The Hiding Place (9 page)

Mary swings the shopping bag over her shoulder, decides to go anyway to Cardiff. But she won’t waste her wages on bus fare: when she reaches the main road, footsore,
welling up inside with rage, she puts out her thumb.

~

Down and down. The sleep my mother thought she’d never have is visiting her now. The bus jerks along The Parade, stop and start, stop and start, and the tinging of the
conductor’s bell, the hot muddle of drunken chat, seeps into her dreams.

~

Oy! You! Over here!

The man is waving his napkin like a starter’s flag, sweeping it high and low across the edge of the booth.

I said two
Lambs
– when you’re ready! Mary would like to snatch the napkin from him and stuff it down his throat. But she smiles apologetically, reloads the unwanted drinks on
to her tray, and darts back to the bar. This is only her second night at Luciano’s. She doesn’t know rum from cow’s milk. And they ask for all sorts of things; Gin and Ginger,
Pineapple Fizz, Scotch and Threat. She’d like to see how that went down at the Miners’ Welfare, where all they ever drank was Mild or Bitter, depending on how they felt.

Mary leans on the counter while the waitress in front of her loads her tray. They’re not allowed to pour the drinks here – they have a man especially to do it. Mary studies him; he
wears a black suit with the sleeves pulled a bit up the arm, the stiff white cuffs of his shirt turned over so that she takes in his cufflinks, with the pattern of a sunrise etched in gold. The
waitress in front is biding her time, flirting with him. He stares over her head, keeping an eye on the evening: he pays her no attention. When it’s Mary’s turn, he looks at her and
speaks.

He give you trouble? he says, motioning with his head towards the man with the napkin. Mary is blank for a second, thinking, he sounds just like Mario Lanza, he even
looks
like Mario
Lanza. The blood rushes to her face. To hide it, she inspects the notepad tied to her apron.

He said rum, an’ I took him rum, and now he says Lambs!

She shows him the order. He nods, takes two clean glasses from the rail above his head and beckons her into the alcove behind the bar.

Two Lambs, he says, pouring a measure of brown rum into each glass. She moves to put them on her tray, but he stops her, picks up one of the glasses, and turns his back. His jaw moves from side
to side, his tongue peeps from between his lips. He spits into the drink.

Don’t take no shit from him, he says, wiping the soft white stream from the rim. And smiles his brilliant smile. This is Frankie at his most gallant.

~

I loved him, thinks Mary, stirred from her past by the weight of the man in the next seat. He’s given up on the Alphabet and has gone to sleep; his head rests on her
shoulder, his mouth popping open and shut like a carp. She heaves him away to free her arm, rubs the racing condensation from the window.

I loved him straight off, she says into Luca’s hair, then loudly, Stupid Bloody Fool! The man jerks awake at this, blinks slowly, starts up again.

A – You’re Adorable, B – You’re so Beautiful . . .

~

Frankie holds her in his arms. She can’t tell if it’s the vibration of music from the club below, or Frankie’s body, or her body, but they’re both
trembling now in the little bed.

You’re so beautiful – he says, and running his hand along the curve of her hip, under the tight elastic of her girdle – Take this off.

~

Two more stops. My mother shifts Luca onto her other shoulder and bends forward to get past the man, his top half keeled like a bent flag into the aisle. His eyes swim in his
head as my mother squeezes by. It’s been so long since Mary has thought about the past, it seems like someone else’s life. Frank Gauci and Joe Medora; the two of them so glamorous and
charming – and then she stops herself. She won’t think about Joe – how
that
happened – and she won’t let herself think any more about Frankie; where he was,
where he might be now; what he will do to her when he finds out about the fire. She concentrates instead on her children.

But Frankie is thinking about
her
. After the hospital, after our house which he couldn’t get near, not with Joe Medora’s car outside it, Frankie goes to Salvatore and
Carlotta’s home. He sits in the parlour and waits, mulling things over.

This is the deal.

Frankie gains: the house, enough money to right the damage caused by the fire; enough money to wipe his slate with the Syndicate; just that bit extra so that Mary doesn’t have to work all
hours to make ends meet. And an offer to manage The Moonlight when Joe is away. He loses: Marina.

