I was sitting at Paco's table in the mountains, watching his wife put a bowl of corn and pork stew in front of me. Pozole is not my favourite dish in Mexico - those massive kernels they use look unnatural, like they come from a land of giants, but I'd been locked in a tower for nigh on six weeks, with no hot food, no hot water, so it was one of the best meals ever.
"Where are you from, friend?" said Paco.
Without his ten-gallon hat and with the machete propped in the corner of the room instead of in his belt or hand, he looked like any other bloke - dark-skinned and high-cheek-boned handsome, but any other bloke. His shirt was off-white, his baggy trousers held up with a multi-coloured cloth belt, his sandals made from tyre-rubber.
"I live in the town, San Juan Martín," I said. "I'm El Güero."
Paco's kids giggled and Concepcion gave them each a light tap on the head. Since I'd been there the two of them had treated me like I was a freak; they would run into the room and look at me, run away screaming if I moved, and giggle if I talked. The taps made them quiet, though, and they tucked into their own bowls.
"I mean what part of Mexico?" said Paco. "I don't recognise your accent, or your look."
"Oh," I said. "I'm from England originally."
"Is that very far north?"
I nodded. "Years away."
I'd meant to say miles, of course, but Paco seemed happy with years, and he nodded also. His wife picked up some red dust and sprinkled it on the pozole like she was performing a trick. The next sip came alive in my mouth. I squeezed some lime on a tortilla and rolled it up.
"So did you find the money?"
"Yes," he said, "there was a lot of gold under the tower you fell out of. We're meeting tonight to decide what to do with it. Many people have lost their homes and crops in the rains this year. And part of the road has been washed away. Not much has come up the mountain or gone down for weeks."
I nodded and Concepcion and the kids watched me eat while Paco got himself ready to go out, tucking the machete under his belt, pulling a cloth bag over his shoulder and parking the hat on his head.
"The other white man," he said. "The one who died, he wasn't killed by the fall, was he? My father said that he was already dead when he fell down the mountain, poisoned."
"Yes," I said.
"There are people that say a devil is hunting you, one that wants to wear your skin like the priests would do in the spring, a long time ago."
Paco's wife crossed herself and the kids edged a little closer together. "I think that's a bit of an exaggeration," I said.
"It may be," said Paco. "Stories do tend to get blown up a bit in the mountains; this is where legends are born. But it is true that she came looking for you, and that she poisoned your friend?"
I left the last few kernels of corn in the bottom of the roughly fired clay bowl and stared at them.
"Yes," I said. "Maybe."
Paco said nothing for a while, nobody said anything in fact, and the children looked almost solemn.
"I have been told to take you down the mountain to your home," said Paco at last. "Tonight I will bring the bag with your clothes. Is there anything else?"
"Did you find a telescope?" I said. "That's mine too. It was a present."
Paco nodded. "I'll make sure you get it."
Sure enough it was there waiting for me when Paco came to shake me out of my dreams early the next morning; so early it was still dark and even the forest was almost silent.
"It's time to go," he said. "Come quickly."
I dressed and went outside to find Paco with the telescope strapped to his back. He was whispering to his wife, stroking her arm; they broke apart when they saw me.
"So, how do we get back to town?" I said.
Paco adjusted the machete by his side. "We walk," he said. "If you walk quickly, we will be there by noon tomorrow."
I wasn't quite sure how to say goodbye to Concepcion. We'd never exchanged a word, but it was her that had cleaned me up, watched over me as I slept maybe two days. So I tried to shake her hand, but this seemed to startle her as much as if I had planted a kiss on her lips, and she took in her breath as she stepped back. Paco rescued the situation by pushing a bundle at me. It was my rucksack — dirty and slightly shredded, but mostly intact.
I pulled it onto my back, and followed Paco into the dark mouth of the forest. The whole day and throughout the night he thrashed through the undergrowth, leading me down to thicker air. Beyond insects, spiders and the like, there wasn't as much wildlife as you might expect. We made so much noise, cutting through and tramping over vines and things, that we would have startled even the bravest of larger animals. Only the odd bird squawked about us, though I rarely saw more than a flash of quetzal plumage, and occasionally I would stop to watch a hummingbird probe an orchid, oblivious to ungainly men in its insect-sized world.
