The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘Shit.’

  Olivia curled her lip and looked surprised by herself.

  ‘Yeah, you inspired me to look for another job, new opportunities. It took a while, but I got there.’

  ‘Wow. I’m glad you did listen to me. But you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No! I was drunk as a monkey or stoned off my tits most of my time in London. I needed to get my shit together.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘To be honest I don’t really remember you much from that night in London, mainly from New Zealand.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Daniel thought back to their hug on the steps of the Italianate train station in downtown Dunedin – their kiss in the deserted ticket hall. At least she remembered that.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, that’s OK…’

  ‘No, I’m sorry that I don’t remember much from London. Apart from the fact I was miserable.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘And Flamin’ Beef Monster Munch. I remember that, I lived on that shit. And vodka.’

  ‘Well, I’m even more sorry then. Pickled Onion is clearly the best flavour Monster Munch,’ Daniel said, nudging a flirty arm into hers.

  ‘Don’t be sorry. I’m happy now. You’re happy now. Gelato?’

  The sun was kissing the tops of the elm trees, lighting up the path in hues of gold and pink, as they strolled through the park towards an ice cream seller and her wagon, striding side by side but not touching. At the wagon Olivia chose a rose-flavoured ice cream, delicately coloured and less pink than the sky, while Daniel chose something called stracciatella he had never heard of before, but the way Olivia said it made it sound all the more appealing.

  Olivia went to open her purse but Daniel quickly handed the elderly woman a five-Euro note.

  ‘Grazie.’

  ‘Prego.’

  They licked their ice creams and started walking again.

  ‘Hmmm, soooo good. What is this exactly?’ He gestured his cone to Olivia.

  ‘Like little stripes of chocolate in vanilla.’

  ‘Ahh, strands,’ Daniel said, feeling the texture of it on his tongue. ‘How’s yours?’

  ‘Good, you want some?’ Olivia proffered and suddenly Daniel felt self-conscious.

  ‘I’m OK, thanks.’

  He wasn’t into floral flavours anyway.

  ‘You want some of mine?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course!’

  Olivia leaned to take a hearty slurp, as a light wind whipped up and some strands of her hair blew across the strands in his ice cream.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ she laughed, ice cream now dragging across her face as she removed it, stopping to savour the taste of stracciatella.

  He was so close to her again, he felt a beat pummelling in his chest. He wanted to wipe the threadlike ice cream strands off her face and kiss her clean. But he pulled back.

  ‘It’s good,’ she declared. ‘But not as good as mine.’ Olivia winked, and stuck her pink tongue out. Daniel wished he’d tried some, that he hadn’t been so self-conscious. So English.

  They carried on walking through the park, past high horse chestnut trees and low fragrant verbena bushes that smelled of orange blossom, Olivia leading the way around the paths and little woodland bridges.

  ‘So those fashion types… they got you down, hey?’

  ‘Yes, quite a lot. But it wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t even my fault. It just wasn’t the right place for me. Or maybe it wasn’t the right time. I didn’t fit in.’

  ‘I guess it’s a hard place to fit in.’

  Olivia didn’t know if he meant fashion college or London, but actually he meant both. ‘Yeah, well Paul McCartney wasn’t my dad. I didn’t want him to be my dad. I just wanted my father back. Full stop. So I was pretty sad.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Daniel didn’t know why Olivia was talking about Paul McCartney.

  As they walked, Daniel noticed the ankle glimmering gold, pink, green and yellow above her silver trainer. ‘So how are you getting on… without your dad?’

  Daniel’s expression was thoughtful and caring. Olivia gave him a sideways glance.

  ‘Well, it’s been five years. Five years since his heart just stopped. I can’t believe it. It feels like yesterday but it’s five years.’ She said this as if it was almost funny. ‘Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago I jumped on a plane and went travelling, to escape the pain in my heart, but it didn’t really work. I had to be here. In Milano. Facing it.’

  Daniel looked across at Olivia as he finished his ice cream.

