Before the Ruins

by Victoria Gosling

  “Maybe. Peter thought he was in love with me. You have to remember I went to public school, to a boys-only school. I was used to it. Crushes. Finding a chocolate bar under your pillow, all that. Peter was a virgin, wasn’t he? He just wanted to be liked, to be allowed to be himself.”

  “You didn’t sleep with him?”

  “No. You knew that.”

  “I wondered if you’d lied.”

  David nodded. “A few meaningful looks, a kiss … I’ve not ever been what you’d call a strict heterosexual. I allowed myself to think it was harmless. That I wasn’t misleading him, that I was just being friendly. Offering an ear. We all need someone to tell our secrets to. But he told me something … And I think he regretted it and that’s why he got rid of me. That’s why he called the police. In case I told you. I wanted very much to tell you in the end. When I saw him in Rome, I asked him. A few drinks in, I asked him if he’d been making it up—this incredible story—and he said he had. We all lie, don’t we? Especially at that age. But I still wonder.”

  I could feel my younger self very close by, crowding in.

  “What was the story?”

  But I already knew. I had known then. Peter had told David that I’d been abused by Joe, hoping to ruin things between us. But I was only half right.

  “Peter always said you must never know. But if it’s lies, there’s no reason not to tell you.” Still, David seemed to hesitate. “Peter said he had killed someone, that he had … been involved in a murder. I know. Peter, right? Ridiculous. It was after we’d taken those pills. You’d gone. You wanted to see your mum, so I asked Peter about your mum, and that’s how it started. We were sitting out on the ridge, high as kites. Some of it didn’t make sense. He was sort of rambling. It was still light. I could see his face. I can remember how it looked now. He swore that he had killed a man called Joe one night out on the Downs because he was hurting you. That he’d had help. He wouldn’t tell me who—I think that was what made it so convincing, that he was too frightened to say who. Only that he had just wanted to scare Joe away and something had gone wrong and Joe had died.”

  * * *

  The end of the world was Italian this time. David found a packet of cigarettes and half a bottle of grappa that burned on the way down and then sat in the stomach burning. There had been a murder, but not Em. Joe. I didn’t doubt David was telling the truth. But what about Peter? We filled the little room with smoke. I wrapped myself in the blanket. I had been losing possession of myself for some time, possibly from the moment I had answered Patricia’s phone call on the train, but it had not been a steady journey. Now I had the sense of hurtling descent. Beneath the shiny life I’d built were ruins, and now I was among them. The blanket was brown and scratchy and I drew it around my back and tightly over my crossed legs.

  “What was I like?”

  “Wild. A menace.”

  “Self-destructive you mean.”

  “Perhaps, but wild too. There is a difference.”

  “And what is the difference?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose animals have that wildness, young animals, children. I don’t know. Lovely when you were sad, lovely when you were happy. And moving, and still. Always suffering. It spoke to me that, but isn’t it a sickness, to love a thing for suffering?” He looked down at the drawing again. “Peter said your mother broke your heart.”

  “She sided with him.”

  “With Joe?”

  “Yes, and then she died and I was still so angry with her. And now in my dreams, she is a child, a child crying at night, from inside the wall, calling my name, and I don’t go to her.”

  It seemed possible to say anything. The sound of the water. The sound of the rain and the wind.

  “When he came to you in Rome, what did he want? Did he say anything about Em?”

  “Not really. He didn’t seem to have an agenda. He wanted to talk about you. At least he told me that you were in London, about your job. He didn’t seem to rate his own work very highly. His firm were doing business in the ’stans, Russia, the Baltic States. That’s why he was there.”

  “What did you make of him?”

  “Hard to say. He came in armor. In command of himself, but not exactly at peace. Once Peter…” David stopped and tried again. “We talked, but all the time I felt him taking me to pieces. Not as interesting as he remembered. Not as good-looking, or clever. What had I made of myself? Not much, it seemed. Before he left he said … How did he put it? You never read any of those books I gave you, did you?”

