Notorious (43 page)

It is soothing now to sit staring through the window. People drift in and out, scrutinising me. Just like Anna, I hear someone say, and it seems to me that Pietr wears the same white look of shock for the rest of the day.

Later, an explosion of rage drifts down to me. I get out of bed carefully, my legs shaking. Pietr is arguing with Stefano, shouting on the walkway above my room. I have never seen him so angry. They go into the glass tower. The door is shut, the anger cut off.

Lying in my bed, I can’t see the deserted ruins of Santa Margherita but I can imagine them: the broken buildings, the lonely graveyard. The planes landing at night, the wolves running up the hill.

It rains in fits and starts; the ashen sky shudders in the cold breeze. When I stand on the back terrace looking for Devlin, I smell smoke. Maybe it is fire caught in the broken stones on the jagged hill across the plain.

I wait for Devlin, but he doesn’t come. There is no letter, no phone call. No message smuggled in. I am permanently cold, walking doesn’t seem to help. I want to go to the hut but I am too afraid that the surveillance equipment is still there. I try to read poetry but the words are remote. They give me no consolation. Images of Devlin distract me, make me more nauseous. I say to myself, No coward soul is mine. I am still cold. Still afraid. I sleep a lot. I presume it is a result of the withdrawal. I am sluggish, disconnected. I tell myself that I don’t mind that Devlin has gone, I don’t miss him.

I wake one day to find a book wrapped in tissue paper on my bed. The pages are tied together with ribbon threaded through holes punched along the edges of two thin cracked sheets of wood; the wood has been painted red, roughly. It is the book that Pietr always talked about showing me but never did. Pages were missing. He said he didn’t have the author’s name. He had only flicked through it himself, he said.

I had been distracted, consumed by Devlin then. Now, I have time to study the black writing covering the yellowing pages. The writer is a Frenchman, a traveller, a writer. A poet. Heat runs through me; I forget my nausea.

There are maps, drawings of a burnt landscape, fragments of poems, diary entries. It is exactly what one would imagine an old, well-travelled diary would look like. There is no signature, only vague references to a provincial home, a farmyard. But when I see the name Verlaine, I immediately think I know the author. I tell myself that is wishful thinking. But I don’t let the book out of my grasp. I sleep with it under my pillow.

I am in the back sitting room, reading Pietr’s book. I have hidden it inside the cover of a bulky leather-bound edition of nineteenth-century love poems. Rosza sees the leather cover when she brings me my milk and gives it a disparaging look.

I study the maps. All are of Africa. This is a time spent in Morocco, at an old monastery which seems once to have been a fortress called Abu N’af. My French is rusty. I am painfully translating the diary segments. The poet seems to be in discussion with a slave trader. A Polish aristocrat. My translation could be wrong yet I can’t bring myself to ask Pietr for a dictionary. I study the poet’s drawings of the landscape, the waves of the desert, the plain beneath the monastery running across to a squat hill. The relation of the hill to the plain reminds me of something. It takes me days of reading to realise how similar it looks to Santa Margherita.

In the mornings, Pietr comes and sits with me. We don’t talk about the present much. We talk about Anna. He says, ‘She was a radiant little girl. But then all children are, before they inhale the rest of the world.’

He says, ‘She was the best thing in my life.’

He brings me books on art and architecture, the international newspapers; an Aboriginal painting has sold for a million dollars.

There is a picture in the paper and he downloads another from the internet. The print-out’s tiny dot matrix can’t disguise the glowing colours, the light shifting and lapping within each stroke. Even the smallest strokes hold sunlight.

‘You’re homesick,’ says Pietr.

I swallow a wave of nausea. I am always sicker in the mornings. I refuse to consider what that means. I refuse to count back to Venice, to Devlin putting me up against the wall, running his hands over my body.

A bolt of warmth goes through me. But then the weight of absence comes back, like anti-blood, like poison. A tear, just one, runs out of my left eye and down my cheek. I think of Anna in the hospital. Pietr holds my hand and gives me a handkerchief.

SATURDAY

I
am standing among the black trees below the back terrace of the glass house. The light from the candle in my unsteady hands turns the trees into crooked fingers. The early evening sky is purple, the low moon reflects off the strange new metal on my hand.

