Chapter Ten
Even for a cathedral this one appears unusually dark.
William wonders if perhaps they had installed the stained glass to face in the wrong direction or they’re using ecologically friendly, low-wattage candles.
It is only when he trips over the bulbous foot of an ancient wooden pew and falls to the floor that he remembers how lazily his old sunglasses actually adjust to the shade.
The flagstones are certainly cool but they’re far from giving.
He manages by sheer luck, as he topples, to shield most of his head with his outstretched hand.
But his efforts are finally thwarted by his own laptop bag, as it swings sharply around his neck and smacks its weightiest corner right into his ear.
He finds himself deciding to stay just where he is for a while, prone on the ground like some overzealous pilgrim, until his universe rights itself once more.
“Senor?”
When he finally raises his throbbing head a few painful inches, all he can see through the dimness, aside from the offending stonework, are the delicate, sandalled feet of a young woman.
A bit higher and slender but firm legs fill his gaze: exquisitely smooth legs, he still manages to remark despite the pain, leading gracefully up to the fluttering hem of a fresh, summery dress.
“Senor…” comes the sweet voice again, like a fragrant echo.
The wondrous legs begin to bend, deep brown knees move towards him and finally a small, elfin face looms into view, closing in on his.
It’s a dark face with long, dark hair encasing it, but of course everything is still bloody dark.
He removes his accursed glasses and exchanges them for the current model.
Now he sees her.
“JESUS CHRIST!” he says, quite loud.
He can hear the people around him gasp, for reasons he would be an idiot not to understand. But William Sutherland feels like an idiot right now. Or perhaps a madman. Because standing directly in front of him, or rather crouching purposefully to help him up, is his wife, Luisa Sutherland.
Yet not as she is today.
He is staring – well, of course he can’t be, but it certainly feels like it – into the perfectly entrancing face and chestnut eyes of Luisa Sutherland, circa 1995.
Actually, no circa about it.
This would be Lu (very newly) Sutherland, April 1995.
If indeed it were her, which obviously it isn’t, patently can’t be, despite that long forgotten yet all too recognisable glow.
Easter 1995, to be exact. Or Semana Santa, as she would say.
If the apparition could speak, which he very much doubts, as of course she isn’t actually there, despite earlier evidence to the contrary.
“Senor? Estas herido? English? ARE – YOU – BUMPING – YOUR – HEAD?”
“Huh?” mutters William, who is rather impressed that he can mutter anything at all.
He tries to process exactly what this “person” is saying, in a voice of pure velvet that is beginning to stir vague and not wholly comfortable memories.
He finds that he can’t venture much beyond the fact that she is actually making far more recognisable sounds than he is.
So he lets the gentle creature, this unexpected doppelg?nger, assist him slowly upwards from his awkward, leg-worshipping position, while he forms an appropriate response.
Wondering vaguely, as he rises, how come you can feel a hallucination’s touch.
“English?” he answers her, finally. “Aye. Well, no. Glasgow. So not really. Or at all actually. But I speak the English. Of sorts. I’m sorry. To be staring, I mean. It’s just that you look so like—”
“Like?” she repeats, with a slight smile.
“Just – someone I know. Used to know. Well, I still do, but – a long time ago. I’m so sorry. Again. Had a bit of champagne. Quite a… They say everyone has a double somewhere. And I had a few doubles, on the plane, I’m afraid. I’m talking gibberish.”
The young woman seems bemused. “I am sorry – my English it is not so good.” She stares back at William now and is looking quite disturbed, although probably not nearly as disturbed as he is. “You shiver! You are shocking, I think. No – you are shocked. Sí.” She offers her arm. “Perhaps we walk—”
William can only nod. She really does look so like Luisa. As was. She even sounds like young Luisa, with that alluring vocal combination of the dulcet and the earthy. Although, of course, young Spanish women all sound very much alike to him now.
He takes her arm.
“Are you on your own, sir?”
Sir?
“Yes. No. Well, sort of. My wife and I are—”
“Lost?”
“Aye,” he nods in agreement. “Lost.”
“My husband and I too!” she yelps in delight. “He always walk everywhere so fast. Even on the holiday. But I tell him, if it happen, if we are losing each other in all the people, then we meet here. In catedral. Even Will, he cannot miss a catedral!”
