The Sacrificial Man

by Ruth Dugdall

  “Oh, Alice,” she says, “It’s like a cathedral.” She stands under the impressive roof of the church, looking up like a tourist in New York gazing at skyscrapers. “How did a tiny village get to have something like this?”

  “It’s because of the wool trade. Lavenham was a big deal in Tudor times.”

  The details of this place are so familiar to me. You can’t go for a drink without reading on the top of the menu about this Tudor village with its roots in the manufacturing of cloth, wool and yarn. The whole area is defined by architecture and symbols of that time, mini-factories dominated the area when Henry VIII was on the throne. Perhaps I take this history for granted because Lee is impressed, squinting up at the carved roses on the eaves. “It’s like The Da Vinci Code. Maybe Dan Brown should have come here rather than traipsing up to Scotland.”

  “Well, you know what Americans are like for the Highlands.” I look up all the same, piggybacking on her enjoyment of deciphering the codes. The last time I was here was with Smith.

  We walk through to the silent chapel where candles are lit, and a thin visitors’ book is open. Curious, I go over and read:

  For my son, John, who is on duty in Afghanistan. Bring him home safe.

  Pray for our neighbour Reg, sick with bowel cancer.

  Thinking of the WPC who died in Ipswich last week while doing her job, stabbed by a drunken teenager.

  I flick back the pages revealing pain and illness, so much bad luck. If lighting a candle and asking a few nuns to pray could work they’d need a much larger volume.

  “What’s that?” Lee peers over my shoulder, and I stand aside so she can see. She peels the pages, more slowly than I had, then puts her hand in her back pocket for a coin which she drops in the box. She chooses a thin white candle. Touching its wick to a flame, she lights it and places it on the rack. I wait to see if she will lift the pen, if she’s going to write a message. She doesn’t.

  I’m itching to know. “Who’s the candle for?”

  She pauses, and for a second I think she is praying. When she looks at me her eyes are like sorrowful pools. “For you.”

  “Me? I’m not ill”

  “You’ve been having a lot of headaches recently. I think you’re really stressed, and it’s my job to look after you.” She takes my arm and leads us out of the chapel. Lee knows about Smith, she must know. How could I ever have thought otherwise?

  Later, back at my home, we lie together in bed. Lee asks, “Why don’t you have any photos around?”

  “I don’t like clutter.”

  “But, not even a picture of your family.” She is silent for a moment, but her eyes flicker with active thought. “Your mother was always so kind to me.”

  “She liked you.”

  “How would she feel is she saw us together now?”

  I look at Lee’s cropped hair sticking out randomly from the shape of the pillow, her face free from make up or any other artifice. She works hard for a living and she loves me. It would be everything my mother would want for me, if only Lee were a man. “I think she’d throw a fit. Probably refer me to a shrink, like last time.”

  “Well, she couldn’t do it any worse than my own folks did. When I first came out my old man said I wasn’t to set foot in the house again. But he came round, Alice. It just took time. You can’t deny what you are. You can’t hide your nature.”

  “I’m not like you, Lee. You know who you are. What you are.”

  “What are you then, Alice?” Her voice rises to uncharacteristic volume. She props herself up on one arm, and with the other she reaches for me, her fingers form a bangle around my wrist. “Poor Alice. So clever, yet you can’t see what’s staring you in the face.”

  I pull my arm free. “Don’t Lee.”

  “Why won’t you ever talk about it, Alice?” she asks, collapsing back down onto the mattress, looking up to me. “Why do you never talk about your real mum?”

  Suddenly I’m melancholy. I can’t speak for a long time. When the words do come they surprise me. It’s not something I ever talked about. “I was four when I lost her. She was only twenty-one, she had her whole future ahead of her, if the world had been just a little bit kind. She deserved a better life than she got.”

  Lee kisses my shoulder. She knows more than anyone that this is hard for me to talk about. “She could have achieved so much, if it wasn’t for me. Having me ruined everything for her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Alice. None of it was your fault.”

  I kiss her, stopping both our mouths from saying anything we could regret. She pulls away, serious. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.”

  I try to pull back, but she won’t release me. “Let me in, Alice. Tell me a secret.”

  I tell Lee this:

  When I was twelve I was invited to another girl’s sleepover party. I didn’t often get invited to parties, but this was a girl from the church youth group so she probably had to invite everyone out of Christian duty. I was determined to go but when I arrived I was miserable. I watched everyone else laughing, their teeth stained red with cherryade, feeling more alone than if I’d been in my bedroom. As we settled down in our sleeping bags some of the girls began to tell ghost stories.

  I hated it and wanted them to stop. I wanted to go home. Then the girl whose party it was, a morose thing with mousy hair whose name I don’t remember, began to tell the story of a woman, in her isolated cottage at night, doing a jigsaw puzzle. The woman slowly places piece by piece into the puzzle until she realises that the picture she is creating is of her own room, and the figure in the picture is herself. Cautiously, she puts in the final piece of the picture that shows a man outside the window brandishing an axe. The final noise she hears is breaking glass.