  ‘My mammas have been amazing – Mamma Due especially. It was hard for them both, but she felt the absence the most. Papa no longer in the apartment. The smell of his cigars, his neroli. His laugh and his presence. Mamma Una too, but she was most worried about me. She didn’t have the emptiness of the space a great man filled.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘In Milano too – but another apartment across town. She has lots of friends and “gentlemen callers”, she calls them. But they were both heartbroken, worried for me, both affected by his loss. The silence of his absence. I made the silence worse, by leaving.’

  ‘You did what you needed to do.’

  ‘Well – I was a bit of a puttana myself. I left them when they needed me. But we’ve reconnected. It’s been good to slow down. Be back here. To work. Although to many Milano is crazy.’

  Daniel looked at the sedate park surrounding them, glancing back at the former castle and ice cream vendor they’d left behind, the balloon seller and artists in front. The fig trees and bushes. Milan looked pretty civilised and serene to him.

  ‘It’s not crazy compared to London.’

  ‘Well, exactly. My father’s parents – and Mamma Due’s – are from Sicilia. They think this place is crazy. Imagine if they ever went to London!’ Olivia threw back her head and laughed, picturing her Nonna Renata crossing Oxford Circus at 6 p.m. on a Thursday. Arms brushing and squashed in the throng bustling for the underground. A scene she knew would never happen. They had only ever left Sicily once, and that was for their son’s funeral.

  Daniel looked around the park.

  ‘I love it.’

  His eyes rested on Olivia. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but he knew that was ridiculous.

  ‘It really is beautiful here. And not what I expected.’

  ‘You’ve never been to Milano?’

  ‘Never. It’s my first time.’

  Olivia gasped.

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘What do you think of it?’

  ‘I thought it would be all supermodels in gaudy clothes and smoking factories and industry, but this park feels like…’

  He was thinking home, that he could imagine going about his business here. Their business. But he didn’t want to use that word and he couldn’t think of another. Fortunately Olivia interrupted, as was her way.

  ‘In which case, I’ll give you a tour.’

  ‘Really? Don’t you have things to do?’

  ‘That’s my thing to do! To pop my Milano virgin’s cherry.’

  Daniel blushed.

  ‘How long have we got?’ she asked, wiping the last of the ice cream cone from the corner of her mouth.

  Daniel looked at his watch. He’d covered all the pre-match press conferences he needed to at the San Siro, but he did need to write his copy up for 11 p.m. and send it to his editor. ‘I have a bit of work to do tonight, but I reckon I have a couple of hours spare…’

  ‘Then let’s walk, before sunset, and you can come back to ours for dinner. Work from our apartment if you need to.’

  ‘You live with Mamma Due still?’ Daniel didn’t want that to sound judgemental, not when he’d only moved out of his parent’s house and in with Jim and Wesley in Tooting Bec last year.


  ‘Of course!’

  Daniel felt silly, for desperately wanting to impress her, to show her that he had moved to London, when all the while the woman he was trying to impress was proud to be living at home. And he so wanted to see her home. Where she lived. To not have a miserable parting of ways again.

  Daniel didn’t know what to do. He felt the urgency of his deadline, how he couldn’t let Lloyd down with this first amazing trip. But he didn’t want to leave Olivia’s side either. Not ever again.

  Don’t blow it.

  ‘Well, that sounds great, thank you,’ Daniel said, from under his hair. ‘As long as you’re sure your mum or mums won’t mind.’

  Olivia had already moved on and started her tour.

  ‘Guarda!’ she said, pointing to a man sharpening a pencil with a thin razor blade. ‘First thing to do in Parco Sempione is to get a portrait.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘This guy, he’s been doing it for years…’

  Olivia looped her arm through Daniel’s and led him to an artist, sitting on a tripod stool in a shady corner. He was a weathered man with tight white curls popping out from under a flat cap and bags under his eyes that carried a lifetime of stories. ‘He’s super funny.’

  ‘Funny?’

  Daniel wasn’t sure the artist would want to be called funny.

  Olivia spoke to him in Italian and he stood up slowly to push two chairs together. A board behind him displayed samples of his work, celebrities in caricature form. Zinedine Zidane. Princess Diana. Elton John. Silvio Berlusconi. One of Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio at the bow of the Titanic. All with the same grotesque features.

