The yellow breakdown truck pulls off and halts outside an Agip petrol station bar. Pushing the stiffly sprung door, the driver throws back his blue anorak hood and shakes off the worst of the rain. Behind him come the two of us, bedraggled from the storm, wet through, with limp hair and blank faces, eyes blinking in the neon as if startled out of a troubled night’s sleep.
Head down, with your long dark hair dripping from the rain, you’ve retreated to a corner as far as possible from the counter and customers. And there you’ll stay, your face still wet with tears or the rain, shivering beside the chrome stands where dolls in plastic bags and soft toys for souvenirs are dangling on display.
The breakdown truck driver walks across the marble floor. It’s muddied with the feet of transients through the small hours of this Saturday morning. Reaching the polished counter, he orders and falls into conversation with the few men standing there. Not much to tell: he hadn’t understood what the two young people were trying to say. Someone had pressed a button on the red emergency box beside a crash barrier down the hard shoulder. He’d stepped out of his truck, into the pouring rain. But there wasn’t a car in sight, and the breakdown man was only a mechanic getting through his long night shift.
‘Polizia!’ you had cried. ‘Polizia!’
So the mechanic had slung our wet rucksacks onto the back of his truck, bundled us into its cab, and driven directly to the Agip service station where, yes, he would phone the police. Now he’s asking the barman for use of the phone to make a quick call to the polizia stradale. That’s right, he had found two foreigners alone on the autostrada towards Como at about half past four in the morning. They were soaked to the skin, and there was definitely something wrong because they were saying ‘polizia’ over and over. Then he puts the receiver back into its cradle. The police would drive over to see for themselves.
By the bar, the workmen are starting to stare towards the souvenir stands. You’re still silently shivering in amongst the bric-a-brac, not responding to anything I might try to say, standing stiffly and slightly stooped. Puddles are starting to form about your feet, further muddying the barman’s floor. Here he comes out from among his shelves of bottles and glasses with a mop, wiping clean arcs around him from the counter to the door and back again. Seeing our disarray, he’s left that part of his floor to look after itself.
His phone call finished, the breakdown truck driver has turned to the other men standing at the bar. Now one of those nightshift workers is venturing across the floor towards the reddish smears from the wet clay earth. It’s streaked up the legs of your jeans, and even on the elbows and front of your clothes. The mechanic, it seems, has encouraged this other man to come and find out what the matter could be.
‘Bist du Deutsch? Sprechen sie Deutsch?’
You don’t so much as look up.
‘Inglese,’ I reply.
He shrugs incomprehension.
‘Mia donna …’
‘Sì,’ says the workman, nodding.
But I don’t know how to say it, and stumble over noises in pretended Italian.
‘Cosa?’ says the workman, with a kindly but puzzled expression. Now he’s looking sideways towards you, your head still lowered among the toys. The workman shrugs his shoulders.
Look, this is my hand pointing out into pitch darkness, pointing towards the clatter of September rain on roofs and leaves. Then this is the shape of a gun being pointed, index and middle finger, the barrel, the thumb raised like a cocked trigger.
‘Ah, si, pistola,’ he says. ‘E poi?’
It’s a ghastly game of charades. The nightshift workman gasps, seeming to understand. He looks askance at you again, hunched there amongst the teddy bears with their flexible arms outstretched, your eyes fixed firmly on the barman’s floor.
‘Venite, venite ragazzi,’ he says, gesturing towards the service station counter. The rain is still pouring in the blackness outside. Rivulets are coursing across the plate-glass windows, fusing and dividing as they run. The interested workman crosses towards the glistening chrome surfaces. Looking around as he walks, he waves an arm in a way that clearly means follow—which is what I do, alone. Up at the counter, the barman is busy with his coffee machine and at first takes no notice of these new arrivals. Now he’s pouring drinks into short glasses and talking with his regulars. Finally, one of the workmen directs his attention towards me standing there, a bedraggled boy with dripping wet hair drawn back from his face. The mirrored wall behind the barman’s back is lined with brightly labeled bottles; bits of a suntanned English face are reflected between their curves and variously coloured contents.
‘Due caffè, per favore.’
‘Corretti?’ asks the barman.
Correct?
‘Sì, sì.’
