Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  We are forced to double back to the ridge above the lake. He climbs, eyes down. I follow him, my boots sinking into soft ground. There is a blur of russet: a squirrel half-hops half-leaps past us. It spreads its arms and legs like a sail to catch the breeze. When it lands in a pile of smeared wet leaves, it sinks until nothing shows but the glossy red pelt along the spine.

  Sloped grey through the trees: the slate tiled roof of a hut, with a stone chimney set over stone walls and small windows with wooden frames.

  ‘Abandoned,’ says Pietr. ‘Because of the lake. We keep it stocked: blankets, old clothes, wood. Snowstorms come quickly sometimes. Hikers still get caught by them. ’

  The door has a big round black metal handle with a wolf’s head hanging over the keyhole.

  ‘To keep the wolves from the door?’ I say.

  Pietr turns down his mouth. ‘My mother’s logo, for the catalogue and the website. The marketing people say it helps sell the wines.’

  He moves past it. He doesn’t offer to show me inside.

  That night, like every night I stand on the balcony and stare at where the forest shadows were deepest, where the wild things were. Where Devlin could be standing. I feel the house sliding into blackness and I look out and wonder, If you can’t see me am I invisible?

  I sleep heavily for the first time since I arrived. I have barely climbed into bed when I am dragged down to a dark blue-green world. I swim along the sandy floor, ripples of light imprinted behind my eyes. Swimming is my abstraction, my salvation, I tell the other who is the only one who can ease my burden. Swimming is my desire, my occupation. My drug.

  I wake, climbing through black waves, past the lost wrecks of ships, past sailors’ drifting hearts, swimming in time to a regular but un-nameable sound. It is only in the morning that I place it: bells.

  FRIDAY

  I am waiting for Devlin. I swear I will only wait half an hour this time. My fur-lined parka hood is up but my head is still chilled; the bracelet is ice around my wrist.

  The house’s profile is unreadable in the cold air.

  A muttered curse. Devlin is behind me. He puts his back to the nearest tree. There are ice sheets on the trunk.

  ‘You’ll get wet,’ I say. Already his weight is making the sheets crack.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ He pulls out his flask, holding it awkwardly with his gloved hands.

  ‘If you’re going to be like that – ’ I turn away.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ His voice is peculiarly dead. Later, I understand it is the effort of holding in his temper.

  ‘Mitch is coming down,’ he says. ‘He’s in Paris now. Then he goes on to Rome.’

  ‘No wonder you’re drinking,’ I say half-joking, still not realising.

  ‘You’ve had two weeks. What have you got?’

  ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘I need information before I give you any.’

  ‘You’re a pimp, Devlin. You never do it because it’s the right thing.’

  I got to him. Not my words but my tone. The pause is too long before he says, ‘You’re not doing anything you don’t want to do.’

  ‘So you and Mitch are keeping your side of the bargain,’ I say. ‘You’re looking for my brother.’

  ‘I told you we were.’ He takes off his gloves, uncaps the flask, offers it to me.

  I shake my head. I want to ask him straight out but the hammer is back in my throat. But I am not crying. I never cry. Water never leaves me.

  He says, ‘Oh, right. Needles are your thing.’

  ‘I never used needles to inflict pain.’

  He curses under his breath. He is trying to put the cap back on but his hands must be cold. He can’t get the thread to catch. It is only now that I wonder whether he has already been drinking.

  ‘I’ve seen your scars, Devlin.’

  ‘Nothing happened that night,’ he says quickly. He grips the flask with both hands. I see past the defiance in his eyes to the worry behind. The uncertainty. He can’t remember, that’s the problem. For him. For us.

  ‘So why did you come to my room?’ I say.

  He waves a hand irritably. ‘Travel arrangements. Your passport. What the fuck difference does it make?’

  ‘You woke up in my bed.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove anything!’ he shouts. ‘You’re not getting me like that. You’re nothing more than the job.’

  ‘Disposable,’ I say. I raise my voice. ‘Unnecessary.’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘The enemy,’ I shout at him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone who doesn’t need to know anything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why did you tell me your real name?’

