So I hope this postcard I’m holding isn’t from that same Alice Baker.
You deserve to die a slow and painful death for what you done to that dog.
It doesn’t sound like Alice; the sentiment might but the grammar doesn’t. The picture on the front is of some donkey sanctuary but the information about the place has been blacked out by the censor’s pen. Same with the postmark, and any other information that might allow me to trace where the card was sent from. I hold it up to the light. I’ve managed to see at least the date in this way on some of the other letters, but this is on card and not on paper.
Is it you, Alice? Did you see my name in the papers and remember me? Is that why you bothered to write – because you knew who I once was and was angry at what I have become? I hate the possibility that this might be so, but let’s face it: the postmark is irrelevant really, isn’t it? You could have gone anywhere, couldn’t you, when you disappeared with Jeb that time? Over to Ireland, or back to the States again? I know you’d had just about as much of England as you could take. The Alice Baker I knew was never going to settle in the one place and I prefer to think of you as being a long way from here. Away from this tiny country with big ideas about its place in the world, and away from where you might read about my pathetic attempt to make a difference. I don’t like the idea of you reading about me somewhere. I don’t want this to be how people remember me.
One postcard with a name I recognise from my childhood and whole weeks – months even – can pass me by. When they first showed me my mail, I refused to give them the satisfaction of reading it. I had no interest in learning what people might think of me. I knew all the accumulated correspondence must have been read and censored and I wasn’t expecting many letters of support from members of Amnesty or the RSPCA. When, finally, boredom got the better of me, I wasn’t surprised by their tone and content. Every letter or card asked how I could do such a thing to Max, and this is fair enough, I guess, because I spend most of the time of each day asking myself the very same thing. But isn’t it just like the English to care more for an animal than for a woman having sulphuric acid sprayed on to her face? Though, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t really believe Paula ever picked up the antique perfume bottle I left on her doorstep, much less test it out on her neck. I’m sure I’d have heard about it if she had.
I am sorry for what I did to Max; I wish I hadn’t done it. I’m ashamed that I could do such a thing to so beautiful an animal – or to any animal. And why I wanted to hurt those close to me, I don’t know. But the rest of it – what they have me in here for – I think I was right to do. I know it all amounted to nothing. I know I’d lost my mind – I must have done to do what I did to Max – and that in the end what I did barely registered on the world. But I will never, ever regret the look of fear on Blair’s face as my rucksack landed at his feet. It was all mixed up in my head with that Brazilian guy they shot going into the Tube, and the fact that carrying a simple rucksack had become a cause for suspicion – a rucksack and a brown face. I wanted to create a new form of protest. I hoped thousands would follow my example and throw their rucksacks at Blair wherever he went, but I guess this was the one and only opportunity for anyone to throw their rucksack at Tony Blair. It’s probably been added to the pointless list of preventative measures they take, much like their fear of bottled water or toothpaste or shoes. I wanted to frighten him. I wanted him to believe it was a bomb. He talked so much about terror that I wanted him to know how terror felt. I wanted to shake his faith in always doing the right thing. I wanted to see him scared and for one brief second – less than a second, probably – I did just that. I saw that doubt on his face but, really, it was such a ridiculous thing – a sad and sorry thing – to do. I was knocked to the ground and held at gunpoint. I’d expected to be shot. I’d hoped to be shot but I wasn’t and then they found the cut-throat razor with which I’d killed Max and now, now I’m here and Blair’s gone and still the war goes on. Sad and sorry is about right.
I don’t know what they intend to do with me and I’m not sure that they know either. Sooner or later they’ll let me go. It’s not as though I actually killed anyone and they can hardly charge me with shaking a Prime Minister’s faith in doing the right thing. So, the public revulsion over what I did to Max has allowed them to keep me locked away while they make up their minds, or until they forget the whole thing and let us all go home.
A cell is not a cell when you’re free to come and go as you please. The monks call these rooms cells because they’re of a type; a certain, basic type of study/bedroom, but it’s the best cell I’ve ever had because it has an open door. It’s siesta time and the room is cool, as it’s designed to be. Tiles everywhere and blinds across the windows to keep out the sun. There’s always a breeze, high up here in the hills above Rome. I have to go back to work in a little while, but it’s just for show. Giovanni, my boss, has a relaxed approach to work this late in the afternoon. We make a big deal out of raking a few garden beds, perhaps we turn over a little soil with a hoe, but any real work that needed doing was done this morning. We don’t kill ourselves in the mornings either. I don’t know who first laid out the gardens in front of the Villa – Giovanni hints he was responsible in some capacity, though I don’t believe him because I reckon it must have taken some hard work and real horticultural knowledge. Maintaining the garden beds is a doddle; we water them and mow the lawns and nature does its best to make us look good. Giovanni lives close by. I guess for him it’s paid work and he hints – it’s all hints with Giovanni – that his family have been involved with the upkeep of the gardens for centuries. Italian bullshit is the same as any other bullshit; it has to contain an element of truth to carry the story. His home is in the grounds of the Villa, he works in the gardens and this seems to be his only source of income, so who am I to say?
