I want to cry but instead I stand up and walk back through the trees, across the river, across the field. I don’t even trouble to hide. No one knows or cares that I am here. I walk back between the sheds and slip around the tow truck and then, so suddenly that I don’t have time to think or react, I feel an arm around my neck. Suddenly, my face is pressing against the unyielding chrome of the tow truck so my cheek feels as though it’s in my mouth and the smell of oil fills my head. A voice is hissing right behind me: ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
I can’t answer because the arm is jammed under my jaw. I move my eyes to the right and the left. I can’t see my assailant but I can discern that he holds some kind of a weapon. Then he swings me round, and his body is all power and I know it is useless to fight and that I cannot escape from his grip. I look at the weapon. It is a small black box which I recognize at once. He holds it near me like a threat. When he touches a button it throws tiny ribbons of blue, hissing lightning into the air. I hear Kirsty’s voice so clearly that she seems to be inside my head: ‘You only have to touch someone with the probes and you can override their central nervous system.’
Slowly, my eyes meet Ricky Marcello’s. I know his face at once. Hirsute now but with the same gaunt, searching look I remember from way back when I was big and he was small. If he has any affection for those years and my bit part in them, it doesn’t show now.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he demands again.
His mouth is curled down and his eyes have a dark asymmetry and I know from them that he is either very angry or crazy or both. I smell his sweat. I smell his body. Oil, rags, coffee, a garage smell.
‘I’m looking for you,’ I tell him. My voice is small. It doesn’t want to continue but I make the words come. ‘I have questions for you. What do you want at my father’s house? Was he paying you? Why? Why were you shouting at him right before he died? You were yelling and threatening him and then the very next day…’
His face is livid. He swings me around like a doll so my back is against him and his hand is across my mouth. He’s squeezing my lips against my teeth, his thumb against my cheek, stretching the skin on my chin, pressing my nose so I can’t breathe. I struggle for the first time, trying to prise his fingers away, fighting for air, but his fingers are clenched too hard against my face.
‘I don’t want you here,’ he informs me. He’s speaking right into my ear like a lover but he’s hissing and there is hatred in his hot, damp breath. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want to see your goddamn face around my house, my family, my truck, my barn.’
I pull my right knee up sharply and stamp my foot down hard, as hard as I can, on to his. I feel pain’s impact run through his body. The hand over my face loosens and I gulp for air. Then his grip tightens and I know I’ve made him even madder.
The taser appears in front of my face, just a few inches away, so that both my eyes are filled by the fizzing, unnatural blue manifestation of its power. One touch and I will be frozen, unable to struggle. I lift my right knee again and then push my foot down hard, harder this time. I manage more of an angle, so that the heel of my shoe, solid although not high, cuts into him. I feel the soft crunch of bone beneath my sole. Probably I haven’t broken his foot but I’ve hurt it and before he can absorb the pain I raise my knee again. I think of Daddy, killed by the taser, tumbling over the cliff at Seal Wash, and this time my foot stabs deeply into his and then I grind it still further. As he relieves the pain by swaying on to his left leg I force my body weight left. For a moment he topples. I struggle. If I’m going to escape it will have to be now. I fight his fingers, I kick backwards, I push my elbows into his ribs. But his grip hardens around my neck, across my mouth, my nose.
Gradually my legs weaken and then my arms. I stop fighting him. I stop fighting for oxygen. There is none. My body goes limp like paper and as it does so, amazingly, he releases me. I stumble forward, disbelieving, biting at the air as though it’s solid.
‘Get out now,’ he yells at me.
I put my fingers to my mouth. It’s bleeding. My cheeks feel raw as though they’ve been grated.
As I stagger away he shouts: ‘Get away from here. And keep your goddamn accusations to yourself and your goddamn mouth shut so I don’t have to shut it for good.’
I break into a run. I feel blood dripping off my face and on to my shirt. I don’t look back.
When I get to the car I fall into it and drive away fast. Ricky Marcello is standing by the garage, hands on hips, watching me go.
