BEN FACCINI

The Water-breather

Dedication

To my father, who encouraged all things

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Part Two

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for The Water-breather:

Copyright

About the Publisher

He stands at the edge of the lake and rolls a dry leaf between his fingers. It crumbles apart, pieces flutter from the palm of his hand, down onto the surface of the water beside him. He watches them spin and drift in opposite directions. With the end of his walking-stick, he pushes against thin ridges of mud. They fall away. Water moves forward, running down lines of earth, filling pockets, creating pools.

He sits down on the grass. He lays his head on his knees and closes his eyes. The sounds of the lake wash against his feet.

Part One

1

We are always travelling. From country to country, from grandmother to grandmother. We spend winter and spring in the car and, in the summer, my brothers and I have bottles of water on our laps and sweets in our mouths to soften the tight bends that send us sideways across the back seat.

I am Jean-Pio, the middle child. I sit between my two brothers, waiting for the petrol sign to flash up red. It has been my place since we started moving. I either lean forward, my knees jammed into the gap between my parents’ seats, or I push my head back and let my eyes drift through the metal grid of the rear window. I see onto the rushing roads with the occasional tree or lorry to block out the light. I swallow with every bump and dip to quell my car sickness, measured, like a metronome, by the indicator clicking left and right. I read number-plates, decipher stickers on the backs of cars. I play ‘I spy’ in my head. A for air. B for bend. C for car. D for dead-end. I add up number-plates. I count down the kilometres from town to town. I scan the billboards and signposts for new words.

Sometimes, peering into overtaking cars, I meet the gaze of a hungry dog or the empty silhouettes of strangers. I strain to see what they’re wearing and guess where they might be going. They rarely look like us, eyes set on the horizon, children sitting tidily in a row, but occasionally I catch sight of a family like ours. I find parents with feet flattened onto worn down matting and children slouched behind, trouser bottoms stuck to their seats. I follow a father clutching the wheel with impatient hands and a mother severed from the world, floating like paper on a flow of water. I nudge my brothers. Together we turn to glimpse at their fleeting faces, tearing urgently along beside us, leaving sky and ground behind.

In the car, Giulio, my younger brother, sits to my right. Our father says, ‘You can never tell if he’s happy or sad.’ I can tell because when he’s sad his lips crumple and fade into the rest of his face. Duccio, the eldest, is to my left. He’s so handsome that we often can’t walk five metres without people stopping and staring. Our mother reckons that now that he’s eleven, he’s only got one or two years left until he gets a hairy top lip and greasy skin and then that’ll be the end of that. Our back seat is wide enough for us not to touch each other, but if Giulio moves into my space I push him back. If I lean too far over towards Duccio, he crushes my thumb with the seat-belt wrapped around his tightened fist. If we all yell and annoy my father, he pulls the car over and shouts and our mother cries.

Our mother is Ava. Some call her Ave, others Avi. We call her Ama because it’s a mix of Maman and Ava and she hates being called Mum. It’s a bit like me. They couldn’t decide on a single French, English or Italian name so that’s why I’m called two names: Jean-Pio. Ama comes out with ‘we’ about the English, but the origins that shape her mind and flawless white face come and go on the number-plates of passing cars: England, France, Holland and Slovenia. Ama is each and every one of us rolled into one. She is a multi-purpose clasp, an all-embracing shape. She is allergic to the sun and suffers from insomnia. She has always been unable to sleep as far back as we can remember. She can never doze in the car because she develops a lingering pain between the eyes and even if she goes to sleep at night in a warm bed she wakes up with a jump and a tired head that stays with her all day.

Our father is Gaspare, or Pado to us. He’s Italian, with a Sicilian father. Ama says his moods swing from singing ecstasy and smiles, to blind fury. He’s an anatomist and a histopathologist, a specialist in toxins and indoor air pollution. He used to teach in England, but now he rushes around Europe, attending conference after conference, and we go with him. Children, he repeats to Ama, need to see the world. We wait for him in long car parks and he appears between meetings to gesture ‘hang on’ or ‘five more minutes’. Sometimes he carries slides with sections of diseased lungs, or a book on rats which is kept in the glove compartment. It has the answer to many questions: peanuts give brown-brimming tumours, artificial sweeteners cause blooded pockets on the tail and nicotine spreads yellow-stained patches across white fur.

2

I’m eight years old. It’s the spring of 1978. Since Pado developed his theory on how diseases spread from air conditioning, and became president of the European Board of Histopathologists, our kilometre dial has clocked into thousands and started its cycle over and over again. Our journeys, along motorways, across seas and over mountains, have to keep up with the progress of sickness from people’s lungs and air conditioners. Travelling is a race against time. Every moment we pause, or complain, is a moment wasted, an opportunity for disease to take hold. Our car must carry on, always. That’s the way it is. Places to get to. Lives to save. Scientists to convince.

Duccio is entrusted with the maps. He keeps these in the pocket behind our father with the stacks of papers and hotel listings for each country. Some maps you have to fold out more than others. Spain and France stretch far across my lap. We always get lost in Brussels because the guidebook for Belgium has a tear where the Flemish and French street names merge in shredded strands. Giulio has the pamphlets for the conferences stashed behind Ama’s seat: ‘Legionella pneumophila and the use of erythromycin’. ‘Epidemiology and the evaluation of environmental carcinogenic risks’. Giulio also has a book of jokes with two hundred reasons why the chicken wants to cross the road. Ama keeps a paperback called What To Do On Long Journeys. It has been fingered and thrown across the car so many times that it is tattered and scuffed like a grimy shirt collar. Duccio can tell you the make of any car from any country. Giulio and Pado can list most of the capital cities of the world. I can tell when the petrol sign is going to turn red.

In England, we stay with our grandmother, Ama’s mother. She was born in London, but her parents were Dutch and Slovenian and brought her up speaking French in England. That probably explains why she married a Frenchman, our grandfather, Grand Maurice. He drowned two summers ago while fishing for crayfish in a lake in France and our grandmother hasn’t been the same since. Grand Maurice thought he was so lucky to have met her that he called her ‘ma chance’. We still call her Machance even if Pado tells us she hasn’t brought us much good fortune lately. I’m Machance’s favourite and no one really knows why. Maybe it’s because I was Grand Maurice’s favourite too. Ama shrugs and goes quiet about it. Giulio thinks it’s because I’ve got Grand Maurice’s brown-green eyes and, now that he’s dead, I’m the only one carrying them around.

When in Italy, we stay in small family hotels in Milan and Rome or with Pado’s parents in Umbria. In Germany, we have a bed-and-breakfast near the motorway which has sticky muesli and cartoons for children on the TV. In Madrid, the owner of our hotel is so chatty that he keeps us waiting for our room keys to tell us stories we’ve heard a hundred times. Over the reception desk there are posters from Pado’s scientific conferences coloured with microscopic close-ups of viruses and then a torn, withered photo of the owner’s wife carrying dried sausages from Cantabria, the sun setting on her skirt. Ama can’t sleep in the Madrid hotel because of the neon street signs outside our room so we wrap her clothes across the windows and whisper in the night. Before going to bed, Ama sniffs the sheets, one by one, to check they are clean. If she finds a hair, a scab, a toenail or even a trace of scent, she calls the reception in a small voice and we watch as astonished maids remake the beds with Ama following behind, smoothing the spreading white surfaces with her drowsy hands. When we try to help her, she gently pushes us to one side, ‘Just let me do it, please.’

Pado always states, ‘There’s no point telling me things I know. Tell me something new’, so when he pops his head into our hotel room to say ‘Goodnight’, you know you have to hurry to come up with new facts fast:

‘If you weigh all the insects in the world, they are heavier than all the animals put together!

‘Every single snowflake is unique!’

‘Not bad, Jean-Pio, I’ll have to think about those.’

Giulio invents a new chicken joke. It still has to cross the road, but it makes Pado laugh all the same. When Pado leaves, Giulio asks me where I get my facts from. I don’t really know. I suppose I just pick them up, here and there, glancing through newspapers in hotel lobbies, listening to Pado’s colleagues, staring out of the car window. Giulio and I have a deal: if I get up before him, I have to wake him gently, ask him what he is dreaming about and suggest a good ending. He then goes back to sleep and tells me what happened later. Duccio stands in front of the mirror ruffling his shiny black hair. He hates the way Ama combs it neatly to the side, every night, before he goes to bed. If it weren’t for our parents, he’d never wash his hair or change his clothes. Then no one would smile in the street or beam thirsty grins at him again. When Ama overhears our night-time whispering, she hisses a rustling ‘Ssssh, be quiet!’ and, in between her words, you can hear the pumping exhausts that choke her day, the sound of car doors slamming and the creasing of maps hiding roads that always carry on over the page.

Our hotels are usually within sight of the conference centres and we park the car in between hundreds of others. The rooms are teeming with fellow scientists and the foyers thick with greetings: ‘Meet my wife and children’, ‘I read your book’, ‘Will you be presenting your recent statistics?’

Ama jots down notes for Pado. Her memory sweeps backwards and forwards like the windscreen wipers on the car. She collects papers, remembers dates, faces and addresses. ‘Isn’t that xsthe pathologist from Stuttgart?’ she nudges Pado, writing down a name called up from the depths of her sleepless mind.

Ama is Pado’s translator too. She translates his speeches and articles, rolls out the languages he needs. She says the important thing is never to have an accent. That’s why no one ever knows where she comes from, not even her. Pado doesn’t care about accents, and whatever language he speaks, it sounds like Italian. If we have the room next to our parents, we can hear Ama correcting Pado, stopping and insisting on an intonation. Pado listens to her, running the cold bathroom tap over his toes, swollen from accelerating, foot down against the floor, all day long.

‘Please Gaspare, just try once more, for me,’ Ama pleads.

Then the rosary of Pado’s pronunciations starts up again and coils through the wall that divides us, an echoing rhythm to sleep to.

When we don’t even have time to stop in a hotel, we rush into roadside bars and hurry the waiters with ‘no time to waste’ sandwiches. Then we race back to the car and drive into the night, humped over our knees and our mother wide-eyed in the darkness. Pado uses the time to rehearse his speeches: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the scientific community …’ He presents his findings on smoking and the different aspects of lung congestion to the cold windscreen with Ama’s lost face painted into the glass.

3

Our car rarely breaks down. ‘It’s a stroke of luck’, say the mechanics. The outside is so dirty it has tiny furrows of green growing along the edges, and tinges of grime on the bonnet that suck up the sliding rain like silent parched mouths. Ama wishes the car would conk out from time to time, simply shudder to a standstill like a wounded car should. Behind her closed eyes, she longs for the sound of the engine spluttering, the slow, burning smell of overheating or the sudden scrape of the exhaust as it finally drops onto the road.

