by Leanne Owens
Ally pulled an even more grotesque face at him, ‘I’m not an invalid, Peter, I’m just a little crazy, but that’s OK…on a sliding scale of cuckoo, who among us isn’t somewhere further along from the point that says everything is perfect and la-de-da-amazing?’
‘Got ya!’ he pointed at her and backed away from the table.
‘Peter?’ she called softly.
He halted and waited.
‘I’m going to sit in the sunshine in one of the gardens. Not the Jasmine one, so don’t get skittish. It’s a beautiful day and I want to enjoy the sun on my face for a while.’
‘You always did love the sun.’
‘Remember sunbaking down at Queen’s Park on the banks of the Barwon?’
The memory of the three teen girls putting vinegar and lemon juice on their hair because they heard it would give them a natural surfer-girl blonde look made him smile. ‘You girls always smelled like a fish and chip shop with all that vinegar.’
‘Summer wasn’t summer without a bit of sunburn and vinegar,’ she grinned. ‘It was good growing up together. I’m looking forward to growing old together.’
‘Me too.’
After he’d gone, she remained at the table for a few minutes, staring at the empty plates. Rising, she chose an exit on the garden side of the cafeteria and left the building. She walked purposefully on the tiled floors until she reached the lawn. Stopping, she reached down to undo the shoe laces of her runners, and removed her shoes and socks so she could feel the grass under her feet.
She remembered seeing a square garden surrounded by small hedges somewhere in the Kamekura puzzle of gardens. It reminded her of one of her favourite spots behind the Lorenzo’s villa at Cafaggiolo, the Castello Mediceo di Cafaggiolo. Enjoying the sun, she meandered across the grass and paths until she found the square garden. A few empty sun lounges sat to one side. She lay down in one and sighed.
There was much to look forward to in the final decades of her life in the twenty-first century, and not much to go back to in sixteenth century Florence, but she wanted to say goodbye to whatever it had been - delusion or reality.
Elli sat at her easel as the door to the other place opened. Her brush hovered over the shoulder of the horse she was painting as a whisper of something passed through her, but it passed quickly, leaving only the sensation of the door closing. The brush started moving again.
The day was drizzly outside, which made the paint slow to dry, and she had several horses to paint for other artists who specialised in the landscapes and people. Hers was the best skill with horses, and though she had no need of the money earned from the painting, she enjoyed helping her friends and creating the horses. Each one represented a horse owned by Lorenzo, many years ago, and, like him, all were gone. They remained only in her memory, and on the canvasses that she painted.
At lunch, her assistant brought her some figs, bread, and cheese, and she looked out at the dreary day, remembering times past when she dressed in boys’ clothes and bounced around after Lorenzo, the ruler of Florence. A tyrant and despot to some, he would always be her Zo, the man who laughed and loved, the adventurer who enjoyed jousting, hunting, and hawking. He had been her friend.
After lunch, she returned to the canvasses and continued to paint in solitude.
When Ally came back from her visit to Elli, less than an hour had passed. Her wrist device that monitored her heart rate and location indicated that she’d been sleeping. To sleep, perchance to dream, she snorted softly at the quote. She didn’t want to visit Elli any more.
Returning to her room, she found Peter sitting by her bed, reading a magazine. He told her that the others had left, and they would come back to Australia after the treatment.
Gina arrived with the consent forms and information about the ECT, and the three spent an hour going over what would happen, possible side effects, and what to expect after each treatment.
A day later, as the anaesthetist administered the general anaesthetic, Ally willingly dropped into the nothingness. There was no awareness of the small electric current passing through her brain until a minor seizure occurred, and when she woke, Peter sat next to her bed like her personal guardian angel. Apart from a fuzziness in her memory surrounding the hour before treatment, she felt normal. She refused to reach out to Elli as she didn’t want to test that path through her mind to Florence - she wanted the path to grow over so that she never walked it again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Geelong. July, 2019
A freezing wind blew off the dark waters of Corio Bay and along the foreshore. The palm trees along Eastern Beach shuddered in the wind, the cypress whistled, and the peppercorn trees waved and nodded. Few people braved the walkways around the bay, and those who did were rugged up against the chill of winter on a cold, grey day in Geelong.
