The record player is a robot. You place the disc on the top of the post with the nub, and it drops onto the spinner by itself. Then the arm with the needle jerks across like Frankenstein and makes the crackling noise before the music starts. For the songs about the sun, you need to flip the disc over. The boy does this for Alma, the au pair, because it is bad luck for her to stop dancing. She twirls through the silent interval barefoot, striped by the light through the blinds, then beckons to him when the music re-starts. He joins her but cannot make his legs sway like hers and does not know when his arms should go over his head. He decides to thump around instead like a dinosaur, knees bent, jaw thrust out. Then this seems wrong, too, so he sits back on the straw chair in his swim trunks.
Mustard is not a real name for a man, but there are two of them. There is the dirty old man who is rude to the Queen. He is a mister and mean and keeps money up his nose and his song comes on immediately after the Sun King although they are nothing alike. Then there is the man from the game, with the yellow moustache and the swoopy yellow neck. He is a colonel but more like a king, because the character card shows his head separated by a thin black gash from the plastic part that props it up. When they sing about the Sun King, the boy thinks of the colonel, who is also the color of the sun — not laughing or happy, but when they say everybody is that way, they could mean everyone except him, laughing at him, with his sad flushed wounded face.
Ants hurry all day in a line carrying grains of rice under their chins. When they bump into others carrying nothing in the opposite direction, they maneuver immediately left or right or climb over them without stopping to think which is best. Maybe thinking so fast you can’t see. Where they find all the rice is a mystery; where they take it is another. Their line along the orange tiles disappears under the morning glory at one end of the terrace and at the other end into the prickly pear. The boy’s back browns in the sun as he crouches above them, placing little objects in their way that they take no interest in: pine needles, a pencil, a finger. Before shifting his feet to new positions, he pours water from his bucket on the tiles to cool them. If the gardener is nearby with the hose, he sends rain.
The gardener is called Alejandro. He found a snake in the garden and severed its head with a shovel. He lives in a house with a wavy tin roof at the first sharp bend in the road that winds down to the sea. There are waves in the road, too, called sleeping policemen, which you have to drive over fast so you don’t feel the bump. The boy’s father yelps as he accelerates downhill into the policemen, wind lifting the wispy blonde hair of his children in the back of the topless Mercedes. He buys them grilled ham and cheese sandwiches in the café under the trees and tells them about the snake.
Shadows through the trees make jigsaw shapes on the waiters’ white jackets. One of the waiters has a black moustache the same shape as his bow tie. The other has nothing. The best type of tie is the bow. Then the long. There are no other options, as far as the boy knows. Beside the café, in the square, is a newsstand with packets of crisps clipped to a wobbly rack. The boys on the packets have their transparent mouths wide open to show all the crisps inside. Their eyes are squeezed into slits from all the smiling or yelling. People take them away but they always come back. The marble tiles on the paths that criss-cross the square are orange and black and cool and covered with the caterpillar-shaped seedpods that fall from the trees. The paths meet in the middle at the fountain where children kick water at the grown-ups who stand around the edges.
The men who visit the boy’s house don’t have jackets or ties. They have shirts, mostly shiny with patterns. Some have chains in their chest hair and smell like ladies. They poke the boy in the tummy or punch at the air. The one with the grey horseshoe moustache has no shoes on his feet but can stand for sixty seconds on the tiles without burning. He is called Ed, which is not a real name either, only the beginning of one. They drink Coca Cola with rum, and the boy and his sisters drink Coca Cola, and they stroll all together down the stone steps toward the white-walled swimming pool, tinkling the ice in their glasses. Some men never make it. They stop at the geraniums and stand there talking halfway down. Others barge roaring into the pool to catch the children or to spin them in their inflatable sharks. Women visit, too, bringing new children sometimes, their own or others’, and the splashing goes mad in the sun with everything glistening yellow and blue and white and brown, and there is the tang of the eucalyptus trees and the water flying in arcs that splatter on the poolside concrete and evaporate.
Some of the splatters catch Alma on her sun lounger at the side of the pool. The children make sure of this; so do the men. Her legs are too long to lie flat on the lounger. She bends them, crossing one over the other, and giggles from under her sunhat. She can’t swim, and only rarely enters the chest-high water when the men are around because they try to teach her to swim or save her from drowning by squeezing and hoisting her into the air. That’s when her sunglasses get splashed and she has to get out. But when they are gone, she comes into the pool and lies flat on her inflated Lilo, allowing the children to glide her around. Her belly gleams in the sun, little puddles of pool water warming in the button. The boy lays his cheek against the soft bronze skin, feels the rise and fall, examines the tiny blonde hairs. He places his lips on the button and blows.