‘Sissy,’ the barman says, parodying my impure vowels. Then, after producing the two espressos, he adds a measure of brandy into each of the small white cups lined up on his freshly wiped bar.
There are a few loose coins in my damp trouser pockets. I slide them onto the counter, gulp the coffee down, and take yours over to the souvenir stands. You’re shivering still with your arms clasped about you, long straight dark hair parted in the middle but falling forward and closing around the head to hide your features. A few traces of the red mud cling in the lank brown strands. You’re wearing my shapeless, crumpled summer jacket, its shoulders and back darkened from the soaking. Other night workers and travellers are swiveling round and glancing towards you. They’re talking about those ragazzi inglesi, making guesses about what must have happened outside in the rain. You sip at the coffee, holding the small white cup near your face with both hands.
The polizia stradale pull up outside and two uniformed men step in. One is carrying a short carbine with a wooden butt. Now they too are trying, with the aid of the German-speaking workman, to discover what the matter can be. Only they aren’t able to hear anything they might understand, just the loud noise of a raised voice speaking a language that none of them knows. But the two traffic policemen can gather from the breakdown truck driver and assorted bystanders that this is none of their business. Nothing about what’s occurred sounds like a motoring offence. Quite simply it will have to be reported to the Questura in Como.
How can this policeman not be concerned about what has happened out there in the rain? What are the police for here, if not to investigate crime? Yet it’s not the policeman’s job to explain for our benefit, and explain in English, that Italy has half a dozen, entirely independent categories of police. Now here in front of your face comes a waggling thumb.
‘Autostop?’
No, it is none of their business. The senior of the two will have to spell it out.
‘La polizia,’ he begins saying slowly and loudly, ‘più vicina … è … a Como … dovete … andare … a Como … ragazzi.’
Then he turns his attention to you. Your arms remain held across your breasts, hands clutching your sides as if doing the best you can literally to pull yourself together.
‘Coraggio! Coraggio!’ he says, resting a large hand for an instant on your shoulder. At which you visibly stiffen. The two policemen turn, step out into the watery early morning light, and are gone towards their blue squad car parked by the door. In they climb, and drive away.
‘Courage?’ I gasp. ‘And would somebody like to tell me how we’re supposed to get to Como? Hitch-hike?’
Momentarily, you look up. You’re standing a slight distance from me, your state made worse by the policemen’s visit. But that considerate workman has foreseen this difficulty too. He’s leading somebody across from the small crowd gathered by the bar. This man in a light blue overall is a pump attendant at the petrol station and will be driving into town at the end of his shift. So the thing is to wait until the attendant clocks off, pointing at his watch, then he’ll drive into Como, turning an invisible steering wheel with his hands, and make a detour by way of the Questura. The what?
‘Polizia?’
‘Sì … polizia.’
At regular intervals other workmen and drivers come in from the road. They glance around and catch a glimpse of you huddled among the dolls and bears, me standing helplessly beside you. These newcomers appear to think nothing of it. Buying their refreshments, now they’re being filled in by the barman or a customer about whatever our story is supposed to be.
They don’t seem surprised, turning around to take another look at us standing over here. It’s as if this sort of thing happens all the time. This nonchalant attention, added to the policeman’s consoling gesture, is piling on your agony. It almost begins to seem worse, even worse than what had taken place out in the dark. The safety of some neon light and the company of those others from the small hours has been so quickly transformed into a purgatory of curiosity—as if we’re already dead, come back to haunt the scenes of our last moments like a pair of unappeasable revenants. It feels like being the blurred black-and-white photos of car accident victims in the Sunday morning editions.
Back turned to them now, standing between you and the bar, I’m making an attempt to shield you from those customers’ eyes. Underneath your thin summer clothes, my damp red-smeared jacket, and the flowery smock you made yourself, your body quivers and quivers. The nightshift might come off around six-thirty. And it’s just after five-fifteen by the bar’s electric clock. The best part of an hour has passed already. Like a compulsive hand-washer, whenever there’s a lull the barman comes out with the mop and attacks his muddy floor. Outside, the rain has begun to ease. A row of Lombardy poplars is forming itself from the blackness, swaying slightly in the middle ground, with an outline of mountains starting vaguely to sketch itself onto the far distance. What promises to be a warm early autumn day begins to lighten through the bar’s glass panels, a landscape’s routine emergence from the dark …
Now the Agip employee is walking out to his Fiat parked beyond the petrol pumps. The air felt chill and fresh across the drying asphalt as we followed him. Car windows down to get the pleasure of this refreshingly cooled atmosphere, he set off without a word. Dawn was lightening on the road. That storm of the early hours had rinsed the sky. Distances stood out pellucid and near. A town came into sight around the wide curve of the lake’s edge. Lines of cable cars led up sheer inclines to the levels of houses and villas high above its glistening water. The streets were almost empty, silent but for the occasional roar of a car, or the clatter of a shutter being raised.
