The Peacock Emporium

  'You can't believe the lollies they sell now. When I was her age you were lucky to get a Strawberry Mivvi, or a Rocket. Do you remember those? With the different-coloured stripes? Now it's all Mars bar lollies, Bounty this and Cornetto that. Unbelievable. And more than a quid each. Still, they're so enormous you wouldn't need lunch as well.'

  She moved to the till, almost unconsciously sweeping crumbs from the tabletop as she moved to collect stray receipts. 'We got you a Crunchie one. Did you know they did Crunchie ones? That's what me and Emma decided you'd like best.'

  'Thanks,' said Suzanna, her face buried in her folder of invoices. 'Can you stick it in the fridge?' She had been staring at them for almost twenty minutes now, unsure why she had got them out in the first place. Her father's visit had unbalanced her, sucked out her drive and enthusiasm.

  'Don't leave it for long. It'll melt in there.' Jessie moved towards the tables scanning them for empty cups. 'Anyone been in?'

  'No one special.'

  That was the maddening thing about crying. You could do it for a few minutes, and your skin, your nose would still display the tell-tale signs up to half an hour later.

  Jessie's glance might have settled on her a fraction of a second longer than it would otherwise have done. 'I had an idea while I was out. About Arturro,' she said.

  'Oh?'

  'I'm going to get him together with Liliane.'

  'What?'

  'I've had this idea, see. Tell me what you think . . .'

  Suzanna could hear the sound of a cloth being run under a tap, as Jessie chattered on.

  She spoke into her folder. 'You know what, Jess? What I think is that people should just be left alone.'

  'Yes, but I think Arturro and Liliane have spent too long by themselves. It's become such a habit with them that they're both too frightened to break it.'

  'Perhaps they're happier like that.'

  'You don't really think so.'

  Oh, go away, thought Suzanna, exhaustedly. Stop trying to convince me I'm someone I'm not. Stop trying to turn everyone into shinier, happier versions of themselves. Not everyone sees things like you do. She said nothing.

  'Suzanna, they're perfect for each other. I think they'd see that, if someone just gave them a jump-start.'

  There was a short silence, then the sound of Jessie moving across to the shelves. 'It's all right, you know. You don't have to join in. I just wanted to tell you what I'm doing so you don't give the game away.' There was no rancour in her voice.

  'I won't.'

  Jessie stared at her for a minute. 'Why don't you take a break? Go and have a walk. It's such a beautiful day outside.'

  'Look, I'm fine, Jessie. Just give me a break, will you?' It came out more sharply than she'd intended. She caught the hurt in Jessie's expression, which was immediately disguised under an understanding smile.

  'Oh, okay, you're right. I'll go,' Suzanna said, grabbing her wallet, feeling perversely resentful that she was being made to feel guilty yet again. 'Look, I'm sorry - take no notice of me. It's just hormones or something.' And then hated herself for using that as an excuse.

  She walked round the square for almost twenty-five minutes: it was market day, and she found she could meander in the shade between the tightly packed stalls, savouring the brief period of invisibility, eyeing the cheap imported confectionery, the wholefood stall, the timeless arrangements of the greengrocers, while simultaneously fighting the inner voice reminding her that London markets had been so much more interesting, so much more vibrant, so much more excitingly stocked.

  It's never going to work, she admitted to herself, as she wandered past the reconstituted bones, kilos of collated seeds and doggie chews that made up the pet stall. It doesn't matter what I do here. However successful the shop is, I'm always going to wish that we lived somewhere else. I'm always going to resent being stuck in the shadow of the Fairley-Hulmes. And even though I never wanted to come back here in the first place, Neil and Dad, the entire family, will simply see it as evidence that here is something else I can't stick at.

  Suzanna wondered, as she occasionally did, whether she would have felt the same way if her mother had lived. Sometimes she wondered if she felt this way precisely because her mother hadn't. 'Do you want something, love?'

  'Oh. No. Thank you.'

