Last Train from Liguria Read online

  I could smell it at a distance. Rough, red, almost black. My hand shaking slightly with lust, I reached for it.

  Later I woke and there was a hot concrete block on my head. My brain was screaming and my gut swaying in that old familiar way. I got out of bed and made for a door that I was sure would lead me out to the landing and down the side stairs to the outside jacks of the pub, where I could puke away without anyone hearing. Every step of the way was there in my head; past the oulfella's room, my sister's room, the rooms that had once belonged to my mother. I was fiddling with the knob of the door, wondering what was the matter with it, how it had managed to shrink, when a voice from the bed asked what I was doing. French, I thought it was – and could only hope it didn't belong to the fuzzy-haired sow.

  'Jacks,' I muttered.

  'Jacques? Qui? Qui est Jacques?'

  I opened the door and stuck my head in. A hum of lavender and must. A faint and sweetish sweat. Shoe leather and naphthalene. I was in a wardrobe, gulping on its stagnant air. Not much I could do about it now anyway. Hot vomit lashed out of my mouth, across coat sleeves and dresses, and down on a row of shoes, splashing in and out of their appalled little mouths.

  'Animal,' I heard the voice say. 'Filthy pig.' This time it spoke in English.

  That was in Lyons, I think. Lyons or maybe Valence, one of those pointless French towns anyhow. They had all become the same by then. Girls with thick ankles, a cathedral overstuffed with bricks, men with exhausted eyes. Everything crawling along: feet, wheels. Time. And still not a whiff of Barzonni.

  A long-ago story. Now that's what I like. It's the sort of thing I hope to find when I wake like this, in the middle of the night, when only a story will steady my mind back to sleep. And it's always in or around the four o'clock mark; a long stretch till daybreak. I used to find the absence of drink cruel at this hour. I used to think, How am I supposed to live the rest of this night, minute by minute? The rest of this stinking life? But you grow used to whatever you have to grow used to.

  Not that I don't, from time to time, slip.

  The drink. The trick is not to shit on your own doorstep. Put up a fight, but if you have to give in, then travel away. Like one of those married men with a weakness for boys. Get on a train and keep going. That's what I try to do anyway. Then find a rooming house. A rooming house where nobody cares; a bar, and if needs must, a brawl where nobody matters. Satisfy the need, overfeed the need, wear it out till it weakens and goes whimpering back to its corner. Only keep in mind that it never quite dies – that's something I've learned the hard way.

  My mind. A scavenging vulturous thing, tugs maggots out of the darkness. It pecks and tears, but will not settle. It skips from this to that. It skids. I say, Stop it now, stop for fuck's sake, if you'd only calm down. Show me a nice slow story.

  Here's one I like: the Barzonni story. Naples, late summer, 1925. Walking away from me, down the Strada di Santa Lucia, where, after over a year of searching, without letting it be known I was searching, I had finally caught up with him. A year of hanging around stage doors in the hope of a glimpse; of buying drink for scene-shifters and carpenters in the hope of a hint; scouring the notices for private tuition in every half-cocked music academy from Torino to here. And there was the bastard, jumping onto a tram, folding himself into the herd and disappearing round a bend in the road.

  The air went out of me, and I more or less collapsed arse first onto the ground. There was a low dockside wall at my back where I stayed with my head in my hands until the lightness went out of it and I could stand up again. I leaned my foot on the parapet of the wall and smoked a cigarette. On the far side, the wall dropped fifteen feet or so to a quayside. A shanty town down there, made up of iron sheets or old sail cloth held to the wall by long poles. Fishermen roaring at each other in an uncrackable dialect. A little girl aimlessly wandering, bluebottles fussing around her head. Directly below me a woman was boiling some foul-smelling thing in a pot. Another woman plucked at rags on a clothes line. On the steps a beautiful, filthy young woman crunched snails between her teeth and dropped them in a bowl she was holding in the hammock of her skirt. A bare-arsed toddler was having a shit in the corner. A dog cowered nearby and waited for his chance. The toddler screaming at the dog, 'Via! Via!' The stink of outdoor poverty. Of shit and woodsmoke and fish gut. In the background, the beautiful bay was beaming. And I thought to myself, Christ, this Naples.

