by Tim Parks
‘Yeah,’ Kwame repeated. ‘We not going to let you down, boss. We love you.’ His black skin seemed perfectly appropriate on the red sofa. He appeared no more shocked or ill at ease than he had been when he found Morris battering Bobo to death on the office floor.
‘So you’re not pregnant,’ Morris faltered.
‘You poor sweet thing,’ Paola said, arms still entended. ‘Let me kiss your poor face.’
‘She’s lying,’ Mimi said. Very loud and clear. ‘She is pregnant.’
Hearing the voice, so ringingly hers, Morris experienced a slight attack of vertigo. The room and his wife and the big black all slipped out of focus for a moment, blurred to grey light. (Was it Paola, already having the affair with Kwame, who had made the phone call? Was it?) By the time everything had recomposed itself he was suddenly decisive, and operating under orders now.
‘I’ll go down and fix a few drinks,’ he said. ‘Give you time to get your breath back and me to wind down. Then I’m going to make you pay for this,’ he laughed unnaturally. ‘In pleasure.’
Paola’s eyes were half closed in cheerfully sultry lust. ‘Anything, Mo,’ she said. ‘Just get your cock up here.’
Excited, horrified, determined, elated, Morris hurried downstairs. It seemed that other hands mixed the drinks for him. Two tall glasses full of ice, three inches of gin, three of tonic. Haifa lemon in each. And where was the Lexotan? Was it still here? Her tranquilliser for when she felt under stress. She felt under stress! Because she was betraying him of course. Where? Got it. Behind the huge jar of KY she had brought back from England. Morris waited while thirty drops dripped painfully slowly from the nozzle.
‘Are you coming. Mo? Don’t change your mind now.’
‘Couldn’t find the lemons,’ he shouted, and while one hand held the Lexotan over the second glass, he filled a third with nothing but cool tonic water. Then he wiped the tonic bottles and threw them away, wiped the handle of the fridge, the handle of the knife he’d used, and the glasses after he had set them on a tray.
Sade was serving up ‘Cherry Pie’, voice oozing with moneyed lust, the saxophones sophisticatedly sleazy, those elements of black culture Europeans have distilled into aphrodisiac. Listening, Morris hesitated a moment on the stairs and closed his eyes. ‘Mirni,’ he prayed, ‘give me the strength to go through with this filth.’ And he added: ‘It will be for everybody’s benefit in the end.’ For quite suddenly, despite his nervousness, she had allowed him to see the sense of this, its necessity almost, and a clear path right through to the happy ending.
‘Mo, che dolce! You darling.’ Paola was cross-legged on the carpet. Smoking. Her hair bubbled on thin shoulders. Her little stomach was flat and tight. From amidst the tawny fuzz so frankly displayed between gently rocking thighs, peeped a gash of blood pink. How could Morris have married such a whore? And how could he ever bring himself to turn his head and look at the nakedness of the street Negro who had just penetrated her, poured his filth and diseases into the womb where his baby daughter was growing.
Morris bent down, put the tray on the floor, picked up his drink and sat back on the sofa. Paola took hers, and to Morris’s right Kwame reached down so that his long ebony arm came into vision, closing a huge hand round the glass. At which point Morris finally turned to look. And what he saw, to his surprise, was almost a vision: the huge torso tight with muscle under satin-dark skin, the lean waist, and between the powerful thighs, thick but slack, and tipped with red, his black man’s long dark sex. Drinking, Kwame began to laugh. This is more fun than working, boss. We let the others work.’
Almost in a trance, Morris was reminded, as if seeing everything in negative, of that marble-white Apollo he had viewed and touched, caressed, with Forbes in the Uffizi. The only way to learn the gratia placendi,’ the old man had said. And here there were no guardians to stop them. Only Mimi as a witness.
For Mimi’s ghost had appeared now. She was standing behind Kwame in a shaft of sunlight boiling from the skylight above. Her long hair was loose and the gauze gown she wore transparent over high breasts, so much bigger and rounder than Paola’s, with a golden crucifix hung between. Likewise a light chain was draped around her hips, gently sagging under the weight of another holy image that winked and shone over the wiry darkness beneath her belly.
. . . Like a heap of wheat, Morris remembered, set about with lilies.
