Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  She catches me staring at her. “I’m sorry. Do we know you?”

  I laugh. “No, you don’t. I’m grateful to you, though.”

  “Grateful?”

  “It’s all right. You’ve played your part.”

  The woman flushes.

  “You can go now,” I say.

  The man fixes me with small hard eyes, and I remember something my aunt Lottie told me. Some men are horrid when they meet you but you shouldn’t worry. It’s just because they fancy you. It’s actually a kind of compliment. She paused, then said, I wouldn’t get involved, though — not with one of them. I wonder if the man in the raspberry-colored shirt is “one of them.” I wonder if he was horrid to Klaus’s girlfriend too.

  I set off through Trastevere, making for the Ponte Sisto. I have plans for the evening — a late dinner, then a new club on the outskirts of the city — but I decide not to go. I feel too elated, too giddy. As I cross the river I replay the conversation I overheard. Certain phrases have stayed with me. Penthouse, wasn’t it? She left him. They’re clues to a future I can’t as yet imagine, fragments of a narrative in which I’m about to feature as a character.

  /

  September 3. Alone in our rooftop apartment on Via Giulia I stretch out on the sofa with the French windows open. My father’s away, as usual. The dome of St. Peter’s floats above a jumble of palm trees, sloping tiles, and TV aerials. It’s nearly six o’clock. I yawn, then close my eyes. I hear my mother asking if I would like to go somewhere at the weekend. We could drive to that forest — the one with the yew trees, remember? She’s dressed in a green T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her arms are slender, tanned. This would have been in England, at a time when she was well … It’s dark when I wake up. The snarl of a passing motorino, the clatter of plates in the restaurant downstairs. Rome again.

  I reach for my phone. I have messages from Massimo and Luca, moody boys with private incomes and slim brown ankles. They want me to come out. There are openings, they say. There are drinks at a film director’s house in Parioli. There’s a party. I think about my friend Daniela. I wish I could tell her about the man I slept with. How he took my hand beneath the Departures board, and how he came without a sound. How he kissed me on the street, then disappeared. You didn’t! Dani, sitting at a table outside the Bar San Calisto, a cigarette between her fingers, her nails a cool chalk-blue. I would tell her what the man said. My little witch. We’d look at each other, wide-eyed, expressionless, then burst out laughing. But Dani’s in Puglia with hardly any coverage and she won’t be back for days.

  I shower, then stand in front of the bathroom mirror, brown all over except for a single blinding strip of white. Tilting my head one way then the other, I run a brush through my wet hair. The ends come to level with my hip bones. I really ought to have it cut but I can’t be bothered to make an appointment, let alone sit in a chair for hours and listen to all the gossip. I remember the time I wound my hair round Adefemi’s wrists. You’re my prisoner, I said. He always liked me to keep it long.

  My phone rings in the living room. I put the brush down and lean close to the mirror. My face stares at me, unblinking. I look like someone who’s about to meet her fate. Are you superstitious? I smile, then lower my eyes. The good thing about September is you still have a tan. Lipstick and perfume: that’s all you need.

  Once dressed — short skirt, leather jacket, sandals — I check my phone. Four missed calls, three of them from Massimo. Kit? Kit! Where are you? Call me! By midnight my arms are round his waist as we race through the warm brown streets, the throaty roar of his Ducati bouncing off the facades of buildings. I rest my chin on his left shoulder and watch the city rush towards me. Massimo’s a prince. Rome’s full of princes. We cut through the Jewish quarter. A man in a white vest sits on a wooden chair. A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he’s peeling an orange. The smoke unwinds into the air. The opal glitter of a fountain.

  Massimo pulls up outside a club in Testaccio. Two revs of the engine, then he switches it off. Deep bass notes take over. I can already see the dance floor, a crush of sweat-soaked bodies, jittery strobe lighting. Massimo watches me remove my helmet and shake out my hair. “You seem different.”

  A cigarette arcs down from the terrace and lands on the cobbles in a shower of red sparks.

