Bloody Women

by Helen FitzGerald

  He moved close to her dribbling arm, held out his tongue, and licked the blood. He moved his head up, and looked at her as he swallowed.

  Once, when Joe was eight, his Nonna took him to a dark shop, purchased five magazines, and walked him home. She sat him down at the kitchen table, splayed the magazines before him, and said, ‘I want you to read these. Every page. Look hard at the pictures.’

  Joe took his time, while his Nonna went into the garden and dug at her vegetable patch with vigour, using her favourite three-pronged garden fork. He grimaced at the hard-core pornography before him. Women flaunting themselves, offering their bodies, genitalia, breasts, legs, arms, open mouths, anuses.

  He felt ill by the time he finished, but he had done as he was asked.

  ‘I’m finished, Nonna,’ he yelled, hoping this meant he could watch the television.

  But Nonna had planned something else for him. She had a belt. She made him bend over the table.

  ‘You see what women are?’ she grimaced as the leather burnt his skin.

  ‘Yes, Nonna.’

  ‘You understand what women are?’

  ‘I understand, Nonna!’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Puttane, Nonna.’

  ‘What did you say, Giuseppe?’

  ‘Women are puttane, Nonna!’

  Pietro, a ‘happy accident’, was born when Joe was nine. Soon after, the family decided to move back to Italy. Joe – in trouble for calling his mother a bitch when she refused to give him cheese and onion crisps – overheard his parents as they packed in their bedroom.

  ‘You see what she’s done to that boy? I’m not letting her do the same to Pierino.’

  What were they talking about? All his Nonna had done was teach him some important truths about women.

  After their return to Italy, Nonna Giuseppina was unceremoniously moved into a rented flat in the old town. Joe visited her every day for twenty-three years. He read the Bible to her. He installed safety rails. He paid for her oak coffin. He helped lay her out in her wedding dress. He tended her grave each Sunday. He thanked the Lord for the wisdom she gave him.

  Sometimes when Joe thought of his exes he thought of their private parts. Private, they were. For him, no one else.

  Sometimes he thought of their mouths. Not to be lipsticked, glossed, tongue-moistened, as if saying ‘Come and get me! I’m a little tart! I’m anyone’s!’

  Sometimes he thought of their clothes. Maria Geurini wore a see-through blouse and Beatrice Conti wore a skirt so short he’d had to ask her to cross her legs at the café.

  He thought of what they were like in bed. At twenty-five, Francesca Dellamorte from one of his favourite self-help groups – perfect pick-up places – liked to be licked in the ear. Giulia Conti had done a striptease. A patient from Lucca called Allesandra Paoli had liked flirty conversation.

  ‘Grazie Dottore!’ the patient cooed.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he offered, smiling from behind his large doctor’s desk.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Why not? I’m closed for the day.’

  He locked the surgery and poured her a special glass of wine. ‘I know what you lot are like,’ he said as he pounded her flaccid frame on the examining table afterwards.

  Sometimes Joe thought about how they were disloyal to him. Wanting to go out, ringing their friends, agreeing to a week of sexual freedom.

  Catriona was beautiful, funny and loving. And she was Scottish. Grieving with the recent loss of Nonna Giuseppina, Joe believed she would right the wrongs of Agnes McCulloch. She would be taken away from Scotland. She would behave as a woman should, without the interference of her loved ones.

  But even more than her Scottishness, it was her vulnerability that he loved the most.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ she said on their second date. ‘I have bipolar disorder . . . manic depression . . . It’s mostly okay, but I need to keep an eye on my moods. Ups and downs . . . Tears and spending sprees . . . What are you thinking? Do you want to run a mile?’

  He didn’t. He wanted to take her away and look after her.

  ‘I want to hold you close,’ he said. ‘I want to be your doctor! Kiss you. I want to say I love you, but that’d be silly – we’ve only known each other two days.’

  ‘I want to say I love you too,’ Catriona replied, ‘but you’re right. It can’t be love.’

  ‘Must be indigestion,’ Joe said.

