Weeks in Naviras Read online

  ‘Interesting,’ said Gavin. ‘Where is Anushka?’

  ‘She had to stay in London. It’s a shame, because I think she would have enjoyed this. But it would’ve taken too long for her to get security clearance.’

  ‘Yeah. All happening a little too fast, isn’t it?’ Gavin might have said more but then the background hubbub grew louder. James and the president had finished huddling and were walking back into the room. My husband was flanked by Rav, who looked stressed as he whispered something in James’s ear. I couldn’t see Rosie, she must’ve been off talking to some news editor on the phone. Gavin stood up and walked over towards his wife, who was having briefings waved under her nose. Their chemistry had always seemed slightly off. I’d always felt she needed him to get elected, but once in power had been unsure what to do with him.

  James and Rav walked over to me. ‘We’re leaving,’ said Rav quietly. ‘It’s on.’

  The motorcade waiting outside the airport was the largest I’d ever seen, with more than two dozen outriders flanking our cars. We were in the third car, with the President’s enormous contraption driving in front of us. The first car was presumably filled with the rest of her senior counsel. James and I were sitting in the back of the limo, facing forwards. Rav was sitting opposite me, his brows furrowed as he looked at his phone. He’d put on a bit of weight around his stomach, something I put down to over-work and poor diet. Perhaps if he’d been in a relationship he would’ve been healthier, gone home earlier, eaten fewer late-night takeaways in Number 10. His hair needed cutting. I’d long wished that he would rebalance his life, make it less ancillary to James’s.

  Opposite James sat Rosie, palpably excited to be on the verge of witnessing such a historic moment. She was thumbing through the news, fielding messages from editors and making sure the embargo was still being observed. I could tell she was uncomfortable in her shoes, which were a bit too strappy for all that walking around, getting in and out of cars while on the phone.

  Although the world knew the deal was being be signed that afternoon, what had not been disclosed was how Morgan would turn up to physically cement it. The White House had shifted so quickly from scepticism to an apparently high level of confidence. Still I felt nervous and turned to Rav, asking him why there’d been so many last-minute changes? Rav said there’d been some chatter about rockets. Too dangerous to land any nearer Gaza. He was sporting his usual full-lipped smile, but was rubbing his stubbly chin. What kind of a peace deal is this, I thought, if we’re still scared of rockets?

  It happened just seconds after we left the airport perimeter, and I saw the whole thing from my window. A truck came careering off an overpass, breaking through the barrier. A large truck with a red cab and a long rear, covered with grey tarpaulin. The cars in the motorcade all swerved but it was too late. The truck came flying down onto the road in front of us, slamming into the first car of the motorcade and exploding. I heard multiple bangs through the bombproof glass. The motorbikes on either side of the first car were either flattened by the truck or sent flying. We could sense the shockwave go underneath and through us. Almost immediately agents appeared on all sides, talking into their sleeves and running towards the expanding fireball. One agent was flanking our car right outside my window, gun drawn. James grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

  Rosie put both hands together in front of her nose. ‘Oh my God, what do we do?’ Facing backwards she couldn’t see as much as me. Rav banged on the divider between us and the driver’s compartment, made a hand signal that we should try to turn around. I was trying to see what was happening with the President’s car in front of us. It was surrounded by agents but appeared to be intact, at least the portion of it I could see. But many of her senior counsel had been in the first car and must’ve been cremated. The agent banged on the driver’s window of our car, made a circular hand gesture. Then he began convulsing. He dropped his gun and leaned forward, both hands on his thighs. He wasn’t the only one. Men near the president’s car were keeling over. One of them was being sick in the middle of the road. Helicopters were beginning to circle overhead. The man outside my window turned toward me, put his hand on the glass. Yellow sputum was pulsing out of his mouth. His eyes had started to bleed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said James, ‘It can’t get in here.’ I told James it wasn’t bloody okay at all, those men were dying out there. We had to do something.

