And it wasn’t just at school we stuck together. Home was wherever we ended up at four o’clock, your place or mine. When you had your glandular fever that time and you were in bed for a month, I came and read to you every day – Babar. I know those stories by heart. Whenever I think of elephants now, I think of you and glandular fever. Then, when Mum went into one of her depressions, you’d always be over at my place, and we’d clean up the house together to make her feel better; and when we’d finished, we’d lie on my bedroom floor and just talk. You’d tell me your secrets, and I’d tell you mine, most of them anyway. We were always together. And when Dad went off, I called you and you came round and I cried up against you. You told me we can’t pick our parents, only our friends. I’d never thought of that. You told me that you’d never desert me, no matter what; and you kept your word. It was me that deserted you. But I didn’t just desert you, did I? I betrayed you. I cheated you.
Boys. It was the only thing we really didn’t see eye to eye about. I always thought you were so strange about them. You never looked at them. They just didn’t seem to interest you, until Daniel. Not like me at all. I was never happy unless I had two or three of them chasing me. I knew you never liked the head hunter in me, but you never said anything. I don’t remember you judging me, not once in all the time I’ve known you. I just thought the whole boy thing was a big game, and there weren’t any rules. You made them up as you went along. You knew it wasn’t like that, and you were right. I just didn’t know it then, that’s all.
More than anything, I want you to believe that what I did wasn’t intentional. It just happened. Even that first day when you brought him into school – Daniel Duroy, your ‘French exchange’ – you were like the cat that got the cream. You adored him. I could see that. Everyone could. I couldn’t see why. I mean, he was all right to look at, nothing special. But he was no Gérard Depardieu, was he? He was silent and unsmiling too. He scarcely seemed to notice I was there, and I wasn’t used to that. You were happier for those three weeks than I’d ever seen you. You glowed, and I was so jealous. I think you knew I was too. It was because I missed you. You were always with him, wrapped up in him. You hardly noticed me all the time he was there. And once he’d gone home, you talked about nothing except Daniel and how wonderful he was, how kind, how sensitive, how intellectual, how unlike any other boy you’d ever met. We had first-year-sixth exams coming up and you didn’t even swot. I’d never known you like it.
Then you got ill again with your glandular fever and you cried because the doctor wouldn’t let you go back for your three weeks in France with Daniel. And what did you do? You asked if I would like to go in your place. Daniel liked me – he’d told you so. You’d go over and see him at Christmas instead maybe. That’s how much you trusted me.
I didn’t really want to go. I don’t much like speaking French, and I wasn’t sure how I would get on with Daniel. But it was three weeks away from school. And you’d told me his place was by the sea, you’d shown me the photos. Besides, anything would be better than hanging around home with Mum. She doesn’t seem to mind whether I’m home or not, just so long as she has enough drink in the house. I had some money saved up. So I went.
The schools in France had already finished for the summer holidays. I don’t think Daniel knew what to do with me at first. We hardly spoke, because I wouldn’t try out my French; and, anyway, he seemed happy enough with silence. So I didn’t make the effort.
He showed me round Concarneau. We saw the castle together. That was the last time I wrote to you, the day we went round the castle. We sent you a postcard of it, and we signed it together. I remember it because that was the moment I first knew I loved him. We were sitting on the quay in the sun, watching the yachts going in and out, dangling our legs over the side. I handed him your card to sign. There was a seagull eyeing us sideways. We laughed, and then we looked at each other and we loved each other. I can’t explain it. I still can’t.
After that I spoke English and he spoke French – we found it easier that way. We just talked and walked and talked and walked. His mother and father were never home, so when we weren’t at the beach snorkelling and swimming, we were at home sitting on the lawn drinking cold apricot juice and talking. Not just talking; touching, kissing, loving. Not the groping and grappling I’d done before. He didn’t know what he was doing any more than I did, but we managed. We managed together. Best of all was sleeping curled up into his back and waking to find him still there. I’d blow gently on the soft hair at the back of his neck until he woke. And we laughed, how we laughed. Not at anyone, not at each other; but because we were so happy, so completely right for each other.
Whenever his mother and father came home from work – I still don’t know what they did, he had something to do with boats I think – we were always on our best behaviour again. We’d hold hands under the table and squeeze secret signals at one another. They’re a bit prim and proper, and always busy-busy – the kitchen, the garden, the car. He was always washing the car. They have one of those cars that rises up on its wheels when it starts. It always made me giggle.
I’m telling you all this, Zo, not to make you angry, although I know it must, but because I want you to know how it was between us, how it was natural, right and good. After the first few heady days we began to talk a lot about you, and I told him often how we had nothing to feel guilty about. But no matter how hard I tried to reason it out and justify it so that I shouldn’t feel guilty, I did, and so did Daniel.
I expect you began to wonder what was going on when you didn’t hear any more after the card from Concarneau, but I just couldn’t face telling you what had happened. When I didn’t come back at the end of the three weeks, I knew you must have guessed. And by then I couldn’t bring myself to tell you because I knew you knew, and I knew how much you’d be hating me.
