The Apartment in Rome

by Penny Feeny

  He beckoned her to follow him into the back office. ‘We’re in trouble,’ he said.

  Gina balanced herself against the edge of his desk and drew her toe along the outline of a floor tile. ‘Why? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Not me. You.’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘What am I supposed to have done?’

  He laid down the photographs and indicated the long-haired football player in mid-leap. ‘This is the Boletti boy, Antonio, isn’t it?’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  He pulled a white-tipped menthol cigarette from the packet he kept in his shirt pocket and toyed with it. ‘A representative of the family called in earlier.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It was a lawyer actually. Apparently the Bolettis were not too happy to learn from the grapevine that their young son was being displayed in public.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake! That’s ridiculous. They’d given me full permission to use them. They were impressed with my client list.’

  David was flicking his cigarette between his fingers like a conjuring trick, obviously desperate to go outside for a smoke. Instead he sat in his swivel chair and drummed on its arm. ‘Not on this occasion, it seems. They don’t care for the company you’ve put him in.’

  ‘Who could have told them anyway?’ Then she remembered Franco Casale.

  She unbuttoned her jacket, tried to relax her shoulders. ‘You loved that sequence,’ she said. ‘Because it was so retro.’ In a series of prints reminiscent of post-war Italian cinema, half a dozen youths played football in a run-down piazza, laundry flapping overhead, a pair of scooters for their goalposts. Energy radiated from their scrawny limbs, the whole group configured into a striking ballet. ‘And these shots of Antonio in his Roma gear – just look at his wonderful, intense expression – were a perfect foil for the others.’

  ‘Sure, but that was before I knew who he was.’

  ‘I don’t see why it should make a difference.’

  ‘It’s a risk I can’t take,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean? Why is it a risk?’

  ‘I’m not fighting your lawsuits for you, hon. The deal is, we take them down or he’ll get the whole show closed.’

  ‘But that’s outrageous! He can’t do that!’ Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow. She had to lean more firmly against the desk to stop her knees wobbling.

  David smacked his forehead. ‘Hey, I’m being dumb here. Boletti’s the landlord who’s after your apartment, isn’t he? The one you thought you’d seen off?’

  She’d already told him about the visit from the police. ‘I got another letter from his avvocato yesterday. Probably the same guy who’s hassling you. If only I’d realised, I’d’ve knocked his teeth out. Franco Fucking Whatever.’

  David was not much given to gestures of affection, but he squeezed her arm in sympathy. ‘I know it’s tough, Gina, but I’m a foreigner here. So are you. We have to be on our best behaviour.’

  ‘This might not seem such a bloody disaster if only your publisher had turned up.’

  ‘I told you he was on a tight schedule. I guess he lost his window, but I’ll chase him, I promise.’

  ‘If there’s anything left for him to see…’ Then she rallied. ‘You’re not really going to let Bertie dictate to you, are you?’

  ‘Well, we have a problem to address here. If we take these two down I’ll have a wall with a crazy gap in it.’ He smoothed back his white-blond hair. ‘So that’s basically why I called you over. Is there anything you haven’t shown me?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Let me see what you’ve got on your laptop.’

  ‘Oh right…’

  She took it out of its sleeve and laid it on his desk. She had lost her equilibrium and everything took longer than it should have done. The keys slipped beneath her fingers, the cursor skated across the screen. Eventually she set up a slide show of the work she’d previously submitted to him.

  He sat down and scanned through the material, shaking his head. ‘I thought so. We already picked the best.’ As he closed the programme he spotted the folder she’d labelled ‘Aftermath’. He leaned forward and opened it. ‘Hey, what’s this?’

  Gina said, ‘They’re not ready.’

  ‘No?’ He clicked from image to image. ‘They look kinda interesting. Holy shit!’

  ‘Honestly, I haven’t done anything with them yet, they’re just raw takes.’

  ‘Raw,’ he agreed, wincing. ‘And new, huh?’

  ‘No, actually I took them last summer.’

  ‘Why didn’t you show me before? I can’t believe that, with a theme like yours, you didn’t think of including them.’

