by Ruth Dugdall
“You came to the bedsit. I remember you.”
“Of course I came. A daughter of mine in those squalid conditions! I came to try and talk her out of keeping the baby. But she was always so surly, so pig-headed. Just like her father.” She had the grace to look at Alice. “Of course, they would have found you a respectable family. But Matilde was determined, and would not be told what was best for all concerned.” Her voice cracked like a dropped glass. “She was so clever. She could have gone to university.”
“I want to go to university. I start my A levels next term.” Her grandmother appraised her with new interest, then fought it down and looked away.
“I suppose you’ve got your brains from her. They certainly didn’t come from me.” Her grandmother ordered a second espresso. All Alice could stomach was water. Today she would discover who she was. “I have a cheque for you, Alice. I want you to take it and make something of your life. It is all I can offer you.”
On the circular table was a silver pot of cubed sugar, and the older woman propped an envelope against it. Alice took it, peered into the open flap and saw the amount the cheque was made for. Her mouth went slack at such a huge amount. “Are you rich, then? You and my grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“But you let us stay in that tiny bedsit.” If this was the only time they would ever meet then she may as well say it. There was nothing to lose.
“Yes. That was Matilde’s choice. She could always have returned home.”
“Without me?”
“Without you.”
Her grandmother dropped a cube of sugar into her coffee. It dissolved upwards, the sweet in the bitter. Alice sipped her Perrier water, welcoming the sparkle in her loosening stomach. “I want to know who my father is.”
Her grandmother touched a red nail to the white tablecloth, to her pink lip. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!” Alice’s anger rose. “You’ve got no idea what it feels like to be raised by strangers. Just tell me, okay? Then I’ll piss off out of your life forever.”
A woman at the next table turned around, but Alice didn’t care. She would never come back here again. Her stomach churned violently, but she couldn’t risk a trip to the loo. Her grandmother may disappear, and with her any hope of her finding her father.
“I want you to promise,” her grandmother replied, carefully, “that after today you will never contact me again. We’ve met. Our mutual curiosity has been satisfied. This must be the end of it.”
Alice struggled to hold the rage within herself. She wanted to scream. She wanted to smash glass.
“Look, why not end it here? Stop searching. It can only lead to heartache. Go home, Alice. Settle for the family you have.”
Alice was blind with tears. “I bet you sent him away, didn’t you? I bet he loved Mummy – they would have made it work! It’s your fault!” The lady at the other table was gawping but Alice didn’t care. “It’s all your fault!” She grabbed the pot of sugar and hurled it to the floor. Everyone in the room turned.
“Shut up!” The old woman didn’t look controlled anymore; her face was pink and her teeth were very white. She leaned forward. “Shut up!” she hissed.
“Why? Because it’s true? It is your fault! You turned my father away!”
“Be careful, Alice! Innocence is precious; once lost, it cannot be regained. Knowledge is a heavy burden.”
“Don’t lecture me, you sanctimonious bitch. You killed Mummy! It was you, wasn’t it? Sending her away like that. It was your fault she died!”
In the silent room Alice’s grandmother reached forward, grabbed her wrist, the silver pot still wheeling on the floor, “Your mother was a little whore!”
“No!” Alice pulled back.
“Oh, yes – Matilde made herself available!”
“You turned her out,” Alice accused, “it’s your fault she’s dead – “
“And was it my fault that she seduced my husband?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s right, Alice. She was seventeen, she wasn’t a child. Your mother was a little slut. And your father is also your grandfather.”
Alice was drunk because she knew no other way to dull the pain.
Alice had been with her grandmother for as long as it took the old woman to drink two espressos, yet in that time her sense of self had fractured into a million pieces. She’d always been different, and she thought it was because she was adopted. Now she knew it was something worse that singled her out. She knew why she had always been on the edge of life.
It was the twinning in her genes, the thickness of her blood.
Mummy had been raped, and she was the outcome. Worse, Mummy had been raped by her own father. And if her mother was a victim, and her father a monster, then what did that make her? Of course she was drunk.
Her grandmother’s cheque was blood money. Family blood, too clotted, too rich. The cheque was for her to disappear, for the problem that she was to go away. Such a large amount. Enough to cover university, to buy a house. The price of her grandmother’s guilt. The price she would pay for failing to protect her daughter, her only child. Alice had taken the cheque. You owe me this, she thought.
Back in her parent’s home, the people who’d taken her on when she was only half-formed, she saw that this silent house was all she had. There would be no rescue. No fairytale ending.
In her bedroom, she smoothed the duvet and lay down, thinking: so this is it. You’ve woken up at last.
Such a lot of money, that cheque. It could buy her a castle to keep her safe from the wolf. From the axe man she feared may be outside her window. She would take something else, too. Just one more thing: the name. Her beautiful Mummy’s name, and her father’s name too. She would take the Mariani name to show what she was, to see if it revealed the poison inside her blood.
