Zo

by Leanne Owens

  ‘It would not be so bad,’ she replied, her eyes sparkling, ‘I am sure, after hitting me, he wouldn’t need those dangling bits he keeps between his legs, so removing them for the dog to eat shouldn’t be a problem.’

  The men all laughed, though nervously closed their legs a fraction as they thought of such a fate.

  ‘My bloodthirsty little princess,’ Lorenzo smiled indulgently at her, then looked at Sandro and raised his brows. ‘Remind me to put away all sharp instruments, my friend, eh?’

  Sandro guffawed, and closed his legs a little tighter.

  ‘I want to know what other things you think of,’ Leo brought the conversation back to the part he was most interested in, ‘when you have those daydreaming moments. This flying creation,’ he tapped her sketch, ‘is this the first time you’ve seen it?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ Elli shook her head. ‘I’ve been having those little episodes for so long, and I can’t explain what goes on, or describe what visions come with them. It is as though I was walking past a building in the street, and someone quickly opened and shut the door, not long enough for me to see who was inside, or how many, or what they were doing, but long enough for me to know that I passed a door that briefly opened. Sometimes, I feel that someone has tried to tell me something, but I can never catch the words.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Leo nodded. ‘Well, if you do have any images of objects or structures that you remember, I would like to see them. Keep some drawing materials at hand.’

  ***

  ‘I really tried to take thoughts of things from the twentieth century back to Elli,’ Ally’s voice was soft as she finished her story of that brief memory from an evening in Milan. ‘It just didn’t work. I tried to take the image of a modern city with me, but instead of drawing a city, as I’d intended, she drew a mouthful of rotten teeth that did look strangely like a city skyline. I knew Leo was obsessive about weaponry, and I tried to take pictures of modern weapons, from tanks to machine guns, back to him, and even though Elli had no idea what she was trying to draw, he seemed to guess at some things, and developed the ideas further, but nothing came of them. Leo was always starting things and not finishing them. His mind ran too far ahead of what he was able to complete physically, and he often scribbled down objects I described, but took them no further.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the grandfather paradox being handled,’ suggested Marcus, ‘you go back in time, but you can’t change anything, as even one small change could alter the future so that you don’t exist to go back in time to make the change.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ally shrugged, unconvinced. She had spent a lifetime trying to work out what was happening, but had learned it was easier not to question.

  ‘And I still want to know why Zo hasn’t come back,’ Lynette voiced her concern. ‘Is there someone on earth right now who is having flashbacks to being him in Florence, and you haven’t met him? If Elli has come back as you, then surely, he is out there somewhere. If Elli hasn’t come back as you, and you are merely experiencing life through her eyes because of some hiccup in time and space, then she’s the one who Zo loves, not you.’

  Lynette’s mouth snapped shut as she realised where her mental meanderings had taken her words. Firstly, she was talking as though she believed everything that Ally told her and, secondly, she had cast doubt on the fundamental belief that had sustained Ally for most of her life: that Zo loved her. If Zo loved Elli, and she wasn’t Elli – if she was only a visitor to her mind - then she had thrown her entire life away for a man who loved someone else. But was that any worse than wasting her life on a romance born of mental illness? Whatever the cause, Lynette couldn’t see it as anything other than a waste of Ally’s life.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Ally told her with an understanding smile. Even after all these years, she could read her friends as though they printed their thoughts and emotions on cue cards and flashed them at her. ‘It’s something I’ve thought of many times before, too. There I was, trying to teach all of you to live your own lives, preaching about not throwing careers and futures away on love. I told you that if a love was real, then the person who loved you would want you to succeed, and he or she would fit into your life, not try to change your life. I asked you to take the energy that others use with falling in and out of love, and put that energy into living great lives. I know all that, and yet here I’ve been, pining my life away for a man who doesn’t even live now, and who may not love me if I’m not Elli. If ever I deserved to be committed for insanity, there is the insanity - loving a man who may love someone else, and yet still sacrificing my life for him.’

