Bloody Women

by Helen FitzGerald

It was text-book emotional abuse. She kept him away from his family and friends, even going so far as moving him to her flat in Edinburgh. She put him down about his physical appearance, terminated his baby, and treaded on his self-esteem day in, day out. After seven years, he became sullen and quiet, and stagnated in his job. Some colleagues called him the office dinosaur.

  When he broke up with Cat Marsden and moved back to his parents’ home, Mani was reinvigorated. Not long after, he married the love of his life and was promoted to producer.

  His wife Harjinder recalls Mani’s final words to her with tears in her eyes: ‘I am a happy man!’ he said on the morning of his death.

  ‘I’d bought peanut butter,’ Harjinder explains, ‘which I never usually do. He loves – loved – it, but it makes – made – him fat in the middle. See, it was on offer the day before, so I bought it. At breakfast he was over the moon. “I am a happy man!” he said, eating his toast. I never saw him again.’

  Harjinder believes his kindness killed him. His inability to resist a needy old flame, who constantly asked him to meet her for lunch – and who, years later, asked him to meet her at the BBC canteen in Glasgow.

  I woke to screeching masturbation. The manuscript was under my left arm. So far, it had contested that I was an evil baby and a playground bully. I was obsessed with an equally obsessive lesbian. I had shamelessly seduced Johnny. I had treated Rory like shit. I had emotionally abused Mani.

  Hmm, I thought to myself over the cold toast of breakfast, I wonder what I did to Stewart.

  But I knew what I did to Stewart. If there’s one thing I knew, it was what I did to Stewart.

  12

  Haven’t most people done something they’re not proud of? Something that makes them hide their head in their hands or under their jumper when a smell or a sound reminds them later?

  My mistake would be written in the book, and it would be completely true, with no need for embellishment. The manuscript was under my pillow. I could feel it, a version of me, nudging me, keeping me awake, the princess and the pea.

  Stewart was my personal trainer. A lovely man, with rather hard muscles. I’d been single two years when I booked a full block of ten weekly sessions to lose half a turkey. He stood beside treadmills and bench presses and counted and sometimes yelled. He weighed and measured me. He was the least good-looking of my boyfriends, I think. Fantastic body, but not much brown hair, which he’d sensibly decided to clip, and large features that were loose and wobbly. But he was in awe of my regional TV fabulousness, and treated me like a queen. Our sessions extended from ten to twenty, then from exercise to chat, and finally from chat to a date.

  Our first official date was a quick hill walk in Perthshire followed by a pub lunch. The next was an early supper in Edinburgh followed by the theatre. He brought me flowers on the third date, which I can’t remember anything about now. Funny, each time I met someone I remembered the first few months exactly for a while, going over the dates in my mind each night in bed, feeling excited and thankful. I can’t remember beyond the third now.

  Very soon, life with Stewart resembled life with Mani. Settled, with good food, enough rest and exercise. Even. After almost ten years of even, I was getting sick of it. Also, I was beginning to wonder if Stewart really knew me. Or was I just his prized ornament?

  ‘Okay then,’Anna said, looking at the graphs I’d drawn on beer mats in a bar in Glasgow. Each graph’s X-axis showed ‘Life, as spent with so-and-so.’ The Y-axes showed ‘Excitement – good or bad’. Johnny’s graph, I showed Anna, stayed in the middle somewhere. There were ups and downs, but not too up, not too down. Rory’s catapulted off the top and the bottom, again and again. Mani’s and Stewart’s were both just below the middle – straight and flat, month after month.

  ‘I just want something in between Johnny and Rory,’ I said, drawing my ideal relationship graph.

  ‘You over-complicate things, Cat. You think too much. Just try and make it more exciting with Stewart, then. Perhaps you’re ready for some thrills . . . but not too many.’

  So I set my mind to it and after a couple of weeks I took Stewart quad-biking, then windsurfing, then to Brussels for a weekend break. We trained hard and ran a marathon together. I asked him to help me lay a new floor in my flat because I hadn’t moved since I was with Rory and the idea made me buzz like I used to back then.

  Stewart finished the new floor on our six-month anniversary and then took me out to dinner. After coffee, he asked me to marry him.