  When I come downstairs for lunch the dining room is deserted. I look around the empty lobby and peer into the alcove behind the staircase. The door is ajar. Inside are spiralling concrete steps descending beneath the neon lights which are set like Morse dashes in the low ceiling.

  I slip through the door, closing it behind me and go down. I think I hear voices and hold my breath. The neon light fizzes. I go down more slowly, one hand against the wall. I reach the bottom step. A door is set on each side of the landing. The door on the right is closed, a murmur inside.

  I open the left door. The light falls on all fours into a room which seems as long as the house. Rows of wine racks disappear into the gloom. I don’t switch the light on. Instead, I pull the door to, leaving a strip of light, enough to see the nearest wine bottles.

  The racks stand in six rows, shoulder height. I kneel and ease out the nearest dark brown bottle. It is coated in patches of something thicker than dust. I hold the label to the narrow oblong of light. Santa Margherita Lambrusco Di Sicilia. There is a year stamp: 1984.

  I am staring at the black grit smeared across the label when I hear a faint click. It seems to me the oblong is growing brighter. The other door has opened, is spilling more light into the room.

  Voices. Fragments of sentences. ‘. . . be notorious,’ someone says. A woman. ‘Notorious.’

  The words hang like lanterns lighting dark gardens. Lighting me. ‘No,’ Pietr says loudly, almost in the room. I feel as though the ground is shaking. But it is my heart shaking me.

  Silence falls. The light recedes. Minute black chips glitter on my finger. The smears where I had touched the bottle are clearly visible. I wipe the bottle over using the hem of my shirt and, squatting by the bottom shelf, take out the first bottle there and move it to the space left in the middle shelf. Then I put my cleaned bottle on the bottom rack. A shadow presses against the glass. Something heavier than wine is inside. I raise the bottle and study the base. A small square package rocks in the dark liquid. I look at the gap on the shelf. I put the bottle back.

  The landing is empty and so are the stairs. The door opposite is still closed. I step towards it, stretch out a hand. The door opens: a woman, head turned, is talking to someone behind her. I throw myself back into the cellar. She moves past me, saying, ‘Exactly what I expected.’

  Pietr comes out. He is looking at the map in his hand. Behind him is an office with computer screens on a desk, steel filing cabinets and what looks like a large microscope. He closes the door and they go up the stairs. In the silence, I count off two long minutes. Then I come out onto the landing and try the door. It is locked.

  I look up the curving stairs. Impossible to know whether anyone is waiting on the steps above. I creep up, keeping as close as I can to the wall. There is a roaring in my ears, like the sea turning over. I round the corner, too fast, anxious, stubbing my toe on the top step. I look down, knowing I will see a graze, a scuff mark there that would eat into the concrete. Some human stain. But there is nothing on the stone, nobody around the corner. The landing at the top of the stairs is empty. As I try to turn the handle, the lights go out.

  I press my ear against the door. I have the image of severed ears in sacks lying on the floor, like peach halves. Listening to me breathing as I press against
the ground. I hear the earth breathe. Somewhere the earth is saying, Enough.

  I am rigid against the wall. I remember Devlin saying to me as the police boat churned waves down the Grand Canal and the water turned a malevolent brown, ‘I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong I think you are for this.’

  If it wasn’t true then, I think, it soon will be.

  The door opens. Someone is coming in. I move down the steps. There is a murmur; the door begins to close. I run up, catch the door as it touches the jamb, count to ten and slip through.

  The staccato beat of rain on the silver shell is loud enough to cover the door closing behind me. I peer from the alcove. Pietr is crossing the lobby. When he turns to look, I am at the base of the stairs. He holds out his arm. ‘Come to lunch with us.’

  A woman stands at the head of the dining table, her back to the main window. She doesn’t look up as I come forward but lifts the cover of an earthenware dish.

  ‘Eggplant from Morocco – good,’ she says. Her English is buffeted by the rolling Italian cadences and some darker, guttural edge but she has obviously been well-taught.

  ‘Friends send it over,’ she explains, spooning slices into a shallow dish. ‘You try it.’

