Buried

It is late spring 2006. I sit at the table stirring my coffee, watching the liquid turn. A letter rests against a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. Curled, shaky handwriting in blue ink. Sender: Mrs Roberts, Mynydd Isa, North Wales. The heavy air warns of a summer of sultry afternoons and sleepless nights. Or is it promises? She has made contact again.
__________________________

The summer of 76 was the longest and hottest on record. The school holiday dragged on and on, sticky days and weeks melted, like chocolate, into an unrecognisable shape.
There were water fights galore on the estate. We weren’t reliant on standpipes for our supply and bans were a thing of the future. Prides of glistening children gathered and wreaked their revenge on bad tempered out of work dads using bike pumps and washing-up liquid bottles. It was a favour to the men really, bored and boiling, sitting on pigeon-grey ground blowing smoke rings into the scorched air. They played along, hollering, howling and promising to belt us if they caught us, which they never did.
It was the sort of heat that slows even children down. We lolled about in the shade, fighting over whose turn it was to fetch orange pop. Evening offered slight respite. We lay on lino floors absorbing dull coolness like sponges in tepid puddles.
It was the year I waved goodbye to uncertainty. I was sixteen years old and girlish. Friends on the cusp of womanhood looked down on me through eyelashes heavy with mascara, plucked eyebrows arched. I didn’t care. By the end of that summer I knew who I was and where I was going. A long way from there.
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I wheel forward in time. It’s 1986 and I’m on a Greek island.
I’d forgotten almost everything about being sixteen. Sweet my arse. I hated it. I left memories of under-developed breasts, bad haircuts and home-made clothes where they belonged: rotting in the corner of a dilapidated town hall, former host to Saturday night discos and other remnants of a decade sent scuttling to the sewers with the furious yell of punk.
The summer of Absolute Beginners and a royal wedding was my summer off. I packed in my crummy job as a recruitment consultant and travelled around the Greek Islands with two university mates. I had hoped to work in advertising but the opportunities for graduates with mediocre arts degrees, and no contacts, were limited. Unlike my counterparts I didn’t have well connected parents.
Frances and Juliet were brunettes and as beautiful as fresh dates. Glossy and smooth they radiated confidence. I watched the guys long to squeeze them, check their firmness and dream of sinking their teeth into their ripe, juicy flesh, and though I wouldn’t have described myself as unattractive I felt like a Cox’s Pippin between two exotic fruits.
On our last night before the journey back to London we went to our favourite haunt: a family run bar sitting on the golden beach at Laganas. As we climbed the steps from the beach I noticed a woman sitting at the bar in a backless sundress. Her hair wasn’t bottle blonde: it was mid-brown. But it was definitely Kaz Roberts. I knew every contour, mole and sinew of her back. The way the muscles either side of her spine rose like the banks of a moat circling a fortress, the dark, shady area where the pores were open, where she might get hairs as an old lady.
I’d followed that back on the long walk from our estate to the White Gates at Nercwys in the summer of 1976.
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Another endless, baking day. A gang of us were restless so we decided to go exploring. We walked three miles to the White Gates in the unforgiving sun, and like the Pied Piper we picked up more kids on the way.
As we approached the edge of our world I saw Kaz Roberts and three of her cronies leaning against the wall of the posh house which sat on the main road leading out of town. Kaz was older than me and had left school a couple of summers earlier. She’d a reputation as a hard nut at our monolithic comprehensive. She put a chisel through a rival’s palm during a woodwork lesson, slapped a teacher, and kicked several sorts of shit out of numerous other girls. Everyone expected her to be pregnant or on remand within weeks of leaving, but she confounded us all by getting a job at Boots the Chemist, on the make-up counter no less. She was very pretty, and we were petrified of her. And we admired her for reasons only teenagers would understand.
‘Where are you lot going?’ she spat, between drags on her Embassy.
No one spoke in the long seconds that passed as she looked us all up and down.
‘The little kids want to go to the White Gates,’ I mumbled. I barely lifted my head from a prayer position.
Kaz surveyed our ragged crew. She took another draw on her cigarette, dropped the butt and twisted her foot against the concrete, hard and deliberate. I was surprised her flip-flops didn’t burst into flames.
‘We’ll come too,’ she replied, and I thought I’d fry. ‘It’s Gail, isn’t it?’
Kaz led the way and I took the opportunity to study her. She wore a tatty halter-neck top and shorts cut from old jeans. Her skin was the colour of a Caramac bar: golden and creamy. Her back was broad and velvety. I thought she was lovely. She looked like the models on Top of the Pops album covers: sexy, available and slightly cheap. I imagined her in a fur bikini – like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC – and if you ignored the swearing, and the strange bastardised accent of our area, and honed in on the timbre of her voice, it was languorous and smooth. I wanted to be wrapped in it. Her bleached, flicked hair formed a halo around her head.
We didn’t talk much. I answered when spoken to, and when we finally approached the gates we had been more or less silent for quarter of an hour.
The gates were disappointing, but the setting was beautiful – thistle and daisy fields with a river ambling through. My feet were killing me. I wanted to dangle them in the water. Kaz told the others to go on without us.
‘We’ll meet you on the way back,’ she said.
She hovered like a hornet as I stumbled to the river bank and sat down. I looked at her feet. She plonked herself down beside me and announced that she couldn’t be fagged to walk any further.
‘You want one,’ she said, waving a cigarette packet, her eyes boring into mine.
