by C. J. Skuse
As the day went on and the happier I became, the gloomier Caro got. Like she was absorbing the bad mood from me.
‘He was a turd as well,’ she huffed as the limousine circumnavigated the Columbus Monument twice so I could take pictures.
‘The guy who found America?’
‘He didn’t find America,’ she snipped, ‘America was already there, being lived in quite happily by millions of native people. He struck a lucrative deal with Spanish royalty so he could plunder any land his ship happened across and force the inhabitants into slavery. He was a selfish bastard. That should be called Monumento a un bastardo egoísta.’
We ambled through the winding streets of the Gothic quarter into an enormous covered food market called La Boqueria. We sat at a counter, and Caro did all the ordering in Spanish. We tried samples of everything on offer – dried and fresh fruits, jamon Iberico, olives, salted anchovies, fried sardines, baby squid, fish still fucking breathing they were so fresh (not such a turn on), oysters, cheeses, gelato, pintxos, hot sandwiches. You name it. When she was happily feeding her face, I saw my chance.
‘What was your son’s name? The one who died.’
‘Simon,’ she replied.
‘How did he get hooked on drugs?’
‘The usual. Moved to a city, mixed in with some bad apples, lost his job.’
‘Why did you two fall out?’
‘He’d only call for money. And when he stopped calling me, he’d call my eldest, Sarah. She soon washed her hands of him but I abandoned him first. I do that. Some therapist teased that out of me in the Seventies – someone gets too close, I abandon them before they can abandon me. I did it with each of my children. Comes from being adopted, apparently.’
‘You were adopted?’
‘My mother left me for a man who wasn’t my father. My own father couldn’t cope and put me up for adoption. This was in 1946, you understand, just after the war. He was old by then. His idea of a bedtime story was to tell me about his time as a PoW.’
‘Sorry.’
She flapped her hand. ‘Tish and pish, I’m not looking for sympathy. But it does explain why I left all five of my marriages early. And why I left Beatrice. I loved her more than anyone I’d ever met.’ Her head bowed. ‘But I couldn’t be sure I deserved her. So I left.’
‘But you said society wasn’t so accepting in the Fifties—’
‘—oh, bugger society. Society could fuck itself in the eye for all I cared,’ she snapped, wiping her hands roughly on a tissue. ‘If I’d wanted to stay with her, I would have. Irrespective of marriage. Irrespective of society. I’d have stayed. But I didn’t feel that I deserved her.’
‘I bet she felt differently.’
Caro laughed, a rueful laugh dampened with lemon juice. ‘It’s a vicious cycle. You don’t think you are worthy of love so you keep it at bay. But you still want it. I had a succession of flings after her – I treated all of them dreadfully for the simple fact none of them was Beatrice. I always called time on it before they had the chance to. After a while, you suffice yourself with being alone. You’ll never break your own heart.’
‘But Beatrice didn’t break your heart. You broke hers.’
‘I’m sure she got over it.’
‘I bet she didn’t. Is that why you live on the ship? So you don’t have to put down roots anywhere?’
‘Roots?’ she said. ‘Oh, I’ve never given them a chance to grow. Once you’ve been yanked out of one place, it’s difficult to thrive anywhere else.’
‘Great,’ I said, downing as much churro as I could get in my mouth in one go, and even then I coughed some out onto the table top.
‘That same therapist told me something which helped me reframe Simon’s loss. He said that when a woman grows a baby, she retains some of that child’s cells forever. Your baby has left some of her cells inside you where you can never lose them.’
Tears came thick and fast at hearing this.
She gripped my hand. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘No,’ I sniffed. ‘I like that.’
‘The point is that the bond will always be there. There will always be a part of her with you. Always. And nobody can take that away.’ She dried my cheeks with her silk-soft palms. ‘Come on – final stretch. Let’s see what that misogynistic old prick Picasso’s got to offer us, shall we?’
For the last part of the day, we walked around the white rooms of the Picasso Museum. Well, I walked, Caro insisted on using the chair so that we got priority in the queues and elevators. She was almost a more manipulative bitch than I was. No wonder I liked her so much.
