She is a little dejected. It looks as if she hasn’t slept well the night before. Dark rings around her eyes, her hair isn’t brushed properly. She doesn’t look like her usual self. During the meal, I am not sure what I can say to get her spirits up.
“Come on, look on the bright side. You’re going to start a new business with Sebastian soon.”
“Yeah, Mary. Do you know how hard it is to set up a business? Loads of work and you go months without any money coming in. If you make a bit of money, it goes straight back into the business.”
“But you’re resilient. Determined. You always bounce back.”
I suppose when we’re down like that, we have to go through a sad period and nothing can help except the passing of time. I decide that the best way forward is distraction. I tell her about going to Sicily. She is so surprised, her wine goes down the wrong way. “You! To Sicily!” At least that makes her laugh.
“Humps is coming, too.”
“What, Humps as well?” she keeps on laughing.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You hate the place, Mary. You’ve always hated The Village.”
“No, I haven’t,” I say. “True, I’ve tried to keep away from our family. That was because I wanted to protect myself. I’d been hurt enough. And look at what they did to you!”
“That’s true. I’ve always thought you were more sensible than me. So why are you going there?”
“I suppose the time has come,” I say, “Humps has never been, he’s always wanted to go.”
“You know what,” she begins, “I could come as well. What’s to stop me? I’ve got sweet F.A. to do right now, and it’ll take my mind off things. My mum might pay my fare, and I’ll ask if I can stay at Aunt Peppina’s.”
Now that would really be an interesting expedition.
“I wanted to talk to you about Adriano. You know, all you went through when you were a teenager.” I wasn’t sure if it was the right time to mention it, when she’d lost her job the day before, but I’ve had the issue on my mind and need to tell her.
“That’s water under the bridge.”
“Maybe. But it has had consequences on you for all your life, hasn’t it? You went into a wrong marriage with Enzo, and he left you penniless when he absconded to Sicily. Don’t tell me it wasn’t difficult.”
“I haven’t been any good at getting into long-lasting relationships with men. I’m not sure it’s Adriano’s fault. But he did cause me a lot of anger, fear and pain, though. Everything about me is wrong. Look how I’ve messed everything up.”
“No!” I answer, emphatically. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It was the people around you who were wrong. Your dad was rotten to you, your cousin raped you, we’ve grown up without good role models. Though I had Auntie Marge. And you didn’t get a proper education.
“And even if you’re right, how’s that going to change now?” she asks.
“I don’t think it will change now. But you could get some money from him. He’s got a thriving business,” I say.
“What from Adriano?”
“Yes.”
“You’re kidding me,” she says.
“No, I’m not. I’ve never been so serious. Here you are without a job, and God only knows when you’ll get your pension now the Government have put up retirement age for women. How are you going to live?”
“It’ll never work, Mary!”
“Maybe not. But you need to try. It’s retribution. It’s putting things right, then laying them to rest. There’s an open wound there now. You need to heal it. To do that will take some effort, but it has to be done.”
“What am I supposed to do? Phone him up and ask for money?” she says.
“Absolutely not,” and now I feel like Zia, “It’s best not to use phone or email for something like this.”
“Not sure,” she says. “You know, I’ve looked up to you since we were kids,” she says.
“Now I’ve stopped work I have more time and can concentrate on doing what I believe in,” I say.
“And what do you believe in?”
“I believe in helping women defend themselves. Sometimes they need help. Getting them the justice we didn’t get,” I say.
“You’re not going to get bored, then, are you? There are no end of women being treated badly out there. Where are you going to start?”
“With you. With the women I come across. I can fix a small number of wrongdoings.”
“We should have gone to the police at the time. The police wouldn’t do anything about my case now. It happened over forty years ago,” she says.
“You’re right there. They’d probably laugh.”
“Exactly. So it’s up to us. Or, I’ll go and talk to him myself, if you want,” I say.
“No, no, I want to be in charge.”
“Do you know what your mother gets up to?”
