me when you get back from Valencia?’ That’s what she’d spent the last few days doing. Writing the letters that she could bear to send.

Kiff took them. ‘I see. I’m going back to Lanjarón but you’re not. Is that it?’

She knew Kiff’s work was slow at the moment. She knew he fancied a short adventure with her, a trip through Italy to Greece and then who knows where. No, you don’t have to take Kiff, she told herself. You don’t have to be good. She sat up and looked towards the place where she had last seen Adrian. Another family stood there now. Adrian was gone.

‘So, I’m coming back and you’re going on from Valencia?’

Bea turned from him. Was there going to be a scene? He wasn’t going to change suddenly into a husband, was he? How long had they known each other? Two months? Three? She was fairly sure she wasn’t the only woman he slept with. Really, men were hopeless on their own.

‘You’ll be all right. There’s Lesley and Jules. There’s Pinkie.’ She spluttered something that should have been a laugh but wasn’t quite.

‘Isn’t that your husband?’ Kiff pointed to the entrance of the car park.

Sure enough, there was Frank, quite near, helping a young woman get her bags in a car. What in God’s name had he got on his feet? The woman slammed the boot closed and thanked Frank politely. He took a step towards her and pulled pen and paper from his pocket. A taxi swung into the car park and stopped. Adrian got out, sloped over to Frank and pulled him away.

‘Ex-husband,’ said Bea.

‘What happened?’

She sat back in her seat and pressed the window closed. They both watched as the taxi drove away, four heads crowded in the rear window.

‘Our marriage walked out on us. Months ago. Frank’s fine.’

‘And the children?’

Bea swallowed but said nothing. She fumbled in her bag and put her glasses on, spreading the map open on her legs. Kiff started the engine.

‘
Vale. Vamos
.’

T
HE FERRY
left Valencia the next morning. Bea sat in the stern and watched Kiff and the harbour wall recede. He raised one hand, the hand holding the letters, and waved them at her. As the land peeled away, taking Kiff and her time in Spain with it, she felt her back and shoulders relax. There were barely a dozen other passengers. A few backpackers, and four elderly Italians freighting domestic appliances back to their island lives. Bea had boarded the ferry, her driving licence ready as ID, but no one was interested; it was off season, it was the sea. The sea had its own rules, and with her shorn hair and tanned skin, she looked, she realised now, more Mediterranean than English.

Kiff remained where he was until he was a speck in the distance. She knew he would post the letters, and she made him promise not to get in touch with the family until after the time they were due to leave Spain. She could trust him to do that, she was almost certain. The wind picked up as they left the shelter of the land, and Bea wrapped herself in the cream and black Moroccan blanket Kiff had taken from his car. It was dusty but soft and she was glad of it, for she had no desire to leave the deck. She wanted to be transported backwards from the land this way, with no vision of the journey ahead. She felt steel and water rumble, shudder up through her body. She tipped her head back and looked up at the sky. This was the way to travel. It was the art of falling, like the leaps off the cliff at Hastings.

A spasm gripped her guts abruptly. She gasped and leaned forward over the rails, panting like a dog into the churn and twist below. Yesterday at the airport had unsettled her perhaps, and for the first time in months she had drunk alcohol the night before. Two glasses of rough, raw Rioja. ‘Idiot,’ she told herself. Alcohol was toxic to her, the journey through Spain had taught her this at least. Precious knew that already, of course. Precious barely drank at all and never had. Once she told Bea that going through the change was just that. Change. ‘You have to stop poisoning yourself the way you’ve been doing all your life.’ In England Bea had tried cutting down on the booze but she found there was always a reason for that glass or three at the end of the day. She had one because of a bad day, because of a good day, because she was tired, because Frank was having one. Precious was right. The last year, since the menopause took hold, she felt the wine sap what little energy she had. But since she’d reached Spain – she breathed shallowly; her stomach felt tender – now it occurred to her that the repeatedly firing furnace, the hot flushes, had receded then ceased altogether. ‘It’s a call to arms, Precious,’ she said, smiling down at the precipice of black metal below. ‘Change or die! Get out of there – that toxic office, those nylon clothes, that overheated bedroom, that stalled marriage, that bloody fridge full of—’ She moaned and retched violently, emptily, over the rail.

