Before There Were Angels (11 page)

As far as she could tell, the divorce was perfectly legal and valid but, if not, I had been resident in California long enough to obtain a US divorce.

First she said she would appeal the INS’ decision, claiming that I was indeed legally divorced. If that did not work, she would appeal it on the ground that I was in the process of obtaining an American divorce and intended to remarry Belle at the first possible opportunity.

The criminal conviction c
ould be more problematic. What was the background to that?

I confessed myself baffled. I was not aware of any criminal conviction and I had never assaulted
Rafaella.

“So you think that this i
s a completely false claim?” Thip asked me.

“Yes. I have no knowledge of any criminal conviction whatsoever.”

“OK, so we’ll challenge that too.”

“What happens next?” I asked. “Could they come and pick me up and throw me out of the country?”

“Very unlikely,” Thip replied. “They only do that if there is a criminal conviction, and a minor assault charge in a foreign country is very unlikely to set off that response, especially if they cannot trace any actual criminal record. We will make the appeal. That should buy us between six months and a year. If that fails, we can file a second appeal, which will give us another six months to a year. Just continue as you have been, go on living your lives.”

Next we
visited a divorce lawyer, Carol Jasinski. She confirmed that I was eligible to be divorced in the United States and that it would take six months from the serving of the divorce petition on Rafaella.

“Because these
will be divorce proceedings across national boundaries, we will need to serve the papers on your wife, or ex-wife, according to the Hague Convention. Once we have done that, we are in the clear. There may be one or two delays, but the divorce will happen. Where does your wife, or ex-wife, live? Do you have the address?”

Now that was going to be a problem.
In the same way as Rafaella did not know my current address, nor did I know hers. She might even be living in the US by now, just down the road, delivering threats by hand through our letter slot. It was going to cost a lot of money to track her down.

“Tell me about the divorce you thought you had,” suggested Carol.

“Well, after I left Rafaella, I went to live in Mexico for eight months, in the Baja California region. I instigated divorce proceedings from there using a Mexican lawyer. Rafaella was invited to participate in the proceedings by a court summons but she never replied. We had no children, so the court said I had to make suitable financial reparation, without specifying what that was, and within a week we were pronounced divorced.”

“Do you have any evidence that she received the court summons or the final divorce declaration?”

“I haven’t. My lawyer should know.”

“Did your lawyer act according to the Hague Convention in serving these papers?”

I laughed. “I somehow doubt it.”

Carol furrowed her brow. “I somehow doubt it too. You had better contact your lawyer and find out if he has any proofs of serving. I don’t
know what the INS will accept - I am not an immigration lawyer - but your immigration lawyer can perhaps help you with that. In the meantime, I suggest you find your wife, or ex-wife.”

Unless, of course, she were to find us first.

Chapter 16

The next morning Belle woke up fighting.

“I’m going to kill that bitch,” she declared.

“Her too?”

“That bitch tried to kill me. She tried to take you away from me. Can’t she mind her own business for once? This is my business now and she is going to wish that she had left us both alone. We are going to find her and she is never going to mess with our heads, or our lives, again.”

I smiled. “That’s my
street-fighting girl,” I said.

“I’m a biter,” she preened, and she meant it.

*  *  *

That night
Stevie announced that someone was following him to and from school, and had been doing so for three days. It was a woman he said, an older woman, older than Belle. He would stop and turn around, and there she would be. Blonde. Mournful looking.

That was all we needed, a physical threat to Stevie, maybe the same person who had murdered Zack
. A blonde woman, thirty plus - who could that be?

Rafaella
was blonde and approaching her thirties, but Stevie’s assessment of her age might be approximate. Belle was twenty-nine. How old was Martha Degamo?

There was only one way to find out. When Stevie left the house the next morning, Belle decided to follow him a hundred yards behind, and I would follow Belle a hundred yards behind that. Belle had seen photos of
Rafaella but had never seen her in person, so I was there to help identify her, if it was her, and to intervene should there be an altercation or should they be attacked. One hundred yards is a long way to make up in a crisis but if we left in a tight crocodile she would never show her face.

Sure enough, before Belle even left the house, a blonde woman, middle-aged, appeared from somewhere down the road and began to trail Stevie. It certainly wasn’t
Rafaella. Could it be Martha DeGamo?

However sorrowful her
face, and according to Belle it was indeed grim as she passed by our front door, from the back she was a solid woman with a determined step. She made no attempt at subterfuge and didn’t try to dodge as Stevie shot a glance back at her. Nor did she seem to care that we were following her. She noticed Belle almost immediately. Whether she saw me behind Belle I cannot say.

When Stevie reached the school, he looked around one more time and entered the building. The blonde woman carried on walking and a second later seemed to disappear. Belle was fifty yards behind her but admitted being distracted watching Stevie safely inside, so she failed to notice what happened to the woman until her eyes left Stevie’s retreating form and she couldn’t see her anymore.

I had more distance on the situation but I too was paying more attention to Stevie than to the woman.

“What happened to her?” Belle asked me.

“I haven’t got a clue. She just vanished into thin air.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“That’s weird. Will anything ever be normal again do you think?”

“It makes you wonder.”

“I think she saw me following her.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“Did she see you?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“Will you pick up Stevie this afternoon?”

