Solana died six months later, and then she was free. She left early one morning, before it was light. Federico the iguana was sitting on the fountain with his face pointing at the moon. No one else was about. The old patio, there it was as it had always been. They were all sleeping. She’d said no real goodbyes, just slipped away. She didn’t think anyone else would miss her very much. Maybe a little. After all, what was she? A servant, moving on. She took a small grip, her harmonica, her guitar, a half round of white cheese, Solana’s old rosary beads and her doll Yatzi.
You and me, Yatzi. You and me.
She heard the lonesome baby cry again, out there somewhere toward the Mississippi. Julia opened her eyes. Myrtle and Delia must have woken her, coming in with whispers and a smothered giggle. They bumped about in the dark, trying not to disturb her. How strange. Far away under this sky it’s all still there. The patio, the stone bench, the fig tree, the shadow of the fountain. She saw it in moonlight, full of broken paper flowers, as it was that night.
Hot night, summer 1983. These were not nights for sleep, too febrile, too sweaty. Rose, walking home from some eternal flop-out, some smoky mustering in Camberwell, twoish, threeish, singing sotto voce the Heart Sutra to lighten the road (still the length of Coldharbour Lane to go) stopped still when the sky growled. A cosmic dog, big one with teeth. She was drunk enough to look up and laugh out loud. What the hell, there was no one around. A change of pressure, a flicker of lightning, then the first high murmur of rain.
Rose had sad brown eyes with tired hollows beneath, a wide big-lipped mouth and hair that stood out all around her head, thick, black and wiry. A scar sliced through her right eyebrow, giving that eye a slight droop at the outer corner. The years had rolled her into her thirties, thin and rakish, somewhat tousled and rough around the edges, and it was OK. The fear was at bay. As the rain set in, she turned her face up. It was good to be drunk. Simply wonderful sometimes to fray the edges, crank up the contrast. All she had on was a loose silky top and some old jeans, and she was getting soaked, but it was nice. She walked on, savouring the dark empty street and the way the soft hissing of late night traffic from Denmark Hill, and the lights shining on the wet pavement, made everything romantic.
Ahead of her, half way down Love Walk, was a skip piled high with rubbish. She never could resist a skip, particularly one full of the dregs and leavings of a house clearance. Whenever she came upon one, and London was awash with them, she stopped and had a good rummage and rescued anything that moved her. Many things did. When she was small, she’d bestowed consciousness on the things around her. Not just dolls and soft toys, but books, clothes, crockery, chairs, teapots and hairbrushes, rugs and pencils, even the corners of rooms and the turns of staircases, the gentle purring sound her bedroom window made when a car’s engine idled in the street outside, or the feathery stroking sensation in her chest when she was nervous with someone. All these things she’d named and given personalities.
She didn’t do it now, of course. But still—
Oh! Poor piece of paper, she’d think, passing a torn scrap in the street. Poor grape, last on the stalk, missing its friends and wondering why no one wants it.
This skip was nothing special, a pile of rags and rubble. She walked round it. A drop of rain hung on one eyelash, quivering in the edge of sight. Askew on the heap was a scattering of debris, shadowy nothings, in their very nothingness as heart-wrenching as anything, she thought, but you couldn’t stop for everything. The doll’s remains lay half in, half out of a doorless microwave oven near the top of the mound. She had to clamber aboard and scramble a bit to reach him. He was naked and limbless, with brown leathery skin, and a big head so damaged that his face resembled an untreated burns victim, the mouth a raised gash, the nose and ears pock-marked craters. One eye, made of glass, was sunk deep in his skull. The other was a black hollow.
‘Poor baby,’ she said, picking him up, cradling him sentimentally in her arms for a long moment before shifting him to her shoulder and patting his back. ‘Poor, poor baby,’ swaying happily in the rain.
She took him back to the ridiculous rambling old tip of a house on Coldharbour Lane where she lived, four enormous floors filled with escapees from small crap towns the length and breadth of the land. The air was an essence of all the people who’d ever passed through, and even though it was the middle of the night, the house had a faint hum of people doing things behind closed doors.
Rose went up to her flat at the top of the house. A waft of incense and dope greeted her when she opened the door. Inside was like an Arabian souk, all coloured hangings and cushions, mirrors, embroidery, long-fingered plants tumbling down deep purple walls. The room was full of stuff she’d brought home from skips and gutters and pavements, shelves full of things she felt sorry for. Old match-boxes and broken jewellery, bits of paper, sticks, fragments, remnants, residues, boxes, knick-knacks, broken things, the teeming leavings of the world.
‘Poor thing,’ she said, putting the maimed doll among her Indian cushions as if it were a cuddly toy, sitting back on her heels and looking into its round black face. The empty holes of the eyes and mouth conveyed an impression of sweetness.
‘Tattoo,’ she said.
Next morning Julia dressed quickly, drew back the curtain and crept silently through the room where the two girls were still asleep. A cockerel crowed in the dark, not too near. Another, closer, answered. Finding the latch, she lifted it silently and went out into the yard. Voices passed on the street. A light burned in the house. There was a movement over by the vegetable patch, and when she looked she saw the tall thin figure of a man walking backwards. With no hesitation, he passed along the side wall, turned and crossed the back of the house, momentarily dimming the light from the window, then disappeared round the corner into the leaf-hung walkway that led to the front. Though the light was coming, nothing but his shape and peculiar swift locomotion was clear. Diablo. There was no sound. He’s come for wicked children who won’t go to sleep. You don’t have to worry about that, Julia, the Sanchez boys used to joke, one look at you and he’ll run! Like the devil! When she was sure he wasn’t coming back, she walked down and used the privy, and by the time she was back Delia was up, sitting on her bed smoking a small cigar.
‘So,’ she said in a blunt throaty way, ‘your big show.’ Thick black pigtails hung either side of her face, and a red shawl was wrapped round her shoulders. Emerging from it, her forearms were tawny and muscled, thick-veined as a fighter’s.
‘The first,’ Julia said.
‘How long’s it been? Since you went on the road?’
‘I’m losing track. Two or three months.’
‘Ooh! So new. So how’s it all getting along with you?’ She waved one brown arm. ‘All this.’
‘Sometimes wonderful,’ said Julia, ‘sometimes frightening.’
‘Rates said you lived in a palace. Down in Mexico.’
‘A long time ago. My guardian was governor in Sinaloa, but I hardly remember it. Then we moved to the house I grew up in.’
‘He decent? Your guardian? Why you wanna leave?’
‘I was looking after an old lady,’ said Julia, ‘but then she died.’
‘An old lady?’
‘Old nurse lady.’
‘So was he decent?’
Don Pedro had always been fond of her in a distant way, as if she were a good old dog that had been with the family a long time. Sixteen years. ‘He was decent,’ Julia said.
Delia blew out a cloud of thick blue smoke, put her head back and gazed pensively at her. ‘Has Rates given you any money yet?’ she asked.
‘I have some money,’ said Julia, ‘a little. My guardian gave me some before I left. But Mr Rates