Weeks in Naviras (2 page)

It happened just seconds after we left the airport perimeter, and I saw the whole thing from my window. A truck came careering off an overpass, breaking through the barrier. A large truck with a red cab and a long rear, covered with grey tarpaulin. The cars in the motorcade all swerved but it was too late. The truck came flying down onto the road in front of us, slamming into the first car of the motorcade and exploding. I heard multiple bangs through the bombproof glass. The motorbikes on either side of the first car were either flattened by the truck or sent flying. We could sense the shockwave go underneath and through us. Almost immediately agents appeared on all sides, talking into their sleeves and running towards the expanding fireball. One agent was flanking our car right outside my window, gun drawn. James grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

Rosie put both hands together in front of her nose. ‘Oh my God, what do we do?’ Facing backwards she couldn’t see as much as me. Rav banged on the divider between us and the driver’s compartment, made a hand signal that we should try to turn around. I was trying to see what was happening with the President’s car in front of us. It was surrounded by agents but appeared to be intact, at least the portion of it I could see. But many of her senior counsel had been in the first car and must’ve been cremated. The agent banged on the driver’s window of our car, made a circular hand gesture. Then he began convulsing. He dropped his gun and leaned forward, both hands on his thighs. He wasn’t the only one. Men near the president’s car were keeling over. One of them was being sick in the middle of the road. Helicopters were beginning to circle overhead. The man outside my window turned toward me, put his hand on the glass. Yellow sputum was pulsing out of his mouth. His eyes had started to bleed.

‘It’s okay,’ said James, ‘It can’t get in here.’ I told James it wasn’t bloody okay at all, those men were dying out there. We had to do something.

‘There’s nothing we can--’ said James. He didn’t get to finish because he’d started convulsing as well, as had Rosie. Then it hit me. My diaphragm went into spasm and I could feel the bile rushing up my windpipe as my salivary glands went into overdrive. I could barely breathe, definitely couldn’t speak. Then I lost both bladder and bowel control, more or less simultaneously. Fortunately my nasal pathways were filling up with liquid so I couldn’t smell myself. I felt James’s hand squeezing mine, hurting me. I think through the vomit he was trying to say he loved me, but I couldn’t respond because I was too busy dying.

I place my drink back down on the table. Luis is still sitting across from me, looking at me patiently. I tell him I remember, and slowly describe the attack. He continues to just watch me, unblinking, before asking if it had been painful to die like that and I say no, because it hadn’t been painful at all. Just terrifying. But already it feels like someone else’s experience, like a story I’ve seen on the news.

When I’ve finished talking I just look at the calm sea again. I don’t feel sad, far from it. There is something though, a kind of subdued grief. I haven’t – hadn’t - run my life the way I’d wanted to. Little incremental errors that I always knew I was making, they all piled up and then I hadn’t had the time to correct them. I look at the family down on the beach. Did they all die together?

‘So James died at the same time then,’ says Luis eventually. He can’t be indifferent but he can’t seem upset either. ‘Maybe he’ll be here soon.’

‘Maybe he’s not dead.’ I think about him raising Bobby and Sadie, the three of them alone in the flat about Downing Street. I think about how I’d rather like my kids to come gallivanting out of the ocean, seeing me and then playing with the two already here. ‘It’s wrong to want them to hurry up, I suppose,’ I say. ‘But I’ll miss the kids.’

Luis tells me to relax now because I’m in the right place. I’ve lived a good life, he says, and now I’m being rewarded. ‘There’s no rush, Ellie. Time doesn’t matter here, I don’t think.’

‘You believe that?’

‘Why not, it speaks for itself, no?’ He gestures across the bay. ‘I think that’s why I’m waiting here, Ellie. The beach seems too empty; more people will come, I’m sure.’

I pause for a second. ‘Have you seen my mother? Sorry, that’s a silly question.’

He shakes his head, but he’s smiling at me. ‘She never came to Naviras, did she?’

‘I’m not sure she ever went to Portugal.’

Luis gives a little nod. ‘Nobody I’ve spoken to here is here for the first time. Everyone always loved Naviras, it was their favourite place in the world.’

‘I always imagined her looking down on me, my mother, I mean,’ I stare at the wine glass, thinking it’ll start to warm up soon and wouldn’t it be good to get some ice cubes for it - and there they are, almost instantly. Two of them, materialising into the wine. There’s no plunk or fizz, it’s like they’ve always been there. ‘Well look at that,’ I can’t stop staring at them.

‘That didn’t take you long to work out,’ His grin’s the widest it can be. ‘You’ll get used to that, here, have another one.’ He looks at the glass and soon a third cube appears, clunking underneath the first two.

‘You can get anything you want,’ I say.

