Alentejo Blue (11 page)

Stanton wasn’t coming out. Jay whistled louder, giving him another chance. He went up to the terrace and touched the glass. It was cold. He held it for a moment and it seemed to make the sweat pour out of his forehead. He put the glass to his lips and drank.

Quinta Nova da Alegria stood on the road to São Martinho, set back along a gravel drive and an avenue of palms, just like the stucco villas in the Algarve. The man who owned it lived in Lagos and came with a different woman for every visit. There was a big wrought-iron gate and high walls to stop the happiness escaping. There was supposed to be a swimming pool round the back. Jay leaned his bike up against the wall and looked through the gate. No cars in the drive today.

There was a dog though and it began to bark in a lazy sort of a way, as if Jay was hardly worth bothering about. Over to the left – Jay had not noticed it before – was a one-room
casa
with a tiny window and a splintery front door. Of course there would have to be somebody to take care of the place while the owner did whatever rich people do. Jay shook the gate to see about the dog. It snarled and took a few paces forward. It was big and sleek and black, not the usual Portuguese mutt. Now it was really barking. If it was Jay’s house and Jay’s dog he wouldn’t tie it up like that. ‘Never going to catch anyone, are you?’ he said and began to climb.

The gate wobbled, his foot slipped and he hurt his thigh against the twisted metal. It wasn’t bad but it made his heart beat faster. He sat on top of the gate and felt dizzy from the heat and the climb and the beer and that moment when he lost his balance. The dog was further forward now, waiting to spring. Most of the guard dogs round here barked and wagged their tails at the same time. They were pretty pleased to see you really. This one wasn’t like that. It was flat-faced and hammer-headed and it didn’t want to play.

Jay jumped. As he let go he knew he had made a mistake. The dog’s rope was still coiled. He opened his mouth to scream but it was stuffed with fear: no sound could come out, no air could go in. He hit the ground and rolled with his hands up over his head, the dog’s breath warm and meaty in his hair, the growl coming up from the ground like an earth tremor shaking his bones.

He rolled and rolled until he hit something solid and lay belly-up in the gravel. Above, the palm leaves cut black slices in the sky. A tractor went along the road spreading its weary message,
off again, off again, off again.
Jay rubbed his head and looked at his hands. He smiled and turned to see the dog, straining now at his tether. ‘Sorry, mate, you lose.’

He remembered the matches just as he was about to dive in and left them on the tiles. The sun smacked down so hard on the water it made little silver scars along the surface. A row of geraniums in earthenware pots gazed thirstily on. Jay shivered, cracked his fingers and took a run up.

The all-and-nothingness of it.

The water closed over his head. He kept his eyes shut. Arms wrapped around his knees, hugged in close to his chest. Whatever the water did with him. The bubbles at his mouth, the cold in his ears.

It let him go, of course, pushed him up and turned him on his side. He opened his eyes and spread his arms so he floated face down. You only got it the first time. He knew it would be different when he jumped in again. Thin ribbons of red dust shifted over the mosaic floor. A grasshopper drifted along on its back. A leaf spun in slow motion and rested. Jay took air and swam. He did ten lengths of crawl, pulse climbing, thrill draining. He held on to the ledge and blinked away the water and panted. Then he got out and jumped in a few times. He swam another length, a good stretch of it underwater, and a blankness entered into him and flattened all desire. He got out, spread his T-shirt on the tiles and lay down. The hot tiles bit at his elbows and feet.

The sky was so blue it hurt. He closed his eyes and watched the black strands flicker across the red. Ruby might be in São Martinho. She went in that bar near the brick-built pond with the terrapins. She said, ‘Miguel likes me. I’m good for business.’ They used to play together all the time but one day she stopped playing. Just like that. If he found her she might buy him a Coke. She might get Miguel to give him a Coke. She said, ‘Just you wait,’ and ‘You’ve no idea,
have
you?’ like something was going to happen to him, something bad. He wanted to ask her what but there was no point, she’d never say. There was no point asking Mum either and there was definitely no point asking Dad.

Jay thought about China falling down last night. He held his leg like he’d been shot and rolled around saying, ‘You’re in or you’re out, mate. In or fucking out.’

