All the Beggars Riding Page 3

  So: Fuengirola. My mother got drunk on the plane. My mother rarely drank, and never drank alone: only when our father was there, to keep him company. She always had a bottle of red wine in the house, and a bottle of his favourite whiskey (a variety of Bushmills called ‘Black Bush’), but they were for him, in case his schedule changed and he came home unannounced or unexpectedly, as he sometimes did. I never once saw her touch them without him. On the plane, though, she got drunk, ordering one gin-and-tonic after another, upending the little green bottle over the ice and splashing in the tonic with shaking hands, then downing the entire thing in three or four swallows. For the first gin-and-tonic, she made a stilted joke to the air hostess that we’d already set our watches to Spanish time, which was an hour ahead, so it was ‘p.m.’ and therefore respectable. She was too apologetic: I cringed. Other passengers seated just ahead of us had asked for gin-and-tonics, or miniature bottles of vodka and whisky: she didn’t need to explain, and explaining just drew attention to it. She dropped the pretence at a joke with the second, and the third she leaned into the aisle to pluck from the trolley herself. I was mortified. I shrank down in my seat and tried to read Harriet the Spy, but it was no use. All I could hear was the sound of my mother ripping the foil packets of nuts with her teeth and pouring the whole contents into her mouth, scrunching up the packet in her palm and a minute later unclenching her hand, flattening the foil out and folding it up neatly into itself, a stiff little triangle, then picking at it until it came loose. Or fiddling with her wedding ring – a pretty, silver ‘lover’s knot’ of the sort that had three rings intertwined in one, which she sometimes let me play with. Twisting it round and round, rolling it up to the joint of her finger and back down to the knuckle, until I wanted to slap her hands down still. She had a new book for the journey, a fat paperback in the sorts of colours she never let herself read, but she didn’t so much as open it. She didn’t eat her meal: the perfect little breast of chicken on a circle of buttery mash, the square of green beans and the bread roll and the chocolate éclair, each in its own neat foil container, and with every bite that I ate and she didn’t I tasted the grim, gin-soaked despair of her mood. She hadn’t taken off her sunglasses, either. Alfie and I, as I’ve said, had insisted on wearing our new clothes to the airport – my white sundress embroidered with red cherries and his sky-blue shorts and the shirt with the appliquéd parrot on it – and we both had on our Mickey Mouse sunglasses and hats, mine a floppy woven one with a brim, his a baseball cap on backwards. So it hadn’t seemed strange when our mother appeared from her bedroom in her sunglasses, and kept them on even underground on the Tube, and inside the airport. In the excitement of gazing at the flashing board of destinations, hearing the announcements of exotic locations and imminent departures, pressing our noses to the thick, smeared glass of the terminal wall to watch the aeroplanes swooping up and nose-diving down, we didn’t notice that she hadn’t taken them off. Now, I noticed. Alfie, torn between his new Beano and looking out of the window, didn’t notice a thing. I accepted the boiled ginger sucky sweet the air hostess gave me and then buried my nose in the paper sick bag.

  It was Alfie who saw our father first: the minute we walked down the metal staircase and onto the tarmac of the runway, into the strange, thick, sweet-smelling heat of the Spanish afternoon. Our father was at the window of the terminal building, wearing a cowboy hat and waving. Alfie yelled and started to wave and run towards him, weaving through the lumbering line of people, white legs and slapping sandals. Our mother had stopped, to the annoyance of the people behind us, and was looking up sharply to where Alfie had pointed, biting her freshly fuchsiaed bottom lip, holding her sunglasses down and squinting against the sun.

  ‘He’s here,’ she said aloud, though not to me, and that was another clue I registered, though didn’t understand: because why wouldn’t he be there?

  My father, I should probably explain at this point, was a doctor, a plastic surgeon, and he worked a lot of the time in Northern Ireland. There was a great need for surgeons there, on account of the ‘Troubles’, the bombs and kneecappings you sometimes saw on the news, and which our mother always turned off. He was flying out to Malaga directly from Belfast, and would meet us at the airport that afternoon; that was the plan.

