Читать книгу The Water-Breather - Ben Faccini - Страница 11

Once on the ferry, the oil-salt smell of the car deck clouded with car fumes, the sound of motors and creaking chains, and the gentle rock of waves get Giulio going. He complains that he’s feeling sick and Ama can’t answer because she can feel it too, a slow vertigo taste that rises from the stomach to lodge in the throat. Pado is convinced ‘it’s all in the mind’. He takes us on a tour of the duty-free shop to pass the time. Giulio is wavering. He can barely walk straight. Pado scoops him up and, as he does so, a stream of sick flies out of Giulio’s mouth. It drips down Pado’s front like a tie and onto the floor. Ama hurries to the cash till to ask for some tissues. She fights against the same lurching, retching urge in her mouth. She stops on a bench and breathes in deeply.

Pado is holding Giulio by the back of his jumper, out in front of him, at arm’s length. ‘Che schifo! Oh no! No! Bloody hell,’ he grumbles, half sorry, half irate. He turns his head away to avoid the smell. Already people are changing direction. A woman with grey hair gingerly steps out of the way and sighs something to herself.

‘Sorry, what did you say? Something wrong?’ Pado hurls at her. She backs away, aghast. Pado pursues her down the corridor, carrying Giulio with him, dangling in mid air, from his sagging jumper. ‘Go on!’ Pado shouts at the woman, ‘if you’ve got something to say, say it. Go on, if you dare, ma va …!’ Giulio swings, crying. He hangs limply above the ground, pushing with his legs against Pado’s arm to get down. Ama staggers to her feet.

‘Put the child down,’ she shrieks at Pado. Then it seems as if all the people on the ferry spin round and watch us, everything stopping, no one but us, perched alone on the sea.

Giulio is sick again. It splatters against the floor and slides with the rock of the ship, this way and that. Pado turns to face the glares. ‘Cosa, what? What is it?’

Ama snatches Giulio from Pado and holds him tight to her chest. She cuddles his head against her. ‘It’s all right my darling, calm down! How are you feeling?’ Giulio shivers a little, a ring of multicoloured sick printed on his lips, and on Ama’s shirt. Pado has got into an argument with one of the stewards. His shouting competes with the noise of the loudspeakers. Ama suddenly grabs me by the arm too and drags me off to find the cabins, with Giulio draped across her shoulder. ‘Come on, get a move on!’

I try and tell Duccio where we’re going. I wave and point down the corridor in front of us, urging him to get a move on. He can’t though, he’s guarding the luggage, a heap of leather and cloth shapes, as high as him.

‘Hang on! What about Pado?’ I say, running beside Ama.

‘Well hopefully he won’t bloody find us!’

We settle in our cabin. We each get a bunk-bed, except Giulio, who has to sleep in the middle, on the floor, in a nest of blankets and jumpers. Ama puts a bowl next to him, in case. We can hear the drinking crowds, with heavy feet, drumming the decks. The pinball machines throw up money and children run, falling between adult legs. From inside the cabin, it sounds like pots and pans knocking in a kitchen cupboard. Pado and Duccio show up, towing the luggage behind them along the corridors. They stack it up next to Giulio on the floor. Pado drops Ama’s bag onto the end of her bunk. It’s a shiny bag she got free from a department store. Pado reckons that’s typically English liking something just because it’s free. The problem with that, Ama argues, is that she’s always typically something when it suits Pado: typically English, typically French, typically Slovenian, typically Dutch. Anyway she’s convinced Pado is typically Italian, even if the mix with the Sicilian bit, she says, has managed to make him look Arabic.

Ama’s bag is splitting at the seams with things although Pado is always telling her to travel with the strict minimum, especially clothes. In fact, he says, you only ever need two of everything because you can wash one item whilst you wear the other. It doesn’t happen that way because Ama has piles of clothes she buys when waiting for Pado to leave his meetings and conferences. The car is barely big enough to hold them all and Pado has to scatter them everywhere to pack the boot, knickers scrunched under the spare tyre, tights between pages of reports, trousers and skirts rolled down the sides of bags. Ama intervenes from time to time: ‘No, don’t put that under that, it’ll crumple’ or ‘I need to be able to get at that later!’ There’s no reply. A bit like when you lean over into the front seats and ask: ‘How much further?’ Then there’s silence. Ama’s bag is also brimming with little bundles of antiseptic wipes in plastic coating. She has kilometres of dental floss too. Before going to bed, she hands out the floss, a good length to each of us to begin sawing at our gums. She’s sure there must be a bit of food stuck somewhere, lost between the back teeth, rubbing against the tongue, refusing to give. Then Ama has her books, lots of them. They are stashed beneath her clothes. She has at least five on the go at once, mostly French and English novels. That’s what she’s always read, ever since she was a child and Grand Maurice lent her new books each day. The two of them would spend hours reading out passages, comparing impressions. Then, as we started travelling, they would write long letters to each other, quoting lines, discussing endings. Now Ama sits up alone at night and reads whilst the rest of us doze off. She has a pocket lamp and it skips up and down the lines across the bed and into the dark with tense flicks of the wrist. Sometimes, we see her in the morning, half asleep, half awake, a book caught between her thumb and forefinger, as if the weight of the story has forced her to give up.

