A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXVI

Saturday, 13th June 199-, Paco de Arcos, Lisbon During those six hard months of controlled fat intake to get myself back into shape, I'd planned to celebrate the end by cooking something exquisitely drenched in fat for Olivia and myself. Somewhere in my body there was a high whining for something like arroz de pato, duck with rice-the fat soaked into the rice, studded with chourico, the flesh of idle chunks of duck falling apart, the skin crisp-and a deep, cutting, slatey red to wash it down. But the dish took hours to make, it was late, nearly midnight, Olivia wasn't home and there was nothing in the fridge. I tipped the whisky undrunk into the sink. I showered and changed.

I slapped around the kitchen in bare feet and thawed some turkey steaks I'd found in the freezer in warm water. I boiled up some rice, a tin of corn and opened a bottle of Esteva red.

By half-past-midnight I was sitting with a small coffee and an aguardente, smoking my penultimate cigarette. Olivia came in smelling of perfume and beer. She sat down and smoked my last cigarette for me. I complained. She hugged me around the head and kissed me loudly on the ear. I crushed her to me and resisted biting her like I used to when she was small. She squirmed away from me and asked what had happened to my hand.

'A little accident,' I said, not wanting to face that again.

'So,' she said, taking a sip of my coffee, speaking in English as we did from time to time.

'You look happy,' I said.

'I am.'

'You met somebody you liked?'

'Sort of,' she half-lied, automatic at any age. 'How was your day?'

'You heard anything?'

'The girl on the beach, Dad. Paco de Arcos hasn't been talking about anything else.'

'And Cascais?'

'Cascais, too.'

'You stopped talking about the Manic Street Preachers for two seconds.'

'Not that long.'

'Yes, well, she was dead on the beach. Hit on the head and strangled. Not nice. The only thing…'

'How old was she?'

'A bit younger than you.'

'What was "the only thing"?'

My sweet daughter, my little girl. I still saw that under the clothes, the hairstyle, the make-up and perfume. I used to disturb myself at night, because I'm a man and I know men, thinking about all those young guys who wouldn't see that, who saw… who saw what she wanted them to see. I suppose that's it. Girls don't want to be little girls for ever… not even for ten minutes these days.

'Maybe you knew this girl,' I said, deviating.

'Me?'

'Why not? She's the same age. Her parents live in Cascais. She goes to school in Lisbon-Liceu D. Dinis. Her name's Catarina Sousa Oliveira. Privileged kids get murdered too.'

'I don't know anyone at the Liceu D. Dinis. I don't know anyone called Catarina Sousa Oliveira. But that wasn't "the only thing". You changed your mind. I can tell. You don't…'

'I did. The thing was… she was under sixteen and for a kid that age she was getting up to a lot of tricks.'

'Tricks?'

'It's what prostitutes do… they turn tricks.'

'I know that… it's just a weird word for the work.'

'I bet your mother didn't teach you that.'

'Mum and I talked about everything.'

'Turning tricks?'

'It's called "Sex Education". She didn't get any herself so she gave me some.'

'Did she use those words?'

'That's what women do, Dad. When boys are kicking footballs in the park, we're talking about… everything.'

'Except football.'

'I bought you a present,' she said.

'What else did your mother tell you?'

'There,' she said, and laid out a razor, five blades and a can of shaving foam. I pulled her over and kissed her on the head.

What are these for?' I asked.

'Don't be difficult.'

'Go on.'

'What?'

We were talking about your mother.'

You were being nosey about our conversations… and if Mum didn't talk to you about what she talked about with me, then she probably thought it was none of your business. Or, more likely Dad, you wouldn't have been interested.'

Try me.'

She looked up into her head, smoked a bit and polished her teeth with her tongue.

'You first,' she said.

'Me?'

'Tell me something personal that you talked about with Mum to show me… good faith.'

'Like what?'

'Something personal,' she said, enjoying herself, 'like sex. Didn't you ever talk about sex?'

I looked into my aguardente glass for quite some time.