I shook my head. She tipped the box, tapped the base, then gripped a cigarette with her sticky, glossy lips and eased it out. A brush of her finger against a lighter and the cigarette was burning. I watched her lips contract and relax as she dragged. She held the cigarette between her middle and ring fingers, high up, almost touching her fingernails, which were coated in an electric blue lacquer. The colour was chipped in places, and as the cigarette smoke twirled into the sky it looked like vapours escaping from her varnish. She didn’t seem to inhale. She rolled the smoke around her mouth and held it there, captive, before releasing it into the atmosphere with an exaggerated sigh. I wished I could smoke without choking.
I kicked off my sandals and lowered my feet into the river. Water slid through my toes, caressing my aching soles and licking my ankles. I put my hands behind my back, locked my elbows and tipped my head to the sky. My hair brushed against the grass. The sun burned through my eyelids, and when I lifted my head I was dizzy and disorientated. I could just about make out the outline of Kaz’ form, but I couldn’t see her features.
‘Your hair must be difficult to look after, being so long and all that.’
‘Not really,’ I replied, plucking a daisy from the bank. ‘Though I hate the colour.’
‘You get called names ‘cos of it?’
‘Sometimes, but I don’t care.’ The heat was making me reckless.
‘I’d care about stuff like that. It’s good that you don’t.’ She lit another cigarette.
‘How’s the job?’ I said.
‘All right. Bit boring.’
‘My mum says jobs in retail are worth holding onto. Solid, you know, secure. With potential for career progression.’ I mimicked my mum’s tones.
She looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Is that what you want to do then? Work in a shop? I thought you were clever.’
‘It’d make my mum happy,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Steady job, steady life…’
‘Steady bloke.’
Phillip, a friend of my brother’s, had asked me out at the beginning of the holiday. I’d refused. He might have been desperate, but I wasn’t.
Kaz stared at me, serious. ‘You got anyone special?’
‘Nope. You?’
‘Not really.’
Her gaze unsettled me, and I stared down at my feet and hers, watching them change shape under the water’s surface. She moved her left foot towards my right.
‘I’ve got huge feet, haven’t I?’ she said.
And as if to prove her point she shifted closer and tucked her foot under mine, her toes creeping out like children from behind a wall: wide-eyed and playful. Legs entwined, her foot circling mine, flesh on watery flesh, calf muscle against calf muscle. She shaved her legs; I could feel the stubble pricking my flesh as we played foot-tag in the water.
She fell back on the coarse grass, head in the cradle of her hands. I followed suit and we lay there, elbow to elbow, in silence, until the others returned. I was as contented as I’d ever been.
Two years later I left our town for university. I didn’t see Kaz Roberts again that summer. I avoided Boots because I didn’t want to break the spell, and months later I heard she’d quit her job and moved in with a bloke from Gwernaffield.
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Grasshopper humming fills the air, Mediterranean waves slap against the shore, and I’m back in Greece.
Kaz sipped her Ouzo and said, ‘Everyone calls me Karen now.’
‘I’m known as Gee,’ I replied, and she laughed.
‘They good mates?’ She nodded at Frances and Juliet. ‘You gonna invite them over?’
‘I’d rather have you to myself.’
She smiled and raised her glass. ‘I recognised you straight away. You’ve not changed.’
‘The hair?’
‘The freckles.’
‘You look great.’ And she did. I took a drink and stole a glance at her feet. They were wrapped in leather sandals, gladiator style, with the thongs crossed up her calves. Her toenails were painted a fashionable pink.
We didn’t talk about the past. She told me about her travels around Greece; I told her about mine. We talked as if we’d known each other all our lives, and, in a way, we had.
I went to the toilet. As I returned along the unlit path running beside the bar Kaz approached me. She pushed me against the wall and brushed her mouth along mine. The roof of my mouth sparked; I felt a weakening in my spine and a rush to my scalp. Her touch was confident and strong, and as we kissed I felt her pelvis pushing into the soft flesh of my stomach. I thought I was going to faint when she suddenly, and swiftly, pulled me through the bar, down the steps and onto the beach. She threw me onto the damp sand. She sat on my thighs and gripped my wrists, forcing my arms above my head.
‘I love your freckles. And your hair. The length, shine, colour – like leaves in autumn.’I looked into her eyes and then closed mine quickly. The sky was too black and the stars too bright. I felt her breath on my face, and I followed her warmth down to my breasts.
Later, in her room, I picked sand from between her toes. I ran my tongue up her inside leg, like a cat combing her kitten, until she howled with pleasure. I tickled her back as I rubbed in cocoa butter and traced my name onto her skin with my fingernail.
She ran her fingers through my hair, scratching my scalp so hard it hurt, and then buried her face in my hair. She was breathing so deeply I wondered if she was crying.
‘No. I’m breathing you in. I want to remember your smell, the feel of your hair. I don’t want to forget.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘You’ll do well for yourself, Gail,’ she said, lying back on the bed. ‘You’re going places, not like me. Mine’s a small life. Always will be. This is running away for a while – I’ll have to go back.’
‘No one has to do anything these days.’
‘People like me do,’ she sighed. ‘And anyway what else can I do? I’ve got a bloke waiting for me back home. At least I think I have.’
And then her hands climbed up my hair, pulling me onto my back once more. We stared at the ceiling. It was decorated with smears of blood, thrust from the bodies of satiated mosquitoes flattened against the white concrete by an unknown assailant.
‘Kiss me,’ I said, and she did. Again and again.
In the morning I was shy. I wondered what I would tell Juliet and Frances. I remembered their shocked faces when I approached Kaz. The way they took in her cheap clothes and haircut. The condescending tone lurking beneath their smiles when I did, finally, introduce Kaz. ‘How lovely to meet you. Gee simply never talks about her old friends.’
I laughed when Kaz said, ‘We should meet again in the summer of 1996 - if it’s a hot one.’
We swapped telephone numbers, written on used ferry tickets from Piraeus.

