The glare of a screen at four in the morning is a more effective stimulant than any espresso and within moments I was entirely alert. There were no messages, no texts or emails. Seeking reassurance, with a sentimental desire to see my son’s face animated and smiling, I opened the link to the video of them singing ‘Homeward Bound’ in that unknown Venetian square. Their performance was more appealing with the sound muted, and I even noted a foolish longing look between them that I’d missed before. ‘Maybe you should let them go,’ Freja had said. ‘Let him be.’
Impossible. I typed in kat kilgour once again, followed one or two dead ends and then, on an image-sharing website, found a virtual, visual diary of her travels. Photographs, many, many photographs. Here were Kat and Albie on the Rialto Bridge, pouting, cheeks pressed together, offering up their foreheads to the phone’s fish-eye lens in that pose that has become standard these days. Here was a moody shot of Albie, posturing with his cheek against the neck of his guitar in moody black and white, the caption ‘lover and friend, Albie Petersen’ and a poorly punctuated commentary beneath from KK’s friends and fans – gorgeous!!! back off bitch hes mine, two thumbs up, bring him to sydney, hes easy on the eye damn gurl he beautiful – my strange pride battling with bemusement at this brazen new world that Albie occupied, where ratings were accorded to everything, including the sexual attractiveness of strangers, and where no opinion went unexpressed. No inhibitions, no repression. I would! said one remark. That’s all, just I would! What had happened to loaded conversations and drunken, whispered confidences in back-street trattorias? Good God, I thought, how might I have fared in a world where people were free to say what they felt?
And now here was Albie in a bed somewhere, his bony torso exposed, cigarette dangling like a French film star, and more comments of a personal nature. I could, I thought, have added one of my own without fear of discovery; chipped in with ‘smoking is NOT cool’ and pasted in a jpeg of a diseased lung, but instead I moved on, skimming past a photo of Kat sleeping on a railway platform, and now standing in front of the Tower of Pisa, pushing it back into alignment and I laughed, actually laughed at the thought of Albie succumbing to the temptation of that picture before catching myself and thinking –
The Tower of Pisa. That’s not right.
The Tower of Pisa is not in Venice. It’s in … well, it’s in Pisa.
I looked at the photograph’s date. Today – yesterday. I swore at the f-ing Tower of f-ing Pisa – and put my hand to my mouth.
I flicked back to the previous photograph, Kat on the train platform. The sign above the bench – Bologna. The caption:
Venice u killed us man. 2 many tourists. On the road again!
I swore louder this time, causing Freja to shift and mumble in her sleep. I felt the panic rise in my chest. Stay calm. Perhaps it was a day trip! Where was Pisa exactly? A traveller’s guide to Italy sat on the top of Freja’s packed case. Bologna sat in the centre of Italy’s thigh, but Pisa was in … Tuscany? I was not just in the wrong city, I was on the wrong coast.
I skimmed forward to the Pisa photos, Albie looking surly and bored on the long promenade of the Arno, head resting awkwardly on his guitar case. Albie on a downer. keep moving on, moving on. sometimes travelling is hard, man. bone-tired. need a place where we can lay our heads. So come back to Reading then, you silly boy! Next, a night-time shot, a photo of Albie arguing with a carabinieri, Albie’s face caught in a sneer, the officer’s eyes shaded beneath his cap. ‘That’s a policeman, Albie!’ I wanted to shout. ‘Don’t argue with a policeman!’ Moved on by fascists was all that Kat could say on the subject. What would the next photo bring? Albie bleeding from a truncheon blow? No, a stray cat drinking from the cap of a water bottle. Night night kitty, said the caption. Siena tomorrow!
Tomorrow. That meant today, this morning, in Siena. The current time was eight minutes past four. Gathering my trousers up in my arms, dangling the evil shoes from my fingertips, I tiptoed to the door.
125. a letter to freja kristensen, posted beneath her door
Dear Freja,
I believe this is called a ‘French exit’ – leaving without saying goodbye. I wonder if that is an idiom that you’re aware of? You know all the others. It seems rather dramatic, I know, and possibly a little rude, and I do hope that you are not offended. But you looked so peaceful sleeping there and I did not want to wake you.