It is late in the afternoon of a sweltering day. Nothing in the San Strana valley moves quickly, not the horses which swish their tails under trees, not the traffic. Progress is frustrating. I drive holding a Kleenex to my face, checking my rear view mirror nervously for the tow truck.
When I am almost out of the valley I swing into a dusty parking lot. There are a couple of fruit stalls which, despite the boards all around advertising their low prices, have now closed for the evening. I reverse between them. From this hidden place, I watch the road, waiting, hardly allowing myself to blink. When at last the traffic eases I steal glances at myself in the vanity mirror. I look shocked and white-faced and one lip is swollen. There is a pool of dried blood under my nose. I try to clean my face without taking my eyes from the road.
I’m waiting for the tow truck but when the blue car with the white bandage on its fender passes, my body responds instantly. I start the engine and edge out of the lot. I reach the road a second too late to pull out in front of a pick-up which shudders slowly up the hill. It is laden with oranges. Four cars trail behind it in low gear. I try to pass. There are bleating horns and round, angry mouths and I am forced to fall into line. By the time the road evens and I leave the pick-up behind, I know Ricky Marcello must be far ahead.
I slot into the southbound traffic on the freeway. Below me I glimpse the red bricks of Lowis. An image of a red-faced boy sitting on a skateboard appears in my mind then disappears as I accelerate fast, leaving Lowis behind. I scan the darkening road for the blue car. When I don’t see it I accelerate still more, until I’m breaking the speed limit, diving recklessly in and out of traffic. Remember death. Joe Zacarro said: if you remember that you’re going to die some day then you live your life in a different sort of way. I sigh and accelerate again.
I don’t see the blue car until we are almost at the bridge and then it appears so suddenly that I have to brake and fall into a lane of slower traffic to remain invisible. It’s hard to keep it in sight without being seen myself. Now that darkness is gathering fast over the city a lot of cars look blue and to watch it among all the other tail lights I must drive closer than is comfortable.
When it leaves the freeway I notice in time to follow. My heart beats faster. This is the exit closest to Jane and Larry’s apartment. I keep my distance but from now on stop lights are a problem. Staying one intersection back would be hard enough in daylight and in the dark it’s impossible. I am just a couple of cars behind Ricky Marcello.
Then I make a mistake and it’s a bad one. I follow the wrong car. The blue car I tail moves fast, weaving in and out of the traffic, and I hurry to keep up. When I stop at a light I realize that the car with the white fender is right beside me. I don’t look at it. I don’t look at the driver. I try to be someone going home from work who has a passing interest in the stores across the street but all the time I feel the proximity of Ricky Marcello, sense that his face is turned to me and his angry eyes stare at me.
The light changes and all the cars move forward with the grace of synchronized swimmers. Ricky Marcello is right beside me. I try to fall back but he slows too. In my mirror I see cars bunching behind us. I still don’t look at him as we cruise to the next light but as we go through it I realize that he has gone, peeled off into the right turn only lane. I dare to look. His car is disappearing at exactly ninety degrees to mine.
I try driving around the block. Then I do a figure of eight. Soon I am in d
espair at the impossibility of finding one pair of tail lights in a city full of lights. In the hope of meeting him at his destination, I head towards Jane and Larry’s apartment. I don’t drive right past it but I look up their street from the nearby intersection. He’s there. I glimpse the blue car pulling in by a parking meter right across the road from the apartment. I was right. Ricky Marcello is watching Larry and Jane.
I double back further up the steep hill and park at what feels like an acute angle. From here I have a view of the street to the apartment. I can’t see the blue car but I will if it pulls out. The hill is well-lit and, if Ricky Marcello tries to cross the street, I’ll see that too.
This is an old, quaint area of the city. The town houses are clustered densely on the hill and the white apartment is on a second storey. Someone is home because the lights are on. Probably Larry, polishing and practising the tribute he’ll be reading at Daddy’s funeral tomorrow. Possibly Jane too. She was at the hospital today but I guess that she’ll be home early, confirming all the arrangements. There’s a car down the street which could be hers. I don’t want to get out to check.
