Midnight Cactus Page 5

  We’re beginning to get the hang of our new way of life now. For a few days after we arrived I found myself looking over my shoulder, fearful that at any moment someone, namely Robert, would barge into the town and drag us kicking and screaming back to reality, but once it dawned on me that Temerosa was our new reality, I was overcome with a delicious feeling of decadence, the kind you get on holiday, when the luxury of sleep is temporarily returned to you, when you can loaf around all day and think about nothing more pressing than what flavour jam to spread on your toast.

  I wake early in the mornings. As the dark blue of night fades to milky indigo, as the outlines of trees slowly develop through the cabin window, I stretch a lazy toe across the cool unused sheets on the other side of the bed, knowing that right around this time, in London, I’d be woken by the whine of the garbage truck, the whirr of the milk float, followed by the clanking of scaffolding as one or other of our neighbours embarked on their seemingly endless quest for home improvements. Then would come the mind-numbing morning rush hour with its child waking, shaking, washing, dressing, breakfasting, teeth brushing, and homework finding, all played out against the clock, against the surly traffic, against the black and white television set that is London in winter.

  Here, though, the iron bars of routine and habit we’d been so imprisoned by in the city have begun to soften and bend. In our brave new world, early mornings are spent wallowing in the old copper bath. The generator boils the water up hot. After we get out, Emmy and I stand on the deck in our towels, looking down at our cooked lobster feet steaming on the wooden planks. As the heat seeps from our bodies into the cool morning air, we watch the sun climbing round the edges of the mountains. This morning I noticed a smudge of nail varnish on my big toe, like a souvenir from another, different life.

  ‘I can clean that off for you, Mummy,’ Emmy offered, ‘when I have time.’

  And time is what we now have. Time is everywhere, ours to spend how we please and we’re making good use of it. We explore the hills around town and play on the carcasses of mining equipment. We collect grasses to press (Emmy) or set up rusted cans on rustier barrels and throw rocks at them (Jack). We moon around like lovesick teenagers, waxing lyrical about the view or going on and on and on about the beauty of the mountains and the glorious sounds of silence (me) until the children’s eyes roll back in their heads and they start choking on their tongues.

  These days it’s goodbye to those hellish evening meals where the children stare in mute fury at their enemy in its cold green uniform of vegetable, whilst Anneka, our duo-syllabic au pair, squats at the table like a prison wardress, denying probation, removing pudding privileges. These days, thanks to the ratification of the Treaty of Nursery Food, we are allowed to live on tinned chicken noodle soup and macaroni cheese for a further two weeks and moreover we get to eat it whilst playing the Memory game or Boggle or painting our bedrooms in lurid colours. (Emmy and Jack – green and pink, me – mustard.) These days it’s goodbye to the hurrying, begging, shouting, pleading, cajoling of children into bed because there’s an evening plan, a dinner to be cooked for Robert’s business cronies, or just something better to do; these days, of course, there is nothing better to do. Here in Temerosa we all go to bed at the same time, at around nine o’clock. Sometimes even eight-thirty! Good Lord – will the debauchery never end? And if it’s all a little strange and new for them, then stranger and newer for me is that, for the first time in my life, I’m finding sole motherhood addictive.

  ‘Night night, John-boy,’ I call from my room. ‘Night night, Mary Ellen.’

  ‘Night night, Maw,’ Jack and Emmy chirrup back even though the joke sails way over their heads, even though they have never seen The Waltons, a television show, hailing as it does from those days of yore when I was young and dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

  ‘Lights out, Granny Walton,’ they chorus, and I am grateful that despite Jack’s swinging moods, despite Emmy’s geographical confusion (Can we walk to London today?) they are trying their best, they really are, to like their new little house on the prairie.

  Benjamín tears his eyes away from the window and dutifully takes the book from my hand.

  ‘Really, Benjamín, take anything you want,’ I press. ‘I mean I don’t even have bookshelves yet.’

  ‘Thank you, Alice.’