  Daniel wasn’t sure about this. His parents had a caricature of him and Matt on the wall of their stairs at home, but they were 8 and 6 at the time, which seemed OK. He looked across at Olivia and realised she made everything feel OK, so he sat down in the chair next to her and the artist started to draw. Daniel would never normally get a portrait of himself, but then Olivia did make him do things he’d never normally do.

  As they sat and talked, Daniel wondered if the artist minded them chatting – shouldn’t their mouths not move – while he held his A3 pad close to his chest and sketched conscientiously. He didn’t seem to.

  ‘So where are you living now?’ Olivia asked, as she tried to sit still.

  Daniel told her how he’d moved in with Jim. ‘Remember my friend from the pub you worked in? The one who realised you were the Olivia I had met travelling…’ Daniel’s cheeks turned pink. ‘The one who came with us to see The Horizontals at the 100 Club?’

  Olivia didn’t remember Jim, although she did remember the misery of working in that pub.

  Daniel explained where Tooting Bec was, and that Jim and Wesley were going great guns, even though she didn’t know them. Jim was now deputy editor of a women’s glossy. Wesley had given up magazines to retrain as a teacher. He told Olivia how glad he was to get away from Elmworth, from the claustrophobia of Saturday night TV; how his brother was marrying his monosyllabic misery of a girlfriend this summer, who still spent most of their evenings on the sofa in the family home, despite owning a flat around the corner. He didn’t mention the Kelly blip. And he didn’t know Olivia had never had a significant boyfriend, although he assumed there must have been several.

  Olivia told Daniel that Mimi had bought a flat in Brixton, but she didn’t know if that was near Tooting Bec or not, but it didn’t matter anyway as she spent most of her life on the road.

  When the artist finished, he silently nodded and turned the pad around, his sombre face hard to read, and Olivia looked at Daniel, awaiting his reaction with excitement.

  ‘Ummm…’

  Daniel was taken aback.

  ‘Well…’

  The artist hadn’t drawn Olivia and Daniel. Not even a grotesque caricatured version of them. He had drawn a woman and a man, neither of which were Olivia nor Daniel. Olivia smiled, studying Daniel’s face and he felt aware of her eyes on him as well as the artist’s, unsure as to whether it was a joke.

  ‘Wow. Just wow.’ He applauded heartily. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Bravo,’ Olivia said, taking ten Euros out of her purse and handing it to the artist. He gave a modest nod and rolled up the picture.

  ‘Let me get that,’ Daniel said, reaching for his backpack and his wallet.

  ‘No, really,’ Olivia replied, giving him a knowing look. ‘My treat.’

  Daniel tried to suppress his laugh so as not to offend the artist.

  ‘Just wow…’ he repeated.

  ‘Grazie mille gentile signore,’ Olivia said, as she took the rolled-up tube and put it under her arm. Daniel stifled a cough as they walked off and out of earshot. They didn’t get very far, he was laughing and coughing so much he couldn’t walk.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Is that…?’

  His face crumpled and eyes started to water.

  Olivia laughed too.

  ‘Is that who I think it is?’

  ‘Siiiiiii.’

  ‘Was that not…?’

  ‘Si! Did you notice how he never once looked up?’

  Daniel held his stomach while he laughed, looking back in the hope the artist couldn’t hear them beyond the bushes.

  ‘I wondered why he didn’t mind us talking!’

  ‘He sees a woman with red hair, he draws Nicole Kidman.’

  ‘But you look nothing like Nicole Kidman!’

  ‘He sees a man with dark hair and light skin, he draws Tom Cruise.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know!’ laughed Olivia. ‘He did Mimi as Courteney Cox.’

  ‘What?! Does he just have stock famous people he draws?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he does. Mind you, my dad did look a bit like Silvio Berlusconi.’

  ‘No!’ said Daniel, stopping to see that she was actually being serious behind the tears of their laughter.