  She shoved her hands into her pockets and moved on, the internal lightness she had felt at the start of the day having turned into something dull, leaden. Perhaps Neil was right. Perhaps she should just give in and have a baby. At least she would be doing the one thing everyone expected of her. She would probably love it when it came. Most people did, didn't they? It wasn't as if anything else had made her happy.

  If it's my destiny, my biology, she asked herself, walking slowly back towards her shop, why, whenever I think about it, does every bone in my body scream against it?

  'You know what you should do?'

  Suzanna closed her eyes, and opened them slowly. She had told herself firmly that, with only two hours before closing time, she wasn't going to take out any more of her bad mood on Jessie. Even a Jessie sporting a pair of child's angel wings and balancing a pair of frankly ridiculous pink sunglasses on her head. 'What?' she said evenly.

  'I was thinking about something Emma said. About drawings.'

  'You think I should get people to do drawings?' Suzanna, refilling sugar bowls, struggled to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

  'No. But I was thinking about what we said earlier, about getting people involved with the shop, building up regulars. Because that's what you're going to need around here. You could have a sort of Regular of the Week.'

  'You're joking?'

  'No, I'm not. Look at what you've put on the walls - the old sheet music and the wills you pasted up. Every time someone's come in this afternoon they've stopped to read the wills, right?'

  It had been one of her better ideas. The bundle of yellowed, calligraphied wills had been on a skip in London; she had kept them in a folder for years waiting for a chance to use them as wallpaper.

  'And once they've spent that long in the shop, they've ended up buying something, right?'

  'And?'

  'So you do something similar in the window. But you do it about someone who comes in the shop. People are nosy around here, they like to talk, they like to know about each other's lives. So you do a little display on, say, Arturro. I don't know, a little written thing about his life in Italy, how he came to have the deli. Or perhaps just take one thing from his life - the best or worst day he can remember - and do a display round it. People would stop to read it and if they're vain, like most of them are, they might even want one of their own.'

  Suzanna fought the urge to tell Jessie that, the way she felt right now, the shop might not be around for long. 'I don't think people will want to put their life in a window.'

  'You might not. But you're not like most people.'

  Suzanna looked up sharply. Jessie's face was guileless.

  'It'll bring more people in. It'll get them interested in the shop. I bet I could get people to do it - just let me try it.'

  'I don't see how it could work. I mean, what would you do with Arturro? He doesn't say more than two words at a time, and I don't want the shop window filled with salami.'

  'Just let me try it.'

  'And everyone in this town seems to know all there is to know about each other anyway.'

  'I'll do it myself. And if you don't think it's working, I'll stop. It's not going to cost you anything.'

  Suzanna grimaced. Why does everyone's life have to be on show here? she thought crossly. Why does everyone have to interfere? Life in this town would be so much more bearable if people were allowed just to get on with things in private.

  Jessie moved in front of her, her smile broad and sympathetic. Her wire wings bounced jauntily behind her. 'I'll show you how it can work. Look, the next person who walks in here, I'll persuade them to let me do it to them. I promise. You'll find out all sorts you didn't
know.'

  'You reckon.'

  'Go on, it'll be fun.'

  'Oh, God, if it's Mrs Creek, we'll have no room left in the window.'

  As Suzanna reached for the empty milk carton, the door swung open. The two women looked almost guiltily at each other. Jessie hesitated, then smiled, a broad, complicit smile.

  The man glanced at them, as if unsure whether to enter.

  'Would you like a coffee? We're still serving.'

  He was as dark as the Italians but taller, and he wore the discomfited expression of someone who considered that a warm day in England qualified as cold weather. He was dressed in the blue scrubs of the local hospital beneath an old leather jacket, and his face, which was long and angular, was almost immobile, as if he were too tired to move it.

  Suzanna realised she was staring and looked abruptly at her feet.

  'You do espresso?' His accent was foreign, but not Italian. He glanced up at the board, then back at the two women, trying to gauge the reasons for the smaller one's barely suppressed merriment, his unwitting role in the strange atmosphere.