It’s taken me about a month to figure this much out; he didn’t talk to me for most of the first week, apart from a few brief instructions on how to rake a flower bed. I don’t think he was too impressed with being assigned a helper. He probably suspected I’d been sent to spy on him, perform a work-in-motion study or something, and report back to the monks. It was hard to decipher his short outbursts of mumbled Italian; he’s no great shakes when it comes to helping me learn the language. His attitude changed towards the end of that first week – I don’t know why – and for a whole morning he wouldn’t shut up, like he was telling me all his worries and troubles in one go, but it was lost on me. I thought I knew some Italian; I did know some Italian, but this showed me the huge gap between uttering a few pleasantries and actually conversing in a foreign language. It didn’t slow him down any, even when he asked me a direct question and I stood there grinning like an idiot, lost for an answer.
I knew I’d made it when Giovanni offered me a cigarette during one of our many breaks. I declined his offer but he insisted, so I took one and we lit up and sat on a stone wall out of sight of the main Villa and the monks’ cells. The cigarette nearly blew my head off and it took me back to when I was a boy. I felt sick and light-headed but I belonged; Giovanni and I were now a team. I was on his side against the dark forces of his employers – the monks – even if I live in one of their cells, which for the life of him Giovanni can’t figure out the reason for and I don’t have the words to explain, even if I could explain it to myself. From that day on, he started to practically illustrate what it was he wanted me to do, such as dead-heading the flowers, and repeated phrases over and over as he showed me. I in turn repeated his words, though his accent is so thick and guttural I still find it hard to make the same sounds come out my mouth.
I’m not paid any wages, but I get my meals and my lodging for free. I work in the garden with Giovanni and am available for any other tasks I might be asked to do. The worst is when a new coach party arrives and they need a hand with their luggage. It’s hard, heavy work in the heat but I don’t care. Giovanni gives out now when this happens, asking how he’s supposed to manag
e if his helper is forever being taken away from him every minute of the day? Mostly though, the guests at the Villa arrive in manageable numbers and the place is so professionally run that they rarely need my help.
The Villa Palazzola, up in the Alban Hills and overlooking Lake Albano, is part of the English College in Rome, and takes in paying guests, either as a retreat or as a package holiday. You’d have to be a little crazy to stay here if you weren’t at least a true believer. They do the holiday thing well, the monks and the hoteliers that run the place, but Catholicism is everywhere. The guests who come here must like that combination of relaxation with either a dash or a large dose of religion. I live behind the scenes, in the monks’ old quarters that now double as lodgings for some of the staff. There are all sorts of religious here, of different ranks and grades and collars and colours of shirts. Giovanni fills me in on who might be important and who we can ignore; naturally enough, the higher the order the more respectful he is to their faces and the more dismissive he is once they’ve passed on by. He reserves his genuine mistrust though for the unordained brothers, some of whom share my living quarters and were the source of his initial suspicion that I might well be some sort of spy in his garden. Once I’d convinced him I wasn’t a plain-clothed monk studying for the priesthood – and was never likely to be – he warned me to be wary of them. At least, that’s what I guessed he was trying to tell me.
I rarely dream in here and my sleep patterns are messed up through inactivity. When I manage to sleep, however, I do so deeply, like I’ve pressed an elevator button for a floor somewhere far underground. When I wake up, I come back to the surface with a gasp. I’m like Ripley in the movie Aliens, sleeping through time and space. Some days when I wake I can’t move my right arm. It just flops around, hanging uselessly at my side. I’m like that man in the Bible – the Man with the Withered Arm. Days like these, it doesn’t matter that they operate a one-way postal system – I couldn’t write a letter of reply even if they allowed me to. It’s not so bad; the arm goes numb for a few days but then hurts so much I’d happily have it hacked off by one of my fundamentalist prison mates. I was scared when it first happened because I didn’t know what was going on. I thought for a while it might have something to do with when they smashed my knuckles, but it doesn’t. I asked to see a doctor and they laughed. We’re left alone for much of the time and the people who run this place aren’t interested in anything that breaks out from the normal routine. I’ve come to suspect there’s nothing actually wrong with my arm and that some part of my brain has had enough and it opts to shut down. The pain is my system re-booting, cranking up the functioning of my arm again, and I’ve learnt I just have to live with it.
There’s a painting by van Gogh of the inmates at St. Remy exercising in the yard of the asylum. I’m reminded of it every day when they let us out into the yard and we trudge around, one after the other, for an hour. We’re not allowed to communicate to each other but I know that some of them do – messages passed along the line, or hurried questions and information. There were forty two of us, but now we’re down to thirty seven. I don’t know if that’s the total prison population or if there are different lines of prisoners at other hours of the day. I hear that such and such was set free, or that they moved somebody somewhere, but the whispered messages come to a halt whenever they reach me – not because I’m worried about breaking the rules, but because I don’t care enough to pass the messages on.