‘Cars only break down if they’re left in garages’, that’s how Pado sees it.

Ama has a big bin at her feet to keep the seats tidy. She’ll take everything except eggshells. They smell and turn grey, so you have to wait for the country lanes and roll down your window to throw them into a bush. Sometimes we miss and Pado tells us it doesn’t matter as eggshells rot fast. Ama is not so sure, she reckons they take years to blend into the earth. That means that there must be eggshell everywhere we’ve been, a thousand jagged fragments dotted around Europe, under bushes, lining puddles in the road.

The car dashboard has dark rings of wood that project weaving patterns onto the rear window in the sun. From time to time, Ama brings out a dusting cloth and polishes it. She keeps the cloth in the glove compartment next to her music tapes. She has ten tapes in all, stacked into two piles of five. Pado keeps his tapes separate, crammed into the pouch to the side of his seat. Ama’s cassettes are all of Liszt. Pado’s are all Verdi. The agreement is that Liszt is for the gentle drives through open countryside, whilst Verdi is for motorways and driving fast, books fluttering in the wind. At least, that’s how it’s meant to be, but Pado is always in a hurry and Liszt rarely makes it out of the glove compartment. If Ama does manage to get a Liszt cassette, it’s only because Pado knows that, sooner or later, as the curves and bends speed up, we are going to have to have Verdi and nothing else. As Ama’s eyes are beginning to brush the leaves outside, floating to the notes of her Liszt, Pado lowers the volume until the music is inaudible, until Liszt merges with the indicator and the murmuring of the tyres against the hard tarmac. Then he pulls out his Verdi cassette, one hand on the wheel and the other on the tape machine, and plugs in opera music at top volume. Ama might be lost in tree tops, curled around distant twigs, but she sits up immediately.

‘Where’s my tape?’ she snaps and stretches for the volume button, her ears ringing with noise.

Pado stops her, ‘We have to push on.’

Ama retreats into hostile mutterings, her smothered complaints frothing out of the windows, trickling down the sides of the car.

Our parents’ struggles last for a while, falling and rising, depending on the traffic ahead or the volume on the tape machine. If Pado is still shouting, ‘It’s bloody Verdi or nothing at all!’, he speeds up to prove his point, chin up against the wheel. His foot pumps the accelerator in an outraged, stamping skip. The car surges forward, shooting ahead like a ball. We bounce over bumps, scrape along walls, hoot people off zebra crossings. Ama stares into her lap, her white hands twitch and fidget with the folds of her dress. She breathes out slowly, at regular intervals, to keep calm. After a few near misses, and as the arrow of the speedometer wrenches at its dial, she hovers her fingers menacingly above the hand brake.

‘Stop Gaspare, you’re going far too fast!’ she yells.

Pado waits to see if she’ll touch the hand brake. Ama turns to her door instead and threatens to open it unless he slows down. Pado drives on, faster and faster. In the back, we watch as Ama opens her door onto the world, widening the gap little by little, the tarmac appearing, swelling into the car until it is running like a frenzied conveyor belt beneath us. The noise of the wheels floods in. Pado won’t take any notice. Duccio tries to convince him. I bow my head, so as not to see. Giulio edges away from the gaping hole, clutching onto his seat. I can feel him pressing his shoulder into me, the way it shakes when he cries. Pado nudges up to the car in front, to the point of touching. Duccio leans over us and pulls in Ama’s door, yanking against the force of the wind and her frozen grasp. Then the car in front skids out of the way, scared by our racing, and we screech to a halt. Ama steps out of the car. She stands silent for a while, in front of us, and then, with spat breath, she turns to Pado: ‘You fucking idiot!’

Ama walks away, crosses fields, kicks dust at the side of the road. We trail behind her, Pado’s window down.

‘Please get back in.’

She ignores him. She stops to look at flowers, picks up stones, folds her arms or runs her hands through the air. She can cut across whole meadows, her head hung low, and disappear into woods to be alone. When she becomes a little wisp on the horizon, Pado jumps out of the car and rushes off after her. Ama can see him coming and she runs to avoid his apologies and smiles, storming over the road into the fields the other side. Cars overtake and slow down to watch our parents racing to and fro, refusing embraces and finally walking back, arm in arm.

Pado is explaining fast. ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’

Ama cries until he has to shout it so loud that all the crows in the trees are thrown up like black seeds sowing the sky with their crops of regret. Then we know it’s time for us to get out of the car and for them to get in. We sit together, hands in our pockets, or in the fields, scratching our fingers in the mud, watching our parents, each on their front seat, trying to sort this out again. We can stay like this for a while, the three of us lined up, a few metres in front of the car, observing the wide windscreen crammed with our parents’ heads. If one of the side-windows is lowered, I creep up close. Snippets of conversation slip out unnoticed. Ama gasps out her splintered words, the rolls of reasons why she can’t carry on with the endless driving, all the conferences and translating. Pado tries to convince her. Ama wraps her refusal around herself and repeats, ‘It’s not a life, Gaspare, it’s not a life.’

I watch Pado’s reaction. His eyes are twitching with arguments. He too has lists, long lists of valid reasons to carry on, lists like row upon row of microscopic slides and, on each slide, more and more reasons. Ama says she no longer knows what is fixed and what is gone. She listens to Pado, but she can’t see herself any more. The never-ending motion of the car is ploughing through his lists, through the days, on and on.

We get back in the car, the seats taut with unresolved temper. To calm matters down, Pado puts on one of the story tapes he and Ama have recorded for us. Ama has imitated the pigs from Animal Farm and Pado has taken on The Three Musketeers in a special battling tone. Occasionally, in the middle of a story, Ama and Pado break into hysterical laughter, struggling to put on an accent or pronounce an unpronounceable word. Their recorded, crackling giggles fill the car, pushing back the resentment and anger. In the background of the tapes, you can hear doors banging, a dog barking and Giulio. He always insists on being present when the tapes are made. He’s even managed to get a slot on a cassette to tell us a joke. Every time that tape comes on, he asks to listen to it over and over again, rewinding and rewinding, until one day it gets so chewed that the machine spits out knotted loops of music and squashed-chicken jokes.

The tapes, in the cramped swinging car, can mingle with thoughts in my mind and change into fears that stick like headaches, at least I call them headaches. There’s no other way of describing them. The headaches come on stronger as the motorways rush their white broken lines into a sickly mess or when the little petrol sign suddenly flicks on red. I watch it waver for a while and then it jams on redder than before, a stain that won’t go as the last drops of petrol slip away into the engine. I go to warn Ama. The sight of her tense shoulders stops me. I pull back, not daring to touch her.

I hesitate, then pat Pado on the arm instead. ‘The light! Look at the petrol light!’

‘It’s all right,’ he answers, ‘I’m sure we can manage another thirty kilometres to the next petrol station. Well done for noticing.’

But how can it be all right? There’s no petrol station anywhere and the road is hurtling itself further and further into the distance. I watch the kilometres tick past, hoping that Ama won’t realise that we are going to grind to a halt with juggernauts and trucks flying about us like leaves in a storm. I concentrate on the stories on the tapes instead. Some manage to calm me. Others bring on a smarting-cut punch between the eyes, the blurring of shadows along the road, the memories of number-plates uncounted. I focus on my brothers’ elbows skewering me. I hold on to that niggling pain, catching like a nail on my skin. I breathe softly, slowly, in and out, but my head leaks, a punctured bowl emptying. The unwanted thoughts, the thoughts I’ve turned back a thousand times, suddenly come, and once they’ve come, they’re shoved aside by new ones, tumbling, falling into my head. My mouth is full of them. I try not to attach words to them. They swim, crippled without letters stuck to their sides, and then that’s it. They trick me. They catch me out. They take shape and snatch words, glue them to themselves. I shut myself off from the car, the perpetual swaying, the rub of its wheels, but I can’t blot out the humming of unsolicited thoughts as they dress themselves faster and faster in aching words and images. I listen to the stories on the tapes again. I reinvent new endings, swap characters with others. I create images and thoughts to wipe everything away. I stop. I start. I warn. I save. The petrol sign is redder and redder and no one is doing anything about it.

Pado looks calm. It might be all right. We might get away with it this time. I look at the cars rushing past. I follow them closely. Then that’s it. A thought springs up inside me again. What if the last drop of petrol has just gone and we’re about to slam to a halt right here in the middle of the motorway and we can’t get out of the car and the lorry behind us swerves and hits the car in front and the car in front spins round and starts coming back the other way? Why did I think that? I didn’t think that really. Look at the lorry. Quick, a word for the driver – ‘Don’t die’ – but then the lorry overtakes and slips into the distance before I have time to say my word for it. What if the driver goes round the corner now and ploughs into the road, tunnelling into the cracked grey surface of the tarmac? What if we shoot round the corner after him, straight into the piled-up cars in front? I hold on to myself and it’s as if I’m pulling on a string of words, till like a chain they dance me away. I silently repeat ‘We mustn’t crash! We can’t crash!’ – I yell it to myself so hard that my ears are singing. I call for help, but no one can hear. I see faces from the morning, cars that passed us by. That staring woman, that crying girl, that dog with a blue collar, tossing and turning its head through the wound down window. I imagine our grandfather, Grand Maurice, fighting and writhing against the water that choked him. I see his face slipping, his feet digging in to the sinking mud, his mouth, his eyes, his ears filling with the lake. Then his face mingles with faces from yesterday and more faces from the day before that, and number-plates, and cars and the motorways they were on. What were the people in the cars doing? What language were they speaking? The days and towns slide past. I can’t remember, but I must remember. What number-plate? What car? I put my hands over my eyes. A spiralling headache comes on full blast. The pain arrows through my eyes and I can’t think at all. I’m overturned by a dizziness that flicks me up and down inside.

‘Turn off the tape. Please!’ I manage to say.

They won’t. I am drifting, disorientated.

‘Stop the car!’

My words melt away. Giulio shakes me, but I can’t feel anything. My voice has changed, it’s an unheard, stifled whistle.

Pado looks round in surprise and parks in a lay-by. I can see a public lavatory in the distance and run towards it.

‘Don’t go in there. It’s filthy!’ Pado shouts after me.

I go in anyway. I lean against its wall, cars filing past and men staring at me from behind urinals. I try to find a lavatory. Most of the doors are locked. One door is open and it has a scratched outline of a mouth swallowing up a telephone number inside a heart. I sit on the closed seat, panting, trying to banish myself from my thoughts. I recite ‘We mustn’t crash’ again and again. I can smell the rotting taste of panic everywhere. All the time Pado is hooting impatiently.