  'Oh, yes,' said Jessie, beaming at Suzanna and then at him. She grabbed a cup and placed it, with something of a flourish, under the spout of the espresso machine, motioning to him to sit down. 'In fact, if you're prepared to spare me a few minutes, I reckon you can have this one on me.'

  Eleven

  The peacock bass is an aggressive, belligerent fish. Despite its deceptive iridescent beauty, it is mean enough to straighten a hook and bend a fishing-rod almost double. Even a four-or five-pounder can wear a man out in under an hour. It evolved in the same waters as the piranha, the alligator, the armour-scaled piraracus, creatures as big as cars, and routinely fights rivals even bigger or more dangerous than itself. But unlike other fish of South America, the larger it gets, the harder the fight, so that in the flowing waters of the Amazon, its natural habitat, it can grow to thirty pounds, providing a sparring partner worthy of Moby Dick himself.

  It is, in short, a mean fish, and when it shoots from the water, several feet up, it is easy to detect in that prehistoric eye a hunger for the fight. You can see its attraction to a young man keen to prove himself in the eyes of others. Or even an older one keen to retain his son's respect.

  Perhaps this was why Jorge and Alejandro de Marenas liked to fish. They would pack up the fishing-rods, take Jorge's big four-wheel-drive to the airport and catch a flight to Brazil to spend two, maybe three days flexing their muscles against this cichlid, then go home with satisfactorily broken tackle, bloodied hands, having satisfied some elemental sense of man's eternal struggle against nature. It was a biannual pilgrimage for them, not that they would have described it as such. It was the one place, Alejandro often thought, that they felt truly at ease with each other.

  Jorge de Marenas was a plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires, one of the best: his client list contained over three thousand names, many prominent politicians, singers and television personalities. Like his son, he was known as Turco, due to his rather Middle Eastern appearance, although when it was said of him, it came more often with a reverential sigh. The women came to him increasingly young, for higher bosoms, slimmer thighs, noses like this television presenter or bee-stung lips like that starlet. With a manner as smooth as the skin he re-created, he satisfied them all, injecting, hauling up, filling and smoothing, often shaping and reshaping the same people over the years until they resembled more startled versions of themselves ten years previously. Except Alejandro's mother. He would not touch his wife. Not her plump, fifty-year-old thighs, her tired, furious eyes, camouflaged by expensive makeup and the religious application of expensive creams. He didn't even like her dyeing her hair. She told her friends proudly that it was because he thought her perfect as she was. She believed, she told her son, that, as with builders and plumbers, the job waiting at home was always the last to be considered. Alejandro himself could not say which version was correct: his father seemed to treat his mother with the same detached respect that he treated everybody.

  For while his mother was almost stereotypically latina - operatic, passionate, prone to dizzying highs and lows - he and his father were an emotional disappointment, both unusually even-tempered and, especially in the case of Alejandro, possessing what was often described as an almost offputting reserve. His father defended him against this (frequently made) charge, saying the men of the Marenas family had never felt the need to communicate as they did in soap operas, with angry, posturing confrontations or extravagant declarations of love. Possibly this was because Alejandro had been sent to boarding-school from the age of seven, possibly it was because Jorge himself was not a man who vented emotion easily - the very attribute that made him such a good surgeon. That biannual fight with the gamefish was the one occasion on which both father and son would let loose, emotions briefly unbuttoned in the swirling waters, laughter, anger, joy, desperation all expressed from the safety-net of waders and a waistcoat full of hooks.

  Usually, anyway. This time, for Alejandro at least, the uncomplicated physical pleasures of the trip had been muted by the conversation that was yet to come, the knowledge that although his chosen career had been considered by his family the worst hurt he could inflict on them he was about to do worse.

  The trip had been complicated from the start: Jorge was unsure whether he should be seen to go, conscious that many of his friends were not just missing their own fishing trips and a retreat to the family estancia but, faced with devalued fortunes and inaccessible savings, were now considering ways to leave the country altogether. He was doing okay, he said, but he didn't want to put his friends' noses out of joint. It didn't do to gloat about one's good fortune when so many were suffering.

