Medusa

‘He’s Welsh, is he?’ I was still looking down at the photograph, puzzled by something in that hard stare that seemed vaguely familiar. Then, because of the silence, I looked up. ‘A friend of yours?’

He seemed to have some difficulty answering that, his eyes slipping away from me. ‘I’ve met him,’ he muttered vaguely, picking up the charts and tucking the roll under his arm. ‘Let me know, will you, if he turns up.’ And he added, ‘You can keep the photograph.’

I asked him where I could get in touch with him and he scribbled his address on a sheet of paper I tore out of our receipts book. It was in Fornells, a private address, not a hotel. And he had written his name — Gareth Lloyd Jones. ‘Perhaps we could have a drink together sometime,’ he suggested. Then he was walking out with an easy, almost casual wave of the hand, all the hesitancy gone as though relieved to get away from me and out into the sunshine.

I watched him drive off and then my gaze returned to the photograph. Soo called down that coffee was ready. Weekdays coffee was all we had in the morning. Sunday was the only day we treated ourselves to an English break fast. I went back upstairs, and when I showed her the photograph, she said without a moment’s hesitation, ‘I’m sure he didn’t have a beard.’

I took it to the window, looking at it in the clear sunlight, trying to visualise the man clean-shaven. ‘The eyes were different, too,’ she said, joining me at the window, the bulge of her pregnancy showing through the looseness of her dressing gown.

‘Who is he?’

‘Es Grau, don’t you remember?’ And she added, ‘You’re not concentrating.’

‘How the hell can I?’ I gave her bottom a smack, caught hold of one buttock and pulled her close so that her stomach was hard against me. ‘Any kicks yet?’

She thrust herself clear, turning quickly and pouring the coffee. ‘He was in that little bar-restaurant where they haul the boats up. It was raining and we had a cup of coffee and a Quinta there after we’d looked at that villa out near S’Albufera. Now do you remember? He was with two or three Menorquins.’

She poured me my coffee and I stood sipping it, staring down at the photograph. I remembered the man now, but only vaguely. I had been more interested in the other two. One was Ismail Fuxá. I had never met him, but I had recognised him instantly from pictures in the local press. He was a member of the Partido Socialista, on the extreme left of the party and very active politically. My attention, however, had been focused on the little man sitting with his back to the window. I was almost certain he was the fellow I had chased one evening out near Binicalaf Nou. It had been dusk and I had stopped off to check one of the two villas we had under care in that neighbourhood. As I let myself in through the front door he had jumped out of a side window. He had had to run right past me and I had had a brief glimpse of his face looking scared. I went after him of course, but he had a motor bike parked down the dirt road and he’d got away from me.

When I returned to the villa and went into the big downstairs room I found he had sprayed URBANIZAR ES DESTRUIER right across one wall, and below that the letters SALV … I knew the rest of it by heart, so many villas had been sprayed with it — SALVEMO MENORCA. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I remember now. But it was months ago, last autumn.’ I was thinking of all that had happened since, the orchestrated build-up of hostility by the separatists. ‘That was the first,’ I added, gazing out at the limpid harbour water where a cruise ship showed white against the far shore.

‘The first what?’ Her back was turned as she filled her cup.

‘The first of our villas to be daubed.’

‘They’ve only sprayed two of them, and they’re not ours anyway. We only look after them.’ She turned, cup in hand, pushing her dog out of the way with a bare foot. It was a basenji so we called it Benjie and it slept on her bed, a pleasant little fellow all dressed in café-au-lait with a long, serious head, a perpetual frown, spindly legs and a curlycue of a tail. It was barkless and I could never understand the purpose of a dog that was a virtual mute. ‘I’ve got something in mind,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you about it.’

I knew what was coming then and turned my back on her, gazing out of the window again. ‘Just look at it!’

‘Look at what? You haven’t been listening.’

‘The morning,’ I said. ‘The sun on the water, everything crystal bright.’ And I began to sing, ‘Oh, what a bootiful mornin’, Oh, what a bootiful day … Remember that moonlit evening in the courtyard of your mother’s house, the old gramophone?’ I tried to grab her, thinking to take her mind off her obsession with property. But she evaded me, eyes gone black and suddenly wide, hands across her belly. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Finish it, why don’t you?’