"Sharp, sly, slinking into their bedroom to look for anything that could give her a way into where she came from, a reason why things had turned out as they had. Because there had to be one, didn't there?"
Luanda by Denis Kehoe
A name and a photograph: that was all Ana had. She should have asked for more, made her father and Helena give her some real information, but it was never a topic they encouraged her to speak about, to explore evenings at dinner in Carcavelos. Though it was always there: beside them, beneath them, between them. Only talking about it out loud would have given the beast a name, a voice; saying the unsaid, raising the dead, Mother. And Ana could never be the one to do that: the shame and embarrassment at being a bastard, a big dark secret unspoken, sitting heavy and stupid on her plate.
So instead she grew up quiet, silent, trying not to draw attention to herself. And teenage years were too angry, too raw, to go begging for the truth, to want to put herself together again with facts long suppressed, life long gone, whistling Dixie.
But in silence, in secret, would look for clues sometimes. Sporadically, hungrily, Wednesday evenings when she was fourteen, fifteen and there was nobody in the apartment; parents gone shopping and Tiago at the swimming pool. Sharp, sly, slinking into their bedroom to look for anything that could give her a way into where she came from, a reason why things had turned out as they had. Because there had to be one, didn't there? Some sense as to why she'd wound up here in Lisbon instead of playing in the dusty streets and sleeping by her mother in Luanda.
Helena's things were what she always started with, making a show of looking through the drawers of her dressing table, in her jewellery box, hands on nylon stockings, silk scarves, ornate brooches, though what she was really interested in was what belonged to her father. That was where the goods were, or might be. Turning the pages of the pile of books by his side of the bed, slipping her fingers into the inside pockets of his blazers. Then opening, slowly, the drawer with his underwear in it, neatly folded when first put in but now just small piles of toppling over cotton; briefs mostly, moulded to carry his sex, his behind, the odd pair of boxer shorts, pastel striped.
The burning of her cheeks as she'd take them in her hands, a dryness in her throat as she imagined him lying down with this young woman, putting himself so eagerly into her, deep brown legs apart, his penis straining for her, and the start of a wetness between her own legs.
Usually she didn't discover anything concrete, any information she might use against her father and Helena. It was more that sudden, wild sense of his sin, the scent of animal off him and a vague feeling of complicity. With Helena firmly shut out. Just he and Solange in a humid, darkened hotel room as the city went on outside. And Ana, sitting like a sleepwalker in the bedroom, suddenly part of the infidelity, of the act, of something. Not just the ill-defined mistake to come out of it, blurred around the edges.
But it was one of those Wednesday evenings she actually found something, after she'd really pulled everything apart, looked frantically through all his things, Daddy Dearest. Anxious, eager, to discover something real now, instead of drifting between here and there; remembering, forgetting, fingers trailing her thigh. She'd put the shoe box with the old pay slips back under the bed, then taken the ladder, climbed up the wardrobe, and removed a pile of old magazines on top of it. Wondering, as she flicked their pages, if she was just wasting time again, thinking she would only have to clean all this mess up later, when there it was.
A photograph, nineteen seventies bright colours faded, like the ones in the leather albums in the lounge, and in it two young women, two good-looking mulatas. One was wearing denim flares and a tight yellow top, hair hidden beneath a headscarf, the other with some African material wrapped into a dress around her body. Resting their arms on one another's shoulders, breasts and behinds out, midriffs in, smiling.
Heart thudding, Ana wondered if this was really happening. Listened as she told herself that one of these women could really be her mother and considered if she should keep the photo. After all there seemed to something so familiar in the slightly awkward stance of the girl in the yellow and the way she looked at the camera, bold but self-conscious at the same time. She stared into her eyes until the image became blurred, then noticed the gangly limbs of the other girl, in the fabric, a pano it was called, and saw some potential there too.
'But probably neither of them is Solange and they have no connection to her,' Ana reasoned. 'Is there any really point in keeping it?' she began to doubt herself, suddenly frightened of what she was doing. 'Perhaps they were just friends of my parents. Or some whores José slept with who gave him a photo as a memento. Other ladies he laid with, who could say?'
She was about to leave, put the picture back where she'd found it, let life reform around its previous contours, but then the thought came to her that she might regret it, could need this one day, this possible clue to where she was from. So she took the photograph and photocopied it the following afternoon, before returning it to its grave amongst the dying pages of the old magazine.
Ana looked at the black and white photocopy in her hand now. It too had faded. Kept for years with family photos, taken out a few early Friday evenings one November when she was tired after the week and held above her head as she lay spread out on her bed. Or pulled out when she got wound up, all set to take control of this story, to find her mother and ask her the truth. Sure this time she'd do it, really do it, not like before when she let it recede to the back of her mind as something she should do. Would do if life weren't so busy teaching, putting classes together, and sitting for hours in the library, turning the pages of books about the male gaze, mind drifting to memories of Helena talking about the sweater girls of the 1950s.
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An extract from the third chapter of Walking on Dry Land by Denis Kehoe, published by Serpent's Tail
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Thursday, 24 February, 2011
In Character studies
- Luanda by Denis Kehoe
- A Visitor by Tessa Hadley
- Miral by Rula Jebreal
- The Fall of a Sparrow by Salley Vickers
- Imtiaz by Sunjeev Sahota
- Alec Demeter by Seymour Clare
- Gail by Rowan Somerville
- Dirty Norma by Samantha Hunt
- Miriam by Robin Black
- Glen Williams of Robinsville, PA, USA, Night Janitor by Matthew Quick
- Charlie Boat by Ben Ockrent
- Freemason by Andrzej Bursa
- Aaliya by Rabih Alameddine
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