Excerpt: Indigestion

Borrachuelos
Orelia had ladled out the green lentil stew. It had been one of my grandma’s signature dishes. Abuela, grandma, had not been a great cook, she had only a few dishes in her repertoire but this was one of her best. It was a universal favourite among the family. It smelt of morsilla; Spanish black pudding, and chorizo. It tasted of Abuela of her heartfelt kindness and earthy simplicity. Orelia had cooked this traditional family dish in memory of her own recently deceased husband Tony, Abuela’s son.
At Tony’s funeral a few months before this gathering, a bunch of us had decided to cook together the dishes that the older folk used to make. We wanted to do this as a way of remembering Tony; my late uncle and all our other Spanish ancestors. So we had gone to Orelia’s place to learn two recipes from the old country and to reminisce. Orelia was uncle Tony’s wife and now his widow.
Orelia had always believed herself to be a great cook. She was even certain of having extended her husband’s life a little with her food and the pleasure of it. “Fresh fish, fresh meat, I buy the best, only the best fresh food for him every day and cook it all fresh.” She had beamed crazily at the consultant in the hospital as he tried to find a vein in Tony’s dying body for the morphine feed on that last night.
So on this Saturday morning in mid-February, we had come together to prepare the now unseasonal Christmas sweets, Borrachuelos and Rosquitos. Spanish variations on donuts, containing wine and spices. So far we had had quite a time of it, all mixing the dough and then taking it in turns to knead, much to Orelia’s amusement. Out of all of us, she had said that I had a natural knack but made the squares a bit small. Chiri, Tony’s youngest sister, on the other hand couldn’t quite get the right thickness to the dough before cutting it into squares and tired very soon. Orelia didn’t say it but I imagined she thought, ‘typical’. Chiri had always been the black sheep of this part of the family. Considered sexually very precocious, she had experimented at 12 and married at 16 when already pregnant with her only child Lucy who was now 29 and had been in the kitchen with the rest of us.
When I was little I remember that all the grown ups had always thought that Chiri was at best, ‘lazy and difficult’ and at worst just too wild. I on the other hand had looked up to her as she was only 8 years older than me but seemed so very sophisticated and knowing, as she proudly flicked her shiny, heavy black hair in my face and swanned off on some date or other. Over the last 20 years though, I think I’d only seen her a handful of times and only at funerals: Abuela’s; grandma, Abuelo’s; grandpa, and then at uncle Tony’s.
Just before lunch I had cadged a roly off Chiri and we were puffing and shivering in the still wintery garden.
“Look at you!” She had beamed at me giving me one of those smiles that took up her whole face. “Still the same, just like when you were little, always fun and funny, it’s great. It’s really great to see you Connie after all this time.”
“It’s great to see you too Chiri I can’t believe it’s been so long. How did that happen?” I replied as she shrugged back her own disbelief.
Throughout the pastry making morning, those feelings rolled over me again that had begun to rise at Tony’s funeral in December. How come we hadn’t seen each other for so long, really? We had almost been estranged for god’s sake. Had it all been down to my mother’s influence? And if so, why?
My mother had managed her family’s immigration from North Africa safely transplanting them all to London in the sixties. But after that we understood that she had ignored them, like left luggage. Letting them slip unattended into the sea of new life that now lapped about her in the ‘swinging’ city she had read so much about in magazines and had seen in newsreels. I had supposed that she felt she had done more than her duty by finding them a new land to settle in and in any case, she was only 19 herself at the time and full of new desires and suddenly free to redefine her own identity.
Not many years later, when she had her own family by then, we would only go to see her parents, Abuelo and Abuela and brother and sister, Tony and Chiri who all now shared a shabby house in Acton, at my father’s insistence. He thought it was important for his children to know all their grandparents and aunts and uncles. So, very reluctantly my mother would consent to occasional visits.
More than 30 years later at Tony’s funeral, surrounded by all these kind looking Mediterraneans who greeted me with wide, sad smiles and then again today as I watched pernickety Orelia take such care over her teaching of us and noticed her avid cleanliness and homely attention in all she did, I felt regret at the power of my mother’s influence in this estrangement. As I pummelled, stretched and kneaded, I vowed to myself that things would be different from now on. I had my own choices to make. Vistas of Spanish narratives that would give my own sense of self a new flavour unfurled before me like the relaxing, fragrant pastry dough on the cool marble slab beneath my hands.
Buoyed by these thoughts while the twisted Borrachuelos and Rosquitos rested on trays under immaculate tea towels, I joined everyone for lunch at the dining room table. As we took our places, I even ventured a toast to the ‘family’ and included Tony’s name in this, which brought a silence into the room as everyone looked at the picture of him Orelia had set out on the sideboard, lit by a flickering, votive candle. Gulps in throats were swallowed and Orelia and Chiri wiped away tears.
Over the meal, as we all ate a little too much of the lentils that were not quite up to Abuela’s mark, talk turned to relationships. Orelia spoke of how she’d been managing since Tony’s death and of not really knowing how she would cope from now on because she and Tony had been such a very tight fit.
I chipped in a little of my own story at this point as a distraction for Orelia who, now the bustle of sweet-making had stopped seemed shrunken and full of tears. I told them that I had met someone and that in a shy way I was feeling I had at last found happiness after years of drifting in the no-romance doldrums.
It was about now I think, that Orelia, uninterested in my good news, suddenly blurted out; “And you Chiri, you should never have let Ronnie go, you were silly, so silly, a silly little girl.”
Eyes were drawn to Tony’s candle flame that suddenly sputtered in a cold blast of air that had pushed its way into the room.
“What? What did you just say Orelia?” Chiri looked like she’d been dealt a body blow. The rest of us fixated on the candle-flame, unsure of what was to come.
“I said,” Orelia continued, “that you shouldn’t have let that Ronnie go, that was very, very silly, he was such a nice, sweet man. Look at you now all alone.”
“Orelia, he wasn’t a nice man. He was a pig!” Chiri snapped back.
“Well, you must have worn him down then. He seemed like a nice man to me, to all of us.” Orelia bit back not giving an inch.
“God Orelia, today of all days. You and everyone else still going on about Ronnie. ‘Ronnie this, Ronnie that.’ So sweet? So sweet! Ask Lucy how sweet he was. Her father, ask her what he was really like. Ask her.”
“Mum!” Lucy said.
“No Lucy, no.” Chiri continued unstoppable now.
“I came here today to see you Orelia and you Connie. Because, I wanted you all to meet Lucy. I wanted to cook, to learn the old recipes so I could make them too. I came because we agreed to do this at Tony’s funeral. I came here for him and then Orelia goes and says that to me about Ronnie, how I wore him down! Him, who threw me against the wall in my bedroom, again and again and again, with the telly turned up loud so noone would notice. Who raped me again and again and tried to break my leg so I couldn’t get away. I wore him down!”
“Oh mum!”
“Shut up Lucy. Not now! Orelia you don’t know anything. You never wanted to know, noone ever did. When we were all sharing the house back in Acton….none of you wanted to know. You didn’t see my black eye, my black eye, didn’t notice how I couldn’t walk properly, again. You didn’t see anything because you didn’t want to. I was in the house with all of you, where my parents, my brother and sister-in-law lived, locked in my room – just a child, 16 years old being abused by my violent husband who everyone thought was so nice, so quiet – wouldn’t say boo to a mouse? Goose? Whatever, you know what I mean?
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t be so dramatic Chiri. Always, with stories, so many stories, always the same.” Orelia tailed off as Chiri took a step towards her sister-in-law, a mixture of desperation and barely controlled rage in her eyes.

