Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  And then she remembers the boy. She can see the cloth bag poking out from under Cecilia’s head and the blanket he was wrapped in that has cushioned her fall, but the boy, impossibly, has vanished.

  She is prodded in the back. She twists, sees a different soldier standing there, older, with crinkles around his eyes, round spectacles and a smooth pink face, an officer.

  ‘Papers,’ he says.

  She gets to her feet, retrieving Cecilia’s documents too. The big blond one stands in the aisle between the two rows of benches. He has put the pistol away but now has a machine gun in his hands. He bends his knees, swings the gun in an arc so that the people he pinpoints around the quiet room feint and cower.

  ‘Tak tak tak,’ he says.

  Did that soldier yank the child away when her attention was elsewhere? Where then has he put him? The officer keeps hold of the papers and steps into the aisle, indicating with a curt nod that she should follow. She glances back at Cecilia who now has a familiar little smile playing on her lips. Her breathing has deepened. In a minute she will start to snore.

  The Italian soldier acts as interpreter. He is a small man, not much taller than Chiara, but with a large bushy moustache. He stands very close and takes hold of her elbow in a familiar way. His breath is sulphurous.

  Chiara states where they are going and that her sister’s ­condition is under control, that she is capable of caring for her, that the mountain air will revive her.

  ‘Are you travelling unaccompanied?’ the officer asks via the soldier.

  She wonders whether this is a trick question, but she answers, ‘Yes, just my sister and myself.’

  Her inability to identify the moment of the boy’s disappearance, to grasp the mechanics of the thing, makes her giddy. She is almost glad of the steadying grip of the vile, eggy-breathed little man. It is as if some alternative version of events might have been going on, outside of her ken and her vision.

  The man whose blustering had brought the soldiers into the waiting room in the first place is standing across the aisle, hangdog, his cap in his hand.

  The hush that began with Cecilia’s first growl continues. No one gainsays Chiara’s statement, and the child is not produced from a hidden location like a rabbit from a hat. It appears that the whole waiting room is in fact waiting, and as the attention still seems to be on her, Chiara launches into a story. An explanation of how and why they are alone in the world, she and her sister, a tale about how their mother died in the Allied bombing just three months ago.

  ‘Everything was lost,’ she hears herself saying in a faltering voice. ‘All the precious things.’

  Cecilia, lying in her blanketed corner, erupts into a great snorting snore, and the blond soldier, as if targeted, lunges forward and points the machine gun at her. Chiara’s words dry up, and she just stands there in a daze. Cecilia snores again, settles into a proper rhythm, and the soldier speaks, asking his superior a question over his shoulder. Chiara doesn’t follow the words, but from the stiffening of the little man at her side, from the throwaway but malicious tone, she gets the meaning, something like, ‘Shall I put her out of her misery?’

  The older one smiles pleasantly. He says something that makes all three of them chuckle, reaches sideways and affably pushes the barrel of the gun. He hands Chiara her papers, and the three of them leave.

  The blond one exits last. He turns at the door and waves his machine gun one last time. ‘Tak tak tak,’ he says.

  Among the precious things on display in the entrance lobby of the San Lorenzo apartment there used to be a Libyan scimitar that their father had picked up on one of his business trips to North Africa. It had a curved blade with a double-edged point and was of a type carried by tribesmen in Cyrenaica. As a child, Chiara was not allowed to touch it.

  She pictures it now. She can almost feel the weight of it, the balance of the pommel and the blade, the warmth of the brass hilt in her palm. She hears the whistling noise it makes when swished through the air. She imagines hurtling after the big blond soldier and, with one vast swipe, cleaving his head from his shoulders so that it rolls onto the railway tracks. She observes his flailing, headless dance before he crumples to the ground.

  She wipes her hand on her dusty handkerchief, plants a foot either side of Cecilia and hefts her sister onto her side, tugs out the excess blanket bunched beneath her body and folds it over the top so that Cecilia is ensconced now in the bed Chiara had prepared for the child. The snoring abates. She has not had a fit of this magnitude for years.

