Wild Gestures Read online

‘I guess.’

  Alicia was surprised he asked this. Liking how you looked seemed obvious, the way, once found, you can only ever see the picture in a Magic Eye and not the coloured dots around it. One day she had looked in the mirror and there was a girl, a pretty girl, not so much hidden as just previously unseen, camouflaged in plain sight, and she wanted to protect her. It was that simple. It was women, not men, who found the idea of beauty interesting, she realised this, but even so.

  ‘Here we say this,’ the boy said. ‘La bellezza va e viene - la bontà si mantiene. It means, beauty doesn’t last, kindness is forever.’

  ‘You saying I’m vain?’

  The boy assured her, he definitely was not saying she was vain. What he seemed not to understand was that no-one gave a fuck about an ugly girl. But he didn’t feel like the sort of person you could say that to and she still wanted him to like her, or maybe needed him to, which was not quite the same thing but under the circumstances was what her father would have called good enough for government work.

  ‘What will happen now?’ she asked the boy, tilting the beer bottle in the direction of the lake. ‘Are they like, removing her body?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But did they actually find her?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Is there maybe a chance that she’ll be okay?’

  ‘Maybe a chance, yes.’

  ‘What do you think it feels like to drown?’

  ‘Alice,’ the boy said, abruptly. ‘My English is not so good for this.’

  She bent over to fix something on her shoe. Lately her body had started doing this new thing when she wanted to cry, becoming unbearably heavy so that it was not embarrassment but weight that eventually broke her, which felt exactly the same as when she tried a particularly complex piece on the piano and her fingers just couldn’t move fast enough. It was actually a very basic problem; just an instantaneous feeling of being terribly small in a vast world, which sometimes could be more beautiful than you knew what to do with. Sometimes even a rapidly ascending series of arpeggios could be too much. She didn’t know even one word of Italian capable of explaining it.

  ‘You promised me excite,’ Alicia said to the boy instead, throwing back the end of the Peroni. ‘So show me something exciting.’

  There were the Scaligeri ruins, not as extensive or complete as elsewhere in the region, but about the right amount for how much he knew and how interested she was in medieval history. The rumour of ghosts would have been a better story had it been dark. They walked streets bright with white tremors of bougainvillea. At the point the beach gave way to damp groves of cypress, three girls were cutting a path the colour of peacock feathers through the lake. Even here the air was still loud with bird sound and it made Alicia sad, distantly sad, like she had no right to be feeling that particular kind of pain. She knew the boy was looking at the girls on the shoreline, milky and phosphorescent as they telescoped in and out of view, but it was okay somehow, just a confirmation that there were things you could always count on to be true.

  ‘Back home,’ Alicia told the boy, ‘there’d be some rule saying you couldn’t sell living things on the sidewalk like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The birds.’

  ‘It’s ok here. It’s tradition.’

  ‘It’s barbaric. And it’s kind of creepy. You know, like Hitchcock.’

  ‘But Sagra dei Osei is about singing, not dying.’

  ‘Someone needs to tell the birds that.’

  She had offended him now. They kicked along the shoreline without speaking and then the boy asked if she needed to get back to the hotel any time soon.

  ‘Tell me,’ she tried instead. ‘About the singing,’—because it was the only connection she could make, a stepping into some dark, shared undertow of bird-haunted streets, where for centuries men had travelled hundreds of miles to market, sparrows and nightingales peddled for the magic of their song. In a way she really did want to know. It was horrific and it was sublime. It was both things and it seemed that when he took her hand to guide her off the beach along dusty, light-stippled paths of olive, and told her about how in Sacile, the oldest of the markets, a thrush would be crowned king of all songbirds, what he was really saying was that the more beautiful something could be, the closer to death it came.

  ‘You don’t find birds creepy?’ she asked. ‘They freak me out. Maybe it’s because they’re so prehistoric. And they have such quick little eyes, like their thoughts are way ahead of me.’