I say ungainly men, but that would just be me. I kept very close to Paco's back, often bumping into him, sometimes straying a little from his path and flailing in webs, and a few times stumbling and almost falling; but each time Paco was there, ready to catch me, straighten me up and pat me on the shoulder, smiling, offering me some water, jerky, bread or cheese to keep me going.
At night the moon lit our way surprisingly well, but we walked slowly, picking our way through the undergrowth, until as the decline began to level out, we found more established paths along which we could walk with more ease in the moonlight.
True to his word, Paco led me out of the forest at around noon the next day. I was wet, dirty and exhausted, and my lower legs and arms were scratched bloody as we entered the outskirts of San Juan, but my exhaustion fell away as we neared Reparaciones El Güero, the electrical repair shop I'd helped to run with Agustin and Maria.
"It's shut," I said, turning to Paco, who looked surprisingly fresh. "What day is it?"
"Tuesday," he said.
I walked quickly up the street toward the house we shared, barely noticing the people watching us, some stopping to gawp, and I pushed the gate open with a rattle, called out for Maria and Agustin. As I walked across the courtyard toward the kitchen I saw a large man rise from the table. He stood in the doorway and looked down at me, still chewing.
"Güero," he said. "I saw you run with the bull."
"Where is everybody?" I said. "Where's Maria?"
"You should go to find your compadre," he said. "That is all I know."
It was close to siesta time; Pedro would either be in his bed, or with the bull.
"Where do they keep it now?" I said. "The bull?"
"It's down in the square at the moment," said the big man. "The bishop is coming to bless it at the weekend. Now go, would you? And don't come back. This place has cost me enough already."
Pedro wasn't much more pleased to see me. He rushed out of the bull's enclosure, brushing hay dust from his hands, looking around at the people coming and going, the thinning crowd as the sun rose to its highest.
"Who's your friend?" he said.
I'd almost forgotten about Paco, who'd been running behind me all the way, breathless in the town dust.
"Oh," I said. "This is Paco. Paco, Pedro."
The two men nodded silently. Paco unstrapped the telescope from his back and laid it at my feet.
"Go well, Peter. May God protect you," he said, turning away.
"Wait a moment," I said. "Can't I get you lunch or something, or at least give you something to take back to the kids?"
"No," he said. "Thank you, I have to get back quickly. I can't lose any time. It's movie night at the pulqueria. We have a Jackie Chan video."
And with that he turned and walked away, without so much as a hug. I had a feeling that Otomi don't go in for hugs; I may have been wrong.
"Let's get off the street," said Pedro. "It's not safe."
I followed him uncomfortably, burdened with my rucksack and the telescope in my arms, but he was in no mood for dawdling. He took me down backstreets and alleys, winding dark areas of the town I'd never seen before with shuttered windows and the occasional dog rising up reluctantly from the shadows to cough at us.
"This is it," Pedro said at last outside a battered old house whose shutters and door looked like someone had been working at them with a small hammer for many years, chipping away at as many layers of paint. "Go to the top floor and knock there," he said.
He turned to go, but then halted, turned back to me. "We had good times, compadre," he said. "I was glad to know you. Come see me some time when this is over; if you make it, that is. Good luck."
He held a hand out to me and I rearranged my burdens to shake it. "See you then," I said, and he was gone.
The stairs were narrow and difficult to negotiate, and they creaked loudly, so that my arrival could not have been a surprise, and the door was already opening when I lifted a hand to knock at it.
Maria peered through the small gap; for some reason it felt best to whisper.
"I'm back," I said. "What's going on?"
She lowered the gun and opened the door wider.
"Come in," she said.
She wouldn't talk; she looked at me up and down and said I needed to eat first. She made me eggs, the creamy yolks blending into the iron-rich beans as I wrapped them in tortillas. There was near silence but for the dripping of a tap in the tiny dark kitchen as she pushed a cup of coffee towards me and sat down. The only sign of the twins were a few toys scattered on the floor and on the counters; there was no sign at all of Agustin.
"I'm glad to see you alive," she said.
I held my hands up in a cheerful 'here I am' kind of way.
"Where's Agustin?" I said. "What are you doing here anyway?"
"I live here now, for the moment," she said.
She rearranged herself on the seat, as though uncomfortable, and sighed heavily.
