The Dress

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.

‘Anyway, let’s say that inside the flat I felt safe, happy, nothing could spoil it for us. But outside, in the town, it was a different matter. There was trouble. Not a lot of money to go around. Businesses failing, shops boarded-up. There were a lot of people coming in, on boats and trains, from France. People from Congo. People like me from Iran. People from Syria, Sierra Leone. Some of them had hidden in shipping containers to get to England or clung to the bottoms of lorries. They were desperate. They all wanted a better life, I suppose. The camps in Calais were terrible. We saw one of them as we came through. Holding centres, they call them, fenced round with barbed wire. People living like animals. No wonder they wanted to leave.

‘And so there were problems in the town. The local people didn’t like all these people coming in. They said they were taking their jobs. It didn’t matter that Enzo and I were not illegals. We had proper passports and papers. All we wanted was to work hard, keep ourselves to ourselves.

‘What the people in the town saw was that we were not like them. Or rather, that I was not like them. Enzo, you see, didn’t look much different. He spoke beautiful English, almost perfect. But I had such dark skin and black hair and I spoke with a funny accent – even funnier back then - and I would mix-up my English with the French words I learned.

‘ “Dirty Arab. Go home,” they would shout, hanging out of their cars as I walked down the street with my bags of shopping.

‘Sometimes they would proposition me, ask me for sex as if I was a prostitute and then spit at my feet when I refused, saying I was stuck-up, ideas above myself, that I thought I was too good for them.

‘I made one friend, a woman from the upstairs flat. She was very kind to me. She told me not to pay any attention. She said they didn’t know any better. That the shipyards, the steel industry had closed down and they weren’t qualified to work in the new kinds of jobs – call centres, offices, that kind of thing. So they got bored and went down the pub where their heads were being filled with nonsense: National Front, BNP…

‘I felt differently after that. I began to feel a bit sorry. I realised that perhaps I was the lucky one. I had an education. I had at least a chance of something better. But then one day...’

Mamma stopped. She looked down at her hand in David’s. She spread her other hand on the table and then closed it into a fist.

‘You don’t have to…’ David began.

‘Oh, I do, I do,’ she said. ‘I’m nearly at the end now. And then it is done. Done.’

She took a deep breath.

‘So, one day, I was walking through the shopping centre. I was on my way to meet Enzo at the end of his shift. We liked to walk down by the sea together before dinner.’

Mamma smiled, remembering something.

‘Yes, we loved to do that. It was so nice down there. The air was so fresh that it washed you clean. You could forget everything.

‘And that evening, I remember, I’d made a special effort to look nice. I can remember exactly what I was wearing. I was six months pregnant by then and I was very proud of how I looked. I put on a sundress, white and covered with big yellow sunflowers. I took a pink rose from the vase on the kitchen table and put it in my hair.

‘There was a short-cut I could take to the hotel where Enzo worked. You had to pass through a shopping centre. Well, I didn’t like to go in that shopping centre. It always gave me a bad feeling. But it was quicker to walk that way. It took much longer to go all the way around.

‘Over and over again, I have asked myself why I didn’t just walk round. But it was five o’clock in the evening so most of the shops in there were just closing and the exit was right next-door to Enzo’s hotel.

‘They appeared from nowhere. I still couldn’t tell you where they came from. I was alone, walking through the shopping centre and then suddenly they were all around me, five or six of them in a circle, just a little way inside the entrance.

‘“Well, what have we here, then?” one of them said. “Pretty lady…”

‘I saw that he had a long scar right across his cheek. In that moment, I knew I was in real trouble. I had never felt more afraid.

‘They pressed in closer around me. One of them reached out and touched my hair. Another put his face right up to mine. I could smell the alcohol on his breath and he took my breast in his hand and squeezed it so hard that tears came to my eyes and I couldn’t see clearly any more. All I could think about was the baby inside me.

‘“Yeah, you like that, don’t you?” he said and I shook my head as hard as I could.

‘He put his finger under my chin and tilted my head so that I had to look at him.

‘“Oi. Did you hear that?” he said to the rest of them. ‘Our little foreign lady here doesn’t like me? Boo hoo. Thinks I’m not good enough for her, eh? Maybe she’ll like one of you better.”

‘One of the others came up to me then and tried to kiss me. His lips brushed the edge of my mouth. I pushed him away. He grabbed my arm and twisted it hard behind my back whilst another put his hands between my legs.

‘I found my voice then. I started to scream and scream.

‘And that’s when it all went wrong.

‘A figure came running into the shopping centre and I saw instantly that it was Enzo. He must have heard me screaming. Whether he knew it was me or just a woman who needed help, I’ll never know.

‘He stopped when he saw me.

‘“Farah!” he said, because that was my name back then. David, you should know, that is my real name: Farah.’

David nodded. He didn’t seem very surprised.

Mamma continued. ‘When they saw Enzo and heard him say my name, the men took a few steps back from me.

‘“Is this your girlfriend, mate? This one?”

‘“She’s my wife,” Enzo said, quietly. All the time, he was looking at me. He never took his eyes off me. He gestured for me to come towards him.

‘I have wondered many times why they didn’t just run away. Perhaps they panicked. Perhaps they had not yet had their fun. Perhaps they were just too full of drink to think about what they were doing. I don’t know.

‘“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the one with the scar said. “F*cking a dirty Arab. Planting one in her an’ all. There’s too many of ‘em as it is. They’re at it like rabbits.”

‘Still Enzo refused to respond. Even from where I was standing, I could see the muscle working in his cheek with the effort he was making to control himself.

‘“Yeah,” said another. “You’re letting the side down, mate,” and he laughed, just a very ordinary laugh and then the man with the scar on his face slipped a knife out of his pocket and, quick as a flash, slipped it into Enzo’s stomach.

‘It sounds strange to say it but it wasn’t even violently done. So quickly, so casually, as if he did that kind of thing every day.

‘Enzo looked at him in disbelief. He watched as the man pulled the knife out. He watched as the blood began to spread across his stomach, flowering red across his shirt.’

Mamma’s face was wet with tears. She pulled herself up a bit higher in the chair as if steeling herself to go on.

‘Enzo fell to the floor unconscious,’ she said, her voice breaking, ‘and I never spoke to him again. I remember that I ripped the straps off my sundress and tried to stop the blood. I kept pressing the cotton against his shirt. Harder, harder. But it was no use. A man walking his dog ran to help us. He called an ambulance. But by the time it came, he had lost so much blood. He died in the operating theatre. The knife had severed a major artery…’

Mamma looked at David.

‘So you see?’ she said. ‘It was my fault. He died because he loved me. This is what happens if you fall in love with me. This is what happens when you love a dirty Arab woman. Nothing good can ever come of it.’

But she let David take her in his arms and cradle her head against his chest. Over the top of her head, his eyes met mine. He held his free hand out to me across the table. And I took it.