by Liz Nugent
I looked at Laurence in horror. ‘Check me out?’
Laurence looked at his knees and didn’t dare meet my eyes.
‘Yeah, you know I’m a nurse now? Might be useful.’
Helen seemed to be pleased to hear that Laurence and Bridget had ended their little friendship. ‘She never suited you, Lar. I don’t know how you put up with her wonky eye.’
‘Her …?’
‘Did you never meet her, Mrs F? You never knew if she was talking to you or the ceiling. Hilarious.’
It disturbed me that Laurence had been dating a girl who was disfigured. How could he? He should have known how important aesthetics were to me. Had I not set him a good example?
Helen prattled on. ‘I mean, when you started going out with her, you were a fat bastard, so you were even, like. But fair play to you for losing the weight. You look normal now.’
I shuddered at the girl’s vulgarity, but she was being coy in her compliment to Laurence. He looked fantastic. Like his father. I saw no reason to tell Laurence that I had assisted his weight loss. When he began his training programme eighteen months previously in earnest, I thought I could help him out and crushed the pills into his food. Phentermine. They had been prescribed to me when I was in the clinic to lift me out of my lethargy, but the side effect had been a suppression of appetite and bursts of energy. When I began to see Malcolm, it was no problem to acquire a pad of prescription papers and fill them in whatever way we needed. I had withheld the tablets from Laurence in the week before he went to Athlone: I thought food would be his reward for carrying out my wishes regarding the Annie letter. It wouldn’t matter what the Bridget family thought of him. I wondered how he would be in Rome. It was I that was keeping Laurence slim. Let him gorge himself in Rome. It might teach him a lesson.
I warmed to Helen. She could be my ally, and I might be able to use her in the future.
The night before Laurence left for Rome, he came home with a bloodied nose and scraped knuckles. My first thought was one of relief. He claimed to have been a victim of a mugging, but curiously he still had his wallet and his grandfather’s watch. And he refused to call the guards. He cleaned himself up and rang Helen for medical advice, but I could tell his face would be bruised. He wrapped ice in a tea towel and applied it to his eyes.
‘What a shame, darling. I know you were so looking forward to this holiday.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m sure you can get a refund under the circumstances.’
‘I’m still going.’
‘But, darling –’
‘Mum, I’m going. I’m fine.’
Why Rome? Why now? Who had struck my son and why? Why was Laurence keeping secrets from me?
17
Laurence
At the departure gate, I tried to read the newspaper but the headlines about the death of Monsignor Horan, and the Spanish fishermen lost at sea, meant nothing to me. I reread them again and again, trying to stop my brain from going over the shock of the previous evening.
He had been waiting for me outside the office at the staff entrance. He grabbed me by the collar and slammed me up against the wall.
‘She’s my fucking wife. Stay away from her. This is your only warning.’
He punched me straight in the face, but I managed to turn my head by a fraction just in time so he didn’t manage to actually break my nose or cheekbone. I could tell that Dessie wasn’t entirely satisfied by the contact, but thankfully he thought he had made his point and walked away. Sally picked me up. She wanted to call the guards, but I insisted I was OK. There was no way I could ever be connected with Karen’s family by the guards in case it rang bells with someone who might have been around when my father was a suspect in Annie’s murder.
‘What was that about?’
‘I haven’t a clue!’ I said. But now I was more determined than ever. Karen was never going back to such a brute. Even if nothing ever happened between us, I would protect her from men like him, like my father.
As the tannoy in the airport announced delays, I noticed a certain charge in the atmosphere as people around me sat up straighter and turned their heads. Distracted, I looked up to see what they were gazing at. Karen was walking slowly towards me. She was even more beautiful than the last time I’d seen her. None of us could avert our eyes as she glided forward, fresh-faced, wearing a simple white shirt and a tiered sky-blue silk skirt. She wore a linked gold chain around one ankle. And she was coming to sit beside me.
‘Laurence?’
‘Hi.’
‘What happened to your face?’
