Chapter 26
Ash
The new best friends continue to do all the things normal new best friends do, all the time, every hour of every day, no big deal.
It makes Ash happy. Really, really happy.
She’s singing in the shower, humming to herself walking for a coffee, feels lighter in her body, her spirit, herself.
She’s stopped trying to put it into words because the true peace she feels, the unshakeable understanding that for once in her life she is in exactly the right place and doing exactly the right thing, is beyond words.
It’s inexplicable. All she can verbalise is that Lisbon suits her.
Perhaps it really is as simple as that: environments affect us, where we live and what we eat and who we pass the time with, and in Lisbon Ash has found a combination that really works for her.
In two months she’s unrecognisable to herself.
Her brain has slowed. Things feel less urgent.
She wakes up naturally, walks around the city, reads, sends postcards home to her nieces and nephews and parents whilst continuing to ignore the family text thread since they continue to ignore Ash’s existence in Lisbon.
She revisits museums and galleries to see her favourite pieces again, and slowly continues visualising a life different to the one she told herself she wanted, each new piece coming into focus like a developing Polaroid.
Now she doesn’t have to be good, Ash can attend to the business of being content.
‘Jorge, look! Look at the sharks!’ says CJ, pointing above their heads. ‘Whoa!’
It’s a Sunday afternoon and they’re at Oceanário de Lisboa – Lisbon’s aquarium.
Voted the best aquarium in the world, it’s one of the biggest in Europe, designed to stun and awe its attendees into reconnecting with the magic beneath the surface of the sea.
Ash, CJ and Jorge have seen puffins, sea otters, rays, Magellanic penguins, and an abundance of sharks and corals.
It’s been incredibly calming, wandering through the oversized tanks that arch over and above them so that the marine life is visible from every angle.
Like being in a church, even if you don’t believe in God: the magnitude of it, the sheer scale, inspires wonderment, and wonderment is best observed in whispers.
‘Mam?e, I just love them,’ Jorge says, his hand slipping into CJ’s, Ash walking beside them.
She’s spent a bit of time with Jorge, now, and has come to be genuinely fond of him.
He’s curious and interested, and Ash finds it makes her more aware of things.
But she’s been able to parse through how it feels to be with him too: is it possible to enjoy a small child’s company without also wanting a small child for herself?
It turns out that it is. If Ash decides not to be a mother, she can still have children in her life.
There is no binary. Being a woman who is ‘good’ with children has made her take it for granted that she should have her own, but why is that the rule?
Can’t she be good with children without having her own?
If it feels like this, then surely it can’t be wrong to at least consider taking this path.
The trio pause in front of a sign saying Sandbar Shark as several of the sleek grey fish glide through the water past their faces.
Ash can’t get over their beady little eyes and tight downward-curving mouths, but Jorge is mesmerised.
CJ stands with her hands on his shoulders as he presses his nose up against the glass.
‘Whoa,’ he says, reverentially.
CJ leans into Ash and whispers, ‘Look.’ She points at the lower point of the signage. During the breeding season, a mature male persistently follows a female, occasionally biting the area between her dorsal fins. This form of courtship behaviour often leaves the female with permanent scarring.
‘Lol,’ says Ash. ‘I know how these girls feel, then.’
‘Right?’ chuckles CJ, and they look at each other, grin, enjoy finding the same things funny. Ash reaches out a hand, rubs the lower part of CJ’s firm back. CJ grins some more.
Later, once they’ve dropped Jorge at home to have a boys’ night with his uncles, the women grab some food at a seafood restaurant at the bottom of the hill.
They really are just BFFs, having their breakfast coffee at Querido bleed into a fake-family outing with Jorge, bleeding into a stop-off at the park, and then a date for two with sardines and white wine, before they decide to get a nightcap at the cute bar with the old stone steps where people sit with their drinks instead of at tables.
Very, very normal, that. Two almost-forty-year-old women platonically hanging out from sunrise until sunset, hands on backs and elbows, and arms across shoulders, knowing looks, finishing each other’s sentences, sharing the minutiae of their days, and their lives, several times over, giddy off each other, their reflection in the eyes of the other.