  He wanted a wife and children. She would be perfect. She was delectable, delicious and needy. He realised he hardly knew her, but nothing annoyed him about her. Not like the others, who’d all ended up back-chatting and lying.

  ‘We should never be scared,’ Catriona had said in bed after they’d decided to marry. ‘We should never clam up . . . We should be living proof that romance need not die. It’ll thrive as long as we admit our innermost secrets and desires and listen not with judgement, but with maturity and generosity!’

  So did she want to flirt at parties?

  Did she want to be wild?

  Did she like the idea of touching new skin?

  ‘Not really . . . I love you, Joe. Just you.’

  ‘I know you do, my love, which is why I give you this gift of a week. Do you want it? Will you use it?’

  The following morning, Joe watched her disappear through the departure gate and wondered if she’d pass the test. If she did, they would marry. If she failed – well, he would punish her. How, he wondered? What would hurt her most?

  He managed the uncertainty for half a day. Her endless phone calls helped reassure him.

  During her first call she said, ‘I don’t want anyone else, ever!’

  In the second she said, ‘No one compares to you!’

  By the third her statements had turned into questions. ‘What about you? What are you doing? No, don’t tell me. We shouldn’t talk about it, should we? I won’t talk about what I’m doing either.’

  Aha, he thought, she was beginning to weaken. He packed the things he always packed for holidays.

  The bottles of magic. He used them occasionally – like that time in his surgery – if the sound of screeching, wriggling, writhing bitches on heat became too much to bear. Like packing condoms, these were a ‘just-in-case’ necessity.

  The false passport. One summer, he’d left a woman lying on the floor of her Greek self-catering apartment, not knowing what she would remember when she came round. He topped her up again, tracked down a guy he’d met earlier in a seedy bar, and became Jonathan Hull for the return journey.

  He changed his clothes, completing the outfit with a large dark coat, slicked back his hair, and called his mother.

  ‘I’m sick,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed. No . . . no, don’t. I have food in the house. I want dark and peace and quiet. Please just leave me alone.’

  His mother – used to doing as she was told – did as she was told. She didn’t notice Joe leaving in a taxi in the middle of the night.

  Joe didn’t have a plan. All he knew was that he was going to follow her – to see how she behaved.

  Catriona’s endless blabbing about her exes helped Joe recognise the men. Johnny at the dancing competition, flirting with judges and eyeballing contestants; in the Hammer Bar afterwards, as he watched from his table in the dark corner, having just spoken to Catriona on the phone, pretending to be in Italy. He watched Johnny make Catriona laugh with his bad-boy anecdotes; watched him in the car, not satisfying her, making her storm off angrily with his concern over a stained car seat.

  He felt the anger his Nonna had taught him to feel. Another one, just like Agnes. All the same.

  He embraced the anger as he walked over to Johnny’s car, as he smashed him in the face with his fist, as he pushed him into the passenger seat and drove somewhere quiet, not knowing what he was going to do, surprised at himself when he had done it.

  The penis was an afterthought. A clever one. What man would ever do that?

  By th
e time Catriona met up with Rory, Joe knew what he wanted to do each time.

  He recognised Rory as he left his office building late at night. It felt right somehow, the perfect punishment.

  It was at this stage that he decided to place the penises in special places that meant something to Catriona – in bars where she’d been chucked at the age of nineteen, in television sets that she’d kicked at twenty-three, in family homes where she was not wanted at thirty.

  Joe recognised Mani as he walked home from the Hilton in Glasgow.

  And the hum of his anger warmed him as Catriona drank alone in a Glasgow bar, Stewart’s flight having been cancelled; as she left her handbag under her seat to go to the toilet; as she walked along a quiet Glasgow street not realising he had placed a murder weapon inside her bag.

  Anger buzzed inside him as he sat opposite Catriona in a cell, where she begged him for forgiveness.

  Puttana.

  37

  Anna arrived in Pisa by 8 p.m. There was a train strike, so she got a bus to Lucca, and then waited ages for another one to Sasso. By the time she’d found someone who spoke English, got directions to Joe’s house, and walked up the steep hill in the darkness, it was after eleven. The lights in Joe’s house were all off, and there was no one in.