Panning for Gold

Panning for gold, sure but this is a different kind of gold – mine.

At 3 years old, the gold was the yellow-spun hair of my handsomest cousin I’d met to date. Angelic, Fernandito with eyes the colour of the sea I’d seen from the plane’s port-hole window as we came in to land on a searingly hot African day. Where the figures wobbled in the heat and the tarmac was sticky under-foot.

Fernandito was waiting for us in crisp, white and blue with his father, Fernando-senior also, blue-eyed and handsome but not a patch on his 3-year old son.

Tangier was blue, dusty-pink and gold, very gold. Oh, and red when the blood and water poured out of my blistered arm when my mum made me stay out too long in the sun. The place smelt of donkeys and Arpege and something my mother told me was, ‘harira’. I missed my dad who had stayed behind in England to work and I didn’t like my mother’s friend Jose.

Next, I was 8 years old in the narrow kitchen in Italy. The cooker was in front of the window, so, between bouts of frying I would look out at the nearby wall outside. You could just about touch it with an out-stretched arm if you were grown up. I was very interested in this wall because usually, taking a nap in the sun would be a lizard keeping very still. I loved the lizard it was so strange.

I didn’t love the way my granny would hack at it with her chopper laughing at my alarm. I think she got its tail once – it came clean away and dropped 3 flights down to the ground below in the yard. That was one of the reasons I didn’t much like my grandma. Another reason was that she was always being kind in a wet way. I didn’t trust that.

On this hot day, we were frying, ‘torta fritta’ – fried cake. Cushiony squares of salty batter that would puff and crisp to perfection in the hot fat. These golden squares were heaven. I would dream of them the whole year after, looking forward to the next time I would eat them although I never much liked frying or fried food otherwise.

