Petras ghost, p.19
Petra's Ghost, page 19
“I mean exactly what I said. I don’t care. I just need to get to Santiago. To finish this. It’s all about getting there, and I’m almost halfway now. She’s not going to stand in my way.” Ginny takes one of her hiking poles and raises the pointed end to his chest. “And neither, Irish, are you.”
The two of them come into Población de Campos in the late afternoon. By this point, Daniel is resigned to his predicament. They are being followed on the Camino by the rotting corpse of a woman who overdosed six thousand miles away in another country. Not to worry, though, the good-looking girl he made out with two nights ago doesn’t care, so why should he? He’ll have to update his sister on their next Skype call. She’ll be bloody delighted for him, probably suggest a good coroner who specializes in the undead.
There is strength in numbers, though, even when it comes to madness, and just knowing that there is at least one other person who sees the woman makes him feel better. Although, he still wants to believe it is someone made up to play the part — someone who has it out for Ginny, perhaps, but she doesn’t want to talk about it, too embarrassed or something similar. A person can do wonders with stage makeup. His sister had dressed as a cadaver one Halloween when she was in her first year of nursing. One of her drama-student friends had gotten that goo in a tube that dries like rubbery skin, and she’d created all sorts of gruesome counterfeit injuries for herself, even worn a toe tag for authenticity. The Dean had called her to the office the next day for borrowing a zippered black bag from the teaching-hospital morgue. She ended up having to pay for it on account of the leg holes she’d cut at one end so she could walk.
He cannot buy into the supernatural explanation that Ginny accepts, despite tales of the Santa Compaña haunting pilgrims along the trail or the Dutchman’s talk of ghostly shipmates with messages. He wishes Rob were with them now so Daniel could bounce these latest developments off of him. He and Ginny haven’t seen his familiar painter’s hat in days now.
They follow a jumble of crooked streets that leads them to Población’s only albergue, a long one-storey red brick building with a flat roof. The building had operated as a school in the sixties and seventies and sits on a pleasant patch of grass, the remnants of an old playground set rusting out the back. After settling their gear and washing up, the two run into the Spaniard Daniel met at the hotel restaurant in Torres del Rio. He has used the albergue’s small kitchen to make pasta with the help of some others in his group. A picnic table has been set up in the schoolyard with a collection of mismatched plates and ridged plastic tumblers for wine.
“You are welcome to join us,” he says, sealing the invite with a handshake.
“We’ll be there,” Daniel says, accepting with a firm grasp on behalf of both himself and Ginny. Perhaps a little too quickly.
“Do we have to go?” Ginny asks after the Spaniard is gone. She’s rubbing her lower back with the heel of her hand. “It’s been a long day.”
“Ginny, if I am forced to eat another pilgrim menu dinner, I’ll go mental. A man can only handle so much pork and chips.”
“The ice-cream bars are good,” Ginny says, and Daniel remembers the one they shared a few days ago. Ginny’s neat little bites finishing off her half, licking what was left of the cream from her lips. But he will not be distracted. Right now, his fantasies centre around getting some good honest food with fresh ingredients. What he would give for a good curry from the Indian place back in Jersey. Homemade spaghetti will have to suffice.
“Sure, it will be good for us. To be around other people. C’mon now, Ginny.” He actually bats his steel-blue eyes at her — his best feature, according to his mother. He’s pulling out all the stops.
She rakes one hand through her hair, still wet from the shower, and looks out over the fallow fields that border the schoolyard, searching before she turns back to him and his eyes. “Okay, Daniel,” she says with a sigh, “I’ll go.”
When they sit down to dinner, he takes a quick, nervous glance around for the French-Canadian girl, but she’s not at the table. Two American women and a retired army officer from South Korea complete the guest list. The pasta has been made with ripe red tomatoes and green peppers purchased at the small tienda on the corner. It is basic, but filling. Daniel shovels it in with a force only a man in need of serious carbs can muster. When he offers to contribute some money toward the meal, none of the others will hear of it.