If William was shivering before, he is going way off the Richter scale now. They can probably feel his heart tremors in Catalonia.
“W-Will? YOUR HUSBAND’S NAME IS WILL?”
William is shouting. He knows this but he can’t seem to stop.
He watches the solid, decorum-abiding, cathedral-respecting people around him and even way off in the distance turn as one to stare.
Yet, disturbingly, the stares have the quality of those you would direct at someone who is totally insane, rather than simply disruptive or over-exuberant.
Even the guys wandering around in the conical hats seem dumbstruck and he can only see their eyes.
“Sí,” says the young woman, who appears just a tad disconcerted herself. “Will. Is little for William. He is a Glasgow-wegian also. We meet when I am au pair in Newton—”
“No. NO!” he begs. “Please. God! This isn’t happening.”
William staggers away, trying desperately not to pass out or collapse onto the hard stone again. He cleaves a ragged path down the longest, most awe-inspiring nave in Spain and into the beating heart of the massive cathedral, heading towards the great, boxlike choir-loft.
Not that he is heading anywhere. Or appreciating anything. Just reeling. The memory of that non-existent bus suddenly charges back at full speed into his brain.
Crowds are beginning to sweep in. The next float is clearly expected to arrive, after its slow journey from some honoured neighbourhood chapel, and they’re after ringside seats.
William feels like he is about to career into each and every one of the innocent bystanders, like a helpless driver whose brakes have just been severed.
Or an errant float powered by too much sangria.
And everywhere he looks there are scenes from the life, or more usually death, of the Christ. Carved, painted, sculpted, etched and scribbled.
By old masters and the youngest disciples.
Hardly unexpected but nonetheless taunting.
He knows that this is probably the deepest of sacrileges but he feels that somebody out there is bent on crucifying him too.
“I’m not even Catholic,” he mutters, before noticing that the concerned young woman, this impossible visitor from another lifetime, is once again directly beside him.
He decides to make a stirring effort to appear vaguely normal, even though the current situation is about as far from normal as an alien invasion of Richmond.
“Lost, is he? Young… Will. Och, well, there’s an old saying.
Coleridge? Tennyson? Someone dead, anyway. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost—’”
“‘Than two in the bush!’ Will, he tell me this!”
“Away ye go!” William wonders briefly why he is finding himself so utterly charmed by a situation that might have come straight out of Satan’s playbook. It’s like meeting Godzilla and wondering if he’d like a biscuit. “So – er – so, how are you finding Seville?”
“By the train.”
She sees him chuckle at this and he can tell from the glow in her eyes that she considers it a friendly, uncritical laugh.
So she giggles too, as she slowly gets the joke.
“Oh. Perdón. We have just arrived. From Madrid. We see my parents there. But I have been the student in this place. Here – in Sevilla.”
“Aye. At the art school.”
The young woman is quiet. The whole vast, Gothic edifice appears to go mute with her. How the hell am I supposed to have known that? he wonders.
“You have artist’s hands!” he explains swiftly.
Oh brilliant, William. And now she’s inspecting her wee hands, the dear thing. Hands that he fondly recalls. Smooth, unadorned hands, that once seemed hardly ever to leave his own.
So, we might as well go the extra mile. “I used to be a detective.”
What?
“Like your Sherlock Holmess!” she cries with glee, her marvellously long, shiny hair swinging around her face and picking up every colour from the glorious, sunlit windows.
William is about to reply, with God knows what further nonsense, when without warning the great organ of the Catedral de Santa Maria de la Setes suddenly launches into something excessively loud and suitably sombre.
He reacts with an involuntary but massive jolt, as if the sonorous notes have been injected directly into his system.
He notices, however, with some puzzlement, that the young woman – okay, Lu; he has to accept that somehow this is Lu – doesn’t appear to register any surprise or awareness at all.
But, of course, she is Catholic and he knows that the delicate, silver cross she wears at all times around her alluring neck has borne witness to some serious cathedral-going and organ-listening.
Even if her recent choice of husband is testament to an unfortunate and, as many around Madrid and its environs pray, merely temporary lapsing.
(William reckons they would have willingly loosened up their views on divorce, or even honour killing, just to see the back of him.)
They find themselves strolling together towards one of the smaller chapels, away from the crowds and the clamour.
