by Liz Nugent
I spoke rapid French. ‘My ex-husband. Get rid of him, please. I’ll explain later. Don’t hurt him, he’s not worth it.’ I threw the rucksack and Christian caught it in his other hand.
As he started to drag Harry out the door, Harry started to scream all the foul words he could think of at me, words that needed no translation.
Later, I heard that Christian, who believed that my ex-husband was the one responsible for my facial deformity, enlisted the help of the Corsicans. They gave Harry a severe beating and dumped him at the airport. I don’t know if they broke bones or stabbed him, but he must have got on a plane. Christian wanted me to be grateful. It made him feel like a man, but in my eyes he became pathetic. He did not have the courage to take on Harry alone.
A month later, I received a letter from Ireland, unsigned. But I knew the handwriting. Inside, in a giant loose scrawl, was written FUCK YOU. That was the end of Ireland and me, or so I thought.
Peter
My brother was six years younger than me, so we weren’t exactly close growing up. We didn’t look alike, nor did we have anything in common, but up until 1983 we got along fine. He was only out of school a year or two, but he was broader than me, active in the GAA Club, better-looking, and he could sing and play the piano. I was interested in science and studying. I was weedy. A girl once called me a chinless wonder. I never had many girlfriends. I should have been jealous of Harry, but until that Christmas I thought of him as my slightly annoying but amusing kid brother and nothing more.
Having had my head turned by living in the UK for a few years, I found my home town small and provincial; I had little patience for small-minded politics and local gossip. I was a snob about Westport. It all seemed so insignificant when compared to London with its splendour and size. I came home at Christmas time and occasionally during the summer, out of duty, to oblige my parents and help out in high season at Carrowbeg Manor. Harry had been seeing Delia for over a year before I met her.
I was shocked when I saw her. Nobody in Westport looked like this. She was beautiful from head to toe and her eyes were startlingly blue. There was something rough and simple and exotic about her, but also something magical. I caught her eye that night, and the way she looked at me, it was like she knew every single thing about me. I’m a person who deals with numbers and facts, but this quality she had was so weird and unnerving. I tried to hide how much she fascinated me that first night, but afterwards I asked Mum about her.
‘Not you as well,’ she said. ‘Your brother is completely smitten. He’d walk over hot coals for her.’ I denied any interest in her, but mum shook her head. ‘Just as well you live in London.’
Back in London after Christmas, I thought about her often. She was going to be a doctor. I guessed that she wouldn’t stay in Westport after she qualified. Harry was going to lose her. A girl like that belonged in a big city.
When summer came around, I looked forward to going home just to see her, to be around her. It would never have occurred to me to try and seduce her, but that day in the hotel room when I went to deliver her results, she was so angry. She attacked me and then we kissed. The kiss was mutual, and so was what followed.
I didn’t see why I should say no to the marriage. It was my baby she was carrying, and I loved her. I was sorry for Harry, but she chose me. I thought Harry would move on, meet somebody else. We lived in separate countries, so it’s not as if he had to be confronted with us every day.
She came to London and turned my life upside down. I was so proud when my friends met her and slapped me on the back like I’d won an enormous prize. I thought I had. She made friends and we went out to bars and restaurants. She absorbed London life like a chameleon, immediately adopting the accent and attitude of her new friends. I thought it odd, but I was encouraged by how much of an effort she was making to fit in. I thought she was doing it for me.
I hid the letters that came to our home addressed to her in Harry’s writing. I didn’t read them, because I guessed what they would say, but they never stopped coming, even after James was born. I told Chiara to get rid of them too.
I never stopped trying to make Delia happy. I gave her everything she asked for, but I couldn’t move to the seaside and she always resented that. I encouraged her to study for A levels and I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stick with it – after all, she was so disappointed at not getting into medicine. But I realize now that Delia was never academically smart. She was clever and lived on her wits. Clever enough to fool me. I began to question her partying and her drinking but then she would withdraw from me, so I learned to let her do as she pleased. She was faithful to me. Dad said she’d cheat on me the first chance she got, but he was wrong. Daniel told me she had no interest in other men when they went out. I convinced myself that she must feel something for me because, God knows, I had some stiff competition in London, and she did not stray. The passion of our first wild sexual encounter was never repeated, and I always thought that sex was something she saw as a function of marriage. I never forced her, but I felt she was never fully present. On that holiday in France, I got a glimpse of the excited young girl she should have been, glistening with seawater and, maybe, truly happy.
I could handle her emotional disconnection from me, because she returned my affection and did not run away, but I can’t get my head around why she couldn’t love our son. An innocent baby. I’d heard about baby blues, but with Delia they never went away. I don’t think she ever thought about the consequences of her pregnancy or about the responsibility of raising a child. But she was only eighteen when she had James. Maybe she just wasn’t ready to become a mum yet. She never adapted to motherhood and I don’t think she tried.
Chiara took over and Delia let her, and I turned a blind eye because James was safe and cared for, and because I was so damn busy trying to keep our heads above water. We were living on credit.