Then, at 23, I think? I risked a really, really short haircut for the first time in my life, a Jean Seaberg pixie cut. It suited me. The, one thing that was missing though was the colour, it just wasn’t gold.

Up to that time, I’d been a brunette who really wanted to be a red-head and who, since the age of 9 had been hennaing-lemon-juicing-vinegaring-chamomiling my hair into varying shades of copper-auburn.

At the time of the pixie-cut I had a bosomy, peroxided, young Italian hair-dresser; a dead-ringer for Scarlet Johansson. She wasn’t too bright but I trusted her and she was kind.

‘Susanna, I want to go blonde.’ I said.

‘No. No way. There’s too much red in your hair, it won’t work. It’ll go green. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. No.’

Well, she did do it but made me sign a disclaimer first, letting herself off the hook. And she was right.

It didn’t work. I didn’t go green. I went electric-fluorescent-un-ripe-satsuma overlaid by a repulsive sheen of green; a female, Ziggy Stardust gone very wrong.

None of my clothes worked anymore. I wore massive shades and looked like a Russian prostitute circa 1989.

I guess I’d struck, ‘fool’s gold’? That’s meant to be green isn’t it?

The Hand

That is the hand that sewed for 60 years the coats, trousers and jackets of the, well-enough-to-do of your town who could spare hours of their time – wasting yours with their pacing’s and frettings in front of the mirror, deliberating the hang of this cuff or the length of that hem.

“Yes sir, no madam of course not” you would echo consonant to their moods while your hand would pleat and fold the cloth of your own worn trouser leg over and over.

That is the hand with square, raised, strong nails that my father also has; that looks able and intelligent.

That is the hand that cooked, torta fritta; my favourite snack of salty, fried batter that you would give us to take to the Feste Dell’Unita summer nights – rustic carousings paid for by the Communist Party soaked in wine and clumsy dancing with older, gnarly men.

That is the hand that gripped the steering wheel as you careened the hairpin bends on the colline in your bald-tired Fiat 500; your straw hat dipping over your market-stall Ray Bans as smiling locals would think; ‘there goes old Armando Gerra, what a card!’

That is the hand that taught me to sew; threading the machines old and steady, new and frighteningly fast; the hand that chalked the lines on the cloth that would become presents for all of us.

That is the hand that removed my milk-tooth from your outraged buttocks when once, admonished by you I ran up behind and bit you so hard that everyone stalled their Sunday lunch, forks in mid-air waiting for your reaction.

That is the hand I did not know I loved so much until I saw it folded upon your chest as you lay in the open casket in your bedroom the day after you died.

The Strange Relic

“Basta”. “Enough”. Admonished my one melon-scented summer in Italy when we were about to sit down to Sunday lunch with the, ‘famiglia’. A sacred ritual conducted by my Nonno.

I was hungry. I was always hungry. So, I did want to eat the bubbling lasagne oozing cheese and savoury meaty-tomatoey sauce in the big oven dish ing the centre of our but much more than that, right now I wanted to dance – it was my latest craze. So as Nonno said Grace, I did my 9- year old version of Cabaret on and around a dining room chair.

“Basta, Stefania! Ferma! Enough. We are going to eat stop! Nonno said sharply having spied me through his half closed praying eye.

“Ooooofffa!” I sullenly protested, sitting down as noisily as I could to a cooing; “there, there, brava, brava” from the other invited relatives who favored me and felt for my frustrated choreography.

After the first lip-smacking course of pasta e ragu’ my now, pacified and off-guard Nonno cleared the plates, giving me a, “brava, cosi’ si fa’” murmur of approval as he went.

Hearing the swelling bars of a grand finale in my head, quick as a flash I chased after him as he exited, leaping like Rudolph Nureyev for good measure as I went.

The still dining forks froze midway from table to mouth as the crash of falling plates and Nonno’s cry of, “Porca Vacca!” Split the air.

Rushing back in clutching his buttocks with one hand and a wriggling me in the other he apoplectically screamed, “SHE’S ONLY GONE AND BIT ME IN THE ARSE AND A LEFT HER BLOODY TOOTH THERE!?”

“Pappa!” Spluttered my shocked aunty Raffa. Bad language was usually never tolerated and was particularly sinful on a Sunday.

I had though. I’d planted a loosening milk tooth in my grandfather’s bottom with the hardest bite I could.

I keep the restituted canine and the shred of trouser cloth it impaled in a little wooden box Nonno gave me some time later. It sits next to a photo of Nonno and Nonna on their wedding day.

It’s a strange and precious relic of my childhood.