The reason for my hasty departure is that I have what we detectives call a ‘hot lead’ on my son’s whereabouts and I need to travel the width of Italy before lunch. Who knows if I will make it in time, or if the trip will prove futile, but I feel an obligation to try. I hope that, as a parent yourself, you will understand.
My other reason for not waking you was that I wasn’t sure what I would say, and felt I stood a better chance of successfully conveying my thoughts on paper, even at this early hour. I thought very hard about leaving a phone number or address at the top of this page, but to what end? I so enjoyed our conversation last night, but it also served to remind me why I am here in the first place, and certain promises and obligations that I carry with me.
So while it seems unlikely that we will ever meet again, this in no way reflects my warmth of feeling towards you, or my gratitude. You are an extremely interesting, intelligent and compassionate woman, with superb vocabulary. While I have no belief in fate or destiny, I was extremely lucky to have bumped into you at a difficult point in my journey. You are extremely good company and also, I might add, an extremely attractive woman, grandmother or no! Part of me would have enjoyed travelling on with you to Florence and Rome and Naples, though sadly this cannot be.
But I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday and, looking to the future, I hope you find happiness, on your own or with someone new, and continue to take pleasure in your beautiful children and grandchildren. For my part, I will always remember the day we spent in each other’s company, will always think of you fondly and with immense gratitude as well as, I suspect, a certain degree of regret.
With very best wishes,
Douglas Petersen
126. departure at dawn
Sunrise found the city abandoned. I hurried through silent streets and squares, encountering not a single soul until the Strada Nuova, where the office cleaners, the hotel workers and waiters on the early shift stumbled along, heads down, inured to the rosy light, the beauty of this place. My one thought now was to leave.
I caught the first train to Florence with three minutes to spare, scalding my hand with the two double espressos that I’d deemed essential to this journey, along with some kind of pastry, greasy as a bag of chips. I wiped my hands on a tiny napkin that disintegrated immediately, then we were out into the startling daylight, the train sliding gingerly along the causeway that connects Venice umbilically to the mainland. To my left, the strangest sight: cars.
The mainland suburbs of Venice were scrappy and dull and I set my alarm for two hours hence, and closed my eyes in the hope of sleep. But the four ill-considered shots of espresso put paid to this ambition and I found the words of my note to Freja running around my head. She would be waking now, finding the note beneath the door, reading it and feeling – what? Embarrassment? Regret? Irritation? Amusement at my misreading of events? Would she give a wry, wise smile as she placed it in the folds of her guidebook, or tear it smartly in two? Perhaps I should have said goodbye in person after all. A thought occurred.
Unlike with Albie, I knew exactly where Freja would be today. In two hours’ time she would be sitting on this very train, looking out at parched suburban gardens, industrial estates and generic office blocks and, like me, regretting that second bottle of wine, and I might easily wait for her at the station in Florence, perhaps with a small gift of flowers. We could exchange a few words and an email address – ‘let’s keep in touch, just as friends’ – and I could still make it to Siena by the afternoon.
Or, more fantastically, I might abandon my quest completely and stay with her for as long
as that lasted. Hurl my phone from the train window into the lagoon, leave Albie to his fate, let my wife do what she wanted. Hadn’t Connie always been the instinctive, passionate one? And hadn’t I earnt the right, after all these years of diligence and reliability, to one last fit of selfish spontaneity?
But the trouble with living in the moment is that the moment passes. Impulse and spontaneity take no account of the longer term, of responsibilities and obligations, debts to be paid, promises to fulfil. I had lost sight of the people I cared for, and it was vital now that I turn my attention once again to the task in hand, rescuing my son and winning back my wife.
And so I decided to forget about Freja Kristensen, and continue with my journey.
part six
TUSCANY
–
Richard suddenly saw his father as a young man, full of ambitious plans for his son, and he wondered if he had ever danced his child on his knee, hurried home from work to do so; if he felt this fierce protectiveness.