  I said yes, accidentally. I was caught unawares, with a deliciously full tummy and a Prosecco’d head, and didn’t know what else to say. That night he couldn’t get it up again (probably steroids), and I half-decided to sigh out loud. The problem was a recurring one – his lack of erection, my impulse to sigh out loud – but usually I held it in and cuddled him till he forgot his little problem, which did the trick. This time I sighed and may even have rolled my eyes. Stewart got out of bed and stood at the window for ages, staring out onto the neat green Meadows beneath my ready-to-sell-for-a-fortune flat. I apologised, and we cuddled, but the next night I treated him even more badly by shamelessly seducing Joe Rossi.

  Anna had been going out with her girlfriend, Diana, for several weeks. It was the longest relationship she’d ever had, but it only lasted a few more months after I met her. In fact, Diana disappeared immediately after my arrest.

  ‘I’m waiting for Ms Right,’ she always said.

  Diana was a stunning second-generation Italian who loved her job as a teacher and had gorgeous relatives such as Joe Rossi. When I say gorgeous, I don’t mean perfect. Or pretty. Or more wrapped up in his own looks than the girl he’s flirting with. A teddy-bear, with soft, curly brown hair, thick dark lashes and glossy brown eyes, lips a little too large for the very small round nose above it. Overweight, for some. For me, gorgeous.

  Joe’s grandparents had moved to Glasgow in the 1950s. Things were tough in the mountains of Tuscany at the time, so his Nonno Alessandro and Nonna Giuseppina had decided to seek their fortune, as many other families from the village of Sasso had already done, by opening a café in Glasgow. One café turned into four cafés and a restaurant, and by the time Joe was born they were very wealthy and had built a large family home to have holidays in, and retire to. Joe’s parents were so busy with the family business that Joe was brought up by his Nonna till he was ten.

  ‘She was my mother, really,’ he said as we exchanged our stories over wine. ‘An amazing woman . . . She died last year.’

  He was appealingly moved as he spoke of his grandmother.

  ‘A saint,’ he said, taking out his wallet and showing me a picture of a stern, well-dressed elderly woman sitting on an arm chair, her cute-as-a-button grandson standing beside her.

  ‘What about your Nonno?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t talk about him,’ Joe said.

  The dinner party wasn’t meant to be a foursome, but Stewart was doing a late shift at the gym, so it immediately felt that way. Anna – a terrible cook – had put the lamb in without turning the oven on, which meant I had at least an hour and a half of drinking before eating. After the second bottle of wine, I said to Joe, ‘If I scratch my ear between courses, it’s a tell.’

  ‘A tell?’ Joe asked, while Diana and Anna were serving dinner, at last.

  ‘Meet me in the bathroom.’

  We ate the starter, which was terrible – the melon was hard as a rock and the Parma ham was actually honey-roasted – and I scratched my ear.

  We ate the main course, which was terrible – Anna had made gravy involving jam – and I scratched my ear.

  We ate dessert, which was terrible – Anna had used cornflour instead of caster sugar – and I scratched my ear.

  ‘Hope you’re using condoms?’ Anna said as I made my way to the bathroom after dessert.

  ‘All of them,’ I whispered back.

  Not very romantic, I suppose. I asked Joe to talk dirty and he’d complied wholeheartedly, calling
me a slutty girl just like his cousin Diana, and throwing in a few Italian words for free. When I woke the next day I was mortified. I was engaged to Stewart, the impotent man in the bed beside me, yet I had scratched my ear three times with a man I didn’t even know.

  The pages were worse than a pea. They were killing me. I retrieved them from under my pillow.

  ‘We speak the international language of lerv,’ I declared to Anna and Diana after returning from the loo the second time.

  ‘The international language of lerv,’ Joe repeated in a thick Glasgow accent that never stopped surprising me.

  I was fiddling with one of the pages.

  All four of us laughed. I think Anna was happy that it might stop me from marrying Stewart.

  I was touching the page with my fingertips and peeking at it. It was arguing that:

  A pattern was beginning to emerge. Of jealousy and man-hating anger. Anna admits she felt uncomfortable during the meal.

