He steps forward. Maybe the neon light overhead is flickering infinitesimally because he seems to shimmer as though he is a long way off.
He looks at my hand and aimlessly, as though they have only caught his eye because they are between us, at the bottles glinting sullenly in the light. He pulls out the nearest one. Brown paper is wrapped around the lower base, the wolf’s head logo stamped inside a red circle. He turns the bottle over and over in his hands and grips it by the neck. The liquid, black through the dark brown glass, rocks back and forth, unsettled, unstable. I wait, wondering if he is going to use it as a weapon. Against me, against himself.
The silence lengthens, grows heavier. He can’t ask the question.
I say, ‘I’m married.’
His hands tighten on the glass. He holds the bottle, trying to keep the wine level, stop it from moving.
‘Did you hear me?’
He puts the bottle carefully on the top corner of the nearest wine rack, on the very edge, so that half of its base is stepping out into white air.
‘Engaged,’ he says. ‘We know Pietr bought a ring.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘We were married. This morning.’
His eyes are completely black. There is no light there.
‘It’s not legal,’ he says.
I shrug. ‘It is to me.’
He makes a sharp wrenching movement with his hands as though he is tearing something in the air. The bottle sways in the current – he puts his forefinger against the base, holding it steady.
‘I gave up drinking for you,’ he says.
A jolt of rage goes through me. It burns any softness. All that is left is the asp of nausea twisting across dried earth and dead stones.
‘I gave up poetry for you,’ I shout. ‘I gave you everything. And you totally betrayed me.’
‘I never – ’ He steps forward, letting go of the bottle, which crashes to the ground. A red river spreads across the flagstones, soaking up the brown paper wrapping so that the fibres collapse into a sodden dark pink mass. The stamped wolf’s head nods at me as the liquid seeps across the floor, eddying around the jagged shards winking in the light and a small, shiny package.
As he crouches and carefully picks up the plastic bag, I come out slowly from behind the rack.
He lifts the bag to the light. I see the stones inside, the sparks of colour through the dull pebbly surfaces.
He isn’t looking at the stones. ‘I could leap up right now,’ he says. ‘I’m faster than you, bigger. I’ll come through the racks. I’ll jam the door. I can catch you and rip your throat out.’
‘Do it then.’
He stands, shoves the bag of stones into his pocket and, very slowly, steps over the broken glass. He is little more than an arm’s length away. This close, I am weakening already, my pulse climbing into my throat. I cling to the edge of the wine rack. I can’t look at him but I know he is moving forward, warily. Soon he will be close enough to touch.
‘You’ve got something to show Mitch now,’ I say.
‘I don’t give a fuck about Mitch.’ He is inches away.
‘He said you’d left.’
He puts his hand next to mine on the wine rack. The skin is broken across his knuckles, there are bruises already turning purple-green around his wrists.
He says, ‘They wanted me to alter my report.’
I imagine reaching out and resting my little finger between his first two knuckles. Some small gesture that he would remember later.
‘I care as much about your report,’ I say, ‘as you care if another man asks the woman you’re sleeping with to marry him.’
‘I didn’t expect you to goddamn marry him,’ he shouts. ‘What did you want me to do?’
‘I wanted you to goddamn stop it,’ I shout back. ‘I wanted you to tell them all to go to hell, tell them I’m not the woman they thought I was. To take me away from this.’
He looks at me. I can tell he still doesn’t understand. He reaches out and runs a hand over my hip, lingering. I slap him. I care enough not to hit hard but I forget about the rings. I cut him on the cheek. Blood wells up. He doesn’t move; he doesn’t try to staunch it.
‘Now we’re even.’ He still thinks that we haven’t gone past the point of no return.
I see the words coming, they are forming in the black air which is swirling around me. I can barely breathe but I know I have to say the words. Make him go away.
‘Let’s go then,’ he says. ‘I’ve got enough money, some friends. We might be okay – a good lawyer – ’
‘I’m not leaving Pietr.’