“That’s not the way on the Camino, my friend,” the Spaniard explains.
“Besides,” the younger of the two American women says, “the wine was only a euro a bottle. I’ll spend more on trips to the restroom than I will drinking it.” She giggles into her clear plastic cup and the red wine froths. At the price, Daniel isn’t expecting much, but is pleasantly surprised by his first glass of vino tinto, served chilled as is the custom here with fresh red wine. It’s delicious.
Ginny, on the other hand, hasn’t even bothered to serve herself any spaghetti. There is no meat in it, so that can’t be the problem. He’s about to ask her what’s wrong when his Spanish friend interrupts.
“So, do you still plan to go to Finisterre, Daniel?” The Spaniard remembers his name, while Daniel has forgotten his.
Daniel finishes chewing his latest mouthful of pasta before he replies. The others wait patiently. “I do,” he finally pronounces after a heavy swallow. He hadn’t fully decided until just now, but yes, he will go there after Santiago. He doesn’t see himself finding the right place to spread Petra’s ashes before then.
“I am glad to hear it,” the Spaniard says, his eyes lighting up. “This is the original destination of the Camino, after all.”
“Not the shrine of Saint James in Santiago?” the bespectacled American woman asks. She is considerably older than the young woman. Daniel places her at a well-kept late fifties.
“The shrines in Finisterre came long before Saint James,” the Spaniard tells her. “Like many things, Christianity has superimposed itself over other traditions. Pagans were walking the Camino a thousand years before Christ to worship the sun god at Finisterre.”
Daniel has heard some of this before, at the restaurant back in Torres del Rio, but he is enjoying the deeper details. He doesn’t know which he is more impressed by: the thought of the Camino predating Christianity; or the fact that the Spaniard knows an English word like “superimposed.”
“Why there?” the South Korean asks. He eats his spaghetti with a concentrated precision that must be a carryover from his army career. This is one of the few times he’s spoken.
“The pagan pilgrims believed the sun died at Finisterre. That the two worlds of the living and the dead came closer together there at the Costa da Morte.”
“The Coast of Death,” Daniel says, not particularly liking where this conversation is going but fascinated all the same.
“Yes. They made sacrifices there, at Ara Solis, the altar where they worshipped the dying sun god each evening to the west,” the Spaniard says, glancing around the table for reaction.
“Were they human sacrifices?” The young American girl is completely drawn in now.
“Who knows?” the Spaniard says with a wink to Daniel.
Daniel doesn’t wink back. He’s beginning to wish they would talk about something safe, like politics or religion.
“Maybe that’s what happened to that girl who went missing,” the young woman says, spilling a few drops of vino tinto on the white tablecloth. She is making good use of the one-euro-a-bottle wine. “Maybe someone took her up to Finisterre and — you know.” She makes a cutting motion, dragging one finger forcefully across the soft flesh of her neck.
“That’s ridiculous, Caleigh,” the older American woman chastises. Daniel realizes she must be the younger one’s mother. Parental wrist-slapping is distinctive in tone. “Besides, I am tired of that subject.” She turns to Daniel. “What part of Ireland are you from?” she says, smiling. “We have relatives in Derry.”
“I’m from County Limerick, in the south.” Daniel doesn’t bother correcting her geography, so relieved is he that they have found a different subject. Derry is in Northern Ireland, a country with an all too violent past that his granny had quaintly referred to as “the Troubles.” People often did not realize that this was a separate country from the Republic of Ireland, where Daniel is from. He gets tired of explaining that he didn’t grow up with bombs in his mailbox or an uncle in the IRA. “I’ve been living in New Jersey for over ten years now. Sure, Ginny is from the States as well,” he adds, hoping to pull her into the discussion.
The American woman follows his gaze to Ginny and nods.
