The Devil`s Feather Read Online Free PDF Page A

television in my parents’ flat after the crowd of reporters and photographers who’d thronged their road finally departed. By that time, a week after I’d left Baghdad, my own story was dead. I’d eluded the Reuters welcoming committee at Heathrow, failed to show up for a press conference and buried myself in an anonymous hotel in London as Marianne Curran—an agoraphobic woman with no appetite and frequent nosebleeds, who never left her room, and whose stay was paid for in cash by the sugar daddy who visited her every evening.
    God knows what the hotel made of me. The only request I made of them was the address and telephone number of the nearest STD clinic. Otherwise, I wouldn’t let the chambermaids into the room, smoked like a chimney, spent hours in the bath and ate only when my father ordered sandwiches on room service. I put on a good show for him whenever he appeared, but I could see it concerned him that I only ate crumbs.
    The story I gave him for my refusal to meet the press was the same as Dan had offered in Baghdad: I didn’t want to speak publicly about my captivity for fear of jeopardizing Adelina’s chances. For his private peace of mind, I told him I’d been blindfolded throughout and had never seen my captors, but had been treated reasonably despite being terrified.
    I don’t know if he believed me. My mother certainly didn’t when he smuggled me into the flat at three o’clock one morning. She was shocked at how much weight I’d lost, worried by my preference for darkened rooms and deeply suspicious of my refusal to talk to anyone, particularly Dan Fry in Baghdad and Reuters in London. However, as I locked myself in the spare bedroom every time she tried to question me, my father put pressure on her to let me deal with things in my own way.
    Adelina Bianca was my single excuse. As long as she remained in captivity I had a reason for keeping quiet, so it was with mixed emotions that I watched her uncertain steps on television as she emerged from a mosque in Baghdad, dressed in a heavy black chador. Beside her was the imam who had negotiated her freedom. She was so hidden beneath the veil that I couldn’t read anything from her face, but her voice was strong as she thanked everyone who’d helped her. She denied that the Italian government had paid a ransom.
    Twenty-four hours later I sat glued to the set again as she gave a press conference in Milan. It was a bravura performance which left me ashamed of my own inability to talk about what had happened to me. I didn’t have Adelina’s courage.

     

    A S SOON AS A DELINA was released, I scoured websites for rented property in the West Country. Of course my mother was unhappy about it, particularly when I told her I planned to take a six-month lease and asked if I could use her maiden name again. Why did I want to do that? What about Reuters? How was I going to live? Why did I keep telling her I was fine when I so obviously wasn’t? What was wrong? And why was I going into hiding the minute Adelina was free?
    Once again, my father stepped in. “Let her be,” he said firmly. “If she doesn’t know her own mind at thirty-six, then she never will. Some wounds only heal in fresh air.”
    I could—probably should —have told them the truth, and I wonder now why I didn’t. I was their only child and we had a close and supportive relationship despite the often huge distances between us. But my father had so many regrets about abandoning the farm in Zimbabwe that I hesitated to burden him with mine. If he hadn’t been married, he’d have stayed put and barricaded the house out of bloody-mindedness, but my mother forced his hand after one of their neighbours was murdered by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF thugs.
    My father never forgave himself for what he saw as capitulation. He felt he should have fought harder for what his family had bought and built, and what was rightfully his. He landed a reasonably paid job in London with a South African wine