Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  Still in the corridor, feverish, Morris stopped a moment, balanced the holdall on one knee and pulled the zip. Clothes: T-shirts, blouses, skirts …? Yes, of course, he’d asked them to put the clothes on top. But underneath? A large man in overalls pushed out of a compartment thrust himself past Morris and sent the precariously balanced bag tumbling to the floor. The neatly folded clothes spilled out.

  ‘Asino!' Morris shouted involuntarily, desperately scrabbling after the thing. The corridor here in the second-class section was all a-bustle and people turned. Likewise the burly man in overalls. A wide aggressive face, low forehead, bulging eyes.

  'Dillo di nuovo e ti spacco la testa. I'll smash your face in,’ The man seemed ready to spit. ‘Nessuno mi chiama asino!'

  At the first hint of trouble a half-silence fell on the scene. Morris, trying to bundle back the clothes, saw the stacks of fifty thousand lire notes tied in elastic bands in the bottom of the case, visible to all. Oh God, get the clothes in quick.

  ‘Mi scusi, mi scusi, colpa mia,’ Morris croaked. ‘My fault. You know how it is in the rush.’

  He was on his feet now. Incredibly, nobody had noticed. Traffic began to flow again down the corridor. Only a little boy was watching him agape. The burly man grunted and pushed along ahead, Morris following timidly. And at the first door he was out. Free! And the air seemed so fresh after the stale sweat and nerves of the train. Free. Rich! He should have brought a suitcase though, so he could have switched over the money now and got rid of this garbage, because Massimina was going to wonder where …

  ‘Hey man, well would you fucking well believe it! Morris buddy!’

  He looked up. Was it a nightmare or what? He was hearing voices now. The platform was throbbing with movement, a great wave of passengers pushing down from the train towards the station end of the platform and then the undercurrent thrusting up along the doors, trying to find a compartment that wasn’t crowded. On the other side a steadily clanging bell indicated that the Venice rapido must already be approaching. Right in front of him somebody was heaving a cart, trying to sell ice-creams and cold drinks - and, as the cart moved away to the right, from behind it there appeared the bearded, grinning face of Stan.

  ‘Hey, one in a million, man, fancy meeting you here!’

  And he had wanted this to be so organized, so cool, so professional You were wrestling with the stars was the truth. He had been bora to this.

  ‘Hello,’ Morris said. His smile must have been wax and ashes. ‘Simonetta too. What a surprise!’

  And now he saw that Stan, leaning heavily on the little girl’s shoulder, had his left leg in plaster nearly up to the thigh.

  ‘Pretty, eh? Drove the microbus into a wall coming off the autostrada. Marion did. Thing was a write-off. I’ve been in hospital here for more than a week and now Netty’s taking me home.’

  The mousy girl smiled brightly at Morris. More brightly than he remembered seeing from her before. She’d nailed her wounded soldier obviously. Got him to herself.

  ‘What bad luck,’ Morris said. You could say that again. His mind was whirling. Get out now and the thing still wasn’t a disaster.

  ‘What are you up to though, fancy meeting you here, I mean …’

  ‘On my way to Sardinia,’ Morris said. Tell the truth, why not? ‘In fact I’ve …’

  ‘Morrees! Morrees, Morreeeeees!!’ The voice shrilled high above the crowd noise in the half-silence after the bell had ceased to clang. From across the space of two empty lines, where any moment now that rapido would come squealing in, Massimina was shouting and waving her arms.

  ‘They’ve moved the platform, Morrees. It’s leaving from number ten. Come quick or we’ll never get a seat.’

  ‘Okay,’ he shouted. She’d think he was holding one of their bags. ‘Got to rush.’

  ‘Who’s the chick?’ Stan grinned. ‘Hey man, I wish I was coming with you. This accident’s fucked up the whole summer, not to mention the money side. Same girl you were with at the bus stop that night, no?’

  What an eye the bastard had! Massimina was at least twenty metres away and completely changed. Or perhaps he only looked at breasts.

  'That’s right.’

  ‘Whatever happened,’ Simonetta asked, ‘to the other girl, the one they said was kidnapped?’

