The Little Red Chairs (27 page)

So Jack had forgiven her, but not entirely. How well she remembered those estrangements, long before the actual ending came. He had begun to suspect her infidelity, saying with sarcasm, what a little traveller she had become. One evening he came down from his snooze, wearing his maroon velvet smoking jacket, as if they might be expecting company, which they weren’t. Then he got out his LPs, and put his favourite jazz piece on the wind-up gramophone. At first he listened, his eyes filling up with emotion and then very chivalrously, he asked her to dance. They danced slowly, closer and closer, and she could feel his erection, pressing on her, in it his need, his suspicion, his love, his hatred. She froze, her body detaching itself from him, and even though they remained dancing, until the record had played itself out completely, it was like a dance of death.

*

It was almost a repetition of what happened once before, Mistletoe’s father standing in the doorway, in his shirt sleeves, except this time he was not indignant, he was pleading. The child was not well. He said it ominously and more than once. She had refused to eat her supper, refused to speak and was shaking with fever. He came to ask if perhaps the ladies could give an opinion.

He led them out and into his narrow hall, that smelt of creosote, a work bench full of tools taking up most of the space, so that they had to squeeze past, to get to the room. Her clothes were on the floor, along with her slippers, sheaves of paper on which she had done drawings and a mangy Greenie stationed on top of the chipped radiator. The eyes, black and glittering, appeared above the coverlet, like a little animal.

‘You see … you see,’ the father kept saying and it was unclear whether he was referring to the state of the room or Mistletoe’s fit. She was indeed quivering and her teeth chattered as she gulped for air. It was clear to Fidelma that she was genuinely overwrought, but with their arrival, her upset had gained fresh momentum. Suddenly she began to cry, loud and piercingly, willing herself to cry more, to punish them, but especially to punish the father, over whom it was evident she now had total mastery, as he looked on, bashfully, asking God what to do with her, what would become of them.

‘You see, you see,’ he kept repeating.

‘What’s wrong Mistletoe?’ Fidelma asked, only to be snubbed and then there were craven offers of fruit, raisins, hot chocolate or toast with peanut butter.

‘Maybe if she slept,’ Jasmeen said, but that was not what Mistletoe wanted, she wanted her audience and was beginning to bask in it. Yet the thaw had not happened, she merely pulled at Fidelma’s sleeve, pulled and pulled, as if it were elasticated. Then it was her hair, she slapped it, to show her disapproval.

‘You remember I had long hair,’ she said at last, directly to Fidelma, but the castigation was for her father. The short hair was not becoming and gave her a pinched, wizened look.

‘You remember,’ she repeated and there followed a slew of wrongs. She had not been allowed out on Bonfire Night, where other children were, her new cardigan was several sizes too big, her judo teacher said she was selfish, and she had caught a cold standing out in the garden in the day with everybody ignoring her. To crown matters, Greenie was not well and she referred to the various battles he had recently been in. As he was returned to her, she remarked on where his amber eyes had once been and said poor Greenie was retiring.

Before long she was propped up on pillows, her hair smoothed back and Fidelma wiping her face with a warm flannel. Then she produced a silk handkerchief to dry the face. The handkerchief had strawberries on it and she began to count them, diligently, one by one, and this was a sign that she would eat.

‘In Barcelona … I ate a steak every evening,’ she told them.

‘You didn’t,’ Fidelma said, but the father answered, saying his employer sent him on a business trip, hoping their garden furniture range might appeal to people in Spain, as it had done in Lithuania. When his meetings were over, Mistletoe and he had a walk along a wide avenue that was known as Las Ramblas and afterwards they ate in some restaurant or other, where Mistletoe had her steak. Then one evening and to their surprise, there was
a pageant, white horses trooping up that avenue, riders in scarlet and black fur hats, the onlookers pushed back onto the pavement, some trying to imitate the dancers, in their frilled skirts, clicking the castanets, and behind, sitting high on a machine, a man in uniform was collecting the horse dung. At this, Mistletoe laughed and it was her father’s cue to become a horse. Holding imaginary reins, he lifted his right leg, then his left leg and with complete absorption, began to trot around the bed, his face a long grotesquerie, in a semblance of what a horse might look like. Then he danced, prancing about the small space, letting out snorts and whinnies, enthusiastic and foolish and awkward and above all, desperate to please her. In conclusion, he towered above her bed, bowed and called her Princess. This led to waves of hilarity from Mistletoe, her laughing now as hysterical as her crying had been a little while before.