He can’t, in all honesty, flatter himself that this is because, despite her lyrical, four-day-old marriage, she has suddenly found a considerably older, balding stranger with eye-bags and a business paunch utterly irresistible.
Yet the knowledge that she may simply be needing to reassure herself he isn’t about to slip into a coma doesn’t appear to diminish his excitement.
Even though this is the weirdest, creepiest, scariest thing that has ever happened to him in his life and may hopefully just turn out to be a result of that unfortunate bang on the head.
Didn’t something of this ilk happen in Dallas?
“Will, my husband, yes – he say he is trying to make the big surprise for me this week.” William knows exactly what the big surprise is, but he is damned if he is going to let himself slip again. “I am sure it is bullfight.” There you go. “I cannot tell him I hate the corrida, can I?”
“Er, no,” says William safely, if anything is safe in this madhouse. “But you’re fine. I tried to get bullfight tickets here years ago. Hopeless! The bulls’ relatives buy up all the best seats.”
He can see her struggling with this one, so he taps a nearby information console, with superb digital close-ups of the cathedral’s hottest features, as a way to change the subject. Yet, to his surprise, her expression has turned from vague puzzlement to shocked incomprehension.
“Why do you do this?” she says.
“What? Make a joke? Check the info?”
“No. Touch this nun. They do not like this.”
“Touch the—?”
It takes only a couple of seconds to go from wondering what the hell she is talking about to knowing what the hell she is talking about. And he realises that the latter is so much worse.
“I’m so sorry,” he explains/lies. “It’s this arm. I injured it once, on a detecting job, and sometimes, you know, it has a life of its own.” He waves it around to furnish credence to this rubbish. “The nun – did she notice?”
“I do not think this. You are very gentle.”
“That’s the one consolation. Aren’t these paintings interesting?” He waves an all-encompassing arm around at whatever art is in the vicinity. “You can see the paintings?”
“Sí. Of course. I do not wear bad sunglasses. Ah, you like the art, yes?”
“I’ve learned to,” William confesses. “I used to hate it. Totally. Couldn’t see the point.
It was my wife who taught me to really appreciate…
” This makes him pause, just for a moment.
“Aye, right enough. Dragging me to galleries until I finally succumbed. Until I really ‘got’ it.” Again, he seems lost in thought.
“Well, she used to. Not these days. We don’t do so much these days. ”
The young woman nods, as if sensing a meander onto rockier terrain. Or maybe she just sees the sadness on his face.
“So. If you are okay, Senor…”
“DON’T GO, LUISA!”
A gasp. “How you know my name?”
“Aah,” he mumbles, the “shit!” unspoken, hearing the drums in the distance and hoping they’re coming to drag him away.
“Your bracelet!” Thank you, God. She looks at her bracelet, on which her name is indeed engraved into the silver, but he would have needed eyes like a bat.
“Eyes like a bat,” he explains. “Could I maybe just take a wee look at your guidebook? Please. I-I need to find my wife again.”
The young woman burrows into her bright-red shoulder bag and he suddenly recalls, as if memory is like a sharp knee to the groin or the stirrings of a migraine, how she so used to love the colour red. Do we go through phases, he wonders, and did I somehow get stuck in sepia?
She removes a glossy new guide to Seville. A wedding gift, that’s it, from an old schoolfriend of his, presented to them and gleefully unwrapped there and then, in the hope it might be something fruitier.
As Lu passes the book to him, it immediately ages and crinkles in his hands.
Oh – Fuck!
William thinks he is going to pass out again, but he manages to look into her face, expecting to see a mask of pure horror swiftly overlay those beautiful, untested features. But, mercifully, she is looking not at the instantly worn and yellowed pages but in the other direction.
“Ah, I think I see my husband.”
“Oh no,” says William quietly. “Oh, dear Lord, no.”
Without saying another word, fearing he might crumple or simply expire in the chapel, he stumbles out through a convenient but unnecessarily heavy side door.
When young Luisa finally looks round again to say goodbye, the man is gone.
Will she ever understand the Scottish?
*
William Sutherland reels into the screaming sunlight without any sense of where he is going.
It is some minutes later, and on the other side of the river, before he realises that he is still gripping the young apparition’s guidebook. Warily, he begins to flick through its pages, now suddenly well-thumbed and weary with age.
A gift card, showing its years and emblazoned with fading printed confetti, slips into his trembling hand.