‘You seem really happy, you know,’ CJ says, where they nurse beers from the bottle – CJ really is rubbing off on her – at the top of the stone steps, looking down on all the other patrons. ‘It makes me happy. To see Lisbon work her magic on you.’
‘Who decided Lisbon is female?’ muses Ash, tugging at the label on her bottle. ‘Why isn’t Lisbon a man? Why is Lisbon she?’
‘Hmmm,’ reflects CJ. ‘Interesting question. To me, Lisbon has always been female.’
‘What other cities are female?’
‘Munich is male,’ CJ says.
And Ash laughs. ‘Obviously.’
‘Barcelona is male too, but enjoys playing with the gender binary.’
‘The definition of gay or European?’
‘Exactly, yes. But that’s hot. I enjoy that.’ CJ looks up into the night sky like she’s considering the thought.
Ash admires her thick lashes, the searching in her eyes. Jorge has the same twinkle of curiosity. The longer Ash knows CJ, the more she understands she isn’t cold, not like she first thought, she just has no tolerance for bullshit, fools or small talk.
‘London is male,’ CJ states. ‘And actually kind of an abusive one, too.’
‘And not even that good-looking.’
‘And not even that good-looking! But, has that rizz, man. London has rizz, and that’s why he’s the toxic boyfriend you keep going back to.’
‘Edinburgh is female, though,’ Ash counters. ‘And she’s taken for granted.’
‘Co-signed,’ CJ says. Then: ‘Copenhagen? Female. Florence? Female. Rome? Male. Tokyo? Male. Vienna, female. Havana, female. Sydney, female. Lisbon … yeah, female. I think it comes back to how much a city takes you as you are, or how much a city tries to mould you into something else, something that hardens you. Lisbon is quintessentially female because she is warm, and welcoming, and nurturing. She wants you to be more yourself, more rested, more looked after. Happy as you are. She’s home.
And home to me feels inherently … girl.’
‘I wonder what Freud would say,’ Ash teases.
CJ whistles through her pout. ‘I think it’s probably very straightforward.’
Ash readjusts her energy. She’d only meant to be playful. ‘I’m listening.’
CJ rocks her head back and forth. ‘Mum left. Dad did a terrible job. I mean, I’ve tried to find the good over the years, tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but since I became a parent myself my empathy for his situation is basically zero.
Have a kid, step up, you know? It baffles me that there is anyone in existence who can’t make their child, their flesh and blood, the centre of their world. ’
‘Yeah,’ agrees Ash. ‘In my time I have definitely felt the unfairness of inadequate parents seemingly able to pop out kids at will – kids they’re not even bothered about – and then me, who used to be desperate for it, knowing I could do it so much better than them, given half the chance.’
‘Past tense?’ observes CJ. ‘Used to be desperate for it?’
Ash shrugs. ‘No flies on you, huh?’
‘We established this a long time ago.’
‘Hmmm,’ reflects Ash. And then: ‘Potential past tense. Which is progress.’
‘I’m proud of you.’
‘I’m proud of me too—’
They’re interrupted then.
‘Ash?’ comes a voice. ‘I thought that was you!’
They look up, and Ash takes a beat to recognise who is talking to her. Muscular arms, deep tan, brown bob tucked behind her ears.
‘Aurora,’ the woman says. ‘Best tour guide in Sintra?’
‘Oh!’ says Ash, getting up now. Dammit. She normally prides herself on remembering people. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, and now she’s stood, isn’t sure why. She’s not going to hug the woman, is she? Or air-kiss her.
Aurora makes the decision for them both, opening her arms so Ash knows to come forward. She offers her right side first, then her left.
‘You look different,’ Ash says. ‘In my defence. You had the shirt, before, the button-down.’
‘My professional clothes,’ Aurora nods. ‘But now I’m in my party clothes.
Ash laughs, and has to admit, Aurora suits her ‘party clothes’: wide-legged beige trousers and a cropped white T-shirt, the softness of her belly on proud display, making her radiate feminine, open energy.
‘Hey, I’m Aurora,’ she says to CJ, offering a hand.
CJ doesn’t get up, Ash notices, as she nods curtly at Aurora without taking her hand. Aurora withdraws it, glancing from CJ to Ash and back to CJ again. ‘I didn’t mean any disrespect,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to say hello.’
