‘Bolivia’ by Julie Cruickshank

Of all my dead it’s you
who come to me unfinished
– Adrienne Rich

Afterwards – for quite a while – I worked in those types of jobs where you pretend to yourself that you make a difference.

There was a woman who attended one of the day centres; straw-thin, irritating. She mixed up her words all the time. (I was a judge-remarkable bitch.) We took her group to Bray one Saturday and sat in a line on the stony beach. Cocooned in a puffa jacket, she leant on my arm for too long, with her mean grip and her scratchy voice. She had so many stories: lost days and weeks, collapsed veins and blunt needles and children who had given up crying left on couches to fall asleep in their stinking nappies. The usual stuff. Her breath was sour. You think I’m a bad person, she said, but I was totally out of it. I was in complete, utter, Bolivia.

You might have liked that story. I would have included it in a letter. Tried to make it funnier than it was. Lots of exclamation marks.

Letters were your thing. Eighteen months before that conversation on Bray beach I opened a tightly packed Airmail I had saved especially for the overnight bus journey from northern Chile to La Paz. Your handwriting hadn’t changed since school; it see-sawed between child and woman, spiky, spidery, determined. The bus was nearly empty: just me, a couple of Israelis with a crate of beer, an American in his twenties and a retired French couple in expensive rain gear who sat upright holding hands. You had sent me a stained beer mat from the Cottage Bar – I tried, but couldn’t smell the smoke and beer – and a newspaper clipping about a Tokyo department store that had nailed a stuffed Santa Claus to a crucifix and suspended it over the main entrance. I could see you scribbling away on a rickety table. I stuck the clipping in my copy of Middlemarch, which had been my favourite book at college. (Earnest and boring was your verdict on Dorothea. I took it personally, though I never said.) Later I took it out and used it to start a conversation with the curly-haired American whose legs were crammed up against the seat in front of him, and we flirted for a while before he left the bus at the Bolivian border. I described him in a letter to you. Please send me more of those stories! The Israelis offered me a beer. The road twisted high into the darkening mountains and we finished the crate.

At dawn I was prodded awake. The French man stood above me, eyes shining, hands gripping the headrests either side of him. Wake! I sat up. Around us were mountains higher than I’d ever seen, pristine white peaks, the sky slashed with streaks of tangerine and pink. Down the back the two Israelis lay stretched across several seats, snoring. I leant my head on the glass and tried to focus on the view, but my eyes kept closing, and for a while I drifted between wakefulness and half-sleep, until finally I gave way to my hangover and lay back down. When the bus stopped in La Paz, the French couple got off without saying goodbye. I wrote to you about the missed sunrise. I should be annoyed at myself, but you know it all gets a bit samey after a while.

I bought the ring – your ring – in La Paz, from a woman sitting on a stool at the side of a steep winding street. It was dusk. Strings of bare bulbs looped around wooden poles flicked on and off and on again. The woman was tiny and leathery. Beside her was a young man, about seventeen, propped up against the wall into a sitting position. His limbs were contorted and rigid and his head lolled to one side. He was naked, except for underpants, and he dribbled a long stream of yellowy spit which she wiped away with a rag.

The rings were set out on a velvet mat. Midnight blue, I’m nearly sure. I chose a silver ring with a turquoise stone. I got the price down to five dollars. When she gave me the ring, she folded her hand around mine. The surprise of skin so smooth it felt polished. I pulled my hand away as quickly as I could. On the journey from Chile I had sat in a bus station for six hours waiting for a connection. I watched from an open window as a bowler-hatted woman lifted her skirts and squatted right in front of me. At first people avoided the lump of shit, but gradually they stopped seeing it, and dogs came and sniffed and ran away, and as the afternoon passed it was dispersed onto shoes and into the grooves of bicycle tyres.

The last time I saw you, I told you this, and I probably embellished it – hammed it up, even; made the sky threatening and the ring woman witch-like, described the feel of the ridged silver cutting my palm, maybe even intimated something about a bad smell. There was nothing I could exaggerate about the crooked boy. I thought my stories might distract you, but you were already in a place I couldn’t reach, holed up in your brother’s apartment, under siege from armies of malicious spirits and dangerous souls. You were suddenly, terribly, thin. You spoke in extremes: of good and evil, treachery and purity, and at times you faltered mid-sentence, looking around the room as if you had forgotten where you were. There were candles on every surface, the curtains pulled tight, your Tarot cards splayed across the coffee table. Tea? You started towards the kitchen and then retraced your steps, sat back down and arranged the cards again, urgent, whispering to yourself. The High Priestess. The Chariot. The Tower. The Lovers. I told myself that you wanted me gone, you were too tired to talk. Forget about the tea. A few weeks with the parents, the sea air, some rest. That would help, I heard myself say as I got up, fixing my clothes into place. You’re going already? Nice skirt, you added. Are you going out?

At the door you were nervous. You barely left room for me to squeeze past into the corridor. I heard the lift crank into action from four floors below. Something about work in the morning, an early start. That’s what I said, I’m nearly sure. Your hand was already on the lock. Give me something of yours to keep, you said. It was almost a command. I twisted the ring off my finger, reluctant. I had a long list of things you’d borrowed and left behind in cafes, libraries, trains. I had yelled at you only once. Outside Keogh’s, in the drizzle, the murky late afternoon. You’d left my grandfather’s jumper behind you. We had gone back to look. It was too loud, you said, eyes blinking, rubbing your forehead until the skin reddened. There was some weird guy staring at me.