  Why am I pushing this? I don’t want to embarrass him. I have no desire to make him in any way uncomfortable because, quite apart from the way he speaks, there are a host of other things I like about Benjamín: the tightly fitted shirts he wears tucked into his jeans; the stiff leather belt with the steer engraved on its oval buckle. I’m fascinated by the length of his legs (very short), and the fact that he takes a smaller shoe size than me (5 English). I like that his eyes turn down at the corners and the way his nose, disproportionately large compared to his other features, cuts through the topography of his face until it hovers over his lopsided mouth, another feature which I find charming, though one I have not yet dared ask how he came by – but then I haven’t yet dared ask much in the way of personal questions because those I tentatively lob into the conversation, ‘Which part of Mexico do you come from?’, ‘How long have you been living in America?’, are met with evasive answers, ones which imply, ever so cordially, that I am downright nosy and should mind my own business.

  But see, that’s the problem. Benjamín’s business is becoming my business and vice versa. He is lonely, that much is obvious, and thus, I suspect, glad to have us around the place. Benjamín gives the impression of someone who knows he should be mean to us, but simply can’t overcome his inherent kind nature to be so, and the thing I like absolutely best about him is that he seems to have taken over nannying by default and this strikes me as an excellent turn of events. I’m only too aware that my children have spoilt city ways and the sooner they’re taught to swear fluently in Spanish and kill things the better. To that end, they have taken to hanging out in his cabin. There are no books in Benjamín’s cabin, nor pens nor writing paper for that matter. In fact there’s precious little in the way of material possessions and it’s a great deal cleaner and tidier than ours. On the walls hang a Madonna and child clock and a tin effigy of the infant Jesus in St Joseph’s arms, the baby tugging playfully on his father’s beard, which is nailed (the effigy, not beard) inside a makeshift altar underneath which, rather audaciously, sits a television powered by the generator.

  When Emmy is not watching Mexican soap operas she likes to help cook Benjamín’s lunch. This takes the form of her balancing precariously on a bar stool and spooning cold shredded mystery meat into quesadillas, folding them in half, pinching down the edges with her filthy little nails before dropping them from a great height into lethally hot spitting fat while Benjamín offers silent encouragement, strokes his chin and mixes a third jug of Kool-Aid. Jack, meanwhile, addicted to Baywatch reruns, sits in Benjamín’s tweedy upholstered chair, in a 36D-cup-induced stupor, picking fitfully at a selection of Ring Ding doughnuts, pop tarts, Twinkies and strange fluffy pink marshmallow things covered in coconut, all of which Benjamín believes constitutes a wholesome child’s meal. As a nanny, Benjamín is unusually good at taking criticism. For instance, when I tentatively broached the subject of the children contracting scurvy, he merely said, ‘Okay, Alice ... no problem,’ and announced he would make them chicken soup instead. Sure enough, the next time the children went round there was a huge pan of water heating on the stove and on the counter next to it, a freshly strangled chicken. When the water boiled and the lid began to jump, Benjamín flipped it off with a wooden spoon and popped in the chicken: legs, beak, feathers – and an onion as an afterthought.

  So, given all of the above, I don’t know why I’m pushing this except that there remains a smidgeon of curiosity, a lingering doubt about the letter-and-cross-in-a-box mystery that I would like to lay to rest once and for all and, however obscurely, this seems like a good way of working my way round to mentioning it. ‘What about this one?’
I hand him a pedantic-looking tome on desert life. ‘It’s got a lot of information on this area.’

  Benjamín stands up stiffly and brushes dust from the knees of his jeans. He reclaims his knife from the bottom of a crate and slides it through his belt.

  ‘I can’t read, Alice.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sit back on my haunches. Now I’ve done exactly what I hadn’t wanted to do and offended him. ‘But you speak such good English?’

  ‘Nooooo, Alice.’ This particular roller coaster of Os implies rank amazement that I could possibly think such a thing.