Finally, the mechanic pulled up at a curb. Was this Como? So which one of those nondescript buildings would be the police station?
‘È quella là, la Questura,’ he said.
The mechanic was pointing towards a dusty-grey frontage with barred and meshed windows, on the opposite side of the street. Treated with a generous indifference by the man in the light blue overalls, still I felt a relief in having climbed out of his car, to have removed our rucksacks from its boot and stood away.
‘Auguri … e buon viaggio,’ the man said.
At the street’s edge, undulating tarmac flaked into recently coagulated dirt. The doors of the Questura di Como were firmly locked and with no sign of life inside. A film of grime covered the grilled windows. It was nowhere near eight o’clock—which was the time a notice announced the building would be open.
‘Let’s try and find something to eat,’ I suggested.
You looked up at me a second time. A few yards ahead the road began to widen. Not much further, a side street appeared to lead off to the left. Some distance down, on the right, a pile of chairs was stacked against the wall.
‘That looks like it might be a café. Why don’t we try down there?’
‘If you like.’
The place looked dingy, but quiet and anonymous—like a good place to hide. Its door wasn’t locked, though there seemed to be no one inside. A sharp tang of floor disinfectant suffused the air. Then came the usual hesitation between the vulnerable feeling of staying outside, and the fear of being caught in some impossible situation. But, as if in response to my anxious peering, a middle-aged woman appeared from a passage behind the bar. The skin around her eyes was tightly wrinkled and discoloured. She was emptying impacted coffee grounds from the café’s red and silver Gaggia machine.
The woman hadn’t said a word, which probably meant it was all right to stay. You didn’t wait to find out. Making your way between the chairs and tables to a place in the far corner, you dropped the grey pack on the floor and sat down. Smears of the same reddish clay mud were visible all over the rucksack, and on the frayed ends of your jeans; similar encrusted traces of the night were mottling my trouser legs, and the tan desert boots I’d bought in Florence.
‘What shall I get you?’
‘A hot chocolate,’ you replied.
‘That’s a good idea. How about a brioche? They’ve got some by the look of it.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ you murmured. ‘My stomach’s not feeling that well.’
Rehearsing the phrase in my head, I crossed the café to where the woman was putting things into a case on the bar.
‘Due cioccolate, e un brioche, per favore.’
The proprietress had her hair in curlers under a floral headscarf. She pointed to the transparent container that opened on the customer’s side. It displayed a few doughnuts, croissants, and biscuits.
After what seemed like forever the two hot chocolates were placed on her wooden bar top. At the table with its red gingham cloth, barely raising the cup from its saucer, you drank in slow, loud sips—the rain-despoiled hair in fronds like cypress trees about your face, a face in shadow.
Giving all my money to you had been such a stupid mistake. As if putting myself at your mercy could have possibly been a token of trust. That way I had seemed to make the promise, but you would have to keep it. If only we’d gone into any of the restaurants whose menus we studied that day. It was just a few minutes after not going in that last one when everything went horribly wrong, and then worse and worse in a helpless slide. Why didn’t I just insist on staying at a hotel in Rome till the trains were running again? If only I hadn’t got into the back.
Those loud sipping noises at an end, you put the drained cup down. Drinking like that was a thing that always managed to get under my skin, and despite what had happened in the last four hours it was painfully upsetting to feel it once again. Now your speechlessness sank in to me like a mute rebuke. What was there to say that might ease or appease you? What was there to say at all? Brought together in adversity, or driven apart by it, now the worst thing that would ever happen to me—it had happened to you.
After quite some while lost in tangles of thoughts like those, with both our chocolates finished on the gingham, I finally managed to say something.