Chrissie said, ‘He wets himself, he stays like that.’ She made herself a cup of tea. She had to step over him to get to the kitchen and again to get to her chair.

He stayed down there moaning and holding his leg. Chrissie dabbed her mouth with a handkerchief and hummed. She had that look, like her eyes were open but not seeing. That used to scare Jay so he turned her into a princess under a spell. The spell made her sleepwalk but it didn’t make her scary.

China said, ‘Don’t talk to me about
your
percentage. You’re lucky I’ve given you a job, you fucking piece of shit.’

Ruby came in and said, ‘Well, I’m not clearing it up.’

‘Dad,’ said Jay, kneeling down, ‘it’s Jay.’

Ruby waved a hand in front of Chrissie’s face. ‘Hello? I said, hello? Jesus Christ. I mean.’ She went out again.

‘Do you want me to help you up, Dad?’ Jay tried to get an arm under him. The alcohol hung like rain in the air.

‘Can’t say anything, mate. Lips is sealed.’

China fell asleep then, or passed out. It was like he’d been tortured. There was a video they had in England – they used to put it on sometimes when they’d run out of cartoons. It was black and white and it was about World War II and this pilot who’d been shot down over Germany and taken prisoner. He escaped and got back to England but he kept staggering around the streets thinking everyone was an enemy and talking in this crazy way. It was because he never told any secrets, no matter what they did to him. In the end it was all right because they took him to a hospital where the nurses had squeaky shoes and stiff dresses and he looked a bit dazed but his hair was tidy and he smiled at a nurse and then the music swelled up and you could see he was going to get better. Jay started thinking of China like that. He never decided to but it happened anyway.

He was going to try this thing. It was like a science experiment. He picked up an old newspaper on the back terrace and poked around the garden until he found a piece of glass. Back by the pool he scrunched a few pages and laid two matches on top, head to head. Then he held the glass over the matches, making sure he got a good angle on the sun. The glass heated up all right. Jay switched hands. He moved the glass closer to the match-heads. After a while he moved it further away and over a bit to the right.

Jay put the glass down. Dud matches. He struck one on the tiles and it flared straight off. He tossed it on the paper and stepped back. The paper decided to fly. It took off on flaming wings and began to drift over the edge of the pool towards the garden. Jay knew he should run after it but the message didn’t get through to his legs. Oh, he thought. And then again, oh.

The paper went nearly the length of the pool then did a kind of backward somersault and chose the water for a soft landing. Two black strings of soot hung in the air like exclamation marks. It was time, Jay decided, to leave.

He wasn’t going to look for Ruby though. In fact he wasn’t going to speak to Ruby any more, not until she started being nicer to him. And he wasn’t going to tell her that either. She’d have to work it out for herself.

He needed something to drink. ‘I’ve got a thirst on,’ Dad would say. That meant he was going to drink a lot of beer.

It was supposed to be different here. That was why they had come. ‘You can play outside, can’t you,’ Chrissie kept saying. ‘All that space. Go on.’

‘Am I Portuguese now?’ Jay asked once.

Chrissie didn’t look sure. ‘Suppose so.’

‘Don’t be bleeding soft,’ said China. ‘Course you’re bleeding not.’

A car passed, hooting and swerving, though there was no need. A moped came from the other direction and the man nodded to Jay, who tried to get the bike on its back wheel as a kind of salute. He managed it in the end but the man and moped were gone by then.

Jay decided to go to Senhora Pinheiro’s. Senhora Pinheiro’s garden came down to the street with a wall only thirty centimetres high to mark it off. She had the best fruit trees in Mamarrosa, especially the peaches. Most of the peach trees in Mamarrosa were sick. If you bit into the fruit it was always rotten in the middle. But Senhora Pinheiro’s peaches were like Our Lady: beautiful on the outside, sweet perfection inside.

