Assassins and Victims Page 16

  Now that Antonio is dead I think more and more often about our wedding. You would not think that something so beautiful and so light could possibly be destroyed. But there you would be wrong. Evil things are sometimes born in beautiful places. I try not to think about Antonio himself, but only of the time when we took the vows. Body and soul. Body. That was the bit that I said, at the time with all my heart, but that was the bit that disgusted me. Body.

  He came to our bed on the wedding night and rubbed himself up and down against my leg. There was this hardness, this hard hard pressure that made me sick. I had to get out of bed and stand by the window. I looked down across Rome and the lights burning in the warm night and I pushed the window wider. We had come to one of those large hotels, a tall building, and when I looked down I thought, I will jump. I will break when I hit the bottom but anything would be better than having to suffer this. I have read of women who couldn’t bring themselves to make love, even though they wanted to very badly. I didn’t even want to. I sat down on the floor and I listened to him toss and turn on the bed. Sometimes he sighed. What is wrong with you? he asked. Stop this little game and come here, I am your husband. But I didn’t go to him. My stomach was rising up inside me. I hung out of the window and tried to be sick.

  So when I think of Antonio now I try to think only of the wedding. Because beyond that point it stops being light and becomes dark. I look around the room. The arm in the jar, the stiff fingers. With those fingers he tried a hundred times to touch me. I used to think of him pushing his fingers up inside me, into my body, and I screamed in my head. Now they are stiff and useless. That is how I want them to be.

  I get up and go into the yard. Rex is awake. I put my arms around him. He is like a child. He licks my face. There is between us a genuine feeling that I will not call love because it would be foolish to do so. I will not put a name to it because I cannot.

  I whisper to him, ‘Nobody can hurt you, darling.’

  And then I kiss his hot fur. It hurts me that I cannot bring him into the house. I do not like leaving him in the yard. But I have to. It is one of those perversities of nature that though Antonio despised the dog, the dog seemed to love the man the more Antonio punished him. Love is wrong. I mean to say, admire, respect, become devoted to. And I cannot have Rex in the house because there are still scents and smells of Antonio that drive him wild with grief. Perhaps I am jealous of this devotion. I do not know truthfully. Perhaps I do not want to witness the animal’s grief because it reminds me of his devotion to Antonio. And that, perhaps, I cannot bear.

  As I turn from Rex, he whines. It is not for me that he whines. No, it is for my dead husband. I look up at the light in the window in the next house. There, staring down, is the man who came earlier and who wants to destroy my Rex. We look at each other for a time. And then he moves away and all I can see is his shadow thrown upon the glass. I hate that man. If he harms even a hair of my dog, I will … No, I do not know what I will do. Perhaps it will be what I tried to do earlier. To shove the scissors through him. To cut into the blood of his sex.

  I go into the house. I walk into the sitting-room and look at the photographs. All my family are there, going back for nearly sixty years. My great-grandfather, Enrico. He was a proud man. I met him only once, when he was lying on his death bed. His face was as white as the pillow. I was held up, hardly more than a child, to kiss his face. Tears were running down from his eyes. He could not compromise with death. I kissed his face quickly. There was a smell of decay. Minutes later he died.

  But I can still see his face on that bed and the white hands that hang over the bedsheets.

  I sit down. I am too nervous to sleep. I think about Edward Carson and the police. If he goes there what will I do? When a policeman comes to the door, what will I say? But it is best to put such thoughts out of my mind. I get up. I walk up and down the room. I imagine Edward Carson coming through the door towards me, and in his eyes I read the nakedness of what he wants.

  Antonio had the same nakedness. After our wedding night he tried time and time again to get to my body. But when I refused, he would say, There is something wrong with you, why don’t you see a doctor? A head-doctor, that’s what I mean. He just did not understand, you see. He did not understand me. I remember him pressing his body against my legs and the feel of him through the thinness of my nightdress. I would rather have died than allowed him to do what he wanted. I am not exaggerating this. I would have died feeling him inside me, feeling his thing pushed up into my body, impaling me. I cannot think these disgusting things.

  I return to the bedroom. He cannot harm me now. I am beyond harm.

  I am safe. So long as I keep to myself, I am safe and need not fear anything.

  I lie down on the bed. I hear Rex. He is whining. How can I tell him that Antonio is dead? The house is still filled with his smells, and smells to a dog mean life. And what if Rex saw the arm in the jar? No, I cannot bring him into the house. The time is not ripe for that.

  I said once to Antonio, You disgust me. He looked at me without changing his expression and he said, Yes, I know. After that there was nothing between us to say. You cannot live with disgust. It is worse than squalor. It is worse than anything else. He disgusted me. His body, his smell, even his mannerisms.

  We came to London to make what he called a fresh start. He said that a change of scenery would help me. As if I needed help! He was the one who needed it. But he did not see that. As far as he was concerned, I was the sick one. Not him, not him with his sickening desires and his appetites. We came to London, but it was a false move. Because if he thought things would change, then he was wrong. When there is disgust between two people, everything dies.

  I lie on the bed with my eyes tight shut. I can pretend that there is no broken door, and that everything is just the same as it was before Edward Carson came.

