Invisible Blood Page 4

  She looked at the patch he was cleaning. The sticky dark stain on the lowest step was, she noted, roughly the shape of Spain. Carlos was mute, and as a consequence his features were highly expressive. He shrugged at her, rolling his eyes at the door above. He had successfully scrubbed away the marks on the landing. Now he tipped soapy water across the last step, dissolving the Spanish map.

  * * *

  Pippa was next, of course. As Linda started the coffee she stood in the doorway looking up at the ceiling, listening. “They’re asleep, thank goodness,” she said, coming in. “I brought cake.” Her wide brown eyes spoke volumes. “I shall be sent to Hell for saying it, but the answers to prayers come in many disguises. He beat her all the time and she did nothing. That was why she could never go out. Her body was black and blue.”

  “Have you talked to her?” Linda asked. “How is she? It must have been awful finding him there.”

  “Yes, probably. She is at the police station.”

  “Why?” Linda brought over cups and plates, setting them in their usual places. “Surely they don’t suspect her?”

  “What, you think she bashed in his head and dragged him to the stairs? Where would she get such a weapon to do this?”

  “You’ve thought it through, then,” Linda observed.

  “She is at the police station because she must make a statement,” said Pippa, unwrapping the cake. “After all, she found his body. I myself think she is in a dangerous situation. Her husband was friends with the captain of police.” She raised a knife over the cake and cut it. “When Maria was younger and even prettier she was arrested. But the handsome young policemen did not press charges and let her come home.” She left the implication hanging in the air. “Your husband is also friendly with the police, no?”

  “Miguel? He never told me that.”

  “There are many things he doesn’t tell you, I think.”

  “Is there anything we can do for Maria?” she asked, feeling as useless as all who merely observe. “Perhaps we should go down there and vouch for her character.”

  “And how can you do that when you have not properly met her? No, we must pray for her,” said Pippa with finality. “That is all we can do. It is as my mother said: The men do the work and the women do the praying.”

  An argument of such simplicity was hard to refute. They ate their slices of cake in silence and tried not to glance across at the washing line.

  “At least she will be a rich widow,” said Pippa, munching. “We have a saying: The new wife comes before the old children.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, as Linda sat in her chair by the windows and read, Maria’s glass door opened and sunlight suddenly fell into her room. The great lead crucifix had gone from the wall. There remained a single bare nail.

  It was washday. She heard Maria singing “Bésame Mucho” as she hung out the washing. Linda tried to catch her eye but as usual the girl kept her head bowed modestly. The iris dress, white and blue, had reappeared. She hung it out and went back inside.

  Linda wondered where the crucifix had gone.

  The afternoon sank into a state of overheated enervation, but she found herself unable to settle. It felt as if a storm was breaking somewhere nearby. She read a few pages, then tried to plan the evening’s meal, but found herself pacing back and forth across the drawing room.

  At 5:00 pm a car pulled up in the street outside and two policemen got out. One of them was carrying a large wooden box with a leather handle. They looked up at the building, then went to the entrance. Linda knew who they had come for and why they were there; they would question Maria and examine the scene of the death. The box contained forensic equipment.

  * * *

  When she went to her chair by the open windows she glanced across and saw that the iris dress had gone, although the pegs were still in place. Leaning over the edge, she looked down. The dress had slipped free of its line and had fallen into the centre of the little stone courtyard.

  Latching the door, she ran downstairs, carefully counting the steps as she went. At the bottom a small back door opened onto the outside area. She quickly gathered up the light cotton dress and took it upstairs to her flat. When she examined it in bright sunlight she saw that it was no longer just blue and white but had several irregular pink patches, including one geometric shape that, to her mind, resembled the upper half of a crucifix.

  Maria had scrubbed the dress, but not with the right detergent. At the hem were several carmine spots she had completely missed in her panic.

  Linda poured a solution of soap and bleach into her sink, adding boiling water. While it was soaking she went to the windows and looked across once more. The men were pacing around Maria, asking her questions.

  She acted quickly and without hesitation. Running back to the sink, Linda rinsed out the dress, noting with satisfaction that the fabric had been restored to its crisp white background. Even the hem was spotless. She squeezed out most of the water, but the dress was still damp and heavy. Laying it across her arms, she left the apartment and went across to Maria’s building.

  On the way, she stopped in the courtyard and dropped the dress back onto the dirty stone floor. Then she picked it back up and climbed the stairs. Carlos had made a good job of the stonework. The steps had already dried. Approaching the partially opened door, she could hear the detective’s questions.

  “One last thing, Mrs Masvidal. You were up and dressed when your husband left for work, yes? What were you wearing when you went to the front door and found he had fallen?”

  She barged in, acting as though she had no idea that there was anyone else in the flat. She spoke loudly and confidently to cover her nervousness. “Maria, darling, your lovely dress fell off the washing line. I’m afraid it will need another rinse.”

  The astonished Maria accepted the wet dress from her.

  “She washes her clothes every Thursday,” Linda explained to the severe-looking gentlemen. “I see everything. I live in the flat directly opposite.” She turned her attention to Maria. “One of your pegs broke. Such a pretty dress. I saw it fall from the line.” She gave everyone a nice friendly smile. “Well, I can see you have friends over. Perhaps if you’d like to have coffee later?”