  ‘He’s here,’ she said again, and she took my hand then and we walked into the terminal. I remember she was singing some silly song – what it was I don’t recall, but I am sure that she was singing. It was the first time all day I’d seen her relaxed, seen something of her normal self. It was the only time, those long, impatient twenty minutes or so we waited for our bags before going through into the Arrivals hall. Because when we went through, he wasn’t there.

  We saw the man who was meant to be him. Close-up, he looked nothing like our dad. He was the same height, and the same general sort of shape, but his face – which had been hidden by the brim of the cowboy hat – bore no similarity at all to our father’s. Our mother went very silent, and very still. I turned and shouted at Alfie: how could he have been so stupid, our father didn’t even have a cowboy hat, had we in our entire lives ever seen him in a cowboy hat, or any hat at all? Alfie cowered; he was confused, his round blue eyes filling up with tears as he looked between me and the man who wasn’t our father, and I wanted to thump him, to kick him, to mash him into a pulp. Poor Alfie. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I almost did. I lifted my arm, hand fisted, ready to punch him, and it was that which spurred our mother into action. She seized my arm and lowered it and pushed me in the direction of a bank of plastic chairs. Then she took Alfie’s hand – he was crying by now, tears and snot slugging down his cheeks – and heaved our suitcases over to the chairs.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.

  She looked at me as if I was a stranger. ‘We wait.’

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Alfie sobbed.

  At this point a Spanish woman, who must have witnessed the scene, came over. She asked, in accented English, if she could help.

  ‘No, thank you,’ our mother said, and stared straight ahead.

  The Spanish woman was friendly, with an open face and kind eyes, and I felt embarrassed at my mother’s rudeness.

  ‘We’re waiting for my father,’ I said. ‘He was supposed to be here already, he was on a flight earlier than ours, but he isn’t here.’

  ‘Lara,’ my mother said, in a voice that would have sounded quiet from the outside.

  ‘Oh, but that is terrible,’ the Spanish woman was saying, and she motioned over a boy – her son, I assume – who was standing a little distance away. ‘What flight was your husband on?’ she said to my mother, ‘we will check with airport information if it has been delayed or if perhaps your husband missed it.’

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ my mother said, icy. ‘We don’t need your help.’

  ‘Belfast,’ I blurted out.

  My mother gazed at me as if I’d committed the worst possible betrayal. I didn’t care. I went on. ‘He was flying out from Belfast this morning.’

  ‘Belfast, eh?’ the woman said, turning to me now. ‘You have the flight number?’

  I shook my head. The woman spoke a stream of rapid Spanish to her son.

  My mother stood up. ‘How many times,’ she began, and her voice was thin with rage, ‘do I have to tell you that we don’t want, or need, your assistance?’ The woman blinked at her. ‘My children,’ she went on, ‘are overexcited and overtired. They misunderstood when I told them that their father would meet us at the airport. In fact, we have to wait a while here, and he will pick us up from the airport. That is all. There is no disaster, no mystery.’ She paused; eyeballed the woman through her big blank sunglasses. She still hadn’t taken them off. ‘Thank you for your concern.’

  There was a short silence. The woman looked from my mother to me, to us, and back to her son. He was sixteen or seventeen, maybe, with lanky hair in a rat’s-tail plait at the back of his neck and boils like raspberries on his neck and face. He was embarrassed.
He muttered something in Spanish. She snapped something back.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and she said a word or so in Spanish, and then they turned and walked away.

  Neither Alfie nor I dared say anything. We had never seen our mother behave like this before. We sat on the glossy moulded chairs, and waited.

  He didn’t come, he didn’t come, he didn’t come. Alfie, too scared to ask for permission to move, wet himself. It seeped down his shorts in a darkening stain and trickled down his leg. You could smell it, too, after a while. Our mother, straight-backed and still, didn’t notice. I pretended I didn’t, either.

