Property of Blood (13 page)

When Woodcutter was putting the chain on my ankle and was close to me I asked, “Are you going to do my eyes now?”

“‘Later.”

‘What I really wanted to ask him was whether he had brought the newspaper with an article in it about me as he had promised, but I didn’t dare for fear of seeming a nuisance. He went away with my boots and I crawled inside and settled down, lying on top of the sleeping bag since it wasn’t at all cold. I had discovered that if I put my arms behind my neck and supported my head so that there was no pressure on those great stones in my ears, the pain was reduced to a bearable level. However, a few nights of sleeping in this position caused terrible pains in my shoulders so now I used a toilet roll as a neck support: I had come to look forward to this moment of retreat in the way you might look forward to settling down to watch a favourite TV programme. My entertainment was provided by my own thoughts and memories. I felt there was something luxurious in this, after years of running to stay in the same place, of juggling insufficient money, then later, the pressure to maintain the success I’d achieved. Only once, and that was as a small child, had I had this same feeling. I was recovering from an illness—measles, I think—and had to stay in bed. That special feeling of separateness that comes from lying quietly in your bed and hearing the world outside go on without you, voices you recognize calling to each other on the way to school, cars starting up, the radio and the vacuum cleaner downstairs. I had a colouring book and crayons, a jigsaw puzzle of horses in the snow, and a shiny new book—even in my musty tent I could recreate the delicious smell of the glossy cover and the fresh print—which I couldn’t read because my eyes hurt. At such a young age I already appreciated the luxury of those hours so totally my own. I can see you must find the comparison odd given that I was a chained captive in the tent but, apart from the chain itself, was I any freer as a child with measles? And Woodcutter was my nurse, responsible for me, feeding me, sometimes kind, sometimes angry. I tried, at first, to fight against my growing dependence on him, but then I stopped fighting and let it take its course. Most things that happen naturally have a good reason for happening and I believe that if I hadn’t accepted it, hadn’t allowed myself to trust him, I would have died. The overt reason might have been an intestinal blockage, blood poisoning from the chain wound, whatever. But the real reason would have been that without that contact I couldn’t have saved myself. It was that or death and I wanted to live.

‘I must have relived everything I could remember of my childhood, good and bad, and my thoughts absorbed me so completely that the interruption for feeding was often unwelcome, especially under the stale bread and cheese regime, as I had no appetite and eating was a necessary mechanical process. I much preferred my mental wanderings. Leo is like me, I think. I know he’s always spent a lot of time with his own thoughts, even when he was quite small. Most often he was silent, concentrating on whatever he was drawing, but I would sometimes hear him humming or even talking quietly to himself. He lived a second, very intense life in his imagination, I think. I used to read to him in the evenings in English because at school everything was in Italian. I felt he should know his own literary heritage. So we read
Tom Sawyer, Nicholas Nickleby, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
And we read the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
and some of the Bible in English, too. They were already so different, he and Caterina, even as small children. He could lose himself in his own imaginative world for hours but Caterina liked company. She liked someone there to talk to and she loved little presents, tiny dolls and miniature china animals. She had such a collection. I felt I ought to read to her as I had to Leo but she only wanted her father to read to her so it was always in Italian. You know the way girls are with their fathers. I wasn’t even allowed to be there if she had him! Then when he went she couldn’t bear to be left for a moment. No matter how busy I was, she would never do her homework alone, even though she always got angry if I tried to help her. She’d scream at me, “I can do it! But you’ve got to stay with me!”

‘Poor Caterina … We make so many mistakes with our children but even with hindsight who can tell what’s right? She needed her father and he was … what he was. He had little enough time for the children and then we divorced. I don’t know yet how it could have gone differently. In my efforts to take the blame on myself I go as far as feeling guilty for marrying Ugo in the first place and so giving my children an unstable father and an unstable life. That’s as foolish as you can get, I think, since then they wouldn’t have existed—not as their present selves, anyway. Besides, for my sins, I was hopelessly in love with him. He dazzled me after all the fresh-faced dull boys at home. Then, when he’d gone, what could I do to make up to Caterina for her father’s absence since it wasn’t my attention she wanted? I resorted to tricks, the way we all do sometimes with our children. Little presents I would say came from him. I wouldn’t do that if I had my time over again, or at least I believe now it was wrong, but my heart bled for her, so still and silent, waiting for him to come back. I didn’t know what else to do.

