Eliana reappeared from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two glasses and what looked uncomfortably like a couple of cans of beer.
‘Uh…you do know how old I am, I take it,’ I said.
She looked down at the cans. ‘You mean these? Show me even one girl of your age who hasn’t tasted this stuff and I’ll take yours back to the refrigerator.’
‘You win,’ I sighed. ‘So what’s next? A spliff to break the ice a little?’
She laughed. ‘Even I have my limits. Go on, sit down. You make the place look untidy.’
I sat down. She sat opposite me, setting the tray on the coffee table between us with a graceful ease. She opened a can, poured chilled gold into one of the glasses and handed it to me. I sipped at it eagerly, glad to have something cold and wet after the claustrophobic heat of the bus journey.
‘Not your first?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘Depends who’s asking.’
No, it wasn’t the first time I’d had beer. Mum’s boyfriend John had seen to that. It was late Spring, after mum had told my father she wanted a divorce but before he’d thrown his legal tantrum. Supper had come and gone, and we were sitting in the garden, stretched out in ancient deckchairs that the previous owner had left behind. The sun was edging down in the sky, the dishes had yet to be done, and we were the three of us just lazing away what little was left of the day.
I remembered giggling at something John had said, some comment about the utter decadence of beer at the end of the day, when he suddenly grabbed a can from the bucket of iced water by his deckchair and tossed it at me.
‘Here!’ he said. ‘Catch!’
I caught it cold and wet in my hands, looked down at it, didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.
‘John!’ said mum. ‘She’s not old enough!’
‘Legally, no,’ he said. ‘But who’s looking? And anyway, a few sips won’t hurt her.’
Mum grunted some vague disagreement but didn’t pursue it: feeling too lazy, I guessed.
‘Hold it upright,’ he was saying to me now, ‘with the opening pointing away from you.’
I held it up. ‘Like this?’
‘Perfect. Now take the ring pull under your thumb and lift it just a little.’
I lifted it, heard a faint fizzing sound, saw froth bubbling out from under it.
‘That’s it, let the pressure out…Slowly…Slowly…Okay, finished?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Can I drink it now?’
‘Push the ring pull full forward then pull it back and yes!’
I did as he said and lifted the can to my lips…took a sip…and coughed it back out again.
‘It tastes funny!’ I said, wiping my hand across my mouth to clear the spillage.
‘What were you expecting? Something sweet like a soda? It’s an acquired taste. You’ll get used to it.’
As if to reinforce his point, he took another swig from his own. Mum? She just eyed him dubiously, glanced at me and shook her head. But she didn’t try to take the can away…
‘Is the beer okay?’ —A voice dragging back to the present.
‘It’s fine, thanks,’ I said. ‘Just…just remembering something, something from when life was good.’
‘When you were with your mother,’ she said. I nodded. ‘So tell me about her.’
I told her. I told her how close we were, everything we shared. I told her how my father seemed always to be on the outside, never seemed bothered by that or even tried to change it. I told her about being in England, about mum and John, about the life we had together. I filled in all the gaps that had been left out of the snatched conversation we’d managed on the patio at beloved nonna’s. I covered everything. By the time I’d finished, she could have been in no doubt about which parent my heart lay with.
‘Hmm,’ she said at length. ‘Vittorio has a lot to answer for here, I think. When he made his abduction case, did your lawyer not try to get it dismissed?’
‘She tried everything,’ I said. ‘But always, always there was some new point of law to be argued. It was like my father had a whole battery of legal experts lined up ready for whatever we could throw at him next.’
‘And when the judgement was pronounced, why did you go with him?’
I looked up at her, puzzled. ‘What do you mean, why did I go with him? I had to. Returned to his care immediately, the judge said.’
‘No, Elisa, all you had to do was not go with him.’
‘But—but how?’
She leaned forward, smiling sadly. ‘Since we met, I have been doing some research on the internet. You see, the court was empowered to hand you back to your father, yes, but not keep you with him.’
I didn’t answer, just gazed dumbly at her.
‘All you had to do was walk away,’ she went on. ‘The court had done its job, it had handed you back to your father. But if you then chose to disobey him, that was a family matter and his problem. The court would have done nothing to intervene.’
‘So that’s why he did it!’ I breathed. ‘That’s why he rushed me out of England so quickly!’
‘Mmm. He was afraid of you doing just what I’ve told you. He knew of the possibility all along.’
I hated him. In that moment, I hated him more than I ever thought I could. And yet…
‘Is it too late now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, can I just walk away from him now, go back to England and there’s nothing the courts will do to stop me?’
‘It is, you can’t and they will,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sorry but the moment you left English soil, you acknowledged his parental authority and his right to take you. If you try to leave now, you will be classed as a runaway and pursued. And you will be brought back. To him.’
I felt my eyes stinging. Of all the stupid…dumb…Was that all it would have taken, for me to let him get me outside the courtroom then tell him to go to hell? And I’d run back to mum and tell her it was all right, that I wasn’t leaving her. And we’d go, the three of us—mum, John and me—back to our home in Dorset to live happily ever after and forget about my stupid father and his stupid work and his stupid family and his stupid everything. I couldn’t handle it. I put my can of illegality on the coffee table and buried my face in my hands.