  I watched the surges of people coming through the Arrivals gate. The milk-bottle legs and arms of English families on package tours, new sandals already rubbing heels raw. The Spanish couples reuniting. An occasional businessman, dark-haired and sunglassed. I watched through the crowds for our father, his big, square, handsome face which would be head-and-shoulders above the rest. Sometimes, for a split second, I almost thought I saw him, the shape of his back, or heard the sound of his voice. There were too many greetings in the air, and they all grated. After each influx of people, I trained my eyes on the exits, flicking between both of them in case, as our mother had said, he was coming to pick us up rather than meet us at the airport. I don’t know why she had lied. I knew the plan: I had heard them making it. He would be there when we got there, I had heard him say it, those exact words.

  The trickle of water left in my flask was warm and tasted like saliva. I needed the toilet, too, and despite myself, my stomach was rumbling. We had been waiting for almost two hours, now.

  At six o’clock precisely – she must have been waiting for the hour, giving him ten more minutes, five, one more minute – our mother stood up and said that he wasn’t coming. We would get a taxi to the complex instead, she said. Alfie and I panicked. How would he know, we said, that we’d gone on? What if something had happened to him? But our mother ignored our flurry of questions.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and she picked up her suitcase and Alfie’s and started walking, which left us with no choice but to do the same. She had an envelope of pesetas – emergency money – in her jacket, which would be enough to get us there and to last a day or so. Our father would come when he came. Despite everything, something about her strange calmness, her practicality, quietened us. We trotted along after her and didn’t argue any more.

  I remember very little about the taxi ride beyond my bursting bladder. It wasn’t a long journey – half an hour or so – but I have never felt so scared or helpless, rushing through the evening, the window jammed down and the warm Spanish breeze tangling my hair across my face, the driver’s techno music on loud, everything foreign, everything wrong.

  When we reached the outskirts of Fuengirola and had been unloaded outside the reception of the complex we were staying in, I dashed to the toilet. When I came out, we had been checked in and had the keys to our apartment, and my mother was smiling strangely. Our father had left a message, she said, with the woman at reception. It was written in badly spelled biro on the back of an old invoice. He had been unable to meet us, it said, he was sorry, there had been complications in the journey. He hoped to get to us tomorrow, perhaps the next day. We were to check in, relax, enjoy ourselves. Our mother was to be at the telephone in reception at nine the next morning and he would call her then.

  Everything should have been all right then, but it wasn’t; we were too exhausted and wound-up for that. We trailed after our mother and the woman from reception as she took us around the complex and showed us into our ground-floor apartment, one of about fifty built in steep white tiers like a wedding cake. There was a big swimming pool, built like a number eight, the top part a shallow children’s pool and the larger bottom half a deeper pool for adults, with a concrete bridge in the middle, like a belt –

