Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘No,’ I said, ‘tiredness; bad hair day …’

I realised I couldn’t leave just yet, although I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her; but at least another few minutes’ grace, the velvet of the armchair, the little girls’ beady eyes which, sensing something, watched me inquisitively. I sighed inwardly with relief and said yes thanks, a double, when Gloria offered.

I thought it would take her a few minutes to make the coffee, but what she came back almost straightaway carrying was a Scotch. And a vodka for her. I don’t know if the mistake was my transmission (coffee) or her reception (Scotch), but they cancelled each other out in any case and I gratefully savoured the outcome. Gloria sat down on the arm of the sofa, balancing on it, legs crossed in a half-lotus; I had a fleeting vision of something that I couldn’t decide was either black knickers or cunt. ‘Wanna find out? Now?’ a faint voice asked me, barely audible from centuries of fatigue. It was me, trying to talk to someone who’d listen.

‘Fox,’ she was staring at my badge. ‘Aren’t you too high up to be going round door to door?’

I unpinned it from my lapel and tossed it onto a cushion on the sofa.

‘It’s borrowed. Here, it’s a present.’

‘Don’t you wear it anymore?’

‘I’m sick of it. I’m going to resign,’ I said.

‘You can bring your boxes over too if you like. We’ll pool our resources and make a city for the girls with them.’ She laughed. It was an innocent laugh, childish, as if she were the girl we were going to make the city for.

We started chatting and soon I felt the awful oppression lifting from my chest, as if in the last few days it had become the foundations of both of Tamerlán’s towers. It felt good to have lost, to have reached the end of the road, not to be able to go any further. It was what many in the Islands felt when they were taken prisoner. That’s it. We’re alive, the English are here, we defended our country and we lost. It felt good to talk without a purpose, a strategy, the need to hustle each other, to humiliate each other, to extract the information they don’t want to give, to mislead them. Suddenly words weren’t just for prising things out of people or imposing one’s will; they were exchanged, given, stroked like a cat, given back, rolled on the tongue, and sometimes reached down to the chest. I hadn’t realised what I’d lost till I’d started to get it back.

Gloria was out of a job, hence her urgency over the money.

‘I didn’t know what I was going to do, you’ve saved us,’ she told me, and I seriously considered the possibility of crawling under the sofa and staying there for the rest of the evening. She told me she worked an eight-hour day in the complaints department at the state telephone company listening to people swear their heads off till her smile shattered like glass and the little pieces started hitting the floor, the way they do in the cartoons (her comparison was a delight: someone else who drew those absurd connections; I thought to myself I’m not alone). She was almost happy when the company was privatised and she was invited to retire. ‘I let myself be screwed with voluntary retirement. We lived on the severance pay for a few months, but the girls and I are a bit frittery, and blew it all on lunches and theatre and cinema and ice creams, clothes and toys and God knows what.’ Whenever she said ‘the girls’ she looked at them and they raised their heads from the arms of my chair to focus their myopic eyes on her and smile. They had just over a thousand dollars left, she told me, when this boyfriend of hers came on the scene: ‘Actually, he picked me up in a bar,’ she said shaking her head as if to say what a jackass she’d been, and had talked her into sinking her money into Surprise, while kissing his crossed fingers and swearing blind he’d cover the risk with his own. ‘Can you believe it?’ Gloria asked me. ‘The bastard picked me up and fucked me just to turn up at the meeting with his friend of the week. Whenever I said “See you on Thursday,” he’d get frantic and say “No, it’s got to be Wednesday, it’s got to be Wednesday, I can’t stand being apart from you for so long,” the piece of shit. When you’re past thirty and in my position, you get so afraid of scaring men away that you sometimes end up giving yourself to them on the cheap,’ she said with a wan smile, and I felt like smothering her with kisses. I restrained myself. ‘Another thing I went to the last meeting for was to kick his arse, but not surprisingly he didn’t show up again. And I’ve had my fair share of dirty tricks, mind; you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But never anything so … petty, so … pathetic. Being betrayed with something so mediocre, that’s what galls me most.’ I have to do something about that cheque, I thought, at least ask her to give it back so I can use it to slit my wrists. ‘Ah well. I’m getting all whingy,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, my life, I dunno … it hasn’t always been easy …’ she said, staring into the bottom of her vodka-less glass.

‘I can see,’ I added without a second’s thought.

She stared at me for a few seconds, not understanding. When she finally did, she looked at me less out of anger than something approaching disappointment. Not that much: must have been used to it.

‘Meaning what? The girls? They’re the best thing that ever happened to me.’

There was an awkward silence. The first.

‘It’s gloomy in here,’ she said, uncrossing her legs so fast that I was left wondering once again, and descending from her promontory and stretching them, she walked over to the stereo. It was a bit cold inside and her thighs were covered in gooseflesh. ‘I’ll put some music on. What do you fancy? Satie or Guns N’ Roses?’

‘Not fussed.’

One after another, the compact disc began to deal a series of slow, pure, crystalline notes, which hung in the air for several seconds before being replaced by the next. I pictured someone with all the time in the world dismantling a crystal chandelier, plucking off the cut-glass teardrops one by one and throwing them into a still pond, barely scaring the fish and reciting she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not without moving their lips, till the end. Satie of course. Gloria disappeared to some unknown destination and came back holding a spliff between finger and thumb.

‘Smoke?’ she asked me, exhaling an endless unfurling of the sweetest, most intoxicating smoke in creation.

‘Do swims duck?’ I answered, reaching out a hand.

We smoked in silence. It was top dope: resinous and smooth as honey, and after a few tokes I was the pond into which the crystal tears were dropping. The two girls had also closed their eyes, swaying and resuming their mmmmm.

‘Musical, aren’t they.’

‘Actually, they’re pretty deaf. They pick up the vibrations I suppose. We communicate more through gestures and looks than words.’

‘Don’t they say anything?’

‘Only from memory,’ she smiled, exhaled. ‘They repeat stuff like little parrots.’

‘Little penguins.’

‘I didn’t know you could make penguins talk.’

‘Maybe a cop could.’

‘That would make them stool penguins.’

We cracked up laughing till I got stomach cramps. The two girls were smiling sympathetically nearby. Forgetting the squeamishness I’d indecisively set out to master, I stroked their bright purple cheeks with the back, then the palm of my hand.

‘Make them say something,’ I asked.

‘Their party piece is the National Anthem. Want to hear it?’

‘Long as I don’t have to stand up …’

‘No, it’s the Charly García version.’

Gloria put Satie on pause and the girls, obeying some gesture I must have missed, skipped gleefully over to her side, each grabbing a hand, and opened their mouths to sing (not bad for those Disney voices of theirs), almost going into a trance over the last lines.