I was due to catch the boat back home on the Sunday from Roscoff, but I just couldn’t bear to leave him. I pretended to be ill, unfit to travel, stomach upset. Daniel’s mother and father believed it. Why shouldn’t they? As they said, English people often get stomach upsets in France. I phoned Mum and told her I’d be back as soon as I was better. She didn’t seem bothered one way or the other. She never even asked me what it was I’d eaten or anything. From her voice I think she was drinking again. I really hate her when she’s like that. I know it’s not her fault, but I can’t help myself. One thing’s for sure. At least I’ll never grow up like her.
During my ‘illness’, Daniel worked out a plan. It was simple. We’d go off together backpacking for as long as we could. We would go as far as his money would stretch. He’d done it before, so his parents wouldn’t be worried about it. I told them Mum had said it was all right for me to stay on a while after I got better. They went along with it without a murmur. Too busy washing cars and cleaning kitchens to worry about it, I think. So we set off.
Three days and four nights later, we found ourselves here in Kalymnos, a little Greek island off the coast of Turkey. I sent a card to Mum, told her that I was better and that I’d be back before term began again. I knew she’d be mad at me for doing it, but I didn’t care. I left no address, so we were on our own and no one knew where we were. We’d bought as much time as we needed. I did a bit of waitressing in the evenings in a café on the seashore. It paid the rent on the room we shared with a million mosquitoes. We swam and we made love, and we swam and we made love. I don’t know why they call it seventh heaven, but if there is one, then we were there, for more than a month we were there, and it was wonderful.
It was Daniel’s birthday and I knew he loved to go diving. There was a wonderful blue and white caique moored in the harbour, a diving-boat. It didn’t cost much to go out for the day. It was my birthday present to him.
We went out on the most beautiful day I ever saw. The sea was a flat, calm, jade green over the sand, blue further out. There wasn’t a whisper of wind, not a puff of cloud. We chugged out and dropped anchor in a bay along the coast
. There were just a few flat-topped houses and a café beyond the beach. I lazed on the deck sunbathing while Daniel got himself all togged up. He flip-flopped around the deck, snorting into his breathing apparatus. Then he flapped his flipper at me and went over the side, a ten-metre dive, the instructor told me.
There was another couple on board the caique, Italians. He was called Enrico and she was called Gina. They were both beautiful. Everything was beautiful that day.
Daniel came up after half an hour or so, climbed on board and dripped all over me as he pulled his gear off. He looked like a god against the sun, my god. Olive skin, grey eyes, gorgeous. Laughing down at me, he told me I should try it, that it was so peaceful at the bottom of the sea, that you were really alone down there. I said I didn’t want to be alone, that I wanted to be with him for ever. The instructor patted him on the shoulder to congratulate him, and then busied himself with the Italians as they prepared for their dive. That was when Daniel said he was thirsty and asked me if I wanted a drink. ‘Coke,’ I told him. The next thing I heard was a great splash, and when I stood up I saw he was swimming for the beach a hundred or so metres away. I remember wondering how he was going to manage to swim back all that way with a can of Coke in his hand. I watched him powering through the sea. He swam so well. He was made for it.
I dozed off while he was gone, not proper sleep, just thinking. I was thinking of you, Zo. I was always thinking of you and wondering how I was ever going to face you again. Then a shadow came over me. It was the instructor asking after Daniel. I told him where he had gone, and he frowned, shook his head and turned away from me. ‘He shouldn’t have,’ he said. ‘I told him. Every time you go down deep, stay out of the water for at least an hour after. I told him.’
He scanned the beach and the café with his binoculars. He called in the Italians and started up the engine. We were going looking for Daniel. I didn’t see why he should be so worried. I wasn’t. I knew Daniel swam like a fish.
The fishermen mending their nets had not seen him on the beach. He hadn’t been seen in the café. We could see no one swimming out in the bay. One of the fishermen shook his head and told us where we should look. He would come and help. They would all come and help. He knew. They all knew, except me. I was still wondering what all the fuss was about. Daniel had clambered ashore somewhere and was making his way to the café. We just couldn’t see him from where we were, that’s all. But no one was searching the island, no one was looking on the shore. I watched from the deck of the caique. I kept telling the instructor they were all looking in the wrong place, that Daniel was ashore already. He said nothing. He didn’t seem to want to look at me. They were all out in boats now, scouring the bay, leaning over and peering down into the sea.
The Italians were snorkelling in the shallows around one of the fishing boats when they found him.
I was there when they dragged him out and tried to revive him, but they never tried hard enough. They just gave up. I tried mouth to mouth, but they pulled me off him. Gina sat by me on the deck as we went back to port, her arm round me, and I looked at the dirty green tarpaulin that covered him, still hoping that it was all a nightmare, that any moment now the tarpaulin would move and Daniel would throw it off and sit up. I could see one of his feet. I willed his toes to move, but they never did.
Back at the harbour, the police were waiting with an open van. There were boxes of tomatoes in the back. They put him on a stretcher and laid him out in the van in the sun alongside the tomatoes. There were dozens of people crowding round, all wanting a look. I said I had to go with him in the van, but they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t let me go with him. They took him away from me, and I never saw him again.