___________________________________
Kaz called in July 1996. For a woman who left school without qualifications she was enterprising and resourceful. I’d moved five, maybe six times. I kept in touch with no one from Wales. I lost touch with Juliet and Frances, though ‘lost touch’ gives quite the wrong impression; I disappeared and reinvented myself, again. But Kaz traced me.
‘Dead easy,’ she said. She wanted to meet.
‘I’ve met someone,’ I said.
‘What’s he like?’
‘She. She’s lovely. Her name’s Hermia.’
‘Posh. Always said you’d do well!’
‘She calls me her ‘bit of rough’.’
Kaz laughed, but I wondered what she expected from our meeting. I was in love with Hermia and I didn’t want to mess up.
It was hot that year; Camden Town sizzled in the sun. It felt like the most
exciting place on earth, looking to the future, and I had no time for my past.
By the time I got to The World’s End I was twenty minutes late. I’d fretted over what to wear. I wanted to look good, but not provocative, nothing too revealing, which wasn’t easy given the heat. The pub was packed. I hovered by the door scanning the space.
Kaz sat at the bar, and though I saw her only in profile I was shocked at the change in her appearance. Her hair was still long, but instead of rich brown it was a poorly dyed red. The evening light caught the grey at the roots, the lines fanning from her eyes, the yellowed teeth as she smiled at a man sat across from her. I thought, guiltily, of the money I spent at expensive hairdressers and boutiques. Her dress was dated, too tight and unflattering across her bust. She wasn’t wearing a bra and needed to. She was no longer the Amazonian goddess of my girlhood. She was a poor, uneducated woman prematurely middle-aged. She could have been a hooker. Dread washed over me at the thought of someone I knew discovering me with her, and though I felt ashamed I could not stop. I turned and raced out of the bar.
_______________________________

I look to the mantelpiece, to Hermia’s photograph and the letter resting against it. Another ten years pass before my eyes. Career, mortgage, an adopted boy.
Kaz.
I hope that she is happy. That life is good to her.
I tear open the letter, stomach spinning. It isn’t Kaz, but her mother. Of course. How could Kaz be a Mrs Roberts?

Dear Ms Hughes (is this the right thing to say? Miss seems so old fashioned and spinsterish now doesn’t it?)
This is Mrs Jean Roberts of Gwernaffield. You might remember my daughter Karen. She was a few years older than you at school. I hope you don’t mind me contacting you. It’s just that I thought you should know. I should have told you earlier but I didn’t know how much you meant to Karen until I read her diaries and it took me such a long time before I could do this. It hurt too much. You see Gail, Karen died over a year ago. She had ovarian cancer and though she was brave and fought hard it got her in the end. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, but Karen wrote such a lot about Gail with the long auburn hair and she said you were the only person who knew the real Kaz Roberts…

Since that summer afternoon, when we lay on the parched grass, legs entwined in the brook, her imprint has remained in my soul. Like a fossil. Buried, but always there. Her gift: my future. In that moment she changed my life.
I weep at the table; the air grows hotter around me.