Maria sat at the metal garden table crammed onto her balcony and gazed out at the view. She knew it so well, the town spread across the valley, the two green humps of the mountains on the far side, one higher and broader than the other, the glittering blue shape of the lake. She took another sip of the tea she was drinking. Steam from the teacup was just visible in the strong blue light that filtered through the awning above her. A flash of brighter light came at intervals from the ramp of a multistory car park — anaemic lighthouse — as the spiralling vehicles passed through some precise conjunction with herself and the sun.
When she finished her tea she squeezed around the table and carried the empty cup into the gloom of her flat. The painting of the crucifixion and the painting of the ballerina faced each other across the single room. Although she had no reason to go outside, she could not bear to spend such a beautiful day indoors. It would be a kind of death to do so, the white attenuated death that plants die in cupboards, stretched out pale and hopelessly thin towards a few chinks of light.
She stepped into a pair of old sandals beside the front door.
The air was cool in the elevator of the apartment block and even cooler in the entrance hall on the ground floor. When she walked out onto the pavement she was shocked by the heat and the hard bright light. Lizards scurried from her along the concrete walls, froze for a moment, scurried again.
She started along the busy road that descended to the centre of town. An endless stream of cars chugged by, the sun slick on their bonnets and windscreens and the dark frustration of their interiors hidden from view. She turned down a flight of old stone steps that led to a cobbled lane between two rows of villas. The traffic noise that was everywhere in the town was much quieter there. Over it she could hear so many birds that their chirping seemed like a solid thing. She passed an open door in the alley wall and caught a glimpse of lush green lawn.
She stepped through the open door and onto the lawn. Grass curled up around her sandals, tickled the sides of her feet. She glanced at the back of the house and through the glare on the ground floor windows she saw a pine bed with white sheets, the walls of a child's room, a television set whose frenetic play of light and shade was like a ripple on the surface of a pond. She turned to face the garden. It sloped up past a tall oak tree to a flat plateau with a pond on one side and a vine covered arbor on the other. The shade of the arbor tempted her like a glass of cool water on that hot day. She padded up the lawn towards it; a shiver went through her as she stepped inside. She sat at the massive stone table with the vine's soft shadows woven across it. A wine glass half full of white wine stood in the centre of the table. The wine caught and seemed to hold the light, the glass was brimming with yellow-clear light. A medusa of refraction spread out beneath it, softly marbled around the base and coming to a sharp white rim further out. She reached forward and disturbed the glass. The medusa trembled, the jellyfish was back in the sea. She repeated this action several times; then she rested her finger on the rim of the glass and began to rock it back and forth. The glass sang a dry little song on the rough stone; but she was listening to something else. In the shivering disc of light she heard a wash of gentle laughter that spread in waves around the table and rolled back on itself and rose and fell with its own mysterious physics.
She ran out of the garden.
Back in the lane with the twittering birds and the hard blue sky above and the echoes of her footsteps on the cobbles she wondered which route to take into town. The lane rejoined the road a little further on, and she could follow this the rest of the way down. But there was also a shortcut she knew, through a department store whose levels were staggered up the hill.
Five minutes later she opened the door of the department store and stepped into a blast of refrigerated air. Almost immediately, the sweat on her back began to dry and chill. She was on the fifth floor: sports and outdoor equipment. Blank white dummies stood at petrified ease in tracksuits and swimming shorts and waterproof jackets, or else blew on soundless whistles or were frozen in the act of crawling into tents. She set off across the floor. Her image swam alongside her, zipping ghostlike over mirrors mounted on wheeled stands or fixed to the sides of square pillars. After the escalators that criss-crossed each other in the centre of the floor she came to the footwear section. She traced a finger over the fabrics as she walked by: leather, synthetics, rubber, suede. It had been a long time since she bought a pair of shoes. She noticed a rack of cute suede trainers with wide tongues and fat laces. Skate shoes, girls, said the sign above them.
She glanced around, as though afraid of being seen. The dummies continued their paralysed recreation. She turned back to the shoes and dallied with several of them with her eyes and hands before selecting a pair she liked. They were powder pink with white laces. She took them from the shelf and tried them on. She walked a few paces up and down. They felt quite comfortable, but she was sure they would be too hot for this time of year. She wanted to see how they looked from the side so she went over to an angled mirror on the floor and she saw her old legs with the threadlike veins standing out on the waxy skin, she saw her old legs disappearing into the soft pink shoes and she took the shoes off and put them back in the gap on the shelf and put her sandals back on and continued to the elevators. She pushed the button marked with the downward arrow and a ring of light came on around it. The elevator mechanism engaged and began to whirr inside the shaft.
When she stepped out onto the ground floor, perfumes and cosmetics, her cheeks were wet and her chest was heaving up and down. She held still for some time in the headachy smell of mixed perfumes and the sparkles of reflected light; then she wiped her face and walked through the big glass doors to the main square.
The square was ringed by cafés. Empty metal chairs were lined up outside them, glinting in the sun. She left along a car-congested street that led to a pedestrian arcade lined with upmarket shops. She passed window displays of fur coats and jewellery and watches, clothes stores so stylishly sparse that they seemed to contain no clothes, delicatessens she would have to save all week to buy a slice of ham from. And she ignored them all. They had nothing to offer her.
The arcade ended and she was back in the sunshine with the throbbing cars. There were more shops out here, windows turned to mirrors by the downslanting sun. These shops had nothing to offer her either, except an old and naked woman in a battered pair of sandals.