“She’s got lots of friends. They go round during the day and they chat. She bakes, knits, watches TV in the evenings. I don’t worry too much about her because she’s not alone much. She’s making me some pink bed socks when she’s finished your yellow ones, she told me on the phone.”
“So that’s how she’s using up that pink wool. Those bed socks will go down a treat with your lovers,” I say.
We laugh.
“Susi, I wanted to ask you something else, that summer when your dad died in Sicily – he was alright when you left England, wasn’t he? What I mean is: do you remember his having heart problems, or anything like that? Was he being treated by doctors?”
Susi has a shocked look on her face. Her voice quivers.
“I don’t know, Mary, I really don’t remember. I was a girl and had other things on my mind. Anyway, it’s painful for me to talk about him. It happened years ago, like the rapes.”
“Sorry, it must have been terrible for you.”
“Yeah, like Luca was terrible for you,” she says. “You know, even if he wasn’t kind to me he was my dad.”
“I’ve put the Luca episode away in a drawer in my memory,” I say. “But your dad’s death must have been such a shock for your mum then she had to go through getting a death certificate and making funeral arrangements in Sicily.”
“Yeah, wasn’t easy for her. But Peppina helped out,” Susi says.
“You and your family were all staying with Peppina, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. Why are you interested in him all of a sudden?”
“I was thinking about him the other day. How cruel he was to you, how he killed my tortoise, cut my ball in half... I suppose he wasn’t nice to your mum either?”
“All his anger and violence were for me and mum. My brothers never got hit. When dad was taking it out on me I used to think that he’d get rid of his anger and hit mum less. That’s not how it works though, is it?”
“Absolutely not. Cruelty is infinite.”
“You used to get hit by your mum, didn’t you?” she says.
“I certainly did. Why don’t we change the subject before we get too sad?”
“What to?” she asks.
“Men. Tell me about all the men you’ve seen in the last year or so,” I say.
She laughs.
“That’ll keep us here until this evening,” she says.
“That’s OK. I can stay here till six. It’s only three. Let’s order some more wine.”
Going back home, thoughts of Zia killing Uncle Tony bounce about in my head. She said that doctors in The Village (there was only one when I was a child) were not ‘curious’ like the ‘busybody’ English doctors. Uncle Tony was forty-six. No age to die. But he was on the chubby side and smoked like a trooper. Either he really did have a heart-attack, or she poisoned him, or something, and passed it off as a heart-attack. Zia said he died of ‘heart-stop.’ And Peppina would have had a hand in it, too.
Am I imagining things? To me there seems to be a pattern emerging. Women whose husbands have died young. Have these women murdered their husbands? Or had them
murdered? And coupled to that, men readily killed each other as well because of some conflict. Has the violence been handed down from generation to generation? Do we have it in our blood? I don’t know what happened in our family before my grandmother’s time. But was this a family of women avengers? Did the isolation of The Village miles away from other inhabited places facilitate killers? But the same was now happening in London. Zia doesn’t have a husband. Most of her women visitors don’t have one. And the woman who still has a spouse, Provvi, would be better off without him.
TWENTY-SIX
What Happened in 1974
1974 was an incredible and tumultuous year. The year Auntie Marge died, and the year that was pivotal in my three cousins’ and my life. Every one of the young generation in our family got hitched that year although we were so young. Three of us got married and one got engaged.
When Auntie Marge died, she left me exposed to my family’s claws. I lost my adult role model. Uncle Peter rushed to our house one late Sunday afternoon in February. Visibly shocked. In a panic. “Quick,” he said, “Auntie’s had a bad stroke.” He could hardly talk, but managed to blurt out that I should run quickly to the phone-box, dial 999 for an ambulance. I ran as fast as I could, crying all the way. There was a young man in the phone-box. He saw my state of despair, interrupted his call, let me in. After the call, I came out of the box sobbing. He offered to walk me home. “No, please, I’ve got to run back. My neighbour is dying.” I hurried back to Auntie Marge’s house. The man followed me. He stood outside the back door.