The black air is swirling around him now. ‘But you can’t stay married to him.’
‘He stood up for me.’
‘But that’s – ’
‘You’ve known all along what my father did to my brother.’
‘How could I tell you?’ he shouts. ‘Without you thinking I was trying to use you?’
I put my hands over my stomach. There are sharp jabs of pain as though I am being pierced inside. I hurt and I want to hurt him.
‘He gave me a book,’ I say. ‘A book of poetry. A book beyond price. You and Mitch would never understand it.’
He puts his teeth together. ‘Don’t ever, ever equate me with Mitch.’
I nod, trying to breathe through the pain. I wonder if I am miscarrying but there is no sensation of liquid leaving me. I want someone to ask. I want Anna. For the first time in years, in my life, I want my mother.
Devlin says, ‘Why didn’t you?’
I breathe out, slowly. ‘What?’
‘Marry me.’
‘You never asked me, Ash.’
‘But you must have known.’
‘How? I needed words.’
He is shocked. ‘But I gave away so much.’
‘All I got from you were absences. You knew about my father. You never told me. I could never rely on you.’
‘Listen to me.’ He holds my shoulders, turns me to face him. There is a moment when I sway towards him, when his hands move on my skin. Despite everything, in the middle of everything, I want him.
He takes a deep breath. ‘If you sleep with him, I’ll – ’
‘It’s not like that. He says he just wants to protect me.’
‘Oh fucking bullshit,’ shouts Devlin. He looks around, grabs the nearest bottle by the neck and pulls it out onto the floor. He pulls out bottle after bottle from the rack, hurling them to the floor, the glass breaking and flying upwards, in wave after glittering wave. The smell of escaping spirits rises as sour as smoke. He grips the rack, shakes it so that it rocks back and forth, bottles chiming like bells. ‘I think he bribed Mitch to show you my file.’ He forces his voice down. ‘Mitch would never usually show classified information to an outsider.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Pietr will do anything to get you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I would.’
‘But you didn’t.’
His eyes are growing darker if that is possible. He is beginning to see now. ‘So you’re going to punish me. Out of spite.’
‘I’m going to punish myself,’ I say, ‘out of guilt. How do you think I feel sleeping with the man who never told me who killed my brother?’
‘How do you think,’ he says, ‘I could ever tell you it was your father?’
There is a sharp pain in my eyes. I don’t even know what it is. I feel water leaving me. I start backing away from Devlin. ‘I don’t cry,’ I say loudly. The snake twists in my stomach. I put my hand over my belly. I think about telling him. I think about his right to know. Then I remember what he has done. I feel my way around the wine rack. When I realise he isn’t following me I stop, lean into the cold wood, the bottles pressing against my hip.
‘You’re sick,’ he says. ‘You’ve been using.’
I remember why I can’t tell him. I can never trust him not to leave.
‘The whole time,’ I say. ‘It was the only way I could get through
sleeping with you.’
‘That’s a lie.’ But there is a white line around his mouth, old insecurities being etched in. Bad memories from the bottle. Failures, humiliations.
‘I pretended the whole time,’ I say. ‘I knew you’d sell me out. I had your file, remember? I knew – ’ I am about to say the words that will make the final severing – ‘I knew what you did to your father.’
‘You – ’ There is no word to describe the chasm I have opened up.
‘Now you know how it feels,’ I say.
He steps back. ‘Go ahead and fuck him then. I’ll leave you to the wolves. You deserve it.’
He walks away without looking back. I hear his footsteps, crunching the glass. A great coolness settles over me. I straighten, the wood rough and reassuring beneath my fingers. But before I can move, the lines of wood shiver. They dissolve in the thin white air. For the first time since my brother disappeared, I cry.
SUNDAY
I wake. It is raining: a clatter of gravel on the roof, hard chips against the window, the sense of the house swaying in the wind. The sound of voices receding, car doors slamming.
