Sleight of Hand (44 page)

I have purportedly stayed behind in order to scour the web for work but so far have found nothing.

Subconsciously I hear the crunch of feet on the gravel outside, followed by the clack of the letterbox. Subconsciously again, I note the sound of a heavier than usual package flopping onto the doormat. But it's not until I have finished reading the onscreen proposal that it all registers.

I straighten my hunched position and frown, and almost as if I'm realising that there may be a burglar in the house, I turn slowly and look across the room.

It's just an envelope. It's perhaps a bigger envelope than usual, but that's it. There is no particular reason to think that this is an important envelope. But maybe we do have senses that, as a race, we haven't yet acknowledged, because I don't jump up to rip it open. I sit and stare at it for a moment. I frown. I take a deep breath. And then, finally, with a powerful sensation of impending …
something
, I cross the room and stare down at it.

I can see, even before I pick it up, that it has been franked by the Colombian postal service. I reach down and grasp the package. It's addressed to Ricardo. Our first batch of redirected mail then. Nothing particularly menacing about that, surely?

I pour myself a coffee and return to the lounge. I sit and finger the package for a moment, and then, deciding that I'm being ridiculous, I rip it open.

It's only once I have done this that I realise that it was, of course, addressed to Ricardo, not me.

But it's too late, so I tip the contents out onto my lap and leaf through the selection of envelopes within.

Most of these I can identify without opening them. There's a mobile bill for me. There's a letter from Maria – I recognise her handwriting from the notes she used to leave when she had cleaned.

There's a bill from Ricardo's old mobile company, and two others from the new one. There are two bank statements. And there is one other hand addressed envelope. Stationary: pink. Postmark: Bogotá.

I sigh and put it to one side. I open my own mobile bill – it contains no surprises. And then I sit and look at the other letters.

I spread them out like Tarot cards. They hold aspects of our lives, the predictable and the unpredictable. My eye is drawn to the pink envelope again and again. I even pick it up and sniff it: paper. Glue. I hold it to the light but it's opaque.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ricardo crossing the beach with Sarah on his shoulders. I see Jenny beside him talking animatedly and holding her wig on with one hand. So I slip Ricardo's post back in the brown envelope and position myself casually on the sofa for their arrival.

“We've got post!” I say enthusiastically once Jenny has closed the window behind them.

“You opened it!” Ricardo protests, when I hand him the envelope.

“Only mine,” I say, waving my phone bill.

Ricardo squeezes the package so that it yawns open and peers inside. “After coffee,” he says.

I jump up, saying, “I'll get it. You look at your post.”

When I return, Ricardo waves three sheets of paper at me. “The old people still bill me,” he says. “And the new.”

“You'll have to phone them.”

“Yeah. They're bastards in Colombia, the mobile companies,” he says.

“Mobile companies are bastards
everywhere
,” Jenny says.

“Anything else?” I ask in a voice I calculate to be casual but interested. I think that I may have got this wrong though, because Jenny frowns at me and stands. “Come on Miss,” she says, picking Sarah up. “You come help Mummy with lunch.”

Ricardo pats the letter from Maria. “Maria's pregnant again,” he says.

“Again!”

“I know. I send her some condom maybe,” he says with a smile.

“And?”

“And.”

“What else?”

“That's it babe,” he says.

“But there's another one isn't there?” I say. “A coloured envelope. Pink.”

Ricardo peers back into the envelope which now contains all the other opened letters. “Oh yes,” he says.

I fix a neutral smile. I'm smiling at Ricardo, but a beast is edging into my field of vision. Because I don't believe that
Oh yes
, for one second.

Ricardo opens the pink envelope and shakes the folded sheet of paper open. As he does this a photo
falls to the table. It falls face down, but the tiniest glimpse catches my eye – I snatch it and flip it over.

A huge lump forms in my throat and tears spring to my eyes instantly.

“Chupy?” Ricardo says looking worried.

I point the photo at him.

“Paloma!” he says.