I was told once as an adult that I had a playground mentality and I don’t think it was meant as a compliment. Good or bad, it allows me to recognise the types I see in the exercise yard every day and I have to tell you – they’re not a very impressive bunch. These are not dangerous people and, if this is the threat to the nation, then the nation is quite safe. I suppose they’re the idea of a threat. They’re the sad cases that have somehow spilt over into the political world and the faces I see belong to lost souls similar to my own. Sure, some of them are committed to the cause but they lack the resources to do anything much about it. You have to be smarter than we are to overthrow the system.
I know from what I hear in the yard that our freedom – or our lack of it – is what exercises the other inmates the most, but I believe all thoughts of freedom are relative. I’m free from the responsibilities of caring for myself, of working, of earning, of learning, of shopping and of cooking. I’m free from the worries of parenthood, of relationships and of my place in the world. In truth, I’m almost content.
Of course, it helps that I was held in captivity before, and that it was a lot less pleasant than this. Apart from my hourly exercise, I’m pretty much left to my own devices. I know that to be kept in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours of each day is supposed to be a form of punishment, but it seems to suit me just fine. It all seems fairly half-hearted to me, such as delivering my correspondence from the great British public. I think the sense of outrage I pick up from the other prisoners is their refusal to accept the situation they find themselves in. A little perspective, I feel like saying to them, but of course I don’t. We’re just being held here, that’s all, and they’ll let us go eventually. To tell you the truth, I suspect most of us have been forgotten, or are being ignored, like a memo in an in-tray full of much more pressing matters to attend to.
And anyway, what would I do if I were free to leave this place? Where would I go? What would I do with my freedom?
When I first meet Maria – or the girl who will become Maria – she’s something of a bitch; the Bitch in the Kitchen. She’s mostly out the back, out of sight of the Refectory where the monks and the staff take their meals. Or she’s just visible through the serving hatches, making a racket with the pans and the dirty dishes of the guests. Even from a distance I can see she’s one unhappy bunny, almost a caricature of the stroppy Italian mamma. She doesn’t have the weight or the build to carry it off though, or the years, and she comes across as something of a spoilt brat of a teenager. She’s nothing to me until we come face to face across the vegetables, and she barks some Italian at me that I don’t quite catch. I smile and say mi scusi and ask for some vegetables in my best Italian, which is still not good. She points to the beans and the potatoes and the zucchini and I guess she’s asking me which vegetable out the three I want, so I take the easy route and say tutto, which doesn’t impress her in the slightest and she slops out the food on to my plate.
Fuck you, I think – in English. Okay, so we’re employees, same as the kitchen staff, and I’d just as soon serve myself, but this is how it is: you serve us our food and clean up in the kitchen. Tough! I don’t ask you to come and set my sprinklers early in the morning.
God help the guests if she’s ever allowed to serve them. As I walk away, one of her colleagues has a go at her and she gives it right back. I don’t know what her problem is with the world, and no – I don’t want to know either.
I eat alone as a rule, though the long Refectory tables and benches hide my lingering tendency towards isolation. The language thing, all day with Giovanni, is tiring and by dinner I’m about ready to relax into myself. Giovanni eats at home, naturally, and most of the staff here are from the front of Villa operations – receptionists, pool attendants, waiters – and they tend to be quite young. I’m closer to Giovanni in years and I’m sure I’m thought of in the same way – one of the almost invisible gardeners they might occasionally see working the grounds. Plus, everybody operates on different shifts; Giovanni and I are about the only ones with the consistent hours of a day job. I’m more likely to be joined at the Refectory table by one of the monks, who also work in various capacities around the Villa, and they have a clearer idea of who I am and what I’m doing here. In particular, one monk called Brother Michael tends to seek me out. Whatever about Giovanni’s opinion of the monks, I enjoy their company. Many of them are English, which helps, and the Italian monks like to try out their English on me while they eat. We talk about the gardens and the weather, and they ask after Giovanni; they�
��re fond of him, despite his suspicious and guarded nature.
I’m allowed to use the Villa’s library, which is half English and half Italian. Of the English books, most are religious texts of some sort and many are biographies or autobiographies of cardinals and popes and mystics. I recognise the autobiography of Cardinal Newman from my grandad’s bookshelves and smile at the memory, but there’s not a whole lot there for me. I’ve also found a collection of novels that I’m working my way through. Many of the stories are from the early part of the twentieth century, written by authors I’ve never heard of, and I like thinking about the effort it took to produce pieces of work that have ended their days in obscurity. They must have meant so much to the writers at the time, and were deemed good enough to publish; the least I can do is to read them. The monks are very generous and encourage me to take what I like back to my cell. They ask only that I return the books to their proper place. All the volumes are beautifully bound and, as I turn the pages, this adds to the reverence and gratitude I feel at the freedom of being allowed to read again. This is how I spend my evenings: alone in my cell, with the door held slightly open, reading. The sunshine and the gardening throughout the day help me to sleep well at night.
The Padre walks into my cell like it’s nothing, like I’m used to taking in visitors, and he introduces himself as Brother Paul. I’m so shaken I don’t do anything but watch to see what he does next. I was standing at the head of my bed when he came in, about to do some exercises. Now I don’t know what to do. This is a change and I don’t do change.
Dancing to the End of Love Page 18