Are You Ready to Be Lucky? by Rosemary Nixon

Author:Rosemary Nixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In Which Jesus Hitchhikes the N332 and the Girl Tries Not to Vanish

There goes Jesus, riding the back of a truck that’s burning rubber down the n332. Hitchhiking on a lorry load of canned tuna, eyes pinned to the passing landscape, crown of thorns jauntily askew. The girl watches him hurtle by, his legs a blur above his strappy sandals. Lucky Jesus. What he will see with his terrible black eyes in the northwest cities he is speeding toward! The girl lists those cities in her head: Salamanca, Segovia, Palencia, Burgos, Avila. Catholic strongholds. Thousands of mud-baked fields with mud-baked castles rising from mud-baked hills between real España and this southeastern strip of Mediterranean Spain, where the Costa Blanca inhabitants have razed palm trees to make way for the foreigners and their high and narrow egg yolk–yellow villas. The Costa Blanca, where British accents reign the streets, and sand rains from the sky. Where British pubs sell bingo cards and crack cocaine and karaoke, British stores sell crème fraîche and double cream, where travelling hairdressers with scissor-sized suitcases visit the high crammed houses, climbing stairs to men who cop a feel in return for a trim and a shave. No one who lives in an egg-yolk villa trusts the Spanish. Well, they’re different, aren’t they then?

The girl imagines Jesus has had it with beach holidays. He is taking his long, flowing crop of sandy hair out of the levanter wind, and scramming.

The girl in her beach dress, seated beside her husband under their cream-and-pistachio-striped umbrella, has just turned twenty-four. Everyone, even her husband, calls her “the girl.” It’s how she has come to think of herself. Another Canadian! the neighbours said to her husband when he introduced her round. No one asks her name. Most of the foreigners here appear closer to fifty than twenty-five. Of course she’s “the girl”! Many have tipped into their senior years — granny years, the girl’s husband says, as if men don’t grow old, don’t drink with deeper desperation, don’t holler at three in the morning and dance like parrots to prove — well — something. The girl brushes back her shiny brown hair, crosses her fine ankles. She’s different. Maybe dangerous. Everyone waiting for her to make some ghastly un-Brit gaffe. Her husband front-and-centre in the audience. She feels his disapproving stare when he pulls on his Easter-egg designer shirts, dressing for dinner.

The girl stares after Jesus, who has disappeared down the N332 in a whoosh of flying curls, smelling of black grass in the ditches. Soon the lorry will turn onto the highway to Madrid. The Spanish newspapers still write the occasional article alluding back to the Madrid bombings. The girl was barely twenty, still living at home in Vancouver, Canada, but she knows her history. Spanish elections were held shortly after. In an astonishing overthrow, the Socialists defeated the ruling Partido Popular. The girl defeated her mother, but now she can’t go home. Her mother said, You made your bed. You lie in it.

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