WHITE LION
Take one teaspoonful of white sugar, and the juice of half a lime, dropping the spent rind into the glass. Add one wine glass of Santa Cruz rum, one teaspoonful of Curacao and one teaspoonful of imported grenadine. Shake well with ice, and strain. Cool and deceptively sharp.
Why do certain individuals have the power to change a person’s life, above all others? To anyone else, they might be a face in the crowd, the tip of a hat at an open door, but to that one person …
They are the branch that falls on to the track and derails the train; they are the cigarette that starts the house fire, the one drink too many that pushes a night into chaos.
That’s what he was to me. I knew it the second we locked eyes, the second before I was hit by the car.
Not badly. He was too fast for that. Our eyes met, I knew, and he acted, sending the car veering away from where I stood. Still, the running board clipped my leg and sent me spinning to the ground.
For a moment, everything was a fog of dust, the world reeling around me. The car’s wheel was five feet from my head, and in its mirror-bright hubcap, I saw a face.
A boy was looking back at me. He had ragged dark hair and a fading bruise across his nose. There were purple rings beneath his eyes and blood on his lip. I spluttered out a breath and the boy did the same, droplets spattering the ground. Blood and sand …
All around, voices were shouting, feet scuffing.
My English wasn’t as good then, but nevertheless I picked up some of what was being said.
The British soldiers were angry, pointing at me and shouting, their candy-coloured faces redder than usual.
I heard the words beggar and lying, more than once.
I was afraid they would punish me for getting in the way of the car, and tried to rise, only to feel a stab of pain in my leg. I cried out, and fell back to the dust.
That’s when he appeared. Leather shoes like browned butter, the hem of linen trousers as pale as the car itself, silver flashing from his cuffs, and finally his face: his saint’s face, brought down from its altar.
It wasn’t flawless; nothing truly beautiful is.
It was tanned, not the rough, burned tan of the British soldiers, but bronzed – that’s the word, bronzed – as though burnished by an artisan.
As he took off his hat I saw brown hair, slicked gold by sun and pomade.
Finally, I looked into his eyes, peering over the dark lenses.
They were brown as well-worn wood, like the butt of a gun, like the handle of a knife.
‘Boy,’ he said in English. ‘Are you hurt?’
Above the dust I caught his scent, musk and soap and something rich I couldn’t name, and when he reached out a hand to me, I flinched away, ashamed of my grime. The movement made me cough, and in utter horror, I saw a droplet of blood from my lip land on his shoe.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, the blood is what did it. You see, when he saw it staining my lips and teeth, he was afraid that my insides had been damaged, that I might die then and there on the road, and he might be held accountable.
‘He’s badly hurt,’ he told the soldiers. ‘I am taking him to a doctor, and I don’t care to be held up about it.’
‘Sir, with all respect he’s just as likely acting,’ one of them answered. ‘He’s been here all morning, begging—’
‘Be that as it may, I won’t be easy until I’ve had a doctor look at him.’
‘There are doctors in La Atunara.’
‘Over there? Quacks and butchers. No, I have to insist. An English doctor.’
‘Has he any identification with him? Any passport?’
Even in my state, I heard that word well enough.
Passport. They meant papers, and of course, I had none.
I couldn’t let them search me. If they found out I was a woman, they would be suspicious.
Who knew if they’d heard about the murder in Córdoba?
The next time their voices turned in my direction, I coughed and gave a terrible groan of agony.
It must have been convincing, because I heard a woman’s voice, exclaiming.
I opened one watering eye a fraction and saw her, hanging over the side of the car.
I hadn’t noticed her at first; she must have been the person the man was laughing with as he drove.
She was just as fine-looking as he, in a peach-coloured hat, hair the colour of custard waving below its brim.
Her rouged mouth was open. I didn’t catch exactly what she said, though she sounded hurt on my behalf. Amongst the words there was one in particular that found its way through the ringing in my ears.
Arthur.
I don’t know how he did it; a mix of stolid English insistence and righteous indignation perhaps, but soon I was being pulled to my feet by the soldiers and deposited into the back seat of the car, beside the woman.
The soldiers looked unhappy about it and made the man take a piece of stamped paper.
A temporary pass, I found out later, issued on the condition that I left Gibraltar as soon as a doctor had seen to me.
The woman made me lie on the back seat with my head on her lap. It made me nervous, because although my disguise might have fooled men easily enough, women were another matter. So I screwed up my face and tried not to look into her grey eyes.
‘Oh it’s too awful, Arthur,’ she said, as the man got into the car. ‘He’s so young, barely more than a boy.’
‘We’ll get him seen to, Hilde,’ the man said, slamming the door. ‘Well?’ he shouted to the soldiers. ‘Are you going to let us through at last?’
Then came the clacking of the barrier, and the great, warm car was purring into life, speeding forwards, taking us into Gibraltar.
That day was one of many firsts for me. I had been in a motor before, but never one so luxurious or fine.
I had been close to wealthy patrons at the inn, but never this close: had never rested my head on legs covered with silk, never smelled perfume that didn’t reek or cloy, but soothed, like the gloved hand that stroked my forehead.