He wanted to leap from the sofa and rush over to her. But the apparition had raised one finger to softly frowning lips. Then over the music and the drone of the excavator, he distinctly heard her whisper: ‘Enjoy, Morrees. Enjoy! But keep your heart and mind on me throughout, and you will stay pure.’
Then came the shock of an ice-cold hand cupped and pressing on his crotch. He looked down to find Paola laughing. ‘Isn’t he beautiful? Our Negro!’ Kwame joined in the laughter. ‘But remember you promised you would punish us,’ Paola said. She was unbuckling his belt now.
‘I do anything you tell me, boss,’ Kwame said. ‘Anything.’
Looking at his watch as it was taken off, Morris saw it was only five past two, and his rapidly calculating mind reassured him that the schedule wasn’t even tight. As his wife’s gin-cold lips came down on his underwear, Morris averted his gaze across Kwame’s splendid stirring to where, standing immediately behind, Mimi’s eyes were half closed now, staring boldly, intently, with complicity, one hand lightly caressing a breast. Her lips pouted in a kiss. With a sense of supreme sacrifice Morris reached across and grabbed the black man’s sex.
Some fifty minutes later he was free. They were both asleep on the big bed in the guest-room, drugged, sated, exhausted. Mimi too had gone now, though her orders were very much on his mind as he moved quickly about the house, shirt in one hand to polish away fingerprints, matchbox in the other for the items he must collect (he had emptied the matches in his pocket): pubic hairs from sofa and bed; head hairs from the pillow; one nail-paring from the bin in the bathroom; one used condom, most carefully wrapped in toilet paper, and then so arranged in the matchbox as not to lose its precious burden. What about an earring? He went back into the bedroom where they lay together, she curled on one side and he curled about her, quite romantically, protectively, his dark skin against her soapy white, his thick lips in her hair. Morris lifted her curls to discover an earring, tiny diamond in the lobe. But she twitched when he touched it, suddenly and quite strongly. Kwame breathed more deeply. Morris backed off. With any luck he would find one in her handbag. Yes. On the floor. The big gold hoops. Just one. And a used tissue. And perhaps a couple of cigarette stubs too, now he came to think of it, from the ashtray, with her sex-red lipstick on the tips.
Then it occurred to him that before doing any more of this he should already have closed the windows and turned on the gas. God only knew how long it took to fill a house with gas. God only knew how long they would sleep. He found the pole for the skylights, banged them shut, then hurried downstairs, turned on all the rings, opened the oven door and turned that on too. Another five minutes, washing the three glasses, then rinsing two with a bit of gin and tonic while putting the third back in the cupboard. Good. Now the last fingerprints: as soon as he’d wiped those off he could get his shirt back on and fill his pockets with one or two last items of detritus: a piece of dead skin spotted on the bathroom floor, a damp pantie-liner. Until at last he was - was he? - yes, ready to leave, yes. Morris had just put his eye to the Judas hole these suspicious Italians could never live without, when the buzzer went.
Somebody was at the front gate, buzzing their buzzer. The sound was so brutally loud in the relative silence of the big flat that Morris felt he must be close to a heart attack. Not to mention the possibility it would wake the sleepers. And he’d been so sure Mimi had got this sorted out for him. So sure. How could she have let someone come to the door? He held his breath. In the space of thirty seconds he was absolutely sodden with cold sweat.
Morris waited, his mind shuffling through the possible visitors. A
marocchino? A Jehovah’s Witness? It was too late for the postman. But perhaps the local vigile had come to warn him he hadn’t paid some council tax or other? The ridiculous business about right of way from garage to street. Had he paid it? Had he paid the TV licence? He thought not. But the smell of the gas was overpowering now. If they got inside the palazzo and came to the front door, they couldn’t help but notice.
There it went again. Buzz! Incredibly loud. He’d never realised. Surely buzzers didn’t need to be this loud. And it couldn’t be a marocchino or Jehovah’s Witness, otherwise he would have heard the muffled buzz of the doorbells in the other flats. Because people like that tried everybody. If only the buzzer could be taken off the hook, like the phone. But then there was the further problem that he would have to get out of the palazzo past whoever it was down at the gate. The gas was beginning to make him feel sick now. Of course if he’d simply been living there he could have gone out on the balcony and looked, something one could usually do without being seen. But not always. Not always.
