The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (27 page)

On the way to the airport, they passed through streets she’d never even seen before, neglected shop-fronts, dusty squares where the café windows were half-boarded over.

The taxi driver slammed on the brakes.

A woman had run out into the middle of the street. Mamma could see that her face was bleeding. There were deep gouges down her face, her dress was ripped and her feet were bare.

For a moment, the woman was caught there, framed in the windscreen, her eyes too wide and the blood on her face, before a man appeared and dragged her backwards by her hair onto the pavement.

Mamma could see now that there was a small knot of people around them and still more gathering. One of them, an old woman wrapped in a black
chador
, spat at the woman and muttered something. Another man picked up a stone from the street and flung it at her. The woman cowered, trying to shield her face with her bare arms. She crouched in the dirty street and Mamma could hear her voice: ‘Please, please, Safiq, listen to me, I haven’t done anything…’

‘What’s happening?’ Mamma asked.

‘She has brought shame on her family,’ said the taxi driver, scratching his chin. ‘What’s to be done? They will probably kill her.’ 

Sitting there in the back of the taxi, with the taxi driver’s prayer beads swinging from the rearview mirror and the woman’s voice in her ears, Mamma remembered the ending from her favourite film, the part where Vicky, the ballerina, has jumped from the balcony and is lying broken on the stretcher, asking her husband to please take off her red shoes. 

As she sat there in the back of the taxi, Mamma said, she realised that perhaps she might have to choose.

For so many years after, she wouldn’t talk about the Old Country, the one that she’d lost. It’s a different place now, she used to say. The place that I’m from doesn’t exist any more.

This was why she refused to teach me any Farsi. Because she believed that people in the West associated it with ignorance and lack of education, with young girls swathed in black from head to toe and women stoned to death in their own streets. They think we’re all terrorists, she said.

But she did tell me my great-grandmother’s stories, the stories from that lost country, the one that came before.

Yes, to understand the woman I learned to call not
Madaar
in her own language but
Mamma
in her husband’s language and then eventually Mum, you have to understand how much she wanted to leave the past behind.

In the end, it wasn’t so much that she wanted something else, something more. It was the thing that she didn’t want, the thing that she was afraid of, that ate away at her from the inside. That was the reason she couldn’t be still. That was what made it so hard for her to stop moving.

It took me a while to work it out. She was so good at pretending. She’d put on a dress, line her eyes with kohl, outline her smile with red lipstick and no one would ever know.

But despite all this and the beautiful shoes in her suitcase - leopard print and gold and, of course, glossy red - she wasn’t dancing. She was running.

*

‘So where will we go, Mum? What’s the plan? And what about school, my exams, all of that stuff…’

Mamma refused to meet her eye.

‘I’m not exactly sure,’ she said ‘I haven’t quite got it all worked out yet. But I will. You know me. By the end of the week, I’ll know what’s happening.’

Ella picked up a magazine that she’d left on the kitchen table. It was folded back at a page from the classifieds:

 ‘Wanted: Live-in housekeeper for private home in beautiful setting in rural Scottish Highlands. Own accommodation provided to very high standard in separate coach house, plus use of car. To provide meals for Italian family of four, supervise cleaning and general maintenance. Fluent Italian a definite advantage… ‘

Ella didn’t finish reading.

‘Is this what you’ve got in mind?
THIS?
’ She didn’t even try to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘Rural bloody Scotland?’

‘Don’t swear,’ said Mamma, automatically.

‘But what about the shop, your business, everything you’ve worked for? What about me? I don’t want to live in some big old house in the middle of nowhere. For God’s sake, mum. I’ll end up like Katrina!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mamma, quietly.

But Ella could see that she hadn’t made up her mind. There was a little chink of doubt, a little gap in Mamma’s usually cast-iron determination.

‘What about David?’ she said.

Mamma waved her hand in irritation, as if she were swatting away a fly.

‘
Tsk
, Ella. Let me get on.’

*

Ella had only been to David’s house a couple of times before. The houses in his street all looked the same. Large stone terraces of three stories, small front gardens behind iron railings, front doors painted in elegant shades of green or grey and flanked by carefully manicured bay trees.