Disrespect? Ash doesn’t get it. What she does get, is that CJ could not be willing Aurora away with any more hostility, and everyone knows it. You wouldn’t need a knife to cut the tension, a simple flick of the wrist would do it. Poof.
‘Well, hello,’ smiles Ash, compensating for CJ’s rudeness. ‘Thanks for coming over. I’ll email you sometime. I’m sorry I never did.’ Why is she saying that? Ash didn’t email Aurora because Mona said Aurora was hitting on her, and Ash doesn’t fancy Aurora.
‘Yeah?’ says Aurora, another quick look at CJ, who has suddenly acquired a new fascination with the floor. ‘OK, well. Cool. Don’t leave it too long, OK?’
‘OK,’ says Ash, her smile getting even wider.
Why is she even apologising for CJ this way?
CJ is her own woman, nothing to do with Ash really.
If she wants to be unbearable, that should be no skin off Ash’s nose.
And yet. ‘Tomorrow,’ she finds herself saying, so that this whole interaction can be sweetened with some sugar.
‘Look forward to it,’ Aurora tells her, looking at Ash from under her lashes intently. Flirtatiously. Yup. There’s absolutely no getting around it. Mona was right: Aurora is into her. And Ash is encouraging it with promises of email.
When she’s gone, Ash sits back down beside CJ and waits for her to speak.
She’s curious – is CJ going to act like she wasn’t just an arse, or will she own up to it so Ash can understand?
Her breathing has become more laboured as adrenaline courses through her.
She’s mad. And Lisbon Ash doesn’t push down being mad, she allows herself to feel it, because being mad when somebody is unfriendly and discourteous is a reasonable reaction to have.
Ash looks at CJ, at her flawless walnut-coloured skin, the curve of her chin, the exposed skin of her neck, the bit beneath her ear. Something isn’t right. CJ seems … sad?
‘CJ?’ Ash says, softly.
CJ doesn’t speak. Her chest rises and falls with deep in- and exhalations, as if she’s counting, to regulate herself.
‘Hey,’ Ash says, reaching out to her, to the smoothness of her shoulder.
CJ shrugs her away, but when she looks up her face is plastered with a smile. A fake one. ‘I didn’t know you were still dating,’ she says.
‘I’m not.’
‘Except for her?’
Ash knits her eyebrows together. ‘She’s just this tour guide from the other week, ages ago, from when I went to Sintra. She gave me her email address.’
‘So you can go out together?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Ash, calmly. ‘Mona thought so, yes. But I’m not a lesbian, so I didn’t email her.’
‘Are you a lesbian now?’ CJ asks, and she still has half the false smile, as if the answer wouldn’t bother her.
But Ash can feel it, nestled in behind her ribcage, under her sternum, that CJ would be bothered by the answer.
Ash had dared not hope.
Ash had dared not wonder.
She looks at CJ, and CJ looks back, and Ash understands, implicitly, that how she answers is going to be very, very important.
She senses that CJ wants her to say she’s into women.
But Ash is not. She’s not into women, plural.
She’s into CJ, who happens to be a woman.
But CJ doesn’t want her that way, and Ash knows this. CJ fled. Ash understands.
Except. The smile has fallen from CJ’s mouth, and now she holds Ash’s gaze almost mournfully, as if preparing herself already for disappointment, to be upset.
So Ash is stuck. She can’t say she’s not gay, she can’t say she is, and she can’t ask CJ what she wants, because Ash isn’t sure what she needs her to say.
The pair of them, they’re stuck in a limbo, a freeze-frame, a game of chicken where neither will go first and so they both lose.
Ash wishes she could read CJ’s mind, get an insight into what that maddeningly blunt, beautiful, pain-in-the-ass needs in this moment, so then Ash could start to work out what she needs, too.
But she can’t. She can’t read CJ’s mind and she can’t figure out what her own is trying to tell her either.
Of course, if she were to simply listen to her heart it would be a lot – a lot – easier.
‘No, not a lesbian,’ Ash says. ‘But like, I don’t know. I’m not not into women, I guess.’
A seed offered.