It was time for them to leave. In the doorway, Fidelma saw the finger curling to beckon her back.

‘I thought I would never see you again,’ Mistletoe said, so earnest, the eyes reproachful, like a little mourner.

Next morning there was a bulletin under Jasmeen’s hall door. Two pages in her usual violet crayon with accompanying realistic drawings.

Not long after I went to sleep the zombies came without warning. They had new men, small freaks with invisible weapons and they kept stabbing and stabbing at me and Greenie, until I had to SOS for reserves as we could not fight them alone. Luckily T-Rex, the big dinosaur and his men came to the rescue. It was a bloody night with casualties on both sides and it lasted many hours. By daylight most of the zombies were
dead
and some had fled. T-Rex lay down under the tree for a rest and as a reward I gave him a medal, a sticker and the livers of the zombies. The meat was raw and fleshy, the way zombies like it. Afterwards they left for their own place near Battersea.

At the end, in different coloured crayon she had written –
Can we go to the High Street for cappuccino and a mince pie?

Sarajevo

‘They think they know … they weren’t there.’ This is Zelmic, drunk, slurring her words, her eyes with a vacancy to them. Fidelma knows her from the Thursday evenings in the Centre, where she often sat, quiet and withdrawn, but now, in her leather skirt and knee-high boots, she is gushing and talkative.

Sarajevo, her city, as she says, not the same anymore, the heart gone out of it. Once upon a time she and her friends sat in cafes discussing Nietzsche and existentialism and now it’s young unemployed men looking at models on TV, evaluating pussy. But everyone still smoked and that was something. Yes, she will be going home for Christmas, has presents for her mother and all the people who help her mother, presents for each one, and also money. Her mother has gone a bit strange and no wonder. To make matters worse, her mother is getting threatening phone calls, which she believes are from some weird sect about to harm her and she has begun collecting money to build a church to be safe in. Her uncle has gone back to the mountain.

‘You have lovely skin,’ she says, tugging her hair back, so that she can see Fidelma’s face clearly. Her thick chestnut hair keeps falling onto her face and repeatedly she throws it back, so that they are close to one another. But this intimacy, this marvelling at their paths crossing again, is unnerving to Fidelma.

They are in one of the little alcoves off the main room, where the party is in full swing. It has been organised by Varya and is
a celebration of migrant and refugee women from all corners of the world. A sign painted on a white sheet that hangs over the stage reads
We Help Victims Become Heroines.
Fidelma can hear laughter, the smart snap and fizzle of crackers being pulled, along with random surges of exhilaration. They are at a small table with a white candle, the flame guttering this way and that and at other tables, white candles burn and teeter in random gusts. Zelmic has dragged her in to talk, puts her long necklace around them both and ropes them in. The necklace is labradorite, bought in Portobello Road from a Roma lady, who also does horoscopes.