It was one of the strangest ideas Richard had ever had, and it made him uneasy.
Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness
127. florence in thirty-six minutes flat
Thirty-six minutes. This was the time I had allowed to see the jewel of the Renaissance and still safely make my connection on to Siena. A challenge, I realised, but it would be fun, too, a chance to clear my head of Venice and the night before, and so I hopped from the train and deposited my bag in the deposito bagagli, a piece of Italian that sounded, frankly, made up. I set the alarm on my phone and strode out into the petroleum haze of the station square, past the shabby tourist shops and snack bars, the dubious hostels, multiple pharmacies and Bureaux de Change – who still needs a Bureau de Change, I wondered, in this age of the international cashpoint card? Never mind that, at the end of the street I glimpsed a sliver of the famous Duomo, startling in its scale and intricacy even at a distance, but there was no time, no time, eight minutes on the clock already, and so with one eye on the tourist information map, I strode to the right, past phone shops and stalls selling tacky leather goods under graceful arches, zigzagging to a great square – the Piazza della Signoria, my map told me – dominated by a crenellated fortress, the kind a child might make from a cardboard box and, to the right, a cluster of immense statues like the pieces from some deranged game of chess; gods, lions and dragons, warriors with raised swords and severed heads, another naked soldier dying extravagantly in his comrade’s arms, screaming women, a naked, psychotic man with a truncheon clubbing a centaur to death and, watching over all of this surreal ultra-violence with fey distaste, Michelangelo’s David. Fifteen minutes gone now, and my guidebook had informed me that this was only a reproduction so I noted the disproportionate size of the hands and walked on towards the Uffizi Gallery. It was not yet ten in the morning and already an immense queue of people stretched beneath the colonnade, fanning themselves with hotel maps while living statues of, incomprehensibly, the Statue of Liberty and an Egyptian pharaoh, stood on crates beneath the marble images of Giotto, Donatello and Pisano. Nineteen minutes gone, and now here was a woman in a pink body-stocking and a long blonde wig, balanced upon a papier-mâché clamshell for the amusement of the weary queue while tantalisingly, in the elegant galleries above our heads, was the real thing, hanging alongside Uccellos and Caravaggios and da Vincis, Titian’s famous Venus of Urbino and three – three! – Rembrandt self-portraits. Connie had been here to the Uffizi as a student, had talked yearningly about returning – a little jewel, she said, very cool and beautiful – and like a smart traveller, I had pre-booked tickets for four days hence, and it occurred to me, as the timer showed nineteen minutes, that if this afternoon’s reunion with Albie went well, we might still make our booking! Perhaps my son and I could travel around some Tuscan hill towns then rendezvous with Connie right here. ‘They should call it the “Queue-ffizi!” I’d quip as we strolled past the hordes of less canny, less forward-thinking tourists. ‘You pre-booked – great idea, Dad!’ Albie would say, and standing in front of Primavera once again, Connie would take my hand. ‘Thank you, Douglas!’ she’d say, and all my care and preparation would be vindicated. No time to daydream, though – twenty minutes had gone now. I strode towards the river, hoping for a glimpse of the Ponte Vecchio, but now the alarm was sounding on my phone, meaning that I had fourteen minutes to return to the station and for the moment I would have to settle for seeing only the queue for the Uffizi, one thin slice of the great Duomo, an artificial David, a living statue Venus. Seen in twenty-two minutes, Florence was a Botticelli fridge magnet in a tan leather handbag, but never mind, we’d be back as a family. I retraced my steps and at twenty-nine minutes the station was in sight again. Breathless, sleep-deprived, perspiring quite heavily, I resolved to stop alternating strong coffee with alcohol and to rest on the Siena train, settling smugly into my seat on the 1010 with a comfortable three minutes to spare. I listened to the train announcement. Montelupo-Capraia, Empoli, Castelfiorentino, San Gimignano; even the names were picturesque. I would be in Siena by 1138, about the time that Albie would be getting out of bed. I closed my eyes, reclined my seat as far as it would go – the pleasures of European rolling stock! – and watched the outskirts of the city go by, feeling my eyelids growing heavy then realising, with a start, that I had left all of my belongings in the left-luggage office of Santa Maria Novella station.