  They stopped in the middle of a pathway, around a corner and a bush from Signore Caricature; Daniel bent over double with his palms on his thighs, Olivia hugging her body as she shook, as locals and tourists walked past them and smiled at the scene. Daniel and Olivia’s laughter was as infectious to strangers as it was to each other.

  ‘Tom Cruise!’ he howled through the tears. ‘My nose!’

  Neither of them had laughed like that in years, as they held their tummies full of ice cream, the ice truly broken.

  Olivia sighed and caught her breath while Daniel ruffled his hair.

  ‘Too funny,’ she said, wiping a tear as the sun disappeared. ‘Come on, let’s go home and eat.’

  *

  As dusk evolved into night, and the scents of spring’s fragrant bushes were overpowered by the heady smell of mopeds and cigars, the lights of the city’s traffic illuminated the wide leafy boulevards along which Olivia led Daniel, on pavements, across tramlines and past gelaterias, pasticcerias and 7-Elevens. With her arm looped through his, they wound, her guiding him past now-empty playparks and closed newspaper stands, through the Buonarotti district of Milan and its villas and imposing apartments. Buildings that were grey and grand, with high ceilings and pretty balconies. The well-heeled women they passed walking their toy dogs gave way to young people heading out for the evening, and Daniel could tell that a new life cycle was emerging during rush hour in Milan.

  ‘Home,’ Olivia announced, as she stopped at an ornate, dark green gate between two pillars. On top of each pillar was a statue of an urn full of abundant fruit, all turned to stone, although it was hard for Daniel to see the grapes, pears and pomegranates in the shard of light emitted from the elegant, grey lamppost further up the street. Behind the gate he could see a tall, cream villa nestled among a small, manicured garden. Shutters framed the lofty long windows on every floor, in the same dark green shade as the gate and its railings.

  ‘Is this your home?’

  ‘Partly. My dad bought the building, before I was born. He hoped to do
it up and fill it with children.’ Olivia put her key in the little round hole on the gate and it squeaked open. ‘He decided it would be more economical to split it into apartments. Mamma Due and I live in the one at the top.’

  ‘Wow, it’s incredible.’

  A garage with a wooden door sat recessed at the back and Olivia led Daniel past it along a terracotta paved path between small neat green lawns from which fig, laurel and lemon trees burst. Cicadas brought the evening song to the flowering dogwood. Daniel felt like he was walking into paradise and wondered what the garden might look like in the sunshine. He hoped to see it so.

  Through another door, this one made of glass and ornate metal, Olivia led Daniel into a marble hallway, eschewing the narrow old-fashioned lift with a sliding bronze grill, for the large staircase ahead of them. As Daniel followed her up, past apartments on the ground, first, second and third floors, he followed Olivia’s silver trainers; watched the sway of her hips, the pull of her calves, and marvelled at the beauty and strength of her. How she wanted to spend the evening with him. To invite him into her home, to meet her mamma.

  ‘Mamma! Abbiamo un ospite!’ Olivia shouted, as she unlocked the tall, thin door at the top of the stairs. She turned back excitedly to Daniel, beckoning him in with an encouraging nod. She looked proud to have brought a friend back for dinner.

  Maria came out of the kitchen, a pinny hugging the waist of her black tight dress.

  ‘Ah, tesora! Buon tempismo! Oh—’

  Maria stopped and inspected the man in the hallway with an oven-mitt-clad hand on each hip, her waist small and her eyes big. ‘Who are you?’ She was so matter-of-fact, Daniel wondered if she were Olivia’s birth mother, but she looked too Italian. Neither answered, so Maria started rambling in a flustered bustle, pushing a wild black curl off her forehead. ‘The ossobuco nearly ready,’ she said in English. ‘Your mother here too.’

  ‘We have enough for one more?’ Olivia asked in English.

  It was a silly question, Maria always had enough food for one more, so she shot Olivia a look to say of course and Daniel followed them both into the kitchen.

  The modern sleek lines of the state-of-the-art kitchen juxtaposed with the primrose-yellow and pale blue tiles of the original floor. At a small table against the wall sat a woman with smooth red hair in a pageboy haircut, zesting a lemon.