  She smiled again and left them all standing there in the middle of the living room. When she reached her own flat, she put the coffee on. After a few minutes she heard the throaty ignition of a car engine and got to the front window in time to see the police drive off.

  Linda unlatched her front door, then made the coffee and set out three cups. She unwrapped some chocolate cake she had been saving and cut three thick slices.

  When she looked up, Maria and Pippa were standing in the open doorway, waiting to be invited in.

  BLOOD LINES

  STELLA DUFFY

  Three nights in and the pain is almost too much.

  Every joint aches, every place where bone rubs on bone, sinew reaches into bone, where muscle twists around bone, I feel as if I am splintering into myself, cracking within from the depths of me. The places that hurt are all of the usual joints where any of us may rub away a lifetime of cartilage and find ourselves left with bone on bone, the places that get us all in the end—knees and hips, lower back, shoulders—but for me the pain is more than simply the aging of my skeleton and what surrounds it. This pain rises up at every point where a human body might bend or twist, reach or stretch, ricocheting internal agonies from bone to flesh and back again.

  Each one of the knuckles on my fingers and my toes is a site of concentrated suffering. She shall cry wounding wherever she goes. My neck, my elbows, my wrists, are racked from inside. Every one of the knobbly vertebrae counting down my spine sing out their individual pain-name as I try to rest, give myself to the ground. I hope that lying might be easier than sitting, standing easier than lying. Decades of this pain have taught me that there is no easier way, have shown me the steps I must pass through to come to ease, and still I shift in my chair,
lift in my bed, turn in my pose in vain hope.

  My body moves because it cannot be still in pain, my mind a labyrinth of pointless suggestions, each one tried a dozen times or more. I know there is no remedy, no solution, just the pain, standing, sitting, sleeping, not sleeping, living with pain and, even so, I search for respite. I practise giving in to it, I meditate on ignoring it, I attempt revelling in it because there is nothing to be done, yet maybe this is the one thing that can be done, and I greet my pain as one long-known.

  There is no way round but allowing it and eventually, every other option tried and failed, I do. I cede. You would think that after all these years I would have learned to give in sooner, taught myself to accept, to stay with, instead of trying to outrun, the inner mutilation. But I am not that evolved, have not yet become one who, confronted with her own mortality, can stare it in the face with equanimity. I look away, shadow my gaze, blink in coyness and fear and, eventually, as ever, pain takes my chin in her firm grasp, turns my lined face to hers and demands I look her in the eyes. Then, finally, I yield, give in, surrender. This pain is all of me. And what it heralds, what it reveals, is all and only mine.

  Of course, I had a choice. I could have taken myself to the highest bridge and jumped into the abyss beneath, or thrown myself in front of a speeding train, a rush-hour bus heavy with urgent passengers. I could have filled my pockets with sea-smoothed stones and laid me down to welcome the rising tide. I have done none of these things because in the months or years between bouts of pain and revelation I lived as easily as you do, as normally as you do.

  (Are you easy? Normal? No, neither am I, but we are all so skilled at the pretence, aren’t we?)

  I did not kill myself, I had no choice but to bear it. I have borne it for decades now.

  * * *

  The first time it happened, I was a girl edging into a woman. Given what comes after the pain I have often thought how useful it would be if I could link these bone and muscle and tissue pains to the pain of my own bleeding, one linked to the other, blood to blood in a womanly echo. That is how nice stories go, but it is not what happened and this is not a nice story. I was well into my fifteenth year, accommodated to my personal lunar cycle when the pain cycle began, the other rhythm that has ruled my life for more than five decades.

  The orbit of my torment is not regular, it matches no heavenly bodies even though it is deeply ingrained in earthbound ones, bound for the earth. The irregularity means that even after all this time it creeps up on me and I can be in the throes before I realise I am part of it again, my darker cycle.

  Since I became menopausal this has been my only cycle and it has come more often. In my youth I experienced it just once or twice a decade, more than enough for a growing person, one already feeling too fiercely the shifts and uncertainties as we begin to make our way in our teens and twenties, those awful years of no belonging, no true home. When my children were small the episodes of pain came more often, but I attributed that to any mother’s mortal fears for her child, every mother’s excessive imaginings—though I did not need imagination to understand excess. The children left home, their fathers went too, and since I have lived alone I have paid more attention to this other pattern, the pattern only I possess. While I cannot track when it will arrive, it does not match weeks or months, count in sevens or twelves, I have come to know intimately the path it will follow once it is with me, when it takes me up, fills me up.

  Today is my third day of pain, tonight will be the third night; I know I will sleep very little if at all. When I wake tomorrow the world will look quite different.

  I didn’t know any of this the first time. I had the pains, yes, but my mother called them growing pains. My father thought I was trying to get out of school. My sister complained I’d kept her awake all night with my groaning, even though we had separate rooms by then and I knew that her nights were disturbed by her dreams of Clyde Forster, not my suffering. Before I understood that the pain was easier to bear by giving in to it, I tried to walk through it, work through it. I found that concentrating on something else, anything else, was useful if not entirely successful.