Wiping her mouth with the blanket, Bea sat down on a damp bench. She hadn’t slept the night before. They had booked into a cheap hotel. Although sleeping with Kiff was the very last thing she wanted. She’d hoped for single beds, but no, it was a small double. It was the least she could do, she thought, as he laboured on top of her, and the bed creaked and groaned below. She lay awake most of the night, listening to him sleep. When she woke in the morning, it was to the end of a dream that slunk into the shadows like an intruder. Uneasy, she shook Kiff awake and made him take her to the port hours before the ferry left. She was impatient for him to be gone. She could not bear to be with him a moment longer, she thought, as he drank his coffee, ate a pastry, had another, bought a paper, chatted to the men by the water, then saw her safely on to the boat.

And now she felt bad because Kiff had been good and demanded very little in return. She had met him in late December, the night she arrived in Granada. She went into the bar by the bus stand, the bar that every Spanish town has, where the sports channel blares and a row of men watch the screen from their stools, where the floor is littered with ash and sugar wraps, and the sound of table football and pool punctuates the air. She remembered seeing him look up at her as she came in. He said he heard her schoolgirl Spanish as she ordered a drink and tapas. He watched her shy glance as she scanned the room for someone who might help her find her feet. He brought her to Lanjarón, a spa town south of Granada. It was Kiff who introduced her to others at Los Mariscos, the bar where the expats gathered. He got her a room to stay in and found work for her every now and then. She taught English conversation to the hairdresser’s daughter and the garage owner’s brother; she helped out in the kitchen at Los Mariscos. She got stronger. She began to sleep at night, and each day she walked. She walked for hours. From her window she could see tracks and trails traversing the hills and valleys around the town. It pleased her to find her way to one of these and walk until she could no longer see her way back. And at night, sometimes during those ten weeks, sometimes she slept with Kiff. That surprised her. She had not expected to be desired, but in Spain she began to notice that she was no longer invisible. She felt men’s eyes on her, and women’s too, as she walked down the street.

It was the daughter of a friend of Kiff’s who found Laura’s YouTube Missing video and brought Bea news of the family’s arrival in Granada. It was Kiff who clicked the ‘I think I know this person’ button on the Missing People website, and it was Kiff who persuaded her to come to Granada airport.

Bea imagined what Precious would say if she could see her now, going the long way by sea, by train and by bus. She had been asked for her passport only once, getting off the ferry at Vigo, a lifetime ago, back in October. She had waited for a crowd and tried to slip through unnoticed but the uniformed officer had spotted her and demanded her documents. She had been rather impressed by her ability to dissemble, calling out to an imaginary friend ahead of her, ‘Oh, Bea! Bea! Hang on, I think I’ve lost my . . .’ then searching in her bag, crouching and pulling out underwear and shoes and holding up the queue. She had looked nonplussed, flustered then embarrassed, pulled out her library card, dropped her staff pass and then her driving licence and was finally waved through with an irritated shake of the head. There had been a teenage Bea, who sometimes shoplifted, took money from her mother’s purse, ran away to Brighton once. Disappearing at fifty, the teenage Bea came back to her. If anything, at fifty it was easier. If you were a woman of fifty, you didn’t have to be good because nobody expected you to be bad. Precious would approve of that.

