The azucena

fiona vigo marshall     

She was from some sardine village on the ruthless, sparkling Med, one of those dustbowls full of half-built ghettos for the English where even now you can get a house cheap without running water, and still missed the smell of fish in the air. Down here on the marina, there was just a pervading dankness, and whiffs of raw, eerie mud coming up from the river. The tide was coming in, swallowing up the mud flats and forming a thin line of water through the marshes. Azu stomped on ahead through the gathering October afternoon with its scrubby grass and red haws, past the conglomeration of industrial huts and portakabins that made up the waterfront. The two schoolgirls who trailed behind in their uniforms were at eleven slightly taller than her, with her determined, bow-legged stride.

‘All right, girls?’ she called back. ‘Come on, chop-chop! Before it gets dark!’

Azu stood waiting for them, hand curled on one hip. Her husband had named the boat after her, so long ago that it fell into the region of myth, not history. Yet there it was, down the swaying, rickety walkway, beneath the shade of the Medway Bridge with its eight lanes of traffic: The Azucena.

The girl with the dun-blonde ponytail hastened forward.

‘A boat. A real houseboat!’

Azu shook her head at her daughter’s friend, in foreboding rather than welcome.

‘Ah! If I had a house like yours, Kate! I’d give anything. But there. Isn’t meant to be at the minute. Your mum, now, Kate, you’d never find her on a boat — no, no. Not like Carla and me, stuck here. No, your mum’s a clever old stick, int-she, a clever old stick—’

Her lisp, from the sides of her mouth rather than the front, might have been a lingering remnant of her Spanish origin, that and the lustrous wave of black hair on her rather large head. Also something about the confident curl of her hands, that were like capable lilies, opening out white and elegant to grasp the air. As if she had never quite forgotten that azucena means lily. Otherwise she could have been native to the place, to the crevices and precipices of chalk tumbling down to the dull hiatus of the water, to the big main roads and their ghosts that encircled this little encampment. If Dickens had found her, he might have given her just such a tagline — clever old shtick — clever old shtick. But her shortness was Spanish; too young for the starved Civil War generation, she had all the same inherited hardship, it had become genetically encoded in her. She had come to the UK at twelve , in forgotten circumstances. Now The Azucena, trim, green and peeling, was home.

‘Home, sweet home.’

The girls gazed at the houseboat: Kate in awe, Carla with indifference. Fresh from the overheated classroom, they looked flushed against the pallid air. Bristling with pride - it was not every day Carla had a friend round — Azu did the honours.

‘Swing a leg, swing a leg. Hope you don’t get sea-sick—’

She flung a short leg over the rail, straddling the uncertain, heaving void, where you might pitch into the black water beneath. For both Azu and girls it was a bit of a stretch. Then the boat lurched beneath them and they were on deck, rocking gently. A small front door was wedged into the green planks that made up the front, with plastic windows either side and alcoves holding potted geraniums and Spanish plates, sombre yellows and greens and oranges, fish and fruit. At which Azu waved her improbable, lily-fingered, white hand.

‘The genuine article. La ceramica. Makes me homesick.’

Tears filled her eyes. Ask her to go back, though, to the bad-place town of narrow streets and little, under-nourished, pigeon-breasted men stepping out in their beige shirts, and hard-faced matrons with their shopping baskets, where once a year there was a festival to whatever pagan goddess kept the sea in order, disguised as the Virgin, and every so often someone threw herself off a balcony on a stifling summer’s night—

‘Funny, int-it, Kate, your mum and me both being Spanish. I’ve got a lot in common with your mum, you know. Shared heritage. Ay Seňor, if only I had her sense!’

Kate considered. Her mind struggled to make any connection between Azu and her mother. Besides, Mum had been born and brought up in London, speaking mainly English, her acquaintance with Spain limited to summer holidays. Her family were from the north of Spain, of a pragmatic, business-like, rather dour race; not like Azu, who had blossomed in the south, speaking a different language, smelling different flowers. Azu’s father, she had it on the best authority, had been a blacksmith, a thing of glamour and black flame impossible to imagine in her own family dynamic.

Azu flung the door open.

‘Aqui es tu casa. Come in, make yourself at home.’

They entered. It was dark and narrow, like another life. Azu hurried to raise the green blinds. It was all in miniature. A neat little worktop with a tiny microwave into which you could just fit one ready meal. A kettle giving two cups of hot water, as if for a dolls’ tea party. A narrow, hard sofa which turned into Azu’s bed at night. A box TV. A dark-red, ornate, cast iron stove of real beauty. Everything was exquisitely tidy.

The only door, at the back, led into Carla’s room, which was pink and held a slim bed with a few ornaments either side and clothes drawers beneath. Two people could fit into the room if one perched on the bed. Enchanted, Kate duly sat and gazed out of the window, which took up most of the side, and out over the baleful river to the line of low, dark shrubbery on the opposite bank some three hundred feet away. She would be tall; already, tucking her legs in beneath her, she felt too big for these surroundings.

‘How amazing to wake up and look out onto water!’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I’d love to be rocked to sleep.’

’’Tisn’t always in water. It often just sits in the marsh. Only floats when there’s lots of rain or if the tide comes in.’

Azu was surveying them from the doorway, hand on hip, with a mixture of pride and dismay.