Pedro said that if Senhora Pinheiro caught a child stealing her peaches she beat it with a brass poker and threw it in the nettles. He said that once, a long time ago, she beat a boy so hard his brains got shaken up and after that he couldn’t speak Portuguese, only Spanish because that’s how dumb he was. Jay knew this was a joke but the first time Senhora Pinheiro caught him stealing he was so scared he peed – just a bit – in his pants. ‘I don’t like dirty little boys in my garden,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’ Jay wouldn’t so she dragged him along by the arm and left him outside her front door. She came back with a damp rag and attacked his face and neck and made him wipe his hands. ‘Now sit there.’ She pointed to a stool. Jay thought she was going to fetch the poker but he did what he was told. She was a very tidy-looking lady in a flowered housecoat and her hair was scraped back with not one strand escaping. It made sense she would want to clean him up before the beating. ‘Now drink this,’ she said and gave him some lemonade. ‘And take this bag of peaches. And if I catch you again you may not be so lucky.’

He had always been lucky so far but today, the day when he was thirstiest of all, he could not get caught. He ate a peach and trod the stone right into the earth so another tree would grow. ‘Somebody in your garden,’ he sang. ‘There’s somebody here.’ He walked beneath a pergola, getting closer to the house, and picked some grapes off the vine. ‘Look what I’m
do
-ing.’ Jay heard the fly curtain tinkle and turned towards the door, but only the wind had stirred it.

Stuff everyone, thought Jay. Nobody wants to know. He sat down to think about what it was that nobody wanted to know but he soon gave up. He thought about Chrissie and the way he could go and stand in front of her sometimes and not a thing in her face would change and then he’d see how she worked to make it change like she had to force each muscle to move, had to put a real hard effort into making her eyes look at his. She could fight off the spell most of the time, only sometimes she couldn’t. He had this dream a long time ago where she was dressed up as a princess in a long floaty pink dress and she was running around everywhere with a big bottle of medicine that was a cure for spells and everyone who came near her begged to be given some and she just laughed and blew kisses and didn’t care at all about anything. It was a dream he had just once but he turned it into something else, a kind of daydream or fantasy he could play and rewind and repeat when things got too boring. China was in this one too, dressed in some sort of uniform, the colour of olive leaves. He sat in a chair with a high, carved back and said, ‘You’ll have to kill me first,’ and four men lifted him on the chair and carried him to Chrissie, who didn’t laugh like she did when she saw the others but stroked his hair and held his hand and said, ‘Who did this to you?’ That’s where the thing got stuck. It wasn’t supposed to end there but he didn’t know how to make it go on. That black and white film filled up with music and you knew from that what was going to happen. Jay thought China should get out of the chair, but he never did, not even when Jay said, practically out loud, for him to move. It showed you it wasn’t all make-believe because China really was like that. Chrissie said that he’d never done anything he was told and she’d wasted enough breath on him to last the rest of her life.

There was nowhere to go so he rode out towards Covo da Zora and into the woods. Some of the cork trees had been freshly harvested. They looked like old men who had rolled up their trousers, fallen asleep in the sun and had the skin cooked right off. The numbers which the
corticeiros
painted in white stood out brightly against the dried-blood bare trunks. The numbers told you which year the cork had been cut. You counted forward nine years and you knew when the tree would be ready again. Sometimes you got a band of the same numbers together, most often they were all mixed up. Jay played a game where you had to ride between one tree and another, counting down the numbers from nine to one. You weren’t allowed to stop until you found the last number. Sometimes it took ages.

By the time he got to number one Jay was sweating. Even his bum was sweating. His shorts were wet, like he’d sat down in a puddle. He let the bike drop and collapsed under the tree.

China was still on the floor when Jay had gone to bed last night but he wasn’t there this morning. There was a jug of amber liquid on the table. Jay got rid of it so his mother wouldn’t have to see. He bet the World War II pilot never peed in a jug when he could have walked a few yards and peed off the side of the terrace.

There was a beetle with beautiful green-black wings crawling along a rock just next to him. Jay put out his finger and let the beetle walk over it.

China wasn’t like the World War II pilot anyway. Jay never thought he was. It was stupid.

The beetle reached the end of the rock and Jay cupped his hand and moved him back to the beginning.

That pilot wasn’t even a hero. All he did was get captured and then run away and go mad.

Jay sat up to get a better look at the beetle. The markings on its back were like eyes.