I am very drowsy but as I sink again, I see lightning flashes veining the horizon in silver, putting roots from the world in the sky down into the world of the earth. I see tornadoes spinning across the plain to Santa Margherita, giant whirlpools revolving around a black heart, churning up trees and dust and stones and bricks and wolf bones, passing across the black lake so that water flies upwards, the drops hanging in the air like blood. Threaded through it all is a sour smell, like sulfur, like burning gold.
I wake again or maybe I had never slept. The house is quiet; the room totally black. Then it fills with light but it isn’t the soft translucence of the moon or the shivering yellow of candlelight but a harsh whiteness as cold as stone. There is silver at the centre and flashes of orange. Everything in the room is whited out. The light bursts through the French doors and sears my eyes. It surrounds me in the double lines and shifting shapes of blue and silver and shadow and light that are made when air meets water, when I swim in the pool and in that other dimension with Devlin, the one which fills every cell in my body with liquid colour.
I can’t breathe. I think a plane is falling, is coming straight at me. The blazing light fills my eyes, my mouth, my ears. It is pure silent noise. It is coming from outside.
I lace my hands over my eyes, grope to the balcony doors and pull the curtains across. The light pulses against the heavy brocade, and a new sound of grinding.
I find my sunglasses, jamming them hard against my nose and cheek. Even then I have to cup my hands around the plastic as I open the door.
The grinding is much louder outside. It reminds me of the sound of the stone pestle on the ceramic bowl when I mixed paints as a kid.
Beyond the balcony the entire landscape is bleached into a map of extremes, just outlines now, every paler colour gone, as though in the flash from a cataclysmic bomb. The light obliterates the moon, the clouds, the stars. The sound is above me but closer than the sky.
Pietr’s tower is lit from within. The curtains are drawn back and the glass tower, filled with light, rises into the sky. The heart of the light – a ball of pure silver – comes from the library, where the raised dais is. The vibrations in its turning break the white into distinct rays. Now that I see the tower revealed in its true purpose, I know why it has always seemed so familiar. I have lived on the coast, near the turning beams sent out to sea.
It is a light turning in a glass tower.
I wonder whether it is a warning or a welcome.
A hand drags me back into the bedroom.
Rosza closes the curtains, switches on the bedside lamp.
‘There’s a storm coming,’ she says. ‘Get into bed. You’re sick.’
‘Has everyone gone?’
‘It’s all over.’ She looks at the half-empty glass of milk on the table.
I say, ‘I didn’t realise the tower was a lighthouse.’
‘We sometimes put on the light to help the coastguard. It was Pietr’s idea.’
My legs are trembling. Rosza helps me into bed. She says, ‘I’ll bring more milk.’
When she has gone, I lie for a moment, thinking. Then I get a towel from the bathroom and fold it up and put it over my stomach, under the sheets.
Outside, the light grinds its slow, relentless circles.
‘I hope it doesn’t keep you awake,’ says Rosza, coming back with a cup on a tray.
She gives me the cup and sits in the chair next to the bed.
I pretend to sip the milk. ‘Hot.’
‘I micro-waved it, I’m afraid,’ she says, watching as I raise the cup again. ‘You don’t mind that you’re still in your same room?’
‘Pietr’s being very good about – giving me some time.’
She purses her lips. ‘That’s one way to see your situation.’
‘He’s a good man. He’ll always do the right thing.’
‘And you’ll support him?’
‘Yes.’
She shrugs and goes to the window. The moment her back is turned, I lift the sheet and pour the milk onto the towel beneath. When she comes back to the bed, I have the cup at my mouth and am tilting my head back.
‘It wasn’t as hot as I thought.’ I hand her the cup and yawn. ‘I could sleep for days.’
I examine the diary entry now and I try to think what happened next. There isn’t too long to go to the end and I have to get it right. I think, I am sure, that I lay in bed and counted off time. To wait until the coast is clear. You always think in terms of water, I imagined Devlin saying.
I count to two hundred and go to the door. The floor is cool beneath my feet, chilly enough to keep me awake. On the landing, I hear a murmur of voices. Not many. I remember the staff was told to go home once they had cleaned up after the party.
