Steal You Away

by Niccolò Ammaniti

  Alima shook her head and stayed put. It was a ridiculous idea. The effort would give her a hernia.

  ‘Crouch down.’ Italo had his hands on her shoulders and was pushing her downwards, trying to make her squat.

  ‘No, no, no, I won’t!’ Alima stiffened up.

  ‘Quiet! Quiet! Get down!’ Italo would not give up and tried to climb on her shoulders and make her crouch down at the same time.

  ‘Get down!’ Since that didn’t work, he started begging her. ‘Please, Alima, please. You must help me. Or I’m finished. It’s my job to look after the school. I’ll be sacked. Thrown out on my ear. Please help me …’

  Alima breathed out and relaxed her muscles for a moment. Italo was quick to seize the opportunity, he pushed her down and with a leap that belied his bulk mounted her shoulders.

  The two of them, one on top of the other, had become a monstrous giant. With two crooked black legs. A body like a two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola. Four arms, and a little head as round as a bowling ball.

  Alima, under those one hundred-plus kilos, couldn’t control her movements. She staggered this way and that and Italo, on top, swayed backwards and forwards like a rodeo cowboy.

  ‘Hey! Hey! Where are you going? Look out, we’ll fall over. The gate’s that way. Go forward. Turn round! Turn round!’ Italo tried to give her directions.

  ‘I can’t … do it …’

  ‘Be careful, we’ll fall. GO! GO! GO FOR GOD’S SAKE!

  ‘I ca … Get off. Ge …’

  Alima caught her foot in a rut and the heel of her shoe snapped. She teetered for a moment, took two more steps, then lost her balance completely and bent double. Italo was thrown forward and to stop himself falling grabbed with both hands at Alima’s hair, as if it were the mane of a bucking bronco.

  This was not a wise move.

  Italo fell flat on his face, open-mouthed, in the mud, both hands still clutching her wig.

  Alima ran round the little piazza, screaming and feeling her scalp. He’d torn away quite a bit of her hair along with the wig. But then, seeing him lying there still, face down in the mud, she went over to him. ‘Italo? Italo!’ She pushed him, rolling him over. ‘What’s the matter? Are you dead?’

  Italo had a mask of mud on his face. He opened his mouth, spluttered, opened his eyes and, jumping up from the ground like a spring, dashed to the 131.

  ‘No, I’m not dead. The Sardinians are.’

  He opened the door, freed the handbrake and pushed the car alongside the gate. He climbed the bonnet and up onto the roof. He grasped the points of the railing. And tried to clamber over.

  It was no good. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t have enough strength in his arms to pull himself up.

  He tried again, gritting his teeth.

  Impossible.

  He was puce with the effort and his pulse was throbbing in his ears.

  Now you’re going to have a heart attack and collapse on the ground and die like a fool for playing the hero.

  Although the rational, prudent half of his brain told him to stop what he was doing, get in the car and drive to the police station, the other half, the bloody-minded part, told him not to give up, to try again.

  This time, instead of pulling himself up with his hands, Italo stretched out his bad leg and rested it on the edge of the wall. Now it was easier. With an effort that he would never have thought himself capable of, he hoisted himself up, supporting himself on that wasted limb, and found himself spread out like a lion’s skin on the roof of his cottage.

  He lay there, filling and emptying his lungs, for a couple of minutes, waiting for his galloping heart to slow down.

  Getting down was easier. The old wooden ladder he used for pruning the cherry tree was leaning against the wall.

  Behind the gate Alima was sitting on the bonnet of the car with her arms folded, muttering angrily to herself.

  ‘Get in the car. I’ll be back a moment.’ Italo entered the cottage without turning on the lights. He crossed the living room with his arms outstretched and didn’t notice the trunk that he used as a table for snacks when he watched TV. He hit the corner of it hard with his good knee. He saw stars. He swallowed the pain, cursed between his teeth and headed, stoically, for the old wardrobe, opened it and rummaged frantically among the clean linen till he felt under his fingertips the reassuring coldness of steel.

