Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Do you think I want this for me?’ she’d said softly. ‘Just for me? Do you think I don’t hear you, lying awake, grinding your teeth every time someone smashes a bottle in the street? Pacing the flat at night as if you’re in a cage?’

  Sandro, suddenly overwhelmed by his own stupidity, had said nothing.

  ‘Too old? No,’ Luisa had said. ‘Life is too short. You need to make changes, now and again. Not too often, but Sandro, caro, once or twice in a lifetime? Is that too often?’

  He’d nodded, mute with shame. ‘I thought you loved Santa Croce,’ he’d mumbled.

  ‘I made the best of things,’ she’d said, shrugging. ‘We both did. But we don’t necessarily have to do that forever.’ She’d sighed. ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t think it was a bad place. But I like this one much more.’

  There was a sound from below, of someone slipping on the crumbling steps, and a muffled curse. And then the agent was with them in the bedroom, examining the dust on his shoes with disgust. ‘Seen enough?’ he asked brightly, key in hand. ‘Ready to go? Sorry to rush you, but there’s another viewing in ten minutes.’

  ‘Another viewing?’ Luisa said with dismay, and the man shrugged.

  ‘It’s a good area,’ he said. ‘Places like this don’t hang around.’

  One of the windows hung at a crazy angle, and Galeotti, trying to open it, had pulled a rusting hinge out of the wall. ‘Needs some attention,’ Sandro had said drily and the man had looked back at him with a trace of sullenness before putting the professional smile back on his face and leaving the rotten window to dangle against the wall.

  Now settled in at Nello for a late dinner, they talked around in circles. Could they afford it, how much would they get for the place in Santa Croce, who might they get to do the work? Pietro knew a mason, and there was a good place in Santo Spirito for the windows. Every time Sandro felt excitement bubble up inside him he fought to suppress it – partly because it was his nature, partly because it was only sensible, wasn’t it? Because nothing was certain. So dangerous, to make plans: disappointment was the default position in life. But Sandro found himself agreeing to go into the bank, to talk about a loan. He pushed away his plate, the breaded cutlet on it not quite finished. This heat, it had taken away his appetite, too.

  ‘There was a girl came in today,’ he said slowly. Talking of plans.

  And he was suddenly overcome by the desire for a cigarette, after twenty years without one. But now smoking was banned more or less anywhere but most particularly in the place where it would have been most perfectly enjoyable, in a convivial restaurant after a good meal. Since when, he asked himself, did we become so intolerant? Since when did we start refusing to take even the tiniest risk for another’s pleasure? Of course, smoking terraces had sprung up all over the city since the new law, most of them so fully enclosed that effectively people were still smoking inside. But that was the Italian way: keep your head down under authority’s demands and then carry on as before.

  Fleetingly he wondered: perhaps taking up smoking again would be a change too far even for Luisa.

  ‘A girl?’ said Luisa, her curiosity caught by whatever it was he had allowed to slip into his voice. Reluctance, regret.

  And for the second time that day Sandro laid out Anna Niescu’s story, but the version of it he found himself telling Luisa was different in several particulars, some of it new even to Sandro himself. He talked of the sweetness of the girl’s nature, of her conviction that the man needed only to be brought back to her for a happy ending to ensue, her faith. And he even found himself telling Luisa, wonderingly, what he would not have dared describe to her even five years ago: of the moment when he and Anna Niescu had both looked down at the child moving inside her, immanent; untainted perfection waiting to be born.

  ‘It seems like waiting for someone to die,’ he said, without even thinking if what he was saying made sense. ‘Waiting for a child to be born. You can’t – anticipate. You can’t know what it’s going to be like, until it’s there.’

  Too late, he heard what he had said. They had waited for their child to die. But Luisa closed her hand over his. ‘You’ll have to find him, then,’ she said. ‘The father. If anyone can, you can.’

  It had never failed her, not through all the chemo and the surgery, the bruising cannulae, the drips and the hospital wards and the vomiting in the dark. And not for the first time Sandro wondered where Luisa got it from, all that certainty.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wednesday

  THE SKY HAD CHANGED overnight; the breath of wind had dropped and, while they slept, it had closed over them like a lid, white-hot. As Roxana climbed off her motorino by the river and removed her helmet, it seemed to her that the city was nothing more than a cauldron, and they were boiling in it like the damned.