Or could it be the police? Or the carabinieri? Forbes perhaps, knowing what Morris, if only by elimination, now knew he knew - for it had been he who had taken the letters of course - had phoned the police. They had come immediately.
Again the buzzer sounded. Morris was frantic. His head was splitting. He might vomit at any moment. It even occurred to him he might just lie down with them both on the bed and die, after all the humiliation he had been through. There it came again, for God’s sake! Except this time the noise was followed by a distant voice screaming: ‘Sporco negro, we know you’re in there. Come out and look what’s happened to your fancy car.’
Morris breathed, if the word can be used of someone in a gas-filled room. Of course! It was just Mimi’s way of reminding him! Running back into the kitchen, arm over his mouth, he grabbed a felt-tip, came back to the sitting-room and began to write in crazy block caps on the whitewashed walls: death to THE DIRTY NEGROES. VIVA THE NORTHERN LEAGUE. VENETO PER I VENETI.
No more than a minute later he was stumbling down the stairs, gasping for clean air. At the main door to the palazzo he stopped and listened. Sure enough there was the sound of some motor bike or other accelerating away into the distance. Presumably they had knifed the tyres of the Mercedes, or tossed brake fluid over the bonnet, which, though annoying in one sense, could hardly be more convenient in another. In any event, he wouldn’t be stopping to look.
Morris had already stepped out onto the front path when he remembered the keys. Oh, but this was so amateur! So hopelessly careless! Did he still have his own? Yes. He rushed back up the stairs, hearing the sudden explosion of a vacuum cleaner behind a door on the first floor. Certainly the builder had cheated shamelessly on the insulation. He deserved a scandal like this to lower his prices. Before inserting his key, without quite knowing why, he untucked his shirt and stuffed it in his mouth.
Inside the air was sickly now. Where would her keys be? There must be some explanation for that writing on the walls, for how the murderous racists had got in, how they had opened the gas jets. And if he smashed a window the precious poison would escape. No, it must seem as if she had left her keys in the door, a carelessness not beyond her.
In her handbag? He couldn’t remember feeling them there.
And how long was he going to last in here without throwing up? Morris dashed up the spiral staircase and straight through to the bathroom, where he pulled the shirt from his mouth’ opened the window a moment and breathed deeply. Only to find, directly opposite him on scaffolding that had risen with obscene rapidity, a worker sitting on a plank, drinking from a wine bottle and presumably looking straight at him. This was simply unfair. He got the window closed, went back into the main room and began to root through her clothes in a heap in the corner. Suspender belts, no less. Obviously she’d brought all the gear. Wet with drool too. But there was no time for this indulgence. Her jacket, they must be In her jacket.
Still holding his breath he found the thing over the back of a chair and pulled out the keys. Good. But, as so often, curiosity got the better of him. Instead of rushing back downstairs he returned to the bedroom and the two naked bodies on the big modern bed with the Armani-upholstered oval backboard she had paid so much for. Even now, he thought, even now he could turn back. They weren’t dead yet, were they? He bent down and kissed his wife’s pale cheek just beside the ear, then crouched and kissed a rubbery nipple, so shy and vulnerable in sleep. The paps that would never suckle Morris’s child.
No more than a minute later, mustering all his sang-froid and city man’s invisibility, Morris left the palazzina. Looking neither to right nor left, he walked to the tiny Seicento, and climbed In. Thanks be to God and His guiding and guarding hand, the ancient piece of junk started first time. Morris smiled. Fiat justitia, as Forbes would say.
32
‘0h, ecco,‘ere you are, Mr Morrees!’ Dionisio pushed the drug trolley into the ward. It was almost five o’clock. Morris had not gone to seek him out. That would be too obvious. Anyway, there had been Forbes to attend to first. A confession to wring from him. Strict orders to give, backed up by threats. And promises. The matchbox and assorted detritus were in his jacket pocket in his locker. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, was the motto there.
‘It is some hours I am looking for you.’
‘I thought your shift was over,’ Morris said politely, raising his eyes from his Bible. He had been marvelling at the work that must have gone into cross-referencing his Authorised Version, a labour that had so far allowed him to track down thirteen uses of the word ‘vengeance’, and notably: Tor he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation upon his head, and he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloke.’