  Lynette wanted to have some definitive answers as she felt she needed to understand this situation, so asked, ‘Have you decided that you are Elli, or that you are not her and only visit her?’

  ‘Until the other day when I hovered on the line between life and death,’ replied Ally, ‘I wasn’t sure. I’d waver back and forth, thinking I’d wasted my entire life on someone else’s love story, and then believing that it was my love story between Zo and me. But I am Elli. Zo loves me. He loved me when I was Elli, and he loves me now. It does defy logic and life, it defies time and everything else that you think is impossible.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Sandy questioned her, curious as to what had changed that day.

  ‘He was here the other day,’ Ally smiled pensively, her thoughts drifting back to how close she had come to death, but why, in hindsight, she needed that in order to go forward. Now that she knew the whole truth, she would make changes. First, she must reveal everything to her friends. Everything. It would test their friendship beyond anything that had happened so far, but she realised it was the only way to heal.

  ‘Here?’ Sandy queried. ‘As in, here in our time?’

  Ally nodded, ‘Yes, here. He saw me as Ally, not Elli, and he knew we’re the same person. But I’ll tell you about that later. For now, back to Lynette’s question about why I have come back in this life, but Zo isn’t here. I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I have a theory. Well, not so much a theory as questions that make me wonder about possibilities. I don’t know if we can be one hundred percent sure about anything regarding what happens before life and after death, and maybe there is nothing before and after, so they are merely possibilities.’

  She paused, all eyes on her, waiting for her to explain herself, because her words were not making anything clear. For people who had always assumed that the only reality was this life, it was a big step to consider that there could be something either side of what they saw as the closed brackets of life – birth and death.

  ‘What if we do have souls?’ Ally looked around at them, seeing the varying degrees of doubt and disbelief. ‘It’s just a thought - maybe there is an energy for which there’s no scientific evidence, but which still exists, and it’s a soul. And maybe it can come back life after life, as many cultures believe, and once the soul has learned enough, they don’t have to come back – like they’ve reached Nirvana. Or maybe, they don’t always come back when they want to. All I know, is that he’s not here this time, and I am. Maybe there have been other lives that I don’t remember, and, sometimes, we find each other, and sometimes we don’t. It’s just possibilities.’

  She turned her clear gaze to Lynette and Nick, making them feel as though she was looking through them to worlds beyond. She smiled and continued, her voice soft. ‘You two found each other. This time round, Zo and I didn’t. But it’s my job to keep on living. I’ve had it wrong for so long. I was never meant to remember. I was meant to live this life without any memories of Elli and Zo, but something went wrong. The pain of my childhood was just too much, and in an act of what might have been mercy at the time, the universe allowed me to go back and be Elli again, to escape the pain.’

  Her gaze dropped to her hands, clasped in her lap. ‘But it should never have been. Perhaps I was meant to die from what was happening to me then, and I didn’t, and all this has been an accidental side-step in what should have be
en. A good step, though, because my memories of Elli helped me change the four of you, so that became the greater purpose of it. I helped you find the greatness you had within, even though I became lost.’

  ‘You’re not lost now,’ Peter took her hands in his and studied them, not game to look at her eyes as he knew that she would be looking past him to the man she loved. That wound never healed over. He had learned to live with it, but it didn’t lessen the ache. He had long ago decided that he would rather live in a world with unrequited love for Ally, no matter how much it hurt, than live without her in his world.

  ‘Thank you, Peter,’ Ally replied, wishing she could be in love with this good man. No matter how much she loved him as a friend, the emotions never crossed the line into wanting a physical love with him.

  ‘I want…’ Peter hesitated, and looked around at his friends. ‘We want you to keep talking about this. If we can understand, we will. I don’t think you need fixing, or curing, or treatment, and I’m sorry I ever thought that. You are uniquely you – Alice Lamore – the greatest warrior girl who ever lived in Geelong. The saver of lives. The maker of lives. The one who gave us the love that made us whole.’

