Within the camera, the salt desert looks faked, tricked up, the brainchild of some film-maker or optical illusionist. No one would believe these photographs. No one would look at them and gain even a fraction of the awe, the surreality, the – here, she thinks of the scientist, twenty feet or so from her, staring up at the sky, his head on one side – purity.
Overreacting. That was what Lionel had charged her with. Overreacting. Emoting. Crying. He had never expressed that he felt hers was a peculiarly female response but the implication was there. The correct response, he seemed to be thinking, the male response would be rationality, calm, order.
It happened so long ago, was the other thing he said, over and over again. It was years ago. As if this would take the sting out of it.
And yet, there was this person, this boy, this man. The resulting child. Evidence, living and breathing, of what had taken place while she was thousands of miles away.
Rosalind has only ever known the body of one other person, in that way. She has only, in all her sixty-eight years, had intercourse with one man: her husband, Lionel. She had believed, for her entire marriage, that it had been the same for him, that their ageing bodies had known only each other, enjoyed only each other, responded only within their exclusive, private pairing.
Now, though, she cannot think these things, she can no longer rely on them. Now she sometimes feels regret that she hadn’t taken the many opportunities that had come her way – because they had, in her twenties, her thirties, sometimes even her forties. There were men, always, who had signalled to her, overtly or otherwise, that they would have been pleased to share her bed. But she had always rebuffed them, always lowered her eyes, always eased away a hand she found on her knee, her waist, her shoulder-blade.
Too late, now, of course. Rosalind adjusts her sunglasses, dabs at the beads of sweat collecting along her hairline. She will be seventy, in the blink of an eye, and somehow she finds herself adrift, homeless, husbandless, childless, grandchildless.
It is not what she had expected of life.
She walks over the crisp skin of the salt. She tries to picture this place, filled as it would have been with water, with tides, with raging, restless seas. What a transformation has been here!
The problem is, she thinks, as she comes to a standstill beside a peaked stalagmite of salt (like a sculpture or a vase, perhaps) that she doesn’t know where to be. How to live. Where to put herself. She is English: she sounds English, her passport is English, all her relatives are English. And yet she hasn’t lived in England for at least half her life. She has been moored here, in South America, for so long that she thinks in Spanish, she dreams in Spanish, she pictures the globe oriented so that the dagger shape of South America stabs proudly down the middle, Europe, Africa and Australasia somewhere off at the periphery.
The idea of going back to England, she reflects, as she rubs her fingers over the crusted, desiccated skin of the stalagmite, is alien to her. Where would she go? Where would she live? Going back with Lionel seemed somehow less strange, as if he carried an element of South America within him, a necessary portion. Without him, it simply doesn’t compute.
Could she live in a little London flat? Rosalind forces herself to envisage sitting at a desk, writing letters, perhaps, in a bay window painted white, veiled in net curtains, somewhere in Maida Vale or St John’s Wood.
What, she wonders, would she do all day? Could she grow succulents along the sills? Would bougainvillaea take in a pot? Could she be bothered to cook, to feed herself in a narrow galley kitchen? Would Lionel try to see her, assuming he goes back to England, to the cottage, as planned? Would she let him?
The altitude is making itself known, she realises. To put one foot in front of another takes a supreme effort, a labouring of the lungs. She can feel her heart knocking away, in its reliable, responsive way, but clearly confused, wondering what on earth is going on.
She needs a moment of shade. She turns back towards the van. She will, she decides, sit in it, with the doors open, to catch whatever breeze comes her way.
She finds the American, Daniel, already there, blowing smoke out of an open window.
‘Does it seem sacrilegious to you?’ he says, indicating the cigarette. ‘In this place?’
‘Not particularly.’ Rosalind climbs into the seat next to him and unbuckles her bag, searching for her tube of suncream. ‘I’ve been chatting to your son.’
‘Oh, yeah? What about?’
‘Sunburnt genitalia.’
Daniel, in the act of tapping ash into a can, stops. ‘Excuse me?’
She gives a short laugh, smearing cream from her chin to her neck. ‘Never mind. Doesn’t matter.’
