Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  She fell so profoundly asleep again that when someone shook her awake, she struggled to grasp where she was. Two men in uniform were at the door of the carriage, and the other passengers were already sitting up, answering questions. The light had been switched on, and people looked ghastly in its glow. The men had a dog. They were looking at her, expecting an explanation.

  ‘I gave my passport to the guard,’ she said.

  Perhaps he hadn’t been a guard; perhaps he was an imposter who stole British passports to sell on to forgers and criminals. The foremost of the uniformed men already had a bunch of passports in his gloved hand, among them two navy-blue embossed ones. She didn’t understand what he was saying. A kind of deafness descended on her when she was nervous, an inability to make sense of language, even her own, especially when it was transmitted over tannoys, radios or loudspeaker systems, especially if it was important.

  Then she understood that they were saying her name, and she nodded.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘Maria Kelly.’

  She might change her name by deed poll. She knew a boy who had changed his surname from Jones to Gilmour so he could seem to be related to the Pink Floyd guitarist. The uniformed men slid the door shut and left.

  ‘They do spot checks at the border sometimes,’ the boy next to Maria said in a faintly posh kind of voice.

  He must be the other British citizen. A strawberry birthmark crept up from inside his shirt, staining his collarbone and the underside of his chin. His hair was lank. The exoticness of his not being French but boarding in Paris was undone by his appearance. She gave him a half-smile, sorry for his sad dreams and his disfigurement. He smiled back as if he knew her, and she swerved her eyes away.

  Everyone shuffled back into position.

  Maria sat scrunched at the window with her coat over her knees. She tried to feel the marvel of being in Italy where she had never been before, of being in her third country in less than twenty-four hours and far from home. She watched the sparse lights of an anonymous town flash by. She was gazing through her own reflection. She drew her gaze back to her hollow-eyed image and then looked through herself again. She was a ghostly apparition in the Italian night. ‘Me and My Shadow’ played plaintively round and round in her head.

  She took out from her pocket the signet ring that had belonged to Daniele Levi. The ring was heavy, solid gold with a pattern like a sunburst engraved on the flat oval front, seven bevelled lines radiating out from a central point. On the inside, the letters AFR could still be read, but only just, their edges softened by time and wear. To see them, the ring had to be held at a certain angle. She put the ring on her forefinger, twisted it so that the round, flat part was on the inside. She closed her fist around it, tight against her palm, feeling its weight.

  She lay down again, pulled the coat over her head and stuck her thumb in her mouth for comfort.

  There had been another realignment of bodies by the next time she awoke. The strawberry-faced boy was now the same way up as her and they were lying face to face. There was a yellowy half-light in the carriage. He was staring at her. His breath smelt of toothpaste. Maria closed her eyes against him and manoeuvred herself round to face the window. He was too close and she didn’t like it. She fished about down the gap between the seats for her handbag, hooked it out and climbed across the bodies to the doorway. Strawberry Boy had pulled his sleeping bag over his face.

  The corridor was striped with blinding bands of early-morning light. Maria propped herself against the wall in one of the darker patches and pulled out her packet of No. 6. There were only two left. She had meant to invest in a carton of two hundred duty-free on the ferry from Dover, but it seemed a lot of money to part with in one go. She blew smoke out and watched it plume in the strip of sunshine streaming in through the dirty window. She wished she hadn’t given a cigarette away to some unknown boy on the ferry. She took a step sideways so she was in sunlight, shut her eyes and let it bathe her. There was an orange glow behind her closed lids.

  She hadn’t slept at all on the ferry. She had sat in the garishly lit café on F deck with her stomach churning, surrounded by people, hordes of them, drinking tea and beer and showing the insides of their mouths. A child at the next table was being sick.

  She had climbed the internal stairs as high as she could get, wrenched a heavy door open and stepped out onto a narrow walkway where a powerful rush of wind had nearly blown her over. It was so harsh and cold that it had scraped the hair back on her head and made her eyes water, but it had also carried away the clogging stench of fuel and cold greasy fittings. She had battled her way against it to the far end. There the torrent of air became a virtual wall, an invisible force field, so that when she pushed her way through it to the other side, it was as if she had passed through a portal into a different dimension from which the wind had been banished. She had hunkered down next to a lifeboat. With her hands cupped over her shocked and frozen ears, in a haven of her own discovery amid the thrill of the dark waters thundering by, she had smoked a cigarette in her own little private space.

  But when she had stood up to go she had seen that farther along the walkway, back the way she had come and would have to return, a hooded man was leaning over the rail. She had squatted down again, thinking to wait until he left. Then he was standing in front of her, his face hidden inside the hood of his duffel coat.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he had said, ‘I couldn’t bum a fag off you, could I?’

  He was talking about feeling sick and coming outside for fresh air, asking her where she was headed. Gate-crashing.

  She had given him a cigarette.

  ‘I owe you one,’ he had called after her.

  She opened her eyes. She stubbed the cigarette out in the metal ashtray screwed into the wall. The guard was approaching. He stopped at each carriage, sliding the doors open and announcing something to the occupants, handing back passports. The corridor filled up in his wake as people spilt out.