I lost Caro on the way round, eventually finding her on a bench, staring at a painting – a 1897 oil on canvas called Science and Charity. Three figures around a dying man’s bedside – a nun carrying a child and a doctor checking the dying man’s pulse on a timepiece. The man’s face was yellow, eyes hollow. Like Dad’s when I last saw him.
‘The old legs are starting to pinch now,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
I followed her gaze to the painting. ‘You’re dying and you ask how I’m feeling after my coke-induced tantrum?’ I scoffed.
‘It was more than a tantrum, Hilary. You could have killed yourself.’
‘Yeah, well. Thanks for today.’
‘You’re welcome. I have a chiropodist’s appointment tomorrow.’
I frowned. ‘Is that important?’
‘It means I won’t be able to be with you in the morning. But you could come with me and have your feet done if you’d like.’
‘No thanks,’ I said, plaiting the mane on my unicorn keyring. ‘I’ll take my chances with the verrucas. Never been keen on having my feet felt.’
‘Come and find me at lunchtime. I’ll be free then.’
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be OK. I’ll join a macramé workshop or go pole dancing or something.’ She smiled. I looked towards the painting she was still staring at. ‘What’s the fascination with that one?’
‘I was just thinking. About things. About death. How it will be.’
‘If you want, I’ll do it for you.’
She turned to me, her milky green eyes flicking round my face. ‘What?’
‘I did it for my dad when he was in pain. If that’s what you want.’
Her mouth opened but no sound came out. She stared back at the painting, chewing on her bottom lip for a long time. ‘Your own father?’
‘Yeah. He was in hospital, having end-of-life care.’ She reached for my hand. ‘I wouldn’t if he hadn’t wanted me to. He was my hero.’
‘Oh, Hilary,’ she said. ‘That’s awful.’
‘No it’s not. I did it for him, not me. I didn’t want him to go.’
‘I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want that to be my only option.’
She was silent for minutes, staring at the painting. I was silent too. I rubbed at the little rainbow heart on the backside of my unicorn keyring. I thought about buying the matching pencil topper in the gift shop window.
‘I was in Croatia once, in a restaurant with my husband…’
‘Which husband?’
‘Number Two. And he was a number two as well. Anyway, we were watching this cat with three legs, climbing a wall. And it fell off, directly into a cactus. And it yowled and screamed and scurried away, covered in spines. I went outside to see if I could help it. But by the time I got there, it had run directly into the path of a speeding car. I saw it on the road. And I stood watching this cat twitching for the longest time before it died.’
‘Well, this is cheering me up no end.’
‘It made me think – where there’s life, there’s hope. Being alive is enough. We strive for perfect – perfect children, good career, finding The One. But the most important thing is, fundamentally, we’re here, we’re breathing.’
We both looked back at the painting. ‘Until we’re not.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to see Beatrice a
gain though, before you die?’
‘No.’
‘But what if she still loves you?’
‘She doesn’t.’
‘She does.’
‘She doesn’t…’ she snipped, eyeballing me. ‘Why do you keep arguing?’
‘Because she told me,’ I said.
Tuesday, 8 January – Marseille
Snooty assistant in the ship shop who’d played the role one too many times and now her face was stuck like that
Room steward Amanda who always seems to be outside my cabin door ready to clean. The most ubiquitous woman since the Fiji Water Girl
Meghan Markle’s sister
Man on the harbourside who threw a plastic bottle into the ocean
People who have no personalities outside of their relationships with their spouses – e.g. Bardot and Gareth. Also…
People who name themselves glamorous names like Bardot but don’t live up to them
I’d found Beatrice on the morning of the Mallorca trip while I was googling sex offenders. In between waiting for pages to load and checking my niece Mabli’s latest vlog about her new micro pig and finding Twitter posts about paedophiles I knew would trigger me – I do that sometimes – I’d absent-mindedly put the words ‘Beatrice’ and ‘Capri’ into the search bar.
