HAIL MARY

  Hail Mary, Mother of God. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

    The priests, unlike civilians, understand criminals. Especially the priests at St Theresa’s; many times over the years they had witnessed hatred entering their church disguised as death. I bet they laugh silently to themselves, those priests, as they pocket our cheques and hear our confessions; watching us come and go, our fashions changing slightly then returning over the years.

    I learnt as a child that nobody cares when a criminal dies. I imagine a world of civilians reading about it in the newspaper, or hearing it on television and thinking things like one less piece of shit in the world, or live by the sword, die by the sword. At least the priests talk about forgiveness and non-judgment. The church gets criticised a lot - for being out of touch, not allowing gays in and for being run by pedaphiles, but I disagree. They’re kinder to us than a lot of the civilians. I hope Father Trask isn’t into sex with choir boys, because to me he personifies goodness.

    The public don’t know our dead as we know them. They’re just a headline, a satisfying sense of the world now being a safer place. They don’t know them!

    Tony’s service was beautiful. Father Trask delivered a moving sermon, mentioning everything Filomena had wanted him to; how hard working Tony was, how devoted to his wife, how highly regarded in his neighbourhood. I bawled my eyes out even though I knew not one word of it was true. Talk about a ball of bullshit wax. Sure, Tony was hardworking, the amphetamine racket he was mixed up in demanded long hours, but my brother was able to do it because he was a speed addict. As for being devoted to Filomena, what man wouldn’t be? She was beautiful, a goddess, and Tony looked like an aged toad in designer shirts and a black toupee. You get the picture? He acted like a toad too, and would fuck anything that moved. As far back as I could remember he had boasted of his sexual conquests. I had never been able to figure out why Filomena was with him. It had to be the same reason so many sluts opened their legs for him. Power, money, cheap thrills. Don’t get me wrong, Tony was my brother and I loved him, but he was shit ugly. Filomena was the classiest woman he had ever met, but even after he married her he still couldn’t stop screwing around.

    Thank god Mum was dead and didn’t have to witness Tony’s latest slut turning up at the service to disgrace his name. Star was a barbie bimbo, a gentleman’s escort. I’m shaking even as I write, but she wore a black diaphanous shirt with a black bra underneath, a black tight miniskirt and high heels. A real class act. Of course the media lapped her up. The cameras flashed as she entered the church, the TV journalists all chased her for comments. Watching her showing off, I felt the most emotion I had experienced since I heard Tony had been shot. I kept turning around in the pew to glare at her. How dare that fucking whore turn up when we’re burying family? 

    Filomena refused to look at her. “Leave it, Carina,” she whispered in a breath of mints. Her eyes were lost and sad. “This is not the time and place.” Her gaze returned to the coffin where my brother lay, as if by fixing her eyes on him she could resurrect him. Unlike Star, who looked like trash, Filomena looked elegant in her mourning clothes. She wore a black suit, with crystal black buttons, black gloves embroidered with tiny black roses and she had her hair the way Tony had liked it, loose down her back. Around her neck was a three tier strand of pearls by Jasmine of Melbourne and her black hat must have been new as I hadn’t seen her wear it before. Her large blue eyes filled with tears as she looked at Tony’s coffin. I loved her so much. I ached more for her sadness and loss than I did for myself.

    I had been preparing for Tony’s death for years. Mental dress rehearsals. You didn’t run with the crowd he ran with and expect to enjoy your retirement in Noosa. But the awful realisation hadn’t sunk in.

    Tony was dead.

    Tony, my shit of a big brother, gone. I had fought with him so many times over the years. Lied to countless women for him. Patched up his wounds. Sneaked through his collection of porno magazines. Carina No Tits, he called me scornfully, and even Dad said a few times I was too flat-chested to marry off. Tony taught me to shoot, to gut fish. Once for my birthday he took me on a parachute jump and pushed me out of the plane when I sobbed I couldn’t do it. I had envied him, loathed him, admired him, hated him, loved him.

    I had begun to sob then, great heaving sobs, snot dripping from my nose, as the sounds of Ava Maria filled the church and the rosebud adorned black gloves moved to my hand and squeezed it tight. Tony was dead, I remember thinking with a terrible loss. Alberto was inside and the prison authorities refused to let him attend his brother’s funeral. Both Mum and Dad were dead. That left Filomena and me. And even then, amidst the raw passion of my grief, I felt relief and joy.