  ‘There’s nothing we can--’ said James. He didn’t get to finish because he’d started convulsing as well, as had Rosie. Then it hit me. My diaphragm went into spasm and I could feel the bile rushing up my windpipe as my salivary glands went into overdrive. I could barely breathe, definitely couldn’t speak. Then I lost both bladder and bowel control, more or less simultaneously. Fortunately my nasal pathways were filling up with liquid so I couldn’t smell myself. I felt James’s hand squeezing mine, hurting me. I think through the vomit he was trying to say he loved me, but I couldn’t respond because I was too busy dying.

  Ice Cubes

  I place my drink back down on the table. Luis is still sitting across from me, looking at me patiently. I tell him I remember, and slowly describe the attack. He continues to just watch me, unblinking, before asking if it had been painful to die like that and I say no, because it hadn’t been painful at all. Just terrifying. But already it feels like someone else’s experience, like a story I’ve seen on the news.

  When I’ve finished talking I just look at the calm sea again. I don’t feel sad, far from it. There is something though, a kind of subdued grief. I haven’t – hadn’t - run my life the way I’d wanted to. Little incremental errors that I always knew I was making, they all piled up and then I hadn’t had the time to correct them. I look at the family down on the beach. Did they all die together?

  ‘So James died at the same time then,’ says Luis eventually. He can’t be indifferent but he can’t seem upset either. ‘Maybe he’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Maybe he’s not dead.’ I think about him raising Bobby and Sadie, the three of them alone in the flat about Downing Street. I think about how I’d rather like my kids to come gallivanting out of the ocean, seeing me and then playing with the two already here. ‘It’s wrong to want them to hurry up, I suppose,’ I say. ‘But I’ll miss the kids.’

  Luis tells me to relax now because I’m in the right place. I’ve lived a good life, he says, and now I’m being rewarded. ‘There’s no rush, Ellie. Time doesn’t matter here, I don’t think.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Why not, it speaks for itself, no?’ He gestures across the bay. ‘I think that’s why I’m waiting here, Ellie. The beach seems too empty; more people will come, I’m sure.’

  I pause for a second. ‘Have you seen my mother? Sorry, that’s a silly question.’

  He shakes his head, but he’s smiling at me. ‘She never came to Naviras, did she?’

  ‘I’m not sure she ever went to Portugal.’

  Luis gives a little nod. ‘Nobody I’ve spoken to here is here for the first time. Everyone always loved Naviras, it was their favourite place in the world.’

  ‘I always imagined her looking down on me, my mother, I mean,’ I stare at the wine glass, thinking it’ll start to warm up soon and wouldn’t it be good to get some ice cubes for it - and there they are, almost instantly. Two of them, materialising into the wine. There’s no plunk or fizz, it’s like they’ve always been there. ‘Well look at that,’ I can’t stop staring at them.

  ‘That didn’t take you long to work out,’ His grin’s the widest it can be. ‘You’ll get used to that, here, have another one.’ He looks at the glass and soon a third cube appears, clunking underneath the first two.

  ‘You can get anything you want,’ I say.

  ‘Isn’t that how it should be?’ He laughs silently. ‘Actually, not everything. You want something to make music with?’ He looks at the base of the cliff wall behind the terrace. A guitar appears; an old fashioned one, more like a lute. ‘You don’t want
that?’ He pauses, looks at the guitar, which summarily vanishes. ‘It’s fun, you should try it.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Well. If you want the sun to come back up from behind the cliffs, no, that’s not going to happen. You want someone to be here who’s not? Never going to happen.’ He pauses, perhaps he’s worried that came out wrong. ‘But food, drinks, little things, they’ll always come. You can have some of your sardines,’ He grins at me but then looks away again.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d want,’ I say. ‘A phone, to tell someone what it’s like here, maybe?’

  Luis laughs, more audibly. ‘Nah, I tried the phone. There’s nothing electrical. Not anywhere. No TV.’ He watches as I smile. ‘Yeah, I thought you’d be pleased about that.’