‘Hurry up. Hurry up!’

I sprint back outside. Pado is beginning to pull away and, with the buttons of my head unfastened, I run to reach the car before any new thoughts trip me up. My brothers are looking at me worriedly through the rear-window. I get back into the car. Pado observes my face in the driving mirror. I know he wants to ask what’s up, but the other cars are pushing past us and the picnic is getting warm. He smiles instead. He leans towards me.

‘Get him a drink of water, he’s dehydrated.’

His face is full of warmth, spreading into ridged lines, a map with motorways, rivers and hills. Then the story on the tape slides back in again on its way round the machine and its voice sings like a stone cast up from the tarmac.

Ama looks worried. ‘Gaspare, we should stop again. Jean-Pio’s obviously not feeling well. Slow down!’

Pado accelerates ahead. ‘He’ll be fine. Will everyone just bloody calm down, lasciatemi in pace.’

I gaze at the changing clouds out of the window. They have joined into one slow dragging crease in the sky. Ama turns to check on me.

‘I’ve never seen a child stare into space so much. That’s all he does all day long!’ she sighs to Pado. ‘No wonder the boy gets car sick.’

‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ I tell Ama. ‘I’m fine.’

She doesn’t answer. She digs her nails into the fabric of the front seat and picks furiously at the thread of the seams.

4

The trickiest thing about travelling from England to France or Belgium and back is the Channel ferry. You have to join endless queues of cars well in advance and have a ticket with an arrival time that is an hour behind or in front of where you are coming from. The last bit of the drive to the port is always silent. There’s nothing to say, except that Pado hates having to be early for a boat and Ama can’t stand the smells and noises of the ferry. She checks the trees on the roadsides for the slightest sign of a storm at sea. We look with her, waiting in dread, for the cutting rain, the litter-carrying gusts, the dance of cars, from side to side, along the motorway in the wind.

The signposts to the ferry seem to change constantly and Pado’s shortcuts lead us to areas where there’s never a shop to buy fresh bread or a place to fill up with petrol. We’re always running late. When we ask someone the way, no one can understand Pado’s distorted French and he drives on frustrated, leaving passers-by in mid-sentence, mouths wide open, until he finds a person who can answer him properly. Duccio normally reckons he’s worked out the route anyway. Pado is sure he’s recognised the road ahead.

‘It’s this way,’ he says.

‘But that last man told us it was in the other direction!’ Ama protests.

‘He wasn’t from around here,’ Pado insists.

‘How the hell do you know?’

‘I do, that’s all. It was obvious.’

Duccio quietly folds his map back together. He turns the top of the page inwards, just in case.

‘Thanks all the same,’ Ama reassures Duccio, loud enough for Pado to hear. She curls her arm behind her seat to touch Duccio’s knee. He hesitates a moment, then edges away, abandoning Ama’s hand to itself.

We pass at least five public lavatories, but we’re not allowed to stop because Pado assures us his Italian university book on venereology is still a reference. He has it with him at all times.

‘Page forty-one,’ he says, pointing to his case.

Ama opens the book and scrunches up her face as she reads that ‘virulent germs and potential diseases are everywhere, particularly in places of scant hygiene such as public toilets’. Then she turns the pages quickly to avoid looking at the photographs too long.

‘How hideous!’ she winces. ‘Is that what happens in acute cases of gonorrhoea?’

Pado nods and, from over Ama’s shoulder, I can see pictures jumping out at me, like squashed animals on the road, stuck between people’s legs. Giulio says he doesn’t care about the photographs or any disease or anything, but he is going to burst if he doesn’t get to a loo soon.

Pado tells him to quieten down: ‘Men can hold on.’

Ama is sure that it is harder for women and then that’s it because Pado says: ‘How come everything is so much more difficult for women?’

‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ Ama protests.

‘Then why say it like that?’

It all comes down to the fact that Ama was brought up in England and it’s not a place to live because people don’t speak their mind and have to make little, snide comments instead. It’s not as if you can’t make little comments in Italy though.

In fact, we used to have a potty, but that ended when Giulio made it overflow. He was telling Duccio to move over, and not looking, and then it was too late. Streams of pee were flooding the car and Ama was screaming ‘Get out!’ in English, French and Italian all at once. The pee made a stain on the floor and layers of antiseptic wipes won’t make it go away. If the days are hot and the car is warm, a faint smell rises in your nose.

Ama likes to find her own quiet spot to pee. As the only woman in the car, she tells us she has a right to be alone. She points at trees and behind bushes, forces us down lanes. Pado always has a different spot in mind.

‘Here’s perfect! Perfetto.’

‘No Gaspare, not here, please.’

‘Why, it’ll do fine.’

‘No, not here.’

‘For goodness’ sake, who cares?’

‘I do!’

‘I’m going to stop here.’

‘No, go on a bit.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s someone coming.’

‘Where?’

‘There, from behind that house.’

‘I can’t see a house.’

‘There!’

‘That’s not a house.’

‘What the hell is it then?’

‘It’s a barn.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Please drive on! Look, there is somebody coming.’

‘That’s a fucking cow.’

‘Don’t get angry with me. I can’t believe this.’

‘You can’t believe what?’

‘I simply want a pee, you idiot.’

‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot.’

‘I didn’t, I said idiot.’

‘Come on, out you get. We’re all waiting.’

‘Carry on further! I’m not going anywhere near that cow.’

‘What? Why the hell not? It’s behind a fence.’

‘I know. I just don’t like it. I’m sorry, I’m not doing anything in front of that cow! Forget it, just forget it.’

‘Right. I’m stopping here, behind this tree.’

We stop under a tree, down a lane. The air is cold, and stripped, desolate farmland stretches all about and around. Pado turns the engine off. Ama won’t budge. She refuses to look at Giulio who is tapping her shoulder from behind. Then Duccio and I tap her on the shoulder too, ‘Go on, Ama, please have a pee! It’s all right here.’

‘Will you all stop getting at me! I don’t want to go any more,’ Ama yells, shrugging us off her. We shrink backwards into our seats and Pado kicks the accelerator so hard that the cows in the meadows stretch over their fences to watch the mud on our tyres being sprayed up into the air.

Crossing the Channel is not only dicey because of the rough seas, there are also Pado’s glass jars of preserved lungs and the histological slides for his colleagues to take into account. You have to explain them carefully to customs so Pado prefers to slip them under his seat with all the wine he’s jammed into every gap of the car.

‘Don’t take that much wine Gaspare, it’s not reasonable. You know what they’re like at customs,’ Ama tries wearily.

‘Bloody customs. Ridiculous limits!’ Pado won’t give up.

We divide the wine into ‘good friends’ and ‘acquaintances’. The good friends get labelled bottles carefully laid out under cheese, garlic and pâtés to hide their number. The acquaintances get cheap wine shoved under the back seat, huddled up against the floating organs in their jars.

‘Please tell me they are from an animal!’ Ama begs when she sees them.

Pado merely mutters ‘Yes, yes’ to Ama.

She’s not convinced, and nor are we, because it’s like the time Mr Yunnan first arrived. Mr Yunnan came in a jumble of brown cardboard boxes with numbers on them. Box one goes on box two and so on and so forth, until you have a whole body, or rather a skeleton, as Mr Yunnan has been dead for some time, maybe four or five years, Pado reckons. It was Giulio and I who gave him his name. The first time he was assembled, we couldn’t believe it was so complicated. Clicking the neck onto the spine was the hardest. Luckily, Pado had had delicate hinges fitted so he could rotate the bones to face all his colleagues in the back rows. He says that’s how he describes the kind of deformation of the ribs that can happen with lung inflammation and something about osteoclastic pitting of the bones.

Ama was sure the skeleton was plastic. ‘Look how the finger bones are joined together! Isn’t it fantastic what they can do nowadays! The knees bend, and the feet!’

That was before she read the certificate, half in English, half in Chinese, which said that Professor Gaspare Messina has the right to carry human skeleton number 76455 for professional purposes.

‘There’s nothing to get het up about,’ Pado reassured Ama. ‘He’s dead. I got him through a special deal with the Chinese government, in Yunnan Province. It’s the cheapest and best place for skeletons because they’re generally in good nick when they arrive.’

Ama couldn’t look Mr Yunnan’s way. She was speechless. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I need this skeleton for my work. It’s fine.’

‘It’s fine to drive around with someone’s bones in our car is it? What next Gaspare? What bloody next?’ Ama gasped.

We looked at Mr Yunnan. This extra presence. This unassembled, severed set of bones that we had touched with our own bare hands. It was only when Pado explained that you could tell he was a young man and that he might well have been a prisoner, that I knew that the hinge at the base of his neck was fastened to the point where the executioner shot the bullet that ripped his life away. I knew it. It grew inside me, an unwanted thought that has stayed in my head ever since.

‘He may have died naturally,’ Duccio announced, but he wasn’t convinced either.

He just said it the way Pado insists that Mr Yunnan gave his life for Science, or the way Ama quietly swallows and tells us that nothing is going to bring back our grandfather, Grand Maurice, now that he’s dead and drowned in a lake in France. You only have to read Pado’s books to see that there’s no turning back: the organs laid out on metal trays, the close-up pinkish patterns with diagrams, the weight of a lung lying alone without a body. Most people don’t give their names, Pado says. They merely die and get cut up and photographed. But the tumour, on page four of Pado’s cancer book, has a name tag to the side of it. It’s too small to read.

5

Once on the ferry, the oil-salt smell of the car deck clouded with car fumes, the sound of motors and creaking chains, and the gentle rock of waves get Giulio going. He complains that he’s feeling sick and Ama can’t answer because she can feel it too, a slow vertigo taste that rises from the stomach to lodge in the throat. Pado is convinced ‘it’s all in the mind’. He takes us on a tour of the duty-free shop to pass the time. Giulio is wavering. He can barely walk straight. Pado scoops him up and, as he does so, a stream of sick flies out of Giulio’s mouth. It drips down Pado’s front like a tie and onto the floor. Ama hurries to the cash till to ask for some tissues. She fights against the same lurching, retching urge in her mouth. She stops on a bench and breathes in deeply.

Pado is holding Giulio by the back of his jumper, out in front of him, at arm’s length. ‘Che schifo! Oh no! No! Bloody hell,’ he grumbles, half sorry, half irate. He turns his head away to avoid the smell. Already people are changing direction. A woman with grey hair gingerly steps out of the way and sighs something to herself.

