Kitty was, and it felt most peculiar, happy.
Why? she wondered. It’s worth thinking it through, for the next time I am miserable. But perhaps that’s like sticking a pin through the butterfly, binding to myself a joy and thus the wingéd life destroying, when I should be kissing the joy as it flies and living in eternity’s sunrise.
No, I want to know why.
She was happy because she would never again have to go to school. Never again wear a horrible uniform and be told what to do. Tom had come and picked her up on the motorbike on the last day. She hauled her school skirt up around her thighs and straddled the bike like Boudicca on the run – Tom her chauffeur, not she his pillion. I’ll have my own motorcycle, she thought. Ride myself wherever I want to go, do whatever I want to do. Vrooming away through the gates of summer: there was never going to be any more maths or physics or biology or chemistry, and she had won the French Prize and was five foot six and she would never see any of those creeps again, except Susan Westenra of course because she, Kitty, had directed her, Susan, in Antigone – in French! – and she had been superb. They both had.
She was happy because she wasn’t going to university or anything like that. A typing course, if she had to – then work, money and life.
And she was happy because they were going to Italy again.
It had been very difficult to persuade Nadine. Kitty had tried over breakfast lunch and tea for weeks, and just got No No No. No reason given – or rather, a vast pile of reasons, none of them any good.
‘We’re not invited,’ Nadine said.
‘We soon will be, if we invite ourselves,’ Kitty replied smartly.
‘They may not want us.’
‘Of course they will.’
‘It’s been a long time.’
‘All the more reason to go!’
‘I don’t want to go travelling again without Riley.’
‘Riley can come too!’
‘No he can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
‘No I don’t.’
Short silence, small frown.
‘He doesn’t travel.’
Gleam of triumph from Kitty:
‘But he’s going to the Venice Film Festival! That’s travelling. That’s Italy even. And if he can go to Venice with Mr Hinchcliffe to see someone possibly get a prize then surely he can come to Rome with the two women who love him best in the world, to meet your family?’
Nadine was quiet, and Kitty delighted. The unlikely development of one of Hinchcliffe’s novels having been made into a film which was up for a prize was the star of her armoury.
‘We must ask him at least! Perhaps he’d like to! We could all go to Venice …’
Kitty could not see why Nadine was being so bullish. But then Kitty never read the papers, and wasn’t very good at putting things together.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Nadine said.
‘Then I shall go alone!’ said Kitty, her final arrow shot. ‘Tom did. I’m much older now than he was then.’
*
Nadine stewed with it. Stewed.
She stewed for a while with the various possible results of a reignition of the relationship between the families. Kitty might stir anything up there, if she went on her own. The risk of Riley finding out what Nadine had kept from him. The pash Tom had had on Nenna, for the decline of which Nadine couldn’t be more grateful, and which she did not want revived in any way. The affection she, Nadine, had had for them all, and had been so sad to have to quash, when it became apparent which way the wind was blowing. Poor dear Aldo, my blood relative. Pretty much my only one.
Thoughts like that made her rush to her darling old father, to sit beside him at the piano and kiss his white head and make sure he had no egg on his tie.
No, no no.
‘Well, I’m going,’ Kitty said. ‘You can’t stop me. Why would you? You can’t. I’m eighteen. It’s just to visit my family. Peter will let me go.’ She said this a lot.
And at last Nadine lost her temper, and said: ‘Very well! Very well, we’ll go. You and I. While Riley is in Venice, and then we will go and meet him there. Venice! How lovely.’
Actually, it wasn’t the worst way out. She could at least keep the visit short; she could control a little what was going on, she could protect this dear but explosively naive smartypants from both her own folly and the attentions of the Roman male, and she could – she could be in Venice with Riley! The joy of that idea made her smile.
So that was the plan.
*
Tom walked up Berwick Street on a hot July morning a month after graduating. He was thinking about what you could control and what you couldn’t.
He had a summer job and a shared flat in Meard Street. Through his obsessions with flying and undergraduate journalism, he had achieved a shockingly bad degree, and so had turned from science with a humiliated nose-in-the-air shrug, and acquired a menial post as a junior reporter and, it sometimes seemed, as everyone on the Daily Chronicle’s personal researcher and slave. But today was his day off, so he was free to delight in the grubbiness and sophistication of summer city life. It was hot. Hot and grubby. This still only meant one thing to him: Rome. Which was on his mind anyway: for some inexplicable bloody reason that he could not fathom, Nadine, Kitty and Riley – Riley! – were all heading there at this very moment.
