by Nikki Owen
‘Mama,’ I say now, sweat springing up in patches on my chest and palms, making myself speak even though just looking at Mama makes me doubt my own mind, ‘the Project is a covert conditioning programme. It is part of the UK intelligence services operation and has been ongoing for three decades. It is not an Asperger’s clinic, as you thought it was.’
She lifts her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my goodness. Maria, this … this sounds so far-fetched. Are you sure?’
‘Yes. How did they contact you originally, Mama, when I was young?’
She hesitates, touches her neck with fingers frail as twigs. ‘Well, my dear, you had … troubles. The Project said they could help you. I took you to the doctor’s appointments, they were quite groundbreaking, I was told, it was just for your Asperger’s, really, for when you had … issues. We travelled a lot with you because of it—they had facilities all over the world. Father Reznik—do you remember him? He helped enormously when Papa was away on … business.’
‘Mama,’ I start to say, but it is hard to speak, the uncertainty hitting me, Father Reznik’s name spoken aloud destabilszing me. ‘It was not simply a doctor’s appointment or a visit to the priest,’ I say. ‘I was being tested on. Father Reznik was a handler for the Project. For MI5.’
‘What?’ She laughs, a crumpled laugh like a scrunched up piece of paper, and it tears me inside that laugh, rips my confidence in one swipe. ‘Oh my dearest, surely not. I used to take you there! Well, no wonder Ramon was concerned about you and … and …’
I begin to worry, start to think, as she laughs at me, that perhaps I have made a huge mistake when her shoulders visibly drop. She shakes her head, neck scrawny, flesh stretched, worn.
‘Mama?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t keep up this pretence,’ she says after a second, her voice barely a whisper. I remain rooted to the spot, unsure. The lights glow and the fire crackles. ‘Ramon—he drugged you, my baby.’ A small sob slips out. ‘He took you down into that cellar, saying you needed help.’ She shoots a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my goodness, was he not telling me the truth? Should you not have been in the basement? I told him I didn’t like it one bit, but he said the Project insisted, said it was some new, radical treatment.’
She lifts her gaze now, eyes moist and I don’t know what to say or think as I hear her speak. ‘Oh, I was so worried. Ramon was acting crazy. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. I knew he had you in the cellar and he was becoming increasingly erratic. I didn’t know this Project was really what you are saying they are. If it is true, then dear Lord, forgive me.’ She pauses, dabs a cheek. ‘Your brother’s been … different recently. Distracted, preoccupied. I thought it was simply work, the busy legal circuit, but then he started talking about this Project more and more—even mentioned Balthus, yes, I believe he mentioned Balthus. Oh my—is he involved, too?’
My fingers scratch into my leg for control as my mind tries to connect what Mama is saying, but it doesn’t make sense because, mostly, I don’t want to believe it. Because if Ramon was in contact with Balthus about the Project, then Balthus is their contact, too, all along he was their contact.
The smells in the air now collide in my senses with the glitter of gold and the confusion of the words spoken, and I struggle to get some order over it. There is a loud crack. My head jerks to the left; Mama jumps.
‘What was that?’ she says, hand on her chest.
There is a rattling sound, sharp, piercing like a rod of metal being thrust down hard on the ground, then, nothing. Silence. My whole body is on red alert. The Project—are they coming?
Mama stays in her seat as I lean to the door and listen. There is a tap, then another, soft first, then louder until it is nearer, closer, outside.
‘Maria, my dear, I am worried. Please see what that is.’
Uncertain, I take seven steps to the door, stop and listen. There is a rustling outside, a scrape and then, without warning, the door slams open sending me flying backwards landing in a heap on the floor. My brother stands there looking like a walking corpse, blood smeared on his skull and cheeks and on the front of his neck, and his hair is soaked and matted where he must have hit the stone steps.
‘Ramon!’ my mother shrieks.
I dart back and at first, I think my brother is going to run at me, to throw himself at me for leaving him for dead on the stairs, but instead, he turns and, staring straight at my mother, flies head on towards her.
‘You liar!’ he yells. ‘You fucking liar!’