I didn’t hear her move, just felt the cushion beside me sag a little as she sat down, felt a comforting arm wrapping itself over me, a gentle hand resting on my shoulder.
‘It’s okay,’ she said softly. ‘I understand how you feel.’
‘Do you?’ I said thickly. ‘If only I’d known!’
‘The question is, why didn’t your mother’s lawyer know? Who was he?’
‘She,’ I corrected absently. ‘She wasn’t mum’s, she was John’s. She’d acted for him when he bought his house, and when my father started sounding off with his legal stuff, he asked her to take the case on, even paid for her, too.’
‘Ah. Then much can be explained. She was probably very good with the buying of houses but when it came to international law…well…what I found is not written in any legal book.’
‘I wish I’d known,’ I said again. ‘So simple.’
‘Such is life,’ Eliana sighed. ‘Full of what-ifs and might-have-beens. But come! The morning has worn away and it is nearly time for lunch. Will you help me in the kitchen?’
I nodded and got up to follow her.
Lunch was a surprise. Not because it was good but because without knowing it, she’d planned one of my favourite dishes of all time—Involtini di pesce spada. So yeah, I helped her. I helped her make up the filling of a little onion fried in a pan, to which we added chopped up swordfish, pine nuts, raisins, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper. We had great fun filling strips of swordfish with this mixture, rolling them up and sticking little skewers through them to stop them falling apart, scattering olive oil and breadcrumbs over them then leaving them to bake in the oven. Because that’s what Involtini di pesce spada is—swordfish rolls. And I love them.
But while we we
re doing this, she’d already been boiling pasta for a starter, to be served with artichokes. Simple, yeah, but also good. It all came together right on time, and we were soon sitting down at the table with plates wafting delicious steam up our noses.
‘You will take a little wine, yes?’ she said as she poured me half a glass without waiting for an answer. After the beer, I couldn’t argue.
‘So what will you do now?’ she asked as we started on the pasta. ‘Now you know what you’ve learned here today, I mean.’
‘Before I answer that,’ I said, my mouth still half full, ‘you said you researched all this on the internet. But why? Why go to all that trouble. It’s like you’re going against your family’s wishes.’
‘Perhaps that is exactly what I’m doing.’
‘Yeah, but why? I mean, if they ever found out about this, you’d be even less welcome than you are now. I saw the way my father treated you, how he just ignored you until he couldn’t avoid you any longer. Why are you doing this?’
She looked directly at me. ‘What is the first duty of a parent?’ she asked.
First duty? I didn’t know, couldn’t know. I was kid—a 14-year-old kid, maybe, but still a kid. What would I know about parental duty?
‘It is really very simple,’ she said, rescuing me. ‘To listen to the child.’
‘And that’s it?’ I said, still none the wiser. ‘You think my father hasn’t been listening to me?’
‘Not just him, Elisa, and not just you.’
And it hit me. Revenge. Pure and simple, this was revenge. Just as my father had refused to listen to me, so her parents had refused to listen to her, had tried to bludgeon her into a marriage she didn’t want then effectively turned their backs on her when she refused to bend to their wishes. Through helping me, she was getting back at them.
‘You understand now?’ she said, picking up her wine and taking a sip. I nodded. ‘So I ask again: what will you do now?’
I didn’t know, I just didn’t know, and told her so. ‘I mean, acting up in front of his beloved parents is one thing,’ I added, ‘but it doesn’t get me anywhere, it doesn’t achieve anything.’
‘Maybe more than you think,’ she said easily. ‘But go on.’
I shrugged. ‘What more is there to say? I only know one thing for certain, that I have to get back to England—you know that, don’t you?’
‘Let’s just say I value my life too highly to try and stop you.’
‘Then help me! Tell me what I have to do to get away from here and back to my family, my real family.’
She set her wine down, thought about this for a moment. ‘Vittorio—your father—he fought dirty, didn’t he?’
‘Oh, you think?’
‘So there is only one answer.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘You have to fight dirty, too.’
I didn’t answer. She was right. I didn’t like to even think about what she was suggesting but she was right. She smiled then, guessed the turmoil inside.
‘Finish your pasta,’ she said, ‘then we’ll attack the swordfish.’
FIFTEEN
More shouting.
This time, I wasn’t listening to music. This time, I was in my room. Making a list.
My father had quizzed me when I got back from Aunt Eliana’s—hey, there’s a surprise—but only half-heartedly, like he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what had passed between us. The interrogation I’d expected turned out to be a wary and oblique conversation, always circling the central questions, never diving in and confronting them direct. And even as I was climbing the stairs to my room, I could hear him lifting the telephone, no doubt to report in to beloved nonna like a secret agent passing on the latest military intentions of a belligerent nation. Well, let him, I’d thought. Like they say in all the best spy films, he’d got nothing out of me.