'She talked to me about what it was like having sex with you,' she said.

'Did she?' I said, astonished.

'She said, let me get this right: "It's a wonderful thing to have sex with a man you love. Once you've felt that tenderness, the deep intimacy of his total regard for you, the thrill of that mental connection, then there's no going back…" I think that was more or less it. She told me that after my first time when I complained that it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.'

Olivia stopped. I was in trouble, unable to swallow, my eyeballs prickling, my stomach clenching. It was silent in the room. A single dog barked in the night, a long way off. My daughter put her hand on my back, rubbed me between the shoulders. I pulled back from the: precipice. She put her forehead on to my arm. I stroked her soft, black hair. More time passed. She kissed my wrist. The traffic reasserted itself in the room.

'Your first time?' I said, coming round.

Olivia sat up.

'She didn't tell you, did she? I didn't think she would.'

'Why?'

'I asked her not to. I thought you'd probably have arrested him.'

'When was this?'

'A while ago.'

'I'm not sure how long a while is in English? Sometimes it's short, sometimes it's long.'

'About eighteen months ago.'

'When exactly. I want to remember that time.'

'February last year, Carnival time.'

'You were only just fifteen.'

'That's right.'

'What happened?'

She stretched and shivered with nerves, not used to talking to me like this. Neither of us were.

'You know,' she said.

'Tell me.'

'It was at a party, he was eighteen…'

You think of these things, and then you find they've happened without you knowing. Why hadn't I seen it? Don't women get that look in their eye when they've eaten the forbidden fruit? I know boys don't-they're nerds before and afterwards they're just happy nerds.

It happened again. I thought I was relaxed, but I was coiled tighter than a metal spring. Where was all this… this rage coming from? For the second time that night my fist came down on the table and I roared against the bastard stranger who'd deflowered my daughter. I harangued my dead wife. I railed against my reflection in the window for being so blind. I castigated Olivia who kicked back her chair and volleyed her entire love-life straight back in my face. Yelling at the top of her voice, so that ship's crews heading out into the Atlantic that night would have lined up on the rails to listen. It didn't stop until she hit me, tears streaming down her face, she thundered her fists into my chest and stormed out, the doors crashing behind her, heels cracking the stairs, a final door slam and I could see her thumping face-down on the bed.

Then quiet, apart from the blood thundering in my ears, and the tick of a woodworm eating its way up the table leg.

After half an hour of circular thinking I went upstairs. Olivia's light was out under her door. I continued up the stairs to my attic room and the weakness I'd been indulging for the past six months.

I had a desk set up in the dormer window with a simple raffia-seated wooden chair. In the desk I had a photograph of my wife, a head shot taken by me at night on the terrace of a house we were staying in near Lagos in the Algarve. In the shot her face is luminous. It was a colour shot, but only black and white and a yellow aura had come out in the flash. She never liked having her photo taken. I'd surprised her, but she wasn't wide-eyed and shocked. She was actually staring intendy and with some intensity, at the moment just before evasive action would be taken.

I set the photograph up in a black frame on the desk facing the window. Her face came up in one of the panes of glass, as if she was outside looking in.

Also in the desk, in a locked drawer, was a bag of grass and a packet of Rizla+ papers. I used to smoke it as a kid in Africa. It was the poor man's booze and the gardeners used it all the time. I hadn't smoked since I left London, but when I had to stop drinking to lose the weight, I knew I wasn't going to get through the occasional hard, lonely moment without something to soften the edges.

I'd smoked maybe two or three joints a week for six months. When I smoked I talked to my wife in the window, and the strange part was, that after the dope had taken hold and I'd fallen into myself, she'd talk back.

I sat with the desk lamp on to give the reflection and smoked. It didn't take much. It was good stuff. Not local. I mean, I could have just walked out the front door and bought a deal in five minutes but that wouldn't do. My father's old driver from Guinea provided the gear for me. My black brother.

'It's been a day,' I said.

No answer, her gaze as steady as a ship's purpose through water.