  Later, in the club, we run into people we know, or half-know — Maurizio, Livia, Salvatore. None of us can quite believe the summer’s over; there’s a sense of nostalgia, an undercurrent of despair. Livia thinks we should spend a few days at her mother’s house on Stromboli. Salvatore says Morocco would be warmer. Massimo is already complaining about Milan, where he will soon be studying. Imagine what the weather will be like up there. I tell him he won’t even notice. He’ll be too busy going out with models.

  “It’s you I want,” he mutters.

  “I’ve only just split up with Adefemi,” I say. “And anyway, we’re supposed to be friends, aren’t we?”

  “Adefemi.” Massimo treads on a transparent plastic cup, which cracks loudly beneath his boot.

  “I’ll be off as well before too long,” I say.

  He nods. “Oxford.”

  I’ve won a scholarship to Worcester College, to study Italian and French, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

  “No,” I say, “not Oxford.”

  “Where, then?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You’re impossible.” He lights a cigarette and blows out a thin blade of smoke that blunts itself against the night.

  I move to the railing at the far end of the terrace. The air smells of spinach and wet fur. In June a group of us went dancing not far from here. I remember stone steps vanishing into the river, and a boat moored against the bank, and the water, green and milky. Nineties techno, dry ice. Ketamine. Then I remember a place Adefemi showed me, on a bridge that links Testaccio and Trastevere. If you stop halfway across and lean over the parapet, a draft reaches up to cool your face, even on a stifling August day. I think about all the people in bars and clubs and restaurants, and how I will soon be gone, and how none of it will change. That’s the thing about Rome. Nothing changes. When you’re somewhere else you can always imagine exactly what’s happening.

  Later still, Massimo takes me back to his apartment, which occupies one entire floor of a palazzo near Piazza Venezia. Massimo has a Thai manservant who wears immaculate white gloves. Every morning he wakes Massimo with a cappuccino and a copy of La Repubblica. Massimo’s living room is the size of a tennis court, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a brown-and-white marble floor. He used to have a brown-and-white fox terrier. Whenever the dog lay down, it disappeared.

  Massimo offers me cocaine. I shake my head. He tosses the see-through plastic packet on the coffee table. Some of the white powder spills. He doesn’t care. He pours me a cognac, then puts on Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. We lie at ninety degrees to each other, on matching cream sofas. I sip my drink; my stomach glows. It’s a last night of sorts and I’m only sorry I can’t tell him. The sound of the trumpet is clear as glass, some notes so fragile it’s a wonder they don’t shatter.

  “Is your father in town?” he says.

  “No, he’s away.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. Some war zone or other.”

  Massimo smiles. He has always liked the idea of my father. He thinks being a reporter is romantic.

  Sitting up, he runs a hand through his hair, then changes the music. This time it’s Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” I finish my cognac and slip out of my shoes. We dance back to back on the cool marble floor, our arms lifting dreamily into the air above our heads like a snake charmer’s snakes.

  At three in the morning I tell him I’m going home. He starts to cry. “What if I never see you again?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” I push the hair out of his eyes and kiss him on the forehead. “You’re tired. You should go to bed.”

  Outside, as I bend over to unlock my Vespa, a car
races down the street, boys leaning from the window, a maroon-and-yellow flag rippling and snapping in their hands. One of them shouts at me. The only word I hear is culo. I’m still thinking about the things Massimo said. You seem different. What if I never see you again? Sometimes he’s so in tune with me that he can read my thoughts even as they’re forming. Not that I know what lies ahead. All I can say for sure is that a space will open up between us and the temperature will drop. Perhaps he was right to feel sad.

  I ride down to Lungotevere then follow the river. As I pass the Isola Tiburina there is the smell of golden syrup. It’s like a memory from another country, a different time. I pull over to the side of the road. The smell’s still there, but I can’t account for it. There’s no factory, no shop. I accelerate away again.

  Tonight the city smells like England.

  Though it’s late I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep. It’s almost as if I had the coke he offered me. My body feels wound up like a clockwork toy. I need to be set down, let loose.

