Carla
Millicent Stott
The low, knowing ache in the pit of my stomach was miles deep, like a reflex or a seizure, and it said – run. Run away from this smiling old man you married all those years ago and the steep green island with its promise and its sex. It said, you know what you are. Run. But I didn’t, of course, and instead we drove up, up, up through winding roads lined with orange trees till we came to the villa, white as the Virgin, white as the syrupy foam of the sea I wanted so badly to hold his head under.
So, I laugh and I cook and I am perfect and shiny. And at night, when his breath slows into sleep, I sigh and creep out like a frightened creature to the balcony where the icing sugar tiles cool my wrought skin. Here, the ants are busy with their whispering tasks, and the stars shield their light with respect – this is when I allow myself a thought about Carla.
Even to feel out her gentle syllables on my tongue brings my pulse to a feverish delight. Madeira with its sweet fruits and she is every one of them. Her tender memory melts me fast into the blushing conception of Mars I see draped foolishly among the stars tonight. The quivering lights of the boats far out at sea bring hot, silly tears to my eyes. I’m not quite sure that I can ever be happy now. From the back bedroom I can hear him coughing again, and perhaps I’m thinking I should smother him with his pillow, and perhaps I am not.
But quickly. I haven’t much time.
When we met, I was staying in a hotel on the island, the white-washed stone kind with dolphin mosaics drowned on the swimming pool floors. He was away on business, and I had fallen asleep in midday sun like a fool, like the thoughtless aged woman I was so fast becoming. The staff felt sorry for me, I imagine, pink, blistered and feverish in my old candy-striped towel, so they sent up their maid to keep an eye on me. This girl, she was clumsy, with eyes green as a wild cat and a tiny, sharp bar through her eyebrow.
My world was strangely heavy and distorted in that unique, heatstroke way, and my waking hours blended luxuriously with my dreams so that I saw her at once wiping the sweat from my forehead beside me and staring down at me from the ceiling on her lovely hands and knees. I felt that I must love her immensely. I laughed out loud at the absurdity and let the dreamscape swallow me.
In the morning I was strong enough to sit, and we drank orange juice freshly squeezed, and played cards. She laughed when she beat me at every round. And when she laughed, it was a sensuous howl that reverberated like glass shattering. It was inhuman and musky and thick as drinking chocolate. I hoped my husband would never come back, that his car would turn over in a freak accident orchestrated by the gods.
I was feeling better within a day, but she visited my room often, her quiet knock sending me into a panicked flurry of perfume and salmon pink lipstick. She showed me her tattoos, the ones of kindly snakes and exotic flowers I couldn’t name, and her daughter’s name in broad black font on her forearm. We played cards, and drank much too sweet wine, and one evening she leaned over and touched the exposed skin of my neck, very gently, very slowly. It was ridiculous. Or was it? My chest caved in at her touch. She smelt of wood smoke, coconut, cheap deodorant. Her body was as foreign to me as the moon, the one thing I had thought forbidden, unreachable to me. But somehow, in the delicate, paper lantern light of the hotel room, there we were, quivering, soft, under the sea and the silk sheets.
To fall in love for the first time in my life at 46 was almost suicidal; I fell headfirst into a well of gorgeous, illuminated misery. No, not a well, more like falling down the stairs as a child. That first trip that makes your heart retch clean into your throat, holding yourself in, and then the comical, hallucinogenic tumble into the unknown. And she was waiting for me there, to brush the dust off my knees, in her fruit haze of crickets and overgrown wilderness.
Now I sit on the cooling balcony and remember with fluttering eyes. I don’t have anything else. Just this. The scent of sweat and vanilla, and how the stars imprinted themselves like stamps on her long, dark hair.
But he came back eventually, he had to, and it ended there. I felt myself emerging reluctantly from my delicious, starry-eyed trance, as though I was awoken in the middle of a dream and said, no, please, just five more minutes. Because five minutes with her was a lifetime. I know it sounds strange; I only knew her a week. But I can see her still, gold earrings, green eyes, sat up on our pillows like a queen eating melon and grapes. I can still feel the muscle of her thighs gripped around my neck, her lips red and bitten as strawberries, soft, siren words and the hush of the sea lulling me to sleep.
In those rose gold hours in between dreaming I felt that I had learned the point of it all. Now, looking out onto the cold blanket of moon ahead of me, and the little boats on the trembling water, I could choke on this fragrant air devoid of her smell. It’s too late now. Or is it? My heart flutters in my chest like the sepia, caged wings of a moth. I turn to go back inside, and my fingers linger on the door handle.
Millicent Stott is a 19-year-old English Literature student from Teesside and currently living in Durham, UK. She loves writing about folklore, the natural world, and queer love. Her aim is to tackle difficult issues in sensitive and creative ways through her poetry and fiction. She can normally be found in the library or sipping fruity cocktails in a bar in Durham! More of her work can be found on Instagram at @mills.poetry.
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