  ‘Now who’s being dramatic,’ she snorted and squeezed his hands to make him understand that she was speaking lightly. ‘I didn’t save or make any of you, I just helped you become what you were always meant to be. So, there lies the balance of me remembering Elli’s life, I suppose – ultimately, it robbed me of a life worth living here, but you have lived, and will go on living, your amazing lives.’

  Peter brushed a hand over his eyes, moved by the love she had for them, but wounded by the fact that it was never what he hoped to receive from her. ‘I’m truly sorry we did what we did to you before.’

  ‘Oh, pwah!’ She swiped at the air in front of his face in a mock slap. ‘You were right. Look at me – how could anyone claim that I am not mentally unstable? What was sane about giving up on one life that was worth living, for another life I can’t prove ever existed? Honestly, I’ve wasted this life when you think about it. I retired from it, and failed to remember all the lessons that Zo had taught me about valuing life, living it, and staying on the horse till the finishing line no matter how much you felt like stepping off.’

  ‘I could almost like your Zo right now,’ Sandy murmured. ‘I’m sure he would prefer to see you living this life than wasting it, dreaming about him five hundred years ago.’

  ‘So, it would seem,’ she gave her friend a crooked smile. ‘I will work up to telling you what he told me the other day – the other day here, not the other day in Renaissance Florence.’

  ‘And I want to know more about that childhood pain,’ said Marcus, tapping a fist against his mouth as though he was hesitant about the words that were coming out. He’d been treating the information from her like pieces of a puzzle, and that was one area that didn’t fit in with the others, yet. A childhood illness that caused extreme pain piqued his curiosity. ‘You’ve mentioned that it was so bad that you would virtually pass out from it, and that the pain itself was possibly the force that ripped open the fabric of time between your childhood and Elli’s childhood, but did you ever find out the cause of the pain? And is it still there?’

  For several seconds, Ally remained silent, a tranquil expression on her face hiding any disturbance beneath the surface. This was something she knew she had to talk about. But not yet. She wanted to tell the rest of the story of Elli and Zo before she came back to talking about this.

  ‘We will talk about it,’ she told him, ‘just not yet. Would you mind listening to the rest of the story of Elli and Zo first? I’d rather talk about what feels like the light, the good, and the sunshine, before I talk about the darkness.’

  ‘All in good time,’ said Lynette, for the first time in her life beginning to suspect that perhaps the abyss of their own childhoods from which Ally had pulled them was not as deep and dark as her own. Only, in their selfishness, they had allowed her to pull them to safety and raise them up so they could fly, and they’d never really stopped to look at what was going on in her life. ‘You tell us whenever it suits you, or not at all if that is what you want. We are the ones who want to hold you up now, and never let you fall again. We want to know you as you are – all of you - not only the parts you think we will like.’

  Andy nodded agreement. ‘And I want to know more about the people you met back there. Didn’t Lorenzo also have Michelangelo in his stable of artists?’

  Ally laughed, ‘Oh, Angelo was there – he was a precocious one. He was so much younger than us, you see. And Leo detested him. Leo was a few years older than Zo, and Angelo was many years younger. A child prodigy, but so different from Leonardo. They drove each other crazy. It’s truly a wonder that Leo didn’t throttle him.

  ‘Angelo only came into our lives in the final years of Zo’s life, shortly after Clarice died, so I’m jumping out of sequence to talk about him now, but what is time if we can’t look back on it out of order? He spent a lot of time at the Medici palace when he was a teenager, from 1489 until Zo left us three years later. Not that Angelo spent much time with me in those years. and he rarely came to the Medici villa of Cafaggiolo with us. He preferred to be at the family table having correct religious discussions than visit the villa or Zo’s private rooms where we were questioning the church and blaspheming.’

  ‘You blasphemed?’ Andrew grinned, amused that this seemed such a crime.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ Ally shook a finger at him. ‘Back then, if you spoke against the Church, you were considered a blasphemer or, worse, a heretic. We took it very seriously. If priests had known of the conversations taking place, they’d have sent a messenger to Rome to inform the Papacy about our heresy, and they’d have locked us up.’

