The Lawsons were only four days into their summer holiday when David first suggested to Jane that she was becoming obsessed with the woman who liked pastry.
It was their first trip to Florence and young and carefree though they were, they were already being overtaken by Stendhal Syndrome – that strange numbing effect caused by the practice of looking at too much art. Like most other tourists in this art-obsessed city, they had queued dutifully and endlessly for their obligatory trip around the echoing stone galleries of the Uffizi and the various other museums that dotted the area; they had stood and marvelled at the giant white wedding cake that was the Santa Maria Del Fiore, topped by Brunelleschi’s colossal dome. They had cricked their necks staring up at the towering statues in the Piazza della Signoria; and they had tried in vain to memorise the names of fifty unpronounceable Renaissance artists, but remembered only the four that had also been Mutant Ninja Turtles. All this, yet none of it had exerted such a powerful pull on Jane’s curiosity as the woman who liked pastry.
They had noticed her on their very first morning as they’d walked sheepishly into the dining room for breakfast. As they collected their bowls of cereal, there she was by the glass-domed hot cabinet, heaping piles of warm croissants onto two plates. Three, six, nine… more than anybody could reasonably help themselves to without feeling embarrassed, Jane thought, but the woman seemed unperturbed.
David had leaned forward and whispered into Jane’s ear that the woman didn’t look like somebody who ate a lot of pastries. She was thin as a whip and dressed like a footballer’s wife in a gold lurex top, designer jeans and impossibly high stiletto heels. Her blonde hair was permed and primped, her makeup meticulously applied (over-applied in Jane’s estimation) and she couldn’t help but notice how David’s gaze kept lingering on the inch or so of thong that jutted up from the back of the woman’s Donna Karan jeans.
‘Who takes so much trouble to dress for breakfast?’ whispered Jane, irritably. She was feeling comparatively dowdy in a shapeless T-shirt and Levis.
‘And who eats so many croissants?’ added David, raising his eyebrows. By now, the two large plates the woman was holding were heaped with the delicacies. Jane tried to do a quick count but gave up when she got to thirty. She noticed how the hotel staff, replete in their starched white uniforms, kept directing disparaging glances in the woman’s direction, as though daring her to take any more, but she seemed oblivious to their displeasure.
When Jane and David were seated with their more modest repast, they noticed the woman tottering by on her precarious heels in the direction of the marble steps that led up to the rooms, her heaped plates held in front of her like sacrificial offerings – but on the way, she paused to talk to a stolid looking man, sat at a table across from the Lawsons, who was eating a small mountain of croissants of his own. The two of them exchanged terse words in Italian and Jane found herself wishing she had some command of the language. She thought perhaps that the husband was admonishing her for not eating with him, but she couldn’t be sure. The woman muttered something back at him and went out of the room, her high heels clicking on the tiled floor.
As they ate, Jane and David speculated about her story.
‘She’s running a rival café down the street,’ said David with a grin. ‘She’s just stocking up for the morning rush.’
Jane shook her head. ‘No, she obviously has teenage kids. They’re too lazy to get up for breakfast, so she takes food up to them and they all eat in their room.’
David looked unconvinced. ‘Teenagers? Are you kidding? You saw her figure, that’s not a woman that’s had kids.’
Jane scowled into her cereal. It was a recurring worry of hers that she could put on weight simply by looking at food and she hated it when David’s attention turned to what she liked to call ‘anorexia victims.’
‘Well, I think it’s ridiculous,’ she concluded. ‘She can barely walk in those shoes. And she must have applied her makeup with a trowel.’
After a short interval, the woman reappeared. She made a beeline for the hot cabinet, collected half a dozen croissants of her own, sat down opposite her husband and devoured everything in front of her in an indecently short space of time. Jane reassessed her appraisal of the woman and changed the word ‘anorexic’ to the word ‘bulimic.’ It infuriated her. How could a woman so slim eat such an indecent amount of pastry? She noticed that the woman and her husband did not exchange another word as they ate.
As the days passed, the woman was always there and her routine never varied. Jane was, quite simply, fascinated by her. She found, that despite her initial dislike, she was actually looking forward to seeing the woman each morning and she began to fret if she arrived later than usual. One morning, she and her husband didn’t show at all and Jane kept putting off heading back to her own room, in the hope of seeing her – but breakfast ended at ten and eventually she had to admit defeat. She could only conclude that the mysterious couple had opted to eat elsewhere that morning.