    The first night Tony brought Filomena home to meet the family I had written three whole pages in my journal. I had been nervous for two days beforehand, dreading her visit. Ever since they met, Tony had been saying he was going to marry her and she was the first girl he had ever brought home. We all knew this one was special. When she first entered the room it was as if she had brought the sky and the sun to us. Perhaps it was just her pale blue dress, but she was like a goddess descended from another world to break bread with mortals. Even Dad was spellbound, hanging onto every word she said and believe me, normally it was the other way around - women were generally entranced by my dad. The crusty demeanour he displayed at home vanished, and I caught glimpses of the man the world knew. He took more interest in Filomena that night than he had shown me or my mother for six months. We all knew my father had a soft spot for women. He was a frequent visitor to the strip joints and massage parlours of the inner city. I hated it when I overheard him joking with Tony and Alberto about a good hand job or blow job he had received that day. But that night he was different. I could see he wasn’t just responding to Filomena’s beauty. It was some sort of inner light she had. It sounds stupid in words, but she provided a cooling effect in our house. Our home, with its ornate sculptures, elaborate security equipment, and Italian artworks still reeked, at least to my mind, of the faint scent of blood, the tension of crimes both committed and not yet committed and the silence around them. Anyway, I believed that night that Filomena was an angel.

    My mother had been cooking for two entire days, filling the house with the aromas of garlic, mincemeat, tomatoes, zucchinis. Our dining table was laden with bowls of salads, breads, cheeses, wines. Amongst this banquet Tony was a stranger. Black shirt, black hair greased back into a ponytail, diamond earring flashing in his earlobe. He looked the same, but I watched in disbelief as he made sure Filomena was served from all the dishes. He didn’t fart or belch once. He said “Thank you,” to my mother and “You’re right, sir,” to my father. Is this what love did to people? I was frightened by the change, but also exhilarated. Where was the boy who held a gun to my mother’s head when she tried to stop him from going out one night? Where was my brother who stayed in bed most of the day, got up to yell at me or my mother and then park himself in front of the television to watch porno films with a crowd of his friends? Love had brought him to his knees. I longed that night in my girlish flat chest to possess the power that Filomena had.

    The night Filomena came to our home my younger brother Alberto sat there stoned, staring open-mouthed at her whenever he wasn’t shovelling pasta down his throat. He laughed at every second word she said. Only my mother and I were silent. My mother’s English was so poor she could hardly follow the conversation anyway, and she was probably worn out from her marathon cooking. But her eyes followed my father’s every move, hungrily watching him as he smiled and flirted with Filomena like a dog waiting for a scrap. I knew my mother had been beautiful once. I had seen photos of her in Italy when she looked like a young Gina Lollobrigida. She had been one of ten children in Napoli, poor as church mice. She spent her days sitting in the sun with the old women who made lace for tourists, dreaming of becoming a movie star in America. Instead she married my father. He wooed her with his jewels and furs, his good looks. He took her to Paris and Venice. She was a starving girl with big lips and hips, desperate not to end up one of the black crones sitting in tiny cobbled streets making scraps of lace while the washing hung overhead. She asked no questions where his money came from.

    I had been so afraid of all these new strangers at my family's dining table I could barely open my mouth. My father noticed, as he noticed everything, and his irritation sparked. “Forgive Carina,” he said to Filomena, wiping his mouth where tomato juice stained his lips. “She’s like her mother, dumb as a dog. I spend a fortune on her school fees and this is what I get!” He jabbed his fork at me, contempt in his chins, his eyes. “A retard for a daughter! She spends all her time with her head stuck in a book instead of helping her mother!”

    Filomena turned her gaze upon me. It was as if the moon had noticed me.

    “She is very pretty,” Filomena spoke softly and slowly to my father, as if not trusting he could understand English. Even her voice was white and creamy. “She must take after her mother.”

    There was a stunned silence. Nobody ever insulted my father to his face and nobody had ever called my obese mother pretty. Not in English anyway. My father put down his fork and wiped his hands. I was praying. Please Mary. Sweet Mary. Don’t let him be mad here. Don’t make him have a fight.  The last time my father had been in a rage he shot our family dog and that was just because Tony had slept in. Then, in this night of miracles, the biggest miracle happened. My father began to laugh. We stared at him in shock. I couldn’t remember ever seeing my crusty, red-wrinkled father laughing at the dinner table before. After a few moments Tony and Alberto joined in, laughing even harder when they saw the perplexed expressions of myself and my mother. Filomena smiled gently as if she understood the joke, without finding it too amusing. She was flushed in the face. I came to know later that when Filomena was very angry her cheeks inflamed. “Did you hear that, Maria?” my father roared, slapping his knee. My mother stared at him. “That’s a good one! I like a woman who answers back!”