‘Sorry, what did you say? Something wrong?’ Pado hurls at her. She backs away, aghast. Pado pursues her down the corridor, carrying Giulio with him, dangling in mid air, from his sagging jumper. ‘Go on!’ Pado shouts at the woman, ‘if you’ve got something to say, say it. Go on, if you dare, ma va …!’ Giulio swings, crying. He hangs limply above the ground, pushing with his legs against Pado’s arm to get down. Ama staggers to her feet.

‘Put the child down,’ she shrieks at Pado. Then it seems as if all the people on the ferry spin round and watch us, everything stopping, no one but us, perched alone on the sea.

Giulio is sick again. It splatters against the floor and slides with the rock of the ship, this way and that. Pado turns to face the glares. ‘Cosa, what? What is it?’

Ama snatches Giulio from Pado and holds him tight to her chest. She cuddles his head against her. ‘It’s all right my darling, calm down! How are you feeling?’ Giulio shivers a little, a ring of multicoloured sick printed on his lips, and on Ama’s shirt. Pado has got into an argument with one of the stewards. His shouting competes with the noise of the loudspeakers. Ama suddenly grabs me by the arm too and drags me off to find the cabins, with Giulio draped across her shoulder. ‘Come on, get a move on!’

I try and tell Duccio where we’re going. I wave and point down the corridor in front of us, urging him to get a move on. He can’t though, he’s guarding the luggage, a heap of leather and cloth shapes, as high as him.

‘Hang on! What about Pado?’ I say, running beside Ama.

‘Well hopefully he won’t bloody find us!’

We settle in our cabin. We each get a bunk-bed, except Giulio, who has to sleep in the middle, on the floor, in a nest of blankets and jumpers. Ama puts a bowl next to him, in case. We can hear the drinking crowds, with heavy feet, drumming the decks. The pinball machines throw up money and children run, falling between adult legs. From inside the cabin, it sounds like pots and pans knocking in a kitchen cupboard. Pado and Duccio show up, towing the luggage behind them along the corridors. They stack it up next to Giulio on the floor. Pado drops Ama’s bag onto the end of her bunk. It’s a shiny bag she got free from a department store. Pado reckons that’s typically English liking something just because it’s free. The problem with that, Ama argues, is that she’s always typically something when it suits Pado: typically English, typically French, typically Slovenian, typically Dutch. Anyway she’s convinced Pado is typically Italian, even if the mix with the Sicilian bit, she says, has managed to make him look Arabic.

Ama’s bag is splitting at the seams with things although Pado is always telling her to travel with the strict minimum, especially clothes. In fact, he says, you only ever need two of everything because you can wash one item whilst you wear the other. It doesn’t happen that way because Ama has piles of clothes she buys when waiting for Pado to leave his meetings and conferences. The car is barely big enough to hold them all and Pado has to scatter them everywhere to pack the boot, knickers scrunched under the spare tyre, tights between pages of reports, trousers and skirts rolled down the sides of bags. Ama intervenes from time to time: ‘No, don’t put that under that, it’ll crumple’ or ‘I need to be able to get at that later!’ There’s no reply. A bit like when you lean over into the front seats and ask: ‘How much further?’ Then there’s silence. Ama’s bag is also brimming with little bundles of antiseptic wipes in plastic coating. She has kilometres of dental floss too. Before going to bed, she hands out the floss, a good length to each of us to begin sawing at our gums. She’s sure there must be a bit of food stuck somewhere, lost between the back teeth, rubbing against the tongue, refusing to give. Then Ama has her books, lots of them. They are stashed beneath her clothes. She has at least five on the go at once, mostly French and English novels. That’s what she’s always read, ever since she was a child and Grand Maurice lent her new books each day. The two of them would spend hours reading out passages, comparing impressions. Then, as we started travelling, they would write long letters to each other, quoting lines, discussing endings. Now Ama sits up alone at night and reads whilst the rest of us doze off. She has a pocket lamp and it skips up and down the lines across the bed and into the dark with tense flicks of the wrist. Sometimes, we see her in the morning, half asleep, half awake, a book caught between her thumb and forefinger, as if the weight of the story has forced her to give up.

In Pado’s case are reviews and reports bound together with wide clips and bold red writing: ‘Embargo’, ‘Confidential’ or ‘Draft’. He leafs through them, making annotations, or catching Ama’s eye to read a passage about a clinical trial and ask for the exact translation in Italian. Ama invents a word for him, the way she does when she can’t sleep, new words to lift her away, heal the worries, pack the empty spaces of the night. She spins off idioms, chases unknown verbs, multiplies and conjugates the languages in her mind. That’s why all Pado’s colleagues ask for Ama’s translations. She knows what’s behind a phrase, the meaning that everyone is searching for but cannot find. Pado cannot dwell on translation though. There’s no time to waste. If he doesn’t analyse his reports and trials quickly, people across the world might start taking new medicines without realising that their lungs are being colonised by cysts and disease.

When we’ve rummaged through our bags and flossed our teeth, we all begin getting our beds ready, trying to make head or tail of the flimsy bunk sheets and the rock-hard pillows. Ama gives up. She’s not going to sleep anyway and doesn’t really care. The captain’s voice comes over on the loudspeakers.

‘I wish that stronzo would shut the hell up,’ Pado murmurs half asleep. I strain to hear what is being said above the locking cabin doors and stamping corridors.

Duccio looks at me. ‘I bet you there’s going to be another storm.’

Why did he say that? Eventually the captain’s voice trails off into an alarm noise: ‘If you hear this sound, get out of your cabin immediately, leaving any belongings behind, and make your way to the nearest lifeboat station.’

I listen to the three test blasts of the emergency alarm. They stab at me, dig deep inside, indelible reminders. Three short sharp slashes of panic.

I am uncomfortable. My left foot is poking out of the sheet and blanket, and every time I feel a wave knocking at the boat, I’m sure it’s a piece of jagged driftwood. The ferry mows over it and we all drink and sleep and run along the corridors not knowing that the wood is swinging its way round the motors to smash a hole in the hull to sink us. I quickly stick my head in the pillow and think of something else. Then I awake with the sound of waves again and stare into the bunks. Pado is grinding his teeth, his jaw twitching. Everyone is asleep, even Ama! I struggle out of bed and check, up close. I stand there looking at her. Her nostrils are moving softly. There is a faint band of light across her cheek from the torch she is still clutching in her hand. I study the fine lines under her eyes which, she says, grow a little deeper every night she can’t sleep. I watch the hem of the sheet flutter slightly with her breath. I can’t believe it. She really is asleep! I delve into Pado’s bag. I get his camera and position myself near the door. The flash goes off and Ama sits bolt upright. She knocks her head on the bunk above and shouts for the light. I scramble for my bed.

Ama is screeching: ‘You idiot, espèce de crétin!’ and I’m crying because she has to be really angry to shout at me in French, even if I was trying to help her by proving that she might have been asleep. Everyone is awake now and telling me I’m stupid. Ama looks weary. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping after all. Maybe she’s never slept. Not ever. Closing your eyes doesn’t mean anything. That’s only resting, but the mind goes on and on, pleading for a second, just a second of sleep, to soothe the swelling of continual waking and thoughts. I lay my head against the sheet and crease its whiteness with my toes.

The night seems interminable now with the clinking of chains and the rush of sea under the boat. People are walking and staggering along the corridors about us. Occasionally there’s a shout as my eyes are shutting or a lazily-held bag knocks against the walls. Between three and four o’clock in the morning, someone tries our door by mistake. The handle jumps up and down, followed by, ‘Shit, it’s the next deck up!’ These are enough words to wake me completely. I shake, following the shuddering movement of the carpet-covered ceiling. I’m sure I heard a thundering wave charge against the ship. I can feel it, rising up above the others, ready to slap us out of the water. I get up and open the door a little. There’s no one in sight. I shut it again quickly. Maybe they’ve already sounded the alarm? In the half-light of the cabin, I look at the evacuation instructions on the back of the door. All the figures are wearing life jackets. Where are ours? I peer under the bunk. I can’t see them anywhere. I finally spot a bundle of material tucked away by the base of the bunk ladder. If I stretch too far though, I’ll wake up Pado and he’ll make me get back into bed and then no one will hear the alarm or have time to get out of the cabin as the waves turn us over. Why did I think that? My heart drums in my throat, pushing at my head. My mind inflates with television and newspaper disaster images, stories of shipwrecks, corpses floating in the sea and boats smashed against rocks with the spray of the water dancing in the air. I watch the light from the corridor under the door. I imagine the water seeping in. A drop at first, then two, then a stream and then a wave that bursts through doors and comes bellowing down the corridors and stairwells. I see the ship filling with water as we struggle to reach our life jackets and Pado yelling and Ama yanking Giulio from the floor with the sea currents curling over us.

‘We can’t sink. The ferry mustn’t sink.’ I start saying it, slowly, continuously.

I’m thinking of Grand Maurice and how the water of the lake must have pushed open his mouth, poured between his teeth and flooded through his body down under the reeds. He lay at the bottom of the lake for a week, with his eyes and ears and nose clogged with water, before they found him. I know that if I’d been fishing with him, it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have slipped in the water. He couldn’t have.

‘We mustn’t sink. We can’t sink.’ Over and over again, I trip out the words.

I feel the door quiver a little with the long heavy corridor silence. Is there anyone on the ship? Maybe we are the only ones left as the boat drifts out of control towards the convulsing open sea. Maybe everyone is already jumping onto the lifeboats, scrambling and screaming for help? My head is pumping. I push against the door with my feet. If I hold the door back, we’ll be all right. We’ll be saved.

I’m shivering and I don’t know if it’s the cold or the rush off the top of the waves that are about to come and drown us. I pull a blanket over me. I shove my back hard against the door, my eyes peering down at the gap underneath it, waiting for the trickle of water to begin. My head hurts so much.

Suddenly Ama is stroking my hair. ‘What are you doing there my love?’ she says with bleary eyes.

‘I don’t like my bed,’ I stutter, but then tears well up inside me and I have to say I have a headache. A searing, aching one.

When day breaks, the corridor becomes alive with slamming cabin doors and running children and groggy morning voices. The loudspeaker makes a few announcements about the car deck, the opening times of the shops and immigration requirements. Pado has a shave in the oval basin. He splashes a lotion on his face and the cabin fills with his familiar smell. He carries us off to the restaurant. He guides us across the newly-cleaned, slippery floor.

As we’re grabbing our trays, Giulio tells me: ‘Ama says they’re going to take you to a doctor!’

‘What doctor?’ I gasp.

Giulio steers me behind the breakfast stand where the cornflakes have toppled out of their bowls. ‘Ama told Pado you don’t sleep enough and that’s why you’re always staring into space and getting headaches. I heard her saying it this morning.’