  Morris shrugged his shoulders: ‘No idea. Still,’ he added lamely, ‘I wasn’t actually going out with her any more when it happened.’ It sounded awful.

  ‘You men are all pigs,’ Simonetta pouted from her little happy face. ‘See if Stan would lose any time worrying if I disappeared.’ But she had turned to look at Massimina who was shouting again, ‘Morrees, come on, come on!’

  ‘Pretty girl,’ Stan said, and to annoy Simonetta. 'Too bad you can’t introduce us.’

  Morris was desperately trying to weigh up how dangerous the situation was. His body, which had been so gloriously cool and relaxed just a few moments before, was now coursing with heat so that he could feel the sweat trickling down his back between tense buttocks. Would they recognize Massimina’s face when it appeared again in the papers? It looked like they’d be spending the whole summer holed up in Verona now and with his leg in plaster Stan wouldn’t have much else to do but read the papers. If only there was only one of them! If Stan was alone he could help him onto the train, bundle him into a loo, get the door closed and throttle him there. Beat the life out of the stupid hippy hypocrite. (Worried about the money indeed!) The same with Simonetta; she seemed so small and frail you could have choked her with one hand. But with the two of them …

  ‘Got to rush, sorry.’

  ‘Send us a card,’ Stan laughed. ‘Hey and introduce me to that chick when you get back to VR!'

  Morris was already moving away down the platform.

  ‘Arrivederci!'

  He turned to shout something reassuring to Massimina, but the Venice rapido was already rumbling in, drowning all sound in squeals and clanks, blocking the view. In the middle of the crowd, now getting frantic with the imminent departure of one train and the arrival of the other, Morris stopped at a litter bin where he’d caught sight of a plastic bag. He lifted the thing out. Full of orange peel. He emptied the peel back into the bin and hunched down, hiding the money under the clothes while he switched it from holdall to plastic bag. There was so much that the thing was full to bursting. Morris laid just one yellow sweater over it, which he could always swear blind was his own, tucked it down around the sides, tied a knot in the handles and checked that you couldn’t see from outside what was inside. No. Good. He left the holdall on the platform with the other clothes, then hurried back to Massimina. He’d met a couple of friends, miracle of miracles, he told her, and helped them with their bags down the platform seeing as one of them had broken his leg. They were off to Venice any minute. ‘Good job I saw you,’ she said.

  17

  The boat plied a sea the blue of brochures. Not a ripple, not a cloud on the horizon. Certainly none of those awful northern buffets which made the Anglo-Saxons feel so gratuitously heroic. His father, for example, insisting they hold firm on the beach despite a near gale that lifted the sand and threw it in angry handfuls against the rented windbreak. You’d have thought they were the rearguard at Dunkirk for God’s sake. The man’s whole sense of self-respect hung on his being the last to surrender that beach - as if there was any chance, any chance at all, with all the other mad Brits there were there, every one quite as determined as himself; there was even a girl with her tits in the wind, a veritable pioneer in those days, with Mother watching Dad to check he didn’t watch that way. And then when Morris had started whimpering because he was cold and still damp from the sea (yes, you had to swim for Christ’s sake!), then it was the moment for Dad to explode with his ‘pansy’ and ‘cry-baby’ and 'next thing you’ll be wanting me to wipe your precious bum for you’ - and Mother would pour oxtail soup from one of a battery of thermos flasks, putting another towel round Morris’s shoulders and telling Dad not to use
foul language, Morris was far too young to hear … Morris appreciated now that it wasn’t just his father had created the ‘pansy/weakling’ stigma that had hung over his infancy and youth: it was Mother too, her insisting on his delicacy, physical and moral, so that she would have a reason to protect him, but at the same time arousing (consciously? to keep them apart?) Dad’s ridicule. Morris’s erstwhile hang-ups (now thankfully overcome) were nothing more in the end than a by-product of their relationship, had nothing really to do with himself at all. He was flne.

