He asks if he can sit and when I don’t answer he waits at the foot of the bed, shifting his weight from one leg to another. He tells me his name again and wants to know if he can do anything – to help out, he means.
His face is clean – clean-shaven and young looking. The kind of face you’d like to see smashed, broken, bloodied, cut, bruised, changed forever yes you can help you can get me out of here that might help.
Obviously a religious of some sort; plane-clothed but you can tell them a mile off. Christ, that’s all I need – a God-botherer.
My breathing’s messed up. I’m taking in short snorts of breath through my nose like I’m sniffing so I try to stop, to calm myself. Jesus one man in my cell is all and I go to pieces fucksake. I focus on my bed, the fold of the blanket just as I like it, that’s my choice the way I do the fold that’s me, no one else in this place does it quite like that I know without seeing their cells. What the hell is he doing here? I thought I was fine I thought I was doing okay but I’m not. Calm your breathing, Brendan, but he’s still there fucking useless comes in doesn’t know what to do or say I’m a case and he’s lost the case before he begins don’t even try to help me you fool go back to college or your church or your seminary or wherever the hell you came from but not here this is my place my cell and I want you gone.
He’s upsetting my equilibrium.
He leaves without saying another word. A mystery then and I’ve seen him off. Wrong cell, methinks. Not today thank you and not tomorrow neither. Whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not buying. Got my exercises to do. Got my hour in the yard. When I’m sure he’s not coming back, I sit down on the bed. I know they might be watching me anytime, day or night, depend on it even and I guess he watched for a while before he came in or is he so green he thought he could just waltz in without even thinking about it? Am I a mess? No, I’m here and I do what I do. The rules are different in here. I was a mess out there, outside, out in the world, locked up for my own good and it seems to suit me just fine. Keep the world away from me and me away from the world tried that living thing and it didn’t work out guess I am a mess but it’s my own mess and mine alone.
Stop. Breathe. Calm yourself. He’s gone.
But he comes back the next day. Jesus.
The library also has newspapers and I’m in the habit of reading after lunch, before my siesta. I take off my work boots at the door and pad over to the large study table in the middle of the room. I see Maria in one of the alcoves, reaching for a book from one of the higher shelves. If it was anyone else, I’d offer to help, but she can reach away as far as I’m concerned. She grunts and walks along the wall to fetch the steps. She notices she’s not alone and grunts again, dragging the steps along the wooden floor. A wheezing sound comes out of her and she turns to face me, barking her Italian again, something about working in the kitchen and using the library.
“What – because I work in the kitchen, you think I can’t read?” She asks this in perfect English, although it’s English with a very strong accent. She’s still looking for a fight, obviously, after the great vegetable incident of the night before. I’m not interested.
“I work in the garden,” I say, in Italian.
It’s a brainless thing to say, but I’m still unused to interacting with other people. Not only am I learning to converse again, but also learning to converse in another language.
She turns back to her steps and her shelves, and I wonder if I’ve failed to say even this simple thing correctly. Fuck it, anyway.
There are Italian and English newspapers, though the English ones tend to be either the Telegraph or The Universe. I often try the Italians – either Corriera della Sera, or Gazetta della Sport – to measure how well I’m progressing, and to see if I can match up the words I read with what I hear come out of Giovanni’s mouth. But I can’t be bothered today, and I leave the library for my siesta.
When he returns I’m ready for him. I’ve had twenty-four hours to get used to the idea that my routine might be about to change. I understand twenty-four hours. I know how those hours work. I understand that one of those twenty-four hours will be spent in the yard and the other twenty-three in my cell. I will be fed three times. If they were to change this, I would adapt. If they were to create a new routine, I would adapt. Whether that new routine was based on hours or days or weeks or months, I would adapt. They need a routine as much as I do to run this place. It’s the ones who fight the routine, the ones I see losing it in the yard, trying to grab a moment of collective outrage – they’re the ones that won’t make it. For this reason, I’m grateful for the time they came at me with their noise and their silence, with their unannounced beatings in the dark. It’s helped me embrace this new life and to accept their routine. I can’t fight the routine and it’s not mine to change, so it’s pointless to try.
I don’t know if he’s a blip or a permanent change, but I’m ready for him.
He doesn’t look like the torturing kind, more like a tortured soul. I give him marks for coming back a second time, but then maybe he has no choice? He might well be acting under orders, holy or unholy – who knows? I was right about his face: so young and fresh, a boy’s face on a man barely a man. He’s in the wrong place, playing the wrong game. I see him cleaning the parish church, collecting hymn books that weren’t returned after a service; certainly not the parish priest, and perhaps not yet even a curate. That’s right, I have him now – he’s considering his vocation.
Says he’s sorry about yesterday, that he may have given me a bit of a fright.
Whether he’s sorry or not, we’re repeating our stand-off dance at the opposite ends of my bed. To be fair, there’s not a great deal of choice in so small a space, especially one designed to contain a single prisoner. There’s the bed alongside one wall and the corresponding strip of floor where I do my exercises, an irritating three and a half paces long. The floor space is wide enough for me to stand with my legs apart. At the foot of my bed is a gap for my sink and my bucket, emptied once a day during the exercise hour. It’s a clean room. It’s my room and now there are the two of us in it. I’m damned if I’m going to ask him to sit down.
