Lured Away
I am driving four hours south, from Porto in the north of Portugal, to the medieval hilltop town of Castelo de Vide. My mum is in the passenger seat, my sons are in the back. We get lost in scrambles of motorway exits leading west and east, but each time find our way back through the web of traffic miraculously. ‘I feel like Grandma is here with us, helping us,’ my mum says of her departed mother. I feel it too, as her presence slips us back onto the right road once again. We pass Coimbra where Jake and I once stayed, met by a friend and her three blonde daughters, before we had any children of our own. Coimbra, where we spent a week in Casa Diana in a February mist of pregnancy tests, The Bell Jar, and episodes of Blue Planet.
Today we pass Coimbra, pull off at a service station and cram into a wooden play-park tipi to eat fresh tomatoes, croissants and a bumpy, homegrown cucumber. The sky is overcast, a grey that sits heavily above stark, whitewashed villages. Leaving the motorway at last, we pass through backwater towns with terracotta roofs, cobbled village squares and austere churches. The cafes and benches are empty in this siesta-hour heat.
When we reach Castelo de Vide the sun is setting. We loop around backstreets and up cobbled hills until, at last, at the very top of the biggest hill, we find our street, our place, our home for a week. Holden and Forrest run around the garden in vests and shorts. The house is white, with thick, cool internal walls and a modern concrete staircase. We hunt for a bottle opener, guitar strings, teaspoons, scissors. Fill up bowls with European crisps, unpack suitcases, sip cold beers.
The next morning, refreshed, I restring Les’s old guitar and sit on my bed with the window open, singing songs to the stray cats we’ve been asked to leave biscuits out for. The guitar is bass-y and deep and reminds me of the one in my teenage bedroom, which had been my dad’s as a kid. It goes out of tune constantly. Through the open window I watch my two little blonde boys ripping leaves off the vine. ‘For our pirate’s potion!’ Forrest tells Holden. They run back and forth past my window cackling, in and out of view, Holden’s sandals slapping the paving stones, his bib soaked in dribble. Following his brother always.
Now I sit in another play-park under shady sycamores rustling in a weak breeze as the boys climb up and down the slide. And now outside a cafe at a table with descafinado coffee and pastel de nata, listening to two German men chat about architecture. And now on a stone slab back in our garden at Casa Genevieve. A breeze blows through the vines and olive trees. The parasol wavers. Holden sings next to me as he potters over cobbles, finding interest in miniature things. ‘Bye bye dee,’ he says, peering into my empty tea mug, then wobbles over to see some lemons rotting on the ground. He has ketchup smeared around one eye. His natural disposition is utter contentment. Teasing from Forrest sends him wild with rage, but he always returns to joy and an uplifted heart, compelled to turn again and again towards the sun.
Forrest seems sullen here though, like something is troubling him, which he doesn’t know how to explain. With undivided attention he blossoms, but he needs this constant reassurance for his anxiety. Like me. It’s tricky to live with. Also like me.
The clock tower dings, old and tinny sounding. Five o’clock, maybe. The clouds are burning off and a crystalline-blue vastness appears above us. A tendril of grape vine curls close to my right ear, translucent with sunlight. Mila (the domesticated stray) crunches cat biscuits between her teeth. ‘I can hear chickens,’ Forrest says, pressing felt-tip pens down hard on a colouring book. Bird trill. Bumble buzz. Then, ‘What colour does yellow and brown make?’ Mila slinks off. My Birkenstocks are sticky and my skin is blissfully hot. ‘It’s so good to be out of the UK,’ I write to Harper. ‘You’ve been waiting to get away for a very long time,’ she replies.
Another day I write postcards outside a cafe in Marvão, trying not to think of slaughterhouses as I chew a ham sandwich. I am very tall and light-haired in Portugal, and my skin looks glaringly white. People don’t speak much English in this part, and I like that. We walk up to a beautiful castle on top of a hill. Enchanting from afar, but up close it is full of sheer cliff drops and un-bannistered edges. I can’t be in places like this with the boys, I just see death everywhere. Becoming a mother is like becoming a constant risk-of-death-assessor for the people you love most. Panic. Unsurprisingly it’s no fun for any of us, and I lure them away with the promise of ice-cream.
All week here I suffer with a low-burning anxiety, waking every night at 4 or 5am for an hour or more, hearing the church bell chime every 15 minutes. The anxiety is confusing in its generalness. I wonder if some of it comes from the Buddhist book I’m reading for my Meditation Instructor training, all about the ego and how we don’t really exist. I struggle to wrap my mind around what a mind and self truly is. But, parallel to this tight-chested feeling, something is loosening up in me here, too. Something is slowing, is less desperate, is settling into un-striving. What is it about living in the UK that makes me feel like I have to move so fast all the time? Here, people seem to sit out on benches gazing into the middle distance. Meditation is built naturally into days. They rest from 1-3pm. Then they wake up and enjoy themselves some more, bimbling back down steep streets to meet again in the communal square.