    It was news to me. The last time my mother had answered him back he had broken her arm.

    After Alberto, Tony and Filomena had left, and my father locked himself in his office, I sought out my mother in the kitchen where she was preparing the marinade for tomorrow night’s meal. “What did you think of her?” I asked. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

    “Bella puttana,” my mother muttered. I was shocked. “Bella whore!” she repeated, and then a string of Italian. “Did you see your father? It’s unnatural. That strega has the Devil’s eyes! She’ll be the death of this family!”

    I thought my mother was jealous - a superstitious peasant. I felt sorry for her and prayed to Mary to give her grace that night. My mother remained the only one impervious to Filomena’s charm. Whenever she visited, my mother lurked in the background, muttering oaths under her breath and refusing to speak English.

    I failed to realise my mother was a prophet.

    I knew every delicate rosebud on Filomena’s black gloves. I could smell the perfume she always wore, honeysuckle and jasmine. When I looked up I saw Star staring at me across the church pews with a strange look on her cheap face. I looked down quickly, not wanting to connect with her. Around me people spoke about a brother I had not known. This paragon drove neighbourhood children to school and football matches, loved animals, cared about the environment. I wanted to believe their words. I ached for that brother. It seemed unbearably sad to me that I was the only member of our family left with the exception of Alberto, now doing time for armed robbery and murder.

    Outside the church the guests mingled for a few moments. The rain still drizzled. It was easy to spot the undercover police amongst the guests. The mourners knew why they were there. They tolerated and ignored them. The rumours said Tony’s killer or killers would show at the service. Three men with identical dress sense and expressions approached Filomena. I could sense the cops interest as I have sensed so many things about the cops over the years. The times they were parked outside our house, the day they followed Tony and I into a shopping mall.

    “Nice service,” Jack, the shorter of the trio said to her. “Father Trask done us proud. Don’t worry Filomena, justice will be done. Everything goes around.”

    Jack knew all about that. His brother and wife had been recently gunned down at a local football match. The other two men remained silent. I knew their faces. Tony’s friends. I’d grown up with them. Now there was a killer amongst us. The rain began to intensify, and we scattered to go our separate ways.

    I bet wherever my mother is, she’d be regretting not being there to prepare the food for Tony’s service. Life to my mother was all about making meals and I despised her for it. Bowls of seafood, octopus, shrimps, olives in a range of tonal colours, pizza Napoletana with warm mozarella cheese thick and stringy, fried eggplant, arancini spicy potato and rice balls and sfogliatella melt-in-your-mouth pastry filled with sweet ricotta. If she was in heaven, she was busting a gut watching Filomena’s sushi-catered reception. As the years passed my mother had become fatter and fatter as if needing to put barriers of protection between herself and her family. She would labour over a meal all day, cutting, dicing, salting, herbing, marinating, cheesing, slicing, only to watch her husband pick at it, a dissatisfied sneer on his face. Peasant food, he called it. My father did not enjoy my mother’s cooking. He lived on antacid tablets and food cooked by strangers in expensive restaurants.

    I grew to hate mealtimes. The unspoken violence that always surrounded our table stole my appetite. The telephones and mobiles that rang in coded signals, the hushed voices at the door, voices of men we never saw. My mother would watch her husband and daughter pick at her meals, sniffing with disapproval. After dinner she retreated to her altar to pray to her saints for members of her family who had died in Napoli. Surrounded by candles, she’d pray in her native tongue for hours, shoulders hunched, arms folded around her belly as if nursing the hate she carried all her life.

 

    On the phone curiosity and hatred battled, but curiosity won. I didn’t want to meet with Star. There is a killer amongst us. She swore me to secrecy; especially Filomena, she repeated over and over. She promised me she knows who killed Tony; she promised proof.       “Come alone,” she said. “If I talk, I’ll sign her death warrant.” She sounded hysterical, but was it a trap? I prayed for guidance.

    Central Cafe wass packed, but that meant nothing these days. Jack’s wife and brother were gunned down at a crowded sports game. Star looked different when she finally appeared; less makeup, more washed out, harder. I sat in the cafe with her for two hours. She smoked one cigarette after another, lighting them from the end of the previous one. It seemed impossible to believe this was the woman Tony chose to share his body with before he died. I mistrusted what she had to tell me. What could this creature with her gravel voice, her knowing slyness have to tell me? But I was wrong. The creature knew a dark tale.

