Born in London, Allegra is a recent graduate from King’s College London where she studied English Literature. She writes both poetry and prose, and has had her writing published in the Keats-Shelley review, and by the Young Poets’ Network, amongst others.
Patrick
He had not recognised her in the green aquarium uniform. Lula must be nearly thirty now, but he remembers her as a child, all wrists and ankles and loose tan hair. Her family and his used to rent a house together every year, an old stone house, once belonging to the coastguard. It had five bedrooms and a long dark kitchen with waxy wood panelling. There was a lawn that sloped down to the rocks and then the sea, with tall native flowers growing on either side. Lula was shy. He remembers telling the children he would give a pound coin to any one of them who could bring him a limpet from the rocks; the children, bending carefully over the clusters of tweed patterned cones, trying to surprise the limpets. Sometimes, one would shift a centimetre and they would shout up the beach, ‘Almost!’ Behind them, the water dim between the rocks, and the sky, pale and open. He remembers that Lula approached him quietly, extending her hand. She had said in a soft voice, ‘Got one.’ When he took it from her, he saw that inside its shell the creature was dead. It sat rotting in its shell, a slack brown hoof. He gave her the pound.
He had no daughters. When he imagined having one, it was using images of Lula. Her wide proud stare as a child, when Linus caught a lobster with a hook and pulled it out from under a rock, holding it up above the water, with its legs folding and unfolding in the air. Yes, he had thought, daughters adore their fathers.
And later, older then, when they had let her and the boys drink wine with them at dinner time. With the heat draped over the patio, and the sound of the sea, shifting like tin up the beach. They must have been in their early teens at this point. The boys became tall and thin, moving awkwardly with their new bodies. Lula was tall too, with a narrow vulnerable mouth, and large accusatory eyes. Her elder sister, Zoe, was practically an adult, and spoke with the grown-ups about the universities she was applying to, the course lists and student cultures of each institution. She had wanted to study linguistics, he remembered. Lula would mumble, bite her nails, narrow her eyes at you, dip her head to hide behind that sheet of blonde hair, if you asked her a question. Zoe was easier to talk to.
But that day, when the kids were drinking wine, he found himself alone with Lula. He had stepped out on the lawn, the other side of the house, to let the pale flat sea light wash over him, to stare out and perhaps imagine himself to be the coastguard, looking after this calm, pewter, desert, and all who might traverse it. He could hear his friends talking, and Linus’ low shaggy laugh. Lula had asked him what he was looking at and he had replied ‘the sea.’ She had stayed there next to him, and he felt an odd sense of pride towards her. She had said ‘It’s beautiful.’ and turning to her he noticed a slight flush in her face, and a new heat in her eyes. The wine, he had thought. He had said ‘I think so.’ She had said, ‘I hate Zoe.’
He was surprised. ‘Why is that?’ He asked.
‘Because she hates me.’ He noticed that she was still wearing her swimming costume under her sundress; wet patches were slowly blooming through the cotton.
‘I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.’
‘She does, she hates me.’ The look she gave him then surprised him with its violence, ‘Because I’m pretty and she’s not.’ Patrick was stunned. ‘It’s true.’ She continued.
‘I don’t think that’s true.’ Patrick said.
‘You can say it.’
‘No.’
‘You can say it if you like, I won’t be offended.’ she blinked at him and a section of smooth hair slid down across her face. She had pushed it back. When he had turned and left her there, she had looked as if she was about to cry.
That night they had eaten grilled chicken, and cherry tomatoes that had been roasted in large rectangular pyrex dishes. They had had a salad of huge bright leaves and olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The candlelight, and the deep blue evening had made the food look electrically bright, alien. Lula did not speak at dinner, he remembered.
This was what he remembered of her after all those years. Linus and Cherry had stopped holidaying with Patrick and his wife after the kids had gone to university; they sometimes had dinner, but they were all freer now. Other families were paying for ten day shared holidays in the stone cottage. The seabirds that hung in the air above the rocks were probably separated by generations from the ones Patrick had watched from the terrace.
