Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,’ Forbes explained.

  But Morris wasn’t listening. The heavens were already falling. Somebody must have called the carabinieri. And the reason was all too obvious. Beyond the gate the huge ugly guard dog Bobo had bought for reasons that to Morris were still obscure (had the company ever needed a guard dog in the past?) was sprinting up and down by the factory wall, barking quite insanely and occasionally leaping up four or five feet to hurl itself against the cement. Fearing their car might already have been seen and recognised, Morris told Kwame to draw up behind the flashing blue light.

  The carabinieri were perplexed, unsure as to whether they should break down the gate to see if an intruder was in the factory, or proceed more cautiously, so as not to damage the property. For his part, Morris had no difficulty appearing concerned. And all the more so a moment later. For no sooner had he gone back to the car for the remote control, thanking the carabinieri for their promptness and wondering aloud why on earth the dog was behaving so wildly, than another car pulled off the road. Turning briefly from buzzing open the gate, the dog howling behind them, Morris found himself face to face with Fendtsteig. And at precisely the same moment he remembered that he still had all the Massimlna ransom letters in his inside coat pocket.

  What a hopeless, hopeless fool!

  ‘Buon giorno,’ Fendtsteig announced, but it might as well have been Guten Morgen. Or Arbeit macht frei. A shiver of danger flickered up Morris’s spine. He was a hair’s breadth from discovery.

  ‘It Is a pleasure to see you again, Signor Duckvorse,’ Fendtsteig Insisted through the dog’s tortured baying. At least the animal was suffering for Its sins.

  Morris merely nodded, almost as if he hadn’t properly recognised the man, and, as the opening mechanism now began to whine and the big iron gate to slide, he shouted desperately: ‘Somebody must be in there! They’re stealing something!’ Squeezing through what seemed an impossibly small gap, he made a mad dash towards the factory building, fearfully aware of the carabinieri and Kwane hard on his heels, of those ransom letters stuffed in his pocket.

  He was some ten metres from the office building when the animal turned. Forty or fifty kilos of Dobermann came bounding at his chest. Morris scarcely had time to register a fury of fangs and fur, snarling black gums, mad eyes, then a terrible tearing of flesh, his own, before he was plunged into a violent blood-tossed dark that had more to do with nightmare than consciousness.

  27

  If there were awakenings over the following forty-eight hours, Morris did not remember them as such. Later, discussing the matter with Forbes, he would suggest that Dante would have had a whole new range of punishments to mete out had he ever undergone modern anaesthetics: combinations of suffocation, nightmare images and nausea, intense lights in oppressive darkness, consciousness only of the impossibility of regaining consciousness, induced passivity of sickness without reference to a before or hope of an after, and total, total anxiety - in short, an excellent punishment, for those whose crime involved the presumption of being in control of their existence, of believing they could organise their lives and the lives of those around them,

  The only solace was that so long as one was still alive one could look on such sufferings as penance. Clearly God was purging Morris for the long years of service ahead, the hundreds of hungry souls he would feed and clothe in a much-expanded Duckworth Wines, gently drawing a Third World fraternity into the Catholic fold.

  But the punishment, while it lasted, was a painful one. Indeed it now seemed that the rubble he was buried under, or rather, the viscous liquid he sank and floated in, at once bright and dark, loud and silent, smooth and abrasive, must soon crush him into itself: a lurid puree of pain, both mental and spiritual.

  From nothing, he heard a muffled voice say: ‘É straordinario!’

  Another voice, equally muffled, said: ‘Paola, Paola, cara, I can scarcely believe it. If only it were true!’

  So that now Morris knew it must be his wife who was enquiring: ‘But what did the polizia say about it?’

  Upon hearing which word, he was suddenly catapulted into a state of the most intense, the most nerve-raw consciousness: aware of the darkness, aware of a sort of institutional humming and rustling behind the voices of his wife and sister-in-law, aware of his supine position on a bed that was too hard to be his own, aware of fierce pain in the right ear and neck, aware of the thick bandages round his face that were blocking out vision and dulling sound, but aware most of all that he was no longer wearing his winter coat. . . .