  * * *

  We finished the cigarettes and the grappa. My stomach was rumbling. David thought that downstairs, in the little kitchen, there were bread rolls. It was dark and the water sloshed beneath us, although while we were talking the rain had stopped. At the top of the stairs, he took off his trousers. When he came back, dripping all over the floor, I handed him the blanket and drew the sheet over myself. Along with the rolls he had a jar of Nutella.

  “I meant to stop eating this. Because of the palm oil. They’re fucking the orangutans for it.”

  We ate the rolls, a little stale, covered in chocolate spread, in the flooded city, and then—after a little—we slept. David sat in the chair and at times, as I rose up out of my shallow dreams, I could feel his wakefulness, sharp in the darkness.

  * * *

  In the morning my phone was dead. Nearly a grand’s worth and it couldn’t last twenty-four hours. I had the charger in my bag, along with my wallet and passport, but there was no power. David was up and moving about.

  “I think we should go.”

  “Go where?”

  “I’ll take you back to your hotel. It seems to have gone down a little bit. At least, it’s not moving so fast.”

  “And the paintings?”

  “If they get looted it’ll have to be Michele’s lookout. I think half of Florence is built on sand. What happens if the buildings come down?”

  I struggled up off the camp bed to look out the window. Stretching as far as I could see was a greenish lake, moving gently as it lapped at the steps up to the houses, its surface reflecting the white sky. The floodwaters were still inside but had retreated down the stairs, leaving a coating of grime. The air smelled brackish, like a sofa left out to rot in the rain.

  With some difficulty, David opened the door to the street. Litter and leaves floated like the silent survivors of a seaborne disaster. There was no breeze, no sounds. I followed David, stepping gingerly into the cold flood, wondering at the things that lay beneath the surface, feeling my way down the steps and into the street.

  David knew a better way back. We sloshed through the flood. In the next street, the water deepened and David reluctantly took my hand. In a small square, we climbed the stone steps at the foot of a statue to rest. He was wearing a blue backpack and took it off, feeling it all over with his hands for dampness.

  “Who’s the statue of?” I asked.

  “Garibaldi.”

  “Nice of them to memorialize a man for inventing a biscuit,” I said. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if they replaced all the statues of royalty and generals with people who’d done small, harmless things? The creator of the foot spa, the reclining armchair, the first person to make a lemon drizzle cake. What?”

  David was staring at me. It made me want to put my hands over my face.

  “I haven’t seen you in such a long time. Let me look.”

  We sat on the cold, damp steps and the flood slipped past softly. As the current flowed, it bore time with it, but time in reverse, so that the years ran away; I felt them sluicing from me. I closed my eyes for a moment. The flood said shhhhhh! The sound seemed to bounce off the buildings, was magnified.

  “What’s that?” I had seen movement, a dark shape struggling in the current at the opposite side of the square. David got to his feet and I followed him. At first I thought it was a dog, but it wasn’t. It was a deer, with fledgling antlers. Eyes rolling, hooves breaking the surface. Soon it was g
one.

  “I came to see you, a few months after Em had died, in the summer. I thought we might … But you weren’t there. I saw Marcus though. Last person I wanted to see, of course. He looked right through me. Turned his back and practically ran. He looked bad.”

  “Alice said he and Em were seeing each other.”

  “You believe her?”

  “In a strange way, I’d like to. Wouldn’t have to feel so guilty then. Where were you that night, David? Alice said she didn’t see you till morning.”

  “I didn’t hurt Em. I didn’t—”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “I sat in an empty room on the top floor. The one we used to meet in. Panicking mainly. I was supposed to be with Alice, to be climbing the greasy pole at Christie’s. But it all ran away with me. I wanted you so much. It was a shitty thing to do, what we did. But I would do it again. I could see that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep in line. I couldn’t trust myself. Where was it going to end? I didn’t hurt Em, but I can’t say I haven’t hurt people. They have expectations.”

  “Like truthfulness?”