  As soon as he got back from the seaside, she would talk to the boss. Prioritize, Maria Grazia had said on the phone last night. Make a list of how you need your life to change, and take it one step at a time.

  Leaning over the parapet for a moment, Roxana could still feel the helmet’s pressure on the back of her neck and her temples, where it had made her sweat; she knew sweat was designed to lower the body temperature, but it didn’t seem to be working.

  In the centre of the river, a bleached stick emerged from the clogged green, a crested bird perched on it, head cocked to look down into the water. Roxana thought that surely there could be nothing living in there; like every Florentine with any choice in the matter, the fish would have moved along to cooler, faster waters.

  There was time for a coffee this morning; Roxana had left a good half-hour earlier than usual. Leaving Mamma in the kitchen on her knees in housecoat and rubber gloves, cleaning out cupboards and muttering angrily. Better the fierce, furious, energetic mother she’d always known growing up, than the fearful, gentle, clinging one who increasingly seemed to be taking her over? Roxana thought so.

  Last night, for the first time in eight years, Roxana had smoked a cigarette, and not just one, either. When Violetta had finally shuffled upstairs to bed, with a small glass of warm milk, Roxana had gone into the salotto, where neither she nor her mother ever went except to put another coat of polish on the huge Biedermeier dining table. As if sleepwalking herself, Roxana had gone straight for the inlaid box where Dad kept American cigarettes for visitors, had taken a handful, dry and light as dead leaves, felt the cool weight of her father’s old Zippo in her hand and then she’d stopped. The smell of lavender wax and stale air, the solid pieces of heavy, old-fashioned furniture around her – the sideboard from her grandmother’s house, the upholstered chairs, the glass-fronted display cabinet – familiar in every detail even in the dark, the ugly roll-down shutters: it had all suddenly borne down on Roxana like a landslip, and she felt as though she was about to lose her balance. So she backed out, as far as the front door and beyond, out on to the porch, leaning against the dusty plaster and looking into the street. Quiet as the grave.

  Lighting up, she’d taken one drag of the stale cigarette, practically coughed up her lungs, and had walked in the hot night down the road to the machine outside the tobacconist’s to buy a half-pack of MS. On the way back home, as she’d listened to the trickle of the river – a tributary of the Arno – that ran through the suburb unseen, through bamboo thickets and culverts, the heat if anything had seemed to be intensifying.

  She’d stood in the garden and smoked among the feathery branches of a big unwieldy shrub her father had loved. There was bougainvillea too, growing up the back of the house, a moth-eaten banana palm, and a fig tree whose fruit was just ripening. She’d heard a whine and slapped fast and hard at her calf; the river drew the mosquitoes. She’d put out the cigarette then and gone inside to get a moon tiger, the coiled incense burner whose smoke was supposed to keep them away. Listening in the hall she’d heard Ma snoring at last, a soft, regular sound through the door. She’d been exhausted, poor old thing.

  Sitting at the table in fr
ont of their empty bowls, Roxana had interrogated her mother as gently as she could.

  ‘Was it – one of those people trying to sell you something, Mamma?’

  What had been starting to worry Roxana was not the stupid phone call, but Ma’s reaction to it, standing there in the gloomy hall in her slippers, about to burst into tears. The forgetfulness, the panic, the disproportionate anxiety over the whole business.

  ‘You know,’ Roxana had said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘Mobile phone, or internet or something?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Ma had said then, and her face had seemed to clear. ‘Oh, no, nothing like that. She was – a friend of yours maybe? She called you by your name—’

  ‘Oh, Ma,’ Roxana had said, in despair, ‘they all do that. It’s a kind of trick. A selling tool.’

  ‘A trick?’ Her poor face falling all over again. ‘I don’t think so. She was upset. She was really upset.’