Bea tasted the salt on her lips. She wondered if she were hungry and ate a handful of seeds. There were things she wanted to tell Precious that she couldn’t tell Kiff. She wanted to tell her how she missed her garden; she had ideas and plans for it and hated to think of it neglected by Frank. She wanted to tell her how she could remember nothing about work, it had left no mark on her at all, and how that couldn’t be right after all those years. She wondered what Precious would say if she told her the journey had taught her that mealtimes are for men and children, not women, indeed
meals
are for men and children, not women, and she would like Precious to know that she was right – she should return all the cookery books that Frank had given for all those Christmases. Not just Frank either. Patrick too. Well, he should have known better. He should. And one year he gave the same one to his wife, she happened to know that for a fact. Two for the price of one. ‘You already cook for them,’ said Precious. ‘It’s not cookbooks you need, it’s a cook! I mean, look at your kitchen shelf. Nigel, Marcella, Claudia, Delia . . .
Delia
? Who are these people, Bea? And what are they doing in your kitchen?’

‘Speaking of food, Precious, I’ve discovered something else on my travels.’

‘You have?’

‘The truth is that I don’t much want to eat. I’m not hungry at breakfast or lunch or at dinner, and as I choose not to eat solo at a table for two opposite an empty chair, I find I get by on very little money for food. So for all those weeks, those weeks travelling from Vigo by bus through Zamora, Valladolid and Toledo, then on through Cordoba and Seville to Granada, I’ve eaten when I’m hungry and lived on oranges and nuts and chocolate bars.’

‘That’s not going to keep body and soul together, girl.’

‘Body and soul manage rather better if they’re apart.’

‘You’re too thin. And your hair . . .’

‘I like my hair short.’

‘You look like a stick. You look like a
match
stick.’

Bea laughed. ‘And I must be fit. I walk everywhere now. I feel light and well and at home in my body for the first time since I was ten.’

‘You’re too thin and you look like a stick.’

‘Kiff didn’t think so.’

‘What kind of a name is Kiff?’

‘You’d be surprised how little food you need. I conserve my energy.’

‘Your teeth will fall out. Come home.’

‘I may go and see Patrick.’

Precious didn’t say anything to that, just ate her yoghurt and scraped the corners of her mouth with a fingernail.

‘What do you think I should do, Precious?’

But Precious was turned away, looking at the foamy trail of their route tapering in a lazy arc back towards the land.

‘Tell me what I should do, Precious. I need your spicy bad advice.’

Bea got to her feet and stood by the rail. She bundled the blanket under one arm and looked down into the wake. She thought of the End of the Pier Game and how Katharine refused to play it. Once she got wise to it, she wouldn’t come to the end of the pier at all so that Bea would rollerskate alone, past the theatre and the old people, the lovers and the fishermen right up to the furthest end where Daddy used to put her on his shoulders and pretend they were on the bow of a Viking ship returning to Denmark with plundered silver and cattle. In the days after Daddy, she would bend and lower herself upside down through the rails, turn her feet out like a clown so that she wouldn’t roll in (although if she did, it thrilled her to know the skates would make her sink like a stone) and hold Teddy, Teddy who had lost his fuzz in patches here and there and who smelt of straw and sleep; hold him at the end of stretched-out arms over the roar and surge and dare herself to let him fall to the fishy deeps below. She never let Teddy drop exactly. She threw him into the air sometimes, to feel the loss and horror pitch in her belly. And once she let Katharine’s doll drop. But the doll wasn’t Teddy; it floated and bobbed with its eyes closed and it didn’t work, she didn’t get the feeling, she just felt bad and empty.

Bea retched again, leaning as far over the railings as she could. A twisted spasm rose up inside her so that she opened her mouth and waited until a thin grey stream fluttered out of her and was snatched away by the wind.

‘Arggh, that was the wine, Precious, not seasickness. I don’t get seasick and I don’t miss the flying one bit. In fact what I like about buses and boats is how long it takes to get everywhere!’ But Precious wasn’t interested in transport. She said, ‘Where exactly are you going, Bea? You seriously going to see Patrick? Have you thought there might be a problem with that?’ Bea chewed at the seeds. She shook her head. ‘There isn’t a plan. There’s a
map.
It’s just . . . I’m just . . .’ She tried to conjure an image of Patrick but his face was hazy like the horizon. She tried to summon the feeling she had once had for him but her belly was hollow and all that came to her was a damp river bank, the smell of cowshit and grass, a child somewhere who called, Mum!