  “Perhaps. But most people also want to be lied to, not just now and then, but all the time.”

  “Did you put that schoolteacher in the hospital?”

  David sighed. “A case in point, Andy. You have an older man, an authority figure—although let’s face it, it’s Badger we’re talking about, so not that much authority—with an interest in boys and power over them. I mean, I was on a scholarship but not actually that bright when it came down to it, so dependent on standout marks in certain subjects. Badger got me through. I mean by the end he was for all intents and purposes writing my essays for me, and in return I played my role, carefully oblivious to his true interest in me, reciprocating a romantic friendship, you know … two outsiders. Sharing in his admirations. It wasn’t physical.

  “It all came to a head in Rome. I don’t think he could forgive me for growing up. I was less amenable. I think I’d awoken to the fact that he couldn’t actually take my exams for me and I was going to fail them. He found this obscene cartoon. Of him. Rob had drawn it but I’d written on it. There was an ugly scene. Drink had been taken. And I just thought, well, there was no need for any of it. Not for him, not for school or exams or anything. He tried to stop me leaving. We were tussling over the door handle. I won and the door hit him in the face. Obviously it’s an extreme example, but most relationships require a degree of complicity, don’t they?”

  “Once or twice I have had a similar thought, but about life.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean, you don’t decide on the conditions. The body you live in. That you breathe and eat and shit. That you sleep. That you sicken and die. That even if you succeed, whatever that means, or have a comfortable life, there are others who suffer.”

  “None of us signed up for it, so why do we have to play along?”

  “Something like that.”

  We sat at Garibaldi’s feet on the steps. A breeze rippled the surface of the flood. It was possible to imagine unseen spirits listening.

  “I saw an installation once,” David said. “The artist had created a virtual reality game. There were headsets. You were supposed to control the game with your brain waves. Only afterward you found out, you couldn’t. It was what the artist called a dark game, purporting to have one set of rules but operating under another, lying to and undermining the player. It won a prize.”

  “Alice said you didn’t want the thing you were supposed to want. What do you want?”

  “I used to want to prove my parents wrong. Loads of people are like that, aren’t they? Mum and Dad’s greatest concerns were safety, security, respectability. It was like honor to them, to be respectable. They kept great long lists in their minds. Tiny debts. Little duties, that kind of thing. Careful people, very loving in their way, but no talent for happiness. I wanted to show them life was wilder and grander and just bigger than that. Instead, every time I got in trouble I confirmed all their beliefs about the world. But then you get a bit older and think, if I spend my life dedicated to pointing out the shortcomings of your philosophy, I’ll not have lived for myself. Not really. So the short answer is that I’m not sure anymore. And you, Andy? What do you want, I mean?”

  “Change. For a very long time now. But I can’t see. I lie there in the dark and there’s this terror. I have to jump. I have to jump. But there’s nothing. Just blackness. Or ads. The Tampax ad. The gravy ad. The car ad. As if someone has stolen my dreams.”

  * * *

  A little further on there were people again. A man in a red jumper carrying a computer monitor. A short-haired woman with dangly earrings. In a crowd, I would not have noticed them, but after the deserted streets, I found them fascinating, was unable to look away. Finally, as the street climbed, we left the flood behind. Where the waters had retreated, the street and walls were filthy with silt and reeked of sewage. The army was out. Soldiers were positioned on street corners and at intersections. As we neared the hotel, I wondered if David was preparing words to say goodbye, and my empty stomach gave a little flip.

  We got to within two hundred meters of the hotel, but they weren’t letting anyone past. To deter looters and because it was not safe. Two young soldiers, both with machine guns, were standing at the intersection turning people back. One had a Brando mouth and liquid, thickly lashed eyes, the other the face of a good-natured clown. David spoke to them in Italian. Their youth made him older. I could see how he would look in ten years, twenty; and then he laughed at something one had said, and there was the David I had known.