  I cried and cried. I wouldn’t stop until Dad came to collect me. I was never invited to a sleepover party again.

  “There. That’s my secret. I’m scared of the axe man at the window.”

  Lee kisses me as tenderly as if I was a child. “No,” she says, “you’re scared of finding the final piece to the puzzle.”

  Lee’s weight is on me, along me, the tight muscle of her thigh tense on my hip. Her fingers move inside me. She is expert at my body, opening me wide, eyes never leaving mine, as her sweat salts my mouth. “Make some noise,” she says. A sound in my throat like air rising, her hands, her thrust urging me on. “Keep going,” she says, and I do, I do. She bites my shoulder, and my mouth gapes, then the noise comes, my sound, and she replies, a yell and call from animal urges, and I’m with her, not in my head, but in my flesh, with her hands, while she is rising and pushing and I know, I know… and I’m rising, above, with her, with her, and the noise is there, and there, and there, and her weight, and eyes, and hands, I fall, and fall, and fall.

  We are still. But not silent. And she smiles. I smile back, our bodies bound together like poetry.

  I can feel myself slipping into Lee’s world, into her hopes. She wants me, wants to be with me, and I’m getting used to that. There’s warmth between us, and skin, only that. And I think that I was wrong. It was never Smith, after all. It was Lee. She was always waiting. Isn’t orgasm a sort of death? To cease upon the midnight with no pain…

  I had a choice, between Smith and Lee. Two lovers, offering different things. I chose Smith. But all along the person I really wanted was Mummy.

  Thirty-five

  1994

  Alice was seventeen when she decided to find her father. She had lost Mummy but she had at least known her. Loved her. The gap, the aching hole in her heart, she put down to the absence of her father. Who was he? Where was he? How old? Hell, he could even be dead. She knew nothing about him. She had no-one to condemn or reject, to try to forgive. Nothing but a space. She felt the absence in her soul. She sat before her mirror and examined her heritage, the genetic evidence of the past: the ash blonde hair, she knew, was like Mummy’s. The eyes too, green like a cat. And Mummy’s mouth, pink and full, a perfect cupid’s bow
. She remembered that. She remembered the smart lady in the bedsit, offering Mummy the money. Making her cry. Alice had inherited her grandmother’s mouth. But what else? She was tall – Mummy had been average height, she supposed, or even shorter. Next to Mr Wilding she looked tiny. Alice smoothed her fingertips over her forehead – domed and smooth, a rounded profile. Romanesque. Mummy had lacked that, had a shallow forehead, a sharper chin. So, this must be her father’s legacy. His contribution to her gene pool.

  She allowed her head to fall into her upturned hands and wondered what her father may or may not be like. The blank on her birth certificate was filled with shadow, a ghost that she tried to conjure like a medium. Please, oh please, reveal yourself.

  She stared hard at her reflection until her features distorted and she saw a man, staring back at her. The face mutated, grotesque, and she blinked with a start. She’d stared too long and scared herself. The man was gone – it was just her own face, so familiar, staring back.

  She longed to see her father, however horrible he looked.

  Since the appointment with Dr Murray her adoptive mother had been pleading with her to go back for ‘therapy’. Alice didn’t need therapy, she needed the truth. Or so she believed.

  She knew she’d another family somewhere. She knew she was adopted because Mummy was dead. She could never forget that. It was the image she held in her heart, the scene that filled the hole. When she wasn’t thinking of Mummy the hole gaped.

  But there was a man, out there in the world, who shared her blood. Every child had a father. She began to fantasise that he held the key to her happiness. Maybe her father had no idea that she was adopted. Maybe he knew and was searching, unable to trace her. She wanted to find him, wanted to be with someone who understood. Someone else who’d loved Mummy.

  Alice had grown away from her adopted family, knowing them to be unlike her. It was the summer and she was working at the old people’s home in the night, sleeping a lot in the day, avoiding her mother’s tearful gaze and pleading: “Please, Alice, go and see Dr Murray. He can help you.” She avoided Lee and her puppy-dog devotion. No wonder she wanted to break free. To catch the piece of her that had been lost and make herself whole again. She felt like she’d been in pieces for years.

  Her mother was a hoarder, and Alice knew she had a box in which she kept special documents. It was somewhere she never let Alice look and Alice guessed that she must have the details of her adoption in that box, maybe the address of the team that had dealt with it. It was hard to snoop with her mother always at home, and always so neat. She was bound to notice anything not returned to exactly the same place. But Alice was determined, and waited until she was in the kitchen, bleaching the floor. That always took at least two hours.

  When Alice heard her mother’s plastic shoe-covers on the kitchen lino she went to the bedroom, slowly opened the door into the stuffy boudoir of pink-valanced pillowcases, china girls in bonnets and lace doilies on every surface. She knelt down by the melamine dressing table and slid open the lower drawer, the one that held tights and slips. The box Alice sought was navy and had once contained a man’s shirt. It held documents her mother considered important, like report cards and the first pictures she’d drawn at school. She hoped it was where she would find the map to her real father.