‘Isn’t that how it should be?’ He laughs silently. ‘Actually, not everything. You want something to make music with?’ He looks at the base of the cliff wall behind the terrace. A guitar appears; an old fashioned one, more like a lute. ‘You don’t want that?’ He pauses, looks at the guitar, which summarily vanishes. ‘It’s fun, you should try it.’

‘Anything?’

‘Well. If you want the sun to come back up from behind the cliffs, no, that’s not going to happen. You want someone to be here who’s not? Never going to happen.’ He pauses, perhaps he’s worried that came out wrong. ‘But food, drinks, little things, they’ll always come. You can have some of your sardines,’ He grins at me but then looks away again.

‘I don’t know what I’d want,’ I say. ‘A phone, to tell someone what it’s like here, maybe?’

Luis laughs, more audibly. ‘Nah, I tried the phone. There’s nothing electrical. Not anywhere. No TV.’ He watches as I smile. ‘Yeah, I thought you’d be pleased about that.’

‘No computers.’

‘Definitely not!’ He looks back up the sun-deck. ‘No-one here seems to mind.’ He stands up, slowly. ‘I haven’t been here long, myself, Ellie. And not everyone stays here, in fact most people leave and who knows where they go next? That’s what he says.’ He cocks his head towards the people nearer the bar. ‘The guy in the hat says those who leave just head out the village towards the main road, and they never come back.’

‘And you’re planning to stay.’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe, for a while longer, anyway.’

‘But it’s your home, not mine.’

‘It’s just where you were most happy, Ellie, and that’s the same for me. Lots of people who you think would be here, they aren’t. For them, I guess their place is somewhere else. But it’s a lot to take in. Why don’t you sit for a while, get used to it? That’s what I did. It’s going to be fine, I promise.’

‘You won’t stay here with me?’ I’ve more questions, but I want him to ask questions of me, too. Does he not care? ‘It hasn’t been long,’ I say. ‘Since you died, it’s only been three months.’

His face seems to harden, ever so slightly. ‘That’s all it’s been.’

‘Yes. Did you think it would be longer?’

He doesn’t answer for a moment. ‘I’m going into the bar for a while,’ he says eventually. ‘But come and see me, when you’ve had some time. You should have it the way I did, when I got here. Some time to reflect on things.’

He turns and walks away, still looking fairly happy but less so than before. I know he’s worried James will appear. Perhaps he will at any moment, out of the water, but that seems unlikely. This couldn’t be his place, he never cared quite enough about it, surely.

I’d felt like I needed the wine, when I’d seen Luis bringing it over to me. It’s dry and delicious, but it’s not getting me drunk. Then I realise while the sun has gone down behind the cliffs, it hasn’t gone down any further and it still shines onto the other side of the bay, casting its usual butterscotch light on the white cottages. The ice cubes show no signs of shrinking, the people at the other table are still talking and laughing, the children still playing with sandcastles below me.

It seems a shame I can’t tell people what’s here, after death. It would be nice to call someone, or be called. How quickly things have changed.

The same Portuguese number had flashed up on my phone three times in the space of a day. The third time it rang was in the evening, I tried to ignore the rattle as the phone slowly spun around the coffee table, focused instead on watching the news.

‘Mummy, your phone’s ringing again,’ called Bobby from his bedroom.

‘I know darling, just a wrong number,’ I said. I switched the phone off.

A Portuguese call hadn’t come through for two years, not since I’d thrown my old phone in the Thames and changed my number. Luis had been the only Portuguese person to know the new one but we hadn’t spoken for nine months. He’d picked a lousy time to re-establish contact, I thought, in the middle of my nightly attempts to get the kids off to sleep. They’d never quite adjusted to living in the flat above Number 10, where the walls were thin and there wasn’t enough space for them to play properly.

James was still downstairs; the previous week had been beyond frenetic thanks to the Energy Bill foundering in the Commons, the sticking point being a gas and oil pipeline to Greenland funded by a specific tax hike. Whatever they said on the news plenty of the Cabinet still loathed that part, despite the threat of further brownouts. James had spent much of the previous week trying to convince truculent backbenchers, all the while trying to keep abreast of the negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians. Neither task appeared to be going well.

When James eventually came upstairs he had two ministerial red boxes. A two-box night meant he wouldn’t sleep for hours.
He kissed me once on the forehead before going to the fridge to find something to microwave, saying there’d been some progress on the Middle East deal but there wouldn’t be a statement immediately. He seemed pleased, though, explaining the details as he ate molten cannelloni, burning his tongue.

He said he’d spend an hour or so making a few calls then do his boxes, so I kissed him goodnight and lay in bed, eavesdropping on James’s phone call from the next room. He listened more than talked during one, saying ‘uh-huh,’ to what sounded like Morgan’s chief of staff. Eventually he came into the bedroom at two-thirty, waking me up getting into bed, spraying his snoring spray before lying facing away from me.