But David’s house, Ella remembered now, had roses growing around the doorway. Mamma had remarked at how beautiful they were, the flowers big and pink and wind-blown. Ella breathed their fragrance in as she took the knocker in her hand. It sounded too loud in the quiet street. She waited.

No answer. Perhaps he’d been called to the surgery.

A woman came out of the nextdoor house, negotiating the steps with a pram. She smiled at Ella.

‘If you’re after Dr Carter, you’ve just missed him. He went out ten minutes ago.’ She nodded to the gap where David always parked his car.

‘Thanks,’ said Ella. She wondered what to do next. Perhaps she should leave a note. She fished in her bag for a piece of paper.

The neighbour was already half-way up the road. Ella could hear her, cooing to the baby in the pram. She tried not to think about what it would be like to live here, in this nice neat house, on this nice quiet friendly street with Mamma and David.

She decided to walk to the surgery. Perhaps she’d find him there.

She turned left through the park at the end of the street and kept going, over the bridge where she’d sat with Billy that night, up the steps, hitting the main road now, with its steady flow of traffic.

Only a couple of weeks, but it already seemed such a long time ago. She thought of Billy and felt that familiar fluttery feeling in her stomach. She hadn’t told him that they were leaving, after all. Not yet.

As if on cue, her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. A text message from Billy:
El? Where are you? XXX

She swallowed. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let herself.

She was so lost in her own thoughts, walking towards the surgery, that she almost didn’t see it. Up there, on the left, outside Katrina’s house, a flash of yellow between the trees. She got closer.

Yes, it was what she’d thought. An ambulance parked in the driveway, its doors open. She started to run towards it, the gravel getting into her sandals, slowing her down.

And then out of Katrina’s front door, ahead of the stretcher, came David, bending to help lever the wheels of the trolley down the steps.

‘David!’

He turned.

‘Ella,’ he said, and a wave of concern crossed his face, ‘Is everything alright? Your mum?’

‘Oh, yes. Yes. She’s… well, she’s OK, I suppose. I was just looking for you. But what’s happened?’

From the stretcher there came a low moaning sound. Ella made out a limp figure under the red blanket, a face with a plastic mask over it, before the ambulance people – a man and a woman – began trundling the stretcher towards the ambulance, the man holding a drip full of some clear fluid high above his head.

David took her arm, manoeuvering her off to one side. ‘It’s Katrina’s mum,’ he said. ‘I got the call fifteen minutes ago. I told Graham to call an ambulance, right away. They were very fast. I got here at roughly the same time.’

‘But what happened?’

‘I don’t know yet. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this, you understand? Overdose, we think. Graham found her collapsed on the living room floor. She’d been drinking a lot. She was on some medications…’

Katrina appeared in the doorway now, with Graham behind her, his hand on her shoulder. Katrina looked dazed and white-faced. She looked over at Ella and smiled weakly. Ella waved her hand.

‘Will she be OK?’

‘She should be,’ said David. ‘Graham heard her fall so it was all very immediate. She’s just about conscious now and her breathing’s not too bad. They’re pretty efficient with this kind of thing. I hope they’ll soon get her stabilised.’

Katrina and her dad disappeared into the ambulance.

‘Are you going with them?’

‘No. Nothing I can do. I’ll phone in a bit and find out how she is.’

They watched the ambulance pull out of the driveway, its lights flashing. David took his car keys out of his pocket.

‘So, you say you were looking for me? Want a lift?’

20.
Sundress, white cotton with giant sunflower print.

When Fabbia saw them getting out of the car, she knew that something had happened. Ella’s face looked serious and drawn. David looked nervous, as if he didn’t really want to be there.

Her fingers felt clumsy as she undid the locks and threw open the door.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

David cleared his throat. ‘I’m just dropping Ella off,’ he said, jingling his car keys. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to get in your way.’

