Unmasking Elena Montella (22 page)

Crossing the Rialto, Irma Taccani turned right and Elena followed. One of the joys of being invisible meant that she didn’t have to keep her distance but, in the jostle of people, Elena suddenly realised what it truly meant to be invisible. She hadn’t really stopped to think about it before. But she was beginning to find out that, just because she had the ability to disappear, it didn’t mean that she disappeared altogether - she still took up space and that, for Elena, was a real problem as she’d always bruised easily and people just kept knocking into her as if she wasn’t there, which, of course, she wasn’t. It wasn’t as if it was their fault; they weren’t doing it on purpose but Elena had the feeling that she’d end up completely black and blue when she finally took the mask off.

Following somebody you don’t particularly like was rather tedious, Elena decided. She’d have to spice things up a bit. The problem was, there wasn’t really much she could do at the fish market, was there? She looked around her. It was an extraordinary place: a rosy red-bricked building with tall stone columns decorated with fantastic fish heads rising into fine arches, huge lanterns hanging from the beamed roof, and the early morning sunshine casting a red glow onto the stalls through the bright canopies. The stalls were simple structures with lights hanging overhead so that the fish glowed and glistened as if still underwater. Most of the fish rested on beds of ice and there were buckets under the stalls to catch the melt water.

There was an incredible swordfish on one of the stalls but the back of his body had been amputated and he looked lost and forlorn. He didn’t belong there, and Elena felt guilty for looking at something which had about as much business being on a table as she had being at the bottom of the ocean.

She watched as one stall holder watered his produce with a small orange watering can. The floor was also wet, shining like polished marble. Elena, who’d never really liked fish, felt almost sad as she saw the heaped bodies of prawns, their tiny black eyes seeming to accuse the shoppers who passed them by.
See what you’ve done
, they seemed to say.

And then she saw the crabs: their spiky limbs tangled together as if they were fighting for space. Elena looked up to see where Irma Taccani was. She was just inches away from Elena, and Elena found her invisible hand reaching out and picking up one of the crabs. Without being seen, she dropped it into Irma’s shopping basket.

‘
Mio Dio
!’ Irma Taccani exclaimed a few seconds later, pulling the crab out of her basket and dropping it onto the table in front of her. The man behind the stall stared at her and then started laughing.

‘
What are you laughing at, you lumbering idiot! You put that in there for a joke? Some joke! Am I laughing?’

‘
I didn’t go near your basket. And you be careful who you call an idiot, you old crab!’

‘
How dare you!’

‘
You think yourself lucky that I don’t charge you for that!’

‘
You wouldn’t catch me paying for anything from you!’ she spat, her tiny eyes flaming with anger and humiliation as she stormed out of the fish market as fast as her little legs would carry her. Her mouth was working overtime as she spat out oaths and curses over the incident in the fish market and Elena did her best not to laugh out loud.

Reaching the flat once more, Elena followed Irma up the stairs, making sure her own footsteps were silent. Irma’s progress was slow and, for the briefest of moments, Elena felt sorry for her, but she soon roused herself by remembering how mean she had been to Rosanna.

Standing a few feet behind her, Elena watched as Irma retrieved her key from her bag. Like in the Danieli, it was all about timing. The key was in the lock and the handle was being turned. The door was open. NOW!

‘
Irma!’ Elena called softly from behind her shoulder before walking lightly down the hallway a little.

‘
Who’s there?’ Irma asked, craning her head back a little but not letting go of the door handle. There wasn’t enough space for Elena to get through.

‘
Irma!’ Elena called again.

Irma’s tiny eyes narrowed until they’d almost completely disappeared. ‘Who is it? Is that you, Dora?’ she asked, walking towards the stairs and peering down.

Elena took her chance and ran lightly into the apartment. She was in! Almost

immediately, she was struck by the neatness of everything. There wasn’t a cushion that was out of the place, the curtains were drawn just so and a large collection of silver photo frames shone brightly on a sideboard. Elena took a step closer to look at them and noticed that they were all of Corrado. These must have been the photo frames from Rosanna’s nightmare, Elena thought, and she had a sudden urge to throw them all out of the window into the nearby canal.

The flat door slammed and Irma Taccani came in muttering under her breath. Elena watched as she walked through to the kitchen and started to put her shopping away, wondering, exactly, what she was going to do with her. She amused herself, for the time being, with unstraightening the curtains and squashing the cushions into unpleasant shapes but that wouldn’t amount to a satisfying revenge even though it was funny to see Irma’s puzzled expression as she walked back through to the living room.

The answer came when Irma took a duster to a picture on the wall. It was one of the few pictures in the flat that wasn’t of Corrado. It was of the Virgin Mary. That was it, Elena smiled.

‘
Irma Taccani!’ Elena suddenly bellowed, surprising herself by the strength of her own voice.

Irma dropped her duster and span around to face the empty space that Elena was occupying.

‘
Who is it?’ Irma asked, obviously terrified. It was, Elena thought, probably the first time in her life that this woman
had
been terrified.

‘
Who do you
think
I am?’ Elena boomed.

‘
Mary, mother of God!’ Irma squealed, looking at the picture she’d been dusting.

‘
That’s right,’ Elena said, trying very hard not to scream with laughter.

Irma crossed herself and sank to her knees. ‘How have I displeased you?’ she asked, eyes closed as if in prayer.

Elena paused for a moment, marvelling at how easy it had been to have this dragon of a woman sink to her knees before her.