First Kitty had insisted she go again. Fair enough. No reason why she shouldn’t want to. Hitler’s visit in May, the Duce building a bloody railway station specially for him, and meeting him off the train with the King in tow, and laying bloody wreaths at the bloody Vittoriale monument and having bloody banquets at the Quirinale might put some people off, but Kitty’s life is her own. That Nadine felt she must go with Kitty was fair enough, under the circumstances. Their Venice plan made sense – and then this morning he received this telegram: ‘Riley arriving Rome please come can’t do this without you love’.
I have a job!
And, more quietly: I don’t go to Rome.
It was not that he blamed Nadine or Riley or – well, perhaps – Kitty for the situation. It was not that he didn’t have a locked and frozen love for his cousins and for Italy still tucked away in his heart. Far from it. A part of him remained paralysed between the rock of his love for them – for her – and the hard place of his disgust with Fascism. But nothing that had happened in the past three years had made Italy, or them, any more approachable. Quite the opposite. When that evil clown is gone, or my cousins see the light, then I’ll go back.
At the little specialist newsagent he picked up a handful of foreign newspapers including, for the sake of being well informed, the fascist rag Giornale d’Italia. He strolled on towards Gino’s Caffe. Coffee, the papers. A sunny London morning. Be of good cheer, he told himself – that sweet old phrase of Riley’s. He did not want to think about it all. He wanted coffee. And a nice lunch.
And he was, for a moment, of good cheer. But then after his lunch he picked up the Fascist rag, Giornale d’Italia. Page three was headed Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti. He made a face, and read it, translating as he went, over his coffee.
‘Manifesto of the racist scientists.’ He took a sip.
‘One: Human races exist. The existence of the human races is no longer an abstraction of our spirit, but corresponds to a reality that is material and perceptible with our senses … To say that human races exist does not mean a priori that superior or inferior races exist, but only that different human races exist.’
I wonder where they’re going with that, he thought.
‘Two,’ it continued. ‘There exist large races and small races. It is necessary not only to admit that the large classifications which are commonly called races and which are identified only by a few characteristics exist, but it is also necessary to admit that smaller classifications exist (as for example the Nordics, the Mediterraneans, the Dinarics – Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins) – identified by a larger number of common characteristics. From a biological point of view, these groups constitute the true races, the existence of which is an evident truth.’
He really didn’t know what that meant, in Italian or English. It certainly wasn’t any biology he’d been taught.
‘Three. The concept of race is a biological concept. It is therefore based on other considerations than the concepts of a people and of a nation, founded essentially on historic, linguistic, and religious considerations. So, the differences of peoples and of nations are based on differences of race. If the Italians are different from the French, the Germans, the Turks, the Greeks, etc., it is not only because they have a different language and a different history, but because the racial constitution of these peoples is different.’
But Italy’s only been a united country for seventy years – what about before? And why are the Milanese generally tall and fair and the Sicilians short and dark? And what about the rearrangements of the northern border after the war? What about the Trentino, and Alsace Lorraine? What about Nadine, half French, half English, and Jewish? This is idiotically simplistic.
‘There have been different relationships of different races, which from very ancient times have constituted the diverse peoples. Either one race might have absolute dominance over the others, or all became harmoniously blended, or, finally, one might have persisted unassimilated into the other diverse races.’
‘Blah blah blah,’ he murmured.
‘Four: The majority of the population of contemporary Italy is Aryan in origin and its civilisation is Aryan …
‘Five: The influx of huge masses of men in historical times is a legend. After the invasion of the Lombards, there were not in Italy any other notable movements of people capable of influencing the racial physiognomy of the nation … while for other European nations the racial composition has varied notably even in modern times … the forty-four million Italians of today have arisen … in the absolute majority from families which have inhabited Italy for almost a millennium.
‘Six: There exists by now a pure “Italian race”. This premise is not based on the confusion of the biological concept of race as the historical-linguistic concept of a people and of a nation, but on the purist kinship of blood which unites the Italians of today to the generations which have populated Italy for millennia.’