‘It was a relief in more ways than one when he died. She was only ten, Leo fourteen. That was my biggest subterfuge of all, a “will” which gave them a two thirds share in the family estate on reaching their majority. Ugo did actually leave a will but it was all fantasy and I made it a reality by arrangement with our lawyers—the children don’t know, so please don’t ever tell anyone. I did what I did to protect them from the truth about their father. At least, that’s what I told myself then. Now, I suspect my motives. I think I was playing God, reinventing reality. It made me feel good, generous, powerful to give my children such an important inheritance
and
a caring father. But it was the Brunamonti inheritance really, and Ugo cared nothing for that or his children. Vanity… vanity and presumptuousness had a hand in what I did. Ugo, you see, no longer owned anything. He had only ever given the estate a thought when he wanted to borrow money on it, and he never gave us a thought at all. I had long since paid him off and got control of the estate. I sold off the smaller properties to launch my business and invested a sum of money for each child.

‘Leo went through a bad time—perhaps the worst in his young life—just before Ugo died. They met in some bar in town, or avoided meeting, and Ugo was reduced to a pitiful state. It shocked and frightened Leo. Caterina was spared that, thank heaven, but his death was a terrible blow. She didn’t shed a tear, she never does. I feel sure not even this business will have made her cry. It frightens me, what she might be suffering when she’s like that. She was too young to understand about the will, and I gave her the only thing I had of Ugo’s, a leather writing set that had been his father’s. I told her he had particularly wanted her to have it and she has always treasured it. Was I wrong? Was I? Oh, why couldn’t he have cared a little for her, whatever he thought of me? I’ve failed to make it up to her, I’m sure I have—and now I’ve been the cause of so much stress and made them poor again—I’m sorry, just give me a moment… I know I’m not talking sense. I didn’t cause it, did I? Did I cause it? I left the main doors open … Do they blame me? It will pass if you just give me a moment…

‘I want to tell you… what did I want to tell you? That morning … Yes, that morning when Woodcutter changed the plasters on my eyes. He let me take the old ones off and with the gauze it didn’t hurt so much. As I was doing it he came close and explained why it was necessary, that after a time, the sweat and the oil from your skin cause them to work loose so that there was a risk of my being able to peer under or over them. He warned me again, for my own good, to tell him if I felt them loosening.

“‘You lie still and never mess with them. That’s good. Give it here. Be more careful with the square ones over your eyes.”

“‘I don’t mind lying still. I think about things.”

“‘What things?”

“‘Today I thought about my time at university.”

“‘Lucky for you. I had to leave school at fourteen and see nothing but sheep for years until I started my own business.”

“‘What sort of business?” He didn’t answer.

“‘If you have your own business, then why do this? Is it anger because you had no chance to study? Is that why?”

“‘No, that’s not why! I do this because I’ve no choice. I ran away from home at fifteen and came over here to some relations. I thought I could work as a shepherd boy part-time and still go to school. Be careful with that one, the gauze is out of place …”

“‘Agh!”

“‘Give it here.”

‘I rubbed at the sticky soreness. “And did you go to school?”

“‘Did I go to school, like hell. I had to be a feeder for a kidnapping the first year I was over here.”

“‘But later, when you were older, couldn’t you have got out?”