  Goodbye, I whisper as I turn away from the river.

  Goodbye, goodbye.

  /

  When my father calls on September 6, everything’s in place and it’s only two days until I act. He’s in the Middle East, he says. In Syria. He’s sorry he’s been elusive recently. I tell him I understand. The line swoops and crackles beneath our words. Sometimes it sounds hollow, as if we’re talking in a cave. Other times, the connection cuts out altogether and there’s an absence that makes me feel queasy, like the numbness you get in your arm when you rest your head on it and fall asleep.

  I ask him how he is.

  He’s fine, he says. He’s not in any danger. Most of the shells are landing in rebel-held suburbs. I say I’m fine too. Rome is relatively peaceful at the moment, I tell him, despite a night of heavy fighting.

  “Have there been demonstrations?” He sounds surprised, annoyed with himself. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s missing out on breaking news.

  “Dad,” I say. “It was a joke.”

  Silence.

  At last he says, “Only a month to go.” Until I start at university, he means. “You must be excited.”

  I say I am. It’s easier if I agree.

  “You’re so lucky,” he says. “I wish —”

  I know what he wishes. He wishes he could be in my position, with everything ahead of him. He has no idea what he’s wishing for. He doesn’t have a clue.

  I ask him when he’s coming home.

  “In about a week,” he says, then he appears to hesitate. “It’s not confirmed. The situation’s volatile.”

  It’s ten years since we moved to Italy but when I hear my father on the phone it always makes me think of London. I see our house in Tufnell Park. The peaked, slightly Gothic roof, the red-brick walls. The hollyhocks by the front door. Green trees, gray sky. I can almost smell the rain. My father would often be abroad, working on a story. It was just me and my mother, for weeks at a time. She wasn’t ill yet but she wasn’t quite right either. I would come home from school and find her lying on the sofa in the front room with her forearm over her eyes, or sometimes she would be asleep in bed. In our last year in the city she was always tired.

  “Kit?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “You’ll need an umbrella. It’s not like Rome, you know.”

  He’s trying to be light and humorous but I sense him turning away, losing interest, even though his mobile’s still pressed against his ear. When filing his reports he tends to stand at an angle to the camera, alert to what is happening behind him, in the unstable darkness of a foreign night. This is David Carlyle. CNN. Benghazi.

  Or Damascus.

  Or Kabul.

  When the phone call’s over I realize he didn’t ask me how I was. He never does. He thinks it’s a meaningless convention, a waste of breath. But I always tell him anyway.

  Seconds later, oddly, Dani calls from Puglia. It’s a relief to hear her voice, but when I tell her about the man I slept with her response surprises me. She thinks I was reckless. I laugh and say we used a condom but that isn’t what she meant.

  “He could have been anyone,” she says. Then she pauses and says, “Sometimes you frighten me.”

  “Dani,” I say, “I wouldn’t have chosen anyone” — though even as I speak I realize there was something completely arbitrary and instantaneous about the decision. It was as if I’d been drinking. Not for a moment did it occur to me to think of consequences.

  That afternoon I go out and buy an umbrella.

  /

  Two days later, on September 8, I flag down a taxi on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. I have a suitcase with me, and my new umbrella. Draped over my right arm is the cashmere coat my father gave me when I turned eighteen. I’m carrying my passport, several credit cards, and a printout of my boarding pass. Round my neck is my most valuable possession — a small, silver heart-shaped locket containing two pieces of my mother’s hair, one blond and wavy, the other a glinting dark brown, almost metallic. The blond hair is what fell out when she first had chemotherapy. The brown is what grew back. I have closed my deposit account and withdrawn my savings. The money my mother left me. My inheritance. It’s enough to keep me going for a while.

