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The Syrian stands on the terrace, staring down into the bay. His head and shoulders are caught in the last of the light, massive, like a centaur’s. He could be Apollo on his chariot with his hair blown back like that. Or Poseidon. Or Prometheus. He is the darkest white man I have ever seen. It is a sort of gilded darkness, gleaming and beautiful. Even an old man can look like a god, I think.
But, of course, he isn’t old. He is just older than I am, much older. I am seventeen and a half and have just lost twelve pounds at the slimming salon. My body is curved and firm and brown. Until now, I have been plain, as my mother is plain, but in a different way. My mother is slim and elegant and plain. I have been sallow and lumpy and awkward, and too clever by half, as she says. Since I lost weight, she has become more watchful than ever. If a boy whistles at me on the street, she says he is common rubbish, he wants one thing and one thing only, and if I give in, I will be his forever. The result is that every night I dream of common rubbish. Common rubbish comes to watch me sleeping, to adore me as I sleep. When we go out in the car, I am always on the lookout for common rubbish. And yet, walking on the street, I dread their attention. They are callow and leering, and I am full of phrases of contempt. The Syrian turns. He shades his eyes against the sun and smiles. "Join me?" he says, holding up his whiskey and soda. I rub at something on my foot, looking away to hide the flush in my cheeks and neck and ears. If my mother were to see me like this, she would throw him out and cancel the dinner. When my father phoned to ask whether his Syrian friend might come, she did not slam down the phone as she usually does. She hung out her blue silk dress and told Maude to make vol au vent and crême caramel. She likes to surprise my father like this, the way he once surprised her, walking into her dressing room one night and taking her into his arms without even asking. My father has never lived with us. He has never lived with my mother either. He lives with one of his other women, or at his house inland, or on his motor launch, tied up at the Esplanade. He is large like the Syrian, and rich, and he is used to getting what he wants. But with my mother, he gets only as far as the dining room table. And sometimes into the lounge afterwards for coffee. When he comes for dinner, it is I who ask Maude to stew guavas for him, and to make a custard to go with it. I am the one who remembers that he takes two lumps of demerara in a demitasse of black coffee. I am not his first child, nor, I suppose, will I be the last. But I am the one he has always wanted for himself. Perhaps this is because he cannot have me. Or because my cleverness makes him laugh, as my mother’s must once have done. When he laughs at me, she makes a show of flapping out the table cloth she is embroidering for my trousseau, asking which colour for the basket, which for the stems? She knows that the idea of a marriage will enfuriate him. And she is right. "I bloody well hope you’re not going to be pulled into that stinking swamp," he shouts at me. My mother herself has never wanted to be in that stinking swamp. She is an opera singer. If it weren’t for Hitler, she might have been world famous. But she had to leave the Conservatoire, where she was studying, and hide away. And then, near the end of the War, she was found out and sent to the camps like everyone else, high and low. After it was over, she got on a ship as soon as she could and came here, to the bottom of Africa, where you can be the greatest lyric soprano on earth and no one in the real world would ever even know. © Copyright 1999-2002 Lynn Freed |