  ‘No computers.’

  ‘Definitely not!’ He looks back up the sun-deck. ‘No-one here seems to mind.’ He stands up, slowly. ‘I haven’t been here long, myself, Ellie. And not everyone stays here, in fact most people leave and who knows where they go next? That’s what he says.’ He cocks his head towards the people nearer the bar. ‘The guy in the hat says those who leave just head out the village towards the main road, and they never come back.’

  ‘And you’re planning to stay.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe, for a while longer, anyway.’

  ‘But it’s your home, not mine.’

  ‘It’s just where you were most happy, Ellie, and that’s the same for me. Lots of people who you think would be here, they aren’t. For them, I guess their place is somewhere else. But it’s a lot to take in. Why don’t you sit for a while, get used to it? That’s what I did. It’s going to be fine, I promise.’

  ‘You won’t stay here with me?’ I’ve more questions, but I want him to ask questions of me, too. Does he not care? ‘It hasn’t been long,’ I say. ‘Since you died, it’s only been three months.’

  His face seems to harden, ever so slightly. ‘That’s all it’s been.’

  ‘Yes. Did you think it would be longer?’

  He doesn’t answer for a moment. ‘I’m going into the bar for a while,’ he says eventually. ‘But come and see me, when you’ve had some time. You should have it the way I did, when I got here. Some time to reflect on things.’

  He turns and walks away, still looking fairly happy but less so than before. I know he’s worried James will appear. Perhaps he will at any moment, out of the water, but that seems unlikely. This couldn’t be his place, he never cared quite enough about it, surely.

  I’d felt like I needed the wine, when I’d seen Luis bringing it over to me. It’s dry and delicious, but it’s not getting me drunk. Then I realise while the sun has gone down behind the cliffs, it hasn’t gone down any further and it still shines onto the other side of the bay, casting its usual butterscotch light on the white cottages. The ice cubes show no signs of shrinking, the people at the other table are still talking and laughing, the children still playing with sandcastles below me.

  It seems a shame I can’t tell people what’s here, after death. It would be nice to call someone, or be called. How quickly things have changed.

  Attic

  The same Portuguese number had flashed up on my phone three times in the space of a day. The third time it rang was in the evening, I tried to ignore the rattle as the phone slowly spun around the coffee table, focused instead on watching the news.

  ‘Mummy, your phone’s ringing again,’ called Bobby from his bedroom.

  ‘I know darling, just a wrong number,’ I said. I switched the phone off.

  A Portuguese call hadn’t come through for two years, not since I’d thrown my old phone in the Thames and changed my number. Luis had been the only Portuguese person to know the new one but we hadn’t spoken for nine months. He’d picked a lousy time to re-establish contact, I thought, in the middle of my nightly attempts to get the kids off to sleep. They’d never quite adjusted to living in the flat above Number 10, where the walls were thin and there wasn’t enough space for them to play properly.

  James was still downstairs; the previous week had been beyond frenetic thanks to the Energy Bill foundering in the Commons, the sticking point being a gas and oil pipeline to Greenland funded by a specific tax hike. Whatever they said on the news plenty of the Cabinet still loathed that part, despite the threat of further brownouts. James had spent much of the previous week trying to convince truculent backbenchers, all the while trying to keep abreast of the negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians. Neither task appeared to be going well.

  When James eventually came upstairs he had two ministerial red boxes. A two-box night meant he wouldn’t sleep for hours. He kissed me once on the forehead before going to the fridge to find something to microwave, saying there’d been some progress on the Middle East deal but there wouldn’t be a statement immediately. He seemed pleased, though, explaining the details as he ate molten cannelloni, burning his tongue.

