Angelina comes in, asks why he didn’t come for lunch. She looks at the immense panel of sea remains, bits of wood nailed on, scraps of denim stuck on with glue.
She looks at the motionless explosion.
‘Have you taken up art?’
Vito shrugs. His hands are black. There’s glue in his hair. He leans against the wall near the case of old bottles, rubs his eyes with his wrists, kicks the dust.
He won’t let his mother near. He keeps her at a distance, in the shadows. He speaks to himself.
‘I stopped a shipwreck.’
Vito has gathered memory. Of a blue gas tank, a shoe.
Someone will need this someday. Someday, a black Italian man will want to look back at the sea of his ancestors and find something. A trace of their passage. Like a suspension bridge.
Angelina cannot look at her son. It is beyond her. It would be like looking at him when he’s making love.
She goes to the big blue panel.
She touches those poor encrusted things, marine relics washed by salt. A shipwreck sculpted in their tool shed. It’s striking. It’s like an intact archaeological site. A world saved.
Angelina looks at the sea her son has recreated, the things he chose from the beach, from history. An interior space in the undertow of the world.
She looks at the leather pouch nailed in the centre.
She knows it’s a charm, the kind mothers in the Sahara prepare at night beneath the watchful eyes of the stars and put round their children’s necks to ward away the evil eyes of death.
She rubs her nose against it like an animal. She hears the sound of the sea, so similar to the sound of blood.
Then it happened.
What month was it? October, always October. The month of their banishment. The month of her birthday. Angelina had thought she might not make it to that birthday alive. One of those thoughts that worms its way in and nibbles away at you. She had made a sort of will, put her affairs in order, bank statements and settled bills out in plain sight.
Vito was gone. That may have been what did it. The feeling of death. I’ve raised him. Now I can go. There was nothing to be done about the mistakes she’d made, so many of them, and yet not so many at all when you lined them up at night, while you emptied a drawer and tidied up the disaster. The photos from Africa and the rest – old bus tickets, an envelope with medical exams, the writing of a certain man who had believed he loved you for a certain time.
She also wrote a long letter to Vito. My love, it began. My son, it began. One of those nighttime letters that don’t go anywhere, that dig deep as the street sweepers pass by beneath the house. That go too far. Where it’s not right to go.
A mother has to stay one step behind.
That night, she smoked a poisonous number of cigarettes. In the morning, she threw away the packet along with the letter. A vehement gesture.
She cleaned the refrigerator. She got rid of every unworthy thing. Old notes, a packet of condoms that had not been used by their expiry date and that she had held on to as a symbol of sexual love, of possibilities. Ridiculous. Like so many ridiculous things. Her thoughts, above all. Like a broom scratching over the patio.
She planted perennials in the flowerpots. The house was clean. For him, if he came back. She lay down on the bed, her feet bare. To see what her cadaver would be like. And she waited a long time.
She thought only of Vito, of Vito beside her.
She went to the window.
It was her birthday. She was alive. Naturally, it had been nothing but anxiety.
Vito called from London. She could hear the ruckus of the Italian café where he worked.
‘Happy birthday, Mum.’
Half an hour later, he called again.
‘Did you hear the news, Mum? They killed him.’
Angelina felt the blows. An entire machine gun’s worth.
‘Who? Who did they kill?’
She thought of Vito in London, of the attacks, the Underground, the crowded square in front of the Tate Gallery where he spent his Sundays.
‘Gaddafi. They killed Gaddafi.’
‘Oh.’
She fell onto a carpet of flower petals, light, immortal.
That was the October crime.
She didn’t go online to see the mob and the bloody rat’s flight into a hole in the cement. She knows how dictators end their days. Flesh dragged along like an eraser. Senseless posthumous rage. No joy, just a macabre trophy that soils the living.
Memory is chalk on bloody pavements.
We’re free. Hurrah, hurrah.
Morning Sea Page 9