"Peter, I'm sorry, but Agustin is dead. He died a couple of weeks after you'd gone."
Stuff sat heavy in my mouth; I no longer wanted to eat, but I had no choice but to swallow it, feel it scratch down the sides of my throat.
"What happened?"
Maria wrapped her arms around herself. "The doctor said he was old, it was his time. He must have had some kind of seizure or shock and swallowed his tongue, or choked at least."
I pushed the plate away. It didn't sound like the "died peacefully in his sleep" scenario you usually hear about. I tried to think of things to say, like 'sorry', like it was my fault.
"What do you think?" I said.
She leaned forward on the table and stared at my plate.
"Peter, something stood over me in bed that night," she said. "I felt it. I didn't dare open my eyes in case seeing it would be an end to me, like staring the devil in the eye; you know those strange feelings you get at night. I had my arm over the twins and I pulled them the tiniest bit closer, praying they wouldn't wake now, and I held my breath. It seemed like an age it was there, watching me, until finally it moved away, slowly; I didn't hear the movement, I felt it, felt a shift in the air, the smallest draft and it was gone."
A shutter or door slammed somewhere and Maria jumped a little, looked at the small slab of white light that was the window. A fly was buzzing there, gasping its last by the sound of it.
"In the morning there was no sign of Agustin at breakfast," she said, lifting dark rimmed eyes to look at me. "You know he was always first up. I went to his room and I could tell straight away he was gone. Even if you've never seen it before, there's no mistaking the stillness of death."
She paused a while, gripping the kitchen towel in her hands.
"His mouth was open wide, Peter. His tongue and lips were black, and the eyes were still open."
She got up from the table, took out some onions and a knife and started cutting angrily, scarring the board with her knife.
"You think it was her," I said. "You think Dolores killed him."
She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand, light from the window catching the blade.
"What do you think?"
I wanted a cigarette, but I didn't have any.
"I asked the doctor to get a post-mortem, but he just laughed; he said I should forget my big city ways," said Maria. "But when he was leaving he said that I should maybe think about leaving town, starting up somewhere new. 'This is a peaceful town,' he said. 'We don't need trouble.'
"Pedro was really good. He helped me to find this place and a buyer for the house and business. I guess you met him?"
I nodded.
"I waited for you, but there was no word. The truth is, Peter, I thought she'd got you too. But I brought your things here, in case you did come back. And I have your share of the cash."
She paused a while, wiped her hands on her pinafore, and turned to face me. "Peter, we brought you here, Agustin and me. We talked about it, about the dangers, and really I think we did the right thing, but now you're on your own; now you're here, you have to go."
My head started buzzing. I was losing everything, being passed around, moved on. It's not that I really wanted to stay there forever, I had to go some day, but having a base would have been nice.
"Fine," I said, standing up too quickly so that I had to lean against the table. "Where's my box?"
"In the bedroom," she said. "Peter, don't be angry. If it was just me, I'd let you stay, or I'd go with you. But I have to keep the children safe."
I let my shoulders sag a little and sighed. "It's OK," I said. "I understand." Though really I thought this whole business about Dolores was being blown out of proportion. Sure she had cut me a couple of times, and maybe caused Javier's death in the tower, but I didn't think she really meant him to die, she expected he would get some antibiotics, probably, like I did, and she wouldn't murder an old man in his bed.
"She's not going to come after you," I said. "Let alone the children. If she's after anyone, it's me."
"She'll take any route to get to you," said Maria. "Look what she's done already."
I opened my mouth to protest, but I knew it was pointless.
"Where will you go?" I said. "I suppose you won't want to stay here?"
"North," she said. "There are jobs at the border making televisions for the gringos, big towns where an ordinary woman can get lost."
"Right," I said. "So I reckon I take any direction but north."
I went to the bedroom to find my shoebox and she followed me, sat on the bed as I looked through it, my hand shaking a little as I picked through my past.
"Where's my notebook?" I said. "There was a notebook. Have the children had it?"
"No Peter," she said. "Was it anything important?"
No, I thought, just the story of my dead girlfriend, my telling of how we lived together, how she died. I could always tell it again.
"No," I said.
She reached a hand out to touch the small of my back.
"Let's get you cleaned up."
"I'm fine," I said, edging away from her.