Millennia, or almost a millennium? Make your minds up.
‘This ancient purity of blood is the greatest title of nobility of the Italian Nation.’
He thought he must be reading it wrong. Perhaps his Italian was not as good as he had thought. It was all upside down, even if you went along with that kind of thing. He read it over, and made no more sense of it.
‘Seven: It is time that the Italians proclaim themselves frankly racist.’
Tom snorted. Well, that’s clear enough.
‘All the work that the regime in Italy has done until now is founded in racism. Reference to racial concepts has always been very frequent in the speeches of the Leader—’
‘That’s not even true!’ he cried, causing Gino to look over at him across the café.
Tom said: ‘Does the Duce ever talk about race? Did he ever?’
Gino gave a little moue, and said, ‘Not much. Not like Herr Hitler.’
‘Have you seen this?’ Tom asked. ‘This manifesto?’
Gino glanced at it. ‘Why are you surprised?’ he said, and turned, and picked up some cups from the next table, and went. The sun was warm through the wide glass window.
Tom continued reading. ‘The question of racism in Italy ought to be treated from a purely biological point of view, without philosophic or religious intentions. The racism in Italy ought to be essentially Italian and its direction Aryan-Nordic.’
‘But what is this?’ Tom exclaimed. ‘Its direction? What does it mean? It’s a nonsense—’
Gino looked across at him, and stepped back over. He leaned down, and said gently, his eyes sorrowful: ‘Signore, it’s a fool looks for sense in the pages of the Giornale d’Italia.’
The look Tom gave was almost grateful, and he carried on, out loud, in Italian: ‘This does not mean, however, to introduce into Italy the theories of German racism as they are or to claim that the Italians and the Scandinavians are the same. But it intends only to point out to the Italians a physical and especially psychological model of the human race which in its purely European characteristics is completely separated from all of the non-European races. This means to elevate the Italian to an ideal of superior self-consciousness and of greater responsibility.
‘Eight: It is necessary to make a clear distinction between the European Western Mediterraneans on one side and the Eastern Mediterraneans and the Africans on the other. For this reason, those theories are to be considered dangerous that support the African origin of some European peoples and that include even the Semitic and Camitic North African populations in a common Mediterranean race, establishing absolutely inadmissible relations and ideological sympathies.’
Make a distinction! Make up a distinction more like. These scientists are really tying themselves in knots.
‘Nine: Jews do not belong to the Italian race. Of the Semites who in the course of centuries have landed on the sacred soil of our country nothing in general has remained.’
And here he stopped in his steady, angry, reading.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
Gino said, ‘Cos’ è adesso?’ Now what is it?
‘Gli ebrei non appartengono alla razza italiana,’ Tom said.
‘So what?’ said Gino, going about his business. ‘Why should they? So long as they work hard and talk the language, who cares?’
Tom smiled.
‘Even the Arab occupation of Sicily …’ he continued, to himself. The details melted and blended. They didn’t matter. ‘… left nothing outside the memory of some names; and for the rest the process of assimilation was always very rapid in Italy. The Jews represent the only population which has never assimilated in Italy … blah blah … Union is admissible only with European races, in which case one should not talk of a true and proper hybridism, given that these races belong to a common stock … The purely European character of the Italians would be altered by breeding with any other non-European race bearing a civilisation different from the millennial civilisation of the Aryans …’
So Jews are not Italian, or indeed European, and union – i.e., what, marriage? Family? – is admissible – what a nasty little word – only with European races. So, Nadine is not admissible? And the Fiores are not Italian? After two thousand years?
All this was detail. Once you’ve divided the human race up like that, into some arbitrary Us and Them, you are half way to announcing that They aren’t actually human anyway.
For a moment he sat in the glow of sun that fell through Gino’s window, the warmth of it on the side of his face and his shoulder, his coffee cooling in front of him. Into his mind floated the image of Piazza Venezia, a little man, thousands of faces all turned up to him as if he were the sun, shining on them, making everything possible for them. A great field of sunflowers diseased with uncritical devotion to this false sun. And that sun with its own diseased devotion to an even bigger false sun.
We are meant to think for ourselves, aren’t we? We’re not children in some horrible orphanage, to be marched around and hypnotised into dumb obedience. Are we?