  Tor Christ’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘My coat!’ His head jerked up, his arms lifted and groped, and the most indescribable pain seared through his face: lightning struck him on the scalp, ran down across his right ear and then exploded in the soft nerviness where shoulder met neck.

  ‘Mo!’ Paola exclaimed. ‘Stai buono! Don’t move!’

  ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ Antonella said.

  Now he remembered the dog, the teeth, the blood that must have been his own. Had they at least dispatched the thing? But it was still the coat that was uppermost in his mind. The old ransom letters of years ago. The proof and key to everything. He had been discovered, despite his conversion. Be sure your sins will find you out. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Mimi!’ he cried out, most, most unwisely. But already the needle was in his arm. As suddenly as he had awoken he was asleep again.

  There followed another great lapse of darkness, though less oppressive this time, a mere eclipse of consciousness, however prolonged, behind fleecy clouds of analgesics. Then he was aware of a hand caressing his own as his soul stirred within him, stirred and gathered anxiety as it rose to the surface of his face, his eyes, until, as he opened the latter, the hand pulled quickly away.

  The bandage across his face had gone now, though something tight ran under his chin and around the top of his head. In any event, he couldn’t move, only stare at a fluorescent-lit ceiling.

  ‘Paola,’ he said.

  The reply was gravelly and low: ‘Morris, my boy.’ Forbes stood up and leaned over him, a benign, dusty apparition carved out of neon above, tears in watery eyes.

  ‘God, what happened?’

  But already Morris was acting. Already Morris knew perfectly well what had happened. The dog had got his throat. Whereas what he needed to know was who had got his coat.

  ‘Somebody tried to poison the dog,’ Forbes was telling him. ‘It went crazy and tore up your face. You remember, when we all went to the office together. The day before yesterday?’

  Morris hadn’t expected this. Tore up my face?’ He was silent a moment. Then alarmed. ‘Tore up my face? For God’s sake, how do I look?’

  Forbes had sat back on his chair and thus disappeared from Morris’s field of vision. Before speaking, he took the younger man’s hand once more, holding it with infinite lightness and tenderness. He cleared his throat. Then still didn’t speak.

  Quite horrified, Morris struggled to sit up, only to be overwhelmed by the pain of skin that refused to stretch. Forbes put a hand on his good shoulder to hold him down.

  ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ he said, the unavailability of a Latin tag perhaps betraying the extent of his emotion.

  ‘Oh God.’ Morris got his other hand free from the sheets and found the thick padding that went from the top of his right temple down as far as the neck. Touching the exposed part of his cheek close to his nose, it was to find the alien coarseness of wire threading. Yards of it. For Christ’s sake! Criss-crossing everywhere from forehead to lips.

  ‘I’m scarred for life,’ he whispered.

  Forbes, still invisible, said nothing.

  ‘Scarred for life!’ Morris repeated. He could feel the tears welling painfully in his eyes. Immediately he wanted to be alone, alone to bewail his misfortune, to call upon Mimi and upon God, to know the meaning of this immense calamity. Merely because he had tried to do away with a stupid dog! The irony of it! When sometimes y
ou felt you could slay half the human race and get away scot-free! The saltiness of a tear scalded fierce wounds. In the space of one stupid Sunday morning, everything had gone wrong.

  ‘Ne cede malis,’ muttered Forbes. Then, as Morris closed his eyes and showed signs of beginning to sob, Forbes added tentatively: ‘At least there is one piece of good news.’

  Morris fought through self-pity to some reasonable state of alertness, and was immediately suspicious.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It seems Bobo may only have been kidnapped.’

  ‘What?’ Morris opened his eyes and again made the mistake of trying to turn his head.

  ‘Antonella has received a letter asking for a ransom.’

  It took quite a few seconds for this to sink in. A letter, asking for a ransom? Morris’s mind was reeling. For Christ’s sake! The least thing and there were a whole bunch of nuts locking round ready to exploit it, to turn it into a fast billion lire, as if other people’s suffering was nothing at all! It dawned on him then that this letter was what Antonella and Paola must have been talking about (’I can scarcely believe it’). Yes. He took a deep breath. Though for the life of him he couldn’t understand why on earth Forbes might think such an outrage was good news.