"No," she said. "You're filthy. That's not how I want to remember you. We'll clean you up and then you can lie down with me and tell me what you've been doing."
She let me stay the night, stepped into the shower with me and cleaned me, sponged my body down, seeking out every bit of dirt with more care than I had ever shown myself. And when we lay in bed together that night we talked about Agustin, his miserly ways and great kindness, how the both of us were better for having known him, and the things we would remember about him.
I coughed a small early-hours laugh. "I'll remember how he sold me a gutted radio from his stall in Mexico City, then each week would sell me the parts he'd taken out – fifty pesos each."
Maria put her hand on my face in the dark; it was small and warm, and I wanted it to cover my eyes and never leave.
"And I'll remember how I thought about the mysterious foreigner whose radio I repaired," she said. "So now, mysterious foreigner, give me something to remember you by, so that I can think of this night for many years, or until something more real fills the empty space."
The sky sat above me as heavy as my mood as I set out to cross the mountains once again, this time on a regular bus service to the west. A chicken was pecking around my feet, and the noise of the old diesel blocked out every other sound, but as San Juan Martín faded, gave way to valleys and ravines, the air became cleaner, the views opened out and blue skies appeared above the mountains.
I had my share of the sale of the business and house, and a pocket of my rucksack stuffed with old banknotes from the Astronomer's Tower. And I had a whole world to explore; no need to act yet.
After two days rolling across mountains and valleys, dozing propped up in provincial bus depots, eating dry roadside tamales and quesadillas and drinking fizzy fake apple juice from clear plastic bags, I finally arrived at the Pacific coast and checked in to a small, ancient hotel in the old part of town, with rooms set about a courtyard, mango trees all around, a dried up fountain at the centre.
The guy on reception showed no interest in me; I was just another wanderer from abroad. I would get drunk in the bars, get chatted up by some whores, get robbed by the police and go home and take my stories with me. His life would go on, one day in paradise dragging after another.
He threw the key and its big wooden fob on the counter. The clatter startled me.
"You can get breakfast at eight if you want it," he said. "It's mostly bread and ham, some coffee. No juice; the juice is no good."
"What did it do?" I said.
He looked at me with hard eyes; he wasn't in the mood for jokes.
"It expired," he said.
The room was shuttered and dark, but cool, the furniture rustic, the bed possibly as old as the building itself; it creaked beneath me as I wrapped myself in its sheets and slipped into a shallow sleep punctuated by the croaking calls of mocking birds, the occasional murmuring of lovers in the room next door.
In the courtyard later, sipping a beer and waiting for the cool of the evening, I saw those lovers emerge. The man was tall, lean to the point of sunken cheeks. He lit a cigarette on the threshold of the room, ran shaking fingers through greyed shaggy hair. He looked like a war correspondent who'd seen too much, with his battered jacket frayed at the cuffs, pockets sagging with the weight of so much history. His partner, coming shortly after into the soft evening light, was about ten years younger, she moved full hips with grace, breasts pressing just the right amount at the limits of her floral dress, hair piled high because of the heat, revealing a long, elegant neck that arched toward him now as she lay a full, lazy kiss on his cheek.
I was filled with longing, not just for her, for the both of them, their story, the history of their life, what brought them here to this point on their journey, what difficulties and sadness they had overcome to get here, what happiness they sought; because whatever had happened, they were together now.
The man caught my eye, caught me looking at the both of them, and he kept my gaze a while, like he recognised me.
I watched them as they stepped out together into the night, arm in arm, her leaning slightly into him as I followed them into the shadows.
Sitting outside a café in the old square, watching the locals promenade in the cool air, I drank another beer and picked round the edges of a disappointing piece of fried fish and frazzled salad. A figure stood close to me, smelling of citrus and sea.
"Mind if I sit here?" she said.
I looked at her and the empty chair opposite me, the empty tables all around.
"No," I said. "Help yourself."
She wiggled into place and smiled a healthy blonde smile.
"If I sit alone I attract the wrong kind of attention," she said. "I was with some friends but they left already. I decided it would be fun to have a little adventure by myself. But it's not easy for a young foreign woman in a Latin country; you get noticed."
It was the most English I'd heard in a good while, except for the voices of the long dead in the Astronomer's Tower.
"I imagine," I said.
"How long have you been here?" she said.
"Since this morning."