  That morning I concentrated on the awful blood on the heavy boots of the lollipop lady. I imagined we would get to school and there would be an assembly about the dreadful accident that had happened before we all arrived. When no assembly was called and we trooped off to English, Biology, French with no call to come together and offer up prayers for the dearly departed, I decided the blood must have come from one of her cats. We knew the lollipop lady had a dozen cats or more. Her house was the old and smelly one at the end of Marshall Road, right where our ordinary town streets hit the beginning of the big dual carriageway. It must have been one of her cats, squashed beneath the wheels of an uncaring businessman’s company car as he raced to the meeting that would finalise his bonus, or broken beneath the huge tyres of the buses that drove factory workers from our little town to the dark new city four miles west. By the time our school day ended with ninety minutes of quadratic equations, the room and my brain slowed down by sun pouring through the afternoon windows, the pain had receded to less than a memory. It was a past itch of hurt, once there, now nothing even to remind me it had gone.

  It came back three years later. By then I was training as a nurse. I was not drawn to nursing as a caring profession, nor was my own experience of pain the reason I had decided to train. I wanted to leave home, to get out of our stifling little town. I thought myself better than our parents and their factory jobs in the city. I knew I was neither as capable nor as interested in learning as my sister with her university place, and took the only route open to girls like me from people like mine.

  Nursing paid a little while we trained and offered a small room in the nurses’ home; it was a way of getting out while not risking too much. I did not yet understand that there is no cocoon against risk.

  Two years into my training I believed myself an independent nineteen-year-old. I had a prescription for the pill and a boyfriend in his third year of medical school; we were starting to weave dreams for a future together and thought ourselves very fine indeed. Our plans to share a small flat the following year would have been daring if my parents had been at all interested in what I did with my life, if his Nigerian family had any suspicions that he was wasting his precious study time with a poor white girl from a small town family. Mine were not and his did not and so we rolled into an easy two-step that allowed each of us to believe we were braver than we were while also offering ready access to the frantic and fulfilling sex our youthful bodies demanded.

  The nurses’ home backed on to a graveyard, a crowded place of angels with broken wings standing sentry above young wives taken too soon in childbirth, dead children alongside them. Elizabeth aged nine years, Charles aged six years, Mary Alice four months, much beloved. Beyond the long dead babies was an Edwardian monstrosity of a church with no redeeming features. In a nod to the twentieth century the hospital trustees, a fat group of great and good who prided themselves on bettering this tired city and lifting it above the factories that enabled their largesse, had installed in the church tower an automated bell that tolled each hour from six in the morning until midnight, with a tedious peal at midday. No matter how late we nurses had gone to bed after our night shift, crawling back to our cupboard rooms with aching feet and eyes gritty from the night, the church bell assured us of our location and the exact hour we were failing to sleep.

  My shift finished as usual at eight that morning, we talked through the handover until eight thirty, I left the hospital and made the short walk to the nurses’ home, rubbing dry eyes with hands that stank of liniment and bandages from my stint on the elderly ward, all arthritis and wasting lives. I sluiced away the worst of the night in the communal bathroom that served eighteen young women, pulled the thin curtains against the damp summer day and lay myself down on my bed. I had not even pulled up the covers before I fell asleep.

  When the pain woke me the church
bell was tolling midday. I came to, groggy and uncertain. By our second year we prided ourselves on hearing the bell every hour, noting its lunchtime alarm, but doing no more than shifting in our beds, turning the pillow to the cool side to sleep on. This was not an ordinary day.

  The pain arrived with the repetitive peal and it did not leave me. It was different from the pain I experienced at fifteen, somehow both more on the surface of me—this time my skin hurt as much as the places where my bones met—and also deeper, in the marrow of me. It may be that by my second year of training I had words for these parts of me, for the capillaries that opened to allow burning blood to flow through, for the specific nerves ripping at me from deep inside muscle fibre, and that knowledge may have made my suffering more specific.

  I lay for a full hour and marvelled at what was happening within me. From midday until the one o’clock bell I twisted and turned, sweated and froze, uttered guttural groans with my fist in my mouth to leave my neighbours sleeping and whispered into the foetid air of my tiny room the worst curses my Nigerian lover had taught me. I did all this and somehow lifted above the pain. I watched myself, observing from far within my mind while simultaneously experiencing each interminable second.

  By early afternoon the pain had ebbed a little. This was to become the pattern for many decades of my life, a sudden onslaught, a slow leaving and then a pulsing of the pain, to and from my body, to and from myself, to and from the me that resided in the body and the me that cowered in my mind, watching pain run its course in morbid fascination. By the time I was washed and dressed ready for my shift the pain had receded to searing blossoms of agony every five to seven minutes, one burst in my lower back, the next in my left shoulder, the third stabbing between my intercostal muscles on the right-hand side, the fourth a solid burn at the back of my right eye. It travelled around my body, taking up residence for three, four, five impossible breaths and then moving on. I knew I could not explain it and therefore I would bear it. I thought I could bear it.