I continued to lie there in the uncomfortably soft bed, staring up at a patch of flaky paint on the ceiling. Everything was tatty and needed renovating, not just in the flat but throughout the building. New rugs to replace the frayed ones, new wallpaper in the basement where the damp was turning one of the walls mouldy. It was acutely embarrassing for everyone but any notion of doing the place up was beyond the pale.

The alarm on James’s phone rang at 5 o’clock, after he’d dressed and gone downstairs I got out of bed and turned on the news. He was doing a live interview, presumably outside in the street. James liked to give interviews, far more than his predecessors. I think he always needed to remind people he was prime minister, since nobody had actually voted for him.

‘Prime Minister, is Morgan Cross correct to say the future of the Middle East depends on securing a deal promptly?’

‘Well it would certainly be a significant moment, which everyone should reflect on. My deepest admiration for the Turkish government in their efforts so far. No timetable for signing anything yet. Thankyou.’

I was dreading the obvious boost any deal would give James and the government. I wanted him to lose the next election; needed him to be forcibly removed from Number 10. Then I could leave him, get a divorce and move the kids out of Westminster. I had just about enough money to survive and could probably go back to work, but couldn’t do any of that while James was still prime minister. Unhappy as I was, I couldn’t be responsible for the government collapsing, which given the precarious nature of it was a possibility. People would say James was compromised, going through a divorce at such a difficult moment. It would damage everyone, including the kids.

I pulled up the venetian blinds at the windows looking onto Downing Street. The TV crews were out in force, but were turning their harsh lights off now James had gone back inside. They were still able to draw power from the outlets on the wall of the Foreign Office. In fact the power was unmetered throughout Whitehall, exempt from the restrictions in place everywhere else.

Liz Brickman’s hair was the brightest colour against the grey stone wall. She’d just finished delivering the first of a dozen ‘two-ways’ she’d end up doing that day. You could always tell what kind of day it was going to be from what Liz wore on her feet. If it was going to be a frantic day running around Westminster she always wore white trainers. They looked silly when contrasted with her angular trouser-suits but viewers never saw her feet. I liked Liz, we’d known each other for nearly a decade. James had always been wary of her, but after he got Downing Street started to openly dislike her reports. That made me privately like her even more.

To my left the pods at the top of the London Eye, peeking above the rooftops
. Not once had they moved since we’d arrived in Number 10, the wheel’s owner bankrupted by the brownouts. I’d heard rumours from Rav it was going to be dismantled. I let the blinds clatter down and went into the little kitchen to toast then munch on a stale sesame bagel, scrolling through my agenda for the day. Cancer charity working breakfast – though ‘working’ was overstating my role in it wildly. Better was the photocall with war veterans in the Number 10 garden at eleven. Over to the National Gallery at one o’clock for the formal unveiling of the last PM’s official portrait - deathly dull. Not involved in this, just parachuted into it at the last moment; if James had been there, he would’ve given a short speech. As the substitute there was no call for me to say anything. Normally when I was given some words to intone at these events, Anushka would annotate
‘see remarks’
at the right hand side. Fortunately there were no remarks for me to see, nor say. Appropriate really, for an event which was completely unremarkable.

Our living space was incredibly cramped. Although Bobby and Sadie each had their own room, Sadie’s was much smaller and she was rapidly outgrowing it. Living above Number 10 for anything more than another year would’ve been impossible and everyone knew it. There had been method in the madness, though. The Chancellor and his wife had a young daughter, and the flat above Number 11 was larger so really it should’ve been us who’d got it. But because James hadn’t been elected as PM and only got the job through a palace coup, the party wanted us to live above the shop. He had to mark his scent on the place, pre-empt any tittle-tattle.

Bobby was enrolled at a wonderful primary in Southwark with large gardens, a good track record and a pre-school annexe for Sadie. She’d just turned three, and was finding everything controversial. ‘Mummy, why can’t I watch videos on your phone?’

‘I’m leaving it turned off, darling, to save the battery.’ It was the latest in a list of questions from her that morning; why weren’t pigeons allowed to sit on the windowsill, why did she have to wash her hair every night and then have it brushed every morning? This volley of whys ran all the way through breakfast, and then during the wriggling and writhing routine she pulled every morning as I tried to button up her blouse. That annoyed me, but the constant questioning didn’t.

Bobby had always been quieter, with darker colouring like James but showing signs he’d take after me. I suspected he was used to getting less attention, something I always felt guilty about. Until he was five I’d kept up my job and he’d spent much of his earliest years in the custody of nannies and nurseries. He seemed happy enough with his games and videos. Sometimes I’d check his search history and be relieved to find nothing untoward. He’d become interested in space; planets, stars, the sun, distant galaxies. He took after his father in that regard. ‘Mummy, if we look out the window tonight at five past seven we can see the space station. It’s going to fly over London.’

‘Then we’ll have to hope there’s a clear sky, darling.’