‘You so fancy her,’ said David teasingly as he slotted the plastic key into the door of their room. He seemed to be irrationally amused by her interest in the woman. There was a brief buzz and he pushed the door open with his shoulder, then hung the red ‘do not disturb’ sign on the handle. Stepping into the room, he turned and pushed the same card into another slot. There was a brief delay and then the lights clicked on.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Jane, closing the door behind her. ‘She just interests me that’s all. But not in that way. I mean, she isn’t in the least bit sexy.’
This was true. The woman, for all that she was so slim and fastidiously turned out, seemed to exude an aura of misery. Her blood red lips were always turned down in a scowl and her kohl-rimmed eyes radiated a kind of sullen fury.
David moved closer and put his arms around Jane, pulled her to him.
‘So what is it about her that you do like?’ he asked softly and his mouth fastened greedily on hers.
That afternoon, they had another day wandering around the bustling streets of the city but Jane was beginning to feel oddly out of sorts. The June heat oppressed her and she was beginning to get a little fed up with being ripped off by everybody she encountered. It seemed to her that everyone wanted to extort money from her. White-faced mime artists groped her in the street and expected David to tip them for their trouble. Impassive flower sellers thrust a single rose into her face and stood there waiting to be paid to go away. In an attempt to counter all this, Jane insisted that they make their long anticipated visit to the Ponte Vecchio.
She had always pictured the medieval bridge with its jewellery stores and souvenir shops as an impossibly romantic location but in the unforgiving glare of the sunlight it looked rather dilapidated, squatting above the olive green river like a third world slum… and there was nothing romantic about the smell of backed-up drains. She overheard an English tour guide telling a group of tourists that back in the day the shops on the Pont De Vecchio had all been butcher’s establishments and that the owners had habitually thrown rotting meat and offal into the river and that the river often flowed red with blood. Jane felt a wave of nausea ripple through her and decided she’d had enough of the place. She pushed her way back through the crowds of tourists, all waving their tiny digital cameras.
Seeking refuge from the heat, she ducked through the high columned entrance of one of the smaller galleries, just to relish the feel of the cool stone flags beneath her feet and David reluctantly followed. He muttered that he thought they’d seen enough art over the past week but Jane persisted. She knew he didn’t much care for looking at paintings but she reasoned, she’d humoured him by pretending to be interested in the things he liked, hadn’t she? She’d agreed to go to that ghastly Museo Criminale in the Via Cavour and had spent more than an hour looking at grotty waxworks of the likes of Charles Manson and Ted Bundy.
‘This is one of the places they mentioned in the Guardian article,’ she added. ‘It’s supposed to be much better value
than the Uffizi.’
‘Whoop de dooh,’ he muttered flatly; but nevertheless, he paid the admission and they went inside. The museum housed a selection of huge oil paintings by some of the lesser-known Renaissance artists. They moved from one picture to the next, staring up in silence, realising that right now, they had very little to say to each other.
‘Where do you want to eat tonight?’ David asked her. He sounded bored. ‘I thought we might try that place with the wood-fired stove again. The chip pizza they do is absolutely phenomenal.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, moving on to the next painting. ‘I’m not really all that – ooh, that’s horrible!’
They were looking up at a huge picture of a bearded man dressed only in a loincloth. He was holding a naked toddler in his muscular arms and appeared to be in the act of biting a huge chunk of flesh out of the boy’s chest, while at his feet, another boy cowered in abject terror.
‘Nice,’ muttered David. He studied the information card on the wall, looking for the English translation. ‘Saturn devouring his sons,’ he said. ‘Artist unknown.’
Despite the heat of the day, Jane felt a chill go through her.
‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ she said. ‘I could do with a lie down.’
‘Great,’ said David, totally misinterpreting her mood.
The next morning, as Jane sat down with her bowl of cereal, the woman bustled into the dining room and began piling croissants onto plates as though making up for lost time. Once again the staff were looking daggers at her, but she was clearly on a mission. Her husband, as ever, sat by himself, working his way through a plate of scrambled eggs and greasy Florentine ham, his face expressionless. Jane noticed that he had a fleck of egg on his chin and had to fight down the urge to point it out to him. She had come down alone this morning because David had wanted to check the emails on his phone, but when he arrived a few moments later, he had some news. He nodded surreptitiously at the woman.
‘Your pal is staying just down the hall from us,’ he whispered. ‘Room 147.’
‘Oh yes?’ Jane feigned disinterest and spooned bran flakes into her mouth.
‘Yeah, it was weird. I was walking down the hall and I saw her coming out. She left the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door.’
‘So?’
