by Guy Burt
‘This building is closed now,’ one of them says.
The words tumble over one another in my hurry to get them out, and it takes a time before the two men start to understand what I’m saying: about the bomb in Anna’s bag, and the way we were there at the jazz club only a few minutes before it was destroyed. I see scepticism turn to uncertainty in their faces as I plough on through what I’ve realized – that Anna’s in danger; that the coincidences have all added up at last to something I can understand and can’t ignore. She’s inside there, and she’s in danger. Everyone is. I search their faces frantically for some lessening of the implacable authority that says I can’t come inside, and when I see it, relief surges inside me like a wave breaking.
One of them stays on guard at the top of the steps, and the other ushers me inside. He looks at me with a mixture of wariness and curiosity. I know I’ve stumbled over the account I’ve given him, that I should have had it much clearer in my head by the time I reach the building; it’s never occurred to me to plan what I’m going to say. But it’s all right: I’m past the first boundary.
There’s a uniformed official at one side of the lobby to take tickets and so on, but the officer who’s brought me inside goes straight past him to an office in the corner. He stands in the doorway while I go inside. There is another man here: a senior officer, from his uniform and the pistol at his belt. They talk hurriedly, low, and the senior man stands. He’s carrying a flattish plastic baton.
‘Raise your arms.’
It’s a metal detector, I realize; they sweep it round me carefully.
‘Nothing.’
‘You say there’s a bomb in this building?’ the senior man says.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure of this?’
I don’t hesitate for a second. I say, ‘Yes.’
‘It’s in a bag?’
‘A shoulder bag. Carried by a young woman – she’s wearing—’
‘You could point her out?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well. We’ll take you to the side gallery, and you can try to point her out. Don’t make it obvious; just tell us who she is. Let’s go.’
We come out into the open space of the lobby, all three of us, and I’m turning to the senior officer. I want to say something about the woman he should be watching for – the one I’ve seen before – when a voice stops me.
‘No, I listened for a while, but it’s not my kind of thing. I’d rather be out in the sunshine than listening to crap, you know? Bye now.’
The official behind the ticket desk laughs. ‘Goodbye, signorina. Enjoy the sunshine.’
It’s Anna – here. I shout out, ‘Wait! Anna!’
She swings round, her eyes wide. I see her mouth drop open in astonishment. ‘Alex!’
The officer by my side sees her too. ‘Stop there,’ he calls.
Anna looks from him to me, a kind of total incredulity in her eyes. I can’t understand what it is that has surprised – appalled – her so much. ‘Alex,’ she says again.
‘Anna, where’s the bag?’ I shout. I’m starting towards her, but for some reason the officer is holding my arm pulling me back. Behind Anna, out in the sunlight on the front steps of the building, the guard we left there is turning, starting to move inside, drawn by the shouts and commotion. ‘Where’s the bag?’
It’s not on her shoulder any longer. Her gaze flickers between me and the two armed carabinieri flanking me. ‘Jesus, Alex,’ she says; it’s almost a whisper, but I hear it perfectly across thirty feet of space.
She turns, then, and must see the guard coming in behind her from the bright steps of the building. She flinches, turning back. The man at my left has taken a pace or two forward, and I can see from the corner of my eye that he looks puzzled, unsure of what exactly is happening. Anna’s face is a mask of disbelief. For some reason I can’t fathom, there is pain there, as though she’s just realized something that hurts her almost as much as it surprises her. She’s looking right at me and the two officers, and I can read it in her eyes as clearly as if I were holding her face, only inches from my own.
It’s the strangest thing, what happens next; so strange I am hardly able to make sense of it. Anna turns once more, her body whipping round, the hem of her jacket flared out by the motion, towards the man on the steps – now half in and half out of shadow. And there’s some kind of sound – a flat sound, like the sound a pebble makes when it misses the can you’re aiming at and smacks into a rock instead. The man on the steps – almost inside the building now – is suddenly reeling backwards, his arms flailing out from his body, and the sunlight catches him again as he goes. He looks for a second as if he is dancing.