  He said he’d spend an hour or so making a few calls then do his boxes, so I kissed him goodnight and lay in bed, eavesdropping on James’s phone call from the next room. He listened more than talked during one, saying ‘uh-huh,’ to what sounded like Morgan’s chief of staff. Eventually he came into the bedroom at two-thirty, waking me up getting into bed, spraying his snoring spray before lying facing away from me.

  I continued to lie there in the uncomfortably soft bed, staring up at a patch of flaky paint on the ceiling. Everything was tatty and needed renovating, not just in the flat but throughout the building. New rugs to replace the frayed ones, new wallpaper in the basement where the damp was turning one of the walls mouldy. It was acutely embarrassing for everyone but any notion of doing the place up was beyond the pale.

  The alarm on James’s phone rang at 5 o’clock, after he’d dressed and gone downstairs I got out of bed and turned on the news. He was doing a live interview, presumably outside in the street. James liked to give interviews, far more than his predecessors. I think he always needed to remind people he was prime minister, since nobody had actually voted for him.

  ‘Prime Minister, is Morgan Cross correct to say the future of the Middle East depends on securing a deal promptly?’

  ‘Well it would certainly be a significant moment, which everyone should reflect on. My deepest admiration for the Turkish government in their efforts so far. No timetable for signing anything yet. Thankyou.’

  I was dreading the obvious boost any deal would give James and the government. I wanted him to lose the next election; needed him to be forcibly removed from Number 10. Then I could leave him, get a divorce and move the kids out of Westminster. I had just about enough money to survive and could probably go back to work, but couldn’t do any of that while James was still prime minister. Unhappy as I was, I couldn’t be responsible for the government collapsing, which given the precarious nature of it was a possibility. People would say James was compromised, going through a divorce at such a difficult moment. It would damage everyone, including the kids.

  I pulled up the venetian blinds at the windows looking onto Downing Street. The TV crews were out in force, but were turning their harsh lights off now James had gone back inside. They were still able to draw power from the outlets on the wall of the Foreign Office. In fact the power was unmetered throughout Whitehall, exempt from the restrictions in place everywhere else.

  Liz Brickman’s hair was the brightest colour against the grey stone wall. She’d just finished delivering the first of a dozen ‘two-ways’ she’d end up doing that day. You could always tell what kind of day it was going to be from what Liz wore on her feet. If it was going to be a frantic day running around Westminster she always wore white trainers. They looked silly when contrasted with her angular trouser-suits but viewers never saw her feet. I liked Liz, we’d known each other for nearly a decade. James had always been wary of her, but after he got Downing Street started to openly dislike her reports. That made me privately like her even more.

  To my left the pods at the top of the
London Eye, peeking above the rooftops. Not once had they moved since we’d arrived in Number 10, the wheel’s owner bankrupted by the brownouts. I’d heard rumours from Rav it was going to be dismantled. I let the blinds clatter down and went into the little kitchen to toast then munch on a stale sesame bagel, scrolling through my agenda for the day. Cancer charity working breakfast – though ‘working’ was overstating my role in it wildly. Better was the photocall with war veterans in the Number 10 garden at eleven. Over to the National Gallery at one o’clock for the formal unveiling of the last PM’s official portrait - deathly dull. Not involved in this, just parachuted into it at the last moment; if James had been there, he would’ve given a short speech. As the substitute there was no call for me to say anything. Normally when I was given some words to intone at these events, Anushka would annotate ‘see remarks’ at the right hand side. Fortunately there were no remarks for me to see, nor say. Appropriate really, for an event which was completely unremarkable.

  Our living space was incredibly cramped. Although Bobby and Sadie each had their own room, Sadie’s was much smaller and she was rapidly outgrowing it. Living above Number 10 for anything more than another year would’ve been impossible and everyone knew it. There had been method in the madness, though. The Chancellor and his wife had a young daughter, and the flat above Number 11 was larger so really it should’ve been us who’d got it. But because James hadn’t been elected as PM and only got the job through a palace coup, the party wanted us to live above the shop. He had to mark his scent on the place, pre-empt any tittle-tattle.