Caro had mentioned Beatrice’s maiden name was Genovesi so I started there. There was a jewellery store on Capri called Genovesi which had changed hands in the Seventies but the owners had kept the name. Beatrice’s father had sculpted cameo jewellery and though he was long dead, I followed that line of inquiry and Google Translated a message to the current owners asking for any information. They got back to me later that afternoon.
Beatrice and her husband Rocco had sold the store in the Seventies and moved to the outskirts of Rome. Taissa had told me their married name was Pelagatti – a thankfully rare surname – and that was where her knowledge went cold. I widened my search for Pelagattis in or near Rome and sent several people with the surname the same message.
I’d all but forgotten about it, until the morning we docked in Barcelona and a notification pinged through on the cracked iPhone. My heart skipped a beat, thinking it was from Dannielle Fairly, but it was a guy called Enzo Pelagatti. He’d contacted me in English, saying he was a student in Rome and that his grandmother had been called Beatrice Genovesi in the Fifties. He’d spoken to her and she remembered Caro and would love to see her again.
His actual words were: ‘Beatrice vuole vedere il suo amato Caro più di ogni altra cosa al mondo.’ Or rather, ‘Beatrice wants to see her beloved Caro more than anything in the world.’
So I set up a meeting for when the ship docked in Rome. A little knowledge and a search engine goes a long way these days so it was piss-easy all in all, but Caro was acting like I’d scaled Everest and found Beatrice resting on the south-east ridge. All the way back to the ship she cried.
‘I can’t believe you found her. I can’t believe I will see her again. You are a wonderful person, Hilary, truly wonderful.’
‘It was nothing,’ I beamed, my head swimming with goldfish.
‘No, this is everything. This is unbelievable.’ But as the car journey went on, she grew quieter, more thoughtful. She stared more out of the window and picked at fingers. ‘She’ll be old,’ she said, more quietly than she had been talking. ‘I only remember Beatrice being young.’
‘Well, I hate to state the obvious but—’
‘I know I’m old too,’ she snipped, ‘but in my head, she’s twenty-five.’
‘My beloved Caro, she said,’ I reminded her. And she smiled like I hadn’t seen her do before – all broad and unashamed.
Her face lost about twenty years in that car ride. There were signs of the younger woman beneath. And weirdly, it made me happier. Not molten happiness, no orgasmic happiness, just happiness. Contentment that I had done something good for someone who’d shown goodness to me. And that lasted for the rest of the day.
Sad, innit? Even serial killers need cuddles.
Talking of which, by this point I was all over the news at home:
FARM SHOP KILLER’S AXE FRENZY: WHAT WE KNOW
FARM SHOP KILLER IS CELEBRITY CHILD HERO: Rhiannon Lewis was sole survivor of Priory Gardens Massacre
FARM SHOP KILLER MAY HAVE KILLED BABY TOO: Killer was eight months pregnant before murder
HOW DID THE DEADLY DUO GET AWAY WITH IT FOR SO LONG?
Flicking through the news channels got me all angry again. Nothing was momentous enough, nothing was loud enough. On all the channels I was the third or fourth news item down. No biggy, just some little isolated murder in some little town no one had ever heard of. The main news was all Brexit chaos, Donald Trump’s latest Twitter faux pas, the Tenerife plane crash and which Brits had won big at the Golden Globes. And why were they calling us a deadly duo? Like Craig was Clyde Barrow and I was his infatuated, simpering little Bonnie, still on the run. Why was he still the Charles Manson figure and I merely his brainwashed hippie acolyte? Fucking cheek.
One paper said he was on suicide watch.
God, it all felt like such a waste of time and effort. And where was my confession? I’d posted it on Christmas Eve – even with the holidays it should have reached you by now. Yet still nothing. I was still an also-ran in the contest for Most Evil Female in History, behind Rose and Myra.
No man had done my dirty work though – I’d done it all by myself. And what thanks did I get? No sodding thanks whatsoev.
