by Annie Murray
‘’Ello,’ Fizz said.
He sounded subdued.
I thought about the wonderful day I’d had, and I felt very sorry for Fizz. He didn’t want to push me away tonight – he’d come to find me, and I was glad.
We didn’t say much. I wanted to tell him where I’d been and all it meant but I ended up saying something flat like, ‘We’ve been to see someone Grandpa knew in the war.’ And Fizz said, ‘Sounds nice,’ and told me he’d been around the camp all day. I didn’t ask any more about what happened in Signora Sacchetti’s kitchen, or why Fizz exploded when she called him beautiful. Or maybe that wasn’t why, I didn’t know. I didn’t ask about Archie, not then. But I did ask one thing.
‘I don’t get what’s wrong with being called Vincent. I think it’s a nice name.’
Fizz stared down between his legs where there were ants moving across the mud. I thought he might get drawn in watching them like he did sometimes, and stop talking to me, but he looked up again.
‘It’s not just Vincent. OK,’ he went on wearily. He raised his head, pushing his hair out of the way. ‘Look, I’ll tell you - laugh if you want. My name’s Vincent Fineen Fitzwilliam Carlos McFarquhar Chubb.’ He gabbled it out, getting it over with.
Trouble was, I did laugh. Like a drain. ‘That’s weird! It’s amazing! Say it again!’
‘Every time anyone finds out…’ Fizz made a despairing gesture, but he was beginning to laugh as well. ‘It’s pretty bad isn’t it? They’ve always found out – whenever I go to school and it makes everything a hundred times worse. That’s my Mum for you. Irish family names. She always calls me “one of God’s miracles,” but I do have a father - somewhere. My real father was Spanish. That’s why she called me Carlos, after him.’
‘Slowly – say it slowly!’
Fizz repeated his names and I watched him and thought how odd he was and how of course it wasn’t just the names that got him into trouble at school, it was him – the whole of him, because he was different.
‘Vincent Fineen…’ I repeated.
‘Fineen means ‘handsome,’ Fizz told me, and I’d’ve sworn he was blushing.’
‘They’re lovely names!’
Fizz looked at me closely for a moment in the gloom, to check whether I was serious.
‘Well no one’s ever said that before!’ And he shifted closer, just a tiny bit, until his tanned leg was just touching mine and I could feel the warmth of him. No one had called us for supper, or if they had, we never heard them, and we didn’t move. We started talking about all the places in the world we wanted to go. Fizz said he wanted to see whales and swim in oceans with dolphins. I wanted to climb mountains and when Fizz asked why I just said, ‘Oh – that’s what my Dad did.’ And I waited, bursting out of my skin nearly for him to say something because then I wanted him to know. I needed to tell him. And he did say something.
‘Your Dad?’ His brow crinkled. ‘Where are your Mum and Dad?’
‘My Dad’s in the mountains, in India,’ I said, my heart banging so hard I could hear blood in my ears. ‘And my Mum’s looking for him. He’s a climber and he’s missing.’
Fizz twisted round, astonished. ‘Well how long’s he been missing?’
‘Since May the seventh.’
‘No one’s seen him or anything?’
‘No.’
‘Blimey - in the snow?’
‘There was an avalanche.’
Fizz digested this for a moment, looking ahead again. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, not unkindly or harshly. ‘He must be dead, mustn’t he? By now?’
I stared out into the smoky grey sky. Lights were going on in the tents and caravans. Something flickered, high up, like a match being struck.
‘Maybe. I s’pose so.’ It came out sounding sulky. I knew it was true, when I let myself think about it and I was afraid I was going to cry, like a damn bursting.
But then Fizz jumped up. ‘Look,’ he cried. ‘Fireflies!’
As we stared into the darkness, I saw what he saw, those tiny matches being struck all over it, little flicking, wiggling lights moving in the sky.
‘Wow!’ Fizz sank down beside me, laughing with delight. ‘Look at them all!’
We sat side by side, knowing that no one else knew where we were. After a few moments, Fizz reached out and took my hand in his without saying anything, and just held it as we watched this show that the fireflies seemed to have put on especially for us, to make us happy as they danced and jittered against the evening sky.
