Blood Red

One

Nobody calls me Prim any more, not since I got to this place. To tell you the truth, I’ve always preferred to be called by my proper given name, Primavera, but I’ve been too polite to object to the abbreviation. Where I live now, in the tiny community that I’ve chosen as my home for the rest of my life, no one would ever dream of shortening such a beautiful word, and that suits me just fine. It was always an inappropriate nickname anyway; I have many qualities, the same mix of good and bad as most people, but primness has never been one of them.

I never really believed, in my heart of hearts, that I’d settle down, not until four years ago. Through my teens, and my twenties, as my barely committed search for Mr Right grew more and more haphazard, until it dwindled to nothing, my life became that of a nomad, moving from place to place and job to job, without any sense that I would ever find either vocation or location, on a long-term basis.

When, finally, my path and that of the man of my dreams did cross, it hardly brought stability. Instead my wandering continued, the background to a series of adventures and betrayals, in which I was not always the innocent party, until I found a home for a few months in Cornton Vale, Her Majesty’s less than charming prison for Scotland’s female offenders. The regime in the place didn’t straighten me up, but the experience toughened me. Also, it left me with an unspoken determination to regain custody of my lovely son Tom. His birth should have triggered the change in me; in truth I’m more than a little ashamed that it didn’t. But no; instead, it took a near-death experience in a plane crash to do that and to make me understand that what I had to do from then on was to dedicate my life to my boy.

And that’s what I am doing. He and I are a two-person unit, living comfortably in the picture-postcard village of St Martí d’Empúries, on Spain’s Catalan coast, in a rambling old house overlooking the Golfe de Roses. Tom’s eight now; old enough for sensible conversation yet young enough still to be excited by things like the arrival of the Three Kings, the climax of the Spanish Christmas celebrations. Sometimes I wish he’d just stay that way, that the two of us could be sealed into a time bubble and go on as we are, for ever. I suppose most mums feel that at some point. No harm in dreaming, is there?

I settled here looking, unashamedly, for a quiet life. Have I found it? So far, fat chance! I did manage peaceful for a couple of years in St Martí, before I ran into all that bother with my cousin Frank. That was hairy, but it passed off and things were smooth again for a year or so, so smooth that I began to think I had cracked it. There were no clouds on our horizon; but out here it can rain when you least expect it. . or is that just on my life?