  ‘I owe you one,’ a voice said. The stained boy was at her side.

  She looked at the proffered cigarette and then at him. He must be the boy on the boat. It would be nice to have a back-up cigarette.

  ‘I’ll save it for later,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry if I was squashing you,’ he said. ‘I turned the other way up because I thought my feet were smelly. You wouldn’t want my smelly feet in your face.’

  The guard approached. Unlike the earlier one, he was young and handsome with a confident swagger about him. He pushed his cap back on his head and said her name, ‘Maria Kel-ly,’ rolling the R in Maria reverberatingly and lingering over the double L as if her name were a musical instrument and he was plucking the notes.

  She smiled at him. ‘Si,’ she said.

  He flicked open the passport, looked at the photo, then at her and held the open passport to his chest, pressed against his heart. He said some words to her that seemed like the words of a poem. He held the passport out, but when she went to take hold he snatched it playfully away. He spoke again.

  ‘He asked what you would give him in exchange,’ the strawberry boy said.

  Maria shook her head, out of her depth.

  The guard laughed, handed her the passport and moved on.

  ‘Nice alveolar trill he’s got,’ the boy said.

  Maria didn’t ask what he meant. ‘What did he say before?’

  ‘I think he might have been quoting Petrarch,’ the boy said.

  Maria watched the guard make his way down the carriage, swaying to the movement of the train, perfectly balanced.

  ‘Fourteenth-century poet,’ he added. ‘He wrote love poems to a woman he knew could never be his.’

  The guard disappeared from view.

  ‘Didn’t you get on at Paris?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head in an innocent way. ‘I just switched carriage there. The one I was in was full.’ He looked away from her, out of the window where electricity pylons sped past.

 
She understood that he had been following her.

  ‘We’ll be in Milan soon,’ he said. ‘We could go for a coffee.’

  She wondered at his boldness, with him being so marred. ‘I’m going to Rome,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, shame,’ he said. A silence fell between them.

  ‘How come you speak Italian?’ she said eventually.

  ‘My dad lives in Milan. I’ve just been back in London visiting Mamma, who is Italian, but my babbo, who’s English, works in Italy.’ He made a snorting noise as if mocking the topsy-turvy world that was his family.

  ‘Babbo?’ she said. She liked the word.

  ‘It means dad. Or you can say papà.’

  ‘So you’re half Italian?’ she said carefully, feeling the tremor in her spine, the wobble of a diving board beneath her feet, conscious of holding herself back from its edge.

  ‘Yes, I am, officially, yes, but I don’t feel Italian. I was brought up in England. So I’ve come to live with my dad to discover my Italiano side.’

  In profile he looked better. His nose was very straight. Now that he was getting off soon, Maria found she didn’t mind him so much.

  ‘They never spoke Italian to me when I was little.’

  Mine never even told me, she thought. The words were fizzing on her tongue like hundreds and thousands. She would never see him again. She could say it.

  ‘I could have been brought up bilingual. What a leg-up that would have been. To have your feet firmly in two cultures,’ he said.

  Maria imagined the Thames lapping grubbily around one foot, sewage and old, oily things streaming between the toes, and the other foot in the Tiber. She didn’t know what things might float in the Tiber or be hidden beneath its surface but in her guidebook it referred to it as ‘Tiber the Blond’, so the water must be golden and limpid and restorative, light made liquid. She imagined floating in those waters and this heaviness being lifted from her.

  ‘Apparently a child can learn up to five languages in their early years,’ he was saying. ‘They get them mixed up at the beginning, and it delays speech by six months or even a year, so a polylingual child might not actually make an utterance until he’s two or even three, but it’s just because the brain is internalising and making sense of all the data. And then when they’re off, they’re off, switching from one to another without a problem. Imagine how that must expand your mind. Like being able to play five different instruments. But each one like a soloist.’

  Maria added musical instruments to her translucent vision. A harp.

  ‘What’s your mission in Rome?’ he asked.

  She liked that notion, that she had a mission. But the moment when she might blurt something out to a strawberry stranger had passed.

  ‘I have a job for the summer with an Italian lady. I’m going to be her companion and correct her English pronunciation which is’–she sought the word Signora Ravello had used in her letter–‘execrable.’

  Maria had had to look it up in the dictionary but she didn’t think this boy would need it explaining. Signora Ravello was going to be waiting for Maria at Roma Termini station in front of the newspaper stand. She would have a copy of Il Messaggero under her arm and would be wearing a mushroom-shaped hat. How strange it was that this unknown lady had agreed to have her to stay.

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ the boy said. ‘I have to get my stuff together. I’m Tom. Tommaso.’

  He smiled apologetically, perhaps to indicate that he knew how ill-fitting the Italian name was, with his skin a patchwork of red and white, and his hair the colour of the dust that collects under the bed.

  The seats in the carriage had been pushed back into their daytime version, and people were gathering their things. It seemed that everyone but Maria was getting off at Milan.

  As the train pulled into the station, Tommaso presented her with a piece of paper folded many times and then tucked into itself.