Ed lives in a castle. The boy has not seen it. It has turrets on top and a four-poster bed and a pool with girls all around it. When the grown-ups talk about the castle, they cluck their tongues or wink and grin. They say girls but don’t mean it. Ed’s girls are not children, but they are not like most grown-ups either. They are like Alma, pretty and springy. They come down from the castle sometimes to take her back with them. Then if the boy’s father is away, leaving only his mother, she has to become Alma. She has to make the supper and do the dishes and run the bath for the children and do literally everything, which makes her stiff and rough and frantic. The boy finds her sobbing at the sink in the kitchen or trembling in the hall or in the bathroom doorway and he takes over from there, cleaning up and then reading the chunky pop-up books to his sisters in bed.
His father is away more than usual. But summer has so many days, and he only flies home for a few at a time. It takes him three hours to get there. When they drive all together, it takes three days one way and three days back on the same straight road up and down between England and Spain. And the boat for the water.
When his father returns, he buys putty to put in the holes that the ants come through. Masilla, you call it, but not like Godzilla. In Spain you turn L into Y, and I into E. The long E. The children hunt for the holes with their father, hands and knees along the base of the bubbly white hallway wall with pots of putty. Slopping it in with a spatula. Ants come by to find their holes and have to turn around, hunting for more, like the humans.
He goes into the bedroom alone and puts the record on the robot. The first four words of the opening song are just “shoop,” or “shoo,” with the rising bass followed by the fast-falling drums, again and again the same sound, the same rhythm. He doesn’t want it to stop. He props the empty record jacket on a chair. Four sad men walk the zebra crossing.
There are two other record jackets with different pictures. On the first there’s a white-hatted woman whose name is Elvira, who looks like Alma and sits in the grass in a long white dress. Above her head it says “Mozart.” Someone is looking at her. You see only his shoulder, a big blue bump in the foreground; you look over that shoulder at her. On the second, there’s a naked red-haired man called Aladdin with the orange lightning stripe across his face, who despite everything peacefully closes his eyes. His last name is Sane. Her last name is Madigan.
His mother unfurls a turquoise mat on the rubbery grass by the pool and stretches out like a lizard, chin high as a Queen’s, sucking air through her nostrils. She wears her bikini like a boy, bottoms only, and notices no one until she has finished the yoga. On the cover of the book beside her bed there is an Indian man balanced on his hands with his legs crossed in mid-air behind him, his body horizontal like the praying mantis with the huge green grapelike eyes in the Guinness Book of Records. His name is Iyengar. He has eyebrows as big as the colonel’s moustache and a blood-red slit down the middle of his forehead. You could pull the skin apart there and see through to the brain, but he is smiling.
She has a friend called Esther who smells like a tree and wears many golden bracelets that jangle up and down on her arms as she talks about how old they both are. The bracelets tinkle on her bottle as it tilts.
Esther brings her daughter to play with the boy. Anneke. She is the same age as him but dressed like a lady: yellow hair in a bun, mauve crayon on her eyelids, and a t-shirt with bits of silver string where the sleeves should be. On the covered terrace by the bedroom, they play the game with fat naked patient, using tweezers to insert the body parts into him — funny bone, Adam’s apple, spareribs, broken heart — jumping when his red nose buzzes. When they go back to the grown-ups, there is a volcanic mound above the rim of Esther’s ashtray, and the women are laughing more than before. The children tell them about the game. His mother says “oh ho ho,” and both women erupt. They don’t understand or perhaps have not heard. The boy begins to describe it again in more detail, to help them, but this only makes them laugh harder and Esther spits Campari onto her skirt.
His mother drives everyone up to the castle. She wears an enormous purple hat shaped like a UFO and a long thin purple kimono. Alma is up there already, she says. She and Esther lift their faces to the sun in the front seat. The boy sits in the back with his sisters and Anneke. There is the sound of the crickets. The sage-spiced wind. The muscle-shaped clouds that bump into each other and then stretch out flat like crocodiles, cowboy hats, frisbees. The road curls back on itself again and again and the children peel the backs of their legs off the hot leather seats to make the sucking sounds.