  The fact is it’s going to make it that much more difficult for them to convict Azedine and Farouk, isn’t it?’

  Again it took a moment or two for Morris to register this. Then he was furious. He tried to sit up again, again fell back. ‘What the fuck do I care about two murderous queers, when my face has been torn apart? I don’t give a damn. I couldn’t care less. My life has been ruined by a stupid dog and you come and bother me with the fate of a couple of queers.’

  This outburst was followed by a long silence. Morris stared dumbly at the ceiling, as if mesmerised by the immense misfortune that had overcome him, at precisely the point when he had sworn to be good, too.

  Finally, in a tone of quiet rebuke, Forbes said: ‘Morris, you have been very generous to me, setting me up at Villa Caritas and paying for all the renovations and so on.’ He hesitated. Morris was hardly listenings having suddenly remembered his coat again. Surely the game was up. Innocence and beauty both lost at a single blow. ‘But the fact is,’ Forbes continued, ‘that I have a very soft spot for Farouk. He is a lovely and very gentle young man. As to his sexual inclinations, they are surely a matter for his own personal discretion. After all, Michelangelo was homosexual, and likewise Socrates. The important thing is that I don’t believe for one moment that he could have been involved in killing anybody and I will do everything I can to make sure he is not convicted.’

  There was a second long and portentous silence. What could Forbes mean by ‘do everything I can’? What could he do? Still the silence. Morris waited, then began to quiz the old man on exactly what had happened after the dog knocked him to the ground (his coat, who had taken his coat?). Only when there was no answer did he realise that Forbes had gone. To the bathroom most probably, Morris thought. But having said his piece in defence of Farouk, the Englishman did not come back.

  Morris had very little experience of hospitals. Apart from the sad occasion when he had pressed his boyish face against the glass of Acton Memorial’s Intensive Care Unit to watch dear Mother die, he had never been in one at all. He was thus surprised, on sitting up at last a couple of hours after Forbes had so abruptly disappeared, to notice that the nurses were predominantly men and wore green pyjamas for uniforms and clogs for shoes. Otherwise the mixture of institutional greys, fire extinguishers, bed screens, enamel-white cabinets, plus a crucifix caught in cobwebs over the spring-loaded door, was all that one might have expected.

  Rotating from the waist to avoid the pain in his neck, Morris observed the man in the bed beside him. With his right arm reduced to a bandaged stump, the fellow was understandably having difficulty turning the pages of his La Gazzetta dello Sport. Newspaper, Morris thought. He must get hold of a newspaper to check the state of play. At least as the media saw it. Though the truth was the police were probably just waiting for him to be sufficiently compos mentis to understand the full weight of the charges they could now lay against him.

  Kidnap. Multiple murder. The scenario seemed less surreal than it might have done before he had been to prison, where one had realised how normal, not to say decent, many of the other kidnappers, multiple murderers and pederasts were. Just people for whom opportunity had collided with predisposition. Most of them suffered their crimes as though they were some unfortunate illness against which they had not been properly inoculated at the appropriate age. Certainly he had met nobody as obtuse as Bobo in prison. Nor as profoundly perverse as his wife.

  Two women and an older man were gathered round the next bed, preventing Morris from seeing whatever misfortune had befallen its occupant. But it was clear that his fellow inmates, bedmates, were all severe accident cases. Mutilation, amputation, disfigurement were all on parade. Plastic surgery candidates perhaps? Did this explain why his slow survey of the ten beds and four walls revealed not a single mirror? The patients had to be carefully prepared. Patients like himself.

  Oh, Mimi, this beautiful, clear-skinned, persuasive face! Ruined. The cheeks you kissed so avidly!

  And what with this on his mind, plus the missing coat, plus the nagging anxiety of the ransom letter (who in God’s dear name could have sent that? The same person who had made the earlier phonecall?), Morris was roasting in a sort of exquisite mental hell. From which, he thought, he could do little more for the moment than turn his eyes upwards to paradise and beg that his guardian angel might dip her fingertips in the soothing water there and wet his flaming wounds, his no doubt grisly jowls and swollen lips, his suppurating soul. Having no other expedient available, Morris pressed his hands together and bowed his mutilated head in prayer. For he was determined not to abandon his beliefs at the very first let-down, however considerable it might have been.