  ‘Well what about Spanish? Can you read in Spanish?’ Good God, what’s wrong with me? Every instinct I have tells me to drop this before it goes any further.

  ‘No,’ he says, refusing to meet my eyes.

  Okay, so fine, I’ve got the whole thing wrong. Benjamín can’t read. Benjamín does not wax his moustache by the light of the moon and he has never slept in my bed. The letter belongs not to him but to one of the dead miners, proof of a forbidden love, kept in a secret box, hidden under a squeaking floorboard. Then suddenly it dawns on me why I find this so difficult to believe.

  ‘But, Benjamín, you must be able to read. I mean you can write!’

  ‘Noo,’ he says, then, too late, remembers.

  ‘Benjamín, I know you can write!’

  He looks at the floor angrily.

  He was lying, I was sure of it. The first time we came to Temerosa, Benjamín gave Robert a file of notes and guarantees on the cabin which minutely catalogued everything that had been installed and how it worked. In the last few weeks I’ve spent long hours poring over manufacturers’ manuals, boning up on pipe flows and instructions for fixing the pump, all of which are hand-written. I don’t exactly remember how Benjamín put it, but certainly he’d left me with the impression that it had been his work. But one thing’s for sure – if you can’t read, you can’t write.

  ‘Benjamín, you were here when the cabin was renovated, right?’

  He takes his hat off the chair and puts it on.

  ‘Benjamín?’

  ‘¿Sí?’ Out comes the jaw.

  ‘Who wrote all the notes in that maintenance file?’

  He scratches the stiff hairs by the side of his ears.

  ‘Was it somebody from the building company?’

  ‘Building company?’ he parrots.

  ‘The guys who put in the well,’ I say patiently, ‘and the generator. Who were the men who did the improvements on this cabin?’

  ‘They’re gone,’ he says, unwilling even to give up this seemingly innocuous bit of information.

  ‘Yes, but where did they come from in the first place, who hired them? Was it the previous owners?’ God knows, I don’t mean to heckle him but I have a bona fide reason for asking these questions. Before going bellyup, the Toronto owners had sunk a substantial amount of money into Temerosa, putting in the basic amenities of electricity, telephone and, thank God, water – in the form of a 250-foot well – and my game plan is to take up where they’ve left off. Renovate the rest of the town and sell it on as a spa, or a retreat. Considering I have only the most basic idea how to go about this, it’s fair to say I’m going to need all the help I can get.

  Benjamín just shrugs.

  ‘Was the job run by some kind of a foreman?’

  ‘Four men?’ he queries artlessly.

  ‘Foreman – uh, you know, somebody who tells the builders what to do.’

  ‘Okay, sí’, yes, a man.’

  ‘Okay, good. So was it someone local to here? Was it an outside person the developers brought in?’

  ‘No,’ he repeats stubbornly.

  ‘Come on, Benjamín, if it wasn’t you, who wrote up the maintenance file? Who organized the work? Who paid the workers, drew up the plans, kept the records? ¿Quién lo hizo? Who did it and what was his name?’

  Benjamín runs his hand over his jaw then pulls down on his moustache.

  ‘Duval,’ he says croakily. ‘His name is Duval.’

  5

  Jack is the first to hear it. The children are lolling around on the kitchen floor, apathetic and fractious from tiredness or possibly my refusal to make them jam sandwiches for the fifteenth night running, when Jack sits bolt upright, clamps a hand over his mouth and looks to the door, eyes widening.

  ‘Vinny!’ he whispers through his fingers.

  Vinny is our dog from London, a handsome if very stupid lurcher currently boarding with my father in Scotland. ‘Oh, Mummy, it’s Vinny, can you hear?’ He jumps up and starts a headlong rush towards the door but I whirl round and catch him by the arm. It’s stormy outside and the wind is rattling the glass in the window frames but, even so, I can hear it, a whining and scratching against the wood. I hold Jack tight and listen.