At the high iron gate, Ed strides out barefoot over the gravel, arms spread. His belly is a balloon, glowing purplish-brown where the thin white short-sleeved shirt gapes open. Plants spill down the walls on either side of the path to the castle. Morning glory. Hearts and trumpets. But the castle is not as it should be. It is brand new, shiny, with cartoon turrets, like the inflatable one at the fair in London. He leads them through an archway into the courtyard where sun loungers are fanned out around the swimming pool. The young Alma-like ladies lie on four of them, unmoving, skin oiled, eyes closed. The others are empty. Another lady steps out from an arch on the far side of the pool and silently immerses herself with barely a ripple, as if the water is air. The tiles bordering the pool are as white as Ed’s trousers, sun bouncing off everything. Ed claps twice, flamenco-style, his silver rings flashing, and sends the children and their mothers inside to find Alma, who will show them around. One of the ladies moans out to him: “Music . . ..” He drifts away.
The castle’s interior is cool and clean. White sofas and armchairs. Black floors. Alma takes them upstairs to a turret. They look out over the hillside and down at the pool. A pair of binoculars sits on the wall. Alma trains them on one of the ladies, and whistles. The lady shrieks and flaps her hand, then laughs. Downstairs off the hall there are many little doors and then a big one, dark wood with criss-cross iron beams. Ed’s bedroom. Alma turns shy, but the boy’s mother and Esther convince her to open it. The women giggle, then gasp. The boy walks in ahead of them. The four-poster bed squats at the center of the room, open space all around it. Mosquito netting is draped to the floor, and the bedsheets are a shimmery slippery black. The boy steps forward, puts a palm on the sheets, and feels them sliding smoothly back and forth under his skin, reflected light gliding secretly up and down among the folds.
More people appear, men and women in trunks and bikinis. Music wafts from the arches, velvety voices, shakers, a saxophone. The grown-ups grow louder as the sun softens and the colored drinks fizz in their glasses. When the lounging ladies finally come alive, they get all the attention. His mother and Esther stand a long while by themselves in the shallow end of the pool, watching the others but pretending not to. Then his mother gets out and slides into her robe, preparing to go, locating the invisible arm- and head-holes in the mass of material. She sets the hat on her head. But the children, moved by the new madder mood, are making running jumps into the pool, one after the other, then two at a time. The boy wrestles for a while under water with Anneke, feeling their cooled limbs locking cleanly together. The boy’s sisters, jumping too soon, land on top of them. Anneke breaks free but the boy goes under and is kicked by his sisters’ flustered feet when he tries to come up. He tries again, but bumps into the base of a body-filled Lilo and has to descend for a second time, seeking an opening.
Even from under the water, he can hear his mother’s scream. She jumps and smacks down flat on the water and the robe twists wetly around her, tangling her arms. She struggles and sinks. The UFO floats on the surface. The boy barges at the billowing purple sea creature and forces it up, but it wraps around him too, dragging him under. He frees himself, surfaces, dives, but again is dragged under, his mother’s panicky octopus arms not knowing any longer who they are saving, her boy or herself. He heaves against her again and at last they are up. She pants at the edge of the pool, and he bangs his fist on her back to help her to breathe. The others have gone silent, watchful. Ed, drink in hand, makes the first of the noises: “Ha–,” quickly swallowed. But that is the signal. The others start too and can’t stop.
His mother is sad that night and for all the following day. The boy sweeps the floors to make her happy again. It does not make her happy. Esther and Anneke leave, and then two of the tummy-pokers arrive. They succeed where he failed. They coax his mother halfway down the steps with drinks and stand there talking, first loudly, then less so.
Their father plays Cluedo with them before bed. They move their pieces up and down the yellow tiles in the halls to the rooms with the open doors and the secret passages, placing the weapons, summoning people. It is not the colonel. It is not anyone. His sister has forgotten to put a person in the confidential envelope, and there is no time left to start again. After reading the girls to sleep, his father lets the boy stay up to watch the stars on the rooftop terrace. They share the telescope. They connect the dots. The Plough. The Seven Sisters. Cassiopeia. Those three are ranked best to worst in that order, ever since the boy came down from the roof and said Cornucopia to his mother, meaning Cassiopeia, and she couldn’t stop laughing, then couldn’t stop telling her friends why she laughed, so that they could laugh too. The rooftop tiles are still warm underfoot. Everything quiet, except for the crickets which become the invisible kings of the darkened hillside, so many they maybe outnumber the stars. His father thinks not. Then from below, different noises. Breaking glass. Giggling. Shushing. The boy goes down to investigate. His father is not interested; he breathes on his glasses to make the little disappearing fog patches, wipes them, and bends again to the telescope. The grown-ups below have moved all the way down the steps to the pool. Glass shards are spread like stars on the concrete, and in the pool his mother floats naked, silent, suspended by the palms of the two men who are now also naked. One man lifts a hand from the water and places it on her, sweeping his fingers gently from the tops of her legs to her upturned neck and then back again, circling round and round.