  But it didn’t translate despite her mime, or if it did it came out as something else that sounded mean when she meant it to be kind of funny, and if not funny then at least selfdeprecating, like acknowledging maybe the birds were going to get the last laugh after all. Even if it was just the language barrier it made Alicia think about what Victor Minchin had said right before she told him she was going to Europe for the summer, the thing about how ironic it was that for a nerd she was so inarticulate when she opened her mouth. Except this was not the real irony, which lay in how he said dumb and not inarticulate and also how Victor Minchin explored it so inexpertly, her mouth, how he was curious but faltered, how cautiously he moved, like a prince stepping softly inside a pavilion. How his own gestures were so incapable of answering her questions. How he really had no idea what he was doing but kept on doing it anyway, which was maybe what the woman on the pedalo had felt when she rented it that morning, I don’t know what I’m doing, but this is supposed to be fun and everyone does it, and maybe there had also been a moment, a luminous, shocking moment before the cold of the water started to compress her thinking where the woman on the pedalo had felt something new, I should never have done this, I had no idea this could happen, the way Alicia herself had thought this, the way she had thought, I had no idea this could happen even though it was the most obvious thing, the only thing that was going to happen the minute Victor Minchin told her she was dumb and she touched her hands to his face.

  ‘Here is good,’ she said.

  Here was a small patch of scrub grass under the trees. Lizards basked and the heat from the sun made them slip in and out of each other’s hands as they scrambled through the undergrowth.

  ‘Strange things happen to people called Alice,’ the boy said suddenly, catching her waist as she stumbled. ‘They get lost in Wonderland, no?’ he added, and she shook her head -‘It’s Alicia’ - and reached up to show him the length of the ‘a’, aaah, like a doctor would make you say it, demonstrated the way the sound fell heavily from the mouth when you slipped it inside someone else’s. The beer made her aggressive, and giddy, so it was less a kiss than an anchoring, or a taking, an act of piracy, but still it was a way in, it was a fall, a sudden silence, or the opposite; new and shared words.

  When he pressed her hands behind her head she caught a tiny scent of bird clinging to her wrist.

  She guessed it would be not like it was with Victor Minchin. It would be fast and certain, which didn’t make it romance, but who needed that? It would have rhythm and it would have meaning, one singular moment of meaning, like a haiku breathed against her body, and because she was still in high school it was okay to measure the formative events of life against poetry. The boy touched her closed eyelids.

  ‘You have your mother’s eyes,’ he said into the place where Alicia’s barrette pulled hair high above her ears.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Beautiful. Like the sea. Like emeralds.’

  ‘Telling me I look like my Mom is not a compliment.’

  ‘Very beautiful,’ he repeated.

  ‘And how do you even know,’ Alicia asked, kissing him back, pulling him in by the belt, ‘what colour my Mom’s eyes are?’

  Her mother’s eyes, are in fact, short-sighted, green because of genetic mutations, not magic; the myths say that the greeneyed are better at holding down long term relationships, but the myths are wrong. Rarer than gold, Alicia knows that not until the Moors invaded Spain did green eyes appe
ar in Europe. They are the eyes of nomads and explorers or faeries and evil spirits, if you read Wikipedia. She herself has stared into a mirror, hoping to cast some kind of spell over her body, hoping that really she might be a witch after all and could undo this thing, just with her eyes. Because Alicia has a secret, a secret that has been growing in her since before she got on the plane at Newark, something that will not sink down and stay hidden no matter how many desperate prayers she invents, something she cannot tell her mother, who hasn’t enough time, despite being on vacation, to wonder what her only daughter has been doing all day, or any day for that matter. Something that she is never going to tell Victor Minchin, who doesn’t even understand irony and is not somebody she wants to be connected to for the rest of her life.

  ‘Alice,’ the boy is saying, out of breath. ‘What are you doing? We just kiss, yes?’

  ‘Why would we just kiss?’