In Pado’s case are reviews and reports bound together with wide clips and bold red writing: ‘Embargo’, ‘Confidential’ or ‘Draft’. He leafs through them, making annotations, or catching Ama’s eye to read a passage about a clinical trial and ask for the exact translation in Italian. Ama invents a word for him, the way she does when she can’t sleep, new words to lift her away, heal the worries, pack the empty spaces of the night. She spins off idioms, chases unknown verbs, multiplies and conjugates the languages in her mind. That’s why all Pado’s colleagues ask for Ama’s translations. She knows what’s behind a phrase, the meaning that everyone is searching for but cannot find. Pado cannot dwell on translation though. There’s no time to waste. If he doesn’t analyse his reports and trials quickly, people across the world might start taking new medicines without realising that their lungs are being colonised by cysts and disease.

When we’ve rummaged through our bags and flossed our teeth, we all begin getting our beds ready, trying to make head or tail of the flimsy bunk sheets and the rock-hard pillows. Ama gives up. She’s not going to sleep anyway and doesn’t really care. The captain’s voice comes over on the loudspeakers.

‘I wish that stronzo would shut the hell up,’ Pado murmurs half asleep. I strain to hear what is being said above the locking cabin doors and stamping corridors.

Duccio looks at me. ‘I bet you there’s going to be another storm.’

Why did he say that? Eventually the captain’s voice trails off into an alarm noise: ‘If you hear this sound, get out of your cabin immediately, leaving any belongings behind, and make your way to the nearest lifeboat station.’

I listen to the three test blasts of the emergency alarm. They stab at me, dig deep inside, indelible reminders. Three short sharp slashes of panic.

I am uncomfortable. My left foot is poking out of the sheet and blanket, and every time I feel a wave knocking at the boat, I’m sure it’s a piece of jagged driftwood. The ferry mows over it and we all drink and sleep and run along the corridors not knowing that the wood is swinging its way round the motors to smash a hole in the hull to sink us. I quickly stick my head in the pillow and think of something else. Then I awake with the sound of waves again and stare into the bunks. Pado is grinding his teeth, his jaw twitching. Everyone is asleep, even Ama! I struggle out of bed and check, up close. I stand there looking at her. Her nostrils are moving softly. There is a faint band of light across her cheek from the torch she is still clutching in her hand. I study the fine lines under her eyes which, she says, grow a little deeper every night she can’t sleep. I watch the hem of the sheet flutter slightly with her breath. I can’t believe it. She really is asleep! I delve into Pado’s bag. I get his camera and position myself near the door. The flash goes off and Ama sits bolt upright. She knocks her head on the bunk above and shouts for the light. I scramble for my bed.

Ama is screeching: ‘You idiot, espèce de crétin!’ and I’m crying because she has to be really angry to shout at me in French, even if I was trying to help her by proving that she might have been asleep. Everyone is awake now and telling me I’m stupid. Ama looks weary. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping after all. Maybe she’s never slept. Not ever. Closing your eyes doesn’t mean anything. That’s only resting, but the mind goes on and on, pleading for a second, just a second of sleep, to soothe the swelling of continual waking and thoughts. I lay my head against the sheet and crease its whiteness with my toes.