‘We needn’t wait for the police station to open, need we? We could just try and get to Switzerland somehow, and there’ll be trains.’
But you looked up at me in blank astonishment.
‘No,’ you said. ‘It has to be reported.’
‘But why put yourself through even more? What good would it do?’
‘What is it with you? Don’t you understand? If he gets away with it this time … don’t you see?’
So that was how you would do the right thing in the circumstances, whatever came of it. Since you could never guarantee the results of your actions, and people always blamed the social worker, the only course was to do what you believed to be right. Not that I thought anything like this at the time, feeling even more crushed by what seemed my cowardice in the suggestion that we go straight home. Leaving the table, going up to settle the bill, I felt myself retreating towards the woman at the bar. Now the proprietress was announcing a price. Then there was the usual fumbling to match what the woman had said with a tiny bundle of dirty coloured paper. Muttering the word ‘moneta’, she handed back five caramels and a piece of chewing gum for change.
At a distance, on the far side of the road from the Questura, we stood waiting. Then, finally, someone appeared. He was wearing what looked like a fireman’s uniform, but without the helmet. Approaching the heavy wooden doors of the Questura, the custodian unlocked them and stepped inside. We remained still a moment, then, picking up our rucksacks, crossed the road and paused at the entrance while I tried once more to decipher its public notice.
‘Go on, just open the door.’
The building’s central entrance let onto a waiting room with a grilled reception cubicle immediately opposite. There were doors on either side of it. All round the room were dark-varnished wooden benches. Its walls had been painted a deep matt green, but, nevertheless, there were scuff marks of soles clearly visible at the floor angle, the signs of recalcitrant suspects perhaps.
You sat down on one of the benches. The officer had taken up his place inside the cubicle. He must have cut himself shaving that morning: a minute piece of tissue paper remained attached to his chin by the tiny circular bloodstain on his jaw.
‘Buon giorno. Dica.’
‘Polizia? Parlare … con la polizia … per favore?’
After looking into the foreign face, the man spoke and must have been asking why we needed the police. But receiving by way of reply no more than an embarrassed shake of the head, he must have been trying to explain that we needed to wait, in response to which there came neither reply nor movement. So the uniformed man was obliged to jab a finger firmly towards the benches where you were already sitting against those dark green walls.
A clock above the grilled aperture moved slowly round with stubborn shudders. At some distance down a corridor, behind one of the two doors opposite, came the sound of another door banging. Then through the entrance, somebody arrived for work. He greeted and spoke briefly with the custodian in his cubicle. Now it was happening at shorter and shorter intervals. Before disappearing through one of the doors, each new arrival would glance momentarily over towards us sitting there. The clacking of their leather soles resounded along the marble passages that extended beyond those doors.
Did the uniformed man understand what we needed? When he spoke with the other men arriving for work, was the custodian even mentioning our existence? We would just have to wait and see.
‘Seguitemi, ragazzi,’ said a stocky man in his mid thirties, a plain-clothes detective whose gesture beckoned towards the left-hand door. We followed him along a narrow passageway with offices off to the left and a faded red carpet. Then the detective invited us into a small room crammed with wooden desks, heavy black phones, big grey typewriters, and filing cabinets. On the desks were dark sunglasses; overflowing ashtrays; pink newspapers filled with sports reports … Half a dozen large policemen, mostly in shirtsleeves, were lolling against the walls, slumped in swivel chairs, or casually perched on the edges of desks. An acrid smell of stubbed-out cigarettes assailed my nostrils.
‘Avete carte d’identità o passaporti, per favore?’
From an inside pocket came the blue booklet with its gold lettering. The detective began to leaf over the pages, stopping first at the one that said it remained the property of Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom and might be withdrawn at any time. Then he opened the page that asked those to whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary. Finally, he found the page with the personal details. There was the photograph of a seventeen-year-old boy in a black school blazer. His unwashed strands were tucked back behind the ears to avoid compulsory haircuts. There were traces of acne above the bridge of the nose. He had a peculiarly pouting mouth caused by the need to suppress an urge to giggle at the photographer’s fuss and palaver. The detective glanced into the face of the bedraggled twenty-two-year-old standing in front of him just to confirm that they were one and the same person. They were.