‘A silly accident in work. A shelf of ledgers fell on top of me. You look great.’ Understatement of the century. I could actually feel the jealousy radiating from the other men sitting nearby. The women too were watching.
‘Did you tell Bridget you were coming to Rome with me?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
She looked at me and I wanted to reach out and touch her face, but I stopped myself. I needed her to feel safe around me. More than anything, I wanted her to feel safe.
‘Karen, you’ve been through so much, and I need a holiday. Let’s just put everything behind us and enjoy Rome.’
She smiled. ‘Let’s not mention Annie, or Dessie.’
‘Or Bridget.’
Her face clouded ‘She’s my friend. I feel like I’m betraying her.’
I feigned innocent motives. ‘We’re not doing anything. I’ve never been to Rome. I’ve always wanted to go. It just seems like a good opportunity.’
She was embarrassed. ‘You’re right. We’re not doing anything wrong.’
My horrors fizzled away and Karen was beside me, chatting, laughing, touching my arm, as if we had always been very dear friends. When we boarded the flight, she dazzled the air hostess into agreeing to let me change seats so that we could sit together in first class. Karen was on an all-expenses-paid trip and was being accommodated in a five-star hotel. I was on a very tight budget. My hotel was starless. She ordered us gin and tonics, even though it was 10 a.m.
Karen was going to be in Rome for three days for a shoot for an Italian fashion magazine. She clearly loved her work, if you could call it that – it sounded like one long holiday to me.
‘But you’ve no idea!’ she said, laughing. ‘All the hanging around, and the posing in really uncomfortable positions, in clothes that you are sewn into, in the heat, or in freezing temperatures. Try doing a summer collection shoot on an Irish beach in January, and then tell me how glamorous it is.’
When she asked about my work and my living circumstances, I avoided talking much about living at home and instead talked up my management job.
‘Pretty boring really,’ I said apologetically.
‘But things are going well for you? You must be fairly senior if you can afford foreign holidays.’
I had taken out a bank loan.
It turns out that Karen did not have to work until the next day, so she was free for the whole day in Rome when we landed. It was as if some long-held fantasy was coming true.
‘I hate travelling on my own. The crew I’m working with are Italian, and I don’t know them at all. Will we spend the day together? I’ve never been to Rome either, so let’s go sightseeing.’ She put her hand on my arm to encourage my agreement. As if I needed encouragement.
When we had retrieved our suitcases from the carousel and stepped outside, a wall of heat hit me that I had never experienced before. Karen hailed a taxi. ‘I’ll put it on my expense account,’ she said, to my relief, as I’d planned to get a bus. We agreed to go straight to my hotel to drop off my bags and then to hers, which was more central. The taxi journey was a revelation. Around every corner there was a monument or a building or a statue straight out of my history books. It was almost alarming to see them still standing among the flocks of tourists.
We stopped at my ‘hotel’, in a semi-derelict area behind Termini station. It was a doorway in a run-down stre
et, which had two flights of steep stairs up to a tiny reception area. I quickly dumped my suitcase in my nondescript room, ran into the bathroom at the end of a sloping corridor, swabbed my armpits, applied four long blasts of aerosol deodorant and changed into my best shirt, short-sleeved and linen.
I checked myself in the mirror and for a shocking moment I saw my father looking back at me. There was a photo of him at home on the sideboard, with his rugby team at a dinner dance, slicked-back hair and chiselled jaw. He too had a bruise under his left eye, acquired through the rough and tumble of contact sport. I was as good-looking as he had been. Visually, at least, Karen and I were not such an odd-looking couple. For a split second I was sorry that my father hadn’t lived to see me like this, but I refused to ruin this moment by thinking about him and put the notion out of my head. Karen was waiting in the taxi. I practically threw the key at the receptionist, Mario, on my way out. Mario halted me. ‘Your mamma telephoned,’ he said, sounding like a character in a pizza ad.
‘My mamma?’ I said, embarrassed.
‘Yes, you must call her now, yes?’