The wolf she’d always dreaded was already deep inside her nature.
Thirty-six
I don’t think I can do it, he’d said, I don’t want to die. So I soothed him and kissed him and told him that he was strong. That if he wasn’t, I would be strong enough for us both. To die with someone, you have to trust them, be able to feel vulnerable in their presence. It was just one week from Smith’s chosen date, June 16th. Just one week and I needed to help him to prepare and remove any doubts. He needed me to show him that I was able to see it through. To prove my strength. After a day wandering around the heart of the village we had returned to my home where we drank a bottle of Pouilly Fumé and ate a light meal of bread and cheese. Smith was jittery, despite the alcohol. He wouldn’t sit and was hovering around the kitchen counter, picking up my things, until I wanted to scream at him. When he touched my precious blue vase I tensed but sat still, my hands wedged between my thighs. He looked it over, put it down, started pulling petals off the flowers.
“Let’s go out,” he said, the idea sparking the corners of his mouth, a shock of a smile.
“There’s not much to do around here,” I said, even as he was heading to the front door, making a bid for freedom. I resented him opening the latch; it was my latch, my door. He was impolite in his haste.
Outside it was cool, the day’s heat gone. The village was dead. Although tourists wander around the shops and houses or read ancient stones in the churchyard or sit in The Swan knifing clotted cream onto floury scones, when evening arrives they leave; entertainment beckons from other towns that come alive at dusk. They go to Ipswich or Colchester, where youths champion the night, hanging about outside the massive multiplex cinemas that show too many loud films, near the American chain restaurants that sell burgers and ribs and chips, chips, chips. I’d hate to live in a busy town. In daylight I can cope with Colchester, with its park and castle offering refuge from the chain stores and social security scroungers, but come evening I only want my own village.
How to entertain Smith was a problem.
Further down the road from my house, behind the pub, there was somethin
g going on. The community hall’s entrance was propped open by a chair and a couple of women were leaning against the wall, smoking and laughing. I wondered what Smith thought of those silly laughing women, if he noticed their short skirts and pumped up breasts.
“Looks like there’s a party going on,” he said, a shrug and a suggestion all at once. I knew there would be nothing else to do and he needed to be distracted.
We walked over, and the women stopped laughing to watch us. “It’s in aid of the church roof,” one said. I recognised her from the delicatessen further down the high street. “Trying to raise money to fix it.” I didn’t want to go to a local village disco and would have preferred the hush of an art gallery, a museum, reading notes telling me what the artist intended. I was suspicious of the laughing women’s motives, but Smith lead the way, pushing his glasses further up his nose as we crossed the threshold.
Inside the hall the stench of middle age desperation was thick. Divorced women, wearing clothes better suited to teenagers, dancing like they were having the time of their lives to songs about surviving. One woman who wore a black taffeta skirt with stiff netting looked over at Smith and winked, then saw me standing behind him and smiled at me knowingly. I was out of place in my cream pencil skirt and linen blouse. I had to be younger than the other women by more than a decade but I felt ancient. For a stupid second despair caught me up and I wanted to run out of the hall and cry. Smith went to the makeshift bar, a pasting table with boxed wine and cans of beer. He came back with a beer for himself, a glass of warm wine for me. It tasted like vinegar.
We perched on chapel chairs at a school desk, watching the women who were dancing like they were at a wedding. There were hardly any men in the room. After downing his can of lager Smith looked at me, frowning. “How do you know you can do it, if you can’t even eat meat?” Two parallel lines appeared between his eyebrows making his glasses bob lower on his nose.
“Robin, we need to know that you can inflict pain.” He was nearly shouting over the blaring disco beat, but the middle-aged women were too lost in their dancing to hear him.
I understood his worry. His fear that, being a vegetarian, I was somehow squeamish about blood or flesh. But my decision wasn’t because of moral scruples or an unwillingness to eat dead flesh. I simply found the lengthy process of chewing and masticating meat tiresome, preferring the simplicity of vegetables, the clarity of blandness. Meat repeated on me physically in a way I disliked. I didn’t say this to Smith. I could see that worrying about the details was his way of preparing himself.
“So what do you want me to do? Wring a chicken’s neck?” It was a joke, and my laughter matched the mood in the hall, the music providing a jolly backbeat. But Smith’s mouth was a straight line, his cheeks crease-free and stern. I swallowed the last of the vinegar-wine and placed a firm hand on his wrist.
“Tell me what you want, Smith.”
“I want to test you.”
He said it was important that we bound ourselves together with a deed. A blood bargain. We decided on a knife. We just needed to find a sacrifice and rural Suffolk is awash with farms and smallholdings, middle-class ex-urbanites longing for idyllic days of Laura Ashley pinnies and organic milk, whimsical romanticism.