They look together at Niall, who is bent double, scraping at the salt with some kind of knife or scalpel. Beyond them, the Swiss couple are putting on their clothes, picking up empty shirts and shorts and handing them to each other. Niall ignores them with a determined, stolid air.
‘He is so like you,’ Rosalind says, ‘and yet so different.’
If it weren’t for the boy, she thinks, it might have been all right. I might have been able to forgive, to overlook. But the child, the boy, the student bothers her, devastates her, in a way so visceral, so elemental, she cannot find a way around it. She will not live in that cottage with Lionel. She will not. But will she stay here or will she go to London and live near her sister, her nieces and nephews?
‘Yup,’ Daniel says. ‘He’s different from me in all the right ways. My wife’s theory about Niall, my ex-wife, I mean, is that—’
‘Did you know,’ Rosalind interrupts, turning to him, ‘you do that every time you mention her?’
‘What?’
‘Call her your wife, then correct yourself to “ex-wife”.’
Daniel stares at her, ash collecting at the end of his cigarette. ‘I do?’
Rosalind nods. ‘Every time.’
Daniel stubs out his cigarette with exacting care and drops it into the can. ‘Huh,’ he says, after a moment. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Is it a case of forgetting?’ she says, because she doesn’t see the point in dissembling, not at her age, not after what she’s been through, not with this man whom she will probably never see again. ‘Because it’s so recent? Or is it a case of not wanting to believe it?’
‘Um.’ Daniel scratches his head, takes off his sunglasses to wipe at his brow. He laughs. ‘You ask very penetrating questions, don’t you? Well,’ he clears his throat, ‘it would be the latter, I guess.’
Rosalind nods. ‘It’s none of my business—’
‘You’re going to say “but” now, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I am. It’s none of my business but if you want her back, if –’
‘If?’ He sighs, with all the longing and regret of a much younger man, as if he’s only just realised, as if he’s only now willing to admit it.
‘– then you must get her back. Or, at the very least, try.’ Rosalind taps him on the arm with her camera strap. ‘Life comes to us but once, Daniel.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he murmurs.
Niall appears at the open door. He hurls a backpack onto the seat in front of them, followed by his sunhat, followed by some kind of tripod.
‘What are you two talking about?’ he says, without looking at them.
‘Claudette,’ Daniel says.
This makes Niall stare, first at his father, then at Rosalind, his eyebrows raised. ‘Really?’ he says.
‘Rosalind here was giving me some advice. The female perspective.’
‘Nonsense,’ Rosalind chides. ‘Being female has nothing to do with it. It’s a simple case of following through.’
‘Following through?’
‘You must take your pills,’ Rosalind says to him, ‘as promised. You must get yourself back on your feet, prove to the world that you’ve changed. Am I right?’
Daniel shrugs. ‘Maybe.’
‘And then – and only then – you must
go to this Colette or Claudette or whatever she’s called and you make sure that she sees you, in your new, revised state. Lie across her front doorstep, if necessary. Don’t leave until you have her attention. And when you do, you tell her.’
‘I tell her what?’
‘Whatever it is you wish you’d said to her years ago, when you were still together. I have a theory,’ she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, ‘that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.’
Rosalind tears her gaze away from the blue, the white, and she looks at the two men in the truck, who are staring back at her.
‘That’s it?’ Daniel says.
‘Were you not listening?’ Rosalind says. ‘It’s not exactly straightforward. It’s going to require fortitude and courage, determination and insight. It will be difficult, it will be a struggle. But,’ she says, snapping shut the clasp on her bag, ‘I have no doubt you can pull it off.’
Daniel responds by rubbing at his eyes, wearily, resignedly, as if to contain all they have seen. ‘I don’t know,’ he murmurs. ‘Claudette isn’t exactly a pushover.’
‘Well, of course she isn’t,’ Rosalind says. ‘She wouldn’t be worth it if she was. Would she?’
She sees that Niall, for the first time, is smiling. A lopsided half-smile but a smile nonetheless.