The house gleams, lit from within, a mindless diamond. Pietr’s tower, usually dark at night, climbs into the sky like a glowing needle. Below is a vast black gulf; even the snow’s light is swallowed, sucked across the plain into the ruins of Santa Margherita.

Childe Rolande to the dark tower came, I think to myself. I want the dark tower to come to me, I want to be swallowed. Night is a substance as water is a substance. Now that Devlin has gone, I want to drown in night.

The thought of him reminds me. I put the candle down, wedging it carefully into the snow next to my bare feet. A red web of dripped wax coats my wrist.

I move out from the well of shade. The moon’s warm rays play over my face, falling into the two small bands of metal on my left hand. I try not to think of them as miniature electronic bracelets.

The night trees are glazed with stars, the night winds are talking to each other. I hold up my hands: a cold breeze travels over my fingers, under my nails. I can remake the wind, the stars, the trees, the water. I can build it.

I am having a conversation with Devlin. He is there, all around me, a substance like night is a substance, water is a substance. Like black smoke.

Let me tell you what I’ve been doing since you went away
, I say to him.
I’ve been reading poems about blighted love. Revenge
, I say.
Poison.

If you want to say something, say it
, he says.
Don’t use poems to frill
it up
.

Do you know
, I say,
that if you are poisoned by cyanide they find
crystals in your heart?

As usual, he looks at me as though I am mad.

The house seems to be growing, it is swelling with light, yet I know it cannot penetrate the forest. Only moonlight can do that. Pain prickles my skin. I feel pressure on my throat. I swing around but there is no-one there.

Water is the only substance that is renewed after use
, I say to Devlin.
Water falls and vanishes and rises again. Tears flow backwards. Venice
will rise again.

Trust you
, says Devlin,
to fall in love with a drowned city.

Not fall in love with
, I say.
In love there
.

Ghosts slip through the shadows towards me – there is a smell of smoke, of burnt winds. Ghosts are growing out of the black lake below. I imagine them breaking through the crust of ice, destroying the ripples of light patterning the silver surface, crawling onto the black bank, wearily climbing through the snow, the dead leaves, passing beneath the down-turned branches. They go around the hut, they never look back. They don’t want to meet me but the wind will blow them here. It is inevitable.

No coward soul is mine
, I whisper to myself, furiously. But the pressure on my throat increases. Maybe poetry can’t save you, I think. Maybe all it does is make the awfulness slightly less awful. It can’t truly console – it never did.

Pain prickles my skin again. Small dark shadows slip from branch to branch. I stretch out my arms. If I can become a shadow, if I can merge with the forest, I can erase myself. But nothing happens. The moonlight picks out the small black absences on my arms, the shackles on my finger.

I try to remember that morning but all I see are fragments of paper burning, words curling into trembling purple, calligraphy in flames spelling out some message I can’t read. Writers and artists turned to ashes. Maybe I already knew what a terrible mistake I had made – out of anger, out of sickness. But for now, when I try to visualise the small church and the upstairs room with the buckled wooden floorboards and Pietr and the man in the black robe, all I see are books going up in flames.

I let my parka fall to the ground, pull off the silk jacket. The moon edges my arm in silver.

The candle goes out but the light from the glass house is bright enough to see by.

A black shape glides through the trees – not a man, not a wolf – something fluid like the mist across a toxic lagoon. A shape-shifter. I want to run but I am stiffening. I am turning to marble in the moonlight, into salt; the first stage of returning to the sea.

No coward soul is mine
, I say to myself, thinking of Emily Brontë so bravely facing the death all around her.
No trembler in the world’s
storm-troubled sphere.

The black shape surrounds me. The trees are engulfed by it as one of the unstoppable floods of the world is hurled at me: Noah’s flood, the flooding of the Three Gorges Dam, the tsunamis. All the floods to come. It is arcing over me. I feel droplets of water on my cheek. I throw my head back and lift my arms.

Ice cracks and crunches. Pietr comes into the clearing, slipping on the snow despite his boots because he is walking fast. He picks up the silk jacket and parka, wraps them around me, kneels to put my shoes back on. I miss Devlin’s shouts of rage. I want Pietr to say,
What the fuck are you doing?
the way Devlin would.