Chapter 40
Apartment buildings, Central Madrid.
Present Day
Ramon lunges at my mother, toppling her cane to the floor, the metal clanking on the air vent, sending a sharp snap vibrating through the air.
‘You liar!’ he shouts, trying to drag her now up out of her chair, onto the floor.
I run, grab him by the shoulders, tear him away, his body hot and heavy. His fists fly out, teeth gnarl, but then Mama begins to cough, splutter, and Ramon suddenly deflates, dropping in front of me like a stone, hauling in great gulps of oxygen.
I slap back my hair. ‘Why did you attack Mama?’
He doesn’t look at me, instead he locks his sight on our mother as she clutches her throat now, gasping for breath. I run over, help Mama to her seat, her wisps of charred hair pointing out like palms trees from her patchy scalp. She tries to smooth them back, but they spring up, swaying.
Ramon stands, stumbles a little then slaps a hand out to a cabinet to his right and pulls himself up. ‘Mama’s a liar,’ he says, blood seeping from his lip. He spits it to the floor. Flecks of red pepper the rug, and Mama’s eyes go wide.
‘Ramon! Manners.’
He laughs, low, steady, a growl, a feral moan. I step back. I do not understand what is happening.
‘You manipulated me to do what I did,’ my brother says to Mama now, ‘and it’s me you call the liar? I heard you, I heard everything you said to Maria just now.’
Mama looks from him to me then back again. ‘My son, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Her voice is low, hushed. ‘What did you do to your own sister?’
‘What did I do?’ He paces. ‘What did you do? It was you who told me to put Maria down there in the cellar. You who told me all about this Project thing. You said it would help her, you convinced me! So I did it, I did what you asked. But I found out, Mama. These Project people of yours—they have DNA. Oh yeah—I did some digging and found out.’ He turns to me. ‘M, you have a photo, don’t you? I found it, too, but I didn’t know what to do about it.’
My hand, without thinking, reaches into my back pocket and pulls out the picture from the cross. I look at my name and year of birth scratched into the corner.
‘I found some information on you,’ Ramon says to me, ‘something on some documents the Project sent to Mama’s email and I read it thinking it was just a standard advice report on you, M, but it wasn’t—it was a DNA report. M,’ his shoulders drop, ‘you’re adopted.’ He exhales. ‘You’re not my sister. And she—’ he points to Mama now ‘—has lied about who you are and what she does all along.’
Adopted. The floor feels as if it is slipping out from under me. I stagger back, eyes down, unable to make contact or see in their eyes what they see of me. ‘Mama, is … is what Ramon says correct?’
She looks now to where I hold the photograph in my fingers then she exhales. ‘I said I had something to tell you.’ She nods to the image. ‘That is it.’
I stare at the photograph and I think I begin to shake, but I am unsure. I look at Ramon. ‘You are not with the Project?’
He shakes his head. ‘No, not the one you describe and definitely not in the way Mama described. M, she set you up. She set us both up. I thought it was a specialist doctor’s clinic, that’s all. That’s what Mama told me. M, I meant it down there when I said I loved you.’ Tears streak his face now, past his cheeks, falling from the tip of his chin. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, I’m so sorry.’
‘Ramon!’ Mama says. ‘Enough tears. Real men don’t cry.’
‘Like hell they do! Tell her!’ Ramon yells, rounding on her, and I wince at his volume, at the chaos that is setting in. ‘Tell Maria about the knee-deep shit you’ve got our whole lives into!’
Mama does not move. Her hair sways and her skin is pale and translucent even in the glow of the embers. She picks at a cotton fibre on the corner of the chair then sighs and, tilting her head, talks.
‘Maria, my sweet, you are not …’ She searches the air. ‘You are not our biological child.’
The words drive a knife right through me and when I fall back, Ramon catches me. ‘I am not Papa’s daughter,’ I say to him. ‘I am not your sister …’
‘Oh, M.’
The room swirls and it feels as if my whole world has been snatched away from me. Papa. He was everything to me and that fact throbs now in my head and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the sadness that forces its way through me, clashing with the smells in the room, with the colours and the sound of the traffic outside and even with the messy wisps of Mama’s hair.