But that had been some while ago. Since then, I’d pulled out pen and paper and started listing all the things I could do that would count as fighting dirty. It hadn’t been going well, the ideas few and far between, and then there was this, an almost welcome interruption. And it was following the same pattern as last time. He’d shout then a pause, and he’d shout some more then another pause, and so on. Just like last time. Just like when—OHMIGOD!
I leapt for the door, throwing pen and paper aside in my haste to get to him before he could hang up.
I flew down the stairs, caught him unawares just as he was telling the other person that Elisa wanted no more contact with her so—
He didn’t finish. I grabbed the phone out of his hand, almost screamed into it.
‘MUM! MUM, IT’S ME! DON’T LISTEN TO—’
Now I was the one who didn’t finish. My father slammed his hand down on the cradle, cutting me off short. She was gone.
We stood there for long moments, glaring coldly at each other.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why can’t I speak to my own mother?’
‘You are too young to understand,’ he said briskly and taking the phone from me. ‘One day you will but for now you are too young.’
‘Yeah, like you said last time. And in the pile-of-crap stakes, we both know it’s a front-runner.’
‘You do not need her, Lisetta,’ he pleaded. ‘Your life is here. With us, with your family.’
‘To hell with them and to hell with you! There’s some other reason for this and I intend to find it.’
‘Do as you will,’ he waved dismissively. ‘But for now, you are living under my roof and you will do as I say. Be ready to go out tomorrow evening at seven-thirty. We will be attending a meeting at eight.’
‘Meeting?’ I said, puzzled. ‘What meeting?’
‘Have you not heard anything I just said? You do not ask questions, you just do as you are told. Seven-thirty. Clear?’
And he was gone, orders issued, control restored. I watched him go, feeling contempt and more than contempt. My glance strayed back to the phone, wondering. Had mum heard me? Did she understand the reality here? I hoped so. But I knew I had to find a way to make sure.
I climbed the stairs back to my room and my list. I’d just thought of something more to add to it.
SIXTEEN
They looked shifty. Mean. Like they had something to hide and weren’t making a very good job of it.
We were sitting in a wide oval in a big room, most of the chairs taken, just two empty. At one end of the oval, some guy who was obviously the leader was shuffling papers together, the sound barely audible above the low murmur the rest of them were making as they conspired with each other, my father included. He was talking low and animatedly with the guy next to him, a thin stick of agitation who darted nervous glances in all directions as he listened, like he was looking for someone else to talk to, to rescue him from the constant stream of drivel my father was spouting. I could relate to that.
Me? I was the only female present, a small but apparently significant fact that had caused something of a stir when we entered, my father ushering me forward while whispering in my ear for the umpteenth time that this meeting was important to him, that I was to say nothing. I didn’t know who these people were or what this supposed meeting was about, he still hadn’t told me, but he’d made it sound serious and it had to be said they did look pretty annoyed about something. I had the feeling that once that guy stopped shuffling his papers, I would find out just what the hell was going on here. And I was right.
He cleared his throat. The murmur stopped.
‘I call to order this session of the Associazione Padri Ingiustamente Abbandonati dai Loro Carissimi Figli,’ he said solemnly.
Now I understood. Association of Fathers Unjustly Abandoned by Their Dearest Children. Now I understood all too well: this was a fathers group. You know what I’m talking about, you’ll have seen them on TV: their members are divorced fathers who dress up like Batman and tie themselves to bridges and stuff to get attention for their cause, that they don’t get to see their kids as much as they think th
ey deserve. Yeah, that was what this was about. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was why I was there.
‘We are all present,’ the guy went on, ‘except for our member Enzo Bertone—’
‘And his mother!’ said a voice, and low laughter rippled round the room.
‘—Quite so. But I am informed that they will be along later. In the meantime, I suggest we continue. Has there been any progress by any member in gaining access to their children since our last meeting?’
A hand on the other side of the room shot up. It belonged to a black haired weasel with dark eyes you wouldn’t want looking at you for very long.
‘The chair recognises member Fabrizio Anastasi,’ said the leader.
‘I have heard back from the court,’ he said, and it was here that he started getting a little forceful, shouting the odd word here and there and stabbing the air as though trying to hammer it home with his finger. ‘And they tell me the mother’s LAWYER has asked for my application for ACCESS to be DENIED! MY lawyer says this goes AGAINST all NATURAL JUSTICE and that I have a RIGHT to see my children and the mother should not be ALLOWED to DEMAND this!—’
—and so it went on, shout and stab, shout and stab until he ran out of steam and finished his rant with a muttered curse, possibly against the legal system for failing to kowtow to his every whim, probably against the mother for daring to think she had legal rights, too. I didn’t know, didn’t care. If home life had been anything like what I was seeing then, I could well understand why this wife was now an ex-wife.
Next up was something of a celebrity. Or at least, that’s what the leader said he was. He introduced him as the man who had done more to bring the group’s aims to the attention of the world than anyone he could remember. And what had he done? He’d locked himself in a cubicle in a public toilet and refused to come out. Actually, thinking about it and if you knew anything at all about public toilets in Sicily, you’d know that yeah, he probably was something special.