Being (27 page)

‘Un momento, señor
,’ the voice said.
‘Quiero hablar con usted.’

I wasn’t sure exactly what he was saying – something about wanting to talk to me – but at least I knew he was Spanish now, which probably meant he wasn’t one of Ryan’s people. I didn’t know that for sure, though, and as I slowly turned round, still chewing on a piece of bread, I wished I’d brought Eddi’s pistol with me. But then, when I saw who it was, I was glad that I hadn’t. The man standing in front of me, with his hands on his hips, was León Alvarez, the local police officer. I didn’t really know him, but I’d seen him around the village before. He never seemed to do very much. He’d just drive into the village, hang around for a while, chatting and laughing with the locals, then he’d drive off back to wherever he came from.

‘Hola,’
he said to me now.
‘¿Eres Juan, no?’

‘¿Cómo?’

He smiled at me.
‘¿Juan? ¿Juan Martín?’

‘Sí
,’ I told him, glancing at the pistol strapped to his belt.

He nodded his head.
‘Lo he visto en El Corazón con Maria. Ella es una buena, muy hermosa.’

I shrugged, showing him that I didn’t understand. ‘No
entiendo
,’ I said.
‘No hablo mucho español.’

‘You are English, yes?’ he asked me.

‘Sí
.’

He smiled again. ‘I speak English.’

‘Bueno,’
I said.

He gazed at me for a moment, still smiling, then he raised his chin and looked around the courtyard, pretending to check things out. There wasn’t anything to check out, of course – he was just reminding me that he was a policeman. I watched him, wondering what he wanted
with me. Did he know anything? Was he after anything? Or was he just nosing around?

‘You with Maria,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘Señorita Lambarda.’

‘Lombard,’ I corrected him.

‘It’s what I say. You with her?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded. ‘She’s good lady. Very fine.’

‘Yes… yes, she is.’

He sniffed and hitched his belt. ‘So… Juan… you OK? You like here?’

‘Sí
,’ I told him,
‘es muy bien.’

‘¿Cuánto tiempo se queda aquí? ¿Está usted de vacaciones?’

‘¿Cómo?’

‘How long you stay here?’

‘No
sé
.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know… Maria’s working… writing…’ I raised my hands and wiggled my fingers, miming someone tapping at a keyboard. ‘She writes,’ I explained.

‘Ah…’ he said. ‘And you – you also write?’

‘No… no, I don’t write.’

‘You do nothing?’

I shrugged.

He smiled again. ‘You want work?’

‘Work?’

‘Sí
… work,
trabajo
… a job.’

‘What kind of job?’ I asked him.

He told me that his brother, Jorge, who I’d seen a few times in El Corazón, had just bought up a load of old farmhouses in the mountains and was about to start reno
vating them, turning them into luxury holiday villas, and he was looking for labourers. It was easy work and easy money, León told me, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. Cash. When I told him that I didn’t know anything about construction work, he just laughed and told me not to worry.

‘You carry bricks,’ he shrugged, ‘paint a wall… no problem.’

I thanked him for the offer and told him I’d think about it… and that was it. End of conversation. That was all he’d wanted to talk to me about – did I want to do some work for his brother? As he said goodnight and walked off across the square, I realized that I was sweating. My palms were moist, my back was clammy and cold with sweat, and I was starting to shiver in the chilly night air.

Across the square, León was getting into his police car. He started it up, looked over at me and waved, then drove off up San Miguel.

‘See you, León,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Thanks for scaring the hell out of me.’

Eddi didn’t come back that night. She didn’t come back the following day either, and by Saturday afternoon, Christmas Eve, I was starting to get really worried. I’d checked with the Garcias downstairs to see if Eddi had left them a message, but they hadn’t heard anything from her, and now I didn’t know what else I could do. She could be anywhere – in a prison cell, in a hospital. She could have crashed her bike in the mountains. She could be lying dead in the hills somewhere. She could have been arrested. She could have got into some kind of trouble with the drug dealers…

Or worse…

There
were
no drug dealers. Never had been. It was all a big lie. She’d just gone, left me, ridden off to somewhere else. Another town, another country. Maybe she had another flat somewhere? Maybe she’d gone back to England? Maybe she’d done a deal with Ryan and was telling him all about me right now?