  She didn’t rummage in the drawer, but lifted out skin-coloured underwear, nylon nighties, piling them neatly on the carpet, until she had the box. She wanted to snatch it and disappear to her room but knew that would be foolish. She should just look, and leave everything as she found it.

  Sitting on the chintzy carpet she lifted the lid, slowly, and slid out a few papers. There were recent letters from the doctor’s surgery acknowledging the ‘assessment’ appointment with Dr Murray. A burst of anger erupted, and she felt justified in what she was doing. Everything in this box was about her.

  She found her birth certificate, showing her adopted name, Dunn. The original would be stored somewhere, locked in a filing cabinet which Alice could only access when she was eighteen. It made her so mad. She didn’t even know what her real surname was.

  Under the papers, her hand touched plastic. She pulled the bag free, an old supermarket carrier. It was light and thin and warmth spread over Alice’s heart. She slid her fingers into the box and touched the wool, fingers tingling with a blissful sensation like coming home.

  She felt a stinging behind her eyes as she gently lifted out the lilac cardigan. The scrappy, badly knitted woollen cardigan that she knew so well. It had been her favourite. It was what she had worn, thrown on over a nightshirt, when she found Mummy in Mr Wilding’s room. That must be why it was there: the precious cardigan had arrived with Alice. She brought it to her face, nuzzling the wool, which bobbled and caught under her lips. It had been in the box for twelve years, yet it still smelled the same. It smelt of Mummy, of the bedsit they had shared.

  She unfolded it on her lap, and then held it to her chest. The sleeves came to the crook of her elbow, and the cardigan stopped just below her bust. That was how small she’d been once. She studied the clumsy knitting, the dropped stitch that had grown into a hole, and knew that Mummy had loved her. She undid the one pearlised button and opened the cardigan, feeling the texture and remembering wearing it. Then she saw a white label, stitched at only one end and hanging loose. A name tag. Because Mummy had knitted this cardigan for her to wear to pre-school, and all clothes had to be named. Her heart leapt.

  The name tag wasn’t printed, but homemade. It was the only time she’d seen Mummy’s handwriting. It said Alice Mariani.

  She knew who she was. She had a name: Mariani.

  Alice had forgotten her name, only remembered that Mummy was called Matty. She was too young to remember her surname, but she liked it. It sounded Italian and sophisticated. ‘Mariani’ was so much more glamorous than ‘Dunn’, which she’d been saddled with for twelve years, a heavy name that made you think of farms and labourers.

  Alice put the reports and pictures back in the box, but not the cardigan. It was hers. It should never have been taken from her. She didn’t waste a second. Hadn’t she waited long enough? After hiding the cardigan in her bedroom, at the back of her wardrobe, Alice went to the hallway. From the low seat of the telephone table in the hall she could see into the kitchen. Her mother was mopping the last part of the floor, backing herself into a corner. Her face was wet with sweat.

  There was no Mariani in the local telephone directory. But she didn’t give up. She knew that the local library had directories for the whole country and would have checked them all if necessary, but she found what she sought in the sixth directory, the one for Norwich. A listing for Mariani. It even gave an address.

  And it was that easy. She had a name, an address. She had a phone number and was just one meeting away from finding out who she was.

  That telephone call was the hardest she’d ever made, but it was brief. Businesslike. As though her grandmother had been expecting her call, waiting for it.

  Mrs Mariani agreed to meet Alice.

  Alice’s grandmother was nothing and everything like she expected. She was younger, and Alice’s memory of her in the bedsit fit like a missing jigsaw piece when she saw her fur coat, the expensive leather gloves. Her grandmother’s face held Mummy’s mouth. She wanted to kiss it.

  There was no kissing. Her grandmother peered at her, perhaps seeing beyond the teenager to the dead woman she so resembled, and then nipped in her mouth. Her skin was tight across her brow and towards her ears, wrinkle free. She was smart and attractive and as unreadable as granite. Alice wished she would smile.

  Her grandmother was dressed in black, tailored fabrics over a solid frame. Her impossibly dark hair was cut straight across her forehead, a fashionable but severe style, and any softness her face might have had been obliterated by sharp kohl and violent rouge. Harsh artist, she had erased any flaws that would have made her approachable.

  Alice wanted so much, but most of all she wanted to know ab
out her parents. Her memories were old. She wanted pretty tales to add to her scant store of love.

  Her grandmother gave her nothing. Her words were cold and distinct. Her eyes quite dry as she spoke of her dead daughter: “Matilde was ridiculously young to have a child. By the time I found out it was impossible to do anything about it.”

  Me, thought Alice. Not it. To do anything about me.

  “She was nearly seven months pregnant by the time we saw the doctor. We’d planned for an adoption. It would have all been so simple, she just had to go through with the delivery. But she got this notion in her head that she had to keep it.”

  Alice looked at her hands, which were pale and shaking. She felt invisible.

  “She was in a home for teenage mothers, and I suppose she saw all the other girls keeping their babies, getting council flats, and she got this crazy idea that she would do the same. It was out of my hands then.”