WITH SIMONE BARRICADED in her room, I headed off to the balcony with a blanket. Under the cold, clear light of the gibbous moon I admitted to myself that I had bigger things to worry about than uneaten carrots or a MEOW T-shirt. There was a sharp knife under my daughter’s pillow. And she was apparently intent on losing her virginity to a man-child without a responsible bone in his body. I’d been living on borrowed time ever since the headmistress called me in, acting as if the penknife was just something Simone boasted about to impress her friends, when in fact I knew quite well that it was potentially a deadly weapon.
My daughter was only trying to protect herself. Passive resistance was not going to get us far; we were sitting ducks. In the movies the gangster father (Liam Neeson) did the killing so his ‘clean’ son who loved his family (a likeable Latino pregnant wife and cutesy daughters) very much (so had a lot to lose) didn’t get blood on his conscience and got to live out his pacifist principles while the father died in a sacrificial hail of bullets. Problem was that it was hard not to see the son as a wimp. There were no movies about gangster mothers in the same situation that I knew of. It could make a nice twist.
Some of the best project managers I knew were females, but nobody carried guns, and as much as you might feel like it, you didn’t get to shoot people for seeing things in narrow terms of their own self-interest. If a project went pear-shaped, a whacking amount of money went down the drain, and maybe a career or two, but not a whole life. I hadn’t yet had anybody commit suicide or murder on one of my projects: occasionally drug or alcohol abuse came into play, but physical violence was rare in the IT arena. Our problems were generally more technical than emotional. And now here I was, contemplating what to do about a knife under my daughter’s pillow.
Heidi.
It was one of those darker-than-midnight balcony thoughts materialising, as if Simone’s earlier fury had summoned her.
Heidi and I were so different that it was hard to even imagine her and me in the same room, although we met at a party. But I’d been known to call on her assistance when no one else would quite do. I called the mobile phone number I’d always called: the number for Heidi’s VIP Protection Services. I sat in the darkness, lights twinkling out at sea, waiting for someone to pick up.
‘Mr Chan Chinese Restaurant,’ a voice answered.
‘I need to speak to Heidi,’ I said.
‘Who you?’
‘My name is Paola Dante.’
‘You wait.’
If there’s a problem, whoever answers the call will say it’s a wrong number.
What happens then?
You order Chinese takeaway and they get a message to me.
Heidi took the call immediately.
‘Hey Paola,’ the throaty voice said. ‘You were looking for me?’
I liked that about Heidi. She understood the value of time.
‘Is it safe for Simone to have a knife?’
‘She has a knife?’ Heidi’s tone was ambiguously mild. ‘Is it a big knife?’
‘I know you gave her the penknife. She told me.’ It was a desperate stratagem but I tried it anyway.
She chuckled. ‘She would not have told you. Besides, your voice lacks truth. A mobile phone is good for that − anything that is not true is amplified.’
‘I know you think all women should carry a knife, but I come from a different world and, as much as I’m trying to understand what Simone is going through, I can’t. So here’s the thing. I’m worried silly about her. I’m worried she’ll get kicked out of school and I won’t find another one that will take her. I’m worried that she’ll use the damn thing to slit her wrists. I’m worried that she’ll use it on the wrong person and end up in a juvenile detention centre and I’ll never get her out of there. Is that enough truth for you?’
‘So you want to take the penknife away? That is how you show you care for her?’
‘I’m not going to take it away. I just want to know that you’re teaching her how to use it properly and to make sure she only uses it when she has to.’
I could almost hear Heidi stretching out on the sofa, the long elastic limbs flexing like a cat’s, enjoying my dilemma.
‘She can learn together with Peggy. You know her, Samba Nyerere’s daughter. They are about the same age. I will tell Samba to start lessons. She is worried Peggy is growing up too soft. Are you satisfied?’
‘It’s something.’
‘My pleasure,’ she purred. ‘Are we done?’
‘No − I mean, does your outfit offer some kind of a package where you learn to shoot as well?’ Your outfit? I was aware that I sounded like a B-grade movie but it was the effect Heidi had on me. Knowing you were dealing with a real-life warrior woman was a strangely surreal experience. Like chatting to Genghis Khan on the phone.
She chuckled softly. ‘A package deal? Mmm, that could be a new market. Corporate whitie wanting to DIY a hit.’
It was my turn to act innocent.
‘I don’t want to carry out a hit on anyone. Why would you think that?’
Heidi snorted. ‘I hear she’s about to come out. The Black Queen.’
That startled me. It was what Daniel had called Nada Sarrazin in Lady Limbo.
‘Why do you call her that?’
‘Everyone else does.’
I decided to let it go.
‘You shouldn’t put ideas into my head. Is it so much to ask to be able to kick a man in the crotch with confidence?’ It had been a long day. ‘What’s the equivalent for a woman anyway? Yanking her nipples?’
‘I could do it for you, for a price,’ Heidi said casually. ‘The hit.’