Says if he’s honest, he hadn’t really thought it through. Coming into my cell, he means. It might have been better to meet me in the yard.
He’s a fool if he considered just coming up to me in the yard. I think he might be a fool regardless. The question remains – what exactly is he doing here in my cell? I don’t think he knows, not sure he’s any the wiser than yesterday and is probably wondering the very same thing. Make it easy on yourself son, and leave. It’s okay – if they ask I’ll tell them you tried, that I was difficult, uncooperative.
Says he read my file.
And I bet he did.
Or what they let him read. There wasn’t a lot there.
I’d say not.
Tells me I’ve been here for almost three years.
Three years – I didn’t know.
And yet from what he can see I’ve never actually been charged.
And don’t expect to be. This boy is green.
He thought he might be able to find me some sort of representation, some legal help?
A question, not a statement.
He thought that might be something he could do for me?
I look him full in the face and see the colour from where he shaved this morning. Once a week we’re given the option of a shave during exercise hour and I take it. I don’t want to end up looking like Saddam again. Of course, many of the beards in here are worn with pride – as religious or political statements. What would they make of the Padre’s raw, freshly-shaven cheeks?
I shake my head, but I think he misses it. Either that or he ignores me. Tells me he’s going to leave now, but that he will get back to me.
I wait for him to go. He knocks at the door, calls for the guard and leaves.
A God-botherer, first class, intent on bothering me. My solitary confinement is no longer solitary. You
see? A God-botherer calls to my cell and my defences break down. He has no idea. He says things like almost three years and has no conception of what that might do to my head. Yes of course it had occurred to me, but who was I going to ask? And when he says almost three years, does he mean two years and ten months and two weeks and three days or two years and three hundred and sixty three days or what? And what am I to do with that almost three years? Not knowing allowed me not to think about it allowed me not to care. Does it matter? What does almost three years tell me? Almost three years almost three years almost three years almost three years almost three years almost three years almost three years what does it mean? What does it say about me? That I’ve been dead for all that time? If you’re dead you don’t consider time and now I’m considering time. I have to get rid of the God-botherer.
Only he doesn’t come back – not the next day or the day after that. No, he waits until I’ve started to hope and then he returns. A fool or a genius then, one or the other. He stands again in my cell and announces he has a solicitor who is willing to represent me. He’s sorry he didn’t get back to me straight away, but it took a little longer than he expected. If I put in a request for legal assistance, he can arrange for me to see her. I haven’t asked, he says – for help, he means.
Like all I had to do was ask and they’d have let me out by now. He’s back in the idiot camp. I hold up my hand, as a signal for him to please stop talking.
I try to speak. I just need to tell him, thank you but no thank you and please, leave, but I have no voice. I haven’t spoken to another person for a long time – almost three years. I make a noise – an ‘aahh’ at the back of my throat, like I’m visiting the doctor to check an infection on my tonsils. Now it’s me that looks – or sounds – like the idiot. I use my hand again, this time to suggest he sits on the bed. He does so and I join him. He’s looking at me expectantly, waiting for whatever it is I have to say. I’m going to be a huge disappointment. I ask him his name and he tells me again – Brother Paul. I can feel the eagerness coming off him. He thinks this is a break-through.
I tell him I appreciate him coming to see me.
Yes?
But I’d rather he just left me alone. Could he do that, please?
I look him full in the face and I see he’s about to come out fighting.
I know he means well and I’m grateful but really, please, I’d like him to leave.
He must have been expecting this. He rallies his face again, but I cut him off and this time he gets it. He stands, knocks on the door, calls for the guard and leaves.
But he comes back the next day.
The siren disturbs the sleep of my siesta and panics me sufficiently to acknowledge that I’m not free of this yet, that I shall probably never be free of the fear that they will come again. The longer I’m here, the greater are the chances that my time is running out. Yes, this is good, but it cannot last. And when it ends, it won’t be with a siren – they’ll come quickly and quietly and I shall be back again always the cell the room me alone as it should be. The siren is close and stationary. It’s so like the Italians to stick with the noise when it’s not really necessary. There must be a guest taken ill or something. It’s hardly the police.
I swing my legs to the floor and the cold tiles on the soles of my feet help bring me around. I’m still amazed, when I wake from a siesta, that I should fall unconscious at this time of day and then still manage to sleep the whole night through. I think I sleep in the afternoon because it’s expected of me, because it’d be a disappointment to Giovanni if I didn’t. I don’t remember giving in so easily when I lived in Italy before; I’d take a rest after lunch, but never fall asleep.
The siren changes tone, increases in volume and moves away. I hear it again from Giovanni when we meet down by the fountain. He makes the noise and whirls his hand about his head.
“Scotch,” he says. “Scotch.” And he points at me.
It’s unusual for him to use any English, but I still don’t understand what he’s getting at – one of the guests drank too much whiskey and was taken away in an ambulance? I try nodding and smiling, but for once he won’t let it go. He points at my chest – a hard jab – and then holds his own chest as he gasps for breath.