    Before his death, Tony had been collecting information on his father. I knew he had taken all his family photos to the house he shared with Filomena, but I had thought no more of it. Star revealed he had been contacted by a leading literary agent who was interested in a book on my father. Crime truly did pay in Australia, and everybody was looking for another Chopper. Tony’s hopes were high - he had even planned a musical around my father’s life. Star showed me a list of songs like My Way and Send in the Clowns.  Then she went one better, and claimed that Tony and her used to sing the songs together in bed. This Tony was as unreal to me as the funeral service Tony. How many Tonys were they? My brother had begun digging around in my father’s past, which was something we had all been raised never to display any interest in. No easy job, as Dad’s friends were the reticent type. But egged on by his fantasy of “The Musical - My Dad the Gangster,” he persevered. At this stage Dad had had his stroke but was still alive in the nursing home. He wasn’t telling Tony anything either, but was no longer around to stop him.

    My parents came out to Australia in the 50s. Tony dug up rumours Dad was involved in the notorious Esolia Piazza shooting, when two rival gangs had opened fire on each other, killing a coachload of American tourists who were definitely in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong country. Then there was the kidnapping of Natalia and Charlie Giacobini’s daughter Silvania. When the parents refused to pay the extravagant ransom, was it my father who put the gun to the child’s head and shot her, then dumped the body in a bin in Rome?

    I was uncomfortable listening to this whore who made a living pushing her implanted plastic breasts into stranger’s faces. She connected my father to these crimes with what amounted to a handful of gossip and aged rumours. I could picture my mother’s eyes black, filled with hatred and knowing, her swift efficient chopping of basil, her hands slippery with innards as she gutted fish.

    Star pushed yellowing newspaper clippings at me. They had been amongst my father’s possessions, she said. I saw glimpses of a little girl with dark hair smiling, and next to that image a body covered by a sheet. Silvania. My father had written a date on the clipping in his old fashioned writing. When I saw that date written by my father who never wrote appointments, who always forgot birthdays, I felt short of breath. Star watched me closely. I examine the other clippings she has handed to me. Robberies, Death notices for several of his friends, clippings on a local politician. Finally I come to the clipping Star wants me to see.

     A black and white photo from The Age, it had been taken outside St Theresa’s church. I vaguely remember the funeral; there had been a lot of media coverage as children had been involved. The mother was crying, supported by black-suited men, a little boy stuck his fingers up at the cameras. An older girl had her head down, dark hair hiding half her face. Next to her - Filomena. I knew her instantly, the only one of the group looking directly at the camera. In the chubby little blonde face with the short fringe I saw the elegant woman she would become. Unlike her siblings, there was no grief or anger in her face. She was blank.

     “There was a lot of talk your father did that shooting,” Star said. “He knew the kids’ father. Some people reckon it was payback for the father giving the police some information. He was shot in broad daylight walking in a park with his kids. It was the first time kids had been involved in a gangland shooting. It created a huge stink.”
      My father, the musical. I saw him on stage singing, putting the gun to Silvania’s head.           “The cops knew,” Star went on in her voice of bricks. She lit another cigarette, inhaling like a character from a movie. “But they couldn’t get anyone to back them. At least seven different people were willing to testify your father was with them at the time of the shooting.”

    I stared at the photograph, feeling sick to my stomach, hating Star more than ever. Oblivious, she continued. “Shortly after, Leanne Marsden gassed herself in the house. She tried to take the children with her, but she passed out from the tablets she had taken and the tenant next door smelt the gas. The kids were taken into foster care.”

    Star’s long acrylics jabbed at the photo of the blonde child. “She bided her time. Nursed her hatred of your family.”
     “It could be anyone,” I said, adding weakly, “People change.”

    Star shook her head, smiling triumphantly. “That’s what I said. I told Tony. Leave it, don’t be a dickhead. You’re making a fool of yourself. But he wouldn’t rest. He had to know. He spent a fortune on private detectives trying to locate Filomena’s brother and sister. The eldest girl died in a housefire. The boy was taken to Perth and just vanished into air. The elderly couple that took in Filomena were long dead. But one of the neighbours led him to the guy she married. A wealthy old bastard in England.”

    I felt sick. I remembered Filomena talking to me in her voice of cream and poetry about the museums, shops and theatres of England. She had spent a year living there, she told me.  And Tony had flown to England only two weeks before he was killed. At the time I had taken little notice. I was trained, you see. In my family it didn’t pay to be curious. But when he returned the tension between him and Filomena had been acute. At the time I had put it down to his womanising, or the bimbo opposite me.