Birkbeck Novel Writing Homework 25th October 2009 (171)

The Letter

Isabel didn’t like writing ‘Dear’ at the top of this letter. She didn’t consider her aunty Dolores as a dear, quite the contrary. She hated her. Interfering bitch. Pretending to have her niece’s best interests at heart, yeah right, she was a snoopy, mean spirited gossip who missed no opportunity to score a point. Her blow usually lancing you when you least expected it. Isabel hated this woman with a hate clean, pure and ice blue. So, after a beat of indecision around the word, ‘dear’ the rest came quite easily:

Dolores,

You are not my chaperone. I have managed to cross a continent all by myself without anyone’s help, least of all yours. You have not been in my life up ‘til now and I have managed fine. I don’t need another aunty. Leave me alone and mind your own business.

Isabel.

Isabel knew that she was unlikely to hear from Dolores after this and that was the whole point.

The White Door

Isabel sits outside her front door in the Souk. It’s not really her front door. It’s

where her mother and father live in the old part of town. A place Isabel no-

longer wants to be associated with. She has always been a refugee although she

doesn’t know the meaning of that word yet. The front door is a white painted,

iron-barred door. The bottom half is solid metal, the upper half has frosted

panes between bars of twisted metal. It has all been painted white even the glass

and like an occluded retina, no real light passes through this cloudy cataract. It’s

always dark inside. In some places on the bottom of the door there are veiny

cracks in the paint where it has relaxed in the great daytime heat and then

strained against itself pulling away from the metal in the shrinking cold of the

night.

Isabel has never liked the door. It looks like a tatty, new-fangled thing,

misplaced. All the other doors in the neighbourhood look far older, almost

disappearing into the dusty walls of the houses as they should like shadows in

sand. Isabel’s parents’ door sticks out. Another reason for her not to like it.

Another reason for her to leave it. As if she needed another reason.

Isabel is wearing a short-sleeved white cotton shirt. Simple but cinched at the

waist that because of her lovely figure, looks like a better, more fashionable

garment than it really is. She is wearing it with beige, pedal-pushers that fit her

snugly but not too tightly. Her father would never countenance her wearing

anything tight, so she wouldn’t dare risk it knowing only too well what would

happen if she did.

On her feet she has her beloved black ballerinas. These are more than shoes.

They are Paris. They make Isabel feel she is in Paris and not in the gob-splashed,

blood streaked, fly-blown stinking alleyways of Tangier when she wears them.

They remind Isabel of Leslie Caron, the star of An American In Paris that several

people have remarked she resembles. Well, she can’t deny that she cut out a

picture she’d found of the French starlet in that very film and that she had taken

it to the hair-dresser in the centre of town when she last had her hair cut. It was

just before the local heat of the beauty competition she had entered and won.

Monsieur Philippe himself, the owner of the salon who had insisted on cutting all

the beauty pageant’s participants’ hair had said to Isabel that she had chosen

well for she, like mademoiselle Caron both had heart shaped faces, essential for

that style. He’d gone on to say that Isabel was further blessed by a ‘divine’

widow’s peak that gave her forehead even more definition. That, according to

Mr. Philippe was a very special attribute and one that he thought might swing the

competition for Isabel. If he were a judge on the panel of Miss Tangier 1963, he

would be very drawn to a young lady with a widow’s peak. Widow’s peak or not.

Mr. Philippe’s words had proved prophetic. Isabel had won the competition and

been crowned the most beautiful girl in Tangier for the next 365 days to come.

She had had to go to Casablanca for the award ceremony where she had been

photographed by the city’s newspapers in her sash, holding the trophy and

smiling. More importantly that’s where she had been given the cheque for $200.

Her getaway money. The cheque had been made in her name. Isabel had been

adamant about that. There was no way her father was going to take that away

from her too.

While Isabel mused she felt her stomach rumble. She was hungry. It was time

for lunch and no matter how much she hated the door and disliked what was

behind it, Sanait her mother’s sometime adolescent, Eritrean home help

would’ve already prepared couscous. Isabel could smell it. First lunch, fill her

rumbling belly and then while her father was taking his siesta she would pack.

Gabriel used to sit out on the same stoop outside the white painted door. He had

built the door himself. He’d never joined the police force as a vocation. Had

there been any work for him in the local foundry he’d’ve gone into metal work or

wood work. He had a gift for turning metal and wood. But in Tangier the

Berbers did all the manual labour, no matter how poor the settler family was.

Some kind of a desk job or work where soiling your hands was not involved was

required of the colonial community and Gabriel’s father had insisted first with

words and then the lash that Gabriel come to heel.

Gabriel was stubborn and tough but eventually he had come to heel. Although,

he had also hung onto his tool bench, a lathe and his chest of tools too. His father

couldn’t object to him having a useful hobby. So over the years he had continued

to tinker. Now and then when he had the time he would take pieces that needed

smelting to the foundry outside town. That’s where he had taken the panels for

the door and the twisted bars.