Auntie Marge was lying on the kitchen floor. Part of her body was frozen. It was heart-breaking to see her trying to talk. Only a few grunts came out. I was at a loss as to what to do at first, so just stood there and looked on. Then I fell to my knees, held her hand and cried. She must have realised it was me because she tried to get some sounds out. It was while I was kneeling beside her on the kitchen mat that she took her last breath. Dead. I howled. The young man behind the door, Tommy, came in softly. He patted Uncle Peter’s back and said how sorry he was. Then he placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. When the ambulance arrived, the three of us stood there and watched. I kept crying and Tommy put his arm round my shoulder. The body was taken into the ambulance and Uncle Peter went with Auntie Marge.
My mother came out of the house when the ambulance arrived, though she understood that Auntie Marge was in a critical condition when Uncle Peter came round, she didn’t bother to go to Auntie’s house while I went to the phone box. She hadn’t come to console me, though I didn’t expect she would. Instead, she started harassing me about Tommy. Saying I must have had a secret boyfriend without telling her. She was livid. Tommy was gob-smacked when she went into one of her frenzies. He walked off, turning his head back occasionally, while she was hissing at me.
It was the second time I had seen a dead body. The first was Ziuzza’s husband. Auntie Marge was cremated. Frightening. A sad affair. The curtain not far from where I sat, on my right, slowly opened revealing a fire. The coffin glided into the hatch, and the curtain closed again. Afterwards there was talk about ashes, but I was in a state of shock and couldn’t take much in. Only four people attended the funeral: Uncle Peter, Auntie’s sister Dorothy, Dorothy’s daughter Belinda, and me. That’s all.
Nobody else bothered.
Carrying on with my account of 1974, I’d become a bag of nerves, plus I had nausea and dizziness. Sometimes my hands seemed to tremble for no reason. One of my mother figures had died, and the other one, Zia, lived miles away. I was left with my real mother. In many ways she relied on me. She had only simple vocabulary even in her own language. She had only gone to school for three years. For the rest of the time, she was needed to work on the land. Never having learnt English, beyond the basics of asking for things in shops, I couldn’t speak to her in English. My Sicilian wasn’t that good. Though it is a nice colourful dialect, it sounded stupid with an English accent. It didn’t help that I’d become overawed by the beautiful language of poetry when studying for A level English. I threw myself into the beauty of highbrow English. And relished it.
With the help of my English teacher, Miss Green, I had a place lined up at an excellent university to read English. It was the beacon of light that kept me going; that glimmer of future happiness. I would be surrounded by people who loved Literature, like me. That would be the saving of me. My mother didn’t agree with my going on to further education. She said I should go and earn some money, stop reading books which had made my brain go soft. Her main argument was that I was lazy so used reading as an excuse to get out of doing housework. So I laboured to get the house clean and shining, then I went off to read. But even that didn’t work at times because she’d still want to whip what I’d read out of me. I couldn’t mention university to her without her going wild. My father was indifferent, as usual, and just brushed me off by saying that I should sort it out with my mother.
Another reason why I desperately wanted a degree in English was because I had set my mind on it when I’d been deeply offended by Auntie Marge’s sister, Dorothy, a few years back. She, her husband Arthur, and their daughter Belinda had been invited to Sunday lunch one day. I carried out my usual tasks of setting the table and beating the Yorkshire pudding. Dorothy said to Auntie Marge: “I don’t understand the attraction of having this little cockney-Sicilian urchin as company.”
Auntie Marge was livid. She hardly talked to her sister during lunch, speaking to Belinda instead. Belinda was talking about university. She was reading English and hoped to become a teacher. She seemed very intelligent to me then and, above all, very lah-di-da. In fact, I don’t remember Belinda ever speaking to me. I was totally in awe of her. She was this grown-up, in a flowery dress and leather shoes, living on a totally different planet from mine. I felt I was akin to a worm and simply didn’t deserve to be spoken to by her, or her mother.