I still didn’t have any answers.

All I could do was wait.

So I sat by the window and waited.

∗

The time passed slowly – hours, minutes, seconds… all the time in the world – and inside my head, a thousand things floated and feathered together. The silence of the flat, the emptiness, the bright blue sea in the distance. Eddi’s eyes, jewels of the ocean… her lies, my lies… her absence.

Desires. Wishes.

Memories…

I remembered a birthday party… or was it a Christmas party? I seemed to remember a fat man in a cheap red suit. How old was I? I had no idea. Over five, under ten. A child. There was a long table and benches. Jellies, music, paper plates, plastic cutlery, bowls of boiled sweets. Orange juice in beakers, coloured balloons…

No, it wasn’t Christmas. The fat man in a cheap red suit was just a fat man in a cheap red suit. It wasn’t Christmas. The room was cold. The walls were painted toilet-green. There were high windows with latched openings, long hooked poles leaning in the corner. Scary poles. And sounds. I remembered sounds: kitchen sounds, the babble of children eating and drinking, excited voices, laughter. Most of all, though, I remembered myself concentrating on a door at the end of the room. Waiting for it to open.

Please open.

Please come in.

I don’t know who I was expecting. I had no one.

It was some time in the early evening when I finally heard the sound of Eddi’s motorbike buzzing away in the distance. I held my breath and listened hard. The sound was getting louder, getting closer. With a pounding chest,
I opened the window and leaned out, hoping desperately that I wasn’t mistaken… and I wasn’t. It was Eddi. She’d already turned the corner at the top of the street and now she was heading down towards the house – the motorbike chugging and coughing, grey exhaust smoke trailing along in its wake. Eddi looked up as she pulled in at the side of the road, and I smiled and waved at her. She waved back, but her face wasn’t smiling. She looked tired. Worn out and dishevelled. She didn’t look happy.

But I didn’t mind.

She was here. She’d come back. That was all that mattered.

I ran downstairs to meet her.

She hardly said a word until we were back in the flat, and even then I had to wait until she’d been to the bathroom, changed her clothes and poured herself a large glass of wine. It was a strange kind of silence, and I couldn’t work out what it meant. I’d never seen her like this before. She seemed angry, but angry in an odd kind of way. Angry and sad, perhaps. Or angry with something she didn’t understand. I watched her, waiting, as she drained the glass of wine in one swallow, then topped it up, drank some more and lit a cigarette. She breathed in deeply, blew out a long stream of smoke, and then finally she turned her head and looked at me.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘I was worried about you. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back…’

She gazed at me for a moment and I thought she was going to say something else, but her lips couldn’t seem to
form any words. She opened her mouth, blinked her eyes, then looked away and stared at the floor.

‘What is it, Eddi?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’

She didn’t answer me, she just shook her head and carried on staring at the floor. I realized then that she was crying. As I moved up closer to her, I could see the tears dripping from her face to the floor.

‘Eddi?’ I said quietly.

She looked at me, her face drained and pale. ‘It all went wrong, Robert,’ she said tearfully. ‘Everything went wrong… they robbed me…’

‘Who robbed you?’

She couldn’t speak any more, she was crying too much. I took the glass and the cigarette from her hands, placed them on the table and put my arms around her. She stiffened for a moment, but then she just let herself go – burying her face in my chest, wailing and sobbing, letting it all pour out.

She cried for a long time.

Every now and then she’d try to speak, but she was too breathless and hysterical to make any sense. And when I tried to tell her that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, she didn’t seem to hear me. So I just held her in my arms, letting her do whatever she wanted, until eventually the tears began to dry up and she fell into an exhausted silence.

By the time she’d calmed down enough to tell me what happened, the sun had gone down and the evening sky was already bright with stars. I closed the window and we sat down together on the settee.