Gino let him make a couple of calls, including one to the paper. The girls were travelling by car, and had stopped off for a few days in Paris. If he left tonight, by train, he could easily be in Rome before them. It seemed to him now absolutely necessary that he should be. Only a worm would not be there now. This could, actually, be a wonderful opportunity.
He headed for the Tube station.
*
It was as he passed the corner of Lexington Street that he saw the family: man, woman, girl. They caught his eye because the man’s silhouette was like Peter’s, and made him think he probably should tell Peter he was going away. Then he saw that it was Peter. Then he saw that it couldn’t be, because as they stepped into the sun the two women – the girl was almost a woman – revealed themselves to be negro. Then he saw, definitely, that it was Peter.
They were walking seemingly easily, cheerfully, and a shaft twisted from surprise, disbelief and guilt speared him to the spot. Why? Who? And, you’ve walked in on something. Walk out.
He stared, unable to remove his eyes from this unlikely target. Then he ducked suddenly away, into Silver Place. His eyes did not follow him quite quickly enough: the girl looked up, and fixed on him. It was only for a moment, but it was quite clear. I see you.
He turned to walk on quickly: up, away. Head down. The pavement was warm and the alley stank. Keep going.
It wasn’t that he forgot what he’d seen. He just didn’t believe it. There was a lot going on.
*
Tom did not go to the Fiores’ house on the island when he arrived in Rome. Instead he looked up Carmichael, who was working now at the British Consulate.
‘Ah, you’re back,’ Carmichael said, in what seemed to Tom a rather knowing manner. ‘Good.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tom asked.
‘Well, are you here to save Italy from herself? Or to save your pretty cousin from her Fascist birthright?’
‘Don’t rub it in, old man,’ Tom said. ‘I know why I’m here, I’ve no clue how to go about it, though.’
They met for supper at a little place by Campo dei Fiori. Carmichael brought a friend, a quiet, well-dressed young man who worked in the Vatican. Very quietly and intently, this man, Michele Bertolini, told Tom about his uncle in Florence. The story was brief and bloody. The uncle was a known anti-Fascist. He had been kidnapped and beaten, and blinded. His friends had rescued him, taken him by carts and byways down to the coast and put him on a boat to Sardinia. Nobody had heard from him since.
Tom blinked. Bertolini kept his dark eyes downcast, his slender fingers resting on the edge of the table.
It’s here, Tom thought. It’s real. Look.
‘Was this an official punishment for something?’ he asked, tentatively.
And Bertolini raised his heavy eyes and said, ‘I’m afraid it’s not really like that at the moment. Not if you have the right friends and the right slogans.’
They had other stories too, and Tom listened carefully. Various addresses were mentioned, neighbourhoods where it was best not to go without the party badge on your lapel, things to say or not to say.
‘I don’t know about your school,’ Carmichael said. ‘But it’s rather like school, with no beaks, just the big nasty boy’s gang in charge. And there’s no comeback.’
‘My uncle,’ Tom said, ‘described it much the same way. Only he said the Duce was the leader of a gang so powerful it stopped all the other gangs from fighting between themselves, and so it was a good thing. People could just get on with their lives. And that’s why everyone loves him.’
‘Do you think that?’ Carmichael asked.
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘But I see why people do. Otherwise they’d have to admit that the person they put all their faith in, who made everything right for them, is some kind of monster.’
There was a silence across the table as Bertolini and Carmichael looked at him.
‘So,’ said Carmichael. ‘Are you staying at your uncle’s again this time?’
‘No!’ said Tom. ‘No. I …’
Their gaze was exceptionally straight. It was Carmichael who leaned forward and said, quite gently, ‘because you are going to have to decide,’ and in that phrase Tom saw, in a flash of clarity, that it was real, it was beginning, it was more than his fears, more than his family – and bigger than them too – and that it was going to be a long haul. He closed his eyes for a moment. He thought. It’s clear. It’s right and wrong. It’s simple. But it won’t be easy.
He looked up at them and smiled. ‘Here goes then!’ he said. ‘Johnny, Michele – my family from London are arriving tomorrow – my socialist pacifist war-hero pa, my pretty apolitical ma, and my ridiculous kid sister. My family in Rome are Jewish Fascists, now under threat from the very man to whom they have dedicated their lives. I’m sorry to sound portentous. But which decision am I to make?’