‘Anyway,’ says Daniel, raising his head, ‘what about you, Rosalind?’
‘What about me?’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘That,’ she says, as the truck’s engine starts beneath them, ‘is another story.’
Gold-Hatted, High-Bouncing Lover
Ari, Calvin and Marithe, Belfast, 2016
The cheetah paces to the end of its compound and turns, walking straight towards them, towards the glass where Zoë and Ari are standing. Ari can’t help it: he pulls Zoë back by the wool of her hood, away from the animal, its gliding flank, its muscled golden fur, its baleful ochre eyes, its maddened face, streaked by twin tracks, as if it has wept black tears and scored itself for ever.
‘Daddy.’ Zoë objects mildly to the manhandling, freeing her hood from his grasp, without taking her eyes off the animal.
‘Sorry,’ mutters Ari, who is checking his watch with one hand and his phone with the other. It’s about the right time but there’s still no text from Daniel, so perhaps it isn’t going to happen after all. After the weeks and months of Ari’s clandestine engineering and planning and arranging and persuading, the idea that this might not come off gives him the urge to bang his head against something. Hard.
He slides the phone into his pocket, then finds himself looking into the curious eyes of the woman next to him – a cookie-cutter, middle-class mother with blond highlights and two kids in a double buggy. Ari holds her gaze, registering and challenging her surprise, until she looks away.
He’s used to people thinking he is Zoë’s older brother or male nanny or kindly cousin. Twenty-two-year-old dads of five-year-olds are apparently not something you see every day.
The cheetah treads its path to the compound wall where it turns, just as before, and heads back towards them. Ari tells himself he mustn’t pull Zoë back: the animal is behind reinforced glass, it can’t reach her, it can’t harm her. But as it nears them – again, the beautiful terror of its markings, so close he can see the irregularities in the pattern – he has to put out his hand to touch her hair, still infant-soft, where it gathers and flows into a hairclip.
He feels the eyes of the woman on him once more. He turns to see her staring at him; when their eyes lock she tries to turn her stare into a smile but he knows. He knows she’s thinking, how can that boy be that child’s father? What is the world coming to?
Ari wants to turn to her and say, I knocked up a girl at school, OK? A condom split on us, bad luck, chance in a million, could happen to anyone: fill in whichever cliché you like. The girl was Catholic – one of the posh ones you get in England – so she wouldn’t have an abortion and here we are. Do you want to take a picture or what?
The mother senses some of his ire, Ari is sure, because she pushes down on the handle of the buggy and swings it round, away from the cheetah.
Zoë wants to see the cheetah every time he brings her to visit his family in Ireland. She will ask about it on the plane, ask again when Claudette picks them up, ask every morning until they agree that, yes, they will take her to the zoo. It’s not as if, Ari said to Claudette yesterday, we don’t take her to the zoo in London. He and Sophie are always getting the bus with her to Regent’s Park and spending hours in front of the cheetah compound.
Claudette had shrugged. So she loves cheetahs, she said. It’s an excellent thing to have passions. It’s a good sign. We’ll go to the zoo tomorrow, she said to Zoë.
So while Sophie will be at a lecture and his colleagues will still be in bed, sleeping off a hangover or a late night, Ari has been up since dawn, as he always is on days when he and Zoë are in Donegal. She can’t sleep, she says, because she doesn’t want to miss a thing.
Zoë likes the cheetah but not the lions. She likes the lizards but not the penguins. She hates the monkeys, she hates the grin-toothed piranhas. She likes the parrots and the meerkats and the sunbears. She will not go anywhere near the giraffes (‘too tall’) or the llamas (‘I don’t like their nostrils’).
‘Is the cheetah happy?’ Zoë asks, twisting her head around.
Ari, caught in the act of checking his phone again, looks at her, appalled. Of all the times they have stood here, she has never once asked this. He has often wondered what she is thinking as she stares at the circling animal, as it wears deeper and deeper grooves in the mud of its cage.