  “Alio, a voice said.” ‘Ow arrre you, Meester Duckwart. Ees the lunch-time!’

  Looking up, Morris saw a squat, diminutive southern figure with toffee-brown face and bright, squinting eyes. ‘Is good we ‘ave the Eengleesh paziente so I can practise my Eengleesh, no?’ Taking a tray from a trolley and laying it on the bedside cabinet, the small man explained: ‘I live two years in the Earrrls Court, you know. That is ‘ow I speak so good the Eengleesh.’ A broad smile showed broken teeth.

  Still absorbed in his supplications, Morris experienced a sense of the entirely surreal. He blinked, then saw how this vision might have been sent him to illustrate that there were indeed people more pathetic and ridiculous than himself. However badly things went, however ugly he became, he would always surely be afforded more respect than this ludicrous mixture of clown and gnome.

  Looking at a piece of chicken in thin broth with floating grains of rice, he said: Thank you, thank you, nurse. By all means speak in English.’ And immediately he asked: where were his clothes, where was there a mirror, where could he find a copy of the local newspaper?

  The nurse squinted brightly. ‘I’m Dionisio,’ he said. ‘Call me Dionisio.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Dionisio. I’m Morris.’

  It must be some kind of divine test of his patience.

  ‘Your clothes is in the armadio that ‘as the number of your bed. It is the eight. The mirror is in the toilette in the corridor.’ The nurse cocked a small Sicilian head to one side. ‘But is better you don’t look before the operation. The newspaper is in the soggiorno at the end of the corridor.’

  ‘And when can I leave, Dionisio?’ Morris asked. His mind had simply refused to register the word ‘operation’.

  ‘Ah, Meester Duckwart, we are in such a ‘urry to go before ‘ardly we ‘ave arrived!’ Dionisio shook his head and went to the end of the bed, where he consulted a clipboard. ‘You ‘ave the operation the Friday. There will be many tests to do before then. They take the, ‘ow do you say?’ - he put down the clipboard and pinched a fold of hairy ol
ive flesh on the back of his hand.

  ‘Skin,’ Morris said, already wincing.

  They take the skeen from the leg and put it on the face.’ The little man patted his own cheeks as if making up. He consulted the board again. Then they ‘ave to - ‘ow you say? - rimodellare the ear,’ Again, he shook his head. ‘You can leave next week maybe.’

  He now arranged a table affair that attached to the bed across Morris’s knees, and placed the tray on top. Then, since he had apparently completed his rounds and all the other patients were already eating, each after his mutilated fashion, the nurse stayed to talk.

  ‘Meester Morris!’ he announced. ‘An Eengleeshman! I am so ‘appy. Is a long time I am not speaking Eengleesh.’

  It was one of the staples of existence, Morris thought, that people you didn’t want to talk to always wanted to talk to you, and that at all the truly important moments of one’s life one always had to deal with somebody ridiculous: that idiot Ph.D. fellow, for example, in the pensione in Rome, explaining his structuralist theory of ghosts as no more than a literary technique, when Morris had known even then that they must exist, they must, as events since had all too clearly demonstrated. Yes, no doubt on his deathbed they would send along some interfering halfwit to see him on his clownish way. The cosmos’s eternal love-affair with the ridiculous. But Morris felt more amenable and resigned since his conversion. Perhaps the whole point of this was to punish him for his vanity. He wasn’t so morally blind as not to appreciate that he sometimes strayed in that direction. With Mimi’s help, he thought, he would do his best to put a brave (if no longer beautiful) face on it.

  ‘You know the Earrrls Court?’ Dionisio was asking, ‘I work in the hotel there.’

  Morris spooned up the broth, only to discover that the right corner of his mouth was extremely painful. Meanwhile, his eyes sought out and found the block often grey lockers at the end of the room, sliced in half by the diagonal of somebody’s leg in traction.