    “He managed to find the husband,” Star said. “Fed him some bullshit about needing to contact Filomena. He said he had news of her long lost brother. Weazled his way into his confidence. He saw wedding photos of them. It was  Filomena. Somehow she must have twigged. The cunt had him shot.” Star began to cry.

    “She wouldn’t be capable of anything like that,” I repeated. “You don’t know her. You’re jealous of her.”

    “Tony said you’d be difficult. He told me about your dykey crush on her. If you don’t believe me, read her diaries!” She pushed a notebook across the table. “She writes it as stories but it’s obvious who she means. Read about when your father was on his deathbed and she whispered in his ear who she was.” I flinched, wanting to cry. I could see my father on his deathbed, Filomena wiping his brow and bending down to say her private goodbyes. He had cried out, startling us all, his eyes wild, his face streaked with sweat. But she couldn’t have...

    “You’re mad,” I said. “You’re full of shit. Filomena was part of our family. She loved us.” I couldn’t beat to hear her speak about Filomena, who was decency and light, in the same breath as the twisted, bloodstained, dark, artery which was my family.

    “Carina, she hated your family,” Star said. “She was fucking trying to destroy you all.” She pushed the folder of papers across the table. “Please, Carina. I’m just asking you to read it. You’ll know what to do.”

    You’ll know what to do. Her words echoed in my head as I sat crying hours later after reading a passage about my mother and me.

    The mother’s eyes are filled with hate as she passes me yet another plate of spaghetti. Her eyes are like burning prayers. Every mouthful of her food disgusts me. It is filled with her murderous silence, her hypocrisy. The daughter watches me over the table with her googly fish eyes. Despite how dark she is, she reminds me of a little white fish, slipping so noiselessly from between that grim woman’s thighs. She is a shadow, tiptoeing around us, apologising for its existence. How can they ignore the crimes of their men? I am sipping blood with them, gorging on the flesh of their victims. I am the avenging angel, flaming sword in my breast, smiling silently among them. Pass me the salt.

    I wished my brother was here. Tony would have known what to do. He would have arranged for Filomena to be killed while he holidayed in Surfers.

    I had believed myself worthy in her eyes.

    That night I arranged my altar and sat all night praying to Mary for guidance.

    

    

    The door clicked and I tensed, crouched behind the ornamented Chinese screen in her bedroom. I heard her moving about her loungeroom, checking her telephone messages, switching on the television. I could smell her perfume, her ignorance that death waited patiently for her only a few feet away. The news headlines blared as she made herself a snack, singing a few bars from a song. She was happy, not knowing she was about to die.

    Anger for what she did to my family made me grip the revolver tighter. My mother crouched beside me. “Puttana la Madonna,” she whispered. “She has the Devil’s eyes.”

    I remembered all the family meals where my father watched me with cold contempt while Filomena looked on with sympathy. Thousands of memories of a family that was rotten to the core. Like cancerous moths we fluttered weakly into time, only dimly remembered for the dark trail of blood we left behind us. The shattered lives. The grief, rage, loss and pain.

    She turned the shower on, and I smelt a pine shower wash. Teeth were brushed. I breathed in and out. The prey was about to enter the room.

    My father was ignorant, a peasant who could not see what was front of him. He had underestimated Filomena and he had underestimated me, cunning Carina, who found the keys to her apartment in Tony’s belongings, who reassured Filomena on the phone that I was fine, thanks for calling, have a nice day.  I am no cold white little fish. I have the blood of his filthy moths in my veins, the evil that will shoot a defenseless child. The breath of a dying dog is in my breath. I have not been able to escape the jagged surgical stitches of our family line. It is over. It is beginning.

    A toilet flushed and she entered the room. I waited until she had undressed and got into bed. The light switched off, and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness I made my move.

    It was over in minutes. Frozen into shock, she submitted, cried out, pleaded. I saw that out of all my family, she had thought I was the least threat.

    “Please, Carina!” she begged. “Don’t kill me! I’ll do anything!”

    “Pray.” Sobbing like a child, she prayed with me, holding my hand while I held the gun to her head.

    Hail Mary.

     Pray for us sinners

     Now and at the hour of our death

     Amen.

    Then I fired, shattering her dreams and her lust for revenge.

    I glanced back only once at her sprawled body, to cross myself before I left. Star lay caught in her own trap. She had to die. How could she try to turn me against the only human being who was ever kind to me in this world?

    Even if it wasn’t true. Even if it was a shadow. I need to believe.

    Pray for me, Mary.

    I need to believe in goodness.

 

    END