“‘You can never get out. They don’t let you. It’s forever. You make me laugh when you tell your pathetic stories about how hard up you’ve been. People like you don’t know what poverty means—” His voice against my face stopped in the middle of a sentence and there was only the sea roaring in my ears. He was no longer touching me and I felt for him. He slapped my hand away. The zip. I smelled someone new but he didn’t come inside. I also felt Woodcutter’s tension. I think the man outside spoke. I was sure this was the boss. I kept as still and quiet as a mouse until I heard the zip again and sensed Woodcutter relax. The boss had gone. This wasn’t the only visit. I learned to read the tension around me when he was there, but it was the only time I knew he had looked at me. I was soon to find out why he had come. Apart from checking on the condition of the goods, which I suppose was his usual reason.

“‘Open your eyes.” I opened them. Woodcutter’s denim jacket, his square hands screwing up the used plasters, the olive light in the tent.

“‘You were scared of going blind, weren’t you?”

‘It was a relief. At once my eyes were searching the tent. Had he brought the newspaper? He was wearing a ski mask, of course, for this job, but I attempted to look into his eyes.

“‘The newspaper. You promised …”

‘He hadn’t brought the whole paper, just the pages with articles about me, the front page and one inside page. There was an old photograph of me on the front page as a model. Another world broken off and floating away from me. Then on the other page … I can’t tell you how it hit me. They’d got hold of a picture of Leo from two years ago. He was looking back over his shoulder towards the camera, his blond hair rather longer than he has it now, and he was wearing a thick patterned sweater. You could only see a tiny bit of the sweater but I remembered it so well—white, patterned in red and green. The background looked deliberately blurred, though perhaps that was just the newspaper reproduction. It was taken on a skiing holiday and I kept it pinned to my notice board in the office. How had they got it? And Caterina! My little girl. A big beautiful picture of her. I couldn’t tell where it had been taken but it was new. You can imagine how I felt when I recognized the collar of one of my coats. It broke my heart to think of her seeking that comfort. At school, when we were dating a boy, we’d wear his sweater. It was like being hugged and you had the smell of the boy on it. I cried then, though even without the plasters I cried deep in my chest from habit, afraid of tears. I cried so much that when, at last, he took the pages back and put them in his pocket I hadn’t read a word. I couldn’t, I was too agitated, shocked into reality by the pictures. My beautiful, beautiful children!

‘And to think that I had dedicated a part of my quiet thinking time each day to trying to calculate the stage my kidnapping had reached. I imagined Patrick’s arrival, I thought of the ransom demand—would they phone? I wondered how much they would ask for and longed to discuss this with Woodcutter because I was still convinced their information must be wrong and I was perfectly willing to tell them my real possibilities, which they could then check for themselves. I calculated how long it would take to get the money together, wondered how they arranged these things. I was sure that, after all this time, I must be near to being released and that kept me determined to eat and try to keep well. But I had no information, and now the newspaper was back in his pocket and I had missed my chance. Yet there was no point in my asking for another chance. I was still crying, almost howling, and could still not have read the article.

“‘Signora, calm yourself. You must quieten down.” The black masked head moved back from my ear and I tried again to look through the narrow slits into his eyes.

'I stopped crying obediently.

“‘Why did you call me signora?”

'He didn’t answer me.

“‘It’s because I can see you, isn’t it?” He had also addressed me in the formal third person, the way we would have spoken to each other in the real world. Until then, he had always used the informal
tu.
I tried to take advantage of this suddenly acquired human dignity.

“‘Please, allow me to see for a while longer.”

“‘I intend to. You’re going to write a letter.”

‘I remembered other kidnappings vaguely with letters full of polemical or political nonsense sent to all sorts of people—once it was the Archbishop of Florence. Was this what they wanted from me, imagining that I had influential friends?’

“‘I don’t know anybody important, if that’s—”

“‘It doesn’t matter. Choose a friend. Someone outside your family whose mail won’t be checked. And someone who won’t go to the cops or it’ll be the worse for you. Here. Write it on here and copy from this one the boss has prepared. His is just notes. You’ve to write it in your own way.”

‘It was a ransom demand. A ransom demand! And all this time I had imagined they’d have phoned, that everything would be under way, the money organized, a matter of days to my release.

“‘You can’t mean you haven’t been in touch with my family before now? Surely it’s more risk for you the longer you wait?”