Morris particularly liked ‘an helmet’ and the spelling of ‘cloke’, though he feared there would be vivid dreams to come. Beneath an enforced calm and interest in curious detail, his mind was still reeling from the degradations he had been forced to submit to. One clung on to Mimi, to one’s religion, one’s God, as to identity itself.
‘You are not ‘ere for lunch.’
He had gone down into the garden, Morris said, and fallen asleep on a bench. He thought it must be the relief of finally having the dressings off and his face fixed (here he smiled falsely). He was feeling good. I’ll be able to leave the day after tomorrow, won’t I?’
‘If the doctor is agreed there is no infection,’ Dionisio sai.
The ward was quite busy at this hour, with worried relatives coming to inspect the kind of monstrosities they would have to learn to put up with over the years to come, and pretend were nothing. The nurse was about to move on with his bountiful selection of tranquillisers. But Morris asked: ‘Are you a Christian, Dionisio?’
‘A cattolico,’ the nurse said, showing no surprise.
‘I was just reading this passage, and I was wondering,’ Morris asked, ‘do you think that the Lord wreaks vengeance on those who do evil? I mean it’s an old-fashioned concept. But the Bible does say it.’
’ “Wreaks”?’ Dionisio was puzzled. ‘I thought this means the bad smells.’
‘No, takes vengeance,’ Morris said patiently. ‘Vengeance, vendetta. Do you think God would do that kind of thing?’
The nurse’s gnomish southern features were endearingly concentrated. At least Morris had got him off the subject of his five-hour absence. Quite probably one thing simply superimposed itself over another in that tiny brain. ‘When I first arrive at Earrrls Court,’ Dionisio said at last, ‘we ‘ave the landlord that asks too much, but too much money and ‘e never mends the toilet flush and never the heating works properly. Then ‘e say he will throw us away because we are too many in the flat.’
‘No sense of charity,’ Morris agreed, thinking how many feckless foreigners he had given a roof to in Villa Caritas.
Dionisio was stumbling on with his story. ‘One of the boys with us ‘e is very religious and ‘e pray th
at something will make that the landlord change ‘is idea.’
Morris waited, mildly bored.
‘Well’ - Dionisio paused for effect - ‘the same day after ‘e say we ‘ave to go ‘e is knocked by the bus.’
‘Really?’ The coincidence was so interesting it actually took Morris’s mind off things for a moment. ‘And died?’ he asked eagerly.
‘No,’ Dionisio said. ‘But he can’t walk. For a long time.’
‘Ah, so you mean he relented and let you stay in the flat?’
‘No,’ Dionisio shook his head very seriously. ‘No, ‘e threw us away anyway. What you want? In England there is not enough protection for the foreigner in these situations. But we find a place in ‘Ammersmith that is nicer.’
‘Oh, yes, that was lucky.’ It did seem to Morris that there was a lack of biblical clarity in this story. He much preferred Sodom and Gomorrah. But he let it pass. ‘By the way, I really want to leave tomorrow morning,’ he announced. ‘Is there any way . . . I feel I should get out and face the world.’
The primario visits at nine o’clock,’ Dionisio said. ‘And he will say if the skeen is ready.’
A couple of hours later, Antonella was sitting on the side of Morris’s bed, sobbing. She had been trying to talk to Paola all day and hadn’t been able to find her. She’d gone to the company, but there was nobody in the office. Anyway the moment she’d walked in she’d had to walk out again, thinking what Bobo had quite probably done there. It was awful, with the police looking at the letters and asking her all kinds of personal details, and with a list of phone numbers called from the house and whose they were and why and who could this woman be. She felt so upset and she just wanted all this to be over. Over. She didn’t even care how it finished now, well or badly. The day the trial of these immigrants was over and they had caught this horrible person trying to extort a ransom, she would just get on a plane and fly away, she didn’t care where. Or she would go to a convent or something. She’d always wanted to go to a convent when she was a girl. She wished she had done now. But then she had wanted a baby so much and she had loved Bobo so much. Only now she would never, never have a baby, and never love anybody ever again because of the way Bobo had treated her, the horrible things that had happened. She was living in hell.