Laia Jufresa - Umami

‘You don’t get it,’ Pina says, now not so sure about anything. She jumps down from the wall.

‘If you don’t have holes, you’re never going to have children,’ she says, then stands up on one of the swings and thrusts her pelvis forwards and backwards, rocking herself furiously. She’s thinking that neither the hole, the penis, nor the tadpoles exist, that it’s all a story for dumb kids; another one of those stories her mom tells her, like when she says she’s going to pick Pina up from school and instead her dad shows up. Like when she told Pina she could go along to her dance class and then just went without her and without saying anything and Pina was left standing in the kitchen in her leotard.

They hear a whistle. Luz recognizes it and starts to clap. A few seconds later Linda turns up at the swings. Pina is on edge. She’s scared Aunt Linda will tell her off. She stops rocking herself but remains frozen on the swing. She clutches hard onto the chains and her eyes bore into her feet, into her shadow on the grass, into Ana’s panties lying there like a dead butterfly. Linda announces that they have to go back to Mexico City. It’s an emergency: Grandma Emma turned up to surprise them and nobody’s there to open the door.

‘Get dressed, all of you!’ she orders. She means all of them bar Pina. Pina is the only one who’s fully dressed. Pina will have to stay there all weekend.

It’s midday when I set off for the tools. Mostly I go so I don’t have to be around my emotionally disturbed mother. She’s completely loca . This morning she burst into my room screaming, ‘Go back!’

‘Eh?’

‘Go back to that song,’ she said, sitting down on what used to be Luz’s bed but is now my chaise longue. ‘Pass the remote.’

I passed her the remote. The stereo was playing a CD I barely know. Mom went nuts with the rewind button and hashed the song as if she were slicing an onion. Look at this big-eyed fish swimming… You see beneath the sea is where a fish should be… You see this crazy man decided not to breathe…

‘What is wrong with you?’ I asked when she finally threw the remote on the bed and let the song play on.

‘Did you ever play this to Luz?’ she asks me.

‘No siree, Marina just burnt it for me.’

Mom went on staring at me, I laughed, and then she got up and took the CD from the stereo.

‘I forbid you to listen to this song,’ she said, already by the door. And then, looking at the CD cover, ‘I forbid you to listen to Dave Matthews! Or his band!’

‘Yeah, right,’ I told her. Mom has never forbidden me to do anything.

‘And don’t say no siree,’ she said before disappearing down the hall.

‘You’re messing with my mental health, you are!’ I screamed, but she had gone. When I went down for breakfast, I found the CD broken into pieces in the kitchen.

*

I go out into the mews’ passageway and the salmony light hurts my eyes. Last night I stayed up reading. I got through an entire novel, but an easy one, not like the ones Emma sends me. The charactress was fifteen and had a brain tumor. Her titties, according to her, look like bananas. Now it’s my favorite book, because usually in metaphors they look like apples or melons or oranges. Or rather similes. But when I bend over, my titties hang down as if I was forty not thirteen, and that’s why I never have a bath at Pina’s anymore, even though she has a big bathtub. Pi likes to chat while I’m washing and I don’t like her seeing me naked. She’s got pointy, pert titties. If it were a simile I’d say: like Grandma’s hat. On the end of each one sits a dark nipple like a hazelnut. But me, I have flat nipples and my skin’s so pale that my sad blue veins show through like a bad omen. Anyway, I don’t want to think about this anymore. The Girls are sunbathing in a corner of the passageway. Sometimes Alf leaves them outside for hours. I go up to their double stroller.

‘Charactress isn’t a word,’ I tell them, ‘but it should be.’

I have the red trolley with me so that I can bring back whatever I manage to wangle off the neighbors. I start with the house across the street: Daniel and Daniela live just out in front with two Pugs, a baby and another on the way. They’re not so bad, but they’re not especially nice either. Their house has white tiled floors in every room that make the whole place feel like a giant bathroom or a spaceship. All the furniture is made of dark, fake leather, except for the baby’s stuff, which is yellow because they refuse to buy anything blue or pink. Some afternoons, Pi and I look after the baby and root through their half-empty bookshelves. It’s mostly manga and then this one book about how men and women come from different planets. One thing they do have going for them is their giant TV — bigger than anyone’s in the mews — and while the baby sleeps we watch the random shows Daniel downloads and warns us not to touch.

As I might’ve guessed, they’re not at home. I take out one of the pre-prepared notes I brought with me and write their names at the top (Daniel, Daniela, Baby). The baby is called Baby because they haven’t given her a name. They think you should get to know your kid before naming it, because if you do it the other way around you force it to take on the personality of that name, not its natural one. My dad says, though not to their faces, that everyone will just keep on calling her Baby forever. But D and D don’t want that, they just refuse to give her a name without taking her feelings into consideration. They’re waiting till Baby is old enough to have an opinion on the matter. Pina’s dad reminded them that what they’re doing is in fact illegal in Mexico. But Daniela won’t listen to him. The way she sees it, a name can make or break you. She says that in her high school there was a guy called Abel who was run over by his brother.

‘On purpose?’ I asked her.

‘By accident,’ she said, ‘but can’t you see? It was his fate.’

I shove the note under the door, then kneel down to see if it went through OK. There’s a pair of feet standing still in front of me. My heart starts pounding. I scramble up and sprint back to the mews, the red trolley making a racket against the cobbles. Once safely inside the mews, I pounce on the first door I come to. How creepy, those feet standing there right next to the door but not opening. It must be Daniel, I tell myself. He must have another woman.

*

Bitter happens to be the first house. Marina lives there. My brothers call her Miss Mendoza, which is what she wrote on her mailbox, but she’s told me before that ‘this whole Miss thing’ makes her feel ‘old and saggy’, and that she’s ‘only’ twenty-one, which in my eyes practically makes her the local spinster. She’s definitely the token single tenant. Pina and I are also technically single, but Pi has no intentions of staying that way beyond fourteen. She swore she’s going to find a summer fling (those were her words) in Matute, or whatever her mom’s beach is called.

Sometimes Marina lives alone and sometimes she lives with a boyfriend. There’s always some new guy hanging around, and they’re usually so good-looking that if I bump into them in the passageway I have to recite poetry in my head just to stop myself from blushing ( Brown and furry caterpillar in a hurry, take your walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each ). It never really works though: I always turn bright red. And maybe good-looking isn’t the right word either. Let’s say: tall. And when I say Marina is the ‘local’ spinster I mean inside Belldrop Mews, which is where everything that happens in my life takes place, apart from the way too many hours I spend at the school around the corner and in La Michoacana on the next block. What measly perimeters us city-kids are dealt.