  ‘I wasn’t certain they fit with the rest of the selection. And I’m still kind of ambivalent…’

  ‘Did you set them up in the studio?’

  ‘No, in the apartment.’

  ‘You’ve sure done a convincing job.’ His tone was half-admiring, half-appalled. ‘The guy looks familiar.’

  ‘Yes, he’s one of the Afghanis. He’s in the football sequence too. I call him Joe.’

  ‘Hey, didn’t he pose for those studies I sold privately?’

  She nodded.

  ‘They were quite a hit,’ he mused. ‘So I vote we go with these. I’ll need two edited prints – you know the dimensions – and I’ll need them fast.’ Then, as if he sensed some reluctance in Gina: ‘Is there a problem?’

  What choice did she have? And the Aftermath shots were indisputably spectacular. David had sensed their erotic charge. ‘No, no problem.’

  20

  Sasha closed the shutters and then opened them again. No, she wasn’t dreaming. There it lay before her: the cobbled pedestrianised street, the crimson awning over the bar on the corner, the cast-iron balconies opposite with their ugly air-conditioning units. Except to her they weren’t ugly. Everything in view was beautiful because she was back in Rome.

  The apartment was tiny. Ruby was currently washing in what was described as a wet room because when you stood under the showerhead the basin and loo were drenched as well. The two of them were sharing the double bed and off the kitchen was another small room where her father would sleep. He hadn’t seen it yet because he’d been delayed. A security threat had disrupted his schedule and he’d overrun his flying hours. When he joined them the following day he would be annoyed, she suspected, because this apartment wasn’t the one they’d booked but a last minute substitute. The agent had been apologetic – something about unfinished building works – but so charming. He’d driven them to the new place which was, he promised, in an even better, more central location, and he’d given them a bottle of white wine from Frascati. The girls had been too excited to complain.

  Sasha loved the way that the sounds and aromas filtered up from the street, that she could simply step outside for her breakfast. The area had been noisy overnight but she’d decided that she loved noise too. She’d spent so much of her life begging her parents for lifts, struggling to get to the heart of things. This was a taste – glorious, heady – of her future.

  Ruby came out of the shower, only half-wrapped in a small towel, and joined her at the window. They used to be the same height, but Sasha had acquired another inch; her slimmer frame had also affected her carriage: she appeared taller, and able to look down on her best friend.

  ‘Cosa facciamo oggi?’ said Ruby in an exaggerated comedy accent.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘What do I want to do?’ A wicked dimple quivered in Ruby’s cheek. ‘Aren’t we, like, going to play detective?’

  Two young men emerged from an open doorway for a smoke. One bent to light his cigarette and then threw back his head to take his first drag. He spotted Ruby in her towel and whistled. Sasha pushed her out of sight. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, why so chicken all of a sudden?’ Ruby was on the floor rummaging in her suitcase. Neither o
f them had unpacked anything and yesterday’s clothes, the ones they had travelled in, lay in a dirty heap. She seized a pair of red lace knickers and shimmied into them.

  ‘That’s so unfair. I’m not chicken.’

  Ruby foraged for a T-shirt, changed her mind and discarded it. Sasha had a strong suspicion that her father’s arrival would make it impossible for them all to share this cramped space. He was, she thought, unnecessarily conscious of health and safety, always pointing out hazards that she could happily ignore. Ruby’s cotton top in the middle of the shiny floor would be an example. This could be turned to their advantage, however, if he felt obliged to stay somewhere else.

  ‘You don’t want me to meet him,’ said Ruby.

  ‘And that’s totally untrue too. It’s not my fault I haven’t been able to get through to his phone. I think he must have had it nicked.’

  She had kept in touch with Joe intermittently, by text. When she’d started going out with Liam on a regular basis, her messages had become less frequent. But things had never really gelled with Liam. He couldn’t help being an average bum-fluff sixth former, his hands clumsy and his kisses too wet. She knew she’d probably romanticised Joe out of all proportion, but the fact remained that he was mysterious and thrilling and tragic. And her first. And maybe, if she met him again, they could take up where they had left off. Or not. If, on their second encounter, he turned out to be nothing like the heroic figure her imagination had conjured, she’d be rid of the fantasy and that would be a good thing too.