I knew it was wrong and I knew it was foolish, but I really believed that one good deal would solve our problems. I talked to the wrong people and took a ridiculous risk and I lost everything. That was bad enough, but all the money Dad had invested went too. I bankrupted all of us. I was worried sick about everything, but I was most worried that Delia would leave me. When she didn’t walk away, I convinced myself that she did love me, even though our sex life died then. She complained a little, but she was surprisingly stoic when we had to move to a tiny damp flat with no garden. In the beginning she hated it, and became more distant, but then we both got jobs and James settled into his new school and I thought things were improving.
She almost killed him. In some ways, she might as well have. Poor James has endured so much pain and isolation. I divorced her and she went without a backward glance. She has never once written to enquire about her son. Apparently she doesn’t care if he is alive or dead. She almost certainly doesn’t care about me, beyond how I support her financially.
I never knew her. I married a stranger.
It hurts that I’ve had to send my boy back to Westport to my parents while I try to make a living here and learn as much as I can about computer design. The long-term goal is to move back home and raise my son there. I think Westport will absorb a boy with James’s difficulties more easily. Without a mother, he needs family and community around him and I’m simply not enough on my own. Mum has been fantastic, despite all the trouble I have caused the family. I chat to James every week on the phone and get home as often as I can to see him.
Harry keeps his distance when I’m home, but I’m surprised to hear from Mum that he’s taken such an interest in James. I’m not sure now if that’s a good thing or not. Mum said Harry disappeared for a few days last week and then turned up completely battered and bruised and wouldn’t speak about where he’d been. I’d like to make amends with my brother, but I fear that it is too late. Perhaps things can be different when I move home for good.
25
Towards the end of 1993, shortly after Harry’s visit, I moved into Christian’s flat.
He wanted to keep me safe, he said. It was substantially bigger than mine, one whole floor of a building whose bedroom overlooked the sea. I was able to drink in the sea with my morning coffee. Christian proposed marriage. I claimed that as a Catholic who had already been divorced in defiance of the Church’s laws, I could not countenance ever marrying again. Raoul, at least, was relieved.
Now that the scars had healed over, I risked sea swimming again. I still wore high-factor sun protection, even at night. I could not risk those wounds reopening.
Some wounds, however, would not stay closed. A month after Harry’s visit, just before I moved in with Christian, I received a letter from Moira.
I met Harry Russell in the street today. He is not in good shape. He told me in confidence that he went to visit you. What kind of people are you associating with, Delia? This will not end well for you. If you lie down with dogs, you will wake up with fleas.
I can never forgive you or condone the way you treated your own child, but I would like to know that you are all right, so please let me know, one way or another. I tried to be a mother to you, even if you didn’t see it like that. You know where I am.
I binned such letters. I saw no point in keeping up contact with Moira or hearing the local gossip from Westport. I was never going to see any of them again. Why should I care? She wrote once every six months for about three years before she gave up, or perhaps she died. I never knew.
Christian fell in love with me, and I played my new role well. When the Corsicans came over to the apartment, I would fix them drinks, smoke their cigarettes, let them pat me on the bottom, smile when they made comments about my face, join in with their crude jokes. But I could not love Christian back, and it drove him insane. Like Peter, he did everything possible to win my love, but he got my company and he should have been satisfied with that. He paid for everything: the rent, my clothing and our bills. I worked in the shop only when I wanted to. In the beginning, he didn’t mind at all.
Peter’s maintenance payments continued, increasing periodically in line with inflation. The terms and conditions stated that they would cease if I remarried. I had no intention of ever giving up that measure of independence that Peter had given me. I saved up the maintenance payments for the operation that was going to fix my face. I had watched and waited and followed the money of the drug deals, but the risk was too high. If I was caught taking any, they would have no hesitation in killing me, so instead I saved my secret money.
In November 1994, a new drug distributor from Antibes started doing business with the Corsicans. There were some fights. People further down the food chain got stabbed and tortured. Christian’s and Raoul’s interests were curtailed heavily and it looked like their little empire was shrinking. Christian said they were lucky now to have any part of the pie. Raoul was worried about the restaurant. It did well in high season and paid for itself, but he worried the tax authorities might become suspicious if his income dropped in half. How would he explain it? He was forced to sell his beloved Ferrari. I hadn’t thought that any of this would directly affect me, but years previously I had told Raoul about my maintenance payments from Peter and one day Christian confronted me with the fact of this secret money.
‘It is mine,’ I said.
‘But you make no contribution to this home.’
I turned the bad side of my face towards him and told him honestly that I was saving to have an operation that would fix the scarring.
‘But you don’t need this operation! I love you already.’
I lost my temper with him. ‘I’m not doing it for you! Do you think I care what you think?’
‘We need that money – we will lose this apartment. You want to be on the streets? We need it.’
‘It is mine.’
‘How can you be so selfish? I have done everything for you and all you care about is yourself. I love you!’
I shouldn’t have done it, but I felt threatened. I imitated his lisp and parroted back what he had said to me. ‘I love you!’ It was the only time I had ever said the words. It was cruel of me and I knew it.