  ‘Because you are a kid, Alice!’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, wondering when it was that he realised.

  She wants the feeling to come back, of the boy watching her on the hotel balcony, her white skirt billowing and rising in the evening breeze while her mother, in shadow on the other side of the floating drapes, slams and curses about the gently sweltering room. Or another feeling, of being in Victor Minchin’s bedroom, right after she picked up her study notes off his bed but before they fell across the rug, before the careful, colour-coded order she’d filed them in became something else that could only happen in the past. But she cannot find either memory. It’s like they don’t belong to her any more. It’s as though she has held the feelings in her hand and gently, and in slow-motion, brought them to her lips and blown them out. Alicia remembers now the time she met the boy in the corridor outside their room, the time when he didn’t notice her, how he smelled of sweat and flowers, the translucent taut-silk shine of the skin across his back when he bent to re-tie his shoes. It is like a new pulse inside her. She lets her fingers move under his shirt, run along his spine as if it is her piano, as if she can play the memory away.

  ‘Alice,’ the boy gasps. ‘This is a bad idea.’

  Behind the trees the girls swim slow, labyrinthine circles through the blue, the lake water like a magnet pulling at the iron firmness of their limbs. And then they stop.

  The sound of her voice—it is two things at once. Her voice is raw, like it is coming from another person’s mouth, but also more her own than it has ever been. Mostly the sounds have no definition. Sometimes they could be the word please. It might be what it feels like to drown. Not water but too much life, crushing you.

  She is aware of the girls returning to shore, suddenly, like stars into an evening sky, but truthfully Alicia has forgotten about the Polizia di Stato who are beginning to arrive further down the beach where the missing woman’s family make terrible bargains with the universe and will time to suspend. The only thing she seems able to think of is the bird, the small, sad, wild dance of the bird on her arm, and it makes her cry the way she knows she has to cry, now that she has started this. She is crying but it feels like she is singing, like in the story of the nightingale and the rose that her father used to read, singing and singing until a thorn pierces her heart.

  It’s not like half the people sunning themselves on the Villa Blanca’s terrace this morning didn’t see the boy come to ask her go down to the promenade, didn’t see how fired up he was, in such a hurry about something. It’s not like there isn’t a photograph somewhere in the camera of a woman called Grace, an ugly composition of dying lovebirds framing a dirty tank of fish and a local boy with his hand at the back of a young girl, sweeping her along with some kind of ardent fury. The duty officer is going to note both Alicia’s evident intoxication and her date of birth in readiness for the incident report. So it doesn’t matter if he didn’t. Didn’t. It just means that now when her mother finds out—it won’t be her fault. The boy is the hotel bellhop, luggage carrier, pool cleaner; Alicia is a paying guest, an honour roll student, vacationing in Italy to improve her language skills, or at least that was the official reason her mother gave the neighbours. Those are just the facts, so. Victor Minchin would want it this way, if he knew.

  The things that aren’t facts don’t seem to have anything to do with her any more. Suddenly they feel a very long way off, as if Alicia has never seen them before. Or maybe she has, but they looked different then. The important thing is that the way the story is written down later Alicia is not the one who rolled the boy, who is in fact twenty-two and an anthropology student at Venice International University, on top of her, and that the hands at the boy’s fly are his own. That is the important thing. The important thing, and this she is sure of, is that when her mother arrives at the Stazione di Polizia with the Villa Blanca’s manager later that evening, she needs to be sobbing fiercely in the evidence room, ready to put on record what from now on she is going to call everything.

  Everything beautiful is far away

  One night there was a man in the lobby who said he had come all the way from the Isle of Man to visit his wife; this was the only hospital that could treat her cancer. The only one? Really? Well no, there were others, he said. But here they could do things that would give her months and not weeks. Wasn’t that worth the trip? I am not the kind of person to answer strangers. I mean, I really didn’t know.