When Pietr holds me tight against him, I realise there is nothing there for me. He is like my brother, my uncle. A friend. There’s no spark of insanity, nothing to make the giving up of self worthwhile.

He pulls my parka hood over my head. ‘Winter was a bad time to cut your hair.’

‘It was the kind of thing me and Anna would do. In our punk stage.’

His arms tighten around me. ‘I couldn’t bear it. Another Anna.’

‘I’m not using,’ I say. ‘I don’t know why I am like this.’

‘Tell me what you need. I’ll get it for you.’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t want to feel. That’s what I need.’

‘I’ll get you Devlin.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s poison.’

I gaze at the house swaying with light. ‘I’m dreading the party.’

He says, ‘They need to see you are with us.’

I nod, swallow the tightness in my throat, my stomach.

Noise swells in the background: the sound of cars travelling up the hill, doors slamming. Stars swarm. I try to watch them over his shoulder. The stars collect above the house and shoot up in two thin beams criss-crossing the sky. The beams go up into the heavens, gradually fading in the outer dark.

‘Moonbeams,’ I say.

‘Lasers,’ says Pietr. ‘The guests are arriving.’

I am walking between earth and heaven. I see an open book: not my diary, the other book, the book with the cracked boards for a cover, the fine pen and ink writing, the delicate drawings of the desert, the small poems. The maps.

‘In the end, there is always only the book, isn’t there?’ I say to Pietr as he helps me up the back steps. ‘My diary, the Frenchman’s book. All the books with maps inside. All the secret ways across the desert. But you knew that.’

He guides me across the back terrace. ‘Yes.’

Fountains of light fall from the top levels of the glass house, shadows slide across them, laughter twining into the air, prisms of memories caught in the bubbles of champagne. I look across to where I imagine the dark tower of Santa Margherita is, eyeless and broken in the darkness. Then I look up at the glass tower. For a moment I am in dark water looking up at the sun. I am far out to sea . . .

Pietr is easing me across the threshold of the back sitting room. I put a hand against the doorway to steady myself.

‘You know, from the sea, that tower would look exactly like – ’ ‘Like what, my dear?’ says Rosza, coming out of the light, bringing her own shadows with her.

She is smoking her thin black cigarette and holding a glass. It takes me a moment to register that it is a martini glass. She drains the glass and hands it without looking to the waiter hovering with a tray behind her. The muscles around her mouth are pinched white beneath the powder.

‘I just found out,’ she says to Pietr. She puts out her hand for another drink. She drains it without taking her eyes off Pietr. ‘Stefano told me.’

‘Of course,’ says Pietr.

‘You should treat Stefano with more respect.’ She snaps her fingers at the waiter, who backs away.

‘Why?’ says Pietr. ‘Did he give her the junk? Or did you?’

‘Her choice,’ says Rosza. ‘She’s
ofanculu
weak. Like – ’

‘If you mention Anna,’ says Pietr, ‘I will leave this house immediately. And never see you again.’

She gapes. ‘I don’t understand. How can you put her first?’

‘I’m not putting her first. I’m protecting her. From you.’

I am confused. Pietr says to me, ‘I did what you suggested. Family research.’

Rosza says, ‘She’s putting ideas into your head.’

‘You can’t touch her now.’

‘She’ll hurt the business,’ says Rosza. ‘You know there’s something between her and Mr Devlin.’

Pietr says, ‘Devlin’s gone.’ As he guides me past her, the light hits the diamond on my finger and patterns Rosza’s face with silver. She blinks. ‘You mongrel bitch – ’

‘Careful,’ says Pietr. ‘Behind you.’

Mitch says, ‘This is a happy family scene.’

Pietr puts his arm around me. ‘Always.’

Rosza says slowly, ‘Signor . . . ?’

‘From the Embassy.’ Mitch turns to me. I put my hands behind my back but I know from the twitch of his eyelids that he has seen the diamond.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he says softly. Then, to Pietr, ‘When is the happy event?’

‘We got married this morning.’

Mitch is still. ‘Congratulations. I’ll make sure Devlin finds out as soon as possible.’