Worrying she may misread the situation, he feels the need to explain further. “Oh, we’re not a couple or anything,” he stammers. “We came on the Camino separately, only met up on the path.” He clears his throat. “What I mean to say is I came here alone. But not alone at the moment, obviously.” He swallows what was meant to be a laugh but comes out sounding like a suppressed hiccup. “At any rate, we’re only friends.” Realizing he’s sinking in the flood of his own babbling, he tries to divert the flow of conversation elsewhere. “Ginny’s from California, of course. Where is it in California you’re from again, Ginny?”
“Orange County,” she replies, picking at her napkin where it flutters on the table in the breeze. “Originally.”
Daniel waits for something more, but Ginny doesn’t volunteer anything further. People start to look uncomfortable. Despite the noise of Caleigh slurping a long strand of spaghetti up into her mouth, Daniel feels the need to fill the silence.
“That’s right, Orange County. I was after forgetting. But sure, you live in the north of the state now. Near the prison. Tell them about where you work, Ginny. Now that’s a lark.” He smiles widely at her, his face cranking up a shade with the effort. Ginny just glares at him and says nothing. The American woman looks back and forth between the two and raises a finely tweezed brow to her daughter. Ginny casts her eyes down at the table, embarrassed. He has made a complete bollocks of this.
“This meal is wonderful, Roberto,” the retired army officer finally chimes in. “Thank you so much for making it.”
Roberto, that’s his name. Daniel remembers now. Like the Dutchman. How could he forget?
The group resumes conversation, obviously not believing Daniel’s account of Ginny and their relationship. This irks him. Even Roberto has caught Daniel stealing glimpses of his attractive walking partner across the wide-planked picnic table more than once tonight, so who does he think he’s kidding.
After dinner they offer to help with the dishes, but Roberto tells him not to worry. The rest of them clear the plates and head back to the kitchen to wash up. He feels like he and Ginny have been dismissed. The Camino can be so damn cliquey. Or maybe they didn’t want to get involved in what appeared to be a lover’s spat. As the group walks away, the young American woman lets out a raucous laugh before being silenced by her mother. She trips up the front steps in her flip-flops and through the albergue screen door.
“Were you not after feeling well?” Daniel asks Ginny once the rest are out of earshot. He is wondering about the untouched spaghetti, her lack of interaction with the group.
“No,” she says, walking back toward the picnic table. “I just don’t like people knowing where I’m from.”
“You didn’t mind the Dutchman knowing.”
“He’s different.”
Daniel is about to ask why when a disheveled old woman in oversized army boots catches them both off guard. She has walked in from the street to the schoolyard, wearing a long, stretched-out wool cardigan over a blue polyester night dress. Her hair is flat on one side as if slept on, and she doesn’t appear to have all her teeth.
“Cigar-ette?” she says, as her upper lip pulls up in a nervous tic.
“Pardon?” Daniel asks, although he’s heard her perfectly well.
“Cigar-ette, por favor.” She brings her crooked fingers up to her face in pantomime. “Me estoy muriendo.”
“What does that mean?” Daniel asks Ginny.
“She says she’s dying,” Ginny tells him with a smirk.
“Is she?”
“For a smoke, it seems.”
“That much I gathered.”
“Cigar-ette?” The woman comes closer to them now, harmless but still demanding with her one English word. She coughs then spits out phlegm on the grass. Charming.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel says. “I don’t smoke.” He shrugs his arms out from his sides in what he hopes is the cross-cultural sign for “Ain’t got none.”
Ginny gets a bar of chocolate out of her waist pack and offers it, but the woman seems put off by this and backs away, going out to the street again through the rear garden gate.
“Well, that was interesting.”
“I hope the old girl didn’t escape from somewhere,” Daniel says. He watches the torn hem of her nightgown drag on the pavement as she disappears around a corner.
“I kind of hope she has,” Ginny says, refilling their wine from what’s left on the table.
She moves down the grass yard to the playground. Daniel follows. They each take a seat on one of the bleached wooden boards attached to rusty chains that pass for swings. Ginny leans back and pumps with her legs. Hinges squeak in protest as she goes higher and higher, still managing to hold onto her wine in the plastic glass. Daniel tries copying her and ends up watering the playground dirt with half of his vino tinto. After a few minutes, she slows down using the heels of her hiking boots as a brake. They make an uneven drumbeat on the ground.