  Up here, at street level, the scugnizzi were prowling for tourists and other fools. Behind the backs of two strolling priests, sailors and prostitutes gave each other the eye. Disconsolate, I walked back to my digs off the Toledo, a tall narrow house, divided into any amount of cells, walls rotting from the outside in, and where even the landlord appeared to be on the game.

  I found him again. As it turned out Naples was not large, merely compressed. A few days later in the Galleria, he sat at the table next to mine, outside a café. I could hardly believe it. He was that close. I could hear his every move, the soft click of his starched shirt front when he lifted his hand to salute an acquaintance, the irritation of his coffee spoon drilling his cup, ticking off the saucer. I could even hear the fucker breathe.

  I kept my face behind the newspaper, now and then lifting it as if to glance at the passing crowd. Each time my eye picked out something else: the diamond ring on his little finger, a pigskin wallet on the table, the cufflinks shaped like sea horses. I looked up at the great glass belly of the Galleria ceiling and began to sweat. I felt sure its black iron framework was a cage about to drop down on me. Footsteps and voices were beating into my head. I stood up, threw the price of the coffee down and walked away across the marble tiles. After a moment I recovered myself and stopped under the canopy of the tabaccheria – I had waited too long to bottle out now.

  Face to the window, as though studying the gift display, I remained until I saw through the glass his reflection skim over mine.

  For two days and a night, I was his dog. When he went into the flower shop to buy his buttonhole, I was outside having a sniff at the boxes of lavender. When he went into the barber's, I snoozed in the sun on a bench across the road. I even pissed when he pissed, taking my place at the far end of the men's latrine on piazza del Pebliscito.

  The following evening when he slipped away from the after-theatre crowd, I was behind him. We turned into streets that rose as they narrowed, deserted but for the occasional slither of a cat. Past stair-alleys and side-slits and the windowless bassi where people lived like mules behind stable doors, and where in the uphill darkness I could have easily lost him, were it not for the tap of his ridiculous shoes.

  I would have liked to have been able to catch him red-handed at some boy or another, the way I had caught him years before in Dublin. Except this time I wouldn't be threatened into silence. Just as I would have liked to have smashed his face into the tiles earlier on in the public latrine. But I had to think of my future. If he was to be any good to me, then I needed him in one piece, secure and respectable; a man of substance, not of shame.

  I can still see him going through that doorway in Naples, me stepping up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder. In the half light, the way he turns and gives me one of his frowns. I can see it dawn on him after a few seconds that it might be me, but…? He is put off by my beard and general appearance. I am far from the fresh-faced boy he last saw in Dublin and almost a year on the run has done my appearance no favours.

  In the end I had to help things along by letting him hear my voice. I said something like, 'What's the matter, Maestro Barzonni – don't you recognize your old pupil?'

  'You?' his voice was hoarse, his eyes alarmed, and I wondered if perhaps word had come through from Dublin that my sister had been murdered and I wondered if perhaps he thought I had come all this way to kill him too. 'How is it you?'

  I shrugged good-humouredly and smiled. He took his eyes off mine just long enough to glance over my shoulder to the street outside, then behind him up to the door at t
he top of the stairs, where a lamp was burning and there was the muffled sound of radio dance music. Then he looked back at me.

  'You're looking well,' I said. 'Prosperous anyway. I see you still wear the sea horse cufflinks my mother bought you.'

  'What are you doing here?' he whispered.

  'Living like a rat,' I snarled.

  *

  That was 1925. Eight years from then to now. How far I've come. Naples to Sicily to Bordighera. Much shorter coming back up, I'd have to say, than it had been going all the way down.