Paul has no shoes. Also no beard. He is holding a cigarette. George walks behind him. There is Here Comes the Sun and then Here Comes The Sun King. The first one is pretty, but the second one makes you all floaty inside and everything falls away. It starts with the sound of the crickets. Then “Aaaah.” You close your eyes like Aladdin and drift along and everybody is laughing and happy, and then the gentle words turn Spanish or something else and you don’t understand and don’t care.
People on the pavement watch the walkers: four figures on the sunny side, one in the shadows by the little black van with the light on top. The road disappears into the trees.
Alma explains that Paul is best, then George, then Ringo. John, who is first in line, is last. Anyway, they broke up.
His father says you can put the stars together in any pattern you choose. You could attach Andromeda’s armpit to Pegasus’s neck. You could draw two lines from the knees of Orion to Gemini’s feet and call it something no one has thought of before. And when you made the new shapes, the old ones (the girl, the horse, the man, the twins) would disappear — except you’d remember and could make them again if you wanted, or switch back and forth from new to old fast enough that they’d both seem to be there at once.
The stars, he says, are all basically suns, and every one of those suns is like the middle of a wheel with invisible planets spinning around them. He says the Sun King is called Louis. Louis has a little moustache and long puffy rock and roll hair and is ranked fourteenth.
If you get up early and drive down the hill through the town and far out along the road with the sea on your left, then turn right at the brandy billboard that is shaped like a bull, you come to the road to the rock pool. The road is rough and dry. Part way along it, a horse stands roped to a tree with clusters of flies in his eyes and in the sores on his legs. The boy’s father stops to walk over and swish the flies away, dust rising around his sandals. But as soon as he lifts his hand from the horse, they swarm back. Some can’t even wait that long; they jam their bodies into the gaps between his fingers as he swipes. The boy and his mother and sisters watch from the car. First there is just the sleepy drone of the insects in the baking stillness, but then suddenly someone singing.
A man with a sore throat thinks he has something to say to Maggie. His voice gushes from the windows of Ed’s Jaguar, which has pulled up behind them. Ed honks. His rings on the steering wheel catch the sun. When he smiles, his moustache lifts like the hem of a dress. Alma is with him, and another lady from the castle. So they carry on together down the deep-rutted road, these two slow low-slung sports cars, crawling. The boy’s mother and father in the front seat of the Mercedes don’t talk. They’ve said so many words to each other already, almost all of them probably. You could put them together in many different ways, but at some point they would stop making sense.
The ants at the rock pool copy the ones on the terrace. They move in lines, but messy ones, four or five of them, merging sometimes, sometimes not. The rice carriers crawl into a hole at the base of a boulder, and then out of the hole come others, or the same ones again, without rice. Alma’s shadow swoops onto them, and her fingers lightly stroke the boy’s hair from behind. She stops for a minute to watch the progression. The rice is not rice, it is eggs, she says.
Towels are laid out on a small patch of sand, and the children hoot at the high rock walls for the echo. There is a narrow slope squeezed between two of the boulders where the river trickles in from above; you slide down it, woosh, straight into the water. There is also a flat spot on top of the highest rock wall, which you can jump from and sometimes surprise the grown-ups.
Alma rubs baby oil onto her body. Ed helps with the places she can’t reach, and with some of the others. When the boy’s mother moves her towel closer, he helps her as well, and the two women lie in their sunglasses chatting, about Alma’s boyfriend in Denmark and Alejandro’s wife Francisca who so often sits at the bend in the road with her knitting to watch the cars go by. Alma raises her foot to show Ed she needs oil on that part too, though his touch makes her wriggle. When he crouches beside her, he exposes the soles of his own feet, ash-colored, cracked.
Finished with her feet, Ed strokes his moustache, watching the boy’s sisters spinning with Alma’s friend in the rock pool. He pads over to the edge of the pool, climbs a boulder and slips his golden watch off, setting it down before leaping in with a colossal cannonball splash, knees tucked to his chest. A few drops land by the watch and almost instantly disappear in the sun. The boy walks down to the boulder, climbs it, and picks up the watch, stretching the elasticized strap and then letting it snap back, the gleaming links coming apart, then together. Shoop.