"No, I mean in Mexico," she said. "You can tell you're a foreigner, but you look, you know, kind of blended in, the way you dress, the way you sit, even the way you hold that cigarette."
I had meant to stop again, but the silence of the day had driven me to distraction.
"I suppose it has been a few years," I said. "I've lost count."
The waiter joined us and asked if we needed anything, patted my shoulder again, reached out a hand to shake the girl's. His first child had been born that very morning, and he was telling everyone who would listen. He was telling her now, and she at least was asking the right questions — what weight, what name, how is the mother — the both of them undeterred by her tentative Spanish. He gave her a beer on the house, waved away her thanks.
She was mostly blonde and soft, but with dark eyebrows dancing above her eyes as she spoke. She wore the standard shorts and halterneck in pastel shades, sandals on her feet, the feet themselves sand-dirty; not long before, I imagined, she'd been strolling along the beach, not fearing the dark or the tiny, spent waves that crawled those last few inches of the sand to lap at her toes.
"What's the matter?"
I shifted focus from feet to face. "Nothing," I said.
She began to talk; a brief life history, a reckoning of her travels, a couple of hints at anecdotes — 'remind me to tell you about that sometime' — not wasting the telling on someone who might make his excuses half an hour from now.
She was asking me something.
"I said do you have a girlfriend?"
"No." I waved at the waiter for more beer.
"Boyfriend?"
"No."
She was quiet while beers and a small bowl of crinkle cut crisps appeared. They were sharp with vinegar and salty to the point of stinging my inner cheeks, but the sea air had already done with the crispiness.
"I have Brock," she said.
It sounded like an America footballer's name, so I said: "Is he an American football player?"
"No," she said. "And I'm clearly not a cheerleader. He's brilliant at math and he writes me love songs."
I nodded slowly. In my mind he still had shoulders that prevented passage through narrow doorways, but I let it go. She stared off into the distance for a while, rubbing the cold sweating bottle against her neck.
"I'm not sure I'll have him much longer though," she said, shaking her head and turning back to me. "I'm going to med school soon, and we'll be apart months at a time. I'm not sure either of us can do that."
"That's a shame," I said. "Why clearly?"
"What?"
"You said you were clearly not a cheerleader," I said. "Why clearly?"
"Well, because I don't have the height or the body for it," she said.
"There's nothing wrong with your body," I said, "or your height."
She laughed. "Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with my body or height."
"You shouldn't," I said. "They're both nice."
She lit one of my cigarettes and looked at me suspiciously. "Can you say someone has nice height? That would sound weird — hey, you've got nice height!"
"Maybe not," I said. "But I can say you have a nice body, and your height is a match."
"A match?"
"For someone of a slightly higher height."
"Such as yourself?"
I shrugged. "Such as someone of a similar height to me."
She tilted her head back and blew smoke into the night, mosquitoes danced in it as it passed through the light of a bulb strung above us. "Are you trying to seduce me?"
I had the tip of my tongue pressed at the back of my upper teeth when she held up a hand.
"To say 'no' would be an insult; you wouldn't want to insult a lady, now, would you?"
"No," I said.
We drank a lot that night, walked from bar to café to bar, Connie hanging on as though she might fall without me, though in reality she was kept sober by her constant talk, the anecdotes that came thick and fast now.
I half listened, but my mind was still mostly filled with Agustin, how we'd only hugged the once, how I would like to tell him now: "I wish you'd been my father." How he would probably have laughed, brushed the whole thing off, but then I would catch him looking at me later, maybe just a hint of pride in his old watery eyes.
Maria had given me a photograph the morning I left, and during a quiet moment, while Connie was in the toilet or something, I took it out to look at it.
"What's that?" said Connie, sitting next to me.
It was taken the first day of the town fair, the morning we unveiled the mechanical bull. I was standing proud beside the bull, the Panama hat that Maria gave me perched on the back of my head, the dust buffed off my boots, jeans pressed and neat, tucked into those boots, my check shirt tucked in also. I suppose I liked the way I looked, like a homesteader, with a straight, tight-lipped almost-smile, like I'd done something to make me proud.
Connie snatched the photo and laughed. "Were you in a circus?"
Next to me — shoulders back, chin up — Maria, hands either side holding pinafore straight and flat, hair neat, pinned tight, the top of her head just below shoulder height; smiling broadly, eyes focused left where the children played off camera.