‘What are you two whispering about?’ Pado shouts. ‘We have to hurry. You can talk in the car.’

I’m not hungry. Not now. There’s nothing wrong with me. I saved the ferry from sinking.

The drive back down the ramp is slow. It’s like that coming into England. You have to wait for hours as they check every car and passport. It makes Pado furious. He joins the ‘Nothing to declare’ queue. Ama asks whether that’s wise, but there’s no way he’s budging. Our mother is the only one allowed to talk at customs. Pado is too dark to speak. Ama inherited our grandmother Machance’s Slovenian and Dutch white skin, but she still doesn’t answer the way she should. As we approach the customs checkpoint, Pado rehearses a few lines for Ama to repeat: ‘We’re on a private visit’, ‘No, we only have the allowed limit of alcohol’, ‘I’m a British citizen’. Ama checks her face in the car mirror. She sweeps her hair to one side. She whips on a quick layer of lipstick.

‘Clear answers. Clear and direct,’ Pado stresses. ‘And remember for the French customs, we’re resident in England and for the English customs we’re resident in France. Okay? Did you hear what I said? Hai capito?

Ama lowers her window.

‘Passports please!’

Ama thrusts out five passports. The officer reads through each one. He comes to Ama’s and opens it to find a long string of floss stuck inside its pages. The floss clings to his fingers and winds itself around the passport cover. ‘Sorry,’ Ama stammers, embarrassed. ‘I don’t know how that got there.’

‘Mrs Maseenou? Messounah? Mishina?’ the officer starts, flicking his hand to free it of floss.

‘Messina!’ Ama corrects him, politely.

‘Italian is it?’

‘The man’s a genius!’ Pado mutters to himself.

‘Where is your place of residence?’ The customs official hands back the passports and waits for an answer.

‘Well, um. It’s … um.’ Ama looks at Pado, unsure, panic crossing her face. Pado glares back at her, eyes wide-open, dumbfounded. ‘Ah! Um, here, England! I mean France, sorry France, yes France,’ Ama strives on.

‘France? You have an Italian car!’

‘No.’

‘No, what?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when were you last in England?’

‘Oh, um … two weeks ago, I think.’

‘Business or pleasure was it?’

‘… um, that’s …’

‘Where are you going now?’ the officer fires quickly.

‘Around,’ Ama makes a wide gesture with her hand.

‘Around where?’

‘How’s the weather been recently? Lovely day for this time of year!’ Ama suddenly tries.

The customs officer looks at her astonished. Giulio asks what’s up. Then the officer starts circling the car with renewed zeal. ‘Great, absolutely fucking great. Thanks for that, Ava!’ Pado huffs. He’s so irritated he flicks through the ferry brochure to keep calm and mumbles, ‘Stronzo,’ ‘bastard’ at the customs official, loudly. He hates the way they look at him. He loathes their facetious smiles, the simple voice that explains, in basic English, that this is England and nowhere else.

‘Did you see the way he looked at me?’

Ama tries to ignore Pado’s mounting rage as the customs officer gets more and more curious.

‘Keep quiet, darling. This is not the time to get paranoid.’

She’s struggling to maintain a composed face, but Pado is off: ‘He probably thinks I’m some jumped-up “dago” just off the boat, some peasant looking for work! Well I can tell him and all these bastards that I used to teach in their bloody country, at their bloody universities!’

‘For goodness’ sake, control yourself, Gaspare. Shut up! Please!’ Ama begs.

‘I mean, look at this idiot,’ Pado rages.

We can feel Pado’s raven hair twitch with indignation. He’s no foreigner to this place. He has our mother and she has pale untouched beauty chalked all over her face. We smile to soothe him. His jaw is set in fury. His hands are dancing across his lap, boiling with a desire to wipe this moment away. Ama is edgy. The customs officer looks into the car. Pado can’t smile, not at him. Ama smiles too much, much too much.

‘Could you open up the car please, Madam!’

‘Figlio di … Fucking …’ Pado growls.

Ama hoists herself out of the car to try and resolve this on her own. The customs officer leans into the boot. He begins lifting wine bottles out. So far he has counted twice the limit. Then he discovers the jars of lungs. Ama blushes, coughs and sniffs. Pado can’t bear it any longer. He’s out of the car too, waving his certificates. He has had enough. On the back seat we shrink into nothing. Giulio curls into a closed, tight ball. Duccio rearranges his maps into separate country piles, making sure the corners meet. I feel myself sliding down, further under the seat. I clench my teeth and wait, trying to help Pado in my thoughts. Ama goes to stop Pado, but his eyeballs are fixed. She stands in front of him, supportive and pleading. It’s going to be all right. She knows he can do it. He’s got to do it.

He’s doing fine, explaining calmly enough, then he says it – the word he can never pronounce – ‘innocent’. It is innocent like ‘inno+scent’ not ‘inno+chent’, we’ve told him a hundred thousand times.

The officer says, ‘Sorry, what?’

Pado raises his voice, ‘Why bother innochent people?’

The officer takes it badly and they’re off.

‘Please follow me, Sir.’

‘Listen …’

‘Kindly do as I say!’

Another officer comes and joins the first. They lead Pado into a room. Ama gets back into the car, crying. She bangs the door shut so hard that we all freeze. She sits holding her head in her hands, then she gently switches on the tape machine for some music, something to take her away from here, from this. Instead of music, the tape is still stuck on Giulio’s joke. His distant voice coughs and laughs. Ama punches the eject button furiously. The tape flies out onto the floor. She picks it up and hurls it onto the top of the dashboard. Giulio fiddles with the biscuit packet beside me, pushing his face up against the glass so no one can see his eyes. Then I hand Ama a biscuit to calm her. She absently takes a bite and throws it out of the window. A seagull snatches it up and deposits a large white dropping on the car in exchange. Pado returns a while later with a heap of clipped receipts.

‘What the fuck is this shit doing on the car?’ he shouts.

He starts up the car again. Ama leans out and tries scrubbing the bonnet with a tissue. The white stain won’t go. She scrapes at it with a piece of paper. It rubs onto her hand. We drive off into England, Pado yelling about customs officers and seagulls that shit everywhere. Duccio leans against the head rest in front of him. I can see he is watching Ama clench her dirty finger, two layers of antiseptic wipes wrapped tight around it.

6

From Portsmouth to London and then on to Machance’s is always busy.

‘Left-hand side darling,’ Ama reminds Pado at every crossroads and roundabout.

By the time we get to London, Pado has to turn and say: ‘Yes, I’ve understood it’s the left. Thank you.’

Our drive is going to take a little longer than usual as we’re stopping near Regent’s Park for a doctor’s appointment. Ama gently tugs at my sleeve.

‘Jean-Pio, we’ve arranged for you to pop in on a colleague of Pado’s. He’s a headache specialist. A very good doctor.’

‘What headaches?’ I complain.

‘Come on. Please darling. It’ll only take a moment and we’ll all feel better.’

There’s no point arguing as Pado has already parked the car and started reading the door numbers. Giulio looks at me as if to say, ‘See, I told you.’

Pado helps me out of the car and Ama waits behind.

‘I’ll only complicate matters, really I will. Your father is much better at these things. I’ll stay with your brothers,’ she assures me.

Pado pushes a button on an intercom. A woman’s voice shouts back, out of the wall: ‘Fourth floor!’ We go up some brown-carpeted stairs. As we’re about to go in, Pado sits down on the sofa on the landing. He leans his head on his arms and takes a long, deep breath.

‘Are you all right Pado?’ I say.

He looks up and pokes me in the stomach, smiling. ‘Course I am. I’m just a little tired today and I can’t see when I’m going to find time to do my research for the next conference. Anyway, we’re here to sort you out. Not me. Come on caro! Andiamo!’

A secretary opens the door and the doctor emerges from behind her to greet us. He can’t wait to talk to Pado about his latest book. Pado would prefer to get straight to the point.

‘We’re in a bit of a rush, sorry, but if you come to my next lecture …’

The specialist is disappointed. He pulls his chair up towards me. Talking to Pado, he shines a torch into my eyes, takes my blood pressure and checks my knee reflexes.

‘You don’t have to bother with all that,’ Pado intervenes. ‘I’ve already checked him over. I think you just need to get him to describe his symptoms.’

I don’t know what to say except that I get headaches in the car and on the boat.

‘Describe us the feeling?’ the doctor asks. I can’t. ‘Where does it hurt?’ he adds. I don’t know.

Pado breaks in to avoid the silence. ‘He’s been having these headaches and dizzy spells for some time now. He gets some form of vertigo or migraine. It seems to come when he is tired. Maybe he’s a little dehydrated from time to time. My wife says he’s easily distracted too. Personally, I don’t see the connection.’

‘How often do you drink water?’ the doctor questions me.

I give him the same answer I’ve given Pado: ‘Every morning, lunch time and in the evening and, since I’ve been told to drink more, at tea time too.’

‘He probably gets travel sickness like most children!’ The doctor reaches for his prescription papers. ‘There are some very good new pills,’ he promises Pado.

‘No, really,’ Pado stops him. ‘I don’t think we would have come to see you if it was just to get some travel sickness pills. Besides, I recently read some research into the side-effects of those pills. They’re not too great.’

I begin to shift in my chair because the specialist seems to be quickly searching for ways to impress Pado.

‘I tell you what,’ he says to Pado, ‘could you leave us alone a few minutes. I’d like to ask him a couple of questions.’

Pado now looks like he thinks this whole specialist thing is a bit of a waste of time. He gives in anyway.

‘If you think that would help. But remember, he’s only eight.’ Pado pats me on the back. ‘It won’t take long, try and tell him what it’s like.’

‘Yes,’ I smile. As Ama said: we’ll all feel better afterwards.

I’m left facing the doctor, who has taken out a writing pad. I imagine Pado walking down the stairs to join Ama. Perhaps they’re sitting in the car together, with music slowly suffocating in the machine. Or maybe Pado is in the room next door, trying to fit in some work, reading through magazines or rewriting his book with the photos of white rats, fleshy pink stumps growing out of their backs and cut-open lungs.

‘Well, Jean-Pio, what can I do for you? Why don’t you tell me how the headaches start?’

I begin to tell the doctor again that sometimes, in the car, with the swerves and dips, I get a bit sick, but that instead of feeling sick in the stomach I get a headache and that if I get a headache I have to close my eyes to make it go away. Then, when my eyes are shut, I feel even more sick. And that’s that. I can’t tell him any more. He wouldn’t understand that I have to stop the car from crashing or the ferry from sinking or that if I’d known Grand Maurice was going out fishing on his own, I would have thought about it all day so that he didn’t drown and leave us with a gap in everything. And now that Grand Maurice has gone, and we’re all stranded for ever, I have no choice but to swap bad thoughts for good thoughts all day long because I can’t think that someone can just go out fishing and never come back, or that hundreds of people, all across the world, are drowning and dying every day and no one is trying to stop them, or that all the air conditioners are spewing out diseases that kill and no one knows.