‘How beautiful!’ Lynette exclaimed, standing on the glassed-in balcony of Sandy’s newly purchased house in Eastern Beach Road, overlooking the gardens and the swimming enclosure where they’d spent so many happy hours in their teenage years. The moored boats and yachts in the bay bobbed in the northerly wind and she enjoyed their colours against the stormy waters. ‘It’s been so long since I’ve been back, I’d forgotten how incredible it is.’
‘Remember Pie Boy?’ Sandy pointed to the sloping lawn on the other side of the road.
‘How could I forget?’ Lynette chortled, looking at the empty lawn and remembering a day in the early seventies when they were spending a summer’s day at Eastern Beach and she’d met the cute Italian boy with the suave moves and the charmer’s talk. Families crowded the lawns that day, and the swimming enclosure frothed with people splashing around.
‘Did you ever get to kiss him?’ asked Peter, walking out from the kitchen with a coffee cup in his hand.
‘Who were you kissing?’ Nick asked, stretching like a satisfied lion in one of the daybeds, not at all concerned about Lynette kissing someone over forty years ago, but curious all the same.
‘Pie Boy,’ Lynette grinned at her lover. ‘I forget his real name. He was the Adonis of the beach. One of the Italian boys with the perfect olive skin and the dark steamy eyes that melted your insides when he smiled at you. He chatted to me and I felt like the luckiest fifteen-year-old in the world. I was going to have my first kiss that day, right over there,’ she pointed at one of the large cypress trees straining against the wind.
‘He stood in front of me and I leaned against that tree, thinking I was going to be like Annette Funicello with Frankie Avalon in every beach movie worth watching. He leaned in close, then I saw that he had this chunk of meat pie on his bottom lip, and a blowfly landed on it. Not any fly – a big fat, maggoty blowfly. I could only stare at his lip with the bit of pie and the fly. I ran. I simply couldn’t kiss those lips. And so that handsome teenager forever became known as Pie Boy.’
‘I’m sure he preferred Adonis,’ Nick drawled before shaking his head and chuckling at the image of Lynette running in horror from the blowfly.
‘That may be,’ Lynette smiled at the memories, seeing the ghosts of those teenagers running around on the lawns, ‘but I never did kiss him. I came close the next weekend… but I just kept seeing that blowfly on that chunk of meat. I hope he married someone wonderful and had six children. Every Adonis should become a family man who frets over his daughters.’
‘Pie Boy?’ queried Ally as she joined them, folding her slight frame into a cream leather recliner in front of the full-length windows.
‘Yep,’ Lynette nodded as she sat next to Nick and took his hand in hers, raising it to her lips. ‘I’d still kiss you if you had a blowfly on your lip.’
‘Liar,’ accused Ally, ‘you’d make him scrub with Dettol for a week.’
‘Yeah, I would,’ Lynette laughed.
‘I remember walking past these houses when we were teens,’ Ally pointed at two students in school uniforms walking past, looking up at the house, ‘and we’d stare up and imagine what it would be like to live in one
. I am rapt in the fact that you bought this place, Sandy – it’s just the best thing, ever.’
‘You’re welcome to live here, you know that,’ said Sandy. ‘I’m not going to rent it out, I’ll just leave it so any of us can stay here whenever we want. My cousin is going to live in the little apartment above the garage, and he’ll keep an eye on everything.’
‘I think Lynette and I could handle a week or two here,’ Nick stretched and let one hand rest on her shoulder. ‘From what I’ve seen, this town has a lot to offer.’
‘Which is why we all left, of course,’ said Lynette. She cocked her head to one side and asked, ‘Why exactly did we leave? Why didn’t we stay in Geelong?’
‘We grew up,’ Ally smiled whimsically, gazing out at the choppy waters of the bay. ‘And we all had demons of one sort or another in this town. We grew up and flew the nest, but it’s pleasant to come back together to see it again.’