128. the siena train
I had no change of clothes or footwear. I had no money, save the notes and coins in my pocket, twenty-three euros and eighty cents. No passport, no guidebook, no toothbrush nor razor, tablet or phone charger. I had my phone, of course, but because I had not slept in my own room last night the power stood at 18 per cent, and now suddenly here was a whole series of texts that Connie had sent, arriving all at once like a hail of stones:
where are you? why did you hang up on me?
you sounded strange I’m worried about you D. please call
I’m not angry I’m worried. First egg now you.
I’m coming out to find you. please just tell me where you are. tell me you are safe.
please let me know you are safe and well.
I pressed reply then hesitated, no longer quite sure if I was.
129. a glass, full to the brim
Understandably, the months leading up to the due date were anxious, with Connie prone to all kinds of irrational fears about her health and her abilities. I did my best to reassure her that all would be well this time. Connie was determined, strong, able, brave; who could be better at this? But our confidence, our complacency had been cruelly exposed before and so we were cautious to the point of paranoia. Vitamins, oils and tonics, an organic diet, meditation, yoga – all played their part. Most of it was mumbo-jumbo, of course, based on the fallacious conviction that we – she – had done something wrong the last time, but it eased Connie’s mind so I kept quiet. Still, there was less of the boisterous good humour of the first pregnancy. Imagine carrying a glass, full to the brim, around for thirty-six weeks without spilling a drop. Caution, care, a contrived and fragile serenity. A certain sadness, too.
But it’s hard to stay sad or serene in the sweaty, bloody mess of that shocking business of birth. The first contractions came at two in the morning, the first but not the last time Albie would wake us at that hour. ‘Tell me that it’s going to be all right,’ Connie demanded as we paced the delivery room, her fingernails digging deep into my palm. ‘Of course it is,’ I said, because what else could I say?
But it was all right, it was. For there to be another catastrophe would have been too cruel, and Albie came easily, almost before we knew it (though Connie may take a different view on this). By nine a.m. I was father to a son, and of course he was beautiful too. Even purple-faced and smeared with that nameless gunk, he was lovely – strong-featured, with his mother’s black, black hair. As the frightening colour of his skin faded, as his features settled into repose and his curious eyes opened, a new word suggested itself: h
andsome. A handsome boy, as handsome as his sister had been beautiful. I held him through the morning while Connie slept, sitting up in a vinyl chair beside her bed, winter sun on his face and, God, I loved him. Had my own father held me like this? He was of the generation that had been encouraged to read magazines and smoke in the waiting room, offspring only presented to them when the mess and gore of birth had been swabbed away. I was old enough to recall my sister being brought home from hospital and the awkwardness with which he’d held her, how reluctant he had seemed, shifting his cigarette from one hand to another, keen to pass her on. Extraordinary to think he was a medical man, too; someone who should have handled flesh and blood with ease, especially his own. Well, I would not be like that, I decided. I would maintain an easy, relaxed demeanour around my son – good God, ‘my son’, I had a son – and we would be such good friends.
We transported him home with neurotic care, almost literally wrapped in cotton wool. The visitors who had come to sympathise now came to celebrate and we accepted the cards and gifts and congratulations, with their hint of consolation, with good grace. We listened to his crying in the night with weary relief. Connie’s mother moved in to lend a hand, and my sister became a constant presence, regressing to coos and gurgles and knitting awful little cardigans, and I did what I was required to do, keeping the kettle on a rolling boil, tidying, cleaning and shopping, slipping once more into that persona of the endlessly capable butler, taking my turn to rise in the night and have Albie scream into my ear. I gave myself instructions. Remain positive, enthusiastic, loving and full of care. Keep a watchful eye and make sure no harm comes to either of them. More resolutions.
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