"Something like that," I said.
Frowning on my other side was Agustin, thin and sharp as ever, his inverted teardrop head squeezing out of his collar, his mouth turned down despite his good mood.
It made me nostalgic I suppose. The morning of the photograph I had woken in the early hours as Maria crept out of my room; I spent the day helping children to mount that mechanical bull, and watched Agustin at his stall, notching up the sales. But we were all other people then, and even the light seemed different, strangely old fashioned.
"I suppose it was a bit of a circus," I said. "I was the freak show. I rescued a bull."
She laughed again, so that I could see the rows of perfect little teeth marching toward to the back of her mouth. "You're funny," she said.
I smiled, drained another tequila and slammed the shot glass on the table; she did the same, sucked at a lime that made her wince and then refilled her glass. There was sweat on her round white cleavage.
"You know, medical students drink more than anyone else, ever," she said, brushing away the competition with a wave of her arm, nearly catching the tequila bottle.
"You haven't started yet," I said.
"I'm practicing," she said. We slammed another two and she looked at the photo again, squinting at it in the dim light.
"You look like you're in some kind of western," she said. "Like someone's going to come into town and shoot the place up moments later. Was she your wife?"
"No," I said. "We were just friends."
She put the photo back into my jacket pocket and patted my chest. "She must have been a good friend if you carry her photo round in your pocket."
I shrugged. "I haven't got round to putting it in my shoebox yet," I said.
"Shoebox?" she said. "What shoebox? Are you looking at my boobs?" She leaned her head against my shoulder. "I need to get to bed."
I woke in darkness in a cold sweat, feeling like I was still tumbling down the mountainside, struggling in the dark and unfamiliar surroundings to the bathroom, making it just in time to vomit into the bowl. The face that looked back from the mirror was sleepless and old, with long thin hair, bags under the eyes; it was a stranger looking back.
I fumbled in my jacket for the photo with Maria and Agustin, put it where it belonged with the other lives in my shoebox, and slumped back onto the bed as the cockerels began to crow.
"What the fuck happened to you?"
She looked fresh and clean again; quite different to the sobbing drunk I'd pulled sheets over the night before.
"I went back to my own place," I said. "You passed out."
"No not that," she said. "Come in; sit down while I get ready. I mean your face, your hair."
"Oh," I said, rubbing my chin. "I found a barber."
"Just in time," she said. "I was thinking of dumping you, but you've cleaned up nicely. I won't be ashamed to be seen on the beach with you now."
"I need new clothes if we're going to the beach," I said. "I have nothing right for the beach."
"Of course we're going to the beach, what else is there to do?" she said. "But let's get breakfast first. I'm starving."
And so we became a pair; saying couple would be overstating it.
We breakfasted, we picked out clothes in which I could lounge on the beach, swim in the sea. She taught me how to jump at the waves and laugh, almost like a child, and then float beyond the breakers, looking up at the fierce sun high above, salt water splashing sometimes into our eyes. In the early evening, we went back to my room, showered, and as she looked through my shoebox history I told her stories about the items in there, mostly lies.
She was holding the photo of my dead girlfriend and her dead dog when I started to slide my hand round her bare shoulders and lean in toward her. She backed away slightly.
"Whoa there," she said. "What are you trying to do?"
"Seduce you?" I said.
She looked at me and thought a while, but said nothing.
Days passed and rolled into weeks. We didn't talk much. As we ate she would tell me stories and I would listen, in the evenings we would stroll along the shore, barefoot and silent, heads down, each with our own thoughts, and late at night we would find our way to bed.
"Would you believe that I've only ever been with one guy?"
We were lying in my room, half naked due to the heat, blowing smoke at the ceiling. The shutters were open and mosquitoes were bashing themselves against the mesh screen, drawn by our exertions.
For some reason her confession scared me a little. "I'm impressed," I said.
"Do you think I should feel guilty about cheating on Brock?"
I put out my cigarette, turned over onto my side to place a hand on the small downy rise of her belly.
"I don't think you should feel anything," I said. "It's none of my business."
"You have played some part in this," she said, "however small you think it is. So have an opinion, please."
I thought for a while, possibly about her question. "I think this is the first step towards ending your relationship with him. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else; it was inevitable."