'You like my new face?'

Her lips, slightly apart, dark against her white face, didn't move.

'I've lost my rag twice today. What does that mean? I've never lost control like that before, not even when I've been drinking. That stuff about my father… Carlos talking about my father like that. I couldn't stand it.'

'Maybe you feel guilty,' she said.

'What was that? I didn't catch that.'

'Maybe you feel guilty about your father.'

'Guilty?' I said. 'I was defending him.'

'But you were lefter than left when I first met you.'

'It was the way to rebel against the… against fascism.'

'Was it? Was it just that?'

Silence. I steeplechased a marathon around my head. I knew the answer to this, but how to get it out?

'You can just say it,' she said. 'It's only me and you.'

'It wasn't the right thing for him to have done,' I said.

'That's what you thought?'

'And I still think that now.'

'That's a hard thing for you to have to admit,' she said. 'I know how much you admired him.'

'But why did I go crazy like that? Banging my fists down on the table…'

'You always said that the Portuguese prefer to live in the past… perhaps you've decided to live in the present and the future,' she said. 'You're changing. You're lonely and you're changing. Maybe you don't want to be lonely any more.'

'I missed you tonight. Hearing Olivia say your words, I missed you.'

'You didn't mind me telling her that?'

'No, no. Not that.'

'What then?'

'I just had the thought that even when you were alive I was still a bit lonely.'

'Not lonely. A loner,' she said, correcting my English. 'It's what makes you the man you are, but it can break you, too.'

'In my job you mean?'

'You don't have to think of your job all the time, Ze.'

'You're right. I spent too much time thinking about that.'

'You were too inquisitive for the truth about everything and everybody. Nobody likes that. Not even policemen, and the ones closest to you don't always want to tell it or know it, either.'

'I don't get that.'

'Especially when you don't reveal your own little truths… when you hide.'

'Ah, yes, I knew we'd get to that. The beard.'

'The beard,' she snorted. 'The beard didn't matter.'

'Metaphorically, I meant.'

'OK, if you like,' she said. 'But remember, that's the first time you've told me about what you thought of your father's actions.'

'Why didn't you tell me about Olivia?' I said it in a rush. 'She trusted me not to.'

'I see.'

'She said she couldn't have borne your disappointment.'

'My disappointment?'

'She remembers all those times you used to take her off as a little girl. All those hours you spent with her telling her about things and about how wonderful she was and how much she meant to you. Were you disappointed?'

I took the joint down to the roach and stubbed it out in the tin seashell ashtray. I re-experienced that crushed feeling after a girl you've fallen for lets you down lightly. 'We're strange creatures,' I said. 'Love is a complicated business.'

I stared at my own reflection in the pane above my wife.

'I met someone today,' I said.

'Who was that?'

'A teacher.'

'He or she?'

'She.'

'What about her?' she asked, with a little edge.

'I'm… I like her.'

'Like? What's like?'

'I'm attracted to her.'

Silence.

'She's the first woman I've met that I'd like to…'

'You don't have to be explicit, Ze.'

'I didn't mean to…'

'Then don't.'

'It was just that…'

'Ze?'

Her image shuddered in the windowpane, a breeze smartening off the sea rattled the loose panes, whose putty had come out long ago. The lamp buzzed on the corner of the table. I leaned back and found myself crouching, braced against the edge of the desk. Tiles on the roof shifted against each other as the breeze freshened more. The jolt, when it came, seemed to come from behind my sternum. It thumped me forward into the desk, the photograph collapsed, the pane blackened, the lamp keeled over.

I lay on the floor in the dark, my hands folded on my stomach. I was half under the desk, unable to get enough air in my lungs. A doctor might have thought it was a heart attack and it was, of sorts. After a small aeon I crawled up the chair, just made it to the door and half-fell down the stairs.

I stripped vehemently, my clothes sticking to me like a crazed lover's. I lay on the bed with my hand in her dent of the mattress. Tears leaked down the side of my face, over my ears and wet the pillow.