  Earlier this afternoon, out of a blue sky, grey clouds began to collect and a wind rose over the mountains. The children and I stood out on the deck, wrapped in blankets, listening to the oak trees squeaking in arthritic protest as their branches were bent this way and that, then, just as suddenly, the wind dropped, there was absolute quiet and snow began falling silently and relentlessly, coating the landscape in the thinnest layer of white.

  ‘Look.’ Emmy lifted her finger and pointed. There it was, in the gathering darkness, padding across our eye line, pausing only briefly to stop and stare at us.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I squinted out into the gloom. ‘A coyote, maybe?’

  Certainly, it was our first real wild animal. Road-runners yes, chipmunks yes, deer, any number of them, soundlessly crossing the mountain road in their ones and twos, hindquarters bobbing as they leaped from track to bush, and even funny little prairie dogs with velvety newborn-looking skin, but I’d yet to see a coyote in the flesh and imagined them brownish, hunchback, of the same mangy, insolent mould as the hyena. This creature, however, was huge with grey, almost silver-streaked fur.

  ‘A wolf!’ Jack breathed.

  ‘Wolves walk in every dream,’ or so said Rudyard Kipling, but when I rubbed my eyes it had vanished.

  Now the whining outside the door turns to a yip and then to an urgent-sounding bark.

  ‘Mummy!’ Jack digs his elbow into my ribs, but no way am I opening this door. There are mountain lions out here and only last week I’d read a story in the Ague newsletter about a grizzly bear up in Idaho who had lumbered onto the deck of some local’s house. This homeowner, presumably out of relief that the grizzly was outside while he was safely in, did a little na na ne na na victory jig right in front of it, whereupon the grizzly smashed his way through the glass door and ate him right up, an Act Three I found hilarious at the time, but less funny now that the scratching and barking persists.

  ‘Vinny, Vinny!’ Emmy takes up the call. ‘Mummy, let him in. Don’t be so mean.’

  ‘Open the door,’ Jack shouts. He renews his efforts to claw free.

  Emmy’s eyes well up with tears, and her bottom lip quivers pitifully. ‘Let him in, Mummy, I beg you to death, he’ll catch cold . . . he’ll catch cold and then he’ll die, DIE ... do you hear?’

  I look at my children, so shaky and miserable. Now that the novelty of the first few weeks has worn off, things have not been going well just recently. There’s no question that both children are missing home and who’s to say my dream of freedom and romantic isolation won’t turn into their nightmare of lonely imprisonment?

  Emmy has started waking in the night. Quite unprompted by me she has taken to dressing like a whore from the Last Chance Saloon. She sleeps with her long hair twisted up into a bun, her frilly nightie nicely setting off the suede thong, purchased for 20 cents from the Ague thrift shop, which she keeps tied high around her throat. I kneel by the small wooden bed and smooth a hand over her forehead. Her flat bosom heaves with sobs.

  ‘I want Vinny! I want Barbie! I want Anneka! I want Daddy!’ she howls. With a pang I realize that the repulsive plastic Barbie is the only one of these I can pro
duce and I think back to Robert’s call earlier that morning.

  ‘Our friends think we’re having a trial separation,’ he’d said. Down the line, that fragile wire of communication that still binds us, I could hear him gulping air.

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Are we what?’

  ‘Having a trial separation? Is this what this is?’

  ‘Robert—’ I began, but stopped. The truth is there are six non-retractable words which mean the end to a marriage, but when it came to it, they’d stuck in my throat like fishbones. We’d gone to a restaurant and I remembered looking at the other couples sitting in awkward familiarity at their tables for two and wondering how many people were lucky enough to feel a real passion for someone, one that endured. When the grand scheme of marriage becomes mundane with disappointment, wrecked by the sheer ordinariness of life, how many end up settling for less? Settling for so very little. The world was full of couples like me and Robert, moving through life together, the principal dancers in a ballet choreographed by the Joker.

  Blindly, I reach under the bed for the doll. A fresh outpouring of grief threatens but Jack comes to the rescue.