Despite the change in her looks, once she starts speaking, he can see similarities to the brittle, colt-like girl who had stretched out silently on the rocks, a towel covering her from her waist to her thighs, over her swimming costume – self-conscious and arrogant with the boys, as though she had been afraid of them. There was still a hardness in her pale eyes. It seemed as if, he had always thought, you were misunderstanding something she had explained patiently many times. She has dyed her eyebrows, he notices, and this, for some reason, accentuates slightly the hardness of the stare. But this impression comes from the fact she is illuminated by the bluish glow of the fish tank. He thinks that she looks older than she is. She had recognised him and said, ‘Patrick.’ It had taken him a few moments. She had said ‘What are you doing here?’
He explains why he had stepped into the aquarium; he was waiting for the storm to stop, he tells her. She replies, dreamily, ‘Is there a storm?’ and he realises that, in the hours she spends in the blue dark, she probably has had no idea of the weather outside. Really, the storm wasn’t the only reason he had stepped off the esplanade. Now he confides this to her, ‘I wanted to see the fish.’
She smiles at this. The light falls cobalt on the side of her face, her ear, her temple. She walks with him now. She asks him,
‘Do you still work?’
‘I retired.’
‘That must be nice.’
‘Sure, I have time to do the things I wanted to do when I was younger.’
‘What were those?’
‘Galleries, exhibitions, we were thinking about going to Sienna in May.’
‘That sounds nice.’
‘It must all seem very boring to you.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘What are you doing at the moment?’
‘Well, I’m working here.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Sure.’
‘It seems like a nice place to work.’ The walls around the tanks are painted black; in the strange blue light it is hard for him to make out the signs next to each window. In the one they look in now, the fish are slim silver ovals, which speed effortlessly across in front of them, suddenly pitching and turning as a group. They make him dizzy.
‘How is Tamsin?’ She asks.
‘Oh, she’s okay, doing fine.’
‘Good.’ He wishes for a moment, that she would leave him alone. They pass a silty tank choked with kelp. He moves closer, squinting. She tells him, ‘There aren’t any fish in that one.’ A young couple passes behind them, and he hears the man speaking earnestly in German.
‘What about you?’ He asks, ‘have you got a boyfriend at the moment.’ When she doesn’t reply he adds, ‘or girlfriend.’
‘No.’ she says, ‘there isn’t anyone.’
‘You were always one for the boys I thought. I mean the way my sons used to show off to you. I was almost embarrassed for them. I used to hope you might marry one of them one day. Secretly.’ He nudges her with his elbow. She says nothing. ‘Oh well, plenty of fish I suppose.’ He gestures to the room with his hand.
She gives a shriek of laughter and he jumps slightly. The German couple glance at them. She keeps laughing for a little too long. He wonders about the last time she heard a joke. She has a horrible way of laughing, baring her bottom teeth as well as her top in a kind of grimace.
‘Yes, plenty of fish.’ She agrees, and then softly, as if to herself, ‘plenty of fish.’
The tank-lined corridor they have been following opens up into a large circular chamber, with high black ceilings. In its centre is a glass cylinder, filled with the russet, alien blooms of huge jellyfish. Over this the aquarium plays a kind of ambient music; there are benches around the cylinder. He notices that the German couple have disappeared.
They sit on one of the benches and he says, ‘Don’t feel you have to look after me. I don’t want to distract you from your work.’ She puts her hands behind her to take her weight and leans back, looking up at the tank.
‘There isn’t much work.’
‘Are you lonely?’ He asks her.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’ The water is moving in the tank, rinsing the ceiling in white strokes of moving light.
‘Do you see your parents often?’
‘Not really.’
‘I should get in touch with your dad.’
‘Why?’
‘I haven’t seen him in a while, it’s so hard to keep up with everyone. Where are they living now?’
‘I don’t know why you would be friends with him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s a bad person.’
‘I don’t think that’s true.’
‘Well, he’s a cruel person.’ Patrick is too surprised to reply. He watches the gentle contractions of the jellyfish. Pulsing bowls of gelatin, they catch the light, seem brighter than the water around them, followed by a ruff of tendrils, and longer, trailing black wires.
‘You’re not listening to me.’ Lula says. He turns to her.
‘I am. I’m sorry.’ He looks at her new, dramatic eyebrows, and beneath them, the white rim of her eye. ‘Hey, what about this then.’ He reaches into the deep inner pocket of his overcoat and retrieves a small bottle of white rum. He had intended to drink a little on his own, perhaps in front of the angelfish, but now it seems it might be a helpful prop. She laughs at the sight of it,
‘
You are full of surprises.’