  Chiara sits on the bare floor at her sister’s feet behind the bench. An elderly man gives her a paper cup filled with red wine. He tells her about someone he knew, a youth, who also had fits. It’s a worry, he says.

  They are brutes, his wife whispers without specifying whom.

  There is a milling about in the waiting room, a restlessness, an unpacking of paper-wrapped food for a last bite before sleep. Some passengers mutter to each other, others come and go, making visits to the washroom out on the platform and then returning. Stuck in transit, with their onward journey out of their hands, they want at least to assure themselves they may go on exercising their paltry right to use the public conveniences. Eventually children are quieted and people start to settle down again. No one has mentioned the boy. It is as if he was never there.

  Chiara sits drinking the wine, and the room darkens, the only light the yellow platform lamp hanging outside the door. The worst thing, as bad almost as the mystery of his disappearance, is that he has left no trace.

  He is gone. Daniele Levi, so transiently there, is gone and only she to mourn his passing. Her mind bangs against the impossibility of his vanishing as if at a bricked-up doorway.

  She drains the wine. Nothing presents itself as a way forward from here. And before she can stop it, the thought is there; it has slipped in.

  She is better off without him.

  FIVE

  Flat, wet leaves brushed and branches slapped against the bus windows. The trees to either side of the road wanted to meet in an arch, and the bus was tunnelling through them. Sometimes, Maria would sit at the front and pretend she was driving a hovercraft or a space vehicle, gliding over the roofs of cars and the heads of pedestrians, dodging the flicking branches, but not today.

  She was on her way to the first of her O-level exams, chemistry, and she was cutting it fine. She had period cramps, and the painkiller was only just beginning to have an effect. She had meant to catch an earlier bus but she had got caught up in a tussle with the neighbours’ cat.

  She placed both hands over the pleats of her school skirt, holding her stomach, and closed her eyes. The pains came in waves, ebbing and flowing. When one subsided, she glanced out of the window. There was the grey school building through the trees, and the bus was sailing past. She pressed the bell, but the bus sped on until it came to its next allotted stop, half a mile farther, on the edge of the village of Llandaff that the school was named after.

  She would be late. Perhaps they wouldn’t even let her in. These thoughts induced a frisson of excitement, which stayed with her all the way back to the school and the examination hall, then left her as soon as she stepped inside.

  The room was packed with girls in bottle-green uniforms bent over their papers, scribbling away. The only sounds were the scratching of pens on paper, the scrape of a shifted chair, the occasional cough, but these were all part of the whole atmosphere of concentrated studiousness and application. That morning, when Maria had been crouching in the neighbours’ garden, these girls had been checking their understanding of the periodic table and sharpening their pencils.

  The invigilator, Mrs Lloyd, the deputy head, signalled from the rostrum to the teacher patrolling the back of the room. Then she pressed the pencil to her lips, urging silence, as if she suspected Maria might be tempted to let out a scream. Maria waited at the door until the other teacher came and led her through the grid of tables, pressing a pathway through the thick, brainwave-fil
led air. Maria’s designated place was right in the middle.

  It was pointless her being there because she didn’t know any chemistry at all. She had never listened in class, preferring to doodle and daydream, and had got away with it by always being partnered for experiments with a girl to whom chemistry made sense. There were mysteries into which you might want to be initiated, and then there was chemistry. Maria had given up on the subject long ago. Or it had given up on her. She wasn’t even going to bother turning over the exam paper.

  She had practised her Italian on that cat.

  Ciao, bella. Come stai? Mi chiamo Maria.

  And the cat had turned out to be a monster.

  The neighbours’ garden had been Maria’s refuge. She would sit there for hours at a time, her books propped on the bench, sometimes open, usually not. Honeysuckle grew up the wall.

  Quite o’er canopied with luscious woodbine, she would think.

  There was a drooping tree with hanging orange blossoms where spiders spun white webs like patches of fog between the leaves and the stems.

  Season of mists, she thought.

  Allowing phrases from her English literature books to dangle and sway in the fuzz and bramble of her brain was the nearest she got to revising, and Tabitha had been her companion throughout.

