by Greg McGee
‘Dad! Please!’
‘Please what?’ he mumbled.
‘Please stop! Please!’
‘Stop what?’ he asked, then realised. This had clearly happened before. ‘Oh, sorry, darling,’ he said.
She felt sorry for her mother. How on earth had she put up with this for so long? Oh hell, she thought, Why did I come? What am I doing here? He was still awake, so she tried not to let her tears become sobs. She should cry for him too. Though, as her counsellor had pointed out, he was very much part of her problem. Why she’d believed in love. What a fool.
3
He, at least, was quite chipper next morning. After he’d worked his way through his blister-pack of pills, he decided he didn’t want the breakfast they’d already paid for. She had no quarrel with that, after seeing the dining room. Small tables had been pressed along one side of the entrance hallway, so that a motley collection of tourists could down stale croissants and beaker coffee in whispering polyglot huddles.
He led her back through Campo San Maurizio to Campo Santo Stefano, carrying his tatty old leather briefcase. When he’d turned up at the airport with that briefcase as carry on, she’d tried to persuade him to upgrade to a lightweight shoulder bag at duty free, but he’d baulked. He was a rational man — no one had ever described him as emotional, unless coupled with the word ‘stunted’ — but he seemed afraid that if he changed his briefcase he would somehow lose all its contents.
Once they were seated in a small cafe where the piazza pinched into the alley they’d entered from the night before, he opened the briefcase, pulled out a bulging manila file and began thumbing through the foolscap pages. No explanation. She tried to see the name on the outside but there didn’t seem to be one, just some numbers beginning with 1 — the rest of the sequence was obscured by his hand.
‘That’s not mine, is it?’
‘Hell no,’ he said. Her relief was tempered when he continued. ‘Though I did bring yours with me, just in case.’
In case of what? Nicholas wasn’t about to change his stance in the next two weeks while they ‘did’ Venice, Florence and Rome.
She said nothing, and watched as he went back and forth through what looked like old typewritten pages. She could see the indentations on the backs of the pages where the keys had punched through the ribbon. He was looking for something he never seemed to find, and not just in the file. Every so often he’d look up at the passers-by, and either stare at them or quickly dismiss them and get back to his pages. She noticed there was a pattern to this. Those his gaze lingered on were all older women, elegantly dressed Venetians. His eyes would devour them, almost desperately, as if he didn’t want to miss one detail, as if there must be a clue there somewhere if he looked hard enough. It was so obvious it was embarrassing, and she was about to say something when their macchiatos and pastries arrived. He closed the file, looked around the piazza again and said, ‘It’s all changed.’
Yes, Dad, she felt like saying, they’re nearly forty years older and so are you. ‘What’s all changed?’ she asked. ‘This place doesn’t look like it’s changed in a thousand years.’
‘Not the surroundings, the people. There are fewer people. You won’t notice it once the day-trippers arrive, but there are only fifty thousand Venetians left here. There used to be at least a hundred thousand. They’re abandoning it to the tourists.’
That figures, she thought. You wouldn’t want to be trying to get over those dreadful little humpy bridges if you were old or disabled or a mother with a pram. How many families did that disqualify? Close to bus and shops would be meaningless in Venice.
When they’d finished their coffees, he said he’d show her the Rialto. At the other end of the piazza was a wooden footbridge that spanned the Grand Canal. He seemed to have regained his energy and sense of direction, as he explained to her that this was Accademia, where he thought they’d be disembarking last night. He stopped at the top of the bridge, breathing heavily, and pointed back down the canal towards one of the grand palazzi. ‘Byron stayed there,’ he said. ‘He swam the canal. He had a club foot and probably felt he had to prove something. Venetians were very superstitious and thought those sorts of defects were contagious.’
I’m in the right place, she thought. Her counsellor would be appalled by the thought, but their work had convinced her that all sorts of contagions, which medical science hadn’t yet considered, could be transmuted through blood and ether.
Then he swung round the other way and pointed to a huge domed church, Santa Maria della Salute, which he said stood sentinel over the entrance to Venice from the Adriatic. The low autumn sun was doing its best to break through the cloud cover and was lancing off the water into the old stone, giving the blue and grey a wash of pale yellow, like looking through gauze. She loved Turner and tried to remember if he’d ever painted Venice.
Water and light, she thought. Hard not to like. She’d been brought up in Herne Bay, had wanted to buy somewhere there, nearer the water, even if it had meant an in-fill do-up, but Nicholas wouldn’t have it. In retrospect, she saw it may have been because she’d been brought up there, and because her father still lived there. He’d wanted to isolate her from all that.
They boarded a vaporetto on the other side of the bridge and found seats easily enough. The canal became a churning mess of water as they worked their way through boat traffic from stop to stop towards the Rialto Bridge. All the boat-buses coming the other way were full, standing room only, with people hanging onto straps and hand-rails.
‘Day-trippers,’ said her father. ‘It’s cheaper to stay outside Venice and come in and out by train each day.’