  Maybe I am about to even things up a little, thought Alejandro, and felt a stab of anxiety.

  Alejandro had meant to tell his father on the walk from the lodge, but Jorge had been preoccupied by a bite that had made his foot swell and caused him discomfort while he walked, so Alejandro carried his things and said nothing, his hat tipped low against the sun, his mind whirring with projected arguments, anticipated confrontation. He had meant to tell Jorge when his father had tied on his plug, a gaudy thing the size of a horseshoe, with the decorations of an Indian festival, the kind of lure that made European anglers shake their heads in disbelief - until they hooked their own bass, of course.

  He had meant to tell him when they hit the water, but the sound of the rushing creek and his father's intense concentration had distracted him, forcing him to wait until the moment was lost. Then, on their favoured quiet stretch between the derelict shack and the standing timber pile, just as Alejandro found himself choking on the words, that were fully formed in his mouth, his father had hooked a great brute of a thing, whose eyes, briefly visible, caught theirs, even from thirty feet, with The same mute fury as Alejandro's mother when Jorge announced he would be late home again. (It didn't do to get too angry, she said, after she had replaced the receiver. Not with things the way they were, and he the only man they knew still making money. Not with all those putas floating around him with their plastic grapefruit tits and adolescent arses.)

  This tucunare, as the Brazilians called it, was big even by Alejandro's father's standards. He announced its arrival with a yelp like that of a surprised child, as the plug was assaulted in the water with a sound like an explosion, and motioned his son over with a frantic head gesture - he had needed both hands on his rod just to keep it in his grasp. Whatever conversation had been planned was swiftly forgotten.

  Alejandro dropped his own rod and sprinted for his father, his eyes fixed on the furious commotion just under the water. The bass leapt from the water, as if better to assess its opponents, and both men let out a gasp at its size. Then in the split second in which they were stunned into immobility by what they had seen, it bolted for the maze of rotting tree-trunks, sending the drag into the high-pitched screech of an aircraft plummeting towards earth.

  'Mas rapido! Mas rapido!'
Alejandro yelled at his father, as the older man strained against his line, everything but that combative fish forgotten. Shaking its head, the bass dislodged at least one of the hooks from the bait, its bright orange and emerald green scales shimmering as it fought the line, the gold-rimmed black eye of its caudal fin taunting them as it flashed above the water, as aggressive and alluring as the peacock's tail after which it was named. Alejandro felt his father falter a little, his mind spun by the sheer ferocity of their battle, and clapped him on the shoulder, glad for once that it was his father who had lured the magnificent fish, glad that it was he who had a chance to display his superiority in the water.

  That said, it was not a swift victory. In fact, for a while they were not sure whether it was going to be a victory at all: reeling it in and out, taking turns to haul on the line as each grew weary. In and out, nearer and nearer the fish came, shaking its vast head to dislodge the coloured hooks from its mouth, thrashing ever more angrily, turning the glassy surface of the water to foam, as it was brought to the shore.

  At one point Alejandro held his father's waist, feeling his broad back hard and straining with the effort of holding on, his feet struggling to keep purchase on the slippery riverbed, and it struck him that he could not remember holding his father before. His mother was all hands and lips - so much so that in his adolescence she had occasionally repelled him - but now he understood that she needed something his father had refused, whether out of genuine inability or bloody-mindedness, to give her: occasional male attention, a mildly flirtatious respect, love. Given the disappointment he had been to her in other areas, it was the least he could do.

  'Mierde, Ale, have you got your camera?' Finally, spent, they half sat, half lay together on the riverbank, the fish like a sleeping baby between proud new parents. Jorge caught his breath, then struggled to his feet. As he held it, still blank-eyed and furious in death, his middle-aged, tanned face was illuminated with hard-won triumph, a rare unguarded joy, his arms sore and flexed under each end as he held it up to the gods. It was the best day, he said, that he had had in years. A day to remember. Wait till he told them at the club. Was Ale sure he had the pictures?