I'm not sure where it came from, but in some way it satisfied her. She turned onto her side, and it wasn't long before I could hear the steady breathing of her dreams.
The next day there must have been twenty of us crammed onto the boat, and it sat low in the water, puttering sluggishly out to sea, leaving a trail of thick diesel smoke that settled in tiny gobbets in our wake. We were sitting round the edge of the boat facing inwards, and the only view, without twisting round, was the murky shallows beyond the glass bottom or the passenger opposite. We peered into the green, then up at our fellow tourists, feeling awkward. Connie was sitting next to me, stiff as a board, silent. The trip had been her idea, but all morning she'd been tetchy, kept throwing glances at me like I'd done something, said something wrong.
Without warning she stood up, pushed her bag onto my lap, and jumped into the water with a dramatic splash.
The pilots shouted after her as she swam toward the shore, and the rest of the passengers surged to my side for a better view, threatening to capsize us. More shouting and they all sat down again and settled for watching me. I tried to act like this had been the plan all along, that I was supposed to spend the rest of the trip alone, lugging her bag about.
The distance grew between Connie and the boat until she was nothing but a bobbing dot between swells.
After some time, the boat moored at an island jetty from which young boys were diving after coins, their shining, near-black bodies slithering in the sea. I opened Connie's purse and emptied out her coins, watching them blink through shards of sunlight to the sea floor, the near-black boys tumbling after them.
When I got back to the mainland, hours later, I found her at a beach bar, nursing the remains of a beer she'd bought with a soggy note in her shorts.
"Here's your bag," I said. "I tipped all your change in the water."
"What did you do that for?" she said.
So I told her about the diving boys, how they swam like frogs after money. She wasn't too pleased.
"You used my money to humiliate local boys?"
I thought about the boys grinning and shouting encouragement as the tourists felt compelled to chuck their money at them, myself included.
"As Saturday jobs go, it beats a paper round," I said.
She glowered at me a moment, then grabbed her bag and rifled through it for her cigarettes, lit one, threw the bag over her shoulder and stormed off.
I ordered beer and a prawn soup with chilli piquin; I was starving. I was just finishing the soup and lighting up when she returned.
"You owe me change," she said.
She was standing with the lowering sun behind her, so that I had to salute to shade my eyes.
"I suppose I do."
She sat down beside me and stared at the remains of my meal. There was a quarter disk of tortilla on the orange plastic side plate, along with a piece of shrivelling lime. She grabbed them both, sucked the lime and pushed the tortilla into her mouth.
"I fell down," she said.
"How?"
"I tripped, over there, tits up; I was so keen to get away from you."
"Any damage?" I said.
"No, not really," she said. "Actually it was quite funny, so I turned back to see if you were watching, so we could have a laugh about it and clear the air. You were too busy ordering lunch."
"Closer to dinner, really," I said.
"Alright, dinner then." She took out her cigarettes.
"So where have you been?" I asked her. "That must have been a while ago."
"I went for a walk. I thought you might come looking for me."
"Oh," I said. "I thought you wanted to get away from me."
She sighed, held a cigarette unlit between her fingers.
"You haven't asked me why I swam back to shore."
"Alright," I said. "Why did you swim back to shore?" I was trying to attract the attention of a waiter.
"To see how you would react," she said.
The sun had just dipped behind a headland in the distance, and the shadow that fell over us seemed to bring a stillness with it also. I looked at her soft, roundish face, her high, puffy cheekbones, the strands of blonde hair curling over her forehead.
"You should have seen those boys," I said. "They really were enjoying themselves. They were throwing themselves into the water like they were living."
She frowned at me. "What do you mean like they were living?"
I wasn't quite sure myself what I meant, but I said: "Like they were living life, you know."
She straightened up a little, drew deeply on her cigarette and looked out at the bay. Lights were pinging on in the distance. Soon lamps from the tourist centre, super troopers maybe a mile away, would start sweeping the sky, and small cruisers would be loading up with revellers, taking them out to deeper waters where they would drink, eat passable food, occasionally fall off. We would only see the lights, hear the faint thump of woofers from their discos, but mostly we would be lulled by the uneven rhythm of lazy waves on the sand.
"I have to go home in a few days," she said. "What happens then?"