I blink past tears that flow unbidden now down my cheeks and past my chin, and a surge of anger and despair rises up and I slam my feet into the carpet and scream. ‘Tell me!’ I yell to Mama. ‘Tell me now how this happened! Tell me what you did!’
Mama sniffs and dabs her nose. When she eventually speaks, her voice is low and measured.
‘Balthazar came to me,’ she says, ‘It was in 1979. He was engaged to be married to Harriet, his now government wife, but, well, he had a wandering eye—as men do—met some young girl named Isabella when he was visiting his parents in San Sebastian. She got pregnant and Balthus panicked. He was on a political career trajectory, his wife, of course, even more so—she is currently making a fine British Home Secretary. So, a rogue pregnancy would not do. I … helped out. I took Maria off his hands. Alarico, well, we had you, Ramon, and we loved you, but your Papa was desperate for a daughter, so when you came along, Maria, well, he was delighted. He could help out an old friend and gain a child.’ She holds her head up high and, inhaling, narrows her eyes to me. ‘My dear Maria, Balthazar—Balthus—my dear—he is your biological father. And the woman in the photograph, she is your real mother.’
‘No.’
‘M? M, it’s okay.’
But I push him away. ‘No, no, no.’ There is a set of irons and fire fork in the grate all in disarray and I stagger to them now, drop to me knees and begin to set the fire items out in neat orders, first by size then by weight, then by grades of black shades, anything to feel order to stop my thoughts and being from becoming utterly fragmented. Order after order after order.
I stop, fingers black from the dust and look at the photograph in my hand but when I do, it all blurs into one and all I can think of is the fact that Papa is not my papa. Not my real, biological papa. Balthus is. I stamp my foot, unable to contain the confusion and upset. Why did he never tell me? All that time we were in Goldmouth and he never said a thing.
I round on Mama. ‘You lied to me. You lied to me! You all lied to me!’ I point to the woman in the picture. ‘Tell me again her name.’
‘Isabella,’ she says. ‘Isabella Bidarte.’
The name on the reverse of the photograph. Isabella Bidarte. Mama is telling the truth. The truth.
I wipe spit from my mouth, tears from my cheeks. ‘Where is she from? Is she alive?’
‘The Basque country. Like … Balthazar. And, well, I think she died, my dear.’
Dead, like Papa—dead. I fall back. The Basque blood data, the information Black Eyes told me on why Basque blood was so important to the conditioning programme. It all dazes me, disorients me and, as if my mind is operating on its own, I raise my shirt sleeve, inch by inch until my arm is exposed to the fountain pen tattoo. I am Basque. I am Basque not because Papa has Basque roots, but because I am not in his blood line at all.
As my fountain pen tattoo is fully visible, I hear Mama gasp. As she does, bile shoots up my throat and I swallow it back, throwing out my hand and finding Ramon’s hand to steady myself.
‘You made me feel like I was not myself. You never went near me, never attempted to hold me like …’ I stop, wanting to say ‘like Papa did,’ but finding now that those words can no longer come out and have still the same meaning. ‘Who let the Project have me? Was it Balthus and … and this Isabella?’
Mama regards me for two seconds then emits a small lemon-scented sigh. ‘My dear girl, I have been ill with cancer for a long time. Longer than you think.’ She pauses, wheezes in a sharp breath. ‘I was at Cambridge University when MI5 were recruiting people, bright, intelligent people.’ She shrugs. ‘It wasn’t something I wanted to get involved with, but I made contacts. Valuable contacts. I knew about a trial Project they were developing after the atrocities of 1973 and Black September. It was just after that I began to get ill, after the cancer was diagnosed, and my contact at the Project told me about experimental cancer drugs they were developing. The drugs were a miracle, but weren’t licensed. Nothing else was working for me, so when they offered me the medicine, with conditions, I did what anyone would do: I took the chance. They were looking for Basque people for the programme and I had you, so it was a straight exchange.’
‘You gave them Maria,’ Ramon says, ‘to test on in exchange for medicine.’
I stand still. I cannot move.