  And now, twelve hours later, Roxana was as far from being ready for work as she’d ever been, her mouth sour from the cigarettes and lack of sleep. She stood outside the only bar near work that was open – the Bar dell’Orafo, an exhausted little tourist dive tucked into a subterranean archway behind the bank – and she considered. Considered how few friends she actually had, friends who would call her if they were upset. Maria Grazia was about it – and she’d spoken to Maria Grazia. Eventually.

  Across the street, a garbage truck squealed and hissed into position beside two big dumpsters, the noise alone enough to drown out Roxana’s thoughts. The Bar dell’Orafo seemed pretty quiet, and looking through the window Roxana relented: it wasn’t such a bad little place. Who didn’t serve tourists, in this city? The pastries would be no good – only a handful of pasticcere worked through August, just as very few bakers did, and the very thought of those ovens blazing brought Roxana out into another sweat – but the coffee would be fine.

  She went inside, ordered a glass of water and a cappuccino, no chocolate on top. Orlando, the wizened, moustachioed barman, made it with ridiculous care, pouring the milk to make an oakleaf shape in the foam. Either oakleaf or heart; if she’d been a different sort of woman she’d have got a heart, maybe, but Roxana liked the leaf better, anyway. Orlando was the middle of seven children, he’d once told her; not much elbow room in his life; perhaps that was why he was working through August, too.

  The coffee was excellent, in fact. Someone standing outside the open door was smoking, and for a second Roxana thought, what the hell. The security guard can wait on the door until Val arrives, ten minutes late as he always is. Stay in this little bolthole half an hour, have another, borrow a cigarette, be five, ten minutes late to work. Life’s too short. Just for a second.

  Maria Grazia had heard her inhale on the phone last night, when she had paused for breath herself in the middle of singing the praises of her Romanian forest and lecturing Roxana on how to take control of her life. And had started shouting down the line at her. Are you mad? Do you remember that bronchitis three years ago? Do you remember how many times you’ve told me that giving up was the best thing you ever did?

  ‘Maria,’ she’d said, and it might have been the nicotine rush but it seemed to Roxana that just hearing the words coming out of her own mouth had made her dizzy, ‘I think Violetta – I think Ma might be losing it. I mean—’ taking a deep breath, ‘I think she might be getting dementia.’

  Maria Grazia had gone very quiet. When she spoke eventually Roxana could hear the strained note in her voice. ‘Over one phone call? Forgetting to take a message?’

  ‘It’s not just the phone call,’ Roxana had said.

  And she had unconsciously lowered her voice. Standing in the garden, with the street barely ten metres away, the nearest neighbours no closer, Ma fast asleep upstairs, whom did she think would hear? The pungent smoke from the moon tiger glowing at her feet spiralled into the still, hot, damp darkness.

  ‘She says there was someone in the garden yesterday. Someone hiding in the garden, and she didn’t dare leave the house all day.’

  Damn, damn. It hit Roxana all over again, in the humid coffee-scented gloom of the Buca dell’Orafo, with Orlando’s kindly, tired eyes on her.

  ‘Your mother still alive, Orlando?’ she asked.

  He crossed himself. ‘Not for twenty-five years,’ he said with genuine sadness. ‘God rest her.’ Shrugged. ‘Worn out. She passed away in the middle of scrubbing someone’s floor.’

  And Roxana nodded, thinking of her mother on her knees this morning. Better to go that way, she thought, though she didn’t say it.

  Ma hadn’t wanted to tell her. Had skirted uncomfortably around it, unable to tell an outright lie but miserably aware of what Roxana would think. After twenty minutes of going round in circles, Roxana had been reduced to taking a tough line, demanding only yes and no answers.

  No, she hadn’t gone out. No, it hadn’t been because she hadn’t been feeling well. Yes, she had run out of bottled water and milk and bread. Yes, the supermarket was open all day even though it was August but she hadn’t gone out. Yes, she just hadn’t felt like it, would Roxana please just leave her alone? She needed to go to sleep. No, she hadn’t seen anyone.

  But she had heard someone. He had come to the door.

  ‘A man?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You said he?’

  ‘I don’t know. I – I just thought it was a man. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  Yes, that was it, the man had called through the door, Signora Delfino, I know you’re in there.