‘Are there any other pains? Do you get stomach aches? Can you sleep?’

I look at the ceiling. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want the specialist to talk to me any more.

‘No, nothing,’ I say.

We both fidget in our chairs.

The specialist gets up and calls Pado in. There’s no reply.

‘I bet you he’s gone down to the car,’ I tell him.

We look outside and there’s Pado leaning through the car window talking to Ama. He notices us and makes his way back up to the doctor’s. It’s my turn to be alone now, whilst Pado listens to what the specialist has to say.

Pado finally emerges, ‘Thanks for your time,’ and points me down the stairs.

‘Well,’ Ama says, as we arrive back at the car, ‘what did he say?’

‘We’ll talk about it later Ava. You know as well as I do that it’s not that simple. Travel sickness, he thinks, maybe.’

‘Oh that’s a surprise!’ Ama sneers. ‘I wonder how he could have got that?’ She strokes my face. ‘What about the water though? Does Jean-Pio understand he’s got to drink more water?’ Ama carries on. ‘We can’t go on like this. It’s getting ridiculous.’

Giulio is prodding me to know what happened. I’m counting time away, nothing to say, nothing to think. Duccio has a map on his knees and is drawing in the precise route we took from the ferry to London.

7

It’s an hour’s drive to our grandmother’s house from London. Machance isn’t old, but she looks it because she hasn’t really eaten very much since Grand Maurice died two years ago and she moved back to England from the house in France. She sits in her bare dining-room and tells Ama that it’s hard being alone.

She spends most days dead heading the flowers in her garden and, in the evenings, she extracts the fine hairs from her chin with a rapid pull of her fingers to pass the time. By nightfall, she has a tiny nest of thin hairs in her palm. On windy nights, she casts them from her window into the breeze and by morning they have gone. I imagine them gathering in the bark of trees, forming rings of wiry softness clinging to the trunks.

Soon after we arrive at Machance’s, Ama sets to work, going through urgent bills and clearing up untidy rooms. She stops as soon as Machance appears, not wanting to get in the way, not able to explain. She glances over the sparse furniture and sagging paintings, confused by the disrupted order of the house.

Then people start turning up to see Ama and Pado. These friends and guests come and go, sad at the fact that we’re never in one place.

‘Why don’t you stay a while? We never see you!’ ‘Why are you always rushing off so soon?’

Ama answers them all with the same empty expression, her bag for the next journey already packed and prepared in her head.

Two visitors, Michael and Joan, stay a little longer. Pado rolls out medical stories and cases he’s heard at his conferences, like the one about the woman who smoked so much that her lips went yellow and grew into grapes of tumours that clustered like chandeliers from her mouth down into her lungs. Michael listens to Pado in horror.

‘Enough! Enough!’ he begs: ‘You’re going to put me off smoking!’

Joan urges Pado to carry on. ‘Keep going, Gaspare. He’s got to give up one day. He already can’t breathe properly going up stairs!’

Michael tells her to stop being so ridiculous and gets up, pointedly, to light a cigarette. Machance brings him an ashtray. He balances it delicately on the window sill, blowing his smoke outside. I watch him from the table, inhaling, sucking in the smoke in big gulps. Pado and Ama move on to another subject. Machance explains something to Duccio. Isn’t anyone going to say anything to Michael? Isn’t anyone going to show him Pado’s book on lung disease? I look at Michael again, rotating the ashtray with his finger. Now he’s knocking the grey ash off, with precise little taps of the cigarette. The smoke snakes into his mouth and sticks to his lips, like deadly air flowing in and out of an air conditioner. The tumours. What about the tumours? His lips will swell and rot. He won’t be able to speak or swallow and the scabs and stubs sprouting from his lips will turn into blisters of blood. I picture him dying and the doctors waiting to cut out his lungs for a photo or a microscope slide, with his finished life etched in its dulling colours. I feel a headache mounting, a sickness in the back of the eyes. I stare back at Michael, transfixed.

Machance interrupts my gaze and asks me to help her lay out some glasses. I reach across the table. I spot a pack of cigarettes, inside Michael’s jacket, draped over the chair. I can’t stop looking at it, poking out of the grey material. I carry an empty bowl to the kitchen. What if Michael ends up like Mr Yunnan or Grand Maurice and all the other dead people? We have to stop him! I corner Giulio near the fridge: we should do something quick! Giulio says if I can grab the cigarette packet, he’ll divert everyone’s attention. He starts running up and down asking Ama for a sip of coffee. She tells him to calm down, plonks him on her lap and roughs up his hair. As she curls strands of Giulio’s hair round her fingers, I dig into Michael’s jacket. Pado looks at me strangely. He is wondering what I’m doing, but he’s too busy waiting for the next joke or smile to mind. Michael laughs with Pado.

I can feel the cigarette packet burning in my hand.

Giulio and I rush off to the bathroom. We pass Machance turning last year’s apples from the garden on the window ledges. She rotates each apple, every day, to check that it’s not rotting. Not that it matters much: she’ll never eat them anyway because she is thinking of Grand Maurice. In the bathroom, Giulio and I run the warm water and fill the basin to the brim. We have to move fast before Michael tries to light up again. We tip the cigarette packet into the water. The cigarettes take up the basin like felled tree trunks on a river. They gradually fall apart, shavings of paper and shredded leaves. Giulio pulls out the plug. The cigarettes clog the hole and gargle. Machance is walking by outside. We don’t have long. The cigarettes won’t go down. I push and prod them unsuccessfully into the plug hole. Then I open the lavatory. They’ll have to go down there instead. We drop them in the bowl and pull the chain, a lengthy throttled flush. Some cigarettes float back up to the surface and linger for a while, others go straight down and never return. Then we realise we still have the packet itself. We drop it into the loo as well. With the brush we crush it up and dilute the water with blue antiseptic. Clean smells drench the bathroom and the packet vanishes.

They haven’t noticed that we left the sitting-room. Duccio is on his own. No one’s patted him on the head. Ama says that we have to protect Duccio. It’s not often that people are born like him. Not even the photographer who came and took pictures of him in his suit could get it right. ‘He’s too good-looking,’ Ama sighs and no one can do him justice. ‘Beautiful children aren’t always beautiful adults though,’ so we have to be careful to appreciate it now. Her friends do. Ama has one friend who kisses us hello and Duccio swears she once touched his lips with her tongue. It was like a warm, wet piece of ham. Giulio and I don’t understand. He has a nose and eyes and mouth like us, but they always look at him, the same way as they look at Ama.

Michael goes to light another cigarette. He pulls the ashtray off the window sill. Giulio tugs at my sleeve. We sit down and do something. Something nothing. I try and think calmly, smoothly. Michael searches from one pocket to another, knocking his head to remember. He gets up and looks in his coat, in Joan’s bag, in his trousers. He’s frantic and he doesn’t like it when everyone carries on talking. He has to find his cigarettes. Now! It has to be now! Joan tries to calm him, but Michael says, ‘The cigarettes can’t have just got up and walked out of the room on their own.’

Machance comes to the door and coughs a little to announce that the loo downstairs is blocked. If we need a lavatory, we’d better go upstairs and be careful not to use too much water, as there’s only a small tank. Ama and Pado don’t understand how the loo could be blocked. It was working ten minutes ago. Lavatories don’t simply block like that. ‘Another thing to fix for my mother before we leave,’ Ama worries. Pado apologises to the guests and fetches some tools from the boot of the car. He begins hacking away at the tap behind the lavatory drain with a spanner, then a hammer. Michael is like a dog, rushing, searching. Pado, with his legs poking out from behind taps, tries to prise the lavatory pipe open. Giulio and I know he’ll never make it. Machance has never opened her pipes and there is rust all around the house. In her bedroom there is a photograph of Grand Maurice shaded with so much dust that it looks like a hoover filter with an old face in the middle. I must never think of what Grand Maurice’s face is like now, dredged from the lake and swaddled in weeds, sealed in his tomb.

Then the pipe loosens, with Pado suddenly saying, ‘What’s this?’

He’s about to pick it up, when Ama warns: ‘Don’t touch it, it’s disgusting!’

She hands him a plastic cup. We always have them ready in the repair kit. He scoops up a lump of shredded matter.

‘Put it down Gaspare, please! It’s revolting,’ Ama fusses.

Pado is not so sure. He points the cup towards the light and swivels it in the palm of his hand.

‘Looks like vegetable with bits of paper.’

Michael hasn’t calmed down. ‘I could swear I had them. I had them there in the sitting-room!’ He squints into the cup of shredded mass and then looks again. He asks for a screwdriver or something from Ama.

He picks around inside the cup. ‘That’s strange!’

He extracts a little white paper. It has disintegrated, but he knows it’s a cigarette filter. He asks Pado to have a look inside the pipe and he scours it with a rod. Giulio and I are just retreating when a heap of filters comes out in an avalanche of matted tobacco. Michael is speechless.

Joan says, ‘How did they get there?’ and that’s when I’m thinking Michael’s lucky to be alive, to have avoided the tumours, otherwise he wouldn’t even be able to speak.

Michael is so angry that he starts packing up his things. He puts his coat on and tells Joan they’re off. Pado attempts to sort things out. He proposes to go and buy some cigarettes. There’s no point wondering how they got there, he’ll pop into town and get some more. We have to stop him! He can’t just go and buy more. We can’t let Michael die.

I shout: ‘He has to stop!’

Michael is astounded, ‘What! You little brat.’

Ama is so embarrassed. Pado is stunned. He ushers me out of the room. ‘You can’t do things like that! Those cigarettes didn’t belong to you!’

I call for Ama. She glares at me across the room, offended, disappointed. She shakes her head: ‘Jean-Pio, how could you? I can’t believe it.’

Michael is gesticulating at us. Pado gently steers me towards our bedroom. He asks me how he’s going to explain all this to his guests, and locks the door behind him. From the bedroom, I can hear everyone arguing and apologising. Giulio is trying to tell me something through the locked door. Pado yanks him away. I have to be left alone, otherwise I won’t learn.