  Then this morning, she, Tabitha, the monster, had come strolling with a swagger from behind the lilac bush with a shivering, quivering little creature in her mouth. Its mouth, Maria corrected. Tabitha didn’t deserve her gender. Its jaw, its bestial fangs. It had dropped the creature–a mouse–and the mouse had fallen over, staggered to its feet and tottered about like a tiny drunkard. The cat had reached out its paw and batted the mouse to the ground. The mouse got back up. The cat batted it back down. The cat lunged forward and scooped the creature up again, shaking it so that its tail coiled and whipped back and forth.

  The next time, Maria pounced, picked Tabitha up, ran, holding her at arm’s length, threw her into the kitchen and banged the door shut.

  The mouse lay half hidden in the grass with a quiver running through it. Maria crouched over it, breathing shallowly. She knew she had to leave for her exam but she couldn’t bear to go. Something began rippling and pulsing in a horrible way, as if parts of the mouse were breaking off and moving independently. She leant in closer. Ants, big stinging ones, were crawling all over the mouse, eating it alive, piercing its minute body. Frantic, she ran to the shed, found some ant powder, hurtled back and sprinkled it liberally in a circle around and over the little beast.

  She had sat next to the mouse and kept vigil. She would have flung the cat off a high building and trampled the ants into the ground to save that mouse.

  From the rostrum, Mrs Lloyd was eyeing her.

  Maria turned her exam paper over and scanned it. She filled in the answer to ‘What is a catalyst?’ She drew a picture of a Bunsen burner and a test tube and labelled all the parts. Then she sat back and looked at the clock. There was another hour and a half remaining. The period pain had abated. She would have liked to leave but to walk out was too grand a gesture.

  She placed over the top of the answer sheet a piece of the scrap paper given them for notes and workings-out, and started to write.

  ‘Catalyst,’ she wrote. ‘Flame.’

  She pressed the pen hard into the paper, scratching in the words.

  ‘Dear Mum,’ she wrote. Then she crossed out ‘dear’.

  What was our catalyst, do you think? I’ll tell you what it wasn’t. It wasn’t the moment when you told me that Barry wasn’t my biological father. It wasn’t even you sleeping with some Italian boy when you were eighteen. (Was it only the one boy, Mum?) It was the fact that you waited until I was sixteen before you bothered to tell me, and that even then it was only because you had to because I found the letter. So it’s the lying that’s the catalyst, Mum. When you tell me that Barry isn’t my real dad, what you’re also telling me is that you’re not my real mum. How can you be? A real mum wouldn’t lie to her daughter every day of her life.

  Once Maria got going, she found she had plenty to say. Or rather she had the same thing to say over and over again, with fierce jabbings of the pen. Liar, cow, bitch, she wrote.

  A ten-minute warning was given, and then it was the end.

  ‘Maria Kelly,’ Mrs Lloyd called out, ‘put down your pen.’

  When the papers were collected, she handed in her drawing of the Bunsen burner and her definition of a catalyst. The teacher held out her hand for the other sheets.

  ‘You’re not allowed to take them out,’ she said.

  Maria tore her ravings into confetti and the teacher swept them like breadcrumbs off the table surface and into her hand.

  It was only chemistry. It didn’t really count because she hadn’t been going to pass it anyway.

  The second exam, on the following Monday, was history, one of her better subjects. As the bus shot past the school and she stayed on board, the excitement returned, stronger this time. It surged down her arms and made her fingers tingle. She got off in Llandaff and went to a café next to a hairdresser. She bought herself a cup of tea and a doughnut with money for the bus fare home. Ordinarily she might have been an object of note in her uniform, wandering about in the middle of a school day among the elderly residents, but in the exam period, when pupils came and went at odd times, it was different. She could pass unnoticed.

  She wandered down to the Anglican cathedral. It was open and empty. She had never been inside before. It didn’t smell of incense like the Catholic churches. She sat in a pew at the back. Nobody would know her or look for her or even realise she was there. She was incognito.