The night seems interminable now with the clinking of chains and the rush of sea under the boat. People are walking and staggering along the corridors about us. Occasionally there’s a shout as my eyes are shutting or a lazily-held bag knocks against the walls. Between three and four o’clock in the morning, someone tries our door by mistake. The handle jumps up and down, followed by, ‘Shit, it’s the next deck up!’ These are enough words to wake me completely. I shake, following the shuddering movement of the carpet-covered ceiling. I’m sure I heard a thundering wave charge against the ship. I can feel it, rising up above the others, ready to slap us out of the water. I get up and open the door a little. There’s no one in sight. I shut it again quickly. Maybe they’ve already sounded the alarm? In the half-light of the cabin, I look at the evacuation instructions on the back of the door. All the figures are wearing life jackets. Where are ours? I peer under the bunk. I can’t see them anywhere. I finally spot a bundle of material tucked away by the base of the bunk ladder. If I stretch too far though, I’ll wake up Pado and he’ll make me get back into bed and then no one will hear the alarm or have time to get out of the cabin as the waves turn us over. Why did I think that? My heart drums in my throat, pushing at my head. My mind inflates with television and newspaper disaster images, stories of shipwrecks, corpses floating in the sea and boats smashed against rocks with the spray of the water dancing in the air. I watch the light from the corridor under the door. I imagine the water seeping in. A drop at first, then two, then a stream and then a wave that bursts through doors and comes bellowing down the corridors and stairwells. I see the ship filling with water as we struggle to reach our life jackets and Pado yelling and Ama yanking Giulio from the floor with the sea currents curling over us.

‘We can’t sink. The ferry mustn’t sink.’ I start saying it, slowly, continuously.

I’m thinking of Grand Maurice and how the water of the lake must have pushed open his mouth, poured between his teeth and flooded through his body down under the reeds. He lay at the bottom of the lake for a week, with his eyes and ears and nose clogged with water, before they found him. I know that if I’d been fishing with him, it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have slipped in the water. He couldn’t have.

‘We mustn’t sink. We can’t sink.’ Over and over again, I trip out the words.

I feel the door quiver a little with the long heavy corridor silence. Is there anyone on the ship? Maybe we are the only ones left as the boat drifts out of control towards the convulsing open sea. Maybe everyone is already jumping onto the lifeboats, scrambling and screaming for help? My head is pumping. I push against the door with my feet. If I hold the door back, we’ll be all right. We’ll be saved.

I’m shivering and I don’t know if it’s the cold or the rush off the top of the waves that are about to come and drown us. I pull a blanket over me. I shove my back hard against the door, my eyes peering down at the gap underneath it, waiting for the trickle of water to begin. My head hurts so much.

Suddenly Ama is stroking my hair. ‘What are you doing there my love?’ she says with bleary eyes.

‘I don’t like my bed,’ I stutter, but then tears well up inside me and I have to say I have a headache. A searing, aching one.

When day breaks, the corridor becomes alive with slamming cabin doors and running children and groggy morning voices. The loudspeaker makes a few announcements about the car deck, the opening times of the shops and immigration requirements. Pado has a shave in the oval basin. He splashes a lotion on his face and the cabin fills with his familiar smell. He carries us off to the restaurant. He guides us across the newly-cleaned, slippery floor.

As we’re grabbing our trays, Giulio tells me: ‘Ama says they’re going to take you to a doctor!’

‘What doctor?’ I gasp.

Giulio steers me behind the breakfast stand where the cornflakes have toppled out of their bowls. ‘Ama told Pado you don’t sleep enough and that’s why you’re always staring into space and getting headaches. I heard her saying it this morning.’

‘What are you two whispering about?’ Pado shouts. ‘We have to hurry. You can talk in the car.’

I’m not hungry. Not now. There’s nothing wrong with me. I saved the ferry from sinking.

The drive back down the ramp is slow. It’s like that coming into England. You have to wait for hours as they check every car and passport. It makes Pado furious. He joins the ‘Nothing to declare’ queue. Ama asks whether that’s wise, but there’s no way he’s budging. Our mother is the only one allowed to talk at customs. Pado is too dark to speak. Ama inherited our grandmother Machance’s Slovenian and Dutch white skin, but she still doesn’t answer the way she should. As we approach the customs checkpoint, Pado rehearses a few lines for Ama to repeat: ‘We’re on a private visit’, ‘No, we only have the allowed limit of alcohol’, ‘I’m a British citizen’. Ama checks her face in the car mirror. She sweeps her hair to one side. She whips on a quick layer of lipstick.

‘Clear answers. Clear and direct,’ Pado stresses. ‘And remember for the French customs, we’re resident in England and for the English customs we’re resident in France. Okay? Did you hear what I said? Hai capito?

Ama lowers her window.

‘Passports please!’

Ama thrusts out five passports. The officer reads through each one. He comes to Ama’s and opens it to find a long string of floss stuck inside its pages. The floss clings to his fingers and winds itself around the passport cover. ‘Sorry,’ Ama stammers, embarrassed. ‘I don’t know how that got there.’

‘Mrs Maseenou? Messounah? Mishina?’ the officer starts, flicking his hand to free it of floss.

‘Messina!’ Ama corrects him, politely.

‘Italian is it?’

‘The man’s a genius!’ Pado mutters to himself.

‘Where is your place of residence?’ The customs official hands back the passports and waits for an answer.