Without hesitation, Bertolini said: ‘You cut them off. They are Fascist.’
‘They are family,’ Tom said. ‘You don’t understand.’
Bertolini dropped his sad scholarly eyes for a moment, and then said, quietly: ‘Yes I do understand.’
Tom looked up at his face: hooded, blank.
‘You cut them off,’ Bertolini said.
‘I can’t,’ Tom said.
Bertolini’s mouth tightened the tiniest bit, like glue drying. ‘If I can,’ he said – and he left it there, as if he couldn’t speak.
‘Oh,’ said Tom. Helplessness loomed in him. Really? he thought. But—
‘I’m going to their house,’ Tom said, ‘and I’m going to make them see sense.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Carmichael said. ‘Only twenty years of solid top-class propaganda to unravel.’
After Bertolini left them, Johnny told Tom that two of Bertolini’s brothers had been involved in the uncle’s disappearance. Tom winced, but said: ‘I have to try though, haven’t I?’
‘Doesn’t matter if you have to or not,’ Carmichael said. ‘You’re going to. And you’re still going to have to choose a side.’
‘I’m on the side of the human, Johnny,’ Tom said.
‘Well just get a move on.’
*
He stayed that night at Johnny’s, sleepless, and went early to the island. Sheepishly, he stood across the piazza watching as they came out and started packing up a little green car: Aldo, Susanna, and two long lanky teenagers with soft black moustaches, the little boys, he thought. No sign of Nenna. All right, he thought, and was about to stride across, a bold Buon giorno! on his lips—
A voice behind him. ‘Eh, Masino.’
He couldn’t stop the smile.
He spun round, and there she was, a quizzical smile on her face, little Marinella clutching her hand. He only had time for the thought I didn’t really think this through, did I, before a swift and deathly drama broke out inside him: his heart ricocheted, helpless, alarmed, and his default English manners swept quickly in to make his face smile, his hand stick out to be shaken and his mouth utter the words, ‘How lovely to see you again, Nenna.’
Jesus, the beauty. Not her being beautiful – though she was. The beauty of her being her.
Her mouth fell open. ‘How lovely to see you too, Tom,’ she said. She put a comical little emphasis on the use of his English name. Tom. Very polite.
I am a fool, he thought. Nenna. Nenna.
Later, he would remember this moment, and how he should have kissed her, swept her over the wall into a waiting boat, hauled her down river to the sea, out and home to safety – her and Marinella too.
*
Everybody was delighted to see him. Time dissolved, past insults had never existed, and all was joy and welcome. And everybody was busy: packing, lugging, closing, locking, forgetting, remembering, arranging, changing arrangements. He caught them just as they were leaving for the lake. The boys would go by bus; there was room for Tom in the car, of course! How not! All the way, Nenna’s leg was against his in the back seat, and Aldo talked loudly about wine-making; when they got out into the country the roads were terrible, and then Aldo insisted on stopping to wait and pick up the boys, which meant a great squash in the back, and on giving them turns at driving, which involved much yelping, instructing, and shrieks of horror and delight, so Nenna and Susanna said they would walk, with Marinella, thank you very much, so Tom said, no of course I will walk, and he walked, with Nenna.
The bastard formality which had frozen him in the piazza would not let him go. He threw glances at her: she had grown tall and fine, physically sleeker, though her stripey mane of hair still sought to escape the control into which she had twisted it. Her skin was sallow, her hands rough, her dark yellow eyes were humorous. She was glad to see him. She teased him for staying away so long, accused him of having grown handsome – and yet he could not speak naturally to her. She made him blush.
Am I just to launch in? Challenge this golden morning with news that her government rejects her? The calmer the dark hills and the blue sky around them, the rustling of the bamboo canes by the stream, the jumpier he felt. He even found himself asking her what she was doing now.
‘Teacher!’ she said. ‘Depending how well I do, either little children, or, I was thinking, history.’
‘And?’ he said.
‘I don’t have my exam results yet. But – I asked my old teacher at school, and he said, “Women cannot teach history”. So I said that I thought I could, and that I would work very hard. And he said, “No, you don’t understand, it’s against the law.”’