‘
I’ve been watching you lately and I am not pleased with what I see.’

Irma’s eyes sprang open as if in shock. ‘What have I done? Tell me what I have done and I will make amends.’

‘
You’re damned right you will!’ Elena boomed, and then wondered if the Virgin Mary would really use the word
damned
, but it was too late and Irma hadn’t seemed to notice. ‘You are a mean and crabby old woman, Irma Taccani,’ Elena continued, not worrying too much about the vocabulary she now attributed to the Virgin Mary. ‘And you’ve been mean and crabby to those around you.’

‘
Crabby?’

‘
Why do you sound surprised by that word?’

Irma shook her head as if in confusion. ‘The market - the crab!’

‘
What are you talking about?’

‘
N-nothing,’ she stammered. ‘But I don’t understand what you mean! My darling Corrado! He means more to me than life itself. I cannot think what I’ve done to hurt him.’

‘
I am not talking about Corrado, you silly woman,’ Elena continued, getting into her stride as the godly messenger.

‘
Then who? I hardly see anyone else.’

‘
No,’ Elena said, ‘you don’t have many friends, do you, Irma Taccani?’

Irma shook her head. ‘My boy! He’s all I need.’

‘
But he is an adult now. He will soon make a family for himself.’

Irma nodded, and silence ruled for a moment. ‘I think I see now,’ she said at last.

‘
What is it you see?’

‘
I think I might have been unpleasant to his girlfriend.’

‘
Think? THINK?’ Elena shouted.

‘
Forgive me! Forgive me!’ Irma babbled wildly.

‘
You were most unpleasant to her.
Most
unpleasant!’

‘
But she-’

‘
What? What did she do to you? There is no excuse for the way you behaved. None at all.’

Irma shook her head. ‘Forgive me! Tell me what I should do.’

Elena thought for a moment, dragging her mind back to the days of confession. ‘Five
Our Fathers
and Eighty-eight
Hail Marys
,’ she said, her voice serious.

‘
Eighty-eight?’

‘
You have a problem with that, Irma Taccani?’

‘
Oh, no! But why eighty-eight?’

‘
You dare to question me?’

‘
No! Oh, no!’

‘
Then I will leave you to begin,’ Elena said, making sure Irma’s eyes were closed in prayer before she quietly let herself out. Before she left, she turned around to see a shaking Irma Taccani clinging on to her rosary and saying the first of eighty-eight
Hail Marys
.

Elena and Rosanna weren’t the only ones to have had a disturbed night’s sleep. Mark had tossed and turned and, after realising that he wasn’t going to find any sanctuary in sleep, had got up at seven o’clock and left his hotel. He’d walked three miles before breakfast which surprised him because he wasn’t used to walking further than to his local supermarket.

Venice was the best city to get lost in, he decided. He wasn’t quite sure where he went on his early morning exploration although he had recognised San Marco. It was ghostly quiet when he walked through it and it was easy to imagine it was like that all the time. He wandered in and out of the arches of the Doge’s Palace, feeling as if he was inside some gargantuan wedding cake, and then spent a few, quiet moments looking out across the bright water of the lagoon. He’d never seen so much water in his life. Being a city boy, water had been something to drink or bathe in - never something simply to look at.

Walking, he’d found, was very therapeutic. With each step he took, he felt a little less anxious and a little less stressed. He let his feet take charge and had found himself at the Rialto where he grabbed something to eat. By now, the city had been awake for some time and the vaporetti were packed with people off to work. Mark wondered what it would be like to get a boat to work. Looking at the queues and the people squashed together, he surmised that it was really no different from catching the bus or the Tube. The novelty of water-based transport would soon wear off, he thought cynically, crossing over the Rialto Bridge and turning right.

He soon found out why there were so many people around as he came across a market. Wandering around the stalls, he bought a couple of large red apples before heading to look around the fish market. The smell of salt-water tickled his nose and made his stomach rumble even though he’d just eaten. He’d never shopped at a proper market before; he was a supermarket kind of guy and his trips involved nothing more time-consuming than grabbing a basket and dashing madly, grabbing as many microwavable goods as he could.

So it was quite pleasant to have the time to just wander around, smelling the smells and seeing the sights, and it culminated in him seeing the most extraordinary thing.

He’d just passed a stall on which was a very impressive display of fish when a crab seemed to have flown into an unsuspecting shopper’s basket. Mark’s eyes had almost been out on springs; it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen and, for a minute, he wondered if he was still half-asleep. Had the crab still been alive? He hadn’t thought so, and he couldn’t help grinning as he watched the old woman’s response. She gave a load of abuse to the stall-holder whom she clearly blamed for the incident but Mark had seen that he’d had nothing to do with it; the crab had simple flown into the woman’s basket. There was no other explanation for it. Maybe it was a species of crab peculiar to the Veneto region?

Mark looked around for someone to share the joke with but there was nobody. All he could think about was how much Elena would have laughed if she’d seen it and he knew that it wasn’t half as funny seeing it alone as it would have been if they’d experienced it together. It wasn’t that he felt half a person without her - he didn’t buy in to all that rubbish - it was just that life wasn’t as much fun without someone who was on your side, someone you could say,
Hey! You’re never going to believe what happened to me today!
Or to assure you that you were right and that it was the world that had lost its marbles - not you. Everybody needed that other person to sound-off to and, for Mark, only Elena would ever do.