  Digesting the information about the consequences of blaspheming, Andrew asked, ‘Did Clarice ever join in on these talks?’

  ‘Clarice de’ Medici did not talk of possibilities or the likelihood of the Bible and the Church being wrong. Also, she tended to stay in Florence while we were out at the villa. On the days and nights when the devout ones were absent, and wine spurred the thinkers, our conversations raced across dangerous ground. Leo’s mind danced in those conversations. Clarice would have been outraged about the heretics around her.’

  ‘So, Clarice never found out about you?’ Sandy asked, wondering how a wife could fail to notice her husband’s mistress living in the Medici residences.

  Ally’s eyes twinkled as she thought of Clarice’s straight-laced, religious ways and disapproving looks. ‘She knew of the boy who often accompanied Zo, and she chose not to know any more than that. When I wasn’t alone with Zo, I dressed as a boy, and most people, except his closest friends, accepted that I was male. It was all very distasteful to Clarice, and she coped by not giving Zo’s young male friend any attention. If she saw me, she looked right through me, as though I was a servant beneath her notice. I was happy to be ignored.’

  Leaning forward, caught in the reality of her friend’s memories, Sandra asked, ‘Did Michelangelo and Leonardo have the chance to meet very often, then?’

  ‘They avoided each other when possible. Even after Zo had gone, it was best to keep them apart because they couldn’t help baiting each other. Leo had spent almost two decades away from Florence after the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, though he made the occasional quiet trip back from Milan to see us. It was easy to keep them apart when they lived in different cities.’

  She recalled a day, many years after Lorenzo had died, when she was living in her apartment near the river. The memories of her brilliant friends from so long ago made her smile as the story flowed across time to her twenty first century friends. Leo understood so much, and his mind leaped and raced where the thoughts of others trudged. His ideas shot everywhere, like out-of-control fireworks, and she loved the conversations with him, so filled with laughter and wonder. It was not surprising that he and young Michelangelo clashed so dreadfully.

  **
*

  Leonardo arrived back in Florence from a trip to Rome a decade or more after Zo had passed from their lives. He visited her and found Michelangelo painting in her studio, while Elli sprawled on a settee writing in a journal. She adored her Angelo, but he had such disdain for the wild genius of Leo’s mind when his own genius was so orderly and disciplined. Where Leo would start one project and race to another before finishing the first, Angelo would follow a strict regime of self-discipline to ensure he finished each project with perfection.

  She suspected Angelo was jealous of Leo’s fame, when, if she was honest, Leo’s great works of art were more limited than his reputation as an artist. Angelo was quite mulish when faced with Leo’s brilliant personality that had patrons vying to have the older man included in their courts.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Leo snapped at Angelo as soon as he saw him at the far end of the room, charcoal in hand, standing at the easel.

  ‘Cooking dinner,’ Angelo met his dark gaze blandly, then smiled at Elli who had risen to her feet. ‘It’s remarkable that people think the man is a genius, when he’s unable to comprehend what an artist might be doing with drawing materials.’

  Leo waved a hand in disgust at the prodigy and spoke to Elli. ‘Only an imbecile would mistake a question about his presence in a certain place, for a question about the activity that he was undertaking.’

  ‘Is he referring to me?’ Angelo asked Elli, placing his charcoal down and wiping his hands on the piece of linen next to the easel.

  Before Elli could intervene to calm the waters, Leo slapped his thigh and laughed.

  ‘He doesn’t know?’ guffawed Leo. ‘Honestly, Elli, he is like one of those pretty little horses that those fancy boys like to ride around town - very showy, but not a lot of substance.’

  ‘Me? The showy one?’ roared Angelo at the impeccably dressed Leo. ‘I work. I dedicate myself to my art. You…you wear fine clothes like the whore of the patrons! You entertain like a jester! You try to be everything to everyone, but you create nothing except your own reputation. You are the one without substance.’