I place it on the table and stare at it. “God, she's so skinny.”

I reach for the letter, but he moves it out of my reach. “It's in Spanish babe,” he says.

“Well what does it say?”

He sits and frowns at the letter as if he's having trouble deciphering the words. And then he smiles. And then he laughs.

“What's so funny?”

“She's OK,” he says. “They went to the house and found her on the doormat.”

“Who?”

“Federico.”

“So that's from Federico?”

“Yes! Hey, is good news, huh? Paloma. She's OK,” Ricardo says with what seems like genuine relief.

I spin the photo toward him. “That's not OK babe,” I point out. “The only time I ever saw a skinnier cat was on the streets of Athens.”

She looks starved and dirty and sad.

“But it's when she found her,” Ricardo says.

“She?”

“Paloma. It's when Federico found her. And now he gave her to a friend in Bogotá.”

“He
gave
her to a friend?!”

“Yes. He has a dog. You know that. So he give her to a girl who likes cats. In Bogotá. She will send another photo soon.”

I stare at him, my brain temporarily paralysed by some unformed thought.

And then I look down at the photo again and my eyes water with fresh tears. Because whatever else might be going on here – and I suspect that there is plenty – Paloma
has
undoubtedly been found. And if another photo is coming then she
is
being looked after by someone.

“Now, I'm starving,” Ricardo says, folding the letter and slipping it back into the pink envelope.

He stands and starts to leave with it still in his hand but then he pauses and puts it back on the table in front of me.

Just before he heads through to the kitchen, he kisses me tenderly on the head and glances at the envelope and then back at me. He looks as happy as I feel.

I watch him go and then I look at the photo again, taking in every familiar aspect – the colour of her eyes, the blob on her nose, her white booty paws … And then I take in everything that has changed – the ripped ear, the mangy fur … I try to calculate how much weight she has lost and I wonder what adventures she has had to live through to survive.

And then I stare at the pink envelope again, sitting on the table, like a Tarot card – the lightning tower perhaps. It crosses my mind that Ricardo left it there on purpose as some kind of challenge. It says,
believe me
. Or
don't
.

Because of course, even if it is in Spanish I could still get the gist. Even if it is badly written, I could still see if macho Federico really has taken to using pink stationary.

I sit and stare at that envelope and think about Tarot cards again and my life with Ricardo flashes before my eyes. It's the life we have had and the life
yet to come. It's working and shagging and living somewhere new. It's possibly even parenting Sarah together. And the strangest thing happens: I decide not to read the letter.

It's as if I'm sitting looking at my life with Ricardo and there, at the edge of my vision, I can sense the beast lurking. I can see the vaguest shadow of stirring, as-yet-unknown, danger.

And I have a choice: to look or not to look.

If I turn to see what is there, then I have to turn away from everything else.

And that thought feels like a new found wisdom. The wisdom to know that you can't see everything at once. Sometimes the picture is so big that you have to choose which bit you want to see.

For the first time in my life, I sense a problem, and I decide not to look.

I clap my hands and stand.

“Hey Jenny!” I shout out. “Ricardo's cousin has only gone and found Paloma. She's OK! Isn't that amazing?”

I dream the strangest dreams that night – dreams of lawyers with luscious lips stroking cats at funerals. But despite my macabre night, I wake up feeling energetic and excited. Rather inappropriately, considering Jenny's long face, both Ricardo, Sarah and I are full of beans.

Jenny clearly still has the will playing on her mind and because the disconnect between her and the rest of us is so great, we offer to take Sarah out.

I drive into Eastbourne and park up not far from the sea-front so that we can take our ritual stroll around the pier.

“I love this pier,” Ricardo says, raising a hand and looking out at the horizon like a mariner. “You can see France.”

“Can you?” I ask, copying his pose.

“No. I ask the question. You can see France?”

“Oh,
can you
see France? Not from here I don't think. It's too far. Further along the coast at Dover I think you can.”

“The weather is better than I think,” Ricardo says. “I expect England to be more raining.”

