thinking about now?’
‘Cicadas. It’s strange that we can’t hear any cicadas. Had you noticed?’
It’s as silent as a cave.
‘It’s really strange, maybe they’ve all burst.’
Everything is brightly lit, and yet I can’t see anything. I cover my eyes with my hand and through the milky screen against that unbearable light I peer into the still olive-grove, full of evil silence and bad sun. I see my sun-tanned fingers and the thin white membrane between them. Behind them is the even sunnier beach, behind the beach is the empty prairie at scorching noon.
My hands will become even darker, my hair copper, my private places white in front of the mirror in my cold, darkened room.
But still, I never succeed in imagining the comfort of my room as I cross the prairie with a red-hot hat on my head, every time, every blinding Monday and Friday.
I try to step broadly and shallowly, to stay on the surface.
2
You didn’t tell me how old you were?’ he said.
‘Seventeen,’ I lied through my teeth and that made him smile.
He’s quite a lot older than me. He has joined-together eyebrows above bright eyes.
‘What're you doing at the market, this early?’ he asked.
‘Nothing much, looking at the fruit and vegetables, taking some photographs. Good colours.’
He had caught me off guard, in other words. In fact I was meant to be collecting news stories from the market about the vendors’ strike; the camera was my room-mate’s, a prop. An amazing new Konica-Minolta – with which neither fruit and veg, nor the old women at the market would need ‘Photoshop’ – they’d never have given me one like it at the office.
We had met three weeks earlier, he and I, at a party at Shit.com that was paying me to write or steal news for their site. I was good at re-working news from competitors’ pages: copying, pasting and touching-up. Even its own author wouldn’t recognize it. It was more than they deserved for the pittance they paid me.
The party was on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper, and at that time I adored skyscrapers, lifts and all of that, life in the air, in the heights. Understandably, given that I had grown up, as it were in a depression, in a cleft between two houses.
I spent the whole evening being pestered by a scarecrow from Marketing.
Before she turned thirty she would ‘sometimes knock back a little glass of brandy or dark ale,’ she said, but that evening she was smashed.
‘I’m totally smashed.’
Unusually, though, she told me the same three stories each time she met me in the corridor or when she found me sitting somewhere, drinking. The first story was about a colleague from the editorial office, who it was discovered, had once mistakenly phoned the mother of a colleague whom he fancied, moaning and saying: ‘Oh, the things I’d do to you, cara mia.’
As it happened the mother was called Cara and she had a total fit.
‘Too, too awful,’ said my collocutor, opening her eyes wide and then bursting out laughing. ‘But it’s true,’ she added, grabbing me by the elbow with her long nails, like a crab. The second story was about silicone implants and the possibility of breast-feeding when the woman had children, and the third about a Danish artist who was a cannibal.
She went from one person to another at the party, that crazy goose, repeating her stories, exactly the same each time. But people ignored her, turning back to those they were talking to, so she kept finding me and starting all over again. About the colleague who moaned into the telephone of someone’s mother Cara, about implants and breast-feeding and about that performance artist in Copenhagen who ate fat from liposuction of the chin. In a moment of lucidity, she added delightedly that she had ‘totally lost it, like a broken record’ and went off to get some more wine.
That gave me time to escape. I wanted a refuge from this persecution, and I needed to lie down. My room-mate and the boy who drove us to the party had vanished without trace, into one of the bedrooms I assume, and I, dying of boredom, had to wait for a lift.
‘I can’t wait to be thirty,’ my sister said before she became thirty. ‘So that I can go home to bed at midnight, without being embarrassed.’
She used to say that often, I recall.
In the kitchen, people were throwing canapés with sea hare caviar at each other. In the room showing projections of old Disney cartoons, there were some partially dressed damsels lying around, while the guy with glasses showing the films rolled a cigarette and absently stroked the nylon-clad leg of one of the girls.
It was still too early for anything more daring so he put on some silent films. Who on earth would think of showing old films at a party, I thought. Perhaps they were the same people who listened to jazz at a wedding, and then everyone would go into an empty swimming pool and take each other’s photos, turning it into a happening.
In the empty dining room, three guys on Ecstasy were singing a medley of Dalmatian songs, their arms round each other.
‘Someone should exterminate them,’ said the man with joined-up eyebrows and the pale eyes of a dingo. He appeared beside me in the doorway and smiled. He looked more sober than anyone else.
In the hall I noticed my persecutor staggering purposefully in search of a victim.
‘Please,’ I said to the dingo with joined-up eyebrows, ‘if you’ve got a car, get me out of here.’
‘You’re white as a sheet,’ he said, wrapping his jacket round me and leading me out into the wet street, where lights were playfully flickering.
‘Have you had a lot to drink?’ he asked me later, as he unlocked the door of his flat that smelled of newness, of polished parquet and Ikea furniture.
‘Not really. Time of the month,’ I explained like an advert for sanitary towels. ‘That’s why I’m not feeling great.’
‘Ah,’ he said. And pointed me to the toilet. ‘Freshen up,’ he said.
I stayed for a while in the black and white cloakroom, looking at the little women’s bottles on the shelf. I touched each of them. I had never been with someone else’s man before.
When I came into the room he was lying on his stomach without a stitch on, snoring. I took off my panties and lay down, naked, on his back, but he didn’t stir. Towards dawn, when I was already asleep, he turned me over like a huge doll and parted my legs. I didn’t manage to protest or draw him to me before we had both cried out. He once, at length. Me twice, but briefly.
The bedclothes were ruined, spattered with blood and semen.
‘Look what we’ve done,’ I said in the morning.
‘What a pair we are,’ he whispered into my hair, pulling me onto his chest, winding his arms and legs round me as though he had at least twice as many, like a hairy octopus. Maybe a spider, I thought.
Days later we ran into each other at the market.
‘You didn’t call me. And you said you would,’ he said, hopping between the little mounds of Macedonian paprika and Golden Delicious apples. It was winter, freezing, white, noisy mornings and steamy evenings, full of smoke.
‘Wait while I take your photo,’ I said.
He posed with a stupid smile, paralysed with cold. Those eyebrows on his face looked like one big one. Later I lost that photo, or I left it in my flat, when I set off for home, to the Old Settlement, with no clear plan, apart from leaving Zagreb and not coming back.
‘The last time was bloody,’ I said as I pointed the lens towards him. ‘I wasn’t sure that you wanted to be reminded.’
‘You