Off-season

Appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, August 2020.

Abigail’s short story Off-Season was Highly Commended in the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition 2020 and appeared in the August issue.

The first young man refused to take his clothes off, so naturally I had to ask him to leave. The second applicant arrived late and wouldn’t make eye contact. The third stared and stared. My ad made things quite clear, I told them.

I had spent an hour getting the wording right. Need, not want. Nurse, or carer or companion or helper or aid? That was a tricky one. Then what to call this place. Community, I decided. Not resort or camp or commune nor, Jesus Christ, colony. Never that. What am I, an ant? Must instead of should. It’s imperative. Be, what? Sympathetic, willing, understanding, happy? Comfortable. I call myself elderly, not senior. I don’t mince words. Naturist, never nudist, which goes without saying. To apply, please call.

I’ll meet the fourth out on the porch. It’s too hot inside the house, the woodwork pushes all the hot air together. I feel like I’m breathing through a thick wool scarf. The wine I had with lunch has made me drowsy. 

The pines smell strongly today, and the breeze is coming in just right. I can hear the ocean. In front of the house there’s my garden. Rockeries, succulents, seashell bunting. In the evening the driftwood sculptures cast long straight shadows, like the masts of ancient shipwrecks. The garden came up from the beach by wheelbarrow. Many long, hot afternoons of happy work.

The Schneider children, nut brown and naked but for plastic sandals, are bothering a stray kitten across the way. The girl lifts the mewling thing by its middle and carries it away under one arm, like a fairground prize. Mr Schneider comes out and throws a mop bucket of silty water over his lilacs; they’re purple, native wanderers. He sees me sitting out and waves, his large belly wobbling. Guten Tag, Henrietta. Hallo, Klaus. In the kitchen, his wife is slicing a melon, her bare breasts swing. I can hear her pretty humming through the open window. An ashy smell of barbecue from somewhere else, a sizzle of meat. A French woman calls to her children, Venez manger maintenant, s’il-vous plaît. Her voice has the quiet clarity of a shout carried over a peaceful distance. I close my eyes. I’ll just close them for a moment and enjoy the breeze out here on my old skin.

A fence marks the boardwalk to the beach. Thin wooden staves joined by neat wire twists, rolled out metre-on-metre down the steep slope of the dunes. Near the surf, Gloria is smiling and beckoning to me and bending; bending carefully at the knees, her silhouette dark against the bright reflecting waves. Her thin arms lift a piece of driftwood easily, it topples into our wheelbarrow with a metal-dent clang. The surface is perfectly smooth, gently lathed by the ocean over who knows how many miles, how many months and years. Impossible not to touch. All around in the powder sand, smaller treasures are half-buried. We search for those pebbles with unlikely holes worn right through the middle, working to gather a horde. That night we sit out on the porch with a bottle of red and string them together. Earthy mobiles, the shapes ordered and reordered until they hang together comfortably, natural contours aligned.

Gloria tying her hair back for her morning swim. The sea is always still so early in the day, like it’s stretching in its sleep. Sometimes I’d go with her, just for the walk and to see the beach so flat and wide and empty, with the haze lifting. A few dog walkers, tiny in the distance like models in a miniature village. Most often I’d stay home and make pancakes. Or scrambled eggs. Or French toast. She’d come back ravenous and glug orange juice and say, Why does swimming make me so hungry? When I close my eyes, I can recall her voice, still.  

That was so long ago, back when Klaus used to bring his father. Walter. Walter would sit on his porch and read Herman Hesse and complain that he was on his third attempt to get through The Glass Bead Game, then his fourth attempt. I just can’t follow this, Henri, he’d call across the gravel path that divided our properties. He’d frown at the pages, a warm beer forgotten on the table. Eventually he’d give up and water his plants. 

One summer, Hesse finally abandoned, he devoured John Le Carré paperbacks one after another. I thought you’d like those, Papa, said Klaus, a teenager then, thin and muscular, circling the property with the watering can. 

It went on like so, years becoming decades, Klaus with a girlfriend, Klaus with a wife, Walter with a Zimmer frame, Walter with a wheelchair. Finally, the Schneider Volkswagen pulled up, the bikes on the back, the hard-shell luggage case, Klaus honking the horn in greeting, but no Walter. The following summer they arrived with a baby. 