I go back and pick up the wet towel, put on soft slippers that make my feet soundless.
The hall lights are off but there is enough light rising from the open door of the living room. I go down the stairs.
My legs are shaking; I hold tightly to the railing. I want to go back to my warm bed, to oblivion.
The wind hits the house. Rain is splayed over the glass roof; a broad shadow runs down the staircase wall.
Now I see my brother’s face. I know he is not alive but it is no delusion. I understand that nothing else matters – not Devlin, not Pietr. I have a euphoric sense that I know what ails me and have the solution to solve it. No-one, not even Devlin, is going to stop me.
The fire is lit in the living room. Rosza stands with her back to it, drinking from a brandy glass. She is as coiffed as ever, still in her black gown from the party, but there is a smattering of rain on her shoulders and water drops gleam in her hair. Pietr stands by the terrace door. He has changed from his tuxedo into jeans and a jacket but he is soaked through. His hair is wet, the colour dulled. The world beyond the windows is pure white.
I stop next to the doorway, my back against the wall. The rise and fall of words becomes sharper. They are arguing.
Pietr says, ‘You told me last time was the last.’
‘You’re living in a fotutto fool’s paradise,’ says Rosza. ‘You think that woman, she will make up for everything. The people we work with won’t let us walk away.’
‘I can make a deal.’
‘Deal?’ Rosza starts shouting in Sicilian, harsh vowels burrowing inside each other.
‘I don’t speak that peasant language,’ says Pietr, and for the first time I see how much he dislikes her.
‘Oh, just like Czeslaw,’ says Rosza. ‘Above everyone.’
‘I’d rather be like him than you.’
‘Stop worshipping a fotutto book lover who never accomplished anything except running away. He couldn’t even save himself to raise you.’
‘Well, you saw to that, didn’t you?’
‘Don’t blame that on me. The accident – ’
�
�Another accident. Like the poisoned village. The ambulance driver’s report . . . ’
I edge into the room as Rosza throws her glass into the fire. The brandy flares purple above the logs; the cracking glass sounds like gun-shots.
‘That woman put you up to it,’ says Rosza. She turns the rings on her fingers. ‘Or did Stefano say something?’
Pietr frowns. ‘Why would Stefano say anything? He’s your creature not mine.’
I see Rosza’s expression of utter weariness. Or maybe resignation.
‘I tried to be a good mother to you,’ she says. ‘I treated you as someone valuable. I made sure I didn’t do to you what my mother did.’
‘You treated me like a business partner,’ says Pietr. ‘You eliminated anyone who was a threat – not to me, to the business.’ He pours himself a drink, downs half in a gulp. ‘I need to know how far you have gone.’
Rosza twists her hands together. Behind her, the last blue flames flare.
She says, ‘There’s no proof of anything.’
I step into the room and say, ‘There is proof.’ I hold out the wet towel to Pietr. ‘You should analyse this. I bet it is the same poison she used in the well in Santa Margherita.’
He is so surprised to see me that he doesn’t move. He looks at the towel but he doesn’t understand.
Rosza snaps her fingers. She says, ‘Oh, she’s mad.’ Then her eyes turn inwards. She is remembering standing in my room. How fast I had drunk the milk.
Pietr is still looking at me as Rosza snatches the towel and throws it into the flames. She grabs his glass and pours the brandy over the sodden material. The falling liquid catches fire; a purple flame runs over the surface of the towel; purple and red blazes into the chimney.
I say, ‘You have to get it back,’ but Pietr is still, watching the remnants curling into ashes.
He says, ‘She’s promised tonight is the last time.’
I recoil. ‘I thought you didn’t know. Or were forced into it. The slave-trading.’
His head jerks back. ‘Slave-trading? What are you talking about? It’s helping people get into the country.’
‘You know it’s more than Africans being brought over.’ I think of the cages I had seen beneath Koloshnovar. ‘It’s more than people-smuggling.’
Notorious Page 35