He sets the watch down and stands at the boulder’s edge where Ed stood, preparing to jump, but no one is paying attention. Ed is repeatedly flipping himself under and surfacing, grunting, a walrus, water streaming from his moustache, hair slicked back. Alma’s friend squeals when he goes under, and after many attempts he comes up with his head between her legs, thighs clamped to his neck, his hands cuffing her ankles against his chest so she can’t struggle free. The boy’s mother sees this and springs up from her towel, howls “yip, yip,” and charges bare-chested over the sand to join them.
The watch is so close to the boy’s big toe. He nudges it inch by inch, without trying almost, to the boulder’s edge. Gives it one final casual flick. It slips lizard-quick down the side, hits the water, and is gone. There are no witnesses. Maybe his father, he thinks — who is up on the sand beside Alma now, his legs curled like a mermaid’s tail — but he can’t be sure. He is facing the boy as if looking straight at him, but the glasses are black and there is no reaction, only the peaceful slanting smile.
The boy plunges into the pool, but he is too small to make much of a splash and again no one notices. He paddles toward the people. Ed and his mother have floated to the shade by the rocks at the back of the pool and are helping each other secretly with something. His sisters and Alma’s friend are pushing water around at the center where it darkens. A wave hits his mouth. Coughing, he splashes back to the sand at the edge of the pool and from down on all fours sees his father still up there attending to Alma, dribbling cooling water from a plastic cup onto the smooth tanned chest and waist and white bared neck that she is arching toward him, braced on her elbows. When the water spills in little rivulets toward the edges of her torso, his father darts down quick to slurp it up. This makes her smile, sympathetic, obliging. His beard tickles. But when he lifts the elastic of her bikini bottoms as if to slurp down there she gets suddenly less smiley and he stops.
The boy gets to his feet in the wet sand and looks up at the highest rock wall that looms over the pool like a lion. You can scurry around behind it and climb its bumpy mane to the top in no time. You don’t think, you just jump, it works better that way. Your chest lurches and your neck fills with blood as your back foot leaves the lip of the rock and you drop. The faces below in the pool and on the sand are all turned to you now, their new focal point, falling.
The pool’s invisible floor rushes up at the boy and attacks him. There is shouting then, and running, and casting around for a sand-free towel to stop the leg from leaking. It has been sliced all the way from the knee to the ankle.
He lies with his head on Alma’s lap in the back seat, his feet on his father’s knees, feeling the road clawing at the underside of the Mercedes as his mother drives fast toward town. He looks at his knees, at the feet down below them, the blood-soaked towel in between. Ed follows behind, but there’s no music this time. Just the hard bright sky and, in some places, clouds, but not the kind you can call anything. Shapeless ones, wispy, slipping around or passing through one another, fusing then dispersing like the breath on his father’s glasses, the faint damp patches shrinking to nothing.
In town, his mother drives straight past the café, the newsstand, the crisp rack. They arrive at the hospital and are told to sit in the hard plastic chairs.
Toward dark, wound stitched, the boy is driven back up the hill. They go slug-slow over the sleeping policemen, inching along, then past Francesca in her chair at the final bend, not knitting this time, just fingering the folds on her neck. His mother parks, and he is carried to a lounger on the ledge above the terrace. Alejandro is watering the garden. If you do this in daytime the sun sucks it up so you might as well not have done anything. He sprays the base of the plants with the machete-shaped rubbery leaves. He hoses the terrace, his cracked thumb fitting all the way over the spout to make a flat silver fan of the water. He has shown the boy how to do this, but the boy’s thumb is too narrow; he can use three of his fingers all bundled together but that just makes a mess. The fan sweeps steadily over the tiles, unforgivingly, pushing the leaves and needles aside. The ants have already fled, maybe knowing they’d be sent with the rest of it hurtling into the grass.
Finally, Alejandro takes a rake and trudges out of sight down the steps to the pool. Then the scraping starts, the long tines drawn like a dog’s claws insistently over the path and the dry grass again and again. Tcht. Tcht. The boy focuses all his attention on that rhythm, and on the fresh damp scent coming up off the soil and the tiles. Then the other details unconnected to these go blurry and muffled: the murmurs from the kitchen, the people who come out and shift busily around him, bringing things, placing them on or beside him, taking things away.
Image by Mathias Reding on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