  Of the two of them, naturally, he vastly preferred his mother except that dying on him like that she had exposed him to the full blast of Dad’s ignorant spartan virility, True, there were no more trips to the beach, but there was always the house in Acton with the doors that didn’t it and the bathroom window that had to be nailed permanently open because there was no vent for the Ascot; there were always the heroic fishing trips Sunday morning on the Grand Canal (the Grand Canal! Great Britain. Great Great Britain). The sun would be rising in one vast haemorrhage over the wasteland Park Royal was (Park Royal! Sunbeam Road!) and ‘shepherd’s warning’, Dad would announce with grim satisfaction so that half an hour later they would be sheltering beneath the umbrella, the one family umbrella, under a cold London drizzle with the worms swimming about at the bottom of their margarine tub, Morris hugging his shoulders, sucking a numb thumb through woollen gloves.

  Oh yes, the Brits thrived on their hardships. (Look how embarrassed they seemed here in Italy to have found themselves in a place so beautiful, how they stooped and slouched about, spindly and Dickensian, squinting weak-eyed in the-sunlight, trying to convince each other it must all be. more than they could afford and they should really go home a few days earlier - ‘We really ought to go home, you know, Doris,’ - because whenever they started enjoying themselves they felt guilty). They thrived on their hardships, their difficult mortgages and windswept Sundays and if they read so avidly about the rich and soaked up facile TV celebrities night after rainy night (‘I’ll just take the old hound round the block, love,’- Dad buttoning up his plastic mac, no hat though, please God no hat for a piddling little drizzle like this - ‘Be back in time for Parkinson.') - if they couldn’t keep their eyes off Titbits and would have given a year of their wintry lives to know if Prince Charles had had it away with Di before their wedding TV appearance, then it wasn’t because they had any ambition to be rich themselves, God forbid, but ‘just so they could savour their poverty and sacrifice all the more - 'You get yourself a good honest job, my boy, and leave off all this university crap,’ His Dad was the kind of person who, having voted Labour all his life, would switch to Thatcher just because she’d shown that the Brits could still raise the flag in a howling Antarctic gale and march across a freezing bog better than any other nation in the world. ‘And 7000 miles from home, lad.’ Dad glued to the wartime newsreel while Morris scribbled off his letters to the Milk Marketing Board.

  “What are you thinking about, Morri?’

  The boat plied its sea the blue of brochures. Morris had taken two deckchairs on the first-class sundeck and they were half sitting, half sprawling under a generous sun, roasting in a bottle of Noon Soon (Gloom Soon they’d probably call it back at Boots the Chem), holding their limp hands between the chairs. All around them were the elegant first-class travellers in their fashionable string bathing costumes and those dainty white leather sandals with golden buckies, that showed off painted toes. Painted toes had begun rather to interest Morris. He must get Mimi to paint her toes.

  ‘Thinking? Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Niente di niente di niente.’

  ‘You’re happy, Morri?’

  'Terribly,’ he said and waited for the soft kiss below his ear. They would make love tonight. He was looking forward to that.

  ‘You should go to a chiropodist Mimi,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A chiropodist. You’ve been cutting your nails too low and they need some attention. Look how elegant that woman’s feet are: over there, with the straw hat like yours.’

  ‘But the chiropodist would cost so much, Morri, and...’

  ‘We can manage,’ Morris said confidently.

  Because Morris Duckworth was a rich man. An extremely rich man. Morris Duckworth had 800 million lire stuffed in a plastic bag jammed inside his suitcase, presently located in the far corner of the boat’s luggage compartment. He hadn’t had time to count it yet but he was perfectly sure it was all there. Why shouldn’t it be if they wanted their precious daughter back? Eight hundred million. It was a shame it was in lire of course with the inflation there was here and then the appalling exchange rates (good old Brits, belts tight now and keep the pound strong). Still, he could hardly go and try to change such a massive sum into sterling or dollars.

  The thing to do would be to invest it somehow. Government bonds might be the things inflation-proof and available at any bank in Italy. Or perhaps he should simply buy a few houses and live in one off the rent from the others. The problem there though was the tenants. Would they pay up? Would they get out when you wanted to sell? Could you trust them to maintain the property decently? No, simple safe investment was the thing, live off the interest, get himself a nice apartment block in the fashionable centre of Verona, nice furniture, set himself up and then relax into doing what he really wanted to do with his life. A little writing. Articles perhaps. On art or politics. Italian politics were interesting. And. then photography. Women of Verona book of photographs with text. That might sell. ‘Dear Publisher, I am a freelance photographer living (opulently) in Italy. I would like to present you with...’ That all had a nice ring to it.