  ‘If you ever come to Milan,’ he said, then added, ‘I might come to Rome sometime,’ just as she said, ‘I would like to see The Last Supper.’

  It was the only thing she knew about Milan. That Leonardo’s painting was there, hanging in a refectory. She had a brief vision of a school canteen, knives and forks clattering, children stuffing themselves with sausages and gravy, oblivious to the benediction of the famous painting glowing on the wall above them.

  ‘It’s terribly faded,’ he said. ‘Bits have disappeared entirely. It’s covered in white spots.’

  He bent to do up his shoelaces, talking now about the different binding agents Leonardo had experimented with, while Maria’s eyes filled with tears, as if the notion that the painting might vanish entirely before she had seen it was more than she could bear.

  Everyone is leaving me, she thought, resenting Tommaso now for still pontificating about tempera and gesso, when he too was leaving her.

  She put her face to the carriage window to watch as Tommaso disappeared among the crowds in the domed vastness of Milan station. Sunshine streamed down between high iron arches onto the heads and faces of the noisy people thronging the platform.

  After Milan, the family Maria shared the carriage with–three teenagers and a stout lady with a moustache who seemed too old to be their mother, too young to be their grandmother–tried to engage her in conversation.

  Maria had been teaching herself Italian. She had bought an old grammar book from the second-hand bookshop in the arcade in town and had borrowed a series of records from the library, sitting for hours in her bedroom, ostensibly revising for her exams but actually listening over and over again, repeating the phrases, memorising whole dialogues. Those words had accompanied her in her daily life, so that when she was walking home from the bus stop, or eating her dinner against the backdrop of her parents’ strained conversation, they played like songs in her head. She had felt that somewhere within her was a well of this language that would rise up once she was in Italy. But now, surrounded by the sheer concentrated Italianness of it all, she couldn’t understand a single word.

  ‘Do you have that handbag in another colour?’ was the only phrase that came to her.

  They gave her a sandwich. The unbuttered bread was dry, chewy and dense. Inside there was a piece of something quite horrible. Flabby ribbons of it got instantly stuck between her teeth. The family made sucking noises at her in an exaggerated pantomime of people enjoying their food. It required a lot of chomping, an unaccustomed sideways movement of the jaw to mush it down into a form that could be swallowed. They watched her with interest, as if they were leaning against a farmyard fence and she in the field beyond, chewing the cud. The slimy thing was pasted to the back of her teeth.

  The woman spoke.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Maria said in English. ‘I don’t understand,’ she repeated, in Italian this time.

  The phrases from the record were back. She trawled through them, joining the beginning of one to the end of another.

  ‘Can you repeat?’ she said, or might have said. ‘I speak bad?’ That was a rhetorical question, she wanted to add, but all subtlety was lost. ‘What is this?’ she asked, indicating the contents of the sandwich.

  The woman said the word for ham.

  Maria took out her Collins pocket dictionary and checked. Yes, that word definitely meant ham. She showed the younger son who was sitting next to her. He looked and nodded, added another word, found it in the dictionary and showed her.

  Crudo. Raw.

  She stared out of the window. She had been eating raw meat. She thought she might be sick. She put the napkin to her mouth, spat out the piece of slime curled inside her cheek, wiped her lips, crumpled it further and stuffed it into her bag.

  The boy moved back to the other side, the better to ogle her, it seemed. In between poking through the contents of the basket on the old lady’s knee, or whispering in her ear, or leaning over to read the older one’s papers on his lap, he would revert to staring at Maria, goggle-eyed. She started to wonder whether he was a bit simple. It’
s rude to stare, she wanted to say. His mother or gran or whatever she was should tell him off. But then this was the woman who was sitting with her legs akimbo in a way that revealed the veins right at the top of her stockings and who fed her family on raw meat.

  Once the food was put away, they had a sort of limited conversation, using the dictionary, sign language, the mongrel phrases Maria managed to splice together. They wanted to know where she was going, where her family was, who was meeting her, why she was so far from home. They discussed her answers to these questions among themselves. It seemed to be a source of strangeness and mystery to them that a girl so young should be allowed to travel by herself, and they couldn’t get over it, exclaiming in various ways that she didn’t understand but shaking their heads and tutting in a way that she did.

  She heard the word ‘mamma’ repeated often. It started to get on her nerves. My mamma, not that it’s any business of yours, she would have said, agrees with you that I am too young.

  Maria bit her lip in order not to cry.

  ‘I can see why you want to punish us, your father and me,’ her mum had said when the school had told them about Maria missing her exams, ‘but this is about you and your future.’

  She had been sitting at the desk in the back room with the letter from the headmistress in front of her. She had been trying to persuade Maria to sit the remaining exams. She must have forgotten to put on her overall when she had made dinner because there was gravy down her front.

  Maria could actually feel it. A hardening of her heart, as if that organ were turning into a very hard nut, a brazil.

  ‘He’s not my father,’ she said.

  Her mother had put her head in her hands. ‘I don’t know what to do with you,’ she had said, and started to cry.