There was still nothing from Dannielle Fairly either and my insides churned and bubbled and spat like a vat of acid. My good deed and all my good feelings of finding Beatrice floated away on the steam from the ship’s funnels as we pulled out of port at Barcelona, headed for Marseille.
By the next morning, El Fuckboy had made the news too. His picture popped up on the Daily Mail website.
MISSING BRIT WHO VANISHED DURING ALICANTE STAG PARTY WITH FRIENDS, MAY HAVE ‘COME TO HARM’, SAY POLICE
A British man who travelled to Spain for a week-long stag party with his friends ‘may have come to harm’ detectives have said last night.
Liam Challoner, 25 from Chepstow, travelled to Alicante on 3 January for the short break. Gwent Police Major Crime Team are working with Spanish authorities to investigate the circumstances of his disappearance.
‘Liam’s family is understandably concerned about his disappearance,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd Williams. ‘Going this long without contacting family or friends is out of character and Liam’s phone has been off since 4 January. The family are being supported by family liaison officers and are being kept informed.’
‘We would like to hear from anyone who has seen him, or has any information about his whereabouts in Spain or any other location since Friday, 4 January.’
Challoner was reportedly staying at the Hotel Estrella in San Gabriel with twelve friends, after arriving on 3 January for a seven-day holiday to celebrate his friend Jack’s forthcoming wedding.
Liam is white, 5ft 9in, of medium build and with short brown hair. He has distinctive tattoos on both his calves (see pic) and was last seen wearing a white T-shirt, long red shorts and white trainers.
Anyone with information is advised to call this special police hotline…
It was a matter of time before police made the connection – the killer who absconded from the UK at Southampton, jumped on a ship bound for the Mediterranean, killed this guy in Cartagena, then another on Mallorca. But it was taking so long. I’d never been the most patient pea in the pod but coupled with the uncertainty of my situation and my endless heartache for Ivy, it was maddening.
The last thing I needed that day was lunch with The Gammonati. Unfortunately, Jayde played the emotional fiddle on my doorstep first thing and Hilary, being Hilary, could hardly refuse.
‘Will you join us? You can bring Bruce along, we’d love to meet him.’
It dawned on me that I’d told them all ‘Bruce’ would be joining me in Ba
rcelona – now that time had passed. I had to come up with Bruce.
‘He’s a bit crook. Touch of sea-sickness. Or too much grog yesterday. Better count him out.’
‘Oh, OK. Well, me and the kids could use some sanity around that table – otherwise it’ll be all racist jokes and judgement on my mothering skills. And that’s just from my in-laws! Save me, Hilary. Please!’
Caro had informed me she was booked up all morning having chiropody and blood pressure checks so I had absolutely no excuses lined up and I needed to keep up my act.
‘Sure, no probs. I’ll meet you in the tea lounge this arvo, no wuckas.’
It was the usual suspects around the circular table – the distended old bollocks Eddie and Dennis were puce with gammony hysterics about some joke the comedian had told at last night’s cabaret. Lynette, Gloria, Ken and newcomers Gareth and Bardot offered trite chat and nods in all the right places.
‘Here’s another one for you,’ said Dennis, wiping his eyes and opening up last night’s folded menu on the back of which he’d scrawled a couple of the ‘best’ jokes. ‘How are women and fried chicken the same? Take away the legs and the breasts and you’re left with a greasy box to put your bone in.’
Eddie joined in. ‘What’s the difference between a clit and a cell phone? Nothing because every cunt has got one!’
Jayde covered Ty’s ears as Eddie’s voice carried over louder than everyone else’s. She didn’t say anything and so neither could I. I found myself bubbling with rage like at work when I’d overhear Linus taking credit for my suggestions. I wanted to march over to Eddie, cut out his tongue and wedge it between his wife’s vegan baps.
Shona was no less irritating. Quite apart from the fact that she looked like Momo, we had to endure her diatribes about how ‘we could all do more to reduce waste’. I fixed my stare on the saggy belly under her shift dress which had birthed five whole-assed kids before diverting my attention to alcohol to stem the need to hand the surly faced Moomin her own arse.
