We had two rooms, Sam and I. Sometimes heated up by a fire, mostly chilly. The damp made my fingers curl in to a comic cramp. Sam laughed when he saw me unfold my hands in the morning. His laughing cheered me up. As long as he was in the rooms, and I tried to make his life enjoyable , those arthritic hands were bearable. The conductors did not even smile when I said I needed more time to warm up. My sound was croaky at the beginning of rehearsals. I didn’t have enough strength left in me to join an orchestra. Whenever I tried I heard a surprised manager on the phone who wondered why I, a soloist, would want to join an orchestra. In any event I couldn’t leave the country because I had to look after Sam. Sam needed his food and books and money to spend on ridiculous ‘cool’ things with his teenage friends. My friends found it harder to reach me. I had no phone or computer.
But I had my two cats to talk to and stroke their warm bellies if they needed affection. I needed none. No men’s hands or lips. The threat was too great. Behind every gentle gesture I saw the gaping void, the burning venom of love.
I met women who avoided the subject of men. I, too, felt that there was nothing I wanted to share with the male species. Not even an orgasm.
We had our knock on the door every evening, Sam and I. It was his father, standing on the steps in front of the house, shivering slightly. Sam would come out with an umbrella and some coins and spend some time going over his schoolwork sitting on the stairs. My landlady had strong objections to my husband coming into the house. At first she had quite liked his entertaining stories and she had let him in, during my absences, out of the rain or the cold, sure the poor fellow couldn’t be that bad. But then she claimed that things went missing in her quarters and she wouldn’t have him around any more. I couldn’t believe it was him. It was more the stories that circulated about him and must have reached her eager ears. Stealing from other people’s houses would have been too much of an effort for my husband. He couldn’t have dealt with the fear. Most of the time we never knew where he lived or slept. He seemed to be clean enough when occasionally we had sex. He was no longer a man but a zombie, who flirted with religions and sometimes remembered the functions of his body. Sam cheerfully denied there was anything wrong with him. I was the mad one who had walked out on his adored father. He didn’t like me for it. But he did like my kisses and my presents and the fact that I was a real parent, one that you could annoy and curse and kick.
I had no access to my belongings so our rooms had bare walls and scanty furniture, except for two paintings – one belonging to my husband that he had entitled ‘The Wrong’, and, ironically, one by my father that he had named ‘The Right’. I was cradled between the two each night, dreaming of some kind of equilibrium. Even in my dreams there were problems to be solved and obstacles to be considered, but the moment I awoke and stumbled to the stove to cook Sam’s breakfast my priorities changed. Sam left very early with his bag on his back and faint circles under his eyes. They would disappear during the day, but then the finest of wrinkles on his brow would have replaced them by the evening. I would stare at my husband’s painting and feel bloodless, limp, unable to do anything to make it change. All I could do was to struggle on my violin and try to make small drawings for children’s books that made me a little money.
My bed was a mattress on the floor. I could touch the hard planks if I reached out. They felt like some kind of truth, as if there was really nothing more to truth than air and hard surface and my anxious breathing in between. I read Nietzsche and put the book in a corner on the floor with the others. We had no shelves for them.
Hard to explain to my friends or my brother abroad that I sometimes ran out of money that enabled me to keep my arse clean. The big needs were not provided for at all. Dentist and doctors had to be avoided at all costs. In the evening we would study Sam’s homework and lie in bed watching the tiny screen of our TV.
Sometimes I was my old self and would go into a clothes shop dressed in the remains of my designer clothes. I could still act out the woman who knew all about fashion and could afford it. I was just a stingy eccentric who wore her expensive clothes into shreds before acquiring new ones. Or the sentimental one who was so attached to her garments that she found it impossible to be separated from them and left them to rot. I fed the dream for a few hours and felt stupidly elevated and good.
In my bed I folded my arms under my head and lay on my back focusing on the bare spot in between the two paintings. It grew dark and in that dark it lit up: the writing on the wall said Santorini.
Black beaches and straight sea. The suspicion of sharks circling the depths of the swimming waters. A Greek island on which they had sharpened their pencils every day of their holiday. Finding subjects to draw was what they discussed in the morning, what silenced them during the afternoon when they rode donkeys to go down and dip their brushes in the sea and swim to wash the efforts of colouring away. The sun would go down on them while they rested on a pier built in a small sandy bay. Once they saw a boat with faded colours. It came drifting in from its own saga, carrying a horse, a goat, a cow, a sheep and a couple of toothless old gods who held up a lobster to them.
They fixed a fire of twigs and roasted the crayfish for themselves. They laughed so much when they watched them eat showing their naked gums to the full. Happy, happy they clapped their hands while they walked away and left them with the helpless claws.
They slept in the sand, snakes nearby, heard but never seen in the low bushes. Morning came to reveal a calm, blue basin of salty sea. Never been crossed by the likes of a boat. Or so it seemed. They had to reproduce it, paint what they had seen. They did and she forgot about her music for weeks. His body, hers, was all there was to that warm vacation. Until they made it to a terrace of a café built high above the sea, where they sat alone in the evening. To listen to Brahms suddenly sounding through bad speakers. On Santorini, island of burnt-out volcanoes, the volcano within her had burst. He held her hand because she cried as she watched the fine line of notes disappear over the water, but he had no idea why.