‘Um,’ he says, hating the weak tone of his voice, ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
Zoë narrows her eyes – she has Claudette’s eyes, pale green with darker edges, but Ari’s thick, dark hair and her mother’s long nose – and says, ‘What do you think?’
Ari sees he can’t sidestep this. ‘I think,’ he says carefully, ‘that perhaps the cheetah would like a bit more space.’
‘To walk around in?’
‘Yes.’
Zoë considers this, looking back at the cheetah, which has stopped by its bare, muddy branch, from which hangs the skinned carcass of some small mammal: white ribs, sawn-off, protrude from the marbled flesh, like piano keys. The cheetah stares past them, a simmering, sour expression on its face, at something only it can see: the vestigial memory of a grassland, perhaps, with wide-leafed trees and leaping gazelles. ‘I think the cheetah is sad,’ she says.
‘Really?’
‘Because it doesn’t get to see me every day,’ says Zoë, with the myopia of a five-year-old, lacing her fingers together and pressing her forehead into the glass.
‘Well, perhaps he—’
Ari is interrupted by someone barging into him, pushing him so that he nearly drops his phone. He staggers forward, towards the cheetah, which is now on the other side of the glass. He turns to see Marithe, who is dressed in peculiar shredded trousers and a black hoody, earphones in.
‘Urgh,’ she says, holding her nose. ‘What’s that stink?’
‘It’s the cheetah,’ Zoë explains, putting her arms around the legs of her aunt. ‘He does poos in there but he can’t help it because he doesn’t have anywhere else.’
Marithe looks down at Zoë, momentarily speechless. Then she says, ‘Gross.’ Then she turns to Ari. ‘Have you got any food? I’m starving.’
‘People in refugee camps are starving, Marithe,’ Ari says. ‘You are merely hungry and probably only because you didn’t bother to eat any breakfast.’
Marithe rolls her eyes. ‘Who made you minister for food?’ She takes Zoë’s hand and tugs on it. ‘Come on, Zo-zo. Let’s go and hit up Grandmère for a fiver and we’ll get ourselves some chips.’
They find Claudette at a picnic table beside the trampolines, where
Calvin is bouncing around inside a net. Zoë runs towards her and Claudette envelops her small form in a sweeping hug.
‘Did you see the cheetah?’ his mother is saying to Zoë, as Ari approaches. ‘Is he as beautiful as ever?’
Zoë is nodding, thumb in, head inclined against Claudette’s shoulder.
‘And was he walking his walk? Did he look at you and smile?’
Calvin sees his family as a blur: smears of colour in the hinterland beyond the net encircling the trampoline. Snatched syllables reach him. An ‘erp’ in his mother’s husky tones; a ‘tting’ from Zoë. A rumble of an ‘aah’ from his brother. Marithe, he knows, will be mostly silent from the outside but inside – inside! – her world will be one of aural colour, music, beat, lyrics filling her skull, a private stream of sound from her earbuds. She lets him listen sometimes, if he asks her nicely, in the back of the car: she will hand him one earbud, which he will insert, and they will listen together, caught as a pair in the eddying world of her music.
Right now, he can hear the hammering of his heart, the rush of blood in his ears, the rhythmic thunk of his feet against the webbed elastic surface of the trampoline. He is pure sensation, pure motion. The sky reaches down and smacks the top of his head, again and again, the trees lurch their branches towards him, like Baba Yaga’s forest but the rest of the world is gone – his family, the crowds, the walls of the aquarium, the chip stand.
He is bouncing higher, higher, trying to remember the rhyme his mother says sometimes, about a gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, which ends with an emphatic I must have you, at which she would always scoop him off his feet into a flailing, tangled hug, when he was little, when they were on the trampoline at home together. He is getting his vision above the top of the net: he can see the monkey enclosure, the tops of buses on the roads outside the zoo and the entrance gate, which is why he is the first to see his father.
Daniel is walking towards them: he appears to Calvin in stop-motion, his progress across the zoo punctuated by the trampoline net, but he’s getting closer with each bounce. He has on a grey overcoat, one Calvin hasn’t seen before, and a paisley scarf around his neck.