I had never wanted so badly to disappear, or to plunge myself into a bath and emerge gleaming new, to match those people.
But there are some things that soap cannot wash away.
I could scrub and scrub and still I would be different.
Beneath my skin was the past, my bad blood: the inn, the Senor and the threat of the garrotte if I was caught.
They – bright creatures – knew none of that.
Scorn rose in me to war with admiration, mistrust of those gloved hands and amused faces.
I had grown up watching their kind; I knew how their interest could disappear in a finger-snap.
I had seen them drop people back into the dirt and drive away, leaving all the damage behind them.
That’s what I would be to them, I thought as we drove, a temporary diversion, nothing more.
In which case, I had to be smart. I had to get what I could.
Even so, it was all I could do to keep up my pretended groans as we entered the streets of Gibraltar.
A different world to La Atunara, just across the border.
Here were motorcars and gleaming shop fronts, fussily dressed matrons next to sailors and soldiers and beyond them all boats – so many boats, jostling white on the sea like gulls.
The hotel they took me to was set high on the rock, above the tangle of narrow streets. The Grand, it was called. I had never set foot anywhere like The Grand.
Where the inn was straw and stone and old wood tough as iron, The Grand was marble and white gravel and shining polish. I did not belong there, in my grimy suit. Even the doormen, who were paid not to notice, looked at me as if I were a bird dropping on a scrubbed step.
But the lady was helping me out of the car; she was insisting I put my arm about her shoulder.
The man was calling for a chair. One was brought, a wicker thing on wheels, and I was taken through a lobby that smelled of flowers into an elevator – another first for me – and from there along a corridor with a patterned wooden floor, into a room.
Doctor, the Englishman was saying, and I felt a stab of panic.
A doctor was a thing that could not be fooled: the girls at the inn had never been successful in concealing their ailments from the health inspector.
If the gentleman and the lady discovered I was a woman, what would they do?
Question me? They would undoubtedly think I was no good, a whore on hard times perhaps, and tell the hotel to take me back to the border, once they were satisfied I would not die.
I might have time to get away, if the Spanish authorities had not alerted the British about the murder, but if they had …
My mind racing, I began to look around the room for a way to escape.
It was like the car: wide and cool and very clean, with thin curtains that billowed like sails.
At any other time I would have sighed to be there, but all I could think about was my lie, and how to maintain it, and how soon these people would lose interest, and leave me to my fate.
The lady appeared with a wet cloth in her hands. I smelled her perfume again as she pushed me back into the cushions of a sofa.
‘You must stay calm, the doctor will be here soon.’ When she tried to wipe gently at my face, at the blood on my lip, I flinched away. No one had ever touched me like that before.
If anything, she looked sorry. ‘We should see about your chest,’ she murmured. ‘Let me—’ Before I knew what was happening, she had slid her hand inside the jacket, dangerously close to the strips of cloth that bound my breasts. I cried out, cringing away from her.
‘Leave him be, Hilde.’ A voice came to my rescue. ‘He’s clearly frightened. And in shock, I would guess.’ The man was standing at a sideboard. When he turned, he held two glasses, filled with brown liquid. He seemed to belong in that room the way a painting would, or a statue.
‘Here.’ He held out one of the glasses towards me.
I took it, unable to look at either of them, and sipped the liquid.
Scotch. It was Scotch. The smell of it ambushed me and I was back at the inn, breathing in spilled liquor and the stink of blood that rushed from the Senor’s throat. I choked and the glass tipped in my hand. The lady plucked it from my fingers.
‘Arthur, really. The poor boy’s probably never had a drink of whisky in his life. Go and get some brandy instead, that’s better for shock.’
Soon I found a big, bulbous glass pressed into my hands, filled with brandy. Exceptionally good brandy. I gulped it, gasped as it stung my lip and gulped the rest.
‘Bueno,’ the man said. ‘?Cómo estás? ?Dónde estás herido?’
I looked at him sharply. I hadn’t expected him to speak Spanish. In English, I could hide, I could play dumb, but in Spanish it would be harder.
‘Mi pierna,’ I said, nodding at my leg. ‘Sólo mi pierna.’ I didn’t want anyone prodding at my chest. ‘Y mi labio,’ I muttered, pulling down my lip to show where it was hot and swollen.
‘Gracias a Dios,’ he said, his eyes creasing in a smile. ‘I was worried you were bleeding from your guts or something.’
I shook my head, though my empty guts were smarting from the brandy, squirming at the memory of blood and Scotch. I glanced at the man again, as he spoke to the lady in English, and she made a noise of relief. When I looked back, it was into his eyes once more.
‘What in god’s name were you doing, stepping in front of my car like that?’
He said it lightly, and looked amused, tolerant, but still I was wary.
‘I did not mean to,’ I said. ‘The sun was in my eyes.’ Ifrahim’s old excuse; the answer of a petty thief.
The man was watching me, his own eyes unfathomable. ‘Mine too,’ he said.
‘?Cómo te llamas?’ That was the lady, interrupting in clumsy-sounding Spanish.
My swollen lip twitched. ‘Del Potro,’ I told her, without breaking the man’s gaze. ‘Alejandro del Potro.’