Purple Mountain
I.
It seemed quite reasonable at the time.
‘We’ll go in the afternoon,’ Grandpa said. ‘The colours will be a picture as the sun’s going down. And we’ll have a Nice Meal on the way.’
Climbing Vesuvius on a Saturday afternoon, however, was not the best idea ever. It was an especially hot, fine Saturday, the sort that makes every Italian south of Naples feel a sudden urge for an outing. Or so Grandpa said later when he was beginning to get the picture that he was not the only person with a yen for mountaineering that day. The traffic was unbelievable. I’d never seen so many Fiats all in one place before.
Nor, as it turned out was the Nice Meal such a good idea when you’ve already set off late and it takes them almost an hour and a half to get round to serving the food. And perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea for Grandpa to drink quite so much vino before scaling a mountain.
‘It’s not really a mountain,’ he said airily. ‘Not the way you think of mountains, you little goat you. More of a small hummock in comparison.’
We sat waiting to eat spaghetti in the heavingly crowded restaurant with its red and white checked plastic tablecloths, the walls decorated with red plastic grapes and wine bottles hanging in their wicker baskets. The sound of car horns blared through the windows from the maddened drivers outside and a family feud of some sort was breaking out loudly a few tables away. A fat, sweating man with a moustache was getting very very worked up about something. Whatever the something was, his wife was obviously convinced of the opposite. Very strongly.
‘Ah well,’ Grandpa sighed, raising his glass again. ‘I suppose we can’t always expect Perfection.’
‘I do think we might be leaving it a bit late,’ Brenda remarked, chewing the side of her fingers. ‘After all – it’s nearly half past three already.’
‘Plenty of time,’ Grandpa said, waving an arm in the direction of the window. ‘Look – all these people. They’re on their way up too.’
A tummy full of spaghetti later (and an epic wait for the bill) we were back in the traffic jam. The road sloping upwards was a glinting, hooting, sun baked snake of cars and it only took Grandpa twenty minutes to crack.
‘I can’t stand this!’ he roared. ‘Let’s get out of here!’
Luckily for Grandpa there was one final café before the buildings ran out on the road up the hump-backed volcano. It was more of a shack really, selling ice creams, fizzy drinks and coffee, but there were tables.
Brenda was getting very edgy. As Grandpa went over to buy her a cup of coffee she started muttering about how we should never have come.
‘We must go to Pompeii next,’ Grandpa said putting her overflowing coffee cup down on the rickety metal table. He sat down and eyed the cone of the volcano through the grimy window.
‘I was there you know, in 1944, when she went up. I was out in the Mediterranean on a troop ship. There she was, a vast column of smoke going up and lava boiling down the sides of the mountain.’
‘It’s called pyroclastic flow,’ I said. ‘And when it erupted in AD 79 a Roman writer called Pliny said the smoke looked like an enormous pine tree, twenty miles high…’
‘You’re very well informed,’ Grandpa said.
‘Fizz,’ I admitted.
‘Ah,’ he said, shaking his head in a way that managed to communicate fondness for Fizz mingled with general disdain for all the Chubb family and for People From Manchester in general.
He
was right about the colours though. As we finally got up and left the café the sun had dropped low and was lighting up the scrubby lava flows in tangerine light. The cone at the top was now a deep purple, gentle and shapely looking against the fading blue sky.
And suddenly, all the traffic had gone.
‘We’ve left it too late George,’ Brenda said wearily. She was still wearing her white sun hat perched on her curls, although there was no need. ‘The sun will have gone down soon, and then where will we be?’
‘We’ll be climbing Vesuvius, that’s where,’ Grandpa said, pulling his shoulders back. Mum always said he was a stubborn old so-and-so. ‘Come along! Let’s get cracking!’
‘George.’ Brenda stalled in the oil-stained car park. ‘I am not going up there now. And neither are you. You can’t take Janey up there. It’s too late and it’d be most irresponsible.’
Her eyes were wide and scared as they so often seemed to be.