Later he had regretted the door. Too many people would stop and stare at it,

especially children. He had got sick of the noise of them yanking at the

unfamiliar, twisted bars and had started to loathe their monkey-grimace faces

pressed up against the bubbled, hazy glass he had bought in Casa as the finishing

touch. So one drunken Sunday when he’d had enough of all the door commotion

and all the interest it continued to attract, he had painted it all over in white

paint. He had started just after dawn and hadn’t stopped until sundown at about

9pm. He could be dogged when he wanted to and the bottle of Anis he had got

himself for the occasion had sweetened the work and his mood when he tired of

it. He’d been at it for about 14 hours, painting skin after skin after skin of white

gluey gloss paint, layer upon layer interrupted by drink upon drink. See if they

would come to peer, gawp and snoop now. Let them! They wouldn’t see a

bloody thing. He laughed at his own ingenuity. His laugh guffing fumes of

aniseed at grimacing passersby.

Roses

Gabriel remembered his white door on another sunday. He wondered why? He

was sitting in his garden in North Acton over 40 years later. Well the garden

allotted to him as part of his tented accommodation. The second place the family

had settled into after arriving in London. He sat there staring at the 6 foot

garden in front of him that in the last few years he had filled with roses. There

were more than 40 bushes all squashed together. Not enough space for them

really but he liked that. It was more than gardening, it was painting with flowers

in thick, clashing daubs. All types, all colours. There were so many, you could

barely see the shed at the far boundary of the smallish garden. Beyond that was

the train track where the central line passed, connecting this suburb to central

London.

Gabriel had never liked flowers as a young or middle aged man. They had passed

him by. He had liked his officer’s uniform in the force. He had liked his food and

drink. He had had an eye for the girls when he was a lad but even when courting

he hadn’t had much truck with flowers. He couldn’t remember ever buying a

bunch for Catalina in the early days. He had liked languages, learning to speak 5

just like that, no special school. He had liked chronometers. He had liked the sun

and the sea and only realized how much he had liked them when he didn’t have

them any more but was exiled to a land of damp, grizzle, grey and bad food.

Then he had turned more and more to drink. That had remained a constant like.

He had turned to High Chapparel, to Bonanza, on his crackly black and white

telly at the end of his high bed in his overstuffed, stuffy bedroom; to sleeping in

the day and more and more drink. When they all left him, then he turned to

flowers. It was even a surprise to himself.

It was only as he had got older and sick that he’s started growing them. After all

the family had left the house. Tony and Orelia and their two boys had left the top

floor and gone to a housing association place that Tony had found in Northolt

near to the Renault garage where he worked. Paqua had vacated her room on

the middle floor a few years before that. She had gone before Tony and

decamped with her English, second husband to somewhere in Gloucestershire,

Gabriel couldn’t remember exactly where right now. Possibly Cheltenham or

was it Bristol? The medication he was on made him sick but also made him

forget and did nothing for the terrible pain that was shrinking his spine so that

he could hardly bear to sit even.

Then, Chiri had gone too. With her little girl. She had ricocheted out of her

middle floor room and premature marriage like a stuttering top. Crashing and

banging all the way but still determined to get the hell out at whatever cost.

She’d followed Paqua at first to the South West, then had gone chasing after

some man. Another arsehole. Older but not much better than Ronnie, her first

husband to whom she’d been a child bride. Gabriel wasn’t sure but new that

Chiri had moved at least 4 times in less than 3 years and for a while had gone

awol which had frightened Catalina, his wife and Chiri, Tony, Paqua and Isabel’s

mother at the time. He hadn’t been that bothered about it. He knew she’d

reemerge at some point, probably when she was skint and needed money.

Isabel his eldest, had never lived in the house in Acton. She’s been their

runaway, their messenger, their self-appointed scout although she didn’t know it

at the time. Flying off in search of not dry land but new land, a land that they

would all move to eventually. Taking the money from that beauty contest and

disappearing almost over night to no-one knew where until Catalina’s sister

Dolores, who lived in London sent message to the family still in Tangier that

Isabel had been spotted, working as a chamber-maid in a local B&B and walking

in the park singing in French at lunchtime. She’d been easy to spot, a natural

beauty and carefree in her movements, almost dancing. A stark contrast to all

the beehived, pansticked stilettoed strutting dummies that click-clacked their

way about Russell Square like barely mobile shop mannequins at the time with

fags hanging out of their pale-lipsticked mouths like chimneys.