  ‘Catriona was on a self-destruct,’ Anna says. ‘Working twelve hours a day, getting a big head about being recognised all the time, quad-biking and windsurfing and running marathons and drinking too much. She shagged three times during dinner, for God’s sake, after nearly four bottles of wine. I was worried. I’d have done anything to make her happier,’ she says. ‘I still would.’

  Her sexual liaison with Joe was one of the most telling precursors to the bloodbath that she ultimately unleashed, wrapping betrayal, impulsive behaviour and cruelty into one neat parcel.

  The day after Catriona Marsden seduced Joe Rossi, she informed her fiancé, Stewart, that she did not want to marry him. She told him she had said yes ‘accidentally’, that life with him had been boring, that she wasn’t sure if he was the right man for her, and that she’d slept with someone else the night before.

  Stewart was too kind about it. He went home and decided to make a fresh start in London. A few months later, he discovered that Catriona was getting married to Joe Rossi. She was giving up her television career and moving to Italy.

  So there she was . . .

  So there I was . . .

  Thirty-three years old.

  Thirty-three.

  Four lovers behind her . . .

  Johnny, Rory, Mani, Stewart: my life’s blueprint, the steps I’d taken, my itinerary.

  With Anna bubbling underneath . . .

  The step I didn’t take.

  Falling in love for the fifth and final time, with a man who made cappuccinos molto caldo and danced outdoors at summer festas . . . Joe Rossi . . .

  Joe Rossi . . .

  The one who got away.

  13

  I loved Joe Rossi, I thought to myself as I lay on my hard bunk. I loved how large and safe he was, my own private Rambo. I loved how much he loved my hair, sniffing it in like he needed it to live. I loved that he wanted to take care of me, that everything about me was okay with him. I loved that he was a family man, desperate to have children of his own, unashamedly close to his parents, and devastated by the loss of his Nonna Giuseppina.

  I thought about my first visit to Italy. Joe had fed me lasagne della Nonna followed by torta della Nonna, then taken me to his Nonna’s grave, which overlooked a glorious blue lake called Lago di Vagli. We put fresh flowers, cloths, polish and a brush and shovel in the boot of his car to spruce up the granite that had Giuseppina Rossi’s name and photo on it.

  It was a beautiful cemetery. The graves weren’t graves as I knew them. They were like shoe boxes, stacked on top of each other. There were also large family crypts made of marble, shiny and expensive-looking, with at least ten spaces so that relatives could lie beside each other. In the middle of the cemetery were meticulously maintained gardens. People cared about their dead in this place, I remember thinking at the time, but not for too long, because if I thought of it for too long, my dad came to mind, buried near Inverness in the rain when I was fifteen, and never visited again.

  I began wiping Nonna Giuseppina’s glass-framed portrait, which sat in the centre of her granite gravestone. I would never have said then, but his Nonna Giuseppina was one of the ugliest women I had ever seen.

  ‘Let me do it!’ he insisted, so I didn’t intervene as he carefully polished the glass and granite.

  Afterwards Joe and I wandered around looking at the names and pictures on some of the other gravestones. Happy smiling faces, mostly. Old, usually. But there was one child – a twelve-year- old girl by the name of Lucia Bellini. She had long dark hair and a white Alice band. She was dressed in a flowing white dress – probably her Holy Communion outfit. Her eyes were closed. She was pale, but she had a calm, peaceful smile on her face. A beautiful, dead smile. Unlike Joe’s mother and all her friends, Lucia’s parents hadn’t arranged her portrait in advance. I guessed they didn’t have the money, or hadn’t thought it necessary.

  ‘She was from Sasso,’ Joe told me. ‘She drowned in the lake, just over there.’

  I touched the photo of little Lucia, the wee soul.

  ‘Mum’s put a deposit on the space next door. Don’t tell her, but I’m going to buy a big family vault on the other side. Much more beautiful. It’s a surprise for Christmas.’

  ‘How much to lie in that one for an hour?’ Joe had joked, pointing to the grave next to Lucia’s, which was empty and open at the end. Getting inside would have been like slipping into a body fridge at the morgue. You’d be surrounded on all sides by death, but with the possibility that inside there were rats, cracks, holes, escape routes. In fact the stone inside this particular one was crumbling at one side.