That was the first time he hit me. A red punch across the good side of my face. I remembered my father hitting my mother in the same way, and the way my brothers would scatter. Mammy would glare at me as if to say, Look what your precious father has done, and I would ignore her. When Christian hit me, I felt exhilarated. I know that I should have left him then, but part of me felt that I earned that punch. It was long overdue.
I stayed at home until the bruise on my face had disappeared, and for months afterwards Christian tried to make it up to me, crying and apologizing. In January, Raoul came to see me and informed me coldly that I must hand over my bank card and its pin number to Christian. Christian cleared out the almost thousand pounds I had managed to save in the year I had been living with him. It was rent he owed, he said, and then: ‘Your name on the card is Delia, not Cordelia?’
‘So what?’ I said. ‘It’s the same name, just a different version.’
Christian shrugged. He had always accepted the story that I was an English girl, down on my luck, victim of a violent, drunken, embezzling husband. But he was suspicious.
A few nights later, I came home from my walk along the promenade to find Christian holding my passport. My Irish passport, which he had found in a bag of summer clothes I kept at the bottom of the wardrobe. He had torn the place apart looking for it.
‘You are Irish. Why have you never told me this?’
‘It doesn’t matter what the passport says,’ I said brazenly. ‘I might have been born there, but I grew up in England.’
He began to quiz me about my parentage, my upbringing, and when I stumbled over facts and the names of schools, the towns I had lived in, he grew livid.
He hit me again that night, not as hard as the first time, but he was furious that I was keeping secrets from him.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ I screamed at him. ‘None of it matters!’
‘This husband you had. You always say his name was Peter, but the man who came to the house, his passport said Henry Russell. Which is your husband? Tell me!’
I slammed the bedroom door on him.
‘I tell you everything!’ he roared. This might have been true, but I didn’t often listen to him. Once you’ve heard the sob story of living in the slums of Paris with his single mother and two brothers, you tend to switch off. He had no idea what real poverty was.
The drama of our relationship – the flare-ups, the tears and recriminations – was energizing. Christian pointed this out one day. ‘You are like a robot! The only time you come alive is when we fight. Is that what you want? Is that what you like?’ and he grabbed me by the hair. I learned to fight back and I learned to fight dirty. Christian often carried bruises too. Sometimes, if I felt bored, I would provoke the argument, by belittling him in some way. He had a short fuse, but after that first time he learned not to target my face, not until the very end.
By autumn 1998, Christian and I were still together, but just barely. He loved me without liking me, and I could scarcely tolerate him. He was, by then, a ‘businessman’, with a new shop near the Cours Saleya from where he sold carpets ostensibly but mostly stolen goods: electronics, phone cards, knock-off designer goods, or whatever came through from Paris or Marseilles. It was a step down from the drug dealing and not at all as lucrative. His criminality was even more petty. I did not like his new associates, who had replaced the Corsicans. Christian complained that I thought myself too good for them. He was right. When Daddy had told me I was special, I am sure he hadn’t imagined this grubby life for me. Christian and his friends and his whole shady world were beneath me, and I told him so. Still, when his new friends were around, I stayed in the shadows and ignored their catcalls and their lewd suggestions that Christian might ‘share’ me. I sat in the apartment in the evenings, watching the sea through the narrow gap between the buildings opposite, watching it turn from the purest turquoise to the darkest ink, while
Christian stayed out, playing poker and drinking beer.
My role as the gangster’s moll had seemed exciting when we had first got together, but those old films never showed the violence or the tension, just the nightclubs, the jazz, the cocktails and the cash. Christian adored me, I knew it, but not enough to keep his fists to himself when I threw insults his way. I stopped provoking him, but the attacks still came.
In ancient times, MacDermod the weaver was famous throughout the length and breadth of the country for the fine garments he could produce from even the roughest wool. But MacDermod had a scold for a wife. She was possessed of the longest red hair that swung down to her ankles, and it was her pride and joy. She would sit outside her cottage on a stool, combing it through with hard fish bones, to be admired by the passing islanders. But she was lazy, it was said, and if her children ran wild and hungry like stray dogs, and brought trouble to the harbour, where they’d be hopping boats and pegging stones at fishermen, she would blame her husband and roar at him in the street, bringing shame upon the man.
MacDermod could not help but love her, despite all her nagging, but the neighbours got fed up of it and one day they held her down and hacked her hair off with knives. Then they ordered MacDermod to weave a sheet from her hair that would sit on the harbour wall, as a warning to all the wives. Daddy always said that the red fronds that covered the wall were the woven hair of MacDermod’s wife, but I was old enough to know it was seaweed.
MacDermod and his wife and children rarely ventured outside their cottage after that day, except to collect necessary items for their household. They spoke little, and kept their heads down when at the market.
The wife’s hair grew back faster than anyone had imagined possible. When one year had passed, her flame-coloured mane reached her knees and she began to look up again, to hold her head straight and look the world in the eye. But the islanders did not like her arrogance and it was said that the nagging had begun once more, that children passing could hear it through the thick walls of the cottage.