∗

She’d got to Granada without any problems, she explained. It had taken her a while to track down these people she knew about, but eventually someone had given her a phone number and she’d called the dealers and set up a meeting.

‘It all sounded fine,’ she told me. ‘They couldn’t see me until eight the next evening, so I booked into a cheap hotel for a couple of nights. I was going to do the deal, stay another night in Granada and come back this morning.’

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know…’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know if the dealers stitched me up, or the people at the hotel, or if it was just bad luck…’ She paused to light a cigarette. I noticed that her hands were shaking.

‘What happened, Eddi?’ I said.

She swallowed hard. ‘I met the dealers, we did the deal… everything seemed perfectly all right.’ She looked at me. ‘It was cocaine… really good stuff. I could have made a fortune out of it. God, I was so
pleased
with myself…’ She shook her head again. ‘They were waiting for me when I got back to the hotel.’

‘Who was waiting for you?’

‘I don’t know… three guys. They were in my room. As soon as I opened the door, they just grabbed me and dragged me inside…’ She was staring straight ahead now, lost in the memory, and I could see the fear in her eyes as she relived the moment. ‘I couldn’t do anything, Robert… it all happened so quickly. I didn’t know what was going on.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘One of them held a knife to my throat, another one snatched the bag of coke… and then they just ran. It was all over in seconds…’ She paused, trying
to control herself. ‘Christ… I’ve never been so frightened in all my life…’

Her voice trailed off and I felt her shiver.

I took hold of her hand. ‘It’s all right… you’re all right now.’

‘I was just so
scared,’
she whispered. ‘I couldn’t
do
anything. After they’d gone, I just stood there, snivelling like a little kid… God, I felt so
pathetic.’

I squeezed her hand.

She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘I wanted to come home… but it was dark… I would have had to ride through the mountains at night.’ Her lips started quivering and she lowered her eyes. ‘I was so
scared,
Robert… I just wanted to come
home
…’

‘It’s all right,’ I said gently. ‘It’s over now. You’re safe –’

‘No, it’s
not
all right,’ she sobbed. ‘I was stupid… everything I did was stupid. I should never have gone there in the first place. It was a stupid idea. Now we haven’t got any money at all –’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

She looked at me, getting impatient. ‘It does.’

I smiled at her. ‘Doesn’t…’

‘Does,’ she said, smiling now through her tears.

I felt something inside me then, something I’d never felt before. A feeling that somehow the world had just shrunk and everything there was – the skies, the mountains, the stars, the sea – everything was right here, right now. Inside me, inside this room, inside this silent white cube. This was the world and that’s all there was.

Just me and Eddi.

Sitting on a settee.

On a starlit Christmas Eve.

‘I really missed you,’ I said to her.

She smiled. ‘I missed you too.’

Later that night, as we lay together in her bed, our nakedness bathed in the light of the moon, I couldn’t help wondering about what we’d just done. I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to think about anything. I just wanted to lie there and smile. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about myself – my self, my body, my skin, my flesh. My workings. The physical things. The glistening sweat on my skin. The excitement, the arousal, the love, the sex. My feelings. My actions. My liquids…

The sex.

How did it happen?

How did it work?

What had actually happened inside me… inside Eddi? What had passed between us? Were we making something together? Was it possible?

Was it
right?

I had no way of knowing.

And I think it was then that I began to realize that I didn’t really care any more. Whatever I was, whatever was inside me, there was nothing I could do about it. I knew it was there and I knew I’d never be able to forget it, but what could I do? I couldn’t do anything. So why bother trying?

I functioned as a human.

I looked like a human.

I thought and felt like a human.

Did it matter that I
wasn’t
human?

No.

What did it matter what was inside me? As long as it worked, and as long as it didn’t stop me from being myself, who cared what it was?

I looked down at Eddi. She was snuggled up warmly in the duvet, her sleepy eyes fixed on mine. Through the open window, I could hear church bells ringing. Eddi smiled at me and draped her arm over my chest.