Rummaging in your rucksack’s front pocket, there you found the official piece of paper, issued by the British Consulate in Rome not twenty-four hours before, valid for one journey only: a return to the British Isles. The detective who asked for the documents opened a drawer in the heavy wooden desk, took out a form and inserted it into the Olivetti typewriter. He would mispronounce a detail from the papers, turn, receive a nod, and type the details onto the form with just one fleshy finger. He was making mistakes. Neither of us corrected him. As the letters of your family address were being stamped into the thin white sheet of paper by the typewriter keys, your face appeared a mask of homesickness and longing. There you stood, the personification of a desire to be removed at once from that place and returned, against the dictates of distance and time, into somewhere warm and secure, somewhere like your own bed in the family home beside the Solent. But you would not die, not for now anyway, nor, for that matter, be changed into a nightingale. Yes, you would undergo the physical examination. It could be no worse than what you’d already endured.
When the detective finished his typing and handed back the documents, another older-looking man took over. Then he must have asked you to tell him what happened. You were trying your best, first in a smattering of high school French —
‘Nous sommes venus ici par la pousse … et à l’heure du quatre du matin … quelqu’un …’
Perhaps the detective didn’t know the language or couldn’t fathom your accent, because he shook his head and turned to one of his colleagues.
‘Cosa dice?’
‘Non lo so.’
‘Qui c’è qualcuno che parla Inglese?’
‘Penso di no.’
‘Beh, devo trovare un interprete.’
The detective picked up the phone and spoke quickly into its dark shell. As he returned the receiver to its cradle, he began again chatting with those around him. He was half-sitting, half-leaning on the edge of the desk, one leg swinging nonchalantly. After some minutes the phone rang and the same detective listened, the receiver balanced between his ear and hunched shoulder.
‘Squadra volante, Como,’ he said. ‘Si, si.’
Then he pointed towards a second handset on the desk nearby. One of the other detectives picked it up and offered it to you.
This was how the exchanges went. First the detective standing beside you would ask a question:
‘C’era un atto sessuale completo, con penetrazione ed eiculazione?’
Then you would hear an adaptation of the phrase:
‘Would you tell him if the sex act was complete; if the man achieved complete intercourse and an orgasm?’
And I heard you answer: ‘Yes.’
‘Il consenso per quest’atto era estorto con minaccia o violenza?’
‘Did the man use threats or force to be permitted to do this act?’
‘Yes, he threatened us with a gun.’
‘Si, l’uomo lì ha minacciati con una pistola … e in quale luogo si sono verificati questi fatti?’
‘And where did these events take place?’
‘In his car.’
‘Nella sua macchina.’
Then you remembered we had tried to memorize the car’s number plate.
‘The number plate …’
‘La targa della macchina …’
The detective leant towards a note-pad lying on the table.
‘Do you remember what it was?’ You turned and asked me.
‘MI653420 … or possibly 4320.’
So you repeated it to the voice in the receiver.
The translator said the numbers in Italian. Then the detective spoke again.
‘Tipo della macchina?’
‘A dirty beige Ford Escort,’ I said, and remembered one more detail. ‘There was a World Cup football in the boot.’
‘Cosa?’ said the detective, and you repeated that fact.
‘Un pallone dei mondiale di calcio nel bagagliaio.’
‘E l’uomo?
‘Could you describe the man?’
You glanced around once more, inviting further help from my memory.
‘Yes: he was short, dark-haired, fairly thin, with a small moustache, and he was wearing a dark red tie …’
You repeated the details into the mouthpiece then added:
‘… and he’d been drinking.’
When the detective had all the information he needed, he thanked the interpreter at the other end of the line and replaced the receiver. Now he was speaking to a colleague at his elbow. The other man immediately telephoned to what must have been the offices in Milan where vehicles were registered. His sentences contained the possible numbers and make of car. More details were jotted down on the desk pad. The detective nearby suddenly pulled open a drawer, took out a large black automatic pistol, a magazine and handful of bullets, assembled the clip, pushed it into the handle, and inserted the gun into a shoulder holster under his light-weight shiny grey jacket. He closed the desk, announced something to the others, and immediately two of them left the office. They appeared to be almost in a hurry.