  We watched the revolving doors instead of talking to each other, wondering who had it worst: the doctors who knew everything, going outside for a smoke, or the mothers who knew nothing, stubbing their cigarettes out on the wall as they ran in. I wondered this. The man in the lobby was probably thinking of other things. If I had to guess, if I was made to, I would say that weeks might be better, but that is because I am an impatient kind of person, and there is only so much anyone can bear. You go through life wanting time to speed up so you can be old enough to drive, or date a man without asking your mother’s permission. You just want someone to take you seriously. You don’t want anything to be measured in periods longer than weeks. What I’m really saying is that I could never be a doctor. There might be miracles but still you have the feeling everyone is bracing themselves for something else. That thing is afterwards. There are not enough miracles in the world to compensate for that.

  I was watching the revolving doors like we were in an old Western, like this was the O.K. Corral and any minute now we were going to have to dodge the spray of fire. If I could count to ten before they opened again, I would stand up and leave. I was on seven when the man in the lobby said; I have to go up and give her a sponge bath now. They want me to have an active role in her care. Do they make you do that?

  They don’t. I have made it quite clear from the start what I am and am not prepared to do.

  Outside the hospital there are fields, wheat I think because historically this is bread-making country. You still see windmills when you drive out over the Fen, but they don’t work except on public holidays, when people come from all over to make bread as a way of bringing the past to life.

  You can see the fields from any of the windows, but that is not why the windows in hospitals are there. It is not about the view. If you have ever lived by the sea you will know this. The wildness – it doesn’t go away when you can’t see it. I thought about the woman from the Isle of Man, how when she closed her eyes she could have the whole of the ocean if she wanted, like a long, living dream.

  There is a name for the way you might want to stay in the dream and not come back. Divers call it the rapture of the deep, but this is no more than a state of nitrous intoxication, an entirely reversible condition as long as you know to ascend to the shallows. It is not a sickness so much as not realising when you have had too much.

  At night you can hear the wheat, like a song, like the sea. You hear the hum of ancient glacial planes beneath long barrows. Suddenly the surface seems very far away.

  At five o’clock a nurse comes to adjust the morphine pump. This nurse, she talks to him like I never have. She touches him
in a way that should make me jealous. That blue diamond inside the wrist. Poor love, she says, rubbing it to bring up the veins. Poor baby.

  You notice this too when people speak to small children, or animals, how they change the tone of their voice, or make incomprehensible hand gestures. When there are no words, we forget that once the only way was touch. My sister used to say, when she was la-ing nursery rhymes late into the night with Anna, well it can only ever help to try. It would take so long some nights, my sister putting Anna in the rugby ball position and swaying from side to side saying, there there baby, la la, a thousand times. At the worst of it I might think, for the love of God Anna! or I might come in and take over, it depended on how things were with my sister, if I felt sorry for her or if she had brought up the thing about the money I borrowed from our parents again. But if I did go in, there was something I knew for certain, and that was that Anna would stop crying. She’d just stop and the triumph would be all mine, which you would think I would feel good about. But all it did was make my sister feel as though she had failed in the most basic biological way. My sister would have preferred the crying to that. So on the nights I felt sorry for her, what I did was put the pillow over my head and go back to sleep.

  I wanted to say to the man in the lobby, let the nurses do the sponge bath: let it go. Only my sister would know how this feels.

  To start with you talk about everything. Arguments are not off limits either. Then there are the things which ordinarily wouldn’t be funny enough to mention, but it turns out not so many things happen in a day, or even a week; you can’t be picky. I ask him if he remembers when we went to Starcross. We drove all the way along the coast of what they call the English Riviera, where palm trees grow next to signs for fish and chips. You know, I say, I wore that patchwork skirt. You hated it because it made me look like a hippie. There were owls flying over the beach even though it was daylight. There was this sign, on the wall of the harbour, Shellfish eaten from these waters must be boiled continuously for three minutes. I talk fast. I talk like there is a stopwatch running and any minute someone is going to shout Stop!