  I lie on my back in this foreign darkness and remember such scenes so vividly I can actually see them. I see other things too, other people, from further away. Mother on the sofa poised for conversation with a stranger. The oulfella rubbing a cloth into the counter, big ruddy face softly wobbling from exertion. Customers come and go, day into night, but the cloth, like his conversation, rubs the same small area. And I see Louise. Her face a younger version than the oulfella's. Slightly less red perhaps, less fat, but it's his face she's wearing. I see her as she used to be when we were children, the heft of her hammering me to the wall with her massive hip, her face radiant with hate. The two of us scrapping like dogs throughout the house. Even when left to practise duets at the piano we wouldn't let up, pinching, biting, punching, pulling; disguising our squeals of pain with louder playing. She was always the stronger, the more resourceful fighter. Hard to believe, in the end, I would have got the better of her. Louise alive. Savagely alive. And that's not how I want to see her.

  The day before yesterday. Out in the morning, promenade all to myself, by a whispering sea. The air was for the moment cool and I must have walked a long while because when I came back through Bordighera, the market men had given way to old men and housewives. A few bureaucratic types were headed for the station and children in fascist uniforms quacked around me at the newspaper stand.

  I came into Tonino's café, still thinking about the housewives, with their fine big arses and dark damp eyes, their tired little early morning sighs. A stranger at the counter was talking to Tonino. From Albenga, I heard him say. I sat down in my usual corner, cracked open my newspaper and felt the first whack of coffee hit my chest. Tonino was called to the telephone and the stranger started speaking to me. We had a pleasantly impersonal conversation about the headlines mostly: Hitler, and Spain, Roosevelt, people shooting each other on American streets. The world was a terrible place, he said, no law, no respect. Thank God we Italians have il Duce to protect us!

  He had taken me for a fellow Ligurian and I realized then that it had been a long, long time since anyone has asked where I'm from. I started to become afraid then. Of what? I don't know.

  There was nothing remarkable about the rest of my morning, but each little turn of it seemed somehow significant. I made my way up the slope of the corso d'Italia, returning nods and good-morning smiles as I received them, then bought a few oranges from Marco's. Next door the barber waved his razor through the window at me, and jokingly threatened my whiskers. I went to his door, pulled the beads aside and lobbed an orange in. He deftly caught it and laughed like a child. At the top of the corsoan elderly couple sat on a bench. He asked me for the time, and when I stopped to check my watch, they both waylaid me with competitive little tales of their individual ailments. The old man had sweets wrapped in shiny paper in his pocket. As he spoke he opened the wrapper of one and handed the bare sweet to me as if I were a child.

  I came back to the house and stood for a while at the window, looking down at the garden. I opened the window and stepped out onto the slight balcony. There was birdsong and butterflies – the usual. The dog down the road with the baritone bark was hard at it. From the kitchen, first rumours of lunch already on the air. I had a full free morning ahead of me.

  I stayed there in the main house, read, listened to the radio, stared into space. Then I came down and picked up the lunch tray Elida had left for me on the hall table. I walked through the garden down to the mews, had my lunch, lay on the bed, may have even snoozed. When I got up, I sat at my piano.

  My fingers flawlessly moving – there is something to be said for this sober life – anything else faded. I stayed like that until Elida came to my window and called out my name, her voice hacking up to me that it was time to collect Alessandro from tennis.

  *

  I have this in my head: if I could only see my sister, just once more see her, then I could find peace. Maybe even sleep a whole night. Or accept a morning like the one before last without being afraid it could be pulled out from under my feet. But I'd have to be able to see her, exactly as I last saw her – dead and smothered in blood. It doesn't really make sense this yearning for a bloody sister-ghost. But that's what I have in my head.

  PART TWO

  Anna

  DUBLIN, 1995

  April

  TODAY I TELL HER Ginger Rogers has died. 'You remember poor old Ginger?' I say, as if she were an oulone who used to live down the road. 'Died last night, heart failure – according to this. Born 1911, that's a few years younger than you – and you're still battling away.'