‘It is against the law for women to teach history?’ Tom asked, just to be sure.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because women are hysterical and inaccurate, and allow emotion to influence them. History must be pure and factual. There is no room for debate and argument.’
‘Oh,’ said Tom.
‘That is what he said. Very calmly! And it made me think of my father’s argumentative, hysterical friends, of all the men who shout and argue in the cafés and in the streets. And of my quiet mother.’
‘But—’
‘I said that too. But. And my teacher said “There is no room for But.”’
She glanced over to him.
‘This did seem wrong,’ she said.
‘It is wrong,’ he said.
‘But, never mind,’ she said. ‘There’s always a way. Perhaps I will teach some history to the little children …’
‘But Nenna, it’s not fair, or right’ – at which she laughed, and said, ‘Oh you are so sweet,’ and the phrase long haul swept into his head, so he laughed too, and he said: ‘I meant it more in a revolutionary way, fiore, not in a sweet way.’
‘Fiore!’ she said. ‘Are you calling me by my surname like your public schoolboys? Or are you calling me flower?’
‘Both,’ he said. ‘Expressing my respect for your pure factual masculine intellect, and admiration for your beauty.’ And she laughed, so it was a little more like the old days, except, of course, that it wasn’t.
*
On arrival at the lake, everybody was busy again, unpacking, cooking, sweeping, making up the small metal beds. There was no way in, through all this activity. He didn’t know if they’d seen the manifesto. They must have! But if they had, how could they be continuing so oblivious? They must, surely, understand the implications. But they were just – continuing. There was an air around the family, a density, which he didn’t remember and couldn’t break through. It was as if they were all held in orbits and circuits with each other, and space was delineated. The whole universe of it was protected by a membrane, which he was outside. His words and his presence prodded it gently, but no impression was left. Tom could not make the declarations he had been rehearsing. His determination, which had been dissipating since the border, and encouraged by Carmichael and Bertolini, flagged again. Long haul, he murmured again.
Lugging buckets of water from the well for the kitchen, he remembered the acro-bat. Little bats, tucked into their cool dark corners; soft-bellied lizards gloating in the hot sun. It was here that he had decided, years before, that he was going to be a naturalist. And perhaps he would yet. He had had an offer to go in September to Palermo, to help a friend of his tutor to list beetles.
Before lunch they walked to the lake, to sweep the dust and sweat of the journey from their bodies, down the dusty track, towels round their shoulders. Marinella skipped about ahead, squelching and squeaking with her feet when they reached the meadow with its grassy irrigation channels. Nostalgia seized him, and he was momentarily helpless. How could he break all this perfection?
Because it’s not perfect. It only looks it.
Can’t I let it carry on looking it? Until someone else breaks it, or it breaks itself?
*
Aldo was looking splendid in a wilting crown of lakeweed, smoking a Florentine cigarillo after lunch beneath the vine-covered pergola.
‘Only three things good about the Florentines,’ he said, reaching for his hat as the sun moved round. ‘Their cigars, their hats, and their Italian. Oh, and their steaks.’
‘And their painters,’ said Nadine.
‘And their architects,’ murmured Susanna.
‘And their TRIPPE!’ Aldo yelled suddenly to Nenna, to alarm her, or amuse her – it wasn’t clear which. It was their old joke: when she was younger the mere mention of Florentine tripe would make her shriek, because nothing in the world was more horrid, chewy and rubbery and clad in tomato sauce that anywhere else would be delicious but on tripe looked like blood on a dead thing …
‘Tripe, tripe, tripe …’ he chanted now, comically, waggling his eyebrows, and Nenna gratified him with a yelp, and went and hung round his neck. Tom recalled her as a small girl, always sitting on her father’s knee, hiding in his coat, climbing into his pocket, burrowing in under his beard. Aldo used to pick her up and carry her under one arm like a parcel. She seemed to wish he still could.
‘Papà,’ Nenna said, helpless. His presence on the holiday was a luxury. She wrapped her arms round his head, and said again, ‘Papà’.
Tom was silent, watching.
Part of him very much wished that he were a young boy still, and could tell himself that if Aldo thought everything was all right then everything was all right.
But that, he thought, is not true.
Looking at Nenna, as in love with her father as her father was with the Duce, he recognised his way ahead. I will not lie.