  The only problem, as Ruby had reminded her, was that he wasn’t returning her calls. She’d had no response since he’d wished her a happy new year in January. She wasn’t going to let this scupper her trip – she and Ruby knew how to enjoy themselves – but it was undoubtedly a setback.

  ‘He’d’ve got another handset by now,’ Ruby pointed out. ‘Even if it was just a cheap thing. Or he could’ve lent a mate’s to tell you what was going on.’

  ‘If he’s lost his phone, he’ll have lost all his contacts too.’

  ‘What about that photographer? Didn’t she have your number?’

  ‘Gina was dead against us,’ said Sasha. ‘Beats me why it was anything to do with her. I told you, didn’t I, how I sent her a friend request on Facebook and she blew me off. Cow.’

  ‘I thought she was cool? She let you stay over.’

  ‘Yeah…’ In truth, Sasha felt ambivalent towards Gina. She envied her lifestyle and her undeniable sophistication and she supposed she owed her – she’d helped her out of more than one scrape. But she was aware of an undercurrent of disapproval which she thought unjustified. She longed to challenge it and put her right.

  ‘Why don’t you send her a text? Ask if she knows what’s happened to him.’

  ‘I told you, Rube, she didn’t like us being together. She won’t tell me.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘There’s other places I’d rather look first, that’s all. Like Piazza Navona. You need to see it, it’s truly awesome. This guy Sami, who’s a mate of Joe’s – they room together – does this living statue thing there. Julius Caesar, I think. And if he’s not around we can go to the church, see if the priest knows where he is.’

  ‘He might not even be here any more,’ said Ruby, pulling on a tight pair of shorts. ‘Hey, d’you think I’ll be let into the church in these?’

  ‘It’s only a crypt, the bit I went to,’ said Sasha. ‘What d’you mean, he might not be here?’

  ‘He might have gone to another country.’ She stuck out her tongue and waggled it at the mirror. ‘Reckon I’m dehydrated. Have we got anything to drink?’

  ‘We’ll have to go out and buy some.’ When they’d arrived, late at night, there’d been nothing in the fridge but the Frascati and a bottle of mineral water, both of which they’d drunk. ‘Anyway, he can’t go to another country. You only get one chance to claim asylum and if you try to move on somewhere else for a better deal, you get sent back again. It’s plain crazy because even if you have friends or family who could help you out, you can’t go and join them.’

  ‘You could try though,’ said Ruby. ‘I bet that’s what your Joe’s done. How come you know so much about this anyway?’

  ‘I said I’d try and help him come to the UK so I had to, like, find out stuff.’

  ‘You sly bitch, you never told me!’

  ‘’Cos I failed,’ said Sasha sadly. ‘The whole thing was hopeless. I reckon that’s why he gave up on me.’

  ‘He was using you, then? One-way ticket.’

  ‘Shut up!’ She closed the shutters again and strapped on the leather messenger bag that contained everything she considered important. ‘I’m ready to go,’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

  It was an odd experience for her to be leading the way. The previous summer she’d been endlessly tagging along – whether with Antonio, Bruton, Joe, Gina, Ilse or Renate. Half the time she hadn’t liked to voice an opinion, afraid of being thought naive. That didn’t matter any more. She was in charge and Ruby couldn’t boss her about; she could only follow.

  The apartment was, as promised, central. Within a couple of twists and turns – Ruby pausing to peep into courtyards or shop windows – they arrived at a flock of white canopies protecting market produce from the day’s glare. Sasha drew Ruby into the gangway between the stalls. ‘And this,’ she proclaimed, ‘is Campo de’ Fiori.’

  ‘Oh my God! Where you were in the riot!’

  ‘Yep.’

  It was strange to be back there again, in a different season, at a different time of day. She pointed to a dark stain on the cobbles a few feet from the statue of Giordano Bruno and joked, ‘That’s my blood. Won’t wash off.’