She continued through the midday sun, sweat slurping between her feet and sandals. She stopped when she came to a smaller square in front of a church. She found a bench shaded by a tree and sat for a while, recuperating. Sound was oddly cocooned there, trapped by the buildings and trees. It seemed entirely possible that the echoes she could hear were the voices of her mother and father and her ten year old self, chatting after Sunday mass.
When the voices became deafening she stood and walked to the tall arched door of the church. She crossed herself on her way between the pews and crossed herself again as she stepped into the pool of coloured light cast by the stained glass window above the altar. The window showed a nativity scene. The different tints of the robes and the gifts and the night behind them stained the pews and the floor of the church and stained the dust that swirled through the air. She sat on the end of a pew and began to pray. She was bathed in the blood red light of the robes of the virgin Mary. She prayed for kindness and purity and peace. She prayed to the woman who shared her name and who alone could heal her heart. She prayed for release from fear, escape from shadows, freedom from the past. She prayed for everything to be simple again. She prayed to the one divine and perfect woman and her prayer was received, and answered, and she understood what she must do. She must go down to the lake and wash herself clean. Then she must return, bringing that cleanness with her. She must carry it in her eyes, so that the world she saw was scrubbed of all defilement; and she must hold it in her thoughts, so that the universe there created, of which all sea and stone and sky were only feeble echoes, would ring out as pure and clear as the note of a single bell.
She felt like she was floating as she left the church. A burden had been left behind her, the burden of her desires and fears. She could hardly wait to reach the lake, to feel the cool water close around her. But thinking of water made her realise how thirsty she was. Her throat was parched, she would have to drink something before she went any further. She was sure there was a café or a bar nearby.
A few minutes of circuitous wandering took her to a narrow alleyway behind the square. It was dark in there, between the buildings — almost as dark as the church. She followed the alley around a bend and found the sign she was looking for. The pink scrolled writing on the shiny black background. Thirst writhed in her throat. She opened the door beneath the sign and passed along a dark corridor and parted the red velvet curtain at the end. The lights inside dazzled her momentarily; they seemed designed to bounce off the spirit bottles behind the bar, the metal legs of the tables and stools, the pole that rose to the ceiling from a raised platform against the wall. A stairway climbed to another red curtain. She was curious about what was up there, but her curiosity was no match for her thirst. She crossed to the bar and leaned forward to examine the taps and bottles — as if a barman were about to materialise and take her order. Then she circled to the other side and passed the line of upturned shot glasses, the bucket of ice-cubes with the plastic scoop, the fridge full of bottled beers. She stopped at the pump for soft drinks. Orange, Cola, Tonic, Sprite. She unhooked the pump from the stand and held it in her hand. It felt like a gun, black plastic nozzle aimed across the bar. She pushed one of the buttons and felt a kick against her palm — recoil of a showerhead when the water comes on. Cola spat out and left a dark hissing pool on the bar. She watched it fizz for a few moments then directed a longer, more satisfying stream into the sink. Apparently the pump was leaky: a few brown drops trickled around her hand towards her wrist. She licked them up, licked away their sticky trail. Then she turned the pump around and jetted Sprite into her open mouth. Bubbles seethed at the back of her throat, began to rise up her nose. She coughed and the sweet, lemony liquid ran down her chin and splattered on the floor. Then she wiped her lips and picked up a glass from the shelf behind her.
When she left the bar it was as if she had never entered it, except her thirst was gone.
Soon she was waiting at a set of traffic lights on the road by the lake. The lights changed and the cars idled, impatient, as she crossed. She followed the promenade that was cushioned from the roar of the road by a line of trees. It took her past jetties and red benches and moored boats clinking on the swell to a park whose tall iron gates stood open.
She had walked through that park so many times it felt like no exterior place at all. Like she had never left her apartment, the sun and beauty of the afternoon had entered it instead. And as she followed the gravel path, headed for the beach where she would bathe, the world seemed to shrink still tighter to her. Neatly trimmed grass unrolled inside her, unrolled outside her, the pretty flowers beside the path were the flowers she had drawn when she was ten.
When she was ten.
The path led to a play area for children. A rope bridge was strung between a climbing frame and a panelled tower, whose platforms and ladders rose to big metal slide that doubled back on itself as it descended to the rubberised ground.
Into the slide, both hands on the metal above the slide, and not wanting to let go, because of the dark and the drop ahead, and wanting to let go, from all the hands and voices behind, and making sure no skin bare against the metal, and letting go, and hurtling down with the rising in her guts, the shriek that seemed like someone else's, and slopping up around the turns and both feet bumping into day and the shouts and laughs and running kids, the sun between the trees and the world that was the only world, bulged around her like the sky in a raindrop, like the ring of adult faces around the playpark, watching, protecting, like the safety of her father.
Maria turned from the empty playpark and followed the path to the stony beach. When she got there she kicked her sandals off and limped over pebbles to the water's edge. The lake was so clear it was hard to tell where this was; only the shifted light gave it away, and the deeper colours underneath. She put a foot in to test for warmth and when she found it no colder than a tepid bath she waded out with tender soles and balancing hands until the line of water lapped around her knees. Then she stopped. She stopped because she felt like she was being watched. A speedboat tore across the lake, white rip widening behind it. Sails drifted back and forth. She turned and scanned the road along the lake, the windows of the hotels and houses, the benches in the park, expecting at every moment to see a pair of eyes. But it was okay. There was no-one. No-one was there.