There’s nothing to do in the bedroom. I gaze out at the farms beyond. There are cows scattered everywhere. On the drive, there is a little white car shooting off with Michael and Joan inside. I can’t see their heads from here, but I want to tell Michael that I tried my best to save him. Now he’s going to buy more cigarettes and Joan is going to collapse when he’s gone with swinging lumps of cancer strangling his throat. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling coming and going, shrinking down on me until the room pushes back its colours. I get up and pace round the bed. I shake the door from time to time. I look at the cows in the fields. I can’t even count them because the sixth or seventh sometimes slips away and then runs back and looks like the others. I feel dizzy, even without the motion of the car, the solid stillness of these four walls marching down on me. I have to get out. I start hammering at the door. There’s no reply. I don’t want to get a headache in here, not here, on my own. I fight against painful thoughts and images, creeping into me because they know that I’m locked in a room with no way out. I kick at the door again and fall on the bed. I breathe like Ama does when she’s upset. One, two, three, and out. I must stop a headache from coming. One, two, three …

There’s a knock at the door. It’s Machance. She wants to know why the door is locked. I say Pado has the key and it’s my fault because I flushed Michael’s cigarettes down the loo. She sits down on the carpet on the other side of the door. Through the wood, I imagine her gently pulling out the hairs from her chin. A soft sound like a blade of grass sliding from the earth.

Machance tells me she doesn’t know what’s happening to our family. Always tired. Always travelling. And now me misbehaving. ‘It’s really not what Ama needs. She’s already at the end of her tether.’ When Machance was young, she says, things were different, you had to be strong. There were no televisions or radios or cars. You couldn’t just switch on some music to brighten up your day, or jump in a car to have a change of scenery. In those days you had to have your own little television screen in your head to click into, turn off this, turn on that. But that was long ago. Now nothing is the same anyway, since Grand Maurice drowned in the lake in France.

She tells me that Grand Maurice looked a little like me. He had hair that you couldn’t keep down and he never stopped walking and thinking. From morning till evening, he pounded up and down the countryside. That’s why, one day, about four years ago, he set out for a stroll and got his foot caught in a jagged rabbit trap. At the time, Machance and Grand Maurice were living in their house in France and farmers often laid traps in the meadows and woods for game. But Grand Maurice had forgotten, because that was the way he used to walk, head in the air and eyes stuck to the sky. The trap sliced his ankle and clasped itself shut around his foot. He yelled out in agony, but no one heard. He tugged at the trap with his hands and picked at it with a large stone, but it only dug deeper into his flesh. The harder he tried to prise the trap apart, the worse the wound became. And so he waited. He waited three days, three whole days until the man who laid the trap came to pick up a crushed or squealing rabbit and saw Grand Maurice with his nearly-severed foot full of rusting metal, dried blood in the furrows of the soil.

During those three days alone, as Machance longed for news of him, Grand Maurice had to keep his mind. He counted trees and ran his tongue around his mouth until he knew all of his teeth in size and shape. He found that the back ones had holes with smooth tops and that the front ones were uneven. He could tell that some were going black and others had roots which wouldn’t let go. When he was bored of his teeth, and the pain was too much to bear, he called upon his memories of journeys, sights and sounds, and each time that he felt himself slipping, he came charging back in with a face from his past and a story to jolt the mind. As he watched his foot fester and swell, he thought hard of Machance and how they’d met on a warm cloudy day in September in London. He spoke to his remembering and chatted to himself. He went back to his childhood and pictured his mother, his father, his school, his friends and clothes. He tried to recall every moment that had been. He started with his earliest memory, year by year, then month by month and, finally, week by week. There were gaps, huge unaccounted-for absences, empty months, patchy years, faces without names, names without people. He tried harder and harder, until he felt his mind might burst, until he had managed to remember almost everything. Then he watched the skies. He invented new words to describe each different kind of cloud. He listened to the birds. He whistled back at them. He picked up leaves from the ground, felt their shapes and ran their surfaces across his hands. By the last day, his mind and body were so stretched that the past and present had merged into one.

Machance was so happy when they freed him from the trap and brought him home from hospital, with his foot stitched up and plastered, that she put together a dinner for all his friends. The pain in Grand Maurice’s foot only grew worse during the course of the dinner and he had to stand up and keep moving so as not to think about it. He dragged himself round the room with eyes full of seething sadness. The heavy plaster on his foot rocked him back and forth, gouging ruts in the parquet. Machance encouraged Grand Maurice to sit down again, but he couldn’t stay in his chair. He went to bed before the guests had left. He could hear them saying ‘goodnight’ to Machance through the bedroom window. As they went down the steps outside, they turned and asked: ‘Is he going to be all right?’ The noise of their cars leaving filled the house. Machance cleared the table on her own. She blew out all the candles lining the table. She climbed into bed alongside Grand Maurice and held on to him through the sheet.

Machance shuffles a little on the carpet on the other side of the door.

‘The doctors never managed to get his foot to mend properly. The bone didn’t really heal. Do you remember how Grand Maurice always limped? That’s why he needed you to help him when he went fishing.’

She taps at the door with her long hands. I can feel solid dry tears rolling down her fingers into the wood. She tells me to hang on. Pado should come and get me out of here. She’ll tell him, enough is enough. I wait a while, lying on the bed, my head swimming with Grand Maurice’s suffering. Thoughts eat into me.

Pado turns the key and swings in. He doesn’t smile. He still looks angry. I won’t talk to him. He sits on the end of the bed. ‘Ma Jean-Pio, cosa facevi? You do know you shouldn’t have done that, don’t you?’

I don’t care if he doesn’t understand. Anyway it’s his fault. He said everyone who smoked was going to end up dead. The photographs are in all his books. Now I can’t tell him anything. If Michael dies then it’s not my fault, because we all could have stopped him, but instead they laughed with him and all that whilst Grand Maurice was battling with a rabbit trap in his head.

Pado tells me it’s time to go again, to move on.

‘Andiamo! Pack your things! Everyone is waiting in the car.’

It’s a slanting wet afternoon and the rain is bouncing off the car bonnet. ‘It won’t last long,’ Ama says, almost to persuade herself.

We have visits to do: friends, and the annual international conference of specialists on legionnaires’ disease. Pado explains to us again how microbes and toxins collect in air conditioners and then expel themselves into rooms and grip in your mouths to kill you. In one company, in New York, the only person who didn’t get ill was the doorman and that’s how they found out because he spent his time outside and wasn’t silently sucking in germs to die. I imagine all those people sitting attentively at their desks, working away, and then, gradually, one after the other, they begin to cough, splutter, sag and turn grey. And then that’s that, they’re gone.

We stop at Elizabeth’s on the way to the conference in London. She’s Ama’s artist friend. We’re thinking of dropping off Duccio to have his beauty captured in a painting. Elizabeth looks Duccio up and down. She declares she’s never seen a boy quite so good-looking.

‘Here we go,’ Giulio mumbles to me.

Duccio doesn’t notice though. He never really notices because he doesn’t care any more. He’s too busy with his duties. Maps to read, cities to identify, trips to plan, cars to name. Pado needs him because Ama no longer knows the difference between motorways, dual carriageways, side roads and main roads. It’s all the same to her: one long journey across nowhere. Duccio though has little notepads in which he writes long lists: all the routes we’ve ever been on, the restaurants, the cities in alphabetical order, the value of local currencies. When he’s finished his duties, he reads books about great sporting geniuses. As Pado says to Ama: just being good-looking won’t get you very far in life.

Elizabeth thinks she can do a portrait of Duccio. It’s going to take some time however. Not an hour here or there – maybe two or three weeks of posing.

‘We don’t have that kind of time,’ Pado objects bluntly.

Ama seems annoyed. How are we going to get Duccio done? He’s coming up to twelve soon and then that’ll be that, he’ll be thirteen and fourteen and then his beauty will have vanished. Elizabeth takes some Polaroid snaps of Duccio. He looks uncomfortable and he is sighing heavily. When the pictures come up, slowly appearing like blue sky amongst dispersing clouds, you can see he is sighing so we have to start again.

‘Darling, make an effort for us,’ Ama pleads. ‘This is not what we need.’

We go off nosing through the paint tubes and turpentine. We find a canvas covered in cloth showing a naked woman reclining on top of a red table. She is motionless and holding a flower to her mouth. She looks like she might be sniffing or even eating the flower. Giulio fetches Duccio and I remain, running my eyes across the pink shapes and breathing in the smell of acrid oil colours. Duccio takes one look at the naked painting and tells us it’s horrible.

‘Stop poking around, come over here!’ Ama orders, exasperated.

This time the Polaroids are all right, but Duccio is refusing to say a word.

As we’re all getting back in the car, Duccio slams Giulio against the head rest and steps over him to get to his seat. Giulio lets out a scream and I can’t sit down either because Duccio keeps on shoving me away with kicks. ‘Behave!’ Pado shouts. Duccio settles down. I try to lean as far as possible towards Giulio, to avoid touching Duccio. He is packed with fury, bubbling, ready to burst. I know that if I even brush his coat, he’ll shower me with punches. I sit upright in the middle. I watch the raindrops drifting across the windscreen. I’m sure the wipers could go faster. They haven’t caught that drop, nor that one. That one, there, the big one! I’m about to make a wish on a raindrop when Duccio explodes. He can’t keep silent any longer.

‘I’m not going to be naked in the painting!’ he yells.

Everyone is a little astonished.

Ama leans into the back. ‘Darling, whoever said anything about being naked?’

Pado is grinning to himself. ‘Where did you get that idea from?’

Maybe I should tell Ama about her friend who stuck her tongue in Duccio’s mouth, but she doesn’t look like she wants to hear that now. Our mother calmly explains that no one will be naked and that’s that. It’s only a portrait of Duccio’s face and it’s a nice thing to have.

‘We’ll hang it on a wall somewhere,’ she adds calmly.

I don’t know where because we are always moving and I can’t see how we can stick it on top of the car as it won’t last with the rain and certainly not with the conferences outside Rome where they even steal the tyres off you. Pado is sure that’s an exaggeration though and that others are just as deceitful and clever at stealing.

Ama brings out the sandwiches Machance had made for our lunch. Salmon, avocado and tomato. I open mine up to make sure there’s no chin hair tucked away inside. I examine the fish for germs lost inside the pink pleats. I hold it up to the light. ‘Stop fiddling and hurry up,’ Pado tells me. We have to eat fast. The ‘legionnaires” conference starts soon. Pado wonders whether he should quickly update his diagram of an air conditioner water tank. Ama thinks that it would be clearer if he’s going to bring in recent theories on cooling systems and airborne microbe reproduction. We drop Pado off outside a large grey building. He rushes up the main stairs. Giulio shouts out that he’s forgotten the rat book from the glove compartment.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ama shrugs, because he has all that stacked away in his mind.