  She is a stocky grey-haired woman in her early seventies, small but expensively dressed in a black tailored pantsuit. She wears thick black eyeliner. The mist outside the window streams past her and makes her look as though she is trailing scarves of smoke. My father had always been non-committal about her, barely mentioned her. I had expected some backwoods peasant, a quavering pensioner, not this war-eyed woman.

  A piece of eggplant slips from the spoon. She says, ‘Ofanculu. Bastard thing’ and throws the eggplant on the floor. She comes around the table, still against the light, and says, ‘What do you think of my son’s folly?’

  ‘My mother,’ says Pietr. ‘Rosita.’

  ‘Rosza,’ she says. ‘I took the Polish after my husband.’

  She folds her arms, studies me. She wears only one ring on her hands, not on her wedding ring finger but on her little finger: a signet ring with a wolf’s head crest.

  ‘In Italy after the war, some women had shaven heads,’ she says. ‘They had it done to them. Did you deserve it too?’

  Pietr frowned. ‘Mother – ’

  She holds up her hand. ‘She can answer.’

  ‘Not without sounding rude,’ I say. ‘Or contrary.’

  ‘I like the contrary, yes,’ she says. She takes a flat cigarette case from her trouser pocket and lights a small square cigarette in dark paper. A pungent tobacco smell floats through the room. A cigarillo.

  I say, ‘I did it to annoy the man who brought me here.’

  Rosza exhales a dark plane of smoke which hangs like a veil in front of her face.

  I say to Pietr, ‘I don’t think Devlin is just some Embassy guy assigned to help the Americans on terrorism. I think he’s been investigating my father.’

  ‘To spy on us,’ says Rosza.

  ‘Not you,’ I say. ‘Me.’

  Rosza exhales another dark veil. I think her eyes dart down to the bracelet but when the smoke shifts, she is staring at me steadily. ‘So you led this Devlin to our house.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I had nowhere else to go.’

  She throws her cigarette on the floor and grinds it out with her foot. Then she rubs her hands briskly together.

  ‘What we thought,’ she says to Pietr.

  I say, ‘I am making . . . difficulties.’

  ‘People always called me difficult,’ says Rosza. ‘There’s nothing difficult about being straightforward.’ She raises her arms. I think she is going to strike me. Instead, she embraces me. ‘You must let us take care of you.’

  She smells of honey and jasmine.

  ‘Don’t give me any sympathy,’ I say. ‘I might cry.’

  She pats my back. She says, ‘I never had time for sympathy.’ She holds me by the shoulders. Her eyes are all black pupil. She says, ‘Don’t worry about those government pigs. Stay here and rest.’

  I nod, but as she moves away, I see Anna in the window’s reflection: Anna in the hospital with her pale face, the shadows under her eyes, the strands from her blanket twisting in the antiseptic air.

  Pietr pours a pale red wine into my glass. The bottle dips towards me and the wolf’s head crest gleams gold on the label.

  Rosza says, ‘From Santa Margherita. Our vineyard.’

  Pietr says, ‘Technically, we harvest on the other side of Trepani.’ He sits opposite me, unfolds his napkin. ‘Margherita is a wreck. But you can find it on the map. So, to impress the overseas buyers . . . ’

  The rain increases, as loud as hail. Rosza spits a pine nut into the bowl on her left.

  ‘My mother follows Sicilian customs at table,’ says Pietr. ‘Plain speaking. And plain eating.’ Eatingk.

  ‘You sound like your father when you say that,’ says Rosza.

  ‘I would hardly know, would I?’ says Pietr.

  Rosza makes a noise between a grunt and cough and watches me, unblinking, over her clasped hands. The water running down the glass softens the dead black of her eyes. In the rippled light, they seem dark grey.

  She nods at me. ‘You have good manners.’

  I say, ‘They were thrashed into us.’

  ‘Thrashings,’ says Rosza. ‘You had no love for your father.’

  ‘I was brought up to be dutiful,’ I say. ‘Sometimes when all that is expected of you is duty – ’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There is no room for love.’ She picks up her fork. ‘And children feel – ’

  ‘Everything,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. There is a spark of recognition in her eyes. ‘Pietr, we should have a party. A Christmas Eve gathering to introduce your friend. Just whoever has not run away from the weather.’