‘Thank you. Later, I will later.’
‘Not now?’ He was disappointed in me.
‘Later,’ I said, backing away towards the staircase.
He shook his head, disapprovingly. I worried. It was just Mum being Mum. Damn her, couldn’t she let me go for one day? Was she going to ring me every day? Long-distance calls would cost a fortune. I would ring her tomorrow. Right now, I was going to enjoy a day sightseeing in Rome with my friend Karen the model.
She surprised me. I guess I had just assumed that a working-class girl would have no interest in culture. She knew a lot about art history and we set off to see a couple of Caravaggio paintings in the Augustinian church of Santa Maria off the Piazza del Popolo. I had not taken art as a subject in school and knew nothing of art history or artists, but she was able to talk with enthusiasm and insight, pointing out his use of light and shade. I tried to see these things through her prism, and even though these works were undeniably beautiful even to my uneducated eye, her passion gave them added excitement and importance. I bought postcard images of the work I had seen, and regretted that I had not brought a camera. Bridget had put me off the idea of photography permanently. Karen was surprised I hadn’t brought a camera but spent so much time in front of one that she was glad to be free of it. Later, I regretted that I had no photograph of Karen and I together in Rome.
The museums and galleries were thankfully cool. Outdoors, the sun was merciless. I thanked God that I had not made this trip before I’d lost weight. I would not have been able to cope with the heat or the walking around. Sitting on the Spanish Steps, we snacked on street food, washed down with ice-cold beer in the afternoon, and stopped in all of the beautiful churches on the Via del Corso with their incredibly ornate side-chapels. At the end of that street a large structure rose in front of us. It was only as we got close that I realized its monumental scale. ‘What is that?’ I said.
Consulting the guidebook, Karen explained it was the Victor Emmanuel II Monument at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. ‘Isn’t it crazy?’ she said. ‘The Romans are mortified by it. They think it’s too big and gaudy. All that white marble! Isn’t it fabulous?’
By seven o’clock, we were both exhausted. We went back to her hotel, and I waited in the heavily ornate rococo lobby while she went to freshen up. The beer I had while I waited cost several thousand more lira than I’d expected.
When she stepped out of the elevator, everyone stopped to look. Her hair was piled high on her head, like Minerva in the frescoes at the Villa Medici we had seen earlier. She wore a long simple straight dress made of dark blue silk, cinched at the waist with a rope-style belt. She looked like she had just stepped down from a plinth and become flesh. Rome, I had noted, was full of beautiful and shapely women, but Karen stood out with her freckles and red glossy hair and piercing green eyes. No wonder they wanted her in their magazines. Nobody here looked like Karen.
‘You look beautiful,’ I said, but she brushed the compliment aside easily. She was used to it. She looked at me curiously, and then took a small compact out of her purse and delicately dabbed a pink sponge under my eye.
‘I’m not hurting you, am I?’
Far from it. She turned the mirror towards me and the redness of the bruise had all but disappeared under the make-up.
We stepped outside into the bustle of a Rome evening, just slightly cooler now, passing groups of American tourists following a green umbrella; ice-cream salesmen; hawkers of mostly religious souvenirs; and small gatherings of Italians, all well groomed and speaking with their hands and their mouths at the same time.
We wandered down the street towards the Piazza Navona and passed several restaurants packed with tourists, but Karen led me further away from the main drag, down a side alley to an anonymous door in the wall.
‘The concierge in the hotel told me to come here!’ she said, as I looked unconvinced at the door that displayed no restaurant name but just a painted ceramic tile with a number on it. Through the door, we found ourselves in a large leafy atrium. Tall umbrella pines surrounded three circular fountains, every one as ornate as a miniature Trevi, which we had been rushed past amidst a throng earlier in the day. Water poured from the mouths of dead-eyed stone gargoyles. Bougainvillea leaves glistened with the spray of water from the fountains.
A small man with badly dyed hair came from nowhere and greeted us.