And then Anna is turning back, only now – and this makes no sense to me – her jacket has come open at the front, flapping loosely, and there’s something in her hand: small and not properly visible because of how she’s holding it. Around me there is sudden confusion. The senior officer is scrabbling madly at the holster on his belt, and at the same time throwing himself sideways away from me; and the other man is, for some reason, lifting the muzzle of his machine-pistol, pointing it towards the light, towards Anna. Something clutches me inside: fear, I suppose. I don’t understand what they’re doing. They’ve misunderstood what’s happening; there’s going to be some kind of hideous mistake. I draw in a breath to shout – No! – but the sound never gets past my lips.
There’s another of those strange, flat crack sounds. But before I even hear it I’m staggering backwards, all the breath of my shout punched out of me. For a while – I don’t know how long, but it’s long enough to fall to my knees and then pitch sideways on the floor – I don’t feel anything at all but that strange, dull punch: and then there’s pain in my knees from where I’ve fallen on them, sharp and nauseating. And still it’s only that – just the pain in my knees – even though I know now that I’ve been shot, that Anna’s somehow shot me.
I can hear the machine-pistol firing now, a long, tearing sound like fabric being ripped.
I stare at her, across the marble floor of the lobby – God, I’m thinking, they’ve hurt her, they’ve hurt her – and I’m trying to get into my eyes the message that I understand, that I know she didn’t mean it. She’s sitting down now, her legs splayed out in front of her, and I know she’s hurt. I can see it. I can see where the bullets have hit her. There are tears in my eyes suddenly, and she swims and blurs in them, shimmering for a moment the way she does when she dives below the surface, when she’s racing with Jamie. I wonder if she knows about that time I let her win. Probably she doesn’t. I won’t tell her. I’ll never tell her that.
The blurriness clears. I’m still staring at her, and although I know I can’t speak yet – something to do with not having enough air, I think – I’m still trying to get her to know that I understand. It’s like the games Jamie and I play sometimes, where we try to read each other’s thoughts. But I’ve never tried it with Anna. I should have. We should have practised. It’s too difficult, now; all I can see in her face is puzzlement. She has both hands holding the gun, but the little black shape that is the barrel is weaving to and fro in the air, unsteady. Her arms are tired, of course. We’ve been like this for hours. She needs to put it down, get some rest, but I know Anna, know how strong she is, how she never gives up.
There are sounds, too. The clattering, fast-breathing sound of the man trying to fit a second clip into his machine-pistol. It’s taking him for ever; I can hear the rattling of metal on metal as his hands tremble. I try to smile at Anna, to show her how much I love her. She can’t get the gun steady; it’s drifting from side to side. She can’t get it clear on the man with the automatic. We should have practised, worked on it, lain with our heads touching and tried to speak our thoughts through our minds. We need it now.
Anna’s gun lurches to one side, and weaves to and fro. There’s no shot clear for her. I know it’s too late now.
Her mouth is slightly open, and her eyes are fixed on me. It makes
me want to cry, the way she keeps looking at me even though she must know what’s coming. The gun in her hands traces small, almost ethereal patterns in the air as it moves. She’s so tired. I remember what she said, about the sunshine; she’s so close to it. It’s only a few feet away from where she’s sitting. I wish she’d drop the gun and go outside. But she looks too tired to walk, anyway; and there’s the blood all across her blouse, slick down the front of her belly. Even so, I wish it wasn’t here, in this cavernous, gloomy place. It reminds me too much of somewhere else. She ought to be outside.