  She knocked on the door of the large stone farmhouse adjacent, and eventually, Pietro came to the door.

  ‘Anna? What are you doing here?’

  They’d met on the day of Catriona’s arrest. Pietro had still been dressed in his suit and tie. Now, he was wearing a dressing gown. ‘Ciao, Pietro. Sorry it’s so late.’

  ‘They’ve gone to a hotel . . . Mum and Dad are in bed. Let’s go into Joe’s.’

  Pietro took a key from a hook beside the door and walked over to Joe’s front door. Once inside, he turned on the lights and dialled Joe’s mobile number.

  It began ringing from the bedroom.

  ‘He’s left it here. Let me get you a drink. Are you hungry? I can make you something.’

  Anna was impressed. As Catriona had often said, he was kind and immediately likeable.

  They shared pasta with tomatoes and basil, drank a glass of homemade wine, and Anna extracted as much information as she could.

  ‘Has she been okay?’

  ‘Not really. Today she did some really weird things with the garden.’

  ‘How’s Joe been coping?’

  ‘Joe just copes. Doctor Joe.’

  ‘Do you get on with him?’

  ‘His grandmother brought him up with some strange ideas.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘That men are men.’

  ‘And women are women,’ Anna finished.

  ‘Something like that. You should get some sleep. I’ll set you up in the spare room. You can ring the hotel in the morning.’

  Anna showered and changed into her pyjamas. She looked at the photos on the mantelpiece: Joe’s parents’ wedding, a café in Glasgow, Joe as a boy with his stern-looking grandmother. There were also a few of Catriona’s photos: of her mother, her old flat, and one of Anna and Catriona in their netball uniforms when they were thirteen. Anna picked up the photo and touched it.

  Ah, Cat.

  It was inevitable that she’d snoop about a bit. Impossible not to. First, through a couple of photo albums on the bookshelf. More of the same: Joe with his grandmother, with his brother in the house next door, at university in Milan. She looked at the books on the mantelpiece – English crime novels, mostly, as well as the odd medical journal. She moved into Joe and Cat’s bedroom, touching some of her friend’s clothes and then picking up the mobile phone Pietro had called earlier. The messages were all in Italian, apart from the odd one to Cat.

  ‘How r u?’

  ‘U should get some sleep.’

  ‘U 2.’

  Then she opened a bedside cabinet. Inside were condoms, a couple of bills and a document pouch. She knew she shouldn’t, but she opened it. There was nothing inside.

  On a roll now, Anna looked under the bed – just shoes. In the drawers – just clothes. In the cupboard – more clothes. In the kitchen cabinets – kitchen stuff. In the bathroom cabinet – it was locked. In Joe’s satchel by the door – papers, but also some keys. She tried several of them before the bathroom cabinet opened. Inside were many medicine bottles – paracetamol, sleeping tablets, lithium and several bottles of unlabelled liquids. She moved to the spare room and looked inside the very tall antique wardrobe in the corner. Then she noticed something sticking over the edge above. It was too high to reach the top of it, so she grabbed a chair from the kitchen, stood on it, and skimmed her hand across the dusty surface.

  A small booklet. She tried to grab it with her fingertips, but it was right at the back and difficult to grasp. She pushed the booklet until it fell down the back of the wardrobe. As it landed, Anna heard something. A car driving up the mountain road outside? Pietro closing his window next door? The noises stopped. Letting out a loud sigh, she shook her head.

  Why on earth was she so scared?

  38

  My legs were heavy like Dad’s were heavy, a bag of stones tied to each. And wet, like his were.

  He’d tried once before. Mum was at work. I came in from school and saw him sleeping on the sofa. I almost ignored him, because he often slept on the sofa after a bottle or two. I put my schoolbag down in the hall, got some milk out of the fridge, poured it into a glass, took it into the living room, sat on the chair opposite Dad, and turned on the remote control. A few minutes into Neighbours, or whatever it was I was watching, I noticed a small bottle on the floor beside him. It was empty, and Dad had white stuff coming out of his mouth. A sensible eight-year-old, I dialled 999 and followed their instructions. Later, in the hospital, he said, ‘Sorry, love, I’m sorry. I’m just not so well, you know. It’s best if you don’t love me, don’t love me . . .’

