The Other Half of Augusta Hope. Joanna Glen

      Spain, my mother wrote, underlining it twice.

      The Alvárez family’s Spanish house wasn’t on the Costa del Sol, but on the Costa de la Luz, I told my mother. In a village by the beach, called La Higuera. Which means fig tree. Higos are figs and you don’t pronounce the h.

      The next year, in August, Diego’s family would be going to Argentina for a family wedding so we could (possibly) rent their holiday house with fig trees in the garden for a much-reduced price. They’d be going at Christmas for the special festivals.

      My father said, ‘It’s all very different out there. Apparently, Lola sunbathes without a swimsuit on in the garden. They probably all do that sort of thing over there. And it’s jolly hot, you know, in summer. Sweltering. It may not suit us.’

      He was right.

      It didn’t suit him.

      Yet we plotted and persuaded to get him there.

      I look around me as I write, here in La Higuera, thirteen years after we first came. How I love its fig trees and its palms, its warm air and wild winds.

      There we were, innocent and dreamy.

      So excited.

      ‘Two months to go,’ I said to Julia, crossing off another day on the chart we’d stuck to the back of the wardrobe door.

      ‘Will we be different when we come back?’ said Julia.

      ‘Course we will,’ I said, smiling.

      I remember us packing for Spain, suitcases open on the bed and the sun coming through the bedroom window and landing in that little pool, over in the corner, where there was, where there is, one of those triangular-shaped stands, made to fit in corners. On it are our awards – all my academic cups, made of fake silver, and my one riding rosette clipped to the top, and Julia’s dancing trophies in the shape of gold ballet shoes. I remember specks of dust falling through the sheet of light, bits of our own skin.

      I’m looking down at my hand, brown from the sun because I live here now.

      The skin of my hand.

      Mano in Spanish.

      Mano mano mano – man-o – man-oeuvre – man-overboard – man-o-tee, but I think it’s manatee actually.

      They are sometimes called sea cows – dolphin things with rounded noses. Like the pilot whales we saw from the boat out in the Straits of Gibraltar, heading off from the port at Tarifa.

      That day.