They’re shooting her again, and although I try to keep them clear, my eyes are filling up with tears. The place where I’m shot might be hurting now; I’m not sure. Then I can see her again. She’s let the gun down at last, and her head’s rested back against the wall. She looks so beautiful, with her dark hair against the pale plaster there. She’s still looking at me. There’s sunlight on the floor just outside her reach, but she doesn’t pay any attention to it; just to me. I try to tell her how much I love her, across the huge distance of the floor, but I don’t know if I manage it. Maybe I do. Maybe she hears me, somewhere in her head. Maybe she even knows already.
It’s very dark in here. I can see the dim shapes of the two carabinieri moving towards her, and I want to tell them to take her outside, to let her be in the sun for a while. But it may be too late for that. I think she’s dead. Her face looks calm and earnest and the puzzlement and pain are all gone from it.
I sit on the floor for years looking at her, and gradually, in that time, the understanding comes, moving like a glacier across the landscape of the past, eroding, changing, reforming what was there before.
I think of Signor Ferucci in the bright sunlight, staring at Anna, smiling; and an invitation that he doesn’t extend to Jamie or me.
It’s so simple. It’s so easy to be wrong, like I have been. I have been wrong all my life; about everything.
I think of Anna pulling my face close to hers across the table, whispering to me while the jazz is playing in the packed club; and I remember wondering how it is that she’s changed her mind so suddenly – but not wondering that much, because I am too caught up in love of her and want of her. And in our wake, the explosion which we never even hear.
By a river-bank, she is angry and hurt when I call these people cowards; and I remember thinking that I don’t really understand her, and thinking that it doesn’t matter.
I understand her now. The airport. The different bags – almost the same, and yet not quite. The stickers of Anna’s cities shifting in the instant of time it takes to switch the one bag for the other; and Anna shifting in the same moment, no longer the victim I thought she was.
So simple, I think to myself. And, Oh God. What have I done?
I brought them to her. I didn’t mean to – I didn’t even know – but I brought them. I killed her.
I killed them both. Oh God, I killed them both. I betrayed them both.
Somewhere behind me, doors are opening, and people are spilling out into the lobby. Very far away, I can hear them screaming. There’s a great chaos of movement and fear and panic all around me, and it almost makes me smile to see that Anna and I are the only ones who stay calm. Even when the running shapes of the people from the lecture hall cut across my field of vision, I can still see her. I wish they’d all go, get out of here, and leave us alone, but they don’t. They just keep running past me, scattering out into the sunshine where Anna should be. When they touch the light they seem to vanish, like confetti blown into a candle flame, or dandelion seeds in the wind.
* * *
Some of them escape past where Anna and I are sitting; but only some. Then the building shudders with the blast, and all the screaming and shouting is silenced for a moment in the vast pressure of the explosion from inside the hall.
I want to touch her hair. I want to hold her, and tell her it’s all right, that I understand everything now and it doesn’t matter in the least. I know what she was – who she was. It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have made a difference.
I think of her, in her belltower, writing her book, and waiting for the valley to fill up with hermits all singing, and drawing, and watching each other. I would have been there with her, if she’d have let me.
Chapter Twenty-four
The background of the scene is dark: rocks and cliffs in shadow, and the dark strand of the beach, and the dark of water lit only with the tracery of light from the moon and stars. A curving promontory sheltering slower, calmer water. Three rocks off to one side. Wave-crests and shadows.
Standing on the curve of land is a boy. His body, naked, is pale in the moonlight, and braced to dive: hands up, legs bent a little at the knee, curving forward over the water. His head is down, and his feet grip the edge of the rock. The light off the water reflects the wave-patterns onto his face and ribs and onto the underside of his arms, and throw a soft shadow into the hollow of his belly. The backs of his calves are taut; the whole body stretched, containing the motion of the dive that hasn’t yet come. Around his figure the night air seems to tremble slightly, as if a heat-haze radiates from him, and the ripples in the air continue this implicit motion through time, both back, to when he was standing relaxed, hands at his side and body turned more away towards the land, and forward, to when the tension will be released in a controlled arc of movement down to and into and through the mesh of ribbonned light below. His eyes are hidden from view by the upsweep of his arms, but his mouth is slightly open, the lips apart for a second with the last breath before the dive.
