by James Gault
Chapter 6
Once again, without any attempt to offer her some kind of ceremony or show, Ogg whisked Antonia off to another time and space. In every other way Ogg was more or less the ideal friend. But, when it came to time-travel with Ogg, Antonia felt like she was standing in front of a locked-up sweet shop without the key. When you have a friend with infinite knowledge and unbelievable powers, you are entitled to look forward to a bit of a spectacle. The occasional paranormal apparition or miraculous manifestation wouldn’t have been out of place. Antonia just couldn’t understand why Ogg played everything so low-key. He should have realised - he must have realised - that his followers were susceptible to a touch of mysticism and ritual. Yet here she was again, certainly in a strange place and most probably in a strange time, and she had no feeling of having made a journey at all. If there was a certain way to take the fun out of time travel, Ogg had found it.
“Come sta, bella cara?” a voice beside her said, and Antonia turned to look. A brown-faced boy of about fourteen with dark curly hair was smiling at her through yellow teeth. He smelt faintly of garlic. Ogg’s disguise for this trip.
“If you’re trying to tell me we’re in Italy, Ogg, you could have chosen a more straightforward way of putting it. And we can do without the beautiful sweetheart bit. Don’t you think I had enough of that with my sleazy great grandfather?”
“Pretty city, this. Don’t you think, Ant?”
Antonia looked around in wonder. They were standing beside a white marble cathedral, one she knew well from picture books.
“Oh, it’s Florence. I’ve always wanted to come here. Thank you, Ogg! I can almost forgive you for the boring journey.”
“Let’s go exploring!” Ogg suggested, and they made their way away from the cathedral and down the narrow streets which Ogg knew led to the river. Ogg was a few paces in front, playing that stupid children’s game of walking with one foot on the pavement and the other on the road, and whistling a tuneless version of an old Verdi aria, when Antonia pulled him up short with a totally unexpected comment.
“There’s a strange sensation of evil about this whole place. Can’t you feel it?”
“What kind of way is that to think, Ant? You have absolutely no evidence for a such a rash and unjustified statement.”
Ogg knew he was completely right. The sky was blue; the sun was shining. It was warm, but still too early in the morning and still too early in the year to be too hot. The ironwork-decorated facades of the ancient buildings were faded, but elegant. The streets were worn by centuries of traffic, but clean. The few people who had crossed their path had been pre-occupied, but smiling. It would make anyone want to sing, or least hum a little tune. It certainly did Ogg, if not Antonia. There were the thugs, of course, but Antonia hadn’t come across any of them yet. So she had no reason to suspect the oppressive presence of evil. Maybe she had just said it to get him to stop whistling.
“Can’t evil exist as an intangible presence, just hanging somewhere in the air?”
This girl was getting just too good at formulating these Great Philosophical Questions. If Ogg weren’t careful, she would eventually trick him into answering one of them. Not this time, though!
“Great GPQ, Ant. What do you think yourself?”
Antonia’s eyes narrowed.
“Well, you can think what you like, Ogg. I’m sure I’m right.”
And indeed she was, as she found out when they got to that quaint little bridge, the one with all the jeweller’s shops. Ponte Vecchio. It was there that Antonia had her first encounter with the thugs.
Some people are of an excessively sentimental and protective nature. Such a thing is a major hindrance to proper rational thought and the correct process of cogitation and reflection. Women are said to be particularly susceptible to this debilitating character flaw, and Antonia was, unfortunately, a typical example of her gender in this regard. So her sympathies were immediately aroused for the elderly little man. For one thing, the thugs were all much younger and much bigger than him. Then there were so many of them, but he was on his own. And while the little old man was carrying only a battered leather briefcase, the thugs were kitted out with large clubs undoubtedly much harder than the skull of an average human. Antonia’s Italian wasn’t quite up to everything the thugs were screaming at their victim, but what she did understand was far from complementary. She was beginning to get very angry, and was just on the point of making what would have been a provocative and dangerous interjection, when Ogg intervened with a silently expressed comment.
“Mussolini supporters! Blackshirts!”
“When are we?”
“Nineteen-thirty. Il Duce has just come to power.”
“I knew it! I sensed the evil! I was right all along!”