‘It’s retirement, I think. Changes a man.’ He hands her the bottle and lets her open it. He can smell it as soon as she takes the cap off. She shakes her head in disbelief,
‘Rum?’ She laughs again.
When she drinks it, she scrunches up her eyes and nose. ‘Fuck. Disgusting.’ She passes it back to him.
‘You shouldn’t lose touch with your parents.’ He tells her.
‘You don’t even know him.’
He supposes most people feel similarly about their fathers. But in his head, he remembers, watching Linus emerge from the cold water, holding up the big, kicking, lobster. He remembers his friend holding it up to his daughter, and the look she gave her father: she had adored him. Things change.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. He puts a hand on her knee and squeezes it through the polyester trousers. He remembers as a child, feeling his kneecaps, trying to work out how they were connected to the rest of his leg, spending hours terrified that they would slide down to his ankles if he wasn’t careful. He tells her about this. They pass the little bottle back and forth between them. His eyes feel hot. The jellyfish gently propel themselves across what seems like acres of blue.
Lula shivers and breathes. He remembers once shouting at her and his sons for sitting on the sofa of the rental in their swimming costumes. How she had turned white, his sons had just laughed at him. He feels deeply sad for this girl, who had once smiled so shyly at Linus’s jokes, with a pink nose and pink ears from the sun. Her life is so sad now, he thinks, and she had so much. The jellyfish pulse, red, white, gold. He remembers her sun-cream creating slicks of oil around her in the cool semi-circular pool.
He turns to look at her; in the flat blue water-light her sharp features have peculiar clarity. Her eyes flick back and forth across the tank. She doesn’t look at him, but says in a slow, calm voice,
‘I think, I think all the time that I have been wrong about so many things.’ She is turning something over in her mind, he can see that, ‘but that also, I’m so sure of the things I have been right about. As a child, there were all these things I could just, intuit.’ She turns her palms upwards. ‘And you don’t realise then how right you are. How good your instinct is.’ Patrick watches her exhale. ‘Do you want to know something I could sense as a child that turned out to be true?’ She asks him.
‘Sure.’ She leans a little closer, and says in a whisper, ‘That you are a fucking creep.’
‘I’m sorry-’
‘I always knew it. The way you looked at us.’
‘Excuse me I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Putting your hand on my thigh? Asking me if I’m lonely. Come on.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Of course, I didn’t.’
He moves away from her on the bench. ‘I was only trying to be nice.’ He feels very tired.
‘Were you?’ Her face is contorted with some kind of weird humour. He regrets having given her the rum.
‘I felt sorry for you. I wasn’t trying anything.’
‘Do you want to hear something funny?’
‘I don’t think-’
‘Zoe and I used to call you Pervy Patrick.’ She laughs a high, alarming laugh. ‘We were right!’ The black paint and the blue light have begun to feel oppressive. When he says nothing, there is just the sound of the spa music. He stands. Then, rather than leaving, he turns to face her. He says,
‘I was trying to be nice to you – no don’t interrupt me – I’ve listened to you, now you listen to me. Okay? I was trying to be nice to you because I felt sorry for you. Because this life, you, is pathetic and lonely, and this job,’ he indicates the polo, ‘is clearly meant to go to a teenager. I was being nice to you despite the fact you hate your parents for your own failures. And despite the fact that,’ he was spitting as he spoke, ‘I am not attracted to you. You, are not attractive.’
She is frozen in the grin she had on before he started speaking.
‘And do you know what, nobody else is going to feel sorry for you. Look what you have done with your life, it’s nothing. You are boring and you are arrogant.’ He stands there shaking. He is breathing hard. She waits a moment before she speaks and then she says,
‘I was right about you.’.
The sky is a bright almost toxic blue when he steps out of the aquarium. The esplanade is still wet. It smells of rain. Patrick walks away from the entrance and stands instead in front of the chattering arcade. He reaches into his pocket and takes out the rum bottle; he tilts it up to his mouth and lets the last hot drop roll into his throat. Up in the sky, he notices, is the pale slip of a daytime moon.