That time I couldn’t hold it in. There’s always some bullshit excuse. Always something.

*

Upstairs, in the spare room, I keep a box of old letters. Whenever I’m cleaning, or moving stuff, I take one of yours out and sit on the edge of the bed. I never get past the first few lines. There is always some distraction, usually the kids shouting from downstairs. (I have two boys now. I always imagined I’d have a girl. I might have given her your name.) The day I arrived in La Paz, I’d collected a bundle of letters from the Poste restante and sat on a bench under a tree with a bottle of beer. I got another backpacker to take a picture of me, my hair in plaits, hiking boots unlaced. I look slim and strong, faintly sunburned. You had done the Tarot for me, long distance and had sent me a battered card with a miniscule handwritten message around the margin. Don’t panic babes, the Hanged Man does NOT necessarily mean death!

The ring stayed on your finger for ten days, as you were passed between tides and swept along by Atlantic currents. Your flesh swelled around it, kept it snug. The turquoise stone had stayed put; a miracle, your mother claimed. Early on the tenth morning a man walking his dog found you, crumpled and small at the water’s edge. I imagined the dog leaping, excited. Above you, those huge Mayo skies. Made it by the skin of her teeth, a man falling off a bar stool told me. Ten days. The tides change, and then it’s too late. I thought of us belting across Front Square with an overdue essay. The times I bundled a rucksack through the window of a departing train.

At the wake I joined the line of mourners that stretched through the front hall of the house, past the stairs, into the kitchen. Mostly locals: men and women wearing winter coats in the middle of June. They remembered you as a slip of a thing. Always curious. Your bag flung over the end of the banisters. The hush that came as the line edged its way into the sitting room. The sound of feet on floorboards, a throat cleared, the scraping of chairs. Your mother smoothed your blue-black hair and nudged a strand back into place. Half of your face was covered by a puffy white muslin cloth. She asked me if I wanted my ring back. The thought appalled me; I would have to mind it for the rest of my life, preserve it in a special box, watch faces grow silent as I told the story over and over. I would see my fingers thicken and my skin grow slack every time I slipped it on. In the heat of the room, the muslin cloth appeared to melt into the space where your face had been.

In the pub, all of us – not just me – swapped cobbled-together stories about you, sweaty in our barely black tights and borrowed wool mix suits. I admit I was the loudest. One thing of mine she managed not to lose! An aunt of yours cupped my elbow at the bar; my other hand held a tenner aloft, waved it at a frazzled barman. The aunt would not go away. Aren’t you the best friend? Did you not notice she wasn’t herself?

This is the last bit of the story. After I paid my five dollars – and wiped my hand on my jeans – I stood in a doorway and watched the old woman roll up her velvet mat and fold it away under her skirts. She hauled her son into a standing position, and then bent forward and draped him over her shoulder, like a roll of carpet. The spasms came in waves, rippling through his limbs. I followed them as she wove her way through the crowds and down the hill. His body nearly obscured hers. It would make an incredible photograph, I thought: the gleam of his skin, the woman’s bowler hat, the fuchsia and scarlet stripes of her skirts, the unseeing crowds. I managed to get my camera out of my rucksack, but I couldn’t focus the lens; it was too dark and the street too crowded.

The street ended at a busy junction. I was a few metres behind her when she turned and looked straight at me. The blush spread from my throat. I tried to back away, but bodies bumped against me almost pushing me towards her. Barely moving her lips she spat something in my direction, something strong and low and full of rage. Even then I knew it would stick.

*

Something else. For you, there will always be something else.

You put the ring on your finger. I love turquoise, you said. I’ll mind it. A bowed head, a flash of blue-black in the dim.

You’re one of the good ones, I think you said, just before the door closed. But I might have made that up.

Afterwards I wondered if you had been trying to make it easier. And it was such a relief – exhilarating to be honest – to be free of you and your garbled talk of omens and fate, judgement and reckoning; to hear the lift doors hiss shut, step into the Temple Bar evening, the mild air on my bare shoulders, to dive into the traffic on Dame Street, swift and sure-footed. I was late, just ten minutes, but late all the same. In the small, mirrored hallway I stopped to catch my breath, pulling the clip from my hair, swiping my lips with gloss. The brass handle was sticky with fingerprints. I listened, relishing the din, the roar of voices from the high-ceilinged room behind the door.

The place was full of early evening drinkers, stocky young men in suits. I pushed my way in, past the panels of swirly brown glass, joined the heave of bodies that first closed around me and then seemed to carry me forward, leaving me at the bar. The cool of the marble counter, my arm not touching his, not yet. I was suddenly shy, awkward with anticipation. I had to shout to make myself heard. Order me a pint; I’m dying for a drink.

Later in the evening, after the conversation had dulled, and we both wanted to be gone, he rested his elbows on the bar and let his head fall forward. Go on then, tell me about Bolivia. I don’t remember what I said but it was probably something about long bus journeys, mountains and amazing skies, the incredible poverty. Eventually, I made my excuses and left. On the bus home, my hands gripped the seat bar in front of me. There was still the trace of a tan, now made darker by a band of pale skin.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Originally from Galway, Julie Cruickshank lives and works in Dublin. She completed the Stinging Fly six month workshop in 2016 and was chosen as a mentee (literary fiction) in the 2017 Words Ireland Mentorship Programme.