‘Prego.’ He pointed us in the direction of one corner, and as we followed him a vaulted colonnade appeared behind the trees, open to the courtyard on one side and open to a busy kitchen on the other. Simple wooden tables dressed in paper tablecloths lined this colonnade, mostly occupied by older people, all Italian. We were the only tourists, but while they could have resented me, they were clearly taken by Karen and acknowledged us kindly with a nod. Beauty is an international passport to acceptance. I used my phrase book to decipher the menu, which included pizza and pasta, as one might expect, but also aubergine, mozzarella and artichokes, exotic to me.
I had an overwhelming urge to devour everything on the menu but fought to eat delicately in front of Karen. She, of course, ate like you might expect a model to eat, picking at her food like a bird, but bemoaning the fact. She would love to eat more, she admitted, but didn’t dare put on an ounce as she was on a diet. I groaned inside as her half-full plates were removed. I resolved to find more street food later when I was on my own.
I couldn’t remember a better day in my entire life. We talked easily to each other. It didn’t matter that we had few shared interests. She listened to my opinions on current affairs and books, and I learned more about pop stars and actors and fashion than I had ever known, but we were able to engage each other. Inevitably, though, the conversation turned to Annie.
‘I’m not going to give up until I find her. Even if I have to go to the press, even if it upsets whatever new life she has now. She owes it to us to make proper contact. One lousy letter after six years of trauma isn’t good enough. She nearly destroyed us.’
I was tentative. ‘What would happen if you just let it go? Stopped looking, forgot about her?’
Karen’s eyes glistened ‘I can’t. I loved her. I know that she loved me. There’s something not right about it. I can’t help feeling she is being kept against her will. It doesn’t make sense.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve ruined our day. It’s been perfect, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
I paid the bill and tried not to panic about how I would survive for the rest of the week.
At ten o’clock, she stifled a yawn and I offered to walk her back to her hotel.
As we meandered slowly through the streets, I wondered if I should take her hand. She held her hand loosely beside mine as we walked, just centimetres away. Was it an invitation? Emboldened by the wine at dinner, I thought maybe there was a chance, bu
t just as I was about to make a move, she turned suddenly.
‘Have breakfast with me tomorrow! I’m not being picked up until eleven.’ I readily agreed. We parted with a peck on the cheek. I sensed for a second that we might have kissed properly, but I was the one who hesitated. Why did I? There was nothing I would have liked more than to follow her up the grand staircase of her hotel, but something stopped me.
‘See you in the morning,’ she said, trailing her fingers away from my shoulder.
I made my way back to my hotel slowly, wondering what was wrong with me. I stopped at a small pizzeria and ate my way through a very large pizza on my own. The proprietor baulked at my capacity, and I worried that my old appetite was returning.
The streets and alleyways behind Termini that had seemed so lively earlier now took on a sinister glow and I thought, at first, that it was my malign thoughts that had brought this change in atmosphere, but then I noticed the girls. Lounging in groups of two or three, dressed inappropriately for their age in very short miniskirts and skimpy Tshirts and the highest of heels. The girls whistled at me as I approached, and I realized that they were for sale. A dangerous-looking man in a leather jacket sat in a Mercedes nearby, surveying his wares. He was clearly the pimp. The girls catcalled, hissed and followed me for a few yards. They tried several languages, including English, but I kept my head down and my hands stuffed into my trouser pockets. I knew that I didn’t look prosperous enough to mug, and I passed unscathed.
The encounter unnerved me. All I could think of was Annie. Selling her body as if it was ice cream to the nearest buyer. I wondered about the man in the Mercedes. Was he there to mind them? Would he treat them well? Or beat them, kill them?
When I got back to my hotel, Mario was still on duty.
‘You telephone your mamma now, yes? She call four times.’ Christ. ‘I place call for you, yes?’
‘Thank you, but I will telephone in the morning.’
‘Not now?’
‘No. It is late. Tomorrow.’
He heaved a deep sigh. I suspected he would never have made his mother wait for a return call.