Catalina had cried when she heard that Isabel was ok. Gabriel had been in a

black mood and had probably struck her. He couldn’t be sure as it had happened

so often punctuating nearly all of their conversations. He had often struck her

with a casualness that now made him wince to recall. He had often struck her

out of boredom. But then he had been drunk all that time. Now with the meds

he was sober. The two didn’t mix, chemo and brandy. They didn’t mix at all. But

now she wasn’t around to test his theory anyway.

In the end Catalina had got him back. He didn’t think she would or could. It

wasn’t in her nature. Paqua had helped her of course. Paqua his second

daughter had always been the one who he knew would mount the vendetta

against him. It was her style. She was the joker but also the sly one, the schemer

in the family. The one who knew how to wait for the right moment. And boy did

she pick her moment this time.

It was the second time he’d had to go into hospital for a transfusion. He’d got so

weak with the Leukaemia and the chemo that he couldn’t function anymore and

he was in indescribable pain. While he was in hospital, Paqua came and took his

wife, Catalina on holiday saying she needed a break from being his nursemaid.

Catalina never came back. He knew he was dying. She knew he was dying and

she didn’t come back. That’s when he started planting more and more roses.

Strange to think it but when he was planting and gardening the pain wasn’t so

bad, it was still there but just not so bad. Denise, his English neighbour, a woman

of about 60, would look out for him over the garden fence. “Alright Gabriel”

She’d say, saying his name like the English called the angel of annunciation with

the, ‘a’ like ‘aye’ rather than the ‘a’ of ‘above’ which is how you really said his

name. If Denise didn’t see him for a few days over the garden fence she would

knock at his door and check up on him. Not that long ago she had started

cooking him a meal a day. It was the only food he ate these days. She even went

and bought him bulbs and plants from the garden centre up the road. It had

come to this. His house empty of family and full of strangers. His family, in touch

now and then, some of them. His wife gone refusing to speak to him even and

him watching the roses and dying.

Grandma

Catalina, my Spanish Grandma
Was a ball of red cheese
She was the squeezy, creamy one too
With the Dutch lady on the front
In a dress white and blue
She was a dark, green lentil
In a meaty stew

She was a home-made biscuit
In the shape of a dome
She was an Avon Shepherdess
Full of cheap perfume
A newspaper-stuffed doll
In a fringed, gypsy dress
Generous to a fault
Her house a bit of a mess

She was black coffin handbags
That snapped shut with a clack
With Jehovah’s Witnesses
She never had much luck
Always buying their bibles
And apocalyptic stuff
She couldn’t say ‘no’ – was a bit of a soft touch

She loved black and white movies
Far too pointy shoes
She was very pretty although one eye looked askew
She was too kindly and enduring (everyone said)
Took beatings for years
‘Til bruised black and blue

Then one day when the doctor told her husband
Grandpa was sick
And didn’t have long to go
Catalina packed her bags and left him to shrink in his home
No visit, no phone call
She made sure
He died all alone.

Smell
The buses in London smelt Isabel thought. The old fuddy-duddy fabric on the seats first of all. In Tangier the CTM buses had leather seats, ridged with stitches running down their greyness in vertical lines, creating a slight bulging of the leather and its stuffing in between the lines of stitches. If you moved gently from side to side, your thighs would get a pleasant massage. She hadn’t minded sitting on those, as they usually looked reasonably clean. The arabs in their jelabas and their women in their abayahs didn’t leave any marks on the seat. Isabel always checked.
But here in London it was different. The fabric was itchy and scratchy for a start unless you were wearing trousers. And then there was that smell. The smell of years absorbed by the carpet like textile. Of wear and tear of poor, sad lives seeped and rubbed into the wool. Then on top of that the smell of the cigarettes, particularly upstairs where the smoke was often so thick Isabel’s eyes would water instantly but even downstairs you could smell it, creeping through the joins of the steel frame of the bus and twirling its way down the stairs into the gangway below in swirls and guffs depending on how much air was blowing in through the upstairs windows. Usually none at all. It seemed to Isabel that the smokers above were serious about their pastime and didn’t take kindly to drafts of oxygen cutting through their clouds of tobacco smoke. On the rare occasion she had gone up top for a seat to take the weight off her blistered and screamingly red raw feet, injured by her day’s hard chambermaiding work, she had slid open a window nearest her just an inch so she might breathe to the almost instantaneous rebuke; “do you mind love, it’s brass monkeys up ‘ere. Do us a favour and shut that window, there’s a nice girl.” Without quite grasping the nuances of what was being said to her, her English not that good yet, Isabel had conceded defeat with a half smile and closed the window, although not completely, leaving a millimetre or so of air coming through that only she knew about. But that wasn’t all, the seats and the smoke made up only part of the unpleasant bouquet, there were the English themselves. God they smelt. Bad, breath, bad teeth, and bad BO. People had warned Isabel about the English and their allergy to bathing. She had thought it all nonsense at the time as the English in Tangier were no worse or better than the French although not quite as violently fragrant as the Americans. With their clouds of Nina Ricci and Yardley and Jicky for the women vaporising warmly about them in the sun and sea air and the men all woody and leathery in their Carven and Givenchy’s Vetiver. They would leave trails Isabel would sometimes follow after work on her way home from the French Patisserie Marie Helene’s. She would tail them and their perfumes, losing them somewhere down by the port usually and then realise she had to rush back or risk a bawling out by her father for being late. Mind you, the Americans probably smelt a lot better because they were the ones with the cash.
So when the neighbours would go on at Isabel about the malodorous ‘Ingleses’ she had thought that they were spouting off their misguided malice perhaps because they simply knew that she dreamt about the place all the time and had desires to go there. Also, she guessed they had their own slippery reasons for wanting to put her off leaving Tangier but mainly she thought they were biased or just plain ignorant.
But now she knew for herself that whatever their true motivation, they were actually right. The English really did smell and didn’t seem to care or notice amongst themselves.
But Isabel noticed and rued her sensitive nose every day. In this careening, eye-popping city her highly attuned nasal membrane brought her too close to the dirty stuff of life. It became even more of a liability when she got pregnant.