‘It’s Mrs Cushworth,’ Ella blurted, her voice breaking. ‘She’s tried to kill herself, mum. She’s been rushed to hospital. You see? No one’s going to pay any attention to her.  She’s lost the plot completely.’

Fabbia felt as if she were watching them from a long way off. She saw the alarm on David’s face.

‘Well, Ella, we don’t exactly know that she tried to kill herself, ‘ he said slowly. ‘You really mustn’t go round saying that…’

Fabbia saw Ella look at him then with those big blue-green eyes. Her father’s eyes, Fabbia thought. She looked again at David. His hand was resting on Ella’s shoulder. She saw something pass between them. In the look that they exchanged, there was something so tender, so full of understanding that Fabbia felt herself begin to give way.

‘Oh, come in, both of you,’ she said, and then to David, ‘Please? Please will you?’

And that was when the tears finally came. They broke over her in a wave so that she couldn’t see anything.

The story of Enzo

‘You have to understand,’ said Mamma, sitting at the kitchen table, ‘that I have never told anyone else about this. It’s very hard for me, Ella, to tell you this story. I still don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.’

David took her hand and gently held it. We looked at her, quietly, expectantly, making the space for her to find the right words.

‘Ella, when your father, Enzo, was a little boy,’ Mamma began, ‘he dreamed of travelling to far-off countries. He told me that he used to pretend that the hearth rug was a kind of magic carpet. He’d sit cross-legged in the middle of it and  command it to take him to Spain, India, China, Turkey. But he was always especially curious about France.

‘His father had an album of postcards that his own parents had exchanged during the war. His grandfather had fought in France, had spent some time posted in Paris, and there were pictures of the Eiffel Tower, and a couple walking along the Seine. He liked that one especially. The sky had been tinted a rose pink. He once told me that he’d thought the sky in Paris was always that colour.

‘So as soon as he was old enough, Enzo - your father – left for Paris. His parents didn’t want him to go, of course. He was supposed to stay behind and help with the family restaurant. He was already a very good cook. But he said that he wanted to learn about other ways of cooking, about
French
food and
French
wine. He’d get a job in one of the top restaurants and then he’d come back in a few years time and take over the family business. That was what he told them.

‘And that, as you know, Ella, is how I met your father. He was working as a sous-chef. I was singing and dancing in the same club. A very nice club, a prestigious club,’ she turned to David with a serious expression. ‘Not tacky at all. A very nice clientele. Anyway…

‘We got to know one another, as young people do, and we fell in love. And we got a little bit carried away, a little bit careless.
I
was a little bit careless.’

Mamma blushed and shifted in her chair.

‘And so we discovered, quite unexpectedly, but to our joy – and such a very big happiness it was – that we were expecting
you
, Ella-issima.

‘But what were we going to do? Enzo was a sous-chef. He earned very little money, only a bit more than the man who did the washing-up. He had a tiny dingy room in the top of the hotel. No women allowed. And I was a dancer, living with the other girls in a
pensione.
The arrangement was
part of my contract. As soon as I had to stop working, I’d have nowhere to live. So we had to do something and quickly.

‘A friend of your father’s told him about a hotel on the south coast of England where he’d worked the summer season. You could earn good money, he said, there was plenty of work, and it was cheap to live there. Your father arranged it all the very next day.

‘He didn’t want to go back to Italy and his family, you see. Not then. Not until he felt he’d made something of himself. Because then his father would not be able to say, “I told you so.”

‘We got married that weekend, spent a few weeks sorting out my visa and then we took the ferry across the English Channel, hanging over the rail, laughing and shouting into the waves for the entire crossing. Everything we owned, we carried with us in two small duffel bags. 

‘It was hard at first. It wasn’t what we expected. The hotel was old and shabby but it did a good steady trade in coach loads of pensioners. I could have got a job cleaning rooms but your father wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t let me lift a finger. So I put all my energy into making a home. We found a flat, quite a nice basement flat, not far from the sea with a tiny courtyard and I fixed it all up and we were happy. We were so excited about you, Ella. We used to lie at night and your father would put his mouth to my belly and talk to you. He used to tell you all his favourite stories.