  A few hours earlier, at dawn, I walked to the Ponte Mazzini, my phone in my hand. The city sticky-eyed, hungover. Still half-asleep. I stopped next to a lamppost in the middle of the bridge. White mist drifting above the river, a blurred pink sun. Leaning on the parapet, I held my phone out over the water and then let go. I thought I heard it ringing as it fell. Who would be calling so early? Massimo? Dani? I would never know. In Rome people ring you all the time and mostly it’s not about anything in particular. Back in the apartment I downloaded Eraser and cleaned my hard drive, not just deleting my files but overwriting them so as to make retrieval more or less impossible. I left my laptop under the arch on Via Giulia with a note that said FREE COMPUTER. If I’m to pay proper attention, if this is to work, there’s no option but to disconnect, to simplify. From now on, life will register directly, like a tap on the shoulder or a kiss on the lips. It will be felt.

  Entering the station, I have an image of myself a week ago, standing beneath the Departures board, my presence implausible, unreal, as though my lungs were drained of oxygen and my veins were empty. How things have turned around since then! On the train to the airport everything we pass seems highlighted or in relief. The bleached papyrus grass that grows next to the railway line, the wasteground where Gypsies often camp. The big blue signs on station platforms. VILLA BONELLI, MAGLIANA, MURATELLA. Strange how a journey that is only just beginning can feel so final.

  At Fiumicino, while queueing for Security, I let out a cry. The old man in front of me turns round and asks if something’s wrong. His face is kind, concerned.

  “It’s my umbrella,” I say. “I must have left it on the train.”

  “You can buy another one.” He chuckles. “It’s not the last umbrella in the world.”

  “But my father gave it to me —”

  I look at the floor. Why am I lying?

  “Your father will forgive you,” the old man says. “I know he will.”

  TWO

  Rain slants across the window as the plane drops out of the belly of the cloud. Flat wet fields appear below, and rows of trees with yellow leaves. Cars slide along a road that looks silver-plated. Germany. I feel my insides twist, a tightness in my throat. A kind of homesickness. I realize I’m missing my mother and the years when there were three of us. That time’s gone forever, though. My home’s gone too. The past is what I’m homesick for.

  The plane shudders when it hits the runway, lurching right then left, as if seeking a way out. Mist gathers behind the wheels. A faint burst of applause from the back, the airy roar of brakes.

  Before I flew, I googled “Berlin accommodation” and found several cheap hotels in and around Kluckstrasse. There’s talk online of a red-light area nearby but that
doesn’t bother me and Kluckstrasse has the great advantage of being central. Walter-Benjamin-Platz is only four stops away on the U-Bahn.

  Outside the terminal I climb into a taxi.

  “Kluckstrasse, please,” I say.

  The driver gives me a look in the rearview mirror. His glasses have caramel-colored lenses that make his eyes difficult to see.

  I say it again. “Kluckstrasse.”

  At last, and reluctantly — or so it seems to me — he pulls away. It’s my clothes perhaps. My luggage. He equated me with somewhere more upmarket.

  I stare through the window. Berlin is gray — a gritty, grainy gray. There’s no warmth, no beauty; I’ve left all that behind. I wonder if my father has been to Germany. He probably has. His job has taken him all over the world. His absences used to be a mystery to me but I became accustomed to him being gone. It seemed normal, almost comforting. When he reappeared, after weeks away, I would throw myself into his arms and he would have a spicy smoky smell that I always thought of as his “work” — the smell of train stations, airport lounges, rented cars — and he would give me a T-shirt or a key ring, proof of where he’d been.

  We pass an Argentinian steak house, then a restaurant called Villa Fellini. The Mercedes smells of deodorant and stale cigarettes. The radio is turned down low. From time to time the driver takes his right hand off the wheel to rub his chin or scratch an ear. With his greased-back hair and his seventies sunglasses he looks as if he might once have been a singer in a seedy cabaret — or on a cruise ship, like Berlusconi.

  “This is Kluckstrasse,” he says at last.

  There isn’t a hotel in sight so I ask him to keep going. A car behind us honks then overtakes. I tell him to turn right. I’m just guessing but as we round a corner I see a two-story building painted a garish blue. A small sign says HOTEL.