There was an allotment area around some outer fields, where village dwellers without sufficient gardens could rent a patch of earth to grow crops or – more to the point – graze a few goats or sheep. Many had hens, as I knew only too well from the shrill rousing I received at dawn if I forgot to use earplugs.
Smith was excited by the idea, and we left the village hall quickly, heading first into the house, collecting the knife from the kitchen, and then to my car. He was so pumped up that he misjudged the angle for the seat belt, and couldn’t buckle himself in. I reached over and secured him, as if he were a child. He gave me a grateful smile, a look of guilty pleasure on his face. He enjoyed being mothered.
Initially, the allotments seemed familiar to me from those of my girlhood, although on closer inspection I realised that these allotments were nothing like Dad’s. His was a solitary, male domain. A rickety shed, amidst smart rows of tomatoes. He’d lean against the shed, his back into the grain of the wood, considering his work. I went with him, also to escape the confines of home, but as I watched his satisfied smile and half-closed eyes, all I felt was boredom. Unearthing carrots or twisting tomatoes free from their vines became boring rather swiftly. When I hit puberty I stopped going to the allotment. I think he was relieved.
These allotments were a distant relation to Dad’s, upwardly mobile from their humble heritage. The sheds were more like chalets with glass windows and wooden verandas boasting pine benches and polka dot Wellingtons. It was almost nine o’clock, and light had faded, so only a few people remained. Unlike the allotments of my childhood the feminine touch dominated; curtains hung at the shed windows, rows of flowers rather than vegetables, and some sheds were painted in pastel shades.
“Bloody hell,” said Smith, “it’s like something from Homes and Gardens.” We took in the scene together, and then heard a rude snort behind us.
Turning sharply, we were surprised to see a black boar-like creature. Disorientated for a second, I had the mad thought that it was wild until I saw that a chicken-wire fence separated us from the ugly beast.
“A pot bellied pig,” whispered Smith, touching my shoulder. “Perfect.”
The pig was friendly, pushing its snout through the holes to suckle my skirt. Its saliva darkened the fabric and I shoved my knee against it, pushed it away, but it was tenacious in its desire to be petted. There was a wooden kennel behind it, with a homemade sign over the door that read ‘Boris’.
Boris chewed ferociously, the sound of gravel on teeth, watching with black beady eyes, its wet snout dripping. Its muzzle and brow were coarse with wiry black, like pubic hair. “I don’t think I can,” I said, feeling my nose wrinkle as I watched Boris take a long piss in the mud.
“Think of it as a gift,” he said, extracting my kitchen knife from his coat, unwrapping the tea towel from the blade. “A sacrifice.”
“To you?”
“If you like.” Smith watched Boris, showing him the shiny steel to see if he recognised the danger; he didn’t. “Or to God.”
I snatched the handle from him, just wanting to get it over with. For Christ’s sake, I thought, this had suddenly got bizarre. To me, the act of killing the pig proved nothing. Smith’s sacrifice was voluntary, but the pig had no consciousness, no choice, and no will. It was just a dumb animal.
I climbed over the netting, only high enough to keep the pig in, not intended to keep humans out, and approached the tame beast, the knife poised and ready.
My God, how it squealed!
I panicked, fearing we would be discovered, and plunged the knife into Boris’ neck, feeling the layers of fat and gristle give way to unforgiving bone. I must have punctured an artery as blood started pouring out, and I wanted to heave but Smith was watching. This was my test and I had to prove myself worthy.
The pig flopped onto its fat side, still alive, a gaping mouth revealing black molars. I pulled the knife from its neck and, seeing the double row of nipples plunged into the centre, aiming for the heart. The pig screamed like a baby, but it was over. I leaned back on my heels, sick to the core. Who the hell called a female, Boris?
“I’ve done it. Now let’s get out of here.”
I stood quickly, longing for escape, giddy on my feet, and stepped back over the netting. Smith was rooted to the spot, his hands clasped to the wooden fence post.
“Are you okay, Smith?”
Was he disgusted with the violence? Had I gone too far? But when he looked at me his eyes were moist and dark. He took my hand in his, which was clammy with sweat, and placed it over his groin. I felt his erection, straining against the thin fabric and understood. Boris’ death had made him feel alive and happy, the act of sacrifice sealing his devotion to the plan.
Later, I took Smith to t
he station in Colchester, and waited with him until his train arrived. We were bound together by blood, and didn’t want to be separated, even for the few days until he returned. I touched him, soothed him, knowing this would be how he remembered me until then. I touched his cheek, stroked the soft skin, felt the irregular growth of stubble. I pulled him to me, kissing the place where his pulse throbbed in his neck. The intercom crackled and a woman’s shrill voice broke the tender tension. ‘The train about to depart from platform one is the seven o’clock service to London Liverpool Street.’
He leaned towards me, his mouth wet on my ear. “Robin,” his voice stuttered, agitated, “I’m ready now. Make sure you’re prepared.”
His words stilled the world. It was all I ever wanted to hear.