Sometimes she remembers what it was like to see and hear, but it is too painful to dwell upon it. You can never regain what is lost beyond retrieval.
Accept and adapt. That has been her constant mantra through most of the last twenty-five years, ever since she first learned of her impending self-imposed prison sentence. But even after all this time, acceptance of that life sentence is still the hardest part.
The anger has never subsided.
People think she has found solace in God. Her daily pilgrimage with Sandro to the church, holding his leash with a trust she would find it hard to place in any human being. Along to the end of Calle San Miguel, feeling the cobbles under her feet, the smell of meat that comes from the carniceria, fresh bread from the despacho de pan. Left into Calle Portada, heat spilling from the open door of the peluquería along with the acrid smell of peroxide and the pungent faux fruit of fresh shampoo. Careless people in a hurry, brushing past her, breathing garlic and smoke into warm morning air. Then right into Calle San Antonio and the long descent to the Iglesia Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in the Plaza San Francisco, inhaling the perfume of the flowers, the delicious aroma of fresh-ground coffee, the snacks in preparation in tapas bars near the foot of the street.
She feels the cool of the church the moment Sandro leads her through the doors. People come here to light their candles and kneel before the Virgin, praying for many things: a better life, pregnancy, wealth, good health. Ana kneels on the cold slabs, eyes closed, and silently vents her anger at the god who took away what others take for granted. Her sight, her hearing. Her life. If only she had been born deaf and blind she would never have missed those senses, would have known nothing else. But what cruelty was it to give her both, then take them away? What kind of god plays a trick like that?
So what others take for devotion is really recrimination, the anger she cannot let go. And after all, who else is there to blame?
Now she sits in her accustomed seat, feeling Cristina’s anxiety in the patterned dots that raise themselves on her screen. The whole sordid story told in graphic detail, from her fateful decision to answer the call in place of Diego, to the shooting of the girl in the villa. Sitting opposite, with her own keyboard and her own screen, she is typing almost faster than Ana can read, tension in every keystroke, apprehension in every word.
Ana is puzzled. She says, ‘But none of it is your fault, cariño. You hurt no one. This man killed his own lover.’
Cristina types rapidly.
— But it is me he blames, Aunt Ana. He says if I had not entered his home illegally with my weapon drawn there would have been no shooting. His Angela would still have been alive.
‘But it was him who broke into the house, not you. He was the one in possession of an illegal weapon. And it was him who shot the poor girl.’
— And it’s him who’s threatened to kill me and every member of my family if he ever gets free.
‘Oh, my darling girl, people say things like that in the heat of the moment, overcome by anguish and anger. Deep down he must know it’s his own fault. And, anyway, he’s in custody isn’t he? In no position to do you any harm.’
— He is to be extradited back to the UK. The courts have agreed to it and he has not contested the decision.
‘Well there you are then, cariño. Soon he’ll be back in his own country and will forget all about you. When do they take him away?’
— They bring him back from Madrid today, and a police officer from the UK will come to Malaga tomorrow to take him to London.
Ana senses there is something more. It is impossible to say how she feels such things, but they gather somehow in the air around her and she can almost touch them. ‘And?’ she says.
— It’s ironic, Aunt Ana. The Guardia will take him in an armoured truck to the airport in the afternoon, and Paco told me today that he will be among the detail assigned to guard him. My own brother-in-law! It is just as well that this man Cleland will never know.
Ana smiles. ‘Well there you are, then, mi niña. He couldn’t be in safer hands.’
Chapter Seven
The Linn Crematorium sprawled across a hill on the south side of the city to the west of Castlemilk, a housing estate built in the 1950s to accommodate people cleared from Glasgow’s inner-city slums. It was built around an old mansion called Castlemilk House, constructed on the site of a thirteenth-century castle. But there was nothing in the rows of drab pebbledash blocks that bore any resemblance to the castle which had inspired their name.
When Mackenzie stepped off the plane at Glasgow Airport it was overcast and drizzling, what Scots called smirr. It was in stark contrast with the sunshine he had left behind in London.
He felt an odd sensation returning to the city of his birth, the place where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life. Unhappy years remembered now as having passed entirely on days like this, grey and sunless and wet. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and the black tie he had eventually found in a men’s outfitters in Fleet Street. In a holdall he carried a change of underwear and his toilet bag. Just one night in this haunted town before flying out tomorrow to Spain.
Through the window of his taxi, he watched rain-streaked red sandstone tenements drift past, the colour leeched from them somehow by lack of light, like watching a black-and-white movie of his childhood spool by. None of it seemed familiar and he had not the least sense of belonging.
The south-side suburbs were greener, tree-lined streets in leaf, the huddled hulk of Hampden Park floating past as they climbed the hill towards the crematorium. Through wrought-iron gates bearing the city crest and the date 1962, then down a long curving drive, past the departing mourners from the previous cremation, to the concrete and coloured glass structure that offered faith and flames in unequal measure.
Mackenzie felt self-conscious, still clutching his overnight bag as he stepped from the taxi. No time to drop it off at his uncle’s house before the funeral.
There were only three vehicles left in the car park, and just five souls in the waiting room. At first he thought he’d made a mistake with the time, for he didn’t recognize any of them. But then was shocked to realize that the white-haired old man with the stoop and the silvered bristles on a cadaverous face was his Uncle Arthur. The old man’s suit looked several sizes too big for him, the collar of his shirt curled up at both sides. The knot in his tie pulled far too tight. The colour seemed washed out of his once bright blue eyes, leaving them a pale, insipid grey. He was diminished in every way. Mackenzie remembered, with guilty regret, almost relishing the opportunity to confront his uncle at his aunt’s funeral. No pleasure now in sticking it to this shadow of a man who had once been a vigorous and robust teacher of physical education. Almost as if his uncle had contrived to deny him even that.