‘Yes, it’s cosy all right. Oh yes — hard work to keep it tidy — but life’s impossible if you don’t. When Dean was here—’

Again her eyes filled with tears. Both girls’ faces froze, in silent prayer that she would not break down completely.

‘But there—’ running a finger beneath her glasses — ‘he found a house. Don’t blame him for legging it, really. Pity of it is, was his idea to live in a boat. Your mum now, Kate, she’d never put up with it.’

Carla gave a rough laugh.

‘Yeah, he’s the one wanted to live on a boat in the first place!’

The girl was jeering and unimaginative. Already she had all but forgotten her father.

‘Don’t you like living on a boat? On a boat?’

‘S’all right.’

‘Yes. He named the boat after me, then did a runner. Bastard. Found another woman, he did, a woman with a house — lived on dry land, she did—’

‘Oh, stop going on about a house, Mum.’

‘Well, I want a bathroom! Marooned here… and winter coming on again…’

‘Um - I need the loo, please,’ said Kate, reminded.

‘We have to go out again.’

Back up the wooden walkway to the shared facilities; toilets with a primary school gap under the door, and showers, bleak, bare cubicles. The wind from the marshes found you everywhere, ankles, back of the neck and wet vulva. Carla’s hand came under the door, holding paper.

‘We have to bring our own.’

‘What if you forget? In the middle of the night?’

‘That’s why Mum wants to move into a house.’

‘Can you get one?’

‘She’s on a list with the council. Or a flat. Anything, she says, so long as it’s got a bathroom.’

‘So can’t you ever have a bath?’

‘No. Just showers.’

‘That must be cold in winter.’

‘Tis.’ Still addressing the locked door, she added, ‘Mum had a bath at Jessica’s house on Monday.’

‘I heard something about it.’

It was no news to Kate; it was all round school, how Azu, towel over arm and soap in hand, had marched Carla into Jessica’s house and taken possession of the bathroom, without invitation.

‘Wasn’t Jessica’s mum out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was she cross when she found out?’

‘Don’t know.’

Jessica’s mother was some kind of distant cousin to Azu; but even so. The sense of outrage had reverberated through the village. Kate felt guiltily that she ought to offer a bath; but she didn’t want to. She trusted her own mother would hold firm. Imagine, just imagine, Azu and Carla arriving to stay, with suitcases, moving in! It was a real possibility. Only give them an opening, and they’d be in.

‘What’s that rustling? Are there rats?’

‘Sometimes, at night. And first thing in the morning sometimes. Have you finished? Hurry up. Let’s go and play in the wreck.’

‘I want to get changed out of my uniform first.’

‘Well, hurry up!’

The wreck was out of bounds, half sunk into the mud and held by a massive rusty anchor. Changed into leggings and hoodies, the girls approached cautiously, looking round. Nothing stirred, the low river held a last afternoon sheen, the banks of mud rose opposite, where four boats stood nose to tail. To the left, the motorway bridge reared tall, the traffic so far above as to be like the constant passing of angels.

A man appeared on the river path, a tall, stooped figure with cap and pipe, walking a golden retriever.

‘That’s Alfie,’ said Carla, sotto voce. ‘Big Alfie. There’s Big Alfie and Little Alfie. They own those two horses that graze on the corner by the school.’

‘Oh, do they? But the horses are the same size.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re not one big and one little.’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. The horses are retired. They used to pull their scrap cart. They’re called Elijah and Ezekiel. Eli and Zek for short.’

‘Can you stroke them?’

‘You can do, if you’re quick. They’re not really that kind of horse. Mum says they bite. I don’t think they do, though. She just don’t trust them.’

Alfie approached, he of the inexplicable horses, nodded good afternoon. Kate dismissed the thought of asking him for more of an explanation. The girls waited until he had gone by; looked round again.

‘Get the plank,’ said Carla.

An old plank lay on the shore. They flung it across the mud and ran across, one by one, to haul themselves awkwardly up the anchor and on board. Kate looked in dismay at the rust stains on her hoodie and hands.

‘Quick, down into the hold!’ said Carla. ‘In case anyone saw us.’

There was a wooden step-ladder, down which they clattered, breathing fast.

 ‘Now we’re marooned,’ said Carla with satisfaction.

‘Aren’t you marooned enough as it is?’ said Kate, looking round. The hold was musty and dark and felt as it were going to fall in on you any moment.

‘I can’t see very much,’ she added, critical.

‘I usually bring a torch. Only I left it on the boat. I sleep with it by my bed.’

Kate wiped her hands down her sides again, but the smell and brown of rust remained. Mum would be unimpressed.

‘What are we going to do now? Just sit here?’

‘Isn’t anything else to do. Except watch TV.’

‘Well, let’s play Robinson Crusoe.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, he’s this sailor who’s marooned on an island…’

But Carla was indifferent. She didn’t know or care that marooned could trace a corrupted descent from the Spanish cimarrón, with an etymology of living wild. Her heritage meant nothing to her. Cimarrón, meaning gone astray, feral, runaway, untamed; believed, probably falsely, to come from Old Spanish cimarra; thicket in turn from cima, summit, peak, also falsely traced to the Latin cyma,  with its implications of escaping to freedom in the mountains. Living wild. Poor Azu had tired of it long ago. And to Kate, already the wild was dull.