You were preparing yourself for the physical examination you supposed would be required to substantiate your story, but none of the policemen had even so much as mentioned the possibility. And now the uniformed man from reception was showing us out of their office.
‘I can’t believe this,’ you said. ‘What’s happening now?’
The uniformed man led the way back down the green corridor past those other doors and over the threadbare carpet weave on which the detectives walked each day with their suspects and criminals, victims and informants. Then the more senior plain-clothes officer appeared. He was explaining rapidly but with expressive gestures that we were free to go. Now you really were astonished. But it did seem as if the police would escort us to the border, still a distance to the northwest somewhere.
‘Fino a Svizzera?’
In response, the uniformed man stepped into the bright morning air and pointed to the right, along an avenue.
‘La corriera per Chiasso si ferma lì,’ he said.
‘So now we have to take a bus!’ you exclaimed, seeing where his finger had pointed.
Alone together once again, we set off in the direction of a post in the crumbling road—the sign for where the bus should stop. Family greengrocers, butchers, tobacconists and cafés were beginning to open; displays of produce, tables and chairs were arranged on the pavement edge. These businesses seemed precariously close to the flow of traffic, cars and lorries mostly travelling north. Housewives wearing headscarves were setting about their chores, dropping in and out of tiny shops, the places so modest it seemed impossible they could ever keep going. Older men sat with drained cups and newspapers, or absently scanned the familiar street. I could hear the hiss of a coffee machine. It scented the drowsy air. This one was called a Jolly Bar.
There at the far end of summer, evidently on our way home to Germany, we must have looked to anyone who cared to examine us as if we’d had quite enough of Italy and would be glad to return to school or work or college. The sun was dispersing the last of the morning’s early mist that shimmered across the expanse of Como’s lake. Some attenuated cloud was drifting above the steep mountain slopes. Along fenced-in wharves jutting into the water, powerboats and yachts were moored. The outboard motor of a fishing craft could be heard spluttering into life. A first steamer was approaching the shore.
Finally, a yellow bus appeared amidst the traffic. At the last minute, it halted by the post where we were standing. The bus was crowded round the entrance and the automatic doors closed so quickly they caught your rucksack, leaving half of it protruding from the bus. Some passengers had noticed this disaster and were smiling by way of consolation, trying to attract the driver’s attention. Doubtless there was the usual sign that expressly forbade doing this while the bus was in motion. Anyway the driver took no notice, and only when he pulled up at the next stop could your damp sack be retrieved from the door.
You were gazing intently at the footprint-grimy floor of the bus, whose motion impinged in the form of legs and shoes on the pavement, passed at speed as the vehicle accelerated. The bus was taking a road that led northwards beside Lake Como and up towards the border. Early risers had loaded surfboards on to roof racks and were motoring out for a day by the shore. Now the bus was travelling along a winding road, mist plumes rising from the woodlands, slowing through almost deserted ports, past advertising signs, furniture warehouses, pizzerias, bars, telegraph and power lines. At furthest distance, through the thinly layered cloud, white tops reached above, their crevices etched with last night’s snow. Then the Alps were emerging, and, with them, Switzerland: thick pines and outcrops of rock interspersed with tiny mountain villages, their small inns by the roadside, fairy-tale castles perched on precipices, a fogginess hanging in the highest branches of fir trees.
Across the frontier there’d be no rail strike. Trans-European expresses would be starting out for Paris. We would probably arrive at the Gare du Lyon and have to go by Metro to the Gare du Nord. Once there, boat trains would be leaving for one of the channel ports and then Dover, then London and home at last.
The bus was slowing to a halt within sight of the border. Everyone was picking up bags and descending. We made to follow them, shouldering rucksacks and walking with the other passengers across the frontier into Chiasso. As we went through, a customs official, or perhaps a policeman, smiled and pointed out the way to the station. Coaches of a train were rushing above as we entered its booking hall. The indicator board announced that an express for Paris would be leaving within the next half an hour. I tried to buy some tickets with the Italian money kept back for just this purpose, but the booking clerk behind her grille would not accept the currency.
Still, there wasn’t the least problem finding a Wechsel-Cambio-Change place near the station: Chiasso was a town full of banks. The exchange rate and commission charges were better not thought about. But we didn’t have a choice. So I queued at a till and asked to get the minimum required converted into Swiss Francs. The narrow slot under its sheet of armoured glass was like nothing so much as a bocca della verità, but with yet more misunderstandings to bore the official for whom it was just another ordinary day.