We drive on, not knowing what to do in Pado’s absence. Ama buys a newspaper and flicks through the film and exhibition pages. She keeps on checking her watch, but there’s not enough time to fit anything in. She starts up the car, with a resigned turn of the wrist, and we push on to a park. Ama stops at the entrance and tells us to get out and play on the bit of lawn in front of her. It’s still raining and we come back after a few minutes. Ama is looking at her newspaper again. She’s ripped out sections, book and theatre reviews. She lays the strips of paper across the dashboard and reads them quickly. When she sees us, standing in front of her, she begrudgingly folds them into a wad in the glove compartment, stacked reminders of occasions to be missed.

We get back in the car and Ama wearily drives on past a few shops. She asks Duccio to get out and see if they have any dresses in the windows. He runs alongside the car, stopping and peering into each shop. He points at a dress. Ama leans over the steering-wheel and shakes her head at him. Duccio tries the next shop and then the next one, till we get to the end of the street and have to turn into another road. Eventually we find something for Ama in a decorated window, two streets further down. We park and Giulio is instructed to wait in the car. He’s sulking at being left behind. He says it’s not fair that it’s always him who looks after the car, but Duccio reads the guidebooks and I have to watch the petrol gauge.

‘Don’t you bloody start. Don’t make me angry Giulio! Not today! Everyone has to help with something,’ Ama warns.

She waves back at Giulio as we enter the shop: ‘If a traffic warden comes then pretend you don’t understand. Speak French or something! We won’t be long!’

In the shop, the assistant is all smiles. Ama tries to find something that Pado might like too. Duccio and I tease her by repeating what Pado says about her bottom being dipped on one side. Ama doesn’t find it funny at all, especially in front of the shop assistant and she whips a ‘Ca suffit. Assez’ at us in French so that only we understand.

It doesn’t work because the shop assistant says, ‘Where are you from?’ and Ama replies ‘England’ rather pointedly.

Then a man comes in and he is drifting across the shop looking for some clothes for his wife. The wife apparently likes red so I point him to a pair of reddish trousers I’ve seen on a rack in the corner. He has hardly started walking across the floor when he notices Ama. He compliments her on the dress she is trying on. Ama pulls back into a changing-room to get away. The man carries on talking to her through the curtain.

I can see her head coming up over the curtain. ‘Kindly leave me alone,’ she says in a curt voice.

The shop assistant intervenes and asks what kind of red clothes the man wants. He can’t answer because he’s got Ama in his mind and he can’t think of his wife’s shape and size any more. Ama pushes past him holding a black-grey dress. She wants to pay. The traffic wardens are coming and we have to go. The clinging man, who wants red clothes, follows us outside and pats me on the head. He hangs in front of the car and tries to help Ama get out of our parking space.

Giulio keeps on asking, ‘Who is that man? What’s he doing?’

Ama refuses to answer. She’s in a fluster. As we are leaving, indicator clicking down, the man blows a kiss at Ama.

She shouts, ‘Petit con,’ and we all laugh because the man doesn’t understand he’s just been insulted.

Giulio doesn’t like him either even though he didn’t see him leering over the changing-room curtain.

‘Not a word to your father,’ Ama begs, as we are all afraid that he will drive bumper to bumper at top speed if he finds out.

We arrive in time to pick Pado up outside the conference hall, before it starts raining again. He’s only been waiting a few minutes, so he’s happy. He has a colleague with him from Denmark. He agrees with Pado: ‘It’s a clear international policy on the regular maintenance of air conditioners that is needed.’

We’re going to be late for our next meeting at the Association of Toxicologists. We get away without anyone blowing kisses and speed across the city. Pado is in a good mood and he still can’t stop laughing about the fact that Duccio thought that he would have to strip off for Elizabeth.

‘Used to be a pretty woman in her day,’ Ama tells us.

‘What’s happened to her now?’ Pado wonders.

Ama explains that Elizabeth has been a little unhappy lately. Things haven’t worked out for her. ‘She even takes Polaroid photos of herself every day to see if she’s growing old. She has two years’ worth of photos stashed away. A photo for every day, and if you look at the first photo two years ago and the ones this month, you can tell her face has slipped and the wrinkles have appeared. But if you look from day to day, there’s no change at all.’

Giulio wonders whether she takes her photos in the morning or the evening. Ama doesn’t know. I’m thinking that she must take them in the morning, so that the thoughts that make up a day don’t weigh down her face.

Pado is convinced that this photo business goes to show Elizabeth still hasn’t got over her husband leaving.

‘Why did he leave?’ Duccio asks.

‘It’s a long story,’ Ama sighs. ‘Her husband told us he simply couldn’t cope, that’s all.’

‘How do you not cope?’ Giulio demands.

Ama glances sideways at Pado. ‘It’s a bit long to explain!’ but now Duccio and I want to know too. ‘Okay, okay,’ Ama says, ‘basically, one day, Elizabeth’s husband was sitting having breakfast with her and he noticed that her jaw clicked every time she chewed.’

We’re all a little taken aback. ‘Her jaw!’

‘Yes, her jaw,’ Ama replies. ‘He’d never really noticed it before. Anyway, he tried not to mind, but the more she ate, the more her jaw clicked away.’

‘Then what?’ Giulio is as curious as me.

‘Well,’ Ama continues, ‘he thought he’d be able to ignore it, but he couldn’t. Even when she stopped eating, her jaw clicked as she talked. It sounded like a bicycle chain against pedals.’

‘Why didn’t he tell her?’ Duccio objects.

‘There are some things you can’t say,’ Ama answers.

‘But then what?’ Giulio demands.

‘So,’ Ama carries on, ‘one night, after a supper when he’d listened to Elizabeth’s jaw click and click, he realised that he was always getting up to clear dishes, to go to the loo, sort out papers, anything just to avoid the noise. Elizabeth got angry and said if he kept on getting up and down, he might as well go and do something useful like walk the dog. He thought about telling her, but he couldn’t. How can you tell someone their jaw clicks?’

‘You say it!’ Duccio protests. ‘You say: excuse me, your jaw clicks!’

‘But he couldn’t,’ Ama argues, ‘because she would have said sorry and that would have been that. She would have explained that a clicking jaw is a clicking jaw and that’s not a reason to be angry.’

‘Well, exactly,’ Duccio answers. ‘Isn’t that what he wanted?’

‘I said it was more complicated than that.’ Ama can’t wait to get this story over and done with now.

‘So what happened?’ I ask.

‘He left,’ Ama snaps rather abruptly. ‘He just left. He got up, cleared her plate, put the cheese in the fridge, opened the door and walked out. She shouted after him, “Where are you off to, what are you doing?” but he couldn’t hear anything except the clicking of her jaw, opening and shutting like a window caught on a broken hinge.’

‘And that’s why she’s looked tired ever since,’ Pado adds.

‘All that for a click in the jaw!’ Giulio can’t get over it. Nor can I.

I press my forehead against the seat in front and go over the story in my mind. The car engine sounds loud behind my closed eyes and I can’t hear what Ama is trying to say to Pado.

8

Each spring, we drive to Italy and stay two weeks with our Italian grandparents. That’s the way it’s always been: two long weeks of heat and open space. Soon after we’ve crossed the border into Italy, Pado gets out of the car and stands on the verge taking in the air.

‘It’s the same air as over the border in France,’ Ama sighs impatiently.

Pado turns to us and in a singing voice smiles: ‘Siamo arrivati! Welcome to Italy, Benvenuti in Italia!’ He gets back in the car and announces that he’s in a better mood.

‘Maybe we should move here just for that,’ Ama laughs.

Ama never enjoys staying at our grandparents’ and, on the way there, she says to Pado: ‘I still don’t understand why we have to stay a whole two weeks. It’s far too long and it’s just another journey, as if we haven’t got enough on our plates as it is!’

‘My mother loves seeing us, and I can catch up on my reading,’ Pado explains. Ama says that’s not enough of an explanation for her. ‘Well your mother certainly doesn’t love seeing me,’ she adds, ‘I can tell you that much!’

‘Ma dai, nonsense, it’s all in your head!’

‘I tell you she doesn’t like me,’ Ama insists. ‘She never has. She thinks I’ve taken you away from her or something. Anyway, the sooner we leave again the better.’

‘That’s positive! Really what the children need.’

‘Don’t tell me what the children need Gaspare!’ Ama stops Pado with a glare.

From the border to our grandparents’ is a stretched-out journey of narrow motorways and cypress-tree bends. If the driving gets too much and the windows rattle with Ama’s stifled complaints, we head off into villages and towns in search of churches with cold stone floors. We stand in the aisles soaking up the cool air. Pado tells us the tales of the local families and the names of the popes. We stop and run our hands along carved tombs or strain to see fading frescoes tucked away behind altars. With a torch darting over the church walls, Pado uncovers the lives of saints and describes biblical stories. He sits us down to recite and memorise the cities of Renaissance Italy. Giulio gets stuck somewhere down south. I stall on the name of Ferrara. ‘Come on ragazzi,’ Pado says, ‘you can do better than that.’ We try again and reach the end of the list without any mistakes. ‘Nothing worse than a lazy mind!’ Pado reminds us as he leads us off into the crypts. The names of Giotto, Benozzo Gozzoli and Masaccio mingle with those of Jesus and the apostles.

Ama slips off and lights a candle.

‘What’s that for?’ Giulio asks.

‘It’s for Grand Maurice,’ Ama answers, grabbing our hands. We form a circle. We watch the flame flutter and struggle against the draughts. Ama stares down at the polished floor. She suddenly looks the way she did two summers ago when Machance called up from France to tell us that Grand Maurice had gone missing whilst out fishing by the lake. For a couple of days Machance kept us informed and then gave up. For a week no one dared think anything and we all sat silently waiting for news until a French policeman rang to say that a drowned man had been found. Ama put down the phone and left the room with Pado following her. Hours later when Pado came back in, he sat us down and made us understand that we wouldn’t see Grand Maurice again. We wanted to find Ama, we wanted to check it was true, it couldn’t be true, but Pado said Ama wouldn’t be coming down. I waited outside her bedroom all afternoon and listened to the walls crumbling with Ama’s cries. I tried the door several times, it was locked and, every time I called out, Ama couldn’t hear me because my voice had gone. No one made any food that evening and Ama didn’t join us. We took the biscuits from the larder and ate them dry. Pado sat with a book on his lap, reading and re-reading the first page. Each day after that Ama shrunk a little into herself. Pado tried to comfort her and then us and then no one could comfort anyone any more. Ama never made it to the funeral in France. She could barely leave her room. Then Machance came over and the loss we felt threaded itself through all of us.

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