Croissants and Cream Cakes
God she thought. It had been a serious mistake to have that café au lait before leaving home. She hadn’t even managed the warmed up croissant left over from her Saturday tea at Maison Bertaux but the coffee was sitting so heavy on her stomach, she felt queasy.
Isabel had gone to the Soho patisserie two days ago with Albertino, the receptionist at Bedford House. Bedford House was the smart B&B where Isabel had found work. Or rather, meddlesome aunt Dolores had put in a good word for her with the proprietor, Nora Ferdenzi. Nora Ferdenzi was part of an extended Italian family that had migrated to Bloomsbury during the inter-war years and bought up B&Bs, restaurants and cafes in the area. Her extended clan was made up of, Ferdenzis, Marazzis, Gerras, De Stefanis, Taylors, although Taylor was the anglicisation of the far more Italian sounding; Damiani. It had been anglicised after the second world war when Silvio Taylor had come back from a POW camp on the Isle of Wight and was looking for work as a chef. He ended up working in the Savoy where three quarters of the kitchen and waiting staff were Italian. Nonetheless, Sylvio, like many of his compatriot fellow workers had changed their names. They wanted to get on and it didn’t do to sound too foreign.
All these different names, Italian and English, were Nora’s relations and they all lived and worked within spitting distance in this fairly sleepy central London borough. Nora who like the rest of her clan was an ardent and active church-goer had met Isabel’s aunt Dolores at church. Once the neighbourly niceties were over between the two well turned out continental ladies of a certain age, one from Italy the other from Spanish Tangier, Dolores pitched in with her customary forthrightness that she had a lovely, clean-living, well-mannered niece coming to London who would be looking for work and a place to live. Nora had suggested there and then that Dolores should not hesitate to send Isabel round when she arrived in London. Nora was certain she could find her work, if not in her own B&B then certainly in one belonging to her family. She had plenty of connections in the trade and there was bound to be a place for a nice girl, especially if she was well-mannered, clean living and Catholic. Job done, Dolores smiled saying, “you can be sure I will send her around just as soon as she gets here”. Then turning on her heel crisply she left the church, shook hands with Father Michael who was saying good bye to all his congregation and made her way up Kingsway smartly with purpose as she did all things.
When Albertino had offered to buy Isabel afternoon tea on her half day off on Saturday, she’d agreed. She knew he was sweet on her and she knew that he didn’t have a chance in hell as, she wasn’t sweet on him but Isabel was tired of fending him off. She was tired through and through. Nora, worked her hard, was strict, fed her badly and expected a lot for her 15 shillings a week for rough, hard dirty work and she needed something nice to cheer her up. Albertino was not such a bad sort just a bit effeminate and clingy but harmless enough and the thought of a Parisian style cake with chestnut cream perhaps or confectioner’s custard and raspberries or just a puffy light as a cloud éclair was enough to make Isabel smile and say, “Albertino, why not?” He had blushed with pleasure and arranged to pick her up as soon as she finished her shift at 1.30. He turned up with too much Brylcream in his hair and too much cheap aftershave. Isabel could smell his Old Spice, sickly sweetly invading her nose by degrees until she felt engulfed by it as she walked up the stairs of the basement into the ground floor reception area. ‘Still’ she thought, ‘at least it’s not BO and once we’re out in the fresh air it’ll fade’. She had linked her arm into his and felt him judder with nervous pleasure and then they had walked down the Bloomsbury Streets, passing by the British Museum and the old bookshops with ancient tomes and etchings in their dimly lit windows. Peering in here and there, commenting on what they liked and didn’t, their conversation as insignificant as the light breeze that gently followed them which was just fine for Isabel. She had something else on her mind. Something which had started to become ever-present background in her head to the foreground of what was going on in front of her or what another part of her busier mind was preoccupied with. But it was always there this background thing thumping like a bass drum under a melody. Growing, growing, growing. Heavier by the day. More present. Looming larger and larger if still indiscernible in detail but definitely looming.