There were questions, lots of questions, about how it had happened, where he came from, where I came from. They took his passport and everything that was his, and left me alone in our room. That was when I really understood that he was dead for ever, gone from me, that I was quite alone in the world.
For two days now I’ve been here. I haven’t moved from our room. Gina and Enrico are kind. They bring me food, grapes, and grilled fish and bread. But I don’t want to eat and I can’t seem to make them understand that. They sit with me, but we can’t speak to one another. So they hug me long and hard, and cry, and then they leave me. And I’m alone again.
Daniel’s mother and father will be here tomorrow, that’s what the police told me. I suppose they’ll take the body back to France. I don’t want to see them. They’ll blame me, and they’d be right to blame me. If I hadn’t come instead of you, if I hadn’t taken him away from you, if we hadn’t been lovers, then Daniel would still be alive.
The light has gone out of my life, and I am alone in darkness. Daniel is gone. So I will go too. I will go down to the bay he drowned in. I will breathe in the sea water that he breathed in, and I’ll go to be with Daniel wherever he is. If it’s heaven, then we’ll be there together. If it’s not, if it’s nowhere, if it’s darkness, then I’d rather be in darkness with Daniel than alone and without him for the rest of my life.
Do you know that you’re the only person in the world I’ll miss? I think you’re the only one who really knows me or cares. And look what I did to you. That’s why I’ve written to you. Because I want you to forgive me. It’s all I care about now.
I think it’ll be easy. I hope so. I’ll just walk into the sea and keep walking. I’m not frightened, Zo, really I’m not. You will forgive me, please?
Love,
Selina
The Beastman of Ballyloch
As a child I once had to be taken out of a pantomime performance of Beauty and the Beast. I was simply terrified of the Beast. Ever since, the story has fascinated me. Then, many years later, I got to hear of an extraordinary, yet ordinary, invention, a mat made entirely of straw, which, if laid on the surface of a pond or a lake, sucks up the algae and lets the pond live and breath again. So I wrote my own Beauty and the Beast. Here it is.
There was once an ogre so pitted and crumpled in his face, so twisted in his body, that no one could bear even to look at him. He was known in all the country around as the ‘Beastman of Ballyloch’. He lived by himself on a small island in the middle of a great dark lake. Being left on his own as a small child, as he had been when his mother died, and shunned ever since by all humankind, he had never learned to speak as other men do, so that when he tried he sounded like a cawing, croaking crow, and no words came out.
Lonely though he was on his island, he was never completely alone, for with him lived all the wild things he loved so well – the squirrels, the otters, the herons and the moorhens. But of all the creatures that lived with him on the island, it was the swans he loved best. He mended their broken wings, untangled them from fishing twine and drove the marauding gulls away from their nests. For the swans, the island was a safe haven. They knew the ogre was not like the people who lived across the lake in the village of Ballyloch. He would not hunt them or steal their eggs, or throw sticks at them. To them, he was not at all hideous. He was their guardian and the kindest man that ever lived, a trusted friend.
He lived simply in the log cabin he had built for himself, under a roof he had thatched himself. Under the thatch it was cool enough in the summer months, and just so long as he kept the fire going, warm enough in the winter too. He grew all the corn he needed in his one-acre field, and all the vegetables he could want in the sheltered garden behind the log cabin. When the fish were rising of an evening in the great dark lake, then he would often go out in his boat and catch himself a fine fat fish for his supper – seatrout perhaps, or brown trout, or even better a silver salmon fresh up from the sea. The ogre needed to eat well, for he was half as big again as any man in Ballyloch.
Much as the people of Ballyloch hated the sight of the ogre, they needed him, for he was the best thatcher for miles around and they knew it. He was also the cheapest. All he asked in payment for a day’s work was a wheelbarrow load of peat for his fire. So whenever there w
as a barn or a house to be rethatched, he would set out across the lake in his boat, and he would always be escorted by a flotilla of swans. The villagers would see him coming, and the cry would go up. ‘The Beastman is coming! The Beastman is coming!’ Many of the children would be hustled away indoors as he tied up his boat by the quayside, as he came limping up the village street. Others, the older ones more often, would laugh and jeer at him, throw stones at him even; and then run off screaming up the alleyways. He did not blame them. He had ears. He knew well enough what they had all been told: ‘Don’t you ever go near the Beastman. He’s mad. He’s bad. Don’t ever set foot on his island either. If you do he’ll gobble you up.’
In spite of this, the ogre did his best to smile at everyone. He would always wave cheerily; but not one of them would ever wave back nor greet him kindly. The ogre endured all the averted eyes, all the wicked whisperings, all the children’s taunts because he loved to be amongst his own, to hear the sound of human voices, to see the people at their work, the children at their play, to feel that he was once more a man amongst men. From high up on a rooftop, as he drove in his spars or combed his thatch, he could look down over the village and watch them all going about their lives. That was as close as he was ever going to get to them. He knew he could hope for nothing more. In all his life he had never once been invited into their houses, never once warmed himself at their hearths. He would do his day’s thatching, wheel his barrowload of peat down to the quayside in the evening, load his boat and row back to his island across the great dark lake, his beloved swans swimming alongside.