“Of course I will.”

“Who the hell was she?”

*  *  *

When we got home, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Thip Ark, our immigration lawyer. “I’ve just realized,” she said, “that the INS broke the rules by not giving you the right to answer to your ex-wife’s allegations. That was a breach of procedure, so that is an extra point for the appeal.”

I don’t know what it was about this statement that suddenly made me furious, not against
Thip for sure as she was being appropriately diligent, nor against the INS, the uncaring scions of bureaucracy, but finally against Rafaella.

Why hadn’t that woman been
Rafaella today? I could have grabbed her and accosted her in public. I could have assaulted her the way she had already falsely suggested I had done. I could have finally behaved the way she had long depicted me as behaving. I could have been out of control, and isn’t that what she would have deserved, to have finally drawn down from me what she had assiduously forged?

During our five years of marriage I freely admit that I had never known her at all. I had taken all her shit, the storms that she
had conjured up from nowhere that had nothing to do with me except that they were always blamed on me. I had been me, harmless, innocent in its truest sense (not wishing to cause anyone any harm), and she had hurled a torrent of pitiless bile at me. But for what? For the fact that I was standing there? For having loved her and for having wanted the best for her? What had I ever
done
to her?

Now, more importantly, what had Belle ever done to her, or Zack or Stevie? Weren’t we merely trying to build a happy life together, a life that she apparently envied, but by what right did she envy our happiness, by what right did she demand to play any part in our lives at all? Isn’t it only monsters who continue to chase haple
ss prey because they have attracted their attention and they can be preyed upon?

Rafaella
was preying upon us, stupidly, viciously, cunningly, without any sense of morality or justice, solely for the pleasure and tittilation of the chase. Wasn’t it time we all turned on her and frightened the bejesus out of her so that she would never dare to mess with our lives again? Wasn’t it time, as Belle had put it, that we threatened to kill the bitch?

But killing isn’t what good people do, what those who want to live fulfilled lives for those and others do. Yet Belle probably really was prepared to kill her. It wasn’t just a figure of speech.
So why not I? Why was I leaving all the outraged sense of needing to protect our family to Belle?

Here we were, having lost Zack a few weeks earlier, deep in mourning and loss, and here was
Rafaella, the self-declared spiritualist, trying to rip apart all that remained to us, all that we were struggling to salvage.

I wished that the woman in the street had been
Rafaella, I wished that I could for once have cornered her and screamed my anguish and contempt at her for the way she habitually and remorselessly behaved towards us, towards me. She wouldn’t have cared, she was swimming in the honey of her own infallibility, her and her pandering archangels. She would be without apology for anything she had ever done, she always was, but I would have liked to have seen a prolonged moment of shock in her face, of discomfort in being trapped by me, of fear as to whether I was finally capable of being the person she had always made me out to be.

‘Look, you petty,
crazy, delusional, specious parasite, I am now the bastard you have always wanted me to be. Now what should I do to you? Should I rip you limb from limb as you have tried to rip my family limb from limb? Should I grab you and throw you in front of a street car? Should I repay you for everything you have put us all through? Should I chase you down the road and lay into you when I catch you until you beg me to leave you alone?

‘
But you wouldn’t beg me to do anything, would you? You wouldn’t do anything that human. There is nothing human inside you. You are an empty vessel of acid that needs to be securely disposed of so that it can poison no more lives.

‘
Now I hate you. Now I want you here. And you probably are here somewhere, plotting your revenge for slights and hurts that exist only in your mind, that are mere figments, illusions, insanity. You want to toy with us and to destroy us, and there is very little a law-abiding person can do about that. The police will not listen. The courts will not listen. Passersby will be embarrassed, and possibly outraged, to bear witness to any scene between us. They will probably take your side because you will play the mistreated victim and people always believe that a woman is a victim of a man, however ludicrous it might be that you are a victim of anyone in reality.

‘
Rafaella, I want you here. I want to know if it was you who murdered Zack. I want to know what possible place you think you have a right to play in our lives. I want you crushed. I want you buried. I want you dead because that is the only safe place you can be, encased in lead-lined concrete and lowered to the bottom of the ocean like radioactive waste.

‘How dare
you do this to us, and what would it take to stop you daring, to stop you fucking with us?’

But I was still being robbed of that moment. Instead I was left won
dering who this unrecognized woman was who was following Stevie every day to school and back again. What harm did she intend to do to him, and why?

Why, why any of it? Why?
And why were we all left, those of us who were left after Zack’s death, tilting at miasmas, at ghosts, at those who could brutalize us without ever showing themselves and almost certainly without any motive.

‘
Senseless cruelty, that is you, Rafaella, someone who should by the rights of any rational society be abolished, be tamed, or at least be forced to restrain yourself and build your own fruitful life far away from us and from others you will always wish to harm.

‘I do
n’t hate you, Rafaella - you have had the monopoly on that emotion in my life - but I too am willing to kill you to make this home a safe home.

‘
I can’t leave this task to Belle. I have to man-up and do what is necessary all by myself, jackets off in the playground, and if it appears unfair for a man to beat a woman to pulp, then you know you started it, even if nobody else believes that, and that will have to be enough for me, to know that I have done the right thing, the only thing that can set things right.