  Edward and Antonio. Two men from the same mould. But all men are like that. Walking along the street I have seen them. Their trousers bulge between the legs. It is an ugly thing to see but I have seen it without meaning to, because I would not look intentionally. One night Edward Carson was sitting on the sofa and saying how much he liked my records when I saw that the place between his legs was hard. I picked up a knife in my hand and looked at it. There was in me a great temptation to strike him with the knife. But I put it down.

  No, I cannot say that life with Antonio was pleasant, because that would be a lie. It became worse when we got to London. He worked as a mechanic in a garage. Sometimes he came home late, very late, and looking at him I knew where he had been and what he had been doing. He went with women. He paid for his women. He paid them to open their legs so that he could enter them.

  I could have suffered this, because it meant nothing to me. There was nothing for me to be jealous of in what he did with the women he bought. What I could not suffer was the way he hurt Rex. When he tried to make me go to bed with him and when I refused, he would take a bottle of wine and go into the front room and drink it, then he would begin to smash my records. After that he would try to force me and I would bite him, or kick him where it hurted most, and then he took out his rage on the dog. Many nights I lay with my face in the pillow and listened to the dog cry out and the sound of Antonio striking him with a leather belt. The dog bled. But it satisfied Antonio. He could be master of the dog, even if he could not be master of me.

  He would say, You need a psychiatrist. You are sick in the head.

  But I knew the value of silence. I said nothing. My mother had told me, You can break a man’s heart with silence, and I believed it. So I would say nothing and he would sigh. And then he would open a bottle of wine and drink it. After a time he stopped sleeping in the bed beside me. I was glad of that. I didn’t want him there. I didn’t want to feel him breathing against me, or pushing himself up at my body.

  I look round the room. I find it hard to associate the arm in the jar with the man I married. There are those silly tattoos he had done when he wa
s a sailor. As a sailor, he had picked up his habits. Once he boasted to me that he had seen a donkey mount a woman and that he himself had slept with three different women in one bed.

  I did not care. It was nothing to me. I could see him in the bed with the women, grunting like an animal. On the morning after our wedding he had come into the room naked. He enjoyed being naked, showing off to me, trying to get me to look. But I did not look. Once, from the comer of my eye, I saw all that I wanted to see and I did not ever look again. I did not look again – except once, when he was dead.

  But I should not think these things. Antonio is no longer alive. I should not think ill of the dead. I try to think other things. But this room is alive with memories of my life with him and it is difficult not to remember, to push him out entirely of my thoughts.

  I get up and stand in front of the jar. In the light it sometimes looks quite pretty. But the colours of the tattoos are fading in the spirit in the jar. There is a snake, and an angel with spread wings, and a heart and – and there is a naked woman with yellow hair. I turn away from this and walk back to the bed. I lie down again.

  He thought we could make a fresh start in London. But how can you make something fresh from something stale? It is not possible. I should have listened to my mother. You are thirty-four years of age, she said, and you want to get married. This is foolish of you. You are not the marrying sort. Some women are born old maids. I should have taken that advice, except that nobody wants to be an old maid. It was my last chance and I seized at it. Who would not have done? Antonio was ugly, but he was a husband. And I wanted a husband.

  Now I was a widow. That is better than being an old maid. People are more sympathetic towards widows than towards spinsters.

  Sometimes even in spite of myself and what I felt about Antonio when he was alive, I feel sorry for him. Like the rest of us, he did not want to die. Of course he did not want it, but it had to be. There was no other solution. I had listened long enough to the pain he was inflicting on the dog, and it had become my agony too. The pain passed between us, and only Antonio stood outside the circle.

  I killed him. Over the weeks I put powder into his food in small drops and one night, standing in the doorway and looking at the girls go past in their short dresses, he fell dead. When he was dead I did not know at first what to do, since I had not planned anything. I had not looked beyond his death to anything else. But there he was lying in the hall, his eyes open and his pipe burning on the carpet. I closed the door and put out the pipe. I let him lie there for a bit while I tried to think it out.

  I wrote a letter to his garage saying that he had gone back to Italy and would not return. And then I told the nosy woman, Agnes, next door, that he had died. She is a slut. I do not know how she can put up with it. All those men. I told her he had died suddenly of a heart attack; at least the suddenly was true. Oh, when’s the funeral? Agnes asked. Didn’t you see it yesterday? I said.

  And then I waited. I waited to see what would happen. In my heart I felt that somebody would come to ask about Antonio. But the days passed, and then the weeks, and nobody came. So, without planning anything, I had done it all successfully. I was relieved. Not just because nobody seemed to care if what I said about Antonio was true, but because he was no longer there to inflict pain on Rex and me. He was dead.

  I took the body into the bedroom and left it on the floor. It lay there for nearly two days. Then I realised what I would do with it. I did not like doing what I did, because I cannot even stand to look at carcasses in butchers’ shops, but it was necessary. The worst part was the lower half of him. I did it with my eyes closed. It made a mess. But I cleaned that up all right. Later, when I had everything in the jars, I washed the carpet.

  Now there is only the arm left.