When they had got to Maison Bertaux, Isabel had asked for one of their terrible coffees and had opted for a Religieuse. The greediest cake she could manage. A bottom ring of choux pastry filled with coffee flavoured crème patissiere topped with a smaller ball of choux filled with chocolate crème and each layer covered with appropriately coloured and flavoured icing, coffee for the bottom and chocolate for the top. Two or three mouthfuls in and she had stopped eating. The sweet sticky cream she usually loved had turned sour in her mouth. Seeing Isabel stall, Albertino had been fastidiously attentive playfully trying to feed another forkful into her mouth himself. She had batted his hand away, run upstairs to the lavatory and retched violently into the toilet, making it just in time. What was going on? She heard that thumping thing in her head and ignored it. After dabbing her face with cold water she had returned downstairs and convinced a crestfallen Albertino that, no his treat hadn’t been spoiled, she just didn’t feel right that was all. He should eat the cake himself so it wouldn’t go to waste, she would enjoy it just as much if he ate it she said and that perhaps if he didn’t mind, he could buy her a croissant to take away and she would eat that on Sunday morning and think of him and of the nice time they had had together. That seemed to do the trick. Charmed, Albertino did as she had bidden him and took pleasure in carrying Isabel’s takeaway croissant in a paper bag looped over his wrist for the rest of their afternoon walk. He felt like a proper ‘English gentleman’ he said in his thick Neapolitan accent. There had been another upside to Isabel’s sickly turn too, it meant that later when it came time to part she had a perfect excuse for avoiding the embarrassing, ‘shall we kiss moment?’ at the end of the date.
On the following day though, she had eaten nothing all morning. She couldn’t face it and she had thought to eat the croissant for lunch in the French savoury way, with ham and cheese. She had picked up a few slices of each from Edwards the general store on Marchmont Street on the way back with Albertino yesterday for that very purpose. But when it came to lunch she still wasn’t hungry and couldn’t seem to get rid of the nausea that had been bothering her since she realised, at least Friday.
Even on Monday she couldn’t bring herself to eat the now stale croissant. What a shame she thought. She loved flaky, buttery croissants with lots more butter slathered on them with no care for waistlines and all that nonsense. She didn’t need to concern herself with all that anyway, she was thin and now getting thinner by the day. What a shame she didn’t feel like eating the pastry though, these were the best croissants in London and not something she would’ve ever bought herself. Couldn’t afford it. But the thought of eating it now made her gag.
Oh no Isabel thought please don’t let it be….
Ten days ago she had gone on a date with Romano. Romano was Nora’s cousin. He had the kindest face Isabel had ever seen in her life. And grey, green eyes that she liked. He had worn a pin stripe brown suit on that day, just for her she imagined. The suit made him look older. So did his slightly receding hair. But his face and smile were young. Isabel knew that Romano was about 30. A lot older than her 19years. He was single. He was teaching Italian to the children of immigrants who lived in the Bloomsbury - King’s Cross area and he was a waiter in a restaurant in Soho called La Dolce Notte, the Sweet Night. She had liked it when he had explained that to her. The name was so romantic and Italian. He had also told her that he was, for the time being living around the corner with his cousin Dino whose mother owned another, even smarter B&B than Bedford House just off Russell Square and his sister, Elvira, who he was sort of chaperoning.
Isabel had found all this and more about Romano over the course of several months. He was a regular visitor. He would come and see his cousin Nora often for tea and a chat. He had also taken to volunteering to run errands between Nora’s and her brother Dino’s establishment a lot more willingly since the arrival of the new chambermaid who sometimes minded the reception just between the proper receptionists’ shifts for 20 minutes or so. Isabel’s English wasn’t up to full receptionist standard yet but she was so attractive and friendly that Nora couldn’t resist her entreaties to start training for the post with these short stints. This special dispensation also meant that Isabel got to finish her chambermaid work half an hour before the other girls and it also meant that she could get to sit down for half an hour before racing off to her English classes or whatever else she had to dash off to. She didn’t mind Roma’s visits at all during these times. He was actually quite helpful to her as his English was far better than hers although terribly accented and he made her laugh with his attempts at Spanish and French and his silly jokes. He was always teasing her and telling her fibs which, more often than not she fell for like a dope.