  These one-sided conversations. I'd forgotten how much of a strain they can be. Not that there's really any other kind in a hospital like this one, or that anyone pays a blind bit of attention. But I've been told to let her hear my voice, and so like it or not, that's what I do. They're big on the voice in here. It always comes back to it. Sometimes I think it's all that they have.

  She's gone downhill since my last visit six weeks ago, a long time, considering. At least then her eyes would often be open, on a good day even make contact. The odd grunt or nod of the head in response to something I'd say so that there had been times when I'd been able to convince myself that she'd actually been listening to me. Now it seems she just sleeps all the time.

  How easy it is to slip back into routine and before I know it I've given her the weather report (last night's rain, today's sun doing its best to squeeze through) and I'm scanning the ward for something to comment on. The least little shift would do, a vase moved from here to there, say, or a new pair of slippers under a bed. But the passing of six weeks has gone unmarked in here and I find nothing noteworthy or new. Except for Mrs Clarke's vacant bed and I'm hardly going to comment on that.

  The newspaper now, I don't mind so much – to read a bit out, throw in a comment or two, read another bit again. The wider world and its familiar strangers – it takes the onus off us both somehow. And it keeps her in touch. Or so the little blondy nurse never tires telling me. 'You never know what's going in there,' she'll often add with a knowing nursey wink.

  I turn over the pages, quickly decide there's no need to go bothering her with Rwanda, Bosnia or OJ's trial. Then I go back to Ginger, this time reading the obituary aloud.

  I've always quite liked this time of the day – this hour of adjournment in the ward's routine; feeding time over, afternoon medication just kicking in. In a moment the junior nurses will start to slip off for a sneaky smoke or a cup of tea. And it will seem like I was never away.

  'You go on,' I'll say to them. 'I'll give you a shout if there's any excitement. If anyone jumps up like, and starts doing a jig.'

  In fairness to the nurses they've never asked me to keep an eye on things, nor would they dream of it. It just sort of happened. I offered one day, then I offered the next. I always have to offer. Unless the staff nurse is on, in which case I'll keep my mouth shut.

  Three nurses. Through the bars in a high-set window, I watch their caps slip into the frame, then wag and nod. Pokes of smoke rise and fritter. Only the tallest one shows the nape of her neck, and her hair which is corseted into a dull-orange bun.

  In here, meanwhile, a lull begins to drift over the beds like a mild dust you can almost see, and all those little hidden notes that an hour ago would have been bashed aside now come into their own. The shuffling slippers come and go (that's Mr Carroll, who can't stop walking about). Mrs Lyons plays with her rosary, muttering obscenitie
s as if they were prayers. Snores and groans sway and stutter. Under the covers old secrets are whispered. A lengthy fart purrs down the line. And through it all I can hear my voice, wandering up and down the ward, like something lost.

  'Virginia Katherine,' I say. 'That was her real name. Did you know? Virginia Katherine McMath – at least I think that's how you pronounce it. Married five times. Can you imagine? Five husbands. One's bad enough,' I say.

  As if either of us would really know.

  It all comes full circle. I put the paper down for a moment and that's what I think. Full circle. We start off in a nursery and we finish up in one. Babies again. If I last long enough I'll be one too. And what will any of the in-between matter or mean in the end? The way I've lived my life so far, the way I'm feeling now, about this woman in the bed, the man who's recently left me, the meeting in a few minutes' time with the registrar of this mental hospital and whatever it is he has to say to me. A big fat ugly wrinkly baba, that'll be me. I'll open my gummy mouth when I want to be fed or when I want to gibber. I'll shit in my nappy when the urge takes me, and no other urge will concern me. I'll finish my days in a place such as this. Sexless and therefore free. Where it makes no difference if the genders are mixed in together, or even mixed into each other, come to think of it (hairy-faced women, men who could do with a bra).

  If the shuffler sometimes shows a flop of willy through his pyjama slit; if the ex-reverend mother goes out to the toilet with one plump tit peering like a plucked chicken out the front of her nightie; and if genteel Mrs Lyons wants to mutter her obscenities – well, who's going to care or even half notice?