  My legs were heavy. I could feel stone under my feet. I could hardly breathe. I felt sick. Woozy. Where was I? What was I doing?

  Limoncello. A photograph. Toreador.

  I reached out and felt the stone beneath me.

  Was I in the cemetery? Beside Lucia Bellini?

  ‘Joe? JOE!’

  I touched my stomach and also felt stone, a stone weight on top of me, pinning me down.

  Why was I wet? With a huge weight on top of me, weighing me down?

  ‘JOE! This isn’t funny!’

  I clawed around beside my body and felt something small and pointy. I picked it up and felt it. It was a small wooden toy, with a long, thin nose. Pinocchio. It frightened me.

  I thought of what Anna told me before our netball grand final. ‘Mental attitude . . . Focus,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t over-complicate things. Have winning on your mind and get on with it.’

  I closed my eyes, took hold of the two-foot-square stone that rested on my chest, and pushed. It didn’t budge.

  ‘Stay calm, Cat. Stay calm,’ I said with my eyes closed. I took a deep breath, thought of Anna, and twisted my chest with a groan.

  The stone fell to the side of me and it returned neatly to the small ditch it had formed before someone had placed it on top of me.

  I sat up in my puddle.

  I wasn’t in the cemetery. Lucia Bellini wasn’t resting in the tomb adjacent to mine. Little Lucia. Her parents unprepared. Only twelve.

  I was in a dark room. I stood up and felt around me. A narrow room. Tall. With high windows that let in small speckles of light that danced on the rising water.

  I looked up to the dark ceiling. I felt the walls with my hands and then tripped on a submerged step. There were other steps, leading up, up, to a non-existent bell.

  This was a bell-tower.

  I’d only seen one bell-tower in the area. The one in the ghost village.

  Oh shit.

  And the water was rising.

  Standing on the fourth step now, I watched as it made its way towards the fifth.

  In the distance, two kinds of black merged. A rectan
gle of lighter black amid the dense blackness of its surroundings. A doorway? I remembered one. Joe and I had walked through it with other tourists and oohed and aahed at the smell of a dampened past.

  I’d have to wade towards it. Could I? Could I wade? Wading was not swimming. Wading was okay.

  I trudged through the rising water till I reached the doorway. Joe hadn’t bothered to board it over or anything. He probably thought there was no need – what with the drugged limoncello he’d used to knock me out, the stone he’d used to weigh me down and my long-term inability to swim.

  He had excellent timing. He’d obviously planned it carefully. When I reached the disappearing doorway and looked outside, I realised that I was at the highest point of the village. I was surrounded by water. But for one tiny jagged piece of rooftop in the distance, the other buildings beneath me had already disappeared.

  The dark water had risen to my thighs.

  My hips.

  Numb now. Like at the Greenock pool. No feeling. Not even fear. My chest, my shoulders now submerged.

  A mass of water surrounded me, hills rising from it in the distance, house lights flickering on them like stars. My head a dot so small the people in the illuminated houses would never see, never know.

  Up to my neck.

  Anna had hooked my neck in Greenock, and saved me.

  My chin.

  I wanted to touch Anna’s hand again. I wanted to feel blessed not damned, loved not tolerated. I wanted to feel the warmth of her.

  My mouth.

  ‘Anna! Anna! Where are you, Anna? Come and find me now, please, please, Anna! Come and get me.’

  She’d come to save me so many times before, and I’d pushed her away. And now it was too late. I couldn’t stop it.

  I always wondered why Dad didn’t stop it. Why didn’t he untie the bags of stones attached to his feet and kick? Why he had no instinct to save himself? How could he have had such determination not to?

  Why wasn’t I kicking? Why was I calmly holding my breath as I floated upwards a little?