  At the bar Roxana signalled to little Orlando, thumb and forefinger about two centimetres apart, for an espresso. He’d bobbed a tiny bow, a smile toothless behind the big moustache, and busied himself.

  She had stared at Ma.

  ‘You couldn’t tell,’ Roxana had said numbly to Maria Grazia, stubbing out the cigarette. ‘From the way she said it, it did sound bad. Like the big bad wolf, or something. With poor old Mamma trembling in the hall. But you couldn’t tell, could you? He might just have been a delivery man.’

  Maria Grazia had taken her time answering and Roxana’s heart had sunk. They’d known each other since asilo, when their mothers had collected them from the nursery at lunchtime together; Maria Grazia still called Ma ‘Signora Delfino’ on her rare visits home.

  In the brief silence as Roxana stood in the garden, something rustled in the dark, over towards the wall that divided them from the neighbours, and Roxana felt the creep of the fine hairs rising along her arm. She turned, just a fraction, setting her back against the rough trunk of the banana palm. Was someone hiding in the garden?

  Eventually Maria Grazia had sighed. ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘Delivery man, postman, yeah.’ But she’d sounded – if not worried, then puzzled. ‘But they do usually leave a card, don’t they? If they’ve tried to deliver and – and there’s no one home?’

  Someone had called in the background and Maria Grazia must have put a hand over the receiver to answer because there was the sound of a muffled reply.

  I know you’re in there, Signora Delfino. Would a FedEx man say such a thing? And what would they be delivering, anyway? Roxana never bought online, and Ma’s sister in Pescara mistrusted the post with a vengeance. Would rather make a 400-kilometre round trip by train to deliver a hand-knitted sweater that no one would wear, refusing all offers of a bed for the night.

  ‘Yes,’ Roxana had said. ‘There wasn’t a card.’

  He hid round the back, Mamma had said, and then it had all spilled out of her in a quavering torrent, face in her hands with shame. I waited and waited, I sat in the hall by the door and waited for him to go.

  ‘Ma said it was at least an hour,’ Roxana had told Maria Grazia, ‘she said she heard him moving around outside the house. All around, then back again, then into the garden. But she fell asleep in the end so she can’t be sure. When she woke up, she thought he was gone but she stayed inside, just to be on the safe side.
’

  Orlando slid the small shot of coffee with a dash of hot milk across to Roxana. Behind the bar the clock said seven-fifty-five. Roxana smiled at him. Wished she could stay in here all day.

  ‘Did you look around?’ Maria Grazia had asked. ‘In the garden, for example? To see if there was any sign anyone had been there?’ There had been more noise at her end: raucous, end-of-the-day voices, people perhaps heading off for a drink together.

  ‘It was dark,’ Roxana had said, and heard the dull certainty in her voice. ‘But there was no delivery man, was there? No stalker, either.’

  And Maria Grazia had changed tack then, not wanting to answer. Briskly she had shifted back to her constant refrain.

  ‘Look, get proactive, Roxi. I don’t know how you can stand to have that Marisa Goldman promoted over you, to start with, useless piece.’

  Marisa and Maria Grazia had history, as they said. Some ex-boyfriend of Marisa’s had pulled out of funding one of Maria Grazia’s films.

  She went on, ‘What you need to do is prioritize. Talk to your boss.’ As if it was Roxana who was going off the rails. The answer to everything: get ahead. Get your freedom.

  You think it’s all in my head. That’s what Mamma had said, disbelieving, reproachful.

  No, Ma. I believe you. It’s all right, Ma.

  As Roxana set the cup back down on the bar, the door swung open and the sharp-shouldered silhouette of a new customer blocked the doorway, a gust of dirty summer air entering with him: the sour smell left by the morning’s bin collection, and the exposed slime of the river bed. It was Val.

  He smiled cheerfully. ‘You’re late,’ he said, nodding up at the dusty clock over the bar. ‘That’s not like you.’

  Prioritize.

  ‘You’re later,’ she said sharply. ‘Five minutes, Valentino.’

  *

  For the first time since as long as Sandro could remember, they had a lie-in.