‘Brenda, my Little Dear…’ Grandpa laid an arm across her shoulders and spoke very earnestly. ‘When we get up there, there are only a couple of hundred yards to get to the top. It’s a stroll – it’s nothing! Janey’s used to far more difficult rock climbing than that, aren’t you?’
I nodded, but the truth was I hadn’t thought of this as mountaineering at all. That meant snow and equipment. Even rock scrambling was much harder than this, surely? I felt very sorry for Brenda, always being so chicken about everything but after all this and seeing the volcano so close I really wanted to go.
‘Look George,’ Brenda said in a small, defeated voice. ‘I’ll stay here. I really don’t feel up to it. I’ve got a magazine to read. It’s just not my sort of thing.’
I felt bad then. ‘Will you be all right Auntie?’ I asked her.
‘Of course I shall. I just hope you’ll be all right.’ She wouldn’t look at us.
Grandpa gave me his ‘We’re in the Dog House’ look. ‘I’ll look after her,’ he promised.
Brenda sat down at a table with her back to us. Grandpa sighed again and we both went and climbed into the Land Rover and set off up the road across the lava flow to the Final Car Park.
II.
We were walking on dry, grey pumice which crunched under Grandpa’s sandals, his walking stick and my pumps. The path up the side of the cone was a pale zig-zag disappearing into dusky gloom, and all the time we breathed in the sulphurous dragon’s breath of the volcano.
I kept having to screw my eyes up to see. The sun had just gone down and it was neither light nor quite dark and my eyes seemed to play tricks, but it was still warm and the air felt lovely on my bare arms and legs. The colour of the sky was fading to a rich, velvety blue.
Now we had climbed a little way we had lost sight of the ledge at the mountain’s waist where the cars were parked. When we got out of the Land Rover there were still a few cars left, but since then we’d met quite a few people coming down the path, standing aside for them and everyone thanking us and saying good night. Then we’d heard car engines starting up and seen their headlights needling along the dark road until they disappeared. I wondered if there was anyone else up there now.
‘We’re having one of our Adventures, aren’t we, My Little Dear?’ In the fading light Grandpa stooped and picked up a handful of the dry dirt, holding it close to his face.
‘Look – ‘ he picked out something black and hard, like a tiny hexagonal tube of liquorice. ‘Know what that is?’
‘Obsidian?’ I said. ‘It’s a kind of glass – you find it round a lot of volcanoes and when you cut it it’s so strong and sharp you can make scalpel blades from it for operations.’
Grandpa seemed a bit tetchy. ‘I s’pose that Fizz boy told you that as well?’
‘Yep.’
He let the stuff trickle back down through his fingers. ‘Proper walking encyclopaedia, isn’t he?’
‘It’s amazing all the stuff he knows.’
‘Yes – quaint boy.’
I wished for a moment that Fizz was with us then, just ahead of me in his baggy shorts with his strong, restless stride. He would have loved it up here.
We carried on in silence for a bit, but stopped twice to look back. Night was falling fast. The land sloped steeply away from us into a dark, mysterious void nearby. As it flattened out in the distance we could see the glitter of orange lights from towns strung along the shoreline: Torre Annunciata, Torre del Greco and others.
‘I do hope My Little Dear is all right down there,’ Grandpa said. ‘We must be quick – I shouldn’t have left her really. She’s a good soul, but not one for life’s adventures.’
‘Well she did marry you, I suppose,’ I said, and this made Grandpa chuckle.
We climbed and climbed. It was walking, not rock scrambling when you have to concentrate on every hand and foot hold. But even so, sometimes when I looked outwards it was scary. There was nothing there, no railings or anything to catch you, nothing but the crumbly edge of the path disappearing into the darkness. If I thought too much about what would happen if I slipped, I felt shaky, so I kept my eyes fixed on the inside of the path against the solid flank of the volcano and followed Grandpa. If he thought it was all right, then it was. I felt safe with him.
As we climbed nearer to the top and the zigzags of the path were getting shorter, I thought I heard voices. We hadn’t met anyone coming down for ages and it was nice to know there was someone up there with us - or it was until we saw them. Suddenly, from the top, close to the lip of the crater, they were coming towards us, three dark shapes, who became three young men in dark clothes, one with a beard. My heart lurched. There was something frightening about them.