The terms are generous, he can see that. He also sees, like a blade twisting a hole in his heart, how long Joe has waited for this time, for a moment desperate enough to make
him jump. He imagines how Mary has deceived him. He can hardly bear it. Frankie’s thoughts won’t stay still; he tries to follow them but as soon as he glimpses one, it streaks away
before his eyes. Random as fireworks, they crack to life in his head, their bright trails fizzing suddenly to black. His eyes roam Salvatore’s parlour in search of something steady to fix on:
a carriage clock ticking glumly on the mantelpiece, the cool dome of a plastic snow-scene, an ornate mirror above the fireplace casting its dark reflection. He finds Mary in everything, mistakes
his rage for love. He wants her, he hates her, he’ll make it up to her, he will tear her into shreds.

It doesn’t occur to Frankie that Marina might
not
be Joe’s daughter; Frankie sees Joe in the child now, sharp as diamond. He wants her out of his sight – he’s
happy to be rid of her. He would abandon Mary, too, and all the rest of us if he could. And with just that extra bit of money, over time, with a little luck, perhaps he can: perhaps he can get
away.

He pictures his daughters, lining them up in a neat row in his head, and studies each one minutely. Celesta, Rose, Fran, Luca, he checks them off with a nod, convincing himself that
they’re his. He stops at me: a word forms in his head; he cannot let it free.

~

He has a lot to say. When my mother arrives, the family will be complete again, a full set. Not counting me, that is. It can’t last.

interference

I don’t remember Marina; I was only a month old when she left, and still in hospital. My mother told me how she went away, listing all the things she packed into
Marina’s new brown suitcase:

Two pairs of Clarks’ Sandals, what with the weather out there being so nice; a new dress with little rosebuds running round the bodice – you know, Dol, like a medieval princess
– and three new blouses; a satin nightie; a proper toilet bag from Marks’; a swimsuit in emerald green. Oh, she had everything she wanted! We had to sit on the case to shut it! My
mother would tell me this time and again, her face fixed in a smile.

Years later, standing on the stairs after one of my dreams, the one where I’m smothered by a hot bubble of fat, I hear a voice below, placating and steady, and then the shrill clip of my
mother’s distress,

You sold her! Don’t
touch
me, Frank. You sold her. Children burnt and children bartered: someone must be to blame.

~

As with all truth, there is another version.

Joe Medora’s car slips up to the kerb, the wheel-rims grating on the edge of the pavement. A blonde woman steps out from the passenger side. Standing in his living room chewing on his
breakfast, Mr Jackson hears noises on the street. He raises the grey net of curtain at his window, and poking his head round it, looks at the car, admires it and the blonde woman standing beside
it, and gazes up to our front bedroom. He sees my mother’s hands pressed flat on the pane, her mouth moving silently. He sees my father suddenly appear from our house, gripping Marina’s
shoulder, helping her onto the back seat, stroking her head as she slides across the leather upholstery. Marina bends forward and waves to our downstairs window, where the faces of my sisters crowd
the steamed-up glass like pale balloons. Fran and Celesta wave back; Rose is crying. The blonde woman takes the suitcase, lifts it onto the seat next to Marina, shuts the car door. Joe Medora revs
the engine.

My father doesn’t look once at Joe Medora, and Joe doesn’t turn his face from the view through the windscreen. The road in front of him leads to the high wall with the dead end,
which means he will have to turn the car round on the street and drive past the house again. It’s not his house any more; but he has Marina, sitting solemnly in the back seat of his car, her
little gloved hands folded now over the belt of her raincoat.

My father cuts straight through the house – in through the front door and out through the back – stumbling on to the morning where he stands until the sound of Joe’s engine
dies to nothing. He takes off his jacket: it’s been raining overnight and the smell is sharp, there’s a bird singing somewhere which infuriates Frankie, thinking of the songs that
Marina will hear, far away in Malta, that he cannot share. He looks at the yard, the washing line empty except for the pegs, and the spiders’ webs between them laced with dew. He looks at the
old back door lying flat on the ground, like an entrance into Hell.

Then he sets to work; to break the door to pieces, to knock and hammer and make the most terrible screeling noise; he wants to scream, he wants to let out his lungs and howl: anything, to drown
out the emptiness that oozes from the house.

He lifts the door from its grave of flattened grass: the hidden side of it is slimy and crawling with woodlice. The saw gibbers through the wood as Frankie devastates the silence. He sings a
song without a tune, in a voice that comes from his bones, all day, like breathing.