‘My boy,’ Mama says, ‘I only did what anyone would do. The Project had not really had a child before entering the programme, so it really was a very exciting opportunity for everyone. And, the programme directors thought it best if the child was, day to day, brought up in a normal, natural environment. They suspected Maria could develop Asperger’s—Isabella was on the spectrum, dear—and so I kindly offered to keep Maria, house her in a normal developmental environment so they could put her on the programme and help her … achieve her potential.’
The shock is so much I can barely speak, ‘Did … did Papa know about this?’
‘Oh no. Alarico didn’t know.’
‘And what about Balthus and … Isabella?’
She pops in a breath. ‘Ah, no. He didn’t know. May have complicated things, what with him being engaged then married to a government official.’
Ramon shakes his head. ‘You selfish bitch.’
She waves a hand. ‘Don’t be so naïve, my dear. I had a career. I had a life. And the drugs worked. It is self-preservation. This is called life.’
‘And what about Maria’s life?’
‘My boy, I had cancer. I wanted to keep my life.’
I do not move, because now, in my mind, I can see him. Black Eyes. Dr Carr. His explanation of Project Callidus being called Cranes. Black September, the secret government files I discovered in Hamburg about the drugs—the cancer drugs. It all links now, explodes in my head like one big bang.
‘It was you,’ I say, almost to myself, barely recognising my own voice. ‘I saw the classified files about the cancer medicine. There were dates tracking back three whole decades, right into the 1970s, with cash amounts linked to each one. In 1979, the money amounts rose substantially, the cash wired to Madrid. The Project began when you gave me to them.’
‘The Project began, young lady, when Balthus and Isabella gave you up because they didn’t want you!’
‘1979?’ Ramon says. ‘M, that was the year before you were born. You took cash in exchange for looking after Maria?’
‘So they paid me to keep you. Sue me.’ She sits back, twirls a bony finger on the edge of the glass.
I force my eyes to rise up now, make myself look Mama in the eye. ‘Why are you telling me all this now?’
But she doesn’t reply.
‘Tell her!’ Ramon shouts.
Mama takes the glass, has one sip then lowers it. ‘When Maria was acquitted she then hid. No one could find her, which meant the Project could not get to her …’
‘And if they don’t have her, you don’t
get your drugs.’ Ramon shakes his head. ‘This is fucked up. You lied and got me to keep my own sister in a basement so you could get your medicine? You want to sacrifice Maria so you can be well enough to run to be the fucking Prime Minister of Spain.’
‘I want to sacrifice Maria so I can live!’ she yells. She stays still, glaring at Ramon, her blouse low on her shoulder from when she bolted up and flecks of spit in the corner of her mouth. She sits back, takes a breath and then smooths down her skirt and dabs her lips.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Ramon says now. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
I swallow, breathe hard, every part of me wanting to run now, desperately needing to rock and moan as the emotions force their way into me. Nothing I knew to be true now is. The family I thought I had does not exist, and without knowing where we are from, without having that foundation a solid family provides, how can we truly grow to be the people we were meant to be?
‘You … you knew why I was in prison,’ I say after a moment. ‘You knew, all along, that I didn’t murder the priest. You knew … you knew the Project set me up. You knew because you were working for them, letting them use me right from the start. You told Balthus about the ICE Room.’
‘Ah, yes. That was a mistake. Had been pumped too full of morphine that day. There was a time, you see, when I used to confide in Balthus about everything.’
‘Except the Project,’ Ramon says.
Mama remains still then, slowly, she tips her head. ‘The Project are doing great things, Maria. You are doing great things.’
‘No. No …’ Memories flood in, a torrent of them, rushing forward in quick succession. ‘You took me to the Project’s facilities,’ I say. ‘The flashbacks I had with you at my bedside while Dr Carr tested on me. Black Eyes …’ My voice trails off as the memories slash into me, one after another. My mother standing as Black Eyes cut into me to see if I could feel pain. ‘I was only a child,’ I say now. ‘I was only a child.’
‘Mama, how could you do all this?’ Ramon says, but she ignores him, her focus totally on me.