  The tempered steel of his double-barrelled Beretta.

  ‘Now we’ll see … You Sardinian bastards. Now we’ll see. I’ll blast you all the way back to your island, so help me God,’ and he hobbled towards the school.

  25

  PALMIERI STIK YOUR VIDEOS UP YOUR ARSE

  This scrawl, in huge red letters, covered the entire back wall of the technical education room. The letters were lopsided, they intertwined with each other like gnarled fingers and were one ‘c’ short, but the message was clear, unequivocal.

  Pierini had written his sentence and now it was the others’ turn to express themselves. ‘Come on! What are you waiting for, daybreak?’ You guys write something!’ He gave Bacci a shove. ‘What’s up, fatso? You look like a bunch of morons, are you all scared?’

  Bacci had the same look of despair as when his mother took him to the dentist’s.

  ‘Well, what’s the matter with you all? Write something! Have you all turned into poofs?’ Pierini slammed Bacci against the wall.

  Bacci hesitated for a moment, perhaps he would have liked to say something, but then he drew a big swastika.

  ‘Good! Perfect. Now you, Ronca, what are you waiting for?’

  Ronca, without waiting for further encouragement, set to work with his spray can:

  THE HEADMASTER SUCKS THE DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS’S COCK

  Pierini approved. ‘Great, Ronca. Now it’s your turn.’ He went over to Pietro.

  Pietro kept his eyes on his shoes. The bread roll in his gullet had become a baguette. He kept shifting the can from one hand to the other as if it were red hot.

  Pierini cuffed him on the back of the head.

  ‘Well, Dickhead?’

  Nothing.

  Another cuff.

  ‘Well?’

  I don’t want to.

  ‘Well?’

  A harder one.

  ‘I don’t … I don’t want to,’ he blurted out finally.

  ‘Oh? How come?’ Pierini didn’t seem surprised.

  ‘I don’t …’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t want to. I don’t feel like it …’

  What could Pierini do to him? At the worst break his leg or his nose or his hand. He wouldn’t kill him.

  Are you sure?

  It couldn’t be worse than when, as a child, he had fallen off the roof of the tractor and broken his ankle. Or when his father had beaten him for blunting his screwdriver. Who gave you permission, eh? Who gave you permission? Will you tell me that? I’ll teach you to take things that don’t belong to you. He’d spanked him with the carpet beater. And he hadn’t been able to sit down for a week. But it had passed …

  Go on, then, beat me up and let’s get it over with.

  He would curl up on the floor. Like a hedgehog. I’m ready. They could hit him till he swelled up like a bagpipe, kick him as hard as they liked, but he wouldn’t write anything on that wall.

  Pierini walked away and sat on the teacher’s chair. ‘How much do you want to bet, Dickhead, old pal, that you’re going to write something too … How much do you want to bet?’

  ‘I’m … not … writing … anything. I told you. You can beat me up, if you want.’

  Pierini held the spray can up to the wall. ‘What if I put your signature, below this?’ he pointed to his composition. ‘If I write in great big letters Pietro Moroni. Eh? Eh? What are you going to do then?’

  This is too much …

  How could he be so evil? How? Who had taught him? A person like that will always get the better of you. You can try with all your might but he’ll always win.

&nb
sp; ‘Well? What do I do?’ Pierini pressed him.

  ‘Go ahead and sign my name then, who cares. I’m not writing anything.’

  ‘Okay. You’ll get all the blame. They’ll say you wrote all the graffiti. They’ll expel you. They’ll say you smashed everything up.’

  The atmosphere in the room had become unbreathable. As if there were a heater turned full on. Pietro’s hands were ice cold and his cheeks were burning.

  He looked around.

  Pierini’s malice seemed to drip from everything. From the paint-bedaubed walls. From the yellow neon lights. From the remains of the smashed television.

  Pietro went over to the wall.