  I fell asleep. When I next opened my eyes it was ten o’clock.

  I am still wearing my clothes, because last night I did not undress for bed. I get up and go through to the kitchen. I boil water and make coffee. I drink it.

  Now comes the part I like least of all. I return to the bedroom and get the jar down from the wardrobe. I then go back to the kitchen and empty the spirit from the jar. I shake the arm out into the sink. It is not the whole arm, because it has been severed just below the elbow. I then take the boiling water that remains in the kettle and pour it over the arm, leaving it to steep for a time. This removes any traces of spirit.

  I go into the front room and drink my coffee, while the arm steeps. I do not feel anything, just a sense of numbness. As I say, I do not associate the arm with Antonio. He is dead. All that is left behind is flesh and muscle. Even if I did think of the arm in connection with Antonio, I do not believe it would much matter. After what he tried to do to me, and after what he did to Rex, he deserves anything.

  When the arm has been in the water for long enough, I take the meat cleaver from the cupboard and hack the arm with it. Half of the time I do not look. I do not like to look. But I open my eyes now and then just to make sure that I am doing it properly. When it is cut up, and no longer recognisable, I put it all on to a plate. This I place in the refrigerator.

  I make my bed and sweep round the room. The broken door annoys me. I will buy some wood today and repair it. Antonio said often that I should have been the man. But I wouldn’t want to be a man.

  Then I go into the yard. Rex is awake. He is looking at me keenly, his tongue hanging out. Soon I shall be able to bring him indoors. It is not healthy for him to be outside all the time.

  I kiss and pat him. He is such a friendly dog.

  Then I bring him his breakfast. There is enough of Antonio’s arm to last for three days.

  While he eats, I go back into the house. I like to think of him eating, but I do not like to watch him. I sit on the bed. There are several empty jars. It is funny to see them empty. I think about Edward Carson. He would have filled them nicely. But now he has gone.

  I think about the man next door, and I wonder. Could I? From the window of the bedroom I can see Rex eat. It is good to see him happy. It is good that he is free from pain. Free, unless the man next door comes again. But if he does come again, I think I know what I can do.

  8

  Eric

  He didn’t come back. He went out on the Sunday and he didn’t come back. I wondered for a time if she might have him down there but I decided she couldn’t have. He’d cleared off. Just like that. A snap of the fingers and he’s gone.

  Mind you, I never liked him much anyway. He was too sort of sharp and couldn’t look you straight in the eye, too shifty for my liking. I’m not saying he wasn’t friendly enough in his way, it was just that he let me down when I needed him most. Still, he left behind a bottle of whisky and you’ve got to be grateful for small mercies. But I’m glad he’s gone. I’m not just saying that.

  Anyhow, I’ve got other worries.

  It isn’t just the sores that are taking a long time to heal up, or even because of the dog and his noise – no, I got this letter from King’s with my cards in it, saying don’t come back, you’re unsatisfactory. Twelve years. How can anybody say that after twelve years? I went down there the same day as the letter came, but the gatekeeper wouldn’t let me through. You old bastard, I said to him. But he just turned away and wouldn’t speak.

  I’ve got twenty pounds in the Post Office and I have to see a man at the Labour Exchange tomorrow. I’ll get another job easily enough. It’s just that I wish Matt was here to advise me. He knew about things like that.

  And then there’s the dog. It still troubles me, and I’m going to settle the matter soon. But I drink whisky at night and that helps me a bit. It doesn’t take the noise away, no, but it helps. It acts like a sedative, you see. If you take two or three codeine tablets along with it, then you drop off. Then the noise sounds like it’s coming from miles away instead of just a few yards.

  I didn’t think Matt would go without saying goodbye. Just like that. I thought all along that we’d been friends. But now I see wh
at it is. There wasn’t anything between us, really. Sometimes you can think that a person is your friend, but you can be wrong. Nigel and Charlie, for example. I waited outside King’s until after work and when they came out they said Hard luck, Eric, and that sort of thing, but they were in a hurry to get away from me. It was obvious.

  Still, I’ll get another job. There’s bound to be plenty at the Labour Exchange.

  Now I come to my main worry.

  Yesterday, Wednesday, I was walking down Ponsonby Gardens when Mrs Peluzzi came up to me.

  She said, ‘Good morning.’

  Surprised, I stopped. I didn’t say anything. She had on a pair of dark glasses. I couldn’t see her eyes.

  ‘We have had nothing but trouble since we first met,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you think we could try again?’

  ‘Try what?’ I asked. I wasn’t going to commit myself.

  ‘Try to be better neighbours?’

  I nearly laughed. Better neighbours? We couldn’t have been worse.

  ‘I mean, we could forget what has happened in the past and we could try again,’ she said.

  I had this odd feeling that she was staring at me crazily from behind her glasses. I couldn’t forget her eyes before.

  ‘Life is too short to bear grudges,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not the sort to bear grudges,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think I am?’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘No, we must try again,’ she said. ‘Remember what Our Lord said about seventy times seven?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you come some afternoon for tea?’

  Later, when I got back to the room, I thought about all this. But it didn’t make sense.