Gloria takes up yoga. She throws the mat out in front of her in the garden, shouting oompa and waves upside-downedly at passers-by. Look, Henri, she’s grinning back at me, head between her knees, bare arse raised, talk about arse over tit.

I’m Gloria. Gloria Bronstein. What’s your name? I lift my head from my towel. A pair of skinny knees encrusted with sand. They stick out from her legs like conkers on pieces of string. There’s a huge jellyfish on the beach just down there, the girl says, pulling her red hair back from her face and tying it deftly into a ponytail. Biggest I’ve ever seen. 

My mother looks at me over her sunglasses, raises her eyebrows, tells me to run along and play. Gloria sticks out her hand, as though for a handshake, and hauls me up and onto my feet with baffling strength. She takes off running, the sand flicking out from her heels like motion lines behind a comic-book superhero. It’s early in the summer, our bare bottoms flash white, still new to the sun.  

That jellyfish really was enormous.

Whoa. I stared down at it, a weird half-formed mass, so alien. Under the translucent skin, some inexplicable system of organs, livid and unnaturally purple. Where was its blood? Did it breathe? Was it still alive? Across the wet sand, fine blue tendrils trailed like spilled oil. 

We edged a little closer. Did it have skin? Could it feel? A sudden wave lapped up onto the beach, catching the weightless tendrils and lifting them, horrifically, to wrap around my ankle. A bolt of pain pulsed up my leg. My head grew hot and my neck tingled, the beach, the sea, the sky, drained of colour. Grey then white, like a Polaroid in reverse. 

When I woke, a man in red shorts was leaning over me. He had a whistle around his neck and I wondered if he had a dog. I couldn’t see a dog.

You are ok, said the man. He was French, heavily accented. My ankle only burned now, a pain without sharp edges. Your friend is coming, with lemonade for you. He pointed. Gloria was running again. The can of lemonade flashed like a watch face turned to the sun. That spot on my ankle wouldn’t tan that summer, nor any summer after. There have always been three crooked pale lines, slightly raised. 

Did we ever tell you how we first met? Gloria coming out onto the porch, backwards through the bead curtain, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a cluster of glasses in the other, clutched between her fingers by their stems. Go on, Henri, show them your ankle.

During the off-season, Gloria returns from her morning swim wrapped in a fleece blanket, requests hot chocolate and says, Brrr, that was bracing. She chases me around the kitchen, trying to warm her icy hands on my back.

The juice stands and ice-cream huts have pulled down their shutters. The grey is flat and constant, like spread newspaper. The sea is an eager child, piling up its odd treasures at our feet.   

We’d spend our evenings in the deserted town square. The merry-go-round folded in on itself, the bandstand empty. One bar stays open for a few extra months, before shutting up until the following spring. We’d order a carafe of wine and sit on plastic chairs outside the tabac, watching the sky over the pine forest bleed pink and orange. We’d smile and feel far away from everything.  

The cat population will boom during off-season. They’ll come out of hiding, sticking their heads out from crawlspaces, coming down from trees, pricking their ears suspiciously, wondering what happened to all the children and dogs. Gloria used to leave food out for them.

In a few weeks it’ll be so quiet. See you next summer, Henrietta. Yes, Auf Wiedersehen, Klaus, drive safe. Our own grand départ. I will picture them on aeroplanes, their tans flaking, already thinking of – what? Spreadsheets? Profit margins? Back to tight waistbands that dig into their skin and leave ugly red marks. That bill to pay, that boring party to attend. Ironing shirts for Monday morning.

It was never for us, that life. We stayed.

Gloria delicately refilling the bird feeders. Gloria planting new succulents. Gloria flicking her wet hair and laughing.

Gloria finding odd jobs. Window frames to paint, leaks to plug, shelves to put up.

The breeze has pushed open a loose window shutter, it bangs softly.

I hear the murmur of the Schneiders’ television. Mrs Schneider laughs.

A crunch of footsteps on the gravel path. Wood creaks. Somebody climbing the porch steps. A hand on my arm, dry and warm, that wakes me.

I open my eyes and squint into the bright afternoon sunlight.