But before she and Ogg could get embroiled in a philosophical debate about her premonitions and the meaning of evil, events took a turn for the worse. The thugs had pushed the old man to the ground, and were kicking him and beating them with their clubs. They were grunting and swearing, he was whimpering. Then suddenly it was all over. Antonia didn’t even have time to express her indignation. The old man was on a heap on the road, blood streaming from his head. The Blackshirts were disappearing down the street in an arrogant march, their threatening clubs swinging above their heads. The motionless crowd gazed silently at the heaped body. Antonia couldn’t understand why no-one stirred, why no-one stepped forward to help the injured old man. She rushed forward.
“What’s wrong with you,” she screamed at the surrounding figures from the ground beside the blood-soaked victim. “Why don’t you help him? Can’t you see he’s badly hurt?”
“Only Jew, signorina! Not important! Dirty Jew only! Not real Italian!”
Antonia looked up at the tanned twelve-year-old urchin who was speaking to her in bad English.
“What do you mean, only a Jew? He’s a person, a human being. Somebody, help me!”
A tall dark man in his mid-thirties was standing beside the boy.
“Antonio, where you learn such a horrible things? Excuse me, signorina, my son listen too much to Fascisti. I think he too young to understand. I am sorry.”
Antonio? Was this horrible Antonio the same horrible Antonio she had met on the tube station platform ten years later? Antonia would have loved to ask him, but of course it wouldn’t have made any sense to him. So instead she glanced at Ogg, who gave her a meaningful nod. Antonia might have known it. The creep!
Antonio’s father - and therefore her own great great-grandfather – knelt beside her.
“Let me help you, please. We can take him to my home.”
But suddenly the silent frightened statues surrounding her sprang to life.
“Let me see him, I’m a doctor,” a man said in Italian, and joined Antonia at ground level.
“I’ll help you! I’m a nurse,” a lady added, bustling in.
Antonia soon found herself on the outside of a circle of now concerned good Samaritans encircling the victim. Why were they suddenly so active? She looked around for the Blackshirts. Gone! ‘Snivelling cowards,’ she thought, and immediately felt guilty. At least they were helping the old man now. They were basically good people.
“It’s not a good time to be tourist in my country, signorina. Where are your parents?”
Antonia didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to tell a lie. Then she noted with amazement that Ogg seemed to have no such hang-ups.
“Sightseeing. Old churches and pictures aren’t so exciting for us, so we escaped.”
Antonia couldn’t understand how Ogg could tell such barefaced fibs. And so coolly, with no hint of embarrassment! I mean, if you can’t trust a Great Being, who can you trust? And she remembered that he had already claimed he always told the truth. This was undoubtedly a mysterious way for an Ogg to
move in.
“Why I not take you for a gelato while you wait for your parents? We will go with my son to the café of my mother”
This struck Antonia as a great idea. So good she immediately forgot about Ogg’s mendacity. If the world had to end, what better way to end than with a large Italian ice cream! Too bad that the horrible Antonio had to come too! Ogg was looking pleased though. Did Great Beings also have a weakness for ice cream, or did he just want her to interrogate the brat?
The feast turned out to be a bit of a mixed blessing for Antonia. The authentic Italian ice-cream was exquisite, but, apart from her great-great grandfather, the company left a lot to be desired. Ogg and Antonio had wedged her in between them, and they were taking advantage of the situation to play all the rotten tricks which nasty boys use to torment nice girls. They weren’t going to get her upset. Oh, no! It was the sort of thing they had done in the classroom in her primary school. And it was just what she would have expected of her great-grandfather, but she was so disappointed in Ogg. True, it wasn’t him who tipped her elbow and made her drop a large spoonful over her dress. And while Antonio’s digs in the ribs were actually painful, Ogg’s were no more than playful. Ogg was probably just having fun; in spite of his great – in fact infinite – age he was still a boy at heart. But if she hadn’t known better, she would have believed that Antonio was getting his own back for the incident some years later in the London Tube station. The only way to deal with this sort of stupidity was to hold one’s head high, ignore all provocation, and continue to consume one’s ice-cream in a dignified or even regal manner.
Then Antonio pushed her ice-cream laden spoon right into her nose. She screamed.
“Ogg, stop this messing about and get me out of here!” she hissed.
Ogg obediently whisked them back to Antonia’s time and place, leaving their two hosts to think goodness knows what.