I shrugged. "I expect you'll go back to Brock, then to medical school, like you'd planned."
She looked at me for a moment, mouth slightly open, as a red snapper was placed before her.
"Looks good," I said.
"But what about us?" she said.
At least I knew what was wrong.
"I'm sorry, Connie," I said. "Should I have hijacked the boat and come after you?"
"Yes," she said. "Or at least jumped in after me. And you should have come after me when I stormed off, or done anything except order lunch."
"Dinner."
She looked like she was ready to thump me.
"Connie, you jumped off the boat. That was your choice," I said. "I didn't follow you, that was mine."
"Really?" she said. "That was a choice? Wasn't that just not giving a damn?"
"Are you saying, anyway, that you want to take me back to Canada and have me live with you while you study medicine, or maybe you want to give it all up and live here with me?"
She had the tip of her tongue pressed against the back of her upper teeth and I held a hand up.
"Saying 'no' would be an insult," I said. "You wouldn't want to insult a man, would you?"
She sighed and her shoulders relaxed.
"Is this just a holiday fling?" she said. "That's a bit tawdry, isn't it?"
I shrugged. "I wouldn't know. It hasn't felt tawdry."
She rummaged in her bag again, head almost immersed in it. "Have you heard of the Lotus Eaters?" she said. "No I don't expect you have. But the other night I was thinking, after we'd made love and you'd gone to sleep, I was thinking about the way you live here, the way you might always live, just letting it happen, and I remembered this, something I read somewhere. Here we go."
She pulled out a scrap of paper and spread it on the table, squinted at it in the dimming light.
"'We met in the boulevards of that easy town,'" she read, "'baked in the South Pacific sun and the sweet-stinking air of idle decay. There was no struggle there, there were no questions. We fell into each other's arms like ripe fruit falls already fermenting from the trees. And there we would stay, enveloped in the melancholy of indolence, lotus eating lovers watching night fall, until we grew tired, walked slowly back to the hut we called home, and had drowsy, forgotten sex beneath a roof that rattled sometimes with the bodies of heat-bruised mangoes, bouncing to the floor."
Connie folded the paper up again, was about to put it in her bag, but gave it instead to me.
We went our separate ways that night, without having said much more, and after a long night staring sleepless at the ceiling, I got up to pad around the dusty courtyard, listening to the cicadas.
"What have you lost, son?"
He was silhouetted on the threshold of his room, barefoot also, smoking a cigarette that occasionally threw an orange glow across his face.
"Nothing," I said. "I just can't sleep."
The shutters of his room were open and I could see the faint outline of a woman's body on the bed.
"You won't find the answer in another man's woman," he said.
I panicked slightly and stepped away. He laughed gently.
"It's cool, son," he said. "It's normal to want what you can't have when you're lost."
"No, I mean, no, I wasn't thinking anything," I stuttered.
"I've been watching you," he said. "And you kind of remind me of when I was a young guy."
"Really?" I said. "How come?"
He offered me a cigarette, and I took it, leaned in to take a light from the spark he offered me.
"You're so afraid to go after what you know is right for you, you spend your time chasing what will never be yours."
I sucked in the smoke so hard and deep that it singed my lungs, but I said nothing.
"I'm making a lot of assumptions here," he said. "But I reckon there's something that you need to do, but you're scared like hell of it, so you're hiding out here, in this low-rent corner of paradise."
The body on the bed stirred. "Jim, who are you talking to?"
He straightened up, not quickly, but decisively. "I got to go, son," he said. "But I reckon it's time for you to go home. That's how it looks to me."
I looked for a while at the door he had closed on me, I even blew smoke at it, but it wasn't going away. It was early hours, and I should have waited, really, but I couldn't. The open telephone kiosk was about two blocks away and I would pass it every day on my way to the beach. For some reason, I realised now, I'd been running my hand over its metal casing each time I passed it, feeling something there, some tremor from a distant place.
I stood in front of it now, looking at the receiver and the metal buttons in the dim light of a streetlamp. I picked up the receiver, fed a handful of coins into the slot, and punched in numbers, not knowing how I remembered them.
It rang for a long time, and as it rang I looked up and down the near-empty street. A dog ran yellow some way off, a black car with Mexico City plates ticked as it cooled outside a shuttered repair shop, not much else moved.
Finally the ringing stopped.
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