For a long time nothing happens. The temperature drops and I feel stiff and dirty and cold but I try to stay alert so I can drive away fast if Ricky Marcello walks up the street and sees me here.
Someone appears at the window of the apartment. I tense. It is Larry, peering anxiously out to see whether he is observed tonight. Maybe Ricky Marcello drives a different car each time he visits because something in the relaxed way Larry pulls the drapes indicates that he doesn’t know he is watched.
My shoulders and face start to throb. When people ask me how my face got bruised I’ll have to say I walked into a door. I can’t tell anyone about Ricky Marcello, not until I learn why he was one of Daddy’s secrets.
Sitting in the car, waiting, not moving, my mind is briefly inhabited by the woman I saw from the woods, the woman who held the baby high above her head. She was busy in the house and she glanced out to where the baby was crawling on the verandah then swooped down on him and delighted him with her sudden attention. He whooped with joy. I seldom experienced pleasure in my child except when he was sleeping and I can’t remember him ever expressing such joy.
Ricky Marcello must live in the house among the trees and the woman must be Ricky Marcello’s wife. The baby is his baby. I’m gathering information about him, although I don’t yet know if any of it is useful. I try to remember the young Ricky whom I knew at the Josephs’. I recall only a sort of kinetic energy, his frantic and often irritating pleas for attention. Whenever I was at the Josephs’ my mind was focused on Robert. Ricky was no more than a fly who buzzed around him.
At last, when my whole body is exhausted by doing nothing, my arms and legs ache for lack of movement, my stomach gurgles hungrily and the inside of my head constantly replays my battle at the Marcello garage this afternoon, something happens. The lights are turned out in the apartment. Sensible Jane, sensible Larry. An early night before the funeral. I feel absurdly grateful to them when I see the blue car slide out from its parking bay. I fall in behind it. Now that traffic is scarce we slip through the night, Ricky Marcello and then me, without difficulty. I see him as far as the freeway then turn towards Aunt Zina’s. I ask myself what he could accomplish by sitting outside the apartment all evening but I am too numb to attempt an answer to this question.
31
When I wake on the day of Daddy’s funeral my body aches as though someone has been pinching me all over for many hours. The bed covers are mostly on the floor. I do not feel rested. I look back on the night as a marathon of anger and tears but I cannot recall my dreams in any detail. I get out of bed stiffly as though my body is made of metal. When I stare at myself, expressionless, in the mirror, I am surprised to see that my face is unmarked by yesterday’s encounter with Ricky Marcello.
I wear my New York clothes. They will be too hot but they are sombre. When I slip them on my body is unyielding like iron. The suit seems to hang limply, without its usual fluidity. I am unable to eat any of the food Aunt Zina offers me and even the coffee tastes sour on my metallic tongue. I add sugar and it still tastes sour.
Sasha and Aunts Zina and Zoya have already left for Redbush when Scott picks me up.
‘How are you, Luce?’ he asks, scanning me anxiously. His face looks white. He has slept badly and now is worrying about the tribute he will be reading.
I say: ‘I wish it was all over.’
As we climb into the car, Dimitri Sergeyevich, obviously pre-warned by Sasha, restricts his disapproval to an eye-browish glare.
We join Jane and Larry in the lobby of the chapel by the cemetery. Jane kisses me. She smells of flowers as usual and looks almost translucently beautiful, her eyes like big blue butterflies which have landed on her pale, pale face.
Mourners soon gather. I recognize only a few of them but others introduce themselves and all murmur sympathy and something nice about Daddy. I try to thank them but this new tongue, hard, shiny, won’t say the right words.
‘Honey,’ says a large woman putting her hand on mine. ‘Grief is cumulative. Each bereavement brings back all the other losses. The cycle never ends but it does get better.’
I nod and store her words away to think about later. I am made of metal and cannot absorb them now.
When Seymour and Katherine arrive they each lock me in a tight embrace.
‘We’ve been so worried about you since we saw you, Lucy,’ says Katherine.
I wonder what I said or did to worry them.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I tell them smoothly. Seymour hugs me again but the warmth from his body does not penetrate my new hard surface.
