Cherry

Cobian, pronounced Koh-bayan, stood still as her mother licked the end of her thumb and rubbed it behind the severe fringe she kept. Cobian frowned and winced, but her mother did not respond to annoyance and carried on.

‘Your makeup is too heavy,’ she said. ‘Look at you. You won’t get away with that at school; your teachers will see it. And they’ll call me and embarrass me. Take it off.’

‘I’ll wash it off at school.’

‘No, wash it off now.’

‘Tzipora’s waiting outside for me.’

This produced a withering glance and her mother straightened up as she stood back. They were about the same height.

‘You’ll do as you’re told – go do it now.’

There was a routine moment of standoff between them and no words were exchanged. Cobian suppressed the urge to make a bigger thing out of it, an expression of pleading and dislike fixed towards her mother, before she capitulated and went back upstairs.

When Cobian met Tzipora in the street outside a few minutes later, she had prepared a familiar outburst about her mother. Tzipora could sense it and refrained from her traditional greetings so Cobian could deliver it. No such complaint arrived, and so after a nervous ‘good morning’ Tzipora rose to walk with her and deliver her morning report.

‘Did you see the news at the cinema last night?’

‘I didn’t go,’ Cobian said.

‘Well, that guy you liked in A Bridge Over Rome, the long-haired one, was arrested for public disorder’ she said, and after a moment, ‘he was causing a bit of a scene with that actress, Siara, um,’

‘Siara Rosenberg,’ Cobian said. ‘Yes, I read it in People. It’s a scandal.’

‘Ah, well, I don’t read those magazines,’ Tzipora nodded and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. Then she looked up.

‘You look nice this morning.’

Cobian was red in the cheeks, as she got in the cold, made worse by the scrubbing she’d done at the sink. She hated that.

‘She’s so stupid,’ Cobian erupted bitterly. ‘She thinks I can’t apply my own foundation. So she humiliates me, because she despises her own life.’

‘I don’t think you need makeup,’ Tzipora said in her regular and tactless manner.

‘You have darker skin than me,’ Cobian said, turning her complaint towards her friend. ‘I have it the worst of anyone. A muddy complexion, ruddy cheeks and dull skin. My mother has it too. A gift of the Algics.’

‘So just reapply at school,’ Tzipora said.

‘It’s psychological,’ Cobian shook her head. ‘She made me feel like a tramp. Now if I put it on at school, I’m going to think I’ve laid it too thick. That’s how she works. She undermines your self-confidence.’

Cobian noticed her round spectacles were dirty and removed them, diffusing the world into foggy colours and shapes. She fumbled around a bit, pinching and wiping the navy wool of her school cardigan over the lenses before resettling them on her nose. She sighed dramatically. The cool air and Tzipora’s clumsy listening helped a bit.

‘It’s only seven-thirty,’ Tzipora noted. ‘What about coffee? I don’t usually take it in the mornings, but I could have some now.’

Tzipora passed her leather schoolbag from one hand to the other. The only things she kept in it were a few pens that rattled around and pulp fiction, so it was light enough to fling around carelessly. It was a habit that usually annoyed Cobian, but the transparent attempt to lift her spirits was charming.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Just a coffee.’

The end of the street opened onto a slightly larger road with tram tracks. It was lined with narrow suburban homes tiled with carved stone patterns and murals. The street for the tram was just about wide enough for a car and flanked by deep concrete gutters that trickled with clear glacial water. Cobian preferred the trendy cafés in Lola, where Tzipora lived, but allowed her to lead away from the station in search of a corner store they could set up at.

Large eucalypts scattered brown and green leaves down the road, their limbs haunting and pale in the dull morning light. As was typical of the early morning, there were no cars out. A clanking of steel freight railcars in a distant siding was the only noise at all.

The warm light of a café window caught Tzipora’s interest, and after assessing the activity inside conspicuously, she opened the door and a bell rang out. The heater was on and they hung their winter capes on the coatrack as Tzipora spoke with the elderly Algic owner, who was at one of the tables with an extinguished cigarette and newspaper.

‘Are you open, madame?’

‘Are you just after coffee?’

‘Yes, but if you have cake, we’d like a little cake to have with it.’

‘Then I’ll open for you, honey.’