  What can I write?

  He tried to think of a drawing or a terrible phrase but it was no good, he just kept seeing a stupid image.

  A fish.

  A fish he’d seen at Orbano market.

  It lay there on the stall, among the crates of calamari and sardines, still alive and gasping, a fish covered in spines and with a huge mouth and bright red gills. A lady had wanted to buy it and had asked the boy to clean it. Pietro had moved closer to the steel sinks. He wanted to see how it was done. The fishmonger’s boy had laid down the fish, made a long cut down the middle of its swollen belly and gone away.

  Pietro had stood there watching the fish die.

  Out of the wound had emerged a pincer, then another and then the rest of a crab. A big, lively green crab which had scuttled away.

  But it didn’t end there. Another crab, just like the first, had climbed out the fish’s belly, then another and another. Loads of them. They ran diagonally across the steel surface looking for somewhere to hide and fell down on the ground and Pietro wanted to tell the boy (The fish is full of live crabs and they’re escaping!), but he was busy selling mussels at the stall so Pietro had reached out and closed the wound with his hand to stop them getting out. And the fish’s swollen belly was teeming with life, full of movement, full of little green legs.

  ‘If you haven’t written something in ten seconds flat, I’ll do it. Ten, ni …’

  Pietro tried to banish the image.

  ‘… seven, six …’

  He took a deep breath, pointed the spray gun at the wall, pressed the top and wrote:

  ITALO’S GOT FISHY FEET

  His mind conceived this sentence.

  And Pietro, without a moment’s thought, transcribed it onto the wall.

  26

  If someone wearing infrared goggles had seen Italo Miele advancing in the dark, he might have mistaken him for the Terminator.

  With that shotgun clutched in his hands, his blank gaze and his stiff leg, the caretaker moved like an android.

  Italo passed the secretary’s office and the teachers’ common room.

  His mind was clouded with rage and hatred.

  Hatred for the Sardinians.

  What was he going to do to them?

  Kill them, drive them out, lock them in a classroom, what?

  He wasn’t quite sure.

  But it didn’t matter.

  At that moment he had only one aim: to catch them red-handed.

  The rest would come later.

  Experienced hunters say that African buffaloes are terrifying beasts. You need real guts to face one when it’s angry. It makes an easy target – even a child couldn’t miss. It’s huge and it just stands there, calmly chewing the cud on the savannah, but if you shoot at it and don’t kill it outright you’d better have prepared yourself a den to hide in, a tree to climb up, a strongroom to lock yourself in, a grave in the cemetery to be buried in.

  A wounded buffalo could rip apart a Range Rover with a couple of twists of its horns. It’s blind and furious and has only one desire: to destroy you.

  And Italo was as mad as an African buffalo.

  In its rage, the caretaker’s mind had regressed to a lower stage on the evolutionary scale (the bovine stage, in fact) and naturally tended to focus exclusively on the objective it wanted to attain. The rest – the details, the context – was filed away in a secondary drawer of his brain, so it was only natural that he should have forgotten that Graziella, the caretaker responsible for the second floor, was in the habit of shutting the glass door that separated the stairs from the corridor before she went home.

  Italo hit it at top speed, bounced back like a rubber ball, fell to the ground and found himself flat on his back.

  Anyone else, after a head-on crash like that, would have fainted, died, screamed with pain. Not Italo. Italo railed at the darkness. ‘Where are you? Come on out! Come on out!’

  Who was he talking to?

  The impact against the door had been so violent he was convinced some Sardinian, lurking in the darkness, had hit him in the face with an iron bar.

  Then he realised to his horror that he had collided with the door. He swore and scrambled to his feet, dazed. He didn’t know what was going on. Where was the shotgun? His nose hurt badly. He touched it and felt it swelling between his fingers like a crispy pancake in boiling oil. His face was wet with blood.

  ‘Shit, I’ve broken my nose …’

  In the darkness he searched for the shotgun. It had slid into a corner. He retrieved it and set off again, even wilder than before.