  We joked about the terms. It would be night-time. The opening would be sealed with a piece of wood and nailed securely. Joe would make whatever noise and take whatever action he so wished, to terrify me into my secret ‘Let me out now!’ signal – ten knocks on the wood to the tune of ‘Toreador’.

  ‘Why the secret knock?’ he asked. ‘Who else would be knocking?’

  Funny, but also terrifying.

  I settled on £20,000.

  Course we never did it. I was too scared.

  On the way home from the cemetery, we walked down the mountain to the edge of Lago di Vagli. The land rose gently from the water’s edge to form magnificent peaks. We wandered back up to an old hotel near the village of Vagli di Sotto. It was rustic, gorgeous. I suggested we should stay there one weekend. Inside the hotel foyer were pictures of the lake when it was completely empty. A small cluster of ancient buildings was plopped in the middle of the dry basin.

  ‘They empty the dam every ten years for maintenance works,’ Joe explained, ‘and the Fabbriche di Carreggine – the ghost village – appears.’

  The photograph was the spookiest thing I’d ever seen. In it, tourists swarmed over the dead village like ants, traipsing into the tradesmen’s houses, beholding ‘La Piccola Pompei’, with its stone church and intact bell-tower.

  ‘The girl in the cemetery, Lucia Bellini, came here with her family to see the dam fill,’ Joe told me. ‘They did what tourists do each decade, looking at the soon-to-be-drowned dwellings. Afterwards they laid out a picnic on the bank. No one realised Lucia had run off. She’d dropped her wooden Pinocchio in the bell-tower, legend has it.’

  ‘Oh God, what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘By the time Lucia’s father had realised she was gone, the water had risen to the highest point of the bell-tower. She couldn’t swim. It floods in fast, the water, and the ghost village just disappears as if it was never there. Eventually her body rose to the top and floated – completely still – over the invisible buildings. Locals say Lucia returns when the dam fills. They say they can hear her crying for help.’

  I’d never been so creeped out. Not only because of the legend, which was probably mostly fictional, but because of my crippling fear of water.

  ‘Joe Rossi’s here to see you,’ the Freak announced, bringing me back to reality. I was no longer at the ghost village in Italy with Joe. I was in HMP Cambusvale.

  What had she sai
d? ‘Joe’s here?’ It was probably the voice in my head again. Joe’s here, Joe’s here. He still loves you. He believes you. He’s waiting. Eccoci!

  ‘Catriona!’ the voice said again. ‘Did you hear me?’

  I considered opening my eyes – was it worth the disappointment to find I was alone with no voice but my own?

  ‘Cat!’

  I opened them. The Freak was in her starched uniform, her brown hair pinned tightly against her large square head, hovering, smiling.

  ‘Joe’s here.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  There was a good reason to ask her this. The week after I arrived, an officer had opened my cell door and declared ‘You’ve got bail! Pack up, you can go.’ I’d leapt from my bed, thrown my meagre belongings into the black bin bag he’d given me, and walked out to the desk, grinning.

  ‘Only joking,’ the officer said. He was a funny guy.

  A few weeks after that, an officer told me we were having lasagne, garlic bread and tomatoes with basil and mozzarella for dinner. Lasagne is my favourite meal, ever. Joe used to make great lasagne. I raced to dinner only to find the usual children’s menu choices of gammon and pineapple and macaroni cheese.

  ‘I’m not joking, Catriona,’ the Freak said, shaking her head, taking the pages that were still spread on my chest, and putting them on the desk. ‘He’s in the Special Visits area.’

  Unwilling to let myself believe he was really there, I followed the escort robotically. Joe hadn’t spoken to me since I was arrested and held in a police cell in Leith. He’d arrived in Scotland on the morning of our wedding as planned, sipped champagne in his Balmoral suite with his brother, Pietro, and got dressed in the kilt I’d bought him – a recently patented Scots–Italian design we called the Macaroni tartan. He was surprised when he got downstairs. Awaiting him was not the Rolls-Royce I’d hired, but a police car.

  In the interview room later, Joe had asked me if I’d done it. I said I had slept with them, all of them, but I didn’t know if I had killed them. A tear came to his eye. A vein on his temple pulsated. His face reddened, his knuckles whitened. He walked out. I don’t think he would have been more disgusted if I said I definitely had killed them.