‘Buona sera!’ Grandpa greeted them. ‘Good evening!
To my relief, they said a rather sullen good evening back, and passed us, their footsteps crunching away behind us. I relaxed again.
‘Goodness, they looked like a bunch of bandits didn’t they?’ Grandpa said.
‘You wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night,’ I said, and again this made Grandpa laugh, but I realized he had been nervous of them as well.
We were at the top then, standing on the flat rim where you could look down, our nostrils met by the sigh of Vesuvius’s warm, stinking breath. The volcano opened out in front of us, a vast, gaping maw. In the dim light you could just make out the deeper dark space of the crater dropping away in front of us, its scalding black throat coughing up steamy wafts of cloud which stank of sulphur.
It was hard not to think of it as alive.
‘Who are you?’ I wanted to whisper. I thought of Kanche, the goddess of Kanchenjunga, the icy, frozen spirit of Dad’s mountain. This god was charred in the very entrails of the earth. I imagined it with lava gushing out, the smoke flowering up like a pine tree twenty miles high and grey ash raining down. But that was another thing I decided not to think about because the idea that it might suddenly belch and roar was so frightening I wanted to run straight back down again.
‘Splendid, isn’t she?’ Grandpa said.
We didn’t say much more. Words were cancelled out by the awe that struck us, standing at the top of this big pimple on the earth’s face with starry sky all around us. We could see no stars right over our heads though because of the cap of cloud from the volcano. Looking back, the lights of the towns seemed very far away and low in the sky I saw there was a half moon rising.
I heard Grandpa taking in some deep breaths. Breathing deeply felt the best way to talk to a volcano.
‘Well,’ Grandpa said after a few minutes. ‘I suppose we’d better wend our way down,’
Going down was harder. Back we went, to the zigzagging path. Simple: all we had to do was follow it and all I had to do was walk behind Grandpa, with his stick. But it was much more slippery going down on the dry path.
‘Steady,’ Grandpa said as I banged into him from behind when my foot skidded. ‘We’ll take this nice and slowly, no hurry.’ I knew though, that he was in a rush to get back to Brenda because he felt ba
d about leaving her in the café all this time.
We couldn’t look at the view going down. I was too intent on my feet and on not bashing into Grandpa again. It suddenly felt very late and I started to wish the whole adventure could be over, with us back in the caravan drinking a nice cup of cocoa.
Back and forth we wound our way and it seemed further going down than it had going up. I started to realize that things felt different and not quite right. Grandpa slowed down. Then he stopped.
‘Just need to get my bearings,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure…’
I’d known there was something wrong. The ground underfoot was different, harder as if we were walking more on rock and less of the trickly pumice gravel.
‘I don’t think…’ Grandpa sounded confused, and for the first time I felt a wriggleworm of fear inside,
We were not on the path any more. There was something odd about the edge of the mountain to our left. Whereas before, all you could see in the gloom was the edge of the path and the land rolling away down below, now I could just make out a curving shape and a steeper drop below, as if we were heading into a horse-shoe shape cut into the side of the mountain. Nothing looked right. There had not been anything horse-shoe shaped before.
‘Well we can’t be far off,’ Grandpa said, trying to sound optimistic. ‘By my reckoning, the car must be just round there – look, where there are all the lights beyond.’
Those distant necklaces of light made where we were seem very dark. The moon was higher now and gave everything a faint sheen but it was still hard to see.
‘What we’ll do is make our way along here.’ He pointed ahead with the stick. ‘I’m sure we’re going in the right direction. We’ll probably meet up with the path again at the end. And it’ll get better along here, I bet.’
Grandpa was doing his best to jolly me along. We edged our way slowly. It didn’t get better – it got quickly worse. The narrow ledge along which we were walking began to tail off, becoming so narrow that soon there was only room to put down one foot in front of the other as if we were mincing our way along a catwalk. I don’t like this, I thought, almost in tears. I knew now that Grandpa was not in charge, and we were so close to the steep slope below, to a drop down into darkness that my legs had gone all weak and shaky. But I didn’t want to show how scared I was.