The coffee was from a machine, but they could hardly complain and it was a nice little place. There was no room at all between the bar area and the seating and the tables were squished together beneath the wooden sills of the street windows. Wooden knick knacks sat on the sills with no indication of their origin or purpose. Such shops rarely had opening hours – they woke with their owners, and closed routinely throughout the day for errands, siestas and the evening news.

Cobian dragged a chair out across the wooden floor and sat down at a table, but Tzipora dawdled for a moment with a hand on the owner’s newspaper. She read the headlines before sitting down.

‘Bad omen in the news today,’ Tzipora said, grating her chair as she pulled it in.

‘What’s that?’

‘Many dead in Louisiana,’ she said solemnly. ‘A bomb went off.’

Cobian did not know what to say, so she reseated her spectacles on her nose to satisfy the urge to talk. Tzipora knew a lot of things about the world, but when she talked about America it was always in short, sad fragments.

‘When you see news from America,’ Cobian spoke slowly, ‘do you feel sad for the country? Or do you imagine the news happening to you?’

Tzipora was staring at the knick knacks and looked back, surprised.

‘I’ve never been to Louisiana,’ she said after a few moments. ‘I am not American, either. I just wish the whole thing would sort itself out.’

‘I don’t understand it. It’s madness.’

It was a generic comment and Cobian was struck by her own provinciality when she said it. She hated that feeling and she resented Tzipora a little for regularly inflicting it on her. It was not her fault she’d never left this island – not everyone could pass around stories from the home country. And the selfishness of this feeling caught on her conscience and compounded her mood, her troubles now trivialised.

‘It’s just news,’ Tzipora said, and started rolling up her shirt cuffs so she could put her elbows on the table. She could be so casual. More jealousy, watching this girl make any transient space a home. ‘Isn’t this a good place? I think it’s a good place.’

‘Sure, it seems fine.’

‘You can smoke here, you know.’

‘Don’t. It embarrasses me even in secret. You look like a gangster.’

‘It’s not even eight, and I don’t even smoke every day anyway. I just meant it’s nice to have old places like this where you can drink and smoke and be friends with the owner.’

Cobian waved it away. ‘That’s every café in this country. You’re saying that as a foreigner. I dream of the American coffee shops you see in the movies, I would love to see that someday.’

‘If America still exists.’

‘Even with everything going on, is it showing any signs of not existing?’

‘Everything is normal until it isn’t. Everything is forever until it ends.’

‘Is that Yeats?’

‘No, that’s Tzipora.’

Tzipora grinned at her, impressed with herself. She always looked very intensely at you, even when she wasn’t staring. It was an endearing trait that could unsettle the nervous, and Cobian was not used to being looked at closely. She was conscious about her splotchy skin and red cheeks again.

‘Thank you,’ they said as the plates and saucers came down.

The coffee was prepared in the old-fashioned way; that is to say, the wrong way. But it was hot and the tea cake was good. The morning was grey and dulled by cold and the headache of a long arctic winter lingered. The light cast on street from the café was pleasant. It was not the sort of place she’d come by herself; she’d had enough of these old Inuits. Seeing this kind of shop stirred a quiet terror that she’d become them. But Tzipora soothed that feeling – she was a lifeline she could reach for should the future threaten to swallow her. It was like she could jump out of her Algic skin and start dressing as Tzipora does; learn some Spanish and carry on as a Mexican or whatever she was.

‘Are you a Mexican?’ Cobian asked abruptly. The question made Tzipora sip coffee noisily.

‘I’m not a Mexican.’ Tzipora said, ‘I’m not even Latin American, even though that’s where I grew up.’

‘So what do you call yourself?’

‘Vekllei.’

‘Yes, we’re all Vekllei, but other than that.’

‘Why do I have to be anything more?’

‘I thought you might tell me. You know what I am.’

‘The ambiguity is useful to me. I can be Spanish, Egyptian or Sri Lankan as the need arises.’

‘Are you playing games with me, or is it really a secret?’

‘My mother was a Spanish Gypsy and my father was from Eastern Europe, but he was a Jew. I really don’t know what they look like because I look like my mother.’

‘That sounds complicated.’

‘You come from people that have stayed in one place for a thousand years. I come from people who move around.’

‘Algics were nomadic, you know.’

‘Not your Algics. Can I have that cherry?’

She reached for the cocktail cherry on the cake and clumsily smudged the icing with her finger.

‘Sorry.’