That morning they were both driven to school in the custody of Anushka, thanks to my cancerous breakfast. This was despairingly normal. I’d always tried to ride with them when I could, and my only testy moments with Anushka came when she diarised too many breakfast functions. The bigger problems came during the school holidays, when the kids had to be occupied all day but Parliament was still sitting. Then they’d roam Downing Street, stressed advisers looking up from their screens to see one of my kids charging down the hallway.

At about 8 o’clock Anushka came to collect them and off they went down the stairs, Sadie first, Bobby behind her. Sadie was giggling something about Bobby’s school tie being too short, her laughter echoed back up the small staircase. I imagined them trooping down the landing towards the back stairs, oblivious to the officials and advisers passing them in a hurry, desperately trying to make sense of the Palestine situation.

I had half an hour to kill before my first meeting. I grabbed a quick shower and got changed, flicked the TV over from the cartoon channel to the news. I walked over to the kitchen area with its dated appliances and finishings. One of my predecessors had installed them long ago, back in a time when it was just about possible to spend money on such things. The design would have been considered uber-modern back then, what would they call it now, retro-chic?

Then the phone rang; not my mobile but the internal Downing Street line. I didn’t like answering it since anyone could be at the other end. There was no chance to prepare.

‘Hello?’

‘Ellie,’ a woman’s voice, faint. ‘Why don’t you answer your phone?’ Her accent Portuguese.

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Carolina, Ellie. I’ve been trying to reach you. I found your number in my father’s things.’ She sounded like she had the most horrendous cold. ‘He’s gone, Ellie. I’m all alone here, I don’t know what to do.’

I listened as Carolina explained how Luis had been lost at sea scuba diving, ten days previously. When I’d failed to answer my mobile she’d eventually tried to reach me via the Downing Street switchboard; half of the acolytes and staffers downstairs must’ve known about it. How awkward, I thought.

His body hadn’t been found but his scuba gear had washed up, not in Naviras bay but on a deserted beach five miles north. Endless permutations; maybe his oxygen tank had failed, perhaps he’d been hit by a falling rock from the cliff. There’d be no funeral, no grave. Just a memorial plaque in Naviras churchyard. I envied him for this in some ways; in death he’d at least provided food for the fish. That was something.

I told Carolina I couldn’t possibly attend the memorial. I blamed it on my workload as the wife of the PM. In truth I didn’t feel comfortable going, in case James wondered why I was rushing out to Portugal for someone I only slightly knew. I told Carolina I’d send her some money, enough to tide her over for a few months. This seemed safer; James would never notice the wire transfer, in fact he hadn’t looked at our bank account for months.

I promised I’d call Carolina again, now I had her number. I promised she wouldn’t be alone.

‘You’re taking this so calmly, Ellie,’ she said at the end of our conversation. Was she accusing me of being callous?

‘It’s just a shock, at the moment,’ I said, and that was true. It seemed obvious to me that Carolina didn’t know the whole story, which was problematic; how to gauge how informed someone is, without giving away potentially more than you want to? Better to say nothing.

After I put the phone down I went to the shelves in the corner of the living room and pulled down an orange decorative box from the topmost shelf. Inside a compendium of nicknacks; a snooker chalk cube, a key on a leather thong, seashells and pebbles, a length of yellow twine with grains of sand stuck in its fibres. An ancient paperback on Portuguese plants underneath. Detritus, that’s how James would’ve viewed these objects, if he’d ever bothered to open the box.

At the bottom was the postcard, one I’d never sent. The cliffs and the beach had turned sepia, there was a little tear running down the sky from the top left hand corner, the gloss of the print curling down revealing dirt underneath the backing paper.
Having a lovely time, such a beautiful little village. Next stop the Algarve
. I’d written those words almost a decade before, and since then I’d become not unlike the postcard; something whose purpose had not quite been fulfilled.

Underneath the postcard the blister pack of tablets, half of them already gone. I’d always made a point of removing the outer box and throwing it away, just in case James or someone else ever decided to rifle through my belongings and wonder what the pills were for. I pushed one of the terracotta tablets through the foil, spun it around in my hand before putting in my mouth.

It was too large to swallow without water. In the time it took to fill a glass from the sink and rinse it down, the tablet’s acrid coating stuck to my tongue. The taste always lingered for several hours, but that was fine. In fact it was reassuring, reminding me that I’d be safe because I’d taken my pill. Yes, I’d taken possession of them, or them of me. But in the eighteen months I’d been taking them life had got better, or at least no worse. Millions of people survived in similar fashion, I’d often tell myself. So what if Luis was dead; he was the third person in my life to disappear suddenly. I’d become accustomed to this habit of people rudely bowing out without consulting me. Anyway, I’d written him out of the story a year before. I’d deal with it in my own way, silently and slowly. Why rush to grieve?