‘Well, then she had a bit of a barney with a cleaning woman. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, obviously, but I got the idea the cleaner wanted to go in and you know, change the sheets and so forth? But your mate wouldn’t let her in. Quite a row they were having.’
‘Stop calling her ‘my mate,’ pleaded Jane. ‘She’s nothing to me.’
‘Yeah, but it’s weird, don’t you think? I mean, if she’s here for two weeks like us, the room’s going to be in a right state.’
Jane didn’t reply but she was already drawing up her plans.
The facts were inescapable. She had to know the woman’s secret. She wanted to understand her reasons for taking all that food up to her room. Did she have five children waiting up there? Or did she sit in the room and gobble down thirty croissants before coming down to eat six more? She knew it was irrational but the need to solve the puzzle was like an itch she was unable to scratch and she knew she would have no peace until it was done.
The next morning, as she and David were heading down to breakfast, she told him that she felt cold and wanted to go back for her sweater. She took the plastic key from him and turned back, telling him that she’d join him downstairs in a little while. He didn’t put up much of an argument. David liked his food and had never been much good at waiting for it. Jane walked along the hall but instead of going back to her own room, she stopped outside the door of 147 and listened intently. She thought she heard a sound from within, a soft burbling noise that she couldn’t readily identify and she stepped closer, pushed her ear against the door. There it was again, a kind of soft sing-song tone, more like the sound of a baby than that of a teenager.
She stepped away from the door as she heard the unmistakable sound of the woman coming back up the stone steps, her high heels clicking on marble. Jane hurried back along the hall, then turned and began to stroll along as if she had just emerged from her own room.
She timed it perfectly, arriving outside 147 at the same time as the woman, who burdened by the two plates of croissants, seemed about to set them down on the floor so she could unlock the door. Jane stepped forward, smiling.
‘May I help you?’ she offered and when the woman hesitated, she reached out and took one of the plates from her, then nodded towards the door. ‘Now!’ she said brightly. ‘You have a free hand.’
There was a long moment of silence while the woman studied Jane with a look of sullen suspicion on her face; but then she seemed to reassess the situation. She nodded gratefully, pulled the plastic card from the back pocket of her jeans and slotted it into the lock. There was a buzz and she pushed the door open onto blackness – odd, Jane thought, the heavy velvet drapes in the room must have been tight shut against the daylight. The woman took a step into the room, then looked back, holding out a hand for the plate, but Jane pretended to misunderstand and simply moved closer, smiling for all she was worth. The woman frowned, then shrugged her shoulders. She motioned with her head for Jane to follow her.
There was a moment when Jane was going to back down. Actually following a stranger into her room seemed somehow too intimate, almost prurient; but then that all-encompassing curiosity got the better of her. She stepped decisively forward into the room and the door swung shut behind her, plunging her momentarily into darkness. At that moment, she became aware of two things, simultaneously. The first was a smell, an overpowering stench of rotting food that made her gorge rise. The second was the feeling of something crunching beneath the sole of her sandal.
There was a brief click as the woman slid the plastic card into its slot and then the lights snapped on. Jane was already looking downwards and she saw to her disgust that she was standing in a litter of half eaten croissants. They covered the tiled floor of the room, in various stages of decomposition and as she stared down, revulsion rising in her throat, she noticed that large, shiny bluebottles were buzzing in and out of the discarded food, laying their eggs.
All this she saw in an instant – but it was the sound, a strange gurgling noise, that snapped her gaze upwards to look at the bed. Or rather, what was on the bed. She supposed that it must be a toddler, bloated and misshapen though it was, its bald head mottled and its toothless mouth smeared with chocolate and egg custard. She couldn’t say if it was male or female but it was holding out its plump, sore-encrusted arms to her as though imploring a hug. She saw too the short length of chain clamped around one excrement-smeared ankle, the chain that held the creature tied to the bed frame.
Jane didn’t know whether to scream or vomit. She opened her mouth to do one or other of those things but then a hand clamped down tightly on her shoulder, a hand that seemed to pulse with an almost freakish strength. Jane looked up and the woman was smiling at her, her black-rimmed eyes glittering with feral madness.
‘My bambino,’ she whispered. She threw the croissants onto the bed and the toddler grabbed at them and began gulping them down. The woman let the plate drop to the floor, onto the soft litter of discarded pastry. Then she reached out and selected one particularly large croissant from the bed.
‘Please…’ whispered Jane but the woman shook her head. She reached out and stuffed the entire croissant deep into Jane’s open mouth, stifling her cry for help. Then she reached out with her free hand and pulled the plastic card from its slot.
The lights went out.
Three Poems
Jane Commane
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 15