“Eastbourne gets more sunshine than anywhere else in Britain,” I say. “But it's been a good winter too. Global warming maybe.”

“I think I like global warming,” Ricardo says.

“Well yes …” I say. “I'm sure if everyone in the developed world liked the cold better we'd take global warming a bit more seriously.”

“Hey!” Ricardo says, looking down at Sarah who is tugging as hard as she can to the right. “What's over there?”

“Ah!” I say. “Blue dinosaurs.”

“Blue dinosaurs?”

“You'll see.”

She leads us to the machine and we each have an attempt at fishing one of the soft toys from the machine. And we all fail.

“Wait,” Ricardo says, fishing in his pocket. “One more try.”

“It's impossible,” I tell him.

“It doesn't work,” Sarah says, repeating my own mantra. “There's no point.”

But this time Ricardo snags a dinosaur by the tail.

“Wow!” I laugh.

“Wow,” Sarah repeats.

“Look how faded it is,” I say as Ricardo pulls the toy from the drawer. The underside is a deep royal-blue, but where the daylight has fallen upon it, it's a vague turquoise colour. “I think you're the first person ever to catch one of those.”

Ricardo laughs and wobbles his head in a cocky manner. “We Colombians – we know how to deal with dinosaur,” he says.

Reluctant to return home on such a stunning day, I drive a little further along the coast to the Wishing Well, an amazing seafront cafeteria that hasn't changed since World War Two. Looking around, I would guess that none of the clients have changed since then either.

The place gives Ricardo the giggles. “Everyone so old,” he says, looking wide-eyed around the restaurant. “It's like a old-person's home.”

“I know,” I say. “Isn't it fab?”

We eat fish and chips and wash the food down with good strong cups of tea poured from a vast chrome teapot. No poncey individual sachets here.

And then, when Sarah gets too fidgety and starts pouring sugar all over the table, we tear ourselves from the view and return to the car.

Back in Pevensey Bay, Jenny too is enjoying the sunshine. She has found a deckchair and is sitting heavily wrapped in blankets in a square of sunshine. At the sound of our voices, she opens one eye and squints at us. “Isn't this weather amazing?”

“It is.”

“January!” she says. “Imagine. Did you have fun? Oh, you got one!” she laughs as Sarah pushes the fluffy dinosaur into her field of vision.

“I called him Doris,” Sarah says. “Ricardo catched him.”

“Doris the dinosaur. That's a good name. But is she a girl or a boy?”

“He's a boy, silly.”

“Fair enough,” Jenny says.

“We went to the Wishing Well for lunch,” I tell her. “It's fabulous.”

“Damn, I wanted to go there too.”

“I know. But I'll take you another time. Anyway, it still hasn't changed. It's exactly like it was when I was a kid. Do
you
need anything?”

“No,” Jenny says. “Or maybe just my sunglasses. They're in the kitchen I think.”

“Don't move. I'll get them,” I say. “And then I'm going to make a curry for tonight if that's OK.”

“Lovely.”

“Do you need anything to eat?”

“No,” Jenny says. “I had some toast. I feel a bit weird today to be honest.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. Dizzy. And tired. But just sitting here is lovely.”

We head through to the kitchen and I send Sarah back with the sunglasses. And then the three of us cook a curry. Ricardo and Sarah wash and slice vegetables and I grind spices and put it all together. Ricardo and I have a brief conversation in French about Jenny, and I explain that I think that the will is simply playing on her mind.

Once dinner is simmering we head through to the lounge and Ricardo opens the laptop.

I turn to Sarah. “So what are we going to do with you until teatime?” I ask.

She looks regretfully out at Jenny and I follow her gaze and see that, to follow the sun, Jenny has moved her deckchair to the far end of the garden. She is entirely enveloped in blankets with just one hand and the bit of face spared by her sunglasses showing - turned towards the sun lizard-like.

“Mummy's having a snooze,” I say. “So it's just you and me. What do you want to do? Drawing? Reading?”