  What a bloody fool I am! he reproached himself. They might have heard me.

  27

  They’d heard him all right.

  They’d jumped in the air, all four of them, like champagne corks.

  ‘What happened?’ said Ronca.

  ‘Did you hear that? What was it?’ said Bacci.

  Pierini was disorientated too. ‘What could it be?’

  Ronca, who was the first to regain his composure, threw aside his spray-can. ‘I don’t know. Let’s get out of here.’

  Pushing and shoving, they piled out of the classroom.

  In the dark corridor they stood in silence, listening.

  Curses could be heard from the floor above.

  ‘It’s Italo. It’s Italo. Didn’t he go home?’ whimpered Bacci, addressing Pierini.

  No one bothered to answer him.

  They must get away. Out of the school. At once. But how? By which route? In the technical education room there was only a small skylight on the ceiling. To the left was the gym. To the right the stairs and Italo.

  The gym, Pietro said to himself.

  But that was a dead end. The door onto the yard was locked and the windows had iron gratings.

  28

  Italo descended the stairs, holding his breath.

  His nose was puffy and swollen. A trickle of blood ran down onto his lips and he licked it away with the tip of his tongue.

  Like an old bear that has been wounded but not beaten, he moved warily and silently, flat against the wall. The shotgun was slippery in his sweating hands. From behind the corner at the bottom of the stairs a golden patch of light spread over the black floor.

  The door was open.

  The Sardinians were in the technical education room.

  He must take them by surprise.

  He flicked off the safety catch and took a deep breath.

  Go! Now!

  He made something resembling a bound and entered the room. He was dazzled by the neon lights.

  Eyes closed, he pointed the shotgun at the middle of the room. ‘Hands up!’

  Slowly he opened them again.

  The room was deserted.

  There’s nobody here …

  He saw the walls bedaubed with paint. Graffiti. Obscene drawings. He tried to read. His eyes were getting used to the light.

  The … headmaster su … su … sucks the deputy headmistress’s sock.

  He goggled in bewilderment for a moment.

  What does it mean?

  He didn’t understand.

  What sock did they mean? He took his glasses out of his jacket pocket and put them on. He read it again. Oh, I see! The headmaster sucks the deputy headmistress’s cock. He moved on to the next scrawl. Italo’s got what? Feet! F
ishy feet.

  ‘You sons of bitches, I bet your own feet smell a lot worse!’ he roared.

  Then he saw the other graffiti and on the floor, smashed to pieces, the television and the video recorder.

  It couldn’t have been the Sardinians.

  They didn’t give a damn about the headmaster or Miss Palmieri, let alone whether he had smelly feet.

  All they cared about was stealing. It must have been some pupils who’d made all this mess.

  So much for his dreams of glory.

  He had already imagined the scene. The police arriving and finding the Sardinians bound hand and foot and ready for jail and he with his trusty smoking shotgun would have said that he had only been doing his duty. He would have received an official commendation from the headmaster, been patted on the back by his colleagues, stood glasses of wine at the Station Bar, awarded an increase in his pension for the courage and disregard for his own safety that he had shown in the field but now none of that was going to happen.

  None of it at all.

  This made him even more furious.

  He had hurt his knee and broken his nose, and all because of a couple of little hooligans.

  They were going to pay dearly for this little stunt. So dearly that they would describe it to their grandchildren as the most traumatic experience of their lives.

  But where had they got to?

  He turned round. He switched on the lights in the corridor.

  The door of the gym was ajar.

  An evil smile curled his mouth and he began to laugh, louder and louder. ‘Oh well done! What a clever idea to hide in the gym. You want a game of hide-and-seek? All right then, let’s play hide-and-seek!’ he shouted with all the breath in his body.

  29

  The green high-jump mattresses were leaned one against the other and tied to the wall-bars.

  Pietro had slipped in between them and was standing still with his eyes closed, trying not to breathe.