How sensible, she thought. She wished it was Carnevale. He’d told her about that. Disneyland for adults. You got to dress up and behave badly before Lent, when presumably you confessed your sins and did penance before Easter. How Catholic. Although, saying that, Nicholas was theoretically Catholic and had shown no sign of penance. He seemed to regard his adultery as an understandable response to her shortcomings, though he’d never been specific about what these were. The way he explained it, his adultery was her fault, a kind of constructive adultery. And for that she was grateful: she didn’t need to know why Sarah was better in bed than she was, what Sarah might do to entertain Pedro that she wouldn’t.
Her father wasn’t interested in the jewellery and trinkets in the Rialto stalls. He seemed preoccupied and then relieved once they’d traversed the bridge. ‘Follow me,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you where the locals buy their stuff.’
That sounded promising, until he told her it was food on sale, not handbags or shoes. She tried not to let her disappointment show as he led her among stalls of fresh vegetables and fish, which seemed a bit of a waste of time since they weren’t able to cook at the B & B.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ he told her, ‘we’ll get up at the crack of dawn and you’ll see the real Venice. Everything has to be brought in by boat and handcart, and all the rubbish taken out. It’s like the tide, an army of workers, in and out, every day, and the tourists never see them.’
Once more, he seemed to be gazing at people, as if there was a clue somewhere there if he stared hard enough. At one stage, there was a yell from behind them, and she saw him turn, his face full of happy expectancy, until he realised that the big swarthy guy in the apron wasn’t calling to him. That’s it, she thought. He’s expecting to meet someone he knows. He’s looking for someone.
That made sense. In 1976 he’d lived for a year in a town on the mainland, somewhere close by, and had spent a lot of his time in Venice. It stood to reason that he would have known people here. But why doesn’t he know where they live? Give them a ring, send them an e-mail, get on Facebook: Hey, I’m in town, what are you guys up to? She guessed she’d find out more tonight at the reunion.
He tired quickly. After drawing a blank at the market, they crossed back over the bridge and followe
d the signs for Piazza San Marco. After about ten minutes walking down narrow alleys they reached an intersection with signs for San Marco and Accademia. He told her he needed to sit down and might head back to the B & B so as to conserve his strength for tonight. Would that be okay with her? Would she be able to find her way to San Marco and then back to the B & B?
She was relieved, if she was honest. They’d passed several bag and shoe bottegas where she would have liked to have browsed. There’d doubtless be more between here and San Marco. And there was something else she’d made a decision about, that she didn’t quite know how to broach with him.
Sometime before dawn, she’d realised that she couldn’t brave another night on the Serengeti. She was going to get her own room in a decent hotel, whatever the cost. It would be much easier if she presented it to him as a fait accompli. He might not like the idea of her spending that money, but this morning’s decision to skip breakfast notwithstanding, the Southerner in him would regard it as a greater sin to pay for a room and not stay in it.
Bari 1942
4
Joe stood propped on one leg against the stable door listening for the dogs, while in the darkness Harry moved among the beasts with an easy, calming confidence. Harry was murmuring to them while he mucked out with his hands between their back legs, scraping shit and urine-infused cornstalks and hay across the earthen floor towards the wooden door.
Joe had wanted to hide in the hayloft, but Harry told him it was the first place Jerry would look: he’d be skewered by a bayonet. He got Joe to lie down in a shallow culvert that drained under the door, smeared him with shit, basted him with urine, then covered him with more of the muck he’d scraped from the floor. ‘Jerry doesn’t like shit on his boots,’ said Harry. ‘Or on his bayonet.’
So Joe lay in the dark culvert as Harry ministered to him and made it look as if the farmer had been halfway through mucking out his byre, and had left a smallish pile of old straw and shit blocking the drain, with the piss gradually pooling behind. ‘Just as well it’s cold,’ said Harry. ‘Your body temperature won’t cake the shit.’
Harry spread some of the muck on his own boots and was gone into the night. Joe didn’t hear the wooden bar lift and latch as the door was opened, then closed.
He was as cold as death, which he thought might come before the Germans. For what seemed like a long time he shivered and had they come then, he would have been a goner. Then something surprising happened: a warmth suffused him, working out from his core. He was as comfortable as he could remember being since lying on the warm rocks beside the river at Clifton Falls, where the Kakanui’s glides and riffles squeezed down a limestone gorge. He and Dan would dive into the deep blue green of the water and come out truly clean, white as they dried in the sun, all the coal dust and flour husks washed away. He’d clasped that image close, used it time and again to try and forestall the other images, the one from El Mreir where he’d dropped his rifle and tried to scrabble through the rock into the safety of the earth as a cloud of molten metallic fire broke over him. The shrapnel that sliced his head from crown to cheek had saved him from seeing much more.
But he’d seen everything on the Nino Bixio, somewhere out on the Mediterranean between Benghazi and Bari, though he’d been desperate to look away. His stretcher had been lashed to a mezzanine above the compartments in the forward hold where the able-bodied Kiwi prisoners of war were crammed. When the British torpedoes hit, bodies exploded upwards through the hatches. Some of the debris was recognisable. Legless torsos, arms, hands, feet, an eye among brain tissue splattering his blanket. As the ship listed, many of those who could had leapt into the sea. Joe saw a lifeboat out there with Italian crew and some prisoners on board, others clinging to rafts and flotsam, but he distrusted the sea and knew he had no chance in the water. He’d resigned himself to death and closed his eyes, but the horror of what he’d seen was imprinted on the back of his lids.