‘It’s good to be back home,’ said Andrew, joining them on the balcony with Marcus not far behind. ‘When we arrived this morning, I drove Marcus around some of our childhood haunts and it was a loop in time for me.’
‘Spare us any Wrinkle In Time quotes, Andy-man. Please.’ Ally squinted up at him. ‘No offence or anything, but we had three lifetimes of them from you when we were at school.’
‘Believing takes practice,’ he quoted in grand tones.
Peter groaned, ‘You just couldn’t help yourself, could you?’
‘What do you want to do this arvo?’ Lynette asked, changing subjects.
‘It’s a good day to stay indoors,’ mused Sandy, watching the tree tops bend over, ‘so how about we go for a walk?’
‘Shannon Park bridge to Queen’s Park,’ suggested Peter, before explaining his choice to Nick and Marcus. ‘When we were still in primary school, Ally used to take us along the wild tracks next to the river. It was the stuff of jungles back then. I see in the guide books that there are concrete walkways along both sides of the river now.’
‘Really?’ Andrew took the tourism book from Peter and looked at the photos. ‘It looks tame, now.’
‘Some of us are sixty already,’ pointed out Sandy. ‘Tame is what we’re looking for these days.’
‘Are you up for a walk?’ Peter asked Ally, as though she might require extra care.
‘You zapped my brain, not my feet,’ Ally retorted dryly, casting him a humorous look. ‘I can still out walk you any day of the week, Doctor Barker.’
With Ally introducing the topic of her treatment, Sandy felt able to ask about it. She, like the others, had been avoiding talking about Ally’s stay at Kamekura. ‘You’re looking happier, Ally. No ill-effects from the treatment?’
Ally shook her head. ‘There was the bit of confusion each time I woke up, but it was only temporary. I haven’t had any delusional moments since then. No visits to Renaissance Florence. Just me, in the twenty first century, with memories.’
‘Memories of Zo?’ Lynette wondered.
‘No, they’re not like memories, anymore. I mean, I remember all that I told you in those days at Kamekura, but it’s more like I thought it would be – like I’d read a book about it rather than lived it. It’s gone, now, so the ECT achieved that.’
‘I’m sorry you lost Florence’ said Lynette. ‘It was special.’
‘A special kind of crazy?’ Ally joked.
‘No,’ Lynette frowned at her. ‘Never that. It was a special kind of you. And we loved all of you, Elli included.’
‘Well, now it’s just me,’ Ally smiled, ‘and a past I’m coming to terms with.’
‘I’m happy for you,’ said Sandy, her tone genuine.
She glanced at Peter, and Ally noted the brief flash of anguish in her eyes. Not everyone has happy endings, she thought, but sometimes being alive is enough. Being alive and having good friends, that is important. Perhaps romantic love is a delusion – hers certainly had been, an entire lifetime of it. But she wasn’t bitter – her imaginary friend had protected her mind when she was young, and she had known love, even if it wasn’t real.
A sudden eruption of swear words from the normally imperturbable Marcus had everyone on their feet. He was staring at his phone screen, his face pale. When they asked what had happened, he waved them into silence as he continued to scan what he was reading, swiping down the page.
After a few minutes, he looked up, his eyes wide. Looking straight at Ally, he cleared his throat and said, ‘That ring. The one you said Lorenzo gave Elli on his death bed. You told us the inscription.’
Ally nodded, her expression confused.
‘I remember,’ said Sandy. ‘It had I love you forever in Latin on the outside, and eternal love on the inside, with their initials.’
‘Yes,’ nodded Marcus. ‘Look.’
He turned the phone to show them a photo of a poesy ring. ‘It was found buried under a basement in Florence, not far from the Arno, a few months ago. It has that inscription. That exact inscription.’
While everyone stared at it, Ally pursed her lips together. ‘A few months ago? So, I could have read about it and added it to my delusion?’