Behind him is the dark mass of the land, the suggestion of a shingle beach, rocks. The details are smudged, out of focus, made hazy and dull by the clean lines of the foreground. Just discernible is the point where the water meets the stones; and, beyond that, a shape paler than the surrounding shadow of the beach that might be a second figure, watching the diver.
It is night. By candlelight I look at the photographs ranged along the walls, the uneven lines of images set against the new image that rests in their midst, spreading across the wall to connect with them. I am seeing the paintings properly now; seeing them clearly for the first time. I can catch in them the first glimpse of what they are.
It’s the eyes. It’s just below the surface of these superficially different faces. I’ve painted young men and old women, and couples, and middle-aged people; and I’ve scattered them through a hundred different countries and situations, a thousand possibilities. All along, I’ve thought each painting I began was new. None of them has been; I can see that now. They’re all the same painting. It’s the eyes that make the faces, and no matter what the figures in these images seem to look like on the surface, the eyes are always Anna’s, and Jamie’s.
Every picture I have painted has been of them, and I’ve never realized – never broken far enough below the surface – until now. I must have been asleep, dreaming, for thirty years, not to have known; no wonder they seem so little like my paintings. I haven’t even known what they are until now.
I walk from image to image, slowly, staring into them, seeing below the contours of the faces which are only the surface of these people. In my mind, Anna’s eyes look straight at me across the marble floor of some old, echoing building, fixed on me; and I try to pass her a message through that impossible distance. From picture to picture it’s the same. All along, I can trace her eyes in the figures: her eyes, and Jamie’s.
We never saw the hermit again, after he left the valley; at least, Jamie and I didn’t. What Anna saw, afterwards, I can only guess at. But I was wrong to think that not seeing him again meant he wasn’t there. He was always there; the stamp of that summer set the mould for all the years that were to follow. I should have seen that, but I didn’t.
The candle takes me by faces of old men and young men, and women also old and young; and in every one of them I see the same glimmer of understanding and recognition. They’re all the same people, under the surface of their clothes and ski
n and features. The room seems to be waveringly full, by candlelight, of Jamie and Anna; as though somehow, magically, they are still here.
The line rings the room, and it starts and ends with the newly finished painting of the boy diving; the night scene with the moonlight on the water and the reflection on his body. I hold the candle up to it, and the water seems to shimmer and move with the flame. I can almost hear the slap and wash of it against the rocks there.
And I think, It depends where you start. There’s something in that – something to do with how to order these images, how to make sense of them. And this picture is the starting place: I can feel that. When the dial has no hands, you can start where and when you like; all times are the same.
I reach out and touch my hand to the wall, but there’s only the cool, smooth feel of its surface against my fingers, unyielding, implacable.
‘Tonight, then. Don’t forget,’ Jamie says.
‘I won’t,’ I say.
He grins. ‘I’ll see you at twelve.’
The valley at night is full of the sounds I know well. I slip out of my bedroom window and feel my way carefully but confidently over the tiles of the kitchen roof. Down in the garden, the night cicadas shrill away and pay me no attention. I drop to the grass beside the verandah, and pad silently along in the shadow of the house to the front drive. The moon is low in the sky now, but it will come higher as the night goes on.
Jamie meets me at the gate.
‘Hey,’ he says.
‘Hey yourself.’
The road is still warm from the day’s heat; I can feel waves of warmth coming up from it as we walk. Below us, nestling in the curve of the land, the few scattered lights of the town make patterns like a lattice of stars; a lone constellation that’s fallen from its place in the sky and come to rest here. It’s very still, and very warm; much warmer than you’d think for this late in the summer. The storms haven’t come yet this year; they’ll come once Jamie is gone, in England, and I’ll watch the hurling rain on my own.