  The only problem that he could see being Massimina. But Morris had decided not to worry himself with this, at least not for the duration of the crossing. He was taking a much needed mental break. Enjoying himself. And Massimina was almost the best part. You could see he got a good deal of respect from people, especially other men (men like his Dad) from having her around. Quite apart from the sort of light butterfly company she kept him.

  Eight hundred million lire in the suitcase.

  They sat outside on the rear deck for iced-lemon granita. A favourite that. Morris had two. Massimina stayed with one because she was tight of course. But then now the money was his, perhaps it was better that way. She was looking happy though. Happy to be going to Sardinia. Morris was well again and they were going to take a real holiday, without any more hotel bills either. (Why, she wanted to know, hadn’t they come in the first place?) She smiled her round smile with the pearly bright teeth and that silver St Christopher winking sunlight in her cleavage. (The cover photograph for the book? Homage to Giacomo Pellegrini. Idiot. He’d been asking for it he had, wanting you to swap girlfriends before you’d barely met him - probably had VD too come to think of it, the kind of life he was leading, riddled with it. He should consider himself lucky, a quick end like that.)

  The Sardinian coast appeared towards twilight, rocky and blue. The passengers were tired after a hot lazy day and the atmosphere at baggage collection was subdued and pleasant. They had all escaped from the city and the crowds now. They could relax and love their neighbours. It was just a question of getting one’s bags and driving a few picturesque miles to hotel or villa and they’d made it. The few hippies and backpackers there were seemed out of place and unüireaten-ing, apologizing even for bumping into you. All very nice.

  Morris exchanged a few words with an elderly gentleman who turned out to be some kind of Venetian count and owned a spot of land in the Highlands too, for hunting. Marvellous people the Scottish, how they put up with their weather. Glorious centuries of it. Morris had always been a fan of the Scottish, he said, in fact his grandparents were from Scotland. Did the count know Renfrewshire? Pity. (Memories of ‘O’ level geography. Where the hell was Renfrewshire anyway? What a name! Still, at least it wasn’t Great Renfrewshire or Renfrewshire Royal.)

  ‘Meet
my fiancée, Massimina, Count Verzi.’ No risks with surnames.

  The count’s wife was about fifteen years younger than her husband, a very attractive and pleasant woman of forty-fivish. No, it was only their second time in Sardinia actually, a villa they had bought last year.

  ‘But if you young people don’t have a car, why don’t we give you a lift? Are you going far?’

  Morris told them.

  The count said their villa was rather beyond that. No, no trouble, he’d be delighted, so encouraging to meet young people you could talk to these days. (Massimina hadn’t said a word.) And Morris’s accent was impressive, my word, how long had he been in Italy? Only two years? Heavens, he had done well!

  And so, forty air-conditioned kilometres later, Morris and Massimina were climbing out of a silver-grey Mercedes in the central square of the village of Palau.

  ‘You’re sure I can’t take you right to some door or other?’

  ‘No, really, we’re just going to look for any old hotel for the night here and then meet up with friends tomorrow.’

  “Arrivederci then. Do come and see us if you can.’

  Morris said he would.

  ‘But why do you have to make up stories?’ Massimina protested as soon as they turned away towards a bar. She seemed angry for some reason. ‘We’re not going to a hotel.’

  ‘I didn’t want my friend to see us arrive in a Mercedes, did I? He’d think we were stinking rich or something and didn’t need somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Can I say something, Morrees? You won’t be offended?’ She had that determined pucker about her lips.

  ‘What?’ He was surprised. He’d been wondering how he should deal with this friend of Gregorio’s who was obviously expecting a pair of homosexuals. Cold shoulder him completely was probably the best line. Just get the key to the place, get taken out there and then make it quite clear they never wanted to see the boy again. Play lovey dovey with Mimi, honeymoonish. Shouldn’t be difficult.