  Ruby hooted with laughter. ‘We can come back tonight, can’t we? I’d like to see it when everyone lets rip.’

  ‘It’ll probably be really staid. People sitting around yammering. Italians yammer a lot.’

  She avoided the bar where they’d been drinking last summer and led Ruby to a small café offering breakfast. They sat outside on wicker chairs, pretending they were actors on the set of a movie. It was one of their routines, each trying to keep a straight face while being the first to make the other laugh. Usually the incongruity of their location would be funny in itself, but this place, with its picturesque stalls and swathes of flowers and chic passers-by, could have been a filmset in any case. Not quite real.

  They moved on to Piazza Navona, which was thronged like an open-air circus with buskers and jugglers and artists and hawkers. Ruby stopped to examine a pair of feathery earrings pinned on a black display board. Sasha pulled her away, cupping her hands around her eyes to scan the piazza. She hadn’t underestimated the crowds, but she hadn’t considered the difficulty of steering a way through them.

  ‘How do you know that Joe’s mate’s going to be here?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘I don’t. But Easter’s a really busy time, innit? So if you want to make money off tourists you’re going to put yourself out there.’

  ‘Is that him?’

  ‘No, you dork, that’s Christopher Columbus.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  She couldn’t, in fact, but she could take a guess, and since she was the old hand, Ruby wouldn’t know any better. ‘Because he’s gold. That’s what Columbus did, wasn’t it? Discover gold. And he’s wearing a hat. Julius Caesar is white and has a laurel wreath.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Ruby went up to the statue and said, hands on hips, ‘You’re not Christopher Columbus, are you?’ The statue didn’t even blink.

  ‘You’ll have to give him some money,’ said Sasha.

  ‘Why? It’s not like he answered me. Who’s that over there?’

  A tall white-robed figure stood motionless in front of the church of Sant’Agnese. As they approached they realised it was a woman: an ice queen or a ghost.

  ‘I don’t think he’s here,’ said Sasha. ‘We could come back later, have another look. It will be really busy in t
he evening too and, like, he probably can’t stick around all day long.’

  Nevertheless, she slumped against the rail of the fountain in disappointment. The waters representing the four great rivers of the world splashed and mingled behind her back. Ruby perched beside her, flicking through a free magazine she’d picked up, promoting exhibitions, concerts and nightlife.

  ‘There are some clubs here that have free entry before eleven. Maybe we should check them out. Google them on the ipad when we get back to the apartment, see if they do decent music.’ Ruby shuffled her feet in a two-step and clicked her fingers; she fancied her dancing skills.

  Sasha leaned across, riffled through the assorted adverts and yelped. ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you got the map?’

  ‘No, you have. I saw you put it in your bag. What is it?’

  She jabbed excitedly at the page. ‘That’s her.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘See this advert for an exhibition? That’s her name: Gina Stanhope. I want to look up the gallery. It might be near here.’

  There were two further names beside Gina’s and, in smaller print, details of an address and opening times. The central image was eye-catching: an other-worldly landscape that had a hypnotic quality if you stared at it for long enough.

  ‘This isn’t one of hers,’ said Sasha. ‘She takes portraits. She was having a session with Joe when I first met him. Maybe I can show you what he looks like and you’ll believe me. He’s well fit, honest.’

  Ruby was enthused. ‘Come on then, get the map out.’

  As Sasha unfolded it, a middle-aged man stopped to ask if they needed help; she quickly refused.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because he’ll offer to take us there. And then he’ll want to buy us a coffee and we’ll never be rid of him.’ This wasn’t necessarily true, but Ruby had a way of inviting attention that made Sasha uneasy. It was true that Renate and Ilse had worn scanty revealing clothes last summer but, like the local girls, they had given off an air of superior confidence. Ruby had swagger a-plenty, but she was also like a puppy who wanted to play with everyone. Indiscriminate. ‘Anyway,’ Sasha carried on, ‘I’ve worked it out. It’s between here and Piazza del Popolo. It shouldn’t take us long to find.’