  “There’s no way through. A problem with the gas mains. They said to try again tomorrow. Or next week. They said Florence is tired of tourists and is taking a holiday. The Venus in the Uffizi is sick of being gawped at and had a word with Neptune. But there’s good news too. Two streets over, my Venus and I should find coffee.”

  We went in the direction of the train station, to where there was a small kiosk and a man making espresso over a gas burner. I sat on a red plastic stool feeling dumb with tiredness. Florence was in a basin and far away I could make out the contours of hills through the clouds over the red rooftops. David came back with drinks and a huge bag of paprika crisps.

  “A third coffee, a third milk, a third sugar. He says fifteen, twenty minutes’ walk that way, it’s a totally different story; there’s power for starters. You can charge your phone up. See what you want to do. Well, that’s one option.”

  “There are others?”

  “There’s something I’d quite like to show you, Andy, now that I think of it. Of course, it may not be possible. Besides”—David, while not looking at me, allowed himself a small smile—“you probably want to get on.”

  * * *

  We went back into the water, away from the people. The day had brightened and light reflected back from the surface of the waters, bobbed in ripples on the facades of the great buildings. David pointed out a statue, a crumbling old tower, a terra-cotta rondel with a man’s face in profile. From a high open window, music poured. Hip-hop. Grandmaster Flash? Something old school, exuberant, and utterly incongruous among the Renaissance palaces.

  “Batteries or generator?”

  “No idea.”

  A helicopter circled. The water, gray brown now, was to my knees. I was more interested in what David was taking me to see than I’d been interested in anything in a long time. We turned off down a narrow street and then into an even smaller lane, where the houses were tall and set no more than five meters apart. Above, the sky was reduced to a scrap of blue and white. It was colder here and dank. We came to a chapel, a tiny thing in dark stone no wider than the house I’d grown up in. The flood had reached only to the top step.

  “Here we are,” David said.

  “Is it open?”

  “The priest is particular about it.”

  The door was only latched. David pushed it open and we stepped inside, into the dark interior,
where it was colder still, raising goose bumps on the skin of my neck. Little light fell through the windows and with the power out, the electric twinkle of LED candles didn’t do much to pierce the gloom.

  David took off his backpack and put it down on a pew. There was a huge painting behind the altar and I moved closer to see it better.

  “It is the one I was telling you about. The War in Heaven by Montocci. He was a student of Michelangelo’s. It shows the Archangel Michael leading the angels against the rebel forces of Satan.”

  “And the dragon?”

  “That’s Satan.” Crushed beneath the archangel’s boot, he had rather a comical, terrified look. Black wings, a red and lolling tongue. Michael, looking like a haughty teenager, was about to stick a sword in him. Around them a host of angels did battle among dark crags, the clouds billowing and roiling crimson and gray as though filled with fire.

  From his backpack David brought out a rectangle enshrouded within layers of plastic. After unwrapping it, he called me over, and I found myself looking at the drawing from the night before, still in its frame. Now I could look more closely, I saw that the figure had wings. The face, even in sketch, was expressive.

  “Look here.” David was indicating part of the painting, where a small barefoot figure stood poised on a crag, fierce faced, wings spread out. It was undoubtedly the same figure. In the angel’s hand was a spear.

  “Don’t you see it?”

  “What?”

  “She’s a girl. A heresy. Angels are always ‘he’ in the Bible. I mean they’re all very androgynous, but this one is unmistakably a girl. You asked how you were back then. How I saw you. And I suppose this is my best answer. Can you not see the resemblance?”

  And I supposed that in a way, I could.

  * * *

  We spent the night in an IKEA out by the airport. It was dark by the time we got there. With no mapping app to guide us, we had been wandering, lost, for what seemed like an eternity through a bleak industrial area. While we were above the flood level, there were no passing cars. In my shoes, my wet socks chafed my feet. Following the sound of an engine, we arrived at the depot where we found a security guard and another man in overalls both standing over the open bonnet of a pallet truck. I sat down on the curb, blank with exhaustion, while David spoke to them. He came back with a torch. A bribe had changed hands.