‘No, you couldn’t,’ Marcus said emphatically. ‘Nothing has been written about it. This is the first time the museum has gone public with what workers found on the construction site. The ring was in a silver and gold decorated box…this.’
He showed them the photo of the box Ally had described in detail. There was no mistaking the decorations that she had explained to them. No one spoke, but they looked to Ally who remained silent, staring at the little chest she had described. There were no emotions on her face as she looked at the gift Lorenzo had given Elli the day he died. Her violet eyes held no feeling.
‘There is a small collection of miniature drawings and paintings in it,’ continued Marcus, turning the phone back so that he could read. ‘They’ve been examined by experts and are believed to be by Renaissance artists including Leonard da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Verrocchio. And two letters. One is signed...’ his voice broke and he stopped, overcome with emotion.
Andrew stepped in closer to him and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Who signed it? Lorenzo de’ Medici?’
‘No,’ Marcus looked at Ally, tears on his face. ‘It is signed with the name Elli.’
Sharp indrawn breaths and gasps greeted her name. Ally, alone, showed no reaction.
‘Is it there?’ asked Sandy. ‘Do they have a copy of the letter?’
‘There’s a translated copy here,’ Marcus confirmed, taking a deep breath. He looked around for a chair. ‘I’ll read it, if you like. It’s quite long. How about we all sit. Ally? Are you alright if I read this?’
‘I know what it says,’ she said flatly. ‘You all have bits of it, too. You should recognise parts of the letter.’
‘Perhaps we should read it ourselves, silently,’ suggested Peter.
‘Read it, Marcus,’ ordered Ally, sitting back in the recliner, and turning her face to the bay. ‘I’d like to hear it.’
Her friends looked at each other doubtfully, not sure if it was the right thing to do, but she glared at them and they motioned for Marcus to read. Ally went back to gazing out over Corio Bay across to the misty peaks of the You Yangs in the distance.
‘They’re calling it The Florentine Letter,’ said Marcus, clearing his throat, ‘and it’s dated April 12, 1514.
It is now twenty-two years since my sun ceased to shine.
My dearest love, my joy, my life, my light, my reason for living, my everything, I write this for you as well as for those in the future in lands far from here, just as Plato wrote to us from his time. I know your eyes will never read these words, and yet I write them for you. Perhaps you shall know of them in heaven.
Our love remained behind closed doors, hidden from public and family, with only our closest friends knowing of this Great Secret, but someday I want others to know of our time together, long from now, when the revelations can no longer bring
harm to your family or Florence, I want them to know. I cannot bear for something so beautiful and blessed to disappear with our passing, so I write this and hope that sometime in the future, these words are found, and others learn of our love.
I want people to know that what we have transcends time and life, and death will not defeat this. You have always known how much I love you - more than life itself. I would have died in your place had God answered my prayers, but I remain in life while you have moved elsewhere. I had thought that I could not live without you, that if you left this life, I would leave, too, but I understood that I must live on. I chose life.
After you left, I lived quietly, reflecting on our years together. I remember you as the greatest man of this time – the greatest thinker, the most far sighted of politicians, the most enlightened. I do not know how those in the decades and centuries to come will remember you. I believe they will look at all those you raised up, such as Leo, Sandro, Angelo, Andrea and the others, and forget that, if not for you, they would not have bloomed. Nay, they are not blooms themselves, they are merely the petals on your flower – and perhaps people will learn of your greatness by examining the petals.
To appreciate the complexity and nature of the flower, it may help to first look at the part which human eyes find most attractive: the exquisitely shaped and brightly coloured petals supported by the plant. Each petal has its own perfection, a work of art in every fine detail. Look at them first and be amazed by such splendour, then realise that you are observing the last stages of the flower, perhaps the reason for its existence. To fully understand the whole flower, you will need to go back through the stages of its development, right back to the seed from which it grew. Watch the seedling emerge from its hard shell and respond to its environment through all its stages of growth until it produces the petals, which many believe to be the purpose of the plant. Look again on the magnificence of the petals and understand the journey of the flower.