‘I don’t somehow think so, Heidi. As attractive as your offer is, if anything happened to Nada Sarrazin, it would get traced straight back to me, and then what would happen to Simone? She’d end up living on the streets and leading her own gang. Can we talk about the other reason I called?’
‘You mean, after that long speech, you aren’t worried about the knife?’
‘I mean I knew nothing much was going to change by calling you. Simone worships you. She sees you as an avenging angel. I just had to be sure you were treating it seriously – my daughter carrying a knife that you gave her.’
Heidi made a ‘humph’ noise.
‘I want to hire you to teach me how to look after myself in seriously dangerous situations. Like if someone was to leave a gun lying around, I should know how to use it.’
Soft hooting sounds came down the line.
‘Are you high, Heidi?’
‘I’m just disbelieving because cleverest woman in wide world − that is according to my brother anyway − wants to learn how to kill a human being. Have you ever killed anything?’
‘You mean besides spiders and cockroaches?’
Heidi waited.
‘A dog,’ I said firmly.
‘You killed this dog with your own hands?’
‘No. But it was the same as if I had.’
‘For the dog maybe it was the same. Dead is dead. But for you it wasn’t the same. We’ll start with you killing a rabbit. If you can slit its throat, skin it and cook it, you’ll be ready for my course. The “package deal”. I’ll even include my granny’s recipe for rabbit stew.’
‘I’m serious−’
‘You’re no killer, Paola. That Peggy who’s going to learn how to use a knife with Simone? I’m putting her through a private school education. She’s going to get a university degree someday, just like you did. You hear me? You got other wars to win. You’d just be another crazy fool walking this planet carrying a gun that you don’t know how to use.’
That was the problem with mixing your private life and business. Things got confused. I’d have to beg.
‘Heidi, listen to me. This is the same as a VIP protection job. I’ll pay you for shooting lessons. All you do is assign someone to me for a few hours each week and she goes with me to the shooting range. And then she shows me some close-quarter self-defence moves that actually work.’ How to stop a hulking great man killing me or my daughter in our flat. ‘That’s all I’m asking. No special treatment,’ I begged.
‘Let me know when you’re ready to go rabbit hunting,’ Heidi said laconically and hung up.
I eyed my mobile thoughtfully. What I felt like doing was hurling it over the balcony railing onto the pavement below, but I needed it tomorrow so I couldn’t do that.
I lay on the futon in the dark, considering my options, the roar of the shore-drawn tide in the background. For some reason I thought of Annie, my dead brother’s psychic wife, who I hadn’t talked to for a long time. Actually I was thinking about Massimo, I realised, my detective brother who handled a gun like it was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. Once I went round and he caught me looking at him while he was cleaning it.
‘What? You got something to say? You better get real, Paola. You want to think the world’s a nice place, that’s fine. You can carry on living in your fool’s paradise because people like me are out there looking out for you 24/7. So don’t give me that look. I feel fucking sorry for anybody who’s going to shack up with you, that’s what I feel.’
‘What kind of a comment is that? It’s hardly as if you’re the ideal spouse, little brother.’
He’d shrugged. ‘Don’t claim to be. Annie knew what she was getting into.’
‘When was the last time you paid for a babysitter and took your wife out to dinner, Mr Big-Time Detective?’ I’d continued, infuriated. ‘Maybe if you looked up from cleaning your gun every once in a while–’
Annie’s appearance in the doorway had interrupted my tirade. ‘Come on, you two, supper’s nearly ready. Max Junior is really really looking forward to his birthday supper.’
‘She’s always so fucking superior,’ Max had growled on his way past Annie to put the gun away in the gun safe.
‘Can we just enjoy tonight?’ Annie had pleaded to his back. ‘Who knows when we’ll be together again?’
Max and I had managed to stay civil to each other through one whole suppertime – we’d done more than that, we’d put on a great happy-family act for the two-year-old we both loved. It was something we hadn’t done in a very long while. Not since we’d eaten at our family table as kids, our own mother and father in their chairs, the way we’d never even imagined could ever change. For a moment I see us, all of us in our places, timeless and perfect, as if we were made of an artist’s concrete poured into memory moulds.
Annie had insisted that Max Junior’s second birthday was an important milestone and convinced me to combine it with a trip for work to Johannesburg. For Annie and Max Junior’s sake, we’d made the effort. Annie gave us that night as a gift. It was the last time I’d seen my brother alive. I caught her watching us at one point as if we were all in a home movie and she was outside the scene, recording it, a peculiar sad look on her face. When she saw that I’d noticed, she slipped out the room to fetch the ice-cream cake she’d ordered in the shape of Thomas the Tank Engine and asked Max to light the two sparkler headlights. Max Junior’s astonished beaming smile bathed us all in its innocent glow.
Three weeks later they found my little brother Massimo, Annie’s husband and Max Junior’s father, in a shallow grave. He’d been working undercover as part of a money-laundering racket and something had gone badly wrong.
That day when Annie turned up on my doorstep and told me she was having flash visions of Simone being spirited away in an SUV, she’d given up pretending she couldn’t see the future.