‘Well, um. It’s … um.’ Ama looks at Pado, unsure, panic crossing her face. Pado glares back at her, eyes wide-open, dumbfounded. ‘Ah! Um, here, England! I mean France, sorry France, yes France,’ Ama strives on.

‘France? You have an Italian car!’

‘No.’

‘No, what?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when were you last in England?’

‘Oh, um … two weeks ago, I think.’

‘Business or pleasure was it?’

‘… um, that’s …’

‘Where are you going now?’ the officer fires quickly.

‘Around,’ Ama makes a wide gesture with her hand.

‘Around where?’

‘How’s the weather been recently? Lovely day for this time of year!’ Ama suddenly tries.

The customs officer looks at her astonished. Giulio asks what’s up. Then the officer starts circling the car with renewed zeal. ‘Great, absolutely fucking great. Thanks for that, Ava!’ Pado huffs. He’s so irritated he flicks through the ferry brochure to keep calm and mumbles, ‘Stronzo,’ ‘bastard’ at the customs official, loudly. He hates the way they look at him. He loathes their facetious smiles, the simple voice that explains, in basic English, that this is England and nowhere else.

‘Did you see the way he looked at me?’

Ama tries to ignore Pado’s mounting rage as the customs officer gets more and more curious.

‘Keep quiet, darling. This is not the time to get paranoid.’

She’s struggling to maintain a composed face, but Pado is off: ‘He probably thinks I’m some jumped-up “dago” just off the boat, some peasant looking for work! Well I can tell him and all these bastards that I used to teach in their bloody country, at their bloody universities!’

‘For goodness’ sake, control yourself, Gaspare. Shut up! Please!’ Ama begs.

‘I mean, look at this idiot,’ Pado rages.

We can feel Pado’s raven hair twitch with indignation. He’s no foreigner to this place. He has our mother and she has pale untouched beauty chalked all over her face. We smile to soothe him. His jaw is set in fury. His hands are dancing across his lap, boiling with a desire to wipe this moment away. Ama is edgy. The customs officer looks into the car. Pado can’t smile, not at him. Ama smiles too much, much too much.

‘Could you open up the car please, Madam!’

‘Figlio di … Fucking …’ Pado growls.

Ama hoists herself out of the car to try and resolve this on her own. The customs officer leans into the boot. He begins lifting wine bottles out. So far he has counted twice the limit. Then he discovers the jars of lungs. Ama blushes, coughs and sniffs. Pado can’t bear it any longer. He’s out of the car too, waving his certificates. He has had enough. On the back seat we shrink into nothing. Giulio curls into a closed, tight ball. Duccio rearranges his maps into separate country piles, making sure the corners meet. I feel myself sliding down, further under the seat. I clench my teeth and wait, trying to help Pado in my thoughts. Ama goes to stop Pado, but his eyeballs are fixed. She stands in front of him, supportive and pleading. It’s going to be all right. She knows he can do it. He’s got to do it.

He’s doing fine, explaining calmly enough, then he says it – the word he can never pronounce – ‘innocent’. It is innocent like ‘inno+scent’ not ‘inno+chent’, we’ve told him a hundred thousand times.

The officer says, ‘Sorry, what?’

Pado raises his voice, ‘Why bother innochent people?’

The officer takes it badly and they’re off.

‘Please follow me, Sir.’

‘Listen …’

‘Kindly do as I say!’

Another officer comes and joins the first. They lead Pado into a room. Ama gets back into the car, crying. She bangs the door shut so hard that we all freeze. She sits holding her head in her hands, then she gently switches on the tape machine for some music, something to take her away from here, from this. Instead of music, the tape is still stuck on Giulio’s joke. His distant voice coughs and laughs. Ama punches the eject button furiously. The tape flies out onto the floor. She picks it up and hurls it onto the top of the dashboard. Giulio fiddles with the biscuit packet beside me, pushing his face up against the glass so no one can see his eyes. Then I hand Ama a biscuit to calm her. She absently takes a bite and throws it out of the window. A seagull snatches it up and deposits a large white dropping on the car in exchange. Pado returns a while later with a heap of clipped receipts.

‘What the fuck is this shit doing on the car?’ he shouts.

He starts up the car again. Ama leans out and tries scrubbing the bonnet with a tissue. The white stain won’t go. She scrapes at it with a piece of paper. It rubs onto her hand. We drive off into England, Pado yelling about customs officers and seagulls that shit everywhere. Duccio leans against the head rest in front of him. I can see he is watching Ama clench her dirty finger, two layers of antiseptic wipes wrapped tight around it.