  She walked slowly all the way home, keeping away from the main roads. She went through Sophia Gardens, on the overgrown path beside the river Taff, and then across Bute Park behind Cardiff Castle. It started to rain, and she shrugged up her blazer collar, tucked her hair inside her beret and pulled it forward. She kept her head down when she walked past the university buildings in case Brian emerged from one of them. She didn’t know what she would say. She might pretend she was someone else.

  ‘Oh, that girl I look like, yes, people are always mistaking me for her,’ she would say. ‘But I’m Maria Levi,’ and she would roll the R in ‘Maria’ in an Italian way. She had been practising rolling her Rs. If she saw Brian, she might just run away very fast.

  She got home at her usual time, and there was the smell of curry. Monday tea was always the leftovers from the Sunday roast. Cold cuts and pickled onions if they had had beef or pork. Curry if the roast had been chicken. Patrick and Nel were romping about in the front room.

  ‘How was the exam?’ her mum asked.

  ‘Fine,’ Maria said.

  She felt a delicious thrill of power. She had hardly been able to be in the same room as her mother or Barry for the last fortnight, since the Daniele Levi revelation. When it was unavoidable, mostly at mealtimes, one or other of them would prattle on and Maria would remain silent, getting the meal over as quickly as possible. She always had the excuse of revision to do. Now, she stayed in the kitchen, watching.

  ‘Good,’ her mum said. ‘Well done.’

  The chicken carcass was in the pressure cooker–there would be a soup made later from the stock–and the room was hot and steamy with a pervasive boiled-bones smell that made Maria nauseous. Her mother scraped the chopped chicken she’d picked from the bones into the curry sauce bubbling on the hob and wiped her hands down the front of her overall, patting the pocket as her hand passed over it. There were smears where she had made this gesture a hundred times before. She fetched a bag of sultanas out of the pantry, shook a handful into the curry and stirred them in. She wiped her hands again.

  Maria picked up the tub of curry powder and put it back where it belonged, at the centre of a circular yellow stain that wouldn’t wash off.

  ‘Are you sure Daniele Levi was my father?’ she said, speaking into the open cupboard.

  She heard her mother’
s intake of breath but she didn’t turn round. Behind the curry powder was a jar of dried mint that would be mixed with vinegar to make mint sauce when they had lamb. They didn’t often have lamb, though. Next to that was a bottle of salad cream.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother said. ‘There wasn’t anyone else.’

  ‘Did you love him?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother said, softly.

  ‘So how come you left?’ She turned round.

  Her mother was standing in the middle of the kitchen, pressing her fingers into her cheekbones, holding them in place, as if her face might dissolve. The hollows under her eyes were bluish.

  ‘My mother was ill. Your nan. I had to come home in a hurry.’

  Her nan had died before Maria was even born.

  ‘I couldn’t find him to say goodbye. I thought I’d go back, but, um, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Oh,’ Maria said.

  ‘I left a note for him with Helen. I didn’t know where he lived.’ Her bottom lip was trembling. ‘I didn’t know I was pregnant when I left.’

  Her mum took a step towards Maria. Perhaps she thought it was a truce. She delved into her overall pocket and held out her clasped fist. Maria automatically reached her own hand forward and a ring dropped into her open palm.

  ‘He gave me this,’ her mum said.

  It was there in Maria’s hand. She wanted to disparage it, but it was a real, solid, thing. Incontrovertible.

  ‘Ta,’ she said and spun out of the kitchen up to her room.

  Edna stood in the middle of the kitchen, listening to her daughter thumping up the stairs and slamming into her bedroom. She heard the squawking noises coming from the front room where Pat and Nel were playing, unaware of the drama in the family home. Behind her, the pressure cooker hissed. She waited for the music that Maria would inevitably put on. She guessed it would be Billie Holiday, turned up loud. ‘Gloomy Sunday’ perhaps. Or it might be Miles Davis. She steeled herself in case it was Chet Baker. Her oblivious daughter, playing the soundtrack to Edna’s snatched youth.