He hammers until darkness, but not able to leave it alone, he goes out again with the red weals of flesh growing tight on the skin of his palms. Hammers into the black. Something will be Built,
he thinks.

It takes him a month to erect the cage. He will fill it with animals. He will buy chickens, perhaps, or rabbits. It is a thing for his daughters.

~

My mother would tell me this story, every time differently, but would always end with the same line:

What he really wanted was to saw
me
to bits, Dol. Like a magician. He couldn’t stand it, you see? Jealousy! That’s what jealousy does for you, girl.

It didn’t occur to her then, or if it did she never let on, that he was doing something about us; about losing everything that winter. He was determined to change his
luck.

~

We loved the rabbits. But then they vanished too. My father killed every single one, for food, for sport, for no reason at all. Like a poacher, he used them as a stake; he would
take them out of his donkey jacket and throw their soft bodies on the counter of the betting shop. They were currency, and he spent them all: apart from the ones I managed to destroy.

It’s an instinctive thing. That’s what my mother told me when I showed her, took her down to the bottom of the garden, and
showed
her – those small scraps of flesh,
streaks of disgorged skin – all that was left of the babies. I couldn’t think what I had done to hurt them; I was
proud
of them. They looked like the sugar mice you buy in sweet
shops. My mother said the doe had eaten her young. And that I had done something terribly wrong by touching her babies.

You had to interfere, she said. I was five; it was the first time I’d heard the word. The way she said it made it sound like murder.

Say it then!

Gowchee, I say, spreading my lips over the last syllable. It’s not a new word, but I’m humouring my mother.

Now spell it, she says, breaking off a thread of cotton with her teeth. She tacks the needle into the front of her blouse where it twinkles when she moves, folds the mended shirt and places it
on the pile of ironing to be done.

G-A-U-C-I, I say slowly.

Well done, Dol. Now do the lot.

I take a deep breath:

Dolores Sebastianne Gauci. Aged Five. Living at Number 2 Hodge’s Row, Tiger Bay, Car— She stops me by flapping her hand in front of my face.

Alright, Dol, you’re not going to the bloody moon. Now, you know what to say?

We’re sitting round the table, which is heaped with washing, the
South Wales Echo
, my crayoning book, and
True Crime Monthly
, and I have to pass this memory
test before my mother will let me go to the corner shop for her. I can feel she’s nervous; she never lets me out. I can’t play in The Square with my sisters, and I can’t go to
school. I started there last month, but you wouldn’t know it – I’ve only been twice. Rose says it’s because I’m bad luck and I mustn’t be seen. She goes on and
on until she gets a smack and starts to cry. I think it’s because my mother’s afraid that if she lets me out of her sight, I might never come back. Marina didn’t. No one talks
about her – it’s not allowed – but sometimes, lying in bed waiting for my mother to come up, I hear her saying her name. And at night, when I’m waiting for the light to
start, my mother whispers it in her sleep. It sounds like a sigh.

I should have gone to school today, but I’m off ill: I keep getting what the doctor calls Ghost Pain. Sometimes I’ll try to open a door, or pick up my knife, and it’s only then
I realize I’ve attempted to use my
left
hand. When my father sees me doing these things, he frowns and gives me a black look:
Sinistra
, he mutters, shaking his head.

Dr Reynolds says it would be normal if I’d ever had my fingers, but he thinks it’s strange I should miss something I never knew. It’s not so strange to me; I miss Marina, and I
never knew her. Sometimes, I dream I’m skipping: I’m holding the handles of the rope with
both
hands, and as it whips faster and faster over my head, someone jumps in. It’s
Marina, stepping in time with me. It’s then I wake up with the pain.

~

My mother pushes back the mound of unpaired socks and reaches for a pen on the mantelpiece. Her eyes search the room; she’s looking for something to write on. I shield my
crayoning book with my arm – my mother writes notes all the time, she’ll put them on anything; a scrap of sugar bag for the milkman (2 gold top, 2 steri), or the back of the Family
Allowance Book for my father (Food in pantry, gone to bed). The note she wrote to my teacher at school was scribbled on the inside of an old Christmas card:
Season’s Greetings!
Dolores
has been Sick all night and will not be in Today.