We passed the barrier and descended the underground walk that led towards the platform. Climbing the dusty steps together, your eyes were fixed it seemed on some distant, different memory. With the holiday in ruins all about us, I was feeling sorry, blankly staring at your squashed, misshapen pack, borrowed for those weeks in Italy, thickly encrusted with that same red mud.
We had both kept looking back through the rain-speckled window of the breakdown truck’s cab to make sure our belongings, thrown against a crane outside, amongst its forest of orange cones, weren’t about to fall off and be lost on the rain-soaked road.
Platform Three was to the right at the steps’ head, and it was deserted. There in the silence a white cloud floated above the empty railway lines. You let your sack fall to the dusty ground. Then, collapsing with relief at having reached this place of safety, you began to shake once more—but now with silent sobs as well. Standing beside you, with my shoulders pinned back by the narrow canvas straps, arms hanging uselessly, I could do no more than slightly raise my hands, palms inward. Only you were too overwhelmed by your own wretchedness to notice that gesture which might have been of care, intercession, exhaustion, or even something resembling remorse.
Coaches that would make up the Paris train were being shunted towards the platform. Immediately they halted we climbed aboard and found an empty compartment. The first thing you did was step over to the window, lowering the blinds and then sitting down with your back to the
engine. Then you turned and opened the flap of your rucksack, placed on the seats as a deterrent against other
passengers who might think to come in. The buckles
undone and strings untied, you fished among the carefully folded wad of your possessions. Searching around in there, you drew out a toiletries bag and change of clothes.
‘Watch our things,’ you said, ‘while I go and have a wash.’
You slid the stiff compartment door open, stepped into the corridor, glanced around to find the nearest lavatory, and then set off to the right.
I could imagine you sensing the faint draughts of cold air below, washing yourself all over in that confined space, rinsing the dried red mud from between your toes, and taking the morning’s pill from its silver card, baffled by the fact that the flying squad hadn’t felt they needed to examine you. While you may have been doing these things, I sat gazing absently from the express train window. Petals of marigolds in pots were fluttering by the ochre-washed wall of a station building. A railway employee went past spearing litter and placing it in a black plastic bag. Then the silences and quarrels of those two weeks in Italy began to tumble out once more.
On our very first Sunday morning in the country, dropped off by the main road from Brunik heading south, we had all but given up thumbing and simply stood bickering beside the curb.
‘Just leave me alone!’ you had shouted. ‘God, I’m going home. The first town we get to I’m taking the train.’
‘But you can’t do that: the travellers’ cheques are all in your name.’
‘Well, that was your brilliant idea,’ you came straight back. ‘I’m going to cross this road and get a lift into town and change them all at the first bank I find. You can have yours and then, I mean it, I’ll get a train out of here.’
‘But do we really have to, now that we’ve come this far?’
Which was when an open-topped saloon veered over and offered a ride. The Austrian couple in the back squashed up and all six of us made the last part of their drive from Stockholm along the swerving autostradas as far as Florence. They were from Carinzia and heading for Amalfi, where the Swedish currency earned in a Saab factory would keep them in comfortable hotels till the end of September.
‘So tell me, now, do you have any idea if this is the road to Rome?’
That was as we climbed towards Fiesole two days later.
‘Well, for God’s sake, just ask someone, will you?’
And Piazza Navona, the sun at its zenith, would forever be associated with a fight about whether we could afford one more ice cream. The very next day, somewhere down near the Tiber, tired and hungry, we were fussing about a suitable restaurant. I was feeling too timid to ask did they do a tourist menu. Had it started because we’d stopped talking to each other?
‘Oh please just do something,’ you complained. ‘Tell me why does it always have to be me?’
Exasperated, I had walked on ahead, leaving you to catch up in the heat. It was only a few minutes later, not exactly sure where we were, wandering along a narrow street with high blank walls on either side, you walking on the outside, that the terrible sequence began. I should have been on the street side of you, I realized now. Why didn’t I guess why the Vespa with the two boys on it was revving up behind? We were terribly tired and hungry—too wrapped up in what was not going right between us. Being robbed like that was a daily occurrence. It could have happened to anyone. It happened to you.