It had been at least a year now, but both El Mreir and the Nino Bixio were red-hot embers of a bush fire in his head, waiting for the nor-wester. While he could keep his head full of other thoughts, the flame spluttered and smouldered but never really died. In unguarded moments it would flare and all he could see was burnt and shredded flesh as the sky closed over him with concussive waves of fire. Feeding that blaze was the shame of his cowardice: that he’d dropped his rifle when the Panzers came and, in his terror, had scraped at the rock with bare, bloody hands, and that when he’d woken up in the Benghazi hospital and heard the nurses whispering in Italian, he’d been relieved that he was a prisoner, that his war was over.
He thought he’d lost the sight in one eye, but it was covered in bandages supporting his fractured cheekbone. When the dressings were lifted, his left eye had been slightly displaced by the force of the fragmented shell but he could see enough to notice that the patients with rosaries hanging above their beds got an extra piece of bread and other kindnesses and care from the nurses, nuns called suore. He’d been cowardly enough to ask for a rosary. Suor Teresa brought it to him. She spoke a little English, but not nearly enough to understand Joe’s whispered confession of cowardice.
* * *
Some weeks later, after the Nino Bixio had been towed to Greece and they’d been transferred to a smaller vessel to run the Adriatic gauntlet, he’d done the same for Harry in the hospital at Bari.
Joe hadn’t recognised anything about the motionless body on the stretcher when they’d carried it into the ward but heard the sisters trying to pronounce his name when they were writing up his chart. It took some imagination to get Henry Spence from what they were saying but he remembered a Harry Spence back in Ngapara just before the war.
Joe had been sixteen, lined up in the players’ tunnel waiting for the referee to whistle them onto the field for his first senior club game. Nervous steel sprigs on concrete, an overpowering stink of liniment and players sneaking measuring glances at their opposites. Joe felt his bowels go and only just made it back to the dunnies. While he was in there, he heard the ref’s whistle and pulled up his jock-strap and shorts and ran back to the tunnel, anxious not to be left behind. Most of the players had already taken the field. One opposition player was still in the tunnel, a tallish loose forward in white shorts and a black, red and amber hooped jersey, who was taking a last deep drag. He’d stubbed out the cigarette on an exposed joist, given Joe a teasing smile and jogged out onto the field, still exhaling smoke, all knees, elbows, angles and gristle. As the opposing half-back, Joe had done his best to let the ball go before that loosie got anywhere near him. From the side of the scrum and the back of the lineout he could feel those predatory eyes on him.
After the game, in the clubrooms beside the dressing shed, Harry Spence had been a striking figure in the local cockies’ uniform of tweed jacket over checked shirt, off-white moleskins and brown riding boots, his dirty blond hair plastered down, a raw scrape of red on the bridge of his nose between powder blue eyes.
When the sisters were done, Joe went to have a look. The man didn’t look much like the Harry Spence he remembered. His eyes were closed. The only sign of life was the wound on his upper thigh already suppurating through the army blanket. The man’s face was drawn back in a rictus grimace and Joe thought he might already be dead, until the fever wracked him, made his teeth clatter like a machine gun and threatened to throw him and the thin kapok mattress right off the wire springs. Spooked, Joe quickly retreated. By the time he got back to his own bed, the spasms had passed and the man was as quiet as a cadaver again.
At the Benghazi hospital, Suor Teresa had told him in halting English that she always knew which of the wounded soldiers would survive. ‘Short neck,’ she said, holding her hands a couple of inches apart as if she was about to pray. Joe thought Suor Teresa was trying to encourage him when he’d been so sick and weak. But Harry, if that’s who he was, had a long neck and he looked as good as dead when later that night Joe took the ros
ary from above his bed and hung it above Harry’s.
It might have been too late but at least the suore seemed to notice. Next day they cleaned and redressed the stinking wound and did what they could for him. But that night they called the local priest and Henry William Spence was given the last rites. Joe woke to the whispered Latin, the priest and two suore bent over Harry’s waxen face. Joe thought about trying to stop it but watched and said nothing as Harry was commended unto God, the act of contrition or extreme unction, something like that. He ought to remember but couldn’t. Instead he lay there wondering if he, not Harry Spence, would end up in hell because the fraudulent rosary wasn’t Harry’s sin, but Joe’s.
There’d been no wife after the match at Ngapara, but a posy of local girls eager for Harry’s attention. Joe was sad for whoever loved and was about to lose Harry Spence. It became more difficult to remember as the war went on and so many thousands were lost that back home there’d be a rippling circle of grief every time another one died. But not for him any more. Only Dan would mourn Joe now.
He was undecided these days about God and an after-life and thought it might be better for him if there wasn’t: there’d be no room in heaven for a man who was thrice a coward when so many thousands of brave men were arriving every day at the pearly gates.
But Harry Spence didn’t die that night.
