The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi Page B

in his head, and studies each one minutely. Celesta, Rose, Fran, Luca, he checks them off with a nod, convincing himself that
they’re his. He stops at me: a word forms in his head; he cannot let it free.
    ~
    He has a lot to say. When my mother arrives, the family will be complete again, a full set. Not counting me, that is. It can’t last.
     
    interference
    I don’t remember Marina; I was only a month old when she left, and still in hospital. My mother told me how she went away, listing all the things she packed into
Marina’s new brown suitcase:
    Two pairs of Clarks’ Sandals, what with the weather out there being so nice; a new dress with little rosebuds running round the bodice – you know, Dol, like a medieval princess
– and three new blouses; a satin nightie; a proper toilet bag from Marks’; a swimsuit in emerald green. Oh, she had everything she wanted! We had to sit on the case to shut it! My
mother would tell me this time and again, her face fixed in a smile.
    Years later, standing on the stairs after one of my dreams, the one where I’m smothered by a hot bubble of fat, I hear a voice below, placating and steady, and then the shrill clip of my
mother’s distress,
    You sold her! Don’t touch me, Frank. You sold her. Children burnt and children bartered: someone must be to blame.
    ~
    As with all truth, there is another version.
    Joe Medora’s car slips up to the kerb, the wheel-rims grating on the edge of the pavement. A blonde woman steps out from the passenger side. Standing in his living room chewing on his
breakfast, Mr Jackson hears noises on the street. He raises the grey net of curtain at his window, and poking his head round it, looks at the car, admires it and the blonde woman standing beside
it, and gazes up to our front bedroom. He sees my mother’s hands pressed flat on the pane, her mouth moving silently. He sees my father suddenly appear from our house, gripping Marina’s
shoulder, helping her onto the back seat, stroking her head as she slides across the leather upholstery. Marina bends forward and waves to our downstairs window, where the faces of my sisters crowd
the steamed-up glass like pale balloons. Fran and Celesta wave back; Rose is crying. The blonde woman takes the suitcase, lifts it onto the seat next to Marina, shuts the car door. Joe Medora revs
the engine.
    My father doesn’t look once at Joe Medora, and Joe doesn’t turn his face from the view through the windscreen. The road in front of him leads to the high wall with the dead end,
which means he will have to turn the car round on the street and drive past the house again. It’s not his house any more; but he has Marina, sitting solemnly in the back seat of his car, her
little gloved hands folded now over the belt of her raincoat.
    My father cuts straight through the house – in through the front door and out through the back – stumbling on to the morning where he stands until the sound of Joe’s engine
dies to nothing. He takes off his jacket: it’s been raining overnight and the smell is sharp, there’s a bird singing somewhere which infuriates Frankie, thinking of the songs that
Marina will hear, far away in Malta, that he cannot share. He looks at the yard, the washing line empty except for the pegs, and the spiders’ webs between them laced with dew. He looks at the
old back door lying flat on the ground, like an entrance into Hell.
    Then he sets to work; to break the door to pieces, to knock and hammer and make the most terrible screeling noise; he wants to scream, he wants to let out his lungs and howl: anything, to drown
out the emptiness that oozes from the house.
    He lifts the door from its grave of flattened grass: the hidden side of it is slimy and crawling with woodlice. The saw gibbers through the wood as Frankie devastates the silence. He sings a
song without a tune, in a voice that comes from his bones, all day, like breathing.
    He hammers until darkness, but not able to leave it