Now, in a green dress with tiny red flowers printed on it, like poppies in an early summer cornfield, you stepped back into the compartment. Your legs below the knee were both bruised. You held out towards me a bundle of clothes.
‘Do something with these for me, will you?’
Outside the compartment, the door closed, wondering what to do with them, I was carrying your jeans with the frayed ends, stringy and damp; a small pair of pants; your pale blue blouse with a button hole badly ripped at the front; and a crumpled white bra.
Stepping down from the carriage, I looked to the left and right. At the far end of the platform, knots of points and sidings snaked away beyond the station, its signal
boxes and trackside huts. The trees’ scorched leaves hardly stirred in the glittering air. Then taking a few quick paces, I thrust the bundle deep into a half-full rubbish bin at the platform’s head.
Back in the compartment, a nun was picking fluff from her habit, a spindly old man in a trilby had settled himself by the door, and an overweight matron with two noisy toddlers was unpacking some plastic bags of
refreshments and finding a handful of comics to keep the blond, mop-headed infants entertained. These would be our nightlong companions. Undeterred by the blinds or the scattered baggage, they had asked if there were places free and taken up their positions.
Put out that we wouldn’t be able to lie across the seats and get some rest alone, I lifted the rucksacks onto the racks provided, first taking out a book to read. The fat mother leaned across and raised one of the blinds. The narrow space with those people had made it impossible to speak.
Now with a jolt the train was in motion. Opposite me, your eyes were shut and your head had slid over to be cushioned by the compartment wall. Your dress lay crumpled from long folding against the skin of your body, shaken slightly as all were by the movement of the wheels. You opened your eyes, aware that we were moving. Far too late, I attempted to give you a warm and tender look. But you immediately curled back into the seat to rest once more.
Asleep, all tension seemed to flow from your body, to be painted across the landscape which unfolded and rolled up beyond the carriage window—for the rest of that day through the St Gothard Pass. Tiny hamlets were
constructed in patches of steep but cultivated land, the surrounding forest so thick no sunlight could penetrate it, great crags obtruding from the slopes. Narrow pathways twined around and up above. They would catch my eye a moment and be gone, replaced by columns of smoke rising from hidden chimneys or farmer’s fires.
The train trundled on through precipitous pasture with rugged cows cropping where they could, inaudible tinkling bells on leather straps around their necks. There were herds of goats. A wiry deep-tanned farmer waved to the coaches from his byre. Moment by moment, your head would slip forward on the green-padded carriage wall. You would be woken by the jolting over points, or discomfort of your
position, would look blankly at me reading, draw your head back to the upright of the seat, and shut your eyes to sleep.
Your oval full face, its small mouth drawn tight and hair limp from the crown, rocked gently from side to side on the column of your neck as if it were saying ‘No’ over and over. I tried to sleep too, but, my eyes closed, the sounds and glimpses would come out of the dark—and with them the series of what ifs and if onlys, the should we haves, and might have beens that I couldn’t then begin to unravel. The only way to keep them at a distance was to stare and stare at the page below. When you awoke, you would have been able to make out, upside down, it was Florentine Painters of the Renaissance that appeared so absorbing, my eyes enlarged behind the thick lenses, reading page after page, retaining nothing at all, yet seeming entirely lost to you in art.
You had eased yourself backwards in the seat and stretched out your legs. It was night outside and somewhere in central France. The shadowy reflections of the compartment’s inhabitants, people attempting to get some sleep, were only just more visible than the phantom countryside beyond. From time to time a gathering of lights would promise the outskirts of Paris. Looking up from a discussion of tactile values, I would find the lamps dispersing in countryside and darkness yet once more.
Framed in the panel above your head was a black and white photograph of a French chateau. It had thick, crenellated towers with pointed tiled roofs and dominated its valley from the summit of a small, steep hill. Around its walls were the roofs of a village grown up in the castle’s shadow. The foreground contained a lake, glistening, still and silent under glass. Looking into that picture, I could feel the tiredness and ache of more than thirty-six hours without sleep taking hold. Over and over on that journey through the night, you would seem to blink awake. As I looked across to try and offer a smile of sympathy, you would close your eyes and leave me to the blurred, swimming pages of my book.