“Scotch.”
This time I use my fake understanding tone, as though I know exactly what it is he’s telling me.
“Ah, si – scotch.”
“Si – scotch.”
He hands me a wide net, points to the water in the fountain, and makes scooping gestures with his thick, hairy arms. Even I can see that he’s telling me to sift through the fountain for leaves, only the water is perfectly clear of debris of any kind. I’m left alone with this, my job for the next two hours. I break up the time half way through by trying to find Giovanni for a smoke, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
I get the full siren story from Brother Michael that evening at dinner.
“The Scottish girl, the one who works in the kitchen?”
I look at him blankly. He’s not my idea of what a seminarian should look like, and he’s nothing at all like the Padre. He has the air of a scholar but also a strong physical presence that you wouldn’t want to mess with. And unlike the Padre’s smooth baby-face, Brother Michael is always in need of a shave. He’s English but speaks perfect Italian that he occasionally uses to test how much I understand. I never fail to disappoint.
“The girl who’s always shouting,” he says in English. “She had a go at you the other night.”
“She’s Scottish?”
“Well, she’s from Scotland. Italian parents, I believe.”
“What happened to her?”
“She has a condition of some sort.”
Yes, an unhappy one, I think to myself, but I guess that’s unfair if she’s been taken to the hospital.
“She has difficulty breathing, or something. Apparently we knew it before she came here, but we agreed to her coming anyway.”
So, Giovanni’s ‘Scotch’ was his way of associating Maria with me. Scotland, England – what’s the difference to an Italian? And holding his chest – Giovanni had the whole story within minutes of it happening. He wasn’t there in the library, though, as I had been, to hear her wheezing as she reached for a book from one of the higher shelves.
Says I don’t realise just how much I need his help. Or at least some sort of assistance to get me out of here.
I’m so angry at this man, at this boy, in my cell. It’s all I can do to sit on my bed, with my head in my hands, and hide my face so he doesn’t see my rage.
I know my reaction is being watched. I try to show them nothing but it’s hard. After all this time, they do this to me. He doesn’t know he’s being used and it’s his ignorance that makes me want to do him harm. I want to hurt him until he realises what damage he’s doing, just by being here. I know I can’t talk sense into him; you can’t reach the mind of a believer. He’s the same as those beards in the yard: believers all. But after a short while the tiredness takes over. Doing harm to others never did me any good; it never got me anywhere. This is just something new that has been introduced into my life, into my prison cell, into my life. I let my hands take the weight of my head and feel my shoulders sag. It was getting to be too easy, obviously. I was in a comfort zone and it had to come to an end.
He doesn’t stop talking. Says he thinks that, without my knowing it, I might actually be very sick.
I wake early to the sound of rain, the first rain I’ve heard since being back in Italy. Thick, individual drops splat down on the terrace outside my window, each one its own character that claims to define the nature of the forthcoming downpour: it will be like this, no, it will be like this. I reach up above my head to open the wooden blind to the pre-dawn sky and, as I do so, lightning flashes and lights up my room. The flash is like that from a digital camera: two or three little attempts before the main event. I listen for the corresponding thunder but it doesn’t arrive. The rain drops become more
intermittent until they almost disappear and I lie back down, believing this is all the rain we’re likely to get. I’m wrong; five or so minutes later I see more lightning and the thunder tells me just how close we are to the storm. When the rain starts up again it’s with a continuous drumming sound and I can hear that the ground outside is already saturated. Those early spots were just to let the earth know what was coming, softening it up and dispersing that top layer of dust. It’s a gentle storm though, nothing like what we’d get in Ireland. There are no gusts of wind. Any extra noise is an increase in the volume of rain falling directly from the sky. I lie there like the earth and let the sound of the rain soak into me.
It doesn’t stop. It seems to have no intention of ever stopping, and I wonder where this leaves me and Giovanni for the day. It’s still early, and I turn over to sleep for another hour or so. The rain can look after things for a while.
I wake up later, much later, to daylight and the sound of continual rain. I look at the digital alarm clock on the shelf above my head, and have to sit up closer to make out the time; it’s 14.15. I haven’t used the clock as an alarm since the week of my arrival because I always wake long before I need to get up. I usually hear the monks leaving for Mass at 7.00am, but not today. The rain has worked some magic and changed the rules; it’s certainly changed all the sounds in the Villa. I listen to the muffled noises, and wonder what the guests will do in the rain. Pray, I guess.
I’m desperate for the bathroom, so I pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The cells run down either side of a long corridor, with a shared bathroom at the far end. You’d miss just having your own personal bucket. I don’t know what it’s like for the female members of staff who live on the other side of the Villa.
There’s no one around. All the monks are at work, doing whatever it is that monks do all day. If I’d turned up for work, it would be close to siesta time but I reckon on having forfeited my right to a siesta today. I have to find Giovanni and explain myself. I pad along the corridor in my bare feet and sit down on the toilet to pee. I’m still slightly dizzy and disorientated from having woken up so late.
Dancing to the End of Love Page 19