  Writing that, I’m suddenly reminded of Alfie’s favourite joke of the time: ‘What did the zero say to the 8? Nice belt!’ I remember how his favourite book was a paperback called something like Ha-Ha Bonk, a compendium for children. ‘What did the traffic light say to the car? Don’t look now, I’m changing!’ and ‘Doctor, Doctor, people keep ignoring me. Next, please!’ and ‘How did the monkey make toast? He put his bread under the gorilla!’ The book had been one of our father’s Thursday presents – Thursday being the day he most often arrived home from his work in Ireland – and Alfie read it from cover to cover and back again until he had memorised the jokes for Dad, laboriously. He was a slow reader and bad speller, and frequently had to ask our mother or me what a joke meant and why it was funny. I can see him now, his pinched, thin little face, pale eyebrows scrunched, peering through the side rail on the top bunk bed and trying to understand the pun on ‘grill’ and ‘gorilla’. This isn’t relevant, really, to the story I’m telling – or at least to the Fuengirola thread that I’m following right now. But it seems to me that in too many books people’s memories come in seamless waves, perfectly coherent and lyrical. Recollections come like that one just did to me, searing, intense and jagged from nowhere, burning bright when before there was nothing. I could delete this and go on with the story, picking up from where the woman showed us into our apartment. We didn’t even fight over beds. We just sat down, not looking at each other, and began the wait for Dad. But it feels somehow right to keep it in, meaningless detail though it is. It isn’t important in the way the Chernobyl documentary is important: rather it seems like something semi-precious, something I didn’t have until the writing itself summoned it up for me, like a ghost of itself. Ahlberg. Janet and Allan Ahlberg, who wrote as well as the joke compendium the baby books we loved so much, and the one about the cops and robbers. Our father read us that book. I can see him, now, and hear him, too, the rhythms and rhymes pulled like toffee in his gritty-then-soft Belfast accent. I didn’t realise I remembered. I didn’t realise I’d forgotten. His voice is there, out of nowhere, right inside my head, as real as if I’m actually hearing it. How strange that voices, or the memory of them, can be preserved intact, caught out of the medium in which they exist, echoing suddenly in the hidden chambers of our minds or hearts.

  And all of a sudden I find I don’t want to write any more, about my father, about what has to happen next.

  Brompton Cemetery

  The start of May, the sky a deep, sure blue. I have today off, after working over the bank holiday weekend. I meant to sleep in, but the pigeons bumping and scraping and chittering on the ledge above my window woke me up at the usual time, just before seven. The room was airless, and the light already too bright for the thin blinds to be effective. When you inch open the window, pigeon fluff and dried-up scrags of pavement grime come wafting in, and the smell, and the clattering of footsteps on the metal plate above. So I got up and came here, Brompton Cemetery, with a takeaway coffee and my notebook.

  I didn’t know I was coming here until I realised I was walking on past Hammersmith, past the Charing Cross Hospital and down the Fulham Road, left into Lillie Road, past Normand Park: down all of the old streets. I think I thought I was headed for the river, to walk the Mall for a while. Watch the morning rowers hauling upstream and skimming back, or the salvage-collectors, trudging through the stinking mudflats with their thigh-high waders and their hooked sticks and sacks. Find a bench and listen to the seagulls, marvel – I always do – at how curved and cruel their beaks are, how blank and beady their eyes, how big they are when they jump up close. Maybe go as far out as Chiswick, the story-book houses with rambling roses up their painted porches, the private locked gardens at the water’s edge, Chiswick Eyot, the tiny tidal island, where a man is supposed to have lived until recently. Lately, or at least since Jeremy, this is how I have been spending my days off. It’s somehow soothing walking the river: the routine of it, the fact that it’s always and never the same. Instead, here I seem to have come, Brompton Cemetery, not entirely of my own – at least conscious – accord.

  It’s been more than a month since I sta
rted writing about the holiday in Fuengirola. So many memories came back so vivid and painful I thought I couldn’t bear it. I’ve carried on taking Mr Rawalpindi to the Monday night classes at the Irish Cultural Centre – which is what made the idea of writing my story seem possible – but I’ve sat at the back and not made any notes, and when the teacher took me aside one break-time and asked if everything was all right I just shrugged and said I wasn’t here to write, I was just the carer. I vowed I wouldn’t write again. When I made all the grandiose resolutions after The Chernobyl Effect, the panicked scrabbling belief that telling my story would save my life – what was I thinking? How embarrassing to think how desperate and earnest I was. I was just overwrought. As if a story can save you: ridiculous, I know now, in the light of day. Yet here I am, notebook in hand, readying myself to write some more. As if it’s brimmed up in me until it’s going to spill over, and I have no choice but to catch it. Or as if once unleashed, the memories aren’t going to go away: so I must write them down, pin them, trap them into chains of words so they can’t flap around my head at night and haunt me.