Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Seven — The Mill

She went down the valley road at twenty to twelve with the torch switched off until she was past the last house.

It had rained earlier and the gravel was slick. She kept to the grass at the edge where there were no stones to turn under her shoes. Her left arm swung and pulled. She had taken two of the ibuprofen the woman in the tabaccaio had sold her and they had done nothing.

The mill was at the bottom, past the second bend, set back from the road behind a hedge of brambles that had grown over the gate.

Low, one storey, built into the slope. Half the roof was gone and the part that was left was corrugated iron laid over the old tiles, from some repair nobody had finished.

Above the door, painted on the lintel in black, faded to grey, was a number.

7.

Giulia stood in the road and looked at it for a count of ten.

Then she went up the short track to the door.

The door was iron, set in a stone frame, and there was a chain through two rings with a padlock on it. The padlock was new. Not new-new — six months, maybe a year. She put her torch between her teeth and ran her thumb over it.

She did not have tools for a lock. She went round the side of the building instead.

· · ·

There was a window at the back, waist height, no glass, no frame, just an opening cut into the wall with a stone sill.

She put the torch and the knife on the sill. She got her right forearm over the edge, found the inside floor with her right foot, and pulled.

It took her four minutes. She fell once, onto her left side, and lay on the floor with her teeth shut and waited for the pain to go back to where it had been.

Then she picked up the torch, went back to the window, and lifted the knife in with her left hand, which did not close properly, so she carried it against her body instead.

· · ·

The mill was one room, and it smelled of old oil and wet stone.

The press was still there. An iron screw press stood in the middle of the floor, a column of iron with a great wooden beam through it, and beside it was the granite wheel, set on its edge in a circular stone bed, tall as her waist. The wheel had once gone round and round over the paste. There was a handle on the frame for a donkey, or for two men.

She swept the torch round the walls.

Stripped. Nothing. No copper, no motors, no tools, no sacks. The pump was a hole with pipes cut off flush. Whoever had come through here had taken everything that could be carried and sold, and they had done it years ago.

She stood still and listened. Rain on the iron roof. Nothing else.

At the back of the room, set into the wall at knee height, there was a steel door.

It was a metre wide and a metre high, painted the same grey as the frame of the press. On it, in the middle, there was a small steel plate with a number stamped into it.

7.

There was a lock. A keyhole, and above it a wheel with three numbers on it.

Giulia put the torch on the floor. She took the key out of her pocket.

It went in to the full depth of the blade.

She turned it.

The bolt drew back with a sound like a stone being moved.

· · ·

The space behind the steel door was dry. It smelled of paper.

Inside there was a metal box, two ledgers, a bundle of letters tied with kitchen string, and one photograph, face up.

She took the photograph first.

Her father, younger by twenty years, sitting at a table outdoors with a bottle in front of him. Across from him, Turi, with his hair, without the orchids. And a third man, standing behind the table, his head turned to say something to somebody out of the frame.

She turned it over. On the back, in pencil, a date: Agosto 1997.

August 1997. She had been eight years old. Enzo had still been in the gutter, two years away from it.

She put the photograph down and opened the first ledger.

· · ·

Her father's handwriting. She would have known it with the lights on and her eyes shut.

The columns were ruled in pencil, the way he ruled everything. Date. Amount. Payee. Purpose.

The first page had a heading, in the same hand:

Accordo 2006 — mantenimento

Agreement 2006. Maintenance.

The first entry was dated 12 October 2006.

Giulia turned the page, and the next one, and the next, and let the dates go past under her thumb.

Twelve entries a year. One a month. The amount never changed: €1,200.

The payee column had two words in it, the same two words, on every line for nineteen years.

E. COSTA

She stopped with her thumb on the page.

Enzo Costa.

Her father had been paying Enzo Costa twelve hundred euro a month since October 2006, which was two months after the day he was brought into the house, which was two months after she had pulled him out of a drainage ditch behind the supermarket in Palermo when she was ten years old.

Nineteen years.

She finished turning the pages to the end. Two hundred and twenty-eight entries. Two hundred and twenty-eight, and she had never seen one of them, and she had signed the family accounts every quarter for six years.

The last entry was dated 14 June.

Three months before the baptism lunch.

Under it, in the same hand, her father had written one line, and she had to read it three times.

Last one. He asked why.

· · ·

She sat down on the floor of the cupboard with the ledger open on her knees and the torch lying on its side beside her, throwing light up the wall.

Her mouth had gone dry again. The ache in her left arm had stopped being an ache and started being a pull from somewhere behind her collarbone.

Somebody had been paying Enzo for nineteen years. Her father.

And then, on the fourteenth of June, he had stopped.

She closed the ledger and put her forehead against her knee and stayed like that until she could think again.

Then she opened it and photographed every page.

Twenty-three photographs. She checked all twenty-three in the gallery, scrolling back through them one at a time, because a photograph you have not checked is not a photograph.

She put the ledgers back exactly as they had been, one on top of the other, the string looped the same way round the letters, the photograph face up on the top.

She closed the steel door and turned the key and took it out.

And the headlights came through the window at the back and swept across the inside wall of the mill.