When they left, Auntie Marge sat me down and said: “Don’t take any notice of my sister Dorothy. She’s a stuck-up old woman who’s set in her ways. Belinda is going to be important. Before long she’ll have a degree in English. She’s a lady. She went to a girls’ boarding school and has learnt all the social graces. One day she will marry an important man and have a good position in society.”
This admiration for Belinda struck me, especially because it came from Auntie Marge, the woman I adored. The closest I’d come to a mother.
“Do you think I could go to university and speak like that?”
“No, I don’t think so, dear. You didn’t get the right start in life. Your school’s not good, either. It’s all those girls from the council housing estate over the bridge. They bring the tone down. They’re common.”
Thinking back, they actually were ‘common’ as Auntie Marge put it. A couple got pregnant at fifteen and had to leave school. Nearly all of them smoked ‘in the bogs,’ their language was uncouth, most of them swore like troopers. Their parents were Labour Party supporters, but of the right-wing bigoted, racist kind. They were all for equality amongst themselves but spurned foreigners, taunted homosexuals, and believed a woman’s place was in the home, while the men spent their money in pubs. Most of my schoolmates’ fathers were unemployed. I couldn’t get my head round that. My mother and father both worked full-time. How was it that my schoolmates’ parents hadn’t filled those jobs? The vacancies were there before my parents ever arrived in England.
If only Auntie Marge had known that I actually did get an excellent degree in English and learnt to ‘speak like that.’ And I had a good marriage. It was not only that I didn’t get a good start, or that my school wasn’t of the best. More importantly, hurdles had been placed all along the track of my life up to when my mother died. But I triumphed. It was hard, but I made it.
I wonder what happened to Belinda.
Susi’s wedding was in March. She was only sixteen and had to have Zia’s parental consent. Silvio accompanied her to the altar. Susi and her groom, Enzo, did all sorts of silly thi
ngs during the reception but, to be fair, they were little more than children. Enzo was a boy from The Village, a sheep farmer, and was a year or two older than her. The scene most impressed on my mind was when she was sitting at the top table, in her white lacy dress, eating salt-and-vinegar crisps out of the packet, and drinking Coca-Cola straight from the can. She looked like a child. My opinion is that she married so that Adriano would stop raping her.
Between dances Stefano stared at me from a distance across the hall. If I didn’t dance with him, he said he’d make a scene. He kept coming back for dances, and holding me tight making my dress creep up at the back. He said our wedding reception was going to be better than this one. I told him, again, that he could forget about that. He said I had no say in the matter. His brother Silvio, of course, was inundated by girls and totally ignored me. I danced my heart out with anyone available: other boys, relatives, and even other girls, just to keep Stefano at bay for a while.
In July, I went to Sicily with my mother. I was eighteen. Going to Sicily had never been good news for me. Little did I know what my mother had planned. My father stayed at home. He didn’t want to go. Neither did I. My mother more or less blackmailed me into it. Because her illness was advancing, she said she needed me to look after her, get medication for her, do the food shopping. My mother also got one of her friends to bully me into going. It was only a month, after all. My ineffectual father did nothing to side with me. Silvio was already in Sicily. Zia had sent him over to look for ‘a nice wife.’ So, begrudgingly, I went to The Village. At least Silvio was there. My mother’s illness, my father’s indifference and my recent swotting for A levels had taken their toll on me.
Arriving in Sicily with my mother was devastating. I was grief stricken. All the women in the village seemed to be there – in my grandmother’s house. Nearly all of them were shrouded in black. Some were relatives, the rest were childhood friends of my mother’s, neighbours, and simple hangers-on. They came to see how my mother was, but also to see what I had grown up into. The ones who had known me from previous visits, didn’t like me because they knew I didn’t want to be one of them. They were disappointed when they saw me. I was wearing a yellow mini-skirt and a yellow matching top with crystal buttons running down the middle, emphasising my small waist and large bosom. My legs were shapely and my shiny black hair hung down past the bottom of my shoulder blades. They were livid because I looked good. One observed my straight legs, gave a toothless grin, and said they would be bandy in a few years.
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