  ‘My mother likes you,’ says Pietr. ‘She only entertains for people she likes.’ He raises his glass. ‘We’ll have to invite your lover.’

  I have an image of Devlin lying on the bed. His breathing fills the room as I bend over him and unbutton his shirt and look down at what is on his body.

  ‘It was a joke,’ says Pietr. ‘But what a long silence. You had to think through all the names.’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rosza frown. ‘You’ll make her blush.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ says Pietr. ‘Mr Devlin called.’ The small deadly dislike coils through the formal address. ‘He has to prepare a report for his boss who will be arriving soon. He said he would call back.’

  After lunch, Rosza takes me into the living room for coffee. We sit on the long sofa while she knits and talks. I am tired – I think of Anna growing paler – and I slouch on the huge soft cushions and watch the light flash off the points of Rosza’s steel knitting needles. She says, ‘Pietr tells me you were a friend of Anna’s.’

  ‘We were at school together. And then on the nightclub scene. She dated my brother before he went away. Before she – got sick.’

  ‘So many of these girls,’ says Rosza, ‘are butterflies on lounges. All they want is excitement.’

  I think of Anna’s small sad face.

  ‘At first the clubs were fun,’ I say. ‘We knew everyone, we had plenty of money. But after a few years there was a nasty pushing quality to the dance floor. Girls getting drunk too easily, getting sick. Girls waking up in the back of crashed cars the next morning, clothing disarranged, far from home. It was predatory.’

  ‘Wolves,’ says Rosza. ‘Wolves are everywhere.’

  ‘The men got older,’ I say, ‘and the girls got younger.’ I remember the teenage girl in the bathroom. A cotton smock dress, plastic princess clips in her hair. Talking about her mother and six sisters and brothers in the country. Smelling of lavender talcum powder. I saw her on the dance floor only briefly after that. The bodyguard of one of the old men came and got her and she went to the back room with him and I never saw her again.

  ‘Anna should have known
better,’ says Rosza.

  ‘No-one knows,’ I say, ‘that they’ll have horse steroids slipped in their drink, and get raped, and become sterile.’

  ‘Well,’ says Rosza. She takes out one of her small dark cigarettes and lights it, blows a perfect smoke ring and watches it break up into small dark sails.

  She puts her head on one side. ‘You survived,’ she says.

  ‘I was always bloody-minded. And I had my poetry.’

  ‘Poetry . . . ’ She blows another smoke ring. ‘I never understood the value. My husband was obsessed with books. Living according to the good book. Carrying his book of scraps. Out of touch with the real world.’

  I run my hand over the silky pillow on my lap. It is threaded satin with tassels and brightly coloured embroidered birds: peacocks, parrots. An exotic flavour, African. I rub my finger against the shiny material. It comes away with the same black specks I had seen in the cellar.

  ‘Volcano ash,’ says Rosza. ‘No matter what you do, it creeps in. Like the mould on the glass. The salt under the doors. Fine black powder everywhere. Soot. It is like being back in the village.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were any active volcanoes left in Sicily.’

  ‘Don’t let the water fool you,’ says Rosza. ‘This is a dry island, an island of fire. No-one can tell when Etna will erupt. The maids think the soot flies around and around and settles on houses which are cursed.’ She snorts, smokes her cigarette. ‘These old ofanculu superstitions. Wearing fear like a medal pinned to the chest. Pinned so the rusted point goes in. Thank God I got away from it.’ She stubs out her cigarette. ‘My mother used to say that I was born with a map of calamity in my hand. As though it was my fault. For years I would turn my hand over, to see where the map was.’ She sits back, her black eyes glassy. ‘One day, she grabbed my wrist and bent it backwards and said, In there, you stupid girl, and drove her long wooden washing peg into my palm.’

  She lights another cigarette, her eyes hooded. ‘My father told me I would twist my own head off to get what I wanted,’ she says. ‘As though that was a bad thing. As though he hadn’t done exactly the same.’ She plants her feet on the Moroccan rug, pushes against the sofa. I feel the heavy frame slide. She is stronger than she looks. ‘Pietr tells me you didn’t stay when your father was arrested.’