‘Dark eras, dark eras,’ she goes on, ‘everybody starving, my uncle going crazy, asking
Why did I come away from the mountain
. He’d come to defend us. One evening a girl, she must have been about twelve, was hanging from the tree in the communal garden outside and everyone was too afraid to go to her, just dangling there. Her family lived upstairs and the parents had suddenly left. Mixed family, half Serbian and half Muslim. Maybe they had gone to find somewhere else to live and then send for her, but as it happened, there was no need. Once the siege started, they withdrew into themselves, not a word, not even on the stairs. That’s what war does. Over three hundred shells a day smashed into our city. Cowering in our apartments. Window frames with broken glass, no electricity, no heat, no water, no nothing. We got a can of oil and two cans of beans each week from the Red Cross, but as we had no wood, we began to burn household stuff, curtains and bedspreads and then shoes. Shoes stink when burnt, especially rubber shoes. We were a bookish family. We loved our books, but before long they were lined up next to the stove and my mother and my uncle fought over which should go first and
which should be saved to the very last. The
Iliad
was a beautiful first edition, the pride of our library, but it too went: Agamemnon king of men, Nestor, flower of Achaean chivalry, the Black Ships, Patroclus’ corpse, Helen’s bracelets, Cassandra’s shrieks, all met the flames, for the sake of two or three suppers. My uncle was loath to let Mark Twain go … Huckleberry Finn and his river did not deserve such an ignominious end. My uncle was the one who went out and cut the little girl down, said her lips were rimed with dew, as if she was still breathing.’ She is scanning Fidelma’s face for a reaction.

‘You are not appalled,’ she says sharply.

‘I am appalled,’ Fidelma said.

But it wasn’t enough. Somehow she knew it was about to turn ugly.

‘I must tell you …’ Zelmic is saying, even more confidential, ‘I had this dream about you. We were all in some kind of hangar that was also a medical centre … lots of patients and a nurse was taking blood from each one of us. Afterwards, we became her assistants. We were in a line, waiting, and suddenly you put a knife in my back, right into the centre of my back between my shoulder blades, you who wouldn’t hurt a fly – what do you make of it Fidelma?’

‘I don’t really know what to make of it … it’s your dream.’

‘Was the fucking good?’ the question fired at her. Can she mean it. Of course she can mean it. This is the whole reason for the tête-à-tête.

‘Beast of Bosnia … pumping his evil into you … a bayonet up the vagina … his words … his poetry,’ and at that she takes from either pocket a phone, one silver, the other black. She pats the silver phone, as she might a little dog, then takes the black
phone and presto, her snap album unfolds, as she scrolls up and down and Fidelma is made to see image after image of Dr Vlad, the man whom day by day in the intervening twenty months she has pushed away, or thought she had pushed away, and now he materialises again with a hovering immediacy and she feels the inverse of love, which is repugnance and shame. Then a recent photo of him in which he is rotund, the smiling, jovial clown, contrasting with the earlier ones, him in his prime, Prometheus with hair flying in the wind and still another, the sombre Commando in a long dark overcoat, surveying his troops in a field in east Bosnia. Interspersed with them are pictures of gravediggers, the slung earth littered with bones and women, old before their time, bent and broken, huddled beneath tombstones.

What follows next is a summary of his thinking and his opinions –

I am an author, a writer, a man of letters, a psychiatrist.
Bullshit.

Sarajevo was never under siege.
Bullshit.

As a psychiatrist I can say that what goes on in our minds has nothing to do with real events. The whole of psychiatry revolves around irrealities, illusions and deceits.
More bullshit.

‘I don’t want to see it … I don’t want to,’ Fidelma says as she shields her eyes, but the knife is going in, in, as this woman, gnawed with hatred and athirst for revenge, will not let up.

‘What was it, apart from the thrills … what drew you to him, you must have had a whiff of something wrong … something very very wrong … his accomplice, his whore, his slut.’ She is filled now with glee, exhilaration, all her suffering, her grievances, the little hanged girl, her uncle, all discharged into this orgy of humiliation.

‘I did not survive that siege for nothing,’ she says bitterly.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Fidelma replies.

‘You don’t know your problem,’ Zelmic goes on. ‘You’re in denial. If I am honest I think you have a nerve to be here … there are some great women here.’

It has gone too far.

‘Yes, I am sure there are some great women here,’ Fidelma begins, ‘and anyone would be justified in thinking that we are all united … sisters … All from the bleeding places … we bring flowers and wine and gifts … but not you … Zelmic, you bring poison, the Rottweiler … you drag me in here for what … for kicks, for your smut, to satisfy your fantasies.’ While she speaks she is tugging at the necklace and at last the string gives way and the beads begin to roll and sidle all over the floor.