“It seemed very important to you to explain we weren’t together tonight,” she says, as her swing arc diminishes.
He starts to slow down as well, but doesn’t answer her.
“Are we, Daniel? Together?”
“Well, we’re walking together, of course,” he says.
“We are, but I think you know what I mean.”
He does know what she means. He lets the swing come to a complete stop before responding. “I reckon I’m just not ready for that at the moment.” He takes a sip of what’s left of his wine with an arm curled around the swing chain.
“Just like you’re not ready to move back to the farm in Ireland?” she asks, tilting her head, her swing now stationary as well.
“That’s a whole different matter,” he says. Damn it, why did he tell her about that. Now he’ll have both her and Angela inquiring after his delaying tactics, bidets and all.
“Is it?” she asks, gazing out to the west, where the sun is starting to set. It glows orange between the tan adobe dwellings of the village.
“I have some things to take care of first. The house and my business,” he says. “Ah, shite.”
“What?”
“I was supposed to call my partner’s wife.” He’d totally forgotten about Cynthia and Gerald and their whole little drama. Well, the hell with it anyway. Even if Gerald wants him to sell, he’s decided he’s not going to. His partner will need to find some other way to pay his gambling debts. Serves him right after what he tried to get away with. “But the business isn’t the only thing, I reckon.”
“I gathered,” Ginny says. She leans back in the swing again. “How long has it been since Petra died?”
“Over a year.”
She looks over at him, but doesn’t comment.
He crumples up the plastic tumbler and drops it on the ground for throwing out later. “You don’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I don’t rightly know,” he says. He toes the cup on the ground with his boot, pushing it around in the dirt. “I suppose, it never seemed entirely real to me.” Despite the inevitable lead up to Petra’s death, Daniel had a hard time with the everyday truth of it. “Back home, I’d often wake up expecting to see her in the bed,” he says, recalling the sunlight falling through the bedroom window, his rolling over to wrap his arm around her and finding nothing but the cold side of the mattress. “It felt like a mistake, a trick.” He kicks the plastic cup onto the grass. “As if she might leap up from under the bedsheets and yell ‘Ta-da’ at any moment.”
“Like the dove pan,” Ginny says, putting her wine down for a moment, twisting in the swing toward then away from him.
“Aye, like the dove pan.” He takes his hands from the cold metal of the chains, rubs them together.
“I was thinking maybe since you hadn’t been there when she …” Ginny hesitates. “Well, you didn’t get to say goodbye and all. Maybe that makes things harder.”
“Sure, there’s that,” Daniel says, keeping up the lie. He had been there when she died, in the most sinister of ways. But it was more than that — something he can barely admit to himself, let alone to Ginny. Instead he concentrates on things that might have a chance of being forgiven.
“I don’t think I ever got around to imagining a life without her,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. The sun has almost entirely set now, the temperature dropping with it. “That’s why it’s hard, the idea of you and me. It feels like I’m after cheating.” He thinks of the heat of that kiss by the river and buries his fists deeper in his jacket. “It’s as if she’s still here.”
“She is still here,” Ginny says. “She’s in a bag in your backpack.”
“I reckon you know what I’m saying.”
“I guess I do.” She pauses, draining the last of the wine and dropping the cup. “But you know, Daniel, that she isn’t really here, right?”
Daniel feels his pride bristle. “I know that, Ginny. I’m not daft.”
“It’s just you keeping her here.”
“Says the woman with a dead addict after her.”
“That’s a cheap shot.” She pulls her fleece sleeves down over her hands from underneath her jacket. “You’re not the only one feeling guilty here.”
Daniel remembers their discussion beneath Da Vinci’s portrait of Mary Magdalene. “Sure, you’re not talking about when you and your friend were kids? What harm, Ginny, but that wasn’t your fault.”