I watch Joe Zacarro limp in. Adam Holler walks stiffly behind him. As soon as he sees me, water drips from Joe’s eyes.
‘Shit, Lucy,’ he says, grasping my hand in both of his. ‘When you get to the funeral and you know you’re going to see a goddamn coffin then you really have to believe someone’s dead. Except I can’t. Eric was the fittest of any of us, he shouldn’t have been the first to go. Lucy, this never should have happened, he never should have allowed it to happen.’
Whatever makes Joe think that Daddy allowed himself to be killed? But I can’t ask him while he’s crying. I watch him impassively. I know I should say something, reach out to him. Slowly, with an almost superhuman effort, I stretch my hand to his arm. He grabs it and smothers it with his own big, wet hand.
Mr Holler says: ‘Lucy, your father was a damn intelligent man. Usually people with that kind of intelligence aren’t people you can love. But he…’ His voice cracks. His rigidity is threatened. He is a building which is about to fall. He leans against Joe and then straightens. I pull a Kleenex from the supply in my purse and he takes it gratefully.
‘Didn’t think I’d be needing any of these,’ he sniffs. ‘You never can tell what feelings are going to come sneaking up on you.’
Grief is cumulative. Each bereavement brings back all the other losses. He’s crying for Daddy but also for the son who died, for the wife who left.
I am soon passing Kleenex to other mourners until, when I look around the lobby, it seems that everyone but me is pressing tissue to their face. I am the only person in the room whose entire body, including her tongue and heart, is made of metal.
Almost late, but not quite, are the Russians. They arrive in a cluster with Mother at its centre. Her arm is linked firmly through Sasha’s. Although I have already resolved to avoid her, when she walks into the room I am drawn, as though powerless, to Mother’s tiny, shuffling body. I am prepared for her smallness but in this big room it takes me by surprise.
Jane kisses her lightly and then melts back into the throng of people before Russian hands can pull her to them. The hands capture me and drag me right up to Mother.
‘Tanechka, aren’t you pleased to see your own Lucia?’ cries Aunt Zina and, although she says it in Russian, her words, as sometimes so inexplicably happens, cut through lingui
stic barriers and I understand her with a crystalline precision. Suddenly and surprisingly, through wisps of blonde, white, hair, the vacant eyes focus on me. There is a fluttering movement and Mother’s face widens, her eyes grow bigger, her confusion leaves her and she is complete. For a sudden, haunting moment her beauty returns. She holds out a hand to me and I clasp it. A tiny bird rests in my hand and I do not let it fly away. Then, as though there has been some silent communication between them, the whole group moves on. Aunt Zoya, her hair slipping from its clasp, catches me excitedly.
‘How happy she is to know you are here,’ she says.
Guests melt away before the wife of the decedent. Sasha leads her towards the doors of the hall and they are now thrown open. We all follow Mother, who walks slowly and with dignity, into the hall. Sasha turns just before they are through the doors and, glimpsing me through a sudden window in the crowd, throws me a conspiratorial wink.
At the sight of the casket there is universal grief. Jane trembles and her tears fall quietly, Larry closes his eyes and stands very straight, his mouth twitching, Scott sobs unreservedly. During the music I look around and try to recognize people but it’s hard to recognize anyone when their faces are buried in Kleenex. Scott, as he predicted, is halted by tears during his reading.
‘He took his big candle
And went into another room
I cannot find…’
Everyone seems to break down with him. I turn to see Joe Zacarro and Adam Holler with their stiff legs pointing in different directions, supporting each other, tears flowing freely. Seymour and Katherine hold hands, heads bowed.
Scott finds his voice again and somehow completes the poem.
At the back, right by the door, are Rougemont and Kirsty. They are dry-eyed. They are watching. My eyes meet Rougemont’s.
After more music it is Larry’s turn. He takes his place at the front of the room, near Daddy’s coffin